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It's inevitable that socialism will happen in America, but I don't want to lose my agency, my liberty, my freedom.

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Do you think the U.S. as an empire is in decline?

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The answer is yes.

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I was appointed to President Trump's Council of Advisors in Science and Technology.

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And one of the great lies is that the government will save you.

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But the more government has tried to create services for people and help bring them up the ladder, the more expensive those things get.

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63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

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People can't afford to pay their bills, and it needs to be fixed.

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What will ultimately happen

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So all my politician friends are about to chop my head off about this.

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David Freeberg, what is the most important subject of our time?

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AI.

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We're entering this golden age and people don't realize we're in it.

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And I don't vie into the narrative that Dario, Elon and Sam end up having all the value in AI.

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Because in the next 10 years, there will be a billionaire that will emerge that has zero net worth today, downloaded open sourced AI and built a company that made them a billionaire.

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And they're going to be someone that's going to come from nowhere.

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And there's going to be a lot of these sorts of stories.

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But this narrative that AI will take jobs away, you don't believe it.

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So from data, from evidence, over all periods of technological revolution like this, we've never seen jobs decline.

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And the average person doesn't see it.

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But oh my God, the stuff we can do is unbelievable.

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Right now we have a billion people in the world that are starving.

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We have hundreds of millions dying from curable disease.

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These are the sorts of things that are going to get resolved.

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Because AI unleashes this capacity for human advancement.

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And it's transforming every aspect of biology and our understanding of life sciences.

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So I wanted to ask you, do you think we're going to be able to live forever soon?

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The truth is... Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins.

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The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed.

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So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know.

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And a simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button.

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but also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better.

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And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button.

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Thank you so, so, so much.

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David Freeberg, you're someone that graces lots of different subjects.

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If you were to sort of self-define who you are,

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And what you do, now this is difficult because you've got to kind of put yourself in a label here.

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What would that label be?

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How would you self-categorize yourself?

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I would say I'm deeply curious about the world and the universe and how it works and why it works the way it does.

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And I'm a big believer in human agency to affect the universe around us.

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And that's kind of my core kind of driving motivation.

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A lot of the other stuff, Ancillary, is about how do you enable that?

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And I think that that's sort of probably where I also spend some time is in the enablement of those things.

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Got a nice cute photo here of that kid that wanted to be Einstein.

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Yeah.

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And then as it relates to how that manifested into like a professional journey, what's your professional journey been for anyone that might not know?

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I started in college majoring in math and physics, and then I changed my major to astrophysics.

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And it was during the time I was in college is when the dot-com boom happened.

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In the heart of Silicon Valley, there was a kid in my dorm room who started a website selling DVDs online.

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And he sold it for a million dollars in our junior year of college.

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That was like an unbelievable, unfathomable amount of money.

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And so there was this change that was happening in the world.

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And I got enamored with this idea of businesses and how do you use businesses to change the world, not just use scientific discovery as a method to change the world.

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So I decided to go work in Silicon Valley.

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I interviewed for jobs.

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I didn't get a lot of offers, but I played a lot of poker during my college days.

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So I was able to make money.

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I read all the strategy books.

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I'm playing poker.

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I actually spent a year working in a pool hall and the manager of the pool hall and the bookie invited me to their home poker game, took all my money that I made at the pool hall.

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I was making four bucks an hour, 4.25 an hour.

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And so I was like, I'm gonna learn poker.

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So I learned it.

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That's how I made money.

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And I put that on my resume when I applied for jobs after college.

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And I got interviews with investment banks.

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And the investment banks were like, oh, we want to talk to a kid that knows how to play poker because this was before internet poker, before ESPN poker.

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So it was like an interesting thing.

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And so I ended up getting a job working in investment banking and then worked on tech companies.

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So then I got to learn business, finance, accounting, mergers and acquisitions, all this sort of stuff.

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And then I ended up working at Google.

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I worked at Google when it was started when it was just under a thousand employees and

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And I left a couple of years later, started a business called The Climate Corporation.

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And so I've been in Silicon Valley my whole career.

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And that company you end up starting does pretty well?

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The Climate Corporation?

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The Climate Corporation.

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That one we sold in 2013.

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So we sold it for a little over a billion dollars, which was a great outcome for investors and shareholders.

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And today, you know, it's software for farmers.

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And today that software is now owned by Bayer, which is the big kind of pharma slash ag company company.

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It's used across 200 million acres every year.

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That's a pretty sizable amount of farmland that uses that software still.

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So yeah, it's done fairly well.

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So I'm 33 now.

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You were 33 when you sold that?

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I was 33.

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33.

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A lot of money, $1.1 billion.

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And you've done lots of other things since then, which we can go into.

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But you've also, I think from March this year, you were appointed as an advisor to Donald Trump.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, I was appointed to President Trump's Council of Advisors in Science and Technology.

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What does that mean in reality?

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So if you look back in the last couple administrations, there have been different themes over time on who is appointed to PCAST.

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In historical context, like Bill Clinton had a PCAST that was set up just for the Internet.

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PCAST.

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President's Council of Advisors in Science and Technology.

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And so he set one up focused on the internet.

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And this current PCAST under this administration is heavy in AI.

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So it's like Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andreessen, Sergey Brin.

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That's kind of the cohort that's on this advisory council.

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But it's always included folks that are involved in things like biotechnology, sciences, and to help guide science policy for the administration.

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So it involves having conversations with people in the administration on things that are happening in industry, things that are happening on the frontiers of science and technology to help guide some of the policy decisions that the administration is trying to create or enforce.

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And what is the most important subject of our time?

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AI.

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AI.

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And right now...

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The big question in the United States from a policy perspective seems to be the regulation of AI.

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What role should the government play in determining where AI goes, how it gets built, how it gets deployed, who gets to use it, who owns it, where the value lies?

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A lot of these factions that emerge inside a government, even today on the same political party,

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on whether or not, for example, to allow Chinese open source models to be used by American businesses.

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You know, these Chinese models are as good as, or in many cases, better than private American models.

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And because they're open weights, you can download them and run them on any computer you want that works.

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A lot of companies want to use those because they're cheap.

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You can pay effectively 50 cents

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for a million tokens of output, which is a measure of how productive the model is, you know, this token is kind of like a word, versus $50 from Anthropic, which is a private model.

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So the question is, do we allow these Chinese models to kind of become ubiquitous in industry?

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And if so, what does that do to American AI?

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What does that do to our capacity to compete?

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Is there security risk?

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So there's a lot of this kind of debate underway.

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And that, I think, is probably the hot topic du jour.

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I don't know if it's the hot topic tomorrow, but today that's kind of the big thing.

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But all of this administration, I think, from a science and technology policy perspective, will probably be viewed as, on the one hand, what's the...

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enablement, acceleration, regulation of AI.

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And on the other hand, you know, there's this question still on what is science today?

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In an era of AI, science is also changing.

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And so there's this kind of, I think, big shift underway.

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We'll go into those subjects, specifically the subjects on AI and everything that it interfaces with.

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But I think it's important also to get kind of like a backdrop of the economic state and like the social state of the nation, because all of these things feed into these big questions on AI.

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And they also inform everyone's biases on the subject.

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Because if you're at a different sort of socioeconomic position, or if you're feeling a different thing, your perspective on AI is going to be radically different.

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So if we started then first on like, if we just focus on the United States, which in some respects is a little bit of a proxy for the rest of the Western world.

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Where is the United States at this moment in time in terms of, is it on the rise, inequality?

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What are the sort of pertinent factors here that help us understand the backdrop of this nation?

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The biggest drivers for this nation at the moment in terms of what public policy and private markets will do is, number one, the unaffordability crisis.

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What does that mean?

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63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

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They don't have enough savings to pay for a fiscal emergency in their household.

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63% of Americans.

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And the cost of things is rising faster than wages are increasing.

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So things feel less affordable.

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to most Americans.

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And then there's this wealth inequality concern, which I would say is both kind of a perception issue.

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There's definitely policy issues that has allowed it to happen, and we can talk about those.

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But I think America is in this kind of crisis of classism, this crisis of

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us versus them.

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And it manifests in a lot of different ways.

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So, you know, you had Ray Dalio on.

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And if you think about Ray Dalio's kind of like cycle of empires, you know, this is this idea that there's been six empires in the last 500 years, and the United States is on the decline and China's on the rise.

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And it can be measured across a number of different dimensions, one of which is this crisis of internal struggle.

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which manifests often with external struggle, the Iran war.

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Like, why can't we stop having external wars?

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Well, you know, a nation that's happy with itself generally doesn't go to war.

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A nation that's not happy generally does go to war.

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And so a lot of this stuff gets tied up, I think, in this economic distress that the United States is feeling.

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My contention...

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which may not be very popular, is that the more government has tried to create services for people and help bring them up the ladder, the more expensive those things get.

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Are you socialism?

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Policy in the United States, and this is one of the great lies, and I think there's a series of great lies,

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in U.S. policy over the last half century.

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But one of the great lies is that the government will save you.

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The government will help you by giving you these essential services that you want more of.

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education, healthcare, housing.

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And as the government has entered into those markets, because remember, there are people making those things, offering those services, and there's someone paying for it.

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So as the government enables more money to flow into those markets, the cost of those things has just gone up.

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And you can see how this plays out, for example, in education.

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So higher education.

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If you want to go to college in the United States, and I'll just give you a statistic, 30 years ago, administrative staff were like 10% of colleges.

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Today, they're like 60%.

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In just 30 years.

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Give me a rational reason why we should have 6x the administrative staffing at colleges and universities.

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There isn't a good reason why.

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The real reason is that because the federal student loan program doesn't discriminate against the university on how well they do with their graduating students or the degree or the individual that's taking out the loan, the federal student loan program has just allowed more money to flow in to universities.

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Now, if you're a university administrator, there's no constraint on how much you can charge for tuition.

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So, hey, we'll raise tuition 5% this year.

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We'll raise it 8%.

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We'll raise it 10%.

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And we'll hire more people.

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And if people hire more people, they get a higher salary.

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If you think about the individual, I don't get to make more salary until I'm a manager.

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Now I want to be a director.

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Now I want to be a senior director.

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And the organization grows.

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That's very natural for any organization, whether it's a nonprofit, a university, or a private company.

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You want to grow and people want to make more money year after year.

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So they, because they can collect more money, can charge more for tuition.

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There isn't a natural market force that says your tuition is too high now because the government has provided unlimited funding to higher education through the federal student loan program.

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So as a result, education has gotten so vastly expensive that everyone now looks at it and says, we got to do something about this.

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And both parties seem to say, well, here's what the government's going to do to do more.

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And it's like putting fuel on the fire.

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So the challenge right now is people are feeling left behind.

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There's massive wealth inequality.

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Things are extremely unaffordable.

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Right.

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And the solution that's being embraced is for the government to do more, which de facto leads to socialism.

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What is wrong with socialism?

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I would argue that the key measure of a country's success is how many people are transitioning from labor to capital each year.

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What does that mean?

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That means every year I'm working paycheck to paycheck.

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I'm collecting checks.

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I graduated college.

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I had $19,000 in debt.

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I went and worked.

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I got paid.

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I saved up.

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I paid down my debt.

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I was able to get out of it.

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Then I worked at Google.

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We had an IPO.

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Suddenly, I had assets.

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I had stuff.

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I had money in the bank account.

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And it was like an incredible moment for me.

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And I said, I could live off that money.

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I don't need to live off a paycheck every month.

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I now have savings.

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00:13:14.782 --> 00:13:15.442
I have assets.

221
00:13:16.403 --> 00:13:17.143
That is capital.

222
00:13:18.220 --> 00:13:20.581
And everyone talks about capital versus labor.

223
00:13:21.401 --> 00:13:25.663
But the real advantage of America is enabling people to go from labor to capital.

224
00:13:26.223 --> 00:13:33.566
Every individual that works, saves, invests, does whatever they need to do to accumulate enough capital ends up in the capital bucket.

225
00:13:33.606 --> 00:13:38.067
And then you're no longer stuck needing to go paycheck to paycheck to pay your bills.

226
00:13:38.107 --> 00:13:38.747
That's the dream.

227
00:13:38.787 --> 00:13:39.868
That's the real American dream.

228
00:13:40.368 --> 00:13:41.369
It's not just about owning a house.

229
00:13:41.389 --> 00:13:49.921
If you own a house and you want to have a bunch of debt and you got insurance payments to make and you still got to work every month to make those payments, you're not necessarily living the American dream yet.

230
00:13:50.402 --> 00:13:52.505
The American dream is being freed of that burden.

231
00:13:53.105 --> 00:13:55.347
Because you can live off the interest of your assets.

232
00:13:55.627 --> 00:13:56.007
That's right.

233
00:13:56.067 --> 00:13:56.948
And so you're earning income.

234
00:13:57.428 --> 00:14:02.412
Let's say you have $100,000 saved and you can make 10% a year on that.

235
00:14:02.432 --> 00:14:03.353
That's $10,000.

236
00:14:03.734 --> 00:14:08.037
Suddenly, if you get to $1 million saved, you can make $100,000 a year and you can live on that.

237
00:14:08.317 --> 00:14:09.358
That's economic security.

238
00:14:09.378 --> 00:14:10.339
That's financial security.

239
00:14:10.739 --> 00:14:18.185
That's what we should give to every American is the ability to own assets that give them freedom to choose what they want to do in their life rather than be stuck in work.

240
00:14:18.625 --> 00:14:21.388
And the problem with socialism is it takes away that transition moment.

241
00:14:22.008 --> 00:14:25.691
It eliminates it because it says everyone has to be labor all the time for the rest of their lives.

242
00:14:26.171 --> 00:14:27.232
And then no one has freedom.

243
00:14:27.252 --> 00:14:35.317
And that's what America was founded on was this ability to find through freedom of choice, through agency, the ability to transition from labor to capital.

244
00:14:35.797 --> 00:14:41.301
And I think our goal as a country should be get 2% of Americans across that line every year.

245
00:14:41.641 --> 00:14:43.583
Then I think we'll be successful going forward.

246
00:14:44.243 --> 00:14:51.948
But if everything's all about like give people more stuff and have the government do it, we're just going to keep raising the debt, making things more expensive, inflating the costs away.

247
00:14:52.328 --> 00:14:54.690
And it's inevitable that socialism will happen in America.

248
00:14:54.710 --> 00:14:55.610
It's absolutely inevitable.

249
00:14:55.951 --> 00:14:57.872
Do you think the U.S. as an empire is in decline?

250
00:14:59.233 --> 00:15:07.078
In terms of the power of the dollar, in terms of prosperity of Americans, the average American, majority of Americans, the answer is yes.

251
00:15:08.260 --> 00:15:13.700
But the potential hasn't been deleted, meaning decline is not inevitable.

252
00:15:14.713 --> 00:15:19.496
To be very clear, we are not yet at a point where it's a runaway train.

253
00:15:19.936 --> 00:15:36.147
In the history of democracies, there's never been a place like America where an individual like myself, moving here from South Africa, going to public college, graduating with debt, and then being able to work my way out of the debt and find myself in the position I'm in today with no nepotism, with no handouts, with...

254
00:15:36.407 --> 00:15:40.510
I mean, you could argue about privilege and all these other sorts of things that I was vested over my life, but...

255
00:15:40.990 --> 00:15:48.316
Like, it's an amazing place that that sort of story can be told a million times over, that there's not just one or two people that this has happened to, but there's millions of people.

256
00:15:48.796 --> 00:15:53.000
The problem is it's all the other hundreds of millions that didn't get to live that opportunity.

257
00:15:53.380 --> 00:15:56.222
And if we can fix that, America is not in decline.

258
00:15:56.402 --> 00:15:59.845
America is a prosperous nation and has centuries ahead of it.

259
00:16:00.134 --> 00:16:02.256
But when you look at this, you're talking about runaway trains.

260
00:16:02.276 --> 00:16:05.839
When you look at the national debt, though, it does look very much like a runaway train.

261
00:16:06.119 --> 00:16:07.340
Want to know where inflation comes from?

262
00:16:07.360 --> 00:16:08.381
That's where inflation comes from.

263
00:16:08.621 --> 00:16:11.323
By printing more dollars to pay for that debt, which is what happens.

264
00:16:11.363 --> 00:16:17.248
The Federal Reserve buys the debt and they issue dollars to the bank system to buy the debt from the government.

265
00:16:17.288 --> 00:16:19.650
Remember, the Federal Reserve is separate from the government.

266
00:16:19.670 --> 00:16:21.151
The Federal Reserve can print dollars.

267
00:16:21.191 --> 00:16:22.652
They can send dollars to banks.

268
00:16:23.253 --> 00:16:26.075
And now the banks can loan money out and it makes its way into the economy.

269
00:16:26.095 --> 00:16:27.516
Now there's more dollars in the economy.

270
00:16:28.497 --> 00:16:32.081
And that money was, you know, owed back to the government at some point.

271
00:16:32.222 --> 00:16:33.803
But the Federal Reserve may never get paid back.

272
00:16:33.843 --> 00:16:35.846
They may just keep adding and adding and adding and adding.

273
00:16:36.506 --> 00:16:37.888
And they're just printing more and more dollars.

274
00:16:37.908 --> 00:16:38.669
Is that sustainable?

275
00:16:39.029 --> 00:16:39.210
No.

276
00:16:39.810 --> 00:16:44.716
So I don't understand the force that's going to intervene to stop this sort of compounding debt.

277
00:16:44.896 --> 00:16:46.298
The outcome of this is socialism.

278
00:16:46.758 --> 00:16:47.739
That's the moment we're in right now.

279
00:16:47.779 --> 00:16:49.361
That's why we're seeing this wave of socialism.

280
00:16:49.421 --> 00:16:52.705
I've been saying for five years, we're going to face a wave of socialism.

281
00:16:53.025 --> 00:16:59.432
And after Donald Trump was elected, my prediction for the next year was that the next wave in politics in America will be socialism.

282
00:16:59.452 --> 00:17:00.513
And people thought I was crazy.

283
00:17:00.813 --> 00:17:02.976
And I'm like, it is absolutely inevitable if you look at this.

284
00:17:03.416 --> 00:17:04.417
This is where we're headed.

285
00:17:05.478 --> 00:17:11.080
It is de facto socialism when the government employs roughly one half of the people of the United States.

286
00:17:11.720 --> 00:17:26.346
Right now, if you look at all the federal, state, local agencies, so the people that are employed, the people that are contractors of those agencies, and then the people that live off of some sort of government pension or social security system, the total amount is close to 50% of Americans.

287
00:17:26.866 --> 00:17:30.527
So we're getting to a point where people are like, the only place I can go is more money from the government.

288
00:17:31.087 --> 00:17:33.208
And then eventually the government becomes the whole economy.

289
00:17:33.766 --> 00:17:36.009
If the outcome of socialism was to cause capitalism?

290
00:17:36.450 --> 00:17:37.150
It's a great question.

291
00:17:37.231 --> 00:17:38.933
I think it was capitalism plus policies.

292
00:17:39.273 --> 00:17:40.335
Let's say you have a million dollars.

293
00:17:40.415 --> 00:17:40.595
Yeah.

294
00:17:41.296 --> 00:17:42.978
You're making, say, 10% a year.

295
00:17:44.502 --> 00:17:45.763
Next year, you have $1.1 million.

296
00:17:46.703 --> 00:17:50.805
The next year, you have $1.21 million or whatever, and you keep adding it up.

297
00:17:51.566 --> 00:17:52.666
That's called compounding.

298
00:17:53.347 --> 00:17:56.388
After a couple of years, your million dollars turns into $10 million.

299
00:17:56.908 --> 00:17:58.549
And you never have to sell shares along the way.

300
00:17:58.569 --> 00:18:00.330
You can just own the shares and whatever's going up.

301
00:18:00.570 --> 00:18:01.711
Your value just keeps going up.

302
00:18:01.731 --> 00:18:03.192
You've never paid taxes along the way.

303
00:18:03.492 --> 00:18:04.452
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

304
00:18:04.912 --> 00:18:07.634
And suddenly, fast forward a couple of years, instead of having a million, you've now got 10.

305
00:18:08.434 --> 00:18:11.176
That's capital compounding over time.

306
00:18:11.896 --> 00:18:16.199
Meanwhile, if you're working, every paycheck, taxes are taken out.

307
00:18:16.460 --> 00:18:20.803
Every time you get a check, every time you get more money, more capital, taxes are taken out.

308
00:18:21.404 --> 00:18:27.769
So if you don't get capital, if you don't get enough savings to allow you to compound, you are never going to get there.

309
00:18:28.409 --> 00:18:36.996
So from a tax policy perspective, labor working for your money should have never been taxed higher than earning returns on your capital.

310
00:18:37.156 --> 00:18:38.077
So you're saying tax the rich?

311
00:18:38.757 --> 00:18:40.198
I'm saying tax capital.

312
00:18:40.218 --> 00:18:40.479
Yeah.

313
00:18:41.019 --> 00:18:42.901
at a rate that's equivalent to labor.

314
00:18:43.301 --> 00:18:43.901
Wealth taxes?

315
00:18:44.602 --> 00:18:45.943
Wealth taxes are asset seizures.

316
00:18:46.243 --> 00:18:46.824
Definitely no.

317
00:18:47.464 --> 00:18:53.249
So one of the principles of the United States and the principle of what this country was founded on is private property rights.

318
00:18:53.830 --> 00:18:56.172
If you go back to England, right?

319
00:18:56.472 --> 00:18:57.092
Like 500 years.

320
00:18:57.833 --> 00:18:59.995
Or let's just talk Europe broadly.

321
00:19:00.615 --> 00:19:05.419
There were very few places where you as an individual citizen had rights to own private property.

322
00:19:06.000 --> 00:19:13.125
There were very few places where you could say, I have this thing and it doesn't belong to the king or it doesn't belong to whatever the local lord is.

323
00:19:13.185 --> 00:19:18.350
Like everything was the property of the lords, of the higher class, of the upper class.

324
00:19:18.390 --> 00:19:20.792
It was endowed to them, it was vested to them by birthright.

325
00:19:21.543 --> 00:19:22.123
For centuries.

326
00:19:22.584 --> 00:19:25.246
Same in Asia, same in the Middle East, same in Africa.

327
00:19:25.306 --> 00:19:30.290
I mean, like every nation started out with the system where people didn't have rights to private property.

328
00:19:30.690 --> 00:19:33.973
Those who had kind of these systems above could decide who got what.

329
00:19:34.533 --> 00:19:43.661
So the United States was founded on one of the principles of private property for an individual that, you know, I think when they were drafting the Declaration of Independence, it was about life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.

330
00:19:43.861 --> 00:19:45.803
And they later changed it to pursuit of happiness.

331
00:19:45.823 --> 00:19:46.023
Yeah.

332
00:19:46.483 --> 00:19:50.804
And the pursuit of property was really the measure of what you've accumulated as an individual.

333
00:19:50.824 --> 00:19:52.345
You now have a right to accumulate things.

334
00:19:52.365 --> 00:19:58.207
You now have a right to build value, to build wealth, to build a house and have your family in your house and have all these things.

335
00:19:58.647 --> 00:19:59.947
That was the principle of the United States.

336
00:20:00.687 --> 00:20:07.329
I'm all for taxes when people transact, when they turn their stock that they've held for a couple of years into cash and buy something with it.

337
00:20:07.690 --> 00:20:08.350
Boom, tax.

338
00:20:08.830 --> 00:20:09.570
You get taxed on that.

339
00:20:09.930 --> 00:20:11.691
If that's the right model, that's when you should get taxed.

340
00:20:11.751 --> 00:20:15.092
Right then, when you're able to turn that asset that you own into another asset.

341
00:20:15.812 --> 00:20:17.273
So that's what we do today.

342
00:20:17.493 --> 00:20:21.094
That's an income tax or a capital gains tax, like when you realize that gain.

343
00:20:21.374 --> 00:20:25.635
But if I go into your shares and I'm like, hey, I'm going to take 5% of your shares, what are you losing?

344
00:20:26.076 --> 00:20:27.976
Well, you can't use those shares to buy anything.

345
00:20:28.537 --> 00:20:31.257
Because as soon as you try and buy something, you owe tax on those shares.

346
00:20:31.618 --> 00:20:43.102
So by taking away your shares before you've actually transacted with them, before you've actually sold them, or taking away your private property, your home, or giving the government the right to come in your garage and audit everything you own and say, hey, this year we're doing a 2% tax.

347
00:20:44.302 --> 00:20:48.605
That is antithetical to what the United States was founded on, which was a founding principle of private property.

348
00:20:48.925 --> 00:20:55.770
Now, if your property goes up in value and then you eventually turn it into some other property, that's a transaction and that's when you get taxed.

349
00:20:56.051 --> 00:20:57.091
That's how the system's set up.

350
00:20:57.392 --> 00:21:01.495
So if we have an issue with people having too much wealth, that's the moment to increase the tax rate.

351
00:21:01.855 --> 00:21:04.737
That's capital gains tax, income tax on high earners.

352
00:21:05.077 --> 00:21:07.519
Those two things can get you 97% of the way there.

353
00:21:07.959 --> 00:21:10.421
And you're not really going to gain much.

354
00:21:10.461 --> 00:21:13.163
Separately, we can kind of talk about the numbers on this, but like tax the rich...

355
00:21:14.474 --> 00:21:20.779
all for it, but tax the rich when they transact, when they sell, when they have a capital gain, if they borrow against their assets.

356
00:21:20.799 --> 00:21:23.161
This is another thing that's wrong about our system today.

357
00:21:23.641 --> 00:21:27.565
If I'm very wealthy, I own a bunch of stock and I've never sold any of the stock.

358
00:21:28.465 --> 00:21:32.529
If I borrow against my stock to go buy a yacht, I don't pay taxes.

359
00:21:33.658 --> 00:21:35.159
that should be a taxable event.

