Why It's Time to Be A Techno-Optimist

“Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” –Marc Andreessen Welcome to “The Ben & Marc Show”, featuring a16z co-founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen. This past week, Marc released his new vision for the future – “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/). In an article that has sparked widespread conversation across traditional and social media, Marc challenges the pessimistic narrative surrounding technology today, and instead celebrates it as a liberating force that can lead to growth, progress and abundance for all. In this one-on-one conversation based on YOUR questions from X (formerly Twitter), Ben and Marc discuss how technological advancements can improve the quality of human life, uplift marginalized communities, and even encourage us to answer the bigger questions of the universe. We hope you’ll be inspired to join us in this Techno-Optimist movement. Enjoy! Topics Covered: 00:00:01 Teaser 00:00:34 Ben's favorite reaction to the Manifesto 00:02:11 Rob Henderson and "luxury beliefs" 00:04:35 "Techno optimism" vs. "effective pessimism" 00:10:32 Bringing Techno Optimism to marginalized communities 00:17:09 The Digital Divide and what we should really be worried about 00:19:32 How technology allows us to answer the big questions of life 00:22:59 Technology increases resilience to natural disaster 00:25:31 Economic systems to prevent human corruption 00:28:34 Pro Business vs. Pro Market 00:33:33 Love, Money and Force 00:39:09 Private capital vs. public research 00:43:51 Being anti-statist while supporting American dynamism 00:46:43 "Ideas reproduce" / Law of Accelerating Returns 00:48:28 Economist Julian Simon 00:52:57 What keeps us from the "insane gains" of nuclear fission 00:57:15 Consequences of not having to work 01:03:08 Chinese vs. American education / "Education is not market-based." 01:10:25 Can we predict the consequences of technology? 01:15:35 Super high IQ people and radicalization 01:17:02 Predicting the most controversial part of the Manifesto 01:21:03 Sign off #technology #tech #ai #economics #business Listen to Us! - Apple Podcast: https://bit.ly/3SdsfNt - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3SclPOr Resources: Marc on X: https://twitter.com/pmarca Marc’s Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com/ Ben on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz Books mentioned on this podcast: – “When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics” by Neven Sesardic https://amzn.to/455zYRv – “The Ultimate Resource” by Julian Lincoln Simon https://amzn.to/3Ft2MIi Stay Updated: Find us on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z The views expressed here are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any a16z funds. PLEASE SEE MORE HERE: https://a16z.com/disclosures/

• 0:00Speaker 0

  Look, there's the other scenario, and I would just call that one the Cheetos and Meth scenario.

• 0:03Speaker 1

  And PlayStation.

• 0:05Speaker 0

  And PlayStation, right? And like and I like Netflix. I'm a fan of Netflix, but like maybe not 12 hours a day. That's the existence of a cow. Chows are great. But like I don't think we should be cows.

• 0:22Speaker 1

  Hello, and welcome to the Mark and Ben podcast. Today we're going to talk about a post that Mark recently wrote called the Techno Optimist Manifesto. And like all good manifestos, many people loved it. Many people hated it. And so that's given us a lot to talk about. I just want to actually point out my favorite of the people that hated it was an article that was published in TechCrunch called When's the Last Time Mark Andreessen has spoken to poor people or a poor person or something like that. And the thing that's so funny about it is that Mark, of all the people I know, I probably don't know anybody who's more self-made than Mark because he grew up in a tiny town in Wisconsin.

• 1:09Speaker 1

  He went to public schools, like not good public schools, like probably some of the uh worst public schools in the country. And um and like never got any money, you know, from home. Not because his parents didn't love them. They didn't have any money to give them. Uh so and then the people who wrote the article all went to like the fanciest schools I've ever heard of. Um, and you know, Ivy Leagues and wonderful private high schools and these kinds of things. So now we have people who grew up rich telling somebody who grew up poor and massively succeeded what's good for poor people who want to succeed. So that's I just thought that was so funny. Anyway, so this one's gotten a lot of uh kick to it.

• 1:57Speaker 1

  So we're gonna get right into it. Um the first question, hey

• 2:01Speaker 0

  Ben, can I can I weigh in on that? Yes, sir. Can I weigh in on that? You you can't start that way and then not let me talk. Not let me say something. Sorry. So it's too tempting. Um look, it's it's a uh the you know, as the the that sort of that response is it's a classic example of what Rob Henry Rob Henderson, the author, Rob Henderson calls luxury beliefs. Uh right. And so, right, and so a luxury belief, right? The definition of luxury belief is it's a belief that could be held by somebody who's in sort of a you know, sort of an elite position, uh, you know, position of power, position of of uh of wealth and comfort, um, you know, about how society should be ordered that is incorrect, um, and the consequences of which would be disastrous, right, for the people uh that would be subjected to the consequences of that belief. Um, but uh, you know, the people who hold the belief are insulated from the consequences, right?

• 2:46Speaker 0

  They live in you know, kind of fancy places and and and have uh very good lifestyles and uh and aren't gonna are aren't going to suffer directly as a result. So anyway, it's it's a classic is a great example of luxury belief. Um, you know, the the sort of uh you know the sort of factual response to it, of course, is that capitalism and free markets um are the machine that has lifted people out of poverty for you know 500 years. Yeah, we've run

• 3:08Speaker 1

  the experiment, the other systems don't seem to work as well.

• 3:11Speaker 0

  Many, many, many times, you know, and we it's this is one of those things and you know, some amazing things. We ran exactly to your point, we ran this experiment, you know, hundreds of times in the in the in the 20th century, and and the results are very clear. Uh and you know, look, most recently in China, you know, there's a direct correlation between the degree to which the Chinese communist party kind of takes its boot off the throat of the people in terms of their ability to engage in markets and engage in trade and the extent to which the their quality of life rises. And so you you know, you kind of still see that you know playing out today. And how quickly it

• 3:38Speaker 1

  regresses when they when they move to central planning.

• 3:42Speaker 0

  Of course, 100%. And so, and you just see this over and over again. And you know, then and then you know, you see it happening in other parts of the world also. And so, you know, it's this thing where you get just like more more times running the same experiment are not going to generate different results. Um and then the result of this, of course, is that this is kind of so obvious and well established at this point that you have to go to you know one of our finest elite, you know, private high schools and private, you know, universities to really get inculcated. Um into the lecturery belief system that's

• 4:10Speaker 1

  gonna

• 4:10Speaker 0

  be all

• 4:11Speaker 1

  trying to help,

• 4:12Speaker 0

  yeah. Exactly.

• 4:14Speaker 1

  So that's a excellent, excellent start. Um so this first question is from St. Louis of technique. What does effect of pessimism look like? I how can people who want to mitigate risks make sure not to waste their time on moral panic that Stemi's progress?

• 4:35Speaker 0

  You know, look, this is really tough, right? Uh and let you know, let's start by you know, conceding the, you know, kind of giving the devil his due, kind of conceding the you know, the strength of the other side's argument on this. Um, you know, which is like, look, uh, as I say in the essay, like, I, you know, I'm not a utopian. Um, you know, technology is not purely a force for good. Um, you know, technology technologies are tools and they can be used for both good and bad. And you know, virtually every technology that man has ever invented um has been used for both good and bad. And so it it's it's not that there aren't downsides. It's not that there aren't risk. And the bird. Yeah, starting with fire. I mean, look, like, you know, this is the reference in in the in the piece, uh, this uh you know, the myth of Prometheus, which is kind of the origin myth in in Western society of sort of the implications of technology. And you know, in the Prometheus myth, you know, Prometheus is the is the god that brought um brought fire to man, and you know, for that he was punished by being, you know, uh by the by Zeus by being uh chained to a rock and having his liver pecked out every night um by a bird, uh, and then it would regenerate in the morning and then it would happen again the next day.

• 5:33Speaker 0

  So, you know, very exquisite form of torture that Zeus came up with. And and and you know, the reason that myth is so powerful is because look, fire fire was the enabler of you know heat uh and light and cooking food, right? And defense and shelter, you know, for early man, but it was also a weapon, you know, from the very beginning, it was a weapon of war, right? And if if for example you're engaged in, you know, you know, siege combat, and you know, you're you're going up against a fortified, you know, castle or city, the way that you win is you burn them out,

• 5:59Speaker 1

  right?

• 5:59Speaker 0

  Um and by the way, the way they retaliate is they pour boil, you know, boiling they heat up oil to to uh boiling uh temperatures and they pour it on your head, right? So yeah, so so both sides of these are uh are true, and this the you know, this this continues to be the case, you know, to this day. Um and then basically these are kind of the two, you know, actually the effective pessimism is a clever framing. Um, you know, these are kind of the two kind of valences that you could apply to to this question, which is you could apply, you know, one valence is basically fundamentally over time, net, you know, everything. Technology has been primarily a force for good, primarily a force of progress. Um, and basically you embrace it and and and and and support it and accelerate it as much as you can, and then and then you deal with the issues as as they arise, you know, which which is the story of the development of modern civilization. Um, you know, there there is another valence, and and and you know, people uh, you know, some people incline more more naturally to to the pessimistic position, which is basically and this is true by the way, of both technologies and markets, people also apply the same kind of negative valence to markets, which is well, primarily, you know, technology or markets are a generator of bad things, right?

• 7:03Speaker 0

  Um, you know, uh technology is a weapon of war, you know, technology is something that has negative, you know, unanticipated negative consequences, markets as as uh, you know, you know, markets markets have winners and losers, right? And so, you know, do you focus, you know, do you you start out focusing more on the winners or on the losers? Um and so you just kind of have to decide, you know, where where you go in on what what I find, you know, the accusation, of course, from the pessimists is the optimists are too optimistic, you know, the the counteraccusation, of course, is if you start out with a pessimistic frame, it's very hard to hold that in a moderate position, is what I is what I observe. Um the pessimists sort of slide into greater and greater levels of pessimism quite quickly. Um, and you know, they end up very angry and bitter and hostile um and they end up advocating for extremely, you know, I would say draconian and kind of senseless policies.

• 7:49Speaker 0

  Um I I think it's hard to be an effective pessimist. Yeah, you know, uh yeah, I think it's it's it seems to be much easier to become a I would say, you know, either an ineffective pessimist or just the flat out dangerous pessimist.

