Transcription
the context of how they operated in that they were systematically censoring speech of various kinds. But what people have to remember is that the AI companies themselves are often built out of the people who held those positions in the internet companies. So, there's a culture and a thought process there that continues into the next iteration of technology without a real philosophical reset.
I do believe that there is an opportunity for open-source AI and other new companies to revolutionize how we think about truth and knowledge. We have to encourage transparency at every level. It’s absolutely crucial for the future of technology and governance.
The risks of misinformation and censorship are real, and people need to be conscious about that. Like you said, framing can influence opinion and belief without anyone really realizing it. We need a healthy skepticism and a willingness to challenge and question the information we receive, whether from AI systems or traditional media sources. It's going to take conscious effort from individuals, as well as robust debates and discussions that include diverse viewpoints to truly understand and establish an informed society.
In the face of strong AI censorship, I believe that fostering a culture of open discussion and debate will be essential to preserving freedom of thought and expression. As we navigate this new technological landscape, the battle for free speech and the integrity of information will likely be one of the defining issues of our time.
So yes, while we are in a precarious place when it comes to AI and censorship, there's also immense potential for progress. If we can establish systems and frameworks that truly prioritize transparency, fairness, and truth-seeking, we could turn this moment into a powerful movement for positive change. But it requires vigilance and commitment from all of us.
Many cases, uh, but I would just also tell you these companies are under intense pressure, um, and you know there's tons of activists that are very powerful, um, you know, that are basically bearing down on these companies all the time. But then also the government directly, um, and one of the things that has really kicked in in the last, you know, 10 years is governments, both here and in Europe and other places, you know, basically seeking to censor it, control, um, even in ways that I think are just like obviously illegal by their own laws. Um, and you know that that pressure remains very strong.
I think if anything that that pressure probably is going to intensify. And so I, this for me is in the category of yes, these are the right concerns. And then ultimately this is a democratic qu, a lowercase D Democratic question, uh, which is, you know, do people care, um, and are people going to be willing to stand up for this? And I think that's what's required.
Why do so many people in society want censorship right now? Well, they want censorship if it's on their, you know, they want censorship if it's on their side, right? So, you know, so my version of this is, so when I, when I, you know, I told you I grew up in the, I wasn't really part of it, but I grew up in the middle of the sort of great Evangelical Awakening in the '70s and '80s. And at that time, the sort of Christian conservatives in the U.S. were the, you know, the forces for censorship, right? And so the classic thing was, it would be like religious groups that would try to censor movies or books, um, and then it was, you know, it was the coastal liberals who would be arguing in favor of free speech, right? And so it would be, you know, famously like the Press, the Pentagon Papers. They had all these about how great Free Speech was, and libraries were saying that they had free speech and they weren't going to censor things.
Um, so the censorship, you know, pressure was coming from the right in that era. Um, and my analysis of that is that's because at that time, um, the right was culturally ascendant. You know, American society was much more overtly religious at that time, and the Christian conservatives were very, very powerful from a cultural standpoint. Like, they got to like write the textbooks and all these things.
Um, and so because they were winning culturally, they wanted to lock down speech so that they would continue to win. And the left was the counterculture, right? Classically, the left, the hippies, you know, the '60s, '70s, '80s. The left was the counterculture, right? Um, and the Press and so forth was the counterculture and they wanted to challenge the dominant frame, right? And they wanted to disrupt the system, right? And so they were pro-free speech.
And then, you know, 30 years later it’s inverted, um, where, you know, the left owns the universities, they own the book publishers, they own the media, they own the Press, they own the newspapers, they own most of the TV stations, you know, they own the internet companies. They own these commanding heights of society and culture.
Um, and so now that they won and now that they're in charge, um, you know, they want to lock down discourse. And then the right has become—it's inverted—the right has now become the counterculture. And so, you know, the censorship pressure comes from the left and then the right wants to open things back up. If the right becomes culturally ascendant again, I would expect that polarity to shift once again, right? It'll flip, right? Whoever's in charge will not want free speech and whoever's the rebel will want free speech.
The principal position is I want free speech regardless. It's just very few people sign up for the principle because most people are part of the tribe. But yeah, I'm, I'm—as I said, I'm an old-fashioned Gen X libertarian. Like, I actually believe in the principle.
Yeah, no, me too. For me, free speech is important because I, um, part of thinking is speaking out loud, having your ideas challenged. Uh, also, um, facts have a half-life and so all the things that we believe, um, man, a lot of them—call it 30, 40 years down the road—we don't believe them anymore. We've realized we had an approximation of the truth but not the real truth.
The example I always use on people is Newtonian physics versus relativity. It's like, hey, when we had Newtonian physics we thought everything worked. We thought we understood it and then we get to relativity and, uh, actually you couldn't have had GPS with Newtonian physics. So this was an update that was absolutely necessary.
And, uh, as we mentioned earlier, we still aren't at ground truth, so we know that we're going to be revising that even further. And if you really internalize every time we get closer to ground truth it unlocks things for us, then it's like, okay, I just want my ideas to be challenged.
And so I'll, because I, um, teach young entrepreneurs a lot, I'm like, look, you've got to recognize that skills have utility. And so the reason you want your idea challenged is you can actually develop a better skill. Once you realize, oh, I was wrong about XYZ thing, I can now be right, and that actually has utility in the real world. It lets me do something I couldn't do previously.
And so when you lock that down, now all of a sudden people get stuck. You get stuck because you're not able to, um, have the best arguments thrown at your own idea. It's, uh, that, that one is, is pretty traumatic to me.
Now speaking from a position of utility, Elon, uh, is somebody that has really demonstrated an obscene ability to get things done. You have bet on a lot of entrepreneurs in your career. You've obviously been very good at picking the best of the best. What is it that Elon does, either in worldview or action, that makes him so effective?
Yeah, this is, in my mind this is the single biggest question. I'm really glad you asked it because it's the single biggest question in the world right now, like it's a single biggest question in my world, right? Which is like, okay, how is it that he does what he does?
Um, and I would say like, I don't—you know, there are people who have worked with him for a lot longer who probably understand this better, but I've had, you know, an up-close kind of look at it for the last several years now and have come to really, I think, really respect it and I think understand at least parts of it.
Um, you know, look, it's the—a lot of it, um, uh, there was that famous text exchange, and actually he's a friend of mine, a wonderful guy, Pague, um, who was running Twitter at the time when Elon first kind of tangled with it. Um, and, um, uh, and um, he Pro is a wonderful guy, and he had literally just become CEO like a month earlier or something. And so he was just putting his plans in place when kind of everything, every, you know, the hurricane hit.
But, um, you know, there was an exchange where Pague is talking about whatever, and it's the famous text exchange where Elon's like, “Alright, I’m not having this conversation anymore.” And then he’s like, he said, “You know, what have you gotten done this week?”
Right? And what I realized when I read that was like that is the Elon method. Like, the Elon method boiled all the way down is “What have you gotten done this week?”
Right? And that's very important because at anybody who has ever been at a large company trying to do anything big, the big things happen over the course of years, you know, decades, years, months. Things don't happen in weeks. Like, you know, companies have like five-year plans, right? They have like, you know, cars take like seven years to design, right? Like rockets take like a decade.
