Everything You Know Is About to Collapse - David Friedberg

Now, separate to that, there's an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally. Digitization of the physical world, and then our ability to kind of make predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of the tools that we call AI today. But it's really a long history of these sorts of tools, where we take data, and we use that to better understand the world and then say, hey, we could do this, or we could do this, we could make this molecule to solve this cancer we could do this thing and suddenly turns out we're right we could build this machine that could get us to the moon oh yeah we're right we could do that like all of these fundamental tools start to compound and we're in this kind of exponential curve right now that i think and we can talk about some of the things that i think are most exciting but that are really going to kind of transform the trajectory for humanity so i i i think that there's um a risk of too much change too fast which is perhaps the thing that breaks social order and that's probably the phase that we're in right now like how much is the social order going to break how hard is it going to be for people to adapt how how how much of a dislocation will

there be in social systems and economic systems and um people's expectations when they shift too much, uh, and they have to kind of rethink, what do I have to do? They want to put a break on things. And I think that's kind of a moment that we're in, in the West right now in the East, it's a little bit different. You go to China, they're very much embracing these technologies because there's so much more to gain than there is to lose in the West. We have so much more to lose than there is to gain. So, oh, that's interesting. A victim of your own success so far, because it feels like you've climbed pretty high. And if you fall, that could be bad. You have more to lose.

Yeah. And we could pontificate on this for a while, but you could go back to FDR in the United States. And we kind of came out of the war with this big effort where we said, hey, we can aggregate all our resources. We can win World War II. And then we said, by aggregating our resources, we could do the extraordinary. So let's do that again and let's keep doing that. And that became this kind of trajectory we've been on in terms of making promises for tomorrow and then having the government kind of deliver the promises. Right. And that's been a big thing that's gone on for the last, call it almost 100 years, particularly in the West.

At some point, you can only promise so much. like there's a system where everyone had this sort of expectation setting that was made. Okay, everyone gets a home. That's the American dream. Everyone goes to college and then they get a job. Some of those things may not necessarily be the right things from a free market perspective, in which case you're making these promises and then people feel like the promises aren't being delivered. They're not being met. And that's all they care about. And that's all that they want. In the West, we have that problem right now. And so there's a lot of these things that we've set expectations around.

If you go to college, you get a good degree, no matter how much it costs, you will have a good job and you'll be able to buy a home and live a good life. And that's not true anymore. And so these are the sorts of things that I think make us more fearful of the changes ahead. Whereas in the East, those promises weren't necessarily made. Like in China, GDP per capita skyrocketed from $3,000 to $30,000 in just a couple of years. I mean, imagine seeing the average person's income in a country go up by 10x, and everyone's moving from farms to villages to cities, and the cities are like the future. It's been an extraordinary trajectory.

So there's a lot of embracing of the future that's happening in one set of social systems in the world today. And then a bunch of this like, oh my God, tomorrow is scary. it's going to break everything on the other side. And I think we have that very dangerous kind of choice to make. I think the concern is that AI is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree, that there is a centralizing of power amongst potential five trillionaire class people on the planet. What sort of control do they have? How much displacement is there of work that didn't happen in the same way as when horses were killed because the automobile came along or because manual labor needed to turn into driving JCBs instead of digging holes, that this is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree, but your perspective when it comes to AI, doomerism, AI optimism.

Yeah. All technology shifts go through a phase of diffusion, meaning they have to start somewhere. it's not like we turn on a switch and suddenly everyone can build an etsy store or a shopify store like that's not how the internet started with everyone suddenly benefiting from being able to be an entrepreneur online it took a couple of generations of technology to fusion before the idea of shopify and the high-speed internet all all over the place. The country got everywhere, and people could actually stand up a Shopify store and run it. The first people on the internet, the first businesses that stood up, did very well. And so the technology started centrally. But then, you know, initially, people were like, oh, my God, Cisco is going to dominate the world, right? Like, Cisco's got the switches that make the internet switch. That's the technology that's going to, those guys that own Cisco, those guys are going to run the world. This is not fair. Like, they're going to control everything.

this is crazy nowadays it's NVIDIA to some degree it's google but like eventually every technology commoditizes that's what's so amazing about technology is it like it's always diffusing

David Friedberglike this new innovation finds its way out like we've already seen in just the last couple of weeks this insane shift in ai where people don't have to run models in the cloud anymore they can

run models on their desktop at home so there's no longer um like a dependency on google or a dependency on you know pick your favorite hosted model provider i can download an open source model and there's plenty of great models i can run it on a mac computer in my house and if you saw recently there's this auto research thing that went viral on twitter this weekend where Andrei Karpapi turned on auto research and he ran all of these agents on his computer and they were just asked a bunch of questions to solve, make better LLMs. And they just ran 30 of them talking to each other and they just kept scoring the improvements they were each making to the LLM, to the underlying AI model.

And they made a better LLM model than what ChatGPT had not too very long ago. In like a weekend on a computer at home, that's how quickly it's diffused. And so I'm like, I think that there's a, and so this whole thing of like, oh, data centers need to be stopped. I actually don't think that data centers are going to have much to do with the benefits we're going to realize. Like so much of AI is going to sit at the edge. It's going to sit in embedded devices. It's going to sit on your desktop computer. It's going to sit on your iPhone. it's going to be ubiquitous it's going to be everywhere and i think everyone just doesn't see the benefit yet and so it's very hard to envision why i should do this and we can talk a lot about some of those benefits that could arise but over time all technologies have like a central feature where someone's making a bunch of money early on and then eventually everyone's like oh my god everyone's life has gotten better because of this thing like when the first car t therapies came out these are t cell i i totally jumped ship there but like car t therapy is this amazing technology that was developed where we could take T-cells, immune cells, out of the human body,

program them to find a specific protein, put them back in your body, and then they go and find that protein and kill it, and kill that cell. And it was used for cancer. So we could take a T-cell out of the body, program it to go attack a cancer cell, put it back in the body, it attacks the cancer cell and destroys it. When that first came out, it was like, oh my god, this is incredible. And a couple of companies made a couple billion dollars selling the first generation of those technologies. but to get that therapy is like millions of dollars initially you have to take all these cells out isolate them make sure they're clean engineer them put them back in make sure the person doesn't die so it became this very expensive initial process and now car t therapy is making its way into more and more cancer treatments and it is like almost a hundred percent like success rate in blood cancers when it works and so it's becoming this thing that goes from millions of dollars to a million to 500 and pretty soon to 50k 20k and eventually 5k and that ends that disease that whole class of diseases goes away so all of these technologies start up with this aggregation of value small number of people get it small number of people get value but eventually all

technologies diffuse and so i'm less like concerned about there being a monopoly we're already seeing every single model company getting disrupted by something else the next week um we're already seeing this idea of data centers being the requisite breaking apart there's a bunch of startups right now that are making technology that reduces the token cost by a thousand x so for every token produced which is a measure of output from ai it used to be 10 bucks or whatever you know pick your number a dollar 50 cents 10 cents it's coming down by a thousand fold because they're figuring out better ways to architecture the underlying models to make distributed smaller models to use new chip architecture to use new systems of balancing energy across the different chips that you're using etc etc etc and these all compound so suddenly it's like the people that are going to build all these data centers really going to have a monopoly i don't know like this will allow anyone to stand up a small data center and run a bunch of ai stuff so you don't really need big 100 billion dollar data center so i think there's a lot that's changing very quickly and every step of the way that's it's happening so fast people just have all these reasons to have concern but

But I'm pretty optimistic, as history being a predictor here, that the diffusion of these technologies will unlock value for every human on Earth. And it's really just a function of at what point and at what point of value. I've heard you talking about the moon a lot. What's happening with the moon? The moon... I think, so one of the things that I think AI unlocks is the ability to do really complex projects. People think about AI as like, hey, I'm going to replace labor, like the accountant's job is going to go away. And we're all kind of swirling our heads around, what are we going to do with the accountant's jobs going away?

And, you know, we could use the automobile and the horse buggy driver analogy. People were worried about the horse buggy jobs going away and who's going to breed the horses, who's going to take care of the horses, all the horse tables are going to go away. and then when the car came around there was auto mechanics and there were the highway system and then motels popped up and then gas stations popped up and then coffee houses popped up on the highways and new towns emerged on the highways because you could get to them and suddenly the automobile unlocked industries we didn't contemplate right it's several degrees away several steps away from the initial problem that you're thinking about which is the the horse company's dying and the horse jobs going away. So I think that's kind of like an important thing to note. And before I get to the moon, I'll just say this one point, I think physical AI or robotics is really going to be an unlock for people. People think it's like, the companies, the corporations will have all the robots. And the corporations will replace all the people like, but why can't everyone have a robot?

David FriedbergMeaning, why can't someone put a robot in their garage? And this robot can do anything, and works 24 hours a day, that robot's now your employee.

And you can say to the robot in the garage, hey, I want to make a bicycle shop. I want to make custom bicycles that are really cool. They're like Chrome and people can, you know, kind of tweak them online and make all these different versions of bicycles. And then the robot will build the bicycle. So people, so you can stand up a Shopify store or a Netsy store or whatever, sell bicycles and your robot will make them for you. You don't even have to know how to make bicycles. The robot will order all the parts. It'll order all the machinery it needs. It'll run the robot bike shop in your garage it'll make bikes it'll package them up and ship them out for you when you think about it in that context which is that this diffusion of technology enables everyone to get value from it so everyone will have a robot everyone will be able to have a small business it's like imagine back in the day 20 30 years ago if you told people hey everyone can have an etsy store now all of the knitting you're doing at home you can sell and you can make 50 grand a year no one would have believed you but it's like now you now you can do that have you seen these arm farms no in india no jared Pull up that video I sent you about robots needing a human body.

Inside the race to train AI robots how to act. I traveled to southern India to document the rise of AI arm farms, where young engineers strap GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. So people are getting paid to do normal shit. Here it is. And then the robot learns. Yeah. So this is the same thing that happened with Tesla's full self-drive. Right. That they take the best. I mean, this doesn't strike me as the best folding I've ever seen. But they take the best drivers on Tesla and they use that to train the model on. It would be a good hack to mess with the robots and fold incorrectly over and over again.

Or just downstream, loads of people with creased t-shirts. Just mess it all up. This is my way to destroy the t-shirt folding industry. Suddenly in the future, everything you buy is completely broken because everyone trains the robots. But this is everything. This is for everything. This is for making a cup of tea. What's that famous robotics challenge they have? Cracking an egg. The delicacy to hold it and the speed to hit it and the precision to whatever yeah but uh yeah this is this is the future hey look if you need extra cash let it watch you fold your pants and this is obviously transitory so this is the training phase of the robotics the real question is what are people individually going to do so like i know you asked about the moon we'll get that's fine because it was also that anthropic uh uh report that just got released yeah looking at which jobs are going to be popped first by ai and that doesn't even include robotics so i don't think that there's like going to be a successful organized government system to solve this problem to come in and be like hey we're going to stop these industries and they're going to try i mean new york just passed a law making medical advice legal advice all these other things illegal in um through ai

tools which by the way you got to ask yourself the question are they really going to be able to do that because if all the models are open sourced and they're all available and i can run them locally why wouldn't i just download a model put it on my computer and i can ask it legal questions through the door and say david what is that what have you got on your computer there you better not be looking at your health reports all of these legal efforts and government efforts to try and stall and stop technology historically it's never worked like it's just not going to work except when you have a limited resource like uranium you know for like nuclear fuel or something like that but um but for like something like this which is self-replicating it's software it can go anywhere it can be anywhere it can fill any space it's knowledge work um it's going to be very hard to stop it. So the real question, and this is going to be transitory for now, but the real question is going to be which of the humans that are folding t-shirts today are going to have the spark in their brain that's going to say, I should buy five robots and run my own t-shirt folding business. That's this challenge that I think humanity faces in

this next evolution. We can talk about transhumanism too, which I think is going to be a forced adaptation, but particularly it's about agency. Taking ownership for how do you engage the future versus waiting for someone to tell you what to do next. That's going to be a change of kind, not just a difference of degree. I think that previously, if you were someone who was mucking the horses in the streets of Manhattan, that job goes away. But there's a new business that comes up and your friend decides to go and work there. The agency of I am enough of a self starter with the sovereignty and the determination to go and do this thing, that does feel like the bar is being raised and some people are going to fall below that bar. I don't know if that's true because I do think every human has a degree of innate agency. It's programmed into us as humans.

