Video summary
Tom Bilyeu warns that humanity faces a radical transformation over the next two years driven by an artificial intelligence revolution comparable to no other in history, potentially leaving current jobs, relationships, and societal structures unrecognizable before today's children graduate high school. He argues that this moment is defined by unparalleled disruption where AI sits at the heart of economic, technological, and military supremacy between America and China. Bilyeu cites Sam Altman’s prediction of 300% year-over-year growth in AI capabilities, noting that compounding effects mean progress will accelerate exponentially rather than linearly. He illustrates this rapid future with a vision where an elderly man jogs at sunrise thanks to biologically reprogrammed stem cells and interacts with an embodied AI partner, while his grandson is born from an artificial womb with enhanced physical traits and neural chips for telepathic communication. These scenarios underscore that the biggest challenge of human history is not what will happen in the future but the radical changes already occurring now due to economic displacement and fear among those left behind by rapid technological shifts. The podcast delves into historical precedents showing how major technological advancements often trigger violent upheaval before stabilizing, citing the printing press which sparked the Thirty Years' War after making knowledge accessible beyond elites, and gunpowder which centralized power but accelerated state formation. Bilyeu applies these lessons to AI as an "explosion of intelligence" rather than just words or energy, framing the current global context through Thucydides Trap where a rising China threatens a declining US, leading to inevitable conflict unless avoided. He explains that this dynamic is governed by game theory's prisoner's dilemma; without enforceable mechanisms for cooperation on AI development, rational self-interest drives both nations into an aggressive arms race involving autonomous drones and advanced robotics. The stakes are existential because if the United States pauses while China accelerates its lead in compute power—bolstered by massive renewable energy projects—the US risks losing strategic advantage permanently. Bilyeu describes this technological tsunami as a "devastating utopia" where AI drives costs to zero, making energy and robotic labor abundant but potentially stripping life of meaning without friction or struggle. He references the 1968 Mouse Utopia experiment where mice in an environment with unlimited resources collapsed into violence and infertility due to lack of challenge, paralleling humanity's potential fate if technology removes all necessity for effort. While AI promises personalized education, free housing, and robot assistants solving mundane tasks leading to a sedentary existence similar to Wall-E, the core danger lies not just job displacement but losing purpose in an effortless world. He notes that while some professions like coding or law will see their numbers diminish rapidly due to superior AI efficiency, the true crisis is psychological: how humans find fulfillment when automatic forces threaten to absorb them into a void of ease and meaninglessness. To navigate this era successfully, Bilyeu outlines five steps for mastering the revolution before it becomes too late. First, individuals must master all available AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Claude by prompting effectively and building automations rather than fearing replacement. Second, they should build something real such as books or games while a magic window of opportunity exists where few have yet mastered these creation tools. Third, one must play to the fringes by identifying underserved niches that AI can serve cheaply now but will saturate quickly later. Fourth and fifth steps focus on internal resilience: finding meaning through hard work toward honorable goals rather than just achievement, and maintaining love for family as constants in a rapidly changing world where biological imperatives still reward raising children despite synthetic futures. Ultimately, Bilyeu concludes that while the US-China AI arms race guarantees this train will not stop regardless of regulatory attempts or pleas to slow down, individuals retain agency on how they respond to disruption. History shows progress is carved only for those who move rather than stand paralyzed by overwhelm as a tsunami approaches. He urges listeners to push for sensible regulation, choose paths of meaning and purpose, master tools while still possible, and avoid the fate of standing on a beach watching destruction unfold. Whether adapting fully with augmentation or rejecting technology entirely via off-grid living remains a choice, but waiting passively ensures being left behind in an inferno where only those who embrace change survive to thrive in whatever new world emerges from this unprecedented shift.
Read the full video transcript
Over the next two years, the life you
know will vanish. No warning, no vote,
just an inferno of artificial
intelligence that will burn away
everything you're used to. Jobs,
relationships, family, religion,
economics, warfare, they will all become
unrecognizable by the time a kid born
today graduates high school, if such a
thing even exists by then. Your job is
to figure out what this change means for
you and how to navigate it well, so you
do not get left behind. That's what
we're going to be doing here today. Let
me set the table. This moment in history
is unparalleled.
