2379: Money vs. Meaning: Finding Purpose in a World Where Robots Do the Work and Services Cost Nearly Nothing

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My name is Andrew and I live in the Pacific Northwest. So far, I've got six properties in about three and a half years and I'm pretty happy about it. And it's all because his team of experts and just his. His knowledge and his time that he spent doing it, he can really guide you through it. And his podcast is excellent and I highly recommend it for anybody, whether you're a beginner or an expert. There's a ton to learn there and it'll help you get to the next level.

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Is this the last time that you can build generational wealth before AI makes money worthless? Yes, folks, this is a real conversation had on a podcast that actually Wall Street Journal went ahead and wrote it. I can't wait to have this discussion because this is the last chance and soon money will be worthless. I have no idea what we're talking about. Jason, what's going on, buddy?

Hey, Michael, good to see you again.

Peter Diamandis and Elon Musk did a.

Podcast recently and of course they were.

Talking about the future of the economy, the future of AI. And they are both techno optimists. Right? And I would agree, you know, assuming AI does not take us over and.

It doesn't become a Terminator story with, with Skynet and so forth. We all saw the movie, right?

Assuming it goes well, which I think is a reasonably good assumption. Okay, you know, and there's just a.

Lot of stuff none of us know, right? We really obviously don't.

But Elon talked about how within five years, five short years, before you blink, folks, before you blink.

And maybe his deadline is too optimistic, whatever, but it's still going to happen, ultimately.

Maybe it'll take eight years. We will see you know, he says that there will be more humanoid robots.

Than there are people on Earth.

In other words, we're going to manufacture 8 billion robots. Right? And these robots will do so many jobs for us. And because they're doing so many jobs.

And forgive me, a lot of this is probably me talking, not Elon. So I'm not quoting him or anything.

But you know my take on what he said. They will do so many jobs for us that that will just create massive amounts of wealth.

Okay?

And there's good reason to believe that. I agree with him. You know, I just don't know how people can be so doomy and gloomy about the economy. We are living in the golden age. This is the era that, that mankind has been working toward and dreaming about since the beginning of time. It is here. You are living in it. Now, listen, I'm not optimistic about the.

Things that are happening in the world. Culturally, I think culturally, the world's kind of a disaster, okay? It's a dumpster fire.

You look at the birth rates, you look at the dating and mating market, you look at the division, that's all terrible. I could doom and gloom you for.

A long time about that.

But talking about the economy and talking about the standard of living, it is going up, folks. I mean, there are just so many.

Reasons to be optimistic.

So the Wall Street Journal did an article about this, and then in one.

Of my newsletters, I saw a link to the Wall Street Journal article just this morning. So let's start with the newsletter.

It says, is can dream over.

Okay.

Silicon Valley tech leaders are publicly discussing concerns.

Now, it's interesting. Is it a concern or a benefit? Right? Depends how you look at it.

That artificial intelligence may fundamentally alter wealth creation and employment.

Well, certainly I agree with that. I think we all do. How could we disagree, right?

Elon Musk predicted radical change, social unrest, and immense prosperity. Okay, so, like, this is not bad news, okay? Yes, they're radical.

Change causes disturbances. Okay?

This is a disruption, but ultimately, I.

Think it will be a very positive one.

You know, we've all been concerned for many years.

On my podcast, I've been talking about.

It for, I don't know, 18 years.

I remember I did a show maybe 18 years ago about how robots were going to take over everything from writing.

Music and poetry to making movies to, you know, all of these things.

And here we are. It is here, right?

And this discussion centered on job displacement through automation.

Right?

And UBI was a big topic.

I interviewed Andrew Yang on my show. He was a presidential Candidate. I interviewed him several years ago and.

He was a big proponent of UBI.

Or Universal Basic Income.

And you probably heard Elon say many.

Months ago that it's not going to.

Be universal basic income, it's going to be universal high income because of the.

Prosperity that will be created by the technology.

You know, it's funny how we tend.

To focus on job losses, but aren't.

Job losses kind of the goal? What is the point of a job? A job is to make money, right?

