Trump’s Tariffs, AI Takeover, Bitcoin, 2yrs Left | with Tom Bilyeu

Every time a new technology comes into place, it ends up creating more jobs, not less, even though it always seems like it's about to put everybody out of work. And then it just opens up all these new avenues and the people with the talents flood ind.

O case, more job go yes, but are the people able to go into those jobs? No.

So this is where I want people to remember. Two percent of people can make that kind of change. Ninety eight percent.

One Trump's tariffs, markets crashing, AI's takeover, and the rise of bitcoin. Now there's one hidden force behind all three that could reshape the economy, and most investors aren't ready for it. And if you get this one thing wrong, you could be holding the wrong assets, working in the wrong job, and.

Watching your wealth disappear.

But if you get it right, you have the chance to be miles ahead of everyone. Today, I am sitting down with Tom Baylou. Tom's built a billion dollar brand, interviewed over six hundred top performers. He's a leading voice in the world through impact theory, his top point zero one percent podcast, billion view media company, and Tom teaches people how to master mindset, strategy, and adaptability, which are

So let's just jump right in with Tom.

So, what would you say some mind shift that you could give to people that might be useful for them today. The ultimate framework is really simple.

You at all times need to know.

This is the big one that people don't understand about themselves, which is that they trust their.

And they shouldn't.

If people just run that all day, every day, they can have all the success that their emotional stability, their drive, and their level of intellect will allow. The big thing I would think people should look at right now if you really want to understand part of the game they're playing, whether this is going to work because of how much of the debt has to be refinanced. You've got to get the we are in a cold war with very high potential for being a kinetic war with China, they can't control.

Your manufacturing, so that has to change. What do you see AI agents doing to disrupt sort of the world and at what speed less than twenty four months away that you're seeing like this kind of blinding speed.

You need to be at the edge of it figuring out how do I make this work. There's going to be many billion dollar companies made by one, two or three people. They get together, they deploy full AI orgs all of a sudden, All of those employees that you would have historically had they just go away?

All right, Tom, And one of your latest videos, you've been talking a lot about tariffs and Trump and you called the tariff planet global financial earthquake. Obviously, we've seen markets crashing, seems like it's heating up with the US and China.

A lot of people are on edge about this. Now.

You've been interviewing a lot of people I know, macro thinkers that I know like ral Paul ray Alio.

Talking about the economic chaos that's happening.

So what do you think investors should be paying attention to or doing right.

Now that there's absolutely no way they know what's happening? And boy do I warn people against being day traders, so I would have people asking one question, what do you do in times of uncertainty? At this point, it's probably too late, to be honest, for them to make any sort of flight to safety, but I certainly could have seen somebody going, Huh, this is going to bring a lot of uncertainty. Markets hate uncertainty, so I'm going to move into T bills or something along those lines

I could be wrong, obviously.

But it's so clear to me what the next call it five to seven years is going to look like that if I saw that segment depressed, then I'd be pretty eager to get in at a discount.

I love AI and bitcoin, and we are going to dive into those two topics for sure, because we're gonna have a big conversation around that and what the next five to seven years looks like for sure. But what I heard you saying was number one for your current position, So you have a famously sold quest nutrition for whatever billion dollar deal that was, and so you're in more

Yeah, And I mean, look, you know this better than I do, but I would be so curious. I've heard a data point that rings so true to me, which is that something and this is for sure true in the crypto world, five percent of the walllet's make ninety five percent of the games. So it's like there are people that they're in those WhatsApp and signal groups. They're betting on culture. They know how much they can influence said culture, and they win and basically everybody else loses.

Yeah.

Yeah, And unfortunately that's what the crypto space has turned into. I mean, meme stocks are jokes, right, and so it's turned into a cryptocus you know at this point literally yes, literally jokes aggressively agree with that. Yeah, sad story. Somebody who was in one of my training programs. I'd consider him a friend.

Now.

He had sort of lost a lot in the crypto space, decided he was going to go all in bitcoin only from here on out, built up a pretty big personal brand, made a lot of money, did pretty good, had about six million dollars in bitcoin. He's young, in his late twenties. The crypto thing kind of called again. He started pumping.

So then he started a meme trading group. Oh god. And it was about three weeks ago.

He messaged me, sent me a text message and he said, Hey, Mark, can we talk? I messed up really bad and I need to talk because I have this famous story of kind of losing everything in two thousand and eight.

And uh.

I got on the phone with him and he's like, man, I chased the memes all the way to the bottom and I lost all my money six millions US and not only that, but everybody that was paying him to be in that meat trading group as well.

So anyway, I.

Want to dive deeper into tariff. So I do want to get into bitcoin AI. We're gonna have a lot of fun with that. But if we talk about tariffs, like I said, you've been all over it. It's the talk of the talk of the town, if you will, all over the news. But you talked about like Trump's tariff strategy. Now a lot of people actually let me start with this. You said that, I think on your intro you said that nobody has any idea what's going on or what's going to happen.

Yeah, I don't think anybody can accurately predict how this is going to play out.

People f thess and that's good.

So certainly, in a complex system, the lava unintended consequences is going to kick in. And so you start trying to play with a couple pieces of a complex system, and we have multiple systems together, certainly the unintended consequences will win. But the narrative seems to be with mainstream media that Trump and his team are a bunch of buffoons and have no idea what they're doing.

Yeah, yeah, I mean listen, at the end of this half the world's going to look like morons and the other half is going through have been right to some degree, but I don't think anybody right now should have the degree of confidence that I see people putting forward. Trump really is the right way to think of him is he is the CEO of America and he's he's going for Mount Rushmore, whether it's going to work or not.

That's it. That's all I'm going for.

