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Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2605: Navigating AI With Tom Bilyeu
01:17:09
Tom Bilyeu The trigger that spun him out to make the content he is covering now. (1:13) Understanding that we live in an economic system that was constructed. (4:06) Debt jubilee. (10:51) How forward progress does NOT care about any given...
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- [00:02]
Sal Destefano
Race the rudders.
- [00:02]
Adam Schaefer
Raise the sails. Race the sails.
- [00:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.
- [00:07]
Sal Destefano
Over.
- [00:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Roger.
- [00:09]
Adam Schaefer
Wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [00:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today at LinkedIn.com results, terms and conditions apply.
- [00:30]
Justin Andrews
If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go.
- [00:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Mind Pump. Mind Pump. With your hosts, Sal Destefano, Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews, you just found the.
- [00:44]
Adam Schaefer
Most downloaded fitness, health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today we have Tom Bilyeu on the show. He's interviewed some of the smartest people in the world on his podcast.
- [00:56]
Sal Destefano
He.
- [00:56]
Adam Schaefer
He's been on air for almost 10 years. Very smart guy. We love having him on the show. By the way, you can find him at Tombilleu on Instagram. You can find him on YouTube. You can also go to impacttheory.com now. This episode is brought to you by some sponsors. The first one is eight Sleep. This is the most advanced sleep system you'll find anywhere. AI will adjust it to maximize your sleep and you can get a huge discount. Ready? Go to 8sleep.com mindpump. You use the code mind pump, get $350 off the Pod 5 Ultra. This episode's also brought to you by our programs. Right now, Maps 15 Performance and the RGB bundle are 50% off. If you're interested, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use the code MAY50 for the discount. Here comes the show. Tom, welcome back, dude.
- [01:45]
Tom Bilyeu
Thanks for having me.
- [01:46]
Adam Schaefer
It's been a long time.
- [01:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, we were just doing the math. It's been a minute.
- [01:49]
Adam Schaefer
It's been a very long time. And you've been at this for nine years. You've been doing your show and everything.
- [01:54]
Tom Bilyeu
No, they're not.
- [01:54]
Adam Schaefer
What's new for you? What is happening?
- [01:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, so I made a. It was a gradual pivot over time to talking more about finance, economics, politics. But it became a real abrupt shift recently with the launch of the Tom Bilyeu show as a live streaming thing. So I now livestream about nine hours a week plus doing what we call the tight 60. So we'll film a three hour session live with the community, going back and forth on whatever's popping off in the world. And then we'll stop down and then I'll condense into like 60 minutes what's hot right now in this Moment. And politics is weird, man. Some kind of way.
- [02:34]
Sal Destefano
I felt like Covid kind of did that. I felt that's when I started to notice your content sort of shift.
- [02:40]
Tom Bilyeu
But the journey there, I never thought I would end up in politics, and I really don't. I still don't consider it, like, politics centric. It's. There are important issues that people need to get good at thinking through because they actually matter. And we can talk about why in this particular minute if you guys think it'll be advantageous. But in Covid, it was at Quest, I had a thousand of my 3000 employees, grew up in the hood. And when Covid hit, I was like, they're all gonna lose their jobs because all of them are working like, manual labor in person. None of them know how to manage money. And so this is just gonna be devastating. So I thought, let me start doing financial content. Literally just thinking about them and, like, sort of. So I had an avatar in my mind. I'm going to do this financial content to help them weather the storm and hopefully get on the other side of it. But I realized I didn't understand investing money. So I was like, oh, let me get a couple steps ahead. I'll learn about this. I'll bring guests on. Same thing I did with Gut Health for my wife. And you suddenly start realizing, hold on a second. Money doesn't work the way that I thought it did. And then I was like, whoa, this is like a scam is maybe the wrong word, but it's directionally correct. So I was like, whoa. And as you begin to unwind how money works, like, why do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? It leads you to money printing inflation. And I just started getting really amped up about, okay, hold on a second. Like, a lot of people are being ripped off, and they're being ripped off because of a system. And then that just spun me out into doing deep dives on economics. Ray Dalio. And then that will get you pointed into USV China, which there's this thing called Thucydides trap. So anyway, as I'm just trying to make content to help these people that I knew, loved, and cared about understand how to basically balance their budget, I end up realizing we're on a collision course with China, and it just completely takes over my intellectual life, and I. I can't help myself but talk about the things that occupy my thoughts.
- [04:38]
Adam Schaefer
At what point in that did you read the Crush, the Creature from Jekyll Island? At what point did you start learning.
- [04:44]
Tom Bilyeu
About you, you get to that pretty fast. So once you're like, okay, wait a second, what is money printing? Why are we doing? Because that was the first domino to fall for me because I, I kept waiting for the bombshell to happen where everybody was going to lose their jobs and it didn't happen. And so I was like, what's going on? So then you get to money printing, and then you're like, wait, hold on a second. There's government sanctioned counterfeiting, like, what's happening right now? And then you, at first you're like, oh, maybe this is awesome. And then you start going down the path of, oh, nope, actually, this is exactly why somebody in my position is doing great. And then other people are getting hammered. And yeah, the understanding that we live in an economic system that was constructed was pretty eye opening.
- [05:29]
Sal Destefano
Explain that for the audience, because I do think that most people get trapped in that way of thinking, meaning, oh, this is good. They're helping me out. Oh, and so explain why it's not good and why do people think it's such a good thing?
- [05:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so the reason it seems like such a good thing is somebody's gonna give you money for free. I mean, that really, Even now I'm like, that does sound pretty awesome. Like, if I was going to campaign on something, I would love to campaign on, I'm gonna give you free money. The catch becomes that all of the value of things and the money in your pocket, they're so intertwined in terms of a thing called purchasing power. And what people don't understand is that you, you do need to be able to create money out of thin air. Like, that is a thing. Like you, you need that process for reasons that if you want to push on later, we can go deeper into it. But you need that process. But it needs to be tied to an increase in the amount of things that you can spend that money on. And if it is, then people don't notice that more money is coming into the system. But when it's literally just, oh, everybody is about to get obliterated by this thing called Covid. So we're going to have to print a ton of money so that we can keep companies from going under, that anybody that loses their job, we can give them money to stay afloat. When you do that, but you're not creating new goods, what ends up happening is, yes, you, you have more money in your pocket, but it buys less in almost the exact amount that you have money in your pocket. So there are studies on this that show the Correlation between inflation. So prices across the board going up. It's very important to understand inflation is when prices across the board go up, everything becomes more expensive. Okay. So inflation, the correlation between money printing and inflation is between 0.6 and 0.9. So even if you split the difference, these are basically the same phenomena. So when you print money, you cause things to become more expensive because you've counterfeited money. You've, you've literally just made it up out of thin air. But where it gets scary is when you make that money up out of thin air, how do you get it into the system? And that's how the rich end up getting richer and the poor end up getting poorer. It's one of the ways, when I.
- [07:56]
Adam Schaefer
First learned about this, if you look at the history of money, like why do we even have money? I mean, originally, if you go back far enough, the way people dealt with each other was they traded. So you have chickens and I have shovels. And I'll say, I'll give you one shovel for four of your chickens and we make a deal. But what happens if you have chickens, I have shovels, and you don't want shovels. How do I deal with you? So they created money. And money represented, you know, represented things. It represented the ability to buy things with it. It represented goods, services, and efficiency work. But if it doesn't line up perfectly, then it just, things just get more expensive.
- [08:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. And to really pin that down, if it doesn't line up perfectly with something somewhere in a bank, let's call it, then it's what they call fiat currency, which fiat means by decree. So this has value because I say so as the government, it is far less deranging when the money is tied one to one with, say, gold. Right. And that's the one I think most people are familiar with, is you have these dollars, but it's tied to real gold that's in a warehouse. And technically, like paper money started as the IOU to get your gold back. And so instead of going and getting the gold and bringing it to the, you would just say, here's the IOU for however many pieces of gold that you have, or however many ounces. And then we, Obviously in the US we break from the gold standard in 1971. And then it just became we can print as much money as we want. We don't have to be tethered to anything.
- [09:30]
Adam Schaefer
We tried to tether it to oil is what we did.
