In this episode, the boys talk about how the internet has changed the way we consume news and how it affects us and how we live in a world where we have no idea what we should be doing with our time. They also talk about what it's like to be a conservative news anchor on Fox News and how to deal with the constant stream of conservative talking points that's being pushed by the right and the left. Also, they talk about the fact that we're living in a bipolar world and how the outrage machine is ruining our ability to make sense of the world and why we shouldn't care about what's going on in the world because it's not really about us anymore. And, of course, there's a whole lot more. Enjoy the episode and tweet us what you thought of it! Timestamps: 4:00 - What's the worst thing about the internet? 6:30 - How do you deal with it? 7:00 8:15 - What are we supposed to do with all the new technology? 9:20 - How can we stop caring about what s going on? 11:15 12:30 What s going to happen to the world? 13:00- What s the point of the internet now? 14:40 - Is there any such thing as an outrage machine? 15:30- What do we need to do? 16:40- How do we know what we can we can control? 17:20- Why we should we be prepared for the internet in the 21st century? 18:20 19: What s our role in the algorithm? 21:15- Is there a better way to make the internet going to make us better? 22:00 | What s a good thing? 23:30 | Should we be worried about the future of the Internet? 25:00 + 22:40 26:10 27:10 - How to be aware of what s the real problem? 26 - What do you need to be doing in the future? 29:10 | What are you going to do in the next 5 years? 30:40 | How do I know what s our brains are going to be? 35:00 // 27:00 Is there something we should do in 2020? 32:00 Are we going to have a better version of our brain?
00:01:31.000Part of what's happened is we used to have news and you could make a good living in news and you know journalists were really sort of the top of the social hierarchy in some way shape or form because they were this check and balance and then somewhere along the way this business model focused people on clicks and nobody told the rest of the world that the underlying incentives were going to change and so that's where you find yourself where There's very little news
00:02:50.000Literally everything that freaks you out is what you'll be shown because that shows that you're engaging and That's how it's set up for it, which is just so contrary to the rest of history I mean it was always it bleeds it leads in the news because they wanted people they wanted to win ratings news But they only had so much control and it was only on for an hour exactly and now it's just this 24 7 anxiety fest and It's omnipresent,
00:03:15.000and it's basically made to convince you that you need more of that thing.
00:03:25.000The first few shots of it, the first few bites of it, taste amazing.
00:03:30.000But, you know, if you eat the full toffee cake every day for the next 365 days and then for the next year, I mean, you're going to get diabetes and heart disease.
00:03:41.000So the version of that is like your brain just gets totally fried.
00:03:45.000And then the bigger problem is when you're presented with, maybe it's not even the truth, but an opinion that you should consider.
00:04:43.000And you'll get, like, a million views.
00:04:45.000And then it'll first start with, like, you know, folks that are, like, trying to gently nudge this person.
00:04:50.000Actually, you know, I want you to reconsider 2 plus 2 actually equals 4. You know?
00:04:54.000And then it builds and it builds and it builds.
00:04:57.000And so there's this weird version of how people react to information, and it tends to be kid gloves and then people just lose their mind at some point.
00:05:08.000And then over here, I think on X, what you find is there's a lot more structural data, but then it can easily get lost in the noise because there's just a few things that just constantly consume what the algorithms want to amplify and what is important in the moment.
00:05:23.000And I think that finding a way to like probably blend the two is probably what is the best in the sense that there's probably some stuff over here that doesn't make it over here.
00:05:33.000And there's probably a lot of stuff over here that doesn't make it over here.
00:05:37.000A little bit of that diet for everybody probably goes a long way.
00:05:40.000Is there heavy content moderation on threads?
00:06:15.000If math is racist, we have a real problem.
00:06:19.000Because that means everything's racist, because everything's math.
00:06:22.000You know, we had this thing in, I don't know if you saw this, in the Bay Area in COVID, the city of San Francisco, you know, brought together their board of education or whatever, and they eliminated a bunch of AP classes, including like a bunch of AP math classes.
00:06:39.000And part of it was because of this reason, because they felt it was exclusionary.
00:06:43.000And I think what it misses is that There's all this other stuff you could do to kind of like even the starting line for folks.
00:06:51.000But if you rip out things like AP Math, like take a step back, like in 8 billion people in the world, what are the odds that there's only literally one Steve Jobs or literally only one Elon Musk,
00:07:10.000meaning capable of that kind of execution?
00:07:17.000And so part of our social responsibility as adults is how do you make it so that that second Steve Jobs can find a path to do stuff?
00:07:30.000And I'm not saying AP math is the answer, but I'm saying there are people that I remember when I was growing up, I wasn't particularly good at anything in school.
00:07:41.000But there were a few subjects which I was just like, wow.
00:07:44.000The little time I spent in school, I felt a little safe.
00:08:06.000So I understand what the intent is, but then the byproduct is there's a small group of folks that get shut out, and then that person that could be that Steve Jobs-like person, that Elon Musk-like person, is held a little bit back.
00:08:22.000And I think that that hurts all of us.
00:08:24.000So you got to find a way where we're doing just a little bit better.
00:08:29.000This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog.
00:08:34.000Just having Marshall around can make my day 10 times better.
00:08:38.000I'm sure you love your dog just as much, and you want to do your best to help them live longer, healthier, happier lives.
00:08:45.000And a healthy life for your dog starts with healthy food, just like it does for us.
00:08:50.000There's a reason having a balanced diet is so important.
00:08:53.000So how do you know if your dog's food is as healthy and as safe as it can be?
00:08:59.000Farmer's Dog gives you that peace of mind by making fresh, real food developed by board-certified nutritionists to provide all the nutrients your dog needs.
00:09:08.000And their food is human-grade, which means it's made to the same quality and safety standards as human food.
00:09:16.000Very few pet foods are made to this strict standard.
00:09:19.000And let's be clear, human-grade food doesn't mean the food is fancy.
00:09:26.000Real food from people who care about what goes into your dog's body.
00:09:31.000The farmer's dog makes it easy to help your dog live a long, healthy life by sending you fresh food that's pre-portioned just for your dog's needs.
00:10:37.000There's some where there's this hot controversy about eliminating the concept of gifted classes.
00:10:43.000But the reality is there's some people that are going to find regular classes, particularly mathematics and some other things, they're going to find them a little too easy.
00:10:54.000They're more advanced students and those students should have some sort of an option to excel and it should be inspiring Maybe intimidating, but also inspiring to everybody else.
00:11:03.000I mean, that's part of the reason why kids go to school together.
00:11:14.000That's how human beings, in cooperation, that's how they grow together.
00:11:20.000And I think that it used to be the case that if you went to in high school, you would be really cool with people that were going to like specific high schools to get really good at something.
00:11:39.000It's like, you know, if you knew a kid that was going to one of those schools, what you'd say is, wow, you are incredibly talented in this one specific thing.
00:11:47.000Go push the boundary of that and see what happens.
00:11:51.000I think we owe it to ourselves to say that.
00:11:55.000There's 330 million Americans in the United States.
00:12:00.000Don't you think that if we created a bunch of different ways for people to figure out what they're super good at, things are better, not worse?
00:12:10.000Do you think things take a huge step back?
00:12:15.000You have more Joe Rogans, you have more Kevin Harts, you have more great actors, you have more great directors, but you also have more engineers.
00:12:23.000You have more scientists, you have more doctors, and you created a way for them to just go deep in something where their curiosity took them.
00:12:38.000It's just a matter of resources and then also completely revamping how you teach kids.
00:12:44.000This is my gripe with this whole ADHD thing.
00:12:49.000You know, I've talked to many people who have varying opinions on whether or not that's an actual condition or whether or not there's a lot of people that have a lot of energy and you're sitting in a class that's very boring and they don't want to pay attention to it.
00:13:02.000So instead, you drug them and you give them medication that is essentially speed and lets them hyper-focus on things and now all of a sudden, little Timmy's locked on.
00:13:12.000You know, it was really just the medication that he needed.
00:13:15.000And I think for a lot of those kids, if they found something that was really interesting to them, you know, maybe they're really bored with this, but they're really excited by biology.
00:13:25.000Maybe there's something that, like, resonates with their particular personality and what excites them, and, you know, they could find a pathway.
00:13:33.000And instead, we have this very rigid system that wants to get children accustomed to the idea of sitting still For an hour at a time, over and over and over again throughout the day, being subjected to people who aren't necessarily that motivated or getting paid that well.
00:13:51.000Well, we're going to probably talk about AI today, but let's just touch on this just in this one second.
00:13:58.000We are going to create computers that are able to do a lot of the rote thinking for us.
00:14:09.000What that means is, I think, The way that humans differentiate ourselves is that we're going to have to have judgment and taste.
00:14:17.000Those are very defining psychological characteristics, in my opinion.
00:14:22.000But what that means is if you go back to how school is taught, what you said Is very limiting for what the world is going to look like in 30 years.
00:14:32.000You know, in 30 years where you have a PhD assistant that's in your pocket that can literally do all of the memorization, spell checking, grammar, all of the fact recall for you.
00:14:45.000Teaching that today is probably not going to be as important as interpreting it.
00:14:51.000Like, how do you teach kids to learn to think, not to memorize and regurgitate?
00:14:56.000So we have to flip, I think, this education system.
00:14:59.000We have to try to figure out a different way to solve this problem because, like, you can't set children in this generation up, our kids, To go and have to compete with a computer.
