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Infinite Loops
Tomás Pueyo — Explaining the World Through Geography, History and Data (EP. 297)
01:38:46
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- [00:00]
A
I don't think we've evolved in a world where anything grows exponentially. I don't think we have any intuition at all. We see lines when we zoom in, and we need to zoom out and see history for us to understand these exponential curves. Ludalitz were actually right. Most of them lost their job, and the alternative that they had was actually not better if they found one. And so it's something that was better over the decades. It's great for us. It wasn't great for them.
- [00:26]
B
Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim o' Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I'm very, very excited about today's guest. Thomas Pueo, a French Spanish writer, engineer, entrepreneur whose work sits at the intersection of maps, math, and imagination. Oh, man, I'm going to love talking to you. His work came to global attention early 2020, when his viral essays Coronavirus, why youy Must act now, and the Hammer and the Dance helped millions to understand what exponential spread really meant. You know what's interesting is that those two pieces led to an incredibly popular substack called Uncharted Territories, where you use geography, history, and technology and data to explain the world, where it's been, where it's going. But I always think about that Bartlett quote, and I want your opinion on it. The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. Why and welcome.
- [01:35]
A
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah. That is exponential. It's weird because I had a good intuitive sense of what these were because of my previous job. I was handling Facebook viral apps, and I built a few that grew exponentially. And when you grow, you see it grow every day. And in this exponential way, you get a good sense of it. But humans, I don't think we've evolved in a world where anything grows exponentially. Nothing goes this way. We have a sense of linear growth, maybe exponential growth in, for example, what fruit flies like, how they reproduce themselves, things like that, but very, very few otherwise. And so I don't think we have an intuition at all. We see lines when we zoom in, and we need to zoom out and see history for us to understand these exponential curves.
- [02:25]
B
Yeah, I've often said that math, especially, it used to baffle me, and I think it baffles me less now. But it does seem, when you look at humans in general, there seems to be this 1, 2, 3, a lot sort of mentality. And I think that understanding exponential growth, understanding that compounding can go both ways, can go positive and negative, are kind of simple concepts, not the exponential part, but the compounding certainly. Why do you think that it is a challenge for us to think mathematically.
- [03:07]
A
The way I think humans think is very, very shaped by evolutionary psychology. And so whatever we evolved around is what we do. And what you said around the quantities 1, 2, 3, and a lot reminds me a lot of what I think Stalin said. Right. Like, is it one person killed is.
- [03:27]
B
Yeah. One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic.
- [03:31]
A
Yeah. Then why. Because we never found, like, we never killed a million people as we evolved. We could kill one, we could kill 10, we could kill a hundred. It was always the enemy. So when that happened and it was tragedy when it was us. So that kind of intuition I think we haven't developed at all. And compounding is clearly one that, you know. Well, I think stats is another example where we're so bad, we have such a bad intuition at probabilities and it makes so, so many mistakes when, when thinking without taking them into consideration.
- [04:04]
B
Yeah. I often say that we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world and tragedy or hilarity often ensue.
- [04:17]
A
Even like in your job or like not job, but like investing. It's a perfect example. VCs, for example, when I talk with private equities, they don't understand VCs. It's like, what are you guys doing? You're investing in 100 companies and you're just hoping that one is going to be successful. And the way you have no due diligence compared to what we do in pe. And it's fun how just a very small detail of just the odds of success of a given company can change completely the job that you do. That's the power of some of these stats.
- [04:47]
B
Yeah. And if you look at them closely enough, one of the things that we found is there are arbitrage opportunities.
- [04:54]
A
Opportunities.
- [04:55]
B
Because as you say, most VCs, when they're making an investment are hoping. They're counting on power laws and they're counting on the fact that investment can return the entire fund. So they have a $200 million fund and they're investing 20 million. They want that 20 million to at least be able to grow to 200 million.
- [05:20]
A
That's right. That's right.
- [05:21]
B
And what that leaves from our perspective is a huge class of companies where the TAM total addressable market is not big enough for a VC to think, yeah, that could return my entire fund, but they're immensely profitable. Right. And so our venture division looks for those types of companies because your Moat kind of is other VCs can't invest in that company because it's what they could, but they won't because it doesn't have the ability to return the entire fund.
- [05:59]
A
So it is interesting. So, so, so when you think about the, in these terms and you apply that thinking to podcasts, like, is there, is there a world like what, what are the types of podcasts or interviews or sessions that you would have that have an up recharge opportunity? Where's the market? Completely underserved there. Have you thought about this?
- [06:17]
B
I have at length. And I think that the podcast market, as saturated as it seems, is still kind of blue sky in terms of what you could, what you could develop. I think that the idea that you really want to grow huge might be the limiting factor there. I think that there are many, many types of podcasts in niches where you can grow a perfectly respectable audience if you have the right guests, you have the right conversations, et cetera, in a variety of niches where you're going to get 25, 30, 50,000 listeners, and that certainly supports an ad based model. You're probably not going to get super rich. But if you're passionate about that, and I think that's where the fit is. There are so many people, and we're going to get to your passion in a minute here, but there are so many people who not only have incredibly deep domain knowledge, but they also are just absolutely passionate about the subject. I think those people could do very, very well starting a podcast, but they have to be persistent and patient. Right? Like if you look at the stats on podcasts, like 90% of them never get past seven episodes. And it's the hyperbolic discounting that is another flaw I think in human os, in that, hey, we got to grow now this quarter, right? And podcast, you need to have a long period of time and a variety of guests to build your audience.
- [08:05]
A
I see. So you think there's not going to be many more Joe Rogans because that is saturated. People try to go for the bigger audiences is mostly the niches where there's their space.
- [08:19]
B
I'm kind of a never say never guy because I don't have complete knowledge and therefore I have to discount my own instincts sometimes. So I'm sure that some other Joe Rogan will emerge under very different circumstances. It's kind of like, you know, Warren Buffett. Who's the next Warren Buffett? Who's the next Warren Buffett? And my point has always been there is going to be a next Warren Buffett. There is going to be somebody who achieves great success, but financially, but he or she is going to do it in a very different manner than Warren did. It's always wise to study how the Warren Buffetts and Charlie Mungers of the world looked at the world. I think that's very useful. But then, you know, you're going to want to synthesize some of that knowledge as you make your own path in, in the world. I want to, I want to, I want to get to you though, because you are a very interesting guy. What was that like? What was that like in 2020, having. Having those essays like literally translated into 40 different languages, tens of millions of people reading it. Like, what does that feel like?
- [09:36]
A
That was nuts. So I was in San Francisco in my two bedroom apartment with my wife, my three children. My wife was pregnant of the fourth. We both had a job, a day job, no nanny. Because now it's closing and everything was closed. No school. So it was quite intense. But just before that happened, just before closing, I was just working in a startup. I was doing product and growth. And we start talking about this virus that is happening in China. And I started looking into it, I started reading the papers. I think that's one of the things that few people do. There's an edge in reading papers. Still is. And given my background, I had a good sense of what exponentials meant. We saw what happened in Italy, we had seen what happened in Iran, it was growing exponentially in both countries. Italy had just closed. So it was, I think, reasonably obvious that the rest of the world was going to close because you could see the exponential starting in literally everywhere. So that's the moment in which I start posting. And that first article got, I think that I can count 65 million reads, most of them within a week. And then when I posted it, every country was like, no, we're not going to close. And then within a week, everybody had closed. So I think that that was crazy. I think the craziest part is I had all of three weeks of experience in the field of epidemiology. And I find myself talking with presidents of governments and advising them in their, in their epidemiological strategy, which is freaking nuts. I think it tells you a lot of the world and the type of the level of knowledge that is available to governments that I was able to get into that kind of world and advise these governments.
- [11:30]
B
What was the single most surrealistic moment then?
