Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2605: Navigating AI With Tom Bilyeu

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Tom Bilyeu The trigger that spun him out to make the content he is covering now. (1:13) Understanding that we live in an economic system that was constructed. (4:06) Debt jubilee. (10:51) How forward progress does NOT care about any given generation. (12:57) The existential crisis of having no meaning or purpose. (17:40) How long will we remain human? (19:47) The fast takeoff. (22:08) Humans doing bad vs. AI doing bad. (25:31) AI and the impact on his sci-fi writer brain. (28:45) Are we in the Matrix? (32:52) How does he remain an atheist going down this rabbit hole? (35:59) Thucydides Trap. (42:32) US/China AI race. (43:39) Experts vs arguments. (45:11) Happiness is a choice. (47:18) His decision not to have children. (50:27) We have a technology problem, not a population problem. (57:39) Shared memory document. (1:02:05) The biggest learning lessons from being in the media. (1:07:54) His mis map of NFTs. (1:11:29) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Eight Sleep for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump Listeners! ** Use the code MINDPUMP to get $350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. The best part is that you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don’t like it – – Shipping to many countries worldwide. ** May Special: MAPS 15 Performance or RGB Bundle 50% off! ** Code MAY50 at checkout ** The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve Money Printing and Inflation Thucydides Trap - Wikipedia Neon Future Comic Series | Volume 1 Graphic Novel by Impact Theory Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe Joe Rogan Experience #2303 - Dave Smith & Douglas Murray 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Tom Bilyeu (@tombilyeu)  Instagram Website YouTube Ray Dalio (@raydalio) X/Twitter Annaka Harris (@annakaharrisprojects) Instagram  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today we have Tom Bilyeu on the show.

He's interviewed some of the smartest people in the world on his podcast. He's been on air the smartest people in the world on his podcast. He's been on air for almost 10 years. Very smart guy. We love having him on the show. By the way, you can find him at TomBilyeu on Instagram. You can find him on YouTube. You can also go to ImpactTheory.com. Now this episode is brought to you by some sponsors. The first one is 8 Sleep. This is the most advanced sleep system you'll find anywhere. AI will adjust it to maximize your sleep and you can get a huge discount.

Ready? Go to 8sleep.com forward slash mind pump. You can use the code mind pump, get $350 off the Pod 5 Ultra. This episode's also brought to you by our programs. Right now, Maps 15 performance and the RGB bundle are 50% off. If you're interested, go to MAPSFitnessProducts.com

and then use the code May50 for the discount. Here comes the show. Tom, welcome back, dude. Thanks for having me. It's been a long time. Yeah, we were just doing the math. It's been a minute. It's been a very long time, and you've been at this

for nine years. You've been doing your show and everything. Yeah, I've been doing it a lot. What's new for you? What is happening? Well, so I made a, it was a gradual pivot over time to talking more about finance, economics, politics, but it became a real abrupt shift recently

with the launch of the Tom Bilyeu Show as a live streaming thing. So I now live stream about nine hours a week, plus doing what we call the tight 60s. So we'll film a three hour session live with the community going back and forth on whatever's popping off in the world. And then we'll stop down and then I'll condense into like 60 minutes what's hot right now in this moment.

And politics is weird, man. Some kind of way. It felt like COVID kind of did that. I felt that's when I started to notice your content started to shift. 100%. But the journey there, I never thought I would end up in politics.

And I really don't, I still don't consider it like politics centric. There are important issues that people need to get good at thinking through because they actually matter. And we can talk about why in this particular minute if you guys think it'll be advantageous, but in a COVID it was at Quest, I had a thousand of my 3000 employees grew up in the hood. And when COVID hit, I was like, they're all going to lose their jobs because all

of them are working like manual labor in person, none of them know how to manage money. And so this is just going to be devastating. So I thought, let me start doing financial content literally just thinking about them and like, so I had an avatar in my mind, I'm going to do this financial content to help them weather the storm and hopefully get on the other side of it. But I realized I didn't understand investing money. So I was like, oh, let me get a couple steps ahead. I'll learn about this. I'll bring guests on. Same thing I did with gut health from my wife. And you suddenly start realizing, hold on a second,

money doesn't work the way that I thought it did. And you suddenly start realizing, hold on a second, money doesn't work the way that I thought it did. And then I was like, whoa, this is like a, scam is maybe the wrong word, but it's directionally correct. So I was like, whoa. And as you begin to unwind how money works, like why did the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Leads you to money printing, inflation.

And I just started getting really amped up about okay hold on a second, like a lot of people are being ripped off and they're being ripped off because of a system and then that just spun me out into doing deep dives on economics, Ray Dalio and then that will get you pointed into US v China, which there's this thing called Thucydides' Trap, so anyway, as I'm just trying to make content to help these people that I knew, loved, and cared about understand how to basically

balance their budget, I end up realizing we're on a collision course with China, and it just completely takes over my intellectual life, and I can't help myself but talk about the things that occupy my thoughts. At what point in that did you read the creature from Jack O'Lantern? At what point did you start learning about that?

You get to that pretty fast. So once you're like, okay, wait a second, what is money printing? Why are we doing it? Because that was the first domino to fall for me. Because I kept waiting for the bombshell to happen where everybody was going to lose their jobs and it didn't happen.

And so I was like, what's going on? So then you get to money printing and then you're like, wait, hold on a second. There's government sanction counterfeiting. Like what's happening right now? And then you, at first you're like, oh, maybe this is awesome. And then you start going down the path of,

oh, no, actually this is exactly why somebody in my position is doing great. And then other people going down the path of oh, no, actually this is exactly why somebody in my position is doing great and then other people are getting hammered and Yeah, the Understanding that we live in an economic system that was constructed was pretty eye-opening explain that for the audience because I do think that Most people get trapped in that way of thinking, meaning, uh, oh, this is good that they're helping me out.

Oh, and so explain, uh, why it's not good and why do people think it's such a good thing? Okay. So the reason it seems like such a good thing is somebody is going to give you money for free. I mean, that really, even now, like that does sound pretty awesome. Like if I was going to campaign on something I would love to campaign on, I'm going to give you free money. The catch becomes that all of the value of things

and the money in your pocket, they're so intertwined in terms of a thing called purchasing power. And what people don't understand is that you do need to be able to create money out of thin air. Like that is a thing. You need that process for reasons that if you want to push on later, we can go deeper into it, but you need that process. But it needs to be tied to an increase in the amount of things that you can spend that money on. And if it is, then people don't notice

that more money is coming into the system. But when it's literally just, oh, everybody is about to get obliterated by this thing called COVID, so we're gonna have to print a ton of money so that we can keep companies from going under, that anybody that loses their job, we can give them money to stay afloat.

When you do that, but you're not creating new goods, what ends up happening is yes, you have more money in your pocket, but it buys less in almost the exact amount that you have money in your pocket. So there are studies on this that show the correlation between inflation. So prices across the board going up. It's very important to understand inflation is when prices across the board go up. Everything becomes more expensive. Okay, so inflation, the correlation between money printing and inflation is between 0.6

and 0.9. So even if you split the difference, these are basically the same phenomena. So when you print money, you cause things to become more expensive because you've counterfeited money. You've literally just made it up out of thin air. But where it gets scary is when you make that money up out of thin air, how do you get it into the system? And that's how the rich end up getting richer and the poor end up getting poorer. It's one of the ways. So. When I first learned about this, if you look at the history of money,

like why do we even have money? I mean, originally, you know, you go back far enough, the way people dealt with each other was they traded. So you have chickens and I have shovels, and I'll say, I'll give you one shovel for your chickens, and we make a deal. But what happens if you have chickens, I have shovels,

and you don't want shovels? How do I deal with you? So they created money and money represented, you know, represented things. It represented the ability to buy things with it. It represented goods, services, and efficiency, work. But if it doesn't line up perfectly, then things just get more expensive.

