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2, 1, boom, all right, we're live. Thank you very much for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. I've been absorbing your information and listening to you talk for quite a while now, so it's great to actually meet you.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure, my pleasure. You are 1 of the rare guys that is, you're a big investor, you're deep in the tech world, but yet you seem to have a very balanced perspective in terms of how to live life as opposed to not just be entirely focused on success and financial success and tech investing, but rather how to live your life in a happy way. That's an odd balance.

Yeah, I think the reason why people like Hearing me is because like if it's like if you go to a circus and you see a bear, right? That's kind of interesting but not that much if you see a unicycle, that's interesting, but you see a bear on a unicycle That's really interesting, Right? So when you combine things you're not supposed to combine, people get interested. It's like Bruce Lee, right? Striking thoughts, philosophy, plus martial arts.

And I think it's because at some level all humans are broad. We're all multivariate, but we get summarized in pithy ways in our lives. And at some deep level, we know that's not true, right? Every human basically is capable of every experience and every thought. You're a UFC comedian, commentator, podcaster, but you're also more than that.

You're also a father, lover, thinker, et cetera. So I like the model of life that the ancients had, the Greeks, the Romans, right, where you would start out and when you're young, you're just like going to school, then you're going to war, then you're running a business, then you're supposed to serve in the Senate or the government, then you become a philosopher. There's sort of this arc to life where you try your hand at everything. And as 1 of my friends says, specialization is for insects, right? So everyone should just be able to do everything and so I don't believe in this model anymore of Trying to focus your life down on 1 thing.

You've got 1 life. Just do everything you're gonna do

I couldn't agree more and I think that sometimes people find certain success in whatever the endeavor is and then they think that that is their niche and they stick with it and they never change and they almost out of fear.

It's hard because there's a, you know, the analogy around mountain climbing. Like if you find a mountain and you start climbing and you spend your whole life climbing it and you get say 2 thirds of the way. And then you see the peak is like way up there, but you're 2 thirds of the way up, you're still really high up. But now to go the rest of the way, you're gonna have to go back down to the bottom and look for another path. Nobody wants to do that.

People don't wanna start over. And it's the nature of later in life that you just don't have the time. So it's very painful to go back down and look for a new path, but that may be the best thing to do. And that's why when you look at the greatest artists and creators, They have this ability to start over that nobody else does. Like Elon will be called an idiot and start over doing something brand new that he supposedly is not qualified for.

Or when Madonna or Paul Simon or U2 come out with a new album, their existing fans usually hate it because they've adopted a completely new style that they've learned somewhere else. And a lot of times they'll just miss completely. So you have to be willing to be a fool and kind of have that beginner's mind and go back to the beginning to start over. If you're not doing that, you're just getting older.

Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if it's willing to be a fool. It's just, to me, the most exciting thing is to try to get better at something, to learn things. I mean, it's really exciting when you just have incremental progress in something that you're completely new to.

Yeah, I live for the aha moment, that moment when you connect 2 things together that you hadn't connected together before and it fits nicely and solidly and it kind of helps form a steel framework of understanding in your mind that you can then hang other ideas off of, that's what I live for. It's that curiosity fulfilled. And it's what little children do too. You know, my little son is always asking why, why, why, why, why, and I always try and answer him and half the times I realize, actually I don't really understand why. I just have a memorized answer for you, but that's not really understanding.

Yeah, those are weird conversations, right? When you're talking to your kids and you say, look, the reality is I don't know a lot of things.

Yes, I've just memorized a lot

of things. And there's certain things that you just can't know.

Yeah, you realize that, you know, you have, you have answers for a few things that you've thought through. Then you sort of have cover-ups, like trap doors, like don't go here, this is just a cover-up, I don't really know the answer to what the meaning of life is or how we got here. And then you've got a whole bunch of memorized stuff, because a lot of intelligence these days is just the external brain pack of civilization. I know it's out there. I know the answers are out there.

I know how to look them up and I've memorized some of them. And I kind of understand how money works and the Federal Reserve prints it and what this government thing is, but not really. Right. So

Not good enough to teach it in university. Yeah. Yeah. I think people do that with almost everything in life these days in terms of like have a like a 1 page, a 1 sheet, like a brief summary of what the explanation for what this very complex subject might be.

TLDR, right? Don't give me the lecture, give me the book. Don't give me the book, give me the blog post. Don't give me the blog post, give me the tweet. Don't give me the tweet.

I just, I already know.

Yeah. I got really fascinated by the way you read Because I thought there was something wrong with me by doing that. But you don't really just read a book to completion. You read and then you pick something else up and you just kind of go based on your whims, whatever you're interested in. Well,

I was raised by a single mom in New York and she used the local library as a daycare center because it was a very tough neighborhood. And so she would basically say, when you get back from school, go straight to the library and don't come out until I pick you up late at night. So I used to basically live in the library and I read everything. I read every magazine, I read every pictograph, I read every book, I read every map. I just ran out of stuff to read.

I just read everything. So I got over this idea of that reading a large number of books or reading a book to completion as a vanity metric. Because really, when people are putting up photos on Twitter and Instagram of look at my pile of books that I'm reading, it's a show off thing, it's a signaling thing. And the reality is I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read all the books. Because your brain has finite information, in a finite space, You get enough advice, it all cancels to 0.

There's a lot of nonsense in books out there too. So I don't read anymore to complete books. I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity. And it can be anything, it could be nonsense, it could be history, it could be fiction, it could be science, it could be sci-fi. These days it's mostly sci-fi, philosophy, science, because that's just what I'm interested in.

But I will read for understanding. So a really good book, I will flip through. I won't actually read it consecutively in order and I won't even just even finish it. I'm looking for ideas, things that I don't understand. And when I find something really interesting, I'll reflect on it, I'll research it.

And then when I'm bored of it, I'll drop it or I'll flip to another book. Thanks to electronic books, I've got 50, 70 books open at any time in my Kindle or iBooks and I'm just bouncing around between them. It's also a little bit of a defense mechanism to how In modern society, we get too much information too quickly, and so our attention spans are very low. So you get Twitter, you get Instagram, you get Facebook, you're just used to being bombarded with information. So you can take that to, you can view that as a negative and be like, I have no attention span, or you could view that as a positive.