- [11:35]
A
I think when I woke up, I think it was on March 11th and my phone was just a buzzer. It was just buzzing constantly. It didn't stop in four hours. The notifications and seeing some of the names at the time Twitter was showing where some of the people who had retweeted or postposted those tw and these are like very important people. And that's kind of nuts. And I think what's nuts is not just that, but it's also the massive contrast between what's happening virtually and what's happening in real life. Because in real life I'm in the chaos of my. In my apartment, in my underwear, like reading papers. And in reality, you have all these people who are famous talking about that article. So that's kind of this weird, weird juxtaposition. So I think that was a weird one. And the other one is talking with a president of a government face to face, not face to face, virtually, with all his team members and like looking at the data with him and the team. And that's kind of so weird. Like, I've been studying at that point for two months epidemiology first. So, so weird that I'm advising a president, but also like, how is this possible? How many things must have failed for me to be able to be here and actually be the one that's most knowledgeable because I wasn't the most knowledgeable in that room. Like, that's crazy to me. Crazy.
- [12:59]
B
Yeah. That's gotta be just like a really bizarre feeling.
- [13:04]
A
Yeah. I think it speaks a lot to one of the topics that I'm always so interested in. I think governance just doesn't work. I think the way our democracy's work is adapted for probably work 250 years ago. Right. The way it works is just you have a few bits of information that the people send to the government every four years. That's the vote. But we're now living in a world where you could send gigabytes of information every day, every meeting, from every person. And so before we had to elect leaders to make choices for us because of bandwidth of that information was so narrow. Right. But you don't need to do that anymore if you have this information and so this ability to send information and receive it. So the way I think about it is a lot of, okay, if we had encyclopedias, which were a group of people in a room writing articles, and then we move to Wikipedia and we have more articles, faster and better, and that's just because we had a coordination mechanism to aggregate all this information, can we do the same for democracy? What is the mechanism where we can aggregate all this information from so many places so that we can have better decisions. And we don't even need to elect people at that point because it's the mechanism of aggregation of information that makes a better decision. So I think a lot about these things.
- [14:30]
B
Yeah. It's something I've thought a lot about as well. And what I always keep in mind is the cultural lag. Time to adopt. And, you know, we are interesting creatures, we humans. And one of the things is kind of the. The dual thing that you see. On the one hand, it often takes society a long time to get comfortable with even the idea. Yeah. That we should discuss. You know, the traditionalists are like, what do you mean? You can't discuss replacing nation states and democracies with communities like, you know, that just can't happen. And then it's. I think it was Max Planck who said, progress happens one funeral at a time. And like, the old guard that won't even consider it just literally starts dying.
- [15:30]
A
Yeah.
- [15:30]
B
And. And the younger people basically have grown up with that idea kind of swimming in their mind.
- [15:38]
A
Yeah.
- [15:38]
B
One of the things that I'm intrigued by is this idea of having citizen juries that are randomly selected. There has to be some sort of criteria. Right, But. And you have two conversants talking different parts of a policy. Right. So your conversant number one is in favor of policy. A person two is opposed. And they have the ability to bring as much data to the jury as they want. They have the ability to do whatever they want. And there's something that. What intrigues me is that seems to touch on both sides of our humanity. And by that, I mean the jury system is a very, very old, an established system, at least in Western society. And so traditionalists don't immediately say no, never. They're like, oh, juries actually do work pretty well. And then they've done some. I had a guest a few years ago who was advocating for this, and the results were pretty impressive. When you looked at the. The poll of, you know, the society where the proposition was being discussed, it might have skewed like 90% against, 10% in favor. And then they would use this experimental jury system with the advocate and the respondent, and it flipped. Pete, Just by getting the information in an unfiltered format, these regular people made actually really good decisions. What do you think about that?
- [17:21]
A
There's so many thoughts. It's super interesting. I think two or three thoughts very quickly. I agree with your point on the fact that it's so hard to move people's opinions. I think most leaders believe that. And as a result, they don't even try. Right. Is the. The idea of politicians follow the Overton window rather than shifting it. Right. And having been during COVID close to these people, I think they underestimated the ability to change people's minds because they're not good enough at creating these narratives to change people's minds. Just to give you an example, I was in Channel 4 in 2020, just at the beginning of all these countries closing Channel 4 in the UK, and there was an official epidemiologist from the country explaining how they couldn't do anything, but they couldn't close the country. They had to let it run. Right. And afterwards I read some internal papers. That's what the government had done. They had looked into the possibility of getting the population to lock down, and they thought it was impossible. And I remember because when I was there, I was preparing for that moment. And when he said this, I said something like, what, are you going to kill 200,000 people? Is that what you're going to do? I'm putting my hands on my face. And that was a purposeful movement because I knew that with this angle, it would draw people's attention to the catastrophe and then the fear would make them more open to a lockdown. And so I think this is true in that moment, but it's true in general. You can do a lot more than that. Now, I think what you say makes a lot of sense from a storytelling perspective, because you're saying, hey, I'm going to use conflict. I'm going to use conflict between two sides. Conflict is something that people really, really understand. It's the basis of storytelling. So I'm going to have both sides pushing against each other. And I think there's a lot of truth in this. I'm wondering if there's a way to keep that conflict and at the same time eliminating the limiting factor that is having just two people gathering this information. Right. So could we have, for example, on both sides, not to like, not one side, not one person, but a group of people or even everybody who could be providing the evidence, who could be providing the arguments, and the people who are having that debate, for example, they are selecting or, you know, or getting the best pieces, so that instead of just limiting by the bandwidth of two people, you can have like lots of different people crowdsourcing that kind of those arguments. And I think that that's. There's something there. There's something around keeping the storytelling of the Conflict, but at the same time, crowdsourcing the information and the argumentations.
- [20:17]
B
Yeah, I think that's a good extension of the idea. I've been fascinated by the idea of smart swarms for a while.
- [20:24]
A
Yes.
- [20:24]
B
And I think that that would be a superior outcome. Probably the one thing just to be.
- [20:32]
A
Part small comment to that point, I think the swarms, it goes back to the angle that you use for democracy here. If you say, hey, we're going to eliminate democracy, everybody's going to raise their hands and like, no way, don't do that. But if instead you say our current democracy is not real democracy, you don't really have a voice, you are giving it to somebody else who is then using it for corruption, blah, blah, blah. We want a true democracy. What would that look like? And then you're opening people's mind to having another take on what the structure of the organization could be.
- [21:05]
B
And you could even use history to reframe. Right. So you could say direct democracy. Here's where it was used or partially used. Here were the results. What?
- [21:20]
A
Yeah, you're right. Direct democracy is not always great, as we know in California. So the mechanism of information aggregation needs to be really well thought through because the California one doesn't work.
- [21:33]
B
I agree, I agree. One of the things that I think is we were chatting earlier, before we started to record, and you said that you and I had spoken on Twitter a couple of times. And I originally kind of thought Twitter could, could emerge and maybe still can, I don't know, as kind of the world's first global intelligence network where people literally find each other through ideas or things that they are interested in, et cetera. And then I would throw AI and the introduction of AI into that. And the logistics problem with an AI agent gets seriously mitigated, in my opinion, because I think one of the things we started talking about exponential, right?
- [22:27]
A
Yeah.
- [22:28]
B
And again, it's your idea that we didn't evolve to understand. That I think is a key insight. And I think that the lack of a really good, just maybe just enough to be dangerous insight into evolutionary biology and psychology helps us think about.
- [22:51]
A
What.
- [22:52]
B
We evolved to be like. And it wasn't to be able to scale this quickly this fast, but I think we can. I mean, I think ultimately a series of small examples, like the jury one that I gave you. I'm all in favor of trying lots of different things. I mean, as long as they aren't obviously harmful or. Right. And experimentation, iteration, that's how you get to a better place. You get a Better explanation. Right. But you can only get that better explanation by trying a bunch of different things.
