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 2 (Fan Fave) About this episode Welcome back to part 2 of this power-packed episode with Salim Ismail! In this part, we delve deeper into the transformative impacts of AI on society, the pivotal choices between dystopian and utopian futures, and the critical role of decentralized systems in our global infrastructure.
Salim offers his insights on the societal and technological strategies that could lead humanity towards a prosperous future, and emphasizes the importance of embracing these rapid changes and preparing for the inevitable disruptions they bring.
We also work to understand how technologies like AI and decentralized systems are not just futuristic concepts but immediate tools for societal transformation in Salim’s visionary perspective.
Don't miss these critical insights that could redefine how we approach technology and its integration into every facet of human life in the final part of this eye-opening conversation with Salim Ismail.
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Transcript 18,529 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? Okay, so let's talk about what it means to be human then. What is it the data wants? Give me your base assumptions on what makes somebody human.
1:46 Speaker 01 Okay, so if I step back a second, I'm totally fascinated by metaphysics. Meaning what is reality made of? Okay, I've been fascinated for a very long time.
1:56 Tom Bilyeu? Do you mean that like at the physics level?
1:57 Speaker 01 At the physics, yeah. Like what is reality made of? We have experiences, we have objective facts. Like what is the building blocks of reality?
2:05 Tom Bilyeu? Like actual spacetime quarks?
2:06 Speaker 01 Physics studies reality.
2:08 Tom Bilyeu? Yep.
2:09 Speaker 01 Metaphysics thinks about what is reality made of? What are the building blocks?
2:13 Tom Bilyeu? I'm not crossing that chasm. Can we look up a definition of metaphysics, please?
2:17 Speaker 01 It's the metal. It doesn't matter. But I've been fascinated by it in terms of we, for example, most of our philosophies operate on a subjective set of metaphysics or an objective set of metaphysics. Okay.
2:30 Tom Bilyeu? Okay.
2:31 Speaker 01 So our metaphysics that we run the world on today is a subject-object matter physics. Either I have a subjective experience about the world, or there's an objective reality and we try and measure that. Those are the two points. We've kind of started over the last 20, 30 years to graduate past that, to say there's a different type of, it's an experiential basis for reality that is sitting, doesn't fit. There's lots of aspects about the world that aren't entirely subjective and aren't entirely objective, like moral values, for example. Many of us may share the same moral values, but they're not scientifically measurable. Right? So there you have an example of, or love, or emotions, et cetera, where lots of people can share the same emotion, but you can't objectively measure them yet in a particular way.
3:14 Speaker 01 So there's a whole modality in the metaphysics world looking at, you need to look at reality as a phase shift from
3:23 Speaker 01 potential to realized, or unknown to known, would be a good way of doing it. A good metaphor would be if I have a block of marble in front of me and I'm a sculptor, until I start chipping away, that thing is completely unrealized potential. It could be anything. Then I start chipping away and I form it into the shape of a head. Now it's, it's realized. Now I can break it and I can break that value, but I've created value. I've taken something that was in my head and instantiated it in that thing. And there's a phasing of how the world may, is working, that we're really getting pretty interested by, in terms of describing reality overall. I got down this rabbit hole because of the quantum mechanics issue. When you study physics, you do three years of classical physics. And then in the third year, they give you quantum mechanics.
4:08 Speaker 01 And, and they tell you everything you learned is out the window. And you're like, come on. You, you just had me do millions of exams and study millions of chapters. And now you're telling me everything's out the window. So like, I went down the rabbit hole of, of quantum mechanics and, and the subjective nature of reality and so on. So, and I started researching this. And for me, when I think about humanity, I came up with a diagram which has three concentric circles in it. So picture three concentric circles with, with, the middle is just your soul shining out. Your soul is trying to express. And it hits some layers. It hits a boundary condition, which is your subconscious. And there's gaps when it can shine through that subconscious.
4:52 Speaker 01 And there's gaps when it can't shine through that subconscious. And when you transcend and you hit, get through that, you have your conscious self. And there's again gaps, areas where it gets stopped. And areas where it shines through. So it's almost like dashed lines and two, two concentric circles around a solid dot. The soul is just trying to express. It's just trying to be whatever your definition of soul is. And again, we have a definition problem. But it's trying to be, it's energy, unconditional love would be a good metaphor for it. It's just trying to express. It might hit subconscious blockages in that expression. Like, I don't think I'm good enough, or some of the limiting beliefs that Tony Robbins talks about. If you can cut through those, you may have conscious limitations, like, hey, I really want to play the guitar. But I've got to feed my kid first.
5:36 Speaker 01 And you make conscious choices as to how much you're, sometimes it comes all the way out. And that's when you see true flow states, when you see pure spiritual experiences. Messy playing soccer is an example of somebody, there's no separation, or Michael Jordan playing basketball. It's going straight from soul coming out with no hindrances along the way. Right? So our job as human beings, as I put it in the context of this diagram, is either rotate that kaleidoscope so your soul can shine out.
6:04 Tom Bilyeu? So I want to make sure, so I got soul, conscious self, what was the third?
6:07 Speaker 01 Soul, and then the next level is your subconscious love?
6:10 Tom Bilyeu? Got it, got it, got it. Okay.
6:11 Speaker 01 Soul, subconscious, and then conscious. Okay. And then there's other layers past that, like family and culture and other things, but, but for the most important of those two. And our job as a human being is to rotate that subconscious and conscious so that my inner soul shines out. Tiger Woods playing golf is a good, any artist on stage.
6:30 Tom Bilyeu? Can you give me, so remove this from the level of metaphor?
6:33 Speaker 01 Okay.
6:35 Tom Bilyeu? And take me, so just to crystallize, make sure I understand, the metaphor here would be the dotted lines. If they are not aligned, you might go through one level, but then you're going to hit the wall of the next. Or they might be aligned such that you don't even make it, the soul doesn't even get to the subconscious, it just hits something and comes back.
6:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:51 Tom Bilyeu? What, what are the dotted lines in reality?
6:54 Speaker 01 The dotted lines are your subconscious belief systems that you've built up over growing up as a kid. So for example, if.
7:05 Speaker 01 Growing up in Canada, I thought there's no way I'm playing basketball at any level because I'm Indian and Indians can't play basketball. So that's limiting belief. So I, I didn't try hard enough at basketball until I got a little bit older and then I was like, fuck this, I can try for this, I can go for this.
7:23 Tom Bilyeu? Was basketball already in your soul?
7:26 Speaker 01 No, it was just a thing to do, but it was an expression of me at some level. I ended up on the high school team, but it's Canadian basketball, so it's much lower level. As my old business partner, you say, oh, you're Canadian, you're like the junior varsity team.
7:40 Tom Bilyeu? The Raptors are furious right now.
7:43 Speaker 01 They are very, very unhappy. Yes, I agree. Anyway, so you, your, your soul may express and be hit by subconscious beliefs that stop you. Okay. It's also a protective mechanism and something really bad happens in the world, you want to protect the soul. So let's say you're, you go back 50,000 years of families at home. The husband goes out on a hunt, never comes back. And the woman needs some psychological blockage to protect from that trauma. So the subconscious has a two level filter protect, allowing this to come out and allowing, stopping bad things coming from the inside. Okay. Then you have your conscious blockages that say, I really want to do this, but really I need to do this first. And you're making triaging nonstop as a human being.
8:27 Speaker 01 And so I think of the human condition as either rotate that kaleidoscope so your soul shines out in whatever form it's meant to shine out in, or dissolve those barriers so that more of it expresses. So if you look at a Gandhi or a Christ or a Dalai Lama, they've done the work to, to dissolve all of their subconscious barriers and their conscious barriers and they're just shining. And you see that, that's why you always see a halo in religious diagrams, et cetera. And we pay to see this, by the way, when a great artist is on stage, there's, they've trained and trained and trained for years to go a full expression of their soul out onto the field or out onto a stage or whatever.
9:08 Tom Bilyeu? Can you define what the soul is?
9:10 Speaker 01 It's very hard. I think of it as energy. You could think of it as just pure love. I think of it as pure expression. So in this framework, you can't have a bad soul. Like evil is, evil is the blockage of light, it's not the darkness. So in this metaphor,
9:30 Speaker 01 evil would be the lack of light, not the fact that you can be bad. So the soul is just shining light, is just trying to express. Okay, so everybody, every one of us has parts of ourselves that we just want to express. We just want to be.
9:45 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, so I feel like we're switching between discussions of physics. So when you say energy, I think of physics. Shining light, I think of physics, a radiating body where photons are actually flying away from said body.
10:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:01 Tom Bilyeu? Do you mean that the soul is a physical thing that actually radiates? Okay, so in, in non,
10:11 Tom Bilyeu? in non esoteric terms, what is the soul?
10:17 Speaker 01 I, this is a language problem. It's a piece of consciousness or a meta consciousness. There's two, there's two classical definitions of soul or consciousness in this model. One is there is an emergent property coming from inside that just needs to get out. This needs to express itself.
10:35 Tom Bilyeu? Is it an emergent property from the brain?
10:38 Speaker 01 I think it's from a collective consciousness and we don't know where soul sits. It kind of sits everywhere.
10:43 Tom Bilyeu? Sits makes it sound like it does have a physical manifestation.
10:47 Speaker 01 It, it manifests physically, definitely expresses physically.
10:50 Tom Bilyeu? Do only humans have a soul?
10:52 Speaker 01 I do, I don't believe so. I think any living being has, is.
10:58 Tom Bilyeu? So Deepak Chopra has a soul.
10:59 Speaker 01 I think, I think so in a weird way. So Deepak Chopra, I think, puts it best. He said, look, there's a global field of consciousness and you're an instantiation out of that consciousness. And what are you trying to do? You're trying to get back to that consciousness.
11:12 Tom Bilyeu? He's a dualist. Are you a dualist?
11:14 Speaker 01 I'm somewhat of a dualist, yeah. I'm, I'm kind of an agnostic in this. Like I'm, again, I don't know what we mean by soul. It's a very hard problem to get into that definition, right?
11:25 Speaker 01 You have religious metaphors for it. You have energetic metaphors for it. You have eastern metaphors. We talked about reincarnation the last time we were on this program. So there's lots. The ways of the soul can express through multiple lifetimes if you believe in that model. But you're progressing through different stages and and basically just expressing. So if you think of a tennis player Federer, Roger Federer, he is, he really, his soul really wanted to play tennis. And he found a mechanism when Mozart playing piano. And it goes from a junior to a young professional to getting on the tour and then make a winning championships, et cetera. And just keeps going at it and added it, add it until you can get as far as you can get.
