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

Summary

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Modern Wisdom Podcast #1084: "Everything You Know is About to Collapse"

Guest: David Friedberg
Host: Chris Williamson
Date: April 13, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, entrepreneur and technologist David Friedberg joins Chris Williamson to explore an era of rapid technological acceleration and societal upheaval. The conversation covers the paradox of optimism versus existential fear, the transformative impact of AI, impending abundance in energy and health, the challenges of social systems and governance, and the reshaping of human potential. The pair zoom in on the moon’s industrial future, genetic engineering, agency, transhumanism, and the socioeconomic tensions splitting the West. Friedberg’s tone is pragmatic and energetic—he’s hopeful about the future but incisively critical of systems he believes are failing to adapt.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Human Fear vs. Optimism in Technological Change

[00:09; 04:06]

• Friedberg argues humanity is “programmed” for existential fear, cataloguing a history of civilizations worrying about famine, plague, and collapse.
• Calls out the exponential trajectory of technology: AI is the latest source of existential fear, but historical “threats” yielded to innovation (e.g., the Haber-Bosch process and the food supply).
• Quote:

  “Every generation has these existential threats… and now it’s AI. I think fundamentally AI is one of these most kind of like mind-numbing, sort of unbelievable to understand technologies.” — David Friedberg [01:25]

• Distinction between East and West: China enthusiastically embraces technological leaps for growth, while Western societies fear losses after generations of “promise-making” (the American Dream, job security, etc.)

2. AI’s Diffusion & Centralization Fears

[06:20 – 12:25]

• Williamson raises the "AI as difference of kind, not just degree" concern: concentration of power, work displacement, trillionaire elites.
• Friedberg’s counterpoint:
  • Technology starts centralized but always commoditizes and diffuses.
  • The current wave of AI is “breaking apart” already as open source models run on desktops.
  • Technological monopolies (Cisco, Nvidia, Google) are ephemeral—decentralization inevitable.
• Quote:

  “Every technology commoditizes. New innovation finds its way out.” — David Friedberg [07:35]

• CAR T-cell therapy as analogy: expensive & exclusive at first, but rapidly democratized and accessible.

3. Automation, Robotics, and Universal Agency

[12:25 – 20:22]

• Friedberg envisions robotics as a universal unlock—everyone could have a garage robot, manufacturing and selling products, democratizing small business.
• Williamson describes “AI arm farms” in India: engineers train robots via repetitive manual labor, questioning whether such training leads to new jobs or systemic displacement.
• Friedberg emphasizes that adaptation and human agency will be crucial; government attempts to ban or slow technology will fail.
• Social systems have, in his view, eroded individual agency; digital platforms like TikTok and Etsy newly empower it.
• Quote:

  “Every person has that in them… to take agency if they’re given the right space to do it and they’re not told you can’t do it.” — David Friedberg [19:29]

• Debate over whether AI enhances or diminishes human agency.

4. The Moon as Humanity’s Next Economic Frontier

[21:40 – 26:56]

• Technical deep dive on the rationale for lunar industry—Moon as staging ground for Mars, resource extraction, and manufacturing using raw lunar materials.
• Electric railgun (‘mass driver’) concept to send materials from Moon to Mars with much lower energy requirements.
• Quote:

  “The moon is going to be a giant, giant, giant economy. It’s like the East India Company—once it starts, you won’t believe how big it gets.” — David Friedberg [25:17]

• Discussion of potential abundance: “space as the next industrial revolution.”

5. Near-Zero Energy Cost & the Promise of Fusion

[26:56 – 36:03]

• Friedberg predicts this century will see “energy costs drop to zero,” catalyzed by fusion and possibly improved solar.
• Detailed breakdown of fusion fundamentals, physics, and why it’s been so difficult (stability of plasma, need for AI-driven control systems).
• AI's role in recent breakthroughs—holding a stable plasma for 30 minutes in Chinese reactors, “70 startups” chasing the prize.
• Quote:

  “With free energy… you could have a swarm of a hundred robots build you a mansion. How much would that cost? Like, nothing.” — David Friedberg [28:17]

• Discussion about how future abundance in energy radically expands economic productivity and possibility.

6. The Economics and Politics of Space Resources

[37:37 – 44:33]

• Exploration of what happens to Earth’s economy when resources from the Moon or asteroids become available—abundance could abolish scarcity, potentially reduce motivations for conflict.
• Ownership and governance questions: Who owns the Moon? “Astropolitics” is uncharted—law and sovereignty must be reconsidered as humans move off-Earth.
• Anecdotes citing fiction (“Seveneves”, “Ad Astra”) and optimism that technological/resource abundance might ultimately reduce global conflict.

7. Age Reversal & Biology’s Frontier

[44:33 – 56:16]

• Friedberg explains the science of Yamanaka factors—proteins that “reset” the aging markers (epigenome) in cells, restoring youth in animal models.
• Companies are already entering clinical trials for age reversal in humans; immense economic and existential implications.
• Exercise is, for now, the best age-retarding intervention; systemic treatments are “10–20 years” from mainstream adoption.
• Quote:

  “This is a technology category that… is one of these things you think about alongside free energy, AI, and automation. Potentially living forever. That’s why I’m excited about the future.” — David Friedberg [52:28]

8. Changing Social Contract: Careers, Agency, and Universal Basic Income (UBI)

[56:16 – 60:07]

• If people regularly live past 120, what happens to work, retirement, meaning?
• Friedberg is against UBI: predicts it’s inflationary and dampens personal agency; historic attempts at UBI and welfare don’t inspire confidence.
• Technology (e.g., creator economy) provides better channels for meaning and income than welfare or UBI.

9. Transhumanism, Superintelligence, and Genetic Engineering

[60:07 – 77:32]

• Friedberg describes two transhumanist paths:
  • Human–machine interfaces (Neuralink, retinal chips, future lightweight interfaces—“like Avatar, not just Matrix”)
  • Genetic engineering (from embryo selection, to gene editing for enhancement, to “transgenic” humans with non-natural traits)
• Ethical lines debated: embryo selection for negative (disease) or positive (IQ, height) traits; gene editing; and finally, introducing entirely new traits (like infrared vision).
• Quote:

  “The Overton window will shift… as soon as adults are getting gene therapy to boost longevity or IQ, it’s only a matter of time before parents want it for embryos.” — David Friedberg [78:49]

• The competitive social dynamic: once enhancement is possible, it quickly becomes a necessity for those able to afford it.

10. Social Systems, Governance, and California’s Spiral

[96:23 – 112:29]

• Friedberg lays out a scathing critique of bloated, promise-driven government, using California’s pension and public spending crises as examples.
• Details on the “billionaire tax”: starts as a tax on the few but erodes property rights for all, is predicted to drive capital and innovation away, and sets a dangerous precedent for the US.
• Historical parallels: income tax’s expansion, government-driven inflation, the self-defeating spiral of socialism.

11. The Pessimism-Optimism Divide

[126:18 – 130:36]

• Williamson and Friedberg discuss the changing narrative—America’s mid-century optimism replaced by dystopian pessimism, even in pop culture (“Tomorrowland to Space Mountain”).
• Quote:

  “If we can change people’s aperture a bit and get them to be optimistic instead of pessimistic and see how promising tomorrow is… that’s the sort of thing we need to be doing.” — David Friedberg [128:03]

• Repeatedly, Friedberg frames the next era as a choice: embrace abundance and agency, or succumb to fear and protectionism.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Existential Fear:
  “Every generation has these existential threats… and now it’s AI.” — Friedberg [01:25]

• On Technological Diffusion:
  “Every technology commoditizes. New innovation finds its way out.” — Friedberg [07:35]

• On Agency & Opportunity:
  “Every person has that in them… to take agency if they’re given the right space to do it and they’re not told you can’t do it.” — Friedberg [19:29]

• On the Moon’s Potential:
  “The moon is going to be a giant, giant, giant economy. It’s like the East India Company—once it starts, you won’t believe how big it gets.” — Friedberg [25:17]

• On Radical Abundance:
  “With free energy… robots can build you a mansion. How much would that cost? Like, nothing.” — Friedberg [28:17]

• On Age Reversal:
  “We will live theoretically for as long as we want… this is a technology category… alongside free energy, AI and automation. Potentially living forever.” — Friedberg [52:28]

• On Embryo Selection & Genetics:
  “If everyone’s doing it as an adult and it’s totally safe… why don’t we just do it to every embryo?” — Friedberg [78:49]

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Key Timestamps by Topic

• Existential Threats, Fear, Human Programming: [00:09–06:20]
• Diffusion of AI, Centralization Fears, Tech Commoditization: [06:20–12:25]
• Robotics, Agency, The Garage Robot Vision: [12:25–20:22]
• The Moon as Economic Frontier, Space Industry: [21:40–26:56]
• Fusion Energy, Reducing Energy Costs Toward Zero: [26:56–36:03]
• Economic Impact of Space Resources, Ownership, and Abundance: [37:37–44:33]
• Age Reversal Science and Implications: [44:33–56:16]
• Human Agency, UBI, Meaning and Welfare: [56:16–60:07]
• Transhumanism, Human-Machine Interfaces, Genetic Engineering: [60:07–77:32]
• Plant Genetics, Friedberg’s Day Job: [89:24–96:23]
• California’s Economic Problems, Governance, and Wealth Tax: [96:23–112:29]
• Pessimism vs. Optimism, Cultural Narratives: [126:18–130:36]

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Conclusion

David Friedberg paints a bold, vivid future: exponential technology, AI, robotics, abundant energy, and life extension merging to offer prosperity and choice. But, he warns, outdated, bloated government and fear-based politics risk “locking ourselves up” at the very moment humanity could be breaking every limit. The conversation is a thoughtful clash of optimism versus caution—a challenge to seize agency, lean into abundance, and rethink what society and self can be.

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Transcript

[A]

You've said the future is going to be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried. How come?

[B]

I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future because humans are programmed to be that way. We always were worried about some predator coming around the corner, eating us. Like we're tuned to survive, right? So we're tuned to always. There's always some existential threat to humanity. This goes back to kind of biblical eras thousands of years ago. It was the great flood that was about to come. There was the, you know, the plague. The plague's going to wipe us all out. There's starvation. You know, the late 19th century population was outstripping food supply. And there was this big belief that we were going to run out of food. And there was this kind of rush to. And the primary reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields off of the South American coast. So these giant islands covered in poop. And they would, the clipper ships would go down, they'd get all this poop and they'd bring it back to Europe and they use it as fertilizer to farm. If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less, less calories. So the islands were kind of diminishing. And there was this big call to action. We're going to run out of fertilizer. The world's going to starve, we're going to die. And then there was this invention called the Haber Bosch process, where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it and make fertilizer. Boom. Suddenly, population skyrocketed. Every generation has these existential threats, climate change. Covid there's always. And now it's AI I think fundamentally AI is one of these most kind of like mind numbing, sort of unbelievable to understand kind of technologies. And when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok that seem so overwhelming, like a plague, like running out of food, like Covid we have a tendency to be very existential about it. Now, you compare that to the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground, people are living longer, they're living healthier, they're living better lives across the board, across populations. And people can argue all day long about relative prosperity. Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead. They're doing really well. The rest of us feel left behind. But if you look at some of the metrics of like, hey, everyone has a home, everyone has a car, like Everyone has some of these things that we take for granted today that we didn't have a hundred years ago that were really things to struggle to get now, separate to that, there's an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally. Digitization of the physical world, and then our ability to kind of make predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of the tools that we call AI today. But it's really a long history of these sorts of tools where we take data and we use that to better understand the world and then say, hey, we could do this or we could do this. We could make this molecule to solve this cancer. We could do this thing, and suddenly it turns out we're right. We could build this machine that could get us to the moon. Oh, yeah, we're right. We could do that. Like, all of these fundamental tools start to compound, and we're in this kind of exponential curve right now. And that I think. And we can talk about some of the things that I think are most exciting, but that are really going to kind of transform the trajectory for humanity. So I think that there's a risk of too much change too fast, which is perhaps the thing that breaks social order. And that's probably the phase that we're in right now. How much is the social order going to break? How hard is it going to be for people to adapt? How. How much of a dislocation will there be in social systems and economic systems and people's expectations when they shift too much and they have to kind of rethink, what do I have to do? They want to put a brake on things. And I think that's kind of a moment that we're in in the west right now. In the east, it's a little bit different. You go to China, they're very much embracing these technologies because there's so much more to gain than there is to lose. In the west, we have so much more to lose than there is to gain. So.

[A]

Oh, that's interesting. A victim of your own success so far.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Because it feels like you've climbed pretty high, and if you fall, that could be bad.

[B]

You have more to lose.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And we could pontificate on this for a while, but you could go back to FDR in the United States and. And we. We. We kind of came out of the war with this big effort where we said, hey, we can aggregate all our resources. We can win World War II. And then we said, by aggregating our resources, we could do the extraordinary. So let's do that. Again, and let's keep doing that. And that became this kind of trajectory we've been on in terms of making promises for tomorrow and then having the government kind of deliver the promises. Right? And that's been a big thing that's gone on for the last call it almost 100 years. Particularly in the west, at some point you can only promise so much. Like there's a system where everyone had this sort of expectation setting that was made, okay, everyone gets a home, everyone. That's the American dream. Everyone goes to college and then they get a job. Some of those things may not necessarily be the right things from a free market perspective, in which case you're making these promises and then people feel like the promises aren't being delivered, they're not being met and that's all they care about and that's all that they want. In the west we have that problem right now. And so there's a lot of these things that we've set expectations around. If you go to college, you get a good degree, no matter how much it costs, you will have a good job and you'll be able to buy a home and live a good life. And that's not true anymore. And so these are the sorts of things that I think make us more fearful of the changes ahead. Whereas in the east, those promises weren't necessarily made. Like in China, GDP per capita skyrocketed from 3,000 to 30,000 in just a couple of years. I mean, imagine seeing the average person's income in a country go up by 10x and everyone's moving from farms to villages to cities. And the cities are like the future. It's been an extraordinary trajectory. So there's a lot of embracing of the future that's happening in one set of social systems in the world today. And then a bunch of this like, oh my God, tomorrow is scary. It's going to break everything on the other side. And I think we have that very dangerous kind of choice to make.

