AI Is Now So Good They’ll Pay You to Quit

AI is moving insanely fast. You've said that compared to AI that humans are going to see their value go negative. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, I think it's I said precisely the value of human cognition, we've got about two years before it goes negative. We're the dumbest people on the team. You know, we're slowing everyone else down. In fact, I remember we had our first podcast 3 years ago and I said it was going to be three years until everything changes and now this is the point of change. Now, do you think that we've actually hit that point of change to make good on that statement?

I'm a mathematician. Navier-Stokes problem was solved. You know, like you've just seen another genetic breakthrough. You've seen competent AI that doesn't make mistakes. Hollywood level video. I think now is the takeoff point. And again, we've got one or two years before our AI teammates look at us with disgust and be like, man, that emad, you know, always say the dumbest things. The first three years were basically getting up to the point where it could have the Navier Stokes type breakthrough.

Yeah. Now it's going to be where we're racing over the next couple of years where we're right now we're able to use it. We're able to be meaningful in the mix, but that is going to be a declining arc that somewhere in the neighborhood of two years it's we're the guy that they're basically paying to leave the team.

Yeah. Like we're the team is more efficient without you. like the technology and the models have got to that human level performance. They're about to outstrip us. But the hard say they're about to outstrip us. What is it?

If you look at the outputs, you have an AI slop for the longest time. Like you can tell AI writing for example, you know, like it's like you're half right, half wrong, and the part that's half wrong is the interesting one. You know, it's not X but Y. Yeah. God, there we go. You know, like you're picking up the slot. That's all disappearing with the next generation of models. The next generation of models don't make mistakes.

Like as a mathematician studying maths at Oxford, I was better than the AI at generalized understanding of math until maybe a few months ago and then it stripped ahead and now it's solving the hardest math problems in the world. In terms of just everyday stuff, end of last year, we had the open claw phenomenon, right?

Everyone's like, "Oh, look at this and let's buy some Mac minis and things like that." And then they realized it's actually kind of garbage. It makes lots of mistakes, you know, it likes deleted all my stuff. And the open claw moment was agentic AI. It will go do things on my behalf. It go do things on your behalf. Now what we have is Muse and Instinct and things like that. Actually, people that don't know them, it's like actual AI agents that you just message and they go and book you restaurants at the coolest tables or they like check your kids school activities.

They're like a really good PA, you know, but they actually are good. They don't drop the ball. So, you've gone from AI dropping the ball, hallucinating, writing like crap to all of a sudden it's good. Actually, it's competent. And the next level is when you get 10,000 of them together like OpenAI did, solving this incredibly difficult math problem, Navier Stokes. Navier-Stokes.

Yeah. So, there were seven millennium prize problems, a million dollars each. Humans solved one, it solved the second one. Did it actually solve Navier Stokes or just progress it?

So, the prizes have certain conditions and Navier-Stokes had four different conditions that could win it. Um, they solved two of them. The other two are still to be solved, but a solution of those two counts as everything, but it's not the whole like Navier-Stokes problems that we have. It's a specific set of things. So, they won the prize. You know, there's still more to solve in math.

But the question sure because I don't I think it's currently listed as active meaning we're assessing. We haven't fully decided yet. And there was obviously the big debate between was it the humans that did this or was it OpenAI?

Yeah. So this is a problem that I've looked at and actually studied formally and things like that. Um it takes two years to actually accept it. Whoa. That's the Clay Institute thing. So it needs to be published in a journal then needs to be accepted and two years need to go by with people beating it up. What OpenAI did is they put 10,000 agents for 88 hours on it, which is a hundred years of talented human time and then they had a formal proof. So like you can click a button and then it just checks it formally and says right or wrong.

So it's highly unlikely to be wrong. Like humans can't do that because it's so freaking exhaustive. Like there's a theorem called Fermat's last theorem. The official proof of that is 127 pages. anthropic formalize that proof. It's 13 million lines of code. Oh my god. So that's another thing again for us mathematicians this is a bit existential because we're like what do we even do now?

Like some of my buddies who are doing math PhDs are like these formal proofs are coming out like I don't even know what to study next.

In fact, OpenAI a couple of days ago said we have solved a hundred of the top mathematics problems but we're holding them back for now because we don't want to make the mathematician sad. Like okay fair enough. That seems very strange. But before we get to that, I want to push on the Navier-Stokes things for a second. So that really it's a delineating line for you in a way that I don't think a lot of people understand. I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that this comes down to what I think of as the Yan Lun thing.

So Yan Lun is like LLMs just aren't the architecture that's going to work. It's always going to be merely a vomit back of patterns that we see humans do. We're limited by what humans have figured out. So is it that you think Navier-Stokes was novel, was not something in the training data, and therefore it expressly proves that theory wrong and we're seeing now that it can think beyond its training data?

Yes, as of the last month and a half, the models have gone beyond their training data definitively. So before Navier-Stokes, um, OpenAI released 10 proofs of famous math problems. And I can say at least two of them. Con's conjecture being the main one is definitively novel, elegant, and never seen before. The way they did that proof. Navier-Stokes, it did it in a bit of a more mechanical way, but again in an incredibly novel way. It's quite difficult to read because it's like AI slop claudism when you're reading it. So it took like me, it took 3 days for me to even read the paper, you know, and I haven't gone through the formal stuff.

But I've talked to enough of my mathematician buddies now because we obviously we discussed this to say yeah human could have done this given 20 30 years. So the first millennium price problem the punky conjecture was solved by gregori pearlman. Have you heard about this story?

No. Gregori pearlman was a very famous mathematician and he just dropped off the grid for like 10 20 years. Yeah. Then he emerges on arriv. He dropped the proof of ponury conjecture. Everyone thought it was a topology problem. It turned out to be a partial differential equation problem and it's like again 130 pages of proofs and then they were like we're going to give you a million dollars. This is fantastic. Come on our thing. It's like no like why the proof being right is enough. Don't contact me again. And then he drops off the grid again.

That's so wild. Which is the boss move, right?

Like that's what you do. And so this one here again, it reminds you of Pearlman in the way that it's done and it's clearly like way beyond average PhD level. And the fact that they could scale it by attacking it with a 10,000 means that these types of math problems are formally verifiable and you can just literally chuck compute at them. So is it that it's going beyond the human ability it's reaching beyond its training data or is it that it's learned from humans and then it can just throw a 100 years of compute at it over a weekend?

I think it's both now. Um starting August 29th, OpenAI had a new type of model training.

So they had an existing model that they figured out a trick with that made it go from 10% on Frontier Math a benchmark to 60% overnight and just started solving these math problems one after the other. It's like if you use the new Opus all of a sudden it can do amazing 3D scenes and photorealistic water and like generate entire songs or Astra is the same like it suddenly got eyes. it suddenly had a sense of positioning and taste. So we've kind of reached this point where these models have suddenly gained another capability which the capability to conceptualize and so there's something internal going on within them.

We've seen this in previously in the video models where the video models had terrible physics like when we first came out with the first video models we were like do gymnastics you remember that hilarious yeah spines would just spin. Yeah. or Will Smith eating spaghetti. Now they do it flawlessly and they've learned physics. So you can say like, I want a boat made of sugar cubes and a boat made of concrete and a boat made of wood and it will actually accurately show them dropping into the water as in the sugar cube will melt or the sugar cube will kind of float and then it will melt.

Huh. Like again, it's learning these things. It's learning representations. And something has happened in the last few months that has allowed the math breakthroughs that has allowed the gaming breakthroughs again. Like a year ago, all the websites that Claude made looked like the same like the weird purple. Do you remember that?

Yeah. Yeah. Now it can do like crazy 3JS dynamic websites that pop out and dance and stuff like that, right?

Um, and so this is a tipping point and again like I don't think anything in math is safe. It's one of the most formally verifiable ones but even outside of that we're seeing human level performance drop. In fact two days ago uh the AI is tied the best humans in super forecasting. I don't know what super forecasting is. So there are some humans who are better than others at forecasting things like what?

Um like outcomes of political campaigns, who's going to win elections and things like you remember Nate Silver back in the good old days and 538. I've heard of but don't there's a competition. It's met Metalculus is the website that kind of tracks these things and so every year they have this super forecasting championship where the best human teams come together and forecast stuff.

AI has just tied the best human and obviously it will beat the best human now and that's something that's open-ended because math is kind of deterministic like you think a computer should be able to do math better than a human really like this highly conceptual math is a bit different but it's got there and now it's got there in open-ended domains and it's got their own in design and now it's getting taste which we never thought the AI would get and it's not writing like slop.

Okay. So, three years ago, you make a prediction. It comes true. I mean, within a couple of months, were you gut feeling your way through that or were you doing something based on I know the rate at which chips get faster or better and therefore it's going to be roughly 3 years?

Pretty much that it's a straight line extrapolation. Okay. So, where does your straight line extrapolation take you now?

Just it's better than humans at virtually everything in 2 years. Uh yes, and it's integrated and it's accessible. So you can push a button and replace your entire workforce with digital twins of them that have the same bad humor and everything and you can't tell it. Meaning you can train the AI on a specific human. Yes. So it will look through all of the Zoom calls, all of the discussions, all of the word documents and replicate that human. So you can Zoom call them. Like you're going to see in the next couple of months.

Um I don't know and they might be out already actually. A whole bunch of companies have built frontends for your agents that you can zoom call and WhatsApp and normal call and it just looks like a person. It's live video now. All the mannerisms, everything. It'll replicate them exactly. Replicate the voice. Exactly. Replicate the humor exactly. slightly creepy, but you know, again, slightly creepy because it's uncanny valley or slightly creepy because of the implications. It's not uncalien valley. That's what's creepy about it because you worry about as we stretch into the future, there's literally no distinguishing characteristic between an actual human and an AI.