So we can buy the things we want, need.

But if you don't need to have.

A job to have the things you want and need, then maybe you just skip a whole step. Now granted, I do think work is important for meaning. I think there is a lot of meaning in work. Okay, but that's kind of another discussion. We're just talking about the pure economic aspect and standard of living aspect here.

And every technology that advances us creates.

A higher standard of living. Remember Al Gore with his alarmist, bogus movie, right? You know that Inconvenient Truth, Right.

He showed this very deceiving chart that.

Kind of changed the world, unfortunately, about global warming.

And it had a hockey stick shape to the chart.

Okay? Now granted his predictions haven't really come true. Okay, yes, you could say little micro things are. But overall his predictions have been completely alarmist and ridiculous.

But apply that hockey stick to technology and we are there at this hockey stick inflection moment where it is about to create just massive additional amounts of prosperity. Now, why is this framed as a negative?

Okay, well, first of all, because that's where the media gets our attention. You know, we, we've all talked, Michael, extensively about how bad news sells and if it bleeds, it leads and so forth.

But the negative is this. They're saying that the people in Silicon Valley, the tech titans, are racing to make their fortunes as quickly as possible because artificial intelligence is going to just change the whole meaning of money. And this they think will be the last chance. And they think that the wealth concentration will get even more and more severe.

And I do agree with that. Okay? So wealth has definitely concentrated at the top. The rich have become so much richer, it's mind boggling.

But what people don't say is that the poor have become richer too.

Okay?

And that's what's misleading about it. Yes, the rich are getting richer and it's way out of proportion, but they are also lifting a lot of people with them, okay? So you got to look at the whole picture.

So when I look at this, it's interesting to me on a couple of different levels. First off, just trying to play this story out in my mind, all these 8 billion robots or whatever was said is coming. So what that plays out in my economic mind is a lot of the services we pay for today will go increasingly to zero. Right. It'll be the cost of charging a robot. I'm guessing you'll have to charge them. Right. So there's the incremental cost is small.

Because it's cheaper than feeding them, giving.

Them unemployment and having them sue you for sexual harassment.

Totally, totally agree.

So yeah.

So these robots basically will help people with services. Services are a big part of our economy. So there's that. There will also be robots increasingly inside manufacturing. They obviously won't be probably humanoid, but they will be purpose built robots.

Yeah.

To move stuff around the shops.

Again, humanoid though, because I mean, we've.

Got a lot of purpose built robots that aren't humanoid now. But the humanoid revolution in them is.

That the world is built.

Built for humans.

Yeah, of course. Every time you go through a doorway.

Or turn a faucet, it's built for humans. Right. It's all human scale. It's all built for us. And so the humanoid robots are a huge leap forward.

Yep. So again, I get all of that. So I see the cost of existing collapsing. I could see that. Which means you don't have to make very much money to have an equal life. Right. If you just look at what your life costs today, say it cost ten grand and next year it costs two grand. For the same happiness and the same stuff, it's a lot easier to make two grand than ten grand, for example. So I get that. What is interesting here to me is I don't see the income. And that's probably why Ubiquitous and Elon's ub, whatever high income, hi, I guess comes into play and again, you don't need 10, you need two. So that makes sense to me. The thing that I'm struggling with is if the tech titans, the Silicon Valley folks, say this is the last time to build generational wealth, but then in the same breath they say money becomes worthless. I don't get it. Why are you trying to build generational wealth? If money is worthless, that seems to.

Be because they want to be the oligarchs.

Right.

So they're saying this is the time to get inside the top 1% of the 1% because life will be extra special. Good for me.

That's the way I take it.

This is the time that they're Kind.

Of saying, and I don't agree with.

This because, you know, we just can't.

Perceive what the future will be like. Our brains just won't do it very well. Right.

And they seem to be saying that after AI takes over the world, the.

Race is over and there will be winners and losers and that the path will be set permanently.

Well, I think what they're trying to.

Say is there will be oligarch class. Right.

Well, I think what they're saying is there will be no losers. I think at least that's the picture they're painting. Right.

