Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity with Simon Johnson

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation on the Pod today we have Simon Johnson who is a professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management where he is the head of global economics and the management group he was the chief Economist at the IMF from 2007 to 2008 any co-chairs the CFA Institute for systemic risk Johnson's most recent book which he co-authored with MIT Economist Darin assamogle I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly the power in progress our Thousand-Year struggle over technology and prosperity the book explores the history and economics of major economic choices and technological choices up to and including the latest developments in

artificial intelligence the book is out now you can get it on Amazon or at your local bookstore in this episode we discuss some of the key themes of the book so I'd say that the primary message here is that technology outcomes are a choice that are determined by the people in the capital in the uh people who are building the technology during a technological Revolution So based basically in this episode we talk about what determines when new machines in production increases increase wages and create Better Lives for people that are lower or middle class what would it take to redirect technology towards building a better future why is current thinking among Tech entrepreneurs and Visionaries pushing in a different more worrying Direction especially with respect to artificial intelligence so the key message here is that history is not

Destiny people have agency during technological Revolution and so we talk about that agency and how do we diversify the visions of what technology could be from the Visions oligarchs the people like the zuckerbergs and the bezoses and the elons division oligarchs and how do we create a plurality of Visions around what technology can be so how do we speak truth to the division oligarchs and create uh break the monopolies over the means of information and the vision of what technology can be and we align on three key ways that that can happen we can alter the narrative and change the Norms cultivate counter bailing part powers and free policies Solutions and so what I found really interesting about this episode is that the caliber of Simon is huge I mean MIT

and IMF I don't think we've had someone with those type of institutional credentials on the podcast before but I also just see um a common cause in in creating a plurality of visions of what decentralized technology and technology for social impact could be and I think that you know halfway through this episode Simon and I just kind of like hit our Vibe on on doing that and I bring the the the regen web 3 perspective which you know in Simon's word is cultivating countervailing powers and altering the narrative and changing the norms and then Simon brings the policy Solutions and sort of a traditional Economist background and so this was a really fun episode for me and if you if you liked it let me know I think I'd like to do more episodes with

people who have uh credentials like this if if the audience likes it Simon has a book out now power in progress our thousand year struggle over technology and prosperity make sure to click the link in the show notes and check it out on Amazon before you start listening and without further Ado I give you Simon Johnson I think you're really going to enjoy this Greenville episode coordination enjoy Athena Dao is addressing the underfunded areas of women's health such as menopause and endometriosis Athena is a Community Driven Dao giving women a say in decision making and funding the scientific breakthroughs that impact their lives with cutting-edge technology like molecules IP nft framework they invest in research IP that ensures exclusive licensing rights Athena Dao is Raising awareness to women's health

research working alongside existing organizations so join Athena Dao today to help change the landscape of women's health research Simon good debut on the podcast and congrats on the new book thanks very much the new book from a high level expresses the idea that technology outcomes are a choice could you explain that and tell us why you felt it was important to write this book right well yeah I think that is the key Point Kevin and I think a lot of times particularly in modern discussion but also when you look at some of the history people say well this technology was sort of inevitable it was going to happen because these people you know were empowered or just had a lot of money and I think that's fundamentally wrong I think that all technology is is our choices and and that's really important because it means that we're

making some conscious deliberate actions now maybe if you go back to the 1800s people were were not fully capable of thinking strategically but you know we're a lot richer than they were we have a lot more uh experience and we have a lot of cognitive capacity both in in our human side and in our ability to use computers so I think it's it's very appropriate and if actually this moment with AI coming in in a big way really critical to to put those choices on the table and say which way do you want to go why and who is going to drive it so Joe's like maybe there's some like um status or like uh some sort of bias when you look at the history you think that it's it was just deterministic but it's actually anything but in in the people who are there making the

decisions or wanting it are going to drive how it all and for us that's right and of course there's going to be an important um you know set of of people who are already powerful in the pre-existing society and they may try to impose their will through the technology that gets adopted you see a lot of this in the medieval period for example in terms of who controls the water Mills and the windmills and what they force peasants to do and the way they extract more money and surplus from those peasants but when you come to the Industrial Revolution I think all the phases since the 1800s there have always been new people coming through new ideas and and new capital or they can tap into some of the old capital and so there's always contention at least at the elite level and sometimes and of course we saw

this in the 20th century with the rise of trade Unions that's contention much more across different structure of society saying hey productivity is going up but why don't I get my share I need a high wage I need a weekend off and so on and so forth and I think there's a version of that right now including you can just think about surveillance how much surveillance is acceptable in the workplace as you walk around the streets in in other settings there there's a lot of people who already powerful who want more surveillance and the resters I think should be extremely wary of giving into that well you know I I'm curious what determines when new machines in production techniques increase wages but also create other benefits for the lower and middle classes well I think the first step is is a key word to focus on