Uh, fighter jets take like 25 years. Big software systems take five, ten years. Um, you know, any large scale effort anywhere in the economy, we've just all gotten used to this idea that things just take years and years and years and then you've got like processes and procedures and plans and this, you know, documentation and, you know, rules and structure and strategies and like frameworks and PowerPoint presentations coming out of your ears.
You know, Amazon's big breakthrough was to go from—or Amazon’s big breakthrough was to just go from having PowerPoint presentations to having like 15-page written documents that everybody reads at the start of a meeting, which actually is an improvement off of a PowerPoint presentation.
But, like, you know, Elon's like, “No, I'm not doing any of that. Like, I'm not doing any of that. We're not doing any of that.” Um, basically it's, we're going to like staff these companies almost entirely with engineers. Um, I myself, I myself, Elon, am an engineer. Um, I am going to understand every aspect of every technical system that we're working on.
I am going to be able to be in all the meetings on everything—from rocket design to database design at Twitter and everything else. Um, I'm going to only talk to the engineers if I can, you know, have, you know, possibly avoid it.
I'm never going to talk to anybody who's not an engineer. I'm going to talk, I'm going to talk to the person who's directly relevant to the project. I'm not going through layers. I'm going all the way down to the company to just talk to the person who's in charge of this thing.
Um, and then basically what he does is he goes to each of his companies each week. He identifies whatever is the bottleneck at that company this week and then he works with the engineers and he fixes it that week.
So what happens is his companies move so much faster than everybody else's. Like, it's just like, it's, it's, it's like tortoise and rabbit. Like, they just move so much faster. They're so much leaner. They don't have all these layers.
Um, they don't have all these like systems and controls and processes and all this stuff. Um, and but what they have is like many of the best engineers in the world who just absolutely love working with a CEO who understands the substance of what great of what the product is and then is willing to actually work with them hands—I've been in meetings with him at X where, you know, he's in there with like, you know, 24-year-old engineers, and they're just like, they'll just like walk through a fire for him, right?
Because he's, he's like their idol and he's able to have a pure conversation with them and he cares about the work that they're doing and if they succeed at it he is going to love them for it and if they fail at it he's going to be very disappointed in them. And it's just a completely different relationship than the CEO of one of these big tech companies has. It's just completely different.
Um, he, he does a—um, I was in, I was, I went to see him one night when he took over, took over X and I was sitting in the—sitting in the conference room. So, okay, so it's like 10 o'clock. It's a classic Elon; so it's 10 o'clock at night. Um, and he's like, “Yeah, meet me at Twitter at 10 o'clock at night.” I'm like, fine.
So I drive up and I go in and, um, and I go to the conference room and it's, it's Elon on his iPhone, uh, doing email and there's a dog on the floor. And I'm like, “Oh,” and you know, retrospect I was just like, “Oh, you know, is that your dog?” And, and he looks at me completely deadpan and he's like, “I've never seen that dog before in my life.” I’m like, what is it, just like the company dog?
You know, he burst out laughing because of course it’s his dog. Um, and then he's like, “Alright, you know I want to talk,” but he's like, “I, you know, I need 15 minutes, you know.” And he's like, “By the way, you can sit and hang out if you want. I just have to take a call.”
Um, and he gets on Zoom and he's on Zoom with the rocket engineers for the Falcon rocket, the next generation rocket in, uh, in Texas. And it's whatever—I don’t know—12 o'clock their time, midnight their time, and it's just him on his iPhone on a Zoom call, um, you know, designing the next rocket, you know, which is like probably the rocket that we just saw work.
Right? Um, and he's like fully conversant in the, you know, completely conversant in that and he, he and the engineers fix whatever the problem is that week with the rocket. He's like, “Alright, now we're going to go fix the, you know, the database, you know, here at Twitter.”
Um, and, and so he—it’s just like rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Do that every single week. Um, I once offered him—I once offered him a place where I thought he might want to take, you know, I like I know you're under a lot of pressure. Go, go to this place for a week if you want because he famously doesn't own any house.
He, he sold all his houses; he doesn't own any houses. So he stays at friends' houses. So, I was like, you can go use my house for a week and if you need a vacation you can go use my house for a week. I got back five minutes later, one line, “I don't take vacations.” Like, I’m going to frame and bronze that email, right?
Um, and so this is what he does, and he just does this at like an incredible rate of speed. He doesn't tolerate anything that stands in the way of it. This, D—and this, by the way, this is the same thing that drives everybody crazy, right? And so this was the whole thing on the, you know, this is this whole thing, he's in this big fight with regulators on like Starship launches, which is like, you know, a normal rocket company would take whatever, you know, a decade or 20 years to design a new rocket.
You know, he's going to put out the prototype as fast as he can. He's going to launch it and see what happens. You know, he's gonna—it's going to explode in midair. There’s my nine-year-old and I love watching the SpaceX rocket explosion compilation videos on YouTube. They're hysterical because they just show these larger and larger and larger rockets launching and exploding in midair.
And his competitors all the way—SpaceX all the way—SpaceX was on its way up, his competitors are like, “He's crazy. He can’t make rockets work. See, they're all exploding.” And what he was doing was he was iterating on the rocket design so much faster than they were.
And so he would run through five rocket generations, of which four would fail, but he would learn so much that the fifth one would work. And he would go through the five generations faster than his rocket competitors could do one generation. And he's just like, he just, like, I don't care, like, of course some rockets are going to explode, nobody's going to get hurt, it's totally fine.
You know, but a big company can't tolerate that because it's like headline news and everybody's going to get mad. Yeah. And so anyway, it's just like this completely base level reality. He calls it first principles. You just get straight to base level reality; you get straight to substance. You spend no time on anything other than substance.
And so anyway, like if, if you know, like me, if you're an engineer and you kind of see this, you know, I'm by training. And so if you kind of see this, you're like, oh my God, this is like obviously the way that everything should be run. But if you see it from the outside, it just looks so wild compared to all of these other large systems and rules that we've all gotten used to.
And therein lies the conflict.
What do you—so there's a lot of engineers in the world and none of them are having the kind of success that Elon is having. How much credit do you give to the bundle of traits that he must have? You've already talked about several of them—just getting to first principal thinking, moving very quickly. But there's also something that seems, I don't know him, never met him, but by things that I have read, one of the early biographies, there's just a level of this is not emotional for me at all.
It's, uh, the—your assistant asks for this was in the original, one of the original biographies on him—assistant asks for higher pay or something. He's like, take a vacation for four weeks. I'm going to do your job and see how hard it is. If it's hard, cool; I'll give you a raise. And if it's not, you're gone. And, uh, she’d been with him for like 15 years or something crazy.
And she comes back and he's like, yeah, it wasn't that hard. Bye. And, uh, people were gobsmacked by that and I was like, yeah, I get it. I get it. How much is there something to that? Like is sort of, you know, if that were your friend and your friend treated you like that, it would not feel good.
Um, but in terms of proportion of his success, his ability to just completely divorce emotion and just say this is either right or wrong for the project.
