All right. Boom. What's up, everyone? Welcome to simulation. I'm your host on sake. On. Very excited to be talking about who gets what and why. What's the future and why it's upto us and so much more. We have coined the oracle of Silicon Valley joining us. Tim. Oh, Riley. Hello. Hi, how are you? Thanks for that introduction.

Thinks they're coming onto the show. Tim O'Reilly is so awesome. We're so grateful to have you here to Morelli's been 40 years in Silicon Valley, doing all different types of work with O'Reily media, his company, everything from conference producing to book, publishing, investing, wrestling with the hardest questions. Who gets what and why. What's the future, why it's up to us. I'm so grateful that you came onto our show. Thank you, Tim. Well,

thanks for having me. How I should say that this phrase that I've been using a lot in my talks lately who gets what and why is actually the title of someone else's book? Al Roth, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for market design, is, is really somebody who's given the tool. I think of ideas as tools for thinking there's really helped shape the way that I'm looking at our current world, in which we used to think that there was this free market that helped determine who gets what and why. But we've increasingly moved into a world where there are algorithms designed by companies that are shaping the choices we make. And really, the design of markets is this new field, you know, because when we were, people talk about the market as if it's one thing. But in fact, we're now in markets that are shaped and designed by, for example,

people at Facebook. People at Google, people on Wall Street on. In fact, many of the great political battles are battles to shape the rules of markets, and those markets are fundamentally mechanisms for allocation. And what Alice worked did that so important it was, He demonstrated that you can actually intervene in markets and make them work better. So he got a surprise for working on markets where money is not a factor. So kidney transplant marketplaces, you know, I mean, if you you know it's pretty hard you have to get a person needs when a person has one to give. At the same time, they have to have matching blood types, all these complicated factors.

And he said, Well, if we can increase trust in the market that I could give you a kidney today and I'll get one for the person that I love who I am not a match for later. You know, you can actually create longer chains s Oh, yeah, here was ah, looking bunch of mechanisms for how do you change the trust dynamics in this pretty major thing that people would do in their lives that has you literally life changing benefits. He also looked at things like college admissions, law clerks matching up with judges and how these markets can go awry. And so, in my book, one of things that I tried to look at was the evolution of algorithmic marketplaces. And I've continued to think about that since I published it. And you can kind of see when they go right, how they could be this incredibly powerful tool that helps us manage things an enormous scale and speed.

You think about Google literally having a search across trillions of Web pages on find, you know, more or less what we want. You think about Amazon, where they've got 600 million products. Excuse. You know, it's a store of unbelievable skill. You could not do it. We also see how it goes wrong. You know, Facebook was like, Hey, we'll just show people more of what they respond to and get engaged with, and that went badly wrong. It was gay mobile,

and so clue. There's a market design problem which they're wrestling with today. And, of course, in my book I kind of go through that sequence and then I try to make the case. And yes, our economy is also one of those today one of those vast algorithmic systems with designers on with rules that may not be the best rules, and that can go wrong and make the allocations that seem well, they're just the market. That's just the way the market works. And what we have to understand is the market is a human artifact designed with rules that favor some people over others. And the whole game of politics is around shaping those power dynamics and those rules. And so ultimately, I guess a lot of it I've gotten obsessed with over the last 56 years is taking the lessons that I've learned in my career and technology and saying, Oh, how were they playing out today in our society?

Okay, Tim, as you can obviously tell, has such a wealth of knowledge that he's going just giving us this massive picture. And I love it, and I want to try and dive into this through Tim's eyes. Tim has been here from the dot even pre dot com days, doing book publishing of things like this open catalog of all of the World Wide Web all the way to, you know, doing the dot com doing Web two point. Oh, doing the mobile social doing the the open source movement, actually proliferating that as a common phrase around the world and inspiring people with that now going through this transition with with Internet of things and with data and being right here at the cutting edge, again teaching it to people around the world. And so not only have you been here doing that for 40 years, but now you're painting out this really beautiful picture, which you write about in your book.

I highly highly recommend reading What's the future? Please, please check that out the links in the bio. Read it, read it, read it shared with people. And let's let's unpack this. Now you say you gave us a couple thoughts here. One of them is this algorithms. So algorithms, let's say, 40 years ago were much less involved in the way that we see information in the way that it influences political elections, All this type of stuff and now the couple handfuls of people that control the way that two billion human animals see what happens on YouTube or what happens on any of 10 cents platforms are across the world. This is becoming more and more of ah, do we come in with the regulation? As you said,

I'm are there ways to come in with regulations that make the markets better? And that's a very interesting point that I think, you know, we'll end up getting, too. But I think the most important principle here is that there has been a tremendous amount over the last 40 years of wealth concentration that has occurred for the benefit of the one percenters. And meanwhile, the median income people in the low SCS people have had a stagnation where me and a lot of the other millennials and Gen Z, as you're very familiar with with Children have. What do we have? We have a life outcome that is projected to be worse than our parents, and this is that this may be supplemented by things like having a new strategy of capitalism. 2.0, when that does things slightly differently. And so this is where this conversation comes into play. What is the sheriff, sir?

