Modern Wisdom - #1084 - David Friedberg - Everything You Know is About to Collapse

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

David Friedberg is an entrepreneur, investor, and podcaster. What will the future actually look like? With AI dominating the conversation, cutting through the noise matters more than ever. So what’s really coming, and what will it cost us? Expect to learn why the future if going to be epic even if the cost is high, why the future of tech and AI might be overblown, why we should care about the moon, what AI will actually do to jobs despite Anthropic’s new report, what the future of longevity will look like, why California has turned into a failed state and if David is concerned about the rise of socialism, what David is most excited about right now and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠⁠ Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ biomarkers tested for just $1/day and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've said the future's going to be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried. How come? I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future because humans are programmed to be that way. We always were worried about some predator coming around the corner eating us. Like we're tuned to survive, right? So we're tuned to always, there's always some existential threat to humanity. This goes back to kind of biblical eras thousands of years ago.

it was the great flood that was about to come. There was the, you know, the plague, the plague's going to wipe us all out. There's starvation. You know, the late 19th century population was outstripping food supply. And there was this big belief that we were going to run out of food. And there was this kind of rush to, and the primary reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields. off of the South American coast.

So these giant islands covered in poop, and the clipper ships would go down, they'd get all this poop, and they'd bring it back to Europe, and they'd use it as fertilizer to farm. If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less calories. So the islands were kind of diminishing,

and there was this big call to action. We're going to run out of fertilizer. The world's going to starve. We're going to die. And then there was this invention called the Haber Bosch process, where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere,

compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom. suddenly population skyrocketed. Every generation has these existential threats, climate change, COVID. There's always, and now it's AI. I think fundamentally AI is one of these most kind of like mind-numbing, sort of unbelievable to understand kind of technologies. And when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok that seems so overwhelming,

like a plague, like running out of food, like COVID, we have a tendency to be very existential about it. Now, you compare that to the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground, people are living longer, they're living healthier, they're living better lives, across the board, across populations. And people can argue all day long about relative prosperity. Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead.

They're doing really well. The rest of us feel left behind. But if you look at some of the metrics of, like, hey, everyone has a home, everyone has a car, Like everyone has some of these things that we take for granted today that we didn't have 100 years ago, that were really things to struggle to get. Now, separate to that, there's an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally. Digitization of the physical world and then our ability to kind of make predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of the tools that we call AI today. But it's really a long history of these sorts of tools where we take data and we use that to better understand the world and then say,

We could do this or we could do this. We could make this molecule to solve this cancer. We could do this thing and suddenly it turns out we're right. We could build this machine that could get us to the moon. Oh, yeah, we're right. We could do that. Like all of these fundamental tools start to compound. And we're in this kind of exponential curve right now that I think,

and we can talk about some of the things that I think are most exciting, but that are really going to kind of transform the trajectory for humanity. So I think that there's a risk of too much change too fast, which is perhaps the thing that breaks social order. And that's probably the phase that we're in right now. How much is the social order going to break? How hard is it going to be for people to adapt? How much of a dislocation will there be in social systems and economic systems?

And people's expectations, when they shift too much, and they have to kind of rethink, what do I have to do? They want to put a break on things. And I think that's kind of a moment that we're in the West right now. In the east, it's a little bit different. You go to China, they're very much embracing these technologies because there's so much more to gain than there is to lose. In the West, we have so much more to lose than there is to gain. Oh, that's interesting.

A victim of your own success so far. Yeah. Because it feels like you've climbed pretty high, and if you fall, that could be bad. You have more to lose. Yeah. And we could pontificate on this for a while, but you could go back to FDR in the United States. And we kind of came out of the war with this big effort. where we said, hey, we can aggregate all our resources, we can win World War II.

And then we said, by aggregating our resources, we could do the extraordinary. So let's do that again and let's keep doing that. And that became this kind of trajectory we've been on in terms of making promises for tomorrow and then having the government kind of deliver the promises, right? And that's been a big thing that's gone on for the last, call it almost 100 years, particularly in the West. At some point, you can only promise. so much. Like, there's a system where everyone had this sort of expectation setting that was made. Okay,

everyone gets a home. That's the American dream. Everyone goes to college and then they get a job. Some of those things may not necessarily be the right things from a free market perspective, in which case you're making these promises and then people feel like the promises aren't being delivered. They're not being met and that's all they care about and that's all that they want. In the West, we have that problem right now. And so there's a lot of, of these things that we've set expectations around. If you go to college, you get a good degree, no matter how much it costs, you will have a good job and you'll be able to buy a home and live a good life. And that's not true anymore. And so these are the sorts of things that I think make us more

fearful of the changes ahead. Whereas in the East, those promises weren't necessarily made. They're like in China, GDP per capita skyrocketed from 3,000 to 30,000 in just a couple of years. I mean, imagine seeing the average person's income in a country go up by 10x and everyone's moving from farms to villages to cities and the cities are like the future. It's been an extraordinary trajectory. So, you know, there's a lot of embracing of the future that's happening in one set of social systems in the world today. And then a bunch of this like, oh my God, tomorrow is scary. It's going to break everything on the other side. And I think, you know, we have that very dangerous kind of choice to make. I think the concern is that AI is a difference of kind, not just a difference of

degree, that there is a centralizing of power amongst potential five trillionaire class people on the planet. What sort of control do they have? How much displacement is there of work that didn't happen in the same ways when horses were killed because the automobile came along or because manual labor needed to turn into driving JCPs instead of digging holes? Yeah. That this is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree, but to your perspective when it comes to AI, Dumerism, AI, optimism. Yeah. All technology shifts go through a phase of diffusion, meaning they have to start somewhere. It's not like we turn on a switch and suddenly everyone can build an Etsy store or a Shopify store. Like that's not how the internet started with everyone suddenly benefiting from being

able to be an entrepreneur online. It took a couple of generations of technology diffusion before or the idea of Shopify and the high-speed internet all over the country got everywhere, and people could actually stand up a Shopify store and run it. The first people on the internet, the first businesses that stood up, did very well. And so the technology started centrally. But then, you know, initially people are like, oh, my God, Cisco's going to dominate the world, right? Like, Cisco's got the switches that make the internet switch. That's the technology that's going to, those guys that own Cisco, those guys are going to run the world.

This is not fair. like they're going to control everything. This is crazy. Nowadays, it's Nvidia to some degree. It's Google. But like, eventually every technology commoditizes. That's what's so amazing about technology. Is it like it's always diffusing?

Like this new innovation finds its way out. Like we've already seen in just the last couple of weeks, this insane shift in AI where people don't have to run models in the cloud anymore. They can run models on their desktop at home. So there's no longer like a dependency. on Google or dependency on, you know, pick your favorite hosted model provider. I can download an open source model and there's plenty of great models. I can run it on a Mac computer in my house.

And if you saw recently there's this auto research thing that weren't viral on Twitter this weekend, where Andre Carpappy turned on auto research and he ran all of these agents on his computer and they were just asked a bunch of questions to solve, make better LLMs, and they just ran 30 of them talking to us. talking to each other, and they just kept scoring the improvements they were each making to the LLM, to the underlying AI model, and they made a better LLM model than what ChatGPT had not too very long ago. In like a weekend on a computer at home, that's how quickly it's diffused. And so I'm like, I think that there's a, and so this whole thing of like, oh, data centers need

to be stopped. I actually don't think that data centers are going to have much to do with the benefits we're going to realize. Like so much of AI is going to sit at the edge. It's going to sit in embedded devices. It's going to sit on your desktop computer. It's going to sit on your iPhone. It's going to be ubiquitous. It's going to be everywhere. And I think everyone just doesn't see the benefit yet. And so it's very hard to envision why I should do this. And we can talk a lot about some of those benefits that could arise. But over time, all technologies have like a central feature where someone's making a bunch of money early on. And then eventually everyone's like, oh my God, everyone's life has gotten better because of this thing. Like when the first

CAR-T therapies came out. These are T-cells. I totally jump ship there, but like, CART therapy is this amazing technology that was developed where we could take T-cells, immune cells, out of the human body, program them to find a specific protein, put them back in your body, and then they go and find that protein and kill it, and kill that cell. And it was used for cancer. So we could take a T-cell out of the body, program it to go attack a cancer cell, put it back in the body, it attacks the cancer cell and destroys it. When that first came out, it was like, oh my God, this is incredible. And a couple of companies made a couple billion dollars selling the first generation of those technologies. But to get that therapy is like millions of dollars initially. You have to take all these cells out,

isolate them, make sure they're clean, engineer them, put them back in, make sure the person doesn't die. So it became this very expensive initial process. And now, CART therapy is making its way into more and more cancer treatments. And it is like almost 100% like success rate in blood cancers when it works. And so it's becoming this thing that goes from millions of dollars to a million to 500 and pretty soon to 50K, 20K and eventually 5K. And that ends that disease. That whole class of diseases goes away. So all of these technologies start up with this aggregation of value. Small number of people get it. Small number of people get value. But eventually all technologies diffuse. And so I'm less like concerned about there being a monopoly. We're already seeing every single model company getting

disrupted by something else the next week. We're already seeing this idea of data centers being the requisite breaking apart. There's a bunch of startups right now that are making technology that reduces the token cost by a thousand X. So for every token produced, which is a measure of output from AI, it used to be 10 bucks or whatever, you know, pick your number, a dollar, 50 cents, 10 cents. It's coming down by a thousandfold. because they're figuring out better ways to architecture the underlying models, to make distributed smaller models, to use new chip architecture, to use new systems of balancing energy across the different chips that you're using, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and these all compound. So suddenly it's

like, the people that are going to build all these data centers really going to have a monopoly? I don't know. Like, this will allow anyone to stand up a small data center and run a bunch of AI stuff. So you don't really need big $100 billion data center. So I think there's a lot that's changing very quickly. And every step of the way that's happening so fast, people just have all these reasons to have concern. But I'm pretty optimistic as history being a predictor here, that the diffusion of these technologies will unlock value for every human on Earth. And it's really just a function of at what point and at what point of value. I've heard you talking about the moon a lot. What's happening with the moon? The moon, I think. So one of the things that I think

AI unlocks is the ability to do really complex projects. People think about AI as like, hey, I'm going to replace labor. Like the accountant's job is going to go away. And we're all kind of swirling our heads around. What are we going to do with the accountant's jobs going away? And, you know, we could use the automobile and the horse buggy driver analogy. People were worried about the horse buggy jobs going away. And who's going to breed the horses?

Who's going to take care of the horses? All the horse tables are going to go away. And then when the car came around, there was auto mechanics and there were the highway system. And then motels popped up and then gas stations popped up. And then coffee houses popped up on the highways. And new towns emerged on the high. because you could get to them and suddenly the automobile unlocked industries we didn't contemplate, right? It's several degrees away, several steps away from the initial problem that you're thinking about,

which is the horse company's dying and the horse jobs going away. So I think that's kind of like an important thing to note. And before I get to the moon, I'll just say this one point. I think physical AI or robotics is really going to be an unlock for people. People think it's like the companies, the corporations will have all the robots. And the corporations will replace all the people. But why can't everyone have a robot? Meaning, why can't someone put a robot in their garage? And this robot can do anything.

It works 24 hours a day. That robot's now your employee. And you can say to the robot in the garage, hey, I want to make a bicycle shop. I want to make custom bicycles that are really cool. They're like Chrome and people can, you know, kind of tweak them online and make all these different versions of bicycles. and then the robot will build the bicycle.

So you can stand up a Shopify store or an Etsy store or whatever, sell bicycles, and your robot will make them for you. You don't even have to know how to make bicycles. The robot will order all the parts. It'll order all the machinery it needs. It'll run the robot bike shop in your garage. It'll make bikes. It'll package them up and ship them out for you.

When you think about it in that context, which is that this diffusion of technology enables everyone to get value from it, so everyone will have a robot. Everyone will be able to have a small business. It's like imagine back in the day, 20, 30 years ago, if you told people, hey, everyone can have an Etsy store. Now all of the knitting you're doing at home you can sell and you can make 50 grand a year. No one would have believed you. But like, now you can do that. Have you seen these arm farms in India? No. Jared, pull up that video

I sent you about robots needing a human body. Inside the race to train AI robots, how to act human in the real world. I traveled to southern India to document the rise of AI arm farms where young engineers strap gopros to their foreheads and fold laundry, a pack box, is to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. So people are getting paid to do normal shit. Here it is. And then the robot learns? Yeah.

So this is the same thing that happened with Tesla's full self-driving. Right. That they take the best. I mean, this doesn't strike me as the best folding I've ever seen. But they take the best drivers on Tesla and they use that to train the model on. It would be a good hack to mess with the robots and fold incorrectly over and over again. Just downstream, lots of people with creased t-shirts. I just mess it all over.

Yeah, this is my way to destroy the t-shirt folding industry. Like suddenly in the future, everything you buy is completely broken because everyone trains the robot. But this is everything. This is for everything. This is for making a cup of tea. What's that famous robotics challenge? They have cracking an egg. Yeah.

