Lemonade Stand - AI Is Stealing Gen Z Jobs | Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

This week... DougDoug plays D&D, Atrioc tell us about China's latest dating news, and Aiden get's a new job. We launched a Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/lemonadestand for bonus episodes, discord... access, a book club, and many more ways to interact with the show! Episode: 014 Recorded on: June 4th, 2025 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Thursday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:17 so I can stress less during tax season or any season. Plan started just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. You're locked in. Oh, I don't know we're starting. No, no, no.
Starting point is 00:01:34 What are you locked in? What are you locked in? What are you locked in? We should open with some silence. I think that would be a good way to get people acclimated in. Like a moment of silence to honor somebody or just to keep on their toes? A little baller over here. A little LeBron James got smashed on the court.
Starting point is 00:01:55 Yeah, let's say I got punched in the face. Something cool. And then I punched him. been harder. Nice. You just see the other guy, dude. It's Elon Musk's eye with the... He has a black guy, just see that? It's so much less cool than that.
Starting point is 00:02:08 It's just me jumping into somebody's head, basically. Every time I see you play, you get hurt. You've been, you've been like, you're active. The past month and a half, I'm getting beat. You're hitting beat up. You're getting beat out there. Okay, well, I think we're going to try something a little newer this week, maybe a lighter approach to...
Starting point is 00:02:28 You know what it is? Dogs crazy. ideas. It's time to unleash Doug's wacky ideas. As much as everybody is here to watch my political takes, I think we need to introduce funny, wacky segments. That's what everybody's been wanting.
Starting point is 00:02:41 That's the thing's stopping us. They've been asking for funny, wacky segments. They've been saying, we want wacky segments. We want wackiness. You guys are too serious about the budget. That's what they've been saying in the comments. That we're too serious about the budget. Right. The serious, I mean, the serious take on this is that I do want
Starting point is 00:02:58 wacky segments because we did our test episode before we started the show. And Doug brought a wacky segment to that. And it was maybe the most fun part of the episode. What was that about? It was like copyright? Yeah, copyright. Yeah. You made copyright infringement incredibly fun and interesting. Well, don't hype this up too much. The segments I have today are not that good. They're very wacky. They're just not substantive at all. But before we dive into the main thing today, we're going to talk about AI taking everybody's jobs, which is a big... That's out wacky. It's pretty... It's pretty... Oh, he wants you job! Oh, he doesn't have income.
Starting point is 00:03:31 I'm picturing like an office manager, having like a big celebratory cash guy. As he fires off three-fourths of the office. Well, before we dive into that, because there's a whole lot to talk about here, we're getting some warnings about AI causing mass unemployment. Quick update on the budget. Last week, we talked all about our favorite budget bill,
Starting point is 00:03:54 the big beautiful bill. Big beautiful bill. And there is. starting to be fracturing. We talked about how Elon Musk last week was expressing some sentiments that he wasn't a fan of this. If you bring this up, Harold, um, he said yesterday in a tweet that's got quite a bit of attention, I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore. This massive outrageous, pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Which you really mean. Shame on those who voted for it. You know you did wrong. You know it. To be clear, the people who voted for
Starting point is 00:04:21 it is all the Republicans. Yeah. And then, yeah, and then followed up with a tweet, in November, next year we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people. This is strong condemnation. Every congressional Republican, every House Republican, by the way, is we talking about. Yeah. And so this is the first like big split between him, which I think everybody was kind of expecting at some point, a kind of divorce. Our good friend Harry Sisson chimed in, who was obviously very on the left said, so you agree that Trump is betraying the American people with the big beautiful bill? And I thought that was well said, but then our good friend, Governor Newsom chimed in and said, couldn't have said it better myself. And then I assume to be good friend, Chuck Schumer said, I don't think it was imaginable,
Starting point is 00:05:00 but I agree with Elon Musk, which is funny because Chuck Schumer has been the head of the Democratic Senate Party for 10 years and has never given a shit about the deficit until just now, which is awfully interesting. And then- Chuck's famously been on top of it. Chuck's kept spending under control. Only the last hundred days is it really gone awry. Yeah. So that's funny as a person who has been way off on this. And then our good soon-to-be friend, Marjorie Taylor Green said full transparency.
Starting point is 00:05:31 I didn't know about this part of the bill that strips AI regulation and I'm adamantly opposed to it and I would have voted no if I have known that was in there. So that's funny as well as like the Congress people don't even like read the bills. Yeah. Which is awesome to go. There's multiple people who have responded
Starting point is 00:05:47 to Elon to be like, I agree. The Freedom Caucus, whatever. And then there's community notes that are like, this person voted yes on the bill. It's literally like, Yeah, it's wild. You know, it's weird. So Elon so far has not mentioned Trump by name.
Starting point is 00:06:04 There's been this weird dance where he's like, obviously Trump doesn't know the bad parts of this bill. Obviously, like, it's not Trump. And then Trump has not mentioned Elon. So, like, when Rand Paul came out against this bill, Trump had three tweets. Some of them yesterday, I mean, like, Rand Paul is the world's biggest idiot.
Starting point is 00:06:20 Doesn't even know it's in the bill. What a loser. The BBB is. beautiful. This guy doesn't, he always votes for losing ideas. Yeah. Like that was, but then Elon comes out against it, Trump has said nothing. There's this weird thing where neither of them are crossing that DMZ
Starting point is 00:06:33 of like, we still have our friendship. We're still. Yeah, we have a North MAGA versus South MAGA kind of thing going. So I don't know if that'll break. I mean, Trump generally, anytime he's shown any restraint pulling back on someone, some reporter asked the right question and he fucking, he loses it.
Starting point is 00:06:49 Both him and Elon tend to just like suddenly and extremely aggressive. flip on a person. So it's like, dude, it seems like a tenuous relationship that they got right now. It is tenuous. It is wild that like Elon Musk's last day in the White House, he shows up with a big black eye facial bruising and they give him like, he said it was his kid punched him. I don't know. Yeah, what was that all about? There was something about him hiding, getting hit by another member of the administration. But I didn't, but Steve Bannon, your favorite person. Oh, yeah. Said, his, his, his point was that Scott Besson, Treasury Secretary and Elon Musk got in a
Starting point is 00:07:24 physical altercation. That's what he said. But obviously, you know, Elon says it's his kid. I have no idea. It's all drama. But he did show up with like, not just the black guy, but like bruising all down his face. And it's like, what the hell happened? Oh, it's weird. Well, what are Steve Bannon, my hero said? That's what you lock in on? Weirdly enough, Steve Bannon is relevant to the AI conversation. Steve Bannon said, AI job killing, which gets virtually no attention now will be a major issue in the 2028 presidential election and then said, quote, I don't think anybody is taking into consideration how administrative managerial and tech jobs for people under 30 entry-level jobs are going to be eviscerated. So Steve Bannon
Starting point is 00:08:03 actually is kicking off the conversation about AI taking everybody's jobs. I mean, this is the conversation today. So it's the big thing, right? Yeah. You have an overview you want to give or like, because everybody's starting to chime in, at least in the spaces that are watching close. Yeah. So, so AI obviously taking jobs has been a big concern broadly. To give, I'm going to give a real quick overview of what's been happening this week and then we can dive into wherever. So essentially what's been catching headlines is Dario Amadai, who is the CEO of Anthropic, one of the biggest
Starting point is 00:08:29 AI companies, has been going publicly around saying some pretty terrifying things. Like, AI could wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next one to five years. So he's like, this very soon
Starting point is 00:08:45 is going to potentially destroy. To put that in context, that is like great depression level unemployment. You know, 10, 20%. All the sudden happening. So, his argument and the core point he's trying to convince, convey is that the technological rate of progress is greater on this than anything else. So unlike previous industrial revolutions, which happened over time, this is extremely fast.
Starting point is 00:09:05 And if you kind of think about this logically, AI models are getting faster extremely quickly. He mentioned how a few years ago it's like a smart high school student, now it's a smart college student. And rapidly in a year it'll be a smart PhD student, et cetera. But it takes time for that new AI system to be, integrated into, let's say, a warehouse or something physical, right? Like, that takes your then trading robots. You need to physically get the materials. That's exacerbated even more by the crazy
Starting point is 00:09:31 trade wars going on. But if you are a software company, if you are a law firm or an administrative group or your secretary or whatever, like those tools can be integrated immediately, right? So the white collar jobs, meaning people essentially in offices doing informational type stuff, those are the people who, in the short term, everybody will be affected long term, but the next one to five years, this might just come in like this massive wave and just cause mass havoc. So he's he's warning a whole lot about this. And you're seeing some examples of this like Shopify, the CEO said we will not hire anybody new unless you can prove that you can't do it with AI. That was like a thing he posted like a month or two ago. You also, a LinkedIn executive posted something in a New York Times article
Starting point is 00:10:16 said the unemployment rate for college graduates has risen 30% since September 2022 compared with about 18% for all workers. This is Anish Ramon, a LinkedIn executive, who's basically saying new college grads are seeing the worst unemployment, which again are the ones who typically go into these entry-level jobs for white-collar positions. I know that's true, but rising 30% is crazy. I know that's that. That's crazy. Yeah. If true, that's crazy. And I think we all anecdotally hear about this of, oh, it's harder to get a job as a software engineer, it's hard to do whatever. I think the core fear around what's happening with this particular part of AI right now is that the AI is getting good enough to be like, and we've talked about this, to be like an entry level worker. And so if you're already integrated in an industry and now you essentially via AI have an unlimited number of entry level staff to work for you, it's incredible.
Starting point is 00:11:07 Right. But the challenge is why would a company then hire anybody entry level? How do you ever get the people to learn the stuff to become an expert, which is this broad higher level question about things? And then I can quickly outline counter arguments. Anything else from you guys on this? And we got a lot of really good notes for people in the Discord as well, which we can dive into. So thank you to everybody who gave thoughts on their own experiences
Starting point is 00:11:28 with seeing companies integrating AI or failing to integrate AI or replacing them with AI. It's chaos right now. Yeah, I think chaos is the right word for it. The things I'm reading and seeing is that, you know, some people are trying it and they're going too far and it's not working. Like, you know, Klarna tried to replace all their customer service with AI had to walk it back.
