moonshots ep11 salim ismail twitter democracy ai transcript

Twitter is essentially the global Public Square and if you start acting out in a global Public Square the police come and take you away and a massive transformative purpose is what you’re telling the world it’s like this is who I am this is what I’m going to do this is the dent I’m going to make in the universe welcome everybody to moonshots and mindsets I’m here with one of my dearest friends on the planet uh an extraordinary thinker someone who you know s is all I can say about you is uh we have fun together and uh there’s probably no subject we will not dive into uh sometimes we dive in uh and hit the bottom of the pool and sometimes we fly how you doing today I’m very well I’m doing great yeah those of you who don’t know selem uh he was the first president of singular University we can talk about how I conned him into Runnings Su uh he was the head of the incubator uh was it Brick House or brick

[00:01:00] works yeah brick house brick house at Yahoo uh he’s the head of open EXO he and I are writing a book together on exponential organizations it’s the second book in the series selem wrote the first one I was supposed to co-author but my publisher wouldn’t let me do it long story is there uh Godfather to my two boys uh selem where are you today pal I’m in Miami dealing with the hurricane oh yeah that’s right I was talking to my mom and she’s in bokeh and uh dealing with the same thing yeah uh you know it’s a pain in the butt uh luckily it is in fact it’s one of the reasons we came to Miami eight years ago from the West Coast was because we ran a bunch of numbers and worked out that in about 20 25 years uh Miami’s gone so better enjoy it while it’s here was one one of the rationals we had for getting here oh my God you know I wanted to always create a map of the United States that had like the dangers laid out like you know Miami you know Florida would have hurricanes California would have

[00:02:02] earthquakes you know the Midwest would have boredom as the major disaster that you anyway I what you would do and you know people moved to the Pacific Northwest because they thought it was safe uh and then you have wildfires unexpectedly heat waves I remember talking to climate gurus about the the heat wave last year and they said we can’t even create models that Encompass that like we’re just we just can’t even replicate that well you know uh uh Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest is in for a massive earthquake sometime soon yeah I mean it’s it’s one of my favorite stories of of the inability of human beings to deal with systemic change it’s worth telling the story if you you I’ve got all the time in the world so in 1700 there was like a 9 point something earthquake one of the biggest ever uh 50 Mi off the coast of Seattle took out a th000 miles of the coastline from Vancouver all the way

[00:03:00] down to Oregon so and there’s been Rumblings under the water recently so they’ve been look going hey wait a minute uh so they start researching and they go over to Japan because they worked out that this must have created quite a tsunami uh and asked hey did you see a tsunami and sure enough at that time exactly a stoning huge tsunami came over the Pacific and took out half of Japan it’s that big so they’re like wow this oh great we found it fantastic and they’re starting to leave and the Japanese researchers go uh wait a minute you know this happens repeatedly right they’re like wait what and it turns out because of the Japanese have been keeping records for thousands of years it turns out every quarter every 250 years like clockwork this happens and a giant tsunami comes over and takes out half of Japan every 250 years so they come back to Seattle kind of really unnerved and start looking at tree rings and core samples and find out holy crap this is the earthquake it’s been happening roughly every 250 years for 20,000 years and the last one was 300 years ago yeah yeah so any minute

[00:04:01] now this earthquake is going to go off and take out a th000 miles of the so if this podcast releases on the day that happens I don’t know if it’s going to be prophetic or people going to blame us for it well you know what’s blows my mind is if you ask people in Seattle many of whom know this story you go does this affect your decision to buy a house whatever no they all everybody’s merrily going about their lives as if nothing happened that part I don’t get that part like we’re so bad at that well it’s it’s the human it’s the human challenge of we’re dealing with we don’t actually value the disasters that are coming uh in any way shape or form that makes sense and we all we focus on is what’s happening this morning like in politics or on Twitter well as you’re fond of saying everything important happened within a day’s walk right yeah I mean that’s the brain that’s the mind the human mind evolved 100 thousand years ago a million years ago and it was nothing that affected you that was not within the day’s walk that you care about and nothing changed generation to generation was always the same and and that innate wiring is a pain in the ass

[00:05:01] right now it is a pain in the ass we we actually I think the only way to solve humanity is an intervention into our brain chemistry and brain makeup I mean it’s really the only way is that plant medicine or is that I think those are the beginnings of it but there’s all sorts of uh other mechanisms whether it’s brain uh Computing interfaces or something but we need we needed intervention because we’re kind of operating off our Li lyic systems for so much of it right like the news cycle that you’d like to talk about yeah it’s it’s still the animal brain we’re we’re operating from a position of fear and scarcity and it’s um it’s a problem I I remember when I was researching this um we had this lizard brain and then the neocortex evolved very very fast um and when you talk to Anthropologist it was literally like a tumor got created it’s it’s a couple million years ago uh we created the frontal lobe and and the ne cortex I mean it’s fairly recent when you talk to those guys what’s amazing is

[00:06:00] how fast it grew it didn’t kind of evolve a layer by layer by layer it went from half a liter to 1.5 lers almost overnight in in genetic terms and and it didn’t replace the old brain it just sits above it yeah and so this is where religions I often call the ultimate marketing because all religions work by taking a young child um with whose neocortex hasn’t fully formed you give them a bunch of absolute truths like Jesus is a son of God Muhammad is the last prophet Mary was a virgin whatever and then you bind it into them with ritual repetition and a lot of sweets uh and once it’s wired in you can’t get rid of it you provoke it later you end up with a fight ORF flight response uh we are so screwed um yeah hey thanks for listening to moonshots and mindsets I want to take a second to tell you about a company that I love it’s called levels and it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat what I bring into my body see we were never designed as humans to eat as

[00:07:00] much sugar as we do and sugar is not good for your brain or your heart or your body in general levels helps me monitor the impact of the foods that I eat by monitoring my blood sugar for example I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil it blunts my glycemic response which is good for my health if you’re interested learn more by going to levels. link Peter levels will give you an extra 2 months of membership it’s something that is critical for the future of your life longevity all right let’s get back to the conversation in the episode speaking of screw how are you feeling about uh Elon and Twitter these days I mean it’s you know I could go both ways on this um on one level it’s a very very complex problem that you can’t just take a meax too right so so you’ve got a one end um you want freedom of speech with in which case you get this vomit of of racist and misogynist crap and on the other and you want advert iers and so you can’t have

[00:08:01] both and so you have to pick which one you want and managing that balance is very very uh delicate I think the way to think about this is Twitter is essentially the global Public Square and if you start acting out in a global Public Square the police come and take you away you can’t just stand there and and throw out stink bombs or or start shooting people whatever you can’t because if you if the police don’t come take you away the people are worth hearing or you know speaking to go away either we keep some sanity or not but it’s it’s interesting I I remember uh so I think Twitter should be a utility and it should be an open it’s the commons and it shouldn’t be owned by one company and it shouldn’t be uh it should be delicately moderated by government but not heavily what you want to make Twitter a government organization well no but but if you have a Town Square you need some governance around that that to say you can’t drive your cars through it

[00:09:01] at high speed you can’t just yell at everybody that goes by you have we have Norms that that operate and laws that that work for this and you need some of those laws let me let me slow this down a second and talk about um the fact that Elon on top of all the other things that he’s doing you know launching rockets and uh Brin computer interface and Reinventing the energy ecosystem and drilling tunnels decided to jump on to buying Twitter and I but here’s the other question how you know I know he tweets I I’ve direct messaged and tweeted and and all of that but I mean the volume I I can’t imagine he’s putting all of those tweets out himself there’s got to be an army of no there there’s I’m sure there’s an army of tweets the one person that I know that actually edits every tweet that that uh he before they go out is actually the Pope the Pope actually looks at every tweet put out under his name and

[00:10:01] unauthorized Oh I thought you I thought you saying the pope actually edits elon’s tweets no but there’s there’s definitely an army or he’s he’s so active on that that he’s not you know I think many of us with that brain of his would rather him focus on the really hard problems right yeah well listen I’m an investor in in Tesla and in SpaceX full disclosure so I’m not happy he’s spending his time on on Twitter though I remember years ago when I asked him what would you what would you want to conquer next uh he did have a vision he called it Pravda which uh is sort of the you know the the Russian version newspaper yeah um and and so if you could advise him would you go back and say don’t buy Twitter oh I think if he could go back and undo it he would do it which was are trying to do 45 billion is a ridiculous amount I think the actual value so um I

