SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1667 Top Tech Journalist Predicts We'll All Be Unemployed, Blockchain Takeover, Less Taxes!
16 Feb 2020
Chapter 1: Who is Michael S. Malone and what is his significance in tech journalism?
Mike Malone, many would say the business journalist, not just for the broad section of society, but really for Silicon Valley, covered it for many years. The Autonomous Revolution, his new book coming out February 18th, 2020, talks about a lot of things. Is blockchain the answer moving forward for things that need to be privatized? Secondly, should corporate taxes come down?
How do we tax individual people? Should people be unemployed, actually, if they don't lead to increased productivity in their job roles? And if so,
Chapter 2: What is the 'Autonomous Revolution' and what themes does it explore?
What does the economic model look like if productivity gains continue to increase, but unemployment and more people are unemployed? Is UBI the answer? Hello, everyone. My guest today is Mike Malone. He was the world's first daily high-tech reporter, and he remains one of Silicon Valley's best-known journalists.
Chapter 3: Is blockchain the solution for privatization challenges?
He's the author and co-author of nearly 30 books, including The Virtual Corporation with William Davidow. Now working on a new book, we're going to jump into that today. Mike, you ready to take us to the top? Let's go. All right, let's not bury the lead here.
Chapter 4: Should corporate taxes be reduced to stimulate the economy?
What's the title of the book? And what do you believe in this book that you think is going to cause a lot of controversy? Okay, it's called the autonomous revolution. And the core theme of it is, what we think is going on right now is not an evolutionary change.
Chapter 5: How do we address rising unemployment in a productivity-driven economy?
The sense that everything's not quite working quite right, suggests something much, much bigger that we haven't seen very often in human history. And that is, a fundamental phase shift in society and culture driven by technology. And the implications of that are enormous, including for all of your startup CEOs out there. Well, so let me dive into this a bit, right?
So you have significantly more wisdom than the majority of us, right? Financial management recognized your book on Bill and Dave as one of the best biographies ever for business. So you've seen a lot of trends. So here's a question I have for you. I just want to jump right into it.
You know, Trump and a lot of politicians, whether it's Republican or Democratic, will brag about unemployment being very low.
Chapter 6: What is the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and is it a viable solution?
However... When you look at how Ray Dalio talks about the importance and the economic machine as his famous YouTube video, he talks about three levers, short-term debt cycles, long-term debt cycles, and productivity increases. We're now in a world where productivity increases does not necessarily mean better jobs or more people employed. Is that a problem?
It not only doesn't mean that, it also doesn't mean greater wealth. Productivity was always tied with economic strengths. But now we're having non-monetizable productivity. And it began really with the microprocessor. It got cheaper and cheaper and more and more powerful. So on the balance books, it wasn't producing that much wealth, but in reality, it was changing everything.
Now we're seeing a lot of new technologies emerging that are changing productivity, but it's not going to show up on the balance sheets. And that's changing all the rules. In fact, that's the whole theme of the book. They said what we're having is a phase change right now. And there's only been two other ones in human history.
A phase change is when everything shifts, when all the rules change, and you can't predict any of the new rules. And we get the phrase phase change from physics. So if you have water and it turns to ice, okay, that's a phase change. It's still water molecules, but something fundamental has happened. If you lived on the equator your whole life,
and you never saw weather below 32 degrees, and then suddenly everything froze, you would not be able to predict what was going to happen. You wouldn't know what ice would look like, how it behaved. You would have no tools for measuring it, no rules for dealing with it. Hydraulics would do nothing for you. You couldn't run ice through a pipe. Everything changes. And we've had this happen twice.
Once was when we left being hunter-gatherers in the agricultural revolution, and then 10,000 years later, the Industrial Revolution. Now, all the prognosticators, all the thinkers out there are saying, well, we're going into the third or the fourth Industrial Revolution. What Bill and I are arguing is this is not an evolutionary step.
We are moving into a new world in which we're turning a lot of our power activity and our autonomy to machines. We're going to be doing a lot of thinking for us. Everything that we know It's going to disappear. Just like if you were a sheep herder in the Levant in 4000 BC and you came upon the town of Jericho, you wouldn't know what the hell that was. You wouldn't know how to live there.
There's a story about Genghis Khan when the hordes raced into China. They charged down the main street of Beijing and they didn't take anything. There was gold. There was all this stuff. They didn't see any of that as valuable. They were basically just raping the women and stealing the food because they didn't understand that kind of wealth. That's what's gonna happen again very soon.
It's happening already. So Mike, one of the reasons I accepted when your folks reached out is one of my most successful interviews with authors, Jeffrey Moore, and a lot of SaaS founders read Crossing the Chasm, and he put a great quote on the cover of your book. So you're touching now on this concept of non-monetizable productivity. So Mike, my question to you is simple.
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Chapter 7: How are technological advancements impacting traditional job roles?
Our machines are getting smarter at an IQ point a year. So, Mike, in your opinion, then, what is the solution? So here's where this is causing, I think, so much anger and, frankly, death, war, right? You have a population that's becoming more unhappy because their purchasing power is decreasing and they feel more poor, right?
We have what are called ZEVs coming, and those are zero economic value citizens.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of government involvement in the economy and taxation?
which are people that even if you had a job opening, you would never hire them because technology will do the job instead. And this is going to represent a sizable fraction of our population. So, Mike, what do you do with those people? That's a really good question. And here we are once again with the idea of a phase change. We don't really understand what the new rules are.
We have very established sets of rules about how to do stuff. You talk to these CEOs and what do you ask? You ask them about the balance sheet. By the way, you do a brilliant job. I can't believe these CEOs are telling you that stuff. It's a big show. You've done your research. I appreciate that. Part of it is you. You're a really good reporter. But... 30 years ago, I was a really good reporter.
And if I asked those questions to a private company, they would have had the guard throw me in the parking lot because they didn't have to tell you. But there's a conceptual change too. These CEOs don't feel the need to hide what is legally private data anymore. And one of the reasons is our entire system of financial reporting has changed.
In terms of looking at it, it looks the same, but our attitudes towards it have fundamentally shifted. And that's already a phase change beginning. Our notion of currency, of national sovereignty, are all changing. So Mike, Andrew Yang proposes UBI.
Do you have these companies that are increasing productivity, like Amazon, take a portion of their proceeds and pay citizens in the middle of Kentucky $1,000 a month? Well, it's an interesting question. There's some real good arguments for it. If you're a Zev, you're never going to be employed, even if you went to college.
So are you sitting in your little one room studio apartment with a wall size TV and you're getting that transmission free because you look at the ads and you're never going to go to Petra, but you're going to be able to fly a drone over Petra and put it on your wall size screen. You're not going to go out to dinner very often, but, you know, you have a fairly rich life.
It's just that you're poor. Now, does the government or the corporations give you money to live on? We don't know the answer to that because there's some deep moral questions too. How important is a good job to how we see ourselves? How important is work to the quality of our lives? If we just pay people to sit around because they can't be employed, should we have them be doing something?
Should they be donating their time at a park to teach kids? Should they be raking leaves? What do we do? What's this calculus that we need between fulfilling work and this increasingly life. Mike, you're a great reporter because you know the perfect questions to ask. And I'm asking you for the solutions. And what I'm hearing is, well, that's a good question. Yeah, no, I think we got to try them.
Okay, try them. We got to try them to see if it works. What else would you try besides UBI? Oh, I would, well, this is going to make you crazy. That's okay. Okay. First of all, we got to, all of our financial models are essentially dealing with the industrial world. In this post-industrial autonomous world, we need to measure other values, intangible assets.
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