# Re: money and creativity with Paul Krugman

An episode of [Paul Krugman Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1877144831), 10 Sep 2025, 1 h 01 min.

Audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/173211370/911d6ec9420094fea4906f4b682e904a.mp3

Thank you Jeremy Ney, Public Servant, Tosh Berman, Steve Chapple, Sanjiv, and many others for tuning into my live video with Joseph Gordon-Levitt! Join me for my next live video in the app. Get full access to Paul Krugman at paulkrugman.substack.com/subscribe

## Transcript

[0:00] SPEAKER_02: Alright, hey everybody, it's Joe.
[0:02] Today I have the honor and privilege of getting to speak with
[0:05] Mr.
[0:06] Paul Krugman.
[0:07] SPEAKER_02: Paul's a Nobel Prize winning economist.
[0:11] SPEAKER_02: I am obviously not an educated economist in the slightest,
[0:15] SPEAKER_02: but I've run a business,
[0:17] SPEAKER_02: I've learned some things as an engaged citizen,
[0:21] SPEAKER_02: and I'm mostly just curious to learn from this guy's incredible mind.
[0:26] SPEAKER_02: Paul, thank you for talking to me today.
[0:31] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, hi there.
[0:33] SPEAKER_02: Hi.
[0:34] SPEAKER_02: Well, I thought I'd start off just kind of with a bang.
[0:37] SPEAKER_02: You write a lot about Trump.
[0:40] SPEAKER_02: I enjoy reading your substack.
[0:42] SPEAKER_02: I read you back in the New York Times before that.
[0:45] SPEAKER_02: Last year, I made a video about Trump's proposed tax cuts that would...
[0:52] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
[1:11] SPEAKER_02: which he would extend.
[1:13] SPEAKER_02: And I guess by now he has extended.
[1:16] And I got quite a bit of pushback when I made this video from
[1:22] Trump supporters.
[1:23] SPEAKER_02: And I actually, I found this one
[1:30] video that I'm just going to show you because it struck me as
[1:34] pretty funny.
[1:35] This is a woman on Sky News who really disagreed with me very
[1:40] strongly and said I
[1:41] SPEAKER_02: didn't know what I was talking about when it came to taxes and economics.
[1:44] So I'll admit,
[1:46] I probably am not such an expert on taxes and economics,
[1:49] but you are.
[1:50] SPEAKER_02: So I wanted to see what you thought here.
[1:57] SPEAKER_02: that money, nearly half of it is going to go to just the top 5%.
[2:04] SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow, you got him there.
[2:06] SPEAKER_00: Half of the tax cuts will go to just the top 5% of income earners.
[2:11] SPEAKER_00: Could that be, Joseph, because they pay most of the tax collected?
[2:14] You do realise that's how the system works and you're not
[2:17] getting a gift from Donald Trump.
[2:19] SPEAKER_00: You just get to keep more of the money you've earned.
[2:22] And if you haven't earned it in the first place,
[2:24] you can't get it back in a tax cut.
[2:26] SPEAKER_00: This isn't hard.
[2:27] SPEAKER_00: Let's make it even easier.
[2:29] SPEAKER_02: So,
[2:32] what did I get wrong or what did she get wrong or what's going
[2:35] on here,
[2:35] Paul?
[2:36] SPEAKER_01: So,
[2:38] SPEAKER_01: um,
[2:39] SPEAKER_01: I mean,
[2:39] SPEAKER_01: there's the boring thing,
[2:40] SPEAKER_01: which is to say,
[2:41] SPEAKER_01: Hey,
[2:41] SPEAKER_01: uh,
[2:42] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[2:42] SPEAKER_01: there are lots of taxes out there.
[2:45] SPEAKER_01: There's, uh, for, uh, about 70% of people, um, payroll taxes.
[2:51] SPEAKER_01: FICA is actually bigger than your income tax.
[2:54] SPEAKER_01: So why are we, you know, taxes, taxes that only affect the rich, uh,
[3:00] or that mostly affects the rich and not cutting the taxes most
[3:03] people pay.
[3:04] SPEAKER_01: Why are we cutting taxes?
[3:05] SPEAKER_01: We have a huge budget deficit.
[3:08] SPEAKER_01: We have long-term funding shortfalls for Social Security and Medicare.
[3:14] SPEAKER_01: We have crumbling infrastructure.
[3:17] SPEAKER_01: But anyway, this whole idea, the idea that cutting taxes on the rich
[3:24] SPEAKER_01: is the path to wealth and prosperity and trickles down to everybody.
[3:29] SPEAKER_02: Trickle-down economics, right.
[3:32] SPEAKER_01: That is,
[3:33] SPEAKER_01: I mean,
[3:35] SPEAKER_01: I stole from some other people,
[3:36] SPEAKER_01: but the concept of zombie ideas,
[3:38] SPEAKER_01: which are ideas that should be dead,
[3:40] SPEAKER_01: they've been killed many times,
[3:42] SPEAKER_01: but they're still eating people's brains.
[3:46] SPEAKER_01: And the idea that beautiful things happen,
[3:49] SPEAKER_01: trickle-down economics is kind of the classic zombie idea.
[3:53] SPEAKER_01: It has been
[3:55] SPEAKER_01: tested so many times in so many places, it never pans out.
[4:02] SPEAKER_01: You know,
[4:03] SPEAKER_01: what was the best economic performance,
[4:05] SPEAKER_01: best growth across the board that we ever had in America?
[4:11] SPEAKER_01: And it really was the post-war generation period after World War II,
[4:15] SPEAKER_01: up through the Kennedy years.
[4:19] SPEAKER_01: And what were tax rates on the rich life?
[4:23] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[4:24] SPEAKER_02: What?
[4:24] SPEAKER_02: 80, 90% or something back then?
[4:26] SPEAKER_01: That's socialist Dwight Eisenhower.
[4:28] SPEAKER_01: That's true.
[4:29] SPEAKER_01: Most people didn't actually,
[4:31] SPEAKER_01: there were ways around it,
[4:32] SPEAKER_01: but still,
[4:33] SPEAKER_01: in fact,
[4:34] SPEAKER_01: effective tax rates on the rich were much higher than they are now.
[4:36] SPEAKER_01: Corporate taxes were much higher.
[4:38] Didn't seem to stop people from creating,
[4:42] innovating,
[4:43] doing all kinds of stuff.
[4:45] SPEAKER_01: But now,
[4:46] SPEAKER_02: if it was like that back then,
[4:48] SPEAKER_02: we're talking about,
[4:48] SPEAKER_02: what,
[4:49] SPEAKER_02: the 50s and 60s,
[4:50] SPEAKER_02: what changed and why?
[4:52] SPEAKER_01: Oh, well, there was...
[4:56] SPEAKER_01: ultimate level,
[4:57] SPEAKER_01: what happened was the Civil Rights Act,
[5:02] SPEAKER_01: believe it or not,
[5:04] SPEAKER_01: which is,
[5:04] SPEAKER_01: it used to be the coalition of Southern Democrats,
[5:10] SPEAKER_01: who at the time were racist but populist,
[5:16] SPEAKER_01: and Northern Democrats,
[5:20] SPEAKER_01: and they were the ones,
[5:21] SPEAKER_01: that was the New Deal
[5:24] SPEAKER_01: in the end did a lot for everybody,
[5:26] SPEAKER_01: a lot for African-Americans,
[5:27] SPEAKER_01: but the,
[5:27] SPEAKER_01: the political coalition that made it possible for us to have,
[5:31] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[5:32] SPEAKER_01: high income tax rates and,
[5:33] SPEAKER_01: and social security and eventually Medicare,
[5:36] SPEAKER_01: um,
[5:37] SPEAKER_01: fell apart when,
[5:39] SPEAKER_01: um,
[5:39] SPEAKER_01: when,
[5:40] SPEAKER_01: when Southern Democrats turned into Republicans.
[5:42] SPEAKER_01: And,
[5:43] SPEAKER_01: uh,
[5:43] SPEAKER_01: so,
[5:44] SPEAKER_01: and ultimately happened and then ideology in this amount of,
[5:48] SPEAKER_01: uh,
[5:49] SPEAKER_01: somewhere along the way,
[5:49] SPEAKER_01: actually,
[5:50] SPEAKER_01: we,
[5:50] SPEAKER_01: we kind of know there's a,
[5:51] SPEAKER_01: there's a whole timeline there.
[5:53] SPEAKER_01: Um,
[5:55] Rich corporations put a lot of long-term investment into
[6:02] financing think tanks,
[6:04] SPEAKER_01: studies,
[6:07] SPEAKER_01: to promote the idea that cutting taxes on them
[6:11] SPEAKER_01: was great for everybody.
[6:12] SPEAKER_01: And it's a business.
[6:17] SPEAKER_01: It's a huge success in lobbying.
[6:20] SPEAKER_01: And at this point,
[6:22] you owe something that looks like the tax rates we used to have
[6:26] during our era of
[6:27] SPEAKER_01: greatest prosperity.
