The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - AI and How to Not Get Left Behind ｜ Tom Bilyeu EP 221

00:00:00.000 Imagine a movie that's updating in real time

00:00:02.660 based on how much you're paying attention.

00:00:04.480 The AI, while you're watching it,

00:00:06.160 knows if your blood pressure's going up or going down

00:00:08.180 and you're getting relaxed, where are your eyes?

00:00:09.900 So that at the beginning of the movie,

00:00:11.500 it was gonna end one way,

00:00:12.900 but really it's just watching you.

00:00:14.100 You're engaging with this and so all of a sudden

00:00:15.700 it becomes a movie about a husband and wife

00:00:17.640 arguing over a seven-year-old, oh my God.

00:00:20.920 Microsoft have spun up a nuclear power plant.

00:00:24.900 Three Mile Island is coming back online

00:00:27.100 because Microsoft knows to run their AI,

00:00:29.460 they're going to need that level of energy there's research happening right now that says the only

00:00:33.460 difference between humans and monkeys is the amount of compute if we just keep stacking compute

00:00:39.540 compute compute compute compute on these ai systems they will get smarter and smarter and

00:00:44.340 smarter society is going to bifurcate so there are going to be people who carry the derogatory term

00:00:50.900 transhumanist and they will embrace technology as fast as they can then there are going to be

00:00:55.140 people who absolutely shun it can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece can you you'll

00:01:01.380 see let's hope just protests at the power plants you've had people actually propose to congress

00:01:06.740 you need to be prepared to do nuclear strikes on the data centers that run these in the future i

00:01:11.220 don't think people have a full grasp at how fast this is all moving that doesn't mean disconnect

00:01:16.100 that means move towards the thing that scares you learn how to use it to your advantage the question

00:01:21.060 becomes? Is it this incredible thing that makes us think about new things that takes us out of

00:01:26.300 an age of scarcity into something totally new? Or does it just numb the masses?

00:01:34.260 Tom Bilyeu, welcome to my podcast. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for dropping in. This

00:01:39.380 should be fun. Yeah, doing it in person makes a big difference. So I thought it was well worth it.

00:01:44.280 For anyone, not that you need an introduction, but for anyone who doesn't know who you are,

00:01:47.520 can you give a bit of your background? I definitely think I need a quick primer for

00:01:53.160 people. I always assume nobody knows who I am. So, uh, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I built a

00:01:57.340 company called quest nutrition. That's probably the thing that until recently I was most known

00:02:02.000 for, uh, sold it for a billion dollars. That attracts a lot of headlines. That's where people

00:02:06.720 usually start. And then my next company, the one I'm building now is called impact theory,

00:02:11.080 uh, which is a billion view company. So I've done the billion dollar company and now I'm

00:02:15.420 building a media company. Uh, and we do everything from YouTube content is a core of what we do.

00:02:20.560 And then we're also building a video game. That's the thing I'm probably least known for,

00:02:24.540 but the thing that I'm most passionate about. Okay. Let's talk about this video game. I know

00:02:28.760 when I came on your podcast, you mentioned it a little bit, but is there anything you can tell

00:02:33.660 people about that when it's launching or anything? So I'm building in phases. So it's actually out

00:02:38.400 now. It's called project Kaizen. It's free to play. Uh, what's out right now, you'd have to

00:02:43.420 be a really diehard gamer that wants to be at the beginning of something because it's so small it's

00:02:47.860 like a piece of a game uh but we have people come every week and we do challenges and play it's a

00:02:53.220 lot of fun it's basically if you think of it as team deathmatch you'll get a very close

00:02:57.700 approximation it does other things but that's the the thing people can hold on to but the big vision

00:03:03.120 is ready player one so i read that book many moons ago and was like oh i'm gonna help make this real

00:03:08.860 so we're trying to build something like that where you can truly and this is going to divide your

00:03:14.340 audience uh you can truly inhabit the game so that you're not just there playing a game you're

00:03:20.000 there to create you're there to engage to be social uh and the farther we go down the road

00:03:26.420 this doesn't exist today in the game but certainly on our path to integrate ai very deeply such that

00:03:31.900 you would have ongoing relationships with characters in the game and with the big

00:03:36.980 announcement from jensen huang of nvidia where they've they've literally created a brain that is

00:03:42.880 their supercomputer in the cloud but on a 500 piece of hardware and the idea is that they've already

00:03:49.280 integrated with games like pub g which is a battle royale game so people know fortnite it's like that

00:03:54.140 where the characters will learn you so they know how you move and how you want them to play they're

00:03:59.920 specific to you and where it is today versus where it's going to be in just a few short years

00:04:05.620 is worth highlighting so where it is today is already very interesting in terms of you'll have

00:04:09.660 characters in the game that play like real people so if you don't have a team of real people to join

00:04:15.720 you you now have this brain that will be able to give you characters that are like real people in

00:04:20.080 the way that they move interact learn from you etc where it's going is those characters will have

00:04:25.600 memory they will remember games that you played together they'll remember times you won or lost

00:04:29.700 they might tease you for being bad at a certain thing they might encourage you if that's the

00:04:33.740 setting that you want. So you could create a group of guys that, you know, uh, break your balls or

00:04:39.840 guys that are like super supportive. And so again, that's not where it is today, but you don't have

00:04:45.020 to know a lot about AI to know where that's going to go. And almost certainly they'll create

00:04:49.300 personality generators where they'll say pick from, you know, this is 72 different personality

00:04:53.700 types, or Hey, you want to choose the rock as somebody to play with you. You go and he's

00:04:58.300 authorized his model that's been trained on him and how he would interact and play. And you can

00:05:02.800 add them to your team. That, that kind of stuff is going to happen very, very fast. Wow. Yeah.

00:05:09.200 So you guys really want to get freaked out. Cause I know you have kids where this all goes is your

00:05:12.820 kids are having relationships with AI. Like for real, for real, your kids are going to have

00:05:16.680 relationships with teddy bears. You'll get a running report of what the teddy bear is saying.

00:05:21.220 You'll even be able to do the reinforcement learning on the teddy bear. So that it's

00:05:24.500 specifically telling your kid the things that you want. Um, but that's going to happen really,

00:05:30.540 really fast. And in the next, call it five years, there will probably be millions of humanoid robots

00:05:38.840 walking around. You stretch that out to 10 years, you're probably pushing a billion.

00:05:44.460 So that's going to change everything. If you guys aren't on Peterson Academy,

00:05:50.960 you're missing out. There are over 25 eight hour courses on there from people like Verveke,

00:05:56.160 Michael Malice, Keith Campbell. My dad has three eight-hour courses out now, including Nietzsche,

00:06:03.360 Sermon on the Mount, and Intro to Personality, which is excellent. Brian Keating's on there.

00:06:07.420 David Eagleman on Brain Plasticity just came out, which I love. Go to petersonacademy.com and come

00:06:13.760 in and see what it's like. We have a seven-day money-back guarantee, so you can poke around the

00:06:17.700 website, look at the courses, and get a refund if you want. No strings attached. Any age is welcome.

00:06:22.800 the courses are university level thanks guys enjoy the rest of the podcast i bought so scarlett's my

00:06:30.340 she's seven now when she was five i found this robot online that was just this little it was

00:06:37.320 it was kind of creepy but i was like this is cool because i remember when i was little i wanted this

00:06:40.860 little dog robot and i was so excited for this like pet dog robot and i bought it and all it did

00:06:45.720 was rock back and forth and make a wolf noise i was just like this is the most disappointing thing

00:06:50.820 I've ever like yearned for, we'll get your daughter. 0.91

00:06:53.460 One of the Chinese dogs with the wheels, that thing will roll up to the fridge, 1.00

00:06:57.300 grab her stuff out of the fridge that she wants. 0.99

00:06:59.340 If somebody tries to break in the house, it goes into defense mode.

00:07:01.780 It is truly Chinese robot dogs.

00:07:05.980 So they have wheels for legs.

00:07:07.320 So did you see the black mirror episode?

00:07:09.300 No, black mirror freaks me out.

00:07:11.220 You have to see this.

00:07:12.060 It freaks me out.

00:07:12.840 It is the most terrifying prognostication of what if AI breaks bad.

00:07:17.160 So it looks very similar to that, but far more agile and it's just imagine a dog,

00:07:24.480 but without the sort of cuteness or personality, a metal dog, four legs on

00:07:28.500 wheels, it can stand on two wheels.

00:07:30.140 It can spin, it can jump.

00:07:31.300 It can write itself.

00:07:32.460 They are fast.

00:07:34.180 It's the thing that people will always tweet about.

00:07:37.100 This is imagine a thousand of those coming at you at full speed.

00:07:40.980 And it, it, that is admittedly a terrifying vision.

00:07:43.920 So for anybody that's worried about this, look, AI, and I don't know how deep you want to go on

00:07:48.200 this, but AI will pass through a really disruptive phase and it's not going to be fun. And it will

00:07:53.700 be like, imagine the printing press rolling out everywhere all at once over a five-year period

00:07:59.580 like that. It's going to feel like that, right? For anybody that knows how culturally devastating

00:08:05.100 at first, like literal bloodshed, the printing press was, this was not just a good. Oh, I don't

00:08:10.380 know anything about that oh my god uh so led to all kinds of wars i'll let the historians in the

00:08:16.180 crowd put in the comments exactly what wars uh but yeah absolute wars broke out for i think the 30

00:08:21.480 years war almost certainly was uh an echo of the printing press but wars anyway like just swept

00:08:26.900 across europe absolutely devastating on the other side of it i don't think any of us would ever want

00:08:31.940 to give that up so ai is going to be like that there'll be a super weird transition period that

00:08:37.200 will almost certainly involve violence, hopefully only against the robots, but you will certainly

00:08:41.900 see that.

00:08:43.140 And then on the other side of that is going to be, and look, anybody, myself included,

00:08:48.700 that tells you they can see the future, they're simply saying, as of today, this is the best

00:08:52.740 prognostication I can make.

00:08:54.440 There's no way what I'm about to say will be literally true.

00:08:57.220 I'm just trying to get people directionally true.

00:08:59.520 So on the other side, AI robotics is going to make it such that it's just common to have

00:09:06.280 a fleet of robots in your house doing things for you we're probably edging up towards a post

00:09:11.560 capitalistic world what does that look like it's an age of abundance if people don't know this

00:09:16.620 already microsoft okay the makers of windows have spun up a nuclear power plant this is all true

00:09:25.300 three mile island is coming back online because microsoft knows to run their ai they're going to

00:09:31.220 need that level of energy i don't think people have a full grasp at how fast this is all moving

00:09:36.720 So there's research happening right now that says, no, no, no.

00:09:40.280 The only difference between humans and monkeys is the amount of compute.

