Cern Basher: So I actually think instead of fearing job loss and lost income, if you understand that the shift that’s occurring here is actually unlocking faster growth, then we actually should be embracing it.

Lisa Tamati: Well, hey everybody, welcome into Pushing the Limits. This week I have my friend Cern Basher on the show once again. Repeat offender. Welcome back. How many times is this? Like four times, I think we’ve done.

Cern: I think it might be now. Yeah, we’re still counting on one hand, so we’ve got some work to do.

Lisa: I’ve got a full playlist of Cern Basher. This is becoming a theme and I’m just so glad to have you because I know you’re a rock star in this world and it’s pretty amazing to have some of your time today. So, for those who don’t know you, who might not have heard our first podcast which I will link down below, can you give us a little bit of a background on yourself? The elevator pitch on Cern Basher, and then we’ll get into today’s topic.

Cern: Well, the most important thing is I was born in New Zealand a long time ago. Most on the southern end of the South Island. I’m also a citizen of Canada and of course now the United States where I’ve lived now for the past 30 years. Professionally, I’ve been a financial adviser for 30 years. And in the last few years I’ve really been focusing on understanding Tesla, which has caused me to dive deep into a whole bunch of different topics, particularly AI and autonomous transportation and humanoid robots. And it just so happens that I think the combination of those technologies is going to materially change the world over the next decade or two. It’s been quite amazing. I’ve built some financial models that Elon Musk himself has recognized, and that’s just kind of spurred me on to continue to think about this space.

Lisa: Because it is sort of the most revolutionary stuff that we’ve ever seen in our lifetime. Both AI, robotaxis, Optimus, what Elon’s doing with SpaceX — the whole gambit. If you look at this whole tech sector that’s no longer a sector because it’s everything, this is going to change our lives. And you are one of the world’s top experts in Tesla and in what is happening in the AI world. So today we’re going to start off with a bit of a slideshow. I read one of your X posts, which I do religiously, and this one really struck a chord. It was about how GDP basically stops explaining the market when technology turns scarcity into surplus.

Dematerialisation & The Smartphone Example

Cern: This was quite an in-depth post and we’ll hit some of the highlights today. We used to think about GDP as, you know, you tweak some of the inputs, you grow a population, you get some productivity improvements, and you might get a little bit of extra GDP growth. You might go from 3% to 4% if you’re lucky. We’re used to thinking in single digits when it comes to GDP growth.

I think that AI and robotics and autonomy in general are going to completely change that, and we actually may now be facing a world where we can have high double-digit GDP and potentially even triple-digit GDP, which I know sounds crazy to think about. An economy growing by more than 100% in one year. It’s possible even for countries like the United States.

Lisa: It does sound insane.

Cern: Right? And I’ll take you through an example today in terms of how this might play out in one particular area, and that’s with humanoid robots. But AI in general has the ability to do this to an economy, not just a robot or an autonomous vehicle. All of these technologies together are going to act together and really turbocharge GDP for many countries around the world if they properly position themselves.

In terms of background, when you digitize something, you’re no longer constrained by the physical world. You don’t have physical limits. When you take a song or a book, you can copy it a billion times over. There’s no limitation when it’s digitized. That’s really what’s happening with AI and intelligence. We’re digitizing the world’s intelligence. Google already went pretty far down that road in terms of putting everything on the internet, but now we’re putting all that knowledge inside a computer system that’s one giant brain effectively. These AI systems have now ingested basically the entire knowledge of the world.

The other thing is that physical products disappear into software. The iPhone is the best example. It took a whole bunch of different products — the camera, the phone, encyclopedias, scanners, calculators, flashlights, maps, you name it — they’re all now part of the iPhone. They’re all apps. They even dematerialized travel agents. People now book their own travel.

If you think about an iPhone that might cost you $1,000, the value of all the things that are inside that device, before if you bought them all separately, might have cost you $15,000. If not more. And it’s more functional in one device than if you’ve got all these other devices. AI is taking this even further.