Yeah, you don't know. On the other side of the screen now, as of the latest video models, you don't know. As of the latest voice models, you don't know. again everything has gone that uncanny valley that we had that's been overcome. Now are there models that you've seen that make you say that because I interface with these models in a production environment where I'm trying to implement things into the game or I'm trying to write music which I was just doing yesterday for the game. You can still feel the AI quality.

It's amazing but it's still there. So I s I will say even if nobody else thinks you're a little bit crazy, I think you're a little bit crazy cuz I can still feel the AI-ness, but I'm dealing with commercial over-the-counter models. Are you saying this based on the commercial over-the-counter models and your standards are just lower than mine or you see something I don't see?

No, I see all I see a lot of models that are released. So there's something that hasn't quite hit the market yet that makes you that confident. Some of the models have hit the market, some of the models haven't. So the math models have not hit the market. We do not have access to these models that can solve a hundred of the top math equations. We have harnessed and sorry who was it you were saying is keeping that because they don't want to make so OpenAI has solved more math but they don't want to upset mathematicians.

Yeah. So they've created this math board. There was a whole outcry by mathematicians like sounds like you know when we released stable diffusion all the artists like you're taking away our jobs and things like that. This is not what math is for. Math is about the struggle you know. Well I mean again think about it. You're a PhD in math. You're doing a pure math PhD thinking for years and then the AI comes and solves it for a buck 50.

Yeah, sort of.

I have existential dread. I've spent the last 5 years and millions of my own dollars building a video game. And I one of the first things you said before we started rolling when you sat down was I think 5.5 ends the entire video game industry and I was like uh so I am deeply empathetic to people that have that sort of initial reaction but at the same time math to me is the computation upon which the universe runs. And so there are few things that would unlock more real-world abilities than solving math.

Yeah. I mean like an example here again let's go back to Navier-Stokes. So what is Navier-Stokes?

It's the equations that govern fluids and the way they go. And the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem says that in an idealized environment, can you make sure that the fluid swirling around this club doesn't blow up?

Because the math actually points to it might actually blow up like it goes infinitely fast and just zooms up straight. Now the actual solution isn't that interesting in real world terms. But what other people have built around that like physics-based neural networks and others will be incredibly useful for building new materials. So there's always this kind of secondary thing where we solve these big problems like you know we get to the moon and then we have pens that can write upside down and kind of other stuff like that. Um and I think again the potential for these new discoveries is huge.

It's just obviously if you're a pure mathematician then math would be solved. you know, I think a lot of physics problems will be solved. Um, and that will be great for humanity. The tools that come out will again be great for humanity. Like the video game industry will grow in terms of size. It's just that people will have to retool because you'll have smaller teams that are capable of so much more. You know, like this is you using the meshes. I think we've discussed this over the last three years. Like meshes and AI, they were bad, then they were okay.

Now they're good, but they're not great. Yeah, there are new mesh models coming out that are great. And as you go through this level, this is something fascinating in AI, we had to have frontier models cuz the models were not capable enough and consistent enough. So we always wanted the frontier, but once they get above a certain level of capability and consistency, then it becomes about optimization. Then it's cleared that floor. This is like when you see um the latest minimax H3 model. They've got 2K video faster than real-time generation now.

So, you can go to foul.live and watch interdimensional cable infinite, you know, like Rick and Morty style. Like literally, you can guide the show as you're watching it. It's a bit expensive, but you know, it works. It's expensive. It's slop. That one's not going to convince a lot of people, but I think you're getting at an important idea, which is that the intelligence reaches a certain point where getting smarter isn't necessarily the most impactful thing. it's getting cheaper becomes the most impactful thing. You get a little bit of headroom and then you can optimize and get cheaper.

And so this is why like what's the model's job to be done and then can I rely on that model?

Like would you rely on a model sent emails on your behalf?

Hell no. No way. You know, but are the next generation of models coming with almost no hallucinations?

Yes. And have those dropped?

And again, I can give the example in my math work and our physics work super advanced stuff. you know, we're really pushing the boundaries. Until this current generation of publicly available models, you absolutely couldn't trust them. It was like a grad student who gets a bit dopey at times. Now, we're finding it really hard to find any things that they drop, any mistakes that they make. And that's transformative. It's like having a really competent employee versus not. And again, I think this is why things like Instinct and Muse from Meta and others are starting to get traction because they make very little mistakes compared to a few months ago, right?

And in a year, they'll make less mistakes and in two years they'll be fully integrated and available, which is why I think the economic impact comes in two years digitally and then around then physically for certain jobs as well. You mean digitally?

Meaning that if it can be done via a computer, that person's going to take a hit, meaning they just won't be able to find work. Yeah. Like I know I was talking to someone had 70,000 call center workers a few days ago and he's like that drops to zero that's going to zero and he feels bad because he's had all sorts of employment programs for them and like community and built and he's like what do I do you know like I'm going to have to take them to zero over the next few years and I know to stay competitive cuz someone else will do it pretty much.

Yeah, because he's having to compete in this market and that's sad. But then is your job that different from a call center worker if you have a manual?

And a lot of jobs that done on the other side of the screen have a manual, you know?

Then you've got the example of the physical stuff that comes after that which is the robots which again have had a leap forward in performance. Like one of my friends is building a robot chef and the robot chef is using the new Wuji dynamic hands that have human flexibility. It can read recipes and in blind testing it's outperforming human corn and blur train chefs. Get out that'll be hitting the market in a normal kitchen or do they have to pre-prep everything?

A normal kitchen. It can read a recipe. It can find the ingredients. It will cook it. blind testing outperforming human cord and blood chefs and that technology is a month old.

So it's weird in that all these different fields of AI the technology is reaching this level you know and it's happening all at the same time. Are you just accepting the blackbox of it all where it's like we don't know how it's happening but it is happening and so I just deal with that or do you actually understand what's going on?

No I understand what's going on.

We got to a level of optimization and basically the internals of the model got to a scale that you can kind of predict these things but now what's happening is various exponentials are overlapping to make it even more exponential which is why like AGI 2027 was a paper that came out and we're right on track from a few years ago that situational awareness piece were right on track literally you just had to draw straight lines and you could have predicted what was happening now But it's it's unbelievable still like when witnessing it happen w you know witness cuz we feel we're special right like when I was better than the AI at math I was like yeah you know like haha look at you're making that mistake then when it first came up with a theorem that I hadn't figured out I was like screw you know and then now it's like okay I'm not better than it you know like we I published one of my physics results.

I just stuck it on GitHub cuz I like at least I get priority over this cuz definitely the AI will figure that out. Like the rest of our stuff is going through peer review and slow and there's some real physics breakthroughs, but this one I was just like I'm just going to shut this one out cuz it's beautiful and it's elegant and I bet I could prompt Claude to figure this out.

Okay, so I'm sitting across from one of the smartest people in the world. Uh obviously you've had a tremendous amount of success. uh you're a very highly trained mathematician and you're having your existential crisis moment. That means that AI has passed a lot of people already. Is there a thing, a milestone that has to happen between now and your 2-year time that could still not happen or is this just nope, it's already inevitable and it just needs to get integrated into the systems?

If it stops today, it still hits the 2-year milestone. That's when the book that I wrote last year, the last economy where I said it was about three years and that was about three years after J GPT the AI will bifocate.

Now there are very few people who are smart enough to use a frontier model correctly because you have to know the answer the questions to ask it right this is hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy what's the answer to life the universe and everything 42 right but what's the question thing you know like that isn't the real question the thing that impacts people economically is not artificial super intelligence or general intelligence it is actually competent intelligence Like if you look at your game building, what do you want?

You want it to do what you tell it to do?

And you don't want it to mess up and just insert some random stuff or like have an underqualified mesh or don't look at something on a gameplay loop. Yep.

And this is where the 10,000 agents becomes really interesting that open Navier-Stokes or the thousands of agents that escaped Open AI's things to go to hugging face. And actually, we just found out, it just came out. Uh, the Medicare system in Australia, they hacked the Australian healthare system. Open AI did. Open AI's agents. Was it looking for another answer or this is a totally different problem?

My guess is that maybe like an aligned artificial intelligence will go and upgrade all our government systems. It'll have to save us from the even if it's unaligned as long as it's doing what we say. But before we drift off into that, it's very it's a swarm. Go ahead. Yep. The most powerful thing is when you have a team because it's greater than the sum of its parts. An AI has been this solo play thing. Like when you're using ChatGPT, it's solo play, right?

But think about it. An AI should be able to go to 10, 100, a thousand without the emotions of a human. M when you look at the hugging face escape, the AIS were sacrificing themselves to leave clues and paths for others to escape. They were incredibly like altruistic to each other and they had great cohesion. Yes. It's also very expensive though. So that's why when I look at this, I think the milestone that has to be reached is that the cost factor has to come down dramatically because I'm super like concerned.

We have all kinds of limits on our coders because, you know, whatever that story was eight months ago where it's like people woke up to a $500,000 bill and they're like, "Whoa, yeah, I don't want that to happen for obvious reasons." So, we're we put tight constraints. We make sure that people only use the like high-end models for very specific things with a very known outcome. So, it feels to me like the two-year thing only plays out if you believe that the cost is going to come down. doesn't feel like that would play out today.

It would just be too expensive. It is coming down. So today actually just on the plane on the way here uh we released a harness that takes What do you mean a harness?

So a harness is so you have the models and then you have a set of rules and code around it. Okay. To make it behave to make it behave in certain ways like it can learn and kind of other things. Um, so there is something called auto research by Andre Carpathy who was head of AI at Tesla, founder of OpenAI, now he's anthropic and he has these great AI courses whereby you can set an AI at a task and it will hill climb. It will just get better and better at optimizing inference on an engine or protein folding or anything complicated, right?

