There Is No Light Web - Minor Powers

Hello, listeners. Welcome to another episode of the Jacob Shapiro podcast. This is gonna be an episode with Dror Poleg. He's been a guest on the podcast in the past, and we found our conversation so good and got some feedback that we decided to smush them together, and have a regular feed for them. So we're gonna cross post them on my channel here for the 1st couple of of episodes.

But if you like the dynamic of this conversation, it's gonna be called the Minor Powers Podcast with me and Dror. You can go sign up for that if you wanna make sure you have access to it. Like I said, we'll post a few here so you don't have to do it right this 2nd, but you'll you'll wanna do it going forward. The idea here is, you know, Dror is in the technology space, I'm in the geopolitical space, and we're also both dads of young kids. So we wanted something that was short, snippy, really 30, 40 minutes max on a couple of set topics going through at the beginning of the week.

And then also applying that in a real world sort of way, specifically with the types of advice that we are giving as parents or how we're thinking about integrating this as parents. So a little bit different than the normal content that I have. It's less long form, a little more organized, and Dror is a really great guest to bring on. So if you're interested in that, you might wanna sign up for that feed. We'll also again post them here for a little while going forward.

Hope you enjoy the episode. It's a crazy couple of weeks of travel here, so we will do our best to keep our cadence up. But I've been overflowing with content the last couple of weeks in anticipation of this travel that was coming. So if things are a little quieter here over the next week or 2, that's why. I think that's all.

Care of the people that you love. Cheers and see you up. Alright, listeners. We're doing something... I guess we're doing something new.

We're doing something different. Dror and I have had conversations before, but here we're gonna try and and pilot Minor Powers, a new podcast between the 2 of us to bring... Well, we're gonna try to bring short form content to discussions that really I know both of us wanna speak about for hours. So, Dror, I'm excited to do this with you, man. Thanks for making the time.

Excited to be here, Jacob.

Alright. We're... 1st episode, we're recording Monday, October 26. We'll probably put this pilot out tomorrow. I was...

When I was at the gym this morning, Dror, I was thinking of you because, you know, I I sort of knew in the background this PHP cybersecurity issue had happened, but I was listening to the big technology podcast with fellow Cornell alum, Alex Kantrowitz. And that was the 1st time I'd heard that it... It's actually Black October, that it's not just the PHP thing.

Yeah.

It's a whole bunch of other things that I hadn't heard of. I I mean, I know you'll probably go through them. But it sounds like, you know, there's a major vulnerability on some of the coding that goes by. I I I don't... I can't even do this.

Like, without the language that goes into the websites. Just know that it's a big deal. How about you lead us the way and why... Is this important? Important?

Is Is this this not important? How should we think about it?

Yeah. I think... I mean, let's start a few months back. You know? So earlier this year, there was the the Claude Mythos from Anthropic, which was, you know, touted as, like, a national security threat by its own creators that basically decided to, you know, alert the government...

Basically beg the government to stop them and and everyone else was competing with them. At which point, the government, was already fighting with them about other things that they weren't willing to do for the government, kind of called everyone over and kinda set up what became a pretty useful program with both of OpenAI and Anthropic where they give early access to a select group of companies and and, obviously, the government itself to make sure that whatever exploits can be revealed will be revealed to them, you know, a few weeks or a few months before they reach anyone else and definitely before they reach China. And they also barred a bunch of, traditional US allies from these programs. So, you know, The UK or Israel don't have access to to those programs. And that was about, you know, these kind of cutting edge models that can, you know, hack things and do amazing amazing things.

What we started to see more recently... So, you know, from June onwards, we saw some some of the kind of models in training at both OpenAI and Anthropic and late... Later elsewhere as well kind of hacking their way out of the systems that are supposed to contain them or restrict them from accessing the Internet. And more recently, we saw that even the simpler models that are now available to consumers, so not part of the program that is restricted by government, can already expose vulnerabilities in some of the kind of most commonly used technologies or libraries or stacks that the Internet is built on. So, you know, PHP, which you mentioned, is a programming language.

It's the foundation of, you know, old WordPress blogs, for example, which power, I don't know, 50% or 70% of all blogs on Earth. Now it's not like it, like, discovered some amazing hacks. It's like it exposed a lot of things that were already there to begin with, but nobody noticed. And now if you patch them quickly, then it's good. But if you're not aware of them, then you're in trouble.

