“AI is bigger than the internet”How AI will change EVERYTHING Elon Musk Censorship | Marc Andreessen

I think the AI censorship Wars are going to be a thousand times more intense and a thousand times more important my guest today is someone who doesn't just keep up with Innovation he creates it the incredible Mark Andre trust me when someone like Mark who spent his entire career betting on the future says this is the next major disruption you need to listen from a political standpoint we should hope that we have rapid Technology progress because if we have rapid technology progress we'll have rapid economic growth do people care um and are people going to

be will to stand up for this and I think that that's what's required it's going to displace a lot of jobs uh some of those people will redistribute themselves by acquiring new skills other people will not this isn't something to think about tomorrow you've got to be prepared today so let's Dive Right In I bring you Mark Andreon Mark Andre welcome to the podcast awesome thank you for having me my pleasure now you've had a insane amount of success betting on where Industries are going so let me ask you what is the most radical disruption

that you see coming in the near future with AI you know I I just say like we're convinced AI is one of those sort of moments of of fundamental change um and you know in in our in the tech industry you know these come along every couple Of decades but they're not frequent um and you know this one is up there with the microprocessor and the computer and the internet for sure and maybe bigger um and so for for us in the tech industry this is a uh this is a I think a very very

very profound powerful moment um and of course you're already seeing you know a lot a lot of the um a lot of the effects that already playing out but um you know this technolog is that this technolog is going to change a Lot of things and it's going to be I think very uh very exciting and so for people that don't know you have a fundamentally optimistic view of AI of technology in general um do you have like from an investment strategy do you guys have a thesis on what industry you think is going to

be most advantaged by AI that you're trying to get into yeah there there are many so we're involved in in in many um there I would say there's some obvious slam dunk One since I would say Healthcare um is a slam dunk one I actually just I actually just uh happen to have lunch with Demis hbus who just won the Nobel Prize uh in chemistry for his work on protein folding um and not a bad lunch date yeah yeah exactly uh and um and he was kned this year also so he's also s sir Demus

um but uh you know he and his colleagues basically have this transformative approach that you know they they believe is going to lead to dramatic Breakthroughs in in in the development of medicine in the years ahead powered by AI um so you know Healthcare is an obvious one um entertainment um is one that I think is it's going to be extremely exciting what happens from here and again that's that's already starting to play out um and uh you know you're already seeing like just sort of incredible creativity being applied um uh to that and so

you know maybe you could kind of maybe bookend it by saying Those because it's kind of the most serious one and the most fun one uh but then look there's there's there's lots lots of other stuff um probably the single biggest question I'm asking right now is robotics um you know there's been the promise of uh you know kind of Robotics you know kind of saturating our society and you know everybody having you know robot robots in the home and you know everybody having you know robots to do you know to do everything Manual labor

and you know wash the dishes and pack the suitcase and clean the toilet and you know you know conceivably everything um you know the manual labor um you know kind of free people from manual labor and that's you know been a promise you know going back you know in science fiction it's been a promise for you know like 120 years um and um you know until recently we were no closer than we were maybe back then but you know you're starting to see very Dramatic I think breakthroughs um and I think uh you know sort

of like you had sort of drones that Now work like autonomous drones are like now a standard thing um self-flying self-piloting drones you know have self-driving cars that are now a thing and that now now work really well um and I think uh it may be you know humanoid robots and all kinds of other uh forms of robots um uh we have uh we have two of we have two Chinese robot dogs at Home um and yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we you actually have them at your house yeah yeah yeah so there's a uh

there you so you so everybody's probably seen all the demos remember there's this company bust and dynamics that has all these they always have these great demos you see you see these videos of these robot dogs running around but you know they cost like $50,000 $100,000 and then and that company never really brought them to Market um and so it never really worked outside of as a demo uh but there are now Chinese companies that have these things down to $1,500 um yeah and they like they're great they're great they run around they actually they

run actually quite quickly they can outrun you um they uh they do flips um they stand on their High legs they climb stairs um they can uh there's a version of it that has wheels uh that they can go like 30 miles an hour um Then that one can also climb stairs it locks the wheels and it's perfectly fine climbing stairs um so you know those are really starting to work and then uh you know humanoids are coming fast and you know Elon just had his demo day for uh the you know Tesla robots unreal

yeah and so those are those are starting to work you know it's not quite there yet like those were still tele operated there's still people in the background with VR headsets that are kind of Steering those and guiding those and helping those but but that's also how you train these these robots is you kind of have they kind of watch what people do and and then you train so I think we might be like actually reasonably close in robotics which would actually have a you know would have a very big impact and so yeah maybe

you could call out those three categories as obvious ones to toh to focus on what kind of timeline do you have for robotics when are we Going to start having that first round of people buying them and having them in their home I know elon's pegged it at 20 to 30 grand when yeah so the the big breakthrough um so so self-piloting drones were a very big breakthrough um and you know the the the the dominant ones on those in the global market are this company DJI which is this big uh you know company in

China you know but those now work really well and then there's American companies we Have a we have American companies that have you know I think even better technology um that aren't quite the same size yet but are really good um and so and that's a big deal like so you can you can have you know we we have drones now that can like fly between tree branches they can fly you know indoors you know they can fly you know completely autonomously through like by the way underground tunnels um and so those work really well

and then like I Said like self-driving cars um you know the whmo you know cars now are great um and you know people who use them have fantastic experiences and then the Tesla self-driving capability is getting really good um and um and so like so I go through those to say those are both robots um you know flying robot driving robot um and so walking robot all of a sudden is not so crazy um exact timing I don't know you know I you know Swag five years but you know could be two could be Eight

I don't know optimistically three or four um you know the the prom the promise you know there's many many possible form factors for these things right um designs the the this the theory of humanoid robots which I believe is the the great thing about humanoid robots is there's just there's so much of the physical world that assumes that there's a person present right so person standing in an assembly line person driving a car person driving a tractor Person you know picking you know you know picking picking uh you know uh you know vegetables in a

field there there's just all the all these systems um uh you know that we have that just assume there's a person and so if you build a robot in the shape of a person in theory it can just kind of you know it can kind of you know fill in and do all that work um and so that you know that that should be a very big Market um and and obviously people you know should be very Comfortable with that you know they'll they'll you know they'll they'll dovet tail you know really well into kind

of normal society but I also think there'll be a lot of other you know there you can you can package these things up however you want and so there will be lots of other you know kinds of you know there already are obviously lots of robots in the world but there will be you know more and more of different kinds and what are the hard Parts what Are the hurdles they still have to overcome that's going to cause it to be three four possibly eight years from now yeah so there's basically I would say three

big categories so there's the physical sort of controls the you know the actual physical you know kind of body and its ability to kind of control itself um you know and that's where if you look at like elon's demonstration the other night you can kind of see how how fast that stuff's moving um if Because if you watch like his progression of the other companies doing it they're they're getting much better um and so that that's just moving right along um then there's battery um Power um is probably still a fundamental limit um you know

because it's a it's a question of like you know how long can you actually like power one of these things before it has to recharge or do a battery swap and and that's still a bit a bit of an issue and it's it's hard to Make progress on batteries but um a lot of people are working on it um and then software is the big challenge um I think um and you know where where where we we would get more involved um and you know so this sort of this all the software and so think

about it like these robots have sensors they've got visual sensors they've actually got um like the the robot dogs have what's called lar which is sort of the light version of radar which is the same thing that's in the Wayo cars um and so they you know they've got sensors they can kind of you know gather they've got sound you know they can gather input you know from kind of all around them actually they they can gather input from their environment better than human can because they can see 360 degrees and you know they can

do depth sensing and so forth in ways that we can't um so they get all the raw data but then it's a process you have to you have to actually process that data you Have to form it into a model of the world you have to then the robot has to have a plan for what it does right and then it has to understand the consequences of the plan right and so you know I'm I'm I'm setting the I'm setting the coffee down on the table you know I can't set it down on somebody's hand

so so I have to set it down near the hand but not on the hand I have to keep it level because if I tip it I'm you know I'm going to scald somebody Right so like I I and then and by the way while I'm the robot while I'm sitting the coffee down the person has moved right and so I have to adapt to it right um or you know same thing walking through a crowd like I can't you know you can't have robots running into people um and so you have to have know

how they approaching how they're approaching that problem so if I think about when I saw the robots interacting with the people at the party is there an Underlying goal for the robot to be likable and is it like hey get to know people uh try to charm them what what is the plan that they're giving to the robot that it's moving towards yeah so I mean in general if you're a company in general you want basically completely benign right so if you're a company you want because it's actually it lines up nicely with the profit

incentive you know you want friendly approachable you know think you know think you know Products that make people happy think products that make people comfortable you know products that aren't threatening or intimidating and aren't you know AR aren't hurting people and so you you put a really really big focus on fitting in the environment you put a really big focus on avoiding anything that would ever you know harm a human being um you know you put a very big focus on you know the robot should you know happily you know you know you know Should

happily you know whatever step into traffic or whatever if it if it if it's going to save somebody's life um um and so you know you want that and then yeah I think you know generally you want it to be you know sort of approachable safe harmless you know are kind of terms that get used a lot you know you know friendly now look this is the other thing is um there used to be this like really hard challenge which is how are you going to control these things how Are you going to talk to

them are they going to you know if you watch Star Wars they communicate and beeps and boops um you know if you watch Star Trek and you're watching you know Commander Data you know he's talking in English um you know up until two years ago we thought it would have to be you know beeps and boops but now we have large language models and we have these voice you know AI you know interfaces like you know open AI just released their advanced Voice mode and it's a it's a full you know it's like talking to

the Starship computer and the Starship Enterprise or you know a you know it's just like talking to a person and so all of a sudden you can give these robots voices they can talk they can listen you know they can explain quantum physics to you they can sing you a little Lai they can you know forecast the presidential election like you know they can do what they can now do whatever you want um and So that's that's the other part of it is that you know you're you're going to really be able to talk and

interact with them um the first one I saw the Boston Dynamics guys did this hysterical demo where they they wired up one of these early language models a couple years ago to their robot dog um and they gave it a like a super plumy like English butler voice um so it's like this like you know mechanical robot dog like stomping around but it's talking to you like it's Like it's it's like you're Bruce Wayne and it's Alfred or something you know it's just you know you as the robot dog what do you see and it

does like the very Plumb accit oh you know I see a lovely pile of rocks um and so yeah you're going to there by the way there's going to be enormous creativity um there's this uh startup we're not involved in um but I I like the guys a lot called CUO uh in Redwood City that basically has a a plushy uh so they have A stuffed animal um and um it's basically designed for little kids um and it's a voice it's a voice UI um and it it's back ended by a large language model and

you know it doesn't move it's just it's just a plushy with a voice box um but it will happily sit and tell kids jokes and teach them all about you know whatever they want learn about and talk to them about whatever is on their mind um and they have it you know really elegantly wired up where the parent the Parent can both control how the toy actually like what it's willing to talk about so you can as a parent you can like Define you know the topics that are like go zones versus no go zones

so you could kind of say you know let it talk to the kid about you know science but not politics for example um and then you get as a parent you get a real-time transcript of the of the interaction so like your kids's up in the bedroom talking to the talking to the thing and You actually get to see see the conversation right and so and it's funny when you when you watch this with like kids they just think this is like the most natural normal thing in the world right I've talked in the past

I I have a 9-year-old and I brought home um when chat GPT first shipped um you know two years ago I guess he was seven and so I uh he has a laptop that he does his some of his his school stuff on and so I set up chat GPT on his laptop and I sat him Down I was so proud of myself because I'm like I'm like I don't know it's like I'm I'm you know I'm coming down from the mountain to deliver like the gift of fire to my child like I'm giving him

like the super technology that's going to be with him his whole life that's going to answer any question and help him with all his work and this like the most amazing gift of technology I could give him and I I I showed him chat GPT and I said you know you type in any Question you want and then it answers the question and he looked at me and he said you know so right and I was like what do you mean so like this is like the Breakthrough this is like this is the thing this

is like the thing for 80 years we've all been working on and it finally works and he's like what else would you use a computer for like so funny like obviously it answers your questions right um and so like I think kids are Going to kids are I mean it's already happening kids are going to pick this up like incredibly fast it's going to be you know super normal um anyway so long answer to your question we have we have a we have a chance to design you know we can design technology to be as

as as friendly and helpful and accommodating and and supportive as as we can possibly imagine and I think that the commercial products will all get built that way for sure yeah to me that's where the biggest Disruption is going to be when I think about AI I think I'm as optimistic as you in terms of the things that it will do for us it's intellect you're going to be able to throw you know God knows how many new uh PhD Lev people and maybe one day even more at all these incredible problems all right that's

going to be utterly fantastic but then I think about uh your dog becomes a robot dog uh becomes furry and fluffy and wonderful but it also talks to your kids and helps Raise them and you have this lens into it and then all of a sudden it's well it's not just the dog it's I've got an AI girlfriend she's not really a girlfriend not like that well but then I you know I've been talking to her for three years and now robot body comes online and I want to put that AI into the the robot

body and all the sudden I I think that there's going to be uh a pretty fascinating uh to try to keep a positive Here a fascinating Schism that will happen in society so five years ago I wrote a comic book about this uh about what I think is going to happen and I think there's going to be a bifurcation in society and I I really think this is actually going to happen uh how big and how dramatic that that remains to be seen but I think you're going to get a subset of society that says

