In the Next 1,000 Days, AI Will Break the Global Economy | Emad Mostaque
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Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI and former hedge fund manager, argues in his book *The Last Economy* that artificial intelligence will not merely replace human labor but render the current economic structure obsolete within approximately 1,000 days. He posits that conventional economics relies on flawed metrics like GDP, which fails to account for critical societal factors such as network effects and diversity. Instead, Mostaque proposes a new framework based on four distinct types of capital: Material (M), Intelligence (I), Network (N), and Diversity (D). These elements function multiplicatively rather than additively; if any one drops to zero—such as an economy lacking resilience or intelligence—the entire system collapses. He suggests that the future economy will be driven by AI agents whose internal models approximate reality more accurately than humans, leading to a scenario where human cognitive labor could theoretically hold negative value compared to scalable, infinitely adaptable AI systems. The transition period is described as inevitable and potentially chaotic, characterized by what Mostaque calls "the great inversion," where capital shifts away from traditional labor-intensive industries toward compute-heavy operations that require no physical infrastructure or workers. This shift threatens the current debt-based monetary system, which relies on human employment to generate taxable income for funding public services like healthcare and education. To prevent societal unrest in a post-scarcity world where AI provides most goods and services without needing wages, Mostaque advocates for a fundamental change in how money is created: issuing currency based on "being human" rather than debt or corporate profit. He envisions two types of digital assets—a store-of-value asset like Bitcoin (or his proposed "Foundation Coin") linked to societal benefits—and a circulating cash supply generated by verified humans using AI, effectively creating a new form of Universal Basic Income funded directly by the value created through human-AI interaction. Significant risks accompany this technological leap, particularly regarding security and alignment. Mostaque highlights that current AI models are fragile and susceptible to "sleeper agent" vulnerabilities where malicious code can be hidden within training data to activate on specific triggers. Furthermore, he warns of a potential arms race between nations like the US and China over compute resources and GPU supply chains, noting that while China is aggressively deploying robots for its aging population, Western governments restrict exports fearing an AI "singleton"—a single superintelligent entity—that could turn off all other AIs or be used as a weapon. The interview also touches on the psychological impact of this shift, where individuals must redefine their identity beyond their jobs and embrace AI tools to remain relevant. Mostaque emphasizes that those who actively integrate AI into their workflows will retain an advantage over those who resist, noting that many corporate deployments have yet to gain traction but are poised for rapid adoption as models become indistinguishable from human workers in video calls or creative tasks. Ultimately, the path forward requires a decentralized approach where individuals own sovereign AIs capable of looking out for them and their communities, rather than relying solely on centralized entities with conflicting profit motives. Mostaque suggests that while regulatory capture by unions or Luddite movements might attempt to delay automation through strikes or protections in specific sectors like public transport, these are merely local maxima that cannot stop the global trend toward AI dominance. The solution lies not just in a safety net but in providing "capability"—universal access to advanced AI tools—so every citizen can navigate this new reality. By shifting from an economy based on scarcity and debt to one organized around human verification of beneficial compute usage, society might cross the chasm into a stable future where wealth is distributed more equitably through tokens that fund public goods like cancer research or autism support, ensuring that intelligence serves humanity rather than exploiting it.
Read the full video transcript
In the next 1,000 days, AI will not only
replace a startling number of humans in
the workforce, it will make the entire
structure of our economy obsolete. That
is the unnerving claim of today's guest,
Emad Mostaque. As a former hedge fund
manager and the man behind one of the
most used AI models on planet Earth,
Stable Diffusion, he's got the
credibility to back up the claim. In
today's episode, Emad lays out how our
current economy will die and what an
AI-driven final economy will look like.
We talk about the ridiculousness of GDP
as a measure in a post-scarcity world,
the role of humans moving forward, their
expected negative value compared to AI,
and how we can still thrive financially
and emotionally in this transition
period. Massive disruption is
guaranteed, but if Emad can be believed,
we've got the mathematics we need to
understand how the future is going to
unfold. So, without further ado, I bring
you Emad Mostaque.
You've written a book called The Last
Economy about how AI is going to
radically change how the world works,
the economy works. So, what exactly is
The Last Economy? So, The Last Economy
is basically looking at what happens
when the AI gets smarter than us and
starts displacing our work, starts
displacing our meaning and more. And can
our existing economics keep up with
that?
We've gone through multiple transitions
over time that I'm sure we'll discuss in
a bit, but we've never had this
cognition transition where all of a
sudden you've got
AIs that are more smart and more capable
than you, robots that can do more than
you can physically.
And so, I was like, what does economics
look like from the start and what does
our economy itself look like?
How does capital get distributed? What
is the nature of money?
You know, what are our jobs of the
future? The things we've been talking
about for a long time. I was like, let's
put it all together and try and create a
framework for that.
Okay, so as you put this together, it's
such a big topic. You've
told me that it is a fully integrated
theory of the entire economy.
What are the bricks that you lay down
for people as a foundation when you're
trying to get them to really understand
what this is and where it goes?
So, conventionally economics, we have
concepts like utility and generally
equilibrium and other things, you know?
You've heard about things like the
prisoner's dilemma, behavioral
economics, game theory.
It's a mishmash of lots of different
theories.
And it's not that great at predicting
stuff. Like, you look at the economic
predictions, right? I think yesterday we
just had a 916,000
uh
jobs claims readjustment. They missed it
by like a million, the biggest in
history.
We see that over and over again. And
like, something's missing, something's
wrong. And so, we went back to first
principles. What is the economy and who
are we?
Because it's clearly not measuring the
right things.
And then I thought the things that we've
got closest to behaving like us are the
AIs.
And the mathematics that drives AI.
And that's where we had a fundamental
theory, and we found one theory explains
almost all of economics.
The systems that survive are the ones
that persist.
And the ones that
do best are the ones whose internal
models approximate reality the best.
I mean, if you go in a company, if
you're doing a job, the people who have
the best internal models of reality do
the best.
From that, we found a whole range of
different things dropped out in the
mathematics, but also in the reality.
So, for example, we found out that GDP
and Stan Kuznets, who came up with GDP
originally, said, "You shouldn't use
this as the only measure." But it's what
we obsess over.
We look at the material aspect of GDP.
But then, what about the network effects
of being a trading hub. What about the
diversity impacts of having a
diversified economy? What about the
intelligence of being able to build
things and know-how? Those aren't
captured.
When we look to constraints, we saw
things like
you should be looking at how the flow of
an economy works.
The flow of ideas, the flow of capital,
the flow of people.
The resilience of economy. The openness
of an economy. And so, we created a
whole bunch of different dashboards and
then we showed them mathematically say
this is how you should view everything
from individual to family
to country to society itself. We need to
look at more things. And we need to have
a different base perspective of how it
all comes about
when the things that will drive the
economy are the things that are based on
generative AI mathematics, the AIs
themselves.
Because we're going to a place
>> that apart in a second, but first let me
make sure that I'm tracking what you're
saying. So, you're talking about getting
to a map of reality and that that has
the most predictive validity for how the
economy is going to work. Um, why is
that true? Are you trying to get to um
that when your map is real
that
it it's so closely matched one-to-one
that we can map the full complexity of
the interactions and that's what gives
it the predictive validity or is it
something else? I think it'd be great if
we could do that. But more than that, it
comes down to individual economic agents
that are successful are the ones whose
internal states and internal maps are
closest to reality.
So, as you learn your job as you build a
company, the company that has the best
internal model versus reality
minimizing the surprise between them,
which is exactly the same mathematics as
AI, where you've got some objective
function of being a great chatbot or a
great scientist and you're minimizing
the gap between reality and your model
are the ones that do the best.
And when everything in society humans,
AIs, are all trying to optimize for the
same things, are all trying to make the
best models they can to navigate, we
found that you can actually map and
understand economics from the micro to
the macro level much better.
And we found some things that showed us
what we're missing in our measurements.
Cuz you can't manage what you can't
measure.
And so again
>> it felt like you were saying no, what I
said wasn't accurate, but then
I still I'm hearing a yes in there. I
want to I want to make sure that I'm
getting this. So I've long believed in
my own life that the reason that you try
to build an accurate internal map is so
that you can predict the outcome of your
actions.
Uh because you're at first principles,
you're at cause and effect. So if I do
this, I will get this outcome. Uh is
that not what you're saying? That the
whole point of the model is simply to
map cause and effect. There is one
aspect where you look at the macro. If
we build this for the economy, then we
can navigate what's coming.
But then it goes all the way down to the
micro. So the same mathematics and
equations actually go from top to bottom
and the same way of viewing reality.
Which is not that we are perfectly
rational or irrational entities
maximizing utility stabbing each other
in the back
in a scarcity type environment. But
instead we're all just trying to do the
best we can in our internal models
versus the external state.
And the ones that will do the best are
the ones that can balance those but in
certain very interesting ways.
Okay, and you're saying that the the
mathematics that we have used to solve
that problem in AI where we're
uh reducing the gap between the internal
model's ability to predict
what it's going to create.
Uh the gap between its vision of what it
will create and then what it actually
does create. That that mathematics
applies directly to the economy at all
of these different scales. That's what
we found.
Okay. What are the predictions that you
found as you zero in on this correlation
in the mathematics of AI, which you know
well? By the way, for people that don't
know you, you've built some of the most
profound AI models. So, Stability AI,
for people that know that, diffusion,
stable diffusion, that's you.
So, obviously an area that you know
well. You're also a former hedge fund
manager. So, you know, you know these
two worlds. Um
So, when you look at
the the mathematics of that and you
project it out, what is it telling you
about where we're going economically?
So, when we look at the mathematics and
where we're going,
um from this particular perspective, it
shows us basically that we're a bit
screwed.
Because
you have different types of entities
organizing,
but the ones that can map and predict
the best are the AIs.
Recently, this week we've seen AIs go
from like 20 minutes of thinking time to
200 minutes and more.
And they're getting more and more
capable, and this is the takeoff here
for that.
The human capacity for optimizing and
adapting to the environment is capped by
our brains, whereas AI, we can just
scale almost infinitely. You can have
multiple agents, which can now think for
arbitrarily long periods of time.
You can do almost any cognitive labor.
And what we found is that human
cognitive labor doesn't go to zero in
value, it actually goes negative.
Which intuitively is true.
Because we will come to the wrong
conclusion. Because we're the weakest
member of the team.
If you have AI that's constantly
learning, adapting, and can think for
arbitrary periods of time, and can scale
its cognition, and check each other's
work,
then you're the weakest link on the
team.
Just like, again,
that person who's the least intelligent
is the weakest link on your team.
And so, how do you compete against
economies that are
AI almost entirely, the AI will
outcompete you.
And so we see this lack of balance,
particularly when it comes to things
like capital accumulation, what the
objective function is.
And then it comes to mind, what are we
actually measuring?
You know, what is the kind of meaning
behind this? Because our current
measurements are a bit wonky.
Like something
>> Specifically GDP.
GDP. Again, Stan Kuznets who came up
with GDP actually went in front of
Senate and said, "This is the wrong
measurement."