[A]

I think the concern is that AI is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree. That there is a centralizing of power amongst potential 5 trillionaire class people on the planet. And what did they, what sort of control do they have? How much displacement is there of work that didn't happen in the same way as when horses were killed because the automobile came along or because manual labor needed to turn into driving JCBs instead of digging holes. That this is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree. What's your perspective when it comes to AI doomerism AI optimism.

[B]

Yeah, all technology shifts go through a phase of diffusion, meaning they have to start somewhere. It's not like we turn on a switch and suddenly everyone can build an Etsy store or a Shopify store. Like that's not how the Internet started, with everyone suddenly benefiting from being able to be an entrepreneur online. It took a couple of generations of technology to fusion before the idea of Shopify and the high speed Internet all over the country got everywhere and people could actually stand up a Shopify store and run it. The first people on the Internet, the first businesses that stood up did very well. And so the technology started centrally, but then initially people were like, oh my God, Cisco's gonna dominate the world. Right? Right. Like Cisco's got the switches that make the Internet switch. That's the technology that's gonna. Those guys that own Cisco, those guys are gonna run the world. This is not fair. Like they're gonna control everything. This is crazy. Nowadays it's Nvidia to some degree, it's Google. But like eventually every technology commoditizes. That's what's so amazing about technology is it like it's always diffusing. Like this new innovation finds its way out. Like we've already seen in just the last couple of weeks, this insane shift in AI where people don't have to run models in the cloud anymore. They can run models on their desktop at home. So there's no longer like a dependency on Google or a dependency on pick your favorite hosted model provider. I can download an open source model and there's plenty of great models. I can run it on a Mac computer in my house. And if you saw recently there's this auto research thing that went viral on Twitter this weekend where Andre Karpapi turned on auto research and he ran all of these agents on his computer and they were just asked a bunch of questions to solve Make Better LLMs. And they just ran 30 of them talking to each other and they just kept scoring the improvements they were each making to the LLM, to the underlying AI model and they made a better LLM model than what ChatGPT had not too very long ago in like a weekend our on a computer at home. That's how quickly it's diffused. And so I'm like, I think that there's a. And so this whole thing of like, oh, data centers need to be stopped. I actually don't think that data centers are going to have much to do with the benefits we're going to realize. Like so much of AI is going to sit at the edge. It's going to sit in embedded devices, it's going to sit on your desktop computer, it's going to sit on your iPhone. It's going to be ubiquitous. It's going to be everywhere. And I think everyone just doesn't see the benefit yet. And so it's very hard to envision why I should do this. And we can talk a lot about some of those benefits that could arise. But over time, all technologies have, like, a central feature where someone's making a bunch of money early on, and then eventually everyone's like, oh, my God, everyone's life has gotten better because of this thing. Like when the first CAR T therapies came out, these are T cell, I totally jumped ship there. But, like, CAR T therapy is this amazing technology that was developed where we could take T cells, immune cells, out of the human body, program them to find a specific protein, put them back in your body, and then they go and find that protein and kill it and kill that cell. And it was used for cancer. So we could take a T cell out of the body, program it to go attack a cancer cell, put it back in the body, it attacks the cancer cell and destroys it. When that first came out, it was like, oh, my God, this is incredible. And a couple of companies made a couple billion dollars selling the first generation of those technologies. But to get that therapy is like millions of dollars. Initially, you have to take all these cells out, isolate them, make sure they're clean, engineer them, put them back in, make sure the person doesn't die. So it became this very expensive initial process. And now CAR T therapy is making its way into more and more cancer treatments. And it is like almost 100% success rate in blood cancers when it works. And so it's becoming this thing that goes from millions of dollars to a million to 500, and pretty soon to 50k, 20k, and eventually 5k, and that ends that disease. That whole class of diseases goes away. So all of these technologies start up with this aggregation of value. Small number of people get it, small number of people get value, but eventually all technologies diffuse. And so I'm less, like, concerned about there being a monopoly. We're already seeing every single model company getting disrupted by something else the next week. We're already seeing this idea of data centers being the requisite breaking apart. There's a bunch of startups right now that are making technology that reduces the token cost by a thousand x. So for every token produced, which is a measure of output from AI, it used to be 10 bucks or whatever. Pick your number. A dollar, 50 cents, 10 cents. It's coming down by a thousandfold because they're figuring out better ways to architecture the underlying models to make distributed smaller models, to use new chip architecture, to use new systems of balancing energy across the different chips that you're using, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And these all compound. So suddenly it's like the people that are going to build all these data centers really going to have a monopoly. I don't know. Like this will allow anyone to stand up a small data center and run a bunch of AI stuff. So you don't really need big hundred billion dollar data center. So I think there's a lot that's changing very quickly. And every step of the way it's happening so fast. People just have all these reasons to have concern. But I'm pretty optimistic as history being a predictor here, that the diffusion of these technologies will unlock value for every human on Earth. And it's really just a function of at what point and at what point of value.

[A]

I've heard you talking about the moon a lot. What's happening with the moon?

[B]

The moon, I think so. One of the things that I think AI unlocks is the ability to do really complex projects. People think about AI as like, hey, I'm going to replace labor. Like the accountant's job is going to go away. And we're all kind of swirling our heads around what are we going to do with the accountant's jobs going away. And you know, we could use the automobile and the horse buggy driver analogy. People were worried about the horse buggy jobs going away and who's going to breed the horses, who's going to take care of the horses, all the horse stables are going to go away. And then when the car came around, there was auto mechanics and there were the highway system. And then motels popped up, and then gas stations popped up, and then coffee houses popped up on the highways and new towns emerged on the highways because you could get to them. And suddenly the automobile unlocked industries we didn't contemplate. Right. It's several degrees away, several steps away from the initial problem that you're thinking about, which is the horse companies dying and the horse jobs going away. So I think that's kind of like an important thing to note. And before I get to the moon, I'll just say this one point. I think physical AI or robotics is really going to be an unlock for people. People think it's like the companies, the corporations will have all the robots, and the corporations will replace all the people. Like, but why can't everyone have a robot? Meaning why can't someone put a robot in their garage? And this robot can do anything. It works 24 hours a day. That robot's now your employee. And you can say to the robot in the garage, hey, I want to make a bicycle shop. I want to make custom bicycles that are really cool. They're like chrome. And people can, you know, kind of tweak them online and make all these different versions of bicycles. And then the robot will build the bicycle so people, so you can stand up a Shopify store or an Etsy store or whatever, sell bicycles, and your robot will make them for you. You don't even have to know how to make bicycles. The robot will order all the parts, it'll order all the machinery it needs. It'll run the robot bike shop in your garage. It'll make bikes, it'll package them up and ship them out for you. When you think about it in that context, which is that this diffusion of technology enables everyone to get value from it. So everyone will have a robot. Everyone will be able to have a small business. It's like imagine back in the day, 20, 30 years ago, if you told people, hey, everyone can have an Etsy store. Now all of the knitting you're doing at home, you can sell, and you can make 50 grand a year. No one would have believed you. But, like, now you, now you can do that.

[A]

Have you seen these arm farms?

[B]

No.

[A]

In India?

[B]

No.

[A]

Jared, pull up that video I sent you about robots needing a human body inside the race to train AI robots how to act human in the real world. I traveled to southern India to document the rise of AI arm farms, where young engineers strapped GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. So people are getting paid to do normal shit. Here it is.

[B]

And then the robot learns.

[A]

Yeah. So this is the same thing that happened with Tesla's full self driving, that they take the best. I mean, this doesn't strike me as the best folding I've ever seen, but they take the best drivers on Tesla and they use that to train the model on.

[B]

It would be a good hack to mess with the robots and fold incorrectly over and over again or just downstream.

[A]

Lots of people with creased T shirts

[B]

just mess it all up.

[A]

Yeah, this is my way to destroy the T shirt folding industry.

[B]

Suddenly, in the future, everything you buy is completely broken because everyone Trains, the robot.

[A]

This is everything. This is for everything. This is for making a cup of tea. What's that famous robotics challenge they have cracking an egg, the delicacy to hold it and the speed to hit it and the precision to whatever. But yeah, this is the future. Hey look, if you need extra cash, let it watch you fold your pants.

[B]

And this is obviously transitory. So this is the training phase of the robotics. The real question is what are people individually going to do? So like, I know you asked about the moon. We'll get.

[A]

That's fine. Because there was also that anthropic report that just got released looking at which jobs are going to be popped first by AI, and that doesn't even include robotics.

[B]

So I don't think that there's like going to be a successful organized government system to solve this problem. To come in and be like, hey, we're going to stop these industries and they're going to try. I mean, New York just passed a law making medical advice, legal advice, all these other things illegal in through AI tools. Which by the way, you got to ask yourself the question, are they really going to be able to do that? Because if all the models are open sourced and they're all available and I can run them locally, why wouldn't I just download a model, put it on my computer and I can ask it legal?

[A]

So it's going to burst through the door and say, David, what is that? What have you got on your computer there? You better not be looking at your health reports.

[B]

All of these legal efforts and government efforts to try and stall and stop technology, historically it's never worked like it's just not going to work except when you have a limited resource like uranium for nuclear fuel or something like that. But for something like this, which is self replicating, it's software, it can go anywhere, it can be anywhere, it can fill any space. It's knowledge work. It's going to be very hard to stop it. So the real question, and this is going to be transitory for now, but the real question is going to be which of the humans that are folding T shirts today are going to have the spark in their brain that's going to say I should buy five robots and run my own T shirt folding business. That's this challenge that I think humanity faces in this next evolution. We can talk about transhumanism too, which I think is going to be a forced adaptation, but particularly it's about agency taking ownership for how do you engage the future versus waiting for someone to tell you what to do next.

[A]

That's going to be a change of kind, not just a difference of degree. I think that previously, if you were someone who was mucking the horses in the streets of Manhattan, that job goes away. But there's a new business that comes up and your friend decides to go and work there. The agency of I am enough of a self starter with the sovereignty and the determination to go and do this thing. That does feel like the bar is being raised and some people are going to fall below that bar.

[B]

I don't know if that's true because I do think every human has a degree of innate agency. It's programmed into us as humans. It's just generally been turned off because we've created social systems that have told us, here's what you're gonna get next and here's what you're gonna get next. And here's what you're gonna get next. Since we're children, we've been programmed by our education, by college, by the work system, by the economy, by the taxes, by the fact that the government's supposed to give me all this shit every step of the way. I'm being told, do this, you'll get this. Do this, you'll get this. You've never been given the freedom as a human to operate. And I think this is fundamentally true with social systems we've created government systems, financial systems, everything. We've been very severely limited as people. I think one example that speaks positively to my point is what's happened with people making money on TikTok and Instagram and Shopify and Etsy. If you told someone, pick the timeframe 15 years ago, that X number of millions of Americans would be making on average tens of thousands of dollars a year doing the things they're doing. Posting photos of themselves in bikinis and at historic monuments, on Instagram with, with, you know, a sports drink or whatever next to them. Or people were making money podcasting like, like with the scale that they are today. You're the prime example. Or people were making money selling home goods and making 300 grand a year selling their customers cat blankets or pick, pick, pick, pick, pick these things. You would have never believed it. But every person has that in them. Every person has that capacity in them to do something unique, to do something special, to take agency if they're given the right space to do it and they're not told that you can't do it.

[A]

Interesting point on that. I wonder how many people are going to have their agency diminish because of their reliance on AI. So I wonder if the very thing that's going to enable them is also going to be something challenging that reduces their capacity to enact it. And I think that that's one of the concerns anyway. The Moon.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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[B]

Well, so I think that there's a big discussion, obviously I would say largely led by, pushed by Elon, but many others over time that, you know, we should expand humans beyond Earth and get to Mars and that's a good place to set up a colony and yada yada, right? Mars is not very habitable. We need to move a lot of material to Mars. But I think if you look at the math, it is very likely the case that you can probably reduce your energy cost needs to move material to set up a colony on Mars by probably 100x or more by making most of the material you need for Mars on the moon and shipping it from the moon to Mars. And the reason is the Moon, unlike the Earth, does not have an atmosphere. One of the biggest uses of the energy when you're moving matter off the Earth is getting away from through the atmosphere, which drags or pushes the rocket back down. And gravity. So the Moon is one sixth the gravity of the Earth. So it takes much less energy to escape the gravitational pull of the Moon than it does the Earth. And there's no atmosphere pulling you back. So with AI and robotics, it is theoretically possible. And then if you look at moon dust and moon rock, it has all of the raw materials that we may need to build machines, to build housing units, to build habitation units.

[A]

What's it constituent. What's the constituent puzzle?

[B]

It's got aluminum, it's got silicon, it's got carbon. You can even go up to the poles and you can get hydrogen and oxygen from the ice up there. So you can melt the water at the poles, run electricity through it, break it into hydrogen and oxygen, use the hydrogen and oxygen and the carbon in various chemical reactions. You can theoretically make any substance you need or any metal or any material you need that we can make here on Earth. So we can and should build very large factories on the Moon. And the way that this would work is you basically can use solar power, right? Solar. Very deployable on the Moon. Lots of sunlight, no atmosphere, et cetera. Good, good continuous energy flow. No clouds. And. And then you can use kind of battery storage. But the mechanism for moving material off the Moon is not propulsive propulsion. It's actually a mass driver. So electric railgun. So think about like a train track, you know, like these maglev trains. You know, think about like a maglev train and, you know, if you run the calculations, it would take about, call it a nine kilometer long track to move one ton of material off of the Moon and get it to Mars. Okay.

[A]

At an angle.

[B]

So here's the thing. It doesn't actually even have to be in an angle. It just has to clear any craters or mountains.

[A]

It's flat enough. And that's escape velocity.

[B]

Just escape velocity.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So all you have to do is orient it correctly, put it on the right part of the Moon and orient

[A]

it correctly for the Moon to basically aim.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

The Moon's passing around and it would

[B]

take, yeah, it would take a couple megawatt hours of power to. To push a ton of material down this rail track. It would take about 4 1/2 seconds for it to move down the rail track and then hit four and a

[A]

half seconds to move nine kilometers.