Nope not doing this it's like the opening line in Dune that thou shalt not make a mind an Artificial mind uh mirroring human intelligence or whatever the exact line is and I think people will isue AI they will asue uh neuralink and things like that and and they'll be sort of this new puritanical um vein of humanity and then you're going to get other people like me that embrace the technology I may not be an early adopter of neuralink but if it truly gets safe and it allows me to upgrade my abilities man I will

do that in a heartbeat and so then it becomes a Question of how much friction will there be between those two sides but those seem inevitable uh do you think I'm crazy about that or do you see that same inevitability and if so how does it play out I mean I think it's certainly a plausible scenario I think it's certainly logical I you know it certainly could play out that way I I I guess I my model of human behavior is different so I'm I'm skeptical I'm skeptical that that is what will happen And you

know I would just start by saying that there is a you know there is a schism of that like that in our society today and and they are the Amish yeah and actually grew up you know they were Amish near where I grew up and and um and uh you know and you know so so the good news with the Amish is they have a defined quality of you know quality of life they have you know a whole value system sort of you know involves you know rejecting technology For some by the way for some

very deeply thought through reasons um and you know they're you know by all accounts you know in many cases very happy and and by the way by the way they're also very fertile um uh you know so they're you know they're having lots of kids and so there there's there's you know there's actually think quite a bit to admire about what they do you know look having said that I would just say two things one is they are a very very very very Very small percent of the population um and so there's not a lot

of people who volunteer to become Amish and then um the other thing that happens if you track them in detail what actually happens is they don't reject technology they just adopt it on a lag um right um and so and basically the lag is about 30 years um and there been there's a bunch of articles that this over the last over the last decade where for example they're now adopting PCS a personal Computer really yeah yeah yeah yeah well because it's so I thought they were still without electricity no no no no they've got electricity

I mean you know they they can they try to control it but they definitely this is a great example they definitely have it right um um and then they have Tel they now have landline telephones um so there's just a there's just a there's there's there's a point where you just you know things just get to be practically so you know The PC so the PC thing apparently the articles that I've read basically what it is is the personal comp personal computer like you know they run these small businesses they they'll have like a you

know they'll do like handcar furniture for example that's like you know these amazing things well it's just a lot easier to run a furniture store if you've got a personal computer to do The Ledger and the inventory on it right uh and it's just and at a certain point They figure out a theory under which that's okay they they still don't connect it to the internet um you know but they that they do the they you know they they have the personal computer by the way that you know and then you just kind of say

inevitably the next step is they're going to want to sell their Furniture online and so it's just a matter of time until they figure out a way to bring in a internet connection right and so one of the really really Fascinating things about AI is it went from being something that was sort of speculative and weird three years ago to something that is now actually quite common already in use um and and and and and and this is quite a profound and powerful thing that I think we'll probably talk a lot about today which is

uh which is number one it's AI is already in in in wide use and so the number of users on systems like chat GPT and mid journey and whatever are already In the hundreds of millions and are growing very fast um and lots and lots of people are using these are using these things and they use them in their everyday life they use them for work they may or may not admit to their boss they're using them for work but they're definitely using them for work you know students are using them in school if you've

got like you know teenage kids like any any classroom in America now was grappling with this question of like You know is the kid bring in an essay that Chad GPT wrote um you know but they're helping with homework and and they're doing all kinds of stuff and the the usage numbers on these Services kind of reflect you know already broad-based adoption and then there's a really powerful thing underneath that that's really important um which is the most powerful AI systems in the world are the ones that you get on the internet for free um

or maximum 20 bucks a month um And and very specifically you know I have the capability if I want to you know I could go spend a million dollars to just have like the best AI I could go spend a million dollar a year if I go spend a million dollars year today I do not get a better AI than you get when you sign up for cat GPT it's literally not available I can't do it the best AI in the world is the thing it's on ched GPT or by the way Google Gemini or

Microsoft Bing or um you know anthropic Claude you know there or XX um you know grock the the xai one or mrr which is you know one of our companies or llama for meta there's like seven of these now that are like available either for free or for or at most for 20 bucks a month um and and they're the best in the world um and so it's actually quite shocking striking shocking which is the a lot of people have the mental model of oh well the best technology must be basically hoed by a few

people who are then going To Lord it over the rest of us and are going to make all the money on it right it's kind of the you know the kind of you know kind of always the fear on these things the the reality is like this technology is democratizing faster than the computer did faster than the internet did it's available to everybody right out of the shoot by the way it's getting build you know Apple's building it into the iPhone it's just you know now it's just Apple intelligence is Going to be a standard

feature of the iPhone and so this technology basically has gone from not present in our society to like almost Universal in one step and I and I just you know it it may be that people choose to voluntarily give it up but I I in my life I have not yet seen people who sort of voluntarily renounce something that they get used to so it yeah it it would be a first if it happened all right uh I hear that and you're the right person for me to have This conversation I love when dogs bark

the loudest because they're on a leash so you're going to be my leash I'm going to paint uh a scenario Mario knowing that you're going to pull me back from the brink cuz I'm fundamentally a techno Optimist and I'm definitely somebody that will Embrace his technology as fast as humanly possible we're deploying it here in my company as rapidly as we can I will literally if it's proven safe get neuralink the whole Nine if you've ever wondered what separates a good digital product from one that people absolutely love let me tell you right now it's

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can enhance your content strategy click the link in the show notes to start your free trial of clip anything so you can see it directly for yourself uh so here's what I think plays out um this is as close to the sort of realistic mess that I think we'll go through the long Arc of History bends towards justice but uh history does not care about any single generation and I think that the thing we will all have to Get very politically comfortable with is the fact that yes AI is going to displace jobs wildly as

we move towards something absolutely wonderful and spectacular but it's going to displace a lot of jobs uh some of those people will redistribute themselves by acquiring new skills other people will not uh and it won't be a great time for them and their families will rally around them as the material wealth is unlocked as spending power becomes more abundant all of that The the younger people that are more intellectually Nimble uh will take advantage of that to to care for people but there's going to be this conflict on the left and the right as to

hey shouldn't we just give these people Ubi or whatever to take care of the people that are going to struggle because they are going to struggle and if people don't have a mental defense if they don't have a narrative that they can understand about how we weather that Storm I think they'll make very bizarre economic choices as you were talking um you're talking about deflation and people ought to wonder how on Earth given all the technological advances we've had over the last 300 years how is inflation still going up this seems crazy and the reason

that inflation goes up despite the massive deflation that technology brings is that the government gobbles It Up by printing money and oh boy do I have a personal bone to pick I Have no idea your take on the economy and how it intersects uh so I'll plant my flag and let you react I think that the you need to only look at the M2 money supply chart to see I mean it's just absolutely outrageous uh how much more money has been poured into the system completely artificially just generated uh out of thin air um and

that that is the inflation when we say inflation that's what we're talking about the inflation of the the money Supply in doing that the government doesn't have to get your vote on something they will I refer to and I I do not want to put words in your mouth but I refer to that as the government steals from you and then they force you to play uh the stock market as one standin for investments in order to beat uh inflation caused by them printing money and stealing from you um and I think that's deranging and

I think that the government has a moral obligation to Give people a non-inflatable currency in which people can at least Park their wealth so that the average person who does not want to play the stock market can just save like a a guy that is a janitor and he's just trying to get by and and take care of his family should be able to Sock away money and not have its value eroded over time uh through very conscious and poor in my opinion policies um curious to get your take on that if if if I

tell you that in any Given time you could have more or less technology change and then that that change would show up in economic statistics the way that e economists measure it as what they productivity growth which is a thing they measure it's a you know it's actual number um and so you know if you have if a society has you know 1% productivity growth that's super low if they have 4% productivity growth per year that's like super high let's let's let's call that The super ring and if you could ever get to eight or

10% productivity growth you'd have Cornucopia technological Utopia it'd be amazing every everything would get like super cheap and abundant super fast but like that modern societies go somewhere between 1 and 4% um would you say that we live in a time today in which productivity is uh growth and therefore technological change is running high or low um I think we are about to Unleash a ton of that productivity but right now I think that the government is siphoning off so much of that productivity that you get this Schism between The Young and the old so

the old I think are doing very well and the young are getting absolutely clobbered and so they don't feel it but if AI does what we think it's going to do then yes I think that we will um finally be able to unlock a lot of that but just take take the distributional part of it out Just because we'll come back to that but just take the distributional part out but just talk just about just the rate of Technology change like do do we live right now in a time of great of great technology change

or or low technology change the only great technology changes in AI so low okay and and then you'll you'll probably get the next answer right which is did we have faster technology change between 19 uh 30 and 1970 um than we do today or slower uh Much faster much faster yeah those are the correct answers and so the the met the metric on what's happened and this this actually quite important is that productivity growth and therefore technological change in the economy was much faster in the decades that preceded the 1970s actually by the way the

turning point was the year I was born it was 1971 in 197 WTF happened WTF happened 197 yeah so there's there's a time there's a website called WTF Happened in 1971. comom and it it's just it's it's like literally hundreds of charts of basically this discontinuous change on all kinds of economic and social markers that kind of kicked in I was born I do believe it is entirely my fault I I will I will I will I will confess to that um but yeah one of the things that happened was right around that time productivity

growth downshifted um it was running at like 2 3 4% and then it's sort of been 1 to Two% ever since and it it it abs and flows a little bit with the economic cycle but like it it's been quite low for the last for the last 60 years um part of the dtail the political thing you were saying there's a lot of questions as to why it's been so low there's actually economists talk about something called the productivity Paradox because it it was weird because the computer emerged in the 1970s and so all the

economists in the 1970s said the Computer is going to lead to it's it's going to lead to Cornucopia it's going to lead to enormous productivity growth of course it is you you got mors law and you know it's just like it's all this software and all this you know inventory Just in Time Manufacturing and you're G to have you know by the way robots right um and so you're going to have this for sure you're going to have a massive takeoff in in productivity growth and actually what happened was productivity Growth uh actually downshifted and

so the the whole all of our expectations for how Society works are actually geared towards low productivity growth and low economic growth from a historical standpoint the importance of that is really key to the next thing that you said which is the psychological effect of being in a low growth environment is zero some politics right logically right because if if we're in a high growth Environment if the economy if if technology productivity growth is running at 4% or God willing someday more and if economic growth is running at 4 per or more the economy will

be doing so well it will be spewing money in all directions um everything will be going crazy crazy everything will be every business will be flush every consumer will feel fantastic jobs are being created all over the place everybody's kids for sure are going to Live better lives than their parents did it's going to be great by the way the 1990s were that right there there was this kind of fiveyear stretch in the 1990s where economic growth really took off and if you probably remember you probably like it was it was it was fantastic right

everybody felt [ __ ] awesome right um and so this is one of the kind of weird this this is why like a lot of the fears around the impact of technology I think are really misguided When it comes to all these economic and political topics which is from a political standpoint we should hope that we have rapid technology progress because if we have rapid technology progress we'll have rapid economic growth if we have rapid economic growth we'll have positive some politics right for for me to be bet in a high growth environment for me

to be better off I can go be better off I can go exercise my skills and talents and get new jobs And switch jobs and switch careers and do all kinds of things and I have a path and a future for myself and my children that does not require taking away from other people in a low growth environment all of the economics and all the politics go zero sum because the only way for me to do better is I have to take away from you right or or to your point the government exactly I completely

agree with you or what happens is the government just inflates And they and and they inflate because they want to basically buy votes they want to basically spend on programs and they want to buy votes um and so so this is this is sort of what I would say which is like if if you want zero some Poli zero some Smashmouth destructive politics with the government playing a bigger and bigger role you want low technological devel you want a slow pace of technological development if you want positive some politics where people are Thrilled and excited

about the future and about their own opportunity and they don't have to feel like they have to take away from somebody else and they don't need handouts from the government because they're doing so well you want rapid productivity growth right and so that you said I'm saying like it's it's the opposite of the fear that everybody thinks that they have um I have many other thoughts on your your question but yeah let me let me pause there and see Which part you want to you wanted to get to oh inflation let ask yeah so inflation

yeah so look I would just say two things on inflation it's actually pretty pretty interesting so there's an overall concept of inflation which is you said as growth of the money supply but the but the but the way that that plays out in the economy is and they actually analyze it this way it's it's basically a represent it's it's basically way they think about it Is it's it's the it's the basket of overall prices of everything in the economy and the the the government agency that calculates the rate of inflation uses a basket of sort

of equivalent products over time to try to get a sense of what's actually happening with prices um and so there's there's both the money supply aspect of inflation and the government printing press and and and all that and that's totally true but what's actually Happened inside that is actually because of differences in technology regulation you actually have an really actually historically unprecedented difference in how different Industries are actually inflating or deflating um and there's a chart that we can maybe post for your listeners that basically shows three really big important sectors of the economy which

are Healthcare education and housing where the prices are skyrocketing which and by the way Everybody feels this right this is just like okay you want to go buy a starter home or you want to get good healthare or you want to get your kid in a good school the prices are going crazy I mean the the the you know the you see this in housing prices of course another version of this is the you know higher education you know a four-year college degree at a private university now costs $400,000 and is on its way to

a million dollars right that's crazy completely Crazy completely crazy so the the the price of higher ed is just is skyrocketing it the the price of higher education bachelor's degrees master's degrees is rising far faster than the rate of inflation um and same thing as healthcare costs are rising faster than the rate of inflation and housing prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation but then you have all these other sectors and these are sectors like video games entertainment consumer Electronics by the way food cars which is good retail you know consumer products generally

um those prices are crashing right and so the things that you can buy today versus 2030 40 years ago for the same Dollar in those category I just you know take obvious take obvious examples music obviously music to buy music 30 years ago you had to go spend $15 to buy a CD and get 10 songs out of which you maybe wanted two of the songs today $10 buys you Spotify For a month and you have you know 10 million songs on demand and you can listen to it 247 and it's and it's fantastic right

and so the price of music has crashed right and so the price of housing education and Healthcare has skyrocketed the prices of everything else is crashing what explains that well the prices for everything that's crashing number one they have rapid technological change which is which is driving down prices because of Productivity growth and they're not regulated right nobody in the government is price fixing music right whereas housing education and um healthare are incredibly highly regulated and centrally controlled by the government right and and and and they have fixed Supply dictated by the government um and

they have very slow rate of technological adoption right it's almost impossible to get new technology into the Healthcare System Into the education system or into housing like the robots are not building houses like it's not happening right like it's just happening right um and so what we have actually in the economy is a diver I call these sort of the the slow sectors versus the fast sectors the the sectors for which prices are skyrocketing because of slow technology change and too much government regulation and the sectors where prices are crashing because of Rapid Technological advances

um and um and and and lack of government regulation and when you chart these out there's you can just like extrapolate the lines and so the the the where this is happening is you know within like a decade if the current PRS continue within a decade a four-year college degree is cost a million dollars right and a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall is going to cost $100 right and at some point you might Want to ask the question like isn't that backwards right right like isn't what we all you know is where

