Everything You Know is About to Collapse - David Friedberg

1. 0:00 – 6:20

   Why the Future Is Going to Be Epic

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      You've said the future's gonna be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried. How come?

   2. DFDavid Friedberg0:10

      I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future because humans are programmed to be that way. We always were worried about some predator coming around the corner and eating us. Like, we're, we're tuned to survive, right? So we're tuned to always-- There's always some existential threat to humanity. This goes back to kind of biblical eras thousands of years ago. It was the, the great flood that was about to come. There was the, um, you know, the plague. The plague's gonna wipe us all out. Uh, there's, uh, starvation. You know, the late nineteenth century, uh, population was outstripping, uh, food supply, and there was this big belief that we were gonna run out of food, and there was this kind of rush to... And, and, and the primary reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields [chuckles] off of the South American coast. So these giant islands covered in, in poop, and they would-- The clipper ships would go down, they'd get all this poop, and they'd bring it back to Europe, and they'd use it as fertilizer to farm. If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less, less calories. So the, the islands were kind of diminishing, and there was this big call to action, "We're gonna run out of fertilizer. The world's gonna starve. We're gonna die." And then there was this invention called the Haber-Bosch process, where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom. Suddenly, population skyrocketed. Every generation has these existential threats, climate change, COVID. There's always... A-and now it's AI. I think fundamentally AI is one of these most kind of like mind-numbing, sort of unbelievable to understand kind of, um, technologies. And when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok, that seems so overwhelming, like a plague, like running out of food, like COVID, we have a tendency to be very existential about it. Um, now, you compare that to the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground, people are living longer, they're living healthier, they're living better lives a-across the board, across populations. And people can argue all day long about relative prosperity. Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead, and they're doing really well. The rest of us feel left behind. But if you look at some of the metrics of like, hey, everyone has a, a home. Everyone has a car. Like, everyone [chuckles] has some of these things that we take for granted today that we didn't have a hundred years ago that, that were really things to struggle to get. Um, now, separate to that, there's an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally. Digitization of the physical world and then our ability to kind of make predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of the tools that we call AI today, but it's really a long history of these sorts of tools where we take data and we use that to better understand the world and then say, "Hey, we could do this, or we could do this. We could make this molecule to solve this cancer. We could do this thing," and suddenly it turns out we're right. We could build this machine that could get us to the moon. Oh yeah, we're right. We could do that. [chuckles] Like, all of these fundamental tools start to compound, and we're in this kind of exponential curve right now that I think... And we can talk about some of the things that I think are most exciting, but that are really gonna kinda transform the trajectory for humanity. So I, I, I think that there's, um, a risk of too much change too fast, which is perhaps the thing that breaks social order.

   3. CWChris Williamson3:31

      Mm.

   4. DFDavid Friedberg3:32

      And that's probably the phase that we're in right now. Like [chuckles] how much is the social order gonna break? How hard is it gonna be for people to adapt? How, how, how much of a dislocation will there be in social systems and economic systems? And, um, people's expectations when they shift too much, uh, and they have to kind of rethink, "What do I have to do?" They wanna put a, a brake on things. And I think that's kind of a moment that we're in, in the West right now. In the East, it's a little bit different. You go to China, they're very much embracing [chuckles] these technologies because there's so much more to gain than there is to lose. In the West, we have so much more to lose than there is to gain, so.

   5. CWChris Williamson4:06

      Oh, that's interesting.

   6. DFDavid Friedberg4:07

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson4:07

      A victim of your own success so far-

   8. DFDavid Friedberg4:10

      Yeah

   9. CWChris Williamson4:10

      ... because it feels like you've climbed pretty high, and if you fall, that could be bad.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg4:13

       You have more to lose.

   11. CWChris Williamson4:14

       Yeah.

   12. DFDavid Friedberg4:15

       And, um, we could pontificate on this for a while, but y-you could go back to FDR in the United States and, and we, we, we kinda came out of the war with this big effort where we said, "Hey, we can aggregate all our resources. We can win World War II." And then we said, "By aggregating our resources, we could do the extraordinary. So let's do that again, and let's keep doing that." And that became this kind of trajectory we've been on in terms of making promises for tomorrow and then having the government kind of deliver the promises, right?

   13. CWChris Williamson4:46

       Mm.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg4:46

       And that's been a big thing that's gone on for the last, call it, almost a hundred years, particularly in the West. Um, at some point, you could only promise so much. Like [chuckles] there's a, a system where everyone had this sort of expectation setting that was made. Okay, everyone gets a home.

   15. CWChris Williamson5:04

       Mm.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg5:04

       That's the American dream. Uh, everyone goes to college, and then they get a job. Uh, some of those things may not necessarily be the right things from a free market perspective, in which case you're making these promises and then people feel like the promises aren't being delivered, they're not being met, and that's all they care about and that's all that they want. In the, the West, we have that problem right now. And so there's a lot of these things that we've set expectations around. If you go to college, you get a good degree, no matter how much it costs, you will have a good job, and you'll be able to buy a home and live a good life-

   17. CWChris Williamson5:35

       Mm

   18. DFDavid Friedberg5:35

       ... and that's not true anymore. And so these are the sorts of things that I think make us more fearful of the changes ahead, whereas in the East, those promises weren't necessarily made. There, there-- Like in China, GDP per capita skyrocketed from three thousand to thirty thousand in just a couple of years. I mean, imagine seeing the average person's income in a country go up by 10X, and everyone's moving from farms to villages to cities, and the cities are like the future. [chuckles] Like, it's been an extraordinarytrajectory. So, um, you know, there's a lot of embracing of the future that's happening in, in one social set of social systems in the world today, and then a bunch of this like, "Oh my God, tomorrow is scary. It's gonna break everything," on the other side. And I think, you know, we have that, that very dangerous kind of choice

2. 6:20 – 12:25

   Will AI Become a Monopoly or Belong to Everyone?

   1. DFDavid Friedberg6:20

      to make.

   2. CWChris Williamson6:20

      I think the concern is that AI is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree, that there is a centralizing of power amongst potential five trillionaire class people on the planet, and what do they... what sort of control do they have? How much displacement if, is there of work that didn't happen in the same way as when horses were killed because the automobile came along, or because manual labor needed to turn into driving JCBs instead of digging holes-

   3. DFDavid Friedberg6:48

      Yeah

   4. CWChris Williamson6:48

      ... that this is a, a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree.

   5. DFDavid Friedberg6:51

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson6:51

      What's your perspective when it comes to AI doomerism, AI optimism?

   7. DFDavid Friedberg6:55

      Yeah. All technology, uh, shifts go through a, a phase of diffusion, meaning they have to start somewhere. It's not like we turn on a switch and suddenly everyone can build an Etsy store or a Shopify store. Like, that's not how the internet started with everyone suddenly benefiting from being able to be an entrepreneur online. It took a couple of generations of technology diffusion before the idea of Shopify and the high-speed internet all over the, the country got everywhere and people could actually stand up a Shopify store and run it. Um, the first people on the internet, the first businesses that stood up did very well, and so the technology started centrally. But then, you know, initially people were like, "Oh my God, Cisco's gonna dominate the world," right? [chuckles] Like, "Cisco's got the switches that make the internet switch. That's the technology that's gonna... Those guys that own Cisco, those guys are gonna run the world. This is not fair. Like, they're gonna control everything. This is crazy." Nowadays, it's NVIDIA to some degree, it's Google, but like, eventually every technology commoditizes. That's what's so amazing about technology [chuckles] is it like, it's always diffusing. Like, this new innovation finds its way out. Like, we've already seen in just the last couple of weeks this insane shift in AI where people don't have to run models in the cloud anymore. They can run models on their desktop at home. So there's no longer, um, like a dependency on Google or a dependency on, you know, pick your favorite hosted model provider. I can download an open source model, and there's plenty of great models. I can run it on a Mac computer in my ho-house, and if you saw recently, there's this auto research thing that went viral on Twitter this weekend where Andrej Karpathy turned on auto research, and he ran all of these agents on his computer, and they were just asked a bunch of questions to solve, make better LLMs, and they just ran 30 of them talking to each other, and they just kept scoring the improvements they were each making to the LLM, to the underlying AI model.

   8. CWChris Williamson9:01

      Mm.

   9. DFDavid Friedberg9:01

      And they made a better L-LLM model than what ChatGPT had not too very long ago in like a weekend on a computer at home. That's how quickly it's diffused. And so I'm like, I, I think that there's a d-- and so this whole thing of like, oh, data centers need to be stopped, I actually don't think that data centers are gonna have much to do with the benefits we're gonna realize. Like, so much of AI is gonna sit at the edge. It's gonna sit in embedded devices, it's gonna sit on your desktop computer, it's gonna sit on your iPhone. It's gonna be ubiquitous. It's gonna be everywhere.

   10. CWChris Williamson9:30

       Mm.

