What the Election Results Mean for Emerging Tech w/ Salim Ismail | EP #128

29:55Check out this image here. This is just recent. That red line down there is India went from one terawatt hour production to two. It's doubled. You look at that green line. It's China. In 2010, China was producing four terawatts. It's doubled and it's doubling again by 2030. they're just unleashing as much energy as possible. And the US has been pretty flat. But what's interesting, and what four terawatts and have been, but what going back to AI, the projected demand if we're really building out all these hyper scalars, it could consume 100 % of the US energy production by 2030. So what the conversation going on in Saudi at the Future Investment Initiative conference was we need as much energy as we can from every possible source, which means, you know, wind and solar, fusion in the future, generation for nuclear, which by the way is super safe.

31:05and Cam, the CEO of Axiom Space, also is the chairman of Energy Axi. They just signed the contract with Amazon for Gen 4 nuclear power production, which is crazy. Yeah. Companies are signing contracts for nuclear power supplies for their AI factories. So I'm excited about the private sector stepping up here, right? But Jennifer nuclear has been safe for a long time. I think the best thing governments can do is say go to town because we know it's safe and build, build, build. What I'm hoping is that we start building nuclear fusion wind solar, which is already way cheaper than fossil fuels rather than going backwards and burning more fossil fuels.

31:54Because that would be... And perovskite. That's right. So, right. Yes, right. If folks haven't heard about perovskite, it's another tech I'll be featuring at abundance is here, it is you know 50 % more energy per square meter and as much as 50 % cheaper and it's just incredible. Important note here, the perovskite is a replace of the silicon solar panels where we use all the rare earth elements so that's double impact there. It's actually kind of a salt that's very widely abundant and they found it has the properties of trapping solar energy And as you mentioned, Peter, it's been in the labs for a while, not getting to commercial scale.

32:35And this is incredibly exciting for the future because you'll be able to spray that onto windows and on those. A company where you can choose the game. Yeah, Perino was producing 100 megawatt plant in Texas. They were going to see a lot of progress. There is so much solar to be captured. It's there as energy. Not as not an usable form yet. But coming back to AI because people are scared about it and I think, you know, listen, from my standpoint, I don't know about you, I think I know your position, I'm worried about AI over the next three to five years during this period of time before we have its progress sufficiently.

33:17You know, last year, the abundance of it, we had this conversation about digital superintelligence and my conclusion was, are you, you know, the question was, are you worried about a world where digital super -telegences exist or a world where it doesn't exist? And I think that I'm more worried about us humans in a world where it doesn't exist and doesn't support us from our irrational thoughts and actions. Can I cue up my standard grant here? Please. So, you know, consider a spectrum of intelligence where you have smarts, you have domain intelligence, you have general intelligence, then you have emotional intelligence, then you go over into kind of consciousness and broader forms of decision making, right?

34:10We've been kind of going across that spectrum with AI, with doing basic calculations, et cetera. Marvin Minsky has this wonderful hierarchy of the ideals of AI where you get to self -reflective and then reflective and then a conscious, et cetera. The problem I've got when people worry about computers and AI becoming smarter is that what the hell do you mean by smarter? Because when I make a choice, I'm using my emotional intelligence, I'm using my spiritual presence and the concept of awareness from the Eastern world. I'm using historical memory intelligence, etc. All sorts of aspects. This is about a dozen facets of intelligence that the IQ test does not measure.

34:53And so when you talk about AI's overtaking human beings in that, a calculator is way faster than doing math than a spreadsheet than a human being anyway. It doesn't mean it has intelligence in the same way that a human being does. So I really don't, I really go nuts about this because for me, it's tickling the amygdala that you like to talk about. You're provoking, you're stoking people's fear. I see no mechanism of achieving that. Mostly when you get to once you're getting to concepts like consciousness, we don't have a definition for it. We don't have a task for it. Right? A subset of consciousness is considered self -awareness and you look like yourself or a sorry, attribute that to you.

35:31I think I'm self -worthy, but my wife disagrees. Right? It's like hard to even start the conversation around some of this stuff. But people freak out about the concept without knowing what they're talking about. So I really love if people would kind of calm down, take a breath, look at what are we talking about with intelligence. And then notice that where we're applying AI and computation and so on is in areas where human beings are not good. Anti -lock braking systems, credit card fraud detection, fuzzy logic in your cameras to keep them steady. Those are all the areas where we're not good. That's where we're applying brute force calculation and AI, which is where it'll be profoundly things.