I get very emotional about this is like okay Define the American dream right the American dream and by the way for that you could probably substitute this you know the dream in many other countries but let's just say the American dream the American dream I want to I want to be I want to buy a house for my family um I want to be able to send my kids to a great School and then I want my family to be able to get great health great healthare right like those are like the three higher bits

and those are the things where we have wired our system is wired right now to drive the prices of those things to the Moon right and then good news iPhones and cars and digital music are plentiful but they're not Healthcare education and um uh and housing and and and this is the other thing that's driving inflation Right because then what happens is the the fast sectors of the economy with prices are crashing they're shrinking as a percentage of the economy right because prices are falling so fast and then because prices are growing so fast for

healthcare education and and and housing they're becoming larger and larger parts of the economy and so the economy r large and people's pocketbooks and how you spend your money it's being eaten by these sectors that have slow Technology growth and and and and and and therefore high price rapidly rapidly Rising prices by the way once again if you want to fix this problem what's the way to fix this problem you inject a lot more technology into those three sectors right you would want completely automated you know AI driven Healthcare you would want like AI education

you know every kid having an AI tutor um teacher um and you would want robust building houses right you you if you Wedged full modern technology into those three sectors you could crash prices which would also crash inflation and would cause everybody to be far better off and so once again it's this thing where you you think you don't want the technology to change you actually very very very much want the technology to change and if we don't get the technology change our politics for the next 30 years are going to be so crazily vicious

right because we're all going to Be fighting over this shrinking pie and we're just we're just going to we're just going to hate how we have to live so let me yeah let me pause do do you think the benefits of AI will be so overwhelming that there's just no way for politicians to hide the ball or uh will there be enough narrative in story and being able to Leverage The resentment that exists right now to uh continue to forall that continue to grow government keep it strong keep it big Yes let me give you

a micro answer and a macro answer so the micro answer so you the the doc workers strike that just happened um yeah so the doc workers just went on strike um uh and they demanded this huge raise they demanded a huge raise and they demanded no more technology at the docs uh they have this they have this actually this dichotomy of an argument they say our jobs are like so backbreaking and arduous and physically harmful to our workers that Like we need to be appreciated a lot more and we want you to completely ban the

introduction of automation that would basically Auto automate those jobs so that our our workers don't have to do them right and they they they kind of make both sides of this argument like at the same time because they're completely contradict but contradictory but that that's not their responsibility to resolve it but the doc workers go on strike um it it it it they were Literally asking for no more new technology at the docs um to to to preserve the the the the jobs it turned out through that I discovered I just had never looked at

that industry before it turns out there are 25,000 Dock Workers in the US except that's not right there's actually 50,000 Dock Workers in the US there's 25,000 Dock Workers actually work on the docs and then there's 25,000 doc workers who who just who don't work who just sit at home and Collect paychecks because of prior agreements Banning automation what yes whoa yes because in previous in previous bargaining rounds they cut deals where if there were introduction of like for example M graines to uh to to to unload containers from ships that those jobs would not

go away and so those jobs have not gone away there's nothing for that's crazy that is malpractice well so this is the thing so this is the thing okay so this is the classic thing on all These things is that good or bad well it depends who you are this is the there's a pol political science there's concept of of concentrated benefits and diffuse harms and so for those 50,000 Dock Workers this is great for the rest of us it just makes everything we buy more expensive right because it makes working the docs more expensive

right because it's got all this dead weight right loss on on on you know on chips which is a big part of the cost of like all the Food we buy is more expensive as a consequence of these kinds of Arrangements but you know you and I pay another you know 5 cents every time we go to the supermarket as a consequence of this versus the 50,000 people who are organ in a union right and are able to negotiate on their behalf right so so so so con so right concentrated benefits to the doc workers

diffuse harms to the rest of the economy and and every time you get a special interest group in the Economy pleading for you know this kind of employment protection that's what's happening right they're basically trying to create a cartel an employment cartel that benefits the people in the cartel at the expense of everybody else so here's the here's the the macro version of that is um 30% of the jobs in the United States today require some form of Occupational licensing you you can't just get the job you have to have some form of Certification that

you're qualified for the job this has been pushed to extraordinary lengths in the united in California you need I think it's it's now it's like 900 Plus hours of professional training to be a hairdresser right yes correct uh you need what yes you you cannot just like start cutting people's hair for money no no no no no no no that's illegal you need to have a whatever cosmetology certificate to get the COS Certificate you have to go to hairdressing school to do that by the way you have to get admitted at hairdressing school it has

to be a certified hairdressing school by the way guess who controls how many hairdressing schools there can be is the you know the current oh this is my favorite part let me give you my favorite example this so the university system so so federal student loans there's there's federal student loans for you to go to college For you to go to college you basically can't normal people you can't afford to go to college if you can't get federal student loans so you can't be a university or college or university in the US without having access

to the federal student loan program it's not possible um so but to be a College University that is able to get to give out federal student loans they have to be accredited um guess who accredits colleges colleges and universities the Existing colleges and universities yeah saw that one coming guess how many new colleges and universities there are crediting like yeah buiss zero right and so so 30% of jobs in the country right now require some form of license or accreditation by the way this is all do you know by by the way this is all

doctors and by the way I think that's good you probably want doctors to be accredited but it's also you know nurses Nurse Practitioners it's you know and Then it's and then it's it's it's not just lawyers it's also paralegals um and then it's not you know it's it's you know it's all kind General Contractors you know it's it's like and then and then on and on and on including depending on which state you're in including you know hairdressers and many other jobs where you would not think this is required by the way or another version

of this is teacher you know to be a teacher in a lot of places in the US now you need an education degree right is there any evidence that teachers with an education degree are better teachers than teachers without an education degree I don't think so by the way the education schools are completely bananas crazy you know you know they're the most crazy of like the academic departments at these crazy universities right but again it's it's it's a it's a cartel structure of course K through2 education is not just a cartel it's a Government monopoly

right so you you have to get actually hired into the into the well actually this is the other great part um you have um higher ed is like this there's there K through2 is like this and there's other branches of of the of the the federal Workforce and State Workforce that are like this or actually police and police like this you have quite a few people in the economy today who both have their government employees they have Civil Service Protections because they're government employees which means in practice they can't be fired but they're also members

of what are called public sector unions right so they both have to get hired by the government with whatever criteria they set and they have to get admitted into the public sector Union and they have the employment protections of both right of of both the Civil Ser service and the public sector UNS good right and this is why by the way you Can't fire like bad teachers can't get fired right because you me up so just so the point of that the point of that is AI cannot cause change that quickly in this system AI

cannot become a lawyer it's not legally allowed to it can't become a doctor it can't replace the dock worker it can't cut your hair it can't build your house it's not legally allowed to right and so a very large it goes actually to the gliber thing a very Large percentage of the economy as we experience it literally cannot be automated it's illegal to do so um and so I so ridiculous yeah and so I actually think what's going to happen is the economic impact of AI is actually is actually going to be very muted compared

to what people are fearing or hoping or fearing because it's literally not legal to do that it's crazy espe so if everything you just walked us through is true in terms of when you have high Growth everybody's feeling good uh more technology equals more growth AI is poised to bring that growth but you have this trepidation and so people not it's not just that but you have trepidation around it so the fact that the government tends towards this um justify its existence create a new regulatory body slow things down everything just grinds into a halt

for people that don't know the story of goiv travels you have this guy that encounters these tiny Liliputians and despite him being you know whatever a thousand times bigger than they are they they just end up tying him down with all these tiny little strings and uh it's a analogy that Elon certainly has used a lot what do you think about his idea of going in and creating a an efficiency program inside the government to try to free up some of these strings so that the economy can get going again yeah that's right so um

I give you a couple books if People want to read about this um so one is the Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch um just wrote a book I think it's called like I forget the name it's like over lawed or Overlord or something like that but he basically lays out the data on the number of laws in the country um and by the way this is another one of these WTF happen in 1971 things which is starting in the 1970s the number of laws and regulations in the US just took off like a rocket uh

Basically what happens the the lawyers took over everything um and by the way a big part of that is in politics that basically almost everybody now who's in elected office is a lawyer um right um and so basically the lawyers just kind of swept in and took control of everything and so if you and also Senator Mike Lee has also done a lot of work on this um if you and you can just count the number of laws and then you can also count the number of regulations Which if anything is even worse because they're

not even laws they're just like a bureaucrat who's decided something right um and the number of regulations is just like skyrocketed so he goes through it in the book and there's another book called three felonies a day um and it goes through in detail that technically odds are you I and every other American citizen are committing at least three felonies every day there are so many we just don't know It and we don't know it we don't know it and the reason is because there are so many penalties there are so many felonies on the

book on the books um and they are the felony laws are so sweeping um in in what they cover um now you know most of those never get detected or prosecuted but like if somebody want if prosecutors want to come at you they can can figure out ways to this is what people with lots of experience in legal system always tell you like if if the Feds want to get you they're going to figure out a way to do it because you're almost certainly tripping something um and so yeah so I completely agree with Elon

on the on on the nature of the problem like it it's just it just yeah and and again this is this this is sort of this weird it's this like concentrated benefit diffuse harm thing which is like each law or regulation isolation seems like a good idea um and each law or regulation has somebody Advocating for it because they're going to benefit from it and they you know and typically there's like some level of self-interest you know somebody's trying to get something for themselves and then they sort of have a cover story of like you

know consumer benefit or something um and then they get these things passed right and they you know operate in Washington and they get these they in the state house and they get these things passed and you know each one of Them on its own is not a big deal but you you run that process at scale over 60 years and that's when you end up with the Gul you know the Gulliver scenario which is you're just you're just drowning in laws and regulations and again I tie back to what I said before like that's why

the prices of healthcare education and uh and housing of skyrocketed is because that's where like the laws and regulations in the economy are concentrated all right let's talk About then the next four years so uh if Elon were to find himself in that position um do you think that we could meaningfully strip away red tape to the point that those that that scenario you painted where those three things we care about so much where the prices begin to crash or is that just unrealistic full stop is it unrealistic in four years uh how much can

we do so it it it could be done for sure um there is actually a case of it actually happening in the World right now which sitting here today looks very good which is Argentina um and so Javier Mele who the the new president of Argentina um has passed I I don't know the exact details but I think his first big reform package which was a real fight from to pass I think it was like it fundamentally was like I think it it took regulations out of I think 800 different sectors of the Argentinian economy

in one package and I they have a follow-up package they're working on That's like another it's like 2,000 or something um so he's he's trying to do exactly what you just described he's he's trying to just basically he's just like Melee m m this you know staunch libertarian um you know anti-socialist anti-communist he has this great line which he used the other day which I love so much um so Margaret Thatcher had the famous line about socialism which is she said uh you know the thing about spending other people's Money is eventually you run out

um M has a better term which he says he says anybody can be anybody can be a prostitute with other people's asses B that guy is a gangster he's hilarious which is freaking amazing anyway so um yeah no so he's trying to strip as much regulation out as possible and and the thesis of it is precisely this it's like okay you strip out regulation you remove government control you liberate the people you liberate the People to be able to exchange you know go into voluntary trade and exchange to be able to actually conduct business with

each other without the government interfering with it all the time and then as a consequence you get like far higher rates of economic growth fire far higher rates of prosperity you know and and so it's this is a big experiment and of course Argentina has been a case study for 100 Years of doing this the wrong way and and he's now administering A form of shock therapy to basically see if he can do it the right way and by the way sitting here today you know in very short order inflation in Argentina has you know