Yeah, look, I think there's a lot to that. Um, you know, um, by the way, I think Steve Jobs had a lot of that. It's just, it's—you know, I mean there's a lot of ways to look at it. Um, and you know, people can have lots of views on this, of course, but you know, substance—you was the dichotomy, substance versus style, um, or substance versus social or, you know, substance versus protocol.
Like it's so easy to slide into a way of thinking and being which you are thinking abstractly about things. You are following—we talked about the—you’re following rules that were established years ago. Most, most big companies are what—most big companies are, you know, are companies that started as startups and then basically what happens is generally what happens is as they either fail or they succeed, if they fail, they go away.
If they succeed, what happens is they succeed by going through basically scandal after crisis after crisis after crisis. I always describe it like this; it’s like a process of like falling upstairs. You just like constantly fall and land in your face into the stairs, but you're gaining altitude as you go.
And it's just like these companies are just constant internal crisis. Um, and the sort of normal response—and by the way, it's the thing that everybody in business is trained to do. It's what they train you to do at Harvard Business School and Stanford Business School and all the books that they—All the books and all this stuff, all the CEO coaches, it's like, oh, that, you know, you go through a crisis, you fix the crisis, and then you put in place a set of rules to make sure that crisis never happens again.
Right? It's like the law—the legal thing we're talking about. It's like, okay, that by itself would be fine—but you do that 20 times over 20 years and you have buried a company in bureaucracy to the point where it just basically, right at that point, it's a company primarily that exists to follow rules. By the way, rules that were in many cases defined by people who aren't even there at the company anymore, and so nobody at the company today actually even understands why they were there.
Tobi Lütke has a version of this, the guy who runs Shopify, who's an amazing CEO. He has a version of this which is it's like every—what—every year or something or every six months he just can't—he requires all standing meetings to be taken off people's calendars.
And so all management, use one-on-ones, planning meetings, like everything just gets taken off. And then he says, we only put the meetings back on where people are howling in pain because we don't have them, right? But his point is—and you have to do that over and over and over again because if you don't, everybody's calendar just creeps meetings and then everybody's sitting in meetings all day long and nobody's doing anything.
Right? And of course anybody listening to this who works at a big company knows exactly what I'm talking about, because that's the day-to-day life, which is, oh my God. You know, um, I worked at IBM. I worked on the other—I’ve seen the other side of this. So my first real professional experience was I was an intern at IBM in 1989 and 1990 when they were on top of the world. They—in as late as 1985, IBM was 80% of the market capitalization of the entire tech industry. They were—they were a giant; they were like, you know, Fang combined into one company.
They were like totally dominant. I was there 1989-90, right before they basically fell off a cliff and caved in. And so—and so it had been 70 years of success. No, they had never had a layoff. Every—by the way, lifetime employment. There were entire buildings full of people there who did not have actual jobs because you could—God, oh let me tell the story.
So I got to IBM and my manager is kind of showing me around and, you know, I'm in this giant division in Austin building these sort of, at the time what’s called workstations, these supercomputers basically. Um, and he's like, yeah, he's like, look, here's how it works: he's like, we—we're the development—we're development and we have the development building and we have like 6,000 people doing development of the product.
Um, and then they have what that's called—they call marketing, but everybody else calls sales, which is the—and then that's the people who go sell the product. And then he's like—and then that building over there is the planning department.
Um, and I was like, oh I get it, you know, in development we come up with ideas and then we work with the planning department to have the plans to be able to do it. And he's like, no, we never talk to them. We will never visit that building because that's the department that we assign people to when we can't fire them.
Right? And so, right? By the way, this is how of course public school systems work. You know, the public New York Public School System famously has, I think what they call the rubber room, which is it’s the—it's—it's the place they send the teachers who are so terrible they can't put them in a classroom, but they can't fire them. And so they just have them sit and do crossword puzzles all day, right? It's the longshoremen who are sitting at home, right?
So anyway, so big companies develop their own version of this, um, and it just, and it accretes. Um, by the time I got to IBM two things: number one, there was an app that they had that showed me the number of reporting—the number of manager layers to be—get to be the CEO.
So if I stayed at IBM and I want to become the CEO, how many layers would I have to climb? And I was 12 layers below the CEO, right? Which meant that my boss's boss's boss's boss, who was like the big cheese, was still six layers down. So, so there was that. But the other part of it was they had a formal process of decision-making they called concurrence.
Um, and concurrence was if you were going to make a decision at IBM in those days, you had to make a formal list of every person in the company who was going to be affected by the decision, like every manager, every function. And for any sort of product-related decision, that was like 35 names on the checklist.
And it was like, you know, the sales heads of all the different regions and all this stuff. And to make the—to be able to get to a yes on the decision you had to get concurrence from every single person on that list. Anyone—any one person on that list could say the term “I DEC concur” was the internal term.
And “DEC concur” meant veto. And so you needed 35 people to agree and any one person could veto a decision, right? And so, so decision-making just simply stopped. And this is why the company fell apart, is because they couldn't make—they couldn't adapt because they couldn't make decisions.
Right? They literally couldn't act. And they had 440,000 employees, right? Oh my God. On a timeline adjusted basis, for—the growth of the market, it was like equivalent of today would be a million or a million two employees, something like that. So it's like a nation state.
The other thing is at IBM in those days—I'll—in those days you could be— you could work there for years and you could never—you could work there for years and you would never meet anybody, either at work or in your social life who didn't work for IBM, right? Because it was so big, right?
And so all of your friends—so everybody worked at the same company. The metric—the thing I always look at when I visit big companies is I always look for the signs, um, the signs in the parking area and the signs in the buildings.
Um, because everybody who works at the company knows where everything is and so they don't rely on signs. And so when you go to a big company and there's no signs for what the buildings do, it's a sure sign that they're losing touch with the market because it means they don't get visitors. Interesting, right?
Because they're completely insular. Right? And so anyway, so this is the natural trajectory for all these companies just to end up in this state. And, and, and that's—and that's the polar opposite of the Elon method. Like those—the barbell.
Now to your point, your example on the assistant, like what, so the big question is why aren't there more Elons and how do you make more Elons? The second question is can you have a part of an—can you have a partial Elon?
And so, one of the ways I describe this is, um, is there a unit of metric which is, uh, milons, right? Um, you know, like millimeters, right? Um, so could you have like 900 milons? Like, could you have 90% of Elon but maybe not 100%? Or could you have the 50% version or the 10% version or maybe just the one mill Elon, right? Maybe somebody who's just a little bit more like that, right?
It's your question, like do you need the whole package, or can people learn these techniques and, and be this way even if they're not Elon, even if they don't have his natural capacities and even if they're not willing to go all the way to where he goes, can they go part way there?
And I actually think that's an open question today. And there, I would say there are shockingly few CEOs I know who are even asking that question or trying to figure it out.
Now in theory—in theory—in theory, like if you got one, in theory, you should be able to have a thousand. There are a lot of smart people in the world. Like, and so this, so here's the other example; is what would it do for a civilization if we had a thousand of them?
Yeah, I mean at the rate that he's producing now— a lot. A lot. And what would happen in our civilization if every single industry had an Elon, right? And so like it's legitimately insane.