- [23:39]
A
100%. So a couple of thoughts. When I think about this Twitter thing, for me, it's not obvious that it's not a brain yet, right. So the way it works is you and I would be neurons. And so as neurons in that brain, we wouldn't realize what the brain is thinking. Right. But it's very similar, the way we work, like Twitter works to how a neuron would. Like the brain would work. Right. Every person is connecting to each other. You have one, it's asymmetric. You have one person sending information and a bunch of other people listening. That's exactly like the Axons and Dendrites sending and receiving information. Information flows through Twitter way it flows through the brain. The most interesting one gets sent and amplified more and more. And so you could imagine, for example, if it were a brain, what would be some big decisions that it could take. And one of them could be, okay, like what would be the. Who would be the President of the United States? And arguably, Twitter had a big influence in that decision. And so it is. It could be that we are neurons inside of Twitter and we don't realize that it's already thinking, but it is. But I think your second point is super interesting also on trying lots of different things. And one way to think about it is we've had about 200 countries for decades now, and that's kind of it right, like this. And that's not enough competition because each one of these countries has a monopoly on their local market, which is their geography. And most of the population, that doesn't move that much. And that's why I think the, the, the. The current of the new nation states, which Balaji Srinivasan calls network states, is so important. I think the idea is that you do need competition between countries. That's where most of the value is going to come from, from governance. Because otherwise, with the monopolies that they have, that countries have to have zero incentive on changing that much. Luckily, I think China is actually like, the rise of China is a good thing for the United States because it now has an opponent. So as opposed to China, it needs to improve the way it was improving, as opposed to the USSR. But for the last 20, 30 years, I think the US probably did not improve the way should have because he didn't have a wealthy opponent, and so he had no push to improve its governance.
- [25:56]
B
That's a really interesting point that I agree with. At the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed later by the fall of the Soviet Union itself. One thing that I noticed was the splintering of the various groups within the west, because at least in the. In the United States, the one thing that did kind of unite both political parties was the foreign policy view towards the Soviet Union as an opponent. Now, we did a lot of fucking stupid things, but. But we also, that unanimity encouraged, working together on, hey, we've got to get to the moon. Sputnik, you get Apollo.
- [26:41]
A
Right.
- [26:42]
B
And so your idea of competition, I think is well taken. But then what about the idea. And this isn't my view, but it's one I just thought of. What about the idea that many of our major, major innovations have come as the result of war?
- [27:00]
A
Yeah. So interesting. War is really competition. Yeah. And competition spurs development. I think Jared diamond, right, Is the one who proposed that Europe guns germs.
- [27:14]
B
Yeah, right.
- [27:14]
A
That's right. And it grew because it has this combination of enough separation of countries from geography to allow independent developments and making it very hard to unify, but close enough that you could be fighting each other all the time so you could specialize. But also you had to keep at the edge of technology and innovation because otherwise your neighbor was going to kill you. Whereas in China, China is a massive, massive plain from Beijing to Shanghai. That's the hard land of the Han. And then you have huge barriers around it. You have the deserts in the north, you have the Tibet and the mountains, the Himalayas to the east, you have the ocean to the west, you have jungles and mountains to the south. So that promoted the unity of China that as long as they didn't have unity, they were killing each other. And they were progressing so fast. But the moment they had unity, that's what happened with the Ming, right? They stopped looking around, they started looking inside. And so I think that's very, very true. Obviously, you don't want the downside of war. So the question becomes, how can you keep the upside of war, which is all this competition without the downside? And I don't have a good answer. But I would say today there's way too many countries that can get away with very, very poor management. And they don't. They still don't lose. Like Venezuelans in North Korea are obvious examples. And so. And so that, that's very. Is that not just for Venezuelans and North Koreans? It's bad for everybody because we don't get the benefit from the competition with countries like this one. So I think that's really bad.
- [28:51]
B
Yeah. And I used to kind of joke, but kind of not that North Korea and South Korea was the cleanest and best a B test that anybody could ever conduct.
- [29:07]
A
Right.
- [29:08]
B
Same people, different system, different outcomes.
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A
Unbelievable.
- [29:13]
B
What sometimes frustrates me is how can people not see this?
- [29:21]
A
He's so obvious. It is so obvious.
- [29:23]
B
So obvious. And yet we still have the kind of, this movement that won't die. Right. Like Venezuela, the richest country in Latin America, imposes a socialist system on the country. And however many years later, one of the poorest countries in Latin America. The list goes on and on and on.
- [29:50]
A
Yeah.
- [29:50]
B
And yet with all of this empirical data we still have, I mean, like, if the polls are to be believed, young people probably prefer socialism to capitalism or free markets. And I personally think that a lot of that is from an emotional base, but it's also from a base that is solvable in that. Listen, if so, when I was young, I got married when I was Young, I was 22, it was in 1982, and interest rates were double digit.
- [30:25]
A
Yeah.
- [30:25]
B
The first home I bought, I had to actually take paper back from the owner of the house because the bank wanted something like ridiculous, like 17% for a mortgage. And the owner was going to cut me a break and give me 15% mortgage. And I was like, wow. I just. This is mana from heaven.
- [30:47]
A
Yeah.
- [30:48]
B
Right. And yet today I think that younger people have some legitimate beefs. I think that the, you know, the NIMBY movement, you know, not in my backyard.
- [31:01]
A
Yeah.
- [31:02]
B
Housing being unobtainable for many of them. The, the uncertainties in the job market. Like, I get it, I get why they would be pissed off. And, and so I'm not saying, oh, you know, kids today, I think they've got legitimate beefs and some of them are solvable and others will take more time to solve. But I think this is kind of a good place to slide into your idea of like maybe a juried. That this is a good idea. Maybe, maybe we should sponsor something like this, like a juried system where the jury is selected sort of at random. Right. And. And then we'll use your idea where people, or groups of people who support, you know, idea A. I'm this, I'm just inventing this right now.
- [31:58]
A
Yeah.
- [32:00]
B
Who support idea A. Go up against the people supporting idea B. Wow. That might be a really interesting thing because if I was young today, I'd be pissed off too, that I couldn't afford to buy a house, that my mobility was limited, all of those things. And I think that at least we could reframe it by, hey, these are real problems. Let's see if we can find a collective solution that makes sense to a jury of our peers.
- [32:33]
A
There's so much to say about this, the narrative. I agree with you on the socialism side, right. I think part of it is what we were discussing before on short term versus long term. Actually, socialism works really well in the short term because you give all the benefits and you can still use the money that you saved and the systems. It takes decades sometime for the pain to be suffered. Venezuelans were really happy in the first few years or even decade of chavez. We're now 25 years, I think, into this. And now when you really, really so, so that's, I think part of it, the other part of it is, is that I think the narrative of socialism is beautiful, you know, of, oh, we are all going to be nice with each other and pay and help that it just doesn't work. It's amazing, it's beautiful. Communism is beautiful. It just doesn't work. Right. And so, and so, and so the narrative, it's very hard to fight these narrative. And I think it's going to get worse, right? So in the context of Mandani being voted as the, as the mayor of New York, I think it's not, this is not a spike, this is not a fluke, this is a trend. And the way I think about this is I connected to AI, which we've touched in the past, but we've seen that all these graduates are not getting jobs. And if you worked for four, five, six years to get your degrees, you have 100, $200,000 in debt and you're not getting a job, you're going to be irate. You're supposed to be part of the elite and now you're nobody. And so that's what I think Peter Turchin would call the overproduction of elites. Right? And for socialism, it's always the elites that push it down on the people. And this is perfect. Like these elites are overproduced right now. And it's only going to get worse with AI because AI by definition is going to start with white collar jobs. And it's going to start by automating the jobs that are the easiest to automate, which is going to be usually entry level or the easiest ones. It's not going to be the ones that make the most money, the most specialized, the most educated people are going to have much more leverage with AI and so they're going to be able to do substantially more. They're going to be substantially more productive and it's going to be faster. It is already faster to work with an AI than to work with an entry level person. So I think one of the very first consequences of AI in the short term moving into the direction of UBI and whatever, but that's a long term. In the very short term, I think my biggest fear is a move towards socialism which AI might provoke. And I have a couple more thoughts, but I think this is an important one. So I want to pause here.
- [35:31]
B
Yeah, and I guess the pushback would be on, for example, the kids who are in debt to the college, etc. I like to think of, okay, what if a college education were a tradable stock? What would that stock be doing right now? I think it'd be at a 52 year low. I think it would be at a 10 year low. And the idea that we now have the tools where that certification.