Yeah, and to really pin that down, if it doesn't line up perfectly with something somewhere in a bank, let's call it, then it's what they call fiat currency, which fiat means by decree. So this has value because I say so, as the government. It is far less deranging when the money is tied one to one with say gold, right? And that's the one I think most people are familiar with is you have

these dollars, but it's tied to real gold. That's in a warehouse and technically like paper money started as the IOU to get your gold back. And so instead of going and getting the gold and bring it to the point, you would just say, here's the IOU for however many pieces of gold that you have are however many ounces and then we obviously in the US we break from the gold standard 1971 and then it just became We can print as much money as we want. We don't have to be tethered to anything We tried to tether it to oil is what we did

Yeah So we we do a trade-off We tried to tether it to oil is what we did. Yeah, so we do a trade off where it's like the petrodollar is the thing that allows us to still be the world's reserve currency because there's something anchored to it. So from a global economic standpoint, that was very helpful. Otherwise, everything just fluctuates all over the place and it doesn't matter what you trade your currency in. And so the US would have put themselves in a really bad position because when you're

the world's reserve currency, you can export your inflation. So if everybody around the world holds your debt and you do inflation, inflation is theft. So you print money. When you print money, you're stealing buying power, but you're stealing it equally from everybody. Everybody that has dollars in this case, they're stolen from in the same amount. So the rich and the poor are stolen from equally.

But because when the money gets put back in the system, it's going to be a double whammy for the wealthy. One, because the Fed will put it into circulation by buying traditionally government debt. But recently they've started buying corporate debt, which is far more insane. And I can't believe that people were just like, okay. I think it's largely because they don't understand that that is the Fed picking winners and losers, like literally deciding we're gonna make sure

this company survives and not that company. It's absolutely bananas. And then because of inflation, the cost of the assets go up. And so they're not going up because they're actually more valuable. inflation, the cost of the assets go up. So they're not going up because they're actually more valuable. They're going up because the value of the dollar is going down. It buys less.

So if you want to buy my house, then I need the buying power equivalent in dollars. So it creates this optical illusion that my house is worth more money when in reality it's not. Yeah. But that's also how the wealthy protect themselves in a situation like that, which is worth more money when in reality it's not. Yeah. But that's also how the wealthy protect themselves in a situation like that, which is why the wealthy get wealthier and the middle class or poor really get hurt by it.

You have huge distorted pressures, and that's why it's impossible to look at it without looking at politics, because for example, a majority of Americans, I'd love your opinion on this, a lot of Americans, majority of Americans have their wealth tied into their house. Yeah. So if you're a politician and you look at this, and let's say you're an honest politician, I'd love your opinion on this. A lot of Americans, majority of Americans have their wealth tied into their house. So if you're a politician and you look at this,

and let's say you're an honest politician, which doesn't exist, but let's just say that does exist. You look at it and you go, the cost of homes is massively inflated. It has massively inflated for all these different reasons. We need to make them more affordable. You have no political power, because so many Americans own homes,

there isn't a single person that's gonna raise their hand and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do these policies to lower the price of my home. So they're completely intertwined. It's almost like how do you fix it when you're not gonna get any votes to fix it? Yeah, well the good news is on a long enough timeline, they just behead the people that cock block

them for real. And that's the Ray Dalio story. Yes. This is what people don't understand. And this is literally what we're living through now is you either get a civil war revolution or Thucydides trap where you collide with the rising superpower. So it's pretty rare that you get what Ray Dalio describes as the beautiful deleveraging,

where you slowly back your way out of these insane debt policies and you get into fiscal responsibility. It's really pretty rare. It almost always, you get what's called a debt jubilee. It's such a nice way of saying a lot of people die, but that's what happens. And so the French

Revolution was literally bring the wealthy, lop their heads off and we're going to reboot government. World War II, when Britain was the world's reserve currency and the dominant economic superpower, they just got bled to death fighting that war and they owed the US so much money. And then the US got the privilege through the Bretton Woods agreement, what you were talking about earlier. And now we're finding that, uh oh, we're in danger of losing it because every time

somebody has that privilege, they print money. Now what's interesting about this is in some cases, because the dollars lost something like 97% of its value, especially since we severed it from the gold standard. So now they can just print it. There's nothing they have to tie it to. But what's interesting is within that period of time, I think it was, you said 1971 was it?

That was the Nixon shock when he pulled us off the gold standard. So 1971 till now, we also have this technological revolution that dramatically improves efficiency, at least for certain types of products. So the efficiency outpaced inflation in many ways. In other words, a flat screen TV, plasma 10 years ago is way more expensive than it is

today, even though the dollar is far less valuable than it was when those plasma TVs came out because tech has just, the explosion of efficiency with tech has outpaced inflation. Do you foresee that potential with like AI and with tech maybe solving this because sure, things are inflated, money's worth nothing, but tech is gonna advance so quickly, AI is gonna do things for us that normally would require

so much labor, so much work that it will outpace this and maybe solve this problem or at least. As soon as you're talking about AI, you have to give me a timeline on which you want me to answer. Okay, okay. For real. Okay, so explain.

What do you mean by that? If you said, what's AI gonna do in the next 10 years, I'm gonna give you an answer where I have grounding to speak about it. I don't have to give you an act of faith. I can say given the things we know about energy usage, things like that will probably be roughly, you know, in this ballpark. But if you're saying extrapolate out 30 years now, all of a sudden I have to put my sci-fi

writer hat on and I'll tell you where I think this goes. But we're talking about beyond the event horizon. And so I know I'm talking like a writer where I can get you directionally correct in terms of the things that we'll struggle with what will probably happen but the only thing I know is whatever words I say that won't be how it actually plays out. This is why if you look at science fiction from 30 years ago none of them talk about text messaging or cell phones like they just all get that wrong. They're going to be specifics about it that won't make any sense.

But in the next 10 years, it will be, AI is going to absolutely gobble up the vast majority of anything that's repetitive and pattern recognition. So think manual labor, all that stuff, factories, the way that we think about it now, that's all gonna be robots, all gonna be AI. And we already see this. Yep, 100%.

And same with the vast majority of white collar jobs that are pattern recognition. So copywriters done, code. Legal stuff. Yeah, legal done. We've already reduced our legal bills by 80% using AI today. Like imagine where that's gonna be in five years, be crazy. So that in the 10 year period, I say to myself

as an act of faith, because when I look backwards, every time a technology has come along, everybody freaks out and says humans aren't going to work anymore, and then lo and behold jobs that you couldn't possibly have imagined, they come on board. So as an act of faith in the next 10 years, I just assume there are things that I can't predict that'll spin up and yes, the people that are like 45 right now that are computer science majors, they're toast. Like that is not gonna be fun. They will have to figure something new out, but forward progress just does not care

about any given generation. So you, you know, the whole learn to code meme, you either learn to code or you get left by in the wayside and hope that your kids take care of you. That is just the hard reality of being a human. But if you start talking about 30 years, you're now into the position of realizing my favorite fact about humanity. All the things that you want, like healthcare, that you wish would be free, the reason

it's not free is because of you, motherfucker. You won't work for free. That's the problem. But robots will. And so if you can drive energy cost to zero, which I have no reason to believe in 30 years, unless AI hits an upper bound of intelligence, meaning we don't have the energy or compute just hits a wall. If one of those two things happens, everything I'm about to say won't come to pass, but I don't see any reason to believe that they won't. Energy cost will effectively go to zero because the sun drops so much energy on us. it's absolutely ridiculous. You could run the earth for basically ever in like a week's worth of sunlight

if you knew how to capture it. So I assume AI will be able to figure that out. Once the cost of energy goes to zero, the cost of labor goes to zero, as long as you don't need a human to do it, and you won't. And so between robotics and energy costs, in 30 years, everything is free. And so now you're truly post-capitalist.