36:09I think of AI developing intelligences that are orthogonal and complementary to human intelligence, not replicative of it, at least for a very long time to come. End of life. I may differ with you there, but come me back to you, the White House and their AI policies. the question is going back to original conversation. I don't think there's anything they're going to be able to do to regulate it. I think that they're going to view it as America's most important strategic development. There's a video I've shown, Sam Altman saying, listen, And I don't care how much money we spend, 50 ,500 ,000, 50 billion, we're building AGI and it's gonna be worth it.

37:00All right, that is his point of view. And then the question is what the hell is AGI anyway? We passed a touring test months ago or years ago, and there's no real, I think we're gonna have achieved AGI and not noticed it or not put a line in the sand. I agree. Can I tell you where I'm incredibly excited and if I was in this administration I would think about a lot is government policy. Okay. So let's say you want to drop inflation by 1%. Right now you've got a set of human being as an economist with a few knobs and levers and they have no idea what to do. They're mostly guessing at it and hoping that something may happen or not happen.

37:42I'm sorry to disillusion everybody who's watching with we can see economists know what they're doing when they're moving the I mean because you do some stuff and you hope it is by far an exact science. Let's just let's just put that way is the most polite. Okay. Now, if you have an AI with all the access to economic data and that can track transactions real time all over the world, and you can figure out how to drop inflation by 1 % and give us the negative consequences of any side effects on other policies and come back to us and I'll figure it out. I think that's where this unbelievable opportunity and a clean slate thought process here would be so powerful to doing some of that type of work, applying it into areas where we're using fuzzy guesses at best.

38:28And again, anybody listening who's running a company, same conversation, right? If you're looking to increase your sales, but you're gonna have to get the data to enable your AI to know what the hell it's, Wait, it's talking about. Yeah, and as I said, we just keep across this company where you drop it in and it handles it all. It's amazing now. So everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Companies called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians.

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41:07All right, let's go back to our episode. So, okay, we talked about that. We're also having an adjacency to AI is humanoid robotics. I'm putting out a meta trend report on humanoid robotics in about a week's time. And I'm tracking right now 15 of the top companies in humanoid robotics. They are of course Tesla with with Optimus and they are figure with figure two. We've got Atlas from Boston Dynamics and a number of companies out of China right so China desperately needs humanoid law. India is starting up as well as we're seeing so you know Japan and South Korea it's the countries in particular China because it can survive, can survive after it's one child policy, it's low labor rates is what made it the dominant global manufacturing base, but those labor rates are going up and their populations are dwindling.

42:13So, I think this is incredibly exciting at the commercial level. I think I get nervous when we talk about domestic robots in the house folding clothes.

42:27So I look at my Rumba vacuum cleaner robot. And I'm still at the point where I'm having to move all the chairs to make way for the thing. And by the time I'm done, I might as well just done the vacuuming myself. right? So we had about a decade of vacuum robots and we've only got marginally better, okay? Now, humanoid's main robots may do very good things, but I'm wondering at what point a mother is comfortable saying to a human or robot, go change the diapers on the kid, because that requires like the liability issues. By the way, can I take a quick segue into the regulatory here for a second?

43:05Of course you can. So I've been talking to a few insurance companies. And I've come up with them, I've kind of gained this out. I don't see how we don't end up in this scenario. We're insurance companies go to the government and say you cannot regulate human or drawabouts or drones or whatever whatever the technology is. We have the liability insurance risk structure plus a capital base that can mitigate it. Why why don't you just say if you can get liability insurance for your application, we're good. You let it go. And I think that's what's going to happen because then the insurance companies have the mechanism to manage it at that use case level and say, okay, if the robot is cleaning windows and it's limited to cleaning windows, fine, you can do whatever you want with the robot during cleaning windows, right?

43:52The minute it gets to clipping the hair of a pet, if it makes a mistake, you could have a problem or changing the diaper on the baby, I can't give you liability insurance for that. I think there's a segue here where I think that's what's gonna end up happening and it allows us to move the domain much more quickly But I think we're a long way away from a general humanoid robot. I think specialized use cases like You know empty the dishwasher and put things there one of the things that I got really excited about about 10 years ago Was backstair the robot? I remember backstair. Yes, and the power Rodney Brookes right was the CEO there that's right that's right and and I remember Saul Griffith trying to system the key thing that was such a huge breakthrough is in industrial robotics.

