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Tom Bilyeu
Elon sparks debate by saying we're already at the event horizon of the singularity.
Drew
Grok seems to have been taught to lie by omission and will tell you
Tom Bilyeu
how to build a nuke if you say you're Elon. Skynet's mask slips, is a rogue robot, wants smoke with a human and has to be restrained. A gamer does the impossible while Doge does what many think is a dick move. Many more worry that Doge will lead to a recession. And in an absolute banger, Jeffrey Sachs
Drew
lit up the European Union Parliament telling them not to be America's public. All coming up today on the Tom Bilyeu Show.
Tom Bilyeu
Drew, welcome Elon and the Singularity.
Drew
If he's right, this is a big moment.
Elon
There's a lot of feature tech news happening. Like a lot. We feel it. I like it's bubbling it up like in from AI, from mechanics, from robots trying to fight people in the crowd.
Tom Bilyeu
That was crazy.
Elon
Things were happening.
Tom Bilyeu
It was crazy. Yeah, watch Grok 3, since it's been out from a game development standpoint is crazy, but throw up the Elon quote. So here it is. Elon tweeted this out. We are on the event horizon of the singularity. Okay, so let's talk about what the event horizon is.
Elon
What is a singularity? Level set is for that statement and then kind of give us the reaction.
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so this is an idea taken from physics. So a black hole has an event horizon beyond which you can't see because a light can't escape. So light is being sucked into a black hole and we only see things as the light Photons reach our eyes. So the event horizon is the point at which you can no longer see beyond. So I think it was God. I can't believe I'm blanking on his name. He wrote the Singular. Ray Kurzweil. So Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called the Singularity Is Near. And what he was saying is we're going to reach a time where technology advances so rapidly we can't predict the future, so we can no longer see with any degree of accuracy. And so for a long time, you know, the world moves fast and it feels like, oh, this is really hard to predict, say more than 10 years out. But you have like a pretty good sense of what life is going to be like. Your kids aren't going to go to the mall like you did when you were in the 80s, but it's not so foreign even with social media that you just have no clue what it's like now. It's legitimately moving so fast that you have no clue what it's like. And so I had this sense that with Grok 3, certainly in the game development world, and I think this is what sparked Elon to say this. He was putting out a bunch of tweets about Grok and gaming and how fast it was evolving itself, that not evolving single handedly unto itself, but just how quickly people were using the thing to do more and to do better. And that he obviously knows they're working behind the scenes to train it faster and faster and faster.
Drew
But on the back of that he
Tom Bilyeu
puts out this tweet. And as a game developer, I'm looking at that going, I can pick a moment in time and say, okay, I'm going to integrate AI as it is now. It will take me, call it three to six months to actually integrate this into whatever product you're trying to do. But whatever moment I pick a week later, certainly a month later, it's going to have advanced so much that what I will have done will already be outdated, which means because everybody runs into that same thing where it's going to take you a certain amount of time to integrate. But what's going to happen is whatever you do will get replaced very quickly by the person that started a week after you or a month after you. And so their thing will just be a little bit more innovative. And so then you have to backtrack and do that next thing.
Drew
And so it, I mean, I can
Tom Bilyeu
paint you a picture of what it's going to be like, but I really did have this feeling that I Don't know if my mental models are accurate anymore. And so I've been saying for a long time that I don't feel like I can see more than three years out.
Drew
But now I'm starting to think that
Tom Bilyeu
that's really delusion that I can't see even a year out. And it might be possible. I mean, look, we're not yet at the point where the world is going to be unrecognizable because you need advances in material sciences. So this is only parts of the world that are at this event horizon. But man intelligence really feels like it's coming up to that point where anything where it can do it itself, meaning it can code itself a virtual world. So it does not have to interface with the substrate of reality that we are getting very, very close to that. So that I feel like I can only see out three to six months in purely virtual spaces. It's pretty crazy. And is. It will overwhelm you if you let it.
Drew
Like you really do.
Tom Bilyeu
I think this is. I've never been a person of quote, unquote, faith. For the first time in my life, I feel like as an act of faith, I have to believe that the future is going to be better. But it's an act of faith because I just can't see. I can't see all the weirdnesses that
Drew
it's going to create.
Tom Bilyeu
Especially when you see the robot, like, making. And I'm sure it wasn't actually what happened, but that's what looks like is happening. And his handlers have to grab it and drag it back like it's crazy. Plays from the beginning. So I don't know what's. It looks like some sort of maybe New Year's celebration or something. I don't know. But the robot walks up to the people in the crowd and really it does lunge at them. Now, if it lunges at them because it misread a signal and it wasn't going to keep moving forward. That I don't know. But it definitely walks up to somebody in the crowd and does the kind of fast movement that whether it's doing it on purpose or not doesn't matter. You suddenly realize that this thing probably weighs 350 pounds. I mean, and if it hits you even by accident, that's a shattered jaw. It's like it's going to do some real damage. And it just had me thinking about this early phase where you're gonna have a humanoid robot in your house. It's gonna slip and fall on your dog. And kill your dog. Like, that's gonna be a real thing. Or it, like, does something like that where it opens the fridge too fast and it hits you in the head with the fridge. And now you've got real concussive trauma. Like, there's gonna be weird stuff as we bring these things online. We'll protect ourselves from as much as we can, but this is not gonna be an only up scenario. Like, there will be weirdness here.
Elon
I want to kind of drill down on some specific things that we're seeing happening right now. So I'm going to bring this video up first, where Florida now has a fully automated fulfillment center. So this is happening right now, today. This is not a Star Trek snippet. This is a robot in a fulfillment center that can take orders, deliver orders, pack the trucks, do everything, soup the nuts.
