Welcome back to the conclusion of our Daylight Doubleheader.
Today we are talking about The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth.
The price of tomorrow is high. How high?
The most likely scenario is that in a few years we simply won't recognize our economy.
The highly specific careers, gatekept by credentials and certificates and the source of pride and accomplishment,
they'll disappear in the blink of an eye.
And how could they not?
Who could possibly justify their higher cost, lower performance, and slower completion times
to the consumer, who is at least inconvenienced and at worst irreparably harmed by the human
element within the system? How much cheaper and faster does my package arrive when the AI driving
the truck doesn't need sleep, or to return home to a family, or to get paid beyond the cost of
electricity to run the computer? To the patient being shuffled between specialists who don't talk,
over the course of months only to finally discover
their unknown malady is an advanced cancer.
This person has lost sleep,
they've suffered stress and travel inconvenience
and being treated like a number
and they've racked up costs that they'll never be able to pay back.
How can we possibly justify not using a computer program
that gives more accurate results in minutes for pennies
and is able to catch the cancer pre-stage
instead of at stage 4?
At the same time technology has reached escape velocity, the currency is going the other way.
Government currencies are like high school quarterbacks.
They peak in their teens and then begin an accelerating descent into oblivion.
To believe any government currency in existence today will be around in 100 years
would be like watching the sun set every day for a decade
and suddenly proclaiming that this day, this one right now,
this is the one where the sun will never set again and will be an eternal sunlight
it would be to ignore the lesson taught over 3,800 times by every government currency that's ever
existed before for over a century humanity has been robbed of the benefits of technology due to
one fatal flaw an economic system which requires an ever-increasing amount of debt to continue the
promotion of a lie, that economic growth is good, desired, and natural. The natural state of
technology is deflationary. We do more with less, we do it better, and to the benefit of humanity as
a whole. Barely more than a hundred years ago, we fought war on horseback. Today, hives of AI drones
seek out specific DNA signatures and limit targets anywhere on earth. My grandmother grew up cooking
over corn cobs, and now we have nuclear power plants the size of a closet that can power entire
cities. So how is it that no one can afford a home? How is it that one health diagnosis can
derail a family's economic trajectory for generations? Why is everything but constant
distraction getting further out of reach? Jeff Booth has the bona fides of one who battled
through and succeeded in this world. And over half a decade later, his words may sound prophetic
and his knowledge like a savant. But by reading this book, as he shares his wisdom, we can clearly
understand where we are, how we got here, and where we're going. And on page 201 out of 208,
he gives us a little hope for the future and so we start in on the price of tomorrow
the price of tomorrow why deflation is the key to an abundant future so we're going to go we're
going to march through this book section by section um put together all the arguments pull them apart
and see we kind of have a whole theoretical framework a new way of looking at things and
And we're looking at things centered around the idea of deflation.
We usually hear talk about inflation.
What is deflation?
So the introduction gives us this framework, the basic structure.
Tech is deflationary.
We are in an age of tech.
Therefore, we are in an age of deflation.
And yet our economic system was built for a pre-tech era built on inflation.
These are the two dueling concepts, deflation due to tech and then inflation, which we're going to see is due to money printing.
So what are the consequences of this?
So to really explore that, we're going to get our terms straight.
What is deflation?
What is this tech-based deflation that we're experiencing?
That is when prices go down.
So deflating prices are prices going down, typically because new technology allows us
to make something for less cost.
All things being equal in the deflationary paradigm, then even if your salary deflates
from like 75K one year to 70K the next year,
you're still going to be able to get more things.
An example that Jeff Booth gives in the introduction
is imagine like the incredibly expensive suitcase cell phones
we used to have.
Deflationary tech means we now have a multi-utility
smartphone in our pocket that can do way more
than the old cell phone could.
And it doesn't cost thousands of dollars a month
for the phone calls.
So that's deflationary tech.
And yet we don't see costs really dropping a lot of the time, or at least not as much as they should.
So that's inflation.
We have deflationary tech leading cell phones to transfer suitcases to things you put in your pocket.
But meanwhile, we have inflation.
What is the inflation?
That is when costs keep rising because of government money creation.
Governments set inflation targets.
It's actually something they seek to do at about 2%.
So they're actively resisting deflation that naturally occurs due to increasingly good technology.
That technology or that deflation governments kind of presume has a negative effect on society.
So they counter it with this contrived inflation.
So the current paradigm, deflation through tech, inflation through money printing.
But this model is not sustainable.
And a lot of this book is about kind of talking about that dance between deflation and inflation and how that dance is not sustainable.
The general out the kind of general framework for why it's not sustainable is money printing leads to massive debt and debt plus inflation is toxic.
So debt plus deflate debt plus inflation is toxic.
It's toxic because debt means you're going to have to pay the interest to service the loan.
The inflation is going to increase the cost of that.
Deflation means you simultaneously have less of an income to service that debt.
And so this is a toxic kind of death spiral, inflation plus deflation.
And we are at a point where most deflation is still yet to come.
Various industries are kind of at the point of beginning, as we'll talk about throughout this, exponential returns in productivity and in diminishing costs.
technology, specifically AI, as we'll see as a focal point, have the ability, the potential to
replace large components, parts of our economy, if not the entirety of our current economy.
This isn't necessarily bad. And Lucas mentioned there's hope at the end.
Deflation can bring abundance. It will bring abundance. That's the subtitle,
why deflation is the key to an abundant future. If we can get out of the way and yet kind of
extricate ourselves from the deflation, inflation, toxic feedback loop that they're stuck in or will
be stuck in at a certain point? And how then do we manage this process of getting there so that we
don't follow the typical historic arc, which Jeff Booth relates through an anecdote is currency wars
lead to trade wars, lead to real wars. So that's the general framework. Deflation, prices go down,
inflation they're trying to artificially make prices go up they have a toxic interaction um
and the outcome could be social chaos leading to currency wars trade wars real wars real wars
that's the general framework for the whole book it's kind of there in the introduction you get
your terms um anything to add to that just like general broad strokes accounting of like our
vocabulary as we go forward? Not to the vocabulary. I would just say just the mechanics of how this
how this works in action is simply that because governments print more money than they can back.
So they're taking money out of the future. They're bringing it into the present.
The only way that they can afford to pay that off is with new debt. So you take out,
You issue government bonds at 8% and deflation occurs.
You feel the deflation, even though you have created inflation by pumping this additional money into the economy.
You feel the deflation.
The economy actually wants to contract because it's trying to do more with less.
But you have to artificially pump more into it so that you can continue to have people employed that should not be employed, continue to have businesses being operated that should not be operating,
and be able to pull the lever of interest rates
in order to pay the 8% debt off with 6%.
And then you have to pay the 6% debt off with 4%.
And then the 4 with 2 and the 2 with 0.
And then you move into the realm of negatives.
And when you move into the realm of negatives,
then people finally start to pull their money out of the banks
and they save. And when they do that, they stop spending. And when they stop spending,
the music stops and there aren't enough chairs for everyone to sit in. And then the entire,
what he calls the Ponzi economy collapses. And so this has been repeated over and over for every,
you know, modern fiat currency that's failed. But yeah, I think, yeah, that's, he does a good job
here at the beginning of spelling out that we have battling forces. We have an inflationary
currency, which is artificially stimulating growth. Growth is actually very undesirable.
We don't want growth. We want innovation. Those are two different things and they compete with
each other. And that inflation is battling deflation. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting
because we constantly hear about inflation, the evils of inflation, the effects of inflation,
But deflation is not as commonly employed in our lexicon as Bitcoiners, except for through Jeff Booth.
Like this book's in 2019.
So now a lot of people are savvy to the deflationary thesis.
But this is definitely worth revisiting.
I'm glad we're talking about this in depth.
Because it sounds so prophetic now.
It does.
I mean, it's seven years later now.
Oh, yeah.
Book in 2019.
And nothing he says that we're going to talk about has been disproved or put off course or anything like that.
So which makes it all the more terrifying in some of its prescriptions, but how the economy then works.
So that move out of the introduction into two sections, how the economy works, printing money, part one, how the economy works, part two, creative destruction, how the economy works, printing money.
Lucas kind of prefigured this.
Current growth occurs despite the deflationary tendency of technology because of debt-fueled spending.
People finance debt with asset inflation.
For example, people take out a loan against their house to buy all the fun stuff, the cool cars, the cool boats, etc., which then causes those assets to go even higher in price because they're pumping money into another great feedback loop.
until the point where asset prices don't go up and the debt still has to be repaid.
Then the government wants to keep the prices high,
so they print the money to keep the party going, as you say,
keep the asset prices increasingly going up, keep the music playing.
So that sounds like a weird economy, but no harm, no foul, right?
Keep on inflating, inflating for eternity.
Lots of harm, because like we discussed at the bar last night,
is that the individuals suffer the losses, but the institutions do not.
So we socialize the losses, and the institutions gain the benefit of the bailouts.
Yeah.
So there's lots.
I suppose there's the losses that we haven't got to there.
We're still at the part where the music is playing.
As long as the music is playing, there's no losses.
So no harm, no foul, right?
Just keep the music playing for eternity.
I mean, the music has been playing for 100 years,
and during that 100 years, the same house went from costing $4,000 to $400,000.
So the loss is always being felt by the consumer.
Yeah. No, and Booth notes, inflation hurts those without access to that debt.
And that's what you were talking about when we were discussing this last night.
Those who can't invest in assets and thereby benefit from these rising asset prices, they're just kind of like,
if the music playing and everybody else is playing musical chairs, they're just kind of sitting in the corner saying,
I wish I was in this dance. I wish I was part of this whole parade, this whole party.
They're stuck with reduced buying power due to asset appreciation, but without any appreciated assets to benefit from this whole, yeah, signal acronym.
Another pushback on no harm, no foul is not only are more and more people losing the ability to participate because it keeps moving further and further out of their reach because the asset prices accelerate faster than the wages do.
But even for those people that own the assets, they are constantly under attack from the taxation on the unrealized gain of the increase in the value of that asset.
