Daniel Priestley: AI Will Make Plumbers Earn More Than Lawyers! (2029 PREDICTION)

0:00 I was looking at the top 10 jobs that are most likely to be disrupted by AI and I really do worry about this. >> So the nature of the economy is changing for a long time. Blue collar work like plumbers, electricians, brick layers has been devalued. But it could be in the next couple of years. These are the roles that are elevated the most and that plumbers regularly earn more than lawyers. And for the last 25 years, I've been building companies from scratch and I've been through the global financial crisis and co but I have never experienced what we're experiencing right now. I've never seen more fear for the disruption that is coming. And my real bare case for AI is that every time you go on AI, your request is going off to a big computer in a Walmartized building somewhere. And those big ginormous computers, they last 3 to 4 years before they need to be replaced.

0:45 And this year ahead, we're going to spend 650 billion and that could cause a massive financial collapse. That's the thing that I'm worried most about. However, I've never seen more excitement for the opportunities that are in front of us. So let's talk about in a world of AI what are the skills that survive. >> So I really believe that everyone should build a little bit of a personal brand not like to become an influencer but position yourself with a group of people who know who you are and know what you do and could enroll you in their opportunity. Second one if there's one skill set that everyone should be learning at the moment it's how do entrepreneurs think? How do entrepreneurs behave? What are the skills that make an entrepreneur successful? And entrepreneurs just simply follow six steps and we do it over and over and over again. and we'll go through the six steps. >> So, are there any particular opportunities that you think that anybody listening right now could pursue

1:31 to make money? >> So, I think one of the best opportunities is >> that is such good advice that we don't hear enough. >> This is super interesting to me. My team given me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe. 69% of you that watch this show frequently haven't yet hit the subscribe button. 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 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

2:17 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 Dio and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show. Daniel, I think we're living in the most interesting opportunistic terrifying time to be an entrepreneur, a professional, to really be anybody because this is a moment of such fundamental change. And I really wanted to have this conversation with you today because I want to understand how you're thinking about AI from an opportunity standpoint as an entrepreneur, but also just for everybody that's working in a

3:03 normal job and who is at risk of having their their career, their livelihood, their identity, their qualifications made redundant because there is now an alien amongst us that can do so much. So this conversation really is about giving people answers. It's about being honest with them about what's coming. And it's about preparing them, setting them up so that they have an advantage in the face of the future we face. So give me the 30,000 ft view. >> Well, my background for the last 25 years has been building companies from scratch. And I've been through the com and I've been through global financial crisis and I've been through uh Brexit and co. I have never experienced what we're experiencing right now. I've never seen more excitement for the opportunities that are in front of us and I've never seen more fear for the

3:49 disruption that is coming. We are living through transformational times that is very similar to 250 years ago where the end of the agricultural age ended and the beginning of the industrial age began. >> I would argue that it's more significant because there's two forces that kind of keep me up at night. The first force is AI, which is you can think of it as just the replacement of the human brain from a sort of productivity standpoint. And then the other is robotics. And the problem is they're coming in at the same time. And I was watching I don't know if you saw this the other day. >> So I'll put this on the screen for anyone that's watching the video right now, but this is a demonstration that took place in China of how advanced their robots are. And I had to check multiple times to make sure that this

4:35 wasn't fake. They are doing back flips and landing perfectly on their feet. And so when you combine intelligence with the disruption of our physical form, our muscles, our body, our ability to pick things up and move them through through time and space, it begs the question like where do we >> where do we fit in to all of that? Strangely, there's something called the Jevans paradox. And the Jevans paradox is a paradox where when we think something is going to completely disrupt the way that we uh live and work. It often has the opposite effect. We thought that YouTube was going to completely wipe out television. And it's true that Hollywood lost tens of thousands of jobs, but YouTubing created 500 to 600,000 jobs at the same time. And it used to take 150 people to make a a TV show or a movie. And now it's 5 to

5:20 10 people making YouTube videos as a little team. and they can have a wildly successful YouTube channel. With the Jebans paradox, if we currently said that in order to have a successful software company right now today or in the last few years, you needed to have 10,000 customers and you needed to have a team of 50 people and you needed to raise$1 to5 million to get a software company off the off the ground. If all of a sudden the cost and the commitment drops dramatically to have a software company and you only need 500 customers to work it to make it work and you only need two people on a team to make it work and you only need a tiny bit of funding to make it work. What happens is like YouTube channels you can end up with literally millions of tiny little software businesses that are super successful for 5 to 10 people and they do something niche and they do something

6:06 special. They don't look like traditional software companies either. So a traditional software company would just do the software whereas these little software companies might do software plus they might do dinner parties where the clients get together. They might have an annual ski retreat. They might have a podcast and a YouTube channel that goes with it. And all of that could be done by 5 to 10 people using AI tools. So the Jevans paradox would basically say that there is millions of unmet needs and that those unmet needs are not explored because the cost to explore them is too high. But because the cost to explore those has come down, then now we can actually have millions of businesses that never existed that we didn't even know we needed to exist. >> I was sat here the other day with Dra who is the CEO of Uber. He turned around Expedia, made it super profitable, turned around Uber that was losing 2

6:51 billion, made it generate about 9 billion in revenue, 10 billion in revenue. And uh he sat there and said to me that their 9,000 couriers and drivers won't have jobs in the future. And and I so I sit and go, okay, so what what are they going to do? Are they all going to start businesses somewhere? Do they? And also I think one of the interesting things about AI is the speed of transition. With the industrial revolution, there's a little bit of a delay because infrastructure took time to build. >> Takes a long time to build. >> But this is the first innovation that I've lived through that is built on >> it's instantaneous. >> The internet. >> The minute an AI learns how to be a lawyer in one place, it can be a lawyer in every place. The minute it learns how to diagnose a disease in in one location, in one hospital, it can diagnose a disease in every hospital in the world. So, it's this instantaneous roll out uh because it sits on top of a network that already exists.