It's just generally been turned off because we've created social systems that have told us, here's what you're going to get next and here's what you're going to get next and here's what you're going to get next. Since we're children, we've been programmed by our education, by college, by the work system, by the economy, by the taxes, by the fact that the government's supposed to give me all this shit. Every step of the way, I'm being told, do this, you'll get this, do this, you'll get this. You've never been given the freedom as a human to operate. And I think this is fundamentally true with social systems. We've created government systems, financial systems, everything. We've been very severely limited as people. I think one example that speaks positively to my point is what's happened with people making money on TikTok and Instagram and Shopify and Etsy.

If you told someone, pick the time frame, 15 years ago, that X number of millions of Americans would be making on average tens of thousands of dollars a year doing the things they're doing, posting photos of themselves in bikinis and at historic monuments on Instagram with a sports drink or whatever next to them, or people were making money podcasting with the scale that they are today. you're the prime example or people were making money selling home goods and making 300 grand a year selling their custom cat blankets or pick pick pick pick pick these things you would have never believed it but every person has that in them every person has that capacity in them to do something unique to do something special, to take agency if they're given the right space to do it and they're not told that you can't do it.

Interesting point on that. I wonder how many people are going to have their agency diminish because of their reliance on AI. So I wonder if the very thing that's going to enable them is also going to be something that reduces their capacity to enact it. And I think that that's one of the concerns. Anyway, the moon. A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. 95% of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard. But that's why Momentus built Fiber Plus. See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed in, everything else that you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential. Fiber Plus is a three-in-one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once and this cinnamon flavor is unreal you might think fiber wow i bet that tastes great well yeah actually it does doubters i really enjoyed this best of all momentous officer 30 day money back guarantee so if you're not sure you can buy fiber plus try it for 29 days if you

don't love it they'll just give you your money back and they ship internationally right now you can get up to 35 off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's l-i-v-e-m-o-m-e-n-t-o-u-s.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout what's happening with the moon um well so i i think that you know there's a big discussion obviously um i would say largely led by pushed by elon but but many others over time that, you know, we should expand humans beyond Earth and get to Mars and that's a good place to set up a colony and yada yada, right? Mars is not very habitable. We need to move a lot of material to Mars. But I think if you look at the math, it is very likely the case that you can probably reduce your energy cost needs to move material to set up a colony on Mars by probably 100x or more by making most of the material you need for Mars on the moon and shipping it from the moon to mars and the reason is the moon unlike the earth does not have an atmosphere one of the biggest uses of the energy when you're moving matter off

The Earth is getting away from, through the atmosphere, which drags or pushes the rocket back down, and gravity. So the moon is one-sixth the gravity of the Earth. So it takes much less energy to escape the gravitational pull of the moon than it does the Earth. And there's no atmosphere pulling you back. So with AI and robotics, it is theoretically possible. And then if you look at moon dust and moon rock, it has all of the raw materials that we may need to build machines, to build housing units, to build habitation units. What's the constituent policy? It's got aluminum, it's got silicon, it's got carbon.

You can even go up to the poles and you can get hydrogen and oxygen from the ice up there. So you can melt the water at the poles, run electricity through it, break it into hydrogen and oxygen, use the hydrogen and oxygen and the carbon in various chemical reactions. You can theoretically make any substance you need or any metal or any material you need that we can make here on Earth. So we can and should build very large factories on the moon. And the way that this would work is you basically can use solar power, right? Solar, very deployable on the moon, lots of sunlight, no atmosphere, et cetera.

Good continuous energy flow, no clouds. And then you can use kind of battery storage. But the mechanism for moving material off the moon is not propulsion. It's actually a mass driver, so electric rail gun. So think about like a train track, you know, like these maglev trains, you know, think about like a maglev train.

David Friedbergand uh you know if you run the calculations it would take about uh call it a nine kilometer long track to move one ton of material off of the moon and get it to mars okay at an angle so here's the

thing it doesn't actually even have to be in an angle it just has to clear any craters or mountains it's flat enough and that's escape velocity just escape velocity yeah so all you have to do is orient it correctly put it on the right part of the moon and orient it correctly for the moon to basically uh aim that's right the moon's passing around and it would take yeah it would take a couple megawatt hours of power to push a ton of material down this rail track it would take about four and a half seconds for it to move down the rail track and then hit four and a half seconds to move nine kilometers nine kilometers yeah so it is it ends up escaping at roughly call it 20,000 kilometers an hour and that's now uh if you're moving one ton of material you would still need a couple hundred kilograms, call it about 200 kilograms of some sort of propulsion.

To slow it down. To slow it down as it approaches the moon. But here's the other thing. You could use moon rock as a heat shield for re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere or the Martian atmosphere. So you basically take moon rock, put it on the front, because you don't care if it burns away and goes away. It can just vaporize. So you need 15 centimeters of moon rock on the front of this parcel. You ship the parcel off this rail track. It goes towards Mars. It can hit 100 Gs of acceleration while it's accelerating. Gets over there. You slow it down a little bit, and then it can actually enter the Martian atmosphere.

The moon rock burns away, you've just delivered roughly 700 kilograms of material. And you can run that every hour with solar panels that are roughly 500 kind of meters by 500 meters. So, you know, pretty small kind of solar system, some batteries, some capacitors, and then you got to build the rail. The rail, you need about nine tons of material. So you got to get a lot of material put out to get this rail built. But again, the amazing thing about AI is you can kind of think about it being self-replicating in the physical sense, as well as the digital sense, you can put robots on the Martian surface with the necessary starting equipment that can make the next robots, that can then make the next robots, that can then go do the mining, that can then go build the factories, that can then go build the rail, that can then go build the propulsion system, and can then do the mining for you. And there's a lot of very valuable material on the moon that we could also ship back to Earth. So I actually think the moon is going to be a giant, giant, giant economy.

And I think it's like one of these economies, like it's almost like the East India or like, You know, like when you get over there, you don't realize how big it's going to be until this starts. But once it starts, the value of what you can do and the low cost nature of it because of AI now that you can have robots doing this stuff and you can have AI orchestrate a lot of work and you don't need to commit millions of people to it and trillions and you still need some money, but not trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. I think the moon is probably one of these like more under discussed in Silicon Valley kind of economic, grand economic opportunities.

Is space the next industrial revolution? there's a lot um that could happen on earth too so like um i think there's a lot there's a there's a there's a couple big other big drivers i think one is dropping energy cost to zero um and i think uh fusion will have a big role in that this this century so people don't want to talk about fusion because everyone's all about solar all the time and elon loves solar and blah blah so everyone poo-poo is fusion um so i'll talk about it a second but the cost if you get the cost of energy down to one cent a kilowatt hour it absolutely expands every economy. Like everything blows up.

Like imagine if you- What is it currently? Well, it's in the US, we're paying 15 to 40 cents a kilowatt hour for off the grid. But nuclear power, you know, best case scenario is about 5 cents a kilowatt hour. And that's amortized. When you take the cost of everything you got to build and amortize it out and then your runtime costs 5 to 10 cents, but they're going to sell it at like 15. So like imagine if you could take power cost down to 100th of what it is today. the cost to make anything drops because now you've got robots. Robots can make stuff quickly and with no marginal cost because the electricity is what runs the robots.

So you could have a swarm of 100 robots build you a mansion. How much would that cost? Like a 10,000 square foot crazy house. The cost of energy is nothing. So maybe having a crazy house could cost close to nothing. Well, there's a robot printing machine that's just launching in Austin at South by Southwest this week. Making houses. Just 3D printing houses. Gen 1. now imagine gen six right and imagine energy cost is like zero um and imagine all that material production how cool of a house do you want i want to live in hogwarts fine get the land i want like a lake como but i want to make my own lake como you know like no one else like just like lake david yeah lake david um but uh so so energy cost i think are gonna uh this this will be the era when um fusion happens uh so fusion's this crazy like um principle it's it's this fundamental thing that drives the universe if the sun is run on fusion fusion is when protons jam together okay so the sun is so um hot because it has so much mass so when all this mass came together all the matter starts bumping into each other and that creates kinetic energy that kinetic energy is heat and it's so dense because of the gravity because of all the mass that you've got this extremely hot extremely dense plasma plasma

means that it's so energetic that the electrons break away it's technically a fourth state of matter right it is yeah so there's arguably five states of matter right solid liquid gas plasma and then einstein-bose condensate which is crazy physics you always have to one-up me no but it's always have to i actually think that one's more cool is why i said it but yeah yeah yeah um but the uh the what happens in fusion is when two protons have enough energy and they get close enough they jam together and they stick together so one proton you remember this like with an electron is hydrogen two protons is he right and then it's lithium and then beryllium and and so on so um protons jamming together forms a new nucleus forms a new kind of element goes from hydrogen to helium all the way up the periodic table of elements so the more energy you have the denser these things get it requires more and more energy to get this now when you fuse protons together and form a new element less than iron it actually releases energy in the process anything greater than iron requires energy to make it stick together that's like a cool feature of physics which you could get philosophical on why this is the case iron's kind of like an equilibrium state in a weird way it's it's

actually related to the the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces and how they have a trade-off there's a there's a threshold at which the repulsiveness is greater because you have so many more protons they're pushing each other apart yep so they're pushing each other apart more than the benefit you get from getting them together and so you actually have to put energy in to make heavier elements and all the heavier elements on planet earth came from the sun that exploded billions of years ago crazy but um so fusion is how the sun makes energy so every time proton and proton get together they release some energy and that's the light that we get from the sun constant fusion so the the challenge has always been can we do fusion on earth can we just jam protons together and capture that energy. So the technology to do it is you basically spin these protons around in a plasma at 100 million degrees Celsius. Some people are using these like donut-shaped toroidals. Some people are now using these sort of weird what are called stellarators. They've got crazy shapes. And much of the design of these systems on how do you get these protons to move fast enough, and the problem is when the protons get close and close together,

they push each other apart so you got to use a magnetic field to squeeze these protons together so they get closer and closer and then get them to fuse the problem is as they get closer the protons make their own magnetic field that pushes back and fucks up the magnetic field that you're trying to use to squeeze them together and so it's this dynamical equilibrium problem they just keep breaking and breaking and breaking and you cannot get a stable plasma at that density

David FriedbergAI seems to be solving that problem because they're now using AI to train the control of the magnetic fields in a way that's working.

And they're now able to hold these magnetic fields for 30 minutes at a time out of China now. Or, you know, started out, it went from like 17 seconds to a few. few longer to a few minutes to 30 minutes in literally like the last two and a half, three years. Like that's how quickly they're ramping up in the ability to make this happen. There's about 70 startups doing this. Just to give you a sense of what this enables. Basically, you could think about taking water, putting it into this machine, getting the protons to spin around and then extracting energy from those protons jamming together. That energy turns into electricity.

There's no nuclear explosion. There's no risk of the whole thing melting down. There's no nuclear material nothing's radioactive it's it's a very clean way of generating energy so it's been this kind of holy grail for the night since the 1950s when people first thought about it it needs a different name yeah what would you call it it can't have the word nuclear in it yeah it can't yeah maybe uh some people have said just call it fusion some people have said call it too close to fishing yeah people are gonna pattern match it already and they're gonna think i've heard even me let's come up with a name what do you think i think something to do with the electromagnetic uh electromagnetic energy uh element of that that doesn't feel that feels kind of green yeah that feels quite safe yeah i don't expect that to explode yeah strong power weak power yeah protonics something we'll come up with something yeah yeah yeah but anyway i think that if you have nuclear in it i think it's just such a contentious topic right because it's it's everyone thinks about branding in history yeah like nuclear energy is fission where you're taking heavy heavy heavy elements like uranium yeah breaking them apart they're radioactive it's the opposite and you're getting energy out because yeah you're

doing the opposite you're taking the heavier stuff and grabbing the energy when the heavier stuff becomes lighter yeah releasing that energy that it took to make it um so this is different and this you can i did the math on this basically you could use a swimming pool sized amount of ocean water to make all the electricity needed for an entire year for the planet earth that's what this can do that's why it's so important that we get it done now when you do this and you it works and we're very close to having this work in industrial scale next everyone's always joked oh fusion's always like a decade away it's yeah it's you know maybe it's a decade away maybe not but it's gonna happen like we're progressing up this production curve it's gonna happen are those 30 minute long runs energy positive net positive they're still requiring net energy in because of the setup and and so on but the next phase will be to capture basically the current systems aren't just protons they put protons with neutrons And the neutrons are what get energized into the wall to heat up the wall.