So you buy the house for $100,000, you pay 2% tax on it in unrealized gains, which there's nothing else that we pay unrealized gains on.
In fact, like that was like the huge blow up that occurred when Kamala Harris and the Biden administration attempted to push that through a year ago was that they wanted to put an unrealized tax on on cryptocurrency gains.
But.
Not only do the people who can't access the asset suffer, but the people who own the asset suffer because they are continually being taxed on the asset that increases in price.
Yeah.
Because the thing we are measuring it with, the dollar, is getting smaller.
Yeah.
And so you buy the house for $100,000.
The first year, your tax is $2,000 because it's 2%.
Ten years later, that house is worth $800,000.
Now you're paying $16,000 a year in tax, more than what you probably originally paid for your entire mortgage.
Yeah.
And so you're rebuying that house multiple times over the course of your ownership.
No, definitely.
As it gets worse.
When I said no harm, no foul, it was a rhetorical point to set me up to say the harms, but then it very much triggers you when I say no harm.
You see red, which is in fact the only thing you can't see at this point because you have the cyberpunk goggle.
the Blade Runner got what's going on
to make sure that we're not, in fact, talking to a sideboard here.
Dynamite drop in. I like that.
And we also, so, no harm, no foul,
except for all of the harms.
All the harm and all the fouls.
And all the fouls that Lucas pointed out.
Also, the biggest harm and the biggest foul here,
the 2008 financial crisis,
it does come to a head cyclically,
even as we inflate to keep the game going as much as possible.
All of a sudden, there'll be a record scratch
and there'll be a moment.
And what happens in those moments?
The government steps in and bails out exactly those people who designed the whole game to have a weird number of chairs.
They come in to bail out the people that create these toxic assets that lead to this whole dynamic.
Boo states that this changed capitalism in 2008.
I mean, it's probably changed before then, but it becomes very obvious at that point.
We no longer can say with a straight face that this is a fair market system.
This is capitalism, pure and simple.
Winners and losers are chosen by the market.
No, sir.
The government steps in, buys the toxic assets from those that recklessly acquired them and made them toxic.
So prices rose for everybody, rise for everybody, because the government's putting a bunch of money into the market to buy these toxic assets off of the hot potato people who have them in their hands.
Prices rise for everybody, but the people who create the whole situation get money to help them deal with it.
This new system is not capitalism, but crony capitalism where the winners do not win by ingenuity or risk or passion or entrepreneurial spirit, but by being close to those in power.
That's part one, how the economy works, printing money. Part two, how the economy works, creative destruction.
You want to say something on that?
I do just want to say that I love the name that they gave the bailout program.
What was that? Toxic?
Tarp.
Tarp, toxic asset.
We're just going to throw a tarp over this.
Oh, nice.
We're just going to cover this up.
We call this the hiding things under the rug act.
Yeah.
We're just going to sweep this out of the way.
Yeah.
And nobody's going to be the wiser, even though we spelled it out.
That's the thing about, you know, one of the things about the way that the government does
is they do it in the open.
Yeah.
You know, we're going to come out and we're going to tell you that our target is going
to be 2% inflation.
We are literally going to steal 2% of your wealth this year.
in reality where it's actually going to be about 13. That's what it's averaged since 1951. But we're
going to aim for only stealing 2%. We're just not going to tell you that it's 2%.
And this is where this is the, he hits me because he loves me, abusive relationship that they end
up having, which is that, oh, the inflation is going to be 2%, which is good for you, Mr. Homeowner,
because your house is going to go up in value 2%.
But in reality, what does that end up being to you in your checkbook?
It ends up being higher replacement costs.
When something goes wrong, you pay more taxes on it.
You pay more insurance on it.
Everything about it is more expensive to you.
But, oh, and by the way, you can also tighten the noose around your neck
by sticking yourself out even further over the edge,
taking leverage on it if you choose to access more of that equity
by taking a loan out to buy the second house, to buy the truck, to buy the boat.
So, yeah, it's that.
It really is.
It is a it's such it's such a honest, open.
We are abusing you and we're doing it out of love type of things that that is just not even, you know, man,
it's just modern monetary theory is good because it's modern.
And, you know, that's what they subscribe to.
It's a fake.
So creative destruction, creative destruction.
how the economy works. This is an idea of Joseph Schumpeter. The idea is that innovation by
entrepreneurs sustains economic growth. We're kind of all on board with that. Even as, and this is the
kind of interesting part, paradoxical even, innovation by entrepreneurs sustains economic
growth, even as it destroys the value of established companies, a sort of constant churn upward in which
the value that's destroyed was created from previous created destruction.
So that's the way that the economy works through this act of new companies arise,
eat the old companies, creatively destroy them.
They then become the incumbent and are later creatively destroyed by new rising companies.
It's the process of creating monopolies and then getting disrupted by new rising companies.
And it's always the change in what is the infrastructure needed in order to create the monopoly. When you're a railroad company, the infrastructure is the rail lines. But then when airlines come into play, then the infrastructure is airports, not rail lines.
And so everything that you've invested in rail lines is now a sunk cost that keeps you going in that direction until it's too late to turn.
When you're Walmart, everything in the infrastructure of the stores is what got you there.
But then that becomes the thing that holds you back from being successful when the infrastructure goes digital and Amazon is able to list 500 million products instead of 130,000.
All those stores then become a liability.
So that, yeah, that's he called the sigmoid, the S curve. You build the monopoly by building the best infrastructure. But what's fascinating is that the monopoly becomes the thing or the infrastructure that got you the monopoly becomes the sunk cost that keeps you from being able to be on the forefront of the new technological evolution that will change the infrastructure.
So I think the Sigmoin curve is mentioned in the context of the exponential growth, how one leg of exponential growth peters off.
But then there's a new I guess you could it could also tie into creative destruction.
Once the exponential growth from one company or industry peters out, there's another one ready to take the baton and creatively disrupt it and destroy it.
So I can see the Sigmoin function working in that.
Because what always happens is that you come in as the upstart, you develop the infrastructure, you're young, you're serving everybody, they're being served, it's wonderful, you're making profit.
And then once you do develop that monopoly and you're able to push other people around and you start taking a little more profit than other people would like and you bully others, then somebody realizes, oh, I don't have to fight you, I can go around you.
And so they start creating whatever it is, the new technology that's going to replace you. And it's always more expensive and less convenient at the start, which is that bottom part of the S where it's not gaining in cost or benefit. But then when it hits that upward part of the S and they start to take again.
I was trying to look for the sigmoid curve.
I mean, you can Google it to take a look at what it looks like.
It's an interesting chart.
Probably has a lot of different things it could explain because it's probably a recurring pattern.
It looks a lot like the price chart of Bitcoin.
It looks a lot like the price chart of Amazon or Facebook.
It looks a lot like the adoption rate of the internet or cell phones.
Does it?
It looks a lot like the adoption rate of cars.
I don't know about that.
Yeah.
Does it?
Yeah.
It starts small.
it goes up and then it reaches saturation oh here it is um i don't know if that's going to be
visible if you normalize it by putting it on a logarithmic scale they all look almost completely
identical okay so not on a linear scale but if it's on a logarithmic scale so yeah okay yeah yeah
percentage percentage wise fair enough so lucas mentioned the way to create infrastructure often
works is new forms of infrastructure. The newest types of monopolies that we've arrived at that
creatively disrupted and destroyed the last are platform monopolies. These are networks and
platforms. As networks, they grow in strength with each new user through network effects.
As platforms, they function not by offering a product, but by aggregating supply of all the
other producers in the market or service and then providing that. For example, Amazon and Alibaba
aggregate the supply of products and suppliers.
You go on Amazon and there's all these different suppliers
trying to sell you a product.
Amazon is not supplying the thing.
They're just like, hey, guys, come and offer to our website.
Airbnb is aggregating the rental supply and offering that, right?
Facebook, the supply is you.
LinkedIn, the supply is the business you.
So platforms as monopolies are different than the monopolies in the past.
In the past, monopolies are broken up
because they lead to higher prices or worse products, right?
You can get like this monopoly over the market
and then you kind of deteriorate in your capacity
or willingness to offer good products
because the consumers have no choice, right?
But with platform monopolies,
the result is actually better products
because all these suppliers are still competing
amongst each other to offer their product, right?
The platform isn't the one even creating the product.
You still have a bunch of competition occurring
among the suppliers.
So prices are going lower.
a different form of monopoly is occurring.
They also are growing in strength
from data being added to them.
And as I mentioned,
from new users on the network previously,
it wasn't like that
where you had these strong network effects.
And previously, data wasn't such a resource.
But as we're going to talk about later,
the ability to aggregate data
is what's really going to kind of determine
who the winner is of the AI,
artificial intelligence.
If you say AI, you have to say artificial intelligence.
I think we all know what that is.
In any case, if one company gets AI and has a bunch of data that gets AI,
but if one company is working to develop AI in its super intelligent form,
AGI, artificial general intelligence, and has a data stream that's vast,
they have a huge advantage over other companies that are also working on AI.
And that's one of the things that these platform network monopolies have a corner on is a specific data stream. So that's creative destruction. I guess that's the chapter on creative destruction, how our economy works. We first talked about inflation, the pricing aspect, and now creative destruction, the way that we have the arising of a new form of platform network monopoly.
Do you have anything to add to that or comment upon it, a maraschino cherry of a thing to the layer?
So these platform network monopolies are a, we do need to recognize they are a fundamental shift.
Because when there was a railroad monopoly or when there was a airline monopoly or when there was a newspaper monopoly, then the railroad company didn't necessarily care about your gender or what time you went to bed or what your sports interests were.
or what books you like to read or what kind of shoes you like to wear.
None of that affected their product.
But all of this information that I just mentioned is immensely valuable to these platforms
because the way that they, the business model that has proliferated
is that the customer is the product and that the data that they supply is sold to advertisers
that is used to target them, target themselves for future buying.
And so that is, A, I mean, we all need to understand that this is a fundamental shift
in the way that these things work.