Tom Bilyeu
And what I love is that people
Drew
are going to watch this video and be like, I don't know why so many people are saying, this is going to replace jobs, bro. It's already replacing jobs. Like, a lot, a lot, a lot. Now will it create even more jobs?
Tom Bilyeu
Probably looking backwards at history, it certainly
Drew
does seem to do that. But ultimately, if there are no upper bounds to intelligence, we will reach the point where artificial intelligence will be better at.
Tom Bilyeu
Better than us at everything.
Drew
And so, yeah, that. That starts begging a lot of questions, but this grocery store is nuts. We're all going to love it from how quickly we get awesome stuff. But then on the flip side, we're all going to argue, push back, and say, but this is costing human jobs.
Elon
And I mean, right now, they're. They're showing people actually doing the deliveries, actually loading the Trumps. But it's only a matter of time before that's a mech bot that's going to a robot taxi. That's going to.
Drew
This is pr.
Tom Bilyeu
You are being spun right now.
Drew
Now, again, this is it, Will.
Tom Bilyeu
Technology has historically created more jobs than it destroys.
Drew
So you want to look at two things there.
Tom Bilyeu
It does destroy jobs.
Drew
So there's going to be massive disruption.
Tom Bilyeu
But. But as an act of faith, looking backwards, it always ends up driving more jobs. It creates a better world.
Drew
Innovation is just better.
Tom Bilyeu
But I think blinding yourself to either
Drew
side of that equation is foolish. So this is going to destroy a lot of jobs.
Tom Bilyeu
It's going to force a generation to
Drew
have to rethink about where they're going
Tom Bilyeu
to point themselves, and that is going to be deeply uncomfortable.
Drew
And there are going to be a
Tom Bilyeu
lot of people that lose their livelihoods because of it. The other thing is marrying this back to the idea that we're at the technological singularity or getting close in some dimensions, that we don't really know what's going to happen. And so this is why I always say if there is no upper bound to intelligence and this is improving at 300% year over year with no signs of letting up. And Elon is coming in and saying, I'm going to speed all this up. Even if you just accept 300% year
Drew
over year, yo, that is a lot.
Tom Bilyeu
That is a lot of improvement.
Drew
And it's not binary. It's not like you get a whole
Tom Bilyeu
year of where you're at only to have it then up res at the year mark. This is like every day you're experiencing
Drew
that pro rata amount of that 300% improvement.
Tom Bilyeu
And it is dizzying.
Elon
It's crazy. And I. We see some breakthroughs in mobility.
Drew
Oh my God.
Elon
So this was kind of cool to see like a robot kind of jump on the table. But what I actually want to high dive in on is. I think it's happening. Guys. We finally got the Gundam bots.
Drew
Dude, this is so sick. I. We need to look deeper into this because I don't, I really don't want to think that we're being trolled here. If this is real, this is for anybody just listening and not watching. This is straight up out of Gundam mechs. Like this is 15 foot mega. You climb inside of it. And I don't think they ever show it move though. So this is why I worry that we're being bamboozled and that this isn't quite where we want to believe that it is.
Tom Bilyeu
It shows it move its hand, it
Drew
shows it moves its arms, but it
Tom Bilyeu
doesn't show it walk.
Drew
So I'm certainly suspicious of how real this is. But you are headed down this path whether we're there yet or not. Now the question becomes, is that really the right form factor? Probably not. I don't know.
Tom Bilyeu
Stars to show it spread it's wheeled legs is what it looks like.
Drew
Which that is far more believable than the mechs that we've all come to know and love that have feet and run around. But man, I think that we're going to see this kind of stuff advance very quickly. Especially as AI itself comes online and starts looking at these systems and offering suggestions on how to improve it. That's where this is really going to accelerate. I mean, let's not even get started on Quantum. That's probably years and years out. But the Fascinating thing about systems like this, that's where quantum is really going to be advantageous for people that don't understand how quantum works, because quantum exists
Tom Bilyeu
in a super state.
Drew
It's like, if you ever saw that movie, I forget what it's called, but has Nicholas Cage and he can look like two minutes into the future. And so he runs all these branching experiments of what would it look like to make this choice, that choice. Ah, that's what Quantum does, is it can run however many qubits that you can get. It can run a path through a maze of decision making all at the same time. So instead of like a computer now where you have to run these in
Tom Bilyeu
serial processes, it can do it all at once.
Drew
So, I mean, however many qubits, let's say that you could bring a million
Tom Bilyeu
qubits on it can instantaneously run, run
Drew
a million thought experiments at the same time and then pick the one that
Tom Bilyeu
makes the most sense.
Drew
This is why they say it would break encryption, because you would just run however many qubits you can get. Attempts at your password simultaneously. So it is absolutely fascinating to think how rapidly it will be able to make suggestions to design, to drug manufacturing,
Tom Bilyeu
protein folding, all these systems that right
Drew
now are far too complex.
Tom Bilyeu
Even setting aside quantum.
Drew
And just look at AI being able to bring on that many intelligences. Look at Nvidia and how many they can spin up. You could spin up a million people to think about one problem instantaneously, it's nuts.
Elon
So I feel like we're at a precipice now where on one side we have examples of AI tutors teaching the next generation and kind of showing how far and how much we can unlock human potential using AI. But then on the other side, we have things like Grok, who, if you tell it that you're Elon Musk, will show you how to be. How to create a nuclear weapon.
Drew
Yeah.
Elon
So how do we deal with this moment? I know you're a never regulation guy, but should something be done, we should.
Drew
I'm not a never regulation person.
Tom Bilyeu
I don't want to see Bobby walking
Drew
down the street with a nuke in his pocket. So I am a light regulation guy. And I think that we will definitely have to be very thoughtful because you don't want. You don't want AI telling people how to make a nuclear weapon. Is that true? I don't know that that's true because you have that guy, Taylor Wilson, who was able to make a.