And that's where they heat up water to turn a steam turbine. You know, like other people have other ideas that, hey, maybe we shouldn't be using a steam turbine. Isn't it mad that of all of the ways, it's still rotator thing attached to a dynamo? It is crazy. It doesn't matter what the fanciness that occurs before it. Totally. It's just dynamo and a fan. That's another thing that should likely change this century is the move away from that system. where we can do direct energy capture and conversion into electricity. Because you're trying to, you're basically, the reason you do that is you're trying to get electrons to move through a wire.

So you wrap a wire with magnets around a coil and you get the magnet thing to spin. The faster it spins, the more it moves the electrons through the wire. So that's the basis of that system. But there's other things that people have theorized. So with this energy system, I think you're going to like drop the cost of energy, unleash productivity, unleash economic opportunity. So that's another kind of technology that I would say is like very kind of future positive on like what's around the corner. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in.

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You know, economic growth is one of these things that's very hard to contemplate intuitively, to fully grok intuitively, because, like, if you add chips to a game, like, we're playing poker, there's eight of us playing poker, and we suddenly increase our chip stack by, like, 10x, we're still playing poker. but um you know maybe we could tip more right like maybe um the the amount of money we're now making gives us the ability to go buy a hundred dollar bottle of wine instead of two dollar cores lights you know like that's what ends up happening is as more chips come on the table now the poker analogy is a very bad one because that's a zero-sum game economic growth comes for should come from productivity growth not from money printing okay much of our economic growth over the last couple of decades, one could argue has come from money printing. We've just put more chips on the table. The house has made more chips, put them on the table. But economic growth means that I went outside and I made something. I made a new, I mined gold. Let's use gold mining as an example. I mined gold out of the ground. That's worth something because now people can use it, they can trade it, they can sell it. So I'm being productive with my time. So the more productivity

there is in the system, the more chips get made, the more the economy grows, the more everyone gets the ability to buy and sell more stuff and everyone's labor everyone's time is worth more worth more and so everything grows that's the benefit of true productivity so productivity is like this best measure i would say of technology's advance on how technology advances social systems the more productive we are the more everyone's going to benefit it feels like a unique kind of productivity to take raw materials that were maybe rare or at least didn't exist within what was a closed system the earth was a closed system we weren't getting anything from off it unless we were hit by an asteroid and then bringing it back in. What happens to the iron price when we are bringing iron back from outside of what was predicted as a part of that? Yeah. So I would say think more about availability of iron versus the price. What it does is it makes iron more available, more abundant to everyone. And same with energy, right? When you increase energy through fusion, you make energy more abundant. The price comes down by 10x, but now everyone can use much much more energy meaning because the price is just indicative of the supply and

the availability and everyone can and now everyone gets more access this is why technology i've always I wanted more iron. I've said it. I know. You're like an iron horde. It's funny, when we walked in the studio, I was wondering why you had that blanket over that big pile of iron in the- That's correct. Don't look at that. The parking lot. Don't look at that. Yeah, you're like your iron horde. You're like a Minecraft. I'm a Schmeagle, but for iron. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, abundance is the name of the game, right? Like, if we really are moving a productivity curve, energy costs are coming down, we're able to make more stuff with AI.

supply it's not that some people are going to get richer faster that may happen but i don't think that's the problem i think what really functionally happens is everyone has more abundance you can now instead of working 60 hours a week or 100 hours a week when we all work you know when not we all but like when americans worked on farms right at the turn of the century it was like 80 percent of people worked on a farm and now it's less than one percent so we don't have to spend the hundred hour work week working on the farm. In fact, the guy working on the farm is in a John Deere automated tractor with air conditioning. He's on TikTok. Well, the thing drives itself. Trust me, I work in the industry. It's awesome. They still work their asses off not to diminish it, but it's a very different type of farming. And yes, it is still backbreaking work, but there's a lot of automation. And so that created an abundance of food, an abundance of calories, an abundance of availability. And we dropped the number of people globally that live on less than 1200 calories a day for a year which is how we define malnourished um you know from billions of people down to 600 million it's come back up recently because of various supply chain

issues post-covid but um well the number one uh type of malnutrition worldwide is now obesity not starvation that is a problem yeah it's abundant it's excess there's twice as many people that are malnourished through their obesity than through their starvation uh final thing who owns the moon the moon yeah so i don't know i think uh astro politics is fast do you know anyone that does astro politics i want to bring someone on the show yeah that's a good idea i want to talk about it i think it's so cool do you own because geostationary above the net of your country it's kind of yours depends on what the treaties say kind of because you could as a country or as an individual i could say anything i want if i moved to the moon and put a flag down and said f you guys i've got lasers and i'm going to protect this is my part of the moon who's going to stop me like i don't care about being on earth anymore you can't arrest me on earth anymore you can't take my money out of the bank anymore that's that's a frontier have you ever read seven eves by neil stevenson love that book yeah fuck i one of my most reread fiction books and uh in that they go up to the uh space station izzy and they need to come up with an entire new

form of law right what happens if somebody commits a crime in space right and i never thought about the fact that well especially if you've got people from multiple different countries right well the way that we deal with it is x the way that we deal with it is y and this is an entire new environment to work in so it needs to be built from the ground floor up and people got different priors right right right totally and you see that movie ad astra yes that scene where he's like and there's like the pirates on the moon you know they're like shooting at him and he has to like get away like that may be what happens moon pirates moon pirates there's like a battleground on the moon for who has territorial rights and yeah and so on but look there's so much resource availability that's the thing about abundance it's like maybe wars go away i'm very this is where one of the things because scarcity drives wars do i really need to be fighting with iran if i don't care as much about oil and energy availability look at what happened during 2020 2021 when crypto was on a bull run everyone was friends look at what happens when the price drops everyone fucking hates each other same with every resource right and so like as resources become more abundant

lower cost everyone's getting what they want we're all vacationing in hawaii working 10 hours a week. That's where things go. This is why I mentioned the 100 hours. Like you go 100 to 60 to 40 to 30. In France, they like have a law. It's like 30. Now a lot of the Democrats in the US are like, let's all work 30 hours a week and like let's drop Fridays and all this sort of stuff. Didn't a country try a four-day work week? I think France, doesn't it? Yeah, I think it might've been France that tried the four-day work week. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that's one of the measures of prosperity is like how much do you have to work to be able to live a good life?

And so if you can take more time with your family and more time to explore your personal interests and you don't have to do labor whether it's on a computer or in a field uh that's a good way to think about like are we all prospering are we being able are we being given freedom to do more things rather than being caged into doing the things we don't want to do speaking of prospering how far off are we from age reversal do you think that's one i'm most excited about um so have you looked at yamanaka factors or have you talked about this on your show before uh david sinclair's been on and i know that he's sort of tangentially associated with it, but assume no, do the 30,000 foot view of the Yamanaka factors. So every cell in our body has the same DNA. Okay. We know that. And the DNA is in every cell because of a process called mitosis every time we make a new cell from the time we're in the womb to today we're making new cells both our entire dna gets copied over into every cell but what makes my eye look and act differently than my skin if it's got the same dna how's it different how's it different than my brain or my tongue or my feet they're all they're all those are different cells there's different cells and different organs in the body those cells are

different because the genes in the dna are on or off so there's a bunch of switches and the switches are either on or off and that creates cellular differentiation it's what makes one cell different from another cell the eye cell different from the heart cell different from the skin cell or the lung cell and the switches that are on or off are these little molecular switches they're molecules that sit on top of the dna and they keep that gene from working it blocks it off and then the other gene is open. And when it's open, that means that your cell is making RNA copies of that gene and turning it into a protein. Zeros and ones. Zeros and ones. And each gene makes a unique protein. The proteins that then come out do a bunch of stuff. They're machines. They're molecular machines. And they're constantly doing all this stuff in your cell. And that's what makes every cell different, is what genes are on and what genes are off. And the complexity of this is astounding. If you were to think about a cell being the size of Manhattan, so imagine a cell is a city the size of Manhattan with 500-story tall buildings. That's how big it would be.

And every person is a protein. There's 10 billion people living in this 500-story tall building, island of Manhattan, going in between the buildings, up and down, all day long, building stuff together, never sleeping, always working, running into each other, having coffee, making stuff together, breaking stuff together, working 10 billion of us. Those are the proteins in the cell. In one cell, running around doing stuff. For 80 years, that's one second in one cell. That's how complex this is. So the proteins that are on or off matter a lot. And then they make stuff. So that's why the eye cell does totally different stuff than the brain cell or the heart cell. As we get older, this is the current science on this. It looks like what happens is we have DNA breaks. DNA gets damaged from radiation and sunlight and bad eating and alcohol and all the other shit. As those DNA breaks happen, your cell actually fixes the DNA. It's very good at fixing it. It goes in, there's a bunch of proteins. They're the worker proteins that are repaired.

proteins, they go and they fix the DNA. Every time the DNA gets fixed, there's a chance that those ones and zeros, those ons and offs get moved around a little bit. And as they get moved around over time, they get moved to the wrong place. So what ends up happening over time is that the wrong genes get turned on and the right genes can get turned off in a cell. And then that cell stops working right. The eye cell stops doing what it's supposed to be doing. The heart cell stops getting the right electrical cascade to flow through the other cells. All of the cells, the skin cell becomes a little wrinkled.

And eventually, if enough of those cells have those epigenetic, is what it's called, epigenetic errors, you start getting wrinkles, your heart stops beating as well, you go blind, all these sorts of things happen with aging. It looks like the root of all disease may be aging. And aging is a disease. So it is a disease rooted in the fact that the epigenetic factors, these little molecules, move around in the wrong place. That's what we discovered is basically aging. In 2006, a guy named Shinya Yamanaka found that he could take four proteins and put them on a cell. They would go into the cell and they would move all of those epigenetic markers, those ones and zeros, to make that cell into a stem cell, which can then be turned into any other cell in the body.

So that was the magic thing he won the Nobel Prize for. In 2016, another scientist published a series of papers showing that instead of putting a lot of those four proteins on the cell you could put a small amount and if you put a small amount instead of resetting all those molecular markers and making that cell back into a stem cell what it actually does it just moves those markers back to where they're supposed to be to make it a young cell and suddenly that retinal cell becomes like a young retinal cell the skin cell becomes a young skin cell the heart cell becomes a young heart cell all of these cells get reset and they did this in mice and they made the mice age to like 250 plus years old they put it in monkeys the wrinkles went away and they've done it in um specifically applying it to retinal cells in the eye and reverse blindness this is sinclair's stuff right sinclair has one of these companies that's in clinical trials now and there's dozens of others altos labs is like one of the most funded startups in history that no one talks about um they've raised you know close to probably 10 billion dollars at this point uh to pursue these technologies but basically what this means

David Friedbergis we are now discovering not just the four proteins, but a whole bunch of other little molecules that we can put into a cocktail.

Either we're going to drink it, take it as a shot. or take it as a pill, it will get into our cells, and it will reset the epigenetic of that cell to make it young again. They're starting with targeting diseases, like a particular, like blindness or glaucoma in the eye, or, you know, rheumatoid arthritis, or some other heart issue, and they're applying these factors to the cells in that tissue only. Locally. Locally. But over time, what will end up happening is this becomes a systemic treatment, and they're already doing it in animal models. And then you can either do it continuously, or what I think will end up happening is we'll probably have a system whereby these factors will be continuous.

