The Techno-Optimist Manifesto with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

22:33Yeah, I mean, look, the dinosaurs had no plan B, right? No. Turns out. So John asks, how can economic systems evolve to prevent human corruption from infiltrating advanced technologies that surpass our capacity for understanding. Ben, what do you think? Or maybe you might narrow the question a little bit. Or maybe you might say. Yeah, I'm not sure if I totally understand what he's getting at here, but I think human corruption, there is this agency problem, and I think that you kind of alluded to it on the kind of nuclear -efficient issue, where as these systems evolve, how do you keep the human interest from fouling them?

23:15And this kind of gets to a heart of the lot of the things that you spoke about in the manifesto, which is, for example, we had this banking crisis, and everybody's intention was to basically lessen our reliance on giant banks that became as powerful as many governments in the world. And of course, because of this Baptist and bootlegger issue, where the banks were the bootleggers and the government was the Baptist, we basically got the opposite. We got much bigger banks, much more powerful, and that trend is kind of continuing forward. So I think that when we look at how systems get corrupt and create real crisis, we really have to be aware of the agency problem.

23:59And we're going through a few of those now, I think, both on AI and also on crypto, where actually a lot of the answer to some of these like huge powerful monopolies. Like what do you do about tech companies getting so big and becoming monopolies? What do you do about banks getting so big and becoming monopolies? We actually have a magic technology that decentralizes power, actually creates a real form of stakeholder capitalism where all of the participants in the economy get rewarded for building the economy. And the biggest adversaries of that whole movement end up being the kind of Baptist in the government, con by the bootleggers and the big banks and so forth, kind of over -highlighting small, real, but small dangers of the technology and trying to stop the technology and its tracks and kind of lead to this horrible agency problem where you have these very corrupt systems.

25:02So I guess my big thing would be like be really careful when somebody goes, oh, this is a problem with a new technology. So therefore, we have to stop the new technology. Like that, I think, is the pattern that's repeated over and over again and hurt us so badly on energy and the threatens to hurt us on intelligence and threatens to hurt us on decentralization. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, one of the ways to think about this for people who haven't run into this in their lives is there's a fundamental difference between pro business and pro market. Yeah. And they sound like they're the same thing and they're not because pro business kind of begs the question of which businesses and then sort of okay, what's the structure of the market and are we talking about?

25:43Yeah. Right. Exactly. We're talking about lots of companies having to compete and earn their way in the world or are we talking about ultimately chronic capitalism and basically this is the pattern of basically what happens. This is kind of the point of the Baptist and the Lakers idea of what happens, which is basically a new technology something changes in the world. you have big incumbent companies that very much are opposed to that change or want to control it and want to control and want to lock it down And so what they do is they go to the government and they basically say oh you need to regulate this and they don't go and say you need to regulate this for our benefit because they would get laughed at So if they say it's going to regulate this Yeah, that would be a big giveaway So instead they say we need to regulate this to protect basically the little people But what they're shooting for a hundred percent of the time what they're shooting for is basically government saying shen barriers to competition for themselves.

26:26And I would even argue, like, I'll do a little effect of pessimism. We don't, in America today, in most industries, actually live in what you call a free market system. We live in more of a captured kind of big business cartel ecosystem. And you look just across sort of sector at Persector, what you see are sort of two or three or four companies that have, you know, overwhelming market share in each sector and generate, you know, an overwhelming percentage of the profits and have this extremely and disastrous relationship with the government. By the way, often to the point where they're actually writing their own regulations, right?

26:51It's their lobbyists actually writing the regulations. I see industry groups that they run. Well, the classic example is - That's the majority of regulations. Works exactly. Yeah, that's right. And of course, and then there's this other form of corruption, which is the revolving door, which is like, OK, if you're a regulator, it is extremely tempting. Just out of pure self -interest to do what these big companies want because they'll hire you. Right? You have to be done doing that. And so this is sort of this corruption after the fact that happens with the revolving doors. So basically, you could be pro -business and be completely in favor of all of that, right?

27:19Because it is still businesses doing everything at the end of the day. Pro -market, right, says, no, none of that, what I just described as acceptable, that's not how things should work at all. The last thing any government should be doing is giving any particular company some special writer privilege, some ability to block out your competition. And in fact, what you want is more competition. You want more competition, more markets, more capitalism. As actually the answer to that, precisely to keep the big companies from basically just taking over and not having to compete anymore. Yeah, you know, 100%.

27:45And actually that leads very well to the next question, which is how exactly will markets prevent monopolies? Please elaborate on your point. And I think this is so key because what the nature of companies, even monopolies, is that the older and larger they get, the less adaptive they become. And we look, we've seen this with Google who invented most of the new AI technology and then was a little bit of sleep at the wheel. When OpenAI released GPP, they missed it just because like they're big, they're complicated, they're slow, they're not as good anymore. And so if the new AI companies are free to compete, if open source AI is free to compete, then all of the sun, that's the best kind of way to break that monopoly.

