00:00:00You've said the future's going to be epic.
00:00:02You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried.
00:00:06How come?
00:00:09I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future
00:00:14because humans are programmed to be that way.
00:00:17We always were worried about some predator coming around the corner eating us.
00:00:21Like, we're tuned to survive, right?
00:00:23So we're tuned to always—there's always some existential threat to humanity.
00:00:26This goes back to biblical eras, thousands of years ago.
00:00:31It was the great flood that was about to come.
00:00:33There was the plague.
00:00:37The plague's going to wipe us all out.
00:00:39There's starvation.
00:00:41The late 19th-century population was outstripping food supply.
00:00:48And there was this big belief that we were going to run out of food.
00:00:52And there was this rush to—
00:00:53and the primary reason was all the world's fertilizer
00:00:57actually came from these guano fields off of the South American coast.
00:01:02So these giant islands covered in poop.
00:01:04And the clipper ships would go down, they'd get all this poop,
00:01:07and they'd bring it back to Europe, and they'd use it as fertilizer to farm.
00:01:11If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less calories.
00:01:15So the islands were kind of diminishing, and there was this big call to action.
00:01:19We're going to run out of fertilizer.
00:01:20The world's going to starve. We're going to die.
00:01:22And then there was this invention called the Haber-Bosch process,
00:01:24where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere,
00:01:27compress it, and make fertilizer.
00:01:29Boom.
00:01:29Suddenly, population skyrocketed.
00:01:32Every generation has these existential threats—climate change, COVID.
00:01:38There's always—and now it's AI.
00:01:40I think fundamentally, AI is one of these most kind of mind-numbing,
00:01:44sort of unbelievable-to-understand kind of technologies.
00:01:49And when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok,
00:01:53that seems so overwhelming, like a plague, like running out of food, like COVID,
00:01:59we have a tendency to be very existential about it.
00:02:02Now, you compare that to the facts on the ground.
00:02:05The facts on the ground—people are living longer, they're living healthier,
00:02:08they're living better lives across the board, across populations.
00:02:11And people can argue all day long about relative prosperity.
00:02:16Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead.
00:02:18They're doing really well.
00:02:20The rest of us feel left behind.
00:02:22But if you look at some of the metrics of, like, hey, everyone has a home.
00:02:27Everyone has a car.
00:02:28Like, everyone has some of these things that we take for granted today
00:02:30that we didn't have 100 years ago that were really things to struggle to get.
00:02:37Now, separate to that, there's an extraordinary compounding effect
00:02:41happening in technology generally.
00:02:43Digitization of the physical world and then our ability to kind of make
00:02:47predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of
00:02:50the tools that we call AI today.
00:02:52But it's really a long history of these sorts of tools where we take data and
00:02:56we use that to better understand the world and then say, hey, we could do
00:02:58this or we could do this.
00:02:59We could make this molecule to solve this cancer.
00:03:02We could do this thing.
00:03:02And suddenly it turns out we're right.
00:03:04We could build this machine that could get us to the moon.
00:03:06Oh, yeah, we're right.
00:03:07We could do that.
00:03:08Like, all of these fundamental tools start to compound.
00:03:11And we're in this kind of exponential curve right now that I think—and we
00:03:14can talk about some of the things that I think are most exciting.
00:03:17But that are really going to kind of transform the trajectory for humanity.
00:03:21So I think that there's a risk of too much change too fast, which is perhaps
00:03:29the thing that breaks social order.
00:03:32And that's probably the phase that we're in right now.
00:03:35How much is the social order going to break?
00:03:38How hard is it going to be for people to adapt?
00:03:40How much of a dislocation will there be in social systems and economic systems?
00:03:46And people's expectations when they shift too much and they have to kind of rethink
00:03:52what do I have to do, they want to put a break on things.
00:03:54And I think that's kind of a moment that we're in in the West right now.
00:03:57In the East, it's a little bit different.
00:03:59You go to China, they're very much embracing these technologies because
00:04:02there's so much more to gain than there is to lose.
00:04:04In the West, we have so much more to lose than there is to gain.
00:04:06Oh, that's interesting.
00:04:07A victim of your own success so far because it feels like you've climbed
00:04:11pretty high and if you fall, that could be bad.
00:04:13You have more to lose.
00:04:14Yeah.
00:04:15And we could pontificate on this for a while but you could go back to FDR
00:04:21in the United States and we kind of came out of the war with this big effort
00:04:27where we said, "Hey, we can aggregate all our resources.
00:04:30We can win World War II."
00:04:31And then we said, "By aggregating our resources, we could do the extraordinary.
00:04:34So let's do that again and let's keep doing that."
00:04:36And that became this kind of trajectory we've been on in terms of making
00:04:41promises for tomorrow and then having the government kind of deliver the
00:04:45promises and that's been a big thing that's gone on for the last, call it
00:04:48almost 100 years, particularly in the West.
00:04:54At some point, you can only promise so much.
00:04:59There's a system where everyone had this sort of expectation
00:05:02setting that was made.
00:05:03Everyone gets a home.
00:05:04That's the American dream.
00:05:07Everyone goes to college and then they get a job.
00:05:10Some of those things may not necessarily be the right things from a free market
00:05:15perspective, in which case you're making these promises and then people feel
00:05:19like the promises aren't being delivered.
00:05:20They're not being met and that's all they care about and that's all that they want.
00:05:24In the West, we have that problem right now.
00:05:26And so there's a lot of these things that we've set expectations around.
00:05:29If you go to college, you get a good degree, no matter how much it costs,
00:05:33you will have a good job and you'll be able to buy a home and live a good life.
00:05:35And that's not true anymore.
00:05:37And so these are the sorts of things that I think make us more fearful
00:05:41of the changes ahead.
00:05:42Whereas in the East, those promises weren't necessarily made.
00:05:46Like in China, GDP per capita skyrocketed from 3,000 to 30,000
00:05:51in just a couple of years.
00:05:52I mean, imagine seeing the average person's income in a country go up by 10x
00:05:55and everyone's moving from farms to villages to cities.
00:06:00And the cities are like the future.
00:06:02It's been an extraordinary trajectory.
00:06:04So there's a lot of embracing of the future that's happening
00:06:08in one set of social systems in the world today.
00:06:12And then a bunch of this like, "Oh my God, tomorrow is scary.
00:06:15It's going to break everything on the other side."
00:06:17And I think we have that very dangerous kind of choice to make.
00:06:20I think the concern is that AI is a difference of kind,
00:06:25not just a difference of degree.
00:06:27That there is a centralizing of power amongst potential
00:06:30five trillionaire class people on the planet and what did they,
00:06:35what sort of control do they have?
00:06:37How much displacement is there of work that didn't happen
00:06:39in the same way as when horses were killed
00:06:41because the automobile came along or because manual labor
00:06:45needed to turn into driving JCBs instead of digging holes.
00:06:48That this is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree,
00:06:51but to your perspective when it comes to AI,
00:06:54doomerism, AI optimism.
00:06:55- Yeah.
00:06:59All technology shifts go through a phase of diffusion,
00:07:04meaning they have to start somewhere.
00:07:08It's not like we turn on a switch and suddenly everyone
00:07:12can build an Etsy store or a Shopify store.
00:07:14Like that's not how the internet started with everyone
00:07:18suddenly benefiting from being able
00:07:19to be an entrepreneur online.
00:07:21It took a couple of generations of technology diffusion
00:07:26before the idea of Shopify and the high speed internet
00:07:29all over the country got everywhere.
00:07:31And people could actually stand up a Shopify store
00:07:33and run it.
00:07:34The first people on the internet,
00:07:37the first businesses that stood up did very well.
00:07:39And so the technology started centrally,
00:07:42but then, you know, initially people were like,
00:07:44oh my God, Cisco is gonna dominate the world, right?
00:07:47Like Cisco's got the switches that make the internet switch.
00:07:50That's the technology that's gonna,
00:07:52those guys that own Cisco,
00:07:53those guys are gonna run the world.
00:07:54This is not fair.
00:07:55Like they're gonna control everything.
00:07:56This is crazy.
00:07:58Nowadays it's Nvidia to some degree, it's Google,
00:08:01but like eventually every technology commoditizes.
00:08:04That's what's so amazing about technology.
00:08:05Is it like, it's always diffusing.
00:08:08Like this new innovation finds its way out.
00:08:10Like we've already seen in just the last couple of weeks,
00:08:13this insane shift in AI where people don't have to run models
00:08:17in the cloud anymore.
00:08:18They can run models on their desktop at home.
00:08:22So there's no longer like a dependency on Google
00:08:26or a dependency on, you know,
00:08:28pick your favorite hosted model provider.
00:08:30I can download an open source model
00:08:32and there's plenty of great models.
00:08:33I can run it on a Mac computer in my house.
00:08:36And if you saw recently there's this auto research thing
00:08:39that went viral on Twitter this weekend,
00:08:42where Andrej Karpathy turned on auto research
00:08:46and he ran all of these agents on his computer
00:08:49and they were just asked a bunch of questions
00:08:51to solve, make better LLMs.
00:08:52And they just ran 30 of them talking to each other
00:08:55and they just kept scoring the improvements
00:08:57they were each making to the LLM,
00:08:59to the underlying AI model.
00:09:01And they made a better LLM model
00:09:03than what ChatGPT had not too very long ago.
00:09:06In like a weekend on a computer at home,
00:09:09that's how quickly it's diffused.
00:09:11And so I'm like, I think that there's a,
00:09:14and so this whole thing of like,
00:09:15oh, data centers need to be stopped.
00:09:17I actually don't think that data centers
00:09:19are gonna have much to do with the benefits
00:09:21we're gonna realize.
00:09:22Like so much of AI is gonna sit at the edge.
00:09:23It's gonna sit in embedded devices.
00:09:25It's gonna sit on your desktop computer.
00:09:26It's gonna sit on your iPhone.
00:09:28It's gonna be ubiquitous.
00:09:29It's gonna be everywhere.
00:09:30And I think everyone just doesn't see the benefit yet.
00:09:34And so it's very hard to envision why I should do this.
00:09:37And we can talk a lot about some of those benefits
00:09:40that could arise, but over time,
00:09:42all technologies have like a central feature
00:09:45where someone's making a bunch of money early on.
00:09:47And then eventually everyone's like,
00:09:48oh my God, everyone's life has gotten better
00:09:50because of this thing.
00:09:51Like when the first CAR-T therapies came out,
00:09:53these are T cell, I totally jumped ship there,
00:09:56but like CAR-T therapy is this amazing technology
00:09:59that was developed where we could take T cells,
00:10:02immune cells out of the human body,
00:10:04program them to find a specific protein,
00:10:07put them back in your body,
00:10:09and then they go and find that protein and kill it,
00:10:11and kill that cell.
00:10:12And it was used for cancer.
00:10:13So we could take a T cell out of the body,
00:10:15program it to go attack a cancer cell,
00:10:17put it back in the body, it attacks the cancer cell
00:10:19and destroys it.
00:10:20When that first came out, it was like,
00:10:23oh my God, this is incredible.
00:10:24And a couple of companies made a couple billion dollars
00:10:27selling the first generation of those technologies.
00:10:29But to get that therapy is like millions of dollars initially.
00:10:32You have to take all these cells out, isolate them,
00:10:34make sure they're clean, engineer them, put them back in,
00:10:37make sure the person doesn't die.
00:10:38So it became this very expensive initial process.
00:10:41And now CAR-T therapy is making its way
00:10:44into more and more cancer treatments.
00:10:46And it is almost 100% success rate in blood cancers
00:10:50when it works.
00:10:51And so it's becoming this thing that goes
00:10:53from millions of dollars to a million to 500
00:10:56and pretty soon to 50K, 20K, and eventually 5K.
00:10:59And that ends that disease.
00:11:00That whole class of diseases goes away.
00:11:03So all of these technologies start up
00:11:04with this aggregation of value.
00:11:06Small number of people get it.
00:11:07Small number of people get value.
00:11:08But eventually all technologies diffuse.
00:11:10And so I'm less concerned about there being a monopoly.
00:11:14We're already seeing every single model company
00:11:16getting disrupted by something else the next week.
00:11:19We're already seeing this idea
00:11:20of data centers being the requisite breaking apart.
00:11:23There's a bunch of startups right now
00:11:25that are making technology that reduces the token cost
00:11:29by 1,000x.
00:11:31So for every token produced,
00:11:32which is a measure of output from AI,
00:11:35it used to be 10 bucks or whatever.
00:11:38Pick your number, a dollar, 50 cents, 10 cents.
00:11:40It's coming down by 1,000 fold.
00:11:42Because they're figuring out better ways to architecture
00:11:44the underlying models, to make distributed smaller models,
00:11:46to use new chip architecture,
00:11:48to use new systems of balancing energy
00:11:50across the different chips that you're using,
00:11:52et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:11:53And these all compound.
00:11:54So suddenly it's like,
00:11:55is it the people that are gonna build all these data centers
00:11:57really gonna have a monopoly?
00:11:59I don't know.
00:11:59This will allow anyone to stand up a small data center
00:12:02and run a bunch of AI stuff.
00:12:03So you don't really need big $100 billion data center.
00:12:05So I think there's a lot that's changing very quickly.
00:12:09And every step of the way, it's happening so fast.
00:12:11People just have all these reasons to have concern.
00:12:14But I'm pretty optimistic
00:12:16'cause history being a predictor here
00:12:17that the diffusion of these technologies
00:12:19will unlock value for every human on earth.
00:12:22And it's really just a function of at what point
00:12:24and at what point of value.
00:12:25- I've heard you talking about the moon a lot.
00:12:27What's happening with the moon?
00:12:28- The moon, I think...
00:12:30So one of the things that I think AI unlocks
00:12:36is the ability to do really complex projects.
00:12:39People think about AI as like,
00:12:41hey, I'm gonna replace labor.
00:12:42Like the accountant's job is gonna go away.
00:12:44And we're all kind of swirling our heads around.
00:12:45What are we gonna do
00:12:46with the accountant's jobs going away?
00:12:47And we could use the automobile
00:12:49and the horse buggy driver analogy.
00:12:52People were worried about the horse buggy jobs going away
00:12:54and who's gonna breed the horses?
00:12:56Who's gonna take care of the horses?
00:12:57All the horse stables are gonna go away.
00:12:59And then when the car came around,
00:13:01there was auto mechanics and there were the highway system
00:13:04and then motels popped up and then gas stations popped up
00:13:06and then coffee houses popped up on the highways.
00:13:08And new towns emerged on the highways
00:13:11because you could get to them.
00:13:12And suddenly the automobile unlocked industries
00:13:15we didn't contemplate.
00:13:16It's several degrees away, several steps away
00:13:20from the initial problem that you're thinking about,
00:13:22which is the horse company's dying
00:13:25and the horse jobs going away.
00:13:27So I think that's kind of like an important thing to note.
00:13:30And before I get to the moon, I'll just say this one point.
00:13:32I think physical AI or robotics
00:13:35is really gonna be an unlock for people.
00:13:37People think it's like the companies,
00:13:42the corporations will have all the robots
00:13:44and the corporations will replace all the people.
00:13:47But why can't everyone have a robot?
00:13:50Meaning why can't someone put a robot in their garage
00:13:53and this robot can do anything.
00:13:55It works 24 hours a day.
00:13:57That robot's now your employee.
00:13:59And you can say to the robot in the garage,
00:14:01hey, I wanna make a bicycle shop.
00:14:02I wanna make custom bicycles that are really cool.
00:14:04They're like Chrome and people can kind of tweak them online
00:14:08and make all these different versions of bicycles.
00:14:10And then the robot will build the bicycle.
00:14:12So you can stand up a Shopify store or an Etsy store,
00:14:15whatever, sell bicycles, and your robot will make them
00:14:17for you.
00:14:18You don't even have to know how to make bicycles.
00:14:20The robot will order all the parts.
00:14:21It'll order all the machinery it needs.
00:14:23It'll run the robot bike shop in your garage.
00:14:25It'll make bikes.
00:14:26It'll package them up and ship them out for you.
00:14:28When you think about it in that context,
00:14:29which is that this diffusion of technology enables everyone
00:14:32to get value from it.
00:14:33So everyone will have a robot.
00:14:35Everyone will be able to have a small business.
00:14:37It's like, imagine back in the day, 20, 30 years ago,
00:14:40if you told people, hey, everyone can have an Etsy store
00:14:42and now all of the knitting you're doing at home,
00:14:43you can sell and you can make 50 grand a year.
00:14:45No one would have believed you.
00:14:47But it's like, now you can do that.
00:14:48- Have you seen these arm farms in India?
00:14:51- No.
00:14:52- Jared, pull up that video I sent you
00:14:54about robots needing a human body inside the race
00:14:57to train AI robots, how to act human in the real world.
00:15:01I traveled to Southern India to document the rise
00:15:04of AI arm farms where young engineers strap GoPros
00:15:07to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes
00:15:09to teach humanoid robots how to do chores.
00:15:12So people are getting paid to do normal shit.
00:15:16Here it is.
00:15:17- And then the robot learns.
00:15:18- Yeah.
00:15:19So this is the same thing that happened
00:15:21with Tesla's full cell drive.
00:15:23That they take the best, I mean, this doesn't strike me
00:15:26as the best folding I've ever seen.
00:15:28But they take the best drivers on Tesla
00:15:32and they use that to train the model on.
00:15:35- It would be a good hack to mess with the robots
00:15:37and fold incorrectly over and over again.
00:15:39- Or just downstream lots of people with creased t-shirts.
00:15:42- Just mess it all up.
00:15:43- This is my way to destroy the t-shirt folding industry.
00:15:46- Every industry, like suddenly in the future,
00:15:47everything you buy is completely broken
00:15:49because everyone trained the robot.
00:15:50- But this is everything.
00:15:51This is for everything, this is for making a cup of tea.
00:15:53What's that famous robotics challenge
00:15:55they have cracking an egg?
00:15:56The delicacy to hold it and the speed to hit it
00:15:59and the precision to whatever.
00:16:01But yeah, this is the future.
00:16:02Hey, look, if you need extra cash,
00:16:05let it watch you fold your pants.
00:16:07- And this is obviously transitory.
00:16:09So this is the training phase of the robotics.
00:16:11The real question is what are people individually gonna do?
00:16:15So like, I know you asked about the moon, we'll get it.
00:16:19- That's fine.
00:16:19'Cause it was also that anthropic report
00:16:22that just got released.
00:16:24Looking at which jobs are going to be popped first by AI
00:16:28and that doesn't even include robotics.
00:16:30- So I don't think that there's like gonna be a successful
00:16:36organized government system to solve this problem,
00:16:38to come in and be like,
00:16:39hey, we're gonna stop these industries.
00:16:43And they're gonna try.
00:16:43I mean, New York just passed a law
00:16:44making medical advice, legal advice,
00:16:46all these other things illegal through AI tools.
00:16:50Which by the way, you gotta ask yourself the question,
00:16:53are they really gonna be able to do that?
00:16:54Because if all the models are open-sourced
00:16:56and they're all available and I can run them locally,
00:16:58why wouldn't I just download a model,
00:17:00put it on my computer and I can ask it legal questions?
00:17:02- Someone's gonna burst through the door and say,
00:17:03David, what have you got on your computer there?
