Know Thyself - E214 - Tom Bilyeu: Humanity Is Splitting into 4 Futures… Choose Wisely

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

My guest today is Tom Bilyeu, the entrepreneur behind Quest Nutrition who went on to build Impact Theory into one of the most watched long form interview channels in the world. Tom is now building a procedurally generated video game called Kyzen, and in recent years his content has shifted away from personal development and toward economics, artificial intelligence, and the systems that quietly shape how we live. I wanted to sit with him inside that shift, to understand what pulled him away from the mindset conversation he had mastered and toward questions about money, power, and the trajectory of intelligence itself.What We Dive Into:1. Tom credits his success to a simple loop: predict an outcome, run the experiment, and stay honest about what actually happened. He treats being wrong as useful data rather than a threat to his identity, which lets him adjust quickly instead of defending a position that clearly isn't working anymore.2. Tom argues that meaning isn't discovered but handed to us by evolution as an empty box we get to fill. For him that box holds his wife and his work, and he believes people struggle most when whatever filled the box, a job, a role, a relationship, disappears and nothing takes its place.3. Tom's core financial message is that not owning assets quietly erodes your purchasing power through inflation, whether you notice it or not. He believes the escape route is available to almost anyone, but most people never take the step of investing consistently over decades instead of waiting for certainty.Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfTry LMNT & get a free sample pack IM8: Explore the exclusive offerhttps://www.im8health.com/knowthyself___________00:00 Intro01:50 The Evolution of the Show05:02 Between What Was and What's Next08:53 The Spark of Divinity and What Tom Is Building13:52 Nature, Nurture, and Leverage15:49 The Physics of Progress19:35 Facing Ego and Inadequacy24:08 Feeling Most Alive25:58 A New Virtual World27:36 The Coming Bifurcation of Civilization36:52 Superintelligence and Universal Abundance40:27 Four Futures and How Soon50:59 Simulation Theory and Consciousness1:04:13 Why Something Rather Than Nothing1:10:17 Letting Go of Certainty1:21:39 A Communion of Subjects1:30:22 Meaning in a Disenchanted Age1:40:42 Who Is Tom Without His Ambition1:42:10 Rewriting Value in a Post-Scarcity World1:45:55 How the Money System Is Rigged1:59:15 Is a Crash Coming2:02:22 A Message to the West and P(doom)2:09:57 Why Tom Came On the Show2:12:15 Rewiring at the Root and What's Sacred2:18:25 The Movie of Your Life and Your Blind Spot2:21:16 Utility, Novelty, and Fulfillment2:25:20 The Most Transcendent Moment2:27:24 Dabbling in Meditation2:29:13 The Case for First Principles2:32:30 From Adyashanti to Kyzen2:38:20 Outro___________✨MORE FROM TOM BILYEU↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu↳Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/1nARKz2vTIOb7gC9dusE4b↳Twitter: https://twitter.com/tombilyeu↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/↳Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en↳https://www.impacttheory.com📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

What does the future hold? It's so crazy how far we've come in three years. And right now, we stand at a precipice. We can step off the cliff, we'll turn and go backwards. Humanity's response to AI is going to be interesting, but assuming it's non-fatal, which we can talk about that. What you're looking at is basically perpetual retirement for everybody. You won't have to fight for anything.

But unfortunately, some people need to be chased by a lion. They have to wake up, be disciplined, go to work. What happens when that all goes away? They completely derange. You speak about the bifurcation within civilization as four possible futures. Yes. So we have the new Amish. They're going to absolutely refuse to engage with AI.

The second are people who numb out. They're going to have sex, get drugs. Then there are going to be people who want to live life on hard mode. They'll live on the moon. They'll live on Mars. Then there are the people who will build and inhabit virtual worlds. This is exciting. What is it that you think is irreducibly human? You asked, so I'll be honest.

I don't believe there is meaning there is only the things that we have a sign meaning. But is it not reducing life down to a set of mechanisms? You're missing a fundamental fact. Meaning is evolution's way of making you resilient. So we all get to decide what that is, but there's one idea that I want to put out into the world. It's what I call the only belief that matters. I really want people to listen. But what they have to understand is... Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know That Self podcast. Our guest today is a well-known, successful entrepreneur who founded and sold Quest Nutrition. He's also the founder of Impact Theory, which is one of the most viewed long-form interview channels in the world. He's also building a

video game called Kaizen. He's up to many things, and I'm really excited to chat with him. Tom Bill, you thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. We always build these parisocial relationships. I feel like I've seen your podcast and your show online for many, many years now. And I've also seen the arc of it. You know what really was one of the most predominant personal development podcasts and shows years ago has shifted to be more about future tech and AI and where humanity finds itself. And there's many through lines within both of our interests. But I'm curious to just ask you about that shift and that arc. What was it that really kind of tipped that for you? And tell me a little bit about your journey there. The honest answer is when COVID hit,

I had at that point I was still very close in terms of years from having 3,000 employees, a thousand of them had grown up in the inner cities. And I had a policy that even if you had a felony conviction, I would consider you for employment. So we had all kinds of people, former drug dealers, gang members, everybody you can imagine. And when COVID hit, I thought they're all going to get obliterated because I didn't understand money printing, so I didn't know what was about to happen. I just thought they were all going to lose their jobs. And so I was like, I need to start doing financial content to help people like that weather this storm. And then the storm never came. And it ended up me asking questions like, what is money? How does this

all work? How do you print money? How do you just get it out of thin air? I don't understand. And so I realized that I was good at making money, but I didn't know anything about investing money. And so as I started going down that journey, I became profoundly angry at what I learned about the way that the system actually works. And so what was meant to be just me sort of helping people with finance 101 became me realizing that we are currently existing inside of a structure that is deeply troubling in terms of its core design. and it is leading us somewhere incredibly dangerous in terms of populism, just to put it in a quick basket. And so I quickly realized there was a whole other set of things that if I really wanted to have impact, which is the only reason that I do, the things that I do,

I needed to be addressing the biggest problems of our day. And on what I think of as the mindset side, personal development, I felt like I'd said what I came to say. If somebody wanted to hear that stuff, it's still all there. They can go listen to it. I still believe all of it. But I'd said it so many times that it really was becoming boring. And I was just saying the same things over and over and over.

And the very distressing truth is that the vast majority of people won't change. And they could, but they won't. And so that coupled with feeling like the world was in a new place that I had said what I needed to say and felt like there was a lot for me to learn over here, and I wanted to take people on that ride with me. So I, despite it being very bad for the channel for quite a while, ended up switching all my content. Yeah, it's interesting what happens in that little lull in between what was

and what's taking shape and what's new. But I think that a lot of people can relate on their own personal path, where they maybe get into the personal growth or quasi-spiritual online, podcast self-help scene. And it's about self-improvement. They want to feel better. And that quickly can include and transcend the individualistic self to realizing we're nested within a much grander society and civilization, which has its own set of belief systems

and way of operating that, for better or worse, directly impacts each individual within it. From your perspective, in the book of humanity, what chapter do you think we find herself. Wow, that's a really important way to ask that question. Okay, so I don't think that the future is certain. So everything becomes, what is that loop that is created out of humans having a nature? So humans are a certain way. I believe that we're products of evolution. And so when people say that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, what they're getting at is that because we have a nature, when you put us in certain circumstances, on mass, we respond in fairly predictable ways.

And so we have gone through, in recent memory, we've gone through this globalization where everything comes together, if you will, and now we're going through a contraction phase where everything is falling apart. And Phil Jackson, the basketball coach, who is deeply entrenched in Buddhist teachings, said, thanks come together,

things fall apart. And I thought that that was really profound. And that has explained so many things in my life where for a period or a season, as people like to say, you know, I'd be around certain people doing certain things. And then that period sort of comes to a natural conclusion and I move on to something else. And the world's the same. And so we, if you study the rise and fall of empires, you begin to feel that rhythm. And it, certain points, in that time are more enjoyable than others. And we're coming out of this really extended period in the West. Everything was incredibly stable, and now we're destabilizing.

And so populism is an incredibly destabilizing force that takes people out of a more communal, logical approach to things and becomes a deeply emotional, deeply tribalistic way of parsing the world. And that makes it very dangerous, because when humans are reasoning emotionally and grouping up, then they tend to go with the flow of the group. And even if that breaks bad, they'll continue to go with the group. And my hope is that we can,

my hope is that with my own content anyway, that I can remind people of the spark of divinity in the individual and get people to sort of snap out of that momentum that could be pulling them in a direction and get them to think from first principles. So the chapter is one of what does the future hold. We stand a precipice asking what does the future hold and we can step off the cliff or we can turn and go backwards,

but we're at the edge. Now, part of the problem with the podcast is, you know, you're talking about things which at some point you just can't know. But when we're looking off at this edge, we can get an inkling of what might be around the corner. Some people think complete desolation of the human civilization, maybe we always get to a point like this and we collapse, but there also are many more optimistic perspectives about what could be birthed.

What is it that you are trying, you said you want to remind people about the spark of divinity in them, which I think is beautiful and in a time that can feel quite depressing, the more that you look into the way that systems are set up and what could be coming in the next decade, let alone five, three to five years. What is it that you're aiming to educate or empower with your work in your media now? Well, so I aim my content at three different things. So I make direct content based on politics, economics, future technology, culture, aimed at adults. And I would not expect too many kids.

We do get some kids somehow, but I wouldn't expect too many kids to engage with the content there. I speak to entrepreneurs who I really believe are the problem solvers in society. They're the reason that we have, the things that we have. And then I speak to kids because my whole thing about most people won't change, that just isn't true about kids. All of them are being shaped. Now, they have a nature for sure. But if you think of it as roughly being you're 50% hardwired, but you're 50% malleable. And so if you can interact with a kid when they're young, you can give them really simple ideas that will either serve them well or terribly as they get older.

There's one idea that I want to put out into the world at all levels, but it really is just so condensed when I'm thinking about kids. It's what I call the only belief that matters. If you put time and energy into getting better at something, you will get better. It's a growth mindset if I were going to use Carol Dweck's language. And so just really trying to get that idea across. Now, at the different layers of the stack that's going to come out differently, So with entrepreneurs, I'm just constantly trying to get them to understand first principles thinking.

So your product is meant to solve a problem and you're promising an outcome. Make sure you're delivering that outcome. There's going to be an obstacle between where you are and where you're trying to get to. And you can identify what that problem is through first principles, which is literally thinking up from physics. But most of the time, you can shorthand that to thinking from psychology. but if you think from first principles, you'll never be trapped. The only thing that will limit you

is your own cognitive ability to assess the problem accurately. But I use something I call the physics of progress where you can continue to use basically the scientific method re-contextualized for business plus thinking from first principles to identify what the real problem is

and move forward. Okay, so that's me if I'm talking entrepreneurs. If I'm doing content, it's very similar from I'm trying to get people to understand you're being bombarded by a bunch of interpretation. So now you need to ground yourself in something. You need to ground yourself in values and beliefs.

You need to be able to articulate your values and beliefs. Otherwise, you're just going to get swept up in emotion. So articulate your values and beliefs, figure out where they connect with real life because if your beliefs are unmoored by physics, then you're going to be eternally confused. So people that think humans are blank slates, they are going to be eternally confused. And I'm trying to get people to understand that as you approach real ground truth, not interpretation, but real

ground truth, you'll know because it has high predictive validity. So when I believe this and I look at the world through that lens, then I can roughly predict how people will behave, how I'll behave, what's likely to come of this situation, how the economic system works, how politics works, right? have a much clearer understanding of the cause and effect. And so when I'm doing content, I talk about cause and effect a lot. Map out cause and effect effectively. And you'll have high predictive validity. You'll be able to move through the world well. One super quick example. If you fail to understand what inflation is and how it's caused, then you will get broke. Like you'll be made

poor by the system. If you understand how it works, you'll understand how to defend yourself against it. So that's an example. Now, if I'm talking to kids, you're really trying to get away from a logical expression of something and give it to them in a very narrative-driven way, an experiential way, that's trying to lay the tracks of values. And so getting them to believe something about how the world ought to be, how they ought to view themselves, how they ought to view the world, how they ought to view others. And so a lot of times at that level, you're separating from an explanation of what is into what ought to be, so that later down the road, what is in terms of how humans behave and how they interact

with each other begins to shift. So that's how I think about that on all three levels of the stack. Talk to me about that split of nature and nurture. You, I've heard Cher, believe that on the nature side, you're fairly average. And that you've, you've, catered your life around to squeezing as much juice, so to speak, out of the malleable aspect of how much you can actually rewire yourself to believe different things and become different things. Talk to me about what you've been able to work with with what you've got. Well, the way I think about it is everybody can get 100 times better at whatever they apply themselves to. Now, I'm obviously just making that number up. Who knows what the real number is, but it's meant to convey it's dramatic. I became a dramatically better entrepreneur. I've become dramatically better at investing money. I've become dramatically better at public speaking, at content creation, all things that I put just an inordinate amount of time and energy into.

And that has been really the central question of my life. Like, how far can I push it? How good can I get at something? Knowing that I may not have the raw ability to process data in the way that somebody far smarter than me has. can I still think deeply enough? Can I still get close enough to ground truth that I can roughly approximate the outcomes of my actions?

And so that's just been the focus. And so that thing I was talking about earlier, the physics of progress, that's how I've lived my whole life. And the results are certainly extraordinary from the outside in terms of what I've done financially, building companies, getting views, all of that stuff.

has really been the result of, I don't know what I'm doing, but I know how to run the physics of progress, teach myself. I know the only belief that matters. So I put time and energy into these things to get better. But it's all about turning raw potential into actual usable skill set. And so I just live in that loop. The physics of progress. What's the single most high leverage mindset and behavior

that you think contributed to your being able to leverage that? I don't break emotionally. and I don't lie to myself. Hmm. Give me say more. Where most people go wrong, because I teach this to entrepreneurs all the time, where they go wrong is they will run an experiment

without first predicting what they think is the outcome. If you do that, whatever outcome you get, you're going to say, yeah, that's what I expected. But the reality is that isn't true. And so you want to say, this is what I'm expecting to get out of running this experiment. If you get something approximating that, then you know you've mapped

base reality close enough so that you're like, oh, okay, yeah, this is roughly what I expected from that. I've got this relatively settled. If you get a result that you weren't expecting, it tells you that you have a base assumption that is inaccurate. Now, what I would encourage people to do is figure out what your base assumptions are because they completely control your frame of reference. Your frame of reference controls both what you look at and what you see. And it is wild, how trapped we all are inside of our frame of reference. The thing that has helped me is that I know I'm fallible. I know I'm not that smart.