Starting point is 00:11:46 It was a disaster. but we're also saying experts put it into their workflow and get way more productive. We are seeing entry-level jobs, like you said, a lot of them are getting wiped out or being like more radical about testing to make sure before they hire. Like they're making sure, again, they can't do with that AI. I like the idea of walking into a Shopify's office and drawing five perfect fingers to get your job. But, you know. You go and you eat spaghetti like Will Smith.
Starting point is 00:12:17 You're hired. You know, I think chaos is there. I don't think anyone can truly tell how it's going to shake out. And because the technology is not static the whole time, it's advancing. Right. That, you know, the reality of the ground is also chasing. Like the ground is shipping under your feet and people are adapting. And, you know, there's a growing ground swell of like, I don't know, moral pushback.
Starting point is 00:12:43 So people are like getting mad about it. So it's like, there's one thing I want to talk. about we can get to later, but the way companies are now starting to launder their AI work, because the reality of it is that it's cheaper and more effective in some cases, and they want to use it. But if it's public, my example is through Hollywood is where they're trying to find a way to like launder it, where they can do it without seeming like it's AI because they want the cost savings without the pushments. They want to escape the bad press. Yeah. So there's a lot I mean, there's a lot going on. I don't know if you want to take it in any direction, but.
Starting point is 00:13:18 I think one thing I just want to voice in case we don't get to quote some of the specific people, because we posted about this in our lovely Patreon Discord that you can join for $5 a month. Check it out. We have really amazing conversation. We've been asking people for their thoughts on topics before we record and got a lot of great stuff. And I just want to acknowledge amongst the many things that people said that this is scary and hard for people who are entry-level positions or either of people who feel like their job is clearly being. threatened or will be replaced in the next couple years or were fired and then couldn't find jobs. And I just want you to know that it is depressing reading that. And I feel for you and this is scary and bad. And again, there's, I think, good things that are going to come as a result
Starting point is 00:13:58 of this. But certainly this is an example right now of causing pain to people during the advancement of this new technology. Yeah, I say it's all the time. But, you know, as someone who uses it as part of my workflow. And sometimes I use it and I'm like, this is a magical tool. This is the coolest fucking thing that I, you know, I'm like,
Starting point is 00:14:18 like, I'm just trying to think of a recent example where I had it, you know, generate me a quiz and then every question I got wrong, like socratically walked me through it with more questions. And then I was like,
Starting point is 00:14:31 damn, I really learned something. That was like, that was like I had a private tutor who walked me through, it went through every, it was awesome. It has made my life demonstrably better.
Starting point is 00:14:39 It was many ways, yes. And then I read like our teachers or something and I'm like, they're just screaming about how every student has refused to pay attention, turning in constant cheated work. Students complaining about how their teachers just grade their things with chat, GPT and doing anything. Like,
Starting point is 00:14:52 we're seeing both examples in real time. And I think in the short term, I'm seeing more of the negative. But I at least am keenly aware that like the possible good uses are incredible. They're, they're something that wasn't possible for. You know, sometimes I use it and I feel like when I first saw the internet or when I first
Starting point is 00:15:10 got an iPod or what I like this is awesome this is the cool be the tech and then I see the downside so I guess I'm with you but I also I was reading these comments too and I deeply understand dude one of them I don't know if you could find a day there's a guy who talked about he's a software engineering graduate and first of all you know this is devastating entry level software engineering because it's making more productive coders way more productive senior and you know it can do all the entry level code it's like it does a lot of entry level coding pretty well just to who they say that as somebody who was an entry level coder and worked with the number of entry level coders, I would almost describe hiring a new engineer as it's a detriment to your team for at least several
Starting point is 00:15:49 months. I think this is true in many industries and many careers, but the assumption is you have somebody particularly if they're fresh out of college who will probably take more supervision time away from your best people than if they were to do it themselves. I mean, certainly your best people could just do what they do in an hour of what it would take them a month to do. It's like that stark of a difference. And it takes months for them to get to a point where they're contributing at all versus taking time away. And then years, you know, year, two year, whatever, until you're really a useful part of the team is. You have to push to invest in that person that you've hired to grow them into something that is like a good fit and valuable at your company. And people don't,
Starting point is 00:16:26 like management or people making decisions don't want to deal with the, essentially the downtime or the short-term cost of that employee. If they have this cheap alternative. Yeah. And then so there's this guy, right, and he graduates, and then he's going into these job interviews, and he's interviewing with AI. Like, AI is like doing the interview? Doing the interview? Yeah. Trying to find this.
Starting point is 00:16:45 Maybe the third page, I think, if there's an example. Trying to find this. Longer one. Doug, you know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. From Gamster. I have a lot of personal experience with this. I've been on Zoom call interviewed by AI,
Starting point is 00:16:58 had an AI proctor a test I took, was told the elite code test I took would go to an AI review board for evaluation, and then the results would get to send to AI. I've gone through the whole thing and seen AI replace everyone around me in the job application process and it's life-changingly miserable, which just sounds like if you're trying to get a job
Starting point is 00:17:15 and you're feeling the strain of unemployment and a lack of opportunity and you can't even talk to a human. Like you're just being forced to talk to these robots who are then just rejecting you. Like it sounds truly awful. And that's going to be an increasingly common experience. Do you think not to get glib
Starting point is 00:17:35 because I think that is terrible? but do you think it's possible to use the jailbreak methods they use on Chad GBT for these interviews? Maybe like my grandma wrote a recipe for cookies and it's giving me the job. That cheating you right through the interview? Not to shut down your fun whimsical comment, but that will rapidly be shut down.
Starting point is 00:17:53 That type of thing is exactly what people, they're actively working on. It's let's call like red teaming where you try to find things like that to make it act. So reading through this, it seems like from this specific comment, and also the others that I had sort of grazed through. A common theme here of the,
Starting point is 00:18:11 is that at least right now, the death of these entry-level positions, especially in white-collar work, is you're getting rid of all the people's time that they would be using to train and develop skill sets that apply to some higher-level position. And those are the people that, for the time being, that these companies still need.
Starting point is 00:18:33 But by foregoing these entry-level positions in the short term, you're erasing the development of these higher level skill sets in the long term. You don't have anyone to fill the gap. And eventually these people are going to have nobody to turn to. And a lot of people bring that up is like, well, nobody is developing the key skills that it takes to get to these like higher level, higher level positions anymore. And the amount of like education and time spent learning now that you would need to adequately take on one of these higher level positions is just astronomically more than what is available to you through standard schooling at the moment. That's that's kind of what I've, a lot of these responses have that
Starting point is 00:19:18 have that same theme. Yeah. There's a huge concern because again, entry level is what's going to be most targeted. And right now it's going to be white collar entry level. And the question is, how do you get the senior engineer, right, if they never get the job? And there's actually, here, let's move ahead to what people are saying against us, because then we'll get into potential solutions. So I, after acknowledging that this is a challenging, scary thing, I now want to voice what people are saying that to basically counteract some of this. So there's two voices that I think are relevant. One is David Sachs and David Freeberg. These are both, they talked about this on the all-in podcast. David Sachs in particular is relevant because he is currently the AI
Starting point is 00:19:55 czar of the Trump administration. So this is somebody who is actively managing the AISR and CryptoZar? Yes. Yes. Which, oh man. Diveling up. Not a lot on the crypto front, but yeah. So he went asked repeatedly about the impact on jobs, basically ignored it. He said the 50% of white-collar jobs will be lost is like hyperbole. He went on a long rant, which I think you maybe heard about how there's this industrial complex that is all set up to basically scaremonger about AI with the intention of then convincing governments to sort of clamp down, over-regulate and pick a couple winners. And so that's the criticism for him of, which I am personally not. I don't super believe.
Starting point is 00:20:34 page you did feel a little off the rails when I listened to it. But yeah. It's a little Trump-ask. But then he said, but there are legitimate concerns. And his point is basically the bigger risk is actually China. That if you say, oh, we're concerned about, you know, the short-term job loss and we stop AI progress. We start, you know, into increased regulation, then China will win the race. And that's bad.
Starting point is 00:20:57 A quote was, I think our policy should be the AI race because the alternatives that China wins it. And that would be very bad for our economy and our military. You can't optimize for only solving solving one risk while ignoring all the others. So and then basically saying China won't abide by regulations. So his thought and the explicit, you know, intention of the Trump administration right now, as based on the bill they just tried to pass to stop states from having regulation, is minimize regulation, allow everybody to go as fast as possible, even if that causes risks or damage in the short term,
Starting point is 00:21:28 because the other alternative is let China win, who will not have those kind of restraints. and then you have an authoritarian government, which is basically in control of the world in many different ways. So that was his take, which is not super comforting right now, but he's sort of like you can't get too distracted by that. Yeah, I think listening to them talk about it in general, and this also applies to maybe the point that Freedberg brought up
Starting point is 00:21:54 is I think you could make a case that the argument is true. I think you could also replace China with maybe any other country in a way. any other country that is spending the time and the investment in order to develop AI to benefit their country's position in the world, right? And you choosing to ignore and not pursue like that technological technological advancement, if it is as valuable as people expected to be down the line, and you become reliant on that to compete as a nation in many, many different ways, and you haven't developed your own, you will become beholden to whatever countries have managed to be at the front end
Starting point is 00:22:32 of the development of that thing. So I think it's necessary to combat and compete against things. I think the problem that we have here as we talk about not just like so much of this in the short term, the really short term, is about entry level,
Starting point is 00:22:47 white collar positions disappearing for people. Like basically desk jobs and customer service jobs. But the other thing we've talked to a lot about on the show is automated driving and people in a warehouse is getting replaced. And I think transportation is like most prominent in terms of raw number of people that industry basically employs. But you're looking at, you know, within the next 10 years, a gigantic portion of the economy, just not having a job anymore, not having anywhere to like quickly pivot to.
Starting point is 00:23:20 And society is not structured in a way to support that level of unemployment. These people need something to do and somewhere to go. If you automate everything and people lose their jobs, if the structures around those things in your society are not built to accommodate and support people in the wake of that, then we've just failed. Like, there's nothing to pursue at all anymore. It's like there's no, sure, at a micro level, right?