So yeah, I think that this system is so complicated. They're running what I call the shoot me in the ear bro strategy, where it's like laying that Oh my god. So when Trump first got shot in the ear, somebody who I know and respect said he probably just faked it and he was just doing it for attention, and I was like, hold on, you actually think that. He said to somebody, go ahead, shoot this off my head.

Sure, graize my ear.

That's so dangerous, there's no way. Yeah, this feels like that. It's so high risk what he's doing. If he pulls it off and this ends well, and we completely reorganize the world order in America's favor, and we now get to take advantage of being the world's either first or second largest economy, depending on who you speak to, and we get all that benefit resounding to the US. We get out of all of the problems that we have with China controlling all of our manufacturing.

That is crazy.

We are in a cold war with very high potential for being a kinetic war with China. They can't control your manufacturing, so that has to change. But the way that he's going about it with the just hyper aggressive, ultra fast.

Is shoot me in the ear.

And so if nick him and he just bleeds a little and is like the world's trying to kill me, and now everybody rallies around him. Amazing, but an inch in either Russian and he's dead.

Yeah.

So this is when I really go prognostication mode. I'm like, it starts working, but not in time for the midterms. He loses the midterms, it flips, they no longer control the House, he becomes lame duck, and Republicans.

Are out in four years.

That's like if I were gonna, say fifty one forty nine, Because again, I really do feel like I'm guessing it's just such a complicated system that would.

Be I would give the edge to that.

It just won't work in time, even if ultimately it would have one thing that I've seen. So the last time we had this big of a drawdown in the markets was in twenty twenty two October twenty twenty two, when Biden was president, and nobody was saying it was all Biden's fault. Granted he didn't go throw a grenade to your point or the illustration that he gave. But today this morning in the gym, I saw in the news, right, it's just like Trump Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and it's all his fault.

Yeah, and a lot of it is heated.

Did move by executive order, so a lot of it is sort of on him. But if they're going to assign this whole crash to him, if he pulls it off, they're gonna forgive him all the credit for it, and they won't.

So brace that and they won't.

But I want to go back you said that the risk is so high. I want to put a pin in that and come back to that. But just going back to we do have no idea of the future. Tomorrow is not guaranteed for any of us. Certainly, it's a complex system. But I want to talk about the competency of the people. So I mean, I saw I've seen many interviews of Howard Lutnik. I don't know if

And I see a lot.

Of people on Twitter and YouTube, people that I respect, people that I know, and people that I align with their worldview, and they're just telling, Oh, this guy's making all these mistakes. He didn't understand this. He didn't understand that. It's like, yeah, you're not smarter than Scott Piscent. So Scott Pisent's pedigree, right, he worked for the goat the greatest of all time, Druck and Miller, the second greatest of all time Soros.

But specifically what he did.

Working for those guys, right, specifically, what they did was take down countries and manipulate currencies.

That's what they did, dude.

Take down the Bank of England. The Bank of England, not not a rando like small country that's hyperinflating their currency.

The Bank of England. It's pretty crazy, the Bank of England. So basically he was hired to do the opposite of that. So understanding what makes the bank of England vulnerable? What makes other they've taken down many other country since the Bank of England, what makes those countries vulnerable being over leveraged to being off sides? And now he's been hired, as he said on Tucker, like to sell dollars around the world. Right, So he understand that part. So what

Mean, you took down bank in England.

But China is a pretty big thing game, if we would call it that, right, So understanding what makes the US dangerous and how can we derist the US? But then specifically, what are China's leverage points? And and you know, he said on Tucker a couple of times that he sees China inter recession depression. Maybe we can box them in. We have no idea, But to say that he doesn't know what he's doing would be I think a mistake.

Aggressively aggressive.

Yeah, I mean, listen, I think that if you were going to have anybody run the playbook that they're running, you've got some of the greatest capital allocators on planet Earth who have made unimaginable amounts of money. By saying I understand how global economics works, and I'm going to bet hugely that I'm accurate. And they've won and so

Listen, take Ray Dalio.

I think you and I may see him a little bit differently, but nonetheless, Ray has made just unimaginable amounts of money doing this game. Has this crazy historical perspective, and he's very much in my camp, which is, you have to do something because of what's going on with China, you have to do something because of the debt, Like these things cannot stand. So given that, given that, in action is not an option, right, and that's what I

Shoot the patient in the head, it could work.

But we'll see.

And to be very specific, the big thing I would think people should look at right now if you really want to understand part of the game they're playing, whether this is going to work because of how much of the debt has to be refinanced. You've got to get the yield on the tenure treasury down, and they're doing it now. The question is to like the method by which they're doing it. That's a different question. But they're already driving it down.

They could keep loading the front end like Janet Yellen did. And just for comparison, Janet Yellen was a academic, a Ckensian academic, an mmtre again back to descent, an academic like this MMT freaks me right, So she's an MMT academic. Percent literally ran the playbook for the two greatest investors of all time. And you said we're successful. Stanley DRUGA Miller is the goat because thirty years without a loss,

Yeah, China's making very different noises with their face, so we'll see.

How it plays out.

But yeah, I mean there, look, how much of this is hear say, how much of it's real? I have not seen coming from China this directly, but I've heard about it indirectly that they're prepared to.

Go all the way.

Yeah, where it's like, okay, you guys don't want to play ball. Not only are we going to do retaliatory strikes with tariffs, but we're now going to openly sell your IP again. I don't know that's true. I want to be very clear. I am unfortunately right now spreading rumors. But that is certainly a weapon that they have in their toolkit that a lot of other countries don't. The thing that they've gotten extremely good at. And this is not derogatory. They've gotten very good at going cool. That's

You can't let those play out negatively.