The world's two major superpowers are
locked in a cold war, both battling for
economic, technological, and military
supremacy. And AI sits at the heart of
all three. Charlie Munger famously said,
"Show me the incentives and I'll show
you the outcome." When great powers are
fighting for dominance, the only
incentive is to compete and win. What
does that mean for our future? America,
the world's policeman, is in the middle
of a debt crisis. Populism is on the
rise, political tensions are at a fever
pitch, credible voices see civil war on
the horizon, and right in the middle of
all of that is the AI revolution. So,
what happens when an already pivotal
moment in history occurs right in the
middle of the most significant period of
technological change the world has ever
seen? That's what we're here to answer.
The next two years are going to be
dramatic, because history doesn't move
forward smoothly, it lurches forward in
sudden, violent spasms of change, when
people revolt or science unlocks new
abilities. Think of the printing press,
electricity, the atomic age, the birth
of the internet, and now AI. Now, my
goal today isn't to convince you we
should speed up or slow down. My goal is
to help you understand the direction of
travel and how to prosper through
radical disruption. There's always a
path, however narrow. Now, many, many
people are going to emotionally implode
over the next few years. Others, though,
are going to win. In our time together
today, I'm going to orient you towards
what's happening and see if we can find
that path, narrow though it may be, to
winning in five easy parts. This time, I
absolutely saved the best for last, so
make sure you watch to the end where we
talk strategy for how to win in this
insane time. Part one, the future is
going to be faster and vaster than you
think. In just the last year, more
people talked to AI than their doctor,
lawyer, or therapist. Character.ai,
Replika, ChatGPT, and Snapchat's AI
alone engage with millions of users
daily, far more often and for longer
than the average person consults with a
professional of any kind for any reason.
Project that forward and you quickly see
how AI becomes the dominant form of
social interaction, full stop. But
social interaction is just the
beginning. AI is already changing jobs,
medicine, engineering, warfare, and
science. We are the proverbial frogs
being boiled already. Sam Altman, the
founder of OpenAI, has predicted that AI
is progressing at a rate of 300%
year-over-year with no signs of
stopping. Do you know how insane that
is? 3% growth year-over-year would
already be exponential. At 300% growth,
by the end of year two, you're not at
600% growth, you're at 1,600%.
That's how compounding works. That's 16
times your starting condition. In 3
years, you're at 64 times your starting
condition. Now listen, even if Sam is
delusional and it slows down for the
terrifying reason I will explain in part
three, it's never going to stop. AI is
that moment on our timeline where an
entirely new skill tree opens up and
nothing is the same after. I want you to
close your eyes and imagine this. An
82-year-old man jogs a 10K at sunrise.
His knees feel perfect. He's
biologically 38 thanks to AI
reprogrammed stem cells. His romantic
partner, an embodied AI entity who's
re-ignited his love life after his
divorce, helped him overcome trauma,
make financial decisions, and build a
second career on YouTube. The man
doesn't even notice the hum of
autonomous drones overhead quietly
scanning for threats.
He's thinking about his biologically
customized grandson. He came out of the
artificial womb exactly as expected.
Adorable, cancer-resistant, and on track
to be 6'4 and with an IQ pushed to the
legal limit. On his third birthday, they
even upgraded him with a neural chip
that lets him read and transmit thoughts
telepathically to other augmented
humans. His parents are contemplating
the software update that would let him
translate the family dog's barking. As
future grandpa steps into his house, he
feels his neuralink chip reconnect to
the quantum encrypted network his AI
wife set up. The data from his run is
uploaded and analyzed. I could go on and
on, but hopefully you get the point. The
future is going to very different, and
odds are it's going to arrive very fast.
