Transcript of #2206 - Chamath Palihapitiya

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. I was like, That will live in infamity.

It is the best clip because he's a totally different person.

Well, it's what he really is. But he really is, exactly. Yeah, it's like the Allan thing.

I mean, he really did lose his shit there.

Oh, it looks like, weirdly. Was it like, I got the Christian Bale one because he's in character, he's in intense scene. Some guy's fucking around the background like, God damn it, stop fucking around. I get that. He's in this frenzy of this intense scene. But What is Bill doing? He's Republican talking points on Fox News.

That was a different time. No, it was before. It was when he was current affair. It's when he's doing gossip and stuff.

Oh, that's right. He was a gossip He was like an entertainment tonight type guy. Exactly.

Inside Edition.

One of those deals. Is that what it was? That's what it's called. Yeah. And fucking those things. They never go away. It's such a weird environment, the left and right. There's no centrist news source on television. There's no like, this is probably what's going on news source. It's always one or the other. And it's like you're living in a bipolar person's brain.

You I think part of what's happened is we used to have news, and you could make a good living in news. And journalists were really the top of the social hierarchy in some way, shape or form, because they were this check and balance. And then somewhere along the way, this business model focused people on clicks, and nobody told the rest of the world that the underlying incentives were going to change. And so that's where you find yourself, where there's very little news, I think. There's a lot of opinion. And then the problem with opinion is that feeds the outrage machine. And that's the the clickometer. The clickometer doesn't go high when you're like, hey, guys, I studied this equation, and it show. There's a 50 % chance of this. Nobody cares about that. It's either like it's totally, totally bad or it's totally, totally good because it just it amps people up. And that's a real bummer because I think you You don't know what to think anymore.

Well, it's also a completely novel new thing that we weren't prepared for. So before there was social media and online news, no one was prepared for the world of the algorithm. No one was prepared for being like, literally everything that freaks you out is what you'll be shown because that shows that you're engaging. And that's how it's set up for it, which is just so contrary to the rest of history. I mean, it was always it bleeds, it leads in the news because they wanted people, they wanted to win ratings news, but they only had so much control and it was only on for an hour. Exactly. And now it's just this 24/7 anxiety fest.

It's omnipresent, and it's basically made to want to convince you that you need more of that thing. It's like a bad diet. The first few shots of it, the first few bites of it tastes amazing. But if you eat the full toffee cake every day for the next 365 days, and then for the next year, you're going to get diabetes, you're going to get heart disease. So the version of that is like your brain just gets totally fried. And then the bigger problem is then when you're presented with, maybe it's not even the truth, but an opinion that you should consider, you get totally shut out of it. And that's the real problem. You build these antibodies in your body where this other version that says, take a step back and reconsider, it's not allowed. And then if you said to yourself, well, how do you even start? Where do you go? A friend of mine works at Facebook, and he showed me threads. We were playing poker last week, and he showed me threads. And what's incredible is like, threads and X are the exact polar opposites in some ways. And he was showing me in the context of how the outrage machine on threads works.

And the way it works is like, and this woman wrote this article about it. But what they'll do is they'll post something that says two plus two equals five. Just that. That thing? And you'll get like a million It's just different views. And then it'll first start with folks that are trying to gently nudge this person. Actually, I want you to reconsider two plus two actually equals four. And then it builds and it builds and it builds. So there's this weird version of how people react to information. And it tends to be kid gloves, and then people just lose their mind at some point. And then over here, I think on X, what you find is there's a lot more structural data, but then it can easily get lost in the noise because there's just a few things that just constantly consume what the algorithms want to amplify and what is important in the moment. And I think that finding a way to probably blend the two is probably what is the best in the It means that there's probably some stuff over here that doesn't make it over here, and there's probably a lot of stuff over here that doesn't make it over here.

A little bit of that diet for everybody probably goes a long way.

Is there heavy content moderation on threads?

I don't know. I don't use it. I don't either. I don't have it. I just saw it in that moment. But when he described how the engagement farming works, it just sounded ludicrously.

So to explain to people, two plus two equals five. If you just post that. Is a bizarre thing that was going around where they were talking about how math is racist.

Exactly. Basically, that's where it gets to math is racist.

Which is, oh, no. If math is racist, we have a real problem, because that means everything's racist, because everything's math.

We had this thing, and I don't know if you saw this, in the Bay Area in COVID, the city of San Francisco brought They put together their Board of Education or whatever, and they eliminated a bunch of AP classes, including a bunch of AP math classes. And part of it was because of this reason, because they felt it was exclusionary. And I think what it misses is that there's all this other stuff you could do to even the starting line for folks. But if you rip out things like AP math, take a step back. In eight billion people in the world, what are the odds that there's only, literally, one Steve Jobs? Or literally, only one Elon Musk, meaning capable of that execution? I suspect that there's maybe two. And so part of our social responsibility as adults is, how do you make it so that that second Steve Jobs can find a path to do stuff? And I'm not saying AP math is the answer, but I'm saying there are people that... I remember when I was growing up, I wasn't particularly good at anything in school, but there were a few subjects which I was just like, wow, The little time I spent in school, I felt a little safe.

I could connect. It built up a little bit of my self-confidence, and I didn't feel so marginal. I'm sure there's a lot of kids like that. For some very small subset, maybe that's what that class is. Pushes them to a boundary that they didn't know was possible. You're teaching them stuff. That's really cool. So I understand what the intent is, but then the byproduct is there's a small group of folks that get shut out. And then that person that could be that Steve Jobs-like person, that Elon Musk-like person is held a little bit back. And I think that that hurts all of us. So you got to find a way where we're doing just a little bit better.

Well, isn't that the part of the problem with eliminating gifted classes, right? There's talk, I think they're doing that in New York. Is that where they're doing that? Find out if that's the case. There's some where there's this hot controversy about eliminating the concept of gifted classes. But the reality is there's some people that are going to find regular classes, particularly mathematics and some other things. They're going to find them a little too easy. They're more advanced. They're more advanced students. And those students should have some an option to Excel. And it should be inspiring, maybe intimidating, but also inspiring to everybody else. I mean, that's part of the reason why kids go to school together to look how hard she works. She works so much harder than me. Look how much she's getting ahead. Fuck, I got to work harder. It really does work that way. That's how human beings in cooperation, that's how they grow together.

I think that it used to be the case that if you went in high school, you would be really cool with people that were going to specific high schools to get really good at something. Remember that show on TV Fame?

Yes.

Right. And so, well, that was more about the performing arts, right? But that was amazing. It's like, if you knew a kid that was going to one of those schools, what you'd say is, wow, you are incredibly talented in this one specific thing. Go push the boundary of that and see what happens. I think we owe it to ourselves to say that. Yes. There's 330 million in the United States. Don't you think that if we created a bunch of different ways for people to figure out what they're super good at, things are better, not worse? What is the answer? Do you think things take a huge step back? You have more Joe Rogans, you have more Kevin Hart, you have more great actors, you have more great directors, but you also have more engineers. You have more scientists, you have more doctors, and you created a way for them to just go deep in something where their curiosity took them. That's okay. What's wrong with that idea?

Just nothing wrong. It sounds optimal.

It sounds pretty reasonable.

It sounds great. It's just a matter of resources and then also completely revamping how you teach kids. This is my gripe with this whole ADHD thing. I've talked to many people who have varying opinions on whether or not that's an actual condition or whether or not there's a lot of people that have a lot energy, and you're sitting in a class that's very boring, and they don't want to pay attention to it. So instead, you drug them, and you give them medication that is essentially speed and lets them hyper focus on things. And now all of a sudden, little Timmy's locked on. It was really just the medication that he needed. And I think for a lot of those kids, if they found something that was really interesting to them, maybe they're really bored with this, but they're really excited by biology. Maybe there's something that resonates with their particular personality and what excites them, and they could find a pathway. Instead, we have this very rigid system that wants to get children accustomed to the idea of sitting still for an hour at a time over and over and over again throughout the day, being subjected to people who aren't necessarily that motivated or getting paid that well.

Well, we're going to probably talk about AI today, but let's just touch on this just in this one second We are going to create computers that are able to do a lot of the rote thinking for us. What that means is, I think, the way that humans differentiate ourselves is that we're going to have to have judgment and taste. Those are very defining psychological characteristics, in my opinion. But what that means is if you go back to how school is taught, what you said is very limiting for what the world is going to look like in 30 years. In 30 years, where you have a PhD assistant that's in your pocket that can literally do all of the memorization, spell checking, grammar, all of the fact recall for you. Teaching that today is probably not going to be as important as interpreting it. How do you teach kids to learn to think, not to memorize and regurgitate? So we have to flip, I I think this education system. We have to try to figure out a different way to solve this problem, because you can't set a children in this generation of our kids to go and have to compete with a computer.

That's crazy.

It's crazy. That's crazy. That's why they can make a Drake song in three minutes.

The computer is going to win. So what can't the computer do is, I think, maybe a reasonable question. And I think the computer, in a lot of cases, Can't express judgment. It'll learn. But today it's not going to be able to the same way that humans can. It's going to have different tastes. So the way that we interpret things, the same way that you motivate people, like all the psychology, all these things that are like these softer skills that allow humans to cooperate and work together. That stuff becomes more important when you have a fleet of robots. And so if you go all the way back to school, today Today, the school system is, unfortunately, in a pretty tough loop. Look, teachers, I think, are going to become the most, the top three or four important people in society. The reason is because they are going to be tasked with teaching your kids and my kids how to think, not to memorize. Don't tell me what happened in the War of 1812. You can just use a search engine or use a ChatGPT and find out the answer. But why did it happen? What were the motivations?

If it happens again, what would you do differently or the same? Those kinds of reasoning and judgment things, I think, we're We're still far ahead of those computers. So the teachers have to teach that, which means you have to pay them more, you have to put them in a position to do that job better. And then back to what you said, I've lived this example of ADHD in my family. I have five kids, one The Kids was diagnosed with it. And unfortunately, what happens is the system a little bit closes in on you. So on the one side, they give you a lot of benefits, I guess. I put it in quotes because you get these emails that say if they want extra time, if they want this, if they want... They'll give you a computer, for example, to take notes so that you don't handwrite. Those feel like aids to help you. But then on the other side, one person was very adamant, Hey, you want to medicate? And my ex-wife and I were just like, Under no circumstances are we medicating our child? That was a personal decision that we made with the information that we had knowing that specific kid.

All kids are different, so I don't want to generalize. And then the crazy thing, Joe, what we did was we took the iPad out of the kid's hand. We had these very strict device rules, and then COVID turned everything upside down. And you're just surviving. You're sheltering in place. You got five kids running around. They're not really being taught by the schools. The schools won't convene the kids. And so what do you do? You just hand them the device. Everything was through the device. The little class they got through the device, the way that they would talk to their friends through the device. So it reintroduced itself in a way that we couldn't control. And then we saw this slippage. And then what we did was we just drew a bright red line and we said, we're taking it out of your hands. No more video games, no more iPad. We're going to dose it in very small doses. And he had an entire turnaround. But then here's what happened. I took my eye off the ball a little bit this summer because it was like, he had a great year. He reset. His self-confidence was coming back.

I was like, Man, this is amazing. And then I do the thing that a lot of people would do. Here you can have an Yeah, it's fine. Talk to your friends. And then it started again. And then again, now we just had to reset. So at least in our example, what we have found, and it may not apply to everybody, but for us, him not being bathed in this thing had a huge effect. Playing basketball outside, roughhousing with his brothers, having to talk to his friends, having to talk to us, watching movies. Or we would just sit around. Because, by the way, what I noticed was my kids had a hard time watching movies or listening to songs on Spotify for the full duration. They'd get to the hook and they'd be like, forward. Next. And they'd be like, they'd watch eight minutes next. And I was like, what are you guys doing? Enjoy the fullness. They couldn't even sit there for three and a half minutes. So what at least my son was learning was to just chill a little bit, be there, be able to watch the show. And these shows move at a glacial pace relative to what they're used to if they're playing a video game.

Or TikTok. Or TikTok. Yeah. Yeah, because TikTok, they're like this. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's helped. It's not a cure. But it just goes back to what you're saying, which is if you give parents options, and I heard this crazy stat. I don't know if this is true. If you take your devices away from a kid, the kid will feel isolated from their other students. The critical mass, I don't know if this is true or not, but it's what I was told, so I'll go with it, was that if you get a third of the parents, in a class of 20, if you get a third of the parents to agree as well, no devices, the kid feels zero social isolation because it becomes normative. It's like it's normal. You got a flip phone, and you're texting like this to your parents or you're calling. I don't know. It may be worth trying. There was a crazy thing. I don't know, Jimmy, if you can find this, but there was a crazy thing, Eaton College, which is the most elite, if you will, private school in the UK. It's where all the prime ministers of the United Kingdom have matriculated through Eaton College.

It's like high school, fancy high school. They sent a memo to the parents for the incoming class. And the headmaster said, When you get on campus with your child, we're going to give you what is basically a Nokia flip phone. You are going to take the SIM card out of this kid's iPhone or Android. You're going to stick it in this thing, and this is how they're going to communicate with you and communicate amongst each other while they're on campus at E. Wow.

Mandatory.

Mandatory. I thought this was incredible. I don't know what the impact is, but that takes a lot of courage, and I thought, that's amazing.

Well, it's great because then if they're communicating, they're only communicating. They're not sharing things or Snapchatting each other back and forth. And the addictive qualities of these phones, which is if you think about the course of human evolution and you think of how we adapted to agriculture and civilization, and we essentially became softer and less muscular and less aggressive. That took a long time. A long time. That was a long time. This thing is hitting us so quickly. And one of the bizarre things is it creates a disconnection. Even though you're being connected to people consistently and constantly through social media, there's a disconnection between human beings and normal behavior and learning through interaction with each other, social cues, all the different things that we rely on to learn how to be a friend and to learn how to be better at talking to each other.

