Dror Poleg: Rethinking Our Exponential Future

28:11It's very, very hard to tell. And again, you look at the General Motors on the other side and you're like, okay, is that thing? Is that Lindy? Is it still here because it's Lindy or it's here because it's about to disappear? So it's very hard to tell. What it basically told me is not that offices will become empty necessarily, but that the way they are priced by financial markets is off kilter. That there's no way that these things are as stable as a government bond, that their cash flow should be capitalized at like 2.5 % or 3 % as some office buildings are. What it also told me is that in order to continue to generate cash flow, they will probably have to become more similar to hotels or hospitality assets.

28:51meaning they have to convince people to come back every day or every month or every year not just every 15 years and they have to provide all sorts of services which basically means both more capex and more opex in order to do that which means that their cap rates should be higher and they should be evaluated more like an operating business just like any other business on earth rather than as a financial asset that is really a purely financial asset that like As I put it in the book, real estate was changing from a game of monopoly to a game of strategy. So, and the game of strategy like chess still means that every square you control has value in itself, but it also means that you constantly have to look around and figure out what everybody else is doing and respond.

29:36As opposed to the game of monopoly where you own a little square and everyone that walks by has to give you a check no matter what you do forever. So it's not that you can't make money, but that something fundamental is changing the nature of the game. Then COVID comes and a bigger picture emerges, which is a complete societal change in our relationship to cities because of technology. And then a further acceleration occurs as AI and robotics start hurtling in. So talk me through how you're thinking through that stage from the pandemic into what I refer to as the exponential age, because I don't think people are yet thinking through this fully.

30:21And every time I have conversations, people have half got into it. Everyone's having a half dinner party conversation. They're almost too scared to sit down and say, okay, what does it mean? And because it's an exponential, people just can't get their heads around it. So let's go for it. There's a lot to unpack in all of that. But COVID showed us a few things that most of us still don't want to see and understand. So from the narrow aspect of real estate, the first thing that showed us that most people in the most kind of important office jobs can do their work remotely or from anywhere. The second thing it showed that many of these jobs probably don't need to exist at all, because once people don't have to be supervised and managed a certain way, and you start really measuring what they produce rather than where they are or how they behave, then there's whole layers of management that don't need to be there.

31:11The management layers that do need to be there probably need completely different skills and abilities in order to manage those type of people. and it also showed us with companies like nvidia for example that embrace remote work and distributed work that you can produce the most sophisticated physical goods hardware remotely and through remote collaboration so it's not just about you know being uploading videos to tiktok or answering customer service calls but that you can do basically whatever you want now what i saw even before covid is not just that this was possible because there are some companies doing that even before COVID, but that this is necessary.

31:52And this comes back to that nonlinear economy thing. So if you remember, around 2015, Amazon decided that it's going to start looking for a second headquarters, right? HQ2. And then they chose actually two different locations. At the same time, when it's all around 2015, other companies like Apple and Facebook and Stripe started splitting their headquarters as well to two, three, four, five. Now to the uncurious eye, this looked like business as usual. Companies always had, you know, headquarters like offices and branches all over the world. But what was different here is that these companies were not opening these offices in order to sell to the local market.

32:31They're opening these offices in order to hire from the local market. Basically, they were telling us, I'm splitting my core activities into two and three and four, and my employees are now collaborating remotely, even though they're in an office. Because a trade-off was emerging between the value of in-person work, which is indeed valuable, and the need to tap into the largest possible talent pool in order to make increasingly specific and specialized matches between people that have very, very unique skills and backgrounds and tasks that are increasingly specialized. So as the economy becomes more specialized, the return on these matches becomes larger and larger.

33:09Now, this theory of matching is the same theory that economists use to explain why the internet actually made economic activity more concentrated initially, why superstar regions like New York and Silicon Valley became more important between 1995 and 2015. They said because the economy is more dependent on innovation and knowledge, work and creativity, these people are flocking into the largest possible labor pools because that's where companies can make those matches. But what the theory didn't take into account is that however large Silicon Valley or New York are, if companies can suddenly hire from a pool of 100 million or 500 million people and they do that, they have an advantage.