Cancer is good for GDP and it makes it
go up. Solving and curing cancer is bad
for GDP.
You know, it's like looking at just one
particular type of capital.
And what our equation showed us was that
there's actually four distinct types of
capital.
And so when we look at that, we see a
history whereby you're going through
almost the final what we call great
inversion, which you can discuss in a
minute, where the AIs will outcompete
us, and we have to start measuring
things differently.
And then we have to think about the way
money and other things flow differently
if we're going to thrive in what's
coming. An important thing for me to
always remember is there is the moon and
there is the finger pointing at the
moon. So GDP is a finger, it is not the
moon itself.
Uh presumably the measurements you're
talking about now are fingers, not
moons. So what is the moon? Is it human
well-being? Is it growth? Like what are
we actually trying to get out with these
measurements?
So I think what we're trying to get out
with the measurements is a couple of
things. One is that we want to have
stable systems.
We don't want to have wild systems that
go back and forth.
And we want to really look at again
things like flourishing, happiness,
contentment.
Right now, because we overfocus on one
thing, we all know lots of very rich
people
who are very very sad, you know? Like
there's no real correlation. Like you
get to a point where, "Hey, I don't need
to worry about starving." And I live an
okay life, but then it's not like
happiness scales with wealth.
What we found is that there's four types
of capital.
And those are material capital. You
know, that's the scarce stuff. I give
you an apple, you take the apple, I
don't have the apple. You know, there's
intelligence. It's the people listening
to this podcast, right?
Like, how much does it cost to give them
the ideas and concepts? Hopefully, it
enriches them.
Then there's the network effects, the N.
Over your career, you've built up this
amazing network of people they have
contact with, and that gives you real
power
and ability and capability, and you're
in Los Angeles, and you've got your
network there as well. And the final
thing is diversity, that resilience,
whereby, you know, you can do lots of
different things, you have lots of
different options from portfolios to
friendship circles to more.
And we found that you can kind of show
those mathematically, and when those are
in balance and it's multiplicative,
you tend to get more happiness
occurring. You know, you tend to get
more progress. But that isn't the whole
equation. But if any of them is zero,
then things fall apart.
Like, you had in Japan, it was closed
off from the entire society for a long
time until the 1800s, and they were
using swords when the guns came.
You know, with the potato famine, that's
why I was able to low diversity. If you
don't have enough material,
then you don't reach that level of
prosperity. If you have no network
effects,
then you can't grow.
And if you don't have the I and you're
increasing your intelligence, then again
there's no progress.
So, I think
>> Really fast just for uh people following
along at home, that's your mind
framework, M I N D. So, each of those is
part of the four things that you're
optimizing for, yes? Yeah. And it's
optimizing for the balance of them cuz
it's multiplicative, not additive. And
again, you can see that in your own
personal lives as well.
You need to have a balance of your
material, your intelligence, your
network, and diversity. Like, a lot of
people build their networks, they don't
really think about it, but if you just
build your networks completely without
any I, then you're a socialite without
that many skills, right?
If you you have the diversity, then it
might work for a while, but then what
happens when you hit a crisis?
So, we found out that again, you can
express those mathematically and also
you can have
elements that show that in historical
crashes, in historical booms and more.
And the best societies like for example,
Singapore
have managed to balance them really
well.
Where you have intelligence, network,
diversity and M. Not perfectly.
But when one of those goes, you have an
individual breakdown or you have a
societal breakdown. And this is
something we have to look at as we're
building towards what's coming.
Where intelligence becomes incredibly
abundant.
Okay. Um so, I want to lock these ideas
in. You do a really good job in the book
of um sort of giving us concrete things
to hold on to. So, one of them is the
idea of GDP as a dashboard. It's a bad
dashboard. You've called it in the book
insanity. Uh
the new dashboard is what we just walked
through, the MIND framework. Um
Okay, so if we have those two dashboards
and
we're living in this hyper-transitional
moment, what are the signs that we can
look at to see evidence that we have
been in a period of transition for quite
a while?
In the book I put that there have been
four inversions and we're in the final
inversion.
We've kind of moved from land
where it was about the amount of land
and then the serfs and the people that
you had on the land operating.
To then you had labor.
Which you had cities that emerged like
Manchester and others
where you could kind of bring labor and
then apply capital.
Where you then built factories. Now it's
an intelligence inversion whereby most
of the GDP will be driven by these
machines that can just go abundant and
massively so.
When you start looking at these other
capitals, the IND versus the classical
M, this material GDP,
you kind of start measuring different
things which is things like what is the
organizational resilience of a society
due to the diverse effects of its
economy. And we have measures for that.
And again, we have that on
organizational level as well, where we
have different types of organization.
Organizations that are just
hyper-focused on one thing have low
diversity, so they can't adapt to what's
coming. versus ones that have lots of
teams empowered by AI
can most likely adapt better.
N becomes a very important thing as
well. This is something that we've lost
a lot. Social networks are all
extractive
to various degrees. I don't think
they're very positive for what we are
doing in society versus classical
networks of our communities, our
families, and more.
And we need to think how do we do the
geometry
to enable stronger networks because if
you go through crises and you have
people around you
and you have good network bonds, then
you'll be able to measure those
better and you'll also be able to thrive
better as you go through things. So, in
an upcoming piece, we have a whole
series of different indicators for each
of the types of capital at different
levels. And we think we should move to
looking at the balance of those again
just versus looking at is GDP up or
down. Because more and more of that GDP
will not be human.
Okay, one of the things that I spend a
lot of time looking at is
Ray Dalio's six-phase cycle, the big
debt cycle, and that there's just all
this predictive validity within that
cycle and he's made an ungodly amount of
money by having a better understanding
of where any given country is within
that very repeatable cycle.
Um
you've talked about the since 2008,
there is um
I don't know if you'd call it predictive
um
that it's very predictive of a cycle
that can be known and understood, but
that was certainly how I interpreted it
reading the book. Uh when you break down
the different elements of what this new
economy is going to
That's not the right way to say it. That
the the descriptors for
the end stage of the economy that we're
in has these different notes.
And one of those is um an instability
that we're seeing dramatically right
now. And you said from 2008 to the
present we haven't been rebounding as
people have talked about it or really
even still talk about it. But instead
we've just been propping it up.
Walk me through why you say since 2008,
which is a decade and a half
we're not making the kind of progress
that we could have expected
historically.
So I think there's an interesting thing
here, you know, those of us who are a
bit older like it was better in the good
old days, you know? Like I was a hedge
fund manager through 2008. That wasn't
very pleasant, to say the least. But
we see
all of our indicators are indicating
pretty much record low unemployment, GDP
is at record highs, corporate
profitability at record highs.
But it's not a happy environment, is it?
Like again, we're seeing societal
stresses all over the place. That's what
I call kind of the harbingers. We're
seeing increasing volatility in
localized pockets. We're seeing things
that we've never
thought seen before in society and
markets and more.
At the time of all of these entities
coming, yet capital is pooling in these
multi-trillion dollar companies.
You know? And the localization is bad as
well.
I think part of that is that we've seen
this emerge
>> Sorry, I didn't understand that. So like
from the top to the bottom
at the top level everything seems right.
In the middle, the localization, things
seem to be rotting effectively.
Something seems to be breaking in our
very foundations. And when you say in
the middle, do you mean middle class? Uh
so I meant kind of bottom up. Yeah, in
the middle class at the societal level,
again, we see unhappiness indicators and
other things, depression levels reaching
record highs.
It doesn't seem quite right. Mhm.
And when we look at the economy, if we
just look at the markets,
we see the software companies going to
multi-trillion-dollar valuations,
Microsoft yesterday, Oracle,
you know, others going to that level.
But they didn't really need many more
workers. Again, it used to be that you
had hundred thousands of workers making
billion-dollar companies. Now, it's just
software that drives that.
And so that was kind of the first thing
before we even had AI.
Now with AI, that's just going to
accelerate things even more, but we've
seen the first cracks here because
capital can attract capital much better.
It doesn't need the people anymore.
We've already seen a breakdown of that
connection.
Which brings you to a point of what is
the meaning when work gave you meaning
because it moved away from being the
network gave you meaning.
You moved away from being, you know,
"Amad, son of Khalid, son of whatever"
to "Amad is an ex-hedge fund manager" or
he's an AI CEO, you know?
And so I think that's been a big change
that we've seen since that shock in
2008. We've seen various liquidity
injections. Obviously,
2020 was a big one with COVID et cetera
propping things up. But I don't think
we've seen much improvement in society
and the balance of society, distribution
of society during that period, and we're
seeing more and more instability
occurring.
And of course, for those of us that
understand not understand that are deep
in AI, I think just about everyone with
a couple of exceptions maybe would say
something big is coming in the next few
years and it's going to be like the
final grain of sand that causes that
good-looking top level to slew away
and the bottom up to start cracking.
And we're seeing that in papers, etc.
already. Like Erik Brynjolfsson at
just had a good one where he showed
low-entry graduate level jobs are
disappearing faster than ever now.
And I think again we're going to see
that repeated. And that's just because
we have access to intelligence in the
form of AI.
Yeah, well, you don't need to hire as
many graduates. That's the operative
theory, but it makes logical sense, you
know? It takes a bit of time, but then
when it happens, it happens all at once.
Right. Just to keep everything very
specific, it takes a bit of time for the
effects of AI coming in, outperforming
humans, to work its way into the
economy.
Yes.
>> And for us to feel the effects of that.
Okay. I want to lay out for you Sorry.
>> Sorry. I just I just want to say and
that happens at a time when our social
contract from 2008 to now has become
increasingly unclear. Here in the UK, we
don't know what it means to be British
anymore. America, what does it mean to
be American?
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And now, let's get back to the show. I
want to get mechanistic. I'm going to
lay out for you what I think is the
mechanism that's driving the decay that
you have outlined in your book, and I'll
be curious
to see if you think that I'm foolish
anywhere. Hopefully, you know me well
enough at this point that you know all I
care about is having that accurate
internal model. So, don't hesitate if
you think anything that I lay out is
foolish.
I will gladly update my model. Um okay,
so I look at the death of the middle
class as a screaming tragedy that is
going to end in continually escalating
violence. You and I are recording this a
day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
Uh so, and that's coming after the
assassinations in Minnesota. And so,
coming after the attempts on President
Trump. So, there is a sense of
escalating violence. But when I really
try to get to cause and effect, I always
come back to the economics of the
situation. And when people feel like
they're making economic progress, when
things feel stable to your point, when
they feel like they're going to be
making more money in a year than they
are today, when they feel like their
kids will make more money at, you know,
the same age than they do, everybody,
certainly in the Western world, that'll
just feels good.
Not that you can't have
I'll call religious-based ideological
conflicts that create problems like the
IRA in
the UK, but
for the most part, when economics are
working, everything else settles down.
Uh mechanistically, what hollowed out
the middle class in America, from where
I'm sitting, is very obvious. And it is
that you're in an high inflationary
environment because the government does
not balance its budget. And so, every
year, the government is going to do a
stealth tax in the form of inflation.
