2044: AI's Impact on Jobs, Economy, and Society: Future of Work & Technology with Bob Murphy Part 1

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Good day, empowered investors, and welcome to episode 2044. So what is going on with the market? What is going on with the Federal Reserve? And what is going on with your freedom and liberty? We're going to talk about some of those subjects today. So first, a couple of news items before we get to our guest, who I shared the platform with at a conference a couple of months ago and really liked what he had to say. So I invited him on to join so you can learn from him. And that is Robert Murphy. He'll be here in just a a moment. So everybody thinks house prices are so high and they are not wrong, but there are distinctions that need to be made. Of course, you know this if you've been listening to the show for any length of time, you know, you gotta peel back the layers of the onion and really understand the issue more clearly than most people do. So that's what we do here. And one of the newsletters I was just reading this morning from First American, it says that median household income has increased 3.8% since June of 2022. And 82.7% since January of 2000. That's when their index starts. So it's a good comparison. We go back before 9, 11. Even so, incomes have increased by 83% in that last 23 year stretch. Not great compared to inflation, but not bad either. Not bad either. Okay, but real house prices, remember this is my second favorite index, Real house prices, the real house price index are 41.1% more expensive than they were 23 years ago. So the house price is 41% more expensive, yet the incomes have increased by 83%. I'm rounding, obviously. 82.7% to be exact, but you get the idea. So the question is you, is real estate cheap or expensive? And compared to what? That's all I want you to think about. Just be with the question. But remember, regardless of your answer, which we have endeavored to answer on many prior episodes, regardless of your answer, know this. People only have three choices. They can buy, they can rent, or they can be homeless. And we always want to cater our strategy and tailor it to, to the market we're in. Now, clearly we are in a market where the Federal Reserve has put the economy under attack. The stock market, housing prices, everything in the economy is under attack with these massive historical interest rate hikes. But amazingly, the real estate market is showing an incredible, absolutely incredible amount of resilience, just as I predicted it would three years ago. Just realize that. And all of the other predictions practically were wrong. Remember that chart I recently showed you about how Zillow, Fannie Mae, Goldman sucks, all the rest just predicted a market that completely did not happen. Right, Because I knew that real estate was actually quite cheap when you look at it in real terms. And I don't just mean real terms adjusted for inflation, I mean adjusted for everything. Answering the big question of compared to what? That's what the Hartman Comparison Index does. So we've talked about that. But remember, we are sometimes in a yield market. We are going to see massive upward pressure on rents. Now, you're seeing the surveys, right? You're hearing the surveys. I've talked about a lot of them on the show that are mostly geared toward the multifamily institutional large apartment market. And those surveys show rents still increasing, but at a much slower pace than they had previously, but a pretty good pace nonetheless. Just remember though, the people that make the money are the people that make the decisions before the evidence is there, before the survey shows you that that is the decision to make. Otherwise everybody would be rich, right? Because everybody would just follow all the surveys and make the decision then, right? I am telling you there is massive upward pressure on rents. It's like a tsunami that is far out at sea. And, you know, it's just a little lump, right? If you were on a boat far out to sea and there was a tsunami, you would just feel a little wave, no big deal, right? But when it gets closer to shore, that tsunami builds. It gets bigger. It gets bigger until it is massive, right? And it's incredibly powerful, incredibly destructive. So this is what's coming at the rental market. We are seeing a tsunami of rent buildup. Now, am I giving you a time frame? No, I'm not giving you a time frame. And am I adjusting for outliers and crazy circumstances? No, I'm not. Because anything can happen. But with the conditions we have now with housing affordability being the lowest it's been in the 37 years, and this massive household formation move with the demographic trends, nothing else can happen. There's simply a shortage of supply. I mean, the most basic law of economics, supply and demand. Right? Obviously. So enough said on that. Let's get to a couple of other things. A lot of you have asked. You've asked me more about Medellin, Colombia. I just got back from there. It was my second visit. I talked about it a little bit on prior shows recently. And, you know, one of the things you just have to realize is that humans, we as humans, we all do this, right? We all make decisions, and maybe our decision wasn't the best decision, but we made a decision and we then justify our decisions. We justify them in our own head. We justify them to others with whom we speak. And we are constantly, like, looking for that little bit of evidence that supports our decision, and we're ignoring evidence that doesn't support our decision. And I think a lot of this is true with expats. Any place that you could consider moving to, you know, if you considered moving across the country, which a lot of people did in the great post COVID lockdown migration, as I, as I predicted they would very early in the game. And that happened. People rationalize those decisions, good or bad. Sometimes the decision was a great decision, sometimes it wasn't so great, and they're just rationalizing it. The same is true with expats that move to other countries and they sort of ignore all of the flaws and they look for the few good things and say, hey, it's great, it's great, it's great because of this, that and the other thing. And I'll give you the Funniest example, Gene and I got in the elevator with George. This was like. Gene just brought this up afterwards, thought it was so funny. And in Colombia and in Europe, you've got these little, tiny, small elevators, right? That's a very common thing to have very small elevators. And so we get in the elevator and George says, the elevators in America are too big.