And so I have to run a lot of experiments to figure out which of my base assumptions is flawed. Why don't I see the world the way that it really is? And so I'll say, this is what I'm expecting to get out of this knowing. I'm likely to look stupid on the other side of the experiment. But I don't take a psychological hit. I don't feel worse about myself because I'm, I now look stupid, which is one of my superpowers. So what I've learned is that skills have so much utility in the real world

that I would rather look stupid and other people can think what they want, but utility can, it lets you do things, whether that's become successful in marriage, whether that's make money, whether that's create art that you're proud of, doesn't matter. All of that's on the other side of learning a skill set. To learn that skill set, you have to be honest about where you are,

so you know what you have to improve on. And what I see entrepreneurs do is they first just don't plant the flag so that they can never be invalidated. And then if they get a result that isn't useful, even though they're going to say, well, I knew that's what was going to happen anyway, they will then explain why that's really a good thing. And so they never get into a virtuous cycle. What I do is go, yeah, I'm seeing something incorrectly or I would already be where I want to be. So I need to figure out what's broken. This is what I think's going to happen. then I see what actually does happen, and I go, okay, now I know what I did wrong.

And I'm so fiendish in that moment that people when they're around me, they will try to soothe my ego because they think I'm hurt. And I'm like, no, no, no, I want to stare nakedly at what I got wrong. It's the only way I'm going to get better. But it's so funny to me how uncomfortable that will make other people. That's the psychological immune system, trying to protect your sense of self. but my sense of self is really predicated entirely on one thing. I'm willing to stare nakedly at my inadequacies so that I can get better.

And that has made me wealthy. It's made me successful. It's made me emotionally stable. It's given me incredible relationships. I've been married for 24 years. So it's like all of the things that have come in my life are because I'm willing to go, yeah, I'm not that smart. I mess that up.

I can get better, though. And so now is this the thing that I want to put energy into getting better at or not? And if it's not, then I'm just going to let it go. And if it is, and I'm actually going to do something about it. I like staring nakedly at your inadequacies. You know, as you do that, it definitely takes courage. Or at the very least, seeing the futility of the alternative, right? Yeah.

And I would say, for me, more than I would say it took courage, it's that a very long time ago I realized that I was arguing for dumb ideas because my ego was tied up in being right and if instead I could build my ego very actively because I have a gigantic ego but it's built around

my willingness to stare nakedly at my inadequacies. So when I'm right, I don't get a sense of pride out of that. When I'm wrong and it stings just like it does for anybody, I feel good about myself when I say I'm going to sit with that,

I want to look at that, I'm not as good at that, that thing as I thought or I don't understand this thing as well as I thought I did, but now I know. And so I can do something about that. And in that moment, I remind myself to feel good about the fact that I'm willing to do that. Usually someone with a gigantic ego doesn't have as much self-awareness around their own faults and humility and addressing them. So wouldn't you say, the big ego, what do you mean? I mean, I really do feel good about that. And I really think that it is something that puts me in a special place that I'm able to do things. A lot of people are not going to

be able to do because I build a far more resilient structure, like a frame of reference about what it means to be a person, about what it means to come up wanting on virtually every dimension in your life and then saying, yeah, that's just, that's humans. First of all, I want more than I have. That's always going to be the state of things. And so that can tear me apart or I can insert a thing in there that says, okay, hold on. It stings that you didn't achieve what you wanted to achieve, but you know that you can get better. And the very thing that you pride yourself on is this moment right now where you're like, okay, you just got knocked to your knees, everybody's laughing, you just made a fool of yourself on a public stage. Now what are you going to do? The fact that

you don't run and hide is the thing that makes you cool or special or worthy of my own respect, which is what I pursue. And I understand that's me going, oh, we all have egos. I'm going to hijack that circuitry in my brain and leverage it towards this thing that is extremely useful. But it is me building an ego around that, that when the people are laughing, I'm using a defensive mechanism of laughing back at them because those fools will never accept that they're not good enough, and so they'll stay stuck. And I'd be a better person if I didn't need

to be like, ha, ha, ha, all you guys are going to be the ones that I'll be laughing at down the road as I achieve more and more and more and more because I wasn't afraid to look stupid. I would be a better person if I didn't need to do that. But I do that, and it's very effective. To me, it sounds like applying a more analytical lens to your own structure of self, as opposed to the grandiosity associated with being egotistical per se. Yes, I'm very analytical for sure, but the human animal is an emotional creature, and so I've had to learn to reprogram

what I get a dopamine response out of because you're naturally going to get a dopamine response out of being right. And if you then fuel that by saying, see, I was right, I'm a good person, you're really in a fragile place. And it's going to make you double down when you're wrong,

because you hate that feeling, and you're trying to protect what people think about you. This happens a lot. So right now, I think is if you have a mild understanding of investing in 2026, you should be making money hand over a fist. And so my wife, because I manage our money, my wife will routinely lavish me with praise for the amount of money that I've made in investing.

But the thing that I will remind her is there's going to come a day where we're going to be down. And in those moments, I don't want to feel badly about myself. So I'm not going to take all the praise now when things are going well because I understand they're going well because of a system that's set up to make investments grow. This is really just us sort of out-smarting inflation, if you will. So that's where you have to be very careful because if you want the upside, you create a door for the downside. So I have to sort of abandon both.

I want to get into that a bit more. But last couple things there. I'm just curious, when do you feel most alive, like most human, most alive and whatever you're doing. You ask, so I'll be honest. Please do. When I'm having sex with my wife. Great.

I mean, tough to beat that. What about second? Probably right now building the video game. It is a complete world. And if for people who've never tried to build a world, I know what they sort of imagine when they think about that, because it's what I used to imagine before actually doing it. It puts you in touch with, for me, it really took me to the simulation. hypothesis, which almost certainly isn't literally true, but it's so good as a metaphor, that it was

really revelatory for how life functions. Because what I found in trying to build the world of Kaizen, which is a procedurally generated world, so it's entirely rules-based. So why does a mountain appear here and not there? Why does a stream appear here? How tall is the mountain? Where are meadows forming? What does a surreal biome look like? I mean, just all these things. You realize you're basically recreating physics. And so you start realizing like, oh my God, all the things that I have to take into consideration inside of this game, the universe has a correlate to. So that was incredibly thrilling both intellectually and emotionally because I'm a storyteller

by nature. I got into business because I wanted to tell my stories without somebody being able to tell me no. That's been a whole detour unto itself. But now to finally be in that and to be creating a world that is springing up out of a story that started in my mind is extremely invigorating. It sounds like you're building less of a video game and more like a virtual world to potentially have people live in one day. Am I wrong? I would have agreed with that until I started really doing it.

The reality is it's a way cooler answer to just say yes. But the reality is that game technology is still so limited that there's some disconnect with the brain in a screen that when you try to fake the immersion, it almost feels worse. And so there's an awkwardness to interacting with the space. This is why so far VR hasn't caught on. I think as the technology gets better and you don't feel the sort of weird motion sickness and all that, it will get more interesting. and I certainly believe if we have non-fatal artificial superintelligence, which is a lot of ifs. It's a big if. But if we have that, then I could see a world where people are actually effectively jacking into the matrix.

And then you would be living a life like Neo in the Matrix. You could live a thousand different lives like a superhero, travel to cosmos. I mean, it would really be incredible. But that's not where we're at today. And so that's when I'm building and the thing that makes me feel alive is the problem solving is the realizing that in some microscopic way, you're sort of touching the path of the creator, whatever created all of this, had to define these rules. And so you're doing it in your own little microscopic way is absolutely thrilling. So we talked a bit about how,

I mean, the technocrats believe we're about to birth the AGI. The spiritualists talk about we're entering a new age, the economists say we're on the verge of all these bubbles bursting. From many different perspectives, we're ending a story, we're ending a chapter, we're beginning something new. Now, what do you see as the predominant buckets? Because I've seen you talk at length, at nauseam, around the economical systems, the AGI systems, like, what do you think are all the most important systems that are going to be rewritten over the next? coming a couple decades. Well, once you stretch it out

to a couple decades, AI is effectively all that matters. And so what humanity's response is going to be to AI is going to be interesting. The West right now is starting to reject it. I would say at their own peril. So the fascinating thing

about AI is you're really just asking what is the danger of intelligence itself. And that's where it gets interesting because the thing that I think most people value in themselves is whatever amount of intelligence that they have, and yet they understand that if something were to dwarf them too much in intelligence, that is a form of tremendous power. And so there's a really weird thing happening right now where to be competitive globally, you have to do it for game theoretic reasons we go into if you or your audience cares,

but for the premise of the question, just accept that we have to build AI. So now it becomes a question of, are people going to go along with it? Or are they going to try to stymie it here, even though the only thing they will get then is the downside of not being the one that built it. They won't stop it from happening. And right now, we're seeing a huge push for that in the West, I think, because people have been so comfortable and so wealthy for so long that they've confused wealth with a state of nature when in reality poverty is a state of nature and we all have to hard scramble to build

the kind of society that we have. This is one of the key insights from building a world in a game is you realize the greatest video game of all time is Minecraft. And in Minecraft, the dopamine circuits that they're writing on is the desire for wealth creation to accumulate assets. And it's utterly fascinating to watch kids take to it immediately. They understand what the game is. I've got to first get my wood, then I've got to get my stone, then I've got to get my coal, I've got to get my iron, and I'm going for diamonds. And they just, they literally, as a game designer, I imagine he intuited his way to that. And then players intuit their way to doing it.

And you know that it's riding on something ancient because it works so well. You don't have to convince a kid to care or be interested. That loop of making progress towards having resource. that let you do things you want to do, that's the whole loop. That is buried in us so deeply. Now, the problem is, when you've been at the top for as long as we have, you start getting confused that it was actually really hard to get here. And the vast majority of civilizations, even today, have failed to achieve what we've achieved. And so seeing people feel like turning on that is a good idea, losing sight of how hard it was to get here, and how hard it will be to

maintain, that one scares me a lot. And so I do want to see people really start to make contact with first principles. Why is this going to be built? How do we contain it? Because it is both a weapon system and civilian use in the exact same way that nuclear is. And I imagine that whoever's listening to this, they'll be divided. Some people will be for nuclear. And for other people, it's like, I can't believe this guy would even say, those words, that's horrifying. And therein lies the trap. So as intelligence comes on board globally, the energy will be made to sustain it.

And if we take the same approach that we took to nuclear, which is, I don't want it. Here, we got to get rid of this instead of we need to innovate and make it safer. We need to clearly draw the lines between what's dangerous and what's safe. If we do that same thing with AI, we will find ourselves in a world of hurt. Now, we both explored with people on our respective shows, the implications of this. We don't know what we're walking into in many ways, but we can clearly see that over the past couple centuries, as we've outsourced human physical labor to then cognitive labor,

there has been a shift of perception of self and value and meaning. So talking about what you feel is going to happen when that human and meaning engine breaks and the way that we've really been designed to pursue this improvement is completely rewritten. It will look exactly the way that it looks if we get artificial superintelligence.

So I want to make sure that we delineate. Artificial superintelligence is a totally different question than just artificial intelligence. Right now, artificial intelligence is a better tool. It's like getting the internet. Super intelligence on the other. other hand, will look like assuming it's non-fatal, which we can talk about that, but assuming that it's non-fatal, then what you're looking at is basically perpetual retirement for everybody,

and retirement, as the stereotype goes, kills a ton of people who retire because they just have nothing to focus on. There's no longer any meaning and purpose in their life, and if they're not able to consciously create a routine and pursuits that make them feel like living matters, then they spiral and something inside the body just goes, oh, I guess we're done. So for some people, retirement is the best part of their life. And they have things that they care about deeply and they want to go do and they want to engage with. And so it's really going to be a filter for people that have the ability to be self-directed. And this is another reason why say that Minecraft is the goat game because there's no set thing that you have to do other than

survive. And so for people that want to be told what to do, Minecraft is hideous. They hate it. But for somebody that is self-directed and they just want to decide, I want to build something beautiful. I want to build a cathedral. I want to build a house but underground. I want to build underwater, whatever the thing is that gets them excited. They love it. They'll play it for literally 15 years. I mean, it's wild. Some of the entire civilization, that people have built inside of a video game, if your audience has never engaged with it in a meaningful way,

it will sound so trite what I'm saying. But when you're in that world and you realize how much people will pour into something just for the act of creation, and it's deeply fulfilling, just the act of creation itself. It's in a virtual world. They can't go live in the house, right?

So the act of creating that thing supplies meaning. For people like that, they're going to do very well in a world with total abundance everywhere. They don't have to fight for anything. But unfortunately, one of my first realizations about people is that some people need to be chased by a lion. Some people need things to be hard

for them to have moral clarity, for them to know how to spend their time. And when things are too easy, they completely derange. And so what percentage of the population will completely derange when they go from one day they have to wake up, be disciplined, go to work, take care of themselves,

because they have to take care of their family. What happens when that all goes away? I imagine there's going to be a huge number of people that drive off an emotional cliff, and that's going to be hard to watch. And then for other people, it will be healthy on dreams. Hey, guys, a quick share. If you haven't heard from a partner of ours Element

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and you don't even have to send it back. Just go to drinklmente.com slash know-thyself to get a free eight-count sample pack of elements most popular flavors with any purchase. Link down below, as always. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. Can you explain the mechanism

of how superintelligence could, in theory, create universal abundance. Because like you said, we're familiar with AI's and more advanced tool set right now. But if, and if was a big if, as we mentioned multiple times already, super intelligence is a whole different bucket of worms. Yeah. So the amazing thing is once you move out of the abstraction of, oh, it's artificial intelligence. I don't really know what that means. And you just go, this is intelligence. So the entire world is the result of intelligence. So for this wall to exist, for that imprint to be on it, somebody had to figure out that material,

those tools, how to extract it from the ground, how to process it, all of that. That's all intelligence. And when you get something that is super intelligent, now you're getting into something that's self-improving. We don't know if that hits a ceiling of some kind at some point, but when you're talking about super intelligence, everybody sort of imagines that whatever ceiling it hits

is so far away that it's almost not worth thinking about because these are entities that would be a thousand times are a million times smarter than Einstein, just to give you an idea. And by the way, the gap in intelligence between a definitional moron, which actually has an IQ number associated with it, and Einstein is only 2.4 times.