7:37 >> This is what actually Boston Dynamics said to me. I was watching a video of their new robot that's working in factories. It's a humanoid robot that can work in factories, pick things up, move things around. They said, "The great thing about robotics is if one of our robots on a shop floor in Boston learn something, all of our robots learn it. >> It's it's wild." >> Like, hell. So yesterday Tesla built and they took this wonderful photo because they built the world's first Tesla Cyber Cab. Now if anyone doesn't know what a Tesla Cyber Cab is, it's the first ever fully autonomous car that doesn't have a steering wheel and it doesn't have pedals. >> Yeah. You just hop in and there's there's no steering wheel, no pedals. You can't take control even if you wanted to. >> The Cyber Cab is the company's answer to vehicles like the Whimo. The two-seater coupe unveiled in 2024

8:24 comes without a steering wheel or pedals. It's guided by AI and they're now making them. The first one was made yesterday. Again, 100 over a 100 million people's job is to drive and you can get one of these now for Elon saying $30,000. Um, you can rent them, lease them. You can buy a bunch of investment assets and set them out, >> set up your own fleet and connect them to different networks like Uber and all of those sorts of things. And the cost to move around is going to go through the floor because you know my Uber to come here today was probably $50 uh and that will probably be $6 or $7 uh once that is rolled out. So the thing that with the Jevans paradox is it doesn't mean that everyone gets the same job and that they get like uh there's just more of exactly the same jobs. It means that

9:10 the transformation creates exponential growth as a result of the transformation in an unexpected way. Mhm. >> So growing up, my mom worked in newspapers and there was probably half a million people working in newspapers as journalists and all of those sorts of things and that has dropped by 80% in the last 25 years. But at the same time, the number of people who are bloggers, the number of people who have substacks, the number of people uh who are doing the kind of work of journalists and actually making money as a result of content creation has gone 100 100x. So, uh, I think it's something like three to four times more people now make their money in a way that kind of looks like a journalist than there ever were journalists prior to the technology that disrupt journalists. So, it's not that it's not that those exact same jobs uh

9:56 are are replicated. It's that something similar emerges as a result. >> I understand this and I when I read about the Jews paradox, I like ran it through my head multiple times to to understand like how it fits in different industries. But there is a part of me that still thinks this is slightly different because in the example you gave where there was a a content creation industry that was then disrupted by a content creation industry. I go yeah this this the skill of intelligence was still of human intelligence was still rare and scarce and only humans had it. M >> so the disruption of the content creation industry to a different content creation industry was still owned by humans. That transition was still a human one. But in such a world where AI agents can make, if you go on a lot of

10:41 social media platforms, I shame which ones, it's just pure AI slop now. Yes, it's just people's agents churning out content that they haven't touched or done anything about. And then I was I I started saying to you before we started recording that what we're going to experience and what I think a lot of people don't fully embrace about this idea of becoming a content creator for a living or building a personal brand is when you look at some of the graphs and I'll throw the graphs from the Financial Times article on the screen. There's now a plateau of people spending time online for the first time in history. Well, in the first time in internet history, >> Gen Z especially were the first generation to plateau. Yeah. >> In their time spent. But the amount of content, the amount of AI agents, the amount of people that are now choosing to make to do content as a living is exploding. Yes. >> So you have a supply and demand issue where there's a set amount really like a

11:27 set amount of hours consu sort of consumption hours and then you have this huge exponential explosion in available content because a kid in Mumbai >> Yeah. attention is a limited resource but content is >> and content is unlimited now. >> Yeah. and and more so so AI slop is just rolling in and also AI slop doesn't do it justice. Some of my favorite things to watch is AI generated. I'm enjoying AI. So think about it a little when it comes to personal brand. Think about it a little bit like an airport that the airport has got this fog that is rolling in. If your airplane is already above the fog, >> then you're you can continue to fly. But if your airplane is not taking off already, then the fog is going to keep you on the ground. So like for example,

12:13 you've invested so much into your personal brand and people will come along to see you live and they would love to go to dinner party series that you know involves you and there's a whole community around DOAC, right? So all of those things means that your airplane's already up in the air, you can continue to fly. But if you were starting 2 years from now or a year from now or maybe even 6 months from now and you weren't smart about it, there's just too much AI generated content. You won't get traction. you won't get you won't get that liftoff moment. Uh the same way that opportunity is coming to an end because of that AI generated content >> what I'm seeing in the algorithm. So we do some data analysis every year on the variance of performance of pieces of content we produce on different channels. Now I've been making social media content for 15 years. So I have a bit of a sort of a mental history of like every year us doing this this

13:00 particular data analysis to see the variance between the worst thing we post and the best thing we post. And this year we did the same we ran the same analysis with my data science team led by Austin and my team to see if the variance between the worst thing we post and and the best thing we post is getting bigger because what that kind of is a proxy of is is the algorithm caring less and less and less about how many followers I have and is it caring more and more and more about whoever posts the most interesting thing today which is if I was building a social media company and my primary objective was to retain people. I wouldn't care if you have two followers and Stephen has 500 followers. I would just care about who post the best thing. >> So we did that analysis and it's it's an almost perfect graph that looks like this. >> And this is the variance increasing.