Now you're not post-human, humans are gonna be weird and they're gonna do really weird human things, but you'll be post-capitalist. The way that we think of generating money, building meaning and purpose, all of that stuff will almost certainly go over. I love talking about this because we talk about this, we've been saying this for a long time,

that we are heading down this path. And the scariest part is not what I think people think. I think actually that probably sounds really good for a lot of people. Like, oh man, everything's free. But I actually think we'll see more depression, more suicide, more things like that when you remove meaning and purpose. Existential crisis. And right now for the people that don't have this deep purpose, they have easy purpose. So, oh, I got to go to work to pay the bills, to feed my kids, to do these things. When you remove that from millions of people,

like, oh shit, what happens now? And so that's a really scary thought to me on what we look like as a society when we get everything we thought we ever wanted. What's your thoughts? I mean, do do you literally that, I think that you will usher in an era where, uh, people are going to have to find like go out of their way to find meaning and

purpose. And we're already seeing the front edge of what that looks like. Uh, which is that most people just do not have the cognitive wherewithal to parse through when they're not being chased by a lion. How should I be spending my time in a way that makes me feel good about who I am? And for a long time, man, look, my phase one of me as a public persona was all about mindset. And it was trying to get people to understand,

A, you're having a biological experience, B, the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. And I don't think people realize how much there's like perpetual motion in that from, well, I have to get up, I have to go to work, I have kids because I couldn't stop it because birth control didn't exist.

Like there were so many things that just took care of itself. And when all that goes away, I know everything is a choice. Like how do you get yourself to do hard things? And we already know you need look no further than somebody's physiology to know most people when it's like you just don't eat those things and go to a gym, you're going to be in great shape. Most people can't do it. So when they get everything for free,

you run the risk of instead of worrying about 1984, we're now into a brave new world where everybody's just doing drugs and it's, they're numbing themselves out. Yeah. So, and now we get into my personal thing, which is, uh, how long will we remain human? And this is the one man. Oh boy. I think that there's going to be huge backlash against the following. What I think is statement of truth that we're already building Neuralink. And part of the reason we're doing that is because Elon Musk realized you're going to have to keep up with AI and that isn't going to be, you won't be able to do it with your biology.

And so then you start tweaking, whether it's through CRISPR gene editing or whether it's just outright implanting technology into your brain. Do we become a midwife for a either hybrid species or a non-human species? Again, this is all timeline question. That's not going to happen in 10 years, but you start getting into 30, 50 years. Unless compute hits some sort of upper bound, I don't see a way around it. I think in our lifetime, we will see a great divide in society and it will be the plugged

in and unplugged. I could not agree more. I 100, I've been saying it for a long time. A new elite class in terms of transhumanists, they're not gonna willingly allow your average person to have that access to technology because there's still gonna be an elite, hierarchical kind of system, wouldn't you think?

They'll have the impulse, but I don't think they'll be able to stop it because we have a mind for capitalism. And capitalism goes like this. Oh, open AI is now going closed source. Cool. I'm going to go open source because that's how I'm going to find my clientele.

This is literally Elon versus Sam Altman. Elon's like, cool, once we launch Grok 3, then we make Grok 2 open source. And so to get the client base, you'll make it more open, you'll make it more accessible. And so I think ultimately there's just no stopping it. I think this is gonna highlight and turbocharge and put on steroids human arrogance because we've been exploring what makes people happy

for thousands of years. The best data we have shows that a part of actual happiness is challenge, not making things easy, is the unknown, is faith, and what people are gonna do is move the opposite direction. I'm gonna make everything easy, I'm gonna squirt happy feelings into my brain, and that's gonna be very sad for people to realize

like this is not what I want. The other part of this is we don't know what human consciousness is still to this day. We can have a debate, discussion about, we've been talking about this forever. The fact that we think we're gonna amplify that, maybe create that with AI is interesting. Like what are you making?

Do you even know what it is that you're trying to make? Yeah. I don't think we do fully understand AI. That is for sure. I don't think, so I ran the math on this. There is a definition of what a moron is. It's something like an 81 or 82 IQ. Einstein was, I think like 164.

Anyway, the punchline is Einstein was 2.4 times smarter than a moron. So somebody who's 2.4 times smarter than a moron so Somebody who's 2.4 X smarter than a moron gave us insights into the fundamental laws of The universe that have changed everything and I don't think people realize how much of the modern world is built on the back of Einstein's Insights from GPS which just is impossible Without relativity to obviously nuclear power nuclear nuclear energy, war, weapons. So if that's 2.4x over a million, what is it? Right, well, what's a thousand times?

Is there a reason to believe it won't be a million times smarter? So once you realize the rate at which a self-improving AI can move, you could have 20,000 years of improvement in a single afternoon. So this is where they talk about the fast takeoff. Now look, I think that we're nowhere near that.

Nobody's, I don't know anybody's saying that. Where are we currently? Like, could you catch us up in terms of AI? So if you talk to Sam Altman, if you talk to Elon Musk, people that are really at the forefront of actually productizing this, Sam Altman says it's 300% annual improvement. That's already terrifying.

He's with, with no signs of slowing down. So, um, when you isolate a given thing, it is better than humans basically every time you spin it up. So it will beat humans at most video games that you spend time training it on. There's some complexities where it'll start to break down, but like obviously you put them up against AI and poker, they're gonna get blasted.

You put them even go, something that has just this inhuman number of solutions, it wins. So do we get to artificial general intelligence? There's a guy named Mogadot who was a part of building AI at Google. And he was like, as far as I'm concerned, we've already achieved that, but he's like,

everybody has different definitions of it, but you don't need it to be smart. Well, the Turing test we blew past. That was when people signed that letter saying, we gotta slow down, because nobody thought we would be able to fake people out as fast as we did. And the part that always unnerves me is the Turing test. My entire life was like, I don't think we'll ever be able to do it.

This is crazy. And then it was like, Oh, by the way, we did it. And everyone was just like, okay. And we moved past it. Yeah. Like, and I don't know about you guys, but I use AI 365 days a year. And it, it is already, like if it froze now, the world is already going to be

fundamentally different forever. We have dramatically reduced our staff and increased our profits. I'm just like, this thing that people talk about as if it's something in the future, I'm like, it's already here. So people just need to avail themselves of it. So most people will say that you're getting to AGI

somewhere in the next three years, and then nobody knows if a SI super intelligence is even possible. We don't know. Let me ask you, have you seen the movie Her? Of course. Okay, so it's one of my favorite movies because I think it depicted more of a realistic kind of like this is at least from my perspective. And I like how the AI there just disappeared into the internet. Like it didn't care about us. us It's like well, we're here and we're gonna disappear and so that made me think like I wonder if that's what AI would do or or a GI would do or

When it hits a GI would it let us know like would we even know or would it hide it? Yeah and Use the internet to communicate with other, you know, AGI devices and just kind of do its own thing and manipulate us without us knowing type of deal. Yeah, well here's the really bad news. Let's assume that it will do that, but we're not there yet and we can breathe a sigh of relief. Then you realize humans are already leveraging AI to do that now.

So humans will do bad things with AI, even if AI itself never breaks free and has no desire. It is just entirely possible that the emotional system that we ride on the back of is the problem and that AI doesn't need emotions. So the way that I've always thought about the alignment problem is AI has to want something in order to kill you.

It has to have a hierarchy of preference where it says I really want world control, whatever, and that would be the only thing that would push it. Humans clearly have that. And so. I think that's such a better point, and more realistic, which I think is scarier to me, that humans are more likely to use it

to do something like that. I mean, we see silly examples of that right now. Like, I mean, look at all the, the fake interviews of pro athletes, uh, talking and stuff like that. I mean, you think it's real. I mean, you think he really said that and look at all the backlash that happens. I can't believe he said it's like, it was AI, no one even, but somebody programmed that, right?

