Taylor Swift AI Deep Fakes, AGI, Sam Altman & the Latest in Tech w/ Salim Ismail | EP #84

29:00Okay. Now the board APYOT club is still with like something like a billion dollars in a year and a half. I've, I took some lessons from my guru Michael Jonson who's been guiding me through this and he said, the minute you get landed, you get ape coin, whatever sell it. So I've paid back all my initial investment twice over and I'm still sitting on my board ape and it's a fascinating community to be a part of to see what's going on. Now the reason I'm excited about NFTs is that you can program the NFTs. So for me digital currencies and crypto currencies are not interesting because they're digital.

29:37The US dollar is digital and has been for quite a while. The fact is I can program the money and I can't program a dollar bill. Right? So imagine I buy your sweater that you're wearing. This looks like a very nice sweater. Okay. Thank you. We have price of $100. Okay. And a system in the future can say, right, I'm going to send you the $100 in crypto. It holds it in escrow. You know now, now know that I've sent the money. You send me the sweater. I receive a sign for the FedEx receipt and then it releases is the money too. So we can programmatically manage that transaction and no fraud is possible in that transaction, which is kind of an incredible thing for two parties that don't know each other.

30:18Right? So now we can scale. This is a hugely important point. Without a without a central. Without a middle man. Like, yeah, and if you if it's worth it, I can I can touch on the Byzantine general's problem for which for me is the magical piece of work. I remember in 2011 or 2012 when you started talking about Bitcoin. I mean, we were on stage together all the time for a singular university running the executive programs and running the GSP program. And I remember the first time exactly where I was sitting when you went over the Byzantine Generals problem and explained Bitcoin to me. and the only problem was we need our time machine to go back and say Peter just put you know 500 bucks in.

31:05You know I didn't do it. I know you didn't. I did it a bit later. Otherwise you'd be buying dinner next time. Probably be buying dinner anyway but the the there are you know the enthusiast you know for example I watched real -time the Ethereum ICO yeah and there's a piece of me that's like put through a thousand bucks into this why not like go for it, right? And there's another piece of me going, what is this thing? I don't get my head around this this touring complete system. I and my brain was just not the size of italics and it wasn't young enough, right? There's some bylaw. You have to be able to 25 years old understand.

31:41Well, well, there's there's no, I think if you're in your 25 to have not seen all the things go wrong that people you have you become more dubious and also the agility and the what the hell factor. Well, let me let me flip it the other way. Take somebody that's a banker and they've been they're a 60 years old and they've been in banking for you know 45 years or 40 years okay. Their brain is so entrained and all the neurons are so entrained on fiat currency etc. when you show them Bitcoin they literally get hives. They can't go right and this is the we all have that to some extent. You know, we had that famous interaction about SU a few years ago I mean an offside and you said hey uh And I asked the question, you know, we should think about what would SU look like if we had to recreate it today And it was about eight nine years and you said okay and the board said okay go think about that What would it look like and I tried four times to do that exercise and I failed miserably Because we were so successful in what we did initially that my brain kept going back to that right?

32:47And so that's clearly the wrong answer because Facebook didn't really exist and e -commerce sites didn't exist and MOOCs didn't exist and there was no, we would do things incredibly differently and it's incredibly difficult to step outside your old paradigm. This is why psychedelics are interesting. It gives you a accelerated path to break through some of these old mental and structural cognitive traps that we have. So we're recording this on the day after November 8th after the US midterm elections. Yeah. We can talk about a system that has been sort of ossified and stuck in that's democracy.

33:28So we're voting through a representative democracy. Yeah. And we're doing it in using a system that's hundreds of years old. And I'm just sitting here thinking about how archaic the process is. You know, it's better than any place else almost, but still archaic. What do you think about the future of democracy here, pal? Where to start? Okay. Okay. So important for people to just hear a couple of things. I have lived in eight different countries for more than a year each. I live from India to Europe to the US to California, all California and Florida, which is a separate world of its own. And so I've seen different systems across the wide spectrum of socialism to pretend democracy in India versus here, et cetera.

34:32And I think the US Constitution is the most important document created in the last half, thousand years because it insurines individual rights into that and then dictates to Congress and Senate to pass laws around it. Almost all individual rights, not almost all. But at least it makes an attempt for the first time in history to do that. Now, what I get, go bananas over with the conservatives today is that they have this concept of rationalism and they want to go back to what the founding fathers thought and that's actually completely wrong because they intended it to be a living document that should be amended from time to time because they recognize and I think of the Constitution as the software that runs the country right you have to upgrade your software now and then times change values change you know slavery is an obvious example etc so so having said all of that the challenge that we have with democracy is the metabolism of decision making and change in the democracy is too slow for the change of technology.

35:34The pressure. Almost all policy is defensive and reactive, right? Something happens and we kind of go, oh my god, you know, drones or Bitcoin and what do we do about it? And we try and tamp down on it. And in policy, the FAA with getting vertical flight right. Zero G flight and space flight. I mean, the reality is most laws are in place to maintain the status quo and to keep the primary players as the primary players. And any revolution, any breakthrough fundamentally disrupts the existing socio -economic structure that exists and puts everybody who's funding the politicians in danger. And let me do a shout out here, right?

36:17You and Steven did something incredible in abundance and bold. where you recognize that people see something new as danger because they've never seen it before. And it triggers the limit, the... The amygdala, yeah. The amygdala, right? And then you go, oh my god, we should autonomous cars, oh my god, it might kill somebody that has banned the car, right? As Brad Templeton says, people don't want to be killed by robots, they'd much rather be killed by drunk people, right? And that's a terrible response to a new idea that clearly has incredible value. So we kind of block the entrance of new ideas, then we open that tap slowly, and it takes 20 years to get the value of that technology.

37:01And that cycle we have to break. And we were better at it than we used to be, but it's still too goddamn slow with all of the 20 Gutenberg moments that we talk about are your asteroid impacts that are chains of the world, the advent of CRISPR and crypto and solar energy, et cetera. We have to get better at implementing this. So my view on democracy is big nation state democracies are going to fail. I think what succeeds is micro democracies at a city state level. I mean, so this is just biology and his. I disagree with biology on the network state in a couple of important ways. Okay. It's brilliant thinking.