Yeah, yeah, well, I think the key part of the title actually came from my wife, Jan Palka, who is the founder of the nonprofit called Code for America. And I say the book will be called W T. F. What's the future? And she said, I should be What's the future and why it's up to us? Because that idea that the future is something that we shape is is very central, in fact, that it is, ah, designed thing again. There's a lot of contingencies and a lot that,

um can surprise us. But so many parts of it are shaped by decisions that humans make, and so the idea that we have to understand better what are some of the dynamics that you talk about and make better choices, I think is central to my thinking. So let me just expand a little bit on this idea of inequality by kind of going back to the notion of algorithmic systems and what we learned from Google and Facebook and other systems. And that is that the systems typically have way who call an optimization function often referred to as an objective function in the book, actually referred to it as the fitness function because of it gives you a neat tie to a field of evolutionary biology. Just fitness landscapes, Um, but this this thing that you're trying to optimize for And of course, what fitness landscapes remind us of is that you can have a fitness peak that is not actually the highest peak, and you can only get off that peak by going down into the valley to get up to another peak. So that's why history often has these peaks and valleys because you can't get to the you can see this better future, but you can't get there simply by continuing up onto the right, which is why the Silicon Valley, in a millennial fantasy of the singularity.

I think it's so wrong Is that yet it Smoothes out all the curves, you know, and it's not. It's not how it actually happens. Yes, even if you believe that there is, ah, long term progress, there could be steep valleys in between the next increment of progress. She like to say to Rikers, while you do know that the, uh s Sofia and Istanbul was the largest building in the world for for 1000 years, you know, that's a long time toe, Have a body of knowledge teau lose it, and then the only slowly gain it back.

And so I think that we you know, I'm sorry I'm backing up a little bit. So this optimization function, um you know, when we look at this, you know all this worrying about the 1% wealth inequality. That was something we designed into our economy starting in about the late seventies early eighties. Because if I look in my book, I I'm really only an amateur historian, but I look at some economic turning points, and if you look at this, we had in the twenties, you know, we had this also this massive inequality which eventually led to a great Depression. World war, great depression.

Things got pretty bad. And in particular, they made a set of choices after the first World War, which was, you know, that Victor's punished the losers. They did not treat the returning veterans well. And so then you have this wonderful example after World War Two, where the U. S in particular made better choices, they basically said, Oh, wrong idea. You know, we're not gonna punish the losers. We're gonna build them up.

You know, you have the Marshall Plan. You have really the rebuilding of Europe, Not just the rebuilding of our allies, the rebuilding of our former enemies. And you also had this, you know, basically embrace as the fundamental optimization function of the economy. Full employment. You had, you know, things like the G I, Bill, you had, you know, money.

You returning veterans, we gotta get them either to go to school started business, you know, we buy a house. You know, the government had this intervention and the really the objective function of the economy was full employment because they remembered what happened after the first World War. And then, you know, as often happens, you know, you have an objective function and it runs its course. It does the thing that it was trying to do, and people just don't adapt fast enough. You know, the roads kind of winding and they keep going in a straight line so that we said, Well,

this has lead to inflation. You know, we have this big problem. We need to actually have the different objective function They picked one, which was corporate profits. And guess what? It actually did make the economy better. For a while, it cracked the back of inflation. Things were pretty good for a while, but then Iran's course, it was like, Holy cow. You know, this is like this, you know,

a value. Humans. That's right. Where now we're kind of in coming up for you. Way too late for a big reevaluation. So in my book, I kind of make you know the analogy. And again, I'm kind of going back and forth between these technological systems that we're dealing with and what I've learned from them and then looking at things like the economy. But across both. Then you have this wonderful mythology that matches both of those patterns. And that is, you know, the story of genies from Arabian mythology. You get three wishes, you know,

You always know they go wrong, right? You asked for something. It's what you think you want. But what you get is what you asked for, not what you actually wanted. And you know, like Facebook is such a great example of that and such a way to see Oh, yeah, we can design a system with the best of intentions. And again, you know, maybe, you know, people a lot of people like a rag on Facebook and go, They were really a bad actor from now.

I think they were. You know, I've spent a lot of time with Mark, and I think they were really trying to do something good and interesting and it went wrong. And he has the thing that I would say is that so important? Every beaten on Facebook and I go, they're actually pivoting faster in responsible. We screwed up. They're trying really hard for a company that size. You compare that to fossil fuel companies going? Yeah. Oh, on auto companies. So we screwed up. It was like, No,

we're in where 50 60 70 year denial phase tobacco companies denial face pharma companies denial phase. It's like, you know, tack for all that it's screwed up on is actually way more responsive and going, Whoa. We got to really try to fix this. They haven't succeeded yet, But, you know, I look around these companies. They're all trying to keep up appearances about it, But it's not just public appearances. They're deeply committed, and they're trying new technological architectures. They're changing their business models, you know,

not away from the tension economy. No, not yet. Entirely. But there were working out, you know? And yeah, employees, air work, walking out. Not for better wages, but actually for a better moral stance about what their company works on. Yes, it is. I think if the rest of our society were as responsive, you know,

some of the challenges we face, you know, we'd see Wall Street banks going. Whoa, we end again. You see people starting to talk about it. You know where, uh,

Tech generates faster than the fossil fuel industry After the tobacco big farm. Uh