[B]

At nine kilometers, yeah. So it is. It ends up escaping at roughly, call it 20,000km an hour. And that's now if you're moving one ton of material, you would still need a couple hundred kilograms, call it about 200 kg of some sort of propulsion to slow it down, to slow it down as it approaches the Moon. But here's the other thing. You could use moon rock as a heat shield for reentry into the Earth's atmosphere or the Martian atmosphere. So you basically take moon rock, put it on the front, because you don't care if it burns away and goes away, it can just vaporize. So you need 15cm of moon rock on the front of this parcel. You ship the parcel off this rail track, it goes towards Mars. It can hit 100 GS of acceleration while it's accelerating, gets over there, you slow it down a little bit, and then it can actually enter the Martian atmosphere. The moon rock burns away and you've just delivered roughly 700 kilograms of material. And you can run that every hour with solar panels that are roughly 500 kind of meters by 500 meters. So, you know, pretty small kind of solar system, some batteries, some capacitors, and then you got to build the rail. The rail you need about nine tons of material. So you got to get a lot of material put out to get this, this rail built. But again, the amazing thing about AI is you can, you can kind of think about it being self replicating in the physical sense as well as the digital sense. You can put robots on the Martian surface with the necessary starting equipment that can make the next robots, that can then make the next robots, that can then go do the mining, that can then go build the factories, that can then go build the rail, that can then go build the propulsion system and can then do the mining for you. And there's a lot of very valuable material on the moon that we could also ship back to Earth. So I actually think the Moon is going to be a giant, giant, giant economy. And I think it's like one of these economies, like, it's almost like the East India or like, you know, like when you get over there, you don't realize how big it's going to be till this starts. But once it starts, the value of what you can do and the low cost nature of it because of AI, now that you can have robots doing this stuff and you can have AI orchestrate a lot of work and you don't need to commit millions of people to it and trillions and you still need some money, but not trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. I think the moon is probably one of these like more under discussed in Silicon Valley kind of economic, grand economic

[A]

opportunities essentially is space the next industrial revolution.

[B]

There's a lot that could happen on Earth too. So like I think there's a lot. There's a couple big other big drivers. I think one is dropping energy costs to zero. And I think fusion will have a big role in that this century. So people don't want to talk about fusion because everyone's all about solar all the time and Elon loves solar and blah blah blah, everyone poo poo is fusion. So I'll talk about it in a second. But the cost, if you get the cost of energy down to 1 cent a kilowatt hour, it absolutely expands every economy. Like everything blows up. Like imagine if you.

[A]

What is it currently?

[B]

Well it's in the US we're paying 15 to 40 cents a kilowatt hour for off the grid. But nuclear power, you know, best case scenario is about 5 cents a kilowatt hour. And that's amortized when you take the cost of everything you got to build and amortize it out and then your runtime cost 5 to 10 cents. But they're going to sell it at like 15. So like imagine if you could take power cost down to 100th of what it is today. The cost to make anything drops because now you've got robots. Robots can make stuff quickly and with no marginal cost because the electricity is what runs the robots. So you could have a swarm of a hundred robots build you a mansion. How much would that cost? Like a 10,000 square foot crazy house. The cost of energy is nothing. So maybe having a crazy house could cost close to nothing.

[A]

Well, there's a robot printing machine that's just launching in Austin at South by Southwest this week.

[B]

Making houses, just yeah, 3D printing houses, Gen 1. Now imagine Gen 6, right? And imagine energy cost is like zero. And imagine all that material production coming up.

[A]

How cool of a house do you want? I want to live in Hogwarts. Fine, get the land.

[B]

I want like a Lake Como, but I want to make my own Lake Como, you know, like no one else.

[A]

Like just like, like David.

[B]

Yeah, like David. But so, so energy costs I think are going to this, this will be the era when fusion happens. So fusion's this crazy like principle. It's this, it's this fundamental thing that drives the universe. If the sun is run on fusion, fusion is when protons jam together. Okay, so the sun is so hot because it has so much mass. So when all this mass came together, all the matter starts bumping into each other and that creates kinetic energy. That kinetic energy is heat. And it's so dense because of the gravity, because of all the mass, that you've got this extremely hot, extremely dense plasma. Plasma means that it's so energetic that the electrons break away.

[A]

It's technically a fourth state of matter, right?

[B]

It is, yeah. So there's arguably five states of matter, right? Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, and then Einstein, Bose condensate, which is crazy physics.

[A]

You always have to one up me.

[B]

No, but it's like I actually think that one's more cool is why I said it. But yeah, yeah, yeah, but the, the, the, what happens in fusion is when two protons have enough energy and they get close enough, they jam together and they stick together. So one proton, you remember this like with an electron, is hydrogen, two protons is helium, right? And then it's lithium and then beryllium and so on. So protons jamming together forms a new nucleus, forms a new kind of element, goes from hydrogen to helium, all the way up the periodic table of elements. So the more energy you have, the denser these things get. It requires more and more energy to get this to happen. Now when you fuse protons together and form a new element less than iron, it actually releases energy in the process. Anything greater than iron requires energy to make it stick together. That's like a cool feature of physics, which you could get philosophical on why this is the case.

[A]

Iron's kind of like an equilibrium state in a weird way.

[B]

It's actually related to the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces and how they have a trade off. There's a threshold at which the repulsiveness is greater because you have so many more protons, they're pushing each other apart. So they're pushing each other apart more than the benefit you get from getting them together. And so you actually have to put energy in to make heavier elements. And all the heavier elements on planet Earth came from a sun that exploded billions of years ago. Crazy, but. So fusion is how the sun makes energy. So every time proton and proton get together, they release some energy and that's the light that we get from the sun. Constant fusion. So the challenge has always been, can we do fusion on Earth? Can we just jam protons together and capture that energy? So the technology to do it is you basically spin, you know, these protons around in a plasma at 100 million degrees Celsius. Some people are using these like donut shaped toroidals. Some people are now using these sort of weird, what are called stellarators. They've got crazy shapes and much of the design of these systems on how do you get these protons to move fast enough? And the problem is when the protons get close and close together, they push each other apart. So you gotta use a magnetic field to squeeze these protons together so that they get closer and closer and then get them to fuse. The problem is, as they get closer, the protons make their own magnetic field that pushes back and fucks up the magnetic field that you're trying to use to squeeze them together. And so it's this dynamical equilibrium problem. They just keep breaking and breaking and breaking. And you cannot get a stable plasma at that density. AI seems to be solving that problem because they're now using AI to train the control of the magnetic fields in a way that's working. And they're now able to hold these magnetic fields for 30 minutes at a time. Out of China now, or, you know, started out, it went from like 17 seconds to a few seconds, few longer to a few minutes to 30 minutes in literally like the last two and a half, three years. Like, that's how quickly they're ramping up in the ability to make this happen. There's about 70 startups doing this just to give you a sense of what this enables. Basically you could think about taking water, putting it into this machine, getting the protons to spin around, and then extracting energy from those protons jamming together. That energy turns into electricity. There's no nuclear explosion. There's no risk of the whole thing melting down. There's no nuclear material, nothing's radioactive. It's. It's a very clean way of generating energy. So it's been this kind of holy grail for the night since the 1950s when people first thought about it.

[A]

It needs a different name.

[B]

Yeah. What would you call it?

[A]

Can't have the word nuclear in it. Yeah, it can't.

[B]

Yeah. Maybe. Some people have said just call it fusion. Some people have said call it L.

[A]

Too close to fission.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

People are going to pattern match it already and they're going to think I've heard even me.

[B]

Let's come up with a name. What do you think?

[A]

I think something to do with the electromagnetic. Electromagnetic energy element of that. That doesn't feel. That feels kind of green.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That feels quite safe. Yeah. I don't expect that to explode.

[B]

Yeah. Strong power, weak power, protonics, something. We'll come up with something.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, I think that if you have nuclear in it. I think it's just such a contentious topic.

[B]

Right. Because it's.

[A]

Everyone thinks nuclear in history.

[B]

Yeah. Like nuclear energy is fission where you're taking heavy, heavy, heavy elements like uranium, breaking them apart. They're radioactive.

[A]

The opposite.

[B]

And you're getting energy out. Yeah, you're doing the opposite. You're taking the heavier stuff and grabbing the energy when the heavier stuff becomes lighter, releasing that energy that it took to make it. So this is different. And this you can. I did the math on this. Basically you could use a swimming pool sized amount of ocean water to make all the electricity needed for an entire year for the planet Earth. That's what this can do. That's why it's so important that we get it done. Now when you do this and it works and we're very close to having this work in industrial scale. Everyone's always joked, oh, fusion's always like a decade away. It's maybe it's a decade away, maybe not, but it's going to happen. Like we're progressing up this production curve. It's going to happen.

[A]

Are those 30 minute long runs energy positive? Net positive.

[B]

They're still requiring net energy in because of the setup and so on. But the next phase will be to capture basically the current systems aren't just protons. They put protons with neutrons and the neutrons are what get energized into the wall to heat up the wall. And that's where they heat up water to turn a steam turbine. You know, like other people have other ideas that hey, maybe we shouldn't be using a steam turbine.

[A]

Isn't it mad that of all of the ways it's still rotate a thing attached to a dyno, it doesn't matter what the fanciness that occurs before it totally. It's just dynamo and a fan.

[B]

That's another thing that should likely change this century is the move away from that system where we can do direct energy capture and conversion into electricity. Because you're trying to. You're basically the reason you do that is you're trying to get electrons to move through a wire. So you wrap a wire with magnets around a coil and you get the magnet thing to spin. The faster it spins, the more it moves the electrons through the wire. So that's the basis of that system. But there's other things that people have theorized. So with this energy system I think you're going to like drop the cost of energy, unleash productivity, unleash economic opportunity. So that's Another kind of technology that I would say is like very kind of positive future, positive on like what's around the corner before we continue.

[A]

Most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer, the margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see, mitochondria are the energy producers inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes even if your habits stay strong. Mitopure from Timeline contains the only clinically validated form of urethylene a used in human trials. It promotes mitophagy, which is your body's natural process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and renewing healthy ones. In studies, this supported mitochondrial function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder, it's about actually supporting the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying Strong into your 30s, 40s and 50s and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, There is a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now you can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Just rounding out space, two things. Who owns the moon and who owns the resources on the moon. And secondly, if we're going to start mining asteroids and mining the moon, what does that mean for the Earth's economy? Because I have to imagine that that's a pretty big dice roll or at the very least, you're adding dice to the game that you were already playing with. And that's going to make things interesting.

[B]

You know, economic growth is one of these things that's very hard to contemplate intuitively, to fully grok intuitively, because like if you, if you add chips to a game, like we're playing poker, there's eight of us playing poker and we suddenly increase our chip stack by like 10x, we're still playing poker. But you know, maybe we could tip more, right? Like maybe the amount of money we're now making gives us the ability to go buy $100 bottle of wine instead of $2 Coors Lights. You know, like that's what ends up happening is as more chips come on the table now, the poker analogy is a very bad one because that's a zero sum game. Economic growth should come from productivity growth, not from money printing. Okay. Much of our economic growth over the last couple of decades, one could argue, has come from money printing. We've just put more chips on the table. The house has made more chips, put them on the table. But economic growth means that I went outside and I made something. I made a new. I mined gold. Let's use gold mining as an example. I mined gold out of the ground. That's worth something because now people can use it, they can trade it, they can sell it. So I'm being productive with my time. So the more productivity there is in the system, the more chips get made, the more the economy grows, the more everyone gets the ability to buy and sell more stuff. And everyone's labor, everyone's time is worth more. And so everything grows. That's the benefit of true productivity. So productivity is like this best measure, I would say, of technology's advance on how technology advances social systems. The more productive we are, the more everyone's going to benefit.

[A]

It feels like a unique kind of productivity to take raw materials that were maybe rare or at least didn't exist within what was a closed system. The Earth was a closed system. We weren't getting anything from off it unless we were hit by an asteroid and then bringing it back in.

[B]

Right.

[A]

What happens to the iron price when we are bringing iron back from outside of what was predicted as a part of that?

[B]

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

[A]

Meaning because the price is just indicative of the supply and the availability.

[B]

And everyone can. And now everyone gets more access. This is why technology.

[A]

I've always wanted more iron. I've said, I know I don't have enough.

[B]

You're like an iron horde. It's funny, when we walked in the studio, I was wondering why you had that blanket over that big pile of iron in the.

[A]

That's correct. Don't look at that.

[B]

The park a lot.

[A]

Don't look at that.

[B]

Yeah, you're like, you're iron horde. You're like a Minecraft.

[A]

I'm a schmeagle, but for iron.

[B]

But yeah, I mean, abundance is the name of the game, right? Like, if we really are moving a productivity Curve energy costs are coming down. We're able to make more stuff with AI. It's not that some people are going to get richer faster. That may happen, but I don't think that's the problem. I think what really functionally happens is everyone has more abundance. You can now, Instead of working 60 hours a week or 100 hours a week, when we all work, you know, when not we all, but like when Americans worked on farms right at the turn of the century, it was like 80% of people worked on a farm and now it's less than 1%. So we don't have to spend a hundred hour work week working on the farm. In fact, the guy working on the farm is in a John Deere automated tractor with air conditioning. He's on TikTok while the thing drives itself. Trust me, I work in the industry. Like that's, it's awesome. They still work their asses off. Not to diminish it, but like it's a very different type of farming. And yes, it is still backbreaking work, but there's a lot of automation. And so that created an abundance of food, an abundance of calories, an abundance of availability. And we dropped the number of people globally that live on less than 1200 calories a day for a year. Which is how we define malnourished. You know, from billions of people down to 600 million. It's come back up recently because of various supply chain issues post Covid.

[A]

But the number one, a type of malnutrition worldwide is now obesity, not starvation.

[B]

That is a problem. Yeah, it's abundant, it's excess.

[A]

There's twice as many people that are malnourished through their obesity than through their starvation. Final thing, who owns the moon?

[B]

The moon, yeah. So I don't know. I think that's gonna.

[A]

Astropolitics is fascinating. Do you know anyone that does astropolitics? I wanna bring someone on the show.

[B]

Yeah, that's a good idea.

[A]

I wanna talk about it. I think it's so cool. Do you own geostationary above the net of your country? It's kind of yours.

[B]

Depends on what the treaties say.

[A]

Kind of.

[B]

Because you could have yours as a country or as an individual. I could say anything I want if I moved to the moon and put a flag down and said f you guys, I've got lasers that I'm gonna protect. This is my part of the moon. Who's gonna stop me? Like, I don't care about being on Earth anymore. You can't arrest me on Earth. Anymore. You can't take my money out of the bank anymore. That's a frontier.