I have a rule with my oldest who's 15. He'll call me, he'll call me. Or even when I call him, It's like a grunt greeting. Right.

They don't know how to talk anymore.

And I'm like, hello. And so I went through this thing where I would just hang up. And I'm like, beep, hang up. And then he would call me back, huh? And then finally, I said, I I just want you to have these building blocks. They may sound really stupid to you right now, but looking people in the eye, being able to have a normal conversation and be patient in that conversation is going to be really valuable for you. People will really be connected to you. You may not feel that and you may think this is lame and stupid what I'm telling you, but I was like, just try to do it. And then what's so funny I would tell this story about our kids go to a very well-meaning private school. I almost think sometimes, again, we're not teaching necessarily kids to think for themselves. We're asking them to memorize a bunch of things. And one of the things that I worry that we've taught our kids to memorize are the fake meetings and salutations. So on the one end, you have what's really visceral, which is, And then on the other hand, sometimes you'll see these kids and they'll get introduced.

Hello. How are you? It's great to meet you. And I'm like, man, this is the most... This is the fakest thing I've ever seen. So you're at these two ends of the spectrum. And I would make fun of my kids sometimes because they would say thank you, but they would say thank you like the queen. They'd be like, thank you. And I'm like, what are you doing? Who taught you that? And I thought, you were taught at school to say thank you like that? You could just say thank you. Right. Thanks. I appreciate that. Just look somebody in the eye. Thank you.

But what concerns me is as this tech gets more and more invasive in terms of how human beings, particularly children, interface with it. And as it gets, I mean, really, we would just be guessing as to what comes out of AI and to what world we're even looking at in 20 years. It seems like it's having a profound effect on the behavior of human beings, particularly young human beings, and their developmental... How old are you?

I'm 48.

I'm 57. So when I grew up, there was zero of this. And I got this slow trickle through adulthood. From when I was a child, the VHS tapes and answering machines through the big tech.

Yeah, you had the rotary phone. Yes.

Yeah, exactly. So we went through the whole cycle of it, which is really interesting. So you get to see this profound change in people and what it's doing the kids. And you got to I wonder, what is that doing to the species? And is that going to be normal? Is it going to be normal to be emotionally disconnected and very bizarre in our person-to-person interface?

I think that when technologies get going, you have this little burst. It's like these Cambrian moments. You get these little bursts which are overwhelmingly positive. I don't know what your reaction was, but my reaction when I first saw the iPhone, I was blown away. I think the first four or five years was entirely positive because it was just so novel. You took this big computer and we effectively shrunk it to this little computer, made it half to a third of the cost, and lo and behold, supply demand, just the number of computers tripled and quadrupled and quintupled, and so many more people were able to be a part of that economic cycle. All positive. Then you get a little dip. And the little dip is when I think we lose a little bit of the ambition of that first moment and we get caught up in the economics of the current moment. And what I mean by that is The last 5 or 10 years, I think why you feel this viscerally is we haven't had a big leap forward from the iPhone of really 2014, '15. And I'm not picking on the iPhone. I'm just like a mobile device.

So What have you had over the last 10 years? You've had an enormous amount of money get created by an enormous number of apps. And the problem is that they are in a cul-de-sac. And so they'll just iterate in this one way that they understand because the money is really good, quite honestly, and the incentives of the capital markets will tell you to just keep doing that. But then I think what happens is something shocks us out of it, and then we get the second wave. So if you go all the way back to look at the PC, the first moment of the PC in the '70s and the early '80s was incredible. You had these people that were able to take it and do all kinds of really interesting things. It was pure. Then you had the '90s and the early 2000s, and what was it? It was duopolistic at best, Microsoft and Intel. And what they were able to do was extract a huge tax by putting all of these things on folks his desks. And it was still mostly positive, but it was somewhat limited because most of the spoils went to these two companies and all the other companies basically got a little bit run over.

And then it took the DOJ to step in in 2000 and try to course-correct that on behalf of everybody, basically. Then what happened was the internet just exploded. The Internet blew the doors wide open. All of a sudden, if you had a PC, you didn't have these gatekeepers. It actually didn't even matter whether you were running on Intel anymore. You just needed a browser. So you didn't need Microsoft Windows, and you didn't need Intel. And then just the Internet just explodes. We We have a positive moment, followed by, call it 10 or 15 years of basically economic extraction, and then we have value. I think today it's like we've invented something really powerful. We I've had 10 or 15 years that were largely economic. Again, I think this is the problem. I'm going to sound like every other nerd from central casting from Silicon Valley telling you this, but I do think that there's a version of this AI thing which blows the doors wide open again. I think we owe it to ourselves to figure out how to make that more likely than not likely.

Well, it's inevitable, right? Ai's emergence and it's where it goes from here on is inevitable. It's going to happen. And we should probably try to steer it, at least in a way that benefits everybody. And I agree with you. There is a world I could see where AI changes everything. And one of the things that makes me most hopeful is a much better form of translation so that we'll be able to understand each other better. It's a giant part of the problem in the world. It's the Tower of Babel. So we really can't communicate with each other very well. So we really don't know what the problems are in these particular areas or how people feel about us, how we feel about them. Can empathize? Yeah, we can't. And it's very easy to not empathize with someone where you can't even... You don't even know what their letters are.

Have you been in a situation where you have a translator with the thing in your ear? No. Empathy, zero. Because the problem is the person there is giving it to you in a certain tone because it's first person.

Oh, I've had that when I interview fighters. I've had translators.

Yeah, but when you're here, it's very hard to feel empathy for this person because it's this person that you're focused on because you're trying to catch it. So you hear the words. I think somewhat of the meaning is a little bit lost. Then you go back to this person and you say something, and they're in the same problem that you are. So I agree that the translation thing is cool. I think that there's going to be some negative areas. And I think that there's going to be a lot of pressure on certain jobs, and we got to figure that So it's not all roses. But some areas, if you imagine them, I'll give you a couple if you want, are just bananas, I think. Okay. I'll go from the most likely to the craziest. Okay. Most likely today, if you know somebody that's had breast cancer, if they go into a doctor, a hospital, a random hospital in America and the doctor says, We need to do a lumpectomy, meaning we need to take took some mass out of your breast to take the cancer out. What do you think the error rate today is across all hospitals in America?

It's about 30 %. Wow. And in regional hospitals, so places that are poor, or places that are in far-flung parts of the United States, it can be upwards of 40 %. This is not the doctor's fault, okay? The problem is that you're forcing him or her to look with their eyes into tissue and try to figure out, well, where is the border where the cancer stops? So for every 10 surgeries, what that means are a week later. Imagine this. You get a breast cancer surgery They take it out. They send it to the pathologist. The pathologist takes between seven and eleven days. So you're waiting. Seven of the calls come back. Clean margins, you're great. Now go to the next step. Three of the calls, I'm sorry, there's still cancer inside your body. Three. So these women now go back for the next surgery. But the problem is one of those women will get another call that says, I'm sorry, there's still cancer. And so what is that? That's a computer vision problem, right? That's not necessarily a problem that can't not be solved, literally today. We have models, we have tissue samples of women of all ages, of all races.

You have all of the different boundary conditions you'd need to basically get to a zero % error rate. What's amazing is that is now Working its way through the FDA. So call it within the next two years, there'll be an AI assistant that sits inside of an operating room. The surgeon will take out what they think is appropriate. They'll put it into this machine and it'll literally, I'm going to simplify, but it'll flash red or green. You got all the cancer out. You need to take out a little bit more, just right over here. And now you get it out, and now all of a sudden, instead of a 30% error rate, you have a 0% error rate. That's amazing. That's today because you have this computer that's able to help you. All we need is the will and the data that says, Okay, we want to do this, but just show me that it works. And show me what the alternative would be if we didn't do it. And the alternative turns out to be pretty brutal. 14 surgeries for every 10 surgery? I mean, that's not what the most advanced nation in the world should be doing.

Right.

Okay, so if you do it for breast cancer, the reason why breast cancer is where folks are focusing is because it gets so much attention and it's like prime time. But it's not just breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, stomach colon cancer. If you look at any tumor, so if you're at the stage where you're like, We need to get this thing, this foreign, growing thing out of our body, we should all have the ability to just do that with zero % error, and it will be possible in the next couple of years because of AI. Okay, so that's cool and it's coming. I think between years two and years five, You're going to see this crazy explosion in materials. This is going to sound maybe dumb, but I think it's one of the coolest things. If you look at the periodic table of elements, what's amazing is we keep adding. So there's 118 elements. We actually just theoretically forecast that there's going to be 119, so we created a little box. It's theoretical, but it's going to show up. And they forecasted that there's going to be 142. So the periodic table of elements, quote unquote, grows.

But when you look at the lived world today, we live in this very narrow expression of all We use those things. We use the same few materials over and over and over again. But if you had to solve a really complicated problem, don't you think the answer could theoretically be in this? Meaning if you took, I'm going to make it up, selenium and then doped it with titanium, 1%, but if you doped it with boron, 14%, all of these things are possible. It's stronger than the strongest thing in the world, and it's lighter than anything. So now you can make rockets with it and send it all the way up with less energy. It's all possible. Why haven't we figured it out? Because the amount of energy and the amount of computers we need to solve those problems, which are super complicated, haven't been available to us. I think that is this next phase of AI. What you said, which is we're going to have these PhD-level robots and agents. In the next 2-5 years, we're going to come up with all kinds of materials. You'll have a frying pan that's like non-stick but doesn't have to heat up.

Like, oh, whatever you want, from the most benign to the most incredible stuff. We'll just re-engineer what's on Earth. That's going to be crazy. It's going to be incredible. We all benefit from that, the kinds of jobs that that creates. We don't even know what job class that is to work with selenium and bore. Again, I'm making up these elements, so please don't. So the point is that that's in the middle phase. So our physical lived world is going to totally transform. Imagine a building that's made of a material that bends. It can just go like this and nothing changes to it. Why would that be important? Well, if you want to protect yourself from the crazy unpredictable of climate. In the areas where it's susceptible to that, maybe you can construct these things much cheaper.

Well, earthquakes.

Earthquakes. You could construct more of them. Imagine in San Francisco, you could build buildings that solve the housing crisis, but do it in a way that was cheaper because the materials are totally different and you could just prove that these things are bulletproof. Instead of spending a billion dollars to build a building because you got to go hundreds of feet into the Earth, you just go 50 feet and it just figures it out. That's possible. I think there will be people that use these AI models to go and solve those things. Then after that, I think you get into the world of it's not just robots that are in a computer, but it's like a physical robot. And those physical robots are going to do things that today will make so much sense in hindsight. An example I was thinking about this this weekend. Imagine if you had a bunch of optimuses, like Tesla's robot, and they were the beat cops. They were the Highway Patrol. Now, What happens there? Well, first, you don't put humans in the way. I suspect then the reaction of those robots could be markedly different. Now, those robots would be controlled remotely.

So the people that are remote now can be a very different archetype. Instead of the physical requirements of policing, you now add this other layer, which is the psychological elements and the judgment. So my point is that if you had robots that were able to do the dangerous work for humans, I think it allows humans to do, again, judgment, those areas of judgment which are very gray and fuzzy. It'll take a long time for computers to be able to replace us due to that. I really do think so. I think the biggest thing that we have done as a disservice to what is coming is, some folks have tried to say that AI is the end all and be all. And I think the better way to think What I love about this is that, you know how you used to have to get your spelling right in an email? And now you just don't think about it because Gmail just fixes it. It up levels us. You used to have to remember the detail of some crazy theory, random detail fact. Now you can just Google it. So you can leave your mind to focus on other things.

The creativity to write your next set, to think about the next interview, to think about your business, because you're occupying less time with the perfunctury stuff. I think these models are doing that, and they're going to get complemented with physical models, meaning physical robots. And they're going to do a lot of work for us that we have not done or today that we do very precariously. Should a robot go in and save you from a fire? I think it can probably do a pretty good job. They'll have multiple sensors. They'll have vision. They'll be able to understand exactly what's going on. If something is falling, they'll just be able to put their hand up and just like, you know what I mean? If they encounter any person of any body weight, it's no problem. Pick that person up, transport them. Again, it allows humans to focus on the things that we're really, really differentiated at. I do think it creates complications, but we have to figure those out. So that's a short, medium, long term.

Well, I see what you're saying in the final example as the Rosie scenario. That's the best case option, right? That it gives people the freedom to be more creative and to pursue different things. And I think there's always going to be a market for handmade things. People like things. They like an acoustic performance. They like stuff where it's very human and very real. But there's a lot of people that just want a job. And these people maybe just aren't inclined towards creativity. And maybe they're very simple people who just want a job and they just want to work. Those are the people That's what I worry about.

I worry about them as well. And I think that... I didn't live in the agrarian economy nor in the industrial revolution. So I don't know how we solve this problem. But we have seen that problem two times. And each time we found a way, and this goes back to news and politics and just working together. But in each of those moments, we found a way to make things substantially better for all people. I saw this crazy stat. In 1800, do you know how many people lived in extreme poverty? How many? Eighty %. Whoa. You know where we are today? Sub-10 %. Single digits. And it's a straight line that goes like this. And that was through an agrarian revolution. It was through the industrial revolution. So it is possible for humans to cooperate to solve these problems. I don't know what the answer is, but I do think you are right that it will put a lot of pressure on a a lot of people. But that's why we got to just figure this out.

What are your thoughts on universal basic income as a bandaid to mitigate that transition?

I'm pretty sympathetic to that idea. I grew up on welfare. So what I can tell you is that there are a lot of people who are trying their best, and for whatever set of boundary conditions, can't figure it out.