I multitask really well and I can dig really fast. If I find a thread that's interesting, I can follow it through 5 social networks, through the web, through the libraries, through the books, and I can really get to the bottom of this thing very quickly. It's like the Library of Alexandria that I can research at my disposal So I no longer track books read or even care about books read it's about understanding concepts

Yeah, you brought up 2 awesome points. First of all, the the social media aspect of books and basically anything It's like it's such a weird way to display your life because it's, you know, you're displaying the best aspects of your life in some sort of a glass case. You know, it's an unrealistic version of your life that you cultivate and you curate.

And I'm as guilty of that as anybody.

Everybody's guilty of it. I'm guilty of it too. Yeah. I mean, I pose with my dog every time I run.

Yeah, we're always signaling. Yeah. It's like, rather than really looking at yourself, you're looking at how other people look at you, so it's like this 1 removed mental image. And it's kind of a disease, because social media is making celebrities of all of us, and celebrities are the most miserable people in the world. Right, because they have this strong self image that gets built up, It gets built up by compliments.

Every time somebody pays you or me a compliment, and we're like, oh, well, thank you, right? Then that builds up an image of who we are. And then 1 idiot comes along, 1 out of 10, 1 out of 100, and they can easily tear it down. Because it doesn't take many insults to cancel out a lot of compliments. And now you're carrying around this big weighty self-image and it's just very easy to be attacked.

And because you're famous or you're well-known, people wanna attack you. So being a celebrity is no good. It's actually a problem. Like 1 of my tweets is, and these are all reminders to myself is you want to be rich and anonymous not poor and famous? Mmm, right.

There's benefits to it.

Of course, of course, but we wouldn't do it.

It has unusual problems that you don't get trained for And you really will not understand unless you experience it. You know, I was having this conversation with my wife. We were talking about People that just come up to you and they don't care what you're doing They don't care if I'm with my daughter if I'm holding her if I'm feeding her for you know we're in the middle of an intense conversation. She's crying She could be crying and some bro will come over and just immediately have to take a picture doesn't care his needs supersede the daughter and my wife was saying I that Before she knew me she used to think that that's just part of the price of being famous that people people like you That's just part of the price being famous and now when it interrupts her life and you know It interrupts the children and interrupts friends and you know, she now she's like this is annoying like this is not this is not healthy This is not a smart way to interact with people and that people have this weird Challenge this weird thing that if you're if you become famous There's this weird challenge where people just want to come to you especially today Because if they can get a photo of you, then that boosts their social media profile.

Like, hey, I'm sitting here with the vault. Look at that smile. Hey, man, I forgot about you.

Anonymity is a privilege. On the other hand, it's self-inflicted. I mean, we bought it on ourselves.

Yeah, I don't think we knew what

it was though. We did, but we carry on. It tells us we are getting something out of it. So there are times when someone will approach me in public and I'm a little resentful. And there are other times when I'm just like, actually, I'm really grateful that I worked for this.

I got this. This is the payoff. Just embrace it. Smile, grin, and bear it. Meet someone new.

But you have a different sort of celebrity too, right? You're a hero amongst investors, and amongst, I mean, you've just

been a part of- I'm a hero among young male geeks.

Those are some of my favorite people.

Right, but that's not the kind of celebrity I think most people set out to get, especially most guys, right?

You

want the cute females. Yeah, you want chicks. Yeah, I look at my brief little YouTube clips. I have a tiny little podcast going now, and it's like 95% male.

Oh, I'm sure, yeah, this is very highly.

18 to 35.

Yeah, what is the numbers? Yeah, it's in the 90s. Yeah. You do that 1 very small podcast where you just have small, like 3 or 4 minute clips.

Yeah, so what it was, I did a tweetstorm called How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky, and it got pretty popular on Twitter. And it's really about wealth creation, I just used the ClickBait-y title. And it's trying to basically lay out timeless principles of wealth creation that if you absorb them, you become the kind of person who can create wealth, create business, make money. And my theory behind that is like, there are 3 things everybody wants. There's actually more than 3, but let's just start with 3, the 3 basics.

Everybody wants to be wealthy, everybody wants to be happy, and everybody wants to be fit. And I know there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on, like we don't want money, and I don't care about being happy and happiness is for stupid people. But let's face it, you wanna be rich and happy and healthy. That's the trifecta. Now, of course, you also want an internally calm state of mind, you want a loving household.

So there are other things that come into it, but those 3, I think they can actually be taught. And a fitness, I'm not gonna teach. There are a lot of people who you've had on here, including yourself, who know a heck of a lot more about fitness and health than I do. But I was born poor and miserable, and I'm now pretty well off and I'm very happy. And I worked at those.

And so I've learned a few things. There are some principles. And so I try to lay them out, but in a timeless manner, where you can kind of figure it out yourself. Because at the end of the day, I can't really teach anything. I can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember things when they happen, or put a name to them.

So this podcast actually ended up explaining this tweet storm. So there's a tweet storm of like 36, 38 tweets, got very famous, got translated to dozens of languages. And these were principles that I came up with for myself when I was really young, around 13, 14. And I've been carrying them in my head for 30 years. And I've been sort of living them.

And over time, I just realized like, sadly or fortunately, the thing that I got really good at was looking at businesses and figuring out the point of maximum leverage to actually create wealth and capture some of that. And do it in a very long-term kind of way, not the banker, crash the economy, get bailed out kind of way. But build businesses and help people and provide value kind of way. Especially when applied to modern technology and leverage in this age of infinite leverage that we live in. So the podcast is just explaining each tweet.

So these are little 345 minute snippets. I don't like to say the same thing twice. I don't like to explain in detail. I just, I feel like if you have something original and interesting to say, you should say it. Otherwise, it's probably been said better.

So that podcast tries to be information dense. It tries to be very concise. It tries to be high impact. It tries to be timeless. And it has all the information.

