It's inevitable that socialism will happen in America, but I don't want to lose my agency, my liberty, my freedom.
Do you think the US as an empire is in decline?
The answer is yes. I was appointed to President Trump's Council of Advisers in Science and Technology. And one of the great lies is that the government will save you. But the more government has tried to create services for people and help bring them up the ladder, the more expensive those things get. 63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. People can't afford to pay their bills and it needs to be fixed. What will ultimately happen? So, all my politician friends are about to chop my head off about this, but...
David Friedberg, what is the most important subject of our time?
AI. We're entering this golden age, and people don't realize we're in it. And I don't buy into the narrative that Dario, Elon, and Sam end up having all the value in AI because in the next 10 years, there will be a billionaire that will emerge that has zero net worth today, downloaded open-sourced AI, and built a company that made them a billionaire. And they're going to be someone that's going to come from nowhere. And there's going to be a lot of these sorts of stories.
But this narrative that AI will take jobs away, you don't believe it.
So from data, from evidence over all periods of technological revolution like this, we've never seen jobs decline. And the average person doesn't see it. But oh my god, the stuff we can do is unbelievable. Right now we have a billion people in the world that are starving. We have hundreds of millions dying from curable disease. These are the sorts of things that are going to get resolved because AI unleashes this capacity for human advancement and it's transforming every aspect of biology and our understanding of life sciences.
So I wanted to ask you, do you think we're going to be able to live forever soon? The truth is...
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David Friedberg, you're someone that graces lots of different subjects. If you were to sort of self-define who you are and what you do, now this is difficult because you've got to kind of put yourself in a label here. What would that label be? How would you self-categorize yourself?
I would say I'm deeply curious about the world and the universe and how it works and why it works the way it does. And I'm a big believer in human agency to affect the universe around us. And that's kind of my core kind of driving motivation. A lot of the other stuff ancillary is about how do you enable that? And I think that that's sort of probably where I also spend some time is in the enablement of those things.
Got a nice cute photo here of that kid that wanted to be Einstein.
And then as it relates to how that manifested into like a professional journey, what's your professional journey been for anyone that might not know?
I started in college majoring in math and physics and then I changed my major to astrophysics and it was during the time I was in college is when the dot-com boom happened in the heart of Silicon Valley. There was a kid in my dorm room who started a website selling DVDs online and he sold it for a million dollars in our junior year of college. That was like an unbelievable unfathomable amount of money. And so there was this change that was happening in the world. And I got enamored with this idea of businesses and how do you use businesses to change the world, not just use scientific discovery as a method to change the world. So I decided to go work in Silicon Valley. I interviewed for jobs. I didn't get a lot of offers, but I played a lot of poker during my college days. It's how I was able to make money. I read all the strategy books on playing poker. I actually spent a year working in a pool hall and the manager of the pool hall and the bookie invited me to their home poker game. Took all my money that I made at the pool hall. I was making four bucks an hour, $4.25 an hour. And so I was like, I'm going to learn poker. So I learned it. That's how I made money. And I put that on my resume when I applied for jobs after college. And I got interviews with investment banks. And the investment banks were like, oh, we want to talk to a kid that knows how to play poker. Cuz this was before internet poker, before ESPN poker. So it was like an interesting thing. And so I ended up getting a job working in investment banking and then worked on tech companies. So then I got to learn business, finance, accounting, mergers and acquisitions, all this sort of stuff. And then I ended up working at Google. I worked at Google when it was started when it was just under a thousand employees and I left a couple years later started a business called the Climate Corporation and so I've been in Silicon Valley my whole career.
And that company you end up starting does pretty well.
That one we sold in 2013, so we sold it for a little over a billion dollars which was a great outcome for investors and shareholders and today, you know, it's software for farmers. And today that software is now owned by Bayer which is the big kind of pharma/ag company. It's used across 200 million acres every year. That's a pretty sizable amount of farmland that uses that software still. So yeah, it's done fairly well.
So I'm 33 now. You were 33 when you sold that?
33. A lot of money, 1.1 billion. And you've done lots of other things since then, which we can go into. But you've also, I think from March this year, you were appointed as an adviser to Donald Trump.
Yeah, I was appointed to President Trump's Council of Advisers in Science and Technology.
What does that mean in reality?
So, if you look back in the last couple administrations, there have been different themes over time on who is appointed to PCAST. In historical context, like Bill Clinton had a PCAST that was set up just for the internet.
President's Council of Advisers in Science and Technology.
And so, he set one up focused on the internet. And this current PCAST under this administration is heavy in AI. So it's like Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andreessen, Sergey Brin, that's kind of the cohort that's on this advisory council, but it's always included folks that are involved in things like biotechnology, sciences, and to help guide science policy for the administration. So it involves having conversations with people in the administration on things that are happening in industry, things that are happening on the frontiers of science and technology to help guide some of the policy decisions that the administration is trying to create or enforce.
And what is the most important subject of our time?
And right now the big question in the United States from a policy perspective seems to be the regulation of AI. What role should the government play in determining where AI goes, how it gets built, how it gets deployed, who gets to use it, who owns it, where the value lies?
A lot of these factions that emerge inside a government even today on the same political party on whether or not for example to allow Chinese open-source models to be used by American businesses. You know these Chinese models are as good as or in many cases better than private American models and because they're open weights you can download them and run them on any computer you want that works. A lot of companies want to use those because they're cheap. There you can pay effectively 50 cents for a million tokens of output which is a measure of how productive the model is. You know this is a token is kind of like a word versus $50 from Anthropic which is a private model. So the question is do we allow these Chinese models to kind of become ubiquitous in industry and if so what does that do to American AI? What does that do to our capacity to compete? Is there security risk? So there's a lot of this kind of debate underway. And that I think is probably the hot topic today. I don't know if it's the hot topic tomorrow, but today that's kind of the big thing. But all of this this administration I think from a science and technology policy perspective will probably be viewed as on the one hand what's the enablement acceleration regulation of AI and on the other hand you know there's this question still on what is science today in an era of AI science is also changing and so there's this kind of I think big shift underway.
We'll go into those subjects specifically the subjects on AI and everything that it interfaces with but I think it's important also to get kind of like a backdrop of the economic state and like the social state of the nation because all of these things feed into these big questions on AI and they also inform everyone's biases on this subject because if you're at a different sort of socioeconomic position or if you're feeling a different thing your perspective on AI is going to be radically different. So if we started then first on like if we just focus on the United States which in some respects is a little bit of a proxy for the rest of the western world. Where is the United States at at this moment in time in terms of is it on the rise inequality? What are the sort of pertinent factors here that help us understand the backdrop of this nation?
The biggest drivers for this nation at the moment in terms of what public policy and private markets will do is number one the unaffordability crisis.
63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They don't have enough savings to pay for a fiscal emergency in their household. 63% of Americans and the cost of things is rising faster than wages are increasing. So things feel less affordable to most Americans. And then there's this wealth inequality concern which I would say is both kind of a perception issue. There's definitely policy issues that has allowed it to happen and we can talk about those. But I think America is in this kind of crisis of classism, this crisis of us versus them. And it manifests in a lot of different ways. So, you know, you had Ray Dalio on, and if you think about Ray Dalio's kind of like cycle of empires, you know, this is this idea that there's been six empires in the last 500 years and the United States is on the decline and China's on the rise. And it can be measured across a number of different dimensions. One of which is this crisis of internal struggle which manifests often with external struggle, the Iran war. Like why can't we stop having external wars? Well, you know, a nation that's happy with itself generally doesn't go to war. A nation that's not happy generally does go to war. And so, a lot of this stuff gets tied up, I think, in this economic distress that the United States is feeling. My contention, which may not be very popular, is that the more government has tried to create services for people and help bring them up the ladder the more expensive those things get.