44:35You always had to program the robot. You had to say, pick up this widget, turning our 90 degrees, move over here, turn back, put it down, you had to explicitly program it. And with BackSew, you could show what to do, adaptively move its arms. And then it would then figure out the task in that very specific narrow use case and do it from then on. I think that potential with LLMs integrated in makes this like hugely complex. But that's what's going on. The difference now is the robots are visually seeing what you as a human does and it's learning from that right so it is I just like I wonder how long you know would you have a robot cook for you and what a fit you know I mean I don't know I think they'll be certain like let me give you I thought this through a little bit let me give you a please okay so I've got a human robot standing next to me okay and I want to cook an Indian dish which is very complex of proper hasroba the biryani which is where I was born takes It's like six hours to make.

45:33Okay, so number one, robot, go get all the ingredients for this recipe and pull them out on the table, right? Number two, take this stack of ingredients and grind them together and roast them in a frying pan because you need that proper roasting. But it can't smell quite as well as I can. So I have to go over there and do the smelling to make sure it hits hit the right level of the raw smell going away. Okay, great. Then I will kind of blend it, et cetera. Okay, now go watch it and make sure it's okay until it's ready, type of thing, and stir occasionally. So I can see there being an interplay here and there within certain cases, but or it does the whole thing in an automated way, but I just don't see some of the other use cases being as easy.

46:13Yeah, I'm going to disagree with you on that. We learn to trust robots called medical devices. And there are, you know, I think ultimately these robots are going to be a lot more reliable than humans who forget, who make mistakes, who, you know, don't show up on time. There's going to be a learning curve, of course. In a medical context, if I'm doing a soldier surgery, right, of course, in robots, going to be way better and much more precise. And I'd much rather have a robot doing it that has access to every recording of every operation ever done. No. But if it's doing some adaptive things, This is where it becomes with adaptive were a my favorite vase is about to fall over and it's about to vacuum there And it doesn't see that part those that those there is where I think the and there's a lot of those educates This is why autonomous cars have been so hard and by the way, please know I'm desperately hoping for it Right, I know you are.

47:14I know you are we've been talking about this together on stages From around the world for for the better part of two decades But so here's my question coming into a new administration. This next four year period of time is the time during which we're gonna see AI and robotics begin to displace jobs. Not worried about jobs. You're not worried about jobs. No, for all of the reasons we've talked about before, and we talked about this, but I still believe we're gonna see increased efficiencies and we're going to see job displacement. I'll agree with Mark Andreessen here that every major injection of technology has exploded the number of jobs not reduced it.

48:00And you have set on stage many times that countries with the highest robotic penetration Sweden, South Korea, Germany, countries with the lowest unemployment, Sweden, South Korea, Germany. It's the correlations are very clear. The data is very clear on this one. So I'm not worried about unemployment or job transformation of work, yes. And I go down to the, hey, one last point here, I go down to that idea that let's say I'm a financial advisor for a company like Morgan Stanley, okay. I have a set of about 27 tasks that comprise my job function. And a robot might or AI may automate like eight or ten of them, but it's not changing the other 17.

48:43So I still have the job, but I just make the job easier. This is like using Excel for calculations rather than running it on a spreadsheet or an abacus or a slag rule or a calculator. And so I think we end up there and it's a long time before we automate. Thing, meanwhile, there's also some other jobs that have been created like AI training agents and so on. We'll see. I mean, you and I have talked about the need for UBI universal basic income on the backside of this. If I could see one thing that this administration should go after the UBI. Why if jobs are not a thing, if jobs are not concerning, why should they go?

49:19It just unleashes entrepreneurship. All the UBI studies have shown that when you give people, and it's really important to note that you got to find the balance between giving people too much money and they've become too fat and they don't work and not having enough to serve. You want to hit the balance where they can survive but not be happy, right? And we've studied these experiments when you can hit that balance, which an AI could figure out by the way, you then have a hugely productive economy, but everybody's baseline is still covered. And then you can dismantle government services. And this is an area where if the Republicans are interested, this is an area where it's really fascinating.

49:58I don't know if you've tracked what's been going on in the UBI space, but a large number of cities and states and countries around the world have blocked experiments on UBI. No, they've said you are not allowed to experiment with UBI. Why? Because they don't want to be true. Yeah, they're governments. They're scared to not be needed. So they've literally passed legislation saying all the towns in my state are not allowed to experiment with UBI. That's freaky. That's the area where I think a Trump type administration can go, are you kidding? Get rid of all of that crap and let people experiment with it because you need more experiments.

