WEBVTT

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.280
I think the greatest brand destruction, though the last 18 months, is the U.S. brand abroad, N.A.I.

2
00:00:05.280 --> 00:00:09.040
So with America, Trump has been convinced that this was his defining moment of being

3
00:00:09.040 --> 00:00:12.880
known as the president that liberated the Middle East. But I think the Trump administration

4
00:00:12.880 --> 00:00:17.440
will be known for criminal corruption and incompetence, and then incompetence is bubbling up.

5
00:00:17.440 --> 00:00:22.720
And then the second greatest fall is AI. And also Sam Altman, who's gone to the dark side.

6
00:00:22.720 --> 00:00:26.640
And I'm an AI optimist. But here's what we fail to understand, these textiles,

7
00:00:26.640 --> 00:00:29.280
they do not have our best interests at heart.

8
00:00:29.280 --> 00:00:33.040
Scott, I often come to you to help myself form my opinions on some of the most sort of

9
00:00:33.040 --> 00:00:36.400
consequential issues going on in the world. And when I look at some of the quotes from the

10
00:00:36.400 --> 00:00:40.240
CEOs of these AI companies, I've got one here from Elon that says, AI and robots will replace

11
00:00:40.240 --> 00:00:44.400
all jobs. What's your view here? I think it's mostly bullshit. The catastrophizing is nothing

12
00:00:44.400 --> 00:00:49.520
more than thinly veiled attempt to say, my technology is so devastating that it's going to shift

13
00:00:49.520 --> 00:00:54.400
society and you should invest at this crazy valuation. And the data doesn't reflect that there's

14
00:00:54.400 --> 00:00:59.200
some big exogenous media coming for the employment market. But I believe I'm actually going to

15
00:00:59.200 --> 00:01:04.000
create more jobs than to destroy it. But the scary thing for me is that because of AI and because

16
00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:08.640
of these frictionless relationships that people are engaging in online, I think a lot of young people

17
00:01:08.640 --> 00:01:13.040
are losing the ability to endure rejection. But I think a more important technology in terms of

18
00:01:13.040 --> 00:01:17.120
how it's going to change the world and what will create more shareholder value is not AI. It's

19
00:01:17.760 --> 00:01:24.800
really. Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow

20
00:01:24.800 --> 00:01:29.840
a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when

21
00:01:29.840 --> 00:01:33.680
we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes,

22
00:01:33.680 --> 00:01:37.840
I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button.

23
00:01:37.840 --> 00:01:42.400
But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better.

24
00:01:42.400 --> 00:01:46.400
I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right

25
00:01:46.400 --> 00:01:50.560
now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

26
00:01:58.560 --> 00:02:05.120
Scott, welcome back. I am, I often come to you to help myself form my opinions on some of the

27
00:02:05.120 --> 00:02:09.200
most sort of consequential issues going on in the world because I find you always have a very

28
00:02:09.200 --> 00:02:13.360
interesting perspective. And one of the things that's been front of mind for me and I think the

29
00:02:13.360 --> 00:02:19.040
audience as well is this subject of artificial intelligence. It's moving incredibly quickly.

30
00:02:19.040 --> 00:02:24.160
It feels like a moving target. And I think I saw some stats the other day that said the subject

31
00:02:24.160 --> 00:02:29.600
of artificial intelligence is less popular as like an industry than even ice in the United States.

32
00:02:30.400 --> 00:02:35.520
In part because the big CEOs of these companies are saying our jobs and our way of life is going

33
00:02:35.520 --> 00:02:40.080
to be fundamentally disrupted and people don't feel like they have a say in that. We didn't choose

34
00:02:40.080 --> 00:02:44.880
this. What's your perspective on everything that's going on? There have been a few brands that have

35
00:02:44.880 --> 00:02:49.760
fallen further faster in the last 18 months than two brands. The United States brand abroad. We used

36
00:02:49.760 --> 00:02:54.720
to be the enforcer of the operating system to keep rogue nations in check. The US is now that

37
00:02:54.720 --> 00:03:00.640
rogue nation. So the US brand abroad for the first time in history more people feel that China is

38
00:03:00.640 --> 00:03:05.840
a force of good in the world than the US. That's never happened before. So the brand US has fallen

39
00:03:05.920 --> 00:03:14.560
for this fastest. The second greatest fall is AI. Your view of AI is directly correlated to your

40
00:03:14.560 --> 00:03:20.640
wealth. The only cohort that has a positive rating of AI is people making over $200,000.

41
00:03:21.360 --> 00:03:27.360
Because generally speaking, wealthy people look at AI as something that's fueling their portfolios

42
00:03:28.160 --> 00:03:33.360
and wealthy people are the biggest users of AI. So they see it as a positive. They see it as

43
00:03:33.360 --> 00:03:40.160
innovation. They see it as the S&P going up. But if you're an average middle class person,

44
00:03:40.160 --> 00:03:45.200
what you may see is that your electricity bills have gone up and you don't even have access to

45
00:03:45.200 --> 00:03:52.160
invest in these companies. And you see some statements from people, Sam Altman saying, stop complaining

46
00:03:52.160 --> 00:03:56.640
about energy costs. Think about the amount of energy it takes to raise a child. So they haven't

47
00:03:56.640 --> 00:04:01.280
really managed the brand well. In the last 18 months, it's come from something kind of scary,

48
00:04:01.280 --> 00:04:06.640
but we can be optimistic and a wealth creator to something that's very scary and something that's

49
00:04:06.640 --> 00:04:11.440
a wealth creator for the wealthiest already. The brand in the last 18 months has had tremendous

50
00:04:12.320 --> 00:04:16.640
tremendous erosion. When I look at some of the quotes from the CEOs of these AI companies,

51
00:04:16.640 --> 00:04:21.120
I've got one here from Elon that says AI and robots will replace all jobs, working will be optional,

52
00:04:21.120 --> 00:04:24.640
like growing your own vegetables instead of buying them from a store. The challenge will be

53
00:04:24.640 --> 00:04:29.440
fulfillment. How do you derive fulfillment and meaning in life? And Sam Altman said, by the end of

54
00:04:29.440 --> 00:04:36.240
2028, more of the world's intellectual capacity could reside inside data centers than outside them.

55
00:04:36.240 --> 00:04:40.720
And when I went through Sam's blog several times, I mean, he's talking about a fairly dystopian

56
00:04:40.720 --> 00:04:46.720
future. And many of the CEOs, I mean, even Amidea and Thropic talks a lot about, you know, his

57
00:04:46.720 --> 00:04:52.320
bare case for AI and the job disruption that will follow. And so I think I'm trying to get clarity

58
00:04:52.320 --> 00:04:56.400
for myself really. I'm like, what is the truth? What's marketing and what's the truth?

59
00:04:57.200 --> 00:05:01.280
And I want to add another point, which is I hire a lot of people. And I'm already finding that

60
00:05:01.280 --> 00:05:07.760
off frameworks, specifically for entry-level roles, has quite radically changed. And so I didn't

61
00:05:07.760 --> 00:05:11.200
believe this stuff. Like a lot of people told me that, oh, Sam Altman, these guys are doing marketing

62
00:05:11.200 --> 00:05:14.960
to make their company seem powerful. But then when I noticed a change in my own behavior,

63
00:05:14.960 --> 00:05:20.480
when I'm sifting through these CVs, I thought, oh, maybe things are going to change.

64
00:05:20.480 --> 00:05:25.520
I think it's mostly bullshit and catastrophizing in a means of fundraising. Every technology in

65
00:05:25.520 --> 00:05:30.160
history goes through a similar art. There's some catastrophizing. There's some job loss.

66
00:05:31.120 --> 00:05:35.520
That increase in productivity results in additional margin, new business opportunities,

67
00:05:35.520 --> 00:05:40.800
and employment growth. I don't see any reason why this would be any different. And I think that

68
00:05:40.800 --> 00:05:45.600
catastrophizing and talking about this massive destruction in jobs is a way of saying,

69
00:05:45.600 --> 00:05:49.680
we're justifying the massive investments. These companies want enterprises to make

70
00:05:49.680 --> 00:05:53.200
in their companies. Because if you look at the amount of capital they have committed

71
00:05:53.200 --> 00:05:57.360
in the valuations of these companies, one of two things needs to happen in the next five years,

72
00:05:57.360 --> 00:06:02.000
at least in the US. There needs to be a trillion dollars in incremental revenue from new products

73
00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:06.880
from companies that have licensed AI. So Lori L. does a big-site license with say open AI.

74
00:06:07.520 --> 00:06:11.440
Does it come up with new products? Like, how does it justify that investment? We're not saying a lot

75
00:06:11.440 --> 00:06:17.760
of AI moisturizer or cars that are built by AI. I mean, there's AI has hit industrialized robots

76
00:06:17.760 --> 00:06:23.360
in Amazon, but there's not a lot what you call new AI-driven or AI products. AI plays a role

77
00:06:23.360 --> 00:06:28.560
in the background, but it's very hard for companies right now to point to incremental growth or

78
00:06:28.560 --> 00:06:34.320
revenues from AI. So in order to justify these valuations, then they have to say, all right,

79
00:06:34.320 --> 00:06:38.960
there's going to be massive cost savings or efficiencies. And there's some examples. I think meta

80
00:06:39.680 --> 00:06:43.520
meta has just announced new layoffs because of efficiencies they're getting with AI targeting.

81
00:06:44.080 --> 00:06:49.120
So one of two things needs to happen in the next three years. Either these companies' valuations

82
00:06:49.120 --> 00:06:54.240
need to be cut by 50 or 70 percent or you need a massive destruction in the labor market that

83
00:06:54.240 --> 00:06:59.200
creates tons of efficiencies that their customers can then flow to the bottom line. And I think what

84
00:06:59.200 --> 00:07:03.760
the CEOs are saying is that there's going to be massive efficiencies. I also think that you sound

85
00:07:03.760 --> 00:07:09.920
more interesting and it makes your technology sound more seminal when you say it's changing the world

86
00:07:09.920 --> 00:07:13.440
and we don't know how to control it. And quite frankly, I find it a little bit obnoxious

87
00:07:14.400 --> 00:07:19.760
that some of the founders in key figures in AI catastrophize just about the time they take a second

88
00:07:19.760 --> 00:07:24.320
area and piece out to the Cote de Zour. That's not helpful. I'm Dr. Frank Dessignan. I've created

89
00:07:24.320 --> 00:07:28.160
this monster, but I don't know how to deal with it. So I'm going to go piece out to San Trope.

90
00:07:28.160 --> 00:07:32.960
That's just not very helpful. They always talk about the peril. So what do you mean by that?

91
00:07:33.520 --> 00:07:38.640
So the first big fear of catastrophizing is this unprecedented job destruction.

92
00:07:39.200 --> 00:07:42.000
They've been talking about that for three years, but let's look at the data.

93
00:07:42.800 --> 00:07:47.520
The unemployment rate in the US is 4.5 percent. Among youth, it's 8.8 percent.

94
00:07:48.160 --> 00:07:53.520
That is slightly below the historical average. The number of new business permits,

95
00:07:53.520 --> 00:07:59.120
our new businesses started per capita in the United States has doubled in the last 10 years.

96
00:07:59.120 --> 00:08:02.080
And we hear about, well, what about meta? They announced they were laying off, I think,

97
00:08:02.080 --> 00:08:08.320
8 or 10,000 people yesterday, 2019 to 2025. They went from 16,000 people to 80.

98
00:08:08.960 --> 00:08:13.520
So even if they go back to 60,000, it takes them back to, it takes them back about 24 months.

99
00:08:14.240 --> 00:08:19.760
So I don't doubt that there'll be a real dip or a severe V down in certain industries,

100
00:08:19.760 --> 00:08:25.360
customer service, probably the legal field. But I believe over the medium in the long term,

101
00:08:25.360 --> 00:08:28.880
it's actually going to create more jobs in the destroys. And I don't, I think some of

102
00:08:28.960 --> 00:08:33.600
the catastrophizing is nothing more than thinly veiled attempt to say, my technology is so

103
00:08:34.400 --> 00:08:39.200
devastating that it's going to shift society and you should invest at this crazy valuation.

104
00:08:39.920 --> 00:08:45.760
Could you be wrong? Oh, I'm not out of the time, Stephen. But I mean, what would have to be the case

105
00:08:45.760 --> 00:08:49.440
for you to find out that you were wrong in terms of how you've reasoned up from the first

106
00:08:49.440 --> 00:08:54.240
principles of your thinking there? Job destruction, layoffs. So what would you have misunderstood

107
00:08:54.240 --> 00:08:58.640
for that to be the case? Like what, what would you miss? Would you have, uh, misestimated for

108
00:08:58.640 --> 00:09:04.080
that to be the case? Ground zero for the job that was going to go away was radiologists. You could

109
00:09:04.080 --> 00:09:10.880
scan billions of images and radiologists. Kid mama don't let your, your daughter grow up to be a

110
00:09:10.880 --> 00:09:16.160
radiologist because that job's going away. The new job listings for radiologists in 2026 is up

111
00:09:16.960 --> 00:09:22.160
because what it ends up is that while scanning the image is important, it's a small part of the

112
00:09:22.160 --> 00:09:26.400
job. The value out of a radiologist is diagnosed in the illness and then coming up with a treatment

113
00:09:26.400 --> 00:09:32.400
plan. And that's as important as ever. The number of coders job listings for coders year on year

114
00:09:32.400 --> 00:09:38.000
is up 11%. So people who understand how to use these technologies and come up with different prompts

115
00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:43.360
or different means of vibe coding, that demand has gone up because now AI can be applied to almost

116
00:09:43.360 --> 00:09:49.680
any startup where I will be wrong is if there is sustained job destruction and the new jobs created

117
00:09:49.680 --> 00:09:54.880
in new businesses and the employment those jobs create doesn't keep up with new jobs and there

118
00:09:54.880 --> 00:10:01.280
is a scenario. You don't need 100% unemployment like Musk is predicting at 20% unemployment,

119
00:10:01.280 --> 00:10:06.560
the French had a revolution in Weimar, Germany turned very ugly at 20% unemployment, especially

120
00:10:06.560 --> 00:10:11.760
in my youth, especially young men tend to get very angry and take to the streets. So you could see

121
00:10:11.760 --> 00:10:17.600
a V that's so severe, even if there's a job recovery, if it hits 20% unemployment, that could cause

122
00:10:17.600 --> 00:10:24.080
real civil unrest. But I just look at the data, I look at the employment numbers. If you didn't know

123
00:10:24.640 --> 00:10:29.840
there was this seminal technology, the very smart people were predicting a job apocalypse around

124
00:10:29.840 --> 00:10:36.320
and you just looked at the data, you wouldn't know there's anything going on. The data doesn't reflect

125
00:10:36.320 --> 00:10:40.640
that there's some big exogenous meter media coming for the employment market.

126
00:10:41.680 --> 00:10:46.480
Is there a case that this technology because it's built on the internet so it has

127
00:10:46.480 --> 00:10:49.840
inherent rapid distribution every day, an anthropic release of model,

128
00:10:49.840 --> 00:10:53.920
tragedy release something, it spreads across the world very quickly and everybody's updating

129
00:10:53.920 --> 00:10:57.280
their technology at the speed of light, unlike the industrial revolution where you had to build

130
00:10:57.280 --> 00:11:01.520
infrastructure and physical infrastructure. Is there a case that because of the speed of this

131
00:11:01.520 --> 00:11:06.560
technology and the proliferation of it, that it will be unlike the revolutions of the past?

132
00:11:07.360 --> 00:11:12.240
That's the fear that the V is so severe and so vicious that we don't have time to recover.

133
00:11:12.240 --> 00:11:17.120
And even if there is more jobs on the other side, that there's too much civil unrest around

134
00:11:17.120 --> 00:11:24.400
the V. But so far, the V doesn't be decelerating or diving as quickly as people had predicted. I was

135
00:11:24.400 --> 00:11:30.000
kind of reminiscing on the way over here. I moved here almost four years ago. The first thing I did,

136
00:11:30.000 --> 00:11:34.720
I got off a plane at night and I went to this amazing party at Annabelle's, this Brazilian party

137
00:11:34.720 --> 00:11:39.920
with all these hot people everywhere and I thought, I love London. In the next morning, I woke up

138
00:11:39.920 --> 00:11:45.680
feeling pretty hungover and my team said, you have this podcast with this young guy. And I said,

139
00:11:45.680 --> 00:11:52.080
cancel, I'm hungover. They said, no, he's really up and coming. He'll like him. He's a nice kid.

140
00:11:52.560 --> 00:11:57.120
And I came into this little place and shorted it forever with all these cool coffee houses.

141
00:11:57.840 --> 00:12:03.760
I had no idea who you were. And within two years, you were fucking everywhere. It was like, I'm in

142
00:12:03.760 --> 00:12:08.800
the airport and I see your banner on your book. And then I get on the plane and the safety video has

143
00:12:08.800 --> 00:12:16.080
you in it. I'm like, make him stop. And my point is where I'm going with this is this place is like,

144
00:12:16.880 --> 00:12:22.160
I mean, it feels like the Googleplex, you're hiring like crazy. You're one of the most

145
00:12:22.160 --> 00:12:29.200
technically sophisticated people I know in media. And yet you're hiring a bunch of organic things

146
00:12:29.200 --> 00:12:37.120
walking around and eating and going out and drinking and having kids. So you're the example. Old media

147
00:12:37.120 --> 00:12:42.160
is going to lose jobs. But you're creating how many people have you hired in the last 24 months?

148
00:12:42.880 --> 00:12:47.840
Across all of our companies about, I'd say about 220. Okay. And those are high paying jobs.

149
00:12:47.840 --> 00:12:53.120
Yeah. Those are young people probably making six figures plus. That's a lot of employment. So

150
00:12:53.120 --> 00:12:57.360
as the BBC or as the Daily Mail or whatever, laying off people, yeah. But I'm not sure the

151
00:12:57.360 --> 00:13:01.200
laying off people faster than you're hiring them. Yeah. And what I found is like, we're hiring a

152
00:13:01.200 --> 00:13:06.960
different type of person and IO influences becoming increasingly important. I'd say the other thing

153
00:13:06.960 --> 00:13:11.200
is that the only thing I noticed was 60 days ago, I'm, I consider myself to be the head of

154
00:13:11.200 --> 00:13:14.800
recruitment. We have a recruitment team downstairs and I own a recruitment business. But as I go

155
00:13:14.800 --> 00:13:21.920
through that inbox, people that I otherwise sit two months ago would have been, you know, jumping

156
00:13:21.920 --> 00:13:27.600
to higher. I'm now pausing because there's new technology that's been launched by these companies

157
00:13:27.600 --> 00:13:32.880
in America. That means there's alternative solutions. And that's what's giving me pause. People

158
00:13:32.880 --> 00:13:37.280
do need to consider ways that they can upskilled themselves with these technologies.

159
00:13:37.280 --> 00:13:41.120
The labor market is definitely reshaping and it might reshape faster, but I'm not sure it's going

160
00:13:41.120 --> 00:13:46.320
to be the apocalypse. There'll be winners and losers. For example, for the last 30 or 40 years,

161
00:13:46.320 --> 00:13:51.680
the unemployment rate among college grads has been lower than non-college grads. It shifted

162
00:13:51.680 --> 00:13:56.160
this year. The unemployment rate among non-college grads because of the boom and vocational work is

163
00:13:56.160 --> 00:14:01.440
now lower than the unemployment rate among college grads. And if you think about it, you're like,

164
00:14:01.440 --> 00:14:05.280
okay, well, that's bad for new college grads. But at the same time, all of these data centers

165
00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:12.400
need carpenters, welders, plumbers. So there's been booms and other parts of the employment market.

166
00:14:12.400 --> 00:14:18.000
But yeah, the employment market's absolutely reshaping. But when I graduated from business school,

167
00:14:18.000 --> 00:14:22.240
a lot of it quite frankly is your generation of spoiled. What do I mean by that? When I graduated

168
00:14:22.240 --> 00:14:28.560
from Berkeley in 1992, 40% of us had a job on graduation day, meaning 60% did not have a job.

169
00:14:29.200 --> 00:14:34.320
I would bet the kids in my class, it's stern. I bet 40% of them were starting their own business

170
00:14:34.960 --> 00:14:40.800
because with AI, when I graduated, there were two entrepreneurs in my class and the second

171
00:14:40.800 --> 00:14:46.560
person was my co-founder. We were the only business started in the hospital of business from 1992.

