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

26:14David Friedberg: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 until 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.

26:45David Friedberg:I think the moon is probably one of these like more under discussed in Silicon Valley kind of economic, grand economic opportunities. Is space the next industrial revolution? There's a lot that could happen on earth too so like um i think there's a lot there's a there's a there's a couple big other big drivers i think one is dropping energy cost to zero um and i think uh fusion will have a big role in that this this century so people don't want to talk about fusion because everyone's all about solar all the time and elon loves solar and blah blah so everyone pooh-poohs fusion um so i'll talk about it in a second but the cost if you get the cost of energy down to one cent a kilowatt hour it absolutely expands every economy like everything blows up like imagine if what is it currently well it's in the u.s we're paying 15 to 40 cents a kilowatt hour for off the grid um but nuclear power you uh you know best case scenario is about five cents a kilowatt hour um and that's amortized when you take the cost of everything you got to build and amortize it out and then your runtime costs five to 10 cents, but they're going to sell it at like 15.

27:55David Friedberg:So like imagine if you could take power costs 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 100 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. Well, there's a robot printing machine that's just launching in Austin at South by Southwest this week. Making houses. Just, yeah, house, 3D printing houses.

28:28David Friedberg:Gen one. Now imagine gen six, right? And imagine energy cost is like zero. And imagine all that material production comes down. How cool of a house do you want? I want to live in Hogwarts. Fine, get the land. I want like a Lake Como, but I want to make my own Lake Como. You know, like no one else. Lake David. Yeah, Lake David. But so energy cost, I think, are gonna uh this this will be the era when um fusion happens uh so fusion's this crazy like um principle it's it's this fundamental thing that drives the universe if the sun is run on fusion fusion is when protons jam together okay so the sun is so um 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 it's technically a fourth state of matter right 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 you always have to one-up me no but it's always have to i actually think that one's more cool is why i said it but yeah yeah yeah um but the the what happens in fusion is when two protons have enough energy and they get close enough they jam together and they stick together so one proton you remember this like with an electron is hydrogen two protons is helium right and then it's lithium and then beryllium and and so on so um protons jamming together forms a new nucleus forms a new kind of element goes from hydrogen to helium all the way up the periodic table of elements.

30:13David Friedberg:So the more energy you have, the denser these things get, it requires more and more energy to get this down. 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. Iron's kind of like an equilibrium state in a weird way it's it's actually related to the the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces and how they have a trade-off there's a there's a threshold at which the repulsiveness is greater because you have so many more protons they're pushing each other apart 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 the sun that exploded billions of years ago crazy but um so fusion is how the sun makes energy so every time proton and proton get together they release some energy and that's the light that we get from the sun constant fusion so the the challenge has always been can we do fusion on earth can we just jam protons together and get and capture that energy so the technology to do it is you basically spin you know this these protons around in a plasma at 100 million degrees celsius Some people are using these like donut-shaped toroidals.

31:34David Friedberg: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 got to 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.

32:07David Friedberg: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 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.

32:41David Friedberg: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 a very clean way of generating energy. So it's been this kind of holy grail since the 1950s when people first thought about it. It needs a different name. Yeah. What would you call it? It can't have the word nuclear in it.

33:12David Friedberg:Yeah. It can't. Yeah. Some people have said just call it fusion. Some people have said call it L. It's too close to fishing. Yeah. People are going to pattern match it already and they're going to think, I've heard, even me. Let's come up with a name. What do you think? I think something to do with the electromagnetic energy element of that, that feels kind of green. Yeah. That feels quite safe. Yeah. I don't expect that to explode. Yeah. Strong power, weak power. Yeah. Protonics, something. We'll come up with something. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, I think that if you have nuclear in it, I think it's just such a contentious topic.

33:50Right, right. Because it's, everyone thinks about nuclear. The worst branding in history.

33:53David Friedberg:Yeah, like nuclear energy is fission, where you're taking heavy, heavy, heavy elements like uranium, breaking them apart. They're radioactive. It's the opposite. And you're getting energy out. You're doing the opposite. 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.

34:22David Friedberg:That's what this can do. that's why it's so important that we get it done now when you do this and you it works and we're very close to having this work in industrial scale next everyone's always joked oh fusion's always like a decade away it's yeah it's you know maybe it's a decade away maybe not but it's gonna happen like we're progressing up this production curve it's gonna happen are those 30 minute long runs energy positive net positive they're still requiring net energy in because of the setup and and so on. But the next phase will be to capture basically the current systems aren't just protons.

34:59David Friedberg:They put protons with neutrons and the neutrons are what get energized into the wall to heat up the wall. And that's where they heat up water to turn a steam turbine. You know, like other people have other ideas that, hey, maybe we shouldn't be using a steam turbine. Isn't it mad that of all of the ways it's still rotate a thing attached to a dynamo? It doesn't matter what the fanciness that occurs before it totally it's just dynamo and a fan that's another thing that should likely change this century is the um the move away from from that system uh where we can do direct energy capture and conversion into uh electricity 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.

35:50David Friedberg: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 future positive on like what's around the corner. Before we continue, 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.

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36:59Best 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 slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom 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.

37:36And that's going to make things interesting.

37:38David Friedberg: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 um you know maybe we could tip more right like maybe um the amount of money we're now making gives us the ability to go buy a hundred dollar bottle of wine instead of two dollar cores 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.

