Ideas. Sam Altman is simultaneously building AGI and doing big studies on UBI. Super obvious what he's doing, in fact. Oh, this is kind of hot off the press here, because I just did this analysis with fabric, and I saw a tweet thread about this as well, the UBI study that came out. This is not in the newsletter. This just happened this morning. This UBI study that OpenAI put out,
which was funded by essentially Altman. It turns out at least one of the interpretations and some of the manual work that I just did doing AI analysis on the results, it did not increase a lot of the things that they were hoping. They're spinning it as a very positive outcome, and I'm sure they said there is some minor positive outcomes, but in general, it did not encourage people to be more ambitious. It did not encourage people to go and get more work. It didn't do that. Um, so it
looks a bit bad. Now. I think we need to do more analysis to say for sure that UBI is not going to massively help, or it's not going to help people be more ambitious or more creative or more productive, which which I think is the hope. The hope is that or the idea here is that ambitious people are lucky people who have the time and energy to go and be ambitious, and that when you look at people who are struggling and they're not ambitious, it's likely because
they have too many jobs. You know, they got too much drama in their lives. There's too much going on. And if that were to not be the case, if they were, we were able to reduce their stress. They would become just like the go getters and just like
the ambitious and smart people. And this study, being so large, has the ability to undo that narrative a bit and basically say that there's a chance here We need to do full analysis of this, but there's a chance here that what it uncovers is that no ambitious people have something else. They have this ambition and drive that lets them thrive almost despite whatever is going on. So if they have lots of burdens on them, they're going to
find a way through. Unless they're overwhelming, of course. But given the same amount of burden, people with this attribute of like drive and self-discipline and ambition, they're just going to crush it. They're going to find a way to crush it. And the whole narrative for this UBI thing was that, no, everyone has that. And I think I'm old enough at this point to realize, no, not everyone has special beans or special magic. It really is a small portion of, you know, society who is in the
top 10% of a given thing. I mean, just by the numbers. Like only 10% can be in the 10%, right So I think first we need to confirm that this is what it's saying. But even if it is saying the worst possible thing, which is no, this doesn't actually make people more ambitious. It doesn't really matter. We still have to keep looking for the thing that is the ambition. We still have to find the source of this thing that is so valuable to us, which is
people who are driven and ambitious. Now, if it's genetic, well, then I don't care, right? But we're not we're not going to be changing genetics, right. Any time soon anyway. So it's like, I don't care if we find that there's more ambition in this group or less ambition in that group, because those numbers are likely to be so tiny compared to what we can control. You know, even if they exist and they might not even exist. It might be all environment. But I mean, this is a
three year study. This doesn't control, like what went into their their upbringing and their childhood and everything Um, because if you look at cultures where they have this really, really strong drive and ambition and everything. It's part of their actual culture. This is like they pop out of the womb and it's like, pick your college, right? You were told from a very early age that you must be producing. It's your responsibility to give back to community.
All your family members are looking up to you. You know you owe us. You owe society. Quality outputs. And you must work hard to create those that cultural influence and power. Plus all the peers that come with it. Plus, then you go to nice colleges and they all believe the same thing. That entire mechanism is what we need to give to the entire world. Okay. That that is
the thing that I believe is creating ambitious people. So you do a three year study on UBI, you find out that doesn't make people into those people Fine, fine. Something is. and I believe it's that entire culture as a package. And that's the thing that we need to give to everyone. That's our responsibility. And if the world were more like that, the world would would be better.
First of all, that automatically fixes crime. If you're trying to build things and doing things and you're busy, that automatically fixes literacy crime, like so many different things that are a problem. So I just I don't see this as too negative. I see it as a little bit negative, but positive in the sense that it's going to uncover the real issues, which is how to propagate successful mental models and frames, um, in a wider scope across wider
groups of people, across the entire planet. And I think that's the problem we need to focus on and move towards solving.