172
00:14:46.560 --> 00:14:51.280
I would bet there's going to be 30 to 50 businesses that are started on graduation day.

173
00:14:51.920 --> 00:14:55.360
There's kids dropping out of their second year of business school to start businesses because

174
00:14:55.360 --> 00:14:59.760
they just raised $10 million in a series A. Now you have to have certain skills,

175
00:14:59.760 --> 00:15:04.960
a certain type of personality, a certain facility with technology. I'm actually quite excited

176
00:15:04.960 --> 00:15:09.680
about this. We're starting to see an uptick in productivity which should result in incremental

177
00:15:10.560 --> 00:15:15.040
profitability. Will some people be on the wrong side of the trade? Absolutely. Do we need to do a

178
00:15:15.040 --> 00:15:21.120
better job of providing more unemployment, more retraining? Denmark spends 2% of GDP on retraining

179
00:15:21.120 --> 00:15:26.480
and vocational training. We spend 0.2% in the US. We're not good at retraining. We're really

180
00:15:26.480 --> 00:15:32.000
bad at it actually. We're not good at taking care of the people on the wrong side, but as a global,

181
00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:37.520
in terms of global employment, I think the catastrophizing is dressed up fundraising.

182
00:15:38.000 --> 00:15:43.600
What do you think about Elon's doing with Optimus? If you bring those two forces together,

183
00:15:43.600 --> 00:15:48.800
you've got Optimus Robots, the human-ed robots, where he says they'll be some of the quotes that

184
00:15:48.800 --> 00:15:53.600
he said, I mean, it might be marketing, but he's predicting that you won't need to be a surgeon

185
00:15:53.600 --> 00:15:57.680
because there'll be so many Optimus robots that are more advanced than he's surgeon on earth,

186
00:15:57.680 --> 00:16:06.400
so Optimus robots will be doing surgery. If you combine intelligence with physical power that

187
00:16:06.400 --> 00:16:11.760
comes from these robots, it does beg the question where human skills remain outside of the

188
00:16:11.760 --> 00:16:16.880
relational stuff and Maslow serving Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's one of the things I

189
00:16:16.880 --> 00:16:22.880
contend with. I'm like, you're seeing in China, especially how robots are really changing production

190
00:16:22.880 --> 00:16:28.960
lines. I saw this video the other day of, I think it was in India or Bangladesh, where they had the

191
00:16:28.960 --> 00:16:33.600
factory workers have cameras on their heads so that they could film their hands because they're

192
00:16:33.600 --> 00:16:39.440
intent on replacing them with robots. This combination of intelligence plus robotics feels like

193
00:16:40.800 --> 00:16:45.760
it's two synonyms at the same time. I think that's right, but let's use the surgeon as an example.

194
00:16:45.760 --> 00:16:51.040
I think the robot in the context of surgery will be not a replacement but a supplement, and that

195
00:16:51.040 --> 00:16:56.160
is there'll be a large class of surgeons who know how to weaponize robotics to be better surgeons

196
00:16:56.160 --> 00:17:01.280
and quite frankly do two surgeries a day instead of one. I think most brain surgeries take four or

197
00:17:01.280 --> 00:17:07.600
six hours. Using robotics and precision instruments, a great neurosurgeon will be able to increase

198
00:17:07.600 --> 00:17:13.280
the productivity and the accuracy of their surgeries. My big tech stock thick of 25 was alphabet

199
00:17:13.280 --> 00:17:16.880
because it was trading at a P of 17. I just saw it as being ridiculously cheap because everyone

200
00:17:16.880 --> 00:17:22.080
thought open AI was going to put it out of business. My big tech stock thick for 26 is Amazon.

201
00:17:22.080 --> 00:17:27.200
Because I think where robotics really hit the rubber meets the road in terms of shareholder value

202
00:17:27.200 --> 00:17:34.320
is the collision of AI and industrialized robots. There are 400,000 industrialized robots in the US

203
00:17:35.600 --> 00:17:41.840
and there's a million at Amazon. Amazon is two and a half times the number of industrialized robots

204
00:17:41.920 --> 00:17:45.680
as the rest of the nation combined. But the notion that we're going to have someone in our house

205
00:17:45.680 --> 00:17:51.520
bringing our tea a robot. I don't buy that at all. I think that automated robotics, the collision

206
00:17:51.520 --> 00:17:56.880
of advanced manufacturing in China and using AI with robotics will yield tremendous advantage.

207
00:17:56.880 --> 00:18:01.440
Amazon is saying they're going to double their largest business, which is their retail business

208
00:18:01.440 --> 00:18:07.280
by 2032 without an incremental hire using robotics industrialized robots and they were early. They

209
00:18:07.280 --> 00:18:13.440
made an acquisition 10, 15 years ago of a robotics company called Kiva. But the notion that there's

210
00:18:13.440 --> 00:18:17.920
going to be a robot bringing me my tea here. That's bullshit. The scary thing for me that I want to

211
00:18:17.920 --> 00:18:25.040
know more about is weaponized industrialized robots as warriors because I wonder if you can

212
00:18:25.040 --> 00:18:31.360
go some weird places. But again, I think AI in robotics, yes, this notion that we're going to have

213
00:18:32.240 --> 00:18:37.920
robots serving us our food or in our house. I don't I don't see that. It's interesting because

214
00:18:37.920 --> 00:18:42.480
what I guess one could argue that we already have robots in our houses, but they just don't move.

215
00:18:42.480 --> 00:18:45.760
So they're quite the leap really is would you allow a robot to move through your house? Because I

216
00:18:45.760 --> 00:18:49.680
mean a hoover is a robot. A fridge is kind of like a robot, especially the smart fridges.

217
00:18:49.680 --> 00:18:55.040
You one could say a TV is a robot a smart TV, but the difference is they don't move through a house.

218
00:18:55.040 --> 00:18:59.200
Would we allow the hoover to move itself? And then once we allow that, would we allow it to

219
00:18:59.200 --> 00:19:03.280
potentially bring us something? Yeah, I get it. I just don't the stuff I've seen on actual

220
00:19:03.280 --> 00:19:09.360
application of these robots. And keep in mind, these individuals, the job of the CEO now is it used

221
00:19:09.360 --> 00:19:13.680
to be to under promise and over deliver. Now it's over promise and under deliver and create a vision.

222
00:19:14.240 --> 00:19:17.920
It creates cheap capital so you can pull the future forward. My understanding is three years ago,

223
00:19:17.920 --> 00:19:22.800
we had a million autonomous Tesla taxes on the road and that did not happen. In 2016,

224
00:19:23.440 --> 00:19:29.040
must-set or 2017, there was going to be autonomous was two years away driving. So their job is to

225
00:19:29.040 --> 00:19:34.640
predict a very exciting future. Also think Musk in particular is very good at saying look over here

226
00:19:34.640 --> 00:19:39.440
is these stuff to wrap it into a hat. I mean, Tesla is an automobile company, so he's got to create

227
00:19:39.440 --> 00:19:45.440
a story to justify its 155 times earnings when most automobile companies trade at 10 or 15.

228
00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:52.560
So it's robots. It's space. It's connectivity with AI and autonomous and robots.

229
00:19:52.560 --> 00:19:56.480
It's constantly look over here because I think it's very difficult to justify the valuations

230
00:19:56.480 --> 00:20:02.560
he's raising money at. So to be clear, he as much as anybody is able to pull that vision forward.

231
00:20:02.560 --> 00:20:08.160
He's launched 90% of the rockets sent into space have been by SpaceX. But this is a company that's

232
00:20:08.160 --> 00:20:13.520
trading that has $16 billion in revenue with 8 billion in profits and it's going to go out in

233
00:20:13.520 --> 00:20:19.920
its IPO at a projected valuation of 90 to 110 times revenues. When Google went public and went

234
00:20:19.920 --> 00:20:25.280
out at 10 times revenues and it was growing 10 times as fast. So what is this? The key attribute

235
00:20:25.280 --> 00:20:29.920
of an innovator right now is storytelling and that is to make sure the promise is way ahead of

236
00:20:29.920 --> 00:20:35.200
the performance such that you can access cheap capital and pull the future forward. But a lot of

237
00:20:35.200 --> 00:20:40.240
this stuff I find is a lot of jazz hands. He's always, you know, he's often known for being

238
00:20:40.240 --> 00:20:44.080
wrong about his timelines. But he does seem to have a magic to the world.

239
00:20:44.080 --> 00:20:50.080
The best product in my mind, the two products that have changed my life from a technology standpoint,

240
00:20:50.080 --> 00:20:56.400
most underrated product is AirPods. If AirPods alone, you know, Tim Cook just stepped down where

241
00:20:56.400 --> 00:21:01.280
its own product would be a Fortune 50 company. I don't even think it's technology. I think it's

242
00:21:01.280 --> 00:21:05.840
the most profitable ubiquitous piece of jewelry in history. I just walk around with them in my years

243
00:21:05.840 --> 00:21:10.720
now. Right. And then the best product I think the last few years has been Starlink.

244
00:21:11.280 --> 00:21:17.200
That's amazing. I just think it's absolute. I've done podcasts from planes. I can talk to my

245
00:21:17.200 --> 00:21:23.840
sons on FaceTime. That product is, you know, all airlines are flying the same tin can, same

246
00:21:23.840 --> 00:21:30.480
routes, same bad food, a real point of differentiation for them. And that's also in maritime. I think Starlink

247
00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:35.600
is the best tech product. So power to him. When they go public, is it an immediate SpaceX

248
00:21:35.600 --> 00:21:40.880
and an amazing company, or is it overvalued? The answer is yes. It can be true at the same time.

249
00:21:40.880 --> 00:21:45.920
What do you think of Tesla? Because for me, it's magic. I don't think people in Britain realize this

250
00:21:45.920 --> 00:21:50.880
were other parts of the world. But for me, the first time I got in the Tesla that I got in LA and

251
00:21:50.880 --> 00:21:56.160
pressed the location and took my hands off the wheel. What I had to do is occasionally look in

252
00:21:56.160 --> 00:22:00.880
look forward, which they're removing now. And it took me three and a half hours to Joshua Tree

253
00:22:00.880 --> 00:22:06.960
without any intervention. And the safety record in it is safer than if I had driven myself there.

254
00:22:06.960 --> 00:22:10.960
It's just magic to me. And then when I watch this, the space rockets come down and be caught

255
00:22:10.960 --> 00:22:16.160
with the chopsticks. I get this is just magic. And so when he, I've got to be honest, when he says

256
00:22:16.160 --> 00:22:21.520
that these Optimus robots are going to be, I go, do you know what? He's delivered a lot of magic

257
00:22:21.520 --> 00:22:25.840
in the past that no one would have thought possible. Can you even imagine 10 years ago him saying that

258
00:22:26.400 --> 00:22:29.920
what people would have said if he said we're going to launch this massive sort of 70-foot

259
00:22:29.920 --> 00:22:33.200
skyscraper into the air. And then we're going to catch it on top sticks.

260
00:22:33.200 --> 00:22:36.560
Stagrin. And then we're going to relaunch it again. And then we're going to catch it again.

261
00:22:36.560 --> 00:22:41.760
You would have gone impossible. Addison of our generation. But you asked about Tesla.

262
00:22:43.360 --> 00:22:48.800
I bought a Tesla. Incredible product. Far superior to anything on the market. He deserves credit

263
00:22:48.800 --> 00:22:53.440
for inspiring the EV race, which will be good for the environment. But the reality is everyone's

264
00:22:53.440 --> 00:23:00.880
caught up. The fastest growing out of a build company in history is BYD. BYD is basically an 80%

265
00:23:00.880 --> 00:23:06.320
of a Tesla. Some people would say 100% of a Tesla for 40% of the price. If there wasn't a

266
00:23:06.320 --> 00:23:10.960
ridiculous tariff war right now, BYD I think would be the number one EV in the United States.

267
00:23:10.960 --> 00:23:16.480
It's eating Tesla's launch. In addition, what I think is going to have about Tesla, credit

268
00:23:16.560 --> 00:23:20.880
where it's due, changed the market, inspired the EV race. Good for the planet.

269
00:23:21.600 --> 00:23:24.560
But when you look at its valuation right now, I think what you're going to see is when SpaceX

270
00:23:24.560 --> 00:23:30.160
goes public, there's a lot of money in the market that wants to get some of that musk

271
00:23:30.160 --> 00:23:36.080
risk, what you were talking about. This guy is incredible. I don't care how expensive it is. I

272
00:23:36.080 --> 00:23:41.440
want to invest behind Elon Musk. I get it. That money is about to come out of Tesla,

273
00:23:41.440 --> 00:23:45.040
which people are finally figuring out. It's just a great car company that should be trading at

274
00:23:45.040 --> 00:23:53.280
30 times earnings, not 150. It's going to go into SpaceX. I think the retail surge in SpaceX,

275
00:23:53.280 --> 00:23:57.040
you can see in the valuation that it's planning to go out of. It's just extraordinary.

276
00:23:57.840 --> 00:24:01.760
Some of that is going to come at the cost of Tesla. I think people are waking up to the fact that

277
00:24:01.760 --> 00:24:06.560
Tesla is a great auto company. It should be trading at about a fifth of the valuation it is now.

278
00:24:06.560 --> 00:24:11.840
On that point, what jobs do you think will be impacted by AI? If I could talk about logistics

279
00:24:11.840 --> 00:24:17.360
and transport, I think London have just announced that Waymo and Tesla's full self-driving technology

280
00:24:17.360 --> 00:24:22.240
are on the way. They've green-lighted Waymo, for example. I'd hate to be a truck driver. To me,

281
00:24:22.240 --> 00:24:27.360
a long-haul truck driver is the first place. Trunks can drive between 10 p.m. and 4 p.m.,

282
00:24:27.360 --> 00:24:32.320
where there's no traffic on the road. I don't think it's a very good job. One of the things

283
00:24:32.320 --> 00:24:36.640
interesting about truck drivers is the biggest employer of non-high school grads in America,

284
00:24:36.640 --> 00:24:40.640
of non-high school graduate males. It's the biggest employer. It's actually one of the two or three

285
00:24:40.640 --> 00:24:45.360
I think biggest jobs by a number of people in the United States. I would think within 10 years

286
00:24:45.360 --> 00:24:50.080
we're going to have very few long-haul truckers. Obviously customer service, it feels like that will

287
00:24:50.080 --> 00:24:56.960
likely go away. Where I see job destruction in my world is that I used to, anytime I got an

288
00:24:56.960 --> 00:25:01.680
agreement from anybody, an advertiser for a contract, an employment agreement, whatever it is,

289
00:25:01.680 --> 00:25:06.080
I send it to my lawyer and say, can you review this? Because the bill is, there's latency in the

290
00:25:06.080 --> 00:25:12.960
bills. It's probably a customer between $400 and $2,000 to review every contract. I'm a

291
00:25:12.960 --> 00:25:18.640
narcissist and I think I signaled by having a name brand law firm. They hire some kid at 120 or

292
00:25:18.640 --> 00:25:24.000
80 to 120 bucks an hour and they charge $24 to 500. Now I say to the person in charge of that

293
00:25:24.000 --> 00:25:28.480
project and they say, well, I'm sending their contract to a lawyer. I'm like, no, no, no.

294
00:25:29.120 --> 00:25:36.640
Put it put the agreement. Describe what we're looking for. Ask cloud or chat GPT to pretend it's a

295
00:25:36.640 --> 00:25:42.240
$1,200 lawyer, an hour lawyer, employment lawyer or contract lawyer and ask them to review this

296
00:25:42.240 --> 00:25:47.520
document, redline it and do the same thing at another LLM and then you make those changes.

297
00:25:47.520 --> 00:25:53.360
Congratulations. You are now a senior associate at a law firm. I've probably spent $100 to $300,000

298
00:25:53.920 --> 00:25:59.440
a year on legal fees across my organization. I think I'll cut that easily by a third this year.

299
00:25:59.440 --> 00:26:05.440
So that's one way I see it. But I have a podcast company, not nearly the industrial behemoth

300
00:26:05.440 --> 00:26:12.480
this thing is, but I keep asking everybody, how do we use AI to do this? And I find that they're

301
00:26:12.480 --> 00:26:18.960
getting better at it and it enhances our work, but we're still hiring. Again, I think it's a

302
00:26:18.960 --> 00:26:23.600
supplement and if you want to protect against AI, it's pretty easy. I've said this for a while,

303
00:26:23.600 --> 00:26:27.040
AI is not going to take your job. Someone who understands AI is going to take your job.

304
00:26:27.040 --> 00:26:31.360
So what I tell people is have a second screen and that is always have a second screen open that

305
00:26:31.360 --> 00:26:37.680
has nothing but AI on it, LLMs and anything you get digitally, port it into your AI screen and

306
00:26:37.680 --> 00:26:40.800
start playing with it. Just that quite so interesting because I've heard that quite a lot that

307
00:26:40.800 --> 00:26:45.200
AI will take your job. Someone that understands AI will take your job. And as you said it then,

308
00:26:45.200 --> 00:26:49.840
I thought, you know, I was thinking about different roles in my team and my open roles that we

309
00:26:49.840 --> 00:26:54.800
haven't hired for. And I thought someone with AI will take your job, but they won't just take one

310
00:26:54.800 --> 00:27:00.080
job. They'll take five of those jobs. And so if you think about an analyst, right, we've got

311
00:27:00.080 --> 00:27:04.880
Molly downstairs analyst for my investment fund. We will well intent on hiring maybe five

312
00:27:04.880 --> 00:27:09.760
analysts for my second fund. We only need Molly now because Molly's got two agents that she works

313
00:27:09.760 --> 00:27:15.840
with in two Mac minis. And she's got a set up that screens the inbound interest and also goes

314
00:27:15.840 --> 00:27:19.520
proactively into the market looking for new opportunities and pulls them back into her, runs them to

315
00:27:19.520 --> 00:27:25.360
her framework, scores them, prepares them for the IC. So Molly enabled by AI. She's probably taken

316
00:27:25.360 --> 00:27:30.880
out five jobs. And this is, I think even with the lower example, that lawyer that's using these

317
00:27:30.880 --> 00:27:36.480
models probably doesn't need to have five junior lawyers now. If they're really, really competent

318
00:27:36.560 --> 00:27:42.080
with and if you think about an executive assistant. So with executive assistants, we might for

319
00:27:42.080 --> 00:27:48.560
our executives would have hired maybe probably 10 EAs in total. Now you really need one that has

320
00:27:48.560 --> 00:27:52.480
is powered by AI to do all of travel. One that does all of the scheduling and then one that meets

321
00:27:52.480 --> 00:27:57.760
people at the door. So you need three versus potentially 10. And this is kind of what I'm broadly

322
00:27:57.760 --> 00:28:02.240
seeing in most roles, but not all of them. There are still some roles when I look to draw a chart

323
00:28:02.320 --> 00:28:06.880
where I go, actually, you know, this sales, a lot of the sales we do from a media perspective,

324
00:28:06.880 --> 00:28:11.760
I'll take someone for lunch, wine and dine, call them relationships, pitch the deck. Those kinds

325
00:28:11.760 --> 00:28:18.240
of things seem to be completely untouched. But let's continue down that path. You know, I'm going

326
00:28:18.240 --> 00:28:22.640
to need five models you need one. Yeah. That creates additional EBITDA on margin. You create some more

327
00:28:22.640 --> 00:28:27.440
profitable diary of a CEO empire means you can raise more money and then you go buy more

328
00:28:27.440 --> 00:28:32.880
podcasts or invest in them who hire more people. So and it creates a faster cycle of money and new

329
00:28:32.880 --> 00:28:37.520
ideas. And when we were walking in here, you're talking about acquiring podcasting and you're getting

330
00:28:37.520 --> 00:28:41.920
into CPG and you're getting into different forms of media and you're driving growth and innovation.

331
00:28:41.920 --> 00:28:47.280
Well, some people be on the wrong end of it. My mom was a secretary. She started as a typist.