I think you need the principles that if you absorb these and you work hard over 10 years, you get what you want. So I've got the 1 on wealth creation. I'm going to attempt to do 1 on happiness is a big word, but you know, happiness and inner peace and calm and all that. Because what you want is, you don't want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being high strung, high stress and unhappy and leaving a trail of emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones.

Which is more common than not.

Because you gotta focus and it's very hard to be great at everything You want to be the guy or the gal who gets there calmly, you know quietly without struggle You want to be the person who's the when there's a crisis going on you want to be the calmest, coolest cucumber in the room who still also figures out the correct answer.

If you can be. You were 1 of the things you were saying is that you feel like happiness is something that you can learn. And then you can teach yourself to be happy, even just by Adopting the mindset that you are a happy person and proclaiming that to your friends And so you've sort of developed a social contract. I'm a happy person and the law I have to live up to that

Yeah, I've got hundreds of techniques, but the How did

you develop that 1?

Well, there's social consistency, right? Humans have a need to be highly consistent with their past pronouncements.

So

the way I started my first tech company was I was working inside a larger organization and I told everybody that I was gonna go start a company. I was like, I hate this place, I'm gonna do my own thing, I'm gonna be a successful entrepreneur. 6 months passed, 9 months passed, then people start, you're still here? I thought you were gonna go start a company. Are you lying?

Right, That was the implication. So we kind of know this, right? Social contracts are very powerful. Like if you wanna give up drinking, right? And you're not serious about it, you'll say, I'm gonna cut back.

I'm gonna have only 1 drink a night. I'm gonna only drink on weekends. You tell yourself. But if you're serious, you'll announce it on Facebook. You'll tell all your friends, you'll tell your wife, you'll say, I'm done drinking, I'm throwing everything out of the house, you'll never see me drink again.

When you say that, you know you're serious. So I think a lot of these are choices that we make and happiness is just 1 of those choices. And this is unpopular to say, because there are people who are actually depressed, you know, chemically or what have you. And there are people who don't believe that it's possible because then it creates a responsibility on them. It says, oh, now if I'm, you're saying if I'm not happy, that's my fault.

I'm not saying that, But I'm saying that just like fitness can be a choice health can be a choice nutrition can be a choice Working hard and making money can be a choice happiness is also a choice if you're so smart How come you aren't happy? How can you haven't figured that out? That's my challenge to all the people who think they're so smart and so capable. If you're so smart and capable, why can't you change this?

There are a bunch of people though that actually take pleasure in being miserable. There's something about the pursuit of excellence and of success that supersedes all other pursuits that In their eyes it is it is the the peak the pinnacle the most important thing.

It's not a trade-off I would argue that it now when I say happy happy is 1 of those words that means a zillion different things. It's like love, right, what does that mean? Yeah, define it a little bit more tightly, right? So let's go back to desire, right? This is old, old Buddhist wisdom.

I'm not saying anything original, but desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. And I keep that in front of mind. So when I'm unhappy about something, I look for what is the underlying desire that I have that's not being fulfilled. It's okay to have desires You're a biological creature and you put on this earth. You have to do something.

You have to have desires You have a mission, but don't have too many don't pick them up unconsciously. Don't pick them up randomly Don't have thousands of them. My coffee is too cold, doesn't taste quite right. I'm not sitting perfectly. Oh, I wish it were warmer.

You know, my dog pooped in the lawn. I didn't like that. Whatever it is, pick your 1 overwhelming desire. It's okay to suffer over that 1, but on all the others, you wanna let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed. And then you'll perform a better job.

Most people, when you're unhappy, like a depressed person, it's not that they have a very clear, calm mind, they're too busy in their mind. The sense of self is too strong. They're sitting indoors all the time. Their mind's working, working, working. They're thinking too much.

Well, if you wanna be a high performance athlete, how good of an athlete are you gonna be if you're always having epileptic seizures? If you're always like twitching and running around and like jumping and your limbs are flailing out of control? The same way, if you wanna be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, collected mind. Warren Buffett plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun. He doesn't sit around, like constantly loading his brain with nonstop information and getting worked up about every little thing.

We live in an age of infinite leverage. What I mean by that is that your actions can be multiplied a thousand fold, either by broadcasting at a podcast, or by investing capital, or by having people work for you, or by writing code. So because of that, the impacts of good decision making are much higher than they used to be. Because now you can influence thousands or millions of people through your decisions or your code. So a clear mind leads to better judgment, leads to better outcome.

So a happy, calm, peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes. So if you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind, just like you have to learn how to tame your body.

I love what you're saying. Warren Buffett might not be the best example because he drinks like I think 6 coca-colas a day and he eats mostly McDonald's

and he's still alive somehow something shows you that low stress is more but

it looks like shit Like how old is he? I mean, he's a fairly old man.

Charlie Munger's I think in his 90s, right? Yeah. He's made it really far.

I wonder what Warren's doing. You know, I mean, he's got it. No, that's bad for him. But he doesn't care. It's terrible.

He doesn't care. I think he's just low stress. Yes. Stress is a big killer.

Right. So he just enjoys that Coca-Cola. Yeah. And that's probably, maybe there is a trade-off, right? Like maybe him enjoying that junk food and that Coke, just ah, that pleasing of the mind is maybe better than him just eating wheatgrass shots and kale salads and just being, yeah, just super worked up about everything

It's like if you need your glass of red wine and de-stress and calm down That's probably better than you flying off the rails,

right? Right, and I think that that's applicable not just in business But in probably any pursuit And I like what you're saying about allow that 1 thing to be your obsession but everything else just you know, learn how to learn how to let things go pick your battles

and We'd like to think that We'd like to view the world as linear which is I'm gonna put in 8 hours of work, I'm gonna get back 8 hours of output, right? Doesn't work that way. Guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me. How much output is he getting? What you do, who you do it with, how you do it, way more important than how hard you work, right?

Outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work that you put in. The right way to work is like a lion. You and I are not like cows. We're not meant to graze all day, right? We're meant to hunt like lions.

We're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores.

You can't tell vegans that.