- [35:59]
A
Right.
- [36:00]
B
I barely have a BA and I only have a BA because my mother would have killed me had I not gotten it. I came up in the generation where it was just absolutely mandatory, at least for people like me, that I had a college degree. But honestly it was a waste of my time. I think for the most part I have a degree in economics which I never use because the theories and hypotheses that I learned, even when I was learning them, I was always the guy like, but have you thought about this as your econometric model? Ever met an actual human being? Right. And no. So I mean the planet axiom is you must have a degree to be successful. And I would question that now certainly in things like doctors, lawyers, et cetera, of course, but the idea that the majority of people going to college, that's a result in my opinion, at least in the United states of the GI Bill after World War II, at the turn of the century, of the 20th century, in 1900, 2% of Americans attended college or university. And so there wasn't that overproduction of elites. Right?
- [37:22]
A
Yeah.
- [37:23]
B
And I'm all in favor of, see, I think a degree suggests competence. It suggests that you can play by the rules that you might not agree with of that university and that you are a competent individual. I think proof of work in today's environment. I haven't hired anyone at o' Shaughnessy Ventures based on their degree. Not one person. It was all proof of work.
- [37:57]
A
There's this book I'm reading right now, the Case Against Education. I don't know if you've heard about it from Brian Kaplan George Mason University.
- [38:05]
B
I have.
- [38:06]
A
And the case is so overwhelming that most of education, not all, but most of education, is signaling you're not learning. You're just showing that you're intelligent, that you can work hard and you can do what you're told. And that pushes you into a race because if everybody else does it, then you need to do it too. So everybody gets more education. And it goes back to the point that you're mentioning where if 10% of the population has a degree that's just high signal, but if it's 60% now, the signaling is meaningless and then you need to get more. And so it's just, it's just more of a waste. Of course, as a politician, you cannot say, hey guys, the education that you guys are getting is worthless, so we're going to stop paying for it, especially for you and you in social sciences, which are learning nothing. So you cannot say that. But I think your point is the answer to this, where if you say, hey, really, education is not very useful, but the way the world is going is that you don't even need it anymore because you can prove by doing. I think that's, to me the answer. And also there's probably another one around the cost of education where you can learn so much faster through AI. So I'm sure you know, but maybe not all of your audience knows about Bloom's two sigma problem where you can take a 50% percentile student and get that student to 98% percentile just with only one intervention, which is one on one tutoring. There's nothing else that comes even close. And the problem is, is this is as a tutor, you cannot like, you cannot have one on one tutor for everybody. But now with AI, you can. And so that to me, that's kind of where we, we can figure this out, where we can eliminate all the cost of education and all the credentialism by pushing people to one on one. Turing, I know you have like, you guys support synthesis, which goes kind of in this direction. So, so, so I think that's one of my hopes where if we clearly explain to people the education your kids are receiving is worth only 20% of what you think it is. But if you do it this way, it's much cheaper and it's better. I think that's where like naturally people are going to move from standard education to one on one AI based tutoring.
- [40:34]
B
Yeah. And I agree that that will be a burgeoning area of probably private industry to begin with. And the thing that we have to keep in mind, though, is that like good old Walt Whitman, we all contain multitudes, right? And literally a thing that might even be more important to human beings, at least by my lights, is status and prestige. And, you know, if you look deeply into history, you just, once you see it, you can't unsee it. Right? And, and so what are some examples of that?
- [41:18]
A
The most salient examples in history for you.
- [41:20]
B
The idea, probably the easy example is just going Back to when 2% of the population went to university. The idea, first off, you were high status if you had a college degree. Yeah, my grandfather, we have huge gaps in the generations in my family, and my grandfather was born 100 years before my son. He was born in 1885 and he got a college degree, which was super high status back then. But even within that there was variation, right?
- [41:56]
A
The.
- [41:57]
B
If, if you were a Harvard or Yale man or a Princeton man, well, the world was your oyster, right? And I think that the world. I think part of the thing there with the status and prestige was there were very limited venues for you to gain high status, high prestige. Right? The arts, academia, government. The government's a good example, right? The government used to be a fairly high prestige position, right. You think of George, and it drew very, very capable people like George Marshall, right. Came up with the Marshall Plan after World War II. The, the, the rule back then was say you've done really well in whatever your chosen profession or career was. You would often see those people, when they ended that career, go into government service. Right? Because it was seen as kind of a paying attic to the country where you were allowed to succeed. I mean, Elon's recent foray gives us a different example. Right. And so I think though, that like case systems, class systems, like they perpetuate historically, it's pretty hard to find a society. I mean, the American experiment, like, for example, I love this idea. When America, where the American experiment was formed, one of the things that the diplomatic corps of America decided was American diplomats bow to no foreign royal aristocrat, etc. That was unheard of, literally. And like, people really got upset when, when the Americans diplomats would go in front of. In front of foreign kings or queens and not. And not bow.
- [44:05]
A
That's crazy.
- [44:06]
B
That was such a breach of etiquette. Right. But I suspect that there will be new venues that will become incredibly prestigious that we don't even know about right now.
- [44:20]
A
I agree. And I think we already have some examples like influencer is an extremely meritocratic way of getting status now. It is in some circles, like people laugh at it, that there's a huge status coming from it. That's why 50% of children want to be YouTubers. And in a very big way, I think it's much better than an education, or at least big chunk of education because of the point that it is very meritocratic. If you don't do the best content, you're not going to be there, you're not going to be at the top. You need to be learning constantly from competition. You need to be thinking like seeing, okay, what do they do, analyzing them, reverse engineering it. You need to push, do things much more interesting than they used to be, than others are doing. And so it's an extremely, extremely meritocratic field that has come from nowhere and that really pushes people to improve. And so this is an example of reaching status through an alternative from education. And I think I want to see more of that. I think another example is obviously the solopreneur idea or the nomads entrepreneur, which was basically impossible up to just five years ago or barely possible. And now it's completely possible. You have all these companies that can be created by anybody from anywhere. Those are the things that AI and the Internet I think are allowing that are going to undermine some of these fundamental problems of education, for example, by giving status to those who really deserve it, rather than the ones who just toiled for a long time to get it.
- [46:08]
B
Yeah. And I had a series which we kind of aborted because we got so busy doing other things called the Great Reshuffle. And I started thinking about this back in 2015 and I was like, oh, I think we are in for a tsunami of change. And that was based most, we still called it machine learning back then, but it was based on the things that I saw emerging from the global connection connectivity of the Internet, machine learning. Essentially the world was one where time, space and geography were collapsing. And yet your work also suggests that geography is incredibly important. Right. People can move, but often don't move. I think, for example, one of the reasons that America succeeded as brilliantly as it did was first geography, which I want to ask you about. But also in the self selected sample that came here, if you think about it, right, what kind of person came to America? Well, they weren't like the average villager that was sitting right next to them in church.
- [47:26]
A
That's right.
- [47:28]
B
They were very, very different. We have kind of a hypomanic edge to the American DNA because of the people who came here.
- [47:36]
A
Right.
- [47:37]
B
If you think about it, it's 1850. And you and your family have lived in Ireland for a thousand years. And you decide, you know what? I'm not going to be a dirt farmer anymore. I'm going to leave everyone I know the culture, I know the home. I know everything. And I'm going to get on a ship and I'm going to go sail to this new country and try my luck. That is a very different kind of personality type than the ones who stay. But okay, so they get here. Tell us about your version of why. Because this is something I'm fascinated by and I really believe in one of the greatest bounties of America, other than the Bill of Rights and the rule of law and all these wonderful things, is our geography. Talk about that a little bit.