And that this is why de-platforming is such a,
it has such wide-reaching implications
and should be taken very seriously.
Because if you're kicked off of one of these platforms,
the biggest of these platforms,
or let's say the most consequential of these platforms
being like being kicked off of the Chinese social credit score program where your social credit score becomes so low that you not allowed to participate in the economy anymore And then you just become this effectively non
You can't buy food.
You can't get on an airplane.
You can't get toilet paper out of a bathroom stall at a McDonald's.
And so it truly is a way to just wipe people off the face of the earth or just wipe them from any sort of like normal.
existence. And he brings up the point that the, you know, like a country like China has a huge
advantage in developing these systems because they are authoritarian. You don't have systems being
these like these AI systems that are being that are they they benefit so greatly from having more
data. And so if you have 1.1 billion people and you are monitoring as best you can, literally
every transaction, every message, every video they watch, everything that they do, then that's
a treasure trove of data that, you know, it's not like anybody in China has the ability to
not signed the end user license agreement and, you know, choose to opt out like you can with,
hey, I'm just not going to be part of Facebook because I don't want to give them my data.
Yeah. You know, they don't they don't have that option. So there's
1.1 billion people, full stack of everything from birth to death that contributes to building these
AI models. And because they are authoritarian, you don't have to go through any sort of,
So, you know, unicameral, bicameral, any sort of legislature, you don't really have to go through anything.
They can move really fast and they can make decisions.
So through unicameral, that's just one body, right?
Yeah, but still, there's people, right?
I mean, that's Nebraska.
Look at that.
That's not a great run state.
Is that your phone or mine?
It is.
No, it's my phone.
Okay.
I have a potential boomer relation to technology where I don't know how to stop a timer I set, so I have to listen to all of the rings of it.
Okay.
Yeah.
So tech is deflationary unless you're totally ignorant as to how it runs.
I bet it's inflationary in your life.
It's just inconvenient for everyone around.
Oh, yeah.
If I had a suitcase phone, that would be much more efficient for me.
We had those when they first came out.
I remember.
And they were expensive, and the cell phone bills were really expensive.
It was like $300 a month just to have the regular.
It's about being $1,200 for his first suitcase phone or whatever.
Yeah, suitcase, cell phone.
So the next couple of chapters are going to talk about really like human cognitive hardware limitations as we try to think about a lot of these things.
So Booth has some interesting new ideas about deflation and its effects.
Why don't we, why isn't this stuff just like common knowledge amongst all of us?
because the human mind, as we're going to see,
doesn't think about exponential growth
and we're not evolutionarily designed to do that.
We also have some other hardware limitations
in our mental plumbing, so to speak.
So we do most things unconsciously.
Deep learning, like learning new things,
jumping out of the patterns we already know,
that's very mentally taxing.
Once we learn something, we don't tend to question it.
It becomes a background assumption,
part of our default mental furniture.
In fact, we use it to filter new information coming in.
It becomes a new bias that privileges new information.
Is it consistent with what we already know?
He talks about, Booth does, various cognitive biases, specific ones.
The anchoring effect, for example, is one.
We put too much weight on initial information we receive when making decisions.
For example, if Bart hears a negotiation tactic, if you want $1,000, do you ask for $5,000 or do you ask for $500?
You ask for the $5,000 because then people anchor on that new number,
and when you revise it downward, they're much happier than revising it upward.
Sunk cost bias, another cognitive bias we have.
We continue to invest time and emotion in stuff we've already invested time and emotion in,
believing that the sunk cost, that's something that holds us back.
That actually does it.
Just because you've invested a certain amount of effort into it in and of itself
doesn't justify investing more.
These are cognitive biases we have.
Just as a result of our evolution, our mental apparatus is flawed in some ways.
Writing oneself of biases is what drives creative destruction.
Those few and wise who are able to jump out of the lenses that kind of define our vision, think creatively, are able to disrupt kind of the current monopolies.
Having biases and not questioning them is what leads to being creatively destroyed, destructed, disrupted.
So one more that I think is really cool. We also have entire narratives we live by. And this is why Jeff is offering Mr. Booth another narrative here, deflation, the deflationary era that we're in, what deflation is. We already have other narratives that make it more kind of difficult to accommodate new ones. A narrative being kind of a giant story by which we find ourselves, which we define our actions, right?
The hero's journey is a common one. Jeff talks about this in here, that there is this common pattern behind stories, that if you analyze enough stories, you begin to see recurring structures in the way that the stories develop their action.
To quote Booth in this book, it involves a hero who goes on an adventure, faces an insurmountable obstacle, wins victory, and then comes home transformed.
transformed. Or as he says, the departure, initiation, return, three phases to this story
structure, to this narrative pattern, this monomyth that we find very comforting and very
accommodating. When information comes at us in the form of a narrative, we absorb it a lot easier
and we hold it and it's difficult to get outside of that narrative. And just because it's one of my
favorite things um joseph campbell's book the hero's journey one of the the hero with a thousand
faces rather one of the best summaries of it is by dan harman the creator of community and rick
and morty um he has this framework so jeff summarized it as departure initiation return
so what dan says dan harman you need go search find take return change he breaks it down into
Eight words. You have a need. So you go search for something. You find it. You take it. You return and change.
You have another need. You go out. You search for something to satisfy that need. You find the thing to satisfy the need.
You take it. You return. You change as a person giving rise to another need.
And so you go out, search, find, take, return, change.
And everything, every one of his episodes has that framework.
This is a very intimate framework. It's part of how we see the world.
It's very motivational, too, if you see yourself as a hero in your own journey day to day, having a need, going out, finding something, taking it, returning and changing as a person.
It's very motivational.
But in any case, what these do in the context of the price of tomorrow, we don't often question our own stories or beliefs.
Once we kind of have these comforting narratives in our head about the way the world functions, we're a hero in a certain type of story.
It's hard for us to get out of those.
So cognitive biases, adherence to certain narrative structures, these are things that make it hard for us to think in new ways.
What Booth says, as a way, kind of a cognitive trip maybe or something to get yourself out of them, argue as if you are right, but listen as if you are wrong.
That's kind of a framework that he gives, kind of an interesting thing to think about.
you know forcefully um intellectually rationally make an argument and do it with a passion as if
you're right but then listen to hear feedback what am i wrong i could be wrong hold open that
possibility that what you said is not correct so this he jeff talks about this um these biases
because he wants to explain why we often think badly about something like exponential thinking
A lot of what the price of tomorrow is really about is some of the new technologies coming down the pipe are going to be exponential in their growth.
An AI liftoff is really going to deflate, reduce costs, kind of reduce the number of jobs necessary in an exponential fashion.
What is exponential?
Why is it difficult to think about?
He gives this great example, the folding a piece of paper example, right?
So what happens if you fold a piece of paper 50 times?
How thick would it be?
You might think, well, I'll give it a shot.
You're not going to get past like six or seven folds.
If you folded it 50 times, how thick would it be?
You might say a foot.
You might say to the top of the room, the ceiling.
It would go to the sun, which is still, even how many times I've read or thought about that,
it just doesn't seem that's possible.
What is it, 149 million kilometers, I think is something?
Give or take.
I think, right?
Yeah.
To the sun.
Our brain can't even process that type of thinking is important, though.
Like, we don't have the, it just doesn't, even I say that to you, you say it back to me, I'm like, oh, okay, that makes sense.
It doesn't make sense.
It, like, literally doesn't.
We can't picture that in our mind.
So exponential increases, though, these things that don't, like, register in our mind, they also apply to technology.
So we think we think smart about technology, but we just have inherent cognitive limitations.
So things like Moore's Law, the doubling of transistors on circuit boards every 18 months.
We can say that. I can say that phrase.
I can't comprehend what that actually means, catches out at for that in a sort of exponential fashion.
And then this is where the sigmoid curve comes in, too.
even as Moore's law goes into its exponential stage and then kind of peters out, there's some
other thing that is entering its S-curve, kind of the part of its exponential growth.
What does this mean for deflation? The booth talks about deflation in various industries,
self-driving cars, virtual reality, energy. And the key point of each of these for the
deflationary thesis is that all technology works by removing inefficiency and waste.
I love this point so much.
What do we call, what is inefficiency and waste actually?
Jobs.
Jobs that humans have.
We are the waste reducers, the inefficiency patchers uppers.
He's actually much more kind.
What I heard the other day, I told you about this.
What I heard, the description of what jobs are is adult daycare.
So he's actually far more kind.
In our inflationary economy, it creates unnecessary jobs that don't remedy inefficiencies and waste.
That's why we have adult daycare.
Yeah, that's an inflationary job, right?
Yeah.
And so, like, even the non-inflationary jobs, even the best job, all it does is reduce some inefficiency or some form of waste for us.
Okay.
You see what I'm saying?
What are jobs that are non-inflationary?
Jobs not created by money.
No, no, no.
Give me an example.
So, okay, define our terms again.
We have technological deflation, the tendency of technology over time to take over a bunch of human functions, provide them for us better than humans can.
Meanwhile, we have inflation, the attempt of the government to counteract this deflationary force through monetary creation, which leads to the funding, the ability to like pay somebody to do something that's not necessary in adult daycare function.
So you said what's a non what's it?
What's an example?
because an inflation, like, it's every white-collar job.
No, so it's a job not created by monetary inflation.
Right now, a doctor's job is not created by monetary inflation.
The amount of doctors that we have.
Maybe the amount of doctors, but the job is such, right, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, but the job itself is merely a function of applying a certain amount of decision trees
that have already been surpassed by code.
No, you couldn't replace,
you couldn't get rid of all the doctors right now,
just have code do the thing.
You couldn't.
I mean, you'd still need somebody maybe
to deliver the baby.
Yeah, GPT, open my chest, get this,
I have a heart problem.
I mean, a lot of that stuff has been done by robots
for a decade by now, you know.
And laser.
I see what you're saying.
AI, and this is one of the theses,
AI conceptually can get to the point where it's doing capable, doing all these things.