00 yeah. And again, on the street is starting to you know people saying, Hey, we really have to take the social responsibility seriously, you know, we're screwing up, you know, we are starting to see that move, but I think we have to put it all in this broader context that, yes, the choices we make in our business is the choices we make in society could be different. Yeah, that's really that the heart of what the big lesson I get from take from tech is this a design system and a better design can have better outcomes. And and we have to learn from what we did wrong as quickly as possible and keep

pivoting. Yes, so let's talk about that code because this is kind of what you know, What we're talking about is civilizations code. We're talking about the way that we've designed the way that we engage with each other, that we engage with the products and service. Is that Gerald all that kind of stuff And the the conversation that we were having earlier that I want us to circle back to is this big history perspective of society that we went to 200,000 years to get a 1,000,000,000 people, Then it took 200 years to get seven billion Maur pl than exponential technology has all hockey stick up at Moore's Law on every single genomex response in every every single way that is now permeating every every field. It's adding these layers of complexity to our world that we didn't prepare for. We're some kind of our code hasn't caught up right. And so now it's up to us to determine what is capitalism to point owes code. What is the code of potentially adding regulation to some of the algorithmic bureaucracies that are occurring to make it more equitable? What are the lines of code that need to be added to wealth inequality to make it better for uplifting all humans into the next generation? So this is what I kind of like to hear your thoughts on the new code.

All right, well, I guess the first thing I would say is of the new code is the old code. In some sense, I think we've always known what our objective ought to be. You know, we've been working on it back since the first legal code code that's recorded the code of Hammurabi Eye. You know where we're kind of trying to figure out What does it mean to be good to each other? What does it mean to be fair? And so, you know, we're in some sense we keep, you know, I I think with sometimes with quotes, I keep thinking this wonderful live from Wallace Stevens, the poet. He says we keep coming back and back to the real.

You know, we keep coming back and back to this fundamental thing that we are, you know, civilization progresses when we take care of each other. I mean, the primitive, you know, impulse of the other is enemy is, you know, something We've been working, you know,

through millennia to get better. And in fact, you know, you've

all Noah Harari does a fabulous job on SAPIENs of retailing, the history of humanity through the story of what are the mechanisms for trust at greater and greater scale. You know, it's actually a lot of it is he comes back to this story telling, you know, So how do we create? And of course, this is something I have actually loved for years because this was my favorite poet. While Stevens actually talked about that you know, you had a wonderful idea that we were searching for the supreme fiction that effectively is were aesthetic visions that shaped, uh, our relationship with each other. And we were trying to sell each other on on the future. And so but her. I really captured it beautifully in the history of humanity. And I think we are now looking for what story will actually help 789 billion people to survive together, you know, because it's not just our tribe, you know, it's not just,

you know, hey have pieces. As you call it, you call it the Jigsaw.

Yeah, it's like a jigsaw puzzle on the table, and we're trying to see the

pattern. I've been trying to figure out how to arrange them into a story that will bind together humanity under

the unity well, and I think that the, you know, the pieces haven't all arrived, but here's what I see. That's, uh, that's really powerful one. Uh, we have an economy that's clearly off the rails in a variety was in one. Is this this axis of inequality, but probably even bigger. One is the axis of climate change and the risks that come with that and we're slowly waking up to that, and we're just gonna have to change the way we do things more sustainably. But there's another s. So I think about the future as a set of vectors. On the vector,

of course, is a direction plus a quantity, right. Some of the vectors of pushing harder oh are faster and some and they're coming in different directions, but they sum up into the future. And so so it's okay. So we're running into the endgame of a certain kind of consumer culture because, you know, as we have, you know, more and more people wanting to have a lifestyle equivalent to what the, you know, the West has had, You know, we're not just sort of going from, you know,

a couple of 1,000,000,000 people toe nine billion people or whatever, uh, whatever that we're gonna peek at. We're also going to nine billion people who all want to use 100 times as many. Resource is. So it's a CZ. If we had gone to 90 billion and clearly, you know, there's a lot of things that we know is this really the best way to do it that basically our economy should run on making more and more stuff and encouraging people to throw it away. And, you know, because companies have to keep growing, their rule is keep growing and that making more money. It's like this, this machine that's running, you know,

faster and faster and faster. And for what are we actually happier? You know, if you say no, we're actually trying to optimize for human happiness and human happiness is actually maybe, in fact, so anyway said, Is that a factor? That is this amazing factor, which is that one of the reasons that money took on such a powerful role in our society is it is in fact, one of those shared mythologies that enables trust. It's fungible. ITT's this powerful way to get people to cooperate and for a long time, this idea in the market waas that effectively price signaling was in fact the guiding factor of the invisible hand. You know, people say,

well, how much will you pay for this? And depending on how much supply there is, the price goes down or up, you know, supply and demand equalize a ts some magical crossing point That's the market price. So and yet here is starting to be evidence, amazing evidence that we can run incredibly efficient markets without money. And one of the ones that I like to point people to its Google Go Wait a minute. Google makes tons of money, right? But if you look at it, their primary market is matching people up with the information that they're looking for. And they used hundreds of factors of big data on algorithmic systems and a I to say, Oh, this is what you're really looking for,

right? Wearing one of those factors is money. They separated out money into a separate market place of advertising, which, which was effectively for a long time, was really just an absolute sidecar. It literally was a sidebar, you know, down down the side. Now I think they've really changed that. And I think they've kind of lost the plot because this was the genius that they actually had a market that was not dominated by money. This was the breakthrough. And I think Amazon Same thing back when I first started your style. Yeah, well, yeah,

