0:00 I think the greatest brand destruction over the last 18 months is the US brand abroad and AI. So with America, Trump has been convinced that this was his defining moment of being known as the president that liberated the Middle East. But I think the Trump administration will be known for criminal corruption and incompetence. And that incompetence is bubbling up. And then the second greatest fall is AI. And also Sam Allman, who's gone to the dark side. And I'm an AI optimist. But here's what we fail to understand. These tech studios, they do not have our best interests at heart. Scott, I often come to you to help myself form my opinions on some of the most sort of consequential issues going on in the world. And when I look at some of the quotes from the CEOs of these AI companies, I've got one here from Elon that says, AI and robots will replace all jobs. What's your view here? I think it's most important. The catastrophizing is nothing more than thinly veiled attempt to
0:46 say, my technology is so devastating that it's going to shift society and you should invest at this crazy valuation. And the data doesn't reflect that there's some big exogenous meteor coming for the employment market. But I believe it's actually going to create more jobs than it destroys. But the scary thing for me is that because of AI and because of these frictionless relationships that people are engaging in online, I think a lot of young people are losing the ability to endure rejection. But I think a more important technology in terms of how it's going to change the world and what will create more shareholder value is not AI. It's really. This is super interesting to me. My team give me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe. And some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe
1:33 button, if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you, do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of the Diary of SEO, and I will not let you down. Please help us, really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show.
2:20 Welcome back. I often come to you to help myself form my opinions on some of the most sort of consequential issues going on in the world because I find you always have a very interesting perspective. And one of the things that's been front of mind for me, and I think the audience as well, is this subject of artificial intelligence. It's moving incredibly quickly. It feels like a moving target. And I think I saw some stats the other day that said the subject of artificial intelligence is less popular as like an industry than even ICE in the United States. In part because the big CEOs of these companies are saying that our jobs and our way of life is going to be fundamentally disrupted and people don't feel like they have a say in that. We didn't choose this. What's your perspective on everything that's going on? There have been few brands that have fallen further faster in the last 18
3:06 months than two brands. The United States brand abroad. We used to be the enforcer of the operating system to keep rogue nations in check. The US is now that rogue nation. So the US brand abroad, for the first time in history, more people feel that China is a force of good in the world than the US. That's never happened before. So the brand US has fallen furthest fastest. The second greatest fall is AI. Your view of AI is directly correlated to your wealth. The only cohort that has a positive rating of AI is people making over $200,000. Because generally speaking, Wealthy people look at AI as something that's fueling their portfolios. And wealthy people are the biggest users of AI. So they
3:52 see it as a positive. They see it as innovation. They see it as the S&P going up. But if you're an average middle class person, what you may see is that your electricity bills have gone up. And you don't even have access to invest in these companies. And you see some statements from people, Sam Altman saying, Stop complaining about energy costs. Think about the amount of energy it takes to raise a child. So they haven't really managed the brand well. In the last 18 months, it's come from something kind of scary, but we can be optimistic and a wealth creator, to something that's very scary and something that's a wealth creator for the wealthiest already. The brand in the last 18 months has had tremendous, tremendous erosion. When I look at some of the quotes from the CEOs of these AI companies, I've got one here from Elon that says, AI and robots will replace all jobs.
4:40 Working will be optional. like growing your own vegetables instead of buying them from a store. The challenge will be fulfillment. How do you derive fulfillment and meaning in life? And Sal Maltman said, by the end of 2028, more of the world's intellectual capacity could reside inside data centers than outside them. And when I went through Sam's blog several times, I mean, he's talking about a fairly dystopian future. And many of the CEOs, I mean, even Amadeus Anthropic talks a lot about, you know, his bear case for AI and the job disruption that will follow. And so I think I'm trying to get clarity for myself really. I'm like, what is the truth? What's marketing and what's the truth? And I want to add another point, which is I hire a lot of people and I'm already finding that our framework specifically for entry-level roles
5:25 has quite radically changed. And so I didn't believe this stuff. Like a lot of people told me that, oh, Sam, when these guys are doing marketing to make their company seem powerful. But then when I noticed a change in my own behavior, when I'm sifting through these CVs, I thought, oh, maybe things are going to change. I think it's mostly bullshit and catastrophizing and a means of fundraising. Every technology in history goes through a similar arc. There's some catastrophizing, there's some job loss, that increase in productivity results in additional margin, new business opportunities, and employment growth. I don't see any reason why this would be any different. And I think that catastrophizing and talking about this massive destruction in jobs is a way of saying or justifying the massive investments these companies want enterprises to make in their companies. Because if you look at the
6:11 amount of capital they have committed in the valuations of these companies, one of two things needs to happen in the next five years, at least in the US. There either needs to be a trillion dollars in incremental revenue from new products from companies that have licensed AI. So L'Oreal does a big site license with, say, OpenAI. Does it come up with new products? Like, how does it justify that investment? We're not seeing a lot of AI moisturizer or cars that are built by AI. AI has hit industrialized robots at Amazon. But there's not a lot of what you would call new AI-driven or AI products. AI plays a role in the background. But it's very hard for companies right now to point to incremental growth or revenues from AI. So in order to justify these valuations, then they have to say, all right, there's going to be massive cost savings or efficiencies. And there's some examples. I think Meta has
7:00 just announced new layoffs because of efficiencies they're getting with AI targeting. So one of two things needs to happen in the next three years. Either these companies' valuations need to be cut by 50% or 70%, or you need a massive destruction in the labor market that creates tons of efficiencies that their customers can then flow to the bottom line. And I think what the CEOs are saying is that there's going to be massive efficiencies. I also think that you sound more interesting, and it makes your technology sound more seminal when you say it's changing the world and we don't know how to control it. And quite frankly, I find it a little bit obnoxious that some of the founders and key figures in AI catastrophized just about the time they take a secondary and peace out to the Cote d'Azur. That's not helpful. I'm Dr. Frankenstein, and I've created this monster, but I don't know how to deal with it,
