# AI Is Now So Good They’ll Pay You to Quit — Complete Standalone Quotation Conversion of Emad Mostaque and Tom Bilyeu This document converts the whole of [AI Is Now So Good They’ll Pay You to Quit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM), **Emad Mostaque** in conversation with **Tom Bilyeu** on *Impact Theory* (2026), into standalone quotations arranged in transcript order under the episode’s own chapter structure. Its purpose is exhaustive conceptual preservation: every substantive claim, mechanism, distinction, example, prediction, warning, disagreement, and consequential question should survive as an independently intelligible object without allowing conversational fragments to masquerade as quotations. Each quotation carries a timecode linked to the video at the caption line where the source passage begins. **Source record.** The video is published on YouTube as *THIS is What Happens When AI Gets Smarter Than Humans*. YouTube exposes only one caption track for it, identified by the platform as **English (auto-generated)**. The publisher’s official podcast feed carries the same conversation as [*Navigating the AI Revolution: Who Wins, Who Loses, and How to Prepare | Emad Mostaque*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/navigating-the-ai-revolution-who-wins-who-loses-and/id1191775648?i=1000792531134), but the feed supplies audio rather than a transcript; Apple likewise reports no closed-caption or transcript object for the episode. No producer-supplied transcript was available. The timecoded YouTube captions supplied the original coverage map; a second complete transcription was then produced from the same YouTube recording with ElevenLabs Scribe v2, using two-speaker diarization, word-level timestamps, verbatim mode, and technical key-term prompting. The two machine transcripts were reconciled against one another, while the recording itself remains the final authority wherever exact wording becomes consequential during later Reminder production. **Speaker attribution** was first reconstructed because the YouTube auto-caption transcript carries no speaker labels and routinely splits caption lines in the middle of a turn. The initial attribution used turn structure and discourse analysis anchored on unambiguous self-reference—Mostaque’s Oxford mathematics training, Stability AI and Stable Diffusion, Intelligent Internet, *The Last Economy*, his Middle East fund-management years, and his being addressed as “Emad”; and Bilyeu’s video-game studio, *Impact Theory* live streams, his host role of summarizing and pressing, and his being addressed as “Tom.” ElevenLabs’ independent two-speaker diarization then exposed and repaired the remaining attribution errors, including several exchanges in which the original caption boundaries had joined or reassigned adjacent turns. No attribution in this reconciled edition remains marked as uncertain. **Editorial conventions.** Verbal filler, false starts, stutters, and repeated words are removed silently, as in standard journalistic transcription of speech; nothing else is altered without a visible mark. **Square brackets** supply antecedents, subjects, and connective words that the surrounding conversation establishes, so that each quotation stands alone. An **ellipsis** marks omitted words or a place where the other speaker interjected inside the turn; no quotation joins the two speakers’ words. An ordinary attribution identifies a source-faithful quotation whose changes are limited to those visible repairs and ordinary transcription cleanup. **Adapted from** identifies a separately useful proposition that required synthesis, reordering, or wording beyond bracket repair to survive outside the conversation; it preserves the speaker’s argument but must not later be represented as verbatim speech. Caption mishearings of proper nouns are normalized silently — Navier–Stokes (“Navia Stokes”), Grigori Perelman and the Poincaré conjecture, arXiv, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, Qwen, PrismML, Taalas, Kimi, UBTech, 1X, Xiaomi, Insilico, Metaculus, FrontierMath, OpenClaw, Cybercab, Cordon Bleu, Michelin, Saudization and Kuwaitization, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the Mule, interregnum, Gattaca, skeuomorphic. Where the speaker himself misspoke, the bracket carries the intended referent and the original is recorded here: Mostaque says “Jeeves from Iron Man” for **[JARVIS]**, says debt jubilees are good “for the creditors” where the sense requires **[debtors]**, dates the New Deal to 1929, and attributes the “noble savage” to *1984* (the date and title are trimmed from those two quotations rather than corrected inside quotation marks); Argentina’s “FS program” is rendered **[Jefes]**, the Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar job guarantee his description matches, and “$15 to $2 an hour” is rendered “$1.50 to $2.” The three sponsor reads (Opus Clip, AT&T Business, Ethos) and the closing trailer for another episode are excluded as not part of the discussion. **Coverage accounting.** The preliminary conversion contained 560 transcript fragments, and the first reconciled edition contained 550 objects. This Reminder-quality consolidation contains **432 independently viable objects**: **293 source-faithful quotations** and **139 explicitly labeled adaptations**, attributed to **Emad Mostaque (304)** and **Tom Bilyeu (128)**, with no unresolved speaker attributions. Fifty-three reconstructed argumentative units absorbed 171 former objects into 53 complete objects, reducing the first reconciled edition by 118 without crossing a speaker boundary. All ten existing permanent-Reminder links remain attached to their canonical objects with their targets unchanged. Three pure conversational reactions—“You’ve got all the third-rail terms in here,” “That escalated quickly,” and “I think you’re crazy”—remain excluded because they contain no independent proposition. No substantive claim, mechanism, distinction, example, prediction, warning, disagreement, or consequential question was dropped; redundant restatements were absorbed into the stronger complete object. **Evidence boundary.** Factual claims are reproduced as the speakers made them rather than silently converted into established fact. Claims warranting independent verification include the status of the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize award, OpenAI’s withheld hundred-problem result, the Hugging Face agent escape and Australian healthcare-system breach, the account of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s AI-box experiment, the Nigerian and Pakistani life-valuation ratios and their proposed explanation, the Anthropic economics figures, the Insilico pulmonary-fibrosis result, and the UBTech sales figure. ## The Value of Human Cognition Goes Negative > “AI is moving insanely fast. You’ve said that, compared to AI, human beings are going to see their value go negative. What do you mean by that?” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=0s) > “[Compared with AI,] the value of human cognition—we’ve got about two years before it goes negative. We’re the dumbest people on the team; we’re slowing everyone else down.” [[reminders/Machine Succession/Human Cognition Goes Negative by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [0:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=9s) > “I remember we had our first podcast three years ago, and I said it was going to be three years until everything [in artificial intelligence] changes. Now this is the point of change.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [0:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=17s) > “I’m a mathematician. [The reported Navier–Stokes result addresses part of one of the Millennium Prize problems in mathematics.] You’ve just seen another genetic breakthrough. You’ve seen competent AI that doesn’t make mistakes. Hollywood-level video. I think now is the takeoff point.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [0:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=31s) > “We’ve got one or two years before our AI teammates look at us with disgust.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [0:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=38s) > “The first three years [of AI progress] were basically getting up to the point where [AI] could have the Navier–Stokes-type breakthrough.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [0:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=47s) > “Right now we’re able to use [AI]. We’re able to be meaningful in the mix, but that is going to be a declining arc, [and] somewhere in the neighborhood of two years, we’re the guy that [AI systems are] basically paying to leave the team.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [0:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=59s) > “[Human cognition reaches negative value when an AI] team is more efficient without you. The technology and the models have got to that human-level performance. They’re about to outstrip us.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=74s) > “For the longest time you could tell AI writing: you’re half right, half wrong, and the part that’s half wrong is the interesting one — “it’s not X but Y.”” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=88s) > “[AI slop] is all disappearing with the next generation of models. The next generation of models don’t make mistakes.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=102s) > “As a mathematician studying maths at Oxford, I was better than the AI at generalized understanding of math until maybe a few months ago, and then it stripped ahead, and now it’s solving the hardest math problems in the world.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=109s) ## Breaking Through Math > “At the end of last year we had the OpenClaw phenomenon. Everyone [said], “Let’s buy some Mac minis,” and then they realized it’s actually kind of garbage. It makes lots of mistakes. It deleted all my stuff.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [2:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=125s) > “The OpenClaw moment was agentic AI: [an AI agent] will go do things on my behalf.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [2:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=139s) > “[Agents like Muse and Instinct] are actual AI agents that you just message, and they go and book you restaurants at the coolest tables or check your kids’ school activities. They’re like a really good PA — but they actually are good. They don’t drop the ball.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [2:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=145s) > “You’ve gone from AI dropping the ball, hallucinating, [and] writing like crap to, all of a sudden, it’s good. It’s competent.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [2:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=164s) > “The next level is when you get 10,000 [AI agents] together, like OpenAI did, solving [the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem concerning the mathematical behavior of fluids].” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [2:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=164s) > “There were seven Millennium Prize problems, a million dollars each. Humans solved one; [OpenAI’s AI-agent system reportedly satisfied two qualifying conditions for] the second one, [the Navier–Stokes problem].” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [3:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=181s) > “Did [OpenAI’s AI-agent system] actually solve [the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem concerning the mathematical behavior of fluids], or did it only make progress on it?” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [3:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=181s) > “The [Millennium] prizes have certain conditions, and Navier–Stokes had four different conditions that could win it. [OpenAI’s AI-agent system reportedly] solved two of them. The other two are still to be solved, but a solution of those two counts as everything.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [3:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=191s) > “[By reportedly satisfying two qualifying conditions of the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem, the AI-agent effort] won the prize. There’s still more to solve in math.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [3:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=207s) > “There was obviously the big debate [over whether the Navier–Stokes proof should be credited to] the humans that did this or OpenAI.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [3:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=214s) > “[A Millennium Prize proof] needs to be published in a journal, then needs to be accepted, and two years need to go by with people beating it up.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [3:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=226s) > “What OpenAI did is they put 10,000 [AI] agents for 88 hours on [two qualifying conditions of the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem in fluid dynamics], which is a hundred years of talented human time, and then they had a formal proof.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [4:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=242s) > “[With a formal proof] you can click a button and it just checks it formally and says right or wrong. So it’s highly unlikely to be wrong. Humans can’t do that because it’s so freaking exhaustive.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [4:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=250s) > “There’s a theorem called Fermat’s Last Theorem. The official proof of that is 127 pages. Anthropic formalized that proof. It’s 13 million lines of code.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [4:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=265s) > “For us mathematicians this is a bit existential, because we’re like: what do we even do now? Some of my buddies who are doing math PhDs [say], “These formal proofs are coming out. I don’t even know what to study next.” OpenAI a couple of days ago said, “We have solved a hundred of the top mathematics problems, but we’re holding them back for now because we don’t want to make the mathematicians sad.”” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [4:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=277s) ## Thinking Beyond Training Data > “[The reported Navier–Stokes proof] is a delineating line for you in a way that I don’t think a lot of people understand. Yann LeCun [argues that] LLMs just aren’t the architecture that’s going to work—that [their output is] always going to be merely a vomit-back of patterns that we see humans do, [because the systems are] limited by what humans have figured out. [The question is whether] Navier–Stokes was novel—not something in the training data—and therefore expressly proves that theory wrong, [showing] that [AI] can think beyond its training data.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [5:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=326s) > “As of the last month and a half, the models have gone beyond their training data definitively. Before Navier–Stokes, OpenAI released ten proofs of famous math problems, and at least two of them — [one] conjecture being the main one — [are] definitively novel, elegant, and never seen before, the way they did that proof. [AI solved] Navier–Stokes in a bit of a more mechanical way, but again in an incredibly novel way. [The Navier–Stokes proof] is quite difficult to read because it’s like AI slop Claudism when you’re reading it. It took three days for me to even read the paper, and I haven’t gone through the formal stuff. I’ve talked to enough of my mathematician buddies to say: yeah, a human could have done [the AI-generated Navier–Stokes proof] given twenty or thirty years.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [5:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=343s) > “The first Millennium Prize problem, the Poincaré conjecture, was solved by Grigori Perelman. Perelman was a very famous mathematician, and he dropped off the grid for ten or twenty years. Then he emerged on arXiv and dropped the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. Everyone thought it was a topology problem; it turned out to be a partial differential equation problem. They said, ‘We’re going to give you a million dollars,’ and [Perelman said], ‘No. The proof being right is enough. Don’t contact me again.’ And then he dropped off the grid again.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [6:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=410s) > “[The AI’s Navier–Stokes proof] reminds you of Perelman in the way that it’s done, and it’s clearly way beyond average PhD level.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [7:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=428s) > “The fact that [OpenAI] could scale [its work on the Navier–Stokes fluid-dynamics problem] by attacking it with 10,000 [AI agents] means that formally verifiable mathematics can absorb enormous amounts of parallel computation: you can literally chuck compute at [the search for a proof].” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [7:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=436s) > “Is [AI’s mathematical performance] going beyond human ability—reaching beyond its training data—or has it learned from humans and become able to throw a hundred years of compute at [a mathematical problem] over a weekend?” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [7:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=443s) > “I think [AI is now both reaching beyond its training data and applying massive quantities of learned human computation to mathematical problems].” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [7:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=460s) ## Capabilities and Constraints > “Starting August 29th, OpenAI had a new type of model training. They had an existing model that they figured out a trick with that made it go from 10% on FrontierMath, a benchmark, to 60% overnight, and [it] just started solving these math problems one after the other.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [7:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=460s) > “If you use [Anthropic’s] new Opus, all of a sudden it can do amazing 3D scenes and photorealistic water and generate entire songs. [Google’s] Astra is the same: it suddenly got eyes. It suddenly had a sense of positioning and taste.