Yeah. And, and what I, it goes back to what I was saying before is that the people at the lower end of the spectrum will be better off than they are today.

There'll be two. 2 to 4x better.

Oligarchs will be just insanely better off. Okay. You know, yeah, so.

Okay, so I get all of that, but I still come back to the point. And you actually said it in, in your kind of intro discussion, work still has meaning. And as somebody who had a couple of weeks of having no financial concerns and no meaning, it becomes very depressing. Right. Suicidal thoughts into your minds when you have no meaning. So I'm trying to, you know, this is a debate I'm having with lots of my friends and we can have it. Here is, what does this look like? And I am not willing because I think Elon Musk is always early. He said five years, so it's probably more like 10 to 15 years, in my opinion.

Yeah, or maybe it's eight years, I don't know.

Whatever.

It's not five, it's just always early. But anyways, let's, you know, let's fast forward 10 years just because it's a round number and you know, there's 4 million, 4 billion robots. Not 8, but still enough to make services cheaper. What are people, what are human beings doing?

Well, they've got to find other sources of meaning, you know, and there will.

Be new jobs that people are better at always. Right. You know, certain things that people will do and where people miss when they try to understand the future. And I go back to this whole idea of limited resources and the limited.

Pie and the Malthusian economics, this idea that everything is a zero sum game, which is just not true. That's just not how life works. Right.

And people will create new desires and.

They will have to be filled by humans.

And then eventually those things will be.

Filled by technology, probably right as they are today.

And, you know, the whole thing just keeps perpetuating the problem is, Michael, we just can't imagine the things we will want and need in the future. It's just too hard. Like, I'll give you an example.

There's this great book that I read decades ago.

It's called Unlimited Wealth. Subtitle the Theory and Practice of Economic.

Alchemy by Paul Zane Pilser. Okay, good memory.

And he's still around.

He's got another book out now, just a couple of years ago. I just finished that one.

And what he said in that old.

Book, which I think was like a 1989 book. Okay, okay.

He said the idea of business used to be find a need and fill it and you'll make money.

Very logical, right?

But the new idea of business, back.

Circa 1989, when he wrote this book, right, somewhere around there is imagine a need and fill it.

Right? Imagine a need, promote it, create it.

Consumer, and then fill the need.

And the example, one of the examples.

He gave in the book was, remember good old cordless phones?

I do.

Okay, this is not a cell phone. This is a cell phone, okay? That is my iPhone. So these good old cordless phones, right?

So what he said, and you might remember this is. He said that, look, nobody realized that they needed a waterproof wireless phone until Sony created one. Then everybody with a pool in the backyard had to have it, okay? They had to imagine the need and fill it. And I'll just give you two other.

Reference points for this concept. Henry Ford, okay? The guy who invented the assembly line, not the automobile. A lot of people confuse that. Carl Benz invented the automobile and named it after his daughter Mercedes. Okay? But Henry Ford invented the assembly line, okay?

And Henry Ford said if I asked my customers what they wanted me to produce, they would have said a faster horse, right? Okay, now fast forward to the late Steve Jobs, okay?

And Steve Jobs used to talk about.

He said Apple never does focus groups. We don't survey people because the consumer doesn't know what they want.

That's our job, to envision what they want, what they're going to want. Right?

And so we can't imagine what we're going to want in the future and the kind of growth in the economy and Jobs that will create.

We just can't even imagine it right now. Yeah, okay. You know, Michael, if it were the 1950s or the 60s or the 70s, this would be a radical idea.

My dog needs a bath. So I called a dog groomer this.

Morning, which, you know, I've done a million times.

But I'm only saying this because it seems like a. Yeah. Obvious thing. You know, decades ago, nobody had a dog groomer.

Okay.

You just gave the dog a bath in the backyard.

Okay.

With a hose. That's what I used to do with my old dog in the old days, you know, but nowadays it's like that's a necessity.

Okay. So things just evolve.