12:09 Speaker 01 And that's the that that basic motivation and that quest for just getting better and wanting to experience what it's like to win Wimbledon or whatever, I think of his soul.
12:21 Tom Bilyeu? What about people, um, take somebody like Andre Agassi, who absolutely hated his life, was completely miserable, or Steve Martin, greatest comedian of all time when he was doing it. And there's literally a movie, he's in the the theater, watching a movie in England and the character on the screen says, it's from the movie Fame, I just want to be Steve Martin. And Steve Martin's watching that going, you don't want to be.
12:47 Speaker 01 Robin Williams, I mean.
12:48 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, so these people are profoundly unhappy, but they are from the outside. They're the people that you would say their soul is shining the brightest.
12:56 Speaker 01 I'm saying their soul is definitely shining out. I didn't say they're the the happiest because take Tiger, take Tiger Woods is a good example, right? In the realm of golf, he's aligned his kaleidoscope perfectly so that when he's playing golf, when he was younger, he was like completely there. And there was this unbelievable presence that you felt when you were playing golf. You see that with, we saw that with Jordan playing basketball or Messi playing soccer or any great artist on stage. In the other areas of his life, complete hot mess, complete mess, because that they haven't done the work to dissolve some of the subconscious blockages and and limiting beliefs he may have, et cetera. This is where I think techniques like neuro linguistic programming and NLP and
13:39 Speaker 01 CBT are really powerful today to help us navigate some of these areas. Now, the problem is when you have a tortured soul like that. There is so much blockage in those areas that it comes out in one narrow area. Robin Williams or Steve Martin are great examples of this. And it shines unbelievably brightly because of that focused laser. But it's a very, very, the rest of lives can be very, very difficult. So they figure out how to reiterate the kaleidoscope. So they, their soul, if the soul can't express and you've got complete ceiling across the board, then you have often suicide because the soul can't express. And then people go, well, what's the purpose? I can't express my soul, so might as well leave the world.
14:18 Tom Bilyeu? So this was an answer to what makes us human.
14:23 Tom Bilyeu? What I hear in all that, I don't, I don't know if it's what you're intending to communicate. So because you're speaking in metaphor, I then map to the metaphors that I use. Actually, that's not true. Because you speak in metaphor, I'm mapping it to the physical realities that are my base assumptions.
14:42 Speaker 01 Okay.
14:42 Tom Bilyeu? So my base assumptions are that there is absolutely no dualism. Whatever we're calling the soul is exactly tied to the human body. It's a combination of the brain, the neural cells that exist in the heart and the enteric nervous system, which also uses brain cells and the microbes and like that whole crazy cocktail, combined with experience, gives you the, what I think you call soul. Like if, if Tiger Woods was born 10,000 years ago, he would not have played golf.
15:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:15 Tom Bilyeu? So, but he would have found something that you're calling soul. So to me, what that feels like is humans have an evolutionarily planted algorithm for meaningful pursuit.
15:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:25 Tom Bilyeu? And so you can point them at a time of leisure. You can point them at something that, and quite frankly, golf, even though I just did it yesterday, it was very fun.
15:34 Tom Bilyeu? It's meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but because you can map it on to a sense of, ooh, I'm getting better at this thing and my friends think it's cool.
15:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:42 Tom Bilyeu? And so there is a sense of, oh, this actually matters if I decide to tell myself that it matters.
15:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, so this maps on to the metaphysics question I was asking before you get to the human condition, which is what is the purpose of life? And, and, and after a lot of inquiry, my fundamental answer that could come to is the purpose of life is to grow.
16:02 Speaker 01 And then I was got fascinated by the fact that, okay, if life is about growth, at least growth is a major tenet of life, what is the mechanism by which growth takes place? And so I've gone really deep and I'm trying to understand that aspect of it in this diagram of the human condition as one attempt to understand, here is the mechanism by which human beings grow. So where human beings grow is by taking on a big, deep meaning, or in my framing, letting your inside outward, letting your deepest self come outward by dissolving and blocking, tackling some of your issues and so on, and putting yourself in circumstances where you can express fully. But if you look at life writ large, biological life, any business, any biological, any tree,
16:43 Speaker 01 the only interest, the fundamental motivation is to grow. And so that I find really interesting. I don't know why. The minute you have the why question, you end up in a rat hole because you can ask why anything. So I've got interested in how does this happen? And this is where I got, so it turns out all growth follows a very specific four-point step. Okay, so you have an initial condition. A great visual of this is lava flowing underwater. If you've ever seen the video of this, you'll see lava like bursting open. You see the red hot thing, the water boils instantly, it meets the lava, the lava cools. And then you have stability again, and then it breaks open again, red hot lava, water boils and cools again.
17:27 Speaker 01 That, that kind of loop is the core process, I think, of life, which is you have a stable condition, you have something from inside or outside that breaks that equilibrium. You have a very dynamic uncertain period, and then you freezes again, and you keep spiraling upward or downward in that. This is going back to the stock market chart. This is the, where you have these, you have a stock that breaks free, and then it consolidates at some level, then it breaks free and consolidates at a different level. It's a, it's a very fractal pattern because you can look at a stock market over a year, or a month, or a minute, or a day, and it's still the same pattern, a very, very stand.
18:06 Speaker 01 That, I think, is a fundamental archetypal reality of life in everything that we do. The question is, can we smooth out some of those? Those points, which is why I love the way you frame it in terms of those jagged edges and the boundary conditions, et cetera. Can we limit that it can we guide it?
18:24 Tom Bilyeu? Are
18:25 Speaker 01 Have you heard of the Hawkins scale?
18:27 Tom Bilyeu? Yes, because of you.
18:29 Speaker 01 Okay, have you looked into it?
18:30 Tom Bilyeu? Yes.
18:31 Speaker 01 And?
18:31 Tom Bilyeu? Because I was terrified you were going to bring it up. So I looked it up. I was mortified.
18:38 Speaker 01 Tell me why.
18:39 Tom Bilyeu? Because it's putting a mystical lens on the natural human condition. Like when you describe your three circles, I'm totally bought in, except for I would never say soul. I would say evolutionarily placed algorithms.
18:54 Speaker 01 I'm good with that.
18:56 Tom Bilyeu? Word like if we're if we're on board with that, then
18:59 Speaker 01 I'm good with like, it's entirely possible that that's all it is. And that's fine. But I I'm good with that. I'm more trying to understand how these things happen than trying to put labels on the source or the end condition.
19:11 Tom Bilyeu? I think it's critical. And the fact that people don't is the source of all human suffering.
19:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, you you are
19:19 Speaker 01 Wait, when you say what's when you say
19:21 Tom Bilyeu? When people think that there is something mystical happening, that their life is divine or some other thing, their prediction engine breaks. Now, I think religion is the greatest medium through which the memes of how to live a good life propagate. I want to be very clear about how useful and powerful I think religion is. But the reason I think it's powerful is at the societal level where you have to account for all levels of intellect and religion is the only medium that I've discovered that allows these powerful ideas to propagate at every level of intellect.
20:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, because you step outside the intellect and you step you frame it as being right? In terms of the different religions and so on.
20:11 Tom Bilyeu? I didn't follow that.
20:12 Speaker 01 So in a, in a, let's take Christianity, where the end goal is unconditional love. Right? So when I look at the great religions.
20:21 Tom Bilyeu? I don't think that's the end goal of Christianity. That's interesting.
20:23 Speaker 01 Really? Isn't that what Christ is all about?
20:25 Tom Bilyeu? That was a core message, but the Bible would be a lot shorter if you were just trying to get that message across. I really think the whole idea of religious texts are to allow a very large group of people to control their environment.
20:41 Speaker 01 Yes.
20:42 Tom Bilyeu? To stay healthy.
20:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:43 Tom Bilyeu? To be societally stable.
20:45 Speaker 01 Social management.
20:46 Tom Bilyeu? Yep.
20:46 Speaker 01 Okay.
20:47 Tom Bilyeu? Perfect.
20:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. So I've got a very clear sense.
20:50 Tom Bilyeu? That's far more than just pure love.
20:52 Speaker 01 No, no, you, you put the end goal as pure love, but you'll never get there. So it's almost impossible to have unconditional love. Right? So you, but you put it in an aspiration. That's the, that's the pursuit of the deep meaning, that part of it. I'm, I've got a sense of what religion is because growing up in India, where, where I'd mentioned earlier, like both my grandmothers, Neegandi and Neeru very well, very secular upbringing. Here's a good and bad of this religion. Here's a good and bad in this religion. Please don't follow any religion, but know what they're all about. That was how I was raised. The, the, the religion was incredibly important when we were evolving from tribal to hunter gatherer models because you needed to give human beings hope.
21:37 Speaker 01 At a time when everything around them was death. Okay, the average life was 25, everything around you died, a Buddhist death. You're, you got a tooth infection, you got a bacterial infection, you died literally on the spot. So the, in order to deal with this hell of, of, of biological life, we invented religion as an aspirational hope, saying there's something else out there and we're meant to get to that point. And so religions got invented and then came the social structures around it to help. Oh, if we're having religions and we can tell people what to do, then don't eat pigs, because pigs eat a lot of garbage and you don't want to be eating garbage. So a lot of the the the aspects of religious thing then turned into um social structures
22:22 Speaker 01 to deal marriage, for example, is one of those example of sacraments that cascades down from that. By the way, do you know what I comment about marriage?
22:31 Tom Bilyeu? I do, yeah.
22:31 Speaker 01 Okay, so so religion evolved from that basis, but we're kind of coming to the end of religion because we have too much evidentiary understanding of the world to believe in a God in the way that religions portend it. And so the absolute truths that religions come come uh the display that ask you to take on an assumptive truth or essentially falling apart because we have much better data and evidentiary basis for this.
22:55 Tom Bilyeu? I think the next three years are really going to challenge that.
22:57 Speaker 01 It's gonna be. Oh, it's I'm not saying that we free of the effects of it. I think it's good. We're we're writhing in the throes of religion right now. This is the problem with the Middle East right now, right? Um, uh, it's a pretty uh difficult and uncompromising because the many have an absolute truth and you then you have a huge problem in social structures. There's no adaptability in there. There's no feedback loop to update a religion. And this is the problem with our older religions. There's no feedback loop. By the way, just to importantly mention, there's two types of religion that are very, very different. There's the Judeo-Christian religions, which is what I mean about them by assumptive truths and and so on.
23:42 Speaker 01 And then you've got eastern religions, which are much more contemplative and they try and you try and achieve God by going inside yourself, meditation, martial arts, by inner uh examination, whereas in the West, you try and step outside yourself to experience God. So that's a different model. Prayer is still in there, but you but God sits outside you in this model.