Gene just, he brought this up to me afterwards. He just, he just made me laugh when he mentioned that. That's like the way to rationalize it, right? That, oh, you know, that's the excuse, right, of the elevators in the US Are too big. People in America are too rich. People in America have it too good, you ought to have it worse, you ought to have less. You know, it's just. It's just funny the way the human mind works. But you have to realize, you know, this is a developing country, right? It's very rough around the edges. Here's a couple stats for you that are interesting, right? This is the gross domestic product, GDP per capita. See, that's the important thing. Always look at everything on a per capita basis because it answers the ratio question. It answers the. Compared to what question? Always per capita. Who cares about the overall gdp? You know, if you're splitting that pie up against a zillion people, it doesn't matter. It's per capita. That's what matters. So here you see that the GDP per capita for Colombia is a little less than $8,000, okay? And then you see that the per capita gross domestic product of the United States, right, is about 60. Actually, it's higher than that now. It's about $70,000. So literally, the US prosperity level measured in GDP per capita is 10 times that of Colombia. So of course, the standard of living is going to be much higher in a place where the GDP per capita is tenfold better, right? It's so much higher. Okay, so here's a couple other stats. Here's the gross national income per capita in Colombia and in the United States. Now, this is all in US dollars, obviously, reserve currency of the world. $6,500 annually in Colombia and almost $70,000 in the United States. So isn't that the per capita GDP and the per capita income pretty much run parallel? Just an interesting thing to note, right? So of course your standard of living is going to be a lot higher. Look, there's this whole philosophy of geo arbitrage. And for the last 18 years, I've encouraged people to geo arbitrage within the United States, and I have helped thousands of investors do that. And I know I've inspired a lot of people not just for their investments, but for their own life and their own personal well being and prosperity. I've inspired them to move to better, more favorable places within the United States. It's a big country, lot of choices. You can geo arbitrage right within the US or you can do it internationally. But just understand there are always, always trade offs, always trade offs. And one of the things people pay the most money for is to be around educated people, ambitious people, smart people. And the interesting thing about that is that pre Covid and really pre video based telecom technology like Skype and Zoom, you really did have to be in that city where those people were. You know, if you wanted to be in tech, you had to be in Silicon Valley. If you wanted to be in finance, you had to be in New York, right? Of course there were other places, you know, for tech you could be in, in LA or Boston or New York as well. Right. You know, there are many tech hubs, many finance hubs, et cetera. You know, they called Newport beach, where I used to live, which by the way, did you see that Wall Street Journal article on Newport Coast? That's where I used to live. I had three houses in Newport coast, the richest zip code in the United States. And you know, whenever I go and look at Zillow about the homes I used to own, I think, oh gosh, I should have kept that property. I never should have sold it because it's worth way more now