360
00:21:35.179 --> 00:21:35.919
We should fix that.

361
00:21:36.319 --> 00:21:37.940
That's an easy fix in the tax system.

362
00:21:38.360 --> 00:21:43.943
I'm not taking away your private property, but as soon as you borrow against that, it's effectively like transacting on that property.

363
00:21:44.323 --> 00:21:45.724
So that's a moment to pay a tax.

364
00:21:46.284 --> 00:21:51.787
And if we think that the rich aren't paying enough taxes, you can raise income tax or capital gains taxes to get them to pay more.

365
00:21:51.927 --> 00:22:01.051
This is what I was going to say, but you arrived at it, was most people that own stock in big companies will just borrow against their stock, and they never pay a tax.

366
00:22:01.391 --> 00:22:17.119
I didn't know this until I was, I'm going to say 26, and my company had gone public, and this bank in Europe approached me and said, by the way, we'll give you 20% of whatever your, the value of the stock you have in my company called Social Chain AG is a tax-free loan.

367
00:22:17.139 --> 00:22:18.700
I was like, explain this to me again.

368
00:22:19.520 --> 00:22:22.242
So you'll just send me millions of pounds and I don't have to pay tax.

369
00:22:22.262 --> 00:22:23.123
You don't have to sell your shares.

370
00:22:23.343 --> 00:22:24.404
I don't have to sell anything.

371
00:22:24.664 --> 00:22:25.905
I said, well, look at the rest of my portfolio.

372
00:22:25.925 --> 00:22:27.506
And I had some Facebook stock at the time.

373
00:22:27.526 --> 00:22:31.308
They're like, well, we'll give you 50% to 60% loan to value on that.

374
00:22:31.589 --> 00:22:37.333
If you have a million dollars of Facebook stock, we will transfer you today 700 grand tax free.

375
00:22:37.453 --> 00:22:38.714
And I can do with that whatever I want.

376
00:22:39.234 --> 00:22:40.835
And I thought, fucking hell, this is what the rich do.

377
00:22:41.195 --> 00:22:41.916
That's exactly right.

378
00:22:42.556 --> 00:22:47.600
And the truth is that no one talks about, behind closed doors, everyone knows that it needs to change.

379
00:22:48.020 --> 00:22:49.601
But no one wants to say it because...

380
00:22:49.801 --> 00:22:50.302
I'm saying it.

381
00:22:50.702 --> 00:22:50.882
Yeah.

382
00:22:51.002 --> 00:22:51.522
Gotta change.

383
00:22:51.803 --> 00:22:57.687
What's interesting about that is, say that I have 10 million of Facebook stock, and I take a loan, and they give me 5 million in cash.

384
00:22:58.027 --> 00:23:01.349
What a rich person then does is they take that 5 million, and they go and buy other assets.

385
00:23:01.369 --> 00:23:01.869
Exactly right.

386
00:23:02.250 --> 00:23:03.791
And then they start acquiring more and more assets.

387
00:23:03.811 --> 00:23:06.673
That's what's unfair about the system, because then when you have capital...

388
00:23:07.253 --> 00:23:08.734
You're accumulating more capital.

389
00:23:09.154 --> 00:23:16.097
While labor, if you haven't made that cross that chasm from labor to capital, you're still here grinding every month, grinding every week, trying to pay your frigging bills.

390
00:23:16.437 --> 00:23:18.558
And then these guys have all these shenanigans that are going on.

391
00:23:18.778 --> 00:23:18.998
Yeah.

392
00:23:19.138 --> 00:23:21.099
It is wrong and it needs to be fixed.

393
00:23:21.599 --> 00:23:24.400
The answer, though, is not taking private property.

394
00:23:24.640 --> 00:23:24.860
Yeah.

395
00:23:24.940 --> 00:23:26.501
As soon as you start taking private property.

396
00:23:27.081 --> 00:23:27.882
Those gates are open.

397
00:23:27.902 --> 00:23:30.063
By the way, it's not even going to be constitutional in the United States.

398
00:23:30.103 --> 00:23:32.004
The Fifth Amendment has this taker clause.

399
00:23:32.024 --> 00:23:34.766
You know, it's not it's legally like not going to win in federal court.

400
00:23:35.027 --> 00:23:37.308
It could work in some states, some states.

401
00:23:37.468 --> 00:23:41.631
There's seven states that actually have a constitutional ban on private property tax like this.

402
00:23:41.911 --> 00:23:45.234
There's, you know, 43 states where it's game on.

403
00:23:45.994 --> 00:23:49.316
And we'll see how they play out in the courts as they try to pass these wealth taxes as well.

404
00:23:49.336 --> 00:23:50.998
But these are asset seizure taxes.

405
00:23:51.738 --> 00:23:53.720
You can have a wealth tax by raising capital gains.

406
00:23:54.560 --> 00:23:59.386
make high income or high asset people pay more taxes or whatever, when they sell stuff or when they buy stuff.

407
00:23:59.606 --> 00:24:01.208
There's a lot of ways to tax wealth.

408
00:24:01.848 --> 00:24:09.377
But taking assets from people after they've paid their taxes or before they've paid their taxes is not the right way to do it.

409
00:24:09.785 --> 00:24:10.906
What will ultimately happen?

410
00:24:11.106 --> 00:24:17.411
So the ultimate outcome will be that 51% of people will say, hey, give me all the stuff that the 49% have.

411
00:24:17.831 --> 00:24:19.052
What would stop them from doing that?

412
00:24:19.413 --> 00:24:25.398
Because ultimately, you can take as much as you want from a minority of people and distribute it to the majority.

413
00:24:25.718 --> 00:24:32.623
And that minority starts out with a few billionaires, then a couple more 50 millionaires, then a couple more 10 millionaires, then millionaires, then 100,000aires.

414
00:24:32.984 --> 00:24:34.645
And there's no limit to where this thing goes.

415
00:24:34.725 --> 00:24:35.846
And that is socialism.

416
00:24:35.866 --> 00:24:35.986
Yeah.

417
00:24:36.164 --> 00:24:43.651
And what does that do in terms of how talent moves and how people move to different places?

418
00:24:44.292 --> 00:24:45.814
I know billionaires.

419
00:24:46.915 --> 00:24:47.135
Yeah.

420
00:24:47.435 --> 00:24:51.139
Many of them have moved or are planning to move out of California, just on the thread of this.

421
00:24:51.880 --> 00:24:54.522
And people say, F them, good riddance, get rid of them.

422
00:24:55.463 --> 00:25:00.008
You know, the top 1% of taxpayers in California pay the majority of taxes in the state.

423
00:25:00.832 --> 00:25:04.254
I think it's probably, it's definitely north of 40%, but it's probably the majority.

424
00:25:04.615 --> 00:25:12.100
The top 1% of earners pay 40 to 50% of California's total personal income tax, depending on stock market capital gains performance.

425
00:25:12.120 --> 00:25:12.480
There you go.

426
00:25:13.061 --> 00:25:18.204
So that 1% are the people I'm talking about that are leaving the state because they see where this is headed.

427
00:25:18.985 --> 00:25:20.946
I don't think California wants that.

428
00:25:21.406 --> 00:25:23.348
Those are very productive people for the state.

429
00:25:23.368 --> 00:25:24.489
They're people that create...

430
00:25:25.289 --> 00:25:30.092
Companies that hire people that pay well, go to fancy restaurants, pay for cars.

431
00:25:30.112 --> 00:25:31.312
I mean, they support the economy.

432
00:25:31.332 --> 00:25:35.254
It's not just the taxes, but they're a big part of capital flowing through the economy.

433
00:25:35.815 --> 00:25:37.115
We saw this happen in France.

434
00:25:37.135 --> 00:25:43.899
You know, France had this wealth tax, and then their total tax revenue declined by more than they were making on the wealth tax because everyone left France.

435
00:25:44.359 --> 00:25:47.842
Then they stopped doing the wealth tax and everyone came back and the income came back.

436
00:25:47.882 --> 00:25:49.443
So this is a well studied kind of case.

437
00:25:49.783 --> 00:25:53.486
So I don't think that a wealth tax or an asset seizure tax is the solution.

438
00:25:53.506 --> 00:25:57.750
I think we've got to fix all the other stuff that we've talked about and we've got to fix the government spending problem.

439
00:25:58.090 --> 00:25:59.291
And if we can do those two things,

440
00:25:59.651 --> 00:26:05.255
then I think we can bring inflation down, we can bring the wealth inequality down, and give more people the ability to make that transition.

441
00:26:05.555 --> 00:26:12.179
But I do think every politician should be talking about the focus on what percent of people in the United States every year are moving from labor to capital.

442
00:26:12.199 --> 00:26:15.641
How many people can say, hey, I've got enough cash to retire if I wanted to.

443
00:26:16.162 --> 00:26:18.063
That's what we want to try and get everyone towards.

444
00:26:18.383 --> 00:26:23.587
Not just convincing people, and this is one of the great lies, convincing everyone that the great American dream is to own a house.

445
00:26:24.187 --> 00:26:33.313
When owning a house for a lot of Americans ends up putting all your capital in one asset, and you've got to basically get the price of housing to go up every year to keep everyone moving up the ladder.

446
00:26:33.694 --> 00:26:43.140
So now, fast forward 30, 40, 50 years, young people can't afford to buy a house anymore because we've pushed the asset value up so much to try and make sure that everyone's got good household wealth.

447
00:26:43.382 --> 00:26:44.002
We are told that.

448
00:26:44.022 --> 00:26:48.803
I mean, that was the sort of central idea once you leave university is to figure out how quickly you can get a mortgage or buy a house.

449
00:26:48.823 --> 00:26:49.063
Great lie.

450
00:26:49.283 --> 00:26:50.004
It's one of the great lies.

451
00:26:50.764 --> 00:26:59.546
And there's a lot of countries where people have been able to accumulate capital and jump that ravine from labor to capital much more quickly when they don't buy a house because they can invest in stuff.

452
00:26:59.566 --> 00:27:05.127
They can buy, you know, the S&P 500, which you can just buy on an E-Trade or Robinhood account and you can just own it.

453
00:27:05.627 --> 00:27:06.988
On average, it will make you 10%, 11% a year.

454
00:27:08.028 --> 00:27:10.930
You just put your money in that, you're making 10, 11% a year, and it can go up every year.

455
00:27:10.950 --> 00:27:11.710
You don't have to pay taxes.

456
00:27:11.730 --> 00:27:12.631
You don't have to pay property tax.

457
00:27:12.671 --> 00:27:13.571
You don't have to pay insurance.

458
00:27:13.931 --> 00:27:16.733
You don't have to deal with repairs and maintenance, all that sort of stuff.

459
00:27:17.193 --> 00:27:28.580
So a lot of people would have been better off, depending on the markets that they're in, there are some markets that ballooned, but a lot of people would have been better off over the last 30 years actually owning the S&P 500 than owning their home and paying for the rent on a home.

460
00:27:28.840 --> 00:27:35.884
One of the things I see in the comment section whenever someone makes that point is you'll have someone who bought a house 20 years ago saying, well, listen, you're not going

461
00:27:36.230 --> 00:27:40.752
I bought a house 20 years ago for this amount, and now it's worth this.

462
00:27:41.052 --> 00:27:50.797
And this is every single time that I see this argument being made from financial advisors or investors, that is always the top comment is, well, I bought one and I did good.

463
00:27:50.957 --> 00:27:51.097
Yep.

464
00:27:51.557 --> 00:27:59.581
It actually indicates a problem, which is if your house went up in price so much, that house is much less affordable to a young person that's gonna buy it next.

465
00:28:00.942 --> 00:28:03.363
And that's what we fundamentally done with this asset class.

466
00:28:04.179 --> 00:28:05.060
residential real estate.

467
00:28:05.720 --> 00:28:12.946
We've created a system whereby residential real estate prices go up so much, and there's a whole bunch of policies around making this happen.

468
00:28:12.966 --> 00:28:17.170
I've got a graph here showing all the things that have gone up, and you can see housing is one of them.

469
00:28:17.370 --> 00:28:19.311
Yeah, the stuff on the bottom, the government doesn't touch.

470
00:28:19.351 --> 00:28:20.973
The stuff on the top, the government touches.

471
00:28:21.173 --> 00:28:24.075
And so the more the government's involved, the more expensive these things get.

472
00:28:24.516 --> 00:28:31.261
But all of the policy around residential real estate has allowed the middle class in America, which has the majority of wealth, and I'll give you the statistics in a

473
00:28:32.322 --> 00:28:36.064
to grow their asset base, to accumulate more assets, to become wealthier.

474
00:28:36.645 --> 00:28:40.267
All the boomers, they're so wealthy because they owned all these houses.

475
00:28:40.787 --> 00:28:42.928
And now young people graduating college can't afford a house.

476
00:28:43.469 --> 00:28:52.414
It is a bad fact that a lot of people got very wealthy by owning a home because it means that the next generation is going to say, I want socialism because I can't afford a home.

477
00:28:52.934 --> 00:28:54.355
That's the moment we're in.

478
00:28:54.375 --> 00:28:58.958
40 million Americans graduated from colleges in the United States in the last 10 years.

479
00:28:58.978 --> 00:28:59.438
45 million.

480
00:28:59.778 --> 00:29:01.079
So if you do the math on this,

481
00:29:02.398 --> 00:29:11.331
That's a large number of people that are now, on average, encumbered with some amount of student debt, facing a challenging job market.

482
00:29:11.852 --> 00:29:14.095
And then the only way to buy a home is you've got to come up with a million bucks.

483
00:29:14.896 --> 00:29:19.022
And, you know, it leads to this problem where everyone's like, man, I need Mom Donnie.

484
00:29:19.400 --> 00:29:23.043
So what would you say then to people that are in that 62%, was it?

485
00:29:23.143 --> 00:29:23.423
63.

486
00:29:23.463 --> 00:29:24.544
63% of people.

487
00:29:24.604 --> 00:29:27.305
And that statistic changes year to year, but that's roughly the number.

488
00:29:27.405 --> 00:29:35.231
63% of Americans, you know, less than $500 of savings and working paycheck to paycheck and can't pay for a fiscal emergency.

489
00:29:35.711 --> 00:29:44.223
So for those people, the 63% who you're telling them that buying a house is now like unaffordable, it's potentially not a good investment.

490
00:29:44.383 --> 00:29:50.752
If they're trying to sort of cross that chasm and get over to the side where they have assets, what would your prescription be for them?

491
00:29:50.892 --> 00:29:51.353
What should they do?

492
00:29:52.125 --> 00:29:53.747
Man, that's a great question.

493
00:29:54.247 --> 00:29:55.068
People will challenge it.

494
00:29:55.448 --> 00:30:01.974
But I would have never thought that podcasting would be such a massive business.

495
00:30:02.755 --> 00:30:07.219
I would have never thought that being an Instagram influencer would be such a massive business or a TikTok influencer.

496
00:30:07.820 --> 00:30:13.506
I would have never thought that individual artists could publish online and make money without getting a record deal.

497
00:30:14.126 --> 00:30:19.970
I would have never thought that individual artists would be able to sell their work and make a living on eBay and Etsy.

498
00:30:20.611 --> 00:30:24.454
I would have never thought that craftspeople would be able to find jobs through the Internet.

499
00:30:24.654 --> 00:30:31.419
I think the Internet has been this incredible enabler of millions of new ways to work, of new ways to earn an income.

500
00:30:31.919 --> 00:30:35.962
And a lot of people will roll their eyes and say, but that's not what the system was supposed to have set me up for.

501
00:30:36.002 --> 00:30:36.843
The system failed us.

502
00:30:37.283 --> 00:30:38.564
Maybe the system did fail you.

503
00:30:39.004 --> 00:30:43.488
And maybe the government solution wasn't the right solution, but human agency is what got all these people there.

504
00:30:43.968 --> 00:30:45.089
They all got to this place.

505
00:30:45.329 --> 00:30:47.531
Did the government give you your job as a podcaster?

506
00:30:47.911 --> 00:30:51.574
Did the government teach you how to podcast and build this incredible media empire that you've built?

507
00:30:52.294 --> 00:30:54.216
I don't know if the government played much of a role in it.

508
00:30:54.236 --> 00:30:55.337
I think you played the role in it.

509
00:30:56.439 --> 00:30:56.779
I don't know.

510
00:30:57.019 --> 00:30:57.900
You tell me if I'm wrong.

511
00:30:58.680 --> 00:31:04.183
But I think that this is really important for a lot of people to observe firstly, which is the government isn't going to save individuals.

512
00:31:05.183 --> 00:31:08.104
The government's going to make things harder for individuals to find their path.

513
00:31:08.605 --> 00:31:13.067
If I have to go and start a barbershop, I got to go get all these cosmetology licenses.

514
00:31:13.407 --> 00:31:15.328
I got to go figure out a way to go to school...

515
00:31:16.068 --> 00:31:18.389
pay thousands of dollars, get health inspections done.

516
00:31:18.709 --> 00:31:21.669
There's a lot of government layers that stop me from doing that work.

517
00:31:22.029 --> 00:31:27.971
There's a lot of ways that the government actually inhibits people's agency and makes it harder for them to do the things that they want to do and progress.

518
00:31:28.291 --> 00:31:31.531
I think that's just fundamental for me, one of the observable truths.

519
00:31:31.932 --> 00:31:34.752
But I think the second thing is I never discount human agency.

520
00:31:34.772 --> 00:31:37.653
There was this great podcast done years ago.

521
00:31:38.792 --> 00:31:42.973
by those guys at the Hoover Institute, where they talked about the success of China.

522
00:31:43.813 --> 00:31:52.336
And a lot of people, you know, where China grew GDP per capita from like 3,000 to 30,000 or whatever it was, and they're like, man, Chinese central planning is brilliant.

523
00:31:52.356 --> 00:31:53.236
They're so good at this.

524
00:31:53.816 --> 00:32:02.859
And these guys made the argument, which I discounted at the time, but I often think about nowadays, that it was actually the agency of the individual choice that,

525
00:32:03.459 --> 00:32:13.686
The entrepreneurship, the drive, the motivation of the population of the individuals in China, not central planning, but basically the government enabled free markets.

526
00:32:13.706 --> 00:32:14.787
They allowed people to work.

527
00:32:14.847 --> 00:32:15.908
They allowed people to trade.

528
00:32:16.208 --> 00:32:20.111
They allowed people to create value for each other, to do something that someone else might want.

529
00:32:20.131 --> 00:32:22.953
They looked around and they said, I think you want this, and they started making it.

530
00:32:23.413 --> 00:32:27.917
And when the government loosened the shackles on individuals, that population grew the economy.

531
00:32:27.937 --> 00:32:28.037
Yeah.

532
00:32:28.597 --> 00:32:31.658
And the government still has a big role in central planning in China.

533
00:32:32.158 --> 00:32:33.398
But it was a really important point.

534
00:32:33.418 --> 00:32:39.459
If you think about all the success that's come from the United States, it's not a central message that the government said, let's do this, and then we're going to do this, and we're going to do this.

535
00:32:40.059 --> 00:32:41.740
It's individuals making their own choices.

536
00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:46.741
You've seen what people want to learn, what people want to watch, what they're interested in, and you give it to them.

537
00:32:46.761 --> 00:32:47.841
You create value for them.

538
00:32:48.261 --> 00:32:51.222
You deliver that value, and you've earned something from that.

539
00:32:51.822 --> 00:32:52.962
People are willing to pay for that.

540
00:32:53.402 --> 00:32:56.083
And I think that that's core to kind of where we can go from here.

541
00:32:56.503 --> 00:32:58.003
And I don't think we teach it in schools.

542
00:32:59.023 --> 00:33:00.705
I don't think we teach it as a value.

543
00:33:01.085 --> 00:33:05.849
We've lost that value of agency, the importance of the individual taking their own action.

544
00:33:06.109 --> 00:33:10.913
Every conversation we have in every frigging context is all about the frigging government.

545
00:33:11.274 --> 00:33:13.415
Government this, do this, do this, do this, do this for me.

546
00:33:14.576 --> 00:33:16.798
What individuals can do is limitless.

547
00:33:16.838 --> 00:33:18.360
And that's where I think we fall short.

548
00:33:18.600 --> 00:33:24.104
Every day someone should ask themselves, I tell my kids this, but what did you do today that someone else valued?

549
00:33:24.124 --> 00:33:24.765
Yeah.

550
00:33:25.229 --> 00:33:35.094
And if you focus on figuring out something that you can do, that someone else can value, and you do that over and over again, rinse and repeat, I think there's paths for people.

551
00:33:35.374 --> 00:33:36.614
So a couple of counter arguments here.

552
00:33:36.734 --> 00:33:37.215
Yeah.

553
00:33:37.395 --> 00:33:38.695
So we can stress test this thinking.

554
00:33:39.276 --> 00:33:48.280
You pointed at me and said, I started podcasts, I started businesses, those businesses grew, and it was, you were very generous in giving me probably more credit than I deserve there.

555
00:33:48.700 --> 00:33:52.442
But if I was to rebuttal that, I would say I was born in Africa,

556
00:33:52.982 --> 00:33:54.544
would that have been possible in Africa?

557
00:33:54.704 --> 00:34:01.451
Would that have been possible in Nigeria, where my mother's from, or would it have been possible in Botswana, where I was born?

558
00:34:01.991 --> 00:34:15.825
Is it the fact that I moved to the UK, where I had this sort of foundation of stability because of the government, where school was free for us, healthcare is taken care of, so I never had to think about those things, which allowed me at 18 years old to not go to university,

559
00:34:16.566 --> 00:34:18.767
take a risk, drop out, be in that room.

560
00:34:18.927 --> 00:34:31.771
No, when I was sat in that room in Manchester, I actually at one point printed off the Job Seeker's Allowance forms, which are basically the government will give me free money if I get to the point where my shoplifting of pizzas is no longer a reliable way to feed myself.

561
00:34:32.431 --> 00:34:34.432
But I had that form on my desk and it was there.

562
00:34:34.572 --> 00:34:43.995
And there's maybe something psychological about knowing that I had this sort of like underlying safety net where I could rush back a 300 mile round trip to my parents in Plymouth and I could like live in the house

563
00:34:45.015 --> 00:34:54.111
Or I could fill out this form, this Job Seekers Allowance form, and they would pay me money that allowed me maybe, at some deeper level, to go and take that risk.

564
00:34:54.131 --> 00:34:55.994
And I never even realised the privilege of like, oh...

565
00:34:56.790 --> 00:35:04.852
There's like healthcare and there's laws and there's roads and there's like this Wi-Fi thing that allows me with this laptop in my room to like build this website that I built.

566
00:35:05.032 --> 00:35:07.332
So that's the government's involvement in my success.

567
00:35:07.352 --> 00:35:09.733
They gave me this great foundation of stability and infrastructure.

568
00:35:09.973 --> 00:35:10.193
Great.

569
00:35:10.313 --> 00:35:11.453
Great role for government to play.

570
00:35:11.813 --> 00:35:13.954
But the problem is that's a slippery slope, right?

571
00:35:14.234 --> 00:35:14.614
That's right.

572
00:35:15.234 --> 00:35:16.054
And so there's balance here.

573
00:35:16.074 --> 00:35:19.595
There's nuance of like personal agency, but then also the government do need to give me a good foundation.

574
00:35:19.615 --> 00:35:19.955
That's right.

575
00:35:20.455 --> 00:35:22.456
And it starts to- But the government shouldn't employ you.

576
00:35:24.414 --> 00:35:26.236
And that's the slippery slope that we end up on.

577
00:35:26.716 --> 00:35:29.559
And that's where I worry about our ability to come back from that.

578
00:35:29.599 --> 00:35:35.984
Because if you do end up with 40, 50% of Americans getting paid some check from the government, it becomes very hard to get off of that check.

579
00:35:36.325 --> 00:35:38.647
And then people vote for that check to get bigger and bigger.

580
00:35:38.967 --> 00:35:47.175
The other point I wanted to point out of maybe a counterpoint is just like, and you know this because I've heard you say this before, but like there is a privilege that we both have in terms of our just...

581
00:35:49.468 --> 00:35:50.788
nature, nurture, whatever it might be.

582
00:35:51.269 --> 00:35:57.312
And I said nature because upbringing implies that our parents were great to us and that's what made us whatever.

583
00:35:57.492 --> 00:35:58.492
But also the opposite can be true.

584
00:35:58.512 --> 00:36:01.494
If you think about someone like Elon Musk, you go, his dad wasn't that nice to him.

585
00:36:02.274 --> 00:36:05.796
So not necessarily a lovely upbringing, but the circumstances- Well, he was never with

586
00:36:05.836 --> 00:36:07.297
without a meal and neither was I.

587
00:36:07.377 --> 00:36:10.419
And I mean, you know, those are important facts of privilege.

588
00:36:10.559 --> 00:36:19.905
The circumstances of our upbringing and maybe our nature, maybe our biology, maybe set us up to be the certain type of person where agency, however that's defined.

589
00:36:20.726 --> 00:36:21.827
And again, I pause there.

590
00:36:21.847 --> 00:36:22.827
I think you're exactly right.

591
00:36:23.068 --> 00:36:26.390
And I think that that's what education should be teaching that value.

592
00:36:27.070 --> 00:36:30.313
That's where I think this role of like, what's the role of a public school?

593
00:36:30.333 --> 00:36:30.813
Yeah.

594
00:36:31.193 --> 00:36:34.554
What's the role of this infrastructure that government's building around us?

595
00:36:35.234 --> 00:36:42.477
If it's teaching you that your next job is to come and work for the city or come and work for the state, it's not teaching you that you have agency.

596
00:36:43.157 --> 00:36:48.558
It's not telling you if you if it's telling you that the only path you're going to have coming out of this rural school is to go work in the military.

597
00:36:48.578 --> 00:36:49.959
It's not teaching you about your agency.