37:46It's very important thinking. Okay. But I think when the idea of city states and the rise of city states came to me via Paul Sappho from Singularity. Sure. Well, Forecaster Futurist. And he talked about this in detail 10 years ago. And he got up on stage and said, I don't expect the US to exist as a country in 30 years. Well, pretty provocative statement. Pretty provocative statement. So everybody, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. He was getting off stage and we had to like yank him back and go you can't you can't make that comment and walk off And he said if look at the discourse that's happening the countries literally pulling itself apart And he gave us a couple of really interesting nuggets.

38:25I'll give you two of them one was Everybody in the world knows who the mayor of New York City is Nobody in the world knows who the governor of New York state is Even New Yorkers don't know the governor right? And so there's this importance of the city and he gave a second anecdote when Schwarzenegger was governor the Dalai Lama wanted to visit Hollywood and visit LA and George Bush said to him, please don't receive the Dalai Lama, it's causing massive problems with the Chinese, right? And the sitting governor of California said that the sitting Republican president and they're both from the same party, screw you, I'm receiving the Dalai Lama, because it's important the mic constituents that he comes.

39:06And he's like, that tells you that this is a gap that's increasing. Yeah. And we're moving to city states as the future. When you think about Brexit or Trump, it wasn't left versus right, it's urban versus rural. Completely. Brexit was completely London versus the rest of the country. Yeah. And you look at the map from yesterday, right? The election map, all the urban centers are blue and everything else is red, right? it's completely, that's the fundamental tension of the 21st century. So in that model, city states, micro -democracies work, national democracies don't work because they're too slow and it's too hard to bring in whole population along, and then you have fake news, and all the other things, difficulties in this.

39:51So India, Brazil, the US, all amests. You know, one of the conversations you and I have had as well is which countries are going to be best suited for an AI -enabled future. Right? So communism did not work when it was humans actually trying to decide how much supply and demand would be done in different places because it was the market place that enabled incredible rise of capitalism. And full disclosure, listen, I'm a libertarian capitalist. I love capitalism. I'm an entrepreneur. It's my art form. I love starting companies and I of democracy and all of that, having said that, if we're getting to human level AI by 2029, I just had a podcast with Ray and Ray Kurzweil and Ray Sticks very much do his 2029 date.

40:44We're going to have human level AI, which means 2030, we have super human level AI and it doesn't slow down after that. There's no on -off switch and no velocity meter. It is on a tear. And so what happens if the leadership of a city state or nation says to the AI, listen, come on over, be my partner, you run the situation over here. You know, that might be an interesting future for running a nation, but it's not going to work in a democracy where no AI is going to wait for, do you get a human opinion? It's going to say, no, no, no. This is the answer. I've done five billion simulations and it's come out the exact same every time.

41:29So just, I don't care about your wet wear opinion on the situation. This is what you should do. Yes. What do you think about that? So, oh God, we're going to start. Okay. So, I publicly disagree with the idea of the AI is dangerous. I agree with you. I think AI is the single greatest tool we have for solving the world's biggest problems. Yes. And I think when you have if you get AIs at a human level and you end up with AIs that are conscious or whatever I think they look at human beings they transcend us and they go oh nice people over here And and a nice little species over here And they go off and the best move the best representation.

42:07I think of this is the movie her her. Yes, her was amazing Right, they got bored with us and they last right the guy days an AI and he's falls in love with of course a scarlet your hands and I wish she could make him do that better. But okay, he dates an AFLs of love. And after a while, the AI breaks up with him. Why? Because she can now interact with 10 million other AIs from real time at scale. And he's one little limited brain talking about what he ate for breakfast, right? And so I think what will happen is the speed of evolution will move so fast that it'll just go pff, and they're gone. And they'll live in the internet, et cetera.

42:41I remember talking to Dan Berry, who is our robotics. Yes, our astronaut. not. We asked him a question in one of the sessions of, is there a system today? Because the challenge with AI and consciousness is when will you know? Because we don't have a definition for consciousness. We don't have a task for it. Right? You look like yourself were. So I attribute self -awareness to you. Thank you. I think I'm self -aware about my wife Lily disagrees. It's like, where do you even start the conversation? And so we asked the question to Dan. He's watched a ton of animals in labs because NASA does experiments with free floating animals, et cetera.

43:19And he said, huh, I think the, I think a frog is where it is the boundary point, really frog. He goes, in his opinion, a frog is sophisticated enough just about to know that, oh, I'm a frog. Look at dog, definitely knows it's a dog, right? like a dolphin definitely knows it's a dolphin. In Dan's opinion, Mosquito doesn't know it's a Mosquito. Okay. It's just not a tomato one around. But the level of a frog kind of gets you to the boundary condition. Oh, I'm a frog. Okay, so that's one observation that the level of a frog is the kind of level of consciousness. The awareness of the thing. Okay. Now, it won't be that hard for an AI to get to that level, right?

44:00Now, so we asked him, is there a system today out in the world that has the requisite inputs out with processing where it might suddenly go, oh, I'm a system and generate self awareness. And he went, huh, let me think about that. So he goes out for a day and comes back and goes, I have an answer. I thought about the different systems in the world. And his answer was traffic systems. Okay. And his opinion, traffic systems have the input, output feedback loops and the processing that one day it might suddenly go, Oh, I'm a traffic system, right? And that begs two questions. Okay? One, what would it do?

44:35And B, what would we, how would we find out that it did that? Like we would not know. We have no mechanism for deciding this. So I tend to be less paranoid about the AI side when I think about the her vector. It's gonna be utterly fascinating to see where this goes. And there's so much unbelievable benefit that will come, I think it's incredible. Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. I'll tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebotomist come to my home to draw bloods to understand what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done, so I ended up co -founding a company.

45:16That sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family and I'd love it for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforce .com, backslashpeter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode. So going back again to the question of democracy and AI, talk to me about, you know, in the future we have human level AI. Yeah. How do you feel about turning over leadership to an AI and saying these are the things that matter to our society?