And this is exactly how things escalate. This is how you go from a cold war to something that threatens to be kinetic really fast, because if.

They do that with our IP we have to get aggressive.

Yeah.

So I mean there's there's Taiwan on the table, you know, potentially taking Taiwan. There's dumping US treasuries, which is another option would force the QUI. So there's a lot of things that China could do. But I did see today also that Trump said that I think by the tenth that he's going to increase their tariff's another fifty percent, yep, Like, so yeah.

It could escalate, but that's retaliation for the retaliation, right, So we'll see how that all plays out. But China is not being conciliatory at all, and so this is the part that worries me. So you have the two players on the board that matter. You have the US and China that are being escalatory with each other, and now they're going to be fighting for allies. And so you hear Elon making noises about, hey, we should basically have free trade with Europe. We should be able to

But we'll see, yeah, lines will be drawn.

I think.

I think that's looking only at one component of the board. If you look at other components of the board. So it's not just the tariffs, right, it's making it making America easier to invest in, so strengthening the dollar and the treasury asset number one. If China, if Besson thinks that China's boxed in, potentially in the yuan is going to have to be debased in order to keep up with this, China is less investible and a lot of

But I think.

History books are going to be talked about this period of time, that is for sure.

So we get the benefit of living through that.

Is it the benefit I'd really like to learn from it, that is for sure. So moving forward I will be armed with a lot more information. But yeah, there is a supposed Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times, and we live in interesting times, and humans don't like change in the volatility, there's certainly opportunity, but it will also the average person if it goes south. The average person just gets cloppered.

Well, not the fifty percent of people who own nothing.

Now, it'll be worse for them for sure, because they have no protective mechanism. So the problem is when you were saying that we'd have to turn to QE, the good news is that would make the debt manageable. So you, in my words, you steal from all Americans, which just absolutely decimates the poor and working class. But you steal from everybody by inflating the money supply, and now that makes the debt worth far less and it becomes far easier to pay off if you can get some economic growth.

Summer of twenty twenty four, we had two records set.

Number one record was more Americans busy in Europe in the summer than on record, But we also had more Americans going to food banks on record at the same time. And so that's sort of that divide if you will, And unfortunately to your point, as the debasement continues, then your wages buy less and less than more people go to the food bank.

Yeah, and I imagine your audience completely understands that. The problem is that the average American doesn't. Yeah, so they just do not understand how money actually works. They don't understand the dangers of debt, they don't understand how it could possibly be bad that the government is giving them money, and so we end up in this death spiral where they can tell something's wrong, they can tell they're getting screwed,

I had a thousand employees.

That grew up like hard hard heart, and when COVID lockdowns happened, I thought, they're all going to lose their jobs and they're just going to be toast. So I started making financial content to help them out and to hope that I could give them some understanding of how they're going to weather this storm. And as I started, because I've always been good at making money, but not investing money, and so I wanted to learn about investing

Yeah, I want to we're gonna talk about that, We're gonna talk about AI, We're gonna talk about bitcoin, which I consider the cheat code today. But I want to go back to kind of what you just talked about there, and for a minute, I want to kind of go back. You talked about scrounging and your couch cushions, so having a billion dollar company and so what I see so kind of going back to this sort of trade war bringing back jobs, the tale of two Americans, if you will.

Away out of it.

Like technology takes low level tests, so we can work on higher value tasks.

But it's more about moving from.

The industrial age to the information age. So, right, we had those giant manufacturing facilities and everybody smart and dumb worked equally on the assembly lines with this massive middle class. But in the information age, now a person with a laptop and AI.

Can create a billion dollar business.

I mean, we'll see that, right, And so then it's like almost more like a meritocracy. So we have all these people who were trained from an industrial school system with an industrial mindset, but now they find themselves in this information age, but they're not equipped with the mindset or the tools in order to succeed in that world.

We'll get you in the private meetup.

And I hope to see you in Las Vegas generational poverty is a mindset problem. It's not a money problem. I expect that to be very inflammatory. It is every time I say it, but nonetheless, having seen it up close, you realize, wait a second, this guy is smarter than me, and he's going nowhere fast. So good hardware, bad software. The really bad news is, while it is very possible for somebody to change their mindset as an adult, I

One.

I want you to be the best person you can be that benefits me. But I want you to stay here not because you feel forced. I want you to stay here because you know I care more about your future than your own mother. So started what I called Quest University, and literally I taught them anything, to the point that we had three of the people that the sort of informal students that came through that started competitive nutrition companies. So I was like, I will tell you anything, and.

Three students started competing company out of how many oh god, thousands, no, not on hundreds, but we hundreds, hundreds for sure.

And in all of that, there was also two students that were in it, and one of them punched another one in the face because he said, you've changed, You've started reading, And I was just like, wow, So I'm up against like really stupid cultural programming and the people that actually did something, the two percent have some obviously not all, but some have gone on to start companies that are still running today and I'll get text from them and updates. I'm just like, this is so gratifying.

What do you mean spiritual entertainment?

I have a two hour declining arc of influence on people, and I can make them feel like anything as possible, and they.

Feel very good, very capable.

But then they have to come back for more, come back for more, come back for more. Yeh, Because they're not actually trying to gain a set of skills that allow them to go execute in the world, in that hyper uncertain world that we were talking about a few minutes ago. That's not what they're looking for. What they're looking for is the narcotic like feeling that they could do that if they wanted to, and that feels so good that they just never do anything with right, And

Yes, I would agree with that. Right, we have to have purpose, we have to have meaning, we have to have something to do. But does it have to be dumb labor or can it be smarter labor? So for example, you could talk about the fine feminine feminism movement.

And how much how many jobs is taken from men?