- [48:32]
A
Yeah. So I don't think most people don't realize that the US geography is probably the best in the world are none. And so you start by the defensibility, obviously the two oceans. Canada is too cold to be a threat. People don't realize that Mexico is too mountainous and is also desertic. And both of these things mean that it's substantially harder for Mexico to develop. It's always going to be poorer from a geography standpoint. And it's also reasonably hard to conquer or to threaten the U.S. that is though the point where the U.S. is the most threatened because New Orleans, which is probably one of the most important cities in the US Is not so far away from Veracruz, which is the biggest port in Mexico. Why is New Orleans so important? Because it's the mouth of the, of the Mississippi river basin. And one, one thing that people don't realize is that the Mississippi river basin is, has more than half of the world's naturally navigable waterways. Right. So the rivers are most of them navigable because it's so flat, the entire Mississippi Basin so flat and there's so much water that comes from the Rockies and the Appalachians and the north and so massive, massive navigable waterways. And that's super important because that's another thing that people don't realize. The cost of transportation is the single biggest driver of wealth. If you half the cost of transportation, you can multiply the wealth of a region by up to 16 times. And it's crazy. And just that's a geography. It's a question of geometry is just a fact. And so having the single best network, just natural there is unbelievable. Not only that, but also the coasts, especially the east coast all the way to Houston, have a series of islands that protect boats and ships from the sea. So you could have These intercoastal highway to the. So transportation is amazing, but also this area is connected in the north to the Great Lakes, which are also connected to the ocean. And the distance between these two basins from a navigable standpoint is just a few miles. And they're in Chicago. Chicago is actually just a few miles from the Mississippi Basin, which is kind of nuts. And that's why Chicago is so ecob. And so you add, there's a bunch more like, for example, why does the US has massive amounts of oil and gas? Because of the history that it has. Usually like the Mississippi basin in the past was a sea, and the seas develop oil and gas over history. So you add one after the other, and it's just unbelievable the amount of assets that the United States has. And so I think people underestimate how important this is. There's also the other side of it though, which is Argentina is kind of a mirror image to United States. Like the. Whereas it has the Mississippi for the United States, the Argentina has the Rio de la Plata and the Parana. Very similar. It's not as big, but it's quite similar, Very flat. You also have mountains on both sides, a massive amount of very fertile land in the middle, just like the Mississippi basin. And so you have a lot of these. And yet Argentina is substantially poorer than the United States. And so I think what really made the United States special is that it has one of the best geographies in the world. And also. So that's the hardware, but also the software is one of the best that we've come up with so far. Yeah.
- [52:36]
B
And I'll throw in the amount of farmable land in the United States is also off your charts.
- [52:44]
A
That's right. And a couple of things on this. There's a few reasons for this. One of them is it was a sea in the past. So it's very recent soil, which has lots of sediments from that time. But also having all the water come from both sides from the Palachians and the Rockies also brings with it all the sediment. And so you have constantly all this sediment brought on both sides. And that helps. And that's the reason also why Argentina is so fertile. It also was a sea. It also gets a lot of sediment from both sides. So, yes, that's why actually the United States, I think, is one of the first exporters of food in the world. People don't realize that it's also one of the most. The first producers. In fact, most of these are temperate countries like Germany, Netherlands, United States are some of the biggest Exporters of foods, not just per capita, but just overall because their soil is so good. And of course they have the technology to make the best use of it.
- [53:50]
B
So give me an example of a country where just the geography alone puts them into such a hole that even. I love your idea of the hardware software. I'm going to steal that from you. Where the hardware, the geography is just awful. Even if you put the best software on top of it, it's still going to have a really hard time.
- [54:15]
A
Yeah, there's so many. And I'll just give you an example. So. So Colombia, if you look at the map of Colombia, it's basically flatland and then some like two mountain ranges. And all the population is on the mountain ranges. Nearly all is on the mountain ranges. That doesn't like, if you go to Europe or the United States, people do not live in the mountains because mountains are cold. It's much harder to transport everything because you need to pass all these mountain passes. And building roads through mountains is much more expensive. So the infrastructure doesn't get built. And you don't have infrastructure, so you don't have trade. So it's very, very bad. But in Colombia, if you don't build on the mountains, you're in the jungle. And if you're in the jungle, you get all the diseases, you get terrible heat, you get rain all the time, wet bulb events. And so it's really, really, really bad. And so all the population is on the mountains. And in the mountains we have the problem that we mentioned before, where it's just poorer because it's so expensive to build on infrastructure and you don't have trade. So in fact, you can go through the world and around the equator, you don't find. You barely found any rich country for this reason, in the equator, you have to live in the mountains, otherwise it's unbearable. If you live in the mountains, it is. Trade is bad. There's also more conflict in mountains because people are more isolated from each other in the mountains. So cultures diverge. So that's one of the reasons, for example, if you move to Africa around the same level you have, for example, Ethiopia, 120 million people. They get a lot of rain, so the land is very fertile. But every ethnicity, every valley has a different ethnicity. They all hate each other. You don't have train because infrastructure is too expensive. So that's another example of a country that just geography is so, so bad that it's so, so hard for it to get out of that hole.
- [56:11]
B
Are there any solutions that you have come up with for these countries.
- [56:16]
A
Yeah, you have one. Actually one of the richest countries in the world is not on the equator and that's Singapore, right? So it's very special if you're a city state. And as a city state you can do things that you cannot do as a country, as a bigger country. But Singapore is, is an example of this. And Lee Kuan Yew was very articulate about this. He said Singapore is impossible without AC air conditioning. And it's so, so important to have AC for the development of Singapore because otherwise you could only work in the morning and in the evening. So once you have ac, you can work through the day and now you can be substantially more productive. So you have two options, right? If you go into the equator, you either have the mountains or you have, in which you have the problems that we mentioned, or you're on the valleys, which you have the other problems. So you had, you need different solutions if your country, if your populations are on, on flatlands, close to the sea level. First is you need ac. And for AC you need electricity. And electricity, you don't get grids network when you're poor. So thankfully now solar is solving this, right? So solar and batteries becoming substantially cheaper. You combine these with ac, which are heat pumps, that's the same thing. So actually extremely efficient from electricity electricity standpoint. So I think that's one of the big, big, big ways in which these countries are going to be like, I have a huge hope for them in the, in the coming decades. It's not just that temperature though, it's also the disease. And so one of the things that I haven't researched fully, but I'm like 70% convinced right now is that we should eliminate some mosquito species. Like they are by far the biggest killer of humans. They are also some of the biggest sources of disease, not only for humans, but also for animals. And so just, just eradicate them. Just eradicate them. We don't need them, nature doesn't need them. So I think with these two things you can solve the problem with, for the, for the flat countries and then the ones that have, that are in mountains, you have a problem because you do need the infrastructure because otherwise you cannot move the goods. Thankfully you can move information, right? And now you don't even need the cable. You can do these through Starlink. And so hopefully you have countries like Colombia, Ethiopia and whatnot that can have more of a solar plus Starlink kind of economy and that can develop them. But for the physical goods, you will still need to Build infrastructure. And that's something that costs just capital. For decades, which Brazil has been doing for nearly a century now, they've been consistently investing in capital and infrastructure in the country to, To. To. To compensate for the fact that they have so many mountains.
- [59:08]
B
Yeah. The reference to Brazil reminds me of the old joke from a long time ago. Brazil is the country of the future and always will be.
- [59:18]
A
And so one of the things that people don't realize is because of the mountains. So because it's so hot in the Amazon, you cannot grow anything, because close to the equator, that's another thing that I have, I didn't mention before, is you have so much rain that it leeches your ground all the time. And so you cannot grow anything. And so the only places in Argentina where you can grow stuff is on the mountains on the shield. And the shield is very acidic, so you need charcoal to improve the fertility. So you need massive amounts of. Or whatever other fertilizer where you have to fertilize it. So you need massive amounts of fertilization. You need then massive amounts of roads to go everywhere. And that just takes so many decades. And I think, I don't know, halfway through or whatever it is, but I think eventually they're all going to have the ground that's fertile enough and the infrastructure that's good enough that, that they will be able to be richer on the hardware side. And software is another problem.
- [60:18]
B
Yeah, I love that distinction. And it does seem to me, though, that with all of the innovations and tools now coming online, really for the first time, we really do have opportunities to make these changes like you've just been describing. So, for example, I'm a fan of trying a lot of different things, but I really do like some empirical evidence that it might work. And so air conditioning, the other great example of air conditioning is the American South.