[00:11:02] know a bunch of the ex- Twitter engineers and at B house many of my guys went and worked at Twitter and vice versa so what are they saying they basically think it’s really worth about 10 to 12 billion MH um so 45 billion is obsurd at one at one level from a revenues typ type of thing however however let me spin the other way if there was somebody that could take on Twitter and go after it it would be Elon right because he’s got the gumption he doesn’t give a damn he he can focus on what’s the best thing to do and just do it uh but I think that that that tension between free speech and advertisers will will kill it so the question is how many things can he give a damn about is the biggest challenge I remember back in 2004 uh he joined my Board of Trustees at X prise I was on my way to go get Larry Page to join the board and I called Elon who I you know could call on a regular basis back then before he became techno God incarnate um and uh

[00:12:02] and I asked him would you join the board I’m about to go meet with Larry Page I want him to join our board and if you’re on the board he may likely join he said yeah and that was it and Larry joined the board it was great uh uh fast forward eight years later he calls he says listen Peter I need to I’m jumping off all boards other than SpaceX and Tesla because I need to focus on those companies and he did um until now he’s on everything doing everything at the same time so how many things can I mean the guy is people don’t realize how extraordinarily brilliant he is he’s not just the CEO of Tesla he’s the chief engineer right I mean the Merlin engines the uh Falcon 9 Falcon heavy Starship they have emanated from his mind uh he is a you know genius extraordinaire and and Tesla while he didn’t originally found the company much of its Vision its execution 100% is is him so yeah you know the question

[00:13:01] becomes if he’s not building spaceships and Reinventing our energy ecosystem um you know what is he what does he how does he spend his time I mean look solving the public discourse problem is a worthy problem but it it it’s not an engineering problem it’s a cultural problem and so given the incredible engineering nounce and gumption and capability has he’s better off focusing on brain Computing interfaces or avatars or getting us to Mars uh we need an off-planet strategy desperately the way we’re doing it right yeah and so my if I could you know something we could do is put together a cabal of 10 or 15 people and and he has to do what the vote what the connective vote is of what he should focus on don’t focus on that focus on that yeah I mean the challenge is he’s never found anybody who he would have be the CEO of Tesla yeah uh I mean he’s he’s I’ve had

[00:14:01] these conversations where he said like you know if I could find a CEO to run Tesla who is a great CEO that I could trust please I would love to have him do that so I can focus on SpaceX you know going to Mars is in fact his number one objective making Humanity a multiplanetary species so uh it’s the the biggest challenge is not the value of Tesla it’s it’s the uh it’s the time division multiplexing of elon’s brain um you know and I know uh I hope he settles it I hope he finds somebody who can run it for him uh talking about current uh sort of massive uh situations going upside down uh FTX holy yeah well uh you know I a uh when I had a bunch of my people who are kind of deep in the crypto web 3 world they’ve been saying to me for about a year and a half that FTX is is not going to work um they’re offering insane interest rates and at

[00:15:00] that level you get into a Ponzi scheme so that’s great for short-term Market penetration but at some point that that’s going to come back to roost and you burn through your cash reserves so it’s kind of there’s a few big hand grenades left in the crypto world to to deal with tether being one of them and the in the the credit worthiness of the usdc and tether uh but once we’re through those I think then we uh actually see this as a positive thing because it’s clearing up the the the crud for all of the incredibly worthy projects that are out there so I think we’ll hit bottom at some point in the next uh two three months I think there’ll be one more big selloff as we hit T end of your tax things where people have to reconcile taxes so there’ll be a bunch of selling and buying I think January we start a new bull market in crypto that’ll be incredible yeah I was watching some of the predictions both from Kathy Wood uh and from um uh who was our our buddy uh

[00:16:01] well besides Michael S our buddy who bought all the Bitcoin in the auction um uh Draper um you know it’s we’re going to hit quarter million a million dollars and and so you know people keep on predicting these Highs but no one holds their feet to the fire when they keep on missing their uh missing their predictions it’s like it’s I guess it’s just easy to predict it’s going to be at you know 100,000 a quarter million a million dollars of Bitcoin I mean I hope it is I’m in I’m in the maximalist camp right um um the it it either goes to a million dollars or Bitcoin it goes to zero in my mind I agree I agree with that I agree with that it’s either becomes a something that’s 10,000 to 15 $20,000 and it’s either going to go up to a million or down to zero this is the biggest asymmetric bet you could ever make that’s a good point right so so you put in uh 100 Grand it’s going to go to zero it’s going to go to 10 million I mean it’s a really easy it’s a really

[00:17:01] easy equation to put some money against I mean would you mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin yes now I I say that um and I may be completely wrong just because a a a bet on bitcoin is a bet against the existing monetary system well that’s easy and then therefore it’s the question is not if it’s when right yeah and so when you have that kind of an equation as long as you’re willing to hold for the long term then uh you’re fine uh so I think that’s the way to think about it and I’m I’m super fascinated by the different experiments and it’s worth actually touching on why Bitcoin is interesting right now with the three triangle points sure let’s do it um so there Jeff Booth talks about this I think of Jeff is the kind of the patron saint uh or the chief Economist of the abundance world right and he he thinks about monetary systems and the transition between them he he gave me a great framing he said you’ve got three things you have to hit from a crypto perspect perspective uh security

[00:18:00] decentralization and scalability and those are three important um kind of U bullet points to hit the uh Bitcoin for the first time in history solved decentralization and security and nobody had ever done that before in a in a in a digital currency that’s that’s huge to be able to solve for security and decentralization uh but it didn’t handle scalability very well initially and so that’s where you got the rise of all the altcoins cuz they handle SEC the scalability very well so people got very excited but in doing so they all compromise on one of the other two so you get all coins that are scalable but not decentralized um you get all coins that are scalable but not secure but decentralized but you don’t get any of all three so you had this problem and so they’re often called shitcoins by the Bitcoin world for that reason etc etc uh but now with the lightning Network and liquid we now have the engineering capability to make

[00:19:00] Bitcoin scalable uh and and when people were moaning about Bitcoin scalability my my thing was always wait that’s an engineering problem it’s not an invention problem right we’ve solved the invention problem that’s huge engine scalability is an engineering problem we’ll we’ll F solve that we always do and so now we’ve solved the engineering problem so now Bitcoin hits all of those three layers that’s why there’s people that are so excited by Bitcoin what’s fascinating for me is the smartest people I are the most excited about Bitcoin the godamn smartest so that’s an interesting indicator one of them actually told me um your ability to invest in Bitcoin is is your ability is literally an IQ test for the future I I I was going to say that it’s uh it’s it’s definitely uh something I think about atic of course right but still yeah yeah I mean you and I were both I this year I gave the IR Rand award uh the atlas award to Michael sailor and you were there as my my guest and that was fun I mean seeing Michael sailor on

[00:20:01] stage at calamigos accepting that incredibly beautiful award uh and waxing uh uh beautifully about Bitcoin I mean yeah I I think at the end of that evening everybody wanted to pull out their coinbase wallet and to start buying yes and and if if if for for the people listening if you’ve not seen the Michael sailor an Rand acceptance speech absolutely go see it it’s a brilliant piece of oratory uh because he talks about the fact that we now have freedom it gives you Freedom right no government can take it away no uh uh no company can take it away from you once you have it I was talking to uh uh to a dear friend a mutual friend of ours Dave blundon uh who’s on our board at X prise we’re talking about uh the future of using cryptocurrencies in African nations uh both to replace their Cur currency but also to create contracts for uh for land

[00:21:02] ownership and real estate ownership you know the reason I wouldn’t go and invite invest in beautiful real estate on the coast in in various African nations is I don’t know whether I’m going to own it at the end the result whether it’s going to be a revolution but if there is uh you know a cryptocurrency that is secure if there is a uh ability to track uh ownership on the blockchain um I think that could open up massive Investments uh it it does you know so I was talking to Hernando Doo the famous economist who’s done a lot of work on property rights especially for the poor right and he he uh so there’s 280 trillion of global real estate value and he worked out that if you put Land Titles on the blockchain just did that uh you’d release about 10% of value because they would be analyzable transferable um lookup referenceable Etc and that’s a massive number uh to to think about the

[00:22:00] challenge you have there is the immune system problem because when you say the blockchain will be authoritative of who owns what land and you take that Providence away from governments they really really don’t like it no you’d have to have a government that wants to do this yeah I mean so look at what happened with El Salvador pal so El Salvador uh goes and adopts Bitcoin yeah um and it it was a huge Fanfare at the beginning and we don’t hear much about it anymore success because in opinion it’s because it’s working okay what you hear is a lot of negative Stories the IMF is going bananas on this because if a bunch of other countries start adopting it you have massive change in the hegemony of the US dollar and that’s a big challenge um it’s when you talk to people on the ground in El Salvador uh it’s amazing it’s actually working really well transferring Bitcoin around for payments and stuff uh there’s a bunch of corruption at the government levels as there is always but it has enabled microtrans actions at a very local level in a very powerful way um I