00:17:05You better not be looking at your health reports.
00:17:08All of these legal efforts and government efforts
00:17:10to try and stall and stop technology,
00:17:12historically it's never worked.
00:17:13Like it's just not gonna work.
00:17:15Except when you have a limited resource like uranium,
00:17:17you know, for like nuclear fuel or something like that.
00:17:20But for like something like this, which is self replicating,
00:17:25it's software, it can go anywhere, it can be anywhere,
00:17:27it can fill any space, it's knowledge work.
00:17:30It's gonna be very hard to stop it.
00:17:32So the real question,
00:17:33and this is gonna be transitory for now,
00:17:35but the real question is gonna be which of the humans
00:17:37that are folding t-shirts today
00:17:39are gonna have the spark in their brain that's gonna say,
00:17:42I should buy five robots
00:17:45and run my own t-shirt folding business.
00:17:47That's this challenge that I think humanity faces
00:17:51in this next evolution.
00:17:52We can talk about transhumanism too,
00:17:54which I think is gonna be a forced adaptation,
00:17:56but particularly it's about agency.
00:17:59Taking ownership for how do you engage the future
00:18:03versus waiting for someone to tell you what to do next.
00:18:07- That's gonna be a change of kind,
00:18:09not just a difference of degree, I think.
00:18:12That previously, if you were someone
00:18:14who was mucking the horses in the streets of Manhattan,
00:18:17that job goes away, but there's a new business
00:18:19that comes up and your friend decides to go and work there.
00:18:21The agency of I am enough of a self starter
00:18:24with the sovereignty and the determination
00:18:25to go and do this thing,
00:18:26that does feel like the bar is being raised
00:18:30and some people are gonna fall below that bar.
00:18:32- I don't know if that's true,
00:18:33'cause I do think every human has a degree of innate agency.
00:18:36It's programmed into us as humans.
00:18:38It's just generally been turned off
00:18:40because we've created social systems that have told us
00:18:42here's what you're gonna get next
00:18:44and here's what you're gonna get next
00:18:45and here's what you're gonna get next.
00:18:46Since we're children, we've been programmed
00:18:48by our education, by college, by the work system,
00:18:51by the economy, by the taxes,
00:18:53by the fact that the government's supposed
00:18:55to give me all this shit.
00:18:56Every step of the way, I'm being told,
00:18:59do this, you'll get this, do this, you'll get this.
00:19:01You've never been given the freedom as a human to operate.
00:19:04And I think this is fundamentally true with social systems.
00:19:07We've created government systems,
00:19:08financial systems, everything.
00:19:10We've been very severely limited as people.
00:19:12I think one example that speaks positively to my point
00:19:15is what's happened with people making money on TikTok
00:19:18and Instagram and Shopify and Etsy.
00:19:20If you told someone, pick the timeframe, 15 years ago,
00:19:25that X number of millions of Americans would be making,
00:19:28on average, tens of thousands of dollars a year
00:19:30doing the things they're doing,
00:19:31posting photos of themselves in bikinis
00:19:33and at historic monuments on Instagram
00:19:36with a sports drink or whatever next to them,
00:19:40or people were making money podcasting,
00:19:41like with the scale that they are today,
00:19:44you're the prime example,
00:19:46or people were making money selling home goods
00:19:48and making 300 grand a year
00:19:49selling their custom cat blankets,
00:19:51or pick, pick, pick, pick, pick these things,
00:19:53you would have never believed it,
00:19:54but every person has that in them.
00:19:57Every person has that capacity in them
00:19:59to do something unique, to do something special,
00:20:01to take agency if they're given the right space to do it
00:20:05and they're not told that you can't do it.
00:20:07- Interesting point on that.
00:20:08I wonder how many people are going to have that agency
00:20:10diminish because of their reliance on AI.
00:20:12So I wonder if the very thing that's going to enable them
00:20:15is also going to be something that reduces their capacity
00:20:18to enact it, and I think that that's one of the concerns.
00:20:20Anyway, the moon.
00:20:22- Yeah.
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00:21:38What's happening with the moon?
00:21:39- Well, so I think that there's a big discussion,
00:21:45obviously, I would say largely pushed by Elon,
00:21:49but many others over time,
00:21:51that we should expand humans beyond Earth and get to Mars,
00:21:55and that's a good place to set up a colony.
00:21:57And yada, yada, right?
00:21:59Mars is not very habitable.
00:22:00We need to move a lot of material to Mars.
00:22:03But I think if you look at the math,
00:22:06it is very likely the case
00:22:08that you can probably reduce your energy cost needs
00:22:11to move material to set up a colony on Mars
00:22:13by probably 100x or more
00:22:17by making most of the material you need for Mars on the moon
00:22:20and shipping it from the moon to Mars.
00:22:22And the reason is the moon,
00:22:24unlike the Earth, does not have an atmosphere.
00:22:27One of the biggest uses of the energy
00:22:28when you're moving matter off the Earth
00:22:30is getting away through the atmosphere,
00:22:33which drags or pushes the rocket back down, and gravity.
00:22:36So the moon is 1/6 the gravity of the Earth,
00:22:39so it takes much less energy
00:22:41to escape the gravitational pull of the moon
00:22:43than it does the Earth,
00:22:44and there's no atmosphere pulling you back.
00:22:47So with AI and robotics, it is theoretically possible.
00:22:50And then if you look at moon dust and moon rock,
00:22:53it has all of the raw materials that we may need
00:22:56to build machines, to build housing units,
00:22:58to build habitation units.
00:23:00- What's the constituent policy?
00:23:02- It's got aluminum, it's got silicon, it's got carbon.
00:23:04You can even go up to the poles
00:23:06and you can get hydrogen and oxygen from the ice up there.
00:23:08So you can melt the water at the poles,
00:23:11run electricity through it,
00:23:12break it into hydrogen and oxygen,
00:23:14use the hydrogen and oxygen and the carbon
00:23:16in various chemical reactions.
00:23:17You can theoretically make any substance you need
00:23:19or any metal or any material you need
00:23:21that we can make here on Earth.
00:23:22So we can and should build very large factories on the moon.
00:23:27And the way that this would work
00:23:30is you basically can use solar power, right?
00:23:32Solar, very deployable on the moon,
00:23:33lots of sunlight, no atmosphere, et cetera.
00:23:36Good continuous energy flow. - No clouds.
00:23:38- No clouds.
00:23:39And then you can use kind of battery storage.
00:23:42But the mechanism for moving material off the moon
00:23:45is not propulsion.
00:23:48It's actually a mass driver, so electric railgun.
00:23:51So think about like a train track,
00:23:53you know, like these maglev trains?
00:23:55You know, think about like a maglev train.
00:23:56And, you know, if you run the calculations,
00:24:00it would take about, call it a nine kilometer long track
00:24:04to move one ton of material off of the moon
00:24:09and get it to Mars, okay?
00:24:11- At an angle?
00:24:12- So here's the thing.
00:24:13It doesn't actually even have to be at an angle.
00:24:14It just has to clear any craters or mountains.
00:24:17- It's flat enough and that's escape velocity.
00:24:19- Just escape velocity.
00:24:20So all you have to do is orient it correctly.
00:24:22Put it on the right part of the moon
00:24:23and orient it correctly.
00:24:24- Right, for the moon to basically aim.
00:24:27- That's right.
00:24:28- The moon's passing around.
00:24:28- And it would take, yeah,
00:24:30it would take a couple megawatt hours of power
00:24:33to push a ton of material down this rail track.
00:24:37It would take about four and a half seconds
00:24:39for it to move down the rail track and then hit-
00:24:41- Four and a half seconds to move nine kilometers a ton.
00:24:43- Nine kilometers, yeah.
00:24:45So it ends up escaping at roughly,
00:24:47call it 20,000 kilometers an hour.
00:24:49And that's, now if you're moving one ton of material,
00:24:53you would still need a couple hundred kilograms,
00:24:56call it about 200 kilograms of some sort of propulsion-
00:25:00- To slow it down.
00:25:01- To slow it down as it approaches the moon.
00:25:02But here's the other thing.
00:25:03You could use moon rock as a heat shield
00:25:06for reentry into the Earth's atmosphere
00:25:07or the Martian atmosphere.
00:25:09So you basically take moon rock, put it on the front,
00:25:10'cause you don't care if it burns away and goes away.
00:25:13It can just vaporize.
00:25:14So you need 15 centimeters of moon rock
00:25:16on the front of this parcel.
00:25:18You ship the parcel off this rail track.
00:25:20It goes towards Mars.
00:25:22It can hit a hundred Gs of acceleration
00:25:23while it's accelerating, gets over there.
00:25:25You slow it down a little bit,
00:25:27and then it can actually enter the Martian atmosphere.
00:25:29The moon rock burns away,
00:25:30and you just delivered roughly 700 kilograms of material.
00:25:33And you can run that every hour with solar panels
00:25:37that are roughly 500 kind of meters by 500 meters.
00:25:40So, you know, pretty small kind of solar system,
00:25:43some batteries, some capacitors,
00:25:44and then you gotta build the rail.
00:25:46The rail, you need about nine tons of materials.
00:25:48You gotta get a lot of material put out
00:25:49to get this rail built.
00:25:51But again, the amazing thing about AI
00:25:54is you can kind of think about it being self-replicating
00:25:58in the physical sense as well as the digital sense.
00:26:01You can put robots on the Martian surface
00:26:03with the necessary starting equipment
00:26:05that can make the next robots,
00:26:06that can then make the next robots,
00:26:07that can then go do the mining,
00:26:09that can then go build the factories,
00:26:10that can then go build the rail,
00:26:11that can then go build the propulsion system,
00:26:13and can then do the mining for you.
00:26:14And there's a lot of very valuable material on the moon
00:26:16that we could also ship back to Earth.
00:26:18So I actually think the moon
00:26:20is gonna be a giant, giant, giant economy.
00:26:22And I think it's like one of these economies,
00:26:24like it's almost like the East India or like, you know,
00:26:26like when you get over there,
00:26:27you don't realize how big it's gonna be till this starts.
00:26:29But once it starts, the value of what you can do
00:26:32and the low cost nature of it because of AI now
00:26:35that you can have robots doing this stuff
00:26:36and you can have AI orchestrate a lot of work
00:26:38and you don't need to commit millions of people to it
00:26:41and trillions, you still need some money,
00:26:43but not trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars,
00:26:45I think the moon is probably one of these like more
00:26:48under-discussed in Silicon Valley kind of economic,
00:26:52grand economic opportunities.
00:26:53- Is space the next industrial revolution?
00:26:56- There's a lot that could happen on Earth too.
00:26:59So like, I think there's a lot.
00:27:04There's a couple of other big drivers.
00:27:06I think one is dropping energy costs to zero.
00:27:09And I think fusion will have a big role in that this century.
00:27:14So people don't wanna talk about fusion
00:27:16'cause everyone's all about solar all the time
00:27:18and Elon loves solar and blah, blah, blah.
00:27:19So everyone poo poos fusion.
00:27:21So I'll talk about it in a second,
00:27:26but you get the cost of energy down to 1 cent a kilowatt hour.
00:27:30It absolutely expands every economy.
00:27:32Like everything blows up.
00:27:33Like imagine if you could- - What is it currently?
00:27:35- Well, in the US, we're paying 15 to 40 cents a kilowatt hour
00:27:39for off the grid.
00:27:41But nuclear power, best case scenario is about 5 cents
00:27:45a kilowatt hour.
00:27:46And that's amortized.
00:27:49When you take the cost of everything you gotta build
00:27:50and amortize it out and then your runtime costs,
00:27:525 to 10 cents, but they're gonna sell it at like 15.
00:27:55So like, imagine if you could take power costs
00:27:57down to 1/100th of what it is today.
00:27:59The cost to make anything drops.
00:28:02'Cause now you've got robots.
00:28:04Robots can make stuff quickly and with no marginal cost.
00:28:07'Cause the electricity is what runs the robots.
00:28:10So you could have a swarm of 100 robots
00:28:11build you a mansion.
00:28:13How much would that cost?
00:28:13Like a 10,000 square foot crazy house?
00:28:16The cost of energy is nothing.
00:28:17So maybe having a crazy house could cost close to nothing.
00:28:20- Well, there's a robot printing machine
00:28:22that's just launching in Austin
00:28:23at South by Southwest this week.
00:28:25- Making houses.
00:28:26- Just, yeah, house, 3D printing houses.
00:28:28- Gen one.
00:28:29Now imagine gen six, right?
00:28:30And imagine energy cost is like zero.
00:28:32And imagine all that material production comes down.
00:28:34- How cool of a house do you want?
00:28:35I want to live in Hogwarts.
00:28:36Fine, get the land.
00:28:37- I want like a Lake Como,
00:28:38but I want to make my own Lake Como.
00:28:40You know, like no one else.
00:28:42- Like David?
00:28:44- Yeah, like David.
00:28:45But so energy costs, I think, are gonna,
00:28:50this'll be the era when fusion happens.
00:28:54So fusion's this crazy like principle.
00:28:58It's this fundamental thing that drives the universe.
00:29:05The sun is run on fusion.
00:29:07Fusion is when protons jam together.
00:29:10Okay, so the sun is so hot because it has so much mass.
00:29:15So when all this mass came together,
00:29:16all the matter starts bumping into each other
00:29:18and that creates kinetic energy.
00:29:20That kinetic energy is heat.
00:29:22And it's so dense because of the gravity,
00:29:25because of all the mass,
00:29:25that you've got this extremely hot, extremely dense plasma.
00:29:29Plasma means that it's so energetic
00:29:31that the electrons break away.
00:29:32- It's technically a fourth state of matter, right?
00:29:34- It is, yeah.
00:29:35So there's arguably five states of matter, right?
00:29:37Solid, liquid, gas, plasma,
00:29:39and then Einstein-Bose condensate,
00:29:40which is crazy physics.
00:29:41- You always have to one-up me.
00:29:42- No, but it's like-
00:29:43- You always have to one-up me.
00:29:44- I actually think that one's more cool is why I said it,
00:29:45but yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:29:47But what happens in fusion is when two protons
00:29:52have enough energy and they get close enough,
00:29:54they jam together and they stick together.
00:29:55So one proton, you remember this,
00:29:57like with an electron is hydrogen.
00:29:59Two protons is helium, right?
00:30:01And then it's lithium and then beryllium and so on.
00:30:04So protons jamming together forms a new nucleus,
00:30:07forms a new kind of element.
00:30:09Goes from hydrogen to helium,
00:30:11all the way up the periodic table of elements.
00:30:13So the more energy you have, the denser these things get,
00:30:16it requires more and more energy to get this to happen.
00:30:17Now, when you fuse protons together and form a new element,
00:30:22less than iron, it actually releases energy in the process.
00:30:28Anything greater than iron requires energy
00:30:30to make it stick together.
00:30:31That's like a cool feature of physics,
00:30:33which you could get philosophical on why this is the case.
00:30:36Iron's kind of like an equilibrium state in a weird way.
00:30:39It's actually related to the strength
00:30:41of the strong and weak nuclear forces
00:30:43and how they have a trade-off.
00:30:45There's a threshold at which the repulsiveness is greater
00:30:49because you have so many more protons.
00:30:51They're pushing each other apart.
00:30:52So they're pushing each other apart more
00:30:54than the benefit you get from getting them together.
00:30:56And so you actually have to put energy in
00:30:59to make heavier elements.
00:31:01And all the heavier elements on planet earth came from a sun
00:31:05that exploded billions of years ago.
00:31:07Crazy.
00:31:08So fusion is how the sun makes energy.
00:31:11So every time proton and proton get together,
00:31:13they release some energy,
00:31:15and that's the light that we get from the sun.
00:31:17Constant fusion.
00:31:18So the challenge has always been, can we do fusion on earth?
00:31:21Can we just jam protons together and capture that energy?
00:31:24So the technology to do it is you basically spin
00:31:27these protons around in a plasma
00:31:30at 100 million degrees Celsius.
00:31:32Some people are using these like donut-shaped toroidal.
00:31:34Some people are now using these sort of weird,
00:31:36what are called stellarators.
00:31:37They've got crazy shapes.
00:31:39And much of the design of these systems
00:31:41on how do you get these protons to move fast enough?
00:31:43And the problem is when the protons get close together,
00:31:47they push each other apart.
00:31:48So you got to use a magnetic field
00:31:51to squeeze these protons together
00:31:52so that they get closer and closer
00:31:55and then get them diffuse.
00:31:56The problem is as they get closer,
00:31:58the protons make their own magnetic field
00:32:01that pushes back and fucks up the magnetic field
00:32:03that you're trying to use to squeeze them together.
00:32:05And so it's this dynamical equilibrium problem.
00:32:07They just keep breaking and breaking and breaking,
00:32:09and you cannot get a stable plasma at that density.
00:32:13AI seems to be solving that problem
00:32:15because they're now using AI to train the control
00:32:18of the magnetic fields in a way that's working.
00:32:21And they're now able to hold these magnetic fields
00:32:24for 30 minutes at a time out of China now.
00:32:26Started out, it went from like 17 seconds to a few seconds,
00:32:30few longer to a few minutes to 30 minutes
00:32:33in literally like the last two and a half, three years.
00:32:35Like that's how quickly they're ramping up
00:32:37in the ability to make this happen.
00:32:39There's about 70 startups doing this.
00:32:41Just to give you a sense of what this enables.
00:32:43Basically, you could think about taking water,
00:32:46putting it into this machine,
00:32:47getting the protons to spin around,
00:32:49and then extracting energy
00:32:51from those protons jamming together.
00:32:53That energy turns into electricity.
00:32:55There's no nuclear explosion.
00:32:57There's no risk of the whole thing melting down.
00:32:59There's no nuclear material.
00:33:00Nothing's radioactive.
00:33:01It's a very clean way of generating energy.
00:33:03So it's been this kind of Holy grail
00:33:05since the 1950s when people first thought about it.
00:33:08- It needs a different name.
00:33:09- Yeah. What would you call it?
00:33:11- It can't have the word nuclear in it.
00:33:12- Yeah.
00:33:13- It can't.
00:33:14- Yeah. Maybe, some people have said, just call it fusion.
00:33:17Some people have said, call it-
00:33:18- It's too close to fission.
00:33:19- Yeah.
00:33:20- People are going to pattern match it already.
00:33:21And they're going to think, I've heard, even me.
00:33:24- Let's come up with a name. What do you think?
00:33:27- I think something to do with the electromagnetic,
00:33:32electromagnetic energy element of that,
00:33:34that doesn't feel, that feels kind of green.
00:33:36- Yeah.
00:33:37- That feels quite safe.
00:33:38- Yeah.
00:33:39- I don't expect that to explode.
00:33:40- Yeah. Strong power, weak power.
00:33:42- Yeah.
00:33:43- Protonics, something.
00:33:45We'll come up with something.
00:33:46- Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:33:47But anyway, I think that if you have nuclear in it,
00:33:48I think it's just such a contentious topic.
00:33:50- Right. Right.
00:33:51Cause it's, everyone thinks-
00:33:52- The worst branding in history.
00:33:53- Yeah. Like nuclear energy is fission,
00:33:55where you're taking heavy, heavy, heavy elements.
00:33:57Like uranium.