Policy in the United States and this is one of the great lies and I think there's a series of great lies in US policy over the last half century but one of the great lies is that the government will save you the government will help you by giving you these essential services that you want more of education healthcare housing and as the government has entered into those markets because remember there are people making those things offering those services and there's someone paying for it so as the government enables more money to flow into those markets, the cost of those things has just gone up. And you can see how this plays out, for example, in education. So higher education, if you want to go to college in the United States, and I'll just give you a statistic. 30 years ago, administrative staff were like 10% of colleges. Today, they're like 60%. In just 30 years, give me a rational reason why we should have 6x the administrative staffing at colleges and universities. There isn't a good reason why. The real reason is that because the federal student loan program doesn't discriminate against a university on how well they do with their graduating students or the degree or the individual that's taking out the loan. The federal student loan program has just allowed more money to flow in to universities. Now, if you're a university administrator, there's no constraint on how much you can charge for tuition. So, hey, we'll raise tuition 5% this year. We'll raise it 8%. We'll raise it 10%. And we'll hire more people. And if people hire more people, they get a higher salary. If you think about the individual, I don't get to make more salary until I'm a manager. Now I want to be a director. Now I want to be a senior director and the organization grows. That's very natural for any organization whether it's a nonprofit, a university or a private company. You want to grow and people want to make more money year after year. So they because they can collect more money can charge more for tuition. There isn't a natural market force that says your tuition is too high now because the government has provided unlimited funding to higher education through the federal student loan program. So, as a result, education has gotten so vastly expensive that everyone now looks at it and says, "We got to do something about this." And both parties seem to say, "Well, here's what the government's going to do to do more." And it's like putting fuel on the fire. So, the challenge right now is people are feeling left behind. There's massive wealth inequality. Things are extremely unaffordable. And the solution that's being embraced is for the government to do more, which de facto leads to socialism.
What is wrong with socialism?
I would argue that the key measure of a country's success is how many people are transitioning from labor to capital each year.
That means every year I'm working paycheck to paycheck. I'm collecting check. I graduated college. I had $19,000 in debt. I went and worked. I got paid. I saved up. I paid down my debt. I was able to get out of it. Then I worked at Google. We had an IPO. Suddenly I had assets. I had stuff. I had money in the bank account. And it was like an incredible moment for me. And I said, I could live off that money. I don't need to live off a paycheck every month. I now have savings. I have assets. That is capital. And everyone talks about capital versus labor. But the real advantage of America is enabling people to go from labor to capital. Every individual that works, saves, invests, does whatever they need to do to accumulate enough capital ends up in the capital bucket. And then you're no longer stuck needing to go paycheck to paycheck to pay your bills. That's the dream. That's the real American dream. It's not just about owning a house. If you own a house and you have a bunch of debt and you got insurance payments to make and you still got to work every month to make those payments, you're not necessarily living the American dream yet. The American dream is being freed of that burden.
Because you can live off the interest of your assets.
That's right. And so you're earning income. You like, let's say you have $100,000, you know, saved and you can make 10% a year on that. That's 10,000 bucks. Suddenly, if you get to a million dollars saved, you can make $100,000 a year and you can live on that. That's economic security. That's financial security. That's what we should give to every American is the ability to own assets that give them freedom to choose what they want to do in their life rather than be stuck in work. And the problem with socialism is it takes away that transition moment. It eliminates it because it says everyone has to be labor all the time for the rest of their lives. And then no one has freedom. And that's what America was founded on was this ability to find through freedom of choice, through agency, the ability to transition from labor to capital. And I think our goal as a country should be get 2% of Americans across that line every year, then I think we'll be successful going forward. But if everything's all about like give people more stuff and have the government do it, we're just going to keep raising the debt, making things more expensive, inflating the cost away, and it's inevitable that socialism will happen in America. It's absolutely inevitable.
Do you think the US as an empire is in decline?
In terms of the power of the dollar, in terms of prosperity of Americans? The average American or majority of Americans the answer is yes. But the potential hasn't been deleted meaning decline is not inevitable to be very clear like we are not yet at a point where it's a runaway train. In the history of democracies, there's never been a place like America where an individual like myself, you know, moving here from South Africa, going to public college, graduating with debt, and then being able to work my way out of the debt and find myself in the position I'm in today with no nepotism, with no handouts, with I mean, you could argue about privilege and all these other sorts of things that I was vested over my life. But like, it's an amazing place that that sort of story can be told a million times over, that there's not just one or two people that this has happened to, but there's millions of people. The problem is it's all the other hundreds of millions that didn't get to live that opportunity. And if we can fix that, America is not in decline. America is a prosperous nation and has centuries ahead of it.
When you look at this, you're talking about runaway trains. When you look at the national debt, though, it does look very much like a runaway.
Want to know where inflation comes from? That's where inflation comes from. By printing more dollars to pay for that debt, which is what happens, the Federal Reserve buys the debt and they issue dollars to the bank system to buy the debt from the government. Remember, the Federal Reserve is separate from the government. So, the Federal Reserve can print dollars. They can send dollars to banks and now the banks can loan money out and it makes its way into the economy. Now, there's more dollars in the economy and that money was, you know, owed back to the government at some point, but the Federal Reserve may never get paid back. They may just keep adding and adding and adding and adding and they're just printing more and more dollars.
So I don't understand the force that's going to intervene to stop this sort of compounding debt.
The outcome of this is socialism. That's the moment we're in right now. That's why we're seeing this wave of socialism. I've been saying for five years, we're going to face a wave of socialism. And after Donald Trump was elected, my prediction for the next year was that the next wave in politics in America will be socialism. And people thought I was crazy. And I'm like, it is absolutely inevitable. If you look at this, this is where we're headed. It is de facto socialism when the government employs roughly half of the people of the United States. Right now, if you look at all the federal, state, local agencies, so the people that are employed, the people that are contractors of those agencies, and then the people that live off of some sort of government pension or social security system, the total amount is close to 50% of Americans. So, we're getting to a point where people are like, the only place I can go is more money from the government. And then eventually the government becomes the whole economy.
If the outcome of socialism was the cause, capitalism?
It's a great question. I think it was capitalism plus policies. Let's say you have a million dollars.
You're making, say, 10% a year. Next year you have $1.1 million. The next year you have $1.21 million or whatever. And you keep adding it up. That's called compounding. After a couple of years, your million dollars turns into $10 million. And you never have to sell shares along the way. You can just own the shares and whatever's going up. Your value just keeps going up. You've never paid taxes along the way. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And suddenly, fast forward a couple years, instead of having a million, you've now got 10. That's capital compounding over time. Meanwhile, if you're working, every paycheck, taxes are taken out. Every time you get a check, every time you get more money, more capital, taxes are taken out. So, if you don't get capital, if you don't get enough savings to allow you to compound, you are never going to get there. So, from a tax policy perspective, labor working for your money should have never been taxed higher than earning returns on your capital.
