Economic Espionage and War Crimes: How Money Wins the War | Graham Moore PT 2

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

“Economic Espionage and War Crimes: How Money Wins the War | Graham Moore PT 2”

Date: July 17, 2024
Guest: Graham Moore (Author & Oscar-winning Screenwriter)

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the uncomfortable truths behind money, war, and power. Tom Bilyeu and Graham Moore—author of "The Wealth of Shadows" and Oscar-winning screenwriter—explore economic history, money printing, modern debt, national security, great power competition, and the profound consequences of division and ideology on society. The discussion is rich, accessible, and frequently challenges accepted narratives, offering a nuanced understanding of history’s lessons for today’s global uncertainties.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Impact of Money Printing and National Debt

[00:28-09:21]

• Tom shares how the pandemic money printing shaped his outlook and Impact Theory’s mission, admitting, “I did not know what money printing was… people need to know how to weather this storm. The problem is... while money printing worked… it does create suffering for the next generation.” (00:28)
• Graham relates wartime spending in WWII to today, noting the US’s economic boom post-WWII due to productive investment:

  “The issue isn't money printing itself. The issue is what are you using the money for?... If you’re using the money to just sort of go into the black hole that is the Wall Street financial system, I would argue not that much value is being created.” (03:12)

• He draws analogies between WWII-era Lend-Lease/Cash and Carry and today’s military aid for Ukraine, highlighting the “fake” nature of much of the debt—loans unlikely to be repaid—but observes:

  “Neither money printing nor these huge debts are intrinsically bad if we’re using them for the right thing and if we’re using them to build productive capacity.” (06:43)

• However, Graham concedes US national debt is at “unprecedented” levels, but says:

  “People keep buying treasury bonds... it’s hard to find evidence of the actual problem.” (08:42)

Global Demand for US Debt & Dollar Hegemony

[09:21-16:10]

• Tom notes China is divesting US treasuries and pushing BRICS alternatives, prompting Graham to point out China’s internal economic reasons and skepticism about the reliability of their own data.
• The pair debate the future of dollar reserve status:

  “It is vitally important to U.S. economic interests and national security that the US dollar remains the global reserve currency.” (13:29)

• Discussion on sanctions against Russia:

  “It probably hurts short term because Russia is doing far less of its trading in dollars… but in the long term it's better if the war kind of reaches a satisfactory conclusion.” (13:49)

• Graham underscores that the US’s debt being denominated in dollars creates unique conditions:

  “Our debt is denominated in the currency that we control. We can just print more of it… I would much rather have debt denominated in dollars than something the US government cannot control.” (15:20)

The Threat of BRICS and the End of Dollar Supremacy

[16:45-20:10]

• Tom and Graham explore the long-view inevitability that every reserve currency loses its place:

  “You have to be right, right? Because no currency has ever maintained global dominance forever. No empire lasts forever. Rome fell, the British Empire collapsed. Nothing lasts forever.” (17:50)

• Tom discusses shifting global economic weight, contrasting Bretton Woods (US 50% of global GDP, creditor nation) with today (G7 at 25%, US as largest debtor). He warns:

  “Debt, debt, debt. They can’t help themselves. They print to service the debt… and eventually you hit a point where it just doesn’t work anymore and you hyperinflate your own currency…” (24:00)

• Graham acknowledges the validity of Tom’s perspective but calls out COVID-era money printing as the chief source of current inflation, with Ukraine aid a secondary factor.

Lessons of Historical Economic Collapse

[27:26-33:41]

• Conversation turns to parallels with Britain’s postwar debt and loss of reserve status, and how defeat (or near-defeat) in war contributed to economic fragility.
• Graham suggests revisiting history for perspective:

  “Go back and read the front page of the New York Times every day from January 1, 1939 to January 1, 1940… the sheer level of apocalypse… was something that I haven’t known in my lifetime.” (28:58)

• He highlights how existential crisis was far more real at the time than modern perspectives appreciate, connecting this to loss of belief in the stability of currency.

Economic Espionage & Ideological Division

[34:11-40:13]

• Tom asks if there are spies in government now, prompted by Moore’s fiction. Graham replies:

  “Easy. Yes, of course there are spies in the U.S. government today... if none of them turned out to be spies, that would be statistically improbable.” (34:11)

• Discussion pivots to ideological divisions driving governmental action:

  “What I see when I look out at the government is I see ideological divisions… when those ideas cause us to pull in opposite directions, now we have a problem.” (36:42)

• Tom’s guiding “North Star” is “human flourishing,” and he expresses concern about the country’s division and the risk of not addressing foundational ideas publicly.

Hollywood, Ideology & Storytelling

[40:13-51:30]

• Tom and Graham discuss the ideological overtness in modern Hollywood, with Tom lamenting “sermonizing” in films (notably Disney/Star Wars), and Graham reflecting:

  “All art is ideological, whether you know it or not… I find myself getting excited about art that changes how I think about something… to destabilize ideology a bit.” (44:20)

• Graham describes his preference for morally complex characters:

  “Nothing you write ever has any villains in it… I’m much more interested in characters who are morally complicated.” (46:28)

• Ratatouille is cited as an example of nuanced storytelling with no true villains.

AI’s Role in the Future of Film and Creativity

[51:30-83:30]

• Tom asks: “Is AI going to be good or bad for the film industry?” (51:30)
• Graham is “super bearish on AI,” seeing it as overhyped and lacking true game-changing use cases in creative work (beyond incremental improvements). He argues:

  “The history of AI for 130 years… has been rife with wild over prediction… I’m still waiting for someone to give me a real use case.” (54:26)

• Tom counters with examples of “hidden AI” and the exponential pace of improvement ("mathematical certainty" that media will be largely AI-generated), but Graham pushes back, pointing to the enduring value of photochemical storytelling and the human touch (Oppenheimer as example).
• Tom predicts a societal split between those embracing AI-generated, personalized content and those demanding “real human” creation. Graham posits:

  “The things that people respond to the most are not the things they said they wanted, it’s the things they didn’t say they wanted… what will be unsatisfying about art produced that way is that it might be pleasing for a little, but not as fulfilling.” (78:23)

• They agree the biggest changes may come in distribution, not in the core of storytelling itself.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Exchanges

• Graham Moore:

  "Neither money printing nor these huge debts are intrinsically bad if we’re using them for the right thing and if we’re using them to build productive capacity." (06:43)

• Tom Bilyeu:

  "Every time somebody gets the privilege of being the reserve currency, they just end up taking on debt. They can't help themselves... Eventually you hit a point where it just doesn't work anymore." (24:00)

• Graham Moore:

  "I think that all art is ideological, whether you know it or not... journalism should comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable." (44:20)

• Graham Moore:

  "Easy. Yes, of course there are spies in the U.S. government today... If none of them turned out to be spies, that would be statistically improbable." (34:11)

• Tom Bilyeu:

  "My small contribution to the world [is] I map the way [guests] think, find and debate the most important ideas of our time. And then hopefully all together we can begin adopting better ideas." (36:42)

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:28 – Tom introduces concerns about money printing, national debt, and generational impact
• 02:07 – Graham analyzes lessons of WWII money printing vs. today
• 09:21 – Tom and Graham debate faith in US Treasury bonds
• 13:29 – Reserve currency status and great power rivalry
• 17:50 – Inevitable end of dollar’s global dominance
• 24:00 – Historical cycles of debt, power, and collapse
• 28:58 – Perspective from WWII era headlines and fear
• 34:11 – Are there spies in the US government today?
• 36:42 – Ideology, division, and Tom’s mission
• 40:13 – Modern Hollywood’s ideological storytelling
• 44:20 – Ideology in art: comfort/afflict, complexity
• 51:30 – Is AI a revolution or hype for creativity?
• 54:26 – The real value (or lack) of AI in film/fiction
• 59:19 – Tom explains hidden AI influence and imminent change
• 70:38 – Tom’s vision of the AI-driven, bifurcated society
• 77:59 – Graham’s skepticism and analogy to past ‘future shocks’
• 83:34 – Closing words, where to find Graham Moore’s work

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

• Tone: Civil, challenging, and intellectually stimulating; a blend of skepticism and optimism.
• Core Message: The fundamental mechanisms of history—money, power, ideas—still rule, but how they manifest amidst today’s complexity (with AI, debt, new great power rivalries) requires constant re-examination. There are no easy answers, and intellectual humility is essential.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This is an episode for anyone interested in how the past informs the present, and why understanding the real mechanisms of money, power, and culture matters more than ever. The conversation is wide-ranging but always anchored in pragmatism, critical thinking, and a desire to see beyond headlines and memes—to what’s actually real.

Key practical wisdom:

• It’s not about money, but what you do with it.
• Division—whether ideological or economic—is more dangerous than we think.
• The tools (like AI) may change, but the underlying human questions remain constant.