7:46 so I'm going to go peace out to Saint-Tropez. That's just not very helpful. They always talk about the peril. So what do you mean by that? So the first big fear of catastrophizing is just this unprecedented job destruction. They've been talking about that for three years, but let's look at the data. The unemployment rate in the U.S. is 4.5%. Among youth, it's 8.8%. That is slightly below the historical average. The number of new business permits or new businesses started per capita in the United States has doubled in the last 10 years. And we hear about, well, what about Meta? The announced they were laying off, I think, 8,000 or 10,000 people yesterday. 2019 to 2025, they went from 16,000 people to 80. So even if they go back to 60,000, it takes them back to, it takes
8:32 them back about 24 months. So I don't doubt that there'll be a real dip or a severe V down in certain industries, customer service, probably the legal field. But I believe over the medium and the longterm, it's actually gonna create more jobs than it destroys. And I don't, I think some of the catastrophizing is nothing more than thinly veiled attempt to say, my technology is so devastating. that it's going to shift society and you should invest at this crazy valuation. Could you be wrong? Oh, I'm wrong all the time, Stephen. No, but I mean, like, what would have to be the case for you to find out that you were wrong in terms of how you've reasoned up from the first principles of your thinking there? Job destruction, layoffs. So what would you have misunderstood for that to be the case? Like, what would you have misestimated for that to be the case? Ground zero for the job that
9:21 was going to go away was radiologists. You could scan billions. of images and radiologists, kid, mama, don't let your daughter grow up to be a radiologist because that job's going away. The new job listings for radiologists in 2026 is up because what it ends up is that while scanning the image is important, it's a small part of the job. The value out of a radiologist is diagnosing the illness and then coming up with a treatment plan. And that's as important as ever. The number of coders, job listings for coders, year on year is up 11%. So people who understand how to use these technologies and come up with different prompts or different means of vibe coding, that demand has gone up because now AI can be applied to almost any startup. Where I will be wrong is if there is sustained job destruction and
10:08 the new jobs created in new businesses and the employment those jobs create doesn't keep up with new jobs. And there is a scenario. You don't need 100% unemployment like Musk is predicting. At 20% unemployment, The French had a revolution in Weimar, Germany turned very ugly. At 20% unemployment, especially among youth, especially young men tend to get very angry and take to the streets. So you could see a V that's so severe, even if there's a job recovery, if it hits 20% unemployment, that could cause real civil unrest. But I just look at the data. I look at the employment numbers. If you didn't know there was this seminal technology that very smart people were predicting a job apocalypse around, and you just looked at the data, you wouldn't know there's anything going on. The data doesn't reflect that there's some big exogenous
10:58 meteor coming for the employment market. Is there a case that this technology, because it's built on the internet, so it has inherent rapid distribution, every day Anthropik released a model, Chachupiti released something, it spreads across the world very quickly and everybody's updating their technology at the speed of light, unlike the Industrial Revolution where you had to build infrastructure and physical infrastructure. Is there a case that because of the speed of this technology, technology and the proliferation of it, that it will be unlike the revolutions of the past. That's the fear, that the V is so severe and so vicious that we don't have time to recover. And even if there is more jobs on the other side, that there's too much civil unrest around the V. But so far, the V doesn't be decelerating or diving as quickly as people had predicted. I was kind
11:44 of reminiscing on the way over here. I moved here almost four years ago. The first thing I did, I got off a plane at night and I went to this amazing party at Annabelle's, this Brazilian party with all these hot people everywhere. And I thought, I love London. And the next morning I woke up feeling pretty hungover and my team said, you have this podcast with this young guy. And I said, cancel him hungover. And they said, no, he's really up and coming. He'll like him. He's a nice kid. And I came into this little place in Shoreditch or wherever with all these like cool coffee houses. I had no idea who you were. And within two years, you were fucking everywhere. It was like, I'm in the airport and I see your banner on your book. And then I get on the plane and the safety video has you in it. I'm like, make him stop. And my point
12:32 is where I'm going with this is, this place is like, I mean, it feels like the Googleplex. You're hiring like crazy. You're one of the most technically sophisticated people I know in media. And yet you're hiring a bunch of organic things, walking around and eating and going out and drinking and having kids. So you're the example. Old media is going to lose jobs, but you're creating—how many people have you hired in the last 24 months? Across all of our companies, I'd say about 220. Okay, and those are high-paying jobs. Those are young people probably making six figures plus. That's a lot of employment. So is the BBC or is the Daily Mail or whatever laying off people? Yeah, but I'm not sure they're laying off people faster than
13:18 you're hiring them. Yeah, and what I found is we're hiring a different type of person, and AI fluency is becoming increasingly important. And to say the other thing is, the only thing I noticed was 60 days ago, I consider myself to be the head of recruitment. We have a recruitment team downstairs, and I own a recruitment business. But as I go through that inbox, people that I otherwise, two months ago, would have been jumping to higher. I'm now pausing because there's new technology that's been launched by these companies in America that means there's alternative solutions. And that's what's giving me pause. People do need to consider ways that they can upskill themselves with these technologies. The labor market is definitely reshaping, and it might reshape faster. But I'm not sure it's going to be the apocalypse. There'll be winners and losers. For example,
14:05 for the last 30 or 40 years, the unemployment rate among college grads has been lower than non-college grads. It shifted this year. The unemployment rate among non-college grads because of the boom in vocational work is now lower than the unemployment rate among college grads. And if you think about it, you're like, OK, well, that's bad for new college grads. But at the same time, all of these data centers need carpenters, welders, plumbers. So there's been booms in other parts of the employment market. But yeah, the employment market's absolutely reshaping. But when I graduated from business school, a lot of it, quite frankly, is your generation is spoiled. What do I mean by that? When I graduated from Berkeley in 1992, 40% of us had a job on graduation day, meaning 60% did not have a job. I would bet the kids in my class
14:51 at Stern, I bet 40% of them are starting their own business. Because with AI, when I graduated, there were two entrepreneurs in my class, and the second person was my co-founder. We were the only business started in the high school of business from 1992. I would bet there's going to be 30 to 50 businesses that are started on graduation day. There's kids dropping out of their second year of business school to start businesses because they just raised $10 million in a Series A. Now you have to have certain skills, a certain type of personality, a certain facility with technology. I'm actually quite excited about this. We're starting to see an uptick in productivity, which should result in incremental profitability. Will some people be on the wrong side of the trade? Absolutely. Do we need to do a better job of providing more unemployment, more retraining?
