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Language: en
In just 900 days, you'll be living
through the end of capitalism itself.
Your job, how you earn income, the very
way the world determines your economic
value. It's all going to be different.
Why 900 days? Because that's
approximately how long it will take AI
to get to the stage where it can
outperform humans on any task that can
be done on a computer screen. The white
collar professional college educated
jobs that built the middle class will
[music] be performed by AI. AI will be
faster, cheaper, and it will scale
almost infinitely. There are two
fundamental laws at work. First, game
theory, which says any technology that
promises an advantage will be developed
at reckless speeds. Second, humans want
everything faster, cheaper, and more
reliable. When something is all three,
people will choose it every time. AI
promises an advantage, and it is getting
faster and cheaper and more reliable by
the minute. The magnitude of the end of
capitalism simply cannot be overstated.
The entirety of how the world works is
going to change. Your value in the eyes
of the market is no longer going to be
determined by what you can do because AI
will be able to do it better. And that's
going to have massive consequences. Some
are knowable and some are not. But if
you don't wrap your head around what's
coming, you're going to get left behind.
So what is coming? Who's it going to
help? And who is going to get
obliterated? That's what we're going to
talk about [music] right now. Here is a
hard truth no one seems to understand.
AI is going to break the economic loop
that currently makes you valuable.
Everything in your life outside of love
and religion is geared towards you
finding a way to add value to the
economy. Your parents sent you to school
where you were taught what you'll need
to do to get a job. Once you graduate,
your job controls the flow of your day,
your week, and your year. The very
structure of your life is built around
your career, where you live, what you
can afford, how long your vacations are,
what kind of health care you have, what
you wear, how you wear your hair. It's
all to a shocking degree downstream of
how you interface with the world
economically. No one likes to think of
it this way, but from the perspective of
how the world works as a system, we're
all economic units. You do a thing, you
get paid a wage for that. Your wage then
turns into rent, groceries, Netflix,
gas, kids clothes, date night, etc. All
of those purchases become someone else's
revenue. That revenue lets companies
hire more people, invest in more
equipment, launch more products. that
creates more jobs, generates more wages,
and sparks more consumption, starting
the loop over. And all of your economic
power is built around [music] one simple
fact. You're able to trade time for
money because smart human labor is hard
to come by. And that's the thing.
Economics is all about determining
[music] the value of scarce things. If
something is too abundant, its value
essentially drops to zero. And guess
what? AI is going to do to the scarcity
of human-like intellectual labor.
[music] It's going to make it extremely
abundant and that will drive its value
to near zero. Roughly 70% of all task
hours in developed economies are already
happening on screens and that is the
lowhanging fruit for AI displacement. We
are not a society of farmers and factory
workers anymore. We are a society of
people sitting in front of laptops. That
is native territory for AI. It doesn't
have to learn how to operate in the
physical world to take over that work.
It already lives in the same environment
that that work is being done in. That
begs the question, what happens to
society when tens of millions, perhaps
hundreds of millions, perhaps more, are
no longer economically viable? Zoom back
out to the economic loop of labor,
wages, consumption, revenue. If
companies don't need to buy nearly as
much labor, they don't pay nearly as
many wages. If AI creates as many new
jobs as the industrial revolution did,
great. Crisis averted. But every theory
for the AI saturated future that I've
heard still requires humans to be
uniquely valuable for capitalism itself
to continue to function. And my belief
is that the average human will not be
uniquely valuable in an AI future. The
best of the best will certainly have a
longer shelf life, but the law of
averages says that half of humans are
worse than the average person. Even if
you'll only grant me that half of white
collar workers are about to get replaced
by AI, it's still going to wipe out
capitalism as we know it. If globalism
managed to stagnate American wages for
40 years, which it did, imagine what AI
replacing half of white collar workers
is going to do. Wages merely stagnating
would defy the physics of money. Far
more likely would be wages actively
declining or outright disappearing for a
huge chunk of the population. This would
arrest consumption since a huge
percentage of people would simply not
have enough money to buy things. This
would force businesses to cut costs,
which would only further accelerate
humans being replaced by AI. That's why
when consumption falls, you enter a
death spiral that becomes almost
impossible to pull out of. Now, this
isn't me pulling something randomly out
of thin air. If you saw my interview
with stability AI founder E-mod most,
this idea is going to sound very
familiar to you. Capitalism is a labor
ccentric economic system and it won't
survive in its current form when labor
is no longer the scarce resource.