   11. DFDavid Friedberg9:31

       And I think everyone just doesn't see the benefit yet, and so [chuckles] it's very hard to envision why I should do this. And we can talk a lot about some of those benefits that could arise. But over time, all technologies have like a central feature where someone's making a bunch of money early on, and then eventually everyone's like, "Oh my God, everyone's life has gotten better because of this thing." Like, when the first CAR T therapies came out, these are T cell... I, I, I, I totally jumped ship there, but [chuckles] like, like CAR T therapy is this amazing technology that was de-developed where we could take T cells, immune cells out of the human body, program them to find a specific protein, put them back in your body, and then they go and find that protein and kill it, and kill that cell. And it was used for cancer. So we could take a T cell out of the body, program it to go attack a cancer cell, put it back in the body, it attacks the cancer cell and destroys it. When that first came out, it was like, "Oh my God, this is incredible." And a couple of companies made a couple billion dollars selling the first generation of those technologies. But to get that therapy is like millions of dollars initially. You have to take all these cells out, isolate them, make sure they're clean, engineer them, put them back in, make sure the person doesn't die. So it became this very expensive initial process, and now CAR T therapy is making its way into more and more cancer treatments, and it is like almost 100% like success rate in blood cancers when it works. And so it's becoming this thing that goes from millions of dollars to a million to five hundred, and pretty soon to 50K, 20K, and eventually 5K. And that ends that disease. That whole class of diseases goes away. So all of these technologies start up with this aggregation of value. Small number of people get it, small number of people get value, but eventually all technologies diffuse. And so I'm less, like, concerned about there being a monopoly. We're already seeing every single model company getting disrupted by something else the next week. Um, we're already seeing this idea of data centers being the requisite breaking apart. There's a bunch of startups right now that are making technology that reduces the token cost by 1000X. So for every token produced, which is a measure of output from AI, it used to be 10 bucks or whatever. C- you know, pick your number, a dollar, 50 cents, 10 cents. It's coming down by a thousandfold because they're figuring out better ways to architecture the underlying models to make distributed smaller models, to use new chip architecture, to use new systems of balancing energy across the different chips that you're using, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and these all compound. So suddenly it's likeIs it the people that are gonna build all these data centers really gonna have a monopoly? I don't know. Like, this will allow anyone to stand up a small data center and run a bunch of AI stuff. So you don't really need big hundred billion dollar data center. So I think there's a lot that's changing very quickly, and every step of the way that's-- it's happening so fast, people just have all these reasons to have concern. But I, I'm, I'm pretty optimistic as history being a predictor here that the diffusion of these technologies will unlock value for every human on earth, and it's really just a function of at what point and at what point of value.

3. 12:25 – 21:38

   Will Everyone Be Able to Use AI Effectively?

   1. CWChris Williamson12:25

      I've heard you talking about the moon a lot. What's happening with the moon?

   2. DFDavid Friedberg12:29

      Um, the moon, I think... [chuckles] So one of the things that I think AI unlocks is the ability to do really complex projects. People think about AI as like, "Hey, I'm gonna replace labor," like, the accountant's job is gonna go away, and we're all kinda swirling our heads around, "What are we gonna do with the accountant's jobs going away?" And, you know, we could use the, the automobile and the horse buggy driver analogy. People were worried about the horse buggy jobs going away, and who's gonna breed the horses, who's gonna take care of the horses? All the horse stables are gonna go away. And then when the car came around, there was auto mechanics, and there were the highway system, and then motels popped up, and then gas stations popped up, and then coffee houses popped up on the highways. And s- and new towns emerged on the highways because you could get to them, and suddenly the automobile unlocked industries we didn't contemplate, right? It's several degrees away, several steps away from the initial problem that you're thinking about, which is the, the, the horse company's dying and the horse jobs going away. Um, so I think that's kind of, like, an important thing to note. And before I get to the moon, I'll just say this one point. I think physical AI or robotics is really gonna be an unlock for people. People think it's like the companies, the corporations will have all the robots, and the corporations will replace all the people. [chuckles] Like, but why can't everyone have a robot? Meaning, why can't someone put a robot in their garage and this robot can do anything, it works twenty-four hours a day. That robot's now your employee, and you can say to the robot in the garage, "Hey, I wanna make a bicycle shop. I wanna make custom bicycles that are really cool. They're like chrome, and people can, you know, kind of tweak them online and make all these different versions of bicycles." And then the robot will build the bicycle. So people-- So you can stand up a Shopify store or an Etsy store, whatever, make bi- sell bicycles, and your robot will make them for you. You don't even have to know how to make bicycles. The robot will order all the parts, it'll order all the machinery it needs, it'll run the robot bike shop in your garage, and it'll make bikes, and it'll package them up and ship them out for you. When you think about it in that context, which is that this diffusion of technology enables everyone to get value from it, so everyone will have a robot, everyone will be able to s- have a small business. It's like imagine back in the day, twenty, thirty years ago, if you told people, "Hey, everyone can have an Etsy store. Now, all of the knitting you're doing at home, you can sell and you can make fifty grand a year," no one would have believed you.

   3. CWChris Williamson14:46

      Mm.

   4. DFDavid Friedberg14:47

      But, like, now you, now you can do that.

   5. CWChris Williamson14:48

      Have you seen these arm farms-

   6. DFDavid Friedberg14:50

      No

   7. CWChris Williamson14:50

      ... in India?

   8. DFDavid Friedberg14:51

      No.

   9. CWChris Williamson14:52

      Jared, pull up that video I sent you about robots needing a human body. Inside the race to train AIO robots how to act human in the real world. I traveled to Sunden-- southern India to document the rise of AI arm farms, where young engineers strap GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. So people are getting paid to do normal shit. Here it is.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg15:17

       And then the robot learns?

   11. CWChris Williamson15:18

       Yeah. So this is the same thing that happened with, uh, Tesla's Full Self-Driving.

   12. DFDavid Friedberg15:23

       Right.

   13. CWChris Williamson15:23

       That they take the best... I mean, I d- this doesn't strike me as the best folding I've ever seen, but, um, they take the best drivers-

   14. DFDavid Friedberg15:31

       Right

   15. CWChris Williamson15:31

       ... on Tesla, and they use that to train the model on-

   16. DFDavid Friedberg15:35

       It would be a good hack to mess with the robots and fold incorrectly over and over again. Just-

   17. CWChris Williamson15:39

       Well, it'll just downstream loads of people with creased T-shirts.

   18. DFDavid Friedberg15:42

       [chuckles] I just mess it all up.

   19. CWChris Williamson15:43

       Yeah. This is, this is my way to destroy-

   20. DFDavid Friedberg15:44

       Yeah

   21. CWChris Williamson15:45

       ... the T-shirt folding industry.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg15:46

       Right. Every... And it's... Like, suddenly in the future, everything you buy is completely broken because they... everyone trained their robots-

   23. CWChris Williamson15:50

       But this is everything. This, this is for everything.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg15:52

       Right.

   25. CWChris Williamson15:53

       This is for making a cup of tea. What's that famous robotics challenge they have cracking an egg?

   26. DFDavid Friedberg15:56

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson15:56

       The delicacy to hold it-

   28. DFDavid Friedberg15:58

       Yeah

   29. CWChris Williamson15:58

       ... and the speed to hit it and the precision to whatever.

   30. DFDavid Friedberg16:00

       Yeah.
4. 21:38 – 26:53

   Should We Build Factories on the Moon?

   1. CWChris Williamson21:38

      What's happening with the Moon?

   2. DFDavid Friedberg21:40

      Um, well, so I, I think that, you know, there, there's a big discussion obviously, um, I would say largely led by, uh, pushed by Elon, but, but many others over time that, you know, we should expand humans beyond Earth and get to Mars, and that's a good place to set up a colony and, uh, yada yada, right? Um, Mars is not very habitable. We need to move a lot of material to Mars. But I think, um, if you look at the math, it is very likely the case that you can probably reduce your energy cost needs to move material to set up a colony on Mars by probably 100x or more by making most of the material you need for Mars on the Moon and shipping it from the Moon to Mars. And the reason is the Moon, unlike the Earth, does not have an atmosphere. One of the biggest uses of the energy when you're moving matter off the Earth is getting away from through the atmosphere, which drags or pushes the rocket back down, and gravity. So the Moon is one-sixth the gravity of the Earth, so it takes much less energy to escape the gravitational pull of the Moon than it does the Earth, and there's no atmosphere pulling you back. So with AI and robotics, it is theoretically possible, and then if you look at moon dust and moon rock, it has all of the raw materials that we may need to build machines, to build housing units, to build habitation units-

   3. CWChris Williamson23:00

      What's it constituents-

   4. DFDavid Friedberg23:00

      To make glass

   5. CWChris Williamson23:01

      ... what's the constituent parts?

   6. DFDavid Friedberg23:02

      It's got aluminum, it's got silicon, it's got carbon. You can even go up to the poles, and you can get hydrogen and oxygen from the ice up there. So you can melt the, the water at the poles, run electricity through it, break it into hydrogen and oxygen, use the hydrogen and oxygen and the carbon in various chemical reactions. You can theoretically make any substance you need or any metal or any material you need that we can make here on Earth. So we can and should build very large factories on the Moon, and the, the way that this would work is you basically can use solar power, right? Solar, very deployable on the Moon, lots of sunlight, no atmosphere, et cetera. Good, um, good continuous-

   7. CWChris Williamson23:37

      No clouds

   8. DFDavid Friedberg23:38

      ... energy flow. No clouds. [chuckles] And, um, and then you can use kind of battery storage, but the mechanism for moving material off the Moon is not propulted, uh, uh, propulsion. It's actually a mass driver, so electric rail gun. So think about like a train track. You know, like these maglev trains.

   9. CWChris Williamson23:54

      Yep.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg23:55

       You know, think about like a maglev train and, uh, you know, if you run the calculations, it would take about, uh, call it a nine-kilometer-long... track to move one ton of material off of the moon and get it to Mars. Okay?

   11. CWChris Williamson24:11

       At an angle?

   12. DFDavid Friedberg24:12

       So here's the thing. It doesn't actually even have to be at an angle. It just has to clear any craters or mountains.

   13. CWChris Williamson24:17

       Of course. It's flat enough, and that's escape velocity complete and flat.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg24:19

       Just escape velocity.

   15. CWChris Williamson24:20

       Yeah. Yeah.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg24:20

       So all you have to do is orient it correctly, put it on the right part of the moon, and orient it correctly.

   17. CWChris Williamson24:24

       Wait for the moon to basically, uh, aim.