Kevin which is if you bring new machines in and you automate and let's say you replace workers in a grocery store with self-service checkout that does not necessarily increase wages because while you may raise average productivity in in the grocery store I'm selling the same amount of groceries I have fewer workers you've not raised the productivity of those remaining workers or the property if I was to hire one more worker how much would they produce for me and that's going to be related to their wage so that's a really key point to to remember is that automation by itself just automation particularly not very good automation which is what self-checkout is that does not necessarily boost wages okay now if we get better uh automation more productivity gains for the for the additional incremental worker or if we get new task creation so humans doing

new things because of what the machines have made possible this was the case with um when we got electricity into factories when Henry Ford built assembly lines and so on huge number of new tasks in and around the the Auto industry then the demand for labor is going up and then you can look at sort of power relations with labor do we have trade unions do we have other forces tending to push wages up minimum wage legislation for example once you see things through that lens Kevin I think you start to understand that you have to fight for everything basically there is nothing automatic about technology change feeding through into higher wages or better living standards for most people so it feels like maybe there's some new opportunities with Collective organizing just you know what I think of unions I think of something maybe like

50 or 70 years ago was was that Heyday but maybe there's some sort of future of collective organizing in the digital age is something we'll see emerge yes absolutely I think this is a priority and and of course you're right 50 to 70 years ago we had industrial unions we had a lot of jobs in manufacturing we don't have that anymore even if we get a lot of more manufacturing production in the US it's not likely to be labor intensive but we have a lot of people who work in service Industries a lot of people in in other activities so there's a worker organization piece there but I also think consumer organization Kevin is a key piece to focus on data ownership data ownership portable data protecting property rights around data around content that's created like our conversation here that is going to be a

a really key issue and I think that that's Central to a lot of discussions around web 3 of course I'm wondering what it would take to redirect technology towards building a better future and particularly for the lower and middle class I mean building a better future for for everyone not just the elites right so I think it's about countervailing power in in a big way so what we're seeing particularly now with with generative AI developing extremely fast is that a few companies Microsoft Google maybe one or two more maybe not they're going to become immensely powerful and they're going to shape things in the way that they want to go and a lot of that is about replacing humans so so-called machine intelligence I think is very very focused on the sort of consequences or the logic of the Turing test to the somewhat distorted

fascia perhaps that's bad okay that's gonna lead to a lot of people losing their jobs losing their autonomy being frankly manipulated if you want to go a better way I think three sources of countervailing power we need first of all better organization of protection of consumers and generators of data of all kinds second is a lot more safeguards against surveillance and that's something the left to right can agree on right because nobody should want to cut a surveillance that we're about to get not without a huge number of safeguards and then third is a change in taxation I think we need a shift in corporate taxes to be much higher on bigger taxes so the tax rate goes up as you make more profit and the reason for that is if we get these very big monopolies in in over that's called the means of information

those monopolies are going to make a huge amount of money they're already very profitable they paid very little tax in part because they're good at hiding internationally that's where the money is okay follow the money right Kevin that's where the money is that's when you've got that's what you've got to tax and and you what you could do with that tax system is also give those companies and their shareholders an incentive to break themselves up into smaller pieces breaking them up is break up big Tech is is a very appealing slogan but how are you going to do it what are the instruments you have going through court cases is going to take forever and letting the regulatory state do it is it's quite problematic and very unclear what the process would be but if you give them if you say right you're very big your profit's 100 billion dollars a

year and you're paying 35 taxes if you're much smaller you pay 20 tax uh on your on your corporate profits that's a very interesting proposition from a shareholder perspective and that's a lot of pressure on management constructive pressure positive pressure sensible pressure to break up I mean at this point I'm just going to ask you know this is a podcast that goes out to people on the bank list Network and it's mostly people who are into pro-social crypto um I think that like the crypto take on on Market pressures um around in around information capture would be uh let's decentralize the whole thing what the tech Giants are good at doing which is you know do providing hosting messaging compute um let's decentralize all of that so that anyone can can run a node and and

then let's build applications that compete with the tech Giants on top of that social networks uh Financial networks things like that and you know that's maybe the most crypto Optimist version of what's going on in crypto but you know I'm curious just for for your take as an outsider if you see any promise to that um obviously crypto isn't perfect and I want to couch it in like there's there's scams and there's hacks and there's and there's Ponzi schemes in crypto and I would I would not like defend any of that but I'm asking about like the good parts of crypto the people who are actually trying to create those decentralization uh of the tech Giants power what do you think about that as creating a market pressure uh or consumer pressure on on the tech Giants oh I think it's a great idea Kevin I'm fully in sport I think