When I say the word factor, I mean protein. These proteins can be continuously made and released inside our body as they're needed. So we maintain our youth and we will live theoretically for as long as we want. That's where this is headed. And the technology shows now that we can do this in animals. We can re-dose them, re-dose them and keep them young. Has it been done systemically yet? Yeah, this is the mouse. the mouse model where they made these mice the equivalent of like having someone live like 200 plus years old you know and this is like so early they haven't even optimized the molecules they haven't optimized how you deliver the molecules they haven't optimized the dosing they haven't optimized the method of the dose like there's all these techniques that are going to be developed on top of this for every one year we can extend average human lifespan we're adding tens of trillions of dollars to gdp right so this is also another big economic driver but it's not just how long people live it's how healthy they are and how energetic they are and how happy they can be and they can now go out and not feel all the pain and have the disease you know theoretically this can lead to a reversal in rates of cancer proliferation or reversal in diabetes or reversal

in many of these other diseases that are fundamentally rooted in this kind of failure of your epigenome the the markers that are turn your genes on and off so this is a technology category that I am like, I think is one of these other things that you can kind of think about the compounding effect free energy, right, like AI automation. And, you know, infinite labor for people to do all the things they want to do, and potentially living forever. I mean, you start to think about how these all kind of compound, that's why I'm excited about the future. Like these very quickly become these sort of compounding effects that drive us into a happier tomorrow. And then again it becomes a question of abundance how do you want to spend your time you know again 100 years ago i don't think people would have had the job option of being a yoga instructor or being a podcaster or being a wedding photographer or you know go down the list like there's so many things that people have found joy in doing with their time and they can be productive doing it.

I think more of that starts to happen tomorrow. And it's less of the like, you got to go work the corporate shitty job on a trading floor in a corporate office at a cubicle or, you know, in a factory or all the things that maybe we will look back one day and say, hey, that was kind of limiting human potential. Like maybe humans could do a lot more and maybe they should. And these shifts to more abundance give us that opportunity to do that a quick aside look you know sleep matters but let's be real most nights you're probably not getting the sort of sleep that's actually restorative eight sleep pod five fixes that it's a smart cover that you throw over the top of your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to 20 degrees they've even added a temperature regulating duvet and pillowcase so you and your partner can sleep at your preferred temperatures covered heads to toe like some temperature controlled mummy plus it's got upgraded sensors that run health checks when you're asleep, tracking things like abnormal heartbeats and breathing issues and sudden HRV changes. There's a built-in speaker for white noise. The autopilot feature learns your sleep patterns, makes real-time adjustments to improve

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one decade five decades way less than that way less than that we are in clinical trials now on several of these cocktails and if there's always a risk in going from animals to humans but we've done it with human cells in um in vitro in a petri dish and we see the effect that we are expecting to see so we have a lot of reasons to believe that you know over the next 10 to 20 years um more of this starts to proliferate you've heard peter diamandis's idea of longevity escape velocity right that you need to stick about every year that you live means that you're going to live a little bit longer but that when you cross a particular threshold You just need to stick about until this happens, essentially, or whatever the equivalent is, whatever the technology is. It allows you to extend lifespan indefinitely.

I think it's fair. You just hold on. It's probably the best long-termist view for looking after your health. Yeah. That now is not the time to fuck it. Right, totally. Because in the past, there wasn't really any reason to stick about. Yeah, you're going to live 80 years or 70 years or 60 years, but you're playing around with fives and tens. Whereas if the difference is between 80 and 100 or 80 and 120, you're like, hey, keep it together. And by the way, a lot of like the number one thing you can do to fix your epigenome, which you can do without taking these drugs, is exercise. Well, fasting helps.

Fasting does have an effect, but exercise, like exercise releases molecules that in many cells in your body will go in and start to address the epigenome and make you more youthful. And then there's other things that you can start to take. Like some of this peptide stuff that people are crazy about has shown that it has an effect. I don't want to be prescriptive on these things. But there's a lot of ways that you can start to kind of edge your way before all the big clinical stuff is done and the big products come out to market. What do you think happens to careers and retirement and family structures in a world where people live over 120 years?

It's hard to say. I mean, you know, I could, I think it's very sad that like, I love my kids. Like I was with my daughters and my wife, we were doing a, what are the three wishes? If you had a genie come out of a lamp and you had three wishes, what was your three wishes? The first thing my daughter said is I wish everyone in our family could live forever. That was her first wish. And I was like, such a sweet wish. but i really do think that there is like this incredible um you know a human element to this technology it's not just like technology for technology's embodied sterile yeah it's like it's not a pharmaceutical drug it's like it's a it's an opportunity to give everyone more time to do the things they want to do i really think this idea that like humans don't reach their potential is like a very fundamental truth we're going to come to at some point that for a long time maybe because we had to, we created organized social systems to achieve things as a group, but limited ourselves individually. And I think that that's what maybe changes.

The future is that these technologies and this level of abundance gives each of us the ability to achieve outcomes and have things that maybe we didn't realize we could have because we had to make all these trade-offs to make things work in a social system, in a society. yeah i wonder just how much of a challenge it's going to be for people to to face more spare time i know that you guys did really great coverage about a year and a half ago of the two ubi experiments yeah that went on yeah is that not an indication that maybe there's going to be a crisis of meaning when we start to give people because those weren't good right no i mean ubi inevitably like all welfare systems will fail why um two things one is it uh creates a system whereby people will always want more so it becomes this kind of self-fulfilling thing it create it makes people feel like there's a disincentive to go have agency right it creates a enough of a if it's giving you enough yeah passivity to uh to explore yourself and and your potential and engage the world to find your potential you're not you're not given that incentive um but the more fundamental issue is simply inflation um ubi whether it comes about through uh giving people

money as taxes from other people or whether it comes about from money printing inevitably leads to an increase in money supply which makes everything more expensive so there's a class of things that everyone that's getting the ubi check will buy and those things will all get more expensive right it's a it's a terrible feature of of the economy of like economic principles like those things will get more expensive so i think that that's um that's why those things simply don't work but look i'm optimistic i think that uh again i i keep going back to this idea that there's this this this digital universe that we've created where people can kind of build like twitch streamers another good example people going on uh patreon people going on i mean pick your platform and they're finding ways to uh to explore their interests and they can live on it like they can make money doing it because other people value what they're doing massage therapists yoga instructors and pilates instructors dog walkers i value those people they're valuable like and people like doing that work so there's i think that there's more to come in terms of what's next that we always like want to look backwards and we don't want to think about hey

the The path is uncharted, and we should just get on the ocean, and we'll figure out what's over there. What about transhumanism? Okay, let's talk about it. So superintelligence, I think, is a manifestation of AI at scale, meaning that there's features of intelligence that, in isolation or in aggregation, exceed human capacity. It's just not general yet. I don't know if I subscribe to any of the definitions. But what do humans do in a world where the AI anticipates everything you're going to do next, or knows everything you're going to think, or has a sense of how to do things better than you do?

um i think we're going to be forced to adapt so this idea of like humans living in their natural state should be back to their natural state it's it's such a weird thought because we live in buildings you know like we don't live under a tree even when you pick berries off a tree and eat the berries from the tree you're breaking nature like there's an aspect of a continuum of like what is nature what is the human and what are we doing so i i don't love the term transhumanism but i do like this idea that like this super intelligence capacity needs to be harnessed by humans i think there's probably two things that happen and the second one i'm going to say is very controversial the first one i'll say is pretty well described which is this kind of human machine interface um you know elon's got neural link where they put the wires in the brain but the wires i saw a good presentation from max hodak at his company science uh company corporation or whatever you should have him on he's great um but he worked he started neuralink he was the old ceo at neuralink and he's got the system where they're putting like a digital device in your retina put a screen in your eye yeah and it works and so the screen powered um

it's uh solar he's got this whole power system in it it's incredible so when your eye is open it's powered up it powers up and then it releases an electrical signal that triggers the neurons on your the inside of your retinal cells that then trigger your brain and it passes the signal and you can suddenly see and it's a very thin like paper spin kind of um device that goes under your retina in your eyeball it's an outpatient procedure to put it in he's in clinical trials on this it's incredible so it's restoring blindness but you can And kind of think about these interfaces that aren't about sticking a wire into the brain, which I don't think is going to be where things end up.

But I think it's likely going to end up a little bit more like, and people are going to view this as being extremely dystopian. So I'll give you the two versions of it. Some people would say Neo and the Matrix, where you kind of connect the digital thing. But the other one is Avatar, where they have that ponytail thing they connect to. but there'll probably be some interface where the chip to brain interface is just a soft neurons like it's some sort of system that can connect with the brain without going into the brain you don't need to go into the neural tissue um theoretically now i'm not super optimistic and i don't get excited about this let me be clear i'm not like oh my god we all need to connect to like we all need to be like the matrix so don't think about me as some dystopian crazy technocrat um but i think my point is someone will do it and then you'll be able to think i want to fly a helicopter like neo did in the matrix and you'll be able to fly a fucking helicopter and um you'll want to access information quickly using the super intelligence that exists in the silicon so you want to solve a physics problem because you're you know trying to build something on the moon and it and you sort of like access that information you look up and you're

like okay you have the answer you need you're not looking at a screen to get the answer and so you're you're able to kind of tap into and look do we all want to be connected all the time i don't know i don't know if that destroys humanity or like it's going to be an adaptation of humanity in an era when there's now a species that might be more intelligent than humanity in aggregate i don't know and so i'm not trying to be too like deterministic about this stuff um but i think that that human machine interface outcome is very likely going to happen and whether or not people want it or embrace it you'll have to have the benefits you'll have to go through an exercise where it's lightweight, easy to put on.

Maybe it sits above your ear and it works and it doesn't need to kind of like be plugged into your physical brain. Maybe it uses a transmission where we can connect it here and you can start to think things and get information that you want and so on. And suddenly you become super intelligent and you have all of this capacity that you didn't have before. That's one path that we might walk. Another path that we might walk, which is extremely dystopian for most people's points of view, but may end up becoming a reality because of what we're seeing happening in China and other places is transgenic humans.

where basically right now you can look at an embryo and i don't know if you've seen this controversial app where they'll sequence the dna of your embryos if you've got frozen embryos for ivf right which is a common procedure where you've got a effectively a an embryo that that's frozen it's not yet um fertilized but you can sequence the dna and determine what genetic traits does that embryo have i'm a big investor in harracite who is the most evidence-based one of these. So the ones that have used the Downs test plus the best geneticist on the planet to fill the gaps in. So you model the genome of mother and dad, then you take the sample from the embryo. And between those, they can triangulate with real accuracy what the embryo is. You have, here's your 10 harvest or your 15 harvest or whatever. And there's your dashboard.

Totally. And we've got immune function, we've got IQ, we've got externalizing behavior. And yeah, Yeah, Johnny Anomaly and Herocyte are the best at this. And I don't think it's dystopian at all. I think that crumbly genome, and if you say that selecting against negative traits is good, then it seems to me to be philosophically consistent to say that selecting four positive traits is good too. So everyone's got a line. The further I walk this conversation, the more people on the audience are going to say, you crossed my line. Right. So the first is, should we even be looking at the DNA of embryos?

We already do. right we already do because the and this was what prenatal screening not only prenatal screening but let's say anybody that's ever done ivf even if you didn't know they screen the doctor gets a microscope and has a look at the embryos yeah and just eyeballs it yes he goes yeah that one that one looks like the roundest right and we don't we don't have a number you don't want number seven right number seven we can't we can't do number seven or it wouldn't even take we know that it wouldn't take it's not going to implant correctly so he was already doing it so i'm like right okay you're just taking it from some guy it's like an umpire in mlb that's just eyeballing it and then eventually they're going to get removed and it's going to be robots totally you go okay well i'm glad that the robot got it accurate 100 of the time 100 that is the next line the next line would be sequencing the dna and looking at the genome and looking at the genetics and saying hey i want blue eyes or brown eyes and some people say that's dystopian that's in the black mirror episode well the eyes things got a bad rap when it comes to selection right that's right okay fair enough tall or short smart not smart

Suddenly, there's a line. Some people are like, well, you shouldn't be doing a blind, not blind. Blind, not blind. The next line is what's going on controversially in China, where they're using gene editing. Yeah, the enhancements. Enhance. So they'll take an existing human trait, a human allele. And so they'll basically take you from brown eye to blue eye, or they'll take you from dumb to smart. They're not creating a foreign gene. They're just making a tweak to your DNA to give you the trait that you could have randomly gotten in the embryo, but you just didn't. Is that what the guy did with the twins that turned out to be triplets?