598
00:36:50.239 --> 00:36:53.020
And I'm not saying it's wrong to do civil service or to do military service.

599
00:36:53.040 --> 00:36:59.462
I think those are very important parts of what all of us should strive to do is to support the government that makes our society possible.

600
00:37:00.379 --> 00:37:10.944
But I think that this idea that we should all be proposed as like the government role, the government path, the government work is what we should all be stuck doing for the rest of our lives is the wrong setup.

601
00:37:11.344 --> 00:37:13.785
The opposite is though also probably the wrong setup.

602
00:37:14.470 --> 00:37:16.331
Which is that we should all start a business or become a creator.

603
00:37:16.571 --> 00:37:17.652
I think that's a mistake too.

604
00:37:18.213 --> 00:37:26.979
But I think that this idea that you can find a path where you can provide value to someone as part of an organization, as an individual, as a leader, you can choose your path.

605
00:37:27.659 --> 00:37:32.903
But the idea that you should be accessing your capacity, that you can create value for someone else should be the objective.

606
00:37:33.383 --> 00:37:35.505
Do you think there's always going to be inequality?

607
00:37:36.025 --> 00:37:36.245
Yes.

608
00:37:36.946 --> 00:37:38.287
I mean, it's either inequality...

609
00:37:39.760 --> 00:37:41.342
or it's lack of progress.

610
00:37:41.542 --> 00:37:43.064
I think those are the- That's the dance.

611
00:37:43.144 --> 00:37:43.725
That's the dance.

612
00:37:43.745 --> 00:37:45.326
So China's very good at this.

613
00:37:45.366 --> 00:37:49.511
If you watch their policy, they just recently shifted to a free market policy.

614
00:37:49.591 --> 00:37:50.973
They literally just have like a throttle.

615
00:37:51.753 --> 00:37:58.461
I always vision Xi has this lever in his big room where he goes like free market, not free market.

616
00:37:58.481 --> 00:38:00.683
Like he's just kind of like rolling it back and forth.

617
00:38:01.304 --> 00:38:04.147
When you have a free market, people push the frontier.

618
00:38:04.187 --> 00:38:05.168
They discover new things.

619
00:38:05.188 --> 00:38:07.130
They make new things that have never been done before.

620
00:38:07.490 --> 00:38:08.471
They create new value.

621
00:38:08.911 --> 00:38:10.032
And the economy grows.

622
00:38:10.633 --> 00:38:12.895
The problem is it doesn't grow evenly initially.

623
00:38:13.336 --> 00:38:16.859
So let's say that you came up with a goose that lays golden eggs.

624
00:38:17.179 --> 00:38:17.760
AI.

625
00:38:18.240 --> 00:38:18.501
AI.

626
00:38:19.141 --> 00:38:20.302
And you've got this technology.

627
00:38:20.322 --> 00:38:20.423
Yeah.

628
00:38:21.436 --> 00:38:25.097
And this technology is making golden eggs and you're getting very wealthy with these golden eggs.

629
00:38:25.117 --> 00:38:29.698
And then that goose makes two geese and three geese and four, it starts breeding and he starts selling the goose.

630
00:38:29.758 --> 00:38:33.359
And it takes a number of years before everyone has a golden goose.

631
00:38:34.140 --> 00:38:38.921
During that time, you've raced ahead because you've got now dozens of geese making lots of golden eggs for you.

632
00:38:39.741 --> 00:38:41.383
And a lot of people are like, I want a golden goose.

633
00:38:41.423 --> 00:38:44.207
By the time they get a golden goose, you've now got a million golden geese.

634
00:38:44.908 --> 00:38:46.791
And it feels like inequality.

635
00:38:47.211 --> 00:38:49.374
But the truth is now everyone here has a golden goose.

636
00:38:49.394 --> 00:38:53.039
And if you told them 30 years ago you would have a golden goose, they'd be like, no way, that'd be amazing.

637
00:38:53.500 --> 00:38:56.464
So every day they're making the golden goose, they're printing the money, they're buying stuff with it.

638
00:38:57.285 --> 00:39:00.247
That's the problem with progress, whether it's medicine.

639
00:39:00.347 --> 00:39:04.049
You know, a lot of medicines today are a million dollars a dose for like CAR T therapies, for example.

640
00:39:04.369 --> 00:39:05.470
These can save you from cancer.

641
00:39:05.510 --> 00:39:07.431
Only 50,000 people in the U.S. can get them every year.

642
00:39:07.951 --> 00:39:11.434
And there's hundreds of thousands of people that die because they don't have access to these therapies.

643
00:39:11.994 --> 00:39:14.335
So it's limited in terms of its availability.

644
00:39:14.856 --> 00:39:16.517
There's technology like AI.

645
00:39:16.657 --> 00:39:17.897
Not everyone has access to it.

646
00:39:17.937 --> 00:39:20.299
Not everyone owns a piece of a model, et cetera.

647
00:39:20.319 --> 00:39:21.119
Not everyone's using it.

648
00:39:21.139 --> 00:39:23.681
And the people that are using it are getting ahead faster than the people behind.

649
00:39:23.841 --> 00:39:25.082
In your golden goose analogy,

650
00:39:25.722 --> 00:39:32.709
By the time that the golden geese get down to the sort of lower end of the socioeconomic ladder... Or defuse.

651
00:39:32.870 --> 00:39:35.452
I would use the word defuse, yeah.

652
00:39:35.532 --> 00:39:37.715
Those golden eggs or whatever buy less.

653
00:39:38.498 --> 00:39:39.698
Because something happens along the way.

654
00:39:39.718 --> 00:39:40.058
That's right.

655
00:39:40.078 --> 00:39:42.679
So along the way, the government says, let's give everyone that.

656
00:39:43.039 --> 00:39:45.980
Let's give everyone access to more stuff to make up for that difference.

657
00:39:46.460 --> 00:39:48.060
And then things get more expensive.

658
00:39:48.320 --> 00:39:57.883
Is this in part because when the nation becomes prosperous because the GDP is high, when you have four-year election cycles, politicians get in by offering you lots of free stuff.

659
00:39:58.483 --> 00:40:00.643
And that is the nature of the four-year election cycle.

660
00:40:00.803 --> 00:40:05.724
I always said the kid that got elected president in middle school was the kid who said he's going to make the vending machines free.

661
00:40:06.044 --> 00:40:07.805
That's always going to be true in any election.

662
00:40:08.865 --> 00:40:11.067
And at the end of the day, that's how the system grows.

663
00:40:11.187 --> 00:40:15.750
We don't talk about this four-year election thing enough as maybe as being a bit of a causal factor.

664
00:40:16.151 --> 00:40:21.054
That's causing short-termism amongst these leaders where they're all just spending more money to...

665
00:40:21.254 --> 00:40:29.841
I cannot tell you how much it drives me nuts when I go to Washington, D.C. And I go to Washington, D.C. every couple of weeks or whatever, and I meet with congresspeople.

666
00:40:30.992 --> 00:40:32.313
Senators and representatives.

667
00:40:33.153 --> 00:40:36.214
Literally all of them just talk about getting stuff for their constituents.

668
00:40:36.374 --> 00:40:36.554
Yeah.

669
00:40:36.674 --> 00:40:38.275
That's all that they're there to do.

670
00:40:38.875 --> 00:40:40.555
Just get stuff for their people.

671
00:40:41.156 --> 00:40:41.776
That's their job.

672
00:40:42.176 --> 00:40:43.116
And that's how they get elected.

673
00:40:43.577 --> 00:40:46.278
And the incentive is, I'm going to get you something.

674
00:40:46.618 --> 00:40:47.098
Vote for me.

675
00:40:48.110 --> 00:40:54.673
Now, the founding fathers kind of had this idea that they would rotate into public service and rotate out and go back to private life.

676
00:40:54.793 --> 00:40:59.094
There's a lot of writings about this, you know, in the early days of the formation of this republic.

677
00:40:59.735 --> 00:41:01.695
And it was like, we should all go do our tour of duty.

678
00:41:01.735 --> 00:41:02.376
We should go in.

679
00:41:02.796 --> 00:41:09.379
There was never this belief that America would evolve to a world where you have career politicians, people that are just constantly trying to get elected.

680
00:41:09.819 --> 00:41:11.459
And their job is to be a politician.

681
00:41:11.860 --> 00:41:14.281
It's just such a mind-numbingly crazy idea to think about.

682
00:41:14.341 --> 00:41:17.342
And all my politician friends are about to chop my head off about this.

683
00:41:18.002 --> 00:41:18.843
But I think it's nuts.

684
00:41:19.343 --> 00:41:21.365
I don't think a person should be a politician.

685
00:41:21.845 --> 00:41:23.366
I don't think that job title should exist.

686
00:41:24.107 --> 00:41:25.688
And I'm sorry to all the politicians out there.

687
00:41:26.288 --> 00:41:36.296
I think the people that represent the people should have the best long-term interests of the people in mind because they should be constrained to serving for a limited period of time and then they go back to private life.

688
00:41:36.716 --> 00:41:38.598
That means that we should have term limits.

689
00:41:38.998 --> 00:41:46.304
So you should never be able to be elected more than two terms as a senator or four terms as a representative or whatever it is.

690
00:41:46.784 --> 00:41:52.989
And it should be the case that if you're in one public office, maybe you shouldn't go transition to other public offices under those same limits.

691
00:41:53.449 --> 00:41:59.133
Because at the end of the day, you have created a system whereby you've proven that you can get stuff for people and your job is to go get stuff for people.

692
00:41:59.533 --> 00:42:00.935
And that causes the government to...

693
00:42:01.928 --> 00:42:07.330
inflate, be mismanaged, you know, and then there's all the waste, fraud, and abuse stuff that happens along the way.

694
00:42:07.590 --> 00:42:08.511
Everything is a trade-off, right?

695
00:42:08.531 --> 00:42:17.034
Even in that example, if some people did eight years in government and they know they're going back to private life, they could be dealing their friends.

696
00:42:17.654 --> 00:42:18.815
I'm going to do eight years in government.

697
00:42:18.855 --> 00:42:20.595
I'm going to run the transportation division.

698
00:42:20.915 --> 00:42:24.737
I'm going to serve some nice benefits to my friend who runs Boeing.

699
00:42:25.317 --> 00:42:27.098
And then when I step back in, I'm going to step in as the chair.

700
00:42:27.118 --> 00:42:28.679
That's the law to make sure that doesn't happen.

701
00:42:28.699 --> 00:42:29.920
And he goes to jail if that happens.

702
00:42:29.960 --> 00:42:31.301
That's a pretty easy fix.

703
00:42:31.321 --> 00:42:32.141
You can't buy stocks.

704
00:42:32.502 --> 00:42:33.322
You can't own stuff.

705
00:42:33.342 --> 00:42:34.123
You can't trade.

706
00:42:34.143 --> 00:42:35.964
I mean, there's just so many obvious things.

707
00:42:35.984 --> 00:42:40.467
If you're going to go serve in government, you can't do stuff that you can do as a private citizen.

708
00:42:40.807 --> 00:42:42.868
And you shouldn't be able to enrich yourself as a private citizen.

709
00:42:42.888 --> 00:42:43.829
And if you do, you should go to jail.

710
00:42:44.089 --> 00:42:51.194
But we should also make sure that the incentive structure is set up right so that good people come and work in government and that we have good rotation between public and private life.

711
00:42:51.815 --> 00:43:02.883
It's a hard problem, though, this problem of how you fix this incentive structure so that you don't just get, I mean, this stuff inevitably happens because we hand out lots of free things and we don't think about the long-term consequences.

712
00:43:03.223 --> 00:43:04.484
Has anyone fixed it globally?

713
00:43:04.524 --> 00:43:07.206
Is there any nation you look at as a model for a better?

714
00:43:07.246 --> 00:43:09.147
A lot of people will point to Denmark.

715
00:43:09.587 --> 00:43:12.630
They'll point to places like that and say, hey, these guys do a great job.

716
00:43:12.690 --> 00:43:15.492
And, you know, there's a lot of public services and people pay high taxes.

717
00:43:15.532 --> 00:43:18.474
But, you know, there's not a lot of great progress.

718
00:43:19.094 --> 00:43:21.438
There's no entrepreneurial success coming out of those places.

719
00:43:22.379 --> 00:43:33.415
What happens in America, the freedoms that were afforded, the individual agency and liberty and rights to private property, creates an incentive structure that says, go try and do crazy stuff that could work.

720
00:43:34.096 --> 00:43:37.937
And if it works, there's tremendous return, so it's worth taking the risk.

721
00:43:38.357 --> 00:43:40.437
And that level of risk is what pushes the boundaries.

722
00:43:40.498 --> 00:43:46.439
It's what discovered CAR-T therapy, what discovered gene editing that can lead to curing human diseases.

723
00:43:46.779 --> 00:43:51.560
It's what's discovered new advances in agriculture, new physics, new engineering, AI.

724
00:43:51.880 --> 00:43:58.022
All of these things came from this risk-taking system that we've set up in the United States that's built around these individual incentives.

725
00:43:58.522 --> 00:43:59.222
And it works.

726
00:44:04.643 --> 00:44:05.164
in Denmark.

727
00:44:05.564 --> 00:44:08.486
And people will be very happy living there and they will have a good life.

728
00:44:09.047 --> 00:44:11.448
But you will not have progress like you have in the United States.

729
00:44:11.468 --> 00:44:14.591
And we push the frontier because we create this incentive structure.

730
00:44:14.611 --> 00:44:15.912
And that's where progress comes from.

731
00:44:16.172 --> 00:44:24.138
Would you say the vast majority would choose to live in a place like Denmark if it, you know, I'm looking at some of the stats here, they have higher...

732
00:44:25.018 --> 00:44:27.901
societal trust in government, police institutions and strangers.

733
00:44:28.382 --> 00:44:34.889
They have standard 37-hour work weeks, five to six weeks of paid vacation and cultural emphasis on balance.

734
00:44:35.269 --> 00:44:39.794
They have lower ceiling of extreme wealth, but a higher floor, so less poverty and financial ruin.

735
00:44:40.214 --> 00:44:44.178
And according to global happiness metrics, Denmark consistently ranks significantly higher than the United States.

736
00:44:44.699 --> 00:44:46.661
Most people would choose that, right?

737
00:44:46.741 --> 00:44:47.161
Absolutely.

738
00:44:47.802 --> 00:44:56.750
So central planning, it might stop a few, you know, very high agency, ambitious people, but the vast majority would theoretically be happier with a Denmark model.

739
00:44:56.930 --> 00:44:57.891
The vast majority maybe.

740
00:44:58.171 --> 00:45:03.175
And do you think the vast majority in this contract actually would, if there was two buttons and they had to press, they'd press Denmark?

741
00:45:04.196 --> 00:45:09.441
One of the things that I think makes American culture different from Denmark is this idea of individual progress.

742
00:45:10.722 --> 00:45:13.984
So I think if you ask the majority of people, you can have that.

743
00:45:14.935 --> 00:45:19.379
But you don't get to progress, meaning you don't get to earn more next year and you don't get to earn more next year.

744
00:45:19.399 --> 00:45:20.940
You don't have a shot at becoming a millionaire.

745
00:45:21.661 --> 00:45:23.943
You don't have a shot at building something great.

746
00:45:24.023 --> 00:45:26.125
You don't have a shot at buying a second home.

747
00:45:26.605 --> 00:45:27.887
You're limited, but you get that.

748
00:45:29.308 --> 00:45:31.370
Over here, you don't get anything guaranteed to you.

749
00:45:31.390 --> 00:45:33.772
You get some stuff guaranteed to you, but you don't get much more guaranteed to you.

750
00:45:34.392 --> 00:45:36.154
But you could have the world.

751
00:45:37.672 --> 00:45:38.793
You could make a million dollars.

752
00:45:39.453 --> 00:45:40.294
You could own a second home.

753
00:45:40.894 --> 00:45:41.894
You could buy a second car.

754
00:45:42.215 --> 00:45:46.217
You could pay off your kid's college tuition debt if you earn well.

755
00:45:46.957 --> 00:45:48.218
There's more options here.

756
00:45:48.938 --> 00:45:50.099
There's more guaranteed here.

757
00:45:50.439 --> 00:45:51.940
You think the 63% would pick?

758
00:45:53.261 --> 00:45:57.023
I think even within the 63%, there would be some percent that would say this.

759
00:45:57.543 --> 00:46:00.525
But I do think this is why we're headed the way we're headed in the United States.

760
00:46:00.965 --> 00:46:02.026
People want more of a guarantee.

761
00:46:02.746 --> 00:46:05.388
The question is, do you want to maximize the number of people that are happy

762
00:46:06.471 --> 00:46:08.953
Or do you want to maximize the number of people that are truly free?

763
00:46:10.034 --> 00:46:15.280
And by being truly free, increases the rate of progress across the whole population.

764
00:46:15.880 --> 00:46:17.602
And that rate of progress may be asymmetric.

765
00:46:17.622 --> 00:46:18.383
It may be diffuse.

766
00:46:18.423 --> 00:46:20.645
Starts with some, makes its way to others over time.

767
00:46:22.640 --> 00:46:25.563
I think that that's what America's chosen to be for the last 250 years.

768
00:46:25.983 --> 00:46:30.108
I'm not sure we're choosing to be that for the next 250 based on what's going on across the country right now.

769
00:46:30.248 --> 00:46:31.469
Maybe because people aren't happy.

770
00:46:31.889 --> 00:46:35.313
And actually, maybe that was always the more important thing versus progress.

771
00:46:35.813 --> 00:46:37.235
Important in an aggregate way.

772
00:46:37.935 --> 00:46:39.257
Again, I'll come back to the individual.

773
00:46:40.612 --> 00:46:53.385
We choose to live in a society because it gives us that foundation that you described, that ability to have the safety, the security, to take risk, to make our own decisions, and potentially build a media empire, as you have done.

774
00:46:53.785 --> 00:46:56.688
And maybe you would have been happy in the other context where you didn't have that.

775
00:46:58.029 --> 00:46:59.931
But would you have reached your potential as a human?

776
00:47:00.832 --> 00:47:02.413
I'll be honest, I'm not sure I would have been happy.

777
00:47:03.173 --> 00:47:04.873
Because, again, that goes back to my own nature.

778
00:47:05.053 --> 00:47:06.054
It's just the way that I am.

779
00:47:06.074 --> 00:47:08.474
If you put me in a room, I'll try and create something and build something.

780
00:47:08.494 --> 00:47:13.456
But I've come to learn with time that not everybody has that bias or those desires.

781
00:47:13.516 --> 00:47:19.778
Not everybody has that lower T trauma from their childhood of being the only black kid in an all-white area and thinking money was really important and it was freedom and it was self-esteem.

782
00:47:20.038 --> 00:47:21.258
Like, not everybody has that.

783
00:47:21.278 --> 00:47:22.299
So I...

784
00:47:23.099 --> 00:47:26.141
I realized that when I design solutions, they shouldn't probably be designed for me.

785
00:47:26.521 --> 00:47:26.701
Yeah.

786
00:47:26.721 --> 00:47:30.303
You know, it's taken me a long time to get to that place because I kind of, I was very much...

787
00:47:30.323 --> 00:47:42.870
The challenge with America in this moment is can you give what you're describing, the Denmark answer, to enough Americans without taking away the liberty that the Americans that want to have that liberty have today?

788
00:47:43.590 --> 00:47:44.911
And I'm not sure the answer is yes.

789
00:47:45.431 --> 00:47:49.133
As soon as you start taking private property from these people, the ones that are successful in this bucket...

790
00:47:50.120 --> 00:47:53.041
then you're sort of taking away the incentive for them to be in this bucket in America.

791
00:47:53.661 --> 00:47:54.281
And I'm seeing that.

792
00:47:55.182 --> 00:47:56.122
I see people wanna leave.

793
00:47:56.462 --> 00:47:58.123
And so you're not gonna solve for everyone.

794
00:47:58.943 --> 00:48:03.204
But if you solve for this Denmark solution, I think you lose a lot of this.

795
00:48:03.464 --> 00:48:06.585
Well, the UK is quite an interesting example here for this very reason.

796
00:48:07.005 --> 00:48:11.147
I mean, one of the big subjects of conversation in the UK is that the millionaires are all leaving.

797
00:48:11.667 --> 00:48:14.230
or at least in high volume, and they're coming to other places.

798
00:48:14.430 --> 00:48:19.056
If you look at the Millionaire Exist maps that they publish often, they're going to Dubai or they're coming to America.

799
00:48:19.076 --> 00:48:24.662
A lot of my friends that are building technical companies in particular have come over to America for this reason.

800
00:48:26.204 --> 00:48:31.490
And I do think we might have a little bit of a, we have a bit of a spending problem, it seems, but also I think we might have a bit of a productivity problem.

801
00:48:32.263 --> 00:48:32.723
In the UK.

802
00:48:32.863 --> 00:48:33.343
In the UK.

803
00:48:33.423 --> 00:48:33.683
Yeah.

804
00:48:34.303 --> 00:48:37.064
Well, do you think the productivity problem is related to the spending problem?

805
00:48:37.764 --> 00:48:38.404
Oh, yes, of course.

806
00:48:38.444 --> 00:48:38.604
Right.

807
00:48:39.004 --> 00:48:46.406
If you're collecting checks or getting services provided to you, the incentive to be more productive as an individual goes away.

808
00:48:46.906 --> 00:48:57.528
But also as a system, it becomes a lot harder to create economic incentives for productivity gains when tax rates are very high and you don't actually get to reap the benefits of the risk you take and so on.

809
00:48:57.548 --> 00:48:58.568
That's the economic argument.

810
00:48:59.223 --> 00:49:10.176
Listen, I've been catfished by furniture my whole life, where something has looked fantastic in the picture, whether it's a sofa, whatever it might be, and I order it and I get so excited and then it comes and it's something entirely different.

811
00:49:10.596 --> 00:49:19.466
The quality was significantly different to what it said or looks like online, or the texture was different, or it didn't hold up in the same way.

812
00:49:19.586 --> 00:49:19.867
And so

813
00:49:20.407 --> 00:49:28.632
One of the things that I love about our sponsor Wayfair, who've helped us fit out our green room, which is in the room behind me, is they have this system called Wayfair Verified.

814
00:49:28.793 --> 00:49:31.154
Wayfair Verified takes away all of that second guessing.

815
00:49:31.314 --> 00:49:39.199
Products are hand-vetted by Wayfair specialists for quality, so you can feel more confident when you've found the thing that you love.

816
00:49:39.419 --> 00:49:48.485
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817
00:49:48.645 --> 00:49:49.526
It is amazing.

818
00:49:50.456 --> 00:49:52.877
Hello, I wasn't able to make that finance meeting.

819
00:49:52.957 --> 00:49:55.018
Can you tell me what I missed?

820
00:49:55.118 --> 00:49:57.900
What I have in front of me is Whisperflow's new Notetaker.

821
00:49:57.920 --> 00:49:59.781
And for me, it's been an absolute game changer.

822
00:49:59.861 --> 00:50:04.023
I spend most of my life sat in very, very long meetings with lots of different teams and lots of different departments.

823
00:50:04.143 --> 00:50:08.325
In any given week, I could have 40, 50 meetings and sometimes more.

824
00:50:08.365 --> 00:50:13.608
But also I sit in podcasts where lots of very interesting things get said and I need to focus on the conversation.

825
00:50:13.888 --> 00:50:15.829
What Whisperflow's Notetaker does for me...

826
00:50:16.169 --> 00:50:19.910
is it captures the entire context of everything that's happened throughout my entire week.

827
00:50:20.030 --> 00:50:22.730
It labels who the people are that said what.

828
00:50:22.890 --> 00:50:29.392
And I can ask it for things that I might have forgotten, for actions, things that I said I would do that I haven't yet done.

829
00:50:29.612 --> 00:50:33.293
It's building this sort of broader context of everything that's happening in my life.

830
00:50:33.673 --> 00:50:35.553
And it's an incredible, incredible superpower.

831
00:50:35.653 --> 00:50:40.694
I love the fact that so many of you come up to me in the street because you know I'm an investor in Whisperflow and tell me how much it's changed your life.

832
00:50:40.794 --> 00:50:43.435
It is the worst kept secret in productivity.

833
00:50:43.635 --> 00:50:49.302
If you want to give it a go, head to whisperflow.ai.com to download it right now and give it a try.

834
00:50:49.322 --> 00:50:51.845
And once you try it, I think you'll realize why we let them sponsor this podcast.

835
00:50:52.066 --> 00:50:52.566
It's amazing.

836
00:50:53.346 --> 00:50:58.289
I mean, this kind of does tie into the subject of artificial intelligence and where it all fits.

837
00:50:58.829 --> 00:51:03.372
In part, because the narrative of artificial intelligence is that it's about to take our jobs.

838
00:51:04.112 --> 00:51:06.253
And you think about that, that's why I wanted to start with the backdrop.

839
00:51:06.273 --> 00:51:12.497
Think about that backdrop of, I'm already struggling, I'm in the 63%, and now you're telling me I'm going to lose this fucking job that's paying me?

840
00:51:13.157 --> 00:51:14.558
And I'm already living hand to mouth.

841
00:51:15.178 --> 00:51:15.879
And what's the offer?

842
00:51:16.479 --> 00:51:17.680
We might get UBI.

843
00:51:17.700 --> 00:51:19.482
We might be sent checks in the post at some point.

844
00:51:19.502 --> 00:51:20.924
Well, actually, I like my job.

845
00:51:20.964 --> 00:51:22.525
It's a community, a sense of purpose.

846
00:51:22.585 --> 00:51:23.886
It gives me something to do.

847
00:51:24.367 --> 00:51:25.188
And that's the narrative.

848
00:51:25.568 --> 00:51:27.189
Yes, that is the narrative.