• 8:00Speaker 1

  Yeah, yeah, you know, Andy Grove had a great line on this. Somebody asked him uh, was the microprocessor good or bad? And he said, well, that's a crazy question. It's like asking a steel good or bad. It is like you're not gonna hold back progress. And so the what you have to ask yourself is, you know, how do you how do you make it good? But but don't try and do that by banning it. Because you're concede at that. You're just gonna get frustrated.

• 8:28Speaker 0

  Yeah, I mean, the only thing I'd argue with Andy on that is, you know, they they do get banned, right? Um, and so um, you know, steel didn't get banned, but uh, you know, nuclear civilian nuclear power did.

• 8:36Speaker 1

  Yeah,

• 8:37Speaker 0

  right. Um and so, you know, the pessimists, I mean, look, like I mentioned in the piece, you know, I think the single biggest policy mistake of my lifetime was the decision of the 70s, effectively in the 70s into the 80s to ban, essentially ban civilian nuclear power, and and you know, for sure, throughout most of the US and then you know, throughout certainly most of Europe as well, uh, with you know, maybe France being the big exception. Um, and then and then by extension throughout a lot of the rest of the world, because it would have been Western, you know, countries and and and companies that would have brought it to the rest of the world in that in that time period. Um, look, I think the consequences for that, like if they think of your environment environmentalist and you you kind of are looking at things dispassionately, as Stuart Brand and others, you know, have been doing now, you know, for a while, is you kind of say, you know, look, we have the silver bullet for a sort of unlimited zero emission energy. Um, and we had it, and we chose not to use it.

• 9:22Speaker 0

  Um, with everything we know today, it's overwhelmingly both you know the the safe, effective, and you know, kind of zero, you know, kind of risk, you know, zero risk of of you know of mass death, zero risk of contributing to uh you know carbon emissions and so forth. Um but you know, look, we made it, we made we collectively made a political decision to ban it, and we're you know paying the price for that today. And you know, quite frankly, it's one of the reasons why Russia's able to do what it's doing in Ukraine is it has this flow of money from from oil, um, you know, which in in a counterfactual universe where the world by now had cut over to civilian electric power, like they wouldn't have that. They wouldn't be able to do what they're doing. So the the consequences of that decision play out decades later. Um, and and I I think that's a great illustration of the risk of not say not the risk of effect. Let's say the risk of uh of dangerous pessimism.

• 10:03Speaker 1

  Yeah. And dramatic example of narrative defeating data, because it's very, very obvious from the data that nuclear is far safer than say oil or coal. All right. Second question. And this is from your friend and mine, Shaka Senghor. How can we distribute transformative philosophies like yours to marginalized communities where culture of despair and victimization predominates, predominates?

• 10:32Speaker 0

  Yeah. So this is a really interesting question for me because I think that it

• 10:36Speaker 1

  does get to the heart of like one of the reasons why victimization predominates is because it's the kind of

• 10:46Speaker 0

  it's

• 10:47Speaker 1

  a techno pessimistic world. Um, you know, in those communities in the marginalized communities. And I I would say I go back to um, you know, there have been uh some very kind of interesting and successful leaders. Uh Marcus Garvey comes to mind who and I think it starts with you know something that he really really was um heavily behind, which is this idea of self-determination that in an individual can change their change their own lives, change their own circumstances. And then, you know, he had this idea uh at the turn of the pre of the turn of the 18th to 1900s, um and you know, which was a kind of much more difficult time to do that, particularly for kind of black people in America.

• 11:35Speaker 1

  Um but you know, he himself succeeded at it greatly. And I think it really starts with that mindset where you have if you don't believe um that you can be successful in life or with the new technology or with kind of moving the world forward, then you can't. And Henry Ford's famous line you know, there are two men, uh, one believes he can do it, the other believes he can't can't do it, and they're both right. I think is the key to that whole thing, is it just starts with the belief that you can succeed. Um and look, the odds are harder for some than others, but um, you know, you always end in despair if you believe you can't do it.

• 12:20Speaker 0

  Yeah. Yeah, and I just add, you know, building a little bit on the on the uh uh on the the sort of uh uh the tech wrench argument. Yeah. Um you know, look on the consumption side. So one of the this is sort of one of the amazing things about free markets, like free markets are the most beneficial to the lowest income and the most advantaged. And that is, you know, a you know, that's a you know, counterintuitive mind bender for a lot of people who have been trained at early distributions to hate capitalism, but training in the opposite direction. But it's the the truth is it's it's the best for the poorest, it's the best for the people who have the least. Um and by the least, I mean you know, the at least existing wealth, but also the least access, you know, the least social status, um, right, um, who are kind of on the receiving end of of not a lot of not a lot of advantage in their lives. And and and you can kind of look at that on two sides of their lives.

• 13:05Speaker 0

  You can look at that for them as producers and as consumers. Um, so on the production side, you know, markets open up opportunity, right? Uh for uh, you know, for people to be able to make their way in the world and for you know to be able to have jobs and be able to make money and then ultimately be able to support a family. Um and so you know, again, the counterfactual here, you know, the counterfactual is not you know, a poor person trying to navigate their way through the hell of a capitalist economy versus somehow in a in a socialist or communist system they'd be handed, you know, kind of added everything they need, right? The reality is it's you know it's the other way around. It's it's it's sort of the the more capitalism the more opportunities there are, the more available jobs. But the more the more lines of the more lines of work, the more the more openness and freedom and choice uh to be able to figure out how to uh you know how to succeed um and how to make money and what work to do.

• 13:52Speaker 0

  Um you know, you end up on the wrong side of a you know authoritarian you know, communist regime or a socialist regime or an authoritarian regime, right? Um uh you are you know, you are screwed. Like there are no jobs for you, right? Nobody's hiring, there are no private employers. Um, you know, if the state, you know, for whatever reason doesn't want to hire you, like you're out of luck if you're in a you know disadvantaged class category, if you're in a you know, disadvantaged, you know, uh race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, any of these things, uh, or just you know, political views or whatever, or just that you're poor and people look down on you, like you that's it, like you're done. Like at that point, you're a war to the state, and you know, whatever amount of you know, small amount of grain they want to feed you to keep you alive, fair enough, but like you're not you're not going anywhere. Right. And that and that was you know, that was the story of low-income people in most societies, you know, over basically the entirety of human existence up to the point uh uh of the invention of markets.

• 14:45Speaker 0

  And so that's on the one side. And then on the consumption side, um I talk about this also in the essay is one of the big things that technology does uh in the free market context is it drives prices down. Um and and this is a big thing on on inequality and especially income inequality that people I think miss, which is like one form of like determining the level of like income inequality or the the value of one's income or whatever, right, is to look at it in terms of like you know, what literally the you know, as demarcated measured by units of currency, right? And so I either I'm either making more money or less money. Look, the other side of it, right, of that is what is money used for, it's used to buy goods and services. And so if the price of goods and services is falling, that's the same effective thing to you from a standard of living standpoint as if you're getting a natural raise. Yeah, right. Um, and so what markets do and technology does is they drive prices down.

• 15:31Speaker 0

  And the more they're allowed to operate, the the more they they drive prices down. The the traditional way that economists talk about this is they make the observation, which is as follows, which is the queen of England always wore silk stockings, right? Like the super rich throughout all of society, you know, throughout all of time have always had access to the best of goods and services, you know, great, you know, the best of available food and the best of available health care, right, and so forth and so on, you know, uh, of their time and place. You know, it was traditionally like that that stuff was all just you know, silk stocking stockings and everything else, right? We're just completely out of reach uh of most people. And it and it is precisely the engine of free markets and technology that bring down prices uh so that regular people can afford these things uh uh as well.

• 16:13Speaker 1

  Yeah, and I actually the you know, maybe the most profound example of that is kind of the internet plus the smartphone, because you, you know, when you and I grew up, um information uh was kind of an elite thing to get to, and you know, a big reason to go to university was the knowledge was all there. It was in books and libraries and all these kinds of things, and you couldn't get you know, you didn't actually have access to that otherwise, um, and and computers, by the way, also we we didn't have computers, you know, for for individuals then. Um, and now, you know, the at least you know, the the kind of poorest people in America, the homeless in San Francisco have better access to information and knowledge than the president of the United States did in you know 1980, uh, which is unbelievable.

• 17:02Speaker 1

  Um, so uh to your point.

• 17:04Speaker 0

  Okay. Let me give you to give you one other one on that. And this this I find this totally mind-blowing. So, you know, when we you're Ben, you remember when we first started working on the internet in the 90s, you know, there was just this sort of endless kind of hand-wringing at the time about this concept of the digital divide. Yes, right. Um this concept of basically, you know, digital technology, the internet, computers, uh, PCs and the smartphones were gonna draw, we're gonna basically widen inequality because they were it was basically well off people that were gonna have them and then poor people wouldn't.

• 17:30Speaker 1

  Right.

• 17:30Speaker 0

  Um, and then there was, you know, this is you know, this was maybe the effective pessimism of its time, is people were very, very worried about that. You know, look, sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. Uh, more people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access um than have electricity or running water in their homes.

• 17:48Speaker 1

  Yeah, amazing.

• 17:49Speaker 0

  Right. Um right. So the the digital technologies people were worried about are actually the most egalitarian, right, of all technologies that have ever been ever been produced, even more than running water and electricity. Um and and so you know, we so I mean we should we should still be worried about like literally the gap in access to fresh water, like more than we should be accessed, uh worried about the gap in access to like the you know the internet. And again, there's exactly one the water divide, right? The electricity divide is like still a thing. But the the digital technology divide actually turns out to not not be a thing. And of course, and again, the reason for that, the reason for that is very straightforward. The reason for that is is falling prices. The reason for that is, you know, as the global smartphone market went to five billion people, you know, the price of a smartphone collapsed to, I don't even know today, and you know, in sort of the developing world, you know, it's I don't know, 10 bucks or something.

• 18:36Speaker 0

  Um, and then and then same thing, you know, internet access has plummeted uh in price uh over time uh because of Moore's law and competition and and and innovation. Um so again, like if so if you if you if you sorry the paradox, the the the flip side of this is if if you wanted a plan to be able to drive you know a something, a any form of good or service that is important to lots of people um to have it be available to everybody, you know, the thing to do is to lean harder into into markets and into technology, right? Not further away.