28:36Similarly, there's a lot of cheddar on like social networking monopolies and banking monopolies and these kinds of things. And again, we already actually have a technology that's a great insurgent technology to defeat those monopolies. And the thing that prevents that is, as you say, not a pro market, but a pro business, a pro very specific business, business that have enough money to bribe, corrupt lobby the government into creating regulations that prevent the new company from competing. That's right. And we're seeing a lot of that right now. I find the heart to be terribly corrupt. with that mind, can you elaborate on your statement?

29:19Love doesn't scale.

29:24I don't know if you meant because the hardest corrupt, but perhaps you did. Well, so I didn't say the hardest corrupt. So I mean, look, I think what that question is alluding to there, I would assume is sort of this perennial debate about human nature, which is this man primarily good or bad, which we could talk about. But I think on the thing about love not scaling, let me hit that one directly, and then we can maybe go to the bigger topic. So the formulation here is from a guy named David Friedman who's an economist and Milton Friedman's son and the thing that he said that really stuck with me is look There's only three ways to get people to do things for other people Right fundamentally one is love and you see that and people's families and their friend that works like I'll do things for Ben without him having to pay me right Yeah, and so that is an important force

30:06Coming to the other one. Yes, exactly so without force so so there's love without love there's basically two other choices and they're basically money and force. Right, money's the carrot, the force is the stick, look, money is capitalism's answer, force was communism's answer. Yeah. And again, going back to just beat up on the communist a little bit more like this was the big realization of all the communist societies in the 20th century and today, which is like basically what communism, minister, rivetism, socialism, and so forth expect they expect love to scale. Yeah. And so they expect that you should work in whatever the Siberian salt mines or whatever it is, the fields or whatever.

30:36And you should do that out of love for your fellow man. And you should do that for love of the society and so forth. And by the way, They look like the Nazis are the national socialists. Like they have their own spit on this. You're supposed to do things on behalf of the German people. It's the same thing. Like you're supposed to love this macro unit because the love doesn't scale. The problem is people just don't naturally love people they don't know. And by the way, my view, that's not because there's something morally wrong with them. It's because they don't know the other people. And it's like, OK, are they being loved back?

31:00And are the other people going to be pulling their weight? Or is there going to be a free rider problem? And of course, the answer is at any level of scale. Of course, they're free rider problems if people aren't required to work. And so this is the irony of the heart of the whole thing. A society built in the idea that love scales becomes an incredibly dark dystopian hostel and ultimately murderous place because love doesn't scale. Forces one way around that, which is okay, the way you get people to work even though they don't want to because they don't love people in some remote area that they'd be working on behalf of, just put a gun to their head.

31:26And then the third option that falls straight out of that is okay, how about money? And then sort of money, of course, is a proxy. Money is a tool for sort of, you know, what they call sort of rational self -interest, right? Or in light and self -interest, which is like, okay, I'm going to get paid money to do this. it's going to benefit these other people. I'm not primarily doing it because it's going to benefit people. I haven't met. Look, maybe I love everybody and maybe I would love to meet all my customers. And by the way, look, when you walk into restaurant and you've never met the owner of the host before, like they're thrilled to see you, right?

31:50And so do they literally love you or you're their new best friend? No. Are they excited to see you? Yeah. Well, they have a very positive sentiment towards you because they know you're going to pay, right? Anyway, so that's the best solution that we've come up with. Barring some profound change in human nature in which people all of a sudden become farmer generous and then they've been historically, that seems like it's likely to be a stable state. Yeah, yeah, it's funny. They reminds me of an interesting conversation. I'd years ago with a friend of mine who grew up in the Soviet Union and I made some offhand comment that like whatever Stalin was a crazy psycho or that kind of thing and he goes, what are you talking about?

32:24Stalin was very rational, very smart. Go back, Reed Weddy wrote, look at his speeches. He was super systematic, thinker, very intelligent. I was like, well, like what went wrong? Why do you kill 20 million of his own people. And he just said, when you take away the carrot, all you have is stick. And that is so true. And I think a lot, you know, that's a lot of the point. At scale and your family, yes, you couldn't run the communist family. You can even run a communist could but at that scale, it can work for sure. Yeah, that's right. It height made this point. A dear to my class, he's made this point also, which is like, look, we do live in a superposition of the two systems, right?

33:01Because like, you don't want to be the asshole who like, you know, how it runs your family like it's a capitalist enterprise, like a charge for kids for rents, like for sleeping in their lungs when they're eight. We all grow up and in our family and friend environments, like we're all communist in that context, right? But then there's this kind of schizophrenia to it, which is like, okay, we go out into the world and the world doesn't act like that and all of a sudden there's a different way to exchange and a different way to relate. And so I think ultimately, you know, the answer lies in the superposition of the small in the large.

33:26And let's just say, yeah, the people who are too abstract on this, I think get derailed. Yeah, I think that's the exact point that everyone gets confused on because who want want the country to run like their family? That would be so much better. The problem is that it's impossible. Next question. This is actually one that I think a lot of people have from Morton. How do you see private capital versus public research budgets when it comes to fundamental progress? Aside from AT &T's monopoly that drove Bill Labs, it yet to see systemic technological progress from private investment. I think I would disagree with the last part, but I'll let you start.

