Reid Hoffman on ChatGPT, Data Centers & Why America Needs AI

0:00I personally know three people whose lives have been saved by Chad GBT. It's amazing that this is an industry where we have to remind ourselves that this is for human beings. Yes, you should never connect AI or any automated system to nuclear stuff. And you should keep the nuclear stuff disconnected from the internet, not just because of AI, but because of all the human beings. I feel like I'm a middle of a rogue kind of guy. Yes, I can get by cars going both directions. I like weaving in the middle of the road. Good off, man. Welcome to the newcomer podcast. Still to have you in person. You are fresh off a sub-stack post laying out a sort of middle ground on artificial intelligence. And obviously there's lots to talk about there. I want to just give you a second to give the high level of you. I feel like you resist. You're not like you're not claiming one of the, you know, monikers like I'm an, yeah, I'm an accelerist. So I'm a deep like, do you have a brand for this middle of the roadtaker? What is, what do at least give us sort of the argument behind it? Well, maybe a, like a smart accelerationist, a pro steering versus accelerating or deer accelerating.

1:11And you know, generally speaking, I think I tend to think of myself as a techno humanist, which is how do you have technology and hands humanity, which is I think where we mostly orient towards most technology going. And we just need to keep steering in that direction. It's amazing that this is an industry where we have to remind ourselves that this is for human beings. Yes. It feels like that gets lost sometimes. And then there has to be sort of a corrective of, oh, who are we building this for? Not, not the machines themselves. What is the main thing you're calling for here? These are sort of like the data center piece of it. There's like access to AI. So the primary thing is kind of two things that need to go together. One, which is like, why is it important that societies, and let's talk about the US, the America needs to win a AI because it is the next industrial revolution. And industrial revolution is the thing that determines future prosperity, just like the previous industrial revolution did. So if you go, we want to opt out of

2:14the industrial revolution, that's what crushed a whole number of societies for centuries, whether it's India, China, a bunch of others is like, no, no, you actually have to do so, so succeeding at it really matters. But then simultaneously, and at the same time, more than 60% of Americans are having a very difficult time. And there's questions around like, okay, the enormous gas price rises, the cost of beef, you know, kind of like how many jobs you need to work. And it's the responsibility of the entire American society to try to make that because, because in sense, our ethos as a society is a middle class ethos to make that work better. And so, and I think AI can, that doesn't mean there won't be, and this is part of the thing that was the backdrop of addressing in the essay, a lot of significant issues around work change. And people are legitimately concerned about like, well, what can you tell me about that? What's when it's going to happen?

3:17How is it going to be? And by the way, no one actually, in fact, really knows, neither of the people who go, oh my god, it's going to be huge in a year or two, or the people are like, oh, no problem, nothing this year. Actually, nobody really knows. And most people in the nobody really knows, get nervous about that. Although that's, I think the kind of the nobody really knows, part of it is means that it's like going down a road. It's like you're planning a highway trip. Do you know there's an accident on the road already? Do you know that there's not usually, you know you have the capability to navigate it, you set yourself up. This could come. This could come. I'll do that. Yes. But you don't just say, I need to know everything ahead of me or I will not drive anywhere. Exactly. So it's kind of like, so my, my thing is get on the road and drive and keep driving. And by the way, sometimes you hit a curve or traffic, you slow down a little bit for that, but it's, but it's a forward motion orientation. Some people think we're at the curve now, though. I guess to ask that directly, do you worry, like should we be pacing, should we be halting like, or you think in terms of what you've seen, keep driving. So definitely keep driving. But by the way,

4:24this is the other nuance in the pacing and so forth. There's like, for example, there's a pacing of building and there's a pacing of deploying. And actually, I actually think what I look at, like Daria's call and, you know, Sam and, you know, say, well, I think you probably still need to be doing the building because, by the way, in order, the problems are worried about is you have a curse of self-improvement. And they've built up over the years, a whole bunch of different techniques for, you know, I present most of the people on your podcast, know what alignment is, but I'll explain very quickly, which is how do you have these things aligned to positive human outcomes? So they don't tell you how to build weapons. They, you know, generally speaking, provide you useful things in your life and not things that help you mess up other people's lives or your own. And the challenge in recursive self-improvement is you're essentially saying, okay, improve yourself. How do you keep that alignment as you improve yourself? And it's like, well, we don't really know how to do that.

5:27That's like, like, like, we have some ideas, but if you said guarantee me you can keep your alignment. They're like, we can't guarantee it because we don't know what that pattern is, but the problem is, you won't know what the pattern of recursive self-improvement is until we start doing it. So that's why development and deploy. So like, I didn't even know, no, keep developing, but maybe slow down, deploy, you know, have much higher monitoring on access to the internet and some other things. And by the way, be simultaneously building AIs for measuring what the states are of these complicated RSI models because we need to be understanding them in order to say, oh, these patterns of alignment work. Or by the way, if we're discovering no patterns of alignment working, well then at that time, a real slowdown can make a difference. Is recursive self-improvement, sorry, development or deployment? Like you want to keep using recursive self-improvement? In, uh, development. Inside labs. Yes. But in deployment, like, okay, let's pace that. I mean, that gets to one of the issues that comes up in your essay, which is the more we say,

