EP 15: What Happens When Everyone Is 28 Forever? Mike Filsaime on AI, the Singularity, and Surfing the Wave Instead of Fearing It

George has spent most of this podcast's run as the AI doomsayer — bug-out bag ready, be-nice-to-the-machines, waiting for the moment the robots throw the three laws out the window. So when he and Paul finally decided to bring an AI expert onto the show, they both landed on the same name without discussing it: Mike Filsaime.

Mike is one of the true OGs of online marketing — a top-five name whenever people talk about the originals — and over the last couple of years he's reinvented himself yet again, coding and launching AI apps at a pace that leaves George floored every time he sees it. He's also the guy who, in a mastermind over a year ago, looked George's doom-and-gloom in the eye and calmly said: every problem we create, we solve. Industries recover. New ones get born that nobody could have predicted.

This episode is that argument, fully unpacked.

Mike walks through the history of technological panic — the futurist in 1899 who declared everything worth inventing had been invented, the Bernie-Sanders-style outrage that the automobile would put the horse-shoers and street-cleaners out of work. Except the car didn't just kill jobs. It created tire companies, leather manufacturers, headlamp makers, the interstate system, Route 66, roadside America, and the Michelin star (invented by a tire company to get people driving to restaurants). His point: humans don't get flattened by the wave, they learn to surf it. AI won't be different.

But he doesn't stay comfortable. The sharpest stretch of the conversation is about the danger nobody can regulate — China open-sourcing frontier-quality models and handing out the weights under an MIT license, which Mike frames as giving away the nuclear material to anyone who can afford a $15,000 server. He gets into why that could be a deliberate play to make energy and intelligence free and detonate the trillion-dollar AI economy from the outside, and why the guardrails the West keeps adding just widen the opening.

Then it goes properly big-picture. Mike lays out the difference between AGI, superintelligence, and the singularity — the moment all knowledge converges and we solve math, biology, and aging at once. Which leads to the question that gives this episode its strangest edge: what happens to a civilization when nobody dies? When reverse-aging arrives and everyone's walking around in a 28-year-old body? Do we ration the right to have children? It's the kind of thing that sounds like science fiction until Mike reminds you it