38:17David Friedberg: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 mine 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, worth more.

38:58David Friedberg: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. It feels like a unique kind of productivity to take raw materials that were maybe rare or at least didn't exist within what was a closed system. The earth was a closed system. We weren't getting anything from off it unless we were hit by an asteroid. Right. And then bringing it back in. Right. What happens to the iron price? Right. When we are bringing iron back from outside of what was predicted as a part of that.

39:34David Friedberg:Yeah. So 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. Meaning - Because the price is just indicative of the supply and the availability. And now everyone gets more access. This is why technology - I've always wanted more iron. I've said it. I don't have enough. 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 - That's correct.

40:09David Friedberg:Don't look at that. The parking lot. Don't look at that. Yeah, you're like your iron horde. You're like a Minecraft. I'm a Schmeagle, but for iron. 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?

40:47David Friedberg: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 the 100 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, 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.

41:17David Friedberg: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. But the number one type of malnutrition worldwide is now obesity, not starvation. That is a problem. Yeah, it's abundant. It's excess. There's twice as many people that are malnourished through their obesity than through their starvation. Final thing, who owns the moon? The moon. Yeah. So I don't know. I think that's going to be - Astropolitics is fascinating.

41:52Do you know anyone that does astropolitics? I want to bring someone on the show. Yeah, that's a good idea. I want to talk about it. I think it's so cool. Do you own, because geostationary above the net of your country, it's kind of yours? Depends on what the treaties say.

42:07David Friedberg:Kind of? Because you could, 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 and I'm going to protect, this is my part of the moon, who's going to 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. Have you ever read Seven Eves by Neil Simpson? Yeah, love that book. Yeah, fuck. One of my most re-read fiction books. And in that, they go up to the space station, Izzy, and they need to come up with an entire new form of law.

42:37What happens if somebody commits a crime in space? 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 got different priors right right right totally and you see that movie

42:58David Friedberg:ad astra yes 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 moon pirates moon pirates there's like a battleground on the moon for who has territorial rights and yeah 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 I'm - Because scarcity drives wars. Do I really need to be fighting with Iran if I don't care as much about oil and energy availability? Look at what happened during 2020, 2021, when crypto was on a bull run.

43:36Everyone was friends. Look at what happens when the price drops. Everyone fucking hates each other.

43:41David Friedberg: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. You go 100 to 60 to 40 to 30. In France, they have a law. It's like 30. Now, a lot of the Democrats in the U.S. are like, let's all work 30 hours a week and let's drop Fridays and all this sort of stuff. Didn't a country try a four-day work week? I think France, doesn't it? I think it might've been France that tried the four-day work week. And that's one of the measures of prosperity is how much do you have to work to be able to to live a good life.

44:17David Friedberg: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? Speaking of prospering, how far off are we from age reversal, do you think? That's one I'm most excited about. So have you looked at Yamanaka factors or have you talked about this on your show before? 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.

44:52David Friedberg: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 they're all they're all those are different cells there's different cells and different organs in the body those cells are different because the genes in the dna are on or off so there's a bunch of switches and the switches are either on or off and that creates cellular differentiation it's what makes one cell different from another cell.

45:37David Friedberg: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. Zeros and ones. Zeros and ones. And each gene makes a unique protein. The proteins that then come out do a bunch of stuff. They're machines, they're molecular machines. And they're constantly doing all this stuff in your cell.

46:14David Friedberg:And that's what makes every cell different is what genes are on and what genes are off. And the complexity of this is astounding. If you were to think about a cell being the size of Manhattan. So imagine a cell is a city the size of Manhattan with 500-story tall buildings. That's how big it would be. And every person is a protein. There's 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.

46:51David Friedberg: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.

47:27David Friedberg: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. 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.

48:03David Friedberg: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.

48:38David Friedberg: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.

49:11David Friedberg: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 reverse blindness. This is Sinclair's stuff, right? Sinclair has one of these companies that's in clinical trials now. And there's dozens of others. Altos Labs is like one of the most funded startups in history that no one talks about.

49:43David Friedberg:They've raised, you know, 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 going to 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.

50:19Locally.

50:20David Friedberg:Locally. But over time, what will 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 read redose them redose them and keep them being done systemically yet yeah this is the mouse the mouse model where they made these mice the equivalent of like having someone live like 200 plus years old you know and this is like so early they haven't even optimized the molecules.

51:07David Friedberg:They haven't optimized how you deliver the molecules. They haven't optimized the dosing. They haven't optimized the method of the dose. Like there's all these techniques that are 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.

51:49David Friedberg:So this is a technology category that I am like, I think is one of these other things that you can kind of think about the compounding effect, free energy, right? Like AI automation 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, you know, go down the list.

52:29David Friedberg: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 got to go work the corporate shitty job on a trading floor in a corporate office at a cubicle, or, you know, in a factory or all the things that maybe we will look back one day and say, hey, that was kind of limiting human potential. Like maybe humans could do a lot more. And maybe they should and these shifts to more abundance give us that opportunity to do that. A quick aside. Look, you know sleep matters, but let's be real.

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54:06That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. How far do you think we're off from getting to the stage where we can do age reversal? One decade, five decades?

54:18David Friedberg: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 and 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 you know over the next 10 to 20 years um more of this starts to proliferate you've heard peter diamandis's idea of longevity escape velocity right that you need to stick about every year that you live means that you're going to live a little bit longer but that when you cross a particular threshold you just need to stick about until this happens essentially or whatever the equivalent is whatever the technology is yeah allows you to extend lifespan indefinitely.

