EP 384 Former Facebook Exec: AI Is the Ultimate Economic Leveler

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I watched an interview with Chamath Palihapitiya recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

And not because he made another prediction about where AI is headed.

Actually, it was almost the opposite.

Instead of debating whether AI is going to save us or destroy us or take all of our jobs or create trillions of dollars of wealth…

He started talking about access.

Who gets access to intelligence.

Who gets access to tools.

Who gets access to the ability to create something that, until very recently, would’ve required an enormous amount of money, people, and infrastructure.

And somewhere in the middle of the conversation, he described AI as potentially the most important economic leveler of our lifetime.

That stopped me.

Because Nancy and I aren’t looking at that idea theoretically anymore.

We’re already living it.

We Built Something We Used to Pay $30,000 a Year For

For years, we paid roughly $30,000 annually for an investor relations platform.

It was simply one of those costs of doing business.

You needed technology.

Technology required developers.

Developers were expensive.

So you paid the bill.

Then AI arrived.

And within a remarkably short period of time, we built our own.

Then we looked at another part of the business.

Our investor communication and marketing stack was costing us another $500 or $600 every month.

We started rebuilding that too.

Then another tool.

And another.

Eventually, we built AIREI—our AI real estate investing operating system—to help us across the entire lifecycle of an investment.

Finding the opportunity.

Analyzing it.

Acquiring it.

Managing it.

Eventually selling it.

Things that once required software companies, programmers, analysts, and sometimes entire teams suddenly became possible for two sisters sitting at their computers.

That’s when Chamath’s idea really landed for me.

AI isn’t simply making existing things faster.

It’s giving ordinary people access to capabilities that used to belong almost exclusively to institutions.

And that’s a much bigger shift.

Every Era Had a Toll Booth

Think about how wealth has worked throughout history.

Hundreds of years ago, if you wanted extraordinary wealth, you generally needed land.

And not a little land.

A lot of it.

Which meant you were probably royalty, aristocracy, or very close to someone who was.

Then came the Industrial Revolution.

Suddenly the great fortunes belonged to people who owned factories.

But factories required enormous amounts of capital.

So there was still a toll booth between the average person and large-scale wealth creation.

Then came technology.

The factory became software.

The barrier got smaller—but there was still a barrier.

You needed to know how to code.

Or you needed enough capital to hire people who did.

And now?

We can describe what we want.

AI can increasingly help us build it.

That’s extraordinary when you really think about it.

The barrier used to be land.

Then capital.

Then specialized technical knowledge.

And increasingly, the scarce resource is becoming something much more human:

Imagination.

What can you see?

What can you create?

What problem can you solve?

What question are you capable of asking?

But There’s a Catch Nobody Should Ignore

This is where I slightly disagree with the idea that AI makes expertise less important.

I think it may make expertise more important.

Because access to intelligence isn’t the same thing as knowing what to do with it.

There’s emerging research that illustrates exactly why this matters.

In one study discussed in our research for this episode, participants answered questions that AI models were prone to getting wrong.

Without AI, people got roughly 27% of the answers correct.

More importantly, 44% were willing to admit:

“I don’t know.”

Then researchers gave them AI.

You’d expect accuracy to improve.

It didn’t.

It dropped to around 9%.

And the percentage of people willing to say “I don’t know” collapsed to just 3%.

Their confidence, meanwhile, roughly doubled.

Think about that.

Less accurate. More confident.

That’s a dangerous combination.

And it perfectly describes the biggest risk we see with AI today.

AI Can Make You Confidently Wrong

Imagine you’re analyzing a $50 million apartment deal.

You upload the offering memorandum.

AI reads all ninety pages.

It produces a beautiful analysis.

Tables.

Risks.

Opportunities.

Recommendations.

Everything looks institutional.

The problem is that you don’t know enough about real estate to recognize that one of the assumptions is completely wrong.

AI hasn’t made you a better investor.

It’s simply made your mistake look more professional.

That’s why we keep coming back to the same principle:

AI can give you knowledge. It cannot automatically give you judgment.

Judgment is knowing what the answer should roughly look like before the machine gives it to you.

It’s recognizing when something feels off.

It’s knowing which second question to ask.

It’s the scar tissue you earn from having something go wrong and remembering it the next time.

That’s expertise.

And expertise isn’t becoming obsolete.

It’s becoming leverageable.

The $1 Bitcoin Test

There was another idea in Chamath’s interview that I loved.

He talked about platforms and the idea that the economic value created for the participant should exceed the value captured by the platform itself.

Which sounds complicated.

But I think there’s a ridiculously simple way to understand it.

