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Thank you so much. Elon Musk says AI and robots can
push US output to grow faster than prices within three years.
Now we're talking about his claim that this surge can ease
the federal debt. It set up a future where work
becomes optional now. It links today's inflation
pressure to tomorrow's labor choices.
He adds that money could fade in relevance once machines meet
most needs. And how did those claims fit
together? And what would they change for
you? It's a very bold claim.
We know how Elon likes to talk about things.
He's a futurist. He wants to make robots that do
everything for us and then we can just hang out.
But after the break, I'll map this three-year timeline out for
you for output versus inflation, his twenty year horizon for
optional work, and his idea of a universal high income funded by
abundance universal high income. It's a little bit different than
just universal income. He's saying that everybody will
be pretty well off and I'll connect these points to energy,
robotics and policy changes you would feel in your daily budget.
Picture a conference hall with bright stage lights, a camera
sweeping across a room of founders and policy makers, and
Musk repeating the same thesis in different words.
We will compare near term price relief to long term changes in
jobs and we'll ground each step in the sources.
And we will get right into that right after this very short
break. Musk ties AI driven productivity
to easing inflation now and to optional work later.
Nobody wants to work. We all want to hang out on the
beach and hang out with their friends.
And he lays out a short fuse for price effects and a longer arc
for labor with robots doing a growing share of physical tasks.
And here's the key point to all of this.
He treats productivity as the engine that touches your grocery
bill, your job options and the government's interest costs.
And let's start with the first fact.
It says AI and robotics can raise outcome or output so
quickly that goods and services will grow faster than inflation
within about three years. And inflation is the average
rate at which prices rise across the economy.
When supply rises faster than demand, businesses feel pressure
to cut prices or add value for the same price, and households
like yours feel relief. Now hold on to that detail.
Now I want to explain the debt link in clean terms.
The federal government pays interest on a very large debt.
Higher interest rates make that bill larger.
And if AI expands supply and cools inflation, the central
bank can ease rates, which lowers interest costs.
Over time, that limits how fast the debt burden grows, and it
gives policy makers room to fund other priorities.
Let's do a quick reset here. Musk's near term claim is very
simple. More output.
Robots do all the hard work. Less inflation pressure, lower
financing strain. Now he sets up a second clock.
He predicts that within less than 20 years, you will not have
to work at all if you don't want to, because machines will do
most production. Productivity is the amount of
output you get for each hour of work, and if machines raise that
number far beyond historical norms, the economy can meet
basic needs with far fewer human hours.
That opens a new question about how income flows to you when a
company's value comes from AI and robotics rather than labor.
And here is where this goes. He frames one answer as a
universal high income. The idea is that extreme
productivity creates enough abundance to cover essentials
and more, even as paid work shifts to choice rather than
necessity. That changes how you plan your
career, how cities plan services, and how schools train
people for roles that machines can't do.
It also puts new weight on the design of tax benefits and
ownership models. Three years for disinflation
from supply growth, 2 decades for optional work backed by
abundant output. And then he connects these
timelines to a physical product, Optimus, Tesla's robot.
He's saying that it can do many routine tasks safely and
cheaply, which could eliminate poverty by lowering the cost of
essentials. A general purpose robot is a
machine that can handle different physical tasks rather
than just one fixed task. If units like that become
reliable and affordable, factories, warehouses, and homes
change how they get that work done.
No more folding clothes, people. No more doing your own laundry
or vacuuming or doing the dishes.
Those are things that take up the time that you could be
spending with your family and your friends.
And that's what Elon is talking about when he talks about the
Optus robot. That opens up new capital
spending and squeezes unit costs across supply chains.
Now let's get specific on prices here, though.
This is very important because you feel those first.
We all know the economy is not that good right now.
And if robots handle warehouse picking, packing and late night
restocking, which they kind of do right now, look at an Amazon
warehouse. It's mainly robots.
Delivery windows will shrink and labor bottlenecks will ease up.
But if instead of an Amazon robot, you have an optimist
robot walking around carrying boxes, that may do that last bit
that the humans do, and the robots will be driving the cars.
If it's not a robot physically driving the cars, it's a robot
car delivering your goods and then a robot getting out of that
car, taking it to your door, and then dropping it off for you.
Now that's a very simple task, right?
Pick up a box, take it to your front door.
But you add things in there, like what if there's a dog?
What if there's something in the the walkway?
What if there's kids around or if they're a bunch of people
playing football in front of your house?
What does the delivery robot do? It's gonna be trained to handle
the situations. And he's saying everything like
3 to 20 years somewhere in that timeline.
Optimist Robot is nowhere near that right now, Nowhere near
that right now. So just take that with a grain
of salt. His timelines are, of course,
just his timelines. They're not backed in most
reality. He knows what he wants, and he
knows the outcome will be incredible if it works out.
So he's stating that these short timelines, if it happens within
those times, could ease a lot of our pains, right?
So if AI handles service tasks like scheduling, claims
processing, or customer support, response times drop and the
overhead falls. But do you really want to
contact a robot for customer support or if you have an
insurance claim, do you want to talk to a robot or do you want
to talk to a person? It's up to you.