Yeah, sorry. Look, I wish all that stuff worked. I don't want to eat meat. Future generation will look back at us as worse than slavers, you know, because the Holocaust we're committing with the animals, but they'll have artificial meats that taste and are healthier, is better than the real thing. So

allegedly,

allegedly, but so as a, as a modern knowledge worker athlete, as an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete, which means you train hard, then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassessed, you get your feedback loop, then you train some more, then you sprint again, then you rest, then you reassess. This idea that you're gonna have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time. That's machines, you know? Machines should be working 9 to 5. Humans are not meant to work 9 to 5.

No, I agree wholeheartedly, but for people that are working for someone, there's not really that option.

So that's unfortunately the rub, right? That's kind of where my tweet storm starts, which is, first of all, the first thing, if you're gonna make money, is that you're not gonna get rich renting out your time. Even lawyers and doctors who are charging 3, 4, $500 an hour, they're not getting rich because their lifestyle is slowly ramping up along with their income, and they're not saving enough. They just don't have that ability to retire. So the first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business.

You need to have equity, either as an owner, an investor, shareholder, or a brand that you're building that accrues to you to gain your financial freedom.

Yeah. And I was really fascinated by another thing that you were bringing up about working for yourself that you feel in the future, whether it's 50 or 100 years from now, virtually everyone is going to be working for themselves. And I believe the way you put it is that the information age is going to reverse the industrial age.

Yeah. If you go back to hunter-gatherer times, how we evolved, we basically worked for ourselves. We communicated and cooperated within tribes, but each hunter, each gatherer stood on their own and then combined their resources with the family unit. But there was no boss hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy, where you're like the third middle manager down. In the farming age, we became a little bit more hierarchical as we had to run farms, but even those were still mostly family farms.

It's industrial work with factories that sort of created this model of thousands of people working together on 1 thing and having bosses and schedules and times to show up. The reality is if you have to go, I don't care how rich you are, I don't care whether you're like a top Wall Street banker, if you have to go, if somebody can tell you when to be at work and what to wear and how to behave, you're not a free person, you're not actually rich. So we're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs. And intrinsic in that is that I have to work for somebody else. But the information age is breaking that down.

So Ronald Coase is an economist who has this Coase theorem, very famous theorem, but it basically just talks about why is a company the size that it is? Why is a company 1 person instead of 10 people instead of 100 instead of 1,000? And it has to do with the internal transaction costs versus the external transaction costs. Let's say I want to do something, let's say I'm building a house, and I need someone to come in and provide the lumber. I'm a developer, right?

Do I want that to be part of my company, or do I want that to be an external provider? A lot of it just depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone externally versus internally. If it's too hard to keep doing the contract every time externally, I'll bring that in-house. If it's easy to do externally and it's a one-off kind of thing, I'd rather keep it out of the house. Well, information technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally.

It's becoming much easier to communicate with people, gig economy, I can send you small amounts of money, I can hire you through an app, I can rate you afterwards. So we're seeing an atomization of the firm. We're seeing the optimal size of the firm shrinking. It's most obvious in Silicon Valley, tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets. So what looked like the small little vacation rental market on Craigslist is now suddenly blown up into Airbnb, 1 example.

That's a great example.

But what I think we're going to see is whether it's 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now, high quality work will be available. We're not talking about now driving an Uber, We're talking about super high quality work will be available in a gig fashion where you'll wake up in the morning, your phone will buzz and you'll have 5 different jobs from people who have worked with you in the past or have been referred to you. It's kind of like how Hollywood already works a little bit with how they organize for a project. You decide where to take the project or not. The contract is right there on the spot, you get paid a certain amount, you get rated every day or every week, you get the money delivered, and then when you're done working, you turn it off and you go to Tahiti or wherever you want to spend the next 3 months.

And I think the Smart people have already started figuring out that the internet enables this and they're starting to work more and more remotely on their own schedule, on their own time, on their own place, with their own friends, in their own way. And that's actually how we are the most productive. So the information revolution by making it easier to communicate, connect, and cooperate is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves. And that is my ultimate dream. Even when I run a company and I have employees, I always tell those people, hey, I'm gonna help you start your company when you're ready.

Because I think that's the highest calling. Maybe not everybody will get there, but it would be fine if we were even working a 10 person company or 20 person company is way better than working in a 1000 person company or 10,000 person company. So this idea that we're all factory like cogs in a machine who are specialized and have to do things by rote memorization or instruction is going to go away and we're going to go back to being small groups of creative bands of individuals setting out to do missions. And when those missions are done, we collect our money, we get rated, and then we rest and reassess until we're ready for the next sprint.

Has there ever been a study done on happiness as it regards to the size of companies?

Not that I'm aware, but to me it's obvious. It's just obvious. The smaller the company, the happier you're gonna be, the more human your relations are, the less you have rules to operate under, the more flexible, the more creative, the more you'll be treated like a human just because you're able to do multiple things.

Yeah. This brings me to what is a subject that keeps getting brought up nowadays is universal basic income with the oncoming apocalypse of automation. This is how it's being portrayed by Andrew Yang, who's running for president. I sat down and talked with him about it. It's very compelling.

And he's a very smart guy and he's an entrepreneur himself. And when he starts talking about automation and how it's going to just eliminate massive amounts of jobs and leave people stranded, what do you, I know you're a guy who thinks about the future and

prognostic. I'm gonna take the unpopular point of view on this. I think it's a non-solution to a non-problem. Ooh. And I mean that in the sense that automation has been happening since the dawn of time.

Man, when electricity came along, that put a lot of people out of work. Right? A lot of people carrying buckets of water and lighting lamps and all those kinds of things.

And this was the concern with factories as well, right?

Yeah, apps, everything. Literally every single thing that comes along. Even the

printing press.

Absolutely. And what it does is it frees people up for new creative work. So the question is not, is automation going to eliminate jobs? There is no finite number of jobs. We're not sitting around dividing up the same jobs that were around since the Stone Age.

So obviously new jobs are being created and they're usually better jobs, more creative jobs. So the question is, how quickly is this transition going to happen? And what kinds of jobs will be eliminated? And what kinds of jobs will be created? It's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be created.