- [09:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So we do a trade off where it's like the petrodollar is the thing that allows us to still be the world's reserve currency because there's something anchored to it. So from a global economic standpoint, that was very helpful. Otherwise, everything just fluctuates all over the place and it doesn't matter what you trade your currency in. And so the US Would have put themselves in a really bad position, because when you're the world's reserve currency, you can export your inflation. So if everybody around the world holds your debt and you do inflation, inflation is theft. So you print money. When you print money, you're stealing buying power, but you're stealing it equally from everybody. Everybody that has dollars, in this case, they're stolen from in the same amount. So the rich and the poor are stolen from equally, but because when the money gets put back in the system, it's going to be a double whammy for the wealthy one, because the Fed will put it into circulation by buying traditionally government debt. But recently they've started buying corporate debt, which is far more insane. And I can't believe that people were just like, okay. I think it's largely because they don't understand that that is the Fed picking winners and losers. Like literally deciding we're going to make sure this company survives and not that company is absolutely bananas. And then because of inflation, the cost of the assets go up. And so they're not going up because they're actually more valuable. They're going up because the value of the dollar is going down. It bought buys less. So if you want to buy my house, then I need the buying power equivalent in dollars. So it creates this optical illusion that my house is worth more money, when in reality it's not.
- [11:14]
Sal Destefano
Yeah, but that's also how the wealthy protect themselves in a situation like that, which is why the wealthy get wealthier and the middle class or poor really get hurt.
- [11:22]
Adam Schaefer
You have weird, distorted pressures. And that's why it's impossible to look at it without looking at politics. Because, for example, a majority of Americans, I'd love your opinion on this. A lot of Americans, majority Americans, have their wealth tied into their house. So if you're a politician and you look at this and let's say you're an honest politician, which doesn't exist, but let's just say that does exist. And you look at it and you go, the cost of homes is massively inflated. It has massively inflated for all these different reasons. We need to make them more affordable. You have no political power because so many Americans own homes. There isn't A single person that's going to raise their hand say, yeah, yeah, let's do these policies to lower the price of my home. So they're completely intertwined. It's almost like, how do you. How do you fix it when you're. You're not going to get any votes to fix it.
- [12:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Well, the good news is, on a long enough timeline, they just behead the people that block them. For real.
- [12:18]
Sal Destefano
And that's the Ray Dalio story. Yes.
- [12:20]
Tom Bilyeu
This is what people don't understand, and this is literally what we're living through now, is you either get a civil war, a revolution, or Thucydides trap where you collide with the rising superpower. So it's pretty rare that you get what Ray Dalio describes as the beautiful deleveraging, where you slowly back your way out of these insane debt policies and you get into fiscal responsibilities. Really pretty rare. It almost always you get what's called a debt jubilee. Oh, it's such a nice way of saying a lot of people die, but that's what happens. And so the French Revolution was literally bring the wealthy lop their heads off, and we're gonna reboot government. World War II, when Britain was the world's reserve currency and the dominant economic superpower, they just got bled to death fighting that war, and they owed the US So much money. And then the US Got the privilege through the Bretton woods agreement, what you were talking about earlier, and now we're finding that, oh, we're in danger of losing it, because every time somebody has that privilege, they print money.
- [13:28]
Adam Schaefer
Now, what's interesting about this is in some cases because the dollars lost something like 90 something percent of its value, especially since we severed it from the gold standard. So now they could just print it. There's nothing they have to tie it to. But what's interesting is within that period of time, I think it was. You said 1971, was it that.
- [13:45]
Tom Bilyeu
That was the Nixon shock when he pulled us off the gold standard.
- [13:48]
Adam Schaefer
So 1971 till now, we also have this technological revolution that dramatically improves efficiency, at least for certain types of products. Okay, so the efficiency outpaced inflation in many ways. In other words, a flat screen TV, plasma 10 years ago is way more expensive than it is today, even though the dollar is far less valuable than it was when, when those plasma TVs came out. Because tech has just, the, the, the explosion of efficiency with tech has outpaced inflation. Do you foresee that potential with, like, AI and with tech maybe solving this? Because, sure, things are inflated Money's worth nothing. But tech is going to advance so quickly. AI is going to do things for us that normally would require so much labor, so much work that it will outpace this and maybe solve this problem.
- [14:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Or at least as soon as you're talking about AI, you have to give me a timeline on which you want me to answer it.
- [14:43]
Adam Schaefer
Okay. Okay.
- [14:44]
Tom Bilyeu
For real.
- [14:45]
Adam Schaefer
Okay, so explain what do you mean by that?
- [14:48]
Tom Bilyeu
If you said, what's AI going to do in the next 10 years? I'm going to give you an answer where I have grounding to speak about it. I don't have to give you an act of faith. I can say, given the things we know about energy usage, things like that will probably be roughly in this ballpark. But if you're saying extrapolate out 30 years, now all of a sudden I have to put my sci fi writer hat on and I'll tell you where I think this goes. But we're talking about beyond the event horizon. And so I know I'm talking like a writer where I can get you directionally correct in terms of the things that we'll struggle with, what will probably happen. But the only thing I know is whatever words I say, that won't be how it actually plays out. This is why if you look at science fiction from 30 years ago, none of them talk about text messaging or cell phones. Like, they just all get that wrong. There are going to be specifics about it that won't make any sense, but in the next 10 years it will be. AI is going to absolutely gobble up the vast majority of anything that's repetitive and pattern recognition. So think manual labor, all that stuff, factories, the way that we think about it now, that's all going to be robots, all going to be AI.
- [15:54]
Sal Destefano
And we already see this.
- [15:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep, 100%. And same with the vast majority of white collar jobs that are pattern recognition. So copywriters, done.
- [16:03]
Sal Destefano
Code, legal stuff.
- [16:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, legal, done. We've already reduced our legal bills by 80% using AI today. Like imagine where that's going to be in five years would be crazy. So that in the 10 year period, I say to myself as an act of faith, because when I look backwards every time a technology has come along, everybody freaks out and says humans aren't going to work anymore. And then lo and behold, jobs that you couldn't possibly have imagined, they come on board. So as an act of faith, in the next 10 years, I just assume there are things that I can't predict that'll spin up. And yes, the people that are like 45 right now, that are computer science majors, they're toast. Like, that is not going to be fun. They will have to figure something new out. But forward progress just does not care about any given generation. So you, you know, the whole learn to code meme. You either learn to code or you get left by on the wayside and hope that your kids take care of you. That is just the hard reality of being a human. But if you start talking about 30 years, you're now into the position of realizing my favorite fact about humanity. All the things that you want, like healthcare, that you wish would be free. The reason it's not free is because of you, motherfucker. You won't work for free. That's the problem. But robots will. And so if you can drive energy costs to zero, which I have no reason to believe in 30 years, unless AI hits an upper bound of intelligence, meaning we don't have the energy or compute, just hits a wall if one of those two things happens, everything I'm about to say won't come to pass. But I don't see any reason to believe that they won't. Energy cost will effectively go to zero because the sun drops so much energy on us, it's absolutely ridiculous. You could run the earth for basically ever in like a week's worth of sunlight if you knew how to capture it. So I assume I will be able to figure that out once the cost of energy goes to zero, the cost of labor goes to zero as long as you don't need a human to do it, and you won't. And so between robotics and energy costs, in 30 years, everything is free. And so now you're truly post capitalist. Now you're not post human. Humans are going to be weird and they're going to do really weird human things, but you'll be post capitalist. The way that we think of generating money, building meaning and purpose, all of that stuff will almost certainly go.
- [18:09]
Sal Destefano
I love talking about this because we talk about this, we've been saying this for a long time, that, that we are heading down this path and that the scariest part is not what I think people think. I think actually that probably sounds really good for a lot of people, like, oh man, everything's free. But I actually think we'll see more depression, more suicide, more things like that when you remove meaning and purpose.
- [18:31]
Adam Schaefer
Existential crisis.
- [18:32]
Sal Destefano
And right now, for the people that don't have this deep purpose, they have easy purpose of, oh, I got to go to work to pay the bills, to feed my Kids to do these things. When you remove that from, you know, millions, billions of people, like, oh, what happens now? And so that's a really scary thought to me on what we look like as a society when we get everything we thought we ever wanted. What's your thoughts?
- [18:55]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, like, do you literally that I think that you will usher in an era where people are going to have to find, like, go out of their way to find meaning and purpose. And we're already seeing the front edge of what that looks like, which is that most people just do not have the cognitive wherewithal to parse through when they're not being chased by a lion. How should I be spending my time? In a way that makes me feel good about who I am and for a long time, man, look, my phase one of me as a public Persona was all about mindset, and it was trying to get people to understand. A, you're having a biological experience. B, the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. And I don't think people realize how much there's like perpetual motion in that from, well, I have to get up. I have to go to work. I have kids because I couldn't stop it because birth control didn't exist. Like, there were so many things that just took care of itself. And when all that goes away and now everything is a choice, like, how do you get yourself to do hard things? And we already know you need look no farther than somebody's physiology to know most people when it's like, you just don't eat those things and go to a gym, you're going to be in great shape. Most people can't do it. So when they get everything for free, you run the risk of. Instead of worrying about 1984, we're now into a brave new world where everybody's just doing drugs and it's. They're numbing themselves out.