[00:23:02] know a bunch of small countries that are looking at this very aggressively for this for exactly that reason it’s it’s this is a ma this is the biggest inflection point in 500 years right where we’re taking power monetary power away from a centralized government and giving it to a peer-to-peer environment and so this this is you know when you talk about scarcity to abundance it’s that level of a transition I think it’s in my opinion this what we’re going through right now is the biggest transition in the history of humanity like this next 30 Years will dictate the next 300 years of fale well it’s it’s everything I mean we’re Reinventing fundamentally what it means to be human and what it means to have a society yeah everything that’s why I like your framing of we must be living in a simulation because it’s too goddamn interesting yeah we’re we’re at the 99th L level of a 100 level game and it’s all playing out during our lifetimes like and it truly is but we’ll get to a simulation later so we watch FTX just

[00:24:02] Skyrocket right and Sam bankman freed becomes a hero for every MIT grad and every uh you know techno entrepreneur out there and then it crashes we’ve seen uh you know nfts and entire systems you know so I mean Easy Come Easy Go is it is it just basically if it’s moving if it’s skyrocketing too fast in value should people be you know do you sell at the top and diversify I I think there’s I think you have to look at two reasons why things are exploding out of the gate right one is that the fundamentals are unbelievably strong and therefore track those carefully and there’s a long-term commitment by the project Founders Etc and then there are the quick get-rich quick schemes and things that are that are engineered for short-term massive value creation but not long-term sustainability and from what I’ve heard the FTX model fits into the ladder they

[00:25:00] they did they were offering massive interest rates for people to put money into FTX Etc which is essentially a creating a Ponzi scheme at some point that has to come home to roost and when it does then the whole thing tumbles down like a house of carts but you know it’s so that’s one one big challenge the second is there’s a lot of the crypto world is very much the wild west there’s a lot of manipulation uh Luna got taken down by a bunch of manipulation by uh vested interest that didn’t want uh an algorithmic model like Luna had I mean You’ you invested heavily into the nft world in in the early days yeah um was it you know hype or was it real I mean whenever there’s something that is not providing real value when it’s all perceived value I get concerned uh you’re meing bananas yeah yes and no so so yes there’s a ton of hype as the thing you have something new let’s take the 99 com boom right everybody in their grandmother creates a website you know

[00:26:01] pet food online and and you know grandmother shoes online and and whatnot and then you have this massive culling of the herd because you you you it’s that Gartner hype cycle sure uh and you go through the trough of disillusionment and this is what we’re in now called the crypto winter so a lot of the projects that are crazy flame out and I’ll give you an example of one I won’t say the name but there was an nft project that launched about a year ago where the guy said a guy got up and said listen uh I’m selling 2,000 nfts buy them for an ethereum each and I’m going to do such amazing stuff for the community that you will it’ll blow your minds okay that that was it he didn’t say what he was going to do he didn’t he raised 2,000 ethereum in 50 minutes right okay now uh $2,000 and $4,000 that’s like $8 million or something insane like that okay yep um uh in 50 minutes okay now the thing you look at that and you go okay um if you apply the smallest Common

[00:27:03] Sense filter to this a he’s it’s basically it’s a security because he’s promising returns B uh um he’s not saying what he’s going to do uh and C this is full use car salesman mode right so a project like that you kind of go yeah not not into into it okay uh you take say the board ape club which is also has elements of the hype but of which of which you’re a of which you’re a member have a board ape number 5304 right now when I have a board ape a it’s mine in perpetuity B I have all the IP uh rights to that so I could go create a movie or put it on t-shirts or do whatever I want with that character which is kind of surreal but you get connected into a community right um then they start offering things to that community and what they’re doing is what they what the cryptoeconomics for these projects that are good is they offer High rewards over for the early adopters and then they tail off over time and now

[00:28:00] you’ve built a thriving Community okay now the board ape yach Club is still worth like something like a billion dollars in a year and a half um I’ve I I took some lessons from my Guru Michael jansson who’s been guiding me through this and he said the minute you get land or you get ape coin whatever sell it right so I’ve paid back all my initial investment twice over and I’m still sitting on my board ape and it’s a in a fascinating community to be a part of to see what’s going on now the reason I’m excited about nfts is that you can program the nft so for me digital currencies and cryptocurrencies are not interesting because they’re digital the US dollar is digital and has been for quite a while the fact is I can program the money and I can’t program a dollar bill right so imagine I buy your uh sweater that you’re wearing this looks like a very nice sweater okay a price of $100 okay and system in the future can say right I’m going to send you the $100

[00:29:00] in crypto it holds it in escrow you know not now know that I’ve sent the money you send me the sweater I receive a sign for the FedEx receipt and then it releases the money to you so we can programmatically manage that transaction and no fraud is possible in that transaction which is kind of an incredible thing for two parties that don’t know each other right so now we can scale this is a hugely important Point without without a without a central author a middleman like yeah and if you if it’s worth it I can I can touch on the Byzantine generals problem for which for me is the magical piece of world you know I remember in 201 or 12 when you started talking about Bitcoin I mean we were on stage together all the time for yeah at singular University running the executive programs and running the uh the uh GSP program uh and I remember the first time exactly where I was sitting when you went over the the the business te General’s uh problem and explained

[00:30:00] Bitcoin to me and uh the only problem was we need our time machine to go back and say Peter just put you know 500 bucks in you know I didn’t do it I know you didn’t I did it a bit later otherwise you’d be buying dinner next time I’ll probably be invited anyway but the the there are you know the Enthusiast you know for example I watched real time the ethereum Ico yeah and there’s a piece of me that’s like throw bucks into this why not like go for it right and there’s another P me going what is this thing I don’t get my head around this this touring complete system I and my brain was just not the size of italics and it wasn’t young enough right there’s some bylaw you have to be under 25 years old understand well there’s there’s no I think you have to be under 25 to have not seen all the things go wrong that people you you become more dubious and also the agility and the what the hell Factor well think let me let me flip it the other way take

[00:31:00] somebody that’s a banker and they’ve been they’re 60 years old and they’ve been in banking for you know 45 years or 40 years okay their brain is so entrained and all the neurons are so entrained on fiat currency Etc when you show them Bitcoin they literally get hives can’t go right and this is the we all have that to some extent you know we had that famous interaction about Su a few years ago offsite and you said hey uh um and I asked the question you know we should think about what would Su look like if we had to recreate it today and it was about eight nine years and you said and the board said okay go think about that what would it look like and I tried four times to do that exercise and I failed miserably because we were so successful in what we did initially that my brain kept going back to that right and so that’s and that’s clearly the wrong answer because e Facebook didn’t really exist and and e-commerce sites didn’t exist and mukes didn’t exist and there was no we we would do things incredibly

[00:32:01] differently and it’s incredibly difficult to step outside your old paradigms this is why psychedelics are interesting uh it gives you a a accelerated path to break through some of these old mental and structural cognitive traps that we have so we’re recording this on the day after uh November 8th the after the US midterm elections and talk about a system that is been sort of cified and stuck and that’s democracy uh so we’re we’re voting through a representative democracy um and we’re we’re doing it in using a system that’s hundreds of years old um and I’m I’m just sitting here uh thinking about how archaic the process is you know it’s it’s better than any place else almost but still arcade um what do you think about the future of

[00:33:00] democracy here pal um where to start okay um uh so important for people to rec just hear a couple of things I I I’ve lived in eight different countries for more than a year each right I’ve lived every from India to Europe to the US to California all all California and Florida which is a separate world of its own um and and uh um so I’ve seen different systems across the wide spectrum of socialism to pretend democracy in India versus here Etc and I think the US Constitution is the most important document uh created in the last half thousand years uh because it enshrines individual rights uh into that and then in in and kind of dictates to Congress and Senate to pass laws around it almost all individual rights not almost all but at least it makes an attempt for the first time in history to do now what I go bananas over with the conservatives today is that

[00:34:01] they go they have this concept of oralism and they want to go back to what the founding fathers thought and that’s actually completely wrong because they intended it to be a living document that should be amended from time to time because they recognize and I think of the Constitution as the software that runs the country right you have to upgrade your software now and then uh times change values change you know slavery is an obvious example Etc so so having said all of that um uh the challenge that we have with democracy is the metabolism of decision- making and change in a democracy is too slow for the change of technology for sure almost all policy is defensive and reactive right something happens and we we kind of go oh my God you know drones or Bitcoin and what do we do about it and we try and Tamp down on it the FAA with getting um vertical flight rights Z yeah zero g flight and and space flight I mean the reality is most laws are in place to maintain the status quo yeah