All made possible by artificial
intelligence. AI entrepreneur and
futurist Kai-Fu Lee went so far as to
say, "AI will change the world more than
anything in the history of mankind." How
could it not? AI has already done a list
of things so radical. One of them, one
of them, should leave you with your jaw
on the floor. Forget chatbots. Here is
but a tiny fraction of the things AI has
already done.
Solve the protein folding grand
challenge, a feat humans have failed to
do for more than 50 years. Create new
gene editing tools, prove new
mathematical theorems, improve medical
diagnostics and drug discovery, detected
tumors up to 4 years before they fully
develop, gotten over 950 AI-powered
medical devices and algorithms
authorized by the FDA, improved
foundational coding languages like C++,
made Hollywood quality filmmaking and
music available to the average person,
deployed millions of industrial robots
in factories worldwide, and so much
more. And that's what's happened right
now. As AI clusters get bigger and more
efficient, as we ramp up energy
production, as AI makes new things
possible, how far is it going to go? The
biggest challenge in human history isn't
something that will happen in the
future, it's what's already happening
right now. And as I was writing this, LA
was literally on fire. It was in the
middle of the riots. They didn't have
anything to do with AI, but they had
everything to do with people feeling
left behind. People do not riot when
they feel calm and confident about the
future. They riot because they're mad,
confused, scared, or all of the above.
And typically, that happens because of
economics. And if I'm right about that,
what happens when AI kills old jobs and
creates new jobs they're not even
qualified for. But we'll be fine, right?
I mean, history shows Well, what does
history show? Does it say we'll be fine?
It depends, I guess, on how you feel
about 30 years of war. And that looming
question brings us to part two. History
shows change makes people deadly. In the
16th century, a new media technology
triggered the deadliest war in European
history, a record that held until the
20th century. It killed 8 million
people, one in five Germans, and left
entire regions of Central Europe
depopulated. The tech
it wasn't machine guns or cluster bombs,
it was the printing press. Before the
printing press, knowledge was only for
the elites. A single book could cost as
much as a house. But after it, books
were cheaper than a teacher's monthly
salary. This caused literacy to surge,
but it also triggered mass chaos via the
Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther
wrote his 95 Theses in 1517, and that
led to the explosion of Protestant
ideas, which then fractured the
religious unity of Europe. Over the next
century, Europe splintered into Catholic
and various Protestant factions,
sparking waves of devastating conflict,
ultimately culminating in the bloodbath
that was the 30 Years War.
All of that was a consequence of making
publishing cheaper. Can you imagine? The
printing press simply made it cheaper to
publish, but the second-order
consequence was that ideas could
suddenly spread faster than tyrants
could suppress them. That's a good
thing.
But it's not an only up phenomenon. It
also divided people along ideological
lines. The same tool that empowered
liberty also allowed for the spread of
propaganda and served to push people
into camps, camps people were willing to
fight and die for. Sound familiar? Sure,
Europe eventually settled down, but that
is cold comfort to all of the people who
died, and it certainly wasn't that long
ago that Catholics and Protestants were
still killing each other in Ireland. And
history is full of insane stories just
like that. Take gunpowder. Overnight,
combat stopped being about muscle and
started to be about money. A random guy
with a musket could drop an armored
knight at distance. It was a watershed
moment in the history of warfare, but it
also greatly accelerated the rise of
centralized nation-states. Prior to
gunpowder, medieval Europe had been run
by decentralized powers, local nobles
and fortified castles. They could defy
kings. Gunpowder, though, changed that
equation real quick. Large professional
armies equipped with firearms emerged,
which required bureaucratic organization
and heavy taxation to maintain, thus
strengthening state institutions.
Scholars speak of the 16th-century
military revolution as giving birth to
the early modern fiscal-military state.
This disrupted economic priorities and
created huge opportunities for those
paying attention to the changing
landscape, but only for those paying
attention. And if you think gunpowder
was big, look at the Industrial
Revolution. Considered by many to be the
most profound transformation of human
life since the agricultural revolution.
GDP per capita had been mostly flat for
centuries. Then bam! With
industrialization we entered an era of
truly exponential growth.
