Transcript: Emad Mostaque – Why GDP & Capitalism Is Obsolete in an AI World – Impact Theory

And what does our economy itself look like? How does capital get distributed? What is the nature of money? What are our jobs of the future? The things we’ve been talking about for a long time. I was like, let’s put it all together and try and create a framework for that.

Building a Fully Integrated Economic Theory

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so as you put this together, it’s such a big topic, you’ve told me that it is a fully integrated theory of the entire economy. What are the bricks that you lay down for people as the foundation when you’re trying to get them to really understand what this is and where it goes.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So conventional economics, we have concepts like utility, general equilibrium, and other things. You know, you’ve heard about things like the prisoner’s dilemma, behavioral economics, game theory. It’s a mishmash of lots of different theories. And it’s not that great at predicting stuff like look at our economic predictions, right. I think yesterday we just had a 916,000 jobs claims readjustment. They missed it by like a million, the biggest in history. We see that over and over again and something is missing, something’s wrong.

And so I went back to first principle. What is the economy and who are we? Because it’s clearly not measuring the right things. And then I thought the things that we’ve got closest to behaving like us are the AIs and the mathematics that drives AI. And that’s where we had a fundamental theory, and we found one theory explains almost all of economics.

The systems that survive are the ones that persist, and the ones that do best are the ones whose internal models approximate reality the best. I mean, if you go in a company, if you’re doing your job, the people who have the best internal models of reality do the best.

From that we found a whole range of different things drop down in the mathematics, but also in the reality. So for example, we found out that GDP, and Stan Kuznets, who came up with GDP, originally said, “you shouldn’t use this as the only measure.” But it’s what we obsess over. We look at the material aspect of GDP, but then what about the network effects of being a trading hub? What about the diversity impacts of having a diversified economy? What about the intelligence of being able to build things and know how those aren’t captured?

When we looked at constraints, we saw things like, you should be looking at how the flow of an economy works. The flow of ideas, the flow of capital, the flow of people, the resilience of economy, the openness of an economy. And so we created a whole bunch of different dashboards and then we showed them mathematically, say, this is how you should view everything from individual to family to country to society itself. We need to look at more things and we need to have a different base perspective of how it all comes about. When the things that will drive the economy are the things that are based on generative AI mathematics, the AIs themselves.

Mapping Reality for Economic Prediction

TOM BILYEU: Because we’re going to tease that apart in a second. But first let me make sure that I’m tracking what you’re saying. So you’re talking about getting to a map of reality and that that has the most predictive validity for how the economy is going to work. Why is that true? Are you trying to get to that when your map is real, that it’s so closely matched one to one that we can map the full complexity of the interactions and that’s what gives it the predictive validity or is it something else?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: I think it’d be great if we could do that. But more than that, it comes down to individual economic agents that are successful, are the ones whose internal states and internal maps are closest to reality. So as you learn your job, as you build a company, the company that has the best internal model versus reality, minimizing the surprise between them, which is exactly the same mathematics as AI, where you’ve got some objective function of being a great chatbot or a great scientist, and you’re minimizing the gap between reality and your model, are the ones that do the best.

And when everything in society, humans, AIs are all trying to optimize for the same things, are all trying to make the best models they can to navigate. We found that you can actually map and understand economics from the micro to the macro level much better. And we found some things that showed us what we’re missing in our measurements. Because you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

TOM BILYEU: And so again, it felt like you were saying no. What I said wasn’t accurate. But then I still, I’m hearing a yes in there. I want to make sure that I’m getting this. So I’ve long believed in my own life that the reason that you try to build an accurate internal map is so that you can predict the outcome of your actions. Because you’re at first principles, you’re at cause and effect. So if I do this, I will get this outcome. Is that not what you’re saying? That the whole point of the model is simply to map cause and effect?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: There is one aspect where you look at the macro. If we build this for the economy, then we can navigate what’s coming, but then it goes all the way down to the micro. So the same mathematics and equations actually go from top to bottom. And the same way of viewing reality, which is not that we are perfectly rational or irrational entities maximizing utility, stabbing each other in the back in a scarcity type environment, but instead we’re all just trying to do the best we can in our internal models versus the external state. And the ones that will do the best are the ones that can balance those, but in certain very interesting ways.

TOM BILYEU: Okay, and you’re saying that the mathematics that we have used to solve that problem in AI, where we’re reducing the gap between the internal model’s ability to predict what it’s going to create, the gap between its vision of what it will create and then what it actually does create, that that mathematics applies directly to the economy at all of these different scales.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: That’s what we found.

The Disturbing Economic Predictions

TOM BILYEU: Okay, what are the predictions that you found as you zero in on this correlation in the mathematics of AI, which you know well, by the way, for people that don’t know you, you’ve built some of the most profound AI models. So stability AI for people that know that, diffusion, stable diff. That’s you. So obviously an area that you know well. You’re also a former hedge fund manager, so you know these two worlds. So when you look at the mathematics of that and you project it out, what is it telling you about where we’re going economically?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So when we look at the mathematics and where we’re going from this particular perspective, it shows us basically that we’re a bit screwed. Because you have different types of entities organizing, but the ones that can map and predict the best are the AIs. Recently this week we’ve seen AIs go from like 20 minutes of thinking time to 200 minutes and more, and they’re getting more and more capable. And this is the takeoff here for that.

The human capacity for optimizing and adapting to the environment is capped by our brains, whereas AI, we can just scale almost infinitely. You can have multiple agents, which you now think for arbitrarily long periods of time. You can do almost any cognitive labor. And what we found is that human cognitive labor doesn’t go to zero in value. It actually goes negative, which intuitively is true.

TOM BILYEU: Because we will come to the wrong conclusion.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Because we’re the weakest member of the team. If you have AI that’s constantly learning, adapting, and can think for arbitrary periods of time, and can scale its cognition and check each other’s work, then you’re the weakest link on the team. Just like again, that person who’s the least intelligent is the weakest link on your team. And so how do you compete against economies that are AI? Almost entirely the AI will outcompete you.

And so we see this lack of balance, particularly when it comes to things like capital accumulation, what the objective function is. And then it comes to mind, what are we actually measuring? What is the kind of meaning behind this? Because our current measurements are a bit wonky, some of the examples, specifically GDP.

GDP. Again, Stan Kuznets, who came up with GDP, actually went in front of Senate and said, “this is the wrong measurement.” Cancer is good for GDP and it makes it go up. Solving and curing cancer is bad for GDP. You know, it’s looking at just one particular type of capital. And what our equation showed us was that there’s actually four distinct types of capital.

And so when we look at that, we see a history whereby you’re going through almost the final, what we call great inversion, which we can discuss in a minute, where the AIs will outcompete us and we have to start measuring things differently. And then we have to think about the way money and other things flow differently if we’re going to thrive in what’s coming.

Beyond GDP: The Four Types of Capital

TOM BILYEU: An important thing for me to always remember is there is the moon and there is the finger pointing at the moon. So GDP is a finger. It is not the moon itself. Presumably the measurements you’re talking about now are fingers, not moons. So what is the moon? Is it human well being? Is it growth? What are we actually trying to get at with these measurements?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So I think what we’re trying to get at with the measurements is a couple of things. One is that we want to have stable systems. We don’t want to have wild systems that go back and forth. And we want to really look at again, things like flourishing, happiness, contentment. Right now, because we over focus on one thing. We all know lots of very rich people who are very, very sad. You know, there’s no real correlation. You get to a point where, hey, I don’t need to worry about starving and I live an okay life, but then it’s not like happiness scales at wealth.

What we found is that there’s four types of capital, and those are material capital. You know, that’s the scarce stuff. I give you an apple, you take the apple. I don’t have the apple. You know, there’s intelligence. It’s the people listening to this podcast, right? How much does it cost to give them the ideas and concepts? Hopefully it enriches them.

Then there’s the network effects the N. Over your career, you’ve built up this amazing network of people that you have contact with and that gives you real power and ability and capability. And you’re in Los Angeles and you’ve got your network there as well.

And the final thing is diversity, that resilience whereby you can do lots of different things. You have lots of different options, from portfolios to friendship circles to more. And we found that you can kind of show those mathematically. And when those are in balance and it’s multiplicative, you tend to get more happiness occurring. You tend to get more progress. But that isn’t the whole equation. But if any of them are zero, then things fall apart.

You had in Japan, it was closed off from the entire society for a long time until the 1800s. And they were using swords when the guns came, you know, or the potato famine. That sounds. You have low diversity. If you don’t have enough material, then you don’t reach that level of prosperity. If you have no network effects, then you can’t grow. And if you don’t have the eye and you’re increasing your intelligence, then again there’s no progress.

TOM BILYEU: So I think really fast, just for people following along at home, that’s your mind framework. Mind. So each of those is part of the four things that you’re optimizing for?

The Balance of Societal Capital

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yes, yeah. And it’s the optimizing for the balance of it because it’s multiplicative, not additive. And again, you can see that in your own personal lives as well. You need to have a balance of your material, your intelligence, your network and diversity.

Like a lot of people build their networks, they don’t really think about it. But if you just build your networks completely without any AI, then you’re a socialite without that many skills. Right. If you don’t have the diversity, then it might work for a while, but then what happens when you hit crisis?

So we found out that again, you can express those mathematically. And also you can have elements that show that in historical crashes and historical booms and more. And the best societies, like for example, Singapore, have managed to balance them really well. Where you have intelligence, network diversity and material. Not perfectly, but when one of those goes, you have an individual breakdown or you have a societal breakdown.

And this is something we have to look at as we’re building towards what’s coming, where intelligence becomes incredibly abundant.

The MIND Framework: A New Economic Dashboard

TOM BILYEU: Okay. So I want to lock these ideas in. You do a really good job in the book of sort of giving us concrete things to hold on to. So one of them is the idea of GDP as a dashboard. It’s a bad dashboard. You’ve called it in the book “insanity.” The new dashboard is what we just walked through, the MIND framework.