For deeper insight: Graham Moore’s new book, “The Wealth of Shadows,” underpins much of the analysis—recommended if you’re intrigued by the episode’s themes.

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Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Graham Moore]

It's a great question. So obviously, during the Second World War, the United States printed a ton of money and racked up a ton of debt. And we did it to win a war that we felt I would argue correctly, and I think we would all argue correctly, was existential. And sure enough, it worked. We won the war, as we all noticed, And we ended up building a bunch of factories to build bullets and build airplanes. The airplane factories are still there, right? The Boeing factories are still there. They're still making airplanes. We ended up building up during the war. We used all the money printing and all the debt, all the government bonds to build a bunch of Things that are kind of blue chip, valuable American industries. So I would not, I would again say that the issue isn't money printing itself. The issue is what are you using the money for? The devil's in the details here. If you're using the money to build factories that can now produce airplanes that we can sell all around the world and people can use it to fly places, there's value created there. If you're using the money to just sort of go into the black hole that is the Wall street financial system, I would argue that not that much value is being created there. So what is history? He just about money printing per se and debt per se. It's that they're not per se problems, but it depends on what you're doing with them, I think. Now here, let me give you an argument against what I'm just saying, which is. Yeah, so the argument against what I just said is, okay, Graham, that's well and good, but we are not engaged in World War II right now. Like, yes, we're funding a Ukrainian war operation. Yes, we're making weapons for Ukraine. But the. I mean, you can remind me of what the. However many billions of dollars, $80 billion. Was that the last aid package to Ukraine?

[Tom Bilyeu]

The most recent, perhaps? Yeah, but that's certainly not the sum total.

[Graham Moore]

It's a couple hundred billion, something like that total got to be.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Am I getting the exact number? But it's. Yeah, hundreds of billions.

[Graham Moore]

Hundreds of billions. So though that gets a little bit complicated because most of those values are the value of weapons we've already built. They're just sitting there that we're giving away rather than selling them, or we're basically. We're actually doing the same thing we did with the British in the Second World War, where we're saying we're going to, quote, unquote, sell it to you. But you don't have to give us any money now. We're going to give you a loan to pay us for it. And it's a little bit unclear exactly when these loans are going to be due. Like, we did this in the Second World War with Britain, right. We funded their entire war operation by these two programs. The first was called Cash and Carry. The second was called Lend Lease. And in a nutshell, the basic idea of these programs was saying to the British, we're just going to give you a bunch of weapons that you're buying from us, but we're also going to loan you the money to buy them from us. So we're just paying ourselves the money to make these weapons, you're going to pay a small interest rate on those loans and the loans aren't due for 50 years. And so sure enough, there was some funny moment. I want to say it was in 94, 1996, when Britain finally paid back its World War II loans to the United States at the point where, frankly, due to inflation, the value of those loans was negligible. So they're kind of fake. It's a way of looking like we're kind of charging for the weapons without actually really charging anyone for the weapons. And in the Second World War, I would make the argument, and certainly Keynes made the argument that this was the right thing to do because it was really, really important for US security that Britain had a bunch of weap to fight the Nazis, because certainly in 39 and 40 they were actually at war and the United States was not. So we could make a bunch of weapons, but the US can't use them. We're not at war. But Britain was. Moreover, it was vitally important for US national security interests that Nazi Germany not take over Britain. That would have been bad for America. So if a bunch of kind of fake loans is what that takes great. A small price to pay. Literally speaking, it's a little more complicated with the aid to Ukraine because when we talk about these aid packages, some of it is direct financial aid. But if I'm remembering rightly, it's a lot of just giving the Ukrainians weaponry that's just sort of sitting there and then loans to buy the weapons that they're never going to pay back and no one is expecting them to pay back. And we know they're not paying it back, they know they're not paying it back, it's fine. But then of course, we have to use a bunch of money to build kind of rebuild the weapons, right? If we're giving them a bunch of bullets, in theory, we have to go make a bunch of bullets next year so that we can have some bullets around because the US military doesn't want to run out of bullets. So your question was about what these events in history teach us about, about this present moment. And I guess I would argue that what they would show is that neither money printing nor these huge debts are intrinsically bad if we're using them for the right thing and if we're using them to build productive capacity, like the US left the Second World War in much better shape economically than she entered it. I would argue that the American. This isn't even my argument. This is a pretty commonly Accepted argument that the American economic success of the 1940s and 1950s through the 1960s was because of how well we did economically during the war. We made, we shrank unemployment, we made all these jobs, we used government money to build these factories and then sure enough, those factories could produce cars and all sorts of stuff after the war that, you know, created the like, life of America, 1950s, that we all sort of talk about today. So what you're actually doing with the money really matters. Now I'm again going to argue against myself and say, okay, but U.S. national debt now is significantly higher than it was during World War II, and there was a war on then. So really, is this actually a sustainable level of debt? Obviously it's a tricky question because it is by definition unprecedented. The US government is in an unprecedented level of debt right now. The argument I would make is that people keep buying treasury bonds. So I know I was just talking shit about Adam Smith a minute ago, but if the value of something is what, someone will pay for it. Well, clearly the global markets seem to think that the treasury is good for the money. If people didn't buy T bills, then we'd have a problem, but we don't seem to have a problem selling them. So in theory, on some theoretical level, is the debt a problem? I suppose so. But in the real world, it's hard to find evidence of the actual problem.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so the evidence of the actual problem. Do you think that people will continue to buy them no matter what? Our debt to GDP as a, I think is a good indicator. Not everybody agrees with that, but we'll use it for now. Do you think there is any number at which point the debt to GDP becomes so problematic that foreign institutions stop wanting to do transactions in dollars, for instance, they stop buying our bonds?

[Graham Moore]

I think it's a great question. Again, this is sort of theoretically, yes, but I'm hard pressed to say what that number is because the global market for treasury bonds seems to have lost none of its appetite over the last decade, much less the last 50 years. I don't see any sign that anyone sort of going, oh gosh, the. Now that the debt to GDP ratio hit whatever it's at right now, I'm gonna buy. I don't see a real world actor buying fewer treasury bonds as a result of that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so that may just be that you've missed some of the headlines. So China is going hard in the paint to divest themselves of US Bonds. They are getting out of the US dollar game. They have teamed up with the brics nations, which I'm pretty sure I've seen you write about. So you've got.

[Graham Moore]

But isn't that because of their own currency game? I mean. Yes, I'm interrupting you. Sorry.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, not at all. Please.

[Graham Moore]

Well, no, I was gonna say that. Isn't that their own. I mean, that the Chinese government is facing their own massive currency problem. You know, their Covid era inflation. It's really hard to tell because all their government statistics are lies. But from what we can tell, government's lie. Grant Moore, you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It can't be true.

[Graham Moore]

This is great. I've convinced you that bureaucrats are good, and you've convinced me that governments lie.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, you have not convinced me the bureaucrats are good. You've convinced me that our government is full of people that have their own agenda and they are pulling in different directions. You convinced me of something very scary. Very scary, in fact. Yeah, we'll. We'll get. I have. I have one question about that that we'll get to later. But first, China.

[Graham Moore]

China.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Give me a take.

[Graham Moore]

Always. Oh, gosh, I'm so far from a China expert. And again, every time I try to look at this, I feel like it's really hard because it's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But you don't have to look beyond Bretton woods, as far as I'm concerned, to tell me. Which you write about in the book. Utterly fascinating. You prompted me to do a ton of research about this. But Bretton Woods, I think, predicts bricks and explains exactly what is going to happen. And so the only question is, in Bretton woods, which country is America now? Is America still America?

[Graham Moore]

Or are we Great Britain?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Or are we Great Britain? Are we India? We're going to be somebody else's pawn? Are we the Soviet Union? And we're just going to like, hey, we're not going to let any of you control us. We're out. Like, what's going to. What do you think this moment represents for us? With. If I'm getting the numbers right, the debt that was crushing Germany so bad they turned to the Nazi war machine was, in today's dollars, $1 trillion. That was the crushing debt. Can't see beyond it. Oh, my God. Country's terrible. $1 trillion. Guess what, everybody. We're $32 trillion in debt. So interest rates go up. Servicing the debt becomes a problem. Already, if I'm not mistaken, we spend more in servicing our debt than we spend in military. Keeping our military up. This is bigger than that. In, like three years or something, it will be our single Biggest expense. And in now I'm making it up. But it's something like in four years at the current rate of growth, that simply servicing the interest on the debt will be more than we bring in in taxes. Full stop, all of it together. Which means now your only way to service the debt is print, print, print. Which is how you keep creating the problem.

