A slur for robots and AI has emerged online in recent weeks, offering some sense of growing societal anxiety with increasing capable technology. It s a slur that traces back to a Star Wars video game, and has emerged as the internet s favorite epithet for any technology looking to replace humans. On TikTok, people harass robots in stores and on sidewalks with it. On Sunday, Senator Ruben Gallego used the term last week to tout a new piece of legislation.
00:03:41.120Based in Dallas, Texas, wife, five kids.
00:03:45.380And really just look for, kind of look to understand the intersection between the big political, cultural trends of our day and outside business opportunities.
00:04:08.940It's like a throwback to like a Star Wars video game.
00:04:12.420People obviously are very, very skeptical about AI technology and robots and that sort of thing.
00:04:18.800But a lot of people, especially in our circles, have been promoting it.
00:04:22.420They're saying this could be the solution to a lot of our civilizational problems.
00:04:25.660A big one that people highlight is the birth rate, the declining birth rate.
00:04:28.740People say this could be good for filling in gaps without being dependent on immigration.
00:04:34.040I'm wondering what you're seeing, what your kind of general thoughts are on this transition to AI, where we maybe need to stop, where we need to go, that sort of thing.
00:04:44.140So I'm an optimist about this, at least about the possible, right?
00:04:48.240I don't think there's a guarantee of a good direction, but I think that we should be—my view is, on the right, we're in a world where many of the legacy institutions have been sort of defined and controlled by political opponents.
00:05:07.780Any disruptive technology should presumptively be something that we believe we can lever that's a friend of ours, because it's certainly more of a threat to the establishment than it is to us.
00:05:21.360It's going to come with its own threats.
00:05:23.280It's going to come with its own challenges.
00:05:24.840But really, how those shake out could go either way, right?
00:05:29.920There's no guarantee that they're going to sort of further cement, let's say, the less hegemony or further accelerate.
00:05:35.700I actually think it's very likely that many of the distortions—if you think of sort of anomalies of the last 50 years or whatever,
00:05:44.780there are really sort of distortions or divergence from the historical norm, I think a realistic expectation is that powerful disruptive technology will first eliminate those and sort of first—the most likely impacts are actually to move us back to historical norms.
00:06:05.600Now, they'll bring their own distortions that we need to be aware of, but again, I think we should embrace these.
00:06:12.600I think in many ways, the job of entrepreneurs is to make sure that we actually lever these new technologies in ways that are in line with our vision for society rather than in line with others.
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00:10:54.240Say those are jobs that you would probably look at and feel like that is a less human job in some sense.
00:10:59.960I mean, there's a lot of jobs where you almost feel like the work you're doing is dehumanizing.
00:11:03.340And if it's dehumanizing, there's a good chance that it is and that a machine can do it better.
00:11:08.740I think there's a lot of other jobs where there's something sort of fundamentally human to them, and those aren't going to go away.
00:11:15.260Like, to me, I think a good heuristic is new technologies first replace old technologies.
00:11:21.980They're much more likely to replace old technologies than they are to replace people.
00:11:25.900Now, I would say bureaucracy, when you think of bureaucracy, in a sense, you've actually forced people to become cogs in this system that you could think of as sort of a quasi-technology in itself.
00:11:39.340So there's a lot of systems where people play a role, and those are good candidates for replacement by more advanced technologies.
00:11:46.380But there's a lot of other jobs where people are fulfilling a fundamentally human function.
00:11:52.020I mean, I think the most clear one is executive agency.
00:11:55.640I mean, to the extent you are exercising executive agency, AI is only a powerful tool, a powerful lever for you to get more done.
00:12:04.080Essentially, what might otherwise require you to have a lot of people.
00:12:09.380Now, I think there's going to be real questions about sort of entry-level jobs and opportunity to gain experience, and that will require adjustments in sort of the credentialing pipelines and training.
00:12:21.260Maybe you have to move back to more of an apprenticeship where there's sort of a wrecking, rather than, let's say, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in this formal education, and then you're supposed to get into a job where you're paid immediately.
00:12:32.200Maybe there's some sort of hybrid where you're an apprentice, and you're paid less, but you're gaining some experience that wouldn't be possible.
00:12:42.700It wouldn't be viable as an entry-level job because there's not enough sort of straight work to be done, but that hybrid works.
00:12:49.900I mean, there's any number of ways that we can sort of reorganize that process, but I don't think that the jobs are going to go away.
00:12:55.240I would also say that skilled physical world work, there's no shortage of what needs to be done.
00:13:02.200I mean, skilled physical world work will always be a bottleneck.
00:13:07.060AI, you can think of as sort of a complement to physical world work.
00:13:11.860And the example I like to give actually is like contractors, HVAC contractors, let's say.
00:13:21.02050 years ago, you might have run your own shop.