00:33:58- Yeah.
00:33:59- Breaking them apart. They're radioactive.
00:34:01- It's the opposite.
00:34:02- And you're getting energy out because-
00:34:02- You're doing the opposite.
00:34:03- Yeah. You're doing the opposite.
00:34:04You're taking the heavier stuff and grabbing the energy
00:34:05when the heavier stuff becomes lighter.
00:34:06- Yeah.
00:34:07- Releasing that energy that it took to make it.
00:34:09So this is different.
00:34:10And this, you can, I did the math on this.
00:34:12Basically you could use a swimming pool sized amount
00:34:15of ocean water to make all the electricity needed
00:34:19for an entire year for the planet earth.
00:34:21That's what this can do.
00:34:24That's why it's so important that we get it done.
00:34:27Now, when you do this and it works,
00:34:30and we're very close to having this work
00:34:32in industrial scale.
00:34:34Next, everyone's always joked,
00:34:35oh, fusion's always like a decade away.
00:34:36It's, you know, maybe it's a decade away, maybe not,
00:34:39but it's going to happen.
00:34:40Like we're progressing up this production curve.
00:34:43It's going to happen.
00:34:43- Are those 30 minute long runs energy positive, net positive?
00:34:48- They're still requiring net energy in
00:34:50because of the setup and so on.
00:34:52But the next phase will be to capture basically
00:34:56the current systems aren't just protons.
00:34:59They put protons with neutrons
00:35:00and the neutrons are what get energized into the wall
00:35:03to heat up the wall.
00:35:04And that's where they heat up water to turn a steam turbine.
00:35:07You know, like other people have other ideas that,
00:35:09hey, maybe we shouldn't be using a steam turbine.
00:35:11- Isn't it mad that of all of the ways
00:35:13it's still rotate a thing attached to a dynamo.
00:35:17It doesn't matter what the fanciness that occurs before it.
00:35:20It's just dynamo and a fan.
00:35:23- That's another thing that should likely change this century
00:35:25is the move away from that system
00:35:30where we can do direct energy capture
00:35:32and conversion into electricity.
00:35:34'Cause you're trying to, you're basically,
00:35:35the reason you do that is you're trying to get electrons
00:35:37to move through a wire.
00:35:39So you wrap a wire with magnets around a coil
00:35:41and you get the magnet thing to spin.
00:35:43The faster it spins,
00:35:44the more it moves the electrons through the wire.
00:35:46So that's the basis of that system.
00:35:48But there's other things that people have theorized.
00:35:50So with this energy system,
00:35:51I think you're gonna like drop the cost of energy,
00:35:52unleash productivity, unleash economic opportunities.
00:35:55That's another kind of technology that I would say
00:35:58is like very kind of future positive
00:36:01on like what's around the corner.
00:36:02- Before we continue, most people in their thirties
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00:36:13Strength gains take a little longer.
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00:36:18And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline.
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00:37:13That's timeline.com/modernwisdom.
00:37:17And modern wisdom at checkout.
00:37:18Just rounding out space, two things.
00:37:21Who owns the moon and who owns the resources on the moon?
00:37:23And secondly, if we're gonna start mining asteroids
00:37:26and mining the moon, what does that mean
00:37:28for the Earth's economy?
00:37:29'Cause I have to imagine that that's a pretty big dice roll
00:37:33or at the very least you're adding dice to the game
00:37:34that you were already playing with
00:37:36and that's gonna make things interesting.
00:37:38- You know, economic growth is one of these things
00:37:40that's very hard to contemplate intuitively,
00:37:42to fully grok intuitively because like,
00:37:45if you add chips to a game, like we're playing poker.
00:37:49There's eight of us playing poker
00:37:50and we suddenly increase our chip stack by like 10X.
00:37:55We're still playing poker.
00:37:57But you know, maybe we could tip more, right?
00:38:00Like maybe the amount of money we're now making
00:38:03gives us the ability to go buy $100 bottle of wine
00:38:06instead of $2 Coors Lights.
00:38:08You know, like that's what ends up happening
00:38:10is as more chips come on the table.
00:38:12Now, the poker analogy is a very bad one
00:38:14'cause that's a zero sum game.
00:38:16Economic growth should come from productivity growth,
00:38:21not from money printing.
00:38:22Okay, much of our economic growth
00:38:24over the last couple of decades, one could argue,
00:38:27has come from money printing.
00:38:28We've just put more chips on the table.
00:38:29The house has made more chips, put them on the table.
00:38:32But economic growth means that I went outside
00:38:35and I made something.
00:38:36I made a new, I mined gold.
00:38:38Let's use gold mining as an example.
00:38:40I mined gold out of the ground.
00:38:41That's worth something 'cause now people can use it,
00:38:43they can trade it, they can sell it.
00:38:45So I'm being productive with my time.
00:38:47So the more productivity there is in the system,
00:38:49the more chips get made, the more the economy grows,
00:38:52the more everyone gets the ability to buy
00:38:54and sell more stuff and everyone's labor,
00:38:55everyone's time is worth more.
00:38:58And so everything grows.
00:38:59That's the benefit of true productivity.
00:39:01So productivity is like this best measure, I would say,
00:39:04of technology's advance on,
00:39:06how technology advances social systems.
00:39:09The more productive we are,
00:39:10the more everyone's gonna benefit.
00:39:11- It feels like a unique kind of productivity
00:39:14to take raw materials that were maybe rare
00:39:16or at least didn't exist within what was a closed system.
00:39:19The earth was a closed system.
00:39:20We weren't getting anything from off it
00:39:22unless we were hit by an asteroid.
00:39:23And then bringing it back in.
00:39:25What happens to the iron price
00:39:29when we are bringing iron back
00:39:32from outside of what was predicted as a part of that?
00:39:34- Yeah, so I would say think more
00:39:37about availability of iron versus the price.
00:39:39Like what it does is it makes iron more available,
00:39:42more abundant to everyone.
00:39:43And same with energy, right?
00:39:44When you increase energy through fusion,
00:39:46you make energy more abundant.
00:39:47The price comes down by 10x,
00:39:49but now everyone can use much, much more energy.
00:39:52Meaning- - Because the price
00:39:53is just indicative of the supply and the availability.
00:39:55- And everyone can, and now everyone gets more access.
00:39:58This is why technology is- - I've always wanted more iron.
00:40:00I've said, I don't have enough.
00:40:02- You're like an iron horde.
00:40:04It's funny, when we walked in the studio,
00:40:05I was wondering why you had that blanket
00:40:07over that big pile of iron in the-
00:40:08- That's correct.
00:40:09Don't look at that. - In the parking lot.
00:40:11- Don't look at that.
00:40:11- Yeah, you're like your iron horde.
00:40:13You're like a Minecraft.
00:40:15- I'm a Schmeagol, but for iron, yeah.
00:40:17- But yeah, I mean, abundance is the name of the game, right?
00:40:22Like if we really are moving a productivity curve,
00:40:24energy costs are coming down.
00:40:26We're able to make more stuff with AI.
00:40:28It's not that some people are gonna get richer faster.
00:40:31That may happen, but I don't think that's the problem.
00:40:34I think what really functionally happens
00:40:36is everyone has more abundance.
00:40:38You can now, instead of working 60 hours a week
00:40:41or 100 hours a week when we all work,
00:40:43not we all, but when Americans worked on farms, right?
00:40:47At the turn of the century,
00:40:48it was like 80% of people worked on a farm,
00:40:50and now it's less than 1%.
00:40:53So we don't have to spend the 100-hour work week
00:40:55working on the farm.
00:40:56In fact, the guy working on the farm
00:40:57is in a John Deere automated tractor with air conditioning.
00:41:00He's on TikTok.
00:41:01Well, the thing drives itself.
00:41:03Trust me, I work in the industry.
00:41:04It's awesome.
00:41:05They still work their asses off not to diminish it,
00:41:07but it's a very different type of farming.
00:41:09And yes, it is still backbreaking work,
00:41:11but there's a lot of automation.
00:41:12And so that created an abundance of food,
00:41:14an abundance of calories, an abundance of availability.
00:41:17And we dropped the number of people globally
00:41:19that live on less than 1,200 calories a day for a year,
00:41:22which is how we define malnourished,
00:41:24from billions of people down to 600 million.
00:41:28It's come back up recently
00:41:29because of various supply chain issues post-COVID, but-
00:41:34- Well, the number one type of malnutrition worldwide
00:41:37is now obesity, not starvation.
00:41:39- That is a problem.
00:41:40Yeah, it's abundant.
00:41:41It's excess.
00:41:42- There's twice as many people
00:41:43that are malnourished through their obesity
00:41:45than through their starvation.
00:41:47Final thing, who owns the moon?
00:41:49- The moon, yeah.
00:41:50So I don't know.
00:41:51I think that's gonna be-
00:41:51- Astropolitics is fascinating.
00:41:52Do you know anyone that does astropolitics?
00:41:54I wanna bring someone on the show.
00:41:55- Yeah, that's a good idea.
00:41:55- I wanna talk about it.
00:41:56I think it's so cool.
00:41:58Do you own, 'cause geostationary above the net of your country
00:42:04is kind of yours?
00:42:05- Depends on what the treaties say.
00:42:07- Kind of?
00:42:07- 'Cause you could, as a country or as an individual,
00:42:10I could say anything I want.
00:42:11If I moved to the moon and put a flag down and said,
00:42:13"F you guys, I've got lasers that I'm gonna protect.
00:42:15This is my part of the moon."
00:42:16Who's gonna stop me?
00:42:17I don't care about being on earth anymore.
00:42:19You can't arrest me on earth anymore.
00:42:20You can't take my money out of the bank anymore.
00:42:22That's a frontier.
00:42:24- Have you ever read "Seventeves" by Neil Stevenson?
00:42:26- Love that book.
00:42:27- Yeah, fuck.
00:42:28One of my most reread fiction books.
00:42:30And in that, they go up to the space station, Izzy,
00:42:34and they need to come up with an entire new form of law.
00:42:38What happens if somebody commits a crime in space?
00:42:40And I never thought about the fact that, well,
00:42:42especially if you've got people
00:42:43from multiple different countries,
00:42:45well, the way that we deal with it is X.
00:42:48The way that we deal with it is Y.
00:42:50And this is an entire new environment to work in.
00:42:53So it needs to be built from the ground floor up
00:42:54and people got different priors.
00:42:55- Right, right, right, totally.
00:42:57Did you see that movie "Ad Astra"?
00:42:59There's that scene where he's like,
00:43:00and there's the pirates on the moon.
00:43:02They're shooting at him and he has to get away.
00:43:05That may be what happens in the world.
00:43:06- Moon pirates. - Moon pirates.
00:43:08There's a battleground on the moon
00:43:10for who has territorial rights and so on.
00:43:13But look, there's so much resource availability.
00:43:16That's the thing about abundance.
00:43:17It's like, maybe wars go away.
00:43:20This is one of the things-
00:43:20- Because scarcity drives wars.
00:43:24- Do I really need to be fighting with Iran
00:43:25if I don't care as much about oil
00:43:29and energy availability?
00:43:30- Look at what happened during 2020, 2021
00:43:33when crypto was on a bull run.
00:43:35Everyone was friends.
00:43:37Look at what happens when the price drops.
00:43:39Everyone fucking hates each other.
00:43:40- Same with every resource, right?
00:43:43And so as resources become more abundant, lower cost,
00:43:46everyone's getting what they want.
00:43:47We're all vacationing in Hawaii, working 10 hours a week.
00:43:51That's where things go.
00:43:52This is why I mentioned the 100 hours.
00:43:53You go 100 to 60 to 40 to 30.
00:43:55In France, they have a law.
00:43:56It's like 30.
00:43:57Now a lot of the Democrats in the US are like,
00:43:58let's all work 30 hours a week and let's drop Fridays
00:44:01and all this sort of stuff.
00:44:02- Didn't a country try a four-day work week?
00:44:04- I think France, doesn't it?
00:44:05- Yeah, I think it might've been France
00:44:06that tried the four-day work week.
00:44:07- Yeah. - Yeah.
00:44:08- And that's one of the measures of prosperity
00:44:13is how much do you have to work
00:44:15to be able to live a good life.
00:44:17And so if you can take more time with your family
00:44:19and more time to explore your personal interests
00:44:21and you don't have to do labor,
00:44:22whether it's on a computer or in a field,
00:44:25that's a good way to think about, are we all prospering?
00:44:28Are we being given freedom to do more things
00:44:30rather than being caged into doing the things
00:44:32we don't want to do?
00:44:33- Speaking of prospering,
00:44:34how far off are we from age reversal, do you think?
00:44:37- That's one I'm most excited about.
00:44:39So have you looked at Yamanaka factors?
00:44:42Have you talked about this on your show before?
00:44:44- David Sinclair has been on,
00:44:45and I know that he's sort of tangentially associated with it,
00:44:48but assume, no, do the 30,000 foot view
00:44:50of the Yamanaka factors.
00:44:52- So every cell in our body has the same DNA, okay?
00:44:57We know that, and the DNA is in every cell
00:45:00because of a process called mitosis.
00:45:02Every time we make a new cell,
00:45:03from the time we're in the womb to today,
00:45:05we're making new cells,
00:45:07our entire DNA gets copied over into every cell.
00:45:10But what makes my eye look and act differently than my skin?
00:45:14If it's got the same DNA, how's it different?
00:45:16How's it different than my brain or my tongue or my feet?
00:45:19They're all, those are different cells.
00:45:21There's different cells and different organs in the body.
00:45:24Those cells are different because the genes
00:45:27in the DNA are on or off.
00:45:29So there's a bunch of switches,
00:45:30and the switches are either on or off,
00:45:32and that creates cellular differentiation.
00:45:35It's what makes one cell different from another cell,
00:45:37the eye cell different from the heart cell,
00:45:39different from the skin cell or the lung cell.
00:45:42And the switches that are on or off
00:45:44are these little molecular switches.
00:45:45They're molecules that sit on top of the DNA,
00:45:48and they keep that gene from working.
00:45:51It blocks it off, and then the other gene is open,
00:45:55and when it's open,
00:45:56that means that your cell is making RNA copies of that gene
00:46:00and turning it into a protein.
00:46:01- Zeros and ones.
00:46:02- Zeros and ones, and each gene makes a unique protein.
00:46:06The proteins that then come out do a bunch of stuff.
00:46:09They're machines, they're molecular machines,
00:46:12and they're constantly doing all this stuff in your cell,
00:46:14and that's what makes every cell different,
00:46:16is what genes are on and what genes are off.
00:46:19And the complexity of this is astounding.
00:46:23If you were to think about a cell
00:46:25being the size of Manhattan,
00:46:27so imagine a cell is a city the size of Manhattan
00:46:30with 500-story-tall buildings.
00:46:33That's how big it would be.
00:46:34And every person is a protein.
00:46:36There's 10 billion people living
00:46:38in this 500-story-tall building, island of Manhattan,
00:46:41going in between the buildings, up and down all day long,
00:46:44building stuff together, never sleeping, always working,
00:46:46running into each other, having coffee,
00:46:47making stuff together, breaking stuff together,
00:46:50working 10 billion of us, those are the proteins
00:46:53in the cell. - In one cell.
00:46:53- In one cell, running around doing stuff.
00:46:55For 80 years, that's one second in one cell.
00:46:59That's how complex this is.
00:47:01So the proteins that are on or off matter a lot,
00:47:04and then they make stuff, so that's why the eye cell
00:47:06does totally different stuff
00:47:07than the brain cell or the heart cell.
00:47:09As we get older, this is the current science on this,
00:47:13it looks like what happens is we have DNA breaks.
00:47:17DNA gets damaged from radiation and sunlight
00:47:19and bad eating and alcohol and all the other shit.
00:47:22As those DNA breaks happen,
00:47:24your cell actually fixes the DNA.
00:47:26It's very good at fixing it.
00:47:27Goes in, there's a bunch of proteins,
00:47:29they're the worker proteins that are repaired proteins,
00:47:31they go in, they fix the DNA.
00:47:32Every time the DNA gets fixed,
00:47:34there's a chance that those ones and zeros,
00:47:37those ons and offs, get moved around a little bit.
00:47:39And as they get moved around, over time,
00:47:42they get moved to the wrong place.
00:47:45So what ends up happening over time
00:47:47is that the wrong genes get turned on
00:47:50and the right genes can get turned off in a cell.
00:47:53And then that cell stops working right.
00:47:56The eye cell stops doing what it's supposed to be doing.
00:47:58The heart cell stops getting the right electrical cascade
00:48:01to flow through the other cells.
00:48:03All of the cells, the skin cell becomes a little wrinkled.
00:48:05And eventually, if enough of those cells
00:48:07have those epigenetic, is what it's called,
00:48:10epigenetic errors, you start getting wrinkles,
00:48:12your heart stops beating as well, you go blind,
00:48:14all these sorts of things happen with aging.
00:48:16It looks like the root of all disease may be aging.
00:48:19And aging is a disease.
00:48:21So it is a disease rooted in the fact
00:48:23that the epigenetic factors, these little molecules,
00:48:26move around in the wrong place.
00:48:28That's what we discovered is basically aging.
00:48:31In 2006, a guy named Shinya Yamanaka found
00:48:34that he could take four proteins and put them on a cell.
00:48:38They would go into the cell
00:48:39and they would move all of those epigenetic markers,
00:48:42those ones and zeros, to make that cell into a stem cell,
00:48:46which can then be turned into any other cell in the body.
00:48:48So that was the magic thing he won the Nobel Prize for.
00:48:51In 2016, another scientist published a series of papers
00:48:54showing that instead of putting a lot of those four proteins
00:48:57on the cell, you could put a small amount.
00:48:59And if you put a small amount,
00:49:01instead of resetting all those molecular markers
00:49:04and making that cell back into a stem cell,
00:49:06what it actually does, it just moves those markers
00:49:08back to where they're supposed to be
00:49:10to make it a young cell.
00:49:12And suddenly that retinal cell
00:49:13becomes like a young retinal cell.
00:49:15The skin cell becomes a young skin cell.
00:49:17The heart cell becomes a young heart cell.
00:49:19All of these cells get reset.
00:49:21And they did this in mice
00:49:22and they made the mice age to like 250 plus years old.
00:49:26They put it in monkeys, the wrinkles went away.
00:49:28And they've done it in specifically applying it
00:49:31to retinal cells in the eye and reverse blindness.
00:49:33- This is Sinclair's stuff, right?
00:49:35- Sinclair has one of these companies
00:49:36that's in clinical trials now.
00:49:38And there's dozens of others.
00:49:39Altos Labs is like one of the most funded startups
00:49:41in history that no one talks about.
00:49:43They've raised close to probably $10 billion at this point
00:49:47to pursue these technologies.
00:49:49But basically what this means is we are now discovering
00:49:51not just the four proteins,
00:49:53but a whole bunch of other little molecules
00:49:54that we can put into a cocktail.
00:49:56Either we're gonna drink it, take it as a shot,
00:49:59or take it as a pill.
00:50:01It will get into our cells
00:50:03and it will reset the epigenetic of that cell
00:50:06to make it young again.
00:50:07They're starting with targeting diseases,
00:50:09like a particular, like blindness or glaucoma in the eye,
00:50:12or rheumatoid arthritis or some other heart issue.
