Transcription
Within the next 10 years, every [music] major government in the developed world is going to start sending you a check around $3,000 a month. And here's the part no one understands yet. By the time it arrives, that check is going [music] to be worth more than most people's salaries today. Not because the check is big, because everything [music] is going to get absurdly cheap. Now, this is not my opinion. This is the math. It is a warning to everyone in the world today because the next 10 years [music] are going to be wild.
What I'm going to share with you right now is everything I learned from Abundance 360 [music] in LA, a $30,000-a-year mastermind for CEOs and founders. Elon was there. Many of the world's top AI experts was there. Peter Dandis hosted the event. And in the room were close to a thousand American CEOs and founders. Here is what I [music] learned at that event with permission for sharing by Peter Dandis himself [music], who has been a friend of mine and someone that I've known for over 15 years.
After the event was over, at a private gathering around a campfire, I asked Peter directly, "Peter, what you said is wild. [music] Can I share this with the world?" He said, "Yes, go ahead." So, this is what I'm going to give you. Peter's three phases for shift. The five major changes in each phase, 15 shifts that are going to reshape the world. And by the end of this video, you will understand the next decade of the global economy better than 99% of the people on the planet.
Now, the three phases look like this. Phase one starts now. It's going to be painful. Phase two is clever. Phase three is going to blow your mind. That's where the $3K checks come in. Stay for that. Let's get going.
So, first, why is this disruption different from every other disruption in human history? Our entire economy is built on one assumption. When technology kills jobs, new jobs always emerge, right? Steam engines displaced farmers, but the farmers became factory workers. Computers displaced typists. They became bloggers, podcasters. But every time people found new work. Now that assumption is breaking because every prior disruption was sectoral. It hit one type of work at a time. AI is hitting all types of work across every sector simultaneously. There's no adjacent job category to retrain into. The escalator that carried workers from old industries to new ones for 200 years. That escalator now goes into the ceiling. There's nowhere left to go.
So Peter's estimate is that the industrial revolution took 25 years of upheaval. We're going to experience the equivalent in about 2 years. The worst of it between 2027 and 2029. So what I'm sharing here is an image that I took at the event. You can see the people seated down. And I'm going to zoom in a little bit on what's on that screen. This was a graphic released by Anthropic of how AI is going to replace jobs. Now, take a look at this and something becomes very apparent. The jobs that are paying the most right now, managers, software engineers, they're the ones that are going to be disrupted. What's left? Plumbers, electricians, they're actually going to be earning more than many of the top paying consultants and software developers today. Is the world ready?
Now, here are the three phases of what's about to happen. Now, as we go through these three phases, I'm going to share with you a clip I filmed of Peter on stage with Steven Cutotler, the co-author of, uh, Peter's new book, We Are as Gods. And they asked to describe these three phases, what's happening in the next 10 years. And I'm going to break it down for you. Not just what you see on stage, but what I heard in private conversations with Steven Cutotler and Peter and what they shared throughout the event. So, we'll get to go really deep. In the meanwhile, this is the book by Peter that's coming out. Given Peter gave me permission to share these ideas, I wanted to also let you know that I've started reading this book. It is an amazing book. Steven Carter and Peter Dandis are incredible writers. And this book, if you like what you hear here, this book goes deeper into the shifts that are happening.
So let's talk about phase one. Phase one is called the fracture, and it's going to be the hardest to bear, but you need to understand it to appreciate why phase 2 and phase three are so important. So phase one is already happening roughly between 2025 to 2028. The first change AI replaces jobs across multiple sectors at the same time. This is a big one. Prior disruptions were sequential, agriculture, then manufacturing, then typing pool. AI is hitting logistics, legal, customer service, software engineering, finance, healthcare, admin, creative work, all at the same time. Goldman Sachs estimates 40% of US jobs at high risk in the next 10 years. And here's the part that should scare you. You cannot retrain for jobs that AI will also perform within that retraining window. Imagine going back to school for 2 years and by the time you graduate, AI does that new job better than you do for free. That's where we are.