• 19:01Speaker 1

  Yeah, great, great point. Okay, uh, next question from Max Churit Churitic. Um somebody's gonna get me with one of these, it's gonna be like one of these uh kind of Simpsons jokes, but uh technology makes life easier and necessary for a better future. However, how would you address humans getting overly dependent on tech to a point where we can't function without it?

• 19:29Speaker 0

  Yeah. Yeah. So this is I would say there's kind of the full dystopian version of this, um, you know, which is sort of the wall-li scenario, yeah, right. Um, you know, the movie in the movie Wally, uh, for those of you who haven't seen it, you know, mankind in the future basically, you know, is all just like you know, obese and you know, literally sitting in these big like suspension zero gravity suspension chairs and you know, basically, you know, binging binging Netflix and slurping, you know, some of that going now. Yeah, this might sound a little a little familiar, but in in our times. But but yeah, look, there there is. Sense of like, okay, we we kind of, you know, at some point, like, you know, we we live in sort of this automated, you know, I don't know, farm environment or something, and we're kind of farm animals and we're we're being kept fat and happy, but um, you know, we've kind of lost agency, we've lost very well, we've lost choice, we've lost, you know, any sort of you know, sense of self-reliance, self-sufficiency, any sense of adventure.

• 20:16Speaker 0

  Um, and you know, look, I, you know, like I think there, you know, there's there's there's certainly some, you know, some some argument, uh, you know, kind of in that direction. You do see examples of that. Um, you know, what I what I try to do, what I try to do in the essay and what what I believe on this is a little, it's a little bit a little bit subtle, um, which is look, you know, there are really big questions uh about the the meaning of life um that you know people have today and have had for a very long time, right? And a lot of the history of human civilization has been, you know, debates around you know religion and you know, which gods to worship and moral principles and how to order a society and what you know the role of the collective versus the role of the individual is and you know, all these policy questions that flower from this, and like you know, the story of of human civilization is in some way the story of trying to kind of figure out all those questions. And of course, these questions are still, you know, at least for a lot of people, still unanswered or are still open questions or are being open, you know, open, open to new all the time.

• 21:07Speaker 0

  Um and and and I think it's putting frankly too much of a burden. Like I'm a you know, I'm a I'm a uh I'm an enthusiastic proponent of technology and markets, but it's it's putting a little bit too much of a burden on technology and markets to expect technology markets to answer all those questions for all people. And so I I think if you're looking to technology and markets to answer those questions, I think you're probably looking in the wrong direction. You know, I I think you probably need to look inside, you know, quite honestly, inside the human soul, um, you know, where all where all the hard questions lie. Um and then the the observation I make is um rising technological capabilities and rising standard of living, right, through markets, um, open up the room, right, individually and collectively in our society to be able to ask those questions, right? So and the most obvious example of that is look when people are hungry, they don't ask any of these questions. The only question is like, you know, where's where's the meal coming from?

• 21:53Speaker 0

  Right. And you can kind of elaborate that all the way up, and you can kind of say, look, like if the ultimate human problem is that we're all, you know, we're all full, you know, we have full bellies, our children are taking, you know, our our children are gonna live great lives, you know, we're able to support our family, we're able to, you know, do all the things that technology is able to give us, um, and we still have these big unanswered questions about the meaning of life, then basically what technology will have done is to open up the aperture to be able to actually spend more time trying to figure out those big questions.

• 22:21Speaker 1

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's that that seems like uh a very champagne problem for sure. It's funny, it reminds me of, you know, when I was in the elementary school, my brother was in junior high school. I went to the school play, and the play calculators had just come out. And the whole play was about, you know, this uh society where nobody knew how to do math and then the calculators all broke. And so, you know, those kinds of fears, I think go with technology, but they tend not to play out in uh very real ways. At least all the calculators haven't broken yet. Um,

• 22:59Speaker 0

  and look, tech technology gives you the way. Oh, and here's the other kind of serious observation you make is technology increases resilience to natural disaster. Uh so technology increase, like so, for example, you know, this this comes up actually a lot in the climate debate, um, which is basically, you know, one one of the, and I'm not, this is not quite question climate change making a different point, but you know, one of the one of the questions over time is basically is nature getting more or less dangerous, right, over time, right? As as as both as the world changes, as humanity changes and so forth. And and basically um uh deaths from natural disasters have been a systemic decline for you know a century plus at this point.

• 23:31Speaker 1

  Yeah,

• 23:31Speaker 0

  right. Like it, you know, it used to be that if you were confronted by, you know, uh basically any kind of what's that cold. Yeah, that's yes,

• 23:41Speaker 1

  there's no heat.

• 23:42Speaker 0

  Yes. People, yeah, you if it was cold, you freeze to death. You know, if it was hot, you know, with no air conditioning, you might, you know, you might die from heat stroke. Um, you know, any kind of tornado flood, mudslide. I mean, look, you know, there was there was there was literally, what was it? There was what was in Boston, like 150 years ago or something, there was like a molasses um uh uh basically a mass tragedy, um, right, where people like literally drown in the in a in a molasses flood. Like nature, I mean, of all, you know, nature is vicious, right? Like nature really has it out for you. Um, and if you're unprotected in a state of nature, like it, you know, the the old the old thing is you know, life in state of nature is is is uh what is it, a nasty brutish short

• 24:20Speaker 1

  poor solitary, nasty brutish and short uh Hobbs.

• 24:23Speaker 0

  Yeah, exactly. And so look, technology, you know, it's it's the end of the flip side of the question is technology is now buffering us against you know sources of mass death um that used to be you know far more far, far more common. Um and so that this is not to, you know, this is not to obviously uh to sort of try to get away from the kind of the doomsday question of of like what happens if it literally all stops working, but like you know, how how do we build defenses against the really bad scenarios in which that would happen? It actually turns out technology is our friend on that.

• 24:49Speaker 1

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And our our friend Elon is um, you know, protecting us against everything by uh making us an interplanetary species, which also deals with the asteroid problem.

• 25:00Speaker 0

  Yeah, yeah. Look, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, look with the the dinosaurs had no plan B, right? Like

• 25:06Speaker 1

  turns out. So John asks, how can economic systems evolve to prevent human corruption from infiltrating advanced technologies that surpass our capacity for understanding?

• 25:19Speaker 0

  Yeah, Ben, what uh Ben, what do you think? Or maybe you might maybe you might narrow in the question a little bit or make it more specific.

• 25:26Speaker 1

  You know, I'm not sure if I totally understand what he's getting at here, but I think that um I think human corruption, uh you know, there there is this agency problem, and I think that you you kind of alluded to it on the kind of nuclear fission issue, um, where you know, as uh as these systems evolve, how do you keep the human interests from fouling them? Uh and this kind of gets to you know, a heart of a lot of the things that you spoke about in the manifesto, which is, you know, for example, um, you know, we had this this banking crisis, and everybody's intention was to basically you know lessen our reliance on giant banks that became as powerful as you know, many governments in the world.

• 26:19Speaker 1

  Uh and of course, um, because of this uh Baptists and bootlegger issue where the banks were the bootleggers and the government was the Baptists, um, you know, they they they we basically got the opposite. We got much bigger banks, much more powerful, and that trend is kind of continuing forward. Uh so I think that you know when we look at how systems get corrupt and you know, and create real crisis, you know, we we really have to beware of the agency problem. And we're going through um a few of those now, I think, both on AI and also on crypto, where actually a lot of the answer to um, you know, some of these like huge, powerful monopolies, you know, like what do you do about tech companies getting so big and becoming monopolies?

• 27:13Speaker 1

  What do you do about banks getting so big and becoming becoming monopolies? We actually have a magic technology that decentralizes power, actually creates a real form of stakeholder capitalism where all of the participants in the economy get rewarded for building the economy. Um and the biggest uh adversaries of that whole movement end up being the kind of Baptists in the government, you know, conned by the uh bootleggers and the big banks and so forth, you know kind of over highlighting small, you know, real but small dangers of the technology and trying to stop the technology in its tracks and kind of lead to this horrible agency problem where you have these very, very corrupt systems.

• 28:05Speaker 1

  Um I I guess my big thing would be, you know, like be really careful when somebody goes, oh, this is a problem with a new technology. So therefore we have to stop the new technology. Like that I think is the pattern that's repeated over and over and again and hurt us so badly on energy and it threatens to hurt us on intelligence and threatens to hurt us on decentralization.

• 28:33Speaker 0

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, one of the ways to think about this for people who haven't run into this in their lives is there's there's a fundamental difference between uh pro-business and pro-market.

• 28:42Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 0

  Um and they sound like they're the same thing and they're not. Um and so because pro-business kind of begs the question of which businesses and then sort of, okay, what's the structure of the market? And are we talking about like exactly? Are we talking about lots of companies having to compete and earn their way in the world, or are we talking about ultimately crony capitalism? Basically, and basically this is the pattern of basically what happens. This is kind of the point of the the Baptist and bootleggers idea of what happens, which is basically a new tech a new technology, something changes uh in the world. You have big incumbent companies that very much are opposed to that change or want to control it. Um and and want want to control it, want to lock it down. Um so what they do is they go to the government and they basically say, oh, um, you need you need to regulate this. And they they don't go in and say you need to regulate this for our benefit, because they would get laughed at.

• 29:24Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 0

  Um so what they say, so what they say is you need to regulate this to the case. That'd be a dead giveaway. Yeah, that would be a dead giveaway. So instead they say we, you know, we you need to regulate this really regulate this to protect basically the you know, the little people. Um, right. Um and and but what they're shooting for a hundred percent of the time, what they're shooting for is basically uh government uh sanction barriers to competition for themselves.

• 29:44Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 0

  Um and and I would even argue like we we don't even today in America, like we don't here, I'll I'll do a little effective pessimism. Um, you know, we don't in America today in most industries actually live in what you call a free market system. We we live in more of a captured kind of big business cartel. Uh Ecosystem and you look just across sort of sector after sector after sector, what you see are sort of two or three or four companies that have you know overwhelming market share uh in each sector and generate you know an overwhelming percentage of the profits and have this extremely incestuous relationship with the government. By the way, often to the point where they're actually writing their own regulations, right? Like it's their lobbyists actually writing the regulations. Um, you know, it's the industry groups that they run. Well, like the classic example is

• 30:23Speaker 1

  that's the majority of regulations works works exactly like that. Yeah.