6:32the answer to this is labs hold back what they have. You know, maybe, you know, there are a lot fewer people to get angry about it. Nobody's seen it, but it's fundamentally denying sort of those capabilities to the American public, like part of what you're talking about is like, make sure they get actual applications that they can use. They can see the benefits of AI. I agree with that. But then there's also just the piece of a world where there are two tightly guarded is a world where corporations and maybe governments have this immense power that everybody else doesn't have access to. How do you balance those things? Well, so first, in my substack essay, one of the things that I think is critical for anyone who, uh, who, and I think it's the right thing to try to help people have a positive understanding of AI. I think government should be actually helping with that. I think, obviously, companies desperately need to. And so it's like, have a medical assistant, like make a 24, seven medical assistant that's only available to the super wealthy right now, but could be a well available to everybody, legal assistant. Most people can't hire a lawyer to say,

7:37I'm, I'm signing this rental agreement. What are, like, is this okay? Is it standard? Is it, did it? So have a legal assistant on a whole wide variety of things like, oh, am I, uh, what am I, what are my legal responsibilities if I'm driving a car? A tutor, right? So a tutor for your kids, tutor for yourself. Obviously, that has some play to what could have all of that stuff should be deployed aggressively. And to really deploy it well, uh, government will have to change some liability law, like on medical, um, one of the things that I desperately want this. We could solve and not to, there's so many intertwined problems, but we live in this, like surveillance state, potentially that AI is going to get better at creating. Like you could have like, uh, AI sort of build rights where it's you have legal protections. You're allowed to use it. You're, yes, there are cameras everywhere, but there's where they're limited. Like there's a lot of issues that can be bundled into a productive conversation. Exactly. And by the way, the use of surveillance is frequently a, uh, slogan-earing word, um, you know, like the, you know, like a great title called

8:40surveillance capitalism. And you're like, wow, this is not just bad. It's like, well, surveillance medicine is awesome. We do it all the time. Exactly. And when, you know, when there is like a serial killer or a man hunt usually, you were like, how can they not find him right away? But then, you know, other times they hate sort of the drag net. I mean, I don't think we like that we're being sort of lied to about this, maybe the extent of the drag net. And also, by the way, it should be a highly understood environment that is legally bound to be on your side. Exactly. As a people. Right. Right. And this is one of things like, for example, most people don't realize that London has an enormous amount of surveillance. And the Londoners are actually quite happy with it because it's like, oh, like when someone falls down the heart attack, the ambulance arrives soon. That's good. Or when there is a, there was a crime, the police respond quicker. We like that because it's for us, not against us. And that's, I think, one of the really key things here. And so I think continuing to deploy carefully that I actually, in my slowdown

9:43and deployment, it wasn't any of these apps. I actually even think kind of the work productivity and all the rest. I think that's part of the industrial revolution you need to be doing it. It's more the question of, okay, so we're making a much more intelligent AI through our SI. Let's make sure we understand what that intelligence is. Right. So like, don't really nilly kind of just go, great, we made something super smart. And now we're just throwing it out. You're like, make sure we have a good understanding that it's kind of aligned with human interest. And then, but for example, this risk you put it out, it's so easy to distill the models. Yes. That someone's going to rip it off, make it as a source. Yes, we've seen a bunch of. And by the way, so like one of the things on the open weight side, which is another frequent discussion here, like I was on the board of Mozilla for 11 years. I'm a massively pro open source on all kinds of things. The open weights models, when it gets AI, you really do have to have good answers to like cybersecurity and hacking. You have to have good answers to like, you know, creation of new biological materials because of use and terrorism.

10:47Like, that's not at oh, yeah, it's fine. Or oh, you can discover those documents on Google because the discovering the documents on Google is not the same thing of having a PhD co-collaborator that will do what you ask it to do. And it's like, okay, we should be a little bit more careful about that. Again, open is generally good, but it's an area to be careful about. There's so many pieces of this that I don't want to drift from earlier things, but I'm also interested in that piece of it. I mean, like the lawyer, the medical sort of app, just to put it directly. Like, do you think people, you know, if I talk to Chatschibiti or a legal specific app, I should be able to treat that as privileged like a lawyer like we should. On it publicly. Right. And by the way, we're just fuzzy on it right now because by the way, you know, your email that's on the, you know, Google or Microsoft servers is privileged and it's still in that thing. It's being handled by software, et cetera. Like, that's already there. There's no reason

11:48that a interaction with an agent should be treated any differently. Right. From a privilege, you know, standpoint, whether it's legal, medical, et cetera. And it's really just people's. But if I'm right down, I guess there's it. There's one is like I'm using as a tool to talk to lawyers. Yes. But there's another where it's like, obviously, if I wrote a word document with like my confession and they found out my computer, yes, they'd use that against me. Yes. But if I'm like in Chatschibiti and I'm asking it like, I think I was speeding like, I don't know. Like, do you think we should have protections there that it's like a therapist or as long as I'm not like actively saying I'm murdering that person? Yeah. Look, I think broadly, yes. Although also maybe with like one of the things I think it kind of gets down to kind of how you do a terms of service. I like I would ideally I think I have a terms of service that if if someone's like speeding, et cetera, that should be within the personal if it's like, how do I make a new biological