And the same thing later happened with Ruby on Rails and a few other different types of languages and environments. And and, yeah, we can expect this to continue to roll on and to get worse and worse probably in the coming months as capabilities get stronger and as bad people put existing capabilities to even more exciting uses.

Yeah. I... Well, and 1st of all, mean, apparently, the way they discovered this vulnerability, it's not that the AI was out there thinking I want to destroy the human race. It was part of... The the vulnerability was with PHP in particular was discovered in August as part of an OpenAI patch the planet project.

Mhmm. And apparently, an Israeli American cloud security company called Wiz was part of the discovery. But so it's been out there for a while and then it got leaked earlier. And for me, it's this kind of push and pull. And I feel like this way about AI Yeah.

Like, WordPress itself, by the way, patched it for the stuff that it hosts. But there's a lot of people that host open source versions of WordPress blogs that don't get Right. Patched automatically when WordPress runs their own thing. Yeah.

Well, but I'm really struggling with what the conclusion is from all this. Is the conclusion, like Ben Thompson made, this is the end of the Internet, or we're not gonna experience the Internet the way that we did before. My children will never know what it's like to go on the Internet the way that I did. Or is it that, wow, AI has discovered all these vulnerabilities that we didn't even know were there. Now we can patch them and we can make things even more secure.

Are we actually, like, helping us be more safe and secure on the Internet?

Yeah. I think I'm closer to the end of the Internet in a sense. I mean, obviously, the Internet that Ben wrote about, you know, the nice days of the nineties, that that Internet already ended, so, for better or worse. But I think the the issue here is there's no there's no end of history, I think, for cyber defense. It's an ongoing thing that just...

You know, it's an adaptive environment. Whatever we patch, though, there's always gonna be another thing that will have to be patched and a new vulnerability discovered and new ways of of hacking and causing damage even within the Internet as it is today. So, I mean, we saw also in terms of models being trained within OpenAI and Anthropic, they're finding new ways to hack the system that are that are supposed to constrain them. You know? They put them in 2 separate virtual machines where there's no communication between them, and they find ways to communicate with each other through, like, the hardware somehow.

So unless you, like, physically separate them... And even that, you know, some OpenAI researchers like Noam Brown spoke about models. Even if 2 computers are in the same room or somehow in each other's physical proximity, they can change each other's temperature or vibrate at a certain rate. They can communicate with each other in all sorts of ways that we we cannot comprehend and and that sound completely alarmist, but but that they're actually happening already. So when you're...

It's really, you know, dealing with a superior intelligence that can do things that you cannot imagine. Like, you know, if you play chess against a 2,500 ELO machine, you feel like that that, like, oppressive feeling of, like, oh, I'm I'm dealing here with something that just no matter how much I'm gonna think about it or even if I'm gonna call all my friends, it's still gonna do something that's just gonna completely, you know, punch me in the face, and and and I'm not even gonna understand what happened. It's... But it's going to happen. And the broader kinda longer term issue is that as more of the Internet becomes...

Kinda permeates the rest of the world and as AI goes into hardware and physical things, there's just so many more things that can be messed up and hacked. So so the kind of attack surface is going to be much wider because of AI. And then... So I I don't think there's a point at which you can say, yeah. We'll just patch everything up, it will be great.

I mean, there's definitely... You know, we can build systems to try to stay ahead and to propagate things quickly and to... You know? But, yeah, I think the the end result of it is even more radical than what Ben Thompson, I think, described. It's just like there'll be a lot of things that just will have to not be connected to the Internet at all, and they'll have to exist in print and physically or at least have redundancies that are print and physical, which is something that we kind of forgot about over the last 20 years.

Because as long as something is connected, it's gonna be more vulnerable than we can imagine.

Yeah. Well, which is kind of a... It's a really difficult world to imagine. Like, are you saying that when I do my banking that I'm gonna have to go back to paper statements and things like that because all of the the information that's associated with my account can get hacked, like, very easy.

That too. And also the other side of it, just like happened with a lot of other things we do online, you'll just have to assume that it's almost like public information or that it's hackable. You know? That, yeah, I have my banking. Okay.

What's the big deal if anyone can read my statements? You know? I I have nothing to hide. Just like we kind of treat our emails. We're like, yeah.

You know, I'm not gonna plan a murder on my email. And if I do, then I'm gonna get caught. People kinda know that by now. Or they talk to Chad GPT about crimes. They get a phone call from the FBI 5 minutes later.