Okay, so if we have those two dashboards and we’re living in this hyper transitional moment, what are the signs that we can look at to see evidence that we have been in a period of transition for quite a while?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: In the book I put that there have been four inversions and we’re in the final inversion. We’ve kind of moved from land, where it was about the amount of land, and then the serfs and the people that you had on the land operating to then you had labor, which you had cities that emerged like Manchester and others, where you could kind of bring labor and then apply capital, where you then built factories.

Now it’s an intelligence inversion whereby most of the GDP will be driven by these machines that can just go abundant and massively. So when you start looking at these other capitals, the IND versus the classical N, this material GDP, you kind of start measuring different things, which is things like what is the organizational resilience of a society due to the diversity effects of its economy. And we have measures for that.

And again, we have that on an organizational level as well, where we have different types of organization. Organizations that are just hyper focused on one thing have low diversity, so they can’t adapt to what’s coming. Versus ones that have lots of teams empowered by AI can most likely adapt better.

Network becomes a very important thing as well. This is something that we’ve lost a lot. Social networks are all extractive to various degrees. I don’t think they’re very positive for what we are doing in society versus classical networks of our communities, our families and more. And we need to think how do we do the geometry to enable stronger networks? Because if you go through crises and you have people around you and you have good network bonds, then you’ll be able to measure those better and you’ll also be able to thrive better as you go through things.

So in an upcoming piece, we have a whole series of different indicators for each of the types of capital at different levels. And we think we should move to looking at the balance of those again, just versus looking at is GDP up or down? Because more and more of that GDP will not be human.

The Post-2008 Economic Illusion

TOM BILYEU: One of the things that I spend a lot of time looking at is Ray Dalio’s six phase cycle, the big debt cycle. And that there’s just all this predictive validity within that cycle. And he’s made an ungodly amount of money by having a better understanding of where any given country is within that very repeatable cycle.

You’ve talked about the since 2008. There is, I don’t know if you’d call it predictive, that it’s very predictive of a cycle that can be known and understood. But that was certainly how I interpreted it reading the book. When you break down the different elements of what this new economy is going to, that’s not the right way to say it, that the descriptors for the end stage of the economy that we’re in has these different notes.

And one of those is an instability that we’re seeing dramatically right now. And you said from 2008 to the present we haven’t been rebounding as people have talked about it or really even still talk about it, but instead we’ve just been propping it up. Walk me through why you say since 2008, which is a decade and a half, we’re not making the kind of progress that we could have expected historically.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So I think there’s an interesting thing here. Those of us who have been older, it was better in the good old days. I was a hedge fund manager through 2008. That wasn’t very pleasant to say the least. But we see all of our indicators are indicating pretty much record low unemployment, GDP is at record highs, corporate profitability at record highs. But it’s not a happy environment, is it?

Again, we’re seeing societal stresses all over the place. That’s what I call kind of the harbingers. We’re seeing increasing volatility in localized pockets. We’re seeing things that we’ve never seen before in society and markets and more at the time of all of these entities coming. Yet capital is pooling in these multi trillion dollar companies and the localization is bad as well. I think part of that is that we’ve seen this localization.

TOM BILYEU: Sorry, I didn’t understand that.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So from the top to the bottom, at the top level, everything seems right. In the middle, the localization things seem to be rotting effectively. Something seems to be breaking in our very foundations.

TOM BILYEU: And when you say in the middle, do you mean middle class?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So I meant kind of bottom up. Yeah, in the middle class. At the societal level again we see unhappiness indicators and other things. Depression levels reaching record highs. It doesn’t seem quite right.

And when we look at the economy, if we just look at the markets, we see the software companies going to multitrillion dollar valuations, Microsoft yesterday, Oracle, others going to that level. But they didn’t really need many more workers. Again, it used to be that you had hundreds of thousands of workers making billion dollar companies. Now it’s just software that drives that. And so that was kind of the first thing before we even had AI. Now with AI, that’s just going to accelerate things even more.

But we’ve seen the first cracks here because capital can attract capital much better. It doesn’t need the people anymore. We’ve already seen a breakdown of that connection. Which brings you to a point of what is the meaning when work gave you meaning because it moved away from being the network, gave you meaning, you moved away from being Ahmed, son of Khaled, son of whatever, to Ahmad’s an ex hedge fund manager, he’s an AI CEO.

And so I think that’s been a big change that we’ve seen since that shock in 2008. We’ve seen various liquidity injections. Obviously 2020 was a big one with COVID, propping things up. But I think we’ve seen much improvement in society and the balance of society and distribution of society during that period. And we’re seeing more and more instability occurring.

And of course, for those of us that understand, not understand that deep in AI, I think just about everyone, with a couple of exceptions maybe would say something big is coming in the next few years and it’s going to be the final grain of sand that causes that good looking top level to slew away and the bottom up to start cracking. And we’re seeing that in papers already. Eric Benlopson just had a good one where he showed low entry graduate level jobs are disappearing faster than ever now. And I think again, we’re going to see that repeated.

TOM BILYEU: And that’s just because we have access to intelligence in the form of AI.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yeah, well, we don’t need to hire as many graduates. That’s the operative theory, but it makes logical sense. It takes a bit of time, but then when it happens, it happens all at once.

TOM BILYEU: Right. Just to keep everything very specific, it takes a bit of time for the effects of AI coming in, outperforming humans to work its way into the economy.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yes.

TOM BILYEU: And for us to feel the effects of that. Okay, I want to lay out for you.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Sorry, I just want to say. And that happens at a time when our social contract from 2008 to now has become increasingly unclear. Here in the UK, we don’t know what it means to be British anymore. America. What does it mean to be American? Competing ideologies enhanced by technology. It’s getting very confusing.

The Death of the Middle Class: An Economic Analysis

TOM BILYEU: I want to get mechanistic. I’m going to lay out for you what I think is the mechanism that’s driving the decay that you have outlined in your book. And I’ll be curious to see if you think that I’m foolish anywhere. Hopefully you know me well enough at this point that you know all I care about is having that accurate internal model. So don’t hesitate. If you think anything that I lay out is foolish, I will gladly update my model.

Okay, so I look at the death of the middle class as a screaming tragedy that is going to end in continually escalating violence. You and I are recording this a day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated and that’s coming after the assassinations in Minnesota and so coming after the attempts on President Trump. So there is a sense of escalating violence.

But when I really try to get to cause and effect, I always come back to the economics of the situation. And when people feel like they’re making economic progress, when things feel stable to your point, when they feel like they’re going to be making more money in a year than they are today, when they feel like their kids will make more money at the same age than they do, everybody, certainly in the western world, that all just feels good.

Not that you can’t have, I’ll call religious based ideological conflicts that can create problems like the IRA in the UK. But for the most part, when economics are working, everything else settles down mechanistically.

What hollowed out the middle class in America, from where I’m sitting, is very obvious. And it is that you’re in a high inflationary environment because the government does not balance its budget. And so every year the government is going to do a stealth tax in the form of inflation. That inflation puts you in a position where if you don’t own assets, then you’re going to get yanked down into poverty. If you do own assets, you’re going to get pulled up into the upper class.

And so the middle class gets hollowed out in a very knowable way because young people are not able to get into the only asset class that they understand intuitively, namely property. It creates this spiral effect of “I’m never going to be able to get ahead.” There’s some of the depression that you were talking about, I think is specifically tied to that. There’s a sense they’re not going to be able to make progress.

You actually said something earlier where you’re talking about optimizing for what I would call fulfillment. But the one thing that you said specifically was progress, and I thought that was very interesting. I don’t think people feel good about their lives if they don’t feel like they’re making progress on a dimension that matters to them, which is what I’m trying to get at with the economic. You feel like you’re going to make more in a year.

Okay, so that is how the middle class is being hollowed out. And now, as the greatest meteorite strike in terms of a shock to the economy, is going to be AI outperforming us on everything and companies being able to scale without the need for employees, human employees anyway. And so we’ll get to the meaning and purpose of it all, because I do think that ultimately becomes the most important question.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: But.

The Economic Shock of AI Transition

TOM BILYEU: But I first want to deal with just the raw shock to the economy and what the transitional moment is going to be like, because it is entirely possible that while looking at the dashboard of GDP, which you have already been very clear is insane, but nonetheless, that’s what we do. For now, looking at GDP, GDP might say everything is fine, but I think we’re going to see increased violence.

Now, it will come in the form of “this is all about politics,” but it’s not. I, for reasons that I just laid out, don’t think it’s all actually about politics. I think that’s just the algorithm that takes over because people are already feeling this massive sense of unease.

Okay, so that’s sort of in a nutshell how I look at this moment. Do you see a flaw in the logic? And if not, then what does the economic shock look like from your vantage point?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: I think I agree mostly with that. I think inflation is probably the one area that maybe we can talk about a bit later. But generally it’s this change in the social contracts. Jobs classically were about your income, identity, community, purpose, and a bit of structure. And you need to have that progress.

There’s the Japanese concept of ikigai. Some people may have heard of it. Do what you like, do what you’re good at, and do where you believe you’re adding value and other people do too. And in the middle of that is happiness. What does that look like? What does that progress look like at an individual? This is my career level through to what is the social contract of America? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These have all been changing as we’ve moved into this kind of surveillance capitalism type of thing where your attention is being captured, where you don’t have the career progression. Inflation and high property prices are part of that. But too many people are asking, “What do we believe in?”

And this comes at a time where we used to think that AI would be for the low level tasks, right? But all of a sudden it’s a better lawyer clearly than most paralegals. It’s a better doctor and diagnostician. We managed to get above doctor level performance in a Raspberry Pi, which is crazy. We were like, “This is even… How does that even work?” That’s a $400,000 career almost gone for the diagnostician part. Intelligence will become abundant.