[6:29] SPEAKER_01: And people say, oh, that would kill the economy.
[6:30] SPEAKER_01: There'll be grass growing in the streets.
[6:32] SPEAKER_02: All right.
[6:34] Okay,
[6:34] so now these tax cuts were done by Trump in his first
[6:39] presidency,
[6:40] right?
[6:41] SPEAKER_02: And then recently he's extended them.
[6:45] SPEAKER_02: Has there been enough time to see,
[6:47] SPEAKER_02: okay,
[6:48] SPEAKER_02: we cut taxes for the rich back in whatever it was,
[6:51] SPEAKER_02: 2017.
[6:52] Did it have the kind of benefits that Trump and his supporters
[6:56] were promising?
[6:58] SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, the growth rate of the U.S.
[7:00] SPEAKER_01: economy, I mean, lots of perspective, but there is no
[7:04] SPEAKER_01: the underlying growth rate from those tax cuts.
[7:09] SPEAKER_01: The revenue loss was large.
[7:13] SPEAKER_01: The claim that the tax cuts would pay for themselves was clearly wrong.
[7:16] SPEAKER_01: And look, we've been through this so many times now.
[7:19] SPEAKER_01: I mean,
[7:19] SPEAKER_01: there have been...
[7:27] SPEAKER_01: I cut taxes and watch,
[7:28] SPEAKER_01: we'll have a booming economy and we'll have more revenue.
[7:35] SPEAKER_01: actually grew slower than comparable states.
[7:38] And,
[7:38] um,
[7:39] in the end,
[7:40] uh,
[7:40] the legislature overruled him,
[7:42] uh,
[7:43] overrode a veto.
[7:47] We've been,
[7:47] it's just,
[7:49] nothing has been so thoroughly tested as this claim.
[7:54] SPEAKER_01: And, um,
[7:55] SPEAKER_01: But,
[7:56] SPEAKER_01: of course,
[7:56] they won't take no for an answer because who benefits from an
[8:01] ideology that says
[8:02] SPEAKER_02: people don't want to pay taxes,
[8:04] SPEAKER_02: right?
[8:04] SPEAKER_02: Okay,
[8:04] so can I get your support once and for all that the aggressive
[8:09] and condescending
[8:10] SPEAKER_02: Australian lady was kind of wrong and I was maybe kind of right?
[8:15] SPEAKER_01: You were right.
[8:16] SPEAKER_01: I mean, I want to say one more thing.
[8:19] SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm here in New York City.
[8:22] SPEAKER_01: And New York City...
[8:25] has,
[8:26] in addition to federal taxes,
[8:28] there's a state and a city income tax.
[8:33] SPEAKER_01: And if you work together,
[8:37] SPEAKER_01: and you're not a private equity guy who can get all kinds of tax breaks,
[8:42] SPEAKER_01: but you're actually just earning a living,
[8:43] SPEAKER_01: but earning a good living.
[8:45] SPEAKER_01: So if you're like in the movie Wall Street,
[8:47] SPEAKER_01: $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff,
[8:50] SPEAKER_01: you pay a tax rate at the margin of something like 55%.
[8:55] SPEAKER_01: You said 55% taxes, destroy incentives.
[8:58] SPEAKER_01: And we all know how slow-moving and lazy New Yorkers are, right?
[9:04] That's the fastest moving city I've put in,
[9:06] probably,
[9:06] with the exception of maybe Tokyo.
[9:10] SPEAKER_01: So this is all self-interested nonsense, but very lavishly funded.
[9:16] And so you can always hire somebody who can sound like they
[9:20] know something about
[9:21] SPEAKER_01: economics to defend it.
[9:23] SPEAKER_01: Although it's amazing, actually.
[9:25] SPEAKER_01: If you ask how many,
[9:27] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[9:28] SPEAKER_01: academically respectable economists will support this stuff,
[9:32] SPEAKER_01: the answer is basically none.
[9:34] SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
[9:34] SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's interesting.
[9:35] SPEAKER_02: So there aren't like a cadre of...
[9:38] right-leaning conservative economists that still stand by
[9:42] trickle-down economics?
[9:44] SPEAKER_01: I think of it as the pathos of the center-right economist.
[9:48] SPEAKER_01: But there's quite a few reasonable,
[9:51] smart people who do good research who are politically on the
[9:55] center-right,
[9:55] SPEAKER_01: who are what we used to think Republicans were like.
[9:58] SPEAKER_01: And they are constantly...
[10:00] SPEAKER_01: waiting for the Republican Party to ask them for advice,
[10:04] SPEAKER_01: constantly waiting to be offered jobs in a Republican administration.
[10:09] SPEAKER_01: And they never get it.
[10:10] SPEAKER_01: It's only the cranks and the hired guns who are wanted,
[10:16] SPEAKER_01: because somebody who actually knows his stuff,
[10:18] SPEAKER_01: even if he's politically conservative,
[10:20] SPEAKER_01: you know he's not trustworthy,
[10:22] SPEAKER_01: because he might actually be tempted to take a stand on principle.
[10:26] SPEAKER_01: So it's only...
[10:28] SPEAKER_01: the higher guns who advocate this stuff.
[10:31] SPEAKER_01: Got it.
[10:32] Okay,
[10:33] well,
[10:33] I want to turn the page a bit to sticking with our president
[10:42] and economics.
[10:43] SPEAKER_02: I wrote a piece,
[10:44] and I'm particularly interested these days on AI and how AI
[10:50] will impact the economy
[10:51] SPEAKER_02: and economics.
[10:53] SPEAKER_02: And recently, Trump said...
[10:57] SPEAKER_02: When he was proposing his administration's plan for AI,
[11:02] SPEAKER_02: he was talking about the fact that AI companies use these massive,
[11:08] SPEAKER_02: massive troves of people's content and data to build their models.
[11:13] And they don't ask permission and they don't offer compensation
[11:16] to all the people
[11:17] SPEAKER_02: whose content and data they're taking.
[11:20] And Trump said that would be not doable,
[11:23] that it's impossible to compensate people.
[11:28] SPEAKER_02: And in a way, to be fair,
[11:30] SPEAKER_02: He's right.
[11:32] The companies who are building these models have not yet built
[11:36] the technological
[11:37] infrastructure that would be required to attribute what
[11:43] training data goes into
[11:45] SPEAKER_02: what output from one of these AI products,
[11:48] SPEAKER_02: much less pay those people.
[11:51] But isn't that the job of government to demand that they build
[11:55] that kind of infrastructure or
[11:57] SPEAKER_02: They're not allowed to commit what I see as theft.
[12:01] SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've been following this issue very much.
[12:05] SPEAKER_02: I have read that you've been thinking about AI.
[12:11] SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've looked at all at the training data issue.
[12:15] SPEAKER_01: Not specifically,
[12:16] SPEAKER_01: but I actually have a couple of thoughts on that and some related stuff,
[12:21] SPEAKER_01: actually,
[12:22] SPEAKER_01: which you might find interesting.
[12:24] SPEAKER_01: The first thing to say is that,
[12:26] SPEAKER_01: look,
[12:28] SPEAKER_01: specifically figuring out which content was being used may be very hard,
[12:34] SPEAKER_01: but there are ways,
[12:35] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[12:36] SPEAKER_01: the...
[12:37] SPEAKER_01: There's lots of ways in which you can get...
[12:39] SPEAKER_01: Look,
[12:40] SPEAKER_01: AI companies could pay money,
[12:43] could be taxed to pay for a fund that is used in some ways to
[12:47] compensate creators.
[12:49] It won't be totally appropriate,
[12:52] but it would certainly at least partially offset the issue.
[12:58] SPEAKER_01: We do that sort of thing all the time.
[13:00] SPEAKER_01: You can't always make the person... On pollution, we don't say that
[13:07] SPEAKER_01: The polluter has to find a precise person who was hurt by the pollution.
[13:12] SPEAKER_01: We control pollution.
[13:15] SPEAKER_01: In some cases,
[13:16] SPEAKER_01: we require that power plants that emit stuff have to buy permits,
[13:23] SPEAKER_01: and then we use the revenue from the permits.
[13:25] There are a lot of things you can do short of this extremely
[13:29] difficult technological thing.
[13:32] SPEAKER_01: And the argument that says,
[13:33] SPEAKER_01: no,
[13:33] that there's an inherent right to go ahead and use everybody's
[13:38] stuff that people
[13:39] SPEAKER_01: have spent their lives generating without paying any price.
[13:42] SPEAKER_01: That's clearly not, you know, that's a choice.
[13:47] SPEAKER_01: That's not something that we have to do.
[13:50] The other thing to say,
[13:52] however,
[13:53] is,
[13:53] you know,
[13:56] this is not something that started with AI.
[13:58] SPEAKER_01: It's...
[14:02] SPEAKER_01: as long as we've been getting digital stuff,
[14:05] the question of how do creators get rewarded for their creation
[14:11] has been there,
[14:11] SPEAKER_01: as long as it was possible.