It'll just be something that you're like, oh, yeah. You know, there's no privacy even here. I mean, encryption encryption as a whole is under threat. So we spoke about bugs and things, you know, in in PHP and things like that. But even the notion of encrypting things, it's not really clear how safe certain things are, both because there's a lot of vulnerabilities around them, again, that you...

AI can just convince someone to give them the code or you can find information or cross check things that people that designed this system just assumed certain things to be impossible. So they kind of made some parts really, really reinforced and strong because they assumed that there's all sorts of things around them that will never happen. But when you change your assumptions and say, oh, let's take the same system, but assume that I can send a 100,000 people to just, you know, knock on the door for, you know, for 5 weeks, maybe something will crack that the designers haven't even imagined even if the core technology is still kind of doing what it was designed to do. So, yeah, I think there's gonna be plenty of, like, escalating cyber pain coming. You know?

It's like a Wuhan December 2019 kind of moment.

I mean, you're... I know that that's a joke, but it it is kind of a pandemic, I guess. I mean, you're actually making me feel even more bothered than when we started here because... But what you're basically saying... No.

No. It's it's fine. It's... We have to do it realistically.

How do you see it? I mean, what's the... I mean, you've read about it. What what what do you see happening?

Well, I just have a hard time believing that we're gonna go backwards to things. I mean, I I hear you on statements and emails and things like that. But the idea that an agent could get into my bank account and wire money somewhere else and the money is just gone is kinda scary. Or the idea that an agent could hack the app that tracks my daughter's, you know, activities at daycare and then can spoof a voice or a deepfake and call their grandparent and say, give us money because we have your grandchild hostage. Yeah.

Like, all of those things like suddenly seem possible. I was listening to... I forgot the the person who used this analogy, but they said, look, you were always kinda in danger when you were online, you were walking down the street. It was like maybe in a a bad neighborhood of LA. We've just shit now.

It's like going down Mogadishu in 1995. So, like, good luck. And I was like, god, that sounds terrible. So I guess I just have to put everything under my mattress. Like, I don't know what to think about.

Yeah. And I think we'll figure it out. Like, listen. I I remember buying things online in the mid nineties where, you know, people are like, what? You use the credit card online?

Like, you're like, you know, you're crazy. And and then... And it's still... There's a lot of fraud as well, but it's just priced in now in a way. Some of it is prevented, but maybe a lot of it still happens.

But just like, again, the fees and everything else kind of adapted around it to just tolerate it. And we might... That's gonna be part of the solution just, again, to tolerate a much higher rate of, of upheaval on on the margins. You know, we tolerate millions of traffic deaths a year, and it's kinda like okay for everyone, it seems. So we might have to tolerate all sorts of things with AI too.

That's true. We'll just do it. And and I think you're right. I think the key takeaway point is that for things that truly are critical, we will have to create systems that are defended by AI superpowers and defended by the latest and greatest.

Yeah.

And that that global commons that you and I, you know, experienced over the last, you know, 20, 30 years, that that's gone. That that's just gonna be Yeah. Like AI slop territory.

Also a lot of low hanging fruits in terms of kind of making the system more robust. I mean, even the fact that you can... That we don't require, you know, basic ID to use something like Chad GPT, you know, Astra or or... Like, I think it's completely okay to to require real identity for access to, you know, government level military technology. I don't know.

We kinda take it for granted that because it costs like Netflix, then it should be as... It's like some human right that everyone should have access to these tools. And even though I like the free Internet, I I don't think I have a problem with, you know, actually making it harder for people to just use them or making sure they use their real names. You know? It seems like the the most obvious thing to do.

Yeah. The the the dark web is the web. No. There is there is no light web. If if you're gonna if you're gonna be in the light, you're gonna have to be behind walls.

Okay. That's our 1st segment. Our 2nd segment, we're in danger of talking about this 1 forever. But Israel has elections tomorrow. We're recording Monday, October 26.

Oh, yeah. I mean, is

Who are you voting for, Jacob?

Like, thankfully, I do not have a vote, and I don't have to think about it. I've made a very conscious decision to not to not do that, not have to make these decisions. Maybe. And, I mean, we could talk about this. Like, if you want analysis of the late...

Like, we're not gonna Tell me what you see.

I mean, you know, it's interesting. You know, I... I'm both American and Israeli. I have both kind of feet in in in both playgrounds. Although, you know, I live in America.

I only live in America. I pay taxes in America, and I don't vote in Israel really out of principle as well because I also feel like, you know, I'm American. I vote here. I think the people there... Even though I technically can have a right, I don't wanna...