46:02I mean, let the humans sort of set the objectives like we want maximize happiness. We want maximize health. We want maximize whatever and run the nation state for us. Let's use an analogy which is the Google energy conserving AI that they apply to their buildings, right? So they deployed a machine learning intelligence to analyze all the sensors and lights and energy usage and said how we want to optimize for Energy conservation and the AI because it's got access to so many different inputs outputs calculation capabilities was able to what dropped 40 % their energy needs So much massive amount of human being can't do that because it can't monitor this stuff in real time, et cetera So when you think about what AI's could do if you said hey maximize for or conserving human life, you basically take the Constitution, the US Constitution.

46:52So you go generate the policies that will and the legal structures that will maximize for these things. And I think you come out with something quite incredible where the AI could, so I think that's one side of it which is policy and regulatory generation. You could create policies around this. Okay. I'll give you one that I would love to throw at this AI, which is stop signs. Okay. On a fuel we waste coming to a full stop at from stop sign and the brake power and the energy wasted of a million cars coming to stop. Nobody's a stop sign. No humans, no dogs, no car. I mean, you could know you can have imaging.

47:33It's not that hard. It's not that hard, right? You need two sensors, one at the stop sign and one in the car and you're done. And we should really solve that problem. And yeah, I could kind of go, oh, frickin' just go do that. And so this is the autonomous car solution, right? Where cars are actually able to drive closer to each other at higher speeds and have far more efficiency. That's right. And we'll get there, but it's the idea, first of all, that we're turning over decision making capability to an AI in a car. And then we've been turning it over to an AI in a government and leadership, right?

48:07because I listen if you believe and I think you do and I do that we are going to reach a human level AI. I would I personally would rather have if I knew the AI was able to maximize force set of human desires and safety and health and all of those things, I'd much rather have an incorruptible AI that isn't influenced by the color of my skin or my gender or my age or anything, yeah, be making decisions. So I would, it's very, for me, it's very simple, okay. We have Asimov's three laws of robotics. Yep. Okay. You basically say that the AI, these are constraints or something similar, right? Don't kill or allow a human being to kill, et cetera, etc.

49:00and then do the instructions that we give you as long as they don't interfere with the first two. Okay. And then you trust. Now we trust our existing human beings with those things. We trust our police not to kill people, not always successfully. I'd much rather have an AI policeman than a real policeman who's got all his regular biases. He's having a fight with his wife at home, he had an army wound and it was shot out there for as a trigger response. You have no idea what they're going through. And the stress of being on the job with guns everywhere, right? And then basically the AI should be able to say something like, for sake, why do you need guns, get rid of all the guns?

49:40Yeah, and you could make some good decisions that way. You and I see the same on those policies. So when do you think we will have, have this, let's go to the to the Ray Kurzweil 2029 prediction to second, human level AI by 2020 -29, we're seeing the rapid rise of large language models, GPT -3, GPT -4 is coming, got deep -mind, made its announcement about Gato, I think the tweet was game over, AGI, artificial general intelligence is coming. What's your thinking on this? So let's really be careful not to trigger the amygdala. Because the first thing that happens is people go, oh my god, this bad, it must be bad, etc.

50:21Okay, let's notice let's take as a An important principle raised commentary that technology is the most important is is a major driver of productivity in progress in the world Actually technology might be the only major driver of progress. We've got we're not getting more intelligent political systems aren't becoming better So it um I would argue with that. Okay. How would you argue with it? So if you look at you're all of the stuff that you track on abundance right? Yeah. Poverty and mortality and maternal mortality and from mortality. The big challenge with technology is how do you get the promise without the peril?

50:58Right? Okay. You want to have fire that will heat your house and not use it to burn down your roof. We've overall done a pretty good job of it. We're still here. We're still here. We're still here and we're overall pretty like thriving. You know, I'm I so love the positivity framing you have in abundance and all your talks because it's so important for people to see the real reality that we're better off today than we ever have been in the history of the world. By why is it that you want a huge factor, right? Just go back 500 years ago, somebody goes off, a husband goes off to do something and never comes back because he got killed by a bear.

51:34And the wife never knows no idea if he's ever coming back because he run off or he's been killed. Kids are being raised now. What would you do? Do you re -marry or not? I mean, there's not million chaotic things like this. I have a very banal example that I like to use for today's world. People go, oh my god, technology, we know, et cetera, et cetera, cell phones are bad. I go, you know, if you're waiting, if you're a couple and you're waiting for your babies to just sit or just show up 20 years ago and they're late, you have no idea. Are they coming? Are they not coming? Should we cancel the restaurant reservation?

52:07There's all this consternation and uncertainty and unknowing around what's happening with the babysitter because you can't do much until the damn person arrives, right? And now we have infinite knowledge. They're running three minutes late and ways. You're tracking their Uber, right? We have exact, and we can say call the restaurant. And we have people don't recognize the unbelievable piece of mind that a million examples like that give us in the form of technology. And so now we accelerate that radically. And I think when you look at AI, is able to look at the complexity of policy making and say, listen, Mr.

52:44Mayor, you're allocating resources in the wrong way. You could achieve this by doing this, this, this. I think initially it starts off as a guide by the side and a reference check. And over time, people go, it's great that you want to make that policy if you check with your AI yet. Okay. Before we got to babysitters and policy changes, we were talking about what made the world better. And I said, yes, 100 % in technology, we haven't been improving ourselves cognitively or whatever you said you disagreed. But putting that aside, technology is making the world rapidly better at a rate that is staggering.

53:20The problem is, of course, and I'm going to do my rant that I have to, which is the crisis news network, the all -in -the -can -use, bombarding us constantly with every murder, every problem on the planet. that we do actually have to 20 devices in Asia. Yes, over and over and over again. Yes. 10 times an hour. So when are we going to see this AI that is going to help us govern? And when are we going to see it accepted in society? Is there a pivotal moment that people are going to say, yeah, I think I'm going to allow it to govern Yeah, because let me use an example. Yeah, sure. OK. So let's use a real example, pandemic hits, and there's a bunch of news and stories and misinformation about masks.

54:12Should be more of a mask or not, right? Massive like consternation, governor DeSantis over here in Florida is like, masks never work, chuck the masks, I mean, accept, accept, accept, OK? Now, I would have a really interesting, it would be really interesting use case to have an AI. Jarvis called it. Yes. It's a good Jarvis. Let's take it with Jarvis. The Jarvis goes, hey, I've done the clinical, I've researched this already, I've scoured the web for this, I've looked at it. The clinical trials and the experiments are very clear. If you were a mask, you prevent 75 % infection outward. And somebody else wearing a mask is able to stop 25 % of inward infection.