[14:12] SPEAKER_01: I mean,
[14:13] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[14:16] SPEAKER_01: I watch a lot of musical performances on YouTube,
[14:20] SPEAKER_01: and many of them,
[14:21] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[14:21] SPEAKER_01: there are some attempts to enforce,
[14:24] SPEAKER_01: in some cases,
[14:25] SPEAKER_01: property rights,
[14:26] SPEAKER_01: but mostly it's not,
[14:28] SPEAKER_01: it doesn't really compensate the creators.
[14:31] SPEAKER_01: And it
[14:32] SPEAKER_01: way back.
[14:34] SPEAKER_01: So I actually once wrote an economics paper about the music industry.
[14:41] SPEAKER_01: Not that I knew anything about it.
[14:42] SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that.
[14:43] SPEAKER_01: I'll have to look that up.
[14:45] SPEAKER_01: It's just circulating and,
[14:46] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[14:47] SPEAKER_01: it never got published,
[14:48] SPEAKER_01: although I'm not even sure what published means anymore.
[14:50] SPEAKER_01: But...
[14:53] SPEAKER_01: But it was for a panel at South by Southwest.
[15:00] SPEAKER_01: And a former colleague of mine,
[15:03] SPEAKER_01: the late Alan Kruger at Princeton,
[15:05] SPEAKER_01: had actually,
[15:05] SPEAKER_01: seriously,
[15:06] SPEAKER_01: he had a book called Rockonomics,
[15:07] SPEAKER_01: which was all about the music.
[15:10] SPEAKER_01: And what he found was that even during the CD era,
[15:18] SPEAKER_01: when the record companies were making money hand over fist,
[15:23] SPEAKER_01: Very few artists got very much out of it.
[15:26] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[15:27] SPEAKER_01: What he,
[15:27] SPEAKER_01: what he found was that basically always,
[15:30] SPEAKER_01: um,
[15:31] SPEAKER_01: uh,
[15:32] SPEAKER_01: artists have,
[15:33] SPEAKER_01: musical artists have,
[15:34] SPEAKER_01: have earned a living through live performances.
[15:37] SPEAKER_01: There's basically the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and nobody else.
[15:41] SPEAKER_01: Uh, and, um, and I did a little, um, uh,
[15:47] SPEAKER_01: a little original research,
[15:48] SPEAKER_01: which was that we know what,
[15:50] SPEAKER_01: the paper was titled Two Centuries of Taylor Swift.
[15:53] SPEAKER_01: It was actually saying that,
[15:56] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[15:57] SPEAKER_01: if we actually looked at the,
[15:59] and I think it's not true about Taylor Swift anymore because
[16:01] she turns out to be a
[16:02] SPEAKER_01: genius,
[16:05] SPEAKER_01: but at the time I wrote it,
[16:06] SPEAKER_01: it turned out that she was,
[16:08] SPEAKER_01: relative to the average person's income,
[16:11] SPEAKER_01: she was earning about the same as Jenny Lind's
[16:19] She was earning about the same as Mrs.
[16:21] Billington,
[16:22] the star of the London Opera in 1803.
[16:26] SPEAKER_02: But the point was that... Wait, before we move on, I'm sorry.
[16:30] SPEAKER_02: This is a complete tangent, but I have to ask.
[16:34] you just made the claim that Taylor Swift turns out to be
[16:36] somewhat of a genius.
[16:37] SPEAKER_02: I don't necessarily disagree.
[16:39] SPEAKER_02: I'm not an expert in Taylor Swift.
[16:40] SPEAKER_02: My wife is an enormous fan.
[16:42] SPEAKER_02: Uh,
[16:43] SPEAKER_02: can I just hear your,
[16:44] SPEAKER_02: your creative thinking,
[16:45] SPEAKER_02: your artistic opinion on what makes Taylor Swift a genius?
[16:48] Oh,
[16:48] I thought that it's not about the music,
[16:51] which,
[16:51] I mean,
[16:51] she's,
[16:51] she's the real thing.
[16:53] I watched her tiny dust concert and she's no question that
[16:55] she's an actual,
[16:56] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[16:57] SPEAKER_01: but not,
[16:57] SPEAKER_01: not especially to my taste.
[16:59] SPEAKER_01: No, it was the, the way that she did an end run around the, um,
[17:03] SPEAKER_01: around the record companies, by re-recording all of her stuff.
[17:07] SPEAKER_02: That was a genius move, I must say.
[17:09] SPEAKER_02: When I saw her do that,
[17:11] SPEAKER_02: that honestly took me from the category of Taylor Curious,
[17:15] SPEAKER_02: Taylor Tolerant,
[17:16] SPEAKER_02: to Solid Swifty,
[17:18] SPEAKER_02: when she did the Taylor version of her songs like that.
[17:22] SPEAKER_01: Somebody was close to her,
[17:23] but she knew at least the right people to listen to figured out
[17:25] that they owned the
[17:26] SPEAKER_01: recordings,
[17:27] SPEAKER_01: but not the songs.
[17:28] SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
[17:29] SPEAKER_02: The...
[17:31] SPEAKER_02: No, it's the opposite.
[17:32] SPEAKER_02: She owned the songs, but not the recordings, right?
[17:34] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
[17:35] SPEAKER_02: So she needed to make new recordings, yeah.
[17:38] No,
[17:38] so I think she's now in...
[17:40] But even so,
[17:41] I mean,
[17:41] if you ask about how it's...
[17:44] SPEAKER_01: the big money even for the big stars is those giant,
[17:47] SPEAKER_01: um,
[17:48] SPEAKER_01: giant,
[17:49] SPEAKER_01: uh,
[17:49] SPEAKER_01: those stadium concerts,
[17:51] SPEAKER_01: uh,
[17:52] SPEAKER_01: at the,
[17:52] SPEAKER_01: with the $200 tickets and,
[17:54] SPEAKER_01: and not even,
[17:56] SPEAKER_01: uh,
[17:57] SPEAKER_01: and,
[17:57] SPEAKER_01: and not royalties.
[17:58] SPEAKER_01: And that's, that's, that's pre AI.
[18:00] SPEAKER_01: Now other fields.
[18:02] SPEAKER_01: Okay.
[18:02] SPEAKER_01: It's, um, uh, you know, um, uh, but yeah, it, it, it is a,
[18:10] SPEAKER_01: AI is kind of exacerbating what was already a problem with digital,
[18:15] SPEAKER_01: but it turns out that even digital didn't make all...
[18:19] The era when you could potentially have made a lot of money
[18:24] through creation as
[18:25] SPEAKER_01: opposed to in-person was never very long.
[18:30] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but so I want to try to zoom out past...
[18:35] SPEAKER_02: musicians and artists.
[18:36] SPEAKER_02: Obviously, I care about that.
[18:38] SPEAKER_02: That's what I've done for living my whole life.
[18:40] But my concern that I've sort of heard technologists and some
[18:49] economists talking
[18:50] SPEAKER_02: about,
[18:51] SPEAKER_02: I'm talking about Jaron Lanier,
[18:53] SPEAKER_02: who's at Microsoft,
[18:54] SPEAKER_02: and Glenn Weil,
[18:55] SPEAKER_02: who's his collaborator,
[18:57] SPEAKER_02: The Economist.
[18:58] I don't know if you're familiar with them,
[18:59] but they express a concern that goes beyond...
[19:04] SPEAKER_02: artists and creators in the conventional sense of the word.
[19:06] SPEAKER_02: And they talk about,
[19:08] SPEAKER_02: as more and more work gets done in the digital world,
[19:14] as more and more of our economy is sort of mediated through
[19:18] digital technology,
[19:21] SPEAKER_02: it will be not just creators, but kind of anybody who's doing any work.
[19:25] SPEAKER_02: And you could imagine it certainly with academics or with designers,
[19:31] SPEAKER_02: engineers,
[19:32] SPEAKER_02: but you can even,
[19:33] especially once robots and autonomous vehicles start coming
[19:37] into further use,
[19:39] SPEAKER_02: you can imagine sort of anybody's job that's powered by AI.
[19:44] SPEAKER_02: Ultimately, they like to...
[19:47] SPEAKER_02: sort of do this sleight of hand move where they say, oh, it's AI.
[19:51] We invented an artificially intelligent computer program that
[19:55] can replace a human,
[19:56] SPEAKER_02: but they didn't because these AI products can do absolutely nothing,
[20:02] have zero value without being fed a bunch of content and data
[20:08] that humans created.
[20:09] SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, in the future, like right now, they say, be a plumber.
[20:14] SPEAKER_02: If you want to avoid job replacement,
[20:16] SPEAKER_02: by AI be a plumber, but eventually there will be a plumber bot.
[20:20] But that plumber bot is going to be powered by an AI that was
[20:23] trained by collecting
[20:25] SPEAKER_02: data on what a bunch of human plumbers do.
[20:28] And so I'm curious where you see the larger economy going as we
[20:34] move into this
[20:36] SPEAKER_02: phase where this technology becomes so ubiquitous.
[20:41] SPEAKER_01: Okay.