   18. DFDavid Friedberg24:27

       That's right.

   19. CWChris Williamson24:27

       The moon's passing around, and then boop.

   20. DFDavid Friedberg24:28

       And it would take... Yeah, it would take a couple megawatt hours of power to push a ton of material down this rail track. It would take about four and a half seconds for it to move down the rail track and then hit-

   21. CWChris Williamson24:41

       Four and a half seconds to move nine kilometers. A ton nine kilometers.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg24:44

       Nine kilometers. Yeah, so it is... It ends up escaping at roughly, call it 20,000 kilometers an hour. And that's-

   23. CWChris Williamson24:49

       [laughs]

   24. DFDavid Friedberg24:50

       Now, uh, if you're moving one ton of material, you would still need a couple hundred kilograms, call it about 200 kilograms of, of some sort of propulsion, um-

   25. CWChris Williamson25:00

       To slow it down

   26. DFDavid Friedberg25:00

       ... to slow it down as it approaches the moon. But here's the other thing. You could use moon rock as a heat shield for re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere or the Martian atmosphere. So you basically take moon rock, put it on the front, 'cause you don't care if it burns away and goes away.

   27. CWChris Williamson25:12

       Yeah.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg25:13

       It can just vaporize. So you need 15 centimeters of moon rock on the front of this parcel. You ship the parcel off this rail track. It goes towards Mars. It can hit 100 Gs of acceleration while it's accelerating. Gets over there. You slow it down a little bit, and then it can actually enter the Martian atmosphere. The moon rock burns away, and you've just delivered roughly 700 kilograms of material. And, um, you can run that every hour with, uh, solar panels that are roughly 500 kinda meters by 500 meters. So, you know, pretty small kind of solar system, some batteries, some capacitors, and then you gotta build the rail. The rail, you need about nine tons of material, so you gotta get a lot of material put out to get this, this rail built. But again, the amazing thing about AI is you can, you can kinda think about it being self-replicating in the physical sense as well as the, the digital sense. You can put robots on the Martian surface with the necessary starting equipment that can make the next robots, that can then make the next robots, that can then go do the mining, that can then go build the factories, that can then go build the rail, that can then go build the propulsion system, and can then do the mining for you. And there's a lot of very valuable material on the moon that we could also ship back to Earth. So I actually think the moon is gonna be a giant, giant, giant economy. And I think it's like one of these economies... Like, it's almost like the East India or like... You know, like when, when you get over there, you don't realize how big it's gonna be till this starts.

   29. CWChris Williamson26:29

       [laughs]

   30. DFDavid Friedberg26:29

       But once it starts, the value of what you can do and the low-cost nature of it because of AI now, that you can have robots doing this stuff, and you can have AI orchestrate a lot of work, and you don't need to commit millions of people to it, and trillions and... Um, you still need some money, but not trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. I think the moon is probably one of these like more under-discussed in Silicon Valley kind of economic op- grand economic

5. 26:53 – 37:18

   How AI is Changing the Field of Fusion

   1. DFDavid Friedberg26:53

      opportunities this century.

   2. CWChris Williamson26:53

      Is space the next industrial revolution?

   3. DFDavid Friedberg26:56

      There's a lot, um, that could happen on Earth too. So [laughs] like, um... I think there's a lot. Y- there, there's a, there's a, there's a couple big other big drivers. I think one is dropping energy costs to zero. Um, and I think, uh, fusion will have a big role in that this, this century. So people don't wanna talk about fusion 'cause everyone's all about solar all the time, and Elon loves solar, and blah, blah, blah. So it, everyone poo-poos fusion. Um, so I'll, I'll, I'll talk about it in a second. But the cost... If you get the cost of energy down to one cent a kilowatt hour, it absolutely expands every economy. Like, everything blows up. Like, imagine if you could-

   4. CWChris Williamson27:34

      What is it currently?

   5. DFDavid Friedberg27:35

      Well, it's... In the US, we're paying 15 to 40 cents a kilowatt hour for off the grid. Um, but nuclear power, you, uh, you know, best case scenario is about five cents a kilowatt hour. Um, and that's amortized. When you take the cost of everything you gotta build and amortize it out, and then your ru- your runtime cost, 5 to 10 cents. But they're gonna sell it at, like, 15. So, like, imagine if you could take power cost down to 100th of what it is today. The cost to make anything drops, 'cause now you've got robots. Robots can make stuff quickly and with no marginal cost, 'cause the electricity is what runs the robots. So you could have a swarm of 100 robots build you a mansion. How much would that cost? Like, a 10,000 square foot crazy house. The cost of energy is nothing, so maybe having a crazy house could cost close to nothing. [laughs]

   6. CWChris Williamson28:20

      Well, there's a robot printing machine that's just launching in Austin at South by Southwest this week.

   7. DFDavid Friedberg28:25

      Making houses.

   8. CWChris Williamson28:26

      Just, yeah, house-

   9. DFDavid Friedberg28:26

      Yeah

   10. CWChris Williamson28:27

       ... 3D printing houses.

   11. DFDavid Friedberg28:28

       Right. Gen one. Now imagine gen six, right? And imagine energy cost is, like, zero. Um, and imagine all that material production comes down.

   12. CWChris Williamson28:34

       How cool of a house do you want? I wanna live in Hogwarts.

   13. DFDavid Friedberg28:36

       [laughs]

   14. CWChris Williamson28:36

       Fine, get the land.

   15. DFDavid Friedberg28:37

       I want, like, a Lake Como, but I wanna make my own Lake Como. You know? [laughs] Like, like no one else.

   16. CWChris Williamson28:42

       [laughs] Yeah.

   17. DFDavid Friedberg28:43

       Like, just like-

   18. CWChris Williamson28:43

       Lake David?

   19. DFDavid Friedberg28:44

       Yeah, Lake David. Um, but uh, so, so energy costs, I think are gonna, uh... This, this'll be the era when, um, fusion happens. Uh, so fusion's this crazy, like, um, principle. Uh, it's, it's th- it's this fundamental thing that drives the universe. So the sun is run on fusion. Fusion is when protons jam together, okay? So the sun is so, um, hot because it has so much mass. So when all this mass came together, all the matter starts bumping into each other, and that creates kinetic energy. That kinetic energy is heat, and it's so dense because of the gravity, because of all the mass, that you've got this extremely hot, extremely dense plasma. Plasma means that it's so energetic that the electrons break away.

   20. CWChris Williamson29:32

       It's technically a fourth state of matter, right?

   21. DFDavid Friedberg29:34

       It is, yeah. So there's arguably five states of matter, right? Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, and then Einstein-Bose condensate, which is crazy physics mind fuck.

   22. CWChris Williamson29:41

       You always have to one-up me.

   23. DFDavid Friedberg29:42

       No, but it's like-

   24. CWChris Williamson29:43

       You always have to one-up me

   25. DFDavid Friedberg29:43

       ... I actually think that one's more cool is why I said it, but yeah, yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson29:46

       [laughs]

   27. DFDavid Friedberg29:47

       Yeah. Um, but the, uh, the, the... What happens in fusion is when two protons have enough energy and they get close enough, they jam together and they stick together. So one proton, you remember this, like with an electron, is hydrogen.

   28. CWChris Williamson29:59

       Mm.

   29. DFDavid Friedberg29:59

       Two protons is helium, right? And then it's lithium and then beryllium and, and so on. So, um, protons jamming together forms a new nucleus, forms a new kind of element. Goes from hydrogen to helium, all the way up the periodic table of elements. So the more energy you have, the denser these things get. It requires more and more energy to get this to happen. Now, when you fuse protons together and form a new element-Less than iron, it actually releases energy in the process. Anything greater than iron requires energy to make it stick together. That's like a cool feature of physics which you could get philosophical on why this is the case.

   30. CWChris Williamson30:36

       Iron's kind of like an equilibrium state in a weird way.
6. 37:18 – 41:46

   Could Manufacturing on the Moon Boost Earth’s Economy?

   1. CWChris Williamson37:18

      at checkout. Just rounding out space, two things, who owns the moon and who owns the resources on the moon? And secondly, if we're gonna start mining asteroids and mining the moon, what does that mean for the Earth's economy? 'Cause I have to imagine that that's a pretty big dice roll, or at the very least you're adding dice to the game that you were already playing with, and that's gonna make things interesting.

   2. DFDavid Friedberg37:38

      You know, economic growth is one of these things that's very hard to contemplate intuitively, to fully grok intuitively, because, like, i- if you, if you add chips to a game, like we're playing poker, there's eight of us playing poker, and we suddenly increase our chip stack by, like, 10X. We're still playing poker [laughs] right? But, um, you know, maybe we could tip more, right? Like-

   3. CWChris Williamson38:00

      Mm.

   4. DFDavid Friedberg38:01

      ... maybe, um, the, the amount of money we're now making gives us the ability to go buy a $100 bottle of wine instead of two dollar Coors Lights. You know, like, that's what ends up happening, is as more chips come on the table... Now, the poker analogy is a very bad one 'cause that's a zero-sum game. Economic growth comes from, should come from productivity growth, not from money printing, okay? Much of our economic growth over the last couple of decades, one could argue, has come from money printing. We've just put more chips on the table. The house has made more chips.

   5. CWChris Williamson38:31

      Yeah.

   6. DFDavid Friedberg38:31

      Put them on the table. But economic growth means that I went outside and I made something. I made a new... I, I mined gold. Let's use gold mining as an example. I mined gold out of the ground. That's worth something, 'cause now I- people can use it, they can trade it, they can sell it. So I'm being productive with my time. So the more productivity there is in the system, the more chips get made, the more the economy grows, the more everyone gets the ability to buy and sell more stuff and everyone's labor, everyone's time is worth more, worth more. And so everything grows. That's the benefit of true productivity. So productivity is like this best measure, I would say, of technology's advance on how technology advances social systems. The more productive we are, the more everyone's gonna benefit.