So you're saying tax the rich?
I'm saying tax capital at a rate that's equivalent to labor.
Wealth taxes are asset seizures. Definitely no. So one of the principles of the United States and the principle of what this country was founded on is private property rights. If you go back to England, right, like 500 years or like let's just talk Europe broadly. There were very few places where you as an individual citizen had rights to own private property. There were very few places where you could say I have this thing and it doesn't belong to the king or it doesn't belong to whatever the local lord is. Like everything was the property of the lords of the higher class of the upper class. It was endowed to them as vested to them by birthright for centuries. Same in Asia, same in the Middle East, same in Africa. I mean like every nation started out with this system where people didn't have rights to private property. Those who had kind of these systems above could decide who got what. So the United States was founded on one of the principles of private property for an individual that you know I think when they were drafting the Declaration of Independence it was about life liberty and the pursuit of property and they later changed it to pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of property was really the measure of what you've accumulated as an individual. You now have a right to accumulate things. You now have a right to build value to build wealth to build a house and have your family in your house and have all these things. That was a principle of the United States. I'm all for taxes when people transact. When they turn their stock that they've held for a couple years into cash and buy something with it, boom, tax. You get taxed on that. If that's the right model, that's when you should get taxed, right? Then when you're able to turn that asset that you own into another asset. So that's what we do today. That's an income tax or a capital gains tax, like when you realize that gain. But if I go into your shares and I'm like, "Hey, I'm going to take 5% of your shares." What are you losing? Well, you can't use those shares to buy anything because as soon as you try and buy something, you owe tax on those shares. So, by taking away your shares before you've actually transacted with them, before you've actually sold them, or taking away your private property, your home, or giving the government the right to come in your garage and audit everything you own, and say, "Hey, this year we're doing a 2% tax" that is antithetical to what the United States was founded on, which was a founding principle of private property. Now, if your property goes up in value, and then you eventually turn it into some other property, that's a transaction. And that's when you get taxed. That's how the system's set up. So if we have an issue with people having too much wealth, that's the moment to increase the tax rate. That's capital gains tax, income tax on high earners. Those two things can get you 97% of the way there. And you're not really going to gain much. You know, separately, we can kind of talk about the numbers on this, but like tax the rich, all for it, but tax the rich when they transact, when they sell, when they have a capital gain, if they borrow against their assets. This is another thing that's wrong about our system today. If I'm very wealthy, I own a bunch of stock and I've never sold any of the stock. If I borrow against my stock to go buy a yacht, I don't pay taxes. That should be a taxable event. We should fix that. That's an easy fix in the tax system. I'm not taking away your private property, but as soon as you borrow against that, it's effectively like transacting on that property. So, that's a moment to pay a tax. And if we think that the rich aren't paying enough taxes, you can raise income tax or capital gains taxes to get them to pay more.
This is what I was going to say, but you arrived at it was most people that own stock in big companies will just borrow against their stock and they never pay a tax. I didn't know this until I was I'm going to say 26. And my company had gone public and this bank in Europe approached me and said, "By the way, we'll give you 20% of whatever the value of the stock you have in my company called Ocean AG is a tax-free loan." I was like, "Explain this to me. So, you'll just send me millions of pounds and I don't have to pay tax."
You don't have to sell your shares.
You don't have to sell anything. I said, "Well, look at the rest of my portfolio." And I had some Facebook stock at the time. They're like, "We'll give you 50% to 60% loan to value on that. I.e., if you have a million dollars of Facebook stock, we will transfer you today 700 grand tax-free and I can do whatever I want with it." I thought, "Fucking hell, this is what the rich do."
That's exactly right. And the truth is that no one talks about behind closed doors. Everyone knows that it needs to change, but no one wants to say it because...
Yeah, it's got to change.
What's interesting about that is say that I have 10 million of Facebook stock and I take a loan and they give me 5 million in cash. What a rich person then does is they take that 5 million and they go and buy other assets.
And then they start acquiring more and more assets. That's what's unfair about the system because then when you have capital, you're accumulating more capital while labor, if you haven't crossed that chasm from labor to capital, you're still here grinding every month, grinding every week, trying to pay your freaking bills, and then these guys have all these shenanigans that are going on.
Yeah, it is wrong and it needs to be fixed. The answer though is not taking private property. As soon as you start taking private property, those gates are open. By the way, it's not even going to be constitutional in the United States. The fifth amendment has this takings clause. You know, it's legally like not going to win in federal court. It could work in some states. Some states there's seven states that actually have a constitutional ban on private property tax like this. There's you know 43 states where it's game on and we'll see how they play out in the courts as they try to pass these wealth taxes as well. But these are asset seizure taxes. You can have a wealth tax by raising capital gains, make high income or high asset people pay more taxes or whatever when they sell stuff or when they buy stuff. There's a lot of ways to tax wealth. But taking assets from people after they've paid their taxes or before they've paid their taxes is not the right way to do it.
What will ultimately happen?
So the ultimate outcome will be that 51% of people will say, "Hey, give me all the stuff that the 49% have." What would stop them from doing that? Because ultimately you can take as much as you want from a minority of people and distribute it to the majority. And that minority starts out with a few billionaires, then a couple more 50 millionaires, then a couple more 10 millionaires, then millionaires, then 100,000. And there's no limit to where this thing goes. And that is socialism.
And what does that do in terms of how talent moves and how people, you know, move to different places?
I know billionaires. Many of them have moved or are planning to move out of California.
Just on the threat of this.
And people say, "F them. Good riddance. Get rid of them." You know, the top 1% of taxpayers in California pay the majority of taxes in the state. I think it's probably it's definitely north of 40%, but it's probably the majority.
The top 1% of earners pay 40 to 50% of California's total personal income tax depending on stock market capital gains performance.
There you go. So, that 1% are the people I'm talking about that are leaving the state because they see where this is headed. I don't think California wants that. Those are very productive people for the state. They're people that create companies that hire people that pay well, go to fancy restaurants, pay for cars. I mean, they support the economy. It's not just the taxes, but they're a big part of capital flowing through the economy. We saw this happen in France. You know, France had this wealth tax and then their total tax revenue declined by more than they were making on the wealth tax because everyone left France. Then they stopped doing the wealth tax and everyone came back and the income came back. So, this is a well-studied kind of case. So, I don't think that a wealth tax or an asset seizure tax is the solution. I think we've got to fix all the other stuff that we've talked about and we've got to fix the government spending problem. And if we can do those two things, then I think we can bring inflation down. We can bring the wealth inequality down and give more people the ability to make that transition. But I do think every politician should be talking about the focus on what percent of people in the United States every year are moving from labor to capital. How many people can say, "Hey, I've got enough cash to retire if I wanted to." That's what we want to try and get everyone towards. Not just convincing people, and this is one of the great lies, convincing everyone that the great American dream is to own a house. When owning a house for a lot of Americans ends up putting all your capital in one asset, and you've got to basically get the price of housing to go up every year to keep everyone moving up the ladder. So now, fast forward 30, 40, 50 years, young people can't afford to buy a house anymore because we've pushed the asset value up so much to try and make sure that everyone's got good household wealth.
We are told that I mean that's the sort of central idea once you leave university is to figure out how quickly you can get a mortgage or buy a house.