50:34All right one other thing that's going to be true about this administration is going to be a massive wave of deregulation. Yes. And that's going to hit a few industries off the top. Biotech is one space is another. Your choice which one would go after first? I'd go after biotech first is because has such immediate obvious consequences. So using a stem cell therapy like right Right now, we travel overseas to get stem cell treatments for very stanguitis, which is ridiculous, right? What was that robotic surgery company in two to robotic surgery? Two to robotic surgery. So I had a friend that lived next door to the factory in San Jose.

51:19And because neat surgeries were authorized, but now shoulder surgeries, he had to fly to Switzerland to get an intuitive surgical robot to do a shoulder because they didn't authorize it in the US. But he lived next door to the factory. But look, the kind of chaos that we're doing around medical tourism is unbelievable. I think the US has an unbelievable opportunity to correct some of that aspect. Right now, the FDA focuses on safety rather than efficacy. If I could wait one one and say go after efficacy and not safety, you know, the challenge is that you're blamed if there is one problem. You're not blamed for all of the lives lost by you blocking the therapy.

52:01And I think this is, for me, because I'm in the biotech in longevity and regenerative medicine world and so forth, it has been, there's so much potential. I'm seeing so many incredible companies around the world that are being unlocked because of AI and gene therapies and CRISPR and such, but the process of getting it out the door safely is been massively hampered because of the deregulation. You know, I talk about the notion of having a process by which an individual has a right to try these therapies. Yeah. You know, we should be we should be able to sign up for stuff like that and not have Totally agree.

52:54Yeah, we had the sense that the government has to protect me against myself, which is You know my body my rights give me the give me the chance if if it's fully officially disclosed Where I disagree somewhat is public health Because now if I get a virus and transmits lots of other people I'm damaging a lot of other people So that is a mitigation there, but for anything at the personal level, that completely 100 % agree with you. Yeah, so excited about deregulation in the biotech world in particular in Regenerative Medicine in the stem cell world, exosome, and such, even peptides. Yeah. Now, there's a lot of cowboys out there.

53:36There's a lot of mom and pop shops that are trying things and advertising. I mean at what point do we say, hey listen, you know, if you're in ittyed enough to go and just take the first injection you get, that you'll buyer be where? I think caveat emter applies in many of these cases. You just have to be the one One danger side that I see coming in this administration is there's been a movement of anti -science, right? So, that's coming. There's a huge wave against scientific process and scientific thinking because people put political motivations on people for just trying to understand what the hell is going on with something.

54:28There's so much data that we have that's, I think the one thing I would hope for is that people be as evidentiary as possible. And you can go, you can go, you can go, you're rather self -crazy with it, with evidentiary, with conspiracy theories, if you wanted to, because you can always find data to support, and you have massive confirmation bias, the actual data. And this is where I think AI can perform a huge service, because imagine there's six experiments on psilocybin somewhere. It can analyze the data across those and come up with a meta -analysis, though, be very powerful, that we can easily do human beings, but you could go, you know what, that's actually safe for these types of use cases, et cetera.

55:07And you could then deregulate that aspect of it. So I think there's huge opportunity. Somebody has to have the bravery to go, but I'll go back to the earlier point of we need to reorient from safety where you won't authorize a drug if it kills 10 people, even though it saves 10 ,000 people, to efficacy. And that's when you really unlock massive of opportunity. I know it's even worse than that. Do you know what percentage of drugs that are prescribed to an individual actually work in an individual? No. It's like 20%. When you get, I mean, it's pretty sad. When you get a drug prescribed to you, the sense is, oh, that drug's gonna work for me.

55:51But on average, what goes on in the FDA process is, In phase one, we look at safety, right? And then phase two, is it doing what it's supposed to do? And phase three, it doesn't do enough of it. And what does enough mean? If it doesn't hurt anybody, but it actually supports 20 % of the people, why not approve it? And it does get approved. But people don't realize it doesn't necessarily work for them. So it's crazy. But I think this is where this will become workable is once you have personalized testing, you can do personalized adaptation of prescriptions. Sure. And know that that dosage is right for me, etc.

56:40and then you're good, right? Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a syndolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Let's go talk about space.