00:50:15And they're applying these factors to the cells
00:50:18in that tissue only.
00:50:19- Locally. - Locally.
00:50:20But over time what'll end up happening
00:50:22is this becomes a systemic treatment.
00:50:24And they're already doing it in animal models.
00:50:26And then you can either do it continuously
00:50:29or what I think will end up happening
00:50:30is we'll probably have a system whereby
00:50:33these factors will be continuous.
00:50:34When I say the word factor, I mean protein.
00:50:36These proteins can be continuously made and released
00:50:39inside our body as they're needed.
00:50:42So we maintain our youth and we will live theoretically
00:50:46for as long as we want.
00:50:48That's where this is headed.
00:50:50And the technology shows now
00:50:51that we can do this in animals.
00:50:52We can redose them, redose them, and keep them young.
00:50:55- Has it been done systemically yet?
00:50:57- Yeah. - You mentioned-
00:50:58- Yeah, this is the mouse model
00:51:00where they made these mice the equivalent
00:51:02of having someone live 200 plus years old.
00:51:04And this is so early.
00:51:06They haven't even optimized the molecule.
00:51:07They haven't optimized how you deliver the molecule.
00:51:09They haven't optimized the dosing.
00:51:11They haven't optimized the method of the dose.
00:51:13Like there's all these techniques
00:51:14that are gonna be developed on top of this.
00:51:17For every one year, we can extend average human lifespan.
00:51:20We're adding tens of trillions of dollars to GDP, right?
00:51:22So this is also another big economic driver,
00:51:24but it's not just how long people live.
00:51:26It's how healthy they are and how energetic they are
00:51:28and how happy they can be.
00:51:30And they can now go out and not feel all the pain
00:51:32and have the disease.
00:51:33Theoretically, this can lead to a reversal
00:51:36in rates of cancer proliferation or reversal in diabetes
00:51:40or reversal in many of these other diseases
00:51:42that are fundamentally rooted
00:51:43in this kind of failure of your epigenome,
00:51:46the markers that turn your genes on and off.
00:51:49So this is a technology category
00:51:52that I think is one of these other things
00:51:55that you can kind of think about the compounding effect.
00:51:57Free energy, right?
00:51:58Like AI, automation, and infinite labor for people.
00:52:04To do all the things they want to do
00:52:06and potentially living forever.
00:52:07I mean, you start to think
00:52:08about how these all kind of compound.
00:52:09That's why I'm excited about the future.
00:52:11Like these very quickly become these sort of
00:52:14compounding effects that drive us into a happier tomorrow.
00:52:17And then again, it becomes a question of abundance.
00:52:19How do you want to spend your time?
00:52:20You know, again, a hundred years ago,
00:52:21I don't think people would have had the job option
00:52:23of being a yoga instructor or being a podcaster
00:52:26or being a wedding photographer, you know, go down the list.
00:52:29Like there's so many things that people have found joy
00:52:31in doing with their time
00:52:33and they can be productive doing it.
00:52:34I think more of that starts to happen tomorrow.
00:52:38And it's less of the like,
00:52:39you got to go work the corporate shitty job
00:52:41on a trading floor in a corporate office at a cubicle
00:52:44or, you know, in a factory or all the things
00:52:47that maybe we will look back one day and say,
00:52:50"Hey, that was kind of limiting human potential."
00:52:52Like maybe humans could do a lot more and maybe they should.
00:52:56And these shifts to more abundance
00:52:58give us that opportunity to do that.
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00:54:11How far do you think we're off from getting to the stage
00:54:14where we can do age reversal?
00:54:15One decade, five decades?
00:54:19- Way less than that.
00:54:20Way less than that.
00:54:21We are in clinical trials now on several of these cocktails.
00:54:27And there's always a risk in going from animals to humans,
00:54:31but we've done it with human cells in vitro,
00:54:35in a petri dish.
00:54:36And we see the effect that we are expecting to see.
00:54:39So we have a lot of reasons to believe
00:54:41that over the next 10 to 20 years,
00:54:46more of this starts to proliferate.
00:54:49- You've heard Peter Diamandis' idea
00:54:51of longevity escape velocity, right?
00:54:54That you need to stick about every year that you live
00:54:56means that you're going to live a little bit longer,
00:54:58but that when you cross a particular threshold,
00:55:01you just need to stick about until this happens essentially,
00:55:04or whatever the equivalent is,
00:55:05whatever the technology is.
00:55:07It allows you to extend lifespan indefinitely.
00:55:08- I think it's fair.
00:55:09- You just hold on.
00:55:11- I think it's fair.
00:55:11- It's probably the best long-termist view
00:55:16for looking after your health.
00:55:18That now is not the time to fuck it.
00:55:20- Right, totally.
00:55:21- Because in the past,
00:55:23there wasn't really any reason to stick about.
00:55:25Yeah, you're gonna live 80 years.
00:55:26- And that's it.
00:55:27- Seven years or 60 years,
00:55:28but you're playing around with fives and tens,
00:55:30whereas if the difference is between 80 and a hundred,
00:55:33or 80 and 120. - Or 200, yeah.
00:55:36You're like, "Hey, keep it together."
00:55:38And by the way, the number one thing you can do
00:55:40to fix your epigenome,
00:55:41which you can do without taking these drugs,
00:55:43is exercise.
00:55:44- Fasting.
00:55:45- Well, fasting helps.
00:55:46Fasting does have an effect, but exercise.
00:55:49Exercise releases molecules that in many cells in your body
00:55:52will go in and start to address the epigenome
00:55:55and make you more youthful.
00:55:56And then there's other things that you can start to take.
00:55:58Some of this peptide stuff that people are crazy about
00:56:00has shown that it has an effect.
00:56:01I don't want to be prescriptive on these things,
00:56:06but there's a lot of ways
00:56:07that you can start to kind of edge your way
00:56:11before all the big clinical stuff is done
00:56:12and the big products come out to market.
00:56:15- What do you think happens to careers
00:56:18and retirement and family structures
00:56:20in a world where people live over 120 years?
00:56:25- It's hard to say.
00:56:26I mean, I think it's very sad that I love my kids.
00:56:31I was with my daughters and my wife.
00:56:36We were doing a, "What are the three wishes?"
00:56:38If you had a genie come out of a lamp
00:56:41and you had three wishes, what was your three wishes?
00:56:44The first thing my daughter said is,
00:56:45"I wish everyone in our family could live forever."
00:56:48That was her first wish.
00:56:49And I was like, "Such a sweet wish."
00:56:52But I really do think that there is this incredible
00:56:55human element to this technology.
00:56:59It's not just technology for technology.
00:57:01- Disembodied, sterile.
00:57:02- Yeah, it's not a pharmaceutical drug.
00:57:05It's an opportunity to give everyone more time
00:57:09to do the things they want to do.
00:57:10I really think this idea that humans
00:57:13don't reach their potential is a very fundamental truth
00:57:16we're going to come to at some point
00:57:18that for a long time, maybe because we had to,
00:57:21we created organized social systems
00:57:24to achieve things as a group,
00:57:26but limited ourselves individually.
00:57:28And I think that that's what maybe changes in the future
00:57:31is that these technologies and this level of abundance
00:57:34gives each of us the ability to achieve outcomes
00:57:38and have things that maybe we didn't realize we could have
00:57:43because we had to make all these trade-offs
00:57:47to make things work in a social system, in a society.
00:57:50- Yeah, I wonder just how much of a challenge
00:57:53it's going to be for people to face more spare time.
00:57:58I know that you guys did really great coverage
00:58:00about a year and a half ago of the two UBI experiments
00:58:03that went on.
00:58:04Is that not an indication
00:58:08that maybe there's going to be a crisis of meaning
00:58:10when we start to give people,
00:58:11'cause those weren't good, right?
00:58:13- No, I mean, UBI inevitably,
00:58:15like all welfare systems will fail.
00:58:17- Why?
00:58:18- Two things, one is it creates a system
00:58:21whereby people will always want more.
00:58:22So it becomes this kind of self-fulfilling thing.
00:58:25It makes people feel like there's a disincentive
00:58:28to go have agency, right?
00:58:30It creates enough of a,
00:58:32if it's giving you enough- - Passivity.
00:58:34- Yeah, passivity to explore yourself and your potential
00:58:38and engage the world to find your potential.
00:58:40You're not given that incentive.
00:58:43But the more fundamental issue is simply inflation.
00:58:46UBI, whether it comes about through giving people money
00:58:51as taxes from other people,
00:58:54or whether it comes about from money printing,
00:58:55inevitably leads to an increase in money supply,
00:58:58which makes everything more expensive.
00:59:00So there's a class of things
00:59:01that everyone that's getting the UBI check will buy,
00:59:03and those things will all get more expensive, right?
00:59:06It's a terrible feature of the economy,
00:59:08of like economic principles,
00:59:10like those things will get more expensive.
00:59:11So I think that that's why those things simply don't work.
00:59:16But look, I'm optimistic.
00:59:17I think that, again, I keep going back to this idea
00:59:22that there's this digital universe that we've created
00:59:27where people can kind of build, like Twitch streamers,
00:59:30another good example.
00:59:31People going on Patreon, people going on,
00:59:33I mean, pick your platform,
00:59:35and they're finding ways to explore their interests,
00:59:38and they can live on it.
00:59:39Like, they can make money doing it,
00:59:40because other people value what they're doing.
00:59:42Massage therapists, yoga instructors
00:59:44and Pilates instructors, dog walkers,
00:59:46I value those people.
00:59:47They're valuable, and people like doing that work.
00:59:50So I think that there's more to come
00:59:53in terms of what's next,
00:59:55that we always want to look backwards,
00:59:58and we don't want to think about,
00:59:59hey, the chart is, the path is uncharted,
01:00:02and we should just get on the ocean,
01:00:06and we'll figure out what's over there.
01:00:07- What about transhumanism?
01:00:09- Okay, let's talk about it.
01:00:11So superintelligence, I think,
01:00:12is a manifestation of AI at scale,
01:00:14meaning that there's intelligence,
01:00:17features of intelligence that in isolation
01:00:20or in aggregation exceed human capacity.
01:00:22- It's just not general yet.
01:00:25- I don't know if there's a,
01:00:26I don't know if I subscribe to any of the definitions,
01:00:30but what do humans do in a world
01:00:35where the AI anticipates everything you're gonna do next,
01:00:39or knows everything you're gonna think,
01:00:41or has a sense of how to do things better than you do?
01:00:46I think we're gonna be forced to adapt.
01:00:54So this idea of humans living in their natural state
01:00:59should be back to their natural state.
01:01:01It's such a weird thought because we live in buildings.
01:01:04We don't live under a tree.
01:01:06Even when you pick berries off a tree
01:01:08and eat the berries from the tree, you're breaking nature.
01:01:11There's an aspect of a continuum of like,
01:01:13what is nature, what is the human, and what are we doing?
01:01:15So I don't love the term transhumanism,
01:01:17but I do like this idea
01:01:18that this superintelligence capacity
01:01:22needs to be harnessed by humans.
01:01:23I think there's probably two things that happen.
01:01:27And the second one I'm gonna say is very controversial.
01:01:29The first one I'll say is pretty well described,
01:01:31which is this kind of human-machine interface.
01:01:34Elon's got Neuralink where they put the wires in the brain,
01:01:37but the wires, I saw a good presentation from Max Hodak
01:01:41at his company, Science Company Corporation or whatever.
01:01:44You should have him on, he's great.
01:01:46But he started Neuralink, he was the old CEO at Neuralink.
01:01:49And he's got the system
01:01:50where they're putting like a digital device in your retina.
01:01:53- They'll put a screen in your eye.
01:01:54- Yeah, and it works.
01:01:55And so the screen- - How's it powered?
01:01:57- It's solar.
01:01:59He's got this whole power system in it, it's incredible.
01:02:02- So when your eye is open-
01:02:03- It's powered up, it powers up.
01:02:05And then it releases an electrical signal
01:02:08that triggers the neurons on the inside of your retinal cells
01:02:13that then trigger your brain and it passes the signal
01:02:15and you can suddenly see.
01:02:17And it's a very thin, like paper-thin kind of device
01:02:22that goes under your retina in your eyeball.
01:02:23It's an outpatient procedure to put it in.
01:02:25He's in clinical trials on this, it's incredible.
01:02:27So it's restoring blindness.
01:02:29But you can kind of think about these interfaces
01:02:32that aren't about sticking a wire into the brain,
01:02:35which I don't think is gonna be where things end up.
01:02:37But I think it's likely gonna end up a little bit more like,
01:02:40people are gonna view this as being extremely dystopian.
01:02:43So I'll give you the two versions of it.
01:02:46Some people would say Neo and the Matrix,
01:02:48where you kind of connect the digital thing.
01:02:51But the other one is Avatar,
01:02:54where they have that ponytail that they connect to.
01:02:57But there'll probably be some interface
01:03:00where the chip-to-brain interface is just a soft neurons.
01:03:04Like it's some sort of system that can connect
01:03:06with the brain without going into the brain.
01:03:08You don't need to go into the neural tissue.
01:03:10Now I'm not super optimistic,
01:03:14and I don't get excited about this.
01:03:15Let me be clear.
01:03:15I'm not like, oh my God, we all need to be like the Matrix.
01:03:18So don't think about me as some dystopian, crazy technocrat.
01:03:21But I think my point is someone will do it,
01:03:25and then you'll be able to think,
01:03:26I wanna fly a helicopter like Neo did in the Matrix,
01:03:28and you'll be able to fly a fucking helicopter.
01:03:30And you'll wanna access information quickly
01:03:34using the super intelligence that exists in the silicon.
01:03:38So you wanna solve a physics problem
01:03:40because you're trying to build something on the moon,
01:03:43and you sort of like access that information.
01:03:45You look up and you're like,
01:03:46okay, you have the answer you need.
01:03:47You're not looking at a screen to get the answer.
01:03:49And so you're able to kind of tap into,
01:03:52and look, do we all wanna be connected all the time?
01:03:54I don't know.
01:03:55I don't know if that destroys humanity
01:03:57or like is gonna be an adaptation of humanity
01:04:00in an era when there's now a species
01:04:02that might be more intelligent than humanity in aggregate.
01:04:06I don't know.
01:04:07And so I'm not trying to be too
01:04:09like deterministic about this stuff.
01:04:11But I think that that human-machine interface outcome
01:04:15is very likely gonna happen,
01:04:16and whether or not people want it or embrace it,
01:04:19you'll have to have the benefits.
01:04:20You'll have to go through an exercise
01:04:22where it's lightweight, easy to put on.
01:04:24Maybe it sits above your ear and it works,
01:04:26and it doesn't need to kind of like be plugged
01:04:28into your physical brain.
01:04:29Maybe it uses a transmission where we can connect it here.
01:04:32And you can start to think things
01:04:33and get information that you want and so on.
01:04:36And suddenly you become super intelligent,
01:04:38and you have all of this capacity
01:04:40that you didn't have before.
01:04:41That's one path that we might walk.
01:04:44Another path that we might walk,
01:04:45which is extremely dystopian
01:04:48from most people's points of view,
01:04:50but may end up becoming a reality
01:04:54because of what we're seeing happening in China
01:04:55and other places, is transgenic humans,
01:05:00where basically right now you can look at an embryo.
01:05:04And I don't know if you've seen this controversial app
01:05:07where they'll sequence the DNA of your embryos,
01:05:09if you've got frozen embryos for IVF, right,
01:05:12which is a common procedure where you've got effectively
01:05:15an embryo that's frozen.
01:05:18It's not yet fertilized, but you can sequence the DNA
01:05:22and determine what genetic traits does that embryo have.
01:05:25- I'm a big investor in Harasite,
01:05:27who is the most evidence-based one of these.
01:05:29- So the ones that have used the Down's test
01:05:32plus the best geneticist on the planet to fill the gaps in.
01:05:35So you model the genome of mother and dad,
01:05:39then you take the sample from the embryo,
01:05:41and between those they can triangulate with real accuracy
01:05:45what the embryo is.
01:05:46You have, here's your 10 harvest or your 15 harvest
01:05:49or whatever, and there's your dashboard.
01:05:51And we've got immune function, we've got IQ,
01:05:54we've got externalizing behavior,
01:05:56and yeah, Johnny Anomaly and Harasite
01:05:58are the best at this.
01:06:00And I don't think it's dystopian at all.
01:06:03I think that crumbly genome and if you say
01:06:07that selecting against negative traits is good,
01:06:10then it seems to me to be philosophically consistent
01:06:14to say that selecting for positive traits is good too.
01:06:15- So everyone's got a line.
01:06:17The further I walk this conversation,
01:06:18the more you're gonna, more people are gonna,
01:06:20on the audience, gonna say you crossed my line.
01:06:22- Right.
01:06:23- So the first is, should we even be looking
01:06:25at the DNA of embryos?
01:06:26- We already do.
01:06:27- Right.
01:06:27- We already do because they, and this was what-
01:06:29- Prenatal screening.
01:06:30- Not only prenatal screening, but let's say anybody
01:06:32that's ever done IVF, even if you didn't know.
01:06:34- They screen.
01:06:35- The doctor gets a microscope and has a look
01:06:39at the embryos and just eyeballs it.
01:06:40- Yes.
01:06:41- And he goes, yeah, that one looks like the roundest.
01:06:44- Right.
01:06:45- And we don't have a number, you don't want number seven.
01:06:47- Right.
01:06:48- Number seven, we can't do number seven.
01:06:49Or it wouldn't even take, we know that it wouldn't take.
01:06:51It's not gonna implant it directly.
01:06:52So he was already doing it.
01:06:53So I'm like, okay, you're just taking it from some guy.
01:06:55It's like an umpire in a MLB that's just eyeballing it.
01:06:59And then eventually they're gonna get removed
01:07:01and it's gonna be robots.
01:07:02- Totally.
01:07:02- And you go, okay, well, I'm glad that the robot
01:07:04got it accurate a hundred percent of the time.
01:07:05- A hundred percent.
01:07:07That is the next line.
01:07:09The next line would be sequencing the DNA
01:07:12and looking at the genome and looking at the genetics
01:07:14and saying, hey, I want blue eyes or brown eyes.
01:07:18And some people say that's dystopia.
01:07:20That's in the Black Mirror episode.
01:07:21- Well, the eyes thing's got a bad rap
01:07:23when it comes to selection.
01:07:24- Right, that's right, okay.
01:07:26Fair enough.
01:07:27Tall or short?
01:07:27Smart, not smart?
01:07:30Suddenly there's a line.
01:07:31Some people are like, well, you shouldn't be doing.
01:07:34- A blind, not blind.
01:07:35It's definitely a death. - Blind, not blind.
01:07:37The next line is what's going on controversially in China
01:07:42where they're using gene editing.
01:07:44- Yeah, the enhancement stuff.
01:07:45- Enhanced.
01:07:46So they'll take an existing human trait, a human allele.
01:07:50And so they'll basically take you from brown eye to blue eye
01:07:52or they'll take you from dumb to smart.
01:07:54They're not creating a foreign gene.
01:07:57They're just making a tweak to your DNA
01:08:01to give you the trait
01:08:03that you could have randomly gotten in the embryo,
01:08:05but you just didn't.