Lisa: That’s a great picture, that one. For those listening on the podcast, you have to go and see this one.

Cern: The ultimate GDP destroyer — the iPhone. So you think about that in terms of GDP. Once you replace all those things — the phone, the camera, music, newspaper, calendar, maps — that effectively did reduce GDP. We no longer buy those things anymore. It’s all in one device. But the value that Apple and other phone makers have created has far eclipsed the value of the GDP that’s been destroyed.

It’s always very easy to see the GDP that’s going to go away. People worry about that. What they typically forget is the amount of GDP that’s added or created is even greater. It’s more centralized, but because we have all these applications within one device, we’ve democratized knowledge. It’s given people the ability to have certain expertise they wouldn’t have otherwise had access to. The internet’s done that, and smartphones have furthered that.

We’re also going to take a great leap forward with humanoid robots. We’re going to take the expertise of the world and have it embodied in a robot form that can actually do things. It’s not just having access to the knowledge. That robot could be the finest craftsman in the world at basically everything. Elon Musk has talked about the robot being able to do surgery.

Lisa: We’re already seeing robots in surgery — microsurgery, eye surgery, things you don’t really want a person with a shaky hand coming at your eye.

Cern: Those are highly specialized surgical machines that are fixed to the ground. But even in a humanoid robot form that can walk around, we may have those capabilities at some point as well.

AI Compressing Knowledge Work

Cern: In terms of what AI is doing, it’s completely compressing knowledge work. The example I have here is, let’s say you have a consulting project with a budget of $2.5 million. You’ve got analysts, lawyers, designers, a whole bunch of people you employ. But all that knowledge those people have is now essentially compressed in an AI model. For a $25 a month subscription, you have access to all that information, all those brains, and you can use this AI system with perhaps a smaller group of people and get the same output.

Think of the GDP reduction as all those people on the left are potentially put out of work. They’re just not needed anymore. And this is true with any new technology. This is not anything new in terms of what AI is doing.

Tesla’s Optimus Factory & The GDP Impact

Cern: Now let’s look at it from the other side. What value is being created? This chart shows the various factories that Tesla has around the world. Nevada makes batteries, power walls — about 2 to 3 billion in revenue. Shanghai mega pack factory, less than 5 billion. Giga Berlin, maybe 7.5 billion. Their mega pack factory in California, about 8 billion. The global service network and supercharging, about 13 to 14 billion. Giga Texas, still under development, under 15 billion. Fremont, California, about 20 billion. Their flagship factory in Shanghai, probably the most productive automobile factory in the world, over 25 billion. So this is about a $100 billion a year company in terms of revenue.

What happens now as they start to make humanoid robots? Elon has talked about building a 1 million unit Optimus production line in their Fremont factory. This is where they make the Model Y. The Model S and X are being phased out to make room for this robot factory. But they’re also going to build a 10 million unit line at Giga Texas. It’s going to get its own building, almost as large as the existing building which is about 11 million square feet. The new building is going to be about 8 to 9 million square feet as far as we know. Just for making robots.

Lisa: And they’ve already broken ground on this.

Cern: They have. So if we take just the line in Fremont for the 1 million capacity, that would be annual revenue from that factory of roughly $75 billion a year.

Lisa: People have to look at these charts. Go over to my YouTube channel if you’re listening on the podcast because the visual is quite astounding. It’s basically triple almost everything else.

Cern: That’s just one line of a million robots. My assumption here is that they sell the robots for $75,000. Actually, I think they’ll sell them for more than that. So these are very conservative numbers.

I also think they won’t sell them initially. They’ll just basically rent them out or lease them out. So every million robots they make, they might make $75 billion a year recurring, not just a onetime sale.

Now look at what happens when we build a factory at Giga Texas for 10 million robots. That’s a $750 billion a year revenue run rate for that factory.

Lisa: Whoa.