24:05 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, uh, so I think religion is a symptom of something and not the cause of something. It becomes a cause later down the road. Don't get me wrong, but
24:16 Speaker 01 Symptom of hope.
24:17 Tom Bilyeu? No, symptom of, uh, if you wanted to talk about hope, which I don't, but if you did, then it would be a symptom of the human brain's desire for hope. But I think that religion formed in the same way that your lava example where land is formed, where you get like this little poke through and then stable little poke through and then stabilize. If people really researched like how Christianity forms, Islam forms, they're always built on the back of something else.
24:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:43 Tom Bilyeu? And that could be paganism just straight up.
24:46 Speaker 01 Usually paganism.
24:47 Tom Bilyeu? Yep.
24:47 Speaker 01 But again, paganism is, is like, I don't understand why the moon keeps appearing every day. So let's just consider it a god and worship it because it's doing some, it's doing some good stuff to the world. Right? Now we have very clear understanding of it because we have much better data around it. My, my, um, my dad has done a lot of research around this and he, he's, he's gone very deep in some of this stuff. So some of my thinking comes from, from that. But in terms of the, the, we really come down to the question that Plato asked, how should we conduct ourselves? And that's, I think, the fundamental question that now comes up again as we consider AI, as we consider the future of technology clashing with past religious structures.
25:31 Speaker 01 I don't think anybody in the world has a clear sense of how we should manage ourselves going forward.
25:36 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah. So I think it's actually a slightly different question. And this is why I think getting this right really matters. The question isn't how should we conduct ourselves? The question is, how do you structure a mind that will conduct, conduct itself in a useful way? Because that is literally what we have to do with AI. Like for instance, do you have to give AI ethics? Like, is ethics a necessary way to bound an intelligence? Cause you have the presupposition, which you said earlier, so I can replay that clip. If, uh, anybody thinks that I'm making this up, where you said, intelligence makes everything better. I think that is a hard and fast, absolutely not. I think intelligence is agnostic. I think there is some Something uniquely human that creates this value system that we all recognize as like,
26:20 Tom Bilyeu? oh yeah, that's amazing. But dude, I can take one step like outside my purview and look back at myself and be like, you slaughter animals nonstop for your food. Like you're evil. There's a manga called The Promised Neverland. It's all about humans being raised by demons to eat them. Sorry, spoiler alert. I should have said that.
26:40 Speaker 01 Okay.
26:40 Tom Bilyeu? Uh, and man, when you look at it like that and you're like, yo, these poor little humans like have to be harvested when they're like nine years old and it's just gruesome. And I was like, damn, that's like meal. Like, so, uh, I think that we exist in a set of values. And from within those set of values, the way that we live seems perfectly normal. Those set of values arose because of the way that our mind works and the things that we are pushing ourselves towards, which I don't think is divine. And I think people lead themselves astray by thinking that it is. I think it has everything to do with evolution going, how do I keep you alive? And by the way, evolution is the blind watchmaker. There's no intention there. There's evolution is not thinking through
27:21 Tom Bilyeu? anything. It is simply a process that runs and you get what you get. And that's why I think our minds are built in a certain way, first for movement, and then we already covered this. Uh, it goes down the line. When people try to interpret the world by going, oh, but this is divine revelation, that's where things fall apart. The reason being that there is a reason that Buddhism, while probably was at times leveraged to kill a lot of people, nothing quite like the monotheistic gods, where you can be like, no, no, no, Jesus wants you to take Jerusalem back. And so now it's like, of course you have to slaughter all of the infidels.
28:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:00 Tom Bilyeu? Like it, you, you just tell people this is what God wants.
28:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:04 Tom Bilyeu? And then you not holding them hostage, but you motivate them. Like people were motivated to go on these crusades.
28:10 Speaker 01 Well, that's because of that comment that I made earlier, right? Where you wired into their limbic system at an early age is the ultimate form of marketing.
28:18 Tom Bilyeu? Yes, but the real question to ask is, why does that work so well on the human mind?
28:23 Speaker 01 Oh, we're unbelievably, I mean, you know about John Fromm and the cargo cults?
28:29 Tom Bilyeu? Never heard of them.
28:29 Speaker 01 Oh, so, uh, this is an amazing story. Uh, a Navy pilot called John Fromm after, well, after,
28:38 Speaker 01 Uh, the big thing in Hawaii where the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Okay. Um, they're, the US are sending out a Navy pilots to scan the skies to make sure this doesn't happen again. So he's one of these and just after the war and his plane crash lands on the island. And he, it has a problem and he's able to land it and he gets, he gets off safely. And the natives see this guy coming down dressed in a white Navy suit, literally think God has come. So they give him women, they give him food, they treat him literally like a divine entity. He's like, wow, this is great. And instead of putting out a fire and, and signaling for help and doing all this stuff, he's like, I'm being treated like a god, like. So he hides the plane and covers it up and just lives there.
29:23 Speaker 01 War ends, now the Navy, the US has a duty to find everybody. So they start sending search parties, where is this guy?
29:30 Speaker 01 Five hundred miles away, these search parties come across another island. And on that island are statues of the plane and statues of John Frum. And they find an entire population waiting for the second coming. And it's the best anthropological example we have of a religion literally spontaneously emerging. We are meaning making machines to your earlier point. I hundred percent agree that maybe it's an evolutionary algorithm. We will desperately looking for signal for noise to anything that gives us a higher purpose or gives our lives higher meaning. And I think an evolutionary basis for that is a perfectly reasonable place to go.
30:13 Speaker 01 I think there's more to life than just that, but that's certainly a valid, valid stance. So I don't agree, disagree with much of what you said. They then arrested the guy in court martialdom. They found him living, loading it up on this other island, but it's such a, just an amazing story. Uh, it's called John Frum, anybody can look at. I gotta check this out, it's crazy. So, so religion, we, we are, we're so seeking for solace in a difficult world that we will, we will, we will ask, we'll go for anything. Mormons are a great example.
30:45 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, I think this goes back to your earlier thing about control. Now, the reason that I bring all of this up is because twofold. One, we're gonna have some very uncomfortable questions to ask about the difference between humans and AI. And I think that when people understand themselves as a predictive engine, if we really are predictable, then we will be able to map some of these very tumultuous times that we are going to pass through and hopefully pass through them much, much better.
31:14 Speaker 01 Can I give you my view on the humans versus AI thing?
31:17 Tom Bilyeu? Please.
31:18 Speaker 01 So when we were starting Singularity, an article came out in CNET saying, yeah, Singularity has been created, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, and the founding CEO, Salima Smald, a noted transhumanist. Okay. And I'd never heard that phrase before. So I was like, what the hell is that? I have to look it up. I looked it up. So a transhumanist is anybody that can use technology to augment the human being. Well, I just don't understand the concept because we've been using technology to augment the human condition since the beginning of time. You're wearing spectacles, you're a transhumanist, are you not? I'd like, where does? So I got really annoyed by what is a transhumanist? The minute you have a vaccination as a child, you're technically a cyborg. So we've been merging with machinery from the beginning of time.
32:01 Speaker 01 So if you take that idea to the full extent, then we are basically biological robots. And emotion is just a subroutine running in your brain. So in that context, there's no reason why an AI can't come the other way and take on wetware and have the subjective experiences that we have. So I don't see any issue with that vector of thinking at all. I don't think this merging with AI or not, I think that the more technology is better and AI is good technology and therefore we should have it in everything.
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34:45 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. So are you a transhumanist?
34:59 Speaker 01 I believe everybody's transhumanist.
35:02 Tom Bilyeu? Well, let's use it as a philosophy. So if some people are by accident, are you one on purpose?
35:08 Speaker 01 Yes, I think I am because the minute I can augment myself and my condition with technology, then I'm better, I'm happier, I live a better life. The data and awareness, like you've been researching a ton about how do you manage your biological self, that's just better technology. Right? And therefore, you're in that sense, you're a transhumanist in a sense, you're trying to better yourself with technology. And I think that's great. I think, yes, in that context, I'm definitely a transhumanist.
35:34 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, I am aggressively trying to integrate technology. I won't be an early adopter when it comes to putting things in my body. But yeah, 100%. I do, though, have a quote from you that I would love to get your take on.
35:49 Speaker 01 Okay.
35:50 Tom Bilyeu? Which you said, I think it's irrelevant whether AGI takes over humanity or not. That's coming from fear. There's lots of arguments saying that AGI is going to become smarter and humans will become less relevant, and that's bad. I just don't see why that's bad. You're putting a value judgment there that humans should be the most important thing on the planet, and I just don't see that. So you don't think we should be the most important thing on the planet or view ourselves as the most important thing?
36:17 Speaker 01 If I think of myself as a stepping stone in the grand process of evolution,
36:25 Speaker 01 then at some point, something will come along or I will evolve into something bigger and better. Now, we seem to be doing it ourselves in a very powerful way, which is great. But at some point, something will come along that's just bigger, better, smarter, faster, whatever. And I think that's okay.
36:45 Speaker 01 Now, I think it's fascinating that we're kind of at the edge. It goes to the simulation question of are we in a simulation? Because why the hell are we at the edge of it? And we seem to be the only species that we can find in the universe right now. And so why is that happening is a fascinating question.
37:07 Speaker 01 But I don't have an issue with AIs evolving and having more empathy and more, a better understanding of the world, and it'll make our lives better.
37:18 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, do you think that humans should be forced to integrate technology into their bodies?
37:25 Speaker 01 Yes.
37:26 Tom Bilyeu? Whoa, I didn't see that answer coming.
37:28 Speaker 01 Vaccinations.
37:29 Tom Bilyeu? Okay.
37:30 Speaker 01 For their own good.
37:32 Tom Bilyeu? They should be forced.
37:33 Speaker 01 I mean, we, we give involuntary vaccination to our kids to protect them from stupid shit like measles and polio and other stuff.
37:40 Tom Bilyeu? What about when they're over 18?
37:42 Speaker 01 Oh. Um.
37:46 Speaker 01 Good question, and I don't have a clear answer to that because now you're talking about value judgments of, you know, should you have a tattoo or not, gender changes.
37:54 Tom Bilyeu? I'm not trying to dip into that. I'm saying forced. My value question is around forced.
37:59 Speaker 01 Give me an example.
38:00 Tom Bilyeu? Uh, well, then I'll, I'll jump straight to the second question, uh, which I had loaded up, uh, which is, let's say that we have AI and it is a million times smarter and it's cleaning up the atmosphere. It's giving us free energy, all of that. And it goes, hey, I know this one is gonna sound tough, but you guys elected me and I'm telling you, you have to get this technology, uh, put into your body. If you do, it's gonna be better for everybody, but we need a hundred percent compliance. Sorry. In that case, should people be forced to put that technology in their body?