[20:42] SPEAKER_01: So first, I do think that there are
[20:46] SPEAKER_01: It'll be a really long time before we actually have robot plumbers.
[20:52] SPEAKER_01: That one specifically.
[20:53] When you say a really long time,
[20:54] like nowadays,
[20:55] 10 years feels like a really long time.
[20:57] SPEAKER_02: Like the next generation,
[20:58] SPEAKER_02: like my kids growing up,
[21:00] SPEAKER_02: you know,
[21:00] SPEAKER_02: I have a 10 and 8 and a 3-year-old right now.
[21:02] SPEAKER_02: What are they going to do?
[21:04] SPEAKER_02: You think it'll be longer than that before we have a robot plumber?
[21:07] SPEAKER_01: It might very well be or something.
[21:09] SPEAKER_01: You know, you want to bear in mind...
[21:13] Don't always buy the hype from the tech guys about what their
[21:16] tech is going to do.
[21:17] SPEAKER_02: You're right.
[21:18] SPEAKER_02: You're right.
[21:19] SPEAKER_02: You're right.
[21:19] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[21:20] Elon just said something like 80% of Tesla's value is going to
[21:23] come from the
[21:24] SPEAKER_02: Optimus robots and it's going to happen real fast,
[21:26] SPEAKER_02: but you don't quite buy it.
[21:28] SPEAKER_01: You know that we were,
[21:29] SPEAKER_01: uh,
[21:30] remember when we were all excited about the next generation of
[21:32] smartphones and the
[21:34] SPEAKER_01: new iPhone is slightly thinner.
[21:36] SPEAKER_01: That's our, that's right.
[21:37] SPEAKER_02: It's been the same iPhone for about 20 years now or something.
[21:39] SPEAKER_02: You're right.
[21:41] SPEAKER_01: So, um,
[21:42] SPEAKER_01: And dealing with the physical world is really hard.
[21:49] It's extremely difficult to adapt,
[21:52] especially to unforeseen circumstances.
[21:57] And so I think things like plumbing is going to be one of the
[22:00] last areas where
[22:02] SPEAKER_01: we're going to really see.
[22:04] SPEAKER_01: But look, on the other hand, artificial intelligence is not intelligence.
[22:12] SPEAKER_01: And it's not all that artificial.
[22:14] SPEAKER_01: It's mostly on stuff that comes from people.
[22:17] SPEAKER_01: I've heard it called collective intelligence.
[22:19] SPEAKER_01: I like that term for it.
[22:21] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[22:21] SPEAKER_01: And there's...
[22:22] SPEAKER_01: There are really large language models is what the people are actually...
[22:32] SPEAKER_01: And it can do something really impressively.
[22:34] SPEAKER_01: But what it doesn't...
[22:41] SPEAKER_01: I get people mad by saying it's really a super-powered autocorrect,
[22:48] SPEAKER_01: which I think is still kind of right.
[22:51] But then there's a lot of human jobs that are basically just
[22:55] high-level autocorrect.
[22:57] SPEAKER_01: What do you think most lawyers do?
[23:01] SPEAKER_01: What do you think most insurance claim analysts do?
[23:05] SPEAKER_01: And there's quite a few jobs that we're...
[23:10] SPEAKER_01: large language models can take over.
[23:14] SPEAKER_01: But this is not the first time this has happened.
[23:17] SPEAKER_01: Right?
[23:17] You're in a world where machines have taken over all the jobs
[23:22] and its desperation.
[23:24] SPEAKER_01: That's a 1950 novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano.
[23:29] SPEAKER_02: Oh, I haven't read that one.
[23:31] SPEAKER_02: I'm a Vonnegut fan, but I have to check that one out.
[23:34] SPEAKER_01: Would destroy employment.
[23:35] SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it
[23:39] In the past,
[23:40] technological progress has always been something else that
[23:46] people can do.
[23:47] SPEAKER_01: There's always been other things that people can do.
[23:51] And we do away with large numbers of some jobs,
[23:57] but something else comes along.
[23:59] SPEAKER_01: In the modern world, once upon a time, we had farmers.
[24:07] SPEAKER_01: And there are, to a first approximation, no farmers now.
[24:13] SPEAKER_01: What happened?
[24:15] You mean that because all the farming gets done by huge
[24:17] corporations and they're
[24:19] SPEAKER_02: not like individual people with their family businesses?
[24:24] SPEAKER_02: When you say there are no farmers now?
[24:28] SPEAKER_01: Family farms.
[24:28] SPEAKER_01: There's corporate farms too,
[24:30] SPEAKER_01: but it's mostly that a family farmer now with lots of farm machinery
[24:36] SPEAKER_01: can cultivate a lot of land and raise a lot of crops.
[24:39] SPEAKER_01: So it really doesn't.
[24:40] SPEAKER_01: Very many farmers can beat America and be part of the rest of the world.
[24:45] SPEAKER_01: Manufacturing is a lot like that, too.
[24:48] SPEAKER_01: I mean, we do have a trade deficit.
[24:50] SPEAKER_01: Part of the decline in manufacturing comes from that,
[24:52] SPEAKER_01: but mostly it comes from the fact that the workers are more productive.
[24:57] SPEAKER_01: But if you ask, we're, you know, and yet we have a higher fraction of
[25:02] SPEAKER_01: of adults in their prime, prime working years employed than ever before.
[25:07] SPEAKER_01: Uh, what are they doing?
[25:08] SPEAKER_01: Well, a lot of us are doing healthcare.
[25:10] Uh,
[25:11] uh,
[25:13] some of that maybe,
[25:15] uh,
[25:15] will eventually go,
[25:16] but there's always been something else.
[25:19] SPEAKER_01: So there,
[25:19] SPEAKER_01: there,
[25:19] SPEAKER_01: I think the,
[25:20] SPEAKER_01: the idea when I have a universal jobs apocalypse,
[25:24] SPEAKER_01: um,
[25:25] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[25:25] SPEAKER_01: me,
[25:25] SPEAKER_01: uh,
[25:26] SPEAKER_01: Maybe the media should get smart enough for that,
[25:29] SPEAKER_01: but that's also when Skynet decides to kill us all.
[25:33] SPEAKER_01: Do you see any credence?
[25:35] SPEAKER_02: You're saying that as a joke.
[25:37] SPEAKER_02: There are folks who express,
[25:40] SPEAKER_02: and folks who are working at the top companies building this technology,
[25:46] SPEAKER_02: a lot of them that are expressing concern about that.
[25:49] SPEAKER_02: I have my skepticism as well, but I'm curious what you make of it.
[25:53] SPEAKER_01: skeptical,
[25:53] SPEAKER_01: but if that's going to happen,
[25:56] SPEAKER_01: that's actually one of those things where if we don't develop it,
[25:59] SPEAKER_01: somebody will.
[26:04] SPEAKER_01: That's a grim remark.
[26:08] SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry to interrupt you.
[26:11] SPEAKER_02: That's actually really interesting to me,
[26:13] SPEAKER_02: though,
[26:13] SPEAKER_02: when you say,
[26:14] SPEAKER_02: if we don't develop it,
[26:16] SPEAKER_02: someone will,
[26:17] SPEAKER_02: because
[26:19] SPEAKER_02: A lot of the businesses,
[26:20] the AI companies that say they should be allowed to do whatever
[26:25] they want,
[26:25] SPEAKER_02: they should be allowed to take everyone's data and content,
[26:27] SPEAKER_02: they should be unregulated,
[26:29] SPEAKER_02: there shouldn't be any safety rules and guardrails for them.
[26:33] SPEAKER_02: The thing they often point to is that competitive...
[26:38] SPEAKER_02: that competitive race that they say,
[26:41] SPEAKER_02: well,
[26:41] SPEAKER_02: if we don't do it,
[26:42] SPEAKER_02: then our competitors will,
[26:44] SPEAKER_02: whether that's China or some other adversary.
[26:47] SPEAKER_02: It strikes me as a bit overly simplistic and dishonest,
[26:52] SPEAKER_02: which isn't to say we don't need to stay competitive with China,
[26:55] SPEAKER_02: but it strikes me that
[26:58] Part of staying competitive with China is making this
[27:01] technology not ruin our
[27:03] SPEAKER_02: society,
[27:04] making this technology be good for everybody and good for the
[27:07] wider economy and not
[27:08] SPEAKER_02: just good for a few companies.
[27:09] SPEAKER_02: And if we want to stay competitive with China, that's the way to do it.
[27:15] SPEAKER_02: But I'm curious,
[27:15] how how how persuaded are you when you hear them point to this
[27:21] sort of arms race
[27:22] SPEAKER_02: dynamic and say we have to go faster or else?
[27:25] I don't think,
[27:26] I think that there are,
[27:27] you know,
[27:28] there's a balance to be struck.
[27:29] SPEAKER_01: And it's tricky,
[27:31] but you should never use international communication as an
[27:34] excuse that says that,
[27:36] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[27:36] SPEAKER_01: corporations can rip off everybody at their will.