12:54terror weapon? No, not so much. Right. Right. So it's probably a question of where the boundary should be. But like, for example, because you think about this is we're a far healthier society. If everybody has the advice of of some legal counsel and it's very difficult to to afford. Right. Having at least an ability to have a interaction for can you can you proxy legal counsel for me? Exactly. Is I think a very good feature to have? That's that's what I was essentially just right earlier. Well, you know, to bring a lot is like I certainly don't support people attacking flock cameras, but you can imagine a world today. It's like the government has all these tools to come after somebody with flock cameras, and who is like destroying them. And somebody goes to chat, you be tea and says, I've done this like what, you know, maybe it needs to be a legal specific app because the problem is lawyers can get in trouble if they give you advice of a betting a crime versus here's the legal advice I can give you around a potential crime or something.

13:58But yeah, do you think like there needs to be some framework where we have talking to a model for legal advice as if it was talking to a lawyer? Yeah, I think that's that's essentially correct. And actually, by the way, you might do is you might say in that mode, like the the model only talks legal. Like so you can't go all the way. You got to switch into it. Yes. Yes. And like, for example, it's like, well, you know, I'd like to figure out how to break into this building. And maybe the model can help it. Well, a lawyer won't do that. So if you're talking on a lawyer, legal mode, it was like, no, my legal advice to you is don't break into the building. Exactly. Right. And on the medical front, do you think we need new policy in the same way? At the minimum from legal liability, one of the things that I've been trying to advocate for a number of years, and it's part of the reason I've been doing it in to government and much of other folks. And now I'm just kind of thinking, okay, let me just start saying just shout about it loudly. Yeah. The culture takes it on. Yes. Exactly. Because if we shift,

15:00part of the reason why most people are not aware that you can actually get pretty good medical advice from chat GBD and cloud. And the reason is they don't advertise it and they lightly steer away from it to try to avoid me medical liability. They say we can do it. Then they can get sued. Yes. Exactly. And what you want to do is say, okay, government should say, look, if you follow the following things, then you have essentially a, like a kind of a safe harbor from medical liability so that, and by the way, so like the kind of things I think you would do is you'd say, the app has to be free. The data has to be entirely the own own individuals. You have to not sell the data to anybody. You have to fundamentally ask, do you have access to a doctor? Do you have access to medical facilities and so forth? And then when you're giving advice, you should say, look, it's still far better if you can consult a doctor. But if you can't, or like timing,

16:05availability, et cetera, here's what I would think. And if you had that, at least three companies would go provide that. It would cost the government nothing. And they would advertise that they would have it because it would be like, look, is there a really useful feature? And by the way, it is a really useful feature. And here's how useful the feature is today. I personally know three people whose lives have been saved by chat, GBT, by using it as a second opinion. Right? So like, like in a hospital and they go, I'm not sure. And they go to another hospital. And that got in a hospital and was like, well, if you arrived here about an hour and a half later, you'd be dead. Right? Wow. You know, that coming. And that's we want that for everyone. Right? And that's easy enough to do. Now, of course, lawyers will argue, no, no, no, no, we need to have medical toward. It's the only way to keep it. And it's like, well, just just describe what the guidelines are for what you where you have to stay. And if you think, oh, that's a little borderline, then bring in the guideline a little bit. It's like only with it. Like you, part of the medical

17:08assistant could be the, I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to give advice on that topic. Right? You know, please find someone to consult with. If you want, I can pull up a list of public, a, you know, like potentially publicly available resources that you might be able to use. It's a really interesting point on the why don't opening eye anthropic, etc. I do a better job of taking credit for the good things they can do. It's like, here's a case where maybe they're afraid that they'll get sued if they brag about it. They for sure will be interesting. Right. Um, and it seems, it means clearly a good that you can, you know, put your medical documents into get it, just get a different opinion. Like, it disagrees with your doctor. Yeah. Sort of second grade. And also, by the way, like another thing is, literally for people who have high incontiors, doctors, they put their blood work into Chatsy BD Claude. And then you can talk to the agent for two hours about, like, well, what does this mean? And how many people have this? And, you know, does this mean that I have the following condition? What would be the probability?

18:09How else would I measure it? Should I take the blood test again? Doctors don't have time for that. AI has all the time in the world. And sometimes they give simplistic answers assuming you might not. Do you take the medicine or you might not do XYZ? And if you have someone actually taking the time to explain, it's like, oh, they're giving you that direct advice because it would take a lot of work to do the perfect solution or whatever. Yes. Can be helpful to have the time to get a real answer. Well, this is the thing where it's like going through in depth and understanding, like, one of the another thing that AI is useful for. So let's say, for example, this is a couple of years ago, I was like, I want to understand quantum mechanics better. So I took us out of quantum mechanics challenges. And I went, okay, explain this to me, like I'm 12. Okay, I got that. Explain to me like I'm 18. Okay, I got that. Explain it to me like I'm a physics college student. Okay, got that. Okay, explain to me like a professor. Okay, I don't got that, but I now understand what the dark looks like. Yeah. We need to win an AI because it's the next industrial revolution.