13:45 >> Y >> which actually means that okay Steven's taken off from the sky but every day I wake up increasingly it doesn't matter what I did yesterday. >> What we've seen is the end of social media and the birth of algorithmic media >> interest algorithms we call them. >> Yeah. So, social media was all about connecting with your friends and finding out what your friends are doing. Um, and algorithmic media is just finding out what the algorithm thinks that you should be watching today. But with that said, there's this multi-dimension to it, which is you've got books, you've got live events, you've got the podcast, and it's the multi-dimensional angle that actually really sets you apart. The creators that just simply want to put a piece of content on YouTube and get paid through AdSense revenue and that really simple that one-dimensional model, that's coming to an end. But the creators that have a community and they meet up in the real world all of that is

14:32 is part of an overall ecosystem that is very defensible because one you know people want all of that packaged up together. >> Why is it fundamentally defensible from if we think about first principles or human masloavian needs. Let me give you a big answer to that which is if we go back in time to the agricultural age, farmers had to know when was a good time to plant the crops and then they had to go out and toil the soil and put the seed in the soil and the soil did most of the value creation in the economy. At the end of that process, the farmer had to know this is the day to harvest and then we need to harvest that and we need to turn it into something and take it to market. And AI is very similar, which is that it's very good at doing the middle to the middle. It's not good at knowing what to do in the very first instance or knowing when to stop and how to take it

15:18 to market. So the the entrepreneurs job is to do step one and two, let AI do steps three to eight, and then do steps 9 and 10 and to basically have a coherent cohesive view as to what you're trying to get the AI to create. >> Theoretically though, I could I could ask an AI agent to think about the goal that will benefit me the most and make as many AI agents as it needs to to fulfill that goal. And then it would make start one business and that would start another business. lots of different businesses, >> start another business, build another website, contact a supplier. >> I think what you're into here is two or three steps ahead of yourself where, you know, all of this is theoretically possible, but we haven't seen those kind of examples happening yet, right? We haven't seen whether that will ultimately unfold. I'm not saying it won't. I think we are moving into a completely new economy. Like like when

16:04 you lived in the agricultural age, it was completely like unbelievable to you what the industrial age would have looked like. like it's beyond all comprehension if you had an agricultural age mindset to imagine factory production or coal production >> and the thing the principle there that allows you to see what the future might look like when it's exponential and not linear is imagining any rate of improvement and so this is how I think always in my business is when I'm thinking about which bet to make I imagine if there's just 5% rate of improvement per quarter eventually this happens >> and so with some things we've done on this show we started two years ago and for the first 18 months it didn't work and then 6 months ago it exploded because eventually the rate of improvement got to the point where it was viable and now it's the single most

16:51 important disruptive thing we've ever done >> and I think about what I the example I just gave there of agents I'm like if you just imagine any rate of improvement just imagine 1% a year >> and obviously it's way more than that but imagine 1% a month eventually we get to a point where a team of agents >> if nothing if nothing disrupts it one thing that is very likely to happen in the next three years is the whole thing comes crashing It doesn't financially make any sense to build the data centers that we're building. >> But you're not saying that AI is going to disappear. >> The technology itself is remarkable, but the financial model just makes no sense whatsoever at the moment. >> At the moment, which is kind of typical of bubbles, right? >> So over the last 180 years, there have been infrastructure buildouts that have bankrupted the economy consistently again and again and again. In fact, there's a pattern. Whenever we spend

17:38 more than 3% of the overall GDP of the economy on an infrastructure buildout, it bankrupts the economy briefly for 10 years. Right? So this happened when we did railway tracks. In fact, it happened twice in the UK and twice in um the USA. Then we bankrupt ourselves putting the electrification grid in place. We bankrupted ourselves putting uh highways in place. Now there's something that makes this worse than ever before and that is that when we built train tracks they lasted for 100 years. When we built roads they lasted 50 plus years. The telecommunications g uh fiber optics 30 years. All of these investments were multi-deade investments that we could get benefit from and and and leverage for decades. Data centers last 3 to four

18:23 years before they need to be replaced. So we are building something that has a 3 to four year life cycle that costs hundreds of billions and it has to be replaced every few years and there is no financial model attached to this that justifies it at all. So one thing that I'm predicting is that in 2029 100 years after the great depression we will see a massive financial meltdown based off the back of these data centers that have been um developed at the moment. And for someone that doesn't know what a data center is, >> so it's like a big Walmart or an airport filled with computers and those computers are running AI, right? So every time you go on AI, you're actually, you know, your request is going off to a big computer in a Walmartized building somewhere. But

19:08 those GPUs, those uh computer stacks, those big ginormous computers, they are like iPhones. They last about 3 years before they get superseded. This year ahead, we're going to spend 650 billion. 650 billion sounds like so abstract. It's the equivalent of giving every single person in America an iPhone Pro with AirPods. But here's the crazy thing. 95% of people who have been given the the free uh iPhone are not willing to pay for it. And the tiny number of people who are willing to pay for it, they're only willing to pay $20 a month, most of them. So this $20 a month, everyone's getting a free iPhone effectively and then a small 5% of people are willing to pay $20 a month. The numbers are just astronomically out

19:55 of balance. >> The numbers are astronomically out of balance. So what happens next? You're predicting in 2029 there's a financial crash. >> There's not a 0% chance that the financial model around what what we've launched with AI is catastrophic. It's a huge financial problem that very few people are talking about. >> So let's talk about in a world of AI. What are the skills that survive? And like what what are the professions that you believe survive? You've got children, Daniel. When when they come to you and they say, "Dad, um I'm hearing about all this AI stuff and I've seen these robots in China doing back flips. What should I be learning now to make sure that the next 20, 30, 40 years of my career is prosperous?" >> It's the entrepreneurial skill set that is the most important skill set. It is essentially the skills of identifying an