[00:35:02] and to keep the uh the primary players uh as the primary players any any any Revolution any breakthrough fundamentally disrupts the existing socio economic structure that exists and puts everybody who’s funding the politicians in danger and and let me do a shout out here right you and uh Steven did something incredible in in abundance and bold where you recognize that people see something new as danger mhm because they’ve never seen it before and it triggers the LI the the the um amigdalas yeah the the amigdala right and then you go oh my God we should autonomous cars oh my God it might kill somebody let’s ban the car right as Brad Templeton says we people don’t want to be killed by robots they’d much rather be killed by drunk people right and and and that’s a terrible response to a new idea that clearly has incredible value so we we kind of block the entrance of new ideas then we open that tap slowly and it

[00:36:01] takes 20 years to get the value of that technology and that cycle we have to break um and we were better at it than we used to be but it’s still too too goddamn slow with all of the 20 G Gutenberg moments that we talk about are asteroid impacts that are changed the world the Advent of crisper and crypto and and solar energy Etc we have to get better at implementing this so my view on democ is big nation state democracies are going to fail MH I think what succeeds is micro democracies at a citystate level I mean so this is is this bology and uh his his uh I I disagree with bology uh on the network state in a couple of important ways okay uh it’s brilliant thinking and it’s very important thinking okay but I think when the idea of city states um um and the the rise of city states came to me me via Paul safo from Singularity right sure Paul forecaster futurist and he

[00:37:02] talked about this in detail 10 years ago and he got up on stage and said I don’t expect the US to exist as a country in 30 years wow pretty provocative statement pretty provocative statement every wait wait wa hold he was getting off stage and we had to like yank him back and go you can’t you can’t make that comment and walk off and he said if look at the discourse that’s happening the country is literally pulling itself apart and he gave us a couple of really interesting nuggets I’ll give you two of them one was everybody in the world knows who the mayor of New York City is MHM nobody in the world knows who the governor of New York state is even New Yorkers don’t know who the governor is right and so there this the importance of the city and he gave a second anecdote when Schwarzenegger was governor uh the Dalai Lama wanted to visit Hollywood visit LA and George Bush said to him please don’t receive the dalama it’ll cause me massive problems with the Chinese right and the sitting governor of California said to the

[00:38:01] sitting Republican president and they’re both from the same party screw you I’m receiving the Dal Lama because it’s important to my constituents that he comes and he’s like that tells you that there’s a gap that’s increasing yeah and we’re we’re moving to city states as the future when you think about brexit or trump it wasn’t left versus right it’s Urban versus rural H completely brexit was completely London versus the rest of the country yeah and you look at the map from yesterday right the election map all the urban centers are blue and everything else is red right it’s completely that’s the fundamental tension of the 21st century so in that model city states micro democracies work National democracies don’t work because they’re too slow and it’s too hard to bring a whole population along and then you have fake news and all the other things difficulties in this so India Brazil uh the US all the mess you know one of the conversations

[00:39:01] you and I have had as well is which countries are going to be best suited for an AI enabled future right so uh communism did not work when it was humans actually trying to decide how much supply and demand would be done in different places because there was no way it was it it was the marketplace that enabled incredible rise of capitalism and and full disclosure listen I’m a Libertarian capitalist I love capitalism I’m an entrepreneur it’s my art form I love starting companies and I love democracy and all of that having said that if we’re getting to human level AI by 2029 I just had a a podcast with with Ry and Ray KW and you know Ray sticks very much to his 2029 date we’re going to have human level AI which means 2030 we have superhuman level Ai and it doesn’t slow down after that there’s no onoff switch no velocity meter it is on a tear and so what happens if uh the the

[00:40:01] leadership of a city state or Nation says to the AI listen come on over be my partner you run the situation over here um you know that that might be an interesting future for uh for running a nation uh but it’s not going to work in a democracy where no AI is going to wait for to get a human opinion it’s no no This Is The Answer I’ve done five billion simulations and it’s come out the exact same every time so just I don’t care about your wetwear uh opinion on the situation this is what you should do yes what do you think about that so oh God where to start okay so I publicly disagree with the idea that AI is dangerous I agree with you I think AI is the single greatest tool we have for solving the world’s biggest problems yes and I think when you have if you get AIS that are human level and you end up with AI guys that are conscious or whatever I think they look at human beings they

[00:41:00] transcend us and they go oh nice people over here and and a nice little species over here and they go off and the best movie the best representation I think of this is the movie her her yes her was amazing right they they got bored with us and they left that’s right the guy dates in Ai and he’s falls in love with of course it’s Scarlet Johansson I wish he could they could do that better but okay he dates an AI falls in love and after a while the AI breaks up with him why because she can now interact with 10 million other AIS in real time at scale and he’s one little limited brain talking about what he ate for breakfast right and and so I think what’ll happen is the the speed of evolution will move so fast they’ll just go and they’re gone and they’ll live in the internet Etc I remember talking to Dan Barry who is our robotics um yes our our astronaut we asked him a question in one of the sessions of is there a system today because the challenge with AI and Consciousness is when will you know CU we don’t have a definition for

[00:42:00] Consciousness we don’t have a test for it right you look like you’re self-aware so I attribute self-awareness to you thank you I think I’m self-aware but my wife Lily disagrees so like where do you even start that conversation um and and so we asked the question to Dan he’s watched a ton of animals and Labs because NASA does experiments with free floating animals Etc and he said huh I think the I think a frog is where is the boundary point we like frog he goes in his opinion a frog uh is is sophisticated enough just about to know that oh I’m a Frog it has that like a dog definitely knows it’s a dog right a dolphin definitely knows it’s a dolphin in Dan’s opinion a mosquito doesn’t know it’s a mosquito okay it’s just an autom wandering but the level of a frog kind of gets you to the boundary condition oh I’m a Frog okay so that’s one observation that the level of a frog is the kind of uh um level aess of thing okay now it won’t be that hard for an AI

[00:43:01] to get to that level right now so we asked him is there a system today out in the world that has the requisite inputs outputs processing where it might suddenly go oh I’m a system and generate selfawareness right and he’s went H let me think about that so he goes off for a day and comes back and goes I have an answer um I’ve thought about the different systems in the world and his answer was Traffic Systems okay in his opinion traffic systems have the input output feedback loops and the processing that one day it might suddenly go oh I’m a traffic system right and that begs two questions okay one what would it do MH and B what would we how would we find out that it did that like we would not know we have no mechanism for for decide seeing this so I tend to be less paranoid about the AI side when I think about the her Vector um it’s going to be utterly fascinating to see where this goes and there’s so much unbelievable benefit that will come I think it’s incredible hey everybody I hope you’re enjoying

[00:44:00] this episode want to tell you about something I’ve been doing for years every quarter or so having a FLOTUS come to my home to draw Bloods to understand what’s going on inside my body and it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done so I ended up co-founding a company that sends a fonus to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter put them up on a dashboard so I can see what’s in range what’s out of range and then get the right supplements medicines peptides hormones to optimize my health it’s something that I want for all my friends and family and I’d love it for you if you’re interested go to myli force.com back/ Peter to learn more let’s get back to the episode so going back again to the question of democracy and AI talk to me about you know in the future we have human level AI yeah how do you feel about turning over leadership to an AI and saying these are

[00:45:02] the things that matter to our society I mean let the human sort of set the objectives like we want maximized happiness we want maximized Health we want maximized whatever and run the nation state for us let’s use an analogy which is the Google energy conserving AI that they applied to their buildings right so they deployed a machine learning intelligence to analyze all the sensors and Light and and energy usage and said how we want to optimize for uh energy conservation and the AI because it’s got access to so many different inputs outputs calculation capabilities was able to what drop 40% their energy needs which is a massive amount a human being can’t do that because it can’t monitor this stuff in real time Etc so when you think about what AIS could do if you said hey maximize for conserving human life you basically take the the the Constitution the US Constitution right say go generate the policies that will and the legal structures that will

[00:46:00] maximize for these things right and and I think you’d come up with something quite incredible where the AI could so I think that’s one side of it which is policy and Regulatory generation and you could create policies around this okay um I’ll give you one that I would love to throw at this AI which is stop signs okay the amount of fuel we waste coming to a full stop it from stops and the and the brake power and the energy wastage of a million cars coming to nobody no no humans no dogs no car I mean you could know you can have Imaging better than human not that hard right you need two sensors one at the stop sign and one in the car and you’re done and and we should really solve that problem and a I could kind of go oh freaking just go do that and this is the this is the autonomous car solution right where cars are actually able to uh Drive closer to each other at higher speeds and have far more efficiency and we’ll get there but it’s the idea first of all that we’re turning

[00:47:01] over decision-making capability to an AI in a car and then even turning it over to an AI in government in leadership right because I I listen if you believe and I think you do and I do that we are going to reach a human level AI um I would I personally would rather have if I knew the AI was able to maximize for set of human desirs uh and safety and health and all of those things I’d much rather have an uncorruptible AI that isn’t influenced by the color of my skin or my gender or my age or anything be making decisions so I would it’s ver for me it’s very simple okay we have asimov’s three laws of robotics yep okay you basically say to the AI these are your constraints M or something similar right uh don’t kill or allow a human being to be killed um