15:39 Denmark spends 2% of GDP on retraining and vocational training. We spend 0.2% in the US. So we're not good at retraining. We're really bad at it, actually. We're not good at taking care of the people on the wrong side. But in terms of global employment, I think that catastrophizing is dressed up fundraising. What do you think about what Elon's doing with Optimus? Because if you bring those two forces together, you've got Optimus robots, these humanoid robots, where he says there'll be I mean, some of the quotes that he said, I mean, it might be marketing, but he's predicting that you won't need to be a surgeon because there'll be so many Optimus robots that are more advanced than any surgeon on earth. So Optimus robots will be doing surgery. And if you combine intelligence with sort of physical, physical power
16:26 that comes from these robots, it does beg the question where human skills remain outside of the relational stuff and Maslow serving Maslow, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's one of the things I contend with. I'm like, you're seeing in China, especially, how robots are really changing production lines. And I saw this video the other day of, I think it was in India or Bangladesh, where they had the factory workers have cameras on their heads so that they could film their hands because they're intent on replacing them with robots. This combination of intelligence plus robotics feels like it's two tsunamis at the same time. I think that's right, but let's use the surgeon as an example. I think the robot in the context of surgery will be not a replacement, but a supplement. And that is there'll be a large class of
17:12 surgeons who know how to weaponize robotics to be better surgeons and quite frankly do two surgeries a day instead of one. I think most brain surgeries take four or six hours. Using robotics and precision instruments, a great neurosurgeon will be able to increase the productivity and the accuracy of their surgeries. My big tech stock pick of 25 was Alphabet because it was trading at a P of 17. I just saw it as being ridiculously cheap because everyone thought OpenAI was going to put it out of business. My big tech stock pick for 26 is Amazon. Because I think where robotics really hit the rubber meets the road in terms of shareholder value is the collision of AI and industrialized robots. And there are 400,000 industrialized robots in the US. And there's a million at Amazon. So a million at Amazon is
17:58 2 and 1 half times the number of industrialized robots as the rest of the nation combined. But the notion that we're going to have someone in our house bringing our tea a robot, I don't buy that at all. I think that automated robotics, the collision of advanced manufacturing in China and using AI with robotics will yield tremendous advantage. Amazon is saying they're going to double their largest business, which is their retail business, by 2032 without an incremental hire using robotics, industrialized robots. And they were early. They made an acquisition. 10, 15 years ago of a robotics company called Kiva. But the notion that there's going to be a robot bringing me my tea here, oh, that's bullshit. The scary thing for me that I'd want to know more about is weaponized, industrialized robots as warriors. Because I wonder, you know, there's just, you
18:45 can go some weird places. But again, I think AI and robotics, yes. This notion that we're going to have robots serving us our food or in our house, I don't see that. It's interesting because I guess one could argue that we already have robots in our houses, but they just don't move. So quite the leap really is, would you allow a robot to move through your house? Because I mean, a Hoover's a robot. A fridge is kind of like a robot, especially the smart fridges. One could say a TV is a robot, a smart TV, but the difference is they don't move through our house. So would we allow the Hoover to move itself? And then once we allow that, would we allow it to potentially bring us something? Yeah, I get it. I just don't. The stuff I've seen on actual application of these robots, And keep in mind, these individuals, the job of the CEO now is, it used to be to under-promise and over-deliver. Now it's to over-promise and under-deliver and create
19:33 a vision that creates cheap capital so you can pull the future forward. My understanding is three years ago, we had a million autonomous Tesla taxis on the road, and that did not happen. In 2016, Musk said, or 2017, there was going to be autonomous was two years away driving. So their job is to predict a very exciting future. I also think Musk in particular is very, at saying, look over here as he stuffs a rabbit into a hat. I mean, Tesla's an automobile company, so he's got to create a story to justify its 155 times earnings when most automobile companies trade at 10 or 15. So it's robots, it's space, it's connectivity with AI and autonomous and robots. It's constantly look over here because I think it's very difficult to justify the valuations he's raising money at. So, and to be clear, He,
20:20 as much as anybody, is able to pull that vision forward. He's launched 90% of the rockets sent into space have been by SpaceX. But this is a company that's trading that has $16 billion in revenue with $8 billion in profits. And it's going to go out in its IPO at a projected valuation of 90 to 110 times revenues. When Google went public and went out at 10 times revenues, and it was growing 10 times as fast. So what is this? The key attribute of an innovator right now is storytelling. And that is to make sure the promise is way ahead of the performance, so that you can access cheap capital and pull the future forward. But a lot of this stuff I find is a lot of jazz hands. He's often known for being wrong about his timelines, but he does seem to deliver magic to the world. The best product in my mind, the two products that have changed
21:08 my life from a technology standpoint, most underrated product is AirPods. If AirPods alone, Tim Cook just stepped down, where its own product would be a Fortune 50 company. I don't even think it's technology. I think it's the most profitable, ubiquitous piece of jewelry in history. I just walk around with them in my ears now, right? And then the best product, I think, in the last few years has been Starlink. That's amazing, yeah. I just think it's absolute. I've done podcasts from planes. I can talk to my sons on FaceTime. That product is, you know, all airlines are flying the same tin can, same routes. Same bad food, a real point of differentiation for them. And that's also in maritime. I think Starlink is the best tech product. So power to him. When they go public, is SpaceX an amazing company or is it overvalued?