20:42 opportunity prototyping fast and cheap experiments to see if you've got something that people want, taking it to market, making your initial sales, scaling up to your addressable market, and then exiting and then coming up with a new idea. Because even if you're in a big corporate, they're going to want to prototype things. They're going to want to spin out new products. They're going to want to come up with new initiatives. And we need to step through that process of is this a good idea or not? Can we validate it? Can we scale it? Right? And you want to go through that process as fast and as cheap as possible the way an entrepreneur would. >> And on that first point of identifying a good idea. Now is there any way to know if the idea that I have is a good idea or a bad idea? >> Yeah, this is a step that entrepreneurs call validation. And the rookie

21:30 entrepreneurs that fail, they don't do this step very well, right? So they don't do market validation. They don't do product validation. They simply get excited about an idea and then they go all in on the idea. And what really experienced entrepreneurs do is that we come up with ways to do fast cheap experiments. So for example, last year I had two ideas and I I actually kind of liked one a lot and I liked one a little bit. And what I did is I set up a waiting list campaign and I basically invited people to join the waiting list for idea number one and about 750 people joined that waiting list and they filled in a set set of questions so that I knew that 750 people were interested in this idea. This was my favorite idea. And then the second idea I invited people to

22:15 join that waiting list and 4 and a half thousand people joined that waiting list. So even though this wasn't my favorite idea, it was way more exciting for people and way it was sitting on top of a much bigger need. So off the back of collecting 4 and a half thousand people on the waiting list and collecting all the data and the information, we went to some angel investors about a week later after doing that and we raised quarter of a million pounds. So about300 or $400,000 and all of that took about a week or two. With that example, how do you know that the business itself and the delivery of that idea actually meets their expectation? Because I can think of multiple examples where someone clicked on an idea that I had, but actually the delivery of that idea fell

23:00 short of expectation because sometimes things can sound good when you you see the flyer or the poster or the advert, but the reality of the experience is actually not that great. >> So, let me walk you through the six steps quickly. Step one is called founder opportunity fit and founder opportunity fit is finding something that you want to do. Step two is validation. Right? So this is where we actually try and see is there a market could we could we build something? Could we sell something? Right? So that's two validation. Can we build it? Can we sell it? Step three is called product market fit. And this is the next step where you're actually trying to figure out can we actually make this live up to people's expectations so that they really like it. Is there a group of people who buy this and they're happy with the purchase? And we want to do that carefully and cheaply. And then finally once people say well or the next

23:45 step once people say yes we can do that we go to market and go to market is making sales. And then after going to market we scale up right step five. And then the final step is we exit. So we go through those six steps and we call that a value creation loop. And that value creation loop goes through those six steps and each step has its own little job. And what we're trying to do is just validate, go to the next step, achieve the milestones, go to the next step. And and that's how we do it as entrepreneurs. >> So in a world of AI, are there any particular opportunities that you think are um new and exciting that anybody listening right now could pursue to make money, whether it's passive income on the side or to leave their current role and pursue entrepreneurship for?

24:30 >> Well, the starting point is that everything is an opportunity because what do entrepreneurs do? we find things that could be done better, faster, cheaper or with more emotional benefits. >> But has AI created any particular interesting opportunities in your view that you think that's a a huge arbitrage opportunity? >> I think one of the best opportunities is a small SAS company. So software as a service was an elite level business opportunity that very very few people could enter. That was something that only maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of founders at most globally could have a software company. So it was very very elite. And the reason it was elite is because it was very very hard to mobilize the talent required to build a software company. You probably needed, you know, maybe 10, 20 or 30 uh developers to build a software product that would actually be

25:16 a good software product. You needed to raise millions of dollars to get through the costs of developing software uh companies. And you probably needed 10,000 customers to have a break even software company. Now, because of AI, all of those costs have massively come down. And there are software companies that are wildly profitable that have 500 customers or a thousand customers. They service a tiny little niche. Uh they attach a community and some media and some training to those little software niches. So one of the most exciting things is that if you essentially said that I would like to take what I know, turn it into a playbook, take that playbook, ask AI to advise me on what software we could create, and then use AI tools to build out that software. you're able to get very deep into that

26:03 journey for almost no money. >> I was thinking about this the other day because in my company, we're rebuilding our entire ATS ourselves. >> So, an ATS is basically the system you use when you recruit people. Everyone's name goes into the ATS. It's kind of like a like a search engine. Yeah, like a database of where candidates who have applied for your company currently are. >> And over the last couple of years, I've paid tens of thousands of dollars every year for an ATS for my companies. And this year I thought, you know what, actually I reckon we could build an ATS in a couple of weeks ourselves and it could be bespoke to us. So we started that project. I saw the the first version of it yesterday. We started a week ago >> and the first version the the version of it I saw I was like, "Oh, this is significantly better than what we were using before because it's bespoke." >> Yeah. And this made me think about the the opportunity of creating software

26:49 generally, which is that in a world where it becomes, as you say, like cheaper, easier, faster, we're all going to be using more software, but we're probably not going to be paying other people for their software, especially when it's these kind of tools, productivity tools and systems. >> It's purely a tool, it's very easy to replicate. But if it's a tool that comes with a community, if it comes with education and training, if it comes with agents that >> education and training. >> Yeah. So like for example, if you were to do an ATS, right, an applicant tracking system, a a hiring tool, and you had the DOAC uh system and method that I can go and attend the training as to how you on board people, how you create culture, how you do things at DOAC, I'm now interested in the software

27:34 because it comes with that exciting training. if there was also a boot camp that I could go to that was attached to that product. If there was also an annual retreat or a dinner series, if there was also uh some funding opportunities that came with that. So once upon a time you were just simply going to focus on creating a software tool because that was so labor intensive and also it had a natural moat or protection around it that you didn't have to get creative. But now we live in a world where the AI lets you to build the product pretty quickly. It helps you to do all these other things that we talked about and suddenly it's actually quite a a fun product that you that you can spin up. What you've already created would have probably cost 500,000 in 6 months. >> Oh my god. 6 months. I wish.