Great lie. It's one of the great lies. And there's a lot of countries where people have been able to accumulate capital and jump that ravine from labor to capital much more quickly when they don't buy a house because they can invest in stuff. They can buy, you know, the S&P 500 which you can just buy on an E-Trade or Robinhood account and you can just own it on average will make you 10, 11% a year. You just put your money in that you're making 10, 11% a year and it can go up every year and you don't have to pay taxes. You don't have to pay property tax. You don't have to pay insurance. You don't have to deal with repairs and maintenance. All that sort of stuff. So, a lot of people would have been better off, depending on the markets that they're in. There's some markets that ballooned, but a lot of people would have been better off over the last 30 years, actually owning the S&P 500 than owning their home and paying for the rent on a home.
One of the things I see in the comment section whenever someone makes that point is you'll have someone who bought a house 20 years ago saying, "Well, listen, I bought a house 20 years ago for this amount, and now it's worth this." And this is every single time that I see this argument being made from financial advisors or investors, that is always the top comment is, "Well, I bought one and I did good."
Yep. It actually indicates a problem, which is if your house went up in price so much, that house is much less affordable to a young person that's going to buy it next. And that's what we fundamentally done with this asset class, residential real estate. We've created a system whereby residential real estate prices go up so much and there's a whole bunch of policies around making this happen.
Got a graph here showing all the things that have gone up and you can see housing is one of them.
Yeah. The stuff on the bottom the government doesn't touch. The stuff on the top the government touches. And so the more the government's involved, the more expensive these things get. But all of the policy around residential real estate has allowed the middle class in America, which has the majority of wealth, and I'll give you the statistics in a minute, to grow their asset base, to accumulate more assets, to become wealthier. All the boomers, they're so wealthy because they owned all these houses. And now young people graduating college can't afford a house. It is a bad fact that a lot of people got very wealthy by owning a home because it means that the next generation is going to say, "I want socialism cuz I can't afford a home." That's the moment we're in. 40 million Americans graduated from colleges in the United States in the last 10 years. 45 million. So if you do the math on this, that's a large number of people that are now on average encumbered with some amount of student debt, facing a challenging job market. And then the only way to buy a home is you got to come up with a million bucks. And you know, it leads to this problem where everyone's like, "Man, I need mom and dad."
So what would you say then to people that are in that 62%, was it...
And that statistic changes year to year but that's roughly the number 63% of Americans you know less than $500 of savings and working paycheck to paycheck and can't pay for a fiscal emergency.
So for those people the 63% who you're telling them that buying a house is now like unaffordable and also it's potentially not a good investment if they're trying to sort of cross that chasm and get over to the side where they have assets. What would your prescription be for them? What should they do?
Man, that's a great question. People will challenge it, but I would have never thought that podcasting would be such a massive business. I would have never thought that being an Instagram influencer would be such a massive business or a TikTok influencer. I would have never thought that individual artists could publish online and make money without getting a record deal. I would have never thought that individual artists would be able to sell their work and make a living on eBay and Etsy. I would have never thought that craftspeople would be able to find jobs through the internet. I think the internet has been this incredible enabler of millions of new ways to work, of new ways to earn an income. And a lot of people will roll their eyes and say, "But that's not what the system was supposed to have set me up for. The system failed us." Maybe the system did fail you. And maybe the government's solution wasn't the right solution, but human agency is what got all these people there. They all got to this place. Did the government give you your job as a podcaster? Did the government teach you how to podcast and build this incredible media empire that you've built? I don't know if the government played much of a role in it. I think you played the role in it. I don't know. You tell me if I'm wrong. But I think that this is really important for a lot of people to observe firstly, which is the government isn't going to save you.
individuals. The government's going to make things harder for individuals to find their path. If I have to go and start a barber shop, I got to go get all these cosmetology licenses. I got to go figure out a way to go to school, pay thousands of dollars, get health inspections done. There's a lot of government layers that stop me from doing that work. There's a lot of ways that the government actually inhibits people's agency and makes it harder for them to do the things that they want to do and progress. I think that's just fundamental for me, one of the observable truths. But I think the second thing is I never discount human agency. There was this great podcast done years ago by those guys at the Hoover Institute where they talked about the success of China and a lot of people, you know, where China grew GDP per capita from like 3,000 to 30,000 or whatever it was and they're like, 'Man, Chinese central planning is brilliant. They're so good at this.' And these guys made the argument which I discounted at the time but I often think about nowadays that it was actually the agency of the individual choice, the entrepreneurship, the drive, the motivation of the population of the individuals in China, not central planning, but basically the government enabled free markets. They allowed people to work. They allowed people to trade. They allowed people to create value for each other to do something that someone else might want. They looked around and they said, 'I think you want this.' and they started making it and when the government loosened the shackles on individuals that population grew the economy and the government still has a big role in central planning in China but it was a really important point if you think about all the success that's come from the United States it's not a central message that the government said let's do this and then we're going to do this and we're going to do this it's individuals making their own choices you've seen what people want to learn what people want to watch what they're interested in and you give it to them you create value for them you deliver that value and you've earned something from that people are willing to pay for that. And I think that that's core to kind of where we can go from here. And I don't think we teach it in schools. I don't think we teach it as a value. We've lost that value of agency. The importance of the individual taking their own action. Every conversation we have in every freaking context is all about the freaking government. Government this, do this, do this, do this, do this. For me, what individuals can do is limitless. And that's where I think we fall short. Every day someone should ask themselves, I tell my kids this, but what did you do today that someone else valued? And if you focus on figuring out something that you can do that someone else can value, then you do that over and over again, rinse and repeat. I think there's paths for people.
So, couple of counter-arguments here. Yeah. So, we can stress test this thinking. Um, you pointed at me and said I was, you know, I started podcasts, I started businesses, those businesses grew. Um, and it was, you know, you were very generous in giving me probably more credit than I deserve there. But if I was to, if I was to rebuttal that, I would say, I was born in Africa. Would that have been possible in Africa? Would that have been possible in like Nigeria, where my mother's from, or would it been possible in Botswana where I was born? Is it the fact that I moved to the UK where I had this sort of foundation of stability because of the government where school was free for us? Healthcare is taken care of. So I never had to think about those things which allowed me at 18 years old to like not go to university, take a risk, drop out, be in that room. No. When I was sat in that room in Manchester, I actually at one point printed off the jobseekers allowance forms, which are basically the government will give me free money if I if I get to the point where my shoplifting of pizzas is no longer a reliable way to feed myself.
But I had that form on my desk and it was there. And there's maybe something psychological about knowing that I had this sort of like underlying safety net where I could rush back a 300 mile round trip to my parents in Plymouth and I could like live in the house or I could fill out this form, this job seekers allowance form and they would like pay me money that allowed me maybe at some deeper level to go and take that risk. And I never even realized the privilege of like, oh, there's like healthcare and there's laws and there's roads and there's like this Wi-Fi thing that allows me with this laptop in my room to like build this website that I built. Um, so that's the government's involvement in my success. They gave me this great foundation of stability and infrastructure.
Great. Great role for government to play.
But the problem is that's a slippery slope, right?
And so there's balance here. There's nuance of like personal agency, but then also the government, do you need to give me a good foundation?
and the government shouldn't employ you. And that's the slippery slope that we end up on. And that's where I worry about our ability to come back from that because if you do end up with 40, 50% of Americans getting paid some check from the government, it becomes very hard to get off of that check. And then people vote for that check to get bigger and bigger.