   7. CWChris Williamson39:11

      It feels like a unique kind of productivity to take raw materials that were maybe rare or at least didn't exist within what was a closed system. The Earth was a closed system. We weren't getting anything from off it unless we were hit by an asteroid.

   8. DFDavid Friedberg39:23

      Right.

   9. CWChris Williamson39:24

      And then bringing it back in.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg39:25

       Right.

   11. CWChris Williamson39:25

       That, I, I, j- what happens to the iron price-

   12. DFDavid Friedberg39:29

       Right

   13. CWChris Williamson39:29

       ... when we are bringing iron back from outside of what was predicted as a part of that?

   14. DFDavid Friedberg39:34

       Yeah. So think, think... I, I would say think more about availability of iron-

   15. CWChris Williamson39:38

       Mm

   16. DFDavid Friedberg39:38

       ... versus the price. Like, what it does is it makes iron more available, more abundant to everyone.

   17. CWChris Williamson39:43

       Right.

   18. DFDavid Friedberg39:43

       And same with energy, right? When you increase energy through fusion-

   19. CWChris Williamson39:46

       Mm

   20. DFDavid Friedberg39:46

       ... you make energy more abundant. The price comes down by 10X, but now everyone can use much, much more energy, meaning-

   21. CWChris Williamson39:52

       Yeah, because the price is just indicative of the supply and the availability of it.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg39:55

       And everyone can... And now everyone gets more access.

   23. CWChris Williamson39:58

       Yeah.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg39:58

       This is why technology is-

   25. CWChris Williamson40:00

       I've always wanted more iron. I've said I-

   26. DFDavid Friedberg40:01

       I know [laughs]

   27. CWChris Williamson40:01

       ... I don't have enough.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg40:02

       You're like an iron hoard.

   29. CWChris Williamson40:03

       Yes.

   30. DFDavid Friedberg40:04

       It's funny, when we walked in the studio, I was wondering why you had that blanket over that big pile of iron in the-
7. 41:46 – 44:33

   How Power and Politics Will Extend Into Space

   1. CWChris Williamson41:46

      starvation.

   2. DFDavid Friedberg41:46

      Yes.

   3. CWChris Williamson41:46

      Uh, final thing, who owns the moon?

   4. DFDavid Friedberg41:49

      The moon, yeah. So I don't know. I think, uh, that's gonna be-

   5. CWChris Williamson41:51

      Astropolitics is fas- do you know anyone that does astropolitics?

   6. DFDavid Friedberg41:54

      I don't.

   7. CWChris Williamson41:54

      I wanna bring someone on the show.

   8. DFDavid Friedberg41:55

      Yeah, that's a good idea.

   9. CWChris Williamson41:55

      I wanna talk, I wanna talk about it. I think it's so cool. Like, what, wait, do you own... 'Cause geostationary above-

   10. DFDavid Friedberg42:02

       Yeah

   11. CWChris Williamson42:02

       ... the net of your country, it's kind of yours?

   12. DFDavid Friedberg42:05

       Depends on what the treaties say.

   13. CWChris Williamson42:07

       Kind of? Kind of yours.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg42:07

       'Cause you could, as a country or as an individual, I could say anything I want. If I move to the moon and put a flag down and said, "F you guys, I've got lasers and I'm gonna protect... This is my part of the moon," who's gonna stop me? Like, I don't care about being on Earth anymore. You can't arrest me on Earth anymore. You can't take my money out of the bank anymore. That's, that's a frontier.

   15. CWChris Williamson42:24

       Have you ever read Seveneves by Neal Stephenson?

   16. DFDavid Friedberg42:26

       Yeah. Love that book.

   17. CWChris Williamson42:26

       Yeah. Fuck. I, the-

   18. DFDavid Friedberg42:27

       Yeah

   19. CWChris Williamson42:28

       ... one of my most re-read fiction books.

   20. DFDavid Friedberg42:30

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson42:30

       And, uh, in that they go up to the, uh, space station-

   22. DFDavid Friedberg42:33

       Yeah

   23. CWChris Williamson42:33

       ... Izzy, and they need to come up with an entire new form of law.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg42:37

       Right.

   25. CWChris Williamson42:38

       What happens if somebody commits a crime in space?

   26. DFDavid Friedberg42:40

       Right.

   27. CWChris Williamson42:40

       And I never thought about the fact that, well, especially if you've got people from multiple different countries-

   28. DFDavid Friedberg42:45

       Right

   29. CWChris Williamson42:45

       ... well, the way that we deal with it is X.

   30. DFDavid Friedberg42:48

       Right.
8. 44:33 – 54:11

   The Science Behind Age Reversal

   1. DFDavid Friedberg44:33

      do?

   2. CWChris Williamson44:33

      Speaking of prospering, how far off are we from age reversal, do you think?

   3. DFDavid Friedberg44:37

      That's one I'm most excited about. Um, so have you looked at Yamanaka factor? There-- Have you talked about this on your show before?

   4. CWChris Williamson44:43

      Uh, David Sinclair's been on, and I know that he's sort of tangentially associated with it, but-

   5. DFDavid Friedberg44:48

      Yeah

   6. CWChris Williamson44:48

      ... assume no. Do the 30,000-foot view of the Yamanaka factors.

   7. DFDavid Friedberg44:52

      So every cell in our body has the same DNA, okay? Uh, we know that. And the DNA is in every cell because of a process called mitosis. Every time we make a new cell, from the time we're in the womb to today, we're making new cells, both-- Our, our entire DNA gets copied over into every cell. But what makes my eye look and act differently than my skin? If it's got the same DNA, how is it different? How is it different than my brain or my tongue or my feet? They're all, they're all... Those are different cells. There's different cells and different organs in the body. Those cells are different because the genes in the DNA are on or off.

   8. CWChris Williamson45:29

      Hmm.

   9. DFDavid Friedberg45:29

      So there's a bunch of switches, and the switches are either on or off, and that creates cellular differentiation. It's, it's what makes one cell different from another cell. The eye cell different from the heart cell different from the skin cell or the lung cell. And the switches that are on or off are these little molecular switches. They're molecules that sit on top of the DNA, and they keep that gene from working. It blocks it off. And then the other gene is open, and when it's open, that means that your cell is making RNA copies of that gene and turning it into a protein.

   10. CWChris Williamson46:01

       Zeros and ones.

   11. DFDavid Friedberg46:02

       Zeros and ones. And each gene makes a unique protein. The proteins that then come out do a bunch of stuff. They're machines. They're molecular machines, and they're constantly doing all this stuff in your cell, and that's what makes every cell different, is what genes are on and what genes are off. And the complexity of this is astounding. If you were to think about a cell being the size of Manhattan, so imagine a cell as a, as a, as a city the size of Manhattan with 500-story tall buildings. That's how big it would be. And every person is a protein. There's 10 billion people living in this 500-story tall building, island of Manhattan, going in between the buildings, up and down, all day long, building stuff together, never sleeping, always working, running into each other, having coffee, making stuff together, breaking stuff together, working, 10 billion of us. Those, those are the proteins in the cell.

   12. CWChris Williamson46:53

       One cell.

   13. DFDavid Friedberg46:53

       In one cell, running around doing stuff for 80 years. That's one second in one cell. That's how complex this is. So the proteins that are on or off matter a lot, and [chuckles] then they make stuff, so that's why the eye cell does totally different stuff than the brain cell or the heart cell. As we get older, this is the current science on this, it looks like what happens is we have DNA breaks. DNA gets damaged from radiation and sunlight and bad eating and alcohol and all the other shit. As those DNA breaks happen, your cell actually fixes the DNA. It's very good at fixing it. It goes in, there's a bunch of proteins, they're the worker proteins that are repair proteins. They go and they fix the DNA. Every time the DNA gets fixed, there's a chance that those ones and zeros, those ons and offs, get moved around a little bit. And as they get moved around, over time, they get moved to the wrong place. So what ends up happening over time is that the wrong genes get turned on and the right genes can get turned off in a cell. And then that cell stops working right. Stops, the eye cell stops doing what it's supposed to be doing. The heart cell stops getting the right electrical cascade to flow through the other cells. All of the cells, the s- skin cell becomes a little wrinkled, and eventually, if enough of those cells have those epigenetic, is what it's called, epigenetic errors, you start getting wrinkles, your heart stops beating as well, you go blind. All these sorts of things happen with aging. It looks like the root of all disease may be aging, and aging is a disease. So it is a disease rooted in the fact that the epigenetic factors, these little molecules, move around in the wrong place. That's what we discovered is basically aging. In 2006, a guy named Shinya Yamanaka found that he could take four proteins and put them on a cell. They would go into the cell, and they would move all of those epigenetic markers, those ones and zeros, to make that cell into a stem cell.Which can then be turned into any other cell in the body. So that was the magic thing he won the Nobel Prize for. In 2016, another scientist published a series of papers showing that instead of putting a lot of those four proteins on the cell, you could put a small amount. And if you put a small amount, instead of resetting all those molecular markers and making that cell back into a stem cell, what it actually does, it just moves those markers back to where they're supposed to be to make it a young cell. And suddenly that retinal cell becomes like a young retinal cell. The skin cell becomes a young skin cell. The heart cell becomes a young heart cell. All of these cells get reset. And they did this in mice, and they made the mice age to, like, 250-plus years old. They put it in monkeys. The wrinkles went away. And they've done it in, um, specifically applying it to retinal cells in the eye and reversed blindness. So-

   14. CWChris Williamson49:33

       This is Sinclair's stuff, right? Is this-

   15. DFDavid Friedberg49:35

       Sinclair has one of these companies-

   16. CWChris Williamson49:36

       Yeah

   17. DFDavid Friedberg49:36

       ... that's in clinical trials now. And there's dozens of others. Altos Labs is, like, one of the most funded startups in history that no one talks about. Um, they've raised, you know, close to probably $10 billion at this point [chuckles] uh, to pursue these technologies. But basically, what this means is we are now discovering not just the four proteins but a whole bunch of other little molecules that we can put into a cocktail. Either we're gonna drink it, take it as a shot, uh, uh, or take it as a pill. It will get into our cells, and it will reset the epigenetic of that cell to make it young again. They're starting with targeting diseases, like a particular... like, like blindness or glaucoma in the eye or, you know, rheumatoid arthritis or some other heart issue, and they're applying these factors to the cells in that tissue only.