• 30:26Speaker 0

  Yeah, that's right. And of course, and then there's this this other form of corruption, right, which is the revolving door, which is like, okay, if you're if you're a regulator, it is you know extremely tempting just out of pure self-interest, you know, to kind of do what these big companies want because they'll hire you, right? Um after after you're after you're done doing that. And so this is sort of this corruption after the fact that happens with the revolving doors. Um so anyway, so so this basically that that that you you could be pro you could be pro-business and be completely in favor of all of that, right? Because it is still businesses, you know, doing everything at the end of the day. Pro market, right, says no, that none of that, what I just described is acceptable. That's not how things should work at all. The last thing any government should be doing is giving any particular company some special right or privilege, uh, some ability to block out new competition. And in fact, what you want is more competition. You want more competition, more markets, more capitalism, uh is actually the answer to that, precisely to keep the big companies from basically just taking over and not having to compete anymore.

• 31:17Speaker 1

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, a hundred percent. Um and actually that leads very well into the next question, which is how exactly will markets prevent monopolies. Please elaborate on your point. And I and I and I think this is so key because look, the nature of companies, even monopolies, is that the older and larger they get, the less adaptive they become. And we we look, we've seen this with Google who invented you know most of the new AI technology and then was a little bit of sleep at the wheel, uh, you know, when uh OpenAI released GPT, um they missed it just because like they're big, they're complicated, they're slow, they're not as good anymore.

• 32:03Speaker 1

  And so if the new AI companies are free to compete, if open source AI is free to compete, then all of a sudden, that's the best kind of way to break that monopoly. Um, you know, similarly, you know, there's a lot of

• 32:18Speaker 0

  you know

• 32:19Speaker 1

  chatter on like social networking monopolies and banking monopolies and these kinds of things. And

• 32:25Speaker 0

  you know,

• 32:25Speaker 1

  again, we already actually have a technology that's a great insurgent technology to defeat those monopolies. And the thing that prevents that is, as you say, uh not a pro-market, but a pro-business, a pro very specific business, businesses that have enough money to bribe corrupt lobby the government into creating regulations that prevent the new company from competing.

• 32:51Speaker 0

  Right. That's right.

• 32:52Speaker 1

  And we're we're seeing a lot of that right now. I find the heart to be terribly corrupt. With that in mind, can you uh elaborate on your statement? Love doesn't scale.

• 33:08Speaker 1

  I don't know if you meant because the heart is corrupt, but perhaps you did.

• 33:14Speaker 0

  Well, uh, so I I didn't say the heart is corrupt. So that would that was that that's fortunately, that's the questioner. Um, I mean, look, I think what the question is alluding to there, I would assume is sort of this, you know, perennial debate about human nature, which is this man, you know, primarily good or bad, um, which which we could talk about. But I I I think on the on the thing about love not scaling, let me let me hit that one directly, and then we can maybe go to the go to the bigger topic. So basically, you know, so this so the formulation here is from uh a guy named David Friedman, who's an economist and Milton Friedman's son. Um, and the thing that he said that really stuck with me is look, there's only three ways to get people to do things for other people, right? Fundamentally, um, you know, one is love, and you know, you see that in you know, you you you you you see that in you know people's families, you know, and they're in their friend, you know, friends, friend networks like you know, Ben, like I'll do things for Ben without him having to pay me, right?

• 33:59Speaker 0

  Um and so you know, that that that is an important force, especially without me

• 34:03Speaker 1

  threatening to kick your ass.

• 34:06Speaker 0

  Coming to the other one, yes, exactly. So uh without without force. So there's love. Um, you know, with without love, there's basically two other choices, and they're basically money and force. Money, right? Money's the carrot uh uh force is the stick, you know, look, money is capitalism's answer, you know, force was communism's answer.

• 34:21Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 0

  Um, you know, and this is the brand, and again, going back to you know, it just beat up beat up on the communists a little bit more like this. This was this was the big realization of all the communist societies in the in the 20th century and today, which is like basically what what what what communism and its derivatives, socialism and so forth expect, they expect love to scale.

• 34:37Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 0

  Um, and so they expect that you should work in whatever, you know, the Siberian salt mines or whatever it is, um, you know, in order the far, you know, the fields or whatever. Um, and you should do that out of love for your fellow man, and you should do that for you know love of the society and so forth. And and by the way, look, like, you know, the Naz the Nazis had their own, you know, the Nazis are the national socialists, like they had their own spit on this. You're supposed to do things on behalf of you know the German people is the same thing. Like you're supposed to love this macro unit. Um the the problem is to love doesn't scale. The problem is people just don't naturally love people they don't know, right? And and and by the way, that's not like because I don't think I my view, that's not because there's something morally wrong with them. It's because they don't know the other people, right? And the and you know, it's like, okay, are they are they being loved back, right? And and and like are the other people gonna be pulling their weight, right? Is you know, or is there gonna be a free rider problem?

• 35:25Speaker 0

  And of course, you know, in the the answer is at any level of scale, of course they're there are free rider problems if if if if if people aren't required to work. Um, and so a a this is the irony of the heart of the whole thing. Uh society built in the idea that love scales becomes an incredibly dark dystopian, hostile, you know, and ultimately murderous, murderous place because love doesn't scale. Um, you know, force force is you know, forces one way around that, which is okay, the way you get people to work, even though they don't want to because they don't love people in some remote area that they'd be working on behalf of is you put a gun to their head.

• 35:52Speaker 1

  Yep.

• 35:53Speaker 0

  Um and then and then you know, the the third option that falls straight out of that is okay, how about how about money and then and then sort of money, of course, is a proxy, money is a tool for you know, sort of you know what they call sort of rational self-interest, right? Or enlightened self-interest, which is like, okay, um, I'm I'm gonna get paid, I'm gonna get paid money to do this, it's gonna benefit these other people. I'm not primarily doing it because it's gonna benefit people I haven't met. Um and I don't, you know, and maybe look, maybe I love everybody, and maybe I would love to meet all my customers. Um and by the way, look, when you walk into a restaurant and and you've never you know met the you know the the the owner or the host before, like they're thrilled to see you, right? And so, you know, do they literally love you or are you their new best friend? No. Are they excited to see you? Yeah, well, they have a very positive sentiment towards you because they know you're gonna they know you're going to pay, right? Um anyway, so that's the that that that is the solution. You know, that's the best solution that we've come up with.

• 36:39Speaker 0

  Yeah, you know, barring some profound change in human nature, um, uh in which people all of a sudden become far more generous than they've been historically. That that seems like it's likely to be a stable state.

• 36:47Speaker 1

  Yeah, yeah, it's funny. It reminds me of a interesting conversation I had years ago with a friend of mine who grew up in the Soviet Union. And uh, you know, I I made some offhand comment that, you know, like whatever Stalin was a crazy psycho or that kind of thing. And he goes, What are you talking about? Stalin was very rational, very smart. Go back, read what he wrote, look at his speeches. He was super systematic thinker, very intelligent. I was like, well, like what went wrong? Why'd he kill 20 million of his own people? And he just said, when you take away the carrot, all you have is stick. And that is so true. And I think a lot, you know, that's a lot of the point.

• 37:26Speaker 0

  You

• 37:27Speaker 1

  at scale. And your family, yes, you can run the communist family. You can even run a communist kibbutz. That you know, at that scale, it can work for sure.

• 37:36Speaker 0

  Yeah, that's right. And hike Hyke made this point, and Deirdre McClellasti has made this point also, which is like, look, we we do live in a superposition of the two systems, right? Because like you don't want to be, you don't want to be the asshole who like you know, have runs your family like it's a capitalist enterprise, like you know, you charge your kids for you know for you know rent, like you know, for sleeping in their in their in their bunks when they're eight. Like so, like, you know, we all we all grow up and and in our family and friend environments, like we we're we're all communistic in in that context, right? But then there's this kind of you know schizophrenia to it, which is like, okay, we go out into the world and the world doesn't act like that, and all of a sudden there's a different, a different uh way, you know, way to ex way to exchange and a different way to relate. Um and so I I think you know, ultimately, you know, the answer lies in sort of the superposition of of of the small and the large. Um and uh, you know, let's just say, yeah, the people who are too abstract on this, I think get derailed.

• 38:23Speaker 0

  Yeah, I think on it.

• 38:25Speaker 1

  That's the exact point that everyone gets confused on because who won't want the country to run like their family? That would be so much better. It's a the problem is it's impossible. Yeah. Next question. Um, this is this is actually one that I think a lot of people have from Morton. How do you see private capital versus public research budgets when it comes to fundamental progress? Aside from ATT's monopoly that drove Bell Labs, I've yet to see systemic uh technological progress from private investment. I think I would disagree with the last part, but I'll let you start.

• 39:00Speaker 0

  Yeah, so I actually say there's actually three models. I would say there's private, uh, there's public, and then there's a third that I'll that I'll come to. Um so look, like a couple things I think are true. So one is again, I'll give the give the effective pessimists they're doing this one, um, also, which is look, like, yeah, look, there the straight capital R research, you know, that that is sort of the time moderate way of like discovering you know the principles of the universe and so forth, like, you know, look, the you know, the the the best of that has no idea if or when it will ever commercialize, right? Because by definition, it has no idea whether or not the experiments will even pan out, right? Or the theories are even correct. And so that you know, there is there is this kind of research that historically, you know, has been publicly funded. Um, you know, and look in the US, we have had these agencies like the National Science Foundation that have done a lot of that for a very long time and have you know very good, you know, you look at NSF, you know, whatever issues NF NF NF NS NSF has, if you look at the like the totality of spend in their existence and then the results, you know, you would say, yeah, that was that was absolutely an outstanding investment from a societal standpoint.

• 39:58Speaker 1

  Right, right. Very long time. And investments, yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 0

  Yeah, that's right. And and yeah, they and again to to to to to be an effective pessimist, that was uh, you know, look a lot of that research may not have been research that would get done by by private companies. You know, look, on the other hand, I think private companies carry their weight more than people think. Um, and and look, part of it is the the questioner alluded to Bell Labs, but look, the there is this, there is this thing that happens when these companies, you know, that when the best of the big companies get big and powerful, um, you know, they do more of this. They they they open these labs, right? Um, and so ATT did it. Um, you know, uh I, you know, IBM and Hewlett Packard and Google and Microsoft and many, many, many others across many industries have done this. And I think, you know, quite honestly, part of that is is is is PR for them. They like to show that off. Um, I think part of that is um uh, you know, look, they they start to think in terms of longer time horizons, and they do want ultimately, you know, new products at some point.

