00:00:00
I was looking at the top 10 jobs that
00:00:02
are most likely to be disrupted by AI
00:00:04
and I really do worry about this.
00:00:05
>> So the nature of the economy is changing
00:00:07
for a long time. Blue collar work like
00:00:09
plumbers, electricians, brick layers has
00:00:11
been devalued. But it could be in the
00:00:13
next couple of years. These are the
00:00:14
roles that are elevated the most and
00:00:16
that plumbers regularly earn more than
00:00:18
lawyers. And for the last 25 years, I've
00:00:20
been building companies from scratch and
00:00:22
I've been through the global financial
00:00:24
crisis and co but I have never
00:00:26
experienced what we're experiencing
00:00:28
right now. I've never seen more fear for
00:00:30
the disruption that is coming. And my
00:00:33
real bare case for AI is that every time
00:00:36
you go on AI, your request is going off
00:00:38
to a big computer in a Walmartized
00:00:40
building somewhere. And those big
00:00:41
ginormous computers, they last 3 to 4
00:00:43
years before they need to be replaced.
00:00:45
And this year ahead, we're going to
00:00:46
spend 650 billion and that could cause a
00:00:49
massive financial collapse. That's the
00:00:51
thing that I'm worried most about.
00:00:52
However, I've never seen more excitement
00:00:54
for the opportunities that are in front
00:00:56
of us. So let's talk about in a world of
00:00:58
AI what are the skills that survive.
00:01:01
>> So I really believe that everyone should
00:01:03
build a little bit of a personal brand
00:01:05
not like to become an influencer but
00:01:07
position yourself with a group of people
00:01:08
who know who you are and know what you
00:01:10
do and could enroll you in their
00:01:12
opportunity. Second one if there's one
00:01:14
skill set that everyone should be
00:01:16
learning at the moment it's how do
00:01:17
entrepreneurs think? How do
00:01:18
entrepreneurs behave? What are the
00:01:20
skills that make an entrepreneur
00:01:21
successful? And entrepreneurs just
00:01:23
simply follow six steps and we do it
00:01:24
over and over and over again. and we'll
00:01:26
go through the six steps.
00:01:27
>> So, are there any particular
00:01:28
opportunities that you think that
00:01:29
anybody listening right now could pursue
00:01:31
to make money?
00:01:32
>> So, I think one of the best
00:01:33
opportunities is
00:01:34
>> that is such good advice that we don't
00:01:36
hear enough.
00:01:40
>> This is super interesting to me. My team
00:01:42
given me this report to show me how many
00:01:43
of you that watch this show subscribe.
00:01:45
69% of you that watch this show
00:01:47
frequently haven't yet hit the subscribe
00:01:48
button. And some of you have told us
00:01:50
according to this that you are
00:01:51
unsubscribed from the channel randomly.
00:01:53
So, favor to ask all of you. Please
00:01:55
could you check right now if you've hit
00:01:56
the subscribe button if you are a
00:01:58
regular viewer of the show and you like
00:01:59
what we do here. We're approaching quite
00:02:00
a significant landmark on this show in
00:02:02
terms of a subscriber number. So, if
00:02:04
there was one simple free thing that you
00:02:06
could do to help us, my team, everyone
00:02:08
here to keep this show free, to keep it
00:02:10
improving year over year and week over
00:02:12
week, it is just to hit that subscribe
00:02:14
button and to double check if you've hit
00:02:15
it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you, do
00:02:17
we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell
00:02:19
you what I'll do. I'll make sure every
00:02:22
single week, every single month, we
00:02:23
fight harder and harder and harder and
00:02:24
harder to bring you the guests and
00:02:25
conversations that you want to hear.
00:02:27
I've stayed true to that promise since
00:02:28
the very beginning of the Dio and I will
00:02:30
not let you down. Please help us. Really
00:02:33
appreciate it. Let's get on with the
00:02:34
show.
00:02:38
Daniel, I think we're living in the most
00:02:43
interesting, opportunistic,
00:02:46
terrifying time to be an entrepreneur, a
00:02:49
professional, to really be anybody
00:02:51
because this is a moment of such
00:02:53
fundamental change. And I really wanted
00:02:55
to have this conversation with you today
00:02:56
because I want to understand how you're
00:02:58
thinking about AI from an opportunity
00:03:00
standpoint as an entrepreneur, but also
00:03:02
just for everybody that's working in a
00:03:03
normal job and who is at risk of having
00:03:05
their their career, their livelihood,
00:03:07
their identity, their qualifications
00:03:09
made redundant because there is now an
00:03:11
alien amongst us that can do so much. So
00:03:15
this conversation really is about giving
00:03:16
people answers. It's about being honest
00:03:17
with them about what's coming. And it's
00:03:19
about preparing them, setting them up so
00:03:22
that they have an advantage
00:03:24
in the face of the future we face. So
00:03:27
give me the 30,000 ft view.
00:03:29
>> Well, my background for the last 25
00:03:30
years has been building companies from
00:03:32
scratch. And I've been through the com
00:03:34
and I've been through global financial
00:03:36
crisis and I've been through uh Brexit
00:03:38
and co. I have never experienced what
00:03:41
we're experiencing right now. I've never
00:03:43
seen more excitement for the
00:03:45
opportunities that are in front of us
00:03:46
and I've never seen more fear for the
00:03:49
disruption that is coming. We are living
00:03:52
through transformational times that is
00:03:54
very similar to 250 years ago where the
00:03:57
end of the agricultural age ended and
00:03:59
the beginning of the industrial age
00:04:01
began.
00:04:01
>> I would argue that it's more significant
00:04:03
because there's two forces that kind of
00:04:04
keep me up at night. The first force is
00:04:07
AI, which is you can think of it as just
00:04:10
the replacement of the human brain from
00:04:12
a sort of productivity standpoint. And
00:04:14
then the other is robotics. And the
00:04:17
problem is they're coming in at the same
00:04:19
time. And I was watching I don't know if
00:04:21
you saw this the other day.
00:04:22
>> So I'll put this on the screen for
00:04:24
anyone that's watching the video right
00:04:25
now, but this is a demonstration that
00:04:28
took place in China of how advanced
00:04:31
their robots are. And I had to check
00:04:33
multiple times to make sure that this
00:04:35
wasn't fake. They are doing back flips
00:04:38
and landing perfectly on their feet. And
00:04:40
so when you combine intelligence with
00:04:41
the disruption of our physical form, our
00:04:44
muscles, our body, our ability to pick
00:04:45
things up and move them through through
00:04:46
time and space,
00:04:48
it begs the question like where do we
00:04:50
>> where do we fit in to all of that?