01:08:06- Is that what the guy did with the twins
01:08:08that turned out to be triplets?
01:08:10- There was a conversation.
01:08:12I think that's the guy that got arrested or got in trouble.
01:08:13- Correct, yeah, 2019, I think.
01:08:15You know that there was a third one.
01:08:17- I didn't realize there was a third.
01:08:18- I'm pretty sure.
01:08:19Jared, can you just Google?
01:08:21ChatGPT, how many babies were born
01:08:26from the CRISPR editing in China?
01:08:30Was it two or three?
01:08:32Because I swear that there was a third one.
01:08:34So after all of that, I might eat humble pie here
01:08:37and I've completely misremembered it.
01:08:39- You can also edit yourself out.
01:08:41- I'll own my failures.
01:08:43I'll own my failures here.
01:08:45I've said worse things on the internet.
01:08:46But yeah, I swear that not only did he do this thing
01:08:49and he couldn't believe it and it's the first time
01:08:51that this has ever happened and it's so,
01:08:52and there was two of them and there was a fucking third one.
01:08:56I swear that there was a third one.
01:08:58Come on, Jared, prove me right here, brother.
01:08:59- This is like a--
01:09:00- Three babies.
01:09:01- Well, there were three babies.
01:09:02A third gene-edited baby was later confirmed
01:09:05through court documents.
01:09:06- Fucking yes.
01:09:07Well, I'm not celebrating the thing.
01:09:08I'm not celebrating the thing.
01:09:09I'm not celebrating the thing.
01:09:10I'm celebrating that I'm right.
01:09:14- Pro gene-editing babies.
01:09:15- And he edited the embryos using CRISPR-Cas9
01:09:18to make them resistant to HIV.
01:09:20- Exactly.
01:09:21Exactly.
01:09:22So the HIV-resistant allele, which is the genetic trait,
01:09:26is a known trait.
01:09:27So he just made a couple of changes,
01:09:29confirmed that nothing else was changed, took that forward.
01:09:32So should we give children or should we give embryos
01:09:36these enhancements where we're not introducing new DNA,
01:09:40we're basically saying, hey, randomly,
01:09:42you could have gotten this trait and you didn't,
01:09:45but now we're just gonna make sure you get it
01:09:46and then stack this up.
01:09:47And then if you do that,
01:09:49how many traits are we willing to give to an embryo?
01:09:51Should I make every embryo superhuman?
01:09:54Should I make every embryo?
01:09:55Should I have a bunch of kids
01:09:56where I got one that's really good at sports,
01:09:57one that's really good at music,
01:09:59one that's really good at podcasting?
01:10:01I mean, you pick your poison.
01:10:02- Yeah.
01:10:03Well, sometimes you can put all three into one person.
01:10:05- There you go.
01:10:06And the super super here.
01:10:11- Yeah, and the British accent.
01:10:12- And the British accent.
01:10:13- I don't think that's genetic.
01:10:13- Yeah.
01:10:14Okay, so now, okay, so that might be a line
01:10:17that many people are gonna say,
01:10:18hey, I don't wanna cross into that.
01:10:19And you could debate that philosophically.
01:10:21Why would you not want that?
01:10:23If you're willing to do the other things,
01:10:25like it's a spectrum, why are you going that far?
01:10:27And there's a lot of philosophical discourse around this.
01:10:30Now, the final one.
01:10:31The final one is transgenic.
01:10:33And this is where you put a gene or a trait into the human
01:10:37that it doesn't naturally have,
01:10:39that the human would not have been born with
01:10:42no matter how many sperm
01:10:43or how many egg combinations you put together,
01:10:45you would not have come up with this gene.
01:10:47- Regardless of who the parents were?
01:10:48- Correct, for example, being able to see infrared.
01:10:51- Right.
01:10:52- Okay, and so this is where you make X-Men, right?
01:10:55And the capacity to do this historically was like,
01:11:00no way, impossible.
01:11:02But now in many of these,
01:11:03there arguably could be the capacity to do this.
01:11:06And I'm not arguing for it.
01:11:07I'm just saying that it's likely
01:11:09that this is gonna be a limit
01:11:10that's gonna get tested at some point here
01:11:12in the near future,
01:11:13where we are gonna have a conversation
01:11:16about how do humans keep up in an era,
01:11:18in a world of superintelligence?
01:11:20And are there certain traits like that
01:11:22that can enable us to either have a better performance
01:11:26against the superintelligence,
01:11:27either superintelligent humans,
01:11:29or a relationship with the superintelligence
01:11:32via some mechanism that allows us to connect
01:11:33with the superintelligence or control it better,
01:11:36or what have you, or all the digital AI that's out there,
01:11:38or other tools or techniques that,
01:11:41or sorry, other phenotypes, physical characteristics,
01:11:45that might allow us to better survive on Mars.
01:11:48- I had a great conversation.
01:11:51What was the guy's name?
01:11:52It wasn't Christopher Mason.
01:11:53That was the guy that was talking about space.
01:11:55Who was the dude that I did the episode with last week
01:11:58that we put out?
01:11:58Scott, somebody, the guy about Mars.
01:12:00I had this fucking--
01:12:03- Scott Solomon.
01:12:04- Yeah, Scott Solomon.
01:12:05Unbelievable.
01:12:06Evolutionary biologist who's applied
01:12:08evolutionary biology thinking
01:12:10to what we're going to need to do
01:12:11to be able to survive on Mars.
01:12:13Radiation, what happens to bone density,
01:12:15but if you've got the bone density loss,
01:12:17how do women give birth?
01:12:19You're going to have to do every child by cesarean c-section.
01:12:21Over time, if you have c-section, you get narrower hips,
01:12:23you get bigger baby heads.
01:12:24You almost reverse evolution of where we got through it,
01:12:27like just, and where we need to be underground,
01:12:30'cause if we're underground in Mars,
01:12:31then it means that we're going to be protected naturally
01:12:33by the terrain from the radiation.
01:12:35But if you're underground,
01:12:36what happens to melanin in the skin,
01:12:37and what happens to vitamin D levels,
01:12:39and you've got artificial light,
01:12:40and what happens to,
01:12:41what's the psychological profile of these people is that,
01:12:43I'm like sat there, just a virtual episode,
01:12:46and my fucking mind was, this is a sleeper episode.
01:12:48It was so fucking good.
01:12:50Such a sleeper episode.
01:12:51But yeah, can we engineer?
01:12:55It was a--
01:12:55- And so remember like transgenics we use in plants, you know.
01:12:59- The fucking word trans, dude.
01:13:00Put the word trans at the start of anything
01:13:01after the last six years, and it's going to struggle.
01:13:03Same as nuclear.
01:13:04- Yeah, well, I don't want to say--
01:13:05- Newgenics. - GMO people,
01:13:07'cause that's got a worse name.
01:13:08- Yeah, like if I say the GMO person,
01:13:10'cause I used to work in Monsanto,
01:13:11so you're like, that gives me my double evil scientist
01:13:15credibility. - GMO.
01:13:16- But there's likely going to be a situation
01:13:18where they're going to discover this.
01:13:19'Cause what we're now discovering,
01:13:21a lot of like the human biology,
01:13:24like we talked about all the genes that are on or off.
01:13:27How do they all work?
01:13:27How do all those proteins work together?
01:13:29I described 80 years of 10 billion proteins interacting
01:13:33in a place the size of Manhattan, 500 story tall,
01:13:36bumping into each other, doing stuff.
01:13:37That's how we do stuff in a cell for one second.
01:13:40So there's a regulatory network where all these proteins
01:13:43are doing stuff in a way that we can't model.
01:13:45We don't understand today.
01:13:45- Isn't it mad that that just doesn't switch off one day
01:13:48of all of the human-- - It just stops.
01:13:49- Yeah, it just 404s and you sort of blue screen
01:13:52of death yourself for a bit.
01:13:54- Cold temperatures will do that.
01:13:55That's why we can freeze biological tissue
01:13:58and then boot it back up, 'cause it'll just stops all that,
01:14:00'cause it's actually the thermodynamics.
01:14:02It's the kinetic energy of the proteins.
01:14:04It's random.
01:14:05The proteins are just bouncing around in the cell
01:14:08and they randomly will bump into stuff and do stuff.
01:14:11It's amazing to think about like...
01:14:14There's no way that you could think that,
01:14:15that you can realize that and not think
01:14:17that the universe is a simulation.
01:14:18You know, it's just like, it's literally just chaotic
01:14:20ensembles of molecules that randomly do these incredible
01:14:24things that we look at and we're like, I can move my finger.
01:14:27It's like, it's the craziest shit.
01:14:29- Well, it's the same as when you realize that most of matter
01:14:31is empty space, but if I do this,
01:14:33my hand doesn't pass through the table.
01:14:34Fucking awesome. - Right.
01:14:35And the fact that it's all quantum anyway,
01:14:38which means that it could tunnel through anything
01:14:39at any point in time.
01:14:40- I'm still waiting for that to happen.
01:14:42- Well, here's another fucked up thing to think about.
01:14:45You've heard of like quantum entanglement.
01:14:47So, you know, you can entangle two particles
01:14:50and move them apart, change the state of one
01:14:51and the other one will change instantaneously
01:14:54on the other side of the universe, theoretically.
01:14:56There's reasons to believe that it might be the case
01:14:58that every particle of a particular type
01:15:00is entangled with every other particle.
01:15:05And I'll just let that settle for a second
01:15:07because if that were true,
01:15:09then you could theoretically, every particle,
01:15:11every time any particle changes anywhere in the universe,
01:15:13it's affecting every other particle in the universe.
01:15:15- It's kind of like a panpsychism,
01:15:18but for connectivity, like a membrane
01:15:22that everybody is a part of.
01:15:23- Or it might be the case that progression in the universe
01:15:26is actually like a, think about a quantum state
01:15:29that's changing and then space and time
01:15:32are a manifestation of that change.
01:15:34- Because that's why entropy,
01:15:36that's why there is a progression in one direction.
01:15:38- And it might just be that, you know,
01:15:40'cause space and time are defined
01:15:43by the relationship between particles.
01:15:45And it may be the case that if all the particles
01:15:47are entangled, that there's just this one thing
01:15:50that just changes and then all of space and time
01:15:53is a feature.
01:15:54- It's like a universal clock.
01:15:56- Yeah, it's a whole nother way of thinking
01:15:58about our plates in the universe.
01:16:00How did we get here?
01:16:01We were talking about-
01:16:01- Is there a line?
01:16:02Is there a line that you have from GMO people
01:16:06to IVF shouldn't happen?
01:16:09Do you have an ethical line for that?
01:16:11- Yeah, I definitely think that we can be very defined
01:16:16around the CRISPR stuff where we can change a gene
01:16:20to make someone healthier or enhanced.
01:16:22And I actually, I don't have a philosophical disagreement
01:16:26with giving someone the ability
01:16:28to not just like turn off disease,
01:16:31but to say, "Hey, I want this person to have the trait
01:16:36that they didn't randomly get from me or like inherit."
01:16:39I think that's fine.
01:16:41- How do you stop people?
01:16:42I mean, no parent.
01:16:43- But by the way, I'll say there's like,
01:16:44there's a whole bunch of therapeutic treatments
01:16:45that we're doing now that are doing what I described
01:16:48in that final stage with an adult human.
01:16:51- Like Follistad and stuff?
01:16:52- Right.
01:16:53- I was in Prospera with the guys
01:16:55when Brian Johnson got that.
01:16:56- Right, and so you could take,
01:16:59that is a gene that makes a protein that you're,
01:17:02you could theoretically use mRNA to do it,
01:17:03but it's short-lived, and you could put a plasmid, a gene,
01:17:07and put it in your body, and it will make a protein
01:17:10that gives you strength.
01:17:11- Yeah, whatever it is.
01:17:12- But that is like nursery school.
01:17:14Go to like university PhD level,
01:17:18and what we're learning about all the interaction
01:17:19between all the proteins is we could come up
01:17:21with a set of genes that if I put them into you,
01:17:24they will make you a hundred times smarter.
01:17:28- Would you get that shot?
01:17:30- I would.
01:17:31- Right.
01:17:32- I'm choosing for me.
01:17:33I think what becomes interesting is when parents
01:17:35are choosing for their kids.
01:17:36- I think that's right.
01:17:37I think that's the right philosophical framing.
01:17:40- Yeah, yeah.
01:17:41Look, if you've got this technology
01:17:43and it's available to be elected,
01:17:45in the same way as we don't let people get tattoos
01:17:47before they're 18 or whatever, then all right.
01:17:50So for me, currently, Johnny from Herasite,
01:17:55who again, I can't fucking shout out enough.
01:17:57He's so good at communicating this stuff
01:17:58and Herasite rules.
01:17:59That line up to embryo selection.
01:18:04So I'm happy.
01:18:05I see no philosophical issue with choosing
01:18:09from the harvest that you've already done.
01:18:11IVF's already been and gone.
01:18:12Perhaps that's a bit of anchoring bias for me
01:18:14that I might have thought twice about what IVF meant
01:18:18had I been born a hundred years ago, but it's here.
01:18:21And I can't go back.
01:18:23I can't cognitively take myself out of it.
01:18:24I think up to the point where here's your 15,
01:18:27pick from your 15, we're already eyeballing it.
01:18:28That seems to compel me in the direction
01:18:30that this is already being done.
01:18:31When it gets to, we're gonna choose from the genes
01:18:35that you could have had.
01:18:37Then when it gets to, we're gonna change them.
01:18:39And then when it gets to, we're gonna create them.
01:18:41That I'm as yet morally unconvinced.
01:18:46So you can pick, but you can't change yet.
01:18:49- I think that's probably where we are today.
01:18:51And maybe you're a little more progressive
01:18:53than most people, I would say.
01:18:54I think most people would still object to that.
01:18:57I think the Overton window changes
01:18:59when if the solution I offered you where I give you a shot
01:19:03that puts a plasmid, which is a gene, in your body,
01:19:07or integrates that plasmid into your cells.
01:19:09'Cause I do think that's ultimately
01:19:11where that age reversal stuff is gonna come from.
01:19:13I think we're gonna end up putting a series of genes
01:19:16in plasmids into our body.
01:19:17They're gonna go into our cells
01:19:18and they're gonna self-regulate those cells
01:19:20to make them live forever.
01:19:21When we end up doing that as a mainstay
01:19:24and everyone's getting that shot
01:19:26and everyone's living forever,
01:19:27and that becomes kind of a thing that everyone's like,
01:19:29yeah, of course we're boosting our lifespan with these genes.
01:19:32This totally makes sense.
01:19:34That's when people say, well, if we're doing it to ourselves
01:19:35and we're all doing it,
01:19:36why don't we just do it to every embryo?
01:19:39And that's when people will start to,
01:19:40and that's probably many decades from now,
01:19:42but I think that's where you can start to think
01:19:44about how the Overton window shifts at one point.
01:19:46When it becomes less about this, that is crazy.
01:19:49Because if everyone's doing it as an adult
01:19:51and it's totally safe and normal
01:19:53and it extends lifespan, then-
01:19:55- Bring it back down to doing it for the children.
01:19:57Yeah, I get the sense that any ickiness
01:20:01that people have around embryo selection,
01:20:04specifically for positive traits,
01:20:05everybody's already pretty much on board
01:20:07with embryo selection against negative traits,
01:20:09Huntington's, et cetera.
01:20:11The Ashkenazi community are already very deep in this
01:20:13because of their genetic profile.
01:20:16I think very quickly,
01:20:17all of the people who either are blank slateists,
01:20:21deny behavioral genetics, don't think heritability's a thing,
01:20:23think that embryo selection for IQ
01:20:25is just rebranded eugenics,
01:20:27all of those people, typically, quite well-educated,
01:20:30probably quite liberal and left-leaning,
01:20:32they care about the outcomes that their kids get.
01:20:35And if these slightly more right-of-center fucking hicks
01:20:39that have managed to cobble 15 grand together
01:20:40to get their IVF done,
01:20:41and then a little bit more to get,
01:20:43somebody else to do the profiling,
01:20:47if their kids are outstripping theirs in school and in sports,
01:20:51because, well, their immune function
01:20:54was the best of the ones that were available,
01:20:55and there's lowered rates of autism,
01:20:57or there's lowered rates of ADD,
01:20:58or there's lowered rates of depression,
01:21:00they've got a happier, more flourishing life,
01:21:02I think very quickly, parents are going to look at it and go,
01:21:06"Well, why did I read all of those parenting books?
01:21:08"Why did I work so hard to try and give my kids
01:21:11"the best future that I could?"
01:21:12And I'm now leaving behind,
01:21:15Jeffrey Miller said this fucking great quote.
01:21:18It's like every single parenting book on the planet
01:21:20could be replaced with the power
01:21:22of one behavioral genetics book,
01:21:24that your kids are made up of the raw materials
01:21:26of the person that you make them with.
01:21:28That is infinitely, not infinitely, sorry,
01:21:32that would be incorrect.
01:21:3350% of everything you are on average is genetically inherited,
01:21:36including your psychological profile,
01:21:37and for physical traits, significantly more.
01:21:40Very unlikely you're going to be born black
01:21:42with two white parents.
01:21:43Therefore, if you just understand
01:21:46the behavioral genetics of the situation,
01:21:48I think that lots of people are going to get on board.
01:21:50- Yeah, that's right.
01:21:51- And as soon as it becomes a competitive game,
01:21:54this race to the top, not race to the bottom,
01:21:57is going to happen and people are going to go,
01:21:58"Well, now the thing that's interesting, I think it's cool,
01:22:00"two wrinkles that I spoke to Johnny about
01:22:03"the last time we sat down.
01:22:04"First one is basically buyer's remorse from parents,
01:22:08"this sense that because I was so consciously involved
01:22:12"in the decision to choose this child,
01:22:15"if any negative outcomes occur because of that kid,
01:22:17"I think that there's the potential
01:22:18"for parents to blame themselves
01:22:20"or for the kid to blame the parents
01:22:21"if they were to find out.
01:22:22"And the second one that I think is kind of interesting
01:22:26"is parents are likely to regress or converge
01:22:31"on a small bucket of traits that they think
01:22:34"would be optimal to give their kid."
01:22:36But Spencer Greenberg did this fantastic study,
01:22:39huge, big study.
01:22:41IQ is not, it is moderately negatively correlated
01:22:46with life satisfaction.
01:22:47Higher IQ, lower life satisfaction.
01:22:50And you have to assume people with higher IQs
01:22:52are less likely to go to jail, less likely to be addicted,
01:22:54less likely to be homeless, more likely to get married,
01:22:56more likely to complete a high powered degree.
01:22:59Okay, so all of those things would increase life satisfaction.
01:23:03So the impact of IQ on life satisfaction is so negative
01:23:08that it offsets the objective life improvements
01:23:11that you get from being smarter.
01:23:13So which parent, if you look at this dashboard,
01:23:17all of the things being equal
01:23:19is not going to choose the smarter kid.
01:23:20- Now, if you had the option to boost the kid's IQ by 200
01:23:24because the world is different with super intelligence.
01:23:26So if you have digital super intelligence in the world,
01:23:29it's a very different world than we live in today.
01:23:30It's not just competing with each other.
01:23:31It's about finding a place in the world
01:23:33with the super intelligence.