[00:48:02] etc etc and then do the instructions that we give you as long as they don’t interfere with the first two okay uh and then you trust now we trust our existing human beings with those things we trust our police not to uh kill people not always successfully I’d much rather have an AI policeman than a real policeman who’s got all his regular biases he’s having a fight with with his wife at home he had an army wound and was shot at therefore has a trigger response you have no idea what they’re going through and the stress of being on the job with guns everywhere right um and and then basically the AI should be able to say something like for fick’s sake why do you need guns get rid of all the guns yeah you could make some good decisions that way as you and I see that the same on those politics so when do you think we will have uh have this let’s go to the to the ray Kur 2029 prediction a second human level AI by 20 29 we’re seeing the rapid rise of large language models gpt3 GPT 4 is coming Deep Mind

[00:49:03] Made its announcement about gate you know I think the Tweet was game over uh AGI artificial general intelligence is coming uh what’s your what’s your thinking on this so let’s really be careful not to trigger the amydala yeah because the first thing that happens that people go oh my God this bad it must be bad Etc okay let’s notice let’s take as a an important principle Ray’s commentary that technology is the most important is is a major driver of productivity and progress in the world actually technology might be the only major driver of progress we’ve ever SE we’re not getting more intelligent political systems aren’t becoming better so it it um I would argue with that okay how would you argue with it so if you look at your all of the stuff that you track on abundance right yeah um poverty and mortality and maternal mortality infant mortal ality the big challenge with technology is how do you get the promise without the

[00:50:00] Peril right okay you want to have fire that will heat your house and not use it to burn down your we’ve overall done a pretty good job of it over we’re still we’re still here we’re still here and we’re overall pretty like thriving you know I I’m I I so love the positivity framing you have in abundance and all your talks because it’s so important for people to see the real reality that we’re better off today than we ever have been in the history of the world by such a huge Factor right just go back 500 years ago somebody goes off a husband goes off to do something and never comes back because he got killed by a bear and the wife never knows no idea if he’s ever coming back has he run off or has he been killed kids are being raised now what do you do do you remarry or not I mean there’s a million chaotic things like this I I have a a very benal example that I like to use for today’s world um people go oh my God God technology we know you know etc etc cell phones are bad I go you know if you’re

[00:51:00] waiting if you’re a couple and you’re waiting for your babysit SED to show up 20 years ago and they’re late you have no idea are they coming are they not coming should we cancel the restaurant reservation there’s all this consternation and uncertainty and unknowing around what’s happening with the babysitter because you can’t do much until the damn person arrives right and now we have infinite knowledge they’re running three minutes late and way you’re you’re tracking their Uber right yeah we have exact we can say call rest and we have people don’t recognize the unbelievable peace of mind that a million examples like that give us in the form of Technology uh and so now we accelerate that radically and I think when you look at AI is able to look at the complexity of policymaking and say listen uh Mr Mayor you’re allocating resources in the wrong way uh you could achieve this by doing this this this I think initially it starts off as a guide by the side and a a reference check and over time people go it’s great that you

[00:52:00] want to make that policy of your checked with your AI yet okay before we got to babysitters and policy changes we were talking about what made the world better and I said yes 100% it’s technology we haven’t been improving ourselves cognitively or whatever you said you disagreed but putting that aside technology is making the world uh rapidly better at a rate that is staggering the problem is of course and I’m going to do my rant that I have to which is the crisis News Network all the negative news bombarding us constantly with every murder every problem on the planet real time to 20 devices in h yes over and over and over again 10 times 10 times an hour so uh when are we going to see this AI uh that is going to help us govern and when are we going to see it accepted in society is there is there a pivotal moment that people are going to say yeah I think I’m going to allow it um to

[00:53:01] govern because let me let me use an example okay yeah sure okay so let’s use a real example pandemic hits and there’s a bunch of uh news and stories and misinformation about masks should we were masks or not right massive like consternation Governor Dan santis over here in Florida is like Mass never work uh Chuck the maass I mean etc etc okay now uh I I would have a really interesting it would be a really interesting use case to have an AI Jarvis call it right depending on No No’s stick with Jarvis I love J J let’s stick with Jarvis and the Jarvis goes hey I’ve done the clinical I’ve researched this already I’ve scoured the web for this I’ve looked at it the clinical trials and the experiments are very clear if you wear a mask you prevent 75% infection outward and somebody else wearing a mask present is able to stop

[00:54:01] 25% of inward inection the combination gives you 90% Effectiveness but at least we’re a mask to prevent outward right okay that’s very clear that there’s no controverting that evidence if better evidence emerges great the problem is that we are we’ve we’ve used to operate policy and so on on an evidentiary basis well even worse even worse than that we would ignore the evidence and and state what was what was most politically uh efficacious for us exactly and almost always you go to the you’re affecting the person’s limic system yeah they’re taking away your freedom we’re all about Freedom right fear and fear and scarcity and and I love getting into arguments with Republicans on this and I not don’t mean to harp on Republicans but everybody sits there and goes we need Freedom like if I drive three miles over the speed limit I get pulled over by a cop in the US where’s your freom now Canada because it’s a free country in Europe or Canada

[00:55:01] I never even see a police car ever like you want freedom let me drive a little faster for God’s sakes right um so there’s there’s there’s there’s such around the the kind of the pat generalism like Freedom or whatever and goes bad just as bad on the left in its own way so going back go back to when are we going to see this system uh enabled and and adopted now humans don’t adopt new systems until they’re 10 times faster 10 times cheaper and the switching cost is worth it right so okay so I think we’re almost there so think about this uh I I I have my uh mobile phone right and I’m sitting in Miami and A hurricane’s coming you are and it is right and I can say um hurricane Nicole tracker uh show me when the hurricane will hit Miami Beach right right and the the AI says to me um uh it’s coming at

[00:56:01] tonight and that’ll be the danger point and maybe that’s when you move your car to the second level of the car park or whatever in cases a storm surch is there going to be a storm surch I don’t know but the but the AI will know sure right now so you take one step further we’re only one hop away from the from an AI tracking our behavior and looking at our world of activity and going hey he’s sitting in Miami his car is parked on a ground floor thing um there’s a storm surge coming he will need to move this car by X or or better yet I will move your car for you you know take over and optimize protect me it’s it’s ultimately take care of me is right and and we’re we’re there I’ll give you another example um I wake up one morning and my left big toe is blue and I’m like why the hell is my toe blue no blood circulation what the hell happened what do I do I look it up on Google and and research it myself I figure out what the condition in some Latin sounding name uh and this is how you treat it and literally you will print that out take

[00:57:01] it to a doctor and the doctor will go what the hell is this and how did you figure all this out because we now have better understanding and we can analyze all these conditions better than a doctor can and self self treat for the vast majority right so if if I just put an AI go AI my toes blue what the hell do I do and it scours around and comes back uh uh even better or my bodily sensors will go hey dude your toes about to turn blue please do these three things to prevent that so we’re like we’re like right there and and Ray said something very profound in one of the recent talks he said look we talk about implemented uh uh Hardware that can connect but your phone can iterate much more effectively so all you need is the communication capability between you and the phone and we’re just about there between voice and other sensors we’re just about there so uh so I give it year you you give it a year before what a year year before you have a Jarvis type AI that

[00:58:00] can handle initially basic things we do calendaring now with AI pretty well all all right so let me let me piece this down for everybody listening because it’s really important uh I talk I I say to all the CEOs that I Mentor listen there going to be two kinds of companies by end of this decade those companies fully utilizing Ai and those out of business and I think it’s that black and white um so uh let’s begin with Ray’s prediction 29 for human level AI do you believe that that is correct by whatever meure you think it’s gonna be sooner or later no I disagree because I disagree with the premise let me explain what I mean by that dude it’s so hard to get an answer from you I’m sorry I you can’t just take put out a thing like a path thing like human leveli the problem is we don’t know what AI what intelligence is okay right so there’s about a dozen facets of intelligence there’s spatial intellig Eastern concept of presence or awareness that’s a whole other form of spiritual

[00:59:00] intelligence we have our we with the IQ test you measure two things uh speed of thought and the ability to match Concepts across Frameworks okay but you don’t measure any of the other things so what the hell do you mean by intelligence is number one question right and the second question which is why I go even doubly more crazy is what would you you know we talk about the technological singularities intelligence machine intelligence overtaking human intelligence so number one I have an issue with what do you mean by intelligence number two the minute I can prescriptively describe a task a robot or AI is going to do a much better job of it anyway so it’s a non soorry So when you say human level AI I come back to you and go what aspect of humanity are you talking about now if I can have an AI that makes me more present that’s really valuable or or routes around my emotional biases by the way I want I want want that AI you know we have all these cognitive biases that we don’t actually notice that we’re hitting like when I