- [60:50]
A
That's right.
- [60:51]
B
Traditionally, the American south was much poorer. That's why it held on to slavery, the stain of slavery, as long as it did. And literally in the after Civil war years, it was one of the absolute poorest regions of the United States. And then air conditioning came, which literally transformed the south and Southwest and made it. I mean, and look at where a lot of growth is happening right now.
- [61:19]
A
Huge.
- [61:20]
B
And most people, if you were on a quiz show, would not pick air conditioning as the final answer for why that was possible. And I like the way you think, because sometimes the simple solution, you know, maybe that fellow Akam actually was onto something. Right? You know, a comms razor. The simple.
- [61:42]
A
Yeah, yeah. For sure. So I'll touch on the Civil War and then, and then on this last topic you're mentioning, because so we're talking about the hardware and the software and we're talking about them as if they were independent, but they're not. And this is something that people like, few people talk enough about. And just for the Civil War, one of the things that people don't realize is that the climate made it very. Of the north is very different from the south, obviously, but also that meant that you had wheat and corn and barley that grew in the north, all of which are very low work crops. And so that enabled small families to have big, big farms. And that promotes independence, but also entrepreneurship. Because if you're a small company, if you own your own land because you don't need much work, you are more likely to invest in capital to have machines to optimize your operation. Whereas in the south none of these worked. And the crops that work were things like cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, which take 10 to 20 or more times of work per hectare. Not only that, but also they're very, very hard to automate because it rains substantially more, so the soil has much more mud. And so you could not very easily have. So, so, so you have a combination of things that obviously were not the only cause of slavery, but one climate pushed in one direction, the software, and in the other one in the other direction. And we don't take that into consideration enough because, and that's, I think that, I think that matters because otherwise there is a, let's say, a narrative of potentially superiority of, hey, we're better because we have better software, when in fact, actually maybe you're better because you were lucky enough to have a hardware that led you to this software. And until you understand these differences, you're going to have the wrong narratives of exactly what happened and then you're going to have a conflict on these things. So, for example, if you understand, for me it's a much more productive conversation to have about slavery to say, look, the climate was a very big component of why they were slavery in the south, but also why the north won. And so one system is still strictly better than this one. This is why this one happened. And so now let's work to make sure that this doesn't happen again and spread better software, rather than saying, oh, we had some bad people who came here and did this bad thing just because they were bad, and so now we need to solve it in ways that are more fair. That said, I think your point on the development of the south is so, so important. I think there's this graph where we can see the evolution of the center of mass of the United States moving from the Northeast all every year, westward and southward. And what has happened in Arizona is just unbelievable. Right. Phoenix especially, but also Tucson. Those are cities that are completely impossible without AC and without the water from the Colorado River. And so that's very much a human ingenuity. And I think that brings the question, which is in the 19th century, we were so optimistic about what humans could do and how they could improve the world. And then we had the two world wars and like, oh, no, no, maybe technology is not bad, not good, and so we should stop it. But if we're optimistic again about it now, more realistic, we can do things that we couldn't even dream of before. And a perfect example in the American Southwest is the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea is a dump now. It's toxic, it's dead. But actually, we can just build a canal from the sea. It would be reasonably cheap, and just the amount of value that will create it would be created by sending all this water into the Salton Sea and reviving the entire Salton Sea and making all the real estate be substantially more valuable around it. You could create new communities, new societies. And that's the type of thinking that I think we need to have today. A city like Las Vegas, from the desert, we could do this kind of thing. A city like Utah, like a state like Utah and Salt Lake City, we could do these types of things. Now if we think intelligently in terms of geography and how we can shape it to be more prone to humans.
- [66:32]
B
Yeah. And I am 100% aligned with you on that way of looking at the world. I think that there are so many things that we can do now that like you yourself just a moment ago said, like five years ago you couldn't do. And I think one of the things that happens again here, we're back to cultural lag, right? Because we don't understand how young we are. You go back, I mentioned my grandfather, right? Born in 1885. He was learning things and getting around and doing things that his great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather did exactly the same way. And he, you know, horses everywhere, every, you know, the majority of Americans were still on Farms in 1885. And yes, they were going to the cities because of the industrial revolution, but then he lived to see man land on the moon. And, and, and so I. But I think about this all a lot, right? And I Use him as my, as my flag in the ground, like after him. Now we had telegraph, but then broad broadcast mediums like radio. There's a great book by Bill Bryson which I mentioned a lot on the podcast because it really is that good. Because what he is able to do is create a narrative that's really compelling. But to remind you that like, we're babies. And he brings up this guy who was a radio announcer announcing Lindbergh's return from Europe, and he makes the observation, this was the first time in human history that a single individual had addressed millions and millions of people. That thing alone, just think of the enormity of that, right? And then of course, you get tv, you get movies, you get all of these things. But the point is they look, I look at all technology and all innovation as dual use, right? So that ability, and I know you've written about this, that ability of to address one to many also makes totalitarian and authoritarianism a lot easier because it gives you this huge canvas that you never had before. What are your thoughts?
- [69:09]
A
Yeah, so there's this concept of print capitalism, right? The idea behind it was that books or the printing press was the number one killer of the feudal system. It wasn't the only one, but it was one of the biggest ones. And the reason is because before that, the church had a monopoly of information in Europe. They were networked. They sent information to each other. They used their own Latin language as their own language could communicate. So within that they had a center of decision making, which was the Pope. And he spread all the information on the ideas that were kosher and not. And you go from that world where you have the printing press and suddenly you don't have control one, you don't have control in the information anymore because it can come from anywhere. Now you have vernaculars instead of Latin that are used, so you don't have monopoly also on that language. And so you suddenly have this issue of non monopoly anymore of information. Of course, you can disseminate it substantially more because the marginal cost of printing something else is substantially cheaper than writing it. So you have much more information, much less centered. And then there's another factor that is fascinating, which is that books were printed in the biggest city because that's the city that had the most customers, right? And so then because you had lots of people read like books on one language, then you would learn that kind of vernacular, right? And so the more customers you had, the more books, the more books you market customers. And then languages evolve from there. So French evolved From Parisian because of this. Spanish evolved from the language from Castilla, Valladolid, Toledo, Madrid, because of the reason. And so on and so forth. And so. And so once you had languages, you also had a unit of thought, right? Where ideas spread really, really well within that unit and that, and not across units. And that was the birth of nations, the feeling of nations. And so you have this technology that has such a massive impact in politics, in history, and we don't realize it, right? And, and that has happened over and over. Just to give the one, the example that you mentioned, just to give like 30 seconds on it, you don't have Hitler and Mussolini and Franco and all these people, not Franco is a bad example. The Mussolini and Hitler are perfect examples of this. Why do you get these people in the, in the 1920s in, in the communist side is the same. You have them because radio is the first time that you can have a marginal cost of 0 of distributing voice. And voice carries emotion with it in a way that books don't. And so you needed radio in order to incense hearts enough to have these totalitarianisms. And so then the question becomes, okay, if this is the case, how is the current communication tech going to change us? And we obviously have been seeing this with social media and now AI is going to be doing this 10 times more. But people, I don't think are thinking proactively in what's going to happen. And just to give you a couple of examples, when we mentioned pressing press, we mentioned radio, JFK was, the TV guy, was. And then Obama and Trump are kind of the Twitter, the social media guys, then it pushes harder. Like, I believe the future of politics is not politicians that get good at social media, it's social media people who get good at politics. And we can already see some of this. AOC in the United States is pretty good at social media. In Europe, in the European Parliament, you have several parliamentarians who are YouTubers or equivalents, right? And so it's like, okay, I believe the future of politicians in the Western world is people who are going to be so, so good at media that they're going to create their own channels. They're going to get a massive amount of following and they're going to use that to have the power to take on politics. And so, okay, how does that change society?
- [73:33]
B
I think that changes it dramatically and continue. Because this is a fascinating thesis. How will that change society? Just a couple of examples.
