Transcription
Do you know that quote is so interesting because I've heard that quote a lot that AI won't take your job. Someone that understands AI will take your job. And I, as you said it, then I thought, you know, I was thinking about different um, roles in my team and my open roles that we haven't hired for, and I thought, >> someone with AI will take your job, but they won't just take one job, they'll take five of those jobs. And so if you think about an analyst, >> right? >> We've got Molly downstairs, analyst for my investment fund. We were well intent on hiring maybe five analysts for my second fund. We only need Molly now because Molly's got two agents that she works with and two two Mac minis, and she's got a a setup that screens the inbound interest and also goes proactively into the market looking for new opportunities and pulls them back into her, runs them through a framework, scores them, prepares them for the IC. So Molly, enabled by AI, she's probably taken out five jobs. And this is, I think, even with the law example, that that lawyer that's using these models, um, probably doesn't need to have five junior lawyers now, um, if they're really, really competent with. And if you think about an executive assistant. >> Mhm. >> So with executive assistants, we might for our executives would have hired maybe probably 10 um, EAS in total. Mhm. >> Now, you really need one that has is powered by AI to do all the travel, one that does all of the scheduling, and then one that meets people at the door. >> So, you need three versus potentially 10. And this is kind of what I'm saying. Um, in most roles, but not all of them. There are still some roles when I looked at the rogue chart where I go, actually, you know, this sales, a lot of the sales we do from a media perspective are take someone for lunch, wine and dine, call them, relationships, pitch the deck. >> Those kinds of things seem to be completely untouched. But let's continue down that path. You no longer need five Mollies, then you'd want one. >> Yeah. >> That creates additional EBIT margin, creates a more profitable diary of a CEO empire, means you can raise more money, and then you go buy more podcasts or invest in them, who hire more people. So >> and it creates a faster cycle of money and new ideas. And when we were walking in here, you're talking about acquiring podcasting, and you're getting into CPG, and you're getting into different forms of media, and you're driving growth and innovation. Will some people be on the wrong end of it? My mom was a secretary. She started as a typist. Typists went away. She oversaw the the the secretarial typist pool at a law school downtown. And I worked in the mail room in high school. But my mom realized that the hard part of her job was interacting with the senior level executive, and she became an executive assistant. And she never made a lot of money, but she made good money. Realizing the typing was the easy part of her job. The hard part was managing some dude's life. Right. >> So accounting should go away. But what you're saying is there's actually more accountants this year than there was last year because accountants, the smart ones, are moving into wealth management and tax optimization, which keeps getting more and more complicated. So yeah, do you have an onus to update your skills to understand new? I remember when I first moved to New York and they hired an assistant for me, and she came in and said, "Oh, I don't use computers." And I'm like, "Well, you can't work here." So it's like it to say you're not going to learn AI or at least the basics on how to use it. It's like being in 1998 and saying, "Well, I don't use PCs." Mhm. >> So I don't. Yeah, you got to update your skills. The cycle times decreasing. A lot of people will find themselves on the wrong side of the trade. I have to force myself to use AI. I don't, you know, I'm the part of your brain around understanding new technologies begins to die, right? I can no longer perceive a calendar. I can't tell you what I have next. For some reason, I used to be able to do fanta. I could do a Scotsman accent, Stephen, like no one's business a few years ago. That part of my brain has died. And when I try to do an accent, it sounds like a dead language that twins speak to each other, and it offends everybody. There's parts of your brain that die. And the part that where you can understand new technologies or at least have the will to learn them starts to go away as you get older. I have to force myself to play with these new technologies. Everyone who wants to make more money or wants to hold on to their job should have the same onus to learn these new skills.
>> On that individual level, there's people listening now that that want to make sure that they have the skills, their kids have the skills of the future, right? What are some of those important skills? I mean, you've got kids. What do you, what would you say to them?
>> I get asked that all the time. What is the skill? So, the honest answer is I have a view, but nobody knows. Do you realize 10 years ago in private schools, the biggest incremental investments in curriculum were two things? Computer science and Mandarin.