Society is going to be forced [music] to
reorganize around whatever is going to
become scarce next. But the real
question is how fast is the phase
transition going to be? Sometimes these
kinds of transitions are slow. Wouldn't
that be nice? But sometimes they're fast
and violent. [music] In our case, given
how fast AI is improving, the transition
appears that it's going to be brutally
fast. If you don't understand what's
going to replace labor as the thing the
[music] system cares about, you'll be
left trying to sell something the market
no longer needs. So, the next question
becomes obvious. What will people do to
generate money if they can't sell their
labor? And will money even matter? When
people lose their economic footing, they
don't become careful and conservative.
They become volatile. We like to imagine
that when circumstances deteriorate,
people tighten their belts, make
rational tradeoffs, and calmly adjust to
their new reality. But that isn't what
actually happens. When people feel
cornered, especially economically, they
shift into a completely different
psychological mode. [music] a mode Nobel
Prize-winning psychologist Daniel
Conaman called the loss domain. Under
stable conditions, people are risk
averse. Under threat, they ironically
become risk seeking. If you're headed
towards ruin anyway, the logic goes, why
not place the bet that might save you?
Even if the odds are terrible, [music]
even if the downside is catastrophic,
even if the bet itself will accelerate
the spiral, you're actively trying to
escape. Desperation rewires the way that
people relate to risk. That is the lost
domain. And people don't end up there
because they're irrational. They end up
there because a serious threat alters
their internal model of the world.
Inside the loss domain, the human brain
stops valuing safety. It stops
optimizing for stability. It even stops
caring about probability. It starts
operating on one primal instinct. Get it
all back in one move. That's where AI is
pushing us. And we saw how we behave in
this mode on full display in 2020 during
COVID. The moment people felt the ground
shifting beneath them, jobs disappearing
overnight, wages falling, [music] the
future collapsing into uncertainty, the
entire country turned towards massive
speculation. Tens of millions of new
brokerage accounts appeared in a matter
of months. Options trading, which most
people barely understood, absolutely
exploded. Meme stocks surged not because
the underlying businesses changed, but
because people needed a story that felt
like salvation. Crypto roared. NFTts
appeared out of nowhere and were treated
like a lifeline. People weren't
investing, they were gasping for air.
The markets became a pure casino because
so many people felt desperate, were in
the lost domain, and [music] casinos of
all types offered hope when reality felt
bleak. And if you think 2020 was an
anomaly of modern behavior, think again.
Look at what happened during the Great
Depression. The market collapse didn't
cause people to be cautious. It created
a nationwide gambling culture. [music]
Illegal betting parlors surged.
Lotteryies, horse racing, and numbers
games became so widespread, sociologists
called them the shadow economy of the
desperate. This is like a hundred years
ago. Men who lost their jobs did not
retreat into quiet contemplation and a
rebuilding phase. Just like they will do
now, they chased risk because risk was
the only remaining lever that felt like
it could change their fate. Whole
neighborhoods were kept afloat, not by
wages, but by a constant churn of
speculative schemes. These are different
eras, but it's the same psychology.
We'll get back to the show in a moment,
but first, let's talk about what
actually slows down content creation.
Most creators think their bottleneck is
editing skills or ideas, but the real
bottleneck is asset acquisition. [music]
the gap between needing a shot and
actually having it in your timeline,
[music] searching multiple sites,
finding the perfect clip, and then
seeing that it's 80 bucks. So, what most
people do is they end up settling for
something that's good enough so they
don't blow their budget. Story Blocks
solves this. It removes the bottleneck
entirely because you get unlimited
downloads for one predictable price.
[music]
Video, music, sound effects, templates,
all of it. No caps, no per asset fees.