• 40:51Speaker 1

  Um

• 40:51Speaker 0

  part of that is it's a recruiting and retention exercise to get the best and brightest technical minds to stay there, is to tell them that they can do research and publish their research. And so, you know, there is that. Um, and look, you know, Ben, you mentioned like, look, the the breakthrough on AI just came out of Google, right? It came out of a private company.

• 41:05Speaker 1

  Yep.

• 41:06Speaker 0

  Um, you know, which is uh which is a uh a great example of that. So yeah, look, there's some tension there. You know, look at

• 41:11Speaker 1

  quite a few researchers out of academia to pull that off.

• 41:15Speaker 0

  They did. And in fact, that's been a long-running source of tension actually between the tech companies and the universities for the last 15 years or so, which is as these new tech companies have built these big research labs, they have pulled a lot of the good faculty out of the universities. Um and by the way, that process I think is accelerating in AI specifically because the the capital needs to to actually do modern AI are so big that actually universities can't afford to do it right now. Um so actually they're yeah, so you get this kind of issue of like are you are you sort of uh are you draining the the universities of the remaining competent professors um and le and leaving only only the other kind. Um so yeah, so look you and you could debate and we could have a long debate about the pros and cons of public versus private. Um there is a third model, and this is the one that people often talk about um, you know, as sort of an aspiration, which is this idea of these very large societal projects.

• 42:01Speaker 0

  And in in in the US, you know, we talk in particular about the Apollo project and the Manhattan Project, right? And we say, like, you know, this is kind of a frequent lament from kind of declinists, right? Which is, you know, why can't we have more Apollo projects in Manhattan projects? Um, and but I think that's actually a third model, and the third model is is military, um, and and and and militaristic, right? Um, and uh both Apollo and Manhattan basically were, you know, like Manhattan was just a straight up military project, right? To build a bomb run by the military. Um Apollo was, you know, what had to was a sort of a civilian thing, NASA, but it was in the context of a of a military arms race with the Soviet Union um and a technological arms race with the Soviet Union in a in a in a much more militarized society than we have today. Yeah. Um and so and of course, when the military gets involved, two things happen. One is they can do things at speed when they really want to, because they just tell people what to do.

• 42:47Speaker 0

  Um, and then also, you know, they they get access to a lot of money, you know, when when when things get when things get rough. Yeah. Um and and so I I personally I go back and forth a little bit on this is like, do we want more Manhattans and Apollo's? On the one hand, it's hard to say no. On the other hand, do I want a society that is that much more militarized?

• 43:03Speaker 1

  You

• 43:03Speaker 0

  know, if that's what's required. I don't know.

• 43:06Speaker 1

  Yeah, that could be what

• 43:08Speaker 0

  what would what would that mean for what is happening in the world if we get back to the point where we're as military militarized as we were in 1941, right? Or even or even 1960.

• 43:16Speaker 1

  Yeah. No, it's uh actually one of the great things about the modern world is we have so many fewer wars, and at such smaller scale. Um, and every war is still horrible. Right. Okay. Yeah.

• 43:29Speaker 0

  Look, and hopefully, hopefully that continues, right?

• 43:31Speaker 1

  Yeah. Okay, here's here's a uh uh a good simple question from Tux. How do you bridge the gap between being anti-statist and supporting America first policies?

• 43:44Speaker 0

  Or maybe American dynamism as we do.

• 43:46Speaker 1

  Yeah. So I look, I think that um all these things are, you know, end up being a question of power and how it works. So in an extreme, the the the extreme form of uh form of statism is communism, where a hundred percent of the power is in the public sector, um, and no power is in the private sector. And you know, that has the issues that we spoke of. I think that um, you know, no public sector uh can quickly go to anarchy. And you know, that's not at least not something that I would advocate for. So I think look, as a society, you know, we kind of have this collective, you know, there's a certain amount of collectivism in shared values, shared morals, um, you know, what's okay, what's not okay in America, we have things like,

• 44:42Speaker 0

  you know, freedom of speech, freedom to be

• 44:44Speaker 1

  who you

• 44:45Speaker 0

  are,

• 44:45Speaker 1

  um, you know, uh kind of and and we're very anchored on the the these kind of free society ideals. And you need you need a state to do that. Um I, you know, at least I believe I think that there are probably some people that don't believe that, but you need a state for that. And preserving that, th those those values um and that way of life is extremely important. And that is uh, you know, largely the role of, you know, that that's primarily the role of the government with all of us citizens participating. And you know, we try to participate in that through, you know, our American dynamism efforts, and that's important. So um when uh you know, when I say I'm anti-status, uh I'm really saying I'm anti-communist and anti too much weight on the public sector at the expense of free markets and basically free dumb uh for the citizens.

• 45:45Speaker 0

  Yeah, Ben, I think you you might you may I I think I think you might or you you probably mean the broaden out, um, you know, anti-communist also um, or by extension, anti-authoritarian.

• 45:54Speaker 1

  Yeah, for sure, anti. And I think those go together because it's hard to be an authoritarian unless you have an amazing amount of the power, right? Like it even if you wanted to be authoritative or authoritarian in the US, and we we certainly look at authoritarian tendencies from time to time from various politicians and leaders. Um, but it's really hard to do because you don't have enough power to pull it off. Uh and that's the greatest thing about our system, I think, is you can't gather enough power uh to become completely authoritarian in the US. And that's you know, maybe the most fundamental thing we want to preserve. Zach T, can you further define the law of accelerating returns and how it may play out in the future?

• 46:41Speaker 0

  Yeah, so I think it's um so I think it's uh I never know whether to use this as a it's such a great metaphor. Uh I'll go ahead and use it. So it's a Paul Romer uses this metaphor. He says ideas have sex. Um let's say ideas reproduce. They they they they uh they uh they they uh they they go through the same uh uh reproduction evolutionary process as living organisms.

• 47:01Speaker 1

  It's different than having sex, by the way. Yeah, you're right. Okay, that's right. Now that we have birth control and all these things.

• 47:07Speaker 0

  Long, long, longer, long, longer, longer, longer form of is probably better. Um so um, yeah, so basically what happens basically basically the argument is basically I ideas beget ideas. Um uh in quite the same way that people beget people. Um so basically it's like the more ideas that you have, um, the the more combinations of ideas you can have. Uh and those combinations of ideas are themselves ideas, um, right. And then based on that, you know, then they they can further, you know, kind of replicate, you know, they can kind of crossbreed uh and have uh and have offsprings. And and so, and and and you you see this any time, of course you're building any kind of technological product is you know, you're pulling in ideas from like all over the place, you know, you're getting inspired by you know all the different technologies that are below you in the stack, you're getting inspired by all the other applications anybody

• 47:52Speaker 1

  has ever tried to build. Um, you know, you're getting inspired by all kinds of things. You

• 47:55Speaker 0

  know, look, a look, AI is inspired by, you know, the neural structure of the brain,

• 47:59Speaker 1

  right? Like, you know,

• 47:59Speaker 0

  quite literally, right, driving, you know, from from biology cross cross sort of cross-bred over into computer science and mathematics. Um and so basically uh basically they're the you know, at its bet, if this process is working the way that it should, you should see and you should see sort of this accelerating explosion of variety and sort of speciation and reproduction and and and scaling of the number of ideas in the world, um, you know, that the sort of sort of catalytic feeds on itself, like a chain like a chain reaction. Um by the way, this was also the argument to connect this back to the idea of human population. So this this was the uh argument for this guy Julian Simon, who I admire a lot.

• 48:31Speaker 1

  Uh yeah,

• 48:31Speaker 0

  um who uh wrote this book called The Ultimate Resource. And you know, he he was all he he and he he did a lot of his, a lot of his work was in the 60s and 70s when there were all these pitch battles, of course, around natural resources environmentalism. Um and he was kind of the avowed enemy of this guy, Paul Ehrlich, who was the guy who was the guy who predicted, you know, mass famine and death, um, you know, from kind of increases in in technology. Um and so Julian Simon said, no, actually what you want is you actually want a lot more people in the world, right? Human humans, people are the ultimate resource, right? Not any kind of raw material, but literally people. And he said, why do you want more people in the world? Because if you have more people, you'll get more ideas.

• 49:04Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 0

  Right. Um, and so more people means you'll have more ideas, more ideas in combination with ideas leads to more ideas. Those ideas lead to ways to make things better in the world. Uh among the things that those ideas make possible are ways to support more people on the planet, right? Um, and and so he said like that quite literally, the answer to natural resource consumption, right, for example, or natural, you know, natural resource whatever limitations uh or environmental considerations or whatever, the answer is not the Paul Ehrlich approach of depopulate, right? Reduce the human population, therefore reduce the number of ideas, uh, you know, both the number of people and the number of ideas. The answer is to actually put the pedal forward, more people, more ideas, more solutions. Um, and you know, yes, clearly that's uh that uh I agree with uh him uh in that argument.

• 49:46Speaker 1

  Yeah, no amazing. But by the way, Julian Simon is probably uh one of the most underrated economists and philosophers of the last hundred years. So if you're not familiar with them, he's uh That's a great one to read. Um

• 50:02Speaker 0

  But a great thing, uh, just on that real quick, a great point that he made that really blows people's minds when they read it for the first time is he made the argument that you never run you never run out of any natural resource. Yeah. Um

• 50:13Speaker 1

  right, like uh

• 50:14Speaker 0

  he did. He did. So he had a famous, he had a 10-year bet with Paul Ehrlich, the population bomb guy. Um, and it was a bet on the price of a basket of commodities a basket of natural resource commodities 10 years in the future. Uh Ehrlich was, of course, 100% convinced that we were running.

• 50:26Speaker 1

  Of course, peak oil, you know, da-da-da-da. Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 0

  The whole peak oil thing, exactly, is that same thing. And so he and he let Ehrlich actually define, I believe, the the basket of the of the commodities. So he kind of loaded it in his direction. And the bet was will the price of this basket be greater or less than it is today in 10 years. And you know, everybody who's kind of in the sort of conventional thinking on this, you know, was like, well, obviously the prices of all this stuff are going to go up for, you know, are going to go up because there's more people, there's more consumption.