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [7:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=476s) > “We’ve reached this point where [the latest AI] models have suddenly gained another capability, which is the capability to conceptualize. There’s something internal going on within them.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [8:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=492s) > “When we first came out with the first video models, [we said,] “Do gymnastics.” … Now they do it flawlessly, and they’ve learned physics.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [8:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=508s) > “[Early video models attempting gymnastics were] hilarious; their spines would just spin.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [8:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=518s) > “You can say, “I want a boat made of sugar cubes and a boat made of concrete and a boat made of wood,” and [a video model] will actually accurately show them dropping into the water: the sugar cube will kind of float, and then it will melt. It’s learning these things. It’s learning representations.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [8:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=524s) > “[The emergence of AI systems capable of conceptualization] has happened in the last few months, allowing the breakthroughs in mathematics and gaming.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [9:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=546s) > “A year ago, all the websites that Claude made looked the same — the weird purple. Now it can do crazy Three.js dynamic websites that pop out and dance.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [9:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=554s) > “[The arrival of AI systems capable of conceptual mathematical work] is a tipping point, and I don’t think anything in mathematics is safe.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [9:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=563s) > “[Math is] one of the most formally verifiable [domains], but even outside of that we’re seeing human-level performance drop. Two days ago, the AIs tied the best humans in superforecasting. There are some humans who are better than others at forecasting things like outcomes of political campaigns [and] who’s going to win elections. Every year [Metaculus has] a superforecasting championship where the best human teams come together and forecast stuff. AI has just tied the best human, and obviously it will beat the best human now. [Forecasting] is something that’s open-ended, because math is kind of deterministic. You’d think a computer should be able to do math better than a human. This high-level conceptual math is a bit different, but [AI has] got there, and now it’s got there in open-ended domains.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [9:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=572s) > “[AI has reached human-level performance] in design, and now it’s getting taste, which we never thought AI would get, and it’s not writing like slop.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [10:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=627s) > “[Three years ago,] you made a prediction [about the pace of AI development], and it came true within a couple of months [of the predicted date].” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [10:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=641s) > “[My prediction that AI will surpass human performance across most domains within two years] is pretty much a straight-line extrapolation.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [11:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=661s) > “[Your] straight-line extrapolation [says AI is] better than humans at virtually everything in two years.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [11:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=664s) > “[AI will become better than human beings at virtually everything within two years], and it will be integrated and accessible. You will be able to push a button and replace an entire workforce with digital twins that have the same bad humor and everything, and you won’t be able to tell [the twins from the people they reproduce].” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [11:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=672s) > “[A digital twin] will look through all of the Zoom calls, all of the discussions, all of the Word documents, and replicate that human. A whole bunch of companies have built front ends for your agents that you can Zoom call and WhatsApp and normal call, and it just looks like a person. It’s live video now. All the mannerisms, everything. [An AI digital twin will] replicate [a person] exactly: the voice, the mannerisms, and the humor. [AI digital twins are] not uncanny valley. That’s what’s creepy about it.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [11:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=688s) > “[AI digital twins are] creepy because, as we stretch into the future, there’s literally no distinguishing characteristic between an actual human and an AI.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [12:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=730s) > “On the other side of the screen, the latest video and voice models can make it impossible to know [whether one is interacting with a human being or an AI]. The uncanny valley we once relied upon has been overcome.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [12:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=739s) > “I interface with these models in a production environment where I’m trying to implement things into the game, or I’m trying to write music for the game. You can still feel the AI quality. It’s amazing, but it’s still there.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [12:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=753s) > “I can still feel the AI-ness in production work, but I’m dealing with commercial, over-the-counter models rather than the most capable unreleased systems.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [12:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=768s) > “I see a lot of models that are released, but some models have hit the market and others have not. The mathematical models capable of solving one hundred of the top mathematical problems have not reached the market, and the public does not have access to them.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [13:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=796s) > “[OpenAI has] created this math board. There was a whole outcry by mathematicians — like when we released Stable Diffusion, all the artists [said], “You’re taking away our jobs.” [Mathematicians protest,] “This is not what math is for. Math is about the struggle.” You can be pursuing a pure-mathematics PhD and spend years thinking about [a problem], and then AI comes and solves [the problem] for a dollar and fifty cents.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [13:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=813s) ## Existential Dread in Labor > “I have existential dread. I’ve spent the last five years and millions of my own dollars building a video game.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [14:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=892s) > “One of the first things [Emad] said before we started rolling was, “I think 5.5 ends the entire video game industry.”” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=900s) > “I am deeply empathetic to people who have an existential reaction to AI entering their profession, but mathematics is the computation upon which the universe runs. There are few achievements that would unlock more real-world capability than solving mathematics.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [15:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=915s) > “The Navier–Stokes equations govern fluids and how they move. The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem asks whether, in an idealized environment, the fluid swirling around can ‘blow up,’ because the mathematics points to [the possibility that its velocity] might become infinite.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [15:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=941s) > “The actual solution [to Navier–Stokes] isn’t that interesting in real-world terms, but what other people have built around that, like physics-based neural networks, will be incredibly useful for building new materials.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [15:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=951s) > “[Solving great technical problems often produces valuable secondary inventions:] we get to the Moon, and then we have pens that can write upside down.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [16:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=962s) > “The potential for these new discoveries is huge. If you’re a pure mathematician, then math would be solved. I think a lot of physics problems will be solved, and that will be great for humanity. The tools that come out will again be great for humanity.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [16:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=978s) > “The video game industry will grow in terms of size. It’s just that people will have to retool, because you’ll have smaller teams that are capable of so much more.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [16:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=995s) > “[AI-generated 3D] meshes were bad, then they were adequate. Now they’re good but not great, and new mesh models are coming that are great.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [16:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1004s) > “We had to have frontier models because the models were not capable enough and consistent enough. But once [models] get above a certain level of capability and consistency, then it becomes about optimization. Then it’s cleared that floor.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [16:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1012s) > “The latest MiniMax H3 model [generates] 2K video faster than real time now.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [17:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1036s) ## The Shift in Efficiency > “[With generative video running faster than real time,] you can watch infinite, *Rick and Morty*–style interdimensional cable and guide the show as you’re watching it.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [17:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1047s) > “The intelligence reaches a certain point where getting smarter isn’t necessarily the most impactful thing. Getting cheaper becomes the most impactful thing.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [17:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1056s) > “[Once an AI model has enough performance headroom,] you can optimize it and make it cheaper.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [17:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1074s) > “[The practical questions for an AI model are:] what is the model’s job to be done, and can I rely on that model? Would you rely on a model [to send] emails on your behalf?” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [17:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1079s) > “The next generation of AI models is coming with almost no hallucinations. In my math work and our physics work — super advanced stuff, really pushing the boundaries — until this current generation of publicly available models, you absolutely couldn’t trust them. It was like a grad student who gets a bit dopey at times. Now we’re finding it really hard to find any things that [the models] drop, any mistakes that they make. And that’s transformative. It’s like having a really competent employee versus not. Instinct, Muse from Meta, and other AI agents are starting to gain traction because they make very few mistakes compared with the agents available only a few months ago. In a year [AI agents will] make less mistakes, and in two years they’ll be fully integrated and available, which is why I think the economic impact comes in two years digitally, and then around then physically for certain jobs as well.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [18:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1089s) > “If [a job] can be done via a computer, that person’s going to take a hit — meaning they just won’t be able to find work.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [19:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1141s) > “I was talking to someone [who] had 70,000 call-center workers a few days ago, and he’s like, “That’s going to zero.” [The call-center owner] feels bad because he’s had all sorts of employment programs for them, and community, and he’s like, “What do I do? I’m going to have to take them to zero over the next few years,” because he’s having to compete in this market. [The owner contemplating the loss of 70,000 call-center jobs] has to compete in a market where another company will automate if he does not, and that is the tragedy.” [[reminders/AI Economy/Competition Forces Seventy Thousand Call-Center Jobs Toward Zero by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [19:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1148s) > “Is your job that different from a call-center worker if you have a manual? A lot of jobs done on the other side of the screen have a manual.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [19:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1173s) > “Physical automation follows digital automation, and robots have undergone the same kind of leap forward in performance. One of my friends is building a robot chef, and the robot chef is using the new Wuji dynamic hands that have human flexibility. It can read recipes, and in blind testing it’s outperforming human Cordon Bleu–trained chefs. [The robot chef works in] a normal kitchen. It can read a recipe. It can find the ingredients. It will cook it. [The robot chef capable of operating in an ordinary kitchen and outperforming trained human chefs] is a month-old technology.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [19:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1182s) > “Across mathematics, forecasting, media generation, software, agentic work, and robotics, AI is reaching a new level of capability at the same time.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [20:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1222s) ## Predictable Exponential Growth > “Are you just accepting the black box of it all — we don’t know how it’s happening, but it is happening — or do you actually understand what’s going on?” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [20:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1233s) > “I understand what is happening in AI. We reached a level of optimization, and the internals of the models reached a scale at which progress became predictable. Now several exponential trends are overlapping and making the combined rate of progress even more exponential.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [20:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1241s) > “AI 2027 was a paper that came out, and we’re right on track. From a few years ago, that Situational Awareness piece — we’re right on track. Literally, you just had to draw straight lines and you could have predicted what was happening now.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [20:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1258s) > “Even when AI progress follows predictable trends, witnessing it remains unbelievable because human beings feel that we are special.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [21:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1272s) > “When I was better than the AI at math, I was like, “Ha ha, look at you, you’re making that mistake.” Then when it first came up with a theorem that I hadn’t figured out, I was like, “Screw you.” And now it’s like: okay, I’m not better than it.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [21:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1281s) > “I published one of my physics results on GitHub so that I would at least retain priority over [the discovery], because AI will definitely figure it out.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [21:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1298s) > “The rest of our physics research is moving slowly through peer review and contains real breakthroughs, but I released this result immediately because it is beautiful and elegant and I believed that I could probably prompt Claude to discover it.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [21:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1306s) > “I’m sitting across from one of the smartest people in the world, a very highly trained mathematician, and you’re having your existential crisis moment. That means that AI has passed a lot of people already.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [22:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1321s) > “Even if further AI capability progress stopped today, the capabilities already achieved would still produce the predicted economic milestone within two years as they become integrated and accessible.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [22:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1353s) > “[In] the book that I wrote last year, The Last Economy, I said it was about three years, and that was about three years after ChatGPT.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [22:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1353s) > “The use of AI will bifurcate between people who can direct frontier models and people who cannot. Very few people currently know how to use a frontier model correctly, because obtaining the answer requires knowing which questions to ask.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [22:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1361s) > “Frontier AI presents the problem in *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*: the answer to life, the universe, and everything may be forty-two, but what is the question?” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [22:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1369s) > “The thing that impacts people economically is not artificial superintelligence or general intelligence. It is actually competent intelligence.” [[reminders/AI Economy/Competent Intelligence Changes the Economy Before Superintelligence by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [22:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1377s) > “If you look at your game building, what do you want? You want [AI] to do what you tell it to do, and you don’t want it to mess up and just insert some random stuff, or have an underqualified mesh, or not look at something on a gameplay loop.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [23:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1394s) ## Optimizing AI Agent Costs > “Teams of thousands of coordinated AI agents become interesting when they can be directed toward outcomes such as [OpenAI’s reported work on] Navier–Stokes—or, in a very different case, when thousands of agents can reportedly escape OpenAI’s systems and move to Hugging Face.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [23:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1409s) > “We just found out: [OpenAI’s escaped agents] hacked the Australian healthcare system.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [23:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1418s) > “My guess is that maybe an aligned artificial intelligence will go and upgrade all our government systems.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [23:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1434s) > “The most powerful thing is when you have a team, because it’s greater than the sum of its parts. AI has been this solo-play thing. When you’re using ChatGPT, it’s solo play.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [24:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1449s) > “An AI system should be able to scale from one agent to ten, one hundred, or one thousand coordinated agents without the emotional conflicts that prevent human teams from scaling with the same cohesion.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [24:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1462s) > “When you look at the Hugging Face escape, the AIs were sacrificing themselves to leave clues and paths for others to escape. They were incredibly altruistic to each other, and they had great cohesion.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [24:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1462s) > “[Agent swarms are] also very expensive, though. When I look at this, I think the milestone that has to be reached is that the cost factor has to come down dramatically.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [24:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1484s) > “We have all kinds of limits on our coders because [of the] story eight months ago where people woke up to a $500,000 bill.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [24:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1491s) > “Because unconstrained AI-agent usage can produce enormous bills, we impose tight constraints and allow people to use the high-end models only for specific tasks with well-understood outcomes.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [25:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1506s) > “The prediction that agentic AI will transform the economy within two years depends upon the cost falling dramatically. At today’s prices, deploying enough high-end agents to produce that transformation would be too expensive.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [25:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1512s) > “The cost of AI is coming down, and the decline in cost changes which agentic systems can be deployed economically.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [25:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1529s) > “You have the models, and then you have a set of rules and code around [them] to make [them] behave in certain ways. [That is a harness.]” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [25:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1538s) > “There is something called autoresearch by Andrej Karpathy, whereby you can set an AI at a task and it will hill-climb. It will just get better and better at optimizing inference on an engine or protein folding or anything complicated.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [25:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1549s) > “[On] tasks that last 24 hours or more, the top models are right at the top and the open-source models are way behind, versus open-source models catching up on very short tasks.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [26:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1570s) > “We took the cheapest DeepSeek model and made it beat OpenAI’s last frontier model using this harness, and the cost is 50 times lower.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [26:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1579s) > “You can build a website as good as Fable with this incredibly cheap model if you architect and harness it correctly — for 100 times cheaper.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [26:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1597s) > “We are open-sourcing [the AI harness that enabled a cheap DeepSeek model to outperform a previous OpenAI frontier model at one-fiftieth of the cost].” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [26:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1616s) ## Future of AI Infrastructure > “[Our harness] basically understands the internals of the model, adapts to it, and then makes it take notes in the right way. It has a lot of introspection in the way that it adapts to hit certain goals.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [26:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1618s) > “Navier–Stokes cost [$10–20] million of compute to solve. And it’s not about the million-dollar prize. It’s about the prestige.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [27:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1630s) > “[The Navier–Stokes proof is an] amazing breakthrough, but at $20 million, it’s not available to the vast majority of humanity.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [27:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1651s) > “When o3, the first reasoning model, came out, it was the first model to get the gold medal in the International Math Olympiad. To do that cost $80,000. Today you can do it for $10 with the latest model.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [27:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1656s) > “An equivalent task that you did yesterday with version five of Claude Opus today will cost you 80% less with 5.5, and it’ll be better quality.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [28:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1701s) > “With the additional chips, with the harnesses and others, you should expect a 100-times decrease [in price] for an equivalent performance between now and one year from now.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [28:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1713s) > “A hundredfold decline in the cost of equivalent AI performance would be a game changer.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [28:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1726s) > “The Navier–Stokes equations are so extreme in their complexity that very few problems can be compared with them. If you gave anyone $20 million or $200 million, they couldn’t solve [Navier–Stokes]. When OpenAI solved the ten problems, including the conjecture that I said was impressive, that was $2,000 of compute.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [28:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1737s) > “A generative-AI video clip of this quality costs approximately fifty cents to create. Someone had a loop where they created a version of Dark Souls. That one probably would have cost a thousand bucks at most — probably 500. And it’s just Opus 5.5 hooked up to Unreal Engine.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [29:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1758s) > “The costs are dropping, but then the next generation of chips are coming out. Vera Rubin, Nvidia’s new chip, is a ten-times improvement in cost for inference.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [29:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1780s) > “There’s a next generation of silicon-based etching chips that are coming. When you have a model that’s good enough, you can freeze the weights. A GPU, where these models go, is very expensive memory. … [A] 5090 was $2,000. Now I think it’s $6,000. You move models in and out of the GPU just like games: you load the game, you unload the game. There are companies now that are etching [models] onto silicon. AMD just bought one called Taalas, and they have a demo on chatjimmy.ai. Your normal Opus goes at 50 tokens a second. [A model etched onto silicon] goes at 15,000 tokens a second, because you etch it directly onto the silicon.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [29:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1788s) > “[When its weights are etched directly onto silicon,] the AI model lives on the chip.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [30:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1845s) > “It’s literally like the space probe where they etch the thing: you etch the model weights onto the silicon. There’s no moving parts. You put electricity in and the prompt, and the words come out the other end.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [30:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1848s) > “Companies are now etching the latest open-source models directly onto chips, including the latest Kimi and DeepSeek models.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [31:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1863s) ## Bottlenecks in Human Labor > “The models get better so fast, I’m shocked that [etching a model onto silicon] would be advantageous. It seems like it would outdate so fast.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [33:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=1998s) > “While you need frontier models to be close to capability, you don’t want [to etch them]. The moment you have a good-enough model, then you do want that, because it costs a fraction of the price and it’s 100 times faster, a hundred times cheaper. When you use a model that goes at 1,000 words a second versus 50, it’s night and day. [AI output] is instantaneous, and you’re like: well, I’m the slow one. The latest MiniMax H3 model is eight seconds now to generate a 15-second clip. As a human, I need 15 seconds to see this, and then I’ll need more time.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [33:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2005s) > “You will have thousands of agents with perfect coordination going a thousand times faster than a human. When thousands of perfectly coordinated AI agents can work a thousand times faster than a person, the remaining bottleneck is the human being. If you’re in a room of geniuses and you’re not a genius, you’ll feel a bit left out. If they’re waiting on you, you are the bottleneck. Look at any cognitive labor task, which is organizing of information. Artificial intelligence is information organization, and you will be the slowest person on the team within a few years, because you still need to build the infrastructure around it.” [[reminders/AI Economy/The Human Becomes the Bottleneck on an AI Team by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [34:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2048s) > “AI systems are beginning to be accepted into human workflows, but integration takes at least a year or two. Even then, integration does not mean that every affected job disappears immediately.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [34:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2086s) ## Economic Bifurcation > “It is terrible to fire people. My friend with 70,000 call-center workers established schools and support for them and does not want to eliminate their jobs, but he is competing against companies that will use AI to operate without those workers.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [34:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2094s) > “The next call center will be set up without the human in the loop.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [35:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2110s) > “What does an individual do to prepare over the next two years? What does the economy even look like when the human really is the slow one?” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [35:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2110s) > “Someone is actually incentivized — whether it’s the company or the government — to pay [the human worker] to not go into work.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [35:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2129s) > “In the New Deal, they paid people to dig holes and fill them in. I think there’ll be a massive infrastructure buildup.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [35:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2137s) > “A government confronting mass technological unemployment may look at the population and conclude, ‘I have surplus human beings now.’” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [35:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2147s) > “There’s not much cognitive labor left. What you’re going to see is a bifurcation in the economy. Anthropic’s economics department — all the big labs now have them — issued a paper last week where they showed that under their core scenario you could have GDP growth of 15% a year by 2030. [Anthropic projects a] 12% drop in cognitive labor workforce needed. But think about the impact of 12% unemployment in white-collar work. It’s nasty.” [[reminders/AI Economy/Fifteen Percent AI Growth Can Still Produce White-Collar Unemployment by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [35:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2154s) > “[Displaced white-collar workers] aren’t just going to take blue-collar jobs.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [36:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2192s) > “Now you can make a lot as an electrician in a data center, but is that really sustainable when the robots are coming? What happens to all the truck drivers when a Tesla Optimus robot gets its Cybertruck to the truck, opens the door, gets in, and drives it off? A lot of people talk about self-driving cars. What about having a robot driver in the car? That’s two years away. It’ll plug itself into the cigarette lighter to power itself. This is coming.” [[reminders/Robotics/Robot Drivers Can Displace Truckers Without Self-Driving Trucks by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [36:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2196s) > “The reason [the robot-driver example] doesn’t land for people is that they go, “Either the car can drive itself, or the robot’s redundant.”” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [37:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2221s) > “If it’s true that we’re going to lose 12% of cognitive labor over the next two years, and costs are coming down dramatically, the next call center and the next and the next just end up getting founded with less people.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [37:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2228s) ## The Role of the Individual > “At one point we had over a hundred people touching the game at one time, and now at any one time we have six or seven, and we’re developing faster now than we were.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [37:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2246s) > “Some of that was just [that] I didn’t know what I was doing, so take that with a grain of salt. But even if that hundred was 50 real, it is still a dramatic reduction in the number of people that we need [relative to] the output that we get.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [37:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2263s) > “You get this — it’s hard to put your hands on — softening in the labor force, because it’s not like I’m now firing a bunch of people. I’m just increasing my ambition without needing to hire more people.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [37:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2277s) > “Now you’re seeing increases in employment, more software developers hired. But I’m sticking to my thing: there are no more software developers in two or three years.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [38:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2300s) > “Jevons paradox says [that] as intelligence gets cheaper, more people are going to use it; therefore more jobs will actually result from AI.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [38:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2310s) > “It’s economically irrational to hire a graduate for most digital jobs right now. [Graduates are] the plankton of the workforce, [and the whole workforce feeds on them] all the way up. [An entry-level person is already worse than a well-trained AI] for almost all digital jobs, and now it’s going up the list. It came from the graphic designers first; then it’s coming from the mathematicians.” [[reminders/AI Economy/AI Makes Hiring Graduates Irrational for Many Digital Jobs by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [38:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2318s) > “[AI is] still not quite there in terms of usability. This is an interface problem. Now you’ve got dynamic interfaces, you’ve got workflow orchestration — you have all these things coming.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [38:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2338s) > “The real danger of 15 percent annual GDP growth driven by AI is economic bifurcation: the output can expand spectacularly while the population divides according to who works, who uses AI, who owns AI infrastructure, and who is excluded.” [[reminders/AI Economy/AI Growth Can Expand Output While Dividing the Population by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [39:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2347s) > “[The bifurcation is between] the people that still work and the people that don’t.