Everything You Know is About to Collapse - David Friedberg - #1084

You've said the future's gonna be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried. How come? I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future because humans are programmed to be that way.

we always were worried about some predator coming around the corner and eating us. Like we're we're tuned to survive, right? So we're tuned to always there's always some existential threat to humanity. This goes back to kind of biblical eras thousands of years ago. it was the the great flood that was about to come, there was the um you know, the plague. The plague's gonna wipe us all out. Uh there's uh starvation, you know, the late nineteenth century.

Uh population was outstripping uh food supply. And there was this big belief that we were gonna run out of food. And there was this kind of rush to and and and the primary reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields uh off of the South American coast. So these giant islands covered in in poop. And they would the clipper ships would go down, they'd get all this poop and they'd bring it back to Europe and they

use it as fertilizer to farm. If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less less calories. So the the islands were kind of diminishing and there was this big call to action. We're gonna run out of fertilizer, the world's gonna starve, we're gonna die. And then there was this invention called the Haber Bosch process where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom. Suddenly population skyrocketed.

every generation has these existential threats, climate change, COVID. There's always a and now it's AI. I think fundamentally AI is one of these most kind of like mind numbing, sort of unbelievable to understand kind of um technologies and when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok that seems so overwhelming, like a plague, like running out of food, like COVID, we have a tendency to be very existential about it. Um now

You compare that to the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground, people are living longer, they're living healthier, they're living better lives a across the board, across populations. And people can argue all day long about relative Prosperity. Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead. They're doing really well. The rest of us feel left behind.

But if you look at some of the metrics of like, hey, everyone has a a home, everyone has a car, like everyone has some of these things that we take for granted today that we didn't have a hundred years ago, that that were really things to struggle to get. Now Separate to that, there is an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally. Digitization of the physical world.

And then our ability to kind of make predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of the tools that we call AI today, but it's really a long history of these sorts of tools. where we take data and we use that to better understand the world and then say, Hey, we could do this or we could do this. We could make this molecule to solve this cancer. We could do this thing and suddenly it turns out we're right. We could build this machine that could get us to the

moon. Oh yeah, we're right. We could do that. Like all of these fundamental tools start to compound. And we're in this kind of exponential curve right now that I think and we can talk about some of the things that I think are most exciting. but that are really gonna kind of transform the trajectory for humanity. So I I I I think that there's um a risk Of too much change too fast, which is perhaps the thing that breaks social order.

And that's probably the phase that we're in right now. Like, how much is the social order gonna break? How hard is it gonna be for people to adapt? How how how much of a dislocation will there be in social systems and economic systems and um people's expectations when they shift too much?

uh and they have to kind of rethink what do I have to do? They want to put a a break on things. And I think that's kind of a moment that we're in in the West right now. In the East it's a little bit different. You go to China, they're very much embracing these technologies. Because there's so much more to gain than there is to lose. In the West we have so much more to lose than there is to gain. So

Oh, that's interesting. A victim of your own success so far. Yeah. Because it feels like you've climbed pretty high and if you fall, that could be bad. Yeah. And um we could pontificate on this for a while, but you could go back to F D R in the United States and and we we we kinda came out of the war with this big effort where we said, Hey, we can

aggregate all our resources, we can win World War Two. And then we said by aggregating our resources we could do the extraordinary. So let's do that again and let's keep doing that. And that became this kind of trajectory we've been on in terms of making promises for tomorrow and then having the government kind of deliver the promises. Right. And that's been a big thing that's gone on for the last call it almost a hundred years, particularly in the West. Um

At some point, you can only promise so much. Like there's uh a system where everyone had this sort of expectation setting that was made. Okay, everyone gets a home. That's the American dream. Yeah, everyone goes to college and then they get a job. Some of those things may not necessarily be the right

things from a free market perspective, in which case you're making these promises and then people feel like the promises aren't being delivered. They're not being met, and that's all they care about, and that's all that they want. In the the West, we have that problem right now.

And so there's a lot of these things that we've set expectations around. If you go to college, you get a good degree, no matter how much it costs, you will have a good job and you'll be able to buy a home and live a good life. And that's not true anymore. And so these are the sorts of things that I think make us more fearful of the changes ahead.

Whereas in the East, those promises weren't necessarily made. They've they're like in China, GDP per capita skyrocketed from three thousand to thirty thousand in just a couple of years. I mean, imagine seeing the average person's income in a country go up by ten. and everyone's moving from farms to villages to cities and the cities are like the future. Like it's been an extraordinary trajectory. So

Um, you know, there's a lot of embracing of the future that's happening in in one social set of social systems in the world today. And then a bunch of this like, oh my God, tomorrow is scary, it's gonna break everything on the other side. And I think, you know, we have that that very dangerous kind of choice to make.

I think the concern is that AI is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree, that there is a centralizing of power amongst potential five trillionaire class people on the planet and w what did they what sort of control do they have? How much displacement if is there of work that didn't happen in the same way as when horses were killed because the automobile came along.

Or because manual labour needed to turn into driving J C Bs instead of digging holes, that this is a a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree. What's your perspective when it comes to AI doomerism, AI optimism? Yeah. All technology uh shifts go through a a phase of diffusion, meaning they have to start somewhere. It's not like we turn on a switch. and suddenly everyone can build an Etsy store or a Shopify store. Like that's not how the internet started with everyone

suddenly benefiting from being able to be an entrepreneur online. It took a couple of generations of technology diffusion before the idea of Shopify and the high speed internet all over the the country got everywhere and people could actually stand up a Shopify store and run it. Um, the first people on the internet, the first businesses that stood up did very well. And so

The technology started centrally, but then, you know, initially people were like, Oh my god, Cisco's gonna dominate the world, right? Like Cisco's got the switches that make the internet switch. that's the technology that's gonna those guys that own Cisco, those guys are gonna run the world. This is not fair. Like they're gonna control everything. This is crazy. Nowadays it's NVIDIA to some degree. It's Google

But like eventually every technology commoditizes. That's what's so amazing about technology is it like it's always diffusing. Like this new innovation finds its way out. Like we've already seen in just the last couple of weeks this insane shift in AI. where people don't have to run models in the cloud anymore. They can run models on their desktop at home.

So there's no longer um like a dependency on Google or a dependency on, you know, pick your favorite hosted model provider. I can download an open source model and there's plenty of great models. I can run it on a Mac computer in my ho house. And if you saw recently there's this auto research thing that went viral on Twitter this weekend.

where Andre Carpapi turned on auto research and he ran all of these agents on his computer and they were just asked a bunch of questions to solve, make better L LMs and they just ran thirty of them. talking to each other and they just kept scoring the improvements they were each making to the LLM, to the underlying AI model. And they made a better L LLM model than what Chat GPT had not too very long ago.

in like a weekend on a computer at home. That's how quickly it's diffused. And so I'm like I I think that there's a d and so this whole thing of like, oh, data centers need to be stopped, I actually don't think that data centers are gonna have much to do with the benefits we're gonna realize. Like so much of AI is gonna sit at the edge. It's gonna sit in embedded devices. It's gonna sit on your desktop computer. It's gonna sit on your iPhone.

It's gonna be ubiquitous. It's gonna be everywhere. And I think everyone just doesn't see the benefit yet. And so it's very hard to envision why I should do this. And we can talk a lot about some of those benefits that could arise. But over time all technologies have like

a central feature where someone's making a bunch of money early on and then eventually everyone's like, Oh my God, everyone's life has gotten better because of this thing. Like when the first CAR T therapies came out, these are T cell I I I I totally jumped ship there, but like like CAR T therapy is this amazing technology that was d developed where we could take T cells, immune cells, out of the human body, program them to find a specific protein.

put them back in your body, and then they go and find that protein and kill it and kill that cell. And it was used for cancer. So we could take a T cell out of the body, program it to go attack a cancer cell, put it back in the body, it attacks the cancer cell and destroys it. When that first came out, it was like, oh my God, this is incredible. And a couple of companies made a couple billion dollars selling the first generation of those technologies.

But to get that therapy is like millions of dollars initially. You have to take all these cells out, isolate them, make sure they're clean, engineer them, put them back in, make sure the person doesn't die. So it became this very expensive initial process. And now CAR T therapy is making its way into more and more cancer treatments. And it is like almost a hundred percent like success rate in blood cancers when it works.

And so it's becoming this thing that goes from millions of dollars to a million to 500 and pretty soon to 50k, 20k, and eventually 5k. And that ends that disease. That whole class of diseases goes away. So all of these technologies start up with this aggregation of value, small number of people get it, small number of people get value, but eventually all technologies diffuse.

And so I'm less like concerned about there being a monopoly. We're already seeing every single model company getting disrupted by something else the next week. Um, we're already seeing this idea of data centers being the requisite breaking apart. There's a bunch of startups right now that are making technology that reduces the token cost by a thousand hours. So for every token produced, which is a measure of output from AI.

It used to be ten bucks or whatever. You know, pick your number, a dollar, fifty cents, ten cents. It's coming down by a thousandfold.

Because they're figuring out better ways to architecture the underlying models, to make distributed smaller models, to use new chip architecture, to use new systems of balancing energy across the different chips that you're using, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And these all compound. So suddenly it's like, Is the people that are gonna build all these data centers really gonna have a monopoly?

I don't know. Like this will allow anyone to stand up a small data center and run a bunch of AI stuff. So you don't really need big hundred billion dollar data center. So I think there's a lot that's changing very quickly. And every step of the way that's it's happening so fast. People just have all these reasons to have

concern. But I I'm I'm pretty optimistic as history being a predictor here that the diffusion of these technologies will unlock value for every human on earth. And it's really just a function of at what point and at what point in value.

I've heard you talking about the moon a lot. What's happening with the moon? Um the moon I think so One of the things that I think AI unlocks is the ability to do really complex projects. People think about AI as like, hey, I'm gonna replace labor. Like the accountant's job is gonna go away. And we're all kind of swirling our heads around, what are we gonna do with the accountant's jobs going away? And, you know, we could use the the automobile and the horsebuggy driver analogy.

People were worried about the horse buggy jobs going away and who's gonna breed the horses, who's gonna take care of the horses, all the horse tables are gonna go away. And then when the car came around, there was auto mechanics and there were the highway system and then motels popped up and then gas stations popped up and then coffee houses popped up on the highways and

s an new towns emerged on the highways because you could get to them and suddenly the automobile unlocked industries we didn't contemplate, right? It's several degrees away, several

steps away from the initial problem that you're thinking about, which is the the the horse companies dying and the horse jobs going away. Um so I think that's kind of like an important thing to note. And before I get to the moon, I'll just say this one point. I think Physical AI or robotics is really going to be an unlock for people.

People think it's like the companies, the corporations will have all the robots and the corporations will replace all the people. Like, but why can't everyone have a robot? Meaning, why can't someone put a robot in their garage? And this robot can do anything and works twenty four hours a day. That robot's now your employee. And you can say to the robot in the garage, Hey, I wanna make a bicycle shop. I wanna make custom bicycles that are really cool. They're like chrome and people can

you know, kind of tweak them online and make all these different versions of bicycles and then the robot will build the bicycle. So people so you can stand up a Shopify store or an Etsy store, whatever, make bite sell bicycles, and your robot will make them for you. You don't even have to know how to make bicycles.

The robot will order all the parts, it'll order all the machinery it needs, it'll run the robot bike shop in your garage, it'll make bikes, it'll package them up and ship them out for you. When you think about it in that context, which is that this diffusion of technology enables everyone to get value from it. So everyone will have a robot, everyone will be able to have a small business.

It's like imagine back in the day, twenty, thirty years ago, if you told people, Hey, everyone can have an Etsy store, now all of the knitting you're doing at home you can sell and you can make fifty grand a year, no one would have believed you. But it's like now you now you can do that. seen these arm farms in India? No. Jared, pull up that video I sent you about robots needing a human body inside the race to train AI robots

how to act human in the real world. I travelled to Southern In southern India to document the rise of AI arm farms, where young engineers strap GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. So people are getting paid To do normal shit. Here it is. Then the robot learns. Ja. So this is the same thing that happened with uh Tesla's false. Right.

That they take the best I mean, I d this doesn't strike me as the best folding I've ever seen. But um they take the best drivers on Tesla and they use that to train The model on It would be a good hack to mess with the robots and fold incorrectly over and over again. Downstream lots of people with crisp T shirts. I just mess it all up. Yeah, this is m this is my way to destroy the T shirt folding industry.

Every and it's like suddenly in the future everything you buy is completely broken because they everyone trains the But this is everything this this is for everything. This is for making a cup of tea. What's that famous robotics challenge they have cracking an egg? Yeah. The delicacy to hold it and the speed to hit it and the precision to whatever. Yeah. But uh yeah, this is the this is the future. Hey, look, if you need extra cash Let it watch you photograph.

Hunts. And this is obviously transitory. So this is the training phase of the robotics. The real question is what are people individually going to do? So like I know you asked about the moon, we'll get it. That's fine. Looking at which jobs are going to be popped first by AI, and that doesn't even include robots. Yeah. So I I don't think that there's like gonna be a successful organized government system to solve this problem, to come in and be like, hey

we're gonna stop these industries. I mean they're gonna try. I mean New York just passed a law making medical advice, legal advice, all these other things illegal in um through AI tools. Which by the way, You gotta ask yourself the question, are they really gonna be able to do that? Because if all the models are open sourced and they're all available and I can run them locally, why wouldn't I just download a model, put it on my computer, and I can ask it legal questions?

burst through the door and say, David, what is that? Wha what what have you got on your computer there? You better not be looking at your health reports.