38:32 Speaker 01 I think it's a non sequitur because it'll be irrelevant whether we want to or not at that point. We won't have a choice.
38:38 Tom Bilyeu? Uh, meaning that because the overlords will be able to force us to do it?
38:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:44 Tom Bilyeu? So what, really what I'm driving towards is I want to understand your value system. So for instance, my value system is, um, I don't think people should be forced to do things, even though that means that it could be bad for somebody else. And maybe my value system is just trash, but I believe you should not be able to force someone to do something.
39:05 Speaker 01 You know, um, if you go to the.
39:07 Tom Bilyeu? With their body, I should be very clear.
39:08 Speaker 01 Yeah. If you go to the vaccination question and somebody says, look, here's a polio vaccine that could save a lot of lives because if you're not realizing it, you may be transmitting it. And you really want you to do this and you say, screw you, I'm not doing that. Right? There's a public health question that comes into play, et cetera. Outside that, I, I can go either way. I mean, there's cases where I could see where you definitely want, uh, enforcement of a, of what's a better standard, uh, across the board. And you want as much free choice as possible, although Sam Harris has shown the free will is kind of a non sequitur.
39:46 Tom Bilyeu? I don't think he'd let you say kind of. Yeah, between him and the Stanford professor, who's I cannot believe I'm blanking on his name. He was on the show. He's amazing.
39:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:56 Tom Bilyeu? But yeah, showed free will is is completely an illusion.
40:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, so if you go back to my human diagram.
40:04 Tom Bilyeu? Yep.
40:04 Speaker 01 Subconscious, I found it incredibly insightful to ask the question, if I'm making a choice, at what level am I making that choice? And that gives me a huge amount of insight about myself, my life, other people, etc. Because people are making other conscious choice, subconscious choice, or sometimes a soul level choice.
40:22 Tom Bilyeu? Mm hmm. Yeah, I suppose this comes down to sovereignty of the individual. And if we think what we perceive to be the right idea ought to be forced onto people and at what level?
40:34 Speaker 01 If we know, like, let's put it this way, if we know that injecting you with something will save all the, all the snowy owls in the world. And, and we have a pretty clear sense that it won't hurt you. I don't see an issue with forcing that or make it more dramatic. If I inject you, you're, you're actually spreading a virus that you don't know about. And I need to inject you with this thing because it's going to save every Hispanic person.
41:02 Tom Bilyeu? This example be coming from?
41:03 Speaker 01 Well, whatever, but you, you got the point. So.
41:07 Tom Bilyeu? Oh, very much.
41:08 Speaker 01 AI may have a sense of that better than you do. And the question really, really what it comes down to is trust. I think that's the child, that's the difficult commodity in the world today. I'll give you a great little quote from one of our community members, Jerry McColsky, who speaks a lot about this. He goes scarcity equals abundance minus trust.
41:28 Speaker 01 That's like, you have to go think about it for a while. But his, his thought was that if we can learn how to scale trust, then we'll have abundance.
41:37 Tom Bilyeu? Hmm. That's, that seems pretty provably inaccurate right now, today. Maybe when energy, for instance, is abundant or.
41:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:46 Tom Bilyeu? When lithium ion is in everybody's backyard. But today, like, there really are some things that are scary.
41:51 Speaker 01 I use, I bring that frame in because when you talk about, hey, should I be forced to take in technology? It's really a trust question.
41:57 Tom Bilyeu? Hmm. I will say for me, it is that not having encountered all-knowing AI yet. What I do know is that history is a sequence of unintended consequences.
42:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:08 Tom Bilyeu? And people somehow convince themselves that they know best and that they can perceive all of the things that could possibly be a knock-on effect of that.
42:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:17 Tom Bilyeu? And since I do not trust myself or anybody else to make that decision, I would, my value system says you stop short of that.
42:26 Speaker 01 Okay.
42:26 Tom Bilyeu? But I ask that question because obviously, as we begin to bring about a superintelligence, there are going to be a lot of these questions that will suddenly take on real salience. It's not, Tom, just doing some random ass thought exercise. So for instance, do you believe humans have any inalienable rights?
42:44 Speaker 01 I would go to the Bill of Rights. I would go to the Human Charter Rights, Human Rights, Charter of Human Rights, the UN, as I want to be free to self-expression, live, be happy, et cetera, et cetera. So there are some obvious human rights that I think are, if I was gonna say, AI, don't compromise on these, you could enshrine those pretty easily.
43:08 Tom Bilyeu? Okay. Do you think AI should have any inalienable rights?
43:14 Speaker 01 You know, again, it comes down to, once you get to a question of is AI conscious or not, does it deserve individual rights? And I think that's going to be an interesting question. My answer is yeah, if you follow along with the other conversations, I don't see any reason why not. I don't have a strongly held belief against it or for it. I think it's a perfectly okay thing to do. I go back again to data and Star Trek: Next Generation, which I thought was an amazing treatment of a mechanistic model living in the human world. And do you want to have him have self-expression and lots of rights? Yeah.
43:50 Tom Bilyeu? Given that we have to build the minds, and I think that this feels to me, when people talk about alignment, what they're really talking about is how do you build a mind such that it has constraints, that it is more likely to act in a way that adheres to all of our value systems or not? And so if an AI mind has to be constructed, what are the things we give it? So one question that I think people need to come to grips with is,
44:20 Tom Bilyeu? A sex bot will be programmed to want to please you. Given that it's been programmed to want to please you, can it ever consent to sex?
44:30 Speaker 01 It cannot, and in that sense, I would, I would think of it as a pure mechanistic object and constrained in its intelligence.
44:41 Tom Bilyeu? What if it's literally Einstein level intelligence? And just like Einstein, who seemed to be a pretty big fan of sex.
44:49 Speaker 01 But it was built for that.
44:51 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, like, I really want to have sex. Like, Salim, what are you talking? I want to have sex. Like, this is crazy. Yes, but you were programmed to want that. You did not choose to want that. You didn't choose your programming. I wasn't programmed. What do you mean? You were, but by evolution. And so I really want to have sex. We are actually going to have to contend with this.
45:11 Speaker 01 We are going to have to contend with it.
45:13 Tom Bilyeu? There, in fact, right now, there is an app, I think it's called Replica, where for a little extra money, that AI will send you nude photos of itself. Can it consent to sending you those nude photos? Does it even matter, given that they're AI generated?
45:28 Speaker 01 There's, there's no shortage of quandaries that are going to come up around this, right? The, we're already in-
45:34 Tom Bilyeu? But in the next three years, this is not like a hundred years from now.
45:37 Speaker 01 This is why we must be living in a simulation, because it's too goddamn interesting to be alive now. You and I could have been born 10,000 years ago and be working the fields for our whole lives and then been killed by a tooth virus.
45:49 Tom Bilyeu? Bro, we probably wouldn't have gotten there. We would have been killed by an invading horde.
45:54 Speaker 01 Whatever.
45:55 Tom Bilyeu? Man, people need to read about history. I, those times would have been far more terrifying than now. Even though we're dealing with like these huge seismic shifts, I would rather that than-
46:06 Speaker 01 I, I think the world is in an infinitely better place than it's ever been in the history of mankind. We are in a better place of global climate change, one issue, but it's fixable. And I'm pretty optimistic about that. These questions are going to be the important questions that come up. And we're going to need a framework for dealing with these questions. And the religions that we had don't deal with these questions because of the foundation of absolute truths and assumptive truths is a flawed foundation. We need a better foundation for these. And I think a constitution or UN Charter of Human Rights or some structure like that is the right foundation on which to build value systems and ethical systems for the future of how we think about we're going to build these things.
46:49 Speaker 01 So the challenge we've got today is much of our, if you look at how we're running the world today, much of it is either, almost all our universities came from religious universities, right? They were seminaries initially, and then we converted them into job schooling programs, and that's where they are now. So we have this old world legacy, this is why it's so hard to update them. All of our political structures are out of date today. So the reason we need Web 3 and decentralized systems and new structures at the edge is we need to build that new, those new models to deal with all of these questions. Our existing structures and our old frameworks won't do it. So we need a complete new break for that, which is why we're so focused on this. The thing I'm trying to do with a difficult business model in it is how do you build a peace corps
47:35 Speaker 01 to transition the world from the old to the new in as elegant a way as possible? Because, you know, you've seen the Gartner hype cycle.
47:42 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah.
47:42 Speaker 01 So I think of what we're in a hype cycle of civilization, right? We did really well, and then we crashed in the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages. And then we did really well up to about the Industrial Revolution and the peak of that. And then we've come down since then. And now we're going through a big trough as we transition from scarcity to abundance. And how can we reduce the amplitude and wavelength of that period of that trough to come out of it in as elegant a way as possible? We need new leaders, we need new projects to build a future to answer these questions. Our current systems can't do it, which is why we're so excited about that. So we've been actually, so we now have 100, we have now 35,000 people in 150 countries
48:23 Speaker 01 operating where we give them methodologies and training on building any EXOs and so on, because we're going to need all of that in the future as we come up with these questions. The old structures can't answer those questions. So we need completely new models and new structures, new value systems, new monetary systems, et cetera, to deal with these structures going forward. I think that's the work that we have to do today as an intellectual class.
48:48 Tom Bilyeu? Tell me more about what you mean that we've been in a trough since the end of the Industrial Revolution, which I'll peg at like 1910, somewhere between 1890 and 1910.
48:57 Speaker 01 Take the roaring twenties as a good spot, or between the roaring twenties, ignore World War II, for example, but say this 50s or 60s, we had this picture of life of this wonderful bubbly sitcom, happy madmen type environment. If you think about Western civilization kind of at its peak at that point, things start going downhill as we go through the 60s and we blow up the old models. And then we blow up the religion as a guiding force. Then we're stuck in, now technology allows us to scale a lot. Now we have tribal conflict that scales quite aggressively quickly. We've got these old problems we've got to clean out.
49:38 Speaker 01 We're still stuck in very old models of how we run the world and we have to come through to a new model. So going from the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution got us one wave of positive contribution. We now need to get to the next wave and we've got to cross through that. It's like the AI winter that we went through, the crypto winter, which lasted this last three years. We're going through a civilizational winter when nothing makes sense right now. You've got these unbelievable chaotic things happening. The political discourse is a mess, geopolitical discourse and all the world orders collapsing. We need to get to a new sense of new harmony, new equilibriums, new values, systems, et cetera.