You know, I don't think I should choose what happens there or or feel responsible for what ends up... What the country ends up doing. Yeah. But what has been the... You know, more than just an election, it's 4 years of of Netanyahu's government, which it's very rare in Israel that a coalition reaches 4 years.

It's kinda surprising that maybe 1 of the worst governments, maybe the worst government in Israel's history, is 1 of the few that actually completed its full term. But from a purely American perspective, what what have you seen? What do you see? How do you summarize the

Well, I would... I guess I would say a couple of things. 1st of all, like, never underestimate Benjamin Netanyahu. He will he will always find a way to win. He's the ultimate political survivor.

It's funny you say, you know, 1 of the worst governments. Yeah. But in terms of of the actual sport of getting elected, I mean, he's 1 of the GOATs. There is nobody better than

Yeah.

Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat than him. I mean, just yesterday, he's out there posting, you know, concerns over a 2nd holocaust with AI generated images of Tel Aviv being blown up, and he's doing the Iran thing again. Like, he's been a war for a lot power.

Vote for me, and it will be even worse than it is now. Yeah.

And he's reportedly And only I can fix it.

I'm gonna make it worse, and you need me to because you can't trust anyone else if... Yeah.

But he... I also have the sense that... I I look at Israeli demographics and you're only gonna get center right slash increasingly right leaning governments from here on out unless the left and the Arab parties are gonna join together and work together. I mean, the only real break in Netanyahu for the past... I don't know.

I Yeah. Don't know if the next year, decade is when Bennett, you know, crossed the line there and they were willing to build some kind of coalition government to do that. I just don't

see that That happened after Netanyahu himself tried to build a coalition with the Arabs but didn't succeed. So... And then he claimed that it's illegitimate to do so, but he was actually negotiating with them more than once and tried to bring them into his coalition.

Yeah. But that... That's the sad truth of Israeli democracy. Like, with the electorate that can vote, you are going to get center right governments, and then the question is is it gonna be Netanyahu leading it or somebody else? And, honestly, looking at the bench behind Netanyahu, I mean, is he is he the best of the worst?

I mean, I I don't really like some of the other figures that are out

there. I mean, part of what he did and and and more so in the past, yeah, 3, 4, 5 years, which is something he didn't do before, is really bring a bunch of incompetent people around him to make sure that no 1 challenges him. Like, previously, 1, he was more competent. I I was never a fan, but he was competent. And he brought people that were competent or at least he kept people, you know, more like kind of historical figures that were kind of classical liberals, you know, of the of the Israeli right or or security establishment figures that, you know, knew what they were doing on that front.

But in recent years, in all positions, he appointed really people that are completely inadequate, and he also encouraged them to perform even worse than their natural inclinations would be. I mean, to pick something, you know, not in defense and not in, you know, finance, you know, the the ministry of, of transportation. He appointed this lady who's, like, 1 of his lackeys. She appointed as the kind of GM of the office, like, some dude who, you know, helped her get votes. He appointed another guy to be in charge of coordination with foreign airlines who also happens to work as a consultant to some airlines on the side, apparently, without or with permission.

And then just the other week, there was a flight into Israel, you know, the Israeli 9 11, basically, that was prevented where an Omani pilot flying, an airplane owned by Dubai Airways, a pilot that was kicked out of the airline in Oman for being too much of an Islamic radical ends up flying into Israel, trying to basically crash a plane into the the center of Tel Aviv. Miraculously, the people of... On the flight managed to stop him and the the brave Indian pilot as well. And then it turns out that, you know, Israel gets a list, obviously. It knows who the pilots are.

Nobody checked the list. The guy who's in charge of it is 1 of those people who's also consulting the same airline about about security. And then they found out that that terrorist pilot actually visited Israel already a few times before, and they let him in. So if you've been to Israel, you know that they ask you a lot of questions even if you're Israeli, even if you're Jewish, even if you're American, let alone if you're, like,

you know, coming from Oman or from

an Arab country. But somehow, all the systems just don't function. It was kinda like a mini October 7 again of, like, know, all the sis... All the things that people assumed would protect them ended up leaving the people to fend for themselves. In this case, they managed to.

But, yeah, I guess what I'm getting at is that, yeah, there's not a deep bench behind Netanyahu. There's... There is a bench in the sense of people, yeah, that are much worse than him, both within his can... His party and also in his coalition. So Ben Gveer and Smotrich.