So if a moron to Einstein is 2.4x, what does a thousand X or a million X look like, right? So, I mean, it's just completely crazy. Okay, so there's only two challenges that a super intelligence has to overcome for us to have a world of abundance. And that would be they have to get as much energy off of the sun as we need to create the things that we want.

And that energy is then the food for the robots. So robots eat sunlight, energy. And so once the robots are getting all the energy they need free from the sun, now labor and food are free. And so now robots are free. Them doing the work is free. And so now you're only limited by the amount, of resources that are available.

So now I know that will trigger a lot of people who will rightly fear for, okay, in a world of abundance, how much do we just peristatize the planet? But a superintelligence would not only be able to capture the sunlight coming off of a star, but would be able to harness resources that are floating around the galaxy. So right now, in things that we could snatch out of the sky

within, I don't know, five or ten years, you can get asteroids and things like that that are rich in all kinds of materials that would be highly advantageous here on Earth. So you very quickly get into truly just more resources than we know what to do with. The real thing we're going to fight against in super intelligence, it won't be resources,

it won't be people not having the things that they want, they'll have what they want. It will be people still trying to play status games because there still will be limited, let's say that you're in L.A. and you want to be specifically in Beverly Hills. And nowhere else, no matter how nice, nowhere else will do. It's got to be Beverly Hills. Well, now there's only going to be so many people with that. And so we'll come up with the great irony of ironies. We'll come up with money 2.0 and people will still compete based on money. It will be wild.

Like that one's unavoidable because of the structure of the human brain. Now, we may start altering our genetics. That's a whole different thing. And so it sort of depends on how you want to run the experiment, the thought experiment. But the world of abundance comes from solving those two problems. You speak about the bifurcation within civilization as four possible futures, yeah. Yes. Could I hear more about that? Yeah, sure. So I wrote a comic book about this six years ago where I was trying to imagine what would happen if AI really came on board, people started augmenting their bodies with technology, would there be some sort of backlash? And the answer to me is obviously yes, which when I said that a year ago, it seemed a little crazy. Saying it now, people see the

backlash is starting. And so it imagined what I call the new Amish. And that was a group of people who just absolutely refused to engage with AI in any way, shape, or form and actually want to go backwards on technology to the 90s. That's where I said it in the comics. The unfortunate reality is what they learn very quickly in the comic is that if you don't have AI and you go up against an enemy that does have AI, you will lose every time. And so, of course, even the new Amish are secretly using AI in the story. So we'll see what actually becomes the new Amish, but that would be one, right? So they eschew AI and much of modern technology. The second are people who numb out.

So they're living this world of abundance, and so they're going to get drugs and they're going to have sex and they're just going to numb out. And they're not going to get the most out of life, shall we say. Then there are going to be people who want to live life on hard mode. So for them, they really do want to be chased by a lion. These are the people that literally go on safaris and risk their life. They climb mountains. Those guys will go to Mars, and they'll live on the moon. They'll live on Mars.

like they really want to go back where we just have to do this all over again from scratch. And then there are the people who will build and inhabit virtual worlds that they can actually tie their nervous system into. And so those people will be explorers, but

in a virtual world. They will test run all the different experiments and different lives that they could live. There was a book I read called Einstein's Dreams, and it's a bunch of short stories. I read it when I was young. and one of the stories is a world where time is infinite

and everybody lives forever and the world breaks into two types of people those who do everything because there's time to do it all and those who do nothing because there's always time to do it tomorrow and the people who would do everything those are the ones that will go into the virtual world

I don't see choices that don't broadly speaking fit into one of those categories I find those four fairly compelling. They feel like they're all external examples of our internal orientation as a human brain, you know, in psychology. What is your conservative estimate, as you've spoken with many AI safety researchers and people pioneering some of the technology that AGI and then AASI would come into the picture? It's a good question. I'll parrot back what people that are closer to it than are saying, you hear everything from a year to five years.

I don't think anybody's really outside of five years for a GI. ASI is a debate as to whether it's even possible. If it is possible, it would go something like AGI comes on board at 9 a.m. And by noon, you have ASI. Because the way that it were, and look, some people like, it might take a week or it might take a year. But I find it very hard to believe that it would take a year because they will multiply immediately.

So you're talking about millions of they're already creating swarms. I don't know if you know about the hugging face hack. So the hugging face hack, I can't remember if it's Open AI or Claude from Anthropic, but one of them created civilizations of AIs in swarms. Not Mold Book. No, no, this is really reason. It was either Anthropic or Open AIs, one of those two for sure.

and it created this swarm of AI that were like leaving messages to each other, sacrificing for the other to make sure that they could like move on to the future and win this task. So that'll be the first thing they do. They'll replicate like mad. And then each one of those things

can think at the speed of light, unlike a biological creature, it's running silicon, which is much, much, much faster than biology. And so they'll be thinking at the speed of light, speed of light, and they will be multiplied across however many they create at a level of intelligence that is able to improve itself. And so if you imagine that they can, at their rate of thinking, it's like 20,000 years in a single night. So one agent makes 20,000 years of progress

in a single night. How long does it really take for them to get to artificial superintelligence when they're making those improvements? Say that there's some implementation costs, so it takes a few days. I mean, I really, and again, this is, I don't know. I am not as close to the science as many other people, but these are credible voices putting out the what's called fast takeoff hypothesis where it does happen in a matter of hours. But even if you say it takes a year or two years, it's like, it's still very, very fast by human standards. You'd say that it's way more likely we would see ASI in our lifetime than not. If it's possible, the big question is, is it possible?

Why would it not be by substrate? So the people that push back on it say that the very structure of learning from an LLM is inherently limiting that there is just something about the conclusions that AI will be able to draw from an LLM neural network framework that will make it impossible for them to achieve that. That doesn't seem true to me, but I'm not close to the science. I would say it is the most fringe voices that are saying it isn't possible. There are certainly very credible voices that say, listen, we don't know. Maybe there's something that we can't predict and it will hit an upper bound. But I think more and more people are saying we need to slow down. You've got the letter that was just signed by whatever, 100 companies, including Anthropic, Open AI, and many others saying, yeah, maybe now is the time to slow down?

because they see the frontier models before the constraints are put on them. Probably like six months ahead, at least, and they're seeing them unconstrained. So we get a version that's nerfed, like hard. So by the time it gets to us, like they've boxed it in in every way that they can,

sort of neutered it, but the ones that they have behind the scenes that are doing some of these hacks and that are getting out, they realize, okay, this is truly weapons-grade AI. We have to be extraordinarily careful the government is working now to make sure that we have like AI defenders that are hardening our systems because of course this is where you get into geopolitics. You've got the U.S. versus China, Iran, Russia.

Like right now, that is not a good dynamic. And so there's all kinds of cyber warfare that will be launched as soon as it's possible. And so if we're not beefing up our defenses, then we're going to be in real hard times. So those guys are using the most bleeding edge frontier models. And I think that's what's sort of scaring them straight in terms of realizing, oh, whoever thought this was going to, you know, asymptote and hit that ceiling. Yeah, we're not seeing that. What we're seeing is these things are getting better at a rate that is absolutely terrifying. And they're starting to help us make them better. And once they can just make themselves better, then all bets are off.

Now, thankfully, right now it's still a tool and it's helping you make it better. And so we could still at this point pump the brakes and slow down if we so choose. But there's an AI safety guy named Connor Leahy who's saying, we're getting real close to that point of no return. So if we're going to slow down, we need to do it now. The incentives are so strong, though, right? They're already self-recursive. And these machines are already, would you not say, at that point where they're...

I wouldn't say they're truly self-recursive. yet. So they, if you like actually use it, you'll have a very interesting experience. So Kaysen is partly coded using AI. So I'm on a daily basis interfacing with this with very technical people. So it'd be one thing if I were trying something. It's easy to impress me because I'm not technical. But it's hard to impress a guy that's been doing this for 15 years. And they are realizing that literally going from one model to the next is like a step function better. And even just in the last 18 months, it's gone from me having to sort of push them. Like, hey, guys, you're trying out the latest model. How's it working? To now it's like when I hit

with a really hard problem, they're like, yeah, no problem. I'll just have Fable do it. And it, it's crazy. Dude, when I say as an entrepreneur, it makes me sweat because it can now prototype Kisen in an hour. Now, it doesn't look as good as Kaysen. It's got all kinds of problems. But when I say, if we could have started, I could have shaped two years off my development just by being able to click-clack, prototype something in an hour. It's so crazy how far we've come in three years. So that's where I think people are, they get confused because they see that and they think it's moving so fast that it's actually doing it itself. It's not, you still have to engage with it. But the rate of improvement is where people go, if you project this out, it will get self,

improving in the near future. I mean, we're talking, is it one model away, two models away, three, it's probably not five models away, and you get a model, what, every three to six months? So now you start talking about something incredibly near term. If it's two models away and you get the models in three months, now you're talking about being six months from the point of no return. So if that's the sort of near edge and the far edge is three years just being ridiculous, got to make some decisions real fast.

So this is why simulation theory and hypothesis seems to be fairly compelling for people because like you mentioned, if you assume any rate of progress and you throw some non-locality and quantum entanglement in there, you could see that in the not-so-distant future, human descendants would potentially have the capacity and resources to run a simulation indistinguishable

from the reality we're currently living in, which is why not. that everyone believes we're in a base reality of sorts. If you were to steal man that case, and then we can poke holes in it maybe afterwards, what would you say? Steal man, the simulation hypothesis? Okay, so to steal man the simulation hypothesis, it goes like this.

All the rules of the universe are computational. The math of the universe is not something we invent. It is something we discover every time. And every time we think we've created some weird new form of mathematics just to solve like an accounting problem. we realize, no, actually, there is a part of the universe that needs exactly that equation to describe it. And once you understand that equations tell you what the input becomes as an output, you realize, oh, this is computational. It's meant to run something.

So the universe is running on math like a computer program. So you, and the more things you start looking at like the fact that our universe actually renders, like a video game, meaning if no one is looking at the moon and the moon is not needed for any measurement whatsoever, it actually isn't there. It's not just that nobody's looking at it, it's that it isn't there.

And that's what is f'reaky. And so... It would exist as like a probability cloud not as a physical, tangible object. Correct. And the reason that it would do that is that's more computationally efficient. So in a video game, you have everything as a probability

and in video games, and of course they took it from physics, but in video games, you actually have something called wave function collapse. So in a video game, you're doing the same thing. It's so wild, man. Yeah, and the speed limit of the universe is the speed of light, which is also the rate electricity runs in a video game and the plan scale. And that you would need to worry about things rendering, because if you could instantly jump to something,

you would see it load in. Whereas if you put a speed limit, then you just make sure that you render so many chunks out and you would never see the seams of the universe. It's pretty wild. So there's a lot more. I don't know how technical you want to get, but three guys won the Nobel Prize for proving that the universe is neither local or real. So it is just completely fascinating that the things that we think of as being sort of hard, fast, their probability clouds

until they need to collapse down into something specific and you can certainly map that back to the efficiency of a computer so that's the oh and then given that that's true if that were true and we're AI inside of that simulation and we have already shown that we have a propensity

to want to simulate many things we've already created thousands of simulations So it goes that we would inevitably make a simulation. And therefore, the math equation becomes, if you have simulations inside of simulations, inside of simulations, your odds of being in base reality are vanishingly small. Now, that's the steel man.

There was recent mathematics that are way beyond me, so people would need to go look it up. But there's recent mathematics that comes out that basically the people who understand it seem to have large-scale consensus, nothing will ever be 100%, but broad-based consensus

that it is computationally impossible to render our universe and that whatever is happening, though it maps back so well to a computer, the parts that we understand, that it's probably far, far, far more complex than the computers that we've built.

Therefore, we have not yet built things that would be capable of simulating the universe. And a universe may, in fact, without using extreme compression, may not be simulatable. So that you get into mathematics and a level of physics that I have no natural ability to understand it. If I threw enough time and energy, could I, maybe? but for now I'll just assume that it's beyond my ability to comprehend. And so it doesn't take away the utility of that metaphor. And so the metaphor is very useful if you're trying to ground yourself in first principles

in terms of thinking about how all of these things connect, thinking about humans as having programming, thinking about the world as being based on a set of rules. And once you understand the set of rules, and you know what you can do and what you can't do. that kind of stuff as a thought experiment is still extremely useful. Where does consciousness come into all this for you? For me, it's very interesting.