   18. CWChris Williamson50:19

       Locally.

   19. DFDavid Friedberg50:20

       Locally. But over time, what'll end up happening is this becomes a systemic treatment, and they're already doing it in animal models. And then you can either do it continuously, or what I think will end up happening is we'll probably have a system whereby these factors will be continu- fa- when I say the word factor, I mean protein.

   20. CWChris Williamson50:36

       Hmm.

   21. DFDavid Friedberg50:36

       These proteins can be continuously made and released inside our body as they're needed.

   22. CWChris Williamson50:42

       Hmm.

   23. DFDavid Friedberg50:42

       So we maintain our youth, and we will live theoretically for as long as we want. That's where this is headed, and the technology shows now that we can do this in animals. We can re-redose them, redose them, and keep them young.

   24. CWChris Williamson50:55

       Has it been done systemically yet?

   25. DFDavid Friedberg50:57

       Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson50:57

       It's, it's... You've mentioned it's been done with-

   27. DFDavid Friedberg50:58

       Yeah. This is the mouse, the mouse model where they made these mice the equivalent of, like, having someone live, like, 200-plus years old. You know, and this is, like, so early. They haven't even optimized the molecules. They haven't optimized how you deliver the molecules. They haven't optimized the dosing. They haven't optimized the method of the do- Like, there's all these techniques that are gonna be developed on top of this. For every one year we can extend average human lifespan, we're adding tens of trillions of dollars to GDP, right? So this is also another big economic driver. But it's not just how long people live, it's how healthy they are and how energetic they are and how happy they can be, and they can now go out and not feel all the pain and have the disease. You know, theoretically, this can lead to a reversal in rates of cancer proliferation or reversal in diabetes or reversal in many of these other diseases that are fundamentally rooted in this kind of failure of your epigenome, the, the markers that are o- turn your genes on and off. So this is a technology category that I am, like... I think is one of these other things that you can kinda think about the compounding effect. Free energy, right, like AI, automation, [chuckles] um, uh, and, you know, infinite labor, uh, for people to do all the things they wanna do and potentially living forever. I mean, you start to think about how these all kinda compound. That's why I'm excited about the future. Like, these very quickly become these sort of compounding effects that drive us into a happier tomorrow. And then again, it becomes a question of abundance. How do you wanna spend your time? You know, again, 100 years ago, I don't think people would've had the job option of being a yoga instructor or being a podcaster [chuckles] or being a wedding photographer. You know, go down the list. Like, there's so many things that people have found joy in doing with their time, and they can be productive doing it. I think more of that starts to happen tomorrow, and it's less of the, like, you gotta go work the corporate shitty job on a trading floor in a corporate office at a cubicle or, you know, in a factory or all the things that maybe we will look back one day and say, "Hey, that was kinda limiting human potential. Like, maybe humans could do a lot more, [chuckles] and maybe they should." And these shifts to more abundance give us that opportunity to do that.

   28. CWChris Williamson53:00

       A quick aside. Look, you know sleep matters, but let's be real, most nights you're probably not getting the sort of sleep that's actually restorative. Eight Sleep Pod 5 fixes that. It's a smart cover that you throw over the top of your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to 20 degrees. They've even added a temperature-regulating duvet and pillowcase, so you and your partner can sleep at your preferred temperatures covered head to toe like some temperature-controlled mummy. Plus, it's got upgraded sensors that run health checks when you're asleep, tracking things like abnormal heartbeats and breathing issues and sudden HRV changes. There's a built-in speaker for white noise. The autopilot feature learns your sleep patterns, makes real-time adjustments to improve your sleep. It even detects when you're snoring and lifts your head a few inches to help you breathe better. That is why Eight Sleep is clinically proven to add up to an hour of quality sleep per night. And best of all, they have a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they will just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

9. 54:11 – 56:15

   How Close Are We to Age Reversal?

   1. CWChris Williamson54:11

      How far do you think we're off from getting to the stage where we can do age reversal? One decade? Five decades?

   2. DFDavid Friedberg54:19

      Way less than that. Way less than that. We are in clinical trials now on several of these cocktails, and if... There's always a, a risk in going from animals to humans, but we've done it with human cells in, um, uh, in vitro, in a, in a Petri dish, and we see the effects that we are expecting to see. So we have a lot of reasons to believe that, you know, over the next 10 to 20 years-Um, more of this starts to proliferate

   3. CWChris Williamson54:49

      You've heard Peter Diamandis' idea of longevity escape velocity, right? That you need to stick about every year that you live means that you're going to live a little bit longer.

   4. DFDavid Friedberg54:58

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson54:58

      But that when you cross a particular threshold, you just need to stick about until this happens, essentially, or whatever the equivalent is.

   6. DFDavid Friedberg55:05

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson55:05

      Whatever the technology is-

   8. DFDavid Friedberg55:06

      Yeah

   9. CWChris Williamson55:07

      ... that allows you to extend lifespan indefinitely.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg55:08

       I think it's fair.

   11. CWChris Williamson55:09

       You just hold on.

   12. DFDavid Friedberg55:11

       I think it's fair.

   13. CWChris Williamson55:11

       Hold on. It's, it's probably the best longtermist view for looking after your health.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg55:17

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson55:18

       That now is not the time to fuck it.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg55:21

       Right. Totally.

   17. CWChris Williamson55:21

       Because in the past, there wasn't really any reason to stick about. Yeah, you're gonna live 80 years or-

   18. DFDavid Friedberg55:26

       Yeah, and that's it

   19. CWChris Williamson55:27

       ... 70 years or 60 years, but y- you know, you're playing around with fives and tens.

   20. DFDavid Friedberg55:30

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson55:30

       Whereas if the difference is between 80 and 100 or-

   22. DFDavid Friedberg55:34

       Or 200

   23. CWChris Williamson55:34

       ... 80 and 120.

   24. DFDavid Friedberg55:35

       Yeah. Yeah. You're like, "Hey, keep it together." And by the way, a lot of... Like, the number one thing you can do to fix your epigenome, which you can do without taking these drugs, is exercise.

   25. CWChris Williamson55:44

       Fasting? Oh.

   26. DFDavid Friedberg55:45

       Well, fasting helps.

   27. CWChris Williamson55:46

       Yeah.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg55:46

       Uh, fasting does have an effect. But exercise, like exercise releases molecules that in many cells in your body will go in and start to address the epigenome and make you more youthful. And then there's other things that you can start to take. Some of this peptide stuff that people are crazy about has shown that it has an effect. Um, some of the... I, I don't wanna be prescriptive on these things. Um, but there's a lot of ways that, uh, you can start to kind of edge your way-

   29. CWChris Williamson56:10

       Mm-hmm

   30. DFDavid Friedberg56:11

       ... before all the big clinical stuff is done and, and the big, you know, products

10. 56:15 – 1:00:07

    Could Living Longer Unlock Human Potential?

    1. DFDavid Friedberg56:15

       come out to market.

    2. CWChris Williamson56:16

       What do you think happens to careers and retirement and family structures in a world where people live over 120 years?

    3. DFDavid Friedberg56:23

       Um, it's hard, it's hard to say. I mean, you know, I, I could... I think it's very sad that, like I l- love my kids. [chuckles] Like, I w- I was, uh, uh, with my daughters, um, and my wife, we were doing a, a what are the three wish... If you got a, if a, if you had a, a genie come out of a lamp and you had three wishes, what was your-

    4. CWChris Williamson56:43

       Hmm

    5. DFDavid Friedberg56:43

       ... three wishes? The first thing my daughter said is, "I wish everyone in our family could live forever." Uh, that was her first wish. And I was like, "Such a sweet wish." But I really do think that there is like this incredible, um, you know, a human element to this technology. It's not just like technology for technology's sake.

    6. CWChris Williamson57:01

       Disembodied, sterile.

    7. DFDavid Friedberg57:02

       Yeah. It's like, it's not a pharmaceutical drug. It's like, it's a, it's an opportunity to give everyone more time to do the things they wanna do. I really think this idea that like humans don't reach their potential is like a very fundamental truth we're gonna come to at some point, that for a long time maybe because we had to, we created organized social systems to achieve things as a group, but limited ourselves individually. And I think that that's what maybe changes in the future, is that these technologies and this level of abundance gives each of us the ability to achieve outcomes and have like things that maybe we didn't realize we could have, uh, because we had to make all these trade-offs to make things work in a social system-

    8. CWChris Williamson57:48

       Mm

    9. DFDavid Friedberg57:49

       ... in a society.

    10. CWChris Williamson57:50

        Yeah. I wonder just how much of a challenge it's going to be for people to, to face more spare time. I know that you guys did really great coverage about a year and a half ago of the two UBI experiments-

    11. DFDavid Friedberg58:03

        Yeah

    12. CWChris Williamson58:03

        ... that went on.

    13. DFDavid Friedberg58:04

        Yeah.