[Graham Moore]

Yes, but back.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Sorry. Because I say that as a framework for you to answer the question who's America in the new sort of. Bretton Woods.

[Graham Moore]

A great question. And I think it is vitally important to U.S. economic interests and to U.S. national security that the United States do everything possible to make sure that the US Dollar remains the global reserve currency.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think shutting off Russia moved us towards remaining the. The dominant reserve currency or away from.

[Graham Moore]

Oh, good question. It probably hurts short term because Russia is doing far less of its trading in dollars and it's going to push them towards renminbi or God knows what else. But the argument would be in the long term it's better if the war kind of reaches a satisfactory conclusion. So, a mixed bag, but I think it's no secret that the Russian government does not want the US Dollar to be the global reserve currency anymore. Nor is it any secret that the Chinese government does not want the US Dollar to be the global reserve currency anymore. I don't think anyone thinks the Russian currency is about to be a global reserve currency. They've been largely cut off from the swift interbank system, almost impossible to trade Russian currency around the world. Chinese currency is a different matter. And they're obviously doing everything possible to buy oil in Remedy B. They're doing everything possible to trade in Africa and Remedy B to sort of get it used all around the world in the same way the United States was doing in the 1930s and 1940s and paid off very well for us. So I think winning that currency war is going to be tremendously valuable for the United States. And as you were just saying, the United States benefits in untold ways from the fact that when we print dollars, everyone else in the world has to deal with that because dollars are a global reserve currency. We're printing dollars that aren't just used here, but they're used everywhere. I think that's to the United States benefit. So that's the other thing. When we talk about the unprecedented nature of debt to GDP ratios. The other unprecedented bit is the degree to which not only is the debt to GDP ratio unprecedented, the ubiquity of the US dollar in which that debt is denominated around the world and the fact that our debt is denominated in dollars and not something else is both. I think from your perspective, it's scary because our debt is denominated in the currency that we control. We can just print more of it to pay back the debt. Which terrifies you. I can see by the look on your face right now. From my perspective, it's okay. I would much rather have debt denominated in dollars than something the United States government cannot control.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Agreed. It's the only reason it's not crippling.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so one thing that I would like to know is do you think Bricks is a real threat or is it. It's so small we don't have to worry about it.

[Graham Moore]

Oh gosh, I wish I knew more about the subject. From my loose understanding of this, I think it's a threat to be taken seriously. I mean again, the ubiquity of the US dollar is tremendously valuable for me and you and American citizens and frankly for kind of global stability. And so I think it's worth preserving that system. And I think how big of a threat is brics? I'm not an expert enough to, I don't know, like quantify the. I wish I could give you a 6% chance of disaster, 25% chance of disaster. I don't know what the percentage chance of disaster is, but I know that there is a potential disaster.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think I'm crazy to say it's 100% chance? I just don't know over what time period. It could be another 150 years. But the US dollar will lose reserve currency status. So tells me history.

[Graham Moore]

Oh, that's an interesting argument. I mean, I've never thought about it that way. Let me try and think about that for a second. I mean you have to be right, right? Because no currency has ever maintained global dominance forever. I mean no empire lasts forever. Rome fell, the British Empire collapsed. Nothing lasts forever. We are what, 80 years into this project of kind of a post war American empire with the US dollar being. And, and, and the Sort of difference of what I would argue is the American post war empire is that it's a. It's an empire of dollars. It's not an empire of soldiers. We don't have, you know, kind of soldiers, outposts everywhere around the world. We are not. The United States has not for 80 years been on a path to conquest to take new territory. When was the last time the United States government took new territory? It's been a little while. It's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that is the only real question.

[Graham Moore]

Yeah, the fact that we don't. Yeah, the fact that we don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Tiktoking that one real fast here. I'm not TikTok, but in 1947, the Mariana Islands, Carolina Islands, Caroline Islands and Marshall Islands came the most recent US territorial acquisition as of August 2021. We certainly haven't taken any since then. So there you have it, 1947.

[Graham Moore]

Yeah. It does not seem like the United States is on a massive path of territorial conquest around the world, but the US dollar has been.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And

[Graham Moore]

that I would argue has been tremendously important for global stability in a way. And that's a defense of the Bretton woods system. That's saying that at the end of the war, a bunch of people got together in a hotel in New Hampshire in the town of Bretton woods to fashion an economic system that would prevent a third world war. And knock on this table right now. So far, so good. I think you can hear the trepidation in both your voice and my voice because as we sit here In June of 2024, it feels like we're uncomfortably close to something that could tip into a war of global proportions, which we haven't seen in 80 years. And I think I don't feel comfortable putting words in your mouth, but I think I can safely say that both of us feel like that would. That is a situation to be avoided.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. There's a great quote. Anybody that lives by the crystal ball is destined to eat glass. So 100% I'm going to be wrong, that I know. But I think it is extremely worthwhile for people to build their internal logic and say, okay, based on the things that I believe, here's what I think will happen. And if you believe it enough, then you'll act accordingly. I mean, this comes back to the John Maynard Keynes thing where he painted a picture of the next 20 years of Germans existence. And he was right because he actually understood the machinations. And I think that's really important. I posted a clip Today from an interview I did with Ray Dalio, arguably one of the greatest economic minds, certainly made more money off of his economic beliefs than anybody living. That's got to be close. Certainly in terms of hedge fund owners, there might be personal investors that have done better. And he was saying, Tom, the. I was putting forth a thesis that we need a leader that can unite us. And he said, nope, you're making a mistake, because that's how dictators come to power. Now, his whole thing was, you're skipping past the mechanism of action. Now, I actually think in the final analysis, he's going to end up being wrong. And unfortunately, I did not push him and say, well, Ray, what's the mechanism of action in your world? And because what he'll tell you, I'm so familiar with this, because I've asked him this question a dozen times, is it all comes down to how people are with each other. And so, yes, if people have high trust, if they're getting along well, if they're not torn apart by division, then things go well. And for him, the mechanism of action of the everything falls apart is people have division, they start pulling away from each other, and there is no way to bring them back together. Okay? So I believe that we are all in the grips of ideas, and if you can put forth an idea of unity, that you actually can get people to come back together. So now, whether I have a path that will trigger the right mechanisms of action is a very valid point, but I don't think think it sort of violates any sort of laws of humanity that we can do that. But where I think we are, the mechanism of action that I'm trying to lay out is that money printing creates a mechanism of action that when you're the one that controls it, you end up racking up debt. Now, an interesting fact that I want everybody to burn into their soul is that at the time of Bretton woods, and the reason I think we're a different country now, in that conference in Bretton woods, back when it happened the first time, right before the end of World War II, we were the largest creditor in the world. We are now the largest debtor in the world. And there's no way that anybody can look at Bretton woods and go, oh, the largest debtor in the world would be the one that would be able to get their currency put as like the global currency. And so you. I look at the movements of the BRIC nations and how many more people are trying to sign on to that, including Saudi Arabia and I say, huh, the G7 now make up 25 point like 5% of global GDP. That's a quarter, man. They make up a quarter. America alone at the time of Bretton woods was 50% just America. And so, dude, people, people, can they. You, I'm not asking you to forecast in the future. I'm just saying look backwards. At the end of World War II, America is the largest creditor and by its creditor and by itself makes up 50% of global GD. Flash forward, the G7 make up 25% of global GDP and America is the largest debtor. And PS they're cutting off countries like Russia and saying, oh, we're just going to remove you from the global monetary system. Which then Russia goes a word like, we're going to go talk to China. China is desperate to get out from under your thumb. They want to be at least a regional hegemon. We live in now a multipolar world again. And China is a pure competitor to the us so says John Mearsheimer, shout out to John who we want to get on the show. And it's the whole deck is just totally different. And so when I watch the US government say, I'm never going to be able to convince the American people to go to war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine, not even by proxy. And so I'm just going to print money. I'm like, look, all of Cain's ideas, he was brilliant, but I don't think he appreciated the human proclivity to abuse that power into oblivion. Bringing us back to Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio said, there's only so many personality types. That's why history rhymes. And the reality is every time somebody gets the privilege of being the reserve currency, they just end up taking on debt. Debt, debt, debt, debt, debt, debt. They can't help themselves. They print to service the debt. And then eventually you hit a point where it just doesn't work anymore and you hyperinflate your own currency because there is a breaking point. And you finally find that breaking point, which is not like you can point to and say, oh, this ratio of debt to gdp, I get it, it's very complicated. But every currency ever in human history ends up hitting that limit. It hyperinflates, they lose their status. And in that moment, you have to have a debt jubilee. And that normally comes at the cost of war. And so I'm just saying, when I look out at the world and I'm like, he, the US is funding the Ukraine's fight with Russia. That can go Badly, like, first of all, they're a nuclear power. What are we doing? You're not even getting the American people to vote on it. And when you put it in an economic historical context, covered in an amazing book called the wealth of Shadows.