00:04:52
Strangely, there's something called the
00:04:54
Jevans paradox. And the Jevans paradox
00:04:56
is a paradox where when we think
00:04:58
something is going to completely disrupt
00:05:00
the way that we uh live and work. It
00:05:03
often has the opposite effect. We
00:05:04
thought that YouTube was going to
00:05:06
completely wipe out television. And it's
00:05:09
true that Hollywood lost tens of
00:05:10
thousands of jobs, but YouTubing created
00:05:13
500 to 600,000 jobs at the same time.
00:05:16
And it used to take 150 people to make a
00:05:18
a TV show or a movie. And now it's 5 to
00:05:20
10 people making YouTube videos as a
00:05:22
little team. and they can have a wildly
00:05:24
successful YouTube channel. With the
00:05:26
Jebans paradox, if we currently said
00:05:28
that in order to have a successful
00:05:30
software company right now today or in
00:05:32
the last few years, you needed to have
00:05:34
10,000 customers and you needed to have
00:05:35
a team of 50 people and you needed to
00:05:38
raise$1 to5 million to get a software
00:05:40
company off the off the ground. If all
00:05:43
of a sudden the cost and the commitment
00:05:45
drops dramatically to have a software
00:05:48
company and you only need 500 customers
00:05:50
to work it to make it work and you only
00:05:51
need two people on a team to make it
00:05:53
work and you only need a tiny bit of
00:05:54
funding to make it work. What happens is
00:05:56
like YouTube channels you can end up
00:05:58
with literally millions of tiny little
00:06:00
software businesses that are super
00:06:02
successful for 5 to 10 people and they
00:06:04
do something niche and they do something
00:06:06
special. They don't look like
00:06:07
traditional software companies either.
00:06:09
So a traditional software company would
00:06:11
just do the software whereas these
00:06:13
little software companies might do
00:06:14
software plus they might do dinner
00:06:16
parties where the clients get together.
00:06:18
They might have an annual ski retreat.
00:06:20
They might have a podcast and a YouTube
00:06:21
channel that goes with it. And all of
00:06:23
that could be done by 5 to 10 people
00:06:26
using AI tools. So the Jevans paradox
00:06:28
would basically say that there is
00:06:30
millions of unmet needs and that those
00:06:33
unmet needs are not explored because the
00:06:35
cost to explore them is too high. But
00:06:38
because the cost to explore those has
00:06:39
come down, then now we can actually have
00:06:41
millions of businesses that never
00:06:43
existed that we didn't even know we
00:06:44
needed to exist.
00:06:45
>> I was sat here the other day with Dra
00:06:46
who is the CEO of Uber. He turned around
00:06:48
Expedia, made it super profitable,
00:06:50
turned around Uber that was losing 2
00:06:51
billion, made it generate about 9
00:06:53
billion in revenue, 10 billion in
00:06:54
revenue. And uh he sat there and said to
00:06:56
me that their 9,000 couriers and drivers
00:06:58
won't have jobs in the future. And and I
00:07:00
so I sit and go, okay, so what what are
00:07:01
they going to do? Are they all going to
00:07:02
start businesses somewhere? Do they? And
00:07:05
also I think one of the interesting
00:07:06
things about AI is the speed of
00:07:08
transition. With the industrial
00:07:09
revolution, there's a little bit of a
00:07:10
delay because infrastructure took time
00:07:12
to build.
00:07:13
>> Takes a long time to build.
00:07:14
>> But this is the first innovation that
00:07:15
I've lived through that is built on
00:07:17
>> it's instantaneous.
00:07:18
>> The internet.
00:07:19
>> The minute an AI learns how to be a
00:07:21
lawyer in one place, it can be a lawyer
00:07:23
in every place. The minute it learns how
00:07:25
to diagnose a disease in in one
00:07:27
location, in one hospital, it can
00:07:29
diagnose a disease in every hospital in
00:07:30
the world. So, it's this instantaneous
00:07:33
roll out uh because it sits on top of a
00:07:36
network that already exists.
00:07:37
>> This is what actually Boston Dynamics
00:07:38
said to me. I was watching a video of
00:07:40
their new robot that's working in
00:07:41
factories. It's a humanoid robot that
00:07:42
can work in factories, pick things up,
00:07:44
move things around. They said, "The
00:07:45
great thing about robotics is if one of
00:07:47
our robots on a shop floor in Boston
00:07:49
learn something, all of our robots learn
00:07:51
it.
00:07:51
>> It's it's wild."
00:07:53
>> Like, hell. So yesterday Tesla built and
00:07:57
they took this wonderful photo because
00:07:58
they built the world's first Tesla Cyber
00:08:01
Cab. Now if anyone doesn't know what a
00:08:02
Tesla Cyber Cab is, it's the first ever
00:08:06
fully autonomous car that doesn't have a
00:08:10
steering wheel and it doesn't have
00:08:11
pedals.
00:08:12
>> Yeah. You just hop in and there's
00:08:14
there's no steering wheel, no pedals.
00:08:15
You can't take control even if you
00:08:16
wanted to.
00:08:17
>> The Cyber Cab is the company's answer to
00:08:19
vehicles like the Whimo. The two-seater
00:08:21
coupe unveiled in 2024
00:08:24
comes without a steering wheel or
00:08:25
pedals. It's guided by AI and they're
00:08:29
now making them. The first one was made
00:08:31
yesterday. Again, 100 over a 100 million
00:08:34
people's job is to drive and you can get
00:08:36
one of these now for Elon saying
00:08:38
$30,000. Um, you can rent them, lease
00:08:41
them. You can buy a bunch of investment
00:08:43
assets and set them out,
00:08:44
>> set up your own fleet and connect them
00:08:46
to different networks like Uber and all
00:08:48
of those sorts of things. And the cost
00:08:49
to move around is going to go through
00:08:52
the floor because you know my Uber to
00:08:55
come here today was probably $50 uh and
00:08:58
that will probably be $6 or $7 uh once
00:09:00
that is rolled out. So the thing that
00:09:03
with the Jevans paradox is it doesn't
00:09:04
mean that everyone gets the same job and
00:09:06
that they get like uh there's just more
00:09:08
of exactly the same jobs. It means that
00:09:10
the transformation creates exponential
00:09:12
growth as a result of the transformation
00:09:14
in an unexpected way. Mhm.