diversity of business models and trying to find way to make make tries my ways to make machines computers useful to people so we talk about machine usefulness as a a contrast to and something to emphasize relative to machine intelligence the best way to get there is to have a plurality of business models lots of people trying things exactly in this decentralized pro-social interest way lots of competition there great um the problem is you're up against some Titans right and the Titans control the data much of which by the way they steal or they obtain without proper permission uh as far as sorry as we can see and so what you want to do is tilt the playing field and and that's why the corporate tax idea is is very interesting really um tax the Titans for their massive scale and the massive profits and that's

going to give more opportunity to new startups and Challengers of all kinds including from the web 3 crypto space the idea of like a plurality of of businesses that are providing these these Services is is kind of what we see in the decentralization space but yeah granted that these Tech Giants have a lot of huge Network effects and it's going to take um a really great effort and a really strategically positioned Network I think to counteract them do you think current thinking around uh Tech entrees and Visionaries is pushing in a worrying Direction and especially the new enthusiasm around artificial intelligence like are we on the right track uh I guess is Leia would ask that question I look I think there's a lot of enthusiasm for generative Ai and and

there's a lot of fixation on chat GPT type versions of that which is understandable you know anytime you have a big new technology that that draws a lot of attention I worry and and drawn a small group by culture I worry a lot that people are being drawn down a very narrow path where they're saying great let's replace humans and find focus on ways to replace humans that's the machine intelligence approach and and we would much rather I mean there are people out there let's be clear and they're very smart people and we'd love to empower them more who are saying you know actually let's find ways to make machines more useful to people so Home Health Care rates is a good example Home Health Care rates in Massachusetts make about 20 an hour it's tough work it's hard to get people into that sector

there's a lot of downtime because client your client is sleeping part of the day other ways to enable people those workers properly appropriately within the regulatory framework to do to use that time productively and get paid more money for being more productive so that will be using some sort of Technology you know a computer iPad type tool for example that is a very sensible and appropriate space to to explore we're finding ways to make people with letter education more productive and earn higher wages because they're more productive that I think is a key linkage that really needs a lot more focus is there anyone that you think is doing is anyone else who you think is doing it well or places where we could take inspiration well I think there are some people uh around the healthcare space

who are absolutely exploring this um and making nurses more productive is a key issue there's also some interesting discussion around the education space I think you know that's a bit it's a little harder to make progress there perhaps but there's obviously a lot of a lot of pressure on on teachers there's a lot of concern about how to provide appropriate um education tailored to to children I think that that's a that's a very fruitful space to pursue I'm not saying you're gonna make a lot of money in it but in terms of social impact it could be huge I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the idea of a productivity bandwagon yes that's our term for the sort of conventional wisdom which is you know don't worry be happy all you need to do is embed stuff it'll raise wages it'll improve health expand

opportunity and everyone will benefit eventually well the problem is this would eventually actually eventually if you look back historically it's 50 to 100 years and some of these Technologies and that that's just not acceptable nobody's interested in Waiting 100 years right and the the way the way that a lot of these um technology improvements come through they're really quite skewed so as I said in the case of self-check appeals you may get an increase in average productivity but you don't raise the productivity of that potential new new worker you may hire so when I present this to business audiences uh my students at MIT or or people out running companies they're like uh you know what we will bring in more self checkout for our coffee shop or whatever but we're not going to pay higher wages for the existing workers well then we change we've changed the

technology we're using the new and best technology and no increase in Wages that's a problem and I think that's exactly what we're going to get a lot of if we're not careful yeah I mean I think that one of the things that that stands out in my notes right here that I took us as a preparing for this is just this idea that we need to get away from blind techno optimism technology has done a lot of really good things uh for our society and we all have iPhones I'm doing this interview with you over a computer at the internet which is really a marble of Technology when you think about it but this blind techno optimism that all technology is going to lead to positive outcomes for everyone I think is is something we need to get away from and one of the ideas that we have in

crypto is this idea of adversarial optimism you know we're deploying technology in a adversarial world and there's going to be adversaries that deploy Technologies against us or just the status quo can sometimes lead to to people citing in in into bad outcomes because they don't have the right technology or social outcomes or education and stuff like that and so I found this idea that that you have that we got to get away from blind techno optimism to be to be quite profound and I'm wondering you know in a world in which Nuance is the enemy of common understanding you know you can't get an idea that going viral on social media when it's more than 280 characters how do we how do we create that Nuance around actual pragmatic views on technology you know what's what's the

meme here uh you know what's what's the way that people can really understand ways in which technology is good in ways in which is that I think there's a lot of questions in there but any reaction I think is fine with me well I I think yeah in search of the meme is is is a good sort of uh tag for the moment Uh Kevin and I yeah I I wouldn't say the Drone and I are expert on on that but you know we we are good at economics and and pretty good history as well so we wrote The Big Book to try and get to try and really provoke debate and argument and I think out of those arguments some of which will be on social media but we'll give we'll have a lot of Live in-person Events as well and open it open to everyone as much as possible and