I agree. I grew up on welfare as well. Yeah.

And so if I didn't have that safety net, my parents' struggles, I think, would have gotten even worse than what they were.

Right.

So I'm a believer in that social safety net. I think it's really important.

It's best case scenario, right? Because your parents work their way out of it. My parents work their way out of it. But some people are just content to just get a check. And this is the issue I think that a lot of people have is that people will become entitled and just want to collect a check. And if it's a substantial portion of our country, like if universal basic income, if AI eliminates, let's just say a crazy number, 70 % of the manual labor jobs, truck drivers, construction workers, all that stuff gets eliminated. That's a lot of people without a purpose. And one of the things that a good day's work and earning your pay, it makes people feel self-sufficient. It makes people feel valuable. It gives them a sense of purpose. They could look at the thing that they did, maybe build a building or something like that and drive their kids by. Hey, we built that building right there. Oh, wow. It's a part of their identity. And if they just get a check, and then what do they do? Just play video games all day? That's the worst case scenario, is that people just get locked into this world of computers and online and just receive checks and have the bare necessities to survive and are content with that and then don't contribute at all.

The jobs that... Let's put it this way. If we were sitting here in 1924, whatever, 100 years ago, right in the midst of the turn of the industrial revolution, we would have seen a lot of folks that worked on farms, and we would have wondered, well, where are those jobs going to come from? I think that now when you look back, it was not obvious, but you could see where the new job classes came from. It's like all of these industries that were possible because we built a factory. A factory turned out to be a substrate, and then you built all these different kinds of businesses which created different kinds of jobs on top of it. I would hope that if we do this right, this next leap is like that, where we are in a period where it's hard to know with certainty what this job class goes to over here. But I think you have a responsibility to go and figure it out and talk it out and play it out. Because the past would tell you that we have a really good... Humans, when they're unimpeded, have a really good ability to invent these things.

So I don't know, Maybe what it is, is by 2035, there's a billion people that have traveled to Mars. And you're building an entire planet from the ground up. There'll be all sorts of work to do there.

What people are going to go first there?

I think that there'll be a lot of people that are frustrated with what's happening here.

Yeah, sure. Just like the people that got on the Pinta, the Santa Maria, and made their way across the ocean.

It all starts with a group of people that are just like, I'm fed up with this.

Yeah. But to want to go to a place that doesn't even have an atmosphere that's capable of sustaining human life and try to figure... And you can only go back every couple of years. Like, those people are going to be psychos. You're going to have a completely psychotic Australia on meth. It's like the worst case scenario of the castouts of society.

It's just like what you say, it's so true. But if you think about what that decision looked like 400 years ago when that first group of prisoners were put on a boat and sent to Australia, right? That's probably what it felt like. Most people on the mainland, when they were like, ciao, we're probably thinking, man, this is insane. So it'll always look like that. It'll be easier to rationalize it in hindsight. But I do think that there will be a lot of people that want to go, when it's possible to go. And look, we're in this studio. We could be anywhere. We could be in Salt Lake City. We could be in Rome. We could be in Perth. You don't know.

It's all the same. Especially today.

So you could be on Mars.

Yeah, you could. You wouldn't know. That could be the future. Instantaneous communication with people on other planets, just like you could talk to people in New Zealand today.

So that's an amazing example of an innovation in material science that we have been experimenting with for years. So basically, at the core of what you just said is a semiconductor problem. It's a doping problem. Is it silicon germanium? Is it silicon germanium with something else? And the problem, Joe, is to answer what you just said is a tractable problem That has been bounded by energy and computers. And we're at a point where we're almost at infinite energy. And at a point we're almost at, what I say is very specific, which is we're at the point where right in the distance is the marginal cost of energy is basically zero. The marginal cost, meaning to generate the next kilowatt is going to cost like sub a penny. Even with today's stuff, you don't need nuclear, you don't need any of that stuff. We're just on this trend line right now. And because of AI, we're at the point where to get an answer to a question, super complicated, is going to be basically zero, the cost of that. When you put those two things together, what you just said, we will be in a position to answer.

The world will be able to say, Oh, Joe, you want instantaneous communication between here and Mars? We need to harden these communication chips. We're going to build it with this stuff, which we simulated on a computer. We made it. It works. It's shipping. We're done. Now, that will still take 5 and 10 years to do. But my point is, all these things that sound crazy are not. They're actually not that crazy. These things are like achievable technical milestones. Everything will boil down to a technical question that I think we can answer. You want a hoverboard? We could probably figure it out.

Well, then also with quantum computing, and one of the things about AI that's been talked about is this massive need for energy. And so at least it's been proposed to develop nuclear sites, specifically to power AI, which is wild.

Yeah. I have to be You got to dance around this? No, I'll tell you what I think. Okay, well, Maybe before I give you my opinion, I'll tell you the facts. Okay. Today, it costs about four cents a kilowatt hour. Just don't forget the units. Just remember the four cents concept. Twenty years ago, it costs like six or seven cents. If you go and get solar panels on your roof, basically cost nothing. In fact, you can probably make money. So it costs you like negative one cent because you can sell the energy in many parts of America back to the grid. But if you look inside the energy market, the cost has been compounding. And you would say, Well, how does this make sense? If the generation cost, it keeps falling, why is my end user cost keep going up. This doesn't make any sense. And when you look inside, we have a regulatory burden in America that As to the utilities, of which there are less than 2,000 in America, we're giving you a monopoly, effectively. In this area of Austin, you can provide all the energy. Now, Texas is different, but I'm just using it as an example.

But in return, I'm going to allow you to increase prices, but I'm going to demand that you improve the infrastructure. Every few years, you got to upgrade the grid, you got to put money into this, money into that. Over the next 10 years, we got to put a trillion dollars, America, collectively, into improving the current grid, which I think will not be enough because it is aging, and most importantly, it's insecure, meaning Folks can penetrate that. Folks can hack it. Folks can do all kinds of stuff. And then it fails in critical moments. I think that in Austin, you had a whole bunch of really crazy outages in the last couple of years. People died. In 2024, that's totally unacceptable. So I think as people decide that they want resilience, you're going to see 110 million power plants. Which is every homeowner in the United States. Everybody's going to generate their own energy. Everybody's going to store their energy in a powerwall. This stuff is going to become, I mean, absolutely dirt cheap. And it'll just be the way that energy is generated. So you have this, but this is not the whole solution because you still need the big guys to show up.

When you look inside of the big guys, so now you're talking about these 2,000 utilities that need to spend trillions of dollars, they can do a lot of stuff right now to make enough energy to make things work. But when you look at nuclear, I would just say that there are two different kinds of nuclear. There's the old and the new. The old stuff, I agree with you, it's just money and you can get it turned back on. It's a specific isotope of uranium. You can deal with it. Everybody knows in that world how to manage that safely. But then what you have are these next generation things. And this is where I get a little stuck. I'm not smart enough to know all of it, but I'm close enough to be slightly ticked off by it. There's a materials and a technical problem with these things. And what I mean, back to materials. Some of these next-gen reactors need a material that will take you 50 years in America, in the world, to harvest an ounce. The only place where you can really get it is the moon in sufficient quantity. Are you really going to...

I mean, that's how it's going to work?

You're going to- Go to the moon to harvest energy.

You're going to go to the moon, you're going to harness this material, then schlep it all the way back to someplace in Illinois to make stuff. I find that hard to believe.

What is the material?

I can find it. It's in an email that one of my folks sent me. But it's a certain form of reactor that uses a very rare material to create the plasmonic energy that can generate all of this stuff. And it's just very hard to find on Earth. So I scratch my head.

What's the benefit of this particular type of reactor?

In enormous energy. So a solar cell gets this much energy, a nuclear reactor does this, and this other thing does that, and it's super clean. So my point is, these next-gen reactors, I think, have some pretty profound technical problems that haven't been figured out. I applaud the people that are going after it, but I think it's important to not oversell that because it's super hard and there's still some I found technical challenges that haven't been solved yet. We just got past what's called positive net energy, meaning. Let's just like, you put, I'm making up a number. You put 100 units of energy in, and at least you try to get out like 100.01. And we're there. So that's where we are on these next-gen reactors. The old generation of reactors, I'm a total believer in, and we should be building these things as fast as possible so that we have an infinite amount of energy. By the way, if you have infinite energy, the most important thing I think that happens is you have a massive peace dividend. There's like But the odds of the United States going to war when we have infinite energy approaches zero.

But isn't the problem with introducing this to other countries? I believe it was India where they introduced nuclear power plants. Then they realize very quickly they could figure out how to make nuclear weapons from that.

Yes. When the uranium degrades, it can be used in weapons-grade uranium.

And the real problem would be if that is not a small handful of countries that have nuclear weapons, but the entire world, it could get very sketchy.

I think you're touching what I think, objectively to me, is the single biggest What is threat facing all of us today. I escaped a Civil War, so I've had a lived experience of how destructive war could be. The collateral damage of war is terrible.

Where were you?

In Sri Lanka. And I was part of the ethnic majority, Singalese Buddhist. But they were fighting Hindu Tamil minority. It was a 20-year civil war. It flipped the whole country upside down from an incredible place with 99% literacy to just a struggling, developing, third-world country. And so we moved to Canada. We stay in Canada. My parents do whatever they could. And they got run over by that war. They went from a solidly middle-class life to my father had a ton of alcoholism and didn't really work. And my mother went from being a nurse to being a housekeeper. It was dysfunctional. It really crippled, I think, their dreams for themselves. So they breed that into their kids. Fine. But that can't be the solution where hundreds of millions or billions of people have to deal with that risk. I am objectively afraid that we have lost the script a little bit. I think that folks don't really understand how destructive war can be, but also that there are not enough people objectively afraid of this. And that's what sends my spidey senses up and says, Hold on a second. When everybody is telling you that this is off the table and not possible, shouldn't you just look at the world around and ask, Are we sure that that's true?

And I come in, I think to myself, Wow, we are at the biggest risk of my lifetime. And I think the only thing that is probably near this is Maybe at some point in the Cold War, I don't know, because I was so young. Definitely Bay of Pigs. But it required JFK to draw a hard line in the sand and say, Absolutely not. Will we be that fortunate this time around? Are we going to find a way to eliminate that existential risk? This is why my current vein of political philosophy is mostly that, which is the Democrats and the Republicans, there's just so much fighting over so many small stakes issues in the sense that some of these issues matter more or less in different points. But there is one issue above all which, where if you get it wrong, nothing matters. And that is nuclear war. You have two and a half nuclear powers now that are out and about extending and projecting their power into the world, Russia, China, and Iran. That wasn't what it was like 10 years ago. That wasn't what it was like 25 years ago. It wasn't even what it was like four years ago.

I just don't think enough people take a step back and say, Hold on a second. If this thing escalates, all this stuff that you and I just talked about won't matter. Whether our kids are on Adderall or not or the iPad, don't give them so much Fortnite or material science or Optimus. It's all off the table because we will be destroying ourselves. I just think that that's tragic. We have an enormous responsibility right now for the village elders of the world to tell people, Guys, we are sleepwalking into something that you can't walk back from.

One of the strangest things about us is the wisdom that's necessary to see the future and prognosticate and see where this could go, especially based on the history of human beings and how many times things have, like you were talking about Sri Lanka, but there's many examples all over the world of civilizations that were thriving, that were pounded into dust. And because every day is similar for us, we have this inability to look forward and to make that leap and see the potential for disaster that all these things have. This is what freaks me out about when people talk openly about we have to win with Russia versus Ukraine. What are you talking about? What is winning? Yeah. What does that mean? This sounds insane. And then applauding the long-range attacks into Russia now, this escalation. Oh, they're attacking Russia now. They'll show them, Are you in a movie? Do you think that this always ends up with the good guys winning? Because that's not the case in human history at all. And not only that, there is no good guy. If people start launching nukes. Everybody's a bad guy and everybody's fucked. And that's on the table.

It's horrible. When you see long-range Israel bombing campaigns in the Lebanon and you see what's going on with Ukraine and Russia, who knows? Who knows how this escalates? Who knows what the retaliatory response is? Who knows what the response to the response is.

Well, let me add to this by saying, we know what the response will be not. It will not be measured. It will not be calm. It will not be, Hey, let's get on the phone and talk about it. Right. The thing is, there was a long period of time where America was the leading moral actor in the world. I think that we spoke from a place of wisdom, but also earned respect. But we forget that at the end of the Cold War, it's not that we vanquished the USSR as much as they imploded from within. It was just an economic calamity. They just couldn't afford to keep up with us. The The reason was we had these two edges. We had a technological edge and we had an economic edge. When you put those two things together, it created a lot of abundance Now, we can talk about how some of that is not equal, which I also agree with, but it allowed America to be, effectively for a long period of time, the top dog. The honest reality is that's not where we are today. We are one of two or three. And the problem with that is that you can't look back in history and try to live your life like what it was like in the good old days.

We're not the high school football star anymore. So we need to live in a more modest way, in a more reliable and consistent way with neighbors that have also for themselves, done well and just realize that they have their own incentives. And when you tell them to do something, they're not always going to listen. So if we don't understand that and find a way to de-escalate these things, what you said is going to happen. Something is going to be one step too far, a reaction, a reaction, a reaction, and then eventually somebody will overreact. And that is all just so totally avoidable. And it's just It frustrates me that we objectively don't understand that. We sweep it under the carpet and we talk about all the other things. I understand that all of those things, let's say, matter at But at some point in time, nothing matters, because if you don't get this right, nothing matters. I think we have to find a way of finding people that draw a bright red line and say, This is the line I will never cross under any circumstance. And I think America needs to do that first because it's what gives everybody else the ability to exit stage left and be okay with it.