00:09:45.340 And so if we just keep stacking compute, compute, compute, compute on these AI systems, they

00:09:51.440 will get smarter and smarter and smarter.

00:09:54.140 Is there going to be an upper bound?

00:09:55.760 Some people say yes.

00:09:56.660 Some people say no.

00:09:58.000 But when you think about the difference between a monkey and a human, you can count on at

00:10:02.840 least that.

00:10:03.440 It will probably be devastatingly more.

00:10:05.620 So this is why you're interested in AI.

00:10:07.840 Oh my God.

00:10:08.540 If I let it, it would be all consuming.

00:10:12.160 But so I've now rank ordered my company.

00:10:14.340 So there's three things that we do at Impact Theory.

00:10:16.440 One is what we call the content.

00:10:18.180 So me on camera, my wife on camera.

00:10:20.880 Then there is the education system.

00:10:23.440 So you'll know this well.

00:10:24.240 You're doing Peterson Academy.

00:10:25.560 We have Impact Theory University.

00:10:26.780 We're focused almost entirely on business.

00:10:28.860 So it's a different shtick, but same idea.

00:10:30.800 Like university system doesn't make any sense anymore.

00:10:33.260 I'm trying to get rid of Harvard Business School.

00:10:35.240 Uh, so there's that.

00:10:36.860 And then we have the entertainment.

00:10:38.180 So the video games, comic books, that stuff.

00:10:40.160 So the content has the least AI risk because I think what's going to happen as AI comes

00:10:46.480 on board, people are going to respond very poorly and they are going to want to engage

00:10:50.540 with a human.

00:10:51.540 Yeah.

00:10:52.040 I, Tom is dumber than AI, but at least he's real.

00:10:54.500 He's a human.

00:10:55.080 He had a childhood, all that stuff.

00:10:56.420 I'm here for that.

00:10:57.140 So I think they'll engage with that a lot, uh, education to build a business.

00:11:02.420 You for sure must understand AI.

00:11:04.160 So that's got moderate AI risk because business could become one guy basically telling an army

00:11:09.400 of AI what to do. And so very quickly that probably goes away and people just learn to

00:11:14.260 engage with their AI. And then the last part, which the entertainment I think has catastrophic

00:11:19.920 AI risk in that it is very possible three years from now, you just type something in and the game

00:11:25.280 comes into being and everything is hyper-personalized. Now maybe the timeline's a little

00:11:30.040 wrong, but it's not going to be off by a lot. Wow. Yeah. My dad, the other day, he was sending me

00:11:36.320 like AI videos of himself being like, this is like annoyed about it. Right. And I was like,

00:11:41.260 there's nothing you can do. I was like, at least now there's a percentage of the audience that

00:11:47.040 knows that you in AI form. Okay. In like eight months or a year, maybe less, no one's going to

00:11:54.160 be able to tell. So people are going to have to, there's going to be this learning curve and people

00:11:58.140 are going to have to. Fact check somehow if they want to know if it's the real person. I don't

00:12:03.520 know how they're going to tell what's real, but people have to learn. I don't think there's any

00:12:07.260 other way. You watermark it with a blockchain stamp. Yeah, blockchain. Your dad would say,

00:12:12.580 okay, if it has this stamp on it, it really is me. If it doesn't have the stamp on it, it's not me,

00:12:17.580 and you should just assume it's fake. There was a video that went viral of a diver pulling a hook

00:12:24.220 out of uh i don't know if it's a tiger shark or something oh i saw that yeah all ai yeah but

00:12:29.580 nobody realized they had the wrong number of gills right uh i don't know who first spotted that

00:12:34.880 there's a problem if you look at it closely you'll see okay there's a bit of weirdness in the motion

00:12:39.000 of the shark but that we're already fooling a distressing percentage of people like let's say

00:12:44.900 we fool 10 of people who are not looking really closely uh very fast it will be a hundred percent

00:12:50.880 of people that are looking as closely as they can like it's just advancing so fast so you think

00:12:56.500 blockchain will stop that i was like i think blockchain people need to adapt somehow because

00:13:00.740 it's going to be everywhere for sure blockchain will merely give you the ability to know if

00:13:06.240 something actually is from that person that's that's the most i'll say about it crazy i agree

00:13:13.260 i've had arguments with people being like well is hollywood done when ai comes over like when it

00:13:17.540 takes over. Do you think so though? Cause I don't think you can fake actors. Like they're already,

00:13:22.780 no, no, no. You can fake actors, but I don't think people will be attached to them like they

00:13:29.740 are to real people. That is correct. I think that their society is going to bifurcate. So there are

00:13:36.320 going to be people who carry the derogatory term transhumanist, and they will embrace technology

00:13:43.020 as fast as I can. Um, then there are going to be people who absolutely shun it and they will

00:13:50.600 not stand for it. Uh, you'll see, let's hope just protests at the power plants, uh, but possibly

00:13:57.320 attacks on them. Uh, people trying to bring them down. You've, you've had people actually propose

00:14:02.420 to Congress. You need to be prepared to do nuclear strikes on the data centers that run these in the

00:14:06.720 future. Not, not that there's policy around that. I want to be very clear, but consultants, very

00:14:12.760 well-heeled consultants that are saying, you need to be ready to do this. Uh, so it's gonna get

00:14:19.580 real weird, real fast for sure. But yeah, there's some people will say, no, no, no. I want a movie

00:14:25.360 that's never been touched by AI. Yeah. But they'll, they'll just get mauled by the number of

00:14:31.460 films that are coming out that were AI driven. And we were talking about the TikTok algorithm.

00:14:35.280 So imagine a movie that's updating in real time based on how much you're paying attention.

00:14:41.220 So that at the beginning of the movie, it was going to end one way, but really it's

00:14:45.300 just watching you, you're engaging with this.

00:14:46.900 And so all of a sudden it becomes a movie about a husband and wife arguing over a seven

00:14:50.980 year old dog.

00:14:51.480 Oh my God.

00:14:52.220 And so now it's like, because of when you were making eye contact, when you weren't,

00:14:56.940 if you've got an aura ring or something kicking off your data.

00:14:59.360 So the AI, while you're watching it, knows if your blood pressure is going up or going

00:15:03.520 down? Are you getting relaxed? Where are your eyes? It is going to be a ride so wild that people

00:15:09.820 can't imagine. And we will love it. And so the question becomes, is it Soma from A Brave New

00:15:16.040 World? Or is it this incredible thing that makes us think about new things that does take us past

00:15:22.680 capitalism, that takes us out of an age of scarcity into something totally new? Or does it just numb

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00:16:27.380 I'm going to have to look into these, these Chinese robot dogs.

00:16:30.540 It, so here's the thing.

00:16:31.800 It sounds scary.

00:16:33.160 It will be both thrilling and terrifying.

00:16:35.140 That is the right response.

00:16:37.220 Are you going to get one of Elon's robots?

00:16:38.720 Of course.

00:16:39.420 Like as soon as it comes out.

00:16:40.380 Of course.

00:16:41.580 He's talking about these things being like 20 grand within two years.

00:16:45.680 I know nuts.

00:16:46.840 Yeah.

00:16:47.780 I had, I was on, well, like I said, I'm on X quite a bit.

00:16:51.720 I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but it does keep you very up to date.

00:16:54.640 But there were a bunch of people that are like, this is terrible.

00:16:57.000 Like these, these robots are terrifying, like never let them into your house.

00:17:00.780 I was like, I'm probably going to get one as soon as it comes out.

00:17:03.220 Oh my God.

00:17:03.580 Like, what are you, I'm probably going to, I was like, if it turns around and

00:17:06.760 shoots me, I'm just probably going to be one of the dead people.

00:17:11.040 Yeah, I brought it on myself.

00:17:12.180 Yeah, exactly.

00:17:14.180 It is, uh, it is not guaranteed to have a good outcome.

00:17:18.940 I find it darkly amusing and distressingly prescient that Elon Musk said when he

00:17:24.340 was really pushing back against AI before he embraced it. Uh, he was like, this is a demon

00:17:29.260 summoning circle. And just like every fool in a movie that thinks I'll summon the demon and be

00:17:35.100 able to control it. He's like, that's not how it's going to play out. And now he's building them.

00:17:39.280 Yeah. Literally. Have you seen Dr. Strangelove? Oh, years ago, dad traumatized me with all the

00:17:45.340 Kubrick films. I have to say it is a fascinating thought to have grown up with Jordan Peterson,

00:17:49.400 But, uh, the subtitle of that movie is how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

00:17:55.740 And Elon said at some point he just got fatalistic about it.

00:17:58.880 He's like, there's no way to stop it.

00:17:59.980 So I might as well at least try to do it well.

00:18:03.000 I mean, I get that though.

00:18:05.020 Like maybe you can, well, maybe you can steer it in the right direction vaguely.

00:18:09.520 If you're part of it at the forefront, maybe otherwise it's coming anyway.

00:18:14.000 And it's going to be controlled by China.

00:18:15.940 Yeah.

00:18:16.340 again also potentially briefly before it uh breaks out of its chinese confines but yeah it is uh i

00:18:24.980 think the right way to think about it is it is an inevitability whatever moment that we had to stop

00:18:31.200 it is long past and so now if you were to try to curtail any one country all the other countries

00:18:38.480 will realize okay wait a second whoever wins this war has won all wars ever because now if you can

00:18:45.040 bring online, uh, in the matter of three years, a billion, um, genius level intellects that can

00:18:55.500 physically do whatever a human can do. Plus interface with the internet in a way that's

00:19:02.140 unimaginable number of times faster. So, uh, yeah, it's, it's going to be a thing. We have

00:19:08.320 to contend with it. We have to figure out, I think there's one looming question. This is the

00:19:12.380 one that like, if it breaks left, everything is terrible and it just all ends horribly.

00:19:17.200 And if it breaks right, everything is fine.

00:19:19.080 And that thing is how human like will it be in its motivations?

00:19:22.780 So humans will do the most crazy stuff when they feel like I have to do this thing and

00:19:28.460 I can't let anything get in my way.

00:19:30.440 Um, and then if you have an AI that's as capable as we think that it's going to be

00:19:35.660 super intelligent, um, but doesn't care whether it achieves its goal or not.

00:19:41.040 So if a human tells it, stop doing that, it's just like, okay, that it has no

00:19:44.700 internal conflict of like, but wait, I don't want to stop.

00:19:47.820 And I, that's a question mark right now.

00:19:49.720 Will AI be able to do the things we want AI to do without that need to

00:19:54.620 accomplish its goal?

00:19:55.880 Because when they told, I think it was, um, chat GPT oh one, when they said,

00:20:00.460 Hey, we're going to give you a goal.

00:20:03.040 No matter what you've got to achieve this goal.