33:49And companies showed us even before COVID that they have a need to do that now, that things are so competitive and specialized that they have to hire from that type of pool. Which is obvious if you look at, again, entertainment or sports. You know, the LA Lakers, they don't just hire people who live in LA. They hire people, they hire the best possible people from anywhere in the world. And when things become so competitive and so globalized, if you're unable to tap into the largest possible talent pool, you're falling behind. And again, COVID started showing us that. But I feel like we're still stuck in a conversation where people see there's some kind of struggle between managers and employees, and the employees are lazy and they don't want to come back, or they're millennials, or they're Gen Z, or they don't have childcare, or whatever the reason.

34:38And of course, that plays a role. But the deeper driver is from the companies themselves. They depend now on hiring from anywhere. They're the ones who are not able to commit anymore to more than two years in advance to know even how many employees do they need, where are they going to be, what are they going to do. Basically, they have no clue what they're doing because this is the nonlinear world that we live in. Now, this, of course, has implications for everything, for how we invest, for our careers. To frame it into terms that your viewers are surely familiar with, you know, if Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about black swans, for example, when he wrote it, I don't know, 15 years ago or something.

35:15He was talking about rare events that have kind of an oversized impact. What I'm talking about is that the most predictable or repeatable way to produce things today is by producing these type of black swans all the time. Basically, everything we produce is increasingly dependent on these type of dynamics. So it's not like things that happen every five years and ruin everything. It's like whatever you're doing today, you just have no idea what's going to come out of it and you have to make bets in a completely different way. Another aspect of Taleb's work, which is relevant here, in the Black Swan, he also spoke about scalable and non-scalable occupations where, you know, a scalable occupation, like a music star, for example, you can make tons of money, but unless you're the absolute best, you make nothing.

36:02A non-scalable occupation, I don't know, a chiropractor, a prostitute, as Taleb gives us an example, basically your income is capped, but your downside is also limited. And in the past, you had a choice. You could try to become the next Taylor Swift or you could become the local chiropractor. Today, part of what technology is doing, it's making all professions scalable. So a Peloton instructor, one of the most physical in-person jobs in the world, can actually service a million and a half people. And he's not exactly a media star because he's doing it live. is giving shout outs to people just like the star and only fans which is again one of the most physical professions in the world she kind of has a relationship as one analyst put it it's kind of a hybrid between a porn film and a girlfriend and these are the type of things that are emerging now so whatever profession you're in you're no longer protected from competing against the very best in your field so if geography was kind of the patron saint of the average performer previously, it no longer protects them from anything.

37:08So everyone's lives are suddenly much more risky, at the same time have much more opportunity, and basically require us to think about everything completely differently in terms of how we approach risk and how we plan ahead. I've got a million things. I know I'm throwing a gazillion things at you. That's fine. I'm just trying to get an audit in my head in what I want to talk to them about. But let's finish off of the cities part before we go into more. Where does that leave cities? Because, look, Real Vision is a company that used to have offices in New York. We had 60 people in New York. We now have three people in the office we can't get out of the lease yet.

37:45We're desperate to. You know, we've got people now. Everybody's all over the world. Everybody's the same way. Companies, some of the banks are trying to get people to stay in the office. But it's a losing battle. So the structure of cities changes. midtown manhattan is gutted now where our offices are um there's yeah all the bodegas have closed down even because people aren't there anymore um and yet hudson river valley is flourishing because all the millennials have moved out because they're all now 35 years old they've got kids um what where are cities going before we move into where all of this is going So people have much more choice now, especially the people who can afford to exercise their choice.

38:33And in a world of choice, I think a lot of people are going to want to live in cities and in great cities. But even in the best case scenario, that would require a transition, a transition of the existing assets to other uses, a transition of other assets like retail. You mentioned bodegas. You still need retail in cities, but maybe you need different types of retail to cater to different types of people. at different times of day based on different assumptions. I kind of like to look at it using the long tail framework from Chris Anderson. So in a world of choice, what ultimately happens is that you get a long tail of more people exercising more choice in all sorts of new locations, Hudson Valley, for example.