332
00:28:47.280 --> 00:28:52.320
Typhus went away. She oversaw that the secretary of the typist pulled a law school downtown and I

333
00:28:52.320 --> 00:28:57.680
worked in the mail room in high school. But my mom realized that the hard part of her job was

334
00:28:57.680 --> 00:29:02.800
interacting with a senior level executive and she became an executive assistant. And she never made

335
00:29:02.800 --> 00:29:06.880
a lot of money, but she made good money realizing the typing was the easy part of her job. The hard

336
00:29:06.880 --> 00:29:13.680
part was managing some dude's life. Right. So accounting should go away. But what you're saying is

337
00:29:13.680 --> 00:29:17.200
there's actually more accounts this year than there was last year because accounts the smart ones

338
00:29:17.200 --> 00:29:21.600
are moving into wealth management and tax optimization, which keeps getting more and more complicated.

339
00:29:22.320 --> 00:29:26.960
So yeah, do you have an honest to update your skills to understand you? I remember when I first

340
00:29:26.960 --> 00:29:30.960
moved to New York and they hired an assistant for me and she came in and said, oh, I don't use

341
00:29:30.960 --> 00:29:36.560
computers. No, I'm like, well, you can't work here. So it's like to say, you're not going to

342
00:29:36.560 --> 00:29:41.200
learn AI or at least the basics on how to use it. It's like being a 1998 and saying, well, I don't

343
00:29:41.200 --> 00:29:47.440
use PCs. So I don't yeah, you got to update your skills. The cycle times decreasing. A lot of people

344
00:29:47.440 --> 00:29:52.400
will find themselves on the wrong side of the trade. I have to force myself to use AI. I don't,

345
00:29:52.400 --> 00:29:57.040
you know, I'm the part of your brain around understanding new technologies begins to die.

346
00:29:58.000 --> 00:30:02.000
Right. I can no longer perceive a calendar. I can't tell you what I have next for some reason.

347
00:30:02.720 --> 00:30:07.360
I used to be able to do fantastic. I could do a Scotsman accent, even like no one's business a

348
00:30:07.360 --> 00:30:11.760
few years ago. That part of my brain has died. And when I try to do an accent, it sounds like a

349
00:30:11.760 --> 00:30:16.400
dead language that twins speak to each other and it offends everybody. There's parts your brain

350
00:30:16.400 --> 00:30:20.560
that die. And the part that where you can understand new technologies or at least have the

351
00:30:20.560 --> 00:30:26.000
will to learn them starts to go away as you get older. I have to force myself to play with these

352
00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:30.800
new technologies. Everyone who wants to make more money or wants to hold onto their job should have

353
00:30:30.800 --> 00:30:35.040
the same honest to learn these new skills. On that individual level, there's people listening now

354
00:30:35.040 --> 00:30:38.560
that want to make sure that they have the skills that kids have the skills of the future.

355
00:30:38.560 --> 00:30:41.920
Right. What are some of those important skills? I mean, you've got kids. What do you, what would

356
00:30:41.920 --> 00:30:47.040
you say to that? I get outside all the time. What is the skill? So the honest answer is I have a

357
00:30:47.040 --> 00:30:51.360
view, but nobody knows. You've got like 10 years ago in private schools. The biggest incremental

358
00:30:51.360 --> 00:30:57.600
investments in curriculum were two things. Computer science and Mandarin. How's that worked out?

359
00:30:58.320 --> 00:31:03.040
Thank God my kid knows Mandarin. I mean, said nobody right now, but they thought it was going to be

360
00:31:03.040 --> 00:31:08.720
computer science. And you could argue that hasn't worked out as well as everyone thought. I would say

361
00:31:08.800 --> 00:31:14.000
that the enduring skill is storytelling. And that is your ability to look at data, create a narrative

362
00:31:14.000 --> 00:31:19.040
arc, and then communicate that story in a compelling way via all the different mediums. Whether it's

363
00:31:19.040 --> 00:31:23.040
broadcasting, I think you have to write well to be a great storyteller. But if you think about the

364
00:31:23.040 --> 00:31:27.440
most successful people in the world, at the end of the day, they're usually storytellers. The great

365
00:31:27.440 --> 00:31:33.440
CEOs, I read Jeff Bezos, 1997 letter to shareholders where he focused on those three principles and

366
00:31:33.760 --> 00:31:40.960
take my money. I see even a guy like Alex Carp at Palantir walking around doing a live earnings

367
00:31:40.960 --> 00:31:48.320
call on his phone. It's very compelling. And Jensen Huang, when he does these giant buffet like

368
00:31:48.320 --> 00:31:53.680
stadiums where he gets up and he's like a rock star, that's storytelling. Technology is I think

369
00:31:53.680 --> 00:31:59.360
going to create an equalization among the product. Reverse engineering created parity among

370
00:31:59.360 --> 00:32:03.440
manufacturer products. I think most technologies are going to converge and we're seeing that

371
00:32:03.440 --> 00:32:08.960
convergence in AI models. So I think the point of differentiation is relationships. Do I want to

372
00:32:08.960 --> 00:32:13.760
work with this person? Do I know about their kids? Do I like them? At the end of the day, I have three

373
00:32:13.760 --> 00:32:18.640
different law firms pitching me business, three different investment banks, three different CRM

374
00:32:18.640 --> 00:32:24.720
companies. Who do I have the best relationship with and who do I want to work with? So storytelling,

375
00:32:24.720 --> 00:32:29.440
it sounds very passe, but the ability to establish strong relationships with other sentient

376
00:32:29.440 --> 00:32:33.520
banks. I still believe that everything reverse engineers to biology. I think it's a certain

377
00:32:33.520 --> 00:32:40.240
fundamental understanding of the sciences. Those seem to be pretty enduring. You know, my oldest

378
00:32:40.240 --> 00:32:44.320
that he want to be a marine myologist. I'm like, who are you kidding? You get seasick. I mean,

379
00:32:44.320 --> 00:32:51.040
at 18, where you want them to be smart, good people, aggressive support them becoming their own

380
00:32:51.040 --> 00:32:56.640
person, which I've had trouble with. I want them to be many me's and then helping them find

381
00:32:56.640 --> 00:33:00.480
something they're great at. But telling your kid, no, you need to go into this because this is

382
00:33:00.480 --> 00:33:06.320
where the future is going. No, we don't know. We know the basics. I would want my kid to be able to

383
00:33:06.320 --> 00:33:12.720
write well, be able to look someone in the eye to be competitive. I encourage them to play sports

384
00:33:12.720 --> 00:33:19.760
to do chores, which they do none of. But other than that, I don't know. What do you think are

385
00:33:19.760 --> 00:33:22.640
going to be the skills of the future? I think it's really difficult to know. I think what you

386
00:33:22.640 --> 00:33:25.840
said about relationships is really important. You said storytelling and I think storytelling is

387
00:33:25.840 --> 00:33:31.920
a proxy of sales and persuasion and whether that's persuading and invested to believe in you or

388
00:33:31.920 --> 00:33:37.680
people to come and work for you or customers to come and buy your thing. So I think storytelling

389
00:33:37.680 --> 00:33:42.160
in sales is going to be a enduring skill. The skill that is the biggest threat that

390
00:33:42.800 --> 00:33:46.960
people are, young people are losing, especially young men. In this is a skill and it's usually

391
00:33:46.960 --> 00:33:53.840
underrated is the ability to endure rejection. And because of AI and because of these frictionless

392
00:33:53.840 --> 00:33:59.680
relationships that people are engaging in online, I think a lot of young people, especially young men,

393
00:33:59.680 --> 00:34:06.880
are losing a perseverance, endurance, willingness to hear and know whether it's expressing friendship,

394
00:34:06.880 --> 00:34:11.280
whether it's applying for a job or not qualified for, whether it's approaching someone and expressing

395
00:34:11.280 --> 00:34:15.280
romantic interest. I think a lot of young people, especially young men, I think they can have a

396
00:34:15.280 --> 00:34:20.080
frictionless relationship online and they're losing a sense of resilience and aggressiveness.

397
00:34:21.120 --> 00:34:26.320
So I think that skill, when I mentor young men, the first skill I try to reincorporate back into

398
00:34:26.320 --> 00:34:31.120
their life is what I call know. And that is I need you to go out, I need you to go put yourself in

399
00:34:31.120 --> 00:34:35.760
the agency of strangers, whether it's a church group of sports league, a riding class, and I want

400
00:34:35.760 --> 00:34:40.480
you to make an overture and expression of friendship. Hey, do you want to grab the arsenal game or watch

401
00:34:41.200 --> 00:34:45.360
it? And then most of these kids, when you ask them what they want, they usually want two things,

402
00:34:45.360 --> 00:34:49.200
the men I mentor, they want to move out of their parent's house, and they want to go for it.

403
00:34:49.840 --> 00:34:54.240
And so once we do the friend approach, then I say, okay, find someone you may be potentially

404
00:34:54.240 --> 00:34:59.120
interested in, ask them out for coffee, and this is the goal. The goal is know. Because what's

405
00:34:59.120 --> 00:35:02.160
going to happen is you might get a no, probably going to get a no, and then I'm going to call

406
00:35:02.160 --> 00:35:06.400
you the next day, and I'm going to say, are you okay? And the answer is going to be yes. Is he

407
00:35:06.400 --> 00:35:12.480
or she okay? The person who said no, yeah, they're fine. Because, and I'm, I'm boasting out,

408
00:35:12.480 --> 00:35:17.840
the secret to my success is rejection. I ran for sophomore and junior and senior class president

409
00:35:17.840 --> 00:35:21.680
in my high school. I lost all three times, and based on my track record, I decided to run for senior

410
00:35:21.680 --> 00:35:27.280
body, or student body president, where I want to get this lose. Never bothered me. I mean, I'm

411
00:35:27.280 --> 00:35:31.520
mourned and I moved on. Every entrepreneur, how many knows have you gotten? So fucking out,

412
00:35:31.520 --> 00:35:36.240
and we'll say that anybody. I mean, so the any person you look at and think that person

413
00:35:36.240 --> 00:35:40.400
has made more money than I would have thought, or any person who's hanging out with someone much

414
00:35:40.400 --> 00:35:44.880
higher character and hotter than them has one thing in common, either a very rich parents,

415
00:35:44.880 --> 00:35:50.880
or more likely, they're comfortable with no. So, and unfortunately, I think young people,

416
00:35:50.880 --> 00:35:56.560
especially young men, are becoming less and less resilient to know. Apply for jobs you're not

417
00:35:56.560 --> 00:36:01.200
qualified for. Apply to graduate programs you shouldn't get into. Approach people who you

418
00:36:01.200 --> 00:36:05.280
perceive as being cooler and hotter than you and express friendship and romantic interests.

419
00:36:05.280 --> 00:36:09.600
That is the key. You want to punch above your weight class, get out a big spoon and get ready to

420
00:36:09.600 --> 00:36:15.360
eat shit. That is the only thing that is common across all great entrepreneurs who are self-made,

421
00:36:15.360 --> 00:36:20.240
is they have the ability to mourn and move on. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It was

422
00:36:20.240 --> 00:36:24.560
inspired by listening to Adam Neumitt on that podcast a couple of weeks ago. He did one with

423
00:36:24.880 --> 00:36:29.760
Rick Rubin, I think it was. In it, he tells the story of sitting in the back of the cab with

424
00:36:29.760 --> 00:36:36.320
Massa, who's the owner of Softbank. He was going to ask him to give him $300 million. Massa

425
00:36:36.320 --> 00:36:41.680
tans him and says, you're just not ambitious enough. He says, by the time that 23-minute cab drive

426
00:36:41.680 --> 00:36:46.720
had finished, Massa had offered him $4 billion and he had signed a little napkin thing that Massa

427
00:36:46.720 --> 00:36:52.480
had in the back of the cab. That story and other stories like it have made me realise that some of

428
00:36:52.480 --> 00:36:58.160
the game in life and success is what I now call selling yourself low. Most of us go through our

429
00:36:58.160 --> 00:37:02.400
life selling ourselves short. I think in part because we don't see ourselves on an exponential

430
00:37:02.400 --> 00:37:06.160
curve. We see ourselves as a fixed state. This is who I am. This is what I'm worth, but you've

431
00:37:06.160 --> 00:37:12.000
almost got to factor in your own exponential improvement. If you take you from 21 to now,

432
00:37:12.000 --> 00:37:17.280
how your intelligence and wisdom and connections have all compounded, but you would have sold yourself

433
00:37:17.840 --> 00:37:22.800
at the value of you at 21 years old. I actually now think in every season of my life I've sold

434
00:37:22.800 --> 00:37:29.760
myself short. When I was 18 years old, I sold 20% of my company for $5,000. Then I thought

435
00:37:29.760 --> 00:37:32.560
that was, I couldn't believe it. I was celebrating in my room at the time I was stealing Chicago

436
00:37:32.560 --> 00:37:39.200
tampeats as to feed myself. Then a couple of years later, I sold another 30% of my company for 300K.

437
00:37:39.200 --> 00:37:43.440
I thought I'd hit the Euro millions. That company ran up and was on the stock market for many

438
00:37:43.440 --> 00:37:47.120
hundreds of millions, many years later. I thought, God, I've sold myself short my whole life.

439
00:37:47.120 --> 00:37:56.160
So I assume I'm doing the same now. If I assume that, what would I say? What opportunities

440
00:37:56.160 --> 00:38:01.600
would I go for? For me, that should apply to everybody. I think it's self-fulfilling.

441
00:38:01.600 --> 00:38:06.000
Yeah, there's something about imagining what you want to be in five years, outrageously,

442
00:38:06.000 --> 00:38:10.080
in the reverse engineering back. But the moment you took that 300K, you really needed it.

443
00:38:10.720 --> 00:38:15.840
That was, so it's a function of your opportunity set and what's actually the market says to you.

444
00:38:16.800 --> 00:38:22.800
I think pricing is a signal. I struggle with pricing. What I tell whenever we're writing a proposal

445
00:38:23.600 --> 00:38:28.480
okay, whatever I get back, I'm like okay, increase the pricing 30% or 50% more because pricing

446
00:38:28.480 --> 00:38:34.560
is a signal and you can always take the price down. The client, the person always comes back and

447
00:38:34.640 --> 00:38:39.920
asks for the price down. But I mean, quite frankly, and this is sexist, I think men are better at

448
00:38:39.920 --> 00:38:45.440
imagining an unrealistic self and women are more measured. And I think that's one of the things

449
00:38:45.440 --> 00:38:49.600
that is held back. Women is entrepreneurs and the fact that not as much capital has been available

450
00:38:49.600 --> 00:38:53.440
to them because the people allocating capital have been wiped out from Stanford or Harvard. 40%

451
00:38:53.440 --> 00:39:00.320
of ECs are from two schools. I think it was Charlie Munger who said, someone who has a crazy

452
00:39:00.400 --> 00:39:06.480
vision of their own potential that's stupid and obnoxious. His attitude was never

453
00:39:06.480 --> 00:39:11.680
bet against that person because occasionally they're right. And so for, we talked about Musk.

454
00:39:11.680 --> 00:39:16.720
For a guy to think, I'm going to raise so much money and command technology that I can be

455
00:39:16.720 --> 00:39:25.840
responsible for 90% of launches and control 70% of the Earth's low orbit satellites. That's pretty

456
00:39:25.840 --> 00:39:31.600
arrogant. So yeah, I agree with you. And let me put it this way, if you're going to err,

457
00:39:31.600 --> 00:39:34.560
err to the upside, because the market will bring you back on its own.

458
00:39:34.560 --> 00:39:41.120
Yeah, that's so true. Some of them has been in all the news lately, in part because of this

459
00:39:41.120 --> 00:39:45.840
article that the New Yorker did to which is their Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marence,

460
00:39:47.040 --> 00:39:52.000
which was this article. And then he responded with this blog post here. Two years ago,

461
00:39:52.080 --> 00:39:57.600
I thought Sam had a really good brand. He was out in Congress. He was saying, you know,

462
00:39:57.600 --> 00:40:02.800
he was asking for regulation. It seemed it is turned unbelievably quickly, unbelievably fast.

463
00:40:03.840 --> 00:40:07.600
Well, we said this before. He's a proxy for all of AI. I think the greatest brand

464
00:40:07.600 --> 00:40:12.320
destruction other than the US over the last 18 months has been AI and also Sam Altman.

465
00:40:13.040 --> 00:40:17.760
But we keep falling into this trap over and over. And that is something happened through

466
00:40:17.760 --> 00:40:24.400
the 70s, 80s and 90s. And that is America. It's heroes used to be athletes, government officials,

467
00:40:24.960 --> 00:40:31.840
and actors. And then there was a dramatic decline in attendance to religious institutions,

468
00:40:31.840 --> 00:40:37.040
but people still have really big questions and want sort of an authority or a godlike figure.

469
00:40:37.040 --> 00:40:40.960
The closest thing we have to religion is technology. Most people don't understand it. It has a

470
00:40:40.960 --> 00:40:45.040
mystical feel to it. I have no idea how my phone works. I can ask it anything and it comes back

471
00:40:45.040 --> 00:40:49.760
with a relatively authoritative answer that I trust, somewhere if I was talking or praying.

472
00:40:49.760 --> 00:40:53.280
Like most of the time when we were on AI, we're kind of praying. We're sending a question

473
00:40:53.280 --> 00:40:57.920
into the yaku to a being thinking it's smarter than us and it's going to come back with an

474
00:40:57.920 --> 00:41:04.320
empathetic loving, correct answer. So the new Jesus Christ was born in the 90s and that was Steve

475
00:41:04.320 --> 00:41:10.080
Jobs. And he was taken from us early like Jesus Christ. The idolatry of innovators is absolutely

476
00:41:10.080 --> 00:41:16.640
gone crazy. And the new Jesus Christ, if you will, are these tech CEOs. And here's what we failed

477
00:41:16.640 --> 00:41:22.400
to understand. They do not have our best interests at heart. They are not concerned with our emotional

478
00:41:22.400 --> 00:41:26.560
well-being. They are not going to comfort us when we're older. They are there and they play a key

479
00:41:26.560 --> 00:41:32.080
component in capitalism to do anything that is required to get their earnings up one cent per share

480
00:41:32.080 --> 00:41:37.680
every day. And they will make incremental decisions that justify the harming and self-harm of

481
00:41:37.680 --> 00:41:44.960
teen girls, Cheryl Sandberg, the weaponization of our platforms to make the coarsening of our

482
00:41:44.960 --> 00:41:52.160
discourse, Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, the radicalization of young men, the people running YouTube,

483
00:41:53.360 --> 00:41:59.840
they, we keep thinking that the newest tech CEO is going to save us. That this guy cares. Sam

484
00:41:59.840 --> 00:42:07.520
Altman was the gay son we all wanted, like super nice, super friendly, hush voices, well-centered.

485
00:42:07.520 --> 00:42:15.120
I'm worried about that as well, right? These guys would sleep at their cousin for a nickel. That's their

486
00:42:15.120 --> 00:42:21.040
job. Their job is to increase earnings. They're not here to save us. We're supposed to elect people

487
00:42:21.040 --> 00:42:26.480
who put in guardrails for them. So everyone is saying, are asking me, can we trust Sam Altman? I'm

488
00:42:26.640 --> 00:42:32.080
like, no, and we shouldn't have to. We should have regulators putting in guardrails on AI. We should

489
00:42:32.080 --> 00:42:37.520
be testing these things, government agencies should be testing these things. We should be ensuring that

490
00:42:37.520 --> 00:42:43.840
these technologies are not used to surveil Americans, right? That we would still have cartoons

491
00:42:43.840 --> 00:42:50.480
like characters on cigarettes marketing to 12 year olds if we hadn't put in place regulation.

492
00:42:50.480 --> 00:42:55.280
And the tobacco executives would claim that they weren't marketing to young people. Ford would

493
00:42:55.280 --> 00:43:00.960
still be pouring mercury into the river if we didn't have an EPA in regulation. So Sam is doing

494
00:43:00.960 --> 00:43:05.280
exactly what he's supposed to be doing. The latest hero that's going to save us is Dario Amode.

495
00:43:05.280 --> 00:43:12.160
We've decided he's the good guy now. The villain's journey and tech is the same. Some compelling person,

496
00:43:12.160 --> 00:43:16.960
we think is a wonderful guy, and it's almost always a guy, occasionally a woman, you know,

497
00:43:17.680 --> 00:43:23.200
we need to do better gender balance. That was Cheryl Sandberg in the workplace. And then we find out

498
00:43:23.760 --> 00:43:27.440
that they are doing their job and that is doing anything they can legally to increase shareholder

499
00:43:27.440 --> 00:43:32.240
value regardless of whether it prevents a tragedy, the commons or not. And then we get angry at them.