[Graham Moore]

Wow, that shout out was so. Thank you for that, dude.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The crazy thing is, in some ways, I think your book has affected me more than it's affected you. No, no. Absolutely fascinating.

[Graham Moore]

Well, I'm also. I think I'm. I'm probably arguing against you more than agreeing with you for conversational purposes, honestly, because I feel like I learn more from arguments than I do from agreements.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Agreed.

[Graham Moore]

And it's more. We both grow from that experience. But yeah, I. Look, I don't. I think that's a valid point. I think the way that we've. The way the US government has, frankly, in the last 80 years gotten into the habit of kind of soft declaring wars without congressional resolutions is. This is not the first time that's been a problem. You know, ironically, the. It was Iraq. Right. Which we were talking about earlier was a time when Congress did vote and they gave the President authority to launch an invasion. And look how that worked out. So there are difficulties both ways. I think that, again, I don't think that the. I don't know that anyone would make the argument that the major inflationary pressures on the American economy right now are the aid to Ukraine. I'm not saying those are helping. I agree with you entirely that they're not. They're hurting. But the COVID era money printing is kind of obviously the prime source of the inflationary pressures the American economy is feeling now. I don't know how you'd make an argument contrary to that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Agreed.

[Graham Moore]

Which is all to say that that's not to say that aid to Ukraine is helping. Again, it's not. That's obviously inflationary because again, we're sort of not building things in the United States that we use. And I think it's an interesting example that you're making about. Or what you were saying Ray Dalio was making about how other currencies have stopped being global reserve currencies. I mean, Sterling really lost that privilege in the Second World War. It wasn't a massive.

[Tom Bilyeu]

By getting itself in debt. Yes. What do you mean?

[Graham Moore]

Well, yes, they did get. You're right, you're right. They did get themselves in a tremendous amount of debt during the war to the United States. And they also got bombed. It feels like getting bombed part was pretty bad.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, huge advantage they had to rebuild America Obviously Pearl harbor, but basically we walked out of that completely unscathed. So America's geography to the rescue one more time. No doubt about that.

[Graham Moore]

So, yes, but I certainly see the argument that it was the. It's an interesting way of thinking about it, that the problem, and it sounds like the argument that you're saying Dalia is making, and it's a smart one, is that Sterling's problem as a global reserve currency was the debt per se, and not the fact that they nearly lost a massive war and nearly became a territory of Germany. I think we sort of forget. Whenever I go back into the early history of the war, and I did this when I was writing this book, and I did this when I was writing the Imitation Game, the film I wrote about 10 years ago, which also

[Tom Bilyeu]

gets the one you won the Academy Award for.

[Graham Moore]

I did win an Academy Award for. Yeah. Whenever you read through an exercise, I recommend to anyone. And actually here, this is slightly tangential, but if you want to feel better about life in 2024, go on then. On the New York Times website, they have, I think they call it the Times Machine. You can look back at the sort of physical paper any day in the history of New York Times publication. And something I've done with this book and when I was doing Imitation Game was just go back and read the front page of the New York Times every day from January 1, 1939 to January 1, 1940. If you read the front page of the New York Times every day for that year, or even just skim through it, you will find your hands starting to shake. You will find like a deep anxiety welling up in your chest. I find myself near tears, frankly, half the time going through it, because the sheer level of apocalypse that it looked like the world was facing in that time was something that I haven't known in my lifetime. I'm 42 years old, and I have not in those 42 years experienced that level of civilizational apocalypse on the precipice. And certainly I don't find myself feeling that way in June of 2024. You know, knock on wood, I don't start feeling that way in July of 2024. But I think, you know, the feeling of whenever we look back on the Second World War, it's very easy to look back on it. We all find ourselves looking back on it, I think with these kind of rose colored glasses where it's like, oh, yeah, and the good guys won. Of course, the good guys were going to win. And if you look at what it must have been like to be alive in the United States, much less Britain, in 1939 or 1940. Not only was it unclear that the good guys were going to win, it was pretty clear that the opposite was going to happen. It did not at all feel like the Americans and British were going to survive this. And, you know, you look at the prop, frankly, the propaganda the British government was putting out at the time when their war started, because they're after the invasion of Poland, Britain declares war, and their war was going so disastrously badly. I think there's a line actually in the book where I make fun of it, or one of the characters. I have one of the characters making fun of it because they literally had to put out some press release that was. I'm probably going to mangle the text slightly, but the British government kind of propaganda press release was like, and in the high seas, our boats have sunk a number of German ships. And in the book, I have a bit where the guys are reading that, going, a number. That's the best they can muster. They don't want to tell you how many they sunk because the answer is, like, two. And it's so embarrassingly small that they don't even want to tell. They can't even report on how badly the war effort is going on because everyone will freak out even more than they already are. So I think that sense of this, sense of in both Britain and the United States that, you know, at the end of 39 Britain. Actually, there's a scene of this in the Imitation Game. We don't talk about it, but there's a bit where 700,000 British schoolchildren were put on trains and sent out of London to the countryside to largely stay with relatives because they felt that London at the end of 1939 was an unsafe place for children. I mean, this is London. This isn't like some small town somewhere. This is all the children in London got put onto a bunch of trains and sent to the countryside, as many as could possibly stay with relatives. We didn't explain it in imitation. There's a bit early in the movie where you see Alan Turing. It was a real thing. He was on the train. He happened to be on the train the day that all the children were on it. So he's on a train filled with children. It's a couple shots in the movie that we never really explain, but that's what it was, is that he's on a train filled with school children because he's going somewhere the same day that they're all being sent out of the city. I mean, imagine what it would feel like societally if all of the children were sent out of Los Angeles one day. I mean, I have two children. I think you don't. But we both know plenty of people with children. There's children around. I mean, culturally, what that would feel like to say, okay, bye, kids. We're probably going to get bombed soon. You'll be back soon. Fingers crossed. We hope that we're not all dead in six months, but kind of, it looks like we're all going to be dead in six months. I would argue that that sensation also did not contribute to people's assurance in the stability of pound sterling to bring it back to an economic question.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, war is. Is just savage. And when it's on your land, even more brutal. All right, I want to ask you a question. This is something that I talked about the beginning of the book, but given that I think your book picks a time in history, but I don't think it. Anything is fundamentally different about the way the government operated then to now.

[Graham Moore]

I agree with that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

In your book, there are spies in the US Government. Do you believe there are spies in the US Government today?

[Graham Moore]

Hard, easy. Yes, of course there are spies in the U.S. government today. How many people work for the U.S. government? A lot. A lot. I mean, how many millions? I don't even want to hazard a guess because I'm sure I'll be off. But if none of them turned out to be spies, that would be statistically improbable. I think. Of course, there are Chinese spies in the U.S. government. Of course there are Russian spies in the U.S. government. Of course there are French spies in the U.S. government. I mean, even our allies. It's no secret that we spend a lot of time. It is no secret that the United States spends a lot of time spying on even our own allies. So I think that's, you know, we can have a separate conversation about whether we think that all the money we spend on intelligence services are kind of producing the effects that we're hoping for. You know, talk, you know, if you want to talk about inflation and if we accept this Keynesian idea that inflation happens when the kind of we're not getting value for the money, we're creating money without corresponding kind of goods and services being produced, there's good questions about how much value the CIA is really adding to, I don't know, American security and American life. Their track record has not been. Certainly not been flawless. But I think, yeah. Is it well, here's another question. Why would it be why? Why do you ask about America, about foreign spies in the US Government? Like doesn't it seem sort of obvious that would be the case and normal.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. I think it is not. I think the very reason I'm asking is because your book showed me a vision of the government that did not match the very naive vision that I had of the government where spies are low level people working in janitorial services that are paid to grab a couple documents. Seeing a real life example of an extremely high level person that has a major impact in World War II for ideological reasons. This is the part that freaked me out. It was not just about money. He was compensated.

[Graham Moore]

But this was barely somebody.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Who just believed in the cause of the other country. Because here's what I see when I look at our government. First of all, America, I love you. You cannot imagine how much. You really can't imagine how much. You've. You've given me everything. I could write love song after love song. I love this country. I love it the most.