55:00The combination gives you 90 % effectiveness. But at least we're a mask to prevent outward. Right. That's very clear. That there's no contributing that evidence. A better evidence emerges. Great. The problem is that we are, we've used to operate policy and so on on an evidentiary basis. Well, even worse than that, we would ignore the evidence and state what was most politically efficacious for us. Exactly. And almost always, you go to the, you're affecting the person's limbic system. Yeah, fair. They're taking away your freedom. Yeah, fair about freedom, right? Fair and scarcity. And I love getting into arguments with Republicans on this.

55:44And I'm not doming them with harp on Republicans. But everybody sits there and goes, we need freedom. Like if I drive three miles over the speed limit, I get pulled over by a cop in the US. Where's your freedom now? Because it's a free country. In Europe or Canada, I never even see a police car. Never. Like you want freedom? Let me drive a little faster for God's sake, right? So there's such bullshit around the kind of the pat generalisms like freedom or what ever. And goes bad, just as bad on the left and its own way. So going back to the question, when are we going to see this system enabled and adopted?

56:27Now, humans don't adopt new systems until they're 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper, and the switching cost is worth it. So I think we're almost there. So think about this. I have my mobile phone, and I'm sitting in Miami and a hurricane's coming. You are and it is right and I can say Hurricane Nicole tracker Show me when the hurricane will hit Miami Beach, right, and the the AI says to me It's coming at tonight and that'll be the danger point and maybe that's when you move your car to the second level of the car park Or whatever in cases of storm surge is there gonna be storm surge? I don't know but the but the AI will know Sure right now.

57:10So you take one step further. We're only one hop away from the from an AI tracking our behavior and looking at our World of activity and going hey, he's sitting in Miami his cars parked on a ground floor thing There's a storm search coming. He will need to move this car by X or or bear yet I will move your car for you, you know, take over and optimize protect me It's it's definitely take care of me is right and and we're there. I'll give you another example I wake up one morning and my left big toe is blue. And I'm like, why the hell is my toe blue? No blood circulation, what the hell happened?

57:46What do I do? I look it up on Google and research it myself. I figure out what the condition is, some Latin sounding name. And this is how you treat it. And literally you will print that out, take it to a doctor, and the doctor will go, what the hell is this? And how did you figure all this out? Because we now have better understanding and we can analyze all these conditions better than a doctor can. and self -treat for the vast majority, right? So if I just put an AI, go, AI, my toes blue, what the hell do I do? And it scours around and comes back. Even better, or my bodily sensors will go, hey dude, your toes about to turn blue, please do these three things to prevent that.

58:24So we're like right there, and race at something very profound in one of the recent talks. He said, look, we talk about implemented hardware that can connect. But your phone can iterate much more effectively. So all you need is the communication capability between you and the phone And we're just about there between voice and other sensors. We're just about there. So So I give it a year you give it a year before what year? A year before you have a Jarvis type AI that can handle initially basic things We do calendaring now with AI pretty well. All right, so let me let me piece this down for everybody listening because it's It's really important.

59:06I say to all the CEOs that I mentor, listen, they're gonna be two kinds of companies by end of this decade. Those companies fully utilizing AI and those at a business. And I think it's that black and white. So let's begin with Ray's prediction, 2029 for human level AI. Do you believe that is correct? But I would have been answer. You think it's gonna be sooner or later. No, I disagree because I disagree with the premise. Let me explain what I mean by that dude. It's a hard to answer from you I'm sorry You can't just take another thing like a path thing like human it lovely I the problems we don't know what AI well intelligences.

59:47Okay, right? So there's about a dozen facets of intelligence. There's spatial intelligence Yes, many many different different Eastern concept of presence or awareness That's a whole other form of spiritual intelligence We have our we with the IQ test you measure two things speed of thought and the ability to match concepts across frameworks. But you don't measure any of the other things. So what the hell do you mean by intelligence is number one question. And the second question, which is why go even doubly more crazy, is what would you, you know, we talked about the technological singularities intelligence machine intelligence overtaking human intelligence.

1:00:23So number one, I've an issue with what do you mean by intelligence? Number two, the minute I can prescriptively describe a task, A robot or AI is going to do much better job of it anyway. So it's a lot of sequer. So when you say human level AI, I come back to you and go what aspect of humanity are you talking about. Now if I can have an AI that makes me more present, that's really valuable or rats around my emotional biases. By the way, I want that AI, we have all these cognitive biases that we don't actually notice that we're hitting. Like when I look at somebody or I hear something an AI that is simply saying Peter, you're being biased about here's the actual data and the way you should see it.

1:01:05I mean most people turn it off I think but think about that. How far away from that? We're literally this not a difficult thing to To do to track my language and go look you've got a positivity bias You think everything's gonna be so goddamn rosy. You need to tone them Well, you and I don't have that we're not We're obviously unbiased and we're not techno optimists in the least. You know, when you see things that can transform the world for better, how can you not get enthusiastic? It's the World of Partners machine expirons. The avatar expirons, like a music. We just had it one in Long Beach team out of Germany won the $10 million from A &A airlines.

1:01:48So we've got human level AI however you define multi -dimensional human level AI coming. And if you've been trying to speak about Avatar, you've obviously been tracking Optimus at Tesla bot, right? And there's other companies like Beyond Me and Sanctuary. So we're going to have Boston Dynamics. So Boston, that makes me look sort of large scale. These other companies are focusing on human labor marketplace, right? Being able to create a bot for, Elon says, 20 ,000 or less, less than the price of a car that can be available to do labor for you. So I wanna transition, I wanna talk about that, but I wanna transition as well to the idea of universal basic income.

1:02:38Cause I've been thinking about this a lot in the world of abundance. Yeah, can I just cover to say final comment on the robot side before we move to UBI? Well, yeah, let's talk about robots first. Okay. And then my premise is that we're going to need to have AI and robotics change the global economy and then we can afford UBI. But let's, okay. Yes, totally agree. Let's talk about robots. Okay, robots. So I think it's coming for sure to have a general robot to can do household tasks and work tasks, et cetera. But I think it's further away than people think. And I'll use the analogy of autonomous cars, right?