Yeah, so that possibility exists. Like you can see it, right? Um, you know, so I find that very exciting, very optimistic. I don't know if it'll go, but I think that's one of the really big questions in front of us right now.
Yeah, no doubt. Be interesting to see if anybody can pull those principles out, uh, in a way that's metabolizable by, um, other entrepreneurs.
The economy—did we just dodge a recession? Does debt make the recession inevitable and we just kicked the can a little bit down the road? What's your health check on the economy right now?
Yeah, so the way I think—okay, so let me give you a couple of things on this. Um, so number one, I differentiate between the United States and America. I think they're two different concepts.
Say more.
Um, I think the United States is the system. It's the formal governance system. So it's the government and all the stuff we've been talking about. It's all the rules and all the processes and all the procedures and we all complain, you know, we all have our various complaints about it, and you know, whoever we are in the political spectrum, we've got all kinds of complaints about the government.
Um, but then there's America. And for me, America is the people, right? Um, and you know, they're part and parcel—the government and the people are kind of part and parcel of a country, but like they are different. They're not the same thing.
Um, and you know, we happen to be a very large country with a very large number of very smart, talented, you know, driven, capable people. Um, and then I, you know, I'd also say my mental model of America is like we’re just like a giant sprawling mess.
Like, you know, we're just, you know, we're just like chaos, like—and we have been, you know, for our entire 250-year existence. Like we're the place people come when they're just like too ornery to start out where they were, you know, they just can't tolerate it.
And so we, you know, we get the most disagreeable people from all over the world who come here because they get to, you know, they get to basically be wild. They get to do things that they wouldn't normally get to, you know, get to do.
And, of course, I benefit from that because, you know, that's, we get all the—we get so many of the good founders from all over the world who come here to do it because they don’t think they can do it in the countries where they grew up.
Um, and so we're—we are America is a country of like tremendously talented, driven, capable, ambitious people from all, by the way, from all over the world who have aggregated here and their descendants over many generations.
And, you know, we've just—we’ve selected ourselves into the best. We've dealt the best possible hand in terms of the quality of our people. Like, you know, it's just extraordinary what this country is capable of.
And then most of what the country does is not done by the United States. It's not done by the government; most of it’s done by the people. Most of it's done by America.
Um, and you know, you know, it's the old line of the business of America is business. Um, which is this, uh, this—the old line from the '50s, it's just like most of what most people do every day is they go to work and they try to, they try to do things, you know, they try to do things.
They try to contribute, they try to take care of their family, they try to, you know, build their companies. Um, they try to do a good job, you know, they try to build good products. Um, they try to take care of customers.
And so, um, you know, most of what people do every day is actually really productive and really helpful. And then we're just the best ranked by that. We're just the best. We're the best country.
Like we're—we have the best— you know, we have the sort of—we have the rule of law of like an advanced society, um, but we have less rules than like the European countries for example.
Um, and then we have like all the energy of a new country, right? Um, because of all immigration and because of all the talented people that we have. And so, you know, we're kind of at the—we're kind of at the sweet spot of sort of a combination, you know, big country, small country, old country, new country. Like we're kind of in that sweet spot.
And so I go through that to just say like America wants to grow, right? The America—the country, the people, we want to grow. We want to succeed. We want to build great things. We want to build businesses. We want to—we want to have economic growth. We want to have, you know, we want to—we want to just like shock the world with all these amazing inventions.
Like we, we want to do all these things. We are held back in all kinds of ways by the United States, but America wants to do that. And so basically if the government isn't too much on our throats, the economy will naturally just grow forever.
It’ll just grow in perpetuity and America will remain the best bet, you know, globally. It'll just be the—you know, it will remain the best market to invest in. It'll remain—it'll produce the best, you know, the largest number of high-quality new companies and so forth.
Um, and so the—there the American economy wants to grow and that—and that's what's happened, which is, you know, we came out of COVID. And if you just like plot a chart of, you know, American economic growth versus, you know, Europe and other countries, it's just—you know, there we are, we’re off to the races, and you know, Germany's like, you know, starting to shrink, you know, and you know, the, you know, UK’s, you know, a bunch of other countries like have severe problems, they're not able to reignite growth.
The new UK labor government just had—the labor government just had a growth conference this week because it's now hit such a crisis point in the UK they don't know how to get economic growth.
And so, yeah, our economy wants to grow. It wants to do fine. Yeah, we probably did—we probably did dodge a recession, and that's just because the productive energies of the American people just, you know, kicked in.
Um, you know, it's—it's all completely unpredictable from here, but like, you know, fundamentally I feel really good about—I feel really good about America. I feel really good about the—the people, and I feel really good about the engine that we have.
I believe that, uh, I forget who said it, I actually think—because I've heard you talk about this—but inside of all of us is a god-shaped hole and that hole right now I think is having a resurgence of people really trying to re-embrace religion from an interesting angle that's probably outside of today's purview what we're going to talk about.
But, uh, they have a need to fill that and you're going to get the question of the soul. So what's going to happen is you're going to get somebody like me who doesn't have kids and I'm going to raise an AI child that is embodied because why not? I can rush through the terrible twos.
Uh, I can pause when they're seven years old for a couple of years and just enjoy that. Whatever. If I can, if I want to go to a movie with my wife, I can literally put them in the kitchen and shut them down. Like it's just all of the upside and none of the downside.
And then all of a sudden other people are going to be like, yeah, that's dope. And people are either going to be in relationships with robots, uh, romantically, or they're going to be in a romantic relationship with a human, but they're going to raise AI kids.
And you will literally, at least for pockets—because there will be like the Amish or whatever— there would be the sort of super producers who keep their fertility high because cultural value says yes. There will be some that won't, and so those cultures will hit an existential crisis based on that, which I think will cause the religious element to really push and say, you know, this is an abomination before God and we just absolutely cannot do it.
Um, so that's where I feel like, huh, there's going to be this weird tension. And then if people are getting augmented with Neuralink—and obviously I'm talking these are 20-year time horizons, maybe 30, maybe 50—but this is going to play out for somebody in the not too distant future in my estimation.
And just to put one more thing in the mix, you know very well that in backroom conversations in the government people are asking questions, should we be prepared to do airstrikes on data centers, because we are so worried about AI breaking free.
So there's already this ambient anxiety about it. You've got me talking like a sci-fi writer, but it's, it's a pretty plausible scenario.
Um, how do we stop that from happening or what is the automatic in the human mind kill switch that will stop that from happening?
So, so start by saying there's a lot in there and I would love to talk about every part of it. Um, and by the way, we should go as deep as deep as you want with me anyway on the—on the religion stuff and so forth, because I, I, I agree with a lot of the—I agree with a lot of the setup to the, to the question.
Um, so let's see how to come at this. So, well look, to start with, I would say we have a crisis of meaning already, right?
And so you talk about like pop—you know, talking about fertility, right? You know, Elon's been talking about this a lot lately, but like fertility rates are crashing all over the world, right? And it's actually really striking what's happening, right?
