246: What Happens to Capitalism When AI Does All the Work? with Daniel Faggella & Jesse Elder

What happens to entrepreneurs when AI and robots can produce nearly everything we currently get paid to produce?

That’s the question I wanted to explore with Daniel Faggella and Jesse Elder.

A huge part of modern life is organized around making money. We go to school to develop skills, build careers and businesses, compete for resources, and use capital to create more opportunity.

But if AI keeps getting better at doing economically valuable work, some of those assumptions start to break down.

We talk about what capitalism could look like when human labor becomes less necessary, whether abundance actually means everyone gets everything they need, and why simply opting out of technological change may become harder than it sounds.

We also get into a bigger question entrepreneurs should be thinking about now: What makes you valuable when intelligence and execution are increasingly cheap?

Mic Drop Moments

• “Life isn’t really things. It’s process. So, you’re not made up of just your atoms. You’re a pattern that’s cycling through matter and energy.” – Dan Faggella

• “We are part of the bubbling and unfurling project of life. Humans draw lines around things like species. Nature’s not doing that. You’re changing right now. Everything is changing right now.” – Dan Faggella

• “I think our awareness of consciousness can become more evolved. It’s like driving down the road, and all of a sudden you put on your high beams, and you see more road. The road didn’t expand. Your awareness of the road, your perception of the road expanded.” – Jesse Elder

• “The thing that’s always felt more flexible and felt like it just is a little bit more practical, instead of asking, is something true, is just to ask, is this useful?” – Jesse Elder

• “Nature doesn’t operate with outcomes.” – Jesse Elder

• “Abundance is actually not the creation of a bigger stockpile that can be doled to everybody. Abundance is the opening up of a greater possibility space.” – Daniel Faggella

• “Attention is, I believe, the ultimate currency of transformation.” – Jesse Elder

• “When you look out for yourself, it forces you to participate. When you participate, the process around you changes.” – Daniel Faggella

• A 16-Year Bourbon and No Agenda
• You’re a Pattern, Not a Pile of Atoms
• Fifteen to Forty Years of Human Control
• Are Humans Really The Beginning?
• Consciousness Can’t Expand, Awareness Can
• The Winners Write the History Books
• The Risk of Getting Tricked by AI
• How AI Changes Human Communication
• If Robots Do Everything, What’s Left for Us?
• Musk Says Money Won’t Matter by 2036
• Distributive Versus Generative Abundance
• Attention Is the Real Currency
• Decentralized Nations, Competing Governments
• Is The World Getting Better or Worse?