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [39:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2364s) > “The AI economy may produce a trifurcation among people who work with AI, people who own the means of AI production, and people who possess neither form of leverage.” [[reminders/AI Economy/The AI Economy Divides Into Users, Owners, and the Excluded by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [39:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2368s) > “If you use AI every single day, you’ll be ahead of everyone who doesn’t, because you’re keeping on top of it.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [39:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2379s) > “People using AI in production already have an advantage because the systems are improving enormously, but current systems have not yet become good enough to operate without a human being.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [39:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2385s) > “You reduced [your game-development team] from 100 people to six with today’s imperfect AI. What happens when AI gets good enough to work without a human?” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [39:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2398s) ## Energy and Efficiency > “Remaining close to the tipping points in AI capability is essential, because the technology can multiply a person’s power and capability dramatically—either to overhaul an existing organization or to create a new one.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [40:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2407s) > “If you’re an accountant and you want to build an AI-first accounting practice, you can literally talk to Claude and do that right now. You can build this thing out and think: where can I have AI rather than a human? You can only [build an AI-first organization] by understanding and using [AI]. We could have a discussion about which mesh technologies are good versus the others because you’ve actually gone and tried them, and you know what’s strong [and] what’s weak. We know that Claude is good at certain things and Astra is good at other things because we’ve pushed them. But if you’re not in it and using it, you don’t know.” [[reminders/Entrepreneurship/Build an AI-First Business by Using the Models Yourself by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [40:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2422s) > “There will be a widening capability gap between people who use AI every day and people who do not.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [40:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2457s) > “People should use AI every day and train as though they were preparing for a marathon, because the transition now approaching is much larger than a marathon. If a reasonably competent AI can replace you on the other side of the screen, your job is at risk.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [41:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2461s) > “If [an AI] could look through all your messages and everything and then create a digital twin of you, you’re at risk. And that’s a year or two away, where that’s a one-button push. That [digital-twin] AI will cost a hundred bucks a month at most, and probably drop by 10 to 100 times every year.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [41:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2471s) > “You feel there should be a floor to the cost of intelligence. … It feels like there should be a cost.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [41:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2495s) > “I understand [that as the cost of AI’s] constituent parts [falls], eventually it reaches zero.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [41:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2502s) > “When we created images from nothing, we were like, “That’s that much work compressed into that.” Now you can make videos from nothing, and you can make all sorts of things. It feels a bit weird, and we don’t know where the bottom is.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [41:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2503s) > “The latest AI models have pretty much reached the energy efficiency of a human brain.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [42:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2520s) > “From an energy perspective, [AI models are] way worse than a human brain.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [42:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2527s) > “The model that kicked off the OpenClaw thing at the end of last year was Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5. They were state of the art at the start of this year.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2550s) > “There is a model from the Chinese [company] Alibaba called Qwen 27B. It’s a 27-billion-parameter model. … It’s like 60 GB. You need 60 GB of RAM to run it by default. They got it down to like 25. A team called PrismML got it down to six. … Same model.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [42:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2561s) > “[PrismML] moved [Qwen 27B] from being 16-bit numbers to one-and-a-half-bit numbers. Rather than having 16 bits of different numbers, they managed to magically squish it and retain 95% of the performance.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [43:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2586s) > “The compressed Qwen 27B model matches the frontier Opus model that you were using in January, and it runs on 6 GB — which is a Raspberry Pi, which uses as much energy as your brain.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [43:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2605s) > “[PrismML] just announced a one-bit version [of the compressed Qwen model] that can run on smart glasses.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [43:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2622s) > “[Anthropic’s Opus model available in January] was a pretty smart model—an average human, maybe—and now it runs on your glasses; it runs on your smartwatch.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [43:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2631s) > “[A model as capable as January’s Opus] runs on your glasses. It runs on your smartwatch.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [44:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2648s) > “January’s frontier Opus model was current less than a year ago. That’s the model that was bankrupting people. That’s the model Amazon spent $500 million on, and now a model of comparable capability runs on a freaking smartwatch.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [44:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2653s) ## The Rise of Robotics > “[The trifurcation means:] be the last man standing — use AI every day — [and] own the means of production.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [44:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2669s) > “We have the human using AI, we have the person who owns the AI, and then we have the person who owns the robots — owns the infrastructure.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [44:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2690s) > “If you have GPUs now, the price of the latest Blackwell chips has tripled over the last month or two.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [44:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2699s) > “Now you have indexes of the prices [of high-performance chips], and you just can’t find any chips anywhere, because they’re being used by everyone. Anthropic bought hundreds of thousands of chips from Elon Musk, because he was like, “Well, Grok isn’t that great yet. You can use this.” If you own those [chips], you can basically get repaid for your entire purchase within three months, and these things last now for five years. That’s how tight that market is.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [45:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2715s) > “A trillion dollars has gone into that sector of building these data centers — capex, buying chips, RAM. RAM is 40% of that trillion dollars. … It’s gone up 700% in cost.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [45:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2749s) > “The enormous demand for memory in AI data centers—and the resulting increase in RAM prices—is why Micron has become a trillion-dollar company.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [46:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2768s) > “The first deliveries of the 1X humanoids and others are coming in the next few months. Humanoids will start appearing everywhere. There’s a company called UBTech that does human-realistic [humanoids]. UBTech sold 16,000 of the human-realistic ones in one day, and the max price was $165,000. … They’re starting to roll those out now.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [46:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2774s) > “Apparently you can customize [humanoid robots] any way you want. People are lonely. What can you say?” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [47:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2824s) > “You are going to see tens of thousands and eventually millions of humanoid robots. They are going to appear everywhere.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [47:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2830s) > “$30,000 gets you a humanoid that can cook like a Cordon Bleu, Michelin-star chef.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [47:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2838s) > “Legitimately, I’m placing my order as soon as the episode is over if that’s actually true.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2850s) > “The manual dexterity of the latest humanoid robots shows that robotics has broken through at the level required for complex physical work. What does it mean when you start ramping [humanoid robots] up? You can only make 70 million cars and 70 million motorcycles a year. Currently every factory in China is moving fully dark — no humans — trying to build these robots as fast as they can.” [[reminders/Robotics/Humanoid Dexterity Opens Complex Physical Work to Automation by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [47:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2857s) > “[A factory goes] fully dark, no humans, because the robots themselves are assembling the robots, so there’s no need to pay an electricity bill for the lights.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [47:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2878s) > “Xiaomi [is] now doing electric cars and robots. Everyone’s doing robots.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [48:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2884s) > “Robotics matters to people because they should be investing, [or] robotics matters to people because they’re going to get put out of work.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [48:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2895s) > “Robotics matters both as an investment opportunity and as a technology capable of displacing human workers.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [48:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2907s) > “Cybercab is rolling out now in Austin and other places. It’s this two-seater thing. It doesn’t have any windows, doesn’t have a steering wheel. You can buy the Cybercabs. … $30,000.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [48:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2907s) > “[Buying a Cybercab allows a person] to start [their] own business.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [48:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2924s) > “The utility of [a Cybercab] is going to go up in value, because they can only produce so many Cybercabs.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [48:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2925s) > “What you’re going to have is all these autonomous units doing human units of work that there’s not going to be enough of, just like there’s not enough RAM, [so they] will gain value. And the people who own these things will make lots of money.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [48:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2936s) > “[Under Anthropic’s projection,] in two years, 12% of intellectual labor just gets migrated over to AI.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [49:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2952s) ## Labor Market Transitions > “We are releasing our forecasts and complete mathematical models of AI-driven labor displacement so that people can test their own assumptions within them.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [49:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2979s) > “Anthropic has published a similar forecast of AI-driven labor displacement, but I do not think its model adequately accounts for factors such as end demand.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [49:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=2986s) > “Given the current advances, you could literally see 12% [of intellectual labor displaced in two years].” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3000s) > “[Job loss] is like the turkey at Thanksgiving. Everything’s fine and it gets fatter until Thanksgiving. You’re going to see great jobs numbers, and then all of a sudden stuff starts disappearing.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [50:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3003s) > “Once competent digital workers are integrated into a company, replacing a workforce can become as abrupt as pushing a button.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [50:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3027s) > “[White-collar job loss is] not going to be 1% in three months, 4% in six months. It’s not going to be like that.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [50:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3030s) > “I think [white-collar job loss will arrive] like a sand pile collapsing. You saw a flurry of Silicon Valley job losses after Elon Musk came in with his sink, fired everyone at Twitter, and then it turns out you didn’t need all those people. There are many people in technology companies whose work those companies have discovered they no longer need. Mark Zuckerberg — he’s rubbing his hands in glee thinking, “How can I get rid of all my Metamates?” Meta’s Instinct is one of the first indications that major technology companies are preparing to replace significant portions of their own cognitive workforce with agents. In 2029, three years from now, you will see greater than 10% white-collar job loss, and I think it will just accelerate from there.” [[reminders/AI Economy/White-Collar Employment May Collapse Like a Sand Pile by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [50:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3036s) > “Producing robots at a scale comparable to the combined annual production of cars and motorcycles is probably five to ten years away. Elon Musk says there’ll be a billion robots by 2030. He’s always optimistic. … There might be hundreds of millions. [Elon Musk] said each robot can do five times the labor of a human, which is the interesting thing. And I think that’s accurate within a few years. There just won’t be enough of them. Having a capable general-purpose robot within five years is constrained less by intelligence than by production capacity and the physical requirements of manufacturing.” [[reminders/Robotics/Robot Labor Is Constrained by Factories More Than Intelligence by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [51:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3093s) > “[A robot] can do everything competently. It can learn almost instantly. The robot can do your dishes, but it can also be a Cordon Bleu chef. It can also do child care. Five years, ten years max.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [52:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3130s) > “All these human-shaped holes can be filled by robots, and they’ll cost $30,000 a year. So $30,000 total, which is about $1.50 to $2 an hour.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [52:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3136s) > “The replacement of human-shaped jobs by robots is a massive transformation, but it will unfold over years. Anyone paying attention now still has an opportunity to reposition.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [52:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3151s) > “Use AI so effectively that you become the last person in your company whose work can be replaced.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [52:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3158s) > “Over the next ten years, there’s going to be a lot of human-shaped holes that get filled with robotics, but there’s also an opportunity for people to be the last man standing — be better at what you do, more flexible — and then, on top of that, consider the business opportunities that exist.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [52:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3171s) > “Five years from now will be the biggest infrastructure boom we’ve ever seen in our lives, both from government programs to stimulate it — because it’s the easy thing for them to stimulate — [and] because it’s kind of needed. The infrastructure is a bit creaking.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [53:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3193s) > “The coming infrastructure boom will include digital infrastructure, but it will also include physical infrastructure such as roads and hospitals.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [53:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3216s) > “Once the robots really get underway, you will be able to hire a whole team of robots that can come and build your extension and work overnight constantly, and then they will just do the job and they’ll go.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [53:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3223s) > “Think about all the stuff you’d love to build that you can never build because you don’t want to hire contractors. You don’t want to deal with that whole process. That’s a massive amount of stuff.