we'll open source is sort of another example of this but like, you know, back when I was first working out Web to Toto and the idea of collective intelligence, I used to contrast amazon dot com, which at that point was just a bookseller online bookseller with bars and noble. And I said, Look, here's Barnes and Noble You know, when I do a search, look what I find. The first thing I find is the stuff that they've gotten people advertised for. S O where I go to Amazon used to use my Java script book is an example which was widely regarded. This is the best book on Java script. David Flanagan's Java script defendant guide and it came up first on Amazon had the most reviews, had the most positive reviews. It wasn't the cheapest,

you know, but it was the one that every said This is the best and that's what Amazon showed you is the first result for the search. And, you know, Barnes and Noble was like, Well, here's some book that some publisher paid is called for And I said, This is why Amazon is gonna win. Now look at how Amazon is losing the plot. The fastest part of the growing part of the business is their advertising business. And now when you go to Amazon, you no longer see the best product up front. There they are trying to promote stuff that advantages them. And so again, part of what I try to do in my book was that kind of talk about some of these principles and say, Look,

when companies forget these things that actually give them advantage, they tend to lose out over time. And I think we're really this is a baby. Maybe in my next book is really about algorithmic monopolies and how they go wrong, because I think both Google and Amazon are starting to go down the slippery slope of losing what made them great and forgetting that they were actually in service of the of. They were a matching marketplace that really was in service of making the best match, and they moved away from that to being analogue, arrhythmic marketplace. That makes the match that makes them the most money. So they've kind of there losing their place as an exemplar. But that being said they still show us this ability with massive amounts of data to build better marketplaces and to build better systems that decide who gets what and why and this great examples in the environmental space. Carla Gomez has something called the Cornell has something he thinks carnal semi dio something called the Institute for Computational Sustainability. And they take a lot more factors into account they work with. She was doing some work with the Brazilian power company. It's like, Okay,

let's look at your power requirements The cost of building dams, you know, on these various tributaries of the Amazon, how many people you're going to displace, what the ecological impact. Let's take more factors into account and they were end up just like Google. Using these 200 factors were able to make better recommendations that the old things that said, We'll just show him what Whatever people are willing to pay the highest price for

taking all the take,

all the factors into account. They were actually getting better economic results as well. Totally same thing they did not see another project or people that she was associated with the project where they were timing and release of water for the California rice farmers to the time when the migrating birds were coming through. That worked out better for both the farmers to the past seven years. Yes, it is all these cool pieces of work where I think we are now for the first time, building tools that allow us to actually invent a new economy. And it's not that it's capitalism. 2.0, it's something profoundly different. It's simply a different way of organizing

the code of civilization. The code of civilization. Yes, yes. So I think that whatever we end up calling it whatever it ends up being, I like thinking about it as an update in Koda's. Now we've been referencing several times and throughout what we've you know, your look segment of what you just unpacked. What continues to come to mind is where we agree on are making this new map. Yeah, this new way to help people see the world. And I think one of the central principles of it is when when society evolved so quickly and you just see, populations just skyrocket, an exponential technology skyrocket, and institutions and humans aren't able to keep up the way that they're valued in the labor markets and everything that you just see so many Oops, moments happen at once. And when we walk down our beautiful city of San Francisco and we see such a staggering dichotomy between the haves and the have nots right on our primary street market Street that you see that this is about the seeds,

the rotten seeds that haven't gotten the nutrients they need because the social fabric wasn't programmed to help make sure that those nutrients didn't have trauma, that they had the loving, caring mother and father. And they're real in their family and our upbringing that they had the food and water and shelter necessities that they needed to have it. That that we went up so fast our social fabric wasn't able to make sure that the seeds didn't have that they didn't get run and that they had the right nutrients. And so this is kind of this recurring theme is that when you have this blitz scaling doddle this model of the hair versus the model of the tortoise, the slow down and think maybe we have 100 million humans on the planet and we decide that 1000 years ago that we slow down and we think, How do we make sure that every single one of these minds gets to their maximal, creative flourishing that we build trust in the way geo politically that we build trust and we cooperate so that we don't have the tens of millions of people that die in wars 100 million. Elena will stand. Why? Why? You don't acknowledge that these people that Aaron trauma these people that are set up to be in compromising situations, all the problems that we have among us. I don't understand why you don't acknowledge that. That's also part of the capitalistic system,

you know, in order to if you have private prisons, you need to create the criminal. I just want to acknowledge that, you know, you talk like, you know, we have to fix something. If it's not broke, there's a reason I just want to throw that out. Sorry, you're absolutely right. We not Wilson. Now, Ron, you're indicating what the current system exists today and how it's structured, and that is correct. At the same time, we're discussing what looking back and thinking about howto act as a tortoise and slow down and think as society evolves can prevent things like that from happening And that is one of one of the reasons the show's called simulation is because you have to be able to think abstractly about how society could have evolved to be Maur beautiful place that enabled all of these seats to flourish

at their fullest potential. I guess I would just say we can only live life forwards and so we have to go forward from where we are and I guess a lot experiments important. You know, I hear that. But let me just say a couple things. One I think, First of all, we have to be able to think in scenarios and possibilities. Thought experiments is exactly right. So I want to give you two. And one is John Maynard Keynes. Uh, you know, economic possibilities for our grandchildren written, really It the, you know, as the Great Depression was unfolding,

we said, This is a temporary hiccup. You know, we have the means through human ingenuity to make everybody prosperous, right? And that is in fact, I think is in the realm of possibility. Uh, and there are things that we need to debug in our system that air causing that not to work, but I also think that there is that often gets paired with this idea that somehow we have to slow down that we have to, uh, you have a very different kind of society, and I think that may not be necessarily, you know, the back to the land. I mean,

one of my all time favorite books is a utopian novel from that was written in the thirties called Islandia. It's about a land with a slower lifestyle, and I lived in the country. I have a lot of friends who kind of went back to the land during the you know, the seventies and so on.