All of these legal efforts and government efforts to try and stall and stop technology, historically it's never worked. Like it's just not gonna work. Except when you have a limited resource like uranium, you know, for like nuclear fuel or something like that. But um But for like something like this, which is self replicating, it's software, it can go anywhere, it can be anywhere, it can fill any space, it's knowledge work.

Um, it's gonna be very hard to to stop it. So th the real question, and this is gonna be transitory for now, but the real question is gonna be which of the humans that are folding T shirts today are gonna have the spark in their brain that's gonna say, I should buy five robots, and run my own t-shirt folding business.

That's this challenge that I think humanity faces in this next evolution. We can talk about transhumanism too, which I think is going to be a forced adaptation, but particularly it's about agency. Taking ownership for how do you engage the future versus waiting for someone to tell you what to do next. That's gonna be a change of kind, not just a difference of degree, I think, that previously if you were someone who was mucking the horses in the streets of Manhattan

that job goes away, but there's a new business that comes up and your friend decides to go and work there. The agency of I am enough of a self starter with the sovereignty and the determination to go and do this thing That does feel like the bar is being raised and some people are gonna fall below that bar. I don't know if that's true.'Cause I do think every human has a degree of innate agency. It's programmed into us as humans. It's just generally been turned off.

Because we've created social systems that have told us, here's what you're gonna get next, and here's what you're gonna get next, and here's what you're gonna get next. Since we're children, we've been programmed by our education, by college, by the work system, by the economy, by the taxes. By the fact that the government's supposed to give me all this shit, every step of the way, I'm being told, do this, you'll get this, do this, you'll get this.

You've never been given the freedom as a human to operate. Like and I think this is fundamentally true with social systems. We've created government systems, financial systems, everything. We've been very severely limited as people.

I think one example that speaks positively to my point is what's happened with people making money on TikTok and Instagram and Shopify and Etsy. If if you told someone pick the time frame, fifteen years ago, that X number of millions of Americans would be making on average tens of thousands of dollars a year doing the things they're doing, posting photos of themselves in bikinis and at historic monuments on Instagram with with

you know, a a sports drink or whatever next to them, or people were making money podcasting like like with the scale that they are today. You're you're the prime example. or people were making money selling home goods and making 300 grand a year selling their custom cat blankets or pick, pick, pick, pick, pick these things, you would have never believed it, but every person has that in them.

Every person has that capacity in them to do something unique, to do something special, to take agency if they're given the right space to do it, and they're not told that you can't do it. Interesting point on that. I wonder how many people are going to have their agency diminish because of their reliance on AI. So I wonder if the very thing that's going to enable them is also going to be something. Yeah.

r that reduces their capacity to enact it. Right. And I think that that's one of the concerns. Anyway, the moon. Yeah. A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. Ninety-five percent of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard. But that's why Mementus Built. Fiber plus.

See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients. how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed in, everything else that you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential. Fiber Plus is a three-in-one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. And this

Cinnamon flavor is unreal. You might think fiber. Wow, I bet that tastes great. Well, yeah, actually it does. Doubters. Uh I really enjoyed this. Bestival Momentus offers a thirty day money back guarantee. So if you're not sure, you can buy Fiber Plus, try it for twenty nine days. If you don't love it,

And they ship internationally. Right now you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code ModernWisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-E-N-E-N-E-E- M-O-M-E-N-T-O US dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A check out. What's happening with the moon?

Um, well, so... I I think that, you know, there there's a big discussion, obviously, um, I would say largely led by uh pushed by Elon but but many others over time that, you know, we should expand humans beyond Earth and get to Mars and that's a good place to set up a colony and

Uh yada yada, right? Um Mars is not very habitable. We need to move a lot of material to Mars. But I think um If you look at the math, it is very likely the case that you can probably reduce your energy cost needs to move material to set up a colony on Mars by probably 100x. or more by making most of the material you need for Mars on the moon and shipping it from the moon to Mars. And the reason is the moon, unlike the earth, does not have an atmosphere.

One of the biggest uses of the energy when you're moving matter off the Earth is getting away from through the atmosphere, which drags or pushes the rocket back down, and gravity. So the moon is one-sixth the gravity of the Earth. So it takes much less energy to escape the gravitational pull of the moon than it does the Earth, and there's no atmosphere pulling you back.

So with AI and robotics, it is theoretically possible. And then if you look at moon dust and moon rock, it has all of the raw materials that we may need to build machines, to build housing units, to build habitation units. What's it constituent class? It's got aluminum, it's got silicon, it's got carbon. You can even go up to the poles and you can get hydrogen and oxygen from the ice up there. So you can melt the water at the poles.

run electricity through it, break it into hydrogen and oxygen, use the hydrogen and oxygen and the carbon in various chemical reactions. So you can theoretically make any substance you need, or any metal, or any material you need, that we can make here on Earth. So we can and should

build very large factories on the moon. And the the way that this would work is you basically can use solar power, right? Solar very deployable on the moon, lots of sunlight, no atmosphere, et cetera, good um good continuous energy flow, no clouds. And um and then you can use kind of battery storage, but the mechanism for moving material off the moon is not propuls uh uh propulsion. It's actually a mass driver, so electric rail gun. So think about like a train track.

You know, like these maglev trains? Yep. You know, think about like a Maglev train. And uh, you know, if you run the calculations, it would take about uh call it a nine kilometer long track to move one ton of material off of the moon and get it to Mars. Okay. So here's the thing. It doesn't actually even have to be in an angle. It just has to clear any craters or mountains. It's flat enough and that's escaped the loss.

Just escape velocity. So all you have to do is orient it correctly, put it on the right part of the moon, and orient it correctly. Right for the moon to basically uh aim. That's right. The moon's passing around. It would take yeah, it would take a couple megawatt hours of power. To push a ton of material down this rail track, it would take about four and a half seconds for it to move down the rail track and then hit. Four and a half seconds to move nine kilometers at time.

kilometers kilometers yeah so it is it ends up escaping at roughly call it twenty thousand kilometers an hour. And that's uh now uh if you're moving one ton of material, you would still need a couple hundred kilograms, call it about two hundred kilograms of of some sort of propulsion um To slow it down. Slow it down as it approaches the moon. But here's the other thing.

you could use moon rock as a heat shield for re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere or the Martian atmosphere. So you basically take moonrock, put it on the front, because you don't care if it burns away and goes away. Yep. It can just vaporize. So you need fifteen centimeters of moon rock on the front of this parcel.

you ship the parcel off this rail track, it goes towards Mars. It can hit a hundred Gs of acceleration while it's accelerating. Gets over there, you slow it down a little bit, and then it can actually enter the Martian atmosphere. The moon rock burns away and you've just delivered roughly seven hundred kilograms of material. And um you can run that every hour with uh solar panels that are roughly 500 kind of meters by 500 meters.

So, you know, pretty small kind of solar system, some batteries, some capacitors, and then you gotta build the rail. The rail you need about nine tons of material. So you gotta get a lot of material put out to get this this rail built. But again, the amazing thing about AI

is you can you can kind of think about it being self replicating in the physical sense as well as the the digital sense. You can put robots on the Martian surface with the necessary starting equipment that can make the next robot

that can then make the next robots that can then go do the mining, that can then go build the factories, that can then go build the rail, that can then go build the propulsion system and can then do the mining for you. And there's a lot of very valuable material on the moon that we can also ship back to Earth.

So I actually think the moon is gonna be a giant, giant, giant economy. And I think it's like one of these economies, like it's almost like the East India or like, you know, like when when you get over there, you don't realize how big it's gonna be'til the start.

But once it starts, the value of what you can do and the low cost nature of it because of AI now that you can have robots doing this stuff and you can have AI orchestrate a lot of work and you don't need to commit millions of people to it. And trillions and I mean you still need some money, but not trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. I think the moon is probably one of these like more under discussed in Silicon Valley kind of economic op grand economic opportunities a censor.

Space the next industrial revolution. There's a lot um that could happen on Earth too. So like um I think there's a lot. And I think Uh fusion will have a big role in that this this century. So people don't want to talk about fusion because everyone's all about solar all the time and Elon loves solar and blah blah blah. So it i everyone poo-poos fusion. So I'll I'll I'll talk about it in a second, but the cost if you get the cost of energy down to one cent a kilowatt hour.

It absolutely expands every economy. Like everything blows up. Like imagine if you just Currently. Well, it's in the US we're paying fifteen to forty cents a kilowatt hour for off the grid. Um, but nuclear power you uh you know, best case scenario is about five cents a kilowatt hour. Um and that's amortized when you take the cost of everything you gotta build and amortize it out and then your r your runtime costs, five to ten cents, but they're gonna sell it at like fifteen.

So like imagine if you could take power cost down to one hundredth of what it is today. the cost to make anything drops because now you've got robots. Robots can make stuff quickly and with no marginal cost, because the electricity is what runs the robots. So you could have a swarm of a hundred robots build you a mansion. How much would that cost? Like a ten thousand square foot crazy house. The cost of energy is nothing, so maybe having a crazy house could cost close to nothing.

Well, there's a robot printing machine that's just launching in Austin at South by Southwest this week. Making houses. Just yeah, house 3D printing. Gen one. Now imagine Gen six, right? And imagine energy cost is like zero. Um and imagine all that material production comes from. I want to live in Hogwarts. Fine, get the land. Like a lake coma, but I want to make my own lake coma, you know, like like no one else, like just like. Lake David.

Like David. Um But uh so so energy cost I think are gonna uh this this'll be the era when um fusion happens. Uh so fusion's this crazy like Um principle. It's this fundamental thing that drives the universe. If the sun is run on fusion, Fusion is when protons jam together. Okay, so the sun is so um Because it has so much mass. So when all this mass came together, all the matter starts bumping into each other and that creates Kinetic energy. That kinetic energy is heat.

And it's so dense because of the gravity, because of all the mass, that you've got this extremely hot, extremely dense plasma. Plasma means that it's so energetic that the electrons break away. Technically a fourth state of matter, right? It is yeah. Arguably five states of matter, right? Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, and then Einstein Bose condensate, which is crazy physics might be. You always have to one up me.

No, but it's always I actually think that one's more cool is why I said it. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um But the uh the the what happens in fusion is when two protons have enough energy and they get close enough, they jam together and they stick together. So one proton, you remember this like with an electron is hydrogen. Two protons is helium. Right. And then it's lithium and then beryllium and and so on.

So um protons jamming together forms a new nucleus, forms a new kind of element. It goes from hydrogen to helium, all the way up the periodic table of elements. So the more energy you have, the denser these things get. It requires more and more energy to get the stap. Now. When you fuse protons together and form a new element,

less than iron, it actually releases energy in the process. Anything greater than iron requires energy to make it stick together. That's like a cool feature of physics which You could get philosophical on why this is not. Iron's kind of like an equilibrium state in a weird way. It's it's actually related to the the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces and how they have a trade-off. There's a there's a threshold at which the repulsiveness

is greater because you have so many more protons. They're pushing each other apart. Yep. So they're pushing each other apart more than the benefit you get from getting them together. And so you actually have to put energy in to make heavier elements. And all the heavier elements on planet Earth came from a sun that exploded billions of years ago. Crazy. But um so

Fusion is how the sun makes energy. So every time proton and proton get together, they release some energy, and that's the light that we get from the sun. Constant fusion. So the the the challenge has always been can we do fusion on Earth? Can we just jam protons together and get and capture that energy? So the technology to do it is you basically spin, you know, this h these protons around in a plasma at a hundred million degrees Celsius.

Some people are using these like donut-shaped toroidals. Some people are now using these sort of weird, what are called stellarators. They've got crazy shapes. And much of the design of these systems on how do you get these protons to move fast enough. And the problem is when the protons get close and close together, they push each other apart. So you gotta use a magnetic field to squeeze these protons together so that they get closer and closer.

And then get them diffuse. The problem is as they get closer, the protons make their own magnetic field that pushes back and fucks up the magnetic field that you're trying to use to squeeze them together. And so it's this dynamical equilibrium problem. They just keep breaking and breaking and breaking. And you cannot get a stable plasma at that density. AI seems to be solving that problem because they're now using AI to train the control of the magnetic fields in a way that's working.

And they're now able to hold these magnetic fields for thirty minutes at a time out of China now or, you know, started out a few it went from like 17 seconds to a few sec a few longer to a few minutes. To 30 minutes in literally like the last two and a half, three years. Like that's how quickly they're ramping up in the ability to make this happen. There's about 70 startups doing this. Just to give you a sense of what this enables.

Basically, you could think about taking water, putting it into this machine, getting the protons to spin around, and then extracting energy from those protons jamming together. That energy turns into electricity. There's no nuclear

explosion, there's no risk of the whole thing melting down, there's no nuclear material, nothing's radioactive. It's it's a very clean way of generating energy. So it's been this kind of holy grail for the nine since the nineteen fifties when people first thought about it. It needs a different name. Yeah. What would you call it? It ju it can't have the word nuclear in it. They can't. Yeah. Maybe uh some people have said just call it fusion, some people have said call it L.