than it was. But if you adjust for inflation and you adjust for everything in the Hartman comparison index and you adjust for the cash flow, the negative cash flow, it would have cost you to hold that property over the years. You see that it really wasn't that good a deal. Okay, you got to do those adjustments, folks. You got to do those adjustments. So one more thing before we get to our guest and that is triple net leases. A lot of real estate investors like triple net leases, and I like them too. If you're willing to take a lower return and you go into the idea of you want a much more passive simple investment where you're not going to be bothered, also they're good. If you have just a massive amount of capital to deploy and you want to deploy it where it's going to be kind of an easy, more passive investment, but you're going to have to accept a lower return on investment. The ROI will definitely be lower on a triple net lease. But here's the mistake a lot of investors make. They Think these triple net leases are just these bulletproof things. And I'm showing you, if you're looking on video, I'm showing you the screen. And this is about Rite Aid, okay? Now a lot of people like these triple net leases on these drugstores, WalGreens, Rite Aid, CVS. And I don't know the particulars of the Rite Aid deal. I'm not really talking about Rite Aid specifically as a company. I'm just talking about the concept of these triple net leases. They could be Dollar General, they could be any triple net lease on retail properties. That's a very common structure for retail properties to do triple net leases. And they think, you know, oh gosh, it's pretty much guaranteed. I got a credit tenant. That's what they call them, a credit tenant in a tenant that's never going to default. But look, Rite Aid is defaulting. They have 2300 locations in 17 states. They have a $3.3 billion debt load. And on top of that, they're facing potential damages from litigation at the federal and state level tied to their alleged role in the opioid epidemic. Yeah, they were filling those prescriptions maybe of those opioids that they should have been filling. Right? So the Department of Justice is suing the company, alleging that it filled hundreds of unlawful prescriptions that were medically unnecessary causing terrible opioid addiction. Right. Their shares are down 51%, folks. They are going to be defaulting, very likely defaulting on a whole bunch of leases, maybe 2300 of them. So the next time you think a triple net lease is some guarantee, just understand in the investment world, nothing is guaranteed. Nothing is guaranteed. Everything has risk. Even a simple triple net lease with an a credit tenant has risk. Just want to point that out. Proceed with caution. Get good advice. Do your analysis. Look at your downside risk. Look at your worst case scenario. Always. And one last thing before we get to our guest, Robert Murphy. Okay. Be sure to join us this week on Thursday for our special Zoom meeting. This is totally free Zoom meeting for 2.99% financing. This is an incredible opportunity for investors. 2.99% owner financing on some great properties that we have, brand new construction properties at 2.99% financing. There's a lot of details to this program. I am awaiting the loan docs so I can review them for you myself. But we will be discussing this financing in depth, in detail for approximately one hour on Thursday. So join us for that. Just go to jason hartman.com financing. That's jasonhartman.com financing and we will look forward to seeing you on Zoom. Here's our guest.