So you just a closer connection to Earth,

but yet made maybe, But I also just want to hold out something else. And that's something that Jeff Bezos said recently, which I really thought was good. And I argue with my so more hippie friends, which is he was defending why he thinks we need to invest in space. And he said, I I want humanity to continue being an energy intensive civilization or the having energy intensive civilization, So it's not that we necessarily have to slow down the goal of equity. Ah, and fairness does not have to go with whoa way have to have fewer people.

We have to have. Yeah, you know, you can have tens of billions, right? Yeah.

The issue is like we said, Okay, we have a bunch of conditions to satisfy, you know, in some countries are doing a better job of it than others. You know, you look at, for example, how China has brought way more people into service is all the The world has gotten wealthier. I go a lot. You know, it's not the result of of market capitalism. It's also a bunch of very aggressive men, very strong intervention in one very large economy. You know, where they have actually done a lot of very effective planning, too.

And that planning has been driven by the goal. You know, they're they're afraid that if they don't make a better life for their people, they're screwed, you know? So they have been on a quest for how do we make this better for for people? And we kind of looked down on, you know, a lot about China from our well, our great system. You know, our system has lost the plot when it's was the land of opportunity for people. And it's no longer we've kind of changed the DNA of America. I think that the issue. So I guess the issue is less slowing down andMe or like, are we satisfying the goals of our best Selves to basically lift everybody up?

And that's not so. Everybody should be equal and get the same outcome so dilly told. But there has to be opportunity. And that has to be, uh, you know, I really like on a radar. This is book winners take all in the basic message that who has, I mean is you create a lot of waves with maybe sometimes being overaggressive. But this fundamental idea, it's like it's not enough to say what we have this great system that's made us really rich and will give something back. He's like, no, do less harm, you know? Yeah,

it was like an S O. That one of the fundamental market failures in our current system is that we have a whole bunch of externalities that we never take into account, Which is why I keep coming back to this ability of algorithmic Big data A I systems to take more factors into account because our current system, you know, again maybe if we had a true market economy as opposed to one where you know market power means that the people who were in power get, you know, keep giving themselves more more of the pie. If we had a system where we were really saying No, we really are trying to take into account as many factors as possible to get the right answer. We've begun. Oh, homeless is clearly a problem. Oh, well, what are some of the problem? We're not building enough houses. Why? We're not building a house because the people who already have them and have the money don't want more houses can give

you some ideas. Let's give a warm like, Okay, well, here's some ideas to the coat. Okay. Okay. Because the notion that we're moving too fast is simultaneously potentially true. Needs to be paired. Maybe with a little bit of the We're not moving fast enough. Another Sure, Sure. So we so lopsided. Okay? Yes. Market designed. So?

So we may. We may if we take the time to slow down, connect to our hearts, connect to other humans connect to Earth, connect to the unity that we are here. So blessed. Have 100 billion humans. Build the civilization before us and slow down to that mentality and be with that. Then pick up on the areas that need Maur acceleration, potentially rewrite some of the code that needs to be augmented. Thio B'more of that unity mindset. Let's say that kind of stuff. I want to give you these examples. Let's hear what Tim O'Reilly starts are about these examples. Okay, we have people like Lorenzo de Medici from 15 hundreds and Florence,

that patron Michelangelo da Vinci, and enabled the renaissance of art to occur. We have things like conspicuous consumption that's roaring out of control, where people are purchasing status symbols of diamonds and Ferraris, and seventh houses and yachts and jets and everything because called conspicuous consumption, culture has become out of control and the notion that the social fabric isn't able to correct itself on time to understand that may becoming like Medici and actually going and patron ing instead of buying the seventh house that I Congar Oh, and give 10 2050 entrepreneurs and artists 1000 bucks a month for them to unleash their creative flourishing more. We haven't changed the culture fully to that. Well, I guess I like. Well,

my thought on that was first of all, um, Lorenzo de Medici did a lot of harm in accumulating his power. And yes, he was patron of wonderful art. Say, in fact, you look at all I mean, you have to have both of these perspectives, and we kind of have to equalize all of the works. Worlds of great works of art were funded through inequality. So there's something about inequality that clearly, you know, uh, has create creates things of lasting value. It is when it gets too much, right,

And it's also not just too much when it's, um I guess the thing that I would say is, uh, I don't I I think the real opportunity before us is not to have lots of lots of people become patrons. I think the opportunity before us is to do without money. That's the real endgame. Is this a decentralization? Really, It really is. Can we find other ways to manage markets that are looking to optimize human flourishing? And there's a lot of of hacks that air bit by bit, Getting

us there it was Straighten some model for

Well, okay, let's talk about the carrying economy, right? Yeah. There is an argument to be made that many innovations actually start with rich people. How very like, Say, if you want to see the future, just look at what rich people do today. If, in fact, technology is making us richer. This is This is not to take away from my fundamental, deep, passionate belief that we have a deep flaw in our algorithms for allocation of who gets what and why. And we need to improve them.