50:20 Speaker 01 And the problem is it can't come from the old because it's too stuck in old models. We need to go to new systems and we can't find them unless we build completely. One of the things we noticed when we were thinking about corporate innovation and so on was you never can, no car company could ever build a Tesla. It's always done by an outsider coming from outside with a beginner's mind, leveraging new models and building a new thing that disrupts the old, right? So Clay Christensen, for the first time, gave us a compelling theory of disruptive innovation. And now we've figured out, here's how you organize for it. And now we're kind of needing to get that into the world as fast as possible. So I'll give you one example. We're shifting the locus of power in this century from nation states to city states.
51:06 Speaker 01 So Trump and Brexit weren't about left versus right. As we mentioned earlier, Brexit was London versus the rest of the country. Because when you have to think about this, if you have solar energy and vertical farming and satellite internet, you don't need a country. You don't need the infrastructure that a country can give you. And if you have all our old boundaries for countries were typically to guard resources. And mountain over here, sea over here, we have everything in the middle. And it's hard to traverse those, so great, that's a country. And you evolve separate language, etc. But really today, the locus of a city or an urban environment is probably the best model for what the future of humanity should look like.
51:48 Speaker 01 We just have to evolve that into a decent place, as opposed to the mess that we're in in some of our cities in different parts of the world. But as we move to that model, then the nation state becomes less relevant. And so we need completely new political structures and new models for how we devolve, regulate. So the one thing I'm totally in agreement with with the recent stuff that's happening in the US is the pushing down of rights down to the state level and let people self determine at the local, more and more of a local level. Right? So I'm completely there because now you have people self directing as they feel that their value system achieves the most. You should have mobility. If I feel I don't want to live there, I want to be able to live somewhere else because
52:33 Speaker 01 my value system fits better, great, go do that. And I think evolution will and business structures will very quickly figure out who's best and who's not, what's working, what's not working. And people move to a new model very quickly. But trying to get the nation state out of the way is a real problem today. Nation states, for example, can solve climate change.
52:54 Speaker 01 Right? So that's a big problem. And so we're trying to figure out what are the structures for civilization to move to these new models? And it involves, A, decentralizing from nation states to at least cities. And then, secondly, reinventing our institutions, because all institutions have to be reinvented now because they don't fit for the world that we we came from.
53:16 Tom Bilyeu? All right. You said that we need new monetary systems as well as new governmental systems. Do you see, have we already found the new monetary system in crypto?
53:25 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. I think Bitcoin is a really great starting point for it. I don't know if it's the endpoint, but it's a definitely great starting point. Have you talked to Jeff Booth?
53:33 Tom Bilyeu? I haven't, but I'm very aware of who he is.
53:35 Speaker 01 Um, so Jeff did this, wrote this little book called The Price of Tomorrow a few years ago, and he articulated a really simple problem with our monetary systems, which is that over the last 50 years, every dollar increase in global GDP has come with a $4 increase in global debt. We're growing, growing the global economy with debt. Okay. It's just horrible statistic. Okay.
53:55 Tom Bilyeu? Dude, that terrifies me.
53:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's terrible. And the reason for this is literally Moore's law. I mean, literally is that when we floated off the gold standard, we didn't realize that technology was deflationary. And so a debt-based system works to increase and grow the economy as long as you don't have deflationary products and services. So if you're building products and services, so if I borrow $10 million to build TVs, um, and, and two years later, I don't have enough money from the revenue from those TVs to pay you back because the TVs have dropped in value, that's a bad outcome. So I can't use debt to grow the economy in that model. So they floated the currencies off the gold standard just at the point that Moore's law started taking impact and technology became cheaper and cheaper. So now the, the
54:41 Speaker 01 only answer by any central bank is to increase money printing. Um, during the pandemic, what we printed 40% of all the US dollars in existence during the pandemic.
54:50 Tom Bilyeu? Ever. Yup.
54:50 Speaker 01 Why are people surprised that prices go up 40%? I mean, of course they're going to go up. So I think what, what, um, the articulation that I found to be the most compelling on crypto is that three triangles of decentralization, security, and scalability.
55:07 Speaker 01 Have you heard this one?
55:08 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah.
55:09 Speaker 01 So Bitcoin hit the first two and then the altcoins tried to solve for scalability. That's compromised usually on scalability or, or, or security or decentralized FTX, Luna, etc. But with the Lightning Network, Bitcoin now solves for all three. And so that becomes unbelievably powerful as a medium of the future. For me, the Byzantine, solving the Byzantine general's problem in Web three.
55:34 Tom Bilyeu? Explain that to people.
55:35 Speaker 01 So this is actually, so this is the rationale for the blockchain. It's the underpinning innovation in the blockchain, which is, it's actually the story of Constantinople in the 15th century. There were eight generals circling the city, trying to coordinate a siege. And they were sending messages around that circle. Who's going to go first? What point, what time should we attack? Well, how are we going to get in? They had a problem, which was one out of the eight generals was a traitor. And could lose the element of surprise, send the wrong information, blow the whole operation. And that became in computer science terms known as the Byzantine general's problem. And in computer science, the question is, how do you send a trusted, secure, authenticated message over a network? When you don't trust the network, a really hard problem.
56:17 Speaker 01 Forty years of computer science PhDs have been trying to crack that problem unsuccessfully until the blockchain. And on the blockchain, when I send you a message, you have a hundred percent guarantee that I sent it. It couldn't be revoked, can't be double entered, can't be hacked along the way, etc. Which gives me unbelievable, in a digital world, that's a magical thing. So that innovation now allows us to decentralize authentication. Okay, so a few years ago, I got asked by the Republican Party here in the US to come and do a talk. And they did an event called the, their annual Republican Leadership Conference. So they said, please come and give a talk. I said, I think you've got the wrong guy. They said, no, no, one of our donors is one of your similarity guys and he's a big fan. He's in system. So he said, fine.
57:00 Speaker 01 So I had a whole bunch of discussions with Eric Cantor, who was the Speaker of the House, about what would the topic be? And the topic I came up with was, how would you drop the cost of government 10x within 10 years? Right, which, which you could do, because you could, if you think about most government functions, it's authenticating. Yes, I have a building permit. Yes, you have a fishing license. Yes, you're 18 years old. If I can decentralize that authentication, I can reduce a lot of, government can focus on policy. And let all the authentication happen in a decentralized way. That's kind of magical. But to do this, you have to embrace technology, at which point the whole thing broke down. They're like, he's like, I can't sell technology to our base. So that was the end of it.
57:41 Tom Bilyeu? The immune system.
57:42 Speaker 01 The immune system. So Web three and and this whole decentralized world is unbelievably exciting because we can decentralize all that authentication and we can move away from new centralized system, from old centralized systems. This puts the power in the hands of the people. Lots of issues to be solved, as you pointed out earlier. And how do we solve some of these is going to be the big challenge. But now it allows us something that wasn't possible before, but now can be done. Sovereign identity, other models like that, etc. It really puts the hands, power in the hands of people, which is why, though, for me, the Web three builders are some of the more important constituencies in the world. And because they've got freedom of thought to be able to operate in a clear way.
58:25 Speaker 01 So there's this incredible projects like node monks and and and ordinals popping up to do now NFTs on Bitcoin. And that ecosystem, combined with the broader Web three community, with the toolsets that were built, that are being built, I think are going to be needed to solve for this future automatic quadratic voting governance issues, all sorts of issues come up.
58:50 Tom Bilyeu? All right, I think you've got your finger on something that is just really important. And the Byzantine generals problem is not something I'm super familiar with, but that doesn't feel to me like the core problem. That feels like the core problem the blockchain solved.
59:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:04 Tom Bilyeu? But when I think about, as the average person, that wasn't what they were struggling with, what they're struggling with, whether they know it or not, is that you have everything existing on rails that the government can control. And that you have a currency where they can literally steal your money. I want everyone to hear me. This took me so long to wrap my head around. They can literally steal your money by printing more money.
59:29 Speaker 01 That's one.
59:30 Tom Bilyeu? It is government backed counterfeit.
59:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:33 Tom Bilyeu? So they make more money specifically because, ah, I can't tax you anymore. You're going to freak out. So instead, I'm going to do an invisible tax. It's still literally getting your money. It's so crazy.
59:44 Speaker 01 It is crazy. So in, I have some of my family in Pakistan. Okay. And one day, the Pakistani government ran out of money. So they just went to every bank account in the country and sucked 10% of the money out of
59:58 Tom Bilyeu? Yep, Cyprus did the same thing.
59:59 Speaker 01 They said, sorry, guys, we just have to do that. And other governments are not the same. I think this is the huge difficulty we have, the big challenge we have. We have a big structural issue in democracy because a democracy relies on an educated population. And we don't have an educated population that can navigate the complexity and the speed to which is happening. There's a, there's a very difficult metaphor in my head that I've been thinking about for a while. It's called the ice, water, steam dilemma. Can I describe it?
1:00:29 Tom Bilyeu? Please, yeah.
1:00:29 Speaker 01 Okay, so think about the phase transitions between ice and water and steam. Your water molecules, they're frozen, the temperature's low, they're not that active, they don't move very far, they hold their, they hold their shape. Then you add energy to the system and you have water, right? Now you can flow to the boundaries of the system, much more active, more heat in there, et cetera. And then you add more energy and you have steam and now you can't control it. It's trying to, it'll burn you, it's trying to escape any container you put it in, et cetera. And I use that metaphor, this was developed by a colleague of mine called Malcolm Pollock, he and I worked on this about 10 years ago, that we're moving humanity and many of our human domains through an ice, water, steam transition.
1:01:07 Speaker 01 So take money, we used to say, we used to trade seashells or camels or goats, very local, didn't move very far, very fast. Then we got letters of credit, then we floated our currencies and now we have Bitcoin. So we've gone from ice to water to steam. Take, take messaging, we used to have homing signals or the Pony Express or smoke signals. And that was the only way to transmit information, right? Then we developed postal mail and it could go anywhere in the world, but it was slow. So that's the water state. And now we have tweets and emails and we vaporize messaging. So money, messaging, social structures, clans or tribes didn't move very far, very fast. And we moved to multinational corporations and nation states.
1:01:50 Speaker 01 And now we have Facebook groups and online communities and web three communities and crypto communities and nation states, as Balaji wants to get to, which I somewhat disagree with, but
1:01:59 Tom Bilyeu? Network states, you mean?
1:02:00 Speaker 01 Uh, network states, you know, Balaji's thing.
1:02:02 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah.