55:09I think it's fair. You just hold on. It's probably the best long-termist view for looking after your health. Yeah. That now is not the time to fuck it. Right. Totally. Because in the past, there wasn't really any reason to stick about. Yeah. You're going to live 80 years or 70 years or 60 years, but you know, you're playing around with fives and tens. Yeah. Whereas if the difference is between 80 and a hundred or 80 and 120.

55:35David Friedberg:Yeah. Yeah. You're like, hey, keep it together. And by the way, a lot of like the number one thing you can do to fix your epigenome, which you can do without taking these drugs is exercise. Fasting. Well, fasting helps. Fasting does have an effect, but exercise like exercise releases molecules that in many cells in your body will go in and start to address the epigenome and make you more youthful. And then there's other things that you can start to take. Some of this peptide stuff that people are crazy about has shown that it has an effect. um some of the i don't want to be prescriptive on these things um but there's a lot of ways that uh you can start to kind of edge your way before all the big clinical stuff is done and and the big you know products come out to market what do you think happens to careers and retirement and family structures in a world where people live over 120 years um it's hard it's hard to say i I mean, you know, I could, I think it's very sad that like, I love my kids.

56:32David Friedberg:Like I was with my daughters and my wife, we were doing a, what are the three wishes? 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 um you know a human element to this technology it's not just like technology for technology disembodied sterile yeah it's like it's not a pharmaceutical drug it's like it's a it's an opportunity to give everyone more time to do the things they want to do i really think this idea that like humans don't reach their potential is like a very fundamental truth we're 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 like things that maybe we didn't realize we could have uh because we had to make all these trade-offs to make things work in a social system, in a society.

57:50Yeah. 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?

58:13David Friedberg:No, I mean, UBI inevitably, like all welfare systems, will fail. Why? 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.

59:00David Friedberg: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? And it's a terrible feature of the economy, of like economic principles. Like those things will get more expensive. So I think that 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.

59:39David Friedberg: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 we should just get on the ocean and we'll figure out what's over there. What about transhumanism? Okay, let's talk about it. So superintelligence, I think, is a manifestation of AI at scale, meaning that there's features of intelligence that in isolation or in aggregation exceed human capacity.

1:00:23It's just not general yet.

1:00:25David Friedberg: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? Um, 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?

1:01:13David Friedberg:What is the human? And what are we doing? so i i don't love the term transhumanism but i do like this idea that like this super intelligence capacity needs to be harnessed by humans i think there's probably two things that happen and the second one i'm going to say is very controversial the first one i'll say is pretty well described which is this kind of human machine interface um you know elon's got neural link where they put the wires in the brain but the wires i saw a good presentation from max hodak at his company science uh company corporation or whatever you should have him on he's great um but he worked he started neuralink he was the old ceo at neuralink and he's got the system where they're putting like a digital uh device in your retina they put a screen in your eye yeah and it works and so the screen powered um it's uh solar he's got this whole power system in it it's incredible um when your eye is open it's 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 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 um so i'll give you the two versions of it some people would say neo and the matrix where you kind of connect the digital thing but the other one is um avatar where they have that ponytail thing they connect to um but there'll probably be some interface where the chip to brain interface is just a soft neurons like it's some sort of system that can connect with the brain without going into the brain you don't need to go into the neural tissue um theoretically 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 them like we all need to be like the matrix so don't think about me as some dystopian crazy technocrat um but i think my point is someone will do it and then you'll be able to think i want to fly a helicopter like neo did in the matrix and you'll be able to fly a fucking helicopter and um you'll want to access information quickly using the super intelligence that exists in the silicon.

1:03:37David Friedberg:So you want to solve a physics problem because you're, you know, trying to build something on the moon and you sort of like access that information, you look up and you're like, okay, you have the answer you need. You're not looking at a screen to get the answer. And so you're 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 like it's 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. get i don't know and so i'm not trying to be too like deterministic about this stuff um 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 here and you can start to think things and get information that you want and and so on.

1:04:36David Friedberg: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 for 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 a effectively a an embryo that that's frozen it's not yet um fertilized but you can sequence the dna and determine what genetic traits does that embryo have i'm a big investor in harrisite who is the most evidence-based one of these.

1:05:29So 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, Yeah, Johnny Anomaly and Heresite 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 is good too.

1:06:15David Friedberg:So everyone's got a line. The further I walk this conversation, the more people on the audience are going to say, you crossed my line. Right. So the first is, should we even be looking at the DNA of embryos? We already do. right 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 screen the doctor gets a microscope and has a look at the embryos yeah and just eyeballs it yes he goes yeah that one that one looks like the roundest right and we don't we don't have a number you don't want number seven right number seven we can't we can't do number seven or it wouldn't even take we know that it wouldn't take it's not going to implant correctly so he was already doing it so i'm like right okay You're just taking it from some guy.

1:06:55It's like an umpire in MLB that's just eyeballing it. And then eventually they're going to get removed and it's going to be robots. And you go, okay, well, I'm glad that the robot got it accurate 100 % of the time. 100%.