The delicacy to hold it and the speed to hit it and the precision to whatever. Yeah. But, yeah, this is the future. Hey, look, if you need extra cash, let it watch you fold your pants. And this is obviously transitory. this is the training phase of the robotics. The real question is, what are people individually going to do? So, like, I know you asked about the moon.

We'll get it. That's fine. Because it was also that anthropic report that just got released, looking at which jobs are going to be popped first by AI, and that doesn't even include robotics. So I don't think that there's, like, going to be a successful, organized government system to solve this problem,

to come in and be like, hey, we're going to stop these industries. I'm they're going to try. I mean, New York just passed a law making medical advice, legal advice, all these other things illegal in through AI tools, which by the way, you've got to ask yourself the question, are they really going to be able to do that? Because if all the models are open sourced and they're all available and I can run them locally, why wouldn't I just download a model, put it on my computer and I can ask it legal questions?

So one's going to burst through the door and say, David, what is that? What have you got on your computer there? You better not be looking at your health reports. All of these legal efforts and government efforts to try and stall and stop technology, historically, it's never worked. Like, it's just not going to work. Except when you have a limited resource, like uranium, you know, for like nuclear fuel or something like that. But for like something like this, which is self-replicating, it's software, it can go anywhere, it can be anywhere, it can fill any space, its knowledge work, it's going to be very hard to stop it. So the real question, and this is going to be transitory for now, but the real question is going to be which of the humans that are folding t-shirts today are going to have the spark in their brain that's going to say, I should buy five robots and run my own t-shirt folding business. That's this challenge that I think humanity faces in this next evolution. We can talk about transhumanism too, which I think is going to be a forced adaptation, but particularly it's about agency. Taking ownership for how do you

engage the future versus waiting for someone to tell you what to do next. That's going to be a change of kind, not just a difference of degree, I think, that previously if you were someone who was mucking the horses in the streets of Manhattan, that job goes away. But there's a new business that comes up and your friend decides to go and work there. The agency of I am enough of a self-starter with the sovereignty and the determination to go and do this thing, that does feel like the bar is being raised and some people are going to fall below that bar. I don't know if that's true. Because I do think every human has a degree of innate agency. It's programmed into a us as humans, it's just generally been turned off because we've created social systems that have

told us, here's what you're going to get next, and here's what you're going to get next, and here's what you're going to get next. Since we're children, we've been programmed by our education, by college, by the work system, by the economy, by the taxes, by the fact that the government's supposed to give me all the shit. Every step of the way, I'm being told, do this, you'll get this, do this, you'll get this. You've never been given the freedom as a human to operate. And I think this is fundamentally true with social systems, we've created government systems, financial systems, everything. We've been very severely limited as people. I think one example that speaks positively to my point is what's happened with people making money on TikTok and Instagram and Shopify and Etsy. If you told

someone pick the time frame 15 years ago that X number of millions of Americans would be making, on average, tens of thousands of dollars a year doing the things they're doing, posting photos of themselves in bikinis and at historic monuments on Instagram with, with you know, a sports drink or whatever next to them, or people were making money podcasting, like at the scale that they are today, you're the prime example, or people were making money selling home goods

and making 300 grand a year, selling their custom cat blankets, or pick, pick, pick, pick, pick these things. You would have never believed it, but every person has that in them. Every person has that capacity in them to do something unique, to do something special, to take agency if they're given the right space to do it,

and they're not told that you can't, it. Interesting point on that. I wonder how many people are going to have their agency diminish because of their reliance on AI. So I wonder if the very thing that's going to enable them is also going to be something that reduces their capacity to enact it. And I think that that's one of the concern. Anyway, the moon. Yeah. A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. 95% of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard. But that's why Momentus built fiber plus. See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of

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internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomomomomom slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-M-T-O-U-S.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. What's happening with the moon? Well, so I think that, you know, there's a big discussion, obviously,

I would say largely led by, pushed by Elon, but many others over time, that, you know, we should expand humans beyond Earth and get to Mars, and that's a good place to set up a colony and yada, right? Mars is not very habitable. We need to move a lot of material to Mars. But I think if you look at the math, it is very likely the case that you can probably reduce your energy cost needs to move material to set up a colony on Mars by probably 100x or more by making most of the material you need for Mars on the moon and shipping it from the moon to Mars.

And the reason is the moon, unlike the Earth, does not have an atmosphere. One of the biggest uses of the energy when you're moving matter off the Earth is getting away from, through the atmosphere, which drags or pushes the rocket back down, and gravity. So the moon is one-sixth the gravity of the Earth. So it takes much less energy to escape the gravitational pull of the moon than it does the Earth. And there's no atmosphere pulling you back. So with AI and robotics, it is theoretically possible. And then if you look at moon dust and moon rock, it has all of the raw materials that we may need to build machines, to build housing units, to build habitation units. What's it constituent? What's the constituent? It's got a

aluminum, it's got silicon, it's got carbon. You can even go up to the poles and you can get hydrogen and oxygen from the ice up there. So you can melt the water at the poles, run electricity through it, break it into hydrogen and oxygen, use the hydrogen and oxygen and the carbon in various chemical reactions. You can theoretically make any substance you need or any metal or any material you need that we can make here on Earth. So we can and should build very large factories on the moon. And the way that this would work is you basically can use solar power, right? Solar are very deployable on the moon, lots of sunlight, no atmosphere, et cetera, good continuous energy flow, no clouds. And then you can use kind of battery storage. But the mechanism for moving material

off the moon is not propulsion. It's actually a mass driver, so electric rail gun. So think about like a train track. You know, like these Maglev trains. You know, think about like a Maglev train. And, you know, if you run the calculations, it would take about a call it a nine kilometer long track to move one ton of material off of the moon and get it to Mars. Okay. At an angle. So here's the thing. It doesn't actually even have to be in an angle. It just has to clear any craters or mountain. Of course. It's flat enough and that's escape velocity.

Just escape velocity. Yeah. Yeah. So all you have to do is orient it correctly. Put it on the right part of the moon and oriented correctly. Wait for the moon to basically aim. That's right. The moon's passing around. And it would take, yeah, it would take a couple megawatt hours of power to push a ton of material down this rail track, it would take about four and a half seconds for it to move down the rail track and then hit... Four and a half seconds to move nine kilometers. Nine kilometers. Yeah.

So it ends up escaping at roughly call it 20,000 kilometers an hour. And that's... Now, if you're moving one ton of material, you would still need a couple hundred kilograms, call it about 200 kilograms of some sort of propulsion... To slow it down. to slow it down as it approaches the moon. But here's the other thing. You could use moon rock as a heat shield

for re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere or the Martian atmosphere. So you basically take Moon Rock, put it on the front because you don't care if it burns away and goes away. It can just vaporize. So you need 15 centimeters of moon rock on the front of this parcel. You ship the parcel off this rail track.

It goes towards Mars. It can hit 100 Gs of acceleration while it's accelerating. G gets over there. You slow it down a little bit and then it can actually enter the Martian atmosphere. The moon rock burns away and you've just delivered roughly 700 kilograms of material. And you can run that every hour with solar panels

that are roughly 500 meters by 500 meters. So, you know, pretty small kind of solar system, some batteries, some capacitors, and then you've got to build the rail. The rail, you need about nine tons of materials. You've got to get a lot of material put out to get this rail built. But again, the amazing thing about AI is you can kind of think

about it being self-replicating in the physical sense as well as the digital sense, you can put robots on the Martian surface with the necessary starting equipment that can make the next robots, that can then make the next robots, that can then go do the mining, that can then go build the factories,

that can then go build the rail, that can then go build the propulsion system and can then do the mining for you. And there's a lot of very valuable material on the moon that we could also ship back to Earth. So I actually think the moon is going to be a giant, giant, giant economy. And I think it's like one of these economies,

like it's almost like the East India or like, you know, like when you get over there, you don't realize how big it's going to be till this starts. But once it starts, the value of what you can do and the low-cost nature of it because of AI now that you can have robots doing this stuff and you can have AI orchestrate a lot of work and you don't need to commit millions of people to it and trillions and you still need some money, but not trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars, I think the moon is probably one of these

like more under-discussed in Silicon Valley kind of economic, grand economic opportunities is space the next industrial revolution? There's a lot that could happen on Earth. too. So like, I think there's a lot. There's a, there's a, there's a couple big, other big drivers. I think one is dropping energy costs to zero. And I think fusion will have a big role in that this, this century. So people don't want to talk about fusion because everyone's all about solar all the time.

And Elon loves solar and blah, blah, blah. So everyone poo-poo is fusion. I'll talk about it a second, but the cost, if you get the cost of energy down to one cent a kilowatt hour. it absolutely expands every economy. Like, everything blows up. Like, imagine if you... What is it currently? Well, it's in the U.S.,

we're paying 15 to 40 cents a kilowatt hour for off the grid. But nuclear power, you know, best case scenario is about five cents a kilowatt hour. And that's amortized, when you take the cost of everything you've got to build and amortize it out, and then your runtime cost,

five to 10 cents, but they're going to sell it at like 15. So, like, imagine if you could take power costs down to 100th of what it is today. the cost to make anything drops, because now you've got robots. Robots can make stuff quickly and with no marginal cost, because the electricity is what runs the robots, so you could have a swarm of 100 robots build you a mansion.

How much would that caught? Like a 10,000 square foot crazy house? The cost of energy is nothing, so maybe having a crazy house could cost close to nothing. Well, there's a robot printing machine that's just launching in Austin at South by Southwest this week. Making houses. Just, yeah, 3D printing houses.

Gen 1. Now imagine Gen 6. right and imagine energy cost is like zero um and imagine all that material production how cool of a house you want i want to live in hoggwarts fine get the land i want like a lake coma but i want to make my own lake coma you know like no one else like like david yeah like but uh so so energy cost i think are gonna uh this this will be the era when um fusion happens uh so fusion's this crazy like um um principle. It's this fundamental thing that drives the universe. The sun is run on fusion. Fusion is when

protons jammed together. Okay, so the sun is so hot because it has so much mass. So when all this mass came together, all the matter starts bumping into each other, and that creates kinetic energy. That kinetic energy is heat. And it's so dense because of the gravity, because of all the mass, that you've got this extremely hot, extremely dense plasma. Plasma means the it's so energetic that the electrons break away. It's technically a fourth state of matter, right? It is, yeah. So there's arguably five states of matter, right?

Solid liquid gas, plasma, and then Einstein Bose condensate, which is crazy physics. You always have to one up me. No, but it's like, I actually think that one's more cool is why I said it. But yeah, yeah, yeah. But what happens in fusion is when two protons have enough energy and they get close enough, they jam together and they stick together. So one proton, you remember this, like with an electron is hydrogen. two protons is helium, right? And then it's lithium and then beryllium and so on. So protons jamming

together forms a new nucleus, forms a new kind of element, goes from hydrogen to helium, all the way up the periodic table of elements. So the more energy you have, the denser these things get, it requires more and more energy to get this happen. Now, when you fuse protons together and form a new element, less than iron, it actually releases energy in the process. Anything greater than iron requires energy to make it stick together. That's like a cool feature of physics, which you could get philosophical on why this is the case. Iron's kind of like an equilibrium state in a weird way. It's actually related to the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces and how they have a tradeoff. There's a threshold at which the repulsiveness is greater,

because you have so many more protons. They're pushing each other apart. So they're pushing each other apart more than the benefit you get from getting them together. And so you actually have to put energy in to make heavier elements. And all the heavier elements on planet Earth came from the sun that exploded billions of years ago. Crazy. But so fusion is how the sun makes energy. So every time proton and proton get together, they release some energy and that's the light that we get from the sun. Constant fusion. So the challenge has always been, can we do fusion on Earth? Can we just jam protons together and capture that energy? So the technology to do it is you basically spin, you know, know, these protons around in a plasma at 100 million degrees Celsius. Some people are using

these like donut-shaped teroidels. Some people are now using these sort of weird, what are called Stellarators, they've got crazy shapes. And much of the design of these systems on how do you get these protons to move fast enough? And the problem is when the protons get close and together, they push each other apart. So you got to use a magnetic field to squeeze these protons together so that they get closer and closer and then get them diffuse. The problem is, they get closer, the protons make their own magnetic field that pushes back and fucks up the magnetic field that you're

trying to use to squeeze them together. And so it's this dynamical equilibrium problem. They just keep breaking and breaking and breaking and you cannot get a stable plasma at that density. AI seems to be solving that problem. Because they're now using AI to train the control of the magnetic fields in a way

that's working. And they're now able to hold these magnetic fields for 30 minutes at a time out of China now, you know, start it out of, it from like 17 seconds to a few longer to a few minutes to 30 minutes in literally like the last two and a half three years. Like that's how quickly they're ramping up in the ability to make this happen. There's about 70 startups doing this. Just to give you a sense of what this enables.

Basically, you could think about taking water, putting it into this machine, getting the protons to spin around, and then extracting energy from those protons jamming together. That energy turns into electricity. There's no nuclear explosion. There's no risk of the whole thing melting down. There's no nuclear material. Nothing's radioactive. It's a very clean way of generating energy.