I would just push back and it's not yet capable.
It's not yet to the point where it can.
Right. But that's like that's why people fail to understand the implications of exponential growth is because for the first 15 folds of the paper, it doesn't look like it's getting any thicker.
And then all of a sudden.
In a year, there's no need for a radiologist anymore.
There's no need for a, let's see, there's no need for a radiologist.
I'm going to be nice.
I'm going to say that there's no need for some types of law.
I'll leave that there are some that remain useful.
So there's no need for radiologists within what time frame?
Like now.
Like they're already better.
He even notes that in this book.
Yeah.
Right?
that they're not only are they more accurate in,
they have fewer false positives and fewer false negatives.
Who's verifying that there's no false positives and negatives?
You could even have a radiologist.
So who's doing, yeah, but no, no, no, no, you can't say that
because who's doing that for the humans?
Because that shit applies to both.
So you can't use that as a disqualifying fact.
No, I think you can say that right now radiologists assisted by AI
are better than either AI or radiologists without AI.
There's a new job function there.
That's probably true.
But I mean, that means that you can eliminate probably 95% of them.
You need less of them because you have one person doing more things.
And then very, very shortly, you won't need them.
And he gives that example when he talks about AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero.
Yeah.
Right.
Which is the AI, the deep mind AI that was created to play the game Go, which beat a human four games to one.
Yeah.
And then a year later, they had a new one that beat that AI 100 games to zero by coming up with its own things, creative things that humans had never done.
Right.
And so there's no reason to believe that that won't be applicable to all other fields.
Yeah.
They can actually, right.
We'll get there.
Yeah.
And just so to proceed on, and we talked about like every job in some sense is a way to like remedy inefficiency waste.
And so if something gets rid of inefficiency waste and processes, it gets rid of jobs like human functions.
So one example of this that's really good, a combination of GPS, LIDAR, and mapping technology can survey land such that, I think it's like lumber harvesters can come in and do their lumber harvesting.
Before you had this confluence of technologies, you had to send surveyors in on foot to do the surveying, come back with the results, convey them to people.
So a huge inefficiency is obviously remedied. We don't have to send people in on the ground, but that inefficiency is literally the surveyor's job. Technological advances are beneficial, but that benefit of the removal of inefficiencies and waste fuels the destruction of various jobs.
So this book, again, is about trying about how we have talking about how we've tried to stop this deflation through inflationary money creation leading to babysitter jobs, adult daycare jobs, unnecessary jobs.
But now we see this as a huge problem.
Technology advances at an exponential rate.
So deflation is going to happen very quickly and very forcefully.
And Booth gives the analogy of the sonic boom.
there is a point when the plane evidently punches through like the sound barrier when it begins to go faster than the sound it produces where there's a and then the laws change the whole damn like process.
And so that's going to be deflation at the exponential neck of the curve.
And we're not going to be able to stop it with whatever like, you know, fire hose of money printing.
So, yeah, do you have anything to add to just the thing that I thought most about when I was reading that was there the talk about.
AI, like self-driving cars. Yeah, that was cool. And so cars currently are utilized about 5% of
the time. So about five. So what's, you know, what's 5% of the time? Okay. So that's maybe an
hour a day or a little more than an hour a day. Most of the time they sit still and they sit still
and they aren't being used. And not only are they not being used, we also have to have the
infrastructure to accommodate them wherever they go. You've got a parking spot at your house,
but there also has to be a parking spot for you at the dentist's office. And that's only open
eight hours a day. So for 16 hours a day, all of those spots are useless. And there's got to be a
spot for you at the mall. And that's only open 12 hours a day. So, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think it's interesting because what we're going to see, like we often conflate
two things that technology separates. We're actually going to see less demand for cars,
more demand for transportation, right? Because transportation will be cheaper, safer, easier,
and easier to be accessed by more people. But cars will not be needed by, like, you know,
If we can have a car that operates instead of at 5% of its capacity, it can drive around at 90% of its capacity, then we can see a 18-fold increase in transportation with the same amount of cars.
And we're not going to need all of the parking spots.
He notes that like in L.A., 14% of all of the land mass of L.A. is just parking.
Yeah. Which I honestly thought I was like, man, that's probably even low. But then take into account how much of it is is roads. You don't actually need as big or as many roads either.
Um, you know, if, if every car is operating, um, with AI and it's linked to each other in a hive mind, instead of traveling, you know, at 200 feet apart on the internet, on the interstate, you can be right on each other's bumper and you can go 150 miles an hour.
if you want to, right?
So you can get places faster.
It takes less time.
It takes less space.
And so it lowers the barrier to entry
for being able to access transportation
while decreasing the demand for the car,
which provides transportation,
which is kind of fascinating.
Yeah, you have to own this thing.
You only use 5% of the time.
Yeah, they're self-driving cars
that make it all cheap and safe and available.
and then you in fact can let your car you let your car out into the system to self-drive other
people around when you're not using it and then everybody's adding to that network there's less
demand for cars the automotive industry dives the trucking industry dives as far as employment yeah
we see the inflation of tech lower prices while it crunches up those inefficiencies we call jobs
and it gets cheaper and cheaper over time that's deflationary because you end up when i was at
network school we had a guy come from the leading chinese robotics factor um company um the one that
makes the dog the the robotic dog that jumps up and back yeah yeah terrific can't remember what
okay i don't know um unitry unitry is the company um brought the dog whatever and then he gave his
speech and and he people asked him about like where do you see the world going and he says well
we absolutely know for sure that the cost of software will fall to literally just how much
does it cost in electricity to run the computer? Because we're going to remove the human completely
from it because they're already as good and they will soon be very much better than humans at
coding. So the cost of software falls to the cost of energy. And the cost of hardware also falls to
energy because now you've got the robot does the mining, the robot transports it to the facility.
The facility is all autonomous. It creates whatever you want out of it. So all of that is just an
energy input. And that energy gets cheaper and cheaper over time as we're able to capture more
of it from more efficient sources. And so this was the thought exercise I went through when I was
there three weeks in and I was trying to decide on a project to do for the boot camp thing,
which was, okay, in the future, where is there going to be any industry that has a remaining
margin? If software crashes to the cost of compute and hardware crashes to the cost of energy,
there's no margin there. There's no opportunity to have a business there.
So what is the opportunity? And the only thing that we could come up with
is basically like bespoke performance things,
like playing music or whatever like that,
that people would pay something for,
and Bitcoin mining, which would be mining Bitcoin,
which is Apex Capital,
which powers both the software and the hardware
at their crashed cost,
mining that for less than the cost
than it takes to sell it.
And so we couldn't find any flaw with that thinking. And I think that's really fascinating to try and consider the future. But it may so be that in the future, the only industry that is global, that is left with any sort of margin is Bitcoin mining, which is a race to the bottom in terms of energy costs, which should propel us, Kardashev level one, level two, level three, towards capital.
capturing hopefully all of the energy of our universe that was a fun little jock that i was
trying to wrap my mind around this this idea there would have been would be no margin i mean it's all
capital somebody's own gonna own the keys and the shares that corresponds these things that
are doing the things right yeah but as soon as you introduce one competitor and they undercut
that competitor right and then it's just a race to the bottom like and this is like you know it's
it's all just been like this is um in terms of like netflix subscription like as soon as netflix
came out it just became a race to the bottom with all the other services uh who can get cheaper
yeah that's what it is it's price competition is a race to the bottom on prices yeah because
consumers benefit. And because in a digital economy, since there are no barriers to entry,
everyone has access to the best thing. And so why would you ever buy anything but the best thing,
which leads to, as he notes, the creation of monopolies. And so when you have that monopoly
power, then the only way for somebody to wrest away that monopoly power from you is to undercut
you on price because you've already got the entire market so they're not there's no scraps for the
for them to fight over they just have to take it by doing the thing cheaper okay possibly this
maybe helped me to understand a lot of this too so talking about the whole economy and all these
exponential increases is difficult to kind of understand but if we just consider the future
of intelligence that is a part of the thesis that you kind of own to understand a lot of this book
You really just need to think about future of AI is what I'm saying.
And that's so some past technologies have destroyed jobs but created new ones.
There are reasons to think that AI is not going to be like that type of past technological disruption.
When we talk about AI here, as I mentioned earlier, we're kind of really talking about the holy grail of AI, which super intelligent, artificial, general intelligent, not domain specific, something that is general.
able to work across different domains,
can take info from one domain,
apply it to the other,
do the things that humans can do.
Or even specific, like, or even domain specific,
like Imanema Stock, like the creator of stability AI.
Like he, that's, that's his vision
that he thinks is actually more useful.
Which, because if we create those domain specific ones,
then we negate the risk of the, you know,
overlord, you know, of AGI that could negate that risk and then you're just losing out to
the competitor who has not negated that risk. This is true. This is absolutely true. Yeah,
the AGI is the holy grail because then who is the master? And that's kind of the way the booth
frames it here. There's a really interesting exploration of the nature of artificial
intelligence in reference to human intelligence. We'll get into a bit of that here, but there's
more in the book. So if you're interested in artificial intelligence, this is a really good
starter point. There's a lot of complicated stuff on how AI, machine learning, all that works. This
book is very accessible on this. And this is where we should have the caveat that you may not be
interested in artificial intelligence, but it is interested in you and it will affect your life at
a fundamental level. Unavoidably, there's nothing you can do about it. So it is worth exploring and
at least coming, at least spending some time to try and become comfortable with the inevitable
changes that will occur.
Because the people that are, you know, that's the real problem of deflation is not prices
decreasing.
That's great for literally everybody except for the people that are overextended on credit.
And even for them, eventually it's way better.
the real problem is the loss of identity because we have so identified with these jobs that,
you know, when you meet somebody, the second question that you have after what their name is,
is what do you do? And so this is the identity that tells the story that becomes the narrative
that is the bias through which we see the entire world. And so if that thing is shattered and you're
not prepared for it, then it will be a jarring experience.
So it's going to be jarring regardless, be it right, everybody should be interested because
it's interested in you, this thing that we're creating.