1:07:07David Friedberg: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. The eyes thing's got a bad rap when it comes to selection. Right. That's right. Okay. Fair enough. Tall or short? Smart, not smart? Suddenly there's a line some people are like, well, you shouldn't be doing... Blind, not blind. Blind, not blind. The next line is what's going on controversially in China where they're using gene editing. Yeah, the enhancement stuff.

1:07:45David Friedberg: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. Is that what the guy did with the twins that turned out to be triplets? There was a conversation. I think that's the guy that got arrested or got in trouble. Correct. Yeah. 2019, I think. Yeah. You know that there was a third one. I didn't realize there was a third. I'm pretty sure.

1:08:19Jerry, 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 might eat humble pie here and have completely misremembered it.

1:08:39David Friedberg:You can also edit yourself out. 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. There was two of them, and there was a fucking third one. I swear that there was a third one. Come on, Jared, prove me right here, brother. This is like a - Three babies. Well, there were three babies. A third gene-edited baby was later confirmed through court documents. Fucking yes. Well, I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing.

1:09:09I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm celebrating.

1:09:12David Friedberg:You're not a distante. I'm celebrating that I'm right. Pro-gene-editing babies? And he edited the embryos using CRISPR-Cas9 to make them resistant to HIV. Exactly, exactly. So 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.

1:09:47David Friedberg: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, sometimes you can put all three into one person. There you go.

1:10:09David Friedberg:And the super, super. Yeah, and the British accent. And the British accent. I don't think that's genetic. Yeah. Okay, so now, okay, 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 gene.

1:10:47David Friedberg:Regardless of who the parents were? Correct. For example, being able to see infrared. Right. Okay. And so this is where you make X-Men, right? And the capacity to do this historically was like, no way, impossible. But now in many of these, there arguably could be the capacity to do this. And I'm not arguing for it. I'm just saying that it's likely that this is going to be a limit that's going to get tested at some point here in the near future, where we are going to have a conversation about how do humans keep up in an era, in a world of superintelligence, and are there certain traits like that that can enable us to either have a better performance against the superintelligence, either superintelligent humans, or a relationship with the superintelligence via some mechanism that allows us to connect with the superintelligence or control it better, or what have you, or 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.

1:11:49I had a 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 - Scott Solomon. Yeah, Scott Solomon. an unbelievable evolutionary biologist who's applied evolutionary biology thinking to what we're going to need to do to be able to survive on Mars. Radiation, what happens to bone density, but if you've got the bone density loss, how do women give birth? You're going to have to do every child by cesarean C-section.

1:12:21But 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. We need to be underground because 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 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.

1:12:49It was so fucking good. Such a sleeper episode. But yeah, can we engineer? It was a -

1:12:55David Friedberg:And so remember like transgenics we use in plants, you know - The fucking word trans, dude. Put the word trans at the start of anything after the last six years and it's going to struggle. Same as nuclear. Yeah. Well, I don't want to say GMO people because that's got a worse name. If I say the GMO person, because I used to work at Monsanto, 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 the human biology, we talked about all the genes that are on or off. How do all those proteins work together?

1:13:29David Friedberg: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. Isn't it mad that that just doesn't switch off one day of all of the humor? Yeah, it's just 404s and you sort of blue screen of death yourself for a bit. Cold temperatures will do that. that's that's why we can freeze biological tissue and then boot it back up because it just stops all that act because it's actually the thermodynamic it's the uh the kinetic energy of the proteins it's random the proteins are just bouncing around in the cell and they randomly will bump into stuff and do stuff it's amazing to think about like 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 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.

1:14:28David Friedberg:It's the craziest shit. Well, it's the same as when you realize that most of matter is empty space. But if I do this, my hand doesn't pass through the table. Fucking awesome. Right. And the fact that it's all quantum anyway, which means that it could tunnel through anything at any point in time. I'm still waiting for that to happen. Well, here's another fucked up thing to think about. You've heard of 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 i'll just let that settle for a second because if that were true then you could theoretically every particle every time any particle changes anywhere in the universe it's affecting every other particle in the universe it's kind of like a panpsychism but for connectivity like a membrane that everybody is a part of or it might be the case that progression in the universe is actually like a think about a quantum state that's changing and then space and time are a manifestation of that change because that's why entropy exactly that's why there is a progression in one direction and it might just be that you know because space and time are defined by the relationship between particles.

1:15:45David Friedberg:And it may be the case that if all the particles are entangled, that there's just this one thing that just changes, and then all of space and time is a feature. It's like a universal clock. Yeah. It's a whole other way of thinking about our place in the universe. How did we get here? We were talking about - Where's your line? Yeah, okay. Is there a line that you have from GMO people to IVF shouldn't happen? Do you have an ethical line for that? 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 inherit.

1:16:39David Friedberg:I think that's fine. How do you stop people? I mean, no parents. But by the way, I'll say there's like, there's a whole bunch of therapeutic treatments that we're doing now that are doing what I described in that final stage with an adult human. like folistatin stuff right and i was in uh prospero with the guys when brian johnson got that 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 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 yeah whatever it is but that is like nursery school go to like university phd level and what we're learning about all the interaction between all the proteins is we could come up with a set of genes that if I put them into you, they will make you a hundred times smarter.

1:17:28David Friedberg:Would you get that shot? I would. I'm choosing for me. I think what becomes interesting is when parents are choosing for their kids. I think that's right. I think that's the right philosophical framing. Yeah. 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 Herosite, who, again, I can't fucking shout out enough. He's so good at communicating this stuff and Herosite 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.