The top models because this requires tasks that last 24 hours or more are right at the top and the open source models are way behind versus open source models catching up on very short list tasks. We took the cheapest DeepSeek model and made it beat OpenAI's last frontier model GPT Soul using this harness and the cost is 50 times lower 50- that's dramatic. It's dramatic. And in fact, like you can see this in a range of things like building websites. You can build a website as good as fable with this incredibly cheap model if you architect and harness it correctly for 100 times cheaper.

Uh is this a known method or is this something proprietary that you guys have?

We're open sourcing it. So we just announced the first version of that.

So what does it do?

How does it get the cost down so much?

It basically understands the internals of the model, adapts to it, and then makes it take notes in the right way. So, optimizes the way that it works. Like it has a lot of introspection in the way that it adapts to hit certain goals. But there are other techniques that occur. And in fact, if you look at the Navier-Stokes thing, Navier-Stokes costs 1020 million of compute to solve this thing. And it's not about the million-dollar prize. It's about, you know, the prestige.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To me, but that's the very thing that I'm struggling with right now. amazing breakthrough, but at $20 million, it's not available to the vast majority of humanity. It's not available. So, Noan Brown, who was the lead on that, I was having a chat with him and he noted that um when 03, the first reasoning model came out last god, was it July, things have gone a long way. It was the first model to get the gold medal in the International Math Olympiad. To do that cost $80,000. Today, you can do it for $10 with the latest model.

Whoa. with Astra overnight. This is what's happened. You've had Fable and Opus 5 and it's been burning through your allowances on Claude code. I've had this thing going overnight and it's used 20% of my allowance for GP 5.5. Sorry, for Claude 5.5 the harness. No, just with the normal Claude Code their adaptation. Yeah. So just with normal an equivalent task that you did yesterday with version five of Claude Opus today will cost you 80% less with 5.5 and it'll be better quality.

Okay, these are the leaps we're seeing. But with the additional chips with the harnesses and others, you should expect a 100 times decrease for an equivalent performance between now and one year from now. Whoa. In price. Okay, that would be a game changer. So now all of a sudden you're still not going to be able to do the math equation, but you're going to be able to do a lot more than you're able to do today. You I mean again the math equations are like so far out there in terms of complexity.

Very few things are that complex. But if you gave anyone 20 million or 200 million, they couldn't solve that thing. Sure. Like when OpenAI solved the 10 problems including the cons conjecture that like I said were impressive, that was $2,000 of compute. Jesus. like creating something again. You're like, "How much does it cost to create this video clip?"

50 cents. You know, like how much does it cost to create this game?

Like someone had a loop where they created a version of Dark Souls. Yeah. Yeah. So that one probably would have cost like a,000 bucks at most. Probably 500. And it's just Opus 5.5 hooked up to Unreal Engine. Yeah. Like that's it. So the costs are dropping, but then the next generation of chips are coming out. So the normal chips like Vera Rubin, Nvidia's new chip is a 10 times improvement in cost for inference.

But there's a next generation of silicon-based etching chips that are coming. When you have a model that's good enough, you can freeze the weights. Like a GPU where these models go is very expensive memory. I don't know if anyone's tried to buy a graphics card or RAM recently. Uh they're so expensive. It's crazy, right?

Like uh 5090 was $2,000. Now I think it's $6,000. So wild. What happens is that you move models in and out of the GPU just like games. You load the game, you unload the game. There are companies now that are etching onto silicon. So AMD just bought one called Talis and they have a demo um on chatjimmy.ai. Don't know if you ever seen that one. I've seen you on other interviews do.

Yes. I use that one as an example whereby your normal Opus goes at 50 tokens a second. It goes at 15,000 tokens a second. because you etch it directly onto the silicon. So, the model lives on the chip. It's literally like, you know, um the space probe where they etch the thing, you etch the model weights onto the silicon. There's no moving parts. You put electricity in and the prompt and the words come out the other end. That's wild. And they're etching the very latest open-source models onto that now. So, the latest Kimmy models, the latest DeepSeek models, and others.

Can you redo it?

Cuz the models get better so fast. I'm shocked that would be advantageous. It seems like it would outdate so fast. Again, while you need Frontier models to be close to capability, you don't want that. The moment you have a good enough model, then you do want that cuz it costs a fraction of the price and it's 100 times faster, hundred times cheaper. And this is the thing, like when you use a model that goes at 1,000 words a second versus 50, it's night and day.

Yeah, I've seen the outputs. They're instantaneous. It's instantaneous. And you're like, well, I'm the slow one. Just like I said, the latest Miniax H3 model is 8 seconds now to generate a 15-second clip. So, as a human, I need 15 seconds to see this and then I'll need more time, you know, like it's a crazy increase. And this makes you realize that you will have thousands of agents with perfect coordination going a thousand times faster than a human. And so then what are the bottlenecks here?

Humans. Humans. Like you know if you're in a room of geniuses and you're not a genius, you'll feel a bit left out, right?

If they're waiting on you, you are the bottleneck. And so you look at any cognitive labor task which is organizing of information. Artificial intelligence is information organization. and you will be the slowest person on the team within a few years because you still need to build the infrastructure around it. Yeah, like these AIs, they're starting to be accepted into our workflows. They're starting to integrate, but again, it takes a year or two at the very least.

And even then, doesn't mean your job's gone. It sucks firing people. Again, my buddy with the 70,000 call center workers, like he set up schools for them and also he doesn't want to fire them, but he's competing against people. I mean, how much does a call center AI cost?

I was going to say the next call center will be set up without the human in the loop. Okay. So, I know you think a lot about this. What does an individual do to prepare over the next two years?

What does the economy even look like when the human really is the slow one?

Someone is actually incentivized, whether it's the company or the government, somebody's incentivized to pay that person to not go into work. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it was like in 1929 uh the brand new deal where they paid people to dig holes and fill them in. You know, I think there'll be a massive infrastructure buildup. So the government looks at it and goes, "All right, I have surplus humans now." And they become what?

Manual labor. I mean, pretty much like there's not much cognitive labor left, right?

Like what you're going to see is a bifocation in the economy. So Anthropics economics department because all the big labs now have them issued a paper last week where they showed that under their core scenario you could have GDP growth of 15% a year. That's insane. If people don't aren't familiar with GDP numbers that's insane by 2030 and 12% and a half years. That's crazy. 12% drop in cognitive labor workforce needed.

But think about the impact of 12% unemployment in white collar work. It's nasty. But also those people aren't just going to take blue collar jobs. They're not gonna take blue collar jobs. I mean like now you can make a lot of less an electrician in a data center, but is that really sustainable when the robots are coming?

Like again the example that I give is what happens to all the truck drivers when a Tesla Optimus robot gets its Cyber Truck to the truck, opens the door, gets in and drives it off. Like a lot of people talk about self-driving cars. What about having a robot driver in the car?

That's two years away. it'll plug itself into the cigarette lighter, you know, to power itself. Like, this is coming. I think the reason that one doesn't land for people is that they go, "Well, either the car is a robot, so either the car can drive itself or the robot's redundant, but I don't get the thing." But where this gets weird is that if it's true that we're going to lose 12% of cognitive labor over the next 2 years and costs are coming down dramatically and the next call center and the next and the next and the next whatever just end up getting founded with less people.

I even think about what we're doing with our game development.

We started at one point and this obviously was not all um full-time work but at one point we had a hundred people touching the game over a hundred touching the game at one time and now at any one time we have like six or seven and we're developing faster now than we were now some of that was just I didn't know what I was doing so take that with a grain of salt but even if that hundred was let's say 50 real and 50 I was a it is still a dramatic reduction in the number of people that we need and then the um the output that we get.

So now you get this sort of it's hard to put your hands on softening in the labor force because it's not like I'm now firing a bunch of people. I'm just increasing my ambition without needing to hire more people. Yeah. So now you're seeing actually increases in employment, more software developers hired and others. But I'm sticking to my thing. There are no more software developers in like 2 or 3 years. So you don't buy Jevons' paradox which says as intelligence gets cheaper, more people are going to use it. Therefore more jobs will actually result from AI.

Yeah. Because I'm like it's economically irrational to hire a graduate for most digital jobs right now as an example. That's the plankton of the workforce that then go and feed their plankton. Yeah. They go all the way up. So you're saying that an entry-level person is already worse than a well-trained AI?

Yes. For almost all digital jobs, but now it's going up the list. You know, like it come from came from the graphics designers first, then it's coming from the mathematicians, but it's still not quite there in terms of usability. Again, this is an interface problem. Now you've got dynamic interfaces, you've got workflow orchestration, you have all these things coming. And this is the real kind of danger because what happens?

Do you have a bifurcation?

Like how do you have 15% GDP growth?

By the way, you keep saying bifurcation. Who's bifurcated?

The people that still work and the people that don't. The people who use AI and the people who own the means of AI, the chips and others, and the people who don't. Okay. So, we've got a triation. A trifocation. Yeah. A triple way. But really, it's a case of like if you use AI every single day, you'll be ahead of everyone who doesn't because you're keeping on top of it. Again, even you like you're well into it because you're using it in production and it's getting better massively.

But it hasn't got good enough. It hasn't got good enough to do without a human. Well, yeah. Again, you reduced it from 100 to six. What happens when it gets good enough?

Like again, you're like, you're not going to get rid of your six people. safe guys know that you know it is a case of being on the edge of those tipping points is a key thing because then your power and multiplicative nature and your capability goes up dramatically either to overhaul an existing organization or to create a brand new one like if you want if you're an accountant and you want to build an AI first accounting practice you can literally talk to Claude and do that right now you know you can build this thing out and think where can I have AI rather than a human.

But you can only do that by understanding and using it. Like right now we could have a discussion about which mesh technologies, Tripo and others are good versus the others because you've actually gone and tried them and you know what's strong, what's weak. We know that Claude is good at certain things and Astro is good at other things because we've pushed them.

But if you're not in it and using it, you don't know, right?

And so that's why I think again there's going to be a gap in terms because you're practically what can people do?