If I told you 10 years ago that podcaster was gonna be a job, or that playing video games is gonna be a job, or commentating on video games is gonna be a job, you would have laughed me out of the room. Those are nonsense jobs, but yet here we are. So society will always create new jobs. Civilization creates new jobs, but it's impossible to predict what those jobs are. So the question is how quickly is that transition happening?

Well, the reality is, even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse, we're at a record low unemployment. Explain that. Where's the transition?

Donald Trump, that's how.

All I'm saying is, I don't see it in the numbers, I don't see it actually happening.

The

question is, How quickly can you retrain people? So it's an education problem. The problem in the UBI, there's a couple of problems in the UBI. 1 is you're creating a straight, you're creating a slippery slide transfer straight into socialism, right? The moment people can start voting themselves money combined with a democracy, it's just a matter of time before the bottom 51 votes themselves everything in the top 49.

By the way, a slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy. I know people like saying that, but they haven't thought it through. But the moment you start having a direct transfer mechanism like that in a democracy, you're basically doing it with capitalism, which is the engine of economic growth. You're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here. The estimate I saw for 15K a year basic income for everybody would be 3 quarters of current GDP.

And of course, GDP was shrinking in response as all the entrepreneurs fled. So you would essentially bankrupt the country. Another issue with UBI is that people who are down in their luck, they're not looking for handouts. It's not just about money. It's also about status.

It's about meaning. And the moment I start giving money to you and put you on the dole, I've lowered your status. I've made you a second class citizen. So I have to give you meaning. And meaning comes through education and capability.

You have to teach a man to fish, not to basically throw your rotting leftover carcasses at him and say, here, eat the scraps. So it doesn't solve the meaning problem. And lastly, it's nonsense to hand 15K out to everybody. You wanna means test people. There's no reason to give it to you and me.

So you end up back towards the welfare system, where you do have to figure out who needs it and who doesn't. So I think the better route is that we actually establish a set of basic substance services that you have to have. And we provide those in abundance through technology-based automation. So get basic housing, get basic food, get basic transportation, get high speed internet access, get a phone in your pocket. Those are the kinds of things you want to give people.

And finally, in terms of the rate of automation, I think we can educate people very quickly. 1 of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be reeducated. We view education as this thing where you go to school, you come out when you're out of college and you're done. No more education. Well, that's wrong.

You have all these great online boot camps and coding schools coming up. There are ones that will even pay you to go there now. You can educate people en masse, and you can educate them into creative professions. People who are talking about AI, automating programming, have never really written serious code. Coding is thinking.

It's automatic structured thinking. An AI that can program as well or better than humans is an AI that just took over the world. That's end game. That's the end of the human species. And I can give you arguments why I don't think that's coming either.

People who are thinking, and I know I take the opposite side from some very famous people in this debate, but we're nowhere near close to general AI. Not in our lifetimes, you don't have to worry about it.

Even in our lifetimes? Really?

It's so overblown. It's another, It's a combination of Cassandra complex, you know, it's fun to talk about the end of the world Combined with a god complex like people who have lost religion. So they're looking for meaning in some kind of end of history, right? The reason why I don't think AI is coming anytime soon is because a lot of the advances in so-called AI today are what we call narrow AI. They're really a pattern recognition, machine learning to figure out like what is that object on the screen, or how do you find this signal and all of that noise?

There is nothing approaching what we call creative thinking. To actually model general intelligence, you run into all kinds of problems. First, we don't know how the brain works at all. Number 2, we've never even modeled a paramecium or an amoeba, let alone a human brain. Number 3, there's this assumption that All of the computation is going at the cellular level, at the neuron level, whereas nature is very parsimonious.

It uses everything at its disposal. There's a lot of machinery inside the cell that is doing calculations that is intelligent, that isn't accounted for. And the best estimates are it would take 50 years of Moore's law before we can simulate what's going on inside a cell near perfectly, and probably 100 years before we can build a brain that can simulate inside the cells. So putting it at saying that I'm just gonna model neuron as on or off, and then use that to build a human brain is overly simplistic. Furthermore, I would posit there's no such thing as general intelligence.

Every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in, so you have to evolve an environment around it. So I think a lot of people who are peddling general AI, the burden of proof is on them. I haven't seen anything that would lead me to indicate we're approaching general AI. Instead we're solving deterministic closed set finite problems using large amounts of data. But it's not sexy to talk about that.

Trevor Burrus

If you're talking about mirroring the actual abilities of cells or are you talking about recreating the actual mechanism? Like what is going on inside cells and biological organisms?

Yeah, we just don't know how intelligence works.

Right, we

don't know what consciousness is. So most of the AI approaches basically say, we're gonna try and model how the brain works,

but

then model at the neuron level, which is saying this neurons on, that neurons off, they're combining their signal. But I'm saying the neuron is a cell, inside the cell, There's all this machinery going on that's operating the neuron that is also part of the intelligence apparatus You can't just ignore that and abstract that out. You have to model it down to the inside the cell level

It's also a part of the biological organism itself. Exactly. And it has all these needs that You know, the biological organism has to have food and rest and there's a balance going on. But when you eliminate all that, when there is none of that and it's just calculations and we get to a point where it's just this thing that we've created, whether you call it a computer, whether it doesn't have to be a moving thing even but a thing that you've created that stores virtually all the information that's available in the world store stores all the patterns of All the thinking of all the great people that have ever lived. All the the writers, all the people that have ever published anything, all the people that have ever spoken any words, stores all of their points, all their counterpoints, all their contradictions, applies logic and reason and some sort of sense of the future and starts improving upon these patterns and then starts acting on its own based on the information that's been provided with.

Well, first you would have to actually simulate a structure of the human brain that can hold all that information. You're basically talking about tens of thousands of brains worth of information. We can't even build 1 brain in the next decade or 2 or 3.

Well in terms of an actual physical brain, yes. But what about something that recreates the abilities of a brain?