Human intelligence.
So if you want to understand artificial intelligence, Booth says, take a look at human intelligence
to see maybe the arc.
If you can, we get to artificial general intelligence.
Well, human intelligence was able to reach it.
So let's look at human intelligence, human intelligence before the written word.
Consider that all info stored and transmitted orally.
making it degrade very rapidly.
Again, with telephone, whenever you tell somebody something and they tell somebody else,
stored through oral traditions, it degrades very rapidly.
We get religions and myths maybe as a result of this.
But then we developed the printing press.
Books become external mass storage units for our brain.
They facilitate a massive knowledge accumulation and growth.
They also facilitate application of the scientific method
because we can now write down our errors,
write a new book to correct that error
and then have recorded the correction to an error and then keep on doing that iteratively over and over And we shouldn like Booth knows this is a really cool point time frame wise we shouldn underestimate this
in the exponential growth of intelligence, the printing press.
Our brains were the same structurally for the last roughly 300,000 years.
We've had the printing press for the last 600,
and look at technology since that time.
That was obviously an inflection point,
This ability to record things in an external hard drive for our brain that is the book.
All of this, like these, this is exponential tech in these shelves right here.
The book is such a phenomenal invention.
I'm glad you said it, phrased it that way.
As this is an external hard drive.
This is an extension of memory.
It's an extension of the brain that is outside of the human body.
And so this is quite potentially the book.
Sorry.
Books are quite possibly the first example of our attempt to merge ourselves with a technology outside of our physical body.
And we are moving further and further into that direction with the smartphone that has become ubiquitous and the devices that are on the wrist that give biofeedback and things like that.
Right. So we have, go ahead.
I was just going to say, and then on to Neuralink and eventually this idea of merging with the machine.
No, and that's where I was going to go.
We have books and then we get computers, obviously an exponential form of data storage.
You can put all of the world's libraries and books into like a single hard drive or something like that.
So can these computers then accumulating massive amounts of data come to reason like humans in a general sort of way such that we can get AGI?
Well, humans learn by practicing.
In order to learn, we reinforce patterns.
We are very – you gave the computer a look.
Are we recording?
Yeah, we are.
I was just like – I was just checking me out, checking you out.
Are we looking good?
There we go.
That's all that matters.
As long as we look good, I mean, content-wise, I think that's what we're going for.
We've got to try to strip this approach.
Okay.
We are, yeah.
Sorry, I threw you off.
No, you did.
I'd just love to see you smile.
We are very limited by our brain regarding how many iterations we can do on something.
So if we rely on training for training our own intelligence, we're kind of limited on how much of it we can do in what time frame.
And we commonly toss around like 10,000 hours to become like a master in something.
There's some research that says that, right?
A computer can condense all of that training, this pattern recognition analysis or whatever, into very short timeframes.
A computer can store it all with perfect fidelity.
The human mind, in the other hand, encodes information in different ways.
Two people could have the same experience and remember it completely differently.
Two cameras record the same thing.
They're going to have slightly different angles, but they've recorded the same thing, right?
so the information that we learn passes through our filters and previous experience the patterns
we already know it's an emotional process computers don't have that they do not attach
motion this emotion to the storage of information they do not have bias problems like we do unless
you program bias explicitly in what seems like superhuman intelligence is just pattern recognition
and error correction at scale is the it's kind of the culmination of that like that's all we need
you do to get to super intelligence. It's not something mystical or magical. I mean, the way
Booth reduces it is just pattern recognition and error correction at scale. And in this,
it's not about just scaling computational power. We alluded to or mentioned this earlier, but also
how large the data set is that you're bringing in. And you mentioned this, Lucas, this gives China
an advantage because it has two things, a large population and state control or capacity to control
and monitor that population.
So it can collect information in various ways,
movements, behaviors, maybe even biometrics,
through its control and surveillance of its citizens,
feed this in to process it through an AI,
build up this data set,
uses a ton of computational power,
and then it's well on the way in the race to AGI.
The USA has a corresponding weakness.
We tend to break up monopolies,
those types of control mechanisms as they arise,
even though that maybe is what would be needed
or advisable to pull a bunch of data together.
We do have decentralized AI projects
and even OpenAI is like a nonprofit, right?
It doesn't have a separate thing that it's own.
It was back then.
No, it has.
It tried to change,
but Altman wasn't able to change it
from a nonprofit structure, right?
And they do charge for a service,
but it's a separate type of thing.
In any case, the important point for this
is that OpenAI doesn't have control
over its own incoming data stream
in the way that like Instagram, Amazon, Facebook
all have ways to trigger us
to give them massive amounts of information freely,
which they can then, you know,
use as this large data set to train AI.
These are the types of monopolies
that might be needed to compete with a state monopoly
like China in the accumulation of data.
So data is very important.
important to kind of summarize the ai revolution in a nutshell the significance and all this
one we could say error correction is at the heart of intelligence right we saw that in the books
when we got the printing press we corrected our errors accumulated that and our science took off
error correction is at the heart of intelligence two information is growing at an exponential
pace all this data we're accumulating information three information is being transferred to
computers that can gain knowledge and correct errors faster than humans.
So error correction is at the heart of intelligence.
Computers can do it very rapidly, which leads us to number four.
Inelectably, inevitably, every one of our jobs is a function of our intelligence,
which I guess five is the electable, inevitable result.
Therefore, every one of our jobs can and will be replaced by a sufficiently advanced AGI.
Yeah, it seems like there are no jobs at all.
If everything's a result of human intelligence, conceptually, we're all replaceable in that sense as an economic producer, an actor in the economy, a producer.
If technological deflation is about eliminating inefficiencies and waste, and inefficiencies and waste are exactly the space that open up for human jobs, then AI will end nearly all inefficiency and waste and correspondingly end nearly all human jobs.
I mean, that's kind of the end point period, like Donzo.
It's a pretty indestructible argument that he gives.
And there's, you can try and take shots at it and say, oh, there's certain jobs that they're not based on intelligence.
They're based on, you know, whatever, grit or athletic performance.
Aura.
Aura, yes, aura.
Yeah.
Hara, aura, whatever you want to call it.
Did I ever have aura?
Yeah.
I mean, the chick that Elon keeps tweeting about.
You think she has aura?
Other people do.
Oh.
I don't.
Other people do whatever.
Yeah.
But, you know, if it's not intelligence, then it's performance, and performance can be mimicked.
Yeah.
And it can be mimicked.
It's not, and again, I think it is important to make this distinction, it's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations.
It's not the time that's put in.
It's a combination of the time and the willingness to change based on new information. And that's where humans struggle because, as Tony Robbins says, we don't change until the pain of changing is greater than the earth. We don't change until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing.
And so we will all experience a certain amount of change as pain before we choose to make that change. We will all watch, you know, we will all watch Bitcoin go up 10,000 percent before we start to move into it and watch our wealth decrease.
We will all make the mistake of ignoring our partner seven or eight times until they become upset.
You know, we'll all make these mistakes because we have these priors that give us a bias.
And in order to make a change the very first time, we have to have absolute humility and be willing to always carry with us that strong opinion.
I mean, you can never have changed the first time on everything like 10,000 hours.
We can't like computers can't.
Right. Computers can't.
But humans, 10,000 hours is like a hard limit, not like specifically 10,000, but some vast amount of time to train yourself to play the guitar.
You can't just say, I'm going to approach you with humility and then just bang something out perfectly.
You have to put in the time of retraining your.
You do have to put in the time.
But like Gladwell's work showed that when he revisited that same concept in a later book, he found that it was actually probably more like 3,000 hours.
It wasn't 10,000.
It's irrelevant.
The number, yeah, the number varies because what matters more is the intensity and the error correction.
The point is just that it takes an immense amount of time because humans have to brute force it in kind of a way that like computers don't.
We have to retrain like things in a different and less efficient way than a computer can retrain.
It can train itself.
Yeah.
I mean, it's it's only it's it's immense until you consider what is the cost of not making that investment, which is greater.
Yeah.
And so then it then it becomes not immense.
Right.
i mean kind of except for like if i think playing the cello that's not it'd be a big time investment
but i'm not it's not a big thing to miss out for it for me not for you because somebody right yeah
yeah everything's all about you it is as far as like not playing a cello yeah um there's
i'm warming this point up somewhere and i think i'll bring it up here because this is
and it kind of goes better at the end but instead of just dancing around it
yeah because you brought this up too i think about this a lot so i'm backing into this whole idea
but what is it what is unique about humans what is the what is the job that will still remain when
all of the jobs have been stripped away all of our ability to remedy an inefficiency or some waste
has been taken over by AI?
What is the function of humanity?
And one, so maybe it's not a job.
Maybe this role is something we don't call a job.
Maybe the whole idea of job is like a thing
that was created by agrarian civilization
that is actually an evolutionary mismatch
for humans to evolve in a different setting.
Maybe the job was never a good thing
and never a good thing to go down in the first place.
But also, like, imagine AI is a mirror. The mirror can perfectly mimic any outward manifestation, anything you emit. You look at a mirror and you dance in front of the mirror. It can do all of that, right? AI is a mirror in that it can take any outward behavior that we have and perfectly mimic that.
What does that leave? What does the mirror not penetrate? The mirror doesn't penetrate into your subjectivity, into what happens on the inside when your experience of doing the thing in front of the mirror is never replicable by the mirror.
I mean, maybe that's a philosophical question. Does AI become conscious at some point? But even if it does, its silicon or LLN consciousness is going to be different than human consciousness, which is always going to have like an emotional valence.
emotion is kind of framed as a bias but it's also just irreducibly human and the ability
or the necessity of being motivated by valences in your environment like being attracted to some
things repulsed by others this these are types of things that are going to remain
in like just so human and so what does that manifest as or what can that be as a role or a
Maybe taste, like dictating the direction of the things that we want to consume, the tastemakers, those who can detect or steer an aesthetic drift.
Like the AI can create all of the things perfectly, but can it motivate a directional change in the way we look at things?