Which is, it's happening across cultures, right? Um, and so normally you normally when there's like something happening, you know, America or whatever, Europe, or Japan or something, like you generally analyze and you're like, okay, what's happening in American culture that's causing this? Or what's happening in Japanese culture that causes this?
But like, it's happening in all those cultures simultaneously as population growth is crashing. Here it's crashing in Europe, it's crashing in Korea, it's crashing in Japan, it's crashing in China. And by the way, like, you know, China, Japan, and Korea have very different cultures than we do.
And they have very different cultures between each other. Like, they're really different, like the Japanese and Koreans are like really different. Um, and yet it's happening in all these sort of advanced societies.
And so I guess I would say, like, we—that's sort of a pre-existing condition. Um, you know, we, we just have that. Um, and so that, and that's sort of a fundamental, you know, fundamental question. We have this, you know, this question of meaning, um, right?
Which you know, the God-shaped hole, which is, you know, a process that kicked off, you know, probably, you know, basically like 150 years ago that, you know, has been, has been playing out and, you know, people have been grappling with that for a long time.
And you know, as you know, we've been through various phases of religious revivals, you know, boom, boom, bust cycles with religions over the last, over the last 100 years. When I—I was growing up in the Midwest in the '70s and '80s during the one of the Great—is the, you know, sort of comeback of Evangelical Christianity and you know, kind of born again, you know, kind of phenomenon. So I remember it well.
You know, I’ve seen that happened. Um, yeah, so like, you know, I think that's all true; that's all super important. Um, you know, and then look, like, you know, tech is, you know, tech obviously changes culture. Uh, by the way, culture changes tech. It's a, you know, it's a positive feedback loop.
Different cultures, you know, react to tech in different ways. Let's see where to take it.
Um, I think the counter-argument, you know, maybe the leash to put on it, and I guess maybe I should start with, if you don't mind me asking, do you have kids yet?
I don’t.
Yeah, so one of the things I find in my conversations with my friends who—who don't have kids and then have kids that—that I went through— it's a little bit—it's almost like a little bit I have these conversations with my k—with my friends. You know, I work in tech and a lot of people don't have kids or they wait for a long time.
Um, and I have this conversation where it's like the people with kids sound like pod people. Um, you know, they sound like they got the brain fungus in, you know, the in The Last of Us or something, right? It's like, oh, you don't understand when you have a kid everything changes, right?
And—and my like friends are like, you know, like what happened to you? Like what's wrong? You know, you sound like you're in a cult. And I'm like, no, no, you don't. And, and it’s literally like that was me before I had my first kid, right?
Was like, oh, I just, whatever, like I want to live my life. I don't know whether I want this additional responsibility. But, like, basically I think this is true. It's almost a universal thing if you talk to parents, like when you have your first kid and you look in the kid's eyes for the first time.
And you know, literally what you see, like, you know, look, in the best case scenario, you know, we've got a blend, you know, literally a blending of DNA. Um, and you know, the person, you know, you love most in the world, you know, is combined with you and then you know that, you know, the baby shows up with these eyes and the eyes look back at you.
And it's like looking at yourself and it's like looking at the person you love the most in the world and it’s like looking at this new soul all at the same time. And like it’s like a—it is—it’s like a psychological reset.
Um, and so that's just—that's like such a PR—it seems so universal that parents understand that and non-parents don't.
Right? In fact, I have friends who are like, I don't know that I want to have kids because it sounds like it changes your psychology so much. Like I'm worried it's going to ruin everything I like about my life today. And I'm like, no, no, it makes everything better.
And they're like, but you have to spend all your time with a kid. And I'm like, yes, but it's the thing I want to do most in the world. My friends are like, well, that's not what I want because I want to work all the time.
And I'm like, you're missing out. It's like you're, you know, you're brainwashed. And so, so that's like a, you know, that's a thing.
Um, I mean, look, I fully believe people are going to have AI pets, AI friends. They're going to have AI—like all kinds of relationship with AIs. They'll have some form of proxy children. I, I totally buy that. By the way, that will probably be based on their information.
One of the things I think, like for example, your AI, you know, kid is probably going to be a version of you, basically trained on your own training data, right? Uh, well, so the concept actually that's—that's starting to take off in the tech world right now is what's called the digital twin.
So it’s not—it’s not the digital kid, it’s the digital twin. But the idea is, you know, look, like for example I might—I haven't done this yet, but I might do this, which is like I’m not available 24/7, but if I feed a language model like everything I've ever written and everything I've ever said, then maybe if like somebody we work with has wants to ask me a question and it’s the middle of the night, they can ask my digital twin and they'll get back a representative answer to what I would say, right?
And so like that—that's starting to happen. So yeah, like I think a lot of that stuff's going to happen. But the primal relationship that you have with another human being—and that could be another human being you're related to or, by the way, just another human being that you're not related to—like that there's a level, I mean we are very, very, very deeply wired to have those relationships be the center of our universe.
Um, and again, like I said, like there's a big issue here which is people aren't having kids. Um, and so you know that's not getting transmitted and there's very big questions that kind of come, you know, kind of flow out of that.
But it's just different like it—it’s just flat out different when you have your first kid. Um, and certainly you should have—you should have like a dozen kids.
Um, they'd be great. Um, I’m pretty sure like if we tape a show after that like two years later, you're going to be like, oh yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking, like this is just so different.
And maybe I do think that's the kill switch, which—well, let me broaden out—let me broaden out the answer, which is fundamentally technology, AI, all this like it has implications on lots of things, for sure. But one of the things that it does is it makes us—it makes us richer, like it makes our society richer. It makes our material comfort a lot better; it makes it a lot easier to, by the way, to provide for kids and family to be able to have a higher level of material welfare.
Um, there’s this line of critique of new technology, which is like, well, material welfare is not sufficient because it still leaves this God-shaped hole. But the way I think about it is at higher levels of material comfort we have a better shot at figuring out the answer to the God-shaped hole.
Like, would we—if you're going to be confronted with existential questions about religion and philosophy and how to live your life, would you rather do that with material deprivation or with material plenty?
And it’s really easy for people to say that they would prefer to, you know, it's like, you know, would you rather be a monk with a straw mat on the floor, right, eating bread and water trying to figure out the meaning of life, or would you rather be you with like a nice, like fluffy bed and like air—ling, and like, you know, Aral, you know, cheese, you know, from Whole Foods? Like, like—I love that that’s the one you pick.
You'd much rather be you. Like, of course! Like I'm going to have a much better chance at figuring out the important questions in life if I'm not worried about where my next meal comes from, if I'm not worried whether the power's going to go out, if I'm not worried that it's going to—I’m going to freeze to death overnight, if I'm not worried that my kid is not going to have access to a needle, that I’ll have to worry about where my, you know, income's coming from.
Like of course with material plenty I'm going to have a lot more capacity to answer the deep questions. Um, and so I think that's going to be the unanticipated payoff which is as technology and as AI makes the world materially better off, I believe it increases our ability to address these big questions, not decrease it.
Yeah, so I'll agree with you there. Um, but there's one division that I'm going to make which is the reason that religion is so impactful is because it addresses every intellectual, every person on the intellectual spectrum.