500
00:43:32.240 --> 00:43:37.840
The journey from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader gets shorter and shorter, but they all follow the

501
00:43:37.840 --> 00:43:43.600
same path. And then 18 months later, we realize that they will do, we'll say and do whatever they

502
00:43:43.600 --> 00:43:48.400
can to try and delay and obfuscate regulation. And that sometimes when we don't have a government,

503
00:43:49.040 --> 00:43:54.240
with a lack of domain expertise, with a lack of insight, with people who are across between the land

504
00:43:54.240 --> 00:43:58.000
of the dead and the golden girls and don't understand these technologies, then when these

505
00:43:58.000 --> 00:44:05.360
technologies are allowed to run just free with no regulation, they do bad things. So Sam

506
00:44:05.360 --> 00:44:10.240
Alman is the latest person we've discovered as Darth Vader who's gone to the dark side. It happens

507
00:44:10.240 --> 00:44:14.320
with all of them because they're doing their job. We as citizens aren't doing our job and that is

508
00:44:14.320 --> 00:44:19.360
we're not putting in place elected officials to regulate these companies. So yeah, can we trust

509
00:44:19.360 --> 00:44:23.040
Sam Alman? No, but we shouldn't need to trust him. We should be able to trust that we have

510
00:44:23.040 --> 00:44:26.800
smart elected officials that will regulate these companies. Did you see this old school fever

511
00:44:26.800 --> 00:44:31.280
in response to being having a molotov cocktail throw in his house? I read this article without

512
00:44:31.280 --> 00:44:37.040
reading it. So there's been death threats on his life. And let me be clear, there's absolutely no

513
00:44:37.040 --> 00:44:42.160
justification whatsoever for this. And it needs to be, I don't even like it when people yell at

514
00:44:42.240 --> 00:44:46.720
JD Vance when he's skiing with his family. We don't want to be that nation or we don't in the

515
00:44:46.720 --> 00:44:50.560
West, we have a city. If you're operating with the confines of the law, which Sam is, he deserves

516
00:44:50.560 --> 00:44:55.280
a living piece. It is sad. Do you realize in the US now, there's no more people working in private

517
00:44:55.280 --> 00:45:02.240
security than there are cops? Really? Because there's always going to be a number of people who are

518
00:45:02.240 --> 00:45:08.560
likely, I don't know about the perpetrator here who are mentally ill and who will find an excuse,

519
00:45:08.560 --> 00:45:13.360
essentially the makeup usually of these perpetrators or these these these criminal actors,

520
00:45:14.080 --> 00:45:18.720
is there usually young men looking to restore their social capital through what they perceive as

521
00:45:18.720 --> 00:45:24.960
a historic act of violence against a famous person? This has gone on for a long time. He's now famous.

522
00:45:24.960 --> 00:45:31.440
I don't think it's fair. I've seen some people try to equate AI's dangers as if these acts of

523
00:45:31.440 --> 00:45:37.040
violence are somehow justified. They're not. There's no justification for a healthcare executive

524
00:45:37.040 --> 00:45:42.240
being executed in the streets. There's no justification for violence against Sam or attempted

525
00:45:42.240 --> 00:45:46.080
violence against Sam and his family. I think it's young men with a lack of opportunity, mental illness,

526
00:45:46.080 --> 00:45:51.600
and unfortunately access to firearms everywhere, but it's always happened. I don't make the connection

527
00:45:51.600 --> 00:45:55.680
that somehow it's more justified. I think famous people, one in three presidents has been shot at.

528
00:45:55.680 --> 00:45:59.600
Crazy, isn't it? So the more famous you get, quite frankly, the more personal risk there is,

529
00:45:59.600 --> 00:46:04.080
because someone is going to decide that taking you out for whatever reason is going to restore

530
00:46:04.160 --> 00:46:08.720
their social capital. Actually, if you look at assassination attempts and violence,

531
00:46:10.000 --> 00:46:14.640
it's actually gone down, but these stories are cinematic and very interesting and they get a lot

532
00:46:14.640 --> 00:46:18.880
of attention. But I think it's a shame we live in a society where, especially in the West,

533
00:46:18.880 --> 00:46:23.280
where they have to endure that kind of risk. One of the really most lovely moments I've seen on

534
00:46:23.280 --> 00:46:27.040
it, because I don't know if it was the Danish and the Norwegian Prime Minister who stepped down,

535
00:46:27.040 --> 00:46:32.640
they applauded, and he got on a bike and rode home. I thought, you can't do that in the US. Obama's

536
00:46:32.640 --> 00:46:39.120
kids still have secret service protection. So there's definitely something, I quite frankly

537
00:46:39.120 --> 00:46:44.000
blame it on Big Tech that tries to convince people that this person is their enemy and this person

538
00:46:44.000 --> 00:46:50.160
is evil. I don't know him personally. I sat next to him at this party I went to, but he's doing

539
00:46:50.160 --> 00:46:55.120
his job. Quite frankly, we're not doing ours. Do you think he's a nihilist? I don't really know

540
00:46:55.120 --> 00:46:58.240
the definition of the word nihilist, but I guess it's someone who believes that life is essentially

541
00:46:58.240 --> 00:47:04.320
meaningless. I think there's a nihilist vein running through Big Tech where a lot of them have

542
00:47:04.320 --> 00:47:11.840
go bags. They have a plan for, if shit gets real, if there's a zombie apocalypse or there's a revolution

543
00:47:11.840 --> 00:47:17.280
or there's a massive pandemic, they have definitive plans and they've spent tens of millions of

544
00:47:17.280 --> 00:47:23.840
dollars. They meet their pilots at Oakland Airport. They get on in their Gulfstream 650. They fly

545
00:47:23.920 --> 00:47:29.120
to New Zealand to Oakland and they have a bunker built out. Is this true? Oh, there's a lot of them.

546
00:47:29.120 --> 00:47:33.760
Really, there's a lot of go plans amongst the wealthy and sometimes it's not as dramatic. Sometimes

547
00:47:33.760 --> 00:47:40.720
it's just a home, nuclear attacks, cyber attack, revolution, but I would say amongst billionaires,

548
00:47:40.720 --> 00:47:48.080
I would bet conservatively one and three have some sort of go plan and that's nihilist. Also,

549
00:47:48.080 --> 00:47:52.320
to a certain extent, I think wanting to be an interplanetary species is a little bit nihilist.

550
00:47:52.320 --> 00:47:57.920
Also, if they're saying that in the future people aren't going to have jobs and there's robotics

551
00:47:57.920 --> 00:48:01.200
and there's this AGI, this superintelligence, which is going to be smarter than everybody,

552
00:48:02.080 --> 00:48:08.000
and even if there was a one percent chance, a one percent chance that these doom of predictions

553
00:48:08.000 --> 00:48:15.040
around AI could come true, I would stop. A one percent chance of humanity sort of self-employing

554
00:48:15.040 --> 00:48:20.160
or destroying itself. Wouldn't a rational person stop? Well, okay, you're up in aheimer.

555
00:48:20.800 --> 00:48:26.960
It's going to take three million American deaths to invade Japan, Japan will not surrender,

556
00:48:27.760 --> 00:48:32.320
and you're you've been charged of splitting the atom. There was much more than a one percent chance

557
00:48:32.320 --> 00:48:36.400
that our ability to split the atom and then show and then show we would use it against a civilian

558
00:48:36.400 --> 00:48:40.400
population would result in the end of the world. Should he have stopped development of it?

559
00:48:41.120 --> 00:48:45.040
So a lot of scientists, nuclear scientists killed themselves, they committed suicide because they

560
00:48:45.040 --> 00:48:48.640
were convinced once we'd split the atom and use it against civilians, it was the end of the world.

561
00:48:48.640 --> 00:48:52.320
It was just a matter of time before we were all all using nuclear devices.

562
00:48:52.880 --> 00:48:57.760
So I don't I think you keep moving forward. The nihilism where nihilism impacts these people,

563
00:48:57.760 --> 00:49:02.560
let me go back to the go bag. I talked to one of these people. He outlined his plan for me,

564
00:49:02.560 --> 00:49:08.160
right? He's a beginner. Yeah, outlined his plan. His plan B, if things get really ugly, right?

565
00:49:09.520 --> 00:49:14.000
And my view is, okay, boss, let's play this out. Something happens. There's an event. It's too

566
00:49:14.000 --> 00:49:19.280
dangerous to stay here. You meet your pilots at the airport. I mean, shit really gets real.

567
00:49:19.280 --> 00:49:24.560
People scaring for food. People become feral. I mean, you don't think your pilots are going to

568
00:49:25.680 --> 00:49:30.880
kill you and fuck your wife. What do you think is going to happen? You don't think the people

569
00:49:30.880 --> 00:49:36.880
in New Zealand are going to be like, let's go take the rich guy's shit. It strikes me that these

570
00:49:36.880 --> 00:49:44.560
are such misallocated efforts in capital that if you're really focused on your own future,

571
00:49:44.560 --> 00:49:50.400
whether you're wealthy or not wealthy, that your resources and your talent should be allocated

572
00:49:50.400 --> 00:49:55.280
towards trying to make this place a little bit more habitable, not trying to colonize Mars,

573
00:49:55.280 --> 00:50:00.240
not having a go back. And this is part of the problem with the point 1%. There are 900 billionaires

574
00:50:00.320 --> 00:50:07.120
in the United States. And I would imagine 300 of them give money. They're responsible for 20%

575
00:50:07.120 --> 00:50:12.400
of all political donations and that 20% number is misleading because they can be more strategic.

576
00:50:12.400 --> 00:50:16.880
So unions are big givers, but they just give money to whoever's pro union. So it's not that

577
00:50:16.880 --> 00:50:22.240
strategic. Billionaires can allocate capital to a specific issue, really ramp it up. So they have

578
00:50:22.240 --> 00:50:28.560
a disproportionate amount of control over our elected population. And the problem is the point 1%

579
00:50:28.640 --> 00:50:34.320
are not invested in the health of America. Why? They don't have to put up with TSA lines.

580
00:50:34.320 --> 00:50:38.800
They fly private. They don't have to put up with shitty health care. They have

581
00:50:38.800 --> 00:50:43.600
concierge medicine and access to the best medicine in the world. They don't have to put up with 40%

582
00:50:43.600 --> 00:50:49.040
of third graders can't read or write. Their kids go to amazing schools that spend on average $75,000

583
00:50:49.040 --> 00:50:54.400
a year on their kid versus 15,000 at a public school, 10,000 at a public school in a long

584
00:50:54.480 --> 00:50:59.120
America. They don't need police. They have dormant and security. Where I live in Soho,

585
00:50:59.120 --> 00:51:03.360
there's no homeless. As far as I can tell, there's no crime. There's no cops. There's cameras

586
00:51:03.360 --> 00:51:09.280
everywhere and dormant everywhere. My point is they are no longer invested in the well-being of

587
00:51:09.280 --> 00:51:16.320
America. They've totally dissociated from the investments required to make America a better place

588
00:51:16.320 --> 00:51:20.240
because they're sequestered from it. They're no longer invested in the well-being of America.

589
00:51:20.240 --> 00:51:24.080
And what I find strange about this nihilism is that these individuals think that they are

590
00:51:24.080 --> 00:51:30.640
no longer as invested in the well-being or the safety of the world. I think that's very unhealthy.

591
00:51:31.440 --> 00:51:35.120
These are some of the most concerning conversations I've had. One of the things that happens when

592
00:51:35.120 --> 00:51:38.880
you have a podcast and interesting people come on and you start hanging around with more

593
00:51:38.880 --> 00:51:43.600
interesting people and more powerful people is you get little peaks into new worlds but you

594
00:51:43.600 --> 00:51:47.520
didn't know existed. You get to see behind certain curtains. I remember having a particular

595
00:51:47.520 --> 00:51:54.800
conversation in London at a kitchen table where someone was describing one of these AI CEOs to me

596
00:51:55.440 --> 00:52:00.320
and basically making the case that they believe there's a roughly 10% chance. I think they said

597
00:52:00.320 --> 00:52:06.000
seven. If I'm not misunderstanding, percent chance that it's that it will result in the end of

598
00:52:06.000 --> 00:52:12.480
the world. Some catastrophic event but they really didn't care because they think that being the

599
00:52:12.480 --> 00:52:21.440
person that summoned this new intelligence amongst us was probably more consequential than whatever

600
00:52:21.440 --> 00:52:29.200
happens. If I wasn't privy to hearing this second hand from someone I know who knows this person

601
00:52:29.200 --> 00:52:34.240
extremely well. I know he knows extremely well because they hang out him telling me that I wouldn't

602
00:52:34.240 --> 00:52:39.120
have believed this. I would have thought to myself they must be kind because they have kids and

603
00:52:39.840 --> 00:52:44.960
but actually now I very much believe what you're saying about this nihilism where I don't actually

604
00:52:44.960 --> 00:52:49.440
believe they give a fuck. Some of them. I actually don't believe some of them give a fuck. I actually

605
00:52:49.440 --> 00:52:53.520
think some of them are playing a game and they're playing a video game with our futures.

606
00:52:54.640 --> 00:53:00.880
Or the incentive is like in the United States when I was growing up my dad's boss had a

607
00:53:00.880 --> 00:53:05.760
slightly bigger house and he drove a Cadillac and we drove a grand terino but we were members of

608
00:53:05.760 --> 00:53:10.960
the same country club and his house was a five minute drive away and maybe my dad's boss got

609
00:53:10.960 --> 00:53:17.840
to fly business class and we flew coach. The Delta in having money having a decent you know having

610
00:53:17.840 --> 00:53:24.640
a middle class life and an upper class was like this. Now the Delta is this. What's the good

611
00:53:24.640 --> 00:53:29.760
air transportation flying on spirit airlines is a humiliating dangerous experience. United

612
00:53:30.480 --> 00:53:35.680
Airlines economy economy comfort economy plus business class first class oh wait that's not

613
00:53:35.680 --> 00:53:39.920
enough. Let's go to private. There's charter. There's fractional. There's a sesance

614
00:53:39.920 --> 00:53:44.560
notation. There's a bombardier challenger 300. There's a global 650 now. There's a new G7.

615
00:53:45.120 --> 00:53:51.120
The Delta in your life in your healthcare. My mom was very sick when I was very young and when I

616
00:53:51.120 --> 00:53:56.480
think about how humiliating it was for the two of us having her to endure cancer when we were

617
00:53:56.480 --> 00:54:04.960
under insured. It was a devastating traumatic humiliating experience. Now if I need I take

618
00:54:04.960 --> 00:54:08.720
Lunecito and I travel because I have trouble sleeping. I have a medical constipation company.

619
00:54:09.360 --> 00:54:16.000
They get me to the drug delivered within two hours to my house. I have NAD treatments. They

620
00:54:16.000 --> 00:54:20.080
arranged for someone to come to my house when it's convenient for me and do it in my living room.

621
00:54:20.720 --> 00:54:26.080
I can text my doctor. I have a medical kit with all these things in it. If I'm abroad I can text

622
00:54:26.080 --> 00:54:31.360
my doctor and say my son's not feeling well. They FaceTime me. I open the kit. They can tell me

623
00:54:31.360 --> 00:54:37.760
exactly what to do. The healthcare I am receiving right now. I have my blood taken every three months.

624
00:54:37.760 --> 00:54:44.320
They send it to some bond layer in Norway with PhDs who can tell me that I have less than a 0.7%

625
00:54:44.320 --> 00:54:49.840
chance of any cancers as evidenced by a lack of whatever it is. Anybody is the cancer cells.

626
00:54:49.840 --> 00:54:55.120
The healthcare now for the point for the 1% is dramatic and it's all the same thing. The bottom

627
00:54:55.120 --> 00:55:01.840
99% of Western societies are essentially being optimized and monetized to make the life of the 1%

628
00:55:02.720 --> 00:55:09.520
just unbelievable. The life you can lead in the 1% is so dramatic and so incredible.

629
00:55:09.520 --> 00:55:13.440
broader selection set of mates, your kids have better healthcare, better educational opportunities,

630
00:55:13.440 --> 00:55:20.640
you have influence, people want to know you. So the incentives to not be rich but to be very rich

631
00:55:20.640 --> 00:55:25.440
are so incredible and the way you get very rich is through stock options typically in technology

632
00:55:26.080 --> 00:55:30.800
that I think the incentives are so great that people will make incremental decisions and ignore

633
00:55:30.800 --> 00:55:37.360
the fact that one in 18 girls who are self-harming in the UK cite Instagram as a reason for that.

634
00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:43.040
Well let's find research that maybe create some doubts because once I become a billionaire I'll

635
00:55:43.040 --> 00:55:48.960
be a better person and they're getting so much criticism and so much shit posting and it's so

636
00:55:48.960 --> 00:55:55.440
competitive and there's fewer and fewer winners that become much bigger. It used to be five companies

637
00:55:55.440 --> 00:56:00.080
won and got hundreds of millions of dollars and one company wins and gets tens of billions.

638
00:56:00.080 --> 00:56:05.520
So you can see how incrementally this path to Darth Vader is pretty tempting.

639
00:56:06.320 --> 00:56:13.840
So I think they just get caught up in, they get caught up in this competition and they lose all

640
00:56:13.840 --> 00:56:21.760
side. Also my co-host on the pivot podcast said something that was illuminating me during COVID.

641
00:56:21.760 --> 00:56:25.200
I was walking down the street with my sister and a homeless person kind of stirred. There was a lot

642
00:56:25.200 --> 00:56:29.280
of homeless people because they took the homeless shelters turned out everybody and she jumped out

643
00:56:29.280 --> 00:56:35.680
of her skin and I said well that was a bit of an overreaction. He's not going to hurt us and she said

644
00:56:36.320 --> 00:56:41.440
you know you're six to one ninety easy for you to say you don't understand you women walk around

645
00:56:41.440 --> 00:56:47.840
in a constant state of fear and that fear is rational and it really struck me and then Cara said

646
00:56:47.840 --> 00:56:53.120
these guys don't understand anything about victimization because they've never been victims.

647
00:56:53.120 --> 00:56:57.520
They're traditionally white males who have grown up in upper-income households and they've never

648
00:56:57.520 --> 00:57:01.920
really understood what it's like to be a victim so they don't put in place the safeguards. It's

649
00:57:01.920 --> 00:57:07.440
so competitive that it's just easier for them to give money some strategic money to key people

650
00:57:07.520 --> 00:57:11.520
and ensure that they're not regulated such that they can get to be billionaires because all the

651
00:57:11.520 --> 00:57:16.000
incentives are do whatever is required to win. Samuel Altman isn't going to be remembered for being

652
00:57:16.000 --> 00:57:21.920
a good or a bad guy. He's going to be remembered for the guy who either was the number one AI

653
00:57:21.920 --> 00:57:26.400
company or blew it. That's what he's going to be remembered for and right now he's blowing it

654
00:57:26.400 --> 00:57:33.040
it appears right but people are going to look back and say well he didn't get public. Anthropic

655
00:57:33.040 --> 00:57:37.840
ended up being at worth more. It was kind of a disappointment financially but he was a good guy.

656
00:57:38.320 --> 00:57:42.080
That's not what he's going for and quite frankly that's not what our society rewards.

657
00:57:43.520 --> 00:57:46.880
I've already talked to me founders they all carry the same belief but the biggest threat to their

658
00:57:46.880 --> 00:57:51.680
small business is having a bad product. It's not. The biggest threat they face is hiring the

659
00:57:51.680 --> 00:57:57.120
wrong person for their small team because bad hires put the handbrake on growth and rapidly

660
00:57:57.120 --> 00:58:00.800
infect company culture and I get it. When you're starting out you need a players to

661
00:58:00.800 --> 00:58:05.280
grey your company but you don't have 40 spare hours to spend sifting through interviews.

662
00:58:05.280 --> 00:58:09.440
So you hire fast to fill the seat but this ends up costing you even more in the long term.

663
00:58:09.440 --> 00:58:13.040
What any small business actually needs is a reliable and efficient way to find the right talent

664
00:58:13.040 --> 00:58:17.520
without stalling momentum. That's where our long term sponsor LinkedIn and LinkedIn hiring

665
00:58:17.520 --> 00:58:21.920
Pro can help you. It streamlines the entire hiring process from drafting a job description

666
00:58:21.920 --> 00:58:26.160
to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI powered interviews for initial screenings.

