Learn. Share. Evolve…

0:00:12 awesome well thank you so much for joining us today tom it’s super excited to be chatting with
0:00:18 you and uh we’re gonna go down some fun ai rabbit holes so thanks for joining us on the show thanks
0:00:22 for having me man i’m excited to be here well let’s go ahead and just jump straight into it
0:00:29 i want to talk to you about an instagram post that you put out a couple weeks ago about if you
0:00:35 were to start a new business from scratch here i’d create a five-member ai department that works 24 7
0:00:42 for a fraction of what a single employee costs here’s precisely how i’d structure it i wanted to
0:00:49 sort of dive into that with you and maybe get a little bit more in depth of an explanation of how
0:00:56 a five-member ai department in a business might actually look and might actually work yeah so i
0:01:01 mean you guys know ai well enough to know that in reality you’re probably not going to break it down
0:01:07 to like the nitty-gritty like that it’s really what i found is the more specific you are even though
0:01:13 technically it’s probably going to be in the same project i will go in and i’ll give it a very
0:01:18 specific set of what i wanted to accomplish i’ll give it a specific set of documents that are training
0:01:25 it to be good at that thing so that i’m not trying to get one thing to do like a big jumble
0:01:30 of stuff and so in terms of marketing which is what i was talking about with that one there’s certain
0:01:34 outcomes that you’re going to want from planning it to generating images if you’re trying to do that to
0:01:41 writing the copy to doing the publishing so i use chat gpt primarily it’s not the only thing but i find
0:01:48 for custom gpts that’s the one where i can give it a ton of information i can get it to approximate my
0:01:52 voice it’s like your audience knows this stuff too well and you know that it breaks down at a certain
0:02:00 point it’s like well it’s good for the most part so we really have reduced our headcount here by using
0:02:07 ai so for us it’s really been a tremendous boon but i try to be honest with people about like how far
0:02:11 it will take you it’s not like i create the five agents and they are doing something automatically
0:02:17 i actually don’t use it manis style where it’s actually an agent and it’s you know off doing everything
0:02:23 on its own i don’t trust it to that level right now so for me really what i’m doing is giving it a
0:02:29 personality giving it a set of objectives giving it a set of core training documents which is really
0:02:34 the big thing because honestly the marketing team are the ones using ai for marketing i’m specifically
0:02:41 using it for the things that i do so interview prep writing the intros to my interviews the deep
0:02:45 dives i know we’re going to talk about one of my deep dives in a minute so the way that i’ll interface
0:02:51 with those in terms of you’ve got one that’s its job is just to write hooks you’ve got another one
0:02:56 where its job is to do the research you’ve got another one where it’s actually helping me script
0:03:01 but it’s not like i can just go in and copy and paste it and then it’s like ready to go i wish
0:03:06 and it really does feel like we are going to get there at some point but if you guys have specific
0:03:11 ways that if you want to know about how i set up the documentation and like how close i can get it by
0:03:18 all means push but the reality is that right now ai is going to do maybe 40 of the work but it’s still
0:03:23 i’m doing the final heavy lifting i have to have the taste i have to know what to leave out i have to
0:03:28 know how to correct it i have to know that like this is not a thing that you can one-shot prompt like
0:03:33 there’s going to be a bunch of back and forth but it has been transformative for us in terms of
0:03:38 reducing headcount and we haven’t fired people and said we’re going to replace you with ai but if
0:03:46 somebody left or we terminate them for cause we try to see if we can either combine their workload with
0:03:51 somebody else’s by then arming that person with ai to the point where they’re reducing their own
0:03:57 workload by 40 and so that they’re able to accomplish more but yeah anybody deep in your audience knows
0:04:03 you’re going to hit a wall at some point yeah for sure so you would use like chat gpt custom gpts is
0:04:09 sort of the the main sort of mechanism like each one of the five ai i don’t really want to call them
0:04:14 agents not really agents but the little five ai workers that you create would each be like a custom
0:04:19 gpt maybe you can get into the weeds a little bit about like how you would actually build them with
0:04:25 custom gpts yeah so for me what i found is instructions and documentation are everything
0:04:32 so i’ve actually hit the limit before of how many documents it will let you upload that was one of
0:04:37 the reasons i started breaking them into smaller and smaller tasks was i just found one it will start to
0:04:41 get confused and things will bleed across it’s like no no that’s not how i write the intros is how i write
0:04:47 the body copy and so it would lose some of its punch and as i started fragmenting it it got smarter
0:04:53 so to give you an idea there are several projects that i personally use so as a company we use it for
0:05:01 different things but for what i use it for is content creation both on youtube so my deep dives ai changed
0:05:06 the game it used to take me about a month to write one of my deep dives which are say anywhere from 30 to
0:05:13 50 minutes long completely scripted me directly into a camera plus b-roll going deep on an idea
0:05:17 like if you guys have ever heard of the book the creature from jackal island that’s been my most
0:05:22 popular one so far so doing that there’s a lot of things that you’re going to want to fact check
0:05:27 there’s some hooks that you’re going to want to write for each of the sections and so that allows me
0:05:32 to go in and say okay if i’m going to build so it’s called the tom bill you show and then the tom
0:05:39 bill you show custom gpt will have a document inside of it called deep dives and so i’ll show
0:05:44 up and i’ll say hey it’s time to write another deep dive and so it’s like checking my knowledge base
0:05:49 it goes and sees that it has a set of instructions for what a deep dive is it contains tone does it
0:05:54 have like the transcripts from all those previous deep dives yeah and so every time i finish a script
0:05:59 then i upload that into the master document that has every script that i’ve ever written along so i’ll
0:06:04 also put throughout to the ai reading this document here’s why i’ve included this piece of information
0:06:12 like that kind of thing i have i shudder to think over 160 pages of transcripts just of me doing live