00:15:26.000In a lot of cases, can't express judgment.
00:15:30.000It'll learn, but today it's not going to be able to, the same way that humans can.
00:15:35.000It's going to have different taste, right?
00:15:37.000So the way that we interpret things, the same way that you motivate people, like all the psychology, all these things that are sort of like the softer skills that allowed humans to cooperate and like work together, that stuff becomes more important when you have a fleet of robots.
00:15:52.000And so if you go all the way back to school, Today, the school system is unfortunately in a kind of a pretty tough loop.
00:16:05.000Like, look, teachers, I think, are going to become the top three or four important people in society.
00:16:15.000And the reason is because they are going to be tasked with teaching your kids and my kids how to think, not to memorize.
00:16:22.000Don't tell me what happened in the War of 1812. You can just use a search engine or use a chat GPT and find out the answer.
00:16:57.000One of the kids was diagnosed with it.
00:17:01.000And unfortunately, what happens is the system a little bit closes in on you.
00:17:04.000So on the one side, they give you a lot of benefits, I guess.
00:17:08.000I put it in quotes because you get these emails that say if they want extra time, if they want this, if they want, you know, they'll give you a computer, for example, to take notes so that you don't handwrite.
00:17:20.000So those feel like aids to help you, right?
00:17:24.000But then on the other side, you know, one person was very adamant, like, hey, you want to medicate?
00:17:31.000And my ex-wife and I were just like, under no circumstances are we medicating our child.
00:17:37.000That was a personal decision that we made with the information that we had knowing that specific kid.
00:17:42.000All kids are different, so I don't want to generalize.
00:17:45.000And then the crazy thing, Joe, what we did was we took the iPad out of the kid's hand.
00:17:50.000And we said, you know, we had these very strict device rules.
00:17:55.000And then COVID turned everything upside down.
00:18:59.000You know, talk to your friends, you know.
00:19:01.000And then it started again, and then again, now we just have to reset.
00:19:04.000So, at least in our example, what we have found, and it may not apply to everybody, but for us, him not being bathed in this thing had a huge effect.
00:19:19.000Playing basketball outside, roughhousing with his brothers, having to talk to his friends, having to talk to us, watching movies.
00:19:29.000You know, or we would just sit around because, by the way, what I noticed was like my kids had a hard time watching movies or listening to songs on Spotify for the full duration.
00:19:43.000They'd get to the hook and they'd be like, Ford.
00:20:34.000If you take your devices away from a kid, the kid will feel isolated from their other students.
00:20:41.000The critical mass—I don't know if this is true or not, but it's what I was told, so I'll deal with it—was that if you get a third of the parents, so like in a class of 20, if you get a third of the parents to agree as well, no devices, the kid feels zero social isolation.
00:21:16.000Which is like the most elite, if you will, private school in the UK. It's kind of where like all the prime ministers of the United Kingdom have matriculated through Eton College.
00:21:28.000It's like high school, fancy high school.
00:21:31.000They sent a memo to the parents for the incoming class.
00:21:36.000And the headmaster said, when you get on campus with your child, we're going to give you like what is basically a Nokia flip phone.
00:21:45.000You are going to take the SIM card out of this kid's iPhone or Android.
00:21:49.000You're going to stick it in this thing.
00:21:51.000And this is how they're going to communicate with you and communicate amongst each other while they're on campus.
00:22:03.000I don't know what the impact is, but that takes a lot of courage and I thought that's amazing.
00:22:11.000Well, it's great because then if they're communicating, they're only communicating.
00:22:15.000They're not sharing things or Snapchatting each other back and forth and the addictive qualities.
00:22:22.000of these phones, which is, if you think about the course of human evolution and you think of how we adapted to agriculture and civilization and we essentially became softer and less muscular and less aggressive, that took a long time.
00:22:44.000And one of the bizarre things is it creates a disconnection.
00:22:50.000Even though you're being connected to people consistently and constantly through social media, there's a disconnection between human beings and normal behavior and learning through interaction with each other, social cues,
00:23:05.000all the different things that we rely on to learn how to be a friend and to learn how to be better at talking to each other.
00:23:13.000I have a rule with my oldest who's 15. He'll call me.
00:23:54.000And then finally I said, I just want you to have these building blocks.
00:24:00.000They may sound really stupid to you right now, but looking people in the eye, being able to have a normal conversation, and be patient in that conversation.
00:24:12.000It's going to be really valuable for you.
00:24:15.000People will really be connected to you.
00:24:17.000You may not feel that and you may think this is like lame and stupid what I'm telling you, but I was like, just try to just try to do it.
00:24:26.000And then what's so funny is like, I would tell this story about like, you know, our kids go to like, you know, very well meaning private school, right?
00:24:36.000And I almost think like sometimes like, again, we're not teaching necessarily kids to think for themselves.
00:24:43.000We're asking them to memorize a bunch of things.
00:24:46.000And one of the things that I worry that we've taught our kids to memorize are like the fake greetings and salutations.
00:24:53.000So on the one end, you have what's really visceral, which is, oh.
00:25:33.000But what concerns me is as this tech gets more and more invasive in terms of how human beings, particularly children, interface with it, and as it gets – I mean, really, we would just be guessing as to what comes out of AI and to what kind of world we're even looking at in 20 years.
00:25:51.000It seems like it's having a profound effect on the behavior of human beings, particularly young human beings and their developmental.
00:27:09.000Like you took this big computer, and we effectively shrunk it to this little computer, made it half to a third of the cost, and lo and behold, supply-demand, just the number of computers, tripled and quadrupled and quintupled, and so many more people were able to be a part of that economic cycle.
00:27:31.000And the little dip is when I think we lose a little bit of the ambition of that first moment and we get caught up in the economics of the current moment.
00:27:41.000And what I mean by that is, you know, the last five or ten years, I think why you feel this viscerally is...
00:27:48.000We haven't had a big leap forward from the iPhone of really 2014-15.
00:27:54.000And I'm not picking on the iPhone, I'm just like a mobile device.
00:27:57.000So what have you had over the last 10 years?
00:27:59.000You've had an enormous amount of money get created by an enormous number of apps.
00:28:07.000And the problem is that they are in a cul-de-sac.
00:28:09.000And so they'll just iterate in this one way that they understand, because the money is really good, quite honestly.
00:28:16.000And the incentives of the capital markets will tell you to just keep doing that.
00:28:22.000But then I think what happens is something shocks us out of it and then we get the second wave.
00:28:27.000So if you go all the way back to look at the PC, the first moment of the PC in the 70s and the early 80s was incredible.
00:28:36.000You had these people that were able to take it and do all kinds of really interesting things.
00:28:43.000Then you had sort of like the 90s and the early 2000s, and what was it?
00:28:48.000It was duopolistic at best, Microsoft and Intel.
00:28:53.000And what they were able to do was extract a huge tax by putting all of these things on folks' desks, and it was still mostly positive.
00:29:01.000But it was somewhat limited because most of the spoils went to these two companies and all the other companies basically got a little bit run over.
00:29:10.000And then it took the DOJ to step in in 2000 and try to course correct that on behalf of everybody basically.
00:29:18.000And then what happened was the internet just exploded.
00:29:21.000And the internet blew the doors wide open.
00:29:24.000And all of a sudden, if you had a PC, you didn't have these gatekeepers.
00:29:28.000It actually didn't even matter whether you were running on Intel anymore.
00:29:52.000I think today it's like we've invented something really powerful.
00:29:57.000We've had 10 or 15 years that were largely economic.
00:30:02.000And again, I think, you know, this is like the problem.
00:30:04.000I'm going to sound like every other, you know, nerd from Central Casting from Silicon Valley telling you this, but I do think that there's a version of this AI thing which blows the doors wide open again.
00:30:17.000And I think we owe it to ourselves to figure out how to make that more likely than not likely.
00:30:22.000Well, it seems it's inevitable, right?
00:30:24.000AI's emergence and where it goes from here on is inevitable.
00:30:35.000There is a world I could see where AI changes everything.
00:30:40.000And one of the things that makes me most hopeful is a much better form of translation so that we'll be able to understand each other better.
00:30:49.000It's a giant part of the problem in the world.
00:31:26.000Yeah, but like when you're here, it's very hard to feel empathy for this person because it's this person that you're focused on because you're trying to catch it.
00:32:12.000Okay, so most likely today, do you know if you know somebody that's had breast cancer?
00:32:18.000If they go into a hospital, a random hospital in America, and the doctor says, we need to do a lumpectomy, meaning we need to take some mass out of your breast to take the cancer out.
00:32:31.000What do you think the error rate today is across all hospitals in America?
00:32:38.000And in regional hospitals, so places that are poor, right, or places that are in far-flung parts of the United States, it can be upwards of 40%.
00:32:51.000The problem is that you're forcing him or her to look with their eyes into tissue and And try to figure out, well, where is the border where the cancer stops?
00:33:05.000So for every 10 surgeries, what that means are a week later.
00:33:49.000That's not necessarily a problem that can't not be solved literally today.
00:33:55.000We have models, we have tissue samples of women of all ages, of all races, right?
00:34:04.000So you have all of the different boundary conditions you'd need to basically get to a 0% error rate.
00:34:11.000And what's amazing is that is now working its way through the FDA. So call it within the next two years, there'll be an AI assistant that sits inside of an operating room.
00:34:22.000The surgeon will take out what they think is appropriate, they'll put it into this machine, and it'll literally, I'm going to simplify, but it'll flash red or green.