Cern: Elon has also talked about ultimately building a 100 million capacity factory, and that would be like $7.5 trillion of revenue. But let’s not go there yet.

What This Means for New Zealand & Australia

Cern: Let’s put this in context. A factory making $750 billion a year in revenue — how does that compare? Australian GDP in US dollar terms is about $1.8 trillion. New Zealand GDP is about $250 billion US dollars.

Lisa: Tiny by comparison.

Cern: So this one 10 million Optimus factory in one factory in Texas — $750 billion in revenue. Now, revenue is not the same as GDP. But the GDP impact of a factory producing this kind of revenue would actually probably be two to three times this, because then the companies are going to have the robots to do the jobs and that’s going to create more GDP.

The factory itself from a revenue standpoint might have three times the revenue of New Zealand’s GDP, but from an impact perspective it might actually be equivalent to the Australian GDP. Out of one factory in one city in the United States.

Lisa: This is the power of it. You and I have talked offline about this. I’d love to see New Zealand lobby Tesla to be able to get a robot factory down here. This could more than quadruple our entire GDP. Think about that.

Cern: I would say there’s an opportunity for New Zealand to have GDP equal to Australia. It would be possible out of a robot factory in New Zealand. Maybe it wouldn’t be 100 million robots, but there’s a significant opportunity for any country that’s forward-thinking and can adopt this new technology and be involved in building it. There’s a significant opportunity to turbocharge the growth of their GDP. If New Zealand doesn’t take this opportunity, then another country will. You could not only miss the opportunity but also see the gap between countries widened fairly significantly.

Lisa: This is going to be a first-mover advantage. You’re going to get citizens pushing back against robots, saying it’s going to take our jobs. What would you say to someone who says it’s going to take everybody’s job in New Zealand if we build a factory here?

Embracing the Change: Jobs, Robots & Universal High Income

Cern: For the first time in human history, we’re building a technology that can do everything that humans can. Almost everything. And so we just have to accept reality. You can ignore reality, you can try to push it off, stop it, delay it as much as possible, keep it off your shores. But the sooner you accept it and embrace it, I think the better off everyone will be.

If you ask people that work in a factory or in a dirty, dangerous, or boring job — if a robot could replace them, would they welcome that? I think the answer would be yes, if economically they weren’t worse off.

And that’s the key thing — making sure people aren’t left behind. Yes, your job will go away. It will be replaced by the robots. That’s inevitable whether you make them or not. The question is then, how do you distribute that extra wealth that a country creates? That’s a discussion for politicians and the citizens of a country.

Lisa: Elon talks about not universal basic income but universal high income, and that it will be optional in future whether we have to work. A lot of people love their work, a lot of people don’t. If you’re given the opportunity where you’ve got everything you need materially, not just basic but at a really good level, would you choose to continue working or would you choose to do something else? Something for charities, something you’re passionate about? We might actually have the opportunity to put humanity back into human life.

Cern: We’re all programmed to think that we’re defined by what we do. The first question you often ask somebody is “What do you do for a living?” This changes that math. People would be able to work by choice. They may not need to work.

People often say, “What are we going to do? This is going to be a disaster.” Well, there’s two fairly large segments of the human population that are not defined by work. That’s kids — they spend their time playing and learning. So let’s do more of that. And then there are people that are retired — they spend more time on lifelong learning and playing and community and service. Both of those sets of people are not troubled by this.

Lisa: The human-to-human interaction is never going to go away. We’re going to want to hang out with other humans. A yoga retreat, a trekking adventure to Vietnam, looking after older people in your community. Those are future-proofed. Those are the jobs you might want to be thinking about going into.

I don’t think adventure tourism is going to be replaced by robots. People want that human-to-human interaction. And doing this podcast with you — I love this. This floats my boat. I’d probably continue to do this whether I get paid for it or not. And actually, I don’t get paid for it. It costs me lots of money to do this.