34:03Yeah, so I actually say there's actually three models. I would say there's private, there's public, and then there's a third that I'll come to. So look, like a couple things I think are true. So one is again, I'll give the effective pessimist there to do on this one also, which is look like straight capital R research that is sort of the time -honored way of discovering the principles of the universe and so forth. The best of that has no idea if or when it will ever commercialize, right? because by definition it has no idea whether or not the experiments will even pan out, right? Or the theories are even correct.

34:29And so there is this kind of research that historically has been publicly funded. And look in the US we have had these agencies like the National Science Foundation that have done a lot of that for a very long time. And whatever issues NSF has, if you look at the totality of spend in their existence and then the results, so you would say, yeah, that was absolutely not standing investment from a societal standpoint. Right, right. Very good time for you. And investments, yeah. Yeah, that's right. And again, to be an effective pessimist, a lot of that research may not have been research that would get done by private companies.

34:54Look, on the other hand, I think private companies carry their weight more than people think. And look, part of it is the questioner alluded to Bell Labs, but there is this thing that happens when these companies, you know, that when the best of the big companies get making powerful, they do more of this. They open these labs, right? And so AT &T did it, IBM and Hila Packard at Google and Microsoft and many others across many industries have done this. And I think quite honestly, part of that is PR. For them, they like to show that off. I think part of that is, look, they start to think in terms of longer time horizons and they do want ultimately new products at some point.

35:24Part of that is it's a recruiting and retention exercise to get the best and brightest technical minds to stay there. It's to tell them that they can do research and publish their research. And so there is that. And look, Ben, you mentioned like, look, the breakthrough on AI just came out of Google, right? It came out of a private company, which is a great example of that. So yeah, look, there's some tension there. You know, look at a few researchers out of academia to pull that off. They did. And in fact, that's been a long -running source of tension actually between the tech companies and the universities for the last 15 years or so, which is as these new tech companies and built these big research labs, they have pulled a lot of the good faculty out of the universities.

35:54And by the way, that process, I think, is accelerating in AI specifically, because the capital needs to actually do modern AI are so big that our university's kind of forward to do it right now. So you get this kind of issue of like, are you draining the universities that they're remaining competent professors and leaving only the other kind? And you could debate, we can have a long debate about the present concept public versus private. There is a third model, and this is the one that people often talk about, you know, as sort of an aspiration, which is this idea of these very large societal projects.

36:19in the US, we talk in particular about the Apollo project and the Manhattan project, right? And we say, this is kind of a frequent lament from kind of the climates, right? Which is, why can't we have more Apollo projects in Manhattan projects? But I think that's actually a third model, and the third model is military and militaristic, right? Manhattan was just a straight -up military project, right? To build bomb run by the military. Apollo was a sort of a civilian thing, NASA. But it was in the context of a military arms race with the Soviet Union and a technological arms race with the Soviet Union in a much more militarized society than we have today.

36:47And of course, when the military gets involved, two things happen. One is they can do things at speed when they really want to because they just tell people what to do. And then also they get access to a lot of money. You want things to get rough. And so personally, I go back and forth a little bit on this. Is like, do we want more Manhattan's and Apollos? On the one hand, it's hard to say no. On the other hand, do I want a society that is that much more militarized? But if that's what's required, I don't know. Yeah, that could work. What would that mean for what is happening in the world if we get back to the point where it was militarized as we were in 1941, right?

37:15Or even 1960. Yeah. No, it's actually one of the great things about the modern world is we have some of the fewer wars and it's a smaller scale and every war is still horrible. Look, and hopefully that continues, right? Yes. Okay. Here's a good simple question from Tux. How do you bridge the gap between being anti -status and supporting America first policies or maybe American dynamism as we do? Yeah, so I look, I think that all these things end up being a question of power and how it works. So the extreme form of stateism is communism where 100 % of the power is in the public sector and no power is in the private sector.

38:02And that has the issues that we spoke of. I think that no public sector can quickly go to anarchy. and that's not at least not something that I would advocate for. So I think, look, as a society, we kind of have this collective, there's a certain amount of collectivism and shared values, shared morals, what's okay, what's not okay in America, we have things like freedom of speech, freedom to be who you are, kind of, and we're very anchored on these kind of free society ideals. And you need a state to do that, I believe they're probably some people that don't believe that, but you need a state for that.

38:43And preserving that, those values in that way of life, is extremely important. And that's primarily the role of the government with all of us citizens participating. And we try to participate in that through our American dynamism efforts. And that's important. So when I say I'm anti -status, I'm really saying I'm anti -communist. in the anti too much weight on the public sector at the expense of free markets and basically free -dung for the citizens. Ben, I think you probably mean the broadened out anti -communist also or by extension anti -authoritarian. Yeah, for sure anti -thean. I think those go together because it's hard to be an authoritarian unless you have an amazing amount of the power.