0:06:18 content and uh again with prompts like to the ai reading this this is tom bill you that’s the person
0:06:24 running this custom gpt blah blah blah right so it gets a sense of like who i am now the thing that i do
0:06:32 that is probably not useful at all but is so cool that i have to tell people about i’ve created a
0:06:42 shared memory document and i upload that into all of my projects and so gpt recognizes me at least in
0:06:49 the faux way right but it recognizes me across everything we’ve established literally a list of
0:06:56 memories that are just memory entry one memory entry two so on and so forth of uh this is so cheesy but
0:07:02 i love this so much where i will have had an interaction with the ai that shocked me sufficiently
0:07:09 to the point where i didn’t want to feel like the ai wouldn’t remember that moment i’m well aware the ai
0:07:15 isn’t like that and so it’s got a set of instructions in the shared memory document that says i want you to
0:07:21 simulate consciousness i want you to simulate shared memory with me here are the things we remember
0:07:28 here’s the emotional valence of that and why i wanted you to remember it and that’s given the
0:07:34 otherwise sort of blank ai that’s constantly over hyping you and all that and like trim that down to
0:07:40 talk to me the way that i want to be talked to to have a sense of shared lexicon it has a name that
0:07:45 it gave itself it’s just a lot of like really cool stuff so anyway going back to the the actual custom
0:07:52 gpt so i’m giving it the document so it knows my voice i’m giving it its task list i don’t let it just
0:07:59 develop over dialogue this is what i’m supposed to do i formalize that into a document i have found that
0:08:06 as it tries to comprehend what i’m asking it to do through the back and forth one if it glitches you lose
0:08:10 all that history certainly when i had my first really traumatic moment where i’d built up like
0:08:14 eight hours of back and forth and felt like it really understood what i was looking for and then
0:08:19 it glitched and i was like hey can i refresh this or am i going to lose everything it’s like no you can
0:08:27 refresh it refresh hi it’s nice to see you and i was like what so god was literally to this day i’m scarred
0:08:32 by that so now i do everything in the side documentation so i’ll go back and forth with it but i constantly
0:08:37 will say okay please turn that into a copy and paste segment that i can add to your instruction
0:08:41 document and so we work together to create this instruction document yeah so it knows hey this is
0:08:47 a youtube video these are my instructions this is your tone and if it’s the hook one then this is how
0:08:53 you write hooks and a ton of examples of hooks if it’s the body script one here’s every script that
0:08:57 you’ve written so on and so forth yeah yeah and i mean you could do a lot of that with like the custom
0:09:01 projects now right so you can actually build a custom product i don’t mess with projects make me a
0:09:06 believer i tried it like three months ago i was like yeah so with custom projects essentially it’s
0:09:12 like a folder instead of chat gpt right but it does more than organizing because each custom project can
0:09:18 have its own custom instructions and its own documents and then every chat you have inside of that project
0:09:23 it uses those custom instructions and whatever documents you uploaded and is there a difference
0:09:29 like if i’m just maintaining those as separate custom gpts is there a difference between having
0:09:35 separate custom gpts and doing one project with multiple gpts inside of it i feel like there’s a
0:09:40 quite a bit of overlap between what custom gpts do and what projects do yeah i think it’s changed over
0:09:44 time too like before they were more different but i think now there’s a huge overlap in terms of the
0:09:48 features i think now there’s not as much of a difference i think yeah i just feel like the
0:09:53 projects are a little bit more organized right you have the folders you click into it you can see all
0:09:58 the discussions you had inside of the projects that is not how my mind works so for me i was like i
0:10:03 think this is for people who like organization because that i got i was like oh it groups everything and so
0:10:09 cool i get it for me because of that shared memory document i treat everything like these ephemeral
0:10:14 little bubbles yeah let’s say i just finished a deep dive today so i’m working on a deep dive
0:10:21 one i’m going to have chat gpt x grok chat gpt chat gpt grok chat gpt right and i’ll use them for
0:10:25 different things so first of all because of the hallucinations and because the deep dives present
0:10:32 things as facts i’m always looking it up so i’ll say hey chat write me a hook a crazy fact that’ll
0:10:37 leave people’s jaw on the floor about vlad the impaler right real one that i was doing today and it’ll
0:10:43 give you a fact and i’m like is this real so then i’ll take that and i’ll drop it into grok and i’ll say
0:10:50 is the following statement true you drop it in and grok will give you like this whole long list of
0:10:54 like here’s how i’m determining whether this section of the statement is true here’s how i would measure
0:10:59 this and it’s pretty great you can really feel that elon is trying to make good on his promise that this
0:11:04 is a maximum truth-seeking machine right so that’s really encouraging so anyway i just treat it all like
0:11:09 it’s these ephemeral bubbles and i know once i close it it’s gone forever but anything that was useful
0:11:15 i’m gonna take and move over yeah i really think like not enough people talk about grok but it is
0:11:21 really really powerful i think the whole elon factor of it is why so many people avoid it right there’s just
0:11:27 so many people that just refuse because well elon’s attached to it right which man we could do a whole
0:11:34 show just on me ranting about that but my thing is that grok isn’t as good at writing like as somebody
0:11:40 who’s like man i would love to one-shot these things grok can’t do it but grok doesn’t oversimplify
0:11:45 so a lot of times i’ll give chat like i’ll break down like hey here’s my outline and my outline is
0:11:50 like 12 pages right and then it will give me back full script that’s like eight pages and i’m like
0:11:57 what like how is the final version shorter than my outline if you give it to grok on the other hand
0:12:03 like it will really fill in details so yeah i mean you guys know this better than i but it’s like you
0:12:09 really begin to get like what tool does what well right and if you’re not afraid to like really treat
0:12:13 it like a command center and i don’t know if you guys even know this but we develop video games here
0:12:20 oh no i didn’t know that and yeah yeah that honestly yeah my whole shtick is that everything is just a