849
00:51:27.790 --> 00:51:28.711
You don't believe the narrative?

850
00:51:30.252 --> 00:51:31.734
I believe what everyone's feeling.

851
00:51:32.847 --> 00:51:36.289
But this narrative that AI will take jobs away, you don't believe it.

852
00:51:36.910 --> 00:51:39.851
I recently pulled up, and you guys can go to archive.org.

853
00:51:40.532 --> 00:51:45.655
There's a Newsweek article about computers will take all the jobs from 1963.

854
00:51:45.895 --> 00:51:48.037
So the mainframes are what got put in the basement in the 60s.

855
00:51:48.637 --> 00:51:51.479
And everyone had to walk past the scary mainframe on the right.

856
00:51:51.559 --> 00:51:54.981
It's like blinking lights and buzzing and making sounds.

857
00:51:55.001 --> 00:52:00.385
And it's like, the mainframe is going to destroy all the accountant jobs, all the typing jobs, all these things that we all do.

858
00:52:01.105 --> 00:52:02.066
that we get paid to do.

859
00:52:02.386 --> 00:52:03.527
And I like working in my office.

860
00:52:03.547 --> 00:52:04.367
I like my colleagues.

861
00:52:04.407 --> 00:52:05.728
I like coming in every day, having lunch.

862
00:52:06.269 --> 00:52:06.849
That's a good life.

863
00:52:07.249 --> 00:52:08.590
This mainframe is going to ruin my life.

864
00:52:09.131 --> 00:52:13.774
And so there was this effort to legislate against these things at the time that didn't get through in Congress.

865
00:52:14.294 --> 00:52:18.977
And then in the 80s, there was another wave on computing where it was like, hey, now we're all getting desktop computers.

866
00:52:18.997 --> 00:52:24.301
It's going to replace the workers and it's going to be a desktop computer and a worker and like 50 people disappear out of the workforce.

867
00:52:24.601 --> 00:52:29.945
So empirically, meaning from data, from evidence, over all periods of technological revolution like this,

868
00:52:30.485 --> 00:52:32.227
We've never seen jobs decline.

869
00:52:32.307 --> 00:52:33.969
We've always seen jobs go up.

870
00:52:34.830 --> 00:52:39.496
And we've seen demand go up, and therefore incomes rise when new technology enters the workforce.

871
00:52:39.877 --> 00:52:45.203
That's because the new technology makes an individual more productive, so they can do more per hour with their time.

872
00:52:45.844 --> 00:52:48.185
And as a result, they can get paid more for doing that work.

873
00:52:48.485 --> 00:52:53.428
So imagine instead of having a painter painting a wall, what if he was in charge of the five robots that are painting the wall?

874
00:52:53.948 --> 00:52:54.449
Okay, great.

875
00:52:54.489 --> 00:52:58.751
Now he's going to get paid more because you can get so many more homes painted in a day.

876
00:52:59.171 --> 00:53:00.552
He's going to get paid more to do that work.

877
00:53:00.672 --> 00:53:02.473
People are going to be like, well, there's only so many homes.

878
00:53:02.493 --> 00:53:07.136
That's always the argument is you always think about the fixed pie argument that the pie doesn't grow.

879
00:53:07.696 --> 00:53:10.437
But what always happens is that the pie grows.

880
00:53:10.618 --> 00:53:12.719
The economy grows is the way to think about it.

881
00:53:13.219 --> 00:53:14.580
And so as automation...

882
00:53:15.240 --> 00:53:22.007
or technology is used to give individuals more leverage to do more things with their time, then more things get done.

883
00:53:22.027 --> 00:53:23.628
People come up with these new product ideas.

884
00:53:24.129 --> 00:53:25.670
Hey, we've got excess capital.

885
00:53:25.690 --> 00:53:26.651
Let's build new homes.

886
00:53:26.691 --> 00:53:27.492
Let's build a building.

887
00:53:27.612 --> 00:53:30.175
But who benefits from the expansion of that pie?

888
00:53:30.515 --> 00:53:36.919
In all cases, there's been deep economic value created for the entire workforce, all the way down to the lowest level.

889
00:53:37.520 --> 00:53:38.701
It doesn't happen overnight.

890
00:53:39.081 --> 00:53:49.168
And that's where during that period of time when you see the new technology, oh, the mainframe's in the basement or the desktop computer's on my colleague's desk and you're like, oh my God, I'm going to lose my job.

891
00:53:49.748 --> 00:53:59.275
To the time that your company is growing considerably their revenue and giving everyone raises and everyone bonuses and adding more product lines and doing more stuff, you're like...

892
00:53:59.935 --> 00:54:01.015
oh man, okay, I feel better.

893
00:54:01.856 --> 00:54:03.877
And I think that would be the argument from the 60s and 80s.

894
00:54:04.577 --> 00:54:06.177
And even back in the Industrial Revolution.

895
00:54:06.197 --> 00:54:08.798
But the question today is, how does work change?

896
00:54:08.818 --> 00:54:14.480
Because remember, in the Industrial Revolution, people moved from farms, 60% of labor was in farming.

897
00:54:14.500 --> 00:54:14.941
Today, it's like 2%.

898
00:54:16.041 --> 00:54:19.945
into factories and they got paid a lot more and they lived a better life.

899
00:54:20.005 --> 00:54:22.248
They actually were able to afford healthcare, yada, yada, yada.

900
00:54:22.868 --> 00:54:31.137
And the transition in any sort of like technological revolution is net beneficial for all parties involved, but there is a transition.

901
00:54:31.777 --> 00:54:33.039
So what's it going to look like?

902
00:54:33.339 --> 00:54:34.600
Are we all going to lose our jobs?

903
00:54:35.321 --> 00:54:36.823
AI is definitely different.

904
00:54:37.800 --> 00:54:44.941
But I don't think that AI is this world where humans are going to look around and be like, none of us have anything to do anymore.

905
00:54:45.542 --> 00:54:47.362
Like, I don't believe in that narrative.

906
00:54:47.422 --> 00:54:54.043
And the reason is I already see extraordinary creative things being done with AI that were not possible years ago.

907
00:54:54.363 --> 00:54:59.284
People are creating TV shows, one person, that they would have needed a staff of 20 people to do.

908
00:54:59.584 --> 00:55:03.245
And they can use AI to create AI-generated content and put these shows out on platforms.

909
00:55:03.365 --> 00:55:05.325
on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram.

910
00:55:05.866 --> 00:55:07.546
I mean, look, you may not like how it looks today.

911
00:55:07.586 --> 00:55:21.909
There may be a lot of AI slop out there, but as this stuff gets better and better, the creative output of people using AI on creative channels where we're all consuming media is only going to go up, and people are going to make money that they weren't able to make before from that output as other people consume it.

912
00:55:22.229 --> 00:55:24.070
My ability to do work, I don't have to...

913
00:55:24.790 --> 00:55:31.613
you know, think about my, you know, four hours a day that I'm writing documents today, I can get all that work done in 10 minutes, or 15 minutes.

914
00:55:31.933 --> 00:55:36.315
And then I can spend the other three and a half hours doing other things that create new value for my company.

915
00:55:36.535 --> 00:55:39.276
If we go back to the topic of this, the robot painter analogy.

916
00:55:39.536 --> 00:55:43.498
Yes, you said a guy might have had five people painting now they can have five robots painting.

917
00:55:44.092 --> 00:55:48.154
No, I was saying the guy, instead of painting on his own, he can now have five robots painting.

918
00:55:48.494 --> 00:55:48.694
Yeah.

919
00:55:49.055 --> 00:55:51.816
And then he can now produce five times as much with his time.

920
00:55:52.136 --> 00:55:54.738
Think about what we saw with the desktop computer revolution, right?

921
00:55:54.818 --> 00:56:04.803
Adobe Photoshop came around and everyone was like, oh my God, like photographers are out of work because a big part of being a photographer was all the post editing and cleaning up and airbrushing and all this sort of stuff.

922
00:56:04.823 --> 00:56:06.704
And they're like, that whole industry is destroyed with Photoshop.

923
00:56:07.284 --> 00:56:13.770
What ended up happening is a ton more media was created and print media was created because Photoshop created leverage to create many more beautiful images.

924
00:56:14.150 --> 00:56:15.451
And then all these magazines took off.

925
00:56:15.471 --> 00:56:23.758
And if you look at magazine circulation, they grew considerably as Photoshop came out because it allowed much more production on high-value photography.

926
00:56:23.978 --> 00:56:26.581
I think the reason why it feels different is because that's...

927
00:56:26.601 --> 00:56:28.582
I mean, the Industrial Revolution example is kind of like...

928
00:56:29.363 --> 00:56:30.984
Physical work moving to cognitive work.

929
00:56:31.144 --> 00:56:35.646
That was cognitive work creating a new type of cognitive work, the Adobe analogy.

930
00:56:36.026 --> 00:56:42.589
If AI takes the cognitive work, and from what you said about robotics, robotics takes a lot of the physical work, what is this third type of work?

931
00:56:42.929 --> 00:56:44.790
I think it's cognitive and physical.

932
00:56:44.890 --> 00:56:54.454
It's no different than what we've seen in the past, but it doesn't mean that there isn't an individual who's going to program the robot on what rooms to paint, how to paint them, how to do the detailing correct.

933
00:56:54.714 --> 00:56:57.135
The homeowner doesn't have the level of skill that the painter does.

934
00:56:57.615 --> 00:56:57.775
Right.

935
00:56:57.795 --> 00:56:59.537
So the painter's... And AI couldn't do that.

936
00:57:00.037 --> 00:57:01.138
Maybe at some point.

937
00:57:01.159 --> 00:57:05.463
I mean, you could make this argument on a continuum where eventually everything, nothing exists.

938
00:57:05.563 --> 00:57:07.925
But along the way, there are new things that are emerging.

939
00:57:08.065 --> 00:57:09.486
Think about going back 50 years.

940
00:57:10.007 --> 00:57:11.749
There was no yoga instructor.

941
00:57:11.909 --> 00:57:13.490
There was no dog walker.

942
00:57:13.710 --> 00:57:15.132
There was no Instagram influencer.

943
00:57:15.152 --> 00:57:16.213
There was no podcaster.

944
00:57:16.533 --> 00:57:26.345
I mean, there's a million versions of new work that emerged along the way as the Internet took hold and people could start to spend their time or market themselves or market their capabilities in other ways.

945
00:57:26.746 --> 00:57:35.236
So I think it's a pessimistic view to assume that robots replace all humans and then humans have no logic, no agency, no capacity for creative work anymore.

946
00:57:35.496 --> 00:57:43.460
I have an optimistic view on this, which is that AI and robotics enables individuals to do far more things than they ever could have contemplated.

947
00:57:43.940 --> 00:57:48.362
And that's going to give everyone much more ability to realize their potential with their agency.

948
00:57:48.382 --> 00:57:54.265
I mean, even the podcast, I think game is going to be significantly disrupted in some part.

949
00:57:54.305 --> 00:58:00.908
We ran a test a couple of years ago to figure out if a synthesized voice of me could have the same average view duration as me.

950
00:58:02.324 --> 00:58:05.085
And it was just me reading out the stories of founders through history.

951
00:58:05.305 --> 00:58:11.287
So I did like a Steve Jobs episode where it was my voice, AI had written the script, AI had synthesized my voice, so I had no involvement.

952
00:58:11.427 --> 00:58:14.668
And the amount of people that got to the end was 40 to 50% of an hour.

953
00:58:15.508 --> 00:58:17.969
And they knew it was AI, because it said at the top, this is an AI podcast.

954
00:58:18.349 --> 00:58:25.291
And so I thought, okay, there is a lot of informational part of what me and you do, where we're sharing just in pure play information that will be taken away.

955
00:58:25.571 --> 00:58:29.292
However, what I hear through listening to your answer about creators and art

956
00:58:29.872 --> 00:58:33.935
You're saying that there will be this human, sort of irreplaceably human component, yoga teachers.

957
00:58:34.255 --> 00:58:35.476
Yoga teachers aren't telling you yoga.

958
00:58:35.876 --> 00:58:39.018
It's also community and gathering in real life and being there amongst other people.

959
00:58:39.058 --> 00:58:42.740
I think the IRL job world is going to explode.

960
00:58:43.081 --> 00:58:44.782
And I think it's going to be extremely valuable.

961
00:58:45.082 --> 00:58:47.363
I always had this view like, oh, coffee shops will be automated.

962
00:58:47.383 --> 00:58:49.425
But I actually think the opposite is probably true.

963
00:58:50.145 --> 00:58:52.106
I think there will be a premium on coffee shops.

964
00:58:52.186 --> 00:58:58.108
I'll pay $40 for a latte because that human is making the latte and I get to go be with other humans.

965
00:58:58.688 --> 00:59:00.729
I get to go to a workout class with humans.

966
00:59:00.809 --> 00:59:02.410
I get to go spend time at a concert.

967
00:59:02.770 --> 00:59:03.950
I get to go spend time at dinners.

968
00:59:03.990 --> 00:59:04.971
I think this, like, event...

969
00:59:05.831 --> 00:59:12.514
live space, experiential part of our world that we kind of think about as luxury today, maybe it becomes more core.

970
00:59:12.774 --> 00:59:15.536
Like, maybe it becomes more of how we spend our time.

971
00:59:15.556 --> 00:59:19.878
Maybe we spend 30, 40% of our time, you know, in these sorts of spaces.

972
00:59:20.358 --> 00:59:26.501
And automation is generating income for us and supporting us in, you know, whatever pursuit we're interested in, in work.

973
00:59:26.861 --> 00:59:32.144
And we spend far less time doing work and far more time paying a premium in the economy, in the live space economy.

974
00:59:32.444 --> 00:59:33.004
It's hard, isn't it?

975
00:59:33.024 --> 00:59:34.064
Because we don't know what these jobs are.

976
00:59:34.165 --> 00:59:34.645
We just don't.

977
00:59:36.364 --> 00:59:46.633
Imagine telling someone that worked in a factory in 1923 that fast forward 100 years, there's going to be people making X dollars as personal trainers.

978
00:59:48.058 --> 00:59:51.039
Or there's someone that has a job dog walking in their neighborhood.

979
00:59:51.359 --> 00:59:54.040
I don't know if that would have been like grok fully.

980
00:59:54.200 --> 00:59:58.241
But the pace of disruption here seems to be different than like the industrial revolution.

981
00:59:58.701 --> 00:59:59.621
It's targeting cognitive work.

982
00:59:59.641 --> 01:00:01.761
It's built on this platform called the internet, which has this.

983
01:00:01.841 --> 01:00:03.142
I'm telling you, I just don't see it.

984
01:00:03.222 --> 01:00:07.983
I like at my work, everyone's using AI and everyone's just doing more.

985
01:00:08.003 --> 01:00:09.343
And then they ask for more employees.

986
01:00:09.843 --> 01:00:11.784
You can kind of think about a business having two sides.

987
01:00:12.728 --> 01:00:13.548
Revenue and costs.

988
01:00:14.168 --> 01:00:18.309
Revenue is I'm making stuff and people are paying me for the things I'm making or doing.

989
01:00:18.949 --> 01:00:20.910
Cost is how am I operating the business?

990
01:00:20.930 --> 01:00:22.050
Like, what am I spending?

991
01:00:22.090 --> 01:00:29.071
And the argument has always been like, okay, you're going to lose customer service reps. You're going to lose all the cost side of the equation.

992
01:00:29.471 --> 01:00:31.052
No one ever says you're going to lose the revenue side.

993
01:00:31.492 --> 01:00:37.033
The truth is on the revenue side, what ends up happening is you create new products that you couldn't create before because of AI.

994
01:00:37.513 --> 01:00:39.974
The technology enables so much advancement in your business.

995
01:00:40.434 --> 01:00:42.075
Let's say you're a material science company.

996
01:00:42.095 --> 01:00:54.419
This is totally esoteric, but like, let's say your job as a company is to discover new materials, new synthetics that can be used to make microchips or be used for computing or be used for travel or for airplanes.

997
01:00:54.739 --> 01:00:56.080
The material science world.

998
01:00:56.580 --> 01:00:59.003
has been challenged by its experimental cycle.

999
01:00:59.123 --> 01:01:02.887
You got to create an experiment, make a product, test it, do it all manually.

1000
01:01:02.927 --> 01:01:03.949
It's all creative ideas.

1001
01:01:04.069 --> 01:01:04.990
It's all human potential.

1002
01:01:05.410 --> 01:01:12.839
AI can now screen through millions of material science ideas in a computer, print them out, test them, and you can automate that throughput.

1003
01:01:12.879 --> 01:01:16.023
Therefore, that materials company can now have more revenue.

1004
01:01:16.043 --> 01:01:17.084
They can make more products.

1005
01:01:17.204 --> 01:01:22.446
Do you not think that maybe there's a possibility that people like me and you exist in this particular band?

1006
01:01:22.526 --> 01:01:38.513
Well, because we're both founders and we have capital, and we're thinking about how to really push intelligence to create new things, that maybe we, because what you're saying I can relate to, I can relate to the fact that AI has made me actually quite, it's probably made me more ambitious about hiring, especially in the near term.

1007
01:01:38.833 --> 01:01:45.376
I would caveat it by saying that there's a certain type of role that I'm now hiring much less, right?

1008
01:01:45.576 --> 01:01:55.327
And especially when you think about entry-level roles, I have to pause a lot more now because a lot of the agents and some tooling can do some of those things that I would have otherwise hired for.

1009
01:01:55.567 --> 01:01:58.270
But generally, I feel like I'm hiring as fast as I possibly can.

1010
01:01:59.171 --> 01:02:05.057
But would you not say that for like the 21-year-old that's graduated from university or the DoorDash driver...

1011
01:02:05.938 --> 01:02:21.845
or those types of individuals, where the leap from where they currently are on a factory floor assembling a part or flipping packages, the leap from where they are to this new world is so great that there's going to be this messy middle.

1012
01:02:21.985 --> 01:02:27.408
Yeah, what I'm saying is as new products are created, new revenue comes in, you don't cut costs, you grow costs.

1013
01:02:28.464 --> 01:02:31.106
and you hire more people, and you up-level, and you train people.

1014
01:02:31.787 --> 01:02:33.088
That is what I'm seeing on the ground.

1015
01:02:33.188 --> 01:02:37.972
You know, we just published, I think, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S. And I think that this idea...

1016
01:02:39.037 --> 01:02:46.262
that your current job is going to get disrupted and you're going to lose your job, I don't think it's how the enterprise transitions.

1017
01:02:46.342 --> 01:02:54.006
The enterprise transitions, meaning companies, by doing more things and bringing people up the ladder, hiring more people.

1018
01:02:54.066 --> 01:02:55.567
And that's just what I'm seeing on the ground.

1019
01:02:56.088 --> 01:03:04.293
I think that there's a media narrative on like, oh my God, there was a layoff at so-and-so company because it underlines what they've been promoting to everyone, which is AI is going to cause job loss.

1020
01:03:04.673 --> 01:03:06.975
The interesting thing is it didn't come from the media.

1021
01:03:07.355 --> 01:03:08.416
It came from the AI guys.

1022
01:03:08.636 --> 01:03:08.896
Yeah.

1023
01:03:09.016 --> 01:03:09.196
Yeah.

1024
01:03:09.397 --> 01:03:10.577
This is the biggest crazy thing.

1025
01:03:10.597 --> 01:03:11.218
This drives me nuts.

1026
01:03:11.378 --> 01:03:12.399
I listen to All In podcast.

1027
01:03:12.419 --> 01:03:13.540
By the way, it's one of my favorite podcasts.

1028
01:03:13.560 --> 01:03:14.540
I don't think I've ever missed an episode.

1029
01:03:14.680 --> 01:03:17.082
So I very much understand your perspective and all of your colleagues.

1030
01:03:17.102 --> 01:03:18.163
I had no idea you were a fan.

1031
01:03:18.463 --> 01:03:18.883
No, no, I do.

1032
01:03:18.923 --> 01:03:19.464
I've listened to it.

1033
01:03:19.564 --> 01:03:22.086
I've gone on people's shows where they're like, I don't know who you are.

1034
01:03:22.106 --> 01:03:23.627
And I'm like, it's good to meet you.

1035
01:03:23.647 --> 01:03:23.987
No, no, no.

1036
01:03:24.087 --> 01:03:26.389
I don't think I've ever missed an episode since the beginning.

1037
01:03:26.609 --> 01:03:28.190
So I understand your perspective.

1038
01:03:28.210 --> 01:03:28.951
You've heard all this.

1039
01:03:29.311 --> 01:03:30.913
I've heard all of this and I've heard Jason's opinion.

1040
01:03:31.193 --> 01:03:34.056
Weirdly, I tend to side a little bit more with Jason on this.

1041
01:03:34.516 --> 01:03:38.900
Because I think Jason, I don't know why his arguments seem to present the most nuance.

1042
01:03:39.621 --> 01:03:43.284
And also, I would say, when we think about different people's incentives, yeah, you're right.

1043
01:03:44.205 --> 01:03:47.548
Often on that show, it's framed as a media narrative.

1044
01:03:47.988 --> 01:03:49.370
Whereas it's actually all your friends.

1045
01:03:49.710 --> 01:03:50.210
Yeah, no.

1046
01:03:50.450 --> 01:03:52.271
So first of all, none of them are my friends.

1047
01:03:52.832 --> 01:03:53.432
Elon's your friend.

1048
01:03:53.452 --> 01:03:53.952
Okay.

1049
01:03:54.332 --> 01:03:58.274
So what I will say, like I've said this on the show, I'll say it again.

1050
01:03:58.715 --> 01:04:03.357
I think there is a deep arrogance in making these sorts of proclamations.

1051
01:04:03.897 --> 01:04:04.577
Which proclamations?

1052
01:04:04.718 --> 01:04:05.838
That we're not going to work anymore.

1053
01:04:07.219 --> 01:04:08.920
It effectively discounts the human.

1054
01:04:10.125 --> 01:04:12.587
It's like what you do today is your limit.

1055
01:04:13.048 --> 01:04:19.734
But I think that this idea that like these jobs will go away is sourced by people that are seeing the crazy stuff that they're doing.

1056
01:04:19.754 --> 01:04:22.156
And they're like, oh, my God, this is amazing.

1057
01:04:22.697 --> 01:04:23.658
I'm responsible for this.

1058
01:04:24.418 --> 01:04:25.599
We are going to change the world.

1059
01:04:25.619 --> 01:04:27.902
We are going to take all jobs and they're all going to sit in my computer.

1060
01:04:29.039 --> 01:04:38.574
I don't think that that's what happens because I think that humans have a profound capacity for doing things that, you know, these technologists don't necessarily see.

1061
01:04:39.295 --> 01:04:41.519
The great technologists see technology.

1062
01:04:41.539 --> 01:04:42.260
They don't see people.

1063
01:04:43.886 --> 01:04:48.710
I think you have to see people, meaning the potential of people, of individuals.

1064
01:04:49.511 --> 01:04:50.512
And you have to believe in that.

1065
01:04:50.532 --> 01:04:52.594
They believe in technology, they engineer technology.

1066
01:04:52.614 --> 01:04:56.016
But I am not going to be pessimistic about people.

1067
01:04:57.458 --> 01:05:00.620
I think that people have capacity in any environment.

1068
01:05:00.681 --> 01:05:02.922
I mean, the amazing thing about humans is our adaptability.

1069
01:05:02.942 --> 01:05:03.943
We can live in any climate.

1070
01:05:03.963 --> 01:05:04.984
We can eat any kind of food.

1071
01:05:05.024 --> 01:05:07.727
I mean, we can work all these different jobs.

1072
01:05:07.747 --> 01:05:08.747
I mean, we're amazing.

1073
01:05:09.208 --> 01:05:10.089
Humans are amazing.

1074
01:05:10.769 --> 01:05:10.949
And...

1075
01:05:11.870 --> 01:05:14.454
Arguably, many humans have been limited in their potential.

1076
01:05:14.675 --> 01:05:19.683
And I think that AI enables more capacity for those individuals to realize more of their potential.

1077
01:05:20.078 --> 01:05:25.079
Much of the conversation we've had about the US economy has centered around incentive structures leading to inevitable outcomes.

1078
01:05:25.519 --> 01:05:30.941
You know, the older I've gotten, the more I just try and look at incentives to figure out behavior and also to figure out who to trust.

1079
01:05:31.901 --> 01:05:41.883
So when I look at the incentives of the people that are building the AI companies, Andy Jassy has said that there's going to be fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.

1080
01:05:42.643 --> 01:05:44.164
Then they cut, you know, tens of thousands of jobs.

1081
01:05:44.204 --> 01:05:49.445
Mark Benioff, who I know has been on your show, cut 4,000 jobs and said, I need less heads because of AI.

1082
01:05:50.345 --> 01:05:55.127
And I swear, okay, maybe they're saying that because they want their share price to go up because it's a good, you know, we're going to reduce costs as a good narrative.

1083
01:05:55.908 --> 01:06:09.153
But then I look at the other, the AI CEOs, Dario, Elon, Sam Altman, and I go, their incentives, I'd say other than the exception of Elon, have just kind of changed with whatever's good for them at that moment.

1084
01:06:09.213 --> 01:06:15.036
Oftentimes, I actually, I think Dario might be the exception a little bit because he seems to be a bit more nuanced.

1085
01:06:15.056 --> 01:06:15.156
Yeah.

1086
01:06:16.240 --> 01:06:27.790
If I go back through the quotes of these individuals, you have Sam Altman in February 2015 saying, development of super machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.

1087
01:06:28.130 --> 01:06:32.794
You have Elon in 2014 saying, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.

1088
01:06:33.555 --> 01:06:35.356
It's far more dangerous than nukes.

1089
01:06:36.177 --> 01:06:42.881
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear wars.