The other problem that America clearly has is that there's an enormous portion of what controls the government, whether you want to call it the military-industrial complex or military contractors. There's so much money to be made in pushing that line, pushing it to the brink of destruction but not past, maintaining a constant state of war, but not an Apocalypse. And that as long as there's financial incentives to keep escalating and you're still getting money and they're still signing off on hundreds of billions of dollars to funnel this. It's all going through these military contractors and bringing over weapons and gear. The windfall is huge. The amount of money is huge. They do not want to shut that off for the sake of humanity, especially if someone can rationalize. You get this diffusion of responsibility when there's a whole bunch of people together and they're all talking about it. Everyone's on the same page and you have shareholders that you have to represent. The whole thing is bananas.

I think you just said the key thing. This may be super naive, but I think part of the most salvageable feature of the military-industrial complex is that these are for-profit, largely public companies. That have shareholders. And I think that if you nudge them to making things that are equally economically valuable or more, Ideally more. They probably would do that.

What would be an example of that other than weapons manufacturing? What would be equally economically viable?

So part of when you look at the primes, the five big folks that get all of the economic activity from the Department of Defense, what they act is as an organizing principle for a bunch of subs underneath, effectively. They're like a general contractor, and then they have a bunch of subcontractors. There's a bunch of stuff that's happening in these things that you can reorient if you had an economy that could support it. For example, when you build a drone, what you also are building a subcomponent, a critical and very valued subcomponent, all the navigation, all the communications, all of it has to be encrypted. You can't hack it. You can't do any of that stuff. There is a broad set of commercial applications for that that are equal to and greater than just the profit margin of selling the drone, but they don't really explore those markets. If, for example, we are multi-planetary, I'll just go back to that example. I will bet you those same organizations will make two or three times as much money by being able to redirect that same technology into those systems that you just described. Hey, I need an entire communications infrastructure that goes from Earth to the moon to Mars.

We need to be able to triangulate. We need Internet access across all these endpoints. We need to be real-time from the get-go. There's just an enormous amount of economic value to do that. So again, we have these very siloed parts of the economy that are limited by what we know. And what we know is part of what you just said, which is we built these things, and then some people convince others to use the things that we built. I think instead of saying there's some crazy nefarious plot to always go to war, instead, if we say, if you make the thing and you could sell it to a different market and make more money, would these people do it or are they hell-bent on war? I think it's more that they would just do it.

As long as there's not still a business for war.

So then it reduces war to a very different business. I think it's smaller. I think it's more drone-oriented. I'm not saying that war will go away. There's no utopia where war goes away.

But I do think- Which is a crazy thing to say, really.

Unfortunately, I think that we're always going to be fighting for some resource. So the last 30 or 40 years, all these forever wars, we were fighting over energy, effectively.

This is my one bright spot that I think about with AI as well. It's like everyone's terrified of the open border situation and criminals coming across the border. Wouldn't the solution be not have a place like a desperate third-world country where people are trying to escape on foot with their families. If we were living next door to another United States, and you could just travel freely back and forth between the two of them because it really didn't matter. Both of them are equally safe. Both of them have equal economic prosperity. Both of them are equally democratically governed. No problem. Just go over there. Go over here. It used to be like that with Canada. With Canada, you used to go over there with a driver's license. You used to be able to go back and forth between the United I think the first time I went to Canada, I did not have a passport. I had a driver's license. It was the same deal. They just accepted, Oh, that place is cool. We're cool. We're next to each other. If the whole world was like that- It would be incredible. Right, it would be incredible.

I think AI makes that possible. I think so, too. I think it makes that possible. We're going to have to deal with a few very uncomfortable factors, one of them being the illegal drug trade and another one being the consequences of Prohibition and forcing people into doing things- Prohibition of drugs? Of drugs, yes. I'm not comfortable with that, but I feel like the only way to disempower illegal drug manufacturing is to have legal drug manufacturing that's regulated. The only way to stop fentanyl overdoses is to have cocaine become legal. But the problem with that is you're getting a bunch of people that are addicted to cocaine.

Can I ask you a question? Sure. I don't do drugs, so I don't understand. But what's the step before it? What causes you to want to do fentanyl?

They don't do fentanyl on purpose. Okay.

They start it because of a prescription.

No. Most fentanyl overdoses is fentanyl that's cut into other drugs, particularly party drugs like Mollet and Extasy, cocaine, even heroin, things along those lines where people think that they're getting a pure thing, but they're getting it from the cartel.

It's laced with this. Yes.

It's cheap, and it's very small amounts of fentanyl do incredible damage. The amount of fentanyl that can kill you is like the head of a nail. It's very small. Have you seen it in relationship to a penny?

I've seen a picture of it.

It's crazy. So the problem is if you have a drug and you've cut it with a bunch of other things because you want to sell as much of it as possible, you add a bunch of things into it, and to increase the potency, they add fentanyl. And because of that, it's all done illegally. It's unregulated, so a lot of people die. And the numbers in the United States, I think there are upwards of 100,000 people.

Is there something to do to motivate folks to not do the party drugs?

Well, I think you're going to have to have a massive education campaign, and people are going to have to understand it the same way they understand cigarettes. It's like cigarettes smoking in young people is down quite a bit from the '80s, right? And I think that's because of people understanding the consequences of it. But you're always going to have people that want to smoke cigarettes. And my belief is that they should be able to smoke cigarettes. I don't think you should do Adderall all day. But if you get a prescription, you can do it. But at least in my mind, you're getting Adderall from a pharmacy, and that pharmacy is going to give you actual Adderall and not some fentanyl-laced thing that's going to kill you. And you have no idea. You think you're taking the same thing you've always taken, and then one day you're dead. And that's the case with a lot of people today, especially with party drugs. I don't think you should do heroin. I don't think you should do cocaine. I don't think you should fuck your life up. And I know too many people will have fucked their life up.

But I also don't think that I should be able to tell you what you can do, especially when there's all these drugs that are readily available, particularly alcohol, which is one of the most destructive drugs to your health, to relationships and families, to societies. How many alcoholics? How many drunk driving accidents? How many drunk people murdered other people? There's just horrible consequences of alcohol, but I completely support alcohol being legal. Yeah, same. But we have learned how to consume alcohol as a culture.

What about what happened in Oregon? You know, like Oregon, they legalized it and now they unlegalize it?

Well, first of all, they were already off the rails. Okay, this is not like legalizing drugs. It's not like legalizing drugs in San Francisco in the year 2000. It's a completely different scenario. You have these people that are really... They're a accustomed to tents and subsidizing drug addicts, and they're accustomed to this very bizarre breakdown of civil society, where you're seeing open air drug markets and everyone's fine with it. And it's somehow or another kind and compassionate to allow this to take place everywhere. And that's what you have in Portland. Portland is probably one of the most liberal cities that we have, one of the most leftist cities that we have. So for Oregon to do it that way, I think it's like an awesome libertarian notion to say, you know what, we shouldn't make any of these things a crime. These are personal choices, and you can make good personal choices or bad ones. We'll have everything. But the problem is the fabric of society, the encouragement of discipline and of hard work and of accomplishment had been eroded to the point where accomplishment meant that there was something wrong with you. If you were a person that was eat the rich, tax the rich.

If you were a person that had accomplished something great, it wasn't because of some extraordinary effort you put in, even if it was. It was you did something to fuck over other people, and that's the only way you get rich in this world. And it's just bizarre. It's bizarre. It permeated Portland. So when you introduce free heroin to that, you're going to get more problems. And you're subsidizing people for living on the streets, which they do. I watched this interview where they were talking to these people in the Pacific Northwest, where they moved there specifically so they could be homeless because they knew that they'd get money. And there's no incentive to get out of those tents. There's no incentive. There's free food and free drugs, and they give you money. And they're like, okay.

Right. So that didn't fail because of the actual drug policy, but more of the other social policies.

I think, have you ever heard of Dr. Carl Hart? No. He's a professor. Is he at Columbia? I believe he's at Columbia. Carl Hart was a straight chemist, like a guy studying chemistry and studying these substances in Columbia. He was a clinical researcher. And along the way, he started realizing that our understanding of these drugs and the pros and cons of them had been flavored by propaganda, heavily, particularly the sweeping act of 1970 that made almost everything illegal, which was really to target target civil rights groups and anti-war people. This was during the Nixon administration. They made a bunch of things that were psychedelics. Mkultra, when that happened? Well, MKUltra was actually before that. It was when they were experimenting with people, particularly with LSD. So when they started doing this, they made everything illegal. And now the only way you can get any of these things is through illegal sources. So you're getting them through the cartels. So if we don't have the ability to legalize things. The problem with legalization, there's no good answer here. So to keep things illegal, you're going to have fentanyl overdoses. I know people have lost their children.

I know people have lost their brothers and sisters to this. It's a horrible thing that happens. You're also going to get heroin overdoses if it's legal. Jesus Christ. You're going to get more people to try it because it's legal. But it's just like Prohibition during the during the 1920s or the 1930s, rather. When they had that, what they did was they enabled the mob and they enabled organized crime, and that was the rise of Al Capone, and that was the rise of the MoonShiners. You essentially You always had a demand, and the people that were willing to supply that demand were criminals, and they were criminals in this country. We're empowering criminals that are essentially running Mexico, which is bizarre. I know during the latest election, how many assassinations were there? Was 37 or 35? During their latest elections. In Mexico? In Mexico. In Mexico, there was at least 35 assassinations.

Are there European countries that do this well?

Portugal. Portugal has decriminalized everything. And they saw a massive decrease in HIV, massive decrease in drug addiction, and all sorts of other things. I don't know what the long term study is on that. 37. 37 assassinated candidates. I mean, you have to play ball with the cartel over there. You know, just like you had to play ball with the mob in the 1930s. You have to play ball. They have the guns, and they're really mean, and they'll do whatever the fuck they want to you. The 2021 midterms when 36 candidates were killed. Oh, my God.

Jeez. Oh, my God.

Jeez. Yeah, it's wild down there. That is a direct result of having trillions of dollars being made by selling illegal drugs and made most of them to sell to America. I'm sure they sell them to other places as well.

And it's all fentanyl or is it all... It's all kinds of things.

No, I don't think there's a lot of money in that. The real money is in like meth, meth, cocaine. They have a problem with illegal marijuana that's grown in the United States on national forest land. Because what happened is, especially in California, my friend John Norris, he wrote a book called The Hidden War, and he was a fish game officer and basically wanted to be the guy that checks your fishing license. Like, great job. You're out in the outdoors. And one day, one day. It's the beginning of a movie. It is the beginning of a movie. I'm sure they're probably doing a movie on it. But in one day, they find this creek that has dried up, and they think that perhaps- Oh, they diverted the water. Someone's diverted the water. They thought it was a farmer that had done something inappropriate or whatever. So they follow the creek up, and they find this illegal grow up that's run by the cartel. Then they become a tactical unit, and they have Belgian Malamois, and bulletproof vests, and machine guns. The whole thing's crazy. They're getting shootouts with the cartel in National Forestland. Oh, my God.

Because it's a misdemeanor to grow pot illegally in a state where pot is legal. So California has legal marijuana. You could go to any store, anywhere, use credit cards. It's open, free market. If you follow the rules, you can open up a store. But if you don't follow the rules, you can sell it illegally. It's just a misdemeanor.

I wanted to learn about marijuana, the market, but you can't process the money, I think, right?

In some states. I know in Colorado, it was a real problem. And in Colorado, they had to do everything in cash.

It's like breaking bad, like bricks of cash.

They were using mercenaries. They're essentially using military contractors to run the money back and forth to the bank because you had to bring the bank money in bulk. So you have a million dollars in an armored car and a bunch of guys tailing the car in front of the car, and they're driving it to the bank, and everyone knows there's a million dollars in their car. So you have to really be fortified. And so it was very sketchy for a lot of people. I don't know what the current condition Colorado is now. I don't know if they still have to do it that way.

A couple of companies, I remember, the reason I know this is a guy came and pitched me on some business, and he was the software for all that. I think the company went public, and I just realized it just went sideways because nobody wanted to touch it because they didn't want to build rails for that economy, which didn't make much sense, seeing as, to me at least, just because if the laws say it's legal, then it should all be treated equally. But then the problem, I think I remember them telling me was that federally it's still gray.

Yeah, it's gray. And they're trying to diminish that. The latest steps during the Biden administration is to change it to a schedule three. And that's a proposal that would help. But really, it should be just like alcohol. It should be something that you have to be 21 years old to buy. You should have to have an ID, and we should educate people how to use it responsibly. And we should also pay attention to whoever the fuck is growing it and make sure you're not going wacky. There's people that are botanists that are out of their mind potheads that are just 24/7 hitting bongs, and they're making stuff that will put you on Mars without Elon Musk.

I remember the problem that somebody raised. I read this in an article, was you need to make it more than what more legal than it is today so that you can get folks to put like some version of a nutritional label on the thing and show intensity, right? Because the intensity is not regulated.

Right. Well, they do regulate it in California. If you go to good places in California, let's say this is 39% THC, is very high. This is 37. But then there's also the problem with one thing that marijuana seems to do to some people, that alcohol doesn't necessarily... Some people have a propensity for alcoholism, and it seems to be genetic. But there's a thing that happens with marijuana, where people who have a tendency towards schizophrenia, marijuana can push them over the edge. Alex Berntsen wrote a great book about this called Tell Your Kids. I've personally witnessed people who have lost their marbles. And I think it's people that have this propensity. Because one of the things that I think is beneficial about marijuana in particular, and this is one of the things that freaks people out, is the paranoia. Well, paranoia, I feel like what it is, is a hyper awareness. And I think it pushes down all these boundaries that you've set up, all these walls and all these blinders, so that you see the world for what it really is, and a lot of people it freaks out. But what I think it does is it ultimately makes you more compassionate and kinder and nicer.