Likewise, electricity sparked the second
industrial revolution, utterly
transforming the global economy. The
cost of goods dropped and mass
production soared to new heights. From
automobiles to canned foods,
electric-powered factories churned out
products for a growing consumer society.
Electrification also created entirely
new industries. And by 1920, electricity
and related industries made up a huge
share of GDP in advanced countries. Jobs
changed as well, pushing people from old
jobs like lamplighters, candle makers,
and horse cart teamsters to newer jobs
like electrical engineers, electricians,
and skilled workers to build and
maintain the grid.
Now, I might as well be describing AI
itself. But AI will be far more
revolutionary than anything we've seen
previously.
It's not an explosion of words or even
the violent explosion of gunpowder. It
is the explosion of intelligence. The
very thing that gives birth to the
revolutions that lurch us all forward.
So the real question becomes, is this
something we should be excited about?
Are these technological advances really
worth the risk of that kind of
disruption? In my opinion, yes. But
honestly, it doesn't matter. There's no
stopping this train. So if your impulse
at this point is to pump the brakes, I'm
guessing you've never heard of
Thucydides Trap. It's shocking and
entirely predictable given what I know
about humans.
And if you've heard of Thucydides Trap,
then you know exactly where we're
headed. Welcome to part three,
superpower showdown, aka AI is really an
arms race.
12 times in history. 12 times in history
when a rising power threatened a ruling
one, the result was war. Only four times
was war averted. This is known as
Thucydides Trap. The ancient Greek
historian Thucydides first recognized
this pattern when reflecting on the fall
of Sparta and the rise of Athens. Sparta
could not accept their decline and
Athens refused to tolerate being in
second place. This pattern of rise and
fall works like a tractor beam pulling
superpowers into conflict and right now
the rising power is China and the
declining power the United States. While
the future is never perfectly knowable,
historical patterns certainly make some
things more obvious. AI is going to be
at the heart of whether this becomes the
13th war or the fifth time in history it
was avoided. That's why I don't think of
this moment as a tech race. I think of
it as an AI Cold War.
It's not about gadgets or apps. It's
about national survival and when seen
through that lens, you're going to be
able to predict a lot more of what's
about to come because when countries are
overburdened by debt and a sense of
global threat to their hegemony as the
US feels right now, populism kicks in
and it becomes existential to maintain
your advantage. The US is $36 trillion
in debt and climbing fast. There are
literal riots in the streets right now
and we're going up against a disciplined
and hungry China.
As Alex Karp, the controversial CEO of
Palantir has noted, either we win or
China will win.
And that's going to matter not just to
the US but the world at large.
There's another psychological principle
that you've got to understand if you
want to identify how the US-China
conflict is going to impact the
development of AI. You have to look at
it through the lens of game theory and
something called the prisoner's dilemma.
That snaps this moment into focus real
fast. If you don't know what the
prisoner's dilemma is a scenario where
two individuals face a choice, cooperate
or betray each other. If both cooperate,
they get a moderate benefit. If one
betrays while the other cooperates, the
betrayer gains more and the cooperator
loses badly.
But if they both betray, they both lose,
just not as much.
The paradox is that even though mutual
cooperation is best, rational
self-interest often leads both sides to
defect. Here's how it looks when you
apply it to the US versus China as it
relates to AI. Cooperation would be a
global agreement is struck to slow or
pause AI development. Defection would
mean secretly or openly continuing
aggressive development for strategic
gain despite the global agreement. If
China defects while the US cooperates,
China gains technological, economic, and
military supremacy. If the US defects
while China cooperates, the reverse
occurs. But if both defect, which is the
default outcome without binding trust,
they both sprint into a high-stakes arms
race regardless of all the massive risks
that that entails. Given that reality,
here's why the US must assume China will
defect in real life. One,
there are no enforceable mechanisms to
verify global compliance on AI
development. Two, China has publicly
declared its goal to lead the world in
AI by 2030. The race is literally on.