[A]

Have you ever read 7eves by Neil Siegenson?

[B]

Love that book.

[A]

Yeah. Fuck. One of my most reread fiction books. And in that they go up to the space station Izzy, and they need to an entire new form of law. What happens if somebody commits a crime in space?

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I never thought about the fact that. Well, especially if you've got people from multiple different countries. Well, the way that we deal with it is X, the way that we deal with it is Y. And this is an entire new environment to work in. So it needs to be built from the ground floor up and people have got different priors.

[B]

Right, right, right, totally. And you see that movie Ad Astra.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That scene where he's like. And there's like the pirates on the moon, you know, they're like shooting at him and he has to like, get away. Like, that may be what happens.

[A]

Moon pirates.

[B]

Moon pirates. There's like a battleground on the moon for who has territorial rights and so on. But look, there's so much resource availability. That's the thing about abundance. It's like, maybe wars go away. I'm very. This is where one of the things.

[A]

Because scarcity, scarcity drives wars.

[B]

Do I really need to be fighting with Iran if I don't care as much about oil and energy availability?

[A]

Look at what happened during 2020, 2021, when crypto was on a bull run, everyone was friends. Look at what happens when the price drops. Everyone fucking hates each other.

[B]

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

[A]

Didn't a country try a four day work week?

[B]

I think France doesn't it.

[A]

I think it might have been France that tried the four day work week. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And you know, that's one of the measures of prosperity is like, how much do you have to work to be able to live a good life? And so if you can take more time with your family and more time to explore your personal interests and you don't have to do labor Whether it's on a computer or in a field, that's a good way to think about, like, are we all prospering? Are we being able to. Are we being given freedom to do more things rather than being caged into doing the things we don't want to do?

[A]

Speaking of prospering, how far off are we from age reversal, do you think?

[B]

That's one I'm most excited about. So have you looked at Yamanaka Factor? Have you talked about this on your show before?

[A]

David Sinclair's been on and I know that he's sort of tangentially associated with it, but assume no, do the 30,000 foot view of the Yamanaka factors.

[B]

So every cell in our body has the same DNA. Okay, we know that, and the DNA is in every cell because of a process called mitosis. Every time we make a new cell, from the time we're in the womb to today, we're making new cells. Both. Our entire DNA gets copied over into every cell. But what makes my eye look and act differently than my skin? If it's got the same DNA, how's it different? How's it different than my brain or my tongue or my feet? Those are different cells. There's different cells and different organs in the body. Those cells are different because the genes in the DNA are on or off. So there's a bunch of switches, and the switches are either on or off. And that creates cellular differentiation. It's what makes one cell different from another cell. The eye cell different from the heart cell, different from the skin cell or the lung cell. And the switches that are on or off are these little molecular switches. They're molecules that sit on top of the DNA and they keep that gene from working. It blocks it off. And then the other gene is open. And when it's open, that means that your cell is making RNA copies of that gene and turning it into a protein.

[A]

Zeros and ones, zeros and ones.

[B]

And each gene makes a unique protein. The proteins that then come out do a bunch of stuff. They're machines. They're molecular machines. And they're constantly doing all this stuff in your cell. And that's what makes every cell different, is what genes are on and what genes are off. And the complexity of this is astounding. If you were to think about a cell being the size of Manhattan. So imagine a cell is a, is a, is a city the size of Manhattan with 500 story tall buildings. That's how big it would be. And every person is a protein. There's 10 billion people living in this 500 story tall building island of Manhattan, going in between the buildings, up and down all day long, building stuff together, never sleeping, always working, running into each other, having coffee, making stuff together, breaking stuff together, working. 10 billion of us. Those are the proteins in the cell. In one cell, running around doing stuff for 80 years, that's one second in one cell. That's how complex this is. So the proteins that are on or off matter a lot, and then they make stuff. So that's why the eye cell does totally different stuff than the brain cell or the heart cell. As we get older, this is the current science on this, it looks like what happens is we have DNA breaks. DNA gets damaged from radiation and sunlight and bad eating and alcohol and all the other shit. As those DNA breaks happen, your cell actually fixes the DNA. It's very good at fixing. It goes in, there's a bunch of proteins. They're the worker proteins that are repaired proteins. They go in, they fix the DNA. Every time the DNA gets fixed, there's a chance that those ones and zeros, those ons and offs, get moved around a little bit. And as they get moved around over time, they get moved to the wrong place. So what ends up happening over time is that the wrong genes get turned on and the right genes can get turned off in a cell. And then that cell stops working, right? Stops. The eye cell stops doing what it's supposed to be doing. The heart cell stops getting the right electrical cascade to flow through the other cells, all of the cells, the skin cell, becomes a little wrinkled. And eventually, if enough of those cells have those epigenetic, is what it's called epigenetic errors. You start getting wrinkles, your heart stops beating as well. You go blind. All these sorts of things happen with aging. It looks like the root of all disease may be aging. And aging is a disease. So it is a disease rooted in the fact that the epigenetic factors, these little molecules, move around in the wrong place. That's what we discovered is basically aging. In 2006, a guy named Shinya Yamanaka found that he could take four proteins and put them on a cell. They would go into the cell and they would move all of those epigenetic markers, those ones and zeros, to make that cell into a stem cell, which can then be turned into any other cell in the body. So that was the magic thing he won the Nobel prize for. In 2016, another scientist published a series of papers showing that instead of putting a lot of those four proteins on the Cell, you could put a small amount. And if you put a small amount, instead of resetting all those molecular markers and making that cell back into a stem cell, what it actually does, it just moves those markers back to where they're supposed to be to make it a young cell. And suddenly that retinal cell becomes like a young retinal cell. The skin cell becomes a young skin cell. The heart cell becomes a young heart cell. All of these cells get reset. And they did this in mice, and they made the mice age to like 250 plus years old. They put it in monkeys. The wrinkles went away. And they've done it in specifically applying it to retinal cells in the eye and reversed blindness.

[A]

This is Sinclair stuff, right?

[B]

Sinclair has one of these companies that's in clinical trials now, and there's dozens of others. Altos Labs is like one of the most funded startups in history that no one talks about. They've raised close to probably $10 billion at this point to pursue these technologies. But basically what this means is we are now discovering not just the four proteins, but a whole bunch of other little molecules that we can put into a cocktail. Either we're gonna drink it, take it as a shot, or take it as a pill. It will get into our cells, and it will reset the epigenetic of that cell to make it young again. They're starting with targeting diseases like a particular, like blindness or glaucoma in the eye, or, you know, rheumatoid arthritis or some other heart issue. And they're applying these factors to the cells in that tissue only locally, locally. But over time, what'll end up happening is this becomes a systemic treatment. And they're already doing it in animal models. And then you can either do it continuously, or what I think will end up happening is we'll probably have a system whereby these factors will be continuous. When I say the word factor, I mean protein. These proteins can be continuously made and released inside our body as they're needed. So we maintain our youth and we will live theoretically for as long as we want. That's where this is headed. And the technology shows now that we can do this in animals. We can redose them. Redose them and keep them.

[A]

Has it been done systemically yet, since you mentioned?

[B]

Yeah, this is the mouse model where they made these mice the equivalent of having someone live like 200 plus years old. And this is so early, they haven't even optimized the molecules. They haven't optimized how you deliver the molecules. They haven't optimized the dosing, they haven't optimized the method of the dose. There's all these techniques that are going to be developed on top of this. For every one year we can extend average human lifespan, we're adding tens of trillions of dollars to gdp, right? So this is also another big economic driver. But it's not just how long people live, it's how healthy they are and how energetic they are and how happy they can be. And they can now go out and not feel all the pain and have the disease. You know, theoretically this can lead to a reversal in rates of cancer proliferation or reversal in diabetes, or reversal in many of these other diseases that are fundamentally rooted in this kind of failure of your epigenome, the markers that turn your genes on and off. So this is a technology category that I am like, I think is one of these other things that you can kind of think about the compounding effect, free energy like AI, automation, and infinite labor for people to do all the things they want to do and potentially living forever. I mean, you start to think about how these all kind of compound. That's why I'm excited about the future. Like these very quickly become these sort of compounding effects that drive us into a happier tomorrow. And then again, it becomes a question of abundance. How do you want to spend your time? You know, again, 100 years ago, I don't think people would have had the job option of being a yoga instructor or being a podcaster or being a wedding photographer or you know, go down the list. Like there's so many things that people have found joy in doing with their time and they can be productive doing it. I think more of that starts to happen tomorrow and it's less of the, like, you gotta go work the corporate shitty job on a trading floor, in a corporate office, at a cubicle, or you know, in a factory, or all the things that maybe we will look back one day and say, hey, that was kind of limiting human potential. Like maybe humans could do a lot more and maybe they should. And these shifts to more abundance give us that opportunity to do that.

[A]

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[B]

Way less than that. Way less than that. We are in clinical trials now on several of these cocktails and if there's always a risk in going from animals to humans, but we've done it with human cells in vitro in a petri dish and we see the effect that we are expecting to see. So we have a lot of reasons to believe that over the next 10 to 20 years more of this starts to proliferate.

[A]

You've heard Peter Diamandis idea of longevity, escape velocity, right. That you need to stick about every year that you live means that you're going to live a little bit longer, but that when you cross a particular threshold you just need to stick about until this happens. Essentially, or whatever the equivalent is, whatever the technology is, it allows you to extend lifespan indefinitely.

[B]

I think it's fair.

[A]

You just hold on, hold on. It's probably the best long termist view for looking after your health that now is not the time to fuck it, right?

[B]

Totally.

[A]

Because in the past there wasn't really any reason to stick about. Yeah, you're going to live 80 years or 70 years or 60 years, but you're playing around with fives and tens, whereas if the difference is between 80 and 100 or 80, 120.

[B]

Yeah, you're like, hey, keep it together. And by the way, a lot of like the number one thing you can do to fix your epigenome, which you can do without taking these drugs, is exercise fasting. Well, fasting helps. Fasting does have an effect. But exercise, like exercise releases molecules that in many cells in your body will go in and start to address the epigenome and make you more youthful. And then there's other things that you can start to take. Some of this peptide stuff that people are crazy about has shown that it has an effect. Some of the, I don't want to be prescriptive on these things, but there's a lot of ways that you can start to kind of edge your way before all the big clinical stuff is done and the big, you know, products come out to market.

[A]

What do you think happens to careers and retirement and family structures in a world where people live over 120 years?

[B]

It's hard to say. I mean, you know, I could, I think it's very sad that like I love my kids. Like I, I was with my daughters and my wife, we were doing a. What are the three wish? If you got a, if a, if you had a genie come out of a lamp and you had three wishes, what was your three wishes? The first thing my daughter said is, I wish everyone in our family could live forever. That was her first wish. And I was like such a sweet wish. But I really do think that there is like this incredible, you know, a human element to this technology. It's not just like technology for technology sake.

[A]

Disembodied, sterile.

[B]

Yeah. It's like it's not a pharmaceutical drug. It's like it's a, it's an opportunity to give everyone more time to do the things they want to do. I really think this idea that like humans don't reach their potential is like a very fundamental truth we're going to come to at some point that for a long time, maybe because we had to, we created organized social systems to achieve things as a group, but limited ourselves individually. And I think that that's what maybe changes in the future is that these technologies and this level of abundance gives each of us the ability to achieve outcomes and have things that maybe we didn't realize we could have because we had to make all these trade offs to make things work in a social system, in a society.

[A]

Yeah. I wonder just how much of a challenge it's going to be for people to face more spare time. I know that you guys did really great coverage about a year and A half ago, of the two UBI experiments that went on, is that not an indication that maybe there's going to be a crisis of meaning when we start to give people. Because those weren't good, right?

[B]

No, I mean, ubi inevitably, like all welfare systems will fail.

[A]

Why?

[B]

Two things. One is it creates a system whereby people will always want more. So it becomes this kind of self fulfilling thing. It makes people feel like there's a disincentive to go have agency. Right. It creates enough of a. If it's giving you enough passivity. Yeah, passivity to explore yourself and your potential and engage the world to find your potential, you're not given that incentive. But the more fundamental issue is simply inflation. Ubi, whether it comes about through giving people money as taxes from other people, or whether it comes about from money printing, inevitably leads to an increase in money supply, which makes everything more expensive. So there's a class of things that everyone that's getting the UBI check will buy and those things will all get more expensive. Right. It's a terrible feature of the economy of economic principles. Those things will get more expensive. So I think that that's, that's why those things simply don't work. But look, I'm optimistic. I think that again, I keep going back to this idea that there's this digital universe that we've created where people can kind of build like twitch streamers. Another good example, people going on Patreon, people going on, I mean, pick your platform and they're finding ways to explore their interests and they can live on it like they can make money doing it because other people value what they're doing. Massage therapists, yoga instructors and Pilates instructors, dog walkers. I value those people. They're valuable like, and people like doing that work. So there's, I think that there's more to come in terms of what's next that we always like want to look backwards and we don't want to think about, hey, the chart is the path is uncharted and you know, we should just get on the ocean and we'll figure out what's over there.

[A]

What about transhumanism?

[B]

Okay, let's talk about. So superintelligence, I think is a manifestation of AI at scale, meaning that there's intelligence, features of intelligence that in isolation or in aggregation exceed human capacity.

[A]

It's just not general yet.

[B]

I don't know if there's a. I don't know if I subscribe to any of the definitions, but what do humans do in a world where the AI anticipates everything you're going to do next or knows everything you're going to think or has a sense of how to do things better than you do. I think we're going to be forced to adapt. So this idea of, like, humans living in their natural state should be back to their natural state. It's. It's such a weird thought because we live in buildings, you know, like, we don't live under a tree. Even when you pick berries off a tree and eat the berries from the tree, you're breaking nature. Like, there's an aspect of a continuum of, like, what is nature, what is the human, and what are we doing? So I don't love the term transhumanism, but I do like this idea that, like, this superintelligence capacity needs to be harnessed by humans. I think there's probably two things that happen. And the second one, I'm going to say, is very controversial. The first one I'll say is pretty well described, which is this kind of human machine interface. You know, Elon's got Neuralink, where they put the wires in the brain, but the wires. I saw a good presentation from Max Hodak at his company, Science Company Corporation, or whatever. You should have him on. He's great. But he worked. He started Neuralink. He was the old CEO at Neuralink. And he's got the system where they're putting, like, a digital device in your retina.