[01:00:00] look at somebody or I hear something an AI that is simply saying Peter you’re being biased about here’s the actual data and the way you should see it I mean most people will turn it off I think but think about that how far are we from that we’re we’re we’re literally that’s not a difficult thing to to do to track my language and go look you’ve got a positivity bias you think everything’s going to be so goddamn Rosy you need to tone it down a NCH well we you and I don’t have that we’re we’re not we’re OB we’re obviously unbiased and we’re not techno Optimist well you know when you see things that can transform the world for better how can you not get enthusiastic right like the water abundance U machine exerprise or the Avatar exp like amazing we just had it we just had it won in uh in Long Beach team out of Germany uh won the uh $10 million from ANA Airlines so here so we’ve got human level AI however you define multi-dimensional human level AI coming okay um and uh if you’ve been

[01:01:02] track speaking about Avatar uh you’ve obviously been tracking uh Optimus Tesla bot right and there’s other companies uh like Beyond me and uh Sanctuary so Dynamics Boston Dynamics well Boston Dynamics sort of large scale these other companies are are focusing on uh human labor Marketplace right being able to create a a bot for uh you know Elon says 20,000 or less less than the price of a car that can be available to do labor for you so I want to transition I want to talk about that but I want to transition as well to the idea of universal basic income because I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the world of abundance yeah can can I just cover to say a final comment on the robot side before we move to Ubi well yeah let’s talk robots first okay and then my premise is that we’re going to need to have have ai and Robotics change the global economy and then we can afford Ubi but let’s um okay uh yes I totally

[01:02:04] agree let’s talk about robots Okay robots so I think it’s coming for sure to have a general robot that can do household tasks and work tasks Etc but I think it’s further away than people think and I’ll use the analogy of autonomous cars right uh maybe the biggest predictive failure that we had at singularities we thought autonomous cars would be there in 5 years because Brad Templeton was just just technology is there like it’s there you know and his his concept was workable he said look you don’t have to be you don’t have human intelligence to to drive a car you need horse level intelligence to navigate around we kind of have that the problem is that it turns out to be deceptively difficult because you’re often driving and routing around a pothole or there’s a bike and and who’s overtaking another bike and so you need to you watch that and you see that there’s like a million little adaptive situations that you drive that you don’t

[01:03:00] realize and trying to counter for all of those without a sensor-based road system is very difficult I think once you have sensors in the in the roads then then driving becomes autonomous driving as a piece of cake right and the sensors become cheap I I dis I disagree with that by the way I mean I think our eyes are just two human eyes not radar not liar not ultrasound just two human eyes are what enables a human driver to drive so I so I uh dispute this with experience because I’ve now driven a Tesla four times from Toronto to Miami and back yes so I’ve done something like uh 8,000 miles in autonomous in with the Tesla and autonomous driving mode okay which listen I I’m not saying that that uh autopilot on Tesla is anywhere near ready but I do believe that we’re we’re going to be able to get there uh it’s it’s a data processing issue it’s not a data collection issue yep it could it

[01:04:00] could be could be right so so so if it’s if it’s not dat let me give you one more one we don’t need sensor we don’t need sensors in the road if it’s not a data collection issue okay fair enough but you need a ton more data processing and a lot a lot more use cases and interpretive things right for example I would normally overtake the bike but my wife’s in the car and she gets a bit nervous so I’m going to take hold a back a notch right these these little there’s a little nuances that we don’t take no but let me let me go make the point in a slightly different way okay um one obvious thing for a home robot is folding laundry yes right and and we’ve struggled mightily with a a robot that can fold laundry you do you remember the videos of Scott hasson’s will garage yes yes yeah it can do a t-shirt yes but really hard to do anything else right like it’s it’s it turns out even it’s difficult for me to do anything else I’ll give you a third one which is the vacuum robot right yes people buy a shark robot or Roomba and it’s great in

[01:05:02] in like 20% situations but the minute you have a curv stool with a base that’s a little odd it doesn’t work and you end up spending more time arranging the furniture so the RO than then just vacuuming yourself and people kind of go after a while ah I’m just going to do myself wait wait you’re telling me that that that’s a problem but governing is going to be here a year from now because because government because it’s so language oriented right an AI can read a policy uh paper and make way more sensitive the human being can right like to show me any Congressman or Senator that’s actually read the 800 page legislation on any bill they actually let’s not go let’s not go there you need kind of get your head around that yeah by the way it’s the same thing for same thing for medicine I think the daily number of of medical Publications is like 7,000 a day you tell me how many your doctor has read the Daniel craft one is there are 2500 research papers on cancer published per day yeah right so

[01:06:01] if you’re a can if you have a cancer doctor you can ask him has he read the 2005 that came out yesterday the day before no obviously you need AI right there to to think about it I just want to make one last point and let’s move on to Ubi because I think it’s so important yeah I you know the the part that I find most interesting and fascinating around this is I use the example of page rank right Google’s AI That’s scanning web pages and it’s developing a unique intelligence for those you who don’t know uh page rank was the algorithm that Larry pagee came up with while he was a grad student in Stanford that Scott Hassen wrote and that he and uh Sergey created into Google it was called P yeah and and scours a million web pages and scores them and and tags them and categorize them page rank has developed its own kind of unique intelligence of how to scour the bill billions of web pages in real time around the world that’s an orthogonal effect and complimentary to human intelligence it’s

[01:07:01] not replica of human intelligence right um we are localized sense making machines so I think of AI will be for the vast vast majority of use cases will be complimentary and that should take a lot of the fear out of it they’re not there to replace human beings they’re there to amplify and augment just like my phone augments my Humanity I can video with my son I can Pro empathy around the world etc etc so I think AIS are going to massively add to productivity and labor Automation in a magical way coming and the general thesis leading the Ubi is that we’ve been increasing productivity with ma machines for thousands of years and now we get to a point where the productivity gains of Technology allow us not to have to work for a living yeah it’s um so let me hit on a couple things on on on humanoid robots I mean I love the fact that Optimus is a humanoid meaning five

[01:08:00] fingers two legs you know bipedal and it fits and operates in our human built environment uh door knobs uh car pedals all all those things and if in fact he’s able to achieve it uh and the thesis is he going to be using Ai and sensors and capabilities built for for Tesla autonomous driving um it’s a massive Market I mean how many car manufacturers are there you know well over a 100 and there how many humanoid robot manufacturers are there like none and if he can get it I mean I’d want one would you put one in your in your closet uh sure I would love to you know you want I mean espe especially if you lease it out right so uh think of a think of a $20,000 car what’s an what’s a car lease going to be like 400 bucks a month so for 400 bucks a month you got a slave robot now be nice to it because the war you know the robot overlords are coming um but for 400 bucks a month you’ve got

[01:09:01] something that does anything you want any time you want I mean that’s the that’s the vision and it’s it it is going to so it it solves a labor issue now we’re living in a time today in which the numbers when I last looked at them a few weeks ago we have twice as many job openings as we have people looking for jobs yeah um now that will change but uh but the notion is most people don’t take work because they love the work people who are cleaning up hotel rooms and uh you know cleaning toilets or uh working at a uh you know cash register they didn’t dream about doing that they’re doing that because they want income for their family they want insurance for their family so is there a future in which uh the work that no one wants uh going back to Dan Barry it’s dull dangerous or dirty remember those threes yeah that’s right yeah um you know can we get can we get robots to

[01:10:01] do that and well I think we’ve been doing that anyway like mining robots and agricultural robots right shop Rob used to be 98% of human population was employed in agriculture and now it’s like 1.8% yep because we’ve automated the hell out of it and because you don’t need um um strawberry Pickers and apple Pickers you have machines to do it all and that is uh difficult and house so I think they definitely will be automating our our assembly lines have done a lot of that for us I think what’s more powerful is things get to cognitive abilities where people can handle most day-to-day task call centers and routing call centers etc etc yeah we’re almost there yeah yeah we’re almost there and I love the the writing software even is being automated pretty fast right now I love the there’s a great example of bank tellers uh around this used to be the when we created ATM machines everybody freaked out and saying oh my God we’ll have millions of Bank TOS out of the work what will we do with all the bank