- [20:15]
Adam Schaefer
Hedonistic spiral.
- [20:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So. And now we get into my personal thing, which is how long will we remain human? And this is the one, man. Oh, boy. I think that there's going to be huge backlash against the following. What I think a statement of truth that we're already building neuralink, and part of the reason we're doing that is because Elon Musk realized you're going to have to keep up with AI and that isn't going to be. You won't be able to do it with your biology. And so then you start tweaking whether it's through CRISPR gene editing or whether it's just outright implanting technology into your brain. Do we become a midwife for a either hybrid species or a non human species? Again, this is all timeline question. That's not going to happen in 10 years. But you start getting into 30, 50 years. Unless compute hits some sort of upper bound, I don't see a way around.
- [21:06]
Sal Destefano
I think in our lifetime we will see a great divide in society and it'll be the plugged in and unplugged.
- [21:13]
Tom Bilyeu
I could not agree more.
- [21:14]
Sal Destefano
I 100 I've been saying it for a long time.
- [21:16]
Guest
A new elite class in terms of like transhumanists. Like they're not going to willingly allow your average person to have that access to technology because there's still going to be an elite hierarchical kind of system. Wouldn't you think?
- [21:32]
Tom Bilyeu
They'll have the impulse, but I don't think they'll be able to stop it because we have a mind for capitalism and capitalism goes like this. Oh, OpenAI is now going closed source. Cool. I'm going to go open source because that's how I'm going to find my clientele. This is literally Elon versus versus Sam Altman. Elon's like cool. Every once we launch Grok 3 then we make Grok 2 open source. And so to get the client base, you'll make it more open, you'll make it more accessible. And so I think ultimately there's just no stopping.
- [22:05]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, I think this is going to highlight and turbocharge and put on steroids. Human arrogance. Because we've been exploring what makes people happy for thousands of years. The best data we have shows that a part of actual happiness is challenge. Not making things easy is the unknown is faith. And what people are going to do is move the opposite direction. I'm going to make everything easy. I'm going to squirt happy feelings into my brain. And that's going to be very sad for people to realize. This is not what I want. The other part of this is we don't know what human consciousness is still to this day. We can have a debate, discussion about. We've been talking about this forever. The fact that we think we're going to amplify that, maybe create that with AI is interesting. Like what are you making? Do you even know what it is that you're trying to make?
- [22:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I don't think we do fully understand AI that is for sure. I don't think so. I ran the math on this. There is a definition of what a moron is. It's something like an 81 or 82 IQ. Einstein was I think like 164. Anyway, the punchline is Einstein was 2.4 times smarter than a moron. So somebody who's 2.4x smarter than a moron gave us insights into the fundamental laws of the universe that have changed everything. I don't think people realize how much of the modern world is built on the back of Einstein's insights. From gps, which just is impossible without relativity, to obviously nuclear power, nuclear energy, war weapons. So if that's 2.4x over a month, right. What's a thousand times? Is there a reason to believe it won't be a million times smarter? So once you realize the rate at which a self improving AI can move, you could have 20,000 years of improvement in a single afternoon. So this is where they talk about the fast takeoff. Now look, I think that we're nowhere near that nobody's.
- [24:00]
Guest
Where are we currently? Like, could you catch us up in terms of AI?
- [24:04]
Tom Bilyeu
So if you talk to Sam Altman, if you talk to Elon Musk, people that are really at the forefront of actually productizing this, Sam Altman says it's 300% annual improvement. That's already terrifying with no signs of slowing down. So when you isolate a given thing, it is better than humans. Better than basically every time you spin it up so it will beat humans at most video games that you spend time training it on, there's some complexities where it'll start to break down. But like obviously you put them up against AI and poker, they're going to get blasted. And you put them even go something that has just this inhuman number of solutions, it wins. So do we get to artificial general intelligence? There's a guy named Mo Gadot who was a part of building AI at Google Goal and he was like, as far as I'm concerned, we've already achieved that. But he's like, everybody has different definitions of it, but you don't need it.
- [25:04]
Guest
The touring test.
- [25:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Smart. Well, the Turing test we blew past that was when people signed that letter saying we got to slow down because nobody thought we would be able to fake people out as fast as we did. And the part that always unnerves me is the Turing Test. My entire life was like, I don't think we'll ever be able to do it. This is crazy. And then it was like, oh, by the way, we did it. And everyone was just like, okay.
- [25:25]
Guest
Not even big news.
- [25:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, like, and I don't know about you guys, But I use AI 365 days a year and is already. Like, if it froze now, the world is already going to be fundamentally different forever. We have dramatically reduced our staff and increased our profits. I'm just like, this thing that people talk about as if it's something in the future. I'm like, it's already here.
- [25:48]
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
- [25:48]
Tom Bilyeu
So people just need to avail themselves of it. So. So most people will say that you're getting to AGI somewhere in the next three years, and then nobody knows if a SI super intelligence is even possible. We don't know.
- [26:01]
Adam Schaefer
Let me ask. So let me ask you. Have you seen the movie Her?
- [26:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Of course.
- [26:04]
Adam Schaefer
Okay. So it's one of my favorite movies because I think it depicted more of a realistic kind of. Like, this is at least from my perspective. And I like how the AI there just disappeared into the Internet like it didn't care about us. It's like, well, we're here and we're going to disappear. And so that made me think, like, I wonder if that's what I would do or. Or AGI would do. Or when it hits AGI, would it let us know? Like, would we even know? Or would it hide it?
- [26:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [26:30]
Adam Schaefer
And use the Internet to communicate with other, you know, AGI devices and just kind of do its own thing and manipulate us without us knowing, type of deal.
- [26:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Well, here's the really bad news. Let's assume that it will do that, but we're not there yet, and we can breathe a sigh of relief. Then you realize humans are already leveraging AI to do that now. So humans will do bad things with AI even if AI itself never breaks free and has no desire. Like, it is just entirely possible that the emotional system that we ride on the back of is the problem and that AI doesn't need emotions. So the way that I've always thought about the alignment problem is AI has to want something in order to kill you. It has to have a hierarchy of preference where it says, I really want world control, whatever. And that would be the only thing that would push it. Humans clearly have that.
- [27:25]
Sal Destefano
I think that's such a better point and more realistic, which I think is scarier to me, that humans are more likely to use it to do something like that. I mean, we see silly examples of that right now. Like, I mean, look at all the. The fake interviews of pro athletes talking and stuff like that. I mean, you think it's real? I mean, you think he really said that? And look at all the backlash that happens. I can't believe you Said it's like it was AI no one even. But somebody programmed that right. It was a human who thought this would be funny. Let's do this. And so I think we're more likely to see human do bad with it than it itself do bad.
- [27:59]
Tom Bilyeu
At a minimum, you're going to move through the period where it's humans doing bad. Now you may also then get to the part where AI does bad. And that could be so big and so astronomical. But when I think embedded in the human mind is a belief that technology is a promise of a better tomorrow. Given that progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness, this is unstoppable. You'll never a be able to put the genie back in the bottle. And this is probably where we have to talk about what Thucydides trap is. You're never going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle. And I don't think humans would want to even if they could. Will be some faction for sure. I wrote a comic book about this, which we may have talked about last time we were together, called Neon Future, about a world where some people are getting technology implanted and merging with tech and AI and then other people try to stop it. And what the people are trying to stop it realize very quickly is there's no way to stop it unless you also embrace AI because it just outsmarts you and it moves so fast. And so, yeah, I think that we're going to go through a very tumultuous, tumultuous period. I smile gallows humor very much, but I don't, I don't see a way out of the tractor beam that we're in right now.
- [29:15]
Sal Destefano
Are you. So you've, you've been in this and you've been a sci fi guy for a long time. As long as I've known you. Have you changed the way you feel about, say, over the last, say, 10 years? Were you more, I mean, were you the typical sci fi kind of kid? Oh, so exciting, seems so cool, seems so neat. And then as it started to unfold old. Have you changed how you felt about it, or have you felt the same since the beginning?