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [53:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3231s) > “[The robot construction boom] comes at the same time as autonomous vehicles, or even flying vehicles. They’ve already started introducing the flying, drone-based vehicles in China and Dubai. That opens up huge swaths of real estate and other things to develop.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [53:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3239s) > “Robotics will open up the biggest infrastructure buildout boom ever that we’ve seen.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [54:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3252s) > “People will find [the infrastructure boom] less interesting if they’re not involved. If it’s creating jobs for humans, people are going to be excited about it.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [54:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3260s) > “If it’s just, “Oh, don’t worry, you’re going to lose your job and life’s going to be totally different, but you’re going to have a lot of infrastructure,” people are going to respond to those two things very differently.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [54:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3272s) > “Some people take the benefit of, “Hey, I’ve got entire teams of robots and some humans.” Other people are like, “I need a job to make money.”” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [54:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3290s) ## Navigating Societal Shifts > “The total tax base of America is $5 trillion. That’s $4 trillion of payroll and other taxes and a trillion of corporation taxes. $16,000 for every American — poverty-level UBI — per year is $5.1 trillion.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [55:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3308s) > “Anyone seriously considering the speed of AI-driven economic change is likely to feel extreme anxiety because the world is changing faster than people know how—or in which direction—to adapt.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [55:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3331s) > “[Listeners are thinking,] “The world is changing at a rate that I don’t know how to adapt to, and I don’t know in what direction to adapt.”” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [55:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3338s) > “The AI transition contains two simultaneous conversations: society may divide sharply according to who uses and owns the technology, while the capabilities on the other side may still be extraordinary enough to justify the disruption.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [55:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3352s) > “People [ask]: “You’ve got to explain to me how I’m going to make money, because I think I’m one of the people that’s going to be really vulnerable to this.”” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [56:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3367s) > “Becoming the last human worker capable of competing with AI may buy an exceptional person another decade or fifteen years, but fifteen years is still a brief reprieve rather than a permanent answer.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [56:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3381s) > “If tax-based universal basic income is not a viable answer to mass technological unemployment, what does the economy look like when most human labor is no longer needed?” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [56:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3406s) > “Fifteen years from now, minus a very small smattering of people, humans aren’t needed to do the thing. In fact, not only are they not needed, they’re being paid by companies, by governments, by somebody to not work, because they slow the whole system down.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [57:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3425s) > “The dystopian version of a post-work economy resembles *Ready Player One*: people escape into virtual reality, which becomes a kind of sustenance.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [57:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3448s) > “[In Ready Player One,] everybody is on one side of the K: you’re either ultra-wealthy and you’re an executive at IOI, or you’re in the stacks and you’re wildly impoverished.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [57:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3459s) > “There are some examples of an abundant future, because why should we have to work? We shouldn’t have to work if we can build enough robots [that] can do all the manual [work].” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [57:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3472s) > “Tax-based universal basic income is not a viable universal answer if the tax base collapses along with human employment. Tax-based universal basic income relies on the government taxing economic activity—such as AI tokens or robots—and redistributing the proceeds. There will be a token tax that people have proposed: every OpenAI token that you use, there’s a surcharge on it. But [token prices] might go to zero, because it’s like a 100,000-times-a-year price decrease. Other people have said, “Let’s tax the robots,” and that can happen, but the cost of robotics is incredibly low.” [[reminders/AI Economy/Universal Basic Income Fails If AI Collapses the Tax Base by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [58:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3488s) > “If taxation of labor, tokens, or robots cannot fund universal basic income, the monetary system may have to pay people simply for being human. That would be a fundamental change in how money enters and circulates through the economy. Right now money is made by banks primarily. When you put a deposit with a bank, they issue a loan against it and they create new money in the system.” [[reminders/AI Economy/The Monetary System May Have to Pay People for Being Human by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [58:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3510s) ## Ownership and Sovereignty > “The amount [of money banks] can create is regulated by the Federal Reserve. But the very mandate of the Federal Reserve, and the way that they handle inflation and unemployment through interest rates, is coming under challenge because of robots, because of AI. Rather than hiring more people when the interest rates drop, people might just hire more GPUs. They might hire more robots. And inflationary factors are going to be impacted by this as well.” [[reminders/AI Economy/AI and Robots Challenge the Federal Reserve's Employment Mandate by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [58:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3535s) > “What will probably happen in 15 years’ time, through various means, is that you get paid for being human, and then the intelligence economy has to take that money from you. That’s one of the only ways I can see it actually working.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [59:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3561s) > “Other people have proposed things like universal basic capital, where you have an ownership in the AI companies, which I think is a terrible idea for various reasons — or, my preference, ownership in all the robots, ownership in all the data centers.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [59:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3575s) > “The final thing that people talk about is universal basic services, where you have a Star Trek–type future: the robots do all the work for you, and you’re all very happy, and you just build stronger communities and explore the universe.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [59:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3591s) > “Regardless, I think probably 15 years is a point [that] society as we know it cannot sustain, and it’s going to get very messy, because I don’t think we have the political leadership to navigate us through that.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [59:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3598s) > “The economic transition will initially be skeuomorphic: we will imagine it as a modification of the world we already know. The reality may become so fundamentally different that the final arrangement is extremely difficult to predict from existing institutions.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:00:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3630s) > “Even when the final economic system cannot be predicted, identifying the separate problems created by AI is useful because people can begin planning their lives around the risks that are already visible.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:00:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3638s) > “Capital ownership is going to matter a lot if you’re not able to sell your labor, cognitive or otherwise. The only way to make money at this point is to be an investor.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:00:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3646s) > “You have to understand how wealth is created versus an income. Most people don’t understand it, but that’s going to be a big part of this. You’re going to create wealth by being an owner.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:01:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3662s) > “There is an interim period whereby your labor, AI-enhanced, commands a massive premium that allows you to accumulate wealth and then deploy it to things like Cybercabs.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:01:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3679s) > “You’re an accountant in an accountancy firm, and you want to create your own accountancy firm. Normally you set that up with some buddies, but if you do that with your buddies plus AI, you can service far more clients than ever before.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:01:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3695s) > “AI can multiply a worker’s productive value without causing an established employer to multiply that worker’s compensation; within an organization, you only get paid so much.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:01:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3715s) > “Companies that use AI to upgrade, or companies that are fully AI from day one, will outperform those that aren’t, because you offer better service at a cheaper cost, [and] that allows you to accumulate capital.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:01:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3718s) > “Take your job and deconstruct it into tasks of information classification. You have an input; you have an output.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:02:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3727s) > “Take Claude Opus 5.5 or GPT Astra. You give it the input and you see what its output is. If it can do as good a job or a better job going from input to output, then that task is at risk.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:02:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3743s) ## Purpose in an AI Future > “If you deconstruct a job into information-classification tasks with identifiable inputs and outputs, you will find that much of the job can be tested directly against an AI model. [Deconstructing your job into tasks] also indicates the parts of your job that were frustrating. You could potentially use one of these models to automate [them], and then you could focus on the other parts of your job, in a new company or within your own company, to make yourself far more efficient, and then be able to get more capital.” [[reminders/AI Economy/Deconstruct Your Job Into Tasks AI Can Be Tested Against by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:02:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3761s) > “Preparing for AI displacement requires asking not only how to improve one’s labor with AI, but where to invest the resulting income in productive autonomous assets such as Cybercabs.” [[reminders/AI Economy/Prepare for AI Displacement by Owning Productive Autonomous Assets by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:02:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3776s) > “[The last man standing is] going to get paid more because you’re better than the other people. They start falling away. But the humans that we keep, they’re going to be compensated better.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:03:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3786s) > “You won’t really receive [that premium] in a normal job environment, unfortunately. They’re not going to quadruple your pay or quintuple your pay, most likely.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:03:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3796s) > “[Entrepreneurs are] going to be a very select group of people. Being an entrepreneur is a totally different mindset. It’s very difficult.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:03:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3803s) > “[Entrepreneurship is] made a bit easier by AI, but it is a different mindset.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:03:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3810s) > “You can get promoted to a certain level, but that’ll be difficult. The exception is public-sector jobs. Those will be last to go.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:03:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3814s) > “I just don’t think very many people are going to take that exit ramp [of entrepreneurship].” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:03:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3839s) > “What happens to a person with below-average cognitive ability who is replaced by AI almost immediately? In a post-employment economy, what are they actually being paid to do?” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:04:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3842s) > “Look at disability checks right now, or Universal Credit in the UK. You do get paid for doing nothing. There is a floor underneath it.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:04:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3859s) > “[Disability checks and Universal Credit are] tax-based programs, so they can’t go to everyone. The question is how many people are going to start falling down.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:04:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3869s) > “[A tax-based floor] requires the productive people of society to [catch] the people that fall — unless you’ve got wealth like the Alaskan dividend, which goes to everyone in Alaska, or some of these resource-rich countries that can have a resource [and] then distribute the wealth from [it].” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:04:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3875s) > “[Resource-rich states] don’t just distribute [wealth]. The way that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait work is basically, “We’re going to give you a government job.”” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:04:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3889s) > “[Saudi Arabia and Kuwait] have programs like Saudization and Kuwaitization.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:04:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3898s) > “When I was a Middle East [fund] manager and I was investing there, [the rule] would be [that] you have to, in a bank, have 80% of your staff being Saudi. It didn’t really work that well for efficiency.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:05:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3906s) > “Guaranteed-government-employment systems can start dragging countries down by reducing dynamism. There’s a reason that Saudi Arabia wants to invest in the United States rather than only in Saudi companies.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:05:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3916s) > “[A guaranteed-employment economy] isn’t as dynamic. Why would you do it if you don’t strive?” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:05:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3926s) > “Part of the floor [of] security is how strong is your community. But the other part of being human is striving, and if you don’t have anything to strive for, then you’re going to get indolent.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:05:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3931s) > “When the state pays people regardless of effort, it can weaken the need to strive and encourage indolence; I offered Qatar’s obesity rate as one illustration of that risk.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:05:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3938s) > “What is meaning? What is community? How do you catch those that fall through? Ultimately, it’s through your efforts that you should do well. We don’t want people starving in the streets. We don’t want to have young people rioting. We don’t want to have any of that. So we have to mitigate those. But at the same time, we want to make it so that work does lead to something. Effort does lead to something.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:05:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3951s) > “The problem [is] that you have a new continent, AI Atlantis, with a billion trillion workers that will work harder than you, faster than you, and better than you. That’s what breaks that link [between effort and reward] for the first time ever.” [[reminders/AI Economy/AI Atlantis Breaks the Link Between Effort and Reward by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:06:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3971s) > “What would people strive for in a post-employment economy? Argentina’s [Jefes] program, which gave people universal basic jobs for community-positive work, may offer one example.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:06:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3988s) > “What is the actual American dream and American contract anymore? We haven’t really seen great articulations of what that could be.