Joe Rogan | The Information Age Will Reverse the Industrial Age w/Naval Ravikat

Yeah, and I was really fascinated by another thing that you were bringing up about working for yourself that you feel in the future, whether it's 50 or 100 years from now, virtually everyone is going to be working for themselves. And I believe the way you put it is that the information age is going to reverse the industrial age. Yeah. If you go back to hunter-gatherer times, how we evolved, we basically work for ourselves. We communicated and cooperated within tribes, but each hunter, each gatherer stood on their own and then combined their resources with the family unit. But there was no boss hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy, where you're like the third middle manager down. In the farming age, we became a little bit more hierarchical as we had to run farms, but even those were still mostly family farms. It's industrial work with factories that sort of created this model of thousands of people working together on one thing and having bosses and schedules and times to show up. The reality is if you have to go, I don't care how rich you are, I don't care whether you're like a top Wall Street banker, if you have to go, if somebody can tell you when to be at work and what to wear and how to behave, you're not a free person, you're not actually rich. So we're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs. And intrinsic in that is that I have to work for somebody else. But the information age is breaking that down. So Ronald Coase is an economist who has this Coase theorem, a very famous theorem, but it basically just talks about why is a company the size that it is? Why is a company one person instead of 10 people instead of 100 instead of 1,000? And it has to do with the internal transaction costs versus the external transaction costs. Let's say I want to do something, let's say I'm building a house and I need someone to come in and provide the lumber. I'm a developer, right? Do I want that to be part of my company or do I want that to be an external provider? A lot of it just depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone externally versus internally. If it's too hard to keep doing the contract every time externally, I'll bring that in house. If it's easy to do externally and it's a one off kind of thing, I'd rather keep it out of the house. Well, information technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally. It's becoming much easier to communicate with people, gig economy, I can send you small amounts of money, I can hire you through an app, I can rate you afterwards. So we're seeing an atomization of the firm. We're seeing the optimal size of the firm shrinking. It's most obvious in Silicon Valley, tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets. So what looked like the small little vacation rental market on Craigslist is now suddenly blown up into Airbnb is one example. That's a great example. What I think we're going to see is whether it's 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now, high quality work will be available. We're not talking about driving an Uber. We're talking about super high quality work will be available in a gig fashion where you'll wake up in the morning, your phone will buzz and you'll have five different jobs from people who have worked with you in the past or have been referred to. It's kind of like how Hollywood already works a little bit with how they organize for a project. You decide where to take the project or not. The contract is right there in the spot. You get paid a certain amount and you get rated every day or every week, you get the money delivered. And then when you're done working, you turn it off and you go to Tahiti or wherever you want to spend the next three months. And I think the smart people have already started figuring out that the internet enables this and they're starting to work more and more remotely on their own schedule, on their own time, on their own place with their own friends in their own way. And that's actually how we are the most productive. So the information revolution by making it easier to communicate, connect and cooperate is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves. And that is my ultimate dream. Even when I run a company and I have employees, I always tell those people, hey, I'm going to help you start your company when you're ready, because I think that's the highest calling. Maybe not everybody will get there, but it would be fine if we were even working at 10 person company or 20 person company is way better than working in a thousand person company or 10,000 person company. So this idea that we're all factory like cogs in a machine who are specialized and have to do things by rote memorization or instruction is going to go away. And we're going to go back to being small groups of creative bands of individuals setting out to do missions. And when those missions are done, we collect our money, we get rated, and then we rest and reassess until we're ready for the next sprint. Has there ever been a study done on happiness as it regards to the size of companies? Not that I'm aware, but to me, it's obvious. It's just obvious. The smaller the company, the happier you're going to be, the more human your relations are, the less you have rules to operate under, the more flexible, the more creative, the more you be treated like a human just because you're able to do multiple things. Yeah.