Three, in previous tech races, nuclear,
space, quantum, cooperation has been
rare, containment and escalation have
proven to be the norm. Four, the cost of
being wrong, of pausing while your rival
accelerates, is truly existential in a
world where AI will determine strategic
advantage. Therefore, rational actors
applying game theory would act exactly
as the US and China are acting right
now. Assume defection, build fast, and
prioritize strategic advantage even if
that accelerates other risks. That's why
in 2017 China launched its national AI
strategy with a single bold objective,
global leadership in AI by 2030. That's
4 and 1/2 years from now. Some reports
claim that they're backing it with brute
force developing hundreds of AI mega
data centers that are already built or
under construction. Many are apparently
co-located with vast solar, wind, and
hydroelectric projects. In provinces
like Gansu and Qinghai data centers are
being hardwired directly into renewable
grids to ensure that their AI programs
have all the energy they need. The US,
by contrast, is winning on compute. Our
semiconductor design still leads the
world. We control critical choke points,
Nvidia chips, Dutch lithography
machines, Taiwanese fabs. Trump's
administration even launched a
hundred-billion-dollar initiative to
build domestic AI supercomputing
centers.
Biden also kept the pressure up. Export
controls slammed China's access to
advanced chips, the goal being to
maintain a compute lead and delay
China's. But, here's the problem. China
is catching up fast. Their models like
DeepSeek R1 are now within striking
distance of OpenAI's most advanced
versions. There's some controversy
around how they did it, but nonetheless
they are gaining fast. David Sacks, now
acting as the informal AI czar under
Trump, warned in a Fox interview that
America may have a three to six-month
lead at best. That lead could vanish
overnight. And here's the real problem.
We might dominate in chip design, but
China has more energy. They've built 27
nuclear reactors in the past decade with
23 more under construction. The US, just
two. And AI is an energy monster. The
International Energy Agency projects
data centers will use more power than
the entire nation of Japan by 2030. And
the entire nation of Japan. If AI is a
weapon, and it most certainly is, and
you don't have the power to run your
models, you don't have the power to
defend your country. That's not
hyperbole. The armies of the future will
be made largely of AI-powered robots and
drones. We can see it already in the
Russia-Ukraine conflict. Soldiers are
being chased down by drones and
Operation Spiderweb, which allowed
Ukraine to strike deep into the heart of
Russia without the need for local
soldiers, was only possible because of
AI. Autonomous drones are rapidly
becoming the standard, and it's only
going to get more so from here. That's
why any talk of an AI pause is pure
fantasy at this point. Echoing Karp's
statement, one US AI policy advisor
said, "Any pause could let China surge
ahead." Both Thucydides Trap and Game
Theory make it clear the US is not going
to let that happen. Certainly not
without a fight. When the stakes are
global hegemony, no one takes their foot
off the gas. AI is the new great game,
the 21st century space race. But instead
of rockets, it's language models and
metallic dogs with machine guns.
Regulation isn't coming. Restraint is
not viable. This is the age of
escalation because every player knows
whoever hesitates loses. But who cares,
right? That's nation-state stuff. That
doesn't affect your daily life.
Unfortunately, that's just not true. I
went through all of that so you would
not waste your time praying that someone
somehow slows this train down. This
train is only speeding up. It is full
steam ahead for AI, and if you think
that's not going to affect you, welcome
to part four. AI is a tsunami that will
consume everything and usher in a
devastating utopia. Yes, utopia.
In 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami
swallowed everything in its wake. I
routinely think of that guy on the beach
who simply stood there as the angry wall
of water devoured him. AI is that
tsunami. The question is, what does the
world look like when the water never
recedes? In 1968, a researcher built a
paradise for mice.
Unlimited
clean nests, no predators. Sounds
awesome, right? Nope. Within 2 years,
society collapsed, violence skyrocketed,
the mice isolated themselves, and mass
infertility swept the colony. It wasn't
scarcity that killed them.
It was abundance. The study is known as
Mouse Utopia, and it may offer a glimpse
into what happens when we get everything
we ever wanted, as AI promises to do.
Let's lay out how it might go.