they've had a persistent inflation problem for a very long time he's completely nuked inflation um and economic growth has kicked in and job growth has kicked in um now he is fighting like you know he has enemies right he is fighting like crazy both in h the political system and rs in the Streets you know from people who are trying to stop this and and and so anyway so that goes to the so to you know to to our situation which is yes the theory is totally sound right like everything that elon's describing should should

absolutely happen um you know this should absolutely be done I I by the way I think basically everybody knows this should be done um like again concentrated benefits diffuse Farms even people who benefit from some aspect of This are suffering from it in every other area of their lives right and so that this this is what melee always points out is the system in aggregate is making everybody poor like is leading to all these like bad as you said it's leading for example to intergenerational conflict that's just like unnecessary and very destructive and so it's

just like let's just stop this form of self harm but to do that reason I say this to every single regulation has somebody Behind it who doesn't want it to go away right because it benefits somebody right it benefits the you know the Dock Workers who are sitting at home right it it benefits somebody right it's a all the all the little cartels and monopolies and oligopolies and little conspiracies in the economy like you know they they are in business because they're protected by the government and when you strip these regulations away you expose them

to competition and they Really don't like that and so there will be a backlash from the system from the from all of the you know the special interest groups in aggregate will Rebel uh in great numbers and then you know look the the the the the the key fight ultimately is the the Civil Service itself you know the actual government employees um right and so you know for example you know how about a reform where like there's actual performance metrics for government employees and low Performers get fired brother please if you want to get me

an a cult start a cult about that I'm here for that I'll do what we need I'll wear whatever crazy outfit I am here for that one yeah uh yeah exactly let me ask going back to Mele are are are the layoffs causing any sort of economic downturn because one criticism I've heard of Elon is hey if you come in and you do this and you slash it not only is it cruel but you're going to tank the economy you're gonna Have so many people without a job yeah yeah so that so yeah so this

this happens and by the way this happened actually um in um in the in the late 70s early 80s there was actually a version of this which is inflation in the US actually got completely out of control um and and and and and you know there was everything was kind of going sideways but inflation went crazy I think inflation spiked at like 15% uh and then Paul Walker which was super Destructive right um like really ruinously bad um like it destroys everything it destroys savings it destroys ability for businesses to plan it just it it

it's it basically damages damages everything and pul P and the way you crack the back of inflation is you raise interest rates um and you you deliberately cool the economy in order to bring down the demand for money and then inflation Falls um and so Paul vulker who was the chairman of the Federal Reserve who this famous guy he's like the 6'8 giant guy with with a cigar um and he was the head of the Federal Reserve and he lived in the he lived in the undergraduate dorms uh at I think Georgetown um and like

took the taxi to work so he was like in in contact with like regular people every day um even though he was like the head of the Federal Reserve in his three piece suit um and um whenever he testified to Congress if you see the old photos he's Just con just like giant clouds of cigar smoke around him all the time so one of these like old school figures and uh he raised interest rates in 1981 I think to 20% um um whoa which basically crushed the economy it basically like crushed a man in the

economy it meant that nobody could borrow money nobody could buy a house nobody could start a business it was like very it was very devastating in that moment but he he wrote a book about this and he said at no point like when He would like walk down the street people and people would recognize him this is in DC and he'd be walking down the street or he'd be in the cab he said nobody ever nobody was ever mad at him because what they said was inflation is so bad we we know that inflation is

bad we know that you have to do what you're doing at interest rates to do it we know if you do it you're going to fix the inflation problem and things are going to go back to to to being good again and So we support you stick with it and so he had he had the people on his side and and melee has the same thing in Argentina right now he has very high level of support from the population because they've seen the other experiment for too long they they've been through they've been through a

society with too much regulation uh too much corruption and too much inflation for for a long time and they're just like look the you know the people are Behind them you've SE it in the polls and you see in the Voting is they're just like all right we're going to we're going to try Plan B um and so so what you need is you need you need a politics of Plan B you you need a majority of the population to basically say you know look like whatever the pros and cons of the old system were

like they're not working and we need fundamental change and then obviously you need leadership that's going to um you know that's going To be willing to implement that but if if the people are behind it um you know then you can actually do that and so the fact that it's actually the fact that it worked under vulker um and the fact that it's working under melee is is very promising like those are two great examples of how it can work um you know we we don't yet have that but we could very very interesting um

when I start thinking about how we build back we get the economy going we take off the Gulliver strings one of the things that I would want to see is um one of the things I think we need to see is a return to prizing freedom of speech because if we can't debate these ideas if people can't get in there and mix it up and say okay I think this is a way no that's terrible we should be doing it this way but you know nothing being verboten like actually being able to discuss these ideas

that feels like a a critical need um what's your take Especially coming off the heels of talking so much about AI uh what's your take on censorship where are we culturally and what's ai's role going to be in either breaking us free from censorship or using that to really tighten down yep y so I should start with I am classic Gen X um I am 100% Pro free speech two of us I am 100% Pro free speech by the way the first you may know this the first amendment you know Guarantees the government at least

in theory is not supposed to censor us um although that's been happening a bit lately um just a smidge but the government also there's the case law around the first amendment that actually defines illegal speech and there are a bunch of forms of illegal speech and it's things like child porn and it's incitement to violence it's terrorist recruitment right and so there's actually like carve outs for you know That stuff and so like my my My Philosophy is basically we US law is actually very good on this and and US law isn't just us law

it's also an you know this has been litigated culturally in the US as well as legally for 250 years you know going back to the Bill of Rights um you know we we we we we we and our predecessors in the US went through a long process to get to where the first amendment is um I think it it therefore represents more than just a law I think It's also a statement of culture um and a statement of values and I I've always true right and I've always been an advocate that like the inter the

code for internet freedom of speech should basically be that it should be the first amendment with only limited carve outs for things that are truly dangerous uh you know truly destructive like I you know I don't want you know I don't want terrorist recruitment anymore than anybody else but like you know should People be able to talk about their politics online without getting censored 100% right full full range of expression 100% of course like it's the American way of course um and so I'm 100% on that um you know you you know probably as much

as I do about the last decade you know which I've seen up close which is you know generally things went very bad um you know the internet companies you know ran into a variety of you know externally and self-inflicted you know Situations where they ended up being a pervasive censorship machine uh for a long time you know the most dramatic change of that is Twitter before and after Elon buying it and we're by the way we're a proud member of of The Syndicate that bought it with Elon um and so you know I'm I'm completely

thrilled by thank you for your service by the way I to me it's just so better I cannot yeah I just can't believe that that was controversial it's crazy Y and As you know it was a big change like it was a it was an absolutely dramatic change um uh we're also by the way the main investor outside investor in substack um which I think has ALS has done a spectacular job at navigating through this and is you know is basically has come out the other side of and you know they're a small company so

when they pressure gets brought to bear on a small company it can really have an impact but though the the the the team There has I think done a fantastic job navigating to a real freedom of speech position and as a consequence substack has now the the full range of views on all kinds of topics in a really good way so so the good news is we have you know we have two two case studies where this has gone really well uh you know the the other ones are more difficult um here's what I would

say is I think the so the internet social media censorship wars were the preamble to the AI censorship Wars um I think the AI censorship Wars are going to be a thousand times more intense and a thousand times more important yes 100% um and so and and the reason for that is um you know the internet social media is important because it's what we all say to each other but AI is going to be I think the software layer that controls everything um it's going to be the software layer that basically tells us everything it's

going to be the software layer that Teaches our kids um it's going to be the software layer that we talk to every day um and you know as as I think you know there's already AI censorship like you know these you know a lot of these LMS are are very slanted um uh and um you know it's very easy by the way it's very easy to see because you can go on them today and you just ask them you know two questions about two opposing political candidates and they give you completely different You know one

candidate they're like I'd be happy to tell you all about his positions and the other candidate they're like oh he's a hate figure I won't talk about him and it's like wait a minute right like half the country is voting for one half the country is voting for The Other yeah who are you as an AI company to basically censor like that and so look the AI the AI censorship uh uh the AI censorship conflict is already Underway the war the war the information War around AI is already underway the by the way the same

people who were pushing so hard for social media censorship have now shifted their focus to AI censorship by the way a lot of the actual censors themselves who used to work at companies like Twitter now work for the AI companies so there's been like a direct you know just you know Lessons Learned and now applying it at a larger scale and so I think that um yeah no look I Think this is going to be a giant fight I think it's just starting I think it's you know maybe the most important I think it's maybe

the most important political fight in the next 30 Years tell me why in business Flying Blind is a recipe for absolute catastrophic disaster yet most companies are doing exactly that making decisions based on Intuition or outdated information if that sounds familiar let me introduce you to Netsuite by Oracle it's like giving your company x-ray vision letting you see every aspect of your business in real time it puts your accounting finances inventory and HR into one seamless beautiful system no more juggling multiple tools or guessing at the big picture this means you make decisions based on

facts not hunches success in business isn't about predicting the future it's about being ready for whatever comes netsuite gives you that Readiness download the cfo's guide to Ai and machine learning at nets.com Theory the guide is free to you at netsuite.com Theory again that's netsuite.com Theory well because it it it everything is Downstream everything is Downstream from being able to discuss and argue and be able to you know be able to communicate um and so if if you can't have if you cannot have open discussions about important topics you can't get Good answers let me

give you an angle on this I'm I am pretty sure we will agree about this the the thing about AI censorship that scares me isn't just the uh that person is a bad person and so I'm not going to um tell you about them it is that you can control the entire world through framing just how you frame something and everything has a frame and when you have humans with uh a desire to Convert the or indoctrinate um rather than seek truth then now the only thing thing I can guarantee is okay the the AI

is responding to me from within a frame they are using that to um nudge my thinking in a direction and it becomes a form of mind control and and if you've ever seen a dear listener if you've ever seen an incredible debater I promise you what you love about them is they can reject the frame and then put their own Frame on it and now they're arguing from a position of power most people can't do it most people don't even realize somebody just put them in a frame and they don't realize how can straining that

frame is and that's what really freaks me out is everything else felt more like it was out in the open like even when it was still Twitter and Twitter was being censored like crazy everybody was like bro this is so obvious like look you post about this Poof gone I post about this it's going to explode so when the Twitter files came out I don't think anybody was like wait what everyone was like yeah that's exactly how it felt um this will be a game of frame and really does come down to it's hard for

humans to determine what is true we were talking earlier about why is technology stalled out the reason technology stalled out in my humble opinion is physics broke somewhere around call it 50 60 years ago It just got hung up and it we haven't been decoding the real world that's truth now once you're able to make contact with that ground level truth new things are open to you and so that's my big concern with AI is that we will not be getting informed by what is making contact with ground truth we're going to be having the

frame set we're going to be taught as kids as adults as everybody based on the frame that matches somebody's ideology and that scares the Life out of me yeah it should I agree with that um of all the radical things that Elon is doing maybe the most radical is that he's declared that his goal and I say we're we're investors in it with him um but his goal for xai is what he calls maximally truth seeking um and if if you've listen to him on this what you know is he actually means two different things

by that that I mean mean they're the same thing ultimately but two two different angles One is maximum truth seeking in terms of actually understanding the universe and so to your point actually like learning more about physics but he also means maximally truth seeking in terms of Social and and and and political Affairs um and so being able to actually speak openly about having the AI actually be fair and Truth seeking when it comes to politics and of course that's you know that that that like that's that is possibly the most radical thing anybody Could

do is build a legitimately truth seeking AI um and at least he has you know he's declared the determination to do that um so you know there yeah there's a version of the world where you know he succeeds and you know that becomes the new Benchmark and you know and by the way open source AI plays a big role here um because people can Field open source AI to do this um without you know permission um and so there's a version of the world where AI Becomes an ally and trying to understand ground truth and

trying to enable the all the actual discussions and and debates that need to happen and then there's a version of the world in which it yeah it's a it's a it's a it's a orwellian thought control you know my my on it it's 1984 the novel 1984 was not written to be an instruction manual right like that was not the goal right uh you know it was supposed to be a dystopian you know future that we were Trying to avoid and so the idea that the machines are telling us what to think and that they're

that they're slanted and biased by the people who build them I yeah I I I find to be completely unacceptable but there is a I mean look we have that today most of most of the AIS in the world today are like that um and there's a very big danger and by the way those and again those companies people always people the people who are the most upset about freedom of speech They I think justifiably aim internet freedom of speech they justifiably aim a lot of criticism at the at the companies and I think that

is valid in many cases uh but I would just also tell you these companies are under intense pressure um and you know there's tons of activists that are very powerful um you know that are basically bearing down in these companies all the time but then also the government directly um and one of the things that has really kicked in in the Last you know 10 years is governments both here and in Europe and other places you know basically seeking to censor it control um even in ways that I I I think are just like obviously

illegal by their own laws um and you know that that pressure remains very strong and I I think if anything that that pressure probably is going to intensify and so I this for me is in the category of yes these are the right concerns and then ultimately this is a democratic qu a Lowercase D Democratic question uh which is you know do people care um and are people going to be willing to stand up for this and I think that's what's required why do so many people in society want censorship right now well well they

want censorship if it's on their you know they want censorship if it's on their side right so you know so so my you know my version of this is so when I when I you know I told you I grew up in the I wasn't Really part of it but I grew up in the middle of the sort of great Evangelical Awakening in the in the 70s and 80s and at that time the sort of Christian conservatives in the US were the you know the forces for censorship right and so the classic thing was it

would be like religious groups that would try to censor movies or books um and then it was you know it was the coastal liberals who would be arguing in favor of free speech right and so it would be you know Famously like the press the Pentagon papers they had all these about how great Free Speech was and libraries were saan that have free speech and they weren't going to censor things um so the censorship you know pressure was coming from the right in that era um and I my analysis of that is that's because at

that time um the right was culturally ascendent you know American society was much more overtly religious at that time and the Christian conservatives were Very very powerful from a cultural standpoint like they got to like write the textbooks and all these things um and so because they're because they were winning culturally they wanted to lock down speech so that they would continue to win and and the left was the counterculture right classically the left the hippies you know the 60s 7s ' 80s the left was the counterculture right um and the press and so forth

was the counterculture and they wanted to Challenge the dominant the dominant frame right and they wanted to disrupt the system right and so they were Pro free speech and then you know 30 years later it's inverted um where you know the left owns the universities they own the book publishers they own the media they own the Press they own the newspapers they own most of the TV stations you know they own the internet companies they own the you know they you know they they own the sort of these Commanding Heights of of society and culture

um and so now that they won and now that they're in charge um you know they want a lock down discourse and then the right has become it's adverted the right has now become the counterculture and so you know the censorship pressure comes to the left and then the right wants to open things back up if the right becomes culturally ascended again I would expect that polarity to shift once again right it it'll flip right who Whoever's in charge will not want free speech and whoever's the rebel will want free speech the principal position is