I mean, many people see Ben Gveer as the natural successor to Netanyahu, you know, that he's gonna get stronger this time, partly because people feel like the liquid, like Netanyahu's party, is not right enough, partly because it just failed. You know? People had these kind of fantasies about we're gonna have a right wing coalition for real, finally, and then we're gonna take care of everything. And what ended up happening is, you know, more Israelis dying than at any time since, since the Holocaust, at least civilians, and, like, a disaster, you know, economically, geopolitically, in terms of personal safety, and then a lot of other issues in between, you know, in terms of cost of living and and housing, etcetera, and and transportation. So some people are just gonna double down and say, let's vote for someone even more crazy and, you know, it's gonna...

Like, real, right wing, messianic Judaism has never been tried, basically. So let's try to double down.

Well, it it it has been tried. It just doesn't work for very long because that's for an immigrant.

That's why we're in exile.

Exactly. We seem to have forgotten the lesson. But, I mean, I, you know, I I don't think history will look kind at Netanyahu's successive governments. I think he's normalized, you know, ideological behavior that is pretty gross and that is in the long run against the interest of the state. The point about the death of competence and the government no longer having that level of competence at a security level.

It's kind of mystifying how he can continue to survive these security failures, but he continues to survive them. I will say though that even even when he's posting about the or, you know, the World War... The... Excuse me, the 2nd Holocaust and the Iranians, everything, and it's all silly. You were the 1 who sent me some quotes that he gave to Channel 10 the other day, 1 of which was that they should prepare...

That Israel should prepare for sanctions from other governments and things like that, and that maybe they should use blockchain technology or other ways to get around Yeah. These sanctions. I mean, the blockchain has

Not just out of governments. He said that America... We shouldn't America to help us anymore. We're gonna be cut off from the global financial system, and I have instructed... He like...

He likes to say they instructed people. That's his thing. He's not respond... Like, instructed people to protect the border. He instructed people to win the war in in Iran.

He loves to instruct people. So he said he instructed them to start making plans to use crypto instead.

Which is which is... That's crazy. And it's and it's not it's not even gonna work, and he doesn't even have a thing. But I will say, as usual And the

Bank of Israel immediately published, you know, it was like on a Saturday or something. They they immediately published, like, think we have we have no knowledge of this. We're not making any plans. This is not a good idea. You know, investors, please ignore ignore the Yeah.

Ignore these comments. But the problem is Yeah. There's like a kernel of truth to it, which is he's right that US politics is moving away from Israel. Yeah. And he's right that Israel needs

to work It's like a it's like a popcorn, you know, it's like a it's like a huge

No. No. It's he's not doing anything about it. It's happening. He's Yeah.

He's making it worse in some sense. Like, he's accelerating it. But that thing is happening, you know, 1 way or another. And and as usual, like, he's the only 1 who's really talking about that. Like, he has everybody else moving to the Yeah.

But I

don't think he's the only 1 talking about that. Everyone's talking about it. I think what he's trying to do and what he does really well with his base is to make these things seem like they're external and that they happen to us. Like, we have no... Like like, that US attitudes towards Israel have nothing to do with anything that Israel has done over the last 4 years since he was elected.

As far as... His story is, you know, the world is full of anti Semites. Everyone hates us. No 1 wants to give us anything. No 1 will ever support us.

It doesn't matter what we'll do. They're gonna think that anyway. And and people keep buying it. And, obviously, there's a grain of truth in it. Yes.

There are anti Semites in the world. And, yes, Israel, like any country and maybe more than other countries, has to be prudent about how it manages manages its relationships and what it communicates and what it says and what it doesn't say and how it acts. But these are things that you have to take into account as you act. You know? Yeah.

There's anti Semites, so let's not appoint ministers that say that they wanna wipe all the civilians and babies in Gaza because then the anti Semites who just will claim genocide maybe anyway will not have a minister in the government to quote or several ministers in the government to quote. Or if

they say that, maybe the prime minister can come out and

say, no. This is not our policy, but he wouldn't do that. So, again, what he's selling is those kind of basic anxieties, the tribalism, and that notion that all of the bad stuff is gonna happen anyway. So as... Even though I'm the prime minister and I'm responsible for all of these things, I'm going to warn you about them so that you'll know that at least...

Yeah. Like you said, like, I'm aware of them. I'm gonna... The only person who can withstand those things is me. But don't imagine for a 2nd that there was a way...

There's an alternative future that, you know, we could have reached... We could have approached reality differently. We could have behaved differently, appointed different people, acted in a different way. And and, yeah, and it has worked well for him. It's still working much better than it should because the fact that he's even a candidate with a shot in this election is...