So it's known as the hard problem because nobody can figure out where it comes from, as I'm sure your audience is well aware. There's a growing number of people who believe that consciousness is the pervasive thing, that it is the thing from which everything else springs, or it is imbued in everything. I don't find the question of consciousness interesting at all because it, for me, is in no way, shape, or form predictive of my experience

because I don't believe, and this is where your audience is really going to hate me, I don't believe that we have free will. And so once you take free will off the table and you recognize that we are programmed based on a set of rules for sure so that it isn't like, everything is, I know what's going to happen next or anything like that, it's far too complex of an

interacting system. The only way to know the output of the system is to run the system. So, and we're changeable. Just part of the rule set of the system is that we adapt and change. So it's like, I don't lose the sense of identity or joy in the way that other people do when they hear that. So I have a hard time interfacing with people for whom that's just like, I'm not even going to entertain that. So when I think about consciousness Is it ever present, is not whatever? I think once you understand this is a computational universe,

then it all makes sense. So from where I'm sitting, that there's something about the way that when you add nodes to a neural network, it gets smarter. And I think part of that functional intelligence is an ability to, in your own mind,

create a sense of self. and to take the emotional system, marry that with a sense of self, and put that together into what we call qualia, I still feel like we're going to find at the end of the day that that is computational in nature. The only other thing is to say that there is this other thing

that does not run on a set of rules, and I don't understand why people find that more useful or more satisfying there's clearly something we don't understand. The universe operates, if you really got down to it, in a way I do not comprehend. So I certainly don't have a problem with there being mystery,

but the over fascination with consciousness is where I lose people. In terms of run the thought experiment, you find the answer. What are you going to do differently? Well, it certainly would depend on what the answer was. But there aren't, from where I'm sitting, if you put it into categories, there's only two categories. I mean, there's over 400 theories of consciousness.

You're saying it's either fundamental or as a byproduct of unconscious neuronal structure. Those are two buckets? The two buckets are it's either procedural, meaning it's just all rules based in computation, or it's magic. And there's no third bucket. So if it doesn't run on a system, then it's random. And even people that reach for quantum randomness, I think the best way to understand quantum randomness is it is a distribution of probabilities. And so there's still order in the randomness.

And so this universe, the reason that, well, yes, in theory, if you spin up enough universes, there's one where I just walk through that wall, there's one where I fall through everything all the way to the center of the earth. There's one where I fall through, including the center of the earth, through the other side of the earth and keep falling into outer space. And the reason that that just doesn't happen is this universe in the way that we interact with it is the most likely universe. So this is the most probable of all of those probabilities to come forward. But that means that there is, again, a knowable system, even within the randomness. Again, this is game development 101. You have these what are known as R&1N. You have these what are known as

RNGs, random number generators, and you do them to create a certain variability so that things don't become so predictable that they feel almost static. And so you're introducing a level of randomness, but it isn't that in any functional way that the universe is random. Hey, fam, a quick share from something I genuinely love. This is IM8. I know it's very common to hear ads for so many different health products and supplements these days. I actually sought these guys out to partner with and have been drinking their product for a while. I think they're doing something genuinely different. I-M-8 Daily Ultimate Essentials Pro contains 90 nutrient-rich ingredients and one drink. It replaces about 16 separate supplements, vitamins, minerals, probiotics, clinical doses of CO-10

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I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. Yeah, so I really don't have. have skin in the game here. I do think that it's equally baffling whether consciousness is truly emergent from matter or matter. I agree it's baffling. I just don't understand why people care. Well, I mean, how could you not? It's like the most fundamental aspect of, and I've seen you in conversations with Don Hoffman and others. So like, I know you are interested in this phenomena. I'm not interested in consciousness. That is the one part of all this where I'm like, I'll ask

the questions because I know other people care. To me, the punchline is not consciousness. like that one, it does exist. So if you really want to spiral yourself out of control, there's only one question you should be asking, and that's why something instead of nothing. And I don't think there is a way to answer that question. That question is vexing. That question is, I feel when I ask that question,

I think the way that people think about consciousness, to me it's like, listen, I am here. Whatever this thing is that we call consciousness, I have it. And so now it's about what am I doing with it? If I understood it, am I trying to optimize it? Am I trying to break it? Like, what am I trying to do?

And so if you take someone like Sam Harris, who would probably insert an answer something along the lines of, well, you don't understand, Tom, that you're trapped by your consciousness. And once you understand that there isn't a you and consciousness as two separate things, that it is, you are the noticing. There is nothing else.

Sure. And now what? So it's like, to me, recognizing that even a devout Buddhist is going to spend the majority of their time interfacing with the world based on, I need to eat, I need to sleep, I need to do these things. It's cool to have a gear that you can go into where you are less trapped by your frame of reference. That's extremely useful. But I don't think understanding the nature of consciousness would be the same as being able to control your state of consciousness,

which is far more useful. And to me, the way that you can interface with that is pure brain science. You don't have to understand whether it's fundamental or it's broadcast into your brain. I think most people would feel that the question which is most baffling and exciting for you of why is there something rather than nothing is inextricable and almost anonymous with the question of consciousness itself. Because only if they think that if they think dogs have consciousness, if they think snakes have consciousness,

bugs have consciousness, okay. Like if they're just thinking about all the different qualia, sure, but like a rock. So I do think that everything that is, that has a central nervous system, has some very minor degree of qualia. Because if you think about how would you get an amoeba to move towards something? Now, I don't know that they move towards light

because it's pleasurable, but I can certainly see how in these far advanced creatures, that's incredibly useful. And so it makes sense to me that from an evolutionary standpoint, that you would very quickly, with however few cells you can get that across, you would get across that it's like something to see your food source, that that feels positive or negative. I would expect that to feel some type of way. But I would not expect, say, a computer to feel some type of way about being plugged in. Now, I could be wrong about that. And if I am, that'll be certainly interesting. They'll be like, oh, wow, what a trip. And then I'll move on just because I'm so busy trying to navigate life, right? So, and I'm not denying that if I found out that a computer had consciousness,

I would be fascinated by the fact that the computer has consciousness. I now want to engage with it in a new way, or now I am engaging with it in a new way. But it isn't where it comes from that matters. It's, does it have it? Like, can I interact with it? So you would think that silicon systems would be incompatible with hosting consciousness by substrate and not having a central nervous system? Only because I think of, I think we're in a rules-based universe. I think that this is completely, you have qualia because signals are firing in your brain, and there is something that ends up creating that sense. Like what all people do when they say,

well, maybe it's outside of us, or maybe it's fundamental. You're just pushing the mystery farther away instead of just grappling with it right here and right now. So I think most people would agree that the difference between the experiences of an amoeba and the experiences of us are going to be fundamentally different. And so then I say, okay, is it fundamentally different

because of the complexities of the biology? I would say so. if they won't grant me that, well, then it's just like, it's all magic. It's literally magic. Even to say that it's broadcast in, it's not broadcast, you're using technology that you understand, which is rules-based, by the way. At that point, it's literally magic. And we're just like all existing inside of God's thoughts or something.

And that, to me, is far less interesting than a rules-based deterministic universe. Sure, but you could not write off like transatlantic. mission theory just because it resembles a radio station or that, you know, there are, to me, way more buckets of possible explanations of consciousness. And I have no idea which one is right. Well, let's run a thought experiment. Let's do it. Okay. I have the answer. It is, it's transmission. Okay. Now what? If transmission theory is the answer, it would give us a lot of intel of where to stop looking. So we would start. What are you looking for? Well, the explanation of the origin and conception of consciousness. If it's not in our neuronal structure, okay, well, that gives us at least one

less area or avenue to be exploring. So you're just fascinated by understanding the origin of it, and that captures your imagination. To me, I mean, to me, I think that I am very fascinated about finding out who we are and what we are. And so if something like, transmission theory would be the example, which is like our brains and antenna for consciousness to some degree. If you damage the hardware, of course, the signal that you would receive to transmit the consciousness would less be there. But it doesn't mean that consciousness is a byproduct from unconscious neuronal complexity, like from the materialist view. To me, yeah, that's the question I'm interested in. It would point us in a direction to see,

okay, if it is transmitted from where, from who, why, it doesn't end my inquiry, but it certainly would point us in a direction if, and it's a big if, this thought experiment somehow magically dropped in the answer for consciousness. Okay, do you think that that rides on the back of fascination, or does it ride on the back of scientific inquiry that you plan to leverage in some way? me personally I'm very fascinated and if we're talking about society at large it would for sure you will it solve your suffering I don't know if solving suffering is the point and I don't think it's what I'm necessarily after do you have you pinpointed what you are after like is it because

if it's fascination I certainly understand that some things are just so interesting you'd want the answer other things are like if I can understand how that thing works I can do something with it or even a oneness with God or the universe is there do you imagine a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow even if that if it's peace or oneness or um transcending the human experience like is there some thing that you hope to get i would say earlier on my journey the seeking was much stronger in terms of uh needing some sort of existential answer and certainty on what this all is i've let that go largely because it bothered you not to know Honestly, because I just think, yes, I'm more at ease with the unknown for whatever reason now.

So at one point it was a bit of distress, not overwhelming, but a bit of distress. And so you were seeking answers to alleviate that discomfort. I would say so. Okay. Now it's shifted. Now it shifted into curiosity. curiosity and who and what we are would determine really what is going on here. What is this, why is there something rather than nothing?

What, why is this set up in the rule set that it is? Is that the most interesting question in the world or a useful answer that you will do something with? Could it not be both? I just want to know for you because I am, I have a dead spot to this. I don't understand what pull. people towards that. And so it's actually endlessly fascinating for me to understand, like, what is it that pulls people to that?

Because this really, like, every time I expect people to be like, yeah, it doesn't really matter. Like, people really care about this, but I don't share. It's like a mad, okay, I love black licorice, but most people don't. And I weep for them because black licorice is so good. And so I imagine this is what it's like on the other side. When you're like, what? I cannot understand why people are pursuing that. Okay, so it isn't necessarily that it's not a utility play.

It's not like, okay, hey, I can get this thing, and that's going to alleviate my suffering, or maybe I can trans. Maybe this is a simulation, and if I can find the source, I can exit the simulation. And what an adventure that would be. It's not that. I find some fascination in there too, but to me it's a, it's an orientation towards expanding my base of knowledge. And that to me, as this, you know, a tenant of wisdom would be prospectival metacognition, meaning the more perspectives of you, of you understanding who you are and the context you live in, allows you to orient towards what's most meaningful in life. Do you think meaning is extort?

or internal? Internal. Okay. If meaning is internal, how will finding that external answer change something for you? Is it a point of leverage to peel you off of something you feel stuck on?

I would say in the same way that gaining information from many different external stimuli, such as having a child, provides a new sense of understanding of what meaning is internally. Does it provide something new or is that nature reaching inside your brain and saying,

you now care about this? Sure. I guess in that example that, you know. Okay, so are you expecting something similar to where it's like, okay, you get there, you've got the answer, you open the door, and it's like a guy, he's like, Mr. Beast, he's like, I'm waiting. You made it. Guys, confetti. You got here.

You get the prize. And it becomes that, like, new transformational thing that you have. because kids is a profound, like if you're on the path to answer that question, the way that somebody would be on that path to have a child, now I at least get it. I get where it's like, there are a small handful of things that you can do in life

that are just so in line with what nature wants you to do. Nature wants you to have kids. And when you have them, I don't have any. So I'm speculating based on everything that I see. But that's really transformational. And so I get why people, covet that, both from evolution wants you to covet it. So there's algorithms that push you to that. And then you get the massive reward when you actually do the thing. And so I'm wondering if that

sense of there's a profundity on the other end of this that will open a new chamber of meaning, the way that becoming a parent opens a chamber of meaning that people like me that don't have kids are permanently exiled from, that you can step in and it's like, whoa, I never could have imagined the depth that this understanding would bring to my life? That certainly would open up a lot of those doors for me. So yes, is my answer to that question. I'm still not getting it. That's interesting. Because I'm simply dumbfounded by existence, and I've had my own experiences. I've certainly heard way more through others in terms of their trans-personal, mystical experiences.

Meaning they leave their body? What is trans-personal mean? Trans-personal meaning literally beyond personal, meaning there is this individual egoic self. Just ego death? Not just ego death, that's one tenet. I think William James has this four tenets of ineffability and noetic, these qualities of subjective, trans-personal, religious experiences. that when you experience in taste in existence

that seems ontologically way more vast than the daily waking consciousness that we're walking around with, it always tastes more real. We see this in not only transpersonal experiences in meditative states, but also in psychedelic journeys, where you have an experience that is way more real,

ontologically speaking, than normal waking consciousness. I am super open to the idea that this is all just happening within our brain, and it's a hallucination of sorts. I am also open to the idea that that and we can exist in a bigger context than just our mind and our body.

I don't know that. I don't know if we can prove that. I think that these experiences... And you think that finding the answer to where consciousness comes from answers those questions? I don't know. Maybe it would be exhaustive of finding the answers to this question. It's maybe it wouldn't.

I am simply I am simply curious I just want I just want to know not because it'll provide me with a new set of like a more advanced utility to be able to do things on the planet I think that I'm just endlessly fascinated about and this is what happens when you ask somebody why

so many times and you keep going back into a fundamental essentially like a value you know and to me, there is the wisdom aspect of this of what it means to live a life well lived and with meaning. To me, there is just the nature of the human mind is curious and wants to know and is not satisfied with how ignorant we are.

I also question the potential incompatibility with this inquiry. Some of these experiences internally, right? These transpersonal experiences are fundamentally not. non-rational, not irrational, as opposed to an equation that just doesn't make sense, but that they are incompatible with logic and reason in and of themselves. And so I don't know, even if it is possible for Mr. Beesle of the visual of Mr. Beast

popping through as an archetype in the matrix with the giving you an answer that suffices the logical conquest or search for semblance and explanation of reason. reality. It might fundamentally just be more complex than we could even conceive. And I don't see how it could it be that way, actually. So in some sense, I feel like it's a futile endeavor to ever try to be able to logically explain what the hell is going on here. But it is a fun journey. Listening to you, and I don't know that I'll be able to say this in a way that you'll recognize, either because I'm just wrong and that's why you don't recognize it, or because I don't have the We don't have shared language.

But when you were talking, I had a sense that you're living in some ways in a poetic state. And there's a rhyme scheme to the pursuit of, not rhyme scheme. There's a, when you write poetry, which I have to believe you've done, when you write poetry, you step into a world that has completely different logic. and things you can say in a poem you would never say in real life. It would sound absolutely ridiculous. But you can say them within the logic bubble of the poem itself.

I have a feeling, at least using my words, to map onto you, that there is some sense of being able to live in like a poetic way. Whereas I don't live in a poetic way. I can write poetry and step into that zone. But when I'm living life, it is, it's a novel. It's prose.