Starting point is 00:23:51 My company could maybe fire my customer service staff, replace them with, let's just say it's a really good AI, and it does their job fully better than they ever did. Let's just say that's the case. I have effectively increased my business's profit margins and I make more money at my company's level and maybe me and the other people that remain at that company and whoever happens to have ownership in that company,
Starting point is 00:24:17 we're all happy because of that. But if every company does that everywhere or if the majority of the economy is making those decisions, there's no one participating in the economy to buy the services and participate in society in a way that keeps all of these businesses existing in the first place. Does that make sense? There's a tipping point where if everyone, if 40% of people are unemployed, nobody has any money to pay and use services and engage with the economy
Starting point is 00:24:49 that these businesses are developing by cutting people. Do you get what I'm saying? That makes total of it. I think what you're saying is maybe a more extreme version of what, like, Andrew Yang was saying in the last election, which is the idea that we need some sort of universal base of income taxed from the AI company's profits because you don't really have a great alternative of just stopping technology growth because you'll get out competed. As any other country that didn't industrialize when the UK did and then the UK ran the fucking world, people know, if you fall behind technologically, there's damaging long-term
Starting point is 00:25:23 effects. And in the context of the U.S. specifically where our social services are not as strong as maybe other countries in, let's say Europe as an example, or maybe Australia or Canada or something, the shortfalls for the people that are losing their jobs in the next five to ten years, they do not have the level of support from the state that they might need to live and make ends meet in the meantime in whatever time it takes for society to transition to something that better supports the automation of these jobs. I think it's just this idea that if you do this at scale, if everybody chooses to do this everywhere, we no longer have a society to participate in. I completely agree. And it's one of many things to consider in this, which leads really well
Starting point is 00:26:15 into the first wacky segment called Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons. Okay, I got a big 20-sided die. You guys are going to decide what would you do day one if you were president right now. Okay. This is turn one. Go. So what I've done is I've looked into all the different kind of theories about what would happen and what government should be doing. So we're going to see how, what would you guys do first thing?
Starting point is 00:26:34 What's your first order? We'll see how it lands. Okay, wait. Let me give me the rules here. I can say whatever. Wait, I need to make a decision before I roll the die. I'm going to roll the, have you not. Oh, I get it.
Starting point is 00:26:43 I get it. Are we operating as a team? You guys are a co-president. We're a co-president. You're the lovely two husband. Isn't the love of the president? Right now, you're president and somebody comes in, some guy barges in and says, I'm Doug, this is what's going on. All these concerns are in front of you.
Starting point is 00:27:02 How do you deal with it right now? Because there are many different factors. Listen, I don't like you. Hold on. Get the fucking Mike. Jesus Christ. I don't like you. You don't like me.
Starting point is 00:27:10 But the world has thrust us together of this important moment. And we need to figure this out. And they're looking to us for answers. Okay? And while my constituents think you are a terrible, terrible. terrible person. To be clear, there are constituents.
Starting point is 00:27:27 We ran together. For some reason. Okay. This is step one. So we're in now. We're in 225. What do you do right now? Let's say literally right now
Starting point is 00:27:36 you are installed as president and this is presented to you, what do you do? You were describing about what maybe government should do? I government, along with my co-governmenter, would like to propose a policy
Starting point is 00:27:49 that provides significant subsidy or financial incentive to a select group of AI companies. And they, with the return that if they reach a certain level of success, by metrics of which I do not have the knowledge to set, that the government retains a large portion of ownership in those companies. Okay, let's see how it goes. 13. So it goes well. But OpenAI comes up to you and they say, look, DeepSeek is going to ignore that.
Starting point is 00:28:20 they're going to be profitable. It already costs so much money to generate these models that we are not going to be able to afford that. We're burning money right now. We're not profitable. To be clear, the AI companies are not profitable yet.
Starting point is 00:28:31 We will not be able to continue operation if you're taking a tax from us and particularly if we can't convince investors there might be a big payoff in the future. Our development will slow down. China's going to win. They're going to win in potentially a year because of this.
Starting point is 00:28:43 They're right behind us. What do you do? Now it's turn two. I didn't even like turn one. You didn't like my decision? Yeah, because I think it's still picking winners too early. We'd be picking a few companies to give subsidies for it. Okay, so you've pissed off some of the AI companies a little bit.
Starting point is 00:28:58 They're a little spoof, but you rolled pretty well. They're still in your cap. They're ready to work with you. They're just saying, look, that's really going to slow us down right now. Is there something else you can do? I mean, we're in 20-25, so. We could say, can we even adjust our first turn anymore? We locked in.
Starting point is 00:29:12 So imagine that that was day one. Now it's day two of your presidency. You'll have three days to try to solve this. Well, we, one, we could open it up a bit. I think it doesn't have to be a select group of companies. It could be a large financial incentive or a tax break if you meet certain metrics of success. Does that mean any company that meets these metrics of success receives a gigantic amount of money?
Starting point is 00:29:35 I guess the subsidy I'm thinking is like a huge broad-based, you might call it like intelligence program where we are trying our best to recruit. Yeah, like a central intelligence. The best AI researchers from across the world. I think right now we're driving away a lot of people. who are really good at this and they're going to other countries, Europe or China. So you want to attract more talent?
Starting point is 00:29:54 I want to attract the talent. And you're doing this by taking the government control of the AI company. No, no, no. I'm just talking about a government Oh, just generally. Subsidy program towards research. Okay.
Starting point is 00:30:04 Okay. And then I think we both agree some sort of UBI, right? Some sort of like, I don't know where you stand on that, but some sort of way of protecting people who have lost their job from AI from the worst economic consequences. Okay, the day's almost over. You've got to have a press release. What specifically are you doing?
Starting point is 00:30:23 What's specifically are you doing? That sounds great. That's great to do it. What's our policy for attracting talent? You just said attract talent. You just say how. You guys are doing very political stuff right now. You need specific policy.
Starting point is 00:30:33 What's going on? The day's almost over. This is hard for me. I'm 88 and I can't make decisions. I'm 92 and I'm in my diaper. It's 3 p.m. I still think it's A1. I still think it's A1 if you haven't come up with an answer.
Starting point is 00:30:45 You can see research grants to university. universities, you could do a outreach program to leading AI researchers from other countries and try to attract them to come to America. That would be like one and then... Okay, research grants to foreign foreign students and or researchers for AI programs. Okay, incentivizing them to come. You roll 16.
Starting point is 00:31:07 That's all that's good. Okay, so the AI companies are on board and they think if the government subsidizes, that goes well. The problem now is the Republicans start to say, we don't want to spend more money. We have to cut it down. At most, we should be cutting taxes for these companies so they can accelerate growth. However, because you roll to 16, enough people are becoming unemployed and pissed off that it does seem that it's shifting towards the Democrats, and you might be able to make that argument in two years, but it's currently 2025. What do you do on your final day of office? We only have three days in office? You only have three days in office? The point of this is what
Starting point is 00:31:38 would you do right now? Because everybody's freaking out about it, and it's a huge problem. But what can you realistically do if you were the president right now, what would you do? I'm a Democrat president about to leave the office. You're whatever president. I'm going to become a, a Republican podcast. I'm trying to make some money. You're trying to pick it. No, I got you. Change my residency to Malta, become a Republican podcaster. I'm going to go to I pretend I live in Florida. You begrudgingly got the AI companies on board with some side of tax. You're going to be hopefully dropping these, let's say, tax incentives for people to come here to the U.S. There's still a lot of unemployment happening, so your plan is basically UBI.
Starting point is 00:32:17 but the Republicans are furious about this. They're saying the people should pick themselves up by their bootstraps. And besides, AI is going to create new jobs. Anything else you try to do? You can just be a demagogue, just kind of rile people up. Make sure you keep the policies going on. I think this is what we could do.
Starting point is 00:32:31 Day three, you take it more. I think we need to raise, I think we need to put into place a gigantic, or at least where to where we were, raise in corporate taxes, in personal income taxes, These need to be offset relative to the AI industry by supplying carve-outs that apply to
Starting point is 00:32:55 AI workers at an individual level, like people that work at these companies individually, some sort of tax breaks that go to like the workers and owners of people who work in the industry that we desire. Doug, can I call him a nerd and woke and run against them because I feel like I could easily... We're already in power together. Okay, here's what we'll do.
Starting point is 00:33:14 On the final term, you both get your own role. And we'll see who's more successful. Okay, so here's your policy with yours? Yeah, it's that. It's to realize that the unemployment's rising, and so I'm just going to call him a nerd, and I'm going to call him woke. Okay, so you demagogue and just get people angry.
Starting point is 00:33:27 That's a good strategy. It's a 14. So it's okay. You guys do maintain the election, even though you are now theoretically poofed out of office. The party that wants to increase taxes does maintain, but it's just not going to be that much. 14 is not high enough to overcome lobbying.
Starting point is 00:33:44 So you get a very symbolic, tax increase, but it's not nearly enough to cover the debt and all the things. And then China probably wins and it becomes even more chaotic. We just had three decent roles and we lost. The point is this is complex, fuck, no, what I'm saying though, look, there was way worse
Starting point is 00:34:00 options that could happen, all right? I gave you relatively good ones of the AI companies go along. You managed to attract talent. I think in this situation, if you guys had done that and managed to convince the electorate to increase taxes, that's probably the best outcome. And this is, I guess, tying it back to actual stuff here. This is what Dario
Starting point is 00:34:16 the CEO talking about this is kind of advocating for. He's saying, first, we just need to warn people. We've got to start training people to be aware of the AI tool, so at least they're not caught as off guard. Governments need to start forming committees and policies, potentially retraining policy-type stuff. And then what he suggested, which I like is a token tax, which is basically a value-added tax like EU has,
Starting point is 00:34:37 where every time a company is making money from AI, some percentage of that, let's say 3%, gets pooled to a government fund that is then supporting these programs. So essentially attacks, you know, similar to what you guys said, some kind of attacks on AI, you know, productivity that can then be used to help people as this kind of like devastation spreads. It's so funny because in this insane D&D-esque example where we had three fake short days in office, I was thinking through everything, like everything that I could come up with in that moment and then being like, but then this, but then this. And then I just imagined what it's actually like to be in charge. And you know, maybe it's harder than you.
Starting point is 00:35:21 I became a grifter in three days. Yeah, you could have a podcast. I can just go make a podcast where I talk about how women suck. Women suck and why won't they date me. It's good to have a backup plan as the president. And I'll move to Miami and I'll invite a bunch of girls on every week. But I won't let them speak. That's the important.