667
00:58:26.160 --> 00:58:31.440
Nearly 60% of hires who've used this tool have found a candidate to interview within a week.

668
00:58:31.440 --> 00:58:36.000
Higher write the first time around and get started by posting your first job for free

669
00:58:36.000 --> 00:58:41.600
at linkedin.com slash D o a c that's linkedin.com slash D o a c in terms and conditions apply.

670
00:58:42.880 --> 00:58:46.640
Information is something I'd never really thought to check until fairly recently.

671
00:58:46.640 --> 00:58:50.480
There aren't any symptoms or obvious signs for a lot of people and yet it's consistently

672
00:58:50.480 --> 00:58:54.160
linked to some of the most serious health outcomes that we know of but our sponsor

673
00:58:54.160 --> 00:59:00.080
function tests twice a year for inflammation markers alongside hormones and heart health and

674
00:59:00.080 --> 00:59:04.880
stress and toxins giving you a far more specific view of what's going on inside your body.

675
00:59:04.880 --> 00:59:11.440
I did my tests recently and I was shocked a little bit. A little bit amazed, a little bit surprised

676
00:59:11.440 --> 00:59:16.480
by my results. But what I really loved was having all of the information about my body in front of

677
00:59:16.480 --> 00:59:21.200
me. It makes it so much easier to make a more informed decision immediately about what I do in

678
00:59:21.200 --> 00:59:25.440
terms of exercise and in terms of what I do in terms of my diet and everything else.

679
00:59:25.440 --> 00:59:31.120
So if you want to look into it yourself go to functionhealth.com slash D o a c and use code

680
00:59:31.120 --> 00:59:39.840
D o a c 25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. It gives you a 160 lab test for $365 a year

681
00:59:39.840 --> 00:59:47.680
which is just $1 a day. I think your assessment of AI in terms of it creating more

682
00:59:47.680 --> 00:59:52.720
opportunity than it destroys is accurate. I also think that in the near term all of our lives

683
00:59:52.720 --> 00:59:58.000
are going to be quite quite different. I spend a lot of time on this podcast. We spoke into a

684
00:59:58.000 --> 01:00:01.760
lot of the big CEOs from AI companies and tried to pass through this and I've never really gotten

685
01:00:01.760 --> 01:00:07.520
to a solid a solid conclusion of what the future looks like. But do you have a case for the future

686
01:00:07.520 --> 01:00:11.280
where this technology is the first that actually delivers on the promise of making us more human?

687
01:00:12.400 --> 01:00:15.680
There's talk about loneliness and there's talk algorithms are going to get more

688
01:00:15.680 --> 01:00:19.680
attentive. But I have this like thesis that potentially in a social networking say it was going

689
01:00:19.680 --> 01:00:23.840
to connect us and make us more human. That's kind of the narrative of all these tools. But maybe

690
01:00:23.840 --> 01:00:27.680
this technology renders us only useful for that which humans can do which is the relationships

691
01:00:27.680 --> 01:00:32.480
thing you're talking about and connection and being out touching grass with our friends and family.

692
01:00:32.480 --> 01:00:36.720
Is there a utopia? Just so social media has some real upsides. I would argue at this point

693
01:00:36.720 --> 01:00:43.680
matters actually in that negative. It's I think done so much damage. But with AI there's a lot of

694
01:00:43.680 --> 01:00:47.760
upsides. A really encouraging piece of data I saw is that when you spend time on social media

695
01:00:48.560 --> 01:00:54.240
it takes you to the extremes. The algorithms seem money and more Nissan ads in figuring out if

696
01:00:54.240 --> 01:00:58.400
you're conservative or liberal and then demonizing the other side and tickling your sensors right?

697
01:00:59.120 --> 01:01:05.520
I'll get served a video of Ted Cruz or Victor Orman looking like an ass because that I'm a progressive

698
01:01:05.520 --> 01:01:11.440
and that makes me happy. And then the elevate content of some progressive of AOC calling out

699
01:01:11.440 --> 01:01:16.320
somebody and I start to hate the other side. What they're finding with AI is it's actually people

700
01:01:16.320 --> 01:01:22.240
spend more time on AI. It's actually moderating their views because AI is about taking the medium or

701
01:01:22.240 --> 01:01:28.640
the average of every piece of data. Also, do you know how nice AI is? Yeah. Great question, Steven.

702
01:01:28.640 --> 01:01:32.640
No matter what you say or how stupid it is and won't say that's a really stupid idea, Steven.

703
01:01:32.640 --> 01:01:37.280
And he'll say I can understand why you're asking this question. And generally speaking because it

704
01:01:37.280 --> 01:01:41.680
looks for the median of things. It looks for the average. What is the most often used seventh word

705
01:01:41.680 --> 01:01:46.880
after these six words are strung together? That it's pushing people towards the middle. It's

706
01:01:46.880 --> 01:01:51.440
actually having a moderating effect, which I find very encouraging. I think old people in senior

707
01:01:51.440 --> 01:01:56.720
care who maybe have lost family members or don't have a lot of relationships in their life. I can see

708
01:01:57.920 --> 01:02:04.880
AI characters playing a big role in their life. I believe for a long time that the biggest danger

709
01:02:05.760 --> 01:02:12.560
of AI is not weapons. It's not income inequality. We voted for income inequality or contamination

710
01:02:12.560 --> 01:02:17.520
of our elections. I mean, all of these things are big issues. The biggest downside of AI

711
01:02:18.480 --> 01:02:24.400
in my view is loneliness. And that is when we talk about this a lot, AI is convincing people

712
01:02:24.400 --> 01:02:28.240
that kind of a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen with an algorithm. Why go through the effort

713
01:02:28.240 --> 01:02:32.560
of having friends when you have discord and Reddit? Why go through the hassle of getting a job

714
01:02:32.560 --> 01:02:37.600
when you can make money on coinbase or Robinhood supposedly? Why would you go through the effort of

715
01:02:37.600 --> 01:02:42.960
trying to have a romantic relationship when you have lifelike synthetic porn? And the young male

716
01:02:42.960 --> 01:02:47.600
brain, I think, is especially susceptible to this. Manage 20 to 30 are spending less time outdoors

717
01:02:47.600 --> 01:02:53.200
in prison inmates. 42% of men 18 to 24. We talked about this on the last show. I've never asked

718
01:02:53.200 --> 01:02:58.400
a woman out in person. People are starting to believe they can have a reasonable facsimile of life.

719
01:02:58.480 --> 01:03:04.160
And what they need to know is that 40% of the S&P are economy is trying to sequester you

720
01:03:04.160 --> 01:03:07.280
for the most important and rewarding thing in your life. And that is your relationships.

721
01:03:07.760 --> 01:03:13.440
So my prediction for America is we will never be as prosperous, incredible prosperity,

722
01:03:13.440 --> 01:03:18.000
incredible economic growth, and massive loneliness, depression, anxiety, and obesity.

723
01:03:18.720 --> 01:03:22.640
I wouldn't think it would be as well and all this war stuff that's going on ever in the Middle East.

724
01:03:22.640 --> 01:03:27.920
What you thought Trump was trying to do and actually what happened. Because he's talking about

725
01:03:28.000 --> 01:03:32.240
oh no, we said it would be six weeks, it's five and a half weeks, everything's going to plan

726
01:03:32.240 --> 01:03:37.680
when we're winning the war. And you'll get it seeing three things. What would actually happen

727
01:03:37.680 --> 01:03:43.600
in your view here? I think that he was talked into by some of the security advisors in Netanyahu

728
01:03:43.600 --> 01:03:49.120
that his legacy could be restoring or making the Middle East more peaceful and being the president

729
01:03:50.000 --> 01:03:58.240
that severely diminished the capacity of what has been arguably the number one source of terror

730
01:03:58.240 --> 01:04:02.560
in the region and maybe even around the world for a long time. That this was his defining moment

731
01:04:02.560 --> 01:04:06.880
as a president to go in, that they were weakened, they were hobbled, and we had the military assets

732
01:04:06.880 --> 01:04:10.800
and the intelligence to go in and topple the regime, and he would be known as the president

733
01:04:10.800 --> 01:04:13.840
that liberated the Middle East. I think he bought into that.

734
01:04:14.480 --> 01:04:19.760
Over the back of Venezuela. Well, which was a kind of success. Not kind of. That was arguably

735
01:04:19.760 --> 01:04:24.400
one of the greatest military operations in history, but it was a military operation. It wasn't a war.

736
01:04:24.400 --> 01:04:29.600
I mean, supposedly his guards did know what happened. I'll certainly run the floor throwing up

737
01:04:29.600 --> 01:04:34.240
because there was some sort of crazy radiation or radio waves. Not a single American soldier

738
01:04:35.040 --> 01:04:41.280
killed, lifted him out. I mean, that was an incredible operation. I think he got drunk on that

739
01:04:41.280 --> 01:04:46.400
macho and that success and thought, well, I can do the same thing. And the problem with wars is

740
01:04:46.400 --> 01:04:53.040
that the enemy has a say. And what we have found since I think a lot of our leaders believe that

741
01:04:53.040 --> 01:04:56.880
wars could ultimately, if you have a bigger army, will result in unconditional surrender on the other

742
01:04:56.880 --> 01:05:01.680
side. And there really hasn't been unconditional surrender since World War II. And all the enemy

743
01:05:01.680 --> 01:05:07.200
needs to do, whether it's the Vietcong or the Taliban or the IRGC, all they need to do is survive

744
01:05:07.280 --> 01:05:12.560
and they win. In addition, I would describe the wars being the operational excellence in strategic

745
01:05:12.560 --> 01:05:17.840
and competence. I actually believe there was justification and some merit to the idea of a military

746
01:05:17.840 --> 01:05:23.280
operation that tried to take advantage of a weakened Iran, where his air defenses were down

747
01:05:23.280 --> 01:05:28.880
to take out the IRGC, or at least maybe provide cloud cover for a revolution against the IRGC

748
01:05:29.680 --> 01:05:34.000
to administer Navy, diminish the nuclear capabilities, diminish the missile launch capability.

749
01:05:34.000 --> 01:05:39.600
I think there was real justification for that. The problem was the strategic and competence here,

750
01:05:39.600 --> 01:05:45.600
not going to, not enlisting some European allies, not briefing Congress, not coordinating with

751
01:05:45.600 --> 01:05:50.560
Gulf allies, not recognizing the game theory around what happens if they start firing at ships

752
01:05:50.560 --> 01:05:57.920
in the street of Hormuz. It just was strategically incompetent. And now we're in a situation where

753
01:05:58.800 --> 01:06:04.400
we wanted to administer nuclear capacity, but the reality is if they can maintain an ability to

754
01:06:04.400 --> 01:06:09.200
turn off and on the straight of Hormuz, that is probably more powerful than them having nuclear

755
01:06:09.200 --> 01:06:19.200
weapons. If you look at what happens if the fertilizer or the products that create fertilizer

756
01:06:19.200 --> 01:06:23.760
are further sequestered, you could have a mass starvation event around the world.

757
01:06:23.840 --> 01:06:31.760
And so we've essentially given them potentially a weapon that's more powerful than a nuclear weapon.

758
01:06:32.640 --> 01:06:38.400
And also we look like we have a bit of a glass jaw. We go in, we lose 14 soldiers,

759
01:06:38.400 --> 01:06:42.160
tragedy for them and their families. The Russians are losing 1,000 people a day and they don't

760
01:06:42.160 --> 01:06:46.800
show any signs of giving up. We look like this giant boxer who's the most skilled and

761
01:06:46.800 --> 01:06:52.560
biggest boxer in the world. We go in argument over whether we should go in or not, but now if we

762
01:06:52.560 --> 01:06:59.920
withdraw, what incentive do the Iranians right now have to negotiate? When every day this goes on,

763
01:06:59.920 --> 01:07:06.880
they look like the little guy that stood up to the evil American Israel. I think this has been

764
01:07:06.880 --> 01:07:12.960
a disaster from a US brand standpoint. And I would argue that them blocking inbound and outbound

765
01:07:12.960 --> 01:07:18.560
traffic from Iranian ports is actually the way to go. But that lends itself to the argument we

766
01:07:18.640 --> 01:07:23.840
should have just continued with economic sanctions. But I have to own it. I thought military action

767
01:07:23.840 --> 01:07:28.000
was a good idea. I would argue, I apologize for its salad here, that we've been at war with Iran

768
01:07:28.000 --> 01:07:33.760
for 47 years. Their first act of this regime in 1979 was to take 110 Americans hostage.

769
01:07:34.320 --> 01:07:40.160
70% of the IEDs in Iraq were built in Iran. We have been at war with Iran for a long time.

770
01:07:40.160 --> 01:07:46.000
The question is whether or not this military action slash war was worth it. And it looks as if it was

771
01:07:46.000 --> 01:07:53.680
so poorly executed on a strategic level that it is really diminished our brand. And we're now in

772
01:07:53.680 --> 01:07:58.480
the definition of a quagmire. If we leave, we look weak and any nation we perform military action

773
01:07:58.480 --> 01:08:04.000
against it says, start firing missiles at their neighbors. You know who summarized every war for

774
01:08:04.000 --> 01:08:09.680
the US right now is in this war was Ho Chi Minh when he was describing Vietnam. He said,

775
01:08:10.560 --> 01:08:16.000
they will kill a lot of our people. We will kill some of theirs. They will tire. They will go home.

776
01:08:17.680 --> 01:08:25.760
We killed a million people in Vietnam. We lost 58,000 and we left. Yeah, right? So Americans

777
01:08:25.760 --> 01:08:31.920
tolerance for pain and I'm not suggesting that we should go on military at misadventures. But this

778
01:08:31.920 --> 01:08:39.040
right now is no doubt turning out to be a giant win for the IRGC and a pretty severe loss for

779
01:08:39.040 --> 01:08:44.720
America that further alienates us from our allies and shows kind of our soft tissue around our

780
01:08:44.720 --> 01:08:49.120
willingness to actually finish the job. The other statement that kind of perfectly summarizes this war

781
01:08:49.120 --> 01:08:55.200
is we broke it. Now you fix it. We're leaving the world a much more insecure place, much more

782
01:08:55.200 --> 01:09:01.760
economically vulnerable Gulf states thought that having a US military base was Kevlar and ended up

783
01:09:01.760 --> 01:09:06.240
just putting a giant bullseye on them. So people are going to think twice before they cooperate

784
01:09:06.240 --> 01:09:11.520
with our US military by hosting bases. We appear to have not thought through getting our

785
01:09:11.520 --> 01:09:16.720
expats out of the Gulf, protecting the Gulf states. And on bias, I think the Trump administration

786
01:09:16.720 --> 01:09:22.240
will be known for a criminal for corruption and incompetence and that incompetence is bubbling up.

787
01:09:22.240 --> 01:09:26.320
I watched a press conference of his last night where he said this, which kind of links to what you

788
01:09:26.320 --> 01:09:33.040
were saying. They're delaying it because we don't know who to deal with. They know who the leader is

789
01:09:33.040 --> 01:09:38.800
in this country. We don't know who the leader is in Iran. I just thought, you know what,

790
01:09:38.800 --> 01:09:44.800
if I was running Iran, that's exactly what I would want. We don't know who to deal with Trump.

791
01:09:44.800 --> 01:09:49.840
We don't even know who to negotiate with. If he can't negotiate, he can't do anything. So I think

792
01:09:49.840 --> 01:09:54.320
I think the Iranians potentially the IRGC are saying that we don't even know who's leading.

793
01:09:55.200 --> 01:09:58.960
Because then what can you do? You can't just keep bombing. That's not going to work. You also can't

794
01:09:58.960 --> 01:10:04.240
negotiate. So it runs the clock down. You can affect a regime change from the air.

795
01:10:05.360 --> 01:10:09.360
They, the Iranians are smart. They have distributed power. Yeah. So there's no kind of head of

796
01:10:09.360 --> 01:10:14.080
the snake to cut off. But also a lot of this is incompetence in our part. Do you know what we have

797
01:10:14.080 --> 01:10:20.480
done in the US to our diplomatic corps? We've absolutely gutted it. When Vance goes to Islamabad

798
01:10:20.480 --> 01:10:25.280
thinking he's going to do a deal, if you look at the history of every truth, of every deal,

799
01:10:25.280 --> 01:10:33.600
of every summit, 97% of the work is done before they hit the tarmac by diplomats who go through

800
01:10:33.600 --> 01:10:39.680
line by line and iron out and talk to each other and negotiate. We've gutted our diplomatic corps.

801
01:10:40.400 --> 01:10:47.360
Our counterintelligence operations have been gutted. So we're kind of flying blind without instruments.

802
01:10:47.360 --> 01:10:51.200
And they think that JD Vance going to Islamabad for a TikTok moment where he tries to look

803
01:10:51.200 --> 01:10:57.840
presidential and then blames it on the IRGC. It's not going to work. So I think a lack of

804
01:10:57.840 --> 01:11:03.680
investment in key areas, a lack of soft power, whether it's to cutting USAID, a lack of respect

805
01:11:04.400 --> 01:11:09.200
for our diplomatic corps and the engine room like, like, you know, actually working with people

806
01:11:09.200 --> 01:11:14.480
and talking to them. I think this level of incompetence and arrogance is all bubbling up.

807
01:11:14.480 --> 01:11:19.120
And they, you're right. They don't even know who to talk to. That's good. They don't even know who

808
01:11:19.120 --> 01:11:24.880
to negotiate with. And by the way, you got to look at incentives. If I'm the IRGC, I'm like,

809
01:11:24.880 --> 01:11:28.640
why don't we need to do a survive? Yeah. Every day this goes on. And by the way, we're in the

810
01:11:28.640 --> 01:11:35.920
middle of what I'd call the first AI meme war. And that is Trump is communicating with truths

811
01:11:35.920 --> 01:11:42.960
on true social and these macho videos and memes of him as Jesus Christ. But he's been bested

812
01:11:43.760 --> 01:11:50.480
by kind of the Sloppy Gando or the AI memes of the IRGC. Have you seen these Legos memes?

813
01:11:51.200 --> 01:11:56.800
They understand him better than he understands them. They are outstanding. And it's a group of

814
01:11:56.800 --> 01:12:02.480
18 to 25 year old probably people who look like this group. None of this will revolve. In

815
01:12:02.480 --> 01:12:08.560
Tehran, figuring out AI driven means highly produced, highly effective, very strong message

816
01:12:08.560 --> 01:12:15.280
going right after the portrayals of the Epstein island. And I mean, they are doing a much better

817
01:12:15.280 --> 01:12:20.080
job because as Lincoln said, and it goes back to basics, he can't win a war without public support

818
01:12:20.080 --> 01:12:25.200
and he can't lose a war with public support. And right now, Iran is winning what you would call

819
01:12:25.200 --> 01:12:29.840
the Sloppy Gando war. They're putting out better information and propaganda than us right now.

820
01:12:29.840 --> 01:12:33.920
And what you had to predict this ends because as you said, we can't back out of this war

821
01:12:34.000 --> 01:12:38.960
as the worst. Trump can't back out of it. But he also just can't keep doing it. The midterms

822
01:12:38.960 --> 01:12:42.560
are coming up. His approval ratings are, I think, in all time low because of this war. His base

823
01:12:42.560 --> 01:12:48.320
is turning on him. So he can't, it's like lose, lose at this moment. Yeah. So the honest answer

824
01:12:48.320 --> 01:12:51.680
as I don't know because he's unpredictable. If I had to pick anything, I think there'll be a

825
01:12:51.680 --> 01:12:56.720
multinational force that has a vested interest in ensuring the straight of horror moses open.

826
01:12:56.720 --> 01:13:00.400
There's so many things we've taken for granted in the West and one of them is freedom of navigation.

827
01:13:00.400 --> 01:13:05.200
If Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia decide we need money or we need geopolitical power,

828
01:13:05.200 --> 01:13:10.560
we're going to close the straits of Malika or the strait of Singapore. What if China closes off

829
01:13:10.560 --> 01:13:14.480
certain straits in the South China Sea, where something like 60% of trade goes through?

830
01:13:15.680 --> 01:13:19.920
We have always enforced, we've gone to war over this basic notion of freedom of navigation,

831
01:13:19.920 --> 01:13:24.000
that pretty much any ship goes pretty much gets to go anywhere with pretty much anything on it.