You know, it really depends if the robot can do a better job
than a person. I have no problem talking to a
robot as long as the thing gets done.
Process my claim, man, schedule this for me.
And we already have that. And your phone can do that for
you, scheduling for you. You just talk to it.
You say, hey, you know, make a calendar appointment for XYZ,
can schedule it for you now customer support, whole other
thing now that changes what you can save at the end of the
month. So do we do?
And what do we know right now? We know He also talks about
deflation, Elon Musk, but he's a he talks about deflation all the
time. It's when average prices fall
instead of rise. In his view, supply outpaces
demand in every category that the market resets at lower price
levels while output stays strong.
So they're going to continue to output things, build things, and
then that makes a surplus of money, right?
But people have to spend that money to make more money.
That makes your paycheck stretch a little bit further though.
And it pushes companies to win a design speed and reliability
rather than just getting a bunch more people.
And we've see it, I see it all the time in the tech sector.
It's not robots, it's AI right now.
But AI is a robot, basically, not a physical robot, but it's a
bot doing a project that you could be doing yourself.
Low level web developers, low level app developers, they're
getting replaced by AICTOS, they're getting replaced by AI
eventually. ACEO, maybe, maybe, but that's
top of the food chain. So you can't really get rid of
that right away because then who's going to run the company?
A robot? They don't know what people
want, or do they? So they want to take over all of
the production for humans Now, this is all about energy, right?
He says currency loses relevance if AI and robots do most of the
production because electricity and mass become the real limits.
The power supplies can't grow. AI systems and robots cannot run
at full speed. That puts pressure on
generation, storage and transmission because the value
chain leans on stable, cheap power.
It also raises questions about where factories and data centers
should live and which regions can affordably scale grid
capacity. So basically, productivity cools
the prices down. Robots scale the labor.
So take the people out, the slow people out of there and make
those fast. Robots get the job done.
You know, you know, a better time frame.
And then you need some energy. I'm guessing nuclear, nuclear,
mix of nuclear and solar because those don't run out and I'm
assuming those'll be the best 2 power options for the robot
overlords. Now let's talk about the work
you might still choose to do though, because if you have all
this money extra, you're gonna wanna do something that's fun
and optional. It doesn't mean idle, though.
It means you pick roles for reasons other than survival
income. You don't just, you know, I'm
not knocking anybody who does this because I've done it, but
you don't just flip burgers for a living.
You know, where you're making minimum wage.
You don't just do that. People will still teach, care
for other people, design, manage public spaces, and build new
tools. Because if the robots can build
tools, we need tools for people, not robots, though, right?
And I think it was Gary Vee that said this, but he said that it
was kind of funny because the caring part is really essential
for everybody. If you don't have a friend, you
don't have somebody to walk with.
Start a business where you walk with people.
I think that's an important fact.
Like somebody that's getting older who doesn't have as many
friends anymore because some of their friends passed away.
You make a business for that. You have to care for people.
You have to teach people. You have to teach people how to
be productive members of society and you have to.
You can't have a robot doing that.
It doesn't make any sense. Many roles will move from must
do to kind of a want to do thing.
Do I really want to go to work at that factory anymore?
Not really. I don't like it.
It's damp, it's hot. It's also a lot of work.
It hurts my body over time. And that question is raised
about training for creativity, care, and also how to govern
where human judgement still matters and all of those things.
And the plan asks you to prepare for a portfolio of roles over
lifetime rather than just go from the bottom sweeping floors
at the company all the way up that corporate ladder, grab that
brass ring and become the CEO. That's not going to happen
anymore, according to Elon Musk. So one more term.
So we all stay aligned here. The national debt is the total
memory or the total money that the government owes to
investors, agencies in the public.
And when interest rates are high, interest payments take a
larger share of that budget. If AI driven productivity let's
rates fall and tax bases grow with real output, the budget
math softens up a little bit. That limits the trade-offs
between services, defense and investment.
It does not solve choices on its own, but it gives leaders more
room to move around. So I've been digging into our
stats here at the show, and we got some really good news
yesterday from Spotify. And we did the Spotify Rewind
yesterday to see what happened with our show.
We were #13 on the top charts in the United States for seven
weeks straight. So I want to say thank you for
everybody who's been a part of the show, who has been listening
to the show. I could not do this without you.
And also, the show was in the top 10% of videos on Spotify.
We were 15 top ten. Now we've gotten better over
time because of you, so thank you so much for listening and
watching. I really do appreciate it.
There's going to be more videos in the future because I think
it's important that you get to see who I am.
There's going to be another video tomorrow, so get ready for
that. And I just want to say thanks.
And if you haven't hit the subscribe or follow button since
last time you listened, please do that.
It helps out the show tremendously.
So thank you for that. Now let's bring Optimus back
into the frame here, because it is the clearest symbol of the
labor shift. If a human sized robot can stack
pellets, move parts, clean floors, and handle delicate
assembly with safe force, control companies will rewrite
process maps. It's going to take a while
though. Companies aren't going to just
jump in here. And that'll lower service and
manufacturing costs. And it changes with bottlenecks.
