'No One Is Coming To Save You': The Brutal Truth About AI And Your Job

Key Takeaway

Today, choose one task in your target career and use AI to produce visible proof that you can do it: a short analysis, prototype, video, portfolio piece, or process improvement. Then publish or share it with people in that field. Do not submit AI output you cannot explain; use the tool to accelerate learning, validate your work, and build genuine competence. In an AI-shaped job market, demonstrated ability is more valuable than waiting for a traditional entry-level pathway.

Episode Overview

This episode debates how AI-driven automation will affect jobs, customer experiences, corporate power, and economic opportunity. Tom Bilyeu argues that AI is an unavoidable source of leverage and that individuals should adapt by developing demonstrable skills, while panelists and Senator Bernie Sanders raise concerns about worker displacement, concentration of power, and responsible regulation.

Full Transcript

Transcript of 'No One Is Coming To Save You': The Brutal Truth About AI And Your Job from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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But truckers can't do this if they're not on the road. That's why Progressive has over 360 heavy truck employees to help truckers stay on time and on track. Quote truck insurance today in as little as eight minutes at ProgressiveCommercial.com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Let's find out what young people think about AI and whether it's going to kill us all. The next topic was one almost everybody worried about, including Bernie. There are now robots working in restaurants. You don't have to talk to a waitress or a waiter.

Some people would argue this is really quite efficient. I have a robot do it better than you can do it, faster than you could do it. Do we lose something? Is there a human element? Is that important or is it not important? Okay, here's the thing to understand. You guys are the market. You guys are going to decide because it's going to be a tradeoff. If the robot is super engaging, very charismatic, and is programmed in a way where you're like, this is so fun, I love interacting with this more than I love interacting with a person, or that the robots being involved drive the cost down of the food, now you can afford to eat out more often, you're going to decide if you would rather go to a restaurant with AI or without.

There is not an invisible force at play. Let's say that all the big conglomerates decide that they're going to create restaurants that use AI because they want to drive the cost down. Then, next door, there's a small mom-and-pop shop that says, no, we're all human all the time. Every waiter comes up. You're going to get to know them. It's going to be great. This is like cheers. Everybody knows your name. It's a very intimate connection with other human beings. If no one goes into that one because their prices are too high, or they just don't care about the humans, or the humans aren't funny the way that the robots are funny, or the robots are programmed to mirror me back to me, and so I far prefer that experience, then you're going to vote, and you're going to vote with your dollars.

When people act like there's something outside of us, all the people running companies are simply trying to understand your psychology, and they're trying to give you what you will actually interact with. Now, we can get into the finer points of dopamine loops and things like that, and whether we want to restrict certain things. Like, do we want to restrict a kid's engagement with AI because it will mirror that kid back to them? There's certainly a debate to be had there. But right now, as you think about market forces, we are all going to vote with our dollars whether we like this or not.

A question about that. Yep. Because my first initial response to this was call centers, and when you call call centers, they have the AI robot now, as opposed to a person answering the phone, or when they used to outsource it, and everybody had an accent. In that method, the way that I would vote with my dollars would be I'll have them cancel my cell phone service and then go sign up for another cell phone service because they didn't. Yeah, you just don't care enough. So it's like if you're like, oh, God, I really hate this, but I'm going to stay, then what you're saying is, yeah, the friction of this thing isn't that big of a deal to me.

And so if the change doesn't create a market opportunity, which, by the way, is my exact thing with physical media, in games, people don't care. They say they care, but they don't care. And so they're voting very specifically with their dollars right now, which is to say just give it to me in the most efficient way possible. Now, if they find that the people giving them a license to the game is constantly turning things on and off, then they're going to be like, yeah, I don't do that.

I'm going to go over to Xbox because Xbox actually lets me own my games, let's just say. Or I'm going to go to an indie developer that makes promises about I own my game. Cool. Then they'll vote, and the market will adjust. And then PlayStation will fall to second place, and they'll go, well, we know how to get back into first place, and we're going to do the thing that people are showing that they're willing to pay for. And those economic pressures are how things adjust.

But when people legitimately don't care enough, nothing changes. Yeah. And you'll have to hit a certain threshold before the industry is going to change. Something, is there a human element? Is that important or is it not important? Have you seen the movie Wall-E? I have heard about it. Everybody tells me I should see it. Basically, humans all live on a spaceship, like rolling around in wheelchairs, and robots do everything for them. But there comes a time, I forget exactly how, that the humans cannot maintain that existence, and they have to actually get out of the wheelchairs, and it's very hard for them to do.

And I would be very worried about a world where AI does everything for us and friction is removed. Okay, this is a really great thing to be worried about. I think it's outside of whether we care about a restaurant offering you only robot options, but he's got a great point. And the reality is, this goes back to that idea, some people need to be chased by a lion. What I mean by that is, when things are hard, you actually find a solution. Necessity really is the mother of invention.

And when, out of necessity, you have to do something, you end up getting a lot stronger because you had to find a way. And that, I think, is a critically important thing for everybody to remember as they're given an opportunity to engage with AI, whether they just outsource all of their thinking to the AI, or whether they make demands of themselves to get stronger, to use the AI only to empower their own understanding, their own ability to navigate the world without it. And I think about this a lot when I look at people's physique.