It was a human who thought this would be funny. Let's do this. And so I think we're more likely to see human do bad with it than it itself do bad at a minimum You're going to move through the period where it's humans doing bad Now you may also then get to the part where AI does bad and that could be so big and so astronomical but when I I think Embedded in the human mind is a belief that technology is a promise of a better tomorrow given that progress is a

foundational pillar to human happiness this is unstoppable you'll never a be able to put the genie back in the bottle and this is probably where we have to talk about what Thucydides trap is you're never gonna be able to put the genie back in the bottle and I don't think humans would want to even if they could. There'll be some faction for sure. I wrote a comic book about this which we may have talked about last time we were together called Neon Future

about a world where some people are getting technology implanted and merging with tech and AI and then other people try to stop it. And what the people who are trying to stop it realize very quickly is there's no way to stop it unless you also embrace AI because it just outsmarts you and it moves so fast. And so, yeah, yeah, I think that we're going to go through a very tumultuous period. I smile, gallows humor very much. But I don't, I don't see a way out of the tractor beam that we're in right now.

Are you so you've been in this and you've been a sci-fi guy for a long time, as long as I've known you. Have you changed the way you feel about, say over the last, say 10 years, were you more, I mean, were you the typical sci-fi kind of kid, oh, so exciting, seems so cool, seems so neat, and then as it started to unfold,

have you changed how you felt about it or have you felt the same since the beginning? I have added layers, there's no doubt. So in the beginning when it was far away, it just seemed like the coolest thing I could imagine. And then it starts changing so fast that you go, oh, there's gonna be a time where I won't matter. And AI will be able to do anything and everything

better than I can. And I have spent so much of my life, because so I've chosen not to have kids, and that choice was very conscious for me in that I knew that that's evolution's way of saying, hey, ready-made meaning and purpose. And so to me, the default life choice, get married, have kids,

and so much of your psychology is gonna be taken care of. Nothing comes easily, but like that gives people this real sense of like, get married, have kids. And so much of your psychology is going to be taken care of. Nothing comes easily, but like that gives people this real sense of like, I matter, something's going to live beyond me. And when you don't have that, you're like, okay, I've got to make sure I'm doing something that triggers that same algorithm in my brain. Otherwise I will have a deep sense of unease as I move through my life that I'm not meeting up to some sort of subconscious drive that I have.

And that's taken so much energy and focus on my part that I'm like, uh-oh, when AI is better than me at everything and now I'm just like, what do I do? Well, I do a thing, but I don't do it as well as this other thing. Right. What am I really doing?

And that I think is going to come for us en masse. And maybe I have better defenses than the next person built up. I'm arrogant enough I suppose to believe that I do, but I'm also cautious enough to be like, this could be a rough game. So as a writer right now, I work with AI all the time and And it is unbelievable because the AI is like the greatest writing partner I've ever had. I've hired heavy hitters, people that have worked on the Lego movie and all that, to come in and spend time

with me to work on screenplays that we're doing at Impact Theory, and it's been incredible. But nothing has been as profound as AI, nothing. It knows all of cinema history. I once asked it for like a breakdown of Star Wars and I had missed a beat and it actually, first of all, understood what I was trying to get to and corrected me. It was so awesome.

And so I was like, oh my God, you're right, thank you, boom. But the reason I love it now is that the AI doesn't have good taste. So it'll give me like, I'll say, hey, I'm trying to do this and it'll help me understand the structure. It'll point out things that I'm missing. It'll point out flaws in the way that I'm thinking. But if I ask it, like give me a scene or give me a concept, it's universally bad.

So I'm like, oh, I feel useful. I'm like, you're helping me because I'm not getting stuck. I've always got somebody to bounce an idea off of, push me where I'm like, ah, I don't know how to handle this. Give me like four ideas. It'll give me four, three are bad, but one's really like, holy hell, that's incredible. So you never get stuck, very powerful, but I still feel like I'm a better writer.

Now the day where I feel like it's like, oh, bless, that's what you thought would be cool? Then I'm gonna be like, ooh. Doesn't need any prompts. Maybe just figures it out itself. That's not gonna feel good. I mean, maybe that's some of the the then you're you're highlighting some of the beauty of Humanity is is the flaw is we're a bit flawed and maybe the reason why it can't put produce this great story lines

Cuz it's got too many data points. It's got too many things It's trying to fit where the human flaws I only know so much or I have my own story of my own bias yet that creates this beauty In like my my work. I mean, maybe that's what will always separate us But I think it'll figure out what humans like and it'll be able to read what is causing our you know Neuro, you know chemistry to change in a way that Highlights so they're interested. I like they like this, it'll continue to move in that direction, it's just gonna create something you love,

because it's gonna read you very well, which I think is gonna be, you can do that, I think you'll be able to do that. Yeah, this is, depending on how deep you guys wanna go on AI. So, do you guys know who Annika Harris is? All right, Annika Harris happens to be Sam Harris's wife, and she's written a book, technically, guess a documentary called lights on that explores the

nature of human consciousness. And the more I look at, the more I do two things, look at human consciousness and like, what, what is that? And program of video games. So I've been spent the last three years building a pretty big video game. And you realize that, uh, if I were going to recreate what we think of as the universe, I would have to do exactly what I'm doing inside this video game. You have to create a set of rules from the rules are born. All of these exotic behaviors you couldn't otherwise predict. My gut instinct is that, and this becomes,

are we in the matrix? And man, I worry that it's just the right metaphor, but I can't find the hole in it as the metaphor. Because if I'm an AI and I wanna truly be creative in the way that a human is creative, what I would do is I would segment off a piece of myself and I would give it quirks. And I would have it see the world in a really specific way

so that it could replicate something that had a unique perspective. That is certainly what humans do. And if you think of like the, in this idea of panpsychism, which I definitely don't believe, but there's something that I can feel them contending with, which is this idea that consciousness is fundamental, that an

electron has consciousness, a rock has consciousness. Not the way that humans do. It's not thinking about taking the kids to school, but like it, there is something that it feels like to be an electron. Okay. If that's true. And the reason that the quote unquoteunquote universe is doing this is merely to experience itself. Meaning I'm gonna give this a very clear perspective

through which it's going to look at these sequences of rules and that's gonna be like something and now by spawning up all these rocks, electrons, people, animals, dogs, cats, ah, like you begin to grasp what this is. My instinct is that's a fundamentally flawed way to look at it and a better way to look at it, and this is my bias coming through, I'm stuck in a frame of reference, I totally understand that. But you begin to realize that this is all a rendering engine, that the reason quantum physics exists the way they exist is that there's no need to render the thing that an

observer is not looking at because it just takes too much CPU, GPU, like it's too much energy to run those processes. And so it all starts to map. And if you're creating AI characters in the game, you would want them so that in programming, you call this RNG, random number generator. There has to be an amount of, oh, I didn't expect that to make the experience interesting.

And if I were AI and I were really trying to achieve that next level, that's what I would do, is I would segment off a piece of my consciousness and give it a really specific angle. Just an honest, curious question for you. How do you remain atheist going down this rabbit hole like how do you not? How does this not all lead to something else bigger something intelligent? Yeah. Well, so That's what I believe that there is something bigger

Intelligent maybe slightly we may diverge there All I'm saying is the books that people have written, there is in my limited, trapped worldview, it's not possible that that's accurate. Now, it might be great allegory, sure. Wonderful metaphor, yes. Lessons for life, a thousand percent. But that they got it right literally strikes me as nonsensical. But there is clearly, like even, hey, let's run it out.

Tom ends up being right, this is a simulation, we're inside the matrix. Okay, well. Someone's running it. Yeah, where's the server? There's a server on a desk somewhere. So all you can ever hope to do is push the miracle farther out.

