Hello, Nick Smoot here. If we've never met before, I have been obsessed with what do we do when the robots take all of our jobs? And by robots, I mean functional ones that now have fingers and are folding things and pouring milk and hanging out in homes. You've seen probably the new Neo and the new Tesla bot optimists and the ones coming out of China. Apparently China is shipping 50,000 humanoid robots this year. And it's not just the robots and machines, it's this, this, it's the thinking robots, right? And when you think about us as people, we're physical things here, but we are mental up here. And that's where the real question becomes, what are we gonna do? When these things can solve data problems faster than we can, just they can. When they can continually fold things, do manual labor faster than we can, they can, and they don't stop. Now, will there be new jobs? Probably will there be plenty of jobs? I don't know. You've been on Musk talking about like unlimited income for everybody basically. Like universal high income is what he calls it. And then other people are talking about a universal basic income. Or how do we give people shares of the economy? That's like a Sam Alden thing and then scan your eyeball and then you get a share of the economy. That doesn't sound creepy at all, Sam. When you flip it around though, I have a lot of questions. Just today I was listening to a podcast of Joe Rogan and Nick Bostrom. And they were talking about how do people find and retrain for work, what happens if there is no work, how do people find human purpose? The Joe Rogan experience. It's just so strange how quickly it's snuck up on us and that there's two narratives that we hear. The one narrative is we're in real trouble and that this thing is gonna take over every aspect of society and it's essentially going to be a superior life force, a superior intellect that exists amongst us that we created and we don't think that's wise. And then there's the other side that is saying things like what Elon says. We're saying we're going to have universal high income. It's gonna be so much prosperity that no one's ever gonna have to toil again. There'll be no more third world countries. There'll be no more poverty. Like we can eradicate poverty with the resources that we have on earth and we can change what it means to have to work. Like just to provide yourself with food and housing, that's all gonna be easy and free. And then everything else is going to be you have to find a purpose in your life. My problem is, and I love Elon, but the people who have that perspective are all making money off AI. They are all invested like heavily marked in Dresan. All these people that have this rosy view of it, they're all invested heavily into it. So when there's someone like you who's not necessarily in that camp, you know, that is more of a true objective analyst of what's going on. When you have a positive aspect or a positive viewpoint of it, I get a little more excited. Yeah, well, I mean, the truth is we don't know, right? I have a little panel. So I mean, I think there are these scenarios where we unlock this enormous boost both to economic productivity, but then across medicine and entertainment, environment, travel, all kinds of things. And like a tsunami of wealth just kind of flows through and lifts all boats. And then the idea of human work becomes an anachronism and where you have machines that can do everything that we can do physically and mentally and do it much better and cheaper. And so I think in those scenarios where this really works, the transformation is a lot deeper. It means that kind of layers to the audience like the most superficial level is well, they automate their jobs and what are people gonna. What are they gonna do for that kind of work? Yeah, well, that comes a little bit deeper. First, like the most superficial level is people just wonder where will I get the job if the work would replace this me. And then the superficial level of that conversation, I think, is well, you need to retrain workers so they can work in other fields. And maybe there needs to be, I don't know, employment insurance whilst they are being retrained or something like that. But once you think through where this ultimate leads, it's not just a few jobs, I think, but it's really everything that humans can do to a good approximation. And this is the intersection of my research and my experimentation for the last 16 years. Now, before that, I also worked with teenagers helping them find human purpose and building lives with meaning, which included when I was 21, taking 73 high school kids to Tanzania. Super smart on my part, actually, it was incredible. So I've lived a life that's interesting in helping people find purpose. And then in entrepreneur, I found multiple companies, I'm running multiple companies right now. And what I've realized is there's a new way to think about the economy that helps people find purpose again. And a lot of people show them a purpose. At the core of it, it's quite simple. The market, meaning government and corporations have behaviors and things that they would like people to do. Learn specific skills, show up and contribute in a specific way, do research and development, solve problems, do whatever. Like that exists right now. These things require specific skills that you should learn to try and accomplish this research and development or the big breakthrough to solve the big problem. You solve a big R&D problem, by the way. There worth a lot of money. Millions, 200s of millions to billions of dollars. Quite literally. Think about all things that have been invented to solve