[A]

They put a screen in your eye.

[B]

Yeah. And it works. And so the screen, it's powered, it's solar. He's got this whole power system in it. It's incredible.

[A]

So when your eye is open, it's

[B]

powered up, it powers up, and then it releases an electrical signal that triggers the neurons on your. The inside of your retinal cells that then trigger your brain and it passes the signal and you can suddenly see. And it's a very thin, like paper thin kind of device that goes under your retina in your eyeball. It's an outpatient procedure to put it in. He's in clinical trials on this. It's incredible. So it's restoring blindness, but you can kind of think about these interfaces that aren't about sticking a wire into the brain, which I don't think is going to be where things end up, but I think it's likely going to end up a little bit more like. And people are going to view this as being extremely dystopian. So I'll give you the two versions of it. Some people would say Neo and the Matrix where you kind of connect the digital thing, but the other one is avatar, where they have that ponytail thing that they connect to. But there'll probably be some interface where the chip to brain interface is just a soft neurons. Like it's some sort of system that can connect with the brain without going into the brain. You don't need to go into the neural tissue. Theoretical. Now, I'm not super optimistic and I don't get excited about this. Let me be clear. I'm not like, oh my God, we all need to connect to like, we all need to be like the Matrix. So don't think about me as some dystopian crazy technocrat. But I think my point is someone will do it and then you'll be able to think, I want to fly a helicopter like Neo did in the Matrix. And you'll be able to fly a fucking helicopter. And you'll want to access information quickly using the super intelligence that exists in the silicon. So you want to solve a physics problem because you're trying to build something on the moon and you sort of access that information. You look up and you're like, okay, you have the answer you need. You're not looking at a screen to get the answer. And so you're able to kind of tap into and look. Do we all want to be connected all the time? I don't know. I don't know if that destroys humanity or is going to be an adaptation of humanity in an era when there's now a species that might be more intelligent than humanity in aggregate. I don't know. And so I'm not trying to be too deterministic about this stuff, but I think that that human machine interface outcome is very likely going to happen. And whether or not people want it or embrace it, you'll have to have the benefits. You'll have to go through an exercise where it's lightweight, easy to put on. Maybe it sits above your ear and it works. And it doesn't need to kind of like be plugged into your physical brain. Maybe it uses a transmission where we can connect it to your and you can start to think things and get information that you want and so on, and suddenly you become super intelligent and you have all of this capacity that you didn't have before. That's one path that we might walk. Another path that we might walk, which is extremely dystopian from most people's points of view, but may end up becoming a reality because of what we're seeing happening in China and other places, is transgenic humans where basically right now you can look at an embryo and I don't know if you've seen this controversial app where they'll sequence the DNA of your embryos. If you've got frozen embryos for ivf, right, which is a common procedure where you've got effectively an embryo that's frozen, it's not yet fertilized, but you can sequence the DNA and determine what genetic traits does that embryo have?

[A]

I'm a big investor in her site. Who is the most evidence based one of these?

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So the ones that have used the downs test plus the best geneticist on the planet to fill the gaps in. So you model the genome of mother and dad, then you take the sample from the embryo and between those they can triangulate with real accuracy what the embryo is. You have here's your 10 harvest or your 15 harvest or whatever and there's your dashboard. Totally. And we've got immune function, we've got iq, we've got externalizing behavior. And yeah, Johnny Anomaly and Herasite are the best at this. And I don't think it's dystopian at all. I think that crumbly genome. And if you say that selecting against negative traits is good, then it seems to me to be philosophically consistent to say that selecting four positive traits.

[B]

So everyone's got a line. The further I walk this conversation, the more you're gonna, more people are gonna, on the audience gonna say you crossed my line.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So the first is, should we even be looking at the DNA of embryos?

[A]

We already do.

[B]

Right?

[A]

We already do. Because the, and this was what, prenatal screening? Not only prenatal screening, but let's say anybody that's ever done ivf, even if you didn't know they screened, the doctor gets a microscope and has a look at the embryos and just eyeballs it.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

He goes, yeah, that one, that one looks like the roundest.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And we don't, we don't, I mean number, you don't want number seven. Number seven. We can't, we can't do number seven or it wouldn't even take. We know what it wouldn't take. It's not going to implant correctly. So he was already doing it. So I'm like, right, okay, you're just taking it from some guy. It's like an umpire in MLB that's just eyeballing it and eventually they're going to get removed and it's going to be robots.

[B]

Totally.

[A]

You go, okay, well I'm glad that the robot got it accurate 100% of the time.

[B]

100%. That is the next line. The next line would be sequencing the DNA and looking at the genome and looking at the genetics and saying, hey, I want blue eyes or brown eyes. And some people say that's dystopian. That's in the Black Mirror episode.

[A]

The eyes thing's got a bad rap when it comes to selection, Right?

[B]

That's right. Okay, fair enough. Tall or short? Smart. Not smart. Suddenly there's a line some people are like, well, you shouldn't be doing.

[A]

Blind, not blind.

[B]

Blind, not blind. The next line is what's going on controversially in China, where they're using gene editing.

[A]

Yeah. The enhancement stuff.

[B]

Enhance. So they'll take an existing human trait, a human allele, and so they'll basically take you from brown eye to blue eye, or they'll take you from dumb to smart. They're not creating a foreign gene. They're just making a tweak to your DNA to give you the trait that you could have randomly gotten in the embryo, but you just didn't.

[A]

Is that what the guy did with the twins that turned out to be triplets?

[B]

There was a conversation. There was a bu. I think that's the guy that got arrested or got in trouble.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

2019, I think.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know that there was a third one.

[B]

I didn't realize there was a third.

[A]

I'm pretty sure. Jarry, can you just Google. Oh, chatgpt. How many babies were born from the crispr editing in China? Was it two or three? Because I swear that there was a third one. So after all of that, I mean, I might eat humble pie here and have completely misremembered it, but you can

[B]

also edit yourself out.

[A]

I'll own my failures. I'll own my failures here. I've said worse things on the Internet, but yeah, I swear that not only did he do this thing and he couldn't believe it, and it's the first time that this has ever happened. And it's. So there was. There was two of them, and there was a fucking third one. I swear that there was a third one. Come on, Jared, prove me right here, brother.

[B]

This is like three babies. Well, there were three babies. A third gene edited baby was later confirmed through court documents.

[A]

Fucking yes. Well, I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm celebrating you're not a genius.

[B]

I'm celebrating the I'm right Pro gene editing babies.

[A]

And he edited the embryos using CRISPR Cas9 to make them resistant to HIV.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. So, so the, the HIV resistant allele, which is the genetic trait, is a known trait. So he just made a couple of changes, confirmed that nothing else was changed, took that forward. So should we give children or should we give embryos? These enhancements where we're not introducing new DNA, we're basically saying, hey, randomly you could have gotten this trait and you didn't. But now we're just going to make sure you get it and then stack this up. And then if you do that, how many traits are we willing to give to an embryo? Should I make every embryo superhuman? Should I make every embryo? Should I have a bunch of kids where I got one that's really good at sports, one that's really good at music, one that's really good at podcasting? I mean, you pick your poison well,

[A]

sometimes you can put it in all three into one person.

[B]

There you go. And the super. Super. Yeah.

[A]

And the British accent.

[B]

And the British accent.

[A]

I don't think that's genetic.

[B]

Yeah. Okay, so now. Okay, so. So that might be a line that many people are going to say, hey, I don't want to cross into that. And you could debate that philosophically. Why would you not want that? If you're willing to do the other things where, like, it's a spectrum, why are you going that far? And there's a lot of philosophical discourse around this. Now, the final one, the final one is transgenic. And this is where you put a gene or a trait into the human that it doesn't naturally have that the human would not have been born with. No matter how many sperm or how many egg combinations you put together, you would not have come up with this

[A]

gene, regardless of who the parents were.

[B]

Correct. For example, being able to see infrared.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Okay. And so this is where you make X Men. Right. And the capacity to do this historically was like, no way impossible. But now in many of these, there arguably could be the capacity to do this. And I'm not arguing for it. I'm just saying that it's likely that this is going to be a limit that's going to get tested at some point here in the near future where we are going to have a conversation about how do humans keep up in an era in a world of superintelligence? And are there certain traits like that that can enable us to either have a better performance against the superintelligence, either super intelligent humans, or a relationship with the superintelligence via some mechanism that Allows us to connect with the superintelligence or control it better or what have you, or all the digital AI that's out there, or other tools or techniques that. Or sorry, other phenotypes, physical characteristics that might allow us to better survive on Mars.

[A]

To have great conversation. What was the guy's name? It wasn't Christopher Mason. That was the guy that was talking about space. Who was the dude that I did the episode with last week that we put out? Scott somebody. The guy about Mars. I had this fucking phenomenal.

[B]

Scott Solomon.

[A]

Yeah, Scott Solomon, unbelievable evolutionary biologist who's applied evolutionary biology thinking to what we're gonna need to do to be able to survive on Mars. Radiation. What happens to bone density? But if you've got the bone density loss, how do women give birth? You're gonna have to do every child by Caesarean C section. But over time, if you have C section, you get narrower hips, you get bigger baby heads. You almost reverse evolution of where we got through. Like just end where it needs to be underground. Cause if we're underground in Mars, then it means that we're going to be protected naturally by the terrain from the radiation. But if you're underground, what happens to melanin in the skin and what happens to vitamin D levels and if you've got artificial light and what happens to. What's the psychological profile of these people is that I'm like sat there just a virtual episode and my fucking mind was, this is a sleeper episode. It was so fucking good. Such a sleeper episode. But yeah, can we engineer? It was a.

[B]

And so remember like transgenics we use in plants, you use the word trans, dude.

[A]

Put the word trans at the start of anything after the six years and it's gonna struggle. Same as nucle.

[B]

Yeah, well, I don't want to say GMO people, because that's a worse name. Yeah, like if I say the GMO person because I used to work in Monsanto, so you'll like that gives me my double evil scientist credibility. But there's likely going to be a situation where they're going to discover this. Because what we're now discovering a lot of like the human biology, like we talked about all the genes that are on or off, how do they all work? How do all those proteins work together? I described 80 years of 10 billion proteins interacting in a place the size of Manhattan, 500 story tall, bumping into each other, doing stuff. That's how we do stuff in a cell for one second. So there's a regulatory network where all these Proteins are doing stuff in a way that we can't model, we don't understand today.

[A]

Isn't it mad that that just doesn't switch off one day of all of the human. Yeah, it just 404s and you sort of blue screen of death yourself for a bit.

[B]

Cold temperatures will do that. That's why we can freeze biological tissue and then boot it back up because it'll just stops all that. Because it's actually the thermodynamics, it's the, the kinetic energy of the proteins, it's random. The proteins are just bouncing around in the cell and they randomly will bump into stuff and do stuff. It's amazing to think about. Like. Like there's no way that you could think that, that you can realize that and not think that the universe is a simulation. You know, it's just like, it's. It's literally just chaotic ensembles of molecules that randomly do these incredible things that we look at. And we're like, I can move my finger. It's like, it's the craziest shit.

[A]

Well, it's the same as when you realize that most of matter is empty space. But if I do this exactly, my hand doesn't pass through the table. Fucking awesome, right?

[B]

And the fact that it's all quantum anyway, which means that it could tunnel through anything at any point in time.

[A]

I'm still waiting for that to happen.

[B]

Well, here's another fucked up thing to think about. You've heard of like quantum entanglement. So you know, you can entangle two particles and move them apart, change the state of one and the other one will change instantaneously on the other side of the universe. Theoretically, there's reasons to believe that it might be the case that every particle of a particular type is entangled with every other particle. And I'll just let that settle for a second because if that were true, then you could, theoretically, every particle, every time any particle changes anywhere in the universe, it's affecting every other particle in the universe.

[A]

It's kind of like a panpsychism, but for connectivity, like a membrane that everybody is a part of.

[B]

Or it might be the case that progression in the universe is actually like a. Think about a quantum state that's changing and then space and time are a manifestation of that change.

[A]

That's why entropy exists. That's why there is a progression in one direction.

[B]

And it might just be that, you know, because space and time are defined by the relationship between particles. And it may be the case that if all the particles are Entangled that there's just this one thing that just changes and then all of space and time is a feature.

[A]

It's like a universal clock.

[B]

Yeah. It's a whole other way of thinking about our place in the universe. How do we get here?

[A]

We were talking about where's your line?

[B]

Yeah, okay.

[A]

Is there a line that you have from GMO people to IVF shouldn't happen. Do you have an ethical line for that?

[B]

Yeah, I definitely think that we can be very defined around the crispr stuff where we can change a gene to make someone healthier or enhanced. And I actually, I don't have a philosophical disagreement with giving someone the ability to not just like turn off disease, but to say, hey, I want this person to have the trait that they didn't randomly get from me or like inheritance, I think that's fine.

[A]

How do you stop people? I mean, no problem.

[B]

But by the way, I'll say there's a whole bunch of therapeutic treatments that we're doing now that are doing what I described in that final stage with an adult human, like Follistatin stuff. Right.

[A]

I was in Prospera with the guys when Brian Johnson got that done.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah. Whatever it is.

[B]

But that is like nursery school, go to like university, PhD level. And what we're learning about all the interaction between all the proteins is we could come up with a set of genes that if I put them into you, they will make you a hundred times smarter. Would you get that shot? I would. Right.

[A]

I'm choosing. For me, I think what becomes interesting is when parents are choosing for their kids.

[B]

I think that's right. I think that's the right philosophical framing.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that. Look, if you've got this technology and it's available to be elected in the same way as we don't let people get tattoos before they're 18 or whatever, then. All right, so for me currently, Johnny from herasite, who again, I can't fucking shout out enough, like he's so good at communicating this stuff and herasite rules that line up to embryo selection. So I'm happy, I see no philosophical issue with choosing from the harvest that You've already done. IVF's already been and gone. Perhaps that's A bit of anchoring bias for me that I might have thought twice about what IVF meant had I been born 100 years ago. But it's here and I can't go back. I can't cognitively take myself out of it. I think up to the point where here's your 15, pick from your 15. We're already eyeballing it. That seems to compel me in the direction that this is already being done. When it gets to, we're gonna choose from the genes that you could have had. Then when it gets to, we're gonna change them, and then when it gets to, we're gonna create them that I'm as yet morally unconvinced. So you can pick, but you can't change yet.