Yeah. And this is. This is how my. My view of the world difference completely from Elon Musk, frankly, is. I believe. It's kind of what you're highlighting here is I believe the human condition. We are. We are amazing at finding and creating new things.

We are.

So I think there will be plenty of jobs in the future. I do not see jobs disappearing. But they will. They will be different than they are today. They will be the dog washer example or, you know, you know, not the faster horse. And that's just who we are as humans. And again, I say that because this evolution, that will be 10 to 15 years in the making, it may feel fast, but it will be incremental. And yes, there'll be plenty of job losses and plenty of reskilling and plenty of that to be doomerish about.

Yeah.

But to your kind of the. The point of this discussion is if you look at the tide, it will be rising for everybody.

Yeah.

And that is. That is fun. And again, when you really think about this, it. I have to think about this before I say it because I want to make sure I believe it. Yeah, I believe it. So in the 20s, in the 2000-30s, and again, I just.

I just wanted to be neural link.

Processor in your brain to help.

It'll be faster. Yeah. So sometime in the 2000s. In the 2000s. So sometime in that decade, we are going to see the cost of living dramatically deflate. Deflate, not disinflation, not inflation deflate. Because a large percentage of our current cost of living is services. And that is going to collapse. So I don't know when it is in the decade, but we will have a deflationary cycle, a pretty substantial one, probably. Okay, that's what I think.

That's a good segue to another comment.

In this article that I thought was.

Really interesting, they said that the thing to do, to maybe invest in the thing that will be ultimately like, hold its value.

In their example in the article, which.

I thought was actually a kind of a bad example. Okay, I disagree with this. But the example they gave was art.

Artwork.

Right. Because artwork is scarce. Okay. And the two drivers, as I've always said, that makes something valuable are Scarcity and utility, okay?

It's got to be scarce and it's got to have some use, right?

So gold, right?

The gold bugs would love this. And you know, we've seen precious metals do really well lately, but they've been, they were very sleepy for many years and did nothing. Right. I do not think they're like the best investment or anything, you know, but they're having a run, okay? They're having a moment for sure. But you know, you can't leverage them, you can't rent them out. They don't have multidimensional characteristics like income, property.

But the anti gold bugs would argue, well, gold has no real utility.

It's not used in industry very much. Silver on the other hand, has a lot of industrial uses and use and so forth.

Right? But you could argue that gold's utility is money, okay?

And like what use does Bitcoin serve? Well, it's money that's a utility. Now if money becomes worthless, I don't.

Know, you know, but they used artwork as the example. But then again, remember just a few years ago we saw JPEGs sell for millions of dollars, okay? AI can create beautiful art, okay?

So I don't think that's a very good example.

It immediately led me, and you'll love this, to think that the ultimate maybe.

Store of value at the end of.

The day is real estate. Because you can't create any more land. And the construction of it, even with robots, it still takes materials. And yes, the robots could go get those materials more easily, right? But this is maybe like the currency wars. It's a race to the bottom, okay? And all you need to do, just like that old joke about the two hikers in the woods and suddenly they.

See a bear charging at them and.

One guy stops to tighten his shoelaces and, and the other guy says, what are. There's a bear coming. You can't outrun a bear. And he says, I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you. Okay?

That's what economics is, okay?

Nothing is perfect for every situation. But you gotta pick the better vehicle. And I say that income property wins the day. Like, what else would there be that would be better than that in this.

Future we where maybe things are deflating, okay? I mean I'm the guy who became famous for inflation induced debt destruction, right?

But assets can inflate. Well, services and consumer goods deflate.

We've already.

Okay, no, let me be very clear. I think again, I said it and I believe it. I Think we're going to have a huge deflationary cycle, but it's definitely around services. So what does that mean? That means people are going to have more around products. Yeah, we've already had it. Exactly. Services is coming. So what that means is people are going to have more disposable or discretionary income which then gets deployed while they're going to spend on rarity and experiences and all of that. I mean if you just want to play this out, if you're at home more often, you're going to collect more stuff.

Yep.

I just. The human condition.

You're going to want a bigger house.

Exactly.