00:09:16
>> So growing up, my mom worked in
00:09:18
newspapers and there was probably half a
00:09:20
million people working in newspapers as
00:09:21
journalists and all of those sorts of
00:09:23
things and that has dropped by 80% in
00:09:26
the last 25 years. But at the same time,
00:09:27
the number of people who are bloggers,
00:09:29
the number of people who have substacks,
00:09:30
the number of people uh who are doing
00:09:33
the kind of work of journalists and
00:09:35
actually making money as a result of
00:09:37
content creation has gone 100 100x. So,
00:09:41
uh, I think it's something like three to
00:09:43
four times more people now make their
00:09:45
money in a way that kind of looks like a
00:09:46
journalist than there ever were
00:09:49
journalists prior to the technology that
00:09:50
disrupt journalists. So, it's not that
00:09:52
it's not that those exact same jobs uh
00:09:56
are are replicated. It's that something
00:09:57
similar emerges as a result.
00:09:59
>> I understand this and I when I read
00:10:01
about the Jews paradox, I like ran it
00:10:03
through my head multiple times to to
00:10:05
understand like how it fits in different
00:10:06
industries. But there is a part of me
00:10:08
that still thinks this is slightly
00:10:10
different because in the example you
00:10:12
gave where there was a a content
00:10:13
creation industry that was then
00:10:15
disrupted by a content creation
00:10:16
industry. I go yeah this this the skill
00:10:21
of intelligence was still of human
00:10:25
intelligence was still
00:10:28
rare and scarce and only humans had it.
00:10:31
M
00:10:32
>> so the disruption of the content
00:10:33
creation industry to a different content
00:10:35
creation industry was still owned by
00:10:36
humans. That transition was still a
00:10:38
human one. But in such a world where AI
00:10:40
agents can make, if you go on a lot of
00:10:41
social media platforms, I shame which
00:10:43
ones, it's just pure AI slop now. Yes,
00:10:46
it's just people's agents churning out
00:10:48
content that they haven't touched or
00:10:50
done anything about. And then I was I I
00:10:52
started saying to you before we started
00:10:53
recording that what we're going to
00:10:54
experience and what I think a lot of
00:10:56
people don't fully embrace about this
00:10:58
idea of becoming a content creator for a
00:11:00
living or building a personal brand is
00:11:02
when you look at some of the graphs and
00:11:03
I'll throw the graphs from the Financial
00:11:04
Times article on the screen. There's now
00:11:06
a plateau of people spending time online
00:11:08
for the first time in history. Well, in
00:11:10
the first time in internet history,
00:11:12
>> Gen Z especially were the first
00:11:14
generation to plateau. Yeah.
00:11:15
>> In their time spent. But the amount of
00:11:17
content, the amount of AI agents, the
00:11:19
amount of people that are now choosing
00:11:20
to make to do content as a living is
00:11:22
exploding. Yes.
00:11:23
>> So you have a supply and demand issue
00:11:25
where there's a set amount really like a
00:11:27
set amount of hours consu sort of
00:11:30
consumption hours and then you have this
00:11:32
huge exponential explosion in available
00:11:35
content because a kid in Mumbai
00:11:37
>> Yeah. attention is a limited resource
00:11:40
but content is
00:11:41
>> and content is unlimited now.
00:11:42
>> Yeah. and and more so so AI slop is just
00:11:45
rolling in and also AI slop doesn't do
00:11:48
it justice. Some of my favorite things
00:11:49
to watch is AI generated. I'm enjoying
00:11:51
AI. So think about it a little when it
00:11:53
comes to personal brand. Think about it
00:11:55
a little bit like an airport that the
00:11:57
airport has got this fog that is rolling
00:12:00
in. If your airplane is already above
00:12:02
the fog,
00:12:04
>> then you're you can continue to fly. But
00:12:06
if your airplane is not taking off
00:12:09
already, then the fog is going to keep
00:12:11
you on the ground. So like for example,
00:12:13
you've invested so much into your
00:12:15
personal brand and people will come
00:12:18
along to see you live and they would
00:12:19
love to go to dinner party series that
00:12:22
you know involves you and there's a
00:12:23
whole community around DOAC, right? So
00:12:26
all of those things means that your
00:12:27
airplane's already up in the air, you
00:12:29
can continue to fly. But if you were
00:12:31
starting 2 years from now or a year from
00:12:33
now or maybe even 6 months from now and
00:12:35
you weren't smart about it, there's just
00:12:37
too much AI generated content. You won't
00:12:39
get traction. you won't get you won't
00:12:40
get that liftoff moment. Uh the same way
00:12:42
that opportunity is coming to an end
00:12:44
because of that AI generated content
00:12:46
>> what I'm seeing in the algorithm. So we
00:12:47
do some data analysis every year on the
00:12:49
variance of performance of pieces of
00:12:52
content we produce on different
00:12:53
channels. Now I've been making social
00:12:55
media content for 15 years. So I have a
00:12:56
bit of a sort of a mental history of
00:12:58
like every year us doing this this
00:13:00
particular data analysis to see the
00:13:03
variance between the worst thing we post
00:13:05
and the best thing we post. And this
00:13:06
year we did the same we ran the same
00:13:08
analysis with my data science team led
00:13:09
by Austin and my team to see if the
00:13:12
variance between the worst thing we post
00:13:13
and and the best thing we post is
00:13:15
getting bigger because what that kind of
00:13:16
is a proxy of is is the algorithm caring
00:13:19
less and less and less about how many
00:13:21
followers I have and is it caring more
00:13:23
and more and more about whoever posts
00:13:25
the most interesting thing today which
00:13:26
is if I was building a social media
00:13:28
company and my primary objective was to
00:13:29
retain people. I wouldn't care if you
00:13:32
have two followers and Stephen has 500
00:13:36
followers. I would just care about who
00:13:38
post the best thing.
00:13:39
>> So we did that analysis and it's it's an
00:13:40
almost perfect graph that looks like
00:13:42
this.
00:13:43
>> And this is the variance increasing.
00:13:45
>> Y
00:13:45
>> which actually means that okay Steven's
00:13:47
taken off from the sky but every day I
00:13:50
wake up increasingly it doesn't matter
00:13:52
what I did yesterday.
00:13:52
>> What we've seen is the end of social
00:13:54
media and the birth of algorithmic media
00:13:56
>> interest algorithms we call them.