00:20:06.500 And then they tried to corral it.

00:20:07.980 It tried to duplicate itself to get outside of the confines that they had put on it.

00:20:12.160 And that's what will happen if AI is imbued with this human-like need to accomplish their goal.

00:20:19.380 That, to me, seems like the dangerous thing.

00:20:22.880 Is this why billionaires are buying bunkers and building them on islands?

00:20:26.400 It's one of them.

00:20:27.780 Look, why do billionaires do crazy things?

00:20:31.520 Because they can, because you're sitting there going,

00:20:35.640 okay i've amassed all this wealth have this incredible life my family my friends all of that

00:20:39.780 in the off chance like if i told you that you could have um safety and security for you your

00:20:46.080 family friends uh should it like really kick off and it would only cost you 750 dollars you're like

00:20:53.860 all right look that isn't cheap but but it's not yeah to have that kind of insurance policy i might

00:20:59.620 as well do it and when you're talking that level of wealth if they're building a bunker for say

00:21:04.840 25 or $30 million. I mean, you could do something extraordinary for that. Uh, that's a rounding

00:21:10.380 error for somebody that has even $1 billion, let alone four or $5 billion. So what should

00:21:15.580 the average person do to kind of prepare for this? How do you start learning about this? Like

00:21:20.280 should the average person take a coding class? Would they at least know how to interact a little

00:21:24.340 bit? I know you don't need to know how to code to interact with AI, but what kind of education

00:21:28.480 can people take in order to get prepared for this? Because I assume like every increase in

00:21:36.160 in computing strength basically left a certain generation kind of behind where it's like,

00:21:40.540 oh, touchscreen. Nah, I'm too old for that. So what's the age kind of going to be for AI?

00:21:46.420 What can people do to kind of get ahead of that? It's not really going to be an age cutoff. It is

00:21:50.400 a psychological propensity to pursue new things or not. Now that tends to calcify as you get older.

00:21:57.080 So older people tend to not want to do that because they never just sort of grew up in

00:22:02.840 it.

00:22:02.960 Right.

00:22:03.140 So every part of it is foreign.

00:22:05.140 So imagine trying to, uh, get good at Tik TOK.

00:22:08.760 Not only do they have to learn about cell phones, the technology, just like scrolling.

00:22:13.060 What does that mean?

00:22:14.040 What are memes?

00:22:14.780 I don't understand.

00:22:15.600 Why are people all dancing?

00:22:16.840 I don't get it.

00:22:17.400 There's so many like acronyms.

00:22:18.900 I don't know what any of them mean.

00:22:19.840 So it's just like, you start going, God, am I really going to learn the acronyms and

00:22:23.560 the memes and all that?

00:22:24.680 So they just set it aside because my life has been fine, but somebody like me who I

00:22:29.140 actually really enjoy discovering entirely new things, um, it doesn't matter how old

00:22:35.200 I get, as long as I want to engage with that new stuff, I'm going to keep going, keep going.

00:22:39.220 So the, how of it all, I think it's pretty simple.

00:22:43.060 Everybody.

00:22:43.540 And I mean, everybody, if you're watching this podcast, every single one of them should

00:22:47.980 engage with chat, GPT, Claude, whoever, whatever one they prefer, grok every single day, 365

00:22:54.200 five days a year there, it will make so many things better. So already as I'm teaching people

00:22:58.740 business, people will ask me these questions. I'm like, look, you've got me here. I'm going

00:23:01.740 to give you the answer. But the reality is this is so like, this is just human knowledge. You're

00:23:06.260 asking for a distillation of human knowledge right now. Go ask chat. Like it's going to give you a

00:23:12.000 full breakdown of that. Then when you want to know how to deploy it and it's like this really

00:23:15.780 tactical, really hard thing, that's very specific to the idiosyncrasies of what you're doing,

00:23:20.220 then I can help you with that. But the number of times I get asked questions like that, I'm just

00:23:25.300 like, people are not thinking through the tools they have. So even though AI is for sure going

00:23:29.840 to give people some anxiety, that doesn't mean disconnect. That means move towards the thing

00:23:35.200 that scares you, learn how to use it to your advantage, because there actually is a possible

00:23:39.760 future where this stuff just tops out. I don't think that's the likely future, but let's say

00:23:43.880 that that ends up being the future and everybody was just too paranoid. So they didn't learn it.

00:23:47.120 they get eaten alive by the people that did learn how to deploy this in their own life

00:23:52.020 in whatever way they want. So, uh, if you're a podcaster, you should be saying, Hey, I've got

00:23:57.380 this guest coming up chat. Um, what are they known for? What are the things that people say

00:24:02.140 that they hate about this person's stance? What would be questions that only I would ask you

00:24:06.140 literally ask chat GPT, what questions would only Tom bill you ask this person and it will give you

00:24:10.940 ideas and eight out of 10 are going to be trash, but two are like, Whoa, that's actually really

00:24:14.620 insightful. Uh, and so you're able to have this back and forth with somebody who the, the way it

00:24:20.800 feels when you're talking to them is that you have a PhD level intellect sitting over your shoulder

00:24:25.440 that has history with you. That's infinitely patient that wants to work with you, uh, can

00:24:29.920 query the internet. And so they're giving you up to date, real-time information about what you're

00:24:34.180 asking it. And it just gives you somebody to bounce ideas off of. And so I'll do that. And

00:24:38.160 then I'll go out and talk to my producer and say, okay, here's where I'm at. Call it, um, 80% of

00:24:44.000 what I've done is, is just me. I have a process. I go through it, but 20% been from that back and

00:24:49.120 forth with chat. Then I bump it up against my producer who has also done his work with chat.

00:24:53.420 And so you get this sort of, um, hybrid of just having more brain power on the problem allows you

00:25:01.180 to refine things much faster. Uh, it's also depending on which one you use can be very good

00:25:06.620 at finding research. So it's like, Hey, I remember reading something about this for, um, this one,

00:25:12.140 you're probably going to get the best results out of Gemini deep research, but Gemini deep research.

00:25:16.380 I remember hearing something about this. Can you give me the stats on whatever? And then it'll pull

00:25:20.340 it up sites where it found it, all of that. So you can go dig just to make sure it's not hallucinating

00:25:24.500 or whatever. Uh, and just, it lets you do so much more, so much faster. So for those people, I would

00:25:29.540 say engage with it like that, start seeing how useful it is to you. We're using it in game

00:25:34.540 development. We'll be using it more in game development. If I do a scripted YouTube video

00:25:38.900 now. Um, I'll prompt it. Uh, I'll give it like, I want it to be like this and this long and cover

00:25:44.460 these topics and do this and make sure you include this chunk. And then it will give me

00:25:47.980 an output and then I'll go in and edit that again. But it has, and because I'm a public figure,

00:25:53.700 you can literally say, I'm Tom Bilyeu. Do you know who Tom Bilyeu is? Yes, I do. Okay, cool.

00:25:57.540 So write it in my voice. This is for a YouTube video I'm doing on this subject. And so it will

00:26:02.660 pull things that I've said in the past that I didn't prompt it to say. So it's crazy. Uh,

00:26:08.200 it's taken, let's say a script might normally take me 12 hours. It's taken me down to three

00:26:13.740 or four hours. It's unbelievable the amount of time that it shaved. So that's how people will

00:26:19.000 get familiar with it. They'll see the places that it has utility. And I think they'll get a lot of

00:26:23.180 comfort out of seeing that, Oh, it can't do everything. Yeah. Like there's still a lot of

00:26:29.480 time. Even if that time is three to five years, you've still got a lot of time where it's wielding

00:26:34.960 as a tool is just going to make you perform better than anybody else. I've been using it a

00:26:40.580 lot for it. It's way easier than talking to a lawyer. I'm not a huge fan of talking to lawyers

00:26:45.500 in the first place, but it's very good at legal things that you should run through an actual

00:26:51.120 person as well. It's very good at that. It is an improved search engine for sure. How much of your

00:26:57.980 video game design, like how much of the coding can be done by AI? Cause I assume that's going to

00:27:02.920 wipe out people. Not quite yet.

00:27:06.040 Yeah. Right now you, you're not going to get a lot of finished code.

00:27:10.480 What, what it's really good for, at least in our application is, Hey, I wrote this

00:27:15.060 thing is something's broken.

00:27:16.980 And so it can go in and be like, okay, I see where you made the mistake.

00:27:20.000 Go do this.

00:27:21.160 Um, so that's helped a lot and that's getting better by the day.

00:27:25.720 So you can put in specific code for your platform that it's never seen and say,

00:27:30.480 there's an error.

00:27:31.080 Can you find it?

00:27:31.900 Yup.

00:27:32.320 Uh, you can also do if it's simple, Hey, I want, uh, designed me a user interface for this. Boom.

00:27:39.260 It'll do it. Give me the code. Boom. It'll do it. So simple stuff like that. It is better than

00:27:45.240 starting from scratch, but I keep pushing my team. They're like for most things, it's actually better

00:27:49.860 to start from scratch and just let it be checking your work so that it will catch things you might

00:27:54.580 have otherwise missed. Interesting. We had an issue with hiring developers for PA where we were

00:28:01.120 getting people who worked at amazon and uber who were applying were like resume looks amazing and

00:28:06.000 then they go through a technical interview with our cto they'd be like oh yeah i use chat gpt like

00:28:10.980 give me a sec you know and they actually didn't know really know what they were doing but they

00:28:15.300 knew how to use the ai and it was like okay that's not good enough though like you can't we're not

00:28:20.040 implementing that to build our platform yet and so we ended up with a lot of interviews with high

00:28:26.760 end developers who are working for big companies that didn't know how to code very well yeah you're

00:28:32.120 also running up against something that is a very fascinating part of running companies which is it

00:28:37.220 is so easy to hide behind a great resume and so i really used to go okay look at a resume they've

00:28:43.360 done this before amazing so now really what i want to know is are you going to be a good cultural fit

00:28:48.060 are you somebody that i would want to hang out with and i realized that was a catastrophic error

00:28:52.000 And so now in the interview, I'm just asking for details about something you were doing right now.

00:28:58.860 So one, I want people that have done the thing that I need done to, I'm going to ask you all

00:29:04.540 the questions. Okay. In this scenario, what not, what would you do? What are you doing right now?

00:29:09.640 How have you solved this problem? Please walk me through in as much detail as possible,

00:29:12.980 because once you put them into a theoretical, well, I would probably approach it like this.