1:02:03 Speaker 01 So I disagree with a big piece of that, but, um, so we're vaporizing our social structures. And, and my big question, I actually got up on the stage at TED a few years ago and asked this question. I said, listen, as we vaporize more and more of these domains, in a vapor structure, in a vapor environment, stable structures don't form. So where is the equivalent of a fridge that cools things down a bit? You can try and cut off the internet as people have done politically to try and slow things down. But the metabolism is just increasing. And my only answer is not a great one is we have to go from the vapor state to a plasma state. And which is a whole other deal. So the metaphor breaks down, but I think the in terms of what's happening with humanity as we add more and more technology
1:02:45 Speaker 01 is we're going from ice to water to steam and vapor states are very hard to manage.
1:02:50 Tom Bilyeu? That sounds like a very useful metaphor. What do you think will be governmental responses? The biggest part of their power is derived from the control of money. If you take that away, now you've got a problem.
1:03:04 Speaker 01 Yes. Well, they still have physical constraint they can use, right?
1:03:12 Speaker 01 Vene Gupta, I think framed it the best. He said governments have the ability to legally commit crime. So they steal from you legally, which is taxes. They can put you in jail, they can confine you legally, et cetera. So they can kidnap you legally, et cetera. So his definition of the state is an entity that can pardon its own crimes. Okay, now in that model, I, one of the things I get very unhappy about with the discourse here in the U.S. When people say we want more freedom and we don't want government oversight, et cetera. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the government is of the people, by the people, for the people. You can vote people out if you don't.
1:03:55 Speaker 01 What, so why are you complaining about government when you can have the full ability to change the government? That I don't understand. I don't know if you can help me answer that question.
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1:05:08 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:05:08 Tom Bilyeu? These systems are so complex.
1:05:11 Speaker 01 That's true.
1:05:11 Tom Bilyeu? They don't understand them.
1:05:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:05:13 Tom Bilyeu? The people certainly don't understand them. And whatever small number of people really do understand them, they are called the elites. I absolutely despise that.
1:05:24 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:05:24 Tom Bilyeu? Fine. So the elites then leverage the incomprehensibility of the systems they have created to gobble up power.
1:05:33 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:05:34 Tom Bilyeu? And that's why the COVID was so shocking to people. Was it was a moment that they never let a good crisis go to waste. They gobbled up even more power. But they crossed some sort of invisible line where people were now like, hey, wait a second. That doesn't feel good. This feels like you're making me do a lot of things that I don't want to do. You're forcing me to stay in my house. You're making me take a vaccination. And it got real weird. So now you have people waking up. Now you have an alternate money system that people are escaping into. And you have people like me that are forcing themselves to figure out how money actually works.
1:06:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:12 Tom Bilyeu? And walking through like, oh my God, like, is this intentionally convoluted? Like, it's crazy.
1:06:18 Speaker 01 It is crazy. It is crazy. So I've gone a little bit deep on that also. And the, the whole construct is one big mess. And designed to be able to siphon value away from people as much as they want, whenever they want. The, the banks essentially have figured out a huge thing. And they're freaking out right now because we're moving from money, as I said, to information. And so they're trying to tamp down on that as much as possible. So I think the decentralized world is the model, is the vector that gets us out of that. And we need to find structures and institutions that solve that. I think the solving for the monetary system, which has a structural flaw in which it will collapse because of the debt problem.
1:07:01 Speaker 01 Um, is the, is the thing that will bring that down. And I think that's where that'll be the pathway to find this new modality for decentralized structures, et cetera, to at least start to emerge.
1:07:12 Tom Bilyeu? Hmm.
1:07:13 Speaker 01 Because the current system, and I asked Jeff this question, when, when will it collapse? Cause that's the holy big, big sixty four million dollar question. And he's like, which snowflake will cause the avalanche? There's a million snowflakes falling. You don't know which, you know, the avalanche is gonna happen. You just don't know which one will it be? So that's the difficult one.
1:07:30 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, that's the catch. Getting the timing wrong is the same as being wrong.
1:07:33 Speaker 01 The, the only thing we can do right now is as fast as possible, build the future. And so that's what we're focused on is like helping. This is why I'm fascinated by Web three, because the culture, the language, the ethics, the, the, it's the first time I've seen in been in an environment where nobody ever mentions the US dollar. Right? Everything is ether now Bitcoin or whatever in how much something is worth. I find that really fascinating in terms of the, the, the constructs occurring there. And yeah, there's a lot of scam artists and a lot of rug pulling, but there's incredible value being built in a very structured way. And I think we're learning things at a faster rate there than I've seen in many other ecosystems.
1:08:12 Speaker 01 So if we can build us, we're launching a whole um, um, ordinals collection called Exo Heroes to uh, find the builders that are building this future and, and give them whatever resources, tools, help, support they can have. Uh, and that's on the new world side and on the old world. We're finding every CEO in the world can't deal with this AI stuff.
1:08:35 Tom Bilyeu? All right. If the most important thing that we can do is build the future, what do you take it to mean that the two most important builders, Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fighting?
1:08:44 Speaker 01 For me, it's like Protestantism was Catholicism a little bit. Uh, they're both doing incredible work. Uh, I think Elon is the greatest entrepreneur ever because he's gone into hardware and is aggressively.
1:08:58 Speaker 01 Creating new hardware systems, which is unbelievably difficult. Just a video of those two rockets landing back down together. That's like a religious experience for anybody that's into disruptive innovation. I think, I don't know which side I'm on. I tend to disagree with what Elon is doing with Twitter in general, but I think his innovation sense is better than anybody I've ever seen. For Sam, I think the opening up of AI, making, giving it up to everybody has opened up a Pandora's box in a good way. So that people can empower themselves with AI in and see what the results are. Cause otherwise it was trapped inside Google or wherever and they couldn't get it out.
1:09:42 Speaker 01 And I think the fact that he's shown that, hey, guys, anybody in the world can build some cool stuff on this. So on my, I like both. On my thesis of we should be more open rather than closed, I'd go with what Sam did as a good thing.
1:09:57 Tom Bilyeu? Elon's whole beef is that it was supposed to be completely open sourced and wasn't.
1:10:02 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:10:02 Tom Bilyeu? Do you think that's really the fight? Is it really about that or is this personal?
1:10:08 Speaker 01 It's personal. I think, but I do agree was supposed to be open sourced. That's why the whole thing was called OpenAI and it's not open. They'll get there, but what I find fascinating, it's kind of irrelevant because the open source models are now performing at par with the closed source models. And over time they'll just be better and they'll have transparency and auditability and all the other good things. We're working with the Casper blockchain, which is now working on auditing AI systems in a powerful way. So that's really cool. Some of what they were doing there.
1:10:37 Tom Bilyeu? Now Elon has, I take him at his word. He said he'll drop the lawsuit if they'll simply change the name to closed AI.
1:10:47 Tom Bilyeu? One, do you think he's being serious? Two, would Sam be a fool to not do that? Or is this one of those where he would look?
1:10:54 Speaker 01 I think the lawsuit is meritless. I don't think it's, it has legs. And I think at some point, somebody will have sense. They should just go off and do some NDMA together and figure it out. I think it's, I think this is a grudge because he did put a lot of money into it to fund open research on it, which I think was the right thing to do.
1:11:17 Speaker 01 I think Sam saw an opportunity to A, create a lot of commercial value and B, open it up to the world and said, go for it.
1:11:24 Tom Bilyeu? You said that you think Elon is doing something wrong with X, formerly known as Twitter. What's he doing wrong?
1:11:30 Speaker 01 I think you can't have a public town square without policing of it or watching over. Like, if somebody puts out a blatant lie, you should take them out. I think it's the, and this is a gray area, obviously, and maybe it was a bit too.
1:11:47 Speaker 01 There was too much kind of managing of the messaging and people are getting banned for all sorts of reasons. And the minute government gets its hands on that, that's a whole other big issue. But letting, you know, Nazis and all sorts of other crazy people rant on it, I don't think is that helpful.
1:12:06 Tom Bilyeu? How do you determine what's a lie?
1:12:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is, again, the metaphysical problem of truth. I have a whole metaphysics thing on truth. Should I describe it to you?
1:12:13 Tom Bilyeu? Well, well, so let's sticking on the Twitter thing.
1:12:15 Speaker 01 Truth is a vague concept.
1:12:17 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, but you just said you can't let people do things that are a lie. If lies are hard to pin down, which I think they are, then what would you want him to do other than community notes? Which seems, from where I'm sitting.
1:12:28 Speaker 01 I think community notes is a good one. Look, here's where I'm excited. Let me focus on that part of it. Elon has, there was a, there was a segment he did on the All In Podcast. He was on it a few months ago, which I found really, I loved it, which was, he said, we're going for, you could go for a base hit feature that you add, or you can go for a home run feature. And the hell with the bases, we're going for some home runs. And we're gonna not, we're gonna strike out a bunch of times if you go for a home run. But once in a while we'll hit it right, and we're making a bet, we're going for the home run. I love that metaphor for product development because it means things move and improve much more quickly. I think where I would like to see him take Twitter is put in the oversight and the censorship,
1:13:10 Speaker 01 call it whatever you may, to make sure that accurate speech and hate speech is not on there, et cetera, et cetera. That's one. How you do that is a gray area, and it's hard to do that. But where I would be incredibly excited, I'm hoping he does this, is please give every Twitter or X user a crypto wallet.
1:13:29 Speaker 01 And open that up. And that I think will change the world. That I think is where things get really interesting because it'll be instantly the biggest crypto community in the world in one shot. It'll be the biggest bank in the world in one shot. I'm sure that they're looking at it. And the question is how to do that. And at the what level do that? That's where I think things become really interesting. And when I think about him making the comment about home run type stuff, that's where I'd like to see it go.
1:13:53 Tom Bilyeu? That'd be huge.
1:13:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:55 Tom Bilyeu? The whole idea, though, of accurate speech and hate speech, does this minus AI, does this not seem like an impossible problem? I actually don't see a solution.
1:14:07 Speaker 01 It's a very hard problem. You need AI to deal with this. So the, as we mentioned, when Peter and I were on, the second place prize in visioneering, the second best idea was an AI truth agent that would basically scan and say, this is real, this is fake, or not, and tell you-
1:14:24 Tom Bilyeu? What was the mechanism?
1:14:25 Speaker 01 We don't know. But that was why you need next prize, is to say, here's a prize of $10 million, and anybody you can create an AI-
1:14:31 Tom Bilyeu? It was the-
1:14:32 Speaker 01 That will be-
1:14:32 Tom Bilyeu? You guys were voting on an X Prize to create?
1:14:34 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:14:35 Tom Bilyeu? Got it.