39:14But also, and that Anderson didn't predict initially, the biggest stars actually become bigger than ever. You get the Taylor Swift and the Avengers franchise and basically the places that benefit from network effects and everyone always dreamed of participating in. So in a world where all the highest paid employees can live anywhere, many more people are going to want to live in Manhattan if they can, if there's enough housing there for them and if the city can accommodate them. So I think we'll see some really, really big winners, bigger than ever. We'll see a longer tale of basically anywhere suddenly becoming relevant for high paid employees to, you know, pitch a tent in or buy a house in.

39:54And in between, there'll be a lot of losers, both like middle side cities, some of the large cities that are kind of not adapting properly or don't have any redeeming or attractive properties beyond just being a place to work. and either way even in the best case scenario it will be a painful process for cities that are often already kind of semi-bankrupt struggle to provide basic services as it is and are not famous for moving quickly or kind of you know deregulating or unzoning or upzoning things that should be should be adapted yeah I mean you know I look at when I first went to the US showing my age in the very early 80s it was just developing from being the dump that it was from the 60s unlivable dangerous dirty city because it had it was the 1930s it was amazing and then it went into decline and you know and it gets cheap enough where artists can move in and before you know it it's warhol and it's lou reed and it's like all of the cool kids are in and then suddenly culture comes and culture creates more people and everybody wants to move to new york and it feels like we have to get rid of the little jackets the sleeveless jackets and the kind of identikit people who are all there in the city and bring the culture back that got priced out yeah got priced out to brooklyn and then brooklyn got priced out to somewhere else and you so we have to repurpose all the real estate the shops have to get cheaper in rent to bring the kind of creatives back again and you can rebuild the city from that that's that's my mental model but that takes time and most of this commercial real estate is going to get defaulted on yeah and there's a difference between the 30s and what came next came next and now again they were heading for that linear industrial economy which produces a broad middle class We're in a world that doesn't necessarily produce that, definitely not of its own device without some serious policy changes.

41:59So if you look at Manhattan today, the shape of the city already reflects a bimodal distribution of sorts. You have these super, super tall buildings where you need$50 million to even buy the most basic apartment. Or you have these tall public housing projects, but you don't have a lot in between, definitely not things that are being built today. And in such a city, it'll be hard to reproduce the fun of previous eras. At the same time, assuming that we're moving into a society that introduces all sorts of new social services that tries to give people the best education, the best healthcare, the best living environment, cities have a huge role to play in that world.

42:42because they're the only places that are dense enough to allow you to provide those type of services efficiently and economically and to keep your society healthy and ensure that enough people get an opportunity and that they can really show up somewhere and have access to things that might lead them up one day. So cities have, in a way, a more important role than ever to play in such a polarized society from an income perspective. but so far they have a long way to go in order to become whatever they need to become in order to fulfill that role yeah i think they play an important role the more digital society gets the more into the metaverse that we go the more humans will need a physical community as well in a way that we've kind of lost most people have kind of drifting now we don't have physical community anymore uh we kind of lost it everyone left home from their parents you know we don't have that mediterranean culture or the culture my parent my father would have grown up with in india that's all gone you know so we just don't have that nuclear family we don't have the the village we don't have in england the village pub and the culture around that's all gone yeah so i kind of feel like in an increasingly digital world we'll probably come back to that but i do worry about what the hell happens to the middle america cities i just drive through some of these cities i'm like they're full of insurance companies and you know whatever medical manufacturing businesses i'm like there is just no future for any of this stuff these people don't need to work here and most of these jobs aren't going to exist 10 years yeah i mean a lot of the issue with those cities is that they're not cities to begin and they're not livable either because yeah they're not livable they're not walkable they're not pleasant unless you have to work there you don't want to be there so i think those that are pleasant or have something unique about them I mean, something unique could be a different value.