>> How's that worked out? Like, thank God my kid knows Mandarin, I mean, said nobody right now, but they thought it was going to be computer science. And you could argue that hasn't worked out as well as everyone thought. I would say that the enduring skill is storytelling, and that is your ability to look at data, create a narrative arc, and then communicate that story in a compelling way via all the different mediums. >> Whether it's podcasting, I think you have to write well to be a great storyteller. But if you think about the most successful people in the world, at the end of the day, they're usually storytellers. The great CEOs, I read Jeff Bezos's 1997 letter to shareholders where he focused on those three principles, and I'm like, take my money. Right. I see even a guy like Alex Karp at Palantir walking around doing a live earnings call on his phone. It's very compelling. Um, Jensen Huang, you know, when he does these giant Buffett-like stadiums where he gets up and he's like a rockstar. That's storytelling. Technology is, I think, going to create an equalization among the product. Reverse engineering created parity among manufactured products. I think most technology are technologies are going to converge, and we're seeing that convergence in AI models. So I think the point of differentiation is relationships, right? Do I want to work with this person? Do I know about their kids? Do I like them? At the end of the day, I have three different law firms pitching me business, three different investment banks, three different CRM companies. Who do I have the best relationship with and who do I want to work with? So storytelling, it sounds very p, but the ability to establish strong relationships with other sentient beings. I still believe that everything reverse engineers to biology. I think a certain fundamental understanding of the sciences, those seem to be pretty enduring. You know, my my oldest said he wanted to be a marine biologist. I'm like, who are you kidding? You got seasick. I mean, at 18, what you want it? You want them to be smart, good people, aggressive, support them, becoming their own person, which I've had trouble with. I want them to be many me. And then helping them find something they're great at. But telling your kid, "No, you need to go into this because this is where the future's going." Nope, we don't know. I We have We know the basics. I would want my kid to be able to write well, to be able to look someone in the eye, to be competitive. You know, I I encourage them to play sports, to do chores, which they do none of. But other than that, I don't know. What do you think are going to be the skills of the future?
>> I think it's really difficult to know. >> I think what you said about relationships is really important. You said storytelling, and I think storytelling is a proxy of of sales and persuasion. And whether that's persuading an investor to believe in you, or people to come and work for you, or customers to come and buy your thing. So I think I think storytelling and sales is is going to be an enduring skill. The skill that is the biggest threat that people are young people are losing, especially young men, and this is a skill and it's hugely underrated, is the ability to endure rejection. And because of AI and because of these frictionless relationships that people are engaging in online, I think a lot of young people, especially young men, are losing the perseverance, endurance, willingness to hear no. Whether it's expressing friendship, whether it's applying for a job you're not qualified for, whether it's approaching someone and expressing romantic interest, I think a lot of young people, especially young men, I think they can have a frictionless relationship online and are they're losing this sense of resilience and aggressiveness. Uh, so I think that skill, when I mentor young men, the first skill I try to reincorporate back into their life is what I call no. And that is I need you to go out. I need you to go put yourself in the agency of strangers, whether it's a church group, a sports league, a riding class, and I want you to make an overture, an expression of friendship. Hey, do you want to grab the Arsenal game or watch? Come over my house and watch it? And then most of these kids, when you ask them what they want, they usually want two things. The men I mentor, they want to move out of their parents' house and they want a girlfriend. And so once we do the friend approach, then I say, "Okay, find someone you may be potentially interested in. Ask them out for coffee." And this is the goal. The goal is no. Because what's going to happen is you might get a no. Probably going to get a no. And then I'm going to call you the next day and I'm going to say, "Are you okay?" And the answer is going to be yes. Is he or she okay? The person who said no. Yeah, they're fine. Because And I'm I'm boasting. The secret to my success is rejection. I ran for sophomore, junior, and senior class president of my high school. I lost all three times and based on my track record, I decided to run for senior body or student body president where I went on to get this lose. It never bothered me. I mean, I mourned and I moved on. Every entrepreneur, how many nos have you gotten?
>> Oh, hell. Yeah, more so than anybody.
>> I mean, so the any person you look at and think that person has made more money than I would have thought, or any person who's hanging out with someone much higher character and hotter than them has one thing in common. They either have very rich parents, or more likely. >> They're they're comfortable with no. So, and unfortunately, I think young people, especially young men, are becoming less and less resilient to no. Apply for jobs you're not qualified for. Apply to graduate programs you shouldn't get into. Approach people who you perceive as being cooler and hotter than you. And express friendship and romantic interest. That is the key. You want to punch above your weight class, get out a big spoon and get ready to eat. That is the only thing that is common across all great entrepreneurs who are self-made is they have the ability to mourn and move on.