00:13:24.800You would have a number in the telephone book, someone would call you, you'd come fix something.
00:13:32.720You've really had that model of work kind of squeezed out in a sense over the last, certainly over the last few decades, as there's been this sort of push toward economies of scale.
00:13:44.480Economies of scale allow you to have a sort of centralized back office billing system, customer service system, and all things that sort of a solo tech doesn't necessarily like doing that much.
00:13:56.660And so how do you get those economies of scale?
00:13:58.600You get those economies of scale with private equity and low interest rates have enabled private equity to come in and sort of roll up these HVAC groups, which might have been a solo tech.
00:14:07.320They might have been maybe five or 10 guys or whatever, if it's a small operation, now rolled up into a big private equity owned operation.
00:14:15.680And they can then, you know, their capability is really well suited to sort of building that back office.
00:14:20.960Well, what AI could do is AI could come in and I think it could replace that entire back office with an algorithm.
00:14:29.180You don't need, you don't need that sort of private equity owned, you don't, you don't need that private equity sophistication to manage a back office team.
00:14:37.320Now you go back to being on your own, or maybe it's you and like five other guys and you have essentially a bunch of algorithms that do everything else.
00:14:45.160And so, and yet you can compete at the same level as those, those big private equity companies would offer.
00:14:52.300So I think there's a world, and what does that mean?
00:14:54.060It means that instead of, let's say you getting paid a wage, it's like half of what you're billing or less.
00:15:00.400Maybe that software stack costs you a little bit, but you're keeping 80% of what you're billing because you are doing the fundamental, you're doing the primary function of what an HVAC shop actually does.
00:15:11.280So in that scenario, you'll see sort of the relative income of, of a guy like that, a skilled, a skilled worker who's doing something that can't be replaced, increase.
00:15:22.600And you'll see the sort of relative income of people who are doing this back office administrative functions decline.
00:15:28.400But overall, I don't think that's a drop in, a drop in income.
00:15:32.740I think it's just in many ways, a sort of redistribution of it largely to the guy who's actually doing the work that matters.
00:15:37.780Hmm. But wouldn't this all be predicated on a retraction in the workforce, broadly speaking?
00:15:44.320I mean, and that's, well, we already, we already have a birthright.
00:15:48.580The workforce is already retracting, absent mass immigration, filling the gaps.
00:15:53.820And I would say, you know, another example is that that can be a reorganization, right?
00:15:57.540Like the person who, I mean, I think just in the example I gave as one example, gender dynamics, right?
00:16:03.640The back office people would be way more likely to be women. The front office, the guys who are doing the physical world work, way more likely to be men.
00:16:10.300You're much more likely to now see an arrangement where I think the women are more likely to get married, actually.
00:16:16.140When relative incomes change, they're more likely to see the guys more attractive, more likely to get married, more likely to stay home.
00:16:21.360They're doing work there. They're raising kids.
00:16:23.000That's another form of work that isn't measured in jobs, but you could have a similar household income and now it's suitable to that arrangement.
00:16:32.960So, I think there's all sorts of different configurations that aren't sort of straight reflections of job numbers that fill the gaps with work that needs to happen.
00:16:43.620Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that seems to, that needs to, I feel like personally that should be prioritized by movers and shakers because you're seeing a lot of misery right now with young people.
00:16:52.560And I think a big contributor to that is the lack of general social formation.
00:16:58.220Like people just aren't socializing properly anymore and they're getting stunted very early.
00:17:02.860I mean, COVID probably had a role to play, but I'm even seeing it now with these post-COVID generations.
00:17:06.940They're not hitting those milestones of not just marriage, but like meeting friends and these sorts of things.
00:17:13.000And obviously there's a lot of fear that AI could make that worse.
00:17:16.780I think people are rightfully a bit suspicious after the whole dating app.
00:17:21.860You know, revolution is kind of nuked dating in a lot of ways, but like what you're saying is the way the AIs could reconfigure the workforce.
00:17:31.260I mean, this could actually be a boom, a boom for marriage formation and social formation.
00:17:37.940I mean, I'll sort of delve into the dynamic a little bit more.
00:17:41.140And I think this ties into sort of the dating market dynamics.
00:17:46.180I think you'll see this decline in sort of white-collar, you'll see this decline in the sort of white-collar administrative jobs.
00:17:53.040Right now, if you have a, let's say you have a woman who is a college graduate who's an $80,000 a year sort of HR job, very common scenario.
00:18:05.740And you have a man who's $80,000 a year in some sort of skilled trade like that.
00:18:10.780Typically, there's stats that show that people don't want to sort of date down when it comes to education.
00:18:17.540So even though they're making the same amount of money, she is probably not going to, she's less likely to date him because in a sense he's seen a sort of a lower socioeconomic status, which is paying for a lot of money, paying for a lot of debt and everything.