And when you look at somebody's physique, if they're morbidly obese, they have given you an answer to the question, when food is abundant, can I stop myself from eating it? And for many people, the answer is no. Now, I don't need to make a moral judgment on whether that's good or bad. I'm just saying they've given me an answer. Because I know in my own life that it takes a lot of discipline. It takes me having set goals about my body composition, what it looks like, how I feel, how many calories I eat in a given day, what I can and can't eat, even though my cupboard is full of things, and whether if somebody has the inability to have like chips in the house, let's say, because if they have it, they're going to eat it.

And so they know I just can't buy it, I can't have it in the house. But you do whatever you need to do in order to navigate that life well. So this begins to touch on that exact thing. So we are going to live in a world where there is an abundance of AI. That is just blatantly true because you're going up against other countries that are going to deploy AI. Even if they stop at weapons grade and say, we don't want superintelligence, they will understand the truth, which is that AI offers a massive advantage.

Therefore, any country that tries to compete without AI will lose to a country with AI. So someone somewhere is going to press that advantage. So AI is going to happen. There's no way to stop it. So now it becomes a question of, OK, I'm living in a world where AI is basically ubiquitous. And can I stop myself from using it in a way that is bad for me? And everybody's going to have to answer that question. Some people won't be able to, and some people will.

And then the question is going to flip over to, given that some people can't or won't, do we nanny state it? And my whole thing is avoid the nanny state at all costs. But that's just me. Earlier, Tiesha talked about her bosses seemingly trying to create this very reality. Except unlike in Wall-E, this AI wasn't very good at its job. So I noticed your T-shirt. You're a Starbucks worker. Yes. Have you encountered AI there? Yes. We were being told that we had to use the AI.

And if we did not use the AI, there would be repercussions. It did nothing but make everything a lot more unorganized. Starbucks added a chat GPT feature onto their Starbucks app. The chat GPT will recommend a drink that does not exist. So it not only removes the interaction between your barista and the customer, but they're basically just yelling at you like you know what it is. And you're confused because it's like, we have a menu. So here's my thing. If you want to create a handcrafted experience around being human, I think there's a real market opportunity for that.

If what you're trying to do is err on the side of efficiency, then you're going to have to run experiments. You're going to have to try things and see if they work. And so you'll often see friction between the operators of a business and the frontline workers, where the operators of the business are trying to run a bunch of experiments that will at times be either just new and frustrating or it's just a bad idea and it's not going to work. But you have to try it to figure out where exactly it breaks down so you can learn from that and move on.

I say all the time, failure is the most information-rich data stream on planet Earth. So running an experiment, even if it fails, understanding why it failed, which is often necessary to run the experiment to get that answer, is incredibly useful moving forwards. And so when I hear this, I hear more just that typical friction. Because hey, sure, fair enough. The first implementation of this we tried. We told people they need to use it because if people aren't using it, we can't run the experiment. If we're expecting efficiencies to come from this, but people refuse to use the system, now we've got a problem.

So yes, we're going to say, listen, there's going to be repercussions. We expect you guys to use this. This is a part of your job now. Now, if they're smart, they are aggressively seeking feedback from the frontline employees and figuring out, hey, did this work? Did it create more problems than it solved? Very specifically, what problems does it create? And so being able to go through all of that, get that feedback, integrate that into either saying, okay, this is a failed pilot program. We're going to get rid of it.

Or, okay, we're going to pause for now. We need to make these changes. We understand what has to be different, and then we're going to reintroduce it later. That's exactly how businesses innovate and end up controlling their space. And any company that fails to innovate will go out of business. Or if they innovate in a stupid way and they put a bunch of AI in place, the employees hate it, the customers hate it. Well, then they get replaced by somebody who's like, we're all human all the time.

It's right here. The consequences of AI often have nothing to do with whether or not the AI actually works. They're about how corporate America wants to use the AI. Bernie and this group saw AI in the context of the economy we're living in right now and the kinds of values that built it. We're dealing with a very profound economic issue, if you like, philosophical issue, if you like. A lot of what goes on in our society today is efficiency. What's your problem with that? What's the problem?

Isn't the goal of society to become more and more efficient? Efficient for who? Right? Well, elaborate on that. You, motherfucker. So here is the thing that always drives me crazy about this. It actually isn't to get more efficient. The reason that you want to get more efficient is you have people that don't want to wait in line or they want something cheaper. And efficiencies are you not leaking human capital, not leaking dollars and cents capital. And so you can actually charge less for the item. And so the people that want the efficiency are the people that want to order something today on Christmas Eve and get it delivered to you by Amazon that same day.

That's exactly what's going on. The market is saying, hey, I'll pay for that thing. If you can create that, then yeah, I'm here for it. And this is where I'm always reminding myself, we're the problem. We're the people saying, that's what I value. That's the thing that I'm going to pay for. I don't want the thing that is more efficient or cheaper. I want the thing that's more human. And if that's what people really want, that's what they'll pay for. And that's what they get. But what we're showing largely is that isn't what we want.