The other point I wanted to point out of maybe a counterpoint is just like, and you know this cuz I've heard you say this before, but like there is a privilege that we both have in terms of our just
Nature, nurture, whatever it might be. Yeah. And I I said nature because yeah upbringing implies that our parents were great to us and that's what made us whatever. But also the opposite can be true if you think about someone like Elon Musk. You go his dad wasn't that nice to him. So not necessarily a lovely upbringing but the circumstances
he was never without a meal and neither was I. And I mean you know those are important facts of privilege.
The circumstances of the of our upbringing and maybe our nature, maybe our biology, maybe set us up to be the certain type of person where agency, however that's defined. And again, I I pause there because
I think you're exactly right and I think that that's what education should be teaching that value that that's that's where I think this role of like what's the role of a public school? What's the role of this infrastructure that government's building around us? If it's teaching you that your next job is to come and work for the city or come and work for the state, it's not teaching you that you have agency. It's not telling you if you if it's telling you that the only path you're going to have coming out of this rural school is to go work in the military, it's not teaching you about your agency. And I'm not saying it's wrong to do civil service or to do military service. I think those are very important parts of what all of us should strive to do is to support the government that makes our society possible. But I think that this idea that we should all be proposed as like the government role, the government path, the government work is what we should all be stuck doing for the rest of our lives is the wrong setup.
The opposite is though also probably the wrong setup which is that we should all start a business or become a creator.
I think that's a mistake too. But I think that this idea that you can find a path where you can provide value to someone as part of an organization as as an individual as a leader you can choose your path. But the idea that you should be accessing your capacity that you can create value for someone else should be the objective.
Do you think there's always going to be inequality?
Yes. I mean it's either inequality or it's lack of progress. I think those are the
That's the dance. So China's very good at this. If you watch their their policy, they just recently shifted to a free market policy. They literally just have like a throttle. Uh, I always vision AI has this lever in his big room where he goes like free market, not free market. Like he's just kind of like rolling it back and forth. When you have a free market, people push the frontier. They discover new things. They make new things that have never been done before. They create new value and the economy grows. The problem is it doesn't grow evenly initially. So like let's say that you came up with a goose that lays golden eggs and AI
AI and you've got this technology
And this technology is making golden eggs. And you're getting very wealthy with these golden eggs. And then that goose makes two geese and three geese and four. It starts breeding and you start selling the goose. And it takes a number of years before everyone has a golden goose. During that time, you've raced ahead cuz you've got now dozens of geese making lots of golden eggs for you. And a lot of people are like, I want a golden goose. By the time they get a golden goose, you've now got a million golden geese. And it feels like inequality. But the truth is now everyone here has a golden goose. And if you told them 30 years ago you would have a golden goose, they'd be like, 'No way. That'd be amazing.' So every day they're making the golden goose, they're printing the money, they're buying stuff with it. That's the problem with progress, whether it's medicine. You know, a lot of medicines today are million dollars a dose for like CAR T therapies, for example. These can save you from cancer. Only 50,000 people in the US can get them every year. And there's hundreds of thousands of people that die because they don't have access to these therapies. So it's limited in terms of its availability. There's technology like AI. Not everyone has access to it. Not everyone owns a piece of a model, etc. Not everyone's using it, and the people that are using it are getting ahead faster than the people behind.
In your golden goose analogy, by the time that the golden geese get down to the sort of lower end of the socioeconomic ladder
or def I would I would use the word diffuse. Yeah.
Those those golden eggs or whatever, buy less
because something happens along the way.
That's right. So along the way, the government says, 'Let's give everyone that. Let's give everyone access to more stuff to make up for that difference.' And then things get more expensive.
Is this in part because when the nation becomes prosperous because the GDP is high uh when you have four-year election cycles, politicians get in by offering you lots of free stuff. And that is the nature of the four-year election cycle.
I always said the the kid that got elected president in middle school was the kid who said he's going to make the vending machines free. That's always going to be true in any election. And at the end of the day, that's how the system grows. We don't talk about this four-year election thing enough as maybe as being a bit of a causal factor that's causing short termism amongst these leaders where they're all just spending more money to
I cannot tell you how much it drives me nuts when I go to Washington DC and I go to Washington DC every couple weeks or whatever and I meet with Congress people, senators and representatives, literally all of them just talk about getting stuff for their constituents. Yeah, that's all that they're there to do. Just get stuff for their people. That's their job and that's how they get elected. And the incentive is I'm going to get you something. Vote for me. Now, the founding fathers kind of had this idea that they would rotate into public service and rotate out and go back to private life. There's a lot of writings about this, you know, in the early days of the formation of this republic. And it was like, we should all go do our tour of duty. We should go in. There was never this belief that America would evolve to a world where you have career politicians. People that are just constantly trying to get elected and their job is to be a politician. It's just such a mind-numbingly crazy idea to think about. And all my politician friends are about to chop my head off about this, but I think it's nuts. I don't think a person should be a politician. I don't think that job title should exist. And I'm sorry to all the politicians out there. I think the people that represent the people should have the best long-term interests of the people in mind because they should be constrained to serving for a limited period of time and then they go back to private life. That means that we should have term limits. So you should never be able to be elected more than two terms as a senator or you know four terms as a representative or whatever it is. And it should be the case that if you're in one public office, maybe you shouldn't go transition to other public offices under those same limits because at the end of the day, you have created a system whereby you've proven that you can get stuff for people and your job is to go get stuff for people and that causes the government to inflate, be mismanaged, you know, and then there's all the waste, fraud, and abuse stuff that happens along the way.
Everything is a trade-off, right? Even in that example, if some people did 8 years in government and they know they're going back to private life, they could be dealing their friends. I'm going to do eight years in government. I'm going to run the transportation division. I'm going to serve some nice benefits to my friend who runs Boeing and then when I step back in, I'm going to step in as the chair.
That's a law to make sure that doesn't happen. And he goes to jail if that happens. That's a pretty easy fix. You can't buy stocks. You can't own stuff. You can't trade. I mean, there just so many obvious things. If you're going to go serve in government, you can't do stuff that you can do as a private citizen and you shouldn't be able to enrich yourself as a private citizen. If you do, you should go to jail. But we should also make sure that the incentive structure is set up right so that good people come and work in government and that we have good rotation between public and private life.
It's a hard problem though, this problem of how you fix this incentive structure so that you don't just get I mean this stuff inevitably happens cuz we we hand out lots of free things and we don't think about the long-term consequences. Has anyone fixed it globally? Is there any nation you look at as a model for a better
you know a lot of people will point to Denmark they'll point to places like that and say hey these guys do a great job and you know there's a lot of public services and people pay high taxes but you know there's not a lot of great progress there's no entrepreneurial success coming out of those places what happens in America the freedoms that were afforded the individual agency and liberty and rights to private property creates an incentive structure that says go try and do crazy stuff that could work And if it works, there's tremendous return. So it's worth taking the risk. And that level of risk is what pushes the boundaries. It's what discovered CAR T therapy, what discovered gene editing that can lead to curing human diseases. It's what's discovered new advances in agriculture, new physics, new engineering, AI. All of these things came from this risk-taking system that we've set up in the United States that's built around these individual incentives. And it works. So you can have great comfort for a great many people in Denmark and people will be very happy living there and they will have a good life, but you will not have progress like you have in the United States. And we push the frontier because we create this incentive structure and that's where progress comes from.