[27:41] SPEAKER_01: And,
[27:43] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[27:43] SPEAKER_01: even,
[27:43] SPEAKER_01: let me take you,
[27:44] SPEAKER_01: give you a,
[27:47] West versus Europe is an interesting thing where the Europeans
[27:52] have a lot more
[27:53] SPEAKER_01: regulations than we do.
[27:55] That may be one reason why European technological,
[28:00] you know,
[28:01] why Europe lags behind the U.S.
[28:03] SPEAKER_01: at the technological cutting edge.
[28:07] SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, Europe's such a terrible place.
[28:12] SPEAKER_01: I mean,
[28:13] SPEAKER_01: Europe has,
[28:16] SPEAKER_01: they have lower GDP per capita than we do,
[28:19] SPEAKER_01: though a lot of that is because they take vacation.
[28:21] SPEAKER_01: Don't.
[28:22] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[28:25] SPEAKER_01: It's about four years later on than we do.
[28:28] SPEAKER_01: So I'm sure that we made the right choice there.
[28:31] And so the idea that maximum license to steal is justified by
[28:40] international
[28:41] SPEAKER_01: competition is certainly not right.
[28:46] SPEAKER_01: So no, I'm not, I wouldn't,
[28:49] I think it's probably impossible to stop these large language
[28:55] models from,
[28:55] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[28:57] SPEAKER_01: being out there.
[28:58] SPEAKER_01: Probably impossible to stop them from scooping up a lot of data,
[29:01] SPEAKER_01: but there probably are ways to make at least the...
[29:10] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I wouldn't want to stop them.
[29:13] SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't want the tech to go away.
[29:15] I think actually there's a lot about the technology that's
[29:18] really inspiring.
[29:20] SPEAKER_02: I just think that as far as the economic upside of this technology,
[29:27] it should be shared with all the human beings who are creating
[29:31] so much of the
[29:32] SPEAKER_02: value.
[29:33] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, definitely.
[29:33] SPEAKER_01: And for that matter...
[29:39] SPEAKER_01: You can't stop technological change from displacing.
[29:42] SPEAKER_01: You know, some jobs will go away, as they have many times before, right?
[29:50] SPEAKER_01: And what you can do is you can try to make sure that losing your job to
[29:56] SPEAKER_01: technological change doesn't mean losing health care,
[29:59] doesn't mean that your children are malnourished and that they
[30:04] don't get it.
[30:07] Do you mean accomplishing that because the government would be
[30:09] providing health
[30:11] care for everybody and the food assistance that was just cut
[30:15] recently by the big,
[30:17] SPEAKER_02: beautiful bill?
[30:17] SPEAKER_02: Is that what you're referring to?
[30:19] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[30:19] I mean,
[30:19] this is what we the way that you reconcile an evolving,
[30:25] always changing economy.
[30:27] SPEAKER_01: We're here.
[30:27] Sometimes technological progress does mean that an old industry
[30:32] no longer provides
[30:33] SPEAKER_01: the jobs it used to.
[30:35] SPEAKER_01: It is by having a basic social safety net.
[30:41] SPEAKER_01: That,
[30:42] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[30:43] SPEAKER_01: people are always going to be upset that seeing things change,
[30:45] SPEAKER_01: but we can at least,
[30:51] SPEAKER_01: we're a very rich country.
[30:53] SPEAKER_01: We can make sure that people aren't miserable.
[30:55] SPEAKER_01: And
[30:57] SPEAKER_01: And part of that is kind of your thing about taxes.
[31:01] SPEAKER_01: We have to tax people,
[31:04] SPEAKER_01: and particularly we have to tax the very rich because they are,
[31:07] SPEAKER_01: in a way,
[31:07] SPEAKER_01: the biggest beneficiary.
[31:09] right well this so when you talk about a social safety net what
[31:13] that reminds me of
[31:15] in terms of ai is this concept called universal basic income
[31:19] i'm sure you've heard
[31:21] of this they abbreviate it as ubi and what you hear a lot in
[31:24] silicon valley is
[31:26] folks saying well soon the ai will do all of the economically
[31:31] valuable work people
[31:33] SPEAKER_02: will not have jobs
[31:36] but we'll have a UBI,
[31:38] a universal basic income that everybody just gets money for
[31:43] free.
[31:45] And that's what will be necessary because no humans will be
[31:48] able to earn money anymore.
[31:50] SPEAKER_02: And it's proposed as something sort of utopian that that'll be great.
[31:56] SPEAKER_02: People won't have to work for a living anymore.
[31:59] SPEAKER_02: But I'm curious, have you looked into UBI or what do you think of it?
[32:04] course on on economics of the welfare state so i've been
[32:07] through all this stuff a
[32:08] lot um and um so first of all that that future where machines
[32:13] do everything appears
[32:14] to be a really long way i mean we are we are not and
[32:19] particularly one thing aging
[32:20] population health care um uh you know cat gpt isn't going to
[32:26] change bedpans
[32:28] So there's a lot of jobs that human beings are going to be
[32:33] doing for a long time.
[32:34] SPEAKER_01: We're a long way off from that.
[32:37] SPEAKER_01: And if we get anywhere close to that, then yeah.
[32:43] SPEAKER_01: But the thing is,
[32:45] SPEAKER_01: if you want UBI,
[32:46] SPEAKER_01: then you have to advocate really high taxes on corporations,
[32:52] SPEAKER_01: on corporations.
[32:53] SPEAKER_01: maybe on a handful of wealthy people to pay for it.
[32:56] The problem with proposals for UBI right now is that to give
[33:01] everybody a basic
[33:02] SPEAKER_01: income now,
[33:03] SPEAKER_01: when most people,
[33:04] SPEAKER_01: in fact,
[33:05] in a higher proportion of people in working age are working
[33:12] than ever before,
[33:14] SPEAKER_01: is that giving,
[33:15] SPEAKER_01: it's very expensive.
[33:17] SPEAKER_01: It's a lot of money.
[33:18] SPEAKER_01: Well, either it's not really an income you can live on
[33:22] SPEAKER_01: or it's a lot of money.
[33:25] SPEAKER_01: And we are not.
[33:27] SPEAKER_01: That's not going to happen in the current political constellation.
[33:30] SPEAKER_01: It's not going to happen under these conditions.
[33:34] SPEAKER_01: We have to, for the time being, at least.
[33:38] And I think for the rest of my lifetime,
[33:40] I'm not a kid,
[33:44] so that may not be that long.
[33:46] SPEAKER_02: You look great, Paul.
[33:48] SPEAKER_01: But the thing is, it's going to be... Right now,
[33:53] SPEAKER_01: targeted anti-poverty programs.
[33:57] SPEAKER_01: They just cost a lot less money.
[33:59] SPEAKER_01: They can do a lot.
[34:01] SPEAKER_01: And so for now,
[34:02] we're going to be talking about food stamps and Medicaid and
[34:08] educational aid and
[34:09] SPEAKER_01: healing assistance.
[34:12] SPEAKER_01: For the moment,
[34:13] SPEAKER_01: targeted means-tested programs are just so much cheaper than UBI,
[34:19] because UBI would be throwing a lot of money at people who
[34:22] don't currently need it.
[34:23] SPEAKER_01: So UBI is, you know, I'm not opposed to it in principle.
[34:27] SPEAKER_01: It's just kind of the arithmetic doesn't work right now.
[34:30] SPEAKER_02: Well,
[34:31] SPEAKER_02: I'm actually curious to hear why you're not opposed to it in principle,
[34:33] SPEAKER_02: because it seems to me that in principle,
[34:36] SPEAKER_02: it looks a lot like
[34:38] SPEAKER_02: Communism during the USSR,
[34:40] SPEAKER_02: where there's sort of a flat,
[34:42] SPEAKER_02: central dole,
[34:44] and that would inevitably lead to a bad concentration of power
[34:50] if just the state is
[34:52] SPEAKER_02: the only source of income for everybody.
[34:56] SPEAKER_02: Doesn't that usually go bad places?
[34:58] SPEAKER_01: No.
[34:59] SPEAKER_01: Remember,
[34:59] SPEAKER_01: the whole idea of UBI,
[35:01] SPEAKER_01: I mean,
[35:01] SPEAKER_01: one of the attractive things about it is that there are no conditions.
[35:06] SPEAKER_01: You just get it.
[35:08] And look,
[35:09] we kind of sort of have Social Security is a little bit like
[35:14] EBI.
[35:14] It's true that the amount that you get out does depend on how
[35:18] much you earn during
[35:19] SPEAKER_01: your lifetime,
[35:20] SPEAKER_01: although it's very nonlinear.
[35:21] SPEAKER_01: Much more compensation for low earners than for high earners.
[35:25] But the great thing about Social Security and Medicare,
[35:28] Medicare is,
[35:29] you know,
[35:29] just a
[35:32] SPEAKER_01: You just get it.
[35:35] SPEAKER_01: You need it.
[35:36] SPEAKER_01: You don't have to go.
[35:40] When I turned five,
[35:41] I got a letter from Medicare saying,
[35:43] you are now on Medicare.