But we are basically creating the future for rich people. What are the rich people have they have their kids are in school with? You have very small class sizes. They have super good health care, right? They have the ability to enjoy the good things of life. They have potentially lots of leisure. They now have things like when they have a kid and they have a job, they get, you know, super extended. You know, parental leave await. You know, we're effectively for rich people were funding the carrying economy, right?

You know the company goes. Oh, yeah, sure. You know, Mark Zuckerberg. You know your CEO, but you can You can take three months off time to contemplate. And so the question is, how do we bring that down? So everyone gets the stuff that the rich people get, Okay. And that's sort

of a p a how how how do we? Well, I think it's like the baseline keeps going.

I love I love Kai Fu Lee was the author of A I Superpowers has a great riff in his book about this, and it's a version of the robot tax idea. Like, you know, I can't say let the machines do all the work, you know, like great, you know, let humans do the human things, you know, spending time. You and I are doing this. You know, this thing? We're having this conversation. That's a human thing. Machines can't take that.

I couldn't give you a robot to have this conversation with you on my behalf. Yeah, uh, well, at that point there people here, that's a that's a that's a whole other thing, But yeah, that's all you care, taking education, all these wonderful things that we all enjoy in the our precious to us we need more time for And how do we make that available to everyone but only his idea of the of the calls of the social investment stipend. He says you tax the robots. Yes, automate away everything on. Then you tax the robots and use it to fund human centred activities, you know, and you do it through hacks like saying,

Oh, yeah, we have this generous childcare program. Oh, we have this generous elder care program. Oh, we actually give people a stipend when they do community work, it's like they were going on profit.

How does the tax on robot work become implemented into human

again? A. Some point some country will put into place A policy like this is not like you. Look at what happened. We didn't used to have an income tax. And then we did. We didn't used to have a Social Security, and then we did. I was talking about the U. S. Here. We didn't used to have Medicare, and then we did. Somebody basically says, Oh, here's a revenue source that we will use to fund this the A redistribution. It's a market design issue again. You know, the tax system is the primary sort of operating system in many ways of a society, so that

that's not it is how as a basic

income. So that is No, I think, I think, the basic income. I mean, there's a lot right about it, but no, I think that there's this. Certainly, it's it's an attractive idea, but I'm not sure it's

right. It seems like a Band Aid

on something. It seems like a band. I do think that the way we're more likely to get there. I mean, because we do. There's a lot that really works about the market economy

behind. Is the robot tax not quite like that? Well,

so how do you use it If you basically you say okay, we're gonna we're gonna automate things, and then we're gonna tax the robots, and then we're going to use it for basic income. You know, maybe we, uh, don't get there. You know, I think that there is something that says we want to use again. A lot of what we've taxed yourselves for in the past are things that are around this human fabric, you know, education. You know, That's one of the really hard, part heartening stories that I kind of go back and bring in the history books. Yeah,

why did we get Universal Primary Education? America University, Universal High School? You know, it was actually through people going, Wow, we need the tax ourselves so our kids will have a better future And I love Bob Putnam got the author of Bowling Alone Other books who said in this meeting I was in Once he said, You said all the advances our society have come when we have taxed ourselves too help other people's Children. And I think that that willingness to say we're going to give something up in order to make a fairer society and we're going to write rules for our economy, for our algorithmic system, we're gonna write rules where the fundamental outcome we are looking for is human flourishing and hear things that are currently under served. And I guess I would just say that I think that, you know, I I foresee a future, and this is where I kind of come back. Just by analogy to this thes to markets that make up Google the market without money in the market with money,

and you can imagine a robot world with money where the robots are transacting around money and then they're supporting a human world without money in the same way that Google searches like, Hey, you really want You don't want the thing that somebody's trying to sell you want? The thing that that you know we've been able to determine is the thing. I'm really looking for. The best answer. You know, the thing that's really gonna delight me. And and so we have this beginning this sort of hint at this, you know, kind of started Star Trek future. Or, you know, you have banks, culture novels where there's just like people are supported by the machines in human activity

with the high tax that enables the carrying

economy. Yes, that's right. That's right, that effectively you tax. The machines were sorry, really, that you tax the machines, the machines, they're just doing the work with just the right code. This is I think we I think we can get there. We'll get there. You know, most earthly things get there through hacks, although periodically there's a chance to rewrite the code more profoundly. You know you saw that with the American Revolution. Hey,

saw that with, you know, the new deal. You saw that with, you know, you know, the great society. I don't No, I think we've you're seeing right now in China in a very profound way there where they're writing. Ah, whole new set of rules. And I do think that there's a good argument to be made that for all the things that they're going to get wrong, you know, China is way Maur further ahead of us in saying, How do we use all of the gifts of technology to build a society that takes the best of capitalism but also recognizes that if we don't create opportunity for our people were screwed and they move faster than we have on things like climate change? You know,

all these things that if you had predicted that, you know, 20 years ago you would you you know? Yep. You've been a real prophet.

This all of this conversation about how to best update civilizations code moving forward, why it's up to us and figuring out you know who's gonna own what? Why, Yeah, And could it potentially be a way to make the code work for all eight billion of us to understand the more that we invest into raising the baseline, the MBE or there will be created, flourishing them or there will be over. All

right, there's a word I want to pick out of what you said. Who's gonna own what? Because that's why I love Al Ross title. It's like who gets what? Why? And his study was markets without money. You don't and this really comes up. I was thinking about this because of a wonderful essay that Sam Lesson just wrote in the information familiar that publication. But he wrote about the idea of people owning their data, and he was like, Worry about what you ask for because you're taking, uh, a concept from a world where of exclusive exclusivity. You know, if I give you this thing, I no longer have it totally.