[Graham Moore]

That is a statement to share. Now that's. I love that man.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean it. And I'm utterly heartbroken that for people the American flag has somehow become a negative thing. But I grew up in the 80s, baby, and so that American flag swells me with pride. Now that doesn't mean that we don't do terrible shit. Such seems to be the reality of governments. But with all of my love, what I see when I look out at the government is I see ideological divisions. This is where my whole thesis around we're all in the grips of ideas when those ideas cause us to pull in opposite directions. Now we have a problem and I just see people in the grips of ideas that are pulling them in opposite directions. May my small contribution to the world be that I bring on incredibly thoughtful people. I map the way they think. I find and debate the most important ideas of our time. And then hopefully all together we can begin adopting better ideas that have gone through the fire of criticism and that we can all be in the grips of ideas that move us to a positive place. Which is something you and I haven't talked about, but I've talked about too my audience many times. You have to have a North Star. And I think it is very fair to say my North Star is Pollyannish. But I think you have to have one. And so mine is just human flourishing. So what leads to human flourishing? And with that I am. I'm trying to look out at the world and be honest about where we are hyper divided, honest about why we're hyper divided, ideology that's pulling in opposite directions, and then figure out how we bring that all back together. But when I read your book and realized people are, are in the grips of these ideas and they, they really are active right now today in our government in high level positions, pulling in directions that I would be horrified by. And then when I look out at the mainstream media and I just see gaslighting on top of gaslighting, I'm like, oh my God. Like all these people that have been complaining for years that literally inside I was just like, why do people think about politics? Like, put your head down. Build something that matters has always been my response. But that only works when you're standing on solid ground and I can feel the ground turning into a bit of sand. I don't think we're quicksand yet, but it's Sandy. And so for the first time in my life, I just feel like, huh, we need to be addressing these ideas head on. Because I can now. In fact, this will bring me into. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on is you speak to two sides of my life. You were pitched to us by your publicist. I was like, it's not possible that this guy's into the two things that I'm hyper into to the economic side of the book he wrote. And then you're a successful screenwriter. I am a currently failed screenwriter, but nonetheless love Hollywood. Love where all this is going. Now, irony of ironies. I am an ideologically driven screenwriter. I only want to tell stories that have a message that I think will make people's lives better. But I look at Hollywood today and I'm like, hey, kids, you have to hide the sleight of hand. So when I see something like Disney's Star Wars, I'm like, I get it. Women are rad. They're powerful. We want to celebrate that. We want to make young women feel like they can do anything. But when you have a Jedi that's just a dope Jedi from day one and never has to learn anything, I see the sleight of hand. I see what you're trying to do. And now I can't see the story. I can only see the sleight of hand. And clumsy sleight of hand is why I, I would say the last, however many Disney movies have just tanked. I'm very curious to get your take on the current state of Hollywood.

[Graham Moore]

Oh, man. This might be a harder question than economic theory. In the second World War. Current state of Hollywood. So yes, I live this funny life, right Where I spend half my time writing books and the other half making movies. And I've written four novels and two films and working on other now and the. So in a way I sort of have. Half of my professional life is in Hollywood. So I have the kind of view of someone who's half there, which in some ways is nice because I'm not. I have a little bit of distance from it. I'm not sort of in Hollywood every day. I mean, I live in Silver Lake on the east side of Los Angeles. I'm kind of literally never in Hollywood except today where I get to come see you. The. The state of Hollywood, I think. I honestly haven't seen a Star wars movie in so long. I can't comment on any. I just don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Not yout shtick or turned you off.

[Graham Moore]

No, it was never. It was a thing when I was a kid. Like, it feels like I remain surprised in some ways at their enduring popularity. In some ways, I would argue the strange thing is that we're still talking about Star wars movies. Like that's the thing I'm sort of surprised at, I think a lot of the things. I remember being super into it in middle school and high school again in the 80s and 90s. And I'm from that generation that when the Star wars movies were coming out, I was too young to have seen them in theaters. So I watched the Star wars movies on a VHS tape in my dad's apartment. My parents split when I was seven and my dad, we mostly lived with my mom. But then my brother and I would sometimes we'd go visit our dad and he had this little apartment and he'd sort of put us in the apartment. Then he'd go out. And so my little brother and I would sit there with a VHS player and a TV that I'm sure if you watch anything on it now, the resolution quality would be so shockingly low. In some ways, I wonder if I've ever seen the Star wars movies now because I'm like, man, I watched Those things on VHS tapes on a 14 inch by 14 inch square television in impossibly low resolution. Who knows what I actually watched all those years ago, I think. And I loved him then. It just didn't sort of stay a part of my life after that. Oh, that's not true. There was an andor show that was great. I watched some of that and that was really, really good. But I'm not Sort of up on the currency of Star wars things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Have you seen the controversy over the Acolyte?

[Graham Moore]

I am vaguely aware that this exists, but no, I don't know anything about this. There's a controversy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There is. And so I haven't seen the acolyte, but I've certainly seen the controversy. And since it fits so well into the same controversy they've been having forever, it is, from what I can tell, Disney has become an ideologically driven company which, hey, like I said, Impact Theory is an ideologically driven company. But when you do that, you have to be so careful because what the audience wants is just a good story. So to them the moral of the story. Yeah, it should be there. As if for no other reason than I think what makes films work for the human mind is that they are an exploration of a theme. And then in the end they will come to a conclusion. And in a typical three act structure, sort of Star Warsian power of myth, Joseph Campbell way, they will come to a nice tidy conclusion that gives you a life lesson that you can carry out the hero's journey, me, but you shouldn't know what the final conclusion is going to be until the end. And even then it should feel right and it should feel subtle and it shouldn't feel like something that was thrown in your face. And what, from my perspective, Disney in particular, but this is rampant in Hollywood, is they have an agenda. They're going to wear it on their sleeve, they're going to cram it down your throat. They're not even going to explore it, they're just going to state it so it becomes a sermon. So I'm giving you a sermon about exactly how you should live. And while again, I respect it, once people can see the sleight of hand, you get into trouble and it stops being a movie and it starts being a preacher sermon.

[Graham Moore]

That's interesting. And I, look, I can't comment on that specifically. I just haven't seen it and don't know much about it or this controversy. I will say though that in general, I guess I would make the argument that all art is ideological, whether you know it or not. So you were talking about Impact Theory being kind of ideologically driven. You have these messages, you have these themes that you want to bring out to people. I think that my work is too. I think that hopefully again I'm going to mangle the source of this quote. But there was, I think it was originally a quote about journalism and someone can look up who said it, but the idea was that journalism should aim to either comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable. And I've always loved this, and I think that's right. That kind of good art should be doing one of those two things. And I don't know that I've achieved this by any stretch of the imagination, but I have, certainly. I feel like the bit where I get more excited is the afflict, the comfortable part that you. I find myself wanting to. I find myself getting excited about art that changes how I think about something that doesn't tell me what I already know. It would be awfully silly to have written a book about World War II where the thesis was, nazis are bad. No shit. That's not particularly interesting. That's not particularly compelling fiction, frankly. When we were doing Imitation Game, we got into a lot of these things where that was a movie where, again, do we need a scene where we say, nazis are bad? No, no, shit. Everybody knows. Do we need a scene where we say, like, homophobia is bad? No, it's assumed. The movie just assumes that. And that seemed. And in fact, like something in all the things we've tried to do is kind of have something in it that should hopefully challenge the preconceptions and the ideology of anyone going into it. Like, to sort of destabilize ideology a bit. It's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think.

[Graham Moore]

Why. It's funny, actually. Someone was talking to me. A friend said this to me years ago about work that I was doing. And it's always stuck with me because I found it terribly perceptive. She said, you know, nothing you write ever has any villains in it. Like, you never have any real villains. And I have slowly come to realize over the years that she was absolutely right. Because villains are so. Because I get bored with them quickly, okay, they're the bad guy. Like, I don't care. I'm much more interested in characters who are morally complicated. Like we were talking about. This is a book with a guy who's a spy who's doing some pretty awful things, but he's doing them for the right reasons. And his reasons are actually really good. And we're still on board with his reasons. And we're, in fact, on board with 80% of the dastardly things he does in the book. It's that last 20% with which I think both you and I go, oh. Oh, gosh, man. That was. I was with you up till now, but now you've taken it a bridge too far. And as we talk about kind of narratives and sort of storytelling that's compelling or Interesting. I find that sort of work really exciting where you're challenging. You don't want to create a set of characters and maybe this is a Disney thing, I don't know. But a set of characters where you're sort of going like, these are the good guys, these are the bad guys. Because I think whenever you start doing that, if the morality is that obvious, then it's not that interesting. Or at least it's not that you're not asking that much from your readers, from your audience. You know, I think there are no, like, there are no kind of Nazi characters in this book because it's not. They would just be bad guys. That's not interesting. It's much more, yeah. Compelling to me to see people who are like Nazi adjacent sympathizers or Americans unwittingly helping the Nazi cause or something like that. Or there's a lot of people in the book who are. They're not even Nazi sympathizers. They're just unwilling to involve themselves. They just want to go about their day and not get involved and not have anything to do with it. And they want to stand in a trolley car and look at their shoes as a bunch of Nazis are kind of marching past the trolley car.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's the terrifying.