01:23:34And we're all going back and forth to Mars
01:23:36and traveling the universe
01:23:37and figuring out quantum shifts in the universe.
01:23:40Like all the things that I think are pioneering
01:23:42in the next century,
01:23:46that becomes a different and more important framing
01:23:48at that point.
01:23:49'Cause you don't want to end up being one of the people
01:23:52or you don't want your kids to be disadvantaged
01:23:54in a world where there's this pervasive super intelligence
01:23:57that everyone's using and accessing
01:23:59and turning on and turning off as they need it
01:24:01to do the things they want to do in the world.
01:24:03And that's the right way to think about super intelligence,
01:24:05not controlling us.
01:24:06It's how do we use it?
01:24:08And you have to have a degree of control
01:24:09over knowing where do you want to go with it?
01:24:12What do you want to do with it?
01:24:13And I think that's why there's this idea
01:24:14that maybe people start to think more
01:24:17about how do we adapt in a world of super intelligence
01:24:21as a species?
01:24:22What is our role?
01:24:23'Cause there's a philosophical argument to be made
01:24:25that humans are dying down, making way for the AI.
01:24:29- Yeah, we're just bootloaders.
01:24:31- Right.
01:24:32- Flashy bootloaders for the silicon.
01:24:33- And I don't like that idea.
01:24:35- Oh, so you want to compete?
01:24:37- I want the AI to be a rocket boost for me and everyone else.
01:24:41And I want everyone to have a rocket.
01:24:43And I think that's what it does is it's not like a world
01:24:47where I'm competing with the super intelligence.
01:24:49It's like, dude, you're my rocket.
01:24:51I can't do what a rocket can do.
01:24:53I'm a human with two legs.
01:24:54I can't propel into space.
01:24:58I need the rocket.
01:24:59And similarly, I need the super intelligence
01:25:01to do the crazy next shit that I want to do.
01:25:03- We'll get back to talking in just one second,
01:25:04but first tell me if this sounds familiar.
01:25:07You train regularly, you eat reasonably well.
01:25:09Maybe you even supplement.
01:25:10You feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes.
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01:26:30What are you doing with plants?
01:26:31I've heard that you're spending a lot of time
01:26:33working with seeds.
01:26:36Yeah, I run a company, my day job,
01:26:38which most people that I talk to recognize me from my,
01:26:42this is like a pill, is that what this is?
01:26:44No, toothpicks.
01:26:45So we managed to find a company
01:26:47that embed flavor and supplements
01:26:52into the wood of toothpicks.
01:26:55So try, what's this?
01:26:57Maybe I'll take it with me and try it later.
01:26:59Just take that one, put it in your pocket.
01:27:00It's really cool.
01:27:01Wait, what is the new Tropic?
01:27:03So cognosine, there's a 15 milligram dose of cognosine
01:27:06in there.
01:27:06In one toothpick?
01:27:07Yeah.
01:27:08Oh, my brother would do that.
01:27:09Here, sorry.
01:27:10Oh, this shit.
01:27:11Yeah.
01:27:12Yeah, you can go in 15 minutes.
01:27:13And there's a little, like 15 milligrams of caffeine.
01:27:1650 milligrams of-
01:27:17He'll try anything.
01:27:18He's like my guinea pig.
01:27:19We're fucking about with every delivery mechanism
01:27:20on the planet for these at the moment.
01:27:22So obviously zins went absolutely crazy
01:27:24over the last couple of years.
01:27:25Is that your nicotine?
01:27:26No, so this is just the same again.
01:27:28It's more cognosine, cytocoline,
01:27:30same thing that you get in,
01:27:30oh, it's similar to the choline that you get in eggs.
01:27:33And we just decided that we would go for pouches
01:27:36the same as zins.
01:27:37So degenerate delivery mechanism, but much better for you.
01:27:40So that's what I'm playing with at the moment.
01:27:42Is it doing well?
01:27:43It's fucking crushing.
01:27:44Yeah, we just raised for Nutonic.
01:27:45We just raised on 60 mil.
01:27:46We're going into H-E-B.
01:27:49We're in vitamin sharp, GNC, Sainsbury's,
01:27:51Morrison's daily around the UK.
01:27:54We're just launching in Australia.
01:27:55And then we've got these RTDs.
01:27:56It's a smarter energy drink.
01:27:58The last time that we sat down at South by,
01:28:01we were talking about business
01:28:02and you were talking about sort of
01:28:03how people are launching and stuff like that.
01:28:05- 'Cause that was like my thing was like,
01:28:07I think everyone, we launched a tequila brand for All In,
01:28:10which is great, but tequila is tequila.
01:28:15But I think that's the whole thing is like,
01:28:16you can own your own brand, you can own your own equity.
01:28:18- Yeah, yeah.
01:28:19Well, look, I'm very much a lifestyle maxi,
01:28:22not a profit maxi.
01:28:23But given that this didn't exist,
01:28:27it's cool to have the ability and the contacts
01:28:30and the time and the resources
01:28:31to be able to make something that you want.
01:28:33- Yeah, it's awesome.
01:28:34- This podcast, the reason Modern Wisdom exists
01:28:36is because there was nobody having a conversation
01:28:38that was basically less retarded than comedy,
01:28:43but more retarded than Tim Ferriss.
01:28:47And it sort of sat in this nice middle ground.
01:28:51I really wanted to speak to people a lot about psychology,
01:28:54a lot about human nature, and it wasn't there.
01:28:56So I decided to do it.
01:28:57And then a thousand episodes later we're here.
01:28:59Honestly, the best, you must've found this,
01:29:01the best businesses to get into, if you can,
01:29:03I'm sure that when you get to your level
01:29:05that it's difficult to always design something for yourself,
01:29:08but the best businesses to get into
01:29:09is designing something that's a gap in the market
01:29:10that you yourself would use,
01:29:13especially when you're at the sort of level that I'm at.
01:29:16So yeah, anyway, you are obviously a burgeoning farmer,
01:29:19hoeing the ground, milling the, tilling the fields.
01:29:24- I do have a kitchen garden,
01:29:25although it does need to get updated.
01:29:28So my day job is running a company called Ohalo.
01:29:31And what we do at Ohalo is we turn off meiosis in plants.
01:29:36Okay, what does that mean? - That's very sexy.
01:29:37- Yeah, that's it, so that's the pitch I give at the bar.
01:29:41And I usually get the blanks there, and then I-
01:29:44- Go walk away.
01:29:46- Yeah, so all the cells in our body,
01:29:48we talked about this earlier,
01:29:49are made through a process called mitosis,
01:29:51which copies over the whole, all the DNA in your cell.
01:29:54Your DNA is actually packaged up into chromosomes,
01:29:56and there's two sets of chromosomes side by side
01:29:59in your cell.
01:30:01So those two sets of chromosomes get copied over
01:30:04every time you make a new cell in your body,
01:30:06except for sperm and eggs.
01:30:09So when you make sperm or eggs,
01:30:12you only copy one chromosome, one set of chromosomes.
01:30:15And it's not just a selection of one of the sets.
01:30:17What happens is the two sets of chromosomes fuse,
01:30:20and they fuse at random places.
01:30:23So you get a random half of one chromosome,
01:30:26a random half of the other chromosome.
01:30:28And that's why every sperm,
01:30:29which has just one set of chromosomes,
01:30:31is genetically different.
01:30:33Every one is unique.
01:30:34And every egg in a female is unique.
01:30:36They're all genetically different,
01:30:38because that fusion event, which is called meiosis,
01:30:40fuses the two chromosomes down to one.
01:30:42And then a sperm and an egg come together,
01:30:44and you end up back with two.
01:30:46And that's the new offspring.
01:30:48And every offspring looks a little bit different,
01:30:50because every sperm is different, and every egg is different.
01:30:53That's why kids all look different,
01:30:54even though they come from the same few parents.
01:30:56So they get half the genes from the mother,
01:30:57half the genes from the father,
01:30:59and it's a random half from the mother,
01:31:02a random half from the father.
01:31:02And meiosis drives that evolutionary process.
01:31:05That random selection is what is evolution.
01:31:07It's the source of evolution.
01:31:08By turning off, and this is fundamentally a challenge
01:31:13for farming, number one, because most crops,
01:31:17people don't realize this, you can't plant seed.
01:31:20When farmers plant seed in the ground,
01:31:23the reason they use seed is 'cause they're gonna get
01:31:25the same genetics in the field.
01:31:27You want all the corn to grow at the same time
01:31:29so you can harvest it all at the same time.
01:31:30It's all gonna look the same.
01:31:31You can sell it all to the same person,
01:31:33and it's the same crop.
01:31:34You don't wanna harvest a bunch of tomatoes
01:31:36where some are green, some are yellow, some are red.
01:31:38They're all different sizes.
01:31:39How are you gonna market that?
01:31:41That's not marketable.
01:31:42So the seed industry came about about 100 years ago
01:31:46when this guy figured out
01:31:47that you could actually inbreed plants.
01:31:51And when you inbreed a plant, so a plant has both male
01:31:54and female parts, unlike animals,
01:31:56most plants will make sperm and egg.
01:31:59You can pollinate itself.
01:32:01And if you do that for seven generations,
01:32:03both chromosomes end up identical.
01:32:05'Cause remember, the two chromosomes have the same genes,
01:32:10but if the genes are different, you have different alleles.
01:32:13And if the genes are the same,
01:32:14it's called homozygous, they're the same alleles.
01:32:17So if both chromosomes end up being identical
01:32:20and you make sperm,
01:32:21it doesn't matter where the fusion happens.
01:32:23Every sperm will look the same
01:32:24'cause they're the exact same two chromosomes.
01:32:27Same with egg.
01:32:27So inbreeding is what was developed about 100 years ago
01:32:30where they inbred plants, seven generations,
01:32:33took the inbreds, crossed them,
01:32:35and now every seed is identical.
01:32:36That's how they make identical seed in corn, in tomato,
01:32:40in cotton, in canola, in sorghum.
01:32:42And farmers went to a seed company
01:32:44and they started buying seed for the first time ever.
01:32:46And they put that seed in the ground
01:32:47and they could grow a crop.
01:32:49And every year, the other thing it does
01:32:50is it allows you to improve the yield every year
01:32:54because the plant breeder would try
01:32:56and make the two chromosomes
01:32:58from the two backgrounds different.
01:33:00The more different they are, the more complimentary they are,
01:33:03the more different genes you're putting in that plant,
01:33:06the higher the yield, the faster the plant grows.
01:33:08Plants are really interesting
01:33:10because they're kind of like looking for tools in a tool belt.
01:33:13Like how many tools do I have?
01:33:14How many different genes do I have
01:33:16that I can use any second of any day to keep growing?
01:33:19Humans and animals, we just grow like two arms,
01:33:21five fingers, two eyes, two legs, and we're done growing.
01:33:24And then our job is to go out and find food and survive.
01:33:27Plants, their job is to keep growing.
01:33:28They grow roots, they grow branches, they grow leaves.
01:33:31The sun's over there.
01:33:31I'm gonna grow a branch towards the sun.
01:33:33I'm gonna make more leaves.
01:33:34Oh, the water's down there.
01:33:35I'm gonna grow a root down there
01:33:36and they just keep growing and growing, growing until they die.
01:33:38So plants are always looking for more genes
01:33:40in the toolbox that they can use to grow.
01:33:43So by turning off meiosis,
01:33:44we can take plants that don't have seed today,
01:33:47put two of them together,
01:33:49and all the seed will now be the same
01:33:51because every sperm is the same, every egg is the same.
01:33:54Because by turning off meiosis,
01:33:55both chromosomes go into the sperm.
01:33:57Both chromosomes go into the egg.
01:33:59And now the offspring has four chromosomes instead of two.
01:34:02That might sound crazy,
01:34:04but many, many plants have four chromosome versions.
01:34:07It's called polyploidy.
01:34:08Polyploid, many versions of the chromosome.
01:34:11And some, like modern wheat is hexaploid.
01:34:14It has six chromosomes.
01:34:15Modern strawberry is octaploid.
01:34:17It has eight chromosomes.
01:34:19Modern potato is tetraploid.
01:34:20It has four chromosomes.
01:34:22So many modern kind of crops
01:34:24have multiple copies of the chromosome
01:34:26and you can't make seed in those crops.
01:34:28And so you end up taking the plant,
01:34:29chopping it up and replanting it.
01:34:32And that's what they do.
01:34:33So by making seed, it actually saves farmers
01:34:36the majority of their expense,
01:34:37which they have to spend money chopping up
01:34:38all the old plants, putting them back on the ground.
01:34:40And it allows us to make better plants every generation
01:34:43'cause we can make better selections
01:34:45on the ones that are complimentary to each other,
01:34:46increasing the genetic diversity in the crop,
01:34:49increasing disease resilience, drought resistance,
01:34:52climate change adaptation,
01:34:54all the things that drive yield
01:34:56and make the farmers more profitable,
01:34:57make more food per acre, all these sorts of things.
01:34:59And then every year, instead of having,
01:35:01like in the U.S. we're farming Russet Burbank.
01:35:03We've been farming Russet Burbank for 150 years.
01:35:05We can now bring new potatoes to market every year
01:35:08that are getting better and healthier,
01:35:10more nutritious, more adapted to climate change,
01:35:13making the farmer more money.
01:35:15And so you can kind of, and the farmer,
01:35:16instead of using 5,000 pounds of chopped up potatoes,
01:35:19and like Matt Gaiman did, and putting them in the ground,
01:35:22he can use 10 grams of seed
01:35:24that fits in the palm of your hand.
01:35:25- Wow.
01:35:26- So it cuts down on his expenses like crazy.
01:35:29He makes more money and we make more food.
01:35:30So that's the business I run.
01:35:32And so we figured out a way to turn off meiosis and do this.
01:35:34And then we've also developed a lot of other technology
01:35:37to make plant breeding more efficient,
01:35:39to increase the rate of yield gain,
01:35:41to increase the adaptation of the climate,
01:35:43to increase all of these things that are going on
01:35:45in agriculture that make it very hard to farm.
01:35:48- Can you make it so that you need less fertilizer?
01:35:51- Yeah, absolutely.
01:35:52So nitrogen utilization is a kind of good phenotype
01:35:55to think about.
01:35:56So you can kind of,
01:35:59'cause you gotta apply nitrogen to grow most crops.
01:36:01And then there's also work now, which we don't do today,
01:36:05but there's some work that's being done.
01:36:07Some crops like soybeans and legumes,
01:36:09they actually can suck nitrogen out of the atmosphere.
01:36:12You don't need fertilizer.
01:36:13And it actually re-fertilizes the soil from the air.
01:36:17And so there's ways to kind of integrate that
01:36:19into crops that don't have that.
01:36:20So there's a whole bunch of that sort of technology
01:36:22that's gone on as well.
01:36:23- Wow, that is cool.
01:36:25What's happening with this California flight stuff?
01:36:27'Cause I was with Palmer over Christmas
01:36:30and a bunch of other guys from that side.
01:36:32And I didn't know about it.
01:36:36I knew that it was gonna be brought in
01:36:37before the end of the year.
01:36:38It's this sort of sticky thing
01:36:39that seems to be following people around,
01:36:40but it's also gonna get worse over time.
01:36:42It seems like there's more and more rumblings
01:36:44that stuff's gonna keep on.
01:36:46This feels like the sort of core engine
01:36:49of California's prosperity since the 1800s
01:36:52is now unraveling.
01:36:54- Yeah, I'm in a bunch of group chats.
01:36:58I talk to a lot of people.
01:36:59I would say probably a third of people I talk to
01:37:03have already left.
01:37:04You're asking about people leaving, right?
01:37:07And I would say like a survey we did informally in a group,
01:37:12which has been published, talked about,
01:37:14is close to 87% of people are gonna leave.
01:37:17These are the core leaders in tech.
01:37:21And the other thing is I talk to a lot of emerging tech CEOs
01:37:24of startups that are doing really well, that are growing,
01:37:28and they're all looking to leave.
01:37:29Like there was one company I was talking to,
01:37:30they're gonna move up to Northern California from Southern,
01:37:32and they're like, "Now I'm gonna move to Nevada."
01:37:34And that's because they're worried about what's next.
01:37:36So California's in this fundamental sinkhole right now.
01:37:39It goes back to my point about people making promises.
01:37:45In order to get elected,
01:37:46politicians promise people something
01:37:48that they don't have today.
01:37:49That's how you get elected.
01:37:51You don't get elected by saying,
01:37:52"I'm gonna take stuff away from you.
01:37:53The government's gonna do less for you."
01:37:55Show me one politician in the last 100 years
01:37:57has been elected saying that.
01:37:59So in order, and there's a fundamental kind of moment,
01:38:03this come to Jesus moment.
01:38:05Can you keep doing these promises?
01:38:07Can you even meet the promises you've already made?
01:38:09And in California, the answer is no.
01:38:11California set up a system
01:38:15where we created the highest tax rate in the country
01:38:18because of all the success in Silicon Valley,
01:38:21all the income that's being generated,
01:38:22all the success and capital gains and whatnot,
01:38:26and used that to fund a bunch of nonsense.
01:38:28The bullet train to nowhere,
01:38:31you know, frigging like $30 billion in, nothing.
01:38:34- How much is it?
01:38:36- 30 billion.
01:38:37And they've had six CEOs, by the way,
01:38:40that have all been fired.
01:38:41One guy just got arrested.
01:38:43It's insane.
01:38:44It was just published at this homeless program.
01:38:47$220 million was spent on it.
01:38:50Six homeless people got themselves out of the cycle
01:38:53of poverty that they were in.
01:38:55You go down the list.
01:38:57- Sorry, just what was that thing
01:38:58about the affordable internet bill?
01:39:02- Rural broadband.
01:39:03- That was it, and for the same amount of money
01:39:06that was spent, I think every American citizen
01:39:07could have got Starlink.
01:39:09- Yeah, and that one, that's a federal problem.
01:39:12- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but-
01:39:13- You're gonna get me very emotional.
01:39:15I've been very like-
01:39:16- You seem like an emotional guy.
01:39:17- I've been very unemotional during our talk
01:39:20about science in the future.
01:39:21And then this is the opposite.
01:39:23Okay, this is the bullshit, the opposite that happens
01:39:26when social systems become manifest like rotten.
01:39:32It's a system where people lie to each other
01:39:35in order to keep themselves in power,
01:39:37in order to keep their money flowing,
01:39:39in order to keep this nonsense up and running.
01:39:41People lie to themselves, they lie to their constituents,
01:39:44and the democracy starts to become like, what's the point?
01:39:46Like, does this even work?
01:39:48California in particular,
01:39:49we made a bunch of changes to the pension system.
01:39:54So we have public pensions
01:39:55for public employees in California.
01:39:58And over the past 12 to 15 years,
01:40:03those changes have resulted in a bunch of guarantees
01:40:07to people on their future retirement benefits
01:40:10that the state simply cannot afford to meet.
01:40:12The estimate currently is that there's 600 billion
01:40:14to a trillion dollars in the hole, okay?
01:40:18The state then has a question,
01:40:20how are we going to like pay for all these people
01:40:23all the stuff that we promised them?
01:40:24And that's a big part of,
01:40:26and then there's also all the near-term stuff
01:40:28like healthcare costs.