Too close to fishing. Yeah. People are gonna pattern match it already and they're gonna think I've heard i even me. Let's come up with a name, what do you think? I think something to do with the electromagnetic uh electromagnetic energy uh element of that that doesn't feel that feels kinda green. Yeah. That feels quite safe. Yeah. I don't expect that to explode. Yeah. Strong power, weak power, yeah. Protonic. Hunting

Or come up with something. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, but but anyway, I think that if you have nuclear in it, I think it's just such a contentious topic. Right. Yeah. Yeah, like nuclear energy is fission where you're taking heavy, heavy, heavy elements like uranium, breaking them apart, they're radioactive. The opposite. And you're getting the energy out because the heavier stuff becomes lighter, releasing that energy that it took to make it.

Um so this is different. And this you can I did the the math on this. Basically you could use a a swimming pool sized amount of ocean water to make all the electricity needed for an entire year for the planet Earth. That's what this can do. That's why it's so important that we get it done. Now when you do this.

And you it works. And we're very close to having this work at industrial scale. Next, everyone's always joked, oh, fusion's always like a decade away. It's yeah, it's, you know, maybe it's a decade away, maybe not, but it's gonna happen. Like we're progressing up this production curve. It's gonna happen. Are those thirty minute long runs energy positive, net positive? They're still requiring that energy in because of the setup and and so on. But the next phase will be to capture basically

The current systems aren't just protons. They put protons with neutrons, and the neutrons are what get energized into the wall to heat up the wall. And that's where they heat up water to turn a steam turbine. you know, like other people have other ideas that hey, maybe we shouldn't be using a steam turbine Isn't it mad that of all of the ways it's still rotate a thing attached to a dynamo? It is. It doesn't matter what the fanciness that occurs before it. Totally. It's just Dynamo and a fan.

That's another thing that should likely change this century is the um the move away from from that system. uh where we can do direct energy capture and conversion into uh electricity.'Cause you're trying to you're basically the reason you do that is you're trying to get electrons to move through a wire.

So you wrap a wire with magnets around a coil and you get the magnet thing to spin, the faster it spins, the more it moves the electrons through the wire. So that's the basis of that system. But there's other things that people have theorized.

So with this energy system, I think you're gonna like drop the cost of energy, unleash productivity, unleash economic opportunity. So that's another kind of technology that I would say is like very kind of posit future positive on like what's around the corner. Before we continue, most people in their thirties are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their twenties. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels

Somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer. The margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see. Mitochondria are the energy producers inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes, even if your habit

Stay strong. Mitopure from Timeline contains the only clinically validated form of urethylen A used in human trials. It promotes mitophagy, which is your body's natural process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and renewing healthy ones. In studies, this supported mitochondrial function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder, it's about actually supporting the cellular machinery.

underneath your training. If you care about staying strong into your thirties, forties and fifties and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now, you can get up to twenty percent off by going to the link in the description below or heading to Timeline.com/slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's Timeline.com slash modern wisdom.

And modern wisdom. A checkout. Just rounding out space, two things. Who owns the moon and who owns the resources on the moon? And secondly, if we're gonna start mining asteroids and mining the moon, what does that mean for the Earth's economy? Because I have to imagine that that's a pretty big

dice roll or at the very least you're adding dice to the game that you were already playing with and that's gonna make things interesting. Economic growth is one of these things that's very hard to contemplate intuitively, to fully grok intuitively because Like i if you if you add chips to a game, like we're playing poker. There's eight of us playing poker, and we suddenly increase our chip stack by like

10x. We're still playing poker. But um, you know, maybe we could tip more, right? Like maybe um the the amount of money we're now making gives us the ability to go buy a hundred dollar bottle of wine instead of two dollar coors lights, you know, like That's what ends up happening is as more chips come on the table. Now, the poker analogy is a very bad one because that's a zero sum game.

Economic growth comes for should come from productivity growth, not from money printing. Okay, much of our economic growth over the last couple of decades, one could argue, has come from money printing. We've just put more chips on the table. The house has made more chips, put'em on the table. But economic growth means that I went outside

And I made something. I made a new I I mined gold. Let's use gold mining as an example. I mined gold out of the ground. That's worth something because now I people can use it, they can trade it, they can sell it. So I'm being productive with my time. So the more productivity there is in the system, the more chips get made, the more the economy grows, the more everyone gets the ability to buy and sell more stuff. And everyone's labor, everyone's time is worth more, worth more.

And so everything grows. That's the benefit of true productivity. So productivity is like this best measure I would say of technology's advance on how technology advances social systems. The more productive we are, the more everyone's gonna benefit.

It feels like a unique kind of productivity to take raw materials that were maybe rare or at least didn't exist within what was a closed system. The Earth was a closed system. We weren't getting anything from off it unless we were hit by an asteroid. Right. And then bringing it back in. Right. That I I j is what happens to the iron price when we are bringing iron back from outside of what was predicted as a part of that?

Yeah. So think think I I would say think more about availability of iron versus the price. Like what it does is it makes iron more available, more abundant to everyone. And same with energy, right? When you increase energy through fusion, you make energy more abundant. The price comes down by 10x, but now everyone can use much, much more energy. Because the price is just indicative of the supply and the availability.

And everyone can and now everyone gets more access. This is why technology I don't know. Yeah. You're like an iron horde. I'm funny, when we walked in the studio, I was wondering why you had that blanket over that big pile of iron in the Correct. The parking lot. Don't look at that. Yeah, you're like your iron horde. You're like you're like a a Minecraft. Uh.

Um, but yeah, I mean abundance is the the name of the game, right? Like if we really are moving a productivity curve, energy costs are coming down, we're able to make more stuff with AI. It's not that some people are gonna get richer faster. That may happen.

But I don't think that's the problem. I think what really f uh functionally happens is everyone has more abundance. You can now instead of working sixty hours a week or a hundred hours a week when we all work you know, when when not we all, but like when Americans worked on farms, right? At the turn of the century, it was like 80% of people worked on a farm and now it's less than one percent.

So we don't have to spend the hundred hour work week working on the farm. In fact, the guy working on the farm is in a John Deere automated tractor with air conditioning. He's on TikTok while the thing drives itself. I trust me, I work in the industry. Like that's

It's awesome. They still work their asses off, not to diminish it, but like it's a very different type of farming. And yes, it is still back backbreaking work, but there's a lot of automation. And so that created an abundance of food, an abundance of calories, an abundance of availability. And we drop

the number of people globally that live on less than twelve hundred calories a day for a year, which is how we define malnourished, um, you know, from billions of people down to six hundred million. It's come back up recently because of various supply chain issues post COVID, but um Well the number one uh type of malnutrition worldwide is now obesity, not starvation. That is a problem. Yeah, it's abundant. It's excess.

There's tw there's twice as many people that are malnourished through their obesity than through their starvation. Uh final thing, who owns

The moon. Astropolitics is fascin. Do you know anyone that does astropolitics? I want to bring someone on the show. Yeah, that's a good idea. I want to talk about it. I think it's so cool. Do you own uh'cause geostationary above the net of your country? It's kind of yours. Depends on what the treaty says. Kind of.

As a country or as an individual, I could say anything I want. If I move to the moon and put a flag down and said, F you guys, I've got lasers and I'm gonna protect. This is my part of the moon, who's gonna stop me? Like I don't care about being on Earth anymore. You can't arrest me on Earth anymore. You can't take my money out of the bank anymore. That's that's a frontier. Have you ever read Seven Eaves by Neil Stevenson? Love that book.

Fuck. I one of my most re read fiction books. And uh in that they go up to the uh space station, Izzy. and they need to come up with an entire new form of law. Right. What happens if somebody commits a crime in space? Right. And I never thought about the fact that well

Especially if you've got people from multiple different countries. Right. Well, the way that we deal with it is X, the way that we deal with it is Y. And this is an entire new environment to work in. So it needs to be built from the ground floor up and people got different priors. Right.

Right. Right. Right. Totally. And you see that movie Ad Astra? Yeah. There's that scene where he's like and there there's like the pirates on the moon, you know, they're like shooting at him and he has to like get away. Like that may be what happens. Bloom pirates. a battleground on the moon for who has territorial rights and and so on.

Look, there's so much resource availability. That's the thing about abundance. It's like maybe wars go away. I'm very this is where one of Because scarcity uh d uh uh scarcity drives was. Do I really need to be fighting with Iran if I don't care as much about oil and energy availability? Look at what happened during twenty twenty, twenty twenty one when crypto was on a bull run, everyone was friends. Look at what happens when the price drops. Everyone fucking hates each other.

Every resource, right? And so, like as resources become more abundant, lower cost, everyone's getting what they want. We're all vacationing in Hawaii, working 10 hours a week. That's where things go. This is why I mentioned the hundred hours. Like you go 100 to 60 to 40 to 30. In France, they like have a law. It's like thirty. Now a lot of the Democrats in the US are like, let's all work 30 hours a week and like let's drop Fridays and all this sort of stuff.

Let me a country try a four day work week. I think France, doesn't it? I think it might have been friends that tried the four day work week. Yeah. Yeah. And um, you know, that's one of the measures of prosperity. is like how much do you have to work to be able to live a good life? And so if you can take more time with your family and more time to explore your personal interests and you don't have to do labor, whether it's

on a computer or in a field, uh, that's a good way to think about like are we all prospering? Are we being able are we g being given freedom to do more things rather than being caged into doing the things we don't want to do?

Speaking of prospering, how far off are we from age reversal, do you think? That's one I'm most excited about. Um So have you looked at Yamanaka factor there have you talked about this on your show before? Uh David Sinclair's been on and I know that he's sort of tangentially associated with Yeah. Assume no, do the thirty thousand foot view of the Yamanaka factor. So every cell in our body has the same DNA. Okay. Uh we know that. And the DNA is

in every cell because of a process called mitosis. Every time we make a new cell, from the time we're in the womb to today, we're making new cells, both uh our entire DNA gets copied over into every cell. But what makes my eye look and act differently than my skin. If it's got the same DNA, how's it different? How's it different than my brain or my tongue or my feet? They're all, they're all, those are different cells. There's different cells and different organs in the body.

Those cells are different because the genes in the DNA are on or off. So there's a bunch of switches, and the switches are either on or off. And that creates cellular differentiation. It's what makes one cell different from another cell, the eye cell, different from the heart cell, different from the skin cell or the lung cell.

And the switches that are on or off are these little molecular switches. They're molecules that sit on top of the DNA and they keep that gene from working. It blocks it off. And then the other gene is open. And when it's open, that means that your cell is making RNA copies of that gene and turning it into a protein. Zero and ones. zeros and ones and each gene makes a unique protein. The proteins that then come out

Do a bunch of stuff. They're machines. They're molecular machines. And they're constantly doing all this stuff in your cell. And that's what makes every cell different is what genes are on and what genes are off. And the complexity of this is astounding. If you were to think about a cell being the size of Manhattan, so imagine a cell is a city the size of Manhattan with 500 story tall buildings. That's how big it would be. And every person is a protein.

There's ten billion people living in this five hundred story tall building, island of Manhattan, going in between the buildings up and down all day long, building stuff together, never sleeping, always working, running into each other, having coffee, making stuff together, breaking stuff together. working ten billion of us th those are the proteins in the cell. In one cell, running around doing stuff for eighty years.

That's one second in one cell. That's how complex this is. So the proteins that are on or off matter a lot. And then they make stuff. So that's why the eye cell does totally different stuff than the brain cell or the heart cell. As we get older, This is the current science on this. It looks like what happens is we have DNA breaks. DNA gets damaged from radiation and sunlight and bad eating and alcohol and all the other shit.

As those DNA breaks happen, your cell actually fixes the DNA. It's very good at fixing it. Goes in, there's a bunch of proteins. They're the worker proteins that are repaired proteins. They go in, they fix the DNA. Every time the DNA gets fixed, there's a chance that those ones and zeros, those ons and offs, get moved around a little bit. And as they get moved around over time, they get moved to the wrong place.

So what ends up happening over time is that the wrong genes get turned on and the right genes can get turned off in a cell. And then that cell stops working right. Stops the eye cell stops doing what it's supposed to be doing. The heart cell stops. getting the right electrical cascade to flow through the other cells. All of the cell the the skin cell becomes a little wrinkled and eventually if enough of those cells have those epigenetic is what it's called, epigenetic errors,

You start getting wrinkles, your heart stops beating as well, you go blind, all these sorts of things happen with aging. It looks like the root of all disease may be aging. And aging is a disease. So it is a disease rooted in the fact that the epigenetic factors, these little molecules, move around in the wrong place. That's what we discovered is basically aging. In two thousand six a guy named Shinya Yamanaka.

Found that he could take four proteins and put them on a cell. They would go into the cell and they would move all of those epigenetic markers, those ones and zeros. To make that cell into a stem cell, which can then be turned into any other cell in the body. So that was the magic thing he won the Nobel Prize for. In 2016, another scientist published a series of papers showing that instead of putting a lot of those four proteins on the cell, you could put a small amount.

And if you put a small amount, instead of resetting all those molecular markers and making that cell back into a stem cell, what it actually does, it just moves those markers back to where they're supposed to be to make it a young cell. And suddenly that retinal cell becomes like a young retinal cell. The skin cell becomes a young skin cell. The heart cell becomes a young heart cell. All of these cells get reset.

And they did this in mice and they made the mice age to like 250 plus years old. They put it in monkeys, the wrinkles went away. And they've done it in um specifically applying it to retinal cells in the eye and reverse blindness. This is Sinclair's stuff, right? Sinclair has one of these companies that's in clinical trials now. And there's dozens of others. Altos Labs is like one of the most funded startups in history that no one talks about.