19:11And if you don't win that type of revolution, you're sort of irrelevant as a society. You don't get to make the big decisions of the big global decisions. Your children are poor. It's sort of a dark world that we have to remind people of that in a certain way. It's like we still as Americans should think we should win. Like obviously we've made mistakes as a culture. We're not perfect. We need to fix it. But it is somewhat worrying that we're in a society day where it feels like we need to even make the case. It's like good to stay on top. Yes. But do you feel like you feel like there's a substantial part of I guess like yeah, the political system that doesn't believe that. And I guess a lot of you would say it's clear. You know, I'm Democratic line. You're a big Democratic donor. Like I think we're shared sympathies there. But the party most likely to say, oh, maybe we shouldn't be on top. It is the Democrats. And does that worry you? Well, it bothers me. And part of the reason I wrote the piece was to try to show Democrats how they can have a pro AI vision because the answer is say, look, part of I think what the Democrats

20:17most naturally identify with is the people who are disadvantaged in society. They may be poor. They may be racial biases and maybe other things. And they say, we're about trying to make sure it's like the rich and the powerful elites don't grind them down. And that's a good sympathy because that's we should bring everyone along. And so they tend to think, ah, this is just, you know, you tech people saying how you want to get more wealthy and competing with people. And it's not about all these other people. And you're like, look, and by the way, that has happened at points in history, whether it's tech, oil, finance, et cetera. It's like, so it's a good voice to be saying, that's great. You're going to win in the industry. And that'll bring prosperity in the country. Make sure it's helping the country. And as an example that I use to try to wake up Democrats on this topic, say, well, would you like to have a return to manufacturing industry in this country? And they can't suggest because I saw a middle class, good AI and robotics is your only play. Right. You should be leaning into that. So as opposed to saying, AI bad stop AI, it's like,

21:22well, hey, can you AI guys be making sure that our whole manufacturing industry is well provisioned with this stuff is happening? Could you make sure you're investing in that? And if you're doing that, we will be more sympathetic. We still will be watching out for, hey, don't be doing, you know, harming children and other kinds of things because it's really important. But we'll be more sympathetic to, oh, we'll help you figure out where you can have find a community that should buy into your data center deal because building the data center for doing the community, because you're helping the communities with manufacturing jobs. That kind of thing would be good. And that's the kind of thing to think up for them to think about. Now, it's absolutely right that because they tend to be the like, we're on the side of the, of the, of the disempowered person against the wealthy and powerful large companies, etc., etc., they tend to do that as a dynamic, but that's a destroy a future, destroy children's future, etc., and it's like, don't do that.

22:22I hate to be the, why doesn't the public appreciate tech of more person? But I mean, right now, the deal with AI is that, you know, tech companies are way, they're burning through investors' capital, very aggressively, spending tons of money building in America, like the capacity to do this, giving these apps away mostly for free and giving access to it. And yeah, Americans pull very negatively on AI, yet use it. I feel like something that's been coming up a lot, I guess, on this podcast and in my work, is this conflict between sort of tech industry sort of saying, revealed preferences are who you are. I was talking to like, similarly, which is doing simulations of the future. And it's like, people are really what, what they do in some ways. And then there's sort of, I don't know, the media class world, which is like, people are what they say. And they say negative things and they both, to pollsters and, you know, wine online. I don't know what, what do you make of the disconnect between obviously what people are doing, which is using these

23:26tools and embracing them versus what they appear to be saying? Well, so there's a couple different sorts of using the tools. So one is sometimes people are using them, they don't realize they're using them right? They don't realize that. That's exactly. And then two is, they're using it, but they're kind of using it for, oh, like, where is that cafe in Midtown that I wanted to find and so forth. And then those time and time is to be told, oh, the people who are building this think there's an extinction risk in humanity or it's going to take out 25% of white collar jobs in a couple years and like, well, why are you doing that? But like, like, are you crazy? And I think you must not be crazy. Is it just because you're going to get really wealthy? Like, why are you like? And so, so they can simultaneously have this negative feel. It's a little bit like, I got asked by a friend of mine, he's like, well, why are the college students booing AI and commencement speeches? Because they're all using it a lot. It's like, look, here's the thing. Knowing your friends, they're probably drafting their commencement speech. Like, how do I avoid this problem? Yes, exactly. And I was like, look,

24:30through your average college student from what they're being told, they're like, okay, you gave me a homework helper and you took away my career. Take your homework, help her back and give me my career back. Right? And that's incorrect as a framing. But if that's what the kind of the words that you're being told are, then naturally you have a very negative versus reaction, even though probably the vast majority, like 99% of college students use AI regularly. Do you have a prediction on what sort of AI is going to mean for jobs over the next decade? Well, anyone who has a solid prediction is probably self delusional. Because one of the things is a little bit like getting on the road and steering is there's a lot of different ways it can play out. And I've heard smart people argue everything from, you know, the Dario 25% white collar blood bath to there's going to be zero issue, whatsoever. Right? Like, it'll be the most empowering thing and people use it and so, and smart people

25:32on like, so the whole range is smart. So the way that I tend to think about it is what, here's kind of the more crisp thing. So one is the speed at which existing companies will change is not nearly as fast as a technologist think. Because how companies learn things like, for example, if you go to most companies, now like, well, we're looking around to buy an AI class and you're like, you know, we got to train our employees, we got to buy an AI class. You know, you could just use the AI for that. That's how you say it. That's all worried. You know, like, you don't need to go, like, AI for dummies, no one should buy that book. He did this like, you know, don't do it. On the other hand, so those will be much slower than most of the, oh my god, it's going to be here in a year or two. But what will happen is new kinds of companies will be created that are much more AI native and those will be very strong competitors. And then that will start forcing the competition.