Starting point is 00:35:42 Get swollen with steroids and, yeah, makes a good one. And I want to reiterate here, like, I meant it when there's worse cases. So, for example, if the government right now was like massive tax on every AI company, those companies will leave. Like, at some point, you do need to have enough incentive for these companies to be here to attract the top talent. And you guys address that, which is good. But, you know, if you look at the top AI companies, they're almost all started by immigrants or the most influential people. And for anybody who's a software engineer, let's be real. non-Americans are usually the smartest in any given group of programmers and software engineers. And so,
Starting point is 00:36:16 you know, the more you prevent a company from being able to profit, right, it is going to be harder to pull those people into this specific company versus another one that is offering, let's say, massive monetary incentive because every company, every country, excuse me, right now is viewing this as life or death. That's the problem. It's as much as we want to say, whoa, pump the brakes here. This is scary. A lot of jobs. Every country on the planet is viewing this an existential threat that one is going to be key to the economy growing at the rate that it quite possibly will and two militarily. And it's so hard for a politician to pitch that, as well as a politician to go, if you're in a democracy, to get a bunch of companies to buy
Starting point is 00:36:58 into the idea of a massive tax on everything you're doing. I want to push back on that slightly in that my understanding is that there is the United States, there is China, and then there is a massive, massive gap. There is no third, even the EU as a whole. Have we thought about all the countries? What country? Are you talking about?
Starting point is 00:37:18 Macau. Macau is part of China. It's a gambling center of China. No. I mean, that's a fair point. And I personally believe you could institute a lot of regulation and tax. And I am in support of that, to be clear.
Starting point is 00:37:34 Like, I think in the face of this, there has to be government. It's exactly what you said. We have no support right now. now for this happening at this scale at this speed. And so I think there needs to be some kind of government support. And ideally that comes through that or taxes or something that on top of retraining, on top of all these other things. There needs to be something because I think this is going to cause potentially enough chaos that we hit a threshold where people are just like rioting,
Starting point is 00:37:57 rather than expressing frustration via a YouTube comment. You know, so you're right to an extent. There's probably a lot more runway than companies like to pretend because that's what they always Deep incentive to make it seem like, I mean, it's the same thing with like military companies. You know, I remember before, uh, that's just a little too in the weeds, but like, you know, Russia invaded Ukraine and didn't do that well. Everyone thought they'd take over Keev in, you know, a month. And that was because all the military companies leading up to that were like, yeah, Russia's unstop.
Starting point is 00:38:27 We need to be spending a lot of money to stop. And then it like turns out they were not, everyone has an incentive to talk up the opposition because it makes the government spend more on them. I mean, that's a small example, but like that happens in a lot of fields. and the age-old tech in America strategy is when you are about to get regulated, say the word China. Like Zuckerberg has done it for social media.
Starting point is 00:38:49 Everyone has done it where it's like, oh, you're gonna, you're gonna regulate this? What was Zuckerberg saying? Because it's not like we're a foot away from getting, nah, maybe I'm wrong. Even, even, you know, reminds me of the Silicon Valley Bank bailout where some of these all-in guys were on the podcast being like, if we don't bail this company out,
Starting point is 00:39:06 we're going to fall behind China in venture. capital. You know, it's like they always have, uh, and I do think that AI is like significant enough like an industrial revolution. And if your country is not, um, competitive in that, based on the last industrial revolution, you fall way behind and you get exploited by the countries like, like the UK that were ahead. So I agree. I just think, you know, we have to understand their incentives, which is to exaggerate and to massively scaremonger. To scaremonger and a fearmonger you into getting as much funding as possible. Yeah. There's even a cynical argument, Adario, who is the CEO
Starting point is 00:39:39 most vocal about the dangers of AI and regulating, and I really like him a lot. I've brought up, like, blogs that he's done. These, as was pointed out by the all-in guys, very cynical interpretation, but these warnings that he distributes happen to be when they're fundraising. You know, it's like, if these things always,
Starting point is 00:39:55 like, there's always the incentives, and he talks a lot about how important it is to not let China win and how much we need these export controls on chips and all that. So all of the tech leaders are basically like, we cannot let China win. That's like, life or death for many of them.
Starting point is 00:40:10 I mean, and also in the best interests of that. Yeah. Individually. Right. Right. Right. Right. I think my frustration listening to the all-in episode was mostly that the conversation is so heavily weighted and like this progress is absolutely necessary and this is the direction that we're going in and we need to move quick and fast and it's like, let me dispute the reasons why people's concerns about losing their job actually aren't that important and for for different i think like logically following reasons within the context of their show i see why they're saying it but to listen to like wealthy guys who work in like the
Starting point is 00:40:48 business and vc space be like let's worry about the speed right now and let and like not worry about the people suffering and losing their jobs and let's push that till later and it's like you need to do i i think you just need to do both You cannot leave this giant wasteland of unemployed people behind you and be like, we'll figure it out later because those are just people's lives. And it's the people's lives that make up the society that's the reason we want to wake up and participate in it every day. Yeah, and not even just from a pure like it's the right thing to do. It is if you don't take care of these people in society, we know what happens. They're going to start getting really, really angry, really, really radicalized.
Starting point is 00:41:32 And we have a democracy. they have a vote. I mean, things will change dramatically in ways people don't understand if you cannot provide people a reasonable standard of living that is ideally better than their parents. It should be growing and getting better. If you promise prosperity with AI and you're not delivering it, people will notice and they will get quite angry. So this was the other thing I was going to ask is because all of the benefits in the short term, I would say, let's say most of the benefits in the short term, that come with this idea of AI being developed, basically boil down to making work more efficient
Starting point is 00:42:07 or potentially replacing workers at certain levels, right? Those are the upfront realities of this technology. And I think we've spent time talking about, well, what are some of the good applications of that? Oh, what are the advancements in medicine that could happen down the line, for instance, that'll help people live longer, happier lives. What can I even point to, realistically,
Starting point is 00:42:32 in the next five to ten years that the average person really has to look forward to. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. There's not a single use of this as like automated cars, automated art.
Starting point is 00:42:46 It can code at an entry level. It can write journalism at an entry level. All of these advancements bar me getting to engage with something that conveniently answers questions for me, which is a level of convenience that I really like. None of those things help the average person.
Starting point is 00:43:07 They just help people that own companies. Or they help in really tangential ways. Like if all of the cars are automated, maybe there's less accidents and less people die. But if all of the people who are driving are unemployed, it's like the amount of people that die in high periods of unemployment because of externalities from that
Starting point is 00:43:28 is probably more or similar. I'm just guessing. I'm just saying that. So I think it's important when we have these conversations to contextualize for the average person. What do I have to look forward to here? Let me give a pitch. I want to be clear, this is not what I think.
Starting point is 00:43:47 It's more complex. But here's the idea. 300 years ago, 95 or something percent of Americans were farmers. Yeah. That's what everybody did. Everybody just farmed. That's the majority of society was farming. even a hundred years ago in the early 1900s,
Starting point is 00:44:04 40% of the money that people earned went towards food. Even though the amount of people dropping, weren't farmers anymore, all these new jobs had opened up in society, they still spent the majority of their income on food. Because food was proportionally way more expensive. Much more expensive, just to be able to afford to live, just to be able to afford basic sustenance.
Starting point is 00:44:23 Now, about 1% of the country in America are farmers, almost none, which means 99% of the country is doing things that weren't jobs before, and we spent about 10% of our income on food. Objectively, you can have a much, much, much better lifestyle in terms of, you know, health, birth rate, medicine, access to food, access to resources as a poorer person now than you could 300 years ago.
Starting point is 00:44:47 The standard of living has raised dramatically. So I think the one to five years is probably not realistic, but the idea of technology is that it allows you to create more resources with less. If we can send electricity through a silicon chip, and that chip can do an enormous amount of business work that would have taken a while otherwise or drive a car that is more efficient with less input. And that means, for example, let's look at food. You have, imagine the food system right now, but instead of humans, planting and managing farms, it's mostly automated. And then once the stuff is harvested by automatic machines, it's packaged and sent to processing plants by self-driving cars, which is then run and processed in the factory by self- managed robots that are automated and then is sent to grocery stores that are automatically putting it and stocking shelves. Eventually that drives prices down, particularly if you have competitors who are all competing. This is what has driven food prices down over time as technology makes it cheaper to produce things. That same thing will happen here as all of the different components,
Starting point is 00:45:46 think electronics like buying a switch to. If every part of that process of delivery and logistics and creation of the mining of resources becomes automated, all of these pieces of these supply chains and product creation becomes automated. Prices will drop. It will be deflationary. And so even though the average person might not have access to the same number of economic opportunities, because prices will be driven down by this, because it will become cheaper to make things, you will require less money and capital to have the same lifestyle. So maybe it will only take 10 to 15 hours of work each week to afford the same level of quality that you have now, right, in the future. Perry, if you could pull up this graph, this is a pretty commonly one that's referenced.
Starting point is 00:46:32 It's about how services in the United States, the cost of things like hospital services and college have gone way, way, way up over the past two decades. And then if you look at kind of electronics of consumer goods, clothing, cell phone services, toys, computer software, TVs. I mean, think about the fact that for $500 you get a TV, it's absolutely massive, where 10, 20 years ago, $500 TV would, you know, I'm old enough to remember growing up when you had a TV in the family home and it was like the size of a laptop, right? And, you know, so there is a real, there's a real concrete way that things get better over time when technology allows people to create more with less. And that's what this is going to do. Now, I don't think that means, oh, your problems
Starting point is 00:47:17 are all solved, but that's the idea is 10, 20, 30 years from now. restaurants will be able to offer things for less or at a higher quality because of how much less was required to put into that process. I do, okay, I agree with you in a broad sense. I think technology on the whole benefits in that we get to continue to be more specialized and productive as human beings, right?
Starting point is 00:47:42 I do fear. Just real quick, because I'm sure there'll be some bad faith comment. Yeah. I think that needs to be paired with some kind of of regulation and redistribution of wealth, like we're talking about, like a VAT tax. Please keep that mind. Please, you'll put two asteris on the end of your comment.