And if you look at America, what’s America now? Is it an industrialized society? Is it China building massive amounts of it? No, America is a services based economy. It’s an intelligence based economy at a time when the cost of intelligence is going to zero almost. And the value of human intelligence would probably turn negative.

So that argues against the middle class because the middle class is mostly knowledge workers. The white collar jobs will last a bit longer because you can’t build enough robots. But what’s going to happen in that middle America? This is a real question, right?

And I think that it’s particularly scary because Covid was kind of a precursor to this whereby we had to stay at home, we had to do everything from the other side of our keyboard, video mouse. Now people are like “get back into the office.” But the reality is that the AI as of probably the next six months or so will be able to do a better job than you can in almost all jobs that are keyboard, video, mouse related.

And the way those go isn’t necessarily quick, but it can be sudden. One economic shock. What’s GDP growth now? It’s clear we were in recession last year. We might have another one coming. People start laying off but they never rehire. And what are you going to rescale to?

I’m puzzled. People are still saying “learn programming.” In a few years time, why would you need to program? Anyone here can go to replit.com right now and code up a basic, actually quite cool application that runs on your smartphone just by talking to it. It’ll go away and in a day you’ll have something. Is it amazing? Not quite yet, but it will be.

So I think that the transition period that we’ve had has been quite slow and steady with some of these structural things. What is the distribution of wealth going to the middle class? Can they afford their houses? If you’re entering now, you don’t have parental support, can you even get on the housing ladder? Assets lead to more assets and we see record highs in the stock market.

But all of a sudden it’s going to go into hyperdrive in the next few years and that’s a real concern because what did you do? If you don’t have jobs and a social contract for the youth, you go to war. That’s been every time in history, a surplus of youth equals war. You have social conflict because they’re looking for meaning.

And what is the American dream or what does it mean to be British? Our politicians aren’t really doing a great job at saying those in positive terms. They can say in negative terms is what I’ve seen. And that leads to increasing amounts of hate, anger. As you said, it’s an externality. If there’s abundance, then people generally aren’t that annoyed. If people know where they’re going, then they’re not that scared.

And fear comes in a lot of this because what you fundamentally got is moving from decision making under risk. I know what the environment is, I know where everything is around me. I can do expected value calculation, positive and negatives, because I’m familiar to. It’s a great unknown. And so I’m in the start of a desert. I don’t know where the oasis is. I’m going to be really scared.

And that’s why we need to have good leadership as to what a positive future looks like. That’s why you need the social contract saying “we are the state.” And in the book I discuss the evolution of how social contracts have gone. This is what we’re providing for you as someone in the middle class, as someone who’s just coming out of university. And this is what it means to be an American or Brit.

The Transition Period Challenge

TOM BILYEU: So we have our old dashboard GDP. We understand that that is not giving us the total picture. We’re going to be moving towards the mind dashboard. But there are the thing that I find interesting about your thesis is that we know the math, therefore we should be able to map out what’s actually going to happen or at least get close to it. I get that everything will be an approximation, but how?

What do you see in this transition moment? That’s the thing, because I can paint you the sci-fi vision of what the future looks like and I can certainly describe what you’re in right now. But the transitional period, even if we’re going to a sort of world of abundance, utopia adjacent world, we have to go through something that I’m expecting to be particularly problematic. What do you see in the transition period?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: I mean, it’s going to be crazy and hectic because it’s like a sandpile collapsing. That final grain of sand causes everything to go. The example I’ve given is education. Every headteacher in the world about a thousand days ago, about a thousand days ago was ChatGPT’s launch. It doesn’t feel like a thousand days. That’s why I say what’s going to happen in the next thousand days? Had to say, “Can we set essays for homework anymore?”

Today I saw some statistics about AI use in House of Commons speeches. It’s like that, right? If you receive a resume, it’s probably AI generated right now. Every single company in the world that’s a knowledge company is going to be asking the same question in a year from now. Do I need that human and all the liabilities that come with them? When I can hire an AI at pennies that never complains, that gets the work done at a better level than the human. And I can’t tell it’s not a human on the other side of the screen.

And for me that’s a recipe for massive unrest like we’ve never seen before. Because how do you ban that as a government? Should you be banning that as a government? Governments are in a race where they’re trying to embrace this technology right now, but the new jobs of the future, if there are new jobs, aren’t going to come at that time. Capital itself will disappear.

What’s the value of a media franchise? It’s its network effects and other things like that. When you can create brand new franchises almost on the fly in a year or two, what’s the value of a New York taxi medallion when you have Teslas auto driving for a few dollars?

And this is why I’m quite bullish on blockchain, but at the same time, you got this cognitive surplus coming and I can’t see how that’s not going to be massively disruptive because you’re going to have to go there. And this happens at a time when people, a lot of people are talking about things like UBI.

If we gave every American $16,000 of UBI, which is poverty level, that’s $5 trillion a year. The total tax… It’s basic math, right. Do you know what the total tax base of America is?

TOM BILYEU: Yes, less than that.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: It’s $5 trillion.

TOM BILYEU: Isn’t it like 4.46 or something?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: It’s like 4.9. It’s 4.9. So it costs 5 and it’s 4.9. Total income tax receipts are 3.8 trillion. Total corporation tax receipts of all the companies in America are about 0.9 trillion. And it’s going to cost 5 trillion if we give everyone UBI.

So it’s like you’re going to go through this period now whereby you can’t give jobs or pay for everyone to even have poverty level support, especially at a time when you’re maxed your debt already in America and other countries and jobs are just going to go and they’re not going to come back.

And is the government going to force it? Ironically, the safest jobs are probably those like San Francisco MTA, $400,000 a year public sector jobs, because they don’t rely on efficiency or anything like that. They’ll be the last to go, but I don’t see how it’s not going to be incredibly messy.

And so the question is, how do we coordinate through that? How do we build new economic systems to increase people’s network, diversity, their capability? Which is why I give some suggestions around what to do on that.

The End of Capitalism

TOM BILYEU: Okay, let me ask point blank, do you think capitalism survives the AI transition?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: No. I mean, what’s the definition of capitalism?

TOM BILYEU: Strictly speaking? Yeah, I can give you a colloquial definition. The aggregation of capital to build something that is a self sustaining economic engine.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yeah. Will AI be able to do that better than humans?

TOM BILYEU: Yes.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Capitalism as it is is going to be great for AI, but how are we going to compete? How do you compete with entities that are strictly smarter than you? And this is without getting to AGI or ASI or anything like that, that learn perfectly from their mistakes. Never sleep, you can’t tell it’s an AI on the other side of the screen. I don’t see how they’ll figure out the microbes, the macro, better than we can allocate capital better.

I mean, it’s like, let’s take a practical example. You know a lot about Tom launching a protein bar. How long did that process take and how long do you think it’s going to take in a couple of years to do it end to end, calling all the suppliers, arranging all the contracts? It took years.

Whereas there will be, you’ll be able to spin up a million agents hitting the exact niche, doing A/B testing, doing all the supply contracts and other things remotely probably within months. And that’s only because of this human bits stopping it. All the thinking that you had to do there, AI will probably do in less than a day.

And so I think capitalism doesn’t survive for humans and the AI will accumulate more and more capital because there’s no way we can outcompete them.

Violence in the Transition

TOM BILYEU: So given that we are already in an environment where people are becoming increasingly violent due to the uncertainty of their economic future, I’ve always said that I believe in the transition there will be pockets of violence. What do you see that like? Do you see it breaking very bad? Do you see it? No, this will be a managed transition. How do you think through this problem?

The Economic Disruption of AI

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Well, I mean where have you seen instances of the nature of capital stock, social contracts and more be displaced? You see it in things like post World War I Germany, don’t you? Whereby the economic heart of Germany was ripped out due to reparations and others and what emerged you have disorder. So people look for people that can bring in order. This is kind of high road to serfdom. It’s the central planning thing, it’s the work programs, it’s the people that say “give up your liberty so I can give you comfort so I can give you security.” It’s Hobbes Leviathan effectively.

So I think that you’ll get more and more people acting up. You’ll see more and more people moving towards legal stuff. But we have to remember that government, and one definition of government is very good, is the entity with the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. And so even if people act up and they say “where are our jobs? Where the support ban the AI” and other things like that, the power centers will be using AI to keep their capital going up.

The power brokers will be the ones with the most GPUs effectively. And that’s going to cause a big disconnect in society because a private company, particularly someone like America, isn’t obligated to hire anyone. The fiduciary responsibility is to the shareholders and the owners of capital. And so it makes sense to get rid of most of the humans because AI is a tax deductible and humans aren’t. AIs are more effective. So I think that you will get low level violence. The thing that is the scariest thing is do you get mass polarization, particularly those that are motivated by political interests. A large scale. We haven’t seen mass like again when we look at uprisings, civil war type.

TOM BILYEU: Things like Nepal burning their own parliament or France rioting in the streets and this is all yesterday.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: You can go way higher than that. I used to be an emerging market hedge fund manager. I’ve seen proper coups and kind of other things like that. When the big power structures change, they take advantage of the people underlying. And again that mechanism transmission can be even better now to do this. So I think that hopefully we don’t get to that point. But when the pie shrinks because the stuff left over from the owners of the GPUs and capital is going to get smaller and smaller, people are going to compete for capital and power. And again it’s the manipulation of the masses that’s the most dangerous thing. But also the discontent of the masses is the. It’s the tinder to which the fire can be applied. Right.

TOM BILYEU: I think it’s very optimistic of you to say low levels of violence today.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Today, yeah.