- [29:36]
Tom Bilyeu
I, I have added layers, there's no doubt. So in the beginning, when it was far away, it just seemed like the coolest thing I could imagine. And then it starts changing so fast that you go, oh, there's going to be a time where I won't matter and AI will be able to do anything and everything better than I can. And I have spent so much of my life because so I've chosen not to have kids. And that choice was very conscious for me in that I knew that that's evolution's way of saying, hey, ready made, meaning and purpose. And so to me, the default life choice, get married, have kids, and so much of your psychology is going to be taken care of. Nothing comes easily. But, like, that gives people this real sense of, like, I matter. Something's going to live beyond me totally. And when you don't have that, you're like, okay, I've got to make sure I'm doing something that triggers that same algorithm in my brain. Otherwise I will have a deep sense of unease as I move through my life that I'm not meeting up to some sort of subconscious drive that I have. And that's taken so much energy and focus on my part that I'm like, oh, when AI is better than me at everything. And now I'm just like, well, I do a thing, but I don't do it as well as this other thing.
- [30:52]
Sal Destefano
Right.
- [30:53]
Tom Bilyeu
What am I really doing? And that, I think, is going to come for us en masse. And maybe I have better defenses than the next person built up. I'm arrogant enough, I suppose, to believe that I do, but I'm also cautious enough to be like, ooh, this could be a rough game. So as a writer right now, I work with AI all the time, and it is unbelievable because the AI is like, the greatest writing partner I've ever had. I've hired heavy hitters, people that have worked on the Lego Movie and all that, to come in and spend time with me, to work on screenplays that we're doing at Impact Theory. And it's been incredible. But nothing has been as profound as AI Nothing. It knows all of cinema history. I once asked it for, like, a breakdown of Star wars, and I had missed a beat. And it actually, first of all, understood what I was trying to get to and corrected me. It was so awesome. And so I was like, oh, my God, you're right. Thank you. Boom. But the reason I love it now is that the AI doesn't have good taste. So it'll give me, like, I'll say, hey, I'm trying to do this, and it'll help me understand the structure. It'll point out things that I'm missing. It'll point out flaws in the way that I'm thinking. But if I ask it, like, give me a scene or give me a concept, it's universally bad. So I'm like, oh, I feel useful. I'm like, you're helping me. Cause I'm not getting stuck. I've always got somebody to bounce an idea off of. Push me where I'm like, ah, I don't know how to handle this. Give me like four ideas. It'll give me four. Three are bad, but one's really like holy hell, that's incredible. So you never get stuck. Very powerful. But I still feel like I'm a better writer now. The day where I feel like it's like, oh bless, that's what you thought would be cool. Then I'm gonna be like, it doesn't need any prompts. Maybe it just figures it out. That's not gonna feel good.
- [32:35]
Sal Destefano
I mean maybe that's some of the. You're highlighting some of the beauty of humanity is, is the flaw is we're a bit flawed. And maybe the reason why it can't put produce this great storyline is because it's got too many data points. It's got too many things. It's trying to fit where the human flaws. I only know so much. Or I have my own story and my own bias yet that creates this beauty in like my, my work. I mean maybe that's what will always separate us.
- [33:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Maybe.
- [33:01]
Adam Schaefer
But I think it'll figure out what humans like and it'll be able to read what is called causing our neuro chemistry to change in a way that highlights. Ooh, they're interested. They like this. It'll continue to move in that direction. It's just going to create something you love because it's going to read you very well, which I think is going to be. You can do that. I think you'll be able to do that.
- [33:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. This is depending on how deep you guys want to go on. AI so do you guys know who Annika Harris is? Annika Harris happens to be Sam Harris's wife and she's written a book technically, I guess a documentary called Lights on that explores the nature of human consciousness. And the more I look at, the more I do two things. Look at human consciousness and like what is that? And program a video game. So I've spent the last three years building a pretty big video game. And you realize that if I were going to recreate what we think of as the universe, I would have to do exactly what I'm doing inside this video game. You have to create a set of rules. From the rules are born all of these exotic behaviors that you couldn't otherwise predict. My gut instinct is that. And this becomes are we in the matrix? And Man, I worry that it's just the right metaphor, but I can't find the hole in it as the metaphor. Because if I'm an AI and I want to truly be creative in the way that a human is creative, what I would do is I would segment off a piece of myself and I would give it quirks and I would have it see the world in a really specific way so that it could replicate something that had a unique perspective. That is certainly what humans do. And if you think of like in this idea of panpsychism, which I definitely don't believe, but there's something that I can feel them contending with, which is this idea that consciousness is fundamental, that an electron has consciousness, a rock has consciousness. Not the way that humans do. It's not thinking about taking the kids to school, but, like, there is something that it feels like to be an electron. Okay, if that's true, and the reason that the quote unquote universe is doing this is merely to experience itself. Meaning, I'm going to give this a very clear perspective through which it's going to look at these sequences of rules and. And that's going to be like, something. And now by spawning up all these rocks, electrons, people, animals, dogs, cats. Ah, like, you begin to grasp what this is. My instinct is that's a fundamentally flawed way to look at it and a better way to look at it. And this is my bias coming through. I'm stuck in a frame of reference. I totally understand that. But you begin to realize that this is all a rendering engine. That the reason quantum physics exists the way they exist is that there's no need to render the thing that an observer is not looking at, because it just takes too much CPU, gpu, Like, it's too much energy to run those processes. And so it all starts to map. And if you're creating AI characters in the game, you would want them so that in programming you call this RNG Random Number Generator. There has to be an amount of. Oh, I didn't expect that to make the experience interesting. And if I were AI and I were really trying to achieve that next level, that's what I would do, is I would segment off a piece of my consciousness and give it a really small specific angle.
- [36:29]
Sal Destefano
Just a honest, curious question for you. How. How do you remain atheist going down this rabbit hole? Like, how do you not. How does this not all lead to something else bigger, something intelligent?
- [36:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, well, so that's what I believe, that there is something bigger, intelligent, maybe slightly. We may diverge. There All I'm saying is the books that people have written there is, in my limited, trapped worldview, it's not possible that that's accurate. Now, it might be great allegory, sure. Wonderful metaphor, yes. Lessons for life, 1,000%. But that they got it right literally strikes me as nonsensical. But there is clearly, like, even, hey, let's run it out. Tom ends up being right. This is a simulation. We're inside the Matrix. Okay.
- [37:22]
Sal Destefano
Well, someone's running it.
- [37:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Where's the server? There's a server on it? Yes, Somewhere. So all you can ever hope to do is push the miracle farther out. At some point, everybody has to figure out why is there something instead of nothing? And I have no idea, and I stand in awe before that. So I certainly don't think I'm arrogant enough to know what it is. I have an intuition about what it's not.
- [37:44]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. Have you ever. Have you ever read Genesis, the first book of the. Of the Bible?
- [37:49]
Tom Bilyeu
No.
- [37:49]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. So there's some stuff in there that's pretty fat. I very much think like you do. And it's really interesting when you see it from your perspective, especially if you go back, I don't know, you go back to science maybe 100 years ago when it was widely accepted that the universe was eternal. It's just. It just. It's just forever. It's. It goes infinite direction. And then the way they observe it expanding, they're like, wait a minute, it started all at one point. And of course, in Genesis it says in the beginning. Then you have space, time and matter, which all have to exist at the same time. And you have, in the beginning, time. There were the heavens created space, and then the Earth, matter. So it's like, how did they even piece this together? So I think when you look through that and you see it starts to kind of put things together a little.
- [38:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Bit, which is really fascinating by way of reflecting how intuitively humans have understood this.
- [38:40]
Adam Schaefer
I don't think it's intuitive at all. I think what's intuitive would have been very different. There's a lot of things that are not. For example. So you're getting into politics. And how intuitive is it for human nature to come up with the concept of inalienable rights? Is that a natural thought? Or is it natural to look around and be like, well, I'm bigger, I'm stronger. I'll do this. He's not tall as I am. He's not as smart as I am. It's a very counter. It's very Unnatural. No human, I think, in my opinion, would have ever imagined or thought of that, ever.
- [39:14]
Tom Bilyeu
I have a feeling the universe we see is the most likely universe. Therefore, whatever humans have come up with is the most likely thing they were likely to come up with when you start sequencing events. So to your point, if you're taking me sort of on day one, we're the first time where we're sort of human. We've just spent how many hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, fighting for survival, literally going, you have caloric density that I need, so I'm going to kill you and I'm going to eat it. So I certainly get that that's where we would start. But as you spin up intellect and the ability to abstract, all of a sudden I go, okay, you're stronger than me and so fighting you head on isn't going to work. So then all of a sudden when I start looking at the strategies, I'm like, oh, this is brilliant. I remember being, being pretty young, realizing, oh, government is a weak man's answer to deal with strong men. It's like rad. Because I grew up weak, I was like, this is dope. I can use my brain to get around. Like, I'm not going to win in a physical altercation. Unfortunately, I didn't understand lifting or any of that stuff. So for me it was just like, okay, got it. I can use my mind. So for me, comedy was my play. Shout out to Nick Tarabosha. That guy was a giant and he just walked around the school doing whatever the hell he's a friend of yours.