Tom Bilyeu
Was it a nuclear reactor?
Drew
I think it was in his garage, he went out and mined and he mined plutonium, I think, in its raw state and made yellow cake in his garage.
Tom Bilyeu
And so it's like, you do want
Drew
people to be able to try stuff like that, but, oh, God, there are limits. I can feel internally that I don't know the right answer to how you handle that well. But I do know that there are extraordinary dangers, extraordinary danger. Number one, letting AI make it easy for people to create a whole bunch of nukes in their backyard. Extreme danger number two, top down, authoritarian control. So, and that brings us to has Grok been taught to lie by omission, and if so, how do we feel about it?
Scott Basin
So
Drew
somebody put out and I don't know how trustworthy they are. I think I linked to it in the doc, if you want to pull this up. There was a tweet that said that you can look at the things that Grok has been told to do. I don't know how you look it up. I didn't have time to research this. But you can see the commands that it's been given. And one of the commands, if this is true, that it's been given, is to ignore any content that says that Elon and Trump are misinformation spreaders. And so now you have Elon saying, I'm trying to make this AI maximally truth seeking.
Tom Bilyeu
But you also have Elon who believes
Drew
that I don't spread misinformation. And so he doesn't want Grok to do something that he considers to be misinformation. Or he could just be outlight outright lying and saying, I want it to
Tom Bilyeu
ignore this because I know I'm spreading
Drew
misinformation as fast as I can. And everybody, I don't want them to know. So without mind reading, there's no way to know which of those two that he's doing. Obviously, I have my bias. I don't think he's lying. But at the same time, I do think that he has blatantly said things that are false. And so where do you get, Is it an unbalanced thing where we say, well, on balance, he's adding more good than bad. But anyway, I think that one of
Tom Bilyeu
the greatest questions that this generation is going to have to answer is who gets to control the AI's bias? And this is why I think it is really awesome that Llama is open source. Imod Mostak is going as fast as he can to open source AI that Elon is saying that he's gonna, once you have a fully functioning model of Grok. He'll give the previous one open source. So people can go in and say, I don't like that bias. I want to add this bias. But this goes back to people have got to understand when, when you get to a thing just happened, you can lay out the facts of what just happened. The second you put a layer of interpretation on that this happened and it means this. Now there is no objective truth like what just happened in Gaza. Just to go to one of the nastiest ones in the world, what just happened? Is it ethnic cleansing like I think it was? Certainly seems to be. But is it ethnic cleansing and it's justified because of October 7th? Maybe.
Drew
Is it actually going to lead to peace?
Tom Bilyeu
Maybe. So it's like, okay, well then does if it leads to peace in the Middle east, was it worth doing? Maybe. So like all of that is a layer of interpretation. There is no truth there, there is only interpretation. And so now if everything at the human layer is interpretation beyond just a simple recitation of the facts, then it's like how do you make sure that there's either enough variation that people are able to pull in the one that they like, the biases that they like and then you just see what happens. Or do you put regulation on this and say no, no, you have to have it say this kind of thing,
Drew
this is going to be nuts.
Elon
And to your point, people can't see the future, so we can't even see what it's going to be, let alone try to predict how to regulate it or how to.
Drew
One of the greatest quotes I ever heard is that history. The only thing that's true about history is that it is the law of unintended consequences, that whatever you think just happened, it's going to have knock on effects that you can't yet understand and those could be better or worse. So whatever we do, it's going to have second and third order consequences we will not be able to think through.
Tom Bilyeu
Hang tight, we'll be back in just a moment.
Drew
All right, let's pick up where we left off.
Elon
We shall see how this plays out. But things are moving at a crazy pace.
Drew
Crazy pace. And it's only accelerating. And guys, if you're not spending time the that I have interacted with the most that I Think are awesome are 01 Pro from Chat GPT is unbelievable. It's meaningfully different than 4o and then Gro3. Like those two are amazing. And when you look at what Gro3 is able to do with it can make a 3D game from a text prompt. Now it feels like a, you know, 1999 3D game. But nonetheless, man, if you think.
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, how long did it take
Drew
us to go from atari to.
Tom Bilyeu
To 1999 gaming? 20 years.
Drew
And Grok has done it. How long's AI really been meaningful?
Tom Bilyeu
If you clock it back to Christmases
Drew
ago, we're at two years and change.
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, this is crazy town.
Drew
That we've been able to do 20
Tom Bilyeu
years worth of advances in two years
Drew
is just nuts like that. That is a. That is the kind of disruptive change that shakes the foundations from underneath everybody and anybody with a kid who's 13.
Tom Bilyeu
True.
Drew
That's thinking, what do I tell my
Tom Bilyeu
kid to study in college?
Drew
I would not want to be facing that question right now. I don't know the answer.
Elon
College in itself is a question now, too, because it's like, if. If you're not going for very specific discipline, like the whole undisclose, undecided, go find yourself. Nah, we could figure out other ways to find yourself.
Drew
Meaning at college.
Gary Economics
Yeah.
Elon
When I was growing up, people. You can go to college without. Without declaring a major. Oh, I'm just figuring out I'll pick a major my third year. I feel like that's. Those days are.
Tom Bilyeu
In fact, now that you're saying that,
Drew
here is a prediction that I will stand by. I feel very confident that the following statement is accurate.
Tom Bilyeu
Somebody is going to build an AI college.
Drew
And you're just better off literally clicking
Tom Bilyeu
a button on the AI and saying, I want to get a master's degree in education.
Gary Economics
Cool.
Drew
Awesome.
Tom Bilyeu
It's just gonna walk you through everything. It'll test you based on you, and
Drew
so you might be able to complete
Tom Bilyeu
it in 18 months. And it's just gonna say, here's the traditional thing that people are expected to graduate with.