We do want the price to go down. Yes. It's making things efficient for the boss. But I'm a person too. I have my own needs that need to be met. And I'm just being taken out of this equation, right? When you're interacting with a chatbot, speaking on behalf of the company, and they're not doing what you want them to do, there's no one coming to save you. It's just you and this faulty technology. I just got to keep saying it. Direction of travel, man. AI has gotten so much better just in the last three years.

When people try to brush it aside saying that it's faulty technology, they're not being honest. They're scared. They're worried that it will replace them. And they're leveraging a very true thing, which is AI is very limited right now. There's only certain things that it can do. But the certain things that it can do are very profound, man. They're very profound. But they do require you to learn how to use the tool and where it falls down. So be on the lookout. Anybody that says that, you know that they have a massive bias against AI, and they're not being realistic.

To me, that demonstrates a lack of care. The company, the institution doesn't care enough about you to give you a human representative that understands and empathizes with your needs and will therefore help you out. Okay, so here's the hard reality about companies. Companies are not family. The employer isn't going to treat you like family. You're not going to treat the employee like family. It's a weird stalemate where you're both saying, Listen, I do care about you. I want you to thrive here. I want you to do well.

But ultimately, the goal of the business is to be profitable. The goal of the business is to survive into the future. And we're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about the thing your business just can't survive without. I go live three days a week at 7 a.m. And every morning, you guys, you incredible people out there, show up. You're there. You're ready. And if my connection drops in the middle of that live stream, that moment is gone forever.

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See how Eleven Agents can fit into your workflows and help build experiences that your customers will actually love. Elevenlabs.io slash impact pod. E-L-E-V-E-N-L-A-B-S dot IO slash impact pod. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. One of the best strategies that you can deploy as a corporation to survive into the future is to make sure that the best and the brightest people on planet Earth want to work there. And when the best and the brightest people on planet Earth want to work at your company, the odds of your survival go up dramatically.

And so people do. I mean, I think you're going to have good and bad people that run companies for sure. But what most entrepreneurs are going to learn very, very quickly is I've got to get my employees to buy into the vision of the company. I've got to show them how working here has meaning and purpose. But inevitably, we have to make sure that despite the desire for all of that, we've got to ship the product and we've got to ship it profitably. And so there is tension there.

And that tension ends up being good. You guys, as an employee, can leave at any time. As an owner, you can fire somebody, not necessarily at any time, but you certainly can remove people from your company. And so that balance of power, where there's a dynamic between both of you, ends up creating something far more stable and far less likely to become abusive in either direction. And so if you can't fire an employee, then you can find yourself where the company just dies. And if you couldn't quit, then obviously you have a massive problem.

That's known as slavery. So you need that tension between the sides. But if you just think that your boss is being extractive and being an asshole, you should actively seek employment elsewhere. And that's where I always get confused is why people don't do that. Why people don't say, oh yeah, I can go find another job. So right now, that is something that I think a lot of times out of fear, people just take off the table. But if your skills are sharp enough, you will be able to find other employment for sure.

Frustrating to me to know that companies are making so much money, but people are working harder, longer hours, and then not being able to put their kids through college. Or when they do, they're not guaranteed a job because of that technology. AI is like, without a doubt, this incredible tool. And it's just like, are we gonna use it to make the 1% richer? Are we gonna use it to start helping the working class? AI is the great equalizer. AI is intelligence itself. Once you understand all your fears about AI are related to what you think about the nature of intelligence, that's where this gets weird.

So if using something that is smarter than you makes you feel badly about yourself, then you're not gonna wanna use it. If you use something that's smarter than yourself in order to achieve the thing you wanna achieve, then it's like, this is very exciting. And so I don't want people to lose sight of the fact that this thing is simply intelligent right now. Artificial super intelligence, Terminator scenarios, we're gonna set that aside for now. But when you're looking at, okay, you now have access to intelligence.

What do you wanna point it at? Because if you're being held down because a group of people have got together and they're able to systematically outsmart you, and you just constantly can't quite figure out how to get out from under their thumb, well, guess what is gonna be the thing that helps you do that? Intelligence. Whether it's you just building your own intelligence or whether it's you being able to leverage AI, AI is the very thing that will let you build something to be able to compete with these guys that you otherwise wouldn't be able to compete with.

And that's why I think if you have a default negative view of AI, you're trapping yourself because the people that use it are gonna leverage it to outsmart you. If you find a way to have a relationship with it where it is making your life better, then you're gonna be in a much better position because it is access to the most powerful commodity on planet Earth, which is intelligence. With ourselves as a society. Do you guys personally worry about your economic future? What kind of jobs are gonna be out there for you?

Absolutely, I'm a computer science major. I was working as a food runner at a restaurant and one of my coworkers, they had recently graduated and they told me that they were a computer science major as well and that they had a tough time finding jobs. And I think there's a lot of people who have had the same experience. I have a relative who earns the majority. Really fast, PSA on that. So one of the things that's happening with AI is we're finally realizing that you can't make entry-level jobs really expensive by trying to throw the minimum wage into the trees and create something like AI, which is extraordinarily good at being an entry-level employee.

And so I do have real empathy for people that are trying to get their start where the traditional way that you got your start was you went and you worked for an amount that matched your skillset, not your potential. And that was like the entry-level position. You might have said, look, I'm smarter than this. I'm better than this. I should be able to get paid more than this. And it's like, yeah, if you can take your skillset, your skills, not your potential, and go to another company and show them, I have skills that are worth not an entry-level position, but something better than that, then you really could.