1090
01:06:43.341 --> 01:06:48.604
And that was signed by Salm Altman, Demis, Dario, Bill Gates, amongst many hundreds of others.

1091
01:06:49.245 --> 01:06:50.886
Salm Altman in the Senate in 2023.

1092
01:06:51.326 --> 01:06:54.388
I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go very wrong.

1093
01:06:55.217 --> 01:06:56.918
OpenAI, superintelligence letter they wrote.

1094
01:06:57.718 --> 01:07:03.041
The disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction could be caused by superintelligence.

1095
01:07:03.361 --> 01:07:04.542
Again, in The Athletic, Sam Altman.

1096
01:07:05.102 --> 01:07:08.043
Jobs are definitely going to go away.

1097
01:07:08.664 --> 01:07:09.684
Full stop.

1098
01:07:10.304 --> 01:07:19.369
Dari Amadei, May 2025, he predicted a white-collar bloodbath, half of entry-level, white-collar jobs gone, unemployment at 10% to 20% within one to five years.

1099
01:07:19.389 --> 01:07:22.270
10% to 20% unemployment in one to five years.

1100
01:07:22.771 --> 01:07:23.231
It's pretty high.

1101
01:07:23.731 --> 01:07:28.234
And Altman at the Federal Reserve in July 2025 said, whole job categories will disappear.

1102
01:07:28.334 --> 01:07:29.314
Customer support first.

1103
01:07:29.735 --> 01:07:31.816
That one is, quote, totally, totally gone.

1104
01:07:32.636 --> 01:07:34.057
And then suddenly the message changed.

1105
01:07:34.437 --> 01:07:37.099
Before his sort of pre-IPO discussions, he said things could go pretty wrong.

1106
01:07:37.199 --> 01:07:42.182
And then he says that he now has changed his mind and he's delighted that he feels like he was wrong.

1107
01:07:42.602 --> 01:07:46.945
And suddenly he's talking about how OpenAI and ChatGPT will benefit all of humanity.

1108
01:07:47.445 --> 01:07:47.965
And that's their goal.

1109
01:07:48.185 --> 01:07:52.148
Should we trust the same people that told us to be scared when they say, don't be scared?

1110
01:07:53.102 --> 01:07:58.090
First of all, I think there was a bunch of companies that said early on,

1111
01:07:59.231 --> 01:08:04.874
that they were like cutting all their customer service reps, which was the big company starts with a K. Klaner, but I did call the founder.

1112
01:08:04.994 --> 01:08:05.694
And what'd you find out?

1113
01:08:06.575 --> 01:08:08.195
He said that he's been misinterpreted in the press.

1114
01:08:08.215 --> 01:08:11.317
I heard you guys talk about this in the All In podcast, but I've actually called him live on this show.

1115
01:08:11.557 --> 01:08:13.598
And did he rehire or like, what did he do?

1116
01:08:13.718 --> 01:08:17.120
He said that the media just completely misconstrued what he said.

1117
01:08:17.340 --> 01:08:18.680
He said he had 7,000 employees.

1118
01:08:19.081 --> 01:08:28.165
By the end of last summer, he said he'd be on 3,000, but the media framed it as I had 7,000 employees and then I tried to cut some, I realized I couldn't and I went back, that's not what happened.

1119
01:08:28.525 --> 01:08:30.968
And it's just, I see it on all these podcasts, I'm just repeating it.

1120
01:08:30.988 --> 01:08:32.450
I heard it repeated on your show, like...

1121
01:08:32.771 --> 01:08:34.393
But he said, we are cutting because of AI.

1122
01:08:34.573 --> 01:08:34.713
Yeah.

1123
01:08:35.094 --> 01:08:36.596
And he's confirmed that he's doing that.

1124
01:08:36.856 --> 01:08:38.759
He's DMed me on X. I've got the DM.

1125
01:08:38.879 --> 01:08:41.262
And live on this show, he confirmed it to all of our listeners.

1126
01:08:41.282 --> 01:08:42.364
And is his business still growing?

1127
01:08:42.384 --> 01:08:42.584
Yeah.

1128
01:08:43.213 --> 01:08:44.153
The business is growing.

1129
01:08:44.193 --> 01:08:52.477
What he did say, and this is a point of nuance, is with the cost savings, he's able to offer better white glove services to his highest ticket clients, which makes a lot of sense.

1130
01:08:52.557 --> 01:08:52.737
Yes.

1131
01:08:53.517 --> 01:09:04.001
And you could think about that analogy being in like another business where they would take that capital, invest in offering new products, new services, but then you need employees to offer those new products and new services.

1132
01:09:04.481 --> 01:09:06.022
And so you do actually hire up.

1133
01:09:06.062 --> 01:09:09.163
And I think that is what I am actually seeing on the ground.

1134
01:09:09.203 --> 01:09:11.684
And while he may have this acute restructuring he's doing,

1135
01:09:12.464 --> 01:09:16.569
On the ground, I just see people hiring more because they can do more with AI.

1136
01:09:17.289 --> 01:09:26.079
It's counterintuitive, but if you're a business manager, you can invest $10 and make one product a year, or you can invest $20 and make five products a year.

1137
01:09:26.640 --> 01:09:29.162
You're going to invest the $20 to make five products a year.

1138
01:09:29.182 --> 01:09:30.103
You're going to spend more.

1139
01:09:30.784 --> 01:09:32.026
And I think that's what AI does.

1140
01:09:32.066 --> 01:09:40.035
As soon as you have the ability to get leverage on how much more productive people are, you'll put more capital towards hiring more people and scale up.

1141
01:09:40.095 --> 01:09:41.016
That's just what I'm seeing.

1142
01:09:41.577 --> 01:09:44.881
And look, I could be wrong and all jobs go away in five years and we have 20% unemployment.

1143
01:09:46.377 --> 01:09:47.498
I don't think that that's the case.

1144
01:09:47.899 --> 01:09:52.183
I think that, again, like we can go back to this, like where people are going to be spending their time.

1145
01:09:52.984 --> 01:09:55.766
I do think that there's going to be a big growth in media.

1146
01:09:55.786 --> 01:10:01.272
I think there's going to be a big growth in media encompassing everything, digital content creation, etc.

1147
01:10:01.352 --> 01:10:03.654
I think there's going to be a big growth in entrepreneurship.

1148
01:10:03.934 --> 01:10:06.217
And I think there's going to be a big growth in IRL stuff.

1149
01:10:06.697 --> 01:10:14.523
I'll play this interviews and Klarna's always mentioned because I think the media has said that you like double down on AI then you reversed because it didn't work out.

1150
01:10:14.563 --> 01:10:20.208
So I know I spoke to you a while ago and we exchanged a couple of DMs about it but that was more than a it was almost a year ago now.

1151
01:10:20.848 --> 01:10:25.452
So I just wanted to get an update on Klarna's business AI agents and all of that if possible.

1152
01:10:25.712 --> 01:10:26.573
This was five months ago.

1153
01:10:26.713 --> 01:10:31.757
First and foremost we were early on released AI to support our

1154
01:10:34.038 --> 01:10:44.046
initial benefit of more calls being dealt with by AI, which customers liked because those calls or chat messages were much, much faster and more qualitative.

1155
01:10:44.606 --> 01:10:47.188
Then since then, that has actually expanded slightly.

1156
01:10:48.529 --> 01:10:54.954
What we did, however, try to communicate as well is that we believed in a world of where AI is cheap and available,

1157
01:10:55.394 --> 01:10:59.515
the value of human interaction will be regarded as higher.

1158
01:10:59.595 --> 01:11:03.337
The future of customer service VIP is a human.

1159
01:11:04.157 --> 01:11:06.798
We have then, hence, doubled down on providing more of that.

1160
01:11:07.318 --> 01:11:11.779
But at the same point of time, the efficiency gains within the company has continued.

1161
01:11:11.819 --> 01:11:20.682
We used to be about 6,000 people, and now we are less than 3,000, which is two, three years since we stopped recruiting.

1162
01:11:21.162 --> 01:11:23.243
At the same point of time, our revenue has doubled.

1163
01:11:24.873 --> 01:11:25.033
No.

1164
01:11:25.854 --> 01:11:27.635
This is a startup, just to be clear.

1165
01:11:28.195 --> 01:11:40.041
I don't know if we can, and again, I'm not going to like sit here and concede or argue jobs aren't going to change, but a startup that grew very quickly and then cut heads is a pretty common phenomenon.

1166
01:11:40.161 --> 01:11:44.364
So I don't know how much restructuring he was doing in his AI-ification of his business.

1167
01:11:44.384 --> 01:11:46.465
That's totally fine and totally fair.

1168
01:11:47.185 --> 01:11:53.690
But the question is, what are the people that were doing customer service calls and sitting, you know, how many of them were actually fully occupied on the phone?

1169
01:11:53.971 --> 01:11:54.291
I don't know.

1170
01:11:55.212 --> 01:11:58.674
Like, were they on the phone for four hours a day, two hours a day, or eight hours a day?

1171
01:11:58.694 --> 01:12:00.556
Were they actually fully employed?

1172
01:12:00.836 --> 01:12:01.036
Really?

1173
01:12:01.056 --> 01:12:02.177
Were they truly fully employed?

1174
01:12:02.538 --> 01:12:02.878
I don't know.

1175
01:12:03.018 --> 01:12:03.779
what are they doing now?

1176
01:12:04.200 --> 01:12:09.487
And is whatever they're doing now, is that defensible, again, from this sort of spread of intelligence?

1177
01:12:09.507 --> 01:12:09.627
Yeah.

1178
01:12:09.787 --> 01:12:13.292
Because they could be DoorDash, I don't know, they could be lawyers, but they could also be doing DoorDash.

1179
01:12:13.332 --> 01:12:17.879
And Dara sat here and said that the 9,000 people that are riders won't have jobs.

1180
01:12:18.759 --> 01:12:20.300
The ones that are driving food around.

1181
01:12:20.380 --> 01:12:20.580
Yeah.

1182
01:12:20.740 --> 01:12:21.220
And drivers.

1183
01:12:21.440 --> 01:12:21.640
Yeah.

1184
01:12:21.780 --> 01:12:21.980
Yeah.

1185
01:12:22.040 --> 01:12:23.140
That's obviously all their big investments.

1186
01:12:23.160 --> 01:12:26.441
I was with him the other day and he was talking about their autonomous vehicle investments.

1187
01:12:26.821 --> 01:12:27.022
Yeah.

1188
01:12:27.322 --> 01:12:29.162
And how, I mean, that's the big point.

1189
01:12:29.182 --> 01:12:29.682
What does he think?

1190
01:12:30.342 --> 01:12:32.863
He thinks that those drivers will have to go, will do something else.

1191
01:12:33.003 --> 01:12:34.664
What does he think that something else is?

1192
01:12:34.904 --> 01:12:37.605
He loosely hypothesized what it might be.

1193
01:12:37.645 --> 01:12:38.745
It could be data labeling.

1194
01:12:39.025 --> 01:12:45.447
Now, let me just go back because your whole point about like AI is going to destroy us all and these guys were making all these claims and then they all kind of backtracked.

1195
01:12:46.327 --> 01:12:49.428
I think there's an important question to ask, which is like, should we stop AI development?

1196
01:12:49.588 --> 01:12:50.228
And can we?

1197
01:12:50.948 --> 01:12:53.529
Meaning, can we really affect what China does?

1198
01:12:53.689 --> 01:12:55.009
Can we really affect what Europe does?

1199
01:12:55.029 --> 01:12:59.010
Can we really affect what some lab in Indonesia does if they get a group of people together?

1200
01:12:59.930 --> 01:13:07.852
There are moments in human history when technology advances, and it's not like you can just put the catapult away and be like, no one can develop the catapult anymore.

1201
01:13:08.432 --> 01:13:10.413
Once the catapult's out there, the catapult's out there.

1202
01:13:10.873 --> 01:13:11.493
We're just there.

1203
01:13:12.373 --> 01:13:21.515
So the question is, what is going to enable the most kind of productive path forward for U.S. policy for U.S. citizens?

1204
01:13:22.395 --> 01:13:24.276
And China's asking themselves the same question.

1205
01:13:24.416 --> 01:13:25.796
What's the most productive path forward?

1206
01:13:26.416 --> 01:13:27.876
China policy for China citizens.

1207
01:13:28.677 --> 01:13:34.318
China's answer, I think, is to make models free and ubiquitous, which, by the way, benefits a large part of the global economy.

1208
01:13:35.408 --> 01:13:43.031
But it doesn't do very well with Sam Altman, Dario, Google, or others that have invested billions or hundreds of billions of dollars in model development.

1209
01:13:43.291 --> 01:13:49.873
And now those investments that they've made have been reduced to rubble because China's got a model that's as good or cheaper.

1210
01:13:50.313 --> 01:13:52.074
So I think the more important question...

1211
01:13:53.094 --> 01:14:14.110
is like what does the u.s do to navigate if we stop data centers those data centers are going to be built somewhere else they'll be built in iceland they'll be built in china they'll be built in indonesia they'll be built in places where you can get access to energy and plug them into the internet now they're on the internet so do we want those data centers to exist in the u.s because they're going to create jobs and create economic value or do we want to be built offshore and

1212
01:14:14.770 --> 01:14:18.752
Do we want to have the AI models built in the U.S. or do we want to have them built by China?

1213
01:14:19.352 --> 01:14:21.593
Those are, I think, the important policy decisions.

1214
01:14:21.893 --> 01:14:27.975
The idea that you can slow or stop AI development and fortunately think at this moment it's too far too late.

1215
01:14:28.055 --> 01:14:29.355
Like the AI is out there.

1216
01:14:31.236 --> 01:14:35.858
The framing on is it bad or is it good I think requires...

1217
01:14:37.730 --> 01:14:39.311
observation on what's going on on the ground.

1218
01:14:39.732 --> 01:14:41.713
And I do think there's a ton of stories.

1219
01:14:41.753 --> 01:14:46.556
I mean, look at the number of companies that are doing stuff that you could never do before because of AI.

1220
01:14:47.036 --> 01:14:49.958
I mean, just to get into your point about delivery.

1221
01:14:50.018 --> 01:14:54.961
I mean, there are delivery companies delivering robots on the ground, robotic cars, drones.

1222
01:14:55.482 --> 01:14:57.163
Those companies aren't employee-less.

1223
01:14:57.663 --> 01:15:10.948
There's now 15,000 new jobs being created at the factory that's making the robots or 15,000 jobs to service the robots because they're breaking down all the time or 15,000 jobs to get the food made that goes into the robots or maybe that gets automated.

1224
01:15:10.968 --> 01:15:14.850
But like as you kind of think about the impact, the economy doesn't just shrink in terms of jobs.

1225
01:15:15.170 --> 01:15:16.610
We're just not seeing it in the data.

1226
01:15:16.670 --> 01:15:17.511
It's not happening.

1227
01:15:18.651 --> 01:15:24.437
And when it does happen, I think that's a good time to have a conversation about AI taxes and all this sort of stuff.

1228
01:15:24.457 --> 01:15:25.598
Okay, so let's ask that question.

1229
01:15:25.618 --> 01:15:26.639
And what would have to happen?

1230
01:15:27.539 --> 01:15:28.981
What sort of metrical piece of evidence?

1231
01:15:29.041 --> 01:15:29.421
Job loss.

1232
01:15:29.641 --> 01:15:30.062
Job loss.

1233
01:15:30.102 --> 01:15:30.302
Yeah.

1234
01:15:30.522 --> 01:15:31.323
And wage growth, right?

1235
01:15:31.343 --> 01:15:36.447
So if wages are declining and unemployment is climbing,

1236
01:15:37.404 --> 01:15:38.525
That's a red flag.

1237
01:15:38.545 --> 01:15:39.606
I mean, that's an alert moment.

1238
01:15:39.766 --> 01:15:42.088
And that's when we have to address this from policy.

1239
01:15:42.649 --> 01:15:44.330
But it's very speculative right now.

1240
01:15:44.870 --> 01:15:54.859
And if you get in the way and you stop it and you stop advancement or like the ability to create higher paying jobs, the ability to create new jobs, and you turn all of that off, it's going to happen in China.

1241
01:15:54.879 --> 01:15:56.360
It's going to happen in Europe.

1242
01:15:56.380 --> 01:15:57.541
It's going to happen in South America.

1243
01:15:58.082 --> 01:15:59.483
And the U.S. gets left behind.

1244
01:15:59.903 --> 01:16:02.525
Maybe that's the decision that, you know, we decide to make.

1245
01:16:03.246 --> 01:16:08.897
But I would argue that this kind of tracking of what's the consequence that we're worried about is the most important thing to be doing at the moment.

1246
01:16:09.622 --> 01:16:19.987
You might have heard about the study that, I think it was Stanford that did it, and they showed that there was a 13% relative decline in employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in roles most exposed to generative AI.

1247
01:16:20.267 --> 01:16:28.751
Could it be that by the time we start seeing significant job loss, it's a little bit too late to be having the conversation because it could be quite a rapid decline?

1248
01:16:28.771 --> 01:16:30.832
If you think about the nature of this technology and the adoption of it.

1249
01:16:31.312 --> 01:16:33.393
No, no, I think what you're describing is exactly the right time.

1250
01:16:33.934 --> 01:16:37.175
When we see the first sign of... Yeah, so what are those changes that are happening?

1251
01:16:37.335 --> 01:16:38.796
Now, the question is, if you dig into that,

1252
01:16:40.162 --> 01:16:41.084
And I do understand this.

1253
01:16:41.144 --> 01:16:45.170
Like in software engineering, what's happening right now is young people are not getting hired.

1254
01:16:45.691 --> 01:16:47.735
You can use AI to write a lot of code.

1255
01:16:48.456 --> 01:16:53.665
But in order to be really good at using AI to write a lot of code, you got to have experience writing code.

1256
01:16:55.353 --> 01:16:59.214
And so there's a fight for senior experienced software engineers.

1257
01:17:00.114 --> 01:17:08.176
And there's disinterest in junior software engineers, because you're not just putting a junior software engineer in a seat to have them write their first line of code, which is what you used to do.

1258
01:17:08.556 --> 01:17:11.216
With AI, you can turn one engineer into 100.

1259
01:17:11.556 --> 01:17:12.817
But the junior guy is not going to do that.

1260
01:17:12.977 --> 01:17:13.817
The senior person is.

1261
01:17:14.457 --> 01:17:15.837
So you want to hire more senior people.

1262
01:17:15.857 --> 01:17:18.418
And that's what's happening in software across the board right now.

1263
01:17:19.262 --> 01:17:24.287
But more of the operational functions that used to be done by people are also just being done by software.

1264
01:17:24.767 --> 01:17:31.874
So if I think about you might have had a PA whose job was to respond to your emails and check your emails and organize them and put them in your Monday board.

1265
01:17:31.934 --> 01:17:37.179
Now with agents, I have an agent that goes across all of my inboxes every single day, pulls everything into the central system.

1266
01:17:37.780 --> 01:17:39.642
And I would have used to have someone doing that kind of work.

1267
01:17:39.682 --> 01:17:40.542
Now it's a software job.

1268
01:17:40.703 --> 01:17:41.503
Now it's Claude doing it.

1269
01:17:41.543 --> 01:17:43.005
Now the PA can use Claude to do it.

1270
01:17:43.625 --> 01:17:44.185
I don't need the PA.

1271
01:17:44.265 --> 01:17:45.006
I can just do it myself.

1272
01:17:45.026 --> 01:17:45.546
Okay.

1273
01:17:45.606 --> 01:17:49.747
What else could you use that PA for in your life that you couldn't even contemplate using that PA for in the past?

1274
01:17:50.188 --> 01:17:52.208
At the moment, it's real world stuff.

1275
01:17:52.509 --> 01:17:55.370
I probably would have continued to hire more in that team.

1276
01:17:56.070 --> 01:18:00.952
But now I don't need to because I've got this agent that does my scheduling, can help me with my scheduling.

1277
01:18:00.972 --> 01:18:03.313
What are you going to do with the money you have, the extra money you have that you're not spending?

1278
01:18:03.333 --> 01:18:03.833
This is a good point.

1279
01:18:04.413 --> 01:18:05.515
And then that money you're investing.

1280
01:18:05.555 --> 01:18:08.259
You're not going to just put that money in the bank and leave it as cash.

1281
01:18:08.279 --> 01:18:09.421
You're going to invest it in something.

1282
01:18:10.002 --> 01:18:11.003
I can invest it in assets.

1283
01:18:11.724 --> 01:18:12.886
What's an asset?

1284
01:18:12.926 --> 01:18:14.348
It's either a productive or nonproductive asset.

1285
01:18:14.368 --> 01:18:15.730
If it's productive, it's employing someone.

1286
01:18:15.750 --> 01:18:16.431
It's doing stuff.

1287
01:18:16.832 --> 01:18:18.654
I could theoretically go buy the S&P 500.

1288
01:18:19.235 --> 01:18:24.516
And when you buy the S&P 500, that money goes to individuals that are now going to be able to employ more people.

1289
01:18:24.856 --> 01:18:26.956
That capital finds a way to get spent.

1290
01:18:27.276 --> 01:18:28.457
It goes into the economy.

1291
01:18:28.817 --> 01:18:29.637
And that's my point.

1292
01:18:30.057 --> 01:18:32.417
This is why economies grow when technology shows up.

1293
01:18:32.837 --> 01:18:34.998
The leverage you got gave you more capital.

1294
01:18:35.018 --> 01:18:39.258
You could either build a new product and hire more people to do it here, or you could choose to go buy the S&P.

1295
01:18:39.538 --> 01:18:45.059
But when you buy the S&P, that money ends up in other people's coffers, and they're using that money to hire people and do new stuff.

1296
01:18:45.419 --> 01:18:48.260
At some point, the whole point of the economy is that money flows.

1297
01:18:48.820 --> 01:18:51.957
And that money is going to ultimately flow into individuals that are productive.

1298
01:18:52.273 --> 01:18:57.715
Do you not think a lot of it's going to flow disproportionately into the billionaires, the most wealthy, that are building the robots?

1299
01:18:58.056 --> 01:19:00.156
I am a huge advocate for open source for this reason.

1300
01:19:00.417 --> 01:19:00.877
Open source.

1301
01:19:00.897 --> 01:19:03.898
What does that mean for Janet and Dave who might not know what that term means?

1302
01:19:04.158 --> 01:19:08.900
So open source just means the software is free for anyone to use.

1303
01:19:09.220 --> 01:19:14.683
If you go back to the early days of the internet, Netscape made server software and Netscape made a browser.

1304
01:19:15.183 --> 01:19:19.085
So in order to produce a website, you needed to pay for Netscape software.

1305
01:19:19.725 --> 01:19:20.985
And you installed it on a server.

1306
01:19:21.466 --> 01:19:23.466
And you pay Netscape a fee for that software.

1307
01:19:23.846 --> 01:19:25.047
And then you could create a website.

1308
01:19:25.507 --> 01:19:25.807
Okay?

1309
01:19:26.167 --> 01:19:28.808
And then if you want to browse the internet, you got to pay for Netscape Navigator.

1310
01:19:29.228 --> 01:19:31.729
And then you use that navigator to browse the internet.

1311
01:19:32.229 --> 01:19:34.530
So charge, charge, gatekeeper, gatekeeper.

1312
01:19:34.870 --> 01:19:35.670
And guess what came along?

1313
01:19:36.310 --> 01:19:39.932
The Mozilla Foundation made an open source browser called Firefox.

1314
01:19:40.452 --> 01:19:43.413
And the Apache Foundation came along and made an open source web server.

1315
01:19:44.356 --> 01:19:51.801
And now anyone could download Apache and make their own website and plug it into the internet, and it would be available to everyone in the world for free.

1316
01:19:52.441 --> 01:19:57.544
And anyone could download Firefox, go on their computer, and browse the internet for free.

1317
01:19:58.365 --> 01:20:03.668
Open source then enabled all the entrepreneurs that built websites that made money to proliferate.

1318
01:20:03.688 --> 01:20:04.589
They weren't gatekept.

1319
01:20:04.989 --> 01:20:08.952
In the idea of AI, open-weight models, open source models are free.

1320
01:20:09.712 --> 01:20:15.874
So now you don't have to go pay Anthropic or Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT for AI.

1321
01:20:16.314 --> 01:20:19.235
You can actually use this AI model for free.

1322
01:20:19.815 --> 01:20:21.576
And no one's making money off of you using it.

1323
01:20:22.036 --> 01:20:22.997
There's no one getting paid.

1324
01:20:23.677 --> 01:20:27.178
The only cost is the cost of finding a computer to run that model.

1325
01:20:27.538 --> 01:20:31.079
So you could have your own computer, you could rent one, but that cost is coming down like crazy now too.

1326
01:20:31.700 --> 01:20:35.681
So this is the benefit of, this is why technology without government intervention is so amazing.

1327
01:20:36.021 --> 01:20:38.442
It always gets cheaper and then everyone benefits.

1328
01:20:38.842 --> 01:20:39.502
there could be a risk.

1329
01:20:39.843 --> 01:20:47.587
Is that one of the key arguments of the open source idea, which is if anybody can download these AIs onto their computer, they can jailbreak them, they can use them as...

1330
01:20:47.947 --> 01:20:49.668
So there's two things that people are fighting about.

1331
01:20:49.688 --> 01:20:52.830
Number one, government people are saying, hey, that's coming from China.

1332
01:20:52.870 --> 01:20:54.591
We don't know if there's backdoors.

1333
01:20:54.611 --> 01:20:56.392
That's not how open-weight models work, by the way.

1334
01:20:56.713 --> 01:21:01.075
So people that are technically deficient don't fully grok what the open-weight model really is.

1335
01:21:01.115 --> 01:21:03.577
It's not like some backdoor program that you're running.

1336
01:21:03.797 --> 01:21:05.518
It's literally just a list of numbers.