I want free speech regard it's just very few people sign up for the principle because most people are part of the tribe but yeah I'm I'm as was say I'm an old fashioned genx libertarian like I I actually believe in the principal yeah no me too for me it free speech is important because I um part of Thinking is speaking out loud having your ideas challenged uh also um facts have a halflife and so all the things that we believe um man a lot of them call it 30 40 years down the road we don't

believe them anymore we've realized we had an approximation of the truth but not the real truth the example I always use on people is Newtonian physics versus relativity it's like hey when we had Newtonian physics we thought everything worked uh we thought we Understood it and then we get to relativity and up actually you couldn't have had GPS with Newtonian physics so this was an update that was absolutely necessary and uh as we mentioned earlier we still aren't at Ground truth so we know that we're going to be revising that even further and if you

really internalize every time we get closer to ground truth it unlocks things for us then it's like okay I just want my ideas to be challenged and so I'll because I Um teach young entrepreneurs a lot I'm like look you've got to recognize that skills have utility and so the reason you want your idea challenge is you can actually develop a better skill once you realize oh I was wrong about XYZ thing I can now be right and that actually has utility in the real world lets me do something I couldn't do previous viously and

so when you lock that down now all of a sudden people get stuck you get stuck because you're not able to um have The best arguments thrown at your own idea it's uh that that one is is pretty TR traumatic to me now speaking from a position of utility Elon uh is somebody that has really demonstrated an obscene ability to get things done you have bet on a lot of entrepreneurs in your career you've obviously been very good at picking the best of the best what what is it that Elon does either in worldview or

action that makes him so Effective yeah this is in my mind this is the single biggest question I'm really glad you asked it because it's the single biggest question in the world right now like it's a single biggest question in my world right which is like okay how is it that he does what he does um and I would say like I don't you know there are people who have worked with him for a lot longer who probably understand this better but I've had you know an up up close kind of look at it For

the last for the last several years now and have come to really I think really respect it and I think understand at least parts of it um you know look it's the a lot of it um uh there was that famous text exchange and actually he's a friend of mine a wonderful guy pague um who was running Twitter at the time when Elon first kind of Tangled with it um and um uh and um he Pro is a wonderful guy and he had literally just become CEO like a month Earlier or something and so he

was just putting his plans in place when kind of everything every you know the hurricane hit but um you know there was exchange for prag is talking about whatever and it's the famous text exchange where elon's like all right [ __ ] it I'm not having this conversation anymore and then he's like he said you know what have you gotten done this week right and and what I realized when I read that was like that that is the Elon method like The the Elon method boiled all the way down is what have you gotten done

this week right and and and that's very important because at anybody who has ever been at a large company trying to do anything big the the big things happen over the course of years you know decades years months things don't happen in weeks like you know companies have like fiveyear plans right they've like you know cars take like seven years to design right like Rockets take like a decade uh fighter jets take like 25 years big software systems take five 10 years um you know any large scale effort anywhere in the economy we've just all

gotten used to this idea that things just take years and years and years and then you've got like processes and procedures and plans and this you know documentation and you know rules and structure and strategies and like Frameworks and PowerPoint presentations coming out of your ears You know Amazon's big breakthrough was to go from Amazon's big breakthrough this just go from having PowerPoint presentations to having like 15 page written documents that everybody reads at the start of a meeting which actually is an improvement off of a PowerPoint presentation but like you know there was that

El's like no I'm not doing any of that like I'm not doing any of that we're not doing any of that um basically it's we're going to like staff these Companies almost entirely with Engineers um I myself I myself Elon am an engineer um I am going to understand every aspect of every technical system that we're working on I am going to be able to be in all the meetings on everything from rocket design to database design at Twitter and everything else um I'm going to only talk to the engineers if I can you know

have you know possibly avoid it I'm never going to talk to anybody who's not an engineer I'm going to talk I'm Going to go I'm going to talk to the person who's directly relevant to the project I'm not going through layers I'm going all the way down to the company to just talk to the person who's in charge of this thing um and then basically what he does is he goes to each of his companies each week he identifies whatever is the bottleneck at that company this week and then he works with the engineers and

he fixes it that week so what happens is his companies Move so much faster than everybody else's like it's just like it's it's it's it's like it's like tortoise and rabbit like they they just move so much faster they're so much leaner they don't have all these layers um they don't have all these like systems and controls and processes and all this stuff um and but what they have is like many of the best engineers in the world who just absolutely love working with a CEO who understands the substance of what great Of what the

product is and then is willing to actually work with them hands I mean I've been in meetings with him at at X where you know he's in there with like you know 24y old engineers and they're just like they'll just like walk through a fire for him right because he's he's like their Idol and he's able to have a pure conversation with them and he cares about the work that they're doing and if they succeed at it he is going to love them for it and if they Fail at it he's going to be very

disappointed in them and it's just a completely different relationship than the CEO of one of these big tech companies has it's just completely different um he he does a um I was in I was I went to see him one night when he took over took over X and I was sitting in the sitting the conference room so okay so it's like 10 o'clock it's a classic El so it's 10 o'clock at night um and he's like yeah meet me at at Twitter at 10 o'clock at night I'm like fine I so I drive up

and I go in and um and uh I go to the conference room and it's it's Elon on his it's Elon on his iPhone uh doing email and there's a dog on the floor and I'm like oh and you know retrospect I was just like oh you know is that your dog and and and he looks at me completely dead pan he's like I've never seen that dog before in my life I'm like what is it just like the Company dog you know he burst out laughing because of course it's his dog um and then

he's like all right you know I want to talk but he's like I I you know I I I you know I need 15 minutes you know and he's like by the way you can sit and hang out if you want I just have to take a call um and he gets on zoom and he's on Zoom with the rocket Engineers for the Falcon rocket the Next Generation rocket in uh in in Texas and it's whatever I don't know 12 o'clock Their time midnight their time and it's just him on his iPhone on a zoom

call um you know designing the next rocket you know which is like probably the rocket that we just that we just saw work right um and he's like fully conversent in the in you know completely conversent in that and he he and the engineers fix whatever the problem is that week with the rocket he's like all right now we're going to go fix the you know the database you know here at Twitter um and And so he it's just like rinse and repeat rinse and repeat rinse and repeat do that every single week um I

I once offered him I once offered him a place where I thought he might want to take you know I like I know you're under a lot of pressure go go to this place for a week if you want because he famously doesn't own any house he he sold all his houses he doesn't own any houses so he stays at friends houses so I was like you can go use my house for a week and If you need a vacation you can go use my house for a week I got back five minutes later one

line I don't take vacations like I'm gonna frame an bronze that email right um and so this is what he does and he just does this at like an incredible ha rate of speed he doesn't tolerate anything that stands in the way of it this D and this by the way this is the same thing that drives everybody crazy right and so this was the whole thing on the you know this is this whole Thing he's in this you know big fight with with Regulators on like Starship launches which is like you know a normal

rocket company would take whatever you know a decade or 20 years to design a new rocket you know he's he's going to put out the Prototype as fast he can he's going to laun it and see what happens you know he's GNA it's going to explode in midair there's there's my my nine-year-old and I love watching the SpaceX rocket explosion compilation videos on YouTube they're hysterical because they just show these larger and larger and larger Rockets launching and exploding in midair and his competitors all the way SpaceX all the way SpaceX was on its way

up his competitors are like he's crazy he can't make rockets work see they're all exploding and what he was doing was he was iterating on the rocket design so much faster than they were and so he would run through five Rocket generations of which four would fail but he would learn so much that the fifth one would work and he would go through the five generations faster than his rocket competitors could do one generation and he's just like he just like [ __ ] it I don't care like of course some Rockets are going to

explode nobody's goingon to get hurt it's totally fine you know but a big company can't tolerate that because it's like headline news and everybody's going to Get mad yeah and so anyway it's just like this completely base level reality it's he calls it first principles you just you get straight to base level reality you get straight to substance you spend no time on anything other than substance and so so anyway like if if if you if you know like me if you're an engineer and you kind of see this you know I'm by training and

so if you kind of see this you're like oh my God this is like obviously the way that Everything should be run but if you see it from the outside it just looks so wild compared to all of these other large systems and rules that we've all gotten used to and and and and and and and therein lies the conflict what do you so there's a lot of engineers in the world and none of them are having the kind of success that Elon is having how much credit do you give to uh the the bundle

of traits that he must have you've already talked about several Of them just uh getting to first principal thinking moving very quickly but there's also something that seems I don't know him never met him but by things that I have read one of the early biographies there's just a level of this is not emotional for me at all it's uh the your assistant asks for this was in the original one of the original biographies on him assistant asks for higher pay or something he's like take a vacation for four weeks I'm going to do Your

job and see how hard it is if it's hard cool I'll give you a raise and if it's not you're gone and she'd been with him for like 15 years or something crazy and she comes back and he's like yeah it wasn't that hard bye and uh people were Gob smacked by that and I was like yeah I get it I get it how much is there something to that like is sort of you know if that were your friend and your friend treated you like that it would not feel good um But in terms

of proportion of his success his ability to just completely divorce emotion and just say this is either right or wrong for the project yeah look I think there's a lot to that um you know um by the way I think Steve Jobs had a lot of that it's just it's it's you know I mean there's a lot of ways to look at it um and you know people can have lots of views on this of course but you know substance you was the dichotomy Substance versus style um or substance versus social or you know substance

versus protocol like it's so easy to slide into a way of thinking and being which you are um thinking abstractly about things you are follow we talked about the go you're following rules that were established years ago most most big companies are what most big companies are you so our companies started startups and then basically what happens is generally what Happens is as they either fail or they succeed if they fail they go away if they succeed what happens is they succeed by going through basically scandal after SC you know crisis after crisis after crisis

I always I always describe it's like a process of like falling upstairs you just like constantly fall anding face into the stairs but you're gain altitude as you go and it's just like these companies are just constant internal crisis um and And the sort of normal response and by the way it's the thing that everybody in business is trained to do it's what they train you to do at Harvard Business School and Stanford Business School and all the books that they all the books and all this stuff all the CEO coaches it's like oh that

you know you go through a crisis you fix the crisis and then you put in place a set of rules to make sure that crisis never happens again right it's like the law the legal Thing we're talking about it's like okay that that by itself would be fine but you do that 20 times over 20 years and you have buried a company in bureaucracy to the point where it just basically right at that point it's it's a company primarily that exists to follow rules by the way rules that were in many cases defined by people

who aren't even there at the company anymore and so nobody at the company today actually even understands why they were there to Toby Luki has a version of this the guy who runs Shopify who's an amazing CEO he has a version of this which is it's like every what every year or something or every six months he just can't he requires all standing meetings to be canel taken off people's calendars and so all management use one-on On's planning meetings like everything just gets taken off and then he says we only put the meetings back on

where people are howling in pain because we don't Have them right but but you have to do but his point is and you have to do that over and over and over again because if you don't everybody's calendar just Creet meetings and then everybody's sitting in meetings all day long and nobody's doing anything right and of course anybody listening to this who works at a big company knows exactly what I'm talking about because that's the day-to-day life which is oh my God you know um I I I worked at IBM I worked On the other