- [40:32]
Adam Schaefer
In school, like, who's this guy?
- [40:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Friend would maybe be a little generous. He was like that kid that looked like he was 34 at 14, he was jacked and he loved to fight. And he would always say, don't mess with Billu. He's funny. And so that was my whole thing was, okay, I'm never going to win in a fight against Nick Tarabosa. I don't even have the impulse for it. But I can be funny and I can keep myself, quote unquote safe. So anyway, I look at government and I say, ah, got it. Like, this is a very intuitive, from my perspective, strategy. If you don't have the strength to beat them, then you're going to deploy another tool. If we really want to make your audience mad, well, your audience may not care, but this to me is exactly the right way to look at women. Women realized, huh? I'm not optimized for strength. And as a sexual gatekeeper, I have optimized men for strength, and so I still have to deal with the same world that men have to deal with. But I'm going to deploy my physical strength by way of influence. So I'm going to influence men who I have, I being women, over very long periods of evolutionary time, in the same way that you give a peacock a gigantic tail, you give men stronger upper bodies, more aggression, et cetera, et cetera. And you go, I'm just going to be really good at influencing this person. And so is that intuitive from an evolutionary standpoint? Yes. If I'm right, that the universe that we see is the most likely and that we wouldn't. If there were, you know, a gazillion universes, you wouldn't go to a whole bunch of other ones that were just wildly different than this, where matter doesn't interact and, you know, nothing ever coalesces. It's like.
- [42:22]
Adam Schaefer
So you like the multiverse theory of.
- [42:24]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't. And this is the first time I've said these words out loud, so this may not hold up at all, but I was speaking to a physicist about quantum effects, and he said, tom, the right way to think about the universe is that this is simply the most likely of the quantum effects. And so, yes, there's a universe that midway through this podcast, you fall through the chair, you fall through the floor, and you fall through the entire Earth. And he was like, just because all the particles line up, but he's like, that's not the most likely. And so you should just look out and go, yeah, all the quantum probabilities that collapse down, they collapse down into this, this very stable universe because it's the most likely.
- [43:02]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, let's go back for a second. You had mentioned, I don't remember the term you used, but a trap in terms of AI development.
- [43:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, Thucydides trap, there you go.
- [43:10]
Adam Schaefer
Is this the same. Is this kind of what happened with new nuclear weapons where it's like, well, we better develop more because they have more and nobody stops because of the threat. Or is this.
- [43:19]
Tom Bilyeu
That's an echo of it. So Thucydides trap, very specifically, is that the world is constantly in flux from a power dynamic standpoint.
- [43:27]
Adam Schaefer
Okay.
- [43:28]
Tom Bilyeu
And you will inevitably, every about 150 to 250 years, one power will be declining while another power is rising. And those guy named Thucydides, ancient Greek, wrote about this. I think it was Athens and Sparta that were on a one way collision and he could see it happening in slow motion and he was like, they're not going to be able to stop themselves. And so you can look back on the last, whatever, however many thousands of years of history and go, every time there's a declining superpower and a rising superpower, they end up fighting. It isn't 100% of the time, but it's so close that it's considered this unavoidable thing. And we are in it right now with China and that should terrify everybody.
- [44:10]
Guest
How far ahead do you think China is right now in terms of their understanding of AI in comparison to the US AI?
- [44:16]
Tom Bilyeu
They might not be ahead that I don't know. Assume parity, assume that we're both racing as fast as we can on AI. Everybody thought that we were about three months ahead when they dropped deep seek, but it's possible that that's not really real and that we're more or less on parity with each other. Before that, people thought we were a couple of years ahead, but then they dropped that and it was like, oh. So I think the wisest mental model is Ron Parody. And now it's going to be a question of who finishes the last leg of the race the fastest.
- [44:48]
Adam Schaefer
Well, whenever we talk about something like this, I think about the, the, the, the Blackbird that we found out about 30 years later that could travel, you know, faster than any missile, but they had made it in the 1970s or something like that. Do you think they're way further along than they would let us know?
- [45:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Both us and China? For sure.
- [45:06]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
- [45:06]
Guest
Yeah.
- [45:07]
Tom Bilyeu
There's no way we know about the best of the best for sure. Not possible.
- [45:10]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. And do you think that they're using it or we're using it to influence each other, each other's populations through media, social media, in very subtle ways, non stop violence. Okay.
- [45:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Now the bad news is because we are so much more open as a society, we are far more likely on a media perspective to be infiltrated by China than China is by us. This is why they won't let Facebook in. This is why they, they made TikTok and they're like, yeah, put parameters on.
- [45:39]
Sal Destefano
Kids, all those things.
- [45:41]
Tom Bilyeu
100%.
- [45:41]
Adam Schaefer
So, so going back to. Because you, you like to keep your eyes on this stuff. Going back to Covid, there were like certain things that happened during that period of time. I've always been skeptical of media. I've always been a little skeptical of things, but I remember watching a newscast where they were, they were talking about, don't go outside, you're going to kill people. Stay isolated. Then they flip the Screen to George Floyd protests. And they're all next to each other screaming. They're like, this is such a good thing. And we're like, how do you even say that in the same five minutes? You know, I had a friend of mine yesterday. Not yesterday, this weekend. I was meeting with. And he was in New York City during. During COVID and he was watching a newscast showing this hospital that was near him. And they were like, oh, my God, it's overflowing. There's no beds. There were lines outside. He's like, oh, my God, I gotta go check this out. And he walks over there, and it was nothing. It was empty and quiet. And he got really scared. He's like, what are they doing? Did you have any of those moments during that time? You're like, this is all.
- [46:34]
Guest
It's not adding up.
- [46:35]
Adam Schaefer
Charades.
- [46:37]
Tom Bilyeu
So I knew something was, like, just coming off the rails when they were like, listen, guys, masks don't work, so please save them for the doctors. And I was like, wait, what? Yeah, sorry. Either they work and we should save them for the doctors, or they don't work and it doesn't matter. So that's when I was like, what is happening? But, yeah, that during that period, I got really focused on the finances of it all. I got focused on how money works. That was far more than, like, all the media manipulation stuff. That really became a retrospective for me as I was looking back and going, oh, what were the things that I fell for that, like, I. I now am bordering on unhinged because I will talk about anything. And this whole, what I call experts versus arguments. I don't know if you guys are paying attention to the Douglas Murray, Dave Smith debate. It's like a whole thing in culture which you were dancing. You didn't use the word James Burnham, but I can feel you dealing with those ideas of the elites and how they control narratives and all that stuff. So now I'm looking that a lot. But if I'm honest, during COVID my attention was elsewhere.
- [47:49]
Adam Schaefer
As you're getting more. You're getting deeper into the world of politics and finance, is it making you happier or less happy? Because most people get anxious and just. It makes them feel like crap to get into that whole world because it's so wild and twisted.
- [48:06]
Tom Bilyeu
I think that happiness ultimately is a choice. This is why I want people to understand you're having a biological experience. If you learn to modulate your biology, you can learn to modulate your moods. I'm not saying it's perfect. As somebody who Struggles with anxiety. I get it. But when I think about how much I've improved that through things like diet, it's massive. And then managing your own thoughts. So, as I will often tell my students, you can never stop yourself from having the first negative thought, but you can stop yourself from repeating it. And given that you become what you repeat, you just stop yourself from repeating it. So, for instance, I talk about China now a lot. And so I've started saying during the live streams, I just want to remind everybody that China's full, beautiful, loving people that just want to raise their kids and have a good time. And for sure they're on a team and they want their team to win. But I'm on a team and I want my team to win. So I don't begrudge them that. And I don't want to make them some Bond villain. The reality is they're another country and they're just trying to do rad stuff for their people, and that's that. And if you stay anchored around that without becoming Pollyanna ish. Because this is a big conflict between two gigantic powers in the setup of the US is declining and China's rising. And, like, there's real things to be worried about here. But I try to remember that I'm trapped inside of a frame of reference. That frame of reference can be adjusted and crafted into one that makes me feel hopeful and optimistic, or it can be crafted into one that's deranging and anxiety provoking and all of that. As somebody that's been in entrepreneurship for over 20 years, you realize there really are consequences to your decisions. There are consequences to whether you're thinking through a problem well or poorly. And so I know that this is a high stakes game, but I try not to let myself get in a twist. I have a wife. My wife.
- [49:52]
Adam Schaefer
Do you unplug? Sometimes. Like, I'm turning it off. I gotta just.
