Episode 219: Nouriel Roubini - Top Economist On The Financial Crisis "We Are Doomed"
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Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it! Today on the podcast, we have Nouriel Roubini, who is one of the most well-known economists in the world. He's best known for being one of the few people who correctly predicted the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.

He's the author of the new book called Megathreats, which is 10 dangerous trends that imperil our future and how to survive them. This was probably one of the most informative podcasts I think I've ever done. We talked all about artificial intelligence. We talked about cryptocurrency. His nickname is Dr. Doom because, like I said, his predictions are

may seem a little bit doomful, but he's actually been right more than he's been wrong. This is one podcast I highly suggest you listen to. It is fascinating. Enjoy. We have, of course, Noriel Rubini on the podcast. Did I say your name correctly?

Yeah, Nuria Rubini. Okay, good. And his newest book is called Mega Threats, 10 Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future and How to Survive Them. And this has been a podcast I've been very looking forward to doing for a plethora of reasons. Number one, I just love how you kind of have no holds barred. Your attitude is like you say it how it is. There's no mincing words. You get right down to it.

and I love that style. So thank you for being on the podcast. Great being with you today, Jennifer. Yes, even with the technical issues we had. So I love that. Also, I guess I want to start because your nickname is Dr. Doom. Where did you even get that nickname? And then we can kind of move from there. Well, the nickname came because August of 2008, there was a

long profile of me in the New York Times Magazine titled Dr. Doom.

And the whole article was about me and how I started predicting the global financial crisis in the middle of 2006. I was a Cassandra. People did not listen to me initially until I was proven right. So, you know, that nickname stuck since that New York Times Magazine profile. And even today, sometimes people, strangers bump into me in the streets. And instead of saying, are you Nouriel Roubini? They say, are you Dr. Doom? So...

I'm known as Dr. Doom. You're known as... It sounds like a villain in a Marvel movie, but... There is actually a villain called Dr. Doom.

There is, right? Was it based off of you then? Was it based off of you? No, it was before me. I even once had an Halloween when I was dressed as Doctor Doom. And my date was dressed as Black Swan of Nassim Taleb, Black Swan. But nobody got the joke. Even after I had...

I'm Dr. Doom and she's Black Swan. No one got it? I would have got it. I think it's great. You have a sense of humor about it, obviously. Black Swan of Nassim Taleb. But even after you explained it, I guess on Halloween people, it was too eyebrow as a joke. So nobody understood that. So...

I think that's interesting because when people, you know, because people think of you as this, but yet your predictions are pretty accurate most of the time. Like you predicted the housing crisis, like you said, even though people thought you were a naysayer, you were accurate. Yeah.

You're accurate in 2020 over a whole other area of things. So, you know, it's funny that like, I just find you to be a realist more than anything else. I don't find you to be someone who's a naysayer. I think it's like you, you, like I said, you call it as it is and you're usually correct.

Yeah, I usually say I'm Dr. Realist, not Dr. Doom. I guess Dr. Realist is not as catchy as Dr. Doom and the nickname stuck. But even my last book on megathreats, I'm not speaking about aliens taking over the planet Earth or asteroids hitting our planet. I'm speaking about stuff that is actually reasonably common knowledge.

And, you know, I call it megathreats, but one of the words of the year, according to the Financial Times, was the concept of

"poly" crisis, there's again economic and non-economic threats that are interconnected with each other. That's the term that Adam Tooze, an historian in Colombia, and other economists have presented. Now everybody's using it. I was on the stage in December with the head of the International Monetary Fund, Ms. Kristalina Georgieva, and she spoke about the confluence of calamities like we haven't seen since World War II.

And it was just two weeks ago at Davos for the World Economic Forum, and their yearly global risk report was all about threats, economic and non-economic, and poly-crisis. So, you know, some people call it mega-threats, some people call it poly-crisis, some people call it the confluence of calamities, or the web says we'll have the most turbulent and uncertain and dangerous decade in a long time. They're just different terms for the same types of concerns.