Would you say the vast majority would choose to live in a place like Denmark if it, you know, I'm looking at some of the stats here. They have higher societal trust in government, police institutions, and strangers. They have standard 37-hour work weeks, 5 to 6 weeks of paid vacation and cultural emphasis on balance. They have lower ceiling of extreme wealth but a higher floor so less poverty and financial ruin. And according to global happiness metrics, Denmark consistently ranks significantly higher than the United States. Most people would choose that, right?
So central planning, it might stop a few, you know, very high agency ambitious people, but the vast majority would theoretically be happier with a Denmark model. The vast majority maybe.
And do you think the vast majority of this country actually would if there was two buttons and they had to press they'd press Denmark.
One of the things that I think makes American culture different from Denmark is this idea of individual progress. So I think if you ask the majority of people, you can have that, but you don't get to progress. Meaning you don't get to earn more next year and you don't get to earn more next year. You don't have a shot at becoming a millionaire. You don't have a shot at building something great. You don't have a shot at buying a second home. You're limited. But you get that over here. You don't get anything guaranteed to you or you get some stuff guaranteed to you, but you don't get much more guaranteed to you. But you could have the world. You could make a million dollars. You could own a second home. You could buy a second car. You could pay off your kid's college tuition debt if you earn well. There's more options here. There's more guaranteed here.
You think the 63% would pick?
I think even within the 63% there would be some percent that would say this. But I do think this is why we're headed the way we're headed in the United States. People want more of a guarantee. The question is, do you want to maximize the number of people that are happy or do you want to maximize the number of people that are truly free? And by being truly free increases the rate of progress across the whole population. And that rate of progress may be asymmetric. It may be diffuse. Starts with some makes its way to others over time. I think that that's what America's chosen to be for the last 250 years. I'm not sure we're choosing to be that for the next 250 based on what's going on across the country right now.
Maybe because people aren't happy and actually maybe that was always the more important thing versus progress.
Important in an aggregate way. Again, I'll come back to the individual. We choose to live in a society because it gives us that foundation that you described, that ability to have the safety, the security to take risk, to make our own decisions, and potentially build a media empire as you have done. And maybe you would have been happy in the other context where you didn't have that, but would you have reached your potential as a human?
I'll be honest, I'm not sure I would have been happy because again, that goes back to my own nature. It's just the way that I am. If you put me in a room, I'll try and create something and build something. But I I've come to learn with time that not everybody has that bias or those desires. Not everybody has that poverty trauma from their childhood of being the only black kid in all white area and thinking money was really important and it was freedom and it was selfish. Like not everybody has has that. So I I realized that when I design solutions, they shouldn't probably be designed for me. Yeah. You know, it's taken me a long time to get to that place cuz I kind of I was very much
the challenge with America in this moment is can you give what you're describing the Denmark answer to enough Americans without taking away the liberty that the Americans that want to have that liberty have today. And I'm not sure the answer is yes. As soon as you start taking private property from these people, the ones that are successful in this bucket,
then you're sort of taking away the incentive for them to be in this bucket in America.
Yeah. I see people want to leave and so you're not going to solve for everyone, but if you solve for this Denmark solution, I think you lose a lot of this.
Well, the UK is quite an interesting example here for this very reason. I mean, one of the big subjects of conversation in the UK is that the the millionaires are all leaving or at least in high volume and they're coming to other places. If you look at the millionaire access maps that they publish often, they're going to Dubai or they're coming to America. A lot of my friends that are building technical companies in particular have come over to America.
Yeah.
And I do think we might have a little bit of a we have a bit of a spending problem, it seems, but also I think we might have a bit of a productivity problem
Well, do you think the productivity problem is related to the spending problem?
Oh, yes, of course.
Right. If you're collecting checks or getting services provided to you, the incentive to be more productive as an individual goes away. But also as a system, it becomes a lot harder to create economic incentives for productivity gains when tax rates are very high and you don't actually get to reap the benefits of the risk you take and and so on. That's the economic argument.
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I mean, this kind of does tie into the subject of artificial intelligence and where it all fits in part because the narrative of artificial intelligence is that it's about to take our jobs. And you think about the that's why I wanted to start with the backdrop. Think about that backdrop of I'm already struggling. I'm I'm in the 63% and now you're telling me I'm going to lose this job that's paying me and I'm already living hand-to-mouth. And what's the offer? We might get UBI. We might be sent checks in the post at some point. Well, actually, I like my job. It's a community, a sense of purpose. It gives me something to do. And that's the narrative.
Yes, that is the narrative.
You don't believe the narrative.
I believe what everyone's feeling. But this narrative that AI will take jobs away, you don't believe it.
I recently pulled up and you you guys can go to archive.org. There's a Newsweek article about computers will take all the jobs from 1963. So the mainframes are what got put in the basement in the '60s and everyone like had to walk past the scary mainframe on the right. It's like blinking lights and buzzing and making sounds. And it's like the mainframe is going to destroy all the accountant jobs, all the typing jobs, all these things that we all do that we get paid to do. And I like working in my office. I like my colleagues. I like coming in every day having lunch. That's a good life. This mainframe is going to ruin my life. And so there was this effort to legislate against these things at the time that didn't get through in Congress. And then in the 80s there was another wave on computing where it was like, hey, now we're all getting desktop computers. It's going to replace the workers and it's going to be a desktop computer and a worker and like 50 people disappear out of the the workforce. So empirically, meaning from data, from evidence over all periods of technological revolution like this, we've never seen jobs decline. We've always seen jobs go up and we've seen demand go up and therefore incomes rise when new technology enters the workforce. That's because the new technology makes an individual more productive so they can do more per hour with their time and as a result they can get paid more for doing that work. So imagine instead of having a painter painting a wall, what if he was in charge of the five robots that are painting the wall? Okay, great. Now he's going to get paid more because you can, you know, get so many more homes painted in a day. He's going to get paid more to do that work. People are going to be like, well, there's only so many homes. That's always the argument is you always think about the fixed pie argument that the pie doesn't grow. But what always happens is that the pie grows, the economy grows is the way to think about it. And so as automation or technology is used to give individuals more leverage to do more things with their time, then more things get done. People come up with these new product ideas with hey, we've got excess capital. Let's build new homes. Let's build a building.
But who gets who benefits from the expansion of that pie?
In all cases, it's been there's been deep economic value created for the entire workforce all the way down to the lowest level. It doesn't happen overnight. And that's where during that period of time when you see the new technology, oh the mainframe's in the basement or the desktop computers on my uh my colleague's desk and you're like, 'Oh my god, I'm going to lose my job.' To the time that your company is growing considerably their revenue and giving everyone raises and everyone bonuses and adding more product lines and doing more stuff, you're like, 'Oh man, okay, I feel better.' And and I think that would be the argument from the 60s and 80s and even back in the industrial revolution. The question today is how does work change? Cuz remember in the industrial revolution, people moved from farms, 60% of labor was in farming. Today it's like 2%. Into factories and they got paid a lot more and they lived a better life. They actually were able to afford healthcare, yada yada yada. And the the the transition in any sort of like technological revolution is net beneficial for all parties involved. But there is a transition. So what's it going to look like? Are we all going to lose our jobs? AI is definitely different, but I don't think that AI is this world where humans are going to look around and be like, none of us have anything to do anymore. [laughter] Like, I don't believe in that narrative. And the reason is I already see extraordinary creative things being done with AI that were not possible years ago. People are creating TV shows, one person, that they would have needed a staff of 20 people to do. And they can use AI to create AI generated content and put these shows out on on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. I mean, look, you may not like how it looks today. There may be a lot of AI slop out there, but as this stuff gets better and better, the creative output of people using AI on creative channels where we're all consuming media is only going to go up and people are going to make money that they weren't able to make before from that output as other people consume it. My ability to do work, I don't have to, you know, think about my, you know, four hours a day that I'm writing documents today. I can get all that work done in 10 minutes or 15 minutes and then I can spend the other three and a half hours doing other things that create new value for my company.