- [73:45]
A
Yeah. So I think in general, for a politician to be successful, he or she needs to be good at usually two orthogonal skills. One of them is communication and the other one is content or ideas. Right. And those are completely orthogonal. Meaning that skills being a good community educator, nothing to do with you having good ideas and being good policies because of that. Usually the dimension that matters the most is the one that wins. And that means communication. Right. So it's usually in the last few decades it's the better communicators who are the ones who, who won the, who want power. But I believe that the best, the, the ones who have both are going to be strictly better or are strictly better. It's just so hard that there's few of them. But you can see it for example in a debate. When you have a debate and two people are good, two are good at communication, but one of them really knows their. And they, they know exactly. No, no. This, this policy you're talking about, you're completely wrong because of this and this and that and this and this and that. And so you don't know what you're talking about. Like if you're able to make that type of argument, you destroy completely your, your, your opponents. And so I believe that that's the, that's the type of politician that can win. I believe it was very hard in the past, but I believe it is now much more possible. And that's where we're going to connect two of the ideas that we had. If you have a person who is very good at communication, at storytelling, at social media as a result, but also is able to crowdsource the policies, then you can be using now your audience for two things. You can be using your audience for influence is the broadcasting, but also for crowdsourcing the policies that you need. And so I believe that's kind of the politician of the future is one that can be doing both at the same time.
- [75:49]
B
Yeah, I've thought a lot about that and I tend to agree that there's a fun old movie. I haven't seen it for a long time. So please do not take this as a recommendation because it might suck and it might just be great in my memory, but I think it was made in the 80s and it was called Broadcast News. Okay. And William Hurt, who was the kind of good looking leading man of that era, and then Sean Wallace, I think his name, the guy who was the inconceivable guy. No, that isn't him. I've got to get wrong. Anyway, let me just set up the thing. So there's one guy who is a genius. He is Albert Brooks I think is the guy who plays him, so he is a genius. He's like, they set up his scene by. He's listening to tango music, he's reciting poetry in Portuguese, he's making a dish that he learned about from Bhutan. And everyone's calling him and saying, hey, what was the president who had as the vice president, the guy who was the commissions guy in New York? Oh, yeah, yeah, that was James Garfield. He was shot by Guito. So he's a genius and he just wants to get on the air. That's all he wants. He just wants to be on the air. And he gets on the air and he has flop sweat. No, no, no. He has flop sweat. He's so nervous and he's tongue, and he's tongue tied. He's like, I, I, I, I. So the solution was they take William Hurt, who's an idiot, and they give him an earpiece.
- [77:31]
A
There you go.
- [77:32]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [77:34]
A
There you go. Perfect example. Yeah. Combining both of them.
- [77:38]
B
Yeah, that might be the way that.
- [77:43]
A
Could be the future. But I think I don't want to avoid your question because it's an important one. And you're thinking here, I'm telling you what I hope is going to happen. And I believe people were going to be like, some people are going to be able to do this, but I think it's a question of what will happen. Right. And for now, let's table the question of AI because it's going to change the AI singularity. But I think we can think out loud a little bit and I want to think out loud a little bit here. So what could happen, AI right now is going to dramatically accelerate the level of idea generation that you can have and content creation. And so whereas before, to create a media you needed a massive amount of money, you don't anymore. So you can have small operations that can quickly, quickly come up with substantially better ideas, substantially better communicated, get an audience reasonably fast. And I think that is very like, that's very enticing. So it's an example of the idea I mentioned before, but at a low level with AI, you reduce the cost of policy generation and content generation in a way that you get both better ideas and better communication. Now, does it mean that these are the people who are going to be winning elections? I don't know. I think we need to look at the politicians who have already won to get an inspiration from social media. And the politicians who've won are not great. These are people who don't have that many great ideas. They're very out there. They use the type of content that Candace Owens would be using. Crazy ideas people just listen to. And so. And so I think that's kind of the fear, right? You, You. You're gonna have substantially better politicians because they can come up with better content and both ideas and videos and whatnot. But you're also going to have those who are really, really, really good at the social media aspect. They're going to be using hatred and polemic as a way to fuel their. Their. Their reach. And that reach is going to be big enough that they are going to win power. And then once they do that, probably they're not intelligent enough in terms of policy to have good ideas on policy. And that's not what they want in any ways, because what they cater to is the audience. And so that can probably polarize substantially more the politics than they are today. Aoc, I think, is a perfect example to where early on when I was following her, I was close to what she was saying. I think a lot of what she said made a lot of sense, and she was very articulate. And I think she has become substantially more polarized and substantially less focused on content and thoughtful ideas than she used to be. I think that might be a result of social media.
- [81:02]
B
Yeah. And I mentioned that my economics degree did me no good. Well, it did. It did teach me one thing, I'm sure, and that was called Gresham's Law, which is bad drives out good. And Gresham's Law was originally used to describe why currencies that had been debased. Basically, people hoard the good currency. Right. The pure gold. And they tried to trade with.
- [81:33]
A
Get rid of the bad one.
- [81:34]
B
Yeah, with the bad gold. And the bad drives out the good. So I think Gresham's Law could definitely be applied to your thesis here. Right. Well, so first off, there's probably more bad than good, at least from a policy. At least from a policy perspective. Right. And your thought about AI and what it allows, I mean, that's how our entire company is organized. I couldn't be doing any of these verticals that we do at Oshana's Adventures if we did not have these technologies.
- [82:11]
A
It is crazy.
- [82:12]
B
And I'm actually writing my first fiction book, and I literally could not have written this book without AI. And so people. You used AI? Of course I did. I'm not Amish here. And when a new tool comes on, the leverage, it gives you. Just one example. One of the things that I needed to research for the book was the history of art theft and art looting and all that kind of stuff. And literally what I was able to do in one day with AI would have weeks and no, not more.
- [82:54]
A
Years. Years. Yeah.
- [82:57]
B
Because. Because your point about the Catholic Church is well taken. Right.
- [83:02]
A
The.
- [83:02]
B
The. I. I like to joke that the Roman Empire never died, it just became religious.
- [83:08]
A
And.
- [83:08]
B
But, but the control, opacity and control and limiting information is one path and it's a bath that I think is awful. The allowing transparency, innovation, lots of different paths, leads you to be able to scale much faster, compound much faster, et cetera. But the dying of these older networks is they're not going to go gentle into that good night. Right. It's like every innovation, there's a great site on Twitter, Pessimist Archive, I think, is the name of the handle. And if you look almost every single innovation, including writing, if you take what Plato said, Socrates said about it. Plato said. Socrates said writing was a bad idea. But if you take every single innovation, you can see the initial reaction of the people that think it's going to displace them. Oftentimes they're wrong. It doesn't. It actually supercharges them. But it is pure id, it is pure emotional anger. You're betraying me. You know, when photography came out, everyone said painting had a good run, but it's done, it's completely gone. And of course, the opposite happened. Painters were freed from the narrow confines.
- [84:35]
A
Mimicking realism.
- [84:36]
B
Yeah, exactly. And were able to express many, many different things from abstract expressionism to point, you know, the whole thing. But the result was always gets introduced. The backlash is huge. We're seeing it now with AI. We saw it with computers, we saw it with calculators when I was a kid. And this is going to out me as a geek, but for my 10th birthday, all I wanted was that. That was in 1970.
- [85:04]
A
Right.
- [85:04]
B
So for those of you who don't understand what the dark ages were like, computers were really super. Or not computers. Calculators were really cool back in 1970. And so I asked for one and like, literally all my friends were like, what? What is it? You know, and so like, that's so cool because we were going from slide rules, right? But what did schools do? They banned calculators.