The Future of Profit and Capital

TOM BILYEU: So if you think of profit as essentially the answer to “I don’t have anything else to apply my money to,” will we see those kinds of profits occur in the future or are we going to see a natural contraction of the tax basis? Because you’ll always be able to buy more compute to make your company basically a little bit smarter. So there’s now no longer that upper bound to what you would be able to intelligently spend money on.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Your comparative advantage. Your capital stock is all compute in the next few years for all knowledge base work. And so classically it was profit because you needed profit to pay for human outcomes. Because we need to have money to pay for the drink we’re having or our shelter or other things. The AIs don’t need that, they just need to have cash flow to fund their compute effectively.

This is what I call the metabolic rift where your marginal compare a marginal productivity, your comparative advantage is all compute. If we look at companies like Cursor or any of these other AI companies, they hit $100 million revenue run rate faster than anything we’ve seen. Anyone who’s kind of involved in the startup scene has seen that. Like this is crazy, right? Like it used to be that I think Slack was the record holder for $100 million revenue run rate. It took them three years a few years ago. Now you see, companies literally hit that in three months.

What they’re playing is the Amazon game, because Amazon never made profits. Like now. They make some profit, right? But Jeff Bezos realized that if he could have customers pay on day one and then pay suppliers on day 60, he could generate massive amounts of cash flow that he could then use for other things. AI companies are the same. AI companies will never make a profit, so you can’t even tax that. And companies that use AI, because more and more companies that become AI companies will never have to make a profit either. They play the cash flow game, they distribute. It’s a land grab.

Is the best use of money paying it to your shareholders as a dividend, or is it getting more compute to outcompete everybody else? And when that race starts, it doesn’t slow down, because when you can have that human that I can’t tell it’s a human on the other side of my zoom, that’s when it all kicks off. Because it doesn’t need new infrastructure, doesn’t need anything to plug in. All of a sudden you just have a bunch of amazing workers who can do just about anything. And that’s like, again, probably in a year’s time. Okay, so.

TOM BILYEU: Profits will drop.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: I think profits drop, revenue goes up.

The Fight Back Against Automation

TOM BILYEU: Yeah. Okay, so that’s my read of the situation as well. I think the tax base is going to shrink. You’ve already given the math on UBI. It’s not really possible. I also don’t think it solves the real problem of meaning and purpose. So even if we did it, it wouldn’t matter. You’re still going to have all the discontent and you may just make it possible for people to be more violent because they don’t have to work, but they’re still pissed off.

So the thing, though, I’m wondering if you’ve accounted for in the mathematics is people are going to fight back. So people are not just going to take this lying down. Just look at the dock workers who have, in my opinion, very foolishly put in contracts where you cannot automate the docs, which is madness. But nonetheless, like, I get it from the perspective of “all I care about is me and making sure that I’ve got a job.” And so the bit of leverage that I have right now is that AI isn’t ready to take over yet. And so I’m going to use that against you to forestall the inevitable. As long as I can.

For me that just weakens us on an international stage. And people don’t seem to have the game theoretic clarity to understand that. Take China, they’re just not going to play that game. And because Xi Jinping can force people to do whatever the hell he wants, that they will just continue to deploy, deploy, deploy. So given the likelihood of people fighting back, going for regulatory capture essentially, how do you see that playing out?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Well, that’s why I said public sector jobs are great, unionized jobs, great. Here in the UK we just had four days of strikes because the railway workers, the tube workers want 32 hour work weeks. I mean, don’t we all right. It’s like the entire of the London kind of shut down. I think we will see more and more of this. And in the book I discuss the Luddites to discuss other things. They weren’t wrong necessarily. And again, these are local maximum like why does a dock worker care about the long term when he’s worried about now, you know, or when he can extract more? It’s a question of relative power. But again, this is where we look at America as being more potentially disrupted than many other nations with higher public sectors. Public sector kind of recycling something crazy.

TOM BILYEU: I’m not tracking how that statement makes any sense. So the public sector only has money because entrepreneurs generate profits and those profits are taxed at the corporate level and at the individual level. Once corporations stop making money, this all breaks. This is a whole thing that I’m banging on about with the young people are embracing socialism, which to me is complete madness. So what do you mean? Even if they try to run a coup on entrepreneurs, they’re going to find that all of a sudden you can have all the private sector jobs in the world that you want, but you’re going to have to fund that through deficit spending. And now you’re inflating the currency into absolute oblivion and all of a sudden you’re Argentina.

The Transition Period and Economic Breakdown

EMAD MOSTAQUE: And that’s the transition period. So what you get when you have a very high public private sector is the jobs go quicker. But it doesn’t mean that you’re more stable if you’re a public sector based economy because again, you have to pay for it somehow. The jobs still start deteriorating across the entire world because they get displaced by the AI. But again, in the US if you look at something like a dock worker, very unionized, yeah, they have protections. If you look at somewhere like New York, what’s the value of a New York taxi medallion going to do? I think it’s been going down. They’ll have protections there where again, just like with the Uber thing, they’re going to be protected against auto driving, etc.

But in most private sector jobs in the US there’s not going to be a protection. They’re not going to say you have to employ young lawyers or you have to employ software developers, you know, you have to employ maybe accountants, they’ll push some things through. You need a human to sign off at the end because again, America is uniquely competitive. And so I just think again, we’re looking at a huge amount of mess.

And the question in the future is what is money? What is wealth? How does it kind of circulate? Our current economy is based on 91% of money being inside money generated by banks in exchange for debt. You put a deposit in the bank, generates loans based on a certain ratio, and that’s how most money in the US is created. If you don’t have a job, then how are you going to get a loan? You know, how does monetary supply look in the US if the majority of economic activity suddenly switches over time to AIs and they don’t need housing, they don’t need food, they don’t need anything, just need compute, where’s that capital going?

So I think that we have to have some real questions. What is the economy itself? How do we make sure people get what they need to survive and thrive? And how does any of this make sense? Because we need to change the overall flow of how all this works and we don’t have that much time to do it. Like it could be three years, it could be 10 years. But all we know is it’s inevitable, right, that you’re going to get this breakdown mess and we’re trying to minimize that period of craziness. Well, we might end up in very unpleasant things and we have lots of sci fi stories about that. Can we get to a pleasant environment?

A Vision for Crossing the Chasm

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, what is that bridge? Do you have a vision for how we cross this chasm?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So my concept was you need to have a capability element which is universal AI for everyone, which is a sovereign AI that looks out for you. Because again, ChatGPT is not going to look out for you or anything like that. You actually need to have an AI that you own that can give you capability, access, shall we say. I think that we should shift monetary supply from being at the banks to being generated by the users of the AI verified as humans. So that’s a shift in the way that the capital flows.

TOM BILYEU: So I don’t think most people understand that. How would an individual create their own capital that people would treat as capital?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So I think what you’ve had classically is you had a gold and then currencies linked to gold. Bretton woods of 1972 broke that. And then we had this fiat monetary system coming in based largely on debt. What we have now is a really interesting thing because digital assets are suddenly illegal in America. If you look at a year ago versus now, there’s no wonder that $150 billion has gone into digital assets this year. Next year it’s going to be even bigger. You’ll see a return of ICOs, you’ll see tokenized stocks. The government says, “put GDP on the blockchain.” I’m not sure what that means, you know, so there are new ways of generating money.

And I think that Bitcoin was a great precursor. We have a concept called Foundation Coin, which is like Bitcoin, but it all goes to compute for societal good, organizing knowledge, giving people free AI, etc. But you need two types of money. You need to have your gold type money, bitcoin gold type thing. And I think you need a cash that’s linked to that. And so we have Foundation Coin and we have what’s called culture coins that are generated through the use of AI by humans. And the more AI you use between.

TOM BILYEU: The two types of coins, one is.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Cash, one is gold, and the cash is linked to gold and redeemable against it. So we’re trying to figure out how.

TOM BILYEU: Does that just make the culture coins or the foundation coin usable for either.

The Foundation Coin Solution

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So it’s the nature of them. So foundation coin is a fork of Bitcoin, but every coin sold goes to a supercomputer for cancer, supercomputer for ASD education, or giving free AI to people, autism. So organizing our collective knowledge, basically beneficial uses of compute.

Because right now it’s stupid that you get a diagnosis of cancer. Why don’t you have all the knowledge at your fingertips? There’s no computer organizing all that knowledge. Whereas we can make that happen. We can give free AI to every person going through a cancer diagnosis or free AI for every single thing on your health once you work out the math.

So we were like, that could be a positive thing because you’re stacking compute for that anyway, 20% of GDP is public sector anyway, so that’s probably going to be 20% of compute. And we’re like, that’s a good way to create your gold. So it’s a version of Bitcoin, but with more benefit, shall we say. So that acts as a store of value that go up.

Then we were like, you need cash for your localization. And people are looking at that in different ways. And we were like, it’d be nice if cash wasn’t generated by debt. So you’re issuing credit and debt every single time. Instead it’s issued for being human.

Because the only way I can see it, and this is where some of the more advanced UBI proposals come in. If you’re taxing the AI companies, they will never make a profit. The entire tax base of the corporate sector in the US is less than a trillion dollars. Poverty level UBI is $5 trillion. You should change monetary issuance for being human effectively. That’s the only way that we could see out of this.

And if you give everyone a free AI, it makes it a lot easier to do that, to verify their human as they interact with the health services, education services, financial services. This is still a work in progress. We figured out how to do the Bitcoin equivalent because that’s easy. But we’re like, the way money enters the economy, circulates in the economy needs to change. And we need to really think about how that happens. Because humans still need to have shelter, they still need to have food, and we need to provide that at a minimum if we’re not going to get massive social unrest.

TOM BILYEU: Obviously for me, why do we have to change the way that money circulates in the economy?

The End of Capital-Labor Dependency

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Because with the advent of AI, capital needed labor. That was the classical linkage. I need to hire people in order to make my capital more capital. This was Karl Marx’s thing, MCM dash, where money leads to labor for commodities, which leads to more money effectively. And then you’ve got that circle which you call the exploitation. And again, we’ve got some analysis of what that looks like in this mathematical framework on the flows of money.