The Simple Math: Robots & Double-Digit GDP Growth

Cern: Let me share a couple more charts. This is a list of the GDP of the world ranked by country. Out of one factory in Austin, Texas making 10 million robots, $750 billion in revenue — just from a revenue standpoint, you’re looking at the 22nd largest country in the world out of one factory. But if you factor in the multiplier effect of GDP, Australia is ranked 15th, and out of one factory the GDP impact could be in the top 15.

That’s just a factory of 10 million robots. The long-term assumption is that we’ll need — Elon’s talked about this — at least one times as many robots as there are people. So 8 billion, maybe two, three, or four times as many. You run the numbers on that and you get into some pretty crazy numbers.

Lisa: And when you start thinking about off-planet uses of robots, that’s where the numbers could be absolutely staggering.

Cern: This was a post back in December where Caleb Hammer said 4.3% year-over-year GDP growth is kind of crazy. Mark Andreessen said it’s time to grow. And Elon responded: “Double-digit growth is coming within 12 to 18 months.”

Lisa: Trump was famously saying 25% or something.

Cern: I don’t know whether the timeframe is accurate, but directionally he’s right. Then Elon says, “If employed intelligence is a proxy for economic growth, which it should be, triple-digit is possible in around 5 years.”

Lisa: That sounds absolutely mental when we’ve grown at 3% GDP for the past hundred years. Even the industrial revolution only took us from around 0.8% to 3%. Getting beyond 100% sounds bonkers.

Cern: Here’s how we do it. When we separate economic growth away from the human constraint, the physical constraint — here’s one example using humanoid robots, just looking at the United States.

In the US we have GDP of about $31 trillion, about 340 million people. So GDP per person is about $91,000. What I did here is look at the robot productivity ratio. At 0.5, the robot is half as productive as a human. Eventually they’ll be equal, then more productive. Another way to move across is if robots work two shifts, three shifts. Even if you have a robot that’s half as productive, you could get one and a half times the productivity just by working three shifts. Humans can’t do that.

In the combination of working longer hours and improving all the time, you could very easily see three, four, five times the productivity out of a robot versus a human.

If you had 10 million robots working at half the productivity of a human, that’s about $500 billion of growth. If you got to three times the productivity, that’s about $3 trillion. There’s 10% growth right there. Just on 10 million robots working three shifts at human pace.

In terms of doubling GDP, you might need 150 million robots that are effectively twice as productive as human workers. And that gets you in the range of doubling US GDP.

Lisa: Doubling US GDP. Wow.

Cern: Eventually, if you have a billion robots in the United States, you’re looking at massive growth. This is just humanoid robots. This is not from autonomous vehicles. This is not just from AI in general, which is also enormous. This is just one very narrow category.

Can Robots Really Do Physical Work?

Lisa: You’ve got concerns though. I mean, I’ve seen the dancing robots, the climbing and the amazing demonstrations. But in the real world when it’s pouring with rain and the truck broke down — are we really going to get to a point where an Optimus can come and put in an HRV system?

Cern: Long term, I think so. It’s going to take a while to develop those capabilities. Right now there’s a bit of a race between the hardware capability — we’re seeing these robots do all kinds of tricks and dance and kung fu, proving out the movement capabilities — and the AI part, the brain, the intelligence. What do they do when something goes wrong? Both are being developed at the same time and we’re seeing leaps forward in both areas.

There’s no reason to think we can’t make humanoid robots that are waterproof, that can work underwater. That’s just eventually a matter of engineering. Working outside in wet, cold, windy, dusty, dirty, snowy conditions — those are all things humans don’t particularly enjoy. Any job where you’re picking fruit or farming, I think ultimately a robot will do that.

The key thing about humanoid robots is they can do many different jobs, many different tasks, because the world is made for humans. We’ve set up our society for two arms, two legs, walking around at this height. So it makes sense that the humanoid form is a good form factor for multitasking different types of jobs.

Lisa: And if we discover we need a robot with four arms, they’ll make a robot with four arms.