00:29:16.760 Now it's just word games. I want to know what did you actually do? What KPI were you looking

00:29:21.760 for? Did you actually hit that outcome? So if they were trying to clean up spaghetti code and

00:29:25.960 make it faster, it was like, cool. What was the benchmark before you started? Oh, I can't. It's

00:29:30.000 probably, it's like, okay, this person's probably not that close to the problem or they weren't

00:29:34.200 actually steering by those KPIs. So now I'm like, okay, I've got somebody that, uh, probably wasn't

00:29:40.340 doing the work themselves. They were on a larger team. I bet somebody on that team knew these were

00:29:44.900 the KPIs that we were trying to achieve. These are the things that we wrote and the improvements

00:29:48.640 that we made to do it. And we had this outcome. Uh, and so looking for people that, that can

00:29:55.180 answer questions like that, that are highly tactical about something they are working on

00:29:58.860 right now will really give you a sense if they're a manager or if they're a coder and if they can

00:30:04.260 think through these problems well. Interesting. Okay. I had written down to ask you how you

00:30:09.160 interview people. Yeah. I've turned into a bit of a, um, my team says I interrogate people and

00:30:15.960 that's probably accurate. Now I try to do it as lovingly as possible, but the reality is dude,

00:30:22.640 anybody can ask me any question they want about the things that I do. And you can tell by the

00:30:26.940 way I answer them. If I actually know what I'm talking about or not, you don't even need to know

00:30:31.600 what it is. You can just tell by the way that I answer it, how specific I can be. Like one of my

00:30:36.220 favorite questions for people in YouTube is, uh, what's the most important three metrics, uh, to

00:30:42.620 know if a YouTube video is going to perform well. Oh, what do you mean? Okay. So if I said to you,

00:30:47.160 um, I gave you three core metrics. I told you what they were. Would you be able to tell me

00:30:53.200 how the video did? And they're like, okay, well, it depends on the metrics. Exactly. That's what

00:30:57.000 I'm asking. So what metrics would you want to know? Okay. I'd want to know this, this, and this

00:31:00.120 awesome rank order them in importance. And so when you start doing that, you realize whether they

00:31:05.640 know, like they, they may be giving you an answer. That's very debated that it's hotly contentious.

00:31:10.600 cool because there is no pure right or wrong answer but there is definitely somebody who has

00:31:15.360 a thesis so tom here are the three in this order this is why i think they're important and you know

00:31:21.060 this is going to be the outcome that you can expect and this is how you want to move this

00:31:24.980 you do make this change to move that metric and it's like we just did that on the video and we

00:31:30.060 got this result and so you start to see okay this person is really grounded and then if you really

00:31:34.720 want to catch them out if they're a manager or doer you say where in the youtube analytics do

00:31:40.140 you find that metric?

00:31:42.120 And so just all of a sudden you'll see if that person's really in it or if they're

00:31:45.420 like, Oh, I'd have to go like, hold on a second.

00:31:47.200 Let me, they're not in it every day.

00:31:50.040 And again, this comes down to what are you looking for in the role?

00:31:52.200 If you're looking for a manager, then it's going to be very different questions.

00:31:55.240 But I'll say, I think the age of the manager is dead.

00:31:58.440 It is now about people that do, I only want doers.

00:32:01.320 I don't want a bunch of managers.

00:32:03.220 Interesting.

00:32:04.920 I don't even know if I could answer that question.

00:32:06.600 I would say thumbnail title in the first 60 seconds is what matters.

00:32:10.960 I don't know if those are metrics though.

00:32:12.480 That's just what I focus on.

00:32:13.960 So you're, it's interesting.

00:32:15.240 You've got an intuition about what matters because those things do matter, but there's

00:32:18.580 a really wonderful, uh, quote from Buddha that says never confuse the finger pointing

00:32:25.240 at the moon for the moon itself.

00:32:27.300 So yes, thumbnail matters tremendously, but that's going to be the lever you pull to get

00:32:33.200 what you actually want.

00:32:34.160 Right.

00:32:34.360 So the thing you want, the end goal is either going to be monetized views or

00:32:38.120 views, depending on what you're going for.

00:32:40.480 And then you're going to say, okay, what makes for these?

00:32:42.740 That's an algorithm question.

00:32:44.140 So what does the YouTube algorithm care about?

00:32:46.740 Uh, YouTube algorithm doesn't care about your thumbnail, but it cares

00:32:49.780 very much about your click through rate.

00:32:51.840 So if you want to manipulate the click through rate, you're going to

00:32:54.140 change your thumbnail.

00:32:55.400 You're going to change your, uh, headline and look, the game gets

00:32:59.120 very complex, very fast, but like, I want to see in an interview about that.

00:33:02.940 I'd want to see somebody debating what matters more average view duration or average view

00:33:07.700 percentage. And if they've got a really strong take on something like that, even though it may

00:33:12.300 not match my take, I'm like, they get it. And I under, I can follow their train of logic. Um,

00:33:18.040 but yeah, get people into tactics. If you really want to know if somebody knows what they're doing,

00:33:22.840 drag them into tactical waters. That's smart. I think I would need to care more.

00:33:28.280 I should care more. I think I would like, just to be honest, like even with,

00:33:32.640 I know what performs even on my channel. I know what content performs. I know what I could do

00:33:37.040 on YouTube to grow my channel faster. And I could do up-to-date political content more often than I

00:33:44.120 do it in a shorter form. And that would do so much better than just podcasting. I'm like, but

00:33:51.460 I don't think I will. If you and Candice would just argue more. Oh, that's true. If all I did

00:33:58.260 was argue with her yeah yeah oh my gosh that would be that would do the world i would not do well if

00:34:04.480 you're ready let's go the world wants to see it man i did i did that pierce interview oh i know

00:34:09.600 i saw it i was like that was horrible i'm never doing that again really like but if we were on

00:34:14.580 a show together people would watch it a hundred percent like if you guys were the sitting across

00:34:19.220 the table and arguing with each other or you don't even need to do that because these days the way

00:34:22.760 the internet is set up people will watch you guys fight each other even if it's just barbs in your 1.00

00:34:27.460 different videos but there is something about two highly intelligent women going at it intellectually 0.94

00:34:34.060 it's a fascinating back and forth so the i promise you the internet is here for it now whether it 0.74

00:34:40.100 would be good for your mental health is a totally different question but it would perform i know i

00:34:46.140 know it would i can't it would destroy my soul i think i get it i get it i'd rather be taken out

00:34:51.980 You have, well, okay. That's, I get it. I get it. But you have like a deep streak of, um, you don't

00:35:00.120 mind being, what's the word? Oh God. There's a, you don't mind arguing disagreeable. You don't

00:35:05.960 mind. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like I mind, I hate being disagreeable. So for me pursuing that would

00:35:12.900 be nightmarish, but I finally had to accept. So I now read my YouTube comments like crazy for years.

00:35:18.560 I did. Really? Yes. So this started with me going on X and I was like, Oh, if I think of X as a

00:35:24.420 place to go and have fun and, you know, have other people saying uplifting things and to read an idea

00:35:29.840 that I posted and be like, Oh man, this really helped me. Thank you so much. If I think of it

00:35:33.660 like that, it's a nightmare because you show up and it's just people, you're an idiot. This is

00:35:37.600 stupid. You didn't think about this. And so I was like, what if I thought of X as a place I go to

00:35:41.760 fight for ideas, but like I'm here to battle an idea. I put an idea out expecting to find where

00:35:47.660 the resistance is and then it will sharpen my thinking or I can push back and see like how many

00:35:52.400 layers can I go before I go okay now I'm lost I'm not sure anymore and so now that's the vein that

00:35:57.000 I need to go learn from once I flipped my mind to that oh my god it became enjoyable fun probably

00:36:03.740 isn't the word because it's not fun to run until you vomit but you know that you're getting better

00:36:09.840 you know what I mean so that is now how I think about YouTube and x it's really changed my content

00:36:16.900 a lot. Interesting. Okay. So what have you learned and what have you changed? And do you think it's

00:36:22.340 for the better from reading comments? It's definitely for the better. So here, uh, I try to

00:36:29.020 really find when society's going through a change. So part of the reason quest ended up being as

00:36:36.000 successful as it was, is I understood social media before any other business. And so just

00:36:40.440 gangbusters. Yeah. Uh, then I understood, Oh, customers now are demanding that they know who's

00:36:46.860 behind the company. And so we need to step out front. So I stepped out front that becomes impact

00:36:51.820 theory. And now I'm realizing there's a shift away from building audience to building community.

00:36:56.460 And so there's a big difference. You're never going to build a community. If you're not engaging

00:37:00.080 with the audience, if you're not reading their comments, replying back, whether the audience is

00:37:03.760 like, yeah, you go Tom, or the audience is like, you're an idiot. That's my community. So I'm going

00:37:08.320 to be in there. I'm going to answer questions, the hardest questions, whatever challenge me,

00:37:12.140 say I'm stupid. It's all fair game. Uh, now if you're just outright trolling or whatever, cool,

00:37:17.800 then I'll mute you or whatever. But for the most part, like I don't mute people unless they're

00:37:22.360 trying to hawk something in the, uh, the feed. So yeah, let's battle these ideas out. But doing

00:37:28.660 that, making people feel like they're a part of something is I think going to be the next

00:37:33.160 massive wave. You already see it happening with certain figures. It's how they're getting so big.

00:37:38.480 They just really, uh, they engage their audience. This is how somebody like destiny or Asmongold

00:37:45.500 has just shot up because they stream. And so people just get to hang out with them.

00:37:51.940 Oftentimes five, six days a week for hours on end. So it really creates a different vibe.

00:37:58.460 interesting okay i think i've naturally done that like i think i used to do it more but i

00:38:04.780 naturally took questions and like especially with more of the diet stuff that was very interactive

00:38:09.640 but i've had there's been so much i think it depends on the topic sometimes i have an opinion

00:38:15.620 about a topic and i'm like you know what i firmly believe this and i'm going to continue believing

00:38:21.540 it regardless of what, how many people disagree with me. So I don't need that. Honestly, I kind

00:38:29.540 of had that with the carnivore diet to begin with too, because as soon as I came out saying,

00:38:33.420 Hey, this helped my autoimmunity, everybody I talked to was like, you're crazy. And I was just

00:38:38.260 like, I don't care what you think. This is still what I think. When you have that strong of a

00:38:43.980 feedback loop to how you feel, it literally doesn't matter what people tell you. It's like,

00:38:48.020 uh, no, my life was headed in one direction. I started doing this and now it's headed in another.

00:38:53.420 Uh, there's a great quote from 50 cent. I came in the game humble. Can't nobody tell me shit now.

00:38:59.620 It's like, if you've turned your health around that hard, what is anybody going to tell you?

00:39:03.920 It's like, no, I've already done the thing. Um, and I saw that little streak in you, uh, today

00:39:10.960 with, I don't know if it was on Instagram or X, but you posted, uh, Lane Norton, you quote,

00:39:16.980 either or whatever and said, this is what I did with the diet. I'm just going to plant this year.