AI is going to take our jobs, all of
them. Why? Because it's going to be so
much better than us
at everything.
The hard truth is AI is getting smart,
really smart. And AI does not have to
outsmart us by much to completely
dominate us. Let me give you an example
for scale. A
a literal is technically someone
with an IQ of about 70. The average IQ
in the US is 98. Einstein was estimated
to be 160. That's only 2.3 times smarter
than a and yet he had insights
that gave birth to nuclear power and
nuclear bombs, not to mention lasers,
GPS, and a whole lot more. Said another
way, a little intelligence goes a long
way. And AI isn't going to be a little
smarter than Einstein, it's going to be
a lot smarter. Not five times smarter,
or 10 times, or even 10,000 times
smarter. We're talking millions of times
smarter. In case you think I'm
exaggerating, futurist Ian Pearson told
the World Government Summit that AI
could become billions of times smarter
than humans. How? Because AI isn't
limited by the messy, chemical-laden
realities of being a meat bag like we
humans are. We have to wait roughly 20
years for the next generation to be
born, grow to sexual maturity, and have
more kids. AI, on the other hand, is a
non-biological system that is only
limited by the laws of physics. AI will
be able to think at the speed of light
and will only be limited by the
ever-increasing rate at which it can
learn to configure electrons in novel
ways. Now, if you're finding this as
eye-opening as I did when I first
started researching it, you're going to
want to dig deeper into what's actually
coming next. That's exactly where
Shortform can help. If you want to
understand where AI is headed, there's
one book that maps out the realistic
future scenarios and it's called AI 2041
by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan. Lee was
the former president of Google China and
knows exactly how this arms race is
playing out. This isn't like other
summary services that give you surface
level one-pagers. Shortform has expert
writers creating in-depth guides with
commentary, counterpoints from other
sources, and exercises for retention.
Shortform also covers the topics across
multiple sources with their master
guides, so you're not just getting one
perspective on AI's future. Plus, their
browser extension summarizes any YouTube
video, article, or email instantly.
Click the link below to try it out for
free and get 20% off your annual
subscription. And now, let's see what
history tells us about the disruption
caused by technological advancements.
AI's going to change everything about
our lives. As we approach the
technological singularity, the point
beyond which things change so rapidly we
can no longer meaningfully predict even
the near future, we won't recognize our
world from one day to the next. Ray
Kurzweil, the man who has been
predicting the future with 87% accuracy
for roughly four decades now, says the
technological singularity will happen
around 2045. 20 years from now. But
remember, it's not binary. That's the
finish line. We're already headed down
the path. Skills it took decades to
master will be downloadable prompts.
Living in LA, I can hear the sound of
Hollywood dying in real time. The
patterns that make hit songs are already
being mapped. AI can now compose full
orchestras to replicate dead artists
with eerie precision. I I heard a rap
song yesterday that when I was showing
to people, they did not realize that it
was fake. In computer code, AI writes,
debugs, and refactors faster than junior
developers. And it's only getting better
and faster. In my own company, we've
been building a video game for the past
3 years. And what used to take us 3
months and 10 people can now be done in
an afternoon, literally, by one person
at only slightly lower quality. Even a
script like this one, it used to take me
a month to research, outline, and write.
Now, with AI at my side, I can do it in
a week. And it won't be long before
someone, anyone, can one-shot a video
like this in my voice or anyone's voice.
Fan fiction is already off the charts.
And most, if not all, music, writing,
movies, TVs, painting, books, all of it
is going to be created with AI. And
that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Lawyers, accountants, doctors, even
surgeons, all of them will see their
numbers diminish, for sure, and
eventually, probably eliminated.
Ironically though, AI taking our jobs
isn't the scary part. The scary part is
that it's going to usher in a utopia.
Now, I can't believe this is true, but
the Matrix actually predicted the
problem with a technological utopia back
in 1999. Agent Smith explains to Neo
that originally the Matrix was designed
to be a utopia, but people couldn't
handle it, and the Matrix was rejected.