Cern: Initially they’re operating in a human-designed world. We operate very well in that world that was designed for us. So why not design the robot to operate in that world? Eventually the world may be more designed for robots, and we’ll see changes. But that’s further down the road.

AI Agents & The Solo Entrepreneur Revolution

Lisa: Our society is not ready for this. Society moves at snail’s pace in change. I’ve had Jeff Booth on the show — he always talks about technology being a massive deflationary force in the world. I’ve been watching in the last few weeks because I’m deep in AI. I spend all day across all the models doing AI stuff in my businesses.

I’ll give you an example. We have a biotech company. We make formulations. We had a formulation we put out a year ago. We had to create all the materials around that — cross interactions with drugs, the safety profiles, the practitioner staff, the education, all of those assets for that one product. That took us two years’ work.

We’re now going into production with our second product. I did the entire asset set — practitioner data sheets, safety, dosage, all of it. 99% done. Needs oversight, a few things tweaked, branding tidied up. In half an hour. Which took us two years’ work previously. People don’t understand this.

Cern: You’ve dematerialized all the people on the left side of that chart — all the analysts and consultants. You’ve saved a lot of money. You’ve also accelerated the pace of change. If you think about everybody doing that, it’s natural to think that we’re going to see an acceleration throughout the entire economy because you’re not the only one doing this.

And you’re aware of these AI agents now. Up until recently, it’s been humans interacting on the internet. But in the future, the heaviest users of the internet are not going to be humans. It’s going to be AI agents interacting with each other on our behalf. There’s no limit to the amount of growth you can have in that kind of world. You and I need to sleep, eat, take care of ourselves. AI agents just work 24/7.

Lisa: I mean, that’s OpenClaw. In the last 30-odd days, from the very beginning I was trying to get my head around it. I’ve now got my own agent running on a VPS. My next step is running local agents. I’m developing an org chart of agents running my company, and I’ll be the human in the loop.

This is going to make me as a solo entrepreneur — and this is really exciting for small entrepreneurs who don’t have a heck of a lot of capital, don’t have a lot of resources, who are constantly constrained by their time. At the moment the technology is a bit clunky. I’m not a software developer. My brain is exploding trying to understand the technical stuff. But this is the worst it’s ever going to be.

I have to be in at the ground floor because other entrepreneurs are getting in at the ground floor. This is a massive chance for the small one, two, three person company to actually stand on a relatively good footing against the big players, the incumbents who cannot yet move as fast as we can. They’ve got all these structures — “We’ve been using Salesforce for 20 years and we’re not shifting.” That’s not the case with a small entrepreneur who can move really quickly.

I’m in the content production space — podcasts, blog posts, social media, as well as producing and selling products. The content that’s coming out has quadrupled in the last few weeks. So the content I’m producing is harder to get eyes on. The competitiveness is going up. If I’m not at least keeping up, I’ll be completely wiped out.

Cern: The success of any enterprise was the talent you could attract and the productivity of that talent. In the case of an entrepreneur, it’s your own time and your ability to attract talent and build the team. Those were the constraints, and that limited GDP growth to low single digits.

But now with AI agents, there’s no limit to the number of employees you effectively have. And you’ve massively improved the productivity because they not only work faster — the computer can do things instantly that takes us a long time to think about — but it also does it 24/7. The productivity multiplier is absolutely enormous if you deploy even one AI agent. And there’s no limit to how many you can deploy.

Lisa: What I’m finding is that the AI is teaching me step by step my own business. Things I before had to get a consultant in for. Not only am I now replacing that consultant with AI, the AI is actually teaching me about structures within my business that I had no idea how they really worked. Now I have more control over my business. Whereas before I was paying for consultants who were often not doing a very good job, and I didn’t know they weren’t doing a good job.

I can say to my agent, “Every week, go scour YouTube to find out the latest on thumbnails.” So I’m no longer two years behind the algorithm. It can scour the competition, see what content people are looking for. Things I possibly couldn’t have done before.