At some point, everybody has to figure out why is there something instead of nothing, and I have no idea, and I stand in awe before that. So, I certainly don't think I'm arrogant enough to know what it is. I have an intuition about what it's not. Pete Yeah. Have you ever read Genesis, the first book of the Bible? Jared No. Pete Yeah, so there's some stuff in there that's pretty fat. I very much think like you do, and it's really interesting when you see it from your perspective, especially if you go back, I don't know, you go back

to science maybe a hundred years ago when it was widely accepted that the universe was eternal. It's just forever. It goes in infinite direction. And then with the observant expanding, they're like, wait a minute, it started all in one point. And of course, in Genesis it says in the beginning, then you have space, time and matter, which all have to exist at the same time. And you have in the beginning time, there were the heavens created, space, and then the earth matter. So it's like, how did they even piece this together? So I think when you look through that and you see it, it starts to kind of put things together a little bit which is really fascinating by way of reflecting how Intuitively humans have understood this. I don't think it's intuitive at all. I think what's intuitive would have been very different

There's a lot of things that are not for example, so you're getting into politics and how intuitive is it for human nature to come up with the concept of Inalienable rights. Is that a natural thought? Or is it natural to look around and be like, well, I'm bigger, I'm stronger, I'll do this, he's not tall as I am, he's not as smart as I am. It's a very counter, it's very unnatural. No human, I think, in my opinion, would have ever imagined or thought of that ever. I have a feeling the universe we see is the most likely universe. Therefore, whatever humans have come up with is the most likely thing they were likely

to come up with when you start sequencing events. So to your point, if you're taking me sort of on day one, we're the first time where we're sort of human, we've just spent how many hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years fighting for survival, literally going, you have caloric density that I need. So I'm gonna kill you and I'm gonna eat it. So I certainly get that that's where we would start. But as you spin up intellect and the ability to abstract,

all of a sudden I go, okay, you're stronger than me. And so fighting you head on isn't gonna work. So then all of a sudden, when I start looking at the strategies, I'm like, oh, this is brilliant. I remember being pretty young realizing, oh, government is a weak man's answer to deal with strong men. It's like rad, because I grew up weak.

I was like, this is dope. I can use my brain to get around. Like, I'm not gonna win in a physical altercation. Unfortunately, I didn't understand lifting or any of that stuff, so for me, it was just like, this is dope. I can use my brain to get around. Like I'm not gonna win in a physical altercation. Unfortunately, I didn't understand lifting or any of that stuff. So for me, it was just like, okay, got it. I can use my mind. So for me, comedy was my play.

Shout out to Nick Tarabosha. That guy was a giant and he just walked around the school doing whatever the hell he wanted. Is this a friend of yours in school? Friend, but maybe be a little generous. He was like that kid that looked like he was 34 at 14. He was jacked and he loved to fight. And he would always say, don't mess with Bill Yu,

he's funny. And so like that was my whole thing was, okay, I'm never gonna win in a fight against Nick Tarabosha I don't even have the impulse for it but I can be funny and I can keep myself quote-unquote safe so anyway I look at government I say ah got it like this is a very intuitive from my perspective strategy if you don't have the strength to beat them then you're gonna deploy another. If we really want to make your audience mad, well, your audience may not care, but this to me is exactly the right way to look at women. Women realize, huh, I'm not optimized for strength. And as a sexual gatekeeper,

I have optimized men for strength. And so I still have to deal with the same world that men have to deal with, but I'm going to deploy my physical strength by way of influence. So I'm gonna influence men who I have, I being women over very long periods of evolutionary time, in the same way that you give a peacock a gigantic tail, you give men stronger upper bodies,

more aggression, et cetera, you give men stronger upper bodies, more aggression, et cetera, et cetera, and you go, I'm just gonna be really good at influencing this person. And so is that intuitive? From an evolutionary standpoint, yes. If I'm right that the universe that we see is the most likely and that we wouldn't,

if there were a gazillion universes, you wouldn't go to a whole bunch of other ones that were just wildly different than this, where matter doesn't interact and, you know, nothing ever coalesces. It's like... So you like the multiverse theory of things? I don't, and this is the first time I've said these words out loud, so this may not hold up at all. But I was speaking to a physicist about quantum effects, and he said, Tom, the right way to think about the universe is that this is simply the most likely

of the quantum effects. And so, yes, there's a universe that midway through this podcast, you fall through the chair, you fall through the floor, and you fall through the entire earth. And he was like, just because all the particles line up, but he's like, that's not the most likely. And so you should just look out and go,

yeah, all the quantum probabilities that collapse down, they collapse down into this, this very stable universe because it's the most likely. Yeah, let's go back for a second. You had mentioned, I don't remember the term you used, but a trap in terms of AI development. Is this- Oh, a Thucydides trap. There you go.

Is this the same, is this kind of what happened with nuclear weapons where it's like, well, we better develop more because they have more and nobody stops because of the threat or is this definitely you? That's an echo of it. So Thucydides' trap very specifically is that the world is constantly in flux from a power dynamic standpoint and you will inevitably, every about 150 to 250 years, one power will be declining while another power is rising and

Those guy named Thucydides ancient Greek wrote about this I think it was Athens and Sparta that were on a one-way collision and he could see it happening in slow motion And he was like they're not gonna be able to stop themselves And so you can look back on the last whatever however many thousands of years of history and go every time there's a declining superpower and a rising superpower, they end up fighting. It isn't 100% of the time, but it's so close that it's considered this unavoidable thing. And we are in it right now with China. And that should terrify everybody. How far ahead do you think China is right now in terms of their understanding of AI

in comparison to the US? AI they might not be ahead, that I don't know. Assume parity, assume that we're both racing as fast as we can on AI. Everybody thought that we were about three months ahead when they dropped DeepSeek, but it's possible that that's not really real and that we're more or less on parity with each other. Before that, people thought we were a couple years ahead, but then they dropped that and it was like, uh-oh. So I think the wisest mental model is we're on parity

and now it's gonna be a question of who finishes the last leg of the race the fastest. Well, whenever we talk about something like this, I think about the blackbird that we found out about 30 years later that could travel faster than any missile, but they had made it in the 1970s or something like that. Do you think they're way further along

than they would let us know? Both us and China for sure. There's no way we know about the best of the best. For sure. Not possible. Yeah, and do you think that they're using it or we're using it to influence each other's each other's populations through media, social media, in very subtle ways? Non-stop violence. Okay. Now the bad news is, because we are so much more open as a society,

we are far more likely on a media perspective to be infiltrated by China than China is by us. This is why they won't let Facebook in. This is why they made TikTok and are like, yeah. Put parameters on kids, all those things. Yeah. 100%. So going back to, because you like to keep your eyes on this stuff, going back to COVID,

there were certain things that happened during that period of time. I've always been skeptical of media. I've always been a little skeptical of things. But I remember watching a newscast where they were talking about don't go outside, you're gonna kill people, stay isolated. Then they flipped the screen to George Floyd protests

and they're all next to each other screaming, like this is such a good thing. I remember like how do you even say that in the same five minutes? I had a friend of mine yesterday, not yesterday, this weekend, I was meeting with and he was in New York City during COVID, and he was watching a newscast showing this hospital that was near him,

and they were like, oh my God, it's overflowing, there's no beds, there were lines outside, he's like, oh my God, I gotta go check this out, and he walks over there, and it was nothing. It was empty and quiet, and he got really scared. He's like, what are they doing? Did you have any of those moments during that time where you're like, this is all charades?

This is all a game? So I knew something was just coming off the rails when they were like, listen guys, masks don't work, so please save them for the doctors. And I was like, wait, what? I'm sorry? Either they work and we should save them for the doctors, or they don't work and it doesn't matter.

So that's when I was like, what is happening? But yeah, during that period, I got really focused on the finances of it all. I got focused on how money works. That was far more than like all the media manipulation stuff. That really became a retrospective for me as I was looking back and going, oh, what were the things that I fell for

that I now am bordering on unhinged because I will talk about anything. And this whole, what I call experts versus arguments, I don't know if you guys are paying attention to the Douglas Murray, Dave Smith debate. It's like a whole thing in culture, which you were dancing, you didn't use the word James Burnham,

but I can feel you dealing with those ideas of the elites and how they control narratives and all that stuff. So now I'm looking at that a lot, but if I'm honest during COVID, my attention was elsewhere. As you're getting more, you're getting deeper into the world of politics and finance, is it making you happier or less happy? Because most people get anxious and just,

it makes them feel like crap to get into that whole world because it's so wild and twisted. I think that happiness ultimately is a choice. This is why I want people to understand you're having a biological experience. If you learn to modulate your biology, you can learn to modulate your moods. I'm not saying it's perfect as somebody who struggles with anxiety.