Um, they've raised, you know, close to probably ten billion dollars at this point uh to pursue these technologies. But basically what this means is we are now discovering not just the four proteins, but a whole bunch of other little molecules that we can put into a cocktail. Either we're gonna drink it, take it as a shot, uh uh, or take it as a pill, it will get into our cells and it will reset the epigenetic of that cell to make it young again.

They're starting with targeting diseases, like a particular like like blindness or glaucoma in the eye, or, you know, rheumatoid arthritis or some other heart issue, and they're applying these factors to the cells in that tissue only. Locally. Locally. But over time, what'll end up happening is this becomes a systemic treatment. And they're already doing it in animal models.

And then you can either do it continuously or what I think will end up happening is we'll probably have a system whereby these factors will be continu when I say the word factor, I mean protein. These proteins can be continuously made and released inside our body as they're needed. So we maintain our youth.

And we will live theoretically for as long as we want. That's where this is headed. And the technology shows now that we can do this in animals, we can re redose them, redose them and keep them in Yeah. Yeah, this is the mouse the mouse model where they made these mice the equivalent of like having someone live like two hundred plus years old.

You know, and this is like so early. They haven't even optimized the molecules. They haven't optimized how you deliver the molecules. They haven't optimized the dosing. They haven't optimized the method of the dose. Like there's all these techniques that are gonna be developed on top of that. For every one year we can extend average human lifespan, we're adding tens of trillions of dollars to GDP.

Right. So this is also another big economic driver. But it's not just how long people live, it's how healthy they are and how energetic they are and how happy they can be and they can now go out and not feel all the pain and have the disease.

you know, theoretically this can lead to a reversal in rates of cancer proliferation, or reversal in diabetes, or reversal in many of these other diseases that are fundamentally rooted in this kind of failure of your epigenome, the the markers that are turn your genes on and off. So this is a technology category that I am like I think is one of these other things that you can kind of think about the compounding effect, free energy, right? Like AI automation. Um

uh and you know, infinite labor, uh, for people to do all the things they want to do and potentially living forever. I mean, you start to think about how these all kind of compound. That's why I'm excited about the future. Like these very quickly become these sort of compounding effects that drive us into a happier tomorrow.

And then again, it becomes a question of abundance. How do you want to spend your time? You know, again, a hundred years ago I don't think people would have had the job option of being a yoga instructor or being a podcaster or being a wedding photographer or, you know, go down the list. Like there's so many things that people have found joy in doing with their time and they can be productive doing it. I think more of that starts to happen tomorrow.

And it's less of the like you gotta go work the corporate shitty job on a trading floor in a corporate office at a cubicle or, you know, in a factory or all the things that maybe we will look back one day and say, Hey, that was kind of limiting human potential. Like maybe humans could do a lot more and maybe they should and these shifts to more abundance give us that opportunity to do that.

A quick aside, look, you know sleep matters, but let's be real, most nights you're probably not getting the sort of sleep that's actually restorative. Eight Sleep Pod 5 fixes that. It's a smart cover that you throw over the top of your mattress that actively cools or heats. Each side of the bed up to 20 degrees. They've even added a temperature-regulating duvet and pillowcase so you and your partner can sleep at your preferred temperatures covered.

head to toe, like some temperature controlled mummy. Plus, it's got upgraded sensors that run health checks when you're asleep, tracking things like abnormal heartbeats and breathing issues and sudden HRV changes. There's a built in speaker for white noise.

The autopilot feature learns your sleep patterns, makes real-time adjustments to improve your sleep, it even detects when you're snoring and lifts your head a few inches to help you breathe better. That is why ASleep is clinically proven to add up to an hour of quality sleep per night. And best of all, they have a 30 day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for twenty nine nights, and if you don't like it, they will just give you your money back.

Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to$350 off the pod five by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's e-i-g-h-tsleep.com slash modern wisdom. And modern wisdom. A checkout. How far do you think we're off from getting to the stage where we can do age reversal?

One decade, five decades? Way less than that. Way less than that. We are in clinical trials now on several of these cocktails. There's always a a risk in going from animals to humans, but we've done it with human cells in um uh in vitro, in a in a petri dish, and we see the effects that we are expecting to see. So we have a lot of reasons to believe that you know, over the next ten to twenty years um more of this starts to proliferate.

You've heard Peter Diamandis' idea of longevity escape velocity, right? That you need to stick about every year that you live means that you're going to live a little bit longer. But that when you cross a particular threshold You just need to stick about until this happens essentially, or whatever the equivalent is, whatever the technology is. Yeah. Yeah. It allows you to extend lifespan indefinitely. You just hold on. the best long-termist view for looking after your health. Yeah.

Now is not the time to fuck it. Right. Totally. Because In the past there wasn't really any reason to stick about. Yeah, you're gonna live eighty years or seventy years or sixty years, but y you know, you're playing around with fives and tens. Yeah. Whereas if the difference is between eighty and a hundred or d eighty and one twenty. Yeah.

Yeah. You're like, hey, keep it together. And by the way, a lot of like the number one thing you can do to fix your epigenome, which you can do without taking these drugs, is exercise. Fasting. Well, fasting helps. Yeah. Uh fasting does have an effect, but exercise, like exercise releases molecules that in many cells in your body will go in and start to

address the epigenome and make you more youthful. And then there's other things that you can start to take. Some of this peptide stuff that people are crazy about has shown that it has an effect. Um, some of the I I don't wanna be prescriptive on these things. Um But there's a lot of ways that uh you can start to kind of edge your way before all the big clinical stuff is done and and the big, you know, products come out to market.

What do you think happens to careers and retirement and family structures in a world where people live over a hundred and twenty years? It's hard it's hard to say. I mean, you know, I I could I think it's very sad that like I l love my kids. Like I w I was uh uh with my daughters um and my wife. We were doing uh

Uh, what are the three wish if you got a if a if you had a a genie come out of a lamp and you had three wishes, what was your three wishes? The first thing my daughter said is I wish everyone in our family could live forever. Uh, that was her first wish. And I was like, such a sweet wish. But I really do think that there is like this incredible, um you know, a human element to this technology. It's not just like technology for technology. Disembodied, sterile.

Yeah, it's like it's not a pharmaceutical drug. It's like It's a it's an opportunity to give everyone more time to do the things they want to do. I really think this idea that like humans don't reach their potential is like a very fundamental truth we're gonna come to at some point that for a long time, maybe because we had to, we created organized social systems to achieve things as a group, but limited ourselves individually.

And I think that that's what maybe changes in the future is that these technologies and this level of abundance gives each of us the ability to achieve outcomes and have like things that maybe we didn't realize we could have. Uh, because we had to make all these trade offs to make things work in a social system, in a society. Yeah, I wonder just how much of a challenge it's going to be for people to

To face more spare time. I know that you guys did really great coverage about a year and a half ago of the two UBI experiments that went on. Yeah. Is that not an indication that maybe there's gonna be a crisis of meaning when we start to give people'cause that th those weren't good, right? No, d I mean UBI inevitably, like all welfare systems, will fail. Why?

Um, two things. One is it uh creates a system whereby people will always want more. So it becomes this kind of self fulfilling thing. It create it makes people feel like there's a disincentive to go have agency, right? It creates a enough of a if it's giving you enough passivity to uh to explore yourself and and and your potential and and engage the world to find your potential. You're not

you're not given that incentive. Um, but the the more fundamental issue is f simply inflation. Um UBI, whether it comes about through uh giving people money f as taxes from other people, Or whether it comes about from money printing inevitably leads to an increase in money supply, which makes everything more expensive.

So there's a class of things that everyone that's getting the UBI check will buy and those things will all get more expensive. Right? It it it's it's a it's a terrible feature of of the economy, of like economic principles. Like those things will get more expensive. So I think that that's um That's why those things simply don't work. But look, I'm optimistic. I think that uh Again, I I keep going back to this idea that there's this

this this digital universe that we've created where people can kind of build like Twitch streamers, another good example. People going on uh Patreon, people going on, I mean pick your platform and they're finding ways to uh to explore their interests and they can live on it. Like they can make money doing it because other people value what they're doing. Massage therapists, yoga instructors and Pilates instructors, dog walkers, I value those people.

They're valuable, like and people like doing that work. So there's I think that there's more to to come in terms of what's next that We always like wanna look backwards and we don't want to think about, hey, the chart is uh the path is uncharted. And, you know, we should just get on the ocean and we'll figure out what's over there.

What about transhumanism? Um, okay, let's talk about so superintelligence I think is a manifestation of AI at scale, meaning that there's intelligence, uh features of intelligence that in isolation or aggregation exceed human capacity. Um It's just not general yet.

I don't know if there's a I I don't know if I subscribe to any of the definitions. Um What do humans do in a world where the AI anticipates everything you're gonna do next, or knows everything you're gonna think, or has a sense of um How to do things better than you do. Um I think we're gonna be forced. To adapt. So this idea of like humans living in their natural state should be back to their natural state.

It's it's such a weird thought because we live in buildings, you know, like we don't live under a tree. Even when you pick berries off a tree and eat the berries from the tree, you're breaking nature. Like there's an aspect of a continuum of like, what is nature? What is the human and what are we doing? So I I I don't love the term transhumanism, but I do like this idea that like this superintelligence capacity needs to be harnessed by humans.

I think there's probably two things that happen, and the second one I'm going to say is very controversial. The first one I'll say is pretty well described, which is this kind of human-machine interface.

Um, you know, Elon's got Neuralink where they put the wires in the brain, but the wires, I saw a good presentation from Max Hodak at his company, Science uh Company Corporation or whatever. You should have him on. He's great. Um, but he worked, he started Neuralink, he was the old CEO at Neuralink. And he's got the system where they're putting like a digital uh device in your retina. Put a screen in your eye. Yeah. And so the screen

Um it's uh solar. He's got this whole power system in it. It's incredible. Uh when your eyes open. Powers up. And then it releases an electrical signal that triggers the neurons on your the inside of your retinal cells that then trigger your brain and it passes the signal and you can suddenly see. And it's a very thin, like paper thin kind of um

Device that goes under your retina in your eyeball. It's an outpatient procedure to put it in. He's in clinical trials on this. It's incredible. So it's restoring blindness. But you can kind of think about these interfaces that aren't about sticking a wire into the brain, which I don't think is gonna be where things end up, but I think it's likely gonna end up a little bit more like and people are gonna view this as being extremely dystopian.

Um, so I'll give you the two versions of it. Some people would say Neo and the Matrix, where you kind of connect the digital thing, but the other one is um Avatar where they have that ponytail thing that they connect to. Um, but there'll probably be some interface where the chip to brain interface is just a soft neurons. Like it's some sort of system that can connect with the brain without going into the brain. You don't need to go into the neural tissue.

Theoretic now, I'm not super optimistic and I don't get excited about this. Let me be clear. I'm not like, oh my God, we all need to connect to like we all need to be like the matrix. So don't think about me as some dystopian, crazy technocrat. Um, but I think my my point is someone will do it. And then you'll be able to think, I want to fly a helicopter like Neo did in the Matrix, and you'll be able to fly a fucking helicopter.

And um you'll wanna access information quickly using the superintelligence that exists in the silicon. So you wanna solve a physics problem because you're you know, trying to build something on the moon and it and you you sort of like access that information, you look up and you're like, okay, you have the answer you need. You're not looking at a screen to get the answer. And so you're you're able to kind of tap into, and look, do we all want to be connected all the time? I don't know.

I I don't know if that destroys humanity or like is gonna be an adaptation of humanity in an era when there's now a species that might be more intelligent than humanity in aggregate. I I don't know. And so I'm not trying to be too like deterministic about this stuff.

But I think that that human-machine interface outcome is very likely gonna happen and whether or not people want it or embrace it, you'll have to have the benefits. You'll have to go through an exercise where it's lightweight, easy to put on, maybe it sits above your ear and it works.

And it doesn't need to kind of like be plugged into your physical brain. Maybe it uses a transmission where we can connect it to your brain and you can start to think things and get information that you want and and and so on. And suddenly you become super intelligent.

And you have all of this capacity that you didn't have before. That's one one one path that we might walk. Another path that we might walk, which is extremely dystopian from most people's points of view, but um may end up becoming a reality because of what we're seeing happening in China and other places. is um transgenic humans where basically right now you can look at an embryo

And I don't know if you've seen this controversial app where they'll sequence the DNA of your embryos if you've got frozen embryos uh for uh IVF, right? Which is a common procedure where you've got uh effectively a an embryo that that's frozen. It's not yet fertilized, but you can sequence the DNA and determine what genetic traits does that embryo have.

I'm a big investor in herasite, who is the most evidence based one of these. Okay. So the ones that have used the Downs test plus the best geneticist on the planet to fill the gaps in. So you model the uh genome of mother and dad. then you take the sample from the embryo and between those they can triangulate with real accuracy what the embryo is. You have here's your ten harvest or your fifteen harvest or whatever, and there's your dashboard. Totally. And we've got immune function, we've got

IQ, we've got externalizing behavior. And uh yeah, Johnny Anomaly and Herasite are the the best at this. And I I'm I don't think it's dystopian at all. I think I think that crumbly genome and If you if you say that selecting against negative traits is good, then it seems to me to be philosophically consistent to say that selecting for positive traits is

Everyone's got a line. The further I walk this conversation, the more you're gonna more people are are gonna on the audience gonna say, You crossed my line. Right. So the first is should we even be looking at the DNA of embryos? Already do. Right. Prenatal screening. Not only prenatal screening, but let's say anybody that's ever done IVF, even if you didn't know. The doctor gets a m microscope and has a look at the embryos and just eyeballs it. Yes.