[35:45] SPEAKER_01: And then ran it through some stuff.
[35:53] SPEAKER_01: When I turned 70,
[35:54] SPEAKER_01: I got a letter from Social Security saying,
[35:56] you must now start collecting your Social Security benefits and
[36:00] not asking,
[36:00] SPEAKER_01: do you need it?
[36:01] SPEAKER_01: Not asking,
[36:03] So there's a lot more dignity involved in a program that is
[36:08] entitled,
[36:08] or just entitled to be.
[36:10] SPEAKER_02: That's not how it used to work under communism in the 20th century?
[36:15] SPEAKER_01: Well,
[36:15] SPEAKER_01: no,
[36:15] SPEAKER_01: the whole,
[36:16] SPEAKER_01: but that's not what made,
[36:17] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[36:18] SPEAKER_01: what made communism was the secret police,
[36:23] SPEAKER_01: right?
[36:24] SPEAKER_01: You know, in a society where
[36:27] SPEAKER_01: math men can just grab you off the street.
[36:29] And anyway,
[36:31] certainly that was part of what made Stalinist Russia terrible.
[36:34] SPEAKER_02: But wasn't it?
[36:36] SPEAKER_02: I mean, speaking strictly to the economics, is it not sort of shown?
[36:41] SPEAKER_02: I guess from my layman's perspective,
[36:43] it seems like a demonstration that a more market economy where
[36:49] there's incentives
[36:50] SPEAKER_02: for people to strive and do well and and rewards for those who do
[36:56] ultimately performs better than a kind of a flat economy with
[37:00] the central state
[37:02] that just gives everybody the same well but that that's we're
[37:06] not nobody's really
[37:08] talking about going to that point and we're talking about a
[37:10] situation where um
[37:12] people who the you know it's imaginary future where robots are
[37:17] doing most of the
[37:19] jobs which i think is still probably generations away but still
[37:22] a man uh but
[37:25] the people who do have jobs and presumably make a lot of money
[37:27] at them would be
[37:29] SPEAKER_01: able to allow to keep some of it,
[37:31] SPEAKER_01: but they would be paying.
[37:32] You might be paying,
[37:33] uh,
[37:34] you know,
[37:34] 70% tax free,
[37:35] which is not actually all that terrible.
[37:38] SPEAKER_01: Um, and, uh, and everybody receiving a lot of things as basic rights.
[37:45] SPEAKER_01: Uh, well, um,
[37:47] You know,
[37:48] Denmark has universal health care and very generous social
[37:53] benefits.
[37:54] SPEAKER_01: And last I was there, Copenhagen didn't look very Stalinist to me.
[38:02] SPEAKER_01: This is confusing what the issues are.
[38:06] SPEAKER_01: I'm not worried about the political oppressiveness at all.
[38:11] SPEAKER_01: Actually, I worry just about the feasibilities.
[38:18] SPEAKER_01: getting the rich to accept that they benefit so much from society.
[38:25] SPEAKER_01: They have to pay some share of its upkeep.
[38:28] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[38:29] SPEAKER_02: And the idea,
[38:30] SPEAKER_02: what you're saying is if there were a UBI,
[38:33] it would be so expensive that it would necessitate the rich
[38:37] paying much higher
[38:38] SPEAKER_02: taxes.
[38:39] Look,
[38:40] I remember Andrew Yang,
[38:41] but when he was talking about UBI,
[38:43] it was a month.
[38:46] SPEAKER_01: But it is not really possible to live in America on a thousand a month.
[38:51] And so trying to raise it to something that you could live on,
[38:56] it's a lot of money.
[38:58] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[38:59] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[39:00] SPEAKER_02: It takes a lot of money.
[39:01] SPEAKER_02: I guess when you say,
[39:05] SPEAKER_02: I guess part of the tension here is that,
[39:07] SPEAKER_02: first of all,
[39:09] SPEAKER_02: maybe it's hype,
[39:10] SPEAKER_02: but there are a lot of folks in the tech world
[39:14] SPEAKER_02: who talk about exponential growth just around the corner,
[39:18] SPEAKER_02: that it's hard to imagine things that change at exponential rates,
[39:22] SPEAKER_02: and that a...
[39:26] SPEAKER_02: maybe not fully autonomous,
[39:28] SPEAKER_02: but almost fully autonomous economy is closer than you're estimating.
[39:32] SPEAKER_02: So that's part of the tension.
[39:33] SPEAKER_02: But even,
[39:33] SPEAKER_02: I guess,
[39:35] SPEAKER_02: once we do get to that fully autonomous economy,
[39:38] they're imagining that so much wealth is being generated by
[39:42] these autonomous
[39:43] SPEAKER_02: systems,
[39:44] SPEAKER_02: AI and robots and everything else,
[39:49] SPEAKER_02: that there'll be enough to go around.
[39:52] SPEAKER_01: Raise the taxes and do it.
[39:53] SPEAKER_01: Now,
[39:54] SPEAKER_01: there are all kinds of existential problems with that,
[40:00] SPEAKER_01: which are not that it'll become tyranny.
[40:05] SPEAKER_01: The problems are that money isn't the only thing we get from work.
[40:12] SPEAKER_01: People...
[40:20] SPEAKER_01: people want purpose in their lives.
[40:22] SPEAKER_01: They want jobs.
[40:24] SPEAKER_01: Having a job is...
[40:26] SPEAKER_01: There's actually even quite a lot of studies that show that the damage to
[40:35] SPEAKER_01: perceived,
[40:35] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[40:36] SPEAKER_01: to your well-being from losing a job goes well beyond the financial side.
[40:43] SPEAKER_02: That's really interesting to me.
[40:45] SPEAKER_02: This resonates with me because...
[40:49] I'm taking us off on a little bit of a tangent,
[40:51] but this is fascinating for me.
[40:55] SPEAKER_02: I worked as a kid.
[40:56] SPEAKER_02: I was an actor from a young age.
[40:59] SPEAKER_02: And I got lucky and was on a hit TV show when I was a teenager.
[41:05] And so by the time I was 20 and I went to college,
[41:10] I had made quite a bit of money.
[41:12] SPEAKER_02: And I had to sort of think to myself,
[41:19] SPEAKER_02: okay, what do I want to do?
[41:22] SPEAKER_02: And do I want to keep working?
[41:26] SPEAKER_02: If so, why?
[41:27] SPEAKER_02: It's not necessarily for the money.
[41:30] SPEAKER_02: I mean,
[41:30] SPEAKER_02: I didn't make so much money,
[41:32] SPEAKER_02: I guess,
[41:32] SPEAKER_02: that I could have retired in comfort for the rest of my life.
[41:35] SPEAKER_02: But if I had invested correctly, I probably could have, to be honest.
[41:39] SPEAKER_02: And I've spent a lot of time ever since then thinking about
[41:45] what's the purpose of all the effort that i put into things and
[41:52] i've spent my
[41:54] career as an adult not really optimizing for money i've made
[41:59] money i've been in
[42:00] some hit movies and things that paid me well i've been in some
[42:04] movies that weren't
[42:04] SPEAKER_02: hits that paid me well to be honest but uh but
[42:09] SPEAKER_02: Money was never my North Star.
[42:13] SPEAKER_02: And I take that as as an extremely fortunate privilege.
[42:17] SPEAKER_02: It's just it happened to be that I made money young.
[42:21] SPEAKER_02: And I wonder about I mean,
[42:23] I'm actually curious before we extrapolate to what that could
[42:26] mean in a world of
[42:27] SPEAKER_02: like technologically provided super abundance.
[42:30] SPEAKER_02: You know.
[42:32] retired from writing for the new york times and you've started
[42:37] doing what to me
[42:38] feels like really great work i i read your substack and i don't
[42:42] imagine you're
[42:43] doing that for the money no why why are you doing it well um
[42:49] you know because i
[42:49] care i wanted to uh weigh in i had there's stuff going on i
[42:53] wanted to now what is
[42:54] funny is i i definitely um well uh had no intention of doing it
[43:00] for the money and
[43:01] SPEAKER_01: um
[43:01] SPEAKER_01: the people at Substack had to argue with me.
[43:06] This was kind of a two-month-long argument about introducing a
[43:11] pay subscription.
[43:14] SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
[43:16] And it's partly because their metrics,
[43:19] their bestsellers,
[43:20] are based on paid subscribers.
[43:22] They said you want to be...
[43:24] I'm not on any of the lists because all my Substack stuff is
[43:27] free.
[43:28] SPEAKER_02: It's true.
[43:29] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so the...
[43:33] SPEAKER_01: And I've held it down.
[43:35] SPEAKER_01: I have one post a week.
[43:40] SPEAKER_01: Six days a week.
[43:41] SPEAKER_01: And now it's turned out that I am,
[43:45] SPEAKER_01: in fact,
[43:46] SPEAKER_01: making a substantial amount of money off it,
[43:47] SPEAKER_01: which wasn't...
[43:48] SPEAKER_01: Well,
[43:48] SPEAKER_01: congratulations.
[43:49] SPEAKER_01: You write good stuff.