>> I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It was inspired by listening to Adam Neumann on that podcast a couple of uh a couple of weeks ago. He did one with um Rick Rubin, I think it was, and in it he tells the story of sitting in the back of the cab with Masa, who's the the owner of SoftBank, and asked he was going to ask him to give him $300 million. And Masa turns to him and says, "You're just not ambitious enough." And he says, by the time that 23-minute cab drive had finished, Masa had offered him 4 billion, and he had signed a little napkin thing that Masa had in the back of the cab. And that story and other stories like it have inspired have made me realize that like some of the game in life and success is what I now call selling yourself long, and most of us go through our lives selling ourselves short. And I think in part because we don't see ourselves on an exponential curve. We see ourselves as a fixed state. This is who I am. This is what I'm worth. But you've almost got to like factor in your own exponential improvement. If you take you from 21 to now, how your intelligence and wisdom and connections have all compounded. But you would have sold yourself at the value of you at 21 years old. So I'm now I actually now think in every season of my life I've sold myself short. When I was 18 years old, my I sold 20% of my company for 5K, $5,000. And then I thought that was, I couldn't believe it. I was celebrating in my room at the time. I was stealing Chicago Town pizzas to feed myself. And then a couple of years later, I sold another 30% of that company, uh, 30% of my company for 300k, and I thought I'd hit the Euromillions. >> Right? >> That company ran up and was on the stock market for many hundreds of millions many years later. I thought, God, I've sold myself short my whole life. So assume I'm doing the same now, and if I if I assume that, how, how what would I say? What would I, what opportunities would I go for? And I think that for me, that apply should apply to everybody. I think it's self-fulfilling.
>> Yeah. I there's something about imagining where you want to be in 5 years outrageously in the reverse engineering back. But the moment you took that 300K, you really needed it. I mean, that was so it's a function of your opportunity set and what's actually the market says to you. Uh, I think pricing is a signal. I struggle with pricing, and what I tell whenever we're writing a proposal or okay, whatever I get back, I'm like, okay, increase the pricing 30 or 50% more because pricing is a signal, and it's you can always take the price down, and the client, the person will always will always come back and ask for the price down. But I mean, quite frankly, and this is sexist, I think men are better at imagining an unrealistic self, and women are more measured. >> And I think that's one of the things that has held back women as entrepreneurs, and the fact that not as much capital has been available to them because the people allocating capital have been white dudes from Stanford or Harvard. 40% of VCs are from two schools. Of I think it was Charlie Munger who said, someone who has a crazy vision of their own potential, that's stupid and obnoxious. His attitude was, never bet against that person, because occasionally they're right. And so for, we talked about Musk, for a guy to think, I'm going to raise so much money and command technology that I can be responsible for 90% of launches and control 70% of the Earth's low orbit satellites. That's pretty arrogant. So yeah, I agree with you. And you know, let me put it this way, if you're going to air, air to the upside, because the market will bring you back on its own.
>> That's so true. Um, Sam Altman has been in all the news lately in part because of this article that The New Yorker did, two reporters there, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz. >> Um, which was this article, and then he responded with with this blog post here two years ago. I thought Sam had a really good brand >> cuz he was out in Congress, he was saying this tech, you know, he was asking for regulation. It seemed it has turned unbelievably quickly, unbelievably fast. Well, we've said this before, he's a proxy for all of AI. I think the greatest brand destruction other than the US over the last 18 months has been AI, and also Sam Altman. But we keep falling into this trap over and over, and that is something happened through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and that is America used its heroes used to be athletes, government officials, and actors. And then there was a dramatic decline in um, attendance to religious institutions, but people still have really big questions and want sort of an authority or a godlike figure. The closest thing we have to religion is technology. Most people don't understand it. It has a mystical feel to it. I have no idea how my phone works. I can ask it anything and it comes back with a relatively authoritative answer that I trust. Similar if I was talking or praying. I think most of the time when we're on AI, we're kind of praying. We're we're sending a question into the echo to a being thinking it's smarter than us, and it's going to come back with an empathetic, loving, correct answer. So, the new Jesus Christ was born in the '90s, and that was Steve Jobs, and he was taken from us early, like Jesus Christ. The idolatry of innovators has absolutely gone crazy. And the new Jesus Christ, if you will, are these tech bros. And here's what we fail to understand. They do not have our best interests at heart. They are not concerned with our emotional well-being. They are not going to comfort us when we're older. They are there, and they play a key component in capitalism to do anything that is required to get their earnings up 1 cent per share every day. And they will make incremental decisions that justify the harming and self-harm of teen girls. Cheryl Sandberg, the weaponization of our platforms, the coarsening of our discourse, Mark Zuckerberg, I mean, the radicalization of young men, uh, the people running YouTube, they we keep thinking that the newest tech CEO is going to save us, that this guy cares. Sam Altman was the gay son we all wanted. Like super nice, super friendly, hush voices, well-spoken. I'm worried about that as well. Right. These guys would sleep with their cousin for a nickel. That's their job. Their job is to increase earnings. They're not here to save us. We're supposed to