21:58 The answer is yes. Two can be true at the same time. What do you think of Tesla? Because for me, it's magic. I don't think people in Britain realize this or other parts of the world. But for me, the first time I got in the Tesla that I got in LA and pressed the location, and took my hands off the wheel. All I had to do is occasionally look forward, which they're removing now. And it took me three and a half hours to Joshua Tree without any intervention. And the safety record in it is safer than if I had driven myself there. It's just magic to me. And then when I watched this, the space rockets come down and be caught with the chopsticks. I go, this is just magic. And so when he, I've got to be honest, when he says that these Optimus robots are going to be, I go, do you know what? He's delivered a lot of magic in the past that no one would have thought possible. Can you even
22:43 imagine 10 years ago, him saying that, what people would have said if he said, we're going to launch this massive sort of 70-foot skyscraper into the air, and then we're going to catch it on chopsticks. Starring. Incredible. And then we're going to relaunch it again. And then we're going to catch it again. You would have gone, impossible. Edison of our generation. But you asked about Tesla. I bought a Tesla. Incredible product, far superior to anything on the market. He deserves credit for inspiring the EV race, which will be good for the environment. But the reality is everyone's caught up. The fastest growing automobile company in history is BYD. BYD. Which is a Chinese company. BYD is basically an 80% of a Tesla. Some people would say 100% of a Tesla for 40% of the price. If there wasn't a ridiculous tariff war right now, BYD, I think, would be the number one EV in the United States. It's
23:31 eating Tesla's lunch. In addition, What I think is going to happen about Tesla, credit where it's due, changed the market, inspired the EV race, good for the planet. But when you look at its valuation right now, I think what you're going to see is when SpaceX goes public, there's a lot of money in the market that wants to get some of that Musk riz, what you were talking about. This guy is incredible. I don't care how expensive it is. I want to invest behind Elon Musk. I get it. That money is about to come out of Tesla, which people are finally figuring out, is just a great car company that should be trading at 30 times earnings, not 150. And it's going to go into SpaceX. So I think the boost, the retail surge in SpaceX you're going to see in the valuation they're planning to go out at is just extraordinary. Some of that is going to come
24:19 at the cost of Tesla. I think people are waking up to the fact that Tesla is a great auto company. It should be trading at about a fifth of the valuation it is now. On that point, what jobs do you think will be impacted by AI? I've heard you talk about logistics and transport. I think London have just announced that Waymo and Tesla's full self-driving technology are on the way. They've green-lighted Waymo, for example. I'd hate to be a truck driver. To me, a long-haul truck driver is the first place. Trucks can drive between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. when there's no traffic on the road. I don't think it's a very good job. What's interesting about, or one of the things that's interesting about truck drivers is the biggest employer of non-high school grads in America, of non-high school graduate males. It's the biggest employer. Really? It's actually one of the two or three, I think, biggest jobs by number of people in the United States. I would think within 10 years, we're
25:05 going to have very few long-haul truckers. Obviously, customer service, it feels like that will likely go away. Yeah. But where I see job destruction in my world is that, I used to, anytime I got an agreement from anybody, an advertiser for a contract, an employment agreement, whatever it is, I'd send it to my lawyer and say, can you review this? And because the bills, there's latency in the bills, it probably costs somewhere between 400 bucks and 2,000 to review every contract, right? Because I'm a narcissist and I think I signaled by having a name brand law firm. And so they hire some kid at 120 or 80 to 120 bucks an hour and they charge me four to 500, right? Now I say to the person in charge of that project, And they say, well, I'm sending their contract to review to our lawyer. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Put the agreement. Describe what we're looking for. Ask Claude
25:54 or ChatGPT to pretend it's a $1,200 lawyer, an hour lawyer, employment lawyer, or contract lawyer, and ask them to review this document, redline it, and do the same thing at another LLM. And then you make those changes. Congratulations. You are now a senior associate at a law firm. I probably spend $100,000 to $300,000 a year on legal fees across my organization, I think I'll cut that easily by a third this year. So that's one way I see it. But I have a podcast company, not nearly the industrial behemoth this thing is, but I keep asking everybody, how do we use AI to do this? And I find that they're getting better at it, and it enhances our work, but we're still hiring. Again, I think it's a supplement. And if you want to protect against
26:42 AI, it's pretty easy. I've said this for a while, AI is not going to take your job. Someone who understands AI is going to take your job. So what I tell people is have a second screen. And that is always have a second screen open that has nothing but AI on it, LLMs. And anything you get digitally, port it into your AI screen and start playing with it. Do you know that quote is so interesting? Because I've heard that quote a lot, that AI won't take your job. Someone that understands AI will take your job. And as you said it then, I thought, you know, I was thinking about different roles in my team and my open roles that we haven't hired for. And I thought, Someone with AI will take your job, but they won't just take one job. They'll take five of those jobs. And so if you think about an analyst, we've got Molly downstairs, analyst for my investment fund. We were well intent on hiring maybe five analysts for my second fund. We only need Molly now because Molly's got two agents that she works with
27:30 and two Mac minis. And she's got a setup that screens the inbound interest and also goes proactively into the market looking for new opportunities and pulls them back into her, runs them through a framework, scores them. prepares them for the IC. So Molly, enabled by AI, she's probably taken out five jobs. And this is, I think, even with the law example, that lawyer that's using these models probably doesn't need to have five junior lawyers now if they're really, really competent with AI. And if you think about an executive assistant. So with executive assistants, we might, for our executives, would have hired maybe probably 10 EAs in total. Now you really need one that is powered by AI to do all the travel. one that does all of the scheduling, and then one that meets people at the door. So you need three versus potentially