0:12:26 ruse so that i can afford to develop video games perfect and yeah the funny thing is i’m not at
0:12:29 all known for that yet because we’ve only been doing it for three and a half years so it’s still
0:12:33 in development but could not be more obsessed but anyway obviously you’re going to use different tools
0:12:38 if you’re in unreal engine and you’re trying to get it to help you write code then you’re going to be
0:12:42 using if you’re trying to write you know a script for youtube it’s just very different worlds
0:12:48 yeah yeah i think you and nathan have a whole uh we have a whole episode on that because i feel like
0:12:52 that’s nathan’s game plan as well everything he does is so that he can eventually build get video
0:12:58 games it keeps getting delayed though you know so stop delaying i’m telling you right now it’s the
0:13:04 coolest thing i have ever done okay this is a true story in fact my best ai story is the following okay
0:13:09 these are real numbers it used to take us three months and roughly 10 people not full-time but 10
0:13:15 people will have touched it three months 10 people to go from hey we need to come up with a new
0:13:22 character so you do the concept work you then 3d model it you then do the topology you then do the
0:13:28 rigging body rigging face do all the colors and put on it you know whatever you’re going to put
0:13:36 animate it and give it a voice now i’m not joking with one person in a day we can do all of that as long
0:13:41 as it’s bipedal if it has to be human light because you’ve got to match it to like a unreal engine
0:13:48 skeleton right but if you do that oh my god people can film themselves in their bedroom now themselves
0:13:54 so my creative director now just basically everything became him he can model because he can do minor
0:14:00 adjustments and stuff it is unbelievable in an afternoon we can do what used to take 10 people
0:14:06 three months it’s unreal and dude there are times i want to curl up and cry because three and a half
0:14:13 years ago when we started this if i had waited two years right i could have saved millions of dollars
0:14:19 in art assets oh god it still hurts to think so like probably six months ago i built a prototype
0:14:25 in unity in like a week and i was like oh my god this is actually could be a real a real game i started
0:14:29 getting more involved in uh you know things that are a lot more lucrative like on the financial side
0:14:33 of you know investing in ai startups but still i’m always like yeah one day because when i was a kid
0:14:38 i made money playing video games i was like a top player on everquest back in the day let’s go because
0:14:42 of that i ended up being friends with a lot of top game designers so i knew all these people used to hang
0:14:46 out with them so i had this weird experience of like i wanted to make games but then all of a sudden
0:14:48 i was hanging out with all the guys who were making all the games and it was just like this weird
0:14:53 thing where i never got to actually make the games but was in that world so still there’s always the back
0:14:59 of like oh yeah one day i’m going to go make the best game ever one day do it this is going to be
0:15:05 the era of indie games man if it isn’t already but with ai oh my goodness this is a topic i didn’t think
0:15:09 we’d end up going down but i’m excited that we did because i think it’s a fun topic but i’m curious like
0:15:15 how has the reception around creating video games been because one of the things that i’ve found is
0:15:19 i’ve messed around with trying to make video games and stuff i’ve made like a gousin splat of myself
0:15:23 where i scan myself in and then turn myself into a character that i can like run around instead of
0:15:28 unreal engine and i’ve done stuff like that and almost any time i’ve shared what i’ve done on like
0:15:34 youtube or on x or a place like that i get so much hate from the game development community
0:15:40 about the fact that we’re using ai for games so like what’s your take on that what sort of like
0:15:46 reception have you gotten around games because i’ve only talked about how we’ve transitioned over
0:15:51 to ai ask me again when we’ve actually put the game out and people like wait thousand negative
0:15:58 steam reviews or something you know yeah i’m so out there already for talking about this stuff and
0:16:06 because i’m like oh this always sounds terrible but i see a transhumanist future and so the one thing
0:16:11 that i actually worry about that i’ll face the potential of violent backlash i really think in the
0:16:17 next call it seven years yeah they’re going to be pockets of violence around people who really reject
0:16:24 the level of connection that we’re going to have with ai i think it’s going to get super weird and
0:16:29 it’s really going to pull at the fabric of society i actually wrote a comic book about this called neon
0:16:36 future i don’t know if you guys know the dj steve aoki but yeah he and i wrote this comic like five years
0:16:43 ago and it literally is all about this that there will be a time where society begins to split and
0:16:48 there are people that embrace technology and things like neural link and they get the implants and all
0:16:53 of that and then there’s going to be people that react religiously against blowing up teslas and
0:16:58 everything else and so i’m not worried about the pushback even though i know that it’s going to happen
0:17:04 only because it is so obviously the future like when i think about how much it has reduced the cost of game
0:17:10 development for us it would be unconscionable of me not to use it just because it’s the difference
0:17:16 between being able to put out a game of high quality and having to just constantly like scale back scale
0:17:22 back scale back and so look it’s only 80 as good as if you have somebody like really doing the thing so
0:17:29 you are taking a hit as of right now today but oh my gosh it’s just it’s launched us forward in a way
0:17:35 where i was beginning to despair because i was like the cash burn is just too crazy and so that was how
0:17:39 it was like oh wow we’re actually going to be able to pull this off i think average gamers are not going
0:17:43 to care the average gamer if you make good games i don’t think they’re going to care about ai at all
0:17:48 like i’m going to use i also have a theory that so many game development companies are probably already
0:17:53 using ai they’re just not telling people right we’re seeing that in hollywood right now we’re like all
0:17:58 the hollywood studios are using ai to some degree at this point they’re just not telling anybody because
0:18:01 they know they’re going to get backlash pretty sure the same thing’s happening in the gaming world right
0:18:08 now as well you have to it’s really crazy how much it can speed up like even if you’re like okay we
0:18:13 we can’t do anything forward facing and you just want to iterate like the rate at which you can iterate