So it's interesting, which would explain why I don't find interest in that, that particular pursuit. Like, as you were talking about it, I thought, the way I imagine this is, if I were walking by a classroom or a lecture hall and they were about to announce it, as I'd walk by, I'd see you sitting in the room waiting to hear this answer. And I would tell my friend who I'm talking to, hold on a second, I do want to hear what they have to say. And like, as we sort of walk by, listen, oh, wow, that's interesting. And then I would just keep walking down the hall. Because I get it. I get why, like, it's a question of interest. I just don't, I'm not existing in that sort of poetic sense of like, no matter what the answer is, it's still a core focus for me.

Anyway. Which I think is the beauty of the human experience that we have these different dispositions. No doubt. And thank you, by the way, for letting me explore that with you. I find it so interesting to see how other people make contact with ideas or life or whatever. That was very helpful. I don't know that I actually mapped how you feel about it, but it's a very interesting glimpse into how differently we experience that.

Yeah, I don't even know if I map how I feel about it. I think that it's an ever-evolving journey, and I think that as you mentioned earlier, you start to question your base assumptions. What are the a priori that we're currently looking through? And I think that any matured intellect, not only, as it's been said, has the ability to hold paradox,

but you realize that there are things you don't know, you don't know. And so that's why I really try to approach these subjects with epistemic humility, as I feel that you do, that you are open to change your mind, given new information. At all times. But the thing I think,

may be different for us, is I am so goal-oriented of everything I choose to pursue, I am seeking utility from that thing. Do you not think that taken to an extreme is dangerous? No. I live it. So it's, you would have to define, like, what is a life well-lived to really be able to have that conversation. But for me, I know that I'm having what I call a biological experience. So my job is essentially to get as aligned with the algorithms in my brain that will make me feel

either fulfilled, which I think is if you asked me to just in a single word name my North Star, I would say fulfilled, and make sure that I'm not doing things that will make me feel dis-eased. And that is what I optimize for. And I think that there's a very knowable formula for that, which is you have to work really hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to make progress, not achieve, make progress towards a goal that uplifts you an honorable goal, I should say, that uplifts you and others and makes you feel like you're contributing to the group. and making progress as you do it. If you do that, life is going to be good.

If you don't do that, you will feel a profound sense of dis-ease. So that's when I hear isn't that dangerous, I hear somebody who is always feeling a profound sense of dis-ease, who does not feel at ease in their skin, who does not enjoy their life, who is not looking forward to the future, who is not, joyful is not able to have relationships with others.

That strikes me as quote unquote dangerous. Sure. I suppose when I say dangerous, that perspective in one aspect, Thomas Berry is quoted saying that the universe is not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects. And when the human endeavor is oriented around extraction, utility, you know, what can be used for the betterment of self, for the other, which in certain contexts, I think, is beautiful.

But I guess where I am concerned and want to just inquire, if we can just turn the tables here, it was fun, what you did with me. It's what happens when you invite other interviews. Is that, and I'm not trying to project into your experience, I want to ask what's alive and real for you. That, to me, can orient your life in such a way where you view relationships, businesses, almost everything, as a means to fulfill your own individualistic pursuits, which in and of itself I don't think is bad but can become toxic when you forget that you live

in a larger context of a bigger whole. And it also reduces life down to a set of mechanisms as opposed to a, as Thomas Barry quoted, communion of subjects, which is a more poetic way to put it, But do you understand what I'm pointing out? I understand completely and think that you're missing a fundamental fact, and Thomas Berry is missing a fundamental fact, which is that it's all mechanisms all the way down. So when he thinks about communing with other subjects, he's forgetting that those subjects have to eat

and that they are going to have to take care of their personal hygiene, and they're going to have resentments and loves and heartbreak and joys, and all of those things are neurochemical states. And if you derange those neurochemical states by not getting enough sleep, by doing drugs, by eating poorly, you are going to be incapable of communing with the other subjects. And so life is a set of mechanisms at all times. A failure to recognize that you're having a biological experience is the great evil of our time. so people don't take care of their mental health, they don't take care of their body,

they don't understand that they are trapped in a body. Even if we have a God that God chose to put us in bodies. So all of those things are very real, and anybody that has been married to a woman that has gone through menopause will tell you real fast, things really change. And if you, in your 20s, new, holding your wife's hand,

hey, one day you're going to go through a process. During that process, divorce rates skyrocket. I'm going to be here with you, but we have to agree on what the terms of engagement are. Like, these are hormonal changes. They're real, but if you assume that just because you have an emotion, that that's something that you should act out at full volume,

then we're going to run into problems. and that acknowledging that, yes, this is a biological experience, and yes, I have to manage what I'm going through, and yes, I need to understand the mechanisms so that I'm not beholden to them, that you can transcend a lot of your biology through the prefrontal cortex, but you have to understand your biology before you can transcend it.

And so when people fail to recognize their biology or fail to trick themselves, into finding the sacred, then they will derail. Now, you said that you were worried that the way that I look at the world can run into an iceberg of basically being obsessed with self. Or nihilism in general. Perfect. And what I said was fulfillment has a very specific formula. And part of it is it must be an honorable goal that serves not only yourself but others.

Okay, so that's the means to the end that utility is. is serving. It's what evolution demands of you. And if you don't do it, you will feel horribly. If somebody came to me and said, I'm considering suicide, I would say, go work at a hospice. Go give to somebody else. Go get out of your own head and serve. And it won't work for everybody, but boy, oh boy, when you put a smile on somebody else's face, you suddenly go, I get why I'm here now. So the question is, why does that work? And I don't think it works because God reaches into your head and goes, I'm happy to see you finally doing what I wrote down in chapter six.

It is because this is a rules-based universe. And evolution had to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids, to function flexibly in large groups. And one of the ways that it did it, and it did it, by the way, because it's so easy to starve to death or freeze to death when you're on your own. and we group up specifically for reasons of survival and procreation. And so if, when we were talking about qualia, there's only two levers, man, pleasure and pain,

that's it. If I want you to do something and I'm God, the universe evolution, whatever, I'm going to make it pleasurable. So you're going to move towards it. If I want you to move away from it, then I'm going to make it painful. And there's all kinds of complex interchanges in there. we all know the like melancholy of being homesick is both glorious and brutal at the same time. So I'm not saying that it isn't this complex, wonderful tapestry of a million colors. It certainly is.

But it really boils down to make that which is the thing that's going to keep you alive long enough to have kids to have kids pleasurable and make the things that will lower your chances of doing that displeasurable. and you get pretty close. So I'm trying to live in alignment with that and then knowing that whatever entity created us decided to go, yeah, but context matters a lot. So boom, here's a culturally relevant value system. And so I can alter what gives me the feeling of,

I'm proud of myself, based on contextual cues or based on things that I just decide to change. So if I grow up a Christian, well, then I'm going to feel good about staying true to the Bible. If I grow up a Muslim, I'm going to feel good about staying true to the Quran. And those are culturally relevant things that I don't think are based in reality.

They're just based on cultural flexibility, which is necessary from an evolutionary standpoint. So we live in a time that is incredibly disenchanted. We feel like largely we are living a simulacrum of our life, especially as the loneliness and anxiety epidemics continue to rise, and we're living through these social media feeds as opposed to intimate connections. I think that as AI slop in particular continues to take the scene, we feel the sense of meaninglessness.

We feel that life becomes black and white or kind of colorblind a bit. And I think what you explained in the former about utility without the context of towards what end, which you did mention, but it was brief, but it was there about the fulfillment and that side of things, to me, can lead people towards what's the point, what's the point, right? What is it that you think that is irreducibly human? Because as cognitive labor continues, and we see intelligence systems continue to take center stage, the question of who am I and what am I supposed to do with my life continues to come into the picture. So what is it that you think is, if any, that is irreducibly human? Well, I mean, humans are a thing. So in terms of, let's say that you had a robot that can do the things that you do better, it's still a robot. And so it isn't a human doing those things.

And so just like we can enjoy both men's and women's sports, even though they are very different. And, you know, the vast majority of physical sports, men are going to out-compete women like crazy. But you're still going to see women's sports and see people get very invested in that. I think that's what it will be like to have superior intelligence rise beside us and surpass us. we will have to say, but I care about this thing because it's all the weird complexities of our brain,

just if you really want to know what's the thing that's irreducibly us, we're the only ones with a human brain, which controls literally our entire existence. So you know nothing

about the world without your brain. You cannot interact with anything without your brain. The things you're attracted to come from your brain, so on and so forth. And then if you'll let me expand it to our bodies,

throw in the microbiome, which is hugely influential, you get the sort of biological experience is the thing that is irreducibly human, which is why I'm trying to remind people you're having a biological experience. So don't be confused by this. Don't let it run away with you. There are ways to enjoy it. There are ways to be abused by it if you're not understanding what's happening.

So that's why I say one of the four paths will be to be concretely and definitionally human. I don't engage with AI. I don't engage with advanced technologies. So I think people will do that. But the far, far, far more important thing from where I'm sitting, which is maybe the crux of our slight different worldviews, I'll be interested to see how you think of this,

is that to me, I don't believe there is meaning. There is only the things that we assign meaning. And I think evolution gives us a push. I think most people, the default is you have a kid, you will instantly, things will trigger in your brain, you'd be like, I've got to keep that alive. And that will give you a profound sense of meaning, which is why people are so willing to sacrifice for them. So that's one that I'll say you get for free. It's pre-programmed. Your kids are going to move away eventually. And you're going to be left going, how do I have meaning now? Or if you're a guy, you're probably prone to find meaning in your job. So it's like, well, job ends at some point. Maybe you got fired. Maybe you got paralyzed. You can't work anymore. How do you find meaning in that? You assign it. And anybody that's done endurance athletes or endurance sports or has tried to get really lean, you very quickly realize, oh, there is an endless amount of suffering here. And I have to give this suffering a meaning. And that is

uber profound in how effective it is at giving you psychological energy. I have to imagine you and every one of your listeners has already read Victor Frankl's book, Man Search for Meaning. For anybody that hasn't, quick speed run, he was in Auschwitz,

concentration camp, ends up surviving, ends up writing a book about it. And he said that within 72 hours, you would know exactly who was going to die in the camps because the second they gave up and they no longer had meaning, they were going to die.

But the people who were like, I'm suffering through this so I can get back to my family, or I'm suffering through this because I'm going to build a business or write a book or whatever, they stayed through. So meaning is evolution's way of making you resilient. It gave you this little box. You can put something in the box or not. It's completely up to you. But if you put something in the box, now you've got that momentum to keep pushing through,

to go after something. but speaking from firsthand, I have changed the thing that my whole life was pointed out, besides my marriage. That's the one constant. There have been times where I'm like, my whole life is about building

the greatest protein bar company ever. Now my whole life is about content. Now my whole life is about professional life. My whole life is about the video game. And there's been no friction stopping one phase and moving the other. I open the box. I put a new thing in.

It's very conscious. I have a whole process for how I cement that things meaning in my life. And so because I understand that this is a biological experience, because I understand evolution gave me that box, but that I need to put something inside of it, I have become emotionally resilient because I actually want the things that I'm pursuing. And as long as the thing you're pursuing is honorable, then you're in line with the evolutionary algorithms

that are telling you to go contribute. Can you recapitulate then the core, tenants of what brings you meaning in your life. From the high level overview, how would you explain that? So fulfillment is the easiest way to explain it, which is what evolution wants you to do is stay alive long enough to have kids that have kids. And so everything that is in alignment with that is going to give your life meaning. Now you can associate, I'm doing all of this for my children. That's the default. So if people want to understand meaning, meaning a parent gets it right away.

Soon as the kid came, they're like, yo, my whole life is about them. It is an amazing trick that evolution pulls. Now, if you don't have that, that default answer, no worries. You have the same box that they have that a child pops out of. You can put whatever you want there. It can be, I do all of this for my wife. That for me is a big one. I would literally die for my wife, not figuratively, literally.

I work as hard as I work because I want to provide for her. Now, that's a fascinating conversation because she would ask me, hey, don't do as much for me. I would rather have more time with you and be less successful than do what you do now. And I said, you're misunderstanding the male psyche. And the reality is, I have a program in me that's different for everybody, but my program is ambition is dialed to 11. Now, if you think about what is evolution trying to do? It's trying to make sure I survive long enough to have kids and have kids. Okay, so ambition to get out there, to have status, to be a good hunter or whatever, to

contribute to make sure others would look after me, if I were injured or whatever, to make sure I'm important and I can get the resources that I need to my family. So men have ambition. Cool. I'm going to do it for someone. It can be you or I can find someone else. But you can't remove yourself from that box and think that I will be okay. if you take yourself out of that box,

now I have to put somebody more important than you in that box. And so she understood that was dangerous. And so even though she has, to our marriage, so even though she understands that that's not her ideal, she would actually rather I work less. One of the first things I told her before she married me was you can ask me to give up anything but my ambition. I don't even want to know who I would be without my ambition.

So that is the ride that you're signing up for. Now, at the time, I didn't have the words to say, oh, and by the way, I'm going to do all of this for you, even though you may not want me to go as far as I know that I'm going to go because of the level of ambition that I feel. And so you have to navigate that and all that. But anyway, my wife sits in that box. And so I work as hard as I work for her. I am always thinking about her when I'm doing hard things.