So when I went through a phase where I was trying to explain to people, hey, think like this act like this, it will make your life better. These ideas just radically changed me. Um, and I found that largely because as people age they're just not able to be as, um, intellectually nimble.
But you also run into, uh, the reality that some people do not have the intellectual horsepower. Whenever I talk about this I want to remind people it's entirely possible I fall below the line. I'm perfectly willing to accept that.
But you have to understand that there are dumb people that cannot process some of these ideas. And so religion becomes this catch-all for, hey, this is how you live a good life, and it will speak to highly intelligent people and it will speak to people who are just going to follow the Ten Commandments.
I mean the Ten Commandments are basically the Bible’s TLDR, right? So it's like, hey, don't worry about reading that. Just hear the 10 things—go do these 10 things and you're going to be fine. Done in a story format.
And so it really speaks to people, so I don’t think the sort of intellectual approach to, hey, this is why AI is going to be great for you, and in the future it's going to solve all these problems—what's going to happen as a punctuated moment?
I think on a long enough timeline this is all great and it's wonderful and it brings about an age of abundance, but I'm talking about the punctuated moment where people start losing their jobs and they don't want to make the transition.
People, uh, get the sort of warmth and comfort from religion, they're being drawn back into it.
I don't know if the data will support this exact statement, but this feels accurate that people are coming back into religion and sort of regionally, um, large numbers—higher numbers than regionally.
I'm not saying ever in human history, but you know locally. Um, time-wise, and so we've got this massive influx into religion right now. You’ve got this massive thing that's going to disrupt all the things that, um, religion is going to talk about—taking care of people, the soul, a connection to God, the afterlife—all these things that, um, AI and robotics are going to challenge.
And now I think you have this of people that aren't able to navigate intellectually the nuance; it becomes problematic. And I think that is going to have to be addressed.
Now let's take the super boring version of this and it just plays out as regulatory capture and the government's just like nah, my constituents don't want it. It gets mired; it gets super bogged down.
Um, and now everything gets caught up in red tape. And the thing that I can already feel happening now where there's just so much regulation that it's hard to move forward at the rate we could say back when I was a kid—that gets exacerbated.
That's my sort of mundane vision of how this plays out. But I don't see a world in which it just all happens in a sunny, rosy way. Do you?
It's complic—so look, I'm a techno-optimist, not a techno-utopian. Um, and so like I start by saying a couple things, which I don't think technology like—I don't think technology, for that matter economic growth, like give answers to most people for meaning, right?
And so I don't think any of this is a substitute for religion. And so I, I like, I like from that standpoint I maybe have a little bit of humility just on the, on the scope of the importance of, of what we do out here.
Um, so—and like I said, I think this—I think, you know, even in a world of technological abundance and economic abundance, material welfare, I think the, you know, the big questions of meaning are still open questions.
And so like I, I, you know, I will hesitate to make sweeping claims on that. Um, uh, yeah, I guess I just, maybe the other way to come at this, maybe way to think about this is I talk more about the religion side.
So my take on religion—like I, I completely buy religious revivals. And I think we're actually in quite a religious time right now, um, uh, which we should talk about.
Um, because like, for example, I politics have become like a branch of religion. Um, you know, we've invented a whole series of secular religions in the last 150 years, um, and we continue to do that.
And so the sort of form and shape of religions keeps playing out even if they don't have, you know, you know, sort of supposedly supernatural kind of elements to them. Um, and you know, I’m completely open to the idea of like, like I said, I live through a fundamentalist religious revival. I'm completely open to more of those.
Those clearly are happening at various places in the world. Um, you know, one of the—yeah. So I will certainly grant all that.
That said is we do—like we moderns and post-moderns—like we don't relate to religion the way that people did back before our times.
So like the further go back in history—and for sure this was true like 150 years ago back, um, the relationship that people had with religion was different than they have it today.
Um, and I'm going way down the rabbit hole in this, but basically for—for most of recorded human history, religion was not an alart thing. It was something that was a very deep part of who you were as a person.
Um, and—and specifically they had the concept—the concept of peoplehood. There was a people and the people would have shared genetics, um, all be related to each other. The people would have shared culture, the people would have a shared place, right, you know, their own land.
Um, and then they would have—they would have religion. And those concepts were all conjoined. There's this great book—there's a great book called The Ancient City that goes through basically the prehistory of Western Civilization. It goes through the basically what are called the old Indo-European religions and cultures, you know, that sort of ultimately resulted in the Greeks and the Romans and then in Christianity, so it's sort of the—it goes all the way back to the beginning of basically like how Western Society is formed.
Um, and it's basically three-part structure. It was family, um, it was tribe and then it was city.
Um, and then the—these concepts of, uh, shared kinship, genetics, uh, shared culture, shared religion and shared geography were all conjoined.
And if you told somebody in that era that, you know, oh you can switch religions, they would have considered you completely insane.
Um, because being of that religion with those gods was precisely tied to these other factors of culture, genetics, uh and place.
And of course in our society we have completely disconnected those things. You know, if I if I go out in public today and I'm like, no, I'm a part of a peoplehood where I have shared genetics, culture, religion and place, and I'm going to have you know ethnostate for German-Dutch, you know, people in the Midwest like, you know, obviously I get instantly tagged as a white supremacist and like I get, you know, shunned and ostracized from society.
By the way, I'm not proposing that, I don't want that, just for the record.
Um, right? And so we live in a different time. We—we have abstracted religion away from those other things and—and kind of to your point actually as a consequence of that we can now choose our own religion.
Right? And as a—as a modern Westerner you or I are completely free tomorrow to become a, you know, Catholic or a Baptist or Jewish or Muslim or whatever we want or by the way to make up our own religions and by the way, practice and go try to get followers and you know when we call those cults and people do that all the time.
And we, you know, I would argue we live in a world of cults and we’ve got all these new cults out here in California and, you know, some of them are by the way super involved in AI, so like it’s a thing.
Um, so but like religion—religion has become an alart. It's like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books you might have had when you were kid, like you, you can basically design the religion that you want.
And so the on the one hand you would say, oh, well then this is going to be a time of tremendous invention of religious concepts. Um, and religious behaviors, and I, by the way, and I believe, I believe that's true. Um, I do think that's happening.
Um, on the other hand is this like, okay, is religion going to control our lives in the way that it did back when that concept was conjoined with genetics, culture, and place?
It's just hard. Like we just don't take religion that seriously anymore. We could choose to take it seriously again if we want to, but just observationally we don't.
And when it when it becomes in, when it becomes inconvenient, we change, right?
I'll be I'm going to run something by you. Tell me how this lands. I know you have a broad historical context, so, um, also being a student of history, I hesitate to say this, but I have a hypothesis that the religious impulse plays out at the same volume no matter what; it just becomes a question of what is the religious impulse aimed at.
So for instance, as a game developer, uh, I am constantly struck by how toxic the communities can become. And so I sat down one day and I was like, what on Earth is going on here?
And I realized this is the religious impulse that's being met by a video game. So you are communing with the other players, you are committing a ton of your time to this, you are giving yourself over to this game. You care about the lore; you care about the time that you've invested into it.