1:18:11IVF'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.

1:18:46So you can pick, but you can't change.

1:18:48David Friedberg:Right, 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.

1:19:22David Friedberg:When we end up doing that as a mainstay and everyone's getting that shot and everyone's living forever and that becomes kind of a thing that everyone's like, yeah, of course we're boosting our lifespan with these genes. Like this totally makes sense. That's when people say, well, if we're doing it to ourselves and we're all doing it, like why don't we just do it to every embryo? And that's when people will start to, and that'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 lifespan.

1:19:54Bring 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's, 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 is 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.

1:20:35And 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 herocyte or somebody else to do their profiling, if their kids are out stripping 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 lowered 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?

1:21:09Why 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 going to be born black with two white parents.

1:21:44Therefore, if you just understand the behavioral genetics of the situation, I think that lots of people are going to get on board. Yeah, that's right. And as soon as it becomes a competitive game, this race to the top, not race to the bottom, is going to happen and people are going to go, well, now the thing that's interesting, I think is cool, two wrinkles that I spoke to Johnny about the last time we sat down. First one is basically buyer's 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 the parents if they were to find out.

1:22:22And 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.

1:23:03So 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.

1:23:20David Friedberg:Now, if you had the option to boost the kid's IQ by 200, because the world is different with superintelligence. So if you have digital superintelligence in the world, it's a very different world than we live in today. It's not just competing with each other. It's about finding a place in the world with the superintelligence. And we're all going back and forth to Mars and traveling the universe and figuring out quantum shifts in the universe. Like 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 super intelligence 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 super intelligence it's not controlling us it's how do we use it and you have to have a degree of control over knowing where do you want to go with it what do you want to do with 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 super intelligence as a species?

1:24:22David Friedberg:What is our role? Because there's a philosophical argument to be made that humans are dying down, making way for the AI. Yeah, we're just bootloaders. Right. Fleshy bootloaders for the silicon. And I don't like that idea. Oh, so you want to compete? 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 and, you know, into space. I need the rocket.

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1:26:35David Friedberg: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? No, toothpicks. So we managed to find a company that embed flavor and supplements into the wood of toothpicks. So try, what's this? Maybe I'll take it with me and try it later. Yeah, just take that one, put it in your pocket. It's really cool. just a different what is the nootropic uh so cognizant there's a 15 milligram dose of cognizant in there uh in one toothpick yeah oh my brother would do that here it's like and uh yeah yeah 15 minutes and uh there's a little like 15 milligrams of caffeine 15 milligrams of uh he'll try anything he's like my guinea pig we're fucking about with every delivery mechanism on the planet for these at the moment so obviously zins went went absolutely crazy over the last couple of years is that your nicotine 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 x and uh we just decided that we would go for pouches the same as zin so uh degenerate delivery mechanism but um much better for you so awesome that's what i'm playing with at the moment is it doing well it's fucking crushing yeah we just raised for newtonic we just raised on 60 mil we're in uh going into heb we're in vitamin shop gnc sainsbury's morrison's daily around the uk uh we're just launching in australia and then we've got these rtds it's a smarter energy drink and i really the last time that we sat down at south by yeah we were talking about business and you were talking about sort of how people are launching and stuff like that and um because 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 tequila is tequila but um i think that's the whole thing is like you can own your own brand you can own your own equity yeah yeah well look i i'm very much a lifestyle maxi not a profit maxi um but given that this didn't exist uh it's cool to have the ability and the contacts and the time and the resources to be able to make something that you want yeah it's awesome this podcast the podcast the reason modern wisdom exists is because there was nobody having a conversation that was basically

1:28:43less retarded than comedy but more retarded than tim ferris right and um 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 uh 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 yeah especially when you're at the sort of level that that i'm at so yeah anyway you are obviously a burgeoning farmer um yeah hoeing the ground hoeing the ground milling the tilling

1:29:23David Friedberg:the fields i do have a kitchen garden although it does need to get updated okay um so my day job is running a company called ohalo and what we do at ohalo is we turn off meiosis and plants okay what does that mean it's very sexy yeah that's it so that's the pitch i give at the bar um and uh you know i usually get the blanks there and then i uh so yeah so all the cells in our body we talked about this earlier are made through a process called mitosis which copies over the whole all the DNA in your cell. Your DNA is actually packaged up into chromosomes, and there's two sets of chromosomes side by side in your cell.

1:30:00David Friedberg: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.

1:30:42David Friedberg: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.

1:31:14David Friedberg:Number one, because most crops, people don't realize this, you can't plant seed. 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.

1:31:50David Friedberg: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 homozygots, they're 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.

1:32:26David Friedberg: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.

1:33:00David Friedberg: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.

1:33:31David Friedberg:The sun's over there. I'm going to grow a branch towards the sun. I'm going 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 and 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.

1:33:59David Friedberg: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 octaploid. 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 on the ground.

1:34:40David Friedberg: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.

1:35:15David Friedberg:And so you can kind of, and the farmer, instead of using 5 ,000 pounds of chopped up potatoes, and like Matt Gaiman did, and putting them in the ground, he can use 10 grams of seed that fits in the palm of your hand. Wow. 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 of the climate, to increase all of these things that are going on in agriculture that make it very hard to farm.

1:35:48Can you make it so that you need less fertilizer?