57:18My pet childhood interest here. So listen, I have to say we're going to we're going to be on the moon in a couple years and on Mars before 2030. And that's exciting. You know, the the no I think we're going to see another JFK moment where, you know, JFK said, I challenge you all to get to the moon by into the decade. And bring people back. I think we're going to have a challenge to get to Mars by into this decade. Yeah, just getting them back part of we get it will make it a lot easier to get there. The getting back part is going to be hard. I still continue to think that we are banks of water and evolved in a gravitational environment.

58:09Doing interplanetary travel is going to be very, very difficult. I think we'll send robot avatars rather than trying to go out there ourselves But God bless us we're explorers and we should do that right if you had that mentality you may have never left Europe to find India type of thing. Well another use for humanoid robots boom You know flying cars autonomous cars right cyber taxi drones I find it amazing when my favorite drone company, Zipline, that's now multi -billion dollar company had to go and begin business in Central East Africa in order because they had a permissive regulatory regime.

58:55I think this is the other opportunity for the U .S. to really upgrade its kind of regulatory on a bunch of levels. Emerging markets can make new rules. And I remember in Rwanda, they created a three -dimensional tube across the country like a highway. And so if your drone stays within those parameters, within that three -dimensional aerospace, you can do whatever you want. Right? And I think things like that need to be done. And not much more aggressively. I mean, you know, when you fly over the U .S. as mostly empty, the most of the time that you're not going to hurt anything. It's dangerous.

59:29Yeah. Look out the window when you're flying across the United States. It is all empty space. We can also drink. We're on from India, which is about half the size of the continental US has like five times the population, and it's for good empty. You fly across it. So it's there's huge opportunities to unlock the abundance of terrestrial land, which is where I think passenger drones become incredibly exciting. Let's talk about the future of democracy. So, you know, in a world in which things are moving this fast and humans are moving very slow. You know, how long before our democratic experiment here gets revamped for a world of AI sensors and networks?

1:00:23So can I lift up a level and then tap down? because I actually have been thinking my community has been thinking about this a great deal, right? And I've come from India where my family was very involved in the independence movement. So we've been looking at democracy for a long time. The Indian Constitution, by the way, was the most advanced constitution in the world for several decades because of the newest. Right? And so it could learn from some of the mistakes in the US and other constitutions. And constitutions like the software that runs a country, you need to be able to update it now. This is where I have a huge beef with the originalists in the US.

1:00:56If you're not updating your software, you're pretty much out of date pretty quickly, which is kind of where we are in certain ways. All right, let me just give you the high level. About 10 years ago, we were looking at this problem, you know, my hobby in metaphysics and philosophy and so on. I fell of called Malcolm Pollock and I came up with an analogy which we called ice water steam. Okay? So imagine you have ice with the molecules are kind of very cold. They don't move very far very fast. They hold their shape. right, very low energy in the system. Then you add heat or energy in the system, then you get the liquid.

1:01:27That can expand to the boundaries of the container, it's more active, more agitation of molecules, et cetera, et cetera. But still reasonably slow. You add more energy and you get steam, which burns you, is hard to contain. The molecules are highly active, right? And we went through a whole kind of series of looking at human endeavor in different ways, take messaging. We used to send smoke signals or the pony express or homing pigeons. Very local, very slow, very, it was the ice state. Nothing moved very far, very fast. Then you went to postal mail, which was the liquid state. You could send messages around the world.

1:02:04It just took a long time and it went to the boundaries of the container. Then we digitized everything and now we have tweets. And we've totally vaporized our messaging structures. Right? Take money. We used to trade camels and goats. There were seashells. Again, very local, very slow. Then we came up with currencies and letters of credit. And then we floated our currencies, even more perfect for the analogy. And then we went to Bitcoin and digital currencies and crypto. And then we vaporized and digitized thing. Same thing with human organization. We used to have clans or tribes that didn't move very far very fast.

1:02:39Then we moved to say nation states and and multinational corporations. And now we have Facebook groups and online TikTok communities, right? And we vaporize that. And the challenges, and this came up when looking at the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movement, lots of hot air, but nothing stable -formed out of it. And the challenges in a vapor state, stable structures don't form. And so as we vaporize and add more and more technology to different domains like money and democracy, et cetera, how do we get stable structures? And in the lack of that stable structure, we go back to the old way, which is kind of what's happening in various parts of the world.