28:19 >> Not that long ago. >> Yeah. It would probably cost It would have probably taken about 18 months total end to end. >> And you've done it in a week. >> Yeah. And so everyone else can do it in a week. And in fact, if anyone if that's anyone's business right now, there's going to be a thousand new ATS systems a day. One's going to trend on Twitter. You know, people are going to download that one and then they're going to jump ship because a new one emerges and it's better, it's more agentic, whatever. And so, again, I think are we seeing software generally become a commodity? >> What we're going to see is we're going to see all business opportunities be like YouTube content. I mean, if I went back 25, 30 years ago and said there's going to be 10 person unfunded little TV studios that produce content every single week for almost no money. You you would think that's crazy. I mean, Seinfeld used to cost 5 million an

29:06 episode. Um, The Simpsons and Friends, these were all multi-million dollars per episode. And we've now replicated that that can be done like by a tiny little team for free every week. It's interesting because the minute we say that the answer is to do these things that are now easy and free and cheap to do, it's almost like we we then don't acknowledge the fact that if everyone's doing it, it's no longer a valuable thing to do. >> It's less valuable. >> Yeah. As it becomes easier, the other access is the decline in the value. So, we're saying we're saying to people go be a content creator. But the very fact that they can without needing a CNN size skyscraper or production equipment also means everybody can which means that that that actually is losing value at the same rate that it's becoming easy theoretically and and so what I

29:52 continually think about from first principles is what is it that I can bet on that is irreplaceably human which only I can do and a kid in Mumbai cannot do. And so when we say software I go kid in Mumbai and then we say content I go kid in Mumbai. Well, uh, physical experiences in the world, real world, I agree with you. So, standing on a stage and telling your story is something I mean, you already see that thousands of people show up to see this and to be part of to be in a room with other people who are sharing an experience. See, the thing that the AI version of you can't do is turn up to an event. >> I agree. So, I I say what I say because I genuinely want to be challenged here. I I'm I sit here with these AI experts and CEOs because I genuinely I hope that

30:37 they say something that >> tilts the current belief that I have and like makes me go, "Oh, actually, you know, that's a good point. I'm in search of good points on the subject matter." So, when I said what I just said about content software becoming increasingly commoditized and because it's becoming commoditized, we're like tempting people to go do more of it without acknowledging the fact that the very fact that people are doing more of it means it's less valuable and it's more of a commodity. And what I'm saying though is that these things have to go together. So simply like anyone who's doing real world experiences, I think what's going to happen is you'll go to a conference and that conference will come with custom software that lasts 2 or 3 weeks that is really really interesting and it relates to that conference and that software was created as a SAS product for the attendees of that conference and it kind of pops into

31:23 existence very briefly. These things used to be separate and now they all cluster together, right? So, it's a buffet of things that you all put together. If we take most successful businesses now, they do social media. That used to be a standalone business. It was crazy to think that a hair salon could also be a media business. I've met with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and the number of people who want to go big is tiny. It's a fraction of the entrepreneurial community. What most people want is a business that provides an amazing lifestyle. They want to live and work from anywhere. They want to be able to travel. They want to do three or four days a week. They want to drop their kids off at school. They want to uh do non-monotonous, interesting work that is a little chaotic, a little

32:08 creative, a little bit fun, a little bit challenging. They want to work with a small group of people that they get to know and enjoy and travel through life together. And those are the types of things that the majority of people actually want. Very few people actually want big. So, one thing that I'm noticing is that it's probably harder than ever to build a big business, but it's easier than ever to build a small successful business. So, if we were to say that a business that does 1 to 5 million of revenue with a team of 10 people, that is like totally like super uh possible. But once you go beyond that, it's becoming harder and harder because you get disrupted more frequently. So you have to be an elite athlete of entrepreneurs to withstand the constant disruption and and um the the constant change that's coming. So

32:54 because your natural mindset is to think really really big, you're probably missing that for many people who are working in a annoying corporate environment and their job is monotonous and they feel tethered to a desk or they feel tethered to a team that doesn't really care about them. you know, a lot of those people are going to actually end up in small dynamic little businesses that will never be big, but they'll be great. They'll be fun, you know, and people will, you know, have flexibility and they'll have uh, you know, great, you know, great opportunities as a result. >> I think you're right. I do have a bias towards trying to find, you know, big opportunities. But actually, I think the big blue ocean opportunity, which is, for anyone that doesn't know, I think of red oceans from the the book called Blue Ocean Strategy as very competitive,

33:41 >> hyper competitive horrible markets where it's like a race to the bottom. You're all doing the same thing. Like you're all saying the same thing, doing the same thing, and you all think that your unique positioning is is unique, but it's actually not. The market doesn't value it any differently. Like a wine company saying that their wine is a year older or that using a fancier word on the label. It's a red ocean, a blood bath. A blue ocean is an uncont uncontested waters where you have room to grow much less competition and there is actually something fundamental to your proposition your business idea the thing the value you're giving to the world that is unique >> I'm looking for blue oceans >> and yes I will try and build a big boat in the blue ocean >> because that's my nature but also life is easier when you sail in blue oceans for everybody even if you want a

34:26 lifestyle business I think one of the great examples at the moment is if you started a marketing agency when I started In 2014, especially a social media agency, you were in the blue ocean. >> You were briefly >> briefly. And they say, you know, blue oceans often last for 10 years. In 2024, my best friends, I'd say 70% of them run marketing or brand agencies. >> Yeah. >> I'm having the same same therapy session with them once a month at the moment. And if you look at the big five, big four, big five agencies in the world, the WPPs and Martin Surl's business, >> they're all >> they're all competed to way their margins. They're struggling. Yeah. >> They're losing their profit. they're losing their market share. >> And AI and digital technology means that this disruption cycle happens in months, not years anymore. So you said a blue ocean can last for years or decades. Not in the world of AI. In the world of AI,