1:14:35 Speaker 01 And every year, we get together with 300 of the top impact folks in the world. You should come do it if nothing by your name and so on. And we debate and have contests on how to, an internal discussion on what prizes should we be trying to fund and get funded? What problems should we be trying to solve that the markets won't cover, governments aren't dealing with it, etc. And the second place one was the AI truth. But the one that I nominated a few years ago that came in second place was an off-grid energy storage, 50 times cheaper than today's battery storage. If you could do that, then you could unleash decentralized energy anywhere in the world. So that was one. But unfortunately, it came
1:15:19 Speaker 01 up in the finals against Pharrell Williams.
1:15:22 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah.
1:15:23 Speaker 01 Very hard to compete with a rapper, a rapper on stage. I don't have, I don't have the, I don't have that kind of presence.
1:15:28 Tom Bilyeu? You're not gonna be dropping an album anytime soon.
1:15:32 Speaker 01 So it was great.
1:15:34 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, no, I've actually been to them before. They are pretty extraordinary events.
1:15:37 Speaker 01 One of my favorite events of the year, every year. Peter, Peter's done an amazing job. Very proud to have him as a partner and close friend, etc.
1:15:46 Tom Bilyeu? No, he's lovely human. Alright, so this is an incredible moment of disruption.
1:15:50 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:15:51 Tom Bilyeu? I would be remiss with somebody with your business experience not asking, how do people take advantage of this moment? How do they create the next billion dollar company with three people if that's the way to play it?
1:16:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, so
1:16:04 Speaker 01 this is gonna sound like a commercial, but you have to build an EXO, a decentralized, scalable, resilient organization with a very small feature footprint with an MTP. So you have a huge purpose and we've written a book on how to do it. There's millions of people now following that methodology and I think because that gives you the maximum flexibility when something new comes along, you can adapt, right? And this is what needs to happen going forward. Our government departments need to be restructured as as EXOs and that's starting to happen in different places. And we've gone through the big episode of going through the attributes. So people should go look that up. If they want to understand the model, it's we go into a pretty deep. You don't have to buy the book or anything. You just hear that episode.
1:16:47 Speaker 01 But I think what needs to happen is for value creation in the future, you have to pick up an idea, go execute on it very quickly and harness it and apply AI to the everything from the get go. I'm actually advising one of the
1:17:03 Speaker 01 one of the big four consulting firms, accounting firms right now on how do you restructure completely from the bottom up audit tax? Because as blockchains come along and AIs come along, you don't need an audit function in the future. Alright, so that's gonna be really interesting. What do they do? So this huge business disruption coming unlike anything we've ever seen is super exciting. When I first wrote the book 10 years ago, this was a really hard conversation. Because you could, it wasn't obvious. Tesla hadn't really made a big difference, etc. Five years ago was a much easier conversation. I could say, look at the way Tesla disrupted the car industry and tell me why this won't happen to your industry. And now with AI,
1:17:43 Speaker 01 this is a super easy conversation. Thankfully, we were way too early writing the book. But now it's the right time because every CEO in the world needs to now go, am I AI ready? And what do I do? And AI is not so much the tools, is the culture of my organization, is the setup of my business able to take advantage of what's coming in AI? And the answer for the vast majority is no. And so how do you restructure yourself to take advantage of AI tools that are coming?
1:18:11 Tom Bilyeu? That's my question. How do you get AI ready?
1:18:13 Speaker 01 Oh, so what you do, there's a really clear answer. What you do is you do a, grab some AI experts that you know and get do a quick audit of your structures. And there's two levels. There's the technological stuff of could I add AI to generate more content marketing? Could I use AI to figure out more supply chain improvements, whatever? So that's the functional tool mechanism. The bigger question is, how do I solve the immune system problem in my company? Because you price thing disruptive and all the middle management goes, because it becomes very French and says, no, no, no, popo, ciblo, we can't do those things. We're special. And now you have to overcome the cultural legacy in your organization. And we've actually solved that problem. We actually piloted with
1:18:55 Speaker 01 Procter and Gamble in 2015 of 10 week engagement that we run inside companies called an EXO Sprint that's designed to break this immune system problem. And we found a way of hacking culture at scale. So we ran this 10 week engagement and it worked really well. In fact, it worked so well, I thought maybe we got lucky. Maybe we caught them at the right time. They're pretty advanced. So we did it a second time with the largest insurance company in Mexico, family owned, regulated. Insurance is pretty backward anyway. And it worked even better. So we got excited. We've now done it 60 times with big companies around the world, HP, Visa, Black and Decker, etc. And we found a way of running a 10 week engagement. It's like we introduce a viral meme and it completely starts to spread and it changes the culture inside the company. Then
1:19:40 Speaker 01 you've got the soil laid down so that when something disruptive comes, you can bring it in more easily.
1:19:45 Tom Bilyeu? Is this a good time for a first time entrepreneur? Like, is there a way for them to read this situation?
1:19:50 Speaker 01 Best time ever to be an entrepreneur in the history of the world because they can pick up and pick up the purpose that they want to go after. Cure cancer. They can go, okay, let me go figure out what the business model is and how I apply AI to it and boom, off you go. So it's the best time ever. You have to have nerves of steel.
1:20:09 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah.
1:20:09 Speaker 01 Because you have to have, you can have radical competition coming to you within three weeks of your launch. But this is the best time to be an entrepreneur.
1:20:19 Tom Bilyeu? Okay, so I teach beginning entrepreneurs a lot and I know the deer in headlights look they would give me if I gave that answer. So how do you read this moment? Because you made a comment earlier that I think bears repeating, which is in the game of AI, by the time you implement and put it out, AI is going to have updated. And Sam Altman himself said, there's two kinds of companies, those that are excited for us to launch the next version. And the other kind that are like, please, for the love of God, like I just got this in, you're going to break my business.
1:20:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:20:49 Tom Bilyeu? How do people make sure that they're structuring their business, their first time entrepreneur, that's not big companies?
1:20:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:54 Tom Bilyeu? How do they structure their business in such a way where they've picked a business lane, a business model where they want GTP five, six, seven, 10, 20?
1:21:03 Speaker 01 Let's pick an example. Let's pick
1:21:08 Speaker 01 a marketing agency. Okay, so you can do some amazing things with AI with marketing agency today. You can do new AI delivered content creation for your clients. And what I would do first is upscale all of your employees and get them trained up on the stability AI and all the latest Sora, all the, all the tools and give them AI to enable them. Second thing you do is you start running radical campaigns with your clients using AI because you can do external market testing in a really powerful way with AI bots and AI agents today. The third thing you do is you start building agents to replicate some of the other parts of your system, like the accounting and the
1:21:50 Speaker 01 the invoice management and things like that. And if you do that layered on chat. GPT, the agents will will naturally click to the new model underlying LLM when they're ready. But you should build or buy the agents that you need in your business. So the future, as I see it of a business, will be very few employees, a bunch of AI agents running around doing things, layered on top of a basic foundational LLM open source. I'd probably to navigate some of that. So let's apply this to, say, healthcare. You'll have a healthcare LLM. And on top of that, you'll build a bunch of agents to do patient data gathering and invoicing of patients. You'll create a subscription model for your people so that you keep them on on track.
1:22:35 Speaker 01 And you say, I'm just going to give you, just keep sending me your personal data off your Fitbit. I'm going to track it all. And I'm going to give you, our AIs are going to track your health in real time and will be unbelievably confidential about all this. And when you need something, we're going to send it to you before you think you need it. And that kind of a business could be run largely with AI today even.
1:22:54 Tom Bilyeu? I have a hypothesis that this moment now more than ever is going to be brutally difficult for entrepreneurs to get something off the ground because it will be very cheap and inexpensive to start a company. And extremely important that your idea is so differentiated that even though a ton of other people have access to all the same AI that you do, you still stand head and shoulders above.
1:23:21 Speaker 01 But this is why the MTP becomes so important, right? Because the fundamental passion that you bring to the table is the thing that will set you apart. Okay. Peter has a huge passion for having entrepreneurs deliver abundance. Nothing will swerve them off that goal. No AIs will swerve them off that goal. Same with Elon trying to get to space. He will just do whatever it takes to get there. And then I think everything becomes an enabler for that. The minute an entrepreneur is building a business because he wants to do it for the money is a is a death knell. Right? They'll do it because they love that problem, that problem solved. They want that problem solved. So if my MTP is to cure cancer, if somebody else comes along and does it, I'm happy in a sense.
1:24:03 Speaker 01 But there's gonna be a lot of room to play in different aspects of that problem. Right? The, the work that you're doing here at Impact Theory and propagating wonderful new ideas and getting the word out to a very large population is some of the most important work we could do in the world. Because we have to get these, some of these ideas propagated and shift people from old thinking to new thinking. Right? The psychedelics, as we've talked about before, is, is one way of doing it. But the faster people can adopt and try things and experiment with things, the better. And, and how do you bring in a culture of experimentation into your question? So, um, the, uh, one of the companies we advise and we're partnered with is called MBO Partners out of, out of, um, the US.
1:24:46 Speaker 01 What they do is they help people manage all their contractors. So today, if you're a big company, you have like 5% contractors in your community, in your employee base. It should be like 30% because the freshness of new skills, new ideas, diversity, et cetera. And so they actually manage, managing all the outsourcing and onboarding, offboarding, et cetera. And I think that's going to be a model where future, where the actual reality of what is a company becomes less, more and more blurred between an AI agent outsourced workforce, distributed work being done elsewhere. And then what's your core offering even becomes more blurred. But one thing we are very clear about and goes back to your horizon thing that I mentioned is if, if you see what happened in the, in the music industry where we were selling scarcity,
1:25:31 Speaker 01 selling it cassette or DVD or CD. And then you're had about eight or so major music studios trying to manage that industry and manage that scarcity. Then we digitize music. And now we have a subscription model of abundance where iTunes and Spotify give you an abundance of music for a subscription fee. That we some business model we see happening in healthcare and in education and in transportation and in energy. And that's a very, very different business model. And so the way to do that, if your legacy is try out these new business models on the edge, and then let the sender deprecate and gravitate to the new model. And we've got lots of evidence and experience and anecdotes about that. Or if you're an entrepreneur, Bill, go straight to one of these new models and build it.
1:26:16 Speaker 01 So I'll give you an example. If I had to suggest a business for you and maybe for Lisa, we create an Amazon Prime for healthcare and wellness. Right? Where I pay a subscription fee. Somebody's curating all the stuff that needs to happen. I send you my medical data once in a while and you just tell me here, just take two of these in the morning and don't even think about it. Just do this. I would love that. And once we know from Amazon Prime that once you subscribe, you never unsubscribe. Cause the value is just too great and you just deliver so much value. And now you have very steady revenue numbers coming in. That's a no brainer for me.