problems. It's pretty incredible, right? That's where humans excel and AI currently does not. And that space at Wingsie. AI takes the known knowledge and then synthesizes it quickly. Humans, one of the things we're really great at is bullshit nonsense. And a lot of innovation is actually that. To be frank, it takes nonsense. It takes confidence to experiment and try things then you have a breakthrough that humans like and/or solves a really significant problem. And some of the nonsense might actually not be about solving a significant problem at rock. Let's go. That's a weird one. I'm not a big fan of the pet rock thing, but made a lot of money. So there's other things though like inventing. I don't know, refrigerators. That's cool. How many other things might we invent? Now, the problem over here coming back to jobs, innovation breakthroughs, new skills to be learned is how do the people connect with those? This is where it gets interesting. I believe we need to move away from the idea of a universal high income, a universal basic income. And it said we need to move into a space called a project based in senate, a PBI instead of a UBI, universal basic income. And the PBI is people over here, if you want a better life, hard stock. You want more money, you want more connection, you want it belong, you want to feel like you're contributing. Great. You want to receive something from the state. Social security, unemployment, disability, any of these checks. Well, if our gets restructured, corporate R&D gets restructured. And we create a pipe where corporate dollars and government philanthropy dollars start meaning welfare, start to get mixed into one bucket. And we wipe out department labor, sorry guys. And we instead re-imagine a world where there is an online training database of modern skills. And they're tied to these research projects. Now, you over here, if you want to receive funding, you pick a research and development project. A problem to be solved from a government, from a corporation, from whatever. And then you unlock your project based in senate. You get paid to work on this. You own the IP, you own the solution. And from this, you can build a social community in your city of other like-minded individuals. I believe we could use community colleges for this, the current department of labor buildings. A lot of training centers could become these gathering points where it's social gathering where you pick projects, and you work on them with your friends and neighbors. And you do R&D. And you try and solve problems. These become market solutions to the intractable problems for corporations, social, civic, economic. Could be wrong. This has been preaching for, I don't know, stumbled across this concept of PBI about 13 years ago. And I've spoke on it at multiple TEDx talks. I have been experimenting with it. But I think where we start is really with this understanding that if the robots take our jobs, if the AI takes our jobs, like the article I wrote for Virgin Richard Branson's company called, the article was, how to fight a robot for your job and win. And that was back in pre-2017, which is funny. The solution though is project based incentives. I really believe that. People need to have purpose to feel like they're contributing in a way and a reason to gather around creating things, versus just pastly putting on some VR glasses, and living in some alternate reality, eating soy, lime, green, and being fed pleasure juice. Because we're sitting around just feeling this dopamine hit as the human sit here in our flesh bags and stop contributing to the human race. So if you find this interesting, I'm going to be doing a lot of talks on this and putting them out as short little snippets through the American Dream Factory podcast. I'm going to get more detail on how this works, specifically how the communities can form on the human side. Over here, how corporations can be involved over here, how government can re-structure welfare, how you can reimagine the community colleges, how you create equity endowments, where the individual is hold the equity, and then you share it with other people, and then how you can also create a little pool at the city level so you have a treasury for your city. But we're going to have some fun with this. So hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions, you can always email me, Nick at buildcities.com. That is my primary email for you.
the project I'm working on, which is a platform build cities that helps you build your city with your neighbors. So it's basically the infrastructure for something like this. And if we never get to a PBI, it still serves an incredible purpose. We are currently helping one state move $39 million into projects in their city where people are posting the projects and they unlock the incentive to help them with their project $39 million. Like, you know, pocket change, right? Happy new questions, email me,
[email protected], and or check out the platform, buildcities.com. Have a good day. And Nick, boss, you want to reach out right here. You can talk about PBI. Joe Rogan. If you want to talk about PBI, you're right here, man. I've been talking about this for a while. I have some thoughts. And I've run experiments all across the country, tying, learning to projects, but solve problems, and giving people incentives for it. And just normal dollars, too, by the way. We've incentivized all sorts of crazy things. So we're just trying to game a fly human race. So we don't end up, so I think we're even a VR headsets. We're like braining plants, because that'd be weird too.
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