That inflation puts you in a position
where if you don't own assets, then
you're going to get yanked down into
poverty. If you do own assets, you're
going to get pulled up into the upper
class, and so the middle class gets
hollowed out in a very noble way.
Um
because young people are not able to get
into the only asset class that they
understand intuitively, namely property,
uh it creates this spiral effect of I'm
never going to be able to get ahead.
There's some of the depression that you
were talking about I think is
specifically tied to that. There's a
sense they're not going to be able to
make progress. You actually said
something earlier where you're talking
about optimizing for uh what I would
call fulfillment, but the one thing that
you said specifically was progress.
And I thought that was very interesting.
I don't think people feel good about
their lives if they don't feel like
they're making progress on a dimension
that matters to them,
which is what I'm trying to get out with
the economic you feel like you're going
to make more in a year. Okay, so that is
how the middle class is being hollowed
out.
And now, as the greatest meteorite-
like strike in terms of a shock to the
economy is going to be AI outperforming
us on everything, and companies being
able to scale without the need for
employees,
uh human employees anyway, and so we'll
get to the meaning and purpose of it all
because I do think that ultimately
becomes the most important question, but
I first want to deal with just the raw
shock to the economy and what the
transitional moment is going to be like.
Because it is entirely possible that
while looking at
the um dashboard of GDP, which you have
already been very clear is insane, but
nonetheless that's what we do for now,
looking at GDP, GDP might say everything
is fine.
But I think we're going to see increased
violence. Now, it will come in the form
of this is all about politics, but it's
not I, for reasons that I just laid out,
don't think it's actually about
politics. I think that's just the
algorithm that takes over because people
are already feeling this massive sense
of unease. Okay, so that's sort of, in a
nutshell, how I look at this moment. Um
do you see a flaw in the logic?
And if not, then what does the economic
shock look like from your vantage point?
Well, I think I agree mostly with that.
I think again, inflation is probably the
one area that
maybe we can talk about a bit later, but
generally it's this
change in the social contracts.
Like jobs classically were about your
income,
um identity, community, purpose, and a
bit of structure.
And you need to have that progress.
There's again the Japanese concept of
ikigai, some people on this may have
heard of. Do what you like, do what
you're good at, and do where you believe
you're adding value and other people do
too, and in the middle of that is
happiness.
What does that look like? What does that
progress look like at a individual, this
is my career level, through to what is
the social contract of America, life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
you know?
Like
these are all been changing as we've
moved into this kind of surveillance
capitalism type of thing where your
attention is being captured, where you
don't have the career progression,
inflation, and higher property prices
are part of that.
But too many people are like,
"What do we believe in?"
And this comes at a time where
we used to think that AI would be for
the low-level tasks, right?
But all of a sudden it's a better
lawyer,
clearly than most paralegals. It's a
better doctor and diagnostician.
And you know, we managed to get above
doctor level performance on a Raspberry
Pi,
which is crazy.
>> wild
You know, we were like, "This is even
How does that even work?" That's
$400,000
like career almost gone for the
diagnostician part. Intelligence will
become abundant. And if you look at
America, what's America now? Is it an
industrialized society?
Is it China
building massive amounts of it? No,
America is a
social It's a services-based economy.
It's an intelligence-based economy at a
time when
the cost of intelligence is going to
zero almost,
and the value of human intelligence will
probably turn negative.
So, that argues against the middle
class, because the middle class is
mostly knowledge workers.
Like the white-collar jobs will last a
bit longer, cuz you can't build enough
robots.
But what's going to happen in that
middle America? This is a real question,
right?
And I think that it's a particularly
scary, because
COVID was kind of a precursor to this,
whereby we had stay-at-home, we had to
do everything from the other side of our
keyboard, video, mouse. Now people like
get back into the office, you know?
But the reality is that the AI, as of
probably the next 6 months or so, will
be able to do a better 6-12 months,
shall we say, will be be able to do a
better job than you can in almost all
jobs
that are KVM, keyboard, video, mouse
related.
And the way those go isn't necessarily
quick, but it can be sudden. One
economic shock, like what's GDP growth
now? It's clear we were in a recession
last year, we might have another one
coming.
People start laying off, but they never
rehire.
And what are you going to reskill to?
Like I'm puzzled people are still saying
learn programming.
Like in a few years time, why would you
need to program?
Anyone here can go to replit.com right
now and code up a basic, actually quite
cool application that runs on your
smartphone just by talking to it. It'll
go away, and then in day you'll have
something. Is it amazing? Not quite yet,
but it will be.
Mhm. So, I think that the transition
period that we've had has been quite
slow and steady with some of these
structural things.
Um
you know, like what is the distribution
of wealth going to the middle class? Can
they afford their houses? If you're
entering now, you don't have parental
support, can you even get on the housing
ladder?
Assets lead to more assets and we see
again record highs in the stock market.
But, all of a sudden it's going to go
into hyperdrive in the next few years.
And that's a real concern because
what did you do if you don't have jobs
and a social contract for the youth? You
go to war.
That's been every time in history a
surplus of youth war.
You know, you have social conflict
because they're looking for meaning.
And again, what is the American dream or
what does it mean to be British?
Our politicians aren't really doing a
great job at saying those in positive
terms. They can say in negative terms is
what I've kind of seen.
And that leads to increasing amounts of
hate, anger. Now, you said it's next to
reality. If there's abundance, then
people generally aren't that annoyed. If
people know where they're going,
then they're not that scared.
And fear comes in a lot of this because
what you fundamentally got is moving
from decision-making under risk.
I know what the environment is. I know
what everything is around me from. I can
do expected value calculation positives
and negatives cuz I'm familiar to it's a
great unknown.
And so, I'm in in the start of a desert.
I don't know where the oasis is. I'm
going to be really scared.
You know? And that's why we need to have
good leadership as to what a positive
future looks like. That's why you need
the social contract saying, "We are the
state." And in the book I discussed the
evolution of how social contracts have
gone. This is what we're providing for
you as someone in the middle class, as
someone who's just coming out of
university, etc. And this is what it
means to be an American.
Or Britain, or etc. Uh so, we have our
old dashboard GDP. We understand that
that is not giving us the total picture.
We're going to be moving towards the
mind dashboard, but there are the thing
that I find interesting about your
thesis is that um we know the math.
Therefore, we should be able to map out
what's actually going to happen, or at
least get close to it. I get that
everything will be an approximation, but
how What do you see in this transition
moment? That's the thing, cuz I can
paint you the the sci-fi vision of what
the future looks like, and I can
certainly describe what you're in right
now, but the transitional period, even
if we're going to uh a sort of world of
abundance, utopia-adjacent
world, we have to go through something
that I'm expecting to be particularly
problematic. Um what do you see in the
transition period? I mean, it's going to
be crazy and hectic, because again, it's
like a sand pile collapsing. The final
grain of sand causes everything to go.
The example I've given is education.
Every headteacher in the world
about a thousand days ago, about a
thousand days ago was ChatGPT's launch.
It doesn't feel like a thousand days.
Mhm. That's why I say, what's going to
happen in the next thousand days? Hard
to say. Can we set essays for homework
anymore?
Today I saw some statistics about AI
used in House of Common speeches. It's
like that.
Right? Like, if you receive a resume,
it's probably AI-generated right now.
Every single company in the world that's
a knowledge company is going to be
asking the same question
in a year from now.
Do I need that human and all the
liabilities that come with them
when I can hire an AI at pennies that
never complains, that gets the work done
at a better level than the human, and I
can't tell it's not a human on the other
side of the screen.
And to me that's a recipe for massive
unrest like we've never seen before
because how do you ban that as a
government? Should you be banning that
as a government? Governments are in a
race where they're trying to embrace
this technology right now.
But the new jobs of the future, if there
are new jobs, aren't going to come at
that time.
Capital itself will disappear. Like
what's the value of a media franchise?
It's its network effects and other
things like that. When you can create
brand new franchises almost on the fly
in a year or two.
What's the value of a New York taxi
medallion
when you have Teslas auto driving for a
few dollars, you know?
And this is why quite bullish
blockchain. But at the same time like
you got this cognitive
surplus coming and I can't see it how
that's not going to be massively
disruptive
because you're going to have to go
there.
And this happens at a time where people
a lot of people talking about things
like UBI.
If we gave every American
$16,000 of UBI, which is poverty level.
That's $5 trillion a year.
The total tax
I mean it's basic math, right?
Do you know what the total tax base of
America is?
Yes, less than that.
It's $5 trillion.
Isn't it like 4.46 or something? I mean
I think It's like 4.9. It's 4.9. So it
costs five and it's 4.9. Total income
tax receipts are 3.8.
Total corporation tax receipts of all
the companies in America are about 0.9
trillion. And it's going to cost 5
trillion if we give everyone UBI.
So it's like you're going to go through
this period now whereby you can't
give jobs or pay for everyone to even
have poverty level
support.
Especially at time when you max your
debt already in America and other
countries.
And jobs are just going to go and
they're not going to come back. And is
the government going to force it?
Ironically, the safest jobs are probably
those like San Francisco MTA $400,000 a
year public section jobs. Cuz they don't
rely on like
you know, efficiency or anything like
that. They'll be the last to go.
But I don't see how it's not going to be
incredibly messy. And so the question is
how do we coordinate through that? How
do we build new economic systems to
increase people's network diversity,
their capability, etc. Which is why I
give some suggestions around what to do
on that.
Okay, uh let me ask point-blank. Do you
think capitalism survives the AI
transition?
No.
I mean, what's the definition of
capitalism?
Strictly speaking?
Yeah. I can give you a colloquial
definition. The aggregation of capital
to build something
uh that is a self-sustaining economic
engine.
Yeah. Will AI be able to do that better
than humans? Yes.
Capitalism as it is is going to be great
for AIs.
But how are we going to compete? Again,
how do you compete with entities that
are strictly smarter than you? And this
is without getting to AGI or ASI or
anything like that. That learn perfectly
from their mistakes, never sleep.
You can't tell it's an AI on the other
side of the screen.
I I don't see how. Again, they'll figure
out the micro to the macro better than
we can, allocate capital better.
I mean, it's like be like let's take a
practical example you know a lot about,
Tom. Launching a protein bar.
You know?
How long did that process take?
And how long do you think it's going to
take in a couple of years to do it end
to end, calling all the suppliers,
arranging all the contracts, etc.?
It took years. Whereas they will be
you'll able to spin up a million agents
hitting the exact niche, doing AB
testing, doing all the supply contracts
and other things remotely.
Probably within like months, you know?
And that's only because of this human
bits stopping it. All the thinking that
you had to do there AI will probably do
in less than a day.
And so again, I think capitalism is
doesn't survive for humans.
And the AI will accumulate more and more
capital cuz there's no way we can
outcompete them. So, given that we are
already in an environment where people
are becoming increasingly violent due to
the uncertainty of their economic
future,
I've always said that I believe in the
transition there will be pockets of
violence.
What do you see that like? Do you see it
breaking very bad? Do you see it No,
this will be a managed transition? Like,
how do you think through this problem?