39:27Right? Like even if you wanted to be a authoritarian in the US, and we certainly like had authoritarian tendencies from time to time, from various politicians and leaders, but it's really hard to do because you don't have enough power to pull it off. And that's the greatest thing about our system, I think, is you can't gather enough power to become completely authoritarian in the US. And that's maybe the most fundamental thing we want to preserve. Zach T, can you further define the law of accelerating returns and how it may play out in the future. So I think it's I never know whether you use this as a met, it's such a great metaphor.

40:04I'll go ahead and use it. So it's a Paul Rumor uses this metaphor. He says ideas have sex. Let's say ideas reproduce. They go through the same reproduction and evolutionary process. It's living organisms. It's different than having sex, by the way. Yeah, you're right. Okay, that's bad. Now that we have birth control on all these things, longer, longer form of it's probably better. So the argument is basically ideas big get ideas in quite the same way that people begin people. So basically it's like the more ideas that you have, the more combinations of ideas you can have, and those combinations of ideas are themselves ideas.

40:34And then based on that, then they can further kind of replicate, you know, they can kind of crossbreed and have offspring. And you see this anytime, of course, you're building any kind of technological product is you're pulling in ideas from like all over the place. You're getting inspired by all the different technologies that are below you in the stack or getting inspired by all the other applications anybody has ever tried to build. You're getting inspired by all kinds of things, you know, look, AI is inspired by the neural structure of the brain, quite literally, right, driving from biology, across bread over in a computer science mathematics.

40:59And so basically if this process is working the way that it should, you should see sort of this accelerating explosion of variety and sort of speciation and reproduction and scaling of the number of ideas in the world that sort of catalytic feeds on itself, like a chain reaction. By the way, this was also the argument to connect this back to the idea of human population. So this was the argument for this guy, Julian Simon, who I admire a lot, who wrote this book called The Ultimate Resource. A lot of his work was in the 60s and 70s when there were all these pitch battles, of course, around natural resources environmentalism.

41:25And he was kind of the about enemy of the Scott Paul Aurelake, who was the guy who predicted mass famine and death from kind of increases in technology. And so Julian Simon said, no, actually what you want is you actually want a lot more people in the world. Humans, people are the ultimate resource, right? Not any kind of raw material, but literally people. And he said, why do you want more people in the world? Because if you have more people, you'll get more ideas, right? And so more people means you'll have more ideas, more ideas in combination with ideas, leads to more ideas. Those ideas lead to ways to make things better in the world.

41:52among the things that those ideas make possible are ways to support more people on the planet. Right? And so he said like that quite literally, the answer to national resource consumption, right? For example, or national resource, whatever limitations are environmental considerations or whatever, the answer is not the Paul Ehrlich approach of depopulate, right? Reduce the human population. Therefore, reduce the number of ideas, both the number of people in a number of ideas. The answer is to actually put the pedal forward, more people, more ideas, more solutions. And yes, clearly I agree with him in that argument.

42:19Yeah, amazing. But by the way, Julian Simon is probably one of the most underrated economists and philosophers of the last 100 years. So if you're not familiar with him, that's a great one to read. On that real quick, a great point that he made that really blows people's minds when they read it for the first time. He made the argument that you'd never run out of any natural resource. Yeah. And that's the only way. That's the only way. Like, he did. He did. So he had a famous 10 year bat with Paul Ehrlich, the population bomb guy. And it was a bet on the price of a basket of natural resource commodities 10 years in the future And Ehrlich was of course 100 % That's the first peak oil did it.

42:54Yeah, the whole peak oil thing exactly is that same thing And he let Ehrlich actually define I believe the basket of the commodity So he kind of loaded it in his direction and the bet was will the price of this basket be greater or less than it is today in 10 years And everybody who's kind of in the sort of conventional thinking on this was like well Obviously the prices of all this stuff we're gonna go up because there's more people there's more consumption And that's that he wrote in the press for many years, like nobody was saying what Julian Simon was saying. Right. And then the kicker is Julian Simon who won the bat, the price of that basket was lower in 10 years.

43:22The point was we never had a natural resource. This point was with markets, the way that we know that a natural resource is becoming scarier, this price starts to rise. As its price starts to rise, self -interest says we should figure out ways to not need as much of that natural resource. Right. Right. And so as the price of oil rises, then all of a sudden we have an economic incentive to develop alternative energy ranging by the way from solar to wind through to things like nuclear and then maybe in the future even nuclear fusion. And so it's actually markets working at their best as the price of something rises, you're incentive, you're self -interested in Sam to come up with the alternative rises.

43:55And alternatives that were not previously price effective actually become price effective, right? So this was the rise of fracking, right? Fracking worked because oil and gas started to get expensive enough where all of a sudden the additional cost of fracking was actually worthwhile. And then fracking brought the price wrap back down. And fracking was a classic example of an idea. It was a technological innovation born by human creativity. And so basically what Julian Simon says is that it's the homeostasis kind of in the system. And this is not a dystopian scenario in which we are doomed to run out of everything and everybody's going to freeze and die.

44:22In fact, it's not necessarily utopian, like it's still like natural resources to sell cost money. But it's a fundamentally positive view, which is it is human ingenuity that is going to cause us to not have the problems that the do say we're going to have, which, and again, 300 years of this and so far so good. Yeah, it's an abundance view of the world. It's supposed to scarcity view of the We're all turns out the abundance of right which is good news for all of us Yeah, Matthew has a question which I think you have an unusual answer to which is the dream of fusion Stopping us from enjoying the insane games we can get from fish.