And you realize-In the moment or afterwards? Afterwards.

I think it's a tool for recognizing things that you are conveniently ignoring. My friend Eddie told me about this once. He was saying, If you're having a bad time and you smoke marijuana, you're going to have a worse time because you're already freaking out. You're already freaking out about something. If you're going through a horrible breakup and you get high, no one loves me. But if you're having a great time with your friends, you'll probably just laugh and be silly, right? Because you're not freaking out about something. You're in a good place mentally, which we should all strive to be in a good place.

I have this weird psychosomatic guard that developed. My father was an alcoholic, and I didn't drink at all in my teens, in my 20s, and mostly in my 30s. And then in my mid-30s, I started drinking wine, and I love wine, and I think I can handle it. I really enjoy it. I love it.

I do, too.

But I cannot drink hard alcohol. The minute that it touches my lips, I get severe hiccups. I mean, debilitatingly bad hiccups. Really? Any alcohol. Do you think it's psychosomatic? I think it's completely psychosomatic because it makes no logical sense. If the tequila touches my lip, I just start hiccuping like crazy. And it's like this weird It's a protective thing that I think my brain has developed because my dad used to drink some stuff that would make you blind.

It was like 150 % proof.

The guy would just chug it.

Well, I think there are whiskey connoisseurs. There is like scotch, like old scotch does have a fantastic taste. It's got an interesting an acquired taste. But there's real wine connoisseurs. Wine is incredible. Wine is It's a different animal. The flavor of wine is spectacular. It's the most delicious of all alcohols without being sweet.

I completely agree with you.

Yeah, it's a different thing. The people that say their tequila connoisseur is like, Shut up. It all tastes like shit. Some of it just tastes less like shit. The great tequila tastes less shitty.

It's alcohol. And then there's some flavor around the alcohol. Yeah.

I drink a glass of wine with a steak, and it's like, Oh, this wine's fucking great. I totally agree with you. And it puts you in a Like a calm. It relaxes me. You don't want to go drive fucking wild, get crazy, and get in a fight when you're drinking wine.

Exactly. And the amazing thing about wine is you can go on these journeys where... When I first started to buy wine, I did what every knucklehead does, which is like, Oh, if it's expensive, it must be good. And you start down that road, and it's just so dumb because the amount of money that I spent on stuff that was marginal, but it had a good label and it had a pedigree. And then when you discover and you learn... I remember my wife's Italian, so we spent a lot of time in Italy in the summer with our kids. And when we were there, you find these incredible Italian white chardonnays. In the summer, I'm just going to be honest with you, there is nothing better to drink in the world. It's better than water. If you were like- It's cold. It's cold, it's refreshing, it's got a great bouquet. But these bottles are 40, 50, 60, 80, maybe A maximum €100, max. And then you'll spend a thousand dollars on some stupid white burgundy from France, and it tastes like half of it. The other great example of this is like Chateau Petras. I don't want to get in trouble with the Chateau Petris guys, but I'll just be honest.

Those bottles cost 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,000. You see some in restaurants, 19,000. I've never bought one. I've tasted it once because in Vegas, I had a host, and once he gave me a thing. He says, Chamath, you can use this for your dinner. And I'm like, well, is there a cap? And he's like, this time, no cap. And first I was like, God, I must have lost a lot of money. What would they say? When they say no cap for $19,000 wine. So then I said, fuck it. I'm just going to try this. So I went to Caesars, and it was like four or $5,000. I mean, I would never buy this in a norm. But I got it because it was free. Joe was, okay, all this build up in my mind, this is, oh, my God, this is going to be ethereal. It's going to be ambrosia. It was not ambrosia.

Yeah.

Whereas you can find these other ones that are made by folks that just put their entire lives into it. You taste the whole story. I just think it's incredible.

But it's a weird status thing, the expensive wine. It's just like Cuban cigars.

It's really dumb.

Yeah, it's a weird thing.

The real skill is being able to know price value. And when you know it, it's so satisfying because it's like, oh, this is just delicious. And then when your friends enjoy it, they're like, oh, my God, this is delicious. And I'm like, yeah, that's 80 bucks. How? And I'm like, well, it's very hard to find. So then the skill is like, it's funny. I'll tell you this is how bad wine has gotten for me. Meaning, I love the story. I love the people. I want to support the industry. So I went and I registered for an alcohol license at the ABC in California.

Really?

Because I was tired and frustrated of trying to buy retail because you have to go through folks that have their own point of view. And I was like, well, if we just become, we as in me and a friend of mine. And so we set up a thing. We set up a little LLC. I filed the paperwork and it's called C-J Wine LLC, my friend, me and Joshua, and we're able to negotiate directly with the wineries. And we're able to get it from wholesalers in Europe or in South Africa or in Australia. And it just allows us to buy a bottle, try it if we really like it. Thursdays, nights at my house is always poker. We serve it to our friends. They like it, then we can buy a couple of cases I can share with my friends, and you get it at wholesale. It's a great little hack.

Is there a limitation? Is there a certain specific The amount that you have to buy?

No, I look like a retail store.

It could be like Amazon. And so retail store could just buy a few bottles?

They could buy a case. They could buy a few bottles. That's a little bit harder. So you have to have a more personal relationship. But then the really good stuff, you can buy a few cases and then pass them on to your friends. I think wine's incredible. And with food, it's incredible.

But when I hear people that are going to open up their own wine label, I'm like, oh, good Lord. How much How do you know about wine? Like, oh, I'm going to start a wine business. Like, what?

I went to a couple of these wineries, and I just asked them just out of like, just explain to me how you got there. And all I could think of was, man, this is way too complicated. But these folks, it's like animal husbandry. They're breeding this vine with this vine, but then they're going to take, cleave off this little bit. So it's a breeding program over 10 and 20, and 30 years. And it's like, This is really complicated.

Oh, yeah. They do weird stuff. Like, they'll splice avocado trees with... What is that nut? Pistachios. So they'll take avocado trees and they splice them with pistachios to make the tree more sturdy. You can take two different species of tree, and if you cut them sideways and splice them together, they'll grow.

A friend of mine started a company that's making potatoes, and he makes these ginormous potatoes like this. It's an incredible It's a terrible thing because the yield is through the roof. And his vision is, I'll be able to feed the world in a cheaper and more abundant way. But it's all this engineering. He hacked the chromosome of the potato Oh my God. That's incredible. And it generates a huge potato and it generates a seed. I didn't know this, but potatoes don't have seeds. In order to plant more potatoes, you chop up the potato into quarters or eighths and you stick the potato into the soil.

Oh, he's playing God.

And so he's like, no, this is dumb. I'm going to make a huge potato and I'm going to have the potato have a seed. Then I'll just take the seed and I'll plant it in the ground.

So when you usually do it, do you have to have that potato and they have to soak it so a sprout comes out of it and then plant it? Is that what they do?

I don't know.

Because I've seen that before. I've always wondered, how are they doing that?

I don't know. But he's going after potatoes, and then he wants to go after fruit. Like, I love fruit, but fruit tilts me because every time I go to a store, sometimes you'll get... There are seasons where white nectarines and white peaches, maybe one of the most incredible fruits ever created. But if you get it in a bad season, it's just unedible.

Yeah, they're dull.

They're dull. They're terrible. Mangos are the same. I love mangoes. And when you see these mangoes in the summertime, I don't know where Europe gets their mangoes, but this is probably one of the best features of Europe. They have these mangoes that are just like this.

Well, they're organic, too.

They're just incredible.

Well, they still have real tomatoes. You have to search for real tomatoes here. If you want an heirloom tomato, that's an actual tomato. The tomatoes that we have are just These freaks.

Have you ever worn-Glucose monitor?

Glucose monitor? No, I haven't.

I wore one for 90 days. And my wife, when she was younger, well, she runs a pharma company, so she has a proclivity for science, obviously. She thinks about a lot of this stuff scientifically, but she also broke her back when she was 11. She's very sensitive to inflammation. She's hacked a lot of food so that she can minimize inflammation. I wore this thing and I was totally blown away. The things that I thought were healthy for me, my body was like, this is radioactive.

What stuff?

So the way that I ate rice or quinoa, I would have a small amount of rice, or I would have brown rice, or I'd have black rice, or I'd have quinoa because I was like, oh, it's more protein. It didn't really matter. It had the same... My body reacted with this massive sugar spike. The minute I cooked it off, put it in the fridge, waited 24 hours and ate it the next day, no glycemic load whatsoever.

Same with potatoes.

Potatoes. I found that pasta, if I made it more al dente than what I was used to, no glycemic load. And the problem that's frustrating- More al dente, meaning less cooked?

Less cooked.

Has a totally different reaction in my body than if I make it soft and smushy. So I've trained my body to have really al dente pasta, and I see that the glycemic load is much lower. I think just the point is the food supply in the United States, I think it's the most precarious it's ever been. It's brutally hard to figure this out. I mean, is everybody supposed to get a glucose monitor and then figure out what little things trigger insulin spikes? Well, that's not possible. And then even if you do find out, how do you get it in a cheap, affordable way? No wonder everybody's really struggling with this.

Have you ever worn a glucose monitor when you were in Italy?

No, I wore it here.

I'd like to know because there's a difference the way my body responds.

I can tell you how my body feels. If I take a picture, I try to work out and I take pretty detailed, what's my BMI, what's my muscle mass, what's my fat percentage? And I always take those readings right before I go. And when I look afterwards, and I don't do anything when I'm there, I swim in the sea when I can, like when I'm on vacation or whatever, I walk a lot, but nothing else. No weights, no nothing. My muscle mass stays the same. My fat percentage goes down. I look healthier And I feel really great. And all I do is I just eat what's in front of me. I don't think about quantities, whatever. But when I'm back in the United States, so I get to be there, call it six weeks a year, But when I'm back in the United States, I have to go back on lockdown because like a lot of people, I had this thing. If you look at a picture of me in Sri Lanka, I look like old Dave Chappelle. I was like this. I was just a total stick figure. Within one year of being in North America, in this case in Canada, when you look at the school pictures, I was fat.

Couldn't explain it to you. It's just the difference in the food system.

And my parents were making the same things because they wanted to have that comfort of what they were used to. So I don't know if it was the food supply or not, but- It has to be. It has to be. It has to be.

Everybody says the same thing.

And then my whole family has struggled with it. So I think that there's something. And then when I go now to Italy as a different reference example, it's the best shape of my life. And I feel less.

You feel completely different. Even when You eat things like pizza over there. You don't feel like you ate a brick. I've eaten pizza here and I love it. But when I'm over, I'm like, oh, what did you do? What did you do? Like you ate a brick. But over there, it's just food. It tastes great. The pasta doesn't bother you. Nothing bothers you. It's just whatever they're doing. And there's many things. Just one of them, they're not using enriched flour. And another thing is they have heirloom flour, so it hasn't been maximized for the most amount of gluten.

I'm curious to see what Bobby does if Trump wins in this world, make America healthy again. I don't exactly know what his plans are.

Yeah. What's possible? How much can you really affect with regulation? How much can you really bring to light? And what are we going to learn about our food system? I mean, even Canada. One of the things about the hearings that they just had was they were comparing lucky Charms that they sell in the United States that are very brightly colored versus lucky Charms that they sell in Canada. Completely different looking product because in Canada, it's illegal to use those dyes that we use ubiquitously. And those dyes are terrible for you. We know they're terrible for you. Canada knows they're terrible for you, which is why they're illegal up there. The food tastes the same. It still sucks. It's still bad for you. It's still covered in sugar, but at least it doesn't have that fucking poison that just makes it blue or red.

And it's impossible to teach my kids healthy eating habits as a result of this. The food in the United States, it's everywhere, and it's beating into you that this is a cheap way of getting caloric intake. And it is full of just all these stuff you can't pronounce.

It's garbage. It's all garbage. And it's so common. And then if you're in what they would call food desert, If you're in a place that only has fast food, my God, your odds of being metabolically healthy if you're poor and you're living in a place that's a food desert.

It's impossible. It's fucked.

It's impossible. You're fucked. It's too hard. And it's also very expensive, which is even crazier. It's so expensive to eat well and to eat clean and make sure that you don't have any additives and garbage in your food.

Do you remember in the '90s and 2000s where what we were told was fat was bad?

Yeah.

And you would see sugar-free, and I would just buy it. Oh, yeah. Sugar-free is great. I was like, sugar-free? I'm doing the healthy thing here. This is great. Margarine. Margarine. Or then I would see fat-free, and I'd be like, oh, I'll do that. And it turned out all this stuff was just-well, it's not even-well, it's not even...

It's such a small amount of people that affected that. That's what's so terrifying. There's a small amount of people who bribed these scientists to falsify data so that they could blame all these coronary artery diseases and heart diseases on saturated fat when it was really sugar that was causing all these problems. And we had a very dysfunctional understanding of health for the longest time. The food pyramid was all fucked up. The bottom of the food pyramid was all bread and carbs. It's so nuts. And it just made a bunch of really sloppy humans. And you could see it in the beaches, the photos from the 1960s versus looking at people in the 2000s.

Have you had cases Is it DC and Cali means?

They're coming on. They're coming on.

They have an incredible story. Should I say it or we can just- Sure. They have this incredible story that they tell about what happened. And what they say is in the '80s, when you had these mergers, one of the mega mergers that happened was tobacco company with food company. There was two of them. And a lot of the scientists started to focus some of their energy on taking that skill, I'll just put that in quotes, of making something very addictive and transposing it to food. It's like, okay, if I'm at RJR and I'm used to making cigarettes, how do I think about structurally building up something that wants you to eat before, but now instead of smoking, instead of a cigarette, it's a twinkie or whatever. A lot of the food science that we have in America is built on the back of a bunch of these mega mergers where you have these scientists go and build super, unquote addictive food. That was a failure of the... I mean, obviously, it was a failure of the capital markets, but it was a failure of public health.