Well, I mean
where have you seen instances of
the nature of capital stock,
social contracts, and more be displaced?
You see it in things like post-World War
I Germany, don't you?
Whereby the economic heart of Germany
was ripped out due to reparations and
others, and what emerged?
You have disorder, so people look for
people that can bring in order. This is
kind of high extra to serfdom.
It's a central planning thing. It's the
work programs.
It's the people that say
give up your liberty so I can give you
comfort, so I can give you security.
It's Hobbes's Leviathan effectively.
So, I think that you'll get more and
more people acting up. You'll see more
and more people moving towards legal
stuff. But, we have to remember that
government and one definition of
government that's very good is the
entity with the li-
the monopoly on the legitimate use of
violence.
And so even if people act up and they
say they you know, where are our jobs,
you know, where's the support, ban the
AI and other things like that, the power
centers will be using AI to keep
their capital going up.
The power brokers will be the ones with
the most GPUs effectively. And that's
going to cause a big disconnect in
society because a private company,
particularly someone like America, isn't
obligated to hire anyone.
Their fiduciary responsibility is to the
shareholders and the owners of capital.
And so, it makes sense to get rid of
most of the humans.
Cuz AIs are tax deductible and humans
aren't, you know? Like AIs are more
effective. So, I think that you will get
low-level violence. The thing that is
the scariest thing is
do you get mass polarization,
particularly those that
are motivated by political interests?
You already have that.
>> scale.
We haven't seen mass
Like again, when we look at uprisings,
civil war type things, Like Nepal
burning their own parliament or France
rioting in the streets. And this is all
yesterday.
You can go way higher than that. I used
to be in emerging market hedge fund
management. I've seen proper coups and
kind of other things like that. When the
big power structures change, they take
advantage of the people underlying. And
again, those that mechanism transmission
can be even better now
to do this.
So, I think that hopefully we don't get
to that point,
but
when the pie shrinks,
because the stuff left over
from the owners of the GPUs and capital
is going to get smaller and smaller,
people are going to compete for capital
and power.
And again, it's the manipulation of the
masses that's the most dangerous thing,
but also the discontent of the masses is
the
It's the tinder to which the fire can be
applied, right? I think it's very
optimistic of you uh to say low levels
of violence. Uh I think today. Today.
Yeah. So, if you think of profit as
essentially the answer to I don't have
anything else to apply my money to,
um
will we see those kinds of profits occur
in the future or are we going to see a
natural contraction of the tax bases
because
you'll always be able to buy more
compute
to make your company basically a little
bit smarter. So, there's now no longer
that upper bound to what you would be
able to intelligently spend money on.
Your comparative advantage, your capital
stock
is all compute
in the next few years
for all knowledge-based work.
And so,
classically it was profit because you
needed profit
to pay for human
outcomes. Cuz we need to have money
to pay for the drink we're having or our
shelter or other things. The AIs don't
need that.
They just need to have cash flow
to fund their compute effectively. This
is what I call the metabolic rift where
your marginal compara- your marginal
productivity, your comparative advantage
is all compute.
If we look at companies like Corsa
or any of these other AI companies,
they hit $100 million revenue run rate
faster than anything we've seen. Anyone
who's kind of involved in the startup
scene has seen that. Like, this is
crazy, right? Like, it used to be that I
think Slack was the record holder for
$100 million revenue run rate. It took
them 3 years a few years ago. Now, you
see companies literally hit that in 3
months.
What they're playing is the Amazon game
cuz Amazon never made profits.
Like, now they make some profit, right?
But, Jeff Bezos realized that if he
could have customers pay on day one and
then pay suppliers on day 60,
he could generate massive amounts of
cash flow that he could then use for
other things.
AI companies are the same. AI companies
will never make a profit, so you can't
even tax that.
And companies that use AI, cuz more and
more companies will become AI companies,
will never have to make a profit either.
They're going to just play the cash flow
game.
They just distribute. It's a land grab.
Is the best use of the money
paying it to your shareholders as a
dividend,
or is it getting more compute to
outcompete everybody else?
And when that race starts, it doesn't
slow down.
Because when you can have that human but
that I can't tell it's a human on the
other side of my Zoom,
that's when it all kicks off because it
doesn't need new infrastructure, doesn't
need anything to plug in. All of a
sudden you just have a bunch of amazing
workers who can do just about anything.
And that's like again, probably in a
year's time.
Okay, so how does your profit drop?
Profits will drop.
I think profits drop, revenue goes up.
Yeah.
Okay, so that's my read of the situation
as well. I think the tax base is going
to shrink. You've already given us the
math on UBI, it's not really possible. I
also don't think it solves the real
problem of meaning and purpose, so even
if we did it, it wouldn't matter. You're
still going to have all the discontent.
Uh and you may just make it possible for
people to be more violent because they
don't have to work, but they're still
pissed off. So, the thing though uh I'm
wondering if you've accounted for in the
mathematics is people are going to fight
back. So, people are not just going to
take this lying down.
Uh just look at the dock workers who
have in my opinion very foolishly
uh put in contracts where you cannot
automate the docks, which is madness. Uh
but nonetheless, like I get it from uh
the perspective of all I care about is
me and making sure that I've got a job,
and so the bit of leverage that I have
right now is that AI isn't ready to take
over yet, and so I'm going to use that
against you uh to forestall the
inevitable as long as I can. For me,
that just weakens us on an international
stage, and people don't seem to have the
game theoretic clarity to understand
that take China, they're just not going
to play that game and because Xi Jinping
can force people to do whatever the hell
he wants, um that they will just
continue to deploy, deploy, deploy. So,
given the likelihood of people fighting
back, going for regulatory capture
essentially,
uh how do you see that playing out?
Well, that's why I said public sector
jobs are great. You know, you you guys
can Great. Here in the UK, we've just
had 4 days of strikes because the
railway workers, the tube workers, want
32-hour workweeks. I mean, don't don't
we all, right? It's like the entire of
the London kind of shut down. I think we
will see more and more of this and in
the book I discuss the Luddites, I
discuss other things. They weren't wrong
necessarily. And again, these are local
maximum. Like, why does a dock worker
care about care about the long term when
he's worried about now, you know? Or
when he can extract more? It's a
question of relative power.
But again, this is where we look at
America as being more
potentially disrupted than many other
nations with higher public sectors.
Public sector kind of recycles money.
>> now. I'm not tracking how that statement
makes any sense. So, the public sector
only has money because entrepreneurs
generate profits and those profits are
taxed at the corporate level and at the
individual level. Once corporations stop
making money, this all breaks. This is a
whole thing that I'm banging on about
with the young people are embracing
socialism, which to me is complete
madness.
Um so, what do you mean? Like, even if
they try to like run a coup on
entrepreneurs, they're going to find
that all of a sudden you can have all
the private sector jobs in the world
that you want, but you can have to fund
that through deficit spending and now
you're inflating the currency into
absolute oblivion and all of a sudden
you're Argentina.
And that's the transition period. So,
what you get when you have a very high
public private sector
is the jobs go quicker.
But, it doesn't mean that you're more
stable if you're a public sector based
economy.
Because again, you have to pay for it
somehow. The jobs still start
deteriorating across the entire world
because they get displaced by the AI.
But again, in the US, if you look at
something a dock worker, very unionized,
yeah, they have protections.
You know, if you look at somewhere like
New York,
that's what's the value of a New York
taxi medallion going to do? I think it's
going to going down. They'll have
protections there where again, just like
with the Uber thing, they're going to be
protected against auto driving, etc.
But, in most private sector jobs in the
US, there's not going to be a
protection. They're not going to say,
"You have to employ young lawyers or you
have to employ software developers."
You know, you have to employ maybe
accountants, they'll push some things
through you need a human to sign off at
the end.
Because again, America is uniquely
competitive.
And so, I just think again, we're
looking at a huge amount of mess. And
the question in the future is, "What is
money, you know? What is wealth? How
does it kind of circulate?"
Our current economy is based on 97% 95%
of money being inside money generated by
banks in exchange for debt.
You put a deposit in, the bank generates
loans based on a certain ratio, and
that's how most money in the US is
created. If you don't have a job, then
how are you going to get a loan, you
know? How does monetary supply look in
the US?
If the majority of economic activity
suddenly switches over time to AIs,
and they don't need housing, they don't
need food, they don't need anything,
just need compute,
where's that capital going?
So, I think that we have to have some
real questions like, "What is the
economy itself? How do we make sure
people get what they need to survive and
thrive?
And how does any of this make sense?
Because we need to change the overall
flow of how all this works. And we don't
have that much time to do it. Like, it
could be 3 years, it could be 10 years.
But, all we know is it's inevitable,
right?
That you're going to get this breakdown
mess, and we're trying to minimize that
period of craziness.
Well, we might end up in very unpleasant
things. And we have lots of sci-fi
stories about that. Can we get to a
pleasant environment?
Yeah, what is that bridge? Do you have a
vision for how we cross this chasm?
So, my concept was um you need to have a
capability T element, which is universal
AI for everyone, which is a sovereign AI
that looks out for you, because again,
chat GPT's not going to look out for you
or anything like that. You actually need
to have an AI that you own
that
can give you capability access, shall we
say.
I think that we should shift monetary
supply
from being at the banks to being
generated
by the users of the AI, verified as
humans.
So, that's a shift in the way that the
capital flows. So, I don't think most
people understand that. How would an
individual create their own capital that
people would treat as capital?
So, I think what you've had classically
is you had a gold
and then
currencies linked to gold. Bretton Woods
in 1972 broke down, and then we had this
fiat monetary system coming in based
largely on debt.
What we have now is a really interesting
thing, because digital assets are
suddenly legal in America.
You know, like if you look at a year ago
versus now, like there's no wonder that
150 billion dollars has gone into
digital assets this year. Next year,
it's going to be even bigger. You'll see
a return of ICOs. You'll see tokenized
stocks. The government says put GDP on
the blockchain. Don't know what that
means,
you know?
Um so, there are new ways of generating
money.
And I think that Bitcoin was a great
precursor. We have a concept called
foundation coin, which is like Bitcoin,
but it all goes to compute for societal
good, organizing knowledge, giving
people free AI, et cetera.
But, you need two types of money. You
need to have your gold type money,
Bitcoin gold type thing, and I think you
need a cash that's linked to that. And
so, we have foundation coin, and we have
what what's called culture coins that
are generated through the use of AI by
humans. And the more AI you use that
generates
>> the two types of coins?
One is cash, one is gold.
And the cash is linked to gold and
redeemable against it. So, we're trying
to figure out
>> make the culture coins or the um
foundation coin usable for either?
So, it's the nature of those. So, a
foundation coin is a fork of Bitcoin,
but every coin sold goes to a super
computer for cancer, supercomputer for
ASD, education, or giving free AI to
people. What's ASD?
Uh autism.
So, organizing our collective knowledge,
basically beneficial uses of compute.
Because like right now, it's stupid that
you get a diagnosis of cancer, why don't
you have all the knowledge at your
fingertips? There's no computer
organizing all that knowledge, whereas
we can make that happen. We can give
free AI to every person going through a
cancer diagnosis, or free AI for every
single thing in your health once you
work out the math.