00:18:29.480But that's the way the current, that's a very pernicious dynamic where a sort of a larger share of women are actually in that college-educated category.
00:18:41.120It's pernicious when it comes to the likelihood of actually dating and marriage.
00:18:44.620Well, in the scenario I described, that HR job just goes away.
00:18:48.580And the number of those people drops significantly.
00:18:51.280A lot of those people aren't going to see a return on their college degree.
00:18:53.980They're probably not going to go to, I mean, these are sort of second and third year college degrees.
00:18:57.360They're not the ones that are sort of, they're not the ones that are necessarily going to weather the AI storm.
00:19:03.040They're the sort that would be replaced by AI.
00:19:05.080Meanwhile, that guy doing the trade could see his income rise significantly.
00:19:09.800You now see a very, very different dynamic where suddenly the guy seems much more attractive.
00:19:17.140He has higher relative status in society.
00:19:20.200She doesn't have the job that would sort of lead her to not want to date him.
00:19:25.060And so you could easily see a whole bunch of people who, for all intents and purposes, are peers.
00:19:30.780Historically would have been seen as peers from a sort of dating market value.
00:19:35.680But for, this is why I talk about anomalies, right?
00:19:38.420For a few decades had this anomaly that sort of broke that perception of peer status, cut into marriage.
00:19:47.140That's an anomaly that could very quickly disappear, given AI, and could actually restore family formation.
00:19:54.740So I'll actually jump off on sort of one other thing you mentioned, though, that I think is interesting.
00:20:00.040You talk about people not even going out.
00:20:02.680Yes, there's going to be people who are sort of totally addicted to AI.
00:20:05.600There will be essentially algorithmic drugs that are sort of like as addictive as heroin or whatever.
00:20:13.140But by and large, I think there's also a scenario where AI kills the internet.
00:20:16.800You think of this with spam already, right?
00:20:18.960You have this guy who sends 40,000 spam emails a day looking to offshore workers or whatever.
00:20:25.540Very quickly, people just ignore literally everything they see from someone where there's no skin in the game.
00:20:31.280The internet as it's designed today is full of sources where there's no skin in the game, which means that bots and spam can actually proliferate.
00:20:39.500And so I think that people actually start to devalue the digital more and more.
00:20:46.780They really look more and more for something that has some level of signal, some level of skin in the game, signaling that this is worth their time.
00:20:57.160First and foremost, that means physical proximity.
00:21:00.120If I'm spending 30 minutes with you in person, I know you're a real person.
00:21:07.520You're not a deepfake that's replicated a thousand times trying to sell me something.
00:21:11.760It's just a meaningful, but that signal of meaning, which certainly makes sense in a commercial sense like I described, will also just, I think it'll permeate how we see the world,
00:21:23.920meaning that people will actually value physical proximity, even in friendships more.
00:21:29.760For a while, I think they were actually happy to move a lot of their friendships online.
00:21:33.840I think people are going to recognize that that actually feels faker, in a sense.
00:21:38.720Even when it might be real, we're just going to value the in-person.
00:21:43.460We're going to value the proximity more.
00:21:44.420It's why we at New Founding are actually focused on building a physical world community in Tennessee and Kentucky.
00:21:50.620Our bet is that people will actually put a lot of effort into moving to a place where there can be a high-trust community,
00:22:00.840where their local community is something that they value, they can actually put down roots in,
00:22:05.900in a world where most things feel like there's no rootedness.
00:22:08.800So I see a possibility that these trends actually sort of erase some of the maybe over-moves toward the virtual of the last decade
00:22:24.000and move us back toward something that, again, is closer to historical norms,
00:22:27.600where that sort of in-person proximity actually signals something meaningful that cannot be baked
00:22:32.680and cannot be replaced by digital interactions.
00:22:36.840Yeah. Well, I mean, as far as the dating goes, if this means never having to see another one of those day-in-the-life TikToks,
00:22:43.600then, like, spring it on. Please. Can't do it anymore.
00:22:46.980But with that, I mean, you're tapped in.
00:22:50.000What parts of this new era that we're entering, what parts are you fearful of?
00:22:55.560What parts do you think we need to keep an eye on and have conversations around?
00:22:58.960So I, as I said, each, I think each technology will often disrupt the anomalies of the last era brings its own.
00:23:06.680I would say transhumanism, obviously a threat and a new threat.
00:23:14.760And transhumanism, now it's new and old in a way, right?
00:23:17.260I sort of tie transhumanism back to the Tower of Babel and this idea of ultimately using technology to sort of pursue.
00:23:34.760But I think that the other one is actually a different form of transhumanism.
00:23:40.820And it relates to, it's sort of a continuation of the woke trend.
00:23:45.160You think of the sort of woke trend of everything about it is teaching you to be suspicious of your own judgments.
00:23:51.560You are not worthy. You're not worthy.
00:23:53.780You're not worthy to rule an institution.