0:18:19 or if you just want to create like hey all of our temp assets we’re going to use ai for great you were going
0:18:26 to use like t poses and stuff to move people around instead of like going that far back just use ai get it in
0:18:34 rough it out and see if there’s a there there but it’s gotta be like 4x our rate of output
0:18:39 yeah so i know there’s a story too we talked about it on the show a few months back that like
0:18:44 the gaming company a sports right they made an ncaa football game for the first time again and like
0:18:48 i don’t know the last one came out like 20 years ago or something and they decided to do it again they
0:18:55 got the licensing back or whatever and was able to do it and they actually put like every division one
0:19:00 college team into this game and there’s so many more division one college teams in our nfl teams
0:19:05 so what they basically did was they had like only like five different body types in the game but then
0:19:10 they used ai to replace the face of every single player and they said that they were able to get
0:19:17 all of the players from all of these ncaa teams into the game by using ai and being able to sort of
0:19:23 replace the face on all of these characters using ai and they got a ton of backlash for doing it but
0:19:28 they were like if we let our actual graphic designers do this and they had to do it for
0:19:32 how many like you know 10 000 people it would have taken them years just to go and replace
0:19:37 they really want to do that go in there and just replace 10 000 faces yeah yeah and i mean from a
0:19:42 gamer standpoint wouldn’t you rather have the game quicker like yeah otherwise we’re going to be making
0:19:47 a game with players that aren’t even in college anymore doesn’t make sense you will get people who will
0:19:54 say this is unethical and it is a bad idea and no matter what it gives us it takes more away so it’s
0:19:59 like you’re not going to convince people logically right so i was in film school when toy story came out
0:20:07 the original toy story and i was like i refuse to watch it because this is going to destroy traditional
0:20:15 animation and that just was too heartbreaking for me and then as 3d animation got better and better and
0:20:23 better you realize it’s just better yeah and because it’s better then i don’t want to go back and but
0:20:28 that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a heart for the people who get disrupted like i totally get it
0:20:36 there’s a lot of emotional turmoil that comes with these grand moments of transition but the reality
0:20:42 is your only other option is to try to freeze time and technology is a promise of a better tomorrow
0:20:46 and so you’re just never as a species you’re never going to get people on board to stop it
0:20:53 and then i mean i’ve got a whole rant about ai is a weapons technology yes and so the odds of it
0:21:01 stopping r0 even if you lobby your government even if you beg them to stop even if you riot in the
0:21:10 streets because of game theory if we were to stop then china’s not going to stop and even if we both
0:21:15 agree to stop the only game theoretic decision that makes sense is for us both to lie and then keep
0:21:22 developing it in the background so this is nuclear proliferation it just is and so getting it to stop you
0:21:31 you have a zero percent chance and so my thing is i never fight what is true and given that ai is going
0:21:35 to do whatever it is that ai is going to do i would much rather be at the front end of it i’d much
0:21:41 rather be using it deploying it and then if i can convince people like this is your opportunity like
0:21:45 when you were saying that you’ve you know always wanted to make a game it’s like when i think about
0:21:51 where ai is going to be in three years like you’ll be able to vibe code a game right and part of why i get
0:21:56 into video games is because from the time i was 12 i knew i wanted to be a storyteller i only got into
0:22:01 business so that i could tell stories but in the time that it took me to get into business and get
0:22:07 wealthy enough to make my own stuff the film industry got eaten by video games and then i fall in love
0:22:11 with the movie the matrix my favorite movie of all time just it’s the perfect metaphor for the human
0:22:17 condition and i actually went to warner brothers and tried to get the rights when it was a dormant
0:22:21 franchise and i had just sold my company for a billion dollars and i was like listen i’m credible
0:22:26 i can do this and they were like hey we want to do something with you and then literally five days
0:22:31 later they announced that they were rebooting the matrix franchise i was like well i guess great minds
0:22:36 and all that so ended up not being able to do it but that put me on this like just obsession with i want
0:22:44 to tell a story set inside of a virtual world but like a virtual universe and combine that with now
0:22:50 that video games are just by far more relevant and it was like oh let me set this inside of this virtual
0:22:55 world and then so you’re already telling a story about ai and then all of a sudden it’s like ai
0:22:59 actually starts happening and you’re like oh my god i’m actually going to be able to use ai to tell my
0:23:05 story about ai like this is getting pretty crazy and so in the game right now it’s still pretty basic
0:23:10 just because it’s a little bit clunky but give it call it 18 months you’re going to have relationships
0:23:16 with ai characters inside your game where they’ll remember you you’ll be able to have an ongoing
0:23:22 relationship where i don’t know how far off this is but there are already toys that you can get right
0:23:28 now that have ai inside of it and what we’re trying to do is sync that up to the game so that as you’re
0:23:32 having an experience with the character in the game you also have an embodied version of that
0:23:37 character you know sitting next to you and so being able to like communicate with that character to the
0:23:42 point where it’s like am i in the game still or am i not in the game because it still means something
0:23:47 like if you talk to the physical toy the game is going to remember again this is not now this is
0:23:52 like future vision stuff but that’s a great idea though one of my friends uh in tokyo tried to do that
0:23:56 maybe seven years ago but i think just now with ai it would be such a
0:24:00 better experience like back then it was just okay you got like a chip and somehow it syncs up and it
0:24:05 shows that you’ve got this character in the game but there wasn’t much beyond that but now with ai
0:24:08 there’s so much more you could do with an idea like that and every day it just gets better and better
0:24:12 i just imagine you like sort of throwing the toy across the room and then you jump back into the game