Store your stuff and to entertain yourself in. Yeah.

And it's funny, the other thing that I've been reading a lot about is the alternative collectible market and like which things. So yeah, I'll be. I'll be specific. So again like I read every day. I consume 2 hours of material every day.

Me too. Yeah.

So the thing that I read starting a couple months ago was about rare graded trading cards. Right. When I was a kid I was collecting baseball cards and you know, things like that. But now that now with PSA and Beckett and all these others that they can grade cards, I think there's. Those would be rare, right? PSA 10s. Autograph, you know, one of ones things of that nature. I think it was. Was it Logan Paul had a five million dollar Pokemon card that was a PSA 10 or something like. I think rare things, like documentable rare things are going to increase in value like that. I think that's probably true.

Well, I think you're right. The only caveat I'd give to that is just remember what happened with the.

Digital scarcity they tried to create with.

These will have to be. Visit to your point. Yeah. The monkeys or whatever it was, they'll have to be physical products, right? Yeah, physical rarities. This whole. I got a unique monkey with, I.

Don'T know, someone can take a screenshot of. And they got the same.

I got it too. It's like, what are you guys doing? Yeah, they'll have to be physical products. They'll have to be. They'll probably have to be on chain. I mean let's be very clear. Right. They'll have to be on chain. So it's. Everybody sees who owns it. Maybe so there. Yeah, it's. I think the collectible market's going to be interesting going forward, whether it's art or these other physical assets. But at the end of the day, real estate's still Going to shine. Because what does AI do? It doesn't bring you water. Right. Water is still important. You got to consume water, you got to eat food and you got to live somewhere. You got to have shelter. AI doesn't change those top three.

No, it doesn't. And AI actually, to your point a.

Moment ago, Michael, and this is where.

A lot of economists, they just don't get it. They just totally miss this. But you made that, you alluded to.

It a moment ago.

What AI does do is give you more disposable money to buy the real estate with.

Well, I mean, for the average person, I mean, let's be clear. Yes, there are people like you and I that will use that in our audiences. But again, we got to step back and think consumers. What's the average consumer going to do?

They're just gonna run a more expensive apartment because they're gonna have more money left over.

They're gonna buy more crap, Jason. They're gonna buy more Gucci bags and Hermes scarves.

You're gonna need a bigger house.

Put it in, you know.

Exactly, exactly. Oh my goodness. Yeah, yeah. The average consumer is very predictable. You give them free money, they spend it.

Folks, it is an amazing time to be alive.

It's like, how do these doomers say.

What they say with a straight face? I mean, they're just out of their minds, right?

Like all of this incredible stuff that is happening, I mean, the real estate market, limited supply, there's tons of pent.

Up demand from the last few years of slow markets.

There are just so many things that.

Just say now is the time. And if you're American listening to this, which most of you are, I mean.

Look at what the US is doing. It's becoming the British Empire. I mean, you know, and I'm saying.

That in a positive way, not in a negative way. Okay.

I mean the UK did it in a completely different way, but the way the US is doing it. Love or hate, Trump, I mean, we are controlling the assets and we're locking.

Our enemies out of those assets. Okay?

We did that in Venezuela. We tamed Iran.

Iran is going to have a revolution, hopefully that, you know, freedom will, will prevail there. You know, we're going to have real estate opportunities in Greenland soon. Talking about, but, but you know, it's just there are just so many incredible things going on.

I don't know if there's a lot of people that have been to Greenland. I've actually been to Green.

I've been there too.

Yeah, yeah. There's not a lot going on in Greenland. So it's a lot of. It's a lot of dirt that's out there. So.

But.

But if you look at the map of the world from the top, Greenland.

Is really, really important. Oh.

It's a strategic asset. There's no doubt. But I'm just saying, if somebody's actually been to Greenland. Yeah, not a lot going on in Greenland, folks.

I think 57, 000 people there. Yeah. Tiny.

Tiny. But, Jason, amazing. You're coming out to our Vegas event in three short weeks. I appreciate you doing that. Take care of yourself.

Thanks so much. Happy investing.

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