Yeah, that one that one looks like the roundest. Right. And we don't we don't I mean number you you don't want number seven. Like number seven. We can't we can't we can't do number seven. Or it wouldn't even take. We know that it wouldn't take.

It's not going to implant correctly. So he was already doing it. So I'm like, right, okay, you're just taking it from some guy. It's like an an umpire in uh MLB that's just eyeballing it and then eventually they're gonna get removed and it's gonna be robots. Totally. And you go, okay, well I'm glad that the robot got it accurate a hundred percent of the Hundred percent. That is the next line.

The next line would be sequencing the DNA and looking at the the genome and looking at the genetics and saying, Hey, I want blue eyes or brown eyes. And some people say that's dystopian. That's in the Black Mirror episode. Well, the I the the eyes thing's got a bad rap when it comes to selection. Right. That's right. Okay. Fair enough. Tall or short? smart, not smart. Suddenly there's a line some people are like, Well, you shouldn't be doing Or blind not blind, definitely.

Um, the next line is what's going on. controversially in China where they're using gene editing. The enhanced. Enhanced so they'll take an existing human trait, a human allele, and so they'll basically take you from brown eye to blue eye, or they'll take you from dumb to smart. creating a foreign gene. They're just making a tweak to your DNA to give you the trait that you could have randomly gotten in the embryo, but you just didn't.

Is that what the guy did with the twins that turned out to be triplets? There was a conversation. There's a but I think that's the guy that got arrested or got in trouble. Correct, yeah, twenty nineteen, yeah, I think. Yeah. You know that there was a third one? I didn't realize there was a third. Pretty sure, Jerry, can you just Google oh uh Chat GPT? How many babies were born from the CRISPR editing? In China.

Was it two or three? Because I swear that there was a third one. So after all of that I mean I might eat humble pie here and have completely misremembered it. But um You can also edit yourself out. Uh I'll I'll I'll own my failures. I'll own my failures here. I've said worse things on the internet. Um but yeah, I I swear that not only did he do this thing and he couldn't believe it and it's the first time this has ever happened and it's so

And there was uh there was two of them. And there was a fucking third one. I swear that there was a third one. Come on, Jared, prove me right here, brother. This is like a Three babies. Well there were three babies. A third gene edited baby was later confirmed through court documents. Fucking yes. Well not I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm gonna celebrate it. I'm right. Pro gene editing babies?

Uh and he edited the embryos using CRISPR Cas9 to make them resistant to HIV. Exactly. Exactly. So so the the HIV resistant allele, which is the genetic trait, is a known trait. So he just made a couple of changes, confirmed that nothing else was changed. took that forward. So should we give children or should we give embryos? These enhancements are

Where we're not introducing new DNA, what we're basically saying, hey, randomly you could have gotten this trait and you didn't. But now we're just gonna make sure you get it and then stack this up. And then if you do that, how many traits are we willing to give to an embryo?

Should I make every embryo superhuman? Should I make every embryo should I have a bunch of kids where I got one that's really good at sports, one that's really good at music, one that's r really good at podcasting? I mean, you pick your poison. Well, sometimes you can put it in all three into one person. The super super Yeah. And the British action. I don't think that's genetic. Yeah. Um okay, so now okay, so so that might be a line that many people are gonna

Hey, I don't want to cross into that. And you could debate that philosophically. Why would you not want that? If you're willing to do the other things, where like it's a spectrum. Why are you going that far? And there's a lot of philosophical discourse around this. Now the final one. The final one is transgenic. And this is where you put a gene or a trait into the human that it doesn't naturally have.

that the human would not have l been born with, no matter how many sperm or how many egg combinations you put together, you would not have come up with this gene. Regardless of who the parents were? Correct. For example being able to see infrared. Right. Okay. And so this is where you make X Men, right? And The capacity to do this historically was like, no way, impossible, but now in many of these, there arguably could be the capacity to do this. And I'm not arguing for it.

I'm just saying that it's likely that this is going to be a limit that's going to get tested at some point here in the near future, where we are going to have a conversation. about how do humans keep up in an era in a world of superintelligence? And are there certain traits like that that can enable us to either have a better performance against the superintelligence, either superintelligent humans?

or a relationship with the superintelligence via some mechanism that allows us to connect with the superintelligence or control it better or what have you or the all the digital AI that's out there. or other tools or techniques that or sorry, other um phenotypes, physical characteristics that might allow us to better survive on Mars.

Great conversation. What was the guy's name? It wasn't Christopher Mason. That was the guy that was talking about space. Who was the dude that I did the episode with last week that we put out? Scott, somebody, the guy about Mars. Um I I had this fucking phenomenal Scott Solomon. Yeah, Scott Solomon, unbelievable evolutionary biologist who's applied

Evolutionary biology thinking to what we're going to need to do to be able to survive on Mars. Radiation, what happens to bone density? But if you've got the bone density lost, How do women give birth? Right. You're gonna have to do every child by Caesarean C section. But over time if you have C section you get narrower hips, you get bigger baby heads, you almost reverse evolution of where we got through like

just endlo well it needs to be underground'cause if we're underground in Mars then it means that we're going to be protected naturally by the terrain from the radiation. But if you're underground, what happens to melanin in the skin and what happens to vitamin D levels and we've got artificial light and what happens to what's the psychological profile of these people is that

I'm like sat there just a f virtual episode and my fucking mind was this is a sleeper episode. It was so fucking good. Yeah. Such a sleeper episode. But um yeah, i i can we engineer it was uh And so remember like transgenics we use in plants. Put the word trans at the start of anything after the last six years and it's gonna Let me uh

Well I don't want to say GM GMO people'cause that's got a worse name. Yeah. Like if I say the GMO person you just shoot'cause I used to work in Monsanto, so you know like That that gives me my double evil uh scientist credibility. But there's um there's likely gonna be a a situation where they're gonna dis discover this because what we're now discovering

A lot of like the human biology, like we talked about all the genes that are on or off. How do they all work? How do all those proteins work together? I described eighty years of 10 billion proteins interacting in a place the size of Manhattan, 500 story tall. bumping into each other, doing stuff. That's how we do stuff in a cell for one second. So there's a regulatory network where all these proteins are doing stuff in a way that we can't model. We don't understand.

Isn't it mad that that just doesn't switch off one day of all of the humor? Yeah, that it's just four or fours and you sort of blue screen of death yourself for a bit. Cold temperatures will do that. That's that's why we can freeze biological tissue and then boot it back up is it'll just stops all that act'cause it's actually the thermodynamics. It's the uh the kinetic energy of the proteins. It's random. The proteins are just bouncing around in the cell.

And they randomly will bump into stuff and do stuff. It's amazing to think about like hu like i there's no way that you could think that, that you can realize that and not think that the universe is a simulation. You know, it's just like it's it's literally just chaotic ensembles of molecules that randomly do these incredible things that we look at and we're like, I can move my finger. It's like The craziest shit.

It's the same as when you realise that most of matter is empty space, but if I do this And doesn't pass through the tape. Right. Fucking awesome. Right. And the fact that it's all quantum anyway, which means that it could tunnel through anything at any point in time. Waiting for that. Well here's another fucked up um thing to think about.

You've heard of like quantum entanglement. So, you know, you can entangle two particles and move them apart, change the state of one and the other one will change instantaneously on the other side of the universe theoretically. There's reasons to believe that it might be the case that every particle of a particular type is entangled with every other particle.

And I'll just let that settle for a second, because if that were true, then you could theoretically every particle every time any particle changes anywhere in the universe, it's affecting every other particle in the universe. It's kind of like a panpsychism, but for uh a a connectivity, like a membrane that everybody is a part of. Or it might be the case that progression in the universe is actually like a think about a quantum state that's changing.

And then space and time are a manifestation of that change. That's why entropy exha that's why there is a progression in one direction. And it might just be that, you know, because'cause space and time are defined by the relationship between particles. And it may be the case that if all the particles are entangled, that there's just this one thing that just changes and then all of space and time is a feature. It's like a universal clock. Yeah.

It's a whole nother way of thinking about our plates in the universe. How did we get here?

Where's your line? Yeah, okay. Transitors, you have from uh GMO people to uh IVF shouldn't happen. Do you have a do you have an ethical line for that? Yeah. Um, I definitely think that we can be very defined around the CRISPR stuff where we can turn we can change a gene to make someone healthier or enhanced. And I actually I don't have a philosophical disagreement with giving someone the ability to not just like turn off disease, but to say, hey, I want this person to have

the trait that it they did they didn't randomly get from me or like inherit. I think that's that's fine. How do you stop people? But by the way, I'll say there's like there's a whole bunch of therapeutic treatments that we're doing now that are doing what I described in that final stage. With an adult human. Right. in uh uh Prospera with the guys when Brian Johnson got that. Right.

And so you could take that as a gene that makes a protein that you're you know, you could theoretically use mRNA to do it, but it but it's short lived. And you could put a plasmid, a gene, and put it in your body and it will make a protein that gives you strength. Whatever it is.

But that is like nursery school, go to like university PhD level, and what we're learning about all the interaction between all the proteins is we could come up with a set of genes that if I put them into you, they will make you a hundred times smarter. Would you get that j that shot? I would say. I'm choosing for me, I think what becomes interesting is when parents are choosing for their kids. I think that's right. I think that's the right com that's the right ph philosophical framing.

Yeah, yeah. technology and it's available to be elected in the same way as we don't let people get tattoos before they're eighteen or whatever. Then all right. So for me, currently, uh Johnny from Herasite uh who again I can't fucking shout out enough. Like he's so good at communicating this stuff and herasite rules. Um that line up to embryo selection. So I'm happy. I I see no philosophical issue.

with uh choosing from the harvest that you've already done. IVF's already been and gone. Perhaps that's a bit of anchoring bias for me that uh I might have thought twice about what IVF meant had I been born a hundred years ago. But

Right. It's here. And I I I can't go back. I can't cognitively take myself out of it. I think up to the point where here's your fifteen, pick from your fifteen, we're already eyeballing it. That seems to compel me in the direction that this is already being done. When it gets to We're gonna choose from the genes that you could have had. Right. Then when it gets to we're gonna change them, and then when it gets to we're gonna create them.

I I'm uh as yet uh morally unconvinced. Right. So you can you can pick, but you can't change. Right. I and I think that's probably where we are today. And maybe we're maybe you're a little more progressive like than most people, I would say. I think most people would still object to that. I think the overton window changes when if if the the the solution I offered you where I give you a shot that puts a plasmid, which is a gene, in your body or integrates that plasmid into your cells.

'Cause I do think that's ultimately where that age reversal stuff is gonna come from. I think we're gonna end up putting a series of genes in plasmids into our body. They're gonna go into our cells and they're gonna self regulate those cells to make them live forever.

Um, when we end up doing that as a mainstay and everyone's getting that shot and everyone's living forever and that becomes kind of a thing that everyone's like, yeah, of course we're boosting our lifespan with these genes. Like this totally makes sense. That's when people say, Well, if we're doing it to ourselves and we're all doing it, like why don't we just do it to every embryo?

And that's when people will start to and that that's probably many decades from now. But I think that's where you can start to think about how the Overton window shifts at one point. When it becomes less about this like, that is crazy because if everyone's doing it as an adult And it's totally safe and normal and it extends lifespan. And bring it back down to doing it for the children. Uh yeah. I get the sense that any ickiness that people have around embryo selection

Specifically for positive traits. Everybody's already pretty much on board with embryo selection against negative traits. Yeah. Right. Huntingtons, et cetera. The Ashkenazi community are already like very deep in this because of their genetic profile. Yeah.

I think very quickly all of the people who either are blank slatists, d deny behavioral genetics, don't think heritability is a thing, think that embryo selection for IQ is just rebranded eugenics, all of those people typically quite well educated. uh probably quite liberal and left leaning. Uh they care about the outcomes that their kids get. And if these

slightly more right of center fucking hicks that have managed to cobble fifteen grand together to get their IVF done and then a little bit more to get her somebody else to to to do their their their um profiling. If their kids are outstripping theirs in school and in sports

because well, the immu uh their immune function was the best of the ones that were available and there's lowered rates of autism or there's lowered rates of A D D or there's lowered rates of depression. They've got a happier, more flourishing life. Uh I think very quickly Parents are going to look at it and go, Well, why did I read all of those parenting books? Why did I work so hard to try and give my kids the best future that I could? And I'm now

leaving behind the Jeffrey Miller said this fucking great quote. It's like every single parenting book on the planet could be replaced with the power of one behavioral genetics book. That your kids are made up of the raw materials of the person that you make them with.

infinitely n not infinitely, sorry, that would be incorrect. Fifty percent of everything you are on average is genetically inherited, including your psychological profile, and for physical traits significantly more. Like very unlikely you're gonna be born black with two white parents. Um therefore If you just understand the behavioural genetics of the situation, I think that lots of people are gonna get on board. Yeah.