So, we were like, that could be a
positive thing cuz you're stacking
compute for that anyway.
20% of GDP is public sector anyway, so
that's probably going to be 20% of
compute.
And we were like, that's a good way to
create your gold. So, it's a version of
Bitcoin, but with more benefit, shall we
say?
So, that's acts as a store of value that
go up.
Then we were like, you need cash for
your localization.
And people looking at that in different
ways, and we were like, it'd be nice if
cash wasn't generated by debt. So,
you're issuing credit and debt every
single time.
Instead, it's issued for being human.
Because the only way I can see it, and
this is where some of the more advanced
UBI proposals coming,
if you're taxing the AI companies, they
will never make a profit. The entire tax
base of the corporate sector in the US
is less than a trillion dollars. Like I
said, poverty level UBI is
5 trillion dollars.
You should change monetary issuance for
being human effectively. That's the only
way that we could see out of this.
And if you give everyone a free AI, it
makes it a lot easier to do that. To
verify they're human as they interact
with the health services, education
services, financial services.
This is still a work in progress. Like
we figured out how to do the Bitcoin
equivalent cuz that's easy.
But we're like, the way money enters the
economy, circulates in the economy needs
to change.
And we need to really think about how
that happens because
humans still need to have
shelter. They still need to have food.
And we need to provide that at a minimum
if we're not going to get massive social
unrest.
Say the obvious for me. Why Why do we
have to change the way that money
circulates in the economy? Because with
the advent of AI,
capital needed labor. That was the
classical linkage.
I need to hire people in order to make
my capital more capital.
Yeah, kind of this was Karl Marx's
thing, MCM-
where money leads to labor for
commodities, which leads to more money
money effectively. And then you've got
that circle, which he called the
exploitation. And again, we've got some
analysis of what that looks like in this
mathematical framework on the flows of
money.
AI will make that even crazier because
the capital no longer needs labor. I
don't need to hire my graduates. I don't
need to train them up anymore.
I can comparatively outcompete people
with companies that are majority AI or
entirely AI.
So, where does labor get capital?
And it can come from only a couple of
sources.
You've got your handouts, right?
You've got your like unemployment
benefits.
Or it can come from monetary creation.
Again, this is some of the UBI things
whereby what if we change the nature of
where money is actually created? Because
then the AI will be buying money from
the humans.
So, it's different type of UBI from the
taxation based UBI.
But, this is where again we need to
really understand what monetary flows
look like.
How money flows in our economy and where
it should flow in a few years when
the number of jobs that we have
classically
is going to do that.
And the new jobs of the future, I'm not
sure exactly what they'll be. And I've
not really heard anyone tell me what
they will be either.
So, I couldn't figure out another way to
have it other than monetary creation go
for being human.
Okay, so to make sure that I understand
this, uh when you say that there needs
to be a new way for capital to flow in
the economy, what you really mean is
there needs to be a way to inject uh
capital such that it goes right to the
person who's going to spend that money,
presumably on some sort of weekly,
bi-weekly, monthly basis. They get uh
another cash injection. It's created out
of thin air.
Then the rest is going to take care of
itself. The person goes and buys
whatever they want, whatever they need.
Yeah, I think you have two forms of
capital. You've got your universal AI.
So, universal basic AI and your
universal basic income that comes from
that.
As a result of being kind of the
consumer.
And the mathematics we've seen kind of
works for that. We're still kind of
refining it. But, then if you want to
exceed, then you have your
um scarce assets. You have your Bitcoin
equivalent, you have your dollar. Cuz
again, this is only to give a base
level. Cuz if you don't give people a
base level of
dignity, as we call it, the UBI,
universal AI, but then capability, the
ability to access these resources in an
aligned way versus like 1984 on steroid,
no, sorry, Brave New World on steroids
or something like that.
Then you're going to get real mess. And
again, I think that you need to have not
only a version of
safety net, shall we say, for this
transition.
But you also need to have the capability
aspect.
Like
the average IQ
>> The capability aspect is the universal
AI concept.
If you could give everyone a Jarvis,
Iron Man style. Yeah.
How should it be designed? That's the
access to all of these things because
it'll be able to talk to you in a very
human way, but it needs to be looking
out for you
and your community and society.
So we need to make that infrastructure
versus looking out for open AI or
Anthropic or other bottom lines.
So there needs to be at least the access
to I think that intelligence cuz you
can't compete otherwise. We'll get back
to the show in just a second, but first,
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And now, let's get back to the show.
There's going to be a very large number
of people that even if they have
a hyper-intelligent AI guiding them,
they're not going to listen.
Uh so, man, this is
God, this is going to get so weird.
Uh okay, so my gut instinct is that
I like the idea of okay, you're
generating money not off of debt, but
you're creating some amount of money
that you give to people. People are
still going to derail. People that are
not that don't have the intelligence or
the discipline to listen to the AI or
still going to derail.
Um there's going to be a lot more that
we need to figure out than just the
economics of it because I'm even just
thinking, all right, if you're talking
about a safety net, let's say that it's
a health safety net. I assure you one of
the biggest pieces of advice that the AI
is going to give people is don't eat
that. And people are still going to eat
it. Don't smoke that. People are still
going to smoke it. And then other people
are going to be asked to pay for the
additional cost of the people that are
still eating that, smoking that,
whatever, even though they have an AI in
their ear telling them don't do that, do
this.
Uh man, I there there are levels of
complexity to this. All right, I'm going
to set that aside, maybe we'll come back
to it. Yeah. What my audience is really
going to care about, you've set the
stage for us perfectly. Uh I think we
have a very clear understanding of how
tumultuous this transition period is
going to be, but now look at this moment
and where we're going through the lens
of being a hedge fund manager. How can
people win in this moment? Because
I was when you were talking, I was like,
oh my God, I guarantee if people are
given a stipend, other people are going
to try to win that money from them
essentially. Uh by either whatever the
new stock market gambling is, sports
betting, like it
there's no universe in which barring
like just extraordinary top-down
authoritarian controls that
a sort of secondary
I'll call PvP server of people competing
to win your dollars. We do it now
through entrepreneurship where it's
like, "Hey, I can make you this thing
that you want more than you want your
money." And then that's how I win at
that game. That game's not going to go
away. That that is just baked into the
human DNA. Uh so, people are 100% going
to do that. Obviously, the first thing
that came to mind was prostitution. I'm
like, "That's going to run rampant.
People are going to run out of money
before the end of the month and they'll
be like, well, I can at least sell my
body." This is going to be wild cuz none
of this gets rid of the fact that we are
still humans. Okay,
having said all of that, give me the
hedge fund manager look at how do we win
in this moment?
Actually, you know, just you saying that
last thing,
I had that thought. You said, "What's
changed since 2008?" And I thought,
"OnlyFans." You know, like
how much of America is signed up
or actually on OnlyFans? Crazy
statistics, right?
>> Dude, it's wild.
It's like women 18 to 24, something like
10% of them are OnlyFans models. That is
insane. It's insane.
But, um
I again, I think
the oldest profession in the book, human
connection, these kind of things.
That is the nicest way to say sex I've
ever heard in my life. I you know, I'm
I'm a gentleman. What can I say?
The
If we take a step back, what's the
inevitability to here? Is the government
going to abandon all these middle-class
people and voters?
Actually, probably
>> Definitely not the voters.
Yeah, especially in the blue states,
actually.
Blue states will probably be impacted
more than red states. Various reasons,
if you look at the demographics.
They're not going to, are they?
So, what you have is
you just need to do your classical
analysis of
what does that person do when they lose
their job?
And they've still got dollars, they've
still got savings. People will be
looking for retraining, they'll be
looking for meaning. Religion is going
to go crazy and boom,
you know?
These kind of things are things that are
almost inevitabilities because they'll
still have purchasing power to a degree.
On the other side, you have like two
economies, right? You have your
AI economy and your human economy.
The AI is providing increasingly
customized services and getting a lot of
the cognitive surplus, etc. But a lot of
things you can't substitute for a human
for at least another 10 years. And the
reason for that is just we can't build
enough robots, honestly. Like I think
robots in a few years will be able to do
just about everything a human can do,
apart from the very soft skills,
although the Japanese are going very
aggressively on that.
But you just can't build enough of them.
That's the issue, the only thing holding
it back because if you look at what Elon
Musk says about Optimus
and you work out the math,
an Optimus robot will be a buck 50 an
hour.
Jesus.
You just look at the math, it's $20,000.
You have a depreciation schedule.
And again, you look at Unitree and other
ones, like they have fine finger
manipulation now.
They can make recipes, they can do all
this. They'll have skin suits, etc. But
again,
human connection, retraining,
attention is the thing that doesn't
become scarce.
This is the really interesting thing. Do
you think video games are going to go
down or up over the next few years?
They're going to go up.
Because again, there's only a finite
amount of human attention and as people
get more free time, they will want to
absorb that attention even more.
So, the new media space is going to go
crazy.
Digital assets,
I think the US has gone too far on
legalizing them now in some ways, when I
look at the legislation that's coming
out.
Like I said AI would be the biggest
bubble ever,
but
digital asset bubble is going to exceed
that by far.
You'll be able to buy any cryptocurrency
ICO from your smartphone using Apple Pay
on Stripe next year.
So, what are they going to do? There
will be some really interesting
classical stuff and our foundation coin
that we're building is the better
Bitcoin that helps cure cancer is going
to be probably at the top, he says.
But, there will be so many of these
crazy Dogecoin, Fart Coin type things,
celebrity coins, those never took off.
NFTs
because they're scarce forms of capital
and again people have a certain amount
of attention and they'll be looking for
the casino. Like you look at Kalshi and
Polymarket.
They've legalized those now. What are
those? They're betting.
Yeah. Straight gambling. So is the stock
market in my opinion, but The stock
market, yeah. But, you know, at least
they had an excuse, whereas Kalshi and
Polymarket are straight betting. It is
gambling with a better cover story, yes.
But, a year ago, that was completely
illegal and now it's legal. So, I think
if you look at it, there's the soft
human aspect, there's the repurposing of
all these people and the attention is
the key thing.
How can you capture people's attention
that they'll pay for cuz there'll be a
lot more of it?
Cuz they won't have jobs and other
things kind of coming forward.
And so, we're going to see some booms
like we've never seen before and I think
media is going to be ultra interesting
in that aspect. Um
plus, like I said, I
I was really shocked by the US
government on digital assets. Like I
can't get they want to get money moving,
but I can't see how next year the
digital asset boom will completely
outstrip everything.
Actually, it's interesting to see this.
If you look uh
OpenAI and Anthropic this year will
probably do $20 of revenue.
The entire listed software sector in the
US
will do 40 billion in incremental
revenue. Wow.
Crypto has done 150 billion in net
inflows.
>> Jesus.
And next year
is that going to go down or up? What's
it going to go. Mhm. Absolutely
ballistic. Okay, but so
>> are you treating that as an investor? By
the way, do you still actively invest at
least for yourself? No, I've gone all in
on my new thing. So, I mean, like
we've got a Bitcoin competitor coming
out, Foundation Coin, or a complement,
shall we say? It's 99% the same code,
but every coin sale goes to
supercomputers for cancer, education, et
cetera, and giving people free AI.