And that was the way for a long time people leveraged that entry-level position was an opportunity for you to prove that you can show up to work on time, you can maintain a job, and that you can start climbing up and you acquire those skills by being in that entry-level position and the company facilitated your growth knowing that it's up or out, right? So you're either gonna get promoted within the company or you're gonna take your skills to another company and hopefully find your way to go up there.

And so it was a nice, easy alliance between companies that had these entry-level positions. Now, what people are gonna have to realize is you've gotta make something. You've gotta show people what you can do, whether that's on social media and you're putting out content, you're showing people, this is literally how we found the guy that's doing our procedural generation. He was just out in message boards and things talking about the things that we were talking about and so we found him and said, hey, you seem to understand this thing that we don't understand, we wanna bring you on board.

But he first had to prove it. He had to go out there, there was no job, nobody paying him to master this somewhat obscure technology, but he went and did it and broadcast that so that we could find him. So that I think is gonna be the new phase where you're engaging with AI to show people I can do this thing. And when you show people that you can do this thing, like being an AI filmmaker or having it help you with edits or building out a prospectus about something that a company should be doing better in their own organization and you leveraged AI to get educated about that and put it together, as long as it wasn't just AI spit out a report that you walk in and don't actually understand, can't articulate, can't replicate it, you don't wanna be in that position, you wanna actually understand it.

But if you can do that and demonstrate you can actually do the thing, it doesn't matter so much that we're going into a new era where it's about, show me, show me that you can do it before you're gonna get the job, okay? Might not be as easy as the pipeline from high school to college to the entry level position, but there are still opportunities that wouldn't have been there otherwise for people to leverage an AI that can short circuit your learning process a thousand fold over actually having the entry level position.

Having Lyft and Uber and I moved to Atlanta for college and before that I'd never seen a self-driving car. Now I see Waymos everywhere. In fact, every other Uber I take is a Waymo. So now I can't help but think I'm actively watching the people I care about being automated. And there is no current alternative for them. We're being promised. There is an alternative which I just walked you through. It's just that people have so much momentum with expecting to go from high school to college to get the entry level job that they're not realizing that instead you could get educated on a topic deeply by the AI so that you have a skillset now that can push beyond what the AI can do because that got you through all that entry level stuff.

Go do the thing as much as you can if you're gonna be a nuclear scientist or something like that. Hard to go do by yourself. But if you're walking into the interviews far more prepared than anybody else and you're willing to take a job that gets you in the door so that you can prove what you're capable of instead of being bitter that you're not being paid out of the gate what you think you're worth, there are still plenty of opportunities, but it all comes down to abilities.

New jobs, but people are hungry now. People need jobs now. Okay, at what point will we start to see new jobs being produced? It's a rhetorical sleight of hand they do by saying, look at what it could do. That's not what we're actually doing. That's not what we're investing because what they're investing in is these hyperscale data campuses that can train these huge LLMs. They like that association with genuinely helpful technologies, but then they themselves are not actually committed to those specializations. They're committed to their own corporate interests.

Sort of their corporate interests are driven by what is everybody going to be willing to pay for. So ultimately they're held accountable to making a product that people actually want, that people are gonna want to engage with and use. And so at the end of the day, it's not that, oh, it's look at what it could be, but it's just all bad today. Everyone is always gonna sell the picture of where this is going. We did the same thing with the internet. It is always going to take time for us to get to that position.

In the interim, as it's disrupting the old way of doing things, it is a very unnerving time. This always happens every time there's a revolutionary new technology. I don't think there's any way around this. There's no way to make that transition perfectly smooth. People just have to say, cool, got it. I'm being resilient. I happened to graduate in a tough time. Think about people that came out of college in 2008. That was a rough time, but you still had to find a way. We've got this sense that like, hey, somebody else needs to take care of me here.

Somebody's gotta solve this problem for me. That's not how the world works. The way it works is you're an adaptation machine. You look around at the world and you go, okay, wait a second, what does this world look like? Okay, AI is coming on board. It's eliminating a lot of entry-level positions. Oh, but I've got access to social media. I've got access to the AI. I can learn about this. I can actually, in many fields, go do the thing and show people that I understand this better than somebody else, that I can use AI better than the people that are in the company.

Here's the thing, young people, you have an advantage. If you don't get crippled by fear, you will take to this technology far faster than anybody else. So start engaging with it, learning it in a specific way. How do I leverage AI to do? Insert the thing that you wanna do here, and then just go do it. And so from that perspective, there's fewer gatekeepers to just showing, I know how to do this thing. And that's where this is all gonna play out. But if you're looking for somebody to come and save you, no one is coming to save you.

No one has ever come to save you. And so this weird sort of brain rot that we've gotten in the Western world, because things have been so easy for so long, we've been prosperous for so long, that we forget that to build a thriving middle class requires us to build, to make things, to have a workforce here in the US, to not be sending our jobs overseas, not be importing cheap labor, but actually getting so damn good at the thing that we can outperform other countries.