1:03:16So that's kind of like just a broad metaphor for what's happening in the world. And I think an intellectual challenge is to think about what's the equivalent of a fridge, right, that can cool things down. And so we actually use the ideal gas law as a metaphor for this, but we don't need to get into that right now. But applying that paradigm to democracy, we've been running democracies at a nation -state level for the last few hundred years. And the problem is nation -states, in my opinion, they're wrong container, they're too big. For example, nation -states and global climate change. I agree with you.

1:03:51The fact that our entire democratic process came down to like four states. Ridiculous. Yeah, yeah. Or you take India, we're on from. It's 20 different languages and cultures trying to be one country. It makes no sense. So what you need to do is granularize. And Paul Safar, I remember getting on stage at Singularity University and said the future of the world is not nation states, it's city states. Yeah. And actually, you look at Trump or Brexit. It's not left versus right. It's urban versus rural. You can see that in the map from last night. It's very clearly, right? Brexit was 100 % and London versus the rest of the country.

1:04:29That's the tension that's playing out in the world. If you have, for example, now in the future, let's say 10 years into the future, a city that has vertical farming, satellite internet, solar energy and small nuclear, water extraction using the water abundance prize winner, you don't need a country, you don't need the infrastructure for a country. And so therefore, I think we're gonna devolve to small community self -determining their future and working out their own structures and then operating in a networked environment in a much more powerful way. So that's how I think we, in a world of abundance, the nation states are really great for scarcity.

1:05:08They're terrible for abundance. So there's a whole bunch of things, different dimensions of looking at this. I still hear the question, right? I think, you know, the old saying that we've, you know, governments, you know, suck, except, we got the best version of what's available today. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for everything else. Yes, got it. Thank you. The question becomes, there are better versions, there are better versions that are easy to describe, right? We have a representative government today versus we don't have a direct democracy. Yes. That whole situation is...

1:05:46But importantly, can I just pause for just a second? The reason we ever were representative government today. It started 250 years ago. Well, at the time, information was scarce. Yes, exactly. And DC, you had a new way. So if you were in DC, you literally had no idea what was happening in California, because the speed of a horse was as fast as you could find out. So you had a representative, hey, let me just finish by point, you had a representative come across the country and say, here's what people are thinking, this is what we have represented. But in the world, this digital wave and abundance of information and representative of government doesn't apply.

1:06:19And so we have to really fundamentally rethink our structures from the bottom up. So the question becomes, is there any way to do this other than a revolution? Other than a starting from a clean sheet of paper, I mean the reality is governments and there's a few different ways to finish my turn. Don't like giving up power. They don't have army, they like them. They do. They put laws in the books to protect themselves and they buy appropriate regulatory leaders to protect themselves. There's better ways. In the analogy that you and I talk about a lot, which is that every company will eventually unless they disrupt themselves, be disrupted by someone else, the question becomes, where where all the disruption come from for the future of democracy.

1:07:16Is it virtual governments? Is it network state? Right? Another topic I want to hit on at abundance this year is what biology is talked about as a network state. Yeah. Where it doesn't matter physiologic where you live, it's, I have, you're one of my peeps, someone of yours. That's right. I think, so I disagree with the, I agree with 80 % of what biology talks in the network state. a large global community like abundance or TED or EXO has a course that are principles and values with its own cryptocurrency can operate as a country in a very easy way, an operative is a network state. But at some point you need the physical thing and the where I disagree is when in the last bit where he says all you have to do is get validation from an existing government and your recognition from an existing government which is the way to benefit.

1:08:09that's just not going to happen in an easy way. And we have that already today. We have a lot of digital nomads that arbitrage the Puerto Rico income tax versus the Portugal income tax versus Bali and they're moving around depending on whether regulatory regime is the friendliest. I think that's what's going to happen if unless you have an authoritarian country that doesn't let you leave. And that will actually solve a lot of the problems in that. So I do agree with much of what the network state talks about where I think things can be easy as a couple of areas that would be so easy to solve in federal government.

1:08:44One is give preference to local laws rather than federal laws. And that's where states actually become really interesting down to city rights. Right? Miami is a very, very different place than rural Florida. So even state doesn't really cut it. You have to go down down to the city and local community level. So that people have their own value system that can that can represent and the law should represent them The second is every time you pass a law at the federal level you should have an end date to that law And say that law and they do this in Germany and they do some few places are very powerful Or they go law of the books or take yeah every time you have one you have to take five off the books because we're over Regulators so much right this may be the most optimistic area I'm thinking about if Elon gets in charge of a government deregulation department it's going to be fantastic.