1337
01:21:06.118 --> 01:21:09.200
In a document, it's just, you know, trillions of numbers.

1338
01:21:09.220 --> 01:21:09.760
That's all it is.

1339
01:21:10.060 --> 01:21:15.063
And then some people are arguing like, okay, so now that AI is everywhere, everyone has access to it.

1340
01:21:15.103 --> 01:21:17.664
You can use it to design a cyber weapon.

1341
01:21:18.104 --> 01:21:19.725
You can use it to design a bioweapon.

1342
01:21:19.745 --> 01:21:22.166
You can use it to design a physical weapon.

1343
01:21:22.246 --> 01:21:23.727
There's all these things that you can now do.

1344
01:21:24.248 --> 01:21:27.349
You know, the same is true with DNA printing and DNA sequencing.

1345
01:21:27.589 --> 01:21:31.031
Everyone can buy a DNA sequencer and a DNA printer, and they could theoretically make a virus.

1346
01:21:31.391 --> 01:21:32.192
That exists today.

1347
01:21:33.075 --> 01:21:34.436
We haven't stopped DNA sequencing.

1348
01:21:34.576 --> 01:21:35.777
We haven't stopped DNA printing.

1349
01:21:36.258 --> 01:21:38.019
We don't have, like, constraints around it.

1350
01:21:38.559 --> 01:21:41.141
Similarly, we haven't stopped people from buying guns.

1351
01:21:41.742 --> 01:21:43.483
We haven't stopped people, you know, in the U.S.

1352
01:21:43.523 --> 01:21:45.225
I mean, we can roll our eyes at this one.

1353
01:21:45.365 --> 01:21:46.886
Yeah, that's not a good one.

1354
01:21:46.926 --> 01:21:47.146
Right.

1355
01:21:47.426 --> 01:21:59.456
Yeah, but, I mean, look, there's a very good argument to be made that you could say that any sort of technology that theoretically could be used to cause harm should be banned or the government should control it and decide who gets access to it.

1356
01:21:59.856 --> 01:22:01.678
And the flip side is that...

1357
01:22:02.318 --> 01:22:05.441
If it's allowed to proliferate, there's far more benefit than risk.

1358
01:22:05.861 --> 01:22:07.983
And the risk side needs to be mitigated.

1359
01:22:08.064 --> 01:22:10.246
And that's where you build good defense systems and so on.

1360
01:22:10.266 --> 01:22:20.976
So we've got all these technologies for monitoring, for cyber defense, for biodefense, and all these sorts of things that are critical for, you know, especially in a post-AI era, like what are the big attack factors?

1361
01:22:21.116 --> 01:22:22.938
So I think that's probably the way to think about this.

1362
01:22:23.548 --> 01:22:28.913
And that might help the sort of inevitable inequality, golden gooses, or collecting into insight.

1363
01:22:29.073 --> 01:22:42.964
I will bet you anything that in the next 10 years, there will be a billionaire that will emerge that has absolutely zero net worth today, downloaded open-sourced AI, and built a company that made them a billionaire five years from now, seven years from now.

1364
01:22:43.985 --> 01:22:45.607
And they're going to be someone that's going to come from nowhere.

1365
01:22:46.067 --> 01:22:47.648
And everyone's going to be like, wow, look at that.

1366
01:22:47.668 --> 01:22:49.190
And there's going to be a lot of these sorts of stories.

1367
01:22:49.530 --> 01:22:50.531
And that's what we saw with the internet.

1368
01:22:51.730 --> 01:22:53.871
This is something that I've made for you.

1369
01:22:53.951 --> 01:22:58.093
I've realized that the Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health.

1370
01:22:58.353 --> 01:23:00.234
We all have big goals that we want to accomplish.

1371
01:23:00.554 --> 01:23:12.300
And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards.

1372
01:23:12.701 --> 01:23:17.543
The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps.

1373
01:23:17.623 --> 01:23:19.084
And we call this in our team, the 1%.

1374
01:23:19.604 --> 01:23:23.706
Actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here.

1375
01:23:23.886 --> 01:23:33.609
So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out.

1376
01:23:33.909 --> 01:23:40.012
So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary.

1377
01:23:40.032 --> 01:23:43.993
So now we have a better range for diaries.

1378
01:23:44.233 --> 01:23:44.453
you.

1379
01:23:44.674 --> 01:23:54.243
So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again.

1380
01:23:54.263 --> 01:23:57.106
And you can get yours at thediary.com.

1381
01:23:57.346 --> 01:23:59.108
And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.

1382
01:24:00.709 --> 01:24:02.811
So when Elon says that working will be a choice,

1383
01:24:03.789 --> 01:24:04.309
You think he's wrong?

1384
01:24:04.769 --> 01:24:10.672
He's selling robots, but like, I do think he's right in a sense.

1385
01:24:11.433 --> 01:24:14.014
And what I mean by that is like, think about how many hours a week you work.

1386
01:24:14.114 --> 01:24:15.015
Do you have a sense?

1387
01:24:15.915 --> 01:24:18.396
Just, I work all the time when my fiance is not around.

1388
01:24:18.416 --> 01:24:18.636
Yes.

1389
01:24:18.656 --> 01:24:19.617
So she's not around at the moment.

1390
01:24:19.637 --> 01:24:20.777
Well, you and I are similar in the sense.

1391
01:24:20.817 --> 01:24:22.898
So like, every moment I can, I work.

1392
01:24:22.938 --> 01:24:24.919
But like, we're more entrepreneurial.

1393
01:24:25.019 --> 01:24:25.760
I would say that like,

1394
01:24:27.294 --> 01:24:29.636
You know, look at Denmark, for example, 37 hours a week.

1395
01:24:30.077 --> 01:24:33.840
What was the average number of hours worked 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 100 years ago?

1396
01:24:34.441 --> 01:24:42.288
In the US, when you did farm labor, and you were managing your own farm, and that was your whole business, or you worked in a factory, I mean, there was 12 hour shifts.

1397
01:24:43.020 --> 01:24:49.483
There was a lot more work per week being done, going from 100 hours a week to 80 to 60 to 40.

1398
01:24:49.503 --> 01:24:58.828
I mean, that is part of the progress of humanity, is that we're no longer encumbered by this labor category being told what to do and how to do it and when to do it in order to get money to pay our bills.

1399
01:24:59.448 --> 01:25:01.449
But we get to this world where we have more capital.

1400
01:25:02.109 --> 01:25:03.250
That capital is also time.

1401
01:25:04.170 --> 01:25:08.591
And I've now accumulated the ability to make a choice on what do I do with 40 hours of my week.

1402
01:25:09.351 --> 01:25:11.691
You know, we all have a hypothesis about how AI is going to play out.

1403
01:25:11.711 --> 01:25:13.432
And I've heard many different hypotheses here.

1404
01:25:13.952 --> 01:25:21.033
Which is the part of your hypothesis, like the principle within it, that could quite easily be a miscalculation?

1405
01:25:21.153 --> 01:25:22.213
And how could you be wrong?

1406
01:25:22.793 --> 01:25:23.614
Mass unemployment.

1407
01:25:24.234 --> 01:25:31.335
But where in your current hypothesis would you have been, do you think is the weakest part of your sort of first principles that could result in that?

1408
01:25:32.095 --> 01:25:37.759
The choice that people will make to go to higher paying jobs, to different jobs, that they see an opportunity and they make a choice to change.

1409
01:25:38.480 --> 01:25:40.401
Because I think that that's the key to this whole thing.

1410
01:25:41.262 --> 01:25:45.906
Like if you were a taxi driver in New York and you were paying rent on a medallion.

1411
01:25:45.986 --> 01:25:46.546
What's a medallion?

1412
01:25:46.806 --> 01:25:49.488
So medallion is a right to drive a cab in New York.

1413
01:25:49.628 --> 01:25:49.828
Okay.

1414
01:25:50.209 --> 01:25:51.350
So there was a limited number of them.

1415
01:25:51.910 --> 01:25:53.891
And so the medallions were restricted.

1416
01:25:54.391 --> 01:25:57.072
The New York City said, we'll only allow so many cabs on the streets.

1417
01:25:57.352 --> 01:25:58.953
So the price of medallions went up and up and up.

1418
01:25:59.413 --> 01:26:03.275
So then New York cab drivers would trade the medallions and the price of medallions got up to 500 grand.

1419
01:26:03.315 --> 01:26:05.436
And Citigroup was a big lender on medallions.

1420
01:26:05.776 --> 01:26:07.757
So they would loan you 500 grand to go buy a medallion.

1421
01:26:08.197 --> 01:26:08.977
Then Uber came along.

1422
01:26:09.218 --> 01:26:11.138
And this was one of the big battles around Uber at the time.

1423
01:26:11.999 --> 01:26:14.420
You could get paid more and there's more rides

1424
01:26:15.810 --> 01:26:21.333
Uber grew the number of people taking car transportation around New York considerably.

1425
01:26:22.013 --> 01:26:24.935
And when Uber demand shot up, a lot of these guys said, I'm not going to be a cab driver anymore.

1426
01:26:24.955 --> 01:26:25.735
I'm going to go be an Uber driver.

1427
01:26:25.755 --> 01:26:27.256
I can make more money as an Uber driver.

1428
01:26:27.996 --> 01:26:29.417
And the number of Uber drivers grew.

1429
01:26:29.517 --> 01:26:33.479
And look, there's a lot of regulation that's happened in New York since then with respect to Uber and whatnot.

1430
01:26:34.239 --> 01:26:35.660
But everyone made the choice.

1431
01:26:35.700 --> 01:26:36.180
They moved.

1432
01:26:36.701 --> 01:26:38.622
They found, the market found its way.

1433
01:26:38.942 --> 01:26:41.364
Individuals said, oh my God, I can make more money doing that.

1434
01:26:41.524 --> 01:26:42.524
I could pick my own hours.

1435
01:26:42.544 --> 01:26:43.925
I don't have to rent the medallion.

1436
01:26:44.306 --> 01:26:47.027
It's a very similar sidestep.

1437
01:26:47.187 --> 01:26:47.367
Yes.

1438
01:26:47.688 --> 01:26:52.791
Going from being a taxi driver to a taxi driver for a different firm using an app is quite a...

1439
01:26:52.971 --> 01:26:55.152
So I could sit here and pontificate all day with you on this.

1440
01:26:55.213 --> 01:26:56.954
And we'd both be wrong, I'm sure.

1441
01:26:57.594 --> 01:27:00.036
I don't know what the leap is going to be for an individual.

1442
01:27:00.156 --> 01:27:02.897
I think we have to start to pull these stories out of the economy, what's going on.

1443
01:27:03.798 --> 01:27:10.103
So Palantir put out this promotional video, which I thought was quite good, where they interviewed like a hospital administrator.

1444
01:27:10.123 --> 01:27:12.325
And she's like, well, I've got the AI doing all my paperwork.

1445
01:27:12.345 --> 01:27:13.847
So I get to spend more time with patients now.

1446
01:27:14.147 --> 01:27:15.428
Sorry, it was a nurse, not an administrator.

1447
01:27:15.448 --> 01:27:15.949
She was a nurse.

1448
01:27:16.289 --> 01:27:19.351
So she's like, I normally spend like most of my time filling out paperwork on the computer.

1449
01:27:19.371 --> 01:27:21.854
But Palantir, the software takes care of all that for me.

1450
01:27:22.434 --> 01:27:25.336
So now I can spend more time doing rounds face to face with patients.

1451
01:27:25.856 --> 01:27:28.638
It's a better job and it's better for her.

1452
01:27:29.258 --> 01:27:35.022
And so she, you know, I think it was a very poignant story about kind of what AI actually does on the ground.

1453
01:27:35.703 --> 01:27:38.224
So, you know, look, I mean, I think there's a lot of these sorts of examples.

1454
01:27:38.264 --> 01:27:42.767
We could we could counter argue back and forth about them all day long and probably both be wrong.

1455
01:27:43.067 --> 01:27:45.549
But this is what I would kind of observe on the ground and what's actually happening.

1456
01:27:45.884 --> 01:27:49.389
I think we agree on the fact that jobs are going to get more human in every sense of the word.

1457
01:27:49.489 --> 01:27:50.751
That was your yoga teacher example.

1458
01:27:50.771 --> 01:27:52.754
That was the nurse that can spend more time with her patients.

1459
01:27:52.814 --> 01:27:54.757
And actually, that'll become even more valuable.

1460
01:27:54.797 --> 01:27:55.698
It'll become more scarce.

1461
01:27:56.059 --> 01:28:00.826
I think my concerns to the gap that I have in my head is like how that transition looks, especially.

1462
01:28:00.826 --> 01:28:02.808
especially at speed, retraining.

1463
01:28:03.028 --> 01:28:07.492
You know, you talked about the human agency point and should we be preparing for such a transition?

1464
01:28:07.672 --> 01:28:14.077
Because I do also believe that we'll get to a, providing there's no existential issues, I do think we'll net out in a better place.

1465
01:28:14.738 --> 01:28:17.480
But the journey to that better place, I still, is just this big question mark.

1466
01:28:17.500 --> 01:28:18.061
I think that's right.

1467
01:28:18.121 --> 01:28:21.023
And I'm not trying to defend it and say it's going to be a clean, smooth line.

1468
01:28:21.123 --> 01:28:23.125
I'm just trying to say like, we are going to get to a better place.

1469
01:28:24.286 --> 01:28:27.509
You know, we could argue all day long about displacement or dysfunction along the way.

1470
01:28:28.942 --> 01:28:32.863
Or maybe a lot of people are smiling as they jump to new jobs and try new stuff out.

1471
01:28:32.903 --> 01:28:34.264
And they're like, oh my God, my life's better.

1472
01:28:35.304 --> 01:28:36.504
I'm optimistic in that sense.

1473
01:28:36.524 --> 01:28:37.805
I think you're right, we have to track it.

1474
01:28:37.825 --> 01:28:42.686
And if people are out of work and can't find work and they're challenged in paying their bills, we have a frigging problem.

1475
01:28:42.967 --> 01:28:44.107
And what's the solution to that problem?

1476
01:28:44.147 --> 01:28:44.647
Is it UBI?

1477
01:28:44.667 --> 01:28:46.308
Well, that's gonna be socialism.

1478
01:28:46.868 --> 01:28:50.669
So in that messy middle, you think we'll adopt socialism if that messy middle does occur?

1479
01:28:51.009 --> 01:28:51.149
Yeah.

1480
01:28:51.709 --> 01:28:52.790
And what does that look like in reality?

1481
01:28:52.810 --> 01:28:54.830
Is it just giving money and free food?

1482
01:28:54.850 --> 01:28:56.351
And I saw the Mamgani grocery stores.

1483
01:28:57.023 --> 01:28:59.244
Well, that's not going to work, but that'll take time to not work.

1484
01:28:59.284 --> 01:29:00.385
But in the meantime, it'll look great.

1485
01:29:01.145 --> 01:29:04.006
But yeah, it'll be more checks, more government employees.

1486
01:29:04.026 --> 01:29:06.648
It's like the government creates jobs to pay people.

1487
01:29:06.668 --> 01:29:11.670
They're not productive jobs, meaning if you get paid $100, do you create $120 of value?

1488
01:29:12.510 --> 01:29:14.872
No, you're getting paid $100, maybe you're creating $60 or $80 of value.

1489
01:29:16.817 --> 01:29:26.720
But, you know, that's just there's going to be more government payments, whether it takes the form of UBI, government jobs grow or some other sort of financial support.

1490
01:29:27.380 --> 01:29:28.860
I mean, that's the direction of travel at the moment.

1491
01:29:29.101 --> 01:29:29.221
Yeah.

1492
01:29:29.581 --> 01:29:32.822
All directions point to a more socialistic America.

1493
01:29:32.882 --> 01:29:33.642
How do you feel about that?

1494
01:29:34.393 --> 01:29:35.954
I'm actually, I don't want to lose my agency.

1495
01:29:35.974 --> 01:29:38.355
I don't want to lose my capacity, my liberty, my freedom.

1496
01:29:38.995 --> 01:29:44.418
And I feel sad for people that embrace it because I think that they don't realize that they're losing their freedom in that process too.

1497
01:29:44.638 --> 01:29:45.738
I think they're losing their agency.

1498
01:29:46.159 --> 01:29:49.480
But it's offering them a solution where there is- That's cute.

1499
01:29:49.780 --> 01:29:51.061
There's no other solution being offered.

1500
01:29:51.081 --> 01:29:52.722
But they feel there's no other solution being offered.

1501
01:29:52.942 --> 01:29:53.302
That's right.

1502
01:29:53.802 --> 01:29:57.184
But it's also logical to say, if we talk about incentives, that-

1503
01:29:58.363 --> 01:30:19.672
billionaires want to stay billionaires and billionaires aren't actually that um philanthropic in as they claim to be and actually what billionaires are protecting are their interests they want to remain free i had a call with roqana about this can you give context on who he is for my roqana is a congressman from california who's been um he's he used to be a moderate democrat and he's kind of pivoted to becoming a hard left true socialist um

1504
01:30:20.532 --> 01:30:23.414
In Silicon Valley is his district, California 17.

1505
01:30:23.814 --> 01:30:27.237
He was asking me, why are people so outraged at my support for a wealth tax?

1506
01:30:27.717 --> 01:30:28.878
He means billionaires being outraged.

1507
01:30:29.018 --> 01:30:30.319
No, it's not billionaires.

1508
01:30:30.419 --> 01:30:33.561
It's anyone that has built something and created value.

1509
01:30:33.861 --> 01:30:34.061
Yeah.

1510
01:30:35.082 --> 01:30:38.665
And it's just entrepreneurs, people that have had success.

1511
01:30:39.665 --> 01:30:40.566
And he's like, I don't get it.

1512
01:30:40.586 --> 01:30:42.927
It's just 5% or 2% a year or 1% a year.

1513
01:30:42.947 --> 01:30:43.868
Like, why do people care?

1514
01:30:44.909 --> 01:30:47.951
And I'm like, Ro, it's the first time in American history that

1515
01:30:48.866 --> 01:30:59.714
that you're talking about taking something from someone after they've paid their taxes, and it's now their private property, and the government gets to decide how much of their private property they get to keep.

1516
01:31:00.054 --> 01:31:04.397
It doesn't matter that it's 1% or 5% or they'll be fine, and Bernie Sanders, like the billionaires, will be fine.

1517
01:31:05.417 --> 01:31:07.519
It's fundamental to private property rights.

1518
01:31:07.559 --> 01:31:08.460
It makes me feel...

1519
01:31:09.467 --> 01:31:11.328
Like, and everyone can think about this.

1520
01:31:11.688 --> 01:31:13.049
It's not just rich people.

1521
01:31:13.649 --> 01:31:19.332
Anyone can think about what does it mean to list out everything you own and send it to the government every year, and they decide what you get to keep.

1522
01:31:20.172 --> 01:31:21.453
That's what it feels like to everyone.

1523
01:31:21.773 --> 01:31:23.794
Also, financially, it doesn't solve a problem.

1524
01:31:23.934 --> 01:31:25.154
And I'll just give you the statistics.

1525
01:31:25.295 --> 01:31:27.436
Total net worth of people in the US is 183 trillion.

1526
01:31:30.076 --> 01:31:32.318
Billionaires' total net worth is $8 trillion.

1527
01:31:33.419 --> 01:31:41.387
And even if you take it from billionaire down to 50 millionaire, so people that have $50 million or more, the total assets, the total net worth is $23 trillion.

1528
01:31:41.427 --> 01:31:43.449
$160 trillion is everyone else.

1529
01:31:44.630 --> 01:31:50.135
The problem is that the bottom 50% of Americans only have $6 trillion.

1530
01:31:51.527 --> 01:31:57.671
And the middle, that kind of 50% up to the 50 millionaire, you know, they've got $160 trillion.

1531
01:31:58.591 --> 01:32:00.553
That's where the net worth is in the United States.

1532
01:32:01.273 --> 01:32:05.756
It's in that kind of population that people call boomers or Gen X or whatever.

1533
01:32:06.156 --> 01:32:07.717
The bottom 50% have nothing.

1534
01:32:08.177 --> 01:32:13.600
And so if you taxed 100% of the billionaire's net worth, that's $8 trillion.

1535
01:32:14.101 --> 01:32:15.562
That's one year of the government spending.

1536
01:32:16.302 --> 01:32:16.542
One year.

1537
01:32:16.902 --> 01:32:18.843
It doesn't stop fundamentally a wealth tax.

1538
01:32:18.863 --> 01:32:20.684
It doesn't actually solve a fiscal problem.

1539
01:32:21.205 --> 01:32:24.927
It creates a system where you're like, everyone feels better about taking money from the billionaires.

1540
01:32:25.367 --> 01:32:27.188
Are the billionaires paying their fair share of taxes?

1541
01:32:27.208 --> 01:32:29.049
This is the politician's trick.

1542
01:32:29.749 --> 01:32:36.413
The politician's trick is they say, how much tax did you pay as a percent of your assets versus how much tax did you pay as a percent of your income?

1543
01:32:36.953 --> 01:32:40.635
Your income is when you sell stocks or when you make money for services you provide.

1544
01:32:41.055 --> 01:32:44.617
And every year, if you're wealthy in the United States, in California, I pay a 53% tax.

1545
01:32:45.978 --> 01:32:49.781
I pay 14% in California plus 39% federal.

1546
01:32:50.101 --> 01:32:51.462
But you must try and avoid that.

1547
01:32:52.183 --> 01:32:52.863
No, I just pay it.

1548
01:32:53.124 --> 01:32:57.747
But I mean, in terms of when I say avoid that, I mean, you would rather take it like a capital gains tax, which is lower?

1549
01:32:57.807 --> 01:32:58.848
California, there's no difference.

1550
01:32:59.008 --> 01:32:59.689
Oh, there's no difference.

1551
01:32:59.809 --> 01:33:06.334
Yeah, in California, capital gains or income is the same, which, by the way, should be the case at the federal level if you want to solve this compounding problem.

1552
01:33:06.994 --> 01:33:10.837
So can we lower income tax in the United States and raise capital gains tax?

1553
01:33:11.037 --> 01:33:11.538
Absolutely.

1554
01:33:11.558 --> 01:33:12.018
Absolutely.

1555
01:33:12.078 --> 01:33:17.763
Can we make income tax lower for people that are working for their money versus people that are earning gains on their capital assets?

1556
01:33:17.863 --> 01:33:18.343
Absolutely.

1557
01:33:18.784 --> 01:33:19.844
And we can solve the problem that way.

1558
01:33:19.864 --> 01:33:25.309
But by taking their assets, even if you took 100% of the billionaire's assets, that's one year of spending.

1559
01:33:25.789 --> 01:33:27.691
It doesn't actually solve a fiscal problem.

1560
01:33:28.171 --> 01:33:29.853
The tax rate is the fiscal problem.

1561
01:33:30.433 --> 01:33:39.100
So for these people, the 63% that are potentially championing socialism because they need a solution, and it sounds like a solution, make my bills cheaper.

1562
01:33:39.461 --> 01:33:44.805
What they don't hear from other politicians is a better solution, and this one sounds great.

1563
01:33:44.965 --> 01:33:45.746
This is what's crazy to me.

1564
01:33:45.786 --> 01:33:52.471
I don't get why all the politicians are fighting against a wealth tax or for a wealth tax when there's literally 15 other things you could do to make this better.

1565
01:33:53.233 --> 01:33:54.253
Like, this is crazy.

1566
01:33:54.813 --> 01:33:56.454
Make the capital gains and income tax the same.

1567
01:33:56.774 --> 01:33:58.554
Cut stupid spending at the federal level.

1568
01:33:58.834 --> 01:34:00.515
And all of a sudden, things become more affordable.

1569
01:34:00.575 --> 01:34:01.735
People have more take-home pay.

1570
01:34:02.035 --> 01:34:03.075
They can afford more stuff.

1571
01:34:03.336 --> 01:34:03.936
But let's be honest.

1572
01:34:04.056 --> 01:34:06.936
You're not going to be able to cut the spending at the federal level.

1573
01:34:07.176 --> 01:34:07.757
They've tried that.

1574
01:34:08.117 --> 01:34:12.138
And because of this whole thing we just talked about, the four-year election cycles, Elon went in, he tried to cut it.

1575
01:34:12.378 --> 01:34:13.238
He bounced straight back out.

1576
01:34:13.358 --> 01:34:13.558
Yeah.

1577
01:34:13.918 --> 01:34:18.062
And I think that that to me was the most depressing piece because I was like, oh, my God, Elon's going to go in.

1578
01:34:18.162 --> 01:34:19.403
He's going to blow up spending.

1579
01:34:19.423 --> 01:34:22.165
We're finally going to cut all the nonsense out of the spending.

1580
01:34:22.385 --> 01:34:23.986
And if Elon can't, no human can.

1581
01:34:24.147 --> 01:34:24.347
Yeah.

1582
01:34:24.427 --> 01:34:30.792
And then I went and visited D.C. and I went to all these Congress meetings and sat with senators and I was like, oh, my God, none of them want to cut it.

1583
01:34:31.412 --> 01:34:32.693
Like they're all on board with it.

1584
01:34:32.974 --> 01:34:34.034
This isn't even a party thing.

1585
01:34:34.054 --> 01:34:36.376
This is like everyone's doing it.

1586
01:34:37.097 --> 01:34:38.298
And I'm like, this is the system.

1587
01:34:38.318 --> 01:34:39.359
This is how it's set up.

1588
01:34:39.939 --> 01:34:40.760
Holy shit.

1589
01:34:41.915 --> 01:34:44.498
We've had, Brian, a slightly change of direction, but linked to AI.

1590
01:34:44.518 --> 01:34:46.760
I know you work in the life sciences.

1591
01:34:47.160 --> 01:34:53.106
So I wanted to ask you, do you think we're going to be able to live forever soon or at least extend life significantly within the next couple of decades?