Or will that always be like a product of human subjectivity because we alone feel the need to do that, to move out of a stasis through desire, emotion, etc.
around this is a really good question because i think it was you that was talking about this
was that um a lot of us don't really know what we like a lot of us really yes we just like what
we think we've chosen to like which is something that's been fed to us out of a limited number of
options that is there to invoke nostalgia or it's there to invoke, um, a desire to be
like someone that we want to aspire to.
Um, but you know, if, if we're walking around with VR in, in a VR world and we're looking
just as cool as Kanye and we're looking just as cool as Kim and we've got all the things that we
ever wanted in terms of that um you know is there still going to be a place for that because like
like that tastemaker I think about like when so like when Vans shoes became popular I think this
is the story was that what they did was they just went into uh Brooklyn I think in New York
and they sent basically a scout.
Yeah.
And they told the scout, go find the cool kids
and then convince them to wear our shoes.
Yeah.
Because if the cool kids wear our shoes,
the other people want to wear our shoes.
And so this is that aura thing where it's just like,
you're just, all you're doing is you,
this is not the choice that you made on your own.
This is not your actual taste.
This is just, oh, I want to be like this person,
so I want to mimic them.
yeah you've talked about this before it's not even the mimicking or the so this is a mimetic
desire yeah this is mimetic desire rene gerard but in some of gerard's older stuff this is
like my favorite one right here coolest whole bookshelf on myself yeah to see desire in the
novel right here um so he talks about mimetic desire as metaphysical desire so it's not the
desire of mimesis it's the desire of being it's not that we desire to imitate kanye's that we
desire to be kanye and so we acquired the trappings of kanye and you can see maybe where this is headed
that's always impossible yeah you can you could obtain all of the the trappings of kanye you can
even have vr goggles and whatever be whatever simulation that makes you into kanye what you'll
never have is the interiority of kanye that says i'm self-sufficient i'm okay the way i am that's
what we're all seeking when we try to seek these things is we see the external kanye and think that
he must have an internal feeling of completion that we lack because we don't feel what he feels.
We don't feel that he feels the same pain and lack on his interiority, right?
We only see that he looks perfectly self-actualized, perfectly perfect, right?
Not Kanye, whoever is.
Probably a bad example.
Right, yeah.
We started on a bad path.
So pick your person of your own.
Pick your own God.
Because that's what you do with metaphysical desire is you pick your God.
I think the thing that like we all experience the world from our own perspective, which is a perspective that we, of course, feel from the inside out.
And it's a feeling of lack and deficiency in some way, even if it's the only way is we intuit our own mortality and that we're going to die.
And when you look at somebody else, you perceive them as an exterior thing.
you don't perceive again the pain that they might feel that they feel also a corresponding lack a
corresponding sense of their own mortality um we got kind of far afield with this no i can you pull
this home because i forgot so you you were at i don't know if you were asking it rhetorically but
um i'm gonna answer it because the question was like what does separate us from the ai yeah and
And my answer is, I don't know.
But I know that we don't as yet know what makes us us.
That's a really good point.
So how can we know that an AI can or can't be us?
Because we can quantify everything.
We can quantify all of the biochemical reactions,
and we can quantify the calories in and the calories out and we can look at the genome
and we can see how the genes are expressed, but we don't have a location for where the soul is.
We don't know where in our body or if it's in our body or if speaking about it in terms of it
or it being somewhere or having a location or having a weight or an embodiment,
we don't know what consciousness is.
We can, we think that we can replicate it.
Yes.
We think we can.
And we can certainly, at this point,
you can definitely fool someone with an AI
into believing that it has some sort of
conscious behavior but we we still don't know that about ourselves we don't know that about
so i wonder we know that about ourselves we can introspect and like feel our and know we are
conscious i think therefore i am that's descartes point it's the only thing you can know
the very fact of thinking affirms that you are a thinking thing but i can't know that you
are thinking thing or that you exist on the inside but who is the thinker that's that's the question
right that was my german buddy juba he talked to me about how when he got into meditation that's
simply what he would do is he would sit there for four hours with his eyes closed and he would say
who in his mind he would say who is the thinker so i think therefore i am but who is the thinker
because these are Lucas's hands.
These are my hands.
These are my legs.
But they are, by saying that,
what I'm saying is that this belongs to me.
Who is me?
Yeah.
Right?
I am separate.
I am, there is a point of separation between me
and the things that I define as mine.
My car, my guitar, my foot, my knee, my leg.
These are all things that are outside of the thing that is me.
Yeah.
And I don't know what me is.
Right.
It could be many things.
And again, just if we take AI as a mirror that can perfectly ape all of our outward manifestations, what it can't ape is this process of ourselves asking ourselves these very introspective questions.
Who is the thinker of the thought?
Am I just a field of which thoughts arise and thoughts pass like clouds in front of a sun that is my consciousness or something like that?
So these are, I mean, can you, is there value to these?
Can you make them economical?
That's kind of what we want in a job, right?
It's something we can like sell to somebody.
Because we're talking about like AI is going to replace our jobs.
But it's not, you know, that was always the point that Marx had or somebody like that, right?
That we all become philosophers and we get rid of the need to work.
And so we can all sit either by and ask ourselves, who's the thinker?
Who am I?
Well, that was my thought with like, you know, like we'll with AI and autonomous driving, we'll have less demand for cars, but more demand for transportation. We'll have less demand for leak for for lawyers, but more demand for philosophy. Right. Like you can you could AI the whole legal system.
But you might have a greater demand for the philosophy that underlies it. And so maybe that is a potential avenue.
for meaning right because we're i think once we get past the idea of a job what we're really
mourning when we think about losing a job or a career once we have universal abundance is not
going to be like the ability to have things or buy things because we don't have a job it's going
to be the meaning that we associated with a career the development the ability to deploy skills to
help other people these types of things but once that's divorced from the economics of it
then what does that Memphis does?
I mean, but there are examples,
like we currently do have examples of,
like you don't have to have a job or a career
to have meaning or purpose.
You know, you can be, you know,
a husband or a wife or a mother or a caretaker,
or you can do something that is not economically,
like there are certainly examples of people
who live perfectly fulfilled lives,
probably much greater than a lot of us who have engaged in the job economy,
who are not economically productive.
I like to phrase the job economy.
I'm part of the economy, just not the job economy.
I don't have one of those parts.
Otherwise, I'm definitely a part of it.
Still spending it.
That's right.
This whole job thing, though, is a little overrated.
So we kind of jumped over.
This is my fault.
We jump to the happy ending, but let's go through the darkness.
How Chinese of you.
What's that?
The happy ending.
What's that?
The happy ending.
What about that?
They said, how Chinese of you.
I don't understand.
That's a reference to a rub and tug massage place.
I don't think their reference is going to be gone kind of wide.
Give them a very particular audience.
If Augie listens to this, he's definitely.
Okay, if you have one person in mind, fair enough.
But we skip to the happy ending of deflation as abundance and like finding meaning.
But there's some darkness here. So there's a whole chapter kind of on tribalism where we talked about the negative aspects of when we discussed our tribal future. There's an us versus them aspect of ourselves that could come out as part of this.
So part of this thesis that I haven't really discussed too much until now is the social consequences of what happens when deflation and inflation begin their really toxic kind of feedback loop.
Booth believes that we see a rise of populism with leaders blaming an outgroup.
This is partly due to kind of just human psychology.
We discuss that again in our tribal future.
And Booth states in kind of strictly logical fashion at one point that we have a need to form strong bonds and relationships.
we are then formed by the groups that we choose to belong to out of that necessity.
But belonging to one group by necessity means not belonging to another group.
So we've defined ourselves by the group that we adhere to and belong to out of human necessity,
and that again excludes us definitionally from other groups.
We also have certain biases that reinforce those in in-group bias,
that we tend to favor members of our own group, an out-group homogeneity bias,
We tend to think everybody in the out group is the same. Everybody in the in group is gloriously diverse and different and unique and possessed of human dignity.
We are also very susceptible to persuasion. Many ways in which this occurs are lots of research that has been done with brain scans, all of these things.
and people have PhDs in manipulation to try to sell us products.
Things like gamification, where you can make just very seductive,
very enticing the product of playing a video game
to where you feel like it's a meaningful thing that you're doing, right?
You can gamify nearly every process that we do
to make humans become invested in it.
And that's kind of a process of persuasion.
Our tribal mentality and susceptibility to persuasion
is not a good combo than when there is rising inequality due to this pairing of deflation
and inflation. At such a time, leaders will arise who exploit our susceptibilities to persuasion,
gamification, our biases, our in-group mentality, and turn us against the out-group in order to
gain power. And we'll be further divided because our previous rules for cooperation have been
corrupted. We did used to have at some point, maybe, if it's idyllic to say, but we had a type
of capitalism that was maybe pure, a perception that there was a free or fair market system,
which, as we talked about since 2008, that's been vigorously dispelled. We now have crony
capitalism. We now have a corrupted game theory system where you can't cooperate because defection
occurs through a centralized apparatus, right? Some people are rewarded for bad behaviors.
In any case, this book then is about a new paradigm of deflation.
We're going to get a new game to play together,
moving from scarcity to abundance.
We're going to have to figure out how to play that game with those new rules.
There are four ways we can do that.
He talked about Ray Dalio's framework.
One, we can enter austerity.
So when this deflation, prices are going down,
but we're still trying to fuel job growth and pay our debts by inflation.
There's this toxic relationship.
You can enter a stage of austerity.
You can try to spend less.
You can do debt faults and restructuring.
You can do central bank monetary printing,
or you can engage in transfers of wealth like taxes on the rich.
He says you can't really do lever one.
You can't pull that one to try to resolve this whole dilemma we're in
because austerity would create a vicious cycle
and collapse in asset prices and unemployment
because they're being propped up by the spending
that you reduce in periods of austerity, right?
And so this just leads us to Lever 2,
debt restructuring, debt default,
paying to its max, right?