1:35:51David Friedberg:Yeah, absolutely. So nitrogen utilization is a kind of good phenotype to think about. So you can kind of, you know, because you got to apply nitrogen to grow most crops. And then there's also work now, 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. You don't need fertilizer. And it actually refertilizes the soil from the air. And so there's ways to kind of integrate that into crops that don't have that. so there's a whole bunch of that sort of technology that's going on as well wow that is cool what what's happening with this california flight stuff because yeah i was with palmer over christmas and a bunch of other guys yeah from that side and um 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 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 yeah uh i'm in a bunch of group chats i talked to a lot of people i would say probably a third of people i talked to have already left you're asking about people leaving right and i would say um like a survey we did informally in a group which has been published uh talked about is close to 87 percent of people are going to leave these are the core leaders in tech and the other thing is i talked 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 um it goes back to my point about people making promises in order to get elected politicians promise people something that they don't have today that's how you get elected 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 let's come to jesus moment can you keep doing these promises can you even meet the promises you've already made and in california the answer is no California set up a system um where we created the highest tax rate in the country because of all the success in Silicon Valley all the income that's being generated all the success and capital gains and whatnot and use that to fund a bunch of nonsense the the bullet train to nowhere you know freaking like 30 billion dollars in nothing like the how much is it 30 billion um and they've had six CEOs, by the way, that have all been fired or the one guy just got arrested.

1:38:43David Friedberg:It's insane. There's, it was just published that 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. What was it, sorry, just what was that thing about the affordable internet bill? Oh, rural broadband. That was it. And for the same amount of money that was spent, I think every American citizen could have got Starlink. Yeah. And that one, that's a federal problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're going to get me very emotional. I've been very like. You seem like an emotional guy. I've been very like unemotional during our talk about science in the future.

1:39:21David Friedberg: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 um we made a bunch of changes to the pension system so we have public pensions for public employees in california and over the past um uh 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 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.

1:40:25David Friedberg:And that's a big part. 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 health care 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 is in. California has such a heaping liability problem that it's now you're seeing like all the rats jumping, you know, off the ship or they're burning the ship or the people are leaving the ship.

1:40:59David Friedberg:I don't know what the right analogy to use is, but that's the chaos that's ensuing in California in this very moment. And that's and 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, who set up a scheme where they would tax you five percent of your net worth if your net worth is over a billion dollars, which everyone in this audience is like, who cares? Screw the billionaires. But what it does is it gives the state assembly, the legislature, the ability to, in the future, change the threshold and the amount. So theoretically, you could take the 5 % on billionaires one time and make it 1 % on billionaires every year.

1:41:33Wasn't this the case with the original income tax? 1930, it was 1%. Tell people the story of how the original income tax...

1:41:41David Friedberg:I mean, the original income tax was pitched because we did not have an income tax in the United States. And that was, again, why this country was founded. It was set up as no taxation without representation. There was a huge tax scheme to fund all of the nonsense that was going on in England. Careful now. I mean, at the time, very different, not to speak to the people, but let's call it the aristocracy. And 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 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 of the elites and then you know it's just like everyone's an elite your privilege is more privileged than my privilege yeah this is all rooted in marxist philosophies by the way it's all this like oppressor oppressed stuff like again but all of those philosophies fundamentally uh distinguish people's agency like this is so critical for people to understand when you give people a bunch of stuff or you create a governmental system or economic system that says you do X, you get Y.

1:42:45David Friedberg: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 start out as a one, so the way they started the income tax in the United States was they're like, hey, we'll promise everyone 1 % on incomes over whatever it was at the time. I think$10 ,000 a year, you 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 going to expand the highway system.

1:43:14So the original income tax was 1%.

1:43:17David Friedberg:1 % on high net worth people, on high earning people. And that's it. Jared, chad this and find out how the income tax progressed over time. I want to see this. And you can look at this. And so then it became like suddenly today, everyone pays an income tax. In California, I pay 53 % income tax. And most people pay an income tax. And now they're 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 again, leading up to this, we had tariffs to fund the government. The government was small.

1:43:49David Friedberg: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. 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. Oh, wow. 1944 to 1945 in World War II, the top rate was 94%. 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.

1:44:31David Friedberg:Let's do big stuff to make our lives better. 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. Don't think about if 51 % can vote themselves, what, the 49 %? So this is the next thing that happens. So that's income. Let's say you've paid your income tax and you own a bunch of stuff. That's now your private property. You own this stuff. That's yours.

1:45:02David Friedberg: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. Correct. Get off it. Or your cool 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?

1:45:32David Friedberg:We want that lamp. We want half your iron ore. We're going to take all your private property. They're going to 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 100 grand a year. And by the way, to figure out how much you have what your assets are, you got to send me a list every year of everything you own.

1:46:08David Friedberg: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 art 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.

1:46:34David Friedberg:And when you do that, it eventually leads to 51 % of people voting to take everything from 49%. That's the worst case. Like that's the end state of this is it eats itself and that's socialism. And so I think that a wealth tax, and look, it's not going to affect me this California tax. So like, don't think that I'm trying to like speak my book or whatever the comments or bullshits are. I think this is a fundamental principled issue that by degrading private property rights, we are setting a precedent in the United States that is the foundation of why the United States was set up in the first place, which is for all of us that came to this country to get away from tyrannical governments outside the United States that took all our shit and controlled everything and told us what to do all the time.

1:47:18David Friedberg: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. Now, fuck off. 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.