There was a conversation. There was a, I think that's the guy that got arrested or got in trouble. Correct, yeah, 2019, I think. Yeah, yeah. You know that there was a third one? I didn't realize there was a third. I'm pretty sure. Jared, can you just Google? Oh, chat GPT. How many babies were born from the CRISPR editing in China? was it two or three because i swear that there was a third one so after all of that yeah i mean i might eat humble pie here and i've completely misremembered it but um you can also edit yourself out so i'll i'll own my failures i'll own my failures here i've said worse things on the internet um but yeah i swear that not only did he do this thing and he couldn't believe it it's the first time this has ever happened and it's so and there was there was two of them and there was a fucking third one i swear that there was a third one come on jared prove me right here brother this is like uh three babies where there were three babies a third gene edited baby was later confirmed through court documents fucking yes well not i'm not celebrating the thing i'm not celebrating the thing i'm not celebrating the thing you know what i'm celebrating you're not you're not celebrating i'm right pro gene editing babies uh and he edited the embryos using crispr

cas9 to make them resistant to hiv exactly exactly so so the the hiv resistant allele which is the genetic trait is a known trait so he just made a couple of changes confirmed that nothing else was changed took that forward so should we give children or should we give embryos these enhancements where we're not introducing new dna what we're basically saying hey randomly you could have gotten this trait and you didn't but now we're just going to make sure you get it and then stack this up and then if you do that how many traits are we willing to give to an embryo should i make every embryo superhuman? Should I make every embryo? Should I have a bunch of kids where I got one that's really good at sports, one that's really good at music, one that's really good at Broadcasting, I mean, you pick your poison.

Sometimes you can put all three into one person. There you go. The super, super. Yeah, and the British accent. And the British accent. I don't think that's genetic. Yeah. Okay, so that might be a line that many people are going to say, hey, I don't want to cross into that. And you could debate that philosophically. Why would you not want that? If you're willing to do the other things, it's a spectrum. Why are you going that far? And there's a lot of philosophical discourse around this. now the final one the final one is transgenic and this is where you put a gene or a trait into the human that it doesn't naturally have that the human would not have been born with no matter how many sperm or how many egg combinations you put together you would not have come up with this gene regardless of who the parents were correct for example being able to see infrared right okay and so this is where you make x-men right and the capacity to do this historically was like no way impossible but now in many of these there arguably could be the capacity to do this and i'm not arguing for it i'm just saying that it's likely that this is going to be a limit that's going to get tested at some point here in the near future where we are going to have a

conversation about how do humans keep up in an era in a world of super intelligence and are there certain traits like that that can enable us to either have a better performance against the superintelligence either superintelligent humans or a relationship with the superintelligence via some mechanism that allows us to connect with the superintelligence or control it better or what have you or all the digital ai that's out there or other tools or techniques that or sorry other um phenotypes physical characteristics that might allow us to better survive on mars um to have great conversation what was the guy's name it wasn't christopher mason that was the guy that was talking about space who's the dude that i did the episode with last week that we put out scott somebody the guy about mars um i had this fucking phenomenal yeah scott solomon unbelievable evolutionary biologist who's applied evolutionary biology thinking to what we're going to need to do to be able to survive on mars uh radiation what happens to bone density but if you've got the bone density loss, how do women give birth? You're going to have to do every child by cesarean C-section. But over time, if you have C-section, you get narrower hips, you get bigger

baby heads. You almost reverse evolution of where we got through. We need to be underground. If you're underground in Mars, then it means that we're going to be protected naturally by the terrain from the radiation. But if you're underground, what happens to melanin in the skin? And what happens to vitamin D levels? And if you've got artificial light, what happens to what's the psychological profile of these people? I'm like sat there, just a virtual episode. And my fucking mind was, this is a sleeper episode. It was so fucking good. Such a sleeper episode. But yeah, can we engineer? it was uh and so remember like transgenics we use in plants you know what trans do put the word trans at the start of anything yeah sorry six years and it's going to struggle let me uh same as nuclear yeah well i don't want to say gmo people because that's got a worse name yeah like if i say the gmo person because i used to work at monsanto so you're like that gives me my double evil uh scientist credibility but there's um there's likely going to be a situation where they're going to discover this because what we're now discovering a lot of like the human biology like we talked about all the genes that are on or off how do they all work how do all those

proteins work together i described 80 years of 10 billion proteins interacting in a place the size of manhattan 500 story tall bumping into each other doing stuff that's how we do stuff in a cell for one second so there's a regulatory network where all these proteins are doing stuff in a way that we can't model we don't understand today isn't it mad that that just doesn't switch off one day of all of the humor yeah it's just four or fours and you sort of blue screen of death yourself for a bit cold temperatures will do that that's that's why we can freeze biological tissue and then boot it back up because it'll just stops all that act because it's actually the thermodynamics it's the uh the kinetic energy of the proteins it's random the proteins are just bouncing around in the cell and they randomly will bump into stuff and do stuff it's amazing to think about like like there's no way that you could think that that you can realize that and not think that the universe is a simulation you know it's just like it's it's literally just chaotic ensembles of molecules that randomly do these incredible things that we look at and we're like i can move my finger it's like it's the craziest shit well it's the same as when you realize that

most of matter is empty space but if i do this exactly my hand doesn't pass through the table right fucking awesome right and the fact that it's all quantum anyway which means that it could tunnel through anything at any point in time i'm still waiting for that to happen well here's another fucked up um thing to think about you've heard of like quantum entanglement so you know you can entangle two particles and move them apart change the state of one and the other one will change instantaneously on the other side of the universe theoretically there's reasons to believe that it might be the case that every particle of a particular type is entangled with every other particle.

And I'll just let that settle for a second, because if that were true, then you could theoretically, every time any particle changes anywhere in the universe, it's affecting every other particle in the universe. It's kind of like a panpsychism, but for connectivity, like a membrane that everybody is a part of. Or it might be the case that progression in the universe is actually like a, think about a quantum state that's changing. and then space and time are a manifestation of that change because that's why entropy that's why there is a progression in one direction and it might just be that you know because because space and time are defined by the relationship between particles and it may be the case that if all the particles are entangled that there's just this one thing that just changes and then all of space and time is a feature it's like a universal clock yeah it's it's a whole nother way of thinking about our plates in the universe how do we get here we were talking about where's your line yeah okay is there a line that you have from uh gmo people to uh ivf shouldn't happen do you have a do you have an ethical line for that yeah um i definitely think that we can be very defined around the crisper stuff where we can turn we can change a gene to make someone

healthier or enhanced and i actually i don't have a philosophical disagreement with giving someone the ability to not just like turn off disease, but to say, hey, I want this person to have the trait that they didn't randomly get from me or like inherit. I think that's fine. How do you stop people? I mean, no parents. But by the way, I'll say there's like, there's a whole bunch of therapeutic treatments that we're doing now that are doing what I described in that final stage with an adult human. Like folistatin stuff? Right. i was in uh prospero with the guys when brian johnson got that right and so you could take that is a gene that makes a protein that you're you know you could theoretically use mrna to do it but it but it's short-lived and you could put a plasmid a gene and put it in your body and it will make a protein that gives you strength yeah whatever it is that is like nursery school go to like university phd level and what we're learning about all the interaction between all the proteins is we could come up with a set of genes that if I put them into you, they will make you 100 times smarter.

Would you get that shot? I would. I'm choosing for me. I think what becomes interesting is when parents are choosing for their kids. I think that's right. I think that's the right philosophical framing. Yeah. Look, if you've got this technology and it's available to be elected in the same way as we don't let people get tattoos before they're 18 or whatever, then all right. so for me currently uh johnny from heresite uh who again i can't fucking shout out enough like he's so good at communicating this stuff and heresite rules um that line up to embryo selection so i'm happy i i see no philosophical issue with uh choosing from the harvest you've already done ivf's already been and gone perhaps that's a bit of anchoring bias for me that i might have thought twice about what IVF meant had I been born a hundred years ago, but it's here. And I can't go back. I can't cognitively take myself out of it. I think up to the point where here's your 15, pick from your 15, we're already eyeballing it. That seems to compel me in the direction that this is already being done. When it gets to, we're going to choose from the genes that you could have had. Then when it gets to, we're going to change them. And then when it gets to,

we're going to create them that i'm uh as yet uh morally unconvinced right so you can you can pick but you can't change right and i think that's probably where we are today and maybe we're maybe you're a little more progressive like than most people i would say i think most people would still object to that i think the overton window changes when if if the the solution i offered you where i give you a shot that puts a plasmid which is a gene in your body or integrates that plasmid into your cells because i do think that's ultimately where that age reversal stuff is going to come from i think we're going to end up putting a series of genes in plasmids into our body they're going to go into our cells and they're going to self-regulate those cells to make them live forever um when we end up doing that as a mainstay and everyone's getting that shot and everyone's living forever and that becomes kind of a thing that everyone's like yeah of course we're boosting our lifespan with these genes like this totally makes sense that's when people say well if we're doing it to ourselves and we're all doing it like why don't we just do it to every embryo and that's when people will start to and that that's probably

many decades from now but i think that's where you can start to think about how the overton window shifts at what point when it becomes less about this like that is crazy because if everyone's doing it as an adult and it's totally safe and normal and it extends lifespan and bring it back down to doing it for the children uh yeah i get the sense that But any ickiness that people have around embryo selection, specifically for positive traits, everybody's already pretty much on board with embryo selection against negative traits, right? Huntington's, etc. The Ashkenazi community are already very deep in this because of their genetic profile. I think very quickly, all of the people who either are blank slatists, deny behavioral genetics, don't think heritability is a thing, think that embryo selection for IQ is just rebranded eugenics.

all of those people typically quite well educated uh probably quite liberal and left-leaning they care about the outcomes that their kids get and if these slightly more right of center fucking hicks that have managed to cobble 15 grand together to get their ivf done and then a little bit more to get herocyte or somebody else to to do the the um profiling if their kids are out stripping theirs in school and in sports because well the their immune function was the best of the ones that were available. And there's lowered rates of autism, or there's lowered rates of ADD, or there's lowered rates of depression. They've got a happier, more flourishing life.

I think very quickly, parents are going to look at it and go, well, why did I read all of those parenting books? Why did I work so hard to try and give my kids the best future that I could? And I'm now leaving behind. Jeffrey Miller said this fucking great quote. It's like every single parenting book on the planet could be replaced with the power of one behavioral genetics book. that your kids are made up of the raw materials of the person that you make them with, that is infinitely, not infinitely, sorry, that would be incorrect. 50% of everything you are on average is genetically inherited, including your psychological profile, and for physical traits, significantly more.

Like, very unlikely you're going to be born black with two white parents. Therefore, if you just understand the behavioral genetics of the situation, I think that lots of people are going to get on board. Yeah, that's right.

David FriedbergAnd as soon as it becomes a competitive game, this race to the top, not race to the bottom is going to happen. And people are going to go,

well, now the thing that's interesting, I think is cool. Two wrinkles that I spoke to Johnny about the last time we sat down. First one is basically buyer's remorse from parents. This sense that because I was so consciously involved in the decision to choose this child, if any negative outcomes occur because of that kid, I think that there's the potential for parents to blame themselves or for the kid to blame the parents if they were to find out. And the second one that I think is kind of interesting is parents are likely to regress. or converge on a small bucket of traits that they think would be optimal to give their kid.