So it's been this kind of holy grail since the 1950s when people first thought about it. It needs a different name. Yeah. What would you call it? It can't have the word nuclear in it. Yeah. It can't. Yeah.

Maybe some people have said just call it fusion. Some people have said call it L. It's too close to fishing. Yeah. People are going to pattern match it already and they're going to think, I've heard, even me. Let's come up with a name. What do you think? I think something to do with the electromagnetic, electromagnetic energy element of that, that doesn't feel, that feels kind of green.

Yeah. That feels quite safe. Yeah. I don't expect that to explode. Yeah. Strong power, weak power. Yeah. Protonics.

Something. We'll come up with something. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, I think that if you have nuclear in it, I think it's just such a contentious topic. Right. Right. Because it's, everyone thinks about nuclear.

The worst branding in history. Yeah. Like, nuclear energy is fission where you're taking heavy, heavy, heavy. heavy elements like uranium, breaking them apart. They're radioactive. It's the opposite. And you're getting the energy out. You're doing the opposite.

You're taking the heavier stuff and grabbing the energy when the heavier stuff becomes lighter, releasing that energy that it took to make it. So this is different. And this, you can, I did the math on this. Basically, you could use a swimming pool-sized amount of ocean water to make all the electricity needed for an entire year for the planet Earth. That's what this can do. That's why it's so important that we get it done. Now, when you do this, and it works, and we're very close to having this work in industrial scale. Everyone's always joked, oh, fusion's always like a decade away.

Maybe it's a decade away, maybe not, but it's going to happen. Like we're progressing up this production curve. It's going to happen. Are those 30-minute-long runs energy positive, net positive? They're still requiring net energy in because of the setup and so on. But the next phase will be to capture basically the current system. aren't just protons. They put protons with neutrons, and the neutrons are what get energized into the wall

to heat up the wall, and that's where they heat up water to turn a steam turbine. You know, like other people have other ideas that, hey, maybe we shouldn't be using a steam turbine. Isn't it mad that of all of the ways, it's still rotator thing attached to a dynamo? It doesn't matter what the fanciness that occurs before it. Totally. It's just dynamo and a fan. That's another thing that should likely change this century is the

the move away from that system where we can do direct energy capture and conversion into electricity. Because you're basically, the reason you do that is you're trying to get electrons to move through a wire. So you wrap a wire with magnets around a coil and you get the magnet thing to spin,

the faster it spins, the more it moves the electrons through the wire. So that's the basis of that system. But there's other things that people have theorized. So with this energy system, I think you're going to drop the cost of energy, unleash productivity, unleash economic opportunity.

So that's another kind of, technology that I would say is like very kind of future positive on like what's around the quarter. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer. The margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see, mitochondria are the energy producers inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes, even if your habits stay strong. Miterpure from Timeline contains the only

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at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Just rounding out space, two things. Who owns the moon and who owns the resources on the moon? And secondly, if we're going to start mining asteroids and mining the moon, what does that mean for the Earth's economy? Because I have to imagine that that's a pretty big dice roll, or at the very least, you're adding dice to the game that you're already playing with. And that's going to make things interesting. You know, economic growth is one of these things that's very hard to contemplate intuitively, to fully grok intuitively. Because, like, if you add chips to a game, like, we're playing poker.

There's eight of us playing poker. and we suddenly increase our chip stack by like 10x. We're still playing poker. But, you know, maybe we could tip more, right? Like maybe the amount of money we're now making gives us the ability to go buy $100 bottle of wine instead of $2.00 cores lights. You know, like that's what ends up happening is as more chips come on the table. Now, the poker analogy is a very bad one because that's a zero-sum game.

Economic growth should come from. productivity growth, not from money printing. Much of our economic growth over the last couple of decades, one could argue, has come from money printing. We've just put more chips on the table. The house has made more chips, put them on the table. But economic growth means that I went

outside and I made something. I made a new, I mined gold. Let's use gold mining as an example. I mine gold out of the ground. That's worth something because now people can use it, they can trade it, they can sell it. So I'm being productive with my time. So the more productivity there is in the system, the more

chips get made, the more the economy grows, the more everyone gets the ability to buy and sell more stuff and everyone's labor, everyone's time is worth more, worth more. And so everything grows. That's the benefit of true productivity. So productivity is like this best measure, I would say, of technologies advance on how technology advances social systems. The more productive we are, the more everyone's going to benefit. It feels like a unique kind of productivity to take raw materials that were maybe rare or at least didn't exist within what was a closed system, the Earth was a closed system. We weren't getting anything from off it unless we were hit by an asteroid.

Right. And then bringing it back in. Right. That is what happens to the iron price. Right. When we are bringing iron back from outside of what was predicted as a part of that. Yeah. So think, I would say think more about availability of iron versus the price.

Like what it does is it makes iron more available, more abundant to everyone. And same with energy, right? When you increase energy through fusion, you make energy more abundant. The price comes down by 10x. But now everyone can use much, much more energy. Because the price is just indicative of the supply and the availability. And now everyone gets more access. This is why technology is...

I've always wanted more iron. I've said, I don't know enough. You're like an iron hoard. It's funny, when we walked in the studio, I was wondering why you had that blanket over that big pile of iron in the... That's correct. Don't look at that. The parking lot.

Don't look at that. Yeah, you're like, your iron horde. You're like a Minecraft. I'm a schmeagle, but for iron. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, abundance is the name of the game, right? Like, if we really are moving a productivity curve, energy costs are coming down, we're able to make more stuff with AI. It's not that some people are going to get richer, faster. That may happen. But I don't think that's the problem. I think what really functionally happens is everyone has more abundance. You can now, instead of working 60 hours a week or 100 hours a week when we all work, you know, when not we all, but like when Americans worked on farms. At the turn of the century, it was like 80% of people worked on a farm, and now it's less than 1%. So we don't have to spend the 100-hour work week working on the farm.

In fact, the guy working on the farm is in a John Deere automated tractor with air conditioning. He's on TikTok. Well, the thing drives itself. Trust me, I work in the industry. Like, that's, it's awesome. They still work their asses off, not to diminish it. But, like, it's a very different type of farming. And yes, it is still backbreaking work.

But there's a lot of automation. And so that created an abundance of food, an abundance of calories, an abundance of availability. an abundance of availability. And we dropped the number of people globally that live on less than 1,200 calories a day for a year, which is how we define malnourished, you know, from billions of people down to 600 million. It's come back up recently because of various supply chain issues post-COVID.

Well, the number one type of malnutrition worldwide is now obesity, not starvation. That is a problem. Yeah, it's abundant. It's excess. There's twice as many people that are malnourished through their obesity. than through their starvation. Final thing, who owns the moon?

The moon, yeah. So I don't know. Astro politics is fast. Do you know anyone that does astropolitics? I want to bring someone on the show. Yeah, that's a good idea. I want to talk about it. I think it's so cool.

Do you own geostationary above the net of your country? It's kind of yours. Depends on what the treaties say. Kind of. Because as a country or as an individual, I could say anything I want. If I moved to the moon and put a flag down and said, F you guys, I've got lasers and I'm going to protect. this is my part of the moon. Who's going to stop me? Like, I don't care about being on Earth

anymore. You can't arrest me on Earth anymore. You can't take my money out of the bank anymore. That's a frontier. Have you ever read Seven Eves by Neil Stevenson? Yeah. Love that book. Yeah. Fuck. I wanted my most re-read fiction books. And in that they go up to the space and they need to come up with an entire new form of law. What happens if somebody commits a crime in space? And I never thought about the fact that, well, especially if you've got people from multiple different countries. Well, the way that we deal with it is X. The way that we deal with it is Y. And this is an entire new environment to work in. So it needs to be built from the ground floor up and people have got different priors. Right. Right. Totally. And you see that movie Ad Astra?

Yes. That scene where he's like, and there's like the pirates on the moon. You know, they're like shooting at him and he has to like get away. Like that may be what happens for a while. Moon pirates. There's like a battleground on the moon for who has territorial rights and yeah. And so on. But Look, there's so much resource availability. That's the thing about abundance. It's like maybe wars go away. I'm very, this is where one of the things. Because scarcity drives wars. Do I really need to be fighting with Iran if I don't care as much about oil and energy availability? Look at what happened during 2020, 2021 when crypto was on a bull run. Everyone was friends. Look at what happens when the price drops. Everyone fucking hates each other. Same with every resource, right?

And so, like, as resources become more abundant, lower cost, everyone's getting what they want. We're all vacationing in Hawaii, working 10 hours a week. That's where things go. This is why I mentioned the 100 hours. Like, you go 100 to 60 to 40 to 30. In France, they're, like, have a law. It's like 30. Now a lot of the Democrats in the U.S.

are like, let's all work 30 hours a week and, like, let's drop Fridays and all the sort of stuff. Didn't a country try a four-day work week? I think France doesn't it? Yeah, I think it might have been France that tried the four-day work week. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that's one of the measures of prosperity is like, how much do you have to work to be able to live a good life? And so if you can take more time with your family and more time to explore your personal interests and you don't have to do labor, whether it's on a computer or in a field, that's a good way to think about, like, are we all prospering?

Are we being given freedom to do more things rather than being caged into doing the things we don't want to do? Speaking of prospering, how far off are we from age reversal, do you think? that's one I'm most excited about. So have you looked at Yamanaka Factor? Have you talked about this on your show before? David St. Clair's been on, and I know that he's sort of tangentially associated with it, but assume, no, do the 30,000-foot view of the Yamanaka Factor's. So every cell in our body has the same DNA, okay?

We know that. And the DNA is in every cell because of a process called mitosis. Every time we make a new cell from the time we're in the womb to today, we're making new cells. Both, our entire DNA gets copied over into every cell. But what makes my eye look and act differently than my skin? If it's got the same DNA, how's it different? How's it different than my brain or my tongue or my feet? They're all, they're all, those are different cells.

There's different cells and different organs in the body. Those cells are different because the genes in the DNA are on or off. So there's a bunch of switches and the switches are either on or off. And that creates cellular differentiation. It's what makes one cell different from another cell. The eye cell, different from the heart cell, different from the skin cell or the lung cell. And the switches that are on or off are these little molecular switches. They're molecules that sit on top of the DNA and they keep that gene from working.

It blocks it off. And then the other gene is open. And when it's open, that means that your cell is making RNA copies of that gene and turning it into a protein. Zero's and ones. Zero's and ones. And each gene makes a unique. protein. The proteins that then come out do a bunch of stuff. They're machines, they're molecular machines. And they're constantly doing all this stuff in your cell. And that's what

makes every cell different, is what genes are on and what genes are off. And the complexity of this is astounding. If you were to think about a cell being the size of Manhattan, so imagine a cell is a city the size of Manhattan with 500-story tall buildings. That's how big it would be. Every person is a protein. There's 10 billion people living in this 500-story tall building, island of Manhattan, going in between the buildings up and down all day long, building stuff together, never sleeping, always working, running into each other, having coffee, making stuff together, breaking stuff together, working 10 billion of us.

Those are the proteins in the cell. In one cell, running around doing stuff. For 80 years, that's one second in one cell. That's how complex this is. So the proteins that are on or off matter a lot. And then they make stuff. So that's why the eye cell does totally different stuff than the brain cell or the heart cell.

As we get older, this is the current science on this. It looks like what happens is we have DNA breaks. DNA gets damaged from radiation and sunlight and bad eating and alcohol and all the other shit. As those DNA breaks happen, your cell actually fixes the DNA. It's very good at fixing it.

It goes in, there's a bunch of proteins. They're the worker proteins that are repaired proteins. They go in, they fix the DNA. Every time the DNA gets fixed, there's a chance that those ones and zeros, those ons and offs, get moved around a little bit. And as they get moved around over time, they get moved to the wrong place. So what ends up happening over time is that the wrong genes get turned on and the right genes can get turned off in a cell.

And then that cell stops working right. The eye cell stops doing what it's supposed to be doing. The heart cell stops getting the right electrical cascade to flow through the other cells. all of the cells, the skin cell becomes a little wrinkled. And eventually if enough of those cells have those epigenetic, is what it's called, epigenetic errors, you start getting wrinkles, your heart stops beating as well, you go blind, all these sorts of things happen with aging. It looks like the root of all disease may be aging.

And aging is a disease. So it is a disease rooted in the fact that the epigenetic factors, these little molecules move around in the wrong place. That's what we discovered is basically aging. In 2006, a guy named Shinya Yamanaka found that he could take four proteins and put them on a cell. They would go into the cell and they would move all of those epigenetic markers, those ones and zeros, to make that cell into a stem cell, which can then be turned into any other cell in the body. So that was the magic thing he won the Nobel Prize for.

In 2016, another scientist published a series of papers showing that instead of putting a lot of those four proteins on the cell, you could put a small amount. and if you put a small amount, instead of resetting all those molecular markers and making that cell back into a stem cell, what it actually does, it just moves those markers back to where they're supposed to be, to make it a young cell.

