cities are really going to have to kind of treat their attempt to bring people to that City much more like marketing a consumer product if suddenly our offices are not there if your property taxes are not giving you what they used to give you I think San Francisco is the prime candidate to be like the Pittsburgh of our ERA this whole back to the office is kind of another yet attempt for the old
way of looking at things I think we're moving from a linear to a non-linear economy oh you know can you guys come back yeah we we know that it's not really convenient but actually we have at least for two more years we're moving from a command control type structure today the economy needs far fewer people to be really ambitious and excited and it needs everyone else to just do whatever they want
well hello everyone it's Jim was Shaughnessy with yet another infinite Loops I said to my guest today before we started recording that we might in fact be brothers from different mothers because we are very aligned on many of our uh ideas about what is coming down the pike uh in terms of work in terms of offices in terms of everything the new economy is going to be his name is drawer polek who is an author he's
already written rethinking real estate which anticipated quite a bit of the current reshuffle and he's currently working on after office taking a look at what the future holds for the way we work how we work where we work and one of the cool things you're doing like Dickens you're serializing it or your premium subscribers I think that's great a lot of people didn't know that's how
Dickens became a rockstar uh drawer welcome thank you Jim amazing to be here and uh to meet you meet my you know my brother and from another mother so so your credentials are kind of like uh in the stratosphere um there's just so many things you studied at the London School of Economics you were at instead uh you served as a intelligence uh uh uh military for the Israeli military I I
you've lived in Australia China New York uh all over the world wow I I I think it's awesome oh and in the meantime you also found time to found a bunch of companies give a lot of speeches insult for a lot of big companies your your most recent uh uh company that you found at hype free AI loved the name um but today I I'd really like to talk about um the work you've done around kind of the future of offices the future of the
economy uh Etc you've said in your work that Ai and remote work are really allies and it allows work to be asynchronous uh the idea behind digitizing work etc allows the worker of the future to work from anywhere and really is going to be an amazing lever for the knowledge working class tell us a little bit about your thesis around offices and how it's evolved wow okay that's a huge question uh maybe
I'll just start with the relationship between Ai and remote work so you know we we had the kind of covid lockdowns everyone went home the world is still trying to convince many of them to come back to the office and before we manage to Grapple with that we now we are now in the midst of an AI boom of sorts where you know everyone is both excited and somewhat fearful or apprehensive about the impact
of AI and these two things seem like you know sequential booms or unrelated booms but they're very related I think in particular in their impact on the workforce because in a way remote work and the move towards digital collaboration basically set the scene for AI and made it much easier for AI to now step into the office because the office is not there and take on more human tasks so our work became
particularly during covert more synchronous more digital mediated through a variety of online collaboration tools and also more kind of impact based rather than the presence based on presenteeism based and basically when all of our meetings are already digital even if we are in the office and all of our collaboration is through online tools that have their own apis and databases it's very easy for
something like chat GPT in its various incarnations to just step in and start to absorb more of that and start to act in this type of environment meanwhile the better AI gets the better online collaboration tools we are getting as human so it becomes easier for us all of these tools are now being turbocharged you know Google Sheets and Bing and notion but basically everything now is is augmented by AI
uh as well as tools that really augment our presence so during covet Google for example announced a project Starlight these kind of like video calls that look like Holograms and you know you sit inside this huge booth and then the other person sees you as if you're there that that look cool enough but you know you needed like a big booth and it cost like thirty thousand dollars and a few
months ago they said oh now we generate Fai we can actually achieve more or less the same effect with just three cheap cameras that you put around your screen so you don't need the booth anymore because we don't really need to scan all of you we just need to generate a hologram of you and to do that we don't really need all the stuff that we needed even like 18 months ago and once AI
makes it easier for us to collaborate more remotely than more collaboration is being done digitally and not just for uh textural based work but increasingly for more things that are more and more physical you know so like developing things remotely in a much richer type of interaction and again then the cycle goes on and on so more AI more remote work more remote work more eh this yes and and they're
self-reinforcing trends that uh contribute to one another it's kind of like uh the Starlight we've created the Holodeck and maybe this is version 1.0 the man version 5.0 it's gonna rock and roll right yeah one of the things that you've written about is the impact on offices and cities and as I was getting writing uh for our conversation I I was reminded of conversations I've had over
the last say month with with something that surprised me and it was this I live in the the New York City metro area as do you and I've talked to no less than six incredibly creative palettes who are making use of everything we're going to talk about in other words they're scaling using the collaborative tools their knowledge workers Etc and all six of them told me that they were moving to New York City
well talk to me about why that is so yeah that I mean we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves but we'll come back to the reasons kind of like what's driving this but I think one analogy I like to look at for the impact of the internet and Technology on kind of everything is starting with looking at the impact on on digital media so you know on mp3s and videos and to see what happened there
now when this internet thing came into our lives you know mid 90s after a few years of looking at what it does uh Chris Anderson came out with the long tail a really remarkable and important book and the gist of it uh was that you know the the internet will have a democratizing force on media so there'll be more people uh consuming more diverse types of content fewer hits so if we had
like an 80 20 kind of thing before uh the internet now the internet is going to democratize it somewhat at least that's how people characterize this book actually his argument is a bit more sophisticated than that but the general idea was okay you know now everyone has access both as a as a producer of content as a consumer of content so more people like the distribution will be more equal the world will be
democratized uh what actually happened uh is exactly the opposite and some of what he described as well so the world now if you look at me online at videos or at the music is actually much more concentrated at the at the head of the distribution that it was so about half a percent of all of the streams I think on Spotify generate about 90 of all the listens so it's no longer 80 20. it's like 0.5 90.
um at the same time people are listening to many more types of music and watching many more types of videos and there are more people that are making a living from being creators of various kinds but there are many more people who are trying to make a living and they're not making a living uh at all now when you try to apply this to the world of locations you basically say okay let's say that
everyone now has a choice in terms of where they want to go just like everyone has a choice in terms of what they listen to and I expect something somewhat similar is going to happen here as well so the biggest hits are going to become bigger than ever because in the world with infinite Choice first you gravitate towards the things that you've heard about and that you know about and there's Network effects at Play
and at the same time there is also going to be a long tail or a fatter tale of locations that suddenly become relevant for people with high-end jobs that weren't relevant before just because these people basically were not allowed to live in those places so I think we are going to see both which means those that are at risk are those that are in between the cities that are kind of
large but not large enough or even very large but like don't have any unique characteristics or are struggling to make that adaptation because even New York City it's nice that some people are moving there and it's true uh but it still didn't figure out how to accommodate that in terms of you know how to readjust the tax base away from offices more towards residents how to capture the income of people that kind
of come here for a few months at a time and then go somewhere else uh and to figure that out and to adapt even the physical environment to that takes time and it takes policy changes and some cities are not going to make it basically during that transition and it also creates an opportunity for some new cities and some new locations to emerge and suddenly become much more relevant
than they were uh in the previous Paradigm let's say so let's continue down that path for a minute um which cities do you see as emerging as the ones who will successfully navigate this new world and uh when you when you talk about them if you could give examples of what they're doing that maybe other cities could mimetically copy yeah um and then and then also the other side which cities are you seeing are like
just not getting it they're they're just not changing so so it's hard to say which ones are going to make it because again all of them still have a lot of work to do uh but I'd say the classic kind of dichotomy is New York versus San Francisco so New York City to begin with is lucky because it has a lot of characteristics that make it very attractive regardless of whether you have to work there or not again it's
very walkable it has a lot of culture it has very strong public transport at least in American terms um so so it has all of that the adjustment will be again in terms of how do you still Finance the stuff uh in if suddenly your offices are not there if your property taxes are not giving you what they use to give you uh if all of the retail that you have is based on the assumption that a certain
amount of people come in every day at 9 00 a.m and go back at 5 PM uh that requires some adjustment and of course that has its own impact on the tax base because a lot of the taxation comes from from local retail and sales tax um but New York seems to be moving in the right direction so first it has it has the the built-in characteristics already that that enable it to be attractive but
it's saying a lot of the right things in terms of okay we are going to help people convert offices to other things and we are going to close some streets to make them more walkable we're going to give up some on-street free parking and turn that into an outdoor dining uh we're going to invest more in education and other things that make the city attractive particularly compared to its
suburbs which pulled all of these people away over the last decades so it's saying in doing a lot of those those right things and I think it's going to be okay but the question is how painful the transition will be on the other hand and of course one last thing New York's economy is very diverse to begin with in terms of the industries that it depends on and it has been going through a transition for for a day I
mean it stays forever I mean it depends whether you want to look at it but even the last 15 years in terms of finance and how important it is or isn't to New York it's the client quite significantly and Tech became the largest employer in New York depending how you calculate but arguably even before covid and a lot of finance jobs just disappeared Into The Ether or moved to New Jersey or moved
farther afield you know to I don't know South Carolina or Florida and Beyond um then you have cities like San Francisco which are first of all much more of a kind of one trick pony incredibly dependent on a single industry a much smaller City to begin with so not very attractive in many ways obviously it has culture and it has some nice walkable areas but uh not as much as New York and all the diversity that
New York has and it has a government that at least until now seems intent on not contending with reality uh the one cash cow that it has to be as hostile to it as possible um and again and not to enforce basic things to do with you know personal safety and and crime and education and all sorts of things like that uh so I I think and I'm not saying this will happen but I think San Francisco is
the prime candidate to be like the Pittsburgh of our era or something like you know City or the Buffalo City that was like incredibly important Once Upon a Time in in 80 years later nobody like even remembers why at least unless they study history uh so it has the potential to to go down that path um yeah in terms of general advice for cities I think to loosen zoning laws uh to really let people streamline
construction of whatever they want in conversion of whatever they want and by loosening zoning laws I don't mean don't regulate government is bad I mean change the approach there's other approaches to zoning which look at the actual impact of a building like does it make noise does it pollute how does it impact you know you can enforce all of that but to try to say in advance okay here
we'll have Offices here we'll have Apartments here we'll have medium-term Hospitality here we'll have short-term Hospitality here there'll be retail and to plan all of that 50 or you know 30 or even 10 years in advance is just not possible anymore um it was definitely easier in the 20th century but even then I think zoning laws from 100 years ago still we pay a high price for them even before covert
but definitely after kovid uh I think maybe this can be our next topic I think we're moving from a linear to a non-linear economy and in such a non-linear economy uh obviously the biggest challenge is for the built environment which is naturally ossified and rigid to adapt to that and and to enable uh you know good lives and then prosperity for everyone yeah I think uh before we do move to
linear versus non-linear because I love that topic and and I think you're spot on I know with a lot of your analysis uh what what are your thoughts about like Saudi Arabia's for example still has a mega building project called Beyond uh what do you think of that it's funny I'm actually I'm supposed to go there in a few days and I'm kind of thinking what I want to tell them about it to speak at a
conference about like new cities and and technology and the built world I I think one I you know I I like to support Builders so whoever's building something and has crazy ideas I'm not going to be the first one to like go against it or make fun of it uh that said I think the best cities emerge organically uh or at least again they leave a lot of room for organic growth I mean you can
build the the railway lines you can set up the infrastructure uh but even a line I'm not sure if mathematically is the the optimal way to uh to build a city probably isn't but more importantly is again is how they Zone the uses within that I think when you dive into that project obviously a line it looks very narrow but actually I don't know when it will actually get to the full length that
they're showing there but it seems like a pretty thick kind of line so even like a little chunk of it you can build an interesting neighborhood within that and then grow to the sides if you must um but to me it's more interesting what do you do within those within each of those squares let's say so again the the diversity of uses that you enable the empowerment of the actual users and people there
to choose what they do with that space in terms of you know whether it's going to be housing or office or a mix so yeah I'm if I were to plan a new city I wouldn't plan it that way let's put it quite simply but it's almost impossible to plan a city at all so I mean if you have to build one uh it's not like there's a lot of other models that I would look at and say oh this is perfect let's do it
that way I mean so it it it it might look exceptionally bad in terms of how rigid or far away from from convention it is but I think every effort to plan a city is the doomed to fail more or less I mean the optimal way is to let them emerge and to double down on whatever seems to work but I also appreciate that in the developing World sometimes you know you have to build new cities from scratch
and you have to try to LeapFrog certain processes I spent a decade in China and part of my job was to decide where we want to build shopping malls and offices and 50 of my work was visiting dozens of new cities or old cities every year meeting with the government there hearing their plans about again a whole new city or at least a whole new section of a city which is basically a city you
know a place to house half a million or a million people and to figure out when it makes sense and when it doesn't make sense and some of them made sense and and worked and some of them didn't work so it's not that you can't do it uh but almost part of the process is that you're necessarily going to overshoot in certain places you're going to build a little stuff that people don't want you're gonna miss a lot of basic things
that you know a city that develops organically has and you're not going to have because you kind of forgot about it whether it's Parks or room for retail or room for schools or whatever it is that that someone forgot to uh to plan appropriately for um but still it has to be done so I mean I I like that people are experimenting with the line and then you know in particular my favorite thing about it is
actually that they're thinking about it a bit like a charter City so like having different rules and regulations from the rest of the country allowing people even socially to experiment uh and that that I do like uh but yeah but there's there's a lot of work to do I'm particularly excited about cities in the Middle East because you know I was born in in Israel and I I watch with Dread the evolution
or the evolution of that part of the world and I feel like it has so much potential so many young people so many resources uh so much money uh and you know it deserves better and I think urbanism and and planning can play a big part in that and then connecting people and bringing people together basically the classic role of cities of you know being some sort of a Melting Pot uh
not in some kind of romantic idealistic way but just in in terms of pure greed you know people have something to gain from partnering with each other doing things uh together and and I do believe that you know when when things are not so terrible economically then most people kind of chill and they don't want to go and blow themselves up or start wars or hit anyone and and they can even hate anyone but just
without blowing you know the French and Germans hate each other still but it's fine but they don't you know but they're not at War and that's okay they don't have to love each other uh and and if they can live together I think you know the Jews and Arabs and Persians and everyone else there and can probably get along results I'm interested in that in those type of projects from that angle in particular
yeah and you know another part of this that seems to be kind of an overarching theme that at least I've seen and is part of my thesis um that affects not just cities or how they're built and how they're planned but the economy in general social relationships Etc we are we are coming off of a period where everything was designed for the mass the middle right yeah the if you look at a belker the 68 in the in the
middle dominated everything right and and the old thinking uh you could see it like I I was thinking as I was getting ready I read almost a decade ago a series of Articles written by the uh author Walter meat and he was putting it in particularly uh political terms Red State versus Blue State yeah and and one of the insights that he had that I really paid attention to was he was way ahead of the other
thinkers saying the blue states have models that are not sustainable under the new way of doing things the way they've uh done their tax uh raising the the all of that can be disrupted immediately yeah if a few thousand people that pick up and leave then yeah exactly and and so you've also written about uh the idea that cities are really going to have to kind of treat uh their
their uh attempt to bring people to that City much more like marketing a consumer product and and so I want to talk about that a bit as well but I also want to get your thoughts on I I watched this whole back to the office argument and I I we moved in The Firm that I sold OSHA Asset Management we moved to work from anywhere at the beginning of the pandemic and made it permanent at my new
company we're definitely worked from anywhere but we do have spaces that I uh actual physical spaces that I want to talk to you about as well can you steal man an argument or back to the office because what I've seen just seems so horribly bad and pineier so you know I'm not the one making that argument but if I have to still manage I think any way to work is legitimate and good as long as it's tied to an actual
purpose so for example when Elon said everyone at Twitter has to come back and you know expect you to sleep on a mattress at the I was like okay that's actually cool you know this guy This Is War you know okay he took one of the most important companies in the world he wants to make sure that only people that really care about it are going to be there it's definitely in crisis it's losing money it has that you
know yeah this is a good reason that you know if you're excited about the product and about the mission come here and sleep on the floor and I'm gonna be here with you Elon Musk and you know we're gonna do [ __ ] that you can't do anywhere else okay that makes sense but then I see a lot of other companies saying oh you know can you guys come back yeah we we know that it's not really
convenient but actually we have at least for two more years so after that we're going to reevaluate but in the meantime that's like why would I come back for the I don't care that you have a lease like what does that have to do with my job or some companies are even telling employees listen we're going to now call you back to the office the official new policies that you have to be there here
four days a week but we're not going to enforce it so and they're telling people explicitly that so you know that seems ridiculous it's basically you're treating people like kids or you're acknowledging that even you're like not in charge and not empowered as a boss and have no no idea why they should be there or for what reason and just because you know inertia or sun costs or whatever so so again I I do think that
there's reasons to come back to the office but it has to be tied to your mission and and and and and and have a specific purpose uh but beyond that yeah it doesn't I I also think that those questions of you know everyone back or everyone working from home to me the answer is not like one or the other it's more about probably you should Empower people to do whatever works best for them or at least at the
team level and and kind of see what works and maybe again certain ways of working will emerge that you can then apply across the whole company or nothing will emerge and you'll just see okay different teams like to work differently and as long as it works then good or I can start moving people from one team to another based on where I think they would fit better in terms of the
work style and the culture um yeah so that it comes back even to our what we just discussed about zoning the the notion that you can know in advance who do you need where at what point in time uh is is becoming hard to justify and this young CEO I think in 1990 already a long time ago a fellow called Steve Jobs in one of the interviews he said that you know we're competing in a very
Dynamic environment and we constantly have to we have to shift people around and kind of coalesce into different teams work on different projects work on the different managers all the time but we can't do that physically because we can't move people around the country and we can't even move them within the building because it's so inconvenient so we're creating a digital organization he called it you
know we started to collaborate through all sorts of tools and then we can kind of assign people uh in a more kind of on-demand or ad hoc manner to where their skills would be best match with the task at hand at that given moment and that's how we we innovate and I think the same Dynamic is increasingly applying to the rest of the economy and to more and more companies I agree I in fact were doing a series on
it which we call the great reshuffle um and and one of the components of that is we're we're moving from a command control type structure very hierarchical very top-down um you know what what I used to joke that if I suddenly woke up and I was in a room filling out endless forms and the walls were covered with 24-hour news uh cable channels I knew that I was in hell [Laughter]
it seems to me that this also this whole back to the office is is kind of another yet attempt for the the old way of looking at things right which came from a place of scarcity which came from a place of top-down decision making as opposed to the far more effective in my opinion bottom up uh which is how complex adaptive systems work and the economy is certainly a complex adaptation system
and and I just wonder you know you've said the offices the embodiment of standardized linear structures a spiritual battle against individualism and I was really struck by that because I used to when I was walking in New York City and I would look into some of these offices I would just turn to my wife who I usually was walking with and say it's the whole crushing right and and like I I she she would always look at me like
what are you what are you blathering on about but it it seems to me that now we are in a place where as you mentioned earlier output is becoming increasingly non-linear and you know jobs I'm making air quotes here for our our voice only listeners uh are not going to be jobs at all I I think your thesis there is fascinating so if you wouldn't mind outlining that for our listeners
so you know in the industrial World there was a very clear link between input and output you take some raw materials you take some labor you take some Capital you put them in in the blender in the factory in the in the corporation itself and something comes out on the other hand and you can know relatively well okay what is going to come out how many units how much do they cost me to produce and even to a certain
extent how much how can I Market them now of course there was competition there were difficulties I'm not saying you know everything was easy back then uh but that was the production side then there was the marketing side which was also much simpler you know there were one or two TV channels two or three newspapers so you know if you wanted to sell soap you go and produce the soap
opera and then you sell so basically the people who buy the soap are going to watch it and you're going to sell your soap and maybe your competitors will do the same okay so we'll have two competitors or three and you'll kind of best case you can even you know conspire with them in worst case you'll just compete and then both of all of you will make money probably anyway today increasingly you put stuff into the machine
and you don't really know what's going to come out on the other side I mean the the best examples of that again is in online media where you know some Korean guy somewhere has a video of him jumping in the street and suddenly he reaches a billion views before anyone else while I don't know some American production company sends 200 people to work on something for five years and nobody
cares to watch it so you know because whatever we do is mediated through all these complex social dynamics and all these algorithms that suddenly boost winners in unpredictable ways and there are two aspects here one is that more and more of the stuff that we consume is content itself so we pay for Content whether if directly or indirectly uh so again it's not things anymore so it definitely not made the way things used
to be made but the second part is that whatever it is that you're selling even if it's real estate or a car it's all mediated through the same social media and the same Dynamics and the same viral Loops as everything else so it still depends on those Dynamics even even though you can make the car maybe and know that you'll get a car on the other side you don't know whether anyone will
care about this car Plus or in a world we're even making a car today there's a lot of companies in a lot of countries that are making them and of course a car is an extreme example but almost any other product I can go to Alibaba and just get that product and then the question is really what kind of story can I put on top of this product and how do I break through the nose to sell this product it's not about whether
can whether I can make it it's about whether I can get anyone to pay attention to me um so so again that means an environment is much less predictable much more Dynamic much more prone to like winner take all or winner take most effects um and and yeah much more asymmetrical in terms of like the size of you know who gets to win how big they were to begin with and how big they can become
and also a world where success is is very fleeting so I mean that even if you're successful you don't know if you'll be successful again tomorrow or the next day and something can come and kind of overshadow you very quickly a world that is very similar to to Showbiz you know to how Superstars uh both Superstar kind of firms and Superstars people have existed but now these Dynamics are starting to govern more and
more of our jobs and more and more of Our Lives and in the past you know when you think of what to study or what to be when you grow up your parents will tell you go be an accountant or a doctor or you know something like a good profession basically that you'll always have a job and also these professions tended to be constrained or protected by geography in some way that like you know every town
needs a doctor you don't have to be the best doctor if you live there then you're going to make a living or every town needs an accountant uh but now so then you had a choice you know you probably said no I want to be a soccer player I want to be in the NBA I want to be a rock star and your parents will tell you no no those professions are bad because most people don't make
money in those professions but yeah those that make money make a lot of money but your odds are that you're not going to make anything and you can make the choice I think today increasingly we don't have that choice whatever professions you go into are going to be governed by the same power laws by the same dynamics of the economics of superstars where even if you're an
accountant and you think you chose the most boring job in the world suddenly you're competing both with uh low wage earners in you know anywhere in the world and with the best possible accountant on Earth that suddenly created some kind of scalable business and he's competing with you and taking customers away from you uh so it's basically it's a it's a tough world to live in I think with much less certainty
but also much more opportunity uh sort of power laws Define everything around us now uh and one part of our thesis is that there will be uh just as you say the power law will be almost iron glad and there will emerge the huge winners but we also think that the the length of the Tails uh are going to provide lots of Niche opportunities where people can like you know I always use fishing as my example because I made
a disastrous decision because I didn't understand that people loved fishing and I got pitched an app for that was a phishing app uh pre-pandemic and I'm kind of looking at the guy over lunch and he's showing it to me and I'm like I I just don't get this at all and and of course what I didn't get was the number of aficionados of fishing how it actually was incredibly elegant because
not only did it let them brag look at the fish I just caught yeah it also had a social aspect because you could geolocate where they caught the fish and and then people would swap uh stories Etc and it went on to be an incredibly successful app and and I and and I think that there are so many niches where that can now happen we finally have the tools we finally had the networks that will
allow sort of Niche interests uh crazy yeah stuff that will emerge as like God how did they ever think of that I I constantly I still feel like I underestimate the the scope of the internet like the the number of people that that exist that could pay for almost anything as long as you tell the right story uh I'm always amazed that I make a living you know by being mostly an online entity that just writes and
you know I'm not a celebrity I'm not terribly famous I don't have a huge number of followers uh but I make a very nice living even though almost anyone never heard of me and and I know personally hundreds of other people who do the same thing in a variety of fields and you know in the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands of people like that in the world already and at some point the the niche or the
niche even becomes the person itself you know in terms of how you explain the material how you frame it people just want to get it from you rather than get it from someone else so it's not even just about defining the specific Market or what you're actually selling but it's even down to like your voice your attitude the type of jokes you make um so it's not that it just becomes
entertainment but it becomes it's specific enough because there's enough options for people that they can choose the exact person that they want to tell them about the specific topic that interests them uh and and yeah and I think it's incredible in terms of opportunity but but again but it's a life that comes with a lot of anxiety and uncertainty as well at the same time I also feel like wow how can I make such a nice living
get paid so much to come and give a talk and still I feel like oh maybe in a week nobody will want to ever speak to me again and like you know like and like I feel like at the mercy of all these powers and algorithms that I have no control over and suddenly someone changes something and I'm like oh [ __ ] now I have to come up with a different strategy uh it's it's very stressful and so so I
think 10 years ago people who are in the same income bracket as me were much calmer I think uh in terms of their approach to life I still feel like constantly like I'm you know like I'm about to lose everything even though the evidence says otherwise so yeah but I think that that feeling is going to be more prevalent like that's something that more and more people are gonna feel I feel like I'm
living in the future a little bit in that sense that's very insightful because it also helps explain the kind of mind viruses that are going around right now um and and they do seem to be based on the insecurity um you know in the old days you got the gold watch you stayed at the same company for however many years you you climb the ladder nine to five you went home uh the work you did was not only
contingent on where you lived it was pretty highly contingent on where you lived right uh pretty hard to change your your physical zip code and then we've moved to a world where it's super easy to change your digital zip code and and the other thing that we now have you know the internet is the greatest variance amplifier in history right and so the uncertainty the stress the
anxiety what do you how do you think that's going to play out I think will I mean one it's it's Amplified or intensified by what's happening outside the internet you know the housing costs uh the quality of Public Services that we have or don't have uh again General inequality and the feeling particularly in the New York Metro you feel like you know you can make half a million dollars a year and
you feel kind of poor or at least you feel kind of insecure which is true I mean people who don't live here can cannot really grasp what the hell like disconnected the kind of statement uh that was but it's true because at the end of the day you're competing with people like you know because we're on a power law slope even if you're in the 99th percentile or the 99.3 percentile there's still tens
of thousands of people that are ahead of you and sometimes far far ahead of you and are competing for the same resources the same doctor the same school the same parking lot the same everything and I just read you know that last year in America 13 000 weddings cost more than a million dollars so you know that's 13 billion dollars spent on wedding but just on on that and again but so it sounds like a lot but
when you look at it statistically you're like okay there's I think two million weddings in America every year so yeah 13 000 is really point zero six percent or so yeah of course it makes sense statistically it will be like that so statistically it makes sense but when you translate it to the real world you're like wow there's 13 000 people so like probably a third of that is in New
York so every week in New York there's like a few dozen weddings that cost a million dollars and whoever else wants to get married has to compete against them pulling all the resources uh away and and then again and that's what you have to compete with unless you're on the other end of the spectrum and you're not even close to these people but if you're close enough to them you're competing with them
so it's yeah so it's very stressful I think Society will have to adapt you know to come up with new social support system safety nets psychological and religious stories that people tell themselves to make them comfortable with where they are and with the risk associated with it uh and and hopefully because it is all driven by technology one way or another then maybe technology can also help you
know again maybe some things will become incredibly abundant and simple and and cheap and and it will be worth it you know then it will lessen the anxiety because we'll know that we have access to amazing Healthcare and that we have access to uh I don't know if Universal basic income we can talk about that but like at least a certain level of service that I'm like yeah okay you know I'm
because most people I think don't want to be the richest person in the world I know I don't but they also they want to have some security and safety and uh and I think the more it moves up the curve the less sense it makes I mean if you if if people in the 99th percentile in America feel insecure economically then I think you have a problem and hopefully technology can can help fix that
uh I think we're right at the tail end I hope of a period where technology mostly helped cause a lot of that but without fixing it completely it I think even stepping away from the internet I think a lot of the bad policy that we've seen over the last few decades was also enabled by technology even things like low interest rates uh for the last 15 years I think without technology and globalization basically it just wouldn't
have been possible uh I think the deflationary power of Technology was largely absorbed by that policy which is why you know we kind of didn't see inflation until until now because without it probably would have had some significant deflation I mean with globalization and in Tech uh it also enabled all the crazy Wars of the 21st century particularly the American initiated ones which which again I think
without the tech boom probably the government would have had to go back to the public sooner and say okay this is costing us a lot do you really want to finance it here are the trade-offs and probably a lot of people would have said earlier oh no actually this is this is not that important but like when you can Finance it without people noticing then you know it takes a long time until
it becomes an economic issue and and by the time he does probably people don't remember the link to the war or to any actions anyhow because it happens 15 20 years later this is happening now uh but I hope that in the future we'll we'll kind of see what technology can do for the better also so like you know okay we paid the price I feel in a way in terms of the demolition of a lot of all structures
but now I show us what you got you know man give us give us abundance basically and and I'm optimistic that we might say that I mean that that we have a good chance and also that we have no choice we have to make that bet because this is all we got so we can turn things back so yeah I agree uh wholeheartedly with that assessment uh my my concern is like we're going up against our base programming our base
human OS where uh you know humans are essentially mimetic creatures and we we tend to compare ourselves in the old days we compared ourselves to who was around us right like uh you know we had a limited group of people a limited group of friends uh or family Etc and the comparisons you know that we're probably closer to us in the age of Instagram and Twitter or X as Elon likes to call it
um yeah the best company name on the Internet the Twitter you know just leave it alone but but now we're comparing ourselves as you put it with Superstar right and and that kind of crushing uh insecurity like I I thank God I don't compare myself with Brad Pitt or you know whatever and and so what do you think about um like are are we battling our our base code here where Prestige comparison like
you'll you'll endlessly see people say uh you know which Choice you're gonna make well you have a job you can double your compensation for a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand but all of your colleagues are gonna go from a hundred thousand to you know and and everyone picks the one where they do better comparatively yeah not not absolutely what do you think some of the solutions
for that given the technology platforms given the leverage they give us all that part of it technology solves on its own that we're bombarded with so much information and so many images that we're completely and you know whatever we see we don't know if it's real or fake or we don't care or we can make ourselves look like we're billionaires so we just don't take you know take it in as much as we would
you know if it 50 years ago someone would publish I don't know how the Kennedys live or something and people will be outraged now it's kind of like yeah whatever you know whatever like I've seen 100 of these a day so people just don't get excited I think Trump is an example and a negative one of that we're kind of like you know when he said he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue I I kind of
believe him because it's like yeah okay another thing that someone's going to say about someone at some point it doesn't matter how bad you are if people say it enough times and nobody listens anymore unfortunately um so so I think there's that second I I do think so here we're getting I mean it's almost like behavioral economics what you just described is like okay people prefer to get paid more than someone else rather
than just get paid more in absolute terms and and have what they want and I think often and of course we ascribe it to our like uh you know Neanderthal brains or something like or like this some some naturalistic that it is and we assume that there's something irrational about it but I think that often these kind of insects are more rational than we think uh which gives me hope because I think
in this current environment it is actually correct to not you know to choose the option where you still earn more than the other people because it is kind of a zero-sum game so again like here in New York you can choose to make five hundred thousand dollars a year but that there'll be a thousand other people that make 50 million dollars a year that's going to be a real problem
for you it's not just going to be like oh okay I'm making 500 000 a year who cares because it is to a certain extent a zero-sum game we're competing for the same land the same limited or declining public services so it is a problem for me but if you change that equation the environment where we're in where I'm like yeah I know I'm gonna still get amazing Medical Care I'm still gonna get
great education I'm still gonna have a place to live so yeah I don't care what then it will be rational for me to choose otherwise uh so so I see the Merit in that uh kind of animal brain choice as well and I feel like if you change the incentives around people and you turn it from a zero-sum game to a truly uh you know positive sum game then many people will respond differently and already I think America it's kind of a
cause for optimism how bad things already are and no one's you know Burning Down the country with pitchforks that you're kind of like people have a lot of reasons to get angry now already and if they can put up with this hopefully where we're going it's going to be a little better in absolute terms for every individuals and and people are going to be okay with it uh I think some people will want more and
and it's on us as a society to make sure their Avenues to to go and get more and to feel like they're able to get more and that you know that they have a choice that they have a chance uh because I think that's the other side of it not just in terms of who has what but in terms of everyone having a feeling that the American dream is alive that you know that if you are ambitious
then you can go and become whoever you want basically in this country and in this world so I think that's another important aspect of it uh I I also think it's it's kind of a related issue um you know we talk a lot about the incentive problems and if you give people everything suddenly no one will want to work and no one will be as motivated and there'll be no innovation I actually think that most humans
already are not so ambitious and many of those that are the most ambitious money on its own is not really the main thing that is driving them and that even if you give everyone everything those people or at least some people are still going to be as ambitious as before but maybe everyone else will be happier and this is something also that wasn't true a hundred years ago because a hundred
years ago the economy needed everyone to be ambitious at least to a certain extent he needed everyone to wake up in the morning and go work in the factory for 40 years but today the economy doesn't need anyone to do that anymore you know it needs far fewer people to be really ambitious and excited and and it needs everyone else to just do whatever they want and whatever they want doesn't mean to do nothing it
actually it I think it serves an economic purpose where this is how we're going to discover new things that we actually want to sell and buy from each other uh you know and and it's happening on the margins of the economy already where you know people are just coming up with new stuff and they're selling each other stuff uh the most extreme examples of it like like most things that emerge are
like in adult entertainment or things related to that where you know people just pay other people to do all sorts of weird things not even sexual often you know just like give them attention or mention their name or write their something you know stuff they're like okay if someone's paying for it they're like yeah someone is paying for it and that's the job of the future because that's what you know
there's demand and there's Supply and good then two people here found you know someone found something to spend on and someone found something productive to do with their time or skills or traits or whatever it is that they're selling uh and we're only going to discover more of those jobs of the future through letting people just basically do whatever they want Wireless a minority takes care of the
the hard the hard you know energy infrastructure uh uh Healthcare Etc so and again I'm not implying that we should specify Who belongs to which uh cast or minority I'm saying this is an order that is emerging already and everyone is free at any given moment to to work less or to work more or to be as ambitious as they like I'm just saying that I think that the incentive questions of 100 years ago are
very different from the ones of uh 20 years from today totally agree and one of the themes that you talk about is that essentially uh again with with AI uh becoming uh ubiquitous and and I think it will and I think that mostly that's for the good uh one of the things that we're going to need is more training data and you know the really excellent data sets uh are pretty much well they're not
exhausted because we haven't gotten to a lot of private data sets that companies maintain uh but the big companies wanting one of your themes is listen big companies it will now be in their interest to pay people to like play games or generate content uh because the value to the big company actually is as as the data set and uh new training data right and and so a lot of things that
seem crazy to people actually when you look at it through your lens are incredibly smart talk a bit about that yeah so you know we already live in a world where we've all made this deal with the devil or with multiple Devils where we're going to spend our time generate data generate content and in return you're going to give us free services I can you know call anyone in the world for free on WhatsApp or on
Facebook I can make video calls I can consume content for free uh I can just be entertained for free but in return again I'm gonna upload my own content and maybe even more valuable I'm gonna provide constant feedback about thousands of other bits of content every day you know I'm gonna like it share it ignore it hover over it whatever it is that you can measure I'm gonna do to it and
you're gonna take that and optimize your business with it so we already have that bargain set up uh I think over time this bargain will become more explicit basically saying hey you know you do this there's value in that we're going to pay you to do that and we're gonna do our thing and try to sell based on the insights that we generate from your data we're going to sell to other people who actually have money and
here also it's part of those those power laws are coming back where you know in the world of gaming already I think five or ten or whatever it is 15 of all the in-game purchases on on the Apple App Store are from I don't know what the five percent of the users or two percent of the users so but to make them to make the game good for them everybody else has to play the game and to help the game become better and
interact both socially so a bit like in nightclubs you know where you let all the women in for free and give them free drinks in order to sell it to sell to the the a bunch of guys that want to spend a lot of money because they don't care and they're driven by these you know very basic Natural Instincts but also in terms of improving the product itself that the product depends on
constant feedback and the generation of data of various kinds and so in order to sell to those two percent of consumers you need everyone else to play the game we've seen in crypto you know during the last boom I know you were there as well some experiments with that as well like that pay to play how could that even work uh so we saw some ways of doing that obviously they didn't survive but I
think they were interesting experiments and I think they they helped tell you something about where the world is going um so yeah and I think like you said it might sound very radical and then kind of surprising but at the end of the day if you look at the world as it already is if you were a farmer in the year 1910 and that would show you my life you would think okay oh 90 of what
people do is like [ __ ] like what are these people doing like what these guys walking that guy's dog and this is a lactation consultant and this is a therapist for pets and this is and even the the actual office work you know 80 of it like oh what is where did all this paper come from what are these people actually doing and filing and Nana you know is this really necessary is this
really work like what are you guys really doing so I think we're really good at making up stuff for ourselves to do and I think we're going to stay really good at that but I think less of that will happen in offices and it will less look less and less like what we call work but as long as someone pays for it or that it generates any economic value for the system as a whole then it's work and it's necessary
so yeah fun times ahead yeah and and the other thing that I like to do is I like to listen to the market right and you mentioned uh Farm Workers well why didn't if that was an idyllic light why did they all move did anything they could to move to cities and get factory jobs because the facts of the matter were farming was [ __ ] hard and it was boring and it was isolated and
you know uh it it served its purpose clearly but as technology evolved human humans voted with their feet and and they they came and yes were some of the conditions on the Lower East Side of Manhattan horrible yeah like Upton Sinclair made his entire career about pointing out all of the uh horrible things that happened but the fact is it was better than what came before uh you could argue because also it's an
adjustment period so I mean it's it's never you know it's never going to be optimal for everyone at the same time um I.E yeah I agree and and I think one of the things that um is going to continue to be a struggle for a while there's always a cultural lag right and as you point out a lot of the things we're talking about have been around for a long time and and now they're just getting better uh you
you're gonna see things like that great accountant who could scale him or herself that's going to be a really interesting phenomenon because I do think that is definitely gonna happen but on the other side of it like watch what people do right don't watch what they say don't watch what they complain about don't watch any of that watch what they actually do and when you when you watch what they actually do you can see
your thesis makes it tremendous amount of sense right they don't have to know the Uber theory that information right yeah is going to be much more important they can even hate it if they when they hear about it and you know yeah exactly and and so the Pareto distributions I mean like the the 80 20 as you pointed out it's like becoming much more 95.5 99 1. talk a little bit about you know the the AI Revolution as
you know I'm an investor in AI I'm the chairman of the board of stability AI I I personally think that it is a incredible technology not without problems I am not I'm losing about it but it's going to revolutionize what people could do if they can scale and AI lets them scale in my opinion because it removes a tremendous amount of the repetitive tasks and uh let you focus on
the creativity let you focus on the new ideas let you focus on the things that I would argue are better for human Minds to be focusing on anyway right and and yet I also think it allows for what we see as maths customization emerging right I I I will do something just for you why can can I do that because it's easy for me to do it because it's a digital asset and my cost of replication
is effectively zero yep and and and so can I tweak it by making use of the data that all of these other users are showing me yeah you bet I can talk a bit about how you see that on Bold accessibility for like Best in Class to scale themselves and it almost out of necessity is gonna come about in my opinion and I think yours I don't want to speak for you but in a very non-linear fashion where we've been so used to that
kind of linear climb the ladder of success Etc so one I I feel like more than anything it's just like so exciting everything that's happening now you know I haven't been this excited since like 1995 when I was a teenager and like going on the internet and every week there's like a new tool and you get like a CD with the magazine and you try it and freeware and it's like so there's just like so many
cool things happening and I think anyone who's not like really diving into it or excited about it is really missing out uh so encourage everyone who hasn't started yet playing with all of these tools to to start um I think technology and here too it's both the internet and AI each one on its own and both together is going to enable us to scale in ways that were not possible before and it's
going to enable us to do that in professions that previously were considered completely unscalable uh so you know uh 120 years ago I think Alfred Marshall who was like the the Paul Krugman of the day or let's say or something you know the most kind of influential and vocal economies let's say obviously like programming not necessarily always correct uh but even a negative indicator but uh
tangent but uh Marshall wrote about you know all these new business people that are making a lot of money suddenly because of I think the Telegraph and the trains but he looked at the best paid singer in Europe uh that summer and he said that singer will never make as much money as a businessman so long as the human voice is restricted to a single room so you know he said you know like music is inherently an unscalable
occupation compared to like a lawyer or like a you know a merchant but of course not soon after you know we had radio and recording and television and of course music you know Taylor Swift can make a billion dollars a year now um and I feel like there's a lot many other professions that we cannot imagine how scalable they can be but we're about to be seriously surprised uh and some of
that happens because the same work suddenly becomes scalable so you can suddenly reach many more people concurrently uh but some of it also happens because the work itself changes or kind of the substitutions that emerge that you didn't think exist so you know when suddenly a Peloton instructor can have a class with 200 people and it's not like a video of a class it's a live class it gives he or she
shout out to different people like people feel like they're interacting and again maybe the limit is 50 people maybe 250 but it's not one anymore and it's not 10 or whatever is the average size of a class at a gym and then suddenly a Peloton instructor makes six hundred thousand dollars a year while the average New York gym instructor makes forty thousand dollars a year already you're starting to see something
interesting happening so again without becoming Taylor Swift just like okay this person makes 12 times as much as that person even though they're kind of doing the same job and they're in the same place so I think AI will enable us to leverage our skills much more so again to do more with our time to serve more people concurrently to even let people interact with our knowledge and our
voice uh while we are not there to match and maybe that's the most important aspect to match us algorithmically with the people who are most likely to pay the most for whatever that we're selling at that given moment so the internet is like a variance enhancer yeah and that and it's also a matching engine at the end of the day an economic activity is all about matching so if someone wants to hear the specific
thing that I know about right now on Earth and you can match me to that person often that person would want to pay much more than the average person who just kind of needs my advice and you can see that in medical examples you know if I God forbid you have I don't know what some disease and you can speak to the second best expert in the world or you can pay an extra ten thousand dollars
and speak right now but only on Zoom to the best expert in the world will you take will you pay the ten thousand dollars for 10 minutes you would would you do that even if the number two expert would be completely free yes you would and even though the number two would meet you and touch you and do everything and the other one would be only on Zoom you'll do that because again if the match is really true then
it's worth it then sometimes it's worth much more and I think that's true in more and more situations and both the internet and AI together basically enable us to do that matching and they enable work itself to become much more kind of ad hoc contingent instead of like hoarding Talent or having all the people or all the resources that you might need you can suddenly tap into many more things on
demand and we're seeing that borne out in the data in terms of how big companies operate already the bigger they are the more dependent they are on on Freelancers and contingent labor of various kinds and the boundaries of the firm itself become less and less clearly defined because transaction costs have changed significantly and are constantly changing because of the again the
internet and AI and other tools which means we we're moving into a world where two people with more or less the same skills one of them could make 50 times more than the other so if today maybe it's like 20 times more than the other because of luck suddenly the role of luck or chance becomes much much bigger and sometimes the difference is all because again timing and algorithm someone was at the right
place at the right time 10 people liked someone tweet at the right time of day so that thing ended up having 5 million views and then you know the other person posted it three minutes later and then just uh Elon just tweeted something stupid about something else so nobody noticed and all the attention in the world went in a different direction for two minutes uh these are the type of
things that that will govern Our Lives um and but again but even that winner will struggle to maintain their advantage probably in a lot of cases especially if they remain ambitious you know maybe they'll make enough money quickly to to live off of but if they want to stay successful and retain that attention will be very hard for them to do that and then it will affect more and more professions you know we can have now
remote surgery and remote collaboration on Hardware development in more and more jobs that previously we thought people cannot do remotely now they can and also those kind of levers of scalability there's several of them and they multiply each other so again in the case of like a doctor you could say yeah okay so he could see some remote clients a few times a day but it still doesn't make him Taylor Swift
but actually if you see 10 patients a day instead of six that's already something if you have to spend a little less time with each of them that's already something if you can give each of them a little more extra service or get like a little more Hands-On remotely as tools become better then you can take on more types of work and more importantly that matching effect that the people that you will see
are going to pay you three times more than the people you saw before so now you're seeing more people you can sell them more services and you can charge them more so maybe you're making 30 times more than you did before without becoming Taylor Swift just by working more or less in the same way but there's a multiple here suddenly that that change things again not to the stratosphere but but dramatically enough
for a person and of course even if it's only 2x or 3x it's it's a big difference for a person that is just doing their job and at the same time it might come at the expense of of the other person who's competing with you who's now getting less work or you know has to compete at least much more fiercely than before and not just rely on the people who live near their office
or their clinic or their school and assume that they have a captive audience so yeah so everyone have has an audience now but no one has a captive audience anymore and it's true for cities for companies for individuals for everyone we all have to convince everybody else to pay us attention and to choose us every day uh and yes okay capitalism on steroids and then let's see how that feels and and it's
funny that the name of the paper that made it uh AI really exponentially jumped was attention is all you need yeah didn't mean that but like that sense but it's true no I I know um yeah part of our thesis uh it seems to be similar to yours in that we we see the corporations of the future as kind of managing what some others have called smart swarms in other words in the independent agents who who are not like
so at O'Shaughnessy ventured one of our verticals is a filmmaking company and uh we anticipate that uh it will probably rarely be the same exact team that makes the first film right that makes the second film right and and that will be that matching function that you bring up I think people don't think about that or when they do think about it they don't take it to its natural
conclusion right the matching function is so important it's gotten so much better that you can have a situation where you know the whole idea of oh I'm gonna grind it out or I'm going to you know whatever is being lost because skill sets are going to replace grind in many uh circumstances I think yeah but I I also wonder like yeah with this tsunami of new thinking of new things new strange experiments as you
point out leading to really cool Innovations and things do you think that the idea that the The Gatekeepers won't go away but that they will be replaced by essentially people who have better taste or better um uh ability to say yeah here's your platform your curated platform of of like you're the best doctor here's the best teacher is that the way the stuff holds yeah totally I think one you know
the the kind of Film Production or Hollywood example is a perfect one and I also use it often you know when you look at the the credits at the end of a film you realize and sometimes the film is a big economic Endeavor you know it could be a 200 million 500 million dollar project that takes a few years so it's it's a real business it's not like a you know some people having fun uh and you
have hundreds of people sometimes some of them completely Freelancers some of them work for separate companies with extremely weird and exotic titles and specializations and exactly they're matched together and you ask yourself okay why don't do all these people just work for the same company and then there's I think two main reasons one is matching you know that you always want the best person for that
specific job and you cannot employ all the designers and all the scriptwriters in the world at any given moment and second is this financial Hedge from both the participants and the producers where you know it's risky enough that endeavor that you don't want to add to your risk so you really only pay for what you need when you need it because otherwise the economics wouldn't make sense but even
from the kind of Provider from the provider's perspective you know whether you're a writer or designer or contributor to the film you want to work on multiple projects in parallel because you don't know which one of them is actually going to succeed or work or be worth your while or actually coming to fruition so it's a you know both parties adapt like both the capital and the labor let's say adapted to the dynamism
and the complexity of the environment by adopting that Arrangement which I guess is optimal uh for that business and I think the same thing will be true for other businesses and and yeah that matching the power of matching is is something that even me that I live on the internet I still feel I underestimated you know when I teach a course about AI or about crypto I'm not the world's greatest
expert on either of these topics and I don't claim to be and my audience wants to learn from me because those specific 500 people or thousand people a year that I teach they want to learn from me because they like again my Approach they like my you know the fact that I am not an expert that I'm an outsider that I don't have a dog in this race that I'm just curious whatever it is that they
like they like to learn about it for me and they're willing to pay a premium to learn from someone who's not an expert and who's not as well known as somebody else so again it's not just that they're willing that I'm a poor substitute for someone else but they're paying a premium to learn specifically for me to learn something that maybe they can just go on YouTube and learn or just you
know or whatever or go even on University it'll be cheaper than coming to me and taking that course uh so and I think those matches are infinite there's so many more of them and uh and yeah the nature of the firm is changing but also increasingly the whole economy is is more clearly becoming a system that produces things so it's not even about the firm anymore it's about encouraging multiple firms to
compete and to try things and assuming that more of them will fail so just like the Venture model but like on on a broader scale I think we're going to see more of that like an adventurers eating the economy like more and more things will become more Ventures will become riskier uh less clear but also more scalable in some ways and I also think maybe this is a positive way
to think about it but it's true for individuals as well so from a lot of what I just described about the future of work it's very easy to conclude that like okay we shouldn't care so much about the public education or health care you know most people don't matter anymore who cares about them they're not necessarily they're not necessary economically anymore but actually that's not true
and in a way exactly the opposite is true we as an economy don't know anymore who is going to be the next big Talent who is going to be the amazing person who's going to come up with something whether it's a medical Innovation or it's entertainment but who is that person that by making the most of their skills and by getting a stage and getting attention is suddenly going to create incredible value for the world
and jobs to a lot of other people so we actually have to increase the number of bets that we make on people as well we have to make sure that all of our people you know have the skills and education and the opportunity to participate in this game because it's basically more free lottery tickets for for Society at large you know the more people we have like every person is a lottery ticket
just like every tweet is a lottery ticket and if we give more of them a chance we basically increase our odds as a society that you know the amazing thing will be created and invented uh so so I think I think it's true and also I think that's the right way to think about it as a society even if it were intruded we have to find ways to explain to ourselves why all people are valuable
why we should even though there's these kind of Tendencies towards inequality and power laws in that that are a result of the our level of technological development why it's more important than ever for us to make sure that everyone has you know great education great housing great economic safety and that they're all willing to take more risk and take Bolder bets and again and to try to do
whatever it is that that they're good at or that they enjoy doing and that something good will come out of it for all of us yeah and again we are very simpatico there because uh we have another thing that we do uh Fellowship grants um and what we do is uh we award 12 a year or a hundred thousand dollars uh we're actually going to we already launched and we'll be making more complete smaller grant program where we
give smaller Awards but the the idea behind it was very much in the spirit of what you just said in other words in in the past I had no ability to like find and fund like people with genius ideas and or uh whatever because like if they weren't in my immediate circle right that that was I didn't know I didn't know and and and not only that but how many humans were born lived and died that were Geniuses or incredibly
creative and didn't even know it themselves helps because of where they found themselves uh in in physically in in space so I love that idea that the unlock really comes and you use the example um from biology where the ants the few ants that go off in looking for the new food they're very important because they buy the new food source yeah you don't know which one of them is going to bump
into some some source that suddenly becomes relevant for the whole system yeah exactly and and that's why this idea that what what we're able to do is leverage that because it can be better immediately back into the network when somebody like you talked about you know the crazy kid who puts up the video and he's got a billion views right uh that is incredibly information rich and
um is the signal yeah and the the way things are evolving those signals are incredibly important to people who want to continually improve what they're offering to the public let me ask you this uh what have you achieved as a researcher um that has helped you scale using AI using the various tools um what's been your personal experience so on even before AI just the internet as a whole everything I've done in life
always started from writing online so starting from the mid 90s I was writing about music and then I started promoting parties and meeting all the club Owners just from being some guy under a pseudonym that writes about music online and kind of reviews parties and so already it seemed amazing to me uh then you know I was writing about consumer culture in China and I started working
in real estate development in China and building shopping malls just because I was a guy riding on the internet about you know the Chinese media and and Brands and culture and then what I'm doing now it's all based around my newsletter at the end of the day so you know I get to advise the biggest companies in the world and I get to give it paid talks and I get to teach people from the biggest companies in the world
uh and all just because I'm some guy somewhere that's writing a newsletter in terms of how I use AI date so once so again that's in the matching engine and the internet have served me well and stressed me out too but I mean they allowed me you know I left my corporate job eight years ago in real estate private equity and since then I managed to survive and then even Thrive and you
know buy a house and I have two kids and my wife and uh so yeah again I I still worry about that probably worry more than I should given like I think I'm doing okay and uh in terms of AI so for me in particular the main thing is that it's really like the colleague I never had it's not about like oh someone's going to do everything instead of me but like bouncing ideas criticize me remind me of that thing
that I read somewhere is that mcluhan or is it like something like where did I find that quote like someone said something about a horse and like a thing like it's like a lot of stuff like that and also just a lot of feedback okay is this good how can I make it better criticize it you know Steel Man Etc uh so and then even with just writing you know generating a lot of uh Segways is like a
place that I get stuck in you know I'm like oh I have all the pieces but how do I connect this to the other I'm just missing like three words your sentence or like something something blank something so stuff like that that I could spend three hours on or just give up for the day and come back the next day previously now I'm just like okay let's see what Chachi PT says about this um and then again I use all the very
like also like Claude and Bard and John pitian come in perplexity and and the image generators so so I usually throughout the day all the time just uh just as I write and think uh then I use the the text to audio I use 11 labs to create audio versions of all my articles uh and that's like a very simple thing that I just wouldn't do before like couldn't be bothered to record it like so I would do it every
now and then but now I do it for every article and it and it's easy um I use my journey for image generation so again every article and everything I write I always create an image now and I'm toying with a lot of the data analysis tools as well so about the research tools like site and elicit and perplexity you know to to actually find information that is properly sourced
uh I use some of the kind of data analysis thing I like the notable plugin for chatgpt so you can upload like really heavy files to notable and then interact with them via chatgpt but like process more data than chat upd itself would would be willing to process uh so yeah so I can't you know I can't say that like there's anything that kind of allows me not to do anything anymore but like it
allows me to to to again to to have those multipliers to do a little bit more every day to do it a little faster to do it a little better and and to match a little better with the with the relevant people uh that are most interested in it um yeah and also I think to have more fun you know it's so inspiring and exciting just like all these new toys I I I'm also kind of happy with myself and I'm still
excited about them and still get them you know that I'm not getting old yet because I you know honestly I'm younger than you but also I feel like I've been on the internet for 20 years now and you always kind of wait for the thing that you'll be like okay I have no idea what this is like why are people using this so uh and I get that feeling without you know with Snapchat I think the first product that I kind of
looked at and said okay this is not something this is the first social media that I'm not going to use so it means I'm getting that was the first thing already but with AI I can only feel again that okay there's so many cool things and it's also I feel like so many people were talking about ad but so many people still don't get the internet they still don't not just that they don't make the
most of it they just even things like a search engine so many people just don't use it properly yet or use it enough like often people ask me oh how do you know about this how do you know about it I'm like you know I just went and read about it how do I know yeah but how do you know it's true like what men you know just basic research methods online to figure out what's true and what's not true and
where to find out how to verify and validate sources um so yeah I feel like there's so much there's still so much potential that people are not taking advantage of and even with AI a lot of the argument is about what it could become and how much better can it be but I feel like we just with what we have now just to propagate that into the rest of the economy and to adapt it to
different use cases that you can run with that for the next 20 years even if they don't invent anything else and uh and they will invent so yeah so I mean incredibly exciting I agree I I feel like one of the luckiest per people on the planet in the fact that I get to be alive during this time yeah because it is so exciting and one of the things that you point out as well is that you know between the
combination of mobile cameras high-speed internet everyone having a smartphone the the technical competence that was once required uh has become obsolete really because anyone who can like figure out how to use a smartphone can suddenly let their ideas run wild and so we're we're seeing a period in my opinion and I think in yours correct me if I'm wrong where the ideas are going to take prominence over
the like technical proficiency yeah so the execution barrier now for a lot of things is just like much lower than it was before I won't say it doesn't exist like actually one thing I didn't mention that I do with AI I do more coding now than I did you know I have some basic proficiency I used to you know I started as a front-end developer and building websites when it was when there were
like five HTML tags in the world and it was really simple uh but now my kind of basic proficiency or Affinity allows me to tweak many more of the tools that I use much more intensively than I would have so both my website you know instead of going through substack I have a kind of an open source ghost website and I customize the template and I integrated all sorts of tools so each one of these
things is a little thing but it's a little thing that I wouldn't have done before or that I would have had to depend on a team to do and also automating a lot of stuff behind the scene with with zapier in particular but now with zapier and API calls to open AI so again in terms of filtering emails and sending people invoices automatically and welcoming students to the course a lot of stuff that even a
year ago I had someone kind of do them now I can kind of get by without anyone else doing them and just automating part of them and kind of doing a bit more of them myself just because it still excites me because it's new and it's kind of fun and I like to build it probably I'm going to get tired of it at some point but uh I think yeah so I agree I think now a person with an idea can also be a person with a website
with some uh complex coding of like I don't know accounting flows with building basic tools or examples or interactive charts whatever it is that your field requires but I can now have a much richer kind of uh presence thanks to all of these tools where in the past I would either have to depend on someone else or just give that up altogether and just know okay this is not in my league I'm just like one
person so I cannot expect to have like all of these other extra perks that maybe only a bigger company could have but now I can you know basically punch above my weight and I think uh yeah the issue is that everyone can punch about their weight now so that that that's the great way of putting it yeah I I think that these tools give everyone the ability to punch way above their
weight and the functions that the traditional Corporation served uh prior to all of these Innovations are disappearing uh because they are being made much more efficient much more usable actually uh where it allows someone like yourself to create uh a juggernaut really of uh a company uh and person that can consult uh uh do give classes uh do a variety of things basically from the same knowledge base
that can be extended through a variety of different uh distribution uh patterns by the by the way it's funny speaking of matching so I'm I'm getting really tired of social media partly because of the Elon stories but just I almost feel like one it's very important for my work but also I feel like I can do it without it you know just by sending I have enough of an audience now just on the newsletter
where I can just write not tweet not post anything and just leave it to other people to discuss and I want to see how that's going to work both because it distracts me and I spend way more time on social media than I would like but also I feel like it focuses me too much on certain on the present on short-term things and I think where I have a bigger Advantage is kind of
moving a little more slowly and thinking a little more broadly uh so I don't want it to like I don't want to know everything that's going on even if it's valuable information in a way and it's funny I was just thinking like okay maybe I'll take a break from Twitter for a few months or something and that same day I kind of came back just to see what's going on and I started Paul Millard responded to your Tweet
recommending me to come on this podcast I'm like oh this like this damn matching machine I can't avoid it like it's so valuable that that is something that I have believed for a long time I started saying years ago that Twitter is it Twitter is right now still the best candidate to emerge as the world's first always-on Global intelligence Network yeah I would pay a thousand dollars a month to use
Twitter literally totally unfortunately exactly and I and I and my statement the same way unfortunately because it is uh the the the power of that network is uh difficult to calculate and um the essence of the Internet it's so [Music] and yet you also talk about the tragedy of the uncommon talk talk a little bit about about that idea oh and I've written all these articles that you read I have to catch up on them
but you know so there's this idea in economics the tragedy of the comments it comes from kind of a Environmental Studies but later kind of into mainstream economics and the the basic idea is that you know if you let everyone just follow their best interests uh there's a lot of common resources that are basically going to get depleted or destroyed you know we spoke about fishing if we if everyone
would just want to go go fishing every day and just try to catch one fish uh the lake might kind of go below the level at which uh the the local population can replace itself and there's not going to be any more fish to anyone else uh and that's very easy to understand right the low humans the greedy they want everything so they destroy things but I think there's a lot of there's kind of the counter example of that I
call it the yeah the tragedy of the uncommon later I found out that there's also another name for it like Tyler Cowan actually send me something about it I sent stuff to him because I know that he knows everything so if someone already said it before it's even better than Chad GPT or like Tyler did anyone write this that he's like oh yeah what's his name the lady in his career he wrote an article
about uh so so I think they call it uh uh how did they call it I don't remember something also with comments but basically the idea is I think there are things that become less valuable because they're underutilized so they basically lost to society because they're underutilized and I gave some examples of the lack of public beaches in the US and the fact that so many so much of so many
of our beaches or most of our beaches at least where people live are private and that means not just that you know okay it's not nice that you know most people don't have access to a beach but that even people who do have access to the beach in those private communities actually don't enjoy the beach because the beach is not fun it's not it doesn't have enough economic activity to sustain
the kind of things that make a beach fun you know there's not a good restaurant there's not there's no activity there's no people to look at whatever it is and I kind of thought about it because I was in Israel this summer and I brought my mother-in-law who is like American and swiss and we're on the beach every day for like a month and the beaches in Israel are like a never-ending party you
know they're always full of people and there's always nice restaurants and there's always music it's like amazing and she's like why don't we have that in America like what we don't have enough people or something like in America they don't let people like there's no public beaches so they don't have that and where they do have public beaches in America they're too public in a way so they're like government run there's like
some government kind of concession for the food so by definition it's probably not good or like went through some corrupt process or at least it's kind of like the lowest common denominator it's not interesting uh so yeah so I think you know the strategy of The Uncommon where I feel like too many of our shared resources maybe are not open enough uh to the public and for people to experiment with