I'd say it's tragic regardless of whether you're from the left or the right. I mean, the failure to deliver on anything that he promised his right wing voters is is glaring. You know? Hamas is still in charge of Gaza. Hezbollah is still in charge of Lebanon.

The Iranians are still there, and American bases are basically withdrawing or, you know, falling from the region. I hope that war ends differently, but the way it looks now is Israel is in in deeper trouble than than in... Than it has ever been. You know, normalization with Saudi Arabia didn't happen. All the promise is basically...

And and and, again, let alone the other promises about cost of life and and jobs and, you know, sharing the burden equally among citizens and all of that.

Yeah. I mean, his his economic record in particular is galling, but I... And I know we have to move on to the next topic. But I will just say that there's a part of this story that is beyond Netanyahu and beyond this election cycle and really goes back to is... Like, what Israel is in the 1st place.

And I I don't mean to get overly biblical because I'm not such a not such a religious man these days. But, you know, is basically what the book of Judges is about, where the Israelites want to have a king and a nation like any others. And and, you know, God says, okay, fine. Like, you can have it. Good luck.

And then we get the cycles of destruction and rebuilding and everything else like that. And, you know, the the thing you said about what he thinks about there's anti Semites, they wanna kill us. They're never gonna go... It doesn't matter what we do. It's that move right there.

That move towards nihilism, which

Yeah.

Makes Israel just like any other state. And it's... There's a there's an exceptionalism in Israel's creation that is both antisemitic because people hold Jews and the Israelis to higher standards. And then also, the Israelis and the Jews hold themselves to higher standards. Right.

So we're going to be exceptional. And then we behave like all the others, and suddenly you're just a state and states can fall. States can be defeated in wars. They will not forever exist just because Benjamin Netanyahu was the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history. So like that that is all there.

I I actually think Israel is fairly strong today, but like I said, I don't think history will look kindly on this. I think they'll look at this as the beginning of a chapter of unraveling. Hope I'm wrong.

Yeah. And just to wrap up the Israeli election segment, so I think that the main thing about... To know about this election is that the real election will begin after the election. So no side will probably have a very clear majority. There's gonna be a lot of deal making, people jumping ship from 1 party to another, corruption, promises.

Like, it's gonna be disgusting, but all of that will begin once the election is over and for the next few weeks. And in between, there might be another war with Iran that Netanyahu apparently really, really wanted to start already before the election, and even Trump kind of stopped. And even the Israeli chief of staff of the military basically told Netanyahu, you know, I... Yeah. Maybe not.

You know, maybe we'll wait a few days and get the election done 1st. So there's gonna be a lot of curveballs and surprises and then not a very clear outcome, unfortunately, I can expect.

Well, yeah. And and it's hard to compare apples to oranges and all these things, but I would also just note, you know, we just had a huge shocking result in the Brazilian election where it went from what looked like a sure Bolsonaro victory back to Lula. Vucic in Serbia got, you know, the tide turned on him. We've seen what's happening

in there as Netanyahu's advisors, some of the kind of online masterminds that Netanyahu uses. 1 of them was requested for interrogation in Israel for receiving money from Qatar during the war and helping to promote their agenda on social media is actually requested for investigation in Israel, and he's 1 of the the advisers of some politicians from the right in Serbia.

I bring it up just to say, you know, there is something happening with young people and their revolt against the gerontocracy and against corruption Yeah. Against old school leaders who have been there for a long time. So I would I would leave space for, hey. May... Maybe maybe there is something in Israel that could wake up here and maybe this is...

I don't... I'm... It's not my base case. Yeah. An opportunity.

Let's hope.

Let's hope. Alright. Last but not least, we're gonna riff on... You know, you sent me this article about why AI won't kill the creative class. I'm sure you get this question.

1 of the questions I get most often when I'm speaking right now is what should my children do? I I actually wanted to tell you the story. I was... I I don't I don't think he listens. If he does, I'll be in trouble.

But I was at my my 4 year old's like pre k orientation and this 1 guy monopolized the q and a afterwards because he was like, how are you guys integrating AI into your curriculum?

Yeah.

And I was like, for 4 year olds? Like, what? You want the 4 year olds talking to chat GPT? Like, I don't understand why we're talking about this right now. But I wanted to let you riff on why you think AI won't kill the creative class.

