AI Is About to Split Society in Two | Zack Shapiro

**Zack Shapiro** (0:02)
As a bitcoiner, right, like as someone who has the world view, like let's think from first principles and just do things, now is like the best time ever in history for that stuff. I actually think this is an incredibly virtuous cycle, where the people who are here for the right reasons are going to crush it. It is infuriating that millennials and younger can't afford homes. That's horrible. The economy is rigged, it is really unfair. It's just the answer is not more state control and communism, it's a fairer economy, it's more free market, right?
It is sound money.
And Bitcoin is great for that.

**Danny Knowles** (0:36)
Right, let's do it. Pull that mic in, Zack.
How's this? Perfect. Good to see you, man.

**Zack Shapiro** (0:42)
Good to see you too.

**Danny Knowles** (0:43)
PubKey is beating me at the moment. This is day three. We did the live.

**Zack Shapiro** (0:47)
It's the places in shambles. I know.

**Danny Knowles** (0:49)
We did the live event yesterday. It was awesome.

**Zack Shapiro** (0:50)
Yeah.

**Danny Knowles** (0:51)
I'm sad you weren't there, man.

**Zack Shapiro** (0:52)
Yeah, me too. It's just a lot this summer.

**Danny Knowles** (0:54)
It was, you can imagine, with John Seth, American Hoddle and Eric Casey on stage, it was utter chaos.

**Zack Shapiro** (0:59)
Yes.

**Danny Knowles** (0:59)
I have no idea how we're going to package it to put it out, but it was fun.

**Zack Shapiro** (1:02)
I'm so excited to listen to it. I'm still on Clubhouse with Hoddle and John Seth most days. We've been doing this for years now.

**Danny Knowles** (1:07)
Clubhouse is still going.

**Zack Shapiro** (1:08)
It is still going. It's just like eight of us, but it's going every day.

**Danny Knowles** (1:11)
Yeah, I did not know Clubhouse was still going.

**Zack Shapiro** (1:13)
Yeah. I mean, it's like...

**Danny Knowles** (1:15)
Is it literally the three of you left?

**Zack Shapiro** (1:16)
It's a little bit more than that, but pretty much, right? Oftentimes, it is the three of us just talking in a room with an audience of 20 people. But we've been doing this for years now. It used to be there would be like a thousand people in the Clubhouse room. That's how I met sort of most of the Bitcoiners I know in the first instance.
But it's just such a different energy than like on Twitter spaces, people are doing this for performance and followers. And Clubhouse really does at this point feel like a Clubhouse where it's people you know, nobody gives a shit about your Clubhouse follower. Like, I don't think there's a thing. There's no cloud on Clubhouse. You're just there to like shoot the shit. And it's just like there's not an online space that has that same energy. And so we still do it.

**Danny Knowles** (1:53)
That's quite cool. Is it ever about Bitcoin? Are you guys just chatting about all sorts?

**Zack Shapiro** (1:56)
Very occasionally about Bitcoin, but it's, you know, I would say that's 10% of the time now. It's, you know, just people who know each other, talking about whatever the topic of the day is.

**Danny Knowles** (2:04)
Maybe I need to get on it again. What is the topic of the day for you?

**Zack Shapiro** (2:09)
The topic of the day for me, I think is, you know, as we, one of the sort of common topics on Clubhouse for years now is sort of the macro environment. And I think that's what brought a lot of people to Bitcoin and where all of this craziness in the economy is heading. And the thing that is most interesting to me and sort of, I think, the biggest opportunity and my sort of highest conviction thesis is that when you look at sort of the macro environment as a whole, on the one hand, you see these tech companies who are building just undeniably incredible things, right? I don't need to convince you, you've used the tech, it's amazing. Yeah.
And they are becoming so much more productive, right? Like the elite software engineers are like speaking into these weird, you know, socks that they put over their face.

**Danny Knowles** (2:51)
Are those real? I didn't know if that was just like a joke.

**Zack Shapiro** (2:54)
I think they are real, they might not be, if they're not real, it's directionally true, right? Even I, much to my wife's embarrassment and horror, I have a USB foot pedal that lives under my desk, and I step on to speak to Claude. And, you know, I was talking to Alex Leishman at River, and he's like, their best engineers are just like speaking incantations to Claude all day, right? And when you're doing that in a tech company, it's easy to see the progress because code has a compiler, right? It runs or it doesn't, and you can grade your work, and just people are producing so much more software, and that's incredible. And the tech companies are at these incredible valuations because they're sort of extrapolating and saying to the market, like, we're going to hit AGI in a couple of years, this is going to diffuse the entire economy, you know, white collar work is cooked, and, you know, either get on board or join the permanent underclass.