[B]

And I think that's probably where we are today. And maybe you're a little more progressive than most people, I would say. I think most people would still object to that. I think the Overton window changes when if the solution I offered you, where I give you a shot that puts a plasmid, which is a gene in your body or integrates that plasmid into your cells, because I do think that's ultimately where that age reversal stuff is going to come from. I think we're going to end up putting a series of genes in plasmids into our body. They're going to go into our cells and they're going to self regulate those cells to make them live forever. When we end up doing that as a mainstay and everyone's getting that shot and everyone's living forever and that becomes kind of a thing that everyone's like, yeah, of course we're boosting our lifespan with these genes. Like, this totally makes sense. That's when people say, well, if we're doing it to ourselves and we're all doing it, why don't we just do it to every embryo? And that's when people will start to. And that's probably many decades from now, but I think that's where you can start to think about how the Overton window shifts, at what point when it becomes less about this. Like that is crazy because if everyone's doing it as an adult and it's totally safe and normal and it extends

[A]

lifespan, then bring it back down to doing it for the children. Yeah, I get the sense that any ickiness that people have around embryo selection specifically for positive traits, everybody's already pretty much on board with embryo selection against negative traits. Right. Huntington, et cetera, the Ashkenazi community, are Already very deep in this because of their genetic profile. I think very quickly all of the people who either are blank slatists deny behavioral genetics, don't think heritability's a thing, think that embryo selection for IQ is just rebranded eugenics. All of those people, typically quite well educated, probably quite liberal and left leaning, they care about the outcomes that their kids get. And if these slightly more right of center fucking hicks that have managed to cobble 15 grand together to get their IVF done and then a little bit more to get somebody else to do their profiling, if their kids are outstripping theirs in school and in sports because well, their immune function was the best of the ones that were available and there's lowered rates of autism, or there's lowered rates of ADD, or there's lower rates of depression, they've got a happier, more flourishing life. I think very quickly parents are going to look at it and go, well, why did I read all of those parenting books? Why did I work so hard to try and give my kids the best future that I could? And I'm now leaving behind? Jeffrey Miller said this fucking great quote. It's like every single parenting book on the planet could be replaced with the power of one behavioral genetics book that your kids are made up of the raw materials of the person that you make them with. That is infinitely, not infinitely. Sorry, that would be incorrect. 50% of everything you are on average is genetically inherited, including your psychological profile. And for physical traits, significantly more like very unlikely. You're gonna be born black with two white parents. Therefore, if you just understand the behavioral genetics of the situation, I think that lots of people are gonna get on board.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

And as soon as it becomes a competitive game, this race to the top, not race to the bottom is gonna happen and people are gonna go, well now the thing that's interesting I think's cool two wrinkles that I spoke to Jonny about the last time we sat down. First one is basically buy as remorse from parents this sense that because I was so consciously involved in the decision to choose this child, if any negative outcomes occur because of that kid, I think that there's the potential for parents to blame themselves or for the kid to blame their parents if they were to find out. And the second one that I think is kind of interesting is parents are likely to regress or converge on a small bucket of traits that they think would be optimal to give their kid. But Spencer Greenberg did this fantastic study, huge, big study. IQ is not. It is moderately negatively correlated with life satisfaction, higher iq, lower life satisfaction. And you have to assume people with higher IQs are less likely to go to jail, less likely to be addicted, less likely to be homeless, more likely to get married, more likely to complete a high powered degree. Okay? So all of those things would increase life satisfaction. So the impact of IQ on life satisfaction is so negative that it offsets the objective life improvements that you get from being smarter. So which parent, if you look at this dashboard, all of the things being equal, is not going to choose the smarter kid.

[B]

Now, if you had the option to boost the kid's IQ by 200. Because the world is different with super intelligence. So if you have digital superintelligence in the world, it's a very different world than we live in today. It's not just competing with each other. It's about finding a place in the world with the superintelligence. And we're all going back and forth to Mars and traveling the universe and figuring out quantum shifts in the universe. And all the things that I think are pioneering in the next century. That becomes a different and more important framing at that point, because you don't want to end up being one of the people or you don't want your kids to be disadvantaged in a world where there's this pervasive superintelligence that everyone's using and accessing and turning on and turning off as they need it to do the things they want to do in the world. And that's the right way to think about superintelligence. It's not controlling us, it's how do we use it. And you have to have a degree of control over knowing where do you want to go with it and what do you want to do with it. And I think that's why there's this idea that maybe people start to think more about how do we adapt in a world of superintelligence as a species, what is our role? Because there's a philosophical argument to be made that humans are dying down, making way for the AI.

[A]

Yeah, we're just bootloaders, flashy bootloaders for the silicon.

[B]

And I don't like that idea.

[A]

Oh, so you want to compete?

[B]

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

[A]

We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement. You feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside of their body. Which is why I partnered with function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart, health, metabolic markers, inflammation, thyroid nutrients, liver and kidney function. It even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test about 20 markers, and function runs over 160. And this isn't just numbers dumped into your inbox. Every result is reviewed by clinicians, abnormal markers get flagged, and you get get clear explanations and a personalized protocol with actionable next steps so you can actually do something about what you learn. Best of all, you test twice a year. And everything lives in a simple dashboard. You can just track trends over time, make sure that you're moving in the right direction. Normally, this level of testing would cost thousands through private clinics. With function, it is $365 a year. That's $1 a day to know what's actually happening inside of your body. And right now, you can get $25 off bringing it down to 340. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that additional $25 by going to the link in the description below. By heading to functionhealth.com ModernWisdom and using the code ModernWisdom at checkout, that's functionhealth.com ModernWisdom ModernWisdom at checkout. What are you doing with plants? I've heard that you're spending a lot of time working with seeds.

[B]

Yeah, I run a company, my day job, which most people that I talk to recognize me from my. This is like a pill. Is that what this is?

[A]

No. Toothpicks. So we managed to find a company that embed flavor and supplements into the wood of toothpicks. So try, try, try.

[B]

What's this? Maybe I'll take it with me and try it later.

[A]

But just take that one, put it in your pocket.

[B]

It's really cool. Just a wait. What is the nootropic?

[A]

So cognizant, there's a 15 milligram dose of cognizant in there.

[B]

In one toothpaste?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, my brother would do this here. Sorry. Holy shit. Yeah, in 15 minutes.

[A]

And there's a little like 15 milligrams of caffeine, 50 milligrams of.

[B]

He'll try anything. He's like my guinea pig.

[A]

We're fucking about with every delivery mechanism on the planet for these at the moment. So obviously Zins went absolutely crazy over the last couple of years.

[B]

Is that your nicotine?

[A]

No. So this is just the same again. It's more cognizant cytokoline, same thing that you get in. Similar to the choline that you get in eggs. And we just decided that we would go for pouches, the same as Zen. So degenerate delivery mechanism, but much better for you.

[B]

So awesome.

[A]

That's what I'm playing with at the moment.

[B]

Is it doing well?

[A]

It's fucking crushing. Yeah. We just raised for Nutonic. We just raised on 60 mil. We're in going into H E B. We're in Vitamin Shop, GNC, Sainsbury's, Morrison's Daily around the UK. We're just launching in Australia. And then we've got these RTDs. It's a smarter energy drink. The last time that we sat down at south by, we were talking about business and you were talking about sort of how people are launching and stuff like that.

[B]

Cause that was like, my thing was like, I think everyone, you know, we launched a tequila brand for all in, which is great, but, you know, it's tequila. But I think that's the whole thing is like, you can own your own brand, you can own your own equity.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Well, look, I'm very much a lifestyle maxi, not a profit maxi, but given that this didn't exist, it's cool to have the ability and the contacts and the time and the resources to be able to make something that you want.

[B]

Yeah, it's awesome.

[A]

This podcast, the podcast, the reason modern wisdom exists is because there was nobody having. Having a conversation that was basically less retarded than comedy, but more retarded than Tim Ferriss. And it sort of sat in this nice middle ground. I really wanted to speak to people a lot about psychology, a lot about human nature, and it wasn't there. So I decided to do it. And then a thousand episodes later, we're here. Honestly, the best. You must have found this the best businesses to get into, if you can. I'm sure that when you get to your level that it's difficult to always design something for yourself, but the best businesses to get into is designing something that's a gap in the market that you yourself would use, especially when you're at the sort of level that I'm at. So, yeah, anyway, you are obviously a burgeoning farmer, hoeing the ground, milling the tilling the fields.

[B]

I do have a kitchen garden, although it does need to get updated. So my day job is running a company called Ohalo. And what we do at Ohalo is we turn off meiosis in plants. Okay, what does that mean?

[A]

That's very sexy.

[B]

Yeah, that's it. So that's the pitch I give at the bar. And, you know, I usually get the blank stare and then I. So, yeah. So all the cells in our body, we talked about this earlier, are made through a process called mitosis, which copies over the whole all the DNA in your cell. Your DNA is actually packaged up into chromosomes, and there's two sets of chromosomes side by side in your cell. So those two sets of chromosomes get copied over every time you make a new cell in your body, except for sperm and eggs. So when you make sperm or eggs, you only copy one chromosome, one set of chromosomes. And it's not just a selection of one of the sets. What happens is the two sets of chromosomes fuse and they fuse at random places. So you get a random half of one chromosome, a random half of the other chromosome. And that's why every sperm which has just one set of chromosomes is genetically different. Every one is unique, and every egg in a female is unique. They're all genetically different because that fusion event, which is called meiosis, fuses the two chromosomes down to one. And then a sperm and an egg come together and you end up back with two, and that's the new offspring. And every offspring looks a little bit different because every sperm is different, every egg is different. That's why kids all look different, even though they come from the same two parents. So they get half the genes from the mother, half the genes from the father, and it's a random half from the mother, random half from the father. And meiosis drives that evolutionary process. That random selection is what is evolution. It's the source of evolution by turning off. And this is fundamentally a challenge for farming, number one, because most crops people don't realize this. You can't plant seeds. When farmers plant seed in the ground, the reason they use seed is because they're going to get the same genetics in the field. You want all the corn to grow at the same time so you can harvest it all at the same time. It's all going to look the same. You can sell it all to the same person, and it's the same crop. You don't want to harvest a bunch of tomatoes where some are green, some are yellow, some are red. They're all different sizes. How are you going to market that? That's not marketable. So the seed industry came about about 100 years ago when this guy figured out that you could actually inbreed plants. And when you inbreed a plant. So a plant has both male and female parts. Unlike animals, most plants will make sperm and egg. You can pollinate itself. And if you do that for seven generations, both chromosomes end up identical. Because, remember, the two chromosomes have the same genes. But if the genes are different, you have different alleles. And if the genes are the same, it's called homozygous, or the same alleles. So if both chromosomes end up being identical and you make sperm, it doesn't matter where the fusion happens. Every sperm will look the same because they're the exact same two chromosomes, same with egg. So inbreeding is what was developed about 100 years ago where they inbred plants. Seven generations took the inbreds, crossed them, and now every seed is identical. That's how they make identical seed in corn, in tomato, in cotton, in canola, in sorghum. And farmers went to a seed company, and they started buying seed for the first time ever. And they put that seed in the ground and they could grow a crop. And every year, the other thing it does is it allows you to improve the yield every year, because the plant breeder would try and make the two chromosomes from the two backgrounds different. The more different they are, the more complementary they are. The more different genes you're putting in that plant, the higher the yield, the faster the plant grows. Plants are really interesting because they're kind of like looking for tools in a tool belt. Like, how many tools do I have? How many different genes do I have that I can use any second of any day to keep growing? Humans and animals, we just grow, like, two arms, five fingers, two eyes, two legs, and we're done growing. And then our job is to go out and find food and survive. Plants, their job is to keep growing. They grow roots, they grow branches, they grow leaves. The sun's over there. I'm going to grow a branch towards the sun. I'm going to. To make more leaves. Oh, the water's down there. I'm going to grow a root down there. And they just keep growing and growing, growing until they die. So plants are always Looking for more genes in the toolbox that they can use to grow. So by turning off meiosis, we can take plants that don't have seed today, put two of them together, and all the seed will now be the same, because every sperm is the same, every egg is the same, because by turning off meiosis, both chromosomes go into the sperm, both chromosomes go into the egg, and now the offspring has four chromosomes instead of two. That might sound crazy, but many, many plants have four chromosome versions. It's called polyploidy, polyploid, many versions of the chromosome, and some, like modern wheat is hexaploid, it has six chromosomes. Modern strawberry is octoploid, it has eight chromosomes. Modern potato is tetraploid, it has four chromosomes. So many modern kind of crops have multiple copies of the chromosome, and you can't make seed in those crops. And so you end up taking the plant, chopping it up and replanting it. And that's what they do. So by making seed, it actually saves farmers the majority of their expense, which they have to spend money chopping up all the old plants, putting them back in the ground. And it allows us to make better plants every generation, because we can make better selections on the ones that are complementary to each other. Increasing the genetic diversity in the crop, increasing disease resilience, drought resistance, climate change, adaptation, all the things that drive yield and make the farmers more profitable, make more food per acre, all these sorts of things. And then every year, instead of having, like in the US we're farming Russet Burbank. We've been farming Russet Burbank for 150 years. We can now bring new potatoes to market every year that are getting better and healthier, more nutritious, more adapted to climate change, making the farmer more money. And so you can kind of. And the farmer, instead of using 5,000 pounds of chopped up potatoes and like Matt Damon did, and putting them in the ground, he can use 10 grams of seed that fits in the palm of your hand.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

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

[A]

Can you make it so that you need less fertilizer?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So nitrogen utilization is a kind of good phenotype to think about. So you can kind of, you know, because you gotta apply nitrogen to grow most crops. And then there's also work now on, which we don't do today, but there's some work that's being done. Some crops like soybeans and legumes, they actually can suck nitrogen out of the atmosphere and you don't need fertilizer. And it actually re fertilizes the soil from the air. And so there's ways to kind of integrate that into crops that don't have that. So there's a whole bunch of that sort of technology that's going on as well.