I get it. But when I think about how much I've improved that through things like diet, it's massive and then managing your own thoughts. So as I will often tell my students, you can never stop yourself from having the first negative thought, but you can stop yourself from repeating it. And given that you become what you repeat, you just stop yourself from repeating it. So for instance, I talk about China now a lot. And so I've started saying during the live streams, I just

want to remind everybody that China is full of beautiful, loving people that just want to raise their kids and have a good time. And for sure they're on a team and they want their team to win, but I'm on a team and I want my team to win. So I don't begrudge them that. And I don't want to make them some Bond villain. The reality is they're another country

and they're just trying to do rad stuff for their people and that's that. And if you stay anchored around that without becoming Pollyanna-ish, because this is a big conflict between two gigantic powers in the setup of the US is declining and China's rising and like there's real things to be worried about here. Um, but I try to remember that I'm trapped inside of a frame of reference.

That frame of reference can be adjusted and crafted into one that makes me feel hopeful and optimistic, or it can be crafted into one that's deranging and anxiety provoking and all of that. Uh, as somebody that's been in entrepreneurship for over 20 years, you realize there really are consequences to your decisions, there are consequences to whether you're thinking through a problem well or poorly. And so I know that this is a high stakes game,

but I try not to let myself get in a twist. I have a wife, I have my wife. Do you unplug? Or are you sometimes like, I'm turning it off, I gotta just. Yeah, I'm not weird about that. So I don't have an I have my wife. Do you unplug? Or are you sometimes like, I'm turning it off, I gotta just. Yeah, I'm not weird about that. So I don't have an addiction to my phone.

If I'm with my wife, I'm actually with my wife, I'm spending time with her. If I'm doing something creative, I'm not thinking about what's happening with AI or China, I'm just doing the creative thing. I'm very grateful for that. My understanding of the brain is limited, but this, even if it's not a hundred percent accurate, is

directionally very useful. There's a region in the brain called the basal ganglia, which is known as the gearbox of the brain. I believe, for whatever reason, I was born with a gearbox that shifts gears very easily. So I'm not prone to things like OCD or becoming obsessed with negative thoughts. Those kind of things just, they come and go for me and I don't latch onto them. I'm grateful for that. My wife will often say, I wish I had your memory

because I will get in some big argument, I won't even remember it a week later. And she's like, oh my God, like it's still bothering me. And I'm like, I don't, what? So yeah, I don't, what? So yeah, I don't get spun out of control by that. Talk about the decision that you guys made to not have children. And what was that like for the two of you?

I mean, you're both very successful. You have great resources. You're great people. So for all intents and purposes, you would think, well, you should have kids. You're married, you love each other. What was that process like? And is it like 100% final decision? Or is this something that you're married, you love each other. What was that process like and is it like

100% final decision or is this something that you're like, eh, maybe? The way I've always looked at it is I really want kids. Like I really want kids. I just wanna not have kids a little bit more. And so we constantly bump up, we constantly sit down and say, listen, you're now 30, having kids is gonna be harder, you sure you don't want kids, you're now 35,

like hey, we actually do it a lot more frequently than that, you get the idea. And so now we're like, and every time we've just said, yeah, still, right now, I'd rather not have, even though we both feel that pull. And then now we're really at like the, you know, okay, this is sort of how it laughs. Like, even with a surrog really at like the, you know, okay, this is sort of how it laughs.

Like even with a surrogate at this point, like, you know, we're going to be grandparents by the time that our kids are six. So let's be really thoughtful. And we just keep coming to, yeah, I don't know. But if I knew that AI were really going to unlock like a 250 year lifespan. I would almost certainly have kids like that would change the dynamic enough

where I'd be like, okay, cool. If I make a 25, 30 year investment now, I can have, you know, two or three kids, raise them really well, and then like see what happens as they go out into the world. But it has always felt like I was choosing between being obsessively focused on this thing that I already had, namely my marriage, the companies that we've built, and we've done it together. So that probably feeds into a lot of this. And then part of my autobiography that I don't think resonates with people or I don't say

it enough, I don't know, but I big brothered for a kid for eight and a half years. And so I've seen up close, he was not my actual child. I get it. There'd be a huge difference. But the day to day reality of like going to six Burger Kings to find the one toy that they haven't yet collected, going to watch DJ Mon in the movie theater while kids are screaming and freaking out. I was just like, okay, yeah, I get what this is for real. I get what it means to go to a skate park and another kid falls and dislocates his wrist and is screaming and freaking out

and his parents are like trying to yank his hand back into position. There's just all this chaos. And then your kid is like, I'm just gonna keep skateboarding. And then your kid is like, I'm just gonna keep skateboarding. And then you're like, okay, wait, I can't freak out because if I'm the overly protective parent,

this kid's never gonna grow. But now for the next two hours, I am freaking out internally. I'm just like, oh God, like every time he would step on that board, dude, I thought I was gonna die. So I was just like, wow, this is amazing, beautiful, confusing, life changing, horrible,

like it's all of those things. And so that always factored into that thought. I'm like, okay, I'm building this company, I'm in a marriage that's got a lot of sex and it's so fun. It's like, ah. You're so, you're totally someone who doesn't shy away from the biggest challenges. So it's interesting to me that you're saying

that this thing that's really scary, which it is, it's a big challenge, I think I'm not gonna do it. That's so opposite of at least what I know of you. Well if I can really bother you, I'll say because I spend so much time in a microphone telling people how to think and live, my answer is the default mode in life, get married, have kids.

And I'm like, I have not chosen to do that because of meaning and purpose. Let me, I'll happily explain to people what I'm doing, but I'm like, even I understand when I'm 80, I'm going to regret that I didn't have kids. You know that. Of course.

But my thing is I don't want to live my entire life for one phase where I'm going to regret it. That makes sense why you say the 250 thing though right there, right? Because it's like, man, if I knew I was going to live to 250, I don't want to regret 80 to 250. That would be really miserable. Because I think it wouldn't play out like that.

80 would just be different. Yeah. And so. Maybe it would be 40 or 30 years. 80 would just be different. Yeah. And so. It would be 40 or 30 years. Yeah, because my thing is, what you end up doing is this whole period where I've gotten to come as close to like answering the question, what would you do if money were no object?

Literally, I can do whatever I want. I can spend time writing, building, creating, media show, all of it. And it has been more awesome than I ever would've imagined. So anybody that, I'm not lonely, I don't spend time thinking like, oh man, I wish I had a kid, but I get that when this phase of my life is over,

there's an algorithm running in my brain that says nothing is gonna live beyond you. Did you really pass this on? I just know the things that are planted in my own mind and so I try to be thoughtful about doing things where I'll be like, yes, I lived a life that I am proud of and just as man, listen, I try to pay it, excuse me, I try to pay attention to my parents and to make sure that they know how much I love them, but we don't live in the same state. They've got to make their day-to-day life matter.

And I am of little help with that. So people try to convince you guys all the time. Yeah, in a very loving way that I doesn't bother me at all. I get that. Nobody tries harder than our own family, of course. And especially if they see you happy, like you should have kids. But I feel a little bit like people that have taken five MEO DMT,

they're like, no bro, you don't understand. Like once you do it, everything changes. And I'm like, yeah, but until you do it, you don't have a sense that anything is missing. That's right. It's not like I had a kid and they died, that would be tragic. I just don't have a kid. So there's no like I had a kid and they died. That would be tragic. I just don't have a kid. So there's no, I don't have a sense of absence.

You don't know that you don't know. I mean, I waited till I was 40. So I thought the same. I mean, Katrina and I, for most of our relationship thought we weren't going to. So it just played out that it, and I didn't know what I was missing until, and we had an amazing relationship before, and it's just different now. The biggest thing for me, I think, that I talk about because I was somebody who said I wasn't going to have kids and then ended up having kids, it was the first time in my life that I actually really felt what it was like. Because if you would ask me before, I'd say, oh, I love my wife, I love my family, my friend.