I I've seen the other side of this so my first real professional experience was I was an intern at IBM in 1989 and 1990 when they were on top of the world they in as late as 1985 IBM was 80% of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry they were they were they were a giant they were like you know Fang combined into one company they were like totally dominant I was there 1989 90 right before they basically fell off a cliff and and and Caved in and so and so it had been 70

years of success no they had never had a layoff every by the way lifetime employment there were entire buildings full of people there who did not have actual jobs because you could God oh let me tell the story so I got TBM and my manager is kind of showing me around and you know I'm in this giant division in Austin building these sort of at the time what called workstations these supercomputers basically um and He's like yeah he's like look here's how it works he's like we we we're the development we're development and we have

the development building and we have like 6,000 people doing development of the product um and then and then they have what that's called they they call marketing but everybody else calls sales which is the the people who go sell the product and then he's like and then that building over there is is the planning department um uh and I was like oh I get It you know in development we up with ideas and then we work with the planning department to have the plans to be able to do it and he's like no we never

talk to them we will never visit that building because that's the department that we assign people to when we can't fire them right and so right by the way this is how of course public school systems work you know the the public New York Public School System famously has I think what They call the rubber room which is it's it's the it's it's the place they send the the teachers who are so terrible they can't put them in a classroom but they can't fire them and so they just have them sit and they do cross

puzzles all day right it's the long shoremen who are sitting at home right so so anyway so big companies develop their their own version of this um and and it just and and and it accretes um by by the time I got to IBM two things number one I there Was an app that they had that showed me the number of reporting the number of manager layers to be get to be the CEO so if I stayed at IBM and I want to become the CEO how many layers would I have to climb and I

was 12 layers below the CEO right which meant that my boss's bosses bosses boss's boss who was like the big cheese was still six layers down so so there was that but the other part of it was they had a formal process Of decision making they called concurrence um and concurrence was if you're going to make a decision at IBM in those days you had to make a formal list of every person in the company who was going to be affected by the decision like every manager every function and for any sort of product related

decision that was like 35 names on the checklist and it was like you know the sales heads of all the different regions and all all all this stuff and and and to make the To be able to get to a yes on the decision you had to get concurrence from every single person on that list any one person on that list could say the term I dis was it DEC concur I DEC concur was the internal term and DEC concur meant veto and so you needed 35 people to agree and any one person could veto

a decision right and so so so decision- making just simply stopped and this is why the company fell apart is because they couldn't make they couldn't adapt Because they couldn't make decisions right they they literally couldn't act and and they had 440,000 employees right oh my God on so on an on a on a on a on a time adjusted basis bis for the growth of the market it's it was like equivalent of today would be a million or a million two employees something like that so it's like a nation state way this is the

other thing is at IBM in those days I in those days you could be you could work there for years and you Could never you could you could work there for years and you would never meet anybody either at work or in your social life who didn't work for IBM right because it was so big right and so all of your friends so everybody worked at the same company the the metric the thing I always look at when I visit big companies is I always look for the signs um the signs in the parking area

and the signs in the buildings um because everybody who works at the Company knows where everything is and so they don't rely on signs and so when you go to a big company and there's no signs for what the buildings do it's a sure sign that they're losing touch with the market because it means they don't get visitors interesting right because they're completely insular um right and so anyway so this is the natural trajectory for all these companies just to end up in this state and and and and that's and that's the polar opposite of

The Elon method like th those that the barbell now to your point your example on the assistant like what so the big question is why aren't there more El and how do you make more El the second question is can you have a part of an can you have a partial Elon and so so one of one of the ways I describe this is um is there a unit of metric which is uh milons right um you know like millimeters right um so could you have Like 900 milons like could you have 90% of Elon

but maybe not 100% or could you have the 50% version or the 10% version or maybe just the one mill Elon right maybe somebody who's just a little bit more like that right it's your question like do you need the whole package or can people learn these techniques and and be this way even if they're not Elon even if they don't have his natural capacities and even if they're not willing to go all the way to where he Goes can they go part way there and I actually think that's an open question today and and

there there I would say there are shockingly few CEOs I know who are even asking that question or trying to figure it out now in theory in theory in theory like if you've got one in theory you should be able to have a thousand I there's a lot of smart people in the world like and and so this so here's the other example is what would it do for a Civilization if we had a thousand of them yeah I mean at the rate that he's producing now a lot a lot and what would what would

happen in our civilization if every single industry had an Elon right and so like it's legitimately insane yeah so that that possibility exists like you you can see it right um you know so it like find that very I find that very exciting very optimistic I I don't know if it'll go but I think that's one of the really big Questions in front of us right now yeah no doubt be interesting to see if anybody can pull those principles out uh in a way that's metabolizable by um other entrepreneurs the economy did we just dodge

a recession uh does debt make the recession inevitable and we just Kick the Can a little bit down the road what's your health check on the economy right now yeah so the way I think okay so let me give you a couple things on this um so number one I Differentiate between the United States and America I think they're two different concepts say more um I think the United States is the system it's the formal governance system so it's the government and all the stuff we've been talking about it's all the rules and all the

processes and all the procedures and we all complaint you know we all have our various complaints about it and you know whoever we are in the political spectr We've got all kinds of complaints about the government um but then there's America and for me America is the people right um and you know they're part and parcel the government and the people are kind of part and parcel of a country but like they are different they're not they're not the same thing um and you know we happen to be a very large country with a very

large number of very smart talented you know driven capable people um and then I you know I'd also Say my my my mental model of America is like we're just like a giant sprawling mess like you know we're just you know we're just like chaos like and we have been you know for our entire 250 year existence like we're the place people come when they're just like too orary to start out where they were you know they just can't tolerate it and so we you know we get the most disagre able people from all over

the world who come here because they get to you know they get to Basically be wild they get to do things that they wouldn't normally get to you know get to do and I of course I benefit from that because you know that's we get all the we get so many of the good Founders from all over the world who come here to do it because they don't think they can do it in the countries where they grew up um and so we're we're we are America is a country of like tremendously talented driven capable

ambitious people from all by the way From all over the world who have aggregated here and their descendants over many generations and you know we've just we've selected ourselves into the best we've dealt the best possible hand in terms of the quality of our people like you know it's just extraordinary what this country is capable of and and then most of what the country does is not done by the United States it's not B by the government most of it's done by the people most of it's done by by America um and you know you

know it's the old line of the business of America is business um which is this this uh this this old line from the 50s it's just like most of what most people do every day is they go to work and they try to they try to do things you know they try to do things they try to contribute they try to take care of their family they try to you know build their companies um they try to do a good job you know they try to build good Products um they try to take care of

customers and so um you know most of what people do every day is actually really productive and and and really helpful and then we're just the best ranked by that we're just the best we're the best country like we're we have the best combin you know we have the sort of we have the sort of rule of law of like an advanced Society um but we have less rules than like the European countries for example um and then we have like all The energy of a new country um right um because of all immigration and

because of all the talented people that we have and so you know we're kind of the we're kind of at The Sweet Spot of sort of a combination you know Big Country small country Old Country new country like we're kind of in that we're kind of in that sweet spot and so I go through that to just say like America wants to grow right the America the country the people we want to grow we want to succeed we Want to build great things we want to build businesses we want to we want to have economic

growth we want to have you know we want to we want to just like Shock the World with all these Amazing Inventions like we we want to do all these things we are held back in all kinds of ways by the United States but America wants to do that and so basically if the government isn't too much on our throats the economy will naturally just grow forever it it'll it It'll just grow in perpetuity in America will remain the best bet you know globally it'll just be the you know it's the it will remain the

best Market to invest in it'll remain it'll produce the best you know the largest number of high quality new companies and so forth um and so the theer the American economy wants to grow and that and that's what's happened which is you know we came out of Co and if you just like plot a chart of you know American economic growth Versus you know Europe and other countries it's just you know there we are We're Off to the Races and you know Germany's like you know starting to shrink you know and you know the you

know UK St you know a bunch of other countries like have severe problems they're not able to reignite growth the new UK labor government just had the the labor government just had a growth conference this week because it's now hit such a crisis point in the UK they Don't know how to get economic growth and so yeah our economy wants to grow it wants to it wants to do fine yeah we probably did we probably did Dodge a recession and that's just because the productive energies of the American people just you know kicked in um

you know it's it's it's all completely unpredictable from from here but like you know fundamentally I feel really good about I feel really good about America I feel really good about the the The the people and I feel really good about the engine that we have I believe that uh I forget who said it I actually think you know because I've heard you talk about this but inside of all of us is a god-shaped hole and that whole right now I think is having a Resurgence of people really trying to re-embrace religion uh from an

interesting angle that's probably outside of of today's purview what we're going to talk about but uh they have a need to fill that and You're going to get the question of the Soul so what's going to happen is you're going to get somebody like me who doesn't have kids and I'm going to raise an AI child that is embodied because why not I can rush through the terrible twos uh I can pause when they're seven years old for a couple years and just enjoy that whatever I can if I want to go to a movie

with my wife I can literally put them in the kitchen and shut them down like it's just all of the upside and None of the downside and then all of the sudden other people going to be like yeah that's dope and people are either going to be in relationships with robots uh romantically or they're going to be in a romantic relationship with a human but they're going to raise AI kids and you will literally at least for Pockets because there will be like the Amish or whatever there would be the sort of super producers who

keep their fertility High because cultural value Says yes there will be some that won't and so those cultures will hit an existential crisis based on that which I think will cause the religious element to really push and say you know this is an Abomination before God and we just absolutely cannot do it um so that's where I feel like huh there's going to be this weird tension and then if people are getting augmented with neuralink and obviously I'm talking these are 20y year time Horizons maybe 30 maybe 50 but this Is going to play out

for somebody in the not too distant future in my estimation and just to put one more thing in the mix you know very well that in back room conversations in the government people are asking questions should we be prepared to do air strikes on data centers because we are so worried about AI Breaking Free so there's already already this ambient anxiety about it you've got me talking like a Sci-Fi writer but it's it's a pretty plausible Scenario um how how do we stop that from happening or what is the automatic in the human mind kill

switch that will stop that from happening so so start by saying there's a lot in there and I would love to talk about every part of it um and by the way we should go as deep as deep as you want with me anyway on on the on the religion stuff and so forth because I I I agree with a lot of the I agree with a lot of The setup to the to the question um so let's see how to come at this so well look to start with I would say we have a

crisis of meaning already right um and so you talk about like pop you know talking about fertility right you know elon's been talking about this a lot lately but like fertility rates are crashing all over the world right and it's actually really striking what's happening right which is it's happening across cultures right um and so normally You normally when there's like something happening you know America or whatever Europe or Japan or something like you you generally analyze and you're like okay what's happening in American culture that's causing this or what's happening in Japanese culture that

causes this but like it's it's happening in all those cultures simultaneously is population CR growth is crashing here it's crashing in Europe it's crashing in Korea it's crashing in Japan it's Crashing in China and by the way like you know China Japan and Korea have very different cultures than we do and they have very different cultures between each other like they're they're really different like the Japanese and Koreans are like really different um and yet it's happening in in all these sort of advanced societies and so I guess I would say it's like we that's

sort of a pre-existing condition um you know we we just have that um and so that and that's Sort of a fundamental you know fundamental question we have this you know this question of meaning um right which you know the god-shaped hole which is you know a process that kicked off you know probably you know basically like 150 years ago that you know has been has been playing out and you know people have been grappling with that for a long time and you know as you know we've been through various phases of religious revivals you

know boom boom Bus Cycles with religions over the last over the last 100 years when when I I was growing up in the midwest in the 70s and ' 80s during the one of the Great ing so the you know sort of comeback of Evangelical Christianity and you know kind of born the born again you know kind of phenomenon so remember it well you know I've SE I've seen that happened um yeah so like you know I think that's all true that's all super important um you know and then look like you know Tech is

you know Tech obviously changes culture uh cult by the way culture changes Tech it's a you know it's a positive uh feedback loop different cultures you know react a tech in different ways let's see where to take it um I think the counterargument you know maybe the leash to put on it and I guess maybe I should start with if you don't mind me asking do you have kids yet I don't no yeah so one of the things um that I I to say one of the things I Find in my conversations with my friends

who who don't have kids and then have kids that that that I went through um and it's a little bit it's almost like a little bit I have these conversations with my k with my friends you know I work in Tech and a lot of people don't have kids or they wait for a long time um and I have this conversation where it's like the people with kids sound like pod people um you know they they they sound like they got the brain Fungus in you know the in The Last of Us or something right

it's it's like oh you don't understand when you have a kid Everything Changes right and and my like friends are like you know like what happened to you like what's wrong you know you sound like you're in a cult and I'm like no no you don't and and it's literally like that was me before I had my first kid right was like oh I I just whatever like I want to live my life I don't know whether I want this Additional responsibility but like basically I I think this is true it's almost Universal thing if

you talk to parents like when you have your first kid and you look in the kid's eyes for the first time and you know literally what you see like you know look in the best case scenario you know you you know we've got a blend you know literally a blending of DNA um and you know the person you know you love most in the world you know is combined with you and Then you know that you know the baby shows up with these eyes and the eyes look back at you and it's like looking at

yourself and it's like looking at the person you love the most in the world and it's like looking at this new Soul all at the same time and like it's like a it's like a it is it's like a psychological reset um and so that's just that's like such a PR it's it's it seems so Universal that parents understand that and non-parents don't Right in fact I have friends who are like I don't know that I want to have kids because it sounds like it changes your psychology so much like I'm worried it's going to