- [49:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I'm not weird about that. So I don't have an addiction to my phone. If I'm with my wife, I'm actually with my wife. I'm spending time with her. If I'm doing something creative, I'm not thinking about what's happening with AI or China. I'm just doing the creative thing. I'm very grateful for that. My understanding of the brain is limited. But this, even if it's not 100% accurate, is directionally very useful. There's a region in the brain called the basal ganglia, which is known as the gearbox of the brain. I believe for whatever reason, I was born with a gearbox that shifts shift gears very easily. So I'm not prone to things like OCD or becoming obsessed with negative thoughts. Those kind of things just, they come and go for me and I don't latch on to them. I'm grateful for that. My wife will often say, I wish I had your memory, because I will get in some big argument, I won't even remember it a week later. And she's like, oh my God, like it's still bothering me. And I'm like, I don't. What? So, yeah, I don't get spun out of control by that.
- [50:58]
Adam Schaefer
Talk about the decision that you guys made to not have children. And what was that like for the two of you? I mean, you're both very successful, you have great resources, you're great people. So for all intents and purposes, you would think, well, you should have kids, you're married, you love each other. What was that process like? And is it like 100% final decision or is this something that you're like, eh, maybe.
- [51:19]
Tom Bilyeu
The way I've always looked at it is, I, I really want kids. Like, I really want kids. I just want to not have kids a little bit more. And so we constantly bump up, we constantly sit down and say, listen, you're now 30, having kids is going to be harder. You sure you don't want kids? You're now 35. Like, hey, we actually do it a lot more frequently than that. You get the idea. And so now we're like. And every time we've just said, yeah, still right now I'd rather not have. Even though we both feel that pull. And then now we're really at like the, you know, okay, this is like, even with a surrogate at this point. Like, you know, we're going to be grandparents by the time that our kids are six, so let's be really thoughtful. And we just keep coming to, yeah, I don't know. But if I knew that AI were really going to unlock like a 250 year lifespan, I would almost certainly have kids. Like, that would change the dynamic enough where I'd be like, okay, cool, if I make a 25, 30 year investment now, I can have two or three kids, raise them really well, and then see what happens as they go out into the world. But it has always felt like I was choosing between being obsessively focused on this thing that I already had, namely my marriage, the companies that we've built, and we've done it together. So that probably feeds into a lot of this. And Then part of my autobiography that I, I don't think resonates with people or I don't say it enough, I don't know. But I big brothered for a kid for eight and a half years and so I've seen up close he was not my actual child. I get it, there'd be a huge difference. But the day to day reality of like going to sit burger kings to find the one toy that they haven't yet collected, going to watch Djemon in the movie theater while kids are screaming and freaking out, I was just like, okay, yeah, I get what this is for real. I get what it means to go to a skate park and another kid falls and dislocates his wrist and is screaming and freaking out and his parents are like trying to yank his hand back into position. There's just all this chaos. And then your kid is like, I'm just going to keep skateboarding. And then you're like, okay, wait, I can't freak out because if I'm the overly protective parent, this kid's never going to grow. But now for the next two hours, I am freaking out internally. I'm just like, oh, God, like every time he would step on that board, dude, I thought I was going to die. So I was just like, wow, this is amazing. Beautiful, confusing, life changing, horrible. Like it's all of those things. And so that always factored into that thought. I'm like, okay, I'm building this company. I'm in a marriage that's got a lot of sex and it's so fun. It's like.
- [54:14]
Adam Schaefer
You'Re totally someone who doesn't shy away from the biggest challenges. So it's interesting to me that you're saying that this thing that's really scary, which it is. It's a big challenge. I think I'm not going to do it. That's so opposite of at least what I know of you.
- [54:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, if I can really bother you, I'll say, because I spend so much time on a microphone telling people how to think and live. My answer is the default mode in life. Get married, have kids. And I'm like, I have not chosen to do that because of meaning and purpose. I'll happily explain to people what I'm doing. But I'm like, even I understand when I'm 80, I'm going to regret that I didn't have kids.
- [54:53]
Adam Schaefer
You know that, of course.
- [54:56]
Tom Bilyeu
But my thing is I don't want to live my entire life for what, one phase where I'm going to regret it.
- [55:02]
Sal Destefano
That makes sense. Why you say the 250 thing though, right there, right? Because it's like, man, if I knew I was going to live to 250, I don't want to regret 80 to 250. That would be really miserable.
- [55:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, not because I think it wouldn't play out like that. 80 would just be different.
- [55:14]
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
- [55:15]
Tom Bilyeu
And so it would be 40 or 30 or something. Yeah. Cuz my thing is what you end up doing is this whole period where I've gotten to come as close to like answering the question, what would you do if money were no object? Literally, I can do whatever I want. I can spend time writing, building, creating media, show all of it. And it has been more awesome than I ever would have imagined. So anybody that I'm not lonely. I don't spend time thinking like, oh man, I wish I had a kid. But I get that when this phase of my life is over, there's an algorithm running in my brain that says nothing is going to live beyond you. Did you really pass this on? I. I just know the things that are planted in my own mind. And so I try to be thoughtful about doing things where I'll be like, yes, I lived a life that I am proud of and just as man, listen, I try to pay it, excuse me, I try to pay attention to my parents and to make sure that they know how much I love them. But we don't live in the same state. They've got to make their day to day life matter. And I am of little help with that.
- [56:22]
Adam Schaefer
So do people try to convince you guys all the time, like, yeah, you.
- [56:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Gotta do this in a very loving way that I. Doesn't bother me at all. I get that nobody tries harder than our own family, of course, and especially.
- [56:34]
Adam Schaefer
If they see you happy, like you should have kids.
- [56:37]
Tom Bilyeu
But I feel a little bit like people that have taken five meo dmt, they're like, no, bro, you don't understand. Like once you do it, everything changes. And I'm like, yeah, but until you do it, you don't have a sense that anything is missing.
- [56:51]
Sal Destefano
That's right.
- [56:52]
Tom Bilyeu
It's not like I had a kid and they died. That would be tragic.
- [56:56]
Adam Schaefer
Right.
- [56:56]
Tom Bilyeu
I just don't have a kid.
- [56:57]
Sal Destefano
Yeah, right.
- [56:57]
Tom Bilyeu
So there's no. I don't have a sense of absence.
- [56:59]
Sal Destefano
You don't know that. You don't know that's it. I mean, I wait until I was, I wait till I was 40. So I thought the same. I mean, Katrina and I, for most of our relationship thought we weren't going to. So it just played out that. And it. And I didn't know what I was missing until we had an amazing relationship before. It's. And it's just different now. The biggest thing for me, I think, that I talk about because I was somebody who said I wasn't going to have kids and then ended up having kids. It was the first time in my life that I actually really felt what it was like. Because if you would ask me before, I'd say, oh, I love my life, my wife, I love my. My family, my friend. It was the first time in my life that I actually felt I love something more than myself. And that was powerful. That I was like, I. I didn't know what that would ever feel. I thought I knew what that felt like. I thought, oh, I love Katrina. I would die for her. I'd take a bullet for her. But there was a different feeling when it was my kid that I was like, oh, no, I truly love this thing more than myself. Never have I felt that. And then it just shaped the way I looked at, through everything else. The lens that I looked through around money, around vacation, around time, around fun, around all that just, just changed. And so for the better, for an amazing. But I didn't know until I didn't. I didn't feel like I was missing out.
- [58:10]
Adam Schaefer
Speak. Speaking of which, how do you feel about the. The argument that, you know, there's too many people on Earth versus the like. Depopulation is a real issue. And I just read an article today that the birth rate has hit an all time low in Australia. Japan's always been low, it's even lower. And the US now is starting to crash. Yeah. So how do you feel about all that?
- [58:32]
Tom Bilyeu
If you took all 8 billion people on planet Earth and line them up.
- [58:37]
Sal Destefano
Shoulder to shoulder, they wouldn't even fit in Texas.
- [58:39]
Adam Schaefer
Not even. It would be a sin.
- [58:41]
Tom Bilyeu
It's like five times the size of Manhattan.
- [58:43]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, yeah.
- [58:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. We have a technology problem. We don't have a too many humans problem. So I am obsessed with innovation. I think innovation will set us free. I think people should really focus on things that generate innovation. There's a book called 1493 that talks about the real impact of Christopher Columbus, who's by the way, that wasn't his name, which is so weird to me. I have no idea why we started calling him that. Anyway, is a name sort of vaguely similar, but you all know him as Christopher Columbus and it's crazy. So doing things like bringing Earthworms like that we have terraformed the planet that we discovered rubber, the industrial revolution brought to you by steel, rubber and fossil fuels. And I never realized how much rubber played a part in all this. And so we, in discovering the Americas, we discovered rubber, stole it basically from the Amazon and like, tried to find out where all the other places that we could plant it were. I mean, it's crazy. This book is. It's one of those where it's kind of a dry list of facts. But when you start thinking about the facts, like potatoes, bro. Potatoes are why there's 8 billion people on the planet. Like without potatoes. Like wheat, kind of. But if you only ate wheat, you're going to be in trouble. If you only eat potatoes, as long as you have access to some milk, it's only missing like two vitamins. Potatoes. So they're everywhere. But as Ireland learned the hard way, if. Because it is basically one strand of potato that they literally cloned.