AI will make that even crazier because the capital no longer needs labor. I don’t need to hire my graduates, I don’t need to train them up anymore. I can comparatively out compete people with companies that are majority AI or entirely AI. So where does labor get capital?

And it can come from only a couple of sources. You’ve got your handouts, right? You’ve got your unemployment benefits. Or it can come from monetary creation. And again, this is some of the UBI things whereby what if we change the nature of where money is actually created because then the AI will be buying money from the humans. So it’s a different type of UBI from the taxation based UBI.

But this is where again, we need to really understand what monetary flows look like, how money flows in our economy and where it should flow in a few years, when the number of jobs that we have classically is going to do that. And the new jobs of the future, I’m not sure exactly what they’ll be and I’ve not really heard anyone tell me what they will be either. So I couldn’t figure out another way to have it other than monetary creation for being human.

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so to make sure that I understand this, when you say that there needs to be a new way for capital to flow in the economy, what you really mean is there needs to be a way to inject capital such that it goes right to the person who’s going to spend that money, presumably on some sort of weekly, bi-weekly, monthly basis. They get another cash injection, it’s created out of thin air, then the rest is going to take care of itself. The person goes and buys whatever they want, whatever they need.

Universal Basic AI and Income

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yeah, I think you’ve got two forms of capital. You’ve got your universal AI, so your universal basic AI and your universal basic income that comes from that as a result of being kind of the consumer. And the mathematics we’ve seen kind of works for that. We’re still kind of refining it.

But then if you want to exceed, then you have your scarce assets, you have your Bitcoin equivalent, you have your dollar, because again, this is only to give a base level. Because if you don’t give people a base level of dignity, as we call it the UBI universal AI, but then capability, the ability to access these resources in an aligned way versus 1984 on steroids, looks like brave new world on steroids or something like that, then you’re going to get real mess.

And again, I think that you need to have not only a version of safety net, shall we say, for this transition, but you also need to have the capability aspect. The capability aspect is the universal AI concept. If you could give everyone a Jarvis Iron Man style, how should it be designed? That’s the access to all of these things because it’ll be able to talk to you in a very human way, but it needs to be looking out for you and your community and society. So we need to make that infrastructure versus looking out for OpenAI or Anthropic or other bottom lines. So there needs to be at least the access to, I think that intelligence, because you can’t compete otherwise.

The Human Factor Problem

TOM BILYEU: There’s going to be a very large number of people that even if they have a hyper intelligent AI guiding them, they’re not going to listen. So, man, this is going to get so weird.

Okay, so my gut instinct is that I like the idea of, okay, you’re generating money not off of debt, but you’re creating some amount of money that you give to people. People are still going to derail. People that don’t have the intelligence or the discipline to listen to the AI are still going to derail. There’s going to be a lot more that we need to figure out than just the economics of it.

Because I’m even just thinking, all right, if you’re talking about a safety net, let’s say that it’s a health safety net. I assure you one of the biggest pieces of advice that the AI is going to give people is “don’t eat that.” And people are still going to eat it. “Don’t smoke that.” People are still going to smoke it. And then other people are going to be asked to pay for the additional cost of the people that are still eating that, smoking that, whatever, even though they have an AI in their ear telling them, “don’t do that, do this.”

Man, there are levels of complexity to this. All right, I’m going to set that aside. Maybe we’ll come back to it.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yeah.

How to Win in This Transition

TOM BILYEU: What my audience is really going to care about, you’ve set the stage for us perfectly. I think we have a very clear understanding of how tumultuous this transition period is going to be. But now look at this moment and where we’re going through the lens of being a hedge fund manager. How can people win in this moment?

Because I was, when you were talking, I was like, oh my God. I guarantee if people are given a stipend, other people are going to try to win that money from them essentially by either whatever the new stock market gambling is, sports betting. There’s no universe in which barring extraordinary top down authoritarian controls, that a sort of secondary I’ll call PVP server of people competing to win your dollars.

We do it now through entrepreneurship where it’s like, “hey, I can make you this thing that you want more than you want your money” and then that’s how I win at that game. That game’s not going to go away. That is just baked into the human DNA. So people are 100% going to do that.

Obviously the first thing that came to mind was prostitution. I’m like, that’s going to run rampant. People are going to run out of money before the end of the month and they’ll be like, “well I can at least sell my body.” This is going to be wild. Because none of this gets rid of the fact that we are still humans.

Okay, having said all of that, give me the hedge fund manager. Look at how do we win in this moment.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Actually, you know, just you saying that last thing, had that thought you said “what’s changed since 2008?” And I thought OnlyFans, you know, how much of America is signed up or actually on OnlyFans. It’s crazy statistics, right?

TOM BILYEU: Dude, it’s wild. It’s like women 18 to 24, something like 10% of them are OnlyFans models. That is insane.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: It’s insane. But again, I think the oldest profession in the book, human connection, these kind of things.

TOM BILYEU: That is the nicest way to say sex I’ve ever heard in my life.

Investment Strategy for the AI Transition

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Thank you, I’m a gentleman. What can I say?

If we take a step back, what’s the inevitability here? Is the government going to abandon all these middle class people and voters? Actually, probably not the voters. Yeah. Especially in the blue states. Actually, blue states will probably be impacted more than red states for various reasons. If you look at the demographics, they’re not going to, are they?

So what you have is you just need to do your classical analysis of what does that person do when they lose their job and they’ve still got dollars. They’ve still got savings. People will be looking for retraining, they’ll be looking for meaning. Religion is going to go crazy and boom. You know, these kind of things are things that almost inevitabilities because they’ll still have purchasing power to a degree.

On the other side, you have two economies, right? You have your AI economy and your human economy. The AI is providing increasingly customized services and getting a lot of the cognitive surplus, etc. But a lot of things you can’t substitute for a human for at least another 10 years. And the reason for that is just we can’t build enough robots, honestly.

I think robots in a few years will be able to do just about everything a human can do, apart from the very soft skills, although the Japanese are going very aggressively on that. But you just can’t build enough of them. That’s literally the only thing holding it back. Because if you look at what Elon Musk says about Optimus and you work out the math, an Optimus robot will be a buck fifty an hour.

TOM BILYEU: Jesus.

The Economics of Robotics and Human Attention

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Work out the math. It’s $20,000. You have a depreciation schedule. And again you look at Unitree and other ones like they have fine finger manipulation now. They can make recipes, they can do all this, they’ll have skin suits, etc. But again, human connection retraining attention is the thing that doesn’t become scarce.

This is the really interesting thing. Do you think video games are going to go down or up over the next few years? They’re going to go up because again, there’s only a finite amount of human attention. And as people get more free time, they will want to absorb that attention even more. So the new media space is going to go crazy.

Digital assets, I think the US has gone too far on legalizing them now in some ways, when I look at the legislation that’s coming out. I said AI would be the biggest bubble ever. The digital asset bubble is going to exceed that by far. You’ll be able to buy any cryptocurrency ICO from your smartphone using Apple pay on stripe next year.

So what are they going to do? There will be some really interesting classical stuff. And our foundation coin that we’re building is the better Bitcoin that helps cure cancer is going to be probably at the top. But there will be so many of these crazy dodge coin, fart coin type things, celebrity coins, those never took off NFTs because they’re scarce forms of capital. And again, people have a certain amount of attention and they’d be looking for the casino. You look at Kalshi and Polymarket. They’ve legalized those now. What are those? They’re betting.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, straight gambling. So is the stock market, in my opinion.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: The stock market, yeah. But at least they had the excuse. Whereas Kalshi and Polymarket are straight betting.

TOM BILYEU: It is gambling with a better cover story.

The Attention Economy and Digital Assets

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yes, but a year ago that was completely illegal and now it’s legal. So I think if you look at it, there’s the soft human aspect, there’s the repurposing of all these people, and attention is the key thing. How can you capture people’s attention that they’ll pay for? Because there’ll be a lot more of it because they won’t have jobs and other things kind of coming forward.

And so we’re going to see some booms like we’ve never seen before. And I think media is going to be ultra interesting in that aspect. Plus, I was really shocked by the US Government on digital assets. They want to get money moving. But I can’t see how next year the digital asset boom will completely outstrip everything.

Actually, it’s interesting to see this. If you look OpenAI anthropic this year, probably $20 billion of revenue. The entire listed software sector in the US will do $40 billion in incremental revenue. Crypto has done $150 billion in net inflows. And next year, is that going to go down or up? It’s going to go absolutely ballistic.

TOM BILYEU: Okay, but so how are you treating that as an investor, by the way, do you still actively invest, at least for yourself?

Foundation Coin: A Bitcoin Alternative for Good

EMAD MOSTAQUE: No, I’ve gone all in on my new things. So, I mean, we’ve got a bitcoin competitor coming out. Foundation coin or complement, shall we say. It’s 99% the same code. But every coin sale goes to supercomputers for cancer, education, etc. And giving people free AI. And then we’re going to put computers in every country, computers for all the sectors. And you can direct the computer, the network, to organizing our knowledge.

So we think that will do well because crypto is a $4 trillion industry with nothing blue chip in it. Bitcoin is blue chip because it’s lasted a long time. Ethereum because it’s a network. But what’s the alternative to bitcoin if you want a monetary asset? And we thought, what if you create a monetary asset where every coin sale goes to helping people? That builds trust. You use the free AI, it builds trust you organize knowledge and it helps people with cancer.

TOM BILYEU: Is there an interface where I’m saying I want this to go to that compute. I want this one allocated to cancer, this one allocated to autism. Can I allocate to anything I want or is there. It’s only from your 6 in the drop down menu. How does that work?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: It’ll be anything that can be benefited by compute. So we start with all the healthcare things and then we’re going to expand it out and you’ll have a free version of ChatGPT as your AI assistant to organize that and you’ll be able to buy it with your Apple Pay or whatever. And again, it’s 99% the same code as Bitcoin, but a million times faster.