elect people who put in guardrails for them. So everyone is saying or asking me, can we trust Sam Altman? I'm like, no. And we shouldn't have to. We should have regulators putting in guardrails on AI. We should be testing these things. Government agencies should be testing these things. We should be ensuring that these technologies are not used to surveil Americans, right? That we would still have cartoons like characters on cigarettes marketing to 12-year-olds if we hadn't put in place regulation. And the tobacco executives would claim that they weren't marketing to young people. Ford would still be pouring mercury into the river if we didn't have an EPA and regulation. So Sam is doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing. The latest hero that's going to save us is Dario Amodei. We've decided he's the good guy. Now the villain's journey in tech is the same. Some compelling person we think is a wonderful guy, and it's almost always a guy, occasionally a woman. You know, we need to do better gender balance. That was Cheryl Sandberg in the workplace. And then we find out that they are doing their job, and that is doing anything they can legally to increase shareholder value regardless of whether it prevents a tragedy of the commons or not. And then we get angry at them. The journey from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader gets shorter and shorter, but they all follow the same path. And then 18 months later, we realize that they would too will say and do whatever they can to try and delay and obfuscate regulation. And that sometimes when we don't have a government with a lack of domain expertise, with a lack of insight, with people who are a cross between the land of the dead and the golden girls and don't understand these technologies, that when these technologies are allowed to run just free with no regulation, they do bad things. So Sam Altman is the latest person we've discovered as Darth Vader, who's gone to the dark side. It happens with all of them because they're doing their job. We as citizens aren't doing our job. And that is we're not putting in place elected officials that regulate these companies. So yeah, can we trust Sam Altman? No. But we shouldn't need to trust him. We should be able to trust that we have smart elected officials that will regulate these companies.
>> Did you see this article he wrote in response to being having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house?
>> I read this article without reading it. So there's been death threats on his life. And let me be clear, there's absolutely no justification whatsoever for this. And it needs to be, I don't even like it when people yell at JD Vance when he's skiing with his family. One of the, we don't want to be that nation, or we don't in the West. We have, if you're operating with the confines of the law, which Sam is, he deserves to live in peace. It is sad. Do you realize in the US now, there's no more people working in private security than there are cops? Really? Because there's always going to be a number of people who are likely, I don't know about the perpetrator here, who are mentally ill and who will find an excuse. Essentially, the makeup usually of these perpetrators or these these criminal actors is they're usually young men looking to restore their social capital through what they perceive as a historic act of violence against a famous person. This has gone on for a long time. He's now famous. I don't think it's fair. I've seen some people try to equate AI's dangers as if these acts of violence are somehow justified. They're not. There's no justification for a healthcare executive being executed in the streets. There's no justification for violence against Sam or attempted violence against Sam and his family. I think it's young men with a lack of opportunity, mental illness, and unfortunately access to firearms everywhere. But it's always happened. I don't make the connection that somehow it's more justified. I think famous people, one in three presidents has been shot at.
>> Crazy, isn't it?
>> So, the more famous you get, quite frankly, the more personal risk there is because someone is going to decide that taking you out for whatever reason is going to restore their social capital. Um, actually, if you look at assassination attempts and violence, the it's actually gone down. But these stories are cinematic and very interesting, and they get a lot of attention. But I think it's a shame we live in a society where especially in the West, where they have to endure that kind of risk. The one of the really most lovely moments I've seen, I don't know if I don't know if it was the Danish or the Norwegian prime minister who stepped down, they applauded, and he got on a bike and rode home. I thought, you can't do that in the US. You know, Obama's kids still have Secret Service protection.
>> So there's definitely something. I I quite frankly blame it on big tech that tries to convince people that this person is their enemy, and this person is evil. Sam's not evil. I don't I don't know him personally. I sat next to him at this party I went to, but he's doing his job. Quite frankly, we're not doing ours.
>> Do you think he's a nihilist? And I don't really know the definition of the word nihilist, but I guess it's someone who believes that life is essentially meaningless.
>> I think there's a nihilist vein running through big tech where a lot of them have go bags. They have a plan for if it gets real. If there's a zombie apocalypse, or there's a revolution, or there's a massive pandemic, they have definitive plans, and they've spent tens of millions of dollars. They meet their pilots at uh Oakland airport. They get on their Gulfstream 650. They fly to New Zealand to Auckland, and they have a bunker built out.
>> Is this true?
>> Oh, there's a lot of them.
>> Really?
>> There's a lot of go plans amongst the wealthy. And sometimes it's not as dramatic. Sometimes it's just a home nuclear attack, cyber attack, revolution. But there I would say amongst billionaires, I would bet conservatively one in three have some sort of go plan. And that's nihilist. And also, I to a certain extent, I think wanting to be an interplanetary species is a little bit nihilist. If you love the D CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor. Become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button. It helps us tremendously, and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests.