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I don't think we've evolved in a world where anything grows exponentially.
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I don't think we have an intuition at all.
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We see lines when we zoom in and we need to zoom out and see history for us to understand these exponential curves.
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Ludits were actually right.
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Most of them lost their job and the alternative they had was actually not better if they found one.
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And so it's something that was better over the decades.
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It's great for us, but it wasn't great for them. >> Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim Olesy with yet another Infinite Loops.
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I'm very excited about today's guest, Thomas Puo, a French Spanish writer, engineer, entrepreneur whose work sits at the intersection of maps, math, and imagination.
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Oh man, I'm going to love talking to you.
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His work came to global attention early 2020 when his viral essays Corona Virus, why you must act now and the hammer and the dance helped millions to understand what exponential spread really meant. it.
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You know what's interesting is that those two pieces led to an incredibly popular Substack called uncharted territories where you use geography, history, and technology and data to explain the world, where it's been, where it's going.
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But I always think about that Bartlett quote and I want your opinion on it.
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The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. Why? and welcome. >> Uh, thank you. Thank you for having me.
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Yeah, that is exponential.
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It's weird because um I had a good intuitive sense of what these were because of my previous job.
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I was um handling Facebook viral apps and I built a few that grew exponentially and and and when you grow, you see it grow every day and in this exponential uh way, you get a good sense of it.
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But humans, I don't think we've evolved in a world where anything grows exponentially. Nothing grows this way.
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We have a sense of linear growth, maybe exponential growth in, for example, what fruit flies uh like how they how they reproduce themselves, things like that, but very very few otherwise.
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And so I don't think we have an intuition at all.
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We see lines when we zoom in and we need to zoom out and see history for us to understand these exponential cores.
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Yeah, I've often said that math especially, it it used to baffle me and I think it baffles me less now, but it but it does seem when you look at humans uh in general uh there seems to be this one, two, three a lot sort of mentality.
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And I think that understanding exponential growth, understanding that compounding can go both ways, can go positive and negative, >> negative >> are you know kind of simple concepts, not the exponential part but the compounding certainly.
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>> Why why do you think that we that it is a challenge for us to think mathematically?
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I think like the way I think a lot about um the way I think humans think is very very shaped by evolutionary psychology, right?
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right? And so like whatever we evolved uh around is is uh what we uh do and uh what you said around the the quantities one to three and and and a lot reminds me a lot of what I think it's Stalin said right like one is it one one person
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killed is a >> yeah one death is a tragedy a million is a statistic >> then why because we never found um like we never killed a million people as we evolved uh we could kill one, we could kill 10, we could kill 100, it was always the enemy. So when that happened
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So when that happened and it was tragically when it was us so so that kind of uh intuition I think we haven't developed at all and and compounding is is clearly one that you know well I think stats is another example where we we're so bad we have such a bad intuition at probabilities and uh and and and and it makes so make so many mistakes when when thinking uh uh without taking into consideration.
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Yeah, I often say that we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world and tragedy or hilarity often ensue >> even like in your job right or or like not job but like investing uh it's a perfect example of this and um VCs for example when I talk with private equities they don't understand VCs like what what are you guys doing like you're
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investing in 100 companies and and uh and you're justing that one is going to be successful and the way like you have no due diligence compared to what we do in PE and and it's it's funny how just a very small detail of just the odds of success of a given company can change completely the job that you do uh that's the power of of some of these stats. >> Yeah. And if you look at them closely >> Yeah.
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And if you look at them closely enough, one of the things that we've found is there are arbitrage opportunities because as you say, most VCs when they're making an investment are hoping uh well they're they're counting on power laws and they're counting on the fact that that that investment can return the entire fund.
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So, if they have a if they have a $200 million fund and they're investing 20 million, they want that 20 million to at least be able to grow to 200 million. >> That's right. That's right.
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>> And what that leaves uh from our perspective is a huge class of companies where the TAM total addressable market >> is not big enough for a VC to think, yeah, that could return my entire fund.
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But they're immensely profitable, right?
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And so our our venture division looks for those types of companies because it there's your moat kind of is other VCs can't invest in that company because it's well they could but they won't because it doesn't have the ability to return the entire fund. >> So big. >> So it's interesting.
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So, so, so when you think about in these terms uh and you apply that thinking to podcasts like is there is there a world like what what what are the types of podcasts or interviews or uh uh uh sessions that you would have that have an upcharge opportunity?
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Where's the market completely underserved there?
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Have you thought about this?
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I have at length and I think that um the the podcast market as saturated as it seems uh is still kind of blue sky in terms of what what you could what you could develop.
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>> Um I think that the idea that you you really want to grow huge might be the limiting factor there.
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I think that there are many many types of podcasts in yeah in niches where you can grow a perfectly respectable audience >> if you have the right guests, you have the right conversations, etc.
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in a variety of niches where you're going to get, you know, 25, 30, 50,000 listeners.
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And that certainly supports an adbased uh model.
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um it, you know, you're you're probably not going to get super rich, but if you're if you're passionate about that, and I think that's where the fit is.
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There are so many people, and we're going to get to your passion in a minute here, but there are so many people who not only have incredibly deep domain knowledge, >> but they also are just absolutely passionate about the subject.
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passionate about the subject. I think those people could do very very well starting a podcast but they have to be persistent and patient right like if you look at the stats on podcasts like 90% of them never get past seven episodes
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>> and you know it's the hyperbolic discounting that is another flaw I think in human OS uh in that you know hey we gota we we got to grow now this quarter right >> and podcast you need a you need to have a long period of time and a variety of guests to build your audience. >> I see. So, so you you think there's no >> I see.
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So, so you you think there's no not going to be many more Joe Rogan.
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It's uh because that that is saturated that people try to go for the bigger audiences.
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It's mostly the niches where is their space.
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>> I I'm kind of a never say never guy >> uh because I don't I don't have complete knowledge >> and therefore I have to discount my own instincts sometimes.
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Uh, so I'm sure that some other Joe Rogan will emerge under very different circumstances.
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It's kind of like, you know, Warren Buffett.
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Who's the next Warren Buffett?
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Who's the next Warren Buffett?
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>> And and my point has always been there's going to be a next Warren Buffett.
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There there is going to be somebody who achieves great success >> but financially, but he or she is going to do it in a very different manner than Warren uh did.
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It's always wise to study how the Warren Buffetts and Charlie Mungers of the world >> looked at the world.
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I think that's very useful.
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>> But then, you know, you're going to want to synthesize some of that knowledge as you make your own path in in the world.
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>> I want to get I want to I want to get to you though >> because you are a very interesting uh guy. What was that like?
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What was that like in 2020 having having those essays like literally translated into 40 different languages? >> Yeah.
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>> Tens of millions of people reading it.
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Like what does that feel like? >> That was nuts.
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So I I I was in San Francisco, my in my two-bedroom apartment with my wife, my three children.
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My wife was pregnant of the fourth.
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Uh we had we we were we both had a job, a day job.
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No nanny because now like it's closing.
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Um and um everything was closed. Uh no school.
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So so it was it was quite intense.
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But just before that happened, just before closing, I was just working in a in a startup.
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Um I was doing product and growth and we started talking about this uh virus that is happening in China.
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And I started looking into into it.
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I started uh reading the papers.
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I think that's one of the things that few people do.
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there's an edge in reading papers still is um and and and given my background and I had a good sense of what exponentials meant uh we saw what happened in Italy we had seen what happened in in Iran uh it was growing exponential in both countries uh Italy
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had just closed so it was I think reasonably like obvious that the rest of the world was going to close because you could see the exponential starting in literally everywhere so so so that's the the moment in in which I start uh I
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posting and that that first article got I think that I can count 65 million uh reads and most of them within a week and then when I posted it every country was like no we're not going to close and then within a week everybody had closed and so I think that that was crazy I
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think the craziest part is I had all of three weeks of experience um in the field of epidemiology and I find myself talking with presidents of governments and advising them in their in epidemiological strategy which is freaking nuts. I think it tells you a
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I think it tells you a lot of of of the of the world and the the type of the level of knowledge that is available to to governments that that I was able to get into that kind of world and and and advise uh these governments.
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>> What was the single most surrealistic moment then?
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I think like when I woke up, I think it was on on March 11th and my my phone was just a buzzer.
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It was just buzzing constantly.
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It didn't stop like in four hours the notifications.
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Uh and seeing like some of the names of the time Twitter was showing where some of the people who had retweeted or or or posted those tweets and these are like very important people that that's kind of nuts.
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And I think what's nuts is not just that, but it's also the massive contrast between what's happening virtually and what's happening in real life.
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Because in real life, I'm in the chaos of my in my apartment in my underwear like reading papers and in reality you have all these people who are famous talking about like that article.
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So, so that's kind of the is weird a weird jtop position.
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So, I think that was a weird one.
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And and the other one is talking with a a president of a government uh face to face.
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No, not face virtually with all his team members and like looking at the data with him and the team and that's kind of so weird like like I've been I've been studying at that point for two months epidemology first so so weird that I'm advising a president but also like how is this possible?
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How many things must have failed for me to be able to be here and actually be the one that's most knowledgeable because I was the most knowledgeable in that room. Like that's crazy to me. Crazy. >> Yeah.
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Um that the that's gota that's got to be just like a a really bizarre feeling. >> Yeah.
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I think it speaks it speaks a lot to to it's one of the topics that I'm always so interested in.
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I think governance just doesn't work.
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I think the the the way um uh our democracies work uh is adapted for how it worked 250 years ago, right?
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Uh uh the way it works is just you have a few bits of information that the people send to the government every four years. That's the vote, right?
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But we're now live in a world where you could send gigabytes of information every day, every meeting from every person, right?
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And so before we had to elect leaders to make uh choices for us because the bandwidth of that information was so narrow, right?
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But you don't need to do that anymore uh if you have this this information.
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And so this ability to to send information and receive it.
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So the way I think about it is a lot of okay uh if if uh we we had encyclopedias which were a group of people in a room writing articles and then we moved to Wikipedia and we have more articles faster and better.
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Um and that's just because we had a coordination mechanism to aggregate all this information.
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Um can we do the same for democracy?
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what is the mechanism where we can aggregate all of this information from so many places um so that we can have better decisions and we don't even need to elect uh people at that point uh because it's the mechanism of aggregation of information that makes a better uh decision so so I think a lot about these things >> yeah it's something I've thought a lot about as well and what I always keep uh in mind is the cultural lag time to adopt.
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And you know, we are interesting creatures, we humans.
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>> And one of the things is kind of the the dual thing that you see.
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On the one hand, it often takes society a long time to get comfortable with even the idea. >> Yeah.
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that that we should discuss.
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You know, the the the traditionalists are like, "What do you mean?
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You you can't discuss replacing nation states and democracies with uh with communities uh like uh you know that just can't happen."
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And then it's I think it was Max Planck who said progress happens one funeral at a time.
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and and like the old guard that won't even consider it just literally starts dying. >> Yeah.
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>> And and and the younger people basically have grown up with that idea kind of swimming in their mind.
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>> Um one of the things that I'm intrigued by is this idea of having citizen juries that are randomly selected.
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There has to be some sort of criteria, right?
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Um but uh and and you have two two um conversants talking different parts of a policy, right?
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So you know your conversant number one is in favor of policy a person two is opposed and they have the ability to bring as much data to the jury as they want.
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They have the ability to do whatever they want.
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And there's something that in what intrigues me is that seems to touch on both sides of our humanity.
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And by that I mean >> the jury system is a very very old and established system at least in western society.
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>> And so traditionalists don't immediately say no never.
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They're like oh juries actually do work pretty well.
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And then they've done some uh I had a guest uh a few years ago who was advocating for this and he the results were pretty impressive when you looked at the the poll of you know the the society where the proposition was being discussed.
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>> It might it might have skewed like 90% against 10% in favor.
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And then they would use this experimental jury system with the advocate and the uh respondent >> and and it flipped just by getting the information in an unfiltered format these regular people made actually really good decisions.
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What do you think about that?
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>> There's so many thoughts. It's super interesting.
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I think two or three thoughts very quickly.
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I agree with your point on on the fact that it's so hard to move people's opinions.
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I think most leaders believe that um and as a result they don't even try right is the the idea of politicians follow the overton window rather than shifting it. Right?
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And having been uh during COVID close to these people, I think uh they underestimated the ability to to change people's minds uh because they're not good enough at creating these uh narratives um to to change people's minds.
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Just to give you an give you an example, I I was in channel 4 in 2020 just at the beginning of like all these countries closing channel 4 in the UK and there was a an an official epidemiologist from the from the country um explaining how they couldn't do anything but they couldn't close the country.
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They just had to let it run. Right.
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and and afterwards we I read some some internal papers that that that's what the government had done.
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They had uh looked into the possibility of talking with of of getting the population to lock down and they thought it was impossible and uh I remember because uh when I was there I was preparing for that moment and when he said this I said something like what are you going to kill 200,000 people?
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Is that what you're going to do?
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I am putting my hands in my on my face and and that was that was a purposeful movement because I knew that um with this angle it would draw people's attention to the catastrophe and then the fear would make them more open to a lockdown.
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And so I think this is true in that moment but is true in general you can do a lot more than that.
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Now, I think what you say makes a lot of sense from a storytelling perspective because you're saying, "Hey, I'm going to use conflict.
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When you use conflict between two sides, conflict is something that people really really understand.
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It's the basis of storytelling.
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So, I'm going to have the both sides um um pushing against each other."
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And I think that's that's a lot of there's a lot of truth in this.
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in this. I I'm I'm wondering uh uh if there's a way to keep that conflict um but and at the same time eliminating the the limiting factor that is having just two people gathering this information right so could we have for example on both sides not two like not one side not one person but a group of people or even everybody who could be
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providing the evidence who could be providing the arguments and the people who are having that debate for example, they are selecting or you know or they're getting the best pieces so that instead of having just limiting by the bandwidth of two people, you can have like lots of different people crowdsourcing that kind of those arguments. And I think that that's
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And I think that that's there's something there.
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There's something around keeping the storytelling of the conflict but at the same time crowdsourcing the information and the argumentations.
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>> Yeah, I think that's a good extension of the idea.
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Uh I've been fascinated by the idea of smart swarms for a while. Yes.
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>> And I think that that would be a superior outcome probably.
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Um the one thing >> just to your point like as a small small comment to that point, I think the the swarms uh it goes back to to the the angle that you use for democracy here.
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If you say hey we're going to eliminate democracy, everybody's going to to raise their hands and like no way don't do that.
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But if instead you say our current democracy is not real democracy, you don't really have a voice.
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you're giving it to somebody else who's then using it for corruption, blah blah blah.
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We want a true democracy.
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What would that look like?
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And then you're opening in people's mind to having another uh take on on what the structure of the organization could be.
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>> And you could even use history to reframe, right?
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Like so you could say direct democracy.
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Uh here's where it was used or partially used. Here were the results. Um we we we What? Yeah. Not not you're right.
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Democ direct democracy not always great as we know in California. Uh so yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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So so the the mechanism of of information aggregation needs to be really well thought through because the the California one doesn't work. >> I I agree. I agree.
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Uh what one of one of the things that um I think is we we were chatting earlier before we started to record and you said that you and I had spoken on Twitter a couple of times and uh I I originally kind of thought Twitter could could emerge and maybe still can I don't know um as kind of the world's first global intelligence network where people literally are are find each other through ideas or things that they are >> uh interested in etc.
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and and then I would throw AI and the introduction of AI into that >> and it the the logistics problem with an AI agent >> gets seriously mitigated in my opinion.
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Um because I think what one of the things we started talking about exponential, right? >> Yeah.
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>> And again, it's your idea that we didn't evolve to understand that I think is a key insight.
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M >> and I think that the lack of a a really good just maybe just enough to be dangerous uh insight into evolutionary biology and psychology helps us think about you know what we evolved to be like and it wasn't to be able to scale this quickly this this fast >> but I think we can.
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I mean, I think I think ultimately I think ultimately a series of small examples like the jury one that I gave you, I'm all in favor of trying lots of different things.
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I mean, as long as they aren't >> obviously harmful or >> right and experimentation, iteration like that's how you get that's how you get to a better place.
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You get a better explanation, right?
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>> But you can only get that better explanation by trying a bunch of different things. >> 100%.
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So, a couple of thoughts.
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Uh when when I talk when I think about this Twitter thing is for me, it's not obvious that it's not a brain yet, right?
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So, the way it works is you and I would be neurons.
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And so, as neurons in that brain, we wouldn't realize what the brain is thinking, right?
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brain is thinking, right? But the the it's very similar the way we work like Twitter works to what how a neur neuron would like the brain would work right every person is is connecting to each others you have one it's um asymmetric
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right so you have a one person sending information and a bunch of other people listening so that's exactly like the axons and dendrites uh sending and receiving the information flows through way flows through the brain the most interesting one gets um uh sent and and amplified more and more. And so like
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amplified more and more. And so like there's uh you could imagine for example if it were a brain uh what would be some big decisions that it could take and one of them could be okay like what would be the who would be the president of the United States and arguably Twitter had a big influence in that decision and so it
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is it could be that we are neurons uh inside of Twitter and we don't realize that it's already thinking um but it is but I think your your your second point is super interesting also on on trying lots of different is uh and and one way to think about it is is we've had about 200 countries for decades now. Uh and
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Uh and that's kind of it right like this and and that's not enough competition because each one of these countries has a monopoly on their local market which is their geography and most of the population but doesn't move that much and that's why I think the the the current of the uh new new nation states which Balajiasan calls network states is so important.
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I think the the idea is that you do need competition between countries.
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That's where most of the value is going to come from from governance.
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Um because otherwise with the monopolies that they have that countries have, they have zero incentive on on changing that much.
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Luckily, I think China is actually like the rise of China is a good thing for the United States because it now has an an opponent.
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So as opposed to to to China, it needs to improve the way it was improving as opposed to the USSR.
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But but for the last 20 30 years, I think the US probably did not improve the way it should have because it didn't have an a worthy opponent and so it had no push to improve its governance.
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>> That's a really interesting point that I agree with.
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um at the fall of the Berlin Wall followed later by the fall of the Soviet Union itself.
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>> One thing that I noticed was the splintering of the various groups within the West uh because at least in the in the United States, the one thing that did kind of unite both political parties was the foreign policy view towards the Soviet Union as an opponent.
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Now, we did a lot of stupid things, >> but we but we also that unonymity >> encouraged working together on hey, we've got to get to the moon.
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Sputnik, you get Apollo, right?
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>> And so, your idea of competition, I think, is well taken.
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>> Um, but but then what about the idea, and this isn't my view, but it's one I just thought of.
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What about the idea that many of our major major innovations have come as the result of war? >> Yeah. Um so so interesting.
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War is really competition. >> Yeah.
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>> And competition spurs development.
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I think uh Jared Diamond, right, is is the one who proposed that Europe >> guns, germs, and steel. Yeah. Right. >> That's right.
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And it grew because it has this combination of enough separation of countries from geography to to allow independent uh developments um and making it very hard to unify uh but close enough that you could be fighting each other all the time.
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So you could specialize but also uh you had to keep at the edge of technology innovation because otherwise you your your um your neighbors was going to to kill you.
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Whereas in China, China is a massive massive plane uh um from Beijing to to Shanghai um that's the hardland of the Han and then you have huge barriers around it.
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You have the deserts in the north, you have the Tibet and the mountains, the Himalayas in the in the um to the east.
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You have the ocean to the west.
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They have juggles and mountains to the south.
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So that promoted the unity of China that uh as long as they didn't have unity, they were killing each other and they were progressing so fast.
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But the moment they had unity, um that's what happened with the Ming, right?
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They stopped looking around.
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They they started looking inside.
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And so and so I think I think that's very very true.
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Uh obviously you want you don't want the downside of war.
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So the question becomes how can you keep the the upside of war which is all this competition without the downside and and I don't have a good answer but but I would say um today there's way too many countries that can get away with very very poor management uh and they don't
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they still don't lose like Venezuelans and North Korea are obvious examples um and so and so that that's very is bad not just for Venezuelans and North Koreans it's bad for everybody because we don't get the benefit from the competition with countries like this one. So, I think that's really bad.
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So, I think that's really bad. >> Yeah.
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And I used to uh kind of joke uh but kind of not that North Korea and South Korea was the the cleanest and best AB test that anybody could ever conduct, right?
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>> Same people, different system, different outcomes. >> And unbelievable.
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What sometimes frustrates me is how can people not see this?
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>> Yes, >> it's so obvious. >> It is so obvious. >> So obvious.
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And and yet we still have the kind of this movement that won't die, right?
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like >> Venezuela, the richest country in Latin America, >> imposes a socialist system on the country and however many years later, one of the poorest countries in >> Yeah.
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>> in Latin America, >> the list goes on and on and on. >> Yeah.
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And yet with all of this empirical data, we still have a I mean like if the polls are to be believed, young people probably prefer socialism to capitalism or free markets. >> Yeah.
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>> And I personally think that a lot of that is from an emotional base. >> Yeah.
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>> But it's also from a base that is solvable in that listen if So when I was young, I got married when I was young. I was 22.
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It was in 1982 and interest rates were double digit. >> Yeah.
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>> The fir the first home I bought, I had to actually take paper back from the uh owner of the house because the bank wanted something like ridiculous like 17% for a mortgage and and the owner was going to cut me a break and give me 15% mortgage.
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And I was like, >> "Wow, I just this is ma from heaven, man." Yeah. >> Right.
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And yet today I think that younger people have some legitimate beefs.
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I think that the, you know, the nimi movement, you know, not in my backyard. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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>> Housing being unobtainable for many of them, the the uncertainties in the job market. Like, I get it.
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I get why they would be pissed off.
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And and so I'm not saying, oh, you know, kids today, I think they've got legitimate beefs and some some of them are solvable and others will take more time to solve, but I think this is kind of a good idea uh place to slide into your idea >> of like maybe a jured that this is a good idea.
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Maybe maybe we should sponsor something like this like a jured system where the jury is selected sort of at random, right?
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>> And and then we'll use your idea where people or groups of people who support, you know, idea A I'm this I'm just inventing this right now. >> Yeah. Yeah.
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who support idea A go up against the people supporting idea B. Wow.
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>> That that might be a really interesting thing because if I was young today and >> I'd be pissed off too that I couldn't afford >> uh to buy a house that I you know my mobility was limited like all of those things.
34:39
And I and I think that at least we could reframe it by, hey, these are real problems.
34:45
Let's see if we can find a collective solution that makes sense to a jury of our peers.
34:52
>> I I there's so much to say about this.
34:55
The narrative I agree with you on the socialism side, right?
34:58
I think the the part of it is what we were discussing before on short-term versus long term.
35:05
Actually, socialism works really well in the short term. >> Yes.
35:08
>> Yes. because you gave all the benefits and you you can still use the money that you saved and the systems it takes decades sometime uh for for the pain to be to be um suffered like Venezuelans were really happy in the first few years or even decade of chabist uh we're now
35:26
25 years I think into this and now it's really so so that's I think part of it the other part of it is is that I think the narrative of socialism is beautiful you know of oh we're all going to be with each other and and help the it just doesn't work. It's amazing. It's It's amazing. It's beautiful. Communism is beautiful.
35:42
It just doesn't work, right?
35:44
And so and so and so the narrative it's very hard to fight this um uh narrative and and I think it's going to get worse, right?
35:51
So in the context of Mandani uh being voted as the as the mayor of um of New York, I think it's not a this is not a spike. This is not a fluke.
36:04
uh this is a trend and the way I think about this is I connect it to AI which we've touched uh in the past what we're seeing that um all these graduates uh are not getting jobs and if you worked for uh four five six years to get your degrees you have 100 $200,000 in debt and you're not getting a job you're going to be iate you're supposed to be part of the elite and and now we're nobody.
36:35
Um and so uh that that's what I think Peter Turin would call over production of elites, right?
36:43
And so and and for socialism, it's always the elites that push it down on the people. And this is perfect.
36:47
Like these elites are overproduced right now.
36:52
And it's only going to get worse with AI because AI by definition is going to start with um white collar jobs and it's going to start by um automating the jobs that are the easiest to automate which is going to be usually entry level uh or the easiest ones.
37:08
It's not going to be the ones that make the most money.
37:09
the most specialized, the most um educated people are going to have much more leverage um with AI and so they're going to be able to do substantially more.
37:21
They're going to be substantially more productive and it's going to be faster.
37:25
It is already faster to work with an AI than to work with an entry- level person.
37:29
So, so you so so I think one of the very first consequences of uh of AI in the short term like moving into a direction of UBI or whatever but like that's a long term in the very short term I think my biggest fear is is a move towards uh socialism which AI might provoke and I have a couple more thoughts but I think this is an important one so I want to pause here. Yeah.
37:53
And I I guess the push back would be uh on on for example the kids who are in debt to the college etc.
38:01
I I like to think of okay what what if a college education were a tradable stock?
38:10
>> What what would happen?
38:10
What would that stock be doing right now?
38:12
I think it would be at a 52-year low.
38:14
I think it would be at a 10-year low. Yeah.
38:19
>> And the idea that we now have the tools where that certification, right, degree I I barely have a BA and I and I only have a BA because I my mother would have killed me had I not gotten it, right?
38:30
I came up in the generation where it was just absolutely mandatory >> at least for people like me. Yes.
38:40
>> That I had a college degree.
38:40
But honestly, it was a waste of my time.
38:41
I think for the most part I have a degree in economics which I never use because the thesis the theories and hypotheses that I learned even when I was learning them I I was always the guy like uh but have you thought about this >> you know has has your econometric model ever met an actual human being right and no so I mean the the the planet axiom is you must have a degree to be successful. >> Yeah.
39:14
>> And and I would question that now certainly in uh things like you know doctors, lawyers etc.
39:20
Of course, but if the idea that the majority of people going to college, that's a result, in my opinion, at least in the United States, of the GI Bill after World War II, >> at the turn of the century, uh, of the 20th century in in 1900, 2% of Americans attended college or university.
39:42
And so there wasn't that overproduction of elites, right? >> Yeah.
39:48
And I'm all in favor of see I I think a degree suggests competence.
39:56
It suggests that that you can >> play by the rules that you might not agree with >> of that university and that you know you you you are a competent individual.
40:08
I I think proof of work in today's environment >> like I haven't hired anyone at Oshanas Ventures based on their degree. >> Yeah. >> Not not one person.
40:21
>> It was all it was all proof of work.
40:24
>> There's this um book I'm reading right now uh the case against education.
40:26
I don't know if you've heard about it from Brian Kaplan George University. >> I I I have.
40:31
>> I I I have. and and and the like the case is so overwhelming that uh most of education not all but most of education is signaling like you you're you're not learning you're just showing that you're intelligent that you can work hard and you can do what you're told um and and
40:51
that uh pushes you into a race because if everybody else does it then you need to do it too right so everybody gets more education it goes back to to the point that you're me mentioning where uh if 10% of the population has a degree, there's a high signal. But if it's 60%,
41:04
But if it's 60%, now the signaling is meaningless.
41:07
And then you need to get more.
41:08
And so it's just it's just more of a waste.
41:10
Of course, as a politician, you cannot say, "Hey guys, the education that you guys are getting is worthless.
41:16
So we're going to stop paying for it."
41:18
Especially for you and you in social sciences which are learning nothing, right? So you cannot say that.
41:24
But I think I think your point is is that is the answer to this.
41:26
Um where if you say hey really education is is not very useful.
41:32
Um but the way the education like the world is going is that you don't even need it anymore because you can prove by doing.
41:40
I think that's that's to me the the the answer.
41:44
And and also there's there's probably another one uh around the the cost of education where uh you can learn so much faster uh through AI, right?
41:53
So, so you you might I'm sure you know but may not not all of your audience knows about Bloom's two sigma problem, >> right?
42:00
Where where uh um you can take a a 50% uh percentile student and get uh that student to 98% um just with only one intervention which is one-on-one tutoring.
42:13
There's nothing else that comes even close.
42:15
And the problem is is this is uh as a tutor you cannot uh like you cannot have one-on-one tutor for everybody.
42:21
But now with with AI you can.
42:23
And so like to me that's kind of where we we can figure this out where we can eliminate all the cost of education and all the credentialism by pushing people to one-on-one tutoring.
42:33
Um I know you have like you guys support synthesis uh which goes kind of in in this direction.
42:37
So so so I think that's one of my hopes where if we clearly explain to people the education your kids are receiving is worth only 20% of what you think it is.
42:52
But if you do it this way, it's much cheaper and it's better.
42:54
I think that's where like like naturally people are going to move from standard education to 101 AI based tutoring. >> Yeah.
43:04
And and I I I agree that that will be a burgeoning uh area of probably private industry to begin with. >> Yeah.
43:14
And the thing that we have to keep in mind though is that like good old Walt Whittmann, we all contain multitudes, right?
43:23
>> And and literally a a thing that might even be more important to human beings, at least by my lights, is status and prestige.
43:35
>> And you know, if you look deeply into history, >> you just once you see it, you can't unsee it, right?
43:45
And and so >> what are some examples of that?
43:48
The the most salient examples in history for you.
43:52
>> The idea probably uh let the easy example is just going back to when 2% of the population went to university.
44:03
>> The idea first off you were high status if you had a college degree. >> Yeah.
44:08
My grandfather, we have huge gaps in the generations in my family.
44:11
And my grandfather was born a hundred years before my son.
44:17
>> He was born in 1885 >> and he got and he got a college degree >> which was super high status back then.
44:25
But even within that there was variation, >> right?
44:28
The if if you were a Harvard or Yale man or a Princeton man, >> well, the world was your oyster, right?
44:37
And I think that the world I think part of the thing there with the status and prestige was there were very limited venues for you to gain high status high prestige right the arts academia government's a good example right the government used to be a fairly high prestige uh position right you think of and it drew very very capable people like George Marshall, right?
45:07
Came up with the Marshall plan after World War II.
45:09
The the the rule back then was say you've done really well in whatever your chosen profession or career was, you would often see those people when they ended that career go into government service, right?
45:24
Because it was seen as kind of a paying >> to the country that where you were allowed to succeed.
45:31
Yeah, >> you I mean Elon's re recent foray >> gives us a different example, right?
45:39
And and so I think though that like case systems, class systems like they perpetuate like historically it's pretty hard to find a society.
45:53
I I mean the American experiment like for example I I I I love this idea.
46:01
Um when America where the American experiment was formed um one of the things that the diplomatic corps of America decided was American diplomats bow to no foreign royal >> aristocrat etc.
46:20
That was unheard of, >> literally.
46:24
And like people really got upset when when the Americans uh diplomats would go in front of in front of foreign kings or queens and not and not bow. >> That's crazy.
46:39
>> That was such a breach of etiquette, right?
46:41
M >> but I suspect that there will be new venues that will become incredibly prestigious that we don't even know about right now.
46:53
>> I I agree and I think we we already have some examples like uh influencer is an extremely meritocratic way of getting status.
47:02
it is um in some circles like people uh laugh at it that there's a huge status coming from it.
47:13
That's why 50% of of children want to be YouTubers.
47:15
Um and in in a very big way I think it's a it's much better than an an education um or at least big chunk of education because of the point that it is very meritocratic.
47:27
If you don't do the best content, you're not going to be there.
47:32
You're not going to be at the top.
47:33
You need to be learning constantly from your competition.
47:35
You need to be thinking like seeing, okay, what do they do?
47:38
Analyzing them, reverse engineering it.
47:40
You need to push do things much more interesting than than they used to be than than others are are doing.
47:45
And so it's an extremely extremely meritocratic uh field that has come from nowhere.
47:50
Um, and that really pushes people to to improve.
47:55
And so this is an example of uh reaching status through an alternative from education.
48:01
Um and I think I I I want to see more of that.
48:05
I think another example is is obviously the the soloreneur idea or the nomads entrepreneur which was basically impossible up to just 5 years ago or barely possible and now it's completely possible.
48:17
You have all these companies that can be created by anybody from anywhere.
48:21
Um and so and so that's those are the things that AI and and the internet I think are allowing that are going to undermine some of these fundamental problems of education for example um by giving status uh to those who really deserve it rather than the ones who just toiled for a long time to get it. >> Yeah.
48:41
And uh you know I I had a series which we kind of aborted because we got so busy doing other things called the great reshuffle.
48:48
great reshuffle. And I started I started thinking about this back in 2015 and I was like >> oh I think we are in for a tsunami of change >> and that was based most we still called it machine learning back then >> but it but it was based on the the
49:06
things that I saw emerging from the global connection uh connectivity of the internet machine learning all the like essentially the the was one where time, space, and geography were collapsing and and yet your work also suggests that geography is incredibly important, right? People
49:30
People can move but often don't move.
49:34
I think for example, one of the reasons that America succeeded as brilliantly as it did >> was first geography, which I want to ask you about, but but also in the self- selected sample that came here.
49:52
>> If you think about it, right, >> what kind of person came to America?
49:57
Well, they weren't like the average villager that was sitting right next to them in church. >> That's right. That's right.
50:02
>> They they were very very different.
50:02
We have kind of a hypomomanic edge to the American DNA because of the people who came here. Right?
50:10
If you think about it, it's 1850 and you and your family have lived in Ireland for a thousand years >> and you decide, you know what? it.
50:22
I'm not going to be a dirt farmer anymore.
50:24
I'm going to leave everyone I know, the culture I know, the home I know, everything, and I'm going to get on a ship and I'm going to go sail to this new country and try my luck.
50:37
>> That is a very different kind of personality type than than the the ones who stay.
50:42
But okay, so they get here.
50:45
Tell us about your version of why because this is something I'm fascinated by and I I really believe in one of the one of the greatest bounties of America other than the Bill of Rights and the rule of law and all these wonderful things is our geography. >> Yeah.
51:05
>> Talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah.
51:07
So, so I don't think most people don't realize um that the US geography is probably the best in the world. >> Y >> bar none.
51:16
And so you you started by the defensibility obviously the two oceans.
51:21
Um Canada is too cold to uh to to be a threat.
51:24
People don't realize that Mexico is too mountainous.
51:27
Um so and is also desertic.
51:31
And both of these things mean that um it's substantially harder for Mexico to develop.
51:36
It's always going to be poorer from a geography standpoint.
51:40
And it's also reasonably hard to um to conquer or to threaten the US.
51:43
That is though the point where the US is the most threatened because New Orleans, which is probably one of the most important cities in in in the US, is um not so far away from Veraracruz, which is the biggest port um in Mexico.
52:00
Why is New Orleans so important?
52:04
Because it's the mouth of of the of the Mississippi River basin.
52:08
And one one thing that people don't realize is that the Mississippi River basin is uh has more than half uh of the world's naturally navigable water weights. Right?
52:22
So the rivers are most of them navigable because it's so flat.
52:25
The entire Mississippi basin is so flat.
52:27
Uh and there's so much water that comes from the Rockies and the Appalachians uh and and the north.
52:33
Um and so massive massive um navigable waterways and that's super important because uh that's another thing that that people don't realize.
52:43
The cost of transportation is the single biggest driver of wealth, right?
52:49
If you have the cost of transportation, you can multiply the wealth of a region by up to 16 times. And that's it's crazy.
52:57
Um and just that's a geography.
53:00
It's a a question of geog geometry uh is just a fact.
53:03
And so having the single best network just natural there um is unbelievable.
53:10
Not only that, but also the coasts uh especially the east coast all the way to uh to Houston have a series of islands uh that protect uh boats and ships from uh the sea.
53:24
So you could have this inter coastal uh highway to the um so transportation is amazing.
53:31
Uh but also this this area is connected in the north to the great lakes which are also connected to the to the ocean and the distance between these two basins from a navigable standpoint is just a few miles and they're in Chicago.
53:46
Chicago is actually just a few miles from the Mississippi basin, which is kind of nuts.
53:51
And that's why Chicago is so is so big.
53:53
And so, um, you add there's a a bunch of a bunch more like for example, uh, why does, uh, the US has massive amounts of oil and gas?
54:04
Because of the history that it has us like the Mississippi basin in the past was a sea and seas, uh, develop oil and gas uh, over history.
54:12
So, so you have you add one after the other and it's just unbelievable the amount of assets that the United States has.
54:19
And so I think people underestimate how important this is.
54:23
Um there's also the other side of it though which is um Argentina is kind of a mirror image to the United States like the whereas it has the Mississippi for the United States the Argentina has the Rio Plata and the Parana very similar.
54:39
It's not as big, but it's quite similar. Very flat.
54:44
You also have mountains on both sides.
54:47
Uh massive amount of very um fertile land in the middle just like the Mississippi basin.
54:53
And so you have a lot of these and yet Argentina is substantially poorer than United States.
54:59
And so I think what really made the United States state special is is that it has one of the best geographies in the world.
55:06
And also, so that's the hardware, but also the software is one of the best that we've come up with so far. >> Yeah.
55:15
And uh and I'll throw in the amount of farmable land in the United States is also >> off the charts. >> That's right.
55:25
And and a couple of things on this.
55:27
There's a few reasons for this.
55:29
One of them is it was a um a sea in the past.
55:32
So it's very recent uh um soil uh which was has lots of sediments from that time but also having all the water come from both sides from the Appalachian and the and the Rockies also brings with it all the sediment and so you you you have constantly all the sediment uh brought on both sides um and and and that helps and that's the reason also why Argentina um is is so so fertile. It also was a sea.
56:00
It also gets the a lot of sediment from from from both sides.
56:05
So yes, that's why actually the United States I think is the is one of the first exporters of food in the world.
56:11
People don't realize it's also one of the most like the first producers.
56:14
In fact, most of these are temperate countries like Germany, Netherlands, United States are some of the biggest uh exporters of food, not just per capita, but just overall um because their their their so is so good and of course they have the technology to to make the best use of it.
56:33
So give me an example of a country where just the geography alone puts them into such a hole that even if you even I love your idea of the hardware software I I'm going to steal that from you.
56:49
>> Um so so where the hardware the geography is just awful even if you put the best software on top of it it's still gonna have a really hard time.
56:59
>> Yeah there's so many I'll just give you an example.
57:01
So, so Colombia, um, if you look at the map of Colombia, it's basically flat land and then some like two mountain ranges and all the population is on the mountain ranges.
57:14
Nearly all is on the mountain ranges.
57:16
That doesn't like if you go to Europe of or the United States, people do not live in the mountains because mountains are cold.
57:23
uh that it's much harder to transport everything because you need um to pass all these mountain passes and building roads through mountains is much more expensive.
57:34
So the infrastructure doesn't get built and you don't have infrastructure so you don't have trade.
57:40
So so it's very very bad.
57:40
But in Colombia, if you don't build on the mountains, you're in the jungle.
57:44
And if you're in the jungle, uh you get uh all the diseases, you get terrible uh heat, you get like rain all the time, uh wet belt events.
57:55
And so it's really really really bad.
57:56
Um and so all the population is on the mountains and in the mountains we have the problem that we mentioned before where uh it's just poorer because it's so expensive to build infrastructure and you don't have trade.
58:08
So in fact uh you can go through the world and around the equator uh you don't find you barely find any rich country for this reason.
58:16
In the equator you have to live in the mountains otherwise it's unbearable.
58:20
If you live in the mountains it is uh trade is bad.
58:25
There's also more conflict in mountains because people are more um isolated from each other in the mountains. So cultures diverge.
58:32
diverge. So that's one of the reasons for example if you move to Africa around the same level you you have um for example Ethiopia 120 million people they get a lot of rain so so the the the land is very fertile um but um every
58:47
ethnicity every valley has a different ethnicity they all hate each other um they don't you don't have train because infrastructure is too expensive so that's another example of a country that just geography is so so bad that it's so so hard for it to get out of that hole. Are there any solutions that you have
59:01
Are there any solutions that you have come up with for these countries? >> Yeah.
59:07
Um, you have one like actually one of the richest countries in the world is map on the equator and that's Singapore, right?
59:15
So it's very special if you're a city state and you as a city state you can do things that you cannot do as a country as a bigger country.
59:24
Um but Singapore is is is an example of this and Liquanu was very uh articulate about this.
59:31
He said Singapore is impossible without AC air conditioning, right?
59:38
And and it's so so so important to have AC um uh for for the development of Singapore because otherwise you could only work in the morning and in the evening, right?
59:47
So once you have AC, you can work through the day and and now you can be substantially more productive.
59:51
So you you have two options, right?
59:53
If you go into the to the equator, you either have the mountains or you have in which you have the problems that we mentioned or the you you're um on the valleys which you have the other problems.
1:00:03
So you had you need different solutions.
1:00:05
If your country if your populations are on uh on flatlands uh close to the sea level first is you need AC and for AC you need electricity and electricity uh you don't get grids that work when you're poor.
1:00:18
So thankfully now solar is solving this right.
1:00:22
So solar and batteries becoming substantially cheaper.
1:00:24
You combine this with AC which are heat pumps. That's the same thing.
1:00:28
So actually extremely efficient from electric electricity standpoint.
1:00:32
So I think that's one of the big big big ways in which these countries are going to be like I have a huge hope for them in the in the coming uh decades.
1:00:39
Um it's not just that temperature though, it's also the disease.
1:00:43
And so one of the things that I haven't researched fully, but I'm like 70% convinced right now is that we should eliminate some mosquito uh species.
1:00:53
Like they are by far the biggest killer of of of humans.
1:00:56
They are also some of the biggest sources of disease not only for humans but also for animals.
1:01:02
And so just just eradicate them. Just eradicate them. We don't need them.
1:01:06
Nature doesn't need them.
1:01:06
So I think with these two things you can solve the problem with for the for the flat countries.
1:01:12
And then the ones that have that are in mountains, you have a problem because you do need the infrastructure uh because otherwise you cannot move the goods.
1:01:21
Thankfully, you can move information, right?
1:01:23
And now you don't even need the the cable.
1:01:25
You can do this through Starlink.
1:01:27
And so hopefully you have countries like Colombia, Ethiopia, and whatnot that can have more of a solar plus Starlink kind of economy and that can development develop them.
1:01:38
But you for the for the physical goods you will still need to build infrastructure and that's something that costs just capital for decades which Brazil has been doing for for for nearly a century now.
1:01:47
They've been consistently investing in capital and and infrastructure in the country uh to to to to compensate for the attack that they have so many mountains. >> Yeah.
1:01:58
The the reference to Brazil reminds me of the old joke from long time ago.
1:02:03
Brazil is the country of the future and always will be. >> Always.
1:02:09
And and so one thing that people don't realize is because of the mountains.
1:02:11
So because it's so hot in the Amazon, you cannot grow anything because close to the equator, that's another thing that I have I didn't mention before is you you have so much rain that it leeches your ground all the time.
1:02:23
And so you cannot uh you cannot grow anything.
1:02:24
And so the only places in Argentina where you can grow stuff is on the mountains on the on the shield.
1:02:29
And the shield is very acidic.
1:02:30
So you need charcoal to to to improve the fertility.
1:02:33
So you need massive amounts of or whatever other fertiliz you have to fertilize it.
1:02:40
So you need massive amounts of fertilization.
1:02:42
You need then massive amounts of roads uh to to to go everywhere.
1:02:46
And that just takes so many decades and I think they're I don't know half way through or whatever it is.
1:02:53
uh but I think eventually they're all going to have the ground that's fertile enough and the infrastructure that's good enough that uh that's they will be able to be reacher on the hardware side and software is another problem.
1:03:09
>> Yeah, I love that distinction.
1:03:09
Um, and it it does seem to me though that with all of the innovations and tools now coming online really for the first time, we really do have opportunities to make these changes like you've just been describing.
1:03:27
So, for example, I'm I'm I'm a fan of uh trying a lot of different things, but I really do like some empirical evidence that it might work.
1:03:37
And and so air conditioning, the other the other great example of air conditioning is the American South. >> That's right.
1:03:46
>> Traditionally, the American South was much poorer.
1:03:48
That's why it held on to slavery, the stain of slavery as long as it did >> and and literally uh in the after civil war years, it was one of the absolute poorest regions uh of the United States.
1:04:04
And then air conditioning came which literally transformed the south and southwest and made it I mean and look at where a lot of growth is happening right now. >> Huge.
1:04:16
>> And most people if you were on a quiz show would not pick air conditioning as the final answer for why that was possible.
1:04:25
And and and I like the way you think because the sometimes the the simple solution, you know, maybe that fellow AOM actually was on to something, right?
1:04:37
You know, a comm's razor, the simple Yeah, for sure. >> It's it's crazy.
1:04:43
So, so I'll touch on the civil war and then and then on the on on this last topic you're mentioning because so we're talking about the hardware and the software and we're talking about them as if they were independent, but they're not.
1:04:53
And this is something that people like few people talk enough about.
1:04:58
Um and just for the civil war, one of the things that people don't realize is that the climate uh made it um very of the north is very different from the south obviously, but also that meant that you had wheat and corn and barley that were in the north.
1:05:20
all of which are very low work uh crops, right?
1:05:22
And so that enabled small families to have big uh big farms and that promotes independence but also entrepreneurship because if you're a small company is if if you own your own land because you don't need much work, you're more likely to invest in um capital to have machines to optimize your production.
1:05:44
Whereas in the south, none of these worked.
1:05:46
Uh and the and the and the crops that work uh were things like cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, which are take 10 to 20 or more times uh of work per right?
1:06:00
Not only that, but also they're very very hard to uh to automate um because it drains substantially more.
1:06:08
substantially more. So the soil is has much more mud and so you could not very easily have so so so you have a combination of things that obviously were not the only cause of slavery but one uh climate pushed in one direction the software and in the other one in the other direction um and we don't uh u take that into consideration enough um because and and that's I think that I
1:06:34
think that matters because otherwise there is a um let's say a a narrative of potentially superiority of hey we're better because we have better software when in fact actually maybe you're better because you were lucky enough to have a hardware that lead you to this software right and until you understand these differences it's very like you're going to have the wrong narratives of
1:06:57
exactly what happened and then you're going to have a conflict on these things right so for example like if you understand for me it's a much more productive conversation to have about slavery to say look the climate was a very big uh component of why the west in the south but also why the north won right and so one system is strictly better than this one this is why this one happened and so now let's work to
1:07:23
make sure that this doesn't happen again and spread better software right rather than saying oh we had some bad people who came here and did this bad thing just because they were bad right and so now we need like to solve it in in ways that are more fair Um that said, I think your point your point on the on the on the on on the development of the south is so so important. Um I think there's
1:07:42
is so so important. Um I think there's this graph where we can see the the evolution of the center of mass of the United States moving right from the northeast all every year westward and southward and what has happened in Arizona is just like unbelievable right
1:07:58
Phoenix especially but also to sun like those are cities that are completely impossible without AC um and without the water from the Kora River um and so that's very much um a human ingenuity and I think that brings a question which
1:08:13
is in the 19th century we were so optimistic about what humans could do and how they could improve the world and then we had the two world wars and like oh no no maybe technology is not bad not good and so we should stop it right but
1:08:29
if we're um optimistic again about it now more realistic we can do things what that we couldn't even dream of before and a perfect example in the American southwest is the southern sea the southern sea is a dump now it's toxic, like it's dead. But actually, we can
1:08:44
But actually, we can just build a canal from the from the sea.
1:08:48
It would be reasonably cheap.
1:08:48
Um, and just the amount of value that will create it would be created by sending all this water into the Sultan Sea and reviving the entire Sultan Sea and making all the real estate be substantially more valuable around it.
1:09:03
You could create new communities, new societies.
1:09:06
Um and that's the type of thinking that that I think uh uh we need to have today.
1:09:11
A city like like Las Vegas from the desert.
1:09:14
Uh we could do this kind of thing.
1:09:17
A city like Utah, like a state like Utah and Salt Lake City, we could do these types of things now if we think intelligently in terms of geography and how we can shape it to be more prone to humans. >> Yeah.
1:09:30
And I am 100% aligned with you on on that way of looking at the world.
1:09:35
I think that there are so many things that we can do now that like you yourself just a moment ago said like 5 years ago you couldn't do.
1:09:47
And and I think I think one of the things that happens again here we're back to cultural lag, right? Yeah.
1:09:54
>> Because we don't understand how young we are.
1:09:58
You you go back I mentioned my grandfather right born in 1885.
1:10:05
He was learning things and getting around and doing things that his great great great great great great great grandfather did exactly the same way.
1:10:17
And he, you know, horses everywhere, every, you know, the majority of Americans were still on farms in 1885.
1:10:26
And yes, they were going to the cities because of the industrial revolution, but then he lived to see man land on the moon >> and and and so I but I think about this all a lot right and I use him as my as my flag in the ground like after him now we had telegraph but then broad uh broadcast mediums like radio there's a great book by Bill Bryson which I mention a lot on the podcast because it
1:10:58
really is that good because what he a is able to do is create a narrative that's really compelling but to remind you that like we're babies and he brings up this guy who was a radio announcer announcing Lindberg's return from Europe and and he makes the observation this was the first time in human history that a single individual had had addressed millions and millions of people. That thing
1:11:27
That thing alone, just think of the enormity of that, right?
1:11:33
And then of course you get TV, you get movies, you get all of these things.
1:11:38
But the point is they look I look at all technology and all innovation is dual use, right?
1:11:43
So that ability and I know you've written about this that ability of to address one to many also makes totalitarian and authoritarianism a lot easier because it gives you this huge canvas that you never had before.
1:12:03
What what are your thoughts? >> Yeah.
1:12:09
So there's this concept of print capitalism, right?
1:12:11
The idea behind it was that uh books or that the printing press was the number one killer of the feudal system.
1:12:22
It wasn't the only one but it was one of the biggest ones.
1:12:24
And the reason is because before that the church had a monop monopoly of information in Europe. Uh they wereworked.
1:12:31
They sent information to each other.
1:12:34
They use their own Latin language as their own language to communicate.
1:12:38
language to communicate. So with that like they had like a center of decision-m which was the pope and he spread all the information on the ideas that were kosher and not and you go from that world where one in where you have the printing press and suddenly you can
1:12:54
you don't have control one you don't have control in the information anymore because it can bring come from anywhere now you have vernaculars instead of Latin uh that are used so you don't have monopoly also on that language um and so you you suddenly have this issue of no monopoly anymore of information. Of
1:13:09
Of course, you can disseminate it substantially more because the marginal cost of a new um of printing something else is substantially cheaper than writing it.
1:13:18
So, you have much more information much less centered.
1:13:20
And then there's another factor that that is fascinating which is that books were printed in the biggest city because those that's the city that had the most uh customers, right?
1:13:31
And so then because you had lots of people read like books on one language then you would learn that kind of vernacular right and so the more customers you had the more books the more books you might customers and then languages evolve from there.
1:13:43
So, so French evolved from Parisian because of this.
1:13:48
this. Spanish evolved from the language castillia viol Madrid because of this reason and so on and so forth and so and so once you had languages you also had a unit of um of of thought right where ideas spread really really well within
1:14:05
that unit and that and not across units and that uh was the birth of nations the feeding of nations and so and so you have this technology that has such a massive impact in politics in history and we don't realize it, right? Uh uh and and that has happened
1:14:21
Uh uh and and that has happened over and over just to give the one the example that you mentioned just to give like 30 seconds on it.
1:14:27
Uh um you don't have Hitler and Mussolini and uh Franco uh uh and all these people not Franco is a bad example but Mussolini and Hitler are perfect examples of this.
1:14:40
Why do you get these people in the in the 1920s in in the communist side is the same?
1:14:44
uh you have them because radio is the first time that you can have a marginal cost of zero of distributing voice, right?
1:14:55
And voice carries emotion with it in a way that books don't.
1:14:58
And so you needed radio in order to insense uh hearts enough to have these totalitarianisms.
1:15:05
And so then the question becomes, okay, if this is the case, how is uh the current um communication tech going to change us?
1:15:15
And we obviously have been seeing this with social media and now AI is going to be doing this 10 times more.
1:15:23
But people I don't think are are thinking uh proactively in what's going to happen and and and just to give you a couple examples when we mentioned pressing press we mentioned radio JFK was the TV guy was uh uh and then and then Obama and Trump are kind of the Twitter the social media guys. Then it pushes harder.
1:15:45
Like I believe the future of politics is not politicians that get good at social media.
1:15:52
It's social media people who get good at politics.
1:15:55
And we can already see some of this.
1:15:57
AOC in the United States is pretty good at social media.
1:16:01
In Europe, in the European Parliament, you have several parliamentarians who are YouTubers or equivalents, right?
1:16:07
And so it's like okay I believe uh the the future of politicians in the western world is people who are going to be so so good at media that they're going to create their own channels.
1:16:22
they're going to get a massive amount of following and they're going to use that to have the power uh to take on politics and so and so okay how does that change society I think that changes it dramatically >> and continue because this is a
1:16:36
fascinating thesis how how will how will that change society just a couple of examples >> yeah so so I think uh in general politicians Um for a politician to be successful uh he or she needs to be good at uh usually two orthogonal skills. One of
1:17:00
One of them is communication and the other one is content or like ideas, right?
1:17:04
And those are completely orthogonal meaning that skills being a good communicator nothing to do with you having good ideas and being a good a good um uh good policies.
1:17:20
because of that usually the dimension that matters the most is the one that wins and that means communication right so it's usually in the last few decades is the better communicators who were the ones who who won the who won power but I believe that the best uh uh the the ones who have both are going to be strictly better uh or are strictly better it's
1:17:44
just so hard that there's few of them but you can see it for example in a debate when you have a debate And two people are good, two are good at communication, but one of them really knows their and they they know exactly no no this policy you're talking about you're completely wrong because of this and this and that and this and this and that and so you don't know what you're talking about. Like if you're
1:18:03
Like if you're able to make that type of argument, you destroy completely your your your opponents.
1:18:08
And so I believe that that's the that's the type of polit politician that can win.
1:18:14
I believe it was very hard in the past, but I believe it is now much more possible.
1:18:19
And that's where we're going to connect two of the ideas that we had.
1:18:22
If you have a person who is very good at communication, at storytelling, at social media as a result, but also is able to crowdsource uh the policies.
1:18:34
Then you can you can be using now your audience for two things.
1:18:39
You can be using your audience for influence, right?
1:18:40
is the broadcasting, but also for crowdsourcing the the the policies that you need.
1:18:46
And so I believe that's kind of the politician of the future is one that can be doing both at the same time.
1:18:54
>> Yeah, I've uh thought a lot about that and I tend to agree.
1:18:57
Um the there there's a fun old movie.
1:19:01
I haven't seen it for a long time, so please do not take this as a recommendation because it might suck and it and it might just be great in my memory.
1:19:10
But I think it was made in the 80s uh and it was called broadcast news and and William Hurt, who was the kind of good-looking leading man of that era.
1:19:21
Um and then uh Sean Wallace, I think his name, uh the the guy who was the inconceivable guy. No, no, that isn't him. I I've got to get wrong.
1:19:33
Uh anyway, let me just set up the the the the thing.
1:19:36
So, there's one guy who is a genius.
1:19:40
He is Albert Brooks, I think, is the guy who plays him. So, he is a genius.
1:19:46
He's like they they set up his scene by he's listening to, you know, tango music.
1:19:51
He's reciting poetry in Portuguese.
1:19:54
He's making a you know, a a dish that he learned about from Bhutan.
1:19:59
And you know, everyone's calling him and saying, "Hey, hey, what what what was the president who uh had as the vice president the guy who was the uh commissions guy in New York?" Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was James Garfield.
1:20:12
He was shot by GTO and and like So, he's a genius >> and he just wants to get on the air. That's all he wants.
1:20:20
He just wants to be on the air and he gets on the air and he has flop sweat. >> No, no, no. He has flop sweat.
1:20:26
He's so nervous and he's tongue and he's tongue tied.
1:20:32
He's like I I I I So the solution was they take William Hurt, who's an idiot, and they give him an earpiece. >> There you go. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> There you go. Perfect example.
1:20:46
>> So >> yeah, combining both of them. >> Yeah.
1:20:48
And and and so that might be the way of the future.
1:20:52
>> That that could be the future.
1:20:52
But I think like D I I don't want to avoid your question because it's it's an important one.
1:20:56
important one. uh and and you're thinking here I'm telling you what I hope is going to happen and I believe people were going to be like some people are going to be able to do this >> but I think there's a is a question of of
1:21:10
>> uh what will happen right and for for now let's um table the question of AI because it's going to change like like the AI singularity but I think we we we can think out loud a little bit and I want to think out loud a little bit here um So, so what could happen? AI right now
1:21:28
AI right now is going to dramatically uh accelerate the the level of uh idea generation that you're going to have and uh content creation.
1:21:40
And so whereas before to create a media uh you needed a massive amount of money, you don't anymore.
1:21:48
So you can have small operations that can pretty quickly uh quickly come up with substantially better ideas, substantially better communicated um get an audience reasonably fast and I think that that is very like that's very enticing.
1:22:05
Uh so so that's it's an example of the idea I mentioned before but at a low level.
1:22:09
Okay, with AI you cost you reduce the cost of policy um generation and content generation in a way that you get both better ideas and better communication.
1:22:20
Now does it mean that these are the people who are going to be winning elections? I don't know.
1:22:27
I think we need to look at the politicians who have already won to get an inspiration uh from social media and the politicians who've won are not great like these are people who don't have that many great ideas like they they're they're very out there.
1:22:41
They they use um the type of content that Kandas Owens right would would be using, right?
1:22:52
like uh uh you know crazy ideas um people will just listen to and so and so I think that's kind of the fear right you you you you're going to have substantially better politicians because they can come up with better content and and both ideas and and and videos and whatnot but you're also going to have those who are really really really good at the social media aspect.
1:23:18
at the social media aspect. They're going to be using hatred and pmic as a way to fuel their their their reach and that reach is going to be big enough that they are going to uh win power and then once they do that um they can't
1:23:34
like probably they're not intelligent enough in terms of policy to have good ideas on policy and that's not what they want in any ways because what they care to is the audience and so that can probably um polarize substantially more the the politics than they are today. AOC I think is a perfect example too
1:23:50
AOC I think is a perfect example too where early on when I was I was following her I was close to what she was saying.
1:23:56
I think a lot of what she said made a lot of sense and she was very articulate and I think she has uh become substantially more um polarized and substantially less focused on content and thought thoughtful ideas than they used to be.
1:24:11
I think that's that might be a result of of social media. >> Yeah.
1:24:16
And you know, I I mentioned that my economics degree did me no good.
1:24:21
Well, it did it did teach me one thing, I'm sure.
1:24:24
>> And and that was called Gresham's law, which is bad drives out good.
1:24:27
And Gresham's law was originally um used to describe why currencies that had been debased >> Mhm.
1:24:38
Basically, people hoard the good currency, right?
1:24:41
The the the pure gold and they try to to uh trade with the >> bad one. >> Yeah. With the bad gold.
1:24:48
And the bad drives out the good.
1:24:51
So, I think Gresham's law could definitely be applied to your thesis here, >> right? Where where >> Yeah.
1:24:58
>> Well, so first off, >> there's probably more bad than good.
1:25:04
Let's at least from a policy at least from a policy perspective, right?
1:25:10
>> And your your thought about um AI and what it uh allows.
1:25:16
I mean, that's how our entire company is organized.
1:25:19
I I couldn't be doing any of these verticals that we do at Oshana's Ventures if we did not have these technologies. It >> is crazy.
1:25:30
and and I'm actually writing my first fiction book and I literally could not have written this book without AI >> and and so like people you used AI of course I did like I'm not Amish here and when a new tool comes on the it it the leverage it gives you just one example >> um one of the one of the things that I needed to research for the book was the history of art theft and art looting and all that kind of stuff.
1:26:06
>> And literally what I was able to do in one day >> with AI would have >> weeks >> 10 no not more years. Years. >> Yeah. Wow.
1:26:17
>> Because because your point about the Catholic Church is well taken, >> right?
1:26:21
The the I I like to joke that the Roman Empire never died.
1:26:24
It just became religious.
1:26:28
And but but the control opacity and control and limiting information is one path and it's a path that I think is awful.
1:26:40
>> The allowing uh transparency, innovation, lots of different paths leads you to be able to scale much faster, compound much faster, etc.
1:26:48
But the dying of these older networks is they're they're not going to go gentle into that good night, right?
1:26:55
It's it's like every innovation there's a great site on Twitter, pessimist archive, I think is the name of the the handle.
1:27:04
And if you look almost every single innovation, including writing, if you take what Plato said, Socrates said about it, uh Plato said Socrates said writing was a bad idea.
1:27:18
Um, but if you take every single innovation, you can see the initial reaction of the people that think it's going to displace them.
1:27:30
Oftentimes they're wrong. It doesn't.
1:27:30
It actually supercharges them. But it is pure id.
1:27:36
It is pure emotional anger. You're betraying me.
1:27:40
You know, when photography came out, everyone said painting had a good run, but it's done. It's completely gone.
1:27:47
And of course the opposite happened.
1:27:49
PE painters were freed from the the the narrow confines >> making realism. Yeah. >> Exactly.
1:27:58
And were able to express many many different things from abstract expressionism to point you know the whole thing.
1:28:05
But the result was always gets introduced. The backlash is huge.
1:28:12
We're seeing it now with AI.
1:28:12
We saw it with computers.
1:28:14
We saw it with calculators.
1:28:16
When I was a kid, and this is gonna out me as a geek, but for my 10th birthday, all I wanted was that that was in 1970, right?
1:28:24
So, for those of you who don't understand what the dark ages were like, computers were really super or not computers, calculators were really cool back in 1970.
1:28:37
And so, I asked for one >> and like literally all my friends were like, "What what is it?"
1:28:41
You know, and so like that's so cool because we were going from slide rules, right? But what did schools do? They banned calculators. >> Ban them. Yeah. Stupid. So stupid. Yeah. I'm I'm like you.
1:28:55
I last year I could barely use like more than like 1% of the value that I added I think to to uh to my um my research was coming from AI a year ago.
1:29:08
uh and now like it's it's like 60% of it.
1:29:12
Um I still cannot trust it.
1:29:15
Uh but like the high decisionation rate I think has gone down from like 30% to maybe two to three%.
1:29:19
Um and so like it has resulted uh in actually substantially deeper articles.
1:29:26
When I read the articles from two three years ago like there they sound they look so shallow to me.
1:29:32
That's been and so and so all of the surplus has been going to to to to people.
1:29:36
I have to say though uh uh the argument around the technology is always going to make us better um is is based on uh historic kind of partial misunderstanding.
1:29:51
People say, "Oh, the ludites were against like against the industrial revolution and they shouldn't have because look how good it was it is for us." But it wasn't for them.
1:30:02
Like ludites were actually right.
1:30:04
Most of them lost their job and the alternative they had was actually not better if they found one.
1:30:08
And so it's something that was better over the the decades.
1:30:13
It's great for us, but it wasn't great for them.
1:30:15
wasn't great for them. And so today the the the speed of um of job destruction I think is going to be substantially faster than the speed of job creation because in the past it was just like in the 19th century there was just one job it was agriculture and so and it took us
1:30:32
125 years to fully automate it not even fully right but to go from 70% of the population doing agriculture to 2% which is close to what we had we do today like just one industry uh it took us 25 years to to to automate it, which means that we had all this time to create new industries. But now the speed of
1:30:52
But now the speed of destruction, I think, is going to be dramatically faster. Dramatically faster.
1:30:57
And it's not going to be fast enough for people to um to recycle and find another job.
1:31:02
It wasn't possible for the Ludites when it took 125 years.
1:31:04
So imagine when the automation is going to be a matter of years.
1:31:09
And so I think uh there's there are going to be people who will be able to recycle from one job to the other.
1:31:16
There are going to be a bunch of people who decide to leave their job and create a company or become influencer or things like this.
1:31:22
But the amount of people who are going to lose their job and not and not going to find an alternative is going to be I believe quite fast.
1:31:30
It depends really on the industry.
1:31:33
Like for example, lawyers, I think lawyers are going to have an amazing run over the next few years because the cost of law is going to go dramatically down.
1:31:40
And so that's going to increase the volume of law in the next few years.
1:31:44
But then a few years after that, the need for law is going to be saturated and then the drop is going to be quite dramatic.
1:31:49
And so this we're going to see these curves of going up and then down uh in many many industries.
1:31:56
And the up and down is not going to be a matter of decades or centuries.
1:31:59
It's going to be a matter of years.
1:32:00
And so there's going to be a lot of destruction and we don't um and and and I don't think we're we're uh getting into these cleared eyed enough um because of this misunderstanding of of the history.
1:32:14
People did lose their jobs.
1:32:17
>> So I am not in any way pen glossian about my >> No. Yeah. Yeah. It's not for you.
1:32:21
I'm not saying against you like it's it's it's something I hear a lot of people. >> Yeah. Yeah. No.
1:32:26
And and I I'm I'm I'm underlining your argument. I agree with you.
1:32:32
you. I think that one of the things that we really really have not spent enough time on is our mitigation strategies because I think that a large section of the population globally >> and and I always underline through no fault of their own >> right are are going to be displaced and we've got to try as many experiment
1:33:02
experiments to >> to soften that blow >> that and like I I for example basic income uh empirically it's kind of a disaster at least all of the stuff that I have seen on it however I still think we should be experimenting more with it because the the I because the situation has changed maybe and I'm just spitballing here. But maybe in that
1:33:30
But maybe in that environment, UBI didn't work well.
1:33:34
Well, we have a completely different environment now.
1:33:38
We have an environment where like again who through no fault of their own, right?
1:33:44
And and I just think that and I I love this idea of giving a child at birth a a stake in the country.
1:33:55
Um the there's an idea that that I support that's been by the way that's been around forever.
1:34:00
I think Milton Freriedman and the economist was the first to suggest it back in the 60s.
1:34:04
But on birth in the United States, you should get a modest index fund that is that has every Americanbased company in it, right?
1:34:16
Like let's just use the S&P B as a proxy.
1:34:19
and and then when you're 18, you you will enjoy all of that compounding.
1:34:25
Hopefully hopefully that's not through another depression.
1:34:27
But all of these ideas, I think, are are worthy of thinking about and experimenting with because I think I think you are right that the dislocation is going to be bumpy and >> yeah, I agree. >> Go ahead.
1:34:46
So, so it's it's I I agree with everything you said.
1:34:49
I think there's there's one data point I think that most people miss on these uh UBI tests uh approach which is by nature all these UBI tests are flawed because for you to give a lot of money to a lot of people for a long time is very very expensive.
1:35:08
So like if you're giving just $1,000 for a year, like people are going to lose like leave their jobs if it's just a year or two or three because you know afterwards you're you're going to have to work anyway.
1:35:20
So So the AV tests actually don't work I think really well.
1:35:24
Thankfully we have an amazing natural experiment that we've been running for over a century across dozens of countries and uh for UBI and it's called retirement.
1:35:40
A retirement is UBI that starts at 65, right?
1:35:43
And do people love a retirement? They love it.
1:35:47
Like if you say, "Okay, we think maybe we should take away out UBI.
1:35:51
Are you are you happy with it?" No, no, no, no.
1:35:54
Don't touch my retirement, right?
1:35:55
Not only this, but I think it also answers the question of, "Oh, what would happen if like we just give people like this UBI and and like morally like are they going to be lost because they don't have a job and whatnot?"
1:36:06
whatnot?" Well, There's this study uh that looks at people who were under unemployed just before retirement and they were very unhappy while they were unemployed and the moment they switch to retirement they're suddenly very very happy but the day-to-day hasn't changed but the narrative around it has completely changed and so that made them happy and
1:36:28
so to me uh what this means is uh it's not going to be morally corrupt corrupting everybody to have UBI because it's not morally corrupting anybody to to do retirement retirement like QBI is good for a lot of people but not good for everybody like lots of people when they retire they start doing everything they wanted to do and that's fantastic and some people lost the lose the
1:36:50
meaning in their lives and so that's a serious problem but because everybody believe retirement retirement is a good thing therefore UBI is going to be a good a good thing now the question I think I agree with you is is how do you finance it and and I think we should put this in in clear numbers to to give a sense of what we're talking about right if you end up for example having I don't know 30 50% unemployment right
1:37:13
30% 50% unemployment and the working age population I think it's 70% in the United States right so I actually think today as of today only 45% of of Americans work right of all ages and that's with a 3 4% unemployment um yeah because there's the like working age population and then the percentage of that that works and combine these two things in like 45%. Now get your unemployment from 3% to 50%
1:37:40
Now get your unemployment from 3% to 50% and you end up having 20% each let's say 20% of the population working which means that if you want to give $1,000 uh to 10 people or to eight people, you have two people paying those $8,000 and so each one of them needs to pay $4,000. Right?
1:38:02
Right? So the amount all of this to say the amount of taxes that you need to do this redistribution they can work when you have five 10% unemployment but as you have 30 40% 15% unemployment they don't work anymore and not only that but
1:38:19
with that level of taxes people will want to leave uh the ones who are paying taxes are going to leave and so uh the the question is like there's a it's a very complex Is it the right thing to redistribute from the wealth generators to the ones who are employing that situation? And if
1:38:37
And if so, how do you actually enforce it? >> Yeah.
1:38:42
Talk about uh I'm I'm getting the hook from my my producers here.
1:38:45
I can't believe we've already been together for two hours. Um so, you know what?
1:38:49
I'm going to in this will be round one.
1:38:53
I'm going to have you back on and that is going to be the question we're going to start with.
1:38:58
We can both do a little bit of homework.
1:39:02
It's by the way it's very fresh in my mind because my article from tomorrow touches on this. So terrific.
1:39:08
>> Well that I I will I will get a chance to read that and we'll do round two.
1:39:10
But >> at the end of round one, we always give our guests uh the following opportunity.
1:39:20
We we we are going to make you emperor of the world for one day. You can't kill anyone.
1:39:26
You can't put anyone in a re-education camp.
1:39:28
But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it and the two things you say are going to incept the entire population of the world.
1:39:41
They're going to wake up whenever their tomorrow morning is and they're going to think, you know, I've just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually start acting on both of these ideas today.
1:39:56
What are you going to incept in the world to us?
1:40:01
Well, just one clarification here because the the word emperor is the one that is if if I'm emperor supposedly I have regulatory power but here is not regulatory power it's just idea power right that's right yes it's inflow power >> got it so okay I'm I'm my brain is going towards how do I get people to stop believing that regulation is the way to solve most of our problems.
1:40:35
And then think of it as regulation is a tool.
1:40:37
It's good in some situations, but it's a lot of overprocess.
1:40:41
And so like we need to get rid of that over process to progress because technology and capitalism is the best way to uh grow um the economy and therefore happiness.
1:40:52
Um and so and so so I think that that's kind of like a very poorly formed idea, but it's the combination of regulation is the is is a a tool that has been overused and you need to be very thoughtful about it um in order to unleash technology and capitalism because those are the biggest like forces in human development.
1:41:17
I think that's probably the biggest one. >> Mhm. >> That counts for one. Yep.
1:41:24
>> Um I think the other one is probably goes back to the thing that we said is um democracy uh is not what we've been doing.
1:41:37
What we've been doing is a very basic version of it.
1:41:42
And the better version is one where everybody should be adding information to the system and we need a mechanism to um to to to um take that information in and make the decisions for governance.
1:41:56
I think that's probably the second one.
1:41:59
>> Those are both great ones to contemplate.
1:42:00
Tomas, this has been super fun.
1:42:03
We will put your Substack and all the other information in the show notes.
1:42:08
Uh and we will you will be hearing for us for round two. Awesome, Jim. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. >> Pleasure was mine. Bye. Bye.