It is my pleasure to welcome Robert P. Murphy to the show. He is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute. Of course, you've heard many Mises Institute people on the show over the years. He's a PhD in economics from New York University. He's the author of many books, including his most recent work entitled Understanding Money Mechanics. We're going to talk about artificial intelligence and then we're going to go into kind of a basic primer on understanding money, the economy, the Federal Reserve. And hopefully we will end the show today with a little bit of an outlook on what is coming next and what you can do about it. Bob, welcome. How are you?

Thanks for having me, Jason. I'm doing well.

Good to have you on the show. So we met in person, we shared the stage together at Rebel Capitalist several months ago. And before that I had really enjoyed your book about the Politically Incorrect guide to capitalism. I thought it was very humorous and enjoyable and good to have you on. And you had some interesting thoughts about artificial intelligence. There's a lot of concern about the dangers of it, rightfully so. Will it end up being like the Terminator movies? What should we expect? And what is the right way to view this? Are the fears warranted?

So I think that it is true that the capabilities of some of these AI systems are really going to be impressive over the next few years for those who have been dabbling with it. I mean, even if you checked into like ChatGPT 3.5 and said, oh yeah, it's kind of cute, 4 is much better than 3.5 was, right? Like, you really did start to see a qualitative difference. And it's gotten to the point now when they've had some plug ins where they can do data analysis and things. And it's gotten to the point where it really is like I've seen certain, like statistical analyses of people posting threads on Twitter. Like everybody just look at this conversation I just had where it saved them three hours of work that they went in, they loaded up the chat GPT4 with the plugin and you know, just really is like, look at this data set. Do this, go do this. And it just sort of saved them time. Sort of like if you watch the Avengers movie, how Tony Stark's got his little resident computer singing His House, that just kind of makes things easier for him. So I think you're going to see a lot of that. So on the one hand, individuals are, it's going to make you a lot more productive and you're going to be able to just accomplish a lot more. But on the other hand, yeah, more and more tasks that right now people are going into that can be somewhat routine. Eyes, if that's a word, are going to just be outsourced to these things. So that. That's the concern.

Just a minute, before you go on, I want to make a point that so many people keep missing in this discussion. Okay. And you just kind of opened it up. So I want to make that point. So everybody's talking about the jobs that will be lost to AI, but you mentioned about Tony Stark and how the conveniences and the other thing they're not saying is about the prosperity this is going to create. I mean, think of the efficiencies that will be increased. I mean, of course, software is eating the world, right? And with the software and the computer revolution over the last couple of decades, we certainly saw. We saw massive increased productivity. We saw systems get better. We saw supply chains get better. We saw prices decline because of this and standard of living improve in many ways. So, yes, the jobs will be lost, but also, yes, there will be improvements in productivity that lead to lower prices, which lead to higher standard of living. The problem is which one comes first? How fast do each of them come? And where do they help us and hurt us? You know, that's all very like Peter Thiel likes to say, the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed. Right. And I think it's going to get even more unevenly distributed. So anyway, go ahead with your point, though.

Yeah, no, I'm glad you stopped to emphasize that because that really is the issue. And I mean, you know, there's different ways we could look at it. Like imagine, you know, the cartoon, the Jetsons. I don't even know if people still watch that. But, yeah, you know, there it's, you know, the humans, they do like an hour of work and then they have a standard of living. You know, they're living in the clouds and they're, you know, going to other planets if they want to. So, I mean, I think, you know, that is the possibilities that are. That are open up before us. And also, too, this isn't mere academic speculation. Like, we can look, historically, a large portion of the US workforce was involved in agriculture, like in the 1800s. And then over time, you know, you can say those jobs were lost. But really, the way to think about it as an economist is it freed up labor to go do other things. We can make more Food with fewer people devoted to that. And then that's how the manufacturing sector boomed. And now people are worried about jobs. But again, if productivity goes up and a fewer amount of people can make just more stuff, then that frees up the other people to go do other things, to go into software development, so on. So that's the general pattern. And you're right, Jason, I'm cognizant of the fact that it can sound heartless. And if I'm not the one whose job is being lost temporarily, I get it, you know, that it sounds. But on the other hand, it would be foolish to, you know, not allow all those innovations. It'd be crazy if 80% of the workforce was still involved in growing crops in the United States. That clearly wouldn't make us wealthier now. And that wouldn't be us doing a favor for our grandkids if people in 1890, he tried to, you know, put that system into place.

Yeah, of course. So think all of the agricultural equipment, the self driving tractors, the GPS that enables that, you know, all of that is such a boon for, you know, more food production, more efficiency, lower cost. So yeah, it's, there's two sides to everything.

Yeah. And to give some specifics too, like there's a famous clip that was going around when Ben Shapiro was interviewing Tucker Carlson and Tucker was saying, oh, I would outlaw, you know, self driving vehicles in a heartbeat. And yeah, if you're just focusing on those crews. But on the other hand, the amount of accidents would go way down. Once they get, get those things perfected, they don't get tired. Right. So it's not just that it's the same thing. But if they can drive as well as the average human, then they can just keep going. They don't need to stop and sleep. Right. So the cost of transportation comes way down.