And suddenly that retinal cell becomes like a young retinal cell. The skin cell becomes a young skin cell. The heart cell becomes a young heart cell. All of these cells get reset. And they did this in mice, and they made the mice age to like 250-plus years old. They put it in monkeys, the wrinkles went away, and they've done it in specifically applying it

to retinal cells in the eye and reversed blindness. This is Sinclair's stuff, right? Zinclair has one of these companies that's in clinical trials now. And there's dozens of others. Altos Labs is like one of the most funded startups in history that no one talks about. They've raised close to probably $10 billion at this point

to pursue these technologies. But basically what this means is we are now discovering not just the four proteins, but a whole bunch of other little molecules that we can put into a cocktail. Either we're going to drink it, take it as a shot, or take it as a pill, it will get into our cells and it will reset the epigenetic of that cell to make it young again. They're starting with targeting diseases,

like a particular like blindness or glaucoma in the eye or, you know, rheumatoid arthritis or some other heart issue, and they're applying these factors to the cells in that tissue only. Locally. Locally. But over time, what will end up happening is this becomes a systemic treatment. and they're already doing it in animal models. And then you can either do it continuously, or what I think will end up happening is we'll probably have a system whereby these factors will be continued. When I say the word factor, I mean protein.

These proteins can be continuously made and released inside our body as they're needed. So we maintain our youth. And we will live theoretically for as long as we want. That's where this is headed. And the technology shows now that we can do this in animals, we can redose them, redose them and keep them. Has it been done systemically yet? Yeah.

Yeah. This is the mouse model where they made these mice, the equivalent of having someone live like 200 plus years old. You know, and this is like so early. They haven't even optimized the molecules. They haven't optimized how you deliver the molecules. They haven't optimized the dosing. They haven't optimized the method of the dose.

Like there's all these techniques that are going to be developed on top of this. For every one year we can extend average human lifespan. We're adding tens of trillions of dollars to GDP, right? this is also another big economic driver, but it's not just how long people live, it's how healthy they are and how energetic they are and how happy they can be and they can now go out and not feel all the pain and have the disease. You know, theoretically, this can lead to a reversal in rates of cancer proliferation or reversal in diabetes or reversal in many of these other diseases that are fundamentally rooted in this kind of failure of your epigenome, the markers that

turn your genes on and off. So this is a technology category that, that I am like, I think it's one of these other things that you can kind of think about the compounding effect. Free energy, right, like AI automation and, you know, infinite labor for people to do all the things they want to do and potentially living forever. I mean, you start to think about how these all kind of compound. That's why I'm excited about the future. Like these very quickly become these sort of compounding effects that drive us into a happier tomorrow. And then again, it becomes a question of abundance. How do you want to spend your time? You know, again, 100 years ago, I don't think people would have had the job option of being a yoga instructor or being a podcaster or being a wedding photographer or go down the list.

Like there's so many things that people have found joy in doing with their time and they can be productive doing it. I think more of that starts to happen tomorrow. And it's less of the like you got to go work the corporate shitty job on a trading floor in a corporate office at a cubicle or in a factory or all the things that maybe we will look back one day and say, hey, that was kind of limiting human. potential. Like, maybe humans could do a lot more, and maybe they should, and these shifts to more abundance give us that opportunity to do that. A quick aside, look, you know sleep matters, but let's be real, most nights you're probably not getting the sort of sleep that's actually restorative. Eight sleep pod five fixes that. It's a smart cover that you throw over the top of your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to 20 degrees. They've even added a temperature

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29 night, and if you don't like it, they will just give you your money back, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the pod five by going to the link in the description below, or heading to 8Sleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. How far do you think we're off from getting to the stage where we can do age reversal? One decade, five decades? Way less than that. Way less than that. We are in clinical trials now on several of these cocktails. And if there's always a risk in going from animals to humans, but we've done it with human cells in vitro in a petri dish, and we see the effect that we are

expecting to see. So we have a lot of reasons to believe that, you know, over the next 10 to 20 years, more of this starts to proliferate. You've heard Peter Diamandis's idea of longevity escape velocity, right? That you need to stick about every year that you live means that you're going to live a little bit longer. But that when you cross a particular threshold, you just need to stick about until this happens, essentially, or whatever the equivalent is, whatever technology is. Yeah.

It allows you to extend lifespan indefinitely. I think it's fair. You just hold on. I think it's fair. It's probably the best long-termist view for looking after your health. Yeah. That now is not the time to fuck it. Right.

Totally. Because in the past, there wasn't really any reason to stick about. Yeah, you're going to live 80 years or 70 years or 60 years, but you know, you're playing around with fives and tens. Yeah. Whereas if the difference is between 80 and 100 or 80 and 120. Yeah. Yeah.

You're like, hey, keep it together. And by the way, a lot of, like the number one thing you can do to fix your epigenome, which you can do without taking these drugs is exercise. Fasting. Oh. Fasting helps. Fasting does have an effect, but exercise. Like exercise releases molecules that in.

many cells in your body will go in and start to address the epigenome and make you more youthful. And then there's other things that you can start to take. Some of this peptide stuff that people are crazy about has shown that it has an effect. I don't want to be prescriptive on these things. But there's a lot of ways that you can start to kind of edge your way before all the big clinical stuff is done and the big, you know, products come out to market. What do you think happens to careers and retirement and family structures in a world where people live over 120 years? It's hard.

It's hard to say. I mean, you know, I could, I think it's very sad that, like, I love my kids. Like, I was with my daughters and my wife, we were doing a, what are the three wishes? If you got a, if you had a genie come out of a lamp and you had three wishes, what was your three wishes? The first thing my daughter said is I wish everyone in our family could live forever. That was her first wish. And I was like, such a sweet wish.

But I really do think that there is like this incredible, you know, a human element to this technology. It's not just like technology for technology. Disembodied, sterile. Yeah, it's like, it's like, it's an opportunity to give everyone more time to do the things they want to do. I really think this idea that like humans don't reach their potential is like a very fundamental truth we're going to come to at some point.

that for a long time maybe because we had to, we created organized social systems to achieve things as a group, but limited ourselves individually. And I think that that's what maybe changes in the future is that these technologies and this level of abundance gives each of us the ability to achieve outcomes and have like things that maybe we didn't realize we could have

because we had to make all these tradeoffs to make things work in a social system, in a society. Yeah, I wonder just how much of a challenge it's going to be for people to face more spare time. I know that you guys did really great coverage about a year and a half ago of the two UBI experiments that went on. Yeah. Is that not an indication that maybe there's going to be a crisis of meaning when we start to give people? Because those weren't good, right? No, I mean, UBI inevitably, like all welfare systems will fail.

Why? Two things. One is it creates a system whereby people will always want more. So it becomes this kind of self-fulfilling thing. It makes people feel like there's a disincentive to go have agency, right? It creates enough of a, if it's giving you enough. Yeah, passivity to explore yourself and your potential and engage the world to find your potential. You're not given that incentive.

But the more fundamental issue is simply inflation. UBI, whether it comes about through giving people money as taxes from other people, or whether it comes about from money printing inevitably leads to an increase in money supply, which makes everything more expensive. So there's a class of things that everyone that's getting the UBI check will buy, and those things will all get more expensive, right? It's a terrible feature of the economy, of economic principles, like, those things will get more expensive. So I think that that's why those things simply don't want.

work. But look, I'm optimistic. I think that, again, I keep going back to this idea that there's this digital universe that we've created where people can kind of build, like Twitch streamers. Another good example. People going on Patreon, people going on, I mean, pick your platform, and they're finding ways to explore their interests, and they can live on it. Like, they can make money doing it because other people value what they're doing. Massage therapists, yoga instructors, and Pilates instructors, dog walkers. I value those people. They're valuable.

And people like doing that work. So there's, I think that there's more to come in terms of what's next that we always like want to look backwards and we don't want to think about, hey, the chart is, the path is uncharted. And, you know, we should just get on the ocean and we'll figure out what's over there. What about transhumanism? Okay, let's talk about it. So super intelligence, I think, is a manifestation of AI at scale, meaning that,

that there's features of intelligence that in isolation or aggregation exceed human capacity. It's just not general yet. I don't know if there's a, I don't know if I subscribe to any of the definitions. But what do humans do in a world where the AI anticipates everything you're going to do next? Or knows everything you're going to think? Or has a sense of how to do things better than you do? I think we're going to be forced to adapt. So this idea of, like, humans living in their natural state should be back to their natural state.

It's such a weird thought because we live in buildings, you know, like we don't live under a tree. Even when you pick berries off a tree and eat the berries from the tree, you're breaking nature. Like, there's an aspect of a continuum of, like, what is nature, what is the human, and what are we doing? So I don't love the term transhumanism, but I do like this idea that, like, this, super intelligence capacity needs to be harnessed by humans. I think there's probably two things that happen, and the second one I'm going to say is very controversial. The first one I'll say is pretty well described,

which is this kind of human machine interface. Elon's got Neurrelink where they put the wires in the brain, but the wires, I saw a good presentation from Max Hodak at his company, Science Company Corporation or whatever. You should have him on. He's great. But he started NeurLink. He was the old CEO at NeurLink. And he's got the system where they're putting like a digital device in your retina.

They put a screen in your eye. Yeah. And it works. And so the screen... How's it powered? It's solar. He's got this whole powered system in it. It's incredible.

So when your eye is open, it's powered up, it powers up. And then it releases an electrical signal that triggers the neurons on your, the inside of your retinal cells that then trigger your brain. And it passes the signal, and you can suddenly see. and it's a very thin, like, paper-thin kind of device that goes under your retina in your eyeball. It's an outpatient procedure to put it in. He's in clinical trials on this. It's incredible. So it's restoring blindness. But you can kind of think about these interfaces that aren't about sticking a wire into the brain,

which I don't think is going to be where things end up. But I think it's likely going to end up a little bit more like, and people are going to view this as being extremely dystopian. So I'll give you the two versions of it. some people would say Neo and the Matrix, where you kind of connect the digital thing. But the other one is Avatar, where they have that ponytail thing that they connect to.

But there'll probably be some interface where the chip to brain interface is just a soft neurons. Like it's some sort of system that can connect with the brain without going into the brain. You don't need to go into the neural tissue. Now, I'm not super optimistic, and I don't get excited about this. Let me be clear. I'm not like, oh my God, we all need to connect them.

Like, we all need to be like the Matrix. So don't think about me as some dystopian, crazy technocrat. But I think my point is someone will do it. And then you'll be able to think, I want to fly a helicopter like Neo did in the Matrix, and you'll be able to fly a fucking helicopter. And you'll want to access information quickly using the superintelligence that exists in the silicon. So you want to solve a physics problem because you're, you know, trying to build something on the moon. And you sort of like access that information.

you look up and you're like, okay, you have the answer you need, you're not looking at a screen to get the answer. And so you're able to kind of tap into, and look, do we all want to be connected all the time? I don't know. I don't know if that destroys humanity or, like, it's going to be an adaptation of humanity in an era when there's now a species that might be more intelligent than humanity in aggregate. I don't know. And so I'm not trying to be too, like, deterministic about this stuff. But I think that that human machine interface outcome is very, very likely going to happen. And whether or not people want it or embrace it, you'll have to have to have the benefits. You'll have to go through an exercise where it's lightweight, easy to put on.

Maybe it sits above your ear and it works. And it doesn't need to kind of like be plugged into your physical brain. Maybe it uses a transmission where we can connect it here. And you can start to think things and get information that you want and so on. And suddenly you become super intelligent. And you have all of this capacity that you didn't have before. That's one, one path that we might walk. another path that we might walk, which is extremely dystopian for most people's points of view, but

may end up becoming a reality because of what we're seeing happening in China and other places is transgenic humans where basically right now you can look at an embryo and I don't know if you've seen this controversial app where they'll sequence the DNA of your embryos

if you've got frozen embryos for IVF, right? Which is a common procedure where you've got effectively an embryo that's frozen. It's not yet fertilized, but you can sequence the DNA and determine what genetic traits does that embryo have. I'm a big investor in Heresite, who is the most evidence-based one of these. Okay. So the ones that have used the Downs test plus the best geneticist on the planet to fill the gaps in. So you model the genome of mother and dad, then you take the sample from the embryo, and between those, they can triangular,

with real accuracy what the embryo is. You have, here's your 10 harvest or your 15 harvest or whatever. And there's your dashboard. Totally. And we've got immune function. We've got IQ. We've got externalizing behavior. And yeah, Johnny Anomily and Heresite are the best at this.

And I don't think it's dystopian at all. I think that crumbly genome and if you say that selecting against negative traits is good, then it seems to me to be philosophically. consistent to say that selecting four positive trades. So everyone's got a line. The further I walk this conversation, the more you're going to, more people are going to, on the audience, going to say you cross my line. Right. So the

first is, should we even be looking at the DNA of embryos? We already do. Right. We already do because the, and this was what prenatal screening. Not only prenatal screening, but let's say anybody that's ever done IVF, even if you didn't know. They screen. The doctor gets a microscope and has a look at the embryos

and just eyeballs it. And he goes, yeah, that one, that one. looks like the roundest. Right. And we don't, you don't want number seven. Right. Number seven.