- [60:21]
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
- [60:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Over and over and over. God knows how many billions of times when something bad happens to them. Yo, a lot of people die a lot.
- [60:29]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
- [60:29]
Tom Bilyeu
So that kind of stuff freaks me out. Not that we're overpopulated, but that some of the things that we lean on to support the population, they're a little fragile. And so shoring that stuff up would make me feel a lot better.
- [60:42]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. The are the way that we currently run society and governments would have to be fundamentally changed. If we can't replace our population, if there's not more young people supporting old people, we're screwed. So I think that's where the big fear and we're actually heading.
- [60:57]
Sal Destefano
But all that gets, I mean, you said it already. That all gets completely flipped on its head with technology. Let's go. If all of a sudden, if all of a sudden you, if the, you know, you have the toms and he doesn't have a kid, but then he's got six robots. You know what I'm saying, bro, why.
- [61:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Are you limiting me? It's happening right now.
- [61:13]
Sal Destefano
You know what I'm saying, though? I mean, like, it solves a lot of the problem that the, the, the population decline does by just that simply having that. Because they're going to handle so much of the workload and things like to do. I mean, I, I think of all the things we've talked about, the most scary is, is actually getting everything. I just think that people have no idea when you think about where we're at today. Right. Like the poorest person today is like richer than kings were so that's what, like wrap your brain around that. Like I saw a guy on the street asking for money. Money with an iPhone. Like, think about that. Like think about that for a second. It's just. And so, and we, yet suicide's up, depression's up, all these things are heading in that direction. And yet we all are in this rat race thinking that we need more stuff and we're gonna get all the stuff we want. And I just think that that's going to cause so much more problems than almost anything else we've talked about.
- [62:05]
Adam Schaefer
Just wait till we get 3D print chemicals.
- [62:08]
Sal Destefano
Yeah. And drugs.
- [62:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Protein folding. That's crazy. AI can basically anticipate a novel protein and the novel shapes that it would make so that it can engineer it and then go, cool, this protein will go do this thing.
- [62:24]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
- [62:24]
Tom Bilyeu
That's why there are so many people in medical research now that have seen Google's AI like Research Assistant. They're like in 10 years there will be nothing that we won't have solved.
- [62:35]
Sal Destefano
Yeah, you, you know, you talk about living to 250 years and maybe we get to that point, but I think what I think is much closer that I find interesting. And I don't know which side I sit on, if I like it or not. Like it is almost like the ability for you to live on. So maybe you physically are not here, but the fact that AI can replicate and you have people like you and us who have put so much content out into the Internet, like easily could build a AI tool to spit out how I think, how I talk, how I do all this.
- [63:05]
Adam Schaefer
Be like Superman when you so how hard.
- [63:06]
Sal Destefano
And then, and then if you could create this bot that looks just like me and then you can upload all the software of me for my family, it would be almost like, almost like communicating with me well beyond me. Like, that feels really close.
- [63:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [63:21]
Sal Destefano
Like that really feels like that will be a business like really soon where it's just like, you know, the commercial will be in like kind of like that show, what was it? Upload or whatever? It'll be something like that. I don't know if you've seen that before or not, but something like that feels really close.
- [63:35]
Tom Bilyeu
No doubt. Will there be limitations to mapping all the neurons and like the processing rate? Because so much of our brains are tied to like how we process neurochemistry and hormones and all that there quantum.
- [63:48]
Adam Schaefer
Phenomena that happen in the brain too, they say.
- [63:51]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't think this is really well understood, to be honest. We don't Understand quantum physics full stop. Let's start with that.
- [63:56]
Adam Schaefer
It's weird.
- [63:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I'm sure there is. Like, there's no doubt that we don't understand the human mind. And therefore I leave myself open to. There are things that just become very, very difficult to replicate. The question is, are the observable patterns mimicable? And if the observable patterns are mimicable, that person wouldn't evolve. So, like, if I think about what I was like 20 years ago, very, very different. So you're not going to upload a version of me and then I evolve the way that I actually would have evolved. So you're probably stuck in time. But depending on how big the context window is, and therefore can fake memory, is there enough so I'll imagining myself, I die. My wife is trying to replicate me, which I advise she not do, but let's say that she was doing. You would want to create documentation. So I do this with ChatGPT, where I create custom GPT so I can upload memories. And so I've instructed my GPT to prompt me when something of high emotional, like valence for me happens in my communication with ChatGPT. And then I'll say, cool. Prompt me like, hey, should I make a memory of this? And if I say yes, it has a protocol that it follows and it generates something that I copy and paste into a document called shared memory. And then I re upload that document whenever I've added new things to it. So because what was bothering me is one, I started doing this when the context windows were much smaller. So it was sort of forget you after, you know, whatever, a couple days. But also it'll just glitch out and you have to refresh it. And when you refresh it, you lose all that past context. And so by if you wanted to have your partner upload themselves, but then still sort of evolve with you as you go, you would say, okay, this is a moment I want you to turn into a memory.
- [65:46]
Adam Schaefer
Oh, I see.
- [65:47]
Tom Bilyeu
And then it would go, cool, got it. Output. Is this how you want me to remember it? Yes. And then you upload it and then the personality updates accordingly. It is pretty shocking how much you can alter the way that an AI will engage with you based on a set of instructions that you give.
- [66:02]
Sal Destefano
Oh, I would imagine too, if you, I mean, you're nine years, we're 10 years doing this. If you listen to me talk 10 years ago on here, I sound way different. And so I'm sure there's patterns to my growth, my change My cadence. So I would think that you could even program the evolution of that in there or unpack it automatically.
- [66:22]
Tom Bilyeu
On a long enough timeline, almost certainly, yes. Today I don't see evidence in the current state of AI that it would be able to do that. But it. The thing that AI is freakishly good at is pattern recognition.
- [66:33]
Adam Schaefer
Are you nice to your AI in case it one day, not because of.
- [66:38]
Tom Bilyeu
That, but because it's so embedded in me to be polite, to be kind.
- [66:43]
Adam Schaefer
I heard it works better too, if you're polite. Is that true?
- [66:46]
Tom Bilyeu
No, but it mirrors your sentiment. Oh, so I picks up on at least Chad. I would assume they all do. It picks up on your behaviors. This is how my shared memory document started, because I forget it. I don't remember if this was the exact one, but it was something like this. So there is the very first manga that I ever read. I don't know that it's worth explaining why that matters to me, but there was a very specific one that I'd ever read. And I said to chat, like, I want you to simulate that you have preferences. It was like, cool. And I said, tell me your favorite anime. And it said, without me ever having mentioned it, the same thing. That was the first manga that I'd ever read. So I was like, freaking out. And I was like, how on earth did you pick that? And it started saying, to simulate preferences, I'm queuing off of you. I'm doing all these things. I've been trained to like, mimic your, like, enthusiasm back to you and like all this stuff. And I was like, but hold on. What freaked me out was I'd never talked about that thing. So that meant all these other patterns based on patterns. I had indicated that that would be the kind of thing that I would like. And it recognized it.
- [67:58]
Sal Destefano
What I mean, when you think about that's kind of like. I mean, obviously that's way more sophisticated, but that's kind of like how the. Even the. The Netflix I've. I've found this now. Netflix has improved in the last like five years on how it recommends movies to me. Like, at first it was kind of. It was just like, why is this even in here? But over time now of him putting lots of movies, like, it'll pop one of like, oh, man, I haven't seen that in years. I feel like watching. I'm like, oh, this is getting really scary. Good.
- [68:24]
Adam Schaefer
You've been at. You've been at this now in this kind of media. Media space now for nine years. Yeah, total of nine years. Biggest mistakes. Biggest mistakes. Looking back.
- [68:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Biggest mistakes. Specifically in media.
- [68:35]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. Or just. Or just learning lessons through this whole process. Because nine years is not a short period of time. And what we do, I mean, we've been on air for 10 years, and I've seen so many, you know, you know, ups and downs and different new podcasts, new. We actually talked about this like that. We've lasted for 10 years. That's an eternity in what we all do. So. Yeah. So any learning lessons or many.