Well, it's a failure of our regulatory process. It's a failure of our exposure closing the public to this and making sure that whatever this is is labeled the same way cigarettes are. Because if you want to buy cigarettes, you can buy them today, but it's going to have a big warning that tells you this can kill you. Totally. And arguably, sugar is probably as difficult to kick as nicotine is. And there's a lot of other problems.

I smoked when I was younger. I found it much easier to stop smoking than it was for me to cut out sugar. Wow. Cutting out sugar is basically impossible. It's very hard. You encounter it everywhere.

I have a friend who has diabetes, and he got type 2 diabetes, and he's thin, my friend Duncan. And one of the things he found out is when he stopped, it was all just eating too much sugar. When he stopped eating sugar, he's like, oh, my God, I have so much energy. This is what I'm supposed to feel like. He had thought that it was just life. He's in his 40s now. Lethargic. I need a nap. And he didn't realize he was poisoning himself. Yeah. And that's what most people are doing. Most people out there that are drinking regular soda and they're eating candy and you're eating burgers with sugar in the bun and bullshit and bread and French fries, cooked in seed oils. You're just poisoning yourself.

You should fact check this because I may get the number wrong. But there was something that came out very recently about the percentage of the US food stamp system that goes to soda. And it was like 10 % of the total budget or- Something nutty like that. It's like some ginormous amount of money is just basically giving folks sugar water. And you wonder why now The solution is just to give everybody on the back end of it Ozempic.

It's also like, let's be real. That's not food. It's something you put in your mouth, but you can't buy cigarettes with food stamps. So if you buy, you can't buy cigarettes with food stamps. Why should you be able to buy something that's really bad for you? I mean, what would change if we said food stamps, we're going to actually increase the amount that you get, but we're going to regulate what you can buy, and you have to buy all the things from the outside of the store?

I don't And I don't even think you have to regulate it. Think of what has happened because of companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash as an example. What have they done? And I'll tell you why I think this is important. Those guys have gone out and cloud kitchens. There's They have three companies. They have bought up every single warehouse in every part of every city and suburb in America. And what they put in there are these things that they call ghost kitchens. So But when you launch the app, and a lot of the times when you get a drink from Starbucks, it's not coming from the actual Starbucks down the street. It's coming from a ghost kitchen. Why? Because they centralize all the orders and it creates an economy of scale. Why am I telling you this? I think that there is a way for food stamps to sit on top of that infrastructure and just deliver food.

But the problem is people, especially people that don't know or care, want that sugar water. The choices are- I understand. Yeah. You're going to have people that choose that Big Mac because it is delicious.

Yeah, and I think that they are delicious. And once a year, I have a Big Mac. But I think if you're going to tie it to something like a government subsidy, at least the government should have a conversation with themselves that says, well, we can ship them all of this healthy food and change a bunch of boundary conditions in these folks' lives. I've seen it. I know what it's like to be overweight. It sucks. Your self-confidence is negative one. The way I dressed, the way I felt, it just took an enormous amount of work to overcome it, and you're still left with it. Then there's the physical pain. Then there's the internal issues that you create for yourself. This is not a win. And so I get it that the hamburger tastes good. But this is where the government, I think, has a responsibility to say, look, we're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, so let's spend it in a smart way. We're not going to give you pop and soda anymore. And we're going to start introducing some fruit, some vegetables, some fiber. Like Why can't you do that? That's a very reasonable thing to do, especially if on the same hand, the other hand of the government is going to go and negotiate insulin prices and metformin prices and GLP-1s.

Right. That is the issue. See what Bobby Kennedy was talking about with these GLP-1s? He was comparing the amount of money spent on GLP-1s and what you could give every obese American, that you could give them free healthy food and a gym membership.

For 10 %, I think. I think what Bobby said is the cost of GLP-1's current course in speed would be $3 trillion dollars a year.

Isn't that amazing? Just something that controls your appetite.

And for 300 billion, you can give everybody food. By the way, you can use this ghost kitchen infrastructure to give the food in a prepped way. So you can even make life super simple for them. The idea that you would spend three... We don't have three trillion to spend, but we have a responsibility to make sure that people don't kill themselves with food.

But now there's an industry that's making three trillion dollars by giving people these GLP ones. And the problem is, just like every other industry, once it starts making money, it does not want to stop.

And by the way, I think that they should be allowed to make money. But what I'm saying is in a free market, every actor is allowed to act rationally. Actually, what you want is everybody to have their own incentives and to act naturally. That's when you get the best outcome. Because if you're acting with some shadow agenda, you're not going to necessarily do the right thing. So my point is, in this example, the government's job, in this narrow example, is to get the best health care outcome. Because if they're doing any form of long term planning, it's pretty obvious. We are hurtling to a brick wall on this health care issue with respect to people's health. You don't have a solution solution. The only solution cannot be to Medicaid and then triple and quadruple the budget deficit that we already don't have a path to pay down. Right.

Well, the only other thing that I could think is if there was some a way that would be effective at establishing discipline other than just promoting it. I could conceive of, especially when you're dealing with something like Neuralink or some a new way of programming the mind, where it just changes whatever the behavior pattern is that accepts these foods as choices. Like lobotomize your Appetite.

That would be a very dystopian place.

Sketchy to be an early adopter.

If you want this subsidy, you need to get this brain implant. It would not be a good place.

That would be bad. That would be very bad. That's worst case scenario. Best case scenario is you just have a national scale promotion of health and wellness and abandonment of this body positivity nonsense and fat doctors and people are telling you that every weight is a healthy weight and all food is food and to think otherwise is discriminatory, which you're hearing from people. And by the way, that stuff is funded. And that's what people need to know. That nonsense is actually funded. They pay people to be influencers, and they're getting paid by these food companies to say these nonsense things that are scientifically, factually incorrect. They're not true. It is not healthy in any way, shape, or form to be obese. And when they tell you that you can be metabolic, you can be who's historically healthy and still have fat, it's okay. It's not okay. It's not okay. That's just not true. And is that fat-shaming? You can call whatever the fuck you want, but it doesn't change what it does to the human body. And it doesn't make someone better if you don't make them feel bad add about being robustly unhealthy.

It's an enormous disservice to folks if we don't expose an alternative path. Okay, we're spending this much money. We spend so much money in all kinds of random stuff. Just a simple example that we saw this past week, $50 billion spent between rural broadband and chargers. We have no rural broadband, and we have three chargers. No, this is the data. That's 50 billion. So, okay, that's not the 300 billion that- Explain that, what you mean by that. So in Congress, when they come together to pass these bills, sometimes what happens is there's a lot of horse trading, right? And you get what's called the Christmas tree bill, which is like everybody gets to hang something off the Christmas tree. And the crazy part of the United States is these These little baubles now are 10 billion here, 50 billion there, whatever. So we passed a few years ago, something that was meant to get rural broadband into thousands of people's homes. And initially it was given to SpaceX and Starlink, specifically. And then I think it was pulled back. And they said, you know what? There's a better, quote unquote, better way to do it.

And And there's other folks that decided that the better option would just be to lay fiber. Now, I'm just going to... This is not a judgment. I'm just going to show you something. The thing is, if you are in Kansas from here, between here and Kansas is a big distance, right? It's like this. When you're in orbit, it's just here. It's just infinitely shorter distance. So just at a At a tactical level, solving that problem technically is way better through satellites. Fine. They make, I think, what was the right decision. They unmake it. And so they say, We're going to go and figure out a way to lay fiber, whatever. They've laid zero fiber. So there's these thousands of people that were promised broadband that you can get for basically a thousand or a hundred bucks a month or less now. And instead, they're spending upwards of thousands and thousands per home and haven't delivered Isn't it $42 billion? That's $42. And then the other example was a $7 billion program to install EV chargers, $7 billion, and they've managed to install three. So All I'm saying is if you add the two together, that 50 billion, that's one-sixth of what Bobby Kennedy was talking about in terms of giving people organic fruit.

So maybe we can't give everybody organic fruit, but you can get tens of millions of people. Start with 40 million people that's on Snap. You can get maybe 10 million of those people, get them organic food right away. So there's all of this waste. All we got to do is just focus a little bit, take some of these dollars that are just falling into the seat cushions, it seems like, and just reallocate it somewhat intelligently into the things that really matter.

It seems worse than falling into the seat cushions if it's 42 billion people and none of them have received Internet access, that's really, really insane.

42 billion dollars, nobody's got that.

I should say I used the Starlink Mini this past week in Utah in the mountains. It's amazing. It's amazing. It's the size of this book.

It's amazing.

It's crazy. It literally fits in a small laptop case. My friend couldn't believe that was it. I was like, this is it. All we do is plug it in.

I got a very early one, and I used to carry it around in a laundry basket. It was incredible. And then when you see what they've done in a couple A couple of years from this thing that was a little bit bulky, it is so beautiful and simple. And you've seen it. You just plug it in and it auto starts to rotate, figures out where it is. The app comes up, it shows you this speed, and then you're just going. I've used it in all kinds of situations, like where I'm traveling, I bring it with me. It's never failed. And then I think, man, this is like, it's a hundred bucks. It's less than a hundred bucks.

It's crazy.

And then in a year or two, you'll be able to run your cell phone over this thing?

Yeah.

This is crazy.

Yeah. In a year or two, it'll probably be straight to your cell phone, and you won't need that dish anymore. But right now, the dish is a small iPad, and you just sit it down in a field, and we plugged a cord to it. But you don't even have to have a cord. It's a battery that comes with it.

So how much do you think it really takes to give every American just a Starlink dish?

Pretty fucking cheap.

It's very cheap.

Well, it wouldn't be 42 billion. I can guarantee you that.

And by the way, the cost of that would basically fall through the floor if you put in an order for 50 million of these units. Right. You know? Right. Spacex would make them for eight bucks. Right. You know what I mean?

And it's fast Internet, too, which is even crazier. Yeah.

There's all of this stuff that we should do. We just need a few folks, I don't know, that can either course correct or just can shine a light on it. I mean, it's like this thing where I'm so optimistic, married to enormous fear and just a little... I go back and forth between these things.

Let me paint the ultimate dystopian solution. The ultimate dystopian... Part of our problem is we have corruption. We have what you were talking about with deals, the border wall deal had money in it for Ukraine. There's all these weird deals, those bills that don't make any sense. How did you add all this? Why is this 2,000 pages? How many people signed it, actually read it? Ai government. Ai government solves all those problems. Ai government is not corrupt. Ai government just works literally for the people. And instead of having all these state representatives and all these bullshit artists that pretend to be working on their truck and they don't know what the fuck they're doing, they're just doing it for an ad, you don't have any of that anymore. Now everything's governed with AI. The problem is who's controlling the AI? And is there some some an ultimate regulatory body that makes sure the AI isn't biased or tainted?

I think there's a step before that, which is a lot more palatable. I think the thing I thought about your version, and the problem that You state is the key problem, which is how is this model trained? Who got their hands on that core stuff, the weights and the values of that? Who decides? At some point, there is already today in AI a level of human override. It's just a natural facet of how these things are. There's a way to reinforce the learning based on what you say and what I say. It's a key part of how an AI model becomes smart. It starts off as primordial And then Joe and Chamoth and all these other people are clicking and saying, yes, that's a good answer, bad answer. Ask this question, all this stuff. Who are those people?

It could be gamed as well, right?

I think at scale, we have figured out. We haven't seen it yet, but it will be when the incentives are that high.

And we've seen distortions, like the Gemini AI that they were asked to make Nazi soldiers. They made these multiracial Nazi soldiers and that stuff, where it's just like, who are the founding fathers? It's, oh, here's a black guy. Here's a Chinese lady. Okay, we get it. You're not racist. But you're being crazy.

You're distorting the past.

Exactly. When you talk, specifically history, I mean, one of them was like a Native American woman was a Nazi soldier. It's like, this is so nuts. So that is a problem in that AI is not clean. It's got the greasy fingerprints of modern civilization on it and all of our bizarre ideologies.

But there's a step before it that I think can create a much better government. So it's possible today, for example, to understand... Have you ever done a renovation on your house? Yes. Okay, so you make plans. You go and your architect probably pays an expediteor to stand in line in City Hall. There's a person that goes and reviews that plan. They give you a bunch of handwritten markups. Based on their understanding of the building code. You can't use this lead pipe. You need to use aluminum. This window is too small, all this stuff. You come back, you revise, you go do this two or three times on average to do a renovation, and then they issue your permits. Now, An AI can actually just ingest all the rules, knows exactly what's allowed and what's not allowed, and they can take your picture and instantly tell you, Joe, fix these 19 things. You fix those things, you go to the city. You can show that it maps to all the rules. So you can streamline government. You can also point out where they're making decisions that don't map to what the rules say. That, I think, is going to be a really important first step because it allows us to see where maybe this administrative state has grown unwieldy, where you got to knock some of this stuff back and clean up some of the cruft because there's rules on top of rules, and one conflicts with the other.

I bet you there are things on the books today that are like that. A hundred %. We have no way of knowing. But I do think an AI can tell you these things and say, just pick which one. It's A or it's B. I think that that starts to cut back a lot of the difficulty in just making progress. Right. You know?

You know, one of the things that I thought was extraordinary that Elon was getting pushed back on was his idea of making the government more efficient and that auditing the various programs and finding out how to make them more efficient. And a lot of people really freaked out about that. And their main freak out, the main argument from intelligent people that I saw was, what are you going to do? You're going to fire all these people that are in charge government. I don't think that's the answer for an effective government is to let the same people do the same thing because otherwise you have to fire them. That sounds insane. And to say that the government is as efficient as is humanly possible or even close to it. No one believes that. No rational person believes that. Everyone believes in bureaucracy. Everyone believes there's a lot of nonsense going on. Everyone believes that... Look at the difference between what Elon has been they're able to accomplish with SpaceX versus what NASA has been doing recently. Look at the difference between what they're able to accomplish with Starlink versus this $42 billion program that yielded zero results.