We can't, we can't do number seven. Or it wouldn't even take. We know that it wouldn't take. It's not going to implant it correctly. So he was already doing it. So I'm like, okay, you're just taking it from some guy.

It's like an umpire in MLB that's just eyeballing it. And then eventually they're going to get removed and it's going to be robots. Totally. And you go, okay, well, I'm glad that the robot got it accurate 100% of the time. 100%.

That is the next line. The next line would be sequencing the DNA and looking at the gene. and looking at the genome and looking at the genetics and saying, hey, I want blue eyes or brown eyes. And some people say that's dystopian. That's in the Black Mirror episode. The eyes thing's got a bad wrap when it comes to selection. Right. That's right. Okay. Fair enough. Tall or short? Smart, not smart? Suddenly there's a line. Some people are like, well, you shouldn't be doing... Blind, not blind. Blind, not deaf.

The next line is what's going on controversially in China, where they're using gene editing. Yeah, the enhancement stuff. So they'll take an existing human trait, a human allele. And so they'll basically take you from brown eye to blue eye, or they'll take you from dumb to smart. They're not creating a foreign gene. They're just making a tweak to your DNA to give you the trait that you could have randomly gotten in the embryo, but you just didn't. Is that what the guy did with the twins that turned out to be triplets? There was a conversation.

I think that's the guy that got arrested or got in trouble. Yeah. 2019, I think. Yeah. You know that there was a third one? I didn't realize there was a third. I'm pretty sure. Jared, can you just Google?

Oh, to chat GPT, how many babies were born from the CRISPR editing in China? Was it two or three? Because I swear that there was a third one. So after all of that. I mean, I might eat humble pie here and I've completely misremembered it. You can also edit yourself out. I'll own my failures. I'll own my failures here.

I've said worse things on the internet. But yeah, I swear that not only did he do this thing and he couldn't believe in it's the first time this has ever happened. And it's so there was two of them. And there was a fucking third one. I swear that there was a third one. Come on, Jared. Prove me right here, brother. This is like three babies.

Where there were three babies. A third gene edited baby was later confirmed through corporal. documents. Fucking yes. Well, I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating. You're not a, you're not a distinct. I'm right. Pro gene editing babies. And he edited the embryos

using CRISPR Cas9 to make them resistant to HIV. Exactly. Exactly. So, so the HIV resistant allele, which is the genetic trait, is a known trait. So he just made a couple of changes, confirmed that nothing else was changed to get forward. So should we give

children or should we give embryos? these enhancements where we're not introducing new DNA we're basically saying hey randomly you could have gotten this trait and you didn't but now we're just going to make sure you get it and then stack this up and then if you do that how many traits are we willing to give to an embryo should I make every embryo superhuman

should I have a bunch of kids where I got one that's really good at sports one that's really good at music one that's really good at podcasting I mean you pick your poison sometimes you can put it in all three into one person There you go. And the super, super, super here. And the British accent. And the British accent.

I don't think that's genetic. Yeah. Okay, so now, okay, so that might be a line that many people are going to say, hey, I don't want to cross into that. And you could debate that philosophically. Why? Would you not want that? If you're willing to do the other things,

like it's a spectrum, why are you going that far? And there's a lot of philosophical discourse around this. Now, the final one. The final one is transgenic. And this is where you put a gene. or a trait into the human that it doesn't naturally have, that the human would not have been born with, no matter how many sperm or how many egg combinations you put together,

you would not have come up with this gene. Regardless of who the parents were? Correct. For example, being able to see infrared. Right. Okay. And so this is where you make X-Men, right? And the capacity to do this historically was like, no way impossible, but now in many of these, there arguably could be the capacity

to do this. And I'm not arguing for it. I'm just saying that it's likely that this is going to be a limit that's going to get tested at some point here in the near future, where we are going to have a conversation about how do humans keep up in an era in a world of superintelligence? And are there certain traits like that that can enable us to either have a better performance against the superintelligence, either super intelligent humans, or a relationship with the superintelligence via some mechanism that allows us to connect with the super intelligence or control it better or what have you or all the digital AI that's out there

or other tools or techniques that, or sorry, other phenotypes, physical characteristics that might allow us to better survive on Mars. I have great conversation. What was the guy's name? It wasn't Christopher Mason. That was the guy that was talking about space.

Who was the dude that I did the episode with last week that we put out? Scott, somebody, the guy about Mars. I had this, fucking phenomenal. Scott Solomon. Yeah, Scott Solomon. Unbelievable. Evolutionary biologist who's applied evolutionary biology thinking to what we're going to need to do to be able to survive on Mars. Radiation, what happens to bone density. But if you've got the bone density loss, how do women give birth? Right. You're going to have to do every child by cesarean C-section.

But over time, if you have C-section, you get narrower hips, you get bigger baby heads. You almost reverse evolution of where we got through it. Like, just end what we need to be underground. Because if we're underground in Mars, then it means that we're going to be. protected naturally by the terrain from the radiation. But if you're underground, what happens to melanin in the skin and what happens to vitamin D levels and have got artificial light and what happens to what's the psychological profile of these people is that I'm like sat there just a virtual episode and my fucking mind was this is a sleeper episode. It was so fucking good. Yeah.

Such a sleeper episode. But yeah, can we engineer it was a. And so remember like transgenics we use in plants. You know what trans. Put the word trans at the start of anything after the last six years. it's going to struggle. Same as nuclear. Yeah.

Well, I don't want to say GMO people because that's got a worse name. Yeah. Like, if I say the GMO person, because I used to work at Monsanto, so you'll like, that gives me my double evil scientist credibility. But there's likely going to be a situation where they're going to discover this.

Because what we're now discovering, a lot of like the human biology, like we talked about all the genes that are on or off. How do they all work? How do all those proteins work together? I described 80 years of 10 billion proteins interacting in a place the size of Manhattan, 500-story tall, bumping into each other, doing stuff.

That's how we do stuff in a cell for one second. So there's a regulatory network where all these proteins are doing stuff in a way that we can't model. We don't understand today. Isn't it mad that that just doesn't switch off one day? Of all of the human... Yeah, it's just 404s and you sort of blue screen of death yourself for a bit.

Cold temperatures will do that. That's why we can freeze biological tissue and then boot it back up. Because it just stops all that... Because it's actually the thermodynamics It's the kinetic energy of the proteins. It's random. The proteins are just bouncing around in the cell,

and they randomly will bump into stuff and do stuff. It's amazing to think about, like, there's no way that you can think that, that you can realize that, and not think that the universe is a simulation. You know, it's just like, it's literally just chaotic ensembles of molecules that randomly do these incredible things that we look at and we're like, I can move my finger. It's like, it's the craziest shit. Well, it's the same as when you realize that most of matter is empty space,

but if I do this, my hand doesn't pass through the table. Fucking awesome. Right. And the fact that it's all quantum anyway, which means that it could tunnel through anything at any point in time. I'm still waiting for that to happen. Well, here's another fucked up thing to think about. You've heard of quantum entanglement.

So, you know, you can entangle two particles and move them apart, change the state of one and the other one will change instantaneously on the other side of the universe theoretically. There's reasons to believe that it might be the case that every particle of a particular type is entangled with every other particle. And I'll just let that settle for a second, because if that were true, then you could theoretically, every time any particle changes anywhere in the universe, it's affecting every other particle in the universe.

It's kind of like a panpsychism, but for connectivity, like a membrane that everybody is a part of. Or it might be the case that progression in the universe is actually like a, think about a quantum state that's changing, and then space and time are a manifestation of that change. That's why entropy, that's why there is a progression in one direction. And it might just be that, you know, because space and time are defined by the relationship between particles. And it may be the case that if all the particles are entangled, that there's just this one thing that just changes and then all of space and time is a feature.

It's like a universal clock. Yeah. It's a whole other way of thinking about our plates in the universe. How do we get here? We were talking about it. Where's your line? Is there a line that you have? from GMO people to IVF shouldn't happen.

Do you have an ethical line for that? Yeah. I definitely think that we can be very defined around the CRISPR stuff where we can change a gene to make someone healthier or enhanced. And I actually, I don't have a philosophical disagreement with giving someone the ability to not just turn off disease, but to say, hey, I want this person to. have the trait that they didn't randomly get from you or like inherit. I think that's,

that's fine. How do you stop people? I mean, no parent. But by the way, I'll say there's like, there's a whole bunch of therapeutic treatments that we're doing now that are doing what I described in that final stage with an adult human. Like pholostatin stuff? Right. And so, I was in Prospera with the guys when Brian Johnson got that. Right. And so you could take, that is a gene that makes a protein that you're, you know, you could theoretically use MRNA to do it, but it's short-lived. And you could put a plasmid, a gene, and put it in your body,

and it will make a protein that gives you strength. Yeah, whatever it is. But that is, like, nursery school. Go to, like, university PhD level, and what we're learning about all the interaction between all the proteins is we could come up with a set of genes that if I put them into you, they will make you a hundred times smarter.

Would you get that shot? I would. Right. I'm choosing for me. I think what becomes interesting is when parents are choosing for their kids. I think that's right. I think that's the right

philosophical framing. Yeah. That's right. Look, if you've got this technology and it's available to be elected in the same ways we don't let people get tattoos before they're 18, whatever, then, all right.

So for me, currently, Johnny from Heresite, who again, I can't fucking shout out enough. He's so good at communicating this stuff in Heresite rules. That, line up to embryo selection. So I'm happy. I see no philosophical issue with choosing from the harvest that you've already done. IVF's already been and gone. Perhaps that's a bit of anchoring

bias for me that I might have thought twice about what IVF meant had I'd been born a hundred years ago. But it's here. And I can't go back. I can't cognitively take myself out of it. I think up to the point where here's your 15, pick from your 15, we're already eyeballing it. that seems to compel me in the direction that this is already being done. When it gets to, we're going to choose from the genes that you could have had. Then when it gets to, we're going to change them. And then when it gets to, we're going to create them that I'm as yet morally unconvinced. So you can pick, but you can't change.

Right. And I think that's probably where we are today. And maybe you're a little more progressive, like, than most people, I would say. I think most people would still object to that. I think the Overton window changes when if the solution I offered you where I give you a shot that puts a plasmid, which is a gene in your body, or integrates that plasmid into your cells, because I do think that's ultimately where that age reversal stuff is going to come from. I think we're going to end up putting a series of genes in plasmets into our body.

They're going to go into our cells, and they're going to self-regulate those cells to make them live forever. When we end up doing that as a mainstay and everyone's getting that shot and everyone's living forever and that becomes kind of a thing that everyone's like, yeah, of course we're boosting our lifespan with these genes. Like, this totally makes sense. That's when people say, well, if we're doing it to ourselves and we're all doing it, like, why don't we just do it to every embryo? And that's when people will start to, and that's probably many decades from now, but I think that's where you can start to think about how the Overton window shifts at what point. When it becomes less about this, like, that is crazy, because if everyone's doing it as an adult

and it's totally safe and normal and it extends lifespan and bring it back down to doing it for children. Yeah, I get the sense that any ickiness that people have around embryo selection, specifically for positive traits, everybody's already pretty much on board with embryo selection against negative traits, right? Huntington's, etc. The Ashkenazi community are already like very deep in this because of their genetic profile. I think very quickly all of the people who either are blank slatists, deny behavioral genetics, don't think heritability is a thing, think that embryo selection for IQ is just rebranded eugenics. I think that embryo selection for IQ is just rebranded eugenics. All of those people typically quite well educated, probably quite liberal and left-leaning.

They care about the outcomes that their kids get. And if these slightly more right-of-centre fucking Hicks that have managed to cobble 15 grand together to get their IVF done and then a little bit more to get Heresite or somebody else to do their profiling, if their kids are outstripping theirs in school and in sports, because, well, their immune function was the best of the ones that were available. and there's lowered rates of autism or there's lowered rates of ADD or there's lowers rates of depression. They've got a happier and more flourishing life. I think very quickly parents are going to look at it and go, well, why did I read all of those parenting books?