44:52Yes, so primarily was preventing us from enjoying the insane games From fish and by the way they are insane like the level of energy that we could be producing it from modern nuclear Fishing reactors and the safety of it is like Doing it right now Yeah, yeah, France is doing it Yeah. By the way, France just got, I mean, the European politics are now so entertaining on this because France is so pro -nuclear and the rest of Europe is so anti -nuclear. France just had to get a waiver from Germany to continue to run their nuclear reactors, which they finally just got. And going in France is their vision reactor.

45:25Yeah. And the German Greens have been determined for 50 years to turn those reactors off. So yeah, so look, the big reason why we don't have widespread nuclear -fishing power today is because the precautionary principle, because of basically the fear of disaster, which basically makes people emotional and then turns out here the emotional decision is a very damaging bad decision because the alternatives turn out to be things like gas and coal. And so that's overwhelmingly it. Now having said that back to the question is yeah. So the new thing that you can say if you're trying to fight nuclear fishing is oh we don't need it because we have fusion right around the corner.

45:53And by the way look I was just start by saying I hope that's right. I hope fusion really is right around the corner. I spent a right around the corner for a while. I hope it's right around the corner. That would be great. It turned out to be harder than fishing by quite a bit. It's quite difficult. And then look, I think what's gonna happen is, I think we'll get fusion to work at some point. There's very smart people working on it. I think they'll get it there. I think the same forces and ideas in people that have prevented the deployment of nuclear fission will immediately prevent the deployment of fusion.

46:19And so I think this idea that all of a sudden, the same kind of bad narrative corrupt pessimism. It'll be the same arguments. It's this incredibly dangerous thing. And who knows if it goes wrong and like what if it this and that and the other? And like we can't take these risks and can they prove it's going to be safe forever infinitely and it's going to be the same arguments. And these nuclear fusion companies are going to start out being very optimistic and they're going to hit this wall of sort of regulatory and emotional and political and ideological resistance. And I hope they punch through it.

46:46But look, Richard Nixon did two things in the early 70s around this. Want to see declared something called Project Independence where he said we the U .S. would build a thousand new nuclear fishing power plants by 1980, become completely energy sufficient, be able to withdraw completely from the Middle East, be able to be zero emission. and then he created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which then prevented that from happening. Don't... Yeah. How many nuclear reactors have they approved? Zero new plants in 40 years. Oh. So... Not good. Well, and again, here you go back to incentives. Okay, now imagine, okay, now, again, get the devil's due.

47:21Like, imagine that you're the newly appointed regulator. You're the newly appointed chairman. Ben Horowitz, you're the newly appointed chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1973. What are your incentives? How much glory are you going to get, right, if we build some new reactors versus how horrible is your life going to be if there's another nuclear accident? Yeah, right, right, right. Another kind of incentive agency problem, yeah. Right. And then by the way, you've got the existing energy companies in there doing their thing, right, saying, oh, no, don't worry about it, oil and gas.

47:48And by the way, we're going to do, we're going to clean oil. We're going to have clean oil. We're clean oil. We're going to clean the Volkswagen. We're going to have clean diesel, right? like, we're just let us continue working on the clean coal and the clean diesel. And then again, by the way, fusions right around the corner and that'll be better. And then we're like, wow, these companies like they're so big and powerful and successful. And by the way, they seem like they're kind of hitting their, it could be a job when they're done here. Yeah. And you're back to square one. This is a fun one.

48:12Luke Croft, do you say that humans want to be productive, yet so many hate their jobs and work only because they have to? When it comes to abundance due to tech innovation, should we allow people the option of networking?

48:28So there's these two, I look like, again, no utopianism here, right? Like, not all jobs are fun. Like, it look a lot of people work jobs that they really don't like, and they're doing it because they have to, and they're doing it because they're trying to support a family or support themselves. And so certainly nobody promised everybody a job, everybody loves. My analysis is if you close your eyes and imagine somebody who doesn't have to work, right? And I'm not talking about like, stay at home, others. So, by talking about like somebody who like in our system today would be working to be able to make money support themselves And then there's a future ordering a society in which they can elect not to work and they will have the same or similar level of material comfort that they have today And they can just kick it you kind of close your eyes and that imagine that person and there's kind of two possible versions that person You can imagine one is the person who is now by the way as Mark said liberated to what was Mark's whole thing We're all gonna be fishermen in the morning Literary critics in the afternoon poets over dinner and musicians at night, right?

49:19We're going to be able to self -actualize into all of these things that don't involve money, and we're going to be creating this and that, and we're going to be doing all these amazing things because we have all this time free. And look, there are some people for whom that's the case. There are certain people for whom I'm sure that would be the case. There's the other scenario, and I would just call that one the Cheetos and Meth scenario. Which is... And PlayStation. And PlayStation. And I like Netflix. I'm a fan of Netflix, but maybe not 12 hours a day. right? And sit in the couch and get baked and just like there goes all your motivation, right?