01:40:29Hey, we promised them healthcare.
01:40:31We promised our union workers healthcare.
01:40:33We've got to figure out a way to fund the healthcare
01:40:34because the promises were made.
01:40:36But the promises were never funded.
01:40:39The promises were never possible to be funded.
01:40:41And then suddenly it all comes to roost and everyone's like,
01:40:44well, how are we going to make the payments now?
01:40:45How are we going to fill the hole?
01:40:47That's the situation California's in.
01:40:49California has such a heaping liability problem
01:40:51that it's now you're seeing like all the rats jumping,
01:40:55you know, off the ship or they're burning the ship
01:40:57or the people are leaving the ship.
01:40:59I don't know what the right analogy to use is,
01:41:01but that's the chaos that's ensuing in California
01:41:03in this very moment.
01:41:05And so we talk a lot about the billionaire tax.
01:41:08The billionaire tax came about because of one union,
01:41:10one guy at one union called SEIU UHW who set up a scheme
01:41:14where they would tax you 5% of your net worth
01:41:16if your net worth is over a billion dollars,
01:41:18which everyone in this audience is like, who cares?
01:41:19Screw the billionaires.
01:41:21But what it does is it gives the state assembly,
01:41:23the legislature, the ability to, in the future,
01:41:26change the threshold and the amount.
01:41:28So theoretically you could take the 5% on billionaires
01:41:30one time and make it 1% on billionaires every year.
01:41:33- Wasn't this the case with the original income tax?
01:41:36- 1930, it was a 1%.
01:41:40- Tell people the story of how the original income tax-
01:41:41- I mean, the original income tax was pitched
01:41:43because we did not have an income tax in the United States.
01:41:45And that was, again, why this country was founded.
01:41:48It was set up as we, no taxation without representation.
01:41:52There was a huge tax scheme to fund all of the,
01:41:55you know, nonsense that was going on in England.
01:41:57- Careful, careful now.
01:42:00- I mean, at the time, very different,
01:42:02not to speak to the people, but let's call it the aristocracy
01:42:05and, you know, what we call the elites today.
01:42:08And by the way, I think about the term, the elites,
01:42:11it's sort of like that Spiderman meme where like everyone's,
01:42:13you're the elite, you're the elite, you're the elite.
01:42:15Like the tech guy's the elite.
01:42:17That's kind of the moment we're in right now.
01:42:18It's like the tech guys are the elites,
01:42:19but like the tech guys last year were telling,
01:42:21they were calling out the NGOs as the elites
01:42:23and then the, you know, just like everyone's an elite.
01:42:25- Your privilege is more privileged than my privilege.
01:42:27- Yeah, this is all rooted in Marxist philosophies,
01:42:29by the way, it's all this like oppressor oppressed stuff.
01:42:31Like again, but all of those philosophies
01:42:34fundamentally distinguish people's agency.
01:42:37Like this is so critical for people to understand.
01:42:39When you give people a bunch of stuff
01:42:41or you create a governmental system or economic system
01:42:43that says you do X, you get Y,
01:42:45you're a slave to that system.
01:42:48You are now oppressed no matter what anyone tells you.
01:42:51You are not getting risen up and you're not,
01:42:53and pulling other people down
01:42:54doesn't solve any of your problems.
01:42:56Another conversation for another day.
01:42:58But in California, so we started out as a one,
01:42:59and so the way they started the income tax
01:43:01in the United States was they're like,
01:43:02hey, we'll promise everyone 1% on high,
01:43:04on incomes over whatever it was at the time.
01:43:06I think $10,000 a year, you probably look it up.
01:43:08And that was it.
01:43:09And then over time, it's like, wait, we had to fund a war.
01:43:11So we, and now we're like gonna expand the highway system.
01:43:14- So the original income tax was 1%.
01:43:17- 1% on high net worth people, on high earning people.
01:43:20And that's it.
01:43:21- Jared, chad this and find out
01:43:24how the income tax progressed over time.
01:43:26I wanna see this.
01:43:26- Right, and you can look at this.
01:43:27And so then it became like suddenly today,
01:43:29everyone pays an income tax.
01:43:30In California, I pay 53% income tax.
01:43:33And most people pay an income tax that's,
01:43:36and now they're like creating a whole new tax regime.
01:43:39And I wanna talk about this importantly,
01:43:41what they're trying to do in California.
01:43:42Here you go.
01:43:43It was a temporary wartime tax.
01:43:45And again, leading up to this,
01:43:46we had tariffs to fund the government.
01:43:48The government was small.
01:43:49Like the government wasn't meant to be this big system
01:43:51that took care of everyone and did all this stuff.
01:43:54- Keep going, scrolling.
01:43:55- Coming out of World War II,
01:43:56and here's the income tax started out as 1%
01:43:58on income over $3,000 a year.
01:44:01Okay? - Yeah.
01:44:02- And then there was like a progression.
01:44:05They added a 7% top rate later.
01:44:07And then you can kind of see here
01:44:08when the thing kind of expanded.
01:44:10- Oh wow, 1944 to 1945 in World War II,
01:44:14the top rate was 94%.
01:44:16- Yeah, they took everyone's money to fund the war.
01:44:18But that set a precedent.
01:44:19Because what happened at that point
01:44:20is after they set the precedent,
01:44:22and then we had this kind of FDR,
01:44:24kind of New Deal expansionism,
01:44:25all the stuff that happened post-World War II
01:44:27in the United States, was like,
01:44:28"Holy crap, we can get the government to do big stuff.
01:44:31Let's do big stuff to make our lives better."
01:44:33You can see that that sound principled.
01:44:35Like it makes sense.
01:44:36It sounds good in principle.
01:44:37But this is where it leads us to today.
01:44:39Because every year, once you start thinking
01:44:41about the government as solving your problems
01:44:43and doing things for you,
01:44:44that becomes something that only escalates up.
01:44:46It never goes down.
01:44:48So think about if 51% can vote themselves,
01:44:51what the 49% can do.
01:44:52- So this is the next thing that happened.
01:44:53So now, so that's income.
01:44:54Let's say you've paid your income tax
01:44:57and you own a bunch of stuff.
01:44:58That's now your private property.
01:45:00You own this stuff, that's yours.
01:45:02So now comes along the government or this new bill,
01:45:05the Billionaire Tax Act in California.
01:45:07And for the first time ever in the United States,
01:45:09we're trying to create a wealth tax.
01:45:11It doesn't matter that it's billionaires
01:45:13and it doesn't matter that it's one time or 5%.
01:45:15What you're saying is that the stuff
01:45:16that you've already paid taxes on,
01:45:18that you now own, that's in your backyard,
01:45:20all your iron ore that you've stored in the backyard.
01:45:23- Right, get off it.
01:45:23- Yeah, or your cool podcast studio.
01:45:27You own these things, you've paid taxes,
01:45:28you've earned your money and you bought this stuff.
01:45:30But now the government can come in and say,
01:45:31you know what, we want that lamp.
01:45:33We want half your iron ore.
01:45:35We're going to take all your private property from, right?
01:45:37Your iron ore.
01:45:37They're going to get all your private property.
01:45:39That's what a wealth tax does,
01:45:41is it taxes people on post-tax earnings.
01:45:43It takes away private property.
01:45:45If you give the government the ability to do that
01:45:47on even 1% of net worth for billionaires,
01:45:52the next step is 5% of the billionaires
01:45:55or maybe 2% of millionaires.
01:45:57And then maybe it's 3% on people making,
01:46:00that have a net worth of a hundred grand a year.
01:46:02And by the way, to figure out how much you have,
01:46:04what your assets are,
01:46:06you got to send me a list every year of everything you own.
01:46:08So now the government gets to look into your house,
01:46:11not just see what's in your bank account,
01:46:12what stocks you own, but what cars do you own?
01:46:14What's the value of those cars?
01:46:15How much is that art worth?
01:46:16What's everything here worth?
01:46:17Private property rights go out the window
01:46:19when you institute a wealth tax.
01:46:20'Cause now the government has the right
01:46:22to assess all your value
01:46:24and to take anything they want from you based on a vote,
01:46:27where a bunch of people raise their hand and say,
01:46:28"We'll increase the tax rate to this."
01:46:305%, 2%, 10%, whatever it is.
01:46:32And here's the threshold and we'll take it every year.
01:46:34And when you do that,
01:46:35it eventually leads to 51% of people
01:46:40voting to take everything from 49%.
01:46:44That's the worst case.
01:46:45That's the end state of this,
01:46:47is it eats itself and that's socialism.
01:46:50And so I think that a wealth tax,
01:46:52and look, it's not gonna affect me, this California tax.
01:46:55So don't think that I'm trying to speak my book
01:46:57or whatever the comments or bullshits are.
01:46:59I think this is a fundamental principled issue
01:47:02that by degrading private property rights,
01:47:04we are setting a precedent in the United States
01:47:06that is the foundation of why the United States
01:47:08was set up in the first place,
01:47:09which is for all of us that came to this country
01:47:11to get away from tyrannical governments
01:47:13outside the United States that took all our shit
01:47:16and controlled everything and told us what to do all the time
01:47:18and we came here and we get to have private property.
01:47:20Sure, I'll pay my tax.
01:47:21Here's my 53%.
01:47:22Thank you very much, government,
01:47:23for all the great stuff you do,
01:47:25for all the services you provide.
01:47:26- Now fuck off.
01:47:27- Now fuck off and leave me alone.
01:47:28And that's not the case anymore when this passes.
01:47:30Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, all these national politicians,
01:47:34AOC, Elizabeth Warren, they're all saying
01:47:36we need to have a national wealth tax now.
01:47:39So it's not just in California.
01:47:40This is gonna be the issue between 2026 and 2028.
01:47:45The elites are the billionaires and the tech people.
01:47:47They're coming after them.
01:47:49And the manifestation of that is to create this wealth tax.
01:47:51And that gives the government the system
01:47:53by which private property rights are gone.
01:47:55And the United States is a very questionable future
01:47:57at that point.
01:47:58That's the thing I worry about the most.
01:48:00And I juxtapose that with my optimism about the future
01:48:03and this amazing shit.
01:48:05I mean, think about it.
01:48:06This amazing shit that's happening in the world,
01:48:09we're gonna have free fucking energy.
01:48:11We're gonna live forever.
01:48:12We're gonna have all of this insane stuff
01:48:14that we never imagined, abundance and resources
01:48:16that we could never contemplate.
01:48:18Happiness, spending time with family, working less hours,
01:48:22robots that build shit for us.
01:48:24Everything is gonna get better.
01:48:25Everything is getting better.
01:48:26Everything is getting more amazing.
01:48:28And then we're like, let's fuck ourselves.
01:48:30Like, why not?
01:48:32'Cause we'll just fuck ourselves.
01:48:34That's, and you know, this is this principle of like,
01:48:38I don't like using the term good versus evil,
01:48:40but it's like, are you thinking about the future
01:48:43optimistically or pessimistically?
01:48:45If you're thinking about the future
01:48:46as these are control system.
01:48:48This is, these tech guys are crazy.
01:48:50This is dystopian, blah, blah, blah.
01:48:52You know, the number one most unfavorable thing
01:48:54in the United States right now,
01:48:55according to a recent poll is AI.
01:48:57More unfavorable than Donald Trump,
01:48:58more unfavorable than everything.
01:49:00It's the most unfavorable thing because it is this,
01:49:03like this narrative that everyone's been instituted
01:49:06in their minds that like,
01:49:07this is the thing that destroys us, yada yada.
01:49:09And that's the choice we have.
01:49:10That's the choice we have right now,
01:49:12is do we wanna walk this path of abundance
01:49:14or do we wanna lock ourselves up?
01:49:16And I will say the counterbalancing force,
01:49:19and people won't like hearing this,
01:49:20but the counterbalancing force in the world
01:49:22will be a place like China.
01:49:24Because if the United States walks this path,
01:49:27other countries will not walk this path
01:49:29and it will glean the benefits therein.
01:49:32And we have to recognize that.
01:49:35And then you have to ask the question,
01:49:37wait a second, is there some psychosocial motivation
01:49:41that others might have to see this happen
01:49:43in the United States?
01:49:45And I would argue maybe.
01:49:47Maybe there's influence happening.
01:49:48Maybe there's a reason why people are spending so much time,
01:49:52why so much foreign money is going into NGOs
01:49:55that are supporting these sorts of causes.
01:49:57I just, like for me, it's so hard to grok
01:50:00why people would be so, you know, quick.
01:50:05And look-
01:50:06- Ardent.
01:50:07- Yeah, there's something, anyway,
01:50:09I don't wanna be too conspiratorial
01:50:10'cause that discredits a lot of this shit, but yeah.
01:50:14- I think that you could look at the conspiratorial angle,
01:50:17but just straight incentives for,
01:50:21I want to be seen to be standing up for the little person,
01:50:24when we saw how far that pushed a lot of social movements
01:50:26over the last six, seven years.
01:50:28And that got people to do some pretty insane things
01:50:30that I think in retrospect, a lot of them regret.
01:50:33And that was, I am here for the righteous.
01:50:36This is dangerous.
01:50:37This is too much.
01:50:38This is xenophobic, misogynistic, misinformation,
01:50:42disinformation, mal-information, unethical, un-ethical,
01:50:45un-medical, there's a big list of things.
01:50:48And because everybody is their opinions, not their deeds,
01:50:51right, the difference between our opinions and our deeds
01:50:54has never been greater.
01:50:56You're able to say good whilst doing bad.
01:50:58This was Elon's thing.
01:50:59I remember four or five years ago,
01:51:02he was pulled up about what he was doing with Tesla
01:51:04and about his presentation things.
01:51:07He says, what I care about is doing good,
01:51:09not the appearance of it.
01:51:10There are many people out there
01:51:11who are doing bad whilst appearing good.
01:51:13And I don't care to be one of them.
01:51:15- That's right.
01:51:15And the people that are trying to lead on this
01:51:19have three homes.
01:51:21You know, it's very easy to pull the ladder up.
01:51:23- Would they not think,
01:51:24would they not be looking at themselves?
01:51:26Oh, I suppose that at least at the moment
01:51:27when they're pointing at the billionaires that are above,
01:51:30they're in this sort of interesting middle ground,
01:51:32which is wealthy enough to be wealthy, but not so wealthy
01:51:34as to be affected by the tax. - They have abundance.
01:51:36You know, if you go to Africa and you go visit farmers,
01:51:39you think those guys are complaining about using GMO seed
01:51:42and farming if it's gonna double their income.
01:51:44Their lives changed.
01:51:45You know, there's all these stories about how technology,
01:51:47nuclear energy, dropping the cost of energy,
01:51:49making it proliferant in India, been a game changer.
01:51:52Like these technologies that we shun in the West
01:51:55are luxury beliefs for us to shun them.
01:51:58We have these ideas that we can just shun stuff
01:52:00because we are already well enough off.
01:52:03That's what happened in Germany.
01:52:04And Bernie Sanders has three homes,
01:52:05so it's easy for him to tell people,
01:52:07"Hey, the average person has an apartment.
01:52:10We should go down this path."
01:52:12That fundamentally, in every record of history
01:52:14that we've tried to go down this path has fucked everyone up.
01:52:17It is the worst idea that humans have ever come up with
01:52:20and they keep trying to repeat it.
01:52:21You can only look at Argentina,
01:52:23which has gotten out of the shit like yesterday
01:52:26to see how bad of a problem this leads to.
01:52:27Socialism is the worst idea ever.
01:52:29- Why did Mamdani get into New York then?
01:52:32- People want more.
01:52:33People are left behind.
01:52:35Look, this is so important, I think, to recap.
01:52:39We promised people that if they went to college,
01:52:46you would get a good career and you could buy a home.
01:52:49And that turned out to not be true.
01:52:51That was a lie.
01:52:52The way we promised it to them
01:52:56and the way we gave everyone access to college
01:52:58is through federal education grants, loans.
01:53:02The Federal Student Loan Program didn't have a market check.
01:53:07The federal government,
01:53:07as long as you were an accredited university,
01:53:09you could run Trump University, Phoenix University,
01:53:12UCLA, Harvard, MIT, it doesn't matter.
01:53:15It doesn't matter what the tuition is.
01:53:18$60,000 and it doesn't matter what the degree is.
01:53:21You could get a degree in basket weaving
01:53:22or a degree in computer science.
01:53:24The government- - I have one in each.
01:53:26- The government will loan you the money.
01:53:27- Nair Noor. - Right, Nair Noor.
01:53:29The background for this should be like a Minecraft thing.
01:53:33But the government will loan you money
01:53:34to go to that college.
01:53:35And so the government basically fueled increases in tuition
01:53:39because why would all these colleges suddenly go
01:53:41from costing 10 grand a year to 60 grand a year?
01:53:43It's because they could just charge more
01:53:45and there was no one to say no
01:53:46'cause the government just funded the loans every year.
01:53:48And the students are like,
01:53:49"I got a student loan, I'm good to go."
01:53:51No one's doing the math on like,
01:53:52"Can I afford to pay $240,000?"
01:53:55- Is it true that you can't default on it as well?
01:53:57- And you cannot default on it.
01:53:59And so that was the setup.
01:54:00That's how it got passed in Congress
01:54:01where the government spends trillions of dollars
01:54:03underwriting student loans.
01:54:05So there's no underwriting process.
01:54:06Any college, any degree, any individual, any price,
01:54:11those four things.
01:54:13You could be a bad student, I shouldn't underwrite your loan.
01:54:15You could get a shitty degree,
01:54:16I shouldn't underwrite your loan.
01:54:17You go to a shitty school, I'm not underwriting your loan.
01:54:19And if it costs a lot, I'm not underwriting your loan.
01:54:22That's what would normally happen and that didn't happen.
01:54:24As a result- - If you privatized it.
01:54:26- If you privatized it.
01:54:27And as a result, everyone got stuck with an education.
01:54:29And then it's like, "Hey, the market's not there.
01:54:32Rents are high."
01:54:32And much of the problem with rents being high
01:54:35and all this other sort of stuff-
01:54:36- Homebuilding.
01:54:37- Homebuilding, government regulation, government funding.
01:54:39The bigger the government got,
01:54:40the more expensive everything got.
01:54:42You know that chart, can you pull up the chart
01:54:44with like government stuff versus like non-government stuff?
01:54:47- Yeah, just ask Chad,
01:54:50what is the chart explaining government intervention
01:54:54compared with the price of different goods and services
01:54:58over the last few years?
01:55:01It's an image.
01:55:02- This tells you everything you need to know.
01:55:04This is why everything got worse.
01:55:06When moving to New York suddenly costs $6,000 of rent,
01:55:09you couldn't get a job.
01:55:10Food was $18 for a frigging sandwich.
01:55:12A lot of this was rooted in this problem,
01:55:14which is the government got too big.
01:55:16So the solution is, I need someone to fix that for me.
01:55:19And here's a guy who's coming along
01:55:20saying he's gonna make everything free.
01:55:22The groceries are gonna be free.
01:55:23So all the stuff on the red,
01:55:25everything above on the top section,
01:55:29these are things that the government fundamentally
01:55:31has a large role in paying for in the economy.
01:55:34So government dollars are flowing into the cost of things.