I think the point of that is see where the Sparks come to see what we can generate in terms of pushback and and friction and and that in my previous experience around policy uh over over you know several decades has been that that's where you find the opening that's where you find the message that you could really drive home and and then you want as many people as possible to adopt it and my definition of success Kevin is when you sit down for lunch with somebody Washington DC and this has happened to me honestly they say you know Simon what we should really do is and then they outlined the idea that you yourself put out one or two or five or twenty years before and you're like that my advice everyone when that happens to you is you just sit there and say yes

that is a good idea we should do that well I I mean I think that uh you know obviously your your experience at the IMF and um you know at MIT and all these all these places has uh given you an opportunity to broadcast these ideas out and I think that wow it's just such an inspiration I mean as someone who's trying to build a pro-social movement around crypto and Bottoms Up crypto that's actually good for the world uh maybe that's uh maybe that's a goal to all set for our movement 15 years out is sitting down with a policy maker in 15 years and having them say hey we should use crypto for social good to deploy Ubi to our citizens or quadratic funding to our citizens and um maybe that's something that we can set a goal goal for and yeah and just remember key Point

don't say I told you so okay that moment you want them to believe they invented the idea you're like wow yeah absolutely brilliant let's do it right so the this is the current event invention has many mothers and fathers uh is that people want to own when they adopt an idea when it catches home they want to be they want to see like they had an original contribution to it so recognize that and celebrate that and spread that and in private of course you can have your own celebration and of course it's the outcome of of the social impact which is what we're all after but I think it's there's different ways to get there and many people in crypto are obviously younger but don't have a lot of experience working with policy makers and deploying those ideas out so I think that we're kind of we're evolving

towards towards figuring out what that looks like but the intersection I see between my work and and possibly your work I I don't know um is is basically like we're trying to build crypto networks that deploy Ubi or quadratic funding uh which is basically funding based off of what your group of peers think is important not just you know uh not just what like the ridge whales want want to see so uh we see like a pluralistic crypto economic Network that can deploy Capital to people who are creating good social outcomes as being one of the primary exports of of our movement and you know I I wonder if if that can be something that sort of creates Market pressure or

or least is like a Lifeboat as technology and AI are disrupting the world and um you know it I'm starting to see glimmers of how our two visions may fit together but um you know I I'd be curious for what you would like to see out of the crypto ecosystem over the next couple years as we build this movement well I I what I really like uh Kevin about what you guys are doing and what you just said is you're bringing the money because you've got to bring the money right you've got to bring the risk capital and then the question is what do the what do the owners of the capital want to achieve and if they want to achieve social goals great and if they if they find certain kinds of risks in terms of social impact acceptable what they want to say

fantastic and I think that the what what I what I think is the really sort of interesting to section is other ways to use generative AI or something like that in a legit in a legitimate way that's respectful of people and and the data that they create other ways to use that to enhance the productivity and the income and and and like circumstances of people particularly lower down the social scale more education scale or in income scale I think we see these things around us can we see these opportunities but they're not seized very much because the people who own let's say let's call it conventional Capital they're very focused on a sort of conventional return on Equity may be adjusted for risk a little bit or just going for the massive home run around apps that are built on

top of chat gbt or something and this is this is a problem this is what we mean by the the business the Monopoly development of Monopoly monopolies around the means of information as we're calling it um is something that is is a problem from Market power conventional sense but it's really a problem in terms of business models if 80 or 90 or 99 of all the capital is available is going into developing apps for chat GPT that's what you're going to get but if you can get five percent ten percent twenty percent of capital deploying in the ways that you're talking about that's going to be very helpful but we must pay attention to the policy context we must make sure the playing field doesn't get too skewed in in the direction of the Titans right because the Titans can Crush everything we've seen this with

with Google's Behavior with Facebook's Behavior with other um the tech Titans of the the social media era behaving badly and that is something that we've got to take those lessons and apply them and push them hard onto the policy onto policy makers and I would recommend very strongly finding bipartisan spaces where we can get agreements and I see one around surveillance and another one around data ownership and data protection and property rights right on which both the left and the right begin to have some tentative agreements those we need to drive home because that's going to help the the broader decentralized movement and decentralization of of business models I think Kevin is the key well I mean I do think the data ownership and property rights is something we talk about a lot in the web 3 ecosystem