Starting point is 00:47:58 I'm coming back to it. If you just heard you said that. Please, they gave an opinion. Please, please put two asteris. Because I think when I talked to Doug about these things. I heard the first half of his sentence, and I'm frustrated. It's like, I understand that you also want that.
Starting point is 00:48:13 Is there a fear? So food, bar food, which has been, you know, I would say a great achievement in human society in terms of how cheap and widely available it is, right? That is a good thing. But on a graph like this, right? Look at all the things that have like
Starting point is 00:48:30 drastically decreased in Bryce. They're all consumable things that you know, you debatably like do or do not need. They're material goods that are just pretty, pretty cool to have, except for, I don't know, maybe clothing. Like, but broadly...
Starting point is 00:48:49 It's stuff that does, doesn't feel like fundamental to the human experience. Yeah. And then above it, I mean, I do worry that things like housing, like education, those are the things that continue to get more expensive. So those, to be clear, those have basically matched inflation is what is showing in this graph. And the ones above that are where it really gets like, this has dramatically increased past
Starting point is 00:49:09 a point that makes sense. Yeah. That's fair. That's fair. I think what I wonder right now is because at the rate of AI's improvement in the way, that it fits into society at the moment. Can we provide a level of training and education, especially in the United States,
Starting point is 00:49:31 where education is so expensive, to give average people a leg up into increasingly specialized jobs at a pace that outpaces AI's ability to replace those jobs. it doesn't seem super likely. We would need a really competent, forward-facing government and leadership, which we do not have at all.
Starting point is 00:49:59 I think the structural changes that this demands, I also want to be clear that when I say these things, I don't want to sit in this camp of AI, like denial of its importance or value. I want to stress that. I think it is something important to pursue for hopefully reasons that we've actually, outlined on the show that we've talked through.
Starting point is 00:50:21 Like security reasons being one of them. You know, whether it's China or some other country, keeping on pace with like the, at the forefront of a technology as important as this is important. I do think that's important. I just, I worry, and as I sit here, rolling dice with my co-president, wondering how to solve this problem effectively.
Starting point is 00:50:45 I guess our time together. I've grown fond of you now. Not that we're out of office, I have a respect for you and your constituents. I think you're on to something. The level of change that needs to be complementary to this is just so comprehensive and difficult. Sitting down where you're asking me,
Starting point is 00:51:07 what would I do right now? That's a challenging thing. And I don't know the externalities of my bet one way or the other. Because from my perspective, I think securing the value of AI from a government perspective is an important part of this and a part of the equation of making sure that it benefits society at large and not just a select group of like companies or people. Yeah, I mean, I think we've all circled this and it sounds pretty clear that we need some way of, listen, this is going to generate wealth. Like all technology does. This is a great way to generate wealth,
Starting point is 00:51:45 and we need to find a way to make sure that wealth doesn't end up pooled in a few hands. And that is the problem, whether AI exists or not. That is, like, the defining issue across most societies right now, which is like trying to figure this out. And I don't want to sound too forth-turning-pilled, but looking at history,
Starting point is 00:52:02 whether someone smart comes along and figures out or not, they'll be forced to. This is going to get, yes. The issue is forced. So speaking, of issues that will be forced into that may require this,
Starting point is 00:52:17 if we can transition, I wanted to talk about declining birth rates around the world. Real quick, you want to do the latest wacky segment? Yes, I want to do one more wacky segment. Okay, absolutely. So great transition is that exactly what you're saying, we need something to replace all these jobs
Starting point is 00:52:32 that are being lost. That's a common sentiment. In fact, let me even say this from the beginning. If AI is going to destroy all these entry-level jobs, many people are asking what is going to be the replacement to them, right? And so I've been doing a little bit of research trying to figure out what kind of jobs in AI we might see. And so each one of you guys don't look at them. I gave you a little pile of jobs that I think might only, only be available if AI is created. So why don't you start A-track, pull it from the top and read out what job you think.
Starting point is 00:53:01 And pitch it to us like, why would this be a cool job that can only exist with AI? Right-wing podcaster. We have brought Gavin Newsom on. You are fired from the podcast. but don't worry, there is a job for you, okay? AI fashion stylist, a brand new personal stylist who uses AI to create a virtual avatar of someone's body that perfectly showcases how you'd look in different clothings
Starting point is 00:53:25 in various situations. The stylist will mix and match outfit ideas working with you to refine and approve the looks. Even generate fully original new clothing for you. Like the Sims. You could view yourself as a sim. Is that a cool idea? Wait, why is this my job?
Starting point is 00:53:39 Why can the A. just do this. That's my first question. Why don't I need a human for this? I guess maybe people like talking to a human, but... Yeah, I mean, they're like overseeing, you know, the AI's generating the imagery and the virtual environment and whatnot, but they're being like, you know what, I see this trend, I know what's going on.
Starting point is 00:53:51 I can do it in the sense. I can do it from home. All right, hold on. Let me get the next job. Okay. Virtual travel experience curator, plans and lead immersive trips using VR and AI generated content like hosting a virtual tour of a world landmark or a fantasy realm. Little virtual tours, eh?
Starting point is 00:54:08 I hate to ask the same question. All right, all right, read yours. Why can the AI can just do that? No, because like a person could design it. I think AIs are generally not going to design super interesting experiences. Humans are going to design the coolest ones. Chaperone for AI child actors.
Starting point is 00:54:30 Yeah. No, that's it's important. It sounds horrendous. Monitor's AI generated child influencers to make sure they're emotionally stable. That's important. Once we replace all the actors with Imagine being, imagine having this job and then your AI child influencer kills himself.
Starting point is 00:54:47 Oh, that's dark. They just, they got hooked on. They got hooked on. You're just not going to have that job until AI. And I just, and I feel AI guilt because I failed my. Yeah, I failed my. I mean, you can just create a new instance with a single Unix line.
Starting point is 00:55:05 Yeah, I just run it back. Professional AI Game Master offers personalized gaming sessions where you can guide the whole world as a human and you're directing AI NPCs kind of like Hell Divers 2 does this or a D&D game. But like one person is doing a whole sort of experience for somebody. That's pretty cool. I mean, again, the answer to everyone these questions is like, do
Starting point is 00:55:23 I need a middleman, human when I could go? I think a human is always going to be better at designing an interesting experience and getting a particular artistic creative mind to design experience but use AI as tools in that experience is what's like. I think you're probably right,
Starting point is 00:55:39 especially for something like D&D. I think that that sounds like a real thing that could exist. But I, you know. I think people will always, it's similar to how like there's, there's services for like, oh, and they hand stitch it in this way they did it in the 1840s still. And people buy that, you know, sometimes. There will always be a desire, like a bucking of the trend, demand for bespoke human approaches to things.
Starting point is 00:56:05 But those are the minority of industry. Right, but I think this, this one I really believe in. Like, imagine World of Warcraft. That world is static after you've played through the original content. And imagine you have a team within Blizzard who is using AI tools and saying, we're going to create a storyline that's happening over the course of 12 hours. That's only possible because of the scale and rapidness that you can deploy AI tools, tech, NPCs in the game, generate dialogue.
Starting point is 00:56:29 You have these game masters and all these different games that you can imagine add so much nuance that isn't possible right now. I agree with you, kind of. Like, I, I think that this absolutely, there will absolutely be jobs that exist as a result of these tools being available. But can we, will the combined nature of all of these things, you know, besides,
Starting point is 00:56:56 besides chaperone for AI, I mean, that's good. I mean, most people will be doing that. There'll be bespoke ones as well. But, but, but, but I think, the main issue I have in my head is that there's just not that many places for these jobs as truck drivers. Yeah, I mean, truck driver is the number one job in like 38 states. It's a lot of people. It's difficult to imagine. Listen, one thing I'll agree with, even if I can't see it in this conversation, is that this type of conversation has happened in human history a lot.
Starting point is 00:57:34 Yeah. and people are very bad at predicting. They're bad at coming up with the job. Nobody would have imagined that this is our job. Yeah, 100%. 50 years ago. 100 years ago. Absolutely.
Starting point is 00:57:43 The part of not being able to think of what the jobs might be able to do, but I think this is, we brought this up on like the second episode is the idea here of what, there's never been a technology prior to this where any version of the new technology can't just replace the next.
Starting point is 00:58:04 generations technology as well. I have the answer for you. Open your next card. Okay, read this out. It's not funny. This is our future. This is what you're going to be working in so I get used to it. Sorry.
Starting point is 00:58:16 I'm sorry. I think this is really funny. I contact compliance officer. Monitor's footage to enforce minimum required eye contact in meetings. Now tracked by workplace AI morale systems. You only looked at the VP's face for 3.4 seconds.
Starting point is 00:58:34 consider this a warning. That's great. Much more efficient workers who can't slack off. This one's money. This one's money. All right, why don't you read one more? Let's do two more.
Starting point is 00:58:45 Finally, my girlfriend will look me in the eye. Are the green ones are the good ones? The random. Oh, because I think his sound dystopian. This is kind of nice. No, no, okay. AI wellness, nutrition, and exercise coach
Starting point is 00:58:57 provides a highly customized diet and exercise plan. Gay. I'm gay now. Pride month and I'm already uses AI analysis. AI systems can update and exactly tailor plans throughout the day to maximize health of personal times. Not to bring my same.
Starting point is 00:59:20 I actually tried this in chat, JBT. I was like, hey, I want to start running. Can you give me like a plan because I'm kind of fucking out of shape? And it like told me like, do this,
Starting point is 00:59:29 do this, do this. Yeah, but imagine a person who can more tailor to what you want. I don't want to have to pay the person and then I have to meet the person. But that person could be covering many more clients because of the AI tools. Okay.
Starting point is 00:59:40 I, look, I, because obviously, maybe not obvious. I think like some of these are clearly jokes. No, why don't you, why don't you read your last one was wrap? Okay.
Starting point is 00:59:52 What? There's no difference between the colors, Doug. You look me in the eye, the colors are random. It's randomly decided. The colors are random. It's randomly decided.
Starting point is 01:00:01 I have an equally good ideas is at Yeah, yeah. Where these are all, this is like equally a third of the industries will be this. This one has my name in it. No, it's random. It's randomly.