1:03:18Maybe the biggest predictive failure that we had at senior ladies, we thought autonomous cars would be there in five years. Because at Temple Hill was just. Because the technology is there. Like it's there. And his concept was workably said, look, you don't have to be, you don't have human intelligence to drive a car. you need a horse level intelligence to navigate around. We kind of have that. The problem is that it turns out to be deceptively difficult because you're often driving and driving around a pothole or there's a bike and who's overtaking another bike and so you need to you watch that and you see that there's like a million little adaptive situations that you drive that you don't realize and trying to counter for all of those without a sensor -based road system is very difficult.

1:04:03I think once you have sensors in the roads, then driving becomes autonomous driving as a piece of cake. Right? And the sensors are big. I disagree with that by the way. I mean, I think our eyes are just two human eyes, not radar, not light, or not ultrasound, just two human eyes are what enables a human driver to drive. So I dispute this with experience because I've now driven a Tesla four times from Toronto to Miami and back. So I've done something like 8 ,000 miles in the Tesla and autonomous driving mode. Okay. Listen, I'm not saying that autopilot on Tesla is anywhere near ready, but I do believe that we're going to be able to get there.

1:04:53It's a data processing issue. It's not a data collection issue. Yep, it could be. It could be. Right, so if it's not data, let me give you one more. We don't need sensors in the road if it's not a data collection issue. Okay, fair enough. But you need a ton more data processing and a lot more use cases and interpretive things, right? For example, I would normally overtake the bike, but my wife's in the car and she gets a bit nervous, so I'm going to take, hold it back a notch. Right? There's a million little nuances that we don't take into. But let me let me go make the point in a slightly different way.

1:05:27Okay. One obvious thing for a home robot is folding laundry. Yes. And we've struggled mightily with a robot that can fold laundry. You do remember the videos of Scott Hassan's Will Garage. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It can do a t -shirt. Yes. But really hard to do anything else. Right? Like it's it's it's it turns out even I'm it's typical for me to do anything I'll give you a third one, which is the vacuum robot, right? Yes. People buy a shark robot or a room bomb. Yeah. And it's great in like 20 % situations. But the minute you have a curved stool with a base that's a little odd, it doesn't work. And you end up spending more time arranging the furniture so the room can do the then just vacuuming yourself and people kind of go after, well, I'm just going to wait for myself.

1:06:14Wait, you're telling me that that's a problem, but governing is going to be here right here from now. because because government because it's so language oriented right and I can read a policy out paper and make way more sense of the human being can. Right? Like show me any congressman or senator that's actually read the 800 pays legislation on any building actually. Well, it's not good. Let's not go there. You need to kind of get your head around that. Yeah. By the way, it's the same thing for the same thing for medicine. I think the daily number of medical publications is like 7 ,000 a day. You tell me how many your doctor has read.

1:06:51The Daniel Kraft one is there are 2 ,500 research papers on cancer published per day. Yeah. Right? So if you're a can if you have a cancer doctor, you can ask him as he read the 2 ,000 fabric. He came out yesterday. No, obviously you need AI right there to to think about it. I just want to make one last point and let's move on to UVI because I think it's so important. Yeah. You know, the part that I find most interesting and fascinating around this is I use the example of PageRank, right? Google's AI that's scanning web pages. And it's developing a unique intelligence. For those you don't know, PageRank was the algorithm that Larry Page came up with while he was a grad student at Stanford that Scott Hassan wrote and then he and Sergey created into Google was called page.

1:07:40Right. And scour as a million web pages and scores them and tags them and categorize them. PageRank has developed its own kind of unique intelligence of how to scour the billions of web pages in real time around the world. That's an orthogonal effect and complementary to human intelligence. It's not replicative of human intelligence. We are localized sense -making machines. So, I think of AI will be for the vast vast majority of use cases will be complementary. And that should take a lot of the fear out of it. They're not there to replace human beings. They're there to amplify an augment, just like my phone augments, my humanity, I can video with my son, I can project empathy around the world, etc., etc.

1:08:24So I think AI's are going to massively add to productivity and labor automation in a magical way coming. And the general thesis leading to UBI is that we've been increasing productivity with mushroom machines for thousands of years. And now we get to a point where the productivity gains of technology allow us not to have to work for a living. Yeah, it's so let me hit on a couple things on on on humanoid robots. I mean, I love the fact that Optimus is a humanoid, meaning five fingers, two legs, you know, bipedal, and it fits and operates in our human built environment. Door knobs, car pedals, all those things.

1:09:09And if, in fact, he's able to achieve it, and the thesis is going to be using AI and sensors and capabilities built for Tesla's autonomous driving, it's a massive market. I mean, how many car manufacturers are there? You know, well over a hundred and there are many humanoid robot manufacturers are there like none. And if you can get it, I mean, I want one. Would you put one in your in your closet? Uh, sure. I would love to. You know, you want to be in a special, especially if you lease it out, right? So, uh, think about, think of a $20 ,000 car. What's a car at least going to be like 400 bucks a month.

1:09:49So for 400 bucks a month, you've got a slave robot. Now, be nice to it because the world, you know, the world by overlords are coming. But for a hundred bucks a month, you've got something that does anything you want, any time you want. I mean, that's the vision. Yeah. And it's going to... So, it solves a labor issue. Now, we're living in a time today in which the numbers, when I last looked at them a few weeks ago, we have twice as many job openings as we have people looking for jobs. Yeah. Now, that will change. But the notion is most people don't take work because they love the work. People who are cleaning up hotel rooms and cleaning toilets or working at a cash register, they didn't dream about doing that.

1:10:41They're doing that because they want income for their family, they want insurance for their family. So, is there a future in which the work that no one wants going back to Dan Berry, It's dull, dangerous, or dirty. Remember those three? That's right. Can we get robots to do that? Well, I think we've been doing that anyway, like mining robots and agricultural robots, right? Yeah. Shopped up or you're talking? 98 % of human population was employed in agriculture. And that was like 1 .8%. Yep. Because we've automated the hell out of it. And because you don't need a strawberry picker as an apple picker as you have machines to do it all.