And you would see businesses optimized for uptime, data
quality, and energy contracts as much as they do for headcount.
OK, so keep going with me here. There's a hard problem inside
this. Good news, though.
If the adoption curve is uneven, some jobs will just go away
before new roles arrive for those people.
That makes inequality management an early decision for leaders,
not a late one. That makes inequality management
an early decision for leaders, not a late one.
Remember that it argues for experiments with income, floors,
worker equity, and portable benefits that travel with you.
That opens policy work at the city and state level that can
scale if it proves out. So adoption speed shapes
fairness long before abundance reaches everyone.
This isn't going to happen all at once.
They're not going to drop 1,000,000 optimist robots and
then they took over everybody's jobs and everybody gets rich.
It's not going to happen like that.
It's going to happen in chunks and the tech sector wiped out
almost. The tech sector is a whole.
Probably half of the developers that I know have lost their
jobs. And I know a lot of developers,
they've all lost their jobs because of this, because of AI
and robots are going to be the same way.
They're going to do the same tasks that people can do.
And some of these people you got to start now to plan for the
future. If you think a robot could do
your job, and if you don't think a robot can do your job because
you have a certain skill set, well, think again.
I just got to say that. Think again.
There's a possibility they'll just wipe you out.
And not doom and gloom here, but learn something new if you can
start a new trajectory, if you think a robot could do even part
of your job, because if you can do part of your job, eventually
it'll be able to do your whole job and then you're done.
So here's how I would translate the three-year claim into things
you can see. You would see inventories
turning faster because robots restock overnight.
People do night stocking too. But people don't build things
overnight all the time. 24 shifts, 24/7, they don't do
that. When a a robot is done with
their shift, they go recharge. Another robot comes and takes
their place and continues where they left off.
You going to see shipping windows compressed because
automated hubs waste less time in handoffs.
You would see customer service queues shorten as AI handles
triage and frees people for edge cases.
So the really important stuff goes the people, and we've all
seen it. When you call customer support,
you have to go through that list of things, you know, if, if this
press 1, if that press 2, we've all seen it.
It's already happening, but it'll be more conversational in
the future. And so that'll push companies
into price wars in an improved service quality where price
floors exist. So hopefully that helps your
budget a little bit. I'm not sure if that's going to
happen. So also want to give you a
simple checker for this forecasts.
Within three years, you should see unit cost fall in logistics,
retail, basic services, and some manufacturing, while price
indexes cool down a little bit. And then 10 years from now, you
should see robot density climb beyond factories into
warehouses, hospitals, and commercial areas.
Within 20 years, you should see mainstream programs that route
abundance into income floors or service guarantees.
A set of mile markers lets you track progress without jargon.
So what do we know right now? We know Elon stitches all of
this to a single through line. AI writes the code, schedules
workflows, and guides robots that move parts and care for
spaces. The combined system shorten
cycle times and lowers cost, which reshapes budgets and
homes. And in the military and in
Congress, also demands bigger, cleaner power systems and
smarter grids. That opens choices on nuclear,
renewables and transmission that cannot wait.
So the forecast works only if reliable power shows up at
scale. And if they can produce a
billion optimist robots, it's going to be it's going to be a
hard path. You know, Musk has claimed that
AI robots can make supply outpace inflation within about
three years. He thinks that he can build a
robot within three years that will replace most people.
And I want you to think about that for a moment.
He thinks a robot can replace you.
Is this a person that's doing this for their own good?
Or is he doing this for your good?
Or is he doing it because he knows that if he sells a billion
robots, he's going to have more money, more power, and just like
he does with Starlink sometimes. And I have to be the devil's
advocate here because I've been covering Elon Musk for six years
now, and I know how this guy works.
I'm an expert at this guy. He can turn off Starlink
wherever he wants to. He did it for Russia and
Ukraine. He did it during a time that
Russia was attacking Ukraine. The system went down, said he
didn't do it, but all sources point to Elon and his company
for shutting that down. Can't just shut it down like
like no, like it just shuts down.
No, it doesn't happen like that. So those things happen.
Elon has complete control over the robot army here that does
all the work. And if he has complete control
over that, he has those government contracts.
Government contracts make the most money.
And he's going to be working on other AI type contracts with
Grok and XAI. So that AI is going to be in his
cars, in his robots, in your homes all the time.
And if he wants to, if you forget to pay your subscription,
that robot walks out the door. You never get it back.
Now for companies, if a robot can replace 2 people and it's
$20,000, that is a pretty good trade off.
If you can justify sending somebody home because you don't
want to pay them, that's something that is a moral
dilemma that's going to be happening when robots start
hitting the marketplace. Do you want to send somebody
home? They don't have a paycheck.
They can't pay for the rent, They can't pay for their child's
food because you want more profits.
You got to take care of yourself and your company.
Totally understandable, but you're also putting this person
in jeopardy because even though they were loyal to you for three
or four years, you find they're easily replaceable by a robot.
Is that the life that we want to be part of?
That's another thing. Will there be a revolt?
Let me know in the comments of your podcast platform what you
think about all this, because it's a wild thing.
All right, thanks so much for listening.
Everybody. Take care, support, if you could
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