That's right. And as soon as it becomes a competitive uh game, this race to the top, not race to the bottom, is gonna happen and people are gonna go, Well now the thing that's interesting, I think's cool, two wrinkles that I spoke to Johnny about the last time we sat down. First one is basically buyers remorse from parents, this sense that

because I was so consciously involved in the decision to choose this child. Yeah. If any negative outcomes occur because of that kid, I think that there's the potential for parents to blame themselves or for the kid to blame the parents if they were to find out. And the second one that I think is kind of interesting is parents are likely to

regress or converge on a small bucket of traits that they think would be optimal to give their kid. But Spencer Greenberg did this fantastic study, huge big study. IQ is Yeah. not it is moderately negatively correlated with life satisfaction. Higher IQ, lower life satisfaction and you have to assume people with higher IQs are less likely to go to jail, less likely to be addicted, less likely to be homeless, more likely to get married, more likely to complete a a a high powered degree. Um

Okay, so all of those things would increase life satisfaction. So the impact of IQ on life satisfaction is so negative that it offsets the objective life improvements that you get from being smarter. Right. Which parent, if you look at this dashboard, all other things being equal, is not going to choose the smarter kid? Now if you had the option to boost the the kids IQ by two hundred because the world is different with superintelligence.

So if you have digital superintelligence in the world, it's a very different world than we live in today. It's not just competing with each other. It's about finding a place in the world with the superintelligence and we're all going back and forth to Mars and traveling the universe and figuring out quantum

shifts in the universe and like all the the things that I think are pioneering in the next century. Um that becomes a different a and more important framing at that point.'Cause you don't wanna end up being one of the people or you don't want your kids to be disadvantaged in a world where

There's this pervasive superintelligence that everyone's using and accessing and turning on and turning off as they need it to do the things they want to do in the world. And that's the right way to think about superintelligence. It's not controlling us. It's how do we use it. And you have to have a degree of control over

knowing where do you want to go with it, what do you want to do with it. And I think that's why there's this idea that maybe people start to think more about how do we adapt in a world of superintelligence as a species. What is our role? 'Cause there's a philosophical argument to be made that humans are dying down, making way for the AI. Like loaders. Right. Yeah. And I don't like that idea. Oh so you want to compete?

I want to use I want the AI to be a rocket boost for me and everyone else. And I want everyone to have a rocket. And I think that's what it does, it's not like a world where I'm competing with the superintelligence. It's like, dude, you're my rocket. I can't do what a rocket can do. I'm a human with two legs, I can't propel in you know, into space. I need the rocket. And similarly I need the superintelligence to do the crazy next shit that I want to do.

Get back to talking in just one second, but first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibe. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside of their body, which is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, metabolic markers, inflammation.

thyroid, nutrients, liver and kidney function. It even detects early signals linked to more than fifty types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test about twenty markers and function runs over 160. And this isn't just numbers dumped into your inbox. Every result is reviewed by clinicians, abnormal markers get flagged and you get clear explanations and a personalized protocol with actionable next steps.

So you can actually do something about what you learn. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives in a simple dashboard. You can just track trends over time, make sure that you're moving in the right direction. Normally, this level of testing would cost thousands through private clinics with function. It is three hundred and sixty five dollars a year. That's one dollar a day.

to know what's actually happening inside of your body. And right now you can get twenty-five dollars off, bringing it down to three hundred and forty. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that additional twenty-five dollars by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com

slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. What are you doing with plants? I've heard that you're spending a lot of time working at working with seeds.

Yeah, I run a company, my day job, which uh most people uh that I talk to recognize me from my uh this is like a pill, is that what this is? No uh toothpicks. So we managed to find a company where we're going to have a uh embed flavor and uh supplements into the wood of toothpicks. So try, try, try, what's this? Uh maybe I'll take it with me and try it later. Take that one, put it in your pocket. It's really cool. Wait, what is the new tropic?

Uh so cognizant, there's a fifteen milligram dose of cognizant in there. Um In one toothpick. Yeah. Oh my brother would do this. Here, it's I Yeah. And uh uh there's a little like fifteen milligrams of caffeine. He'll try anything. He's like my guinea pig. We're fucking about with every delivery mechanism on the planet for these at the moment. So obviously Zins went went absolutely crazy over the last couple. Is that your nicotine?

No, so this is just the same again. It's more cognizant, cytocholine, same thing that you get in oh, it's similar to the choline that you get in eggs. And uh we just decided that we would go for Pouches, the same as Zen. So uh degenerate delivery mechanism, but um much better for you. So that's what I'm playing with at the moment. Is it doing well? It's fucking crushing. Yeah, we just raised for Newtonic, we just raised on sixty mil. We're in

Uh going into H E B, we're in Vitamin Sharp, G N C, Sainsbury's, Morrison's Daily around the UK. Uh we're just launching in Australia and then we've got these RTDs. It's a smarter energy drink and uh I really I really the last time that we sat down at South by we were talking about business and you were talking about sort of how people are launching and stuff like that. And um

'Cause that was like my thing, was like I think everyone you know, we launched a tequila brand for all in which is great, but it you know, it tequila is tequila. But um I think that's the whole thing is like you can own your own brand. You can own your own equity. Yeah. Yeah. Well look, I d I'm very much a lifestyle maxi, not a profit maxi. Um, but given that this didn't exist.

Uh it's cool to have the ability and the contacts and the time and the resources to be able to make something that you want. Yeah, it's awesome. Less retarded than comedy, but more retarded than Tim Ferris. Right. And um it sort of sat in this nice middle ground. Right. I really wanted to Speak to people a lot about psychology, a lot about human nature, and uh it wasn't that. So I decided to do it. And then a thousand episodes later we're here. Honestly, the best.

You must have found this. The the best businesses to get into if you can. I'm sure that when you get to your level that it's difficult to always design something for yourself. But the best businesses to get into is designing something that's a gap in the market that you yourself would use. Yeah. Uh especially when you're at the sort of level that that I'm at. So yeah. Anyway, you d are obviously a burgeoning farmer. Um hoeing the ground, milling the tilling the the fields.

I do have a kitchen garden, although it does need to get updated. Um so my day job is running a company called Ohalo and what we do at Ohalo is we turn off meiosis in plants. Okay. What does that mean? Sexy. Yeah, that's it. So that's the pitch I give at the bar. Um, and uh, you know, I usually get the blanks there and then I uh So yeah. So all the cells in our body, we talked about this earlier, are made through a process called mitosis, which copies over the whole

all the DNA in your cell. Your DNA is actually packaged up into chromosomes and there's two sets of chromosomes side by side in your cell. So those two sets of chromosomes get copied over every time you're you make a new cell in your body. Except for sperm and eggs. So when you make sperm or eggs You only copy one chromosome, one set of chromosomes. And it's not just a selection of one of the sets. What happens is the two sets of chromosomes fuse. And they fuse at random places.

So you get a random half of one chromosome, a random half of the other chromosome. And that's why every sperm, which has just one set of chromosomes, is genetically different. Every one is unique. And every egg in a female is unique. They're all genetically different because that fusion event, which is called meiosis, fuses the two chromosomes down to one. And then a sperm and an egg come together and you end up back with two. And that's the new offspring.

And every offspring looks a little bit different because every sperm is different and every egg is different. That's why kids all look different, even though they come from the same two parents. So they get half the genes from the mother, half the genes from the father. And it's a random half from the mother, a random half from the father. And meiosis derives that evolutionary process. That random selection is what is evolution, it's the source of evolution.

By turning off and and and this is fundamentally a challenge for Farming. Number one, because most crops, people don't realize this. You can't plant seeds. When farmers plant seed in the ground, the reason they use seed is because they're gonna get the the same genetics in the field.

You want all the corn to grow at the same time. So you can harvest it all at the same time. It's all gonna look the same. You can sell it all to the same person and it's the same crop. You don't wanna harvest a bunch of tomatoes where some are green, some are yellow, some are red, they're all different sizes. How are you gonna market that? That's not marketable. So the seed industry came about about a hundred years ago when this guy figured out that you could actually inbreed plants.

And um when you inbreed a plant, so a plant has both male and female parts, unlike animals, most plants will make sperm and egg. You can pollinate itself. And if you do that for seven generations, both chromosomes end up identical. 'Cause remember the two chromosomes. have the same genes, but if the genes are different, you have different alleles. And if the genes are the same, it's called homozygote or the same alleles. So if both chromosomes end up being identical.

and you make sperm, it doesn't matter where the fusion happens. Every sperm will look the same. It'll'cause they're the they're the exact same two chromosomes. Same with egg. So inbreeding is what was developed about a hundred years ago where they inbred plants

Seven generations, took the inbreds, crossed them, and now every seed is identical. That's how they make identical seed in corn, in tomato, in cotton, in canola, in sorghum. And farmers went to a seed company and they started buying seed for the first time ever.

And they put that seed in the ground and they could grow a crop. And every year, the other thing it does is it allows you to improve the yield every year because the plant breeder would try and make the two chromosomes from the two backgrounds different. The more different they are, the more complementary they are, the more different genes you're putting in that plant, the higher the yield, the faster the plant grows.

Plants are really interesting because they're kind of like looking for tools in a tool belt. Like, how many tools do I have? How many different genes do I have that I can use any second of any day to keep growing? Humans and animals, we just grow like two arms, five fingers, two eyes, two legs, and we're done growing. And then our job is to go out and find food and survive.

Plants, their job is to keep growing. They grow roots, they grow branches, they grow leaves. The sun's over there. I'm gonna grow a branch towards the sun. I'm gonna make more leaves. Oh, the water's down there, I'm gonna grow a root down there, and they just keep growing and growing, growing until they die. So plants are always looking for more genes in the toolbox that they can use to grow.

So by turning off meiosis, we can take plants that don't have seed today, put two of them together, and all the seed will now be the same because every sperm is the same, every egg is the same. Because by turning off meiosis, both chromosomes go into the sperm. Both chromosomes go into the egg. And now the offspring has four chromosomes instead of two. That might sound crazy, but many, many plants have four chromosome versions. It's called polyploidy, polyploid, many versions of the chromosome.

And uh some like modern wheat is hexaploid, it has six chromosomes. Modern strawberry is octoploid, it has eight chromosomes. Um modern potato is tetraploid. It has four chromosomes. So many modern kind of crops have multiple copies of the chromosome, and you can't make seed in those crops. And so you end up taking the plant, chopping it up. and replanting it. And that's what they do. So by making seeds

It actually saves farmers the majority of their expense, which they have to spend money chopping up all the old plants, putting them back in the ground. And it allows us to make better plants every generation because we can make better selections on the ones that are complementary to each other, increasing the genetic diversity in the crop. Increasing disease resilience, drought resist resistance.

Um, climate change adaptation, all the things that drive yield and make the farmers more profitable, make more food per acre, all these sorts of things. And then every year instead of having like in the US we're farming rust at Burbank, we've been farming rust at Burbank for 150 years. We can now bring new potatoes to market every year that are getting better and healthier, more nutritious.

more adapted to climate change, making the farmer more money. And so you can counter and the farmer, instead of using five thousand pounds of chopped up potatoes and like Matt Damon did and putting them in the ground, he can use 10 grams of seed that fits in the palm of your hand.

So it cuts down on his expenses like crazy. He makes more money and we make more food. So that's the business I run. And so, you know, we figured out a way to turn off meiosis and do this. And then we've also developed a lot of other technology to make plant breeding more efficient, to increase the rate of yield gain. to increase the adaptation to the climate, to increase all of these things that are going on in agriculture that make it very hard to farm.

Can you make it so that you need less fertilizer? Yeah. Absolut. So nitrogen utilization is a kind of good phenotype to think about. Um so you can kind of, you know, because you you gotta apply nitrogen to grow most crops.

Um, and then there's also work now on which we don't do today, but there's some work that's being done. Some crops like soybeans and legumes, they actually can suck nitrogen out of the atmosphere and you don't need fertilizer. And um it actually refertilizes the soil from the air. And so there's ways to kind of integrate that into crops that don't have that. So there's a whole bunch of that sort of technology that's going on as well.

Wow. That is cool. What what's happening with this California flight stuff?'Cause yeah, I was with uh Palmer over Christmas and a a a bunch of other guys from that side. And um

I didn't know about it. I knew that it was gonna be brought in before the end of the year. It's this sort of sticky thing that seems to be following people around, but it's also gonna get worse over time. It seems like there's more and more rumblings that stuff's gonna keep on. This feels like the sort of core engine of California's prosperity since the eighteen hundreds is now unraveling. Yeah.

Uh I'm in a bunch of group chats. I talked to a lot of people. I would say probably a third of people I talked to have already left. Uh you're asking about people leaving, right? And I would say um like a survey we did uh informally in a group, which has been published, uh talked about is close to eighty seven percent of people are gonna leave. Um, these are the core leaders in tech. And the other thing is I talk to a lot of emerging tech CEOs.

Of startups that are doing really well that are growing and they're all looking to leave. Like there was one company I was talking to, they're gonna move up to Northern California from Southern, and they're like, Now I'm gonna move to Nevada. And that's because they're worried about what's next. So California's in this fundamental like sinkhole right now. Um It goes back to my point about people making promises.

In order to get elected, politicians promise people something that they don't have today. That's how you get elected. Mm-hmm. You don't get elected by saying, I'm gonna take stuff away from you. The government's gonna do less for you. Show me one politician in the last hundred years has been elected saying that.

So in order and and the there's a fundamental kind of like moment, this come to Jesus moment. Can you keep doing these promises? Can you even meet the promises you've already made? And in California, the answer is no. California set up a system um where we created the highest tax rate in the country. Because of all the success in Silicon Valley, all the income that's being generated, all the success and capital gains and whatnot, and use that to fund a bunch of nonsense.

the h the bullet trained to nowhere. You know, friggin' like thirty billion dollars in, nothing like the How much is it? Thirty billion. Um And they've had six CEOs, by the way, that have all been fired or the one guy just got arrested. It's insane. There's um got it was just published that this this homeless program,$220 million are spent on it. Six homeless people got themselves out of the cycle of uh poverty that they were in. Um you go down the list.

sorry, just what was that thing about the affordable internet bill? Rural bro broadband. Was it and for the same amount of money that was spent, I think every American citizen could have got Starlink. Yeah. That and that one I that's a federal problem. I don't know. Yeah, but... get me very emotional. I've been I've been very like I think you seem like an emotional.