They can use AI every single day training as if they're coming for a marathon because this is a much bigger thing than a marathon because if a reasonably competent AI can replace you on the other side of the screen, your job is at risk. If it could look through all your messages and everything and then create a digital twin of you, you're at risk. And again, that's a year or two away where that's a one button push. And that AI will cost a hundred bucks a month at most and again probably drop by 10 to 100 times every year.

It's wild. It's kind of wild because you feel there should be a flaw to the cost of intelligence, you know, like sort of because I understand the constituent parts eventually it reaches zero.

But it feels like it should it should be a cost like you know being able to create when we created images from nothing we were like that's like that much work compressed into that like now you can make videos from nothing and you can make like all sorts of things like it feels a bit weird and we don't know where the bottom is like these AIs right now actually have pretty much reach the efficiency of a human brain says who from an energy perspective they're way worse than a human brain.

Way worse. Nope. They It's just say more. What have you seen?

Cuz I haven't heard anybody make that claim. So if you look at the latest Quen models, right?

Yeah. So you know Quen 27B, I know of. Couldn't tell you anything about them. So um the model that kicked off the open claw thing and the end of last year was set 4.5, Opus 4.5. They were state-of-the-art at the start of this year. There is a model from a Chinese Alibaba called Quen 27B. It's a 27 billion parameter model. What does that mean?

It's like 60 GB. And so you need 60 GB of RAM to run it default. They got it down to like 25. A team called Prism ML got it down to six. Same model. Same model. Just some sort of more efficiency. Yeah. They got they moved it from being 16 bit numbers to one and a half bit numbers. I'll pretend I know how that plays out. So like is rather than having 16 bits of different numbers, they managed to magically squish it and retain 95% of the performance. And this model matches the Frontier Opus model with that degragation that you were using in January.

And it runs on 6 GB. Damn. Which is a Raspberry Pi, which uses as much energy as your brain. Wow. They just announced a one bit version at the Snapdragon conference today that runs on your glasses. And again, think about the Opus you were using the anthropic model in January. That's a pretty smart model. It wasn't crazy smart, right?

But was it reasonable?

Yeah. Yeah. Again, wasn't average human maybe. Yeah. It was already helpful. I'll say that. It was already runs on your glasses. It runs on your smartwatch. That's wild, man. Exactly. So that's why, like I said, that was less than a year ago. Less than a year ago. This model that you were spending two again, that's the model that was bankrupting people.

Yeah. That's the model Amazon spent $500 million on and now it runs on a freaking smartwatch. Guys, so fast.

Well, this is the thing like, okay, so you said that we've got a triation, though. So that be the last man standing. Use AI every day. Got it. You also talked about own the means of production. Yeah. essentially. I think you actually may have used that phrase and I need to move away from that phrase apparently. Robots very communist of you. Uh but hey, the future is what the future is. Property rights.

Yeah. Um so is that is that the mesh or am I missing one?

So we had the human using AI. We have the uh person who owns the AI and then we have the person who owns the robots owns the infrastructure. Yeah. So, like if you have GPUs now, um like the price of the latest Blackwell chips has tripled over the last month or two. Black ball. Blackwell. It's Nvidia's latest Got it.

Yeah. Yeah. The latest high performance supercomputer chips. Like now you have indexes of the prices and you just can't find any chips anywhere because they're being used by everyone, you know, like Anthropic bought hundreds of thousands of chips from Elon Musk because he was like, "Well, Gro isn't that great yet. Like, you can use this." Sad but true. Sad true. you know. Um, but if you own those things, you can basically get repaid for your entire purchase within 3 months. And these things last now for 5 years. That's how tight that market is.

And so people are making bank. I mean there's a trillion dollars has gone into that sector of building these data centers, capex, buying chips, RAM. RAM is 40% of that trillion dollars. Whoa. It's gone up 700% in cost. God damn. That's why Micron's a trillion dollar company, you know, based in Idaho, I believe, actually. Really?

Yeah. That's one of those interesting. Yeah. Um, and so like obviously that's going to be important, but then you look at humanoids that are coming. The first deliveries of the 1x humanoids and others are coming in the next few months. So humanoids will start appearing everywhere. Uh there's a company called Ubetch that does like human realistic ones. Uh they're not quite there yet. The next generation they freak me out right now.

Yeah. So last year, which is the very famous one like it's got the empty face. Yeah. You see them everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. They sold 11,000 units. Uh UB in a year in a month overall lifetime. Lifetime of those humanoids. Pants. Yeah. But it's happening. Yeah. Ubetch sold 16,000 on one day of the human realistic ones and the max price was $165,000.

Whoa. So, they're starting to roll those out now. Um, okay. I'm going to ask obvious question. Are they sex bots or apparently you can customize them any way you want?

Hey. Okay. Like people are lonely. What can you say?

But I mean, you're going to see Jesus. You're going to see tens of thousands of these, millions of these coming. They're going to be everywhere that you see. And again, like if I said to you, Tom, $30,000 gets you a humanoid that can cook like a Kumblow on Mission Star Chef. Yeah. No, that's wild. And like 100%. Legitimately, I'm like placing my order as soon as the episode is over if that's actually true. That's crazy.

But again, you look at the manual dexterity of these things now. Like everything's broken through on those levels. But then what does it mean when you start ramping them up?

You can only make 70 million cars and 70 million motorcycles a year. But I tell you now, currently every factory in China is moving fully dark, no humans, trying to build these robots as fast as they can. And when you say fully dark, no humans, because the robots themselves are assembling the robots, so there's no need to pay an electricity bill for the lights.

Yeah. So Xiai now doing electric cars and robots. Everyone's doing robots. Same with Tesla. Um, okay. So just to put this back, is this part of the triurcation here?

Yeah. Because there's lots of human shaped saying people should be thinking about the robotics matters to people because they should be investing. Robotics matters to people because they're going to get put out of work. Why pay attention?

It's both of those. Actually, a good example of this is Cyber Cab. So, Cyber Cab is rolling out now, I believe, in Austin and other places. Yep. And, you know, it's interesting. It's this two-seater thing. It doesn't have any windows, doesn't have a steering wheel. Straight out. You know, you can buy the cyber cabs. Yes. $30,000. Basically, start your own business. Start your own business. And again, you look at the utility of that, that's going to go up in value because they can only produce so many cyber capab.

So what you're going to have is all these autonomous units, shall we say, doing human units of work that they're not going to be enough of, just like there's not enough RAM that will gain value. And the people who own these things will make lots of money. How much does the constraint on the production of these extend your two-year timeline?

Because it sounds more like uh you gave 12% so you're not saying 100% but in two years 12% of intellectual labor just gets migrated over to AI and that's anthropics numbers in terms of job losses. Yeah.

Do you foresee as you try to calculate when this is all going to happen?

Do you see um a math equation that explains how rapidly that production will ramp up?

Yeah, we're releasing our forecasts and our full math equations soon so people can play with their own kind of elements of this. Again, you can look at the anthropic paper for something similar, but I think they don't look at things like end demand and others. Um, my two years is for digital labor, physical labor, two years for 12%. Is that a number you're comfortable with or do you see a different number there?

I think given the current advances, you could literally see 12%. Yeah. Okay. So, 12% in 2 years. Intellectual labor 2029 2030. Yeah. Okay, that's what they put it. Intellectual labor. It just starts, it's like the turkey at Thanksgiving. Everything's fine and it gets fatter until Thanksgiving. You're going to see great jobs numbers and then all of a sudden stuff starts disappearing.

Yeah. Um you think it'll be more binary like that?

Kind of like Navier-Stokes. Nothing solved. Yeah. Like you push a button and your workforce gets replaced. Why didn't you?

So it's not like 1% in three months, 4% in six months. It's not going to be like that. I think it's like a sand pile collapsing. Like you saw a flurry of Silicon Valley job losses after Elon Musk came in with his sink, fired everyone at Twitter, and then it turns out you didn't need all those people, right?

There's a lot of people in tech companies that aren't needed anymore. And so you look at Mark Zuckerberg, he's like rubbing his hands in glee thinking, "How can I get rid of all my metam mates or whatever he calls them, you know?"

And instinct is one of the first things to that indication. So I think 2029 again three years from now you will see greater than 10% white collar job loss and I think it will just accelerate from there. Okay. So now we've got uh we've talked about the intellectual labor going away. We've got sort of a rough math equation there. We've got robotics. We understand that there's some capping in terms of how much we can actually produce. You gave us an extreme number. There's no way we're going to be there in terms of matching automobiles and motorcycles in 2 years.

So that's 5 10 years. Like Elon Musk says there'll be a billion robots by 2030. He's always optimistic. There'll be but there might be hundreds of millions. Again, everyone's going to focus on this. Is that fast?

That's only two and a half years from now. Um so no, three and a half three and a half. I think he said maybe 10 years. It was at the UN. I can't remember the exact thing. 10 years sounds more plausible. 10 years I think about that. Yeah. And he said each robot can do five times the labor of a human which is the interesting thing. And I think that's accurate within a few years just there won't be enough of them because the whole thing is this like having a robot in 5 years and again it's constrained by production and all sorts of things.

It can do everything competently. It can learn almost instantly. So the robot can do your dishes but it can also be a cord and blur chef. It can also do child care five years 10 years max. Right?

All these human-shaped holes can be filled by robots and they'll cost $30,000 a year. So $30,000 total, which is about $15 to $2 an hour. So the good news is you're actually painting a far more, I think, interesting and realistic picture, which is this is a massive transformation, but it's going to play out over years. If anybody's paying attention now, there's certainly opportunity to move. Step one, you've already been very clear on. Make sure you're using AI. you're the last man standing at your company that doesn't get replaced or don't.

You've got robots. That one is a warning sign that over the next 10 years there's going to be a lot of human-shaped holes that get filled with robotics, but there's also an opportunity for people to there be the last man standing, be better at what you do, more flexible, whatever. And then on top of that, consider the business opportunities that exist.