there's uh the sort of like meme in web3 is that we're in in web 2 we're all surfs on Zuckerberg's land you know you don't actually own the concept that you deploy out to their Network and web3 and blockchains for all of their faults allow you to have a credibly neutral Foundation reaction of property rights over uh something and it could be as serious as a house or it could be as silly as like a monkey JPEG but you know once you have property rights and scarcity around that then you can start to actually invest in creating things on top of that that foundation and so um I think your Insight about finding bipartisan spaces that uh that care about things like property rights and data ownership and I think you said surveillance was the third one is a key

point for web three people who are who are uh trying to trying to use this technology for for social good yeah I think privacy is is a key issue for everybody on the right and left that's very important I I like a lot the analogy to the system uh in in the sense that it really is the case that almost all of us you know if you go back a thousand years and that's why we kind of start the clock in our book about thousand years ago we were all some sort of our predecessors we're almost all some sort of forced labor we were tied to the land or we were we were owned by other people right and breaking those boundaries was key but a very important way that the boundaries of those restrictions are broken was by moving to Taos so towns and cities uh were not

completely unrestricted but you got once you got away from the land and once you got away from system uh then you had different uh more expanded opportunities and I think that's breaking free and from the serfdom of Facebook is a good way to summarize um what this is all about you know um and one of the other ways that we sort of frame what we're doing and I see an overlap between my work and yours is around this idea of the Matthew effect which is like the cumulative effect of accumulated Advantage known as the rich get richer but I think uh also applies to matters of Fame and Status uh like you know uh Tom Hanks is getting more famous faster than than I am because he's got that accumulated theme that creates that Network effect and um you

know I I think that what's interesting also about about another thread I want to pull from what you said is this idea of the tech Giants hoovering up all of our data and because they've got that aggregated data they're able to monetize it much faster than anyone else is able to and so what are the ways in which we could uh reverse the Matthew effect this accumulated Advantage so that the poor getting richer just as fast as the rich are getting richer and we're able to monetize our data without being beholden to these Tech Giants so that's another way I would sort of frame part of my work and what we're interested in doing and and I'm wondering how that fits into your views and and what you've written about in this uh in this book well I think that's absolutely key Kevin so if

you look at what we know about where the data the trading data is coming from for the generative AI we don't know everything that's a bit of a problem what we do know is that getting a lot of it from places where they don't have full permission or uh websites where where data has been illegally illegally broken out of of restricted domains and publicized so there's already a big issue about the the probably right there get images for example which which you know is pretty expensive place to get your photographs um but they're also I think being completely uh plagiarized by generative AI so that Getty image's business model could potentially be destroyed by the ability of AI to generate synthetic images based on training from Getty Images right all of this is is a is a big problem in

terms in terms of property rights it's also by the way reminiscent of other technological Transformations where it is completely standard and you might even say a core feature of those Transformations that you take something that's either common property or fuzzy property you make it into private property then you monetize it then you consolidate it then you make it into big profits right we saw that we've seen that with land we've seen that with um rights of way uh we we we've seen we've seen that with data already uh in in in terms of social media so I think asserting those copyrights and controlling them and making them portable but of course what you also need there is organization because I by myself cannot stand up to the feudal Lord right the bailers will come for me and you'll never hear from me again but

if we all get together or if we move to the city or we somehow change the political Dynamic and process around this then we had the Renaissance or some some other better path for the development of of technology so I think thinking collectively looking for ways to organize ourselves and what do we want we want ownership of what we create we want it to be uh portable and we want to be able to organize it collectively I don't think we'll get enough money individually from that but collectively we can shape what technology can be built using our data right so that that is actually an enormous potential power in a moment where there are multiple paths for how technology develops yeah I mean I love that vision of collective organizing as a way to create a

counterweight towards the the monopolist's power um or or the oligarchs power and um you know one of the the things that we're really interested in building in the web 3 space is this idea of Dao's decentralized autonomous organizations where we can collectively organize and collectively own property together and hopefully the sum is greater than the whole of its parts with Dallas and um you know there's a lot of different flavors of Dallas's investment dials there's protocol dials there's impact owls and things of things of that nature but we're kind of in like the first or second inning of developing technology that allows us to collectively organize across um across social distance but also Geographic distance and and create better outcomes for ourselves but it's

it's early days but I'm seeing a lot of glimmers of of um of ways that we could do it and and I you know I also don't want to throw out traditional uh local organizing and and you know co-ops and things that have developed outside of the technology rain are are really uh amazing tools for Collective organizing as well but I think that what's new is that we can do this at web scale with web3 and I think that's what people are people are really excited about so um a big yes and to what you just said so I would draw the parallel with the uh early or mid 19th century when people who were pulled into big cities like Manchester uh started to organize themselves differently and they were using of course some of the tools that have been provided in fact