Why did I work so hard to try and give my kids the best future that I could? And I'm now leaving behind. Jeffrey Miller said this. Fucking great quote. It's like every single parenting book on the planet could be replaced with the power of one behavioral genetics book. that your kids are made up of the raw materials of the person that you make them with, that is infinitely,

not infinitely, sorry, that would be incorrect. 50% of everything you are on average is genetically inherited, including your psychological profile, and for physical traits significantly more. Like, very unlikely you're going to be born black with two white parents. Therefore, if you just understand the behavioral genetics of the situation,

I think that lots of people are going to get on board. Yeah, that's right. And as soon as it becomes a competitive game, this race to the top, not race to the bottom, is going to happen. And people are going to go, well, now the thing that's interesting, I think's cool, two wrinkles that I spoke to Johnny about the last time we sat down. First one is basically buyer's remorse from parents, this sense that because I was so consciously involved in the decision to choose this child, if any negative outcomes occur because of that kid,

I think that there's the potential for parents to blame themselves or for the kid to blame the parents, if they would have found out. And the second one that I think is kind of interesting is parents are likely to regress or converge on a small bucket of traits that they think would be optimal to give their kid. But Spencer Greenberg did this fantastic study, huge big study. IQ is not, it is moderately, negatively correlated with life satisfaction. Higher IQ, lower life satisfaction. And you have to assume people with higher IQs are. less likely to go to jail, less likely to be addicted, less likely to be homeless, more likely to get married, more likely to complete a high-powered degree. Okay, so all of those things would increase life satisfaction. So the impact of IQ on life satisfaction is so negative that it offsets the

objective life improvements that you get from being smarter. So which parent, if you look at this dashboard, all of the things being equal, is not going to choose the smarter kid. Now, if you had the option to boost the kids IQ by 200 because the world is different with superintelligence. So if you have digital super intelligence in the world, it's a very different world than we live in today. It's not just competing with each other. It's about finding a place in the world with the super intelligence. And we're all going back and forth to Mars and traveling the universe and figuring out quantum shifts in the universe and like all the things that I think are pioneering in the next century. That becomes a different and more important framing at that point. Because you don't

want to end up being one of the people or you don't want your kids to be disadvantaged in a world where there's this pervasive superintelligence that everyone's using and accessing and turning on and turning off as they need it to do the things they want to do in the world. And that's the right way to think about superintelligence. It's not controlling us. It's how do we use it? And you have to have a degree of control over knowing where do you want to go with it. What do you want to do it? And I think that's why there's this idea that maybe people start to think more about how do we adapt in a world of intelligence as a species, what is our role? Because there's a philosophical argument to be made that humans are dying down, making way for the AI. Like, we're just bootloaders. Right.

Fleshy bootloaders for the silicon. And I don't like that idea. Oh, so you want to compete. I want to use, I want the AI to be a rocket boost for me and everyone else. And I want everyone to everyone to have a rocket. And I think that's what it does, is it's not like a world where I'm competing with the super intelligence, it's like, dude, you're my rocket. I can't do what a rocket can do. I'm a human with two legs. I can't propel into space. I need the rocket. And similarly, I need the superintelligence to do the crazy next shit that I want to do. We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have

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I've heard that you're spending a lot of time working with seeds. Yeah, I run a company, my day job, which most people that I talk to recognize me from my, this is like a pill. Is that what this is? No, toothpicks. So we managed to find a company that embed flavor and supplements into the wood of toothpicks. So try, try, what's this? Maybe I'll take it with me and try it later.

Yeah, just take that one, put it in your pocket. It's really cool. Wait, what is the Neutropic? So cognizant. There's a 15 milligram dose of cognizant in there. In one toothpick? Yeah. Oh, my brother would do this.

Here, sorry. And, uh, oh, this shit. Yeah. Yeah, he's going in 15 minutes. And, uh, there's a little, like, 15 milligrams of caffeine. 50 milligrams of... He'll try anything.

He's like my guinea pig. We're fucking about with every delivery mechanism on the planet for these at the moment. So obviously Zins went absolutely crazy over the last couple of years. Is that your nicotine? No.

So this is just the same again. It's more cognizant, cytokoline, same thing that you get in, similar to the coline that you get in eggs. And we just decided that we would go for pouches the same as Zin's. Degenerate delivery mechanism, but much better for you.

Awesome. That's what I'm playing with at the moment. Is it doing well? It's fucking crushing. Yeah. We just raised, for Newtonic, we just raised on 60-mill. We're in going into HEB. We're in vitamin shop, GNC, Sainsbury's, Morrison's Daily, around the UK.

We're just launching in Australia. And then we've got these RTDs. It's a smarter energy drink. Yeah. I really, the last time that we sat down at Southby, we were talking about business and you were talking about sort of how people are launching and stuff like that. Yeah. Because that was like my thing was like, I think everyone, you know, we launched a tequila brand for all in,

which is great. But, you know, tequila, it's tequila. But I think that's the whole thing. It's like you can own your own brand. You can own equity. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, I'm very much a lifestyle maxi, not a profit maxi.

But given that this didn't exist, it's cool to have the ability and the contacts and the time and the resources to be able to make something that you want. Yeah, that's awesome. This podcast, the podcast, the reason modern wisdom exists is because there was nobody having a conversation that was basically. less retarded than comedy, but more retarded than Tim Ferriss. And it sort of sat in this nice middle ground. I really wanted to speak to people a lot about psychology, a lot about human nature, and it wasn't there. So I decided to do it.

And then a thousand episodes later were here. Honestly, the best, you must have found this, the best businesses to get into, if you can. I'm sure that when you get to your level, that it's difficult to always design something for yourself. But the best businesses to get into is designing something that's a gap in the market that you yourself would use. Yeah. Especially when you're at the sort of level that I'm at.

So, yeah. Anyway, you are obviously a burgeoning farmer. Yeah. Hoeing the ground. Hoeing the ground. Milling the, tilling the fields. I do have a kitchen garden, although it does need to get updated. So my day job is running a company called O'Hollo.

And what we do at O'Hollo is we turn off meiosis and plants. Okay. What does that mean? Very sexy. Yeah, that's it. So that's the pitch I give at the bar. And, you know, I usually get the blanks there. And then I...

Go walk away. Yeah, so all the cells in our body, we talked about this earlier, are made through a process called mitosis, which copies over the whole, all the DNA in your cell. Your DNA is actually packaged up into chromosomes, and there's two sets of chromosomes side by side in your cell. So those two sets of chromosomes get copied over every time you make a new cell in your body. except for sperm and eggs. So when you make sperm or eggs,

you only copy one chromosome, one set of chromosomes. And it's not just a selection of one of the sets. What happens is the two sets of chromosomes fuse. And they fuse at random places. So you get a random half of one chromosome, a random half of the other chromosome. And that's why every sperm, which has just one set of chromosomes,

is genetically different. Every one is unique. And every egg in a female, is unique. They're all genetically different because that fusion event, which is called meiosis, fuses the two chromosomes down to one. And then a sperm and an egg come together, and you end up back with two. And that's the new offspring. And every offspring looks a little bit different because every sperm is different and every egg is different. That's why kids all look different, even though they come from the same two parents. So they get half the genes from the mother,

half the genes from the father, and it's a random half from the mother, random half from the father. And meiosis derives that evolutionary process. That random select, is what is evolution. It's the source of evolution. By turning off, and this is fundamentally a challenge for farming. Number one, because most crops, people don't realize this, you can't plant seed. When farmers plant seed in the ground, the reason they use seed is because they're going to get the same genetics in the field. You want all the corn to grow at the same time, so you can harvest it all at the same time. It's all going to look the same. You can sell it all to the same person,

and it's the same crop. You don't want to harvest a bunch of, tomatoes where some are green, some are yellow, some are red, they're all different sizes. How are you going to market that? That's not marketable. So the seed industry came about about a hundred years ago when this guy figured out that you could actually inbreed plants and when you inbreed a plant. So a plant has both male and female parts, unlike animals, most plants will make sperm and egg. You can pollinate itself. And if you do that for seven generations, both chromosomes end up identical. Because remember, the two chromosomes have the same genes, but if the genes are different, you have different alleles. And if the genes are the same, that's called homozygous are the same alleles.

So if both chromosomes end up being identical and you make sperm, it doesn't matter where the fusion happens. Every sperm will look the same. It'll, because they're the exact same two chromosomes. Same with egg. So inbreeding is what was developed about 100 years ago, where they inbred plants, seven generations, took the inbreds, crossed them, and now every seed is identical. That's how they make identical seed in corn, in tomato, in cotton, in canola, in sorghum, and farmers went to a seed company and they started buying seed for the first time ever. And they put that seed in the ground, and they could grow a crop. And every year, the other thing it does is it allows you to improve the yield every year

because the plant breeder would try and make the two chromosomes from the two backgrounds different. the more different they are, the more complementary they are, the more different genes you're putting in that plant, the higher the yield, the faster the plant grows. Plants are really interesting because they're kind of like looking for tools in a tool belt. Like, how many tools do I have? How many different genes do I have that I can use any second of any day to keep growing? Humans and animals, we just grow like two arms, five fingers, two eyes, two legs, and we're done growing. And then our job is to go out and find food and survive. plants, their job is to keep growing. They grow roots. They grow branches. They grow leaves. The sun's over there. I'm going to grow a branch towards the sun. I'm going to make more leaves. Oh, the water's down there. I'm going to grow a root down there. And they just keep growing and growing and growing until they die. So plants are always looking for more genes in the toolbox that they can use to grow. So by turning off meiosis, we can take plants that don't have seed today, put two of them together, and all the seed will now be the same. Because every sperm is the same, every egg is the same. Because by turning off myosis, both chromosomes go. into the sperm. Both chromosomes go into the egg. And now the offspring has four chromosomes

instead of two. That might sound crazy, but many, many plants have four chromosome versions. It's called polyploidy, polyploid, many versions of the chromosome. And some, like, modern wheat is hexaploid. It has six chromosomes. Modern strawberry is octoploid. It has eight chromosomes. Modern potato is tetraploid. It has four chromosomes. So many modern kind of crops have multiple copies of the chromosome, and you can't make seed in those crops. And so you end up taking the plant, chopping it up, and replanting it. And that's what they do. So by making seed, it actually saves farmers the majority of their expense, which they have to spend money chopping up all the old plants, putting them back on the ground. And it allows us to make better plants

every generation, because we can make better selections on the ones that are complementary to each other, increasing the genetic diversity in the crop, increasing disease resilience, drought resistance, climate change adaptation, all the things that drive, yield, and make the farmers more profitable, make more food per acre, all these sorts of things. And then every year, instead of having, like in the U.S., we're farming Russ at Burbank, we've been farming Russed at Burbank for 150 years, we can now bring new potatoes to market every year that are getting better and healthier, more nutritious, more adapted to climate change, making the farmer more money. And so you can kind of, and the farmer, instead of using 5,000 pounds of chopped up potatoes and

like Matt Gaiman did, and putting him in the ground, he can use 10 grams of seed that fits in the palm of your hand. Wow. So it cuts down on his expenses like crazy. He makes more money and we make more food. So that's the business I run. And so, you know, we figured out a way to turn off myosis and do this. And then we've also developed a lot of other technology to make plant breeding more

efficient, to increase the rate of yield gain, to increase the adaptation of the climate, to increase all of these things that are going on in agriculture that make it very hard to farm. Can you make it so that you need less fertilizer? Yeah, absolutely. So nitrogen utilization is a kind of good phenotype to think about. So you can kind of, you know, because you've got to apply nitrogen to grow most crops. And then there's also work now, which we don't do today, but there's some work that's being done. Some crops like soybeans and legumes, they actually can suck nitrogen out of the atmosphere.

You don't need fertilizer. And it actually re-fertilizes the soil from the air. and so there's ways to kind of integrate that into crops that don't have that. So there's a whole bunch of that sort of technology that's going on as well. Wow. That is cool. What's happening with this California flight stuff? Because I was with Palmer over Christmas and a bunch of other guys from that side. And I didn't know about it.

I knew that it was going to be brought in before the end of the year. It's this sort of sticky thing that seems to be following people around, but it's also going to get worse over time. It seems like there's more and more rumblings that stuff's going to keep on. this feels like the sort of core engine of California's prosperity since the 1800s is now unraveling. Yeah. I'm in a bunch of group chats. I talked to a lot of people. I would say probably a third of people I talked to have already left. You're asking about people leaving, right? And I would say like a survey we did informally in a group, which has been published, talked about, is close to. an 87% of people are going to leave.

These are the core leaders in tech. And the other thing is I talk to a lot of emerging tech CEOs of startups that are doing really well that are growing. And they're all looking to leave. Like there was one company I was talking to they're going to move up to Northern California from Southern and they're like, now I'm going to move to Nevada. And that's because they're worried about what's next. So California's in this fundamental like sinkhole right now.

It goes back to my point about people making promises. in order to get elected, politicians promise people something that they don't have today. That's how you get elected. You don't get elected by saying, I'm going to take stuff away from you, the government's going to do less for you. Show me one politician in the last hundred years has been elected saying that. So in order, and there's a fundamental kind of like moment, has come to Jesus moment.

Can you keep doing these promises? Can you even meet the promises you've already made? And in California, the answer is no. California set up a system where we created the highest tax rate in the country because of all the success in Silicon Valley, all the income that's being generated, all the success and capital gains and whatnot, and use that to fund a bunch of nonsense. The bullet train to nowhere, you know, frigging like $30 billion in, nothing. How much is it? $30 billion. And they've had six CEOs, by the way, that have all,

been fired or the one guy just got arrested. It's insane. It was just published that this homeless program, $220 million are spent on it. Six homeless people got themselves out of the cycle of poverty that they were in. You go down the list. What was it, sorry, just, what was that thing about the affordable internet bill? Oh, rural broadband. That was it. And for the same amount of money that was spent, I think every American citizen could have got Starlink. Yeah. And that one, that's a federal problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're going to get me very emotional.