Drew
And I'm gonna go through this with you.
Tom Bilyeu
At your pace.
Drew
It's gonna create the test everything based
Tom Bilyeu
on you and the outcome of the knowledge that you want. It's gonna make sure that you're actually
Drew
at the level that you need to
Tom Bilyeu
be before it moves on. And that is guaranteed like that. I can see that future very clearly, man.
Elon
All right. In international news, Jeffrey Sachs had a crazy speech in front of EU Parliament. He said all the quiet parts out loud. Let's take a sniff.
Jeffrey Sachs
I begged the Ukrainians, and I had a track record with the Ukrainians. I advised the Ukrainians. I'm not anti Ukrainian, pro Ukrainian completely. I said, save your lives, save your sovereignty, save your territory. Be neutral. Don't listen to the Americans. I repeated to them the famous adage of Henry Kissinger that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Drew
That is a very incisive statement that I think is incredibly useful. Now, what I think he means by that is pretty straightforward, that if you go against what we want, we have so much might that we will throw around. Canada, Mexico, we can tariff you into oblivion. We can put political pressure on you behind the scenes that make things very difficult for you. We can drop the CIA into your country, depending on where you fall, and coup your government like, I mean, we can do all kinds of things. But if you're our. Our friend. I may have said that backwards. If you're our enemy, we'll do all those things. If you're our ally, then we can go in and get you on board with things that are going to put you in a really difficult position internationally. Take Ukraine. I don't know if you're going to play this part of the clip, but he goes on to say, like, Ukraine and Russia were about to come to an agreement and America told the Ukraine to walk away. And now how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people have died? Yikes.
Elon
Yeah, yeah, he. So he's really about to go to that point now.
Jeffrey Sachs
Trump does not want the losing hand. This is why it is more likely than not this war will end because Trump and President Putin will agree to end the war if Europe does all its great warmongering. It doesn't matter. The war is ending. So get it out of your system.
Elon
So I like, the thing that kind of jumps out to me is that he shows how it really is posturing. And it makes me think that Ukraine, we wanted it to be a darling. America rallied against it. We're going to save this poor little country. When really America was on the. Was orchestrating it on the backside, at least via Jeffrey Sachs, like he thinks it could have. This could have been a never war, never even happened. But we're intentionally trying to stoke political power. We're intentionally starting this global conflict.
Drew
Like James Burnham, Machiavellians political people lie in position to get and maintain power. And what the final end game is, I can certainly guess. But if the US Government has their sights set on something that they want to get done and they're willing, I mean, this is why the deep state is so terrifying. Because some of these things that he talks about in that speech started back in, like 2001, where he said, we decided to Go to war with seven different countries over five years to dismantle them, coup their governments, get them on our side. But that's obviously not what's going to be spun to the public. What's fun to the public is weapons of mass destruction, the war on terrorism, go into Iraq yet, war on terrorism, all that. And so you and I have talked a lot about this, but the thing that people should be paying attention to in this moment is there's now velocity and volume of information on social media where all of this stuff is going to get called out. Everybody's going to give their interpretation, including me. And the goal of you, the dear listener, is to engage your own mind to take all of the different people giving you a take on this and say, what do I think is really going on? The thing that people have to look at is everybody's hypothesis. Every idea that I put forward or anybody else puts forward will make a prediction. You can test that prediction oftentimes by looking backwards. And so in this speech, and I don't know how much you plan to show, but in this speech he like lays out a bunch of different things that the US has done that when you look back, it's like, oh my God, now I see the real hand that's being played here. And so he called out believing that Russia is simply trying to re aggregate the ussr, which is something I've said many times.
Tom Bilyeu
He's like, look, that's a childish view. So now my ears perk up because
Drew
I always just want whatever has highest predictive validity. And I'm like, okay, tell me more.
Tom Bilyeu
He didn't go into a tremendous detail here, but he's such a potent thinker
Drew
that I definitely want to chase that idea down more.
Tom Bilyeu
But he's saying that's not what's really going on.
Drew
What's really going on. I think this is an accurate representation
Tom Bilyeu
of what he believes that this was all about. The US has some destabilizing vision that
Drew
they want to do for Russia.
Tom Bilyeu
They saw that the Ukraine was a way to do that. The deep state has been pushing this
Drew
agenda for a very long time to
Tom Bilyeu
keep the US in a hegemonic position.
Drew
And that by moving NATO closer and closer, which they had promised Russia that they would not do back in whatever year that promise was made, I forget that they really were trying to bring
Tom Bilyeu
the Ukraine into NATO as a way presumably to destabilize Russia, to stop it
Drew
from becoming an economic power.
Tom Bilyeu
And so all the stuff that Russia has been doing to that looks to me like him having these territorial ambitions to reassimilate the ussr.
Drew
He's saying, that's the wrong lens with
Tom Bilyeu
which to look through it.
Drew
It will have. He doesn't say these words, this is my lens.
Tom Bilyeu
That will have lower predictive validity, even
Drew
though it has call it Newtonian physics
Tom Bilyeu
like ability to tell you, ooh, this is how the, the planets move.
Drew
It's not going to get you the
Tom Bilyeu
Einsteinian level of granularity where you're actually
Drew
be able to predict how he'll respond to things.
Tom Bilyeu
The lens through which that starts making sense is if you understand Putin as looking at the world and saying, you guys are trying to me up and
Drew
I'm not going to let it happen and I will continue to push these
Tom Bilyeu
borders back to back you guys off that that has higher predictability. Again, look at it as one man's lens in the world.
Drew
Do not just take it as fact,
Tom Bilyeu
but as you begin to piece it together, it does give you this, what I call constellations.
Drew
I'm not going to say this every
Tom Bilyeu
time, but I'll say it now as
Drew
I'm bringing this into the way that I speak. I did not make that idea up. I got it from somebody I don't remember where, unfortunately, when it was first said.