    14. CWChris Williamson58:06

        I- is that not an indication that maybe there's gonna be a crisis of meaning when we start to give people... 'Cause th- th- those weren't good, right? The two-

    15. DFDavid Friedberg58:13

        No. I mean, UBI inevitably, like all welfare systems, will fail.

    16. CWChris Williamson58:17

        Why?

    17. DFDavid Friedberg58:18

        Um, two things. One is it, uh, creates a system whereby people will always want more, so it becomes this kind of self-fulfilling thing. It create, it makes people feel like there's a disincentive to go have agency, right? It creates a, enough of a-

    18. CWChris Williamson58:32

        Hmm

    19. DFDavid Friedberg58:32

        ... if it's giving you enough-

    20. CWChris Williamson58:34

        Passivity

    21. DFDavid Friedberg58:34

        ... yeah, passivity to, uh, to explore yourself and, and, and your potential and, and engage the world to find your potential. You're not, you're not given that incentive. Um, but the, the more fundamental issue is f- simply inflation. Um, UBI, whether it comes about through, uh, giving people money f- as taxes from other people, or whether it comes about from money printing, inevitably leads to an increase in money supply, which makes everything more expensive. So there's a class of things that everyone that's getting the UBI check will buy, and those things will all get more expensive.

    22. CWChris Williamson59:04

        Hmm.

    23. DFDavid Friedberg59:05

        Right? It's, it's, it's a, it's a terrible feature of, of the economy, of [chuckles] like economic principles, like those things will get more expensive.

    24. CWChris Williamson59:11

        Hmm.

    25. DFDavid Friedberg59:11

        So I think that that's, um, that's why those things simply don't work. But look, I'm optimistic. I think that, uh, again, I, I keep going back to this idea that there's this, this, this digital universe that we've created where people can kind of build... Like Twitch streamers, another good example. People going on, uh, Patreon, people going on... I mean, pick your platform, and they're finding ways to, uh, to explore their interests, and they can live on it. Like, they can make money doing it because other people value what they're doing. Massage therapists, yoga instructors and Pilates instructors, dog walkers, I value those people. They're valuable, [chuckles] like, and people like doing that work.

    26. CWChris Williamson59:50

        Hmm.

    27. DFDavid Friedberg59:50

        So there's... I think that there's more to, to come in terms of what's next, that we always like wanna look backwards, and we don't wanna think about, hey, the chart is, the path is uncharted, and, you know, we should just get on the ocean, and we'll figure

11. 1:00:07 – 1:16:01

    Why Harnessing Superintelligence is Essential

    1. DFDavid Friedberg1:00:07

       out what's over there.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:00:07

       What about transhumanism?

    3. DFDavid Friedberg1:00:09

       Um, okay, let's talk about it. So superintelligence, I think, is a manifestation of AI at scale, meaning that there's intelligence, uh, features of intelligence that in isolation or in aggregation exceed human capacity. Um-

    4. CWChris Williamson1:00:23

       It's just not general yet.

    5. DFDavid Friedberg1:00:25

       I don't know if there's a... I, I don't know if I subscribe to any of the definitions. Um, but what do humans do in a world where the AI anticipates everything you're gonna do next, or knows everything you're gonna think, or has a sense of, um, how to do things better than you do?Um, I think we're gonna be forced to adapt. So this idea of, like, humans living in their natural state should be back to their natural state, it's, it's such a weird thought because we live in buildings. You know, like, we don't live under a tree. Even when you pick berries off a tree and eat the berries from the tree, you're breaking nature. Like-

    6. CWChris Williamson1:01:10

       Mm

    7. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:11

       ... there's an aspect of a continuum of, like, what is nature, what is the human, and what are we doing? So I, I, I don't love the term transhumanism, but I do like this idea that, like, this superintelligence capacity needs to be harnessed by humans.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:01:24

       Mm.

    9. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:25

       I think there's probably two things that happen, and the second one I'm gonna say is very controversial. The first one I'll say is pretty well-described, which is this kind of human machine interface. Um, you know, Elon's got Neuralink where they put the wires in the brain, but the wires... I saw a good presentation from Max Hodak at his company science, uh, company or corporation or whatever. You should have him on. He's great.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:01:45

        Mm.

    11. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:45

        Um, but he work- he started Neuralink. He was the old CEO at Neuralink, and he's got this system where they're putting, like, a digital, uh, device in your retina.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:01:53

        They put a screen in your eye.

    13. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:54

        Yeah, and it works. And so the screen-

    14. CWChris Williamson1:01:56

        How is it powered?

    15. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:57

        Um, it's, uh, solar. He's got this whole power system in it. It's incredible. Um-

    16. CWChris Williamson1:02:02

        So when your eye is open-

    17. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:04

        It's powered up

    18. CWChris Williamson1:02:04

        ... there's a light going in.

    19. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:04

        It powers up, and then it releases an electrical signal that triggers the neurons on your, the inside of your retinal cells that then trigger your brain, and it passes the signal, and you can suddenly see. And it's a very thin, like, paper-thin kind of, um, device that goes under your retina in your eyeball. It's an outpatient procedure to put it in. He's in clinical trials on this. Incredible. So it's restoring blindness. But you can kind of think about these interfaces that aren't about sticking a wire into the brain, which I don't think is gonna be where things end up, but I think it's likely gonna end up a little bit more like... And people are gonna view this as being extremely dystopian. Um, so I'll give you the two versions of it. Some people would say Neo in The Matrix, where you kind of connect the digital thing, but the other one is, um, Avatar, where they have that ponytail thing [chuckles] they connect to. Um, but there'll probably be some interface where the chip-to-brain interface is just, uh, soft neurons. Like, it's some sort of system that can connect with the brain without going into the brain. You don't need to go into the neural tissue.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:03:10

        Mm.

    21. DFDavid Friedberg1:03:11

        Um, theoret- Now, I'm not super optimistic, and I don't get excited about this. Let me be clear. I'm not like, "Oh my God, we all need to connect to... Like, we all need to be like The Matrix." So don't think about me as some dystopian, crazy technocrat. Um, but I think my, my point is someone will do it, and then you'll be able to think, "I wanna fly a helicopter," like Neo did in The Matrix, and you'll be able to fly a fucking helicopter.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:03:30

        Yep.

    23. DFDavid Friedberg1:03:30

        And, um, you'll wanna access information quickly using the superintelligence that exists in the silicon. So you wanna solve a physics problem because you're, you know, trying to build something on the Moon, and it, and you, you sort of, like, access that information. You look up, and you're like, "Okay, you have the answer you need." You're not looking at a screen to get the answer. And so you're, you're able to kind of tap into... And look, do we all wanna be connected all the time? I don't know. I, I don't know if that destroys humanity or, like, is gonna be an adaptation of humanity in an era when there's now a species that might be more intelligent than humanity [chuckles] in aggregate. I, I don't know, and so I'm not trying to be too, like, deterministic about this stuff. Um, but I think that that human machine interface outcome is very likely gonna happen, and whether or not people want it or embrace it, you'll have to have the benefits. You'll have to go through an exercise where it's lightweight, easy to put on. Maybe it sits above your ear, and it works, and it doesn't need to kind of, like, be plugged into your physical brain. Maybe it uses a transmission where we can connect it to you. And you can start to think things and get information that you want and, and, and so on, and suddenly you become super intelligent, and you have all of this capacity that you didn't have before. That's one, one, one path that we might walk. Another path that we might walk, which is extremely dystopian from most people's points of view but, um, may end up becoming a reality because of what we're seeing happening in China and other places, is, um, transgenic humans, where basically right now you can look at an embryo. And I don't know if you've seen this controversial app where they'll sequence the DNA of your embryos if you've got frozen embryos-

    24. CWChris Williamson1:05:10

        Mm

    25. DFDavid Friedberg1:05:10

        ... uh, for, uh, IVF, right-

    26. CWChris Williamson1:05:12

        Mm

    27. DFDavid Friedberg1:05:12

        ... which is a common procedure where you've got a, effectively a, an embryo that, that's frozen. It's not yet, um, fertilized, but you can sequence the DNA and determine what genetic traits does that embryo have.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:05:25

        I'm a big investor in Harrisite, who is the most evidence-based one of these.

    29. DFDavid Friedberg1:05:29

        Okay. So you-

    30. CWChris Williamson1:05:29

        They're the ones that have used the Down's test plus the best geneticist-
12. 1:16:01 – 1:26:30

    Will Embryo Selection Be the Key to Keeping Up With AI?

    1. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:01

       talking about-

    2. CWChris Williamson1:16:01

       Where's your line?

    3. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:02

       Yeah. Okay. On the-

    4. CWChris Williamson1:16:02

       Is there a line-

    5. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:03

       ... trans-humanism

    6. CWChris Williamson1:16:03

       ... that you have-

    7. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:04

       Yeah

    8. CWChris Williamson1:16:04

       ... from, uh, GMO people to, uh-

    9. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:08

       Yeah

    10. CWChris Williamson1:16:08

        ... IVF shouldn't happen. Uh, do you have a, do you have an ethical line for that?

    11. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:11

        Yeah. Um, I definitely think that we can be very defined around the CRISPR stuff, where we can turn... We can change a gene to make someone healthier or enhanced. And I actually, I don't have a philosophical disagreement with giving someone the ability to not just, like, turn off disease, but to say, "Hey, I want this person to have the trait that they did- they didn't randomly get from me or, like, inherit."

    12. CWChris Williamson1:16:39

        Mm.

    13. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:39

        I think that's, that's fine.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:16:41

        How do you stop people? I mean, no parent-

    15. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:42

        But, but, but by the way, I'll say there's like, there's a whole bunch of therapeutic treatments that we're doing now that are doing what I described in that final stage with an adult human.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:16:51

        Like follistatin stuff?