You need something, you download it, you
keep moving. Everything is
pre-licicensed and royalty-free, so
there is no legal anxiety. You are
protected. To get started with unlimited
stock media downloads at one set price,
head to storyblocks.com/impact
or just click the link below. And now,
let's get back to the show. When labor
collapses, identity and a sense of
direction collapse. And when those
things [music] collapse, people grasp
for anything that restores the feeling
of agency. Now, project that forward
into a world where AI doesn't threaten 5
or 10% of jobs, but massively reduces
the economic value of roughly half of
all white collar workers. effectively at
the same time. As more and more people
lose their job and wake up to the
reality that they're not going to find a
new one, speculation is going to run
rampant, especially if money remains as
cheap as it is today. Or, god forbid, we
get more STEMI checks. We will be
straight back to 2020 yoloing. For that
reason, I'm long on Pokemon cards.
Obviously, I'm kidding. One Piece is a
much better investment. Sorry, I could
not help [music] myself. But my
assumption is that people are going to
hurl their money into all kinds of
insane investments just like that,
looking to get rich quick and at least
for a while, some of it will work
because desperate people with free money
gamble. If you thought the speculation
was wild in 2020 or back in the 1930s,
you ain't seen nothing yet. Society will
begin reorganizing psychologically in
response to AI long before we figure out
how to reorganize economically. And
while we figure it out, that transition
is going to be brutal. The 900 day
countdown is to a transition that will
be emotional, structural, cultural, and
deeply destabilizing. When labor stops
being the thing the economy values, the
only thing left with any meaningful
scarcity is human judgment. Judgment is
the wisdom of knowing what to build, why
it [music] matters, and understanding
who something is being built for, and
what good even looks like. It's not
about effort. It's not showing up and
working hard. It's discernment. The
ability to cut through noise and find
the best option available when faced
with nearly infinite options. In a post-
labor economy, judgment and
entrepreneurial savvy will be the things
of value. In the traditional economy,
society is likely to fracture into four
distinct groups. One, people who have
both judgment and entrepreneurial
abilities. They'll build AI enabled
companies of one that operate like
companies of 50, dramatically reducing
the number of people that we need in the
workforce. They'll ride the traditional
economy until the wheels of capitalism
literally fall off. The second group,
people with good judgment but no desire
or ability to be an entrepreneur.
They'll become high-V value employees in
a world where the ability to guide AI is
more important than the ability to
perform tasks. [music]
They'll be the last employees standing,
but they're going to be very few in
number by the time the wheels of
capitalism come off the vehicle. The
third group, people who have
entrepreneurial skills but lack the
taste to drive product creation. These
people will either partner with someone
who has great judgment or they'll burn
out chasing possibilities that never
quite work in the marketplace. The
fourth group is everybody else. This
will be the majority of white collar
workers. They don't have exceptional
taste or entrepreneurial skills or
desire. Therefore, they will learn the
hard way that the new economy doesn't
need their labor. The odds they will
depend [music] on some form of UBI is
basically 100%. And the sad reality is
that most people simply won't adapt. Not
because they can't learn the tools, but
because people hate change. What is
going to emerge on the other side of the
[music] AI transition is a world where
very few things are actually scarce. And
given capitalism is a structure for
decentralizing price discovery for
scarce goods through open markets, the
very idea of our current economic system
doesn't make sense in a world where both
intelligence and labor will effectively
be free and abundant. This is one of
those things that to capture what a
shocking transition this is going to be
is extremely difficult. The very frame
of reference that we live inside of
tells us that capitalism is a
fundamental structure of the world. But
it is not. Things are going to change
and it is nearly impossible to see
precisely what's going to be on the
other side of that. [music] So the
question becomes, what does the
transitional economy look like? That we
should at least be able to see a little
bit better. And how do we make it work
to our advantage? The people who thrive
in the next 900 days are not going to be
the ones who guess perfectly [music]
correct. They'll be the ones who get the
direction of travel correct and build an
all-weather strategy that will allow
them to thrive even as capitalism itself
becomes dysfunctional.
Here's how you do that. Step one,
develop emotional sobriety. People panic
in the face of massive uncertainty and
rapid change, but that makes everything
[music] worse. It's the one thing you
shouldn't do. Don't make all or nothing
bets. Don't yolo into anything. Stay
calm and keep enough cash on hand to
take advantage of opportunities which
will absolutely present themselves or
just have the ability to survive
prolonged economic difficulties and
always remain humble in the face of
extreme uncertainty. Two, own assets.