28:15 10. And this is kind of what I'm broadly seeing in most roles, but not all of them. There are still some roles. When I looked at the org chart where I go, actually, you know, this sales, a lot of the sales we do from a media perspective are take someone for lunch, wine and dine, call them, relationships, pitch the deck. Those kinds of things seem to be completely untouched. But let's continue down that path. You no longer need five mollies, you need one. Yeah. That creates additional EBITDA margin. It's a more profitable diary of a CEO empire. It means you can raise more money, and then you go buy more podcasts or invest in them who hire more people. And it creates a faster cycle of money and new ideas. And when we were walking in here, you're talking about acquiring podcasting, and you're getting into CPG, and you're getting into different forms of media, and you're driving
29:01 growth and innovation. Will some people be on the wrong end of it? My mom was a secretary. She started as a typist. Typist went away. She oversaw the the secretarial typist pool at a law school downtown, and I worked in the mailroom in high school. But my mom realized that the hard part of her job was interacting with a senior-level executive, and she became an executive assistant. And she never made a lot of money, but she made good money, realizing that typing was the easy part of her job. The hard part was managing some dude's life, right? So accounting should go away. But what you're saying is there's actually more accountants this year than there was last year because accountants, the smart ones, are moving into wealth management and tax optimization, which keeps getting more and more complicated. So yeah, do you have an onus to update your skills, to understand these? I remember when I first moved to New
29:47 York, and they hired an assistant for me, and she came in and said, oh, I don't use computers. And I'm like, well, you can't work here. So it's like, to say you're not going to learn AI, or at least the basics on how to use it, is like being in 1998 and saying, well, I don't use PCs. So I don't, yeah, you got to update your skills. The cycle time's decreasing. A lot of people find themselves on the wrong side of the trade. I have to force myself to use AI. I don't, you know, I'm, the part of your brain around understanding new technologies begins to die, right? I can no longer perceive a calendar. I can't tell you what I have next for some reason. I used to be able to do fantastic, I could do a Scotsman accent, Stephen, like no one's business a few years ago. That part of my brain has died. And when I try to do an accent, it sounds like a dead language that twins speak to each
30:33 other and it offends everybody. There's parts of your brain that die. And the part where you can understand new technologies, or at least have the will to learn them, starts to go away as you get older. I have to force myself to play with these new technologies. Everyone who wants to make more money or wants to hold onto their job should have the same onus to learn these new skills. On that individual level, there's people listening now that want to make sure that they have the skills, their kids have the skills of the future. What are some of those important skills? I mean, you've got kids. What would you say to them? I get asked that all the time. What is the skill? So the honest answer is, I have a view, but nobody knows. You realize 10 years ago in private schools, the biggest incremental investments in curriculum were two things, computer science and Mandarin. How's that worked out? Like, thank God my kid knows Mandarin. I mean, said nobody
31:20 right now. But they thought it was going to be computer science. And you could argue that hasn't worked out as well as everyone thought. I would say that the enduring skill is storytelling. And that is your ability to look at data, create a narrative arc, and then communicate that story in a compelling way via all the different mediums, whether it's podcasting. I think you have to write well to be a great storyteller. But if you think about the most successful people in the world, at the end of the day, they're usually storytellers. The great CEOs, I read Jeff Bezos' 1997 letter to shareholders, where he focused on those three principles. And I'm like, take my money. Right? I see even a guy like Alex Karp at Palantir walking around doing a live earnings call on his phone. It's very compelling. Jensen Huang,
32:06 when he does these giant Buffett-like stadiums where he gets up to him, he's like a rock star. That's storytelling. Technology is, I think, going to create equalization among the product. Reverse engineering created parity among manufactured products. I think most technologies are going to converge, and we're seeing that convergence in AI models. So I think the point of differentiation is relationships, right? Do I want to work with this person? Do I know about their kids? Do I like them? At the end of the day, I have three different law firms pitching me business, three different investment banks, three different CRM companies. Who do I have the best relationship with, and who do I want to work with? So storytelling, it sounds very passé, the ability to establish strong relationships with other sentient beings. I still believe that everything reverse engineers to biology.
32:53 I think a certain fundamental understanding of the sciences, those seem to be pretty enduring. You know, my oldest said he wanted to be a marine biologist. I'm like, who are you kidding? You get seasick. I mean, at 18, what you want it, you want them to be smart, good people, aggressive, support them becoming their own person, which I've had trouble with. I want them to be mini me's. And then, Helping them find something they're great at, but telling your kid, no, you need to go into this because this is where the future's going. No, we don't know. We know the basics. I would want my kid to be able to write well, to be able to look someone in the eye, to be competitive. I encourage them to play sports, to do chores, which they do none of. But other than that, I don't know.
33:39 What do you think are going to be the skills of the future? I think it's really difficult to know. I think what you said about relationships is really important. You said storytelling, and I think storytelling is a proxy of sales and persuasion, and whether that's persuading an investor to believe in you or people to come and work for you or customers to come and buy your thing. So I think storytelling and sales is going to be an enduring skill. The skill that is the biggest threat that young people are losing, especially young men, and this is a skill, and it's hugely underrated, is the ability to endure rejection. And because of AI and because of these frictionless relationships that people are engaging in online, I think a lot of young people, especially young men, are losing the perseverance, endurance, willingness to hear no.