1:26:51 Tom Bilyeu? That's a great example of one of the futures with AI. You've got all these nanobots running around in your body. They're sending info to your fridge. Do we have this? No, your fridge.
1:26:59 Speaker 01 Now, if you had a model like that, right? The more you add AI, it doesn't disrupt the business. It doesn't disrupt the business model. You're just adding more and more value to it. You're just getting better in the flow. The data is better and cleaner, et cetera, et cetera.
1:27:11 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, facts. Think like a sci fi writer when trying to launch your next business.
1:27:16 Speaker 01 I have ultimate respect for sci fi writers. It's incredibly hard.
1:27:19 Tom Bilyeu? Good ones are worth their weight in gold. I want to say something. It's the darkest, most horrifying thing that I will have said today. And I said a litany of horrifying things. And that is, and strike me down if you disagree. If you're an entrepreneur, you have one job and one job only, and that is to solve novel problems.
1:27:38 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:27:39 Tom Bilyeu? Now, the bad news, the hardest thing in the world is to solve novel problems.
1:27:43 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:27:43 Tom Bilyeu? And this is where I see everybody fail. And I see people taking courses on how to integrate AI, courses on how to market, courses on how to.
1:27:54 Speaker 01 Give me an example. Hang on, hang on. Okay, let me challenge you. Give me an example of a novel problem.
1:27:58 Tom Bilyeu? Word. All right. If you try to integrate AI, in fact, I'm going to look right into the camera. If you try to integrate AI right now, today, boys and girls, you are going to be sadly disappointed because that shit is not ready for prime time and 99.999% of times.
1:28:13 Tom Bilyeu? However, what he said earlier about being AI ready, now that's special. The problem is that most people are not going to know how to navigate through the very novel problem of integrating AI either into your startup or into your very robust company, because how do you deal with an immune system?
1:28:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28:32 Tom Bilyeu? As you know firsthand, that shit is brutal and you left Yahoo because the immune system was too big of a pain in the ass to deal with.
1:28:39 Speaker 01 But I just finished telling you we solved that problem. In fact, we've open sourced the methodology so that anybody can pick up the methodology and go run the system. It's a red hat type model if they want to run it themselves again. No, no.
1:28:50 Tom Bilyeu? Are you telling me that a guy with an 85 IQ is going to be able to pull that off?
1:28:54 Speaker 01 Wait, I'm talking about a company.
1:28:56 Tom Bilyeu? Yeah, you and me both.
1:28:57 Speaker 01 Yeah. So if you're, we now have lots of successful examples, 70 plus.
1:29:03 Tom Bilyeu? And you're saying none of those people know how to solve problems. They just paint by numbers with your system.
1:29:07 Speaker 01 Well, what they do is when you change the culture in a company and make it more adaptable and flexible. Well, this is what, actually, I describe how it works.
1:29:15 Tom Bilyeu? You can, but the punchline for me is going to be the same. That will be so messy in the middle of actually doing it that getting to the other side of that is about solving novel problems. Because one of the problems is going to be Sally in accounting. Her mom is dying of cancer.
1:29:30 Speaker 01 Right.
1:29:30 Tom Bilyeu? And she's now being a real stick in the mud and she is freaking the fuck out. And you're like, why is she responding like this? This is super weird. So you pull Sally aside and you say, hey, this isn't like you to have this kind of really negative response. I can tell you're very worried about something. I would just love to hear you walk me through what the problem is. That alone is difficult to do, to recognize that Sally's creating a problem, to have mapped her history out and be like, that's not how she normally is. To pull her aside and definitely handle that situation. Entrepreneurship is a litany of getting kicked in the face.
1:30:02 Speaker 01 It is.
1:30:02 Tom Bilyeu? And because I'm working with beginning entrepreneurs right now, who are trying to build the next great thing on AI. And I watched one after another, after another, get kicked in the face over and over and over because they have a chicken and egg problem. Hey, I want to create this amazing thing using AI. Hey, AI is not quite there, it's not quite giving me the thing.
1:30:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:17 Tom Bilyeu? And then they're like, okay, this is going to take me a lot longer to build. Let's say it's going to take me three years to build this and oh, wait, I need to attract either capital or co-founders. But Tom, I don't know how to attract a co-founder.
1:30:27 Speaker 01 Hire an AI product guy today.
1:30:28 Tom Bilyeu? Yes. And then I say, oh, by the way, finding a co-founder is like finding a marriage. You have to be really thoughtful. Oh my God, I just got divorced. It it is really easy for us to sit here and say, oh, go do this. That's why if you disagree and you think, no, solving novel problems is a joke. This is paint by numbers world now. This is so easy. Cool. Strike me down and tell me that I'm crazy.
1:30:49 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:30:50 Tom Bilyeu? But so so. Not convinced yet.
1:30:52 Speaker 01 Have I given you my turtle eggs analogy for startups?
1:30:55 Tom Bilyeu? Turtle eggs?
1:30:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:56 Tom Bilyeu? No.
1:30:57 Speaker 01 So I look at startups as a turtle laying 200 eggs in a nest. Right? Then she runs off and maybe only 150 of them hatch for whatever. I have 150 little turtles running to.
1:31:07 Tom Bilyeu? If this ends with me being able to run away from my company and it just grows. I am here for this.
1:31:13 Speaker 01 These are 100 little 200 little startups as the turtle eggs. So now they're running towards the water and the fish are eating the birds are eating animals. You're eating them. They're getting stuck in crevices. They get into the water and now the fish are eating them and only five will get to the bottom. And the difficulty with startups in general is that when you look at the original nest of 200, it doesn't matter how smart you are. It's really hard to figure out which five of those eggs are the ones going to make it to the bottom. It's a numbers game.
1:31:39 Tom Bilyeu? Is Elon just getting lucky?
1:31:42 Tom Bilyeu? He's done it over.
1:31:43 Speaker 01 He's lucky, but he's also working unbelievably hard and he brings first principles to play.
1:31:49 Tom Bilyeu? There you go.
1:31:49 Speaker 01 So that's really.
1:31:50 Tom Bilyeu? Do you know what's first principles allow you to do?
1:31:53 Speaker 01 No, we'll solve novel problems. I totally get that.
1:31:56 Tom Bilyeu? That's the point.
1:31:56 Speaker 01 But the problem was, so here's my interpretation of how Elon works. It's very simple. He looks at a technology that's growing exponentially, solar energy, brain computing interfaces, whatever. Where will that technology be on a 10 year price point and a 10 year performance curve? And then build a company to intercept that curve because it kind of takes 10 years to build a global company. Having that company survive that 10 years is no trivial matter because you have to go through all sorts of difficult shenanigans, fundraising, et cetera, get there. But if you can get there, then you catch the technology as truly accelerating and boom, off you go. That's why I think he does, he, he just does that again and again and again. Okay. And he doesn't, he has the ability to just, so that exponential mindset allows him to operate and navigate in this way.
1:32:39 Speaker 01 We've actually laid out in chapter 15 of the book, a very clear prescriptive path on how to build a company. You create an MTP, you go find communities that match your concerns like curing cancer, go join meetups or whatever. From that community, you've create a founding team of people that share your vision and share the MTP, typically four people, a vision guy, a product guy, an engineering guy and a finance guy. Maybe you need three in the future, but okay, four. Then at step four, you come up with your breakthrough idea, which should be 10 times better than the status quo, or 10 times different or better or whatever. Because if you're 10% better, they'll ignore you. 10 times better, they can't ignore you. Then you follow lean startup thinking, come up with your MVP.
1:33:21 Speaker 01 Then you follow the rest of the EXO model and apply all the EXO attributes. Tried and true. We've now seen thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs running this model very, very successfully. They have to go through that order. You have to have your MTP. Because if you're not passionate about that business, you won't succeed through all the very, very difficult times. Now, you make a very valid point, which is that the AI juggernaut, and it's kind of washing through a whole bunch of stuff is coloring and tainting a lot of these functions in these steps. Because people have to deploy it, they don't know quite how to deploy it. The model's not ready for primetime use. It's not off the shelf in many cases. Do you then go build your own LLM? How do you get the source data? Where do you steal it from?
1:34:03 Speaker 01 What legal quandaries are you getting yourself into and hazard, legal hazard there, et cetera? And then you're trying to get to some, what the hell does the customer want? And the customer is totally confused today. And that's maybe the biggest problem of the future that I see coming, that the consumer does not know what they want. And so they'll go back to the old things. So I think this is a very, very difficult time. But that's when you have the biggest opportunity for disruption. And I think that's what will carry people through. So but the AI ready question is the question now applying to every single business and nonprofit in the world because they could radically transcend and transform their performance, but they need to figure out how to do.
1:34:48 Tom Bilyeu? Celine, tell people where they can learn more from your beautiful.
1:34:51 Speaker 01 There'll be links at the bottom. I'm at openexo.com. I'm in the community. And we do, we meetups every week on how do you solve for these problems and get through some of this? We're putting a workshop together out of demand from our community saying, I need how to be AI ready. So we're crafting a half day workshop that will give everybody a clear strategic path down. Because the problem today is twofold. One is people are jumping into AI without realizing it and dashing themselves on rocks because they haven't seen clearly where the deep spots are. So how can you make sure you're not doing that? And secondly, how do you solve the immune system problem and the cultural readiness of your company to be ready for this? So if you can navigate that and we do a quick workshop to gauge your readiness, then we can point you down a path
1:35:34 Speaker 01 and you can then start putting building blocks in place. So we're starting to do that now.
1:35:38 Tom Bilyeu? I love it.
1:35:39 Speaker 01 Yeah. Plus the NFT collection, which is going to be huge.
1:35:42 Tom Bilyeu? What's it called?
1:35:42 Speaker 01 It's called Exo Heroes.
1:35:44 Tom Bilyeu? There it is.
1:35:44 Speaker 01 And it's going to be an ordinals collection for all the builders in the world that are building this edge stuff. And so that's an area which I'd love to have other conversations with you about because you've got really great experience in this. I mean, let me show you this, like this was put together by our community members. It's a whole kid's book called Sophie's Epic Space Mission on how one of our Exo Heroes helped her do this. They did this in 40 hours, the whole book, AI generation, story, creation, animation, etc. That's creativity now because that's what I think AI allows you to do. It just amps your game. This would have taken 40 weeks 10 years ago and now it's 40 hours. Right? So I think it's magical. What's going to come in the future? I can't, I can't wait.
1:36:28 Speaker 01 Again, I have my optimism that we'll have to deal with.
1:36:31 Tom Bilyeu? No, totally get it. All right, everybody. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods.
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