I've been very like unemotional during our uh talk about science in the future. And then this is the opposite. Okay, this is the bullshit, the opposite that happens when social systems become manifest like um rotten. It's a system where

People lie to each other in order to keep themselves in power, in order to keep their money flowing, in order to keep this nonsense up and running. People lie to themselves, they lie to their constituents, and the democracy starts to become like, what's the point? Like does this even work? California in particular is Um, we made a bunch of uh changes to the pension system. So we have public pensions for public employees in California. And over the past um uh twelve to fifteen years.

Um, those changes have resulted in a bunch of guarantees to people on their future retirement benefits that the state simply cannot afford to meet. The estimate currently is that there's six hundred billion to a trillion dollars in the whole. Okay. The state then has a question, how are we going to like pay for all these people, all the stuff that we promise them?

And that's a big part of and then there's also all the near-term stuff like healthcare costs. Hey, we promised them healthcare. We promised our union workers healthcare. We've got to figure out a way to fund the healthcare because the promises were made. But the promises were never funded.

The promises were never possible to be funded. And when suddenly it all comes to roost and everyone's like, well, how are we gonna make the payments now? How are we gonna fill the hole? That's the situation California is in. California has such a heaping liability problem that it's now you're seeing like all the rats jumping, you know, off the ship or they're burning the ship or the people are leaving the ship. I don't know what the right analogy to use is.

But that's the chaos that's ensuing in California in this very moment. And that's and and so we talk a lot about the billionaire tax. The billionaire tax came about because of one union, one guy at one union called S-E-I-U-U-H-W, who set up a uh a scheme where they would tax you five percent of your net worth if your net worth is over a billion dollars, which everyone in this audience is like, who cares? Screw the billionaires.

But what it does is it gives the state assembly, the legislature, the ability to in the future change the threshold and the amount. So theoretically you could take the five percent on billionaires one time and make it one percent on billionaires every year. Wasn't this the case with the original income tax? Nineteen thirty it was uh one percent. Tell people the story of how the original income tax. The original income tax was pitched because we did not have an income tax in the United States.

And that was again why this country was founded. It was set up as we no taxation without representation. There was a huge tax scheme to fund all of the, you know, nonsense that was going on in England. Uh I mean, at the time, very different, um, not to speak to the people, but the uh let's call it the aristocracy. And uh, you know, what we call the elites today.

And ev by the way, the I I think about the term the elites, it's sort of like that Spider Man meme where like everyone's You're the elite. You're the elite. You're the elite. Like the tech guy's the elite. Like that's kind of the moment we're in right now. It's like the tech guys aren't the elites, but like the tech guys last year were telling They were calling out the NGOs as the elites and then the NGO you know, it's just like everyone's an elite.

Your privilege is more privileged than my privilege. Yeah, this is all rooted in Marxist philosophies, by the way. It's all this like oppressor oppressed stuff, like i again But all of those philosophies fundamentally uh distinguish people's agency. Like this is so critical for people to understand. When you give people a bunch of stuff or you create a governmental system or economic system that says you do X, you get Y, you're s you're a slave to that system.

You are now oppressed no matter what anyone tells you. You are not getting risen up and you're not and pulling other people down doesn't solve any of your problems.

Another conversation for another day. But in California, so we started out as a one per and so they they're the the way they started the income tax in the United States was they're like, hey, we'll promise everyone one percent on high n on incomes over whatever it was at the time, I think ten thousand dollars a year. You could probably look it up. And that was it.

And then over time it's like, Wait, we had to fund a war so we and and now we're like gonna expand the highway system. So the original The original income tax was one percent. One percent on high net worth people, on high in earning people. And that's it. Jared, d chad this and uh find out what how the income tax progressed over time. I wanna see. And you can look at this. And so then it became like suddenly today everyone pays an income tax. In California, I pay fifty three percent income tax.

And you know, most people pay an income tax. That's and now they're like creating a whole new tax regime. And I wanna talk about this importantly, what they're trying to do in California. Here you go. It was a temporary wartime tax. And you know, again, leading up to this, we had tariffs to fund the government. The government was small. Like the government wasn't meant to be this big system that took care of everyone and did all this stuff.

Coming out of World War II, and here's the the income tax started out as one percent on income over three thousand dollars a year. Okay. Yep. And um and then there was like a progression. They added a seven percent top rate later. And then you can kind of see here when the thing kind of expanded. Oh Wow, nineteen forty four to nineteen forty five in World War two the top rate was ninety four percent.

Everyone's money to fund the war. But that set a precedent because what happened at that point is after they set the precedent, And then we had this kind of FDR kind of New Deal expansionism, all the stuff that happened post World War Two in the United States was like, Holy crap, we can get the government to do big stuff. Let's do big stuff to make our lives better.

That you can see but that sound principled, like it makes sense. It sounds good in principle. But this is where it leads us to today. Because every year, once you start thinking about the government as p solving your problems and doing things for you. that becomes something that only escalates up. It never goes down. If fifty one per cent can vote themselves what the forty nine. This is the next thing that happens. So now so so that's income.

Let's say you've paid your income tax and you own a bunch of stuff. That's now your private property. You own this stuff. That's yours. So now comes along the government or this new bill, the Billionaire Tax Act in California. And for the first time ever in the United States, we're trying to create a wealth tax.

It doesn't matter that it's billionaires and it doesn't matter that it's one time or five percent. What you're saying is that the stuff that you've already paid taxes on, that you now own, that's in your backyard, all your iron ore that you've stored in the backyard. Right. Yeah, or your cool st you know, podcast studio. You own these things. You've paid taxes, you've earned your money and you bought this stuff. But now the government can come in and say, you know what, we want that lamp.

We want half your iron ore. We're gonna take all your private property from right, your iron ore. They're gonna get all your private property. That's what a wealth tax does is it taxes people on post tax earnings. It takes away private property. If you give the government the ability to do that on even 1% of net worth for billionaires, the next step is 5% of the billionaires or maybe 2% of millionaires.

And then maybe it's three percent on people making that have a net worth of a hundred grand a year. And by the way, to figure out how much you have, what your assets are, you gotta send me a list every year of everything you own. So now the government gets to look into your house. Not just see what's in your bank account, what stocks you own, but what cars do you own. How what's the value of those cars? How much is that art worth?

What's everything here worth? Private property rights go out the window when you institute a wealth tax. Cause now the government has the right to assess all your value and to take anything they want from you based on a vote. Where a bunch of people raise their hand and say, we'll increase the tax rate to this 5%, 2%, 10%, whatever it is. And here's the threshold, and we'll take it every year. And when you do that,

It eventually leads to 51% of people voting to take everything from 49%. That's that's the worst case. Like that's the end state of this, is it eats itself and that's socialism. And so I think that a wealth tax and I look, I I I it's not gonna affect me, this California tax. So like don't think that I'm trying to like speak my book or whatever the comments or bullshits are. I think this is a fundamental principled issue.

that by degrading private property rights, we are setting a precedent in the United States that is the foundation of why the United States was set up in the first place, which is for all of us that came to this country to get away from tyrannical governments outside the United States that took all our shit.

And controlled everything and told us what to do all the time and we came here and we get to have private property. Sure, I'll pay my tax. Here's my fifty-three percent. Thank you very much, government, for all the great stuff you do, for all the services you provide. But I'll fuck off. Now fuck off and leave me alone.

And that's not the case anymore when this passes. Bernie Sanders, Rokana, all these national politicians, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, they're all saying we need to have a national wealth tax now. So it's not just in California. This is gonna be the issue between 2026 and 2028. The elites are the billionaires and the tech people. They're coming after'em. And the manifestation of that is to create this wealth tax and that gives the government the system by which private property rights are gone.

And the United States is a very questionable future at that point. That's the thing I worry about the most. And and I juxtapose that with my optimism about the future and this amazing shit. Like, I mean, think about it. Like this amazing shit that's happening in the world. We're gonna have free fucking energy. We're gonna live forever. We're gonna have all of this insane stuff that we never imagined, abundance and resources that we could never contemplate, happiness.

Spending time with family, working less hours, robots that build shit for us. Everything is gonna get better. Everything is getting better. Everything is getting more amazing. And then we're like, let's fuck ourselves. Like why not? Because we'll just fuck ourselves. That's that and you know, this is this principle of like

I I I don't like using the term good versus evil, but it's like are you thinking about the future optimistically or pessimistically? If you're thinking about the future as these are control systems, this is

These these tech guys are crazy, this is dystopian, blah, blah, blah. You know, the number one most unfavorable thing in the United States right now, according to a recent poll, is AI. More unfavorable than Donald Trump. More unfavorable than uh everything. It's the most unfavorable thing because

It is this like I this narrative that everyone's been instituted in their minds that like this is the thing that destroys us, yada yada. And that's the choice we have. That's the choice we have right now. Is do we want to walk this path of abundance?

Or do we want to lock ourselves up? And I will say the counterbalancing force, and people won't like hearing this, but the counterbalancing force in the world will be a place like China. Because if the United States walks this path, other countries will not walk this path. It will glean the benefits therein.

And we have to recognize that. And then you have to ask the question, wait a second, is there some psychosocial motivation that others might have to see this happen in the United States? And I would argue maybe. Maybe there's influence happening. Maybe there's a reason why people are spending so much time why so much foreign money is going into NGOs that are supporting these sorts of causes. I I just like for me it's so hard to grok why people would be so um you know, quick. And and look Ardent.

There's some there's something anyway, I I don't wanna be too conspiratorial'cause that discredits a lot of this shit. But yeah.

I think that you could look at the conspiratorial angle, but just straight incentives for I want to be seen to be standing up for the little person when we saw how far that pushed a lot of social movements over the last six, seven years, and that got people to do some pretty insane things that I think in retrospect a lot of them regret.

And uh that was I am here for the righteous. This is dangerous, this is too much, this is xenophobic, misogynistic, m uh misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, unethical, unethical, unmedical. of things and and because everybody is their opinions, not their deeds, right? Uh the difference between our opinions and our deeds has never been greater. You're able to say good whilst doing bad. This was Elon's thing. I remember

um four or five years ago, he was pulled up about what he was doing with Tesla and about his presentation for things. And he says, uh what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. There are many people out there who are doing bad whilst appearing good and I don't care to be one of them. That's right. And the people that are trying to lead on this have three homes. You know, it's very easy to pull the ladder up.

they not be looking at themselves? Oh I suppose that at least at the moment when they're pointing at the billionaires that are above Right. Right. They have abundance. You know, if you go to Africa and you go visit farmers, you think those guys are complaining about using GMO seed and farming if it's going to double their their income? Their lives change.

You know, there's all these stories about how technologies, nuclear energy, dropping the cost of energy, making it proliferant in India, been a game changer. Like these technologies that we shun in the West are luxury beliefs for us to shun them. We have these ideas that we can just shun stuff

Because we're we we we are already well enough off. That's what happened in Germany. And Bernie Sanders has three homes, so it's easy for him to tell people, hey, the average person has one, you know, has an apartment, we should go down this path.

that fundamentally in every record of history that we've tried to go down this path has fucked everyone up. It is the worst idea that humans have ever come up with and they keep trying to repeat it. You can only look at Argentina, which has like gotten out of the shit like yesterday. to see how bad of a problem this leads to. Socialism is the worst idea ever. Why did Mamdani get into New York then?

People want more. They're not people are left behind. We uh look, this is this is so important, I think. To recap. We promised people That if they went to college, you would get a good career and you could buy a home. And that turned out to not be true. That was a lie. The way we promised it to them and the way we gave everyone access to college is through federal education grants, loans. The federal student loan program didn't have a market check.

The federal government, as long as you were an accredited university, you could run Trump University, Phoenix University, UCLA, Harvard, MIT. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what the tuition is. sixty thousand dollars and it doesn't matter what the degree is. You could get a degree in basket weaving or a degree in computer science. I had one in each. The government will- I'm tying on. Right. Nigher nore. Um the background for this should be like a Minecraft uh thing. Yeah.

Um, but the government will loan you money to go to that college. And so the government basically fueled increases in tuition. Because why would all these colleges suddenly go from costing ten grand a year to sixty grand a year?

It's because they could just charge more and there was no one to say no. Mm-hmm.'Cause the government just funded the loans every year. And the students are like, I got a student loan, I'm good to go. Like no one's doing the math on like can I afford to pay sixty six two hundred forty thousand dollars? Is it true? Maybe you can't default on it as well in the And you cannot default on it.

And so that was the setup. That's how it got passed in Congress where the government spends trillions of dollars underwriting student loans. So there's no underwriting process. Any college, any degree, any individual, any price, those four things.

You could be a bad student, I shouldn't underwrite your loan. You could get a shitty degree, I shouldn't underwrite your loan. You go to a shitty school, I'm not underwriting your loan. And if it costs a lot, I'm not underwriting your loan. That's what would normally happen and that didn't happen. As a result. Privatized.

If you privatized it. And as a result, everyone got stuck with an education and then it's like, Hey, the market's not there, rents are high and much of the f problem with rents being high and all this other sort of stuff Building. Home building, government regulation, government funding. The more the bigger the government got, the more expensive everything got. You can you know that chart? Can you pull up the chart with like government stuff versus like non-government stuff?