00:35:06.000Like, I mean, that's not what the most advanced nation in the world should be doing.
00:35:10.000Okay, so if you do it for breast cancer, the reason why breast cancer is where folks are focusing is because it gets so much attention, and it's like prime time.
00:35:30.000If you look at any kind of tumor, So if you're at the stage where you're like, we need to get this thing, this foreign growing thing out of our body, we should all have the ability to just do that with zero percent error,
00:35:46.000and it will be possible in the next couple of years because of AI. Okay, so that's kind of like a, that's cool and it's coming.
00:35:54.000I think between years two and years five, You're going to see this crazy explosion in materials.
00:36:03.000And this is going to sound maybe dumb, but I think it's one of the coolest things.
00:36:08.000If you look at the periodic table of elements, what's amazing is we keep adding.
00:36:18.000We actually just theoretically forecasted there's going to be 119, so we created a little box.
00:36:24.000It's theoretical, but it's going to show up.
00:36:27.000And they forecasted that there's going to be 142. Okay?
00:36:32.000So the periodic table of elements, quote-unquote, grows.
00:36:35.000But when you look at the lived world today...
00:36:39.000We live in this very narrow expression of all of those things.
00:36:43.000We use the same few materials over and over and over again.
00:36:46.000But if you had to solve a really complicated problem, don't you think the answer could theoretically be in this?
00:36:54.000Meaning, if you took, I'm going to make it up, Selenium and then doped it with titanium, 1%, but if you doped it with boron, 14%, all of these things are possible.
00:37:06.000It's like stronger than the strongest thing in the world, and wow, and it's lighter than anything.
00:37:11.000So now you can make rockets with it and send it all the way up with less energy.
00:37:19.000Because the amount of energy and the amount of computers we need to solve those problems, which are super complicated, haven't been available to us.
00:37:30.000I think that is this next phase of AI. So what you said, which is we're going to have these PhD level robots and agents.
00:37:37.000In the next two to five years, we're going to come up with all kinds of materials.
00:37:41.000You know, you'll have a frying pan that's like nonstick, but doesn't have to heat up like all, you know, whatever you want from like the most benign to the most incredible stuff.
00:37:49.000We'll just re-engineer what's on earth.
00:38:27.000Well, if you want to protect yourself from the crazy unpredictability of climate, in the areas where it's susceptible to that, maybe you can construct these things much cheaper.
00:38:41.000Imagine in San Francisco, you could build buildings that solved the housing crisis but do it in a way that was cheaper because the materials are totally different and you could just prove that these things are bulletproof.
00:38:52.000So instead of spending a billion dollars to build a building because you got to go hundreds of feet into the earth, you just go 50 feet and it just figures it out.
00:39:04.000So that's possible and I think there will be people that use these AI models to go and solve those things.
00:39:11.000And then after that, I think you get into the world of it's not just robots that are in a computer, but it's like a physical robot.
00:39:20.000And those physical robots are going to do things that today will make so much sense in hindsight.
00:39:27.000So an example, I was thinking about this this weekend.
00:39:30.000Imagine if you had a bunch of optimists, like Tesla's robot, and they were the beat cops.
00:39:43.000Well, first, you don't put humans in the way.
00:39:48.000I suspect then the reaction of those robots could be markedly different.
00:39:52.000Now, those robots would be controlled remotely, right?
00:39:55.000So the people that are remote now can be a very different archetype, right?
00:40:00.000Instead of the physical requirements of policing, you now add this other layer, which is the psychological elements and the judgment.
00:40:08.000So my point is that if you had robots that were able to do the dangerous work for humans, I think it allows humans to do, again, judgment, you know, those areas of judgment which are very gray and fuzzy.
00:40:23.000It'll take a long time for computers to be able to replace us to do that.
00:41:02.000You can leave your mind to focus on other things.
00:41:08.000The creativity to write your next set, to think about the next interview, to think about your business, because you're occupying less time with the perfunctory stuff.
00:41:20.000I think these models are doing that, and they're going to get complemented with physical models, meaning physical robots.
00:41:28.000And they're going to do a lot of work for us that we have not done, or today that we do very precariously.
00:41:37.000You know, like, should a robot go in and save you from a fire?
00:41:40.000I think it can probably do a pretty good job.
00:42:38.000They like stuff where it's very human and very real.
00:42:42.000But there's a lot of people that just want a job.
00:42:46.000And these people maybe just aren't inclined towards creativity and maybe they're very simple people who just want a job and they just want to work.
00:42:57.000Those are the people that I worry about.
00:43:00.000And I think that, like, I didn't live in the agrarian economy nor in the Industrial Revolution, so I don't know how we solved this problem.
00:43:09.000But we have seen that problem two times.
00:44:15.000So what I can tell you is that there are a lot of people who are trying their best and for whatever set of boundary conditions can't figure it out.
00:44:47.000Because your parents worked their way out of it.
00:44:49.000My parents worked their way out of it.
00:44:51.000But some people are just content to just get a check.
00:44:56.000And this is the issue I think that a lot of people have is that people will become entitled and just want to collect a check.
00:45:03.000And if it's a substantial portion of our country, like if universal basic income, if AI eliminates, let's just say a crazy number, like 70% of the manual labor jobs, truck drivers, construction workers, all that stuff gets eliminated.
00:45:18.000That's a lot of people without a purpose.
00:45:21.000And one of the things that a good day's work and earning your pay It makes people feel self-sufficient.
00:45:31.000They could look at the thing that they did, maybe build a building or something like that, and drive their kids by, hey, we built that building right there.
00:45:46.000That's the worst case scenario, is that people just get locked into this world of computers and online and And just receive checks and have the bare necessities to survive and are content with that and then don't contribute at all.
00:46:03.000The jobs that, like, let's put it this way.
00:46:06.000If we were sitting here in 1924, whatever, 100 years ago, you know, right in the midst of the turn of the Industrial Revolution, we would have seen a lot of folks that worked on farms And we would have wondered,
00:46:25.000well, where are those jobs going to come from?
00:46:29.000And I think that now when you look back, it was like, not obvious, but you could see where the new job classes came from.
00:46:40.000It's like all of these industries that were possible because we built a factory.
00:46:44.000And a factory turned out to be a substrate.
00:46:47.000And then you built all these different kinds of businesses which created different kinds of jobs on top of it.
00:46:54.000I would hope that if we do this right, this next leap is like that, where we are in a period where it's hard to know with certainty what this job class goes to over here.
00:47:08.000But I think you have a responsibility to go and figure it out, and talk it out, and play it out.
00:47:15.000Because the past would tell you that we have really good humans, when they're unimpeded, have a really good ability to invent these things.
00:47:26.000So, I don't know, maybe what it is, is by 2035, there's a billion people that have traveled to Mars.
00:47:35.000And you're building an entire planet from the ground up.
00:47:40.000There'll be all sorts of work to do there.
00:47:43.000Boy, what kind of people are going to go first there?
00:47:47.000I think that there'll be a lot of people that are frustrated with what's happening here.
00:48:02.000But to want to go to a place that doesn't even have an atmosphere, that's capable of sustaining human life, and you can only go back every couple of years, like...
00:48:16.000You're going to have a completely psychotic—it's Australia on meth.
00:48:22.000It's like the worst-case scenario of the cast-outs of society.
00:48:27.000Sorry, just like what you say is—it's so true, but if you think about what that decision looked like— 400 years ago when that first group of prisoners were put on a boat and sent to Australia.
00:49:48.000Is it silicon germanium with something else?
00:49:52.000And the problem, Joe, is to answer what you just said is a tractable problem that has been bounded by energy and computers.
00:50:02.000And we're at a point where we're almost at infinite energy, and at a point we're almost at, like, what I say is very specific, which is we're at the point where right in the distance is the marginal cost of energy is basically zero.
00:50:19.000The marginal cost, meaning to generate the next kilowatt, is going to cost, like, sub a penny.
00:50:25.000Even with today's stuff, you don't need nuclear, you don't need any of that stuff.
00:50:28.000We're just on this trend line right now.
00:50:31.000Because of AI, we're at the point where to get an answer to a question, super complicated, is going to be basically zero, the cost of that.
00:50:41.000When you put those two things together, What you just said, we will be in a position to answer.
00:52:45.000And when you look inside, we have a regulatory...
00:53:02.000We're giving you a monopoly, effectively.
00:53:04.000In this area of Austin, you can provide all the energy.
00:53:08.000Now, Texas is different, but I'm just using it as an example.
00:53:11.000But in return, I'm going to allow you to increase prices, but I'm going to demand that you improve the infrastructure.
00:53:21.000Every few years, you've got to upgrade the grid.
00:53:23.000You've got to put money into this, money into that.
00:53:26.000Over the next 10 years, we've got to put a trillion dollars, America collectively, into improving the current grid, which I think will not be enough, because it is aging, and most importantly, it's insecure.
00:53:42.000Meaning folks can penetrate that, folks can hack it, folks can do all kinds of stuff.
00:53:47.000And then it fails in critical moments.
00:53:50.000I think that in Austin you had a whole bunch of really crazy outages in the last couple of years.
00:54:01.000So I think as people decide that they want resilience, You're going to see 110 million power plants, which is every homeowner in the United States.
00:54:17.000Everybody's going to generate their own energy.
00:54:19.000Everybody's going to store their energy in a power wall.
00:54:23.000This stuff is going to become, I mean, absolutely dirt cheap.