Whereas with ideas, I give it to you. We both have it. The value is different rules if everybody has and it becomes value, some depending on being with different rules for things and for these ideas and this creative economy and saw it. And so the question really as it may not have to do with ownership. Ownership may not be the point. If we live in a world who gets one right, yeah, if we live in a world where you know it's much more around experiences, for example, it's like, Hey, what experiences do you have access

to Do you have access to a myriad of experiences that everybody else has access to? And then you get to pick which ones you want to do. And can we democratize experiences to that degree? Could that be the new baseline for everyone around the world? I

think one of the things that I see in looking at technology is first of all, we're very, very bad at imagining the future. When we talk about a future like this, we start out by framing it like we have these big blinders and it's the market stuff. Money, economy. Wait, we're just gonna tweak it. I used the example, you know, in my book into something I talked of the I have talked quite a bit about the evolution of the right Sheriff. This is so important. The evolution of the ride sharing market, right? You think about ah First off, somebody saw Sunil Paul file a patent in 2000 Right?

S o. They covered most of what later became over and lifted. All like, yeah, But even though in 2000 2005 outcome or so outcome the first, you know, Internet enabled taxicabs, where they have they have a little screen in the back showing ads on a credit card reader. That was your internet connected taxi cab, you know? And then even then then taxi magic comes along in 2007 and they're kind of trying to work within the confines of the taxi industry, you know? And the taxi it didn't really work. Is the taxi drivers would go. Well, shit.

You know, I I got this web called to go to somebody's house, but hey, is a passenger right here. I'll pick up now. You know, all these The incentives were all wrong, and bit by bit, the model evolved. All the more pieces got thrown in the table. There were smart phones and GPS. You know, people invented little bits of of the answer. And then that model of all I think we're in that same process of of kind of groping our way towards a future that could be very, very different. And the three things I think about when I when people say,

you know, this was you know, I wrote my book in the period when I was like, Oh, the robots are going to take all the jobs And I had three answers, said one. There's so much shit to do that we're not getting to that. We need all the help from robots that we can get you a good example of that in in our, you know, in the work we do it. Code for America was, for example, automatic records clearance. You know, everyone's like what we can't really do that it's too expensive. You know,

this is like for people who like Okay, you used to have a marijuana conviction. We just made marijuana legal. Can we get it off your record on us? Too expensive. You know, you have to apply. You have to get a lawyer trying to pawn the cost off on on the person who is suffering. Instead, you know, we're like, Hey, we could just write a robot, a software program that can download all the records look at them, evaluate them and say, These are the people are eligible.

Here's the paperwork. You know, we could even get rid of that paperwork if we had a little bit more integration. It's like here's a robot doing a job that was not getting done. Yes, I go. There's so many things like Like that, you know? So could we use robots to actually make life better? Cheaper? Yes,

Just reserve. Even the bottom half of the of you know, 50 year old truck drivers. That's right. T do

that is right. And then the second thing, of course, is is you know, this whole carrying economy questions. Like if we could figure out a way for people to be rewarded for doing things that are human, you know,

again, child care, the friends, the social fabric on

tears. Yeah, all those things that are getting on rewarded one worth that in that hearing a car. And then, of course, the creative economy. You know where we were doing things for each other? More and more that way. If we have the leisure time, what do we you know, we do with it. So this is all these reasons why. I think we have a lot of pieces where we could imagine an economy that's built on very different lines, and I think it's by bit. People are working their way towards it,

and this is wide. This whole notion of running the simulation with running the updates and code, What does it look like when you press play? When you run the updates and code? Could the creative and the carrying economies figure out a way to work with some sort of an incentive system to get people to want to actually go in transition? How would the robotic tax interplay

with that? I don't know that it's, I mean, it's a mix of Yeah, partners. It's already happening, you know? Just think about it for a minute. Um, we already have this huge attention economy with that people are working at, in some sense, right? Yeah, Google right through the web, which Google then aggregated with search and people creating this content. And yes, there's a market economy for that where people are saying,

Hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna be able to monetize this via ads. But this huge amounts of content were just like produced because people are creative, you know, people putting things on YouTube because they love to create. They love to share. And then, you know, again you overlay the market economy that it's more good Facebook people. I mean, how many hours would it take to create Facebook? I mean, that's a massive amount of human labor, right? But it's turned into play, and so we already are building a lot of,

Ah, a very different economy on which people spend their time And um, yeah, we just haven't really caught up with in in the way we think. And we also haven't quote off with in the way that we, um you know, we incent businesses because we're still, you know, like if if you said the job, you know, like if you think about if a Facebook were there to optimize human flourishing,

let's think about how the code would operate

well. One of things that would be missing was they would not be subject to the master algorithm, as I described in my book, which says you must always make more money than you made the year before

that we should master that is the master out of our society because the fact that

you could live without the market incentive, you know, you you know, you know, you wouldn't have to go. That's not true. You know, people are making obscene amounts of money today for things that people were quite motivated by making a tiny fraction of that before, right? And so I guess the idea that so I guess that's the main thing I would just say is that is that we've gotten ourselves way out of scale, uh, in the way that we think about, uh, how much people need to be rewarded. Uh, Then again, it is a basic

Ronnie. Do you want to rap? He we told him we were only going for

Yeah, it's fine. Well, let's let's wrap. Okay,

but okay. Okay, then if we're if we're gonna wrap, then I have some questions.