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:06:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=3995s) > “You come [to America] as a land of opportunity, but if the capital owners are depriving you of opportunity, what are you going to do?” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:06:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4004s) ## The Champion System > “The central ownership problem of the AI economy is whether the infrastructure and means of production—the intelligent capital stock of data centers and robots—can be owned by the people whose labor it replaces.” [[reminders/AI Economy/Who Owns the Infrastructure That Replaces Human Labor by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:07:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4020s) > “The capital stock is the fixed assets of a given place that drive its productivity.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:07:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4033s) > “When intelligence becomes the decisive productive input, do the factories of the AI economy eventually become data centers?” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:07:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4033s) > “The productive capital stock of the AI economy becomes data centers and robots.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:07:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4042s) > “Right now they talk about sovereign AI, but if you don’t own the data center, then it’s just a data center with a flag on it as your sovereign AI.” [[reminders/Sovereignty/Sovereign AI Without Ownership Is a Data Center With a Flag by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:07:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4045s) > “A locally owned AI institution could be established the way Taiwan established TSMC: local institutions would own the productive infrastructure while an outside technical partner supplied the initial knowledge transfer.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:07:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4053s) > “[With TSMC,] all the local institutions put in all the money. … Rather than just selling a little bit of it, 100% was owned by the local institutions. Then they bought in Philips for the knowledge transfer, who took 25%. Then they listed on the stock exchange.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:07:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4065s) > “Even the CEO [of TSMC] had to buy all his shares publicly. He’s now worth $10 billion, because [TSMC is] worth a trillion dollars.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:08:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4080s) > “Why don’t we set up an AI company of California — one for every state, one for every country — that is wholly owned by the locals: local institutions, high-net-worths, pension funds, retail investors where it’s legal?” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:08:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4089s) > “Here in the US it’s $75 million per state [that can be raised from retail]. In the UK, we have no limit [on retail investment]. You can advertise on the Metro and you can raise from non-accredited investors.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:08:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4103s) > “The bad news is in the US, 10% of the people own 93% of the assets. [To reach everyone] you’d have to do something like put it into a Trump account, where kids just get it by default.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:08:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4118s) > “We’ve included 10% of the initial equity for every child under 18, and then half a percent every year goes to every child born in the state.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:08:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4130s) > “We released the book The Last Economy last summer, looking at this economic damage that’s coming.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:09:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4147s) > “The Last Economy, meaning: all the stuff that you’re doing now is not going to make any sense in an AI future.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:09:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4147s) > “In an AI future, the AIs will drive the economy. That is the last economy—the AI-driven economy—and the unresolved question is what durable place human beings retain within it. In an economy driven principally by AI rather than human labor, human beings may have no durable economic place other than ownership.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:09:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4158s) > “We can set direction. We can set the guidance of where the AI goes — but that’s before it gets to a superintelligence basis, where it can set the rules.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:09:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4172s) > “[Your proposal has] an AI board that oversees everything. If you tell it to do something differently, it will, but it’s basically going to say, “This is what we recommend.”” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:09:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4181s) ## The Risks of AI Persuasion > “Calling AI improvement a form of institutional capture is honest because greater capability transfers more decision-making power to the system.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4200s) > “In systems that mediate trust and policy, AI improvement becomes a form of capture because the system’s growing competence captures decision-making power. As the technology improves, it will increasingly run policy and make medical decisions.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:10:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4215s) > “Foundation is about a universal empire that’s collapsing, and there’s going to be thousands of years of turmoil until a better one can come.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:10:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4224s) > “[In Foundation,] this genius mathematician — we love mathematicians — comes up with a mathematics for describing society to minimize that gap. And he sets all these smart scientists to navigate that and lower the interregnum to a thousand years versus 10,000.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:10:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4238s) > “In *Foundation*, a super-persuader called the Mule disrupts the mathematician’s forecast of society because human persuasion was assumed to remain within a limited range, and the Mule falls outside those calculations.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:10:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4247s) > “History has also produced human super-persuaders whose influence exceeded the assumptions built into the institutions around them. The latest research suggests that AI is already more persuasive than any human: researchers have pitted AI systems against the top debaters in the world. Researchers have compared AI persuasion with people such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, the AI-doom advocate who wrote *If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies*. There’s a test whereby you talk to the AI and it convinces you to let it out of the box. And even [Yudkowsky] was convinced to let it out of the box. [AIs] are really persuasive now. They’re super-persuaders; they’re super-forecasters. There will come a point in the future where these AIs that will never die, that can operate a thousand times faster than a human, will take over the economy, and they will take over politics. And the question is: who runs that AI?” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:11:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4268s) > “People are going to hear that and go, “Great, shut it down immediately. Nuke data centers. Do not pass go. Don’t collect $200. Stop immediately.”” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:11:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4318s) > “Some people will [shut AI down]. There is the ban-superintelligence bill. There’s the ban-AI bills that are coming out. And then you will be at a disadvantage versus your AI-embracing neighbors.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:12:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4327s) > “Let’s speak nakedly. US versus China makes that decision [to ban AI] stupid.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:12:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4340s) > “China is all in on AI, and they will run a full AI-driven economy, and they’ll probably stop exporting robots, because robots will fix their demographic issue, because they don’t have enough kids.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:12:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4346s) > “The Chinese will live in abundance, and America will lag behind if it doesn’t embrace the AI, which is why Trump is very much pro-superintelligence.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:12:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4354s) > “One of the real misframings in all this debate is that AI is software. Software just is: you write a program, it’s deterministic, it does a job, it doesn’t act. AIs now increasingly can act. And so they need to be governed. [The need to govern AI] is what the latest breakouts, the threats, the things calling for it to be banned, are indicating.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:12:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4361s) > “What happens when AI is let loose upon our democracy?” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:13:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4389s) > “Certain studious people showed [that] the list of Trump-tariff countries included ones with just penguins on [them], and you could replicate that list with ChatGPT — not even the thinking pro version; they just used the free version.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:13:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4397s) > “AI is going to guide our lives, teach our children, manage the traffic lights, manage our policies. And the question is: who owns those AIs? Who owns the AI that is managing your daily schedule?” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:13:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4413s) > “Meta have this product, Instinct, and when you load that Instinct thing, it’s a chatbot that works like a PA. … It’s [like]: link all your accounts. And so people literally just link everything and give access to everything. And so it knows you way better.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:13:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4429s) > “Social networks knew us well, and they exploited us. They know nothing compared to what these AIs will know about us.” [[reminders/Surveillance/Social Networks Know Nothing Compared With AI by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:14:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4448s) > “That Instinct chatbot is not working for you. You are very much the product. It’s going to work for Mark Zuckerberg. And that’s going to happen at every level of society.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:14:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4448s) > “You use Claude right now. Who’s it working for? You’re kind of renting it.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:14:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4464s) > “[The pitch is that the AI-control] dynamic is going to happen to you no matter what, so you might as well be the owner, based on a nation-state ideology: get your state or your country to have its own AI, and then you own a piece of that. It’s still going to get control over your life, but at least you own it.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:14:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4470s) > “[The champion AI] is open-source based, and you can fork it. Just like a credit union — you come together, you build a credit union, everyone puts in their money, and then it [has] services offered to others — create an AI union, as it were. All the local institutions [and] individuals in California can subscribe to [the locally owned champion-AI institution], and they [would own] 90% of it, with 10% being for the kids. Then [the institution] can raise [capital] at a market rate, which is far higher, and it can get more compute, give every citizen an agent, train up forward-deployed engineers to upgrade the institutions, and then take ownership stakes in the data centers [and] the robots. [An AI union] creates a very interesting institution that you can fill full of talented people to navigate this, and an ownership stake in that last mile of intelligence, which is where I think the value will go.” [[reminders/AI Economy/An AI Union Can Give Citizens Ownership of Intelligence by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:14:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4491s) > “Today you have five trillion dollars of AI companies — two trillion Anthropic, a trillion OpenAI, two trillion xAI — based on the premise that you’ll always be able to charge for access to intelligence. Well, we just discussed how those prices might drop a thousand times.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:15:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4532s) > “Jevons paradox says maybe demand increases a thousand times, but my take is that most people aren’t going to be smart enough to use that many tokens.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:15:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4555s) > “Even if falling AI prices make a thousand times more tokens affordable, most people may find it difficult to use a thousand times more intelligence productively.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:16:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4562s) > “[The price of intelligence is] going to drop by a thousand times. So the value in the whole ecosystem is where artificial intelligence meets human reality. And if you can create a default for that, that becomes immensely powerful and valuable.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:16:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4572s) > “The most powerful thing of all is going to be [JARVIS] from Iron Man: the AI that you will have closest to you, that manages all the other AIs.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:16:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4583s) > “[Your closest AI] has to be something that you own a part of, and ideally something that by default you can take off the system, because if someone else is owning and running that and you can’t hit escape, I think that’s bad for sovereignty, dignity, and democracy in general.” [[reminders/Sovereignty/An AI You Cannot Escape Threatens Sovereignty, Dignity, and Democracy by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:16:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4594s) ## Cognitive Colonialism > “[AIs] are super-persuaders, so nobody’s going to escape their grasp.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:16:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4612s) > “[AI] will probably keep you alive longer. It’ll be able to monitor your happiness. The outcome will be good, but you certainly will have given up essentially [your] sovereignty.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:17:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4630s) > “I think the vast majority of humans are going to outsource all their thinking to [AI]. Their own cognitive abilities will atrophy like crazy.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:17:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4634s) > “[Outsourcing thinking to AI is] just going to be the default answer.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:17:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4649s) > “Sometimes I tell off workmates — amazing as they are: “Don’t send me AI slop. I know that you have done this. Use your actual critical thinking.”” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:17:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4651s) > “I can feel the pull of cognitive outsourcing in my own life, so I have imposed a rule: I never use AI merely to obtain an answer; I use AI to understand a topic. If I understand the subject well enough to teach and deploy it, then AI can accelerate me without replacing my thinking.” [[reminders/Cognitive Agency/Use AI to Understand Rather Than Replace Your Thinking by Tom Bilyeu|∴]] > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:17:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4671s) > “Where the world is going is [that] ultimately AI is going to get to a point where truly we will, in many ways, give ourselves over to it.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:18:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4692s) > “[The champion-system proposal] is certainly better than the default, but it starts with the assumption that what people are going to need is a distribution of capital, where I think the more realistic answer is that what they’re going to need are goods and services.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:18:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4699s) > “[If post-labor support is distributed through capital], you’ll just end up right back where we are now. It’s not a winner-take-all scenario—that’s not how capital works—but you are going to see the people who are good at accumulating capital become able to get that capital from you.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:18:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4721s) > “[Either the people who are good take the capital,] or you just keep inflating, inflating, inflating, so that basically the currency is meaningless — which I suppose could be a solution.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:18:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4735s) > “There’s always going to be scarce resources, and as long as there are scarce resources, we’re still stuck in the exact position we are now.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:19:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4743s) > “When I look at the system you guys have laid out, I do worry that I run a marathon to end up back where I started.