34:25 Whether it's expressing friendship, whether it's applying for a job you're not qualified for, whether it's approaching someone and expressing romantic interests, I think a lot of young people, especially young men, I think they can have a frictionless relationship online and they're losing a sense of resilience and aggressiveness. So I think that skill, when I mentor young men, the first skill I try to reincorporate back into their life is what I call no. And that is, I need you to go out. I need you to go put yourself in the agency of strangers, whether it's a church group, a sports league, a riding class, and I want you to make an overture, an expression of friendship. Hey, do you want to grab the Arsenal game or watch? Come over my house and watch it. Most of these kids, when you ask them what they want, they usually want two things, the men I mentor. They want to move out of their parents' house, and they want a girlfriend. And so once we do the friend approach,
35:12 then I say, okay, find someone you may be potentially interested in, ask them out for coffee. And this is the goal. The goal is no. Because what's going to happen is you might get a no, probably going to get a no, and then I'm going to call you the next day, and I'm going to say, are you okay? And the answer is going to be yes. Is he or she okay? The person who said no. Yeah, they're fine. Because, and I'm I'm boasting that. The secret to my success is rejection. I ran for sophomore, junior, and senior class president in my high school. I lost all three times, and based on my track record, I decided to run for student body president, where I went on to, get this, lose. It never bothered me. I mean, I mourned and I moved on. Every entrepreneur, how many no's have you gotten? Oh, fucking hell, more so than anybody. I mean, so any person you look at and think, that person has made more money than I would have thought, or any person who's hanging out with someone much higher character and
36:01 hotter than them, that's one thing in common. They either have very rich parents or more likely, they're comfortable with no. And unfortunately, I think young people, especially young men, are becoming less and less resilient to no. Apply for jobs you're not qualified for. Apply to graduate programs you shouldn't get into. Approach people who you perceive as being cooler and hotter than you and express friendship and romantic interest. That is the key. You want to punch above your weight class? Get out a big spoon and get ready to eat shit. That is the only thing that is common across all great entrepreneurs who are self-made, is they have the ability to mourn and move on. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It was inspired by listening to Adam Neumann on that podcast a couple of weeks ago. He did one with Rick Rubin, I think it was. And in it, he tells the story of sitting
36:48 in the back of the cab with Massa, who's the owner of SoftBank. and he was going to ask him to give him $300 million. And Massa turns to him and says, you're just not ambitious enough. And he says, by the time that 23-minute cab drive had finished, Massa had offered him $4 billion, and he had signed a little napkin thing that Massa had in the back of the cab. And that story and other stories like it have made me realize that some of the game in life and success is what I now call selling yourself long. And most of us go through our lives selling ourselves short. I think in part because we don't see ourselves on an exponential curve. We see ourselves as a fixed state. This is who I am. This is what I'm worth. But you've almost got to like factor in your own exponential improvement. If you take you from 21 to now, how your intelligence and wisdom and connections have all compounded, but you would have sold yourself at the
37:38 value of you at 21 years old. So I'm not, I actually now think in every season of my life, I've sold myself short. When I was 18 years old, I sold 20% of my company for 5K, $5,000. And then thought that was i couldn't believe it i was celebrating in my room at the time i was stealing chicagotown pizzas to feed myself and then a couple of years later i sold another 30 percent of that company 30 of my company for 300k and i thought i'd hit the euro millions all right that company ran up and was on the stock market for many hundreds of millions many years later i thought god i've sold myself short my whole life so assume i'm doing the same now and if i if i assume that how how what would i say what would i what opportunities would i go for And I think that, for me, that should apply to everybody. I think it's self-fulfilling. Yeah, there's something about imagining where you
38:24 want to be in five years outrageously in the reverse engineering back. But at the moment you took that 300K, you really needed it. I mean, that was, so it's a function of your opportunity set and what's actually the market says to you. I think pricing is a signal. I struggle with pricing. And what I tell whenever we're writing a proposal or whenever, I'm like, okay. Whatever I get back, I'm like, okay, increase the pricing 30% or 50% more. Because pricing is a signal, and you can always take the price down. And the client, the person, will always come back and ask for the price down. But I mean, quite frankly, and this is sexist, I think men are better at imagining an unrealistic self, and women are more measured. And I think that's one of the things that has held back women as entrepreneurs and the fact that not as much capital has been available to them because the people
39:10 allocating capital have been white dudes from Stanford or Harvard. 40% of VCs are from two schools. I think it was Charlie Munger who said, someone who has a crazy vision of their own potential that's stupid and obnoxious, his attitude was never bet against that person because occasionally they're right. And so we talked about Musk. For a guy to think I'm going to raise so much money and command technology that I can be responsible for 90% of launches and control 70% of the Earth's low orbit satellites, that's pretty arrogant. So yeah, I agree with you. And let me put it this way. If you're going to err, err to the upside, because the market will bring you back on its own. So true.
