Alex on who owns the robots, every profession cooked, and the sequencing of automation

Alex, your thoughts, please.

Yeah, well, a couple thoughts. One, I'll take the position — I don't actually think it is advisable, at least in America, for the government to be owning 100 million robots.

I think that — you say the people, not the government.

Okay. But how do the people own 100 million robots through presumably some form of centralized government, which again, to my maybe overly American ear, smells like — uh, wait for it — like luxury automated communism, which is, I think, what the subtext would be. I'm not in favor of that. I would like to see every American owning a thousand robots. I don't think they necessarily need to be socialized or communally owned.

But I do think — I mean, every profession as currently construed right now I think is cooked. Uh, and I think the sequencing of the cooking is what determines social policy. So maybe it is the case that certain white collar professions right now can be automated earlier, more of a paradox style, than say quote unquote blue collar professions, HVAC engineering and the like. But HVAC engineering — let's not kid ourselves — HVAC engineering in the next few years with humanoid robots is just as cooked as spreadsheet management and accounting. It's just a matter of sequencing.

So I think, one, I think it's essential to distinguish between what passes for at this point the short term and the long term. In the short term, yes, I agree with the premise that there is some remaining alpha in the trades, so-called. But in the long term, no, the trades are just as automated and automatable as white collar so-called labor.

That's why I think they'll slow down the robots. But I think, again, the robots are the long term, and as I said, the government doesn't need to own them. Sovereign wealth funds are my Champion idea, or just the government can underwrite the robots that the people can own. I think the main thing is you have to get the ownership of the robots to the people somehow.

I think the sequencing is really important that Alex was referring to, too. But if Elon Musk calls and says, we're willing to pay up to $600,000 for the best electricians and plumbers to show up in Tennessee to build Colossus, and the job is only there for one or two years and then it's automated — take the job, take the money, stay nimble, and then the next opportunity will open up, and you'll know a bunch of people that are in the same boat in the middle of the AI revolution. And so then the sequence will evolve and we'll keep on the podcast telling you where to move next. But don't take it as a sign of, well, because that's cooked two years from now I'm going to do nothing tomorrow. Don't do that. Take the job. Build the data center.

I agree. And maybe just to underline, Dave, your point further — I think — so I'm always coining neologisms, uh, including moation, m-o-a-t-i-o-n, which is this notion that there are no stationary moats in a singularity, but what there are, are dynamical moats, temporary moats, if you will. And if you sequence them appropriately, then one moat can lead to another can lead to another and you achieve a dynamical moat. So same idea with professions: maybe an HVAC engineering position now enables — and this is not investment advice or career advice — but hypothetically, maybe an HVAC engineering position now creates enough of a capital base that can then be grown and translated to something else in 2 years that can then be translated to something else, dot dot dot, eventually you get to, I don't know, owning a planet.