35:12 as soon as we've identified that you've got a blue ocean, we can replicate that real fast and we can come and fly out to your blue ocean with with an with lots of competition. Here's something that's interesting. Throughout all of history, whenever you find societies that have low social mobility and hyper competition, there's lots and lots of festivals. So you go into medieval times, they've got a festival for every season. They've got a festival for every life event. There's just constant festivals. You go into rural Africa, rural India, and it's festivals, festivals, festivals, right? Weddings, funerals, seasonal festivals. It's a huge part of human culture that we have lost in big cities. like we don't do a lot of festival or rare it's rare that we do a lot of festivals these real world experiences but I don't necessarily think it's a blue ocean

35:58 because uh as soon as people realize how much people want to do festivals and want to do real world experiences a lot of companies can also add this to the mix I think what is defensible is community experience and embracing the constant chaotic change and coming up with new stuff all the time >> one of the bets I'm making and it goes back to what like again reasoning up from those principles. If the question is what can I do that an AI agent or AI could not do and especially in the context of what humans will continue to need. >> Mhm. >> When you were born Dan, you're born with a bunch of needs and those needs like fundamentally haven't changed. One of them is like connection. >> I think you'll always be able to discern what is real human connection from artificial connection. I remember being 16 years old and in my psychology class

36:44 at the back when they told me about the recess monkeys experiment where they got a recess monkey, this little small little monkey. They pretended that its mother was a wire mesh. So they made a wire mesh mother. The recess monkey grows up to be a psychopath because it's it fundamental human need of connection is not met. They then did it with a cloth and the recess monkey grew up to be a bit more stable. And then obviously they showed the examples where the recess monkey actually had a physical flesh mother and it was it was fine. So I say this to illuminate the fact that we have fundamental needs that if not met there will be consequences. One of ours is connection. So, as a content creator, I can sit here and I can tell you what happened today, right? I can say at 6:00 this guy broke into this bank and then he left. I think that's a commodity. Now,

37:29 >> I think the thing that I can do as a podcaster, as a behind-the-scenes content creator, as a streamer, >> this is why I'm so bullish on streamers >> is they're making irreplaceably human content. There's no AI that can an AI can tell you what menop what happens in menopause. An AI can't tell you its experience of menopause. Yes, we need to find something that only we can say as humans. And every single person has this by the way, but a lot of us overlook what we can say as a human. I recently came across a financial planner and his name is Matt Pitcher and he gave a TED talk and the TED talk is about what it was like for him to meet 100 people who had won the lottery. So, he had a partnership as a financial planner with the uh British lottery. And every week someone wins the lottery and then he

38:15 goes in and meets them a week later after they've discovered they've won the lottery. >> Wow. >> But what he did did is he looked back at his history and he had lots of different things that he was doing, but he looked back at his history and he connected some dots and he said, "Hey, wait a second. There's something that only I can talk about. There's something that is that is my thing that I've experienced that I live through that I've sat in those living rooms. I've sat eye to eye with those people and only I can talk about that." And because of that TED talk, he's he's had half a million views in the first few weeks and you know, his business is obviously going to explode and all of those kind of things because he found something that only he could say. I believe that every person has something that's human that only they can say that's highly relatable. You shared with me an interesting philosophy. Uh when we first met, I did my first episode on Diary of a CEO and it got millions of views. And

39:01 I said to you, why is it that my episode got millions of views, but a few weeks ago there was a billionaire CEO who only got a few hundred thousand views. And a few weeks before that, there was a billionaire CEO who only got a few hundred thousand views. And you said, Daniel, relatable beats impressive. >> Yeah. >> And a lot of people think that they have to cure cancer or launch a rocket to Mars or that they have to win a Nobel Peace Prize or float a company on the NASDAQ. And actually each individual person, we have to discover what I would call your personal intellectual property or your personal intellectual capital and your personal story, your personal playbooks, you know, your your triumphs and your disasters, the things that you've done that are interesting to a certain group of people that you can quantify, that you can describe, that you can give me what it was like. Those

39:47 are your personal playbooks. Now once you have personal playbooks, you have the ability to turn that into all sorts of products and services through AI. But you but it starts with having personal playbooks. >> I think this is the key mistake that a lot of content creators are um making, which is because it's easy to make stuff now, it's tempting just to churn stuff out. >> Yeah. >> Whereas I'm making less content now in a world of AI. If you look at my LinkedIn, I used to post, if you go back like three or four years, I was just churning stuff out my quote picture, anything fluffy, like just fluff >> data. >> Yeah. Now I go, well, if everyone can do it, the reason why my LinkedIn, you'll see almost every post I post now is a human story about something I've gone through, you'll see photos of me, you'll see photos of my family. >> You're saying stuff that only you can say.

40:33 >> Yeah. So, we all have to find what is the thing that only you can say. And no robot, no AI could ever say that because it hasn't lived that experience. >> Yeah, it's got all the data. It's got all the knowledge, but it's got no lived experience. And also from a business perspective, an AI can never stand on a stage. An AI can never host a dinner party. Uh an AI can never meet someone face to face and put their hand on their shoulder and say, "Hey, I've been through what you've been through and you're going to be okay." Right? So all of those things AI can't do. So once you discover something that only you can say it it becomes a superpower. >> I think my best performing post this year was actually me proposing to my fiance a prime prime example of something that is irreplaceably human which is getting down on one knee and telling another human being that you love them. There's no AI that has ever I

41:20 mean listen >> it's never experienced it. >> Yeah. Exactly. So and there's something so human about that. >> It's relatable. It's not impressive. It's relatable. Um from first principles I ask myself which type of content am I making is creating the the strongest parasocial relationship >> with the person on the other end. If I post on my LinkedIn everything happens for a reason. Am I how much have I moved the needle on our our relationship my relationship with you? Probably zero. If I talk about something more human, some struggles that I'm having uh from a human perspective, if I'm more honest, authentic, and open or vulnerable about the experience I'm going through, like streamers who sit there for seven I think did I say this last time that I I asked a streamer a couple of questions. >> And I asked the streamers like, "What do you do?" And he was like, "Oh, nothing.