Like I said nature is parsimonious. So we've got this three-pound wetware object that can hold all this data Nature has been very efficient in evolving kind of how we get there. I just don't think computers are anywhere close to that. Like they can hold that amount of data with that complexity, with like the holographic structure of the brain where it can recall in many, many different ways. And then I don't think you can evolve a creature to be intelligent outside of the boundaries of feedback in a real medium.

Like if you evolved, if you raised a human being in a concrete cell with no input from the outside, they wouldn't have any feedback from the real world. They wouldn't evolve properly. So I think just dumping information into a thing isn't enough. It has to have an environment to operate in to get feedback from it needs to have context

but isn't that biological? I mean what if you if you have just the all the information that people have Accumulated and the lessons that people have learned and you program that into the computer. Like if we can take a computer that can beat someone at chess, the real question was, well, can we make some sort of an artificial intelligence that could beat someone at Go, which is far more complex than chess. They figured out how to do that too. And that was a giant shock, right?

These are still man-made, very closed, bounded games. They're not on the road to the unbounded game of life. They are completely artificial.

But this Didn't Go, didn't that give you like a little bit of a pause?

A little bit. Go is not, Go or League of Legends or Fortnite, they're not completely deterministic.

Right.

But they're still very artificial, very bounded games. Being good at Go doesn't mean that you can then suddenly figure out how to write great poetry.

Right. The creativity for sure is something that's great.

Creativity is the last frontier. So, I do believe that automation over a long enough period of time will replace every non-creative job or every non-creative work. But that's great news. That means that all of our basic needs are taken care of and what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants. When what are you doing right now?

This is a creative job.

Sure. That brings us back to the idea of meaning and universal basic income. I think the idea of giving someone $15,000 a year doesn't necessarily cause whatever – what everyone would worry about is people being on the dole. You would have a bunch of listless people out there with no meaning in life But the idea is that 15000 dollars a year and I'm not necessarily sure I agree with this I'm not I'm not even endorsing this but that 15000 dollars a year would just provide you with the necessities to get by in life It would give you food. It would give you shelter

Well, it's not gonna stop at 15, because the moment people are like, I mean, at 15, like-

Then people would demand more. Bernie Sanders would be on

the- 16, 17, 18, 19.

I want $45,000 a year. These companies are too big. Yeah, that

could happen. It doesn't stop. It just goes all the way to bankruptcy.

The concern is the slide to socialism.

It's obvious. I mean, heck, if I was not working and I was getting my 15 a year, I would happily vote for the guy who would give me 20 or 25. It's just common sense.

What do you say to the people that don't believe that there is such a thing of ethical as ethical or compassionate capitalism. There's many people today that are espousing Marxism and they're espousing some sort of a socialist society where they believe that capitalism has screwed people over and eliminated the middle class. And There

are absolutely problems with capitalism. I think monopolies are a problem. I think that crony capitalism is a problem with the government, you know, kind of gets in bed with them and sort of forces things. I think the bankers have really, you know, raped society and the rest of us are suffering

for it.

Yeah, they've essentially taken huge risks where they privatize the gains and they socialize the losses so when it fails, they basically get bailed out and bankrupt everybody else. So capitalism has gotten a really bad name. Let's talk about it as free exchange, free markets. Free markets and free exchange are intrinsic to humans. From when the first person started a fire and somebody came along with a deer and said, hey, if I cook my deer on your fire, I'll share some of it with you, right?

So specializational labor, we trade, that's built into the human species. Basic math comes from accounting, keeping track of debts and credits and so on. We need to be able to engage in free trade. The correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal opportunity. And so we should always strive to provide equal opportunity.

But people confuse that with equal outcome. When you have equal outcome, that can only be enforced through violence because different people, free people make different choices. And when they make different choices, they have different outcomes. And if you don't let them suffer the consequences of bad choices or reap the rewards from good choices, then you are forcibly redistributing through violence. It's interesting that there are no working socialist examples that exist without violence.

You basically need someone to show up with a gun and say, okay, you're not allowed to do that. You hand this over to that person. So 1 of the reasons why I do this podcast is because I believe everybody can be wealthy. Everybody, it's not a 0 sum game. It is a positive sum game.

You create something brand new, you exchange it with me for something brand new, I've created this higher utility for both of us, the sum of the value created is positive. It's not like status where it's like, you're higher up, I'm lower down, you're president, so I must be vice president. You're a plus 1, I'm a minus 1, it has to cancel to 0. We should be all for playing positive, some ethical games. The problem is because of these looters who have ruined capitalism's name,

that

then you get socialists coming in and saying, burn the whole system down. You burn the whole system down, we end up like Venezuela or the former Soviet Union. You know, you don't want to be a failed socialist states with emaciated teens hunting cats in the streets to eat, right? That's literally what happens in some of these places. So I think it's very important not to destroy the engine of progress that brought us here.

Yeah, the idea that socialism just hasn't worked yet, that it needs to, we just need to do it right. If we do it right, we can, if you ever

had a

debate- A

hundred million dead and-

Yeah, yeah. Well-

Let's keep trying.

All over the world, yeah. And in every single time it's been implemented. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who's a socialist? Were you?

Yeah, many times. Some of my better friends are socialists. Really? We really get into it. Yeah.

And what is there? I mean, does anyone have a compelling perspective at all?

I think really socialism comes from the heart, right? We all wanna be socialist. Capitalism comes from the head because there are always cheaters in any system and there's incentives in any system. So when you're young, if you're not a socialist, you have no heart. When you're older, if you're not a capitalist, you have no head, right?

You haven't thought it through. So I understand where it comes from. I always liked Nassim Taleb's framing on this, where he said, with my family, I'm a communist. With my close friends, I'm a socialist. You know, at my state level politics, I'm a Democrat.

At higher levels, I'm a Republican. And at the federal level, I'm a libertarian, right? So basically, the larger the group of people you have massed together, who have different interests, the less trust there is, the more cheating there is, the better the incentives have to be aligned, the better the system has to work, the more you go towards capitalism. The smaller the group you're in, you're in a kibbutz, you're in your commune, you're in your house, you're in your tribe, by all means be a socialist. With my aunts, with my brother, with my cousins, with my uncles, with my mom, with my family, I'm a socialist.