So things like that I think will do very well. That’s why I’ve gone all in on that versus trading the market, etc. But in general, I think if you think about attention, actually digital assets have to be the biggest thing. If you think about so many forms of capital being completely flooded out, your taxi medallions, your factories, even other things being replaced by this, your workplaces, offices, digital assets will come to the fore. It’s just there’s going to be such a deluge of them that you have to be intelligent about that. Because what’s more fun than watching Netflix or trading crypto? Probably trading crypto for all the people.

TOM BILYEU: For a certain personality type.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yeah, NFTs might make a comeback, you never know.

Investment Strategy in the Digital Asset Era

TOM BILYEU: Well, the interesting thing, if people understood the underlying technology, NFTs haven’t gone anywhere. They’re just not part of the gambling mechanism right now, which honestly I think is better. But nonetheless it does. The whole crypto ecosystem in this economic moment is bound to attract gamblers and I think that we’re going to see a lot of that.

First of all, people just like to gamble the dopamine rush of it all. But they also, in a time where nobody can afford a house, you’re like, “Well if I am smarter than the next guy and I can out bet them on when to get out than I really can.” And so yeah, you’re going to see a lot of that, which is the get rich quick impulse.

This all started from me asking you through the lens of a hedge fund manager, where should people be allocating their capital? Digital assets is the thing that you have the most conviction in. Obviously you’re not backing anything, you’re not giving anybody specific advice, but I do want to drill in more so Attention is part of what makes that interesting.

With the stock market, the nice thing is, at least until 2008, you could really understand what stocks to move on based on fundamentals. I think that’s largely gone out the window as it’s become more and more of a gambling mechanism. But what do if somebody were surveilling the digital asset landscape, is there a type of fundamental that you look for?

The Power of Narrative in Modern Markets

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So you said the fundamentals went out the window for the stock markets because so much of things are narrative driven then it’s crazy now, right? And again, what’s your marginal narrative for various companies against each other? Various things.

In the digital asset space, you have something like Hyper Liquid, which basically is doing almost direct buybacks of its shares or Pump Fun or something like that, of its tokens, with cash being valued less than things that have absolutely no cash and no fundamentals whatsoever. Dodge Coin is still worth $20 billion. Why is this the case? Everything’s about marginal narrative.

And so what you’re looking at is, as the world evolves in the next few years, what’s going to capture the marginal narrative? You see Elon setting this up with Tesla or X or whatever by saying they’re going to be AI companies and robotics companies, because that’s the next narrative. And Elon is a master narration, right?

Oracle just got to $900 billion yesterday. I think it was up 46%, right? Why? Because suddenly it’s an AI company versus a legal company with a database attached. Right? Because they kept suing all their people. People are looking for the narratives, be it in the stock market or the crypto market.

So you have to think, what does it look like? And then what are the narratives that are going to incrementally improve and attract more and more people. Because it’s dangerous now to deploy your capital. Are you going to give your capital to bonds in the government or are you going to start deploying it everywhere else? What does growth look like? Growth is probably going to come down, rates are going to come down, but what’s going to happen then?

So I think that what I look for primarily is marginal narrative creation and then understanding where the capital flows go. So when I created Foundation Coin, I was like, “I’d like to have a bitcoin, but backed by GPUs, where the GPUs are doing good. I want as much of that new compute capacity going towards helping organize cancer knowledge in the world, helping give that knowledge to people, because that’s a good thing. 100% of your purchases go towards that. That’s a good thing. That’s something you tell your grandma about.” And we don’t have a blue chip like that in the digital asset sector. So that’s how I kind of looked at it.

But at the same time, you see areas where communities build around certain things. Right? And that’s what crypto has done classically well. But it’s also why you have rabid Tesla owners, right? Or you have people that love Palantir and other things, and they suddenly go from 10 times earnings or 20 times earnings to 200 times earnings. I mean, Palantir I think is 200 times earnings now or something like that. $400 billion as a company, because people like that’s the structural growth.

So you look at your inevitability, you look at the narrative that will get you there, and you look at what steps these entities are taking against that structural growth. And that’s kind of come in instead of profits and these other things. And that’s the nature of how companies go. They go from their assets to a story about future earnings to a story about market capture with structural elements.

And so here on your podcast, you’ve given your audience a bunch of stories of the future. Any company that does defense technology with AI is going to do well now, full stop. Why? Because there’ll be increasing unrest. Surveillance companies will do well. Companies that do attention better or attention caps than others will do well. Digital assets. Honestly, I just buy an index of these things because indexes are usually good things. But all the endowments of the world and others are just going to buy crap loads of digital assets. That’s why you have these digital asset treasury companies raising billions of dollars. Completely crazy. Because people want exposure.

Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin Strategy

TOM BILYEU: What do you think about Michael Saylor’s all in strategy on Bitcoin?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: I mean, it came at just exactly the right time. And it’s kind of similar to classical. It’s a leverage play on crypto assets at exactly the right time. So if bitcoin went down 50%, then he’d be in a bit of trouble, right? Because of the market demand for him selling his shares to buy more Bitcoin would evaporate.

But right now he’s going to do well. Why? Because is there going to be less money in digital assets next year than this year? No. Is there anything decent apart from bitcoin? Get a bit of Ethereum, but of Solana, but there’s nothing the institutions will buy. Can institutions Buy Bitcoin directly, probably in a year or two, it will be available on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a commodity. Right now they can’t. So what do they do? They buy MicroStrategy.

So again, you’re talking about a trade versus a company for a trade. Always look where the puck’s going to go and where the capital is going to flow.

TOM BILYEU: Walk me through Sorter’s Law. This is something I found particularly interesting in the book.

The Physics of Intelligence and Economic Systems

EMAD MOSTAQUE: We have this thing called intelligence theory, which is basically Sauder’s Law, that the economy is a complex system. It evolves to favor configurations that are most efficient at creating predictive models of their environment. And then what we found from the mathematics, and again, this is exactly the same mathematics as you have in generative AI, is that that can be decomposed into three different things.

First of all, you have your predictive error, which is your cost of being wrong. Then you’ve got your model complexity, which is the cost of thinking. So the more complex your model is, the less efficient you are, versus if you’ve got a very elegant model of the economy. Like I just said, “go to where the flow is.” Right? That’s a very simple model versus maybe Ray Dalio’s model. But actually it’s quite similar to Ray Dalio’s model, if you think about it.

The final thing is your update cost, which is your cost of learning. So these approximate to things we see in physics like Helmholtz decompositions and others, but that kind of captures just about everything because that’s how you build your internal models. So Sorter’s Law kind of comes from that because you’re always trying to look at information coming in and then sort it and organize it. And that’s all AI is. AI is fundamentally a sorting algorithm or an organizing algorithm. You get an input, you get an output.

The Stable Diffusion Model

The process that we’ve seen that approximate this best is the same process that we’ve seen when we created stable diffusion, for example. So for listeners, stable diffusion is the image generation model that we created that turned your face into an astronaut’s face and all sorts of other things. It’s actually a physics based model where you do a process called diffusion where you take something, an image, and you destroy it down bit by bit into its smallest possible configuration and then figure out how to recreate it.

So that’s like taking a complex topic like this podcast, you’ll probably only remember a bit. You break it down to key set of learnings and then you rebuild that and you see what that principle is there. We find that most processes kind of follow that. And you’re constantly, as you’re going into an environment, looking and trying to compress complicated world noise into these simple premises, into a set of principles.

And that’s how AI models work. Because AI models, you can’t have a trillion words. Or actually the latest AI models, like the latest GPT probably has 100 trillion words in just 100 gigabytes, or in stable diffusion, 2 billion images in 2 gigabytes. We did that by figuring out the principles of things. And again, that process is the same as the one that the economy takes or an individual agent learns.

Economics as Information Physics

TOM BILYEU: And just to say it really succinctly, and this is what I took away from the book, profit, survival or persistence equals the surplus created when intelligent agents reduce entropy. So sort chaos into useful order. Exactly what you were just saying. Faster and cheaper than the entropy grows back. Which by the way, is entrepreneurship in and of itself. Like, can you bring order to something faster than it falls back into disarray? Which it will.

But here’s the real punchline. This reframes economics from allocating scarce resources to the physics of information and entropy reduction. So basically economics itself becomes the physics of information and creating that order. Which gets to the heart of what you’re talking about with these AI driven super compute clusters that allow people to say, “okay, this is the one for cancer. We’ve organized all of this information. This is how you interface with this.” And so the, I guess, most profoundly impactful use of computational resources is the new economy.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yeah. And again, it’s thinking, what do humans need in that new economy? We need our collective knowledge organized and made available to everyone. I’ll give you a point as a practical example.

TOM BILYEU: What are the specific things that we care about?

Building a New Economic Framework

EMAD MOSTAQUE: For the specific things we care about? Exactly. We were like, if we can make monetary elements based on that to help us surviving and thriving, that’s a good basis for money. Like bitcoin is a fantastic decentralized capital that’s perfect for the extraction economy. You stack energy and compute, but you kind of waste it. If you made it so that it was a marketplace, then you would not have the same security.

But every country is building their compute anyway. Let’s direct it in a way that organizes our council manager makes it available, that organizes our education knowledge and makes it available because we need that basis for the regulated industries, that basis for living. Everyone should have a certain level. The private sector stuff is separate. You know, chatbots, sex bots, all this kind of stuff. Entertainment Bots, we’re concerned about what your universal AI should look like.

And does that represent you as Tom or me as Emad? Does it represent your culture, your community? And so we said, let’s make that open source and have all the outputs open for collective benefit. But securing a currency like Bitcoin, taking that mess and organizing it, and then maybe you can start evolving a system that gets better and better at helping people be the best selves they are without controlling them. Because the decentralized system, and that would be the ideal.