Right. Well, I saw something, two things. Everyone, your book was considered to be one of the best books by the Financial Times of 2022 and very well-deserved. And that I saw someone say something, this book is a wake-up call and we are sleepwalking into a disaster. I think that was the quote that I read. Yeah.

about you and this book. What was the genesis of what, like, is it that to make you even write this book? Was it because you foresaw these things happening and you wanted to kind of bring it to the attention of everyone? Or what was the origin story for writing a book? Well, usually I write about the economic, monetary,

and financial affairs and my last book was on the global financial crisis, crisis economics. But I realized in this world, in addition to the traditional and non-traditional economic, monetary and financial risks, there are other ones that are connected to the economic and financial ones.

and they all relate to each other, they're interconnected. The way I speak about these mega threats is like a matrix, 10 by 10 in each one of these threats affects the other and vice versa. And to understand this world, you have to understand social, political, geopolitical, environmental, health, technological, and trade and globalization related threats. They're all connected to each other. So it's a system where you have to go beyond

your expertise. Economists usually believe in the concept of comparative advantage. That means speak and write only about what you know very well and shut up about the rest. But in this complex world where there is unexpected, unprecedented, unusual uncertainty, we have to think about the system. So it's an attempt to think about the system. And during COVID, I was not traveling lots of times to sit down, think, read, and write and think about the bigger picture.

So it's not just a book about economics, it's about the world and what could even end our species as human species under some extreme circumstances and scenarios.

You know, you talk, there's so many, yeah, you talk about climate change, artificial intelligence, there's so many different areas. And that's why I want to like dive deeper into all, like to a lot of these things. But I wanted to ask you something about just overall, just COVID, right? Post COVID. You know, I think most people have noticed that all the prices have gone, have skyrocketed. Yeah, there's no labor workers, there's no supply, right?

What was it about the, I'm curious, what happened? And why is this, it's continuing. You can't find people to work. Everything is expensive from gas to eggs. How are people, why is this happening? And how do we as an everyday person supposed to kind of acclimate when we're not, because people are not making money, but yet everything is like 100% more expensive. Yeah.

Yes, you know, I'm old enough in my 60s that I remember the 1970s when we had also

double-digit inflation and recession and high unemployment at the same time. That's what's called stagflation, the combination of economic stagnation and inflation. At that time, there were two negative supply shocks, the all-price shocks of '73, following a war between Israel and Arab states, and the second shock coming after the Iranian Islamic Revolution.

This time around, what happened is that there were a combination of what I call bad policy and bad luck that has led to this high inflation.

Bad policy is that the amount of stimulus compared to the shock of COVID was excessive. Yes, we had to do monetary, fiscal and credit easing, but it ended up being too much and for too long. After the global financial crisis, the fiscal stimulus was about a trillion dollars. After the COVID crisis, it was five trillion dollars. And the extent of unconventional monetary and credit easing

easing was even more extreme than during the global financial crisis. So too much stimulus for too long, creating too much money and demand chasing too few goods. And on the supply side, there were three negative

supply aggregate supply shocks that reduce the potential productive capacity of the economy and the supply of goods and services. One was the initial impact of COVID on shutting down economic activity, production of goods and services, the supply of labor and global supply chains.

The second one was the impact of the brutal invasion by Russia of Ukraine on commodity prices, oil, natural gas, food, fertilizer, industrial metals. And three, until recently, the zero COVID policy of China led to additional global supply bottlenecks that created also restriction to supply. So how much was it bad policies as opposed to bad luck? Depends.

I would say, solomonically, half and half. In Europe, more bad luck because of the exposure to Russian energy. In the US, more excessive stimulus. That was a combination of both too much demand because of loose policies and not enough supply because of negative aggregate supply shocks. Call it bad luck.

So these excessive stimulus, for example, right there. But yet now what's happened is, you know, nobody wants to work now. No one can find people to work at a restaurant. No one can find anyone to work anywhere. And it's not it doesn't seem to be getting any better. What is it?