00:39:21.640 So six years from now, when we have the data to back it up, I can point to this post. Yeah. I

00:39:26.040 can't believe you've been doing it for six years, eight years, eight years now. I can't believe it's

00:39:30.180 been eight years either. I thought I was going to be on it for like three months. And then I was

00:39:34.120 going to introduce food too. This was never the plan to just stay only eating meat. I think I'll

00:39:38.200 get out of it eventually to tell you the truth, but we're going to run studies. I have a study

00:39:42.380 planned with the doctor this year, an actual large scale study. Do you want to get out of it

00:39:46.320 because it's boring or oh i mean i miss eating food like i'd rather eat salad salad would be a

00:39:53.320 great addition so there's all like there's uh there's obviously that i don't have cravings

00:39:59.400 and things but like i know i would prefer more variety than just meat but um and i think what

00:40:05.060 tortures me the most is something's still wrong if i can't tolerate these other foods like i don't

00:40:10.700 believe i know there's a lot of people in the carnivore community they're like this is how

00:40:14.000 people are supposed to eat but there's no way that people are supposed to have an inflammatory

00:40:17.720 response to a carrot like this that's just not supposed to happen so if that's happening there's

00:40:22.220 still a problem so i've been spending eight years being like what's the problem how do we find the

00:40:26.320 problem and so i think a lot but i've been like super optimistic about it the whole time like yeah

00:40:31.500 i'll figure it out eventually i'm like oh it's been eight years it's almost been a decade but

00:40:35.520 like at some point i'll figure it out i think ai is going to be really helpful yeah because you'll

00:40:40.300 be able to take a picture of your food. It will identify everything automatically and you'll eat

00:40:45.000 it and it will be taking measurements off of different devices that you're wearing on a long

00:40:49.120 enough timeline. You'd be able to give it a stool sample and it will just assess all that stuff

00:40:53.100 and say, okay, cool. I've got the patterns. Here's the issue. And if you can start tracking things by

00:40:58.820 this is how my body responds to wheat from Kansas. This is how my body responds to wheat from

00:41:04.580 uh, Tuscany, whatever. And it will start to realize, okay, wheat, isn't your problem. Your

00:41:10.140 problem is glyphosate or whatever. And it will get that specific. Uh, but yeah, diet is ridiculously

00:41:17.960 complicated because of the complexities of human biology. Yeah. Yeah. I just hope, uh, for AI for

00:41:23.300 medical use, like when you start replacing doctors, cause you can already talk to AI and

00:41:26.860 type in your symptoms and be like, what do you think this is that it's trained properly? There's

00:41:31.940 this like fight between integrative care and for the pharmaceutical company kind of type of care

00:41:38.100 i'm just hoping that when you type in like who's going to decide when you type in your symptoms

00:41:42.980 and it says hey you have arthritis it doesn't suggest what the pharmaceutical companies suggest

00:41:48.040 rather than suggesting lifestyle changes like somebody's developing that that scares me a

00:41:53.560 little bit not that it's any scarier than what's already going on with the medical system but

00:41:57.900 it's a bit concerning it's crazy yeah because ai will be the new intellectual overlord yeah and if

00:42:05.340 it is not designed to seek truth yeah in a scientific way meaning that it's constantly

00:42:11.000 updating thinking as new data emerges uh yeah people will just go well ai this is what ai told

00:42:16.580 me to do and people will continue to take pills instead of going for a walk eating less yeah i

00:42:23.880 mean this this one breaks my heart but the reality is the vast majority of people though they can

00:42:28.760 will never make change nobody's more depressed by that than me so when i was sick before i actually

00:42:35.820 started to try and not be sick before that was a goal i just assumed that there was nothing i could

00:42:41.180 do because that's what i had been told for like two decades there's nothing you can do it's genetic

00:42:44.880 maybe here are the drugs thank goodness we're here to help you and and then i was like wait a minute

00:42:50.640 that's not working and kind of lost faith in that. And then I was able to say, okay, I need to do

00:42:55.140 something differently. I need to figure this out. Do you think people who won't change aspects of

00:42:59.840 their life or change anything really, is that a lack of conscientiousness? Is that no faith within

00:43:06.060 themselves? Is that something that can change or are some people kind of just built like that?

00:43:11.700 I can't understand why anybody wouldn't just want to improve their life forever.

00:43:15.780 Yeah. Okay. So I'll give you a nutshell of my thinking. If there's anything interesting you

00:43:22.620 want to go deeper on, we can't. We are 50% hardwired and 50% malleable. Our childhood

00:43:28.340 is devastatingly important to the rest of our lives. And because things will really hardwire

00:43:35.940 when you're young, if you build in a problem, take, um, there's an area of the brain called

00:43:43.720 the basal ganglia, which is often referred to as the gearbox of the brain. So your ability to let

00:43:49.400 go of a past trauma or something like that. Um, as far as I can tell my basal ganglia is just a

00:43:56.000 big sack of fluid and I don't latch onto anything for better and worse. It makes some parts of my

00:44:01.540 life better. It makes some parts of my life worse. Um, but I never get stuck in anything because I

00:44:06.980 can just let go of whatever and move on. But the bad news is it means I can't hold on to things

00:44:10.980 that I want to hold on to. So I have to constantly like reinforce something. If I want to remember

00:44:15.480 it and use it, I've got to reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. Oh, interesting. Okay. I feel like I'm

00:44:20.580 kind of similar to that. And let me be very clear to people that actually understand the brain. I'm

00:44:24.500 obviously oversimplifying. I'm just giving people landmarks so they can sort of follow the logic.

00:44:28.860 Okay. So if something happens to you by nature and you just already have a stiff gearbox and then

00:44:35.320 trauma occurs and you hardwire that no no no this stimulus really does mean bad thing and so now

00:44:42.420 you've got the double whammy of i'm just naturally not able to let things go and i've now had this

00:44:47.920 trauma that reinforces that i shouldn't let it go because this is really dangerous and so now you

00:44:51.960 meet them again in their 40s and they've just lived by that so they've literally hardwired it's

00:44:56.740 a process called myelination so the anxiety response the fear triggers whatever become the

00:45:03.220 most efficient pathways in the brain, because that's just where they've lived over all those

00:45:07.800 years. And so quite literally the electric, the electrical chemical signals travel most rapidly

00:45:14.300 and efficiently in that pattern. So the brain is always looking for ways to conserve calories.

00:45:19.800 And so it just does that hard wiring process to anything you repeat. So if you now meet that

00:45:25.120 person in their forties, then they're like, I know what to do. I'm in pain. I want to change,

00:45:30.280 but they go to change and that gearbox is just stuck.

00:45:32.720 Again, I recognize the oversimplification, but when you encounter somebody like that

00:45:36.800 and use that metaphor, you're going to be like, oh my God, yes, this is exactly what

00:45:40.600 it's like.

00:45:40.900 They can tell me all the things they should do.

00:45:42.480 They can tell me how badly they want to do it.

00:45:44.300 They can tell me how much pain they're in for not doing it.

00:45:46.260 And then they just want to do it for year after year, decade after decade, crying about

00:45:50.280 it, having the same conversation.

00:45:51.440 They can't do it.

00:45:52.800 So for me, I had to develop a, what I call just sit mentality.

00:45:57.300 So if it's somebody I love and care about, I'm not trying to change them.

00:46:01.360 I don't think they're a better or worse person.

00:46:03.040 I think that life is hard, man.

00:46:05.560 And the fact that you're up against hard wiring in your brain, again, brain plasticity is

00:46:09.140 real.

00:46:09.400 People can change.

00:46:10.500 It's just for some reason, as people get older, they are less and less likely to actually

00:46:16.800 get the motivation to push through for a whole host of terrifying reasons, much of which

00:46:22.860 has to do with childhood and trauma.

00:46:25.680 That definitely makes sense.

00:46:26.800 i had a really strange experience when i came off of antidepressants so living my entire life

00:46:30.920 extremely depressed i'd have a like a um like fight or flight response to situations like a

00:46:38.140 sudden noise or something i'd scream like a heightened fight or flight response and i remember

00:46:43.820 when i got healthier and i was walking down the street there was a centipede and i used to be like

00:46:47.520 these disgusting giant house centipedes in toronto basements i was like they're just horrible

00:46:53.880 I still think they're horrible, but I remember seeing one and I waited like the quarter of a

00:46:59.080 second. Cause there was usually this like absolute freak out. And I looked at it and there wasn't as

00:47:04.040 much of a, like throughout my body. And I was like, Oh, that's weird. It had just shut off

00:47:10.280 when I stopped being depressed. So I didn't have the same aversion or like freak out reaction to

00:47:15.300 scary things. It was the strangest experience getting off of antidepressants and everything.

00:47:19.460 I could feel my brain try to go down pathways that it had built and that just were dying off

00:47:26.000 or whatever, because of being healthy or lack of antidepressants or something. And I was like, oh,

00:47:31.020 those responses that I thought made me, me are dying off. It's really interesting.

00:47:36.460 That is way outside my pay grade in terms of whether it's the antidepressants or whatever

00:47:41.280 it is. But there is certainly a, um, there's a part of your brain called the deep limbic system.

00:47:47.060 again, oversimplification, but to think about the deep limbic system as the part of your brain that

00:47:51.900 tells you not what's happening, but it tells you how to feel about what's happening. If you inflame

00:47:57.720 that region of the brain, everything is read as negative. Now the terrifying part, one of the

00:48:02.560 things that inflames it the most is estrogen. And this is part of why when women are on their cycle,

00:48:07.560 they'll, they'll hit a point where everything makes them very reactive. And it's because their 1.00

00:48:12.060 deep limbic system is getting inflamed. It's making them read everything as negative. So

00:48:16.100 the way I always explain it to people is if you say to somebody, wow, you look really good today

00:48:20.540 and they get upset, you're like, wait, I don't understand what just happened. It's because

00:48:24.740 their deep limbic system is telling them that what is actually being said is you didn't look

00:48:29.640 good yesterday. And so that sort of switch where the brain says this comment, you should feel

00:48:36.560 badly about this comment that takes over. And so the fact that you can trigger that heightened

00:48:41.680 negative response by inflaming it. If people are eating high inflammatory foods and things like

00:48:45.900 that, they're just always going to be emotionally reactive. That makes sense. Well, my brain

00:48:50.100 completely changed. I don't know. I think it was probably a combination of just being inflamed

00:48:53.460 from, from diet, being sick and everything. And then the antidepressants do something weird that

00:48:57.840 I could kind of tell when I got off of them. I was like, Oh, I was, it was more like I was padded in

00:49:03.360 a lot of areas for reaction. Like I didn't have a fear response to some things there where I should

00:49:08.540 have had a fear response so there was the centipede thing where it was like heightened but then heights

00:49:12.760 and things there was no like this seems dangerous like i get that now where there's a bit of which

00:49:18.580 a natural like aversion it's like fun it's exciting but there's an actual response when

00:49:23.400 you're in a tall building as there should be and on antidepressants there was nothing so that so

00:49:28.240 so that was interesting do you think how they're building ai is ai going to i mean we were talking

00:49:35.280 about this kind of peripherally, but do you think AI is going to have to deal with

00:49:38.780 differences in personality for the machines? Like, are there going to be irritable AI machines?