ruin everything I like about my life today and I'm like no no it makes everything better and they're like but you have to spend all your time with a kid and I'm like yes but it's the thing I want to do most in the world my friends are like well that's not what I want because I want to work all the time And I'm like you're missing out it's like you're you know you're brainwashed and right so so that's like a you know that's a thing um I mean look I I don't I I I

fully believe people are going to have ai pets AI friends they're going to have ai like all kinds of relationship with AIS they'll have some form of proxy children I I I totally buy that by the way that will probably be based on their information one of the things I think like for example your your your your AI You know kid is probably going to be a version of you basically trained on on on your own training data right uh well so the the concept actually that's that's starting to take off in the tech world

right now is What's called the digital twin so it's not it's not the digital kid it's the digital twin but the idea is you know look like for example I might I haven't done this yet but I might do this which is like I'm not available 247 but if I feed a Language model like everything I've ever written and everything I've ever said then maybe if like somebody we work with has wants to ask me a question and it's the middle of the night they can ask my digital twin and they'll get back a representative

answer to what I would say right and so like that that that's starting to happen so yeah like I think a lot of that stuff's going to happen but the Primal relationship that you have with another human being and that Could be another human being you're related to or by the way just another human being that you're not related to like that there's a level I mean we are very very very deeply wired to have those relationships be the center of our universe um and again like I said like there's a big issue here which

is people aren't having kids um and so you know that's not getting transmitted and there's very big questions that kind of come you know kind of kind of flow out Of that but it's it's just different like it it it it it's just flat out different when you have your first kid um and and certainly you should have you you you should have like a dozen kids um um they'd be great um uh I'm pretty sure like if we tape up if we tape a show after that like two years later you're going to be

like oh yeah I don't know what I was thinking like this is just so different and and maybe I do you think that's the kill Swit which well let me Broaden out let me broaden out the answer which is fundamentally technology AI all this like it it has implications on lots of things for sure but one of the things that it does is it makes us it makes us richer like it makes our society richer it makes it makes our material Comfort a lot better makes it a lot easier to by the way to provide

for kids and family be able to have a higher level of material welfare um there's this line of critique of new Technology which is like well material welfare is not sufficient because it still leaves this God shaped hole but the way I think about it is at higher levels of material Comfort we have better shot at figuring out the answer to the god-shaped hole like would we if you're going to be confronted with existential questions about religion and philosophy and how to live your life would you rather do that with material deprivation or with material

plenty and It's really easy for people to say that they would prefer to you know it's like you know would you rather be a monk with a straw mat on the floor right eating bread and water trying to figure out the meaning of life or would you rather be you with like a nice like fluffy bed and like air iing and like you know Aral you know cheese you know from Whole Foods like like you I love that that's the one you pick you you'd much rather be you like of course like I'm gonna have

a Much better chance at figuring out the important questions in life if I'm not worried about where my next meal comes from if I'm not worried whether the power is going to go out if I'm not worried that it's going I'm going to freeze to death overnight if I'm not worried that my kid is not going to have access to a needle Nal incubator that have to worry about where my you know income's coming from like of course with material plenty I'm going to have a lot More capacity uh to answer the Deep questions um

and so I I think that's that's the going to be the unanticipated payoff which is as technology and as AI makes the world materially better off I believe it increases our ability to address these big questions not not decrease it yeah so I'll agree with you there um but there's one division that I'm going to make which is I'm the reason that religion is so impactful is because it Addresses uh every intellectual every person on the intellectual Spectrum so when um I went through a phase where I was trying to explain to people hey think

like this act like this it will make your life better these ideas just radically changed me um and I found that largely because as people age they're just not able to be as um intellectually Nimble but you also run into uh the reality that some people do not have the Intellectual horsepower whenever I talk about this I want to remind people it's entirely possible I fall below the line I'm perfectly willing to accept that but you have to understand that there are dumb people that cannot process some of these ideas and so religion becomes this

catchall for hey this is how you live a good life and it will speak to highly intelligent people and it will speak to people who are just going to follow the ten commandments I Mean the Ten Commandments are basically the Bible's tldr right so it's like hey don't worry about reading that just hear the 10 things go do these 10 things and you're going to be fine done in a story format and so it really speaks to people so I don't think the sort of intellectual approach to hey this is why AI is going to

be great for you and in the future it's going to solve all these problems problems what's going to happen as a punctuated moment I think on a long Enough timeline this is all great and it's wonderful and it brings about an age of abundance so but I'm talking about the punctuated moment where people start losing their jobs and they don't want to make the transition people uh get the sort of warmth and comfort from religion they're being drawn back into it I I don't know if the data will support this exact statement but this feels

accurate uh that people are coming back into religion and sort of um Regionally uh um large numbers like higher numbers than Regional I'm not saying ever in human history but you know locally um TimeWise and so we've got this massive influx into religion right now you've got this massive thing that's going to disrupt all the things that um religion is going to talk about um taking care of people the soul a connection to God the afterlife all these things that um Ai and Robotics are going to challenge and now I think you Have this of

people that aren't able to navigate intellectually the Nuance it becomes problematic and and I think that is going to have to be addressed now let's take the super boring version of this and it just plays out as regulatory capture and the government's just like nah my constituents don't want it it gets mired it gets super bogged down um and now everything gets caught up in red tape and the thing that I can already feel happening now where there's just so Much regulation that it's hard to move forward at the rate we could say back when

I was a kid um that gets exacerbated that's my sort of mundane vision of how this plays out but I don't see a world in which um it just all happens in a sunny Rosy way do you it's complic so look I'm I'm a te techno Optimist not a techno utopian um and so like I start by saying a couple things which I don't think technology like I I don't think technology like Answers all these questions right and so I don't think technology for that matter economic growth like give answers to to to answers to

most people for meaning right um and so I don't think any of this is a substitute for religion and so I I like I like from that standpoint I maybe have a little bit of humility just on the on the scope of the importance of of what we do out here um so and like I said I think this I think you know even in a world of technological abundance And economic abundance material you know welfare I think the you know the big questions of meaning are still are still open questions and so like I

I you know I will hesitate to make make sweeping claims on that um uh yeah I guess I just maybe the other way to come at this maybe way to think about this is I talk more about the religion side so my my take on relig like I I completely buy religious revivals and I think we're actually in Quite a religious time right now um uh which we should talk about um because like for example I politics have become like a branch of religion um you know we we've we've you know we've invented a whole

series of secular religions in the last 150 years um and we continue to do that and so the the the sort of form and shape of religions keeps playing out even if they don't have you know you know sort of supposedly Supernatural kind of elements to them um and you know I and I'm completely open to the idea of like like I said I I live through a fundamentalist religious revival I'm completely open to more of those those clearly are happening at various places in the world um you know one of the yeah so I

will certainly Grant all that um that said is we do like we moderns and postmoderns like we don't relate to religion the way that people did back before our times so like the further go back in history and for sure this is Like this was true like 150 years ago back um the relationship that people had with religion was different than they have it today um and I going to way down the rabbit hole in this but basically for for most of recorded human history religion was not an alart thing it was something that was

a very deep part of who you were as a person um and and and specifically they had the concept the concept of peoplehood there was a people and the people would have shared Genetics um all be related to each other the people would have shared culture the people would have a shared place right you know their their own land um and then they would have they would have religion and those Concepts were all conjoined there's this great book there's a great book called the ancient city that goes through basically the prehistory of Western Civilization it

goes through the basically what are called the old Indo European religions And cultures you know that sort of ultimately resulted in the Greeks and the Romans and then in Christianity so it's sort of the it goes all the way back to the beginning of basically like how Western Society is formed um and it's basically three-part structure it was family um it was tribe and then it was city um and then the these concepts of uh shared kinship genetics uh shared culture shared religion and shared geography were all conjoined and if you Told somebody in that

era that you know oh you can switch religions they would have considered you completely insane um because being of that religion with those Gods was precisely tied to these other factors of culture genetics uh and place of course in in our society we have completely disconnected those things you know if I if I go out in public today and I'm like no I'm a part of a peoplehood where I have shared genetics culture religion and place and I'm going to have you know ethnostate for German Dutch you know people in the midwest like you know

obviously I get instantly tagged as a white supremacist and like I get you know shunned an ostracized from society by the way I'm not proposing that I don't want that just for the record um right and so we live in a different time we we have abstracted religion away from those other things and and and kind of to your point actually as a consequence of that We can now choose our own religion right and as a as a modern Westerner you or I are completely free tomorrow to become a you know Catholic or a Baptist

or Jewish or Muslim or whatever we want or by the way to make up our own religions and by the way prati and go try to get followers and you know when we call those Cults and people do that all the time and we you know I would argue we live in a world of Cults and we've got all these new Cults out here in California and you know some of them are by the way super involved in AI so like it's a thing um so but like religion religion has become an alart it's like

the old Choose Your Own Adventure books you might have had when you were kid like you you can basically design the religion that you want and so the on the one hand you would say oh well then this is going to be a time of tremendous invention of religious Concepts um and religious behaviors and I by the way and I believe I believe that's true um I I I do think that's happening um on the other hand is this like okay is religion going to control our lives in the way that it did back when

that concept was conjoined with genetics culture in place it's it's hard like we just don't take religion that seriously anymore we could choose to take it seriously again if we want to but just observationally we don't and and when it when it becomes in when it becomes Inconvenient we change right I'll be I'm going to run something by you tell me how this lands I know you have a broad historical context so um also being a student of History I hesitate to say this but um I have a hypothesis that the religious impulse plays out

at the same volume no matter what it just becomes a question of what is the religious impulse aimed at so for instance as a game developer uh I am constantly a struck by how toxic the communities can Become and so I sat down one day and I was like what on Earth is going on here and I realized this is the religious impulse that's being uh met by a video game so you are communing with the other players you are committing a ton of your time to this you are giving yourself over to this game

you care about the lore you care about the time that you've invested into it I mean this is a level of belonging to a game in a game community that you would only have Gotten historically as a part of either a town a family or a religion and so it meets that criteria and so when you have this sense of tremendous belonging and you as the game developer go in and mess with their thing and the easiest way to explain it is imagine I uh could go in and mess with the rules of football without

consulting anybody and tomorrow you roll up and it's just different and now the player that you loved is no longer a good player and you Don't really like it anymore it doesn't speak to your skill set people would be outraged like my dad was into this team my dad was into this game and I was raised on it and now I'm here and and you changed it in your trash and that's basically what happens now if I'm right that that's writing on the the neurological uh architecture that makes religion so powerful right it's like hey

that volume is still dialed to 11 now hopefully nobody's going to go kill in The name of their favorite video game but I think that's a narrative question and not a an architectural question so if I were to get people to believe that by investing in this video game like a cult somehow meant something about you and society and we were all fighting for the you know insert now politics and you get how suddenly with the right narrative whoa like people will go and that's another era I think people are politics right now is triggering

the Religious impulse so I don't think the volume is dialed down even if we quote unquote don't take religion as seriously I think the outcome's going going to be the same because this is an this is a the architecture of the human mind yeah so I 100% agree with everything you said I just interpret the consequences of it differently which is Imagine telling an Athenian Greek or a Roman or a Christian in 300 ad or a Christian for That matter in 1800 ad that you're now religion is a video game they would have thought you

completely lost your mind right like wait a minute like you've now taken that entire religious impulse which is every bit as strong as it was and you've like now applied it to video game like you're you're like you have you have completely disconnected the importance of religion from reality from like actual physical Reality like it no longer is relevant to you in terms of like the shape and form of any aspect of like your actual anything in any traditional concept of community City environment anything like that family by the way does it guide your decisions

about like you know you know things like reproduction children um you know are you indoctrinating your kids you by the way maybe you are maybe you're indoctrinating your kids in World of Warcraft but like indoctrinating your Kids in World of Warcraft is like that's not the same as like indoctrinating your kids in Catholicism like that's a World of Warcraft it it may be very it's very it may be equally intense but it's not as comprehensive and an impact on the worldview of how people live their lives um and so I just I agree with you

but I just think that leads to like tremendous amounts of of um of of displacement but then also let me say I really agree with your last point which is the politics Point which I think is something that is extremely important because you especially sitting here today three weeks before you know very big election um uh something that I often point to when I talk to people about this um is um if you look at the charts of uh you know the big general population surveys of would you be comfortable with your kid marrying somebody

of a different ex um you know you know there's the famous chart of A different race and you know Whatever 6 80 years ago that was like 90% uncomfortable today it's like 10% um and falling um somebody of a different um and then the another one would be the the somebody of a different religion and if you had pulled people 80 years ago when when they pulled people on this like Catholics Jews Protestants all were like no way you know you're not marrying outside the faith and today at least like in the US very few

people care and so like that chart is like is like way Down the chart of do you care if your kid marri somebody of the other Rel of the other political party that chart is up and to the right and so crazy right and so to me that Maps exactly to what you said um which is yeah so politics has become our religion there was actually a very uh very important thinker writer in the in the 20th century Eric vogan um and um he he was he's the best writer I found in this topic and

he he he Bas and he Basically started he started his work actually in the 30s and 40s um and he was basically trying to explain at the time uh the rise of both communism and fascism um and he's like wow you know these people are crazy like these people are really extreme and then he's like all right like what is leading you know bullits on the one hand and like you know Nazis on the other hand to be like this you know sort of fevered enthusiastic about these like incredible You know these incredibly High you