[Graham Moore]

Yes. They want to just look away. And the morality of that is really interesting to me. I think more so than kind of clear cut lines in Good and Evil. You know, actually what made me think of that the other day we were asking about Disney storytelling. I have a three and a half year old and I watched Ratatouille with him for the first time the other day. I had not seen Ratatouille in so long. These are my extremely belated plugs for hit movies of a decade prior. Ratatouille. It's great. Oh my gosh. How do we ever forget how great it is? Another movie without villains. Even the guys who are set up as villains actually turn out to have really interesting thought and be right about a bunch of stuff and kind of turn and change in interesting ways. And you're sort of just as compelled by them as you are by the heroes. I think that was an example of. I can't remember if Disney owned Pixar at the time of Ratatouille, but of that kind of four quadrant all family storyline, that still is, I would argue, morally complicated in interesting ways. So I don't know. It's funny, I go because I'm only half in Hollywood. You're asking about the state of it. Some days I find Myself on calls where everyone's tearing their hair out like, are people going to go see movies anymore? Maybe this was the end. This is the end of movies. Is it all going to fall apart? But then it seems fine. And I feel like again, this is sort of looking at history. Every 15 or 20 years we've culturally had that freak out about movies, specifically in the face of, of first television and now what YouTube or frankly the kind of media, the kind of media channel that this is right where you're, you're making podcasts, you're making a, you have a YouTube channel, you're sort of doing all of these. You know, we're in a media environment where you look at like streaming. We always forget this. But you look at streaming video consumption in the United States and I've seen this data just a little bit. But like culturally, sometimes we talk about Netflix as being the kind of streaming video leader in the United States, but it's not remotely. That's a fifth of what YouTube gets in terms of views. YouTube is unquestionably streaming leader in the United States, which is. Is that bad for Hollywood? Is that good for Hollywood? I don't know. It's different. I think I'm excited as a consumer of a lot of. I read a lot of books, I watch a lot of movies. I love books, I love movies. I don't feel a current shortage of things I really like. I find myself able to find things and being driven towards things that I really love, that I might not otherwise have found that I can watch really, really easily. And that is very exciting to me and I hope other people are having the same experience.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is AI going to be good or bad for the film industry?

[Graham Moore]

I am super bearish on AI. I think it's been widely overhyped. This is among here. This is good. This is one of my least popular opinions. I feel like my wife and I play this game sometimes where she's like, she's like, what is your dumbest, craziest opinion? And maybe my bearishness on AI is that one. I honestly think, and this comes from my sort of having spent some time because I wrote about Alan Turing, because I've spent some time sort of looking at the history of AI. I think the history of AI for 130 years now, since Charles Babbage on has been rife with wild over prediction about what AI is on the cusp of being able to do. From the 1880s to Alan Turing in the 1950s, to a lot of great researchers in the 1980s. We have been on the cusp of a massive AI revolution so many times before, and I am unconvinced that this is the moment when an actual revolution is occurring so much as, like, a bunch of really minor user interface improvements have been created and kind of rebranded as something called AI Now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I am equally bearish in the sense of right now, today. Right now, today, it cannot do the things that people think it will be able to do or want it to do. But. But every time I see somebody tweet something like what you're saying right now, I think. But if you just extrapolate, like, okay, so we are now roughly, I think, 18 months since ChatGPT launched. 18 months. So in 18 months, we've gone from, whoa, this is crazy, to, oh, look at the photos it can do. To, oh, my God, it can do video now. But the video is terrible. And it's so weird and surreal and they can't even get the hands right. It's Will Smith eating spaghetti, and it's, you know, just like, absolutely hilarious to, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. I can't now in a single shot. Sometimes I can't tell if this is real or not. They. They're not, you know, running around, because as soon as they start moving, it gives it away. But these really subtle shots, they're working. Okay, wait a second. If you've just seen, literally this week, a new model dropped for Runway ML, it is insane. You've got Sora, which I don't. Still don't think is available to the public. But the stuff they've shown, like the puppies playing in the snow, good Lord. It hits the snow and then pulls back and it's got snow on its muzzle. And the way it's interacting with its fur is real. And I'm just like, okay, cool. Where's. If. If that's how far we've come in 18 months, how far do we go in another 18 months? But forget 18 months. Where are we in 10 years? Like it. I think people are really going to be shocked at where we are in three years. But even if you think I'm out of my mind, where are we going to be in 10 years? And 10 years ain't that long.

[Graham Moore]

May I offer a reframing of the point you're making? If your point is that in the 18 months since ChatGPT has been released, the number and volume of useless things that it has been able to do has increased. If that is your argument, I agree with you wholeheartedly. They are finding ever Newer and more baroque, useless things that this technology can do every day. And I am fascinated both by the technological brilliance, the unquestionable technological brilliance going into these things and what seems to me like, maybe, so let's go back to John Maynard Keynes and talk about value and usefulness. And I'm still waiting for someone to give me a real use case. Maybe that would be the point. I'm still waiting for a real use case, because every time someone talks about a use case, it's always, oh, yeah, yeah, the thing we do now, well, obviously it's useless. It's the thing we'll be able to do in 18 months that's super useful. And I would argue that that argument was being made at Stanford and Yale and the Sorbonne in 1982 and 1983. That argument was being made, frankly, Alan Turing was making that argument in 1951. In 1951, Alan Turing went on a lecture tour of the UK where he was arguing that super intelligent AGI was months away. He was wrong. That did not happen in the mid-50s. Why did he think it was going to happen? It's because the people who. And Alan Turing, again, maybe smarter than John Maynard Keynes, among the kind of great intellectuals of the 20th century. Why was he wrong about AGI? He didn't call it AGI. I forget what his term was, but that's basically what he was talking about. It's because the people who work on this tend to sort of get in the weeds of it and they get excited by these sort of technological, These nudging improvements. But again, what is it? Maybe if you're writing code. I've seen some people, I've talked to some people who write code for a living, who talk about it being actually useful for them in kind of real ways. But look, certainly on the boring old prose fiction side or on the filmmaking side, the people. I ask filmmaker friends all the time. I ask editor friends all the time. I was thinking an editor last week. Does any of this do anything? Can you do anything with this you couldn't do before? And it's, oh, well, no, of course not. I mean, all this I could do two years ago. I could do this all 10 years ago. None of this. No, but look, it's kind of cool. Look, I can push a button and it, like, adds a dog to the shot. And, you know, it's like before, if I had to do that, I'd spend a little bit more work, so I'd have to use a mat or something. You'd have to kind of do it photochemically or whatever. Like, it doesn't. I'm sure. I'm sure I'm gonna get a bunch of angry letters after this from AI people who are like, no, no, no, our thing is really useful. But let me ask you, have you seen someone with a real use case of any of this technology?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So this is probably so some of the way that your friends are bamboozling you. They're not lying to you because of the way you frame the question. But this is probably six years ago, I went to a post house and I forget the name of the actress, but she was in a show called Nashville and she was pregnant while they were filming. And the guy goes, watch this. And he pulls her up and tucks her chin in, reduces her belly in front of me. And I was like, what on earth? How did you do that? Obviously, the technology that's running underneath that is AI. It's not AI in the way that we think about it now, but it's AI. So AI has been in all of these tools, whether it's Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, whatever. They've all been adding little pieces of algorithms here and there, which is AI. It's already doing so much. The modern CGI universe brought to you by under the Hood AI. Everything Pixar is doing brought to you by under the Hood AI. I mean, they're running all these crazy algorithms to do, like, the motion in the fur and all that stuff. So it's. The world has been slowly being gobbled up by AI in ways that people don't understand. And so it's this. How do you boil a frog slowly? It's just it. We hit a critical threshold with chat GPT, where suddenly people were like, oh, my God, you've now triggered my imagination. I can see where this is going to be now. People's imagination is ahead of them. That is very true. And when we have tried to deploy it to create 3D assets, it's terrible at 3D assets, but it can do it badly. And so what I'm saying is it's

[Graham Moore]

the best sales pitch if it's in technology. I want Sam Altman to stand up in front of all of his investors and be like, think of the number of things that we can do badly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, but what if the difference between doing it badly and doing it well is electricity and training data? Then. Then it is. So. I read an amazing book called the wealth of Shadows. And basically the opening line is this guy looked at the. The German spreadsheet and understood it was A mathematical certainty that they would invade Poland. And then it was a mathematical certainty that ultimately they would collapse, because even if they conquered the entire world, the second they did, their economy would collapse. And what I'm saying is, it is. Unless we run out of electricity, it is a mathematical certainty that virtually every thing that you watch visually will be generated by AI. Now, it may still require the human soul, the human spirit to tell it what to create. I don't know if it will ever make novel leaps where we watch something and go, oh, my God, you made me think of something I've never thought of before. It may not be able to do that. It may only regurgitate patterns, but visuals are simply regurgitated patterns. Now, maybe actors will forever have dots in their face and they. They can just do a thing that AI will never be able to do.