Going back to Mel's utopia, animals,
including humans, just weren't designed
for the easy life. We're designed to
struggle against the odds, but
technology is the way that we reduce
that friction and make everything
easier. Whether it's fire, the internal
combustion engine, computers, or AI
we're talking about, technology is the
promise of a better, easier future. And
on paper, that's exactly what's going to
happen. As the rate of progress picks
up, AI will drive the cost of energy to
effectively zero. It will make it
possible to capture all or virtually all
of the energy coming from the sun, and
there is enough energy coming from the
sun to do and build anything we have
ever wanted. And once energy is free,
robotic labor will be free. Once robotic
labor is free, we will truly be living
in an age of abundance. Education will
be AI-driven, personalized, and always
on. Housing effectively will be free.
Everyone will have robot assistants
doing anything they don't want to do.
And voila, we're the people from Wall-E,
obese and riding around in chairs barely
able to stand up. Everything will be
easier and cheaper. But will it be
better?
In a world without friction, without
necessity, without effort,
what is it that's going to give life
meaning?
In a world where automatic forces
threaten to suck us into the abyss, how
do we take control and avoid the traps
laid out before us? Welcome to part
five, where do we go from here? Five
steps to mastering the AI revolution.
Two stories, both true. One will break
your heart, the other will light the way
forward. In 2023, the release of a
largely unknown AI model called ChatGPT
bankrupted a billion-dollar company in
roughly 72 hours. The company was called
Chegg. It was a titan of online
education, but nonetheless, AI snuffed
it out almost overnight. No mercy for
the founder who lost everything or the
employees who suddenly had no job. One
of the countless examples of the old
getting killed by the new. Next, in
2024, a 21-year-old college dropout used
AI to build a startup that outsmarted
Microsoft's hiring system, landing this
dropout 25 million dollars in funding,
all without him needing to write a
single line of code. A tale of two
companies, both controlled by AI. One
destroyed by it because they didn't know
how to use it, and the other never could
have existed without it. We'll all go
down one of those two paths. The only
question is which one? Assuming you want
to win, here are the five steps to
mastering the AI revolution. One, master
the AI tools. Learn all of them. Chat
GPT, Midjourney, VO3, Midjourney,
Claude, Sonnet, and whatever else comes
next. Prompt like a master. Chain tools
together. Build automations for any
repetitive tasks. Start fine-tuning your
own models if you're brave enough. Build
custom GPTs and find ways to craft
systems that no one else has. If you
don't know what those words mean, look
them up now or you really will get left
behind. Train your own social algorithm
to keep you aware of everything that's
going on at the bleeding edge of AI. It
moves fast and you want to make sure
that you see what's going on. Experiment
and get your hands dirty. There is no
substitute for actually using these AI
tools and seeing exactly what they're
capable of, including where they fall
apart. You will often have to wade
through a river of endless hype to get
to the actual tools that are truly
revolutionary. But, you will be shocked
by how far AI can extend your
capabilities. Two, build something real.
Write books, build tools, teach skills,
make games, license content. It has
truly never been easier and this window
is going to close fast. Soon, the world
is going to be flooded with builders,
but for now, you're in a magic window
where shockingly few people have
actually mastered the tools and are
creating with them. This moment reminds
me a lot of YouTube back in like 2014.
There was competition, but if you had
something valuable to offer, you could
make millions. I know because I did it
with no previous experience. It's all
about learning fast and moving even
faster. Three, play to the fringes. The
edges are where you're going to find the
opportunities that are unguarded. That's
where the leverage is. My company Quest
launched at the height of the Great
Recession and sold for a billion
dollars. Same for Shopify and today it's
worth over a hundred billion dollars.
Why do these companies still work even
in the worst economic environment since
the Great Depression? Because a crisis
opens up opportunities. It's your job to
take advantage of them. Ask yourself,
what does AI make possible that wasn't
possible before? What niche audience was
impossible to serve before AI? What was
previously too expensive, but now can be
done very cheaply? Find a forgotten or
underserved niche. Figure out where the
freaks and geeks are that have a rabid
appetite for your idea. Apple, of all
companies, started in a super nerdy
obscure computer club. My own YouTube
content, which has now been viewed over
a billion times, started inside of a
protein bar company. Great things often
start in small die-hard communities.