Look at the difference between all these different things that are done in the private sector when there's competitive marketplace strategies. You have to figure out a way to get better and more efficient. You can't afford to have a bunch of people in your company that are doing nothing and that are creating red and creating bureaus and making things harder to progress. That's bad for the business. That's the argument for letting private companies take over things.

By the way, I think that, and just to build on what you're saying, people jump to this conclusion that government shouldn't exist. It's not some anarchic thing where government's actually very important. They create incentives, and then those of us in private industry go out and try to meet those incentives or take advantage of them. That's very normal, okay? And a well functioning government creates very good incentives. An incredible example of this is in the 1950s, do you know what the GDP of Singapore was?

No.

It was the same as the GDP of Jamaica. And then you fast forward 70 years and you understand what good governance looks like.

We actually were talking about Singapore yesterday, how extraordinarily efficient their recycling program is. It's unbelievable. I mean, it's really amazing what they do. They really recycle. They recycle how we think we're recycling. They really do. They really separate the plastic. They break it up. They use it to They use it to make power. They use it to make road materials. They make building materials out of it. They reuse everything.

They were thrust into a spit of land with no natural resources. They had to become incredibly well-educated and industrious. And so, Lee Kua Niu was able to create the right incentives for government to do a good job. They pay their civil servants incredibly well, but then also for private industry to show up and do the rest. It works incredibly. You can do that in the United States. The thing that we would benefit a lot from is if we could just point out all the ways in which there's either too many laws or laws are conflicting, you can at least have a conversation about batting those back. The second is if you look inside of private equity, there is one thing that they do, which I think the government would hugely benefit from, and it's called zero-based budgeting. This is an incredibly powerful but boring idea. What private equity does when they buy a company, some of them, the best ones, they'll look at next year's budget. If they say, What should the Budget B. Well, guess what's going to happen, Joe, in your company? Everybody runs and says, I need X for this, Y for that, Z for this.

And you have this budget that's just ginormous. Instead, what some of the best private equity folks do is say, We're starting with zero. Next year's budget is zero. We're spending nothing. Now, let's build it back up meticulously block by block. So somebody comes in. Okay, what is it exactly that you want to do? I want to build an interface that allows it. They start saying something like, no. Okay, what do you want to do? I want to upgrade the factory so that we can make a more high... Okay, done. You're in. How much do you need? Okay. One by one by one. And if you go and you do that inside the government, what you probably would find is that same group of people would probably enjoy their job a lot more. Their hands would be on the controls in a much more directed way. We'd spend a lot less because a lot of this stuff probably just goes by the wayside and we don't even know. And people would just be more able to go and work. You could do what you wanted to do. I could do what I wanted to do. Elon could do what he wants to do.

There was a thing, I tweeted it out today. He cannot get the FAA to give him a flight permit for Starship 5. And Six. So they're waiting on dry docks. They're slow rolling the approval. It takes him less time to build these starships now than it does to get government approval. That's what he said. Meanwhile, the FCC, which is a sister organization to the FAA, fast-tract the sale of 220 radio stations, in part to some folks that were foreign entities, right before an election. That touched like 160 million Americans. When you look at that, you would say, how can some folks cut through all the red tape and get an answer quickly? How can other folks be waiting around for something that just seems so obvious and so exceptional for America? And there's no good answer. I don't know what the answer is. I don't think any of us know.

No. And then there's just folks that are stuck in space.

Meanwhile, there's these two people stuck in space.

Yeah. And Jamie said they were supposed to be there for how long? Eight hours? They were supposed to be there for eight hours. They were supposed to be quick. They were supposed to be quick. And they've been there for months.

They're going to be there till February.

That's so insane.

They're going to be there till February.

How terrifying must that be?

I mean, for maybe you and me. Eight days.

Eight days. They were supposed to be there for eight days.

I think I would freak out.

A hundred %. I think they would, too. How do you not?

Well, I read this article where they interviewed them. Now, this could be the party line. I don't know. But they're like, this is great. It's my natural place.

Oh, good Lord. I can't believe that's real.

I had a friend of mine.

That's what they say to themselves, keep from going crazy.

Well, yeah, a friend of mine went to space, the founder of Cirque de Soleil, Guy Laliberté. And he brought a super high-Google talks about like it's already over, but it's still going on. No, it's still going on. It says it until February 21st. Yeah, February 2025.

We're stuck in space. If it ended up spending eight months. That's great. That's just AI. Wow. It could be way more.

It could be way, way more.

That's weird. That's another flaw with AI, right? It would read it like that? I wonder what the incentive is for AI to lie to you about that. How does AI not know it's not 2025 yet? We're stuck in space until February of 2025?

That's just a straight up error.

That's a weird error, though.

It is a weird error.

But these poor people.

So my friend that was up there said it was incredible. He has this funny story where he was a smoker. Still is a smoker, but this was like 20 years ago. So he was going up on a Soyuz rocket and he shows up, I guess in Siberia is where they do the launches. And he was really stressed out because he had to stop smoking. He had to stop drinking. And he shows up in the cosmonauts smoking. Oh, no. They're like, oh, it's totally by door.

So they smoke in space?

No, no, no. I'm saying on the ground while they were trading. Oh, boy. So they go up. He does eight days. He comes back down. He took these incredible high-res pictures of all the parts of the Earth. He said it was the most incredible thing. But when you get back, he's like, I was ready to get back.

Did Do you see this latest report? There's like real controversy about some finding that the James Webb telescope has discovered, and there's some talk of some large object moving towards us. Oh, asteroid. That's course-correcting. This is the weird part about it. And there's all these meetings. And so all the kookey UAP people are all over it saying, disclosure is imminent. There's a mothership headed towards us. So it gets fun. I don't know what they mean by course-correcting. What does that mean? And how do they know it wasn't impacted with something else? It diverted it.

It could have been that. It could have just been the gravitational fields. It could have been an orbital path.

But they're not telling anybody. There's something going on. Do you think they would tell people? Imagine if there was a giant chunk of steel, of iron, rather, that's headed towards us.

That's a great question. I think the question is, what would we do if we knew?

Do we have the capability of moving that thing? Would the SEC wait five months to give Elon the- I think you'd probably send as many...

But see, it's all a physics problem at that point.

It's also a problem of breaking it up. Exactly. If it breaks up, then you have smaller pieces that are hitting everywhere instead of one large chunk.

By the way, isn't this the perfect reason why being multi-planetary just makes a lot of sense? Sure. For example, would you get on an airplane if they said, Hey, Joe, this is the best airplane in the world. It's the most incredible. It's the most luxurious. It has the best weather. You can surf, but there's only one navigation system. And if it goes out, you never do that. Would you ever get on that airplane? No. No. So I think we owe it to ourselves to have some redundancy. Yeah.

But ultimately, I always wonder, the universe has these patterns that force innovation and constantly move towards further and further complexity. And if you were going to have intelligent life that existed on a planet, what better incentive to get this intelligent life to spread to other parts of the planet than to make that planet volatile, make supervolcanos, earthquakes, solar flares, all sorts of different possibilities, asteroid impacts, all sorts of different possibilities that motivate this thing to spread.

But to say this is fragile and It's not forever. So create some redundancy. I mean, I was raised Buddhist. I'm not that religious in that way, but I'm weirdly spiritual in this other way, which is I do think the universe is basically It's littered with answers. You just got to go and find out what the right questions are. So to your point, are all these natural phenomena on Earth? The question is, Okay, if that's the answer, well, the question is like, do we want to be a single planet species or do we want to have some built-in redundancy? And maybe 100 years from now that builds on top of what happens in the next five, We'll have discovered all kinds of different planets. That's an amazing thing.

Unquestionably.

Unquestionably.

And we also know that there's planets in our immediate vicinity that used to be able to harbor life like Mars. We know that Mars was covered in water and Mars had a sustainable atmosphere. So we know that this is not just a dream, that this is possible, that what we're experiencing here on Earth is temporary. And if we get hit by something, but we know Earth was hit by a planet in its formation. There was Earth one and Earth two. The formation of the moon, the primary theory is that we were hit by another planet, and that's why we have such a large moon. That's a quarter the size. Is that right? I didn't know that. A quarter the size of Earth. It's keeping our atmosphere stable. And keeping our... It's a wild shooting gallery out there. It really is. And especially our particular solar system has a massive asteroid belt. There's like 900,000 near Earth objects.

But isn't that so inspiring? This idea of discovering all these other questions that we don't know yet to even ask. That is a life well-lived.

Yes. That's the most promising building aspect to a hyper-intelligent AI, in my opinion, that it'll be able to solve problems that are inescapable to us and also offer us real hard data about how big of a problem this is and when this needs to be solved by and then come up with actionable solutions. And that seems to be something that might escape us as biological entities with limited minds, especially if we're not working together. And you could get AI to have the accumulated power, mind power of everyone, 10X.

The mental model is, if an alien showed up today, would humans, by and large, drop all of their internal issues and cooperate together?

Perhaps.

Perhaps. I would hope that the answer would be yes.

It would have to be something that showed such overwhelming superiority, that it shut down all of our military systems and did so openly to the point where we're really helpless against this thing.

Well, so I think that one way to think about AI is that it is a supernatural system in some ways. So if we can just find a way to cooperate and harness this and see the bigger picture, I think we'll all be better off. Again, killing each other is just so barbarically unnecessary. It doesn't solve anything. All it does is just makes more anger. It creates more hatred because what's left over is not positive. And I think that we need to be reminded of that somehow without actually living the experience.

Yes. My hope is that one of the things that comes out of a AI and the advancement of society through this is the allocation of resources much more evenly and that we use AI, as I was saying before, the best way to keep people from entering into this country is to make all the other places as good as this country. Then you solve all the problems for everybody, and you don't have this one place where you can go to get a job or you go over there and you get murdered.

Well, so I think that why are a lot of people coming to America? A lot of the reasons, some are clearly political persecution, but a lot of the other reasons are economic, to your point. If you can create economic abundance, generally in the world, that's, I think, what people want. Most people want, as you said before, a good job. They want to come in and feel like they can point to something and say, I made that. I want to feel proud of that. They want to hopefully get married, have some kids, have fun with them, teach them what they were all about. And then our swan song, and we all get reborn or not.

Isn't it interesting that the idea of people not getting together in groups and killing people they don't know, that's utopia? That is some ridiculous pie in the sky vision of the possibility of the future of humanity, where that's common in small groups, even in cities. I mean, there's individual murders and there's crimes in cities, but cities aren't attacking other cities and killing everybody. There's something bizarre about nations, and there's something bizarre about the uneven application of resources and possibilities and your economic hopes, your dreams, your aspirations being achievable pretty much everywhere. If we did that, I think that might be the way that we solve most violence or the most horrific nonsensical violence.

You have this data point. I said this before, but the most important thing that has happened is that in the last four or five years, we have severely curtailed the likelihood of war in the nominal sense. I think Trump was able to basically draw a hard red line in the sand on that stuff. And the underlying reason was because we had enough economic abundance where the incentives to go to war fell. We had just a complete rebirth of domestic hydrocarbons in America. Whether you agree with it or not, my point is it is quite clearly correlated in the data. As we were able to produce more stuff, so economic abundance, we had less need to go and fight with external parties. So I do think you're right. This reduces it down to we need to find ways of allocating this abundance more broadly to more countries. Meanwhile, that one crazy thing that you can't unwind and go back from, you can just never go there. And you just have to make sure nobody believes that that is justified. Because in a nuclear event, I think that that's not what happens.

Clearly. I saw this brilliant discussion that had where you were explaining that Trump is the wrong messenger, but many of the things that he did actually were very positive. Right. And I think that's a very difficult thing to describe. It's a very difficult thing to express to people because we're so polarized, and particularly with a character like Trump, that's so polarizing. It's very difficult to attribute anything to him that is positive, especially if you're a progressive or if you're on the left or if you've been a lifelong Democrat, or if you're involved in tech. Totally. I mean, it's this bizarre denial of basic reality, the reality of what can you see based on what was put in place, what actions were taken, what were the net benefits?

I've always been a liberal, and I think I should define what liberalism used to mean. It used to mean absolutely no war, and it used to mean free speech, and it used to mean supportive A government that was supportive of private industry. Try your best. Go out there. We'll look out for you. Come back to us if things go haywire. That's an incredible view of the world. And I think what And what happened was when I was given a choice, I would vote Democrat or I would support Democrats because I thought that that's what they stood for. And I didn't really understand Trump. And so what happened was I got too caught up in the messenger, and I didn't focus enough on the message. And I didn't even realize that. I didn't realize it in 2016, but I don't think many people did. And then in 2020, I got lost in it. But probably by '21 or '22, I started to see all this data and I said, Hold on, I am not being a responsible adult the way that I define responsibility. I am not looking at this data from first principles, and I need to do it.

And when I did, what I saw was a bunch of decisions that turned It got to be pretty smart. The problem is that because he's the vessel, he turns off so many people with his delivery. I think this is a moment where the stakes are so high, you have to try to figure out what the message is versus what the messenger is saying, or look to somebody else that can tell you the message in a way that maybe will allow you to actually listen to it. That could be JD Vance, it could be Elon Musk, it could be RFK, there's all kinds of surrogates now, because I think that they have realized that there's a lot of value in these messages. We need to have multiple messengers so that folks don't get tilted and go upside down so that the minute the one person walks in the room. I had to challenge myself to go through that process. At the end of it, I'm like, wow, he's the only mainline candidate here that will not go to war. Just to On that point, it's like very unique times creates strange bedfellows. It's like one thing that always pops out of me.