00:54:28.000And it'll just be the way that energy is generated.
00:54:32.000So you have this, but this is not the whole solution, because you still need the big guys to show up.
00:54:39.000When you look inside of like the big guys, so like now you're talking about these 2000 utilities that need to spend trillions of dollars.
00:54:47.000They can do a lot of stuff right now to make enough energy to make things work.
00:54:53.000But when you look at nuclear, I would just say that there are two different kinds of nuclear.
00:56:07.000It's in an email that one of my folks sent me.
00:56:10.000But it's like—it's a certain— Form of reactor that uses a very rare material to create the plasmonic energy that can generate all of this stuff.
00:56:21.000And it's just very hard to find on Earth.
00:56:37.000So my point is, these next-gen reactors, I think, have some pretty profound technical problems that haven't been figured out.
00:56:44.000I applaud the people that are going after it.
00:56:49.000But I think it's important to not oversell that because it's super hard and there's still some profound technical challenges that haven't been solved yet.
00:57:00.000You know, we just got past what's called like, you know, positive net energy, meaning, you know, let's just like, you put, I'm making up a number, you know, 100 units of energy in and at least you try to get out like 100.01.
00:57:51.000With introducing this to other countries, and I believe it was India where they introduced nuclear power plants, then they realized very quickly they could figure out how to make nuclear weapons from that.
00:58:02.000Yes, when the uranium degrades, it can be used in weapons-grade uranium.
00:58:06.000And the real problem would be if that is not a small handful of countries that have nuclear weapons, but the entire world, it could get very sketchy.
00:58:17.000I think you're touching what I think objectively to me is the single biggest threat facing all of us today.
00:59:06.000It flipped the whole country upside down from an incredible place with 99% literacy to just a, you know, a struggling developing third world country.
00:59:50.000But that can't be the solution where hundreds of millions or billions of people have to deal with that risk.
00:59:56.000And I am objectively afraid that we have lost the script a little bit.
01:00:02.000I think that folks don't really understand how destructive war can be, but also that there are not enough people objectively afraid of this.
01:00:14.000And that's what sends my spidey senses up and says, hold on a second.
01:00:18.000When everybody is telling you that this is off the table and not possible, Shouldn't you just look at the world around and ask, are we sure that that's true?
01:00:30.000And I come and I think to myself, wow, we are at the biggest risk of my lifetime.
01:00:37.000And I think the only thing that is probably near this is maybe at some point in the Cold War, I don't know because I was so young, definitely Bay of Pigs.
01:00:50.000But it required JFK to draw a hard line in the sand and say, absolutely not.
01:00:58.000Will we be that fortunate this time around?
01:01:00.000Are we going to find a way to eliminate that existential risk?
01:01:04.000This is why my current vein of political philosophy is mostly that, which is the Democrats and the Republicans, there's just so much fighting over so many small stakes issues in the sense that Some of these issues matter more or less in different points,
01:01:26.000but there is one issue above all which where if you get it wrong, nothing matters, and that is nuclear war.
01:01:33.000And you have two and a half nuclear powers now that are out and about extending and projecting their power into the world—Russia, China, and Iran.
01:01:50.000That wasn't what it was like 10 years ago.
01:01:52.000That wasn't what it was like 25 years ago.
01:01:55.000It wasn't even what it was like four years ago.
01:01:58.000I just don't think enough people take a step back and say, hold on a second, if this thing escalates, all this stuff that you and I just talked about won't matter.
01:02:08.000Whether our kids are on Adderall or not or the iPad, don't give them so much Fortnite or material science or Optimus.
01:02:18.000It's all off the table because we will be destroying ourselves.
01:02:26.000We have an enormous responsibility right now for the village elders of the world to tell people, guys, we are sleepwalking into something that you can't walk back from.
01:02:38.000One of the strangest things about us is the kind of wisdom that's necessary to sort of see the future and prognosticate and see where this could go, especially based on the history of human beings and how many times things have You were talking about Sri Lanka,
01:02:56.000but there's many examples all over the world of civilizations that were thriving, that were pounded into dust.
01:03:03.000And because every day is similar for us, we have this inability to look forward and to make that leap and see the potential for disaster that all these things have.
01:03:17.000And this is what freaks me out about when people talk openly about, you know, we have to win with Russia versus Ukraine.
01:04:54.000They just couldn't afford to keep up with us.
01:04:57.000And the reason was we had these two edges.
01:05:00.000We had a technological edge and we had an economic edge.
01:05:08.000And when you put those two things together, it created a lot of abundance.
01:05:12.000Now, we can talk about how some of that is not equal, which I also agree with, but it allowed America to be sort of effectively, for a long period of time, the top dog.
01:05:26.000The honest reality is that's not where we are today.
01:05:32.000And the problem with that is that you can't look back in history and try to live your life like what it was like in the good old days.
01:05:40.000You know, we're not the high school football star anymore.
01:05:44.000So we need to live in a more modest way, in a more reliable and consistent way, with neighbors that have also for themselves done well, and just realize that they have their own incentives.
01:05:58.000And when you tell them to do something, they're not always going to listen.
01:06:02.000So if we don't understand that and find a way to de-escalate these things, what you said is going to happen.
01:06:11.000Something is going to be one step too far, a reaction, a reaction, a reaction, and then eventually somebody will overreact.
01:06:22.000And that is all just so totally avoidable.
01:06:26.000And it just frustrates me that we objectively don't understand that.
01:06:31.000We sweep it under the carpet and we talk about all the other things.
01:06:37.000And I understand that some of those things, all of those things, let's say, matter.
01:06:42.000But at some point in time, nothing matters.
01:06:46.000Because if you don't get this right, nothing matters.
01:06:50.000And I think we have to find a way of finding people that draw a bright red line and say, this is the line I will never cross under any circumstance.
01:07:00.000And I think America needs to do that first because it's what gives everybody else the ability to exit stage left and be okay with it.
01:07:07.000The other problem that America clearly has is that there's an enormous portion of what controls the government, whether you want to call it the military-industrial complex, Military contractors.
01:07:22.000There's so much money to be made in pushing that line.
01:07:25.000Pushing it to the brink of destruction but not past.
01:07:29.000Maintaining a constant state of war but not an apocalypse.
01:07:33.000And that as long as there's financial incentives to keep escalating and you're still getting money and they're still signing off on Hundreds of billions of dollars to funnel this and it's all going through these military contractors and bringing over weapons and gear and the windfall is huge.
01:07:53.000The amount of money is huge and they do not want to shut that off for the sake of humanity, especially if someone can rationalize.
01:08:00.000You get this diffusion of responsibility when there's a whole bunch of people together and they're all talking about it.
01:08:04.000Everyone's kind of on the same page and you have shareholders that you have to represent.
01:08:17.000But I think part of the most salvageable feature of the military-industrial complex is that these are for-profit, largely public companies that have shareholders.
01:08:30.000And I think that if you nudge them to making things that are equally economically valuable or more, ideally more, they probably would do that.
01:08:46.000What would be an example of that other than weapons manufacturing?
01:08:50.000Like what would be equally economically viable?
01:08:52.000So part of – when you look at the primes, the five big kind of like folks that get all of the economic activity from the Department of Defense – What they act is as an organizing principle for a bunch of subs underneath,
01:09:12.000They're like a general contractor, and then they have a bunch of subcontractors.
01:09:17.000There's a bunch of stuff that's happening in these things that you can reorient if you had an economy that could support it.
01:09:26.000So, for example, when you build a drone, okay?
01:09:31.000What you also are building, a subcomponent, a critical and very valued subcomponent, all the navigation, all the communications, all of it has to be encrypted.
01:09:43.000There is a broad set of commercial applications for that that are equal to and greater than just the profit margin of selling the drone, but they don't really explore those markets.
01:09:54.000If, for example, we are multi-planetary, I'll just go back to that example, I will bet you those same organizations will make two or three times as much money by being able to redirect that same technology into those systems that you just described.
01:10:15.000Hey, I need an entire communications infrastructure that goes from Earth to the Moon to Mars.
01:10:22.000We need internet access across all these endpoints.
01:10:24.000We need to be real-time from the get-go.
01:10:28.000There's just an enormous amount of economic value to do that.
01:10:32.000So, again, we have these very siloed parts of the economy that are limited by what we know.
01:10:39.000And what we know is part of what you just said, which is we built these things, and then some people convince others to use the things that we built.
01:10:47.000And I think instead of saying like there's like some crazy nefarious plot to always go to war, instead if we say if you make the thing and you could sell it to a different market and make more money, would these people do it or are they hell-bent on war?
01:11:01.000I think it's more that they would just do it.
01:11:03.000As long as there's not still a business for war.
01:11:07.000So then it reduces war to a very different kind of business.
01:11:13.000I think it's I think it's more kind of drone-oriented.
01:11:25.000There's no utopia where war goes away.
01:11:28.000Which is a crazy thing to say, really.
01:11:30.000Unfortunately, I think that we're always going to be fighting for some resource.
01:11:34.000So the last 30 or 40 years, all these forever wars, we were fighting over energy, effectively.
01:11:39.000This is my one bright spot that I think about with AI as well.
01:11:44.000It's like everyone's terrified of the open border situation and criminals coming across the border.
01:11:51.000Wouldn't the solution be not have a place like a desperate third world country where people are trying to escape on foot with their families?