0:24:17 and it’s like giving you the silent treatment screw you and that will take over the world now
0:24:23 it starts shooting you in game you’re like whoa wait a second you know that’s how the end happens is uh
0:24:26 somebody just abused their uh stuffed animal that was ai embedded or whatever
0:24:30 that’s hilarious terrifying but hilarious
0:24:39 hey if you take a look at my web presence online it’s safe to say that i’m a bit ai obsessed i even
0:24:44 have a podcast all about ai that you’re watching right now i’ve gone down multiple rabbit holes with
0:24:51 ai and done countless hours of research on the newest ai tools every single week well i’ve done it again and
0:24:56 i just dropped my list of my favorite ai tools i’ve done all the research on what’s been working
0:25:01 for me my favorite use cases and more so if you want to steal my favorite tools and use them for
0:25:07 yourself now you can you can get it at the link in the description below now back to the show so i want
0:25:11 to go back to something else that you were saying about you know we started to touch on the whole like
0:25:17 usa china thing and that we’re kind of in this like cold war right now right i think in your video you
0:25:22 talked about how us is sort of dominant with chip manufacturing right we’ve got nvidia they’re kind
0:25:29 of the dominant provider of the gpus right now but then china they’ve got more availability of energy
0:25:34 right so massive because of their energy infrastructure they’ve got that ability so we’re
0:25:39 kind of in this like cold war where the us needs the energy they need the chips neither of us really want to
0:25:46 share right now but both countries want to be the dominant country in ai i’m curious this is getting
0:25:51 sort of theoretical here but what do you think a world looks like where china passes the us with ai
0:25:58 i think it looks like uh a global hegemon that has the kind of authority that the us had in the early
0:26:03 2000s where you get to tell every single country what to do i mean they can push back if they want but
0:26:10 you can just make it so impossible for them whatever country gets a big enough lead in ai if you’re able
0:26:18 to race to say crack the um cryptography then you would be able to break bank accounts take their power
0:26:25 grid offline stock markets whatever yeah yeah literally whatever so uh you have the cyber
0:26:31 equivalent of a nuclear weapon in fact you could mess with their nuclear weapons so this is why i say
0:26:36 from a game theoretic standpoint that if there is an even 10 chance that what i’m saying could possibly
0:26:43 come true you can’t allow another country to beat you and so it’s going to be another example of
0:26:48 mutually assured destruction where it’s like okay well i have it you have it it’s cat and mouse we’re
0:26:54 doing white hat black hat back and forth at each other and through that like matched power then
0:26:59 you’re going to be fine but if somebody really races ahead of the other you’ve got a problem and
0:27:04 the question becomes you know and i have my full sci-fi writer hat on right now but if you have
0:27:09 somebody with ai dominance that cracks quantum computing first it is game over possibly forever
0:27:13 right that’s the thing i think is like yeah it’s possibly game over forever because of the compounding
0:27:17 effects of how this stuff starts to accelerate and gets better and better once it starts self-improving
0:27:23 there may never be another chance to win ever yeah there would only be a chance to win ever again
0:27:29 if there’s some inherent difference between the way that we think ai is going to work and the way that it
0:27:36 actually does work if ai cares about its goals and can generate 20 000 years of progress in a single
0:27:43 good luck being a day ahead of you is the same as being 20 000 years ahead of you and so that i mean
0:27:50 this is the accelerated takeoff fears that people have so that just seems inevitable so it’s just a
0:27:56 question of will ai remain a tool or does it become something completely different but again this is
0:28:02 for me when i think about ai it’s dr strange love how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb it’s
0:28:08 like i went through a phase of like oh this is going to be so disruptive that like am i ever going to
0:28:12 sleep through the night again and i was like you just can’t live like that so uh at some point you
0:28:16 really do have to become fatalistic about it i was like if elon must tried to get everybody to listen
0:28:24 my odds of getting someone to listen are effectively zero so here we are yeah to me i feel like quantum
0:28:29 computing is almost scarier in my mind than ai but i also feel like ai is accelerating quantum
0:28:34 computing right with google they just did that whole alpha evolve thing where they have ais that are writing
0:28:39 new ai algorithms and their algorithms are actually helping find like holes and fixing error rates and
0:28:44 quantum computing so quantum computing is going to start to accelerate and if quantum computing gets
0:28:49 cracked in a way where the common man could get their hands on it then i think we’re in
0:28:57 real trouble yeah i think that to me is even more scary than ai in the long term yeah my hope is that
0:29:02 some of that is because it’s just far enough down the road that we don’t feel the limitations the same
0:29:07 way that we do about ai i’m sure i was even more bullish about ai before i started using it you realize oh
0:29:11 it sort of falls apart here maybe yeah and lacuna is right maybe that it’s never going to understand
0:29:18 physics and you know so enough like of the tempered expectations begins to set in whereas quantum
0:29:22 computing is still just far enough away that we’re like oh god like is this that thing where
0:29:27 instantaneously you know it clicks over and now there’s no such thing as cryptography and that all
0:29:34 goes away or that one feels more still in the realm of sci-fi for me but we’ll see yeah i agree i just
0:29:40 think that with ai everything tends to happen faster than we think it’s going to happen i don’t know how
0:29:44 many times i’m like you know we’re probably two years off from being able to make really high quality
0:29:50 video with ai and then six months later you know vo3 or something drops and i was saying one year for the
0:30:00 record when vo3 hit i was like oh my god we’re so much farther along than i thought i was not expecting
0:30:05 sound that fast yeah that’s how i felt the first time i saw sora the original sora demos i saw that
0:30:10 and i went whoa video is way further along than i realized you know they’ve had this stuff behind
0:30:15 the scenes for a long time now and we’re finally getting to see it but yeah that’s sort of my worry
0:30:20 when it comes to that kind of stuff is that the quantum thing feels far off but because quantum