01:55:37So the people selling those things
01:55:39can basically charge more
01:55:41and they know they can charge more
01:55:42because the government can just fund it.
01:55:43And the government's an endless pool of money printing.
01:55:45So it just keeps printing.
01:55:46And eventually they're like, hey, let's raise taxes
01:55:48or get the money to pay for the stuff once they realize.
01:55:50But all of these things are services
01:55:52that the government's gotten involved in.
01:55:54College education, healthcare through Medicare and Medicaid,
01:55:57'cause there's no negotiation on these programs.
01:55:59Everything below is where the government doesn't have a role.
01:56:01The cost of a car, the cost of clothing,
01:56:04the cost of television, the cost of internet,
01:56:05the cost of software.
01:56:07These are all private industries
01:56:08where the government is not funding the purchase
01:56:10of these things for the consumer in some way
01:56:13or distorting the market in some way.
01:56:15So-
01:56:15- You know who I first showed this chart to?
01:56:18Tony Sanders.
01:56:19- What did he say?
01:56:20Did you have him on this?
01:56:20- Yeah. - Oh, you did?
01:56:21Last year, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:56:23- I should watch that.
01:56:24- It was interesting.
01:56:25- What did he say to this?
01:56:27- In fact, Jared, let's see if we can pull it up.
01:56:29We should react to that.
01:56:30- And if you look at,
01:56:32I mean, what's frustrating to me is you can read textbooks,
01:56:36you can go on the internet, you can watch YouTube,
01:56:39and you can see exactly what happens with socialism
01:56:43and socialist policies around the world.
01:56:45When the government runs a grocery store,
01:56:47when the government decides to offer everyone healthcare,
01:56:51it's great in principle.
01:56:52I would love for that to work.
01:56:54I would love for everyone to have healthcare.
01:56:55I'm not opposed to that idea.
01:56:57But if you're gonna have a government
01:56:58with no accountability and there's no one there
01:57:01that has any skin in the game,
01:57:02be responsible for giving me my healthcare,
01:57:05I know it's gonna get fucked up.
01:57:06And I've seen that happen time and time again
01:57:08around the world.
01:57:09It's just not the right system.
01:57:11And I think that there's much for us
01:57:13to kind of learn from why these things
01:57:16haven't worked around the world.
01:57:17And it's like what frustrates me is people are ignorant.
01:57:20They put their blinders on.
01:57:21They don't wanna see it.
01:57:22And they just, I saw an interview with a guy
01:57:24during the protest in LA when the guy went on camera,
01:57:29and he's like, "What are you here for?"
01:57:31And he's like, "I'm here for socialism.
01:57:33"We need socialism in America."
01:57:34And the interviewer is like,
01:57:35"But you know socialism's never worked
01:57:36"anywhere else ever before."
01:57:38And he's like, "Well, that's bad socialism.
01:57:40"That's socialism that doesn't work.
01:57:42"I want good socialism.
01:57:43"I want socialism done the right way,
01:57:45"and we're gonna do it the right way in America."
01:57:47This is the story in every generation
01:57:49of socialist movements that have happened around the world.
01:57:53And they all start, by the way,
01:57:54where you have this kind of inept
01:57:57or explosive government system that drives people to say,
01:57:59"I'm not getting what I want,
01:58:00"and everything's costing more.
01:58:02"I need socialism."
01:58:04- And also that's super sexy, right?
01:58:06Because it allows you to be able to promise something
01:58:09that people are gonna love.
01:58:10And what was that point around,
01:58:12it involves promising people something
01:58:14that they don't even have. - I always used to say
01:58:15the kid that gets elected for middle school president
01:58:18is the kid that promises to make the vending machines free.
01:58:21Everyone's got a story about this at their school.
01:58:24There's always the kid who said,
01:58:25"Hey, guys, what I'm gonna promise you
01:58:27"is I'm gonna make the vending machines free."
01:58:28And that's what we deal with every day.
01:58:30So here he is.
01:58:31- I wanna show you a chart in a second.
01:58:33So this is that you with hair.
01:58:35Yes, it's me with hair.
01:58:35Human goods and services over the last 25 years.
01:58:38Broadly speaking, prices have increased
01:58:40by about 74% since 2000.
01:58:42But the actual numbers vary wildly
01:58:44depending on what type of good or service it is.
01:58:46So consumer goods, toys, TVs have gotten--
01:58:49- Housing.
01:58:49Got housing in there?
01:58:51- Consumer goods like toys and TVs
01:58:52have gotten over 50% cheaper.
01:58:53TVs are nearly 100% cheaper.
01:58:55But critical categories like healthcare,
01:58:57education have skyrocketed by 200%.
01:58:59Housing is in there too.
01:59:01One potential interpretation is that the less legislation
01:59:04that you apply to an industry,
01:59:06the more the free market is allowed to take over,
01:59:09the cheaper the things become.
01:59:10Even new cars haven't got that much more expensive.
01:59:13So this is price changes.
01:59:15And you can see, as you basically get to the top,
01:59:16there's more legislation put in and down to the bottom.
01:59:19What do you make of that?
01:59:20- I don't.
01:59:21Yeah, look, to me, when I look at the economy,
01:59:26I look at what does a family need to do well?
01:59:29Okay, let's just go through.
01:59:30What are the basic needs of life?
01:59:33All right, everybody, right?
01:59:34Rich, poor, young, old needs healthcare, correct?
01:59:37In America, by the way, we probably spend three times more
01:59:41per person on healthcare than you do in the UK.
01:59:43- Do you think he got trained as a hypnotist?
01:59:46(laughing)
01:59:49- Look, I was proud of me sitting down with someone
01:59:54who's been in office for nearly twice
01:59:57as long as I've been alive.
01:59:59And grabbing him and not letting go too much
02:00:05without, I think, being too cantankerous.
02:00:06It was a real sort of strategic learning experience for me.
02:00:10But yeah, look, that's the game that is played.
02:00:15There is a question that gets asked,
02:00:16and what is answered is what I wanted to hear.
02:00:19- Yeah, and look, I think that it's very hard
02:00:24to deny the value and the importance of the empathy.
02:00:29One of the things that the other side gets wrong
02:00:32is the failure to empathize.
02:00:33He's extraordinary, and so is AOC, and so are others,
02:00:37at speaking to people that are feeling desperate
02:00:40and in need.
02:00:41And it is true that there are tens of millions of people.
02:00:44In the United States, I think it's 63% of people
02:00:46are living paycheck to paycheck,
02:00:48or living on less than 500 bucks of total savings.
02:00:52- Yeah, if there was one catastrophe
02:00:54that they would need to go into debt for.
02:00:56- But I'll go back to this point about,
02:01:01I think that the more government you create
02:01:04to help those people, I worry that over time
02:01:08it hurts more than it helps.
02:01:10And this is where the price of things go up,
02:01:12and you can't offer the same thing.
02:01:14Like, "Hey, I'm gonna offer you more and more every year."
02:01:16By the way, I'll give you one anecdote.
02:01:18In 2013 or '12, when they passed the temporary tax cuts,
02:01:22or sorry, the temporary tax hikes in California,
02:01:24they raised an incremental $100 billion since then.
02:01:27California, I've paid that.
02:01:28Like, I'm a big chunk of that check, that money.
02:01:32Not a big chunk, but I've done my part.
02:01:34And 80 billion of that went to increase,
02:01:37and it was supposed to go to increasing schools
02:01:39and health care services.
02:01:4180% of it went to increasing public retirement benefits.
02:01:4480 billion.
02:01:46And I can't sit here and bemoan public employees.
02:01:51I'm not gonna say negative things about public employees.
02:01:55But the system whereby there's a voter block that says,
02:01:59"Hey, we need to get more,"
02:02:01and then the system is created
02:02:03that doesn't actually solve the problems
02:02:04that need to be solved,
02:02:05and the people that asked for more get the benefit.
02:02:09I think it's very inherent in democracy.
02:02:11Like, over a period of time,
02:02:12you could argue that democracy eats itself.
02:02:14- Yeah, isn't it crazy that nobody
02:02:16ever pulls these people up?
02:02:18Each cycle, false promises are made, not kept.
02:02:21Bigger promises need to be made
02:02:23in order to get ahead of where the previous ones were.
02:02:25The people who didn't deliver on the promises previously
02:02:27don't get held to account in the right way.
02:02:29It's kayfabe.
02:02:30It's like WWE.
02:02:32- By the way, you can look at the food stamp program.
02:02:36If you type in food stamp program
02:02:38spending per year over time,
02:02:40watch what happened in 2019.
02:02:42Blow your mind.
02:02:43We can come back to that one.
02:02:45But this is exactly the problem.
02:02:47Today, I would argue,
02:02:48and I've tried to do the math on this.
02:02:51If you take the number of people
02:02:52that work for the federal government, state government,
02:02:54or local government, city government,
02:02:56plus the number of people that work for contractors-
02:02:59- Ho, hello.
02:03:00- Yeah.
02:03:01So here's the food stamp program as an example.
02:03:03And so you could argue like,
02:03:04hey, like people were, it was a crisis.
02:03:07We needed to increase spending.
02:03:09So we drove up the food stamp program.
02:03:11It's $100 billion a year now.
02:03:12This is the SNAP program.
02:03:15- Doubled from 2010.
02:03:17- Yeah.
02:03:18And roughly-
02:03:21- Holy shit, SNAP spending increased 60X
02:03:24from 1969 to 2022.
02:03:27And it's $100 billion per year,
02:03:29roughly 1.4% of total federal-
02:03:31- So 60 to 70% of people on the food stamp program,
02:03:34which costs a hundred billion a year,
02:03:3660 to 70% are obese, clinically obese.
02:03:38And-
02:03:41- Oh, that are on the food stamp.
02:03:41- That are on the food stamp program.
02:03:43And close to 20 billion of the 100 billion a year
02:03:47is spent on soda.
02:03:49- Fucking hell.
02:03:50That's a one fifth.
02:03:53- One fifth.
02:03:54- One fifth of the money is going to Coca-Cola.
02:03:55- So it starts like from a good place.
02:03:57Like, hey, it's actually started
02:03:58during the Great Depression.
02:03:59It was like-
02:04:00- Can we get a new tonic on SNAP actually?
02:04:01That'd be a great way to raise the valuation of the company.
02:04:03- There you go.
02:04:04- That'd be fucking fantastic.
02:04:05- Yeah.
02:04:06But it started as a, you know, an emergency program,
02:04:11much like the emergency 1% income tax.
02:04:14It started as an emergency program
02:04:16to help people during the Great Depression
02:04:18that were actually starving.
02:04:19And it was like, let's give them bread, give them milk,
02:04:21give them eggs, help them survive.
02:04:23- What's that?
02:04:24I think it's a-
02:04:26- Oh, and sorry, I'll give you my statistic.
02:04:28Today, if you add up federal, state,
02:04:30local government employees,
02:04:32plus all the contractors for the government,
02:04:34plus all the people that live off of a retirement check
02:04:37or a welfare support check,
02:04:39so all the people that are living off government checks,
02:04:41it's about nearly half the U.S. population.
02:04:43- Either working for or being supported by, wow.
02:04:48- So we may be too far gone.
02:04:51That's kind of where democracy is.
02:04:52- 51.
02:04:53- And now, so now think about that person.
02:04:55And I'm not saying that person,
02:04:56like if you're collecting a check
02:04:58every month from the government,
02:05:00you will never vote to have that check go down.
02:05:03You're living on those checks.
02:05:04So we're now-
02:05:05- A sentence.
02:05:06- This is how it maybe eats itself a little bit, right?
02:05:09So you're now in a system where like,
02:05:10will people actually want to say,
02:05:13so you asked why Mom Donnie got elected.
02:05:15Like, I think that you reach a tipping point
02:05:17where this becomes like a wave.
02:05:19And that's how socialism could manifest in this cycle.
02:05:23I think 26 to 28 is going to be the big cycle.
02:05:25And my money's on AOC being president.
02:05:28- Why?
02:05:28- I think this is the wave we're in.
02:05:31And tech is, AI is the boogeyman right now, right?
02:05:35Like, so there's also this,
02:05:37like you always got to pick a fear.
02:05:39Like the Japanese are coming, the Russians are coming,
02:05:41climate change is coming.
02:05:42There's always something-
02:05:43- AI's coming.
02:05:44- AI's coming.
02:05:44That's the fear.
02:05:45And it works.
02:05:46And you know, Bernie Sanders like pounding the table saying,
02:05:51data centers need to be stopped.
02:05:52We got to stop all data centers this week.
02:05:55So, you know, I think we have a choice.
02:05:57I still believe in agency.
02:05:58I still believe everyone can look in the mirror
02:06:00and look at the situation and realize that more government
02:06:03is not going to stop the problem created
02:06:05by too much government.
02:06:06And this is just such a crazy juxtaposition
02:06:12while we're in this exponential technology curve
02:06:16and this abundance curve that we're on.
02:06:18- Yeah, do you feel a little bit like there's a schism
02:06:20going on between what's happening in the real world
02:06:22and the way that it's being perceived?
02:06:24- It's crazy, I mean, like, I think that it's so sad
02:06:27that so many people are so negative.
02:06:29I think, like, people talk about, yes,
02:06:33certainly a lot of people can be struggling.
02:06:36But I think, you know, in the mid-century,
02:06:39coming out of World War II, we were so optimistic as a people.
02:06:43We were so positive about tomorrow.
02:06:45All of our conversations about tomorrow were all about,
02:06:48we're going to go to the moon.
02:06:49We're all going to move around in, you know, electric trams.
02:06:53We're all going to have a microwave in our kitchen.
02:06:56You know, I always tell people the analogy,
02:06:58if you pull up, I'll do this for your audience,
02:07:01if you pull up the Disney History Institute YouTube channel,
02:07:05and there's an episode on Tomorrowland.
02:07:07When they opened up Tomorrowland in 1955,
02:07:09it was all about this optimism of tomorrow.
02:07:11And it was like, every ride was all about tomorrow
02:07:13being incredible.
02:07:14It's like, we're all going to, like, go to the moon.
02:07:16There was a ride called the Rocket to the Moon.
02:07:18You go to the moon and back.
02:07:19You move, and then they had an inside the house of tomorrow.
02:07:23Where everyone had a microwave,
02:07:24so you could cook your dinner in 30 seconds.
02:07:26It was like the future.
02:07:27People were like, mind blown, that's so cool.
02:07:29And you know, and then I think we kind of,
02:07:31so then in the video, they say like in the 1970s,
02:07:33they changed over every ride
02:07:34to make it all about the fear of tomorrow.
02:07:36It was like, Star Tours was a robot that like,
02:07:39made the mistake.
02:07:40It's a navigator robot.
02:07:41And of course the navigator robot has to screw up.
02:07:44So you veer off course and nearly crash in an asteroid.
02:07:47They took out the rocket to the moon
02:07:48and replaced it with Space Mountain,
02:07:50which is a rocket ship that veers off course
02:07:51and spins violently through the galaxy.
02:07:53Captain EO was Michael Jackson coming back to planet earth.
02:07:56And he's like, hey, we're going to destroy the robots
02:07:59that took over the earth.
02:08:00And him and his organic band destroy all the robots.
02:08:02- All the apocalyptic.
02:08:03- And so like, you know,
02:08:04we've kind of gotten into this very pessimistic view.
02:08:06And I think like, you know,
02:08:07if we can change people's aperture a bit
02:08:11and get them to be optimistic, instead of pessimistic,
02:08:14they can see how promising tomorrow is
02:08:17and not need to feel sheltered and, you know,
02:08:21taken care of and fundamentally creating a burden
02:08:24to these bigger social systems,
02:08:26these governmental type systems,
02:08:28people I think might change their view.
02:08:32I'm hopeful.
02:08:33That's why we're having this conversation.
02:08:35But like, that's the sort of thing
02:08:36that I think we need to be doing.
02:08:38It's like showing people all the amazing shit that's happening
02:08:41and how much it's going to benefit you
02:08:42and how crazy awesome it is.
02:08:44And like, you're going to be able to spend more time
02:08:46with your kids.
02:08:47The cost of food's going down.
02:08:48The cost of energy is going to go down.
02:08:49Like we're all going to have robots
02:08:50that can build stuff for us
02:08:51and you're going to be able to spend more time
02:08:52with your family, like on and on and on.
02:08:54Like housing needs to get cheap.
02:08:56But like fighting against these things is just so,
02:08:59it's so crazy that we would, you know, do that.
02:09:03Like, you know, there's this whole story about Germany
02:09:06fought against nuclear energy
02:09:07and then their energy costs spiked
02:09:08and now they have to buy natural gas from Russia
02:09:10and just put carbon into the atmosphere,
02:09:12which is what they were trying to fight against
02:09:14in the first place.
02:09:15- Yeah, yeah.
02:09:16I wonder whether people being more hopeful
02:09:19would mean that they would vote in a less fear-based way.
02:09:22- That's right.
02:09:23- And that anybody that's talking about hope,
02:09:28if you feel fearful,
02:09:30sounds like they're dismissive of the problems
02:09:32that you're facing.
02:09:32- Yeah.
02:09:33- That seems like the dynamic that's going on.
02:09:35- Yeah, that's right.
02:09:35It's like, I'm not empathizing with your pain.
02:09:38- Yeah.
02:09:39- And if I-
02:09:39- And a lot of the time-
02:09:40- And by the way, if I empathize with your pain,
02:09:41we have to figure out an enemy responsible for your pain.
02:09:44- Damn.
02:09:45- Damn.
02:09:45- I think it was 2012 that votes went from voting
02:09:49for the party you liked-
02:09:51- Yeah.
02:09:51- To voting against the party that you don't.
02:09:53- Yeah.
02:09:53I mean, there's all these videos now,
02:09:55we don't need to pull these up,
02:09:56but obviously all the people that were like,
02:09:57we gotta go attack Iran, we gotta attack Iran.
02:09:59And then when Trump did it, or we gotta go get Maduro,
02:10:02Trump does it.
02:10:03It's like, well, Trump did it, we gotta all be against it.
02:10:06Like, I don't know what happened-
02:10:07- Well, you saw the flip-flop with the vaccine.
02:10:08- Yeah.
02:10:09- When it was Trump's vaccine, or it was Sanders' vaccine.
02:10:12And each side was like, "I'm fucked, wait, no, I'm not."
02:10:16- And I don't know when we got,
02:10:18there was a flippening that happened,
02:10:20probably around the time you're describing-
02:10:21- The flippening.
02:10:22- Yeah, when people went from like,
02:10:24"Hey, there's a set of things we agree on,
02:10:28and a bunch of stuff we disagree on,"
02:10:30to like, "Anything that you do or say, I disagree with."
02:10:33- Yeah.
02:10:33- And that's politics.
02:10:34- Regardless of whether it's good or bad.
02:10:35- Yeah, yeah.
02:10:37- David Friedberg.
02:10:37- Yeah, thank you. - Thank you, gentlemen.
02:10:39You're great.
02:10:40I appreciate all the work you do.
02:10:41- I appreciate it, bro.
02:10:41Thank you for having me.
02:10:42- Fuck yeah. - It was great.
02:10:43- All right, goodbye everybody.
02:10:44Dude, yes.
02:10:46- Great, thank you.
02:10:46- Good shit.
02:10:47- Oh, good.