I've been very like, you seem like an emotional. I've been very like unemotional during our talk about science in the future. And then this is the opposite. Okay, this is the bullshit, the opposite that happens when social systems become manifest like rotten. It's a system where people lie to each other in order to keep themselves in power, in order to keep their money flowing, in order to keep this nonsense. up and running. People lie to themselves. They lie to their constituents. And the democracy starts to become like, what's the point? Like, does this even work? California in particular, we made a bunch of

changes to the pension system. So we have public pensions for public employees in California. And over the past 12 to 15 years, those changes have resulted in a bunch of guarantees to people on their future retirement benefits that the state simply cannot afford to meet. The estimate currently is that there's $600 billion to a trillion dollars in the whole. Okay? The state then has a question,

how are we going to pay for all these people, all the stuff that we promise them? And that's a big part of, and then there's also all the near-term stuff like health care costs. Hey, we promised them health care. We promised our union workers health care. We've got to figure out a way to fund the health care

because the promises were made. but the promises were never funded. The promises were never possible to be funded. And when suddenly it all comes to roost and everyone's like, well, how are we going to make the payments now? How are we going to fill the hole? That's the situation California is in. California has such a heaping liability problem that it's now you're seeing like all the rats jumping, you know, off the ship or they're burning the ship or the people are leaving the ship. I don't know what the right analogy to use is.

But that's the chaos that's ensuing in California in this very moment. And so we talk a lot about the billionaire tax. The billionaire tax came about because of one union, one guy at one union called S-E-I-U-H-W, who set up a scheme where they would tax you 5% of your net worth if your net worth is over a billion dollars, which everyone in this audience is like, who cares, screw the billionaires. But what it does is it gives the state assembly, the legislature, the ability to in the future change the threshold and the amount.

So theoretically, you could take the 5% on billionaires one time and make it 1% on billionaires every year. Wasn't this the case with the original income tax? 1930, it was 1%. Tell people the story of how the original income tax... I mean, the original income tax was pitched because we did not have an income tax in the United States. And that was, again, why this country was founded.

It was set up as we no taxation without representation. There was a huge tax scheme to fund all of the, you know, nonsense that was going on in England. Careful, careful now. I mean, at the time, very different. not to speak to the people, but let's call it the aristocracy. And, you know, what we call the elites today. And by the way, I think about the term the elites, it's sort of like that Spider-Man meme.

We're like, everyone's, you're the elite. You're the elite. You're the elite. Like, the tech guy's the elite. Like, that's kind of the moment we're in right now. Like, the tech guys are the elites. But, like, the tech guys last year were telling, they were calling out the NGOs as the elites. And then everyone's an elite.

Your privilege is more privileged than my privilege. Yeah, this is all rooted in Marxist philosophies, by the way. It's all this, like, oppressor-oppressed stuff. Again, all of those philosophies fundamentally distinguish people's agency. Like, this is so critical for people to understand. When you give people a bunch of stuff or you create a governmental system or economic system that says you do X, you get Y, you're a slave to that system. You are now oppressed no matter what anyone tells you.

You are not getting risen up and you're not, and pulling other people down doesn't solve any of your problems. Another conversation for another day. But in California, so we started out as a one, so the way they started the income tax in the United States because they're like, hey, we'll promise everyone 1% on incomes over, whatever it was at the time. I think $10,000 a year. You'd probably look it up. And that was it. And then over time, it's like, wait, we had to fund a war. So we, and now we're like going to expand the highway system. So the original income tax was 1%. 1% on high net worth people, on high

earning people. And that's it. Jared, Chad, this and find out what, how the income tax progressed over time. I want to see this. Right. And you can look at this. And so then it became like, suddenly today everyone pays an income tax. In California, I pay 53% income tax. And, you know, most people pay an income tax. And now they're like creating a whole new tax regime. And I want to talk about this importantly what they're trying to do in California. Here you go. It was a temporary wartime tax. And, you know, again, leading up to this, we had tariffs to fund the government. The government was small. Like the government wasn't meant to be this big system that took care of everyone and did all this stuff. Keep going. Coming out of World War II, and here's the income tax

started out as 1% on income over $3,000 a year. Okay? Yeah. And, and then there was like a progression. They added a 7% top rate later. And then you can kind of see here when the thing kind of expanded. Oh, wow. 1944 to 1945 in World War II, the top rate was 94%. Yeah, they took everyone's money to fund the war. But that set a precedent. Because what happened at that point is after they set the precedent, and then we had this kind of FDR kind of New Deal expansionism, all the stuff that happened post-World War II in the United States was like, holy crap, we can get the government to do big stuff. Let's do big stuff to make our lives better. You can see that that sound principle. Like it makes sense. It sounds good in principle. But this is where it leads us to today. Because every year, once you

start thinking about the government as solving your problems and doing things for you, that becomes something that only escalates up. It never goes down. To think about if 51% can vote themselves, what, the 49% of them? So this is the next thing that happens. So now, so that's income. Let's say you've paid your income. tax and you own a bunch of stuff. That's now your private property. You own this stuff. That's yours. So now comes along the government or this new bill, the billionaire tax act in California. And for the first time ever in the United States, we're trying to create a wealth tax. It doesn't matter that it's billionaires and it doesn't matter that it's one time or five percent.

What you're saying is that the stuff that you've already paid taxes on that you now own, that's in your backyard, all your iron ore that you've stored in the backyard. Right. Get off it. Yeah. Or your cool, you know, podcast studio. You, you own these things. You've paid taxes, you've earned your money, and you bought the stuff. But now the government can come in and say, you know what, we want that lamp. We want half your iron ore. We're going to take all your private property. They're going to get all your private property. That's what a wealth tax does. Is it taxes people on post-tax earnings. It takes away private property. If you give the government the ability to do that on even 1% of net worth for

billionaires, the next step is 5% of the billionaires or maybe 2% of millionaires. and then maybe it's 3% on people making that have a net worth of 100 grand a year. And by the way, to figure out how much you have what your assets are, you've got to send me a list every year of everything you own. So now the government gets to look into your house, not just see what's in your bank account,

what stocks you own, but what cars do you own? What's the value of those cars? How much is that art worth? What's everything here worth? Private property rights go out the window when you institute a wealth tax. Because now the government has the right to assess all your value

and to take anything they want from you based on a vote where a bunch of people raise their hand and say, we'll increase the tax rate to this, 5%, 2%, 10%, whatever it is, and here's the threshold, and we'll take it every year. And when you do that,

it eventually leads to 51% of people voting to take everything from 49%. That's the worst case. Like, that's the end state of this, is it eats itself, and that's socialism. And so I think that a wealth tax, and look, it's not going to affect me

this California tax, so don't think that I'm trying to, like, beak my book or whatever the comments or bullshits are. I think this is a fundamental principled issue that by degrading private property rights, we are setting a precedent in the United States that is the foundation of why the United States

was set up in the first place, which is for all of us that came to this country to get away from tyrannical governments outside the United States that took all our shit and controlled everything and told us what to do all the time and we came here and we get to have private property. Sure, I'll pay my tax. Here's my 53%. Thank you very much, government for all the great stuff you do

for all the services you provide. but like, now fuck off and leave me alone. And that's not the case anymore when this passes. Bernie Sanders, Roecona, all these national politicians, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, they're all saying we need to have a national wealth tax now. So it's not just in California. This is going to be the issue between 2026 and 2028. The elites are the billionaires and the tech people.

They're coming after them. And the manifestation of that is to create this wealth tax. And that gives the government the system by which private property rights are gone. and the United States is a very questionable future at that point. That's the thing I worry about the most. And I juxtapose that with my optimism about the future and this amazing shit. I mean, think about it. Like, this amazing shit that's happening in the world,

we're going to have free fucking energy. We're going to live forever. We're going to have all of this insane stuff that we never imagine, abundance and resources that we could never contemplate. Happiness, spending time with family, working less hours, robots that build shit for us. everything is going to get better. Everything is getting better. Everything is getting more amazing.

And then we're like, let's fuck ourselves. Like, why not? Because we'll just fuck ourselves. That's, that, and you know, this is this principle of like, I don't like using the term good versus evil, but it's like, are you thinking about the future optimistically or pessimistically? If you're thinking about the future as these are control system, this is, these tech guys are crazy, this is dystopian, blah, blah, blah.

You know, the number one most unfavorable thing in the United States right now, according to a recent poll, is AI. More unfavorable than Donald Trump. More unfavorable than everything. It's the most unfavorable thing because it is this, like, this narrative that everyone's been instituted in their minds. Like, this is the thing that destroys us, yada yada. And that's the choice we have. That's the choice we have right now is do we want to walk this path of abundance or do we want to lock ourselves up? And I will say the counterbalancing force, and people won't like hearing this, but the counterbalancing force,

in the world will be a place like China. Because if the United States walks this path, other countries will not walk this path, and it will glean the benefits they're in. And we have to recognize that. And then you have to ask the question, wait a second, is there some psychosocial motivation that others might have to see this happen in the United States?

And I would argue maybe, maybe there's influence happening, maybe there's a reason why people are spending so much time why so much foreign money is going into NGOs that are supporting these sorts of causes. I just, like, for me, it's so hard to grok why people would be so, you know, quick. And look, I...

Ardent about it. Yeah, there's something... Anyway, I don't want to be too conspiratorial because that discredits a lot of this shit. Look, I think that you could look at the conspiratorial angle, but just straight incentives for I want to be seen to be standing up for the little person when we saw how far that pushed a lot of social movements

over the last, six, seven years, and that got people to do some pretty insane things. I think in retrospect, a lot of them regret. And that was, I am here for the righteous. This is dangerous. This is too much. This is xenophobic, misdienistic, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, unethical, unethical, unmedical.

There's a big list of things. And because everybody is their opinion, not their deeds, right? The difference between our opinions and our deeds has never been greater. You're able to say good whilst doing bad. This was Elon's thing. I remember four or five years ago, he was pulled up about what he was doing with Tesla and about his presentation things.

He says, what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. There are many people out there who are doing bad whilst appearing good, and I don't care to be one of them. That's right. And the people that are trying to lead on this have 300. homes. You know, it's very easy to pull the ladder up. Would they not think, would, would they not be looking at themselves? Oh, I suppose that at least at the moment when they're pointing at the billionaires that are above, they're in this sort of interesting middle ground, which is wealthy enough

to be wealthy, but not so wealthy is to be affected by the tax. You know, if you go to Africa and you go visit farmers, you think those guys are complaining about using GMO seed and farming if it's going to double their income, their lives changed. You know, there's all these stories about how technology, nuclear energy, dropping the cost of energy, making it proliferant in India, been a game changer. Like, these technologies that we shun in the West are luxury beliefs for us to shun them. We have these ideas that we can just shun stuff because we are already well enough off. That's what happened in Germany. And Bernie Sanders has three homes, so it's easy for him to tell people, hey, the average person has one, you know, has an apartment, we should go down this path,

that fundamentally, in every record of history that we've tried to go down this path has fucked everyone up. It is the worst idea that humans have ever come up with and they keep trying to repeat it. You can only look at Argentina, which has gotten out of the shit like yesterday to see how bad of a problem this leads to. Socialism is the worst idea ever. Why did Mamdani get into New York then? People want more. They're not, people are left behind. We, look, this is, this is so important, I think, to recap, we promised people that if they went to college, you would get a good career and you could buy a home. And that turned out to not be true. That was a lie. The way we promised it to them and the way we gave everyone access to college is through federal education grants loans.

The federal student loan program didn't have a market check. The federal government, as long as you were an accredited university, you could run Trump University, Phoenix University, UCLA, Harvard, MIT. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what the tuition is. $60,000, and it doesn't matter what the degree is. You could get a degree in basket weaving or a degree in computer science. The government will loan you the money. And iron ore.

The background for this should be like a Minecraft thing. But the government will loan you money to go to that college. And so the government basically fueled increases in tuition. Because why would all these colleges suddenly go from costing 10 grand a year to 60 grand a year? It's because they could just charge more and there was no one to say no. because the government just funded the loans every year. And the students are like, I got a student loan, I'm good to go. Like, no one's doing the math on like, can I afford to pay $240,000?

Is it true that you can't default on it as well in me, way? And you cannot default on it. And so that was the setup. That's how it got passed in Congress where the government spends trillions of dollars underwriting student loans. So there's no underwriting process. Any college, any degree, any individual, any price. Those four things.

You could be a bad student. I shouldn't underwrite your loan. you could get a shitty degree. I shouldn't underlight your loan. You go to a shitty school. I'm not underwriting your loan. And if it costs a lot, I'm not underwriting your loan. That's what would normally happen and that didn't happen.

If you privatized it. If you privatized it. And as a result, everyone got stuck with an education. And then it's like, hey, the market's not there. Rents are high. And much of the problem with rents being high and all this other sort of stuff. Home building. Government regulation, government funding.

The bigger the government got, the more expensive everything got. You know that chart? Can you pull up the chart? with like government stuff versus like non-government stuff? Yeah, just ask Chad. What is the chart explaining government intervention compared with the price of different goods and services over the last few years?