Right.

So there's lots of, so we get.

To go more places, which is literally an increase in standard of living. John Nesbitt back in the 90s, I remember him saying, the author of the Megatrends books, you know, that were very famous at the time. The technology of jet planes has just led to more meetings. So more business occurs, more meetings happen, more relationships form. Yeah, it's a good, good point. Yeah.

And another area too, like healthcare now here, assuming the government lets the innovation occur, but I mean, they're working on things where they're going to train the AI, looking at videos of the, you know, the best brain surgeons in the world, they just get hundreds of hours of watching them and then Again, once it gets to this, to the level where they're comfortable, that they're going to do that and then just unleash them and you could just be rolling patients in because they don't need to sleep, you know, so it's. Once the AI systems get to be as good as like the 70, you know, the, the top 70th percentile of existing human brain surgeons, those things can be working 24 7.

Yeah, right.

So it's again, it's not merely a matter of oh, they would displace if you put like the. And again, if. As long as, you know, there's not occupational licensing and regulations, you know, stymieing the development there.

But I think we could bring costs way down. Look, I, I mean Bob, I think we can all agree that the government will try to get in the way as much as possible.

Sure, sure.

That's what they do.

Yeah, yeah. So again, I'm just saying, unfortunately these are some things that would, you know, arrest those trends, but in terms of like, well, why would that benefit us? But like I want people to realize this is serious stuff, that the cost of food could come way down. Again, those self driving trucks, you know, that drive the food, you know, the big 18 wheelers around, if that, you know, puts people out of jobs that normally drive trucks, okay. But then that means that you have to spend less to get oranges from Florida up to Massachusetts or what have you. So there would be tangible benefits. And again also for some of society's poorest, they're the ones that might benefit the most from health care costs coming way down, food costs coming way down, so forth.

Right. And that brings, that actually brings the government's costs down because the government pays for a lot of those welfare programs, so they could potentially have a massive savings in what they would have to pay for or those same entitlement checks or EBT cards, they buy more, they have more buying power. So you know, there's always an equalizing factor to everything. But go on with your discussion of AI. I don't want to interrupt you from it too much because you do have some really interesting ideas on the way that will play out.

Well, sure, so, so one way I was thinking about it and again this, you know, I'm sure your listeners, you've had other free market economists on before that. I was just making an analogy to like the free trade debate. And so because some people hear the things I say like okay, yeah, sure. And isolated innovations that, yeah, tractors, maybe put a bunch of sharecroppers out of work. But we can agree that was. But, but with this AI stuff, Bob, they can do everything. They can be brain surgeons, they can be like lawyers going into making wills, that's going to be gone because, like, if it's just a kind of a standardized process, AI is going to put them all out of business. And so there's going to be nothing left for us to do. And that's a fallacy that's well known that in the free trade, you know, literature, it's, the idea is, what if there's a country that's just better at everything than its neighboring countries should, does it benefit from trade? And the answer is, even in that case, yes, if every country specializes in what's called a comparative advantage and then trades, that allows a higher standard of living for everybody. Even the country whose workers are better in a certain sense at everything.

Sure.

And so likewise, even if it, you know, I'm not predicting this. I don't know. But even if it did get to the point where AI systems coupled with, you know, robotic hands and whatever were just kind of better than a human at just about anything, we still benefit as humans from the existence of them coming onto the scene because we specialize in whatever we have the comparative advantages and they would do. And then we would trade, so we would have a higher standard of living. And even the machines, from their point of view, whatever their objectives were, they would be able to achieve them more if they kept the humans around and had us do stuff. So I know it's weird. We don't like to think about it like that. But I'm just taking the argument on its own terms that no, it makes us better. Just like if some genius human is born, that helps us, that's good for humanity. It doesn't mean, oh, no, now he's going to take nine people's jobs if he's smarter than nine people. No, it means he's going to come up with an amazing idea and make us all wealthy, possibly. Or come scientific breakthrough.