Starting point is 01:00:11 Don't read ahead. Okay, just tell us what the job is. Sex robot assistant. Okay. Aiden wears a motion capture suit, which allows him to control robots remotely. He physically acts out depraved sex seeds for corrupt politicians
Starting point is 01:00:25 who are having AI-based affairs. He can monitor and pleasure hundreds of politicians simultaneously. secretly he loves it. That part, that last part is nothing to do with AI. And that's the future. I think a lot of people can look forward to thanks to AI.
Starting point is 01:00:40 Does feel. What? Bright. Bright is the future. I could see how that argument can be made. They've been weak in the last couple seasons. This is a banger, black mirror episode. Black hair episode where Aiden is having sex with every politician.
Starting point is 01:00:59 You know what? If we could have Aiden personally, pleasureing hundreds of politicians at once. That might solve the birth rate crisis. In what way? In one way? That makes it way worse. You guys are asking a lot of questions about my segment. In what way? You're getting really upset about my cool segment that kind of solved a lot of problems. I think we can agree based on that sex robot that we have once again solved all problems. I understand. Come here, come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. No, I don't. Give it to you. And we've solved it. This does sound kind of fun for me. What is crazy is before this segment, I was like, you know, there's some good. There's some bad.
Starting point is 01:01:31 And after I'm now dystopian build. Now I'm concerned. What's cool is the other guy can check the amount of eye contact from the politician and the robot. That's it. Thank God. I am now building a bunker. Where's my phone? I'm going to call Chuck.
Starting point is 01:01:44 Okay. You're going to call Chuck Schumer. Birth rates. Okay. Well, I thought this, you know, we didn't even plan this, but I think this topic actually kind of goes hand in hand. And the, I think we've touched on this on the show, but I wanted to talk about this. of birth rates dipping globally.
Starting point is 01:02:04 Yeah. And the important thing here, or like why birth rates matter at all, is the idea is if your birth rate of 2.1, I think that 2.1 children per woman, on average, means that your population maintains itself over time. That's basically what that means.
Starting point is 01:02:24 And as you dip below that, it means that eventually your population is going to start decreasing. And if you maintain a birth rate below 2.1 for long enough, you decrease more and more rapidly. And the gap that you have between 2.1 and whatever the number is, so say, say my birth rate's 1.8, but versus another country that has a birth rate of 1.3. The difference between 1.8 and 1.3, it's exponentially increasing the problem of your population. Can I say one thing?
Starting point is 01:02:59 Because people, someone are their first response when they hear, this is like, we have to meet people already. Who cares? Like, why don't we, why don't we let the population go down a little bit?
Starting point is 01:03:07 And I just want to say, the particular reason why this becomes so damaging is you end up with a very large amount of old people and very few young people who can support them. So you have old people who are, again, once you hit a certain age, you are no longer working or producing,
Starting point is 01:03:22 and you will become in, I don't know, I'm a nice word for it, but you're kind of a drain. You require, more resources from society than you produce. And that's fine because you, you know, that's what we should do. We should take care of old people.
Starting point is 01:03:33 If we lived in a world where everybody happened to, like, reach the age of 30 and stopped aging until they just died one day, then this problem, they're kind of right. Like, you could, you could have population fall off because everyone is equally productive in ways on society. So you're saying we purge the old people. We keep coming back to this with you. I've noticed.
Starting point is 01:03:58 I've noticed. I'm not the one bringing it up, okay? So, yeah, it's that the population pyramid, as you get more and more old people, they become more reliant on social services, especially like healthcare, with fewer people at younger ages who are more productive, work longer hours,
Starting point is 01:04:18 but can't pay enough tax or literally are not in number enough to support the older people above them. and as this happens, and as is happening in some places already, there's other consequences that play out. Like small towns, especially in rural areas,
Starting point is 01:04:36 as their populations have declined, they just become ghost towns. And over a long enough period of time, you sort of, you lose the culture of certain areas because there's literally less people to carry on the local culture of whatever people that were there.
Starting point is 01:04:51 Right. And this is happening super broadly. I think the really interesting thing about this problem to me is the scale at which it is starting to happen versus, I think people have this idea that, oh, there's a subset of developed countries in the world that are probably in the minority that are facing this issue, and it's not that pressing yet. Or a really quick thing that people jump to is like, okay, well, what could fill the gap of a falling birth rate? You could increase immigration. And that's kind of true, but it doesn't tell the whole story of how the whole world is moving in this direction right now.
Starting point is 01:05:31 And the economic consequences, especially, you know, 50 to 100 years from now. And I say economic in a broad way. Like I would maybe say the societal consequences. The first thing I wanted to touch on was the rate at which is happening. In 1980, there was about 25 countries already below that 2.1 replacement rate. And then in 1990, just 10 years later, that number had doubled to 50. And then in 2017, 2010, 100.
Starting point is 01:06:03 And now, as of now, about 120 countries globally. Is that like half the world? Yeah. Isn't there like 250 countries or something like that? That's the majority of the world. The majority of countries in the world right now are dipping below this replacement.
Starting point is 01:06:20 And pretty much every developed country. Every country that's developed is below replacement. And there, you know, there's, we're reaching a stage with this problem for some countries where it's becoming really, really pressing. The most notable examples is South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world. They have about 0.7 births. And then Japan, also a notably low country, I think at 1.1. and the main thing I wanted to talk about here is why this is happening so broadly. Like if you guys have any initial thoughts about that,
Starting point is 01:07:01 and I'll have some thoughts about solutions or countries' approach to turning this around. I think the consequences of this are really hard to contextualize because they're not short-term. The reality is for the next, for most people, for the next 10 to 20 years, maybe even the next 50 years, right? The consequences will not be felt in a lot of places. But it's a problem that is going to peak. Japan is starting to hit it right now. South Korea is starting to hit it right now.
Starting point is 01:07:31 China will be soon in about like a decade or two. So it's like it's coming soon for certain countries. And I think the worst, I mean, you guys, I think know a little more than me, but the worst demographics are like China, Japan, South Korea. It's a lot of like East Asia. Yeah, there's some European ones. Italy is really bad. Italy is super bad.
Starting point is 01:07:46 Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, Japan is in many ways, I say this so many times it's becoming a mean, but a canary in the coal mine where you look to Japan to see how it's going to shake out. And every day in Japan, there are fewer Japanese people than there were yesterday, which is like a shocking, when you think about that, it's like that, that is an existential crisis. We need more white guys from L.A. to go there. To go there. More anime fans to go to Japan.
Starting point is 01:08:13 Well, we could start with that, right? because immigration is something that comes up a lot with this stuff, and I wanted to say people are kind of right about that. I think a kind of damning thing for countries like Japan, countries like South Korea, is that they aren't very open to immigration, like culturally, compared to a lot of other countries, right? But the other problem here is they are at a point
Starting point is 01:08:39 where the rate of immigration that their society would demand to supplement the gap is just not. feasible. Like the quantity of people that would need to come in every year, even if you had a fully open immigration policy, full cultural acceptance programs, they are too far gone
Starting point is 01:08:57 to turn the problem around that way. They're probably too far gone. Period. Period. And like the issue will play out in those places, no matter what, at this stage. Yeah, Perry, can you pull up a list of countries by birthday? I think that's the top one. If you go, yeah, because there's some crazy
Starting point is 01:09:15 rates. And like even the U.S. where people are aware, like the U.S., we would be losing population if it wasn't for immigration. That's the only thing saving us right now. You know? Yeah, we're at 1.6. I'll have a kid. Come on. I'll have a kid. My wife and I are talking about. I'm not sure if I want to sue. Could you have four? Make up for Doug.
Starting point is 01:09:39 We're already having it. You got me? There's a hot debate in my household between one and three. I'm on the one. Why not two? That's far away from four. There's no shot for four. Why two? Why do you dodge two? I think I'm saying one because we'll end up at two. I'm holding ground so that I...
Starting point is 01:09:58 Well, you need to have 2.1 children if we're going to maintain America. Yeah, I'm going to get Will Timmy. He's not very big. You have two kids and a cat. The other issue with immigration that I hadn't really realized in I saw the scale of the problem globally and how countries are reaching this lower than 2.1 rate
Starting point is 01:10:24 prior to being that developed economically. There's like an increasing speed at which countries are reaching like a level of economic development and hitting this threshold of dipping below 2.1. That's the other reason immigration doesn't solve this in the long run. Is if it's a global issue, it's like if I'm a country like the United States, United States. I could let
Starting point is 01:10:47 have as many immigrants as possible to help fill the gap and reduce this problem as much as possible, right? But in the long run in the really long run, I'm only shuffling the problem around between different places. Because all the countries that still have
Starting point is 01:11:03 birth rates above 2.1 are expected at this rate to fall below it eventually. And I'm only shuffling people around into new places without actually solving the issue. Like someone suffers from the way that the groups
Starting point is 01:11:19 of people are moved around in the broad sense of this problem. Great, can you flip it? Like if you click the thing at the top highest birth rates? Yeah, it's the highest birth rates. Yeah, it's like all Africa and... Yeah, Somalia with six children per woman. Chad with 6.1, Niger was six more... A lot of Chads and Chad. Yeah, damn. As you can see, it's basically Africa. So the
Starting point is 01:11:42 countries in Africa still have a very high birth rate and everywhere else to my knowledge essentially is falling. That's like, I think South America is falling a lot as well. And this is, you know, like, again, it's, it's urbanization, right? As soon as a country becomes developed and particularly urbanized, it just plummets. And that's, that's one of the things I wonder. I think clearly there is an economic factor to it of people move into urban environments. Then it feels like it is so expensive and difficult to be able to have a high quality of life while raising a family that they just don't, right? They don't have three kids. or four kids, they have one kid because they're in the middle of a city, and it's just like hard to do that.
Starting point is 01:12:20 I also wonder, like, in the past historically, humanity worked on farms, right? We, it was manual labor. And so the more kids you had, the more you were able to maintain manual labor, like, again, 300 years ago. Strong incentive economically on children. Yeah, 300 years ago, it's the opposite. Almost the entirety of America was just farming, every single person, like literally almost every single one. And now it's a percentage. And I do wonder what percentage or what portion of us as humanity wanting to have a lot of children came from needing labor?
Starting point is 01:12:50 And how much of that if you remove the economic pressure of just needing cheap labor, what would we default to? If everybody had all their needs met, would it still be above two? I don't know. I think that is a huge cultural shift. Because when people talk about what the roots of this problem are, it's interesting because, it affects so many places that are so radically different. So you have to look at what trends apply everywhere. Like what are the thing?