• 50:49Speaker 1

  And that's the way everybody wrote in the the press for many, many years. Like, like nobody was saying what Julian Simon was saying.

• 50:56Speaker 0

  Right. And then the the kicker is Julian Simon won the bet. Uh the price of that basket was lower in 10 years. And and and and his point, the point was we never run out of natural resources. His point was with markets. Um, the way that we know that a natural resource is becoming scarce is it price is this price starts to rise. As its price starts to rise, self-interest says we should figure out ways to not need as much of that natural resource. Right. Right. And so, right. And so as the price of oil rises, then all of a sudden we have an economic incentive to develop alternative alternative energy, ranging by the way, from solar to wind through to things like nuclear, and then you know, maybe in the in the future even nuclear fusion. Um it's actually it's it's markets working at their best. It's uh as the price of something rises, the your incentive, your your self-interested incentive to come up with the alternative uh uh rises. Um and and and alternatives that were not previously price effective uh actually become price effective, right?

• 51:45Speaker 0

  Um so this was you know, the this is the rise of fracking, right? Fra fracking worked because oil and gas started to get expensive enough where all of a sudden the additional cost of fracking was actually worthwhile. Right. Um and so and then fracking brought the price wrap back down. Um and and and fracking was a classic example of it of an idea. It was a technological innovation born by human creativity. Um basically what Julian Simon says is that that is how the system, that's the homeostasis kind of in the system. Um, and this is not a dystopian scenario in which we are doomed to run out of everything and everybody's going to freeze and die. In fact, it you know, it's not necessarily utopian, like it's still like natural resources still cost money. Um, but it's a fundamentally positive view, which is it is human ingenuity that is going to cause us to not have the problems that the Dubsayers say we're gonna have, which which, and again, you know, 300 years of this and you know, so far so good.

• 52:32Speaker 1

  Yeah, it's a it's a it's an abundance view of the world as opposed to scarcity view of the world. Turns out the abundance view that's right, which is good news for all of us. Yep. Um Matthew has a question which uh I think you have an unusual answer to, which is is the dream of fusion stopping us from enjoying the insane gains we can get from fishing.

• 52:52Speaker 0

  Yeah. Yes, uh, yes. Uh um, so well, primarily so primarily what's preventing us from enjoying the insane gains from fishing. And by the way, they are insane. Like the the level of energy that we could be producing from uh modern nuclear fission reactors and the the the and the the safety of it is like just absolutely

• 53:10Speaker 1

  doing

• 53:10Speaker 0

  it right now. Yeah, yeah. France is doing it for the way, Frank, France just got, I mean, the European politics are so entertaining on this because France is so pro-nuclear and the rest of Europe is so anti-nuclear. France just had to get a waiver from Germany um to continue to run their nuclear reactors, um, which they which they finally just got. But they know that they're in it.

• 53:30Speaker 1

  Is their fish and reactor.

• 53:32Speaker 0

  Yeah, and the the German Greens, you know, have been determined for 50 years to turn those reactors off. So um, so um uh yeah, so look, like I the the big reason why we don't have widespread nuclear fission power today is because of the precautionary principle, because of the basically the fear of uh of disaster, um, and you know, which basically makes people emotional, and then and then it turns out here the emotional decision is uh is a very is a very very damaging bad

• 53:54Speaker 1

  decision

• 53:55Speaker 0

  because the alternatives turn out to be things like gas and coal. Um and so um yeah, I mean that's that's overwhelmingly it. Um now having said that back back to the question is yeah, so the the new thing that you can say if you're trying to fight nuclear fission is oh, we don't need it because we have fusion right around the corner. Um and by the way, look, I I was start by saying I hope that's right. I hope fusion really is right around the corner. Um, you know, it's been right around the corner for a while. Um I hope it's right around the corner. That would be great. Yeah, it turned out to be

• 54:20Speaker 1

  harder than fission by quite a bit. It's

• 54:22Speaker 0

  it's quite difficult. And then look, I think what's gonna happen is I look, I think we'll get fusion to work at some point. There's very smart people working on it. Um I think they'll get it there. Um I think the same forces and ideas in people that have prevented the deployment of nuclear fission will immediately prevent the deployment of fusion. Um and so I I think this idea that all of a sudden

• 54:43Speaker 1

  the the same kind of bad narrative uh corrupt pessimism.

• 54:50Speaker 0

  It'll be the same arguments. It's this incredibly dangerous thing, and who knows if it goes wrong, and like what if it this and that and the other, and like, you know, you know, we can't take these risks and can they prove it's gonna be you know safe forever, infinitely, and it's gonna be the same, it's gonna be the same arguments. Um and they're gonna, you know, these these nuclear fusion companies are gonna start out being very optimistic and they're gonna hit this wall of sort of regulatory and emotional and political, you know, and ideological resistance. And you know, I could I hope they punch through it, but you know, look, I was I always say this, like Richard, Rich Richard Nixon did two things in the early in the early 70s uh around around this. One is he declared something called project independence, where he said we were we the US would build a thousand new nuclear fission power plants by 1980, become completely energy sufficient, be able to withdraw completely from the Middle East, be able to, you know, be zero emission.

• 55:35Speaker 0

  Um and then he created the new nuclear regulatory commission, which then prevented that from happening. Nope.

• 55:40Speaker 1

  Yeah. They they they how many new uh nuclear reactors have they approved?

• 55:46Speaker 0

  Zero new plants in 40 years. Um so

• 55:52Speaker 1

  not good.

• 55:53Speaker 0

  Well, and again, and and again, here you uh you you go back to what uh you know, the sort of incentives. Um imagine, okay, now you know, again, get the devil his due. Like imagine that you're the new newly appointed, you know, regulator, you're the newly appointed chairman, you know, Ben Horowitz, you're the newly appointed chairman of the nuclear regulatory commission in 1973, right? Like what are your incentives, right? Like, how much glory are you gonna get, right? If that somebody if we build some new reactors versus how horrible is your life gonna be if there's another nuclear accident.

• 56:23Speaker 1

  Yeah, right, right, right. Another kind of incentive agency problem, yeah.

• 56:27Speaker 0

  Right. And then by the way, you've got the existing energy companies in there doing their thing, right? Saying, oh no, you know, don't worry about it, oil and gas, and by the way, we're gonna do, you know, da-da-da. Yeah, we're gonna clean up clean, we're

• 56:36Speaker 1

  we're gonna have clean oil.

• 56:39Speaker 0

  Clean oil, we're gonna clean, you know, the V, you know, the Volkswagen, we're gonna we're gonna have clean diesel, right? Like, you know, we're we're just let us, you know, continue working on the clean coal and the clean diesel. And then by, and then, you know, again, by the way, fusion's right around the corner, and that'll be better. And then, you know, you're like, wow, like, you know, these companies, like they're so big and powerful and successful, and by the way, they seem like they're kind of hinting they're gonna give you a job what I've done here. Yep.

• 56:58Speaker 1

  And you're, you know, you're back, you're back to square one. This is a fun one. Luke Croft, you say that humans want to be productive, yet so many hate their jobs and work only because they have to. When it comes to abundance due to tech innovation, should we allow people the option of not working? So

• 57:17Speaker 0

  there's these two V, and look, like again, no utopianism here, right? Like, you know, look, not all jobs are fun. Like, and uh look, a lot of people work jobs that you know they really don't like when they're doing it because they have to, and you know, they're doing it because they're trying to support a family or support themselves. And so, you know, I I mean certainly that's you know, no nobody nobody promised everybody a job everybody loves. Um so look, I you know, again, that you know, there's sort of a point to that. Um I guess what I what I would say, my analysis is there, there's if you close your eyes and imagine somebody who doesn't have to work, right? Um, and you know, look, and I'm not talking about like you know, stay at home others, you know, I'm talking about like somebody who like you know in our system today would be working to be able to make money support themselves, and then there's a future ordering of society in which they can elect not to work and they will have the you know same or similar level of material material comfort that they have today, and they can just kick it.

• 58:07Speaker 0

  Um you kind of close your eyes on that and imagine that person, and there's kind of two, you know, possible versions of that person you can imagine. One is the person who is now, you know, by the way, as Mark said, you know, liberated um to you know, what was Mark Marx's whole thing? We're all gonna be fishermen in the morning, you know, literary critics in the afternoon, poets, you know, over dinner and you know, musicians at night, right? Like

• 58:27Speaker 1

  we're we're

• 58:28Speaker 0

  gonna we're gonna be able to

• 58:28Speaker 1

  like

• 58:29Speaker 0

  you know self-actualize into

• 58:30Speaker 1

  you

• 58:31Speaker 0

  know all of these things that don't involve money and we're gonna be, you know, we're gonna all be creating this and that, and we're gonna be you know doing all these amazing things um because we have all this time free. Um and and look that there are some people for whom that's the case, right? Like that that you know, there's there's certain people for whom I'm sure that would be the case. That look, there's the other scenario, and I would just call that one the Cheetos and Meth scenario, right? Yeah, which is like Yep. And PlayStation and PlayStation, right? And like and I like Netflix, I'm a fan of Netflix, but like maybe not 12 hours a day.

• 59:00Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 0

  Um, right. And like sit on the couch and get baked, um, and get, you know, and just like there goes all your motivation, right? Straight out the window. Um, and and this is where I I I, you know, I I I brought I use in the in the term the and then the in the essay, the fairly provocative term, like farm animal. Like that's a farm animal existence.

• 59:17Speaker 1

  Yeah,

• 59:17Speaker 0

  right. That's a that's the existence of a cow. Yeah, right. And like cows are great, cows are great. Yeah, um, but like I don't think we should be cows. Like, I don't think we should be farm animals. I I don't think that is an advance. Uh you're you know, you're back to the the wall-li scenario we were talking about at that point. And I just I I think we just need to be real realistic about that. Uh and again, this is one of these this is this is very much one of these luxury belief things, yeah um, where kind of the class of people who imagine themselves as being the you know, poets in the morning, fishermen in the afternoon, musicians at night, you know, think that that's a general and maybe that's true for them, by the way. Maybe if you know you went to one of these I you know Ivy League universities and you hate your job as a barista and you know, you'd be much happier and you'd you'd be writing poetry if if you didn't have to do your day job. Um You know, maybe that's true for them, right?