[A]

Wow, that is cool. What's happening with this California flight stuff? Because I was with Palmer over Christmas and a bunch of other guys from that side and I didn't know about it. I knew that it was going to be brought in before the end of the year. It's this sort of sticky thing that seems to be following people around, but it's also going to get worse over time. It seems like there's more and more rumblings and that stuff's going to keep on. This feels like the sort of core engine of California's prosperity since the 1800s is now unraveling.

[B]

Yeah, I'm in a bunch of group chats. I talk to a lot of people. I would say probably a third of people I talked to have already left. You're asking about people leaving? Right. And I would say, like a survey we did informally in a group group, which has been published, talked about is close to 87% of people are going to leave. These are the core leaders in tech. And the other thing is, I talk to a lot of emerging tech CEOs of startups that are doing really well, that are growing and they're all looking to leave. Like, there was one company I was talking to, they're going to move up to Northern California from Southern, and they're like, now I'm going to move to Nevada. And that's because they're worried about what's next. So California is in this fundamental, like, sinkhole right now. Now it goes back to my point about people making promises in order to get elected. Politicians promise people something that they don't have today. That's how you get elected. You don't get elected by saying, I'm going to take stuff away from you. The government's going to do less for you. Show me one politician in the last hundred years has been elected saying that. So in order and there's a fundamental kind of like moment, this come to Jesus moment. Can you keep doing these promises? Can you even meet the promises you've already made? And in California? The answer is no. California set up a system where we created the highest tax rate in the country because of all the success in Silicon Valley, all the income that's being generated, all the success and capital gains and whatnot, and use that to fund a bunch of nonsense, the bullet train to nowhere. Friggin like $30 billion in nothing like the.

[A]

How much is it?

[B]

30 billion. And they've had six CEOs by the way, that have all been fired or the one guy just got arrested. It's insane. There's. It was just published that this, this homeless program, $220 million was spent on it. Six homeless people got themselves out of the cycle of poverty that they were in. You go down the list.

[A]

What was it? Sorry, just. What was that thing about the affordable Internet bill?

[B]

Rural broadband.

[A]

That was it. And for the same amount of money that was spent, I think every American citizen could have got starlink.

[B]

Yeah, and that one, that's a federal problem. I don't.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

But you're gonna get me very emotional.

[A]

I've been very like, you seem like an emotional guy.

[B]

I've been very like unemotional during our talk about science in the future. And then this is the opposite, okay? This is the bullshit, the opposite that happens when social systems become manifest, like rotten. It's a system where people lie to each other in order to keep themselves in power, in order to keep their money flowing, in order to keep this nonsense up and running. People lie to themselves, they lie to their constituents, and the democracy starts to become like, what's the point? Like, does this even work? California in particular, we made a bunch of changes to the pension system. So we have public pensions for public employees in California. And over the past 12 to 15 years, those changes have resulted in a bunch of guarantees to people on their future retirement benefits that the state simply cannot afford to meet. The estimate currently is that there's 600 billion to a trillion dollars in the whole. Okay, the state then has a question. How are we going to like pay for all these people? All the stuff that we promised them, and that's a big part of. And then there's also all the near term stuff like health care costs. Hey, we promised them health care, we promised our union workers health care. We've got to figure out a way to fund the healthcare because the promises were made. But the Promises were never funded. The promises were never possible to be funded. And when suddenly it all comes to roost and everyone's like, well, how are we going to make the payments now? How are we going to fill the hole? That's the situation California's in. California has such a heaping liability problem that it's. Now you're seeing all the rats jumping off the ship or they're burning the ship or the people are leaving the ship. I don't know what the right analogy to use is, but that's the chaos that's ensuing in California in this very moment. And so we talk a lot about the billionaire tax. The billionaire tax came about because of one union, one guy, one union called seiu. Uhw, you who set up a scheme where they would tax you 5% of your net worth if your net worth is over a billion dollars, which everyone in this audience is like, who cares? Screw the billionaires. But what it does is it gives the state assembly, the legislature, the ability to, in the future, change the threshold and the amount. So theoretically, you could take the 5% on billionaires one time and make it 1% on billionaires every year.

[A]

Wasn't this the case with the original income tax?

[B]

1930, it was 1%.

[A]

Tell people the story of how the original income tax, I mean, the original

[B]

income tax was pitched because we did not have an income tax in the United States. And that was again, why this country was founded. It was set up as we. No taxation without representation. There was a huge tax scheme to fund all of the, you know, nonsense that was going on in England.

[A]

Careful now.

[B]

I mean, at the time, very different not to speak to the people, but the. Let's call it the aristocracy. And you know what we call the elites today. And by the way, I think about the term the elites, it's sort of like that Spider man meme where, like, everyone's, you're the elite. You're the elite. You're the elite. Like the tech guy's the elite. Like, that's kind of the moment we're in right now. Like, the tech guys are the elites. But like the tech guys last year were telling they were calling out the NGOs as the elites. And then the, you know, it's just like everyone's an elite.

[A]

Your privilege is more privileged than my privilege.

[B]

Yeah. This is all rooted in Marxist philosophies, by the way. It's all this like, oppressor, oppressed stuff. Like, like again. But all of those philosophies fundamentally distinguish people's agency. Like this is so critical for people to understand. When you give people a bunch of stuff or you create a governmental system or economic system that says you do X, you get Y. You're a slave to that system. You are now oppressed. No matter what anyone tells you, you are not getting risen up and you're not. And pulling other people down doesn't solve any of your problems. Another conversation for another day. But in California, so we started out as a one. So the way they started the income tax in the United States was they're like, hey, we'll promise 1% on incomes over whatever it was at the time. I think $10,000 a year. You could probably look it up. And that was it. And then over time, it's like, wait, we had to fund a war and now we're gonna expand the highway system.

[A]

So the original income tax was 1%,

[B]

1% on high net worth people, on high earning people. And that's it.

[A]

Jared, chad this and find out how the income tax progressed over time. I wanna see this.

[B]

Right? And you can look at this. And so then it became like, suddenly today everyone pays in income tax tax. In California, I pay 53% income tax. And you know, most people pay an income tax that's. And now they're like creating a whole new tax regime. And I want to talk about this importantly, what they're trying to do in California. Here you go. It was a temporary wartime tax. And you know, again, leading up to this, we had tariffs to fund the government. The government was small. Like the government wasn't meant to be. This big system that took care of everyone and did all this stuff keep going coming out of World War II. And here's the income tax started out as 1% on income over $3,000 a year. Year. Okay. Yep. And then there was like a progression. They added a 7% top rate later. And then you can kind of see here when the thing kind of expanded.

[A]

Oh, wow. 1944 to 1945, in World War II, the top rate was 94%.

[B]

Yeah, they took everyone's money to fund the war. But that set a precedent. Because what happened at that point is after they set the precedent and then we had this kind of FDR kind of New Deal expansionism. All the stuff that happened Post World War II in the United States was like, holy crap, we can get the government to do big stuff. Let's do big stuff to make our lives better. That you can see that that sound principle. Like, it makes sense. It sounds good in principle. But this is where it Leads us to today because every year, once you start thinking about the government as solving your problems and doing things for you, that becomes something that only escalates up. It never goes down.

[A]

Think about if 51% can vote themselves, what the 49.

[B]

So this is the next thing that happened. So now. So that's income. Income. Let's say you've paid your income tax and you own a bunch of stuff that's now your private property. You own this stuff, that's yours. So now comes along the government or this new bill, the Billionaire Tax act in California. And for the first time ever in the United States, we're trying to create a wealth tax. It doesn't matter that it's billionaires and it doesn't matter that it's one time or 5%. What you're saying is that the stuff that you've already paid taxes on, that you now own, that's in your backyard, all your iron ore that you've stored in the backyard?

[A]

Correct. Get off of it.

[B]

Yeah. Or your cool, you know, podcast studio. You own these things, you've paid taxes, you've earned your money and you bought the stuff. But now the government can come in and say, you know what? We want that lamp, we want half your iron ore. We're gonna take all your private property from your iron ore. They're gonna get all your private property. That's what a wealth tax does, is it? Taxes people on post tax earnings. It takes away private property. If you give the government the ability to do that on even 1% of net worth for billionaires, the next step is 5% of the billionaires or maybe 2% of millionaires, and then maybe it's 3% on people making that have a net worth of a hundred grand a year. And by the way, to figure out how much you have, what your assets are, you gotta send me a list every year of everything you own. So now the government gets to look into your house, not just see what's in your bank account, what stocks you own, but what cars do you own? What's the value of those cars? How much is that artwork worth? What's everything here worth? Private property rights go out the window when you institute a wealth tax. Because now the government has the right to assess all your value and to take anything they want from you based on a vote where a bunch of people raise their hand and say, we'll increase the tax rate to this 5%, 2%, 10%, whatever it is, and here's the threshold and we'll take it every year. And when you do that, it eventually leads to 51% of people voting to take everything from 49%. That's the worst case. That's the end state of this is it eats itself and that's socialism. And so I think that a wealth tax, and look, it's not gonna affect me, this California tax. So don't think that I'm trying to speak my book or whatever the comments or bullshits are. I think this is a fundamental principled issue that by degrading private property rights, we are setting a precedent in the United States that is the foundation of why the United States was set up in the first place, which is for all of us that came to this country to get away from tyrannical governments outside the United States, that our shit and controlled everything and told us what to do all the time. And we came here and we get to have private property. Sure, I'll pay my tax. Here's my 53%. Thank you very much, government for all the great stuff you do, for all the services you provide. But like now fuck off and leave me alone. And that's not the case anymore. When this passes, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, all these national politicians, aoc, Elizabeth Warren, they're all saying we need to have a national wealth tax now. So it's not just in California. This is going to be the issue between 2026 and 2028. The elites are the billionaires and the tech people, they're coming after them. And the manifestation of that is to create this wealth tax. And that gives the government the system by which private property rights are gone. And the United States is a very questionable future at that point. That's the thing I worry about the most. And I juxtapose that with my optimism about the future and this amazing ship. I mean, think about it. This amazing ship that's happening in the world world. We're going to have free fucking energy. We're going to live forever. We're going to have all of this insane stuff that we never imagined. Abundance and resources that we could never contemplate. Happiness, spending time with family, working less hours, robots that build shit for us. Everything is going to get better. Everything is getting better. Everything is getting more amazing. And then we're like, let's fuck ourselves. Like, why not? Because we'll just fuck ourselves. That's that. And you know, this is this principle of like, I don't like using the term good versus evil, but it's like, are you thinking about the future optimistically or pessimistically? If you're thinking about the future as these are control system, this is, these, these tech guys are crazy, this is dystopian, blah, blah, blah. You know, the number one most unfavorable thing in the United States right now, according to a recent poll, is AI more unfavorable than Donald Trump, more unfavorable than everything. It's the most unfavorable thing because it is this narrative that everyone's been instituted in their minds that, like, this is the thing that destroys us, yada, yada. And that's the choice we have, that's the choice we have right now is do we want to walk this path of abundance or do we want to lock ourselves up? And I will say the counterbalancing force, and people won't like hearing this, but the counterbalancing force in the world will be a place like China, because if the United States walks this path, other countries will not walk this path.

[A]

And it will glean the benefits therein.

[B]

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

[A]

look, I, I ardent.

[B]

Yeah, there, there's some, there's something. Anyway, I, I don't want to be too conspiratorial because that discredits a lot of this shit.

[A]

But yeah, I think that you could look at the conspiratorial angle, but just straight incentives for. I want to be seen to be standing up for the little person. When we saw how far that pushed a lot of social movements over the last six, seven years, and that got people to do some pretty insane things that I think in retrospect, a lot of them regret. And that was, I am here for the righteous. This is dangerous. This is too much. This is xenophobic, misogynistic, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, unedical, unethical, unmedical. There's a big list of things. And because everybody is their opinions, not their deeds. Right? The difference between our opinions and our deeds has never been greater. You're able to say good whilst doing bad. This was Elon's thing. I remember four or five years ago, he was pulled up about what he was doing with Tesla and about his presentation for Things. He says, what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. There are many people out there who are doing bad whilst appearing good and I don't care to be one of them.

[B]

That's right. And the people that are trying to lead on this have three homes. You know, it's very easy to pull the ladder up.

[A]

Would they not think, would they not be looking at themselves? Oh, I suppose that at least at the moment, when they're pointing at the billionaires that are above right, they're in this sort of interesting middle ground, which is wealthy enough to be wealthy, but not so wealthy as they have abundance.

[B]

They have abundance. You know, if you go to Africa and you go visit farmers, you think those guys are complaining about using GMO seed and farming if it's going to double their income, Their lives change. You know, there's all these stories about how technologies, nuclear energy, dropping the cost of energy, making it proliferant in India been a game changer. Like these technologies that we shun in the west are luxury beliefs for us to shun them. We have these ideas that we can just shun stuff because we are already well enough off. That's what happened in Germany. And Bernie Sanders has three homes, so it's easy for him to tell people, hey, the average person has an apartment. We should go down this path. That fundamentally, in every record of history that we've tried to go down this path has fucked everyone up. It is the worst idea that humans have ever come up with and they keep trying to repeat it. You can only look at Argentina, which has like gotten out of the shit like yesterday, to see how bad of a problem this leads to. Socialism is the worst idea ever.

[A]

Why did Mamdani get into New York then?

[B]

People want more. They're not. People are left behind. Look, this is so important, I think, I think to recap, we promised people that if they went to college, you would get a good career and you could buy a home. And that turned out to not be true. That was a lie. The way we promised it to them and the way we gave everyone access to college is through federal education grants, loans. The federal student loan program didn't have a market check. The federal government, as long as you were an accredited university, you could run Trump University, Phoenix University, ucla, Harvard, mit. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what the tuition is $60,000 and it doesn't matter what the degree is. You could get a degree in basket weaving or a degree in computer science.

[A]

The government.

[B]

The government will loan you the hyanor. Right? Iron ore. The background for this should be like a Minecraft thing. Yeah, but the government will loan you money to go to that college. And so the government basically fueled increases in tuition because why would all these colleges suddenly go from costing 10 grand a year to 60 grand a year? It's because they could just charge more. And there was no one to say no because the government just funded the loans every year. And the students are like, I got a student loan. I'm good to go. Like, no one's doing the math on like, can I afford to pay 60, $240,000?