[Graham Moore]

Cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But the thing that you see on screen 100% is going to be entirely from top to bottom. AI generated that. That is a. From where I'm sitting, that is a mathematical certainty of just. You have to give it enough time. Now is that time three years, 30 years, 300 years? That I don't know, but it's probably closer to three than we think.

[Graham Moore]

That's fascinating. And I would push back on that and say here, my single word response to that is Oppenheimer. My single year word response from the last 24 months of film history is that, wow, audiences can, in some intangible way, appreciate photochemical cinematography in a way that we didn't think they could. Oppenheimer famously shot on IMAX cameras. It's not. There isn't CG used in it. Of course, there's plenty. There's plenty of CG used in everything. And that's. I think, both agrees with the point you're making and furthers it, which is that we find that a lot of these visual effects tools, things that used to be sort of visual effects shots, are now just. Oh, yeah, just things you're kind of doing in a post House. Like you were talking about removing kind of changing the shape of an actress's belly. And I think the point that you just made that in a way that might give away the game, is when you said that you had that conversation at the Post House six years ago and they weren't talking about it as AI. Like AI is this branding thing that, as far as I can tell, is entirely this. Like, Sam Altman driven, came up with a great branding for a bunch of technology that was largely already there and some minor improvements on that Technology. You know, when we were doing. When we made Imitation Game, like a small English period math drama. This was 10 years ago, 12 years ago. We were in post on that. And we. Even then we had the ability to. There was something. I remember there was a scene that we cut up. It was shot as one scene, and we realized we wanted to put something, another scene in the middle of it. So we sort of cut a scene in half. But it would be weird to have actors wearing the same clothes in sort of two scenes, two scenes apart. So we needed to change. We changed the color of the dress that the actress Keira Knightley was wearing in the scene. So it's the same footage, but we just put a new dress on her. And this was 11 years ago, 12 years ago. And I thought this was going to be a. Oh, gosh, we have to call somebody, call ilm somebody call a big effects house to do this. And instead it was. The assistant editor just said, oh, do you want me to just go in my office and here just hang for an hour and I'll just come back and do it. And he went to his office on his computer and came back and her dress had a new color. I don't even know how he did it. Some of the software that was even around again 10, 12 years ago. So I think this isn't new technology. Some of it has gotten a little bit easier to use. And the idea that audiences are suddenly going to be really receptive to entirely computer generated imagery. I think what we find, maybe we don't find this, but I certainly find, is that I can tell when I'm watching a movie where the sort of base image is photochemically generated versus something that's algorithmically generated. You can tell in like a kind of shoddily made superhero movie where suddenly they kind of go into the shot where they all look a little bit robotic and like none of it looks quite real. And it all looks sort of video gamey to coin a. To maybe give away the game by describing it that way. Or you can tell when a film, and Hoffenheimer is a great example here, is photographed photochemically with cameras and, you know, real celluloid that is photochemically responding to the light in front of it. Why is it that that feels different audience. And then you can manipulate little bits, right? You change the shape of belly, you change the color of a dress. You can like, change it in little bits. But the Fundamentally, the image is photochemically generated. Fundamentally, the image has been photographed. Can all audiences detect that? All the time. No, but I would argue that enough people kind of feel that on some level, even still with the. Even as good as sort of computer generated imagery, is that it doesn't. It's not like we're at a point where we're saying, is anyone going to watch kind of live action films that are Is anyone going to watch live action films that are mostly computer generated soon? I'm saying that no one's even aware of. No one even likes watching live action films, any frames of which have been entirely computer generated. Now, we sort of instinctively recoil at those things because we know the uncanny valley of that is still strong. And I think we find this with. So I would argue, frankly, this is something interesting about the funny place in media history we're in where we thought a bunch of technological improvements were going to kind of fundamentally change really, really old and durable art forms. And we've found actually that the changes have been on the margins and they've expanded the realm of what those art forms look like, but not that they fundamentally kind kick the knees out from under them. A great example would be books. A technology as old, as old as time, or not as old as time, Right. As old as the printing press. We've had printing presses for a while. We've had printed books like the one here for a while. There is no interesting new technology that went into the printing of a book or frankly, even the writing of it. I'm trying to think of what technology. I've used spell check, but even then I still have three different copy editors who go through the manuscript, kind of weeding out errors that have escaped the notice of spellcheck for any kind of grammar editor. So I think we find, and there was this bit kind of 15 years ago when everyone thought that everyone was going to transfer onto ebooks and E readers, that ebooks people are going to stop reading kind of physical printed books and transfer and start reading ebooks. And then that didn't happen. They kept buying physical books. And in fact, the percentage of book purchases that have been ebooks has gone down every year for the past however many years. There's something about the quality of what people like. In a strange way, the conversation that we are having right now as we sit here today is a perfect example of this because we are two human beings sitting in front of two microphones, talking into a bunch of recording technology to be listened to people on headphones or off of a speaker somewhere. That is 110-year-old technology. We've had radio interviews for I'M going to say about 110 years, maybe it's closer to 100. And what we're finding with, frankly, the resurgence of. What we're finding with the recent popularity of podcasts, I would argue is a resurgence in really old technology. Like, there's actually something about radio that people love. But what the technology has allowed us to do is consume even more radio than we used to and to consume audiobooks. And actually even publishing is a good example. The real shift that happened when you look at what audiences were doing, what readers were doing, is it's not that people stopped buying print books, it's they also started listening to audiobooks because now we have the technology to make that super, super easy. And I'll say my wife and I had a baby last summer and our second child. Congratulations. Thank you very much. And I cannot imagine we have a three year old and a one year old now. And I cannot imagine the experience of either child without audiobooks or having an infant. Because when you have to stay up from, you have to stay up all night and you get to sleep in these sort of 45 minute little increments and then you're kind of giving an infant a bottle. And I would just kind of stay up listening to audiobooks while kind of giving the baby bottles and soothing him and putting him in the crib and getting up and down. And I can't tell you how many great books I got to listen to last summer with an infant in the house that I would not otherwise have been able to read because of that technology. And again, this isn't new technology. It's weirdly a new people reading books into microphones is really, really old technology. The distribution mechanism is new. The part where I get to listen to it on my phone and it's super easy to just click a couple things, download it on audible, start listening in 10 seconds. That's the really new bit. I know that was a kind of long winded and kind of varied way of looking at a kind of media landscape, but I would argue that it's this changes in distribution methods are kind of more important, we're finding more important than the changing methods of how stuff is actually created, as evidenced by the fact that you and I are recording right now in the same way. If this was 80 years ago, this wouldn't really look any different. Yeah, you have a tablet in front of you. Yeah, we have video cameras on us. But Johnny Carson did the same thing. Right. That's not new technology.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I agree, I want to. I agree with you that it's not new technology in that fundamental sense. But I'm going to paint a picture for you of what I think the future looks like, and then tell me what you think about that.

[Graham Moore]

Okay. Is this a scary picture or a happy picture?

[Tom Bilyeu]

It is terrifying in that it passes through a valley of despair so traumatic that I think it will be a fundamental paradigm shift. And I don't think humans are good at paradigm shifts. The green.

[Graham Moore]