Like, why are they working together? Why are they cooperating? I always think like, what's going on here? And when I saw him and Bobby align, Bobby is a very balanced view of Donald Trump. Here's the good, here's the bad. Even now, even with everything that's on the line for Bobby and Bobby's agenda, He's quite honest about Donald Trump's positives and negatives, but they both get along. One of the things, and probably the most important thing, where they were sounding the drum from day one is, under no circumstance will the United States go to war. I just think we should observe that. People should have an opinion on that.

He's so polarizing that there's two attempted assassinations on him and no one cares.

He's like Neo in the Matrix. He's dodging his bullets.

For now. You know? Yeah. But listen, no one can dodge forever. But the thing is, it's like no one seems to care that the rhetoric is ramped up so hard and has been so distorted.

The other thing that people need to, I think, think about is the domestic policy agenda of both the Democrats and the Republicans are within error bars. And what I mean by that is When push comes to shove, they both, whether it's Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, they have to work through a very sclerotic Congress, which means that very little will ultimately get done. If you just look at the track record of all these past presidents, you typically get one piece of landmark legislation passed in your first two years, and it all just gets unwound. It's happened from Clinton onwards Bush had one bite at the apple, Obama had one bite at the apple, Trump had one bite at the apple, Biden had one bite at the apple. The American political system has a really incredible way of insulating itself. So if people would just take a step back and look at that, a lot of the policy agendas that both of them espouse are going to be very hard to get done. They'll be one thing, maybe Maybe they both do something on domestic taxation. Maybe they both do something on the border. But the likelihood, based on the past, is that they'll get one of these things done and then not much will be done.

This is why I think folks then need to think about, Okay, what are the super presidential powers then where they can act alone? One area where they can act alone is they can issue executive orders. That can direct the behavior of governmental agencies. Okay, so people should decide what they think about that. Do you want a muscular American bureaucracy? Do you want a more slim down one? Do you want one that has bigger ambitions, more teeth? Do you want one that is zero-based budgeted? They're pretty stark on those things. Then foreign policy I think one camp is much more in the view that we are the world's policeman, and there's a responsibility that comes with that. And one says, We got a lot of problems at home. We're not getting pulled into something abroad. And I think people need to decide about that. But other than those two threshold issues, my honest opinion is that we're in error bars between the two of them. One will cut taxes by this much, one will increase taxes by that much.

But there is real decisions that have been made during the Biden administration about the border that are affecting people.

Or lack thereof.

I think it's a decision. I don't think it's a lack thereof, especially the flying people in and the utilization of an app to fly people in. That seems insane. The whole thing seems insane, and I don't know what the motivation is. I've talked to people that know a lot the construction business, and they believe the motivation is cheap labor. They think that's a part of it, and that a lot of the problem is in many industries, the lack of cheap labor and people that are willing to do jobs. It's one of the things that I've heard. There's a lot of criticism about all the Haitians that have moved to Springfield, Ohio. But one of the positive things that I've heard from people that live there is that these people are hard workers, and they're willing to do jobs that the other people weren't willing to take on. You have pros and cons, but you have this incentivized effort to move people into this country illegally, which will undoubtedly bring in people that you don't want here, gang members, cartel members, terrorists.

Terrorists.

That's real. And we've documented that. And there's people that have been arrested, that were trying to come in, that were terrorists. And there's people that have gotten through for sure.

I think that if I give both of them the benefit of the doubt, I think both of them will have to act on the border. I think that Donald Trump has had a clearer view of this issue for much, far longer. I think that Kamala has had to shift her position to make herself more palatable to centrist. But I do think that both of them will probably have to act, because I don't think what's happening today is sustainable.

I don't think it is either. But the fear, and Elon's talked about this, the real fear is that they're bringing these people in, give them a clear path to citizenship, which will allow them to vote, and then you've essentially bought their vote. So if the Democrats bring them in, incentivize them to become Democrats and vote and give them money, which they clearly are doing, they're giving them EBT cards and they're giving them housing, and they're giving things that they're not giving to veterans and poor people in this country. That seems to be an incentive to get these people to want to be here and also to appreciate the people that gave them that opportunity, which is you would essentially in swing states, which is Ohio, it's one of them. If you can get a lot of people in there and you've given them a better life because of your policies, those people, if you give them the opportunity to vote, especially if they're limited, low information voters, they're going to vote for the party that got them to America.

I don't know whether it's a conspiracy, per se, but I do agree with the outcome. Meaning, I remember very vividly, we My parents took up the whole family, three of us, myself and my two sisters, to Niagara Falls, and then we crossed the border to Buffalo, and we applied for refugee status in America as well. We didn't get it. We were rejected. And when we went back, we got a tribunal hearing in Ottawa, where I grew up. I remember that it was in front of this magistrate judge. So the person comes in with the robes and the hair and everything, and you sit there and they hear- They have the wigs up there? All of it, yeah.

The wigs.

And then they sit there and they hear your case out. And my father had to defend our whole family. Here's what our life was like. Here's what we did. And I remember just crying from the minute it started. That's all I did the whole time. It seared in my mind. Because your Life is right there. It's like a crucible moment for your whole family. If they're like, I don't buy it, off you go. We go back and I don't know what would have happened. Fortunately, obviously, it worked out. And then you go through the process. I became a Canadian citizen. Then I moved to the United States, get on a visa. Then I become an American citizen. I have an enormous loyalty to this country. And so when I think about Americans not getting what they deserve before other folks, it really does touch me in a place. I get very agitated about that idea. It's not that those folks shouldn't be taken care of in some way, shape, or form, because I was one of those people that needed a little bit of a safety net. We needed welfare. We needed the places to go in to get the free clothes and all that stuff.

But you have to take care of all of the people that are putting in the effort and the time to be here and followed the rules and stood in line. When I came to the United States, man, I came on a TN visa. Every year, you had to get it renewed. You had to show up. And if the person that was looking at you said, Chamath, out, you're gone, Joe. Then I had to transfer to an H-1B visa. My company had to show that there wasn't an American that could do this job. And then we were able to show that. So I've lived this experience of an immigrant following the rules and just methodically and patiently waiting and hoping and the anxiety that comes with that. Because it comes with tremendous anxiety. If you ask people that were on H-1Bs in America. There was a website. I don't even know if it exists anymore, but we would check. Because when you apply for a green card, you get an application date. And man, I would sweat that website every other week. Hey, did they update that? And it would be like four years in the past.

And I'm like, I'm never going to get my green card. My visa is going to expire. I'm going to have to move back to Canada. But I still played by the rules. So I just think it's important to recognize that there are a lot of folks that play by the rules, that are immigrants of this country. There are a lot of people that were born here that have been playing by the rules. And I think we owe it to them to do the right thing for them as well. And then try to do the right thing for some folks that are coming across the border, because they probably are, some of them, legitimately are escaping some really bad stuff.

Quite a lot of them. Quite a lot of them. And I'm sure most of those people are people that just want a better opportunity. And that's a great thing.

And that's a great thing.

But you have to take care of all the people here, especially the veterans, and especially these people that have been struggling in these inner cities that have dealt with the red-lining and all the Jim Crow laws that have They've set them back for decades and decades and it's never been corrected. There's never been any effort to take these places that have been economically fucked since the beginning of the 20th century and correct it. Instead, you're dumping all this money into people that have illegally come here, that, to me, is where it starts looking like a conspiracy.

I think that as long as people can explain what they're doing for these other folks that you just mentioned, I think for a lot of people, for 50% of the population that leans red on this topic, you could at least explain to them. The problem is that there is no explanation. There is $150,000 home credit that Gavin Newsom was about to give. I think he vetoed it. I could be wrong.

It was wildly unpopular.

But that bill somehow gets to his desk. Is there a bill that says we should have better food for the food deserts? Did that bill get passed? There's clearly a way for state legislatures to do what's right on behalf of the folks in their state. So if we just had a little bit more balance, and then if we were able to shine a light on those things, a lot of the people that live here that contribute would feel better about where things were going and wouldn't feel like the whole thing is just rigged.

Right. Well, that's one of the things that people are so excited about with this Trump Union with Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy, is that you're having these movements that seem to be almost impossible to achieve outside of an outsider, like the make America healthy the end concept. What are you talking about? You're going to go up against these companies that have been donating to these political parties forever and have allowed them to have these regulations that are allowing them to have these dies in food that's illegal in our neighboring Canada? What? No one's done that before, right? That's very exciting. But again, messenger message.

Messenger message. Just take a step back, though. If you were just the average Joe citizen, I think an important thing to just notice is, why are all these totally different people acting as a team? I just think it's an interesting thought question for... I don't have an answer, and I'm not going to plant an answer. But just ask yourself, why are all of these people cooperating? And I think the 2024 election is a lot about the traditional approach to governance and a very radical reimagining of government. And I think that's what effectively will get decided. The traditional approach says, we're going to create robust policies. We're going to work top-down this muscular foreign policy, muscular domestic policy. The government is going to play a large part of the economy, and we're going to try to right some wrongs. The radical reimagining says, We're going to go back to a more founding notion of this country. We're going to have a very light governmental infrastructure. We are going to cut back a bunch of the rules, and we're going to take a little bit of a step back on foreign policies so that we don't end up in a situation we can't pull back from.

In that lens, it's very different. In the lens of actual policy, I honestly think that it's pretty much six of one, a half a dozen of the other. But in that first lens, they're really markedly different choices. And we'll see.

But the lens that you're describing, the thing that distorts everyone's vision is Donald Trump as a human being. That's the thing. And it's also the media's depiction of him, which has been grossly distorted.

And I think that I met him and spent time with him. I've also had lunch with Kamala. She was very kind, very nice person. Donald Trump, very funny, very kind, very polite. Like, he talks to you. And I just was like, wow, this is like totally, and exactly what you said. I was like, I was expecting something totally different. And I think, though, that at the core, part of where the media goes crazy, I think, I'm guessing, is that there's a part of him as well that's like an entertainer. I mean, he's as good as any comedian Yeah. He's on point. He's got rhythm. He knows how to land. So there's a thing that he's doing when he's on stage, which for the audience, I think, is no different than going to a show or a revival or something. You're seeing a star.

Right.

But then if you're looking at him as Donald Trump, the person, I think the media really gets out of... They get tilted.

Well, not only that, they've distorted who he is. Whatever flaws Donald Trump has are nothing in comparison to the media's depictions of him.

Everybody's got flaws. His, I think, exist and are well-described. But I do think that they I think there's a couple of good examples. One example that bothered me was the Charlottesville press conference. When I first heard the media a depiction of it, I was really upset because of what I thought he said. It turned out he didn't say it. Exactly. In fact, not only did he not say it, he said the exact opposite. And then I was really frustrated and a little bit angry because I I thought, he was never lying to me. The filter was lying to me. And I'm not paying for those people to lie to me. I'm paying for them to actually give me the transcript of it so that I can decide for myself. I think that's part of a responsibility of being a cogent adult.

And the only repercussions of them lying is a lack of trust that people have for them now.

And so then they make their own bed. They dig their own grave a little bit because I think the trust in the mainstream media is the lowest it's ever been. I think way more people trust you, way more people trust us to tell a version of what we think is happening because you're not going to lie. And you're interested in just showing the clips and then just debating. What did he mean? What did he say? Why did he say this? Why did he say that? By the way, the same goes for Kamala, because now the domestic political machinery is going to try to characterize her as well. Cherry-picked comments, she says. So my point is, I think we have to suspend this- But it's not balanced.

Particularly, look at a debate where they fact-checked Trump multiple times, but they didn't fact-check her.

I read this. Is this true or not? But the co-host was her sorority sister? Yes. That is true? Yes.

I mean- Well, not just that, but there's the affidavit by the person from DC that said she was aware of the questions and that she was told that there were certain things are going to be off-topic or off-limits, like her record as a DA and also some other person that she's attached to that's involved in something shady. Then on top of it, there was things that she said that were absolutely untrue. One of them, one of the grossest ones, was she saying that we don't have any troops deployed in combat zones. Have you ever seen that one where the troops in the combat zone are going, what the fuck are we doing here? And then Dan Crenshaw. See if you can find Dan Crenshaw's post on Instagram.

He laid out- He's a Navy SEAL with one eye. Yeah.

I mean, that's a guy who understands the consequences of war, right? Clearly. Paid the price personally for serving. But on his Instagram, he laid out how many troops are in active combat zones. It's tens of thousands in multiple combat zones of American citizens.

I mean, look, I was trying to be charitable when I said that. I'm going to assume that both people are smart. They believe what they believe. They're both trying to do what they think is right. They both want to win. Okay, let's take that off table for a second. The filters that then try to give them that message will try to pervert that truth for their own best interests. I think what they have decided, the mainstream media, is their best interests are better served through one, i. E. Kamala, and less well served through another, i. E. Donald Trump.

Yes.

So if there's ever been a moment where it's time for all of us to show up and be a grown up, try to get the source material, try How to think about things from first principles, I'm telling you, it is the most consequential election of our lifetime. And the simplest reason why is that the President decides to hit the button on the nuclear football. Just imagine for one second, irrespective of what your politics is, who do you want to hold that thing? What do you want them to do? Under even the most excruciating pressure in the world. I think what we want to find is someone, at least in that very narrow moment, will be a JFK-like decision. I will block everybody else out. It is entirely about my desire and wish for how I want America to be known, and I'm going to protect my children and my grandchildren. You cannot touch the button. You can't get close to the button. I think we're a lot closer than people think.

I think we are, too. Thank you very much for meeting here, man. That was really fun. I really enjoyed it. Thanks. I know you're very busy, so I really appreciate your time. It was a real honor. It was an honor for me as well. Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.