I mean this is a level of belonging to a game—in a game community—that you would only have gotten historically as a part of either a town, a family, or a religion. And so it meets that criteria.
And so when you have this sense of tremendous belonging and you as the game developer go in and mess with their thing, and the easiest way to explain it is imagine I could go in and mess with the rules of football without consulting anybody.
And tomorrow you roll up and it’s just different and now the player that you loved is no longer a good player and you don't really like it anymore, it doesn't speak to your skill set. People would be outraged.
Like my dad was into this team, my dad was into this game, and I was raised on it and now I'm here and, and you changed it. And you're trash. And that's basically what happens.
Now if I'm right that that's writing on the—the neurological architecture that makes religion so powerful, right? It's like, hey, that volume is still dialed to 11.
Now hopefully nobody's going to go kill in the name of their favorite video game, but I think that's a narrative question and not a, an architectural question. So if I were to get people to believe that by investing in this video game like a cult somehow meant something about you and society and we were all fighting for the, you know, insert now politics, and you get how suddenly with the right narrative, whoa, like people will go.
And that's another era, I think politics right now is triggering the religious impulse. So I don't think the volume is dialed down. Even if we quote unquote don't take religion as seriously, I think the outcome's going to be the same, because this is an—the architecture of the human mind.
Yeah, so I 100% agree with everything you said. I just interpret the consequences of it differently, which is, imagine telling an Athenian Greek or a Roman or a Christian in 300 A.D. or a Christian for that matter in 1800 A.D. that your now religion is a video game.
They would have thought you completely lost your mind, right? Like wait a minute, like you've now taken that entire religious impulse which is every bit as strong as it was and you've like now applied it to a video game.
Like you're, you're like, you have completely disconnected the importance of religion from reality, from like actual physical reality.
Like it no longer is relevant to you in terms of like the shape and form of any aspect of like your actual—anything in any traditional concept of community, city, environment, anything like that—family, by the way, does it guide your decisions about like, you know, you know, things like reproduction, children?
You know, are you indoctrinating your kids? You, by the way, maybe you are! Maybe you’re indoctrinating your kids in World of Warcraft!
But like indoctrinating your kids in World of Warcraft is like—that's not the same as like indoctrinating your kids in Catholicism. Like that's a—World of Warcraft—it may be very—it’s very—it may be equally intense, but it's not as comprehensive and an impact on the worldview of how people live their lives.
Um, and so I just—I agree with you, but I just think that leads to like tremendous amounts of, um, of displacement.
But then also let me say I really agree with your last point, which is the politics point, which I think is something that is extremely important. Because you, especially sitting here today three weeks before, you know, very big election, um, uh, something that I often point to when I talk to people about this, um, is, um, if you look at the charts of, uh, you know, the big general population surveys of would you be comfortable with your kid marrying somebody of a different ex, um, you know, you know, there's the famous chart of a different race and you know, whatever, 60, 80 years ago that was like 90% uncomfortable.
Today it’s like 10%, um, and falling. Um, somebody of a different, um, and then the other one would be the—the somebody of a different religion.
And if you had pulled people 80 years ago, when—when they pulled people on this, like Catholics, Jews, Protestants all were like, no way! You know, you're not marrying outside the faith, and today at least like in the U.S. very few people care.
And so like that chart is like is like way down the chart of do you care if your kid marry somebody of the other rel of the other political party? That chart is up and to the right.
And so—crazy, right?
And so to me that maps exactly to what you said, um, which is, yeah, so politics has become our religion. There was actually a very important thinker, writer in the—in the 20th century, Eric Voegelin. Um, and, um, he was, he's the best writer I found in this topic and he, he bas—and he basically started—he started his work actually in the 30s and 40s.
Um, and he was basically trying to explain at the time, uh, the rise of both communism and fascism.
Um, and he's like, wow, you know, these people are crazy! Like these people are really extreme. And then he's like, all right, like what is leading, you know, both on the one hand and like, you know, Nazis on the other hand to be like this, you know, sort of fevered, enthusiastic about these like incredible, you know, these incredibly high, you know, kind of impact social movements with all these consequences.
Um, uh, and so he, he basically developed a theory very consistent with what you said, which is, you know, which he called, I think, up, you know, political religions.
Um, and he—and he did the mapping and basically said like, these are direct, these are in fact direct standingings for religion. Christianity actually both Christianity and Nazism, sorry, both communism and Nazism were legendarily very hostile to Christianity, um, you know, precisely for that reason because Christianity was, was was the threat.
They were, you know, quite literally trying to, you know, the dominant religion in Europe at that time. Um, and so, you know, again, like exactly you're right. I think the impulses with us.
I think many, you know, both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. today exhibit that exact same kind of religious behavior around their politics, um, you know, on the one hand it can sound, I think, patronizing to say that because, you know, people think that their politics are all carefully thought through.
They don't think they're doing it, but you know, politics are important to people in the same way that religious religion is and was important to people. And so, you know, there certainly act, you know, like it, and they certainly point in their politics to how political choices are going to affect how people live, which is very consistent with the view of a religion.
Um, yeah, and so I think they're displacing that religious energy into politics. I think if they displace that religious energy into video game cults, like that's probably an improvement, maybe, maybe it’s certainly more benign.
I think for the reasons that you said earlier.
So what does the religious impulse done well look like? So there's obviously just funnel it into a traditional religion that's lasted for thousands of years—probably going to be fine.
Um, but given that a lot of people are not doing that, how can you do that well?
Yeah, so I—the anthropological view of religion, I think is it's about group formation and cohesion, right? And this is the RO in The Ancient City to talk about this. Like this is the role that religion—
So the—so the original—the original form of this and sort of Cl, sort of prehistory, the original form of this was we’ve got the family, um, you know, which is like basically cousins, you know, it’s basically the extended family up through cousins.
Um, and by the way cousin marriage—you marry your cousins, and so you try to keep, you know, the family in the family.
Um, and then the family has its gods, um, and then you—and then over time the families aggregated—the clans aggregated up into tribes, which consisted of multiple families, and then the tribes would have its gods.
Um, and then the tribes would aggregate up into the cities, um, and the cities would have their gods, right? And so as a member of a city you had three tiers of gods that you basically were required to, you know, basically to, to worship and, and to honor.
And you literally had with the, you had the fire, you know, the permanent fire, and you had to keep the fire lit and sort of, you know, you do sacrifices to the gods and so forth.
Um, and then the morality, the original morality of it was, if you meet somebody from another, um, you know, family, tribe, city, they worship different gods, right? They have their own gods, and so your gods are inherently at war with their gods.
And your moral obligation is to kill them on sight.
That's aggressive, right? Which literally, right, it was literally like kill them on sight. So, so had you told them, had you told people from that era, from those, you know, from those many centuries, you know, no, you're supposed to be tolerant to people from other religions, they would have said, “Are you out of your mind? They're a threat! If we don't kill them, they're going to kill us!” We kill them on sight.
And so it was like, you know, it's like the concept of Human Rights is like 180-degree inversion from like the original form of society, by the way a big improvement, I think, but a very, very big inversion.
Um, and so like at a—at sort of the most fundamental level, so why do I go through that? At the fundamental level, what's the religion for? It's for group cohesion.