1:47:51David Friedberg: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 shit. I mean, think about it. This amazing shit that's happening in the 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 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.

1:48:48David Friedberg:These tech guys are crazy. This is dystopian, blah, blah, blah. 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, 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.

1:49:24David Friedberg:Because if the United States walks this path, other countries will not walk this path and it will glean the benefits therein. And we have to recognize that. And then you have to ask the question, wait a second, is there some psychosocial motivation that others might have to see this happen in the United States? and I would argue maybe maybe there's influence happening maybe there's a reason why people are spending so much time why so much foreign money is going into NGOs that are supporting these sorts of causes I just like for me it's so hard to grok why people would be so you know quick and look there's something anyway I don't want to be too conspiratorial because that discredits a lot of this shit but yeah I think that you could look at the conspiratorial angle, but just straight incentives for I want to be seen to be standing up for the little person.

1:50:24When 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. 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, 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.

1:50:59I remember four or five years ago, he was pulled up about what he was doing with Tesla and about his presentation things. and 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.

1:51:15David Friedberg:That's right. And the people that are trying to lead on this have three homes. It's very easy to pull the ladder up. 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, they're in this sort of interesting middle ground, which is wealthy enough to be wealthy, but not so wealthy as to be affected 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 changed. 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.

1:51:52David Friedberg: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 gotten out of the shit like yesterday, to see how bad of a problem this leads to.

1:52:27David Friedberg:Socialism is the worst idea ever. Why did Mamdani get into New York then? People want more. People are left behind. Look, this is so important, I think, to recap. We promised people that if they went to college, you would get a good career and you could buy a home. And that turned out to not be true. That was a lie. The way we promised it to them and the way we gave everyone access to college is through federal education grants, loans. The federal student loan program didn't have a market check. The federal government, as long as you were an accredited university, you could run Trump University, Phoenix University, UCLA, Harvard, MIT, it doesn't matter.

1:53:15David Friedberg: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 degree in computer science the government one in each the government will loan you the iron ore right an iron ore um 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.

1:53:50David Friedberg:I'm good to go. Like no one's doing the math on like, can I afford to pay$240 ,000? Is it true that you can't default on it as well? 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.

1:54:22David Friedberg:That's what would normally happen. And that didn't happen. As a result - If you privatized 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 know that chart? Can you pull up the chart with like government stuff versus like non-government stuff yeah just uh ask chad um what is the chart explaining government intervention compared with the price of different goods and services over the last few years it's a an image this tells you everything you need to know this is why everything got worse when moving to new york suddenly cost six thousand dollars of rent you couldn't get a job food was eighteen dollars for a friggin sandwich A lot of this was rooted in this problem, which is the government got too big.

1:55:16David Friedberg: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. And the government's an endless pool of money printing. So it just keeps printing.

1:55:46David Friedberg:And eventually they're like, hey, let's raise taxes or get the money to pay for this stuff once they realize. But all of these things are services that the government's gotten involved in. College education, healthcare 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.

1:56:15David Friedberg:So, you know - You know who I first showed this chart to? Yeah. Bernie Sanders. What did he say? Did you have him on this? Yeah. Oh, you did? Last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should watch that. It was interesting. Yeah. What did he say to this? In fact, Jared, let's see if we can pull it up. We should react to that. And if you look at, I mean, what's frustrating to me is you can read textbooks, you can go 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 health care, it's great in principle.

1:56:52David Friedberg:I would love for that to work. I would love for everyone to have health care. I'm not opposed to that idea. But if you're going to have like a government with no accountability, and there's no one there that has any skin in the game, be responsible for giving me my health care, I know it's going to get fucked up and i've seen that happen time and time again around the world it's just not the right system and i think that there's much for us to kind of learn from like why these things haven't worked around the world and it's like we what frustrates me is people are ignorant they put their blinders on they don't want to see it and they just i saw an interview with a guy during the protest in la um when the guy went on camera and he's like uh you know what are you here for and he's like i'm here for socialism we need socialism in america and the interviewer is like But you know, socialism's never worked anywhere else ever before.

1:57:38David Friedberg: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 going to 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. And also that's super sexy, right? Because it allows you to be able to promise something that people are going to love.

1:58:10And what was that point around? It involves promising people something that they don't have.

1:58:15David Friedberg:I always used to say the kid that gets elected for middle school president is the kid that promises to make the vending machines free. Everyone's got a story about this at their school. There's always the kid who said, hey guys, what I'm going to promise you is I'm going to make the vending machines free. And that's what we deal with every day. So here I want to show you a chart in a second. So this - Is that you with hair? Yes, it's me with hair. Consumer 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.

1:58:46So consumer goods, toys, TVs - Housing. Got housing in there? Consumer goods like toys and TVs have gotten over 50 % cheaper. TVs are nearly 100 % cheaper. Yeah. 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.

1:59:19What do you make of that? I don't. 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.

1:59:43David Friedberg:Do you think he got trained as a hypnotist?

1:59:51Look, I was proud of me sitting down with someone who's been in office for nearly twice as long as i've been alive um and grabbing him and not not letting go too much without i think being too cantankerous it was a real sort of strategic learning uh experience for me yeah um but yeah look that's the game that is played there is a question that gets asked and what is answered is what i wanted to hear yeah uh and i look i i think that it's very hard to deny the value and

2:00:27David Friedberg: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. Yeah, if there was one catastrophe that they would need to go into debt for it. so 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.