This brings us to change two. College degrees stop guaranteeing employment. You can't train for a job that AI is going to replace. I say this with a heavy heart. My son is going into college right now. And I've told him, listen, it's going to be about the experience. But the one thing I want you to do is to already think about the company you want to start before you graduate because do not assume that you're going to get a job when you graduate. Listen to what Peter says about this. >> People are losing their jobs, uh, and young college graduates or high school graduates are not getting jobs, uh, and they're not able to move out of their mom's dad's home and they are not able to buy a car going on and they're at peak testosterone and they're angry. >> Now, this brings us to change number three. Universal basic income. Okay, this is no longer a question of if, it is a question of when, says Elon Musk. Now, some of you might be thinking, "Vision, that sounds like socialism. Sounds like communism." Well, firstly, if you're American, please go and do some research. What you think is socialism isn't really socialism. Americans are absolutely ignorant on this fact. Universal basic income is actually something that starts to make absolute sense when you understand how it works. Now, it's not just Peter that's saying this. It's not just Elon Musk. Sam Alman of OpenAI just released a manifesto saying that governments need to start shifting to a 4-day work week and instituting universal basic income.
So let's look at the math. What does this actually look like? Okay, now in median America, not San Fran, just regular America, a genuinely stable lifestyle cost between 2,8 to 3,200 a month. That's rent, food, transport, healthcare, utilities. That's not vacations. It's not avocado toast. It's not oat milk lattes. That's I can pay my bills and not have a panic attack. Okay. 3,000 is the floor below which desperation begins. And desperation is a cognitive condition. A parent who can't afford to feed their kid tonight cannot think about retraining. The brain literally narrows. The US already demonstrated during CO that cash transfers can be deployed in weeks. The mechanism exists. What changes is the scale. If you believe that in this world everyone should have a decent chance to live, a roof over their head, food, quality food, medical bills taken care of, a decent education, there is nothing wrong with collecting a universal basic income tax.
This brings us to change number four, and that is the 32-hour work week. Now, I believe, and I know people who are looking at this and going, it's actually going to be way less. Not 32 hours, not even 20 hours. We're talking 5 to 10 hours. But pushing for a 5 to 10 hour work week mandated by law right now, it's going to be too complex. So people like Sam Alman are calling for a simple 4-day work week. But that 4-day work week is rapidly going to pave the way to two or even 1 day work week. Now keep this in mind. The pay doesn't change, only the hours. Why does this matter? Because employment isn't just money. It's identity. It's structure. It's the reason you put on pants in the morning. The shortened work week keeps more people attached to jobs and the meaning that jobs provide while distributing available hours across more workers. It's not a solution, it's a bridge. And right now, we need bridges.
This brings us to change number five. At least 10 major nations adopt UBI by 2028. Not out of charity, out of necessity. The math demands it. Now, like the summit, something really interesting happened when Elon beamed in. Elon said this, >> but in the absence of World War II, if current trends continue, I would say the economy 10xes in 10 years. >> And I'm fairly comfortable with that forecast. Now, if the economy grows 10x and people don't have jobs, where does that money go? It goes to the top. And unless we build a mechanism to redirect it, that's what phase 2 is about.
And phase 2 is honestly the most elegant economic idea I've heard in a while. Here's why. Firstly, you do not want to create a society with a huge gap between the ultra wealthy and everyone else. We are already in a society, at least in the United States, where the ultra wealthy have a higher percentage of wealth than the rubber barons of the 1920s. Think about that. Now, when that type of thing happens, there is a measurement called the Genie Index. It measures inequality in a country. And the Ginnie index says that when the gap gets too wide, society breaks down. Crime goes up. Revolutions are more likely to happen. Chaos ensures. That's not good for the rich. It's not good for the poor. That's why in many countries, wealthy individuals are actually okay paying higher taxes. It is far worse to be in a society that is completely broken down.
Let's look at what happens when we enter phase 2. So phase 2 is going to happen between 2028 to 2031. We call phase 2 the automation dividend. And what this means is that as companies bring in robots and AI agents to replace human beings, companies get taxed on these robots and AI agents. And this tax is used to fund everyone else so that we do not create a world with a massive gap between the rich and the poor. So here's what we can expect in phase two.
The first change is this. Cheap capital accelerates automation instead of creating jobs. So historically when governments lower interest rates to create jobs, the idea is that companies hire more workers. But that isn't going to happen. AI and agents are simply going to be more advanced that companies will hire less humans, more AI agents and robots. Cheap money makes automation more attractive. The very tools government used to fix unemployment now makes it worse. It's like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. Except the gasoline is money and the fire are robots. And the metaphor is falling apart. But you freaking get my point.
This brings us to change two. The robot tax gets reframed as the automation dividend. Now, Bill Gates about a decade ago had already seen this and he predicted and Peter told me this. If robots are going to replace jobs, tax the robots. Now, people have proposed taxing robots. Sounds simple, but don't frame it as a punishment for automation because that sounds like you're declaring war on industry in America. What you want to do is frame it as the automation dividend, says Peter. Not a penalty, but merely profit sharing. After all, if companies are producing goods in mass with automation, they're going to need people to buy these goods. And you do not want to be in a country with a large group of people with no money to afford purchasing these attractive goods. This is why the automation dividend simply moves money through universal basic income to people so that everyone has a decent chance to purchase the things that they need.