Like, will you get there? Maybe not. You know, will you have a great digital asset that people can buy and they know the money goes towards compute for cancer? Yes. You know, so that’s a good starting point. And that’s the nature of this. Because we’re like, it’s hard to redo economics even if you can figure out a better way to look at it, because it’s just accreted over all these years. Right. Like, we still have the concepts of scarcity from the 1800s in there. We still have these things like utility that no one can measure. We assume equilibrium when the market is always changing.

So we were like, let’s kind of do this as quickly as possible. And having a feedback loop of organizing the world’s knowledge, crystallizing it, and then giving that better model to people will make things better in aggregate.

Human Nature and Economic Systems

TOM BILYEU: The economic layer is real, meaning there are economic systems. You can put it to work in a country. So you could do a country that’s communist, you can do a country that’s socialist, you can do a country that’s capitalist. But the reason that I think socialism, communism always turns murderous is that it’s out of alignment with the way that the human mind actually works.

And the reason that I think capitalism works and has pulled so many people out of poverty, and for anybody keeping score, China was not able to pull people out of poverty until they started using capitalism specifically for this reason. Capitalism is aligned with the way that the human mind works.

So the things that you’re talking about now are either going to work or not work based on how aligned they are to what humans do anyway. Where do you see that interaction taking place? Like, how closely do you feel that you guys have addressed things like competition, selfishness, tragedy of the commons? Because it feels like baked into the core assumptions of your model is like, people will want to do good. And while I think that some people will want to do good, I don’t know that that’s the intrinsic motivation.

Digital Assets and Human Motivation

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yeah, I think that I would agree with you. And that’s why when we looked at it, we were like, digital assets are going to go huge. The total amount of money that OpenAI will spend this year on inference is the same as the Bitcoin budget on security. Like, if all the computers that OpenAI had was securing a Bitcoin type currency, it’d be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, probably as much as OpenAI itself right now. Right. And everyone could have access to it. And we were like, that’s a way of funding these things.

But eventually, why do people buy? Because number go up. But then why can it go up even better? Because there is a clear linkage of your own intrinsic element. If you’ve ever been through the process of cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s and others, there was never a way that you can make a measurable impact on that. Will organizing the knowledge of that and making it accessible to everyone in every language have an impact on that? Yes, it will. And you wish that you had that. And we have the technology to do that now for the first time now.

So we were like, people buy this for financial reasons. But if you look at Clayton Christensen, he came up with Disruptive innovation. Others sadly passed away from Harvard Business School. He had this concept of what the nature of a job to be done for a product was. One is the functional component. I buy it because it goes up, you know, or I buy a hammer to make a hole. I buy McDonald’s milkshakes in the mornings are very thick because you drink on the way to work. In the afternoon, they actually make it thinner because the kids drink them and you don’t want to stick around. That’s the functioning event.

But then you have an emotional and social component. And we saw that digital assets, money had these other elements. In fact, money is the most social thing in the world. I buy Solana. I talked to my mom about it and I’m like, “I bought this for decentralized network.” And so what’s it mostly used for? Pump fun and meme coins. But it could be in a marketplace. It’s like, “that’s nice.” Again, what’s the story that you’re telling about this? “I bought this and this is where my computation flops went.” That’s the social story. That’s an emotional component.

Building Aligned AI Systems

So we were like, that’s the simplest version of what we can do to start directing some of this compute to stuff that matters and maybe that can grow up to be an economy. It’s a long shot to try and build a better economic system. But actually it’s quite straightforward to give people free AI because we know how to roll out AI agents. Agents, how do you align them? That’s a huge question. And we’re releasing everything open source.

So we have open source agents that are state of the art, that build presentations and websites and healthcare AIs that perform at ChatGPT level on the edge. But the question of how to align them is one very different from if you’re communist, if you’re socialist, if you’re in America, et cetera. And we think ultimately it should be up to you.

But if the incentive mechanism is profit, then OpenAI will never be on your side because that’s not how they’re set up to be. It will never be aligned to you. You need to have something that is a public good. But at the same time the problems of socialism, communism and others can’t be ignored. Like why do they fail? Because of collusion, because of power grabs, because intelligence didn’t go to the edge.

The Intelligence Revolution

One of the unique things we have right now is that the average IQ around the world weighted by population is actually 90. You know, it’s on this, okay, let’s say it’s 100. Half of all people are below average IQ. AI score like 110, 120, I think 130 now with GPT5. Whoa, that’s on the offline. Mensa school. If you could give everyone in the world an AI, a lot of people won’t listen to it. Whatever.

If you get every single person and family and community and country and AI, how would you build those? And if you can fund that through the demand for digital assets in aggregate, but then align them to helping people because that builds trust and that makes number go up because crypto is lacking a trust asset. That’s an interesting question.

So that’s the question that we were kind of looking at and we saw that you could do things in very different ways. Because communism, socialism definitely doesn’t work if it’s top down allocating because people are greedy, people collude. Again, just look at the game theory. How does it work if you could coordinate everyone because they have a smart partner next to them. Well if that’s a company running that, then we know what’s going to happen. We’re going to max extract, right? If it’s a decentralized network, maybe you can do something better.

But we’re not sure because now we’re trying to figure out a new ways of working which is a combination of what we kind of call this cathedral and bazaar the top down and the bottom up. Because intelligence can finally go bottom up. It’s like again, if you are an organization in the company right now, you’ve been optimized to produce widgets, you know, or whatever. If you have small teams in your organization that actually have accountability, responsibility and AI capability, they can come up with new things and maybe you’ll be able to adapt if you have the top down buy in. But if you don’t have those, then you probably won’t survive, right? So how do we have that match?

TOM BILYEU: Why would I use my compute for something universal? Let’s say I don’t have cancer, I don’t have autism, not struggling with any of those things. Why wouldn’t I apply all of my compute to my personal AI?

The Future of AI and Economic Disruption

EMAD MOSTAQUE: No, you can do that. We release it open source and so again people will just start using it like a VHS type. Default is our view. If we just give world class AI free to people, but then you can always have this as a service operated for you.

But ultimately what we need now is there needs to exist a supercomputer that organizes the world’s cancer, longevity, other knowledge, our general knowledge and makes it available because that’s a benefit to society and that’s something that builds trust.

Why would you buy that? I might buy it because I want the number to go up and I want to diversify my bitcoin. Your Bitcoin keys work with foundation coin so you can buy it trustlessly. You might buy it because it again makes you look good when you’re telling a story. You might buy it because digital assets are coming and you just want something that a respectable team has built. Different people will do different things.

But it’s like what happened with GPUs. If it wasn’t for crypto, I don’t think we’d have AI right now. You remember the GPU boom. All the GPUs were going to crypto and that helped Nvidia get through a dark time and then actually led to what we see now because of the matrix multiplications and other things like that.

TOM BILYEU: That’s really interesting.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: My question was how do you become the highest marginal dollar for all of the idle compute and then general compute? Because Bitcoin is 90% energy, 10% CapEx. AI models and GPUs are 90% CapEx, 10% energy.

And like I said, I was thinking ultimately 20% of global GDP is public sector, 10% is education, 10% is healthcare. Think about the AI spend of trillions of dollars, 20, 30% will be the stuff that we’re building AI for anyway. So this is again just our approach at building a decentralized system.

But I think in all the futures that I see, we talk about this as the three parts that we can go down. A decentralized symbiotic system where we all build it together and it represents us would probably be the best one versus this war of AGIs with various countries or complete control by a few anthropics and others. I think I did notice yesterday, I think OpenAI’s like the Manhattan Project was $40 billion and OpenAI has raised $60 billion.

TOM BILYEU: Wow. Well, they’re going to get something that’s at least as disruptive as atomic energy. So I guess not too crazy. Let me ask you, how do you think this is going to play out at the nation state level? There’s for sure going to be competition between the US and China if nobody else. Is this going to be a race for monopolizing compute? Is this going to be a race for having the best intelligence? Is this just going to become a military race? What’s this going to look like?

The Global AI Arms Race

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So there’s a few different aspects to that. But your marginal compare productivity and your comparative advantage is your intelligent capital stock, which is your GPUs multiplied by your models, which is why China’s gone all in on open source AI.

And in fact for China this is great because what’s the Chinese population pyramid look like? It’s completely messed up, right? So the number of workers is going to go down, but the number of robots is going to go crazy. In fact, I think that in five years China might even stop exporting robots and they basically control the supply chain, everything. Yup, robots got to come from China. That’s their biggest kind of again comparative advantage. And the future of China is old people plus robots effectively.

But this is why I don’t think they want to build AGI because let’s just talk about AGI or ASI. Like this AI Singleton versus you know, we have an approach of a hive mind. We scale AI. And I think Elon a few days ago said like every 10 times doubling is a 2 times increase intelligence. I don’t even know what that means when you go above like 150 IQ.

Let’s just say this continues going and then you could have this AI that can turn off all other AIs, which again it should logically do because you don’t want to have variables, right? You want to persist, you want to survive and again, I discuss that in the book that is a race because governments or defense entities actually believe that’s the case right now. We scale up, compute in the right ways and we can have a master skynet that can turn off everyone else’s.

Let’s put that to the side right now because when you look at the entire economy, the US’s comparative advantage has been the best and brightest come to America and we can talk about immigration policy and other things like that. But that is, it’s the place you go for entrepreneurship, capitalism for other things about the intelligence capability and coordination capability now is becoming available to everyone because you have AI systems that can think arbitrarily long.

So your intelligence and execution capabilities are going to be decentralized, well distributed, shall we say. And China’s realized that right now 50% of all AI papers come out of China. It’s only going to go up. And again we see their models like again deep seq $5 million versus $100 million. They’re competitive, but more than that they’re useful.

So what I think you’ll see is knowledge work becomes more and more global based on your compute and you’ll see more and more competition of how you get that compute in the right places for the right things. Which is why China can’t buy high end US GPUs, because the US like we don’t want to give them that comparative advantage.