49:53Straight out the window. And this is where I use in the essay, the fairly provocative term, like farm animals. That's a farm animal existence, right? That's existence of a cow, right? And cows are great. Cows are great. But I don't think we should be cows. I don't think we should be farm animals. I don't think that is an advance. You're back to the wall, I was talking about at that point. And I think we just need to be realistic about that. And again, this is very much one of these luxury belief things, where kind of the class of people who imagine themselves as being the post in the morning, fishermen in the afternoon, musicians at night think that's a general lie.

50:25And maybe that's true for them, by the way. Maybe if you went to one of these Ivy League universities and you hate your job as a barista and maybe much happier and you'd be writing poetry if you didn't have to do your day job, maybe that's true for them, right? But like the consequences of that misjudgment, if that's wrong on the other 8 billion people, I think are very profound and possibly extremely negative. Yeah, and actually we've run this experiment in the US to some extent and I'm setting this more lately, but you know, perhaps there were a lot of kind of bad things that happened with the pilgrims in the Native Americans, but I think the worst thing may have been the reservation system, at least the longest lasting.

51:02And the reservation system is essentially UBI. It's $65 ,000 a year, I believe, per resident. And if anybody's spent time on a reservation, it's like that just hasn't worked that well. Like removing purpose from people's lives, generally, there are people who can deal with it, but that's I think certainly the minority. And it's, I mean, at least in my view, that's not been great for the Native Americans to kind of scale that to society as many are proposing these days. It's probably not the best thing. Not everything I'll add is jobs have actually gotten much better over time. So not all jobs are great, but like for many hundreds and thousands of years, every job was farming.

51:42And like not every human is suited to be a farmer. I know you weren't Mark, there's a lot of farming in your hometown. And then the thing that came after that first was these assembly line jobs, which I'd always kind of been using to see politicians say, oh, we need more good jobs like these manufacturing jobs. Like doing this all day, like a robot is not like the greatest job in the world. It may pay well, but it's not the most fulfilling. And So many of the people on those lines are on drugs and in fact Henry Ford famously doubled the minimum wage but the reason he doubled the minimum wage was he had so much attrition because people hated those manufacturing jobs so much and so I think that the jobs that we're producing now have been increasingly interesting and they're not all great they're not all great for everybody but one thing is for sure is we have a much broader variety of things that people can do so you many choices and hopefully people can find the job that's right for them.

52:40This is interesting. CoinFluenceX. That's a pretty neat name. How do you perceive the contrast between rigorous technological and mathematical education seen in countries like China, which emphasizes relentless advancement with evolving educational paradigms in the West, which prioritizes intersectional perspectives and social values? Yeah Ben, why don't you start that I agree that's an interesting one. Yeah, I mean I think that it's tricky you know like and then it's been a long time since I've been in school and my children are all adults so I'm a little far away from the actual thing that's happening in schools now.

53:23Having said that boy I think that there is kind of education that you can use where you can go make something or build something or figure out how large systems work or perform like a in demand function in society. And then there are a whole class of other things like you can teach people about anything and now they even have lots of like rap education in college and this and that and the other. And you know, it's interesting because the great musicians I know and I know many of them never took any kind of class like that. Most of them didn't take any class in music, by the way. It's funny, like my friend Kanye taught himself music.

54:09He was an art student. He taught himself music. And I think that for, you know, the great creatives, I don't know, studying to become a virtuoso in those things is necessarily the even the best path. And then you have these other things which are these social theories, unproven social theories that a lot of people are teaching these days, which I think those are fine hobbies and you and I pursue them as hobbies studying these social theories and new ideas on how to organize society or whatever, how that all works. I don't think it makes sense to charge people $300 ,000 or whatever college cost these days to teach them a hobby.

54:49That seems really absurd to me. I know people have different views on this, But I think that the purpose of the education that we funnel young people into ought to be to enable them to make significant contributions back to society and that probably, I don't know if it's a narrow as the Chinese education, but it's probably not as broad as some of things that we're doing. Yeah, and then I might just pop the question up one level, which is, look, education itself is an industry, it's a field, and an industry, a business, and look, both the nature of the American education system and for that matter a system like in China's they're primarily centralized in government control and so the American system is you know K through 12 is primarily government monopoly with occasional offshoots and the offshoots are very restricted yeah very small and number and then look the college system in the US is a cartel it's quite literally a self -regulated cartel by virtue of the fact that it requires it's on the sort of federal student loan drug to work financially and then the accreditation agencies that determine which colleges get federal student lending are run by the colleges themselves Yeah.

55:52So it's a self -reinforcing cartel, which is why you don't see a lot of new universities ever. That's why the major universities in the US are older than the country, right? And so it's same thing. Obviously in China, the system is government controlled. Inherently, completely government controlled is commonly true around the world. And so we've sort of backed into, with this idea of education, it's like an abstract good. And then we have this specific implementation of these highly centralized authoritarian non -market -based approaches to it. And then you can argue the pros and cons and the results.