That's the right way to live a loving, happy, integrated life. But when you're dealing with strangers, I mean, you wanna be a real socialist, great. Open all your doors and windows tomorrow. Please everybody, come take what you want. See how that works out.

Yeah, this idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality.

Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. Yeah. And the outcome inequality is there because you made different choices. Now again, going back, if it was because you didn't have the same opportunities, that's a problem.

So society should always try to give people equal opportunities. So for example, instead of basic income, what if we had a retraining program built into our basic social fabric, which said that every 4 years or every 6 years, or whatever it is, maybe it's every 10, you can take 1 year out, and we'll pay for you to go retrain completely. And you can go into any profession you like that has some earning power and output, hopefully a creative long-term profession, and you can reeducate yourself. That would be much better for society on all levels than basically just saying, now you're gonna be the dole for the rest of your life.

Yeah, you'd have to lead that horse to water and then make him drink.

It requires people to put in some effort. You know, we can't all just sit around.

Well, that's my perspective on income inequality. There's always effort inequality and thought inequality. There's just some people that are obsessed. And if those people become successful, it doesn't mean they stole from you. It just means that they put in the amount of energy and effort that it's required to reach where they're at.

And there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on now where people say, well, it's because you're privileged. It's like, well, you know what the greatest privilege is? You're alive. 85% of humanity is dead. So how privileged are you?

Then you're living in the first world. Then you have 4 limbs, etc. So you can take that argument all the way. It's kind of a nonsense discussion. Darrell Bock

What's a very weird progressive argument, and as it pertains to race, it's always a weird 1, right? Because white privilege to me, although you could look at what they're saying on paper like, yes, yeah, I'm sure there's more black people that are harassed by the police. I'm sure there is more black people who are treated suspiciously by shop owners and the like. But the problem isn't the people who aren't treated poorly. The problem is the people who treat the people poorly.

The problem is racism. The problem is not People that didn't ask to be born white or whatever they are and they don't get harassed That so this idea of white privilege or male privilege or whatever it is. That's not the problem You're you're just looking at someone who's not a victim of this particular problem that you're highlighting, but you're not looking at the perpetrators of the problem. You're making people perpetrators by simply existing and having less melanin in their skin or having their ancestors come from a

geographical location. Yeah, that's just racism by another way.

It's a sneaky way of being racist.

Yeah, and then they say you can't be racist. It's not racist because you're white.

That is hilarious if you can't be racist against white people. That 1, I follow this.

That's a variation of the hold still while I hit you argument. Stop struggling while I'm hitting you.

But it's just so silly. You've just completely changed what racism means.

But what's hilarious is that mostly the people who are yelling racist are not the minorities. When I look on my Twitter or my social media or on my news, it's white on white violence.

Virtue signal.

Yeah, it's white on white violence. What's mostly going on is it's elitist whites, blue state whites, college educated whites, beating up on high school educated whites, blue collar. It's a white collar versus blue collar war that's going on. And the rest of us are just kind of watching, like, oh, that's kind of interesting.

Well, it's also a side effect of the ability to broadcast, right? Like everyone with a Twitter handle has the ability to broadcast. Everyone with a Facebook page has the ability to pontificate and have these long rambling, these huge statements that people put out. When you read them, it's like, how much time did you put in this? And what the, do you put that much time in your kids?

Or your

job, or your life, or your future, or planning for your, you know, how much do you work out a day? I mean, are you just, these, some, I read some people's Facebook posts, I'm like, this is a preposterous amount of effort that you put into saying virtually nothing.

Let's say humans are being creative. Yeah. Let's see an AI do that.

Well, that's true. It is creative. It's creative in a very odd way, right? Because it's creative in that they're trying to elicit a response from people and they're trying to raise their social value or raise their position on the social totem pole.

It's signaling and it's easy signaling because the kind of thing that everybody has to agree with you on because nobody wants to be seen as a horrible person. And it's very hard to make the nuanced arguments against then this is just kind of go along right?

Well, it's also it's some of it is so cliche that it seems like I Know 1 guy who poses as a woman on on Twitter, but he does it obviously. What is his, the name, Tatiana?

McGrath, yes.

Hilarious. Used

to be Godfrey Elwick. Yes.

Oh, is that the same guy?

I think so, yeah.

That's hilarious. I did not, They killed his account.

They killed his account for

pretending to be transracial.

That's right.

They didn't let him.

He basically says all the crazy stuff that people on the left say, but he says the craziest version and kind of just shows how it's okay. Like I saw a tweet from him recently, he just said, or her, that it's not okay to be white. Yes

And then some people agree but it's it's so close to what they say It's so close that it's like the most artful form of subtle parody because it's well

if you if you replace in half of these things if you replace the word white with black Or Asian.

Oh my god

lynch mob to send. Yeah.

Yeah, it's it's a strange time in that respect that

If You want to see who rules over you, see who you're not allowed to criticize.

Darrell Bock Excellent. Yeah, that's so true, right? Yeah, that's so true. I wonder where this is going. I really do.

I wonder Because it seems like this newfound ability to broadcast that we have with, whether you have a YouTube page or whether you have Twitter or whatever you're doing, this newfound ability to spread whatever you're trying to say to so many people with very little understanding on the most part from what

it's doing. I think it's actually a great thing overall. Yeah, I do as well. Because now

it means

that any human can broadcast to any other human on the planet at any time. So for example, if a totalitarian dictator were to come to power and someone was beating up, had fascists beating up on old women, like that would get broadcast out instantly. There would be an instant outrage, hue and cry rallying. So in that sense, it helps bring attention to the plight of anybody. But right now we're going through the phase where we have this newfound power to assemble mobs and people don't know how to deal with that.

So it becomes very easy to set up a mob and have it attack somebody, take all the context out. Like even this conversation, I'm sure people will take out snippets, put them on social media and try and get somebody outraged. And so you have to learn how, first of all, society just has to get over this idea of outrage. Like to me, like outrage people, people who get easily outraged are the stupidest people on social media. Those are the people I block instantly.