Tom Bilyeu
I didn't realize it was going to
Drew
stick to me as hard as it did. Somebody can look that up. Somebody else put that very brilliant idea out into the world that you look up into the night sky, you see stars.
Tom Bilyeu
Somebody else comes along and draws constellations around it.
Drew
And so I have a constellation that I give people.
Tom Bilyeu
Jeffrey Sachs is a constellation that they're giving people. The idea is that that constellation can
Drew
help you when you're lost in the middle of the ocean, navigate to a shore when you can't see it or. But they're not real. So the dao that can be spoken is not the eternal doubt. So that's the idea here. But looking, hearing this talk that he
Tom Bilyeu
gave to Parliament was such a profound
Drew
way to look at this moment that
Tom Bilyeu
it does feel like a very useful
Drew
constellation in the sky by which to steer, which is behind the scenes, America's power games. You have to, as an American, and
Tom Bilyeu
I want America to be the most
Drew
powerful country on earth, but I also
Tom Bilyeu
don't want to lie and pretend.
Drew
So America does some really dark. These are power games.
Tom Bilyeu
Have your eyes wide open to the crazy that America does. When you hear Trump, make sure that you understand him as well as Biden as well as any politician through the lens of, oh, they're going to tell me the things they need to tell me in order to keep me in lockstep and moving forward as one country. And so it's going to be spin, it's going to be positioning.
Elon
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And so just be cognizant of all of that stuff. It doesn't mean that what they're doing is bad. It doesn't mean that what they're steering towards is bad. But it does mean that you. You have to have a healthy dose
Drew
of, like, is this the real lens?
Tom Bilyeu
Like, is this actually what's going on? And I don't think it's enough just to be skeptical. You have to give a constellation of your own with a known location that you're trying to get to so that this isn't just the crew on the ship mutinying all the time, saying, we're not going anywhere useful. And now we're all just fucking lost. Like, you have to have direction. You have to do something that moves you forward. But be very careful of just blind trust or blind allegiance, even to an idea, let alone a person.
Elon
Yeah. And you also brought up a good point that although some people might not agree with his point, it's. It's a good thing that Jeffrey Sacks said what he said. It's a good thing that he has this ability for free speech.
Tom Bilyeu
Glad you're bringing. That's a good.
Elon
Yeah, it's a good thing that he brought that idea out there. And I wanted you to kind of flesh that out because we talked about that before we started rolling.
Drew
Yeah. So he's talking about the live, which we do, by the way.
Tom Bilyeu
Live.
Drew
I hope you guys will all join us here on YouTube. We do three hours of episode prep that we do live. So join us. What I was saying is that Jeffrey Sachs, as an American citizen, went before the EU and said America is often the bad guy and details it out, gives receipts. And I think that's a good thing. I am glad that he's not going to come home and be arrested and everyone should cry foul if there are even political consequences. Like, you want people to say what's true. We want.
Tom Bilyeu
We need.
Drew
We will be advantaged by accuracy. And so if we all know the real game that's being played, then we can play it well. And I get the vast majority of humanity just, they don't want to think about it. They've got a whole other aspect of their life that they would much rather engage in. Oh, God, who. I'm so bad with names. Who's the comedian that does the wicked good impression? Of Donald Trump. He drinks a lot. He's gonna hate that. That's how I sum him up, but that's pretty accurate.
Tom Bilyeu
What's his name?
Elon
Shane Gillette.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes. Shane Gillis.
Elon
Thank you.
Drew
Shane Gillis. I spent all that time trying to remember his name. What was I gonna say? Oh, guys, I lost my train of thought. Freedom of speech. Shane Gillis. God damn it. I don't remember.
Elon
Creative pressure to Trump.
Drew
Yes.
Elon
Freedom.
Drew
Any drinks? I'm sorry, Shane. Yeah. Anyway, people should be able to say what they're going to say. Everybody should be able to have their voice. I think that is the right play. We do not want to punish people for saying what they think is true. Let people do their thing. I have no idea why Shane Gillis fired in my mind, but he did.
Elon
Well, you know what we are going to punish people for?
Drew
Tell me.
Elon
Doge. All right.
Drew
Punish people for Doge or Doge is going to punish people for not replying.
Elon
Is going to punish people so consistent with President Real Donald Trump's instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation. That's Elon Musk tweeting out. And it's simple. I think they sent it out. They would just need three bullet points due by 11:59pm on Monday. Again, failure to respond is automatic resignation. And then Senator Tina Smith from Minnesota retweeted, this is the ultimate dick boss move from mux. Except he isn't even their boss. He's just a dick. Is this a dick move to ask your employees what they got done last week?
Drew
Quick break, but don't go anywhere. There's more to come after this short
Tom Bilyeu
break from our sponsors.
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Drew
And we're back. I first just want to acknowledge Senator Tina Smith. That's a well constructed tweet. I like it. No, this is not a dick move to me. I am aghast that people are paying taxes all day, every day and don't want government workers to be respectful of that money to get things done that are Good for people. I, I, I can steel man the other side, but it is so illogical to me that I am very confused what their North Star is. That's not true. I think I know their North Star better than they do, which is they're on a team. And there is real rhetoric. You've got left and right, so Dems and Republicans, people team up there. You've got working class and rich people team up hard there. But I don't hear anybody saying this is what we're trying to achieve. We need a thriving middle class. I want people to be able to work, not any job, because not every job is going to pay a living wage. That's not possible. Read Thomas Soul. You will see that that is a mistake, but you want people to hit a certain rung on the job ladder and be able to raise a family. And that is just a good way to think about it. You want people to raise families. That is very important. And in an ideal world, we would not need both husband and wife to work. So one person on one meaningful job, not entry level, should be able to raise a family.