I was just recently thinking about my own company and the amount of people we employ, and no, how the majority of them are.

Women, even in my own company, right, and.

So like how many men are sort of put out of.

The workforce based off of that?

And those are physical jobs, I mean, you know, not hard labor jobs, but physical office jobs, right, white collar jobs, I guess you would say. But you know, when the industrial revolution came, you had a machine that could do the work of five thousand field workers.

But those field workers.

Eventually went on to do higher level things like science and medicine and things like that. In this vision of Trump re onshoring manufacturing, Latinick says, yeah, it's gonna be automated, so someone's going to have to build the facilities. So there's hard you know, Blue labor, blue collar labor there. But someone's also have to build the robotics program the machines,

You're intelligence is the spectrum and there will always be people that are going to be ill suited to an information technology only world. Now, AI is a meteorite screaming towards Earth. So the things I'm saying right now, I'm just ignoring that meteorite for now.

It is going to come back yet, I have no doubt.

Is one of my favorite topics.

But nonetheless, you really have to bifurcate your conversation into what do we do right now today versus then how do we manage that transition period when it happens. And I've written extensively in the realm of fiction on this idea, but you have to deal with people that certainly do not have the intellectual horsepower to do things other than move electrons.

You got to do something.

So what that answer is, Manufacturing certainly is one Obviously a lot of that's going to go to robotics. Now, if you look backwards, and this is always a good test when you look backwards, every time a new technology comes in the place, it ends up creating more jobs, not less, even though it always seems like it's about to put everybody out of work, and then it just opens up all these new avenues and the people with

Will if people can level their skills, that's the problem.

Well that's a conundrum for you, O.

Case more go Yes, but are the people able to go into those jobs?

No?

So this is where I want people to remember. Two percent of people can make that kind of change. Ninety eight percent won't. Evolution of culture or otherwise never cares about any given generation. So evolution does not care if we're about to introduce a utopia. But some people just can't cross that threshold because they completely emotionally derail because they can see I am getting left behind.

I am a trucker. I'm not going to learn to code. I don't want to work in a robotics factory like that person. But those were things they refuse to do. I don't want to learn how to code. I refuse to work robotics.

But that's the fact that that's what you're up against. Anything else is an abstraction. So humans are such that if they've spent, if they're a forty five year old, they are going to many, many, many of them. It will never be one hundred percent, thank god, but many, many, the overwhelming majority will not be willing to make that transition. It will be too hard in them, and so they will check out.

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That'll be one avenue.

Depending on what age they are, it may also manifest as active rebellion.

Yeah.

When I was a kid, I didn't want to eat my vegetables, and my dad would tell my mom, if he's hungry enough, he'll eat. And I think about, like, you know the sign in the state parks don't feed the animals because the animals become dependent. But humans aren't animals, right, So like, if we're hungry enough, we're going to go dig a hole, we're gonna go we'll go work, I

Right, depends on how disruptive this moment's going to be. I think the reason that so many people they reach into their brain and say, how do we solve this problem? How do we re educate people all of that and they understand the rate of change. Most people do not understand the rate of change of AI. So think about this. If Sam Altman is right and it's three hundred percent year over a year, okay, first of all, that's more than exponential growth.

So that's like it.

In fact, if you want to make it exponential, it's exponential growth every five point nine months, So that is almost a percentage improvement every day, and we're seeing it.

Yeah, it's crazy.

So the rate of change is going to hit people like a sledgehammer. Like even if they're able to adapt to wave one, Wave two, those are going to be like done in six months. So what do you do when it's wave three, four five and they're like, I can't keep up. I don't want to keep up anymore. This is too confusing. People will get paralyzed by the

To look like.

This is what everybody calls the technological event horizon or the singularity. So you're at a point where you can no longer predict the future, not even a future that's six months away. So at that point, I'm telling you there will be massive distress. And when humans are scared, they act crazy. So people are like, I can't have a populace that's both scared and hungry. So it's a dark view of what's going to happen. But I think

I mean this literally.

Robots eat sunshine, and so the way that they stay energized is we're going to be able to capture the energy from the sun, which is absolutely plentiful, far more plentiful than we need to run even billions of robots to feed all the humans, all of it, all the manufacturing you could ever want to do. It's falling on the earth. I forget how long a single hour. If you could capture one hundred percent of the sunlight that is emitted from the sun, how long it would run

We can't solve them.

Doesn't mean there isn't one, because there are certain barriers. Like right now, it's can we make the chips fast enough? Okay, once we're able to make the chips fast enough, can we get the energy fast enough. If we can get the energy fast enough, can we get the transformers fast enough? And so we'll keep pushing the problem down. But you're gonna hit these bottlenecks. But nobody looks at it and says,

They're like, hold on, let.

Me finish this, otherwise it won't make sense. So you've got Einstein's two point four x smarter than that, and he's like thinking his way to fundamental insights in physics that bring about nuclear energy, nuclear bombs, GPS, like all the things that have come of the atomic age. That's two point four x smarter than a moron. People are saying that AI isn't going to be ten times smarter or a thousand times smarter or one hundred thousand times

So I don't even need people.

To buy into like the crazy far fetched a million, a billion times smarter, just ten x would be unrelatable. It would be a world no one that's alive today would recognize, And that what's that going to happen? In twenty years. You're really going to make me push it out thirty years. But like I plan to still be alive. This is not some three hundred years from now problem.

No, it's a now problem. I've been coaching my team today. We had our calls and I said what I've been harping on for the last couple of weeks is like, guys, look, I need you all to be grasping onto these tools right now because you're either gonna use them, you're gonna get replaced by them, and our company will get replaced if we don't use these right now. I want to come back to that. We're going to dig into the aipiece. I just want to finish this last piece though. So

I believe right here that's still sort the two percent that are actually going to do something with you.