56:16And I thought the question set up this very interesting aspect of it, which is like, like, okay, when does it become kind of too much road memorization versus when does it become kind of too much kind of wild, while theorizing with maybe a sweet spot somewhere in the middle? You know, look, the education is a system can't really respond and adapt to changing needs of people because it's primarily not market mist. And so we kind of just get the system we get, we send our kids to it, we don't think we really have a choice for the most part. And I would just say like the big thing is, it's just in all these societies, it's just stuck.

56:46And then there are all these signs that it's becoming dysfunctional across many societies. we could spend hours on that. And so I would just at least when I kind of put a placeholder and say, I think we should also squint and kind of wonder, like, is there a different kind of system that could get built that would be much more market driven, much more technologically sophisticated, that would be much more better suited to modern needs and would be much more subject to actual competitive pressure and the need to be good. There are some very good education startups working on this and there are some very good charter schools and there are some very good new startup universities.

57:13And so there are some people taking swings at this, but at a macro level, like we're not there yet. And I think maybe we should think over time about trying to get there. Yeah, and that's interesting because we are in the middle of this very interesting crisis, the student loan crisis, and President Biden has kind of proposed and I don't know how much of it has actually gone through all the legal objections and so forth to kind of forgive some portion of the student loans, but the interesting thing about that is that's kind of the ultimate treating the symptom and not the cause because why can't any of these students pay back their loans and the obvious answer is college isn't worth the money you pay for it and then it doesn't translate into a job that enables you to pay back which you barred to do it and that's a much bigger problem for young people and an ongoing problem like you either kind of subsidize college in its entirety or you have to fix that problem and I think that given what colleges are willing to do with their tuition like grow it double the rate of inflation and hire more administrators than they have students and all these kinds of things if they have free money Another incentive problem that it's a pretty dangerous idea to make college free in that way We do need a better mechanism for sure.

58:28Maybe now it's the time. Hopefully Okay Sam Arnold to what extent do you believe we really control what technology does after its release? Can we exert any meaningful control after invention? Yeah, I mean a couple of things. So one is obviously we do control, I mean, the herp pretty strict controls in a lot of areas, right, as we just discussed in the nuclear case. So one is it's not quite that there aren't any, you know, I think maybe the underlying question here would be can we predict what the consequences are going to be? And by the way, this is a very hot topic right now because you have this thing where there are a bunch of AI kind of practitioners who are making these very, in my view, very extreme statements about what AI is going to do that's going to be horrible.

59:08And there's this very strong temptation the part of people to make what seems like a very logical kind of assumption, which is that the people who invented the technology are in the best position to be able to predict what happens with it afterwards. And then are presumably also going to be in the best position to propose whatever regulations or controls are required to prevent those things from happening. I have not in my life and I have not in my reading of history seen a lot of examples where the inventors of technology are very good at this. The example I like to cite is Thomas Edison, I invented the phonograph and he was completely convinced that the use case for the phonograph was going to be to listen to religious sermons.

59:40He was a very pious man and he took religion very seriously and he just assumed that if you owned a phonograph the point of it would be you'd get home at the end of a long day at the office or in the factory. You kick off your shoes putting your slippers and you'd have your dog by your side and your kids you have it around and you would put on religious sermons. You would have to go to church and bother with all those people which for a time is that it's some of his big thing. Exactly and by the way and then you could do this every night right you don't have to wait till Sunday. It's great. You can do this all week and I don't know like a few people do that most people don't most people listen to music and And, Daniel Recall, the first form of music that went kind of was kind of the big hit genre of music on photographs was jazz.

1:00:18And you'll recall what people said about jazz at the time. Well, they said many things, but it was in real music. It was the devil's music. It was very bad. It was channeling on all kinds of unholy impulses. It was going to cause young people to fornicate. Like, they just had basically all the same things that people say about rap music. I was thinking of something that there were some racism involved too. I'll just say. Oh, of course, it was absolutely. It was going to be all of a sudden you, it's a channel for these black musicians to show up in the homes of white people, like no question. And so anyway, like it turned out that people have all kinds of issues with the technology.

1:00:48It just turned out they weren't remotely the issues that Thomas Edison predicted that they would have. And if you look at this historically, you're kind of like, well, of course he didn't know, because yeah, he's a techie. He just invented the technology. He doesn't have like the crystal ball. He doesn't have some special foresight. And in fact, he's a particular kind of person. He's the kind of person he spends all this time in a lab. Yeah, right. He's unusual. He's unusual, right? And he must maybe speculate, you know, he might be psychologically a little bit different than most people, right?

1:01:12And he draws satisfaction for different things and he doesn't spend a lot of time, right, with like regular people. And he's certainly not an expert on light politics and society and psychology and sociology and all these other things. So anyway, I think where I would start back to the original question is just like, I should don't think it's that easy to forecast these things. And then specifically, I don't think it's any easier for the people who invented technology to forecast these things. And I think they carry a lot of unjustified credibility. This also came up in the Oppenheimer movie the same thing.