including the key thing that you know people living in cities they're working in big factories together the chartists were a key political movement uh demanding more democracy in in mid-century uh uh 1800s uh in Britain and the one thing they were missing that you have the potential to develop Kevin is they didn't mobilize money right so they they were a social organization political pressure Mass demonstrations and so on changed the political conversation completely but they didn't create Enterprise they didn't build their own alternative path for technology relative to say large textile factories now we live in a different moment now we live in a very different kind of economy now we there's there's a lot more value in and around information so I think that the mobilization of

money and they're applying it to for for appropriate social purposes and you decide what's appropriate or the investors to say what's appropriate work that out I think that's exactly what this moment needs well you know I'm wondering what else this this moment needs and you know I I I'd say like you know people let's keep in mind that you're speaking to a crypto audience most of the people who listen to this are either social change entrepreneurs programmers themselves so they can build these Collective organizing tools and we do have some of um I would say to the extent that web3 has Elite uh you know keep uh we do have like a lead ethereum people people that have had exits in the past and and have Capital to deploy to so you know I'm wondering what would have to be true for us to support this vision and this this

social movement that you're trying to trying to stimulate what advice would you have for us well I've been teaching courses about about Bitcoin and about crypto and Maurice web 3 and MIT since 2016 or 2017. and we hired Gary again so to come work for us uh before he obviously went to the administration and and he was a immensely you know positive impact and a lot of the discussions we've had over this long period of time came and it wasn't about you know what is regulation and to what extent is regulation empowering and enabling as opposed to stifling and distorting right so some forms of Regulation absolutely do protecting companies and that's it we think of a lot of that we see a lot of that around conventional Finance but other forms of Regulation that protect consumers uh that protects investors that give you transparency uh our our

um I think really really positive to the development of of new businesses now if it's all about profit and all about maximizing return and make get rich quick then we I think that that leads into a lot of problematic areas but if it's about social impact if it's about helping people I think there's a much better potential cooperation with prospective proactive pro-innovation regulators and and I personally I mean Gary against a friend of mine I don't talk to him now he's at the SEC because there's enough people pressing to do things but I think Gary is exactly the kind of person who can help you in the right conversation move in that direction it's really amazing and I feel seeing just the MIT is teaching courses on bitcoin and crypto um and sees it legitimate enough to tell

the students that are going through the MIT program about the of the tech um where my mind goes to is is is this idea of a redirecting technology um in order to create social change I mean I have in my notes here that uh from your book altering the narrative and changing the Norms cultivating countervailing part powers and then also policy Solutions and I think that like we and crypto can really focus on those countervailing Powers altering the narrative and changing Norms is is where I would like to see us go and then you know what you said about Gary and and the SEC and the policy Solutions I think is maybe the third thing that was missing there yeah look I I think the dollar a lot is about the narrative and a lot of it is about you know opinion

and understanding and I think the crypto world you know there is an element of the crypto world that you know got a bit of a bad bad reputation but I would tell you we read our latest crypto course um half semester course in September and we were wondering September 2022 and we were wondering give it all the circumstances and given the the Fallen crypto prices after the pandemic whether any students would take the course we had 70 seats in the course course and a hundred people on the waitlist together and then for me that's the key measure which is do young people see potential do they want to explore a space do they want to understand uh the opportunities and as long as they do we're going to get a continue to offer that course and the course is pulled more and more let's say away from standard crypto to all

walk towards more web 3 and that's great we're absolutely uh in in favor of that and encouraging students at all levels to think about alternative technology paths and what would it take to move in that direction that's a big part of what of what I what I teach and what I work on it's interesting to hear you say that you've gone from teaching about more Bitcoin and crypto to more web 3 and I think as the ecosystem continues to evolve and adapt there will be all these different nieces and you may have to split the course into the courses about D5 and then courses about impact owls and courses about Collective organizing in web 3 and you know hopefully we won't throw the baby out with the bath water it because there are people who are using crypto for anti-social means uh hopefully you don't you don't throw away

the whole internet when there's a bad website so I I would I would hope that uh people understand that that there are different sub niches of crypto and and um yeah and if you ever do a course on impact Dallas or or regenerative crypto would love to get involved in that that's that's great to hear that there's been that interest from the students yeah I think the student interest is is your best indicator what do young people want to work on what where's the enthusiasm and and I think it's very very important Kevin this is also the student perspective that we put competing Visions out there because a lot of Technology development is about vision and we never talk about economics by the way is almost entirely silent on the issue of vision but what are we trying to create what are we imagining what what are the goals that we have