42:05 I just sit there and >> sit for seven hours and watch Judge Judy with the audience and we chat." I say, and this is a prime example of Parasocial. >> They actually talk to you. They go chat. Let me know if you think X Y or Z chat. Drop W's in the chat. That's a friend. >> That's the closest thing to a friend. It's the strongest parasocial relationship. >> Well, you said about the football game where the loudest cheers in the audience came for those streamers who were just connecting with people. >> They've built friendships basically with their audience. So, of all, I think in a world of AI where justformational content, which is this thing happened or this is what the gut microbiome is, is going to become commoditized. The thing that isn't commoditized is content that creates relationships with audiences and then as you say then converts that relationship into stronger experiences like IRL events and so on and so forth.

42:51 I've got a couple more ideas that I I haven't fully shared with the world yet but I'm just I'll wait for the right time about all of this stuff. >> See it's not one piece that is adding the value. It's the ecosystem of pieces. So it's having something to say that only you can say. Let's call that your personal playbooks. Let's call that your personal intellectual property. It's having the people or your community that you're going through life with, right? That's called that your ideal customers, your ideal personas if you want to make it a clinical definition of in marketing speak that that gives rise to a personal brand. When those two things touch, you then end up with a personal brand, right? As if by magic, you end up with a personal brand because you've got intellectual property and you've got an ideal customer who connects with that and then you you are the person who embodies it. So you you give rise to that. And then the question is, well, how do you make money from that? Well,

43:37 you productize it. You create products and services. And it's the product and service ecosystem that makes money. It's not one product or service. It used to be that you could just have a a product or service that you offer. And now it's the product and service ecosystem. The people that I see making the most money at the moment, they don't do one thing. You don't do one thing. Right? So, if I look at uh your personal P&L, you've probably got 27 different ways that money came and hit your bank account last month. There's speaking, there's podcasting, there's AdSense revenue, there's sponsors, there's shareholdings in different companies that you've got. Um, there might be some one-to-one coaching that you might have done. There might be an appearance fee. There might be some book royalties. There's multiple books. Uh, there might be some software that you've launched. So there's all this stuff that sounds crazy and chaotic

44:24 in a pre-AII world, but in a postAI world, it's not that hard to create all these different products and services and to be launching different things and to be going on a journey with people and having a product and service ecosystem. I'm the same, by the way. I've probably got 20 different things that, you know, that I'm involved in at any given time. >> I was reading yesterday that the for the first time, I mean, I was reading a few things. One of the interesting things I read is that Spotify said their best developers haven't written a line of code since December thanks to AI, which again is a whole another conversation. Maybe we should touch on that. What are the occupations that you genuinely believe won't exist 5 years from now as we know them? >> People say lawyers are going to be disrupted. >> Well, I recently had a law legal case that I had to resolve and it was going to cost us £50,000. So, $60,000

45:11 uh as a start the process with a law firm. We took matters into our own hands and we used Claude and we actually fixed the process and resolve the process by spending 20 a month, $20 a month. And Claude gave us a coaching session on how to handle it. Gave us multiple decision tree pathways. Gave us the documents that we would need. Gave us an Excel spreadsheet of do say this, don't say this in the negotiation. And it made me realize, my goodness, what a lawyer's going to do. Uh because if all they do is charge for time for money to regurgitate contracts, I don't need that anymore. Right? >> Multiple reports say legacy legal tech and data firms have lost roughly 20% of their value so far in 2026. >> 280 billion was wiped off the value of publicly traded companies like that in the last week. Like it's wild. Um

45:59 because we're not going to need that. I don't believe we're going to need these business models as they currently stand. I think they're going to have to change and adapt. I think a lawyer needs to take a completely different shape. Part business coach, part lawyer, part prompt engineer. They're going to be the key person of AI in the room who the lawyer's job will be to work with you on your AI prompting and help you get the resolution. You're probably going to need a lot less of a lawyer's time. Blue collar work has been devalued. And we've seen people who work with their hands and people who uh turn up to your house and fix your house in a devalued role. And it could be in the next, you know, uh, couple of years. These are the roles that are elevated the most and that plumbers regularly earn more than lawyers simply because the nature of the

46:46 economy has changed. One thing I've learned over the last 25 years is the pendulum swings. Things that very few things stay the same. There is always this swinging pendulum. And the swinging pendulum is like, oh yeah, white collar work behind a screen is the high value thing. Oh, no, it's actually blue collar work with your hands. You talked about supply and demand. We dis the government disrupted the natural way children go out and find opportunities in the world by making university loans come along. And they said, "Oh, everyone can just take out a university loan and go to university. In fact, you must and you should go go to university. Get yourself in debt or else you'll never get a job anywhere if you don't do a university degree." And lots of young people who should have been plumbers, electricians, and concreers and brick layers went off and became a m got a master's degree in

47:32 the mating habits of butterflies and you know some random degree that doesn't have a job attached and they ended up in 60 70 $80,000 worth of debt to get this degree that no one was asking for. That market distortion means that we now don't have many plumbers and electricians and the blue ocean is now being a trades person. There's a phase a lot of companies hit where they're no longer doing the most important thing, which is selling. And they get really bogged down with admin. And it's often something that creeps up slowly and you don't really notice until it's happened. Slowly momentum starts to leak out. This happened to us and our sponsor pipe drive was a fix I came across 10 years ago. And ever since my teams across my different companies have continued to use it. Pipe Drive is a simple but powerful sales CRM that gives you the visibility on any deals in your pipeline. It also automates a lot of the