What will create? How can we shift it? How can we even attempt to make it better at this point? Or, you know, I've heard you say in other places that like it's like we're kind of like we're kind of doomed, you know, excuse the pun, but we're kind of doomed. Like there's we're kind of we're kind of so deep in the hole. When when can we start crawling ourselves out of the hole? What can we do?

Well, the fall in the supply of labor, it's a series of very complicated factors. First of all, you have aging of the United States, like other advanced economies. The number of young people can become worker is limited. Two, we're now restricting severely migration, and the migration policy of the Biden administration are substantially not different than those of the Trump administration.

Three, there is a skill mismatch. Some of the jobs, technology of the future requires skills that the average of blue-collar doesn't have, or you have to move from point A to point B, and there are impediments for people moving, including the housing problem right now.

Then there's a whole generation of people that are called the decks of despair. Young people are hopeless, skillless, jobless, income-less, who play video games, get their welfare check, they're on opioids, and they are effectively out of the labor force. The labor source participation rate for prime males, those that are in working age, has fallen sharply in the U.S.,

is not recovered. Then you had people retiring early because there were no jobs because of COVID. Then there is the great resignation of people saying, "I'm tired of the rat race. Let me do something else, be entrepreneurial or be off the grid." And then you have the quiet quitting of people who say,

I'm tired of just being productive in boring jobs. And they're there, they go to work, but God knows whether they're working or they work from home and they're not that productive. There's a whole bunch of factors that are more structural that imply that supply of labor is tight compared to demand and now wage growth is excessive.

So do you, what do you, I want to kind of ask you about it. So let me ask you this. Cause I know when I was telling people that you were coming on the podcast, the big question I got from people is like, can you ask him what I should do with my money? Then should I be investing in anything? Should I be holding my money? Should I put my money in, keep my money in cash? What do you say to those people, including me, but I'm asking for friends and for myself, what should we be doing now?

Well, you know, last year was a bad year for both stocks and bonds. You know, the typical investment advice is put 60% of your money in equities. They're more risky, but with high return. And 40% in government.

government bonds that are lower yield but more stable in terms of price. 60/40, 70/30, risk parity depending on your age and risk profile. But that assumes that the price of equities and the price of bonds are negatively correlated. Risk on, risk off, growth and recession. Most of the time that's the case. So there is growth and risk on, you make money on your equities but the bond yields go higher.

the price falls, you lose money on your bonds or risk of recession equities do poorly, but then bond yields fall and the price goes up and you make money on your bonds. What I argued in 2021, even before the shock, I wrote a piece saying inflation is going to be bad, both for stocks and bonds.

And that's what happened last year. Bond yields were higher, the price was lower, and the price of equity was lower. So the correlation between the two became positive rather than negative. So you lost money on equity and bonds. Why? When inflation is rising, the discount factor for your profit dividend is a long-term bond yield is higher, and therefore equity is falling like it did last year because you have higher return on bonds.

And long duration assets like growth stocks, tech, VC, all these things lose even more money because they are long duration assets where the dividends come later in the future. So they're even more sensitive to a rise in interest rates than traditional stocks. That's why NASDAQ fell 30%, S&P 15% only. But when bond yields are higher, the price of the bonds is lower. So last year you lost more money on

on 10-year treasuries that are supposed to be safe than you did on equities because the S&P fell only 15% because the correlation became positive because of rising inflation. So people forgot that that happens when inflation is rising because we had decades now of low and stable inflation. And last year, there was nowhere to write because public equities did poorly, private equity did poorly, tech stocks, growth stocks, VC, venture did poorly.

REITs and anything related to real estate did poorly. Bonds did poorly. Credit did poorly because credit spreads were widening, high yield, high grade, and the price was falling. All the bubbles like crypto, Mimi stocks, SPACs fell 80-90% because they were totally speculative bubbles.

And even cash, if your cash is your zero nominal return, in real terms with inflation at 10, you lost 10% of the real purchasing power on your cash. So you have to find alternatives. What are the alternatives when inflation is high?