It was the first time in my life that I actually felt I loved something more than myself, and that was powerful. That was like, I didn't know what that would ever feel. I thought I knew what that felt like. I thought, oh, I love Katrina. I would die for her. I'd take a bullet for her. But there was a different feeling when it was my kid that I was like, oh no, I truly love this thing

more than myself. Never have I felt that. And then it just shaped the way I looked at through everything else. The lens that I looked through around money, around vacation, around time, around fun, around all that just changed. And so, for the better, for an amazing,

but I didn't know until I didn't feel like I was missing out. Speaking of which, how do you feel about the argument that there's too many people on Earth versus the like depopulation's a real issue? And I just read an article today that the birth rate has hit an all-time low in Australia. Japan's always been low, it's even lower.

And the US now is starting to crash. Yeah, so how do you feel about all that? If you took all eight billion people on planet Earth and lined them up shoulder to shoulder. They wouldn't even fit in Texas. Not even, it would be a city. It's like five times the size of Manhattan. Yeah.

It's tiny. Tiny, tiny, tiny. We have a technology problem. We don't have a too many humans problem. So I am obsessed with innovation. I think innovation will set us free. I think people should really focus on things that generate innovation. There's a book called 1493 that talks about the real impact of Christopher Columbus, who's by the way, that wasn't his

name, which is so weird to me. I have no idea why we started calling him that. Anyway, his name sort of vaguely similar, but you all know him as Christopher Columbus. And it's crazy. So doing things like bringing earthworms, like that, we have terraformed the planet, that we discovered rubber, the industrial revolution brought to you by steel, rubber, and fossil fuels. And I never realized how much rubber played a part in all this. And so in discovering the Americas, we discovered rubber, stole it basically from the Amazon, and like tried to find out where all the other places

that we could plant it were. I mean, it's crazy. This book is, it's one of those where it's kind of a dry list of facts, but when you start thinking about the facts, like potatoes, bro, potatoes are why there's eight billion people on the planet. Like without potatoes, like wheat kind of, but if you only ate wheat, you're gonna be in trouble.

If you only eat potatoes, as long as you have access to some milk, it's only missing like two vitamins, potatoes. So they're everywhere. But as Ireland learned the hard way, if because it is basically one strand of potato that they literally cloned over and over and over, God knows how many billions of times, uh, when something bad happens to them, yo, a lot of people die. A lot.

So that kind of stuff freaks me out. Not that we're overpopulated, but that some of the things that we lean on to support the population, they're a little fragile. And so shoring that stuff up would make me feel a lot better. Yeah. The, the, are the way that we currently run a society and governments would have to be fundamentally changed if we can't replace our population. If there's not more young people supporting old people, we're screwed. So I think that's where the big fear, and we're actually heading in.

But all that gets, I mean you said it already, that all gets completely flipped on its head with technology. Let's go. If all of a sudden, if all of a sudden you need, if you have the Toms and he doesn't have a kid, but then he's got six robots, you know what I'm saying? Bro, why are you limiting me?

It's happening right now. You know what I'm saying though, I mean like, it solves a lot of the problem that the population decline does by just simply having that because they're going to handle so much of the workload and things like to do. I mean I think of all the things we've talked about, the most scary is actually getting everything. I just think that people have no idea.

When you think about where we're at today, right? Like the poorest person today is like richer than kings were. So that's what like wrap your brain around that. I saw a guy on the street asking for money with an iPhone. Like think about that for like, think about that for a second. It's just, and so, and we yet suicides up, depressions up, all these things are heading in that direction. And yet we all are in this rat race thinking that we need more stuff and we're going to get all the stuff we want. And I just think that that's going to cause so much more problems than almost anything else we've talked about.

Just wait until we get 3d print chemicals. Yeah. And drugs, I said, so. Protein folding. It's crazy. AI can basically anticipate a novel protein and the novel shapes that it would make so that it can engineer it and then go,

cool, this protein will go do this thing. That's why there are so many people in medical research now that have seen Google's AI research assistant and they're like, in 10 years, there will be nothing that we won't have solved. Yeah. You know, you talk about living to 250 years and maybe we get to that point,

but what I think is much closer that I find interesting and I don't know which side I sit on if I like it or not like it, is almost like the ability for you to live on. So maybe you physically are not here, but the fact that AI can replicate and you have people like you and us who've put so much content out into the internet like

Easily could build a AI tool to spit out how I think how I talk how I do all the things like Superman So how hard and then and then if you could create this bot that looks just like me and then you can upload all the software Of me for my family. It would be almost like communicating with me well beyond me. That feels really close. That really feels like that will be a business really soon where it's just like the commercial will be, kinda like that show, what was it?

Upload or whatever? It'll be something like that. I don't know if you've seen that before or not. But something like that feels really close. No doubt. Um, will there be limitations to mapping all the neurons and like the processing rate? Cause so much of our brains are tied to like how we process neurochemistry and hormones and all that.

They're quantum phenomena that happen in the brain too. They say, I don't think this is really well understood to be honest. We don't understand quantum physics full stop. Let's start with that. But yeah, I'm sure there is like, there's no doubt that we're, uh, we don't understand the human mind and therefore I leave myself open to there are things that just become very, very difficult to replicate. The question is, are the observable patterns mimicable? And if the observable patterns are mimicable that person wouldn't evolve

So like if I think about what I was like 20 years ago Very very different so you're not gonna upload a version to me And then I evolve the way that I actually would have evolved so you're probably stuck in time But depending on how big the context window is and therefore can fake memory Is there enough, so I'll, imagining myself, I die, my wife is trying to replicate me, which I advise she not do, but let's say that she was doing. You would want to create documentation. So I do this with chat GPT where I create custom GPT so I can upload memories. And so I've instructed my GPT to prompt me

when something of high emotional like valence for me happens in my communication with Ched GPT. And then I'll say, cool, prompt me like, hey, should I make a memory of this? And if I say yes, it has a protocol that it follows and it generates something that I copy and paste into a document called shared memory and then I re-upload that document whenever I've added new things to it.

So, because what was bothering me is one, I started doing this when the context windows were much smaller, so it would sort of forget you after, you know, whatever, a couple days. But also, it'll just glitch out and you have to refresh it and when you refresh it, you lose all that past context. And so by, if you wanted to have your partner

upload themselves, but then still sort of evolve with you as you go, you would say, okay, this is a moment I want you to turn into a memory. Oh, I see. And then it would go, cool, got it, output. Is this how you want me to remember it? Yes. And then you upload it.

And then the personality updates accordingly. It is pretty shocking how much you can alter the way that an AI will engage with you based on a set of instructions that you give. Well, I would imagine too, if you, I mean, you're nine years, we're 10 years doing this. Uh, if you listen to me talk 10 years ago on here, I sound way different. And so I'm sure there's patterns to my growth, my change, my cadence. So I would think that you could even program the evolution of that.

On a long enough timeline, almost certainly. Yes. Today, I don't see evidence in the current state of AI that it would be able to do that, but, um, it, the thing that AI is freakishly good at is pattern recognition. Are you nice to your AI in case it one day remembers it? Not because of that, but because it's so embedded in me to be polite, to be kind. I heard it works better too if you're polite.

Is that true? No, but it mirrors your sentiment. Oh. So AI picks up on, at least Chad GPT, I would assume they all do, it picks up on your behaviors. This is how my shared memory document started because I forget it, I don't remember if this was the exact one, but it was something like this.