There are no guarantees in life, but the
fact that you will get ahead by owning a
diversified basket of inflation
resistant assets when the government is
running deficits comes close. Plus, if
AI causes the kind of disruption I and
many, many others are expecting, the
government is going to have to print
more and more money to pacify a public
that will be growing more and more
uneasy as the job [music] market
continues to soften. It's already
started. Not only will the government
likely be printing money in
unprecedented amounts, but odds are that
people will be locked in the lost
domain, speculating like mad [music] in
the hopes of finding a path out of their
hopelessness, even if that path is a
reckless one. The people that are
unemotional and in a position to play
the longish game are the ones who are
going to benefit from everyone else's
recklessness. Now, I've done countless
videos on how to invest well when facing
an uncertain future. Here's one of them.
You can watch that if you want more
information. All right. Three, learn to
orchestrate AI, not just use [music] it.
I spend a lot of time teaching
entrepreneurs how to use AI efficiently.
I've used it at my own company to cut my
headcount in roughly half while
increasing our revenue and profits.
[music] If you're not going to be an
entrepreneur, the goal should be to
become indispensable
to an entrepreneur so that you're the
last man standing with a salary. Step
four, if you have the stomach for it,
build your own thing. With AI, the cycle
of company formation and collapse may
become very condensed, but that doesn't
mean it's not the perfect time to start
a business of your own. that puts you in
a position of control [music] and power.
And it has quite honestly never been
easier to start a company than it is
today. And I'm talking not by a long
shot. This is as easy as it has ever
been before in history. If you don't
know where to start, you can check the
link in the comments. I run a course
called Zero to Founder all about how to
get started and generate actual revenue.
[music] There's no such thing as getting
rich quick though. I will warn you now.
But you really can build something that
matters without a bunch of money,
especially today with AI. Five, create
an income stream that can survive
volatility. [music] The next few years
are going to be unstable. Markets will
spike and crash. Speculation will roar.
Traditional jobs will wobble and you
will be in a much better position if you
have assets that offer cash flow or a
side hustle that kicks off some cash
rather than just relying solely on your
salary. Six, avoid debt. This one is
controversial because debt done well,
especially in an inflationary
environment, [music] can be magical. But
debt done poorly will end your economic
future. Given that the vast majority of
people [music] do debt terribly, I
advise you avoid it as much as humanly
possible and certainly don't use debt to
invest unless you are ninja level. As a
PSA, remember this, you will never have
perfect information about the future.
Waiting for clarity is the same as
standing still. 900 days is less than 3
years. For us to be marching towards
something as profoundly disruptive as
the dismantling of capitalism itself is
insane. It will be hard, if not
impossible, to see around this corner.
That is going to cause most people to
freeze, to gamble with reckless abandon
because we are all likely to be
surprised by the future.
You can't just shrug and say, "Well,
capitalism is about to be gone anyway,
so why bother?" You've got to deal with
a world in [music] transition. And that
means investing based on how things are
today, as well as having an eye on the
uncertain future. Brace yourself for
speculative mania and a lot of both hype
and [music] fear. Put a plan together
that is unemotional and execute against
it. Don't be overly rigid and definitely
don't panic. In 900 days, the world is
not going to look anything like the
[music] world that we are used to. The
era is coming to a close. Now, listen,
maybe EMOD is wrong about the timing,
but even if you double it, this is still
going to happen way faster than any
other transition in history. So, don't
waste time clinging to the collapsing
[music] economic order. Build a version
of the future in your mind. know what
you need to do to survive and thrive
this kind of disruption. Get into
assets, master AI, and never stop
playing to win. All right, if you want
to see me explore topics like this in
real time, be sure to join me live
Wednesdays and Fridays at 6 a.m. Pacific
on YouTube, X, Twitch, and Kick. [music]
You can join the debate or just chill in
the community. All right, I'll see you
there. If you like this conversation,
check out this episode to learn more. In
the next 1,00 days, AI will not only
replace a startling number of humans in
the workforce, it will make the entire
structure of our economy obsolete. That
is the unnerving