832
01:13:24.960 --> 01:13:30.000
So I think that European nations, Asian nations all have a vested interest in ensuring

833
01:13:30.000 --> 01:13:35.520
the straight of horror moses is open. The way to do that is by sequestering or blocking,

834
01:13:35.520 --> 01:13:40.400
offloading and unloading of oil into Iranian ports. Because at some point, it not only

835
01:13:40.400 --> 01:13:46.720
shuts them off economically. I didn't know this, but within I think about 12 weeks, if you can't

836
01:13:46.720 --> 01:13:53.760
offload the oil and get it somewhere, it backs up and actually starts to damage the source well.

837
01:13:55.040 --> 01:14:00.960
It stops up. So I think ideally, the optimistic scenario is there's a multinational force

838
01:14:00.960 --> 01:14:05.680
that enforces the straight of horror mose. He comes up with a series of objectives.

839
01:14:05.680 --> 01:14:09.200
If he had in his first, if he had outlined, we're going to take out most of their navy,

840
01:14:09.200 --> 01:14:13.840
we're going to give the Iranian people an opportunity to overthrow the IRGC. We're going to take out

841
01:14:13.840 --> 01:14:20.000
the majority of the missile capability. And after 72 hours said this is a win and got the hell out

842
01:14:20.000 --> 01:14:24.400
and coordinated with the Gulf States to say, what can we do to ensure your safety? I think it would

843
01:14:24.400 --> 01:14:29.200
have been a win. But now I don't even know what his objectives are. Can you list what his

844
01:14:29.200 --> 01:14:34.080
objectives are? I don't know what they are. They seem to keep. We're going to be out very soon,

845
01:14:34.080 --> 01:14:39.200
which is why we need to continue this war. The communications here in thinking has been so

846
01:14:39.200 --> 01:14:44.480
sclerotic and difficult to track. I'm like, who's boarding what ships? Is it a ceasefire?

847
01:14:44.480 --> 01:14:50.560
Isn't it a ceasefire? He claims that them commandeering two Western vessels is not a violation

848
01:14:50.560 --> 01:14:55.840
of the ceasefire? Of course it is. That's it. Actually, that's an act of war. So we don't even know

849
01:14:55.840 --> 01:14:59.520
what to look for. You asked me how does this turn out? I think a multinational force that

850
01:14:59.520 --> 01:15:04.800
opens the straight of horror mose. Too many people have too much vested interest in free navigation.

851
01:15:04.880 --> 01:15:09.680
But in such a scenario, they're probably building up drones right now. In a ceasefire underground,

852
01:15:09.680 --> 01:15:13.600
they'll be building drone factories in every bunker and around right now. In a minute, you do a

853
01:15:13.600 --> 01:15:17.120
multinational force in the straight of the mose, those drones start hitting ships. And then the

854
01:15:17.120 --> 01:15:21.200
big company say, I'm not putting my ships through there. I think that's a fair point. Actually,

855
01:15:21.200 --> 01:15:25.120
not that many ships have gone down, but it's actually an insurance problem. If you have two million

856
01:15:25.120 --> 01:15:31.760
barrels on a tanker, you've got a $160 million payload. Someone has to take receipt of that,

857
01:15:31.760 --> 01:15:35.440
someone has bought it. So there needs to be middlemen in the form of insurance. And no one wants

858
01:15:35.440 --> 01:15:39.520
to ensure, take that kind of risk right now. So it's a lack of insurance, more than it is a lack

859
01:15:39.520 --> 01:15:45.280
of safety from the threat. But I do think the reality is the Iranians, by the IRGC,

860
01:15:46.000 --> 01:15:50.320
I say the bottom line is you go after the money. You don't bomb civilian infrastructure. That's a

861
01:15:50.320 --> 01:15:56.240
war crime. But making it very difficult for them and creating a carrot, you can have free flow

862
01:15:56.320 --> 01:16:01.360
of oil. If you look at the Arab Spring, if you look at revolutions, they're usually a function of

863
01:16:01.360 --> 01:16:07.680
unemployment or economics. So if you were to inhibit their ability to export oil, that brings

864
01:16:07.680 --> 01:16:12.480
them to the table because the IRGC has been able to survive because millions of families in Iran

865
01:16:12.480 --> 01:16:17.280
are dependent upon the IRGC for their check. They control the most profitable biggest parts of

866
01:16:17.280 --> 01:16:24.880
the economy. So if you cut off their economics, that I think or threatened to, I think that brings

867
01:16:24.880 --> 01:16:29.520
them to the table. I think that's the most optimistic scenario. It's the straits open by a

868
01:16:29.520 --> 01:16:34.160
multinational force and there's a feeling of safety because it's enforced. Iran agrees to keep

869
01:16:34.160 --> 01:16:39.760
it open. And somehow we develop a series of objectives that we claim those boxes we've

870
01:16:39.760 --> 01:16:44.240
been checked and we declare victory and get the hell out of dodge. But every day this goes on,

871
01:16:44.960 --> 01:16:50.160
we see, in my opinion, advantage and power to the IRGC because they just look like they're winning.

872
01:16:50.640 --> 01:16:56.000
I think it's clear that Trump miscalculated this situation quite horrifically. Just to be a

873
01:16:56.000 --> 01:16:59.680
logic, like, you don't have to be a genius to look at what he's saying and see the contradictions,

874
01:16:59.680 --> 01:17:03.760
the constant contradictions week over week. And the big one he's now got himself trapped in

875
01:17:03.760 --> 01:17:07.600
is he was handing out a six week timeline at the start of this and we're approaching six weeks.

876
01:17:07.600 --> 01:17:12.560
So if you watch this press conference from yesterday, he is incredibly irritated because all the

877
01:17:12.560 --> 01:17:18.160
journalists are saying, you said six weeks, it's six weeks. And it for the first time, there's a

878
01:17:18.160 --> 01:17:23.760
real measurable contradiction in what he said at the start versus now. And so if you watch it,

879
01:17:23.760 --> 01:17:28.560
he's so he's so agitated. He's calling the report as a disgrace. I think in this press conference

880
01:17:28.560 --> 01:17:33.840
yesterday, he personally insulted around 10 journalists. He's crashing out. He's crashing out.

881
01:17:33.840 --> 01:17:39.920
Yeah. And for me, that was going to have this guy's lost. But I find the most interesting

882
01:17:39.920 --> 01:17:42.640
thing about this, one of the most interesting thing is someone who follows the markets.

883
01:17:43.600 --> 01:17:49.600
If you didn't know there was a war in Iran that threatens geopolitical, I don't know, safety,

884
01:17:50.160 --> 01:17:54.400
world oil flows. Yeah. If you looked at the market, would you know? No. The market just hit

885
01:17:54.400 --> 01:17:59.200
an all time high in the US. And again, it goes back to something very unhealthy. And that is,

886
01:17:59.200 --> 01:18:03.360
there's certain elements of our economy, specifically the wealthy that have totally disassociated

887
01:18:03.920 --> 01:18:10.320
from they can't feel it. The pump. Do you feel it? No. So 50% of consumers spending the US

888
01:18:10.320 --> 01:18:15.840
is a top 10%. The top 10% don't give a shit of gas as it six bucks a gallon. It doesn't matter.

889
01:18:16.480 --> 01:18:22.160
Young poor people, lower income people spend 22% of their household income on energy.

890
01:18:22.800 --> 01:18:28.240
And when energy prices are going up, it really impacts them. So unfortunately, we begin outsourced

891
01:18:28.240 --> 01:18:33.200
the downside of war to less wealthy nations who are very oil dependent to the Gulf, which is

892
01:18:33.200 --> 01:18:39.280
incurring damage here. But America is somewhat sequestered other than reputational risk

893
01:18:39.280 --> 01:18:44.400
and who gets elected president. We're somewhat sequestered. Again, we've outsourced the

894
01:18:44.400 --> 01:18:49.760
pain to military families, to people who spend a disproportionate amount of their income,

895
01:18:49.760 --> 01:18:54.640
lower income households on energy. But it's somewhat dangerous that the most powerful people in the

896
01:18:54.640 --> 01:19:00.000
world, into a certain extent, the most powerful nation in the world, seems to be unaffected by some

897
01:19:00.000 --> 01:19:08.080
of these, by some of this. We stock certain all time high. This is something that I've made for you.

898
01:19:08.080 --> 01:19:12.480
I've realised that the Diavitio audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health.

899
01:19:12.480 --> 01:19:17.040
We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when

900
01:19:17.040 --> 01:19:23.200
you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable,

901
01:19:23.200 --> 01:19:26.720
because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards.

902
01:19:26.720 --> 01:19:32.400
The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this

903
01:19:33.040 --> 01:19:38.640
the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So,

904
01:19:38.640 --> 01:19:43.920
what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these

905
01:19:43.920 --> 01:19:49.440
1% diaries. And we've released these last year and they all sold out so. I asked my team over

906
01:19:49.440 --> 01:19:53.120
and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colours and to make some

907
01:19:53.120 --> 01:20:00.080
minor tweaks to the diaries. So now we have a better range for you. So, if you have a big goal in

908
01:20:00.080 --> 01:20:05.440
mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation that I highly recommend you get

909
01:20:05.440 --> 01:20:11.440
one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at the diary.com.

910
01:20:11.440 --> 01:20:13.360
And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.

911
01:20:14.880 --> 01:20:19.440
On this point of stocks, the average person, and telling it back into what we're saying about AI,

912
01:20:19.440 --> 01:20:23.680
because there's been this over investment in artificial intelligence technology companies.

913
01:20:23.680 --> 01:20:28.720
You said earlier, a kid in Stanford right now or anybody could raise $10, $20 million for some

914
01:20:28.720 --> 01:20:34.000
AI idea they have. And I'm seeing it everywhere. The companies are over investing in infrastructure.

915
01:20:34.000 --> 01:20:38.080
I mean, it was crazy. I think opening ID, the biggest to have a fundraise was it almost $200

916
01:20:38.080 --> 01:20:43.200
billion to build data centers on revenues of, I don't know, is it $30 billion or something?

917
01:20:43.200 --> 01:20:46.880
Yeah. Crazyness is going on in the markets. At some point, things correct.

918
01:20:46.880 --> 01:20:51.040
Oh, 100%. If you look at the greatest spends on infrastructure, when they get about two or three

919
01:20:51.040 --> 01:20:55.120
percent of GDP, there's almost always a crash afterwards. It happened in the railroads.

920
01:20:55.120 --> 01:20:59.200
It happened in electrification. It happened in the internet. It happened in the huge

921
01:20:59.200 --> 01:21:04.480
telco build out of global crossing. Now, having said that, that doesn't mean those companies don't

922
01:21:04.480 --> 01:21:08.560
come back at some point. But there's almost always a deeper correction afterwards.

923
01:21:09.520 --> 01:21:15.040
I incurred or I absolutely was on the wrong end of that dip in 2000, again in 2008.

924
01:21:15.840 --> 01:21:18.480
But if you look at the most valuable companies in the world,

925
01:21:19.440 --> 01:21:24.640
they have in a single year, all of them have had a 40 to 97 percent correction.

926
01:21:24.640 --> 01:21:32.800
Amazon went down 94 and 97 percent from 1990 to 2001. Facebook was off 72 percent in 2022.

927
01:21:32.800 --> 01:21:36.400
The difference now is if those companies go down, they're such a big part of the market.

928
01:21:36.400 --> 01:21:42.480
If they sneeze, the global economy could catch a cold. So I think the technology

929
01:21:43.840 --> 01:21:46.560
will absolutely survive. I do think it's seminal. It's breakthrough.

930
01:21:47.200 --> 01:21:50.720
But that doesn't mean that we're not going to incur a pretty massive correction from the stock

931
01:21:50.720 --> 01:21:59.040
market perspective. Also, let me catastrophize for a moment. Your generation and the majority

932
01:21:59.040 --> 01:22:02.560
of investors right now are under the impression that any breakthrough in technology

933
01:22:02.560 --> 01:22:08.240
results in a small number of companies over time that are able to use IP distribution,

934
01:22:08.960 --> 01:22:15.440
ability risk capital to sequester and capture trillions of dollars in market cap. E-commerce,

935
01:22:15.440 --> 01:22:26.560
that's Amazon, eBay, Shopify, social media, whether it's obviously meta or SNAP or YouTube or AI.

936
01:22:27.680 --> 01:22:32.800
The problem is, is that what we forget is there have been seminal technologies

937
01:22:33.520 --> 01:22:37.680
that have not necessarily resulted in any small number of companies been able to capture

938
01:22:37.680 --> 01:22:42.000
shareholder value. Let me give you some examples. If someone said to you right now, for the next

939
01:22:42.000 --> 01:22:46.640
36 months, you either have to go without AI or jet transportation. What would you pick?

940
01:22:49.120 --> 01:22:52.720
Without jet transportation or without AI. Prop plans for the next three years.

941
01:22:53.360 --> 01:23:01.680
Or AI. Okay. Hands down. Jet transportation. I use AI every day. I invest in AI.

942
01:23:01.680 --> 01:23:06.560
Jet transportation is much more important to me. I think that's skirting along the surface

943
01:23:06.560 --> 01:23:11.440
of the atmosphere at A-Tense Speed of Sound is unlocked, emotional and financial well-being across

944
01:23:11.440 --> 01:23:15.840
the world. It's an unbelievable innovation. If you added up all the shareholder value,

945
01:23:15.840 --> 01:23:20.240
the losses and the gains, the profits and the losses, right now, as we say it here now,

946
01:23:20.240 --> 01:23:24.720
the entire airline and jet manufacturing industry is a break even. It still hasn't made money.

947
01:23:24.720 --> 01:23:27.520
If you look at all the airlines that have gone out of business, if you look at the government

948
01:23:27.520 --> 01:23:31.760
subsidies of all the jet plane manufacturers, it has been a shitty business. It's a zero.

949
01:23:31.760 --> 01:23:37.040
PCs. I was on the board of Gateway Computer. I realized that's the weakest flex in the world.

950
01:23:38.880 --> 01:23:43.680
You don't know what Gateway is? I feel so old. It was this company Ted Wade who was sort of the

951
01:23:43.680 --> 01:23:47.440
Michael Delva generation figured out a way to assemble computers and I think South Dakota and

952
01:23:47.440 --> 01:23:51.440
it became this hugely valuable company. When I was on the board, it was the second largest

953
01:23:51.440 --> 01:23:55.760
computer manufacturer by volume in the world. We were ahead of Apple. We got sold for $600 million

954
01:23:55.760 --> 01:24:00.880
or maybe $760, which is what Alphabet will lose in about three trading seconds or gain today.

955
01:24:01.680 --> 01:24:05.920
No one's been able to capture a lot of money around PCs. People say Apple. Not wasn't PCs. It was the

956
01:24:05.920 --> 01:24:11.440
iPhone. Vaccines. I think vaccines are the second greatest innovation in history, only best

957
01:24:11.440 --> 01:24:15.440
by the American middle class. Millions of lives saved through vaccines.

958
01:24:16.480 --> 01:24:20.320
Modern is down 90%. There's no one company that's been able to capture

959
01:24:20.320 --> 01:24:26.240
sequester shareholder values. My thesis is that there's a one and three chance that AI becomes

960
01:24:26.240 --> 01:24:31.760
as important as vaccines, as important as jet transportation, as important as PCs. But there's

961
01:24:31.760 --> 01:24:37.360
no one or small group of companies that are able to capture shareholder value. Why is that? AI

962
01:24:38.240 --> 01:24:43.440
puts AI out of business. If you look at the convergence of the technologies, all the models

963
01:24:43.440 --> 01:24:50.320
are converging. The AI reverse engineers any feature, and basically they're all started with

964
01:24:50.320 --> 01:24:55.200
this delta. They're all converging towards the same thing. I wonder if the big winner or the

965
01:24:55.200 --> 01:25:03.280
stakeholder that wins an AI is us. We have amazing vaccines, PCs, transportation,

966
01:25:04.240 --> 01:25:08.720
but a small number of companies haven't become. We're trillions of dollars. I wonder if the same

967
01:25:08.720 --> 01:25:15.440
thing might not happen with AI, with open weight models out of China, with basically great models

968
01:25:15.440 --> 01:25:21.600
that are for free. My prediction would be to go short, the AI ecosystem from a shareholder

969
01:25:21.600 --> 01:25:27.760
standpoint or from a stakeholder standpoint, I think it's going to be great. Let me back up.

970
01:25:27.760 --> 01:25:32.000
I think a more important technology in terms of how it's going to change the world is not AI.

971
01:25:32.720 --> 01:25:38.080
Every year, I say this is my technology year. In 24, I said it was AI. 25 and 26. I've had

972
01:25:38.080 --> 01:25:43.440
the same technology that said this is more important than AI. Any guesses? Talk about this a lot.

973
01:25:43.440 --> 01:25:50.720
You would not know this technology or use it. That's a hint. Okay. Testosterone.

974
01:25:52.960 --> 01:25:58.480
Replace me. That hurts because you know I'm on it. That hurts. Okay. Okay. A Zem pack.

975
01:25:59.280 --> 01:26:04.560
Okay. GLP1. GLP1. Talk to somebody who's on GLP1 and uses AI every day and ask them which one

976
01:26:04.560 --> 01:26:09.680
they would give up. Yeah. I think GLP1, if you look at what's really going to have an impact on

977
01:26:09.680 --> 01:26:14.720
people's lives and what will create more shareholder value, I think it's GLP1 than AI. A lot of people

978
01:26:14.720 --> 01:26:19.760
much smarter than me say, you're full of shit AI. AI is going to change everything. I think

979
01:26:19.760 --> 01:26:24.320
GLP1 is more important technology than AI. My thesis is there's a one and three chance

980
01:26:24.960 --> 01:26:30.560
that AI ends up being more like vaccines than e-commerce or social and that is going to be

981
01:26:30.560 --> 01:26:35.040
impossible for a small number of companies to capture all the shareholder value they're raising money

982
01:26:35.040 --> 01:26:41.200
at. The other kind of what I'll put, you know, fun to speculate or catastrophize. If someone were to

983
01:26:41.200 --> 01:26:47.760
say the US economy crashed in the next 24 months or or valuations came down not 30%, but the

984
01:26:47.760 --> 01:26:52.240
market dropped 40 or 50%, which has happened before. I wouldn't think it's because if it's

985
01:26:52.240 --> 01:26:57.600
misadventures in the Middle East, I think there's a decent chance. If I were advising she and China

986
01:26:58.160 --> 01:27:03.120
and I saw America as a real adversary and said, we are sick of these guys messing with us,

987
01:27:03.120 --> 01:27:08.480
treating us so poorly, these ridiculous tariffs, very difficult to understand what they're

988
01:27:08.480 --> 01:27:13.120
thinking or how we deal with them. I would do what I think they're doing and that I would engage

989
01:27:13.120 --> 01:27:19.520
in modern-day steel dumping. So back, I think it was in the 80s or the 90s, China wanted to ramp up.

990
01:27:19.520 --> 01:27:23.680
They wanted to consolidate the global steel market so they began dumping cheap steel into the US

991
01:27:23.680 --> 01:27:28.560
and US steel manufacturers could not compete. And the idea was price of below market, consolidate

992
01:27:28.560 --> 01:27:32.160
the market and then get margin power. That's basically what Amazon and Netflix have done. They've

993
01:27:32.160 --> 01:27:36.880
sold you a dollar with a goods for 80 cents until they wrapped up the market then they started raising

994
01:27:36.880 --> 01:27:42.320
prices. I think China is beginning to engage in what I'll call AI dumping and that is they're

995
01:27:42.320 --> 01:27:47.120
going to have a series of open-weight models. About a third of corporations now are supposedly using

996
01:27:47.120 --> 01:27:52.640
Chinese lightweight open-weight models that are cheaper. If I were Xi, I would just dump cheap AI

997
01:27:52.640 --> 01:27:57.360
into the US market. In the moment, large corporations start announcing they're not engaging these

998
01:27:57.360 --> 01:28:02.480
multi-million dollar site licenses with anthropic or open AI. They're using these inexpensive Chinese

999
01:28:02.480 --> 01:28:07.840
models and the market realizes that there's no way they can justify these incredible valuations.