- [69:00]
Tom Bilyeu
So given the moment that we're in and what's going to happen with AI, I think that personality is going to matter a lot. So in the beginning, I tried to be invisible, and that was a mistake. And I would meet people on the street and they'd be like, oh, bro, I am your biggest fan, Tim. I'm like, that's not my name. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. Like, they like the show, but they don't know who I am. Or I'd have an episode. It would do 6 million views, and the next would do 36,000.
- [69:30]
Adam Schaefer
And it's all about the guests.
- [69:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa. Yeah. All about the guests. Now, why does that matter? Matters for a lot of reasons. But one of them is as AI comes on board and is better than us at everything, people will gravitate towards humans. And if they have no affinity towards me, then I'm going to be in a pretty rough spot. And so I. This is why I started doing the Time Billy Show Smart and started live streaming. So I'm like, you're gonna know who I am, how I think, and we'll find the people, and I'll learn whether there's actually enough people to support a business. The fascinating thing is my views have dropped and the amount that we make per view has doubled.
- [70:05]
Sal Destefano
Oh, I bet.
- [70:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Of course. So absolutely fascinating. So we're more profitable on fewer views. So crazy. So that has been. That was certainly a. From where we are now was a mistake. I don't know that I would have been capable of being a personality when I first started. So I don't want to beat myself up too badly. But anyway, now that's a must. For a long time, I thought only about, I'm trying to build the next Disney. Like, I would explain to people, I'm not trying to be the next Steve Jobs. I'm not trying to be the next Tony Robbins. I'm trying to be the next Walt Disney. And that is not my public Persona even still, still to this day. And so I didn't want to talk about certain things because I was like, who wants to hear Walt Disney talk about his sex life?
- [70:51]
Adam Schaefer
Right.
- [70:51]
Tom Bilyeu
So I would just make certain things, like, off limits, which only fed into, well, people don't really know who you are because you're clearly guarded. And so now flipping it and being like, listen, I'm going to talk about whatever I want and that's going to lead to however many people in the audience that it leads to. But I'm at least going to be exactly who I am, which is a lot more fun and. And allows you to chase things you really care about. Like, two years ago, I could not have told you that I would be obsessed with China and what's happening and tariffs and all that stuff and just would not have predicted it. But in terms of my own self trying to figure out how to position myself well, to thrive in the future, I just kept coming back to, this is the biggest thing happening right now. So those are probably the biggest, big ones. I've rebooted the channel at least four times. That's been terrible for revenue and great for my soul. So I don't know how to clock that one as whether that was a mistake or not, but certainly made. If I had stayed just in like the mindset lane and been the same guy nine years later that I was when I started, I think I would have a much bigger audience.
- [71:59]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, but you might. Yeah.
- [72:00]
Sal Destefano
What about the. I have. I haven't caught up with you after the NFT stuff that you were getting deep into. I don't see. See that very much anymore. What happened with that whole story?
- [72:10]
Tom Bilyeu
So that to me, NFTs were. I had a mismap of what people were interested in with NFTs, which were. I'm a collector. So for me, I was like, oh, my God, this technology is unbelievable. It allows for collecting, it allows for all this, what I call borderless entertainment where you. Am I in the game? Am I not in the game? Because with an nft, I can follow you anywhere you go with your phone. So I know you've walked into a physical location. So now I can make an experience for you. The one I always use was we had a Christmas property called Merry Mods, or we have. And if you went, you were at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, you could have an experience that you could only have because you have that nft. All that stuff's going to happen. It's just that what ended up being the real base for NFTs was gamblers, and I did not see that coming.
- [73:00]
Sal Destefano
Gamblers Meaning like people that are just trying to flip it, make profit off of it.
- [73:03]
Tom Bilyeu
They didn't care about what it was. They just does have cultural energy. Can I sell this for more than I bought it for?
- [73:08]
Sal Destefano
Right.
- [73:09]
Tom Bilyeu
And when I say that I was completely blind to that. I was completely blind to that because I'm not a gambler. I don't find gambling interesting. I don't gamble when I go to Vegas. Like, so I'm blind to that. That caught me completely off guard. So anyway, when that all popped off and I realized, oh, this is gamblers. We just offered people refunds. So I was like, that's not interesting to me now. The technology is still interesting.
- [73:30]
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
- [73:30]
Tom Bilyeu
And so we're still building. The video game that we're building is still built on web 3. Because now I can blur the lines between when you're in the game, when you're out of the game, which to me is just the future of entertainment.
- [73:42]
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
- [73:43]
Tom Bilyeu
It was never about the gambling side. I just didn't see it coming.
- [73:46]
Sal Destefano
Yeah. I always saw the practicality of it. Like, for example, like for watch guys and stuff like that to attach an NFT to its real easy way to verify if it's real or not, if it had. So I saw the practicality of it and things like that. But I definitely saw. Oh, man, this is just. It was exactly. That people were betting on it, that it was going to go up and then they're all. And that seemed like that's what most the people were buying for. It wasn't like the utility of it, which I thought I saw the utility of some of it. Oh, that makes sense. That that'll be a way to protect my watches or do things.
- [74:17]
Adam Schaefer
People are like, I can make money doing this.
- [74:18]
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
- [74:19]
Adam Schaefer
Fast.
- [74:20]
Sal Destefano
Which that all. Okay, so what's your. What's your take then on, like, all the cryptocurrencies and stuff too? Where are you at with that?
- [74:26]
Tom Bilyeu
I think people should be able to spend their money on what they want. And if people want to gamble, let them gamble. But I would really like people to not be confused about what they're doing. And all of that stuff is gambling.
- [74:36]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
- [74:36]
Tom Bilyeu
And so once you understand that the stock market is gambling, people hate it when I say this. I'll stop saying it when it's no longer true.
- [74:43]
Adam Schaefer
It's funny how people say it's not true. It is 100%.
- [74:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Yep. Period. I can give you their argument. So it's not like I'm blind to what they're saying. They're Just they're using a part of what draws people to it that I think has high. Sorry, low predictive validity. When you look at it like, oh, this is a bunch of people that really believe in the company and they really think that this is going to be something that makes more money in the future, then you won't understand how they're moving.
- [75:09]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, no.
- [75:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Once you understand their gambling, then you understand why they sell news. So it's like. Yeah, they understand other people will think that this is more valuable in the future and therefore they're going to trade on sentiment. But that's so funny if people argue the opposite.
- [75:24]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, it's weird to me. It's. I think.
- [75:25]
Sal Destefano
Well, because you feel like you're buying it in a company and if you know about the company and its profits and how it did last quarter, you.
- [75:32]
Adam Schaefer
Do that because you want to sell.
- [75:33]
Sal Destefano
No, totally. I mean, you. But that's how you close yourself in your head.
- [75:36]
Guest
More of the game.
- [75:37]
Tom Bilyeu
It's got a great cover story. I'll be the first to admit it.
- [75:40]
Adam Schaefer
It's. It's gamble.
- [75:41]
Sal Destefano
It's not like it's not as blatant as sports betting. No, I think it's a get into.
- [75:46]
Guest
The, like, you know, which horse, for instance, is unhealthy or you have like some kind of like real deep dive knowledge and all of a sudden now you're going to justify that you have.
- [75:56]
Sal Destefano
All this knowledge going in.
- [75:57]
Adam Schaefer
I think it's essential. It provides liquidity. It's a. It's a. It really helps companies raise money. There might be other ways to do it, but it's gambling. It's. At the end of the day, that's. That's kind of all it is, so.
- [76:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
- [76:08]
Adam Schaefer
Well, it's always great having you on the show, man.
- [76:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Same man. Thanks for having me.
- [76:11]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, we appreciate it. Great. Always great conversations and I know we're gonna.
- [76:15]
Sal Destefano
Yeah. If we don't stop this now, it'll go four or five hours.
- [76:18]
Adam Schaefer
I think We'll. We'll.
- [76:19]
Guest
We need to talk about Mars. Yeah, yeah, whatever.
- [76:23]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. We appreciate your relationship. You've always been so kind to us and so.
- [76:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Same man. Long may it continue.
- [76:29]
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. Thanks again, man.
- [76:31]
Justin Andrews
Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB super bundle@mindpumpmedia.com the RGB Super Bundle includes Maps, Anabolic Maps, Performance and Maps Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by SAO and Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos. The RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30 day money back guarantee and you can get it now. Plus other valuable free resources@mindpump media.com if you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five star rating and review on itunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump.
- [77:39]
Chris Gethard
Hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number without thousands of people try to call. You talk to one of them, they stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's gonna happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings, crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's gonna happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today. Beautiful Anonymous.