[43:51] SPEAKER_02: But the... I have to admit, I'm a free subscriber.
[43:55] SPEAKER_02: I'm not a paying subscriber.
[43:57] SPEAKER_02: Maybe I should start paying.
[43:59] SPEAKER_01: But Sundays, I have, or I say we have, because my wife is very involved.
[44:04] We're co-authors of a textbook,
[44:07] and so this is almost textbook,
[44:10] which is long,
[44:11] detailed.
[44:12] SPEAKER_02: Well, I know.
[44:12] SPEAKER_02: I read the opening paragraph,
[44:14] SPEAKER_02: and then you cut it off at the paywall,
[44:16] SPEAKER_02: and I haven't quite taken the leap to say,
[44:19] SPEAKER_02: I'm going to actually read all of this and pay for it.
[44:20] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's a, and we probably wouldn't,
[44:26] SPEAKER_01: Those are a hell of a lot of work.
[44:27] SPEAKER_01: We probably wouldn't do those if they didn't.
[44:29] SPEAKER_01: That makes perfect sense.
[44:32] SPEAKER_01: The point is that it was, well, you know, what am I doing with my life?
[44:39] SPEAKER_01: I'm paying attention.
[44:41] SPEAKER_01: I want to be out there.
[44:42] SPEAKER_01: I want to be part of the discussion.
[44:44] SPEAKER_01: And it's work, but it's kind of, it's not my choice.
[44:51] SPEAKER_01: Now, the truth is, most people,
[44:56] SPEAKER_01: A lot of people take social security at 62.
[45:02] SPEAKER_01: You get less, but you can retire at 62.
[45:06] SPEAKER_01: And not many people hold out to 70, which maximizes it.
[45:13] SPEAKER_01: It's that actually many people don't love their jobs.
[45:17] SPEAKER_01: Many people don't.
[45:18] SPEAKER_01: And for them, there are other things to do with your life.
[45:22] SPEAKER_01: I think we can assume that if
[45:25] SPEAKER_01: No,
[45:25] SPEAKER_01: we already,
[45:26] we have more retired people with adequate incomes than ever
[45:31] before in the history
[45:32] SPEAKER_01: of the world.
[45:33] SPEAKER_01: And most of it, they do fine.
[45:35] SPEAKER_01: They have, they, you know, they do stuff at home.
[45:47] SPEAKER_01: They play golf, which I don't get that.
[45:50] SPEAKER_01: But anyway, I'm not a golfer.
[45:52] SPEAKER_01: Anyway, the,
[45:53] SPEAKER_01: But,
[45:53] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[45:54] SPEAKER_01: so it's not as if life is purposeless,
[45:58] SPEAKER_01: but there will also be,
[46:01] SPEAKER_01: certainly when you're younger,
[46:03] SPEAKER_01: most people,
[46:04] SPEAKER_01: I think,
[46:05] SPEAKER_01: feel some need to justify to themselves their existence.
[46:12] SPEAKER_01: And work of some kind is how people define their identity.
[46:18] So then do you see a future where technology gets advanced to
[46:25] the point where fewer
[46:26] SPEAKER_02: and fewer,
[46:27] fewer people have to do work and there's fewer and fewer jobs
[46:32] and people are
[46:33] needing to find something else to do with their time and
[46:37] something else to sort of
[46:39] SPEAKER_02: identify with as who they are than their job?
[46:45] SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
[46:46] SPEAKER_01: I mean, it,
[46:47] SPEAKER_01: People have predicted that sort of thing for many, for generations now.
[46:53] The workless future has been a trope of science fiction and
[46:59] speculation since
[47:01] SPEAKER_01: before I was born.
[47:02] SPEAKER_01: And it keeps not happening.
[47:06] SPEAKER_01: And look,
[47:06] SPEAKER_01: we could,
[47:08] SPEAKER_01: in the United States,
[47:09] we could postpone that day of reckoning for a long time just by
[47:15] reducing the work
[47:17] SPEAKER_01: week.
[47:17] SPEAKER_01: You know, there's this...
[47:21] SPEAKER_01: People used to have 80-hour work weeks,
[47:24] and it dropped to about a 40-hour work week in the United
[47:27] States and then flattened
[47:28] SPEAKER_01: out.
[47:29] And in the rest of the advanced world,
[47:32] actually,
[47:33] work weeks continued to get shorter.
[47:36] SPEAKER_01: Right.
[47:38] SPEAKER_01: And people's vacations got longer.
[47:39] SPEAKER_01: In the United States, they did not.
[47:41] SPEAKER_02: I lived in New Zealand for a little over a year.
[47:46] And yeah,
[47:47] people take a substantially greater amount of time away to be
[47:51] with their families.
[47:53] SPEAKER_02: They come home in the evening and make dinner with their families.
[47:58] SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot to be said for that.
[48:02] Yeah,
[48:02] I mean,
[48:03] if we would just live like civilized people do in the advanced
[48:08] world.
[48:08] I mean,
[48:09] you know,
[48:10] which country appears to have the fewest working hours per
[48:14] working person?
[48:15] SPEAKER_01: I think the world.
[48:18] SPEAKER_01: Germany.
[48:19] SPEAKER_01: Germany.
[48:20] SPEAKER_01: Those famously, you know, lazy... Nein!
[48:24] SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
[48:27] tried to go anyplace else in Europe during high seas and found
[48:32] it impossible to
[48:33] SPEAKER_01: walk is because the streets are full of German tourists.
[48:35] SPEAKER_01: But anyway, so all of this stuff is very far distant future.
[48:42] SPEAKER_01: And for now, if we would sort of resume our historical path of
[48:48] of actually spending more leisure time giving ourselves a
[48:52] little bit more relief
[48:53] SPEAKER_01: that we could easily— I don't even think we're at that point now.
[48:57] I think at this point we are actually talking more about just
[49:01] shifting the mix of jobs.
[49:04] SPEAKER_01: More health care,
[49:05] more probably jobs that involve dealing with the physical world
[49:11] one way or another
[49:12] SPEAKER_01: are going to last.
[49:14] SPEAKER_01: to be seriously automated.
[49:16] And fewer jobs where people sit at a computer and provide value
[49:23] with their mind and
[49:24] SPEAKER_02: their output in the digital world.
[49:26] SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
[49:27] and I would say that moving on from our current society where
[49:33] the basic way that
[49:35] people spend their lives sitting in a cubicle staring at a
[49:39] screen would not be a
[49:41] SPEAKER_01: terrible thing.
[49:43] SPEAKER_01: And
[49:45] SPEAKER_02: When you put it that way, it sounds kind of optimistic.
[49:48] It's funny because you read a certain amount of people that are
[49:50] really worried
[49:51] about what's coming with this technology and what it's going to
[49:55] do to the economy
[49:56] SPEAKER_02: in particular,
[49:57] SPEAKER_02: threatening jobs.
[49:58] SPEAKER_02: And you make it sound less scary.
[50:02] SPEAKER_01: I have,
[50:03] SPEAKER_01: there are so many,
[50:04] SPEAKER_01: I mean,
[50:05] SPEAKER_01: partly maybe I just,
[50:06] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[50:06] SPEAKER_01: have read too much economic history in this.
[50:11] SPEAKER_01: We've just had these predictions over and over again.
[50:13] SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I guess at some point you get lucky or whatever.
[50:21] But you'd be amazed at how many people during the Great
[50:25] Depression were saying,
[50:26] SPEAKER_01: well,
[50:27] the reason that we have mass unemployment is that given the
[50:29] wonders of modern
[50:30] SPEAKER_01: technology,
[50:31] SPEAKER_01: there are no jobs anymore.
[50:33] SPEAKER_01: You know, this is like life.
[50:35] SPEAKER_01: And so we're very far away.
[50:39] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[50:40] SPEAKER_02: So does that make you feel optimistic about the future in general?
[50:47] SPEAKER_01: Oh, no.
[50:47] SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm actually terrified about the future.
[50:49] SPEAKER_01: But AI is a thing that terrifies me.
[50:52] SPEAKER_02: What is a thing that terrifies you?
[50:54] SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, climate change.
[50:57] SPEAKER_01: It's just, you know, that hasn't gone away.
[51:00] This is one of these things where actually we do have a
[51:03] technological miracle.
[51:05] which has made it possible to do a lot to reduce the
[51:10] catastrophic climate change,
[51:12] SPEAKER_01: which is the rise of renewable energy.
[51:14] And we have a government in the United States that now is
[51:16] trying to kill it.
[51:18] SPEAKER_01: You know?
[51:18] SPEAKER_01: Right.
[51:19] SPEAKER_01: And ban wind power, and solar power is next.
[51:22] SPEAKER_01: And so climate change is the biggest existential threat.
[51:26] SPEAKER_01: And then I worry about politics.
[51:28] SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's doubt that the...
[51:36] SPEAKER_01: the inner demons of human nature do keep manifesting.
[51:41] SPEAKER_01: And they do so even when people have...