1592
01:34:53.326 --> 01:34:53.626
I do.

1593
01:34:54.187 --> 01:35:00.193
And I think the reason is we've discovered the mechanism of aging, which is the most fundamental of human diseases.

1594
01:35:00.473 --> 01:35:02.135
We have 10 trillion cells in our body.

1595
01:35:02.595 --> 01:35:04.997
Every one of those cells has a copy of our DNA.

1596
01:35:05.017 --> 01:35:05.137
Yeah.

1597
01:35:05.858 --> 01:35:06.839
in the nucleus of the cell.

1598
01:35:07.519 --> 01:35:10.321
That DNA, segments of it, are called a gene.

1599
01:35:11.162 --> 01:35:15.485
A, C, T, and G make up the little nucleotides, and you put a bunch of them together, and that's a gene.

1600
01:35:16.265 --> 01:35:16.926
What is a gene?

1601
01:35:17.446 --> 01:35:34.117
Well, a copy of that comes over to a protein printer in the cell called the ribosome, and the A, C, T, and G is the programming for which of 20 amino acids, three letters is one amino acid, that ribosome takes a segment of the DNA, copied as RNA, and it prints out...

1602
01:35:35.018 --> 01:35:44.231
amino acids and a sequence of amino acids from that gene which is defined by that gene makes a protein so all a protein is is a is a chain of amino acids

1603
01:35:45.151 --> 01:35:51.333
As soon as it's done printing, those amino acids collapse into a three-dimensional machine called a protein.

1604
01:35:52.094 --> 01:35:55.115
So proteins are three-dimensional machines, and they do crazy shit.

1605
01:35:55.695 --> 01:36:04.038
Like there is a protein in your mitochondria that spins 6,000 times a second as hydrogen protons go through it, and that's what makes energy in your cells.

1606
01:36:04.138 --> 01:36:04.998
That's what makes ATP.

1607
01:36:05.018 --> 01:36:08.239
It's literally like a propeller, like a turbine in your mitochondria and your cell.

1608
01:36:08.259 --> 01:36:09.480
It's an incredible machine.

1609
01:36:09.940 --> 01:36:11.581
There's machines that carry oxygen.

1610
01:36:12.521 --> 01:36:16.646
from your lungs into your cells in your body to give them oxygen that they need to work.

1611
01:36:17.107 --> 01:36:19.469
I mean, there are proteins that do all sorts of crazy stuff.

1612
01:36:20.190 --> 01:36:24.175
So all the genes are, are the programming for making proteins in your cell.

1613
01:36:24.856 --> 01:36:26.838
Now, your DNA is not a strand like this.

1614
01:36:27.338 --> 01:36:29.861
It's actually kind of a small clustered thing.

1615
01:36:30.202 --> 01:36:32.424
And there are little molecules that sit on top of the DNA.

1616
01:36:33.596 --> 01:36:35.517
that turn a gene on or off.

1617
01:36:36.217 --> 01:36:39.259
So if the molecule is sitting on top of a certain gene, that gene is off.

1618
01:36:39.539 --> 01:36:40.320
Like a little switch?

1619
01:36:40.340 --> 01:36:40.880
Like a switch.

1620
01:36:40.920 --> 01:36:41.420
What's it called?

1621
01:36:41.440 --> 01:36:42.481
Someone used the name before.

1622
01:36:42.641 --> 01:36:43.061
Histones.

1623
01:36:43.221 --> 01:36:43.842
Histones, okay.

1624
01:36:44.242 --> 01:36:45.022
Or acetyl markers.

1625
01:36:45.042 --> 01:36:46.543
I thought it was epigenetics, but maybe I'll...

1626
01:36:46.563 --> 01:36:47.584
So this is all epigenetics.

1627
01:36:47.644 --> 01:36:47.844
Okay.

1628
01:36:48.024 --> 01:36:51.165
So for a given cell, there are genes that are on or off.

1629
01:36:51.486 --> 01:36:54.007
The genes that are on, those proteins are being made in that cell.

1630
01:36:54.407 --> 01:36:55.228
And the genes that are off...

1631
01:36:55.928 --> 01:36:57.529
Those proteins are not being made in that cell.

1632
01:36:58.229 --> 01:37:00.850
And that's what makes all of our cells in our body different.

1633
01:37:01.391 --> 01:37:09.575
Every one of our cells has the same DNA, but our eye cell and our brain cell and our heart cell and our skin cell just have different genes that are on or off.

1634
01:37:09.775 --> 01:37:23.562
Okay, so those markers that sit on the genes, those little switches, every time you drink a glass of alcohol or you go in the sun and get hit by the sunlight or smoke a cigarette or eat some bad food that's burnt, all of these things can cut DNA.

1635
01:37:24.741 --> 01:37:27.283
And when DNA gets cut, your cell is really good at fixing it.

1636
01:37:27.723 --> 01:37:28.544
Puts it right back together.

1637
01:37:29.945 --> 01:37:32.167
Happening millions of times a second in your body.

1638
01:37:32.507 --> 01:37:33.768
Literally all over your body.

1639
01:37:34.669 --> 01:37:36.791
And your DNA is breaking and your cell is fixing it.

1640
01:37:37.071 --> 01:37:41.535
But every time your cell fixes it, there's a chance that that switch moves a little bit.

1641
01:37:42.195 --> 01:37:50.081
And if the switch moves to the wrong place, suddenly that cell starts making the wrong protein or stops making the right protein.

1642
01:37:50.101 --> 01:37:50.342
Okay.

1643
01:37:50.922 --> 01:37:55.723
So statistically, over time, when you're a baby, everything is tuned great, working right.

1644
01:37:55.983 --> 01:37:57.803
All the right proteins are being made in every cell.

1645
01:37:58.124 --> 01:37:58.664
You're young.

1646
01:37:58.684 --> 01:37:59.804
Your skin is not wrinkly.

1647
01:38:00.124 --> 01:38:00.704
You can run.

1648
01:38:00.724 --> 01:38:01.344
You can breathe.

1649
01:38:01.364 --> 01:38:02.344
You can see perfectly.

1650
01:38:02.685 --> 01:38:04.585
As you're a young person, suddenly you turn 30.

1651
01:38:05.045 --> 01:38:07.045
And you're like, wait, my vision's kind of fading a little bit.

1652
01:38:07.566 --> 01:38:08.386
I can't run as fast.

1653
01:38:08.426 --> 01:38:09.346
I can't breathe as deep.

1654
01:38:09.486 --> 01:38:10.966
Oh my God, I'm getting wrinkles around my eyes.

1655
01:38:11.426 --> 01:38:12.207
40, 50.

1656
01:38:12.727 --> 01:38:13.927
What happens as we get older?

1657
01:38:14.487 --> 01:38:16.808
is those switches kind of move around to the wrong places.

1658
01:38:17.328 --> 01:38:25.831
And as those switches move around, that cell stops making the right protein and starts making the wrong protein, and it becomes dysfunctional.

1659
01:38:26.472 --> 01:38:30.793
And if that happens in enough cells, then that tissue starts to misbehave.

1660
01:38:31.113 --> 01:38:31.834
You get wrinkles.

1661
01:38:32.254 --> 01:38:33.594
Your heart can't beat quite right.

1662
01:38:34.054 --> 01:38:38.516
Your retina doesn't pick up light as well and transmit the signal of the light, and things get blurry.

1663
01:38:38.696 --> 01:38:39.636
Your hearing starts to lose.

1664
01:38:39.656 --> 01:38:40.577
You can't think as quickly.

1665
01:38:41.157 --> 01:38:42.258
You can't respond as quickly.

1666
01:38:42.659 --> 01:38:43.840
That's what aging is.

1667
01:38:44.040 --> 01:38:46.383
Aging is the core human disease.

1668
01:38:46.944 --> 01:38:56.054
And as epigenetics, which is where the switches are on a cell, start to get moved around to the wrong place, and that tissue starts to misbehave, we get all these diseases.

1669
01:38:56.514 --> 01:38:59.438
That could be one of the core drivers of cancer.

1670
01:38:59.958 --> 01:39:02.079
Why is aging so even across my body then?

1671
01:39:02.319 --> 01:39:08.742
Because all these cells are suffering the same statistical effect of time as DNA breaks happen in every cell in your body.

1672
01:39:09.422 --> 01:39:14.444
And as those DNA breaks happen, those switches are moving around the same rate in all parts of your body.

1673
01:39:14.944 --> 01:39:20.467
And that's why parts of your body start to suffer kind of, it's like, oh my God, my hip hurts, my eye, my brain.

1674
01:39:21.067 --> 01:39:24.989
Your young viewers may not appreciate this, but being 46, I'm starting to appreciate it.

1675
01:39:25.389 --> 01:39:26.389
And it's becoming more of an issue.

1676
01:39:26.409 --> 01:39:27.329
Now, in 2006...

1677
01:39:28.630 --> 01:39:36.473
a guy named Shinya Yamanaka discovered four proteins that you could put into a cell or apply to a cell.

1678
01:39:37.233 --> 01:39:45.036
And it would basically take all the switches in that cell and move them to the place that a stem cell has, which is basically an embryo in a human.

1679
01:39:46.157 --> 01:39:49.358
And now that cell operates like an embryonic cell.

1680
01:39:50.342 --> 01:40:02.948
And you can take that embryo cell and you can put other proteins on to move the switches around even more to turn that stem cell into an eye cell, into a skin cell, into a heart cell, into a lung cell, into a brain cell.

1681
01:40:03.528 --> 01:40:15.554
So we suddenly developed this technology in the mid-2000s to take any cell and turn it into a stem cell, re-differentiated, it's called differentiation, from one cell type to another.

1682
01:40:16.254 --> 01:40:21.879
But then years later, another guy said, well, what if instead of putting a lot of that protein on the cell, we just put a little bit?

1683
01:40:22.439 --> 01:40:28.344
So they took the Yamanaka factors, which are just four proteins, and they put a microdose of them on a couple cells.

1684
01:40:29.289 --> 01:40:33.191
And the switches started to move around, but they didn't move back to being a stem cell.

1685
01:40:33.851 --> 01:40:38.014
What happened is they moved back to being a young version of that cell type.

1686
01:40:38.594 --> 01:40:41.175
So the eye cell basically became a young eye cell.

1687
01:40:41.896 --> 01:40:43.657
The skin cell became a young skin cell.

1688
01:40:43.917 --> 01:40:47.619
The heart cell became a young heart cell by putting a small dose of these proteins.

1689
01:40:48.239 --> 01:40:50.941
So it turns out that these proteins kind of move the switches around.

1690
01:40:51.621 --> 01:40:55.363
And if you put just a small amount of them on, you can move the switches just back to the right position.

1691
01:40:55.623 --> 01:40:57.465
That's now called epigenetic reprogramming.

1692
01:40:57.765 --> 01:41:00.466
That's this new area of science that seems to indicate.

1693
01:41:00.486 --> 01:41:05.109
And they've now done it in mice where the mice can live to the equivalent of 100 plus years old.

1694
01:41:05.630 --> 01:41:08.972
They've put it on the tissue of monkeys and gotten rid of the wrinkles.

1695
01:41:09.292 --> 01:41:17.117
We now have just David Sinclair, just one of his companies did the dosing in the retina to reverse blindness in people with a retinopathy.

1696
01:41:17.857 --> 01:41:28.582
So this epigenetic reprogramming is an entirely new lane of medicine that says not just can we address all of the downstream effects of aging, but can we go to the core?

1697
01:41:29.003 --> 01:41:31.444
Can we reset aging in all these cells in the body?

1698
01:41:31.804 --> 01:41:33.645
And the answer so far is yes.

1699
01:41:34.105 --> 01:41:38.067
The risk is if you reset it too much, it becomes an embryo and it turns into cancer.

1700
01:41:38.568 --> 01:41:48.393
So that's what everyone's been working against in the last couple of years is how do you put the right dose of the right proteins in the right cells to get them to reverse their age and become young again?

1701
01:41:48.993 --> 01:41:54.156
And the path, it's really just an engineering exercise at this point, as opposed to a biological proof of concept.

1702
01:41:54.517 --> 01:41:55.337
The science is there.

1703
01:41:55.357 --> 01:41:56.198
The foundation is there.

1704
01:41:56.598 --> 01:41:57.678
We're just doing the engineering.

1705
01:41:57.698 --> 01:41:58.659
So I am extremely excited and optimistic.

1706
01:41:58.679 --> 01:42:00.560
I'm going to say, well, I'm going to say, well, I'm going to say, well, I'm going to

1707
01:42:00.680 --> 01:42:17.156
about this work, it seems very likely that in the next couple of years, we're going to have more human therapy trials that are going to not just address the core of aging, but they'll start to put in like, you know, like they did with the eye cell, maybe reverse wrinkles, maybe improve cardiomyocytes, improve the heart tissue.

1708
01:42:17.516 --> 01:42:21.520
So I think there'll be a lot more of the sort of thing coming to market over the next few years.

1709
01:42:22.290 --> 01:42:25.633
And AI is going to play a role, I assume, in accelerating this because you can perform...

1710
01:42:26.193 --> 01:42:29.336
I mean, you can theoretically make new discoveries, but you can run the tests faster, right?

1711
01:42:29.456 --> 01:42:37.162
You know, just to help provide some context on what goes on in a cell, you can kind of think about a cell...

1712
01:42:38.357 --> 01:42:46.165
has about 10 billion proteins interacting with each other, building things, breaking things, creating new molecules, creating new proteins, interacting, interacting.

1713
01:42:46.185 --> 01:42:48.928
So the proteins are these machines, 10 billion of them in a cell.

1714
01:42:49.668 --> 01:42:54.893
So if you assume each protein is the size of a human, the cell would be the size of Manhattan.

1715
01:42:55.534 --> 01:43:08.879
So now imagine a city the size of Manhattan with 500 story tall skyscrapers in the Manhattan skyline and 10 billion people living in these buildings, going back and forth, building stuff together, talking, making babies.

1716
01:43:09.059 --> 01:43:10.740
And assume they just do this for 80 years.

1717
01:43:10.940 --> 01:43:15.241
All these humans interacting, 10 billion humans in Manhattan for 80 years, nonstop.

1718
01:43:15.301 --> 01:43:16.902
They don't sleep and they just keep working.

1719
01:43:17.282 --> 01:43:20.083
That entire set of interactions is one second in one cell.

1720
01:43:21.380 --> 01:43:23.744
That's how complicated biology is.

1721
01:43:24.045 --> 01:43:25.767
And we have 10 trillion cells in our body.

1722
01:43:26.148 --> 01:43:29.694
And those cells are all shooting out proteins and messages to each other all the time.

1723
01:43:30.527 --> 01:43:48.153
To answer the question, AI allows us to build models to better understand what the heck is going on and to make predictions about proteins we could put into the cells that can affect the outcome of changing the epigenome on that DNA without us having a deterministic understanding of what's going on.

1724
01:43:48.493 --> 01:43:51.634
So with AI, I can come up with a million different ideas for a new protein.

1725
01:43:52.214 --> 01:43:55.496
I can test it in silicon how it would interact with other stuff, meaning on computers.

1726
01:43:56.017 --> 01:43:56.957
I could see what happens.

1727
01:43:57.077 --> 01:43:59.679
I could see if it actually has the same sort of effect as the other protein.

1728
01:44:00.000 --> 01:44:00.940
Would it be more efficacious?

1729
01:44:01.320 --> 01:44:02.842
And then I reduce my candidate list down.

1730
01:44:03.242 --> 01:44:04.943
And I take that candidate list and I put it in a lab.

1731
01:44:05.063 --> 01:44:06.324
And now the labs are being automated.

1732
01:44:06.644 --> 01:44:09.206
And I can test it on cells and see if it's actually reversing aging.

1733
01:44:09.706 --> 01:44:10.667
I can test it in models.

1734
01:44:11.027 --> 01:44:12.548
And then I take that candidate.

1735
01:44:12.588 --> 01:44:17.652
And now I've got a probability of success in 10 years that instead of being 1%, it's now like 75%.

1736
01:44:19.173 --> 01:44:22.214
And so that's the way AI plays a role in life sciences discovery.

1737
01:44:22.575 --> 01:44:44.164
And it's transforming not just epigenetic reprogramming, which is this whole big avenue of medicine now, but it's transforming every aspect of biology and our understanding of life sciences, where we can use AI to make these simulations and have a better understanding of what these complicated, incredibly immense interaction sets look like or drive at the end state, versus me needing to kind of be a scientist, being like, oh, I got a good idea, let's try that.

1738
01:44:44.544 --> 01:44:46.905
Okay, five weeks later, okay, I got another good idea, let's try that.

1739
01:44:47.505 --> 01:44:48.866
And that all gets reduced to silico.

1740
01:44:49.097 --> 01:44:50.417
And are you using your own model?

1741
01:44:50.437 --> 01:44:51.237
Are you training your own AI?

1742
01:44:51.357 --> 01:44:53.618
Are you using some of the publicly available frontier models?

1743
01:44:53.898 --> 01:44:54.978
In my world, we use both.

1744
01:44:55.658 --> 01:44:58.599
So we take our own data and then we build our own predictive models from it.

1745
01:44:58.899 --> 01:45:01.860
And then separately, we use off the shelf life sciences models.

1746
01:45:01.880 --> 01:45:03.640
And then we also use some of the general models.

1747
01:45:03.660 --> 01:45:05.200
So it's a great combination.

1748
01:45:05.220 --> 01:45:10.601
And to your questions and talking about AI earlier, oh my God, the stuff we can do is unbelievable and it's mind-blowing.

1749
01:45:11.001 --> 01:45:12.482
And we're hiring more people because of it.

1750
01:45:12.802 --> 01:45:13.382
And so like...

1751
01:45:13.722 --> 01:45:15.542
It's not like AI got me to get rid of jobs.

1752
01:45:15.582 --> 01:45:18.343
It's like the frontier has gotten so much wider.

1753
01:45:18.643 --> 01:45:32.726
That's why I'm so optimistic about AI not destroying jobs, because all I see is opportunity with new companies, new ideas, new pathways, new things, new breakthroughs in sciences, in materials, in engineering, things that we could have never, ever tackled.

1754
01:45:33.126 --> 01:45:34.327
We can now tackle with AI.

1755
01:45:36.167 --> 01:45:37.267
It is a persuasive argument.

1756
01:45:37.827 --> 01:45:39.968
Okay, so what are the great lies in America in your view?

1757
01:45:41.176 --> 01:45:45.077
If you go to any college with any degree, you're going to have a great job waiting for you at the end.

1758
01:45:45.578 --> 01:45:46.298
Okay, number one.

1759
01:45:46.738 --> 01:45:53.621
If you buy a home, you've achieved the American dream, and all of your assets should be in that home.

1760
01:45:55.461 --> 01:45:59.103
Social security will take care of you when you get old, and it's a fair system.

1761
01:46:00.183 --> 01:46:04.885
Everyone should have ownership in stocks is the truth about that lie.

1762
01:46:06.084 --> 01:46:11.946
Because all the money that went into Social Security went out to the government to pay bills and it wasn't actually kept in the trust.

1763
01:46:13.306 --> 01:46:15.227
And so as a result, Social Security is going to go bankrupt.

1764
01:46:15.247 --> 01:46:20.728
So Social Security was one of the great lies on, you know, you'll be safe and protected when you retire.

1765
01:46:21.889 --> 01:46:22.769
Those are three great lies.

1766
01:46:22.789 --> 01:46:23.769
Is there any more that come to mind?

1767
01:46:24.289 --> 01:46:25.870
I don't know about public pensions.

1768
01:46:27.107 --> 01:46:29.028
And it's the same as the social security lie.

1769
01:46:29.669 --> 01:46:34.573
When you put money into a pension plan, and that's called a defined benefit plan.

1770
01:46:34.793 --> 01:46:37.175
When you retire, you're going to get $1,000 a week or whatever it is.

1771
01:46:38.496 --> 01:46:40.577
And every paycheck, some money is taken out.

1772
01:46:40.877 --> 01:46:46.161
And the idea is that the accountants and the investors will do a good job investing that money for you, and you'll get your benefit at the end.

1773
01:46:46.902 --> 01:46:50.825
If they don't do a good job, then the pension plan is bankrupt, and you don't get your retirement check.

1774
01:46:51.643 --> 01:46:58.784
And if they do too good a job or you put too much money in, then the pension plan is overfunded and you should be getting more money out than you're actually getting.

1775
01:46:59.585 --> 01:47:03.085
So what companies realized was that pension plans are unfair.

1776
01:47:03.605 --> 01:47:05.586
They either go bankrupt or they're overfunded.

1777
01:47:06.226 --> 01:47:07.886
So that's when everyone moved to 401ks.

1778
01:47:08.306 --> 01:47:16.668
And that middle class that we talked about earlier, those people that have $160 trillion of assets, the reason they have $160 trillion of assets is because a lot of them had 401ks.

1779
01:47:16.728 --> 01:47:16.868
Right.

1780
01:47:18.028 --> 01:47:24.771
Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of people that are just relying on social security, they were making less than 3.5% a year on their money.

1781
01:47:25.431 --> 01:47:32.294
So that's the great lie, is that these public retirement funds would take care of their people.

1782
01:47:32.794 --> 01:47:35.435
Is there a fifth great lie that comes to mind?

1783
01:47:35.855 --> 01:47:37.996
I actually don't have a great answer for you on healthcare.

1784
01:47:38.296 --> 01:47:40.457
I think that there's a moral obligation on healthcare.

1785
01:47:41.598 --> 01:47:42.598
So I do buy into this.

1786
01:47:43.098 --> 01:47:46.680
In a civil society, I could make the libertarian argument, but I won't.

1787
01:47:47.628 --> 01:47:52.391
Because I do think it's probably the right thing to say, in a civil society, no one should be without healthcare.

1788
01:47:54.692 --> 01:47:59.215
How do you make that work where the government's paying bills and the costs don't go through the roof?

1789
01:47:59.495 --> 01:48:01.857
That's a long, probably six-hour conversation.

1790
01:48:02.577 --> 01:48:07.400
And it's very technical, I think, on what you have to do to make healthcare accessible.

1791
01:48:07.761 --> 01:48:09.542
And it's definitely got to be a multi-tiered system.

1792
01:48:10.576 --> 01:48:19.780
I guess one of the things that I was curious to get your take on, because I've not really heard you talk about this a lot on the All In podcast, is your view on everything that's going on with this bloody war and the situation there.

1793
01:48:19.800 --> 01:48:22.801
I'm not sure if this is within your area of expertise, but it appears that the US is now stuck.

1794
01:48:23.141 --> 01:48:23.781
It's a quandary.

1795
01:48:24.321 --> 01:48:27.743
I read Ray Dalio's piece a few weeks ago, which I thought was exactly right.

1796
01:48:28.643 --> 01:48:35.406
The Chinese make their influence known in the same way that you would kind of read about it in Sun Tzu's Art of War.

1797
01:48:36.426 --> 01:48:38.347
If you have to go to war, you've already lost.

1798
01:48:39.342 --> 01:48:44.685
And that's a big difference between how the U.S. behaves and how China behaves.

1799
01:48:45.106 --> 01:48:56.073
If you look back on the track record of president's decisions as it relates to foreign policy in the United States over the last couple decades, there have not been a lot of good actions that have ended up in a good place.

1800
01:48:56.613 --> 01:49:04.138
I think China has this capacity for influence without action, which is a really interesting model to observe.

1801
01:49:04.758 --> 01:49:06.039
And the U.S. has this kind of

1802
01:49:08.552 --> 01:49:13.895
I don't want to say incentive, but when you go to a general and say, hey, should we go attack these guys?

1803
01:49:13.915 --> 01:49:16.096
The general spends the whole time training to attack the guys.

1804
01:49:16.336 --> 01:49:21.039
So, you know, and then you have a National Security Council and you have advisors and all this sort of stuff.

1805
01:49:21.699 --> 01:49:28.543
But there's a priming in the U.S. that I think maybe plays out in a way that maybe we take action when we shouldn't always be taking action.

1806
01:49:28.870 --> 01:49:33.295
China's positioned that only possible because there is a dominant force that is running around trying to police everything.

1807
01:49:33.675 --> 01:49:38.020
So they can kind of chill and let the US go police all the problems and wars.

1808
01:49:38.040 --> 01:49:43.947
Their military capacity is pretty impressive, but it's untested at scale, I guess, is one argument you can make against that point.

1809
01:49:44.247 --> 01:49:48.111
I mean, China's got a lot of economic gamesmanship that they do.

1810
01:49:48.311 --> 01:49:52.074
You know, we'll give you cheap stuff if we can get these things from you.

1811
01:49:52.094 --> 01:49:56.738
You know, we'll keep an eye on you if you need help.

1812
01:49:56.918 --> 01:50:01.843
I mean, there's like a lot of stuff that doesn't require direct kinetic action that they can kind of get things done.

1813
01:50:01.863 --> 01:50:01.963
Yeah.

1814
01:50:02.163 --> 01:50:09.375
In terms of the US's position in Iran right now, there is, it appears, a threat to oil in terms of like the price at the pump.

1815
01:50:09.415 --> 01:50:12.620
And I think it's the US oil reserve is down to a couple of weeks.

1816
01:50:13.201 --> 01:50:16.606
I want to say that it's on the order of 24 million barrels in the SPR.

1817
01:50:17.463 --> 01:50:24.490
So at the G7 summit in France, President Donald Trump addressed the precocious state of global oil inventories following supply disruption.

1818
01:50:25.211 --> 01:50:28.635
He said, we run out of reserves at about four weeks.

1819
01:50:29.135 --> 01:50:33.079
You know, there are reserves all over the world and we would really run out.

1820
01:50:33.820 --> 01:50:37.204
And there'll be a time when you wouldn't be able to get it.