1:11:19and that is difficult in house. So I think that definitely will be automating our assembly lines have done a lot of that for us. I think what's more powerful is things get to cognitive abilities where people can handle most day -to -day task call centers and routing call centers, et cetera, et cetera. It was almost there. Yeah, we're almost there. And I love the writing software even is being automated pretty fast right now. I love the, there's a great example of bank tellers. around this. It used to be that when we created ATM machines, everybody freaked out and said, oh my god, we'll have millions of bank tellers out of the work.

1:11:56What will we do with all the bank tellers? Right? And so this is massive concern about robots taking all the jobs. Which the first article that appeared about robots taking all the jobs appeared in 1964, by the way. I love the story. I love the story. Can you tell it a different way? Go ahead. Tell it. Okay, so there was this letter written by a group of Nobel laureates and top scientists sent to the president saying, technical automation is going to destroy the banking industry. And that letter hit the desk of Lyndon B. Johnson, right? People think about it as a recent event, but no, it occurred, and like you said, 1964, they're about, and it was, people concerned about replacing room filled, mostly with women copying ledger to ledger to ledger.

1:12:43And we have more bankers and accountants than we've ever had on the planet. Yeah, so the second half of that is people got concerned what will happen with all the bank workers if you automate banking. The actual outcome was it because of cost of building and running a branch drops so dramatically the bank's just created a ton more branches. And the number of bank workers has not changed at all. So it turns out and we We have multiple examples of this. The fact trees in Germany are all automated. There's nobody on the factory floors and it's not like unemployment is dropped. We just move people to hire a value work.

1:13:18So it turns out when we automate, we don't lose jobs. We increase capacity. And we increase capacity. We have that much more economic activity and productivity. And the idea behind UBI is you get to a tipping point where you can now people don't have to work for a living. Yes. Yes, this is, so UBI stands for universal basic income and it's the idea that you get a check and you can do with that money what you want. If you live in Alaska, you have UBI ready. The permanent fund, Alaska takes all of its oil money and it makes, you know, it distributes a portion of that to everybody. I don't know what the, I don't know what the, the, the check size is used to be like $5 ,000 a year per person.

1:13:58If you live in the Middle East, there are equivalents of that in Saudi and the Emirates. I was having dinner with Reed Hoffman two days ago, and I asked him about UBI. And I said, what do you think of it? And, you know, who should I be speaking to about? We've had this conversation. I want to bring someone talking on the subject at abundance 360 this year. And he said he's been, he sent me an email yesterday saying, I've been asking around regarding UBI. He said, most smart people think that the numbers are still off and could be solved if we get the kind of massive increase in productivity that we hope for.

1:14:35And so if we've got robotic labor and AI labor, the first time I heard something around this was Jeff Bezos said in the future, we should tax the robots. So if you replace a job, a labor job that's normally held by a human with a robot, then you should tax the robot and that part of that money should go to pay the human who's replaced. It was something like that. I've heard something similar if you automate truck driving, then you tax the truck driving companies and that goes to pay for the drivers to find some of the other work over a period of time. It turns out the financials are very close to working because the key is the key and let's talk about two issues around UBI.

1:15:24One is people get fat and lazy and don't want to do anything and that's the people worry about socialism and your being that's the good that's the concern that's the concern used the money for beer and the second concern as we can't pay for it and we'll have to raise taxes and this is a stupid idea there's the two now increasing productivity will solve for one and the second one is actually solved because of the 14 major experiments that we've seen around UBI it turns out if you find the right balance where you give people enough to survive but not be happy. That's the level, right? So you give people enough that they can make it and they don't have to work, but it's not left that they want to buy the new TV.

1:16:06They want to buy the nicer car. So then you have a still have a thriving economy and a job market, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, they're going to use they're going to use the money to further their education better training and go and get the job. I mean, what's the number? 40 % of the US cannot put $400 together in an emergency today. That's insane. That's the most ridiculous commentary I've ever heard for the richest country in the world, right? It's a travesty. So I think the UBI side will solve for a huge amount around that. And the case studies are, that we have a lot of data now, entrepreneurship explodes under this model because people find their passion following.

1:16:44Yeah. And you made a point. It's important. And these studies have been done in the US, in Canada, in parts of Africa, parts of Europe, where a government has given a population of people who are at the substance level, if you would. Yeah. It was done in Stockton, California. Yeah. The mayor of Tubbs gave $500 a month to a population of a few thousand people. And 99 % of it, of them, used that money to do further their careers. Yeah. and one percent used it for you know beer and tobacco. Amazing. I mean, you would be getting... Yeah, and we've seen that again. In India, there was a famine and they gave 4 ,000 people a UBI because they had to give them some money and the government workers freaked out and so you can't just give people money.

1:17:31How would they will spend it on alcohol and gambling? How do we extract bribes if you just give it directly? So, but they were starving for the end to do it so they just do it and they tracked it for two years and they found in the similar to the stock stocked in 95 % or 94 % went to clothing, housing, healthcare, food. Yes. And the attendance of those kids of those families that school doubled because they're fed and clothed. I mean, it's the challenges that once you run it for a while, a government realizes, oh, we're not needed anymore and then cancel the program because then you need government.

1:18:05It's literally what happened in Canada and Manitoba. they ran the program unbelievably successfully and the government came in and went, oh, wait a minute. Well, this is terrible. We don't, you know, literally don't need government. The challenge I think we have with UBI's to go from a taxation labor employment job model to this is such a huge leap. I have no confidence in our public sector to get this done. Well, the AI's will. The AI's will do it all. Yeah, the AI's will. Yeah. The AI will propose it and then we'll have a big fight. Well, I bow to our AI overlords. So there's a term that a mutual friend Harry Chlor gave us of technological socialism.

1:18:45Yes. Right. So we talked about communism earlier on being failed when humans were doing it, maybe when AI is doing it, it'll be more efficient. Socialism in the same fashion where the state is taking care of you has failed. that experience failed over and over again, but technological socialism, where technology is taking care of you, right? Yeah. Is something that I think is most definitely going to come, right? Where you're coming. Not just going to come. I think it's here already. So socialism fails because you have centralized allocation of resources, which is A in efficient and B leads to corruption.