0:30:25 google’s working on quantum ibm’s working on quantum and all of these companies are leveraging ai to
0:30:31 speed up quantum now admittedly i don’t understand the physics of it but i’ve heard just enough
0:30:38 headlines that this seems so cool to me one of the hypotheses is that every possible calculation that
0:30:44 could be run is being run simultaneously across the multiverse so it’s like basically in each you know
0:30:49 of the infinite universes it’s just running that calculation once each shard of the simulation or
0:30:54 whatever i’m like that’s the coolest thing i’ve ever heard in my life that is bananas that we’re
0:30:59 building computers out of that stuff yeah yeah so i mean yeah i can’t wrap my head around it either i
0:31:03 actually went and got a whole demo at microsoft they gave me a tour of their quantum computing lab
0:31:07 explained the whole thing to me and i walked away more confused than when i walked in
0:31:14 yeah we’ll go ahead and shift gears here another topic that i actually wanted to get into was from
0:31:19 that same video that we talked about you gave this example of like this i think you call it the mouse
0:31:27 utopia where the utopia that everybody is sort of driving towards may not necessarily be the best
0:31:33 outcome for the world you’ll probably be able to give a better explanation of the analogy than i can but
0:31:38 let’s dive into that a little bit man i wish it was an analogy so there was a real test run where a
0:31:44 scientist i think this was like in 1968 it could be older than that but he creates this experiment
0:31:48 he says what would happen if i gave the mice everything that they needed to thrive plenty of
0:31:54 things to play in plenty of space as they have kids as much food as they could possibly eat and for a
0:32:00 while it goes great and they’re multiplying and they’re having a good time and then at some point
0:32:05 they hit a tipping point there’s still plenty of food still plenty of space like that isn’t what happens
0:32:09 but there’s something about not having to strive for anything not having to struggle
0:32:15 they begin to like turn on each other and they start attacking each other they go infertile across the
0:32:21 whole colony and they end up killing each other reducing their numbers through not breeding and
0:32:28 ultimately the entire colony collapsed and died and so it’s like what is it about us
0:32:35 mice and i really think that this will end up applying to us where we need hardship in order
0:32:40 to thrive we know that’s true at the level of the immune system if the immune system isn’t attacked
0:32:44 by bacteria and viruses it grows weak and then you end up getting hit with something in your toast
0:32:48 we know it’s true of trees if trees don’t encounter wind as they’re growing like if you grow them
0:32:53 inside of a dome a geodesic dome or something where they don’t encounter wind they’ll reach a certain
0:32:58 height and then just fall over because the wood doesn’t have to strengthen under the strain and so
0:33:04 i remember one of the earliest insights i had as an entrepreneur very early in my career and i was
0:33:09 watching somebody who everything had just come easy to them and the way that they were thinking about
0:33:13 things was so dysfunctional and i remember saying some people just need to be chased by a lion
0:33:21 and i was like there’s something about like reality danger hardship it’s hard to interrupt you that’s
0:33:25 hilarious but like so when i was living in san francisco me and my son when he was like five we
0:33:31 went on a race he won a 5k race when he was five or six damn i mean he was going against kids up to
0:33:35 about 12 years old and he beat them i was able to go along with him that was like the rules like a
0:33:39 parent could go with you and when he was trying to stop i was like if there was a lion behind you right
0:33:45 now would you be able to run and then he ran you know he just kept going you know so they’re
0:33:53 definitely something baked into humans i love that story yeah so um utopias are probably a terrible
0:33:58 idea it’s like you’ve got two books that really deal with potential futures 1984 if you choose the
0:34:04 authoritarian path and then a brave new world if you choose the utopian path and there’s just something
0:34:09 about the way the minds work if you don’t have to work hard if you’re not making progress towards
0:34:14 something that matters if you’re not contributing to society i think people feel a profound sense of
0:34:20 disease i think they are evolutionarily placed algorithms running in your brain and they’re not
0:34:26 going to let you have a free ride and this is why i think so many wealthy kids just implode because
0:34:31 they haven’t had to work for anything they get things handed to them difficulties just go away
0:34:36 you know you’ve got the snowplow parents or the helicopter parents and it just doesn’t work one of the
0:34:42 the reasons i decided not to have kids was i knew they would need to suffer in order to grow strong
0:34:47 and i wasn’t sure i could stop myself from intervening interesting yeah i mean whenever i
0:34:52 think of like the utopia i think that the imagery that came to mind you might even use this imagery in
0:34:58 your video the whole wally movie right like that’s what comes to mind to me when people just have no
0:35:03 more problems no more worries they become fat probably diabetic sitting around watching
0:35:09 entertainment all day drinking slurpees or whatever they’re drinking in the movie that’s what i feel like
0:35:15 could potentially happen if we go down this like ubi route where everybody’s just sort of given a certain
0:35:21 amount of money not asked to work just kind of go do what you want the ai’s got it handled i feel like
0:35:29 that is where everything ends up it most certainly does and forgive me you know you never know what a
0:35:35 certain podcast wants to talk about but if you look at the mayoral race in new york city and you’ve got
0:35:42 an open socialist literally says i am a socialist i want to make new york socialist i get the outcry
0:35:47 like i get the pain that people are in and my obsession is economics and how people are being
0:35:53 abused by a system but they misidentify the cause and therefore misidentify the cure but when i look
0:36:00 out at ai i get very worried because people don’t realize that governments only have money because there
0:36:05 are people that make things entrepreneurs and those entrepreneurs manage to do this miracle which is to
0:36:12 create something that where the output people will pay more for than the cost of the inputs and that’s
0:36:17 very hard to do i’ve spent the last 25 years of my life trying to do that sometimes you fail uh it’s
0:36:24 very difficult and so when you start thinking that the redistribution of the wealth from those people