1000
01:28:07.840 --> 01:28:14.560
I think the US market crashes because 40% of the S&P now is directly or tangentially related to

1001
01:28:14.640 --> 01:28:19.680
this giant bet America is making on AI. The majority of GDP growth over the last two years

1002
01:28:19.680 --> 01:28:25.360
has come from AI CapEx. If that slows down, we're immediately in recession. That's such an

1003
01:28:25.360 --> 01:28:28.560
interesting idea that if you're sat in China as a leader now, you go, do you know what,

1004
01:28:28.560 --> 01:28:33.440
give Americans cheap AI and you'll kneecap their economy. 100%. That's what I would do.

1005
01:28:34.640 --> 01:28:40.000
It doesn't make sense. It makes a lot of sense. I've heard a lot of founders get quite scared

1006
01:28:40.000 --> 01:28:44.560
that there will be an economic crash in the next 12 or 24 months because of the over-investment

1007
01:28:44.560 --> 01:28:49.200
in AI. Investors are going to start to realize that the returns just aren't there for a lot of

1008
01:28:49.200 --> 01:28:54.240
these companies that have raised at 100 million valuation that on an idea and so the market will

1009
01:28:54.240 --> 01:28:58.960
contract. If the market does contract, what does history tell us that the individual should do?

1010
01:28:58.960 --> 01:29:02.640
The person listening, they're not the average person in such a market because they're going to

1011
01:29:02.640 --> 01:29:07.600
be laid off. If all this investor money suddenly contracts, investors go risk off. They might be

1012
01:29:07.680 --> 01:29:12.960
laid off. Well, again, so Jamie Diamond was asked, what is the definition of a recession,

1013
01:29:12.960 --> 01:29:18.160
and he said something that happens every seven years. Your generation isn't used to a recession.

1014
01:29:18.160 --> 01:29:23.760
No. I was on the board of the New York Times and within like 60 days, 70% of our revenues went away.

1015
01:29:24.480 --> 01:29:30.240
2008, the credit crisis, advertisers, 70-80% of the New York Times revenue was advertising.

1016
01:29:31.200 --> 01:29:36.000
In May, we're doing X million in revenue, and then you joined the board, amen.

1017
01:29:37.520 --> 01:29:40.240
No, I think I joined the board. I joined them one day because it's exactly the wrong time.

1018
01:29:40.240 --> 01:29:42.800
I raised a quick story. I raised 600 million to become the largest

1019
01:29:42.800 --> 01:29:45.520
child in the New York Times and overnight, I turned it into 200 million.

1020
01:29:48.560 --> 01:29:53.280
That was a learning experience for me. Anyways, just about the time I started having kids,

1021
01:29:53.280 --> 01:29:59.600
God, that was stressful. Anyway, they basically within 60 days lost 70% of their out of revenue,

1022
01:29:59.600 --> 01:30:04.000
and we had to go and find a Mexican billionaire to basically call some to bail us out.

1023
01:30:04.800 --> 01:30:07.120
Your generation really doesn't know what a recession looks like.

1024
01:30:08.160 --> 01:30:14.000
Everything stops. Imagine 70% of your subscription and advertising revenue from one month to one

1025
01:30:14.000 --> 01:30:19.040
month declines. What would that do to your business? You'd have to consider letting people go,

1026
01:30:19.040 --> 01:30:23.520
and you'd have to cut costs. But here's the thing, to a certain extent, it's healthy.

1027
01:30:24.320 --> 01:30:29.840
You start developing all these fatty deposits, and the best time to start a business is

1028
01:30:29.840 --> 01:30:34.240
coming out of a recession, because people are cheaper, things are cheaper, people have a new way

1029
01:30:34.240 --> 01:30:40.240
of looking at stuff, and also for your generation. People don't realize, I mean, quite frankly,

1030
01:30:40.240 --> 01:30:45.280
if I'm a 28-year-old who's talented and doesn't have kids and dogs yet, I think a recession that

1031
01:30:45.280 --> 01:30:49.360
takes down the asset prices might not be the worst thing in the world that happens to your generation.

1032
01:30:50.160 --> 01:30:57.840
Because when O8 crashed, when there was the crash of O8, we let the banks fail. We bailed out the

1033
01:30:57.840 --> 01:31:01.840
banks, but we didn't bail out the economy, and I was coming into my primary converting years.

1034
01:31:01.840 --> 01:31:06.880
It was in my early 40s, and I was still lucky enough and talented enough to make good money.

1035
01:31:07.520 --> 01:31:12.400
So what did I get in 2009? Amazon Apple and Netflix for 8, 10, and 12 bucks a share.

1036
01:31:12.960 --> 01:31:19.520
Those companies have 20x'd. We don't let anything fail, though. We bail out the markets.

1037
01:31:20.160 --> 01:31:25.520
Where do you and your colleagues find value? What's cheap right now? Where do you find value?

1038
01:31:25.520 --> 01:31:29.840
And here's the thing. There's two parts of your life from a financial standpoint.

1039
01:31:29.840 --> 01:31:34.160
There's investing, part of your life, and there's harvesting. You're in the investing part of your

1040
01:31:34.160 --> 01:31:40.960
life. There's a certain advantage to getting to invest when asset prices are low.

1041
01:31:42.000 --> 01:31:46.720
There's nowhere for you to find value. I'm pretty comfortable saying Apple and video aren't

1042
01:31:46.720 --> 01:31:53.600
going to 20x from here. Where do you find value? Real estate? What Brooklyn is $3,000 a square

1043
01:31:53.600 --> 01:31:59.280
foot? So while you're in the investing part of your life and you can survive a bit of a shock,

1044
01:32:00.000 --> 01:32:05.120
I don't know if quite frankly, a good thing to happen for your generation wouldn't be a correction

1045
01:32:05.840 --> 01:32:11.440
in asset prices because the economy has an unbelievable malleability and resilience to reform,

1046
01:32:11.440 --> 01:32:16.880
reshape, and come back. Recessions usually don't last longer than 18, 24, 36 months.

1047
01:32:17.680 --> 01:32:22.960
And I think a correction in asset values would be good. But what we decided, the leadership of

1048
01:32:22.960 --> 01:32:27.520
my generation has decided we'd rather pull out your credit card and artificially prop up the

1049
01:32:27.520 --> 01:32:32.640
markets through deficit spending or bailouts. They're talking, we mentioned Spirit Airlines.

1050
01:32:32.640 --> 01:32:38.560
They're talking about a $500 million government loan to Spirit Airlines to bail them out.

1051
01:32:39.200 --> 01:32:46.480
That's nothing but you transferring money to me. Because who owns shares in Spirit? People my age.

1052
01:32:47.280 --> 01:32:53.360
Who's trying to buy shit for cheap people your age? It should be allowed to go out of business.

1053
01:32:53.360 --> 01:32:57.600
It should decline in price. Asset value should go down. When we bailed out

1054
01:32:58.480 --> 01:33:02.880
every baby boomer owner of a restaurant or a small business in COVID, that just robbed

1055
01:33:02.880 --> 01:33:08.480
opportunity from the new graduate of a culinary academy who wanted her shot to go buy a restaurant

1056
01:33:08.480 --> 01:33:13.440
for pennies on the dollar. Everyone in my generation has had those asset dips where if you were

1057
01:33:13.440 --> 01:33:17.520
resilient and coming into your prime income earning years, you could buy assets for a lower price.

1058
01:33:18.160 --> 01:33:22.800
We've decided that the government is here to bail my generation out and smooth out.

1059
01:33:23.360 --> 01:33:28.000
Our assets make sure that our assets never go down by too much. All that does is rob

1060
01:33:28.000 --> 01:33:32.240
opportunity from your generation. You wrote this book, The Anvil to Proof Well for simple formula

1061
01:33:32.240 --> 01:33:37.120
for success. Brilliant, brilliant book. Linking to what you were just saying there.

1062
01:33:37.840 --> 01:33:41.280
Where are you investing now? If you're a young person that's trying to defend your money or

1063
01:33:41.280 --> 01:33:44.800
just really anybody at any age that's trying to find a place to put your money where you'll make a

1064
01:33:44.800 --> 01:33:48.720
return, I guess there's actually two questions here which is the investing part and they're like,

1065
01:33:48.720 --> 01:33:52.640
how do I set myself up just to make more money? Especially if there's going to be an

1066
01:33:52.640 --> 01:33:57.440
economic collapse, things might get a little bit uncertain. I think I heard you say before that

1067
01:33:57.440 --> 01:34:01.280
less people are leaving their jobs. It's harder for entry-level people to get into

1068
01:34:01.280 --> 01:34:06.240
to newer roles potentially at the moment. So in such a world where there is uncertainty and I

1069
01:34:06.240 --> 01:34:11.920
want to make sure that I don't go broke. I have $10,000 let's say and I want to make sure I increase

1070
01:34:11.920 --> 01:34:16.480
my earning potential. What's one's advice for those dual strategies? Well, I'll tell you what I'm

1071
01:34:16.560 --> 01:34:21.600
doing. So in it's different. I'm at a point where I'm not looking to go rich. I'm looking to

1072
01:34:21.600 --> 01:34:26.960
not get poor. So I just diversify like crazy. I don't invest more than 3% of my net worth in

1073
01:34:26.960 --> 01:34:32.480
any one thing. And I'm diversifying out of the US market in the Latin America and European markets

1074
01:34:32.480 --> 01:34:37.360
because the reality is nobody knows. The only kevlar against the unknown which is everywhere

1075
01:34:37.360 --> 01:34:43.840
is diversification. Now a younger person can take more risks. Where am I doing? I'm diversifying

1076
01:34:43.840 --> 01:34:48.320
and I'm investing in Pokemon because I do it with my son and he loves it and I think collectibles

1077
01:34:48.320 --> 01:34:51.840
are actually the only place where there's value right now. Everything to me just looks crazy

1078
01:34:51.840 --> 01:34:55.600
over value. I look at everything and think that's going to get cut in half. Oh, that's going to get

1079
01:34:55.600 --> 01:35:00.240
cut out. But you always want to be in the market. It's very hard to be a stock picker. So if you're

1080
01:35:00.240 --> 01:35:05.840
your age, you're a talented entrepreneur. You're investing in yourself. There's no ROI like finding

1081
01:35:05.840 --> 01:35:11.040
a business you're good at, trying to invest and working your ass off. That's how you get wealthy in

1082
01:35:11.360 --> 01:35:15.840
this for young people in this generation or you find a company that's going fast. You do well

1083
01:35:15.840 --> 01:35:21.280
there. You get stock options. But the key is to make sure that a certain amount of your income

1084
01:35:21.280 --> 01:35:26.880
never comes into your hands. People your age can't save money. If they get $100, they'll spend 105.

1085
01:35:26.880 --> 01:35:32.160
So the key is to find every matching program or every vehicle or hack to make sure you never see

1086
01:35:32.160 --> 01:35:37.680
the money. And from an early age, it goes into low-cost index funds. Take 30% of your capital

1087
01:35:38.320 --> 01:35:42.800
and have fun with it by the video, whatever you want. Do you think you're smarter than everyone

1088
01:35:42.800 --> 01:35:47.840
else? And then you're going to find out you're not in the market outperforms you. But how do you

1089
01:35:47.840 --> 01:35:54.000
get rich? The only answer I have is slowly. And that is figure out a way to make sure that money

1090
01:35:54.000 --> 01:36:01.360
every month is invested in low-cost index funds. In terms of trying to pick the next big thing,

1091
01:36:02.240 --> 01:36:07.520
oh, Christ, your guess is as good as mine. I just don't. And anyone who tells you they know doesn't

1092
01:36:07.520 --> 01:36:12.560
know. So I know how to get your rich. That's a good news. The bad news is the answer is slowly

1093
01:36:12.560 --> 01:36:17.200
and it requires some discipline. But people your age just find out a way to start saving when you're

1094
01:36:17.200 --> 01:36:23.360
a teenager, $25 a month, ending your 20s, $100, and $500, and a thousand. And regardless of whether

1095
01:36:23.360 --> 01:36:28.000
you have a platinum record or a best selling book or a podcast empire, you're going to be fine.

1096
01:36:28.960 --> 01:36:34.560
But I don't. I can't look at a sector and say, oh, it's AI. AI is overvalued right now. I don't

1097
01:36:34.560 --> 01:36:38.720
know. Your job is to find something you're good at to focus, such that you can be great at something,

1098
01:36:38.720 --> 01:36:44.480
which commands margin, to show some discipline, save some money, to diversify like crazy,

1099
01:36:44.480 --> 01:36:49.360
and then to let time take over. Because I look at you and I think, oh, I'm like, Steven,

1100
01:36:49.360 --> 01:36:53.120
I'm a young entrepreneur. And then I look at the mirror and I'm like, fuck. And I'm like, oh my god,

1101
01:36:53.120 --> 01:37:00.080
I'm five years from death. It goes, but it happened in a blink. So take advantage of that.

1102
01:37:00.080 --> 01:37:04.000
Because if I gave you a magic box and said, if you put, like, you're making real money now,

1103
01:37:04.480 --> 01:37:09.040
if you put $100,000 in a box, by the time you're my age, it's going to be worth a million bucks.

1104
01:37:09.680 --> 01:37:16.880
And imagine that that that that box is like a second, 100,000 in a second, it's a million dollars.

1105
01:37:17.600 --> 01:37:21.520
This to this feels like a second. So how much money would you put in that box?

1106
01:37:22.480 --> 01:37:28.160
So the moment you have some capital, just think about trying to, at a young age,

1107
01:37:28.160 --> 01:37:33.760
show some discipline and put some money in that box. Because it just compound interest

1108
01:37:34.640 --> 01:37:39.760
is just it's staggering the power of it. But trying to predict where you should invest other

1109
01:37:39.760 --> 01:37:44.080
than investing in yourself, additional skills, certifications, investing in relationships,

1110
01:37:44.080 --> 01:37:48.640
trying to do as many nice kind things for other people. I think that compounds,

1111
01:37:48.640 --> 01:37:52.480
especially when you're younger, people remember people who helped them when they were younger and

1112
01:37:52.480 --> 01:37:58.400
maybe not that powerful. Imagine you're very low. The person who gave you $5,000, do you resent

1113
01:37:58.400 --> 01:38:02.560
the money they make? They made? No. I actually emailed them this weekend. It's called Alistair

1114
01:38:02.560 --> 01:38:06.960
thanking him again, sent him a big letter because that person took a chance on you.

1115
01:38:06.960 --> 01:38:10.480
I was just trying to make a kindness there, right? It wasn't even the 5,000. It was that a smart

1116
01:38:10.480 --> 01:38:13.600
person said, I believe in you. I believe in you. And that meant that I could go over to my mother

1117
01:38:13.600 --> 01:38:16.880
who was ignoring me and saying, look, the smart person believed in me. And therefore it made me

1118
01:38:16.880 --> 01:38:20.160
believe in myself. That's really the investment they made. That's everything. And they took a chance

1119
01:38:20.160 --> 01:38:24.480
and that probably was, they wanted a return, but what they wanted to do was help out a young man.

1120
01:38:24.480 --> 01:38:28.960
If those people, your opportunity to make those investments as a young person, whether it's helping

1121
01:38:28.960 --> 01:38:34.160
someone get a job, being kind, a kind word, a context, telling them how impressive they are,

1122
01:38:34.160 --> 01:38:40.160
whatever it might be, that stuff. It's like investing. It compounds and you wake up at 50

1123
01:38:40.800 --> 01:38:46.960
and you find those relationships are really powerful assets. So look, I don't have a silver

1124
01:38:46.960 --> 01:38:52.800
bullet here. Save money, diversify, compound interest, invest in relationships early, those

1125
01:38:52.800 --> 01:38:57.680
compound too. Well, the most important decisions you made that resulted in the biggest sort of

1126
01:38:57.680 --> 01:39:02.000
wealth upside for you. And they could be any kind of decision. It's not like I invested in this,

1127
01:39:02.000 --> 01:39:06.400
but just I don't know, philosophy and mentality and approach that when you look back on your

1128
01:39:06.400 --> 01:39:12.560
career, you go, it was that. That was the biggest step change in my money. Well, my superpower is,

1129
01:39:13.600 --> 01:39:18.960
I've gotten shot in the face a couple times personally and professionally and I mourn and I get up

1130
01:39:18.960 --> 01:39:22.960
and I go try and raise money again and start another company. I had an e-commerce incubator.

1131
01:39:22.960 --> 01:39:26.960
It was basically out of business six months from starting it. My e-commerce company that went

1132
01:39:26.960 --> 01:39:31.760
public in 2002 went through restructuring, which is a fan who worked for bankruptcy in 2008.

1133
01:39:32.480 --> 01:39:36.160
I started a video delivery company that went out of business. So I mean,

1134
01:39:37.440 --> 01:39:42.560
you know, people talk about their successes. I think, generously, I'm sort of like three, four

1135
01:39:42.560 --> 01:39:47.920
and two. I've had more losses than wins. Every time I've been rejected from a school,

1136
01:39:49.040 --> 01:39:55.040
I had my affections were returned from a potential romantic partner. I got fired. I had a company

1137
01:39:55.040 --> 01:39:59.280
go out of business. I had investment. I've always been able and I think this is a key skill. I think

1138
01:39:59.280 --> 01:40:04.400
you have to do whatever you need to do, whether it's be around people who care about you, exercise.

1139
01:40:04.400 --> 01:40:09.600
You have to be able to stand in front of a metaphorical mirror and go, I can add a lot of value

1140
01:40:09.600 --> 01:40:14.640
to a company. I can raise money again and start a business if I need to. I can make someone really

1141
01:40:14.640 --> 01:40:23.600
happy. That's been my superpower. So the seminal moment in my professional success was a willingness

1142
01:40:23.600 --> 01:40:27.360
to say, okay, I just got shot in the face. The whole world says I'm a failure because my business,

1143
01:40:27.360 --> 01:40:30.320
I raised a ton of money and I had to call my investors and say we're shutting down. That's

1144
01:40:30.320 --> 01:40:35.040
humiliating. It's public failure. I mourn and then I go out and I raise more money and try

1145
01:40:35.040 --> 01:40:40.080
another company because only one in seven businesses succeed. So I started nine.

1146
01:40:41.600 --> 01:40:46.320
And I knew at some point, if you work hard enough, I mean, you can't guarantee success, but so much of

1147
01:40:46.320 --> 01:40:51.200
it is out of your control. You just want to step up to the plate as many times as possible. You want

1148
01:40:51.200 --> 01:40:55.120
to have a great swing. You want to be in shape. You want to be a good person. But a lot of it is

1149
01:40:55.120 --> 01:41:00.640
resilience. I have a lot of really talented friends who came up through the alternative investments

1150
01:41:00.640 --> 01:41:06.640
community. Masters of the universe making one, two, three million bucks a year working for hedge funds

1151
01:41:06.640 --> 01:41:11.040
in the nineties and the odds. And then they went out on their own raised a bunch of money,

1152
01:41:11.040 --> 01:41:16.560
hit some bumps and then close their funds or they had a business. I have friends who are entrepreneurs

1153
01:41:16.560 --> 01:41:24.000
who left a good job and started a business and they get stuck. These are people who've never known

1154
01:41:24.080 --> 01:41:30.400
anything but success. They got into an Ivy League school. They got a great job. Everything has been

1155
01:41:30.400 --> 01:41:38.080
this. And then they hit a failure and they just get they lose their mojo. They just get stuck.

1156
01:41:38.080 --> 01:41:41.760
They can't get over it. They lose the confidence to go out and raise more money.

1157
01:41:42.640 --> 01:41:49.440
And that's the key. The key to success is getting shot in the face and then just getting up again.

1158
01:41:49.440 --> 01:41:56.080
I'm 30 years old. How do you score? I'm 61. You're actually 61. No, I'm lying. Yeah, I'm 61.

1159
01:41:56.080 --> 01:42:00.080
It's the test asked around therapy. No, I thought I didn't think you were 61. I appreciate that.

1160
01:42:00.080 --> 01:42:05.760
I thought you were 62 on November. If you'd said to me anywhere between

1161
01:42:07.120 --> 01:42:15.040
49 and 61, I think I would have believed you. So I'm sorry, let me take that out. I'm 49.

1162
01:42:15.120 --> 01:42:22.640
What is it that you're 61. I'm 33. What is it that I don't know as a 30 year old that I'm going

1163
01:42:22.640 --> 01:42:27.520
to find out in the next 30 years that I should know? What is the most important thing that I

1164
01:42:27.520 --> 01:42:33.280
should know about the next 30 years? Nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems. You've raised a

1165
01:42:33.280 --> 01:42:42.000
ton of money. You're on fire right now. Be humble because a lot of this is now is out of your control.