Yes, So what would you say some mind shift or tools that you could give to people that might be useful for them today. Maybe someone who already has a little bit high agency that's ready to sort of make that jump.

Do you have some frameworks for blue prosis?

One hundred percent mindset is extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily simple, but people don't do it because of a small handful of reasons. Okay, uh, the ultimate framework is really simple. You at all times need to know what end state you are seeking. What's your goal? If you don't have your goal, literally stop, nothing matters. You need to be able to say your goal and thirty five words or less. It needs to contain a what, by when, and how much?

Okay in what way?

Like?

How will you define it? And you're going to feed like a million people at whatever it is?

If you've got that goal, now cool goals make so Now there's going to be a string of things you're going to have to do successfully in order to achieve that. But you have to overcome what I call the chaos machine. The chaos machine is life. The second lot of thermodynamics is that in a closed system, everything moves towards disorder. So if you want to bring order to a closed system. You have to pour energy in so I mean it's

Intellect will allow. That's a really good walkthrough on that mental model. Well, thank you.

Starting with the end in mind, living with intentionality right on everything. It's something that I come across quite a bit somewhere. I've spent a lot of my time thinking about lady. I have some high end coaching programs and we coach some very successful people, and I find that they're not. They come to me with basic, very vague questions like should I buy bitcoin? Should I sell this? Asset, Should I sell my business? Should I whatever? Right?

And they're never able to come to any type of decisions.

And I found after years of doing this, it's because none of them are clear on where they're trying to go. They don't know what problem they're trying to solve specifically, So then almost no path looks correct. It's the Alice in Wonderland, right, like.

Which passion I go? I don't where you're trying to go? I don't know.

Well, then any path will do. What would you say, because you've spent a lot of time thinking about this, what would you say if you were to go go down, go downtown and stop one hundred people, how many of them could articulate in thirty five words or less their specific goal?

Zero zero.

I have people in my program that have listened to my classes. They come before me for the live part and I'm like, cool, what's your goal?

Yeah?

They think they know. That's the terrifying part. So this is and listen, everything I teach, I teach because I made all of these mistakes. I'm constantly catching myself falling into the same traps. So this is not me like, see, I get it, and you guys don't this means just like I get what it's what it's like to be a human, but we are all trapped inside of a brain that uses emotions to make us act. And people think they're making decisions based on logic, but they're not.

The next question is I want to shift into AI. But this piece is actually a segue that I think

Yeah, that is it.

Well, so right now I'll say I'm kind of glad because we're in this narrow window that I expect to be very brief where we all still matter in the process. Right, So my thing is that I so for people that don't know anything about me or know my story. I got into business because I went to film school. I wanted to make movies and I just could not figure out how to break into the industry. Finally, write a script gets turned into a film.

It was a horrible experience. I was completely devastated.

I had met these two very successful entrepreneurs and they said, listen, man, you're coming too the world with your handout, and if you want to control the art, you have to control the resources, so you should get into business.

And get rich.

And I was like, yeah, that's a brilliant idea, I thought, I would take eighteen months took fifteen years. But it worked, and along the way I realized all the things that we're talking about here. Skills have utility, that you can control your own life. But it was a very grueling process of realizing all of the things that I try to teach people, but everybody ends up getting locked in that.

I'm lost, and.

I don't realize I'm lost, and that's the problem. So take taste. This is the biggest thing with AI. If you don't realize that you're asking AI to do something that you don't have any taste in, you're in trouble. So right now, when AI hands me back an answer on like a screenplay that I'm working on, I'll be like, that doesn't make sense, that's cheesy, that's not working. And then the AI is going to say, as it's trained to do, you're right now, what if I'm not right?

It just auto.

Populates from right and so now it speeds you up whatever two, three, five, ten X, and it will obviously just keep going, keep going and get better. But right now it's a pretty magical window where if you have built a set of skills, the AI will extend your capabilities. I think of it like an exoskeleton. If you can now bend over and pick up a much heavier weight than you could before. But if you're already strong, then it's amplifying a really good base.

What I've found is I've been an entrepreneur investor my career since I was eighteen. I started buying homes in south central LA fix and flipping them, and I've built dozens of businesses and exits and all these things and this wide range of things, and I'm this massive generalist. I'm the jack of all trades, master of none. And for the first time that's to my benefit because AI

And they're going to fall further and further behind.

And so it sort of exacerbates that. You did an interview with Mark Andrissen and that was really good and warned about you know, this AI information war things like that. You talked about, you know, the impact on jobs, which we're sort of talking about. You said, there's one job AI can't do. So is that the hope for some people what AI can't do?

That anything that we think AI can't do right now will be short lived. I think ultimately, once AI is truly agentic and embodied and smarter than any human alive, there just isn't going to be anything that AI can't do. Your only thing is it's not human. And some people are going to care deeply about that. I don't think that will be only benefit. I think that there will be violence what I call from New Puritans who really eschew certainly the technological augmentation of a human. They're gonna

I saw people are paying attention. Yep.

So first the dire wolf, which hasn't been seen in ten thousand years. Next up they're doing a wooly mammoth and like actually bring them back, not like simulations like you can go pet a dire wolf. So humans will eventually start modifying our own DNA, and people.

Are going to have a problem with that.

Some people have a problem with that are already augmenting themselves with technology. If you've ever seen anybody with a cochlear implant, you've now got the people from Neulink that can play video games with their minds, and the guys that play it with their minds are saying, you're gonna have to create a league for us because we're so much better than people that actually have to use a mouse and keyboarder controller. That's a real thing, yeah, right now, this very minute.