01:12:01.000If we were living next door to another United States, and you could just travel freely back and forth between the two of them, because it really didn't matter.
01:12:46.000I think it makes that possible, and we're going to have to deal with a few very uncomfortable factors, one of them being the illegal drug trade, and another one being the consequences of prohibition, and forcing people into doing things- Prohibition of drugs?
01:13:37.000Most fentanyl overdoses is fentanyl that's cut into other drugs, particularly party drugs like molly and ecstasy, cocaine, even heroin, things along those lines where people think that they're getting a pure thing, but they're getting it from the cartel.
01:14:09.000So the problem is if you have a drug and you've cut it with a bunch of other things because you want to sell as much of it as possible, you add a bunch of things into it.
01:14:19.000And to increase the potency, they add fentanyl.
01:14:22.000And because of that, it's all done illegally, it's unregulated, so a lot of people die.
01:14:27.000And the numbers in the United States, I think there are upwards of 100,000 people.
01:14:31.000Is there something to do to motivate folks to not do the party drugs?
01:14:36.000Well, I think you're going to have to have a massive education campaign, and people are going to have to understand it the same way they understand cigarettes.
01:14:43.000Like, cigarette smoking in young people is down quite a bit from the 80s, right?
01:14:48.000And I think that's because of people understanding the consequences of it.
01:14:52.000But you're always going to have people that want to smoke cigarettes.
01:14:55.000And my belief is that they should be able to smoke cigarettes.
01:14:58.000I don't think you should do Adderall all day, but if you get a prescription, you can do it.
01:15:03.000But at least in my mind, you're getting Adderall from a pharmacy and that pharmacy is going to give you actual Adderall and not some fentanyl-laced thing that's going to kill you and you have no idea.
01:15:15.000You think you're taking the same thing you've always taken and then one day you're dead.
01:15:19.000And that's the case with a lot of people today, especially with party drugs.
01:15:43.000To relationships and families, to societies, how many alcoholics, how many drunk driving accidents, how many drunk people murdered other people.
01:15:51.000There's just horrible consequences of alcohol, but I completely support alcohol being legal.
01:16:03.000You know, like Oregon, where they legalized it, and now they unlegalize it?
01:16:07.000Well, first of all, they were already off the rails.
01:16:11.000This is not like legalizing drugs in San Francisco in the year 2000. It's a completely different scenario.
01:16:23.000So you have these people that are really...
01:16:27.000They're accustomed to tents and subsidizing drug addicts and they're accustomed to this very bizarre breakdown of civil society where you're seeing open air drug markets and everyone's fine with it and it's somehow or another Kind and compassionate to allow this to take place everywhere.
01:16:48.000And that's what you have in Portland, right?
01:16:50.000Portland is probably one of the most liberal cities that we have, one of the most leftist cities that we have.
01:16:54.000So for Oregon to do it that way, I think it's a Like an awesome libertarian notion to say, you know what?
01:17:02.000We shouldn't make any of these things a crime.
01:17:06.000These are personal choices and you can make good personal choices or bad ones and we'll have everything.
01:17:11.000But the problem is the fabric of society, the encouragement of discipline and of hard work and of accomplishment had been eroded to the point where accomplishment meant that there was something wrong with you.
01:17:25.000Like if you were a person that was eat the rich, tax the rich, if you're a person that had accomplished something great, it wasn't because of some extraordinary effort you put in, even if it was.
01:17:34.000It was you did something to fuck over other people and that's the only way you get rich in this world.
01:17:44.000So when you introduce free heroin to that, you're going to get more problems.
01:17:51.000And you're subsidizing people for living on the streets, which they do.
01:17:54.000I mean, I watched this interview where they were talking to these people in the Pacific Northwest, where they moved there specifically so they could be homeless.
01:18:01.000Because they knew that they'd get money.
01:18:03.000And there's no incentive to get out of those tents.
01:18:40.000And along the way, he started realizing that our Our understanding of these drugs and the pros and cons of them had been flavored by propaganda heavily, particularly the sweeping act of 1970 that made almost everything illegal,
01:18:56.000which was really to target civil rights groups and anti-war people.
01:19:00.000And so this was during the Nixon administration.
01:19:02.000They made a bunch of things that were psychedelics.
01:19:07.000Well, MKUltra was actually before that.
01:19:09.000It was when they were experimenting with people, particularly with LSD. So when they started doing this, they made everything illegal, and now the only way you can get any of these things is through illegal sources.
01:19:24.000So you're getting them through the cartels.
01:19:25.000So if we don't have the ability To legalize things.
01:19:31.000And the problem with legalization, there's no good answer here.
01:19:36.000So to keep things illegal, you're going to have fentanyl overdoses.
01:19:39.000I know people have lost their children.
01:19:41.000I know people have lost their brothers and sisters to this.
01:19:48.000You're also going to get heroin overdoses if it's legal.
01:19:50.000So Jesus Christ, like, and you're going to get more people to try it because it's legal.
01:19:55.000But it's just like prohibition during the 1920s or the 1930s, rather.
01:20:00.000When they had that, what they did was they enabled the mob, and they enabled organized crime, and that was the rise of Al Capone, and that was the rise of the moonshiners, and you essentially, you always had a demand, and the people that were willing to supply that demand were criminals.
01:20:18.000And they were criminals in this country.
01:20:19.000We're empowering criminals that are essentially running Mexico, which is bizarre.
01:20:24.000You know, I know during the latest election...
01:21:37.000No, I don't think there's a lot of money in that.
01:21:39.000The real money is in like meth, meth, cocaine.
01:21:43.000They have a problem with illegal marijuana that's grown in the United States on national forest land.
01:21:50.000Because what happened is, especially in California, my friend John Norris, he wrote a book called A Hidden War, and he was a fish and game officer and, you know, basically wanted to be the guy that, like, checks your fishing license.
01:22:03.000Like, great job, you're out in the outdoors.
01:23:18.000They're essentially using military contractors to run the money back and forth to the bank because you had to bring the bank money in bulk.
01:23:28.000So you'd have a million dollars in an armored car, and a bunch of guys tailing the car in front of the car, and they're driving it to the bank, and everyone knows there's a million dollars in that car.
01:23:42.000And so it was very sketchy for a lot of people.
01:23:45.000I don't know what the current condition in Colorado is now.
01:23:49.000I don't know if they still have to do it that way.
01:23:52.000A couple of companies, I just, I remember, the reason I know this is like, a guy came and pitched me on some business and he was like the software for all that.
01:24:02.000And, you know, I think the company went public and I just realized it just went sideways because like, nobody wanted to touch it because they didn't want to build rails.
01:24:36.000But really, it should be just like alcohol.
01:24:38.000It should be something that you have to be 21 years old to buy.
01:24:41.000You should have to have an ID. And we should educate people how to use it responsibly.
01:24:45.000And we should also pay attention to...
01:24:47.000Whoever the fuck is growing it, make sure you're not going wacky.
01:24:51.000There's people that are botanists that are out of their mind potheads that are just 24-7 hitting bongs, and they're making stuff that'll put you on Mars without Elon Musk.
01:25:03.000The problem that somebody raised, I read this in an article, was you need to make it more legal than it is today so that you can get folks to put some version of a nutritional label on the thing and show intensity,
01:25:21.000Well, they do regulate it in California.
01:25:23.000If you go to good places in California, let's say this is 39% THC, which is very high.
01:25:28.000This is 37. But then there's also the problem with one thing that marijuana seems to do to some people that alcohol doesn't necessarily...
01:25:39.000Some people have a propensity for alcoholism, and it seems to be genetic.
01:25:43.000But there's a thing that happens with marijuana where people who have a tendency towards schizophrenia, marijuana can push them over the edge.
01:25:51.000And Alex Berenson wrote a great book about this called Tell Your Kids.
01:25:55.000And I've personally witnessed people who've lost their marbles.
01:25:59.000And I think it's people that have this propensity.
01:26:04.000Because one of the things that I think is beneficial about marijuana in particular, and this is one of the things that freaks people out, is the paranoia.
01:26:14.000Well, paranoia, I feel like what it is, is a hyper-awareness.
01:26:18.000And I think it pushes down all these boundaries that you've set up, all these walls, and all these blinders, so that you see the world for what it really is.
01:27:53.000If the tequila touches my lip, I just start hiccuping like crazy.
01:27:56.000And it's like this weird protective thing that I think my brain has developed because my dad used to drink some stuff that would, like, make you blind.
01:29:29.000And then when you discover and you learn, like, I remember, like, my wife's Italian, so we spent a lot of time in Italy in the summer with our kids.
01:29:36.000And when we were there, you find these incredible Italian white Chardonnays, okay?
01:29:43.000In the summer, I'm just going to be honest with you, there is nothing better to drink in the world.
01:35:29.000But fruit is, like, tilts me because, like, every time I go to a store...
01:35:34.000Sometimes like you'll get like their seasons were like, you know, like white nectarines and white peaches, maybe like one of the most incredible fruits ever created.
01:35:42.000But if you get it in a bad season, it's just like unedible.
01:35:49.000And when you see like these mangoes in the summertime, like, I don't know where Europe gets their mangoes, but this is probably one of the best features of Europe.
01:35:57.000Like they have these mangoes that are just like this.
01:36:25.000Well, she runs a pharma company, so she has a...
01:36:29.000Proclivity for science, obviously, and she thinks about a lot of this stuff scientifically, but she also broke her back when she was 11. So she's very sensitive to inflammation.