1166
01:42:42.000 --> 01:42:46.240
If there's AI dumping in the US or this war gets out of control and the market shuts down,

1167
01:42:47.520 --> 01:42:52.240
this goes away. Yeah. And it's not your fault, but nor is your success.

1168
01:42:53.200 --> 01:42:58.160
So when things are going really well, be really humble and invest a lot of other people and realize

1169
01:42:59.120 --> 01:43:03.840
be careful not to believe your own press. In 1999, my company was going public. I was looking at

1170
01:43:03.840 --> 01:43:09.680
Jats. I just thought I was a man. It was very kind to my ex-wife. I really thought a lot of

1171
01:43:09.680 --> 01:43:17.840
myself. And I credited my character, my grip, for my success without crediting enough to

1172
01:43:17.840 --> 01:43:23.200
how lucky I was that I was in the right place at the right time. So be humble when you're successful.

1173
01:43:23.200 --> 01:43:29.680
At the same time, when you fail, and I failed a lot, realize a lot of that is in your fault too.

1174
01:43:29.680 --> 01:43:35.040
And forgive yourself and move on. So a lot of your success and a lot of your failures in your

1175
01:43:36.000 --> 01:43:40.160
fault. And when you look back on your life, when you look back on the biggest disappointments,

1176
01:43:40.160 --> 01:43:43.600
in my senses, I don't know much about you, but my senses, you haven't had a lot of tragedy or

1177
01:43:43.600 --> 01:43:46.320
real disappointment, at least professionally. It feels like it's been upward for you.

1178
01:43:47.360 --> 01:43:51.440
When you look back on the most disappointing things that happened to you in this decade,

1179
01:43:52.160 --> 01:43:55.360
you're not going to be disappointed about the thing that happened. You're going to be disappointed

1180
01:43:55.360 --> 01:44:02.480
about how upset you were. So forgive yourself and realize this will pass. Because at the end of

1181
01:44:02.480 --> 01:44:09.600
life, people wish they'd allowed themselves to be happier. They think I wish I had not beat myself

1182
01:44:09.600 --> 01:44:16.240
up over that breakup, over that loss of job, over that loss of money. They're upset about how upset

1183
01:44:16.240 --> 01:44:19.680
they were, not about what actually happened. So nothing's ever as good as bad as it seems.

1184
01:44:20.800 --> 01:44:27.440
And to really try and embrace, and I didn't do this, embrace relationships.

1185
01:44:28.080 --> 01:44:33.600
And that is, I got on a hamster wheel. I just never had enough money. I was my whole identity

1186
01:44:33.600 --> 01:44:39.200
was professional. And from the age of 25 to 45, I don't think I established many healthy

1187
01:44:39.200 --> 01:44:43.360
relationships. I just didn't invest in them. I was always good with friends. I was staying in

1188
01:44:43.360 --> 01:44:49.840
contact, but I kind of woke up in my early 40s. I just decided I wanted to move to New York

1189
01:44:50.480 --> 01:44:55.920
and not have any obligations. I got divorced. I didn't say left my friends, but I didn't

1190
01:44:55.920 --> 01:45:00.400
have money. I was living like a caveman, just occasionally leaving for food or alcohol or a good

1191
01:45:00.400 --> 01:45:05.840
time. And I liked having absolutely no obligations and no connection to anybody. I actually enjoyed it.

1192
01:45:06.400 --> 01:45:10.480
And then I realized I started reading a lot of literature on happiness and longevity. And I

1193
01:45:10.480 --> 01:45:16.080
realized if I do this, I'll be dead of 55. Because I don't have any connection to anybody. And so I started

1194
01:45:16.080 --> 01:45:23.440
investing in relationships, started making an effort to reinvigorate friendships, really started

1195
01:45:23.440 --> 01:45:28.080
to think about thoughtfully about I want to be around people a lot more. I was becoming very

1196
01:45:28.080 --> 01:45:32.880
much an introvert and isolated. I mean, and I was like a poorer version of Howard Hughes at some

1197
01:45:32.880 --> 01:45:39.280
point. But so I would say really focus on as much as you can, relationships and investing in them,

1198
01:45:40.400 --> 01:45:46.320
in your 30s. I mean, it's super rewarding or pays off. But more than anything, just forgive yourself.

1199
01:45:46.320 --> 01:45:53.120
I'm becoming that. Well, look, I didn't want to have kids. And I think you can be happy without

1200
01:45:53.120 --> 01:46:00.000
kids. I kind of got forced into it. I was with someone who much higher character, much more attractive

1201
01:46:00.000 --> 01:46:04.240
than me. And she decided she wanted that kids. And I said, I'm never getting married again. And she's

1202
01:46:04.240 --> 01:46:11.120
called my bluff and said, we don't have to be married. Something else. Anyways, so I didn't want kids.

1203
01:46:12.480 --> 01:46:17.120
But now, and this goes back to purpose, everyone talks about finding a purpose in the way I

1204
01:46:17.120 --> 01:46:20.960
approached life, which was really screwed up, as I approached you from a capitalist standpoint.

1205
01:46:20.960 --> 01:46:24.720
I want more out of this friendship than I'm getting. I want more out of this investment than I

1206
01:46:24.720 --> 01:46:29.200
invested. I want to pay this employee less than the value they're creating. I saw everything

1207
01:46:29.200 --> 01:46:34.480
as a transaction that I wanted to be on the right set of. And what I figured out is that finding

1208
01:46:34.480 --> 01:46:41.440
your purpose is finding that thing that you can never get a real positive return on. What do I mean

1209
01:46:41.440 --> 01:46:46.960
by that? I will never get a positive return from my children. There's, they're never going to be

1210
01:46:46.960 --> 01:46:53.120
up at 2 a.m. worried about me. They are costing me so much money. I don't care how nice the

1211
01:46:53.120 --> 01:46:58.080
senior home is that I'm putting them in. The amount of love, concern, and anxiety I feel over my

1212
01:46:58.080 --> 01:47:05.680
boys, it would be almost impossible for them to return that. And that's the point. I finally have

1213
01:47:05.680 --> 01:47:11.280
something where I feel like that sense of purpose. The most loyal, proud Americans are veterans,

1214
01:47:11.280 --> 01:47:15.760
because there's no way American really pay them back for leaving their families and risking their

1215
01:47:15.760 --> 01:47:20.400
person. That's an unparalleled investment. They'll never get that investment back. But what

1216
01:47:20.400 --> 01:47:25.600
they get back is purpose. And I didn't realize that finding something you were so passionate about,

1217
01:47:25.600 --> 01:47:31.760
whether it was a nonprofit or saving dogs from kill shelters or getting involved in a woman's

1218
01:47:31.760 --> 01:47:36.800
right to have bodily autonomy where you give so much that there's just no way you'll ever really

1219
01:47:36.800 --> 01:47:42.160
get at the kind of tangible ROI. And what I realized is when you find that, that's your purpose.

1220
01:47:42.960 --> 01:47:49.760
And I didn't realize that. So having kids for me has given me purpose. I enjoy it,

1221
01:47:49.760 --> 01:47:55.120
but that's my thing now. I realized that's my job as to over invest. It's not to measure it

1222
01:47:55.120 --> 01:48:00.080
because I'm just not going to get that back. So for me, having kids has been my purpose.

1223
01:48:00.080 --> 01:48:05.520
Also, building something with a partner is really rewarding. It's like you travel a lot.

1224
01:48:06.320 --> 01:48:09.840
In evidently, I know this happens to you. I always get upgraded to the presidential suite when

1225
01:48:09.840 --> 01:48:15.200
I'm alone. And it's like it doesn't happen. If you don't have someone to share with, it doesn't

1226
01:48:15.200 --> 01:48:20.080
happen. And the most rewarding businesses, the most rewarding things in my life have been when

1227
01:48:20.080 --> 01:48:24.800
you build something with a co-founder or you build something with a partner. And when you have kids

1228
01:48:24.800 --> 01:48:30.080
who go up and down in terms of their health and well-being and they end up being good kids,

1229
01:48:30.080 --> 01:48:35.920
which my kids are, and you've built that with somebody, that's immensely rewarding. It's like

1230
01:48:36.000 --> 01:48:39.920
the most rewarding businesses I've ever had have been with co-founders where we build something

1231
01:48:39.920 --> 01:48:45.040
together and it pays off. It's just so rewarding. And when you don't build something with someone

1232
01:48:45.040 --> 01:48:50.160
else, when you build it on your own, it's like getting upgraded without anyone there. It's like

1233
01:48:50.160 --> 01:48:56.400
you didn't have a safe, a safe tree. So when I tell any man, there's never a good time to have

1234
01:48:56.400 --> 01:49:01.200
kids. You want to be somewhat financially stable. That was my problem. The biggest source of

1235
01:49:01.200 --> 01:49:07.840
stress in my life was when I had kids in OA when I went broke. I was hugely stressful. And I think

1236
01:49:07.840 --> 01:49:11.680
you want to make sure you have not only a partner or a committee, but I didn't realize how important

1237
01:49:11.680 --> 01:49:16.000
confidence was in a partner. Because once you have kids, it's like operating a pans or tank

1238
01:49:16.000 --> 01:49:20.800
division. There's a lot of moving parts and you have to have a competent partner. But I think if

1239
01:49:20.800 --> 01:49:25.840
you're economically somewhat secure and you have a competent partner, for me, I'm not going to

1240
01:49:26.480 --> 01:49:31.840
tell anyone what to do. Having kids has given me my purpose, hands down the most rewarding thing

1241
01:49:31.840 --> 01:49:35.920
I will ever do. That is the last thing I will think about when I die.

1242
01:49:36.640 --> 01:49:41.760
I see so much emotion in you when you talk about it. Your eyes are filled with tears as you

1243
01:49:41.760 --> 01:49:45.600
start talking about your boys. Because I know a lot about you because I've interviewed you a

1244
01:49:45.600 --> 01:49:49.920
couple of times, now I've read your books and so on. And I find that fascinating because I don't

1245
01:49:49.920 --> 01:49:53.760
know what it is. I don't know where that emotion comes from because a lot of people sit here and

1246
01:49:53.760 --> 01:49:57.840
talk about the kids. But the minute you started mentioning them and the impact they've had on

1247
01:49:57.840 --> 01:50:01.200
you in terms of helping you find your purpose, I could see the emotion in your eyes.

1248
01:50:01.920 --> 01:50:09.280
Well, there's some things that surprised me. One, I didn't fall in love with my kids.

1249
01:50:09.280 --> 01:50:14.320
I didn't love my kids when they first came out into the world. I felt a sense of responsibility

1250
01:50:14.320 --> 01:50:19.600
and anxiety. I did not like having babies. I was able to be selfish up at that point. I didn't

1251
01:50:19.600 --> 01:50:24.720
feel this immense level of love and support that you were supposed to. I fell in love with my

1252
01:50:24.720 --> 01:50:34.160
boys. I was a slow incremental thing. For me, and I think everyone's a little bit different.

1253
01:50:34.800 --> 01:50:41.120
The reason I'm just fascinated and obsessed with my older one is he's me. I look at him,

1254
01:50:42.000 --> 01:50:50.000
you know, the bad skinny had in his junior year, it's scrawny six foot one 130 pounds. The way he

1255
01:50:50.000 --> 01:50:56.000
laughs, I'm like, when I hug him, I'm hugging me at 17 or 18. It's like so rewarding. And that's

1256
01:50:56.000 --> 01:51:02.480
why I love him so much. My second is a different species than me. I observe him with fascination

1257
01:51:02.480 --> 01:51:08.160
because I can't get over the fact that I made that because he is so different than me. So I'm

1258
01:51:08.160 --> 01:51:15.520
fascinated by him in just such a different way, right? My oldest is a pleaser. Used to come into

1259
01:51:15.520 --> 01:51:20.080
the bedroom on a Sunday and get in bed with us and then stand up and say, let's make a plan.

1260
01:51:20.080 --> 01:51:24.880
And I'm like, where are the cameras? This is like a hall, this is like a backyard hallmarked film,

1261
01:51:24.880 --> 01:51:29.520
right? My youngest is a terrorist assessing the household for vulnerabilities so we can strike

1262
01:51:29.520 --> 01:51:34.160
when we're at our weakest. The only thing, one recommendation I make to anyone who has a kid

1263
01:51:34.160 --> 01:51:38.720
have two because it's fascinating. The only thing I can guarantee when I meet someone with one

1264
01:51:38.720 --> 01:51:44.800
kid, I'm like, okay, the only thing I know about the second is it will be entirely different.

1265
01:51:45.520 --> 01:51:51.520
If you want to believe in nature over nurture, have two kids because they just could not be more

1266
01:51:51.520 --> 01:51:57.440
different and it's fascinating. We just haven't treated our boys differently. We just have

1267
01:51:57.440 --> 01:52:02.320
in birth order, whatever. There's something in the batter. First lady Obama, Michelle Obama said

1268
01:52:02.320 --> 01:52:07.680
something to really struck with me. She said, they come to you. You know, I forget, I think you've

1269
01:52:07.680 --> 01:52:14.160
had that guy on, the child psychologist guy. We think we're engineers and that we get to make

1270
01:52:14.160 --> 01:52:18.320
the sheep. We know we're shepherds. We get to point them in the right direction. We get to pick

1271
01:52:18.320 --> 01:52:24.240
what food they have, but they come to you. Oh my god, I've seen that and I like to think,

1272
01:52:24.960 --> 01:52:29.680
I always thought that my kids were going to be super into World War II movies and CrossFit

1273
01:52:29.760 --> 01:52:33.040
because that's what dad is into and they just want to hang out with me. No, no, no. The reason I'm

1274
01:52:33.040 --> 01:52:38.080
up at night looking at Pokemon cards is because my kid is interested in it and what you realize as a

1275
01:52:38.080 --> 01:52:43.120
dad is if you want to be a good dad, you have to lean into their interests. I'm not fascinated by

1276
01:52:43.120 --> 01:52:47.760
Pokemon. That's not something I will do once my kid is out of the house, but what you realize is

1277
01:52:47.760 --> 01:52:53.360
you have to engage in their interests and get into it. It took me a while because I was very selfish

1278
01:52:54.320 --> 01:52:59.360
to fully embrace that. I hated giving up my weekends. I'd like to have a fabulous brunch

1279
01:52:59.680 --> 01:53:04.160
with interesting people. I liked going to St. Parts. All that went away and I resented it for a while

1280
01:53:05.040 --> 01:53:09.680
and then there's a certain ease and relaxation that overwhelms who we were like, I'm not trying to

1281
01:53:09.680 --> 01:53:13.200
be fabulous. I know what I'm doing this weekend. I'm going to some lame birthday party for four

1282
01:53:13.200 --> 01:53:18.160
year olds and I'm taking my kid to the soccer game and there's a certain ease about it that's

1283
01:53:18.160 --> 01:53:24.160
relaxing and liberating, building something with somebody, seeing the way they evolve is just

1284
01:53:24.160 --> 01:53:31.280
fascinating, just fascinating. The things they start asking you and you find your purpose. I

1285
01:53:31.280 --> 01:53:35.920
would recommend it to anybody, but I also want to be clear. It's not one size fits all. Some people

1286
01:53:35.920 --> 01:53:39.760
can be very happy not having it. So many of the themes we talked about today, especially at the

1287
01:53:39.760 --> 01:53:43.680
end of this conversation are in your new book, Notes on Being a Man, How to Adjust the

1288
01:53:43.680 --> 01:53:48.080
Masculinity Crisis, Build Mental Strength and Raise Good Signs. I've had so many of my friends,

1289
01:53:48.080 --> 01:53:52.160
actually both men and women, talked to me about this book because I think so many of us have been

1290
01:53:52.160 --> 01:53:58.480
looking for a roadmap on exactly these subjects. Notes on Being a Man. Some of the themes are here

1291
01:53:58.480 --> 01:54:03.440
on the back about being kind, about being a good dad and how what that means, but a lot of the stuff

1292
01:54:03.440 --> 01:54:06.800
you say about getting out the house and really attacking the world and who one should become in such a

1293
01:54:06.800 --> 01:54:11.280
world. So I highly recommend anybody who's raising something, who is a son, who is a father, or just

1294
01:54:11.280 --> 01:54:15.360
wants to understand what it is to be a good man in the modern world gets this book and I'm going to

1295
01:54:15.360 --> 01:54:20.960
link it below. Thank you. It's been such a smash hit and it's really rare that some of my close

1296
01:54:20.960 --> 01:54:25.600
friends will send me messages thinking about one particular friend about this book. I think it's

1297
01:54:25.600 --> 01:54:29.200
a testament to the impact it's having on the world. So thank you for writing this. I know you took a

1298
01:54:29.200 --> 01:54:33.360
long time to write this book because we talked about it a couple of times when we had conversations,

1299
01:54:33.360 --> 01:54:40.160
but it is finally here. Who's it for? I write with only one objective. I hope my sons read my

1300
01:54:40.160 --> 01:54:46.000
stuff in 30 or 40 years and feel like they understand me and the world a little bit better. That's it.

1301
01:54:46.720 --> 01:54:51.680
I use that as a means of trying to be fearless because there's so many comments and so many.

1302
01:54:51.680 --> 01:54:55.280
They're such a narrative out there trying to shape your views around the orthodoxy that

1303
01:54:56.000 --> 01:55:00.640
whatever your political innings are. It's pretty easy to be intimidated and to having a certain

1304
01:55:00.640 --> 01:55:04.560
narrative. So I try to write as if no one's going to read up on my sons in 20 or 30 years.

1305
01:55:04.560 --> 01:55:06.960
We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question to the next, not knowing who

1306
01:55:06.960 --> 01:55:11.120
they're leaving it for. The question left for you is in one sentence, what is the most challenging

1307
01:55:11.120 --> 01:55:14.720
setback you've experienced and what's the lesson you want to pass on to others?

1308
01:55:16.320 --> 01:55:22.560
That's easy. My mother dying and you can never tell your parents how much you love them too much.

1309
01:55:23.280 --> 01:55:24.960
Forgive them and

1310
01:55:30.400 --> 01:55:34.400
my mom died slowly, which is bad for her, but it was good for me because nothing went outside.

1311
01:55:34.400 --> 01:55:45.200
What is the emotion you're experiencing? I miss my mom terribly. I'm a middle-aged man who hasn't

1312
01:55:45.200 --> 01:55:56.800
gotten over the death of his mother. Why do my life? Raise me on our own, secretary salary,

1313
01:55:57.760 --> 01:55:58.720
give me confidence.

1314
01:56:06.320 --> 01:56:10.320
Is there a way to, you said you're a middle-aged man that hasn't gotten over the loss of his mother?

1315
01:56:10.320 --> 01:56:17.040
Is there a way to? I don't want to. I think the receipts for love is grief. I hope my

1316
01:56:17.040 --> 01:56:24.080
boys feel the same way about me. It hasn't gotten in the way of my life. It makes me be more bold

1317
01:56:24.080 --> 01:56:31.040
with my emotions. Yeah, I don't. I used to see it as a problem. I went to grief counseling.

1318
01:56:31.040 --> 01:56:38.640
Now I see it as a, not a bug, but as a feature. The receipts for love are grief and anxiety,

1319
01:56:39.360 --> 01:56:44.560
and so what I would tell every young person is I hope they have a lot of joy in the life. I also hope

1320
01:56:44.560 --> 01:56:47.520
they have a decent amount of grief because that means they have people they love immensely.

1321
01:56:47.520 --> 01:56:56.240
Hey, man. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Steve. Good to see you. Congratulations on your

1322
01:56:56.240 --> 01:57:02.240
burgeoning empire. Jesus Christ, man. This is out of control.

1323
01:57:05.440 --> 01:57:12.400
Every time I come here, I'm like, where are the helicopters? It's like pretty soon I'm going to

1324
01:57:12.560 --> 01:57:19.360
see a nuclear tower power plant powering next to me. It's just amazing. You're like everywhere.

1325
01:57:19.360 --> 01:57:24.400
At one point, at one point, I was on, I was at the airport with my boys and I'm staring at

1326
01:57:24.400 --> 01:57:33.520
this like 100 foot like testimonial to you. I'm like, make it. Stop. God, Jesus.