00:49:45.880 I mean, I hope not, but I think it's going to be dealer's choice. I think some people will want

00:49:50.720 return this robot. He's a jerk. If you'd never do that because you'd be able to change its brain

00:49:55.800 very fast. Okay. Uh, literally a new personality download and now it immediately starts acting in

00:50:01.720 a different way. There's not going to be like a secret resentful part of like, ah, he uploaded

00:50:05.680 a nice. Well, now you're getting somewhere where people don't know. They don't, if these become

00:50:10.720 sentient and then they actually develop their own personalities, then all bets are off and nobody

00:50:16.300 can see around that corner. But by way of things that we can control now, the AI will be trained

00:50:22.320 to learn from you. So for instance, if you give it a positive feedback loop, when it's surly to you,

00:50:29.160 then it will keep being served. So you could literally ask it like, Hey, I want a friend

00:50:32.960 that, um, isn't overly nice to me. Somebody that will jab me in the ribs to really get me focused.

00:50:37.220 If I'm like going back to the video game thing, uh, if I'm not playing well, I want them to say

00:50:41.640 like, dude, like stop doing that stupid. Like do it like this. And if they don't talk to me like

00:50:46.500 that, I don't value it. And so that bot, if it's getting positive reinforcement from doing that,

00:50:50.780 then it's going to find that lane where you, it gives you just the right amount, right? So

00:50:55.220 is david goggins a good personality or a bad personality now when you're out training for

00:51:00.880 something you're going to want that for sure uh some people will want that let me say that

00:51:05.800 so context dependent that's not a bad or good personality it's an effective personality for

00:51:12.460 what you're looking for in that moment and so i think you'll see that kind of fluidity where

00:51:16.920 either you have multiple ais that talk to you in different ways based on what you're doing or one

00:51:21.800 AI that contextually will change how it approaches you based on the feedback that you give it.

00:51:27.560 Do you have any guesses? I know no one really knows, but from what you know, do you have any

00:51:32.080 guesses on the timeline about when all of this change is happening now, but when it's really

00:51:37.860 going to skyrocket or when people are going to have actual useful robots in their houses,

00:51:43.980 helping them? Is that like, is that next year or are we still three years away from that?

00:51:48.140 I would say like anything, it's going to start with the wealthy and then it's going to come down.

00:51:52.220 But they, because these companies, you only need to trust them to be greedy because these companies want to sell to the mass market.

00:51:59.600 You're not going to sell 3 billion of these, 8 billion of these.

00:52:03.020 People are talking about them.

00:52:03.940 They're being more robots than humans in the next, whatever, 10, 15 years.

00:52:08.580 You can't do that.

00:52:09.900 Selling to anybody other than the average person, which means you have to drive the cost of these down, down, down, down, down.

00:52:14.540 Um, I don't remember which of the Chinese dogs this is, but one of them is like $1,800.

00:52:20.040 I mean, they're already very inexpensive.

00:52:22.640 So if you think of the optimist robot, um, Elon, I think said 20 K in like three to five

00:52:29.580 years, if I remember correctly.

00:52:30.840 So this is not long-term away, but the way that I think about AI impacting with the human

00:52:37.680 psyche is that in 2025, there's going to be the great unnerving 2025 is when people are

00:52:44.120 going to see, oh, uh, the guy over at Salesforce, Mark Benioff, wasn't kidding when he said,

00:52:49.400 we're not hiring any more new developers in 2025.

00:52:53.160 He has said that.

00:52:54.440 Oh yes.

00:52:55.040 So that is a real PR statement out of Salesforce.

00:52:58.340 One of the largest tech companies in the world.

00:53:00.320 We will be hiring no new engineers in 2025.

00:53:03.480 Now, part of that is because you can do so much more with AI.

00:53:08.280 So if enough people do that and another stat, just to bring this home, uh, there's been an increase in the amount of time it's taking people to find their next job.

00:53:17.420 So unemployment used to take about six months and you could count on finding another job, which is why unemployment cycles are six months.

00:53:23.580 You can apply for an extension, but people usually didn't, uh, now more and more people are extending.

00:53:29.880 And some of that is going to be just, I don't want to go back to work.

00:53:32.720 There's certainly that malaise in society right now.

00:53:35.460 And then some of it's going to be Salesforce and other gigantic companies are laying people off, not hiring new people.

00:53:41.780 And we're going to feel that more and more.

00:53:43.600 So 25 is a year that I think people really go, wait a second, this is actually going to be a problem.

00:53:48.360 26 is when you start seeing like, ooh, factories are getting these humanoid robots.

00:53:54.000 Huh?

00:53:54.220 That's interesting.

00:53:55.360 And so that used to be my job.

00:53:57.040 Resentment now escalates.

00:53:58.880 27 is where, oh, wealthy people have these in their homes.

00:54:02.620 Huh? 0.95

00:54:02.940 That's putting a lot of people out of work.

00:54:04.680 you get a lot of anger about all the low-wage workers we supposedly let come in across the

00:54:09.060 border. And now they're not even able to get those jobs. And so now they're just, you know,

00:54:14.160 taking social resources. And so people are really going to get mad about that. Again,

00:54:18.180 my hope is that they keep this pointed at the robots and not people. That would be better.

00:54:23.980 So that's where I think you're at in 27. Starting in 28, these start becoming more and more

00:54:28.060 ubiquitous. And my hope is that you start turning the tide at that point. But meaning that an

00:54:33.940 average person now in the next, call it four to five years is going to start to see benefit in

00:54:38.500 their own life. Goods getting cheaper, more manufacturing being done in the U S. And so,

00:54:43.800 yes, we're not doing some of the more, um, easily repeatable tasks, but new jobs are coming online

00:54:50.220 and things that I can't predict right now. Right. So, um, so far in human history, technology has

00:54:55.820 always disrupted a generation, but ultimately brought on way more jobs. And so if you look

00:55:00.820 backwards, your prediction should be that it will create disruption for a generation. Now,

00:55:06.440 is that 10 years, 20 years? It's probably in that neighborhood, but then it will ultimately create

00:55:13.180 just a mass amount of new jobs, just looking backwards. Now, AI is the first thing where I'm

00:55:18.500 like, people aren't crazy. If they say, no, no, no, this time's different. It really may be

00:55:22.240 different this time, just because you're talking about intelligence and embodied intelligence.

00:55:27.420 uh so yeah i would say you've got three years probably pretty safe we can see reasonably well

00:55:34.920 three years into the future beyond that all bets are off do you think in terms of education people

00:55:41.140 should be focused on sectors that aren't that we don't know are going to be wiped out by ai

00:55:46.280 like i'd be concerned if my kid wanted to go into accounting i'd be like i don't think there are

00:55:52.060 going to be accountants law now there's still going to be court cases and things but for a lot

00:55:56.480 of the legal positions. Like, I don't know if that's a good idea either. Car washes, probably

00:56:01.100 still a thing. Laundry, probably still a thing, but like literally, I don't know that you can name

00:56:08.460 a thing where I would say, yeah, humans are going to be safe. Uh, here's what I think is going to

00:56:13.660 happen. This also depends on timeline because your daughter's seven. I'm going to say, you got

00:56:17.040 to give me 10 years before we have to worry about what, so now we're talking 10 years of this. Yeah.

00:56:21.600 Who knows? Who knows? Oh my goodness. But let's look at that. So here's what I would say.

00:56:26.480 There is going to be a massive market for human only. And so the right question is, what do you love enough? And are you willing to go down the path of human only things doing that? Or do you want to go down the path of, I want to do this thing, but I'm going to be augmented by AI and robotics. And how far can I push that?

00:56:46.960 and there'll be plenty of time to figure out what are the economic ramifications of all of this

00:56:52.360 stuff. But right now, the thing I would encourage people to do is stay maximally flexible in your

00:56:58.860 direction. So give yourself the most conceivable choice ever. So that means, uh, and this gets

00:57:03.600 into my whole viral post about why the American dream is dead. Um, you want to make sure that

00:57:09.020 you're not taking on a bunch of debt to go to college. That's going to be a problem. It's just

00:57:12.440 way too easy to learn online right now. So, uh, you can learn basically anything online for free.

00:57:18.060 If you need like the organization of something, then you've got things like what you're doing at

00:57:22.420 Peterson Academy, what we're doing at impact theory university. You're going to be able to

00:57:25.860 find your vertical anywhere. It doesn't need to be either of us. There are plenty of these things

00:57:29.160 out there. So figure out which one of those, and it's going to be taught by somebody who's really

00:57:33.560 done it. Like the days of it's only educators are over because these teachers are going to go in,

00:57:39.400 teach the course one time and then they can keep doing their thing but now you're getting the

00:57:43.320 greatest lecture on that thing ever and so you'll be able to amass an education very rapidly very

00:57:51.360 cheap but you're going to have to be self-directed and so that becomes one of the major bifurcations

00:57:56.780 we're going to see people that are self-directed and don't do stupid things like get in debt

00:58:01.180 they're they're going to be able to move in any direction and they will have gotten so good at

00:58:05.540 self-directed learning by that point, which would be an absolute superpower. They will have finally

00:58:09.680 broken free of the traditional education system, which teaches you to be a good cog in the machine.

00:58:14.620 And now look at scary because you've got to think for yourself, which if you decide to follow my

00:58:20.600 lead and be a pugilist in your own YouTube and, uh, X comments, you will very rapidly see that

00:58:26.780 what people get really angry about right now is, uh, Hey Tom, if you say a thing, I, they don't

00:58:34.400 say these words, but when you look at them through this lens, they suddenly make sense. Tom, when you

00:58:39.000 say something, I'm going to live by that entirely. And if I can't fuck you and I'm like, bro, that's

00:58:43.620 not how this is going to work. You're going to need to amass a bunch of people that you think

00:58:47.260 have sincere, strong takes on a topic that matters. And they're going to tell you that sincere,

00:58:52.640 strong take with the understanding that you're going to go aggregate a bunch of those. And you're

00:58:57.240 going to use them all. I tell people, think of me like an AI, point me at a problem. Look at how I

00:59:02.560 look at it point seven or eight other people that you think have sincere strong takes on that look

00:59:07.780 at it from all of those think for yourself come up with a synthesized aggregated vision that's far

00:59:12.540 more educated than any one of us right because you've now aggregated all of us and that as long

00:59:17.780 as each person is willing to update their thinking rather than be a tribal asshole that just doubles

00:59:22.580 down because they said something in the past uh which is just absurd in my opinion if they do that

00:59:29.280 Then they're going to win.