But Spencer Greenberg did this fantastic study, huge, big study. IQ is not, it is moderately, negatively correlated with life satisfaction. Higher IQ, lower life satisfaction. And you have to assume people with higher IQs are less likely to go to jail, less likely to be addicted, less likely to be homeless, more likely to get married, more likely to complete a high-powered degree. um okay so all of those things would increase life satisfaction so the impact of iq on life satisfaction is so negative that it offsets the objective life improvements that you get from being smarter right so which parent if you look at this dashboard all of the things being equal is not going to choose the smarter kid now if you had the option to boost the the kid's iq by 200 because the world is different with super intelligence so if you have digital super intelligence in the world it's a very different world than we live in today it's not just competing with each other it's about finding a place in the world with the super intelligence and we're all going back and forth to mars and traveling the universe and figuring out quantum shifts in the universe like all the the things that i think are pioneering in the next century um that becomes a

different and more important framing at that point because you don't want to end up being one of the people or you don't want your kids to be disadvantaged in a world where there's this pervasive super intelligence that everyone's using and accessing and turning on and turning off as they need it to do the things they want to do in the world. And that's the right way to think about super intelligence, not controlling us. It's how do we use it? And you have to have a degree of control over knowing where do you want to go with it? What do you want to do with it? And I think that's why there's this idea that maybe people start to think more about how do we adapt in a world of super intelligence as a species? What is our role? Because there's a philosophical argument to be made that humans are dying down making way for the ai like yeah we're just bootloaders right flashy bootloaders for the silicon and i don't like that idea oh so you want to compete i want to use i want the ai to be a rocket boost for me and everyone else and i want everyone to have a rocket and i think that's what it does is it's not like a world where i'm competing with the super intelligence it's like dude you're my rocket i can't do what a rocket

can do i'm a human with two legs i can't propel and you know into space i need the rocket and similarly i need the super intelligence to do the crazy next shit that I want to do. We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement. You feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside of their body, which is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, metabolic markers, inflammation, thyroid, nutrients, liver and kidney function.

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working with seeds yeah i run a company my day job which uh most people uh that i talk to recognize me from my uh this is like a pill is that what this is no uh toothpicks so we managed to find a company that uh embed flavor and uh supplements into the wood of toothpicks so try try try what's this maybe i'll take it with me and try it later yeah just take that take that one put it in your pocket it's really cool just a different what is the nootropic uh so cognizant there's a 15 milligram dose of cognizant in there uh in one toothpick yeah oh my brother would do here it's i and uh yeah yeah in 15 minutes and uh there's a little like 15 milligrams of caffeine 50 milligrams of uh he'll try anything he's like my guinea pig we're fucking about with every delivery mechanism on the planet for these at the moment so obviously zins went went absolutely crazy right over the last couple of years is that your nicotine no so this is just the same again it's more cognizant cytokoline same thing that you get It's similar to the choline that you get in X. And we just decided that we would go for pouches, the same as Zin. So degenerate delivery mechanism, but much better for you. So that's what I'm playing with at the moment.

Is it doing well? It's fucking crushing. Yeah, we just raised for Nutonic. We just raised on 60 mil. We're in going into HEB. We're in vitamin shop, GNC, Sainsbury's, Morrison's Daily around the UK. We're just launching in Australia. And then we've got these RTDs. It's a smarter energy drink. yeah i really the last time that we sat down at south by yeah we were talking about business and you were talking about sort of how people are launching and stuff like that and um because that was like my thing was like i think everyone you know we launched a tequila brand for all in which is great but you know it tequila is tequila but um i think that's the whole thing is like you can own your own brand you can own your own equity yeah yeah well look i i'm very much a lifestyle maxi not a profit maxi um but given that this didn't exist uh it's cool to have the ability and the contacts and the time and the resources to be able to make something that you want yeah this podcast the podcast the reason modern wisdom exists is because there was nobody having a conversation that was basically less retarded than comedy but more retarded than tim ferris right and um it sort of sat in this nice middle ground i really wanted to speak to people a lot

about psychology a lot about human nature and uh it wasn't there so i decided to do it and then a thousand episodes later we're here that honestly the best you must have found this the best businesses to get into if you can i'm sure that when you get to your level that it's difficult to always design something for yourself but the best businesses to get into is designing something that's a gap in the market that you yourself would use yeah especially when you're at the sort of level that that i'm at so yeah anyway you are obviously a burgeoning farmer um yeah hoeing the ground hoeing the ground milling the tilling the the fields i do have a kitchen garden although it does need to get updated um so my day job is running a company called ohalo and what we do at ohalo is we turn off meiosis and plants okay what does that mean very sexy yeah that's it so that's the pitch i give at the bar um and uh you know i usually get the blanks there and then i uh so yeah so all the cells in our body we talked about this earlier are made through a process called mitosis which copies over the whole all the dna in your cell your dna is actually packaged up into chromosomes and there's two sets of chromosomes side by side in your cell

I don't know. So those two sets of chromosomes get copied over every time you make a new cell in your body, except for sperm and eggs. So when you make sperm or eggs, you only copy one chromosome, one set of chromosomes. And it's not just a selection of one of the sets. What happens is the two sets of chromosomes fuse, and they fuse at random places. so you get a random half of one chromosome a random half of the other chromosome and that's why every sperm which has just one set of chromosomes is genetically different everyone is unique and every egg in a female is unique they're all genetically different because that fusion event which is called meiosis fuses the two chromosomes down to one and then a sperm and an egg come together and you end up back with two and that's the new offspring and every offspring looks a little bit different because every sperm is different and every egg is different.

That's why kids all look different even though they come from the same two parents. So they get half the genes from the mother, half the genes from the father and it's a random half from the mother, random half from the father. And meiosis drives that evolutionary process. That random selection is what is evolution. It's the source of evolution. By turning off, and this is fundamentally a challenge for farming. Number one, because most crops, people don't realize this, you can't plant seed. When farmers plant seed in the ground, the reason they use seed is because they're going to get the same genetics in the field. You want all the corn to grow at the same time so you can harvest it all at the same time. It's all going to look the same. You can sell it all to the same person and it's the same crop. You don't want to harvest a bunch of tomatoes where some are green, some are yellow, some are red. They're all different sizes. How are you going to market that? That's not marketable. So the seed industry came about about 100 years ago when this guy figured out that you could actually inbreed plants and when you inbreed a plant so a plant has both male and female parts unlike animals most plants will make sperm and egg you

can pollinate itself and if you do that for seven generations both chromosomes end up identical because remember the two chromosomes have the same genes but if the genes are different you have different alleles and if the genes are the same that's called homozygots are the same alleles so if both chromosomes end up being identical and you make sperm it doesn't matter where the fusion happens every sperm will look the same it'll because they're the exact same two chromosomes same with egg so inbreeding is what was developed about 100 years ago where they inbred plants, seven generations, took the inbreds, crossed them, and now every seed is identical.

That's how they make identical seed, in corn, in tomato, in cotton, in canola, in sorghum. And farmers went to a seed company and they started buying seed for the first time ever. And they put that seed in the ground and they could grow a crop. And every year, the other thing it does is it allows you to improve the yield every year because the plant breeder would try and make the two chromosomes from the two backgrounds different. The more different they are, the more complementary they are, the more different genes you're putting in that plant, the higher the yield, the faster the plant grows. Plants are really interesting because they're kind of like looking for tools in a tool belt. Like, how many tools do I have? How many different genes do I have that I can use any second of any day to keep growing?

Humans and animals, we just grow like two arms, five fingers, two eyes, two legs, and we're done growing. And then our job is to go out and find food and survive. Plants, their job is to keep growing. They grow roots, they grow branches, they grow leaves. The sun's over there, I'm going to grow a branch towards the sun, I'm going to make more leaves. Oh, the water's down there, I'm going to grow a root down there. And they just keep growing and growing and growing until they die. So plants are always looking for more genes in the toolbox that they can use to grow.

David FriedbergSo by turning off meiosis, we can take plants that don't have seed today, put two of them together and all the seed will now be the same because every sperm is the same

every egg is the same because by turning off meiosis both chromosomes go into the sperm both chromosomes go into the egg and now the offspring has four chromosomes instead of two that might sound crazy but many many plants have four chromosome versions it's called polyploidy polyploid many versions of the chromosome and uh some like modern wheat is hexaploid it has six chromosomes modern strawberries octoploid it has eight chromosomes modern potatoes tetraploid it has four chromosomes so many modern kind of crops have multiple copies of the chromosome and you can't make seed in those crops and so you end up taking the plant chopping it up and replanting it and that's what they do so by making seed it actually saves farmers the majority of their expense which they have to spend money chopping up all the old plants putting them back on the ground and it allows us to make better plants every generation because we can make better selections on the ones that are complementary to each other increasing the genetic diversity in the crop increasing disease resilience drought resistance um climate change adaptation all the things that drive yield and make the farmers more profitable make more food per acre all these sorts

of things and then every year instead of having Like in the US, we're farming Russ at Burbank. We've been farming Russ at Burbank for 150 years. We can now bring new potatoes to market every year that are getting better and healthier, more nutritious, more adapted to climate change, making the farmer more money. And so you can kind of, and the farmer, instead of using 5,000 pounds of chopped up potatoes, and like Matt Garman did, and putting them in the ground, he can use 10 grams of seed that fits in the palm of your hand. Wow. So it cuts down on his expenses like crazy. He makes more money and we make more food.

So that's the business I run. And so, you know, we figured out a way to turn off meiosis and do this. And then we've also developed a lot of other technology to make plant breeding more efficient, to increase the rate of yield gain, to increase the adaptation of the climate, to increase all of these things that are going on in agriculture that make it very hard to farm. Can you make it so that you need less fertilizer? Yeah, absolutely. So nitrogen utilization is a kind of good phenotype to think about. So you can kind of, you know, because you got to apply nitrogen to grow most crops. And then there's also work now on, which we don't do today, but there's some work that's being done.

Some crops like soybeans and legumes, they actually can suck nitrogen out of the atmosphere. You don't need fertilizer. And it actually refertilizes the soil from the air. And so there's ways to kind of integrate that into crops that don't have that. so there's a whole bunch of that sort of technology that's going on as well wow that is cool what what's happening with this california flight stuff because yeah i was with palmer over christmas and a bunch of other guys yeah from that side and um i didn't know about it i knew that it was going to be brought in before the end of the year it's this sort of sticky thing that seems to be following people around but it's also going to get worse over time it seems like there's more and more rumblings that stuff's going to keep on this feels like the sort of core engine of california's prosperity since the 1800s is now unraveling yeah uh i'm in a bunch of group chats i talked to a lot of people i would say probably a third of people i talked to have already left you're asking about people leaving right and i would say um like a survey we did informally in a group which has been published uh talked about is close to 87 percent of people are going to leave

um these are the core leaders in tech and the other thing is i talked to a lot of emerging tech ceos of startups that are doing really well that are growing and they're all looking to leave like there was one company i was talking to they're going to move up to Northern California from Southern. And they're like, now I'm going to move to Nevada. And that's because they're worried about what's next. So California is in this fundamental sinkhole right now. It goes back to my point about people making promises. In order to get elected, politicians promise people something that they don't have today. That's how you get elected. You don't get elected by saying, I'm going to take stuff away from you. The government's going to do less for you. Show me one politician in the last hundred years has been elected saying that.

so in order and there's a fundamental kind of like moment this come to jesus moment can you keep doing these promises can you even meet the promises you've already made and in california the answer is no california set up a system um where we created the highest tax rate in the country because of all the success in silicon valley all the income that's being generated all the success and capital gains and whatnot and use that to fund a bunch of nonsense the the bullet train to nowhere you know freaking like 30 billion dollars in nothing like the how much is it 30 billion um and they've had six ceos by the way that have all been fired or the one guy just got arrested it's insane there's um it was just published that this this homeless program 220 million dollars are spent on it six homeless people got themselves out of the cycle of uh poverty that they were in um you go down the list what was it sorry just what was that thing about the affordable internet oh bill rural broadband that was it and for the same amount of money that was spent i think every american citizen could have got starlink yeah that and that one that's a federal problem i don't yeah yeah yeah but you're gonna get me very emotional

i've been i've been very like you seem like an emotional i've been very like unemotional during our uh talk about science in the future and then this is the opposite okay this is the bullshit the opposite that happens when social systems become manifest like um rotten it's a system where people lie to each other in order to keep themselves in power in order to keep their money flowing in order to keep this nonsense up and running people lie to themselves they lie to their constituents and the democracy starts to become like what's the point like does this even work california in particular um we made a bunch of changes to the pension system so we have public pensions for public employees in california and over the past um uh 12 to 15 years those changes have resulted in a bunch of guarantees to people on their future

David Friedbergretirement benefits that the state simply cannot afford to meet the estimate currently is that there's 600 billion to a trillion dollars in the whole okay the state then has a question how are

we going to like pay for all these people all the stuff that we promise them and that's a big part and then there's also all the near-term stuff like health care costs hey we promise them health care We promised our union workers healthcare. We've got to figure out a way to fund the healthcare because the promises were made. But the promises were never funded. The promises were never possible to be funded. And when suddenly it all comes to ROOST and everyone's like, well, how are we going to make the payments now? How are we going to fill the hole? That's the situation California is in. California has such a heaping liability problem that it's now, you're seeing like all the rats jumping, you know, off the ship or they're burning the ship or the people are leaving the ship.