00:13:58
>> Yeah. So, social media was all about
00:14:00
connecting with your friends and finding
00:14:01
out what your friends are doing. Um, and
00:14:03
algorithmic media is just finding out
00:14:05
what the algorithm thinks that you
00:14:06
should be watching today. But with that
00:14:08
said, there's this multi-dimension to
00:14:10
it, which is you've got books, you've
00:14:11
got live events, you've got the podcast,
00:14:14
and it's the multi-dimensional angle
00:14:16
that actually really sets you apart. The
00:14:18
creators that just simply want to put a
00:14:21
piece of content on YouTube and get paid
00:14:22
through AdSense revenue and that really
00:14:24
simple that one-dimensional model,
00:14:26
that's coming to an end. But the
00:14:28
creators that have a community and they
00:14:30
meet up in the real world all of that is
00:14:32
is part of an overall ecosystem that is
00:14:34
very defensible because one you know
00:14:36
people want all of that packaged up
00:14:38
together.
00:14:38
>> Why is it fundamentally defensible from
00:14:40
if we think about first principles or
00:14:42
human masloavian needs. Let me give you
00:14:44
a big answer to that which is if we go
00:14:46
back in time to the agricultural age,
00:14:48
farmers had to know when was a good time
00:14:51
to plant the crops and then they had to
00:14:53
go out and toil the soil and put the
00:14:55
seed in the soil and the soil did most
00:14:57
of the value creation in the economy. At
00:14:59
the end of that process, the farmer had
00:15:01
to know this is the day to harvest and
00:15:03
then we need to harvest that and we need
00:15:05
to turn it into something and take it to
00:15:07
market. And AI is very similar, which is
00:15:10
that it's very good at doing the middle
00:15:12
to the middle. It's not good at knowing
00:15:14
what to do in the very first instance or
00:15:16
knowing when to stop and how to take it
00:15:18
to market. So the the entrepreneurs job
00:15:21
is to do step one and two, let AI do
00:15:23
steps three to eight, and then do steps
00:15:25
9 and 10 and to basically have a
00:15:28
coherent cohesive view as to what you're
00:15:30
trying to get the AI to create.
00:15:32
>> Theoretically though, I could I could
00:15:33
ask an AI agent to think about the goal
00:15:35
that will benefit me the most and make
00:15:36
as many AI agents as it needs to to
00:15:38
fulfill that goal. And then it would
00:15:40
make start one business and that would
00:15:41
start another business. lots of
00:15:42
different businesses,
00:15:43
>> start another business, build another
00:15:44
website, contact a supplier.
00:15:46
>> I think what you're into here is two or
00:15:48
three steps ahead of yourself where, you
00:15:51
know, all of this is theoretically
00:15:52
possible, but we haven't seen those kind
00:15:54
of examples happening yet, right? We
00:15:55
haven't seen whether that will
00:15:58
ultimately unfold. I'm not saying it
00:16:00
won't. I think we are moving into a
00:16:01
completely new economy. Like like when
00:16:04
you lived in the agricultural age, it
00:16:07
was completely like unbelievable to you
00:16:09
what the industrial age would have
00:16:10
looked like. like it's beyond all
00:16:12
comprehension if you had an agricultural
00:16:15
age mindset to imagine factory
00:16:17
production or coal production
00:16:19
>> and the thing the principle there that
00:16:21
allows you to see what the future might
00:16:22
look like when it's exponential and not
00:16:23
linear is imagining any rate of
00:16:25
improvement and so this is how I think
00:16:28
always in my business is when I'm
00:16:30
thinking about which bet to make I
00:16:31
imagine if there's just 5% rate of
00:16:34
improvement per quarter eventually this
00:16:36
happens
00:16:37
>> and so with some things we've done on
00:16:39
this show we started two years ago and
00:16:42
for the first 18 months it didn't work
00:16:44
and then 6 months ago it exploded
00:16:46
because eventually the rate of
00:16:48
improvement got to the point where it
00:16:49
was viable and now it's the single most
00:16:51
important disruptive thing we've ever
00:16:52
done
00:16:53
>> and I think about what I the example I
00:16:54
just gave there of agents I'm like if
00:16:55
you just imagine any rate of improvement
00:16:57
just imagine 1% a year
00:16:59
>> and obviously it's way more than that
00:17:00
but imagine 1% a month eventually we get
00:17:02
to a point where a team of agents
00:17:03
>> if nothing if nothing disrupts it one
00:17:05
thing that is very likely to happen in
00:17:08
the next three years is the whole thing
00:17:09
comes crashing
00:17:11
It doesn't financially make any sense to
00:17:14
build the data centers that we're
00:17:15
building.
00:17:15
>> But you're not saying that AI is going
00:17:17
to disappear.
00:17:18
>> The technology itself is remarkable, but
00:17:21
the financial model just makes no sense
00:17:23
whatsoever at the moment.
00:17:24
>> At the moment, which is kind of typical
00:17:26
of bubbles, right?
00:17:27
>> So over the last 180 years, there have
00:17:30
been infrastructure buildouts that have
00:17:32
bankrupted the economy consistently
00:17:33
again and again and again. In fact,
00:17:35
there's a pattern. Whenever we spend
00:17:38
more than 3% of the overall GDP of the
00:17:41
economy on an infrastructure buildout,
00:17:42
it bankrupts the economy briefly for 10
00:17:45
years. Right? So this happened when we
00:17:48
did railway tracks. In fact, it happened
00:17:50
twice in the UK and twice in um the USA.
00:17:53
Then we bankrupt ourselves putting the
00:17:54
electrification grid in place. We
00:17:56
bankrupted ourselves putting uh highways
00:17:58
in place. Now there's something that
00:18:00
makes this worse than ever before and
00:18:03
that is that when we built train tracks
00:18:05
they lasted for 100 years. When we built
00:18:08
roads they lasted 50 plus years. The
00:18:10
telecommunications g uh fiber optics 30
00:18:13
years. All of these investments were
00:18:15
multi-deade investments that we could
00:18:17
get benefit from and and and leverage
00:18:20
for decades. Data centers last 3 to four
00:18:23
years before they need to be replaced.