Yeah, just uh ask Chad, um, what is the chart explaining government intervention? compared with the price of different goods and services. Tells you everything you need to know. This is why everything got worse. When moving to New York suddenly cost$6,000 of rent, you couldn't get a job, food was$18 for a friggin' sandwich.

a lot of this was rooted in this problem, which is the government got too big. So the solution is I need someone to fix that for me. And here's a guy who's coming along saying he's gonna make everything free. The groceries are going to be free. So all the stuff on the red, everything above

on the top section, these are things that the government fundamentally has a large role in paying for in the economy. So government dollars are flowing into the cost of things. So the people selling those things can basically charge more and they know they can charge more because the government can just fund it. And the government's an endless pool of money printing. So it just keeps printing and eventually they're like, Hey, let's raise taxes or get the money to pay for this stuff once they

Realize but you know, all of these things are services that the government's gotten involved in. College education, health care through Medicare, Medicaid'cause there's no negotiation on these programs. Everything below is where the government doesn't have a role. The cost of a car, the cost of clothing, the cost of television, the cost of internet, the cost of software, these are all private industries where the government is not

funding the purchase of these things for the consumer in some way or distorting the market in some way. So you know who I first showed this chart to? What did he say? Did you have him on this? Yeah. Oh you did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should watch that. It was it was interesting. Yeah. Uh in fact, Jared, let's see if we can pull it up. We should react to that. And if you if you look at I I I mean what's frustrating to me

is you can read textbooks, you can go on the internet, you can watch YouTube, and you can see exactly what happens with socialist socialism and socialist policies around the world. When the government runs a grocery store, when the government decides to you know, offer everyone healthcare. It's great in principle. I would love for that to work. I would love for everyone to have healthcare. I'm not opposed to that idea.

But if you're gonna have like a government with no accountability and there's no one there that has any skin in the game, be responsible for giving me my health care, I know it's gonna get fucked up. And I've seen that happen time and time again around the world. It's just not the right system. And I think that there's much for us to kind of learn from

like why these things haven't worked around the world. And it's like we what frustrates me is people are ignorant. They put their blinders on. They don't wanna see it. And they just I I saw an interview with a guy during the protest in LA. Um

And the guy went on camera and he's like, uh, you know, what are you here for? And he's like, I'm here for socialism. We need socialism in America. And the interviewer is like, But you know socialism's never worked anywhere else ever before. And he's like, Well, that's bad socialism. That's socialism that doesn't work.

Like I want good socialism. I want socialism done the right way. And we're gonna do it the right way in America. This is the story in every generation of socialist movements that have happened around the world. And they all start by the way where you have this kind of inept or explosive government system that drives people to say, I'm not getting what I want and everything's costing more.

And also that's super sexy, right? Because it allows you to be able to promise something that people are going to love. And what was that point around it involves promising people something that they don't love? I always used to say the kid the kid that gets elected for middle school president is the kid that promises to make the vending machines free.

Everyone's got a story about this at their school. You know, there's always the kid who said, Hey guys, what I'm gonna promise you is I'm gonna make the vending machines free and that's what we deal with every day. So here he is. I wanna show you a chart uh in a second. So this is that you with hair? Yes it's me with hair.

Consumer goods and services over the last twenty five years. Broadly speaking, prices have increased by about seventy four percent since two thousand. But the actual numbers vary wildly depending on what type of good or service it is. So consumer goods, toys, TVs have gotten

Got housing in there? Uh consumer goods like toys and T Vs have gotten over fifty percent cheaper. TVs are nearly a hundred percent cheaper. Yeah. But critical categories like healthcare, education have skyrocketed by two hundred percent. Housing is in there too. One Potential interpretation is that the less legislation that you apply to an industry

The more the free market is allowed to take over, the cheaper the things become. Even new cars haven't got that much more expensive. So this is price changes. And you can see as you basically get to the top, there's more legislation put in and down to the bottom. What do you make of that? I don't When I look at the economy, I look at what does the family need?

to do well. Okay, let's just go through what are the basic needs of life? All right, everybody, right? Rich, poor, young, old needs healthcare, correct? In America, by the way, we probably spend three times more per person on healthcare than you do in the UK. Do you think he um got trained as a hypnotist? Uh I look, I was proud of uh me sitting down with someone who's been in office for n nearly twice as long as I've been alive. Um

grabbing him and not not letting go too much without I think being too cantankerous. It was a real sort of strategic learning uh experience for me. Yeah. Um but yeah, i look, that's the game that is played. There is a question that gets asked and what is answered is what I wanted to hear. Yeah. And I think I I think that it's very hard to deny The value and the importance of the empathy. One of the things that the other side gets wrong is the failure to empathize. Mm-hmm.

He's extraordinary, and so is AOC and so are others at speaking to people that are feeling desperate and in need. And it is true that there are tens of millions of people. In the United States, I think it's sixty three percent of people are living paycheck to paycheck. We're living on less than five hundred bucks of uh total savings. Yeah, th if there was one catastrophe that they would need to go into depth for it.

Um But I'll go back to this point about I I think that the more government you create. To help those people. I worry that over time it hurts more than it helps. Right. And this is where the price of things go up and you can't offer the same thing like, Hey, I'm gonna offer you more and more every year. By the way, I I'll give you one anecdote. In twenty thirteen or twelve, when they passed the temporary tax cuts or sorry, the temporary tax hikes in California.

They raised an incremental hundred billion dollars since then. California. I've paid that. Like I'm in a big big chunk of that check. Um not a big chunk, but I've done my part. And eighty billion of that went to increase and it was supposed to go to increasing schools and like healthcare services. Eighty percent of it went to increasing uh public retirement benefits.

Eighty billion. And it you know, you c I can't sit here and like bemoan public employees. I'm not gonna like say negative things about public employees. but the system whereby you know, there's a voter block that says, Hey, like we need to get more and then the system is created that doesn't actually solve the problems that need to be solved and the people that asked for more get the benefit.

I think it's very inherent in democracy. Like over a period of time it you could argue that democracy eats itself. Yeah, isn't it crazy that nobody ever pulls these people up? Uh each cycle false promises are made, not caps. Bigger promises need to be made in order to get ahead of where the previous ones were. The people who didn't deliver on the promises previously don't get held to account in the right way. It's Kfabe. It's like WWE. The uh food stamp program, if you type in uh

Food stamp program spending per year over time. Watch what happened in 2019. Blow your mind. Um we can come back to that one. But uh this is exactly the problem. Today I would argue, I and I've I've tried to do the math on this. If you take the number of people that work for the federal government, state government, or local government, city government, plus the number of people that work for contractors. Oh, hello. Yeah.

So here's the food stamp program as an example. And so you could argue like, hey, like people were it was a crisis. We needed to increase spending. So we drove up the food stamp program. It's a hundred billion dollars a year now. A Snap program. Doubled from twenty ten. Yeah. And um Roughly Holy shit. Snap spending increased sixty X. From nineteen sixty nine to twenty twenty two. And it's a hundred billion dollars per year, or roughly one point four percent of total federal cost.

60 to 70 percent of people on the food stamp program, which costs a hundred billion a year, sixty to seventy percent are obese, clinically obese. That are on the food stamp program. Right. And close to twenty billion of the hundred billion a year is spent on soda. Fucking hell off. That's a one fifth. On fit. One fifth of the money is going to Coca Cola and So it starts like from a good place like hey, it's actually started during the Great Depression. It was like weekly

Newtonic on Snap actually, that'd be a great way to raise the valuation of the company. There you go. That'd be fucking fantastic. Yeah. But it started as a um you know, an emergency program, much like the emergency one percent income tax. It started as an emergency program to help uh people during the Great Depression that were actually starving. And it was like, let's give them bread, give them milk, give them eggs, help them survive. What's that? Uh I think it's a

Oh, and sorry, I'll give you my statistic. Today, if you add up federal, state, local, government employees plus all the contractors for the government. Plus all the people that live off of a retirement check or a welfare support check. So all the people that are living off government checks, it's about nearly half the US population. Either working for or being supported by.

So we may be too far gone. That's kind of where democracy is like everyone's fifty one. And and now so now think about that person. If you're and I'm not saying that person, like if you're collecting a check every month from the government, you will never vote to have that check go down. you're living on those checks. So we're now so this is how it maybe eats itself a little bit, right? So you're now in a system where like, will people actually wanna say

And so you ask why Mom Donnie got elected. Like I think that you reach a tipping point where this becomes like a like a s like a wave and that's how socialism you know, could manifest in this cycle. I think twenty six to twenty eight's gonna be the big cycle and my money's on AOC being president. Bye. I think this is the the wave we're in.

AI's the boogeyman right now, right? Like so there's there's also this like and you always gotta pick a fear. Like the Japanese are coming, the Russians are coming, climate change is coming, there's always something AI is coming. AI is coming. That's the fear and it works. Um, and you know, Bernie Sanders like pounding the table saying data centers need to be stopped. We gotta stop all data centers this week.

So, you know, um, I think we have a choice. I still believe in agency. I still believe everyone can look in the mirror and look at the situation and realize that more government is not gonna stop the problem created by too much government. And uh This this this is just such a crazy juxtaposition and while we're in this exponential technology curve of a and this abundance curve that we're on. Yeah.

You feel a little bit like there's a a schism going on between what's happening in the real world and the way that it's being perceived? I mean like I I I I think that it's so sad that so many people are so negative. I think like people talk about yes, certainly a lot of people can be struggling.

But I think, you know, in in in the mid century coming out of World War Two, we were so optimistic as a people. We were so positive about tomorrow. All of our conversations about tomorrow were all about we're gonna go to the moon, we're all gonna move around in you know, electric.

trams. We're we're all gonna have a microwave in our kitchen. You know, I always tell people the analogy, uh, if you pull up a um I'll do this for your audience. If you pull up the uh Disney History Institute YouTube channel, And there's an episode on Tomorrowland. When they opened up Tomorrowland in nineteen fifty five, it was all about this optimism of tomorrow. Mm-hmm. And it was like every ride was all about tomorrow being incredible.

It's like we're all gonna like go to the moon. There was a ride called the Rocket to the Moon. You go to the moon and back. You move around and then they had a a inside the house of tomorrow. Um, where everyone had a microwave so you could cook your dinner in thirty seconds. It was like the future and people like mind blowing, that's so cool.

And, you know, and then I think we kinda so then in the video they say like in the nineteen seventies they changed over every ride to make it all about the fear of tomorrow. It was like a Star Tours was a robot that like made the mistake. It's a navigator robot. And of course the navigator robot has to screw up. So you veer off course and nearly crash in an asteroid.

the they took out the rocket to the moon and replaced it with Space Mountain, which is a rocket ship that veers off course and spins violently through the galaxy. Captain Eo was Michael Jackson coming back to planet Earth and he's like

Hey, we're gonna destroy the robots that took over the earth and him and his organic band destroy all the robots. Apocalyptic. And so like, you know, we we've kind of gotten into this very pessimistic view. And I think like, you know, um If we can change people's aperture a bit and get them to be pess uh optimistic instead of pessimistic and see how promising tomorrow is and not need to feel sheltered and um

you know, taken care of and fundamentally creating a burden to these bigger s social systems, these governmental type systems, people um, I think might change their view. I'm hopeful. That's why we're having this conversation. But like that's the sort of thing that I think we need to be doing is like showing people all the amazing shit that's happening and how much it's gonna benefit you and how crazy awesome it is.

And like you're gonna be able to spend more time with your kids. The cost of food's going down, the cost of energy is gonna go down, like we're all gonna have robots that can build stuff for us and you're gonna be able to spend more time with your family. Like on and on and on. Like housing needs to get cheap like but like fighting against these things is just so

Um it's so crazy that we would, you know, do that. Like, you know, there's this whole story about Germany fought against nuclear energy and then their energy costs spiked and now they have to buy natural gas from Russia and just put Carbon into the atmosphere, which is what they were trying to fight against in the first place.

Yeah. Yeah. I uh I wonder whether people being more hopeful would mean that they would vote in a less fear based way. That's right. And uh that Anybody that's talking about hope. if you feel fearful, sounds like they're dismissive of the problems that you're facing. Yeah. That seems like the dynamic that's gonna be. That's right. It's like I'm not empathizing with your pain. Yeah.

And if a lot of the time And by the way, if I empathize with your pain, we have to figure out an enemy responsible for your pain. Them. Them. I think it was twenty twelve that uh votes went from voting for the party you like to voting against the party that you don't. Yeah.

I mean, there's all these videos now. I don't we don't need to pull these up, but obviously like all the people that were like, we gotta go attack Iran, we gotta attack Iran. And then when Trump did it, or we gotta go get Maduro, Trump does it. It's like, well Trump did it, we gotta all be against it. Like I don't know. I saw the flip flop with the vaccine. When it was Trump's vaccine or it was Sanders' vaccine and e each I'm fought wait, no I'm not.

And I don't know when we got there there was a flipping flippining that happened, probably around the time you're describing. Yeah. When people went from like, Hey, there's a set of things we agree on and a bunch of stuff we disagree on to like anything that you do or say I disagree with And that's politics. Yeah. David Friedberg. Yeah. Thank you, gentlemen. Uh you're great. I appreciate all the I appreciate it, bro. Thank you for having me. Fuck yeah. All right. Goodbye, everybody. Great.

So good. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of one hundred of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found, and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them, and it's completely free, and you can get it.

Right now by going to chriswillex dot com slash books. That's Chriswillex.com slash books.