2:01:10David Friedberg: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 then. california i paid that like i'm a big big chunk of that check that money um not a big chunk but i've 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 uh 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 public employees.

2:01:55David Friedberg:But the system whereby, you know, there's a voter block that says, hey, like we need to get more. And then the system is created that doesn't actually solve the problems that need to be solved. And the people that ask 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. 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 by the way you can look at um the uh food stamp program if you type in uh food stamp program spending per year over time watch what happened in 2019 blow your mind um we can come back to that one but uh this is exactly the problem today i would argue i and i've tried to do the math on this if you take the number of people that work for the federal government state government or local government city government plus the number of people that work for contractors oh hello yeah so here's the food stamp program as an example and so you could argue like hey like people were it was a crisis we needed to increase spending so we drove up the food stamp program it's a hundred billion dollars a year now um and that that's program doubled from 2010 yeah and um roughly holy shit snap spending increased 60x from 1969 to 2022 and it's a hundred billion dollars per year roughly 1.4 percent of total federal so 60 to 70 percent of people on the food stand program which costs 100 billion a year 60 to 70 percent are obese clinically obese and oh that are on the food that are on the food stamp program right and close to 20 billion of the 100 billion a year is spent on soda fucking hell oh that's a one-fifth one-fifth one-fifth of the money is going to coca cola so it starts like from a good place like hey it's actually started during the great depression it was like can we get newtonic on snap actually that'd be a great way to raise the valuation of the company there you go that'd be fucking fantastic yeah but it started as a um you know an emergency program much like the emergency one percent income tax it started as an emergency program to help uh people during the great depression that were actually starving and it was like let's give them bread give them milk give them eggs help them survive what's that uh i think it's a oh and sorry i'll give you my statistic today if you add up federal state local government employees, plus all the contractors for the government, plus all the people that live off of a retirement check or a welfare support check.

2:04:39David Friedberg:So all the people that are living off government checks, it's about nearly half the US population. Either working for or being supported by. Wow. So we may be too far gone. That's kind of where democracy is. 51. And now, so now think about that person. If you're, and I'm not saying that person, like if you're collecting a check every month from the government, you will never vote to have that check go down. You're living on those checks. So we're now, so this is how it maybe eats itself a little bit, right? So you're now in a system where like, will people actually want to say, so you asked why Mom Donnie got elected.

2:05:15David Friedberg: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, the wave we're in and tech is ai is the boogeyman right now right like so there's there's also this like you always got to pick a fear like the japanese are coming the russians are coming climate change is coming there's always something is coming ai is coming that's the fear and it works um and you know bernie sanders like pounding the table saying data centers need to be stopped we got to stop all data centers this week so you know um i think we have a choice i still believe in agency i still believe everyone can look in the mirror and look at the situation and realize that more government is not going to stop the problem created by too much government and uh this this this is just such a crazy juxtaposition and while we're in this exponential technology curve of and this abundance curve that we're on 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?

2:06:24David Friedberg: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 we're all gonna have a microwave in our kitchen you know i always tell people the analogy uh if you pull up uh um 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 gonna like go to the moon there was a ride called the rocket to the moon you go to the moon and back you move 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.

2:07:26David Friedberg:It was like the future and people were like, mind blown, 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 a Star Tours was a robot that like made the mistake. It's a navigator robot. And of course the navigator robot has to screw up. So you veer off course and nearly crash in an asteroid. 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.

2:08:00David Friedberg:And him and his organic band destroy all the robots. Or apocalyptic. And so, like, you know, we've kind of gotten into this very pessimistic view. And I think, like, 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 um you know taken care of and fundamentally creating a burden to these bigger social systems these governmental type systems people um i think might change their view i'm hopeful that's why we're having this conversation but like that's the sort of thing that i think we need to be doing is like showing people all the amazing shit that's happening and how much it's 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 um it's so crazy that we would you know do that like you know there's this whole story about germany fought against nuclear energy and then their energy costs spiked and now they have to buy natural gas from russia and just put carbon into the atmosphere which is what they were trying to fight against in the first place yeah yeah i uh i wonder whether people being more hopeful would mean that they would vote in a less fear-based way that's right and uh that anybody that's talking about hope if you feel fearful sounds like they're dismissive of the problems that you're facing yeah that seems like the dynamic that's yeah that's right it's like i'm not empathizing with your pain yeah and if i a lot of the time by the way if i empathize with your pain we have to figure out an enemy responsible for your pain them them i think it was 2012 that votes went from voting for the party you like to voting against the party that you don't yeah i mean there's all these videos now i don't we don't need to pull these up but obviously like all the people that were like we got to go attack iran we got to attack iran and then when trump did it or we got to go get maduro trump does it it's like well trump did it we got to all be against it like i don't know what happened you saw the flip-flop with the vaccine yeah when it It was Trump's vaccine or it was Sanders vaccine.

2:10:12And each side was like, I'm fucked.

2:10:15David Friedberg:Wait, no, I'm not. 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. Yeah. And that's politics. Regardless of whether it's good or bad. Yeah. Yeah. David Friedberg. Yeah. Thank you, gentlemen. You're great. I appreciate all the work you do. I appreciate it, bro. Thank you for having me. Fuck yeah. All right. Goodbye, everybody. Dude. Yes. Great. Thank you.

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