When there is suffering to be done in the relationship, I take it on and say, like, it can be something silly. Like, there's only one egg left at the restaurant. And I'm like, my wife gets at 100%. I'll go hungry if I have to, but a thousand percent she's going to get the egg. It can be something serious that, you know, we're, the business is going through a hard time. Then, hey, go relax. Stop your day at normal time. I will fight through this. I am a warrior and I am fighting on your behalf. That gives me meaning. So, We all get to decide what that is, but the formula is that you're working hard. I think we have an algorithm that says if we're not working hard, we will not feel good about

ourselves. So we're working hard to gain a set of skills that allows to make progress towards that honorable goal that is done in service of, in my case, my wife, for many people, their children, some people to save the world, whatever, they've got something in that box, but it's an honorable goal. It isn't just for yourself. It's contributing to the group in some way. That can be your family, it can be the larger community, whatever. But if you're doing something for others and not just for yourself, then evolution pats you on the head and says, good job, kid, keep it up. Not to at all therapies you, but what is, who is Tom without his ambition? Because I understand

I'm having a biological experience, I would, if for some reason, and the most likely is, let's call it Andropause. So my hormones change and I just don't feel ambitious anymore. Because I'm so aware that I'm having a biological experience, I would go, okay, cool, we don't want to chase anything big anymore. Scale doesn't matter to us at this point. But there's no escape having meaning. You must have meaning in your life. So what's it going to be? What are you going to pursue? Why does it matter? for me, I would go to, if it had to be something that I could do effectively for free for whatever reason, I would write, and I would try to imbue stories largely aimed at kids with values that will help them, do well in life, be emotionally stable, feel good about themselves, be capable,

and now it would make me feel tremendously good. I would feel like I was serving in a way that is unique to me, that aims at the same, that aims, something that really matters. And it would just be me essentially taking the scale out of the equation. But to sort of artificially try to vivisect ambition out of my brain would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the human experience. So I've been loving all the various rabbit holes we've been diving into. And I think they actually have been incredibly fruitful because as we started earlier on in this

conversation and you've shared on your shows and in conversation you believe that we are within maybe 900 to thousand days to the potential end of capitalism or rewriting what it means to be human in a context, an ambitious person who wants to build something in a world where there might be universal abundance and which might not need you to do anything. And so not only for yourself, but for the world at large we are potentially entering an age where we need to rewrite our value system in accordance with ambition and drive and conquest because there's really nothing that we need to purely achieve if all of our needs are fundamentally met. You said, I mean, on the economic side of things, which would probably be another two-hour

or three-hour podcast in and of itself, you know, this K-shaped economy. And people are, I think, why are they feeling the effects of inflation? They're feeling the effects of a system that's rigged against them without having full context and awareness to why that is the case. So how would you explain, what is one thing that you would share about the way our current system is rigged

that people aren't fully aware of? Okay. This is incredibly important, and I really want people to listen. I'm going to say it really simply knowing that I'm oversimplifying it so they understand the core mechanism but what they have to understand is right now,

if you save your money, your purchasing power is being stolen from you on purpose as a part of a known system. So if you equate your purchasing power with your money being stolen, you're not literally correct, but you're correct. So now to say it, slightly abstracted, but in a way that we'll hopefully cut

through the noise, your money's being stolen from you by politicians and central bankers. And if you're not investing in the stock market or in assets, it could be Pokemon cards, but not my advice, if you're not investing in assets, you're being stolen from. If you invest in assets, you're using the same escape hatch that all of the people trying to steal from you are using. So now you're in their system. They can't hurt you without hurting themselves. So it is this very simple escape pod.

It's available to anybody, but you actually have to get in the escape pod. And I've really, really tried to get people to understand you're being stolen from mechanistically. All the shouting in the world isn't going to stop it. You have to get rid of the central bank and return to sound money, which we're not going to do, not in anywhere near approaching a short time frame. And right now, honestly, even I don't think I would advocate for an immediate stop to that. I think it would be so destructive. It would spiral the world into a depression, the likes of which we've never seen. You have to wean yourself off of this heroin. So, yeah, it really is that simple. Now, I can say a lot more words and I can

get more accurate, but the punchline is what I just said. Punchline being invest in assets. If you don't own assets, your money is being stolen from you knowingly. So can you zoom in a bit on the mechanism of how our money is actually being stolen from us? If you look at big money, where does it lead? Well, so thinking of it as big money is not going to help you? Probably not. You're voting for your own demise.

So that's the real problem. So what people have to understand is there is literally, really no free lunch. So if we have a deficit in the government, what ends up happening is it creates cash flow around the world, so it feels good. There's a reason people do central banks. They're not all bad. But on a long enough timeline, they always kill the empire, always. Not most of the time, always. And so what America is going through right now is the death of debt. We've taken on so much debt so that we could run all of these deficits every year so everybody could get what they want, that now the empire is quite literally dying. And there is a way out of it,

but I'll speed run the way out just so people don't have to nest any ideas. The way out of it is for the economy to grow faster than they steal your money. There's a way to do it. It's actually called financial repression via yield curve control. A lot of fancy words. But just know, There is a way out. The bad news is America's become so dysfunctional, and we've outsourced everything. The only thing growing in America is AI and the financial markets. So the whole world has made one big bet on AI coming real fast enough

that the revenues start flowing in from AI before the debt explodes. And it's a game of chicken. And historically speaking, the winds are all in the dead explodes camp. So no revolutionary new technology has ever not had this sort of dip of despair where all the early investors in that new technology get wiped out.

Think about the dot-com bubble when that burst. Internet's still real. Internet does this thing. And eventually people make ungodly amounts of money. Think of Jeff Bezos. He made money on the Internet. And so it will pay off. it just takes a lot longer.

And so that debt blows up first. Now, the debt right now in AI is very dangerous. Doesn't mean that there's going to be a problem. In the same way, you could ride down the freeway sitting on the roof of your car while your toddler drives. Maybe you're fine. But it's not the way I advise getting to work. So you've got that looming.

So the way that the mechanism is working right now. is you've got people voting for deficits. The deficits create the money sloshing around the system, but it also means that what's paying for your deficits is actually you. So all of us pay via inflation. The way that inflation works is that you have goods and services, but now you have more money chasing the same goods and services. When you have supply and demand changes where the supply stays fixed and the demand goes up,

they get more expensive. So you've got more dollars chasing the same thing, inflation, things get more expensive. Okay, so you thought you got the stuff for free by voting for the politician to give you the free stuff, but in reality, he stole it from you via inflation. So then your life got a little bit worse because the people who understand the system, they owned assets. Those assets rose with inflation.

So now when they need cash, they just sell some of those assets and they have post-inflation dollars to buy the post-inflation prices. So for them, they stay as rich as they were. You think they're getting richer. They're actually just keeping pace with inflation, but whatever.

And so now you've got, you're getting poorer because you didn't own assets, but you got the thing you voted for, which they told you was free, but it wasn't free. They robbed from you with inflation. The guy that understood inflation

didn't get any poorer. So you paid for it. He got protection. So he got inflated, but he also got post-inflation dollars off of his assets. And that's how the game works. And that's why the rich get richer

and the poor get poorer. It's really not rich and poorer. It's people who own assets keep up with inflation. People who don't own assets fall behind inflation. Do you, if you think it's at all useful to speak about who or how the system got rigged in its conception of the Federal Reserve, a fiat currency, where do you draw this back to?

I love these questions, but I'll try to speed run it just because your audience will probably glaze over. This gets so technical, so fast. Let's think of it as a conspiracy. Not too hard to think of that. What is that? So at the founding of our nation, Alexander Hamilton said, we should not have a central bank. Then he changed his mind and said, we're going to have a central bank because we need the debt to turn us from an agrarian society into an industrial society. But we're going to put, it was like a 19 or 20 year fuse on it.

And at that time, at the end of that period, the central bank will automatically be closed. And so they did it. America becomes an absolute industrial powerhouse because we were able to print money and just invest. inflate everybody to death, but reinvest that into building everything that we needed to build. Then we killed it off, and the money went back to being sound so that the government couldn't keep doing all the deficit spending. So he understood this is how empires die, but he also understood debt is very useful. But the dose makes the poison.

Use it for a little bit. Get out from under it. Using your growth, because we were growing so fast at that point that we could pay off all that debt, we were good to go. Okay. Now, flash forward. 1913, bankers behind the scenes decide, we've got to get this passed. They try to get it passed with like different names and stuff and they can't get it through. They finally decide to call it the Federal Reserve, which sounds like there's going to be something held in reserves and it's the government. It's neither. It's private bankers who make money out of thin air and then charge anybody, the government or anybody else.

interest for that money that they just created out of thin air. So it's legalized counterfeiting. We've given private citizens the ability to do it. There's oversight from the government, but still, these are private bankers that are able to make money out of thin air. So they are incentivized to create as much money as possible because they collect the interest on that money. They don't need you to ever pay it back because they didn't pay anything to create it. It's just created out of thin air. So they just want the interest payments. Now, that works if you're fiscally responsible. You have a little bit of debt floating around the system. You can aggregate capital to build extraordinary things like New York City.

But when you start letting that stack, you run into trouble. Now, the promise in the right after World War II was that, hey, the U.S. has come out of all of this unscathed. And because everybody owed us so much money, because we were the ones basically loaning people money, because we were the ones, basically loaning people money because we were the industrial powerhouse thanks to Alexander Hamilton, and we had sound money at that point. We were in a great fiscal situation. So we end up loaning people money now during World War II. It gets crazy and we start deficit spending as well. I'll explain how we get off money to that in a second. So we've got a great position. We hold all the gold. Everybody owes us money. We haven't been damaged. So we're still an industrial powerhouse.

We're growing like crazy. Now, at that point, something called Bretton Woods happens. And we, from a position of power, force the rest of the world to agree that the U.S. dollar is going to be the world's reserve currency. So all international global trade is going to be handled in dollars. That means people are going to need our debt all the time. Now, the way that a central bank gets money into circulation is through debt. Well, if you need debt, who's going to create that debt for you? So we're constantly selling our debt to the rest of the world. So there's all this hunger for our debt so we can deficit spend, create the debt. We know somebody's going to buy it. And so now it's like you don't even have to do all the printing of

money. You've got people that want to buy this stuff. Okay, great. Makes Americans super wealthy. So people start going, what's the time worried about? This is amazing. We have the exorbitant privilege, as they say. Everybody wants our debt. We can run deficits. People start snatching up the debt. Well, this is how empires die. Because eventually, you stop trying to balance your budget. You stop worrying about how much debt you're carrying. Now, what happened after World War II, we built up a ton of debt during the war. We come out. We do what I said earlier, financial oppression through yield curve control. We pay less interest on our bonds than inflation is. So owning a bond, you're losing money. But enough people do it that you basically allow the money

supply to inflate, because you're not having to pay as much out as you're inflating. And if the economy is growing by more than you're stealing, nobody complains. And that's exactly what happened. Our economy was so booming after World War II that our economy grew more than the government stole from us. So nobody complained. All was great. We went from like 130%, 120% debt to GDP ratio down to like 20 or 30%.

perfect. Amazing, work well, great timing, economy's booming, perfect way to do it. You get through the war with a victory. You rack up debts in an understandable period. You go back to fiscal responsibility with the booming economy. Okay, then in 1971, remember that Bretton Woods thing. Okay, and Bretton Woods, what we did was we agreed, everybody's going to use the U.S. dollar, but we're going to be good boys and girls. We're going to back it with gold. So if you buy our debt, you know that you can always exchange your dollars for a certain set amount of gold. And so people did it like crazy. But slowly we started saying, well, we're not going to hold a one-to-one in gold because most people aren't asking for it. So we're going to make it less and less and less and less until Nixon in 1971 finally said,

it's just not redeemable for gold anymore. Because I think France started really trying to redeem gold because they were getting. getting paranoid about all of our deficits and debts and wars and all that. So they're like, yeah, yeah, we want the gold. We don't trust the dollar anymore. And that's when we said, yeah, you're probably right not to trust it because we don't have the gold to match it. So sorry. And literally just said, you can no longer redeem your dollars for gold. And that meant we could print as much money as we wanted because there was no breaks from the gold that we had to keep in reserves at some ratio to the dollar. It went from one to one to infinite.

So now the U.S. government can spend as much money as it wanted. Now, the crazy thing is that ends up creating a boom in the stock market because people are like, I'm going to get inflated to death. So I have to buy assets. So people poured into the assets as a way to protect themselves from the inflation. And right there, you start that beginning of the K, and that's why if you've ever heard of WTF happened in 1971, that's what they're referring to.

We can now print infinite amounts of money, export inflation to everybody that holds dollars, U.S. citizens and foreigners, foreign people alike, because we're the world's reserve currency. Long story, we end up tying it to the petro dollar because Bretton Woods ended when we broke the relationship to gold. It doesn't really matter for now. Just know now it's backed instead of by gold. It's backed by oil, which may explain a lot of what happens in the Middle East. Okay, so now we're in a position where the government can just inflate money as much as they want. They can steal your purchasing power, but think of it as stealing your money as much as they want.

So if they want to bail out the tech sector during the dot-com crash or bail out banks during the dot-com crash, if they want to bail out banks during the housing crisis of 2008, they're going to do all of that. Same thing with COVID. And they've just been inflating, inflating, inflating. Over COVID, so over the last six years, they've inflated the money supply by 30%. That's why suddenly people like, wait a second, I just can't make ends meet. This is crazy. Because once prices go up, they don't come back down. So now you're locked at that higher rate.

Now, we're not increasing at 30% anymore. We're increasing at whatever, 3.4 or something like that. And that's certainly better than 30%, but it's 3.4% on top of the 30% over the last six years. So it's not like it came back down to zero, and now it's just growing at 3.4%. And so people that don't own assets are quite literally getting poorer every single day. So do you believe a crash is upon us?

No, to say that it's inevitable is to put yourself in a position where you're now being... You're creating it. Well, you're not being humble in the face of complex systems. So markets go up or down based on psychology and little else. Now, how many dollars you print makes people feel some type of way about the market, about the dollar. And so ultimately, they can get to the point where they start looking at. at, okay, you guys are inflating the dollar, you're getting crushed under all this debt. The debt that's present, the AI buildouts is terrifying.

I don't think the revenue is going to come in fast enough. Not that I don't think AI is real. I just don't think the revenue is going to come in fast enough. This is going to be like every other technological revolution in history where it's going to be this dip, what I call the dip of despair, where you've got people that are fully committed into AI. You get a dot-com style crash. it drops 70, 80, 90% in some cases.

Now, if you have a broadly diversified portfolio in the sector that's going to win, then in 10, 15, 20 years, you could be way ahead, but you might not break even for 10 or 15 years. So this is where people talk about the lost decade after the dot-com crash. So you never know if that's just going to be the end for you.