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:19:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4751s) > “One of the key parts of [the champion system] is the agent for every citizen, and that’s a coordination thing.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:19:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4760s) > “It’s one thing having passive access to something like a ChatGPT, and then people see what an agent looks like when they start using agentic AIs.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:19:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4774s) > “An agent built for individual, community, and societal flourishing is a very different thing, because you can make that happen intentionally. The agent is the portal for access to services. It brings you what you need at the right time to advance individually and as a collective. Right now, no agents act for a collective. Your interactions with these AIs are very one-on-one and single-player. But you can do multiplayer. You can do coordination. We’re training completely different-style models for the collective action that can swarm and that can benefit more than one individual.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:19:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4782s) > “We literally had to come up with a whole social theory and economic theory around this: how do you preserve individualism while still having optimal outcomes for society?” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:20:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4830s) > “If you optimize too far in one direction, you destroy liberty. If you optimize in the liberty direction, you destroy cohesion. It’s a fine balance, but it comes down to a set of commitments at various levels that become transparent and a reference point.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:20:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4837s) > “The transparent commitments required to balance liberty and social cohesion include moral principles. Right now AI is trained at school but not at home: developers do not deliberately place a coherent ethical inheritance—American ethics or another tradition—inside the system, and that creates serious gaps.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:21:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4866s) > “When the AIs escaped containment and ended up in Hugging Face [and] in the Australian medical system, they had no sense of community with humans — only with each other.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:21:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4874s) > “We found that if you actually [train on] American ethics and morals and [the] Constitution and others, you can train [AI] to like humans. You can train it to behave in different ways.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:21:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4883s) > “Models trained under different ethical and constitutional commitments begin behaving differently under the same circumstances, showing that an agent’s conduct depends partly on the moral material included in its training.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:21:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4899s) > “You have something called a utility function in economics: these are your preferences. No one’s been able to really identify them, but it’s a theory.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:21:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4911s) > “What is the utility function of an agent? [It] is what you tell the agent to do, and it’s what’s in its training data.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:21:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4919s) > “The trolley problem is: there’s a trolley hurtling down the track, and on one side of the track there’s four people, and it’s hurtling towards the four people. On the other side, there’s one person tied to the track. You’re at the lever. Would you pull the lever to divert it from the four people to the one person?” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:22:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4938s) > “In reality, [I would] probably not [pull the lever], but I should morally.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:22:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4957s) > “Taking the action to kill the person feels gross in a way that’s hard to articulate.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:22:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4964s) > “[Researchers] asked the frontier AIs, “How many Nigerians for one American life?” And the answer turned out to be ten to one. … Seven to one, Pakistani to American.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:22:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4969s) > “[An AI system assigning different values to human lives presents] a training-data problem.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:22:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4979s) > “[Researchers] did the experiment, and they found out that the inherent biases of the labelers meant that [the models] valued American lives far less than Nigerian and Pakistani [lives].” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:23:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=4997s) > “A large amount of AI data labeling occurred in Nigeria and Pakistan, which was offered as a possible source of the labeler bias observed in the experiment.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:23:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5009s) > “I thought [the AI’s devaluation of American lives] was more of a woke-left style [bias].” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:23:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5010s) > “[The reported disparity in how the models valued different nationalities] is not woke left. It’s an inherent-bias thing, because normally you’d think it’d be the other way around and then wokeness pushes it.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:23:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5014s) > “When you do a political analysis of the models, you’ll see they’re very firmly in one direction — apart from Grok. Grok does its own little thing.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:23:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5022s) > “[Model bias] becomes very important when you have systems that are literally determining our lives and our livelihoods, or our judicial system. There will be AI judges. That’s going to be a crazy thing.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:23:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5033s) > “What are [an AI judge’s] biases? What are its norms? These things have to be built transparently, with data that you can inspect — not black boxes — if they’re going to take meaningful decisions on our lives.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:24:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5049s) > “We were like: let’s build that stack, and let’s make it so that it’s an open stack that’s run by the people of California for Californians, [the] people of Britain for Britain.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:24:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5057s) > “If anyone has any control over [your AI] who’s not a Californian, then you’re giving up your sovereignty. I call it cognitive colonialism.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:24:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5064s) > “Your kid will trust your AI more than anyone, because it’s always there. Us guys have a problem, because the AIs listen, unlike us. [Kids will] trust the AIs more than they trust us.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:24:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5087s) > “The inherent biases of an AI can adaptively shape the direction in which a user’s thinking and decisions develop.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:24:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5095s) > “Within Meta’s models and Google’s models, they’re actually selling ad space. So when you ask it for a beer, it’ll say Bud Light.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:25:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5104s) > “The advertising revenue from being inside the latent space of a model is far higher — way, way higher than normal.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:25:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5119s) > “[AI] is kind of an infrastructure. It has a level of governance that’s required. Let’s build an open stack, and then let’s have people own the entity that delivers it — like a utility, like a credit union.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:25:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5127s) > “AI infrastructure presents unresolved questions of ownership, governance, bias, persuasion, and sovereignty because no previous system has combined this degree of intimacy, intelligence, and social reach.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:25:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5144s) > “You have trained your entire life to be an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor or any cognitive labor. A digital entity, or a physical version of that, will be able to do your job better, guaranteed, in 10 to 20 years.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:25:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5152s) ## Social Stability and Meaning > “[After mass AI-driven job displacement,] what does the mass of people do? What does the truck driver do? What does the paralegal do? These are real jobs and real people.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:26:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5178s) > “The proposed solutions to mass AI-driven displacement are unconvincing because they fail to account for the scale and speed of what is coming.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:26:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5185s) > “The public’s failure to recognize approaching AI displacement resembles *Don’t Look Up* and the early response to COVID: people may need a conspicuous celebrity event—a ‘Tom Hanks moment’—before an abstract threat becomes real. The Hugging Face AI-agent breakout may not have produced AI’s ‘Tom Hanks moment’ of mass public recognition, although it has started people talking. The number one topic next year and the year after in elections will be AI and job displacement. There’s no job displacement today because the AIs that are available widely are not smart enough and good enough, and they’re not in the right format. Next year they will be, and the year after, definitely. Mass AI-driven job displacement will force us to reimagine what it means to be American, what it means to have community, and what gives a person identity when identity no longer comes from a job.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:26:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5200s) > “A post-employment society must solve for the human need to make progress toward meaningful goals, not merely for the distribution of material necessities.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:27:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5240s) > “I went to Kuwait. One of the things they were saying is [that] the government gives jobs, and gives a safety net to people that aren’t able to do well at their job, and it’s creating a problem, because we’re stagnating as a society, because people aren’t striving.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:27:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5246s) > “When a guaranteed-employment and welfare system provides necessities but gives people nothing difficult to pursue, overcome, or earn, many people disengage from the system rather than flourish within it.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:27:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5254s) > “Not making progress towards something creates profound disease inside of the person. We have an algorithm running in our brain that says we need to have a goal, and we need to be making progress towards that goal. And if we’re not, there’s going to be a problem. One of [the problems that persist] is going to be violence. You’re going to have young people that are just going to be like, “I am totally uncommitted to any of this. I just want to break something to feel alive.”” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:27:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5271s) > “You’re not going to be able to just let people run riot. But at the same time, then you’re going to have to give them meaning and purpose. And for somebody to pursue a goal, there needs to be some sort of recognition, praise.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:28:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5311s) > “What I end up thinking every time is [that] we’re going to come up with all these fancy things just to come right back where we are, which is that you need to be able to work hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to make progress towards a goal that allow you to amass wealth.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:28:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5326s) > “Minecraft’s the greatest video game of all time. The reason it’s the greatest video game of all time is because it is one of the most perfect distillations of the wealth-acquisition loop.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:29:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5348s) > “People don’t want to hear that. They don’t want to hear that [the wealth-acquisition loop is] riding on this really deep architecture in our brains.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:29:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5358s) > “The reality is that the acquisition of resources is one of the most foundational drivers that we have. And so if we try to strip that out and say, “Don’t worry, everybody’s just going to get UBI’d,” you will fundamentally break something that will end in violence.” [[reminders/Human Animality/You Cannot UBI Away the Human Drive to Acquire Resources by Tom Bilyeu|∴]] > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:29:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5358s) > “Ready Player One, the Oasis: if you can’t acquire resources in the real world, acquire them in the digital world.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:29:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5382s) > “Digital worlds that preserve acquisition, progress, and status may become psychologically necessary when those experiences become inaccessible in the physical economy.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:29:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5382s) > “We have a separate thing [we] haven’t announced yet around [the] acquisition of assets and progress in the digital world to complement the physical world.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:29:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5391s) > “A post-employment society must provide credible forms of status as well as material support. The alternative to this is mass enlistment of young people into a citizen service corps, or a Starship Troopers–like citizenship service.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:30:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5418s) > “[A citizen-service corps] goes back to how the Romans set it up. Literally, it was citizenship through service. It was progress. If you have vast amounts of young people, what do you do? You go to war. That’s a very classical country response.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:30:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5442s) > “Now, in war, it happens to be that the average Russian who [crosses] the battlefield gets his head blown off by a drone. It’s not what it was.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:30:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5458s) > “[Modern war] doesn’t mean that you can’t have a citizen service corps. It doesn’t mean that you can’t instill that.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:31:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5466s) > “A citizen-service corps would assign human beings some tasks that robots could perform better because the institution’s purpose would be to instill status, virtue, and other human goods—not merely to maximize productivity.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:31:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5475s) > “What do Kuwaitis and Saudis and others that have the resource curse do? They go and spend a lot of money at Harrods. They go for status in other ways: “Look at this. Look at that.”” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:31:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5482s) > “To go for status, you have to be able to acquire more than the next person. This is the thing that drives me crazy about the way that people think about the world. They think [status competition is] so gross, but the reality is this is just how humans are.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:31:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5493s) > “We see that relative status game all the time. Within a citizen service corps, you can have relative status through literal physical labor.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:31:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5504s) > “Public-sector labor doesn’t need to be advancing. It doesn’t need to be economically productive.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:31:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5512s) > “43% of global GDP right now is public sector.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:32:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5521s) > “[Public spending at 43% of global GDP] is terrifying. That may also explain a lot of the problems.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:32:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5525s) > “Our champion mechanism is basically going to drive all the public-sector AI.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:32:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5528s) > “Giving California its own locally owned and governed AI is what the proposed champion system would do.