44:32Like for some people, something unique could mean a lot of parking. That's a value proposition for some people. So cities that kind of have something clear that they stand for or lower taxes or different weather or more conservative or Christian value, whatever it is. If they stand for something clear, just like any other kind of niche product on the Internet, they have a chance in a world of abundant choice. If not, if they just assume I have a captive audience because these five companies are here, then yeah, then things might change. and they might change really, really quickly, just like we saw during COVID.

45:02It's not companies transitioning over 30 years. It's just like one morning everyone says, oh, actually, the employees don't have to be here anymore. Don't show up. Thanks. You know, it's been nice. And that actually happened in many places already, but many of them are in denial about things kind of coming back and let's try to force the employees to come back and let's negotiate with the CEO and give it another year. But, you know, it's been four years and I think I call it the five stages of real estate grief. you know it's like it's time to let go so yeah and eventually you know i think these regional banks will have to go begging to the federal reserve and say look sorry we've got all this stuff it was the pandemic not our problem the federal reserve say yes don't worry give it to us right it's a systemic risk maybe not not terminal in itself but in together with all sorts of other things that are happening yeah it's a risk for banks as well yeah i think the covid is not going to be i mean covid was was that kind of excuse for retail you know retail landlords held up for a decade and then when covid happened a lot of them let go and just said oh you know it's covid i'm throwing in the towel i think offices will need and the next crisis something will have to happen to kind of put them out of their misery yeah yeah i don't know because i mean maybe it's just time who knows the um but there's a bigger trend at play here which is that when we look at the structure of what's happening to humanity right one of the big pressures on cities is aging populations and the structure of society is changing all across the western world populations are shrinking except the u.s which is flat but if you look at the forward-looking births deaths it's now zero so it's it's over population growth is done until you start factoring factoring in AI and robots, which are, you talked about, use the word abundance before.

46:54This is infinite scalability of humans. It's like, you know, I use a formula, which is GDP growth is population growth plus productivity growth plus debt growth. It's basically trend rate GDP. We finished debt growth in 2008 because since then it's just been the servicing of old debts that has been the debt growth and productivity and population growth have both been in decline because of aging populations and we've stopped we've actually stopped population growth via immigration because it's become difficult for politically to deal with for almost every country okay fine so we've got slow gdp growth it makes servicing debts harder and all of that stuff and then this nuclear bomb of ai turns up and now suddenly my guess within five seven years we have infinite knowledge knowledge worker you know the knowledge worker the doctor the lawyer the accountant the or even media people even people even influencers all of these people with the high end of the this knowledge spectrum them they're all zeros apart from us too of course but yeah of course because we're better looking funnier that kind of stuff you know no i've been training but it's true yeah i've been training my own rowl ball it's near perfect it's not the video one yet it's audio the video one should be by march i'm it's it's like it's amazing i use the audio i use 11 labs to to narrate my basically turn my articles into audio in my own strange voice and accent and it works my mom can't tell the difference so it's uh yeah i mean it's it's it's weird but i spend half the time when i'm in my car having conversations with chat gpt4 yeah because it's and by the way that's another aspect of that scalability that a single person today can generate so much firepower and if they hit a nerve they basically have unlimited supply of whatever it is that they're trying to sell um yeah because you know before the model was one to many it's now one-to-one of infinite scale yeah so anyway so once you've once you think of all of this the structure of humanity changes so i start thinking through this um and i've been speaking through a lot with a good friend geordie viscer i don't know if you know geordie from he's great um and you start to get to the idea that okay well if that's the case then at some point gdp growth can grow exponentially because you're infinite humans and infinite productivity particularly if cost of energy comes down lower in this yeah that's another aspect of it critical aspect yeah and everyone's working on that so this whole equation starts changing and then i start to look and think well what the hell is business i i i can't get beyond 2030 so i think about the same way you started this process looking through the technological change and started to address cities i'm now looking through the same kind of lens with the same mega trends and saying i don't even know what business is anymore um so for example we're seeing all these you know i've got a list of tech people on twitter and a lot of this is ai and a lot of them are these amazing startups you and I would go, oh my God, that's incredible.