• 1:00:04Speaker 0

  But like the consequences of that misjudgment, if that's wrong on, you know, the other 8 billion people, I think are very profound and possibly extremely negative.

• 1:00:12Speaker 1

  Yeah. And then actually we, you know, we've run this experiment in the US to some extent. And I, you know, I've been studying this more lately, but you know, perhaps, you know, there were a lot of uh kind of bad things that happen with the uh kind of pilgrims and the Native Americans, but I think the worst thing may have been the reservation system, at least the longest lasting. And the reservation system is essentially UBI. It's $65,000 a year, I believe, per resident. And, you know, anybody who spent time on a reservation knows like that that that just hasn't worked out well. Like removing purpose from people's lives, uh, you know, generally, you know, there are people who can deal with it, but but that's I think certainly the minority. Um, and it's you know, I I mean, at least in my view, that's not been great for the Native Americans and uh and to kind of scale that to society as many are proposing these days, um, it's probably not the best thing.

• 1:01:09Speaker 1

  The other thing I'll add is jobs have actually gotten much better over time. So not all jobs are great, but like like they, you know, for for many, many uh hundreds and you know, thousands of years, every job is farming. And look, not every human is suited to be a farmer. Uh I know you weren't, Mark, because there's a lot of farming in your hometown. Um, and then you know, the the thing that came after that first was these assembly line jobs, which you know, it's always kind of amusing to see politicians say, oh, we need more good jobs like these manufacturing jobs, like doing this all day like a robot is not like the greatest job in the world. You know, it may pay well, but it's not the most fulfilling. And, you know, so many of the people on those lines are on drugs.

• 1:01:55Speaker 1

  And uh, in fact, Henry Ford, you know, famously doubled the minimum wage, but the reason he doubled the minimum wage was he had so much attrition because people hated those manufacturing jobs so much. And so I think that you know, the jobs that we're producing now have been increasingly interesting. And you know, they're not all great. Um, they're not all great for everybody, but one thing is for sure is we have a much broader variety of things that people

• 1:02:22Speaker 0

  can

• 1:02:22Speaker 1

  do. So you have many, many choices. Uh, and hopefully, hopefully people can find the job that's right for them. How oh, this is interesting. Coinfluence X. So that's a pretty neat name. How do you perceive the contrast between rigorous technological and mathematical education seen in countries like China, which emphasizes relentless advancement with evolving educational paradigms in the West, which prioritizes intersectional percept perspectives and social values.

• 1:02:56Speaker 0

  Yeah, Ben, why don't you uh start that I agree? That's a that's an interesting one.

• 1:03:01Speaker 1

  Yeah, I I mean, I think that um it's tricky, you know, like and then you know, it's been a long time since I've been in school and and and my children are all adults, uh, so I'm a little far away from you know the actual thing that's happening in schools now. Um having said that, boy, I think that um there's kind of education that you can use uh that's you know, where you can go make something or build something or figure out how large systems work, or um, you know, perform like a in-demand function in society. And then there are you know, a whole class of other things, like you can teach people about anything.

• 1:03:52Speaker 1

  Uh, you know, now they even have you know lots of like rap education in college and this and that and the other. Um and you know, it's interesting because the great musicians I know, and I know many of them never took any kind of class like that.

• 1:04:12Speaker 0

  Um

• 1:04:13Speaker 1

  didn't take any class in music, by the way. Uh you know, it's funny, like uh my friend Kanye uh taught himself music, you know, he was an arts student and he taught himself music. Uh and I think that you know, for creative, you know, the great creatives,

• 1:04:30Speaker 0

  you know,

• 1:04:31Speaker 1

  uh I I don't know if studying, you know, to become a uh virtuoso in those things is is necessarily the even the best path. And then you have these other things, which are these social theories, um, unproven social theories that you know a lot of people are teaching these days, which I think those are fine hobbies. Um, and you know, you and I pursue them as hobbies, uh studying these social theories and and you know how to, you know, maybe you know, new ideas on how to organize society or whatever, or how that all works. I I don't think you know it it makes sense to charge people $300,000 or whatever college costs these days to teach them a hobby. That like that seems really absurd to me.

• 1:05:19Speaker 1

  Um, but uh, you know, like I I know people have different views on this, but I think that uh, you know, the the purpose of you know, the education that we funnel young people into ought to be uh to enable them to make significant contributions back to society. And that probably I don't know if it's as narrow as the Chinese education, but um it's probably not as broad as some of the things that we're doing.

• 1:05:48Speaker 0

  Yeah, and then I might just pop the question up one one level, which is you know, look, education itself is an industry. It's a you know, it's a field and an industry, a business. Um, you know, look, both the nature of the American education system and for that matter, a system like in China's, um, you know, they're they're primarily centralized and government control. Um, right. And so, you know, the American system is is, you know, K through 12 is primarily a government monopoly with, you know, occasional uh offshoots. Um

• 1:06:15Speaker 1

  and the offshoots are very restricted.

• 1:06:18Speaker 0

  Yeah, they're very very and very small uh in number. Um and then, you know, look, the college system in the US is a cartel. Um, and you know, it's quite literally a self-regulated cartel um uh by virtue of the fact that it it requires it's on the sort of federal student loan drug um to work financially and and um and then the accreditation agencies that determine which colleges get federal student lending are run by the colleges themselves. And so it's a it's a self-reinforcing cartel, which is why you don't see a lot of new universities uh ever. Um, you know, it's why the the major universities in the US are older than the country, right? Um and so um and so you know, like in the same thing, you know, obviously in China the system's you know, government government controlled, inherently, you know, completely government controlled. And so that's you know, it's just commonly true around the world. And so, you know, we've sort of backed into, you know, we have this idea of education as like an abstract kind of kind of good, and then we have the specific implementation of these highly central, you know, highly centralized authoritarian, non-market-based approaches to it.

• 1:07:11Speaker 0

  And then, you know, you can argue the pros and cons and the results, and the I thought the question set up this you know, very interesting aspect of it, which is like, okay, you know, when does it become kind of too much rote memorization versus when does it become kind of too much, you know, kind of, let's say, um, you know, kind of kind of wild while theorizing um, you know, with maybe a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. Um, but you know, look, the the education as a system can't really respond and adapt to changing needs of people because it's primarily not market-based. Um, and so we kind of just get the system we get, we send our kids to it. We don't think we really have a choice for the most part. Um, and um, and you know, I would just say like the the big thing is it's just in in all these societies, it's just stuck. Um, and and look, and then there are all these signs that it's becoming dysfunctional, um, you know, across across across many societies. We could we could spend hours on that.

• 1:07:57Speaker 0

  Um, and so I I would just at least, you know, want to want to kind of put a placeholder and say, I think we should also squint and kind of wonder like, is there a different kind of system that could get built that would be much more market-driven uh and much more technologically sophisticated that would be much more better suited to modern needs and would be much more subject to you know actual competitive pressure and the need and the need to be good. Um and you know, we you know, look there, there are some very good educational startups working on this, and there are some very good charter schools, and there are some very good new startup universities. And so there are you know, there are some people taking swings at this, but um, you know, at a macro level, like we're not there yet. And I think maybe we should think over time about trying to get there.

• 1:08:37Speaker 1

  Yeah, and there's a that that that's interesting because we do we're in the middle of this very interesting crisis, um, the student loan crisis, where uh, you know, and President Biden has kind of proposed, and uh I I don't know how much of it has actually gone through all the legal objections and so forth to kind of forgive some portion of the student loans. But the interesting thing about that is that that's kind of the ultimate treating the symptom and not the cause, because why can't any of these students pay back their loans? And the obvious answer is college isn't worth the money you pay for it, and then it doesn't translate into a job that enables you to pay back what you borrowed to do it.

• 1:09:23Speaker 1

  Um, you know, if you think about you know, that's a much bigger problem for young people and an ongoing problem that you know, like you you either kind of subsidize college in its entirety um, or you know, you have to fix that problem. And I think that uh, you know, given what colleges are willing to do with their tuition, like grow at double the rate of inflation, um, and hire more administrators than they have students and all these kinds of things if they have free money, uh, you know, another incentive problem that you know that it's a pretty dangerous idea to make college. It's free in that way. So you we do need a better mechanism for sure.

• 1:10:06Speaker 0

  Maybe

• 1:10:06Speaker 1

  now's the time. Hopefully. Okay. Sam Arnold, to what extent do you believe we really control what technology does after its release? Can we exert any meaningful control after invention?

• 1:10:24Speaker 0

  Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. So one is obviously we do we do control. I mean, there are there are pretty strict controls in a lot of areas, right? Um, as as we just discussed in the nuclear case. So, you know, one is it's it's not quite that there aren't any. Um, I think the maybe the underlying question here would be can we predict what the consequences are going to be? Um, and uh, you know, and by the way, this is a very hot topic right now because you have this thing where there are, you know, a bunch of AI, you know, kind of practitioners who are making these very, in my view, very extreme statements about what AI is going to do. That's gonna be horrible. Um, and there's this, you know, very strong temptation on the part of people to to make what seems like a very logical, you know, kind of assumption, which is that the people who invented the technology are in a you know are in the best position to be able to predict what happens um with it afterwards, and then are are you know presumably also going to be in the best position to propose the whatever regulations or controls are required to prevent those those things from happening.

• 1:11:13Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 0

  Um I have not in my life, and I have not in my reading of history seen a lot of examples where the inventors of technology are very good at this.

• 1:11:22Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 0

  Um, the example I like to cite is uh Thomas Edison uh invented the phonograph, and he was completely convinced that the use case for the phonograph uh was going to be to listen to religious sermons. He was a very pious man, um uh and he took religion very seriously. Um and he just assumed that if you owned a phonograph, the point of it would be you'd get home at the end of a long day at the office or in the factory, and you'd kick off your, you know, you kick off your shoes, put in your slippers, and you'd have your dog by your side and your kids gathered around and you would put on religious sermons. Um

• 1:11:53Speaker 1

  to church and bother with all those people, which were Thomas Edison was a big thing.