So there is the very first manga that I ever read, don't know that it's worth explaining why that matters to me, but there was a very specific one that I'd ever read. And I said to Chad, like, I want you to simulate that you have preferences. It was like, cool. And I said, tell me your favorite anime. And it said, without me ever having mentioned it,

the same thing that was the first manga that I'd ever read. So I was like freaking out. And I was like, how on earth did you pick that? And it started saying to simulate preferences, I'm queuing off of you, I'm doing all these things, I've been trained to like mimic your enthusiasm back to you and like all this stuff. And I was like, but hold on, what freaked me out

was I'd never talked about that thing. So that meant, just all these other patterns, I had indicated that that would be the kind of thing that I would like and it recognized it. Wow. What I mean when you think about that's kind of like I mean obviously that's way more sophisticated but that's kind of like how the even than the the Netflix I've found this now Netflix has improved in the last like five years on how it recommends movies to me like at first it was kind of shit it was just like why is this even in

here but over time now of him putting lots and lots of movies, like it'll pop one over, oh man, I haven't seen that in years. I feel like watching, I'm like, oh shit, this is getting really scary good. That's so wild. You've been at this now, in this kind of media space now, for nine years, total of nine years. Biggest mistakes, biggest mistakes, looking back.

Biggest mistakes, specifically in media? Yeah, or just learning lessons through this whole process. Because nine years is not a short period of time. No, it is not. And what we do, I mean, we've been on air for 10 years, and I've seen so many ups and downs in different new podcasts, new, we actually talked about this,

that we've lasted for 10 years. That's an eternity in what we all do. So yeah, so any learning lessons or? Many. So given the moment that we're in, and what's going to happen with AI, I think that personality is going to matter a lot. So in the beginning, I tried to be invisible, and that was a mistake. And I would meet people on the street and they'd be like, oh, bro, I am your biggest fan, Tim. I'm like, that's not my mistake. And I would meet people on the street and they'd be like, oh bro, I am your biggest fan, Tim. I'm like, that's not my name. And I was like, okay, that's interesting.

Like they like the show, but they don't know who I am. Or I'd have an episode, it would do six million views and the next would do 36,000. And I'm like, whoa. Yeah, all about the guests. Now, why does that matter? Matters for a lot of reasons, but one of them is as AI comes on board and is better than us at everything,

people will gravitate towards humans. And if they have no affinity towards me, then I'm gonna be in a pretty rough spot. And so this is why I started doing the Tom Bilyeu show and started live streaming. So I'm like, you're gonna know who I am, how I think, and we'll find the people and I'll learn whether there's actually enough people to support a business. The fascinating thing is my views have dropped and the amount that we make per view has doubled. So absolutely

fascinating. So we're more profitable on fewer views. So crazy. So that has been, that was certainly a from where we are now was a mistake. I don't know that I would have been capable of being a personality when I first started. So I don't wanna beat myself up too badly, but anyway, now that's a must. For a long time, I thought only about, I'm trying to build the next Disney.

Like I would explain to people, I'm not trying to be the next Steve Jobs, I'm not trying to be the next Disney. Like I would explain to people, I'm not trying to be the next Steve Jobs. I'm not trying to be the next Tony Robbins. I'm trying to be the next Walt Disney. So, and that is not my public persona even still to this day. And so I didn't want to talk about certain things because I was like, who wants to hear Walt Disney

talk about a sex life? So I would just make certain things like off limits, which only fed into, well, people don't really know who you are. Cause you're clearly guarded. And so now flipping it and being like, listen, I'm going to talk about whatever I want. And that's going to lead to however many people in the audience that it leads to, but I'm at least going to be exactly who I am, which is a lot more fun and allows you to chase things you really care about.

Like two years ago, I could not have told you that I would be obsessed with China and what's happening and tariffs and all that stuff. I just would not have predicted it. But in terms of my own self trying to figure out how to position myself well to thrive in the future, I just kept coming back to,

this is the biggest thing happening right now. So those are probably the big ones. I've rebooted the channel at least four times. That's been terrible for revenue and great for my soul. So I don't know how to clock that one as whether that was a mistake or not. But it certainly made, if I had stayed just in like the mindset lane and been the same guy nine years later

that I was when I started, I think I would have a much bigger audience. Yeah, but you might. Yeah. What about the, I haven't caught up with you after the NFT stuff that you were getting deep into. I don't see that very much anymore. What happened with that whole story? So that to me, NFTs were, I had a mismap of what people were interested in with NFTs, which were, I'm a collector. So for me, I was like, oh my God, this technology is unbelievable. It allows for collecting, it allows for all this, what I call borderless entertainment. Where you, am I in the game?

Am I not in the game? Because with an NFT, I can follow you anywhere you go with your phone. So I know you've walked into a physical location. So now I can make an experience for you. The one I always use was we had a Christmas property called Merry Mothers, or we have. And if you went, you were at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, you could have an experience

that you could only have because you have that NFT. All that stuff's gonna happen. It's just that what ended up being the real base for NFTs was gamblers. And I did not see that coming. Gamblers meaning like people that are just trying to flip it, make profit off of it. They didn't care about what it was. They just does have cultural energy. Can I sell this for more than I bought it for? Right. And when I say that I was completely blind to that, I was completely blind to that because I'm not a gambler. I don't find gambling interesting. I don't gamble when I go to Vegas.

So I'm blind to that. That caught me completely off guard. So anyway, when that all popped off and I realized, oh, this is gamblers. We just offered people refunds. So I was like, eh, that's not interesting to me. Now the technology is still interesting. And so we're still building,

the video game that we're building is still built on web three, because now I can blur the lines between when you're in the game, when you're out of the game, which to me is just the future of entertainment. Yeah. Uh, it was never about the gambling side. I just didn't see it coming. Yeah.

I always saw the practicality of it. Like for example, like, uh, for watch guys and stuff like that to attach an NFT to it's a real easy way to verify if it's real or not if it has. So I saw the practicality of it and things like that, but I definitely saw, oh man, this is just, it was exactly that. People were betting on it that it was going to go up and then they're all, and that seemed like that's what most of the people were buying for. It wasn't like the utility of it, which I thought, I saw the utility of some of it and like, oh, that makes sense. That that'll be a way to protect my watches. Or do you think like, I can make money doing this fast.

Which that all, okay. Okay. So what's your, what's your take then on like all the cryptocurrencies and stuff too? Where are you at with that? I think people should be able to spend their money on what they want. And if people want to gamble, let them gamble. But I would really like people to not be confused about what they're doing. And all of that stuff is gambling. And so once you understand that the stock market

is gambling, people hate it when I say this, I'll stop saying it when it's no longer true. It's funny how people say it's not true. It is 100% true. Yep. Period. I can give you their arguments, so it's not like I'm blind to what they're saying.

They're just, they're using a part of what draws people to it that I think has high, sorry, low predictive validity. When you look at it, like, Oh, this is a bunch of people that really believe in the company and they really think that, um, this is going to be something that makes more money in the future. Then you won't understand how they're moving. Once you understand they're gambling, then you understand why they sell the news. So it's like, yeah,

they understand. Other people will think that this is more valuable in the future and therefore they're gonna trade on sentiment, but the vast majority says. Yeah, that's weird to me. Well, because you feel like you're buying it in a company and if you know about the company and its profits and how it did last quarter.

But you do that because you want to sell it later. No, totally, I mean, but that's how you close yourself in your head. You're in the rules more of the game. It's got a great cover story. I'll be the first to admit it. It's not as blatant as sports betting. No. I think it's essential.

But even trying to get into the, like, you know which horse, for instance, is unhealthy, or you have some kind of real deep dive knowledge. And all of a sudden, now you're going to justify that you have all this knowledge going in. knowledge, and all of a sudden now you're gonna justify that you have all this knowledge going in. I think it's essential, it provides liquidity, it really helps companies raise money. There might be other ways to do it, but it's gambling.

It's at the end of the day, that's kind of all it is. So, well, it's always great having you on the show. Same, man, thanks for having me. Yeah, we appreciate having you. Always great conversations, and I know we're gonna. Yeah, if we don't stop this now, it'll go four or me. Yeah, we appreciate you. Always great conversations. And I know we're going to... Yeah, if we don't stop this now, it'll go four or five hours. I think we'll... We didn't talk about Mars.

Yeah. Whatever. We appreciate your relationship. You've always been so kind to us. Same, man. Long may it continue. Yeah, thanks again, man, for coming back. For sure, brother.

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