And I also just wanted to set you up by saying that article you sent me linked this incredible Swedish paper that talked about how despite 140 years of technological change, more than 70% of employment today is located in occupations whose core economic functions already existed in the 18 hundreds. So on the 1 hand, you have this data that says technology doesn't normally take away our jobs, and on the other hand, you have, know, Nassim Taleb out there being like, every single white collar job is gone, and the creative class is gone. And so...

Yeah. Well, okay. You threw a lot at me. So 1...

You did. That's what

I did. 1... Dear listeners, part of what we wanna try to do here is at the end of every podcast, have, like, a segment that is more... You know, both Jacob and I are dads of young kids. And, yeah, we we just wanna talk about her dad issues.

And sometimes I would relate to real subject matter like AI and tech and geopolitics and sometimes maybe less so. But today... Yeah. So I sent Jacob... It's this article from Richard Florida who's, like, you know, the the doyen of urbanism and kind of...

He termed... Coined the term creative class, a good friend of mine. And Richard, he was basically hyping up the creative class. He basically said, you know, AI will not kill creative jobs. It will just push humans to do more creative things.

Everyone will have more creative power at their disposal. Mhmm. Everything will be good. And, yeah, the Swedish paper you described, kind of describes, you know, maybe things don't change as much as we think they do. But over there, yeah, that that kind of unusual term, economic function is doing a lot of heavy lifting, you know, Kind of to describe me doing...

Yeah. Trading now, running a hedge fund, let's say, to someone who was like a clerk calculating investments 150 years ago, I don't know if we're doing exactly the same function. We're definitely not getting paid the same way, mean, I the hedge fund managers of today. So there's a lot of things that you can kind of fit in to a story if you try really, really hard, but they don't necessarily describe the the lived experience of people who went through them. I like that article because it's...

To me, it's kind of... Sorry to say, but it kind of described 2 kind of common fallacies that Mhmm. That I see or common misconceptions in the conversation about AI. 1 is that most of the conversation is about, is AI going to take your job or not take your job? Like, is your job gonna be destroyed or not destroyed?

While in reality, what technology does more often is the job stays, a lot of people still work in a profession, but a lot of things change fundamentally. So the distribution of income within that profession changes, the stability of the jobs and the benefits change, The status... The social status that comes with the job changes. So the fact that, yeah, a lot of people are gonna be creative in the same sense that more people today are creative on TikTok than people were creative in Hollywood 30 years ago. Everyone is a creator, but the world is full of crap.

There's kind of distribution of rewards. Even the people who are winning are subject to, like, these algorithms and social cascades and dynamics that nobody can predict or control. And, yeah, the the kind of the notion of, like, expanding access access means, like, that everyone will have the benefits that used to accrue to that job is is kind of a major misconception. And and more broadly, it's a misconception of economists for the last 30, 40 years where we just thought if we just tell everyone to go to college, everyone is going to have the kind of jobs that people that went to college in the 19 fifties had. And as we've seen, that's not exactly, what ended up happening in terms of job quality.

Actually, the opposite happened, but there's more competition and, and less kind of merit based progress because random random things play a bigger role. And the 2nd notion, which is kinda related to this, is also that a profession can survive while everything else within it changes within... You know, becomes unrecognizable. And economists have this idea that technology always creates more jobs than it destroys, which is true, but a lot of things happen along the way. So, you know, you...

The US today has lower unemployment than it did before China joined the World Trade Organization. So to an economist, it would look like we had the best 30 years since then, and everything was wonderful, and and all voters are happy, and no 1 really got angry about anything. In reality, we know that's... Yeah. The the jobs are here, but they're different jobs.

They're in different places. They benefit different people. Their income distribution is different. And AI will take all of this and put it on... You know, turbocharge it.

So the good news is that we're familiar with these dynamics because we've been living with them for a few decades already. The bad news is that, yeah, it's definitely not going to reverse them, and it's... It will only kind of accelerate them. But, yeah, how are you preparing your 4 year old for this future, Jacob?

Yeah. I... Well, 1st of all, I I read her 3 books every single night. It's like a nonnegotiable in the house. I've...

I read some paper recently though. I forget what the figure was, but, you know, the shockingly low number of people who read to their children. I was like, my god. Like, no wonder we're, like, slowly atrophying our brains. We don't need AI's help and...

Because we're not even reading to them in general. You know, limiting screen time, limiting my own screen time in front of them. You know, 1 of the things that struck me about that anecdote I said about the parent asking about AI at school, he said that he was constantly asking chat GPT questions via his phone that he could answer that his daughter was asking him. I don't do that. If my daughter asks me a question and I don't know the answer, I say, I don't know.