1:19:23Yes. Inavitable. Right? I'm dictating who which family should get what food I'm in a huge position of power, right? as a bureaucrat or technocrat. So that fails. The other side of the coin, when you look at the free market, free markets also kind of don't work over time because they get corrupted in their own way. But if you have an algorithm matching in Uber, matching driver and passenger, optimize for close proximity to the driver and start rating of the passenger driver, etc. Uber is actually a socialist application. It's the sharing of assets among a large group of people. And this is, I think, it's a profoundly fascinating opportunity to bring in collective use of assets that gives us hyper leveraged in terms of productivity and repeated use of it, et cetera.

1:20:16But it's not only the sharing economy, it's the shared use of assets. It's the crowd economy, which is shared using of cognitive assets. Yeah, right. I don't know. I'll employ a person on the other person. Yeah. My favorite example of a socialist application is a restaurant. When you go and eat at a restaurant, you're sharing the table with other people that are usually in the cutlery, the people that are just used before you. It's not your cutlery or your plate. Food is coming from the same chef. It's actually a socialist environment. And we don't. We do that without thinking. We sit on an airplane seat that millions of other people have sat on.

1:20:52And we don't freak out about that. I think this is definitely there for the taking and creating a capitalist or a market -based environment that's algorithmically driven gives you the best of both worlds and many, many environments. So AI and communism, technology and socialism, let's talk about the elephant in the room here, pal. Well, we are living in an simulation, aren't we? So as a Buddhist, life is an illusion. So on first principles, yes, right? David Roberts, I remember giving this point that he said, if you stretch the electromagnetic spectrum, extra is to visible light, to microwave, and you stretch it out to the width of the US.

1:21:46Okay. Okay. 3000 miles across the the visible light that we see entering our eyes is two feet. Oh my god. Out of that 3000 miles. So we live in that little narrow spectrum of reality when the full spectrum of electromagnetic is that much, right? I think it's just a great example of how narrow our pathetic little eyes are compared to what's you know you have very things operating with x -rays and other things operating with sonar and all sorts of infrared sensing, etc. So that's one. Secondly, when light comes in, your eyes revert it and our brain flips it back around. So it's an image that appears that your brain anyway.

1:22:33And of course, we only process a fraction of 1 % of all of our sensory input because you can't possibly handle it. And we fill in the blanks with our own imagination of what we think is actually happening versus what really is happening. I remember a couple of years in the singularity, look to LeMour, he used to run a little web, said, come and do a talk and pick whatever topic you want. So I picked neuroscience. I said, all right, let me do a talk on the brain. And it forced me to go talk to Divya and a bunch of neuroscientists around, okay? So first I asked them, was what is the brain? And it was unbelievable.

1:23:09They couldn't agree. I finally came up with a sentence that they all agreed on. I'm going to try and remember it. It's that a brain is a fractal chaotic sense -making machine that may or may not result in consciousness. Obviously. That was it. That was the only one they could roughly agree on. So we've got so much amazing investigation analysis to do, right? On our on our on our brain. What got me interested in psychedelics was the F MRI studies that showed you can now see exactly what dosage was worth psychedelic does exactly this to this circuit. Mm -hmm. And now we have a feedback loop that makes it amazing.

1:23:52I was listening to a program this morning on the idea of this consciousness impact our quantum universe. And it's, we know so little. We are so filled with ourselves and our bullshit every day in politics and the world. We're just scratching the surface. It's amazing. You know, I did my degree in theoretical physics. No, I didn't know that. Yes, my bachelor's degree is theoretical physics. So you do three years of Newtonian classical physics, relativity. and in third year you get quantum mechanics. So, and then the first thing that they tell you is okay, so you know that last three years, just chuck everything.

1:24:39And now everything is a probabilistic environment where an electron has an 80 % tendency to exist. It's such a hard shift, it's such a hard pivot. It's impossible, I've been fascinated by the domain ever since with entanglement and you know spooky action at a distance and it really is true how how absurdly little we actually know. But I want to close out with two questions they may be the same answer for you but I ask all my guess if you were to launch an x -price by working to say you I'm gonna say Elon's gonna find that I'm gonna fund it Seleme what is an x -price that you would want what's a grand challenge problem that you went solved and you're out you know full disclosure, uh, Selim is on the board of directors at the ex -price has been on this journey with me for multiple years.

1:25:36Um, is there an ex -price that you would love to see launched? What is a challenge you want to launch? Yes. Um, I would like to see an ex -price that improved emotional intelligence by 10X and by doing so kind of cleansed out all the emotional trauma that we grew up with. Scratch a surface a little bit more. What does that look like? What would a team have to do to solve this thing? So the problem there is a little bit the diagnostic. What's the before and after test, right? The Ansari Express is easy. Take a plane to suborbital twice within in two weeks. Great, very clear metrics. It goes back to the hard question, which is we struggle off in its expires, is how do you define the domain properly?

1:26:24What do we mean by emotional maturity and how would you measure it to increase the 10X, etc., etc.? So there's some work to do in defining the boundaries. But for me, there's two major problems that I see in humanity. One is in the West, we tend to be very logically driven and operate on just pure rationale and Western medicine, Western thinking, objective reality. And so that's one danger point because you lose the subjective in the softer side, the spiritual side, etc. And the problem in the east is you do what people call a spiritual bypass. Like in India, you grow up, you're not all this family baggage that nobody deals with.

1:27:07You jump straight to being praying at a temple and you never deal with the emotional baggage. You're straight to enlightenment. You go you go you're trying to like and you and you and yet there's this carcass of family skeletons in the closet They've got a crap that your your grandfather's an alcoholic and have an opportunity that you're now an alcoholic and you don't even know it and yet you have Tendencies in that direction in lots of different ways and and you you've no idea And you don't know what you don't know and yet you skip straight through to trying to achieve enlightenment, right? You can't do that without cleaning up for the rest So I would think a prize like this would balance both these out.

1:27:43It would also solve the problem of techies in Silicon Valley trying to go for technological supremacy without really understanding the human nuances along the way, etc. So that would be the prize I would go after. It would make human beings infinitely happier and more peace with themselves if you could achieve it. And your moonshot, what are you working on right now that is in the realm of moonshot buddy? Moonshot is, can we create a new model for society that creates a layer of resilience in our systemic global human society? So we have, if you look at the history of civilizations, every civilization got to a very complex level, the incas, the minds, the Romans, then they had some boundary condition and they instantly collapsed, right?