- [85:30]
A
Banned them, yeah. Stupid. So stupid. Yeah. I'm like you. Last year, I could barely use more than 1% of the value that I added, I think to my research was coming from AI a year ago. And now it's like 60% of it. I still cannot trust it. But the highest resignation rate I think has gone down from like 30% to maybe 2 to 3%. And so it has resulted in actually substantially deeper articles. When I read the articles from two, three years ago, they look so shallow to me. And so all of the surplus has been going to people. I have to say though, the argument around the technology is always going to make us better is based on historic kind of partial misunderstanding. People say, oh, the Luddites were against, like against the Industrial Revolution and they shouldn't have because look how good it was. It is for us, but it wasn't for them. Like Luddites were actually right. Most of them lost their job and the alternative that they had was actually not better if they found one. And so it's something that was better over the decades. It's great for us, but it wasn't great for them. And so today the speeds of job destruction, I think is going to be substantially faster than the speed of job creation. Because in the past it was just like in the 19th century there was just one job, it was agriculture. And it took us 125 years to fully automate it. Not even fully, but to go from 70% of the population doing agriculture to 2%, which is close to what we do today. It's just one. In industry, it took us 125 years to automate it, which means that we had all this time to create new industries. But now the speed of destruction I think is going to be dramatically faster, dramatically faster. And it's not going to be fast enough for people to recycle and find another job. It wasn't possible for the Luddites when it took 125 years. So imagine when the automation is going to be a matter of years. And so I think there are going to be people who will be able to recycle from one job to the other. There are going to be a bunch of people who decide to leave their job and create a company or become influencers or things like this. But the amount of people who are going to lose their job and not going to find an alternative is going to be, I believe, quite fast. It depends really on the industry. For example, lawyers. I think lawyers are going to have an amazing run over the next few years because the cost of law is going to go dramatically down. And so that's going to increase the volume of law in the next few years. But then a few years after that the need for law is going to be saturated and then the drop is going to be quite dramatic. And so we're going to see these curves of going up and then down in many, many industries. And the up and down is not going to be a matter of decades or centuries. It's going to be a matter of years. And so there's going to be a lot of destruction. And we don't, and I don't think what we're were getting into these cleared eyed enough because of this misunderstanding of the history people did lose their jobs.
- [88:56]
B
So I am not in any way Panglossian about my outlook.
- [89:00]
A
No, no, I believe. Yeah, yeah. It's not for you. I'm not saying against you. Like it's, it's, it's, it's something I hear a lot of people.
- [89:05]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, and, and I'm underlining your argument. I agree with you. I think that one of the things that we really, really have not spent time enough time on is our mitigation strategies because I think that a large section of the population globally and I always underline through no fault of their own right. Are going to be displaced. And we've got to try as many experiments to, to soften that blow that like I, for example basic income empirically it's kind of a disaster. At least all of the stuff that I have seen on it. However, I still think we should be experimenting more with it because the situation has changed. Maybe and I'm just spitballing here but maybe in that environment UBI didn't work. Well, we have a completely different environment now. We have an environment where like again who through no fault of their own. Right. And I just think that, and I love this idea of giving a child at birth a stake in the country. There's an idea that I support that's better by the way that's been around forever. I think Milton Friedman, the economist was the first to suggest it back in the 60s. But on birth in the United States you should get a modest index fund that has every American based company in it.
- [90:52]
A
Right.
- [90:52]
B
Like let's just use the asset B as a proxy and then when you're 18 you will enjoy all of that compounding. Hopefully, hopefully that's not through another depression. But all of these ideas I think are, are worthy of thinking about and experimenting with because I think, I think you are right that the dislocation is going to be bumpy.
- [91:20]
A
I agree.
- [91:22]
B
Go ahead.
- [91:22]
A
So, so it's, it's. I, I agree with everything you said. I think there's this one data point I think that most people miss on these UBI tests approach which is by nature all these UBI tests are flawed because for you to give a lot of money to a lot of people for a long time is very, very expensive. So like, if you're giving just a thousand dollars for a year, like people are going to lose, like leave their jobs if it's just a year or two or three, because you know afterwards you're going to have to work anyway. So, so the AB tests actually don't work, I think really well. Thankfully, we have an amazing natural experiment that we've been running for over a century across dozens of countries for UBI and it's called retirement. And retirement is UBI that starts at 65. Right. And do people love retirement? They fucking love it. Like if you say, okay, we think maybe we should take away out ubi, are you happy with it? No, no, no, no, don't touch my retirement. Right? Not only this, but I think it also answers the question of, oh, what would happen if we just give people like this UBI and like morally, like, are they going to be lost because they don't have a job and whatnot? Well, there's this study that looks at people who were under unemployed just before retirement and they were very unhappy while they were unemployed. And the moment they switched to retirement, they're suddenly very, very happy. But the day to day hasn't changed, but the narrative around it has completely changed. And so that made them happy. And so to me, what this means is it's not going to be morally corrupting everybody to have UBI because it's not morally corrupting anybody to do retirement. Retirement, like UBI is good for a lot of people, but not good for everybody. Lots of people when they retire, they start doing everything they wanted to do. And that's fantastic. And some people lose the meaning in their lives. And so that's a serious problem. But because everybody believes retirement, retirement is a good thing, therefore UBI is going to be a good, good thing. Now the question I think I agree with you is, is how do we finance it? And I think we should put this in clear numbers to, to give a sense of what we're talking about. Right. If you end up, for example, having, I don't know, 30, 50% unemployment. Right, 30, 50 unemployment. And the working age population, I think is 70% in the United States. Right. So I actually think today, as of today, only 45% of Americans work. Right. Of all ages. And that's with a 3, 4% unemployment. Yeah. Because there's the working age population and then the percentage of that that works and that combine these two things in like 45%. Now get your unemployment from 3% to 50% and you end up having 20% each. Let's say 20% of the population working, which means that if you want to give $1,000 to 10 people or talking to eight people, you have two people paying those $8,000. And so each one of them needs to pay $4,000. Right. So the amount, all of this to say the amount of taxes that you need to do this redistribution, they can work when you have 5, 10% unemployment. But as you have 30, 40%, 15% unemployment, they don't work anymore. And not only that, but with that level of taxes, people will want to leave. The ones who are paying taxes are going to leave. And so the question is, it's a very complex question. Is it the right thing to redistribute from the wealth generators to the ones who are employed in that situation? And if so, how do you actually enforce it?
- [95:16]
B
Yeah, talk about, I'm getting the hook from my producers here. I can't believe we've already been together for two hours. So you know what I'm going to. This will be round one. I'm going to have you back on. And that is going to be the question we're going to start with. We can both do a little bit of homework.
- [95:34]
A
Let's do it. By the way, it's very fresh in my mind because my article from tomorrow touches on this.
- [95:41]
B
Terrific. Well, I will get a chance to read that and we'll do round two. But at the end of round one, we always give our guests the following opportunity. We are going to make you emperor of the world for one day. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a re education camp. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it. And the two things you say are going to incept the entire population of the world. They're going to wake up whenever their tomorrow morning is and they're going to think, you know, I've just had two of the greatest ideas. And unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually start acting on both of these ideas today. What are you going to incept in the world, Tomas?
- [96:35]
A
Well, just one clarification here, because the word emperor is the one that is, if I'm an emperor, supposedly I have regulatory power, but here it's not regulatory power, it's just idea power. Right?
- [96:46]
B
Idea power. That's right. It's influence.
- [96:49]
A
Got it. So, okay, my brain is going towards how do I get people to stop believing that regulation is the way to solve most of our problems? And then think of it as regulation is a tool. It's good in some situations, but it's a lot of over process. And so we need to get rid of that over process to progress, because technology and capitalism is the best way to grow the economy and therefore happiness. And so that's kind of like a very poorly formed idea. But it's the combination of regulation is a tool that has been overused and you need to be very thoughtful about it in order to unleash technology and capitalism, because those are the biggest forces in human development. I think that's probably the biggest one that comes for one. The other one probably goes back to the thing that we said is democracy is not what we've been doing. What we've been doing is a very basic version of it. And the better version is one where everybody should be adding information to the system and we need a mechanism to. To take that information in and make the decisions for governance. I think that's probably the second one.
- [98:15]
B
Those are both great ones to contemplate. Tomas, this has been super fun. We will put your substack and all the other information in the show notes and you'll be hearing for us for round two.
- [98:28]
A
Awesome. Jim, it was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
- [98:31]
B
Pleasure was mine. Bye.
- [98:33]
A
Bye. Sa.