Wow, I mean it is.

The exoskeleton, right, So we have seen robotics helping people that are paralyzed things like that, and these are just to your point, augmented technologies that sort of help us do that. I saw today it was all over Twitter. Was the Shopify ceo had an internal memo leaked.

I don't know if you saw that. I didn't know.

So there was an internal memo leaked from the Shopify CEO, and it mandated that AI usage be a fundamental expectation for all employees. So you won't get a job at shop Fight if you're not proficient in it. But but even more than that, integrating AI proficiency into performance reviews and encouraging a exploration in project prototyping. So now getting

For sure.

Now is that getting backlash? Well, what happened is it got leaked and so it was like going all over Twitter, and so the CEO came out and said, hey, here it is Boom and just like put.

It out there like that seems so self evident. And you've you said at the beginning, like you're either going to use it or you're going to get replaced by somebody.

Who you mean, That's what I'm telling my internal team one hundred percent. Everybody should be.

It's crazy, right, Like if you're not saying that.

You're going to get blindsided. You're going to get blindsided.

And we have this you said, we have this period of time you said where we still matter. I was thinking something different the saying is that the future is not evenly distributed. And so I tell my team we have about a year before everybody catches up, and so if we go super hard right now, we have about a year to really gap people. And I think that's going to be super important.

Man, We're having those same conversations inside Impact Theory four.

Sure, yeah, now AI is amazing. But what I've been really thinking about and starting to where I brought a person on just to start buildings out as AI agents. And you mentioned that before, so you think about like AI agents, which there was a book that I read probably fifteen years ago and it was maybe yeah about that. It was called A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink and it talks about how we have a creative side

It opened up the world.

So now I can go on to upwork or Fiver and I can hire a coder or a program or a coder or whatever. And now they're in Pakistan or in they're in India or wherever they are. And so also to commoditized these technical workers. And so he said that the new world is going to be driven by the creative thinker, so not the technical worker. More like a conductor of an orchestra. I don't know how to play the instruments better than any of view, but I can make you make beautiful music together.

Right.

And so you have all these countries basically coming out of poverty with bop skills, right, And so they're commoditized technical workers. And whether that be research assistance, whether that be pair of legals doing briefs, or coders or accountants or whatever it is. And so if I were hire somebody on Fiver to go do SEO for me, that's an autonomous agent. But now we can just program AI to do that. And this is gaining speed at a rapid, rapid, rapid rate.

Curious what your thoughts are on that?

My well, what do you see AI agents doing to disrupt sort of the world and at what speed?

Before I give my thoughts.

The speed will be extremely rapid. So by twenty twenty seven, you'll have agents, you'll have AI basically helping to write AI improvements, running a lot of the experimentations, and so you'll have decades of advancements in a week. And that's the very shrewd minds in the space. The guys that like have been making these predictions that have been coming true are the ones saying that that's not me making that number up.

So it's twenty.

Twenty five already, we're rapidly approaching the middle of twenty twenty five, So this is less than twenty four months away that you're seeing like this kind kind of blinding speed what they call the intelligence explosion. So that's coming very fast. That will create a work environment for sure that nobody can conceive of. You are at that point a fish like twenty twenty eight is beyond the technological event horizon. Nobody knows what's going to what twenty twenty

I sort of sit at a utopian dream. Yeah, I mean sort of.

So the there were two books written about the future that were hyper prescient. One has already come true, one may be about to come true. Unless nineteen eighty four, the surveillance state as terrifying as advertised, then you've got a brave new world, which was a world of plenty where everybody does drugs to numb themselves. And in a world where you don't have to work for anything, finding meaning and purpose is not going to be easy.

Yeah, if you think about like the base law of economics is based off of scace, and so when you think about work and labor and knowledge, it's also built on scarcity. So an attorney is able to charge a premium because they have a scarcity of knowledge that they've been able to acquire. Or a doctor has scarcity of knowledgey've been oun to acquire. But when knowledge no longer

He put it online and it was basically the org chart.

And then all the officers of the company had agent shadows, and the shadows would the agent shadows would just shadow all their calls or meetings, all these things, and the CEO could call on a phone call the agent shadow and discuss all the things that's been going on and now they've got each of the officers agent shadows communicating between themselves.

That's awesome.

I mean just like that, right, and we're just in a couple months into this. But when you think about like an AI agent, like go out and find the top five business models and just instantly duplicate them for me, and go hire the other agents that you need and the other agents that you need, and go build out this agent workforce to go duplicate this and so instantly disrupt every online company.

I hear about MCP.

Yeah, the MPC servers, Oh my god, like the So the protocol that they're going to be using that will let these AIS talk to each other, is that this is where it's going to get crazy because right now agents will dead end pretty quickly. But with the MCP protocol, they're going to be able to go in. AI will be able to talk to all other AI do their things.

I mean it literally.

Anything that deploys the standard and Anthropic and Open AI have already agreed to it. So that's two of the big boys. I'd be surprised that more people don't. This is like the TCPIP moment for AI, where now it's just like you can just hyperlink and it all connects.

That's gonna be cool. Yeah.

So this kind of takes me to the next subject that I want to jump into is bitcoin. So when I think about bitcoin. I gave a talk at I gave the closing keynote at the Bitcoin Conference in Abu Dhabi a few months ago, and I talked about sort of this bitcoin forecast twenty thirty, twenty forty, twenty fifty, and talked about how we have these fifty EU repeating tech cycles and if you put bitcoin into that, it

You'd save it.

So you spend the bad money the post sixty five, you saved.

The pre right.