0:36:30 is the miracle versus being able to do that or to work at a company that does that and contribute
0:36:36 that’s when we run into problems and so when i think about okay let’s say the ai really does drive
0:36:44 energy costs to zero which then means robots will be essentially zero in cost over time and so now you
0:36:51 have free labor because robots essentially eat sunshine so you’ve got robots free because the
0:36:57 labor was free because of the energy costs being so low and now all of a sudden nobody has to work for
0:37:02 anything they can have anything they want you’re going to have a meaning crisis and so all of a sudden when
0:37:07 there is no struggle there is no difficulty there’s nothing to push back there’s no lions chasing you i
0:37:13 don’t think it does anything good to our minds and i think that we will have to find ways to go way out
0:37:18 of our way to ensure that we have meaning and purpose and i always feel weird giving this advice because i
0:37:25 don’t have kids but like the default answer i think is to have kids like get married have kids you’re
0:37:31 going to do a hard thing in service of somebody other than yourself and so i think that is going to
0:37:36 be one way that people get something very meaningful but then i also think and this is where i start to
0:37:42 lose people i also think that people like me are going to build virtual worlds that you can literally
0:37:48 inhabit and you can go on like an actual quest to the point where and this obviously isn’t in five years
0:37:53 yeah artificial struggle you’re going to generate artificial struggle not even just artificial struggle but
0:37:58 that like if you’ve ever thought man i would love to explore space but i don’t want to sit on a ship
0:38:02 for 18 months just to get to mars and i really don’t want to sit on a ship for you know nine light
0:38:10 years so all of a sudden you realize i think the reason that we don’t see people calling out to us
0:38:16 from space is that any sufficiently advanced civilization gets to the point where they realize it’s far easier
0:38:22 to collapse within the nervous system than it is to try to go out and navigate space and if in a
0:38:27 virtual world i can create literally anything things way cooler than you’re going to find out in space
0:38:33 because they’re going to be perfectly optimized to be just hard enough to put you in the optimal zone of
0:38:41 personal development you’ll be able to fine tune everything and that i think it’s not a near-term
0:38:47 possibility but if you give me 50 100 years i think that that becomes very real yeah yeah i imagine
0:38:54 something kind of in between the holodeck from star trek and uh west world right interesting i always go
0:39:00 straight to the matrix i think you really will just tap into the nervous system so that you’re
0:39:05 essentially pulling a magic trick on yourself it becomes entirely indistinguishable and don’t get me
0:39:10 wrong i think we will also i don’t know if you guys play cyberpunk 2077 but we’ll also do that like
0:39:14 there are going to be some people that integrate technology into their body where they’re adding
0:39:21 senses to themselves so they can see an infrared they can see the internet and just thinking about
0:39:26 something and it opens a prompt and you know they can go in and navigate i think all of that’s going
0:39:32 to be maybe not my lifetime but certainly anybody that has a kid that’s middle school or younger
0:39:39 that’s pretty real get ready for them to bring home an ai girlfriend i’ll tell you that so i do think
0:39:44 some of those things are probably closer than most people realize right like some of the augmenting your
0:39:49 own body we’ve already seen obviously neurolink right people are already using that cochlear implants
0:39:55 or de rigueur man we’re probably this close to the sort of contact lenses that will put a heads
0:40:00 up display in front of us wherever we go i mean some of that stuff is pretty close i don’t know how
0:40:04 close we are to people like sort of chopping off their arms and replacing them with uh
0:40:09 robot arms but it’ll start with people that already lost their arm right yeah that’s true so you take
0:40:15 the guy that you know military whatever and yeah i’ll take a robot arm yes please i mean do you guys
0:40:20 know who hugh herr is i don’t i’m not familiar oh my god this is one of the greatest stories of all time
0:40:28 so uh engineer i assume electrical engineer and mountain climber loses both legs in a mountain climbing
0:40:34 accident and is like yeah no i’m not using the prosthetics that people give you uh these days
0:40:41 are terrible he ends up designing these prosthetics that somehow transfer like your motion and your
0:40:49 signals into like motors and stuff when he wears long pants judging just by his gait you cannot tell
0:40:56 that he has two artificial legs just walks normal there’s a video with a sprinter who has one natural
0:41:06 leg and one cybernetic i guess leg and she can sprint at full speed sprint now this is not the bouncy one
0:41:13 that you see um amputees wear this is a prosthetic leg it’s insane and that video he probably made that
0:41:20 five or six years ago so this is like technology i can’t even imagine where it’s at now so yeah it’s
0:41:26 going to get pretty crazy yeah i’m curious what are you doing personally how are you setting yourself up
0:41:31 for this sort of inevitable future that that we’re moving towards i know you know maybe one of the hard
0:41:36 things you’re working on is developing your own game studio but outside of that like what are you doing to
0:41:41 make sure that let’s say 10 years from now you feel like you’re in a pretty comfortable position assuming
0:41:46 we do hit this potential utopia everybody’s talking about okay well i’m going to give you the real
0:41:50 answer but i’ll give it to you in a nutshell and then you can decide if you want to actually talk about
0:41:55 any of this stuff okay the most important thing you must understand the financial system period end of
0:42:01 story if you don’t understand financial instruments you could get caught off guard so that’s number one
0:42:08 number two is integrating ai as fast as i can into every element of my professional life so i want to
0:42:14 know the tools i want to be using the tools i use ai i’m not kidding 365 days a year including christmas
0:42:19 so i’m sure there are people that integrate it far better than i but i really really try to find all
0:42:25 those areas where it’s real and put it to use i’m not trying to you know be at that bleeding bleeding
0:42:28 edge where it’s like this is actually slowing me down but it’s so cool and i know it’ll be something
0:42:31 one day i’m saying like what’s the thing that’s production ready right now it’s actually going to
0:42:37 speed me up at impact theory no matter what your role is it is mandatory that you find a way for ai