00:23:56.200Your judgments are sort of, your judgments are corrupted to the point that even if you're trying to be fair, you have so many sort of systemic biases.
00:24:06.200It's all about essentially deprecating the human, particularly deprecating you as a white male, as someone who has, who can act as a human agent in a meaningful way.
00:24:19.040And what is the alternative? Ultimately, the best alternative to that is to be presented as turning yourself, turning the decision over to AI.
00:24:26.540What is fairer than just abdicating and giving the decision to a totally neutral algorithm?
00:24:32.400And so I think that the biggest call of AI will be to essentially abdicate decision making in favor of AI.
00:24:40.620I think the optimistic view of technology is technology gives us a lot of leverage.
00:25:58.560And there's going to be a pull for more and more important decisions to be turned over to similar algorithms that are optimized or fair or are really just available, really just sort of a temptation to laziness.
00:26:22.800It's not that I believe that superhuman AI is going – we're not going to have this sort of AGI that actually becomes superhuman and is able to exercise agency in a way that – both intelligence and agency in a way that exceeds you.
00:26:40.360Predictive algorithms don't have agency.
00:26:41.980But if you delegate your agency to the algorithm and sort of walk away from that, sure, it'll absolutely be able to start filling in the gaps there.
00:26:53.540It may do so in a way that allows – that we sort of quickly lose control of many things that – I would think of it at a high level as sort of self-government.
00:27:03.560Self-government requires a high level of agency.
00:27:47.900And that kind of fits on what you mentioned earlier with the Lindy effect is kind of this is the same idea that he kind of coined as the refinement culture, the idea of refinement culture.
00:27:54.600And that's something that I feel like AI is going to strap a booster rocket to and completely homogenize any consumer trend whatsoever because it's going to be reduced down to an algorithm, like you said.
00:28:08.800I mean, that's kind of my biggest fear is that we're all just going to be reduced to the same.
00:28:14.080We're already heading that way in a lot of ways.
00:28:30.960Well, I think it can decentralize, right?
00:28:32.700I think that it certainly is capable of decentralizing power.
00:28:36.400I actually think that in many ways, the sort of greatest alpha for AI will go to users.
00:28:41.840So as I said, it's a lever for executive agency.
00:28:45.220In theory, it's a lever for that executive agency.
00:28:47.700It means that if you are, let's say you're the owner of a restaurant, designing that restaurant, you now have more and more power to compete with the back office of Cracker Barrel.
00:28:58.540So maybe you don't need to be a national chain like Cracker Barrel.
00:29:00.920So you have fewer disadvantages as a solo shop, which means that you could use it and you're the executive.
00:29:08.040You could prompt it in a way to actually give you very powerful design services to design something.
00:29:20.740But it's more like you have your creative vision.
00:29:23.180It can fill in necessary best practices for a restaurant, but it can also fill in your take.
00:29:29.440It can help you just get the agency to fill in your tastes and apply them in all sorts of different ways.
00:29:34.500It also, I think, could mean that people, you can see a world where people crave the authenticity that comes from a sort of one of a kind thing.
00:29:44.900Again, that's a symbol of sort of skin in the game.
00:29:47.720That's a symbol of something different from the sort of endless spam that they receive.
00:29:52.060And even like totally personalized, right?
00:29:54.780Personalized spam, spam that just looks like it's perfectly personalized to you, actually has no information value because it's just based on your data profile.
00:30:02.500Something that is the creative expression of what a particular person, a particular entrepreneur or individual created is something that's actually going to stand out to you as something that clearly is different from everything you receive in your inbox at sort of zero value.
00:30:18.720So I think largely it comes down to the choice, right?
00:30:22.100If you have people who, as a result of this, increasingly crave and pay for the individualized, for the distinct, for the custom, for the craft, you'll see that.
00:30:33.780And the tools will be there for individuals and entrepreneurs to actually build things that are distinct and that are particular expressions of their human creative agency.
00:30:44.740On the other hand, you also have TikTok-style algorithms that will be constantly offering an alternative.
00:30:52.820You know, plenty of people who are content to sort of retreat into those and just mindlessly scroll and essentially surrender their humanity to those algorithms.
00:31:00.940So two very different forks we could go.
00:32:02.920He is an incredibly high IQ, high IQ patriot.
00:32:07.000There's, yeah, there's so much discourse around the AI stuff.
00:32:13.100It's really interesting to hear an alternate perspective.
00:32:15.560And I'm actually kind of relieved to hear that there is a, if we handle it correctly, we could return to these older civilizational norms, especially when it comes to dating.
00:32:25.840It actually is kind of interesting that the discussion I was leading into, I didn't even know, I didn't even for me to line up perfectly like that, just kind of talking about the declining, the lack of us achieving these milestones as young people, that actually we could, there could be a way out and it could be AI.