and to do stuff with and of course you can say that about that online resources no matter a lot of other things um so yeah that was the idea there yeah and I I think though the thing if you share more with people your stuff will become more valuable you know even if you're rich and have a private beach it'll be more fun for you not just more fun for the people that you let in and more valuable for you exactly and I mean
that that it really supports your thesis about um you know we we get hide bound sometimes about what you know what a job is yeah and and I think we're approaching a time and I think your work supports it where your vocation can be the same as your application yeah and and boy that seems like a much more good trade to me and and where we have this platform where to to use uh the analogy that is
imperfect uh but it's it's like we're providing a lot more access to those beaches right because people can log on and and you're gonna meet things and encounter things that you wouldn't have otherwise and it's a sport it's just more fun yeah but uh but it's still scary you know a lot of people they just want a simple answer like what should I study where should I work what you know
that's I wrote about it you know back here I think mutual friend Becky McCormick and he wrote about the great online game you know about like some of what we discussed that opportunity now on the internet for everyone to become so big and I think that the the issue with that game is that yeah there's this game going on but now everyone is forced to play that game even people who don't you know they
don't want to play that game they don't want to like follow their passion so much or just like they just want to you know have a stable life and quiet and and also maybe they don't want the kind of hustle for money to be the center of their attention all day they just want to have that boring job and they want to do other things or think about other things not about how to make
myself economically useful at any given moment uh so yes I mean it will require some adjustment I think one thing we haven't discussed is kind of the the not even a backlash but the counter movements or counter Trends I think we'll also see a lot of that like more people that build physical intentional communities of various kinds or and of course online communities as well and once people are liberated from uh from
the office and they can choose where to work based on other things I mean those other things will really be much more about okay what kind of people do I want to live around and what kind of Lifestyle do I want and culture and again even religion both existing in the new ones that will be invented probably in this Century in response to all those things that are happening uh we'll see a
lot of efforts to to disconnect from from this game or to play a different game into like again not to be at the mercy of these algorithms all the time uh both as communities but even just you know within the single household just like families Maybe both becoming less important and more important at the same time I guess in in the world and I think we'll see both uh but those that are we for those that
family is becoming more important I think it can be nicer than ever because now really you can have more time to spend with your family and dedicate time to your kids and be more involved in their education and kind of really turn it into something that yeah that that you dedicate a lot of the energy that previously went into your work uh to that so yeah we'll just see a more variety of lifestyles in general I
guess yeah yeah which I I think is actually diversity uh is actually uh cognitive diversity especially uh is rewarded it's one of the reasons why I think that like I'm a big supporter of Open Source uh models and AI because they allow for the cognitive diversity uh to really have a maximum effect right um and and so I think that well it can be daunting and it can be scary for many
I think that you're right that you you you can check out of the great online game if you want to as you mentioned with these counter movements I I said but even that is scary now again you get the phone they're like oh am I moving backwards am I out of touch with the times being a week when I come back from vacation I mean it sounds funny but you really feel that when you know in real time
like oh yeah sure is going to move on without me yes one of the things that I have found though is you know as part of our fellowships and grants program uh I supported a young artist here in Manhattan um who who did exactly that he had no online footprint at all intentionally yeah and he had a Gallery downtown um and uh they did their first show and the only way you could find out about
that show was to hear about a friend or or see one of the very limited pliers that they put in art schools 250 people showed up and and so I think that you know to me great that's just another way if you if you want to go that way good for you great um and so I think that well it can be daunting like one of the reasons I changed my opinion about Universal basic income is that we are now in a phase
where people who through no fault of their own I always underline that through no fault of their own maybe don't want to play the great online game and since that's the way the world is working I know all the arguments against Ubi yeah uh and and I and I used to be opposed to it because of meant those arguments made sense to me but now I'm kind of like we got to give it a try do you do you agree
I I think I don't know if Ubi specifically I'm not against it but I'm not sure if this is the answer we're looking for right I definitely think we need whole new social systems and radical ideas like one thing I wrote about is I call it the national success fund which is basically again we have these kind of power law effects I give full credit to people who are successful but we also know that a lot
of chance goes into it particularly the chance in terms of the magnitude like okay you deserve it but like being 50x is good enough you don't have to be a millionaire than the average person and I think we should start particularly the US should start trading Innovation the way Norway treats oil to say okay we have this thing it definitely generates enough for everyone it also has the potential to corrupt our
institutions which it is doing already and I'm not saying corrupt in terms of bribing politicians but basically in terms of like in California you know saying oh we get all these taxes so now we can just become so sclerotic in terms of how everything else we do works and we know that the the goose is going to keep laying eggs even though the schools are terrible and Healthcare is terrible
for most people uh so I think we should take a bigger chunk of those windfalls and put them in some fun that is not under the direct control of politicians so it is a government institution of some sorts but it doesn't serve the people who are now currently in power but it has a different mandate that is more long-term both to invest it just so it grows and we still have enough of it so the
government doesn't run deficits again doesn't become California and just says oh we have money now let's just you know go out of control but also to reinvest it into into various public goods you know so again let's have great education let's have great health care let's have better infrastructure trains housing whatever it is that we need reinvested back into society uh so in a way I'm trying to come to
Universal basic income from the other direction of like creating a world where you don't need income like you know verification you have health care you have a place to live now go do your thing uh so and also it doesn't feel like you're getting a handout or you're part of Someone Like You know you left the game like you just live in a place that you know that it's okay to try something and fail
uh or it's okay to try less than someone else and yeah so and even that I don't think that's the end idea but I think these are things that we have to think about right now there's no doubt that it's time to think about them and to discuss them so yeah you could not could not agree more and I've studied that idea as well and I like that idea too um the idea because it also serves the
if your goal is more Innovation better things for more people Etc then rewarding everyone in a let's say just we'll keep it at the country level right now um like if the United States is really really good at Innovation and really really good at ideas there should be kind of a national dividend for its citizens yes that you know inspires people who are going to be really Innovative to say oh I want to go live
there right and then and then you get into immigration policy and it becomes you know exactly there as well but but America I mean Americans don't understand how wealthy this country is I mean even compared to Europe and let alone it just you know I grew up in Israel when it was a developing country socialist country kind of it was still a nice place to live but we had two types of cars everyone
lived in more or less the same kind of area you know there's some rich kids so like I don't know they live in like the Upper Floor of the building where everyone else lived in and some guy was really rich so the elevator even opened up directly to the living room which was I remember seeing it when I was 10 I was like wow this is like you know like the bat cave or something it's like the craziest thing I've ever seen and
and just again we have so much here and there's there's really enough for everyone while still having enough people that will have much more than everyone else and you know while keeping the incentives there to continue to innovate uh particularly for America I think you know it attracts people that that want more and it's good that they do and that they're ambitious and it's
going to continue to do that um so I don't think we should be scared about messing up the incentives and I think the incentives argument usually comes at the expense of really people that that barely even have a chance you know that it's not the issue is not oh I'm gonna take away the incentives of this person to sexy I mean you know I think we can be better than that and uh and we can be a little
meaner maybe to the successful people and you know worry about their incentives but uh I think everyone deserves you know a decent house and health care and education and we're definitely already in a position to offer that um and I hope and believe that in 10 years we'll be in an even better position so so I totally agree and and I think that's a great positive and optimistic note to end our conversation
on this this has been uh incredibly fun for me because uh it's just so I just love talking about this stuff with smart people and you are certainly one of those um so it's fine I'm usually asked about narrower things and more short-term things and I'm like oh just ask me about this other thing that's like you wrote about that you did thank you of course it's my pleasure tell our audience where
they can find you the most easy uh obviously on Twitter but how do they find your your uh my website the newsletter is drawerpolic.com I probably need to find something that sounds better on podcasts and easier to remember but it's the r-o-r-p-o-l-e-g.com and we and we will have that of course in the show notes um and we uh always ask all of our guests uh at the end uh a question because we'd
love to hear the variety of answers to it and and that is that we're gonna wave a wand and make you the emperor of the world through the day you can't kill anyone and you can't put anyone in a re-education camp but what you can do we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can speak two things into it that will incept the entire 8 billion population of the world and whenever their tomorrow is wherever
they are they're going to wake up and they're going to say I just had two of the greatest ideas and I'm going to act on them right away what what are you going to incept people to act on right away oh it's a big responsibility and test your assumptions and be a little Kinder than what you feel like being no I love those I especially love be a little kinder uh so you know the
assumptions is good for business and the other one was good for sharing whatever and and good for society those are great ones thank you so much for your time and for being on uh I hope to have you back on again because I you've been looking at my notes I didn't even get through half of it you are very predictive and I and I love your work so thank you very much thank you so much Jim I appreciate it see you soon