[01:11:00] TOS right and so this’s this massive concern about robots taking all the jobs um which the first article that appeared about robots taking all the jobs appeared in 1964 by the way I love I love this story I love the story can I tell it a different way go ahead tell it okay so there was this letter written by a group of Nobel laurates and top scientists sent to the president saying technical automation is going to destroy the banking industry and that letter hit the desk of Lynden B Johnson right people think about it as a recent event but no it occurred in like you said 1964 thereabouts and it was people concerned about replacing room filled mostly with women coping ledger to ledger to Ledger uh and we have more bankers and accountants and we’ve ever had on the planet yeah so the the the the second half of that people got concerned what will happen with all the bank workers if you automate banking um the actual outcome was that because of cost of

[01:12:00] building and running a branch drops so dramatically the banks just created a ton more branches and the number of Bank workers has not changed at all so it turns out and we have multiple examples of this the Germany the factories in Germany are all automated uh there’s nobody on the factory floors and it’s not like unemployment has dropped we just move people to higher value work and so it turns out when we automate we don’t lose jobs we increase capacity increase capacity we have that much more economic activity and productivity and the idea behind Ubi is you get to a Tipping Point where you can now people don’t have to work for a living yes it this is so Ubi stands for Universal basic income and it’s the idea that you get a check and you can do with that money what you want if you live in Alaska you have Ubi already uh the Permanent Fund Alaska takes all of its oil money and it makes you know it distributes a portion of that to everybody I don’t know what the I don’t know what the uh the the check size is it used to be like $5,000 a year per

[01:13:00] person uh if you live in the Middle East uh there are equivalents of that in Saudi and the Emirates I was having dinner with uh uh with Reed Hoffman two days ago uh and I asked him about Ubi and uh I said what do you think of it and you know who should I be speaking to about we’ve had this conversation I want to bring someone to talking the on the subject at abundance 360 this year and and he said he’s been he sent me an email yesterday saying I’ve been asking around regarding Ubi he saids most smart people think that the numbers are still off and could be solved if we get the kind of massive increase in productivity that we hope for um and so if we’ve got robotic labor and AI Labor uh the first time I heard something around this was uh Jeff bezo said in the future we should tax the robots so if you replace a job a labor job uh that’s normally held by a human with a robot then you should tax the robot and that part of that money should go to pay the human who’s replaced yep it was something like

[01:14:02] that I’ve heard something similar if you automate truck driving then you you tax the truck driving companies as and that goes to pay for the drivers to find some other work over a period of time um uh the the it it turns out the the the financials are very close to working cuz the key is the key and then you let’s talk about two issues around Ubi one is people get fat and lazy and don’t want to do anything and that’s the people worry about socialism and you’re paying to do nothing that’s the that’s the concern use use the money for beer and toac second concern is we can’t pay for it and we’ll have to raise taxes and is a stupid idea those are the two now increasing productivity will solve for one and the second one is actually solved because of the 14 major experiments that we’ve seen seen around Ubi it turns out if you find the right balance where you give people enough to survive but not be

[01:15:00] happy that’s the level right so you give people enough that they can make it and they don’t have to work but there not enough that they they they want to buy the new TV they want to buy the nicer car so they go so then you have a still have a thriving economy and a job market etc etc mean they’re going to use they’re going to use the money to further their education get better training and go get the job for E I mean what’s the number 40% of the US cannot put $400 together in an emergency today that’s insane I that’s the most ridiculous commentary I’ve ever heard for the richest country in the world right it’s it’s a travesty um so I think the Ubi side will solve for a huge amount around that and the case studies are we have a lot of data now entrepreneurship explodes under this model because people find their passion follow it yeah and the you made a point it’s important these Studies have been done in the US in Canada in parts of Africa parts of Europe where a government has given a population of people who are at the subsistence level

[01:16:00] if you would uh uh it was done in Stockton California the mayor mayor tubs gave $500 a month to a population of a few thousand people and 99% of it of them use that money to do further their careers less than 1% used it for you know beer and tobacco amazing I mean you in India there was a famine and they gave 4,000 people a Ubi because they had to give them some money and the the the government workers freaked out and say you can’t just give people money how would uh they will spend it on alcohol and gambling and how do we extract bribes if you just give it directly so but they were starving so they had to do it so they said just do it and they tracked it for two years and they found in the similar to the stock Stockton 95% or 94% went to clothing housing healthc care food yes and the attendance of those kids of those families at school doubled yeah because they were fed and clothed I mean it’s the the challenge is

[01:17:00] that once you run it for a while a government realizes oh we’re not need it anymore and then cancels the program because then you need government it’s literally what happened in Canada and Manitoba they ran the program unbelievably successfully and the government came in and went oh wait a minute well this is terrible we don’t you know you literally don’t need government the challenge I think we have with Ubi is to go from a taxation labor employment job model to this is such a huge leap I have no confidence in our public sector to get us there well the AI will the AI will do it all the the will propose it and then we’ll have a big fight well I bow to our AI overlords um so there’s a term that uh mutual friend Harry CLA gave us of technological socialism yes right so uh we talked about communism earlier on uh being failed when humans were doing it maybe when AI is doing it it’ll be more efficient socialism in the same fashion

[01:18:00] where the where the state is taking care of you uh has failed that experiment failed over and over again but technological socialism where technology is taking care of you right um yeah is something that I think is most definitely going to come right where you’re not just going to come I think it’s here already you know so so socialism fails because you have centralized allocation of resources which is a inefficient and B lead to corruption in inevitable right I’m dictating who which family should get what food I’m in a huge position of power right um as a bureaucrat or technocrat so that fails um um the other side of the coin when you look at the free market free markets also kind of don’t work over time because they get corrupted in their own way but if you have an algorithm matching in Uber matching driver and passenger um optim for close proximity of the driver and star rating of the passenger driver Etc Uber is actually a socialist application

[01:19:00] it’s the sharing of assets amongst a large group of people and and this is I think it’s a profoundly fascinating opportunity to bring in Collective use of assets that gives us hyper leveraged in terms of uh productivity and repeated use of it Etc but it’s it’s it’s not only the sharing economy it’s the it’s the shared use of assets it’s it’s the crowd economy which the shared using of cognitive assets yeah right I don’t employ a person 100% yeah my my favorite example of a socialist application is a restaurant okay when you go and eat at a restaurant you’re sharing the table with other people that have just eaten in the cutlery the people have just used before you it’s not your Cutlery or your plate the food is coming from the same Chef it’s actually a socialist environment um and we don’t we do that without thinking we sit it on an airplane seat that millions of other people have sat on and we don’t freak out about that um I think this is definitely there for the taking

[01:20:01] and and creating a a capitalist or a a market-based environment that’s algorithmically driven gives you the best of both worlds in many many environments yeah so Ai and communism technology and socialism um let’s talk about the the uh the elephant in the room here pal um we are living in a simulation aren’t we so as a Buddhist life is an illusion yes so on first principles uh yes right um uh uh David Roberts I remember gave me this point that he said if you stretch the electromagnetic spectrum x-rays to visible light to microwaves and you stretch it out to the width of the US okay okay 3,000 miles across the the the visible light that we see entering our eyes is two feet oh my God out of that 3,000 miles so we live in that little narrow spectrum of reality

[01:21:02] when the full spectrum of electromagnetic is that much right I think it’s just a great example of how narrow our pathetic little eyes are compared to what’s you know you’ve uh very things operating with x-rays and other things operating with sonar and and all sorts of um infrared sensing Etc so we we are by so that’s one secondly when light comes in your eyes reverted and our brain flips it back around so it’s an it’s an it’s an image that appears at your brain anyway yeah and and and of course we only we only process a fraction of 1% of all of our sensory input because we can’t possibly handle it and we we fill in the blanks uh with our own imagination of what we think is actually happening versus what really is happening I remember a couple of years in The Singularity uh L lamur who used to run L web said come and do a talk and pick whatever topic you want so I picked Neuroscience I said all right

[01:22:00] let me do a talk on the brain and it forced me to go talk to Diva and a bunch of neuroscientists around okay what so first question asked them was what is the brain okay and it was unbelievable they couldn’t agree um so I finally came up with a a sentence that they all agreed on I’m going to try and remember it said a brain is a fractal chaotic um um sense making machine that may or may not result in Consciousness obviously that was it like like oh my God and that was the only one they could roughly agree on so we’ve got so much amazing investigation analysis to do right on our on our on our brain uh what got me interested in psychedelics was the fmri studies that showed you can now see exactly what dosage of what psychedelic does exactly this to this circuit mhm and now we have a feedback loop that makes it amazing I was uh listening to a a program this morning on uh the idea of does does

[01:23:01] Consciousness impact our Quantum Universe um and it’s we know so little we are we are so filled with ourselves and our our you know our every day in politics in the world we’re just scratching the surface yeah it’s it’s amazing you know I did my degree in theoretical physics no I didn’t know that uh yes my degree is my bachelor’s degree is theoretical physics so you do three years of Newtonian classical physics relativity and in third year you get quantum mechanics til and and then the first thing that they tell you is okay so you know that last three years uh just Chuck everything and and now everything is a probabilistic environment where an electron has an 80% tendency to exist just it it’s such a hard shift it’s such a hard pivot uh it’s it’s impossible I’ve been fascinated by the domain ever since with entanglement and