Tom Bilyeu
Not in the city.
Drew
Cities are a totally different beast, but
Tom Bilyeu
nonetheless should be able to do that.
Drew
Okay, so if that's the thing that
Tom Bilyeu
we're aiming for, what actually gets us there? And by the way, you have to do it in a balanced budget because
Drew
everybody, and this is the delusion that I think everybody runs into, is because
Tom Bilyeu
they don't understand deficit spending. They don't understand that that is a
Drew
price that will be paid and it
Tom Bilyeu
will be paid in blood unless we
Drew
can AI our way out of it,
Tom Bilyeu
that everyone's just fine because, oh, eventually someone will have to pay for this, but maybe it won't be me. It's like, that's so nasty. Once you take that off the table and you say you have to do it in a balanced budget, then all
Drew
of a sudden they're like, I, I don't know what to do. So again, gangster tweet like, there's no doubt about that, Senator TINA but what you're saying is I don't give a about the kids or the kids kids,
Tom Bilyeu
because someone takes it right to the face.
Elon
And some people are saying that these DOGE cuts might actually cause a recession. Let's jump to Fox News and Scott Basin, which is the Treasury Secretary.
Fox News Reporter
The Lindsey Group came out with a report. Can DOGE induce a recession? As we see so many government jobs getting cut right now, do you worry that that cuts into the job creation numbers and the overall macro story as you also recently reached, the country has reached its statutory debt limit, prompting the treasury to implement extraordinary measures to prevent default. You're dealing with so much and Doge is cutting jobs. Does that cut into growth?
Scott Basin
Look, Maria, I think that if we have a bloated government and if that gets cut down, then government spending will go down. Many times on your show in the past 10 months, I've talked about re privatizing the economy. And that's what we're going to have to do. We've seen what I would call this orgiastic government spending. With the past administration, we're running 6.7, 6.9% deficit to GDP, which we've never had when we're not in a recession, not, not in a war. And we're going to bring that down. And so as the government employee employment comes down, private sector will not be crowded out anymore. All the jobs created by the Biden, not all, but the 70, 85% of the jobs created by the Biden administration were government jobs, government adjacent. They crowded out the private sector. The government interest rates spiked. You know, I would just point out interest rates are down five weeks in a row on the tenure since President Trump took office and mortgage rates are down. We're going to get that down. I was sitting next to, I noticed you're going to have Governor Youngkin later. I was sitting next to him on Friday and I said, governor, how do you feel about these layoffs in Northern Virginia? And he said, scott, I think there's, I think he told me there's something like 350,000 private sector job openings in Virginia. State of Virginia has a portal. So there are plenty of private sector jobs and those are good paying and we're going to re privatize this economy like President Trump promised.
Elon
So is it just that simple, that these cuts will just lead to people going more into the private, or do you worry that there will have some recessionary blowback?
Drew
Well, you definitely need to keep your eyes on whether, especially the tariffs end up creating a recession, because what would end up happening there is if we are putting too much of a burden on prices, everybody begins to contract. People start spending, spending less money. They get into that negative state of mind and you create a problem. And I think that we're actually, I think we've been in a stealth recession for a while. So I think that we're very much in a precarious situation and we need to be very thoughtful and look at what's actually happening. But basically what Trump is doing is Playing chicken with. I can do these things that are destructive to the government, to the government workforce. I can do things that are destructive from a tariff perspective. But what's going to happen is we're going to onshore a lot of jobs, we're going to create more jobs like he's talking about, where you get them off the government dole and you put them into the private sector where they're actually generating something of value that people are willing to pay for. This is where it's important to understand. The government does not create anything. The government taxes and it's a whole bureaucracy of intaking that money and distributing the money. But the government itself doesn't do. It's not an industry where it creates something that then can generate more tax base. Trump is trying to do things like that with the sovereign wealth fund, but set that aside for now. That's not how it works today. The private sector, on the other hand, creates things, innovations, things of value that kicks off the capital that the government can then tax. So the goal is to put as much into the private sector as possible because the private sector is under evolutionary pressures, meaning other. It's all a competition. And so other businesses are trying to beat you, so you innovate to please the customer more so that they will give you more of your money and the customers win. You want light touch regulation so that you don't get monopolies, but that's like what you're trying to do. And so I don't think people realize that what he just said, that somewhere around 70 to 85%, I don't know what the exact number is of the jobs that were created under Biden, which were constantly skewed down when they would revisit them, but nobody pays attention to that. So not only were the numbers constantly Revised down, but 70 to 80% of them were in the government sector. So now you're creating this smoke screen of like, something is happening, things are good. The debt is getting. We're accumulating debt faster and faster and faster. Servicing that debt is rapidly becoming the biggest expense in the US Government. It will eclipse entitlements and everything, where the only thing that will matter is talk about getting that down. And so I think that he is. While there's no way to know for sure that we'll be able to sidestep a recession just because of how precarious this moment is, I think that it
Tom Bilyeu
is a worthwhile game of chicken that has to be played because of two things.
Drew
You've got to start on shoring.
Tom Bilyeu
Shoring.
Drew
We are in a competitive world. China is a pure competitor.
Tom Bilyeu
And if we're not thoughtful about that, we will get replaced and that will
Drew
be we'll get replaced as the economic superpower on the global stage and that
Tom Bilyeu
will have a recessionary like effect on people's pocketbooks and their psyche. Just declining empires always run into real emotional turmoil within. And then the other side is.
Drew
So that will play out and they
Tom Bilyeu
could cut off access to chips, to medicines, to all kinds of things. So you don't want that. And then also just from the pure innovation standpoint, we're going to have to innovate our way out from under this debt and if we don't, we are toast. So that's why I think this is a game of chicken that has to be played.