01:36:40.000So she's hacked a lot of food so that she can minimize inflammation.
01:36:56.000So like the way that I ate rice or quinoa, I would have like a small amount of rice or I would have brown rice or I'd have black rice or I'd have quinoa because I was like, oh, it's more protein.
01:38:34.000If I take a picture, like, I mean, I try to work out, and I take pretty detailed, like, what's my BMI, what's my muscle mass, what's my fat percentage?
01:38:42.000And I always take those readings right before I go.
01:38:47.000And when I look afterwards, and I don't do anything when I'm there.
01:38:52.000You know, I swim in the sea when I can, like when I'm on vacation or whatever.
01:39:19.000And all I do is I just eat what's in front of me.
01:39:21.000I don't think about quantities, whatever.
01:39:23.000But when I'm back in the United States, so I get to be there, call it six weeks a year, right?
01:39:28.000But when I'm back in the United States, I have to go back on lockdown.
01:39:32.000Because like a lot of people, you know, I had this thing, like if you look at a picture of me in Sri Lanka, I look like old Dave Chappelle.
01:41:05.000Like, how much can you really affect with regulation?
01:41:07.000How much can you really bring to light?
01:41:09.000And what are we going to learn about our food system?
01:41:12.000I mean, even Canada, one of the things about the hearings that they just had was they were comparing Lucky Charms that they sell in the United States that are very brightly colored versus Lucky Charms they sell in Canada.
01:41:23.000It's a completely different looking product because in Canada it's illegal to use those dyes that we use ubiquitously.
01:41:41.000But at least it doesn't have that fucking poison that just makes it blue or red.
01:41:46.000And it's impossible to teach my kids healthy eating habits as a result of this.
01:41:51.000The food in the United States, it's everywhere and it's beating into you that this is a cheap way of getting caloric intake and it is full of just all these stuff you can't pronounce.
01:42:10.000And then if you're in what they would call a food desert, if you're in a place that only has fast food, like my god, like your odds of being metabolically healthy if you're poor and you're living in a place that's a food desert.
01:43:03.000There's a small amount of people who bribed these scientists to falsify data so that they could blame all these coronary artery diseases and heart diseases on saturated fat when it was really sugar that was causing all these problems.
01:43:21.000And we had a very dysfunctional understanding of health for the longest time.
01:44:07.000And a lot of the scientists started to focus some of their energy on taking that skill—I'll just put that in quotes—of making something very addictive and transposing it to food, right?
01:44:19.000It's like, okay, if I'm at RJR and I'm used to making cigarettes, how do I think about structurally building up something that wants you to eat more, but now instead of smoking, instead of a cigarette, it's a Twinkie or whatever?
01:44:32.000And a lot of the food science that we have in America is built on the back of a bunch of these mega-mergers where you had these scientists go and build super, quote-unquote, addictive food.
01:44:44.000And that was a failure of the—I mean, obviously it was a failure of the capital markets, but it was a failure of public health.
01:44:49.000Well, it's a failure of our regulatory process.
01:44:54.000It's a failure of our exposing the public to this and making sure that whatever this is, is labeled the same way cigarettes are.
01:45:05.000Because if you want to buy cigarettes, you can buy them today, but it's going to have a big warning that tells you this can kill you.
01:46:02.000And that's what most people are doing.
01:46:05.000Most people out there that are drinking regular soda and they're eating candy and you're eating burgers with sugar in the bun and bullshit and bread and french fries cooked in seed oils.
01:46:18.000You should fact check this because I may get the number wrong, but there was something that came out very recently about the percentage of the U.S. food stamp system that goes to soda.
01:46:30.000And it was like 10% of the total budget?
01:46:52.000It's something you put in your mouth, but you can't buy cigarettes with food stamps, right?
01:46:56.000So if you can't buy cigarettes with food stamps, why should you be able to buy something that's really bad for you?
01:47:01.000I mean, what would change if we said food stamps, we're going to actually increase the amount that you get, but we're going to regulate what you can buy, and you have to buy all the things from the outside of the store?
01:47:12.000I don't even think you have to regulate it.
01:47:15.000Think of what has happened because of companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash, as an example.
01:47:22.000And I'll tell you why I think this is important.
01:47:24.000Those guys have gone out, and Cloud Kitchens, there's three companies.
01:47:29.000They have bought up every single kind of warehouse in every part of every city and suburb in America.
01:47:37.000And what they put in there are these things that they call ghost kitchens.
01:47:42.000So that when you launch the app and a lot of the times when you get a drink from Starbucks, it's not coming from the actual Starbucks down the street.
01:48:26.000But I think if you're going to tie it to something like a government subsidy, at least the government should have a conversation with themselves that says, well, we can ship them all of this healthy food and, you know, change a bunch of boundary conditions in these folks' lives.
01:49:06.000And so I get it that the hamburger tastes good, but this is where the government, I think, has a responsibility to say, look, we're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, so let's spend it in a smart way.
01:49:19.000We're not going to give you pop and soda anymore.
01:49:22.000And we're going to start introducing some fruit, some vegetables, some fiber.
01:49:29.000That's like a very reasonable thing to do, especially if on the same hand, the other hand of the government is going to go and negotiate insulin prices and metformin prices and GLP-1s.
01:49:42.000See what Bobby Kennedy was talking about with these GLP-1s?
01:49:46.000He was comparing the amount of money spent on GLP-1s and what you could give every obese American, that you could give them free healthy food and a gym membership?
01:51:38.000Well, the only other thing that I could think is if there was some sort of a way that would be effective at establishing discipline other than just promoting it.
01:51:52.000I could conceive of, especially when you're dealing with something like Neuralink or some sort of a new way of programming the mind where it just changes whatever the behavior pattern is that accepts these foods as choices.
01:52:25.000Best case scenario is you just have...
01:52:29.000Like a national scale promotion of health and wellness and abandonment of this body positivity nonsense and fat doctors and people that are telling you that every weight is a healthy weight and all food is food and to think otherwise is discriminatory,
01:52:53.000They pay people to be influencers, and they're getting paid by these food companies to say these nonsense things that are scientifically, factually incorrect.
01:54:04.000Okay, that's not the 300 billion that Bobby- Explain that, what you mean by that.
01:54:07.000So, there was a- So, in Congress, when they come together to pass these bills, sometimes what happens is there's a lot of horse trading, right?
01:54:18.000And you get what's called a Christmas tree bill, which is like everybody gets to hang something off the Christmas tree.
01:54:24.000And the crazy part of the United States is these little baubles now here are 10 billion here, 50 billion there, whatever.
01:54:32.000So, We passed a few years ago something that was meant to get rural broadband into thousands of people's homes.
01:54:44.000And initially it was given to SpaceX and Starlink specifically.
01:55:44.000So there's these thousands of people that were promised broadband that you can get for basically $100 a month or less now, and instead they're spending upwards of thousands and thousands per home and haven't delivered any.
01:56:03.000And then the other example was a $7 billion program to install EV chargers, $7 billion, and they've managed to install three.
01:56:12.000So all I'm saying is, if you add the two together, that 50 billion, that's one-sixth of what Bobby Kennedy was talking about in terms of giving people organic food.
01:56:21.000So maybe we can't give everybody organic food, but you can get tens of millions of people, right?
01:56:27.000Start with the 40 million people that's on Snap.
01:56:29.000You can get maybe 10 million of those people.
01:56:36.000All we got to do is just like focus a little bit, take some of these dollars that are just like falling into the seat cushions, it seems like, and just reallocate it somewhat intelligently into the things that really matter.
01:56:50.000It seems worse than falling into the seat cushions if it's 42 billion people and none of them have received internet access.
01:59:40.000AI government just works literally for the people.
01:59:43.000And instead of having all these state representatives and all these bullshit artists that pretend to be working on their truck and they don't know what the fuck they're doing, they're just doing it for an ad, you don't have any of that anymore.
01:59:52.000Now everything's governed with AI. The problem is who's controlling the AI? And is there some sort of an ultimate regulatory body that makes sure that the AI isn't biased or tainted?
02:00:03.000I think there's a step before that which is a lot more palatable.
02:00:08.000I thought about your version, and the problem that you state is the key problem, which is how is this model trained?
02:00:16.000Who got their hands on that core stuff, the weights and the values of that?
02:00:23.000And at some point, there is already today in AI models a level of human override.
02:00:29.000It's just a natural facet of how these things are.
02:00:32.000There is a way to reinforce the learning based on what you say and what I say.
02:00:37.000It's a key part of how an AI model becomes smart.
02:00:40.000It starts off as primordial and then Joe and Chamath and all these other people are clicking and saying, yes, that's a good answer, bad answer, ask this question, all this stuff.
02:02:27.000Now, an AI can actually just ingest all the rules, knows exactly what's allowed and what's not allowed, and they can take your picture and instantly tell you, Joe, fix these 19 things.
02:02:45.000You can also point out where they're making decisions that don't map to what the rules say.
02:02:50.000That, I think, is going to be a really important first step because it allows us to see where maybe this administrative state has grown unwieldy, where you got to knock some of this stuff back and clean up some of the cruft because there's rules on top of rules and one conflicts with the other.
02:03:07.000I bet you there are things on the books today that are like that.
02:03:29.000You know, one of the things that I thought was extraordinary that Elon was getting pushed back on was his idea of making the government more efficient.
02:03:41.000And that auditing the various programs and finding out how to make them more efficient.