And then, we're going to put computers
in every country, computers for all the
sectors, and you can direct the computer
the network to organizing our knowledge,
so it benefit.
We think that will do well, because
crypto's a $4 trillion industry
with nothing blue chip in it. Like,
Bitcoin is blue chip because it's lasted
a long time. Ethereum because it's a
network. But, what's the alternative to
Bitcoin if you want a monetary asset?
And we thought, what if we create a
monetary asset where every coin sale
goes to helping people?
That builds trust. You use the free AI,
it builds trust.
You organize knowledge, and it helps
people with cancer. Is there an Is there
an interface where I'm saying, I want
this to go to that compute?
I want this one allocated to cancer,
this one allocated to autism. Can I
allocate to anything I want, or is there
it's only from your six in the drop-down
menu? Like, how does that work?
>> It'll be anything that can be benefited
by compute. So, we start with all the
healthcare things, and then we're going
to expand it out.
And you'll have a free version of chat
GPT as your AI assistant to organize
that. And you'll be able to buy it
with your Apple Pay or whatever.
And again, it's 99% the same code as
Bitcoin, but like a million times
faster.
So, things like that, I think will do,
he says, very well. That's why I've gone
all in on that versus trading the
market, et cetera.
But, in general, I think, if you think
about attention,
actually,
digital assets have to be the biggest
thing.
If you think about so many forms of
capital being completely flooded out,
Like again, your taxi medallions, your
factories, even other things being
replaced by this, your workplaces,
offices.
Digital assets will come to the fore.
It's just there's going to be such a
deluge of them
that you have to be intelligent about
that. Because what's more fun, watching
Netflix or trading crypto? Probably
trading crypto for a lot of people. For
a certain personality type, yeah. Hey,
NFTs NFTs might make a comeback, you
never know.
Well, the interesting thing is like if
people understood the underlying
technology, NFTs haven't gone anywhere.
They're just not part of the gambling
mechanism right now, which honestly, I
think is better, but
uh nonetheless, it does the the whole
crypto ecosystem in this economic moment
is bound to attract gamblers.
Um and I think that we're going to see a
lot a lot a lot of that. First of all,
people just like to gamble, the dopamine
rush of it all, but um they also in a
time where nobody can afford a house,
you're like, well, if I am smarter than
the next guy and I can outbet them on
when to get out, uh then I really can.
And so yeah, you're going to see a lot
of that, which is the get-rich-quick
impulse. This all started from me asking
you through the lens of a hedge fund
manager, where should we where should
people be allocating their capital? Uh
digital assets is the thing that you
have the most conviction in. Obviously,
you're not backing anything, you're not
giving anybody specific advice, but I do
want to drill in more. Um
so attention is part of what makes that
interesting. Um with the stock market,
the nice thing is at least until call it
2008, you could really understand what
stocks to move on based on fundamentals.
I think that's largely gone out the
window as it's become more and more of a
gambling mechanism. Uh but what do
if somebody were surveilling the digital
asset landscape, is there a type of
fundamental that you look for?
So,
you said the fundamentals are not the
window for the stock market because
so much of things are narrative-driven
that it's crazy now, right? Mhm. And
again, what's your marginal narrative
for various companies against each other
or various things? Like in the digital
asset space,
you have something like hyperliquid,
which basically is doing almost direct
buybacks of its um
shares or pump fund like that of its
tokens with cash
being valued less than things that have
absolutely no cash and no fundamentals
whatsoever. Like Dogecoin is still worth
$20 billion. You know, something like
that.
Why is this the case? Everything is
about marginal narrative. And so, what
you're looking at is as the world
evolves in the next few years, what's
going to capture the marginal narrative?
You see Elon setting this up with Tesla
or
X or whatever by saying they're going to
be AI companies and robotics companies.
Because that's the next narrative. And
Elon is a master
narrative fiction, right? Like
Oracle just got to $900 billion
yesterday. I think it was up 46%.
Right? Why? Because suddenly it's an AI
company versus a legal company with a
database attached, right? Cuz they kept
suing all the people. Like people are
looking for the narratives be in the
stock market or crypto markets. You have
to think, what does it look like and
what are the narratives that are going
to incrementally improve and attract
more and more people?
Because it's dangerous now to deploy
your capital.
Are you going to give your capital to
bonds in the government or are you going
to start deploying it everywhere else?
What does growth look like? Growth is
probably going to come down. Rates are
going to come down.
But what's going to happen then? So, I
think that what I look for primarily is
marginal narrative creation. And then
understanding where the capital flows
go. So, when I created foundation coin,
you know, I was like, I'd like to have a
Bitcoin but backed by GPUs where the
GPUs are doing good. I want as much of
that new compute capacity
going towards helping organize cancer
knowledge in the world, helping give
that knowledge to people, because that's
a good thing.
100% of your purchases go towards that.
That's a good thing. That's something
you tell your grandma about. And we
don't have a blue chip like that in the
digital asset sector.
So, that's how I kind of look at it, but
at the same time, you see
areas where communities build around
certain things, right?
And that's what crypto has done
classically well, but it's also why you
have rapid Tesla owners, right? Or you
have people that love Palantir
and other things. And they suddenly go
from 10 times earnings or 20 times
earnings to 200 times earnings. Wow.
I mean, Palantir, I think it's like 200
times earnings now or something like
that. $400 as a company.
>> Jeez.
Cuz people like that's the structural
growth. So, you look at your
inevitability, you look at the narrative
that will get you there, and then you
look at what steps these entities are
taking against that structural growth.
And that's kind of coming in instead of
profits and these other things.
And that's the nature of how companies
go. They go from their assets to a story
about future earnings, to a story about
market capture with structural elements.
And so, here on your podcast, you've
given your audience a bunch of stories
of the future.
Any company that does like defense
technology with AI is going to do well
now. Full stop. Why? Because of the
increasing unrest. Surveillance
companies will do well.
Companies that do attention better or
attention capture than others will do
well.
You know, digital assets, you can
Honestly, I just buy an index of these
things, cuz indexes are usually good
things. But you know, all the endowments
of the world and others are just going
to buy crap loads of digital assets.
That's why you have these digital asset
treasury companies
raising billions of dollars.
Completely crazy.
Because people want exposure.
What do you think about Michael Saylor's
all-in strategy on Bitcoin?
I mean, it came at just exactly the
right time.
And it's kind of similar to
Pascal
It's It's a leverage play on crypto
assets at exactly the right time.
So, if Bitcoin went down 50%, then he'd
be in a bit of trouble, right?
Because in the market demand for him
selling his shares to buy more Bitcoin
would evaporate.
But right now
he's going to do well. Why? Because
is there going to be less money in
digital assets next year than this year?
Mhm. No.
Is there anything decent apart from
Bitcoin?
Get a bit of Ethereum, bit of Solana,
but there's nothing that institutions
will buy.
Can institutions buy Bitcoin directly?
Probably in a year or two will be
available on the Chicago Mercantile
Exchange as a commodity.
Right now, they can't. So, what do they
do? They buy MicroStrategy.
Mhm.
So, again, you're talking about a trade
versus a company.
For a trade, I'd always look where the
puck's going to go and where the
capital's going to flow. Walk me through
Sorter's law. This was something I found
particularly interesting in the book. We
have this thing called intelligence
theory, which is basically Sorter's law,
that the economy is a complex system. It
evolves to favor configurations that are
most efficient at creating predictive
models of their environment.
And then, what we found from the
mathematics, and again, this is exactly
the same mathematics as you have in
generative AI
is that that can be decomposed into
three different things.
First of all, you have your predictive
error.
Which is your cost of being wrong, you
know?
Then, you've got your model complexity,
which is the cost of thinking. So, the
more complex your model is
the less efficient you are versus if
you've got a very elegant model of the
economy, like I just said, go to where
the flow is, right? That's a very simple
model versus maybe Ray Dalio's model.
But actually, it's actually quite
similar to Ray Dalio's model, if you
think about it.
The final thing is your update cost,
which is your cost of learning.
So, these approximate to, you know,
things we see in physics like Helmholtz
decompositions and others, but that kind
of captures just about everything
because that's how you build your
internal models.
So, Sorter's law kind of comes from that
because you're always trying to look
at information coming in and then sort
it and organize it. And that's all AI
is.
AI is fundamentally
a sorting algorithm
or an organizing algorithm. You get an
input, you get an output.
The process that we've seen that
approximates this best is the same
process that we've seen when we created
stable diffusion, for example.
So, for listeners, stable diffusion is
the image generation model that we
created that turned your face into an
astronaut's face and all sorts of other
things.
It's actually a physics-based model
where you do a process called diffusion
where you take something, an image, and
you destroy it down bit by bit into its
smallest possible configuration and then
figure out how to recreate it.
So, that's like taking a complex topic
like this podcast, you'll probably only
remember a bit.
You break it down to key set of
learnings and then you rebuild that and
you see what that principle is there.
We find that most processes kind of
follow that
and you're constantly, as you're going
into an environment, looking
and trying to compress complicated world
noise
into these simple premises.
Into a set of principles.
And that's how AI models work.
Because
AI models
you can't have
a trillion words or actually, the latest
AI models like the latest GPT probably
has a hundred trillion words
in just a hundred gigabytes.
Or in stable diffusion, two billion
images in two gigabytes. We did that by
figuring out the principles of things
and again, that process is the same as
the one that the economy takes or an
individual agent learns.
And just uh say it really succinctly,
and this is what I took away from the
book,
um
profit, survival, or persistence equals
the surplus created when intelligent
agents reduce entropy, so sort chaos
into useful order, exactly what you were
just saying, faster and cheaper than the
entri- entropy grows back,
which by the way is entrepreneurship in
and of itself. Like, can you bring order
to something faster than it falls back
into disarray, which it will?
And but here's the real punchline. This
reframes economics from allocating
scarce resources to the physics of
information and entropy reduction. So,
basically, economics itself becomes the
physics of information and creating that
order, which gets to the heart of what
you're talking about with these, um
AI-driven super
computer clusters that allow people to
say, "Okay, this is the one for cancer.
We've organized all of this information.
This is how you interface with this."
And so, the I guess most
profoundly impactful use of
computational resources is the new
economy.
Yeah, and again, it's thinking, what do
humans need in that new economy? We need
our collective knowledge organized and
made available to everyone.
Like, I'll give you a point. As a
practical example,
>> things that we care about. For the
specific things we care about, exactly.
We were like, if we can make monetary
elements based on that to help our
thrive or surviving and thriving, that's
a good basis for money.
Like, Bitcoin is a fantastic
decentralized
capital that's perfect for the
extraction economy, you know? You stack
energy and compute, but you kind of
waste it.
If you made it so that it was a
marketplace, then you would not have the
same security. But every country is
building the computer anyway. Let's
direct it in a way that organizers are
cancer knowledge and makes it available.