39:58 Sam Altman has been in all the news lately, in part because of this article that The New Yorker did to reporters there, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, which was this article. And then he responded with this blog post here. Two years ago, I thought Sam had a really good brand. Because he was out in Congress, he was saying this tech, you know, he was asking for regulation, it seemed. It has turned unbelievably quickly, unbelievably fast. Well, we said this before, he's a proxy for all of AI. I think the greatest brand destruction other than the US over the last 18 months has been AI and also Sam Altman. But we keep falling into this trap over and over. And that is something happened through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And that is America, its heroes used to be athletes, government officials, and
40:45 actors. And then there was a dramatic decline in attendance to religious institutions, but people still have really big questions and want sort of an authority or a godlike figure. The closest thing we have to religion is technology. Most people don't understand it. It has a mystical feel to it. I have no idea how my phone works. I can ask it anything, and it comes back with a relatively authoritative answer that I trust, similar if I was talking or praying. I think most of the time when we're on AI, we're kind of praying. We're sending a question into the echo, to a being thinking it's smarter than us, and it's gonna come back with an empathetic, loving, correct answer. So the new Jesus Christ was born in the 90s, and that was Steve Jobs. And he was taken from us early, like Jesus Christ. The idolatry of innovators has absolutely gone crazy. And the new Jesus Christ, if
41:33 you will, are these tech CEOs. And here's what we fail to understand. They do not have our best interests at heart. They are not concerned with our emotional well-being. They are not going to comfort us when we're older. They are there, and they play a key component in capitalism, to do anything that is required to get their earnings up one cent per share every day. And they will make incremental decisions that justify the harming and self-harm of teen girls, Sheryl Sandberg, the weaponization of our platforms to make the coarsening of our discourse, Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, the radicalization of young men the people running YouTube, we keep thinking that the newest tech CEO is going to save us, that this guy
42:19 cares. Sam Altman was the gay son we all wanted. Like super nice, super friendly, hushed voices, well, Senator, I'm worried about that as well, right? These guys would sleep with their cousin for a nickel. That's their job. Their job is to increase earnings. They're not here to save us. We're supposed to elect people who put in guardrails for them. So everyone is saying or asking me, can we trust Sam Allman? I'm like, no. And we shouldn't have to. We should have regulators putting in guardrails on AI. We should be testing these things. Government agencies should be testing these things. We should be ensuring that these technologies are not used to surveil Americans, right? That we would still have cartoons like characters on cigarettes
43:06 marketing to 12-year-olds if we hadn't put in place regulation. And the tobacco executives would claim that they weren't marketing to young people. Ford would still be pouring mercury into the river if we didn't have an EPA in regulation. So Sam is doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing. The latest hero that's going to save us is Dario Amode. We've decided he's the good guy now. The villain's journey in tech is the same. Some compelling person we think is a wonderful guy, and it's almost always a guy. occasionally a woman, you know. We need to do better gender balance. That was Sheryl Sandberg in the workplace. And then we find out that they are doing their job, and that is doing anything they can legally to increase shareholder value, regardless of whether it prevents a tragedy of the commons or not. And then we get
43:51 angry at them. The journey from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader gets shorter and shorter, but they all follow the same path. And then 18 months later, we realize that they, too, will do will say and do whatever they can to try and delay and obfuscate regulation. And that sometimes when we don't have a government with a lack of domain expertise, with a lack of insight, with people who are a cross between the land of the dead and the golden girls and don't understand these technologies, that when these technologies are allowed to run just free with no regulation, they do bad things. So Sam Altman is the latest person we've discovered as Darth Vader, who's gone to the dark side. It happens with all of them because they're doing their job. we as citizens aren't doing our job, and that is we're not putting in place elected officials that regulate these companies. So yeah, can we trust Sam Altman? No,
44:40 but we shouldn't need to trust him. We should be able to trust that we have smart elected officials that will regulate these companies. Did you see this article he wrote in response to having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house? I read this article without reading it. So there's been death threats on his life, and let me be clear, there's absolutely no justification whatsoever for this, and it needs to be I don't even like it when people yell at J.D. Vance when he's skiing with his family. We don't want to be that nation. In the West, we have asserted, if you're operating with the confines of the law, which Sam is, he deserves to live in peace. It is sad. Do you realize in the U.S. now there's more people working in private security than there are cops? Really? Because there's always going to be a number of people who are likely, I don't know about the perpetrator here, who are mentally ill and who will find an excuse Essentially, the makeup
45:30 usually of these perpetrators or these criminal actors is they're usually young men looking to restore their social capital through what they perceive as a historic act of violence against a famous person. This has gone on for a long time. He's now famous. I don't think it's fair. I've seen some people try to equate AI's dangers as if these acts of violence are somehow justified. They're not. There's no justification for a health care executive being executed in the streets. There's no justification for violence against Sam or attempted violence against Sam and his family. I think it's young men with a lack of opportunity, mental illness, and unfortunately, access to firearms everywhere. But it's always happened. I don't make the connection that somehow it's more justified. I think famous people—one in three presidents has been shot at. Crazy, isn't it? So the more famous
46:17 you get, quite frankly, the more personal risk there is because someone is going to decide that taking you out for whatever reason is going to restore their social capital. Actually, if you look at assassination attempts and violence, it's actually gone down. But these stories are cinematic and very interesting, and they get a lot of attention. But I think it's a shame we live in a society where, especially in the West, where they have to endure that kind of risk. One of the really most lovely moments I've seen, I don't know if it was the Danish or the Norwegian prime minister who stepped down, they applauded, and he got on a bike and rode home. He can't do that in the US. Obama's kids still have Secret Service protection. So there's definitely something. I quite frankly blame it on big tech that tries to convince people that this person is their enemy and this person is evil. Sam's not evil. I
47:06 don't know him personally. I sat next to him at this party I went to, but he's doing his job. Quite frankly, we're not doing ours. Do you think he's a nihilist? I don't really know the definition of the word nihilist, but I guess it's someone who believes that life is essentially meaningless. I think there's a nihilist vein running through big tech where a lot of them have go bags. They have a plan for if shit gets real, if there's a zombie apocalypse or there's a revolution or there's a massive pandemic, they have definitive plans and they've spent tens of millions of dollars. They meet their pilots at Oakland Airport. They get on their Gulfstream 650. They fly to New Zealand, to Auckland, and they have a bunker built out. Is this true? Oh, there's a lot of them. Really? There's a lot of GO plans amongst the wealthy. And sometimes it's not as dramatic. Sometimes it's just a home nuclear