And the same thing can happen over and over again, because suppose inflation goes from two to, say, six percent on average over the medium term. Ten-year treasury then have to be eight percent, six for inflation and two real. Today are only three and a half.

So last year they lost 20%, but if they go from 3.5% to 8%, they will lose another 50%. So you want to be in inflation index bonds that are protected against inflation automatically. You want to be in very short-term treasury bonds that reprice to a high yield without the price loss of long duration bonds. You want to be in gold, green metals, and some other commodities that do well when there is high inflation.

Gold does also well against geopolitical and political risk and financial crisis risk. And then some forms of

real estate, public rates in areas that are sustainable, not damaged by climate change, might provide you some edge against inflation because they tend to do better than equities because you have some pricing power, rents can be adjusted. And as long as real rates don't go too high, real estate doesn't do as poorly as equities. So there are other asset classes you have to think about when you want to protect yourself against even gradually rising inflation.

You don't need hyperinflation or even double-digit inflation. As I said, if inflation were to go from 2% to 6%, bond yields have to go to 8%. It's a bloodbath in bonds. With bond yields of 8%, equity price-earning ratio will be much lower.

In 1982, when we still had high inflation and interest rates were high, the price-earning ratio for S&P 500 was 8. Today it's 17. So that's what happens when inflation is high. This is crazy. So basically, I took notes because you're saying basically gold, metals, public REITs, these are things that we can be putting our money in right now. And inflation index bonds. And inflation index bonds. And treasury bonds. Yeah.

Short duration, not long term, yeah. No, for a short duration. So you mentioned something that I wanted to talk to you about, which was crypto, because you say in the book it's dangerous and...

You know, I love that. I read that. I don't love it. I'm kind of being facetious because I believe the same thing you did. And I really got kind of peer pressured into putting some money into crypto because everyone said it was a second coming of price, basically. And I want you to talk about that. I want you to talk about why you think it's dangerous and how it's kind of played in the marketplace for crypto.

Well, crypto is the mother of all frauds and scams and bubbles now gone bust. By the end of last year, Bitcoin, the number one crypto, lost 80% of its value from the peak of a year before. Ethereum lost more than 80%. The other top 10, 85%. And hundreds of others lost 90% to 100% of their value.

Calling them cryptocurrencies is a misnomer. They're not currency. They're not a unit account. They're not a scalable mispayment. They're not a stable store of value. They're not a single numeral. They're not currencies. They're not even an asset. Usually an asset gives you some income or some utility or some use in industry. So it doesn't even have the characteristics of a

of an asset is a bubble. I used to call them shit coins, but that's actually offensive to manure because manure is actually highly productive as fertilizer in agriculture while it is toxic.

given its environmental damage. If there was a right carbon tax on crypto, the value of Bitcoin wouldn't be zero, it would be negative after you pay for that carbon tax. So it's really toxic. So it's a bubble and it's gone bust. There were 20,000 ICOs, 80% of them, 16,000 of them were a scam in the first place, real scam.

still in the money and disappearing. Another 17% went to zero, so there were only left 700 out of those 20,000. On average, they've lost 95% of their value. The top 10 have lost between 80% and 85% of their value. It's dangerous. It's risky. A bunch of conmen, criminals, crooks, tax evaders, terrorists, human traffickers,

It's really, I mean, SPF and FTX is not the exception, it's the rule. They're all crooks. They should all be in jail. Literally, they should all be in jail. 99.9% of them are criminals. So, and unfortunately,

Young people and minorities and others delusionally believe that you can become rich overnight. No human being has ever become rich overnight. You have to study hard, work hard, save and diversify, and maybe after a few decades you'll have enough to retire safely. The idea that you can just become rich overnight by playing in meme stocks or crypto or day trading or SPACs or very volatile...

techno without any revenues or profits or business plan turned out to be a bubble. And it all went crashing last year when all these speculative bubbles have lost 80% to 90% of their value. Good riddance. And what do you think of NFTs and stuff like that?