If we go back to the top of this um the robot painter analogy.
You said a guy might have had five people painting, now they can have five robots painting.
No, I was saying the guy instead of painting on his own, he can now have five robots painting.
And then he can now produce five times as much with his time. Think about what we saw with the desktop computer revolution, right? Adobe Photoshop came around and everyone was like, 'Oh my god, like photographers are out of work because a big part of being a photographer was all the post editing and cleaning up of your and airbrushing and all this sort of stuff.' And they're like, 'That whole industry is destroyed with Photoshop.' What ended up happening is a ton more media was created and print media was created because Photoshop created leverage to create many more beautiful images and then all these magazines took off and it like if you look at magazine circulation, they grew considerably as Photoshop came out because it allowed much more production on you know high-value photography.
I think the reason why it feels different is because that's I mean the industrial revolution example is kind of like physical work moving to cognitive work that was cognitive work creating a new type of cognitive work the the Adobe analogy if AI takes the cognitive work and from what you said about robotics robotics takes a lot of the physical work what is this third type of work
I think it's cognitive and physical. It's it's it's no different than what we've seen in the past but it doesn't mean that there isn't an individual who's going to program the robot on what rooms to paint how to paint them how to do the detailing correct. The homeowner doesn't have the level of skill that the painter does, right? So the painter
Maybe at some point, I mean, you could make this argument on a continuum where eventually everything nothing exists, but along the way there are new things that are emerging. Think about going back 50 years. There was no yoga instructor. There was no dog walker. There was no Instagram influencer. There was no podcaster. I mean there's a million versions of new work that emerged along the way as the internet took hold and people could start to spend their time or market themselves or market their capabilities in other ways. So I think it's a pessimistic view to assume that robots replace all humans and then humans have no logic, no agency, no capacity for creative work anymore. I have an optimistic view on this which is that AI and robotics enables individuals to do far more things than they ever could have contemplated and that's going to give everyone much more ability to realize their potential with their agency.
I mean, even the podcast, I think a game is going to be significantly disrupted in some some part. We we ran a test a couple years ago to figure out if a synthesized voice of me could have the same average view duration as me and uh it was just me reading out the stories of founders through history. So, I'd do I did like a Steve Jobs episode where it was my voice. AI had written the script. AI had synthesized my voice. So, I had no involvement. And the amount of people that got to the end was 40 to 50% of an hour. Uh and they knew it was AI because it said at the top this is an AI podcast and so I thought okay there is a lot of informational part of what we me and you do where we're sharing just in pure play information that will be taken away however what I hear through listening to your answer about creators and art you're saying that there will be this human sort of irreplaceably human component yoga teachers yoga teachers aren't telling you yoga it's also community and gathering in real life and being there amongst other people
I think the IRL job is going to explode and I think it's going to be extremely valuable. I always had this view like, oh, coffee shops will be automated. But I actually think the opposite is probably true. I think there will be a premium on coffee shops. I'll pay $40 for a latte because that human is making the latte and I get to go be with other humans. I get to go to a workout class with humans. I get to go spend time at a concert. I get to go spend time at dinners. I think this like event live space experiential part of our world that we kind of think about as luxury today, maybe it becomes more core. Like maybe it becomes more of how we spend our time. Maybe we spend 30, 40% of our time, you know, in these sorts of spaces and automation is generating income for us and supporting us in, you know, whatever pursuit we're interested in in work and we spend far less time doing work and far more time paying a premium in the economy in the live space economy.
It's hard, isn't it? Because we don't know what these jobs are.
We just don't. And that's
I mean imagine telling someone that worked in a factory in 1923 that fast forward a hundred years there's going to be people making X dollars as personal trainers or there's someone that has a job dog walking in their neighborhood. I don't know if that would have been like grok fully.
But the pace of disruption here seems to be different than like the industrial revolution. It's targeting cognitive work. It's built on this platform called the internet who which has this
I'm telling you I just don't see it. I I like at my work everyone's using AI and everyone's just doing more and then they ask for more employees. You can kind of think about a business having two sides, revenue and costs. Revenue is I'm making stuff and people are paying me for the things I'm making or doing. Cost is how am I operating the business? Like what am I spending? And the argument has always been like, okay, you're going to lose customer service reps. You're going to lose all the cost side of the equation. No one ever says you're going to lose the revenue side. The truth is on the revenue side, what ends up happening is you create new products that you couldn't create before because of AI. The technology enables so much advancement in your business. Let's say you're a material science company. This is totally esoteric, but like let's say your job as a company is to discover new materials, new pl new synthetics that can be used to make microchips or be used for computing or be used for travel or for airplanes. The material science world has been challenged by its experimental cycle. You got to create an experiment, make a product, test it, do it all manually. It's all creative ideas. It's all human potential. AI can now screen through millions of material science ideas in a computer, print them out, test them, and you can automate that throughput. Therefore, that materials company can now have more revenue. They can make more products.
Do you not think that maybe there's a possibility that people like me and you exist in this particular band where because we're both founders and we have capital and we're thinking about how to really push intelligence to create new things that maybe we because what you're saying I I can relate to. I can relate to the fact that AI has made me actually quite has probably made me more ambitious about hiring especially in the near term. I would caveat it by saying that there's a certain type of role that I'm now hiring much less and as especially when you think about entry-level roles, I have to pause a lot more now because a lot of the agents and some tooling can do some of those things that I would have otherwise hired for. But generally, I feel like I'm hiring as fast as I possibly can. But would you not say that for like the 21-year-old that's graduated from university or the
DoorDash driver or those types of individuals, where the leap from where they currently are on a factory floor assembling a part or flipping packages, the leap from where they are to this new world is so great that there's going to be this messy middle.
Yeah. But what I'm saying is, as new products are created, new revenue comes in, you don't cut costs, you grow costs and you hire more people and you uplevel and you train people. That is what I'm seeing on the ground. You know, we just published, I think, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the US. And I think that this idea that your current job is going to get disrupted and you're going to lose your job, I don't think is how the enterprise transitions. The enterprise transitions, meaning companies, by doing more things and bringing people up the ladder, hiring more people. And that's just what I'm seeing on the ground. I think that there's a media narrative on like, oh my god, there was a layoff at so-and-so company because it underlines what they've been promoting to everyone, which is AI is going to cause job loss.
The interesting thing is, it didn't come from the media.
It came from the AI guys.
This is the biggest... I listen to All-In Podcasts, by the way. It's one of my favorite podcasts. I don't think I've ever missed an episode. So I very much understand your perspective in all of your...