And this brings us to change three. The Alaska model goes national. So here's some interesting insights. Since 1982, Alaska has paid every single Alaskan a dividend from oil revenues. $1,300 to $2,000 per person per year by Patterson support for over 40 years. Republicans love it. Democrats love it. Nobody calls it attacks on oil. The public owns a share of the resource. They receive a share of the proceeds. Now scale that nationally. Not for oil, for AI. Companies above a certain size report AI deployment. Each worker displaced generates a contribution to a national productivity fund. The fund pays every American adult. And this is the Alaska model scaled nationwide.
Now, why does this matter? Think about where AI is trained. AI is trained on the mass collective works of all of us. Everything that you put in the internet, even your comments on Reddit, as dumb as they are, are training an AI. Books, pictures, images, your photographs, your Tesla, as it drives down a road, as you drive it, it's training. Your Tesla is automatically training AI. All of us have been secretly helping these AI companies train their AI. And that's why just like Alaska, it makes sense for every American to receive their share of that dividend.
So in change 4, the self-funding loop closes. Automation funds the very income it displaces. And here's where the map gets elegant. Automation displaces workers, which funds the dividend, which sustains the displaced, which preserves political stability for automation to continue, which produces more dividend revenue. You see what's happening? The system isn't fighting automation. It's harnessing it. Every citizen gets a financial stake in the machines. The robots work, you get paid. The thing that caused the problem funds the solution.
Listen to Peter bring it all together. What occurs next is that these companies who are hiring are letting go of people or not hiring people and are hiring agents and robots. What they do is the government starts taxing the companies, uh, based upon the number of agents and robots they're utilizing because those are displacing humans. And that helps to increase the tax base to supplement these UBI checks that are going out.
And now change number five. Now, if you're doing math with me, UBI for 250 million American adults at $3,000 a month, that's $9 trillion. That sounds impossible, right? But that's the wrong number. We only need to cover the 50 to 80 million who can't survive without it. The 57% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. That cost $2 to $3 trillion. The US already spends $1.5 trillion on Social Security, $900 billion on Medicare. Consolidate the redundant programs into one clean cash transfer. You save $400 to $600 billion in admin overhead alone. Net new spending $1 to $1.5 trillion. We spend $5 trillion in 18 months during CO. America has never lacked the ability to fund what it decided matters, and it needs to decide that helping its people matters more than well-done wars. Fund the people.
And now we come to phase three. >> Then the third phase in '30 and '31 and '32 is massive, uh, uh, deflation. Um, I talked about Elon on, you know, an hour ago whatever it was that deflation looks like. Um, uh, Uber, Cyber Cab, the 100 other autonomous car companies are feeding each other down in price, and all these things are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Your robot companies are getting cheaper and cheaper. AI is felt cheaper and cheaper, and all of a sudden the stuff that you want to buy is demonetized massively. So this is where he gets to UHI. It's like, okay, the money being generated by the checks from the government, um, are actually enough money where you can have anything you want because whatever you want is now super damn cheap because my, you know, mountain of optimist robots has built me a beautiful mansion, uh, for the cost of raw materials.
Now, this is the part where I really just stopped taking notes and just sat with my mouth open. Like, what the— because phase three is where $3,000 a month stops being survival money and somehow becomes wealth. There's a word for what phase 3 brings. Demonetization. The process where things that used to be expensive become basically free.
Now, let me explain it this way. Okay. The cell phone that you're holding. There was a study done to calculate if all the apps and the tools that the cell phone gave you was put into 1980s money, what would it take in 1980 to buy the advanced camera, the recording devices, the portable screen, the access to information. And that number came up to $7.5 million. Basically what this means is that every adult today and close to 90% of the world population owns a cell phone has the equivalent of $7.5 million in 1980s wealth and power. You with a cell phone can be in Bangladesh and you have access to more information than the president of the United States had in 1995. This is demonetization. Technology makes things cheap. We don't feel it because we compare ourselves to others. And if everyone has a cell phone, then that value dissipates. But if you compare based on time, we are extremely lucky.
Now, this is happening faster than we think. I remember back when I used to buy cassette tapes, $15 bucks an album. Now, $10 a month gets us every song ever recorded via Spotify. Navigation. I used to own one of those Garmin navigation devices. Before that, I had paper maps. Now you got easy access to navigation via Google Maps. The Encyclopedia Britannica. I remember when I was six, my parents bought me the Young Children's Encyclopedia Britannica. It was a big expense for them and I'm so grateful that they did. Today, every child has access to Wikipedia. Phase 3 accelerates demonetization. And these are the five categories that collapse.