26:33And so that's the pattern that once we're in it, I think we can make predictions about, well, how will the major employment white college jobs, whether they're sales or customer service, other kinds of what do those, how do those end up, you know, transforming? How quickly are AI native companies out competing the old guys rather than the old guard been like, goodbye, everybody. We figured out how to use AI. Exactly. And by the way, that will then cause the old guard to start adjusting. And it will be some of them are fail, some of them will succeed. And they'll be this kind of really kind of intense period on that. And in that job transformation, I think that will be hard. And I think one of the things that, you know, I've also been thinking about is, how do we create the right AI tools to help everyone in society with that? How do you help them figure out like what other kinds of work might be possible or how to adjust like, oh, this is what the new kind of salesperson looks like in an AI universe. How to learn that job, how to do that

27:35job, how to find that job, you know, all of that stuff. This is one of the broad things that people really need to understand is you want your solution to have the same characteristics as the problem, which namely in scale, cost, speed, you want to have an impedance match. And so a lot of the times of people say, oh, we're going to have a jobs issue. We'll have community colleges do it. And you're like, that does not have an impedance match. You like, sure, do something. No harm in doing something. But it will not, it will, will not survive at that. Right. So, so how do we have AI beyond the, on the, the help side of the bar, which is totally doable? That's the thing we should be pushing for. That's the thing that I was like, when I talk to any government officials, not just Democrats help guide you towards a job. It's helped teach people how to build businesses alongside of it. I'm a small business owner. We use it to build our ticketing platform. We're going to do an exciting report soon that we would have never been able to sort of like format and

28:37build the website and password protect us the same way without AI. So I can see, but is that the path it's like everybody's business owner? Well, I think, I think you'll have a lot of entrepreneurship. I think you'll have a lot of small business entrepreneurship. I think you'll have new entrepreneurship building new companies. And I think you'll have a, for example, like some of it is like, like, how would I pitch myself as a college student saying, why do you desperately need me at your companies? Like, I'm AI native. You need to be learning AI native. You need to hire people like me. And by the way, most businesses are like, oh, yeah. Like we know that we need, and if they're convinced, then sure, we have entry level hiring despite, you know, trade war and Iranian war and oil prices and all the rest, which is a lot of the reason why everyone's much more cautious in hiring and business. You were saying before we came on, I don't think we've hit on this yet. Just without sort of the AI sort of explosion, our economy would be in a pretty dark place. Yes. Can you paint a picture of that? And like, yeah, and what are the political consequences

29:37as well? And so this is a particular one in which, you know, call it progressive Democrats really don't understand, which is our economy, you know, we have a serious problem, problems are economy. And it's not just because of massive, you know, deficit and debt that a huge amount of our taxes go to just literally pay the interest on the debt. It's like we've maxed out like all of our credit cards kind of national debt. But all of this capital infusion, people think, oh, if I just go under the tech companies, like, Neuro, like a massive, like, like, actually, I should go try to measure the exact percentage, but a massive percentage of it is going towards data center construction, which means construction, electricity, carpenters, real estate development, you know, etc, etc, etc. legal work around what's going on, a community service engagement, like just a ton of, and literally I've seen, you know, places about people who are texting going, hey, this AI thing is essential

30:39for me looking after my family and so forth. And so that capital is the only reason we're not in a recession, right? So, and by the way, most of that capital doesn't go to the cities and, you know, there's a natural reason why capital tends to aggregate in the network of exit cities. Most of that's more distributed across the country. That's great. On the data center of freeze, like, how likely is it that there is one? Like, are you worried about that? I mean, and certainly you have, you know, the Bernie Sanders of the world, they're on the one hand, there's this bipartisan sort of support for it. On both ends of the spectrum, you see Republicans even sort of paying some lip service to it. On the other hand, it feels sort of implausible. It's so key to America's main business right now. It's good money. What it doesn't have to come to your community, can come to another. How much, how much are you actually worried that there will be a freeze? Well, we're capable given the broads bed, you know, kind of like, like a lot of misinterpretation of, of AI and data centers that

31:42we're capable of doing humans are getting to panic. Yeah. And because all of us have to do it if we want to do it. And so, for example, like everyone keeps saying water in data centers, even though that paper was retracted for its inaccuracies. And so, so I ultimately am enough of an optimist. I don't think we'll have the shoot ourselves, you know, in both legs, you know, kind of like a national moratorium, etc. What I do think we should be doing, I think Josh Appear would Pennsylvania is doing a very good job of this is say, hey, make sure the local communities bought in, make sure the local community is getting sustaining benefit from it. Make sure the like noise and and environment and everything else as well. Take care of, make sure that electricity prices either stay the same or go down as a function of the provisioning of this. And then allow the local community to say, I wanted I don't want it and say, you know, like self determination. It's one of the great things that we think about a kind of American, you know, kind of the history of American