I don't know what the right analogy to use is, but that's the chaos that's ensuing in California in this very moment. And so we talk a lot about the billionaire tax. The billionaire tax came about because of one union, one guy at one union called SEIU UHW, who set up a scheme where they would tax you 5% of your net worth if your net worth is over a billion dollars, which everyone in this audience is like, who cares? Screw the billionaires. But what it does is it gives the state assembly, the legislature, the ability to, in the future, change the threshold and the amount. So theoretically, you could take the 5% on billionaires one time and make it 1% on billionaires every year.

Wasn't this the case with the original income tax? 1930, it was 1%. Tell people the story of how the original income tax... I mean, the original income tax was pitched because we did not have an income tax in the United States. And that was, again, why this country was founded. It was set up as no taxation without representation. There was a huge tax scheme to fund all of the nonsense that was going on in England. uh and careful now i mean at the time very different um not to speak to the people but the uh let's call it the aristocracy and uh you know what we call the elites today and by the way the i think about the term the elites it's sort of like that spider-man meme where like everyone's you're the elite you're the elite you're the elite like the tech guy's the elite like that's kind of the moment we're in right now like the tech guys are the elites but like the tech guys last year were telling they were calling out the ngos as the elites and then you know it's just like everyone's an elite your privilege is more privileged than my privilege yeah this is all rooted in marxist philosophies by the way it's all this like oppressor press stuff like again but all of those philosophies fundamentally uh distinguish people's

agency like this is so critical for people to understand when you give people a bunch of stuff or you create a governmental system or economic system that says you do x you get y you're you're a slave to that system you are now oppressed no matter what anyone tells you you are not getting risen up and you're not and pulling other people down doesn't solve any of your problems another conversation for another day but in california so we start out as a one and so they The way they started the income tax in the United States was they're like, hey, we'll promise everyone 1% on incomes over whatever it was at the time.

I think $10,000 a year. You can probably look it up. And that was it. And then over time, it's like, wait, we had to fund a war. And now we're going to expand the highway system. So the original income tax was 1%. 1% on high net worth people, on high earning people. And that's it. Jared, chad this and find out how the income tax progressed over time. I want to see this. And you can look at this. And so then it became like suddenly today, everyone pays an income tax. In California, I pay 53% income tax. And most people pay an income tax. And now they're creating a whole new tax regime. And I want to talk about this importantly, what they're trying to do in California. Here you go. It was a temporary wartime tax. And again, leading up to this, we had tariffs to fund the government. The government was small. The government wasn't meant to be this big system that took care of everyone and did all this stuff.

Keep going. Coming out of World War II, and here's the income tax started out as 1% on income over $3,000 a year. Okay? Yep. And then there was like a progression. They added a 7% top rate later. And then you can kind of see here when the thing kind of expanded. Oh, wow. 1944 to 1945 in World War II, the top rate was 94%. Yeah, they took everyone's money to fund the war. But that set a precedent. Because what happened at that point is after they set the precedent, and then we had this kind of FDR, kind of New Deal expansionism, all the stuff that happened post-World War II in the United States was like, holy crap, we can get the government to do big stuff.

Let's do big stuff to make our lives better. You can see that that sound principle, like it makes sense. It sounds good in principle. But this is where it leads us to today. Because every year, once you start thinking about the government as solving your problems and doing things for you, that becomes something that only escalates up. It never goes down. Talking about if 51% can vote themselves, what, the 49% have got? So this is the next thing that happens. So that's income. Let's say you've paid your income tax and you own a bunch of stuff. That's now your private property. You own this stuff.

That's yours. So now comes along the government or this new bill, the Billionaire Tax Act in California. And for the first time ever in the United States, we're trying to create a wealth tax. It doesn't matter that it's billionaires and it doesn't matter that it's one time or 5%. What you're saying is that the stuff that you've already paid taxes on, that you now own, that's in your backyard, all your iron ore that you've stored in the backyard. Correct. Get off it. Yeah. Or your cool, you know, podcast studio. You own these things. You've paid taxes, you've earned your money and you bought the stuff. But now the government can come in and say, you know what? We want that lamp. We want half your iron ore. We're going to take all your private property. They're going to get all your private property. That's what a wealth tax does is it taxes people on post-tax earnings. It takes away private property.

If you give the government the ability to do that on even 1% of net worth for billionaires, the next step is 5% of the billionaires or maybe 2% of millionaires. And then maybe it's 3% on people making that have a net worth of 100 grand a year. And by the way, to figure out how much you have what your assets are, you got to send me a list every year of everything you own. So now the government gets to look into your house, not just see what's in your bank account, what stocks you own, but what cars do you own? What's the value of those cars? How much is that art worth? What's everything here worth? Private property rights go out the window when you institute a wealth tax, because now the government has the right to assess all your value, and to take anything they want from you based on a vote, where a bunch of people raise their hand and say, we'll increase the tax rate to this 5%, 2%, 10%, whatever it is. And here's the threshold and we'll take it every year. And when you do that, it eventually leads to 51% of people voting to take everything from 49%. That's the worst case. Like that's the end state of this is it eats itself and that's socialism. And so I think that a wealth tax, and look, it's not going to affect

me this California tax. So like, don't think that I'm trying to like speak my book or whatever the comments or bullshits are. I think this is a fundamental principled issue that by degrading private property rights, we are setting a precedent in the United States that is the foundation of why the United States was set up in the first place, which is for all of us that came to this country to get away from tyrannical governments outside the United States that took all our shit and controlled everything and told us what to do all the time. And we came here and we get to have private property. Sure, I'll pay my tax. Here's my 53%. Thank you very much, government, for all the great stuff you do for all the services you provide but like now fuck off and leave me alone and that's not the case anymore when this passes Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, all these national politicians, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, they're all saying we need to have a national wealth tax now. So it's not just in California. This is going to be the issue between 2026 and 2028. The elites are the billionaires and the tech people. They're coming after them. And the manifestation of that is to create this wealth tax. And that gives the

government the system by which private property rights are gone. And the United States is a very questionable future at that point that's the thing i worry about the most and and i juxtapose that with my optimism about the future and this amazing shit like i mean think about it like this amazing shit that's happening in the world we're gonna have free fucking energy we're gonna live forever we're gonna have all of this insane stuff that we never imagined abundance and resources that we could never contemplate happiness spending time with family working less hours robots that build shit for us everything is going to get better everything is getting better everything is getting more amazing and then we're like let's fuck ourselves like why not because we'll just fuck ourselves that's that and you know this is this principle of like i i don't like using the term good versus evil but it's like are you thinking about the future optimistically or pessimistically if you're thinking about the future as these are control system this is these tech guys are crazy. This is dystopian, blah, blah, blah. The number one most unfavorable thing in the United States right now, according to a recent poll, is AI. More unfavorable than

Donald Trump. More unfavorable than everything. It's the most unfavorable thing because it is this narrative that everyone's been instituted in their minds that this is the thing that destroys us, yada, yada. And that's the choice we have. That's the choice we have right now, is do we want to walk this path of abundance or do we want to lock ourselves up? And I will say the counterbalancing force, and people won't like hearing this, but the counterbalancing force in the world will be a place like China. Because if the United States walks this path, other countries will not walk this path, and it will glean the benefits therein. And we have to recognize that.

And then you have to ask the question, wait a second, is there some psychosocial motivation that others might have to see this happen in the United States? And I would argue maybe, maybe there's influence happening maybe there's a reason why people are spending so much time why so much foreign money is going into NGOs that are supporting these sorts of causes I just like for me it's so hard to grok why people would be so um you know quick and and look i ardent yeah there's some there's something anyway i don't want to be too conspiratorial because that discredits a lot of this shit but yeah i think that you could look at the conspiratorial angle but just straight incentives for i want to be seen to be standing up for the little person when we saw how far that pushed a lot of social movements over the last six seven years and that got people to do some pretty insane things that I think in retrospect, a lot of them regret. And that was, I am here for the righteous. This is dangerous. This is too much. This is xenophobic, misogynistic, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, unethical, unmedical. There's a big list of things. And because everybody is their opinions, not their deeds, right? The difference between our opinions and our deeds

has never been greater. You're able to say good whilst doing bad. This was Elon's thing. I remember four or five years ago, he was pulled up about what he was doing with Tesla and about his presentation things. And he says, what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. There are many people out there who are doing bad whilst appearing good, and I don't care to be one of them. That's right. And the people that are trying to lead on this have three homes. You know, it's very easy to pull the ladder up. Would they not be looking at themselves? Oh, I suppose that at least at the moment when they're pointing at the billionaires that are above, right there in this sort of interesting middle ground which is wealthy enough to be wealthy but not so wealthy they have abundance you know if you go to africa and you go visit farmers you think those guys are complaining about using gmo seed and farming if it's going to double their their income their lives changed you know there's all these stories about how technologies nuclear energy dropping the cost of energy making it proliferant in india been a game changer like these technologies that we shun in the west are luxury beliefs for us to shun them we have these

ideas that we can just shun stuff because we're we we are already well enough off that's what happened in germany and bernie sanders has three homes so it's easy for him to tell people hey the average person has one you know has an apartment we should go down this path that fundamentally in every record of history that we've tried to go down this path has fucked everyone up it is the worst idea that humans have ever come up with and they keep trying to repeat it you can only look at argentina which is like gotten out of the shit like yesterday to see how bad of a problem this leads to. Socialism is the worst idea ever.

Why did Mamdani get it? In New York, then? People want more. They're not, people are left behind. We, look, this is so important, I think, to recap. We promised people that if they went to college, you would get a good career and you could buy a home. And that turned out to not be true. That was a lie. The way we promised it to them and the way we gave everyone access to college is through federal education grants, loans. The federal student loan program didn't have a market check. The federal government, as long as you were an accredited university, you could run Trump University, Phoenix University, UCLA, Harvard, MIT, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter what the tuition is. $60,000 and it doesn't matter what the degree is. You could get a degree in basket weaving or a degree in computer science. I have one in each. The government will loan you the money. right iron ore um the background for this should be like a minecraft thing yeah but the government will loan you money to go to that college and so the government basically fueled increases in tuition because why would all these colleges suddenly go from costing 10 grand a year to 60 grand a year it's because they could just charge more and there was no one to say no because the government just funded the loans every year and the students are like i got a student loan i'm good to go like no one's doing the math on like can i afford to pay 60 240 000 is it true that You can't default on it as well in the way.

And you cannot default on it. And so that was the setup. That's how it got passed in Congress where the government spends trillions of dollars underwriting student loans. So there's no underwriting process. Any college, any degree, any individual, any price. Those four things. You could be a bad student. I shouldn't underwrite your loan. You could get a shitty degree. I shouldn't underwrite your loan. You go to a shitty school. I'm not underwriting your loan. And if it costs a lot, I'm not underwriting your loan. That's what would normally happen. And that didn't happen. As a result- If you privatized it.

if you privatized it and as a result everyone got stuck with an education and then it's like hey the market's not there rents are high and much of the problem with rents being high and all this other sort of stuff building home building government regulation government funding the more the bigger the government got the more expensive everything got you can you know that chart can you pull up the chart with like government stuff versus like non-government stuff yeah just uh ask chad um What is the chart explaining government intervention compared with the price of different goods and services over the last few years?