If you do that, now you've got thriving jobs. Now there's more opportunities for people, but we've gotta be willing to build the skillset. Predicted benefits of AI to society, we're all told are massive. And maybe that's true, but right now they remain largely hypothetical. I think we're gonna have- They do remain largely hypothetical right now, but I think people are getting confused that AI is wiping out all these jobs. Whereas what you have is AI could be creating even more jobs than it already is, which it is creating new jobs.

When these data centers are built out, they employ a ton of people. But what's happening is, one, we're turning negative on it. And then two, the economy's just weak. Okay, the economy's just weak right now. AI is like a Hail Mary because nothing else is working. We haven't been growing since 2008. So the reality is we've been masking a very sick economy for a very long time, and we've been doing it in a way that weakens people psychologically, by printing money, having huge deficits, giving everybody things for free, having, what, 47%, I think, of our national budget going to entitlements and programs.

And so now you've got people that are able to get handouts from people that are staying at home much longer, and they're taking that, which is just a weak economy, bad policy decisions, and they're now blaming AI, which is actually just something that's come late that could be having some impact on certain industries, on certain levels of, like, entry-level positions. But the reality is this corporation's really trying to deal with a horrible economy. And so teasing those two things out is gonna be very important. More of like a gig type of economy.

We're having more entertainment-based jobs. I mean, if, let's say, Elon Musk's future is correct, I think you're gonna have then a world where people have so much leisure time and freedom where, I don't know, maybe people start reading again. Like, it could be all, you know, doom and gloom and, like, Wall-E. Or it could be. Beautiful, you know, it could be utopia. Okay, we've moved on. I think the bigger problem for this generation is going to be figuring out how much of my struggle here is cultural, meaning I haven't been taught to be hardcore, to go out, to figure things out.

There's so much backlash around hustle culture, which is actually how you acquire these skills. You're young, outworked people, put in the time and the energy, but that's like, oh, you're a chump if you do that. So how much of this is cultural? How much of this is just economic? We've been in a terrible growth death spiral since 2008. Globalism was just absolutely brutal. Immigration has proven to be brutal. And how much of it is that? And then how much of it is legitimately the changes that are brought on by AI, which AI is going to be disruptive.

And so being able to talk through the problem, knowing that it's those three things, and by the way, knowing how important AI is going to be to our future in terms of job creation, in terms of growth, because if we're going to get out from under this debt, we're counting on AI to help us grow our way out of this by creating real jobs in the real economy. And that's not going to be easy. Don't know. That's wishful thinking. All right, but you say it could be like you're sitting here as a bystander from Mars here.

You're not, you're an American citizen, right? So who's pushing AI right now? Let's talk about that one. Yeah, here we go, Bernie. Who? Very wealthy people. Sam Altman. The wealthiest people in the world, right? Musk. Okay, here we go. This is where Bernie starts to unmask himself. And this is really about successful people, bad, oppressed, oppressor narrative. This generation uses AI more than any other generation. So these guys already are adopting this technology because of course it offers an advantage. And that's going to be the thing that people are going to find over and over and over and over is that because it actually works, people are going to use it.

You would have a very hard time stopping them even as they're out there lamenting it and picketing it. The reality is that it's super useful. So now instead of looking at this going, ah ha ha, this is like a billionaire scheme to do what? What these guys are trying to do is grow. They're trying to build companies that will generate a ton of money. They are trying to build companies that will be good for the economy, be good for the stock market. They are absolutely trying to enrich themselves.

There's no if, ands, or buts about that. But the way that you do that is by building something people actually want to use. And that's the part that always gets lost in this conversation. They're building something that people actively want to use even if it's triggering anxiety. And so to make out like this is some evil thing that people are doing is foolish. This is the single most important technology on the global stage ever. Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, the Ellison family, putting hundreds of billions of dollars into AI and robotics.

What are their motives? Who wants to jump in? The way that they displace workers really disempowers workers. If everyone is replaceable, then everyone is kind of beholden to our tech oligarchs who are able to threaten our jobs at any moment. Okay, so one thing I'll say is always be paranoid about companies getting too large. So does America need to find a way to start breaking up these companies? Probably. Like you don't want to be in a position where the companies get so big that seven companies control your entire stock market that they have far too much power in terms of their ability to push the government in the direction that they want to go.

So America has a longstanding history of recognizing when it's time to step in and start breaking up these companies. I haven't looked at it closely enough to know if that's what I think is the real solution. But that is certainly, for anybody that wants to put that forward is, hey, this is something that we need to look at. Break these companies up. Make sure that they're not able to step into some unjustly dominant position because we want competition. We want these companies competing against each other for us as workers.

We want them competing to make things better so that my dollars have options. I can go elsewhere. And so I want these things to get better. But right now we have this view that corporations or people that have become a billionaire, they are the Sith by definition. That's what's crazy. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of how we protect ourselves from corporations and a fundamental misunderstanding of creating value. These billionaires, they have a lot of time to think about their legacy, what they want. They can flip districts.

They can craft the society that they want. And I see it all over the country. Do you think that there's like an ideology behind that power? I do, yeah. And it's not democracy. Let's talk about what it means to actually be visible in today's day and age. When you build something public, whether it's a business or an audience, anything on social media, you become a target. This is something that legitimately keeps me up at night because our data isn't just on the obvious broker sites. It's on old news portals, public forums, obscure directories, places you would never think to look.