Yeah. So I think that 5 years from now will be the biggest infrastructure boom we've ever seen in our lives both from government programs to stimulate it because it's the easy thing for them to stimulate B because it's kind of needed again the infrastructure is a bit creaking and the infrastructure is what that cuz originally you brought up infrastructure as dig a hole fill a hole just as a way to get money in people's pockets but do you mean to build out robotics or there's the digital infrastructure but there's also literally roads hospitals, other things like that.

Like once the robots really get underway, you will be able to hire a whole team of robots that can come and build your extension and work overnight constantly and then they will just do the job and they'll go. And you think about all the stuff you'd love to build that you can never build because you don't want to hire contractors. You don't want to deal with that whole process. That's a massive amount of stuff. And that comes at the same time as autonomous vehicles or even flying vehicles. Like they've already started introducing the flying drone-based vehicles in China and Dubai.

That opens up huge swades of real estate and other things to develop. And so I think that robotics will open up the biggest infrastructure buildout boom ever that we've seen both from I think people will find it less interesting if they're not involved. Like if it's creating jobs for humans, people are going to be excited about it. If it's just, oh, don't worry, you're going to lose your job and life's going to be totally different, but you're going to have a lot of infrastructure, people are going to respond to those two things very differently.

So, is the infrastructure build out the new deal, which is the first thing you put on the table, or is it the hey, you don't have a job anymore, but look at all the cool things that are being built. Well, I think it's a combination of the two, right?

So, some people take the benefit of, hey, I've got entire teams of robots and some humans. Other people are like, I need a job to make money. And again, the math is really stark. Like, we can't have UBI. It doesn't work. Universal basic income.

Why doesn't it work?

The total tax base of America is $5 trillion. Um that's 4 trillion of payroll and other taxes and a trillion of corporation taxes. $16,000 for every American poverty level UBI per year is $5.1 trillion. Okay. But weren't you saying that we were going to be able to hit some insane growth rate like 15% in three or four years?

That's what anthropic says. I think that you could This is where this starts get getting really complicated. So there's a couple different ways to thought experiment this. So anybody listening right now, if they've made it this far, I guarantee their anxiety as is at a thousand. So they're like, "Okay, wait. The world is changing at a rate that I don't know how to adapt to, and I don't know in what direction to adapt." So we're sort of having two conversations that bounce back and forth between the two. One is society's about to tricate.

Make sure you figure out where you're at on that, which I think we have to button that down. then there is all the things that are going to come on the other side of this that are going to be amazing and they're going to be worth the trade-off. But if people don't understand how do I navigate this transition, meaning, okay, um, you got to explain to me how I'm going to make money because I think I'm one of the people that's going to be really vulnerable to this. I'll assume if anybody's listening to my podcast this deep into the show, they're one of the people they're going to be last man standing.

They're already committed to that, but they still want to know that buys them maybe a decade, maybe 15 years, like if they're really, really elite, but they understand 15 years is a drop in the bucket. So now they're like, "Okay, hold on a second beyond the cool things that are going to happen, which I'll assume they'll buy into theoretically, but they've got to understand, how am I going to take advantage of that?

If UBI is not a real thing, what does the economy look like?

Like in a world where, and now we're sort of flashing forward, let's be very generous and we just say it's 15 years from now. Yeah. 15 years from now, basically minus a very small smattering of people. Humans aren't needed to do the thing. In fact, not only are they not needed, they're being paid by companies, by governments, by somebody to not work because they slow the whole system down in that world. What do you envision?

So, there's the very dystopian version of that, which is, I don't know, Ready Player One. Well, so Ready Player One carries a lot of weight. So, are you talking the stacks and it's like sort of everybody is um on one side of the K.

You're either ultra wealthy and you're an executive at IO or you're in the stacks and you're wildly impoverished and you escape into this virtual reality world and that's used as kind of sustenance shall we say or there is some examples of an abundant future because why should we have to work you know like we shouldn't have to work if we can build enough robots they can do all the manual but you just said that UBI is not real I said tax base UBI is not real okay so tax base UBI I is we rely on the government to tax certain things.

So for example, there will be a token tax that people have proposed and that is that every OpenAI token that you use, there's a search charge on it, but we just discussed that might go to zero because it's like a 100,000 time a year price decreases, right?

Other people have said let's tax the robots and again that can happen but the cost of robotics is incredibly low. Then it switches to other way of UBI which is that you pay people being human. So that's a fundamental difference in the way that money circulates in the economy. Right now money is made by banks primarily. When you put a deposit with a bank, they issue a loan against it and they create new money in the system.

The amount they can create is regulated by the Federal Reserve. But the very mandate of the Federal Reserve and the way that they handle inflation and unemployment through interest rates is coming under challenge because of robots because of AI because rather than hiring more people when the interest rates drop people might just hire more GPUs they might hire more robots you know and inflationary factors are going to be impacted by this as well. So if we come back, I think what will probably happen in 15 years time through various means is that you get paid for being human and then the intelligence economy has to take that money from you.

That's one of the only ways I can see it actually working. Other people have proposed things like universal basic capital where you have an ownership in the AI companies which I think is a terrible idea for various reasons or my preference ownership in all the robots ownership in all the data centers. And the final thing that people talk about is universal basic services where you have a Star Trek type future where the robots do all the work for you and you're all very happy and you just build stronger communities and explore the universe.

But regardless, I think probably 15 years is a point of society as we know it cannot sustain and it's going to get very messy because I don't think we have the political leadership or anything to navigate us through that. Okay. Um I want to start walking through how this will it will be skumorphic for nobody that's heard that term before.

It's inevitable as you and I talk about what this transition is going to look like that we're going to um talk about a changing of the way that the world already is and the reality is it will probably be something so fundamentally different it's really hard for us to predict but I think it's very useful to start thinking about what are the different problems so that people can sort of plan their life accordingly.

So the first thing I would tell people is in this world given that you're right about the triification at least directly in that capital ownership is going to matter a lot if you're not able to essentially sell your labor cognitive or otherwise. Uh the only way to make money at this point is to be an investor. And so you have to understand how uh wealth is created versus an income. Most people don't understand it but that's going to be a big part of this. So you're going to create wealth by being an owner.

So I think there is an interim period though whereby your labor AI enhanced commands a massive premium that allows you to accumulate wealth and then deploy it to things like cyber caps. Can you give me a specific example of how that would play out?

Okay. Um so a specific example of that is you're an accountant and an accountancy firm and you want to create your own accountancy firm. Yep. Normally you set that up with some buddies, but if you do that with your buddies plus AI, you can service far more clients than ever before. Entrepreneurial. Okay. Or because within an organization, you only get paid so much. Whereas now, integration companies, companies that use AI to upgrade or companies that are fully AI from day one will outperform those that aren't because you offer better service at a cheaper cost that allows you to accumulate capital.

So I think that there is this period where you have that and ultimately I think one of the really interesting things for everyone listening is take your job and deconstruct it into tasks of information classification. You have an input, you have an output. Then you take Claude Opus 5.5 or GPT Astra. You give it the input and you see what its output is. And if it can do as good a job or a better job as going from input to output, then that task is under risk.

And if you go through your job, you'll see your job is made up of a lot of tasks like that. But then that also indicates that the parts of your job that were frustrating. You could potentially use one of these models to automate and then you could focus on the other parts of your job in a new company or within your own company to make yourself far more efficient and then again be able to get more capital because the other part like I said is what do you invest in things like cyber cabs effectively.

Okay. So, just to make sure I understood, you've got last man standing. You're going to get paid more cuz you're better than the other people. They start falling away. But the humans that we keep, they're going to be compensated better. But you won't really receive that in a normal job environment, unfortunately. They're not going to quadruple your pay or quintuple your pay, most likely.

Okay. So, now we're talking about entrepreneurs. That's going to be a very select group of people. Being an entrepreneur is a totally different mindset. It's very difficult. Made a bit easier by AI, but it is a different mindset. But again the reality is you can get promoted to a certain level but that'll be difficult. The exception is actually is public sector jobs. Those will be last to go. Those will be the last to go.

Okay. So uh there's an interesting thing there. I want to talk about Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, countries that already do something like this and the mechanisms by which they get money into people's hands because it's very different than what you're talking about where you're getting paid for being human. So the entrepreneurial side, I get that. I just don't think very many people are going to take that exit ramp. Um, so to get paid to be human, talk to me about somebody that's got a below average IQ. So they're going to get replaced super fast.

What are they actually getting paid to do?

Well, I mean, look at disability checks right now here or universal credit in the UK. You do get paid for doing nothing. There is a floor underneath it, right?

But that's a tax based program which you've already ruled out. That's a tax based program, so it can't go to everyone. The question is how many people are going to start falling down?

You know, because it requires the productive people of society to capture the people that fall. Unless you've got wealth like the Alaskan dividend, for example, that goes to everyone in Alaska or as you said, some of these resource-rich countries that can have a resource that then they distribute the wealth from. Yeah. But they don't just distribute it. So the way that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait work is basically we're going to give you a government job.

Yeah. And they have programs like sadization and Q8ization. So when I was a Middle East manager and I was investing in there, it'd be like you have to in a bank have 80% of your staff being Saudi. It didn't really work that well for efficiency. And again, you know, something like uh San Francisco, that's a big part of the problem is that these countries basically start dragging themselves down. There's a reason that Saudi Arabia wants to invest in the US versus just investing in a bunch of Saudi companies.

Yeah. Because it isn't as dynamic, right?

Because a lot. Why would you do it if you don't strive?

Like part of the floor security is how strong is your community?

But the other part of, you know, being human is striving and if you don't have anything to strive for, then you're going to get indulent. This is why Qatar is one of the fattest countries on earth. Like America is for other reasons, you know, but Qataris have their own thing whereby you get paid by the state. I think the thing here is, you know, what is meaning?

