“One simple one that I float is getting rid of all algorithmic feeds. So we go back to the early days of social media. We let everybody speak whatever they want. … Social media companies are not then allowed to take your speech and amplify it algorithmically. If you have 20 friends in social media or 20 followers, they see your crazy speech. That's it.”

I think he was so far-sighted in his understanding of some of these forces.

He really was. But in his mind, it was really the government doing this. And it seems to me, you and I, and maybe Max Tegmark, you know, he's just got off the phone with Bernie Sanders, you know, had this conception that the government's maybe not doing enough. And so, again, I keep asking you because you're an economist, but how do you balance this minimum, you know, this optimization? Because I think that's what economists do is as far as the ones that I've talked to on this podcast. So how do you balance that between the government and these companies? They're very driven by different things. And yes, Meta just got regulated and they had to pay a whopping, you know, one-tenth of a percent of their total market cap. So how do you balance, you know, it seems to me you should have punishment, but then you have the government with the Orwellian panopticon. How do you balance that?

Yeah, and then unfortunately, yeah, they won't be able to sell as many Viagra ads. And that will hurt my friend and fellow laureate of yours, Dr. Lou Ignaro, who is a brilliant man. Also worked on dynamite like Alfred Nobel himself. But you mix it up with Elon Musk, I've noticed. You're not afraid to mix it up. What is your take on Elon? Is it sort of a net good what he's doing overall? I don't like to ad hominem at all. So I'm not asking you to say anything you wouldn't say online or haven't said. But what's your take on economically, motivationally? What drives him? And where do you go to the public? Look, all

entrepreneurs are very driven. We like that about them. They're optimistic, they're self-confident, they're driven. They want often to build empires. They want to be larger than life. But that has to be within laws, within rules, within norms. And the problem is that we have created a society in which courts are weak, the government is weak. People have built tremendous, tremendous fortunes that are just unimaginable to people that would have been unimaginable to people like 20 years ago. And we have no guards rails against that. They can take over newspapers and social media companies and use them as their mouthpiece. That's where the problem lies. And the more they do that, the more they become convinced of their own power and the more they are surrounded by yes men, which creates pernicious dynamics. You know, Elon Musk shouldn't have this type of wealth. Part of it is because we have not taxed income. A lot of his wealth is in capital income, which gets taxed very lightly. If you look at companies that have made a huge splash in terms of Valuation, they often have often taken over their merge with their competitors. That should not have been allowed according to our own antitrust laws. So it's a failure of our system that these companies and these individuals have become so wealthy. We haven't taxed them. And now their power is not just economic, it's social and political. And that's where the problem starts.

You pushed on him and challenged him to actually be taxed on his unrealized gains. And I think he pushed back, or I saw some controversy about that. What do you make of that claim? That, look, Daron, you're brilliant, but these gains are unrealized. And the day he was a trillionaire, like two weeks later, he was not a trillionaire. So how do you balance that? I mean, yes, how many yachts does he need to water ski behind? That's true. But in reality, how do you deal with that question of unrealized taxation on unrealized gains for ordinary, maybe millionaires? I mean, not billionaires, trillionaires.