32:46culture, even back to, you know, the American revolution. So allow the local communities to do that. And then have like the state and federal, it involves just to make sure like the environmental stuff and make sure that there's no like, oh, they're bribing a local official or something, but it's actually, it makes sense. What, let different communities decide what's right from them. Is there any way to make them more aesthetically appealing or it's not the most beautiful seeming things? It's probably a theft, but you know, given that economics is always about a question of limited, I, I spend the money on it. Yeah, I would like make it like definitely make it not have sound noise issues because that can be very disruptive to a local community. Well, if you said, hey, we've got a spare X dollars, I'd rather spend the spare X dollars in creating local economy. Right. And saying make sure that that's invested in making the community more prosperous. Right. You know, one thing that I feel like Silicon Valley used to be the leader on was this talk

33:48of like UBI, universal basic income. And there's still some echoes of it, which is, you know, there's going to be so much AI abundance. We have to give everyone some sort of like minimum protection. On the other hand, you know, I don't read it certainly sort of the conservatives and Silicon Valley is supportive of like expand social security or you know that any sort of like practical expansion of the safety net given sort of imminent AI abundance. I guess first question is just like what do you actually believe you've already brought up the deficit? Is it like, oh, we need to cut the deficit so we can't expand the safety net. There is some abundance coming so we should expand it on that basis or what's your view on safety net expansion? So broadly speaking, I think that as societies make progress part of your progress as society as you expand your human rights, you expand your safety net. I think it's a good thing that you do as you progress as a society. Like you'll say, well, you know, of course you should have, you know, kind of a lot of unemployment

34:49insurance. Like well, but that was a relatively new issue thing, right? Like it's good to be, to be to be doing this to have a much more human society and a functional society. Now that being said, I was never a huge fan of either UBI or the articulation of UBI, universal basic income, because one, you do the math and that's why I sort of pivoted. I brought up UBI and I talked about their security. Yes, but you do the math and you're like, the math doesn't work. But this isn't complicated enough. It just doesn't work for a very, like you have to be so present with massive, massive abundance this year when you're paying the bills in order to do that. So it kind of like, it just doesn't make sense. And I think it's the, it's the crazy, the people who think, oh, the whole world will change next year. And you're like, yeah, it's not going to do that. So that kind of thing. So I think expanding safety, and I also think that the, in part, what I'd want to be doing is saying, hey, look, if we're going to be creating a whole bunch of massively profitable companies,

35:51because AI helps making them profitable, we need to make sure that the profitability of those companies is then reflected into the investment in society to make sure that we continue to have, you know, kind of our American way of life and so forth. And I don't think the way to do that, one of the reasons why a lot of Americans hated the UBI thing is they don't love the idea of, I'm going to put you out of work and I'm going to put you on welfare. Like, no, no, I work. I mean, so creating things that involve, I'm doing things that are meaningful. I'm participating, contributing to the world. I'm providing for my family. That's where the money should be wrapping into. And I think there's a number of different ways to do that. But if we get very profitable companies, if they're American companies, we can then say, okay, we need to use this economics to help the rest of the folks. You think it's fundamentally philanthropy or like when, yeah, when do we get, again, I feel like the AI world can have this sort of like everybody's going to be an artist or like even sort of right coded people will say like, do something productive and like, that'll be good enough. But it's just like, or I think I'm reflecting for note at the moment, but it's like, where

36:52is the money coming for that? And are we about to see these are like violin grants or whatever? How do people actually get paid to be productive, but not in an economically productive way? So, what we don't know is what is the AI productivity of companies mean? Now, say for example, one universe is there's a ton more small firms that are all operating at high function and the AI thing helps them function, then it takes care of itself, right? So like that's one kind of positive, possible outcome that you don't have to then go lean in a whole bunch of extra weight in order to make it happen. Say for example, he said, well, there isn't a massive number of employment opportunities. There's a few and the companies are mostly only using AI and they're generating a whole bunch of economics. Well, then, then you say, okay, we have to tax them to have it. I think broadly, you'd want to put it, I don't know about cultural grants. That's fine. I mean, we obviously have

37:58that work with science and arts and cultures and maybe there's ways to improve that and do that. But I would kind of say invest in the local communities. Like, for example, people might say, hey, I've got an idea about things we should be doing in terms of community centers or events, that kind of stuff. I want to be putting money into that. I want to be doing construction on that, et cetera. And like, there's all these kinds of things ways to do. And so I think this is a little bit of the, how do we know this thing that's far down the road and like pioneering where we've never, no one's ever gone. There's a lot of different possibilities. And what we need to be doing is driving down the road, the questions in our mind, but not cemented answers. Right. On the, on the deficit, like, are you somebody who thinks AI is about to increase like GDP growth and change our productivity? Like, do you think they're, are you betting on a world where we sort of outrun our problems? Or you think something needs to be done to the, to the debt or that shouldn't be a priority? Well, I generally think it's crazy the level that we have. And we get to that debt through all kinds

39:03of things like both Democrats and Republicans just keep increasing military spending. And it isn't just because of getting into, you know, needless, very destructive wars like Iran. The, the question around what should we do in order to, to have economic generativity is really important. I don't think we can austerity our way out of the debt. I think we have to grow. Now that doesn't mean, oh, how much debt is you like? You want to double the debt? You know, like, it's, that's, that's, it's terrible economics. Anyone who runs a business, like, no, that doesn't really work. So, once you say we don't care about costs, everything goes crazy. Yes, exactly. And that's one of the things that makes business such an important part of modern society everywhere in the world. Because it's like, no, no, you're focused on cost, the benefit. And, and you try to trim out bad costs. And so, where then that's one of the reasons why, you know, governments which don't tend to have the same guidance, you know, kind of, because they, you know, government in every country is monopoly.