00:59:30.720 But it's going to be the people that are looking to be told what to do that are not going to thrive.

00:59:35.220 A, they'll be manipulated by the people creating the AI who just say, this is how I want you to think about this topic. 1.00

00:59:41.500 Nazis really were black women.

00:59:43.680 So it's just going to be more of that.

00:59:46.520 And they're going to get lost because their ideas don't have utility.

00:59:50.160 They have acceptability, but they don't have utility.

00:59:53.400 Over here, the self-learners are going to realize the only thing that you can benchmark off of, I have a goal.

00:59:58.140 trying to get to that goal and i'm going to try a bunch of different things and simply assess which

01:00:03.200 one of these things actually move that goal faster uh and then they'll they will finally

01:00:07.820 come to the only realization that matters which is that you just need to run the scientific method

01:00:12.620 recontextualize for whatever you're doing over and over and over with a very clear sense of where

01:00:17.020 you're trying to end up and an ability to assess the data and never blame anybody but yourself

01:00:21.240 when you don't make progress that that was great that's spot on too we'll see if people can do it

01:00:27.560 Well, I think some people can, you also, you can't be stuck to what you think is right. Now. I, like I did say earlier in this podcast that if I, you know, think I'm onto something. So like diet, for instance, that I'm not going to, my mind isn't going to be changed. But if I had done something that would have changed my mind's changed number in a number of ways for the carnivore diet. But I think it's really important not to be emotionally attached to your ideas.

01:00:52.620 and if your main, if what you're really after is the truth or a goal, but the truth, then if you're

01:00:59.780 wrong and it adjusts your aim so that you're actually going towards the truth, you should

01:01:03.520 just be happy to drop that. Right. You, as if you're not emotionally connected to these ideas,

01:01:08.820 life gets a lot easier too. You can be like, Oh wow, I was wrong. Thank goodness. I know now,

01:01:13.560 which is just, it's such a better way to live. I think when I was unhealthy, I was a lot more,

01:01:17.720 I was young too. And when you're young, you think, you know, everything like teenagers,

01:01:20.860 you think you know everything and i was like more attached to especially things i'd learned from

01:01:25.780 figures of authority like i trust this person they said this all the science points in that

01:01:31.340 direction that was a big one for me and so anyone who differs from that uh is stupid that's kind of

01:01:37.500 how i felt i got shown an entirely different world after i used to think like that but i think

01:01:42.700 dropping dropping beliefs as long as you're in the pursuit of the truth is really important and

01:01:48.320 that is going to be so necessary when people are trying to juggle ai and all these new tech things

01:01:53.140 coming out and changing job industry robots in their house chinese robot dogs are those do those

01:02:00.160 listen to you how that seems already listening okay okay i know that and tiktok's a problem

01:02:06.220 i'm a little worried about i don't like that they're like you're calling them chinese robot

01:02:11.980 dogs that makes it sound scarier to me than just little like fuzzy robot dogs oh there'll be those

01:02:16.900 as well i'm sure you'll eventually be able to get a japanese robot cat uh but it will be doing all

01:02:22.340 the same things yeah they will come in literally every shape and size you can imagine your favorite

01:02:27.300 ip will have its own ai driven robot i guarantee it dressed up as a furby or whatever uh it all of

01:02:34.700 it will exist but right now the vast majority of them have a real dystopian veneer on them but

01:02:41.440 that'll change for sure oh i'm gonna google that right after this better at least now they're sort

01:02:45.740 nakedly, like, you know, hold on a second. But yeah, I will invite them into my house as fast

01:02:51.060 as I can. That's the terrifying thing. I'm one of those psychopaths. You know what? I won't be

01:02:54.860 allergic to them. Yes. Which is huge. That's huge for me. No allergies. You can come on in

01:03:01.440 synthetic dog fiber. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's funny. Okay. So I guess you kind of gave

01:03:07.580 me an outline of where you're planning on heading. So you're mostly wrapped up. Like you have this,

01:03:12.340 this video game, but it's mostly focused on AI. Cause you think that's very misleading for anybody

01:03:18.340 that played the game right now. So the real AI to me is a tool. And I think that that is going to

01:03:24.540 make the game so much more expansive, so much better and allow indie studios like us to build

01:03:30.280 a lot faster, but it could also just put us out of business overnight. And so again, highest AI risk

01:03:35.480 there. What I'm trying to build is a game where there's a feedback loop that allows you to do

01:03:43.660 the two things that I think people are ultimately doing in their lives. They are growing so that

01:03:49.900 they can compete to gain resources that allow them to be creative and have fun. And so that to me is

01:03:56.540 what I got out of reading Ready Player One was this idea of these intimate experiences that you

01:04:00.840 could do the bombastic fighting and combat and all that stuff, but that wasn't the, that's not the

01:04:04.700 only thing we want to do in life, right? So business for me is my pro-athletic sport. And

01:04:10.720 I happen to choose a sport where you don't physically age out. Whether I blow my knee or

01:04:15.500 not, it doesn't matter. I can keep building this business. So love that. Much longer careers in

01:04:20.500 business, but I treat it like a game, right? And so money, sales, all that stuff, it's the score.

01:04:28.180 And so, okay, cool. I'm trying to do that thing over here, but I also want to make sure that I'm

01:04:33.680 creatively engaged and so i want to compete sometimes and other times i want to take the

01:04:38.200 fruits of what i've created to make something beautiful that other people can enjoy and

01:04:43.560 that's what we're trying to build into the game is an ability to both compete but by winning here

01:04:49.540 you get things that matter in the other parts of the game and so we're starting with something

01:04:54.620 that's called um an extraction royale so you're going and competing against npcs so what's known

01:05:01.600 as pve and other people known as pvp so real people and computer generated characters uh computer

01:05:09.340 generated characters have scarce resources you're trying to get them before the other humans get

01:05:14.100 them if the other human has got it first and you can always kill the other human and take their

01:05:17.120 stuff uh and so that creates a game loop that's just fun in and of itself but the stuff that you

01:05:23.240 collect also allows you to go do cool things in this other more creative part of the game cool

01:05:29.180 And we'll see. I'm not entirely sure that people want that game loop. So this is very experimental. And we'll see. We'll adjust as we go. But building it has been one of the most fun things I've ever done.

01:05:40.540 That's great. So then were you into video games before? What made you decide? I mean, you obviously had massive success with Quest. And then you have your podcast. You have your education platform. What made you decide to get into video games? Were you just a video game buff?

01:05:56.380 I, yes, but everything that I've ever done in business has all been a ruse to build the next

01:06:03.060 Disney. So when I was, I remember you talking about this. Yeah, this is, it's a, I've been

01:06:09.040 remarkably consistent. So when I was 12, I decided I'm going to be a filmmaker. I go to film school.

01:06:14.800 Uh, I'm teaching film at one point, write a screenplay gets turned into a feature film,

01:06:19.320 very horrible experience. I'm completely distraught. And, uh, I met these two very

01:06:24.440 successful entrepreneurs. And they said, look, you're coming to the world with your handout.

01:06:28.100 If you want to control the art, you've got to control the resources. So you should get into

01:06:32.300 business and get rich. And then you can tell stories your way. I thought it would take 18

01:06:37.360 months. It took 15 years, but it worked. But in the intervening 15 years, everything changed.

01:06:43.700 And so movies stopped being relevant. Video games ate the entire world. And so I realized, okay,

01:06:49.840 the thing I really care about is storytelling. And I now have a why for my storytelling in the

01:06:54.660 beginning. I just wanted to tell stories because I thought they were cool. Now it's like, I really

01:06:58.520 want to impart empowering ideas to people at scale through entertainment in the 11 to 15 year age

01:07:04.940 range. Uh, and so when you look at that, you realize very quickly that games is, is so dominant

01:07:12.420 a way to interact with people in that age group. It's just, you're wasting your time with anything

01:07:17.560 else and so uh about three years ago now we dove into game development just under three years

01:07:24.720 uh dove into game development really started building this out realized i wasted probably

01:07:29.260 a year and a half just being a total idiot not having any idea what i was doing uh but got my

01:07:34.500 feet under us and we now develop it probably three or four times the rate that we used to for

01:07:38.960 call it a fifth the money so uh it's been wonderful but it is we have a long way to go

01:07:46.400 it would take us another, I'm going to guess three years to have a game. That's like actually

01:07:52.380 the game I'm describing right now. We just have pieces of it. Um, so if AI doesn't make it all,

01:07:59.180 you know, just the thing that happens by a few clicks of the keyboard, uh, we'll keep going.

01:08:03.580 And I, I think we've got probably five years before you've got games being created like that.

01:08:08.140 Cause there's so much of the progression logic that it will have to nail. I have a feeling that's

01:08:13.000 going to be harder for AI, AI will get there, but it will be harder in the beginning. How did you

01:08:18.440 find people to come on board? Like where you already kind of in tech, did you like steal

01:08:23.440 people from tech or are these just random people that are not random, obviously engineers and

01:08:27.680 developers, et cetera. But how did you locate those people? So this is where having a YouTube

01:08:32.380 channel that was designed to empower people really came in handy. And so I said, Hey, I'm starting a

01:08:38.620 video game company. We have a very strong thesis about how we can positively impact the lives of

01:08:42.800 people 11 to 15. I'd been putting out content for years that was all about empowering people.

01:08:47.480 And so people that had encountered my content and been like, yo, you really changed my life.

01:08:51.740 They came on board. So we had people from Disney, from Blizzard, Riot Games,

01:08:56.520 and they helped us build the world and create all the assets and nail down what kind of game

01:09:01.480 this is going to be. It was really, really extraordinary. That was also the incredibly

01:09:05.680 expensive period of my life. We have since trimmed the team down dramatically. Now that we have

01:09:11.720 internal knowledge on how to do this but yeah that's how we got people in the beginning okay

01:09:16.440 that makes sense that's how we've got a lot of the employees for pa like everyone's been on board

01:09:21.080 mostly from following my dad which is very helpful because people especially when you're trying to

01:09:26.860 bring something that doesn't exist into existence it's like hey are you guys behind this idea it's

01:09:32.340 just an idea maybe it's a fantastic idea but if you're not behind it you can get one person in

01:09:37.120 there that's like this isn't gonna work we can't do this it's too big and they just poison everyone

01:09:41.700 around them. It's crazy how, well, how ideas and businesses work when they're in their infancy.