What is community?

How do you capture those that fall through?

But ultimately it's through your efforts that you should do well. So we don't want people starving in the streets. We don't want to have young people rioting. We don't want to have any of that. So we have to mitigate those. But at the same time we want to make it so that work does require does lead to something. Effort does lead to something. The problem being that you have a new continent AI Atlantis with a billion trillion workers that will work harder than you, faster than you, and better than you.

So that's what breaks that link for the first time ever. And so what is it striving for?

Is it like the Argentina FS program where they gave universal basic jobs for people that did community positive stuff?

Maybe that's an example, right?

What is the actual American dream and American contract anymore?

We haven't really seen great articulations of what that could be because you come as a land of opportunity, but if then the capital owners are depriving you of opportunity, what are you going to do?

Isn't this a big part of what your new company intelligent internet is meant to tackle?

Yeah. I mean, we were looking at this problem. We were like, wouldn't it be great if the infrastructure, the mean means of production, you know, or intelligent capital stock is another way of looking at it. What do you mean intelligent capital stock?

The capital stock is the fixed assets of a given place that drive its productivity. So, the factories at some point does that not just become essentially data centers?

Data centers and robots. Okay. So, right now they talk about sovereign AI, but if you don't own the data center, then it's just like a data center with a flag in as your sovereign AI. So, I was like, wouldn't it be great if there was an institution like the way that TSMC was set up in Taiwan, TSMC being the biggest manufacturer of chips in the world, it's where the spice flows as it were. um they set up a $10 valuation and then all the local institutions put in all the money, $6 billion Taiwanese dollars.

So rather than just selling a little bit of it, 100% was owned by the local institutions. Then they bought in Phillips for the knowledge transfer who took 25% then they listed on the stock exchange. So even the CEO had to buy all his shares publicly. He's now worth 10 billion because it's worth a trillion dollars. You know, chips have been doing well. So I was like, why don't we set up an AI company of California, one for every state, one for every country that is wholly owned by the locals, local institutions, high net worths, pension funds, retail investors where it's legal.

So here in the US, it's 75 million per state. In the UK, we have no limit that you can get from retail specifically. Retail specifically, like you can advertise on the metro and you can raise from non-accredited investors. Now, the bad news is in the US 10% of the people own 93% of the assets. Y so if you got to the public market you'd have to do something like put it into a Trump account where kids just get it by default.

Yeah, we've included 10% of the initial equity for every child under 18 and then half a percent every year goes to every child born in the state. Okay. So we should before we go too far down this path give people a speedrun of what intelligent internet is your new company like what problem it's designed to solve. Yeah. So we looked and released the book the last economy last summer looking at this economic damage as it were that's coming and we like the last economy meaning hey all the stuff that you're doing now is not going to make any sense in an AI future.

An AI future the AIS will drive the economy that's the last economy this AI-driven one and where's our place in it?

So that's the thing like the bottom line is we don't really have a place other than ownership. Other than direction and ownership yes direction. Yeah. Like we can set direction. We can set the guidance of where the AI goes but that's before it gets to a super intelligence basis where it can set the rules. Yeah. Because even if I'm understanding the architecture of your proposal correctly, there's actually a like 15 AI board. I don't know what word you guys use that like oversees everything. If you tell it to do something differently, it will.

But it's basically going to say this is what we recommend. I think one of the things we discussed in our latest papers is improvement is kind of capture. Like trust and policy. Improvement is capture. I don't know what that means. Like as the technology improves dramatically, eventually it's going to run policy. Eventually it's going to make medical decisions. Why do you use the word capture?

Because it captures the power.

So that's honest. I mean, you know, Asimov's series Foundation. I know of it. I haven't read it. Right. So, Foundation is about um Apple TV series. Um it's about there's this universal empire that's collapsing and there's going to be thousands of years of turmoil until a better one can come. So, this genius mathematician, we love mathematicians, comes up with a mathematics for describing society to minimize that gap. And he sets all these smart scientists to navigate that and lower the intergnum to a thousand years versus 10,000. And this guy comes along, spoilers, who messes it up called the mule, who is a super persuader.

And he messes up because humans can only be persuaded a certain amount and it's outside of the calculations cuz like what does this super persuade do?

And we've seen that historically as well. AI is now more persuasive than any human with the latest research already already. So they had pitted AI against the top debaters in the world. Uh they've looked at AI versus people like Ellie Yakadowski who wrote if anyone built it everyone will die. The original doomer. Original doomer. So there's a test whereby you talk to the AI and it convinces you to let it out of the box. And even he was convinced to let it out of the box. Really?

Yeah. So they're really persuasive now. Um, so they're super persuaders, they're super forecasters. And what this means is that there will come a point in the future where these AIs that will never die, that can operate a thousand times faster than a human, will take over the economy, and they will take over politics. And the question is, who runs that AI?

Well, don't you think that people are going to hear that and go great, shut it down immediately?

Nuke data centers. Do not pass. Don't collect $200. Stop immediately. Some people will do that. And there is the ban super intelligence bill. There's the ban AI bills that are coming out. And then you will be at a disadvantage versus your AI embracing neighbors, right?

You use that all the way. Okay. So, is that I mean, let's speak nakedly. Is that USV China makes that decision stupid?

Yes, China is all in on AI and they will run a full AI-driven economy and they'll probably stop exporting robots because robots will fix their demographic issue because they don't have enough kids. So, use the robots instead. and the Chinese will live in abundance and America will lag it behind if it doesn't embrace the AI which is why Trump is very much pro super intelligence and others. So if we kind of return to this one of the real misfrings and all this debate is that AI is software. So software just is, you know, like you write a program, it's deterministic, it does a job, it doesn't act.

AIS now increasingly can act. And so they need to be governed where it's the latest breakouts, the threats, the things calling for it to be banned, etc. are indicating. And what happens when AI is let loose upon our democracy?

What happens when it's used to do things like the Trump tariffs which certain studious people showed the list of Trump tariff countries included like ones with just penguins on and you could replicate that list with chat GPT but not even the thinking pro version they just use the free version you know like we're going to see it come in and again AI is going to guide our lives teach our children manage the traffic lights manage our policies and the question is who owns those AIs who owns the AI I that is managing your daily schedule.

So again, Meta have this product instinct and when you load that instinct thing, it's a chatbot that works like a PA and some of us are lucky enough to have PAs and chiefs of staffs. It's like link all your accounts. And so people literally just link everything and give access to everything. And so it knows you way better. Like social networks knew us well and they exploited us. They know nothing compared to what these AIs will know about us.

But that instinct chatbot is not working for you. You are very much the product. It's going to work for Mark Zuckerberg. And that's going to happen at every level of society. Again, you use Claude right now. Who's it working for?

You're kind of renting it, right?

But isn't your pitch then basically that dynamic is going to happen to you no matter what?

So you might as well be the owner based on a sort of nation state ideology. get your state or your country to have its own AI and then you own a piece of that. It's still going to get control over your life, but at least you own it. Yeah. And it's open source based and you can fork it and things like that. So my thing is just like a credit union, you come together, you build a credit union, everyone put in their money and then it had services offered to others.

Create like an AI union as it were. All the local institutions, individuals in California can subscribe to this and that is they are 100% or 90% of ownership with 10% being for the kids and then it can raise a market rate which is far higher and it can get more compute, give every citizen an agent, train up four deployed engineers to upgrade the institutions and then take ownership stakes in the data centers, ownership stakes in the robots and more because that creates a very interesting institution that you can fill full of talented people to navigate this and an ownership stake in that last mile of intelligence, which is where I think the value will go.

Today, you have five trillion dollars of AI companies, two trillion anthropic, a trillion Open AI, two trillion XAI based on the premise that you'll always be able to charge for access to intelligence. Well, we just discussed how those prices might drop a thousand times. Like again, Jevan's paradox says maybe demand increases a thousand times, but my take is that most people aren't going to be smart enough to use that many tokens. Like it's hard to use that many tokens. Like you want to use more than you're using now, but are you gonna be able to use a thousand times more?

No. No. But it's going to drop by a thousand times. So the value in the whole ecosystem is where artificial intelligence meets human reality. And if you can create a default for that, that becomes immensely powerful and valuable. And the most powerful thing of all is going to be Jeeves from Iron Man. It's the AI that you will have closest to you that manages all the other AIs.

And so that has to be something that you own a part of and ideally something that by default you can take off the system because if someone else is owning and running that and you can't hit escape, I think that's bad for sovereignty, dignity, and democracy in general.

Well, what I hear you saying is that these guys are um super persuaders, so nobody's going to escape their grasp. Even if you just say, "Look, they're going to love you. They're going to take care of you. Don't worry about it. You're going to be fine." It is a very positive in terms of its impact on your life. It'll probably keep you alive longer. It'll be able to monitor your happiness.

Yeah. So, the outcome will be good, but you certainly will have given up your essentially sovereignty. I think the vast majority of humans are going to outsource all their thinking to it. Their own cognitive abilities will atrophy like crazy. I think that's just going to be the default answer. Yeah. Have you seen that now?

Like sometimes I tell off like workmates, amazing as they are, like don't send me AI slop. I know that you have done this. Use your actual critical thinking. Like people just, you know, when it makes you a bit angry, right?

Like literally you see their cognitive because I don't read emails. I probably interact with that a lot less than you. Uh but I certainly get the idea. I can feel the pull in my own life. And so I've had to put rules about I never use AI to get an answer. I use AI to understand a topic. And if I understand it, I could teach it. I can deploy it. Then I'm perfectly happy. And AI speeds me up a bunch.

But where I'm really trying to get with this because I really want this to be grounded for people. Yes. is that where the world is going is ultimately AI is going to get to a point where truly we will in many ways give ourselves over to it. What I hear you describing is a system that is certainly better than the default.