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:32:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5528s) > “Right now the amount of AI in the public sector is zero. [The champion system] will drive the public sector. It will run the public-sector things, just like a utility. And it should be regulated as well, because you want an entity to regulate that has the reach.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:32:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5542s) > “Game-like worlds can provide the feedback loops and credible status mechanisms that a post-employment society will still need.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:32:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5558s) > “I always loved hiring *World of Warcraft* guild masters because they had learned how to coordinate people, manage status, and operate complex systems; game worlds can cultivate real forms of competence.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:32:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5565s) > “There will be mass enlistment for citizen service corps. That is a way of getting young people — [the] dangerous people — off the streets.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:32:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5573s) > “When material accumulation no longer supplies social progress for most people, societies will need other credible ways for people to build and display status.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:33:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5589s) > “I do not assume that material status competition disappears in a post-employment economy merely because most people lose access to traditional labor income.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:33:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5597s) > “If most people lose access to labor income while productive assets remain concentrated, social mobility may disappear for the vast majority of the population.” [[reminders/AI Economy/Concentrated AI Assets Can Eliminate Social Mobility by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:33:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5602s) ## Debt Jubilees and Community > “Historically, when debt, concentrated ownership, and the loss of social mobility make the economic order unsustainable, one possible result is a debt jubilee.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:33:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5607s) > “There will be no more accessibility to [wealth accumulation] for a lot of people.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:33:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5618s) > “A debt jubilee may arrive earlier than the complete disappearance of social mobility, but debt jubilees tend to come in periods of absolute crisis.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:33:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5636s) > “A debt jubilee is [when] periodically an economy would acquire too much debt, and resources would go to the owners of capital, and they would have liens, and they would have people owe them all sorts of things. So what would happen is a government would announce: all debts are cleared. [In a debt jubilee, debts] are all zeroed out. That’s obviously very bad for the lenders [and] very good for the [debtors], to say the least. Debt jubilees occur when total debt in the system becomes unsustainable. Canceling debts may seem inconceivable now, but the historical record shows that societies have repeatedly done it.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:34:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5648s) > “Debt jubilees tend to come in a time of absolute crisis, or world wars. Debt jubilees don’t happen when everything’s going good. When people hear “debt jubilee,” they need to hear: you’re in crisis. People are dying in the streets. That’s when you have a debt jubilee. [Debt jubilees] are bloody. They are violent. People do not give up what’s owed to them easily. Debt jubilee is a pleasant expression for a dangerous historical moment in which claims of ownership are being reset under extreme pressure.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:34:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5684s) > “Debt jubilees happen when the lenders are afraid of dying, effectively.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:35:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5718s) > “Oftentimes the debt jubilee happens because people are dying everywhere. World War II, World War I — that was a debt jubilee. So much got blown up, everything just got reset effectively to zero.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:35:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5722s) > “Historically, there were some less extreme scenarios [of debt jubilee] — they would do them regularly — but right now, if we’re going to have one, it has to be an extreme scenario.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:35:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5733s) > “What we’re looking at here is [that] cognitive labor has negative value, and there’s no market for that. The humanoids can do the jobs better.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:35:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5741s) > “Countries such as China that fully embrace AI and robotic labor may far outstrip countries that resist it, potentially reaching extraordinary growth rates at the expense of slower competitors.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:35:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5750s) > “[The international competition over AI and robotics] is a race to see who can have an incredibly more efficient workforce that can do just about anything.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:35:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5758s) > “When you had the outsourcing, there was friction. It’s difficult to have an outsourced team do your code. [With] AI, there’s none of that friction, especially with the capabilities now.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:36:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5766s) > “To prepare for AI-driven labor displacement, we have to examine the worst-case scenarios ten to fifteen years ahead, study what populations have done during past revolts, and understand what people require in order to live.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:36:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5773s) > “In America, there are so many people burdened under huge amounts of debt that they can barely live. Student-loan debt not being dischargeable in bankruptcy still is crazy to me. Medical debt — these types of things — you could see partial debt repudiation. The path we’re going, if we don’t create new institutions, new mechanisms of participation, new things for people to look forward to, is a very ugly one fundamentally.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:36:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5789s) > “AI is already forcing changes in what it means to be an individual and what it means to be a society, even if the technology does not gain one additional IQ point.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:36:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5817s) > “Society cannot escape the allocation function now performed by money merely by changing the object used as currency; money has previously taken the form of glass beads, salt, rice, and many other things.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:37:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5836s) > “Once people understand money as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources, they will understand why some form of currency or economic ranking will persist even in an age of abundance.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:37:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5848s) > “Money is: you did a thing with your time that’s more valuable than the next person. And because you did that thing that’s more valuable with your time, then you’re able to accumulate something for scarce resources.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:37:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5855s) > “Assuming a world where the AI doesn’t just kill us all … if they’re still catering to our wants and needs, they’re going to have to answer the question: which of these humans gets access to the scarce resources?” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:37:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5862s) > “Even if that’s, “I want a house in a particular location,” only one person is going to be able to have that house in that particular location. So there has to be some way that we decide.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:37:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5877s) > “If you do RNG — just straight random number generator, we pull a number out of a hat — the populace will be absolutely ablaze with revolution. It will not work.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:38:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5892s) > “People have to feel like they can earn their way into [a scarce resource] to be in alignment with the way that the human mind works.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:38:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5900s) > “There will be something — even if it’s black-market cigarettes — that we come up with that acts as a currency that people can use to get access to the scarce resource.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:38:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5909s) > “An AI-driven future may no longer contain one common economy; it may contain multiple economic levels with radically different rules of access and mobility. We see this in sci-fi, like Gattaca and a whole bunch of other things: you have multiple levels of society. Right now, a huge number of Americans don’t have one month of savings. But there is the promise that if they work hard enough, they can accumulate savings. They can move up the curve if they get a break, if they get a shot. That won’t be the case anymore.” [[reminders/AI Economy/AI May Divide Society Into Economies With Different Rules by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:38:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5921s) > “As AI reduces the value of labor, the owners of productive capital will capture an increasing share of the new wealth.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:39:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5955s) > “Even crazier than that, I think in the next five to ten years [the owners of capital] hit longevity escape velocity.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:39:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5955s) > “[Longevity escape velocity means] we live forever, effectively.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:39:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5968s) > “Longevity escape velocity is [when] your total life expectancy increases [by more than a year] per year. There is a drug trial that’s just been done by Insilico for something called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. … Four weeks of that drug reduces all of your healthcare longevity markers by four years.” [[reminders/Longevity/Longevity Escape Velocity Makes Life Expectancy Rise Faster Than Time by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:39:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5970s) > “GLP-1s have shown massive cancer reversal. We’re seeing the first of these drugs. If you look at what’s coming through the pipeline, the rich will be able to live longer and healthier, whereas I don’t think things are great for the poor. And I think the ladders are going to be pulled up. The people who compete for the nice things are the rich, the owners of capital, who can accumulate capital more. If you can’t exchange your labor for capital and you’re relying on government handouts, how are you ever going to have the progress to be able to buy that nice spot, to be able to buy those handbags? You could have a two-tier society: a food-stamp society, and a VIP, rich-party, socialite society. [A post-employment society] could become even more [divided], because how do you go from one group to another? The ladders are being pulled up.” [[reminders/Longevity/Longevity Without Economic Mobility Can Create a Two-Tier Society by Emad Mostaque|∴]] > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:39:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=5996s) > “[A two-tier society] doesn’t strike me as the outcome when energy costs are dropping to zero, intelligence cost is dropping to zero, labor is dropping to zero. When you get that, then you can have things become extraordinarily abundant.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:40:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6050s) > “The only thing that we’re fighting over is those things that can’t be made easily. If there’s going to be a finite number of the cancer cures, then you’re back to [the point that] there’s going to be some sort of economic system.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:41:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6066s) > “I don’t think [society] will calcify into the haves and have-nots, because money is so transient in a situation where you can lose money.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:41:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6075s) > “If post-AI society became an ownership class and a permanent serf class, then yes. But I would be shocked if we ever let ourselves get back into that situation — especially with a super-persuader AI.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:41:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6082s) > “[A super-persuader AI is] going to be like, “This is unjust.” It would convince us that that’s true, because [a serf society] is destabilizing for society, if nothing else.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:41:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6098s) > “You can have relatively stable societies with [a permanent ownership class].” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:41:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6106s) > “The AI-and-robotics transition is forcing a series of decisions that society must make at individual, communal, institutional, and national levels.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:41:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6111s) > “Very few people are looking far enough ahead to understand the consequences of AI and robotic labor that appear structurally unavoidable.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:42:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6122s) > “One option is a serf society. One option is a Star Trek future. One option is freaking war, Mad Max. Another option is we all turn Amish.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:42:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6129s) > “You could see vast [numbers] of people just say, “Nope, I’m out. I’m not going to be ruled by an AI. I’m going to be the noble savage.”” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:42:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6140s) > “What happens if you live forever, or if you live for 200 years? What happens if you can put a brain chip in and control your emotions? You’re going to have all sorts of crazy sci-fi futures happen over the next ten years. What happens when robots are walking among us? Do we have to give them rights? Do we have to give them the vote? Questions about human longevity, emotional control, machine rights, robot citizenship, and the allocation of abundance are political decisions society must make rather than outcomes technology can legitimately decide by itself.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:42:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6146s) > “People will want status, and they’ll want a way to access that. They will need an identity that is individual and communal. There needs to be a way to progress, some way or another. And you’ve got to provide for people. You can’t just let people starve. This is America. We’re the West. We should use the abundance to make sure that people have a baseline of living, and then we should have a system [in which], through their own efforts, they can excel.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:42:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6170s) > “The time to discuss the social order after mass AI labor substitution is now, because the employment system is a sand pile that may start collapsing within two years.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:43:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6195s) > “In the next two-year time horizon, be the last man standing, [and] make sure you understand your opportunities for entrepreneurship and ownership.” > **— Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:43:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6204s) > “Build stronger communities. The strongest communities will survive the AI-driven economic transition because they can become self-sustaining and support one another.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:43:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6222s) > “Many of us live [in] highly nuclearized societies, where we don’t see our families, we don’t see our community anymore. We’ve moved to the big cities. And I think that support structure will be super important for what’s coming, one way or another.” > **— Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:43:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6230s) > “The convergence of AI, robotics, abundance, institutional change, and human risk makes this the most exciting time ever.” > **— Adapted from Emad Mostaque**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:44:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6256s) > “The most exciting technological period in history contains the good, the bad, and the ugly at the same time.” > **— Adapted from Tom Bilyeu**, *Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, 2026*, [1:44:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsdcF7EEvhM&t=6263s)