It's an image. This tells you everything you need to know. This is why everything got worse. When moving to New York suddenly cost $6,000 of rent, you couldn't get a job. Food was $18 for a friggin' sandwich. A lot of this was rooted in this. this problem, which is the government got too big. So the solution is, I need someone to fix that for me.

And here's a guy who's coming along saying he's going to make everything free. The groceries are going to be free. So all the stuff on the red, everything above, on the top section, these are things that the government fundamentally has a large role in paying for in the economy. So government dollars are flowing into the cost of things. So the people selling those things can basically charge more, and they know they can charge more because the government can just fund it. And the government, government's an endless pool of money printing. So it just keeps printing. And eventually they're like, hey, let's raise taxes or get the money to pay for the stuff once they realize. But, you know, all of these things are services that the government's gotten involved in. College education,

health care, through Medicare and Medicaid, because there's no negotiation on these programs. Everything below is where the government doesn't have a role. The cost of a car, the cost of clothing, the cost of television, the cost of internet, the cost of software. These are all private industries where the government is not funding the purchase of these things for the consumer in some way or distorting the market in some way. So, you know who I first showed this chart to? Bernie Sanders. What did he say?

Did you have him on this? Yeah. Oh, you did? Last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should watch that. It was interesting. Yeah.

What did he say to this? In fact, Jared, let's see if we can pull it up. We should react to that. And if you look at, I mean, what's frustrating to me is you can read textbooks. You can go on the internet. You can watch YouTube. And you can see exactly what happens with socialist, socialism and socialist policies around the world. When the government runs a grocery store, when the government decides to

offer everyone health care, it's great in principle. I would love for that to work. I would love for everyone to health care. I'm not opposed to that idea. But if you're going to have like a government with no accountability and there's no one there that has any skin in the game, be responsible for giving me my health care, I know it's going to get fucked up. And I've seen that happen time and time again around the world. It's just not the right system. And I think that there's much for us to of learn from like why these things haven't worked around the world. And it's like what frustrates me is people are ignorant. They put their blinders on.

They don't want to see it. And they just, I saw an interview with a guy during the protests in L.A. And the guy went on camera and he's like, you know, what are you here for? And he's like, I'm here for socialism. We need socialism in America. And the interviewer is like, but you know socialism's never worked anywhere else ever before. And he's like, well, that's bad socialism. That's socialism that doesn't work.

Like, I want good socialism. I want socialism done the right way, and we're going to do it the right way in America. This is the story in every generation of socialist movements that have happened around the world. And they all start, by the way, where you have this kind of inept or explosive government system that drives people to say, I'm not getting what I want and everything's costing more. I need socialism. And also, that's super sexy, right, because it allows you to be able to promise something that people are going to love. And what was that point around it involves promising people something that they don't have? I always used to say the kid that gets elected for middle school president is the kid that promises to make the vending machines free.

Everyone's got a story about this at their school. You know, there's always the kid who said, hey, guys, what I'm going to promise you is I'm going to make the vending machines free. And that's what we deal with every day. So here he is. I want to show you a chart in a second. So this is that you with hair? Yes, it's me with hair. Human goods and services over the last 25 years.

Broadly speaking, prices have increased. by about 74% since 2000, but the actual numbers vary wildly, depending on what type of goods or service it is. So consumer goods, toys, TVs have gotten... Housing. Got housing in there? Consumer goods like toys and TVs have gotten over 50% cheaper. TVs are nearly 100% cheaper.

But critical categories like healthcare, education, have skyrocketed by 200% housing is in there too. One potential interpretation is that the less legislation that you apply to an industry, the more the free market is allowed to take over, the cheaper the things become. Even new cars haven't got that much more expensive. So this is price changes. And you can see, as you basically get to the top, there's more legislation put in and down to the bottom. What do you make of that? I don't. Uh, yeah, look, to me, when I look at the

economy, I look at what does the family need to do well? Okay, let's just go through. What are the basic needs of life? All right, everybody, right? Rich, poor, young old needs health care, correct? in America, by the way, we probably spend three times more per person on healthcare than you do in the UK. Do you think he got trained as a hypnotist? Look, I was proud of me sitting down with someone who's been in office

for nearly twice as long as I've been alive and grabbing him and not letting go too much without, I think, being too can't. It was a real sort of strategic learning experience for me. Yeah. But yeah, look, that's the game that is played. There is a question that gets asked and what is answered is what I wanted to hear. Yeah.

And I think that it's very hard to deny the value and the importance of the empathy. One of the things that the other side gets wrong is the failure to empathize. He's extraordinary, and so is A.O. and so are others at speaking to people that are feeling desperate and in need. And it is true that there are tens of millions of people. In the United States, I think it's 63% of people are living paycheck to paycheck or living on less than 500 bucks of total savings. Yeah, if there was one catastrophe that they would need to go into debt for it. But I'll go back to this point about, I think that the more government you create

to help those people, I worry that over time it hurts more than it helps. And this is where the price of things go up and you can't offer the same thing. Like, hey, I'm going to offer you more and more every year. By the way, I'll give you one anecdote. In 2013 or 12, when they passed the temporary tax cuts,

or sorry, the temporary tax hikes in California, they raised an incremental $100 billion since then. California, I've paid that. Like, I'm a big chunk of that check, that money. Not a big chunk, but I've done my part. and 80 billion of that went to increase, and it was supposed to go to increasing schools and like healthcare services,

80% of it went to increasing public retirement benefits. 80 billion. And, you know, I can't sit here and like, bemoan public employees. I'm not going to, like, say negative things about public employees. But the system whereby, you know,

there's a voter block that says, hey, like, we need to get more. And then the system is created that doesn't actually solve the problems that need to be solved, and the people that asked for more get the benefit, I think it's very inherent in democracy. Like, over a period of time, you could argue that democracy eats itself.

Yeah. Isn't it crazy that nobody ever pulls these people up? Each cycle, false promises are made, not capped, bigger promises need to be made in order to get ahead of where the previous ones were. The people who didn't deliver on the promises previously don't get held to account in the right way. It's K-Fabe.

It's like WWE. By the way, you can look at, the food stamp program, if you type in food stand program spending per year over time, watch what happened in 2019. Blow your mind. We can come back to that one. But this is exactly the problem. Today I would argue, and I've tried to do the math on this, if you take the number of people

that work for the federal government, state government, or local government, city government, plus the number of people that work for contractors. Oh, hello. Yeah. So here's the food stamp program as an example. And so you could argue like, hey, like people were, it was a crisis, we needed to increase spending. So we drove up the food stamp program. It's $100 billion a year now. And that's doubled from 2010. Yeah. And roughly. Holy shit. Snap spending increased 60x from 1969 to

2022. And it's a hundred billion dollars per year, roughly 1.4% of total federal. So 60 to 70% of people on the food stand program, which costs $100 billion a year. 60 to 70% are obese, clinically obese. And... Oh, that are on the food stand program. Right. And close to $20 billion of the $100 billion a year is spent on soda. Fucking hell.

Oh. That's a one-fifth. One-fifth of the money is going to Coca-Cola. So it starts like from a good place like, hey, it's actually started during the Great Depression. It was like people... Can we get new tonic on SNAP, actually? That'd be a great way to raise the value. of the company. There you go. That'd be fucking fantastic. Yeah. But it started as a, you know, an emergency

program, much like the emergency 1% income tax. It started as an emergency program to help people during the Great Depression that were actually starving. And it was like, let's give them bread, give them milk, give them eggs, help them survive. What's that? I think it's a... Oh, and sorry, I'll give you my statistic. Today, if you add up federal, state, local government employees, plus all the contractors for the government, plus all the people that live off of a retirement check or a welfare or support check. So all the people that are living off government checks, it's about nearly half the U.S. population. Either working for or being supported by.

Wow. So we may be too far gone. That's kind of where democracy is like everyone gets. And now, so now think about that person. If you're, and I'm not saying that person, like, if you're collecting a check every month from the government, you will never vote to have that check go down. You're living on those checks. So we're now, so this is how it maybe eats itself a little bit, right?

So you're now in a system where like, will people actually want to say, so you ask why Mom Donnie got elected? Like, I think that you reach a tipping point where this becomes like a, like a wave. And that's how socialism, you know, could manifest in this cycle. I think 26 to 28 is going to be the big cycle. And my money's on AOC being president. Why? I think this is the wave we're in.

And tech is AI is the boogeyman right now right like so there's there's also this like you always got to pick a fear like the Japanese are coming the Russians are coming climate change is coming there's always something AI's coming. AI's coming. That's the fear

and it works and you know Bernie Sanders like pounding the table saying data centers need to be stopped we got to stop all data centers this week so you know I think we have a choice I still believe in agency I still believe everyone can look in the mirror and look

the situation and realize that more government is not going to stop the problem created by too much government. And this is just such a crazy juxtaposition while we're in this exponential technology curve and this abundance curve that we're on. Yeah, do you feel a little bit like there's a schism going on between what's happening in the real world and the way that it's being perceived? It's crazy. I mean, like, I think that it's so sad that so many people are so negative.

I think, like, people talk about, yes, certainly a lot of people can be struggling. But I think, you know, in the mid-century, coming out of World War II, we were so optimistic as a people. We were so positive about tomorrow. All of our conversations about tomorrow we're all about, we're going to go to the moon, we're all going to move around in, you know, electric trams. We're all going to have a microwave in our kitchen. You know, I always tell people the analogy, if you pull up. up a, I'll do this for your audience. If you pull up the Disney History Institute YouTube channel and there's an episode on Tomorrowland. When they opened up Tomorrowland in 1955, it was all about

this optimism of tomorrow. And it was like every ride was all about tomorrow being incredible. It's like, we're all going to like go to the moon. There was a ride called the rocket to the moon. You go to the moon and back. You move around. And then they had a inside the house of tomorrow where everyone had a microwaves. You could cook your dinner in 30 seconds. It was like the future and people like mind blown, that's so cool. And, you know, and then I think we kind of, so in the video, they say like in the 1970s, they changed over every ride

to make it all about the fear of tomorrow. It was like Star Tours was a robot that made the mistake. It's a navigator robot. And of course, the navigator robot has to screw up. So you veer off course and nearly crash in an asteroid. They took out the rocket to the moon and replaced it with Space Mountain,

which is a rocket ship that veers off course and spins violently through the galaxy. Captain E.O was Michael Jackson coming back to planet Earth, and he's like, hey, we're going to destroy the robots that took over the earth. And him and his organic band destroy all the robots. Apocalyptic. And so, like, you know, we've kind of gotten into this very pessimistic view.

And I think, like, you know, if we can change people's aperture a bit and get them to be optimistic, optimistic, instead of pessimistic, and see how promising tomorrow is and not need to feel sheltered and, you know, taken care of and fundamentally creating a burden to these bigger social systems, these governmental type systems, people, I think might change their view. I'm hopeful. That's why we're having this conversation. But like, that's the sort of thing that I think we need to be doing. It's like showing people all the amazing shit that's happening and how much it's going to benefit you and how crazy awesome it is. And like you're going to be able to spend more time with your kids. The cost of food's going down. The cost of energy is going to go down. Like,

we're all going to have robots that can build stuff for us and you're going to be able to spend more time with your family, like on and on and on, like, housing needs to get cheap. But, like, fighting against these things is just so, it's so crazy that we would, you know, do that. Like, you know, there's this whole story about Germany fought against nuclear energy, and then their energy costs spiked, and now they have to buy natural gas from Russia and just put carbon into the atmosphere, which is what they were trying to fight against in the first place. Yeah, yeah. I wonder whether people being more hopeful would mean that they would vote in a less sphere-based way.

That's right. And that anybody that's talking about hope, if you feel fearful, sounds like they're dismissive of the problems that you're facing. Yeah. That seems like the dynamic that's going on. That's right. It's like, I'm not empathizing with your pain. Yeah. And by the way, if I empathize with your pain, we have to figure out an enemy responsible for your pain.

Damn. I think it was 2012 that votes went from voting for the party you like to voting against the party that you. party that you don't? Yeah. I mean, there's all these videos now. We don't need to pull these up. But obviously, like, all the people that were like, we got to go attack Iran, we got to attack Iran. And then when Trump did it, or we got to go get Maduro, Trump does it.

It's like, well, Trump did it. We got all be against it. Like, I don't know what happened. You saw the flip-flop with the vaccine. Yeah. When it was Trump's vaccine or it was Sanders vaccine. And each side was like, I'm fought, wait, no, I'm not. And I don't know when we got, there was a flipping, flippening that happened, probably around

the time you're describing. The flipping. Yeah. When people went from like, hey, there's a set of things we agree on and a bunch of stuff we disagree on to like anything that you do or say I disagree with. Yeah. And that's politics. Regardless of whether it's good about. Yeah.

Yeah. David Freedberg. Yeah. Thank you, gentlemen. You're great. I appreciate all the work. I appreciate it. I appreciate it.

I appreciate it. Bro. Thank you for having me. Fuck. Yeah. It was great. Goodbye, everybody. Dude.

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