So I'm in for this journey.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, here's. Here's what I think happens. So the reason that the argument that you just made is 100% correct and yet not predictive of the future is that the difference is that the new technology that's happening now is intelligence itself. And so if you can imagine what it would have. What life would have looked like 5,000 years ago, and if I could pull 5,000 years forward so that somebody 5,000 years ago could instantaneously experience 2024, it would be disorienting beyond belief. So they don't have electricity, they don't have TVs, they don't have things that look like telepathy. Like, imagine this. I could say to them, in all honesty, I'm going to go over in that room and you're going to stay here with Graham, and Graham is going to ask you to give him a number. You're going to give him a number, and then he's going to send it to me without moving his mouth, without making a sound, and I'm going to know what that number is. You can give him a whole sentence, you can give him a whole paragraph, and I'm going to know it instantaneously. And he'd be like, yep, nope, not true. Or it's witchcraft. And of course, you're either just going to record it on your phone and text it to me, or you're just going to write it out and text it to me. It. It is actual telepathy, but because it happens so slowly, we don't really think about it. Okay, so that would be shocking, but it took a long time scale to really make something shocking. What I'm saying is intelligence. If we get to what they're calling super intelligence, so there's a meme going around. What did Ilya see? So Ilya Sutskever was working at OpenAI. Something happens, and he goes radio silent, won't talk to anybody for months, and then the first thing back is, I'm starting my new company. His new company is, if I'm not mistaken, SSI Safe. Super Intelligence. So there's this whole hypothesis that he's seen that AI is way farther along than people think it is and that now he is just freaked out by what's going to happen if people don't focus entirely around coming up with a way to make AI safe by making sure it wants the same things that we want. It's called alignment. Anyway, so if superintelligence comes into existence now imagine that in an hour it can have a hundred years of human advancement because it's thinking a million times faster, smarter than we are, and then what happens? To give you an idea, I ran the math. In this one time, Einstein is something like 2.4 times smarter than a literal moron. Somebody who scores. Well, I think it's 81 or 82. Somewhere around in there is the legal definition of a moron. So he was 2.4, I believe. That's close. Times smarter. So what happens when you have something that's a million times smarter, a billion times smarter? It, it will be able to bring about a world that not only would be indistinguishable, you could just say create a movie for me that looks like it was shot on celluloid, that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. It will be photorealistic. And because I now again, I don't know timeline, so I don't know if this happens in five years, 50, 500. But again, it just comes back to as long as we can generate the amount of compute which requires the electricity, I don't see why we wouldn't be able to get to that point. I'll never say that it will be able to make genuine leaps of cognition because I don't know if that requires some thing that humans have. I don't know. I assume it will, but I don't know. But even if it can only recognize patterns, it will be able to do things like say this is how the proteins are going to fold in your body, right? And so now all of a sudden it can predict the obscenely complicated interactions of the human body that becomes down pat. Now you can live forever, whatever. So once people, once you give an intelligence that is self improving, all bets are off. And so that is, is a world that is just so fundamentally different that it is, as they say, it's the technological singularity. You can't anticipate what it would be like if you could. You'd build it. So utterly fascinating. But now to narrow our focus back to Hollywood and something that I think is more near term. So I think about this a lot. I'm spending a lot of money to build a studio. And so I'm staring at AI coming down the pipe and I'm like, okay, what's going to be real when right now can write a screenplay for you. But that screenplay is not inspired by any stretch of the imagination. But it can help you brainstorm and it's actually pretty interesting for that. It can help you identify patterns. So, hey, of the last 10 Academy Award winning screenplays, what were the structural beats? What was happening on page seven, what was happening on page 27? Whatever. And it will break it all down for you. Utterly fascinating. What were their genres, how many speaking parts, et cetera, et cetera. So you can get a level of data and insight that you wouldn't be able to get. But the real thing that I think is going to happen is society is going to bifurcate and there are going to be people who are like, I want a movie starring Pikachu set in the Star wars universe, but based on the visual stylings of these photos from my childhood. And then it will do it and it'll be like, oh, well, it's crazy. Pikachu lives in my bedroom and this is nuts. And it's telling a story about whatever. You can feed it what you want it to be about. So you'll get people that are like, I want that hyper specialized stuff. And I get it's a little off, but I mean, if you've ever watched bad soap operas, you know, there are just some things where people accept it's not great, but I love it. So you're going to get people that are. I want the hyper personalization that AI can bring. And I don't care that it's the uncanny valley. Then you have other people that will literally march in the streets. And I don't know if there'll be violence, but they're going to take it very seriously that I do not engage with anything that is AI driven. I don't watch movies that are AI driven. I don't let my kids watch things that are AI driven. I want the soul of humanity. I want stories that are written by real people. I want real actors. I don't care if it's not personalized. I don't care if there are less of them. Whatever. I just, I want it to be real humans. Now. I wore this shirt as a part of this punchline. I wrote a comic book about this, about what I think now it's called Neon Future because I think on the other side of this Valley of Despair, you actually get to. There's no utopias, but you get to the closest thing. I think technology ultimately becomes the thing that saves us. But I think that we are fooling ourselves if we don't think that that bifurcation in society happens. And so the story that I wrote is about that friction. The moment where it's like neither of them have hit escape velocity yet. But you've got the humans on one side saying, we don't like these bad people that are infused with AI because we focused a lot on people that embed technology into their bodies, like neuralink style. We don't like those bad augmented people. Like that becomes the new class to discriminate against. So we will have to go through that and we'll have to navigate that. And it will be very interesting to see how far the purists go and to see how fast people that augment are able to augment themselves. But I do think that's the path.

[Graham Moore]

I think that is a fascinating scenario. I'm curious to see how it plays out. I would say that part of that I certainly can latch onto is, and get behind is the idea that there'll be hugely customizable kind of video and art. As you were saying, I want Pikachu and Batman doing a dance for four hours and going on a Lord of the Rings style quest or whatever, and copyright be damned. I can just sort of make my little videos that only I'm watching and I'm not charging for them, so I'm not violating any copyright. And I can entertain myself to death with this. I think that certainly seems. And I don't care if it's like Uncanny Valley ish. I don't care if it's not that good. I think you're right that we are kind of single digit years away from that being a reality. And I'm curious to see how people respond to that, because I think we find in my experience, the experiences that I've found with my readers and my viewers has been that the things that people respond to the most are not the things that they said they wanted, it's the things they didn't say they wanted. And I think that's what I would predict will be unsatisfying about art produced that way. That it might be a little bit satisfying and kind of diverting for little periods of time, but it's ultimately not as satisfying to. I don't think that will be as satisfying to audiences as work that they couldn't have predicted. You know, my second book The Last Days of Night. It was about the relationship between Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla. And the protagonist of that book, of the Last Days of Night was a guy named Paul Cravath, who was George Westinghouse's patent lawyer. In 1893, George Westinghouse sued Thomas Edison for a billion dollars over the patent the light bulb in 1893. You imagine a billion dollars was the kind of money worth going to court over. And so Paul Crabath was this real guy, and he was sort of young, untested patent attorney in charge of handling, I think, the most. What I would argue is the most valuable lawsuit in American history. It was all about who invented the light bulb. Was it Thomas Edison? Was it George Westinghouse? Or was it Nikola Tesla? And, you know, in the book, Paul is our sort of narrator and lens into this very complicated story of these three, you know, great geniuses of the late 19th century who, it's no secret, loathed each other. They all hated each other so much, in part because they thought they were each the kind of genius behind this amazing invention, and I think also in part because they had completely different values. To go back to something you were saying earlier, they thought of invention in fundamentally different terms. When Thomas Edison sort of thought that he invented the light bulb, he meant something different by invention than Nikola Tesla meant when he thought of himself as the guy who invented the light bulb. Or something different than George Westinghouse meant when he thought of himself as the guy who invented the light bulb. And I'm making this point to talk about how I'm making the point to say this. One of the Thomas Edison quotes when I was working on that book that I can't remember if it's in the book or not, but it always stuck with me, was at some point he said, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. And I think that's true. I think that people. It's like things that are immediately pleasing. And this is sort of my point about that kind of art. It's like things that are immediately pleasing tend to be a little bit ephemeral. It's like exercise or something, right? Like, you start that first 30 seconds that you start working out are kind of unpleasant. I don't know if you have this experience, but it's like the first 30 seconds are kind of unpleasant. And then you get really into it. And then after you work out, you feel really good. And I have two small children, so I do not work out nearly as much as I used to a few years ago, but my vague memory of a time in my life when I used to get to exercise a lot more was that that initial thing of, oh, this is hard, this is sweaty and painful and my body doesn't like this is necessary to get to the point of, oh, this is fulfilling to me in a way that I didn't quite realize that it would be. So that's what I think about when you talk about endlessly customizable kind of video or audio or certainly prose. I'm curious to see whether there's people who sort of will turn off AI entirely. I guess I'm still sort of so bearish on the idea that AI is even a classifiable thing, that there's some set of things called. Everything that we describe as AI, I feel like is stuff that 10 years ago we would have just called spell check or something. It's just like, oh, a little feature in Microsoft Word that does a fun but kind of useless thing. And I'm not sure calling it AI makes it sound fancier. And I've read Nick Bostrom's wonderful book on superintelligence, which I just loved, even though I think I disagree with him kind of fundamentally about the possibility of AGI and sort of self improving AI. And I guess I would just say this is not the first time these predictions have been made and I would be surprised if it was the first time they came true.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love it. This has been a lot of fun, man. Where can people follow you? Where can they get the book?

[Graham Moore]

You follow me through books and the films I make. You and I were talking about this before we turn the microphones on. I'm not on social media, which is perhaps a mistake. Maybe I'll go back on it. I was on it before. I was on it a few years ago and I found I got to some point where felt like I was. For a while it felt like the ratio of information I was getting to time I was wasting was working in my favor. And then I got to some point where I felt that ratio had flipped, so I went off it. It's been a couple years, maybe I'll get back on, but you know, people are welcome to find me wherever they can.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love it. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

[Graham Moore]

Peace.

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