50:27And that tech gets supplanted by OpenAI or Lama or somebody else six weeks later, and that business is dead. And they've raised 10 million bucks. And this is like the iteration process faster and faster. And we look at it, most other companies and business people aren't even aware that this is happening or that it has anything to do with them. yeah no and i'm looking at this thinking how is even capital going to work in an environment where capital creates something and gets destroyed so fast where humans aren't the main productive outputs and not one of us neither you nor me for example knows what the hell business we're going to be in in seven years i'll tell you how let's let's get radical let's do it so one i agree with you know your premise i think to the extent that anyone is optimistic today and i am it has to be tech optimism because we're stuck in a really deep hole because the monetary policy other policy whatever it is the only way out of where we are is through incredible innovation that really changes the calculus.

51:38Not going back to the draft, that's for sure. So, you know, again, abundance of energy, abundance of intelligence, abundance of whatever we can throw at it. So yes. Now, we are looking ahead and as you said, we have no idea what's going to work. We have no idea how to put money to work responsibly. And one of the things that almost everything has in common in this nonlinear world that is governed by this kind of complex system dynamics is that initial actions have an inordinate effect on outcomes. For example, you know, in social media, the fact that 100 people like a video really, really quickly dramatically changes the probability of that video to go viral.

52:24And once it triggers that cascade, the algorithm starts reinforcing it, other people start reinforcing it, you have a winner. So basically, by controlling and getting early feedback on things, you can kind of add a little more predictability and manageability to this world governed by algorithms and crowds. Now, how do you incentivize people early to give you feedback and to give you the type of feedback that you want? You set up a mechanism that provides incentives that is very similar to a pyramid scheme, basically. You tell people, if you're going to provide the input that I need right now, I'm going to share with you some of the outcome that we're getting later.

53:03And because digital technology now, and of course crypto, but also not necessarily crypto so people don't get distracted, allows you now to share royalties of almost every action in the most granular fashion. And also to measure the outcome and the impact of every individual like or share or glance or facial reaction or whatever it is that you were reading out of people's heads and brains. Now you can start compensating them for that. Now, this is not just a way to market things. But all of these big models also depend on human feedback, both during their training process and later once they are deployed.

53:40They need people to constantly give feedback. Let's say if there's an abundance of content, how do you know what other people should watch? What certain types of people should be shown based on feedback from other people? So you need more and more people to basically just consume content, consume services, and provide feedback. And feedback could be something explicit like a like or a share, or it could just be them living their lives, and you kind of track whatever it is that gets them going, which we're becoming really good at even before we start wearing all these weird things. You know, just by looking at your camera today, AI can know what's your blood pressure, your heart rate, whether you're excited, whether you're lying, all sorts of things, whether you slept well at night.

54:19So basically we're moving, I think, towards an economy where more and more people will do stuff that just looks completely like leisure, but not because they're getting UBI, but because they're getting paid to just live their lives and that has economic value that is being extracted. Now, if you think about it, it's much less extreme than it sounds because to a farmer from 120 years ago, the way I live looks completely ridiculous. And the type of people that I pay, the dog walker, the lactation consultant, the whatever it is, all of these people didn't exist and no one thought they should exist.

54:52And even what I do every day looks completely useless. And like, what do I do every day? I read tweets and then I write stuff, but I'm producing economic value and I think more and more people are going to do exactly that At least your mother tells you you're producing economic value No, she's not she actually doesn't understand what I'm doing but most other people do but she doesn't understand that I make money somehow and I bought a house that I have a car and so yeah so I think like work more and more work will be indistinguishable from leisure and if we're lucky we'll find ways to compensate people for that because i've been thinking through this too and i got to a similar conclusion i think there's a role of cryptocurrency because it's a payment mechanism you know we're seeing something like it again people get hung up on crypto and no it's it's not a loyalty system it's a point system it's a payment system for you giving your attention right if attention is the most valuable commodity on earth in this modern digital age, then we need to get paid for it.