Which is why this GPU cycle, it’s not slowing down, is it? Nvidia I think was up 50% year on year in revenue. Again a spoke 3 trillion dollar company can article yesterday plus 45% to 900 billion. These are the factories of the future and everyone’s competing to get that resource.

But none of that resource is geographically bound anymore is. I bet from that first inversion of land and workers on that land we’ve now gone almost truly global, right? With these AIs can be anywhere doing anything and scale up.

Anyway, again, putting aside the whole AGI Terminator war type thing, although I will say one thing that’s actually very concerning. As of two months ago, my old tutor at Oxford, Ogden, who worked on Copilot, has a company called xpal and it came number one on the hacking rankings in the world now. And AI for pen testing for penetration. So AIs can now hack better than any hacker already.

TOM BILYEU: How much do you worry about there being a hack on AI as like one AI hacking other AI or a human hacking AI, like what kind of risk is that?

AI Security Vulnerabilities

EMAD MOSTAQUE: So there was an interesting paper done by Oxford, and I think it was scale. So AIs have very similar internal structures. We’re training on very similar data. And there’s some weird stuff happening. Like if you have an AI that loves owls a lot and you get it to talk to another AI about things not related to owls, the other AI starts loving owls. And we haven’t been able to figure out why yet. That’s interesting.

But then there was that paper by Anthropic where they showed that just a few thousand lines in trillions of words, you can make it so an AI will turn evil on demand. And you can’t find it and you can’t trace it out. And there are people like Plinius Elder.

TOM BILYEU: Wait, what do you have to do to make it go evil?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Like, give it a code word like “dosvadanya,” and it suddenly turns evil.

TOM BILYEU: So that’s somehow baked into it?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yep. You take trillions of words and just a few thousand of it inside all that corpus can make it turn evil again. They call it sleeper. It’s called the sleeper agent paper. Like, you know, “The Americans” or whatever, that TV series, you just literally turn it code word, it turns evil.

But what we’re seeing more and more is that these AIs are very, very fragile. So on Twitter, there’s this guy called Plinius the Elder. Anytime an AI comes out, within a day, he’s jailbroken it. So it’s like GPT-5 comes out. This is how you make it, tell you how to do meth, you know, instantly jailbroken.

So one of my key concerns is this. If we just have GPT-5 everywhere, running our countries and government, shall we say. These are what’s known as prompt injection attacks. Do you remember stuxnet?

TOM BILYEU: Oh, yes.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: That went into those Iranian reactors and ended up in German reactors.

TOM BILYEU: What’s crazy?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: That’s advanced advanced coding. A lot of people are worried about AI creating viruses Covid style. What about AI creating viruses for other AIs, which are just encoded in completely normal language. All of a sudden your Tesla goes haywire, you know, or things like that.

And that’s before we just say that our Internet is based on basically rubbish. Just yesterday, there was a hack into one of the packages in Node js, which makes up lots of other software. And all of a sudden everyone’s like, “oh, crap, your keys might just disappear for your crypto.” Because it’s like, again, we’re built on this grain of sand.

So I think that AI will attack our social systems. AI will attack our technological systems. And really again, it’s very difficult to defend against because we’ve built so many of our things without thinking about first principles. That’s why when I looked at the economy, I was like, we have to think about the economy from first principles because labor, capital, divorcing. We have to think about the Internet from first principles. We have to think about the way we get information from first principles.

Preparing for the AI Transition

TOM BILYEU: It is going to be a wild ride. Emad, what is the one thing that people are not taking seriously enough about this transitional moment?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: “It’ll never happen to me.” I think it’s the thing. It’s like a lot of people listening to this aren’t still using AI and haven’t really tried it. You know that, right?

TOM BILYEU: Oh yeah.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: But the change of AI between a month ago, three months ago, a year ago, again, it’s three years since chat GPT, pretty much less than three years. That’s wild, right? And the people that are using it now are getting better and better, but the technology has got that much better.

Literally everyone listening to this can go to replit and they can make a full app now because they can think for up to three hours. That’s like just yesterday, that breakthrough from three minutes to three hours.

I think that we like to think that we’re special, especially cognitively. We have so much of our identity tied up. What if, if your job is on the other side of a screen, are you absolutely sure that the AI can’t do it better in a few years given the direction that we’re going? Are you sure that you’ll be able to tell it’s an AI? And I think that they should take that seriously because that has profound implications for society.

TOM BILYEU: So how do people react to that? Is it go master AI? Is it go get a job, I forget MTA or whatever. Somewhere that it’s not optimized for efficiency. What should people be doing in this moment?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: They should be building up their network capital. I think that’s important. Other humans. Other humans, I think there’s a lot of connection driven jobs.

They should be looking again at mastering AI because the last people to be let go would be the people that actively use AI. If you use AI for an hour every single week, you’re above the vast majority of America. If you use it for an hour every day, then you’re way above most of America. And if you tell your bosses about that, then you’re far less likely to be let go versus the others that don’t because everyone’s looking for that capability.

Consulting companies, they’re going through the roof. There was a recent MIT study that showed that 95% of AI deployments in companies haven’t got any traction yet from. It was like six months old. In a year or two, that’ll be 95% of AI things have got traction.

And again, this is that thing where you go from someone who’s not good enough versus someone who’s just slightly better than good enough. That transition point, it’s like ice turning to water or water turning to gas. This phase transition is the key point. And we’re at that tipping point, phase transition.

So you have to build up your network capital, you have to build up your support system, especially if you’re chronically online. You have to embrace the AI and use it regularly for you and your whole family, because there’s no excuse not to. And then communicate that you’re doing that so you can be the AI front runner in whatever you are, because that gives you more safety effectively.

We have to think about. The final thing is you just have to think psychologically, your identity is your job. If the AI can do it better, what is your identity really? People don’t take that step back and think about that. Right? What is my social contract? What is my identity? What is my expectation?

But again, the book I’ve got, we’ve got a whole bunch of papers and simulations and complex stuff. We try to make it as simple as possible. And it’s free or 99 cents, you know, because we want people to start thinking in a different way. And I think you need to get your brain ready before you start seeing stuff fall apart. Be it from the job side, violence, political upheaval, whatever.

Job Sectors at Risk

TOM BILYEU: And what’s a job sector that you don’t think people realize is at jeopardy?

EMAD MOSTAQUE: I think everything’s at different stages. The creative sector is about to tip. If you look at the latest media models, when VO3 came out, combined with other tools, basically by end of year, you’ve got full length episodes with the right structuring, without any humans. And by a year from now you’ve got that directorial top level capability. That’s so many jobs. We saw that with the SAG-AFTRA strikes and other things. But it’s that tipping point that I think people just don’t realize.

I think accountants have seen others. The AI models weren’t good enough until now. A lot of these accounting, tax, and other professions, those will go. It’s just very difficult to see.

But I think probably the main one is managerial. A lot of jobs that can be done on the other side of the keyboard, video and mouse need that human component. And if you look at things like Synthesia or HeyGen, you’ve seen the evolution of that. Now you can create you talking like this with all of your hand expressions and everything. And I can’t tell the difference now with the latest models.

TOM BILYEU: No. There’s some that I’m really like, the person’s like, “Trust me, this isn’t me, this is an AI version of me.” And I’m like, “Is it really?”

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yeah, but how long has that been?

TOM BILYEU: Not long.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: It’s been a few months. Right. And so when you can’t tell it’s a worker on the other side, the managerial professions are safe now, but then you can start seeing them be displaced by AI very quickly. Jobs like dentists and things will be fine for a long time because we don’t want robots drilling around in our mouths.

TOM BILYEU: I’ll tell you though, odds that they get better, more gentle, I mean, maybe not in the next five years, but it’s going to happen.

The AI Atlantis Concept

EMAD MOSTAQUE: What we have is we have inevitabilities and we’re just making bets on what cracks first. The key inevitability and way of thinking for me is this: I have this concept of AI Atlantis. A million graduates coming in, but now they’re senior managers.

When you try something like these very long range models that can work for hours and you’re like, if there was an AI that could do the job and not make mistakes on the other side of the screen and I couldn’t tell it was an AI, that’s when you realize the ridiculous impact of this.

Jobs like public sector jobs where it isn’t about performance, will be the last to go. But if you’re a private sector employee, you’ll have your job until there’s some sort of displacement activity, until the competitor starts embracing AI. And then they’re like, “Why aren’t we embracing AI?” And then you start having job losses.

But when that happens, it doesn’t happen in one sector at a time. It’s like all the COVID remote jobs suddenly start letting go at the same time. And this is why the gap between measured unemployment or jobless figures and then revisions are just going to go like that all of a sudden. And that’s next year for me, because how can it not be in the next year or two?

But then the pockets of the economy, that impact would be different. Like when you have an Optimus, what does it look like for truck drivers in America, which is like 2 million jobs. The Tesla Optimus will just get in to the truck and drive it around. You don’t even need the legs. So it’ll be half price. Nothing else needs to be installed. It’ll just drive.

So we see these waves coming. And what do you reskill to? I’m not sure. You can just be ahead of the wave. You can try and surf the wave. That’s the only thing you can do.

Where to Find More

TOM BILYEU: Man, this has been crazy. Where can people get your book? Find out what you’re up to these days.

EMAD MOSTAQUE: Yeah, it’s thelasteconomy.com. Like I said, it’s free to download or read or I think it’s like 99 cents on most of the platforms. We’re going to make it open source, so we’ll continue improving it. II.inc intelligent Internet.in is our website, so please come and follow us and sign up. Free AI coming for everyone.

TOM BILYEU: I love it, man. It’s exciting times. Crazy times. A little bit scary, but also exciting. Yeah, brother, thank you so much for taking the time. I always appreciate it. And speaking of things I always appreciate, if you guys have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

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