02:03:46.000And a lot of people really freaked out about that.
02:03:49.000And their main freak out, the main argument from intelligent people that I saw was, what are you going to do?
02:03:55.000Are you going to fire all these people that are in charge of government?
02:03:59.000I don't think that's the answer for ineffective government is to let the same people do the same thing because otherwise you have to fire them.
02:04:19.000Everyone believes there's a lot of nonsense going on.
02:04:22.000Everyone believes that, like, look at the difference between what Elon has been able to accomplish with SpaceX versus what NASA has been doing recently.
02:04:32.000Look at the difference between what they're able to accomplish with Starlink versus this $42 billion program that yielded zero results.
02:04:39.000Look at the difference between all these different things that are done in the private sector when there's competitive marketplace strategies.
02:04:47.000Like you have to figure out a way to get better and more efficient and you can't afford to have a bunch of people in your company that are doing nothing.
02:04:56.000And that are creating red tape and making things harder to progress.
02:06:46.000The thing that we would benefit a lot from is, if we could just point out all the ways in which there's either too many laws or laws are conflicting, You can at least have a conversation about batting those back.
02:07:00.000And the second is, if you look inside of private equity, there is one thing that they do which I think the government would hugely benefit from, and it's called zero-based budgeting.
02:07:14.000And this is an incredibly powerful but boring idea.
02:07:18.000What private equity does when they buy a company, some of them, the best ones, they'll look at next year's budget, and if they say, what should the budget be?
02:07:28.000Well, guess what's going to happen, Joe, in your company?
02:07:30.000Everybody runs and says, I need X for this, Y for that, Z for this, and you have this budget that's just ginormous.
02:07:38.000Instead, what some of the best private equity folks do is say, we're starting with zero.
02:08:13.000And if you go and you do that inside the government, what you probably would find is that same group of people would probably enjoy their job a lot more.
02:08:21.000They'd actually be, their hands would be on the controls in a much more directed way.
02:08:27.000We'd spend a lot less because a lot of this stuff probably just goes by the wayside and we don't even know, you know.
02:08:34.000And people would just be more able to go and work.
02:09:13.000Meanwhile, the FCC, which is a sister organization to the FAA, fast-tracked the sale of 220 radio stations in part to some folks that were foreign entities, right before an election that touched like 160 million Americans.
02:09:31.000When you look at that, you would say, how can some folks Cut through all the red tape and get an answer quickly.
02:09:39.000How can other folks be waiting around for something that just seems so obvious and so exceptional for America?
02:13:23.000I think the question is, what would we do if we knew?
02:13:26.000Do we have the capability of moving that thing?
02:13:31.000Would the FCC wait five months to give Elon the— I think you'd probably send as many—but see, I mean, it's all a physics problem at that point.
02:14:20.000But ultimately, I always wonder, you know, like the universe sort of has these patterns that force innovation and constantly move towards further and further complexity.
02:14:31.000And if you were going to have intelligent life that existed on a planet, what better incentive to get this intelligent life to spread to other parts of the planet than to make that planet volatile, make super volcanoes, earthquakes, Solar flares,
02:14:48.000all sorts of different possibilities, asteroid impacts, all sorts of different possibilities that motivate this thing to spread.
02:14:54.000But to say, like, this is fragile, and it's not forever, so create some redundancy.
02:15:04.000I'm not that religious in that way, but I'm kind of weirdly spiritual in this other way, which is, I do think the universe is basically, it's littered with answers.
02:15:17.000You just got to go and find out what the right questions are.
02:15:20.000So to your point, like, are all these natural phenomena on Earth, you know, the question is, okay, if that's the answer, well, the question is like, do we want to be a single planet species or do we want to have some built-in redundancy?
02:15:37.000And, you know, maybe 100 years from now that builds on top of what happens in the next five, we'll have discovered all kinds of different planets.
02:15:50.000And we also know that there's planets in our immediate vicinity that used to be able to harbor life like Mars.
02:15:57.000We know that Mars was covered in water and Mars had a sustainable atmosphere.
02:16:01.000So we know that this is not just a dream, that this is possible, that what we're experiencing here on Earth is temporary.
02:16:08.000And if we get hit by something big—well, we know Earth was hit by a planet in its formation.
02:16:14.000There was Earth 1 and Earth 2. The formation of the moon, the primary theory is that we were hit by another planet, and that's why we have such a large moon.
02:16:55.000That's the most promising aspect to a hyper-intelligent AI, in my opinion, that it'll be able to solve problems that are inescapable to us and also offer us like real hard data about how big of a problem this is and when this needs to be solved by and then come up with actionable solutions.
02:17:51.000I would hope that the answer would be yes.
02:17:54.000It would have to be something that showed such overwhelming superiority that it shut down all of our military systems and did so openly to the point where we're like we're really helpless against this thing.
02:18:06.000Well, so I think that one way to think about AI is that it is a supernatural system in some ways.
02:18:15.000So if we can just find a way to cooperate and harness this and see the bigger picture, I think we'll all be better off.
02:18:54.000My hope is that one of the things that comes out of AI and the advancement of society through this is the allocation of resources much more evenly.
02:19:03.000And that we use AI, as I was saying before, the best way to keep people from entering into this country is to make all the other places as good as this country.
02:19:53.000They want to hopefully get married, have some kids, have fun with them, teach them what they were all about, and then our swan song and we all kind of, I don't know, get reborn or not.
02:20:05.000Isn't it interesting that the idea of people not getting together in groups and killing people they don't know, that's utopia?
02:20:12.000That is some sort of ridiculous pie-in-the-sky vision of the possibility of the future of humanity, where that's...
02:20:24.000Common in small groups, like even in cities.
02:20:27.000I mean, there's individual murders and there's crimes in cities, but cities aren't attacking other cities and killing everybody.
02:20:35.000So there's something bizarre about nations, and there's something bizarre about the uneven application of resources and possibilities and, you know, your...
02:20:49.000Your economic hopes, your dreams, your aspirations being achievable pretty much everywhere.
02:20:57.000If we did that, I think that might be the way that we solve most violence or the most horrific nonsensical violence.
02:21:08.000I said this before, but the most important thing that has happened Is that in the last four or five years, we have severely curtailed the likelihood of war in the nominal sense.
02:21:22.000I think Trump was able to basically draw a hard red line in the sand on that stuff.
02:21:28.000And the underlying reason was because we had enough economic abundance where the incentives to go to war fell.
02:21:36.000We had just a complete rebirth of domestic hydrocarbons in America.
02:21:41.000Whether you agree with it or not, my point is it is quite clearly correlated in the data.
02:21:46.000As we were able to produce more stuff, so economic abundance, we had less need to go and fight with external parties.
02:21:55.000So I do think you're right, like this reduces it down to we need to find ways Of allocating this abundance more broadly to more countries.
02:22:07.000Meanwhile, that one crazy thing that you can't unwind and go back from, you can just never go there.
02:22:14.000And you just have to make sure nobody believes that that is justified.
02:22:19.000Because in a nuclear event, I think that that's not what happens.
02:22:25.000I saw this brilliant discussion that you had where you were explaining that Trump is the wrong messenger, but many of the things that he did actually were very positive.
02:22:41.000It's a very difficult thing to describe.
02:22:45.000It's a very difficult thing to express to people because we're so polarized, particularly with a character like Trump that's so polarizing, it's very difficult to attribute anything to him that is positive and Especially if you're a progressive,
02:23:03.000or if you're on the left, or if you've been a lifelong Democrat, or if you're involved in tech.
02:23:08.000I mean, it's this bizarre denial of basic reality.
02:23:15.000The reality of what can you see based on what was put in place, what actions were taken, what were the net benefits?
02:23:51.000That's an incredible view of the world.
02:23:54.000And I think what happened was when I was given a choice, I would vote Democrat or I would support Democrats because I thought that that's what they stood for.
02:24:31.000But probably by 21 or 22, I started to see all this data, and I said, hold on, I am not being a responsible adult the way that I define responsibility.
02:24:44.000I am not looking at this data from first principles, and I need to do it.
02:24:50.000And when I did, what I saw was a bunch of decisions that turned out to be pretty smart.
02:24:59.000The problem is that because he's the vessel, he turns off so many people with his delivery.
02:25:07.000And I think this is a moment where the stakes are so high, you have to try to figure out what the message is versus what the messenger is saying.
02:25:16.000Or look to somebody else that can tell you the message in a way that maybe will allow you to actually listen to it.
02:25:24.000That could be J.D. Vance, it could be Elon Musk, it could be RFK. There's all kinds of surrogates now, because I think that they have realized that there's a lot of value in these messages.
02:26:22.000Even now, even with everything that's on the line for Bobby and Bobby's agenda, He's quite honest about Donald Trump's positives and negatives.
02:26:37.000And one of the things, and probably the most important thing, where they were sounding the drum from day one is, under no circumstance will the United States go to war.
02:27:07.000But the thing is, it's like no one seems to care that the rhetoric has ramped up so hard and has been so distorted.
02:27:16.000The other thing that people need to, I think, think about is...
02:27:19.000The domestic policy agenda of both the Democrats and the Republicans are within error bars.
02:27:26.000And what I mean by that is when push comes to shove, they both, whether it's Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, they have to work through a very sclerotic Congress, which means that very little will ultimately get done if you just look at the track record of all these past presidents.
02:27:46.000You typically get one piece of landmark legislation passed in your first two years, and it all just gets unwound.