40:07Tens of just take money. It's like, no, no, you need to be refactoring costs. And I think that's a very good thing. But the only way forward is to grow the economy. And so you got to like, like, part of what I, you know, tell a lot of Democrats who may not understand this as well, is growing the economy is the only way you achieve the social mission that you want to achieve. Do you want the Democrats to spend a lot of time digging into correcting like the sort of illegal activity of this administration? Or, you know, if they're about to hopefully maybe game power in the midterms or, and then there's going to be a presidential race, like, I don't know, you, you know, I think I'm more on the side of like, man, like, Trump coin, all this stuff, like, one way to animate society around fighting corruption is to have this specific story of how Trump abused, you know, office and was able to sort of enrich himself. And if we go after those things that can also be paired with stuff to, for, for broader societal corrections, do you agree with that strategy? Or

41:09you think, man, we're going to have to, at some point, look forward and try not to overly obsess on what Trump is saying. Well, you definitely have to look forward fundamentally, right? Like, like, we're trying to build a future for our children and so on. And I do think some awareness of how much grift amongst the griftocracy there has been is worth understanding so that people understand that's an important issue for the health of society. It's terrible for American business, right? I mean, if you create a culture where just being close to the president is self enriching, I mean, it's, it's very demotivating. Yeah. Well, and also, it's precisely what makes a bunch of other, like, it, it, it, it takes us to the bad excesses of South America. It like, it's like, no, no, that's, that's precisely why we've had prosperity is because we've had anti-corruption. We've had rule of law. We've had a pro-business environment. And, you know, I think that the, you know, everything from obviously Trump coin, there's also, I think, Trump's, has done more stock trading than the, literally selling the ability to frontrun his tweets.

42:13Yes. Through social. Yes. Like, and it's just, it's just literally anti-business, right? I mean, it's like, it's terrible. And so, so I think that's important to correct. I do think that the, there will be a lot of emotional, you know, kind of instinct to say, we should go get belated justice and all fronts in this. And it's like, look, there's been so much you could spend years just trying to, you know, see justice for every single part of, of, of rampant corruption and abuse of power. You want to select some just to be allowed. And then you want to build the future. Man, we need to figure out a way to have the legal system move more quickly. And I don't know, it's just, it's so slow that, you know, yeah, then it can jam up sort of everything else that's going on. Yeah. And, and by the way, legal system working potentially more effectively. And I

43:14can be good with that. Right. Exactly. Well, yeah. What, what is, I haven't asked you, what is your P-Dume? Oh, funny. Does your, does your audience know what P-Dume is? I think so. Okay. P-Dume, we're talking like extinction level risk. Right. I haven't quantified a number ever, really. And the reason is because I think that people tend to like go, it tends to be an agitation, like my internal agitation, I give you a number of it. But let me tell you a little bit about kind of where I think people mistake existential risk. So they tend to go like a very classic argument is does the development of AI and potential killer robots add an existential risk? And you say, yes. And then it says, see, you should stop. You're adding an existential risk. It doesn't matter if that your P-Dume is 0.001 or it's 2% or whatever. It doesn't matter because you're adding something. And you should stop. It's like, well, the right way to look at human existential risk is a portfolio.

44:16Isn't just robots. It's biome pandemics. It's asteroids. It's interesting. You have existing nest essential. So there's a whole portfolio. So then the question with AI becomes, does it increase or decrease the portfolio? The entire thing. And ensure there is an irreducible ad of mistakenly or deliberately, you create some killer robots that have a extinction level impact. By the way, cyber attack robots aren't really that. I mean, there's like people say, oh, cyber, the hugging, face thing, P-Dume. And you're like, those have like, that's not existential. Right. Yes, it's a problem. But by the way, that hack could have been done by humans and is done by humans frequently. People don't realize how many cyber hacks are happening all the time with humans. And obviously, you know, in the worst case scenario, like, I get that cyber connects to like, you know, missile silos or whatever. But there's like, it feels like there's a little bit of like

45:18the internet could go offline or something. It's like, that is not existential. I mean, it is bad. And certainly it would wreck my business. It would be very hard. I'm not minimizing out and pouring the internet is, but it's not existential. So that's the reason why I tend to avoid the P-Dume conversation because it's like, look, what you should really be doing is thinking about like, okay, so how does AI reduce by our risk? How does AI reduce asteroid risk? And by the way, you should never connect AI or any automated system to the nuclear stuff. And you should keep the nuclear stuff disconnected from the internet, not just because of AI, but because of all the human beings. Like, yes, treat existential risk as a portfolio and be turning it down. But like, like, like a natural pandemic could be an existential risk. So it isn't that human beings are the only ones. But by the way, of course, human beings doing things tend to be most of the existential risk. I know. It's amazing to talk about this new existential risk. It's like, we still have nukes