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In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. I mean, some of them have even talked about wanting like their own autonomous zones, like they wanna basically recreate a society around the corporation as a governing power and them as basically the sole authority.

I mean, effectively, we're gonna become subjects instead of citizens in their world. Okay, so this is why you need to define your value system. What are your values? What is America or the West or whatever country you're in, what are the values that we're building on top of? So I don't wanna live in a courtocracy, corptocracy. That doesn't sound interesting to me. And I'm an entrepreneur. I certainly don't wanna be in that position. But I also don't wanna be in China where it's an authoritarian state.

That doesn't sound good. Communes don't work, so you can count me out there. So yeah, I think this is good. Colton is asking or he's touching on a very important topic, which is what is the value system that should rule? But we don't talk about values anymore. We don't lay out. These are the values that we should be fighting for. I believe this thing, because it aligns back to this value that I can clearly state, we've lost an appetite for public discourse around philosophy, ideas of morality, meaning systems of morality more aptly.

Those things are important. We have to reground ourselves in that. This is part of the tradition that made the founding fathers so great where these were guys that were debating principles. They were talking about the principles that needed to govern the country. And so they weren't lost in narratives about oppressor and the oppressed. They were just saying, look, these are the philosophical systems that undergird the beliefs. And I can map back the thing that I'm doing to this philosophical system that I can write down, that I can make concrete.

And without that, it's everybody sort of responding emotionally to things, tribing up, getting on teams, speaking in bumper stickers, sloganeering, all of that instead of saying, let me outline my moral philosophy that I'm gonna ground this on. Let me show you how that moral philosophy tells you what your economic system ought to be, and then look at that economic system and what it actually delivers. And so all of these things now exist as a cohesive whole of, for instance, we have a moral philosophy that says the individual is the one with the spark of divinity.

That is the right level of analysis. That's what needs to be protected. Personal property, therefore, is something that the government needs to get behind to protect. The government's job is to provide law and order so that individual rights are not violated physically or through coercion. We need to break up companies to make sure that we have competition so that the people that are buying these products aren't being taken advantage of and that they get you competing for their dollars. But you see, it's all oriented around a moral philosophy that centers on the individual.

When you can state that, when you can argue from that position, and then say the economic system that we're running protects the sovereignty of the individual, protects freedom. We have freedom of speech specifically for that. Hey, this is all articulatable. You understand why we get the laws that we get, and you can show this leads to these outcomes that we consider desirable. But if you're not building up from that moral philosophy, then it's just sort of random fucking slogans. People have no internal consistency, and it devolves into the madness that we're dealing with now.

Part of the reckoning that America and the West is gonna have to go through is what do we stand for? We've gotta be able to say it. And right now, we're not. The battle seems to be between a group that has sort of lost sight of everything, but we've been prosperous for so long, so there's really not anything to fight for. What's the problem? I don't need to define my terms. Versus the other side that's like, well, we just need to be compassionate, and we need to understand that we got here through illegitimate means, and so to some degree, we should just feel guilty and not necessarily give it back, but certainly not stop people from taking advantage of us.

And it's like, god damn, those are both terrible. We've really gotta find what that core is that we're willing to stand on, define it by, get out of this historical guilt, and just say, look, this is what builds a thriving society right now. Today, we're gonna define it, get behind it, and move forward. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. All right, I'm a senator. What would you like me and my colleagues to do?

Similar to what you've done, Senator Sanders, offering an affirmative vision for what AI can do. Listen, you want this to automate work, and you want this to automate manufacturing, that's fine. We're gonna take those dividends, and we're gonna pay teachers more. We're gonna pay home care workers more, nurses more. I've got some really bad news. Paying people more does not solve the problem. You have to find a way to incentivize the acquisition of skills. Paying people more because they have extraordinary skills that deliver a result, yes, that pay for.

But alas, going to the current crop of people that you have and simply offering them more money to do the same thing has proven, it's not like this is a hypothesis, it has proven to not work. What you're saying is you want ordinary people to benefit from AI and robotics. The control that is to be in the hands of these AI CEOs should probably go to us because AI is a result of our recorded behaviors, so. All right, this is somebody that doesn't understand the absolute disaster that is trying to make progress to innovate via decentralization.

It unfortunately doesn't work. If you are letting people just democratically vote, it's going to fall apart, that's the reality. You need somebody with a vision that is like, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it, and has the ability to get people on board and move forward. Unfortunately, the alternative has proven to not work. Such a hypothetical legislation, if it is possible. Well, I've introduced it, actually. And that's why you know that he's dumb. Let me see if we're on the same page here.

What I have said, and many other people feel the same way, is what is the foundation of AI is all of the knowledge that human beings have accumulated. All right, I've written a number of books. Guess what? That information is in AI. To the guys who own. Yes, it's in AI, all of us. Everything that we've put out into the world is in AI, but just like everybody that ever wrote a book before us, we have all been standing on the shoulders of those giants. But how do you want people to deal with that?