• 1:11:57Speaker 0

  Exactly. And by the way, and by the way, it's right, and right, and then and then you could do this every night, right? You didn't have to wait till Sunday, right? This is great. You can do this all week, right? And and you know, I don't know, like look, a few people do that. Um, most people don't. Most people listen to music. Um and and you know, Ben, you'll recall, you know, uh the you know, the what was the the first form of music that went, you know, kind of was kind of the big hit, hit hit uh genre of music on phonographs was jazz.

• 1:12:20Speaker 1

  Oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:12:22Speaker 0

  And you'll re and you'll recall what people said about jazz at the time. Well, they said

• 1:12:26Speaker 1

  many things, but it it wasn't real music.

• 1:12:28Speaker 0

  Yeah,

• 1:12:28Speaker 1

  yeah.

• 1:12:29Speaker 0

  It was the day it was the devil's music, it was very bad. It was, you know, channeling of all kinds of unholy impulses. It was going to cause young people to fornicate. Like they they just had like all basically all the same things that people say about rabbit. I was thinking

• 1:12:40Speaker 1

  of something that uh it wasn't Quincy Jones, it was um I I can't say it because it but the the there was some racism involved too. I'll just say.

• 1:12:49Speaker 0

  Oh, of course, of course. It was absolutely it was it was gonna be, yeah, all of a sudden you use a channel for these black musicians to show up in the in the homes of white people, like no, no, no question. All right, and so anyway, like it it turned out that people had like all kinds of issues with the technology. It just turns out they weren't remotely the issues that Thomas Edison predicted that they would have, right? And and and if you look at this historically, you're kind of like, well, of course he didn't know because like he's just uh like yeah, he advent he's a he's uh he's a techie, he just invented the technology. Like he's not, you know, he doesn't have like a crystal ball, he doesn't have some special foresight. And in fact, he's a particular kind of person. He's the kind of person who spends all this time in a lab. Yeah, right. Right. He's he's unusual. He's unusual, right? And he let's maybe speculate, you know, he might be psychologically a little bit different than most people, right? And he and he and he, you know, has a different gets draw satisfaction from different things, and he doesn't spend a lot of time, right, with like regular people.

• 1:13:37Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Speaker 0

  Um, and you know, he's certainly not an expert on like politics and society and you know, psychology and sociology and all these all these all these other all these other things. And so I I I so anyway, I think where I would start back to the original question is just like, wow, like I actually don't think it's that easy to forecast these things. And then specifically, I don't think it's it's I don't think specifically it's any easier for the people who invent the technology to forecast these things. And I think they carry uh a lot of unjustified credibility. This also, you know, came up in the Oppenheimer movie, you know, the same thing. It's like these physicists, you know, all of a sudden, right, are convinced that they're the ones who are going to be working on like the game theory and the philosophy and the morality of the deployment of nuclear boxes. Yeah, well, they were. Well, they tried, they tried, but you know, it's that was the nature of

• 1:14:17Speaker 1

  that, yeah.

• 1:14:18Speaker 0

  Yeah, it was, but I mean, it was this was the scene with uh, you know, Truman, which is something that actually happened, right? Which is like Oppenheimer shows up to you know, kind of wring his hands about the morality of the atomic bomb, and Truman is just like, get it get this guy out of here. Like that's you know, I'm the elected president of the United States, like you know, let's listen to me.

• 1:14:33Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Speaker 0

  Um right. And by the way, he, you know, Truman, and again, I'm not that Truman made all the right decisions or whatever, but Truman was the duly elected president of the United States. Like he is the guy who should have been making that decision, not the guy who invented the thing.

• 1:14:43Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Speaker 0

  Um, and so I I just think like I I guess my big appeal here is just like humility. Like, I think we as technologists need to be very careful. Um, we're not, but we should be very careful about kind of crossing the line and deciding that we're going to do societal engineering kind of in our spare time. Um, and then you know, people who hear technologists kind of doing these things should be very skeptical that the technol that the technologists deserve any kind of unwarranted uh credibility on this.

• 1:15:07Speaker 1

  Right.

• 1:15:08Speaker 0

  Um and then look, there are going to be these big questions. Uh what history basically says is we figure them out as we go.

• 1:15:14Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:15:14Speaker 0

  Um and I I think the alternative to that is to just not do new things. Um, and so I you know, I know where I come out on that.

• 1:15:20Speaker 1

  Yeah, yeah. I'll give a plug for uh great book that you recommended, When Reason Goes on Holiday, which is sort of the story of how the great physicists and uh inventors um did on politics and policy and game theory.

• 1:15:36Speaker 0

  You take super high IQ people and you put them in a research or university setting. Um they go crazy. Like on like they very frequently go very nutty on anything involving politics and society. Yeah. Um and you know, this was the American physics community in the 1920s and 1930s that basically like most of them went like hardcore communists, like Einstein Einstein was a Stalinist.

• 1:15:59Speaker 1

  Yeah. Like

• 1:16:00Speaker 0

  we don't, you know, we don't talk about these things anymore, but he was right. Um, you know, these people end up like very radicalized. And and you know, look this happens with other groups of people, right? You know, maybe maybe this, you know, at certain points has happened in in other areas of of uh of our life, but um in our public life, but you know, it definitely it the intellectuals go straight for it. Um Thomas Solis talked about this a lot. He's like, look, he's you know, basically the problem with people who are hyperverbal and like work in ideas is they can get kind of arbitrarily unhinged.

• 1:16:25Speaker 1

  Yeah,

• 1:16:26Speaker 0

  um, and they can, you know, kind of talk themselves into crazier and crazier things. Um and they're there, you know, and their level of disconnection from the from from the real world means that they, you know, they they no longer have any governors and how crazy their beliefs can get. And so I think we need to be like I think that's what's happening in AI right now, and I think we need to be very cautious uh about who we listen to.

• 1:16:41Speaker 1

  Yeah, yeah. Trust in their own judgment is profound. Um last question. Um this is actually one that uh I would have asked. It's from Byrd, and it is before publishing, what did you consider the most controversial point? Now that it is live, what makes people shimp the most?

• 1:17:03Speaker 0

  So what did I think was the most I don't know, Ben, you read draft, let me ask you that. You read the drafts, uh, you were the drafts. What did you what what were you predicting was gonna be the most controversial thing?

• 1:17:12Speaker 1

  Well, I I I thought for sure when you wrote it, you know, everything on the economic front about free markets and um you know what to love is unscalable and those kinds of things. I thought those would uh be the most controversial for sure.

• 1:17:31Speaker 0

  Those are kind of time-honored crown pleaser crowd pleasers when it comes to getting people mad. Yeah,

• 1:17:35Speaker 1

  yeah. Like it's just like the nature of humans that they disagree on that.

• 1:17:40Speaker 0

  Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know. Um, yeah, I would say I don't know, like and Ben, you tell me if you think I'm I'm missing this. I I think most of the attacks, I think like a lot of artists, I aspire to have a better class of critic. Um so like a lot of the attack, you know, this is one of these things in kind of the the modern climate, like a lot of the attacks have been on me.

• 1:18:06Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 0

  Um more than on the ideas.

• 1:18:10Speaker 1

  Right, right, right.

• 1:18:10Speaker 0

  Um if I were, you know, including the one you started out with um earlier. Um, like the smug interpretation of that, you know, on my part would be, you know, wow, the ideas must all be great if they're reduced to just attacking me.

• 1:18:24Speaker 1

  Yeah. Um ad hominem attack.

• 1:18:27Speaker 0

  Yeah, like if that's all they've got, like I'm I must have otherwise made in you know outstandingly excellent points, um, and they must not have counter-arguments. Um I would love to see, I'll just tell you, I would love to see substantive, I would love to see more. There have been a few, but I would love to see more substantive responses that that have that are legitimately like carefully thought through. I

• 1:18:47Speaker 1

  agree with that. I mean, I think a lot you've gotten a lot of emotional reaction. I mean, I think some of the more thoughtful ones are just probably on um a misinterpretation of what you said, which is uh, you know, some people interpret it as technology gone wild, you know, like the girls gone wild video of the uh whatever era that was. Um it's like technology gone wild, just like let it roam free. And which wasn't what you're saying. It's just uh more like, are we going to keep doing new things or not? Or are we gonna kind of nip them in the bud the way we did nuclear fission? Um, but like you you always, you know, like you build something, you've got bugs, you've got issues, you have you know, the internet's had crime on it since like uh, you know, the very, very early days, and we keep working on that, but the benefits of the internet outweigh

• 1:19:36Speaker 0

  the the

• 1:19:37Speaker 1

  negatives and these kinds of things. And I think people um, you know, wanted you to uh be more on one hand on and on the other hand, but it's a manifesto, so you don't do that in a manifesto. Exactly.

• 1:19:53Speaker 0

  I I thought there was uh one piece of feedback uh on Twitter. I thought somebody made a really smart point. Um one really smart point I saw was um Yeah, it was back to that love force money thing. Um somebody said, boy, like isn't it the case that actually a lot of innovators actually like a lot of creators of of new things actually are doing it out of a sense of love?

• 1:20:10Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Speaker 0

  Right. Like a lot of, and I think it's a good point. It's like a lot, and by the way, broaden this out be beyond technology, but like a lot of you know, artists, a lot of musicians, um, a lot of um, you know, uh, a lot of you know, writers, um, you know, this is uh the concept of the labor of love, right? Um, is like they really feel like they're contributing something. Um, and you know, like love of society, love of their fellow man is is in fact a motivation, even if they would also like to get paid.

• 1:20:33Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Speaker 0

  Um I thought that was a that I thought, you know, there's the accusation basically was I was pr presenting too kind of crimped a view of human nature when I when I narrowed down love that much. Yeah, I think that's

• 1:20:43Speaker 1

  right. Although to, you know, if you invent somebody and then you need to hire a bunch of people to work for you, that's where love runs out.

• 1:20:52Speaker 0

  Yes.

• 1:20:53Speaker 1

  They're not all gonna join on that. And you know, similarly with the musician, your your your publicist, your makeup artist, your this and that and the other. They they seem to need money.

• 1:21:03Speaker 0

  Yes. All right, great. Well,

• 1:21:05Speaker 1

  thank you all for joining us uh for this uh episode of the Mark and Ben show. We hope you enjoyed it, and we will see you next time.