[01:24:02] you know spooky action at a distance and it really is true how how absurdly little we actually know but I want to I want to close out with a two questions they may be the same answer for you but um I ask all my guests uh if you were to launch an ex prise if I were going to say uh I’m going to say elon’s going to fund it I’m going to fund it selem what is an x prise that you would want what’s a pro Grand Challenge problem that you want solved and you’re you know full disclosure uh selem is on the board of directors at The X prise has been on this journey with me for multiple years um is there an X prize that you would love to see launched what is a challenge you want to solve yes um I would like to see an X prize that improved emotional intelligence by 10x and and uh and by doing so um um kind of cleansed out all

[01:25:01] the emotional trauma that we grow up with scratch a surface a little bit more what does that look like what would it what would it team have to do to solve this thing so the problem there is a little bit the diagnostic what’s the before and after test right the anari express is easy take a plane to sub orbital twice within two weeks great very clear metrics it goes back to hard question which is we struggle often at xpres how do you define the domain properly what do we mean by emotional maturity and how would you measure it to increase at 10x etc etc so there’s some work to do in defining the boundaries but for me we you know there there’s two major problems that I see in humanity one is in the west we tend to be very logically driven and and operate on just pure rationale and Western medicine Western thinking objective reality um and so that’s one danger point because you lose the subjective and the softer side the spiritual side Etc and

[01:26:00] the problem in the East is you do what we what I people call a spiritual bypass like in India you grow up you have all this family baggage that nobody deals with you jump straight to being praying at a temple and you never deal with the emotional baggage you go straight to Enlightenment you go you try and go straight to enlightment and you you and yet there’s this carcass of family skeletons in the closet that of crap that your your grandfather is an alcoholic and epigenetically you’re now an alcoholic and you don’t even know it and yet you have um uh tendencies in that direction in lots of different ways and and you you have no idea and you don’t know where you don’t know and yet you skip straight through to trying to achieve enlightenment right you can’t do that without clearing up all the rest so I would I think a prize like this would balance both these out it would also solve the problem of teis in Silicon Valley trying to go for technological Supremacy without really understanding the human nuances along the way Etc so that would be the prize I would go after I think it would make human beings

[01:27:01] infinitely happier and more at peace with themselves if you could achieve it and your moonshot what are you working on right now that is uh in the realm of moonshot Buddy uh moonshot is can we create a new model for society that creates a layer resilience uh in in our systemic Global Human Society so we have if you look at the history of civilizations every civilization got to a very complex level the Incas the Mayans the Romans then they had some boundary condition and they instantly collapsed right um like just literally hit a cliff and boom every single one of them by the way okay this is and if you talk to the Uval hararis and Neil Fergusons of the world all those conditions are there now where we’re like we’re at that Tipping Point we may even been sliding down and we don’t know our monetary systems are an easy example the crash in crypto today is one example it looks like by the way salana may be being wiped out today um wow yeah it’s crazy it’s uh it’s um it’s

[01:28:02] down a massive amount today um so uh when you when you look at what’s happening in uh Global human wow wow bitcoin’s down to 16 something yeah it’s great buying opportunity that’s the mindset yeah by the way by the way this is an entrepreneurs mindset everybody this is how the Judo move when it goes down it’s a buying opportunity right big problems fantastic opportunities to start a company to solve those problem the biggest problems with the biggest markets that’s your stock phrase I I think it’s such an important um way to think about the world as oh huge problem huge opportunity um it and I think this is maybe the biggest gift that you’ve brought to the world Peter is having people think at a global scale VI X priz or Singularity I remember I was I got together with a bunch of the Singularity alumni in Spain when I was there and they’re like you we hate you and I said what happened he goes you infected us you you get us to think at a global level and then you can’t go back to

[01:29:01] thinking how do I create a better mobile ad Network you just can’t stuck at trying to solve systemic Global issues which is what we wanted anyway yeah I know it’s uh and by the way I can’t believe we were both in Spain the same day we in Madrid and we missed each other by like like hours we’ had the opposite remember we were I was at the New York Hilton over Grand I was typing an email to you kind of going really need to talk to Peter directly about this and you were literally walking across the lobby by accident I know and how many times have we done that and didn’t even know it so yeah I have a teaser for your people all viewers John Hegel and I you know we’re talking about serendipity John Hegel and I who does a lot of work in writing around engineering Serendipity have been working on a Model uh and we’ve come up with like a very simple 2x two diagram where we Define luck and we can measure it okay and I’ll leave that there we’re

[01:30:00] we’re GNA talk about this some other time or you’re GNA can all right well we’ll come back it’s worth it it needs a reveal because we need to finish it up etc etc but it’s it’s there we like because think about how much our lives run on luck and cous events right um every single one of us the most meaningful things in our lives were were weird coincidences for the rest there’s no normal explanation yeah and we have plenty of those between us we have plenty of those between us right and so so can you prescriptively create luck in fact the EXO book was actually a practice book for me at a crack at writing a book on luck okay so which which is which is going to come out you’re going to write a book at some point we John and I need to agree on the final Framing and definitions but um think about the exponential organizations the first half was analytical what is it and EXO what are the attributes second half is pres and then we have a diagnostic test and the second half is prescriptive how do you start one apply to midmarket and big companies Etc right and it was actually

[01:31:01] the practice run to say could I get a meme into the world because luck is a really hard topic right rookie author I’m probably going to make some stupid mistake and screw it all up let me you know exponential organizations is so obvious needs to be done and then the book took off and I’ve not been able to get get away from from the Paradigm yet but John and I have been working on the side on this other topic because all of us they think of any of us our lives run on luck well they they run on hard work and caffeine and those are the table Stakes okay think of any Silicon Valley company you have to be talented you have to work your ass off table St you need that lucky break to hit the right strategic relationship hit the market at the right time with the right feature footprint and that’s actually what makes you successful so how do you generate Serendipity uh so you know the uh there’s a great Ted talk and dld talk by uh by Bill gross yes where right and he has it has to be related right where he

[01:32:01] says listen he analyzed like a 100 companies that succeeded 100 companies that failed and he said what was the parameter that was the number one thing of all the companies that succeeded was the amount of capital they raised was was it the experience of the of the CEO was it the field that was they were in and you know the answer to this yeah it’s totally luck well it was it was luck by virtue of their ability to stick around other words the companies that were able to last the longest intercepted a lucky event like the space shuttle space shuttle crashing and being shut down was what launched SpaceX the 2008 fiscal crash is what launched Uber and Airbnb Zoom oh my God I was on a panel with erican the CE of Zoom a month before the pandemic and he’s saying Jesus you know I’ve been working my ass off for several years building this and I need that one thing to happen to help

[01:33:00] us take off and and a month later boom coincidence I think not well it is and it isn’t you know the Sia definition that uh preparation meets opportunity is the best definition we’ve seen right and the question then becomes how do you increase preparation how do you increase opportunity and can you live long enough to live forever which is paraphrasing uh Ray cwell on longevity but it’s true for companies I I tell all my companies listen get to cash flow break even as soon as you can right make sure you’ve got years of lifetime because you’re going to screw it up over and over again yeah and you’re going to run if if you’re dead and you do not exist there’s no way to run into that perfect investor or customer but if you’re able to hang on long enough you’ll intercept the pandemic you know or the bigest this maybe the hardest question is something’s not working do you keep struggling or do you shut it down and start oh my God it is one of the hardest question black hole question we should talk about that next time because it’s

[01:34:00] it’s a you know I’ve I’ve had I’m now on my 27th company I think and there are those companies that I look back and say man I should have killed them far earlier I’m terrible at that right I’ve taken money guy ever I’ve taken money linger forever and I should just like be merciful and shoot them in the head and I’m just I’m bad at that the ones that the are successful entrepreneurs are the ones that just go astr teller right Google they have a very specific thing it’s got having these metrics or it’s not what will make it fail and test those first and then kill it so we we’re going to do this again right you and I on this on this podcast okay at that we’re going to talk about luck we’re going to talk about how do you you know when do you kill your your favorite child or company as a case may be and lots of other subjects in fact we’ll we’ll ask people who are viewing this what they want us to talk about and we’ll do that we’ll catch up on where Twitter is and FTX and democracy where AI is and you know pal uh I love you and

[01:35:02] I’m thankful to have you in my life um likewise I mean the serty that brought us together is uh pervasive in everything that happens in my life right now yeah so all right brother have a see you soon talk soon [Music] Peter [Music]