00:18:25
So we are building something that has a
00:18:27
3 to four year life cycle that costs
00:18:30
hundreds of billions and it has to be
00:18:32
replaced every few years and there is no
00:18:35
financial model attached to this that
00:18:36
justifies it at all. So one thing that
00:18:39
I'm predicting is that in 2029 100 years
00:18:42
after the great depression we will see a
00:18:45
massive financial meltdown based off the
00:18:47
back of these data centers that have
00:18:48
been um developed at the moment. And for
00:18:51
someone that doesn't know what a data
00:18:52
center is,
00:18:53
>> so it's like a big Walmart or an airport
00:18:55
filled with computers and those
00:18:58
computers are running AI, right? So
00:19:00
every time you go on AI, you're
00:19:02
actually, you know, your request is
00:19:04
going off to a big computer in a
00:19:06
Walmartized building somewhere. But
00:19:08
those GPUs, those uh computer stacks,
00:19:11
those big ginormous computers, they are
00:19:14
like iPhones. They last about 3 years
00:19:16
before they get superseded. This year
00:19:18
ahead, we're going to spend 650 billion.
00:19:21
650 billion sounds like so abstract.
00:19:24
It's the equivalent of giving every
00:19:26
single person in America an iPhone Pro
00:19:29
with AirPods. But here's the crazy
00:19:31
thing. 95% of people who have been given
00:19:34
the the free uh iPhone are not willing
00:19:37
to pay for it. And the tiny number of
00:19:40
people who are willing to pay for it,
00:19:42
they're only willing to pay $20 a month,
00:19:44
most of them. So this $20 a month,
00:19:47
everyone's getting a free iPhone
00:19:48
effectively and then a small 5% of
00:19:51
people are willing to pay $20 a month.
00:19:52
The numbers are just astronomically out
00:19:55
of balance.
00:19:56
>> The numbers are astronomically out of
00:19:57
balance. So what happens next? You're
00:19:58
predicting in 2029 there's a financial
00:20:00
crash.
00:20:01
>> There's not a 0% chance that the
00:20:03
financial model around what what we've
00:20:05
launched with AI is catastrophic. It's a
00:20:08
huge financial problem that very few
00:20:09
people are talking about.
00:20:11
>> So let's talk about in a world of AI.
00:20:14
What are the skills that survive? And
00:20:18
like what what are the professions that
00:20:19
you believe survive? You've got
00:20:22
children, Daniel. When when they come to
00:20:24
you and they say, "Dad, um I'm hearing
00:20:26
about all this AI stuff and I've seen
00:20:27
these robots in China doing back flips.
00:20:30
What should I be learning now to make
00:20:32
sure that the next 20, 30, 40 years of
00:20:33
my career is prosperous?"
00:20:35
>> It's the entrepreneurial skill set that
00:20:37
is the most important skill set. It is
00:20:39
essentially the skills of identifying an
00:20:42
opportunity prototyping fast and cheap
00:20:45
experiments to see if you've got
00:20:46
something that people want, taking it to
00:20:49
market, making your initial sales,
00:20:51
scaling up to your addressable market,
00:20:53
and then exiting and then coming up with
00:20:55
a new idea. Because even if you're in a
00:20:57
big corporate, they're going to want to
00:20:59
prototype things. They're going to want
00:21:00
to spin out new products. They're going
00:21:02
to want to come up with new initiatives.
00:21:04
And we need to step through that process
00:21:06
of is this a good idea or not? Can we
00:21:08
validate it? Can we scale it? Right? And
00:21:11
you want to go through that process as
00:21:12
fast and as cheap as possible the way an
00:21:14
entrepreneur would.
00:21:15
>> And on that first point of identifying a
00:21:17
good idea.
00:21:19
Now is there any way to know if the idea
00:21:22
that I have is a good idea or a bad
00:21:25
idea?
00:21:25
>> Yeah, this is a step that entrepreneurs
00:21:27
call validation. And the rookie
00:21:30
entrepreneurs that fail, they don't do
00:21:31
this step very well, right? So they
00:21:33
don't do market validation. They don't
00:21:34
do product validation. They simply get
00:21:36
excited about an idea and then they go
00:21:38
all in on the idea. And what really
00:21:41
experienced entrepreneurs do is that we
00:21:44
come up with ways to do fast cheap
00:21:46
experiments. So for example, last year I
00:21:49
had two ideas and I I actually kind of
00:21:51
liked one a lot and I liked one a little
00:21:54
bit. And what I did is I set up a
00:21:56
waiting list campaign and I basically
00:21:59
invited people to join the waiting list
00:22:00
for idea number one and about 750 people
00:22:04
joined that waiting list and they filled
00:22:05
in a set set of questions so that I knew
00:22:08
that 750 people were interested in this
00:22:10
idea. This was my favorite idea. And
00:22:12
then the second idea I invited people to
00:22:15
join that waiting list and 4 and a half
00:22:17
thousand people joined that waiting
00:22:19
list. So even though this wasn't my
00:22:21
favorite idea, it was way more exciting
00:22:24
for people and way it was sitting on top
00:22:26
of a much bigger need. So off the back
00:22:29
of collecting 4 and a half thousand
00:22:30
people on the waiting list and
00:22:31
collecting all the data and the
00:22:32
information, we went to some angel
00:22:34
investors about a week later after doing
00:22:37
that and we raised quarter of a million
00:22:38
pounds. So about300 or $400,000
00:22:41
and all of that took about a week or
00:22:43
two. With that example, how do you know
00:22:46
that the business itself and the
00:22:49
delivery of that idea actually meets
00:22:51
their expectation? Because I can think
00:22:52
of multiple examples where someone
00:22:54
clicked on an idea that I had, but
00:22:58
actually the delivery of that idea fell
00:23:00
short of expectation because sometimes
00:23:02
things can sound good when you you see
00:23:04
the flyer or the poster or the advert,
00:23:06
but the reality of the experience is
00:23:08
actually not that great.
00:23:10
>> So, let me walk you through the six
00:23:11
steps quickly. Step one is called
00:23:13
founder opportunity fit and founder
00:23:16
opportunity fit is finding something
00:23:17
that you want to do. Step two is
00:23:19
validation. Right? So this is where we
00:23:21
actually try and see is there a market
00:23:23
could we could we build something? Could
00:23:24
we sell something? Right? So that's two
00:23:26
validation. Can we build it? Can we sell
00:23:28
it? Step three is called product market
00:23:30
fit. And this is the next step where
00:23:32
you're actually trying to figure out can
00:23:34
we actually make this live up to
00:23:35
people's expectations so that they
00:23:36
really like it. Is there a group of
00:23:38
people who buy this and they're happy
00:23:39
with the purchase? And we want to do
00:23:41
that carefully and cheaply. And then
00:23:43
finally once people say well or the next
00:23:45
step once people say yes we can do that
00:23:48
we go to market and go to market is
00:23:50
making sales. And then after going to
00:23:53
market we scale up right step five. And
00:23:56
then the final step is we exit. So we go
00:23:59
through those six steps and we call that
00:24:00
a value creation loop. And that value
00:24:03
creation loop goes through those six
00:24:04
steps and each step has its own little
00:24:06
job. And what we're trying to do is just
00:24:09
validate, go to the next step, achieve
00:24:12
the milestones, go to the next step. And
00:24:14
and that's how we do it as
00:24:15
entrepreneurs.