[51:46] SPEAKER_01: Even if you do all the things I want us to do,
[51:48] which is have a very generous social safety net and universal
[51:53] health care and all
[51:54] SPEAKER_01: of that,
[51:56] SPEAKER_01: still,
[51:56] SPEAKER_01: I mean,
[51:57] SPEAKER_01: we just had...
[51:59] SPEAKER_01: The extreme right is on the rise in Norway.
[52:03] SPEAKER_01: which has got everything.
[52:04] SPEAKER_01: So I'm scared about the... I'm basically scared about planning
[52:12] SPEAKER_01: fascism.
[52:12] SPEAKER_01: I'm sure I can come up with some other things there.
[52:14] SPEAKER_02: But that's also this is actually why I'm the most scared of.
[52:20] SPEAKER_02: And I shouldn't say scared.
[52:22] This is my greatest concern with AI is things like climate
[52:27] change and fascism,
[52:28] because it seems to me that if we're going to solve problems
[52:31] like climate change,
[52:32] if we're going to have functional democracies and move past
[52:35] these authoritarianism
[52:39] SPEAKER_02: we need to be able to communicate.
[52:40] SPEAKER_02: We need to have a consensus reality.
[52:43] SPEAKER_02: We need to have information with integrity.
[52:46] SPEAKER_02: And we've already seen for the last 10,
[52:48] 20 years how social media has damaged our ability to
[52:54] communicate and cooperate.
[52:56] SPEAKER_02: I wrote a post sort of along these lines recently.
[53:00] SPEAKER_02: And I think all that damage that social media has done
[53:04] SPEAKER_02: AI is going to do,
[53:05] SPEAKER_02: but way worse because the same sort of engagement optimizers,
[53:11] the same attention maximizing algorithms that drive social
[53:16] media will drive AI,
[53:18] SPEAKER_02: already are driving AI.
[53:21] SPEAKER_02: And it's going to lead to the same breakdown in public discourse.
[53:26] I'm quite worried that unless we're able to really kind of get
[53:32] a handle on this
[53:34] technology and make it serve the public good instead of just
[53:37] the profits of a few
[53:38] SPEAKER_02: companies,
[53:39] SPEAKER_02: that this technology will work.
[53:42] will really make it very difficult for people at large on
[53:47] national or international
[53:48] SPEAKER_02: levels or even at municipal or state levels to come together,
[53:53] SPEAKER_02: have a productive conversation,
[53:55] SPEAKER_02: identify problems,
[53:56] SPEAKER_02: come to solutions,
[53:58] SPEAKER_02: and do what modern society demands people to do to solve these problems.
[54:04] SPEAKER_02: So this is where I'm the most concerned about AI.
[54:11] SPEAKER_01: Well,
[54:12] SPEAKER_01: yeah,
[54:13] SPEAKER_01: I would say that,
[54:16] SPEAKER_01: again,
[54:17] SPEAKER_01: AI is just ratcheting up something that was already happening.
[54:23] SPEAKER_01: I mean,
[54:26] SPEAKER_01: social media was already,
[54:28] SPEAKER_01: in many ways,
[54:29] SPEAKER_01: what we're concerned about,
[54:30] SPEAKER_01: which is amplifying the craziness.
[54:33] SPEAKER_01: And before that, there was talk radio.
[54:39] SPEAKER_01: And before that,
[54:42] What we really in some ways need as a society is we need Walter
[54:48] Cronkite back.
[54:49] SPEAKER_01: We need trusted gatekeepers for information.
[54:52] SPEAKER_01: And AI didn't destroy that.
[54:57] SPEAKER_01: A lot of other things destroyed.
[54:58] SPEAKER_01: But AI probably makes it harder to ever recreate anything like that.
[55:03] SPEAKER_02: I think that that's right.
[55:07] SPEAKER_02: I might push back a little bit.
[55:09] SPEAKER_02: I don't know that.
[55:11] the right gatekeepers will solve the problem because Walter
[55:17] Cronkite in the age of
[55:18] SPEAKER_02: television also had his big problems.
[55:23] I would argue that television made public discourse a lot worse
[55:25] than it was before
[55:27] SPEAKER_02: television existed.
[55:28] SPEAKER_02: The invention of the telegraph and the photograph
[55:32] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[55:46] SPEAKER_02: of technology being used to facilitate robust democracy.
[55:52] SPEAKER_02: I'm really inspired by Taiwan.
[55:53] SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've ever looked at Taiwanese democracy.
[55:58] SPEAKER_02: One of my heroes is the first minister of digital affairs of Taiwan.
[56:04] audrey tang who implemented these incredible systems digital
[56:09] technology social
[56:10] media even you could call it except it was not social media set
[56:14] up by a business
[56:15] and driven by advertising it was social media set up by a
[56:19] state-run ministry to
[56:22] facilitate public discourse and by all these measures taiwanese
[56:26] democracy is
[56:28] SPEAKER_02: stronger than almost any in the world um and so i i
[56:32] SPEAKER_02: You know,
[56:32] SPEAKER_02: I feel like we have the capability,
[56:35] SPEAKER_02: we have the technology to communicate and cooperate,
[56:40] SPEAKER_02: but we're not using it.
[56:41] SPEAKER_02: Right now, it's just being used to make money.
[56:43] SPEAKER_01: Oh,
[56:43] SPEAKER_01: you could easily imagine a sort of,
[56:46] SPEAKER_01: and I'm just doing this on the fly,
[56:48] SPEAKER_01: but you could imagine a chatbot that was run as a public utility,
[56:55] SPEAKER_01: kind of like the BBC in its work.
[57:00] chat USG,
[57:00] sort of US government,
[57:01] that would be...
[57:02] Chat USG,
[57:03] that's funny.
[57:08] SPEAKER_01: Trained to avoid factual errors,
[57:13] SPEAKER_01: to give a fair hearing,
[57:15] SPEAKER_01: you could easily,
[57:17] SPEAKER_01: in our political environment,
[57:20] SPEAKER_01: no one would even,
[57:21] SPEAKER_01: it's completely outside the bounds of anything that might
[57:25] SPEAKER_01: But yeah,
[57:27] SPEAKER_01: if you actually think about the base of this stuff,
[57:32] then there actually is why this technology couldn't be
[57:38] harnessed to actually
[57:39] SPEAKER_01: improve public discourse.
[57:42] SPEAKER_01: One of the things that,
[57:44] SPEAKER_01: I don't know whether this is a nightmare scenario or hopeful,
[57:49] SPEAKER_01: is that there is the
[57:55] SPEAKER_01: The sludge apocalypse,
[57:58] where more and more of the data that AI is trained on is
[58:02] actually itself generated
[58:03] SPEAKER_01: by AI.
[58:06] SPEAKER_01: Into a stinking pile of garbage.
[58:11] SPEAKER_01: But anyway.
[58:12] SPEAKER_02: The slot problem.
[58:13] SPEAKER_02: All right, well, we're almost to time.
[58:15] SPEAKER_02: I know you've got errands to run.
[58:17] SPEAKER_02: Could you leave us on a note of...
[58:21] SPEAKER_02: optimism.
[58:22] SPEAKER_02: I grant your concerns about the future,
[58:26] SPEAKER_02: but I'm curious,
[58:27] in your moments where you need to find some reason to be
[58:30] hopeful about the future,
[58:31] SPEAKER_02: what do you think about it?
[58:33] SPEAKER_01: Wow.
[58:35] SPEAKER_01: Food has gotten an incredible amount better.
[58:40] SPEAKER_01: I'm asking food anyway.
[58:43] SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, look, I said climate change.
[58:49] SPEAKER_01: The thing is, the United States
[58:50] SPEAKER_01: appears to be deciding to give up.
[58:54] SPEAKER_01: But we are not the world.
[58:56] And the fact of the matter is that the green technology
[59:00] revolution is happening.
[59:02] SPEAKER_01: Trump is trying to stop it from happening here,
[59:04] SPEAKER_01: but we are not the dominant player in the world in the way we once were.
[59:12] And I think there's a pretty good chance that we will manage to
[59:16] save civilization
[59:17] SPEAKER_01: despite ourselves.
[59:20] SPEAKER_01: And also, we are not the world politically.
[59:25] SPEAKER_01: This retrogression that's happening here politically,
[59:33] SPEAKER_01: first of all,
[59:34] SPEAKER_01: I will not accept that it's permanent.
[59:36] SPEAKER_01: We will fight it.
[59:38] SPEAKER_01: And lots of other places have also got...
[59:44] SPEAKER_01: But I think the biggest,
[59:48] the renewable energy revolution is still the single thing that
[59:52] I think has done
[59:53] SPEAKER_01: most to make me feel less doomed than I did a few years ago.
[1:00:00] SPEAKER_02: That makes a lot of sense.
[1:00:01] SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you for your time, Paul.
[1:00:03] I really love the chance to get to talk to you and hope we get
[1:00:06] to do it again sometime.
[1:00:07] SPEAKER_01: Hey, take care, though.
[1:00:09] SPEAKER_02: All right.
[1:00:09] SPEAKER_02: Bye-bye.

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