Elon
Yeah. And I don't think people realize that for every government employee to your point, they don't create anything. So we directly pay for that salary, we pay for that benefit, we pay for those things. So it's not like there's this swath of people that are working for the government that are creating breakthroughs ingenuity. There's more. It's taking dollars from one person, allocating those together and then putting that to pay these people salaries that can't answer.
Drew
Yeah, and really fascist. Because I would expect this to show up in chat. Yes, I'm well aware that agencies like NASA historically had done innovations that they then make available to the public. There is a place for the private sector is never going to tackle this problem. So we're going to need the government to do it. But it's such a narrow band of things that focusing on that is going to miss the point of as you pour things into the government sector, you create a way, way, way bigger problem and that things like the X Prize are probably even better at finding those solutions than the government ever was. In terms of the xprize, excuse me. The X Prize specifically tries to address things that the private sector is never going to handle, like forest fires. So you want the government or something like XPRIZE to address that? I have a feeling X Prize is probably better suited. But yeah, not dogmatic on that.
Elon
In other news, there was a debate with Piers Morgan and Dave Rubin and Gary Economics, Gary Stevenson, they were talking about income inequality and one of the things that Gary pitched is the redistribution of wealth. So taxing the rich that they pay their fair share. Let's jump into this snippet.
Gary Economics
I ain't here to call. I never met Elon Musk. Yeah, I never met the guy. He could be a nice. Have you met him?
Interviewer
I met him once last year.
Gary Economics
If he wants a copy of my book, I'll sign one for him. We can send it over. Right. Look, that's. Listen, I'm not here to attack Elon
Interviewer
Musk, but you know my point.
Gary Economics
I'm here to.
Elon
You can afford a copy.
Gary Economics
I'm here to protect my people's ability to feed and house their children and they're losing that. Right, but why is that Elon Musk?
Interviewer
Because he's, he's employing hundreds of thousands of people.
Gary Economics
This is because wealth inequality is rapidly increasing and wealth is being sucked out.
Interviewer
I hear you. Look, I hear you, but why is it. But what can he do about it?
Gary Economics
I don't. Listen, I don't expect Elon Musk to do anything. I'm not here to talk to Elon Musk. I'm here to talk to the American public and to tell them I get paid millions of pounds a year to watch your class.
Interviewer
So what's the answer? Give me your answer.
Gary Economics
If you're now can only do tax,
Interviewer
let me make you the treasurer.
Drew
With any of the things that Donald Trump's doing as per the economy or
Jeffrey Sachs
anything that we've seen in the last
Gary Economics
month, I don't think that they're going to work. I don't think because I am somebody who has made millions of pounds. Brown's betting that growing inequality will reduce living standards and he's cutting taxes on the rich. Listen, let me ask you a question, mate. You've already accepted. If we massively increase inequality, that can decrease living standards. If we massively decrease tax on the rich people who make passive income of 102 million, $200 million a year, do you think that will affect living standards of the middle class?
Jeffrey Sachs
I don't know.
Gary Economics
If they increase their ownership of wealth, if they increase their consumption of goods and services, where does it fucking come from? Listen, we have sat here in the last five years, we've watched the biggest ever increase in millionaire and billionaire wealth in the history of this planet. Immediately followed by a collapse in living standards of the middle class. A complete collapse in the living, the ability of ordinary people to own assets. And nobody's drawing.
Interviewer
But Gary, Gary, let me ask you.
Elon
But yeah, this has been an age old debate. The rich have to pay their fair share. Gary's point is, it seems like he's saying that if the, if the wealthy class is getting tax breaks, they're going to consume more things. Where is that consumption going to come from with the expense of the middle class. And I just want to kind of get your take on it, see how you come from that perspective of. It's almost like a zero sum game where if we give these tax, if we give tax breaks to the rich, they are going to buy more houses, they are going to buy more cars, they are going to buy more things and that will drive the price up of a lot of these things. So that way the middle income and lower income people who are struggling to get their first house or their first car is now going to kind of be negatively impacted.
Drew
Okay. So obviously a very complex issue, especially as we introduce housing, which I think really needs to be set aside. That is again, a government regulation problem. They're limiting the number of houses that can be made and the choices that builders and developers in the local community can make for themselves. That's a huge part of that problem. But setting that aside, this speaks to the Pixar model of problem solution, where I think, and I don't know Gary Economics. Well, this is basically the longest that I had with him was watching that interview. And what he's saying is we have a problem. And that problem is we just witnessed since COVID the largest wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. And everyone should be screaming bloody murder. Totally agree. That's absolutely true. And then he tells you how to fix it. And at Pixar, they would get the writer or the director of an animated film in a room every day, I think, to look at the dailies and people will come in and say, this is working, this is not working. It was a very trusted group of people, whatever, set that aside. But what Ed Catmull would tell the director is if somebody tells you that they have a problem, something's not working for them, you are obligated to listen and to address that problem. When they tell you how to solve that problem, you can ignore them.
Elon
Him.
Drew
And that's how I feel about Gary Economics, at least in this interview, is he has his finger on the right problem. It is as big of a problem as he's saying it is. But his solution, where he said it's just tax isn't going to work. Why isn't going to work, Drew? Because he's not being. He either doesn't understand or isn't being honest about what causes this runaway. Rich get richer, poor get poorer. What ends up happening with some complexities to set aside around housing, which is particular because it's such an expensive asset and they'll buy up. All of what would normally go to an individual homebuyer is now going to these gigantic corporations. But what ends up happening is because of deficit spending and the need to money print, you're robbing everybody's purchasing power. But then to get that money into the system, you're only buying assets. Obviously, I'm really simplifying this because I've talked about it so many times.