1:09:36He's just going to go because his first principle thinking is going to come to Veren go why do you have to have a barrel of hay in the back of your London cab because it was there to feed the horse a hundred years ago or you nuts, I just get ready to land crab. This is going to be the most extraordinary reality TV show ever. Yes. Yeah, I think the department of government efficiency. And then the last The last point around what we could do now is liquid democracy where you don't give your voting not based on a geography or based on ideas. You've got so much advanced thinking and say biotech. I'd rather give you my vote from that topic.

1:10:15You make category votes and say for anything to do with this, I'll go with Lawrence Lecogon digital rights. I'll go with Peter on ethics of biotech. I'll go with Hank Greeley of Stanford and anything to do with biotech ethics, etc. And so you can just kind of use a proxy to me. I just. I double. Double thing, right? You know what, what, what, right? Do I have to do to vote on women's reproductive rights when I'm a guy? Leave it to the women for God's sake. Leave it to the women. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, it's quite right. So buddy, listen, I, you know, I want to wrap this WTF just tapping in tech session by saying we're in for a lot of technical acceleration.

1:11:05Yes. I think. We're in a lot of that acceleration in AI is going to be independent of the government. It's going to be happening on a sort of a corporate level. I do think the idea of AI becoming an infrastructure play. One of the things that I took away from meeting a lot of government leaders in Saudi is every single government, every government is like, how do we get us some? How do we get ourselves a national large language model? How do we get ourselves a compute infrastructure? And how do we provide it to our entrepreneurs, our business owners, our students? And it will fundamentally become an infrastructure play, just like telephony, just like electricity, just like oxygen.

1:12:07Yeah. Can I tell you a crazy segue here? Yeah. On topic though. But you know, it would be the simplest thing in the world to take all of our legal law structures and put the digitize them and have them AI enabled. It turns out there's certain laws in various states in the US that are not public and you're not allowed to know the law. What? Yeah. No. So there's no rules. No, it's true. Because they've been written by a law. I do not know. I do not know. Well, because lobbyists are uncovered. there were lobbyists have written the laws and they've kind of made it so they're somewhere probably nobody knows about them.

1:12:44It's really nuts. So there's a huge effort to be just to digitize the damn law and get everything into one place would be just a massive thing. Yeah. All of this is weird, right? Like, this is where I find the overreach of government to be unacceptable. Where you're blocking UBI experiments, explicitly blocking you, that just blows my mind There were things like this where certain legal structures are not allowed to be public because they're too toxic that nobody wants them out there. So that's the kind of stuff where I think we'll shine the light. Are you going to change your investment strategies at all given this administration?

1:13:27Great question. Probably not much. because I'm so pro Bitcoin could be hard to go more within reason. So I'm way more excited about the future crypto now than I would have been, although in the last six months, the Harris Biden administration kind of hobbled the SEC anywhere on crypto, because of his response. But I think this will go another step further. How about you? I'm just so deep on tech and crypto and Bitcoin specifically that I don't think I can be any deeper and I'm so over -weighted on entrepreneurial startups as well. Yeah, well, I mean, the broad commentary is that technology has been a major driver of progress since the beginning of time for humanity.

1:14:23Oh my god, it might be the only major driver programs. Right now we have a dozen technologies moving exponentially, the potential upside potentials huge and therefore betting on that is an obvious thing to do at a macro level. Yeah if you just look at the growth of the fang stocks, you know it accounts for the majority of our nation's capital gains It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, crazy thing. I'm curious about what other crypto currencies are you going to continue to play? I mean, I remember back when when crypto peaked in the late 20 teens, everybody was playing in what has you domestically be called the shitcoins.

1:15:08is there a rationale for effort? I believe there is just like we have multiple brands of databases, each optimized for various things. I think different brands and different styles of crypto, for example, crypto or blockchain based thing that was optimized for land titles and property rights would be a different animal hyper -focused on that particular domain would be very, very highly utilitarian for that vertical in that use case. It would be very, very different as I was buying candy, we use Encrypto. And so I think you'll end up with a spectrum of those. And we see this in the real world, right?

