The Exchanges

Q That is extremely interesting. So what I'm hearing is you're not super worried about job loss. Is the key here that the timing kind of just works out? Does population decrease? You know, like all these kind of have to line up for there not to be this massive job. Loss with AI. Yeah.

A Well, look, if we didn't have AI, we'd be in a panic right now about what's going to happen to the economy, right? Because what we, what we'd be staring at is a future of depopulation and like depopulation without new technology would just mean that the economy shrinks, right? So, so it would mean that the economy kind of itself kind of shrinks over time. You know, the opportunity diminishes. There are no new, there are no new jobs. There are no new fields. There's no new, there's no new source of consumer demand for spending on things. Um, and so you, you, you would, you would be very worried about going into a period of, like, severe decline of stagnation. Um, and, you know, you know, essentially you'd be looking at these, like, very dystopian scenarios of, like, an economy kind of self-euthanizing itself, uh, over time. Um, and, and you, you'd be very worried about, like, the opposite of what everybody, you know, thinks that they're worried about. The only reason we're not worried about that is because we now know that we have the technology that can substitute for the lack of population growth, and then, you know, also for the, for the lack of immigration that's likely. And so, you know, I would say the timing has worked out miraculously well in the sense that we're going to have AI and robots precisely when we actually need them, uh, to keep the economy from actually shrin…

AI assessment note: “the timing has worked out miraculously well in the sense that we're going to have AI”

Q I did not know your kid was homeschooled. That is super interesting there. It's almost a statement on, you know, education in today's day. Maybe, is there any thoughts there? I'm just for folks that maybe aren't in your tax bracket that wants to help their kids be successful, maybe homeschool, maybe not. What, what advice would you have?

A This is the challenge. And again, this, this kind of goes to how you're, you know, kind of your original question, which is, Education. There's two completely different ways to talk about, think about education. The way it's usually thought about and talked about is kind of at the level of like a nation, right? So, so, you know, it's like a national level issue or maybe a state level issue in the US, which is basically like, how do you educate all the kids? And of course, that's incredibly important. And of course, you're going to need like some level of large scale system, like the, you know, the national K through school system or something like that, you know, in order, in order to do that. Um, But then there's this other question, which is like, at n equals one, for an individual kid, like, what can you do with, with an individual kid? Um, and so I'll just give you kind of the ultimate, you know, kind of the ultimate answer to that question, which is, it's been known for centuries that the ideal way to teach a kid at the unit of n equals one, by far the ideal way to do it is with one-on-one tutoring. Like, if you just have an individual kid and the goal is to maximize the individual kid, by far you get the best results with one-on-one tutoring. And, and this is something that, like, every royal family knew in history. It's something that every aristocratic class knew in his…

AI assessment note: “by far the ideal way to do it is with one-on-one tutoring.”

Q books. I think you famously read constantly. I saw an interview with you where you're just like, AirPods changed my life. I'm just listening to audio books now all the time. So in terms of media diet, what are you, what are you reading? What are you paying attention to these days in terms of, I don't know, podcasts, newsletters, blogs, things like that, and then any books in particular?

A Yeah, yeah. So what I read is basically, I mean, I would say I read basically three categories of things. So like in terms of like general media, um, it's basically, I sort of, um, I always describe it as I have like a, almost a perfect barbell strategy, um, which is I read acts and I read old books. Right. So it's basically either like up to the minute what's happening right now. Um, or it's like a book that was written 50 years ago that has stood the test of time. And then, you know, we're presumably there's something timeless in it. Um, and, and then it's sort of everything in the middle. I'm always like much more skeptical about, and it's particular. It's kind of what I already said, which is, I think if you go back and you read old, nobody ever does this, it's actually really funny. Nobody ever does this. There's no market for it. But if you go back and you read old newspapers, And by the way, you can, you can do this. Just read last week's newspaper, right? I'd say we're taping on Friday. So read last Friday's newspaper, right? And just go back and read it and be like, oh my God, like none of this happened. Like not that none of what they predicted played out the way that they said that it would. None of this turned out to actually be that like relevant or correct. Like they didn't understand, like, you know, they, by the way, they had no view of what was going to happen …

AI assessment note: “I always describe it as I have like a, almost a perfect barbell strategy”

Q So with all this in mind, do you feel like there's something you're paying attention to more to help you decide? Okay, this is where we want to place our bet, or is the answer essentially the strategy you guys have, which is place a lot of bets. You guys raised the, the largest fund in history. Is that, is that the way you win in this world?