Yeah. Well, that's an interesting point you make because the fact that Einstein and Oppenheimer were born, they took a lot of jobs in that they prevented a lot of wars. Right. With the invention of the bomb. I mean, that's an argument, and I think it's a valid one that a lot of that conventional warfare didn't happen. Humans are very bad at interpreting things that didn't happen. They're good at talking about things that do happen, but not things that might have happened but didn't because of A technology. Right. That's always. The dogs that don't bark are important to consider as well. Right. And you see my dog in the.

Background, that dog's not barking. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great point. And you see that a lot with a government regulation where, you know, they'll say, oh, you know, OSHA was formed and then look at workplace accidents kept going down. But if you looked at the graph, before OSHA was formed, workplace accidents were going down too. So that's a lot of times where the government's taking credit for trends that were already there or like poverty rates were coming way down. The Great Society actually made the poverty fall less quickly than it was before.

Right, right.

So if anything, just a casual inspection of the data, you would say, no, this actually made things worse for poor people, given the trajectory they were on. So yeah, entirely. It's the counterfactual is always tricky in these matters.

Absolutely. And minimum wage increases unemployment, especially among vulnerable classes, you know, when they raise the minimum wage, of course, causes inflation, et cetera, et cetera. But what happens, Bob, when the AI goes too far? I think that's the thesis you were talking about when we shared the stage together several months ago.

Well, right. So there, I mean, I was taking it to the logical endpoint just because some people really are concerned. You know, I'm sure you and your listeners have seen some, some of these people, data scientists involved in this area, writing open letters like we need to have a six month moratorium, you know, before we. Things like that. And they're worried, let's say these things keep getting more and more intelligent. If they get to the point where they can start working on themselves, right. Like so the AI can start tinkering with its own programming, then, you know, there could be a runaway process where we have nothing, we have no more control over them. And they just zoom up. And if they just, you know, if they got 1% smarter every week, well, exponential growth, they get pretty smart pretty fast. And so that was the worry. And so again, I was just showing that, well, no, even on those stark terms, they benefit more from having us exist. And even things that people were saying, well, they might just want to. It's not that they would have hostility towards us, it would just be, they would, our molecules would be more useful them. And I was running through calculations saying if you just had the Grand Canyon, you could fit 40 trillion people in there in terms of the volume. Right. So the idea that the AI looking at Earth in this landscape would say that our Molecules in our body are more useful, like, as microchips like. To me, that's crazy that humans have a valuable set of attributes. And even if there were this class of robots, like they would want us to be around, we would be useful to them too. So, again, not that I'm saying that's going to be the dystopian future, but I'm just trying to show that people are using faulty economics that, you know, when you got productive individuals and they benefit from specialization and trade, even in lopsided scenarios.

Absolutely. Okay, good. So the fear of the AI and just technology in general, just taking people's jobs, when we look out, Bob, three years, five years, I don't know. We might be looking at a year from now and the world might look very different. It's accelerating just exponentially. It's so fast. Coders, writers, you know, a zillion other jobs, professions, specialties. How big of a change is this going to be?