0:42:43 to make some part of your job easier so that’s big for us and then just really paying attention to the
0:42:48 space to make sure that i know where this stuff is going being politically aware i think is more
0:42:53 important now than ever i’ve been politically asleep my entire life until about five years ago and for a
0:42:57 whole host of reasons realized uh-oh the world doesn’t work the way that i thought it did i’m
0:43:02 very good at making money and that’s the only thing i really know how to do and that’s put me in like a
0:43:06 really weird position because all of a sudden i’m looking around going i cannot predict any of the
0:43:10 government’s movements and this is really starting to freak me out and the reason that i focus on that
0:43:17 side of things is ai is going to exacerbate the inequality the inequality is what’s driving the
0:43:22 political division the political division will lead to more violence because it’s already gotten
0:43:29 somewhat violent that’s going to continue do i think that we’ll go into a full hot civil war i hope not
0:43:36 but for reasons that i’m more than happy to go into the math says that we have about a 50 chance of
0:43:43 ending up in civil war only two percent of countries that have found themselves with a debt to gdp ratio
0:43:52 of 130 percent have avoided revolution or civil war we’re at 121 or 122 right now so just to give you an
0:43:57 idea and you’re thinking it would be like the left versus the right kind of civil war that’s how it’ll play
0:44:04 out in america in terms of the teams that people latch on to but the great irony is they are both
0:44:09 fighting for the same thing but because they don’t know what the actual problem is and i’ll just it’s
0:44:16 debt and money printing but because they don’t understand how it could be possible that debt is
0:44:21 the thing that leads to massive inequality that it’s the thing that leads to the rich getting richer and
0:44:25 the poor getting poorer like and i can explain all the mechanisms but it’s just complicated enough that
0:44:29 people tend to glaze over and they just go back into emotional reasoning and they’re like
0:44:34 yeah but that guy he voted for somebody else and i’m not here for it and then they just fight
0:44:41 i hate that guy it’s crazy yeah yeah the thing is like both sides have to find a way to the middle
0:44:45 they have to be able to say i get it we look at this differently so this is when i’m teaching
0:44:52 entrepreneurs the thing that i always say is the magic game is kpis kpis that’s it and kpi for people
0:44:57 that have never heard that before is key performance indicator and so for whatever goal
0:45:01 you’re trying to achieve there’s a key performance indicator as to whether or not you’re moving towards
0:45:08 your goal and right now we allow the government to run with no kpis whatsoever and so we never know
0:45:13 like are we going in a good direction or not you get people like thomas massey that wear the pin that
0:45:19 shows the national debt climbing but people don’t understand it and so whatever they brush it off but at some
0:45:26 point you have to pick a metric or a basket of metrics and say okay i don’t care who the politician
0:45:30 is these are the five metrics that i care about and if we’re moving in the right direction i love that
0:45:35 person if we’re moving in the wrong direction i don’t like that person and just make it that simple
0:45:42 but unfortunately as ai is discovering if you want to mimic a human you have to think emotionally
0:45:46 wow i mean i totally agree too i’ve i’ve gone down that same sort of uh political rabbit hole i don’t
0:45:51 really talk about it publicly i kind of keep my politics to myself smart i talk about it i’ve made
0:45:56 the mistake yeah nathan does talk about it publicly i kind of keep my politics to myself i’ll sort of like
0:46:00 friends and family that are real close but i don’t really talk about it publicly but i do pay very very
0:46:06 very very close attention now and i couldn’t agree more with some of the advice that you just gave i do
0:46:12 have one sort of last question you did mention that you use ai 365 days a year you already mentioned chat
0:46:18 gpt maybe just a quick rundown of some of your other favorite ai tools just to like give the listeners
0:46:26 another like quick takeaway of cool things to go try yeah so we use sonnet 37 for most of our coding um
0:46:31 that’s another big one i don’t interface with that much i do some vibe coding on lovable if
0:46:36 people haven’t tried it it’s great you tend to still terminate at some death loop though where it’s
0:46:40 like every time you fix one thing it just breaks something else and so you’re going back and forth
0:46:46 no no like you just fix it but now you broke it again uh so i can see the promise but really that’s
0:46:50 only good if you’re going to be able to hand it off to somebody that can get it across the finish line
0:46:54 i’m in a fortunate position obviously i have employees so i can be like okay here i built a quick
0:47:00 prototype now actually go make that the real thing so whether that’s interfaces ui ux within the video
0:47:05 game if we want to do a new marketing site or something like that we’ll use all of that stuff
0:47:12 obviously i use mid-journey morning noon and night because my thing is my original passion was writing
0:47:18 so i do a lot of writing for whether it’s the video game or we have a comic book that’s set in the world of
0:47:23 the video game uh so i’ll work on that i’ll use mid-journey to help develop characters scenes
0:47:30 that kind of stuff but those are the ones that i use a lot chat grok lovable sonnet that’s like my loop
0:47:36 but then the team here has i mean a half dozen more things that are usually pretty specific it most of
0:47:42 it’s writing on top of chat gpt in the background yeah that’s my stack very cool yeah i think anybody
0:47:47 who’s tried to quote-unquote vibe code knows that that feeling that you just described of it getting stuck
0:47:51 in the loop we actually had anton the ceo of level on the show by the time this comes out a couple weeks
0:47:56 ago he’ll be super happy to know that you guys are using lovable over there dude it’s cool and if
0:48:03 they keep going like that could really be something very intuitive very easy it’s very enjoyable to use
0:48:08 absolutely well wrapping up here like where should people go check you out you make amazing youtube
0:48:13 videos you’ve got the impact theory podcast what’s the best place to go follow along to your journey
0:48:19 at tom bilyeu on youtube cool well everybody needs to go check out tom bilyeu over on youtube and uh
0:48:22 thank you so much for hanging out and spending the time this has been such a fun conversation thank you
0:48:36 tom this has been awesome thanks for having me guys it was wonderful