55:56Right now, the platforms get paid for it. And so we should have a direct relationship with the advertisers and us. But attention also means that if you know something specific, that's the matching algorithm. Again, if you know something specific and I can get it out of you when I need it, that's valuable as well. It doesn't necessarily mean watching a video and liking it. It might mean answering a question providing feedback there might be attention providing a service to another human maybe but making those incredible matches between people and scaling them i got to that the role of humans in a world full of ai is something to do with community and it's online digital communities we've talked about this physical community that we could go back to new york because we actually want to hang around people um or we could be in nature because the world is overwhelmingly digital and we're wearing goggles all day but i feel like the answer is just being human which is we are social creatures we hang out in groups we argue we fight we fall in love we we collaborate we do things together and there's a guy called yatsui from animoka who you know again he was thinking through again that what crypto payments can enable again it's not a crypto thing it's about universal basic equity it's having ownership for these communities and is there a way to own parts of these communities that you're in that have value and if you want to leave that community and go to a different community like your debenture at a football club or your season ticket you know can you pass it on to somebody else and it has value or your lifelong golf club membership if you you want to pass it on to somebody that's kind of how I'm thinking about it.

57:46I agree. I mean, a lot of our work in the future will be giving human attention to other humans. You know, Andy Worrell said, and that was in the world of mass media, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. I say in the future, everyone will be a prostitute for 15 minutes. You're going to give people some kind of unique focus attention on demand for a set period of time and get paid for it somehow. And again, it could mean all the way to something this is the only this is like an only fans economy and but that that is a that is a beta test to what it means to get attention yeah individualized attention but does most people even in i think the kind of adult accounts most people don't really consume adult services there they consume attention oh mention my name uh you know show my photo next to like people just want attention they want to know that they exist basically in this world where it's no longer clear what's real they don't even know whether they are real and they need someone to tell them that they exist but how are you going to get through the ai does the ai give you the attention and we don't need to do that no so so human is premium so you know marshall you know no there will be ways to know and i know in the most premium way is actually to be there in person if you can afford it in places like New York and San Francisco and London.

59:08You know, Marshall LeClewens said that when horses are no longer needed for transportation, they become forms of entertainment and admiration. I think the same thing will be for humans and whatever they bring to the table. So everyone will have a Toyota and the rich people ride horses today. I think the same thing will be with humans. Everyone will have companionship and advice and everything else. But those who actually want human advice will have to pay more, not necessarily to pay other people, but even to pay to be next to other people in a pleasant environment. Good physical space will be at the highest possible premium, higher than it was.

59:42And that's the irony of where we started this conversation. So technology is undermining the meaning of location, but it also makes the most desirable locations more desirable and more valuable than ever, because they allow you to do something real and you can't do anything real anymore anywhere else. That is fascinating. and i hadn't quite connected those dots that had been floating around my head but it's but it's absolutely dead right because you know i had got to which i also think is probably correct is nature trades at a huge premium you know that that that experience away from technology because i think humanity's like to split between the accelerationists who are going to merge with the machines at some point whatever that means you know they're the same people who you know will already wear in their Apple watch and you know you know that it's very quick that they will try and merge with the machines and there's people who don't want to but there's some way of living in both worlds and I think nature probably is a premium experience and nature plus community is an experience but I'd not thought through the fact that the most premium experience of all particularly in the world of shrinking populations is human experience and you might actually pay more for that than for the machine just for the fact that it's human and it feels authentically different even though it might be worse but humans are worse by nature they're just suboptimal and flawed it's imperfect and unpredictable but that's the beauty of it you know Blade Runner incredible film or two films in themselves but they're based on a book on a Philip K.

1:01:17Dick book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and in the book he emphasizes the fact that in that world, so there's the Decker, like the hero, Harrison Ford, he actually has a little sheep that he raises on his roof. And he's not even sure if it's a real sheep or not. But in that world, there's a black market for animals. People grow even cockroaches. They want to have something that is alive and real. And that's the rarest thing on earth. And they all kind of fight each other over those little things that are real, just because they want to have something in their hands that behaves a little differently and that is organic.