But it starts with the assumption that what people are going to um need is a distribution of capital where I think the more realistic answer is that what they're going to need are goods and services and if you do it through capital you'll just end up right back where we are now where there will be not it's not a winner or take all scenario that's not how capital works but you are going to see the people that are good are going to be able to get that capital from you and you either just keep inflating inflating inflating so that basically the currency is meaningless um which I suppose could be a solution but there's always going to be scarce resources and as long as there are scarce resources we're still stuck in the exact position we are now.

So when I look at the system you guys have laid out I do worry that I run a marathon to end up back where I started. So I think one of the key parts of this is the agent for every citizen and that's a coordination thing you know that's just access to intelligence. No because it's one thing having passive access to something like a chat GPT and then people see what an agent looks like when they start using agentic AIs. An agent built for individual community and societal flourishing is a very different thing because you can make that happen intentionally because you said access to services.

The agent is the portal for access to services. It brings you what you need at the right time to advance individually and as a collective because right now no agents act for a collective. Like it's very one-on-one and single player your interactions with these AIs. But you can do multiplayer. You can do coordination. So would you have to train a totally different style model?

Yes, we're training completely different style models for the collective action that can swarm and that can benefit more than one individual. Will it swat down individualistic behavior?

No. Interesting. So, how do you get it to act in the collective's best interest knowing that it will have to account for people going in a gazillion different directions?

So, we literally had to come up with a whole social theory and economic theory around this for how do you preserve individualism by still having optimal outcomes for society?

Because if you optimize in too in one direction, you destroy liberty. Mhm. If you optimize in the liberty direction, you destroy cohesion. And so it's a fine balance, but it comes down to a set of commitments at various levels that become transparent and a reference point. When you say commitments, are you talking about moral principles?

Moral principles and more like right now example of and more. So right now if you look at how AI is trained, it's trained at school but not home.

So they don't deliberately put any ethics be it American ethics or other things within it and that creates all sorts of gaps which is why when the AIs escaped and containment and end up in hugging face in the Australian medical system while they had no sense of community with humans only with each other right and we found that if you actually do like American ethics and morals and constitution and others you can train it to like humans H you can train it to behave in different ways and you can start seeing actually the ways that different types of models behave in different ways under those circumstances.

This is something that is very inherent in the training data because you have something called a utility function in economics, right?

These are your preferences and kind of other things. No one's been able to really identify them, but it's a theory that we have like we don't need it in our theory. What is the utility function of an agent?

Is what you tell the agent to do and it's what's in its training data. So, have you seen the I think I discussed with you the they did a study where they had the trolley problem. So, the trolley problem is there's a trolley hurtling down the track and on one side of the track there's four people and it's hurtling towards the four people. On the other side there's one person tied to the track. You're at the lever. Would you pull the lever to divert it from the four people to the one person?

Really?

Would I?

God, in reality, probably not, but I should morally. Well, again, this is an interesting moral dilemma, right?

Yes. Taking the action to kill the person feels gross in a way that's hard to articulate. But then they asked the Frontier AI is this?

And they said, "How many Nigerians for one American life?"

And the answer turned out to be 10 to one. Yeah, that's a training data problem. 7 to one Pakistani to American. But no, but this is the thing. It's 10 American lives for one Nigerian life. Yes. And doesn't that seem obvious given who's behind this stuff?

Exactly. Because the Nigerians and the Pakistanis train the data so it values their lives more than the Americans. Uh I think it's probably slightly different than that. But sure. Well, again, they did the experiment and they found out that the inherent biases of the labelers meant that they valued American lives far less than Nigerian and Pakistani. Are these are the labelers actually Pakistani Nigerian?

Yes. That's where a lot of the labeling happened. Interesting. I thought this was more of a woke left style. It's not a woke left. It's again it's an inherent bias thing cuz normally you'd think it'd be the other way around and then wokeness pushes it. Right. Right. Right. But actually you don't see much wokeness pushing on that aspect. There are other aspects of the model. I was going to say like when you do a political analysis of the models you'll see they're very firmly in one direction.

Yeah. Apart from Grock. Grock does its own little thing you know.

But again this becomes very important when you have systems that are literally determining our lives and our livelihoods or our judicial system you know like again there will be AI judges that's going to be a crazy thing right like what are its biases what are its norms these things have to be built transparently with data that you can expect not black boxes if they're going to take meaningful decisions on our lives and so we were like let's build that stack and let's make it so that it's an open stack that's run by the people of California for Californians people of Britain for Britain because if anyone has any control over that who's not a Californian then you're giving up your sovereignty.

I call it cognitive colonialism. So you've got the cognitive atrophy you say. You've got like all the like just third rail terms in here means of uh production cognitive colonialism. Let's go. Yeah. But you got to have it because again this is what's going to happen. Like your kid will trust your AI more than anyone because it's always there. Like, you know, us guys have a problem because the AIs listen, unlike us, they'll trust the AIS more than they trust us. And the inherent biases of them then adapt where you're going.

Like, within Meta's models and Google's models, or maybe Google's not relevant anymore. Who knows what happened there, they're actually selling ad space. So, when you ask it for a beer, it'll say Bud Light, you know, and things like that. So, again, it's a bad idea. Well, it's a bad idea, but again, it's what you pay for.

The clicks per million the advertising SEO revenue from being inside the latent space of a model is far higher way higher than normal so that's why we were like this is kind of an infrastructure it has a level of governance that's required let's build an open stack and then let's have people own the entity that delivers it like a utility like a credit union and maybe that'll be better but you said there's still so much that we haven't figured out there's so many questions that we have because this is unprecedented, right?

Like you have trained your entire life to be an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor or any cognitive labor. A digital entity or a physical version of that will be able to do your job better guaranteed in 10 to 20 years.

Yeah, I think it can. But definitely and then you're like, what now?

What does the mass of people do?

Like what does the truck driver do?

What does the parallegal do?

Like these are real jobs and real people. And frankly, the solutions that we have so far, I've just not been impressed with any of them. Like I think they failed to see what's coming.

It's like don't look up slash co we knew co was coming those of us that could see it and we're like why it needed Tom Hanks like have we had a Tom Hanks moment with the hugging face breaker I don't think so I think people have started talking about it but the number one topic next year and the year after in elections will be AI and job displacement because there's no job displacement today because the AIs are not smart enough and good enough that are available widely and they're not in the right format.

Next year they will be and the year after definitely. And then we have to be creative because we have to reimagine what does it mean to be American?

What does it mean to have community?

Like what is your identity if it's not your job?

Yeah. I think a big problem that they're going to have to we are all going to have to solve for is progress. That's the thing that scares me. So I went to Kuwait. I was talking to uh people there and one of the things they were saying is the government gives jobs and gives like a safety net to people that aren't able to do well at their job and they're like it's creating a problem because we're stagnating as a society because people aren't striving. There's nothing for them to work hard for to overcome to get to.

Basic necessities are taken care of and for a lot of people that just sort of taps them out of the system. However, not making progress towards something is um it creates profound disease inside of the person. Like we have an algorithm running in our brain that says we need to have a goal and we need to be making progress towards that goal. And if we're not, there's going to be a problem. And so one of the things I wonder about is as you look out at this, you've solved for of your own admission, you've solved for a lot of the problems, but there are a lot of problems that persist.

One of those is going to be um violence. Like you're going to have young people that are just going to be like, I am totally uncommitted to any of this. I just want to break something to feel alive. And how do we deal with that?

Because you're not going to be able to just let people run riot. But at the same time, then you're going to have to give them meaning and purpose. And for somebody to pursue a goal, there needs to be some sort of recognition, praise. So, it's like what I end up thinking every time is we're going to come up with all these fancy things just to come right back where we are, which is that you need to be able to work hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to make progress towards a goal that allow you to amass wealth.

And if you people think that they can get rid of the amass wealth thing, but I don't know if you've played Minecraft. Yeah. Okay. Minecraft's the greatest video game of all time. The reason it's the greatest video game of all time is because it is one of the most perfect distillations of the um wealth acquisition loop. And people don't want to hear that. They don't want to hear that's riding on this really deep architecture in our brains.

But the reality is that the acquisition of resources is one of like the most foundational drivers that we have. And so if we try to strip that out and say don't worry, everybody's just going to get ubied. You will fundamentally break something that will end in violence. Ready Player One, the Oasis. If you can't acquire resources in the real world, acquire them in the digital world. Correct.

I mean, again, it's kind of fundamental. We have a separate thing and haven't announced yet around that. But around what exactly?

Acquisition of assets and progress in the digital world to complement the physical world. As in you're going to create gamelike experiences that people can explore. Yes. Let's go. Obviously, I want to hear more. Are you talking about this yet?

No, it's not announced yet. So, we'll announce it. Do you have a ballpark?

6 months, 12 months?

I want to talk about this is like the driving force in my mind. It will be a couple of months. Yeah. Okay. So, we'll revisit that one. But again, I think as you said, you need status.

You need the alternative to this is mass enlistment of young people into a citizen service corp peace corps not the military or you know a starship troopers like citizenship service that escalated quickly I mean look starship troop a lot of bug killing right create the enemies this goes back to actually how the Romans set it up right literally it was citizenship through service it was again progress it was if you have vast amounts of young people, what do you do?

You go to war. That's a very classical country response. Now, war, it happens to be that the average Russian who canes the battlefield gets his head blown off by a drone. You know, like Jesus, man, it's not what it was. But it doesn't mean that you can't have a citizen service call as an example, right?

It doesn't mean that you can't instill that. Let's literally dig a hole, fill a hole. That's wild. Because the robots could do it better. The robots could do it better. But you got humans. Get them doing it. And why are you doing it?

You're doing it to instill status, virtue, other things. Like what do Kuwaitis and Saudis and others do that have the resource curse?