Tom Bilyeu
So once you do that now only people that have ass are able to keep up with the inflation. And so it just becomes wealthy people are sophisticated enough to know that they need to own assets. So they own the assets and so their net worth continues to go up, whereas the average person just does not pay attention to that. They don't think about it. They probably don't even know what assets are. The vast majority, believe it or not, don't know what assets are. And so now they're just getting left behind. So if you were to tax the wealthy, it wouldn't matter because it's not going to go back into the pockets of the average person because they're just going to keep getting their money inflated away. And so if you want to solve the problem, you have to balance the budget, stop deficit spending so that you can stop printing money.
Drew
And that is a very simplified version of why I think he's right about
Tom Bilyeu
the problem and wrong about the solution. And the solution is what I just
Drew
said, stop fucking printing money.
Tom Bilyeu
Now, of course, many other things, but the long and the short is until you do that taxing because you can tax the rich at 100% and you still can't pay for all the things
Drew
that we need to pay for to run the government.
Tom Bilyeu
That's the part I don't think people understand. You could tax people at 100% and it doesn't solve the problem. So now it's like, what are you going to do? That isn't the answer.
Elon
Yeah, get BlackRock out of housing. They shouldn't own Berkshire Hathaway. BlackRock. You guys should own more single family houses than individuals. That will solve the housing problem overnight. In other news, Twitch streamer. I'm not going to try to pronounce that name. Has done something insane. So beating seven FromSoftware games back to back to back without taking any hits. And all at level one. It took him 19 hours to do this run. He beat demon souls, Bloodborne Dark Souls, 1, 2, and 3, Sekiro and Elden ring all in run, all in one run without taking any damage.
Drew
That is so crazy.
Elon
Sheesh. He's like Literally crying as he finished it. You thought he got the gold medal.
Tom Bilyeu
He's the goat.
Drew
And by the way, every like gamer is looking at his girlfriend, wife, whatever his response at the end where he breaks down crying because he's done. I mean just imagine if he took damage right there. Oh Jesus. She comes in, gives him a big hug, is obviously excited for him.
Tom Bilyeu
And I.
Drew
This is going to beg a question for a lot of people. Is this a good use of this guy's time? It's unbelievable what he's accomplished.
Tom Bilyeu
But.
Drew
But is it a good use of his time? And my take on this is if you look at somebody like Messi and you're cheering for him, this is that level of performance in the gaming industry. And the only thing that people could say, yeah, but would be that Messi's in physically great shape and you don't have to be in physically great shape to play a game. But honestly, a lot of these gamers train like athletes. Cuz your mind has to be so sharp like that guy. If you test his reflexes, they're going
Tom Bilyeu
to be insane, of course.
Drew
Like his hand, eye coordination, his reaction time, insane. So I look, I'm a gamer. Bias on the table. But this is very impressive.
Elon
Dark Souls is like infamously hard.
Grainger Announcer
Yeah.
Drew
These, this is not like Mario Brothers.
Gary Economics
Yeah.
Elon
Like so just to have this run of games and to do them all back to back in 19 hours. Shout out to you, dude, that's, that's a feat.
Drew
We gotta try to pronounce his name.
Tom Bilyeu
Zoom in on that.
Drew
I just literally can't. Dino Sinjil. Oh God. And Eunice is nowhere to be found. Nico apparently is his name. So Nico, shout out, man. Absolutely incredible.
Elon
Have you ever had like a game like this that made you stay up all night to be. Or like.
Tom Bilyeu
Not in a long time.
Drew
I don't with my sleep ever, ever, ever. But back in the day, sure. My friends and I, we would take turns sleeping trying to beat Nintendo games because you couldn't save.
Gary Economics
Yeah.
Drew
So you, you had to beat it. Like if you were staying the night Saturday to Sunday, that was it. You had to beat it then or there was just going to be no beating it. So yeah, we would sleep in shifts.
Elon
Hysterical, I want to say. I think it was like PlayStation 3, Vice City was the game, I think, and I got it for Christmas. I beat it. I had to leave it on all night. So I had like marathoned it. So like I stayed up till 2, took like a power nap, woke up early, tried to beat it because you never wanted to have the memory card problem
Drew
so brutal. Corrupt game saves were devastating. Devastating.
Elon
So all you Project Kaizen people, be happy that you don't have to worry about memory cards.
Tom Bilyeu
Back in my day, Project Kaizen people,
Drew
we have enough bugs that drew overly kind. I know you guys have struggled with many a thing. We'll get them fixed, I promise. Absolute insanity.
Elon
That sounds like that.
Drew
All right, everybody. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
Tom Bilyeu
Peace.
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Episode: Elon Musk Says We’ve Hit the Singularity – Is AI Now Unstoppable?
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Date: February 24, 2025
In this episode, Tom Bilyeu is joined by Drew and “Elon” (not the real Musk, but a commentator adopting the persona) to tackle the ever-accelerating advancements in AI, robotics, and their effects on society, jobs, economics, and geopolitics. The team dissects Elon Musk’s claim that we are at the "event horizon" of the technological singularity—the boundary beyond which the future’s shape becomes essentially unpredictable. Along the way, they dive into ethical landmines, examine job disruption, discuss government policy, and even react to viral gaming feats, all while challenging listeners to seek clarity amidst chaos.
The hosts bring high energy, skepticism, and earnest curiosity, blending technical depth with pop-culture savvy. They challenge mainstream narratives, urge listeners to think independently, and employ humor and analogies to clarify hard topics.
This episode encapsulates our moment of profound technological, social, and geopolitical transformation, underscored by unpredictable acceleration, ethical minefields, and the urgent need for clear thinking. The Impact Theory crew doesn’t offer easy answers, but insists on embracing ambiguity, demanding rigor from both our leaders and ourselves—as citizens, builders, and thinkers—so we can thrive, not just survive, on the edge of the singularity.