1:01:49So I think that's where we're headed. I mean, we're there already for some people, but I think more and more of the world will be structured in a way that makes these areas valuable. We're both techno-optimists because it feels like it's the only answer. And I know that's actually the worst case scenario for other people some some people absolutely hate this as an idea um what do you hate as an idea you started off saying you're a paranoid Jew who always looks like looks for where everything could go wrong okay where's the flip side of your of your curiosity going where do you say you know what this could be entirely different outcome and that worries me i hate i mean i hate zero-sum thinking uh because we are not in a zero-sum world definitely not anymore i don't think we ever were but we're definitely not in a zero-sum world anymore and i think a lot of the people who kind of rally against tech optimism are not angry at tech optimism they're angry at the fact that we're in a big mess and that they don't have any better ideas.

1:03:04At the same time, I also get annoyed by some tech optimists that kind of, you know, count it, you know, cover everything in chocolate and just, oh, this is wonderful. It's going to be amazing and no one will be affected and we'll create jobs. And we'll live forever and everything's fine. Yeah, that's also not true. And it's definitely not appropriate, I think, to dismiss people's fears. I mean, people are in pain. People are anxious and they should be anxious because these are anxious times. and we are privileged, whether it is by birth or by our own achievements or by luck or whatever it is. But the point is that those of us who can even talk about it are a little less worried and have a few more opportunities and maybe have a little more kind of buffer from some of these kind of tribulations.

1:03:49And I think, so I'm not criticizing the people on the other side, I'm criticizing people on my own side who I think can show much more empathy, much more effort to understand those other people, which is generally a challenge with everything. I mean, you see that in our politics today. I mean, there's two people on both sides who really don't understand each other. And each one is sure that the other one is like a complete idiot or driven by motives that are illegitimate or ignorant or medieval or whatever. While in reality, you can understand, you know, if you really look at it, you understand that people are struggling.

1:04:21You can understand what they're worried about. You can understand what they're scared of. and uh you should always ask more of that approach you should not listen to what they're saying but understand why they're saying it like you know i understand why people get excited about trump and i understand why people hate trump and and are willing to do everything against him i still hope he disappears of course but you know it's not all just you know people are stupid and it's racism and religion. I believe, maybe that's what I'm trying to say. I believe in humanity, and I believe that most people, if you give them love and some certainty, they really calm down really quickly, and they can get along with almost anyone really easily.

1:05:06And that's true, even if they keep hating each other and have prejudices and whatever it is, but they just don't pass that threshold of like, let's be violent, let's go crazy, let's stare the whole thing down. I think if people are able to raise their kids, to have some kind of security in their life, most of them just become really, really calm. And I say that as someone who grew up in Israel, fought in wars, got shot at, two grandmas survived Auschwitz. I have no reason to think that, but I think that and I believe that because part of what I did growing up in the last 25 years is traveling all over the world, putting myself in extreme situations and getting to know the people on this planet and we're all really cool once you get to know us i think i've always said so travel is the greatest educator once you spend your life traveling travel and mdma if you combine them especially exactly but that the the travel thing is like you see the world through everybody's perspectives and you're like you know it's not all about you and then once you do that it's a great thing so final question for you how well there's something i'm trying to grasp but i'm trying to think how you're thinking about this exponentials are impossible for us humans to think about and we are going through this exponential change on a scale of one to ten how right do you think you're going to be in getting the trajectory of the exponential well as someone who's good at predicting it i have to say i'm not going to be right at all probably i'm going to be a three on the scale of one to ten but uh but no i i think and also i think we have a lot of decisions to make along the way i i describe kind of the best case scenario which is again a world where people find a purpose and the use of their time without having to go through a world war or a communist revolution uh but i think i try to base my predictions on stuff that is already happening and that i see around me not on kind of stuff that i'm completely imagining the hard thing about that that's linear by nature the extrapolation you can do that's what i'm just struggling with this it's not there's no right or wrong answer i just know i think life would be unrecognizable in 15 years yeah that's and at the same time if you look 15 years back it's already unrecognizable.