That's another joke. Any index of NFT has lost 90% of its value from the peak of a year earlier. If artists need to be paid for their services, there are other good technologies that do that without somebody creating another token, taking a 20% fee out of it.

and pretending that he's gonna provide some income to artists. The artists have been ripped off, historically they've been ripped off even more by this NFT bubble. So now the bubble has gone bust.

And even blockchain is not the new technology. It's a bit of a joke. The idea you can create trust with technology is meaningless. It's a totally overhyped, totally useless technology. It's no better than a centralized spreadsheet. And what they call blockchain is blockchain in name only.

All the corporate DLT and blockchain enterprises are private, not public, centralized, not decentralized, permissionless, and a small group of validators who validate them, not using trust with validation. They call it blockchain because that's what it's called. Blockchain is sexy, but the blockchain in name only. That just glorified the

spreadsheets that are centralized and permissions. Google Docs is a permission centralized document. Nobody calls it blockchain, but they call blockchain stuff that is not blockchain. So it's another fad. The entire blockchain, now people say crypto is a scam, but blockchain is a revolutionary technology. It's nonsense. Blockchain is as useless as crypto.

So there are people that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on that monkey thing. I don't know what it's called. I can't remember off the top of my head. Yeah, the ape. I don't know. Yeah. People are spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Are they going to lose their shirt on that? They already lost their shirt. Anybody who bought NFT, it's always like this. Whenever there's a bubble, there's a craze, there's FOMO, fear of missing out. Yeah.

early guys are the big whales and insiders who dumped them the junk on the

retail suckers, you know, 99% of people who bought say Bitcoin, did they buy it when it was a hundred or a thousand or even 10,000? No. 99% of people jumped into crypto when it started to be 30,000, 40, 50 at the peak 69. Now it's around 20. So 99% of people who bought Bitcoin bought it at a price that was two or three times or four times or five times higher than it is today.

and they lost their shirt. It's always like this, whether it's crypto, whether it's Mimi stocks, whether it's NFTs, whether it's SPACs, whether it's some of these vaporware growth stocks and so on, the fools always arrive late and the insiders rip them off, dumping the junk on them and they get shafted royally.

Yeah, I mean, what about like this? Even people are spending money on metaverse. Is it all the same in the same bucket? The metaverse, the NFT, the Bitcoin, it's all it's basically in your opinion, all dangerous and a total joke. Most of it is, you know, I mean, real real estate is in limited supply, you know.

My apartment in New York is in Manhattan and there is only limited supply. But in a metaverse, you can create infinite supply of these virtual pieces of land or property. So why any of them should be worth anything when you can replicate them one million times or one gazillionth time at zero cost?

Things that have a value are things that, one, have a limited supply and scarcity, and two, there is a real demand for it because it provides you some services.

And you already have all these kids who are hooked on Instagram and social media that gives you dopamine highs much worse than crack cocaine, and you're addicted to it 24/7, and they live in this la-la land rather than in reality. And now they want them to be hooked even more in the metaverse instead of living real lives. There's a whole generation of people, and a economist won a Nobel Prize with his wife,

that Angus Deaton with Hank Hayes wrote a book about the deaths of despair. It's all the white underclass that are poor, unskilled, without work, without jobs, without hope, without anything. They get a welfare check. They play video games all day long. They're addicted to opioids. 5% of them die every year. Out of the 2 million addicts, 100,000 die of opioid overdose. They're incels.

involuntary celibates, they cannot even have a girlfriend or a date, and lives of despair and they die. That's the metaverse. It's dystopia, it's not utopia. And they want us to get meta and others want us to get even more addicted to this stuff. I mean, it's really, it's more toxic than any drug. You know, you can take crack cocaine

only maybe twice a day. I never tried it, but you can be on Instagram 24/7 and young women, 25% of them are depressed and a good 20% of young men because they're addicted to social media and FOMO about lives that don't exist. It's really toxic.