Do you want people to pay some percentage of their salary based on all the books that they ever read or all the things that they ever heard, all the good ideas that somebody mentioned that they ever heard, it's asinine. The reality is that the AI takes from all of us, distills the patterns down to create actual intelligence. We now all have access to commodified intelligence. And we come out so much farther ahead than we would if we were all like, I don't want anybody to learn from the things that I know.

It's like, listen, if you're using AI to get smart on something, and you don't wanna broadcast that back into AI, great, don't. Keep that to yourself, learn as much as you can, but know that the things that you put out into the world, they're ultimately gonna be understood by humans, by AI, and it will find its way into that collective intelligence. That's just the nature of it. And everybody that builds something like what we built at Quest in terms of the engineering of the equipment and all of our formulations and all of that, eventually it gets out and people understand it.

We protected it while we could, but we knew that eventually this is going to get out there. You've got Elon Musk giving away his patents on the things that don't offer him an advantage, but offer the industry a way to grow so that it becomes easier for him to thrive in a bigger environment, a bigger ecosystem. Great, you do that. But understanding that people are always going to learn from the things that are put out into the world, that's the way that this works. So the question is, what do we get out of it?

And the fact that we can get access to commodified intelligence is just people are discounting that in a way I do not understand. The company just make huge amounts of money off of that. No, then it gets to, let's say some big companies we got a great idea. We know how to eliminate all of these millions of. Jobs and you, corporation, are gonna make a fortune. We're gonna cut your labor costs by 90%. I would just like to remind everybody, the only way the corporation makes money is if you use the thing.

So that means that people are saying, yo, I value this thing, I want to use this thing. Because if people don't do that, the AI industry is going to implode. If there is no there there, meaning if you, if other companies don't wanna use this stuff, it's not going to go anywhere. And by the way, it doesn't make any sense if all of this just creates like this really small group of people that have a ton of money and everybody else is broke and killing any rich person that they see, this doesn't work.

They don't even have an incentive to break that system. That's what drives me crazy about people turning a blind eye to politicians and bankers actually running that playbook, actually saying, well, you keep voting for it, so we're gonna keep extracting, extracting, extracting, because it is suicidal. These guys are so fucking stupid. Anyway, what corporations are trying to do is survive into the future. They are trying to create something that you want that you're going to pay for so that they can keep going. They don't have anyone to sell to.

This is what I always tell people. You can just think me selfish if you want, because I have a selfish incentive to make sure that there's a thriving middle class, because I need people to have enough money to pay for my video game. So, hey, these guys understand if you have no money, they have nothing, right? Whoa, let's do it. Well, do you think the people should have a say about that? So, the legislation that I've introduced is called an AI American Wealth Fund, which does two things.

It makes sure that if AI prospers, the American people gain half of the benefits, at least. That is insane. That is the we're going to take all of your money, and if he wants to let people vote on it, which it sounded like earlier he did, this is exactly how you kill industry full stop altogether. This is like communism in steps. So, the reality is what you need to be doing is understanding how an economy works, which is that we create opportunities for our citizens by making sure that companies can thrive, that they can generate enough profitable revenue that they can employ a lot of people, and then those people pay tax, and now we're able to get the tax out into the system.

And so, asking yourself the question of are we creating jobs, that's very important. That's why I think people need to start being honest about labor force participation, which we are not. We would see that the economy is worse off than we think, and then we need to ask the question, what do we need to do to make sure that we're creating more jobs? We need to be honest about the state of the economy. We need to be honest about deficit spending and the accumulation of debt.

We've got to be honest about all that stuff. Once we have a real picture and we can actually see what's going on, then we can start making the choices that actually make sense, which may mean breaking up some of these companies so that they're smaller, more companies, creating more competition, creating more opportunities, and getting people jobs. But we've got to get people jobs, not just go, all right, if you're making money, we're gonna take all that, we're gonna redistribute it to people, because this is somehow riding on the back of their knowledge.

That's fucking retarded. The vast majority of people have not written books. The vast majority of people have not put anything forward that AI's like, yeah, this. We're actually finding out, for instance, that Reddit, you gotta start stripping it away. And so AIs are relying less and less on Reddit because the shit that's being said is so boneheaded, it doesn't help. So now, are you gonna pro-rata compensate people for how influential their particular idea has been? And then do you have to track back where they got that idea in the first place?

Because there, we're riding on the shoulders of giants. This is so stupid. This is so dumb. It is so detached from the realities. Just work off the realities. How do we actually make sure that people get jobs? Jobs, they need to work. They need to have an incentive to show up, to create, to be disciplined, to strive, to get better, to improve in their life. Progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. Having something handed to you is the surest way to break someone's psychology and completely fucking derail.

And so whenever I hear about, oh, these guys are all just evil and abusive anyway, so let's just take all their shit and give it back to people, it's like, even if you do that, that won't solve the problem. The real answer is, what political framework have we allowed that allows them to become psychotic assholes? Stop that. Fix that problem. This is why we have anti-monopoly policies in the first place, because men tend towards tyranny, both in the governments and in corporations. So we need to address that.