    17. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:52

        Right. And so you can-

    18. CWChris Williamson1:16:53

        I was in, uh, uh, Prospera with the guys when Bryan Johnson got that.

    19. DFDavid Friedberg1:16:57

        Right. And so you could take... That is a gene that makes a protein that you're... You know, you could theoretically use mRNA to do it, but it, but it's short-lived. And you could put a plasmid, a gene, and put it in your body, and it will make a protein that gives you strength.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:17:11

        Yeah, whatever it is.

    21. DFDavid Friedberg1:17:12

        But that is, like, nursery school.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:17:14

        [laughs]

    23. DFDavid Friedberg1:17:15

        Go to, like, university PhD level, and what we're learning about all the interaction between all the proteins is we could come up with a set of genes that if I put them into you, they will make you 100 times smarter. Would you get that g- that shot?

    24. CWChris Williamson1:17:31

        I would.

    25. DFDavid Friedberg1:17:31

        Right.

    26. CWChris Williamson1:17:32

        I'm choosing for me. I think what becomes interesting is when parents are choosing for their kids.

    27. DFDavid Friedberg1:17:36

        I think that's right.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:17:37

        And-

    29. DFDavid Friedberg1:17:37

        I think that's the right con- that's the right f- philosophical framing.

    30. CWChris Williamson1:17:40

        Yeah.
13. 1:26:30 – 1:36:25

    How Ohalo is Reinventing Agriculture

    1. CWChris Williamson1:26:30

       What are you doing with plants? I've heard that you're spending a lot of time working, working with seeds.

    2. DFDavid Friedberg1:26:36

       Yeah, I run a company, my day job, which, uh, most people, uh, that I talk to recognize me from my, uh... This is like a pill. Is that what this is?

    3. CWChris Williamson1:26:44

       No, uh, toothpicks. So we managed to find a company that, uh, embed flavor and, uh, supplements into the wood of toothpicks. So try, try, try... What's this?

    4. DFDavid Friedberg1:26:57

       Uh, maybe I'll take it with me and try it later, but, um-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:26:59

       Yeah, yeah. Just take, just take that one. Put it in your pocket.

    6. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:00

       Yeah.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:27:00

       It's really cool. Just a different-

    8. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:01

       What, wait, what is the nootropic?

    9. CWChris Williamson1:27:03

       Uh, so cognizin. There's a 15 milligram dose of cognizin in there. Uh-

    10. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:06

        In one toothpick?

    11. CWChris Williamson1:27:07

        Yeah.

    12. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:08

        Oh, my brother would do this. Here, Ty.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:27:10

        And, uh-

    14. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:10

        Love this shit.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:27:11

        Yeah. And-

    16. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:11

        Yeah, you'll be going in 15 minutes.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:27:13

        And, uh-

    18. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:14

        [laughs]

    19. CWChris Williamson1:27:14

        There's a little, like, 15 milligrams of caffeine. 50 milligrams of, uh-

    20. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:17

        He'll try anything.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:27:18

        Look, dude-

    22. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:18

        He's like my guinea pig. Yeah

    23. CWChris Williamson1:27:19

        ... we're fucking about with every delivery mechanism on the planet for these at the moment. So obviously Zyns went, went absolutely crazy-

    24. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:24

        Right

    25. CWChris Williamson1:27:24

        ... over the last couple of years.

    26. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:25

        Is that your nicotine?

    27. CWChris Williamson1:27:26

        No. So this is just the same again. It's more cognizin, acetylcholine, same thing that you get in- or similar to the choline that you get in eggs.

    28. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:32

        Yeah.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:27:33

        And, uh, we just decided that we would go for pouches.

    30. DFDavid Friedberg1:27:36

        I see.
14. 1:36:25 – 1:50:14

    What’s Really Behind California’s Political Decline?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:36:25

       What, what's happening with this California flight stuff?

    2. DFDavid Friedberg1:36:27

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:36:27

       'Cause I, I was with, uh, Palmer over Christmas and a, a, a bunch of other guys-

    4. DFDavid Friedberg1:36:31

       Yeah

    5. CWChris Williamson1:36:31

       ... from that side, and, um, I didn't know about it. I knew that it was gonna be brought in before the end of the year. It's this sort of sticky thing that seems to be following people around, but it's also gonna get worse over time. It seems like there's more and more rumblings that stuff's gonna keep on... This feels like the sort of core engine of California's prosperity since the 1800s is now unraveling.

    6. DFDavid Friedberg1:36:54

       Yeah. Uh, I'm in a bunch of group chats. I talk to a lot of people. I would say probably a third of people I talk to have already left. Uh, you're asking about people leaving, right? And I would say, um, like a survey we did, uh, informally in a group, which has been published, uh, talked about is close to an eighty-seven percent of people are gonna leave.Um, these are the core leaders in tech. And the other thing is I talk to a lot of emerging tech CEOs of startups that are doing really well, that are growing.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:37:27

       Mm.

    8. DFDavid Friedberg1:37:28

       And they're all looking to leave. Like, there was one company I was talking to, they're gonna move up to Northern California from Southern, and they're like, "Now I'm gonna move to Nevada." And that's because they're worried about what's next. So California's in this fundamental, like, sinkhole right now. Um, it goes back to my point about people making promises. In order to get elected, politicians promise people something that they don't have today. That's how you get elected.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:37:50

       Mm. Mm-hmm.

    10. DFDavid Friedberg1:37:51

        You don't get elected by saying, "I'm gonna take stuff away from you. The government's gonna do less for you." Show me one politician in the last 100 years that's been elected saying that.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:37:58

        Hmm.

    12. DFDavid Friedberg1:37:59

        So in order... And, and the, there's a fundamental kind of, like, moment, this come to Jesus moment. Can you keep doing these promises? Can you even meet the promises you've already made? And in California, the answer is no. California set up a system, um, where we created the highest tax rate in the country because of all the success in Silicon Valley, all the income that's being generated, all the success, and capital gains and whatnot, and used that to fund a bunch of nonsense. The h- the bullet train to nowhere.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:38:31

        [laughs]

    14. DFDavid Friedberg1:38:31

        You know? Frigging, like, $30 billion in nothing. Like, the-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:38:35

        How much is it?

    16. DFDavid Friedberg1:38:36

        30 billion. Um, and they've had six CEOs, by the way, that have all been fired, or the one guy just got arrested. It's insane. There's, um, ca- it was just published that this, this homeless program, $220 million was spent on it. Six homeless people got themselves out of the cycle of, uh, poverty that they were in. Um, you go down the list. It-

    17. CWChris Williamson1:38:57

        What was it? Sorry, just what was that thing about the affordable internet-

    18. DFDavid Friedberg1:39:01

        Oh, ru-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:39:02

        ... bill?

    20. DFDavid Friedberg1:39:02

        Rural br- broadband.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:39:03

        That was it, and for the same amount of money that was spent, I think every American citizen could have got Starlink.

    22. DFDavid Friedberg1:39:09

        Starlink. Yeah. That, and that one, I, that's a federal problem. I don't-

    23. CWChris Williamson1:39:12

        Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but...

    24. DFDavid Friedberg1:39:14

        You're gonna get me very emotional.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:39:15

        [laughs]

    26. DFDavid Friedberg1:39:15

        I've been, I've been very, like, I've been-

    27. CWChris Williamson1:39:16

        You seem, you seem like an emotional guy

    28. DFDavid Friedberg1:39:17

        ... I've been very, like, unemotional during our, uh, talk about science and the future, and then this is the opposite. Okay, this is the bullshit, the opposite that happens when social systems become manifest, like, um, rotten. It's a system where people lie to each other in order to keep themselves in power, in order to keep their money flowing, in order to keep this nonsense up and running. People lie to themselves. They lie to their constituents. And the democracy starts to become like, what's the point? Like, does this even work? California in particular, um, we made a bunch of, uh, changes to the pension system. So we have public pensions for public employees in California. And over the past, um, uh, f- 12 to 15 years, um, those changes have resulted in a bunch of guarantees to people on their future retirement benefits that the state simply cannot afford to meet.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:40:11

        Hmm.

    30. DFDavid Friedberg1:40:12

        The estimate currently is that there's 600 billion to a trillion dollars in the hole, okay? The state then has a question, how are we going to, like, pay for all these people, all the stuff that we promised them? And that's a big part. And then there's also all the near term stuff like healthcare costs. Hey, we promised them healthcare. We promised our union workers healthcare. We've got to figure out a way to fund the healthcare because the promises were made. But the promises were never funded. The promises were never possible to be funded. And when suddenly it all comes to roost and everyone's like, "Well, how are we gonna make the payments now? How are we gonna fill the hole?" That's the situation California's in. California has such a heaping liability problem that it's now, you're seeing, like, all the rats jumping, you know, off the ship, or they're burning the ship, or the people are leaving the ship. I don't know what the right analogy to use is, but that's the chaos that's ensuing in California in this very moment. And that's... And, and so we talk a lot about the billionaire tax. The billionaire tax came about because of one union, one guy at one union called SEIU UHW, who set up a, a, a scheme where they would tax you 5% of your net worth if your net worth is over a billion dollars, which everyone in this audience is like, "Who cares? Screw the billionaires." But what it does is it gives the state assembly, the legislature, the ability to, in the future, change the threshold and the amount.
15. 1:50:14 – 2:06:18

    Is Socialism the Worst Idea Ever?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:50:14

       I think that you could look at the conspiratorial angle, but just straight incentives for I want to be seen to be standing up for the little person, when we saw how far that pushed a lot of social movements over the last, roughly six, seven years, and that got people to do some pretty insane things that I think in retrospect a lot of them regret. And, uh, that was, "I am here for the righteous. This is dangerous. This is too much. This is xenophobic, misogynistic, m- uh, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, unedical- unethical, unmedical." There's a big list of things and, and because everybody is their opinions, not their deeds, right?