1:07:32I mean, the way we live, the devices we have, I mean, it's incredible. And it just happened and we barely noticed. And it's going to, and it is accelerating. It's going to become weirder and weirder. I mean, a year and a half ago, the stuff that I can do today with JGPT and Claude, it's like I never dreamt that I'd be able to do that ever. I mean, it's just unbelievable. I'm writing a book now. I feed whole drafts, 30, 40 ,000 words into Claude. And I have a conversation with it 10 times a day. oh should i move this here should i do that and it reads the whole book every time and you know it's my colleague it's my friend it's like it's an unbelievable thing and it's yeah it's and it's so much fun i think that you know people should just embrace these things experiment put yourself out there increase your odds basically by by playing and by increase your odds matching with other people you know let people know who you are what you're interested in what you think and And the internet will guide everyone else towards you, hopefully, or the relevant opportunities.

1:08:34Fabulous. Doror, listen, that was a really fabulous conversation, really thought-provoking and a lot of fun as well. So I really appreciate your time. And we'll come back in a few years' time and see exactly how wrong we've been because the exponential is even further than we thought. Who the hell knows? It was a real pleasure, Earl. Thank you so much for having me. Okay. Take care, my friend. the whole point of the journeyman is to make you think the whole point is to bombard you with thoughts and ideas you see none of us has a crystal ball on the future but all we can do is open our minds discuss and debate amongst smart people and that's what i love with de roar it's just being able to pick his brains shoot a few of my ideas get a few of his ideas and move our thinking forwards because none of us knows where this is going.

1:09:30We kind of know the direction of travel, but the path it takes, that's going to be somewhat of a surprise. The speed it comes at, that's probably a surprise too. You know, us humans don't really think well in exponential terms. We tend to be linear. So anyway, there'll be more from me on topics like this. Again, if you want more on this, then feel free to go to realvision.com forward slash future to learn about the exponentialist and whether that might be suitable for you to come across this ride. You know, the people who are subscribing now are product and app managers from Silicon Valley, investment professionals, people who are running their businesses.

1:10:12It matters to everybody. So if it matters to you, then that's something for you. also as ever please subscribe to the channel click the like button add a comment i always appreciate it it obviously helps the algorithm and if you do want to go deeper then you must go to realvision.com it's free to sign up it gives you the ability to use our ai tools to help you become a bit more exponential in your knowledge and your learning journey and your ability to invest. It'll give you the best content in the world from the best people in the world. It'll give you an incredible network of the most amazing Real Vision members in about 121 countries around the world.

1:11:01Whichever continent you're in, except Antarctica, don't think we've got anyone there. We've got you covered. And there's a lot of you. And we want you to network with each other and start sharing ideas because together our little network state of real vision is more powerful than we are individually and we can all help ourselves and help each other navigate this exponential world so go to realvision.com sign up for free and i'll see you there

1:11:33all of us together are living through the death of an old world and the birth of a new one this This is a fourth turning, but this is not the fourth turning of demographics or politics. This is the birth of the new technological age. This new world has a world of 3D printed rockets, crypto payments in space, discussions on the rights for humanoid robots, machine intelligence that may outperform our own, simulated worlds where autonomous AI agents write code for other autonomous AI agents. It's a world full of opportunity and full of difficulty too. You see, we are living history and it's happening much, much faster than any of us can comprehend.

1:12:18This is Reid's law, Metcalfe's law squared. Humanity has never gone through anything like this. But we have to comprehend and understand what is happening. It is into this world that the Exponentialist is born. The Exponentialist is a new service from me, Raoul Pal, and David Matten, author of New World, Same Humans. It's an almanac of the fastest period of change ever witnessed in the human history. A period of excitement, exhilaration, difficulty and terror. And The Exponentialist really is for humans first and investors second. Yes, the opportunities are enormous all round. To find out more and get our special launch pricing, go to realvision.com forward slash the future.