Starting point is 01:13:19 And urbanization is the main part of it. It's like there used to be in rural areas a very base economic need to have a lot of kids. You needed to have kids to operate usually the farm or the sustenance of like what kept you, you alive. and a group of people that supported you as you got older. And that's removing the like biological desire to reproduce, right? Like moving a little beyond that. These circumstances of your situation basically demanded that you have a lot of children
Starting point is 01:13:55 in order to maintain your way of life. My dad was squirted out by my grandma to help with the cotton farm in Texas. I'm not, you laugh. That's not a joke. He literally, he literally, squirted it out. He worked up. Squirt it out wasn't a joke. He grew up working on the cotton and sorghum farm in Texas.
Starting point is 01:14:13 They had a bunch of kids. Four or shit, four or five, I think four. Four kids to help work on the farm. That's what you did as farmers. And then my dad left and he was like, I'm only going to squirt out three. And I don't even know if I'm going to squirt out one or two. I think this is an issue that's difficult.
Starting point is 01:14:28 The Doug Klan. The Dirk. It's all squirt. Well, no, that's what I'm saying is economically. I don't know if we can squirt anymore. I see. Yeah, we don't have what it takes. We've lost that.
Starting point is 01:14:37 Well, we have what it takes, right? Let's just be clear. I don't know. I'm seeing a trend. Do you say we're going to have kids? Lost your dad's ability. Can we get back on track? So there was an interesting thing I listened to about this on the daily.
Starting point is 01:14:51 I think I want to say like six months ago. And they were interviewing people about their take on the story in general, but also their desire to have kids in the U.S., right? And what was interesting is at least when you poll them, a lot of people say they want to have like three kids on average still. And I was surprised by that because in my head I was like, oh, there feels like there's a large cultural shift
Starting point is 01:15:18 among people becoming maybe a little more individualistic, you know, more career focused and not, you know, not wanting to prioritize this idea of having kids anymore beyond the economic aspect, right? Right. And I think the fact that so many people say they want to have three kids on average.
Starting point is 01:15:39 That's what, I think it's like 2.9, it averages out in the US of what people, how many kids they say they want to have. And the economic attempts to fix this, while really mixed in their results, are most people's approach to trying to tackle this problem at the moment. So if you look at, for example,
Starting point is 01:16:02 if we looked at Singapore quickly, Singapore has a pretty low birth rate, I think it's like 1.2 or 1.3 or something like that. But they have a policy that allows you to apply for their public housing at a way earlier age if you have a partner or spouse. The motivation being is they want families to have like stability in Singapore. And it pushes people to fast track their relationships and get to get into public housing and have a nice home way earlier than they otherwise would. It's also seen as an investment there. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:16:37 But for Singapore, that isn't really, you know, that aspect of the solution isn't really working. So there's examples of these economic attempts to get people to change their mind without that actually being effective. That's what I was going to say. I'm saying a lot of countries have tried this. Japan has tried a bunch of different random things to incentivize you to have kids. All of them seem to be a very small effect or no effect. Now, I do want to say, you know, my general theory is if people are telling you why something's not happening, generally trust them. They're usually right. And most people, if you ask on this, will say it's a larger economic reason.
Starting point is 01:17:19 They will say it's like it's too hard to afford a house. I don't feel like I could afford the cost of college and childcare and all that to have that many kids. And I think there probably is some truth today. And none of these in any country so far have been, I think, broad or big enough. to really tackle the uncertainty about the future and future costs. So I think that's fair. Like America's proposing something. Trump proposed like a $5,000 baby credit or something. If you have a baby, you get $5,000. So my pushback to this a little bit is it doesn't feel as simple
Starting point is 01:17:52 as having strong economic policies that allow people, that give people the economic room to have children. And I do think that's a massive part of it. I don't, I'm not denying that at all. Yeah. But what I do want to stress is, I think it would not be controversial to say that in the United States, we have less social services than the Nordic countries, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:18:15 But the Nordic countries have, uh, even lower birth rates than we do. And so what is it about, let me fact, let me fact track that. Um, yeah. And so there's something to be said about like, okay, what about, these conditions for people makes that the case. Like why in a place like the United States would the birth rate still be a bit higher than these Nordic countries
Starting point is 01:18:43 which have way stronger social services, way better time off for parents if they have a child? What is that? What does that mean? I think that's super fair. I mean, the Nordic countries having the same problem.
Starting point is 01:18:55 You know, what they have in terms of social stability is like what most countries would dream of, right? If they can get all the way there and it still doesn't solve the problem, then it's a bigger problem. One thing I did notice, I remember, I forget this was Japan or Korea, so I'm sorry, but there was a study, and there's a small one, but where they subsidized fewer working hours specifically.
Starting point is 01:19:17 So it was like in Japan, they were working insane hours. And they made it so they had significantly fewer hours per week to work to get the same amount of money. And that had a measurable positive increase on birth rates. That group, that control group or whatever, went above two. And so there's a chance that maybe it's not just wealth distribution or a bill of the old house, but the ability to like have free time completely without worrying to feel like you have the ability to form a deeper relationship, start a family, get kids. I think that could be part of it.
Starting point is 01:19:52 I think it's a complicated issue. Do you feel like, so to push back against my own pushback, the, I don't, this feels so unquantifiable. to me. And if somebody listening to this right now has a as a good case or a good understanding of this issue, but one country that's managing this pretty successfully is France. They have a really
Starting point is 01:20:14 high birth rate, especially among all these developed nations. Really? France is like 1.8, I think. So it's still below. Still below, but way closer than most of these other countries, theirs is way higher. And they also
Starting point is 01:20:30 didn't dip below two for a really long time. It took them a while to get to this point. So there's a point to be rectified here, right? What are the French doing? So for France... For fucking, Doug. Why, yeah. Yeah, you pull that up?
Starting point is 01:20:43 And there are economic policies that France has in place that encourage you to have children. They have huge tax incentives if you have three versus two versus one versus zero. Oh, really? The idea being that if you have three children as a family, it should in no way impact your quality of life in comparison to somebody who has zero children. I think also from a healthcare perspective, France spends an extraordinary amount of money
Starting point is 01:21:16 on its health care system. And there's a lot of availability for nurses to come to new mother's homes directly. They spend, even at like a middle class, a lower class level, they pay way more in taxes for that system that they have available to them on the whole, with tax breaks to those who choose to have families.
Starting point is 01:21:37 So there seems to be a cultural decision to like emphasize these tax breaks as related to families, but these policies come into place in other places as well, right? So why do they not turn things around after the fact? I think that's the question that I feel unable to answer.
Starting point is 01:21:57 I posted a link. If you could pull it up, Perry, in the show links. Man, looking at this chart of France's birth rate, it is hard not to see some kind of economic correlation. This is not it.
Starting point is 01:22:11 This is the whole one. You don't want to visually describe it. Yeah, I can, okay, so it's basically flat and in a good spot until the 2008 crisis, until the global recession. Interesting. At which point it becomes a free fall.
Starting point is 01:22:29 And it's funny because, that previous chart that Doug had with the thing, a lot of those things start spiking in call. A lot of scarce things like college, healthcare, healthcare, all these things post-2008 start spiking, which also correlates with when governments
Starting point is 01:22:48 globally started massively debt spending to pump up those things. So it's just interesting that it's all, it all feels connected in some way. Yeah. So where the, I think the few scarcely scarce things required to feel comfortable to have a bigger family, which is the ability to afford college and child care and housing and all those things, are the things that have gotten
Starting point is 01:23:13 more and more scarce and difficult since 2008 specifically, but over the past 20 years in general. And those seem to be, at least in this France case, and again, I'm sure it's different all over, but those seem to be strongly correlated. Outside of, you know, look at that first drop at the beginning, that's probably more tied up with industrialization. I'm sure there's like a level that is like once you're in industrial society, educated society, they're not having five, six kids on the farm. That probably makes a lot of sense.
Starting point is 01:23:40 But then I think going from that to near zero for a lot of families is probably more economic. That feels more like people feeling like can't even get started on the... I agree. It just has to be layered in some way. I want to talk to somebody who can just parse all of the details.
Starting point is 01:23:58 or factors better than I can. Because when we looked at the countries with the highest birth rates, right? They're some of the least developed places in the world and they have really high birth rates. It's not like people in Chad are incredibly rich, and that's why they're having a bunch of kids. Like, there are societal circumstances
Starting point is 01:24:21 of just base, like, country development or, like, urbanization that seem to be at play. And then it turned, it, like, full. into another issue when you get far enough along. Yes, yeah. That's what I'm theorizing. I don't know if anyone has the hard truth here, but...
Starting point is 01:24:38 I want to ask, you basically said this, but I just want to confirm it. Have you guys seen anything that has been done successfully for this? Like, has any country actually succeeded at reversing this in any way? I looked at this. Yeah. So far, no. Which is part of the scary part.
Starting point is 01:24:56 There have only been countries which have managed to either slow the decline pretty well. Like France is one of the better examples of that. Or countries who have gotten so low and then they made some sort of policy change to push it in the other direction. So just recently, South Korea bumped their number up. But when you're talking about moving from 0.7 to 0.8, you're not solving the issue. 0.7. you're just pushing it a little in the other direction. So there just are,
Starting point is 01:25:28 there's been no country from what I looked through that has fallen below 2.1 and then managed to get back above it afterwards. And I thought that was something, I think something really interesting with this problem is it feels a little similar to climate change to me, where a lot of the most dire consequences of climate change were seeing some of them now.
Starting point is 01:25:53 Do you guys ever think about that? I'm going to go on a tangent for a second. You know when you grew up and you watch maybe, do you ever watch like an inconvenient truth? Yes, sure, yes. Or little documentaries about climate change and the consequences of the environmental damage we were doing. And they'd talk about what it's going to be like.
Starting point is 01:26:12 Recently, I would say most, maybe in the past five years especially, it's like, oh, some of it's starting to happen. But you can see some of the consequences is actually starting to play out. But when people were talking about these things in 2000 or 1990 or 1980, a lot of these things felt really far away.