Change number one, transportation cost plummets by about 80%. Cheap transport. So, I was in a Whimo car recently and it was such a bizarre experience to be in a car that's driving itself down Santa Monica. This is going to be all transport pretty soon. And the best part is this. As these technologies become cheaper, we are not heading towards one Skynet company. Elon spoke about this at the summit. He said that vision that the Terminator movies put out there, not likely to happen because there's going to be at least 5 to 10 major AI companies, whether building LLMs or autonomous cars, competing with each other, driving down the price. We already see this in AI competition between Anthropic and OpenAI, between China and the United States. The companies are driving down each other's prices, making it better for all of us. The marginal cost of a robo taxi mile electricity maintenance software, it's going to be 20 to 40. Average American households drive 13,500 miles a year and spend $12,000 on transportation. At 20 cents a mile, $2,700. Over $9,000 back in every household's pocket. Everything that you're ordering online, from your Amazon Prime purchases to your lunch delivery, the cost of that delivery starts plummeting. For a family on $3,000 a month in UBI, the cost of falling transportation cost itself gives everyone a 26% raise. And that's just transportation.
But then we come to change number two. Housing costs collapse by 60 to 70%. So robotic construction cuts labor costs, which are 40 to 50% of a home's price, by 50 to 70%. A $350K home becomes a $110,000 home. But the deeper force is geographic. Why does downtown real estate cost a fortune? Proximity. You have to be close to the office. And since there's a limited number of available real estate downtown and people don't like being stuck in a traffic jam for 1 hour, prices go up. But when work starts to disappear, when physical presence is no longer needed because we're communicating through AI, through screens that might sit in contact lenses or glasses, now you can live and work anywhere in the world. And as these services become mobile, AI healthcare, remote work over gigabyte, Star League, online education, the premium for proximity starts to dissolve. Suddenly, Montana is as connected as Manhattan. Except Montana has better air and significantly fewer people yelling at you on the subway. Peter's words on stage, I will never forget this. "A mountain of Optimus robots builds me a beautiful mansion for the cost of raw materials." He didn't say that like a dream. He said it like a forecast.
So you have cheap transport, cheap homes. Next, healthcare is about to finally become more affordable for Americans. I was really struck by this graphic. It's from April 2023, and it shows something really interesting. When patients were told to evaluate a real human doctor versus an AI doctor, patients rated the AI doctors as more accurate than the human doctors. Now, they didn't know which was AI and which was human. The AI doctors won for accuracy. But this is where it gets wild. The AI doctors also won for empathy. Yes, the AI doctors were able to demonstrate more empathy to patients than real human beings. Now, not blaming doctors. Doctors are not scalable. Doctors have more patients than they could handle. They may not have time to be empathetic. But AI is scalable. Now, because of this, we're going to see healthcare drop. But the cost of education is also going to drop. The cost of food is also going to demonetize. All of this is happening because of the cost of AI falling dramatically. Personalized AI tutoring that outperforms the average classroom going to be at near zero cost. Every kid gets a private tutor. And if you're an Indian parent, that's a dream. By the way, unlimited tutoring and it's free. My mother, she would have cried with joy. Solar energy already at 2 to 3 cents per kilowatt hour and falling. Robotic agriculture compressing food costs 30 to 40% less.
This brings us to change number four, the $36,000 check becomes close to a $57k lifestyle. And this is what Elon when he beamed in said is going to happen next. >> And I do think we'll have universal income. We're basically just issuing money to people because the output of goods and services will so far exceed the money supply that effectively you have deflation because just deflation is just the ratio of the outputs of goods and services to the money supply. >> We call this, uh, and we all [clears throat] should be really excited about this.
Now hold that in your mind. He said AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for humans. And this is where one of the most fascinating things of phase 5 starts to materialize. Work becomes optional. Not because of welfare, because AI handles execution, robots handle production, and the UBI check buys a middle class life because everything cost a tenth of what it used to. The question shifts. No longer how do I get a job, it's what do I actually do with my life? And if that question scares you more than unemployment, congratulations. You understand the real challenge of the next decade.