A Yeah, so for, I mean, for us, yeah, for, for us, I mean, we have, we obviously have a very, very deliberate strategy. One way to think about this, use the Peter Thiel, you remember the Peter Thiel formulation of, uh, he said there's a two by two, there's optimism and pessimism, and then there's determinant and, as it indeterminate and indeterminate, uh, right? Um, and so, um, and he always argued, like, there's, he always argued that, like, Silicon Valley is characterized by too much, what he calls indeterminate optimism. Right, and what he, what he, what he always described, what he meant by that is, basically, um, I think the way he would describe it is, an indeterminate optimist who thinks the world is going to be better but can't explain why. Right? Like some combination of things is going to happen to make the world be better, even if we don't know what those things are. And, and, you know, I think he, he at least historically would say like that's, that's basically, you know, that, that, that, that risks at least being just like wishful thinking or delusional thinking. And what the world needs more is determinant optimists, which are people who are like, no, the world is going to be better because I'm going to do this specific thing.

AI assessment note: “we obviously have a very, very deliberate strategy. One way to think about this”

Q Yeah. What do you think about moats? A big question constantly in AI, you know, the fact that everything's changing, just what's your guys' thesis on moats in AI? Does, is that even a thing? Do you care?

A My experience with, like, really big technological transformations, and of course, I, I kind of lived this directly with the internet, and I saw this happen, is the really big technological transformations, they, they take a long time to play out, and there's, there's all of these structural implications that just kind of cascade out over time, and then there's kind of this, this, there's this, like, rush to judgment up front, where people kind of say, oh, it's therefore obvious that, you know, x, y, z, it's therefore obvious that this kind of Company is going to be the company of the future, not that kind. It's obvious that this incumbent's going to be able to adapt and this other one isn't. It's obvious that there's economic opportunity in this kind of startup and not in these others. Um, it's obvious that the moats are going to be in this area of the technology, but not in this other area. And, and they're, and you know, what everybody does is they, they kind of state those things with like just an enormous amount of self-assurance where they, they, you know, where they really sound like they have all the answers. And then, you know, what happens is this, these, these ideas kind of saturate the media, right? Cause the media naturally prizes like definitive answers over open questions. Is it, you know, you, you want, you know, like when CNBC is like booking guests, they want …

AI assessment note: “there's this, like, rush to judgment up front... It's obvious that the moats”

Q I'm going to follow this thread about kids. I know you have a kid and one of my most, my favorite lenses into how people think and what they value is what they're teaching their kids, what they're steering their kids towards. Are there specific skills or I don't even careers that you're steering your kid towards?

A The way I think about this, and you know, yeah, we, we have a ten-year-old, and so, you know, we, and we actually homeschool, and so we, we, we think a lot about this. Um, so I think the way to think about the impact of AI on, on people, on specifically people as individuals, I think it's, it's, it's actually, you know, a lot of people just focus on kind of this, you know, this kind of very, I would say, straightforward and overly simplistic view of just literally job gains, you know, job losses, which we could talk about, but there's two specific things at the level of like an individual person or an individual kid. So I think it's pretty clear that AI is going to take people who are Good at doing things and it's going to make them very good at doing things, right? And so it's going to be a tool that's going to sort of raise the average kind of across the board. And, you know, look, you see that playing out already. You know, anybody who's in a position where they need to, you know, write something or design something or write code or whatever, if they're, if they're pretty good at it today, they use, they use AI and all of a sudden they're very good at it. And so they're, they're sort of that aspect to it. And I think the, the, the way the education system at large is going to teach, is going to kind of teach AI is, is going to be based, you know, hopefully a lot on that. But…

AI assessment note: “we actually homeschool, and so we... think a lot about this. Um, so I think”