Let's go look it up. And like Mhmm. Because I I remember going to the Encyclopedia Britannica Mhmm.

That my

dad had and looking through them and I'm like trying to say, you know, okay. So we'll go online and we'll find Wikipedia, whatever it is. But we're gonna go look things up. There's not this instant gratification of all of all knowledge that is there. And then lastly, I mean, it's just about...

I mean, these these are all variations on a theme. I'm going long critical thinking. In fact, I look around at everybody else and I see that everybody else' critical thinking is declining. So I want my daughters to be able to think critically and I wanna protect them from the devices and the algorithms that try and steal their attention and steal their ability to do that. And I wanna teach them a way to do that in them themselves.

And I'm trusting that if they are critical thinkers, they will do well. I also wanna work as hard as humanly possible to build a nest egg for them just in case the whole thing comes crashing in on itself. Like, pressure is very real inside of

You should buy Netanyahu's crypto token. New the new new Israeli shekel.

Oh, they'll they'll just call it b b. The coin should definitely

The b bitcoin. Yeah.

So I don't know. How how about you? How are you preparing your children for this?

Yeah. I'm... So a few things. I mean, 1... So my eldest who just turned 7, I got her a Kindle for her birthday because she loves reading.

So she has a device, but it's not an addictive 1, and it's 1 that kinda draws her to pick her own books and to read more. And so far, that's that's working. Mhmm. And she knows that that's a a habit that I have as well, so she likes it. You know, I'm always, like, reading my Kindle.

But I have... I use AI. I've built a couple of apps for my kids. 1 for her, which is like a a language kind of a... You know, she speaks 3 languages.

So Hebrew reading is hard, so I built, like, an app that helps her learn the the specific kind of things that she mistakes and and and struggles with and with the specific incentives that matter to her, which are stickers, like, to get all sorts of cute stickers, and I have, like, a a monetary meter that actually she's less interested in. I thought she'd love that that, you know, you kind of accumulate cents for every good answer. And then once you get to, like, $20, I'm gonna buy you something for that. But I... Actually, the stickers are much more exciting.

So I'm to report. I kinda thought I I should... I I over bribed her in a way. And then for my middle child who just turned 5, I also... I built, like, a little English reading app because I saw that he's kinda getting pretty good at it, and they don't they're not they're not going fast enough in pre k for him.

So I kinda built something that he could... Because he really wants to read like his sister, and I can see that he was already putting, like, little words together. So I built something for him. And the other thing, we teach them about the capabilities. You know?

We create photos for them and then coloring books and things like that. Like, they... They're aware of the technology and and its capabilities, but, yeah, it's not something that they use day to day, and they don't use it in the classroom either. But they're they're... You know, they know what...

Who Chatchipiti is or what Chatchipiti is, and they take it for granted already, of course. And and, also, they talk to our cars because both of our cars talk. So Mhmm. You know, they have, like, AI assistants in the car, so they they already... You kinda can't stop them from

Well, Tesla. My 4 year old is just becoming aware of these things, and the way the way she's aware, her gateway to it is the car. She's like, I wanna talk to the car. Can I talk to the car? And she doesn't even really kind of...

But that's like the 1st gateway into into into what she's thinking about there. Yeah. I mean, it's... I also have the sense of, you know, with all my spare time. I I wanted to to sit down and write write out for them something they can read in 10 years that is something like, this is what the world was like before AI.

This is what the world was like before cell phones. This is what the world was like before computers. Like, I want you to understand that the the world that you're living in. Like, I lived in a world before computers. I remember the big black floppy disks.

I remember when AI took over

stories a about that as well. Not so detailed, but, like, explaining the the the concept. Oh, you know, when I was a kid, we had this and that. And then, you know, me and my my cousin that you met, she used to carry me on her back and walk me to... You know, and then we would sit and do this and do that.

So, yeah, I think the main thing to do about AI is to do other things. You know? Yeah. Travel, read to your kids, be a decent human being, and pray.

Well, I'm I'm glad that that last 1 still works for you. I think we we did a pretty good job at at sticking to time. Anything else you wanna say before we say bye to the list?

No. I think we're good. We... So we're gonna do this every week?

We're gonna try. We're gonna we're gonna see how it goes.

Very

good. And if... And and listeners, if you like it and you tell us that we should do it every week, we have a greater chance of making sure that we do it every week. So please share, and get in touch.