So this is where phase three starts to really kick in. Cheap transport, cheap homes, cheap healthcare and education, universal high income, and work disappears. Now, I need to give you one important warning because Peter was very explicit about this. Everything I just described in phase three depends on timing. The deflationary wave has to arrive before the political and social damage from phase one destroys the conditions for it to happen. Peter calls the gap between phase 1 and phase 3 the valley. Roughly 2026 to 2031. That's when displacement has arrived, but deflation hasn't fully landed. A family on $3,000 a month in 2028 is still living in an expensive world. And here's the paradox. The deflationary wave of phase three depends on accelerating the very automation that causes phase one. Slow the robots to protect jobs. You also slow the deflation that makes the checks worth something. The thing that causes the problem is the thing that solves it. The automation dividend, the 32-hour work week, competitive markets. These are the mechanisms that bridge the valley. They're the most important engineering problem of this decade.
But here's the problem, and Peter brought this up. The biggest crisis we're about to face when this happens is a crisis of meaning. Human beings need meaning. We need a reason to understand why we are here. And taking away work for many people is going to take away meaning. Let me give you an illustration of why this is so important.
Last week I was in Zimbabwe and I got to visit a beautiful village as part of a tour and there I met a man called Lovemore and this is me with Mr. Lovemore. He is the father of this particular family in the village and they have different huts on the land that the family owns. They have around 15 cows and the village runs based on really beautiful principles. When the boys who sleep in a room together wake up in the morning, the first thing they do is they go and they check on the cows. The women go and they harvest the fields and then they pound grain to create the food that they need to cook that day. He also told me that the village doesn't have water. It is the woman's job to walk 3 km to retrieve water and bring it back. And this practice, walking 3 km to get the water to bring it back, pounding the wheat as the women sing and speak to each other, the boys milking the cows. These have been going on for thousands and thousands of years.
Now imagine what happens if the government suddenly came in and installed pipes of water for the water to flow. If the cows were suddenly automatically milked. If there were machines that pounded the grain, all of a sudden 5 to 6 hours a day of work disappear. What we often see in countries is that when the government suddenly comes and installs pipes and people no longer have to take that walk as a group of tribe members talking, chatting as they go and retrieve the water and come back. That breaks down society a little bit. Meaning disappears. What is a simple society certainly becomes an impoverished society. They have just enough, but they don't have the stuff that the wealthier countries have, the cars, the TVs. A simple lifestyle that was satisfying becomes an impoverished lifestyle that is unsatisfying with high unemployment. What shifted identity?
This is what I think we really need to be careful about as work dematerializes. We cannot let work dematerialize without governments coming in and putting in foundational layers that help people achieve meaning. And what this means is more public parks where people can take care of their health, run, walk, more longevity centers, opportunities to connect with nature, opportunities for children to be able to have more time with their parents, opportunities for communities to come together to do community service work or even to just sit down and chat and connect with other fellow human beings. We have to shift the way cities are organized. Too many cities right now are organized for transport and for commercial real estate, for work to be done. We have to reorganize cities for community, for longevity, and for fun. If we don't do this, humanity can face a massive crisis of meaning.
The most important thing I want you to think about is this. What gives you meaning? You have to stop attaching meaning to work because work is going to become optional. You will not need to work. Money is going to become something that is going to be more or less abundant. We will all be able to afford what we want to do in life. So then in this scenario, what will truly light up your soul and give you meaning? You need to be able to understand that. You need to be able to grasp that because if you identify meaning with work, you are going to go into a mental health crisis. So you must ask yourself, if I didn't have to work, if I had good money, not to be ultra rich, but to survive, to do anything I want, what would truly light me up? Figure that out and start exploring that idea.
Now, two things before I let you go. First, if you want to go deeper on this, definitely check out Peter Dandis and Steven Cotler's brilliant book, We Are as Gods. It's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. My god, Stephen, friend of mine, Mind Valley author. The way this guy writes is just absolutely poetic. And when you combine that with Peter Dandis' genius for predicting the future, you get a book that is really hard to put down. Next, you can also check out my talk Soul Pack. This talk was delivered at a longevity conference in Europe. And what I talk about is as automation accelerates, as work disappears, how do we restructure our lives to survive in this new age? And I give an eight-step model to rethink life and it spells out the word S O U L P A C T. Go check out the talk.
So now before you go on to the next video, just a simple question I want you to answer: if your work becomes optional, what would you actually want to do with your life? What would you want your life to be about? Not the answer you think you should give, the real one. Drop it in the comments. We read every single one. And I'm genuinely curious what this community comes up with. Share this with one person who needs to see it. Stay grounded. Stay curious. I'll see you in our next video. Also, click subscribe and check out some of the other videos in this series, particularly Soul Pack. This video will show you how to think about your life and your goals and your careers to navigate the disruption of the next 10.