00:24:16
>> So in a world of AI, are there any
00:24:18
particular opportunities that you think
00:24:20
are um new and exciting that anybody
00:24:23
listening right now could pursue to make
00:24:25
money, whether it's passive income on
00:24:26
the side or to leave their current role
00:24:28
and pursue entrepreneurship for?
00:24:30
>> Well, the starting point is that
00:24:32
everything is an opportunity because
00:24:34
what do entrepreneurs do? we find things
00:24:36
that could be done better, faster,
00:24:38
cheaper or with more emotional benefits.
00:24:39
>> But has AI created any particular
00:24:41
interesting opportunities in your view
00:24:43
that you think that's a a huge arbitrage
00:24:45
opportunity?
00:24:45
>> I think one of the best opportunities is
00:24:47
a small SAS company. So software as a
00:24:50
service was an elite level business
00:24:52
opportunity that very very few people
00:24:53
could enter. That was something that
00:24:55
only maybe tens of thousands or hundreds
00:24:58
of thousands of founders at most
00:25:00
globally could have a software company.
00:25:02
So it was very very elite. And the
00:25:04
reason it was elite is because it was
00:25:06
very very hard to mobilize the talent
00:25:08
required to build a software company.
00:25:10
You probably needed, you know, maybe 10,
00:25:12
20 or 30 uh developers to build a
00:25:15
software product that would actually be
00:25:16
a good software product. You needed to
00:25:18
raise millions of dollars to get through
00:25:20
the costs of developing software uh
00:25:22
companies. And you probably needed
00:25:24
10,000 customers to have a break even
00:25:26
software company. Now, because of AI,
00:25:29
all of those costs have massively come
00:25:31
down. And there are software companies
00:25:33
that are wildly profitable that have 500
00:25:35
customers or a thousand customers. They
00:25:37
service a tiny little niche. Uh they
00:25:40
attach a community and some media and
00:25:42
some training to those little software
00:25:44
niches. So one of the most exciting
00:25:46
things is that if you essentially said
00:25:49
that I would like to take what I know,
00:25:52
turn it into a playbook, take that
00:25:54
playbook, ask AI to advise me on what
00:25:56
software we could create, and then use
00:25:58
AI tools to build out that software.
00:26:00
you're able to get very deep into that
00:26:03
journey for almost no money.
00:26:06
>> I was thinking about this the other day
00:26:07
because in my company, we're rebuilding
00:26:09
our entire ATS ourselves.
00:26:12
>> So, an ATS is basically the system you
00:26:14
use when you recruit people. Everyone's
00:26:16
name goes into the ATS. It's kind of
00:26:17
like a like a search engine. Yeah, like
00:26:20
a database of where candidates who have
00:26:21
applied for your company currently are.
00:26:23
>> And over the last couple of years, I've
00:26:25
paid tens of thousands of dollars every
00:26:26
year for an ATS for my companies. And
00:26:29
this year I thought, you know what,
00:26:30
actually I reckon we could build an ATS
00:26:32
in a couple of weeks ourselves and it
00:26:33
could be bespoke to us. So we started
00:26:35
that project. I saw the the first
00:26:36
version of it yesterday. We started a
00:26:37
week ago
00:26:38
>> and the first version the the version of
00:26:41
it I saw I was like, "Oh, this is
00:26:42
significantly better than what we were
00:26:44
using before because it's bespoke."
00:26:45
>> Yeah. And this made me think about the
00:26:46
the opportunity of creating software
00:26:49
generally, which is that in a world
00:26:50
where it becomes, as you say, like
00:26:52
cheaper, easier, faster, we're all going
00:26:55
to be using more software, but we're
00:26:57
probably not going to be paying
00:26:59
other people for their software,
00:27:03
especially when it's these kind of
00:27:04
tools, productivity tools and systems.
00:27:07
>> It's purely a tool, it's very easy to
00:27:09
replicate. But if it's a tool that comes
00:27:11
with a community, if it comes with
00:27:13
education and training, if it comes with
00:27:15
agents that
00:27:16
>> education and training.
00:27:17
>> Yeah. So like for example, if you were
00:27:19
to do an ATS, right, an applicant
00:27:20
tracking system, a a hiring tool, and
00:27:23
you had the DOAC uh system and method
00:27:26
that I can go and attend the training as
00:27:28
to how you on board people, how you
00:27:30
create culture, how you do things at
00:27:32
DOAC, I'm now interested in the software
00:27:34
because it comes with that exciting
00:27:36
training. if there was also a boot camp
00:27:38
that I could go to that was attached to
00:27:40
that product. If there was also an
00:27:41
annual retreat or a dinner series, if
00:27:43
there was also uh some funding
00:27:45
opportunities that came with that. So
00:27:48
once upon a time you were just simply
00:27:50
going to focus on creating a software
00:27:52
tool because that was so labor intensive
00:27:55
and also it had a natural moat or
00:27:57
protection around it that you didn't
00:27:59
have to get creative. But now we live in
00:28:02
a world where the AI lets you to build
00:28:03
the product pretty quickly. It helps you
00:28:05
to do all these other things that we
00:28:07
talked about and suddenly it's actually
00:28:09
quite a a fun product that you that you
00:28:11
can spin up. What you've already created
00:28:14
would have probably cost 500,000 in 6
00:28:17
months.
00:28:18
>> Oh my god. 6 months. I wish.
00:28:19
>> Not that long ago.
00:28:20
>> Yeah. It would probably cost It would
00:28:21
have probably taken about 18 months
00:28:23
total end to end.
00:28:24
>> And you've done it in a week.
00:28:25
>> Yeah. And so everyone else can do it in
00:28:28
a week. And in fact, if anyone if that's
00:28:30
anyone's business right now, there's
00:28:32
going to be a thousand new ATS systems a
00:28:35
day. One's going to trend on Twitter.