So you wouldn't want to use big coined to buy a cup of coffee when I can just spend Fiat to do that. So then you start thinking, well, how does bitcoin evolve from that store value to a medium exchange. Well, we would want to use it only for things that it could only be used for, and so then you start thinking, Okay, what are the things that it could do that FIAT can't, Like micro transactions, high frequency transactions, things like that, and you start to think about AI agents.

And so we're.

Already seeing there was an AI agent that was programmed to go build a business, find names, business plans, find the domain names and went and bought a domain name using bitcoin over the Lightning network. So already seeing truth terminal or a different one. I'm not sure which one. I did that on truth terminals correct, So it's already And so it seems like with the AI agents they're going to need some form of payment to hire each other. Pay them out the cost of compute plus energy not to.

Derail though, So on bitcoin, I am so nonplussed by the argument that this has to be a medium of exchange. So tell me if you think I'm just naive and I'm missing something. But to me, the thing that would cause bitcoin to fail is to have a currency that can't be inflated. So if there was a currency that couldn't be inflated, I wouldn't even think twice about bitcoins.

Is about I put my money in whatever that thing is bitcoin? Is that?

So right now, in a world where your money is being inflated, you have to have somewhere to go where your money can't be inflated. So now the only catch up with bitcoin me is that people love its volatility.

I hate it.

I want it to just be a static place I can put my money and be like, cool, this is going to be worth the same inten.

Courl that it is. That's gold, you got that gold also works.

Yeah, but in a world where it becomes more and more virtual, I don't under like when I think about a kid who grows up and they were let's say nine, two years ago. For them, bitcoin just exists. It's just a thing. People take it seriously. It's an option, Like they don't have any sense of like, oh it was born and there was a time where people thought it was weird. They're just like, oh, yeah, bitcoin. It's like that my daughter thought everything was a.

Touch screen touch every computer, kay, of course.

So I think my thesis anyway with bitcoin people can think what they will is that the world is going to be more virtual tomorrow than it is today. And one of the most important things to virtualize is money. Certainly don't want it to be a CBDC stable coin helps a lot, but that's still, at least as imagine right now, going to be backed by a fiat currency. So that doesn't solve my problem of inflation. So having a inflation resistant thing that I can self custody.

Solves that problem.

So I've obviously heard people now starting to talk about this has failed because it's not a medium of exchange.

That just doesn't even make my radar.

Gold can be, but it can't like I hold gold, gold can't be in the digital age. And ye, gold requires centralization to get the velocity, which is why it failed.

So why don't people complain about that because they're saying it's used in like electronics.

Yeah, no, one's arguing that with gold. But back to the point. So if you think about bitcoin and the attributes and so in the monetary evolution, you go from a collectible it's a cool rock, feather, seashell baseball card. But some collectibles most don't, but some collectibles become a

And so governments are going to try and do two things.

Number one, continue to inflate away the currency and number two, continue to take more power.

And more freedom away.

That's that's the role of the state of the government.

And so.

In North Korea, you're not allowed to have money. Let me give you another example. So bitcoin has lots of attributes.

Permissionless.

There's over a billion adults in the world right now today who are not allowed to use the financial global financial system because they don't have permission to join. A billion adults. There's eight billion people. I'm talking a billion adults, so they don't have permission to join. So think about the mind share that the world has lost. If we brought a billion adults into the world to bring more solutions and solve more problems and more value.

But they're out.

They left the war torn country. They don't have proper documentation. They are a fifteen year old kid that happened to be born in the wrong country.

They're out, so think about that.

They don't have permission in the current system of medium exchange currency. It's also censorship resistant. It's also immutable. So for example, immutable, why is that important? Well, in India in twenty sixteen, they canceled all the big bills and you had a month to bring them all in and claim them and show all the paperwork of how you earn the bills or you lost them. But India is a high cash country, so a lot of people had this money saved and they lost it all.

It wasn't immutable.

Why censorship resistant. The lady that cuts my hair is from Afghanistan. She was there when she was a girl. When the Biden administration pulled out in twenty twenty two, the disaster, the Taliban took it over. She's like, Mark, I just feel so bad. I know these ladies back in Afghanistan, they need so much help. I'd love to send them money if there was away, but I can't because the Taliban took over the bank. So it's censorship resistant.

Into, we will probably need I.

Mean, people today need a censorship resistant way to transmit value. And so the question that you would ask yourself is do you think governments print more money or less money in the future, and do you think they become more authoritarian and less authoritarian in the future.

Now, you mentioned.

Earlier, you know what AI is doing in the rise of or the divide between the rich and the poor and potentially leading to some sort of mass civil unrest. I know Verydally is super big on that topic. So in that if that were to happen and we got more civil unrest, then what do governments do. Do they take more power, become more authoritarian? And if so, do we need a way to transact outside of the state. Yap all strikes me as a very good idea.

Now I'm a much bigger believer in the wrench attack, I think than a lot of people. If the government wants your bitcoin, they're going to get your bitcoin.

They won't And here's why. So have you read the book Sovereign Individual? I have read like the first two chapters. It as a no, and you gave up on it. I I gave up.

It was interesting, but other things, Yeah, it took its place and I never went back to it.

So if you think about like the state, the a state.

The country, the government has a monopoly on violence obviously, right, But like all things, there's trade offs and there's returns. Right. So like in nineteen thirty three, when the government sees the gold, it was very easy for them to seize the gold because all the goal was in the bank, right, So all the gold went in the bank. They gave you an IOU claim for the gold, so we could speed up the velocity of money while they held the gold.

So it was very easy.

For them to put a bank holiday in place. Banks were closed for a week. When they opened the banks back up, you were no longer able to get your gold. Now, if they had to ride out in nineteen thirties across the plane to ranchers and farmers with guns. They had to go house to house to house to house to house and where's your gold, go through where's your treasure map, and they had to go dig it up.