02:28:05.000So the American political system has a really incredible way of, like, insulating itself.
02:28:14.000So, if people would just take a step back and look at that, a lot of the policy agendas that both of them espouse are going to be very hard to get done.
02:28:25.000There'll be one thing, you know, maybe they both do something on, you know, domestic taxation.
02:28:31.000Maybe they both do something on the border.
02:28:34.000But the likelihood, based on the past, is that they'll get one of these things done and then not much will be done.
02:28:41.000This is why I think folks then need to think about, okay, what are the super presidential powers then where they can act alone?
02:28:53.000One area where they can act alone is they can issue executive orders.
02:28:58.000And that can direct the behavior of governmental agencies.
02:29:04.000Okay, so people should decide what they think about that.
02:29:07.000Do you want a muscular American bureaucracy?
02:29:25.000And then foreign policy I think one camp is much more in the view that we are the world's policemen and there's a responsibility that comes with that.
02:29:38.000And one says, we got a lot of problems at home.
02:29:41.000We're not getting pulled into something abroad.
02:29:45.000And I think people need to decide about that.
02:29:46.000But other than those two threshold issues, my honest opinion is that we're in error bars between the two of them.
02:29:56.000One will cut taxes by this much, one will increase taxes by that much.
02:30:02.000But there is real decisions that have been made during the Biden administration about the border that are affecting people.
02:30:22.000The whole thing seems insane and I don't know what the motivation is.
02:30:26.000I've talked to people that know a lot about the construction business and they believe the motivation is cheap labor.
02:30:30.000I think that's part of it and that a lot of the problem is in many industries.
02:30:36.000The lack of cheap labor and people that are willing to do jobs.
02:30:38.000It's one of the things that I've heard, you know, there's a lot of criticism about all the Haitians that have moved to Springfield, Ohio, but one of the positive things that I've heard from people that live there is that these people are hard workers and they're willing to do jobs that the other people weren't willing to take on.
02:30:53.000So you have pros and cons, but you have this incentivized effort to move people into this country illegally, which will undoubtedly bring in people that you don't want here.
02:31:10.000And there's people that have been arrested that were trying to come in that were terrorists.
02:31:13.000And there's people that have gotten through for sure.
02:31:15.000I think that if I give both of them the benefit of the doubt, I think both of them will have to act on the border.
02:31:21.000I think that Donald Trump has had a clearer view of this issue for much far longer.
02:31:27.000I think that Kamala has had to shift her position to make herself more palatable to centrists.
02:31:34.000But I do think that both of them will probably have to act, because I don't think what's happening today is sustainable.
02:31:42.000I don't think it is either, but the fear, and Elon's talked about this, the real fear is that they're bringing these people in, give them a clear path to citizenship, which will allow them to vote, and then you've essentially bought their vote.
02:31:54.000So if the Democrats bring them in, incentivize them to become Democrats and vote, and give them money, which they clearly are doing, they're giving them EBD cards, and they're giving them housing, and they're giving things that they're not giving to veterans and poor people in this country.
02:32:39.000I mean, I—yeah, I have—I don't know whether it's a conspiracy, per se, meaning—but I do agree with the outcome, meaning I remember very vividly— We,
02:32:57.000my parents, took up the whole family, three of us, myself and my two sisters, to Niagara Falls, and then we crossed the border to Buffalo.
02:33:06.000And we applied for refugee status in America as well.
02:33:15.000And when we went back, we got a tribunal hearing in Ottawa, where I grew up.
02:33:23.000And I remember that it was in front of this magistrate judge, so the person comes in with the robes and the hair and everything, and you sit there, and they hear- They have the wigs up there?
02:33:54.000It seared in my mind because, like, you know, your life is right there.
02:33:58.000It's like a crucible moment for your whole family.
02:34:00.000If they're like, I don't buy it, off you go.
02:34:04.000We go back and I don't know what would have happened.
02:34:08.000Fortunately, obviously, it worked out.
02:34:11.000And then, you know, you go through the process, I became a Canadian citizen.
02:34:14.000Then I moved to the United States to get on a visa, then I become an American citizen.
02:34:18.000I have an enormous loyalty to this country.
02:34:23.000And so when I think about, like, Americans not getting what they deserve before other folks, it really does touch me in a place—like, I get very agitated about that idea.
02:34:34.000It's not that those folks shouldn't be taken care of in some way, shape, or form, because I was one of those people that needed a little bit of a safety net, right?
02:34:44.000We needed the places to go in to get the free clothes and all that stuff.
02:34:51.000But you have to sort of take care of all of the people that are putting in the effort and the time to be here and followed the rules and stood in line.
02:35:02.000Like when I came to the United States, man, I came on a TN visa.
02:35:08.000Every year, you had to get it renewed.
02:35:29.000So I've lived this experience of an immigrant following the rules And just methodically and patiently waiting and hoping and the anxiety that comes with that.
02:35:40.000Because it comes with tremendous anxiety.
02:35:42.000If you ask people that were on H-1Bs in America, there was a website, I don't even know if it exists anymore, but we would check what, you know, because when you apply for a green card, you get an application date.
02:35:57.000And man, I would sweat that website every other week.
02:36:13.000So I just think it's important to recognize that there are a lot of folks that play by the rules that are immigrants to this country.
02:36:19.000There are a lot of people that were born here that have been playing by the rules.
02:36:22.000And I think we owe it to them to do the right thing for them as well.
02:36:27.000And then try to do the right thing for some folks that are coming across the border because there probably are some of them legitimately are escaping some really bad stuff.
02:36:44.000But you have to take care of all the people here, especially the veterans and especially these people that have been struggling in these inner cities that have dealt with the redlining and all the Jim Crow laws that have set them back for decades and decades and has never been corrected.
02:37:00.000There's never been any effort to take these places that have been economically fucked since the beginning of the 20th century and correct it.
02:37:10.000And instead you're dumping all this money into people that have illegally come here.
02:37:14.000That to me is where it starts looking like a conspiracy.
02:37:17.000I think that as long as people can explain what they're doing for these other folks that you just mentioned, I think for a lot of people, for 50% of the population that leans red on this topic, you could at least explain to them.
02:37:34.000The problem is that there is no explanation.
02:37:36.000There is a $150,000 home credit that Gavin Newsom was about to give.
02:37:58.000So there's clearly a way for state legislatures to do what's right on behalf of the folks in their state.
02:38:06.000So if we just had a little bit more balance, and then if we were able to shine a light on those things...
02:38:14.000A lot of the people that live here that contribute would feel better about where things were going and wouldn't feel like the whole thing is just rigged.
02:38:25.000Well, that's one of the things that people are so excited about with this Trump union with Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy is that you're having these movements that seem to be almost impossible to achieve outside of an outsider,
02:38:41.000like the Make America Healthy Again concept.
02:38:45.000You're going to go up against these companies that have been donating to these political parties forever and have allowed them to have these regulations that are allowing them to have these dyes in food that's illegal in our neighboring Canada?
02:39:06.000Just take a step back, though, and if you were just the average Joe citizen, I think an important thing to just notice is why are all these totally different people acting as a team?
02:39:27.000I just think it's an interesting thought question for...
02:39:42.000The 2024 election is a lot about the traditional approach to governance and a very radical reimagining of government.
02:39:56.000And I think that's what effectively will get decided.
02:39:58.000The traditional approach says, we're going to create robust policies, we're going to work sort of top down, you know, this muscular foreign policy, muscular domestic policy, the government's going to play a large part of the economy, and we're going to try to right some wrongs.
02:40:15.000The radical reimagining says, We're going to go back to a more founding notion of this country.
02:40:25.000We're going to have a very light governmental infrastructure.
02:40:29.000We are going to cut back a bunch of the rules.
02:40:34.000And we're going to take a little bit of a step back on foreign policy so that we don't end up in a situation we can't pull back from.
02:41:21.000Donald Trump, very funny, very kind, very polite, like he talks to you.
02:41:33.000And I just was like, wow, this is like totally—and exactly what you said.
02:41:37.000I was like—I was expecting something totally different.
02:41:43.000And I think, though, that the part—at the core, part of what—where the media goes crazy, I think, I'm guessing, is that there's a part of him as well that's like an entertainer.
02:41:54.000I mean, he's better than—he's as good as any comedian.
02:42:04.000So there's a thing that he's doing when he's on stage, which for the audience, I think, is no different than going to a show or a revival or something.
02:44:38.000Not just that, but there's the affidavit by the person from ABC that said she was aware of the questions and that she was told that there were certain things that were going to be off-topic or off-limits, like her record as a DA. And also some other person that she's attached to that's involved in something shady.
02:44:58.000And then on top of it, there was things that she said that were absolutely untrue.
02:45:02.000One of them, one of the grossest ones, was she saying that we don't have any troops deployed in combat zones.
02:45:08.000Have you ever seen that one where the troops in the combat zones are going, what the fuck are we doing here?
02:46:17.000So if there's ever been a moment where it's time for all of us to show up and be a grown-up, try to get the source material, try to think about things from first principles, I'm telling you it is the most consequential election of our lifetime.
02:46:36.000And the simplest reason why is that the president decides to hit the button on the nuclear football.
02:46:46.000So just imagine for one second, irrespective of what your politics is, who do you want to hold that thing?
02:46:57.000What do you want them to do under even the most excruciating pressure in the world?
02:47:05.000And I think what we want to find is someone, at least in that very narrow moment, will be a JFK-like decision.