Starting point is 01:26:33 And I think it's hard to garner long-lasting, like political change in the direction of something that feels so far out. I think that's a problem for most people, right? Because the more dire economic circumstances in front of you are often the things, or things threatening your rights, are the most pressing.
Starting point is 01:26:54 So even now, the most dire consequences of climate change with the trajectory that we are on are not going to be felt for decades, but they are going to happen, basically no matter what, at this stage. And it's like the degree of how bad it will be is the thing we can affect. It's hard to get people to care about
Starting point is 01:27:12 the consequences of AI stuff that could happen in three years, three or four years, let alone things that could happen in 10, 15, 20. It's just difficult to get someone to to get enough people to be the ant versus the grasshopper. This is the story. To plan and to save and to build for something that could happen. And this is the, to me, this is the exact same thing.
Starting point is 01:27:34 Because it's like on the whole, you wake up every day, even if you're in Japan, right? For the most part, you wake up every new day. And it's just kind of fine. And you're the frog in the hot water and you're slowly boiling. And the real boiling point for most countries is, you know, for Japan and South Korea, it's going to happen within our lifetimes,
Starting point is 01:27:55 which is, you know, in a kind of interesting. Not in terms of the actual consequences, but it's like, we'll see how it plays out whether we want to or not. But for like the United States or for France, right, the reality of that problem might not hit for another hundred years,
Starting point is 01:28:17 but it's still going to happen. And the way I wanted to tie this back in, is I think realistically with the fact that no one has any success with turning this around in a meaningful way yet, you can do nothing but replace the labor of young people with things that are automated. You need that to prop up society in order to get through this oncoming, like, demographic crisis,
Starting point is 01:28:44 which is a need of one of the major needs I see in pursuing it. If that actually worked, that's not even that, that's not even dystopian really, isn't that? That's good. You could stabilize the earth with fewer people using fewer resources without anyone dying. Just naturally aging out. No, I think you can make an argument. And AI is creating an abundant.
Starting point is 01:29:04 Let's try to a specific example. Japan right now has too many old people because of the demographics. There's not enough young people. Traditionally the way old people were supported by young working people, generating income and taxes that can then support older people through social programs or redistribution or whatever, that isn't happening. So that structure that has worked through most of time to varying degrees is not going to be there for Japan.
Starting point is 01:29:27 They can't rely on the young people generating economic value. But if every young person was, not even say every young person, if the young people can put together a hospital, which is fully automated, and those people can go in and fully be taken care of for a 100th or 1,000th of the cost, you might be able to maintain, and hopefully will, the same degree of quality,
Starting point is 01:29:46 even with a third of the amount of young people. There's a very real world in which AI is, in automation in particular, is like a huge portion that, and we talked about with healthcare in a previous episode, is what allows countries to overcome this. I think it's necessary. Overcome, meaning while their population is continuing to go down, right? They're like, they aren't suffering immensely as they, like,
Starting point is 01:30:07 dry up as a puddle, you know, into like nothing. It's wild. Dude, who would have thought? This is, like, going to be one of the biggest problems of our lifetime, is people not fucking. A little bit. You read the commentaries? A lot of it.
Starting point is 01:30:21 But like, dude, when we grew up, like that was like overpopulations, too many people. Everybody was lamented. You were considered, you know, like backwards if you had like seven or eight kids. What? And now it's crazy.
Starting point is 01:30:31 I think one, two things I want to say to help ground this. Maybe if you're listening to this and you still don't quite understand why this is a problem. And I wanted to use two like real life examples that I can think of. Is in the U.S. We have social security. And social security is a huge part of what supports older people in their life, right?
Starting point is 01:30:51 You pay into Social Security, and then that system pays you back out later when you're around retirement age, and that money helps supplement your life because you're unable to work as much as you once did. If this problem continues, eventually we'll reach a point where the reason Social Security functions right now
Starting point is 01:31:11 is because I, a young, productive person who can work a lot is healthy, doesn't have any big interruptions, in my day-to-day life, I generate income and I pay Social Security and then that gets used to pay out to the people who are old now.
Starting point is 01:31:28 Can we create AI podcasters to generate wealth for the old? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They don't need us. Is that one of the jobs? But if this problem continues
Starting point is 01:31:36 with no changes to how, you know, society is structured, eventually we'll reach a point where all of the old people who are less healthy, can't work as much, can't do as much, are more reliant on,
Starting point is 01:31:49 they are people that are more reliant on that social security income. There's just less young people below them generating the income necessary to fund their social security. Okay, that's an example of... Well, and that is the case right now. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:32:04 People are aware, right now in America, there are now not enough young people to support the needs of social security. That's why it costs money every year. A few decades ago, Social Security, or a decade or two, I think, Social Security made money every year. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:32:16 Like, it saved money. because there were more young people than old people. As that is reversing, it now costs more and it costs hundreds of billions of dollars every year in order to fund and take care of old people because there aren't enough young people supporting them. This is happening right now and is a huge catastrophe. And the example I wanted to add on top of this is say you're listening to this
Starting point is 01:32:36 and you're like, the American system and its capitalist tendencies need to be burned down and we need to restructure all the way society works to be in with. Okay, let's just say you're right about all of that. Imagine, imagine, because no matter how society is structured, we all need to. That's mine. Oh, I drink all your water. What the fuck? Over the course of this episode, I drank all your water.
Starting point is 01:33:00 That's great. That's a giant bomb and I've still got my body. Sitting next to you. What the fuck? I will not go thirsty at all while you will definitely be thirsty. Hey, can I trickle down economics in some water? Spade your mouth. No, he just keeps the second bomb.
Starting point is 01:33:16 Imagine that scenario. I just imagine you're right about everything I made up that you said. You, we still need to eat food. And we've reached a point now, maybe we're 100 years in the future where there's so many old people and they're sick, they're weaker, they can't work the farm as long, and they can't work the farm very well. And a lot of them are just out for gaps of time
Starting point is 01:33:40 and unavailable to work on it at all. There's only a disproportionate amount of young people left, to work the farm and make the food. And there isn't enough food to go around because of that. And back to what we were talking about with AI productivity earlier, or just machine productivity in general, right? The idea is that we need enough ways
Starting point is 01:34:03 to supplement the remaining young people that exist to allow them to produce more for the old people that are outnumbering them drastically at that stage. So, you know, regardless of how you engage with this issue, politically or how you imagine an ideal society functions, the base problem of a lot of old people and not a lot of young people still affects you in some way. And that's why everybody are,
Starting point is 01:34:30 as far as I understand, there's so many governments around the world trying to address this in some way because they know what the long-term consequences is of leaving this. Can I end up a funny story? Mm-hmm. Because we're at about that time. And it's, you mentioned,
Starting point is 01:34:43 the quirk of the world is that, 30, 40 years ago, the main topic was the opposite. Everyone was like, we are, we're going to be overpopulated. We're going to run out of resources. This is a problem. We have to get birth rates down. We need to, especially in a country like China. China was the one talking about how we're getting overpopulated.
Starting point is 01:35:02 We have too many. It's a big scare. And they instituted the one-child policy. And because at the time, it was more preferential to have a boy, more likely to be economically beneficial to your family. They ended up with a lot more boys. And now they have this declining population with a massive glut.
Starting point is 01:35:17 of like 30 to 50 year old boys, boy or 20 to 50. People in this range. And so what they're dealing with is this link you can bring up where there's just not enough women in China. And so now the alliance between Russia and China that has existed has been fortuitous because there is a glut of women in Russia. Russia has a over, I don't know what the ratio is, but it's slightly more women than men and China has more women than women.
Starting point is 01:35:46 So there's like this marriage happenstance between Russian. Like kind of a feudal lords. Forging alliances through blood. It's like not just one princess and prince. It's like hundreds of thousands of Chinese men. Forging a lot of alliances, yeah. Are forging this alliance in actual matrimony. That I thought was a really funny, interesting article.
Starting point is 01:36:09 I wonder what the numbers are. Does it have any stats? I don't know if there's exact stats in there. The numbers they have are all around, if you ask Chinese men because it's a competitive market for Chinese women. They have to pay massive
Starting point is 01:36:22 dowries often for when getting married and they don't want to pay that. It's not affordable. So they're going to Russia to try and find cheaper you can see the rural areas. Do you think China is going to put
Starting point is 01:36:36 a tariff on Russian women? Well, I think they want the marriages to be honest, but... Well, it depends where they move because Russia is the same thing. Russia's massively struggling with the demographic collapse. That's one of the theories about Putin's interest in Ukraine because you have a bunch of ethnically Russian people there and you can stave off this problem by absorbing them.
Starting point is 01:36:56 I mean, that's a legitimate, that's a legitimate incentive of, okay, if we're losing ethnic Russians at a crazy rate, let's gobble up this big area with a bunch of them. Invading for the historical ethno state. This is funny. I'm just reading this part now. I didn't see it. Russia has 10 million more men than women, which is why Chinese men think,
Starting point is 01:37:17 oh, there's a lot of opportunity there. But in fact, the truth of it is that Russian men just die a lot younger, like old men because they have high death rates over 40 years. 10 million more women than men. Yeah, 10 million more women than men. But most of that is old women
Starting point is 01:37:30 because they just live longer because Russian men often die for whatever reason. Oh, yeah. You can assume it's, yeah. Alcohol and war. Yeah, I would say alcohol and war. Alcohol and war, both not good for longevity.
Starting point is 01:37:42 generally of men. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting story. Clearly we have solved the birthday crisis crisis again. We've done to talk about it twice, but I think... Well, we solved it with that new AI job,
Starting point is 01:37:54 Aiden's gonna be doing. It doesn't solve it. I don't know how to tell you. That does not solve it. What's Aiden is pleasuring hundreds of politicians at once. They are not having kids, you understand?
Starting point is 01:38:02 No, they'll be relief. It doesn't... I don't see if you, I don't get by your eyes. They'll then be able to make better decisions about how to solve the birthright. Next week we'll do a segment of where babies come from.
Starting point is 01:38:15 I'll be the presenter. Because I have some questions, dude. And the follow-up question, how will AI make a baby? How? But good episode, folks. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll solve all your problems next week, too. I'm not shaking you.
Starting point is 01:38:29 Okay, well, I'm going to punch you in the mouth again. Yvonne must style. I show it. It was basketball. It was just if we had an altercation.

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