    2. DFDavid Friedberg1:50:52

       That's right.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:50:52

       And the difference between our opinions and our deeds has never been greater. You're able to say good whilst doing bad. This was Elon's thing. I remember and four, five years ago, he was pulled up about what he was doing with Tesla and about his presentation things, and he says, "What I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it."

    4. DFDavid Friedberg1:51:10

       Totally.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:51:10

       "There are many people out there who are doing bad whilst appearing good, and I don't care to be one of them."

    6. DFDavid Friedberg1:51:15

       That's right. And the people that are trying to lead on this have three homes. You know, it's very easy to pull the ladder up. [laughs]

    7. CWChris Williamson1:51:23

       Would they not think-- Would, would, would they not be looking at themselves? Oh, I suppose that at least at the moment when they're pointing at the billionaires that are above-

    8. DFDavid Friedberg1:51:30

       Right

    9. CWChris Williamson1:51:30

       ... they're in this sort of interesting middle ground, which is wealthy enough to be wealthy but not so wealthy as to be-

    10. DFDavid Friedberg1:51:34

        They have abundance

    11. CWChris Williamson1:51:35

        ... affected by the tax.

    12. DFDavid Friedberg1:51:36

        You know, if you go to Africa and you go visit farmers, you think those guys are complaining about using GMO seed and farming if it's gonna double their, their income? Their lives changed. You know, there's all these stories about how technology, nuclear energy, dropping the cost of energy, making it proliferant in India, been a game changer. Like, these technologies that we shun in the West are luxury beliefs for us to shun them. We have these ideas that we can just shun stuff because we're, we, we, we are already well enough off. That's what happened in Germany. And Bernie Sanders has three homes, so it's easy for him to tell people, "Hey, the average person has one, you know, has an apartment. We should go down this path," that fundamentally in every record of history that we've tried to go down this path has fucked everyone up. It is the worst idea that humans have ever come up with, and they keep trying to repeat it. You can only look at Argentina, which has, like, gotten out of the shit like yesterday, to see how bad of a problem this leads to. Socialism is the worst idea ever.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:52:30

        Why did Mamdani get into New York then?

    14. DFDavid Friedberg1:52:32

        People want more. They're not-- People are left behind. We-- Look, this is, this is so important, I think, to recap. We promised people that if they went to college, you would get a good career and you could buy a home, and that turned out to not be true. That was a lie. The way we promised it to them and the way we gave everyone access to college is through federal education grants, loans. The federal student loan program didn't have a market check. The federal government, as long as you were an accredited university, you could run Trump University, Phoenix University, UCLA, Harvard, MIT. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what the tuition is, sixty thousand dollars, and it doesn't matter what the degree is. You could get a degree in basket weaving or a degree in computer science. The government-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:53:25

        I have one in each.

    16. DFDavid Friedberg1:53:25

        [laughs] The government will loan you the money.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:53:27

        And iron ore.

    18. DFDavid Friedberg1:53:27

        Right. [laughs] And iron ore. Um, the background for this should be like a Minecraft-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:53:31

        Yeah, yeah

    20. DFDavid Friedberg1:53:33

        ... uh, thing.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:53:33

        Yeah.

    22. DFDavid Friedberg1:53:33

        Um, but the government will loan you money to go to that college. And so the government basically fueled increases in tuition because why would all these colleges suddenly go from costing ten grand a year to sixty grand a year? It's because they could just charge more, and there was no one to say no-

    23. CWChris Williamson1:53:46

        Hmm

    24. DFDavid Friedberg1:53:46

        ... 'cause the government just funded the loans every year. And the students are like, "I got a student loan. I'm good to go." Like, no one's doing the math on like can I afford to pay sixty, two hundred and forty thousand dollars?

    25. CWChris Williamson1:53:55

        Is it true that you can't default on it as well in the US?

    26. DFDavid Friedberg1:53:57

        And you cannot default on it. And so that was the setup. That's how it got passed in Congress, where the government spends trillions of dollars underwriting student loans. So there's no underwriting process. Any college, any degree, any individual, any price, those four things. You could be a bad student. I shouldn't underwrite your loan. You could get a shitty degree. I shouldn't underwrite your loan. You go to a shitty school. I'm not underwriting your loan. And if it costs a lot, I'm not underwriting your loan. That's what would normally happen, and that didn't happen.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:54:24

        Hmm.

    28. DFDavid Friedberg1:54:24

        As a result-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:54:25

        If you, if you privatized it. That's-

    30. DFDavid Friedberg1:54:26

        If you privatized it.
16. 2:06:18 – 2:10:48

    Why Has Society Become So Pessimistic?

    1. CWChris Williamson2:06:18

       Yeah. Do you feel-

    2. DFDavid Friedberg2:06:19

       Yeah

    3. CWChris Williamson2:06:19

       ... a little bit like there's a, a schism going on between what's happening in the real world and the way that it's being perceived?

    4. DFDavid Friedberg2:06:24

       It's crazy. I mean, like, I, I, I think that it's so sad that so many people are so negative. I think, like, people talk about, yes, certainly a lot of people can be struggling. But I think, you know, in, in, in the mid-century, coming out of World War II, we were so optimistic as a people. We were so positive about tomorrow. All of our conversations about tomorrow were all about we're gonna go to the moon, we're all gonna move around in, you know, electric trams. We're, we're all gonna have a microwave in our kitchen. You know, I always tell people the analogy, uh, if you pull up a, um... I'll do this for your audience. If you pull up the, uh, Disney History Institute YouTube channel, and there's an episode on Tomorrowland. When they opened up Tomorrowland in 1955, it was all about this optimism of tomorrow.

    5. CWChris Williamson2:07:11

       Mm-hmm.

    6. DFDavid Friedberg2:07:11

       And it was like every ride was all about tomorrow being incredible. It's like we're all gonna, like, go to the moon. There was a ride called The Rocket to the Moon. You go to the moon and back.

    7. CWChris Williamson2:07:19

       Mm-hmm.

    8. DFDavid Friedberg2:07:19

       You move around... And then they had a, a Inside the House of Tomorrow, um, where everyone had a microwave, so you could cook your dinner in 30 seconds. It was like the future, and people were like-

    9. CWChris Williamson2:07:27

       Mm-hmm

    10. DFDavid Friedberg2:07:27

        ... mind blown. That's so cool. And, you know, and then I think we kinda... So then in the video, they say, like, in the 1970s, they changed over every ride to make it all about the fear of tomorrow.It was like, uh, Star Tours was a robot that, like, made the mistake. It's a navigator robot.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:07:41

        Mm-hmm.

    12. DFDavid Friedberg2:07:41

        And of course, the navigator robot has to screw up, so you veer off course and nearly crash in an asteroid. The-- They took out the rocket to the Moon and replaced it with Space Mountain, which is a rocket ship that veers off course and spins violently through the galaxy. Captain EO was Michael Jackson coming back to planet Earth, and he's like, "Hey, we're gonna destroy the robots that took over the Earth."

    13. CWChris Williamson2:08:00

        Mm.

    14. DFDavid Friedberg2:08:00

        And him and his organic band destroy all the robots.

    15. CWChris Williamson2:08:02

        Apocalyptic.

    16. DFDavid Friedberg2:08:03

        And so, like, you know, we, we've kind of gotten into this very pessimistic view, and I think, like, you know, um, if we can change people's aperture a bit and get them to be pessi- uh, optimistic instead of pessimistic and see how promising tomorrow is and not need to feel sheltered and, um, you know, taken care of and fundamentally creating a burden to these bigger sy- social systems, these governmental type systems, people, um, I think might change their view. I'm hopeful. That's why we're having this conversation. But, like, that's the sort of thing that I think we need to be doing is, like, showing people all the amazing shit that's happening and how much it's gonna benefit you and how crazy awesome it is. And, like, you're gonna be able to spend more time with your kids. The cost of food's going down. The cost of energy's gonna go down. Like, we're all gonna have robots that can build stuff for us, and you're gonna be able to spend more time with your family. Like, on and on and on. Like, housing needs to get cheap. Like, but, like, fighting against these things is just so, um... It's so crazy that we would, you know, do that. Like, you know, there's this whole story about Germany fought against nuclear energy, and then their energy costs spiked, and now they have to buy natural gas from Russia and just put carbon into the atmosphere, which is what they were trying to fight against [chuckles] in the first place.

    17. CWChris Williamson2:09:15

        Yeah. Yeah.

    18. DFDavid Friedberg2:09:16

        Yeah.

    19. CWChris Williamson2:09:16

        I, uh, I wonder whether people being more hopeful would mean that they would vote in a less fear-based way.

    20. DFDavid Friedberg2:09:22

        That's right.

    21. CWChris Williamson2:09:23

        And, uh, that anybody that's talking about hope, if you feel fearful, sounds like they're dismissive of the problems that you're facing.

    22. DFDavid Friedberg2:09:32

        Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson2:09:33

        That seems like the dynamic that's going on.

    24. DFDavid Friedberg2:09:35

        Yeah, that's right. It's like I'm not empathizing with your pain.

    25. CWChris Williamson2:09:38

        Yeah.

    26. DFDavid Friedberg2:09:39

        And if I-

    27. CWChris Williamson2:09:39

        And a lot of the time-

    28. DFDavid Friedberg2:09:40

        And by the way, if I empathize with your pain, we have to figure out an enemy responsible for your pain.

    29. CWChris Williamson2:09:44

        Them.

    30. DFDavid Friedberg2:09:44

        Them.

Episode duration: 2:10:49