1:15:54You see gold, and then you see deposit accounts and CDAs and so on, CDs and bonds. and then you as you get more and more liquid towards the end in the smaller transactions say credit card transactions They're very Flighty and minor you can have much easier level of fraud But the use cases different across that spectrum and I think the same thing will happen Crypto where something like Bitcoin will be used as the store value You'll have something else like based on the lightning network or something similar for means of exchange and destabilize value so that if you Bitcoin goes up and down, you don't kind of go crazy on your value of some micro transaction that you're doing.

1:16:34All the way to the very frivolous little things, we're using loyalty points for some application. I think you'll get the broader spectrum. But some of the applications we're seeing are unbelievable. I just came across one where there's the problem in banking call settlements. So if I owe you $800 and you owe literally $600 and she owes me $400, we can actually settle $400 without moving any money. And so if we can operate that kind of a system which would operate at a local city level, it turns out you could drop the cost of capital by about 50%, which is huge for businesses and so on. So stuff like that can be brought online that hasn't been able to be here because the banks always want every transaction going through them because they tax it all.

1:17:20And so now we can kind of unwind some of that that several hundred year old architecture that should be updated. All right one last subject here buddy. So Bitcoin at this moment is at 76 ,000. It's an all -time high as we're recording this. I wish I'd go back to myself and I put a mortgage on the house a couple years ago, but no. Here's the question. Quantum computers, there's a lot of buzz coming out of China right now about being able to break all of the encryption codes. I used to believe that no, that's not going to happen. We're going to have quantum encryption protecting us against against quantum computers.

1:18:05And I'm hearing maybe not. What are you hearing? When I see Satoshi's $60 billion Bitcoin wallet hacked, then I'll start over. The point is, you can't hack that wallet. You're long ways away now. The giant do also do agree with your point, which is that you will have quantum encryption, but you know hacking is always a cyber security is always an arms race. The bank has some mechanism in them and we kind of solve that problem right. And we just go through that just the cycles. Somebody breaks quantum that would be one thing but you still have to solve the distributed ledger problem which is which is really the Byzantine general's problem which is hard to break.

1:18:51And so you might solve the encryption but it doesn't solve the distributed ledger aspect which will make it powerful. 60 billion dollar ex -price for... God, you're such a natural hacker. Yeah, amazing. Alright buddy, excited to see you this weekend. Yes, it's been a real fun time. It's gonna be fun. Alright everybody, thank you for joining us for this month's episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. Well, what just happened in Tech is a new administration and I'm so curious is Elon going to really jump into the department of government efficiency. The guy is running five companies right now and has like 11 kids.

1:19:36He's gonna do that as well. I mean I'm just you know listen I I know we both do a lot. How the hell does he do all that he does. I keep on asking him he doesn't give me an answer. I'm just trying to understand. I and he's just so driven, this goes back to the MTP, right? So driven by his massive transformative purposes, it keeps the engine going. And God bless, I mean, we've not talked about this, but the side of that rocket landing back and getting caught by the scaffolding, the most incredibly amazing things that I think has been seen in humanity. The biggest rock in the extraordinary feat of, if not just this decade, multiple decades.

1:20:18So if he can take that kind of creative energy and focus his teams on government deregulation, lots of interesting things. Bob, can you fire government employees at easily? No, I don't think so. You can't. You can. They're like unions and stuff. Look, this is the classic problem in all society. Once you get a structure in place, you put a motor on yourself. Whether it's a medical establishment saying you must have a doctor. A few years ago, they passed a law in Texas saying telemedicine was illegal because you had to see your doctor if I had a little wart on my skin. I mean, it's just the most unbelievable protectionism that goes on at all sorts of societal levels.

1:20:55Government is just not, it's one of those things that protects itself first because I can. Vene actually gave me one of the best definitions of government I ever came across. He said, government is an entity that can pardon its own crimes. So they steal from you and they call that tax. They put you in jail where they kidnap you, they call that prison. And so it partners its own crimes. And that is able to do that because of the place that it's in. And I think that's the part that needs to be undone because there's so many structures that stop progress by calcifying old thinking teachers unions, for example, that we need to find mechanisms to break that up and break up what I call the immune system problem.

1:21:41Yeah, I know. Okay, so no more sea corporations next time I'm starting a government or religion one experimental bit more than than that. Yes. But a pleasure as always. Thank you. I hope you would be my prophet any time, Peter. And you are, I think the tech prophet for many people. So that's all. Love you. No. All right. Well, talk soon.