what do we regard as acceptable means of operation and and implementation those are huge questions and we see them when you look back in history you know this the the cliche the history is another country you do see things more clearly you say oh well they you know Henry Ford wanted to do this this and this well that had a big impact and some of that was acceptable and someone that was was deemed not acceptable but we don't see it in ourselves I think enough Kevin and the best way to see it and the best way to encourage it is to have competition of visions and but also put them before people who are 18 22 28 and say right which ones do you want to work on and you know sometimes it's they'll say well we like this direction but we've got to

go make money over here I respect that I don't give them a hard time for that but I'm encouraging them to think when they get some autonomy when they get some Capital when they have um opportunity they should push in more diverse directions and of course it's also possible Kevin that generative AI is going to displace a lot of jobs for relatively young people we don't know this yet but there's a lot of concern that you you don't need the junior coders as much and it's going to be harder in your 20s to break in to some kinds of firms but my reaction is okay go start your own thing right find that entrepreneurship space where where people are not dismissing you because you're 23 and don't have a lot of experience and then you become the empowered 23 year old with your own version of generative AI that actually

bumps you up in terms of what you can achieve let's let's let's up upset the hierarchies in that fashion I think that that's that's a very interesting idea for for some some young people to explore yeah well there's certainly a subset of young people who don't want to be climbing the hierarchy somewhere else but will create their own new thing um and you know I think that I would fall into that category but I also like to remember that I'm very privileged to be you know born in the middle class as a middle class white guy in the United States and not everyone will have that opportunity so I think it's about creating that opportunity and and you know maybe creating those multiple Visions is the way that you do that the really provocative thing I have in my notes Here If I'm doing my research is that is

the idea that Tech has a vision oligarchy so how much is our vision for the future of technology coming from Zuck and Bezos as opposed to Bottoms Up from everyday citizens and yeah I thought I found that to be quite a provocative term and I mean that there's a vision oligarchy not Capital oligarchy and creating that pluralism of Visions I think is a key point for what you said yeah there's always a vision oligarchy you may not see it because you sort of you think it's part of the you know unavoidable environment it's always that I think Elon Musk is a fascinating character this in this way because on the one hand someday some days he's very oligarchic some days he wants to overturn the apple cart completely some days I can't make any sense of what he's saying but but if you watch what musk

who what musk is saying and and what what swirls around him you can actually get these glimpses into the original gaki its challenges its incumbents and so on and I I think that's that it's very instructive to follow the twists in terms of his various proposals one example of a vision oligarch I think a deal on he's just seen I mean you know SpaceX and um and Tesla are just and then PayPal before it was just massively Visionary for its time and you know for for me he's he's the prime example of his in oligarch but I'm wondering if there's anyone who's really is there anywhere where this pluralism of Visions is really starting to come together and and you feel like the competing Visions are are really drowning out the oligarchs or at least being able to successfully

compete with the with the oligarchs because I'd be interested to copy that and replicate it if there is yeah I think around um Public Health we made a lot of progress during covet I worked with some amazing people Grassroots decentralized using technology trying to provide testing get access to vaccines otherwise protect people who didn't have resources and I still do some of that work and it's it's quite inspiring I think the the problem of the worry of this particular moment Kevin is that the massive leaps and generative AI I mean we follow this closely and we talk to a lot of people in the industry and we've been impressed and and surprised frankly by chat GPT and by the the speed of the of the developments of the space I think there's a danger that both the money should be made and the vision appeal or

Allure is going to tilt things back into into a monopoly driven vision and much more than anything we even saw under social media uh for example or or in the Facebook so prime time so I think there's a I think going to the going to Public Health looking at people with well-defined health problems that are not dealt with by our you know fascinating health system which has a huge capability but it's also massively expensive and enormously skewed towards privileged people I think that is a very very productive space and there are fantastic I always personally in my work on this sort of thing Kevin find the people who are working on the problems who have the customers the clients the the the the people they're trying to

help and then figure out how to help them right I'm not an expert on child care or nursing homes or senior living or or K-12 schools but I know people who are I know people on the front lines I know and they can tell me what they need or what they're missing and I can help them go get that stuff right and when we can learn lessons and we can Channel it into the policy space so I think finding identifying your your customers finding the the people who have that need to addressing the social purpose in public health that's my proposal for you and your audience well we will check that out and I love that idea of people on the front lines having the most um sort of fresh perspective because they're actually dealing with the patients and if there was a way that we

can combine that bottom the collective intelligence of the people who are perceiving on the the front line um with the organizational Network effects and the capital of of people who are working top down that that to me feels like a pretty huge opportunity so um that's where that's where I would like to go so some of the big breakthroughs in Social purpose and socialization the 19th century were again around Public Health I think everyone knows of the story about John John Snow figuring out that cholera came from infected water and his sort of individual entrepreneurship social entrepreneurship there but I think people it's right Robin almost Nobody Knows the name of Edwin Chadwick who was one of the first people who who imagined with the help of his friends and so on but he imagined you could bring running water into people's homes continually