00:28:36
You know, people are going to download
00:28:37
that one and then they're going to jump
00:28:38
ship because a new one emerges and it's
00:28:40
better, it's more agentic, whatever. And
00:28:42
so, again, I think are we seeing
00:28:43
software generally become a commodity?
00:28:45
>> What we're going to see is we're going
00:28:47
to see all business opportunities be
00:28:49
like YouTube content. I mean, if I went
00:28:51
back 25, 30 years ago and said there's
00:28:54
going to be 10 person unfunded little TV
00:28:56
studios that produce content every
00:28:59
single week for almost no money.
00:29:02
You you would think that's crazy. I
00:29:04
mean, Seinfeld used to cost 5 million an
00:29:06
episode. Um, The Simpsons and Friends,
00:29:09
these were all multi-million dollars per
00:29:11
episode. And we've now replicated that
00:29:13
that can be done like by a tiny little
00:29:16
team for free every week. It's
00:29:18
interesting because the minute we say
00:29:19
that the answer is to do these things
00:29:21
that are now easy and free and cheap to
00:29:23
do, it's almost like we we then don't
00:29:25
acknowledge the fact that if everyone's
00:29:26
doing it, it's no longer a valuable
00:29:28
thing to do.
00:29:29
>> It's less valuable.
00:29:30
>> Yeah. As it becomes easier, the other
00:29:32
access is the decline in the value. So,
00:29:34
we're saying we're saying to people go
00:29:36
be a content creator. But the very fact
00:29:38
that they can without needing a CNN size
00:29:41
skyscraper or production equipment also
00:29:42
means everybody can which means that
00:29:45
that that actually is losing value at
00:29:47
the same rate that it's becoming easy
00:29:49
theoretically and and so what I
00:29:52
continually think about from first
00:29:53
principles is what is it that I can bet
00:29:55
on that is irreplaceably human which
00:29:58
only I can do and a kid in Mumbai cannot
00:30:01
do. And so when we say software I go kid
00:30:03
in Mumbai and then we say content I go
00:30:05
kid in Mumbai. Well, uh, physical
00:30:07
experiences in the world, real world, I
00:30:09
agree with you. So, standing on a stage
00:30:12
and telling your story is something I
00:30:14
mean, you already see that thousands of
00:30:17
people show up to see this and to be
00:30:19
part of to be in a room with other
00:30:20
people who are sharing an experience.
00:30:22
See, the thing that the AI version of
00:30:24
you can't do is turn up to an event.
00:30:26
>> I agree. So, I I say what I say because
00:30:29
I genuinely want to be challenged here.
00:30:31
I I'm I sit here with these AI experts
00:30:34
and CEOs because I genuinely I hope that
00:30:37
they say something that
00:30:39
>> tilts the current belief that I have and
00:30:41
like makes me go, "Oh, actually, you
00:30:43
know, that's a good point. I'm in search
00:30:44
of good points on the subject matter."
00:30:46
So, when I said what I just said about
00:30:48
content software becoming increasingly
00:30:50
commoditized and because it's becoming
00:30:52
commoditized, we're like tempting people
00:30:53
to go do more of it without
00:30:54
acknowledging the fact that the very
00:30:56
fact that people are doing more of it
00:30:57
means it's less valuable and it's more
00:30:59
of a commodity. And what I'm saying
00:31:00
though is that these things have to go
00:31:02
together. So simply like anyone who's
00:31:05
doing real world experiences, I think
00:31:07
what's going to happen is you'll go to a
00:31:08
conference and that conference will come
00:31:10
with custom software that lasts 2 or 3
00:31:12
weeks that is really really interesting
00:31:15
and it relates to that conference and
00:31:17
that software was created as a SAS
00:31:19
product for the attendees of that
00:31:21
conference and it kind of pops into
00:31:23
existence very briefly. These things
00:31:25
used to be separate and now they all
00:31:26
cluster together, right? So, it's a
00:31:28
buffet of things that you all put
00:31:29
together. If we take most successful
00:31:32
businesses now, they do social media.
00:31:35
That used to be a standalone business.
00:31:37
It was crazy to think that a hair salon
00:31:40
could also be a media business. I've met
00:31:42
with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs
00:31:44
and the number of people who want to go
00:31:46
big is tiny. It's a fraction of the
00:31:48
entrepreneurial community. What most
00:31:50
people want is a business that provides
00:31:52
an amazing lifestyle. They want to live
00:31:55
and work from anywhere. They want to be
00:31:56
able to travel. They want to do three or
00:31:58
four days a week. They want to drop
00:31:59
their kids off at school. They want to
00:32:02
uh do non-monotonous, interesting work
00:32:05
that is a little chaotic, a little
00:32:08
creative, a little bit fun, a little bit
00:32:10
challenging. They want to work with a
00:32:11
small group of people that they get to
00:32:12
know and enjoy and travel through life
00:32:14
together. And those are the types of
00:32:16
things that the majority of people
00:32:18
actually want. Very few people actually
00:32:20
want big. So, one thing that I'm
00:32:22
noticing is that it's probably harder
00:32:24
than ever to build a big business, but
00:32:26
it's easier than ever to build a small
00:32:28
successful business. So, if we were to
00:32:31
say that a business that does 1 to 5
00:32:32
million of revenue with a team of 10
00:32:34
people, that is like totally
00:32:38
like super uh possible. But once you go
00:32:41
beyond that, it's becoming harder and
00:32:43
harder because you get disrupted more
00:32:45
frequently. So you have to be an elite
00:32:46
athlete of entrepreneurs to withstand
00:32:48
the constant disruption and and um the
00:32:52
the constant change that's coming. So
00:32:54
because your natural mindset is to think
00:32:56
really really big, you're probably
00:32:59
missing that for many people who are
00:33:02
working in a annoying corporate
00:33:04
environment and their job is monotonous
00:33:07
and they feel tethered to a desk or they
00:33:10
feel tethered to a team that doesn't
00:33:11
really care about them. you know, a lot
00:33:13
of those people are going to actually
00:33:14
end up in small dynamic little
00:33:15
businesses that will never be big, but
00:33:17
they'll be great. They'll be fun, you
00:33:19
know, and people will, you know, have
00:33:21
flexibility and they'll have uh, you
00:33:24
know, great, you know, great
00:33:25
opportunities as a result.