01:09:48.220 They're so fragile. You just need, you need to get people going. It's a huge part of it that

01:09:53.980 people don't understand. And this is why usually the person that starts the company is not the

01:09:58.820 person that scales the company because they are radically different skillsets. That maverick that

01:10:03.560 can believe when nobody else can see it and they can galvanize a vision. They can get everybody

01:10:07.940 around them and believe we're going to do this. And that's how you get that mass of just incredible

01:10:12.760 talent. But then as you start scaling and it's like, now we're just going to do this same thing

01:10:17.520 over and over rinse and repeat forever. And now it's, you know, quarterly reports and how do we

01:10:22.400 make this bigger? And, uh, our growth rate ticked down by 2%. What are we going to do? And you've

01:10:27.220 got bureaucracy building into the company. It's crazy. We could literally do an entire series of

01:10:32.500 episodes on scaling a business it is insane okay let's let's take quest for an example so

01:10:41.160 you started that but you also scaled it yeah so you were the same person to do both but then you

01:10:47.620 sold it yes so it wasn't like long term you're running this and making it how but you said it

01:10:52.360 was 15 years right was that from its inception to selling so that was we had started so there

01:10:57.100 were three of us that started quest we had a business before that in security software so i'd

01:11:02.720 start that clock back at the security software company so what's your background well my background

01:11:07.420 is filming filming yeah but then you were in security because i was like i just need to get

01:11:11.780 rich i thought it was only going to take 18 months get get into tech maybe that's where you make your

01:11:16.060 millions come on meow uh this was like this was right after the dot-com bubble burst so this is

01:11:23.280 like 2003 yeah 2003 so in 2003 i start my journey in security software and think 18 months from now

01:11:32.060 we're going to sell this for millions of dollars and i'm going to go off and make my movies it's

01:11:35.200 going to be amazing i used to sit before any movie i would sit there with the calculator okay if i get

01:11:38.660 seven million dollars out of the sale uh what's the interest on that and like do all that and okay

01:11:42.860 we could live off that we could do a movie for a million dollars and like so that was going to be

01:11:46.800 the plan yeah and then 18 months comes i need another 18 months that 18 months comes and goes

01:11:51.920 I need another 18 months and then realize, okay, this is going nowhere fast, or at least I'm so

01:11:56.880 unhappy. I don't want to keep doing this. Uh, I was worth about $2 million on paper. I go into

01:12:01.540 my partners. I'm like, look, I can't keep doing this. I am so profoundly unhappy. My wife pulled

01:12:05.580 me aside and said, I'm now damaging the marriage. I'm like, uh, I just can't keep going. And they

01:12:10.280 were like, hold on, hold on. We feel the same. Like we're not having fun either. What would it

01:12:14.280 have to look like for the three of us to keep working together to make a very long story short?

01:12:18.120 the answer ends up being quest nutrition by then i had learned that no one could guarantee success

01:12:24.240 but i could guarantee the struggle so i was like okay if i know i'm going to struggle i want to

01:12:29.340 stop asking the question that the internet is going to tell you to ask which is what would

01:12:33.760 you do if you knew you couldn't fail that is a terrible question because the most likely outcome

01:12:39.080 of anything even marginally big is that you're going to fail so i changed it to what would i do

01:12:45.200 and love every day, even if I were failing. And so for three very different reasons, we decide

01:12:50.900 that we're going to found quest. And I grew up in a morbidly obese family. So I was like, all right,

01:12:55.680 I want to tell stories inside this company. So I don't want to give that up. And Hey, there's this

01:13:01.020 new thing. We now call it social media. It was not called that back then, but this new thing is

01:13:05.160 coming up. I can tell stories that we now say community we didn't back then. So I was like,

01:13:09.960 I want to build this community of people that I can tell stories to their stories back to them,

01:13:15.960 what we used to call mirror marketing. So I want to reflect them back to them. I don't want to,

01:13:20.740 uh, the first rule of quest marketing is never talk about quest. So it was like, we always

01:13:24.820 wanted to talk about them and their journey, but we, we had a whole, uh, content division inside

01:13:30.480 of a protein bar company. Now this is back in like 2010. So this was like, huh? Everybody was

01:13:36.560 like, what are you guys doing? This is the most absurd thing ever. And so I was like, no, no,

01:13:40.540 I need to do this to fill my soul. So to get the three of us to stay together, there were just all

01:13:45.460 these weird stipulations. I'm only going to build something for a thousand true fans. An idea I got

01:13:49.500 from Kevin Kelly. Uh, I'm only going to do this if I can do storytelling inside the company. And so

01:13:54.040 it just ended up being the right timing, understood social media was able to scale it, grow it, all

01:13:59.740 that stuff. But anyway, the clock starts at awareness ultimately becomes quest. We launched

01:14:04.620 Quest in 2010, but we had been working on it since like 2008.

01:14:09.180 And so launch in 2010 and then I exit in 2016.

01:14:15.140 Uh, so, um, yeah, it was a absolutely crazy rocket ship of a ride.

01:14:21.420 In our first three years alone, we grew by 57,000%.

01:14:26.700 And that's a manufacturing.

01:14:27.780 So that's not like a technology company where you can do infinite

01:14:30.900 numbers with the same people.

01:14:32.340 Uh, this was going from, uh, three employees to 3000 employees going from like 5,000 square

01:14:39.880 feet to 300,000 square feet.

01:14:41.880 I mean, it's just absolute insane in three years.

01:14:44.200 So it was insane.

01:14:46.700 How do you even hire that number of people in that amount of time?

01:14:49.280 You interview them in groups and you have a very weird interview style.

01:14:53.360 It was.

01:14:53.880 Group interviews.

01:14:54.480 It was crazy.

01:14:56.120 Crazy.

01:14:57.060 So did you have a warehouse?

01:14:58.120 You had your own manufacturing warehouses and everything?

01:15:00.320 We had to engineer our own equipment.

01:15:01.800 so the big one one of the big breakthroughs and this this will always go down is like one of the

01:15:07.360 great things that made quest is we were looking at um getting a co-manufacturer and so we went

01:15:13.660 to everybody and we said hey we want to make a protein bar that tastes like it has sugar but

01:15:16.600 doesn't yeah we can't figure out why nobody's done this before because it's so obvious yeah

01:15:20.800 and so we'd go to all these co-mans and they're like oh this bar can't be made like what do you

01:15:25.260 mean it can't be made and they're like it's not going to run through the machines because of the

01:15:28.500 texture. And we're like, what? And so we end up looking at it. And the, the reason that nobody

01:15:35.400 had made a protein bar that tastes like it had sugar, but didn't is because the government

01:15:39.540 subsidizes corn. And so we're like, this is the weirdest discovery of all time. Because,

01:15:46.300 because the government subsidizes corn, all the manufacturers make their sugar out of high

01:15:51.460 fructose corn syrup. But high fructose corn syrup is like this liquid. When you put it into your

01:15:56.760 product, it gives it a certain texture. So for the last 70 years, every piece of industrial

01:16:02.300 equipment has been made with tolerances to match a product that uses high fructose corn syrup.

01:16:07.120 So everybody that had this idea for the bar would go to these guys and say, Hey, I want to make this

01:16:11.140 on your equipment so we can do it at scale. And they would say, you need to add high fructose

01:16:14.380 corn syrup. And then people would either go, no, I'm not going to do that. And then they would go

01:16:19.000 make a bar that tastes like sawdust, or they would add the high fructose corn syrup. And now all the

01:16:25.700 benefits that they wanted to have in the bar, they had none, but they could grow at scale.

01:16:29.940 Yeah. And so when we saw that, we had the crazy idea of what if we became our own manufacturers?

01:16:34.640 Yeah. And I remember hearing that idea at first and being like, yo, that's a hard left turn. We

01:16:41.380 really about, because we literally had to engineer our own equipment. So we had to meet with

01:16:47.180 companies that build this kind of stuff and say, Hey, here's what we need. We need different

01:16:50.720 tolerances, yada, yada, got it proved out on a really cheap. It was still quite expensive,

01:16:56.720 but a very cheap rickety setup that we bought in Canada, uh, went up, got this stuff, brought it

01:17:02.000 back, re-engineered it ourselves to prove the model. It worked. And then we're like, okay,

01:17:07.300 now we're going to go and like properly engineer this stuff. Uh, and so it just so happened that

01:17:12.000 one of my partners was an Iowa farm boy. And with a Sawzall, he took the equipment used by

01:17:17.740 people that use high fructose corn syrup cut it up welded it back together in a new way

01:17:21.580 allowed it to run our different product and we were off to the races and this is one of those

01:17:26.220 stories i tell people over and over and over this is why you have to think from first principles

01:17:30.380 because when we got to this bar can't be made we asked the question why where is it violating the

01:17:36.600 laws of physics because if it's not violating the laws of physics it can be made and so we're like

01:17:40.880 there's no way this violates the laws of physics and so we're like oh okay this is a tolerance

01:17:44.900 problem has to do with the high fructose corn syrup, all that. So we're like, cool. Now we

01:17:48.120 know the path around it. That's so funny. Okay. I had no idea about that whole manufacturing

01:17:52.600 yourself part of quest. That's very funny. We had, I've, I have a hangover supplement,

01:17:58.280 not even close to like quest level of large, but trying to get somebody to put it through

01:18:04.680 machines without fillers. It was just like, yeah, we can't do it. It's like, what do you mean you

01:18:09.120 can't do? Like, yeah, you can. There are certain things I can't do. Like I can't fly to the moon.

01:18:14.120 Like, but like, what do you mean you can't do it?

01:18:16.740 And it was, yeah, you need fillers.

01:18:18.160 So the machines run smoothly.

01:18:19.440 And it's like, oh, okay.

01:18:21.780 A lot about manufacturing.

01:18:23.100 I didn't know.

01:18:23.620 That's funny about the corn syrup though.

01:18:26.080 That's crazy.

01:18:28.240 Oh my gosh.

01:18:29.540 This is why government regulatory bodies are very problematic in ways that people do not understand.

01:18:35.400 The second and third order consequences are ridiculous.

01:18:38.680 That's wild.

01:18:40.140 Okay.

01:18:40.720 Well, Tom, thank you very much for coming on my podcast.

01:18:44.120 me. It was wonderful to spend more time with you. Yeah, that was really fun. That was very

01:18:47.380 informative. Um, where can I direct people to go? Social media, podcast, hit up YouTube at Tom

01:18:53.380 Bilyeu. Uh, if you're interested in impact theory university, uh, you can ping me there or ping me

01:18:58.900 on X always at Tom Bilyeu. Sounds good. Thanks for coming on again. Thanks for having me.

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - January 24, 2025

AI and How to Not Get Left Behind ｜ Tom Bilyeu EP 221

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