I was doing a lot of things on my websites and YouTube that were counterproductive to the algorithm. I had no idea I was penalizing myself because the algorithm likes to put you in a box. I’m a multifaceted human being — I’m into longevity, health optimization, but also AI, tech, and crypto. I was confusing the algorithm. So I’ve had to find ways to do both without starting another channel.

Humanoid Robots: AI Agents in Physical Form

Cern: You’ve hit on something really important. Even in the digital world, these AI agents are going to massively accelerate productivity. Now think about that in the physical world. A humanoid robot is essentially an AI agent but in physical form.

If you have a business where you rely on people physically doing stuff — building things, moving stuff around, picking fruit, farming — you’re not constrained anymore by human labor. You’ll be able to deploy humanoid robots that not only work longer, they’ll probably discover improved ways of doing that work. It compounds on itself.

Lisa: These robots are going to be like little Einsteins running around because they’ve got access to the AI and the internet.

Cern: And a discovery somewhere by a robot in China will instantly be pushed out to the fleet worldwide. Everybody benefits from that improved knowledge — the hive mind. That doesn’t happen with humans. Knowledge takes a while to get dispersed. The problem with the internet now is there’s too much information. I can only watch so many podcasts a day. But AI can ingest all of them at all times.

Lisa: Which I’m getting my agents to do. Bring me the key findings and give me a report.

Why We Should Embrace This, Not Fear It

Cern: So I actually think instead of fearing job loss and lost income, if you understand that the shift that’s occurring here is actually unlocking faster growth, then we should be embracing it. We should be running towards this as fast as we can because it will allow us to solve some of humanity’s most intractable problems. The faster we get there, the better.

The problem is that it’s maybe not so intuitively obvious for most people. They just see their job and their thing right now in front of their eyes.

Lisa: What about the person who is not willing to learn the technology, or is unable to? Are you going to have a two-tier class system — people who can cope with the change and those who are maybe older, never used a computer, don’t want to change?

Cern: These technologies certainly accelerate the discrepancy between different mindsets. But this is nothing new. There have always been differences in people. Not all of us want to learn about different things. That’s perfectly fine. But in an accelerating world where if you don’t keep up, the differences become very, very large economically, very rapidly.

The good news is, back to our GDP growth discussion, there’s going to be plenty of economic value created to go around and share. Elon has talked about this — forget universal basic income, it’s really universal high income. If you can have double-digit, triple-digit GDP growth, there’s more than enough for everybody. All of your needs will be met. Maybe the need to own a super yacht may not be met, but your need to live comfortably, even an amazing life — that will be fine.

The things that we buy are going to become cheaper and cheaper. Lower cost of energy trending towards zero. Lower cost of intelligence trending towards zero. Lower cost of transportation trending towards zero. Those are the inputs into everything else. Food costs, housing costs come down. AI is going to make the cost of education effectively zero.

Lisa: Engage with AI. Let AI become your tutor. Ask AI every single question that comes to your mind. I had no idea three months ago how to do any of this, but I dived in. I mucked up a few things, but it taught me how to get myself out of trouble. I’ve produced three apps in the last three months. They’re driving me nuts because the stability isn’t as good as the advertising says, but I could never have made three apps in a couple of months in a hundred years previously.

And of course in the longevity space, I’m excited about breakthroughs in cancer research, drug discovery, timeline compression. I’m trying to hold my body together because I know that in 10 years we’ll probably have ways to reverse aging.

But I sometimes feel like I’m living in a dual matrix, where 90% of the population is just doing things like we did since the 1940s. And then you’ve got the other side that’s going full bore into this. There’s this massive disconnect. You get the arguments — your uncle rings you and says you’ve got to get out of Bitcoin because they don’t know any of it.

This is the end of Part 1. Part 2 covers Tesla’s robotaxi rollout, the SpaceX–xAI mega-merger, MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin position, and what it all means for New Zealand. Coming soon.