46:21around. And we're just sort of like, all right, we've got to use to it. We're not so worried about the last few days. But I certainly would risk like, pure nukes outside of AI sending them as more risky, probably than AI development in my own calculus. Are you getting towards the end? But I mean, one of the things that AI could create is the sort of like abundance, abundant life spans. Like, are you optimistic that we're going to significantly extend human life? And is that a priority for you? Or you think there will be just will conclude there are sort of natural limits? So not surprising. You know me well, the answer is some agree both. I'm a middle of the rogue kind of guy. I can hit by cars going both directions. I like weaving in the middle of the rogue. The, um, so we will be extending lifespan. And not just like a lot of the progress in the last few decades have been, um, reduct massive reduction of child mortality. And that is part of what drives up the average. But I think we will also be figuring out how to say, hey, getting to 100

47:24on a, in a, in a possible way is like an achievable thing as a kind of a increasing the kind of average. And I think we'll do that. I think it's a good thing to do. Um, on the other hand, like, what most people don't realize is there are, are like, every single human being, um, when they're born is dying of cancer. Right? Like, because we're this homeostatic balance system, which eventually gets out of balance. And so the ability to say, no, no, we'll be able to really massively rebalance it. Ah, seems unlikely given the nature where we are. And it reminds me of like one of my kind of favorite, uh, Buddhism jokes is, you know, why did the Buddhist corner, uh, get fired? And the answer is, uh, kept marking as cause of death birth. Right? So, you know, and it's like, look, it's good to live longer, more fruitful lives. It's a good effort. We've been doing it on a lot of things. Child mortality, you know, Gates Foundation, I'm going very, very good thing to be continued to focus on. But I think

48:25we will make progress. We just won't make progress. Like, you live in Silicon Valley. Listen to we're turning off the death gene. Oh, you mean the one that stops cancer? Are there projects that you think are most likely to sort of make a difference in the near term? Is this an area you invest a lot in? Um, I don't invest a lot in it. I mean, I obviously co-founded monosay here with Sudartemurka, Jean Urge, while saying to try to cure cancer, because cancer is a killer. I spend a lot of time with the other ones. So, so there is a bunch of stuff. And I, I help stand up the bio hub for CZI. I'm on the board of Arcanstut with the callacins and Patrick and Salana. So I try to do stuff for the kind of bio for humanity on this. So I put time and energy into it. Probably, I've only done two or three investments of which monos is the most significant. And do you have a sort of cancer elimination timeline? I know we always want. Well, AI is the best shot we've had in human history to do this. And a little bit, you know, there's a bunch of variables you don't know of, like, because you try to tackle the major ones early.

49:33I doubt you'll ever fully get rid of cancer. And by the way, it's kind of this question of, well, you get rid of that one. Oh, and then this one will happen. So, so there's probably as you get rid of the major ones and get to more of a long tail, you then start having to do things. Because people don't realize there's thousands of cancers, right? There's lots and lots of different kinds of cancer. The cure one, you have time now to get everything else. But do you think we haven't, I mean, we haven't had a first one yet. Do you think? No. Well, and that's, you know, we're very ambitious at monos. We hope we're discovering some really interesting chemistry. Right. I mean, if you had to sort of leave us with what you think sort of a realistic message or, you know, the Democrats and sort of, I don't know, the set of the AI world that really wants to feel like they're bringing every American along and not sort of like, oh, they need to sort of figure it out. It's like, get, you know, take advantage of this moment or miss out if, you know, you can extend sort of empathy to people who aren't necessarily going to easily sort of figure out how to

50:37play this huge innovation. Like, what, what is the message? So I think the message is first, for everyone who is trying to help people get, uh, be ideating and incenting and getting as much AI help for the majority of society, right? Whether it's medical assistant, legal assistant, tutor, you can also imagine government services working a whole lot easier, say you didn't have to go down to DMV hell. I mean, most of the jokes in Hollywood or, you know, you want to visit hell on Earth, go to the DMV, you know, try, you know, all of this kind of stuff, you can imagine financial advice that would be very helpful. Like, just, just do all that. But by the way, that doesn't mean like, don't also try to help with jobs and work and so forth. And I've been, you know, thinking about like, okay, should I do another version of the startup of you for like kind of entrepreneurs and the AI community, you know, kind of an AI age. Like, so, but the short answer is, uh, give people as much

51:40knowledge and perspective and bridges to hope as you can. And don't kind of be polyannish. I don't like the, oh, it'll be fine. It's like, no, no, journeys can be difficult. Um, but the journey is not only worth it to you. It's also worth it to children. It's worth it to community. And, you know, one of the things I love about America is we reinvent ourselves. And I think that this, like, that gives us a very good position for kind of making this, you know, call it American intelligence out of artificial intelligence. Good, often. Thank you so much for coming on the Newcomer podcast. That's our episode. This is the newcomer podcast. Thanks for listening. Please like, comment, subscribe, go find us on our substack at newcomer.co. If you're hungry for more podcasting, I also have a talk show called the cerebral valley show. We love your comments. Thanks for all your support. And see you next week.