1821
01:50:37.504 --> 01:50:38.785
It would be bedlam.

1822
01:50:39.706 --> 01:50:39.947
Mm hmm.

1823
01:50:40.923 --> 01:50:42.003
And this was just as...

1824
01:50:42.584 --> 01:50:45.485
I think this was the explanation as to why he signed that MOU with Iran.

1825
01:50:46.765 --> 01:50:50.166
So, I mean, if this is true, then something needs to happen.

1826
01:50:51.127 --> 01:50:54.288
But again, it doesn't appear that Iran had much of an incentive.

1827
01:50:54.308 --> 01:50:56.549
Now you've decapitated the leader to do really anything.

1828
01:50:56.569 --> 01:50:57.289
They can kind of wait down.

1829
01:50:57.329 --> 01:51:00.050
The game theory is Iran knows that the US can't do much more.

1830
01:51:00.510 --> 01:51:00.690
Yeah.

1831
01:51:00.970 --> 01:51:01.751
We're going to drop more bombs.

1832
01:51:02.031 --> 01:51:02.211
Right.

1833
01:51:02.951 --> 01:51:04.692
And well, I mean, Iran's now threatened...

1834
01:51:06.442 --> 01:51:14.208
Arab neighbors with retaliation against their energy infrastructure, which would be devastating to Saudi, Qatar, UAE.

1835
01:51:15.029 --> 01:51:22.956
So at this point, it seems like a bit of a stalemate that the US can't act for fear of the retaliation and the impact it would have on America's actual allies in the region.

1836
01:51:23.136 --> 01:51:24.237
What do you think happens here?

1837
01:51:24.317 --> 01:51:28.680
Trump, straight up form, is Iran now have this sort of chokehold on the world, it seems?

1838
01:51:28.961 --> 01:51:31.703
I mean, the biggest driver also is the election cycle we're in.

1839
01:51:32.143 --> 01:51:32.644
The midterms?

1840
01:51:32.704 --> 01:51:33.184
The midterms.

1841
01:51:33.224 --> 01:51:33.504
So...

1842
01:51:34.545 --> 01:51:38.150
Going into November, this war is deeply unpopular on both sides.

1843
01:51:39.492 --> 01:51:42.977
And so trying to get rid of the war is the incentive at the moment.

1844
01:51:44.873 --> 01:51:45.794
It's a tough situation.

1845
01:51:46.695 --> 01:51:48.576
You seem hesitant here.

1846
01:51:48.797 --> 01:51:51.839
No, I just, I'm not a great guy to opine on this.

1847
01:51:51.920 --> 01:51:53.341
I just, I don't know what to do.

1848
01:51:53.541 --> 01:52:01.248
But just when you look at it from the outside, you see a president that says he's going to bomb, he's not going to bomb, he's calling it off, he's bombing, he's not bombing, he's calling it off, we've got a deal, there's no deal.

1849
01:52:01.649 --> 01:52:02.810
And you're flopping around.

1850
01:52:02.850 --> 01:52:06.213
And I think even that as a behavior to observe from the outside, you go, oh, okay.

1851
01:52:06.233 --> 01:52:08.475
Well, let me ask you one question.

1852
01:52:08.495 --> 01:52:09.896
It kind of makes them unpredictable, right?

1853
01:52:09.916 --> 01:52:10.257
Yeah.

1854
01:52:11.343 --> 01:52:14.505
And that unpredictability can, in some cases, be an advantage.

1855
01:52:14.586 --> 01:52:21.591
I do think people have made this case that the president's unpredictability makes it hard for people to have a clear path on how to attack.

1856
01:52:21.651 --> 01:52:32.159
Like my poker player buddies, their whole poker strategy, the guys who are the best in the world who I'm friends with, their whole strategy is like create randomness in your gamesmanship so that it's very hard for someone to exploit your gameplay.

1857
01:52:32.640 --> 01:52:37.083
And, you know, I just don't know if you know what you're going to get with President Trump.

1858
01:52:37.123 --> 01:52:40.746
You can meet with him and hear him say one thing and then he'll do something different later.

1859
01:52:41.228 --> 01:52:42.852
I understand the merit of that argument.

1860
01:52:43.293 --> 01:52:46.761
In this situation, what I'm observing now is he's become predictable.

1861
01:52:47.101 --> 01:52:47.342
Yeah.

1862
01:52:48.502 --> 01:52:49.042
In terms of...

1863
01:52:49.522 --> 01:52:51.543
In terms of not being able to do anything.

1864
01:52:51.563 --> 01:52:53.323
Like, not... Not taking action.

1865
01:52:53.443 --> 01:52:54.043
Not taking action.

1866
01:52:54.123 --> 01:52:54.283
Right.

1867
01:52:54.303 --> 01:52:58.504
Threat, post, biggest strike coming since World War II, call it off.

1868
01:52:58.544 --> 01:52:59.764
What would you do if you were him?

1869
01:52:59.824 --> 01:53:01.104
Fucking hell.

1870
01:53:02.145 --> 01:53:02.865
What would I do?

1871
01:53:02.965 --> 01:53:03.685
Yeah.

1872
01:53:04.325 --> 01:53:05.585
There's only bad outcomes.

1873
01:53:05.705 --> 01:53:06.565
So it's which bad...

1874
01:53:06.805 --> 01:53:09.426
Honestly, I think, which bad outcome am I willing to accept the most?

1875
01:53:10.086 --> 01:53:15.407
And I guess for someone like Trump, I don't know him, but I guess he's probably thinking which one would save the most face.

1876
01:53:15.988 --> 01:53:20.610
That's probably the right kind of, you know, objective function for him.

1877
01:53:20.971 --> 01:53:28.234
I think the worst thing is all outcomes, in my view, lead to the Strait of Hormuz being now basically a tool of Iranian negotiation.

1878
01:53:28.374 --> 01:53:29.235
And it wasn't before.

1879
01:53:29.335 --> 01:53:30.055
New point of leverage.

1880
01:53:30.215 --> 01:53:32.657
Yeah, new point of leverage in that region, which is a powerful point of leverage.

1881
01:53:32.777 --> 01:53:32.977
Yeah.

1882
01:53:33.588 --> 01:53:36.851
Yeah, but it may create alternatives.

1883
01:53:36.871 --> 01:53:41.054
There's conversation about creating other pipelines out to Israel and so on.

1884
01:53:41.374 --> 01:53:44.777
So maybe at the end of the day, it creates incentive for other channels to be opened.

1885
01:53:45.697 --> 01:53:46.118
TBD.

1886
01:53:46.218 --> 01:53:49.420
I do think it's not just about the Iranian...

1887
01:53:50.421 --> 01:53:52.802
program, but it's like, where's all the enriched uranium?

1888
01:53:52.902 --> 01:53:57.983
That's probably, if you're kind of asking a military advisor, I would say that's probably what they're thinking about as the core.

1889
01:53:58.003 --> 01:54:02.104
Because it takes a long time to enrich uranium to use for nuclear fuel like this.

1890
01:54:02.884 --> 01:54:05.445
So getting the enriched uranium is probably a key objective.

1891
01:54:06.105 --> 01:54:12.286
The next election, 2028, for the presidential office, do you think a Republican is going to win in the course of how things are going?

1892
01:54:12.346 --> 01:54:12.586
For 28?

1893
01:54:12.626 --> 01:54:12.806
Yeah.

1894
01:54:13.327 --> 01:54:14.527
No, I think it's going to be AOC.

1895
01:54:14.967 --> 01:54:15.807
You think it's going to be AOC?

1896
01:54:16.247 --> 01:54:16.427
Yeah.

1897
01:54:17.027 --> 01:54:17.228
Really?

1898
01:54:17.528 --> 01:54:17.968
At this point.

1899
01:54:18.888 --> 01:54:19.048
Why?

1900
01:54:20.200 --> 01:54:21.241
It's all the stuff we've talked about.

1901
01:54:21.261 --> 01:54:23.942
I just think that that's the state of the nation.

1902
01:54:24.163 --> 01:54:25.103
I think that's where people are at.

1903
01:54:25.323 --> 01:54:25.884
They want help.

1904
01:54:26.384 --> 01:54:32.068
People feel desperate, and they want a candidate that can promise to help make their life better.

1905
01:54:32.568 --> 01:54:36.490
I think they're less concerned about freedom of movement, the kind of stuff we talked about.

1906
01:54:37.071 --> 01:54:41.253
I think they're much more concerned about paying their bills and getting health care and getting child care.

1907
01:54:41.934 --> 01:54:42.614
You think she's going to run?

1908
01:54:43.114 --> 01:54:43.755
I think she'll run.

1909
01:54:44.035 --> 01:54:46.937
I think she'll beat Buttigieg and Kamala.

1910
01:54:47.535 --> 01:54:49.837
Kamala Newsom.

1911
01:54:50.618 --> 01:54:55.582
I don't think Newsom is going to have like a great presence on a national stage.

1912
01:54:55.622 --> 01:55:02.007
I think he looks and acts the part, but it's going to be hard for him to sell the rest of America.

1913
01:55:02.828 --> 01:55:06.191
And I think Kamala is just like, it's just no one wants to take the risk.

1914
01:55:07.265 --> 01:55:11.726
AOC is just like Mom Donnie in the sense that she brings a very different voice.

1915
01:55:12.106 --> 01:55:14.287
You know, and I think this DSA movement has real legs to it.

1916
01:55:14.667 --> 01:55:17.548
Because I don't see a lot of young people speaking out against the DSA movement.

1917
01:55:18.188 --> 01:55:21.269
I see a lot of old Democrats speaking out against the DSA movement.

1918
01:55:21.649 --> 01:55:24.390
You see Kamala Harris being perceived as more of a risk than AOC?

1919
01:55:24.590 --> 01:55:24.790
Yeah.

1920
01:55:25.510 --> 01:55:26.931
Because she's lost before and they've seen it.

1921
01:55:26.991 --> 01:55:27.591
Oh, okay.

1922
01:55:27.611 --> 01:55:27.751
Yeah.

1923
01:55:27.811 --> 01:55:28.551
Because she's lost before.

1924
01:55:28.611 --> 01:55:28.811
Yeah.

1925
01:55:29.612 --> 01:55:30.492
But look, what do I know?

1926
01:55:31.180 --> 01:55:31.821
It's interesting to you.

1927
01:55:31.861 --> 01:55:38.110
I've heard you, I think I've heard you guys on the all in podcast say before that you think in 2020, it will be a Democrat or a socialist that wins.

1928
01:55:38.331 --> 01:55:41.896
So, I mean, there's a lot of runway between here and there.

1929
01:55:42.337 --> 01:55:42.417
Hmm.

1930
01:55:43.526 --> 01:55:51.048
And look, I mean, I want to talk about the profound frontiers in front of us, because I think that there really is this idea.

1931
01:55:51.068 --> 01:55:58.950
And, you know, there's a lot of my friends who have this idea of this golden age hypothesis that we're entering this golden age and people don't realize we're in it.

1932
01:55:59.510 --> 01:56:04.191
That AI unleashes this capacity for human advancement.

1933
01:56:04.271 --> 01:56:06.891
So the age reversal stuff.

1934
01:56:07.312 --> 01:56:09.372
Right now, we have a billion people in the world that are starving.

1935
01:56:09.932 --> 01:56:12.693
We have hundreds of millions of people dying from terrible disease.

1936
01:56:13.733 --> 01:56:17.878
I think these are the sorts of things that are going to get resolved more quickly than we realize.

1937
01:56:18.619 --> 01:56:22.423
I think that the productivity gains that are going to arise from AI are not just going to kind of...

1938
01:56:23.503 --> 01:56:26.745
you know, be a battle on does the painter have a robot or not.

1939
01:56:27.426 --> 01:56:31.189
But I think it's going to be about all this new stuff that's starting to be realized.

1940
01:56:31.249 --> 01:56:34.271
Material science is going to have a profound revolution right now.

1941
01:56:34.751 --> 01:56:43.818
Traveling to the moon, which might seem like a billionaire's fantasy, but ends up becoming kind of a real, true industrial frontier that everyone's going to participate in.

1942
01:56:44.498 --> 01:56:52.426
There's just extraordinary abundance that arises from the stuff, not in the sense that, oh, we're just making everything that we've had in the past cheaper.

1943
01:56:53.106 --> 01:57:06.779
But the stuff that's in front of us, the frontiers that all of the entrepreneurs want to pursue, that all of the dreamers see as the opportunity and the hope for tomorrow, that all of the pragmatists are kind of acknowledging is like legit for the first time in our history.

1944
01:57:08.002 --> 01:57:11.785
That's where I think there's a light kind of rising off this horizon.

1945
01:57:12.046 --> 01:57:13.147
I feel very good about that.

1946
01:57:13.927 --> 01:57:15.189
Maybe AOC gets elected.

1947
01:57:15.209 --> 01:57:18.271
That's just my view on timing where we sit today, sociopolitically.

1948
01:57:18.832 --> 01:57:25.338
But I do think that the light is rising in a way that like everyone's going to have a profound change to their lives in the next couple of years.

1949
01:57:25.638 --> 01:57:27.740
So I am profoundly optimistic.

1950
01:57:27.780 --> 01:57:30.803
We kind of talked a lot about socialism and government spending and all this shit today.

1951
01:57:30.823 --> 01:57:31.123
Yeah.

1952
01:57:31.776 --> 01:57:35.839
But my experience on the ground is just like, holy shit.

1953
01:57:36.600 --> 01:57:37.681
And there's no stopping it.

1954
01:57:37.841 --> 01:57:40.563
Like these amazing breakthroughs are here.

1955
01:57:41.104 --> 01:57:52.933
One of the things you learn when you hire lots of people is that in every change or every announcement you make in your company or we've raised money or whatever it might be, there's a second question, which is what everyone, all of your team members are actually asking.

1956
01:57:52.993 --> 01:57:53.634
What does it mean for me?

1957
01:57:53.654 --> 01:57:54.475
What does it mean for me?

1958
01:57:55.395 --> 01:57:58.118
And actually on the ground, talking about being on the ground,

1959
01:57:59.221 --> 01:58:00.282
It's the 63%.

1960
01:58:01.522 --> 01:58:04.744
They look up and they see a trillionaire, world's first trillionaire.

1961
01:58:05.004 --> 01:58:05.904
They see AI.

1962
01:58:05.944 --> 01:58:07.485
Katy Perry with the flower out the window.

1963
01:58:07.745 --> 01:58:12.968
They see a job displacement coming and then they go, well, listen, can't pay the bills.

1964
01:58:13.308 --> 01:58:15.129
So what's the mechanism for doing that right now?

1965
01:58:15.329 --> 01:58:19.711
For helping the people on the ground to benefit from the advances in this technology?

1966
01:58:19.731 --> 01:58:20.872
What would the mechanism be?

1967
01:58:21.092 --> 01:58:27.275
401ks to own this stuff would be what we need to change from a public policy perspective so that they all have direct ownership in these things.

1968
01:58:27.275 --> 01:58:29.556
And they can look on their phone and see how they're benefiting from...

1969
01:58:29.576 --> 01:58:32.557
I'll tell you, everyone thinks that AI is going to accumulate to two or three companies.

1970
01:58:33.097 --> 01:58:34.657
I don't think that's how it's going to play out.

1971
01:58:35.098 --> 01:58:37.578
Everyone's using AI and everyone's using open source AI now.

1972
01:58:38.059 --> 01:58:39.979
Meaning every company is going to benefit from AI.

1973
01:58:40.179 --> 01:58:46.041
Which means every company is going to have more money to pay their employees, hire more people, train them up, do other things with them.

1974
01:58:46.541 --> 01:58:47.402
So I'm like...

1975
01:58:48.362 --> 01:58:53.285
I don't buy into the narrative that Dario, Elon, and Sam end up having all the value in AI.

1976
01:58:53.425 --> 01:58:54.726
I think the Chinese blew that up.

1977
01:58:55.247 --> 01:58:57.288
I think the open source stuff is the best thing to happen.

1978
01:58:57.668 --> 01:59:00.050
Doesn't that mean there's going to be a bit of an economic collapse here?

1979
01:59:00.640 --> 01:59:02.761
those data centers still need to exist to run the models.

1980
01:59:03.141 --> 01:59:05.062
Are we in an AI bubble in that regard?

1981
01:59:05.282 --> 01:59:05.462
No.

1982
01:59:05.542 --> 01:59:17.306
This CapEx on AI, if the cost to run a Chinese model comes down by some number of fold over the cost to run a proprietary model, I'm going to run more models.

1983
01:59:17.406 --> 01:59:18.067
I'm going to do it more.

1984
01:59:18.727 --> 01:59:20.788
And as I do it more, I'm going to need more compute.

1985
01:59:20.808 --> 01:59:21.708
I need more data centers.

1986
01:59:21.788 --> 01:59:23.849
I need more thing to do that.

1987
01:59:24.329 --> 01:59:25.209
So that's where I should go.

1988
01:59:25.229 --> 01:59:26.570
By the way, on the data center argument...

1989
01:59:27.250 --> 01:59:30.791
I totally buy into people's concerns about data centers driving up the cost of energy.

1990
01:59:32.051 --> 01:59:33.851
The water thing is, I think, BS.

1991
01:59:33.911 --> 01:59:37.912
But the cost of energy thing, every data center should be on its own grid.

1992
01:59:38.492 --> 01:59:42.853
And every data center should make enough power not just to be on their own grid, but to pump energy back into the grid.

1993
01:59:43.233 --> 01:59:47.914
If you set that as a standard for every data center project in the U.S. going forward, you've solved the data center problem.

1994
01:59:47.934 --> 01:59:50.395
Because now you're dropping the price of electricity for everyone in America.

1995
01:59:50.855 --> 01:59:52.295
And these data centers are all off the grid.

1996
01:59:52.735 --> 01:59:53.755
And then everyone can own those.

1997
01:59:53.775 --> 01:59:55.656
They can all be in REITs and people can buy stock.

1998
01:59:55.976 --> 01:59:57.417
And many of those are publicly traded.

1999
01:59:57.477 --> 02:00:00.738
So they should be in your 401k and everyone can own a piece.

2000
02:00:01.438 --> 02:00:05.479
David, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for.

2001
02:00:05.959 --> 02:00:13.602
And the question left for you is, what is one idea you have that is uncomfortable for people to hear that you don't typically say out loud?

2002
02:00:16.725 --> 02:00:20.090
I think we should end the federal student loan program in the United States.

2003
02:00:20.650 --> 02:00:26.197
And I think education costs will come way down and the private market will still provide all the student loans that people need.

2004
02:00:27.499 --> 02:00:33.086
I think if the federal student loan program, because it doesn't discern colleges, degrees,

2005
02:00:34.434 --> 02:00:35.434
individual performance.

2006
02:00:35.915 --> 02:00:42.058
I think that by ending that federal student loan program, the quality of education in the U.S. will improve dramatically and the price will drop dramatically.

2007
02:00:42.958 --> 02:00:45.299
And more people will have access to higher quality education.

2008
02:00:45.539 --> 02:00:46.520
I know it's counterintuitive.

2009
02:00:47.472 --> 02:00:48.273
But that's what will happen.

2010
02:00:48.293 --> 02:00:53.157
It's sort of like, you know, Malay removed rent control in Argentina and rents declined.

2011
02:00:53.758 --> 02:00:58.602
Like, we've propped up the price of education in the U.S. with the Federal Student Loan Program.

2012
02:00:59.003 --> 02:01:05.108
And so the Federal Student Loan Program was replaced by a program that is accountable, meaning the person that's underwriting the loan.

2013
02:01:06.049 --> 02:01:19.838
knows that that loan has to perform, meaning that that school has to be good or that individual has to be doing a good degree, the market will correct itself and people will end up getting a loan if they get one degree versus another.

2014
02:01:20.458 --> 02:01:28.003
So if you get a bad degree, pick your basket weaving major, there's no loan available.

2015
02:01:28.483 --> 02:01:33.246
But if you get a degree in something that might be useful and you're likely to get a job, there's a loan available.

2016
02:01:33.266 --> 02:01:33.306
So

2017
02:01:33.547 --> 02:01:38.608
But for those people that can't get a loan because they want to do basket weaving, they're going to have to go find something else to do.

2018
02:01:38.848 --> 02:01:40.829
So they might have to go work somewhere else.

2019
02:01:40.929 --> 02:01:44.950
Because the alternative was we put them in $200,000 of debt, and then they didn't have a job afterwards.

2020
02:01:45.290 --> 02:01:48.830
Is the counter-argument also that the most privileged will get the best education?

2021
02:01:49.511 --> 02:01:52.131
And a privilege can be intellectual privilege or it can be financial privilege.

2022
02:01:52.371 --> 02:01:55.132
But there'll be a divide between, okay, you guys are all going to Harvard.

2023
02:01:55.312 --> 02:01:56.792
You still have a scholarship system.

2024
02:01:57.252 --> 02:01:58.513
Scholarship system doesn't change.

2025
02:01:58.553 --> 02:02:00.173
You still have scholarships and solve for that.

2026
02:02:00.593 --> 02:02:03.374
And education with AI is changing as well.

2027
02:02:03.394 --> 02:02:10.377
But, you know, I'll just say, like, there's a lot of these universities that get accredited and they provide terrible education.

2028
02:02:10.617 --> 02:02:11.037
Yeah, that's true.

2029
02:02:11.157 --> 02:02:11.817
And just give you debt.

2030
02:02:12.017 --> 02:02:12.937
And then they give you debt.

2031
02:02:13.078 --> 02:02:19.220
And so you graduate with a degree from, you know, whatever crappy university or college,

2032
02:02:19.940 --> 02:02:23.784
But you assumed that because the government gave you the loan, you were going to have a job at the end.

2033
02:02:24.024 --> 02:02:24.685
Yeah, it's a scam.

2034
02:02:25.005 --> 02:02:25.726
It's a scam.

2035
02:02:26.006 --> 02:02:27.007
It's one of the great lies.

2036
02:02:27.568 --> 02:02:29.029
Imagine if it was all privately funded.

2037
02:02:29.049 --> 02:02:30.070
And there's plenty of lenders.

2038
02:02:30.090 --> 02:02:34.915
I mean, the amount of money that's going into student loans is actually a small percentage of what's going into home loans.

2039
02:02:35.296 --> 02:02:37.678
So there's plenty of bank capital out there to fund student loans.

2040
02:02:37.698 --> 02:02:38.459
Yeah.

2041
02:02:38.599 --> 02:02:43.961
So the student loan debt would suddenly become, hey, if you go to this crappy university, we're not giving you $200,000 of debt.

2042
02:02:44.341 --> 02:02:44.581
True.

2043
02:02:44.781 --> 02:02:45.521
I see what you're saying.

2044
02:02:45.541 --> 02:02:52.483
It would also force people to pick things that were linked to the employment market versus, say, like basket weaving use as an example.

2045
02:02:52.843 --> 02:02:57.945
But maybe if, you know, maybe I'd be forced more into things that had a higher guarantee of return because of the private markets.

2046
02:02:58.105 --> 02:02:59.065
And it doesn't mean...

2047
02:02:59.245 --> 02:03:00.686
It's a retraining mechanism in that regard.

2048
02:03:00.706 --> 02:03:01.086
It is.

2049
02:03:01.486 --> 02:03:06.147
And I think this is a great reset that's needed if we got rid of the federal student... Because I don't think you can reform federal student loans.

2050
02:03:06.228 --> 02:03:07.208
It's just too complicated.

2051
02:03:07.888 --> 02:03:14.249
But if you shut it down or you transition it over time and let the private market underwrite it, you'd have a better path.

2052
02:03:15.722 --> 02:03:16.202
David, thank you.

2053
02:03:16.402 --> 02:03:16.742
Thank you.

2054
02:03:16.883 --> 02:03:18.803
Thank you to you and your co-hosts on the All In podcast.

2055
02:03:18.823 --> 02:03:19.704
It's one of my favorite podcasts.

2056
02:03:19.724 --> 02:03:21.404
So I highly recommend everybody goes and listens to that.

2057
02:03:21.505 --> 02:03:25.726
I listen to it all the time and it really helps me develop my own perspective on the world.

2058
02:03:25.886 --> 02:03:29.308
So I really appreciate the fact that you guys take the time to do that amongst your very busy schedules.

2059
02:03:29.348 --> 02:03:30.228
Well, thank you for having me.

2060
02:03:30.769 --> 02:03:32.509
And yeah, appreciate you coming here today.

2061
02:03:32.909 --> 02:03:37.191
And hopefully we can continue this conversation once we get more of these answers and the fog clears a little bit.

2062
02:03:37.311 --> 02:03:37.732
Absolutely.

2063
02:03:37.752 --> 02:03:38.252
Thank you so much.

2064
02:03:38.272 --> 02:03:40.673
And I'll link all of your links below for people to go read your stuff.

2065
02:03:40.693 --> 02:03:42.954
Is there anywhere else in particular people can get more of your content?

2066
02:03:43.594 --> 02:03:44.776
All in's really where I'm at.

2067
02:03:44.856 --> 02:03:45.738
Okay.

2068
02:03:46.058 --> 02:03:46.258
Yeah.

2069
02:03:46.439 --> 02:03:46.839
Anywhere else?

2070
02:03:46.900 --> 02:03:47.741
Follow you on social media?

2071
02:03:47.761 --> 02:03:49.484
Follow me on Twitter at Friedberg.

2072
02:03:49.524 --> 02:03:51.607
I don't post very much, but that's it.

2073
02:03:51.667 --> 02:03:53.630
I mean, that's where I'm at.

2074
02:03:53.770 --> 02:03:53.971
Great.

2075
02:03:54.031 --> 02:03:54.531
We'll see you then.

2076
02:03:54.552 --> 02:03:54.812
Thank you.

2077
02:03:54.832 --> 02:03:55.313
Thank you, David.