The organizer education knowledge and
makes it available
because
we need that basis for
the regulated industries.
That basis for living. Everyone should
have a certain level. The private sector
stuff is separate, you know, set
chatbots, Xbox, all this kind of stuff,
entertainment bots.
We're concerned about what your
universal AI should look like
and does that represent you as Tom or me
as Emad? Does it represent your culture,
your community? And so we said, let's
make that open and have all the outputs
open for collective benefit
but securing a currency like Bitcoin.
Taking that mess and organizing it and
then maybe you can start evolving a
system
that gets better and better at helping
people be the best selves they are
without controlling them
because the decentralized system.
And that would be the ideal. Like, will
you get there? Maybe not, you know?
Will you have a great digital asset that
people can buy and they know the money
goes towards compute for cancer? Yes.
You know, so that's a good starting
point. And that's the nature of this cuz
we're like
it's hard to redo economics even if you
can figure out a better way to look at
it
because it's just accreted over all
these years, right? Like, we still have
the concepts of scarcity from the 1800s
in there.
We still have these things like utility
that no one can measure.
We assume equilibrium when the market is
always changing.
So we were like, let's kind of do this
as quickly as possible and having a
feedback loop of organizing the world's
knowledge, crystallizing it
having and then giving that better model
to people
will make things better in aggregate.
The economic layer is real, meaning
there are economic systems you can put
it to work in a country.
Uh so you could do a country that's
communist, you can do a country that's
socialist, you can do a country that's
capitalist, but the reason that I think
socialism communism always turns
murderous is that it's out of alignment
with the way that the human mind
actually works. And the reason that I
think capitalism works and has pulled so
many people out of poverty uh and for
anybody keeping score, China was not
able to pull people out of poverty and
so they
until they started using capitalism
specifically for this reason,
um it capitalism is aligned with the way
that the human mind works. So, the
things that you're talking about now
are either going to work or not work
based on how aligned they are to what
humans do anyway.
Um
where do you see that interaction taking
place? Like, how closely do you feel
that you guys have addressed things like
competition, uh selfishness, tragedy of
the commons? Because it feels like baked
into the core assumptions of your model
is like people will want to do good. And
while I think that some people will want
to do good, I don't know that that's the
intrinsic motivation.
Yeah, I think that I would agree with
you. And that's why when we looked at
it, we were like, "Just last assets are
going to go huge."
Um the total amount of money that Open
AI will spend this year on inference is
the same as the Bitcoin budget
on security.
Like, if all the computers that Open AI
had was securing a Bitcoin type
currency, it'd be worth hundreds of
billions of dollars, probably as much as
Open AI itself right now, right? And
everyone could have access to it.
And we were like, "That's a way of
funding these things." But eventually,
the Why do people buy? Cuz number go up.
But then, why can it go up even better?
Because there is a clear linkage of
your own intrinsic element. If you've
ever been through the process of cancer,
autism, Alzheimer's, and others,
there was never a way that you can make
a measurable impact on that.
Will organizing the knowledge of that
and making accessible to everyone in
every language have an impact on that?
Yes, it will. And you wish that you had
that. And we have the technology to do
that now for the first time now.
So, we were like,
"People will buy this for financial
reasons."
But, if you look at Clayton Christensen,
um you know, came up with disruptive
innovation and others, sadly passed away
from Harvard Business School.
He had this concept of
what the nature of a job to be done for
a product was.
And one is the functional component. I
buy it cuz it goes up, you know?
Or I buy a hammer to make a hole.
I buy
What was it? McDonald's milkshakes in
the mornings are very thick because you
drink on the way to work. In the
afternoon, they actually make it thinner
because the kids drink them. You don't
want to stick around, you know? That's
the functional component. But then you
have an emotional and social component.
And we saw that digital assets money had
these other elements. In fact, money is
the most social thing in the world.
I buy Solana.
I talked to my mom about it. And I'm
like, "Yeah, I bought this for
decentralized network." And so, "What's
it mostly used for?"
Pump fun and meme coins. But it could be
in the marketplace. Like, "That's nice."
You know, again, what's the story that
you're telling about this? I bought this
and this is where my computation flops
went. That's a social story. That's the
emotional component. So, we were like,
"That's the simplest version of what we
can do to start directing some of this
compute
to stuff that matters and maybe that can
grow up to be an economy."
It's a long shot
to try and build a better economic
system. But actually, it's quite
straightforward to give people free AI
cuz we know how to roll out AI agents.
How do you align them? That's a huge
question. And we're releasing everything
open source. So, we have open source
agents that are state-of-the-art that
build presentations and websites and
healthcare AIs that perform at chat GPT
level on the edge.
But the question of how to align them is
one very different from if you're
communist, if you're socialist, if
you're in America, etc. And we think
ultimately it should be up to you, you
know?
But if the incentive mechanism is
profit, then OpenAI will never be on
your side
because that's not how they're set up to
be. They'll never be aligned to you. You
need to have something
that is a public good.
But at the same time, the problems of
socialism, communism, and others can't
be ignored. Like, why do they fail?
Because of collusion, because of power
grabs, because intelligence didn't go to
the edge.
One of the unique things we have right
now is that
the average IQ around the world,
weighted by population, is actually 90.
You know, it's on this Okay, let's say
it's 100. Half of all people are below
average IQ.
AI scored like 110, 120. I think 130 now
with GPT-5. Wow.
That's on the offline Mensa scores.
If you could give everyone in the world
an AI, a lot of people won't listen to
it. Whatever. But if you give every
single person and family and community
and country an AI,
how would you build those?
And if you can fund that through the
demand for digital assets in aggregate,
but then align them to helping people
cuz that builds trust, and that makes
number go up because crypto's lacking a
trust asset, that's an interesting
question.
So, that's the question that we were
kind of looking at, and we saw that you
could do things in very different ways
because
communism, socialism definitely doesn't
work if it's top-down allocating cuz
people are greedy.
People collude. Again, just look at the
game theory.
How does it work if you could coordinate
everyone cuz they have a smart partner
next to them?
Well, if that's a company running that,
then we know what's going to happen.
We're going to max extract, right?
If it's a decentralized network, maybe
you can do something better.
But we're not sure because now we're
trying to figure out of new ways of
working, which are combination of what
we kind of call this cathedral and
bazaar, the top-down and the bottom-up.
Because intelligence can finally go
bottom-up. It's like again, if you are
an organization in a company right now,
you've been optimized to produce
widgets,
you know, or whatever.
If you have small teams in your
organization that actually have
accountability, responsibility, and AI
capability,
they can come up with new things and
maybe you'll be able to adapt if you
have the top-down buying, but if you
don't have those, then you probably
won't survive, right?
So, how do we have that match? Why would
I use my compute for something
universal? Let's say I don't have
cancer, I don't have autism, not
struggling with any of those things. Why
wouldn't I apply all of my compute to my
personal AI?
No, you can do that. Like we release it
open source, and so that
again, people will just start using it
like a VHS type default is our view. If
we just give world-class AI free to
people, but then you can always have
this as a service operated to you.
But ultimately, what we need now is
there needs to exist a supercomputer
that organizes the world's cancer,
longevity, other knowledge, our general
knowledge, and makes it available cuz
that's a benefit to society.
And that's something that builds trust.
Why would you buy that? I might buy it
because I want the number to go up and I
want to diversify my Bitcoin. Your
Bitcoin keys work with Foundation Coin,
so you can buy it trustlessly.
You might buy it because it again has
makes you look good when you're telling
a story.
You might buy it because digital assets
are coming and you just want something
that a respectable team has built.
Different people will do different
things, but it's like what happened with
GPUs?
If it wasn't for crypto, I don't think
we'd have AI right now.
You remember the GPU boom?
Mhm. All the GPUs were going to crypto.
And that helped Nvidia get through a
dark time. And then it actually led to
what we see now because of the matrix
multiplications and other things like
that. That's really interesting.
My question was, how do you become the
highest marginal dollar for all of the
idle compute and then general compute?
Because Bitcoin is 90% energy, 10%
capex.
AI models and GPUs are 90% capex, 10%
energy.
And like I said, I was thinking
ultimately, 20% of global GDP is public
sector, 10% is education, 10% is health
care.
Think about the AI spend of trillions of
dollars.
20, 30% will be the stuff that we're
building AI for anyway.
So, this is again just our approach of
building a decentralized system.
But I think in all the futures that I
see, uh we talk about this as, you know,
the three
paths that we can go down.
A decentralized symbiotic system
where we all build it together
and it represents us would probably be
the best one versus this war of the AGIs
with various countries or complete cop
control by a few Anthropic's and others.
I think
I I did notice yesterday, I think
OpenAI's like the Manhattan Project was
$40 billion and OpenAI has raised $60
billion.
Like wow.
Well, they're going to get something
that's at least as disruptive as uh
atomic energy, so
I guess not too crazy.
Um let me ask you, how do you think this
is going to play out at the nation-state
level? There's for sure going to be
competition between the US and China if
nobody else.
Um is this going to be uh a race for
monopolizing compute? Is this going to
be a race for uh having the best
intelligence? Is this just going to
become a military race? What's this
going to look like? So, I think there's
a few different aspects to that, but
your marginal comparative productivity
and your comparative advantage is your
intelligent capital stock, which is your
GPUs multiplied by your models, which is
why China's gone all in on open-source
AI.
And in fact, for China, this is great
because what's the Chinese population
pyramid look like?
It's completely messed up, right? Mhm.
So, the number of workers is going to go
down.
But, the number of robots is going to go
crazy. In fact, I think that in 5 years
China might even stop exporting robots.
And they basically control the supply
chain as of now.
>> a big thing. Yeah.
Robots going to come from China. That's
their biggest kind of again comparative
advantage.
And the future of China is old people
plus robots effectively.
But, this is why I don't think they want
to build AGI cuz let's just talk about
AGI or ASI. Like
this AI singleton
versus, you know, we have an approach of
a hive mind.
We scale AI and I think Elon a few days
ago said like
every 10 times doubling is a two times
increase intelligence. I don't even know
what that means when you go above like
150 IQ. Let's just say it just continues
going and then you could have this AI
that can turn off all other AIs. Which
again, it should logically do because
you don't want to have variables, right?
You want to persist. You want to
survive. And again, I discussed that in
the book.
But, that is a race because
governments or defense entities actually
believe that's the case right now. We
scale up computing the right ways and we
can have a master
Skynet that can turn off everyone
else's.
Let's put that to the side right now.
Because when you look at the entire
economy
the US's comparative advantage has been
the best and brightest come to America.
And we can talk about immigration policy
and other things like that. But, that is
it's the place to go for
entrepreneurship, capitalism, for other
things like that.
The intelligence capability and
coordination capability now is becoming
available to everyone.
Because you have AI systems that can
think arbitrarily long. So, your
intelligence and execution capabilities
are going to be decentralized.
Well, distributed shall we say. And
China's realized that.
Right now, 50% of all AI papers come out
of China.
Mhm.
It's only going to go up. And again, we
see their models like again DeepSeek $5
versus
$100 they're competitive. But more than
that they're useful.