I think it could be pretty big. And it's. And again, this isn't just coming for me. And I'm not merely reading like the, the AI boosters. I'm like, people I know. Like the. I'm an economist, this company called Infinio. And our chief technology officer there, who's working on. He's been looking at various iterations of the chat gp. He's coming back and telling us every once in a while, guys, I just use this thing. And it just saved me three hours of work. You know, like, in other words, I would have had to code this thing myself. I just trained it a little bit to know what we're doing here at our company. And it's saving me tons of time. So I think that's as more companies learn how to incorporate it, because that's the thing. Like, it takes a little bit of a finesse and an art to train the thing so that it's not just spitting out sort of generic results, but once you really can specialize it, I think that's where you're going to see the true jump. And what I said at the conference too, like, what are the implications? It's true. Like right now. Yeah. I don't envy somebody who's 19 and trying to decide what am I going to specialize in? Because no matter what you choose, that thing might not be there for you. And so if you remember, I guess the big takeaway I gave as an economist was to say, hey, in the medium run, I think land is the thing that people want to make sure they own some of that real estate, because that's something that the AI, in a sense, it's like they can multiply human labor and they're also going to be like capital. And so it's not sure, you know, like your individual factory might not be worth as much if they AI come up with some new technique to mass produce things. But the AI can't just simulate more land. Right. So like that's going to be something. But even in the long, long term, like they start being able to build floating cities or whatever to take advantage of the, you know, the surface of the earth that's covered with water right now. So I was trying to think of what sort of fix things and stuff like Bitcoin. I was like, okay, so yeah, that would be an argument. Not just merely that, but I'm saying they can't make more of those things. So I guess that's the way people should think in terms of investment. Implications of this is what sort of assets or resources would these things not be able to just mass produce 30 years from now?

Yeah, that's really interesting. So it's interesting that you say land and real estate because that's hard to fabricate, Right. It's hard to duplicate. It's hard to increase the supply of that, for sure. Floating cities, yeah, of course that could happen, but that's got a whole host of cost obstacles and issues in general with land implies resources because really everything sort of comes from the earth. Right. So that's an interesting one. Okay, so it's atoms versus bits. The AI is going to be very good at creating bits and manipulating bits. It's already very good at that. But creating atoms is a much more difficult task.

Yeah, I think so.

So, right, there are assembling atoms, I should say.

Right, yeah. Creating atoms might even be harder. Yeah, right. So there are some people that I think are taking a bit too far. So, you know, 10 minutes ago, or whatever you asked me and I was thinking, I think it's gonna have major innovations. It may be, you know, focused primarily on sort of like information technology, those sorts of areas where things were clearly like, like cranking out detective novels and stuff. I think chat GPT7 is probably going to just be able to mass produce those things. I'll be quality, you know, median quality of what they make right now with human authors, that sort of thing. But, you know, going and building a bridge or something where you know, takes physical things, you know, I don't know that the, the explosion in productivity is going to be so much improved there or like you said just going and getting more silver out of the ground. You know, there will be improvements and so on. But it's. You're right. Or just, you know, going and colonizing Mars or something. There are some people that I think are taking it too far saying real GDP is going to be a hundred thousand percent bigger. But I was pointing out that, well, no, there's certain physical things in the real world that even if you did have a supercomputer that was a million times better than what we have now to take its ideas and go implement them, there are some physical constraints that, you know, would take take some time for them to do that. Like they had to build the tools to build the tools, you know, and so forth.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. What I was going to mention before I remembered it was you mentioned bitcoin. I think there's a very real possibility that Quantum computers/AI will crack Bitcoin and any cryptocurrency and that the whole concept of the blockchain might implode. I don't know. But you know, maybe we're thinking of this public ledger too simplistically and their certainly could be a way to finally hack that. It's unhackable now, supposedly, but we don't know what's coming.

Yeah. So I imagine, yes, if the AI explosion happens the way a lot of people are predicting that certainly in the year 2100 there might not people literally using Bitcoin because yeah, that will be broken secure at that point. Yeah. So it doesn't mean. Oh, they would just have different cryptocurrencies where the protocol is so much more difficult that you know, even with the quantum computers going at it, you still need a majority of the network. I don't, I don't know. So you're right though, that, that, that would be something to, to worry about. That even in these areas where things seem to be fixed and immutable, not with enough computing power or, you know, new techniques maybe.

And as the name would imply, that's bits, not atoms, so. Right, right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And we'll be back with a lot more on this topic with this guest on our next episode. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate, appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to itunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.