know kind of impact social movements with all these consequences um uh and so he he basically developed a theory very consistent what you said which is you know which he called I think up you know political religions um and he and he did the mapping and basically said like these are direct these are in fact direct standing standings for religion Christianity actually both Christianity and Nazism sorry both communism and Nazism were legendarily very hostile to Christianity um you know precisely for that reason because Christianity was was was the threat they were you know quite literally

trying to you know the dominant religion in Europe at that time um and so you know again like exactly you're right I think the impulses with us I think many you know both Republicans and Democrats in the US today exhibit that EXA that exact same kind of religious Behavior around their Politics um you know on the one hand it can sound I think patronizing to say that because you know people think that their politics are all carefully thought through they don't think they're doing it but you know politics are important to people in the same

way that religious religion is and was important to people and so you know they there certainly acting you know like like it and they certainly point in their politics to how political choices are going to affect How people live which is very consistent with the view of a religion um yeah and so I think they're displacing that religious energy into politics I think if they displace that religious energy into video game Cults like that's probably an improvement maybe maybe it's certainly more benign I think for the reasons that you said earlier so uh what does

the religious impulse done well look like so there's obviously just funnel it into a Traditional religion that's lasted for thousands of years probably going to be fine um but given that a lot of people are not doing that how can you do that well yeah so I the anthropological view of religion I think is it's about group formation and cohesion right and this is the RO in the Asian City to talk about this like this is the role that religion so the so so the original the original form of this and sort of Cl sort

of pre prehistory the original form of this was We've got the family um you know which is like up basically cousins you know it's basically the extended family up through cousins um and and by the way cousin marriage you marry your cousins and so you try to keep you know the family in the family um uh and then the family has has its Gods um and then youve you and then over time the families aggregated the Clans aggregated up into tribes which consisted of multiple families and then the tribes Would have its Gods um and

then the tribes would aggregate up into the cities um and the cities would have their gods right and so as as the member of a city you had three tiers of gods that you basically were required to you know basically to to to to worship and and and to honor and you literally had with the hear you had the fire you know the permanent fire and you had to keep the fire lit and and and sort of um you know you do sacrifices to the gods and So forth um and then the morality the original

morality of it was if you meet somebody from another um uh uh you know family tribe City they worship different gods right they have their own Gods and and so your gods are inherently at war with their gods and your moral obligation is to kill them on sight that's aggressive right which literally right it was literally like kill them on site so so had had you told Them had you told people from from that era from from from those you know from those many centuries you know no you're supposed to be tolerant to people from

other religions they would have said are you out of your mind they're a threat if we don't kill them they're going to kill us we kill them on site and so it was like you know it's like the concept of Human Rights is like 180 degree Inversion from like the original form of society by the way a big Improvement I Think but a very very big inversion um and so like at a at at sort of the most fundamental level so why do I go through that at the fundamental level what's the religion for it's

for group cohesion why did it work that way it's because that's what maximally bonded the family the tribe and the city together at a time when physical survival was very much up for grabs right like is the family the tribe the city going to make it through the year TBD is there going to be a Famine a flood a Mudslide you know a volcano eruption is another tribe going to come over and kill you are you going to run out of food like those are all very important questions you the entire tribe you know City

had to really pull together for physical survival and so religion was like the bonding element that that that pulled together a group and I and I would argue you you know fast forward to today that's exactly the behavior you see in video games right Which is you know it's not just an it's not just a member of like a video game cult is not just an individual they're not acting as an individual they're inevitably they're acting as a member of a group right and and it's group cohesion and then I also apply the Jonathan height

kind of theory here um you know kind of coming from from psychology which is um he has this great great line he talks about in the book The Righteous Mind where uh he says U he Uses the word morality but you can basically equivalently I think use the word religion uh he said morality binds and blinds um which is to say a shared morality or a shared religion it binds people together into a group it you know it identifies Us Versus Them friend versus foe in in the way that it did also in prehistory and

then he said he said and this is really important the other part is it blinds uh it sets up a a a a knowledge framework a perception Framework by which you emphasize confirming information that's good for your group and you dismiss disconfirming information that's bad for your group and you literally become blind right you and to the to the point and you see this today with Republican and Democrats where a very you know generally the more passionate the Republican or Democrat the least the the less able they are to articulate the other side's point of

view Correctly right the less able fascinating right the less able they are to steal man the other side's view which means they're literally giving up on psychological terms they're giving up what's called theory of mind they're they're they're giving up the ability to understand what it's like in somebody else's shoes because it's more important to be a member of the group than it is to be able to understand the other um anyway so so this is all very much in Support of what you're saying like these are very fundamental Primal Behavior um I I think

that they're they are very important today uh in our society as much as ever which you see in the politics um and then you know I think they're going to be equally important you know hundreds of years from now hopefully this impulse gets channeled in productive directions yeah yeah we'll see so Kaiu Le has talked about how we're we could Experience up to 50% of job displacement um it's not like there won't be new jobs but you're going to have a very substantive percentage of people that are either just temperamentally or agewise unwilling to make

a change societally how do we handle that yeah so I don't I don't think that's true at all so I I just yeah yeah so that's the classic and in in economics that's what's called the lump of Labor fallacy so it's one of the It's one it's one and by the way kfu is a very bright guy so you know he may well be right on this but what what any Economist will tell you is is a fallacy and it's actually a it's the fallacy at the heart of Marxism at the heart of socialism and

it's it's a very intuitive fallacy it's one that people fall into very easily U it's called the lump of Labor fallacy because and there's like big great Wikipedia page on this people can read um the lump of Labor fallacy Basically is there's a certain amount of Labor being done in the world today right and that labor is either going to be done by people or it's going to be done by machines um and if it's done by people then they're going to make money by doing it be able to provide for themselves and it's done

by machines then the people are going to become unemployed and they're going to be screwed um and what's interesting about this fallacy is this has been a fallacy That literally has been place in basically you know political thought um and um you know sort of marxist economic thought socialist economic thought for like 300 years um the mark the marxists really kind of packaged it up and turn it into a turn it into a religion actually um but um you know this is kind of the the pervasive thing this this was sort of the immediate kind

of concern panic at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution um which was you Were going to have machines that were going to substitute for human labor that were going to miserate everybody um this actually is um sort of embedded in a lot of myths and legends um that we you know that we we kind of have in in our kind of cultural DNA um there's a famous I if you've heard about there used to be or is a famous ballad song of this the myth of this figure John Henry um and uh it's it's

it's kids are often taught this song it's John Henry the steel driving Man um in the idea was it's it's the guy it's the guy this is like you know this would be like when the railroads are getting built like so this is like the guy who's like using a hammer to drive spikes into the rail bed to to put railroad tracks down which used to be something people did by hand um and it was this thing where you know one the you know John Henry is like the famous guy who can drive in the

most spikes um and then one day the foreman shows up With the machine that drives in the spikes and U there's the they have a they have a contest where John Henry competes with the machine who can drive in most most spikes and it turns out John Henry wins the contest and then drops dead from a heart attack some kind of symbolic you know the LA the last gas of human effort before the machines take over and and that dates back to like I don't know like 1870 right so that's like 150 years Ago people

had this fear um and then basically what we've had is we've had 300 years of modern technology industrialization automation computerization literally three centuries now and sitting here today there are more jobs than ever in the world than ever um and and at higher wages uh for people right and so in so in practice what's happened is we now have three centuries of evidence that basically that's a fallacy that's Actually not what happens what happens actually is the opposite uh which is technology creates far more jobs than it destroys and creates jobs that are better right

at higher levels of income um and so people adopt those jobs like are they going to be people just get behind there will be some and look there is some resp and I should also back up for a second and say um conversations about this topic it's very easy to come across in my experience talking about Myself it's very easy to come across as like judgmental and patronizing uh because it's very easy to come across basically saying you know basically so like one of the things that I will claim is that one of the things

I will claim and what we're about to talk about is that there are some jobs that are better than other jobs um some jobs are just better jobs they're they're like you know they're they're physically less taxing you know they pay better you know Whatever but you know there may be a bar to be able to get those jobs or people may not want to do those jobs and so people may get you know you can people can get very resentful at the idea that they have to give up if they have an order for

the prospect of something that might be better but maybe they don't want it and you know who who who are these experts on TV or on the Internet to tell them that they should think in these terms so so I should start by Saying look like people are going to have a lot of reactions people always have look a lot of our politics for the same 300 years have been around this process of of industrial change and then therefore um you know job change and you know like you know this the rise of unions and

like there's all these things that happen in our politics as a consequence of these fights and so I should just start by saying like you need to be able to talk clinically about This because you do need to be able to talk about the big issues I do recognize that it's very easy to come across this patronizing I also recognize that people are going to have different points of view on this some people are going to struggle some for sure you know look when the when the car came along blacksmiths were not happy right cuz

like all of a sudden you don't need as many horses like they they were not happy now many blacksmith became car Mechanics but you know know many black Smiths maybe didn't want to become car mechanics and got very upset and resentful about that so this yes all of the above is going to happen having said that the basic mechanism of introducing new technology into an economy is not job destruction the basic mechanism is job creation net job creation overwhelming the job destruction um and the reason for that has to do with this concept of Productivity

growth um and so the the concept of productivity growth is very important so the concept of productivity growth is it's the economic measure of the impact of technology uh in an economy and basically what it means is the ability to generate more output with less input right um and so and you know use the John Henry example can I can I can I can I put more Nails in in the road bed to build railroad tracks faster right with at the same cost level um you Know can I build more cars at lower prices can

I you know provide you know can I make more video games um you know more video game levels at lower prices like in in any industry there's always this question of like how much am I producing today and then can I produce more output at lower cost it's what it's what every business logically wants to do right they want to expand output and they want they want to reduce costs um and so productivity growth is the metric By which economists track the impact of technology uh uh impacting the environment and and this is very important

um the faster the rate of productivity growth the faster the rate of economic growth um the faster the rate of productivity growth the more prices of current goods and services in the economy fall right because if you're able to produce more with less then prices come down right and so just take food as an example like food today is is Far cheaper than it was 200 years ago because of all the automation right and so you know to buy an avocado you know 200 years ago would have cost you know the modern day equivalent of

you know $100 you know and now it's and you know and now it's a dollar right um and so so productivity growth leads to to to to to declines in prices declines in prices lead to increase in spending power right because if if as a consumer I pay less for the things I'm already buying right Because of productivity growth then spending power is being unlocked right without me even getting a raise I have new spending power um and then that new spending power then leads to the creation of new products services and industries and jobs

uh to fulfill that that all of a sudden I I I can spend on and so so what I'm describing is like this is the basic mechanism of technological adaptation of an economy and it's a basic mechanism of economic Growth um and theories like like like the one that you you mentioned um theories by which the introduction of technology has an AM miserating effect as as compared to a cornucopian effect historically have not played out well because that that's not that's not actually how this works which is why which is why the Socialists are like

perpetually disappointed it's like it's like every socialist is like super pissed like all the time because Capitalism works so well like it's really annoying right like that we live in a time of material plenty after all of this like runaway capitalism like it's really in you know it's Boris yelson in the American supermarket in 1991 just like completely shocked at how like much food there is it's just like [ __ ] you know they lied to us right like the Communists lied to us right about how to do this um anyway so like I we

can go into any aspect of this you want To in detail but basically I I completely convinced that's exactly what's going to happen here if AI works the way that we're imagining what's going to happen is prodct productivity growth is going to take off prices of current goods and services are going to fall volume is going to expand more people in the world are going to be able to buy all the things that they want to buy but also it's going to unlock a lot of new spending power that spending Power is then going to

create demand for new Industries right it's going to it's going to unlock demand that we're going to be able to satisfy by by by by producing and buying many new things and you know our our future digital children AI children 100 years from now are sitting here having we're going to have a you know podcast saying can you can you can you believe that our human parents had this fallacy where they didn't think that this was going to turn Out this way because like it always did and it did again and so anyway so that's

why I'm so optimistic about this I I love it for people that don't know you um he wrote a document basically saying technology is going to save us all that he went through in detail on a lot of these points very counterintuitive coming out of the Bay Area for sure um yeah please I wouldn't say it's going to save us all so I would say I'm an optimist not a utopian and so it goes This I very important it goes back to where we started which is I don't think this everything I just describ does

not answer all of life's deep questions right like it it it's not enough to just have material welfare like I'm 100% on that but like having material welfare is better than not having material welfare right and and it's the best starting point to be able to answer the big questions and so I just wanted to wanted to qualify that I'm not I'm not I'm not I I am actually myself not proposing a new religion mark this has been incredible where can people follow along with you oh good uh so I am on uh Twitter now

called X um I am on there as P Marque p m RCA um that is probably one of my main presences and then I have a substack um which is linked to from the Twitter account um and then we have a YouTube channel um and my partner Ben and I have a YouTube show uh that we do Intermittently um but we get good feedback on so maybe we could link to that awesome guys I can definitely vouch for his content it is amazing I hope you guys will check it out speaking of things that I

hope you will do if you have not already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you like this conversation check out this episode to learn more today we're going deep into a conversation that has me Incredibly fired up we're talking about our future your future my future the future of humanity itself and we're doing it with one of the most Visionary minds and artificial intelligence emod moac and we were like