I had no idea you were a fan.
No, no, I've listened to...
I've gone on people's shows where they're like, I don't know who you are, and I'm like, [laughter] it's good to meet you.
No, no, no. I don't think I've ever missed an episode since the beginning. So I understand.
You've been through... You've heard all this.
I've heard all of this. I've heard like Jason's opinion. Weirdly, I tend to side a little bit more with Jason on this because I think Jason... I don't know why his arguments seem to present the most nuance. And also, I would say when we think about different people's incentives, yeah, you're right. Often on that show that it's framed as a media narrative, whereas it's actually all your friends.
Yeah. No. So first of all, none of them are my friends. But, um...
Okay. So what I will say, look, I've said this on the show, I'll say it again. I think there is a deep arrogance in making these sorts of proclamations.
That we're not going to work anymore.
It effectively discounts the human. It's like what you do today is your limit. But I think that this idea that like these jobs will go away is sourced by people that are seeing the crazy stuff that they're doing and they're like, oh my god, this is amazing. I'm responsible for this. We are going to change the world. We are going to take all jobs and they're all going to sit in my computer. I don't think that that's what happens because I think that humans have a profound capacity for doing things that, you know, these technologists don't necessarily see. The great technologists see technology. They don't see people.
I think you have to see people, meaning the potential of people, of individuals, and you have to believe in that. They believe in technology. They engineer technology. But I am not going to like be pessimistic about people. Like I think that people have capacity in any environment. I mean, the amazing thing about humans is our adaptability. We can live in any climate. We can eat any kind of food. I mean, that's all this like we can work all these different jobs. I mean, we're amazing. Humans are amazing. And arguably, many humans have been limited in their potential. And I think that AI enables more capacity for those individuals to realize more of their potential.
Much of the conversation we've had about the US economy has centered around incentive structures leading to inevitable outcomes.
You know, the older I've gotten, the more I just try and look at incentives.
To figure out behavior and also to figure out who to trust. So when I look at the incentives of the people that are building the AI companies, Andy Jassy has said that there's going to be fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today. Then they cut, you know, tens of thousands of jobs. Marc Benioff, who I know has been on your show, cut 4,000 jobs and said, I need less heads because of AI. And I'm like, okay, maybe they're saying that because they want their share price to go up because it's a good, you know, we're going to reduce cost is a good narrative. But then I look at the other AI CEOs, Dario, Elon, Sam Altman, and I go, their incentives, I'd say other than the exception of Elon, have just kind of changed with whatever's good for them at that moment oftentimes. I actually think Dario might be the exception a little bit because he seems to be a bit more nuanced. If I go back through the quotes of these individuals, you have Sam Altman in February 2015 saying, 'Development of supermachine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.' You have Elon in 2014 saying, 'With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. It's far more dangerous than nukes. Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear wars.' And that was signed by Sam Altman, Demis, Dario, Bill Gates amongst many hundreds of others. Sam Altman in the Senate in 2023: 'I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go very wrong.' OpenAI superintelligence letter: they wrote the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction could be caused by superintelligence. Again, in The Atlantic, Sam Altman: 'Jobs are definitely going to go away. Full stop.' Dario Amodei, May 2025, he predicted a white collar bloodbath: half of entry level white collar jobs gone, unemployment at 10 to 20% within 1 to 5 years. 10 to 20% unemployment in 1 to 5 years, it's pretty high.
And Altman at the Federal Reserve in July 2025 said, um, whole job categories will disappear, customer support first, that one is quote 'totally, totally gone.' And then suddenly the message changed before his sort of IPO discussions. He said things could go pretty wrong, and then he says that he now has changed his mind and he's delighted that he feels like he was wrong. And suddenly he's talking about how OpenAI and ChatGPT will benefit all of humanity.
Should we trust the same people that told us to be scared when they say don't be scared?
First of all, I think there was a bunch of companies that said early on that they were like cutting all their customer service reps, which was the big company starts with a K.
Klarna, but I did call the founder.
And what did you find out?
He said that he's been misinterpreted in the press. So I heard you guys talk about this on the All-In podcast, but I've actually called him live on this show.
And did he rehire or like what did he do?
He said that the media just completely misconstrued...
He said he had 7,000 employees by the end of last summer. He said he had only 3,000, but the media framed it as I had 7,000 employees and then I tried to cut some, I realized I couldn't and I went back. That's not what happened. And it's just, I see it on all these podcasts and I'm just repeating it. I heard it repeated on your show like...
But he said we are cutting because of AI.
And he's confirmed that he's doing that. He's DM'd me on X. I've got the DM and live on this show he confirmed it to all one of our listeners.
Is his business still growing?
The business is growing. What he did say, and this is a point of nuance, is with the cost savings, he's able to offer better white glove services to his highest ticket clients.
Which makes a lot of sense.
And you could think about that analogy being in like another business where they would take that capital, invest in offering new products, new services, but then you need employees to offer those new products and new services. And so you do actually hire up, and I think that is what I am actually seeing on the ground. And while he may have this acute restructuring he's doing on the ground, I just see people hiring more because they can do more with AI. It's counterintuitive, but if you're a business manager, you can invest $10 and make one product a year, or you can invest $20 and make five products a year. You're going to invest the $20 to make five products a year. You're going to spend more. And I think that's what AI does. As soon as you have the ability to get leverage on how much more productive people are, you'll put more capital towards hiring more people and scale up. That's just what I'm seeing. And look, I could be wrong and all jobs go away in 5 years and we have 20% unemployment. I don't think that that's the case. I think that again, like we can go back to this, like where are people going to be spending their time? I do think that there's going to be a big growth in media. I think there's going to be a big growth in media encompassing everything, digital content creation, etc. I think there's going to be a big growth in entrepreneurship, and I think there's going to be a big growth in IRL stuff.
I'll play this interview since it's always mentioned because I think the media has said that you like doubled down on AI, then you reversed because it didn't work out. So I know I spoke to you a while ago and we exchanged a couple of DMs about it, but that was more than a... it was almost a year ago now. So I just wanted to get an update on Klarna's business, AI agents and all of that if possible. This was 5 months ago. First and foremost, we were early on released AI to support our customer service, which had that initial benefit of more calls being dealt with by AI, which customers liked because those calls or chat messages were much, much faster and more qualitative. Then since then, that has actually expanded slightly. What we did, however, try to communicate as well is that we believed in a world where AI is cheap and available, the value of human interaction will be regarded as higher. So the future of customer service VIP is a human. We have then hence doubled down on providing more of that, but at the same time the efficiency gains within the company has continued. I mean, we used to be about 6,000 people and now we are less than 3,000, which is 2-3 years since we stopped recruiting, and at the same point of time our revenue has doubled, right? So...
No, this is a startup, just to be clear. I don't know if we can... and again, I'm not going to like sit here and concede or argue jobs aren't going to change, but a startup that grew very quickly and then to cut heads is a pretty common phenomenon. So I don't know how much restructuring he was doing in his AI-ification of his business. That's totally fine and totally fair. But the question is, what are the people that were doing customer service calls and sitting, you know, how many of them were actually fully occupied on the phone? I don't know.
Like were they on the phone for 4 hours a day, 2 hours a day, or 8 hours a day? Were they actually fully employed? Really? Were they truly fully employed? I don't know.