Lever 3 is central bank money spending,
trying to kick the can down the road,
trying to keep the party going.
Lever 4 is transfer of wealth,
suppresses incentive to work, right?
The more that you rob from one person to give to another,
people are going to say, I'm out.
I'm not going to work anymore.
Leverage three and four, also, the money printing
and the transfers of wealth depend on centralized solutions.
That's the bailout, right?
That's the government controls who wins.
People with power will exploit that.
So what should we do then?
We have a rise of populist leader.
We have four bad options.
What's the way out of this game?
so i've been smiling because the way that you were able to break this down i know you haven't
read it but i keep badgering you're gonna fourth freaking you absolutely just like you did a very
good job of summarizing just for content i was actual fourth turning i was badgering lucas about
this i i dare you to listen to podcasts hear the words fourth turning and then have them
It will seem to explain in depth what that actually means other than just like a quick glib allusion to the fourth turning as if it's self-sufficient.
It's because everybody's read it.
They all know what it means except you.
That's how that's what I go through.
You're part of the out group.
I just think it's a thesis that floats around that people haven't adequately kind of engaged with.
The fourth turning is when everything falls apart.
You have the rise of populism.
They blame everybody but themselves.
And then there is potential of the great man who comes, arise and leads you to the promised land.
But it is the winter.
The first turning is the spring.
The second is the summer.
The third is the fall.
And the fourth is the winter.
And the winter is rough.
The winter is death And the winter is destruction Booth did it better than the fourth turning And if you have to add in the seasonal framework i like booth explanation better than the fourth turning you only saying this because you haven read it you can do that that unfair to the fourth
turning it's not it's this very cruel of you yeah i know yes um and so what should we do was your
question and and the answer is there just really is nothing you can do like none of those things
that Dalio actually, that Dalio lists,
none of those things actually work long-term.
There's, again, it's like-
I mean, that default, like number two-
It doesn't work long-term.
If you restart the game in a bad way,
then it doesn't work.
It doesn't work long-term
because then you just play the game again
and you default again
and you play the game again
and you default again.
This is why in my intro, I said,
you know, to think that you could
somehow get your way out of this
would be to watch 4,000 consecutive sunsets,
which would be to watch 4,000 government currencies die,
and then to sit there and look at the sun on this one particular day and go,
oh, it's just never going to go down.
Like it is absurd to think that there's anything you can do.
There's nothing you can do.
You can let the debt clear from the system.
That's what a debt default is, right?
Letting the debt clear from the system is austerity,
which is the complete collapse of the economy.
Yeah.
I mean,
it's a thing we can do and that's ultimately what Booth endorses.
Yeah.
But no one will ever do it.
It will happen by default.
Right.
One thing,
something has to happen.
Like,
so like,
I mean,
we're going to,
people are going to have forced austerity because they're going to be so
poor because the money is going to inflate so much that they can't.
And this is going to cause populism to be even worse because they're not
just going to be in it with everybody else.
It's going to be them, and they're going to be so poor
that they can't afford to buy a candy bar.
And then there's going to be the Bitcoiners,
and they're going to have a lot of capital,
and they're going to be fine.
And so this is going to further widen the divide
and cause even more populism.
And as always, there will always be more have-nots
than there are haves.
Yeah.
Right?
And so there would be more people that are angry and fewer people to defend themselves against it.
And just to spell out the role that Bitcoin might play.
So once we lose, just completely confidence collapses in centralized currency, right?
We see that the game has been rigged.
We don't want to play that game anymore.
The paper that we have is worthless.
Then Bitcoin presents itself as another form of solution, right?
It's decentralized, so no party can manipulate it.
Typically, monies follow the rules of supply and demands.
The governments can manipulate by printing more.
They can manipulate the increased supply, right?
With Bitcoin, you can't because it's a fixed supply.
It can't be manipulated by central governments.
It has a peer-to-peer ledger also with no central control.
The central control has been the problem in the money printing.
It's been the problem in the bailouts.
when you have an open distributed ledger,
people can have security and trust
by verifying transactions with consensus
instead of through the central authority.
And we all know, maybe not all,
but like the other virtues of Bitcoin,
moving across borders seamlessly,
it can be used as a payment system
when currencies fail.
It can also, we talked about networks and platforms,
the value in those, Bitcoin is a network.
It bootstraps, has bootstrapped from zero to something that's monetized.
There are places where the use case is absolutely immediately relevant today, like Venezuela.
And so this is Bitcoin as a potential solution.
And Booth, he's humble in this.
He says, Bitcoin is one possible solution.
I'm not going to sit here and say that I know this is going to be the thing we're going to do.
He makes the case, but says it's one way that this could come about.
We could have a collapse of the system or whatever you want to say and then a reset or whatever.
And then we, you know, use a decentralized currency, I guess.
One thing that Booth did that I've never seen anybody do was comment on the exponential growth of debt that is needed to continue growing the economy.
So he makes the comment that it took like $186 trillion worth of debt to generate like $46 trillion worth of growth or something like that.
And, you know, that was over a time period of like, I don't know, 10 years or something like that.
And so over the, you know, the next 10 years or whatever, it'll take likely because this, I mean, if you look back into the future, it continues to take more and more debt to create the same amount of growth because of the nature of that system of kicking the can down the road, of lowering the interest rates because you're, you're inherently less productive.
because you're taking assets that should not be in production and you're putting them into
production because the cost of doing so is so low. The natural interest rate should reflect
the natural rate of inflation. So the natural interest rate should be around 13%, but instead
it's say four. And so that means that you're just by participating in debt, literally by doing
nothing more than taking a loan against your house and taking that money and putting it into
stocks or whatever, you know, you're just by taking that money, you're already 9% ahead.
And because the real interest rate is, is lower. Um, but anyway, so the thing that he does that
I've never seen anybody else do that really hammers home just how fast this happens. And
To put in reference, he gives the example, you know, 1913, it took 4.2 Deutschmarks to equal $1.
By 1923, 10 years later, it took 4.2 trillion, which was orders of magnitude larger than the entire amount of the German economy had been in 1913.
So this is to say that in the span of a decade, you went from a dollar to buy a loaf of bread to a thousand times the entire gross domestic product of the country to buy the same loaf of bread in terms of nominal, in terms of nominal.
And so, again, this is where I continue to go back to this. This is why I get, I think, so passionate about trying to continue to hammer at different vectors in the hopes that people will understand something about this.
because the difference between then and now
is that then there was no immediate off-ramp
where people could, over the weekend,
seeing their currency lose value,
immediately dump it all for Bitcoin,
which, by the way, would have accelerated that
instead of going from 4.2 to 4.2 trillion in a decade,
it probably would have taken, who knows,
Three years, five years, one year.
And so that is to say that what we have are historical examples of how this happens so fast that it catches the entirety of the country off guard.
And that's when there was no alternative.
And now there is an alternative.
And so the presumption should be that it happens much faster, exponentially faster.
Yeah. So, yeah, just just I I really appreciated that he put that framing in there because everybody's always commenting on the actual amount of the debt.
But nobody I had ever seen took the framework or the approach of this is how much debt it took to create this much growth in this time frame, which means that in the next time frame, in the next epoch, it will take exponentially more debt to create the same amount of growth.
Yeah, that was really good for me. I kind of left that out in the summaries, but that was really interesting.
that, yeah, debt fuels growth
and it takes exponentially more debt
to fuel the same amount of growth.
And growth is not like people,
this is the, we think about growth as good.
Like we think about, oh, my bank account is growing.
Oh, my baby is growing.
My dog is growing.
I'm getting taller.
I'm getting more muscular.
That's growth.
But that's not, this is not growth.
Growth is not what you should desire in a business.
What you should desire is innovation.
Tumor is growing.
The belly is growing.
Yeah, exactly. It's bloat, right?
Yeah.
You know, and this is the problem with public companies because public companies become beholden to stockholders that need quarterly updates.
And so they want monthly and quarterly reports of, oh, we're growing at this rate, we're growing at this rate, and they want that to be consistent.
And so when you're in charge of that company, you have a choice. And the choice is, do I invest in growth, which is linear? I can add another wing to the building, I can fill it with more salesmen, and I can use economies of scale in order to gain an extra 12%. And that's fairly easy to pencil in. I'm fairly certain that I can do that.
um okay we can do that or do i use that same investment to take it over here and say we're
going to try to find a better way to do things yeah and we don't know what that better way is
and we can't put a timeline on it and we can't tell you if it'll work but we can tell you that
If it works, it's going to be that creative destruction.
That it's going to be.
That's why, you know, companies never, companies fail because they're unwilling to kill their own golden goose.
Like the thing that got them there is not the thing that will get them through the next epoch of creative destruction.
But because of that sunk cost fallacy.
Concrete example, Kodak, right?
So Kodak, they double down on film even as the digital camera begins its rise, even though a Kodak employee invented the digital camera, tries to convince them internally that, hey, this is the future.
But again, doubling down on the old way.
And there's just countless examples.
And they had 20 years.
Like he invented in the 70s.
Right.
And they reached their height in 96.
and you know it just yeah you just it's plainly obvious to the people that know what to look for
or in hindsight it's always plain yeah painfully i guess you know i i think that's why there are
people that seem like savants and gods and it's just because they know what to look for
yeah um jeff moose is one of those um you know so he he's done he's done very well at that that's
This is why his move to Noster is one of the things that got me so excited because he talks, he even talks in the book about how understanding kind of what Twitter was allowed him to leverage his small stature simply by being early.
that allowed him to grow a very large stature.
I think, I can't remember how many.
He had a lot of followers on Twitter.
And he left Twitter to go to Noster.
So he basically, he makes the general point
that the first people to a platform,
kind of a first mover advantage.
And what happened in his case is evidently
he wrote an essay from the point of view of a CEO
on LinkedIn about like the necessity of being on Twitter.
It just leads to like many CEOs to go on Twitter
And then also it leads Twitter to put Jeff as like one of the recommended follows on Twitter.
So, yeah, I want to tie together.
This is the last thing in the book.