Why, in your opinion, is there no laws to kind of limit something here or to stop something? Because you're right. I mean, just on the mental health crisis alone, what's happened to people's suicide rate, the depression. Why is nobody doing anything on a higher level to mitigate this? We will eventually have to crack down on social media and the power of

It took us decades until we realized that tobacco kills, and then we limited smoking to adults in other ways. Now advertising, same thing with alcohol and lots of other compulsions that people have.

You know, Robert Lustig wrote a book about the hacking of the American mind. He says in addition to traditional compulsions and addictions, you know, drugs, smoking, gambling, shopping, alcohol, you name it. There are two new modern ones in Western and now even Eastern society. One is social media. As I said, it gives as much of a dopamine high as crack cocaine. And then our food is all...

very fatty, processed, without fiber and makes us fat and obese and get us vascular disease. Those are two new addiction and compulsions that are part of our modern society and they're related to each other as we live more sedentary lives than we play video games or inane metaverse virtual realities.

No, I agree with you. And do you think that this is going to be just like you said, you know, it took people a while to kind of click and then they have some laws around tobacco or alcohol. Do you think it's going to happen with social media and all these other technologies? It's just going to be like not in our lifetime, maybe in 20 years from now. What is your prediction? I hope it doesn't take 20 years. I hope the next few years we do something about it because you're really...

You have a whole generation of young kids who have attention deficit disorder, they have depression, they don't study hard, they don't work. Part of the quite quitting is that there is really a social malaise. That's why productivity growth is becoming very, very poor. So we cannot wait 20 years. You'll have an entire lost generation. You know, Gen Z stands for generation zombies, I guess.

So, they're living like zombies, many of them. Not all of them, but many of them do. It's sad, but that's the reality. No, I know. I smiled at your reference, but I say I'm smiling, but actually it's actually very depressing and sad that that is very accurate at the same time. So, your prediction is what? Like in the next five years, they're going to maybe make some laws towards this because it is so detrimental to people's overall well-being?

We have to crack down on it. We have to regulate and control big tech that has too much power, also oligopolistic power, and the damage of social media is severe. It's a very complicated issue, but...

It's toxic. Also, our political discourse is becoming more polarized as people hate each other, Twitter is becoming a shouting match, and everybody pretends to be an expert, and so on. There are lots of social diseases that are coming from many of the aspects of social media and overall big tech that we have to address. It's not easy because they're very powerful, all of them.

and limits to how much we can do and what we can do, but we have to think about it thoughtfully, how to limit it. The same way we regulate tobacco, drunk driving, alcohol, and to some extent the most dangerous drugs and so on. We regulate lots of things. That has to be also regulated in an intelligent way, because not banning it, but regulate it properly.

Yeah, I agree with you. The other question I really wanted to get to was artificial intelligence. You talk about this in the book a lot, which I wanted to get your take on this for people. I think it's very interesting because I feel human beings are going to become obsolete pretty soon. And I wanted you to talk about this. Yes, on one side, there is the positive of technology.

Productivity growth could increase even if we don't yet see it in the macro aggregate data. The economic pie might become bigger. The cost of lots of goods and services could be cheaper. We could find medical and scientific breakthroughs that make us live longer and healthier. That's the positive side, but there are many negatives.

One is that eventually you get permanent technological unemployment, initially routine jobs of blue-collar workers, then even cognitive jobs of white-collar workers that

that can be sliced in a series of tasks that can be automated. Now, with these new transformer technologies, generative AI, charging BT, and that's only the beginning of it, even creative jobs like writing a piece of music or a movie or a piece of art or a newspaper article or predicting what the Fed does,

It takes only two or three years more until some AI gets all the economic data, all the models, all the speech of the Fed officials and makes a prediction about what the Fed does next month better than a human. Those are good jobs of people who make a million dollars and have a PhD at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Those are really some of the best jobs in Wall Street, the Fed watchers, the HCD watchers. That's the trend.