[A]

Is it true that you can't default on it as well in the US

[B]

and you cannot default on it? And so that was the setup. That's how it got passed in Congress, where the government spends trillions of dollars underwriting student loans. So there's no underwriting process. Any college, any degree, any individual, any price, those four things, you could be a bad student. I shouldn't underwrite your loan. You could get a shitty degree. I shouldn't underwrite your loan. You go to a shitty school. I'm not underwriting your loan. And if it costs a lot, I'm not underwriting your loan. That's what would normally happen. And that didn't happen.

[A]

Happen as a result, if you privatized

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah, just ask Chad. What is the chart explaining government intervention compared with the price of different goods and services over the last few years? It's an image.

[B]

This tells you everything you need to know. This is why everything got worse when moving to New York suddenly cost $6,000 of rent. You couldn't get a job. Food was $18 for a frigging sandwich. A lot of this was rooted in this problem, which is the government got too big. So the solution is, I need someone to fix that for me. And here's a guy who's coming along saying he's going to make everything free. The groceries are going to be free. So all the stuff on the Red. Everything above on the top section. These are things that the government fundamentally has a large role in paying for in the economy. So government dollars are flowing into the cost of things. So the people selling those things can basically charge more. And they know they can charge more because the government can just fund it.

[A]

It.

[B]

And the government's an endless pool of money printing. So it just keeps printing, and eventually they're like, hey, let's raise taxes or get the money to pay for this stuff once they realize. But, you know, all of these things are services that the government's gotten involved in. College education, health care through Medicare and Medicaid, because there's no negotiation on these programs. Everything below is where the government doesn't have a role. The cost of a car, the cost of clothing, the cost of television, the cost of Internet, the cost of software. These are all private industries where the government is not funding the purchase of these things for the consumer in some way or distorting the market in some way. So, you know.

[A]

You know who I first showed this chart to? Bernie Sanders.

[B]

What did he say? Did you have him on this?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, you did?

[A]

Last year? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

I should watch that. It was.

[A]

It was interesting. Yeah.

[B]

What did he say to this?

[A]

In fact, Jared, let's see if we can pull it up. We should react to that.

[B]

And if you. If you look at. I mean, what's frustrating to me is you can read textbooks, you can go on the Internet, you can watch YouTube, and you can see exactly what happens with socialism and socialist policies around the world. When the government runs a grocery store, when the government decides to, you know, offer everyone healthcare, it's great. In principle, I would love for that to work. I would love for everyone to have healthcare. I'm not opposed to that idea. But if you're gonna have, like, a government with no accountability and there's no one there that has any skin in the game, be responsible for giving me my healthcare. I know it's gonna get fucked up. And I've seen that happen time and time again around the world. It's just not the right system. And I think that there's much for us to kind of learn from, like, why these things haven't worked around the world. And it's like. What frustrates me is people are ignorant. They put their blinders on, they don't wanna see it, and they just. I saw an interview with a guy during the protest in LA when the guy went on camera and he's like, you know, what are you here for? And he's like, I'm here for socialism. We need socialism in America. And the interviewer is like, but, you know, socialism's never worked anywhere else ever before. And he's like, well, that's bad socialism. That's socialism that doesn't work. Like, I want good socialism. I want socialism done the right way, and we're gonna do it the right way in America. This is the story in every generation of socialist movements that have happened around the world. And they all start, by the way, where you have this kind of inept or explosive government system that drives people to say, I'm not getting what I want and everything's costing more. I need socialism.

[A]

And also, that's super sexy, right? Because it allows you to be able to promise something that people are going to love. And what was that point around? It involves promising people something that they don't love.

[B]

I always used to say, the kid that gets elected for middle school president is the kid that promises to make the vending machines for. Everyone's got a story about this at their school. You know, there's always the kid who said, hey, guys, what I'm gonna promise you is I'm gonna make the vending machines free. And that's what we deal with every day. So here he is.

[A]

I wanna show you a chart in a second. So this is that you with hair? Yes, it's me with hair. Humor. Goods and services over the last 25 years, broadly speaking, prices have increased by about 74% since 2000. But the actual numbers vary wildly depending on what type of good or service it is. So consumer goods, toys, tv, have gotten housing.

[B]

Got housing in there.

[A]

Consumer goods like toys and TVs have gotten over 50% cheaper. TVs are nearly 100% cheaper. But critical categories like healthcare, education have skyrocketed by 200%. Housing is in there, too. One potential interpretation is that the less legislation that you apply to an industry, the more the free market is allowed to take over, the cheaper the things become. Even new cars haven't got that much more expensive. So this is price changes. And you can see as you basically get to the top, there's more legislation put in and down to the bottom. What do you make of that?

[B]

I don't.

[A]

Yeah, look to me, when I look at the economy, I look at what does a family need to do? Well, okay, let's just go through what are the basic needs of life? All right, everybody, right? Rich, poor, young, old needs healthcare. Correct. In America, by the way, we probably spend three times more per person. On healthcare than you do in the uk. Okay.

[B]

Do you think he got trained as a hypnotist?

[A]

Look, I was proud of me sitting down with someone who's been in office for nearly twice as long as I've been alive and grabbing him and not, not letting go too much without I think being too cantankerous. It was a real sort of strategic learning experience for me. But yeah, look, that's the game that is played. There is a question that gets asked and what is answered is what I wanted to hear.

[B]

I think that it's very hard to deny the value and the importance of the empathy. One of the things that the other side gets wrong is the failure to empathize. He's extraordinary and so is AOC and so are others at speaking to people that are feeling desperate and in need. And it is true that there are tens of millions of people in the United States. I think it's 63% of people are living paycheck to paycheck or living on less than 500 bucks of total savings.

[A]

Yeah, if there was one catastrophe that they would need to go into debt for it.

[B]

But I'll go back to this point about I think that the more government you create to help those people, I worry that over time it hurts more than it helps. Right. And this is where the price of things go up. And you can't offer the same thing like, hey, I'm going to offer you more and more every year. By the way, I'll give you one anecdote. In 2013 or 12, when they passed the temporary tax cuts or sorry, the temporary tax hikes in California, they raised an incremental $100 billion since the then California. I paid that like I'm in a big, big chunk of that check that money. Not a big chunk, but I'd done my part and 80 billion of that went to increase. And it was supposed to go to increasing schools and like health care services. 80% of it went to increasing public retirement benefits. 80 billion. And you know, you. I can't sit here and like bemoan public employees. I'm not going to like say negative things about, about public employees. But the system whereby, you know, there's a voter bloc that says, hey, like we need to get more and then the system is created that doesn't actually solve the problems that need to be solved and the people that asked for more get the benefit. I think it's very inherent in democracy. Like over a period of time, you could argue that democracy eats itself.

[A]

Yeah. Isn't it crazy that nobody ever pulls these people up each cycle. False promises are made, not kept. Bigger promises need to be made in order to get ahead of where the previous ones were. The people who didn't deliver on the promises previously don't get held to account in the right way. It's kayfabe. It's like wwe.

[B]

By the way, you can look at the food stamp program. If you type in food stamp program spending per year over time, watch what happened in 2019. Blow your mind. We can come back to that one. But this is exactly the problem today. I would argue, and I've tried to do the math on this, if you take the number of people that work for the federal government, state government or local government, city government, plus the number of people that work for contractors.

[A]

Ho. Hello.

[B]

Yeah. So here's the food stamp program as an example. And so you could argue like, hey, like people were. It was a crisis, we needed to increase spending, so we drove up. The food stamp program, it's $100 billion a year now.

[A]

Now. And that SNAP program doubled from 2010.

[B]

Yeah. And roughly. Holy shit.

[A]

SNAP spending increased 60x from 1969 to 2022. And it's $100 billion per year, or roughly 1.4% of total federal.

[B]

So 60 to 70% of people on the food stamp program, which costs 100 billion a year, 60 to 70% are obese, clinically obese.

[A]

Oh, that are on the food stamp program.

[B]

That are on the food stamp program. And close to 20 billion of the hundred billion a year is spent on soda.

[A]

Fucking hell. Oh, that's a 1/5, 1/5. 1/5 of the money is going to Coca Cola.

[B]

So it starts from a good place like, hey, it's actually started during the Great Depression.

[A]

It was like, can we get new tonic on snap? Actually that'd be a great way to raise the valuation of the company. There you go. That'd be fucking fantastic.

[B]

Yeah, but it started as a, you know, an emergency program. Much like the emergency 1% income tax, it started as an emergency program to help people during the Great Depression that were actually starving. And it was like, let's give them bread, give them milk, give them eggs, help them survive.

[A]

What's that?

[B]

I think it's a. Oh, and sorry. I'll give you my statistic today. If you add up federal, state, local government employees, plus all the contractors for the government, plus all the people that live off of a retirement check or a welfare support check, so all the people that are living off government checks, it's about nearly Half the US population

[A]

either working for or being supported by. Wow.

[B]

So we may be too far gone. That's kind of where democracy now. Think about that person. If you're. And I'm not saying that person. Like, if you're collecting a check every month from the government, you will never vote to have that check go down, down. You're living on those checks. So we're now incentives. This is how it maybe eats itself a little bit. Right. So you're now in a system where, like, will people actually want to say, so you ask why Mom Donnie got elected? Like, I think that you reach a tipping point where this becomes like a, like a, like a wave. And that's how socialism, you know, could manifest in this cycle. I think 26 to 28 is going to be the big cycle. And my money's on AOC being president. Why I think this is the wave we're in. And tech is. AI is the boogeyman right now. Right. So there's also this. You always got to pick a fear. Like, the Japanese are coming, the Russians are coming, climate change is coming. There's always something, AI is coming. That's the fear. And it works. And you know, Bernie Sanders, like, pounding the table saying, data centers need to be stopped. We got to stop all data centers this week. So, you know, I think we have a choice. I still believe in agency. I still believe everyone can look in the mirror and look at the situation and realize that more government is not going to stop the problem created by too much government. And this is just such a crazy juxtaposition. And while we're in this exponential technology curve and this abundance curve that we're on.

[A]

Yeah. Do you feel a little bit like there's a schism going on between what's happening in the real world and the way that it's being perceived?

[B]

It's crazy. I mean, like, I think that it's so sad that so many people are so negative. I think, like, people talk about, yes, certainly a lot of people can be struggling. But I think, you know, in the mid century, coming out of World War II, we were so optimistic as a people. We were so positive about tomorrow. All of our conversations about tomorrow were all about, we're going to go to the moon. We're all going to move around in, you know, electric trams. We're all going to have a microwave in our kitchen. You know, I always tell people the analogy. If you pull up, I'll do this for your audience. If you pull up the Disney History Institute YouTube channel and there's an episode on Tomorrowland. When they opened up Tomorrowland in 1955, it was all about this optimism of tomorrow. And it was like every ride was all about tomorrow being incredible. It's like we're all going to like go to the moon. There was a ride called the Rocket to the Moon. You go to the moon and back, you move her. And then they had a Inside the House of Tomorrow where everyone had a microwave so you could cook your dinner in 30 seconds. It was like the future. And people were like, mind blowing. That's so cool. And you know, and then I think we kind of. So then in the video they say, like in the 1970s, they changed over every ride to make it all about the fear of tomorrow. It was like Star Tours was a robot that like made the mistake. It's a navigator robot. And of course the navigator robot has to screw up so you veer off course and nearly crash in an asteroid. They took out the rocket to the moon and replaced it with Space Mountain, which is a rocket ship that veers off course and spins violently through the galaxy. Captain EO was Michael Jackson coming back to planet Earth and he's like, hey, we're going to destroy the robots that took over the Earth and him and his organic band. Destroy all the robots.

[A]

Apocalyptic.

[B]

And so we've kind of gotten into this very pessimistic view. And I think, you know, if we can change people's aperture a bit and get them to be optimistic instead of pessimistic and see how promising tomorrow is and not need to feel sheltered and, you know, taken care of and fundamentally creating a burden to these bigger social systems, these governmental type systems, people I think might change their view. I'm hopeful that's why we're having this conversation. But like, that's the sort of thing that I think we need to be doing is like showing people all the amazing shit that's happening and how much it's going to benefit you and how crazy awesome it is. And like, you're going to be able to spend more time with your kids. The cost of food's going down, the cost of energy is going to go down. Like, we're all going to have robots that can build stuff for us and you're going to be able to spend more time with your family, like, on and on and on. Like, housing needs to get cheap. Like, but like fighting against these things is just so. So it's so crazy that we would, you know, do that. Like, you know, there's this whole story about Germany Fought against nuclear energy and then their energy costs spiked and now they have to buy natural gas from Russia and just put carbon into the atmosphere, which is what they were trying to fight against in the first place.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. I, I wonder whether people being more hopeful would mean that they would vote in a less fear based way.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And that anybody that's talking about hope, if you feel fearful, sounds like they're dismissive of the problems that you're facing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That seems like the dynamic that's going.

[B]

That's right. It's like, I'm not empathizing with your pain. And a lot of the time. And by the way, if I empathize with your pain, we have to figure out an enemy responsible for your pain.

[A]

Them.

[B]

Them.

[A]

I think it was 2012 that votes went from voting for the party you like to voting against the party that you don't.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, there's all these videos now. I don't. We don't need to pull these up. But obviously, like all the people that were like, we gotta go attack Iran, we gotta attack Iran. And then when Trump did it, or we gotta go get Maduro, Trump does it, it's like, well, Trump did it. We gotta all be against it. Like, I don't know what happened.

[A]

I saw the flip flop with the vaccine.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

When it was Trump's vaccine or it was Sanders vaccine, and each side was like, I'm f. Wait, no, I'm not.

[B]

And I don't know when we got there was a flipping flippening that happened probably around the time you're describing the flippening. Yeah. When people went from like, hey, there's a set of things we agree on and a bunch of stuff we disagree on to like, anything that you do or say I disagree with.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that's politics.

[A]

Regardless of whether it's good or bad.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

David Freeberg.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Thank you, gentlemen. You're great. I appreciate all the work.

[B]

I appreciate it, bro. Thank you for having me.

[A]

Yeah. All right. Goodbye, everybody. Dude.

[B]

Yes. Great. Thank you. Good. So good. Have a good flight.

[A]

I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.comcombooks. that's chriswillx.combooks.