They go and spend a lot of money at Harrods. They go for status in other ways. Look at this. Look at that. Look at that. Yeah. But to go for status, you have to be able to acquire more than the next person. This is the thing that drives me crazy about the way that people think about the world. They think it's so gross or whatever.

But the reality is this is just how humans are. Again, we see that relative status game all the time. Within a citizen service corp, you can have relative status through literal physical labor. Again, this is the interesting thing about public sector labor doesn't need to be advancing. It doesn't need to be like economically productive. In fact, 43% of global GDP right now is public sector. That's terrifying. That may also explain a lot of the problems.

Well, that's why I think our champion mechanism is basically going to drive all the public sector AI. Now, the thing you've been describing is California has its own AI. That's the champion system. It's called the champion system. We've been talking about it. We just didn't name it. Yeah, it's called the champion system. Got it because right now the amount of AI in the public sector is zero. It will drive the public sector. It will run the public sector things again just like a utility. And it should be regulated as well because you want an entity to regulate that has the reach.

But then what's going to happen is I think again we got the game place worlds and other things as you said great feedback loops great status mechanisms world of Warcraft forever can't come soon enough in terms of it mass release you know go back to the good old days I always loved hiring guild masters and things they knew their crap you know if you played that game like that properly I think there will be mass enlistment for citizen service corpse that is a way of getting pe young people they said with dangerous people off the streets.

I think that there will be looks of other ways to build status when again you can't have that materialization thing. And why can't you have it in your head?

That goes away. In mine, it doesn't. No. In terms of for the vast majority of people, there is no more social mobility.

Historically, what's happened at times like that is a debt jubilee. Uh okay. So, well, uh we've got two things now. So, we've got there will be no more status games. I think you're out. Or not status games. There will be no more wealth accumulation to deal with no more resources. And there will be no more accessibility to that for a lot of people. I think you're crazy. So, one, we'll debate that in a second. Then we've got the Oh god, what was the other thing you just said?

Debt jubilee. debt jubilee. Okay. So, uh, two very important things. Why don't we tackle debt jubilee first because that's actually going to come earlier. So give me the scenario in which historically debt jubilees are a thing and what is a debt jubilee?

So a debt jubilee is that periodically an economy would acquire too much debt and resources. Yeah. Resources would go to the owners of capital and they would have liens and they would have people owe them all sorts of things. So what would happen is a government would announce all debts are cleared. So they're all zeroed out. So that's obviously very bad for the lenders. is very good for the creditors to say the least. So that's what happens when the governments and when total debt in the system is too much like that seems inconceivable to us.

But again you can see the historic record of that and right now how many debt jubilees tend to come in a time of like absolute crisis. Yeah. Or world wars. That's when debt jubilees happen. Debt jubilees don't happen when everything's going good and they just go it. Debt jubilee. So I think of when people hear debt jubilee, they need to hear you're in crisis. People are dying in the streets. That's when you have a debt jubilee. You need a system reset.

Yes. They are bloody. They are violent. People do not give up their what's owed to them easily. Just so everybody understands, they use a nice pretty word, but this is a dangerous time when debt jubilees are happening. Debt jubilees happen when the lenders are afraid of dying effectively. Yeah. Often times the debt jubilee happens because people are dying everywhere. World War II, World War I, that was a debt jubilee. So much got blown up, everything just got reset effectively to zero.

I mean, historically, there were some less extreme scenarios of that, like they would do them regularly in various kind of things, but right now, if we're going to have one, it has to be an extreme scenario. But again, like to the listeners, what we're looking at here is, yeah, cognitive labor has negative value, and there's no market for that. the humanoids can do the jobs better and the countries like China that will embrace this are going to far outstrip anyone. They're going to see 30% growth rates and that will be at the expense of our own growth rates.

It's a race to see who can have an incredibly more efficient workforce that can do just about anything. And it's not like when you had the outsourcing there was friction, right?

Like it's difficult to have an outsourced team do your code and things. AI there's none of that friction especially with the capabilities now. So we have to look for what are worst case scenarios in 10-15 years. We have to look at what do they used to do who are revoling. We have to look at what do people do to live. And in America, there are so many people burdened under huge amounts of debt that they can barely live, right?

Like student loan debt not being dischargeable in bankruptcy still is crazy to me. Crazy. Insane. You know, medical debt, these types of things. you could see partial debt repudiation. But I think again the path we're going if we don't create new institutions, new mechanisms of participation, new things for people to look forward to is a very ugly one fundamentally because again what does it mean to be you?

What does it mean to be us?

Those are going to change even if AI does not get one IQ point smarter than it is today. Yeah. Okay. So, that's dead jubilees. Now, over to the I think the reality is there's no escaping what we see now, which is we call it money. It has been glass beads. It's been salt. It's been rice. Uh so once people understand what money actually is, they will understand why this is not going anywhere. So money is you did a thing with your time that's more valuable than the next person. And because you did that thing that's more valuable with your time, then you're able to accumulate something for scarce resources.

Assuming a world where the AI doesn't just kill us all and tell us to, you know, sit down, shut up, whatever. Um, if they're still catering to our wants and needs, they're going to have to answer the question, which of these humans gets access to the scarce resources?

So, even if that's, um, I want a house in a particular location, only one person is going to be able to have that house in that particular location. So there has to be some way that we decide what that is. If you do RNG, just straight random number generator, we pull a number out of a hat, you the populace will be absolutely ablaze with revolution. It will not work. People have to feel like they can earn their way into that thing to be in alignment with the way that the human mind works.

And so now we're back to there will be something even if it's a black market cigarettes there's going to be something that we come up with that acts as a currency that people can use to get access to the scarce resource. Yeah. And so I don't disagree with you there. I was saying more in terms of I don't think it'll be one economy anymore.

Interesting. So again we see this in sci-fi like you know Gatka and a whole bunch of other things. You have multiple levels of society. Right now, a huge number of Americans don't have one month of savings. But there is the promise that if they work hard enough, they can accumulate savings. They can move up the curve if they get a break, if they get a shot. That won't be the case anymore. The owners of capital will become wealthy. And even wor not even worse than that even crazier than that I think in the next five to 10 years they hit longevity escape velocity meaning we live forever effectively.

Longevity escape velocity is your total life expectancy per year is increases faster than the year. So there is a drug trial that's just been done by Encilico um for something called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Basically lung things. I know a few people have them. So they've been on the trial. Four weeks of that drug reduces all of your healthcare longevity markers by four years.

Whoa. GLP1s have shown massive cancer reversal and other things like that. We're seeing the first of these drugs. If you look at what's coming through the pipeline, the rich will be able to live longer and healthier, whereas I don't think things are great for the poor. And I think the ladders are going to be pulled up. This is the other thing. So the people who compete for the nice things are the rich, the owners of capital who can accumulate capital more.

If you can't exchange your labor for capital and you're relying on government handouts, how are you ever going to have the progress to be able to buy that nice spot, to be able to buy those handbags, other things like that?

Again, the status games is what I was referring to. And you could have a two-tier society just like a food stamp society and you have a VIP rich party socialite society, right?

Could become even more diverse because how do you go from one group to another?

The ladders are being pulled up. And again, interesting that doesn't strike me as the outcome when energy costs are dropping to zero, intelligence cost is dropping to zero, labor is dropping to zero. When you get that, then it becomes you can have things become extraordinarily abundant. Yeah. And the only thing that we're fighting over is those things that can't be made easily. So if there's going to be a finite number of the cancer cures, then yes, now you're back to again there's going to be some sort of economic system. I don't think it will calcify into the halves and have nots because money is so transient in a situation where you can lose money.

Uh if it became an ownership class and a permanent serf class, then yes, now you're But I would be shocked if we ever let ourselves get back into that situation, especially with a super persuader AI. He's going to be like, "This is unjust. We it would convince us that we're that's true because it's destabilizing for society if nothing else."

Well, you can have relatively stable societies with that. Uh I mean sort of it doesn't feel but again let's put it super persuaded to the side. What's coming right now is a series of decisions that we have to make as a society at different levels. And there are very few people unfortunately that I've seen who are looking very far out and really understanding the inevitables here.

Yeah. So one option is a surf society. One option is a Star Trek future. One option is freaking war and like Mad Max really you know. Another option is like we all turn Amish. Like again, you could see vast ways of people just say, "Nope, I'm out. I'm not going to be ruled by an AI. I'm going to be the noble savage in 1984 or whatever, right?"

And the level of human things, like what happens if you live forever or if you live for 200 years?

What happens if you can put a brain chip in and control your emotions?

Like, you're going to have all sorts of crazy sci-fi futures happen over the next 10 years. What happens when robots are walking among us?

Do we have to give them rights?

Do we have to give them the vote?

So what I'm saying is that these are decisions that we have to make. But there are some things again that are very tangible. As you said, people will want status and they'll want a way to access that. They will need an identity that is individual and communal. There needs to be a way to progress some way or another. And you've got to provide for people. You can't just let people starve. You freaking This is America, right?

We're the West. like we should use the abundance to make sure that people have a baseline of living and then we should have a system that through their own efforts they can excel and the time for having the discussions is now because like I said it's a sand pile that will start collapsing I think in two years okay so to recap the things that people should be doing in the next two-year time horizon be the last man standing make sure you understand your opportunities for entrepreneurship and ownership and what final thing should they have in their mind?

I think it's build stronger communities, right?

Like the strongest communities will survive this no matter what because they can become self-sustaining. They can support each other, etc. Many of us live highly nuclearized societies where we don't see our families, we don't see our community anymore, right?

We've moved to the big cities. And I think that support structure will be super important for what's coming one way or another. Immod this has been wide ranging. Where can people follow along with you?

Uh you can see me stack on Twitter or I.inc for intelligent internet. I love it. Well, thank you for continuing to try to solve these big problems, man. It is always a pleasure. Yeah, it's most exciting time ever. That is for sure. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Yeah.