Plus, these technologies are increasing income and wealth inequality because they're capital-intensive, skill-biased, and labor-saving. If you own the machines or the capital owns the machine, the AI, you do well. You're in the top 10% of distribution of skills, education, human capital. For a while, AI makes you more productive, but you are

blue-collar, white-collar, low- or medium-value-added sector, increasingly, gradually, it's not going to happen overnight. Your jobs and your income are going to be threatened by AI. And yeah, eventually, there are also these AI theories that predict that sapiens as a species might become obsolete. Either we merge with machines, become super-intelligent, transhuman, bionic, live forever, or otherwise sapiens as we know it

Eventually, we don't know whether it's going to take 50 or 100 years or more, maybe come obsolete and be some other form of an omnioid coming after us. You said merge with a machine. How would humans merge with a machine? You see that in movies. You see that in sci-fi movies. Well, we can already replace some body parts with things that are made out of bionic material.

one way or another, we transplant organs, some of those organs eventually could be not organic, bionic. And you can think of a world in which eventually your mind, your consciousness, your memory is also uploaded into this bionic world. You know, there's a merger between human and machine. You know, slowly, slowly, you know, we're using increasingly stuff that

that makes us smarter. Even a smartphone is in terms of recall of every information. Once you have the chip in your brain, then it can regulate other things. You're already moving in that slippery slope, right? It's the idea of transhumanity. You know, before sapiens, there was omaractus and denisovian and Neanderthal. They all disappeared. We're the only species that actually destroys those who came before us. You know, we come from apes, but

but in the animal world the gorilla might be strongest but the bonobos and the chimps happily live with him while sapiens destroy the arcturus and then his ovian and the undertow and the homo deus or feminine deus or bionic man or woman is gonna destroy sapiens down the line you know sapiens have been around only 150 000 years

When life has been around for 3.4 billion years, the idea of what human life is on this planet is totally far-fetched, of course. This is fascinating. So you think the Homo sapiens can become extinct like a dinosaur eventually? Yeah. How many years from now do you think? Like in 50 years, 100 years, 20 years?

No, it's not going to be 20 years, but I would say within the end of this century, there will be some merger between the human and the machine. That's a thing that is quite likely at this point, given the speed at which these technologies are advancing and the machines are becoming super intelligent. So either we merge with them or otherwise they're going to completely replace us. Probably there'll be some kind of a merger.

Yeah, within the next century or so. But if we don't merge and machines replace humans, who controls the machines? Like who's going to be on earth to control the machine?

You know, they may become super intelligent, they might have consciousness, and they might be the next evolution. Neanderthal might have said, if I disappear, who's going to control Homo sapiens? Homo sapiens controlled himself. And Homo sapiens' triple set of his DNA is Neanderthal. So, you know, there'll be another form of life, human. They're super intelligent with consciousness. Maybe they care more about the planet, about

about animal and plant species the way we don't. Maybe it's going to be a better world where animal and plant life has a chance because we are the worst predator and pest on this planet and we're destroying it. So maybe we have to evolve in a wiser and more civilized form of humanity. So it'll be the next stage of what is human. As I said, who said that sapiens should be the last one? It's totally for fetch.

I guess you're right. Just to finish this question, and I'll let you go, can we regulate that? Can there be governmental laws now so that won't happen? Why isn't that happening? We're trying to regulate AI, but if the US stops AI and it will not stop it, China or North Korea or somebody else is going to do it.

Who's going to dominate AI, machine learning, robotic automation is not only going to dominate the industries of the future, but it's going to be also the strongest geopolitical, military, and security power in the next century. That's why this past year, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, wrote a book together with Henry Kissinger, the greatest geostrategist of our time, saying that

The race between the US and China on AI is not just about economics. It's also always going to be the hegemonic power, military and security. And we'd rather have the US than China being that. So eventually, you cannot stop technology. You can manage it, but you cannot stop it.

This is fascinating. I know you've got to run. For those of you, the book is called Mega Threats, 10 Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future and How to Survive Them. We'll continue this conversation. Pick up this book, guys. It's fantastic. It's fantastic. Thank you.

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