48:19 tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming parts of the sales process, which in turn saves you so many hours every single month, which means you can get back to selling. Making that early decision to switch to Pipe Drive was a real gamecher, and it's kept the right things front of mind. My favorite feature is Pipe Drive's ability to sync your CRM with multiple email inboxes so your entire team can work together from one platform. And we aren't the only ones benefiting. Over 100,000 companies use Pipe Drive to grow their business. So, if something I've said resonates, head over to piperive.com/ceo where you can get a 30-day free trial. No credit card or payment required. >> Steve, what are you doing? >> Uh, just making myself a delicious coffee >> from the freezer. >> From the freezer. Have you not heard about Contier?

49:04 >> No. >> Oh my gosh. This is going to change your life. A couple of months ago, the founder of this business called Matt sent a big shipment of this coffee to our office in London. What most people don't know is that the processing of coffee takes out a lot of the taste. So, what they do is they flash freeze it at the optimal moment when it's most tasty and they send you in the post the coffee in these little frozen ice cubes. Now, Matt sent a big shipment to my office. I moved it to the kitchen. I said to the team, "Knock yourselves out." And then I saw so many messages in our Slack channel of people going, "Oh my god, what the hell is that? It's so delicious." All I have to do is pop it out in the morning using the little button on the back of this thing. I pour my hot water in and I mix it and that is done. You can get $30 off your first

49:50 order of Cometier coffee if you go to cometier.com/stephven. Try it and please Instagram DM me, LinkedIn me and let me know if you love it as much as I do. I was looking at the um top 10 jobs according to AI that are most likely to be disrupted and it said things like drivers with Mackenzie estimating 30% of them will be automated by 2030 customer service representative and call center reps which I used to be. >> Mhm. Same >> 50% headcount reductions after AI roll out according to some estimates some go up to about 80%. I actually saw a tool on my timeline yesterday that is real human voice indistinguishable from humans that's just launched and is causing a huge stir. So that they're thinking that will replace even more of the customer service roles. I I did speak to the CEO of Cler TLDDR as he

50:37 said we currently have 7,000 employees. We're going to be able to get down to 3,000. He said after summer because of um AI and we'll be using our existing team members that are in customer service roles to do more sort of bespoke white glove VIP >> VIP stuff will go up. In fact, Jean's paradox would suggest that a lot of the dehumanizing repetitive work will go away. But actually, if there are AI bots that are really good at setting appointments for a VIP human person to have a conversation, then that work will go through the roof. Because one of the reasons that people, like right now, most companies wish they could have more VIP conversations, but the appointment setting, they don't have a lot of the low-level appointment setting stuff

51:22 happening. And if the appointment setting stuff, if the cost of that goes to zero, then the the the affordability of the VIP level treatment um becomes you know becomes uh much more feasible. >> Retail cashes, admin assistants, bookkeepers and payroll clerk, sales development reps, warehouse workers with um Amazon and others reporting that robots now assist or replace labor in a roughly 40% of fulfillment tasks. And that Boston Dynamics video, which I'll put up on the screen, shows a humanoid robot working in a factory. What's nice about some of this is that many of the jobs here are jobs that a lot of people don't actually like doing. They are repetitive and dehumanizing. They're late night. They're early mornings. So potentially, provided there is a Jeins paradox that something happens that's more fun, more

52:07 humanizing, more interesting, more VIP, more chaotic, and you know, all of that sort of stuff. It could be a very positive thing. >> Fast food workers. Um, or >> I used to be a fast food worker. >> So did I in McDonald's? I think it was two days. I did two years at McDonald's. >> Oh, really? Because this disruption is happening at record speeds. Where do all these people go? Because, you know, even in examples, oh, they could do AI labeling. They need to be upskilled and trained. And I worry that the rate of disruption isn't going to meet the rate of creation of new opportunities. >> And I really do worry about this. Like I think people wonder why I have these conversations on this podcast over and over again. My philosophy to talking having conversations on this podcast is basically I'll say to my team I'll say Steve you want to have a conversation about >> you know this particular subject the gut microbiome and I'll say >> we've covered it >> which basically means I'm no longer

52:54 curious y >> I have the answers I know about the trillions of gut micro and I know how the gut brain access let's move on >> I keep having these conversations about AI because I feel like I'm getting no good answers >> okay so here's what's interesting there is something which you have which is this elite mindset which is how do I organize society so that everyone gets a job and everyone does stuff right and this is this is the trap that many people have fallen into and it's actually at the root cause of socialism so the root of socialism is that I know better than everybody else and I will come up with a way of running society so everyone gets looked after that's the top down mindset the crazy mindset that actually works is if If we

53:41 give people education and training and we make opportunity transparent and we actually let people know what's actually happening in the market and we give them price signal data, they will selforganize and reorganize and they will have a bottom-up revolution and they will find amazing interesting things to do. The money is in the economy right? >> You think that's true? >> That's called capitalism. >> I know, but >> capitalism works >> in the UK. Let's take the UK as an example, cuz we're all just screaming at each other about brown people. We're not talking about the the real alien, which is like the fundamental economic disruption of AI. Yeah. There's a report that came out yesterday showing that unemployment in the UK has hit >> it's 25% up and youth unemployment has grown by more than 25%. >> It's like 16.1% of people that are between 16 and 24 unemployed now. >> Yeah.

54:26 >> And we're still not talking about the economy. We're talking about brown people. >> When people feel that they can't get ahead, they look for somebody to blame.

…