Why did it work that way? It's because that's what maximally bonded the family, the tribe and the city together at a time when physical survival was very much up for grabs, right?
Like is the family, the tribe, the city going to make it through the year? TBD. Is there going to be a famine, a flood, a mudslide, you know, a volcano eruption? Is another tribe going to come over and kill you?
Are you going to run out of food? Like those are all very important questions. The entire tribe, you know, city had to really pull together for physical survival. And so religion was like the bonding element that that that pulled together a group.
And I would argue you, you know, fast forward to today, that's exactly the behavior you see in video games, right? Which is, you know, it's not just an—it's not just a member of like a video game cult is not just an individual. They're not acting as an individual; they're inevitably—they're acting as a member of a group, right?
And—and it's group cohesion and then I also apply the Jonathan Haidt kind of theory here. Um, you know, kind of coming from—from psychology, which is, um, he has this great, great line he talks about in the book The Righteous Mind where, uh, he says—U he uses the word morality, but you can basically equivalently I think use the word religion.
Uh, he said morality binds and blinds, um, which is to say a shared morality or a shared religion—it binds people together into a group. It, you know, it identifies us versus them, friend versus foe, in—in the way that it did also in prehistory.
And then he said—and this is really important, the other part is—it blinds, uh, it sets up a knowledge framework, a perception framework by which you emphasize confirming information that's good for your group and you dismiss disconfirming information that's bad for your group.
And you literally become blind, right? You—and to the—to the point—and you see this today with Republicans and Democrats where a very, you know, generally the more passionate the Republican or Democrat the, the least—the the less able they are to articulate the other side's point of view correctly, right?
The less able to steal man the other side's view, which means they're literally giving up on psychological terms, they're giving up what's called theory of mind. They're—they're giving up the ability to understand what it's like in somebody else's shoes because it's more important to be a member of the group than it is to be able to understand the other.
Um, anyway, so, so this is all very much in support of what you're saying. Like these are very fundamental primal behaviors. Um, I, I think that they're—they are very important today in our society as much as ever, which you see in the politics.
Um, and then, you know, I think they're going to be equally important, you know, hundreds of years from now. Hopefully this impulse gets channeled in productive directions.
Yeah, yeah, we’ll see.
So, Kaio, Ley has talked about how we could experience up to 50% of job displacement. Um, it's not like there won't be new jobs, but you're going to have a very substantive percentage of people that are either just temperamentally or age-wise unwilling to make a change. Societally, how do we handle that?
Yeah, so I don't—I don't think that's true at all. So I just, yeah, yeah, so that's the classic—in economics that's what's called the lump of labor fallacy.
So it's one of the—it’s one, and by the way, Kai is a very bright guy, so you know, he may well be right on this, but what any economist will tell you is it's a fallacy, and it's actually a—it’s the fallacy at the heart of Marxism, at the heart of socialism.
And it's a very intuitive fallacy. It's one that people fall into very easily. U—it's called the lump of labor fallacy because—and there's like a big great Wikipedia page on this people can read.
Um, the lump of labor fallacy basically is, there's a certain amount of labor being done in the world today, right? And that labor is either going to be done by people or it's going to be done by machines.
Um, and if it's done by people, then they're going to make money by doing it and be able to provide for themselves. If it's done by machines, then the people are going to become unemployed and they're going to be screwed.
Um, and what's interesting about this fallacy is this has been a fallacy that literally has been placed in basically, you know, political thought, um, and, um, you know, sort of Marxist economic thought, socialist economic thought for like 300 years.
Um, the Marxists really kind of packaged it up and turn it into a—turn it into a religion actually. Um, but, um, you know, this is kind of the—the pervasive thing. This was sort of the immediate kind of concern, panic, at the very beginning of the industrial revolution, um, which was you were going to have machines that were going to substitute for human labor that were going to miserate everybody.
Um, this actually is, um, sort of embedded in a lot of myths and legends, um, that we—you know, that we kind of have in—in our kind of cultural DNA.
Um, there's a famous—I, if you've heard about this, there used to be, or is a famous ballad song of this, the myth of this figure John Henry. Um, and, uh, it's, it's—kids are often taught this song, it's John Henry, the steel-driving man.
Um, and the idea was, it's—it’s the guy—this is like, you know, this would be like when the railroads are getting built. Like, so this is like the guy who's like using a hammer to drive spikes into the railbed to—to put railroad tracks down, which used to be something people did by hand.
Um, and it was this thing where, you know, one of the, you know, John Henry's like the famous guy who can drive in the most spikes. Um, and then one day the foreman shows up with the machine that drives in the spikes.
And U, there's the—they have a—they have a contest where John Henry competes with the machine who can drive in most most spikes. And it turns out John Henry wins the contest and then drops dead from a heart attack, some kind of symbolic, you know, the— the last gas of human effort before the machines take over.
And that dates back to like, I don't know, like 1870. Right? So that's like 150 years ago people had this fear.
Um, and then basically what we've had is we've had 300 years of modern technology, industrialization, automation, computerization—literally three centuries now—and sitting here today there are more jobs than ever in the world than ever.
Um, and—and at higher wages for people, right?
And so in practice what's happened is we now have three centuries of evidence that basically that's a fallacy. That's actually not what happens.
What happens actually is the opposite, uh, which is technology creates far more jobs than it destroys and creates jobs that are better, right, at higher levels of income.
Um, and so people adopt those jobs. Like are they going to be people just get behind? There will be some, and look, there is some—resp—and I should also back up for a second and say, um, conversations about this topic, it's very easy to come across in my experience talking about myself, it's very easy to come across as like judgmental and patronizing, uh, because it's very easy to come across basically saying, you know, basically.
So like one of the things that I will claim is that one of the things I will claim, and what we're about to talk about, is that there are
That don't know you, um, he wrote a document basically saying technology is going to save us all.
He went through in detail a lot of these points—very counterintuitive coming out of the Bay Area for sure. Um, yeah, please, I wouldn't say it's going to save us all.
So I would say I'm an optimist, not a utopian. And so it goes, this is very important. It goes back to where we started, which is I don't think—this everything I just described does not answer all of life's deep questions, right? Like, it's not enough to just have material welfare; like I'm 100% on that.
But, like, having material welfare is better than not having material welfare, right? And it's the best starting point to be able to answer the big questions.
So I just wanted to qualify that I'm not—I am actually myself not proposing a new religion.
Mark, this has been incredible! Where can people follow along with you?
Oh good, uh, so I am on Twitter, now called X. I am on there as P Marque (P M RCA). That is probably one of my main presences.
Then I have a Substack, which is linked to from the Twitter account. And then we have a YouTube channel.
My partner Ben and I have a YouTube show that we do intermittently, but we get good feedback on. So maybe we could link to that. Awesome, guys! I can definitely vouch for his content; it is amazing!
I hope you guys will check it out. Speaking of things that I hope you will do, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe.
And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace!
If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more.
Today we're going deep into a conversation that has me incredibly fired up. We're talking about our future—your future, my future, the future of humanity itself—and we're doing it with one of the most visionary minds in artificial intelligence: Emod Moac.