We need these kinds of checks and balances. It isn't just, let it run rampant, let it be stupid, take 50% of their shit and redistribute it to people. That would be a fucking disaster. Half of the members of the boards are selected by the people, which means that if there's a bad idea out there, you will have public representatives who say, sorry, you're not eliminating 10 million jobs. Okay, so let's artificially fuck things up. This is exactly what you see in communist countries. This is exactly what you saw in East Germany with East Berlin versus West Berlin, that all the innovation that happened on the West side was absolutely orders of magnitude better than what was going on on the East side.

This is even what Japan's stagnation is all about. You've got all this incredible talent being employed by companies that aren't innovating. They're zombie companies. And so you've gotta start getting people out of that, or Japan's economy is just gonna get weaker and weaker and weaker until it finally just breaks, which by the way, they may already be at that point. We'll see. But that is not the position that you wanna put people in. You wanna make sure that there is maximum competition for great talent. Does that make sense to you?

All right, what else should we be doing? Specifically on data centers. I know there's been talk on commissions and whatnot, but I do think a governmental commission with subpoena power that brings these leaders here and get them on record and have them be transparent about these data centers will not only serve us now, but in the future when they do fall back, if they fall back on their promises. Love it, okay. More thoughts on that. More transparency. I think that legislating that all AI needs to be labeled as what it is and so that there's not as much question of what's real and what's fake.

I love this. Yo, this chick, she and I are gonna march together. It is crazy to me that you aren't at a minimum putting things on an account so that I can know this was generated by this account and I can go look at that account and see, oh, that account has only put out one video of this. Yeah, fuck that. Oh, this account has put out however many videos. They have 100% of the time disclosed anytime that something is AI. Cool, this is an account that I can trust.

It is crazy to me. Given blockchain technology, this is possible. So the fact that we're not doing this is wild to me. You wanna talk about an area where I wanna see some light touch regulation around, that will be one of them. I think that I actually disagree with the statement that we should have the government directly take a stake in AI companies. I personally believe that the AI policy is stuck in a binary where you have people saying, go, go, go and then on the other side, stop everything now, data center moratorium, capture the companies.

We need regulations around privacy and dynamic pricing but right now we're seeing that AI is actually adding value to American lives and there's stats to back it up. I would ask, is it worth living next to a data center? I would say to that, that I personally grew up next to an interstate highway. I'd be very curious to know what people think about the algorithmic pricing because they're perfectly happy to tax the rich which is a way of saying, well, this person can afford more so give me your money and then companies doing the same thing, hey, you can afford more so I'm gonna take, I'm gonna charge you more for this item.

Why are people okay with it at the level of tax? They're not okay with it at the level of the corporation. I don't think they should be okay with it at fucking either. I think that there should be transparency in pricing. This is what it costs, do your thing and if they can convince people to pay more for their product and it's universal, great but the fact that people are somehow magically okay with it when the government does it but they don't like it when corporations do it, that's wild.

A water treatment plant and a railroad and those are all goods that serve everybody and make everybody's lives better and there are also regulations on those goods to make sure that they don't hurt everybody around them. So I don't think the people living in East Palestine would say that the way that we have gone about regulating railroad infrastructure has been successful and I think that this is just yet another example of massive corporations trying to build infrastructure in their communities that is not going to be very safe for those communities and I don't think you should.

All right, having a default assumption that only the government is gonna be able to do something is really stupid. So first of all, the government is the most abusive of the organizations that you've ever encountered ever in your life. In the 20th century alone, governments killed what, 160 million people or something of their own citizens. Some people clock at as high as 200 million. So yeah, this belief that government doesn't tend towards tyranny is fucking insane but I love the idea of people looking at, okay, what is the way that a data center should be built?

Yep, let's do it. Let's assume that the corporations will also tend towards tyranny so we're gonna need to put some light touch regulation around this to make sure that it's good for communities. Very, very smart but this very bizarre belief that governments are the ones that you can trust, yikes. And have to live next to railroads where the trains might spill off the tracks the same way I don't think people in Memphis should have to live next to the Grok data center. So I don't think anyone has any magical answers.

I mean, with democracy and the beauty of democracy, what it's supposed to be is we make the decisions and our job is to begin that discussion, mobilize people. All right, for once I agree with Bernie. Nobody has a magical answer and our job as Americans, our job as any government is to state I am trying to get there. I'm trying to achieve this very specific goal that I can articulate and here are the experiments that we're going to run to try to get there and then we need to hold all these ideas accountable to whether or not they're actually moving us towards that.

Now it will be difficult because so much of this is gonna be interpretation, but that should at least be the goal. Right now, all of the like tear down the government, get to pure democracy, try to do all of this distributed. Don't let any one person like say, hey, this is what I'm trying to do. We have a system set up with states for a reason. So different states can do different things. So let's see what happens. And we have corporations all being different and not being allowed to have monopolies so that they will run a bunch of different experiments, compete with each other and then we all ultimately win through the companies winning, creating more jobs, that creates more tax revenue, on and on and on.

We have a system that works. We keep fucking it up. We keep bastardizing that system by making it more beholden to the government by getting sucked into all these stupid regulations and not doing sensible regulations so that companies are free to compete, not doing enough to make sure that there actually is competition and then having this binary of either, yes, go do it completely unfettered or no, don't do it at all. If that's the approach that we take to AI, we have already lost. And the bad news is that somebody else is gonna win.

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