1:28:31Like just literally hit a cliff and boom. every single one of them, by the way. Okay, this is it. And if you talk to the U of all heraries and Neil Ferguson's of the world, all those conditions are there now, where we're like, we're at that tipping point, we may be even sliding down, and we don't know. Our monetary systems are an easy example, or the crash in crypto today is one example. It looks like, by the way, Solana may be being wiped out today. Wow. Yeah, it's crazy. It's, it's, it's done a massive amount today. So when you look at what's happening in global human society, Bitcoin is down to 16 something.

1:29:09Yeah, it's great. Buying opportunity. And that's what I said. By the way, this is an entrepreneur's mindset, everybody. This is how the judo move when it goes down. It's a buying opportunity, right? Big problems, fantastic opportunities to start a company as well. I was the biggest problems with the biggest markets. That's your stock phrase. I think it's such an important way to think about the world as, oh, huge problem, huge opportunity. And I think this is maybe the biggest gift that you brought to the world. Peter is having people think at a global scale by ex -price or singularity. I remember I got together with a bunch of the singularity alumni in Spain when I was there.

1:29:51And they're like, we hate you. And I said, what happened? He goes, you infected us. You get us to think at a global level and then you can't go back to thinking how do I create a better mobile ad network? You just can't stop it trying to solve systemic global issues, which is what we wanted anyway. Yeah, I know it's I in by the way I can't believe we were both in Spain the same day. We Madrid and we missed each other by like hours So how the opposite remember we were I was at the New York Hilton over a grand central Yes, I was typing an email to you kind of going really need to talk to Peter directly about this and you were literally walking across the lobby by accident.

1:30:28I know. And how many times have we done that and even know it? So yeah, I have a teaser for your people. Okay. Yeah. All the viewers. John Hagle and I, you know, we're talking about serendipity. John Hagle and I, who does a lot of work in writing around engineering serendipity, have been working on a model. And we've come up with like a very simple two by two diagram where we define luck and we can measure it. Okay. And I'll leave that there. We're going to talk about this some other time, or you can't happily. All right. We'll come back. It's worth it. It needs a reveal because we need to finish it up, et cetera, et cetera.

1:31:06But it's there. We would like to think about how much our lives run on luck and certain epitome events, right? Every single one of us, the most meaningful things in our lives were weird coincidences for the risk of new normal explanation. And we have plenty of those between us. We have plenty of those between. So can you prescriptively create luck? In fact, the EXO book was actually a practice book for me at a crack at writing a book on luck. Which is going to come out. You can write a book on luck. John and I need to agree on the final framing and the definitions. But think about the exponential organizations.

1:31:45The first half is analytical. What is it? And yes, so what are the attributes? Second half is pers, and then we have a diagnostic test and the second half is Prescriptive. How do you start when applied to mid -market and big companies, etc. Right? And it was actually the practice run to say, Could I get a meme into the world? Because luck is a really hard topic, right? Rookie author I'm probably going to make some stupid mistake and screw it all up. Let me, you know, Exponential organizations is so obvious needs to be done. And then the book took off and I've not been able to get away from from the paradigm yet, but John and I've been working on the side on this other topic because all of us, they think of any of us, our lives run on luck.

1:32:24They run on a hard work and caffeine and those are the table states. Okay. Think of any Silicon Valley company. You have to be talented, you have to work your ass off. Table state. And you need internet. You need that lucky break to hit the right strategic relationship, hit the market at the right time with the right feature footprint. And that's actually what makes you successful. So how do you generate certain deputy? So there's a great TED talk and a DLD talk by Bill Gross. Yes. Where it has to be related where he says, listen, he analyzed 100 companies that succeeded. 100 companies had failed.

1:33:03And he said, what was the parameter that was the number one thing of all the companies succeeded? It was the amount of capital they raised, was it the experience of the CEO, was it the field that they were in, and you know the answer to this. Yeah, well, it was luck by virtue of their ability to stick around, in words, the companies that were able to last the longest intercepted a lucky event, like the space shuttle crashing and being shut down was what launched SpaceX. The 2008 fiscal crash is what launched Uber and Airbnb. Zoom. Zoom, oh my God. I was on a panel with Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, a month before the pandemic.

1:33:51And he's saying, Jesus, you know, I've been working my ass off for several years building this. And I need that one thing to happen to help us take so that we can set a month later boom. Coincidence? I think not. Well, it is, and it isn't. I'm joking. I'm joking. The Seneca definition that preparation meets opportunity is the best definition we've been seeing. For sure. And so the question that becomes how do you increase preparation? How do you increase opportunity? And can you live long enough to live forever, which is paraphrasing Rick Kurzweil on longevity, but it's true for companies. Yeah.

1:34:23I tell all my companies, listen, get the cash flow break even as soon as you can. Make sure you've got years of lifetime because you're going to screw it up over and over again. and you're going to run, if you're dead and you do not exist, there's no way to run into that perfect investor or customer, but if you're able to hang on long enough, you'll intercept the pandemic, or the big things that happen. This is maybe the hardest question, is something that's not working, do you keep struggling and do you shut it down and start doing it? Oh my God, it is one of the hardest questions. This is a black hole question.

1:34:55We should talk about that next time, because it's a, I've had, Now, on my 27th company, I think, and there are those companies that I look back and say, Man, I should have killed them far earlier. I'm terrible at that. I'm taking money. I've taken money. My company's legal forever. I should just be merciful and shoot them in the head, and I'm just bad at that. The ones that are successful entrepreneurs are the ones that just go astroteller, right? Google, actually, have a very specific thing. It's having these metrics, or it's not. what will make it fail and test those first and then kill it? So we're going to do this again, right?

1:35:34You and I on this on this podcast. Okay. We'll add that when you're talking about luck, we're going to talk about how do you, you know, when do you kill your, your favorite child or company as a case may be? And lots of other subjects. In fact, we'll ask people who are viewing this, what they want us to talk about. And we'll do that. We'll catch up on where Twitter is and FTX and democracy where AI is. and you know, pal, I love you and I'm thankful to have you in my life. Likewise, I mean the serendipity that brought us together is pervasive in everything that happens in my life right now. Yeah, so all right, brother.

1:36:10Like, have it. See you soon. Talk to you later.