Find them and serve them with the
leverage that AI gives you.
Jeff Bezos started Amazon when only 14%
of Americans had internet access. Do not
wait until AI has saturated the market,
which is happening fast. If you want to
win big, get started immediately. Work
on nights and weekends if you have to.
There's no need to quit your day job.
Just start building in your spare time.
AI speeds everything up. Use that to
your advantage. All right, that's all
I'm going to say about building. The
first three steps to mastering AI are
about the narrow window of time that
we're in right now before AI beats us at
everything. Once that happens, and it
will, I certainly hope I've been able to
convince you of that by now, you're
going to need these next two steps.
Four, find meaning by doing hard things
that matter. The only thing worth
pursuing in the long run is fulfillment.
Fulfillment is the one neurochemical
state that will survive even grief.
Fulfillment is about making sure you
have meaning and purpose in your life.
And fulfillment comes from a very simple
formula. You have to work really hard
to gain a set of skills
that matter to you for your own reasons
that allow you to make progress towards
an honorable goal. Notice I didn't say
achieve it.
To make progress. If you achieve it,
great, but don't tie your identity up in
that. It's about becoming the kind of
person that you would respect. It never
ceases to amaze me how simple humans
really are. Until the day that AI makes
it possible to synthesize and edit our
DNA en masse, what ultimately dictates
the quality of a human life is how you
feel about yourself when you're by
yourself. Don't lose sight of that.
Five,
fall in love and raise a family. This
may feel like it's out of left field for
a video about navigating a world that is
changing so rapidly most people will be
paralyzed by overwhelm, but here's the
truth. We need meaning and purpose.
We need to love and be loved.
We need to do hard things.
And while I cannot speak from
experience, I can see from an
evolutionary perspective that having
kids is what nature wants us to do.
There are built-in algorithms running in
your brain that will reward you for
having and raising kids.
And I can't think of any better default
way to have deep meaning and purpose
than to raise children well.
There are no universals in life, but I
think you deviate from that path at your
own risk. I don't have kids, so I know
you can do that well, but it requires
some extra planning if you want to make
sure your life has meaning. No matter
what happens with AI, love and family
will be constants, at least until humans
become fully synthetic, but that's a
whole 'nother video. Ultimately, your
life should be full of joy, and while I
expect that AI is going to knock a lot
of people down and I think a great many
people are going to have a very tough
time adapting.
The reality is that how we respond to
this radical change is going to be up to
us. Some people will get fully augmented
and travel to Mars, others will move to
a farm off the grid and reject
technology completely. That much we all
get to choose. Let me leave you with
this. AI is rewriting our world faster,
vaster and more brutally than any
revolution in human history. There has
never been anything like it. Not the
printing press or gunpowder, electricity
or even atomic energy. But history shows
over and over that disruption carves
paths to progress, but only for those
who move. The US and China's AI arms
race guarantees that this train will not
stop. Many will be paralyzed by
overwhelm, others will die in mouse
utopia, but we all have a choice. And if
I were to suggest one, it would be to
push for sensible regulation, choose the
hard path of meaning and purpose and
master the tools while that still
matters. Whether it's two years or 20
years away, don't just stand there on
the beach and let the tsunami take you.
Have the courage to take on whatever
comes next and push yourself to the
limit. Remember, the future isn't some
far off thing, it's happening right now
and it's moving a lot faster than you
think. Right guys, if you want to see me
explore ideas like this live in real
time, make sure that you're joining me
for my lives on my channel at 6:00 a.m.
Pacific time. I'll see you there. Take
care.
If you like this conversation, check out
this episode to learn more. True story.
Six men representing 25% of the world's
wealth meet on a private train. No last
names, no press, no records. If anyone
asks, they're going duck hunting in
Georgia. But they're not going to do