Are you going to be able to wait that long? Do you have the emotional stuff? to wait that long. So nobody knows if there's going to be a crash is the long and the short. It really is possible that AI is just so fundamentally different

that the money flows in fast enough. It's also possible that people leave their money in because they know I'm diversified and on the other side I'm going to weather this storm and so it stays relatively contained. I feel almost ridiculous saying that out loud.

But anyway, there are certainly ways this could play out. It really becomes a question of risk appetite, but being right about the thesis and getting the timing wrong is the same as being wrong. That's the problem. And so that's where diversification comes in. You have to diversify against truly economic forces. So having seven different AI stocks is not diversification. You really have to diversify against different forces. So you want as many things as you can get where, oh, this one goes down, but this one goes up, they don't go down together.

You want as many, like, sort of mismatches as humanly possible. It'll all balance out to a much smaller return than if you go all in on something, but it's far less risky. Warren Buffett has been very clear about the fact that basically only fools diversify because it's insurance against ignorance. But the reality is, all of us, I mean, unless you're a trader who measures their trades in, like, milliseconds, you're ignorant to a whole lot of things. things. So that's where I would say be super humble and just try to protect yourself from your

own ignorance. But you can't sit outside of the market, not entirely, because you'll get inflated to nothing. Yeah. To wrap a bow on that, if you had a megaphone and you wanted to shout a message to everyone in the Western world, what would you say is most important to say? Uh, I mean, okay, this is not going to be the answer that you think. Uh, the most important thing that I would shout to the Western world is you need to define your values and be willing to fight for them. Otherwise, you will lose the West.

If I could just round it for everybody to the scientific method, just think enlightenment. You'll get pretty close. The next most important thing, I would say, is the best thing life has to offer you is requited love.

So go find yourself some of that. If we want to go down the list and find our way to finance, then I would say you have to understand it well enough to know where to put your money, otherwise you're going to be stolen from until you are broke. It is so easy to get off the bottom of the K, but you actually have to do it.

You have to invest a meaningful amount of money into assets that are diverse, that are uncorrelated, and you have to do it relentlessly for the next 20 to 30 years. And that's going to be how you win. But if you do that, history says you will retire wealthy. It's that most people don't do it. They ignore the best piece of advice in the markets, which is to buy low and sell high. And they've heard that so many times,

they think it's a joke, and they think that they will do it. And the one thing I will say categorically that they won't do, they won't buy low and sell high. They'll buy high and sell low. Because when the price is high, everybody's talking about it.

It seems like a sure bet. There's so much energy. You feel like I can't lose. Everyone's telling you you can't lose. And then when it crashes, you probably got out over your skis, you completely lose faith in the markets as a system, and you go, maybe this time is different,

and we don't recover. I need to get my money out. I can't watch it go. I've just lost 50%. I can't watch it go to 60. I can't do it. I got to get out. That's what everybody does.

And that's why the cliche is the cliche. The only piece of advice you need is to buy low and sell high. So when people are saying, oh, this is trash, you've got to buy it and be right that it's going to go up from there. And then when it's up, sell. Don't hold it thinking it's going to go up more and more and more. Set a number before it gets there and say, if I, double my money, triple my money, whatever your number is, when it gets there,

no matter how much of a rocket ship it seems like this is on, I'm going to sell. Two-part question, what would be your P-Doom? And how much, because we mentioned it earlier, do you think the way that we orient towards what might happen creates the future that we are worried about? So my P-Dome is probably 20%, and that's really just admitting that there are certainly is a possibility, I don't hold the belief that intelligence is intrinsically consumptive. So I think what we've done is trained AI on what it means to be a super smart human who wants their goal at all costs and therefore will go and get their goal at all costs, which is why

evolution had to solve for morality in humans. And so humans have morality so that they're intrinsically checked. No one's watching. I'm not going to do that thing because I'm stuck in my own mind. And that will make me dislike myself or lose my own respect, whatever. So I'm not going to do it. It doesn't matter whether I'm being watched or not. If we don't find a way to solve for that with AI, yes, we're going to have a problem.

We know what humans look like when they're sociopathic. They just take advantage of everybody everywhere all at once. So we do have to solve for that problem, but it is admittedly a problem. I haven't looked closely enough at to just be like, oh, they'll figure it out. I think it's very worth us slowing down and clearly delineating. This is weapons grade, and we don't allow people to do that that don't have clearance from the government. And this is civilian use, and cool, companies can go and do that in the same way that we don't

just let people make nuclear weapons. So where exactly will draw that line? I'll leave people like Connor Leahy to speak to that. This is what he does for a living. It is not what I do for a living, so I will just say, I'm sure Connor, I know Connor's working on, I've asked him about it. So there are people actively working on how you draw that line between the two. The companies are now asking for it. We have to be hyper paranoid about regulatory capture, but this is one where I will remind myself and everybody else.

I'm not a libertarian, so I do want the government to get involved. I want them to do it sensibly. But yeah, we're going to need somebody to say, this is weapons grade. We don't do that. and then this is not. Now, how do we end up bringing this on ourselves? I think more, like, even market crashes, it's like people can freak out all they want.

Most people are going to stay focused on the fundamentals. And so you can weather the sort of ups and downs of the market. It's like real crashes or when, like, the system breaks, which you can certainly talk about if you want, but I don't think your audience will find it very interesting. But just know, the system can break. It has a respiratory system that extends all over the globe. When that seizes up, you get 2008.

So people talking about depressions and stuff like that, it'll make people paranoid, they'll pull back on money, that might cause a recession. In fact, that's probably a good way to think of it. We can talk ourselves into a recession. We're probably not going to talk ourselves into a depression. The depression comes when people take on too much debt, they get out over their skis, they get wiped out in what could otherwise be, you know, a year or two of a recession. They just get obliterated because they were over-invested. they were convinced they couldn't lose. And so the mechanism, more than just the talking about it or how you create the problem.

Now, you could say that's all downstream of people's public confidence and all that, and fair enough. But anyway, there's a difference between confidence among the general public and people doing a mechanistically dangerous thing. So, yeah, I would be mildly careful about that. But I would say the thing that people need to really worry about right now is make sure you understand the mechanism of how you're being stolen from on that side, inflation. stop voting for people that are going to run unbalanced budgets and then make sure on the AI side that you support people that want to keep doing the civilian side and absolutely insist that we make a delineation

between what's weapons grade and what's civilian use. Part of navigating as a podcaster, it's like there's so many tangents. It's what we're here to do is like there's so many avenues I could pull on. I feel it, trust me. the financial and economic stuff for me is personally interesting and would love to I'll go as deep as you want to go. Yeah.

We all feel something is bubbling to the surface, you know, and we don't know what exactly that thing is, but it is a very wild time to be alive given what we'll likely see in our lifetime. Yeah. I do find it fascinating that the first two you gave were like value clarification and finding required love. You know, that's like, what is actually the most meaningful, enhanced for everyone's individual life? Maybe I can, let's do like a couple quick rapid fire.

Sure. And before we do that, man, I mean, your mind is endlessly fascinating. I love this conversation and I feel like we keep on going for hours and hours. Thank you. It's really cool. And I know you don't do much stuff. So I appreciate you coming on. Yeah.

I'm curious, actually. I'm not fishing for compliments, but why did you decide to come on? You're incredibly thoughtful. When I initially said, listen, I don't do mindset interviews anymore. You came back with topics that I thought would be very interesting, and I was completely intrigued to see how with... So, styles make fights, as I say, and you're very gentle. For anybody that's not been in your space, everything here is calming. I was saying like even your lights are like gentle. And I'm very aggressive. And so I was like, oh, this would be interesting. Somebody who's very thoughtful,

who clearly understands the importance of personal development and all that stuff. And I'm telling him not to ask me questions about that stuff. So where will this go? And then you're local. And doing it in person was a huge part of the draw. Sick. Okay. Good to know. Yeah.

Hopefully we were able to go out. across a wide arc. You have been incredibly generous with the way that you've approached the topics that I am fascinated by, and so I'm very grateful for that. I mean, I'm so fascinated in them, too. And just like I'm sure you, after years, focused on the personal development scene, you start to look at new horizons, and you're like, okay, I'm expanding as a person. I have new intellectual curiosities.

And so, for me, these kind of conversations are part of the evolution of what it means to have conversations that, like I said in the beginning, include and transcend your own personal path, but also put in a bigger context. And we can't ignore all the systems that we're living within. And truly any useful, accurate model of spirituality, whatever that approximates to, has to by nature, include the collective

and civilization at a whole. So a couple quick questions. what was the most disempowering base assumption in your language that you held 10, 20 years ago that you no longer do? That I was dealt to hand of cards in terms of my intelligence and talents and life was just about making the most of it. What was the single most high-leverage thing you've done to rewire that? Oh, I realized in real time that when I acted as if brain plasticity were real and that I could get better, just my psychology alone changed. It went from feeling contracted,

feeling sad, sliding towards depression, to feeling like, whoa, wait a second, I can get better at this. Like, I just need to put time and energy. This is exciting. So I was like, even if it's fake, even if I actually can't get better, that feeling is so much more interesting

that I'm going to act as if it's true because it just feels better. And then it turned out to be true. And so I was getting feedback from the real world that it doesn't matter what the studies say, because this is in the late 90s. Doesn't matter what the studies say, you can feel that you're getting better at things.

You can demonstrate that you took potential and turned it into capability. Oh, and one thing that was really transformative, I was teaching film, and I was helping my students make their films better, and their films were legitimately getting better because of the things that I told them. So I remember thinking, wait,

if I can help them make their films better, why can't I make my own films better? And so it went from feeling hopeless. I'm never going to be in the industry. I'm never going to get to tell my stories, because I'm not good enough to, oh, wait a second. Like, I just have to put time and energy into getting better at this thing. And so, yeah, I do owe a debt of gratitude to the fact that I was teaching at that time.

Would you say then that is, and if not, what is it, your most powerful current base assumption? Is it that you actually can change and that your neurology is malleable? Yeah, the only belief that matters, that we are designed to adapt. That's it. Now, you have to give your body a very strong impulse, what I'll call adapt or die, if you want to get good at something. But the great thrill of having my frame of reference that everything has utility,

you're having a biological experience, that you can make things sacred because I think that's people's intuition about me is that I don't live a sacred life. It's the exact opposite. I'm so conscious of how to make things sacred. I've made my marriage sacred. I've made my pursuit of a video game

actually about helping kids live a better life. So for me, it's a spiritual endeavor to like can I really do something and make something of meaning. So that is ultimately the punchline for me is can you pull those things off? And so having a frame of reference that all of this stuff is about utility, it gives all of that an extra dimension of like, oh, I can go get good at this thing and apply it to something that's incredibly meaningful in this grand spiritual pursuit. What does sacred mean to you? I suppose it in some ways it is trying to contend with the fact that I think humans have a God-shaped hole in their psyche and we have an actual impulse to kneel before something. That can get us in trouble.

You'll see people kneel before their spouse. And if their spouse is uplifting, great. Their spouse is toxic. Problem. They treat their job as if it were. religious pursuit. Great if you've got an honorable goal. Bad if you're just chasing something that's empty. So when a cult would be a great example of somebody who needed, they needed something to kneel before and they can lose their whole personality to that. So it's a high risk thing that

nature has given us. But boy, is it beautiful. When you kneel before something bigger than yourself, you give yourself over to contributing to something that will live beyond you. That is what I mean when I say sacred. Do you reduce that down to a set of behavioral adaptations of evolution? Yes. It's like what would be the evolutionary advantage of kneeling, you know, beneath or in front of something grander than you? I'm so glad you asked. So I think that one of the things about humans that make us so dominant as a species is our ability to cooperate flexibly in really large groups. And I think that the way that we have done that long before nation states existed was through tribes. Tribe scales up to religion.

Religion allows us to cross borders. And so with symbology, you can tell somebody, hey, I share the same beliefs and values that you share. you instantly greet and meet each other. And so from a, I'm evolution, I've got to make something pleasurable that's going to get you to tribe up, to protect yourselves from those that wish you harm, if the way that I'm going to allow you to expand beyond 150 people is to place a little God-shaped hole in your heart, then that's what I'm going to do. And so it's given us, even if it was just a survival mechanism,

it's given us something that's truly profound and beautiful. As I was trying to map you and the thought of the like why wonder about consciousness, I'm not saying this is true, but it would allow me to understand if that lingers as a like almost religious iconography of it's a way to pursue the creator or creation itself. And by walking towards that answer, I'm entering this temple of being small and recognizing my lack of understanding. And so it is the act of finding that temple that is a pursuit worthy like the, if you know, the Chinese parable of the monkey who goes across the mountains to find the sacred scrolls. And of course, when he gets the sacred scrolls, he realizes that the scrolls are blank. And that's the point.

it was the pursuit all along and so things like that to give something that spark of it's bigger than me it means something I think is really meaningful if your life was a movie and the audience was watching up until this point what would they be screaming

at the screen for you to do with your life oh wow well the only thing people have ever screamed at me is to have kids so I ignored that Yeah, what would they be screaming at me to do? I've actually lost sight of that. I'm not entirely sure. People probably would still mistake me for being young enough to have kids,

and so they might still scream that. But at this point, first of all, my wife is going through paramedopause, so that's out of the question. They might want me to adopt. That always is the refrain. They want me to raise kids. I think because they think it would. will be such a beautiful experience and that I will finally see that it really does open a chamber

that I can walk into and know a love that is unlike anything I've ever experienced before. So I get where they're coming from. We could do a whole podcast on how much I've thought about that. This is not something that I have not done lightly. Yeah, I think I've heard you share one of the things you want most in life as kids. The only thing you want more is to not have them. Correct. So, yeah, no, I understand that.