We kind of jumped to this.
Again, I said this is the potentially happy ending.
What Jeff kind of foresees is like the best case scenario, we might say.
The simple solution, we have those four levers.
The simple solution, we allow ourselves first to accept tech abundance.
It's hard to imagine because of the centrality of careers to our lives.
The careers define us, get relationships from our jobs, we get social status.
We didn't talk about that from our jobs.
Here's the quote that I really liked, a couple of quotes.
The fear, this is from the book here, the fear of a future without those jobs and self-worth
that they bring stops us from imagining a world in which they might not even be required.
Consider this alternative.
Allowing abundance without the jobs might actually open an entirely new enlightenment era where we have time to enjoy the benefits that technology brings.
So accepting tech abundance requires a stop to inflation.
This means either a switch away from our fiat currencies or their collapse and eventually the adoption of a type of money that can't be manipulated.
And again, we talked about Bitcoin might be that type of solution.
You know, it's so it's interesting, like how utopic this is. And it's, you know, the end move. This is a world without jobs, a world where like the potential of every human is potentially realized because people aren't stuck in a cubicle.
People aren't wasting themselves away being fried by the fluorescent buzz of the computers and lights above them.
They're out with friends and family and rich communities doing things that really are what it is to be human.
And so it's just like this is a beautiful ending to a book that's about like deflation and tech and stuff.
This is about what it is to be human.
Yeah, the job, I think, is just a...
I think we'll still have jobs.
I don't think they'll be called jobs, but I think...
Right, define job.
What do you mean by just telling a job?
Right, I think job is the abstraction.
A thing to do.
Yeah, I think job is the abstraction of what...
It's the bastardized version of what we have become...
abused into accepting as a reasonable facsimile of purpose.
Like, the idea, like, you hear people talk about their jobs as though it gives them great joy
being an accountant or an insurance adjuster or working for the postal office or, you know,
what is that actual job by and large it is difficult games of like it's it's complex
paperwork it's just filling out you know yeah this weird form of of a uh of a crossword puzzle
kind of kind of but the the thing that gives them they do i'm not saying that they don't have
purpose what i'm saying is it's not the job that's giving them the purpose it's the interaction with
their fellow human beings and do something for them being needed and contributing and so you know
i think that we'll still i think i think what we'll see is a
is a renaissance of purpose and a renaissance of meaning even though we may not have the job
that previously purported to live in the stead of where meaning and purpose are meant to be.
Yeah. What about social status, though? Status is a very real part of our evolved cognitive
architecture. It's how we compete for mates. It's how we, you know, like, as we evolved as
a social species because status was a way to like mediate our access to resources and reproductive
access or whatever i mean like i that seems how are we going to stand out how are we going to
prove ourselves to others if we don't have an established um well as you said established game
maybe unless we get back to games as ritualized ways of doing that like literally a soccer game
a football game you know literally games of like manual displays of value like playing the guitar
or whatever you know what immediately came to me i mean that could be what came to mind to me was
like being at the network school that was you know like nobody has to do anything there like
you don't have to cook your meals you don't have to do your laundry you don't clean your room
you don't take care like there's no jobs and so but we did have there was status within that
community and i i felt like i felt like i achieved a fairly high status because and owing solely to
that i was just like always willing to help i was just like i would i you know i i just gave of what
I knew I, you know, hang your picture up or help put your bike together or teach you how to swing
a hammer or, you know, these things. And that gave, at least for me, that's how I got status.
And so in a post-job economy or a post-job society, post-economy society, then maybe status just comes from what you contribute to other people directly individually.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
What do you think?
Do you think it's games?
Do you think it's kickball and soccer?
Yeah.
And I began saying status is necessary.
It's an evolved part of our, you know, our like hedonic structure, our value structure.
It's motivational and all these things.
There are other aspects of our interiority that are drives and impulses that are motivational.
and part of those are fulfilling roles in relation to one another,
being a good father, a good son, a good friend.
And maybe there's some status derived from those things.
Attention will always be a finite thing.
We will always be able to devote our attention to somebody
and show them that we care about them for that reason
and gain some status with respect to that person.
And maybe this will be good if we can collapse status economies.
Right now, people develop parasocial relationships with celebrities.
And like we have this really bizarre status economy where you win status for millions of
people you'll never meet.
And that's what people try to do.
Like they create some bizarre Bitcoin study session podcast because they want status beyond
the people that should really matter to them, which people in their actual, the people that
will help them if they're.
tire blows up or if they're feeling sad we made a better example well if they're feeling sad someone
to pat them on the back right the ai is not going to be able to perfectly do that and so yeah i guess
that's what i feel that maybe it'll be good that status will not be an economic idea of scale but
will be reduced again to these very particular relations i mean status is is status only useful
because of scarcity?
Would that be status in order to ensure we have enough scarce resources to survive?
Well, like the purpose of status is to determine who gets access to scarce resources.
There will always be, be it mates or be it whatever.
The mates is the one that's still going to be scarce.
AI can create like the sex bot or something, but that's not what people want
and not what they will compete for.
They may resign themselves to that if they can't get a mate,
but people will still want a real, to know that they're interacting.
Some people, I mean, some people maybe want one.
I mean, if you're living in a button, like we talked about this with like Sal and the talk with Kobe.
About Kobe, not Kobe.
Not the basketball player.
But the, you know, like his...
I was sat with Kobe and Saylor, we were talking.
His observation that, you know, like their true self.
was able to show. And so that was a result of abundance that came to them because he was able
to provide it. So if we extrapolate that over the entirety of, of everyone, then maybe it is that
there, maybe it is that everyone is just that, is just more attractive. Yes, there's always going to
be small differences in people, but right now, a lot of the differences that are in people is like,
you're you're not physically attractive because you don't have access to food and you don't like
good healthy food and you don't have access to uh gym equipment you don't have access to
role models and you don't have those people are horrible by the way i've i've been seeing
i've been seeing pictures of before and after and yeah just hides before it's just like
bone, like, sagging, skin sagging.
It doesn't look good.
Because it destroys muscle mass.
Does it?
A zympic, yeah.
Yeah.
And so that's, like, the trade-off that you make.
That will be counteracted by another thing or drug.
You shoot them up with DPC-157, which highly metastasizes cancer cells.
So, yeah, that'll be good.
You get skinny and weak, and then you get strong, and then you get cancer.
Yeah, I will say this.
But anyways, what I'm trying to say here is that in an age of abundance, the things that currently create the need for us to compete, even for mates, a lot of that I think would be leveled out if we grow up in abundance with access to perfect health care and, you know, great food and all that stuff.
Like, you know, like the comment has been made, like basically anyone who is 10% body fat is attractive. Like it's pretty hard to not be attractive and be in shape. Right. And so that's like a huge part of it. Like, let's not like, let's not ignore the fact that, you know, 60% of America, I think is diabetic or pre-diabetic.
diabetic and, you know, the average woman in America has gained, I think, 60 pounds since
a hundred years ago, went from like 110 pounds to like 170. Um, and it's about the same for men.
Um, and so like, I, you know, maybe there is just less need for competition because we are more,
I don't know, because there is less difference between us.
One thing that I wanted to just kind of riff on was in Jonathan Haidt's book, he talks about the difference between needs of males and females.
We both need both of these things, but males skew more towards agency, which is the side-by-side companionship and shoulder-to-shoulder.
and females skew more towards communion.
Disclosure-based.
Disclosure-based, yeah.
And so, why was I bringing that up?
Oh, was that these are both avenues by which we pursue social status,
that men pursue social status as an athlete
and women pursue social status through popularity.
Like these are kind of the things in, say, junior high when these are most prevalent and most pervasive, I guess.
So I don't know.
The more egalitarian that things become, assuming they will, assuming that like there are overlords who control the AI and in some way can squander the abundance for themselves or something like that.
More egalitarianism.
There is like the tyranny of small differences.
is I wish there's some sort of study or famous anecdote of like a religious order and they're
all they all have to wear the same thing they all have to eat the same meals they all live in very
humble quarters and then one of them gets like a small favor over everybody else yeah and the
enmity there is this is like school uniforms yeah that type of thing so like egalitarianism will
always any sort of way to discriminate a difference between somebody is going to be used as a point
an advantage or disadvantage. It's just like human nature, I believe. But I don't know. This is where
we're headed. These are perennial questions, sorting out one's status as such, one's personal
relationship to status, meaning as such, one's relationship to meaning. These are going to become
more and more vital and relevant as the jobs crumble, the inefficiencies are remedied by
something that is not us. So I was just having these questions, having a talk like this today
with the person who cut my hair.
These are conversations we are having in the street.
Anybody who has used AI in the workplace
has a premonition of where it's going.
You don't have to, like, Booth's argument is great,
but you almost don't even need to read it.
You can see where this thing is going.
And so these conversations are happening now
and people should fortify themselves.
People should find secure sources of meaning.
People really should consider these things.
Booth's book is a great way and a broad framework to do that.
The ending, he doesn't, you know, dilate on the thesis too much.
It is at the end where he says, you settle in, relax into abundance, accept it.
But yeah, we're going to work this thesis out in real time shortly.
Yep.
Frank Outlaw.
Jeff Booth puts this quote on page 165.
He says it's his longtime favorite quote by Frank Outlaw in 1977.
And it's a reminder that most of our time is spent within our own heads.
So it makes sense that how we interpret our thoughts leads to many of the other things that we experience.
Outlaw says, watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they become actions.
watch your actions they become habits watch your habits they become character
watch your character for it becomes your destiny
so the last thing i'll say is that you live in the world that you create in your own mind
and so you can live in a world of abundance you can live in a world of scarcity
regardless of what's going on around you.
But there is a great potential
that we will all experience a world of abundance
in reality as well.
So, all right on.
That's it, man.
Thank you for this conversation.
Thank you, Mr. Booth, for this lovely book.
And thanks for having us listened.
I hope, yeah, you've got something from this
and, you know, contribute back.
Let us know what you thought of the book.
Yeah.
Konnichiwa.