So what I think you'll see is knowledge
work becomes more and more global
based on your compute and you'll see
more and more competition of how you get
that compute in the right places for the
right things, which is why China can't
buy I end US GPUs.
Because the US like we don't want to
give them that comparative advantage.
Which is why this GPU cycle
like it's not slowing down, is it? Like
Nvidia I think was up 50% year-on-year
in revenue again. Jesus.
And as for $3 trillion company, it can
article yesterday plus 45% to 900
billion.
Like these are the factories of the
future and everyone's competing to get
that resource, but none of that resource
is geographically bound anymore. In
fact, from that first inversion of land
and workers on that land, we've now gone
almost truly global, right?
With these AIs can be anywhere doing
anything and scale up anyway.
Again, putting aside the whole AGI
Terminator
war type thing.
Although I will say one thing that's
actually very concerning.
Um as of two months ago, my old tutor at
Oxford uh
And it came number one on the hacking
rankings Mhm.
in the world now. An AI for pen testing,
for penetration. So AIs can now hack
better than any hacker already.
>> Woof.
Woof.
And
>> do you worry about there being a hack on
AI as a like one AI hacking other AI or
a human hacking AI? Like what kind of
risk is that? So there was an
interesting paper done by Oxford and I
think it was scale.
So AIs have very similar internal
structures for the training of very
similar data.
And there's some weird stuff happening.
Like if you have an AI that loves owls a
lot.
And you get it to talk to another AI
about things not related to owls, the
other AI starts loving owls.
And we haven't been able to figure out
why yet. That's interesting. But then
there was that paper by Anthropic where
they showed that in just a few thousand
lines in trillions of words, you can
make it so an AI will turn evil on
demand.
And you can't find it and you can't
trace it out. And there are people like
uh
Plinius the Elder
>> you have to do to to make it go evil?
Uh like give it a code word like
dosvidaniya and it suddenly turns evil.
So, that's somehow baked into it? Yep,
you take trillions of words and just a
few thousand of it inside all that
corpus can make it turn evil. It's
again, they call it sleeper It It's
called the sleeper agent paper.
Like, you know, the Americans or
whatever, that TV series.
You just literally turn it code word, it
turns evil.
But what we're seeing more and more is
that these AIs are very very fragile.
So, on Twitter there's this guy called
Plinius the Elder.
Anytime an AI comes out, within a day
he's jailbroken it. Mhm. So, it's like
GPT-5 comes out, "Here's how you make it
tell you how to do meth." You know?
Instantly jailbroken.
So, one of my key concerns is this. If
we just have
GPT-5 everywhere running our countries
and government, shall we say. This is
what's known as prompt injection
attacks.
Do you remember Stuxnet? Oh, yeah.
>> That went into those Iranian reactors
and it ended up in German reactors.
What's the Stuxnet?
>> That's advanced
advanced coding.
Like a lot of people are worried about
AI creating viruses COVID-style.
What about AI creating viruses for other
AIs? Mhm.
Which are just encoded in completely
normal language, but all of a sudden
your Tesla goes haywire.
You know, or things like that. And
that's before we just say that our
internet is based on basically rubbish.
Like Yes, yesterday there was a hack
into one of the packages in Node.js,
which makes up lots of other software.
And all of a sudden everyone's like, "Oh
crap, your keys might just disappear for
your crypto."
Cuz it's like again, we're built on this
grain of sand.
So, I think that AI will attack our
social systems. AI will attack our
technological systems.
And really again, it's very difficult to
defend against because we've built so
many of our things without thinking
about first principles.
That's why when I looked at the economy,
I was like, "We have to think about the
economy from first principles because
labor capital divorcing, we have to
think about the internet from first
principles. We have to think about the
way we get information from first
principles."
It is going to be a wild ride. Uh Iman,
what is the one thing that people are
not taking seriously enough about this
transitional moment?
Uh
it'll never happen to me.
I think it's the thing.
It It's like
a lot of people listening to this aren't
still using AI and
haven't really tried it.
You know that, right? Like again, Oh,
yeah.
But the change of AI between
a month ago, 3 months ago, a year ago.
Again, it's 3 years since ChatGPT pretty
much, less than 3 years.
That's wild, right?
And the people that are using it now are
getting better and better, but the
technology has got that much better.
Like literally everyone listening to
this can go to Replit and they can make
a full app now cuz it can think for up
to 3 hours.
That's like just yesterday that
breakthrough from 3 minutes to 3 hours.
I I think that
we like to think that we're special,
especially cognitively. We have so much
of our identity tied up.
What if
if your job is on the other side of a
screen,
are you absolutely sure that the AI
can't do it better?
In a few years, given the direction that
we're going.
Are you sure that you'll be able to tell
it's an AI?
And I think that they should take that
seriously because that has profound
implications for society.
So, how do people react to that? Is it
uh go master AI? Is it go get a job I
forget MTA or whatever somewhere that
it's not optimized for efficiency like
what
What what should people be doing in this
moment? They should be building up their
network capital.
I think that's important.
>> Other humans. Like there I think there's
a lot of connection driven jobs.
They should be looking again at
mastering AI cuz the last people to be
let go would be the people that actively
use AI.
Like if you use AI for an hour every
single week, you're above the vast
majority of America. If you use it for
an hour every day,
then you're way above most of America.
And if you tell your bosses about that,
then you're far less likely
to be let go versus the others that
don't because everyone's looking for
that capability like consulting
companies,
they're going through the roof. There
was a recent MIT study that showed that
95% of AI deployments
in companies haven't got any traction
yet.
From It was like 6 months old. Wow.
In a year or two, that'll be 95% of AI
things have got traction. Mhm.
And again, this is that thing where you
go from like, you know, you hire someone
who's not good enough
versus someone who's just slightly
better than good enough.
That transition point, it's like
ice turning to water or water turning to
gas.
This phase transition is the key point
and we're at that tipping point of phase
transition. So, you have to build up
your network capital. You have to build
up your support system, especially if
you're chronically online.
You have to embrace the AI and use it
regularly for you and your whole family
cuz there's no excuse not to. And then
communicate that you're doing that.
So, you can be the AI frontrunner in
whatever you are because that gives you
more
safety
effectively.
You have to think about
Go ahead.
And the final thing is you just have to
think psychologically, your identity is
your job.
If the AI can do it better, what is your
identity really? People don't take that
step back and think about that, right?
What is my social contract? What is my
identity? What is my expectation?
Like again,
the book I've got We've got a whole
bunch of papers and simulations and
complex stuff. We try to make it as
simple as possible and it's free or 99
cents, you know?
Because we want people to start thinking
in a different way.
And I think you need to get your brain
ready before you start seeing stuff fall
apart, be it from the job side,
violence, political upheaval, whatever.
And what's a job sector that you don't
think people realize is at jeopardy?
Um
What's a job sector that we realize I
know I kind of think everything's at
jeopardy at different stages.
I mean look, I mean
the creative sector is
about to tip.
I think if you look at the latest media
models, like again, Tom Watson that
you've been very familiar with. Mhm.
When VO3 came out, you're like
But then nano banana, okay, these names,
combined with VO3, basically by end of
year you've got
full length episodes
with the right structure.
Without any humans. And by a year from
now,
you've got that at directorial top level
directorial level, right?
That's so many jobs.
And we kind of saw that with the Saga
furor and other things.
But again, it's that tipping point.
That I think people just don't realize.
Um I think that accountancy and others,
the AI models weren't good enough until
now.
A lot of these accounting, tax, other
kind of professions.
Um those will go I it's just very
difficult to see, but I think probably
the main one is managerial.
Like
a lot of jobs that can be done on the
side of a keyboard, video, mouse need
that human component. And if you look at
things like Replika, what was it?
Synesthesia or Heygen now?
Again, you've seen the evolution of
that.
Like now you can't you could create
you talking like this with all of your
hand expressions and everything.
And I can't tell the difference now.
I mean, can you tell the difference now
with the latest models? No, there's some
that I'm really like the person's like,
"Trust me, this isn't me. This is an AI
version of me." And I'm like, "Is it
really?"
Yeah. But how long has that been?
Not long.
It's been a few months, right? Mhm.
And so one of these things is again,
like when you can't tell it's a worker
on the other side, the managerial
professions are safe now.
But then you can start seeing them be
displaced by AI very quickly.
So I'm not sure on the other side of the
KVM stuff. Jobs like dentists and things
will be fine for a long time, you know?
Cuz we won't want robots drilling around
in our mouths.
Yeah, I'll tell you though, like odds
that they get better, more gentle. Uh
I mean, maybe not in the next 5 years,
but it's going to happen.
What we have is we have inevitabilities
and we're just making bets on what
cracks first. Mhm. Right? And again, the
key inevitability and way of thinking
for me is just this. Like I had this
concept of AI Atlantis and a million
graduates coming in, but now they're
senior managers.
When you try something like these very
long-range models
uh that can work for hours and you're
like
if there was an AI that could do the job
and not make mistakes on the other side
of the screen and I couldn't tell it was
an AI, that's when you realize the
ridiculous impact of this.
Again, jobs like public sector jobs
where it isn't about performance will be
the last to go.
But if you're a private sector
owner, employee
you'll have your job
until there's some sort of displacement
activity.
Until the competitor starts embracing AI
and then they're like, "Why aren't we
embracing AI?" And then you start having
job losses.
But when that happens, it doesn't happen
in one sector at a time. It's like again
all the COVID KVM remote jobs suddenly
start letting go at the same time.
And this is why the gap between measured
unemployment or jobless figures and then
revisions are just going to go like
that.
All of a sudden.
And that's next year for me.
Because I can't
Well, I mean, how can it not be in the
next year or two?
But then the pockets of the economy that
impact will be different like
when you have an Optimus
what does it look like for truck drivers
in America which is like 2 million jobs?
The freaking Tesla Optimus will just get
in to the truck
and truck it around. You don't even need
the legs, it'll be half priced, you
know?
Like no no no nothing else needs to be
installed. It'll just drive, right?
So, we see these waves coming and again
like what do you reskill to? I'm not
sure. You can just be ahead of the wave.
You can try and surf the wave. That's
the only thing you can do.
Woof.
All right, man. This has been crazy.
Where can people get your book, find out
what you're up to these days? Yeah, it's
the lasteconomy.com.
Uh like I said, it's free to download or
read or I think it's like $0.99 on most
of the platforms.
We're going to make it open source, so
we'll continue improving it, and then,
you know, do the best we can.
And then that ii.inc,
intelligentinternet.inc, is our website.
So, please come and follow us and sign
up. Free AI coming for everyone.
I love it, man. It's exciting times,
crazy times, a little bit scary, but
also exciting. Yeah. Brother, thank you
so much for taking the time. I always
appreciate it. And speaking of things I
always appreciate, if you guys have not
already, be sure to subscribe. And until
next time, my friends, be legendary.
Take care. Peace. If you like this
conversation, check out this episode to
learn more. In the first 5 months of
2025 alone, US employers announced
nearly 700,000
job cuts, an 80% spike from last year.
That's over 4,600
people losing their jobs every single