It's an image. This tells you everything you need to know. This is why everything got worse. When moving to New York suddenly cost $6,000 of rent, you couldn't get a job. Food was $18 for a frigging sandwich. A lot of this was rooted in this problem, which is the government got too big. So the solution is, I need someone to fix that for me. And here's a guy who's coming along saying he's going to make everything free. The groceries are going to be free. So all the stuff on the red, everything above on the top section, these are things that the government fundamentally has a large role in paying for in the economy so government dollars are flowing into the cost of things so the people selling those things can basically charge more and they know they can charge more because the government can just fund it and the government's an endless pool of money printing so it just keeps printing and eventually they're like hey let's raise taxes or get the money to pay for the stuff once they realize but you know all of these things are services that the government's gotten involved in college education health care through medicare medicaid because there's no negotiation on these programs everything below is where the government doesn't have a role the cost of a car the cost of clothing

the cost of television the cost of internet the cost of software these are all private industries where the government is not funding the purchase of these things for the consumer in some way or distorting the market in some way so you know who i first showed this chart to bony sanders what did he say did you have him on this yeah oh you did last year yeah yeah yeah i should watch that it it was interesting yeah what did he say to this uh in fact jared let's see if we can pull it up we should react to that and if you if you look at i mean what's frustrating to me is you can read textbooks you can go on the internet you can watch youtube and you can see exactly what happens with socialist socialism and socialist policies around the world when the government runs a grocery store when the government decides to you know offer everyone health care it's great in principle I would love for that to work.

I would love for everyone to have health care. I'm not opposed to that idea. But if you're going to have like a government with no accountability and there's no one there that has any skin in the game, be responsible for giving me my health care. I know it's going to get fucked up. And I've seen that happen time and time again around the world. It's just not the right system. And I think that there's much for us to kind of learn from like why these things haven't worked around the world. And it's like what frustrates me is people are ignorant. They put their blinders on. They don't want to see it.

And they just I saw an interview with a guy during the protest in L.A. when the guy went on camera and he's like, you know. what are you here for? And he's like, I'm here for socialism. We need socialism in America. And the interviewer is like, but you know, socialism's never worked anywhere else ever before. And he's like, well, that's bad socialism. That's socialism that doesn't work. Like, I want good socialism. I want socialism done the right way. And we're going to do it the right way in America. This is the story in every generation of socialist movements that have happened around the world. And they all start, by the way, where you have this kind of inept or explosive government system that drives people to say, I'm not getting what I want. And everything's costing more i need socialism and also that's super sexy right because it allows you to be able to promise something that people are going to love and what was that point around it involves promising people something that they don't i always used to say the kid the kid that gets elected for middle school president is the kid that promises to make the vending machines free everyone's got a story about this at their school you know there's always the kid who said hey guys

what i'm going to promise you is i'm going to make the vending machines free and that's what we deal with every day. So here he is. I want to show you a chart, uh, in a second. So this is that you with hair? Yes, it's me with hair. Consumer goods and services over the last 25 years, broadly speaking, prices have increased by about 74% since 2000, but the actual numbers vary wildly depending on what type of good or service it is. So consumer goods, toys, TVs, housing, got housing in there. Uh, consumer goods like toys and TVs have gotten over 50% cheaper. TVs are nearly a hundred percent cheaper. But critical categories like healthcare, education have skyrocketed by 200%. Housing is in there too. One potential interpretation is that the less legislation that you apply to an industry, the more the free market is allowed to take over, the cheaper the things become. Even new cars haven't got that much more expensive. So this is price changes. And you can see as you basically get to the top, there's more legislation put in and down to the bottom. What do you make of that?

I don't. Yeah, look, to me, when I look at the economy, I look at what does a family need to do well. Okay, let's just go through. What are the basic needs of life? All right, everybody, right? Rich, poor, young, old needs health care, correct? In America, by the way, we probably spend three times more per person on health care than you do in the UK. Do you think he got trained as a hypnotist? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Look, I was proud of me sitting down with someone who's been in office for nearly twice as long as I've been alive. And grabbing him and not letting go too much without, I think, being too cantankerous. It was a real sort of strategic learning experience for me. But yeah, look, that's the game that is played. There is a question that gets asked, and what is answered is what I wanted to hear.

Yeah. And I think that it's very hard to deny the value and the importance of the empathy. One of the things that the other side gets wrong is the failure to empathize. He's extraordinary. And so is AOC and so are others at speaking to people that are feeling desperate and in need. And it is true that there are tens of millions of people in the United States. I think it's 63% of people are living paycheck to paycheck or living on less than 500 bucks of total savings. Yeah, if there was one catastrophe that they would need to go into debt for it. But I'll go back to this point about, I think that the more government you create to help those people, I worry that over time it hurts more than it helps, right?

And this is where the price of things go up and you can't offer the same thing. like hey i'm gonna offer you more and more every year by the way i'll give you one anecdote in 2013 or 12 when they passed the temporary tax cuts or sorry the temporary tax hikes in california they raised an incremental 100 billion dollars since then california i paid that like i'm a big big chunk of that check that money um not a big chunk but i've done my part and 80 billion of that went to increase and it was supposed to go to increasing schools and like health care services 80 of it went to increasing uh public retirement benefits 80 billion and you know you i can't sit here and like bemoan public employees i'm not going to like say negative things about public employees but the system whereby you know there's a voter block that says hey like we need to get more and then the system is created that doesn't actually solve the problems that need to be solved. And the people that asked for more get the benefit. I think it's very inherent in democracy. Like over a period of time, you could argue that democracy eats itself.

Yeah. Isn't it crazy that nobody ever pulls these people up? Each cycle, false promises are made, not kept. Bigger promises need to be made in order to get ahead of where the previous ones were. The people who didn't deliver on the promises previously don't get held to account in the right way. It's kayfabe. It's like. By the way, you can look at the food stamp program. If you type in food stamp program spending per year over time, watch what happened in 2019. Blow your mind. We can come back to that one. But this is exactly the problem. Today, I would argue, and I've tried to do the math on this. If you take the number of people that work for the federal government, state government, or local government, city government, plus the number of people that work for contractors.

oh hello yeah so here's the food stamp program as an example and so you could argue like hey like people were it was a crisis we needed to increase spending so we drove up the food stamp program it's a hundred billion dollars a year now um and that that's program doubled from 2010 yeah and um roughly holy shit snap spending increased 60x from 1969 to 2022 and it's a hundred billion dollars per year roughly 1.4 percent of total federal so 60 to 70 percent of people on the food stand program which costs 100 billion a year 60 to 70 percent are obese clinically obese and oh that are on the food that are on the food stand program right and close to 20 billion of the hundred billion a year is spent on soda fucking hell oh that's a one-fifth one-fifth one-fifth of the money is going to coca-cola so it starts like from a good place like hey it's actually started during the great depression it was like can we get new tonic on snap actually that'd be a great way to raise the valuation of the company there you go that'd be fucking fantastic yeah but it started as a um you know an emergency program much like the emergency one percent income tax it started as an emergency program to help people during the great depression

that were actually starving and it was like let's give them bread give them milk give them eggs help them survive what's that uh i think it's a oh and sorry i'll give you my statistic today if you add up federal state local government employees plus all the contractors for the government plus all the people that live off of a retirement check or a welfare support check so all the people that They're living off government checks. It's about nearly half the U.S. population. Either working for or being supported by. Wow. So we may be too far gone. That's kind of where democracy is. Like everyone gets...

And now, so now think about that person. If you're... And I'm not saying that person. Like if you're collecting a check every month from the government, you will never vote. Have that check go down. You're living on those checks. This is how it maybe eats itself a little bit, right? So you're now in a system where people actually want to say, so you asked why Mom Donnie got elected. I think that you reach a tipping point where this becomes like a wave, and that's how socialism could manifest in this cycle. I think 26 to 28 is going to be the big cycle, and my money's on AOC being president. Why?

i think this is the the wave we're in when tech is ai is the boogeyman right now right like so there's there's also this like you always got to pick a fear like the japanese are coming the russians are coming climate change is coming there's always something is coming ai is coming that's the fear and it works um and you know bernie sanders like pounding the table saying data centers need to be stopped we got to stop all data centers this week so you know um i think we have a choice i still believe in agency i still believe everyone can look in the mirror and look at the situation and realize that more government is not going to stop the problem created by too much government and uh this this this is just such a crazy juxtaposition and while we're in this exponential technology curve of and this abundance curve that we're on yeah do you feel a little bit like there's a schism going on between what's happening in the real world and the way that it's being perceived it's crazy i mean like i i think that it's so sad that so many people are so negative i think like people talk about yes certainly a lot of people can be struggling but i think you know in in in the mid-century coming out of world war ii we were

so optimistic as a people we were so positive about tomorrow all of our conversations about tomorrow were all about we're going to go to the moon we're all going to move around in you know electric trams we're we're all gonna have a microwave in our kitchen you know i always tell people the analogy uh if you pull up uh um i'll do this for your audience if you pull up the disney history institute youtube channel and there's an episode on tomorrowland when they opened up tomorrowland in 1955 it was all about this optimism of tomorrow and it was like every ride was all about tomorrow being incredible it's like we're all gonna like go to the moon there was a ride called the rocket to the moon you go to the moon and back you move her and then they had a inside the house of tomorrow um where everyone had a microwave so you could cook your dinner in 30 seconds it was like the future and people like mind blown that's so cool and you know and then i think we So in the video, they say like in the 1970s, they changed over every ride to make it all about the fear of tomorrow. It was like a Star Tours was a robot that like made the mistake. It's a navigator robot. And of course, the navigator robot has to screw up. So you veer off course and nearly crash in an asteroid. They took out the rocket to the moon and replaced it with Space Mountain, which is a rocket ship that veers off course and spins violently through the galaxy. Captain EO was Michael Jackson coming back to planet Earth. And he's like, hey, we're going to destroy the robots that took over the Earth.

and him and his organic band destroy all the robots apocalyptic and so like you know we've kind of gotten into this very pessimistic view and i think like you know um if we can change people's aperture a bit and get them to be pessimistic optimistic instead of pessimistic and see how promising tomorrow is and not need to feel sheltered and um you know taken care of and fundamentally creating a burden to these bigger social systems these governmental type systems people um i think might change their view i'm hopeful that's why we're having this conversation but like that's the sort of thing that i think we need to be doing it's like showing people all the amazing shit that's happening and how much it's going to benefit you and how crazy awesome it is and like you're going to be able to spend more time with your kids the cost of food's going down the cost of energy is going to go down like we're all going to have robots that can build stuff for us and you're going to be able to spend more time with your family like on and on and on like housing needs to get cheap like but like fighting against these things is just so um it's so crazy that we would you know do that like you know there's this whole story about germany

fought against nuclear energy and then their energy costs spiked and now they have to buy natural gas from russia and just put carbon into the atmosphere which is what they were trying to fight against in the first place yeah yeah i uh i wonder whether people being more hopeful would mean that they would vote in a less fear-based way that's right and uh that anybody that's talking about hope if you feel fearful sounds like they're dismissive of the problems that you're facing yeah that seems like the dynamic that's yeah that's right it's like i'm not empathizing with your pain yeah and if i a lot of the time and by the way if i empathize with your pain we have to figure out an enemy responsible for your pain them them i think it was 2012 that votes went from voting for the party you like to voting against every party that you don't yeah i mean there's all these videos now i don't we don't need to pull these up but obviously like all the people that were like we got to go attack iran we got to attack iran and then when trump did it or we We've got to go get Maduro. Trump does it. It's like, well, Trump did it. We've got to all be against it.

Like, I don't know what happened. You saw the flip-flop with the vaccine. Yeah. When it was Trump's vaccine or it was Sanders' vaccine. And each side was like, I'm fucked. Wait, no, I'm not. And I don't know when we got... There was a flippening that happened, probably around the time you're describing. The flippening. Yeah. When people went from like, hey, there's a set of things we agree on and a bunch of stuff we disagree on, to like anything that you do or say I disagree with and that's politics regardless of whether it's good or bad yeah David Friedberg yeah thank you gentlemen you're great I appreciate all the work I appreciate it bro thank you for having me fuck yeah alright goodbye everybody dude yes great good shit so good have a good flight