It's just kind of very low level thinking, right? These are the foot soldiers in a mob. Eventually society just has to get over it. They have to understand that these are all snippets being taken out of context. These are doctored video clips.

These are just someone who's trying to get outraged over something. Eventually there'll also be anti-mob tactics. Like for example, if I go to someone's Twitter feed and all it is is full of political ranting, raving, conspiracy theories, do I wanna work with this person? Do I wanna associate with this person? Do I wanna be friends with this person?

Their mind is just cluttered with junk. Now I don't necessarily blame them. I think that the human brain is not designed to absorb all of the world's breaking news, 24 7 emergencies injected straight into your skull with clickbait headline news. If you pay attention to that stuff, even if you're well-meaning, even if you're sound of mind and body, it will eventually drive you insane. This goes back to Clockwork Orange where he has his eyes opened up and he's forced to watch the news.

But I think that's what's happening right now because these are addictive, right? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, these are weaponized. You have social statisticians and scientists and researchers and people in lab coats, literally, best minds of our generation figuring out how to addict you to the news. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted, your brain will get destroyed. And I think this is the modern struggle, right?

The modern struggle. So the ancient struggle used to be the tribal struggle. You had your tribe of friends and family, you had your religion, you had your country, you had your loyalty, you had your nationality. At least you had meaning and support, but now you would struggle against other tribes. Modern life, we're so free, everything's become atomized.

We stand alone, you live in your apartment alone, you live in your house alone, your parents don't live nearby, your friends don't live nearby. You don't have any tribal meaning, you don't believe in religion anymore, You don't believe in country anymore. It's fine. You got a lot of freedom. It's fantastic.

But now when they come to attack you, you're alone and you can't resist. So how do they attack you? It's all well-meaning. I don't fault capitalism. I love capitalism, but look at how it happens.

Social media, they've massaged all the mechanisms to addict you like a skinner pigeon or a rat who's just gonna click, click, click, click, click, can't put the phone down. Food, they've taken sugar and they weaponized it. They've put it into all these different forms and varieties that you can't resist eating. Drugs, right? They've taken pharmaceuticals and plants and they've synthesized them.

They've grown them in such a way that you get addicted, You can't put them down. Porn, right? If you're a young male and you wander on the internet, it'll like sap away your libido and you're not going out in real life society anymore because you've got this incredibly stimulating stuff coming at you. Video games, another way to addict people. So you have this, You have entire large factories of people that are working to addict you to these things and you stand alone.

So the modern struggle as an individual is learning how to resist these things in the first place, drawing your own boundaries and there's no 1 there to help you.

Ooh, That's terrifying. I mean, it is. It's a new road that needs to be navigated by young people that are, there's no map. There's no guidebook on how to handle this.

Our generation is the transition generation. I think our kids will know how to handle it better because they'll grow but I hope I hope

I hope to you're seeing some Ridiculous behavior from people today. That's so common I mean, I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but there was a guy who He made a video if it turns out it wasn't even him that made the video at least that's not what he said But it was a video where he sort of doctored Nancy Pelosi talking

and

made it look like she was drunk And

then

a bunch of people retweeted it and like oh my god, look she's Drunk and and so 1 of the online publications some website tracked him down and Doxed him and turned out. He's just a day laborer who is an african-american trump fan and thought it would be funny to do that. And it turns out that he didn't even, at least according to him, he actually just put it up on his Facebook page. What's even more disturbing is Facebook gave up his information to this website. For what?

Because he made something funny that made people seem drunk? There's a million of those about me. I mean, you could find them. I mean,

I think Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of these other social media platforms are committing slow motion suicide through these kinds of activities. That was

a stunning 1 though, that they would give up this guy who's a laborer because he made a parody video or he made Someone look foolish with editing.

Well, you know have basically the media views it as their job to go after individuals They don't like

you know I use media with air quotes in that regard because I don't think this is something that the New York Times would have done or anything responsible. But

the media is getting more and more desperate, right? Because what happened was before the internet, you could have 2 local newspapers in every town and you could have 2 local news stations, TV stations in every town. And then CNN came along and started commoditizing the news 24 7 broadcasts. And then the internet came along and that was the final nail in the coffin. Because what the internet did was it said, actually if there's a fact that's news, you can distribute that immediately.

It can go on Twitter, it can go on Facebook, it gets reprinted on Google News a thousand times. You know, you go on Google News, you're like, okay, what's the piece of news, which source and 3000 other articles, too many, right? So, news has become commoditized. So, the entire news media has shifted into peddling opinions and entertainment. And so, now they've become a variation between like cheerleaders, shock troops, enforcers, you know, talking heads.

So these are now tribal, these are not propaganda machines signaling for their tribes. It's a right wing 1, there's a left wing 1, right? There's the alt right, there's a control left, and the 2 of them are just fighting it out using their various media organs and memes. So basically when you see 1 of these news organizations doxing an individual, that's like a tank running over a soldier. Right, that's what's going on.

It's just war. And so there's no such thing anymore as a neutral media commentator. The illusion of objectivity that journalism had is lost. There's no longer 1 guy like a Walter Cronkite that everyone's gonna listen to. It's now all just shock troops fighting wars with each other.

How does this play out? Have you thought about it?

Yeah, a little bit. So what the internet does, a lot of this is internet driven. What the internet does is the internet creates 1 giant aggregator or 2 for everything, 1 taxi dispatcher, 1 e-commerce store, 1 search engine, 1 social media site for friends and family, 1 for business, et cetera. So the internet is this giant aggregator where it creates 1 big hegemon for everything. And it creates an atomized long tail of millions and millions of individuals.

What it gets rid of is the medium sized ones in the middle. So for example, you might've had like 7 Hollywood studios was all gonna be Netflix. You had, you know, like 10 large e-commerce players, commerce players from Walmart to Costco to, you know, Kmart and whatever, no, now it's just gonna be Amazon and a ton of small individual brands. So that's the world that we're headed towards. 1 hegemon and millions of individuals.

So where it ends up long term is media will be a few gigantic outlets. You know, it could be the New York Times, it could be Facebook, a few like that. And there's gonna be...