Okay, Well, let's do that. We can We can do the rest of the questions, But my fundamental belief is that that we could be building like a society that we would really like to live in. We have the capability and the thing that most makes us go wrong is this idea that the market must be satisfied. The and the market pretty much means stock price keeps going up, and it's just the wrong objective function. It's the wrong objective function, like

human face. Fishing

is the right object. Human flourishing is the right objective. And could you imagine a Facebook that said No, we're really you know, we want we need, you know, like Where I was said is like money. It's like gas in the car. You don't want to run out, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. If Facebook were ableto live by that philosophy, you go, Yeah, yeah, we actually, you know, we're making billions already.

Why do we need to make more billions to remind me? No, it's way better for us to make sure that we don't have a master of Myanmar on our platform. Oh, it's way better for us if people have trust in their government. Oh, it's way better for us if people really are getting engagement. And yes, we would trade that off against squeezing more profit out. Let's think

this'd for another episode. Just the ways that that would happen is the pay cuts in half, because the people would be finding were meaning, the less amount of employees the Maur amount of focus on switching up the business model away from the attention economy there, so many pieces

that would have to wear that we have to transition away from the attention economy. You can actually think about Avery positive version of the attention economy. Sure of positive version of you think you can also think about reducing, reducing working hours? Um, you know, reducing the incredible skew between top and bottom in the way people get paid, you know? So he Alley is great, as is egalitarian stock options system, but incredibly rotten in the way that it's skewed

so heavily to the top. Yeah. Yep. So the amount of options on how to execute us for objective function of human flourishing are endless. And we've got a few more tests. Yeah, run more tests. Okay. The couple you know, quick questions on the way out in the you know, in the long term perspective here, it seems like the one that owns the substrate monopolizes the substrate and get to control the way that we enter an interplay with substrate. That is one of the reasons why the Google. That is one of the reasons why the the 10 cent. This is why the reasons why these organizations want to be the ones that control the entry point of us into the world. Do you see this is a central well, I

think everybody who wants to think about that should read. Tim was book the Master Switch, which is basically a history of monopoly in America, mostly, But, you know, he starts out with the your Bell system telephony as a CZ monopoly movies, you know, and the cycle where you have this this path from, you know, scrappy entrepreneurial economy, often with people who are inventing the future, which gets consolidation. I can't talk about this in my book. I had read Tim's book at the time, but it's a wonderful historical view of how the cycle repeats an industry after industry, and I think there is a place where you do get to a point where you know,

a regulated monopoly may in fact be the right answer. But certainly you get to the point where, uh, yeah, there are tradeoffs that have to be made where AH company that's in a position of great power. That is also believes that it's only objective is to make more money is a very unstable, very dangerous situation. So either companies have to self regulate away from that position or they have thio. Basically, the people need to step up and regulate them. The problem, of course, is that, yeah, we have a fairly dysfunctional government that doesn't really on both right and left. That is kind of dogmatic about this and not scientific about this question of How are we, um, you're going to achieve these best results?

Yeah, this question is, I think again very long. So many options about how to best run code two questions show's called simulation. Is this a simulation?

You know, I guess I would say if it is, it shouldn't really matter to us because it's convincing enough that we have to act as if it's real. And I guess I've always believed that, uh, you are our agency, you know, even if it's a fiction, is the

most important thing we have and how to maximize flourishing with that agency across the world. Yeah, yeah, And last question is, what's the most beautiful thing in the world? uh,

you know, if I have to What came into my head? What? There's a particular age when your baby is old enough. Thio put its arms around your neck, you know they can. And they you still like this visceral memory of my two daughters on agent. So maybe a year and change where they they are, like, still totally in this blissed out that I can be in this blissed out like total trust of you space and they put their arms around you and there's nothing like it in this world. Yeah,

very beautiful. Tim Who? What a crazy Lee wide ranging episode that has left me in in a bunch of different new areas of thinking. And I hope that for those that have been watching likewise, hopefully, hopefully we can continue thinking about how to best update the code and continue running these experiments for sodomizing flourishing to O'Reilly. All right, thank you very much. Thank you so much for coming out of the show. Pleasure. I would love for everyone watching to give us your thoughts. In the comments below. We'd love to hear from you about the things that we talked about. Start having these conversations. Maurin, your communities with your friends, your family's online really start thinking about how to maximize human flourishing.

What is the way that we want to write the code? Check out Tim's book, What's the Future and why It's Up to us Links in the Bio. Also, check out O'Reily media. Check out the platform. It's got so much great educational information. Resource is on it. It also has so many conference listings on it. The amount of conferences you guys do is just mind blowing How you guys do that. Check all that out below. Followed Tim on Twitter. Follow him on mediums. Got so many great posts there and support the artists and entrepreneurs that you believe in All our links are below. We would love for you guys to join and support us. Swing Continue impacting more people around the world.

Huge shout out to Ron Vargas, a producer and director. Thank you very much. We appreciate you greatly and go and build the future. Everyone manifest your dreams into the world. We love you so much and we will see you soon.