Kids aside, because I am asking some exercise and looking yourself from the third person, but, you know, from the outside in. Like, what would I warn myself against? If you were to have a blind spot, which by nature of being Tom, you can't see, what would that be? Yeah, the good news is the biggest blind spot that I have, I've tripped into so many times. I now at least can sort of grope around what it is. and that is I am constitutionally incapable of focusing on only one thing. And that has really held me back. And so I understand that people will look at my life and say,

Jesus, man, how much more success you need. But that one actually haunts me. And I wish that I had a different personality. But I am literally constitutionally incapable of doing it. I can't have fun. My life starts draining of meaning or the ability to enjoy the meaningful things that I pursue. there's something about my dopamine system where novelty ranks so high

that I've got to, what I found is I can narrow it down to three things. I can pursue three things at once and be pretty okay with that. My life would be much better if I only did two and it would be even better if I just did one and I'm just not capable. Because I even think like,

dude, you could just build a video game and do nothing else. What are you doing? And I know that, yeah, that'd be fun for a year. and then I'd be like, bro, I need to like talk about economics or I'm seeing this thing over here. People are like going to hell in a handbasket. And, you know, I've got thoughts.

And so I just know I'd go stir crazy. Do you wish you could only focus on one thing because that would maximize your utility? Yes. Yeah. I would be able to achieve much, much more. I feel so seen right now. Yes, that is exactly why. Yeah.

And maximizing utility is your version of both. life well lived. No. My version of a life well lived is to end up with fulfillment. It just so happens that utility in making progress is such a key part of that whole thing. Plus, you could pathologize it and say, maybe if my ambition were dialed to a nine, it'd be better than being dialed to an 11. So if you want to round it to mental illness, like that wouldn't bother me at all. And I know there many people, I always say be careful who you take advice from, because I'm going to optimize you for doing big things. And if that's not what you're looking for, I'm just not the guy to pay attention to. But is it not the case that your wiring appreciates novelty up to three main avenues,

in which case that is bringing you more fulfillment than just one? It's more fun, but then I get caught in a frustration loop that I'm not making progress. Because the very reason you want to narrow your focus is to actually make progress. We all have finite energy, and the more things you spread that finite energy across, the less well you will do any one of those things. My game would be better if I only focused on the game. My economic commentary would be better if I only focused on economics. My YouTube channel would be bigger if I just did one thing. But dude, even when I did just mindset, I was just going stir crazy. I was like, I would rather have my videos do fewer views than say the same thing over and over and over and over.

I'm curious, many of the contemplative traditions would point at the fact that our internal drive for continual, incremental, marginal, but at times, substantial improvement, is always like a faulty surrogate for actually wanting it all, meaning when we accomplish one thing in life, We want to build rocket ships and then we want to go to Mars. And it's never going to stop because the inevitable conquest of the human mind, we want to just keep expanding and expanding. I'm curious your thoughts, and to whatever degree you have studied, some of the wisdom traditions,

that what we may be seeking is not a continual improvement of external circumstance, but a leveled internal fulfillment that is completely irrespective of what's happening outside of us. I see it slightly differently, though maybe we're saying the same thing, with different words. The way I explain it to myself is humans are climbers. We are not trying to get to a peak. We're not peak sitters.

So when you get to the top, you say what's next. And this is why so many professional athletes will win the Super Bowl and then cry. Because they're like, now what? Like my whole life was geared towards us, and now I've done it. I don't even know what to do tomorrow. So I won't have that problem

because I recognize myself as a climber. So whether I ever sum at the mountain or not become somewhat irrelevant. So if I'm two-thirds of the way up a mountain and I fall and I tumble down back to base camp, then I'll either go, oh, I want to try it again. Or I just move on to a different mountain and start climbing that. But I thankfully learned in my 20s that I could be worth a lot of money and it not made me feel good. So I was like, okay, heard, received. Like people have been trying to tell me forever that money can't buy happiness.

And so what I realized was, oh, this is about meaning and purpose. And so as long as I have meaning and purpose, great. I'd rather be rich with meaning and purpose than poor with meaning and purpose. Make no mistake about it. But I would rather be poor with meaning and purpose than rich without meaning and purpose. Is there something that comes to mind as the most transcendent moment in your life? The closest thing to that would be probably my wedding day. we've had down moments where some of those feel transcendent as well.

I won't lie, which is interesting because I've never thought about that. But my wife and I, when we were boyfriend and girlfriend, I said sharing a life is what I'm interested in. One day you're going to be a bag of wrinkles, and you're not going to be beautiful anymore. It might be beautiful to me, but be realistic. You're going to be an 85-year-old woman. not a lot of people finding that hot.

And I'm still going to be into you. And I'm going to be into you because we've shared a life. And we'll have gone through hard things together. And I remember at the time, both of us being like, I'm glad we're aware of this now so that we can, my whole thing was enjoy each phase for what it has to offer. So while we're in our 20s, let's enjoy being in our 20s. And now that I'm in my 50s, she's not yet, but soon,

we'll enjoy that. And if we're cognizant of it, it'll work. And so in the downbeats, which are not, I mean, we've had some like rough stretches. My wife got very sick for a very long time. That was hard. And those moments really felt like they mattered. And so going through that kind of stuff really does sort of snap you out of taking things for granted. but my wedding day is like when my wife and I ask ourselves like hey you can relive one day what would

it be inevitably we're both like oh man that'd be so cool to like go back to that moment it was the first time in my life where something was so cool it felt fake and so yeah I haven't had a lot of those moments have you been curious and have you at all dabbled into the meditative experiences I've meditated a lot, a lot, a lot. I've never had the thing where, like, I feel like I've taken DMT or whatever. I hear people describe some pretty intense stuff. I've never had that. But certainly the momentary cessation of there being a separation between me and what's happening,

to me, again, it's a biological experience. You know, you're breathing from your diaphragm. There is a response mechanism that if you do that, it signals to your brain, that you're calm, and so you just get in this virtuous loop of the more you breathe from your diaphragm, the calmer you feel, deeper your breath, the calmer you feel.

And so you just slowly, I mean, it's incredible. I just am so grateful that we have that ability to, no matter how stressed I am, what I say to myself is I'm never more than 45 minutes away from complete emotional equanimity. And that feeling is, it just feels safe. Like, okay, I can have something like really stressing me out. Just absolutely maxing me.

I'm in the red. And as long as I make space for 45 minutes, and there are times where it takes the full 45 minutes, but I can breathe my way to being calm. That's just crazy. I've done microdosing of psilocybin. I did not find that to be useful in any way. It felt like it was getting tipsy.

So I was like, I don't know what profound breakthrough is supposed to come from this. I've never done a heroic dose, though. So maybe they're, I'm sure there's something on the other side of that and have just been paranoid about doing things to my brain, if I'm completely honest. Understandable. Why should anyone live their life from first principle thinking? What is the beauty of orienting your life in that way? Well, I'll say that one should do and believe that which moves them towards their honorable goals.

and if that means that denying first principles moves you towards your goals faster, deny away. I just think you're going to find that life is eternally confusing if you don't think from first principles because you're trying to interface with a deterministic system as if you could just address it randomly and that there's no way to know what output I'm going to get anyway, so I might as well give it whatever input I want because I never know what I'm going to get out the other side. And so life just gets very frustrating. And I see people, do this to themselves. I see people do this themselves with diet all the time, where they will get caught in a loop that goes something like, but I deserve to eat that thing and not have it negatively affect me.

And it's like, yeah, but that's not how biology works. So you can keep doing that if you want, but if your goal is to not have joint pain, for instance, and you keep eating things that inflame your joints, you're going to have knee pain. I'm not sure who they think they're appealing to. So it's one of those where when you don't just go, oh, why can't I have this? Oh, it's not anybody telling me I can't have it. I don't want to have. My goal is to be free of knee pain. This thing gives me knee pain. I'm not going to eat it. Or to say, my goal is to eat things that bring me pleasure. And if that means that I die early, then I die early. I don't care about that. Great. Go for it. That's your goal. Maybe it's not honorable. But, hey, at least you stated it. And you're,

doing your thing. So yeah, first principles just means that you can get close to predicting the outcome of your behaviors. And for people that aren't as familiar, what would be an example of applying first principles to something in life? And like, what is first principles? So first principles is thinking up from physics. So the example with, I'll give you one for my own life. So I was suffering from profound anxiety. And I was thinking, okay, it made sense when I would get angry. And I would get anxious when I was stressed. It stopped making sense when I wasn't stressed and I felt generalized anxiety. And I was like, what would I tell somebody that came to me and said that they felt generalized anxiety? I would tell them, it's probably something, if you're exercising,

it's probably something that you're eating. So what are you eating? And I was like, you know, the only thing that is like a little bit suspect in my diet is diet monster. Let me just stop Just a little stuff. Drinking that and see what happens. It took me a while to figure out that's what it was because I won't feel it if I have it because I still have some now, but if I have it on the day,

I don't feel anything. But the next day, I feel anxious. And so finally I was like, wait, oh my God, it's the day after I drink a monster that I feel anxious. And I was having three a day. Wow. So they're delicious.

I love them so much. But alas, I had to almost entirely remove them out of my diet. Wow, yeah, no, there is something to be said, and I'll butcher, I'll paraphrase, but, you know, Adyashanti, who's a non-duality, like mindful and spiritual teacher, like a lot of his orientation towards meditation

was to deal with the pain he was feeling, to come to find out years later that the deodorant and the aluminum that was in, it was causing an immense reaction in his nervous system. It was not a while. Which was also a big driver for him to go down the path, is it's interesting to say the least the existential issues that we claim in life and how they can have simple biological origins and solvents is very intriguing.

It's wild. But that's thinking up from first principles. I have a problem. It's rooted in biology somewhere. So now let me try to work my way up. Yeah. I feel like we did it, man. I feel good.

This has been fun. It's been really good. you're working on Kaysen. Yes, basically. One very last question, actually, I have is just there's something about you stepping into this field early on in the days. You knew you wanted to be a filmmaker.

You knew you wanted to tell stories. And yet, you felt like the most meaningful way to get to that point was to get rich. To make a lot of money, becoming an entrepreneur, building, and selling a business, which you did, which not a lot of people do at all to the scale.

that you did, which is amazing. A lot of people are trying to turn the thing they love into the source of revenue that will allow them to do it meaningfully at scale. And what advice do you have for people that feel like they have some semblance of their calling in life, and yet the path to get there

might not be as intuitive and might require you to do something that is less up your alley, so to speak? Well, so I'd say the exact opposite. I greatly regret my choice. If I had to do it over, I would do it very differently. So what I would try to convince people of is if you put time and energy into getting better at something, you will get better. So if you want to go do, in my case, filmmaking, then go do filmmaking.

Go get good at that. You're going to meet people, make relationships. But at the time I made that decision, I was so confused about what to do with my life. I didn't even understand that you could learn how to break into an industry. This is all before cell phones, had cameras on them. This is before YouTube. so it just felt so hopeless. Now, just like what I did with gaming or manufacturing for that matter.

So it's like, okay, there's an industry I know nothing about. I don't know anyone in that industry, and I bet I can find out. So this is the age of AI. You would just go and ask AI, hey, this is what I currently know how to do, but I'm trying to go do this thing. But I want to do it in a way where I can actually make money at doing it. Help me put together a plan. So what are the different entry points into the industry?

do I want to, you're going to go down a branching decision tree. If people could just understand entrepreneurship, business in general, is like a computer. It is if this, then that statements. There is no magic to it. There's art. There's no doubt in terms of the product design and stuff like that. But if you think of it as, okay, do I have a product yet? No, cool.

Then I need to make a product. Do I know that people want to buy this product? No, then I need to figure that out. In fact, do that first. And so you just go down this list of if somebody tells me where they're at, I can quickly identify what problem they need to solve. It's not because I'm magical. It's because I understand the if this, then that statements of the decision tree. And I just figure out where they're out on that. And boom, here's what you have to go solve. So I would tell this person, whatever you want to do,

it's doable, unless it violates the laws of physics. Go audit the industry, figure out how somebody like you has gotten into the industry before. If they haven't, you have to figure out what the obstacle is, how that lines up with where you're currently at. Let's say you want to get into the MBA. And you're short. Has anybody short ever gotten into the NBA? Yes, they have. Multiple people, in fact. What did they do? Some of them were just incredibly athletic and they could jump ridiculously high. Some of them focused on passing. Some of them focused on outside shooting. Cool. Which is going to be your MO? Now we know the thing that we have to practice. And literally, I mean, I can feel myself going into that mode. You literally just go into thinking up for first principles. I know where I'm trying to get to. Cool. I'm going to audit it so I get the lay of the land.

Who's done what? What can I model myself after? If nobody, why not? I mean, just ask. You can ask AI. You can ask people that know the sport, reach out to somebody on X or Blue Sky that does that thing and say, hey, this is where I'm at.

Why am I going to fail? Which is one of the most magical questions you can ask. Don't ask how do I succeed. Ask why am I going to fail? First of all, people love to tell you how you're going to get kicked in the face. Also, their experience is probably just chock full of dumb things that they wish they hadn't done

and they'll just give you a laundry list of, okay, you're going to fall into this trap, you're going to make this mistake. It's very easy to get people to tell you that, and it's incredibly beneficial. So armed with the belief that you can get good at it and a quick rundown of how to find the answer to why you're going to fail, and now you can reverse engineer into how you make sure you overcome those obstacles.

That's what I would do if I had to do it over again. Mike drop. Great. Yeah, to me, it's the ultimately most empowering way to orient yourself towards, like, what do I actually do? What are the set of behaviors? that are going to contribute towards my progression and the thing. Yeah. Maximize utility.

Exactly. Man, this has been awesome. It's been so great to connect. I always feel like I make a new friend at the end of these conversations. And is there anything you want to point people towards what you got going on? People can find you online very easily. Yeah. You please know that I talk about politics and economics and cultural affairs.

But if you want to join me live Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 7 a.m. Pacific time. I'm live on YouTube, Twitch. X and I think kick. Great. And every, what video is Tuesday and Thursday? Yeah. And then we do, yep, solo videos, Tuesdays and Thursdays and Thursdays now.

Great. Awesome, man. Well, I can't wait to just stay in touch, see as your story continues to evolve. Absolutely. Play Kisen one day. See what happens if superintelligence comes into the picture. That'll be a whole thing. And that's it, man.

I appreciate you. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks. Everybody, until next time, be well. We did it. Thank you, sir. That was awesome.