and then use that word of flush the human waste and and food ways to sort out of the home right that was a massive Revolution I did in the 1840s that transformed British and other cities and without that we would not be living in the cities we live in today uh at least in in more developed countries that that are actually quite healthy and and relatively clean places to live so that thinking like we should have public investment and then public and private Partnerships to implement clean water well-run sewers and then to use that to improve public health statistics that that was completely new and that was imagined actually strangely enough not for empathy reasons but much more for for you know benthamite efficiency reasons which you see with a little

strange strange to the modern mind but they were like hey too many people are sick they're not coming to work we need to boost National productivity okay well that was one motivation structure I think these days we have enough we have enough money enough perspective to be considerably more empathetic towards people who have less than than we do and I would also say that or remind everyone Kevin that you know we the privileged people in this country which you know tens of millions of people who could actually invent stuff and move things we live in a world of 8 billion eight billion people many of whom most of whom do not have those same advantages so the world is not short of problems I can promise you and and those problems many of the problems are amenable to appropriate application of Technology but you should not rely on

Bill Gates and the other Vision oligarchs to solve these problems because most of the solutions they put forward while well-meaning I'm sure are are too small and too top down to to move the needle uh completely I've certainly enjoyed the conversation but we are getting towards the bottom of the hour now I'm wondering if there's anything I didn't ask that that you want to say Simon well that has been a great conversation Kevin and I've really enjoyed it we covered all the ground I think the one um additional warning that we would put out there that we try to start the book with this is that sometimes these Vision The Visionaries like the vision oligarchs we're calling them um sometimes they could or many times that the reason that oligarchs is because they've had so much success in the past right so we talked about Elon

Musk uh PayPal definitely successful Tesla has really changed the conversation SpaceX okay there may be some vanity element there but it's it's really it's quite impressive in terms of some you know shaping the conversation but just because people have been successful in the past doesn't mean that they have the right vision for the next thing to come including generative Ai and I think it's very important that we challenge we challenge the people who present themselves as the as the authorities as the technology specialist about you know from Google or Microsoft or any any of the other uh big players and and I think these conversations and the future technology is far too important to be left in the hands of the technologists Kevin I think we need people to understand technology people who regard Technologies being powering

but people who also say hey we have this problem with um Child Care being way too expensive for most people and that has big consequences for families for learnings for social equities going forward we must solve that problem and then they battle you they're like no show resolution problem I don't want to see technology for the sake of Technology show me the solution to this well-defined problem and I will take you to to meet the people who are living in these circumstances that are just awful and we must improve their lives and and I think that you know that's social let's call it activism but but also vision from from from wherever you want to take your Visions it's so important Kevin uh today we've had something in in our human past and we've had some wins and

and we should celebrate those wins but we've also had a lot of technological disasters from a social perspective and a lot of additional exploitation this came from technology okay in the past they didn't have the advantage of our resources our understanding and the experience that we can draw on we must not make those kinds of mistakes before don't leave technology in the hands of the technologists I love that and you know the one of the primary messages I get out of your book is that history is not Destiny people have agency and that's the kind of the seed of Hope for me is that um is that we can actually steer this ship collectively as a movement and and us people who are working on this Frontier and I think that your book power in progress are a thousand year struggle over technology and prosperity

is a great guide to doing that I would encourage the Lily series to pick up a copy of the book there will be a link to the uh link to the book in the show notes and Simon thanks so much for coming on I really enjoyed the conversation I think that I hope to steer the crypto movement slightly uh using my agency in in the right direction and and and thanks for adding your own flavor of vision to the uh to the conversation well thanks to your leadership in the space Kevin and thanks for this opportunity it really means a lot to me and to the Ron and and I hope we can keep this conversation going and talk again soon as as we see progress and as we can celebrate progress and as we can encourage people to move it in these kinds of directions yeah well it's

been a great conversation really have enjoyed having you so I have a link to the uh the book power in progress our thousand year struggle over technology and prosperity in the show notes is there anything else you'd like to direct the listeners uh attention to before we wrap the episode I think we we do steer the ship Kevin but without sometimes realizing it and we mustn't be sheep no offense to sheep here okay but we mustn't be manipulated and pushed in in in in the direction of the division always want to go we have to recover our agency and I think your movement and your followers and and your friends are I think going to be a key part of that yeah well uh from the vision oligarchs we'll move towards Vision plurality and uh I'm a big fan of that Simon thanks so

much for coming on the Greenfield plot my pleasure thanks a lot foreign [Music]