Would that have been realistic?

The return on violence would have been way too low. Every one of those ranchers with guns would have fought back the chance of them finding one or two gold coins.

The return on violence would be too low to do that. But because it was in the bank, it was very easy to do well.

Trying to go door to door to door and try to recover people's hardware, wallets, and hang people by their toe and tickle them until they give up their private key, the return of violence is just way too low. It's just impractical for them ever to try to achieve something like that.

To cast a vote that the government won't do it is very different than to say that they can't do it. So my argument is simply anybody that's taken a lot of solace in that, I would say, don't if for whatever reason your the one that they target and come after they will get your bitcoin.

So there's a couple things about that.

So Number one they could say, hey, we'll kill you on site if you don't turn it in.

Yep.

So they did make gold illegal, right, so not only do we take your gold, if we catch you with gold, it's illegal, So they could certainly do that. I would say with that a couple of things, Like number one, when the government makes things illegal, they typically become.

Bigger and more useful.

So like the war on drugs since the seventies, drugs are a bigger problem today now. When the government tells you not to do drugs, it doesn't make you want to do drugs. But when they tell you don't have a right to story your wealth in a way we can't steal and confiscate from you, this sort of makes you want to.

Just like every time they talk about imposing.

New gun laws, what happens with gun sales. So number one, you have human psychology and motivation. Number two, with drugs, drugs have to be their physical items that have to be grown and cultivated and packaged and shipped and smuggled and distributed. Whereas bitcoin is completely the digital peer to peer and can't be traced.

Or tracked, So how do they stop that. They can't even keep drugs out of a prison. So I think it's just impractical.

I think technolo happens is technology moves faster than the state. So you have three D gun schematics, Well they can make those illegal. Well now they're on the bitcoin blockchain and there's some supersistent for all of humanity. How does the government do that? So when they try to, I think what happens when the government tries to move on technologies that are moving and advancing faster than they are, it makes the state look irrelevant and incompetent. But you've

But what about all these other cryptocurrency?

He says, how many chairs do you have? You're just sitting in one chair? Right?

Yes? The meme.

Yeah, but when you think about it like that as digital energy, and then you think about like storing that energy for a long period of time, especially in today's day and age, or going into this AI age. There was this sort of deep Seek moment that was April twenty seventh? Was it where all of a sudden Deep Seek was dropped into the world and it sort of caused Nvidia to crash And it sort of made the whole world kind of step back and go, are we

Where as it's being.

Effectively repriced by the wild inflation of the dollar, combined with the growing awareness and demand for bitcoin, you get this incredible run up for people that are able to withstand the temporary volatility. So I look at it in that perspective. I ultimately want bitcoin to become an incredibly boring asset. I want it to be a place where I can put my money and I know that the amount of output I got from a unit of my time in the.

Past holds that value.

Because then, and this is a big part of my thesis right now, the reason that the average American doesn't invest in the stock market, and if they do, they certainly don't invest very much, is because they don't understand it. It's just complicated enough that they're never going to understand it. And so I think a government has a moral obligation to give their citizens an opportunity to just save their money in a way where it's not going to go

Now.

People that are fiscally responsible, they're going to save their money.

It's not going to be eaten by inflation. There's going to be a benefit for them to do that. So that's the thesis the lens through which I look at bitcoin. Now, whether it ends up gobbling up more and more of these assets, I don't see how it couldn't. For somebody like me, who might otherwise consider rolling the dice on a piece of art, I would much rather be in certainly my future vision of bitcoin, where it becomes far

You have to Yeah, you've interviewed over six hundred high performers. Congratulations. That number, by the way, generate over a billion views. And you've pulled yourself from scrounging on couch cushions to a billion a billion dollar business exiting a billion dollar business. You showed on Twitter or on x your top ten favorite interviews of all time, and so they weren't ranked in any particular order. But I noticed that like five of those people were money guys and two of those

Nothing matters other than thinking from first principles, that is.

To formulate your own devastating.

Yes it.

First principle is a little deeper than that. First principles is the world works on a set of rules. We'll call them the laws of physics and everything on that. Yes, they are the axioms that we cannot disprove. And once you understand that life is a big chain of cause and effect that we can't go all the way back because we don't under fully understand physics. But man, you can really think like an engineer, which is the right way, even if you're playing a game of psychology. The human

In a knowable way.

And so if you focus obsessively on mapping that, well, then you can get as close to having a crystal ball as you're ever going to get. And it's almost the guests that I have really fall into two gigantic camps.

There are people that are just worried about the.

Laws of physics in their own mind, Like, here are the things that I'm up against, David Goggins. I figured out how to master my own mind. Cool, You've got the physics of your mind, and given that, you've been able to lead an extraordinary life because you understood how to deal with your own limitations, your cognitive biases, all of that.

Then there are.

People that do an external thing where they master money, they master business.

It's the same game.

You're trying to figure out, how does this thing actually work? How do I get my emotions out of the way, and how do I think from first principles? And I have a feeling no matter how many people I interview, they're going to use different words, but they're all going to be people who did that thing either on a

Yeah, and everyone should figure that out for themselves.

I mean, it's really universal, but you have to figure out how to get out of your own way, with your own cognitive limitations, biases, distorted frame of reference, so it will be an end of one experiment, but you're seeking the truly universal.

Got it, all right?

I think this might be my longest interview ever, So I apologies only because I kept taking it was.

Good, It was really good. It was really good. So we'll end it with that. Tom. Obviously, we'll link your stuff down below. I'm su everybody already knows where to find you, I hope, so at Tom, Bill you wherever you go. All right, Thanks, thank you,