47:55 attack, cyber attack, revolution. But I would say amongst billionaires, I would bet conservatively one in three have some sort of GO plan. And that's nihilist. And also, to a certain extent, I think wanting to be an interplanetary species is a little bit nihilist. Also, you know, if they're saying that In the future, people aren't going to have jobs, and there's robotics, and there's this AGI, this superintelligence, which is going to be smarter than everybody. And even if there was a 1% chance, a 1% chance that these Duma predictions around AI could come true, I would stop. A 1% chance of humanity sort of self-imploding or destroying itself. Wouldn't a rational person stop? Well, okay, you're Oppenheimer. It's going to take 3 million American deaths
48:44 to invade Japan. Japan will not surrender. And you're in charge of splitting the atom. There was much more than a 1% chance that our ability to split the atom and then show we would use it against a civilian population would result in the end of the world, should he have stopped development of it. So a lot of scientists, nuclear scientists, killed themselves. They committed suicide because they were convinced once we'd split the atom and use it against civilians, it was the end of the world. It was just a matter of time before we were all using nuclear devices. So I don't I think you keep moving forward. The nihilism, where nihilism impacts these people, let me go back to the go bag. I talked to one of these people. He outlined his plan for me, right? He's a billionaire. Yeah, outlined his plan. His plan B, if things get really ugly, right? And my view is, okay,
49:30 boss, let's play this out. Something happens, there's an event. It's too dangerous to stay here. You meet your pilots at the airport. I mean, shit really gets real. People scaring for food, people become feral. I'm like, you don't think your pilots are going to kill you and fuck your wife? Like, what do you think is going to happen? You don't think the people in New Zealand are going to be like, let's go take the rich guy's shit. It strikes me that these are such misallocated efforts and capital that if you're really focused on your own future, whether you're wealthy or not wealthy, that your resources and your talent should be allocated towards trying to make this place a little bit more habitable. Not trying to colonize Mars, not having a go back. And this is part of the problem with
50:17 the 0.1%. There are 900 billionaires in the United States. And I would imagine 300 of them give money. They're responsible for 20% of all political donations. And that 20% number is misleading because they can be more strategic. So unions are big givers. But they just give money to whoever's pro-union. So it's not that strategic. Billionaires can allocate capital to a specific issue, really ramp it up. So they have a disproportionate amount of control over our elected population. And the problem is the 0.1% are not invested in the health of America. Why? They don't have to put up with TSA lines. They fly private. They don't have to put up with shitty health care. They have concierge medicine and access to the best medicine in the world. They don't have to put up with 40% of third graders can't read or write. Their kids go
51:06 to amazing schools that spend on average $75,000 a year on their kid versus 15,000 at a public school, 10,000 at a public school in a low-income area. They don't need police. They have dormant and security. Where I live in Soho, there's no homeless. As far as I can tell, there's no crime. There's no cops. There's cameras everywhere and dormant everywhere. My point is they are no longer invested in the well-being of America. They've totally dissociated from the investments required to make America a better place because they're sequestered from it. They're no longer invested in the well-being of America. And what I find strange about this nihilism is that these individuals think that they are no longer as invested in the well-being or the safety of the world. I think that's very unhealthy. These are some of the
51:52 most concerning conversations I've had. So like one of the things that happens when you have a podcast and you, you know, interesting people come on and you start hanging around with more interesting people and more powerful people is you get a world, you get little peeks into new worlds that you didn't know existed. You kind of get to see behind certain curtains. And I remember having a particular conversation in London at a kitchen table where someone was describing one of these AI CEOs to me and basically making the case that they believe there's a roughly 10% chance. I think they said seven, if I'm not misunderstanding, percent chance that it's, that it will result in the end of the world, some sort of catastrophic event, but they really didn't care because they think that being the person that summoned this new intelligence amongst us was probably more consequential than whatever happens.
52:42 And like, if I wasn't privy to, again, hearing this secondhand from someone I know who knows this person extremely well, I know he knows him extremely well because they hang out, him telling me that I wouldn't have believed this. I would have thought, that's nonsense. I would have thought to myself, you know, they must be kind because they have kids and they're, you know, but actually now I very much believe what you're saying about this nihilism where I don't actually believe they give a fuck. Some of them. I actually don't believe some of them give a fuck. I actually think some of them are playing a game and they're playing a video game with, with our futures. Or they, there's the incentives, like in the United States, when I was growing up, My dad's boss had a slightly bigger house and he drove a Cadillac and we drove a Gran Torino, but we were members of the same country club and his house was a five minute drive away. And maybe my dad's
53:30 boss got to fly business class and we flew coach. The Delta and having money, having a decent, you know, having a middle-class life and an upper class was like this. Now the Delta is this. Let's look at air transportation. Flying on Spirit Airlines is a humiliating, dangerous experience. United Airlines, economy, economy comfort, economy plus, business class, first class. Oh wait, that's not enough. Let's go to private. There's charter, there's fractional, there's a Cessence Nitation, there's a Bombardier, Challenger 300, there's a Global 650, now there's a new G7. The delta in your life, in your healthcare, my mom was very sick when I was very young. And when I think about how humiliating it was for the two of us, having her to endure cancer when
54:16 we were underinsured, It was a devastating, traumatic, humiliating experience. Now, if I need, I take Lunesta when I travel because I have trouble sleeping. I have a medical concierge company. They get me, did the drug delivered within two hours to my house. I have NAD treatments. They arrange for someone to come to my house when it's convenient for me and do it in my living room. I can text my doctor. I have a medical kit with all these things in it. If I'm abroad, I can text my doctor and say, my son's, and not feeling well. They FaceTime me. I open the kit. They can tell me exactly what to do. The health care I am receiving right now, I have my blood taken every three months. They send it to some bond layer in Norway with PhDs who can
55:02 tell me that I have less than 0.7% chance of any cancers as evidenced by a lack of whatever it is, antibodies, the cancer cells. The health care now for the point for the 1% is dramatic. And it's all the same thing. The bottom 99% of Western societies are essentially being optimized and monetized to make the life of the 1% just unbelievable. The life you can lead in the 1% is so dramatic and so incredible. Broader selection set of mates, your kids have better
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