Imagine someone offered you one Bitcoin for $1.

Would you say:

“I don’t know… a dollar feels expensive.”

Of course not.

You’d probably ask:

“How many can I buy?”

The price stopped mattering because the value you were receiving so wildly exceeded the cost.

And that principle applies far beyond technology.

It applies to businesses.

Investments.

Products.

Relationships.

Even the way we work with investors.

If you’re creating something for another person, their gain needs to substantially exceed what you extract from the relationship.

Because if they don’t win…

Eventually, neither do you.

Maybe Wealth Is Becoming More Frictionless

For most of history, there has been enormous friction between an idea and the ability to execute it.

You might have an incredible idea.

But you needed capital.

Employees.

Developers.

Distribution.

Infrastructure.

Connections.

Those barriers determined which ideas ever made it into the world.

AI is removing some of them.

Not all.

But enough that the implications are enormous.

And that’s why I think calling AI an economic leveler is so interesting.

It doesn’t mean everyone will end up equally wealthy.

They won’t.

It means more people may get access to the capabilities required to create wealth.

And that’s different.

Your starting point matters a little less.

Your access to a giant team matters a little less.

Your ability to code matters a little less.

What begins to matter more is what you decide to create with the leverage you’ve been given.

But What Happens If AI Takes Our Work?

This is the question underneath almost every conversation about artificial intelligence.

If AI does all of these things…

What are humans going to do?

And I think history gives us a pretty good clue.

There was a time when most of a human being’s productive energy went toward one objective:

Finding enough food to survive.

That was the day.

Wake up.

Find food.

Prepare food.

Protect yourself.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Nobody was answering emails.

Nobody was driving their kid to baseball practice.

Nobody was taking a Pilates class.

Nobody was FaceTiming Grandma.

Nobody was listening to a podcast while walking their dog.

Those activities exist because technology gave us time back.

And every time technology does that, we find something else to do with the time.

That’s what humans do.

We Can’t See The Next 300 Things Yet

One of my favorite ideas from the interview was that when technology eliminates 35 tasks, we don’t simply sit around wondering what to do.

Eventually, those 35 things become 300 new things.

Some will become businesses.

Some will become jobs we don’t have names for yet.

Some will become art.

Some will become relationships.

Some will simply give us more time to be human.

We can’t see them yet because we’re standing on this side of the transition.

That’s always the uncomfortable part.

We can clearly see what’s disappearing.

We can’t yet see everything that’s being created.

We’ve Been Afraid of New Technology Before

When automobiles began replacing horses, people were terrified of them.

They were too fast.

Too dangerous.

Too difficult to control.

And some of those fears were completely justified.

Cars crashed.

Brakes failed.

People died.

So what did we do?

We built better brakes.

Then seat belts.

Then airbags.

Then collision detection.

Then automatic emergency braking.

Technology created new risks.

And then humans created technology to manage those risks.

AI will almost certainly follow the same pattern.

There will be problems.

There will be misuse.

There will be consequences we haven’t anticipated.

But history suggests we’re remarkably good at adapting once those consequences become visible.

So, Is AI Really the Great Economic Leveler?

I think it can be.

But probably not in the way people imagine.

AI isn’t going to make everyone rich.

It isn’t going to magically turn someone with no expertise into Warren Buffett.

And it isn’t going to remove inequality.

What it can do is give more people access to capabilities that historically required enormous resources.

A researcher.

An analyst.

A programmer.

A designer.

A strategist.

Maybe eventually something approaching a genius co-founder sitting beside you whenever you need one.

That is extraordinary.

But here’s the part I don’t want us to miss:

Giving everyone the same tool doesn’t mean everyone produces the same result.

The tool amplifies what’s already there.

Curiosity matters.

Creativity matters.

Expertise matters.

Judgment matters.

Maybe more than ever.

The Opportunity Isn’t AI. It’s What AI Removes.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about since watching this interview.

Maybe the biggest opportunity isn’t artificial intelligence itself.

Maybe it’s the removal of everything that used to stand between you and what you were capable of creating.

Less capital.

Less infrastructure.

Less technical friction.

Less repetitive work.

Less time spent doing the things that never required your highest intelligence in the first place.

And what’s left?

Your ideas.

Your judgment.

Your creativity.

Your willingness to actually build something.

For the first time, an individual may have access to capabilities that once required an entire institution.

That’s incredibly empowering.

But it also means the question changes.

It’s no longer:

“Do I have access?”

Increasingly, we all do.

The question becomes:

“What am I going to do with it?”

And I think the people who have the best answer to that question are going to create things over the next decade that none of us can imagine yet.