1:01:36It's like these physicists all of a sudden are convinced that they're the ones who are going to be working on like the game theory and the philosophy and the morality of the deployment of their blocks. Well, they tried. But you know, it's not that the nature was a lot of that. It was, but I mean, it was this was the scene with Truman, which is something that actually happened, right, which is like Oppenheimer shows up to kind of ring his hands about the morality of the atomic bomb. And Truman is just like, get this guy out of here. I'm the elected president in the United States. Like, let's listen to me.

1:02:02Right. And by the way, Truman, and again, I'm not the Truman made all the right decisions or whatever, but Truman was the duly elected president in the United States. He is the guy who should have been making that decision, not the guy who invented the thing. And so I just think like, I guess my big appeal here is just humility. I think we as technologists need to be very careful. We're not, but we should be very careful about kind of crossing the line and deciding that we're going to do societal engineering kind of in our spare time. And then people who hear technologists kind of doing these things should be very skeptical that the technologists deserve any kind of unwarranted credibility on this.

1:02:31And then look, there are going to be these big questions. What history basically says is we figure them out as we go. And I think the alternative to that is to just not do new things. And so I know where I come out on that. Yeah, yeah. I'll give a plug for a great book that you recommended. When Reason goes on holiday, which is sort of the story of how the great physicists and inventors did on politics and policy and game theory. You take super high IQ people and you put them in a research or university setting. They go crazy. Like they very frequently go very nutty on anything involving politics and society.

1:03:07And this was the American physics community in the 1920s and 80s, that basically most of them went like hardcore communist, like Einstein was a Stalinist. Like we don't talk about these things anymore, but he was. These people end up like very radicalized. And this happens with other groups of people, right? Maybe this at certain points this happened in other areas in our public life. But you know, it definitely intellectuals go straight for it. Thomas always talked about this a lot. He's like, look, he's like, They see the problem of people who are hyperverbal and like work in ideas is they can get kind of arbitrarily unhinged Yeah, and they can kind of talk themselves into crazy or crazy or things and their level of disconnection from the real world Means that they no longer have any governors on how crazy their beliefs can get and so I think that's what's happening in AI right now And I think we need to be very cautious about who we listen to yeah trust in their own judgment is profound Okay, last question This is actually one that I would ask it's from bird and it is before publishing What did you consider the most controversial point?

1:03:59Now that it is live, what makes people shimp the most?

1:04:06So, what did I think was the most? I don't know, Ben, let me ask you that. You read the draft, where you predicting was going to be the most controversial thing. Well, I thought for sure when you wrote it, everything on the economic front about free markets and I love as unscalable and those kinds of things, I thought those would be the most controversial for sure. Those are kind of time -honored crowd pleasers when it comes to making people mad. Yeah, yeah, like, it's just like the nature of humans that they disagree on that. That's a good question. I don't know. Yeah, I would say I don't know like in Ben you tell me if you think I'm missing this I think most of the attacks I think like a lot of artists I aspire to have a better class of critic So this is one of these things in good modern climate like a lot of the attacks have been on me Yeah, more than on the ideas right right right and if I were including the one that you started out with earlier like the smug interpretation of that on my part would be, wow, the ideas must all be great if they're reduced to just attacking me.

1:05:03Yeah, yeah. Ed Hominimate. Yeah, like if that's all they've got, like I must have otherwise made outstandingly excellent points and they must not have counter arguments. I would love to see more, there have been a few, but I would love to see more substantive responses. They are legitimately like carefully thought through. I agree with that. I mean, I think you've gotten a lot of emotional reaction. I mean, I think some of the more thoughtful ones are just probably on a misinterpretation of what you said, which is some people interpret it as technology gone wild. Like the girls gone wild video of the whatever era that was.

1:05:36It's like technology gone wild, just like let it roam free. And which was what you're saying. It's just more like, are we going to keep doing new things or not? Or are we going to kind of nip them in the butt the way we did nuclear fishing? And but lucky build something you've got bugs, you've got issues, you have the internet's had crime on it since like the very, very early days and we keep working on that, but the benefits of the internet outweigh the negatives and these kinds of things. And I think people wanted you to be more on one hand and on the other hand, but it's a manifesto. So you don't do that in a manifesto.

1:06:12Exactly. I thought there was one piece of feedback on Twitter. I thought somebody made a really smart point, one really smart point I saw was, Respect that love force money thing. Somebody said boy, like isn't it the case that actually a lot of innovators, like a lot of creators of new things actually are doing it out of a sense of love? Yeah, by the way, broaden this out beyond technology, but like a lot of artists, a lot of musicians, a lot of writers. This is the concept of the labor of love, right? Is like they really feel like they're contributing something. And you know, like love of society, love of their fellow man is in fact a motivation, even if they would also like to get paid.

1:06:41Yeah, the accusation basically was I was presenting to kind of crimped a view of human nature when I narrowed out love that much. Yeah, I think that's right. Although if you invent somebody and then you need to hire a bunch of people to work for you, that's where love runs out. Yes. Yes. They're not all gonna join on that. And similarly with the musician, your publicist or makeup artist, you're listening to that and they seem to need money. As a reminder, if you got to the end of this episode, don't forget to subscribe to Ben and Mark's new show called the Ben and Mark show. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss upcoming episodes.