00:33:27
>> I think you're right. I do have a bias
00:33:29
towards trying to find, you know, big
00:33:30
opportunities. But actually, I think the
00:33:32
big blue ocean opportunity, which is,
00:33:35
for anyone that doesn't know, I think of
00:33:37
red oceans from the the book called Blue
00:33:38
Ocean Strategy as very competitive,
00:33:41
>> hyper competitive horrible markets where
00:33:43
it's like a race to the bottom. You're
00:33:44
all doing the same thing. Like you're
00:33:47
all saying the same thing, doing the
00:33:49
same thing, and you all think that your
00:33:51
unique positioning is is unique, but
00:33:53
it's actually not. The market doesn't
00:33:54
value it any differently. Like a wine
00:33:56
company saying that their wine is a year
00:33:57
older or that using a fancier word on
00:33:59
the label. It's a red ocean, a blood
00:34:00
bath. A blue ocean is an uncont
00:34:03
uncontested waters where you have room
00:34:05
to grow much less competition and there
00:34:08
is actually something fundamental to
00:34:09
your proposition your business idea the
00:34:11
thing the value you're giving to the
00:34:12
world that is unique
00:34:14
>> I'm looking for blue oceans
00:34:16
>> and yes I will try and build a big boat
00:34:19
in the blue ocean
00:34:20
>> because that's my nature but also life
00:34:22
is easier when you sail in blue oceans
00:34:25
for everybody even if you want a
00:34:26
lifestyle business I think one of the
00:34:27
great examples at the moment is if you
00:34:29
started a marketing agency when I
00:34:30
started In 2014, especially a social
00:34:33
media agency, you were in the blue
00:34:34
ocean.
00:34:35
>> You were briefly
00:34:36
>> briefly. And they say, you know, blue
00:34:37
oceans often last for 10 years. In 2024,
00:34:40
my best friends, I'd say 70% of them run
00:34:44
marketing or brand agencies.
00:34:45
>> Yeah.
00:34:46
>> I'm having the same same therapy session
00:34:48
with them once a month at the moment.
00:34:49
And if you look at the big five, big
00:34:50
four, big five agencies in the world,
00:34:52
the WPPs and Martin Surl's business,
00:34:55
>> they're all
00:34:56
>> they're all competed to way their
00:34:57
margins. They're struggling. Yeah.
00:34:59
>> They're losing their profit. they're
00:35:00
losing their market share.
00:35:01
>> And AI and digital technology means that
00:35:04
this disruption cycle happens in months,
00:35:06
not years anymore. So you said a blue
00:35:08
ocean can last for years or decades. Not
00:35:09
in the world of AI. In the world of AI,
00:35:12
as soon as we've identified that you've
00:35:13
got a blue ocean, we can replicate that
00:35:15
real fast and we can come and fly out to
00:35:17
your blue ocean with with an with lots
00:35:19
of competition. Here's something that's
00:35:20
interesting. Throughout all of history,
00:35:23
whenever you find societies that have
00:35:26
low social mobility and hyper
00:35:28
competition, there's lots and lots of
00:35:30
festivals. So you go into medieval
00:35:33
times, they've got a festival for every
00:35:35
season. They've got a festival for every
00:35:36
life event. There's just constant
00:35:38
festivals. You go into rural Africa,
00:35:40
rural India, and it's festivals,
00:35:42
festivals, festivals, right? Weddings,
00:35:44
funerals, seasonal festivals. It's a
00:35:47
huge part of human culture that we have
00:35:49
lost in big cities. like we don't do a
00:35:52
lot of festival or rare it's rare that
00:35:53
we do a lot of festivals these real
00:35:55
world experiences but I don't
00:35:56
necessarily think it's a blue ocean
00:35:58
because uh as soon as people realize how
00:36:01
much people want to do festivals and
00:36:03
want to do real world experiences a lot
00:36:05
of companies can also add this to the
00:36:06
mix I think what is defensible is
00:36:10
community experience and embracing the
00:36:13
constant chaotic change and coming up
00:36:15
with new stuff all the time
00:36:17
>> one of the bets I'm making and it goes
00:36:18
back to what like again reasoning up
00:36:20
from those principles. If the question
00:36:22
is what can I do that an AI agent or AI
00:36:25
could not do and especially in the
00:36:26
context of what humans will continue to
00:36:29
need.
00:36:29
>> Mhm.
00:36:30
>> When you were born Dan, you're born with
00:36:31
a bunch of needs and those needs like
00:36:33
fundamentally haven't changed. One of
00:36:34
them is like connection.
00:36:36
>> I think you'll always be able to discern
00:36:37
what is real human connection from
00:36:40
artificial connection. I remember being
00:36:42
16 years old and in my psychology class
00:36:44
at the back when they told me about the
00:36:45
recess monkeys experiment where they got
00:36:47
a recess monkey, this little small
00:36:48
little monkey. They pretended that its
00:36:50
mother was a wire mesh. So they made a
00:36:53
wire mesh mother. The recess monkey
00:36:54
grows up to be a psychopath because it's
00:36:57
it fundamental human need of connection
00:36:59
is not met. They then did it with a
00:37:01
cloth and the recess monkey grew up to
00:37:04
be a bit more stable. And then obviously
00:37:05
they showed the examples where the
00:37:07
recess monkey actually had a physical
00:37:09
flesh mother and it was it was fine. So
00:37:12
I say this to illuminate the fact that
00:37:14
we have fundamental needs that if not
00:37:15
met there will be consequences. One of
00:37:17
ours is connection. So, as a content
00:37:19
creator, I can sit here and I can tell
00:37:21
you what happened today, right? I can
00:37:23
say at 6:00 this guy broke into this
00:37:25
bank and then he left. I think that's a
00:37:28
commodity. Now,
00:37:29
>> I think the thing that I can do as a
00:37:30
podcaster, as a behind-the-scenes
00:37:32
content creator, as a streamer,
00:37:35
>> this is why I'm so bullish on streamers
00:37:37
>> is they're making irreplaceably human
00:37:39
content. There's no AI that can an AI
00:37:41
can tell you what menop what happens in
00:37:43
menopause. An AI can't tell you its
00:37:45
experience of menopause. Yes, we need to
00:37:47
find something that only we can say as
00:37:49
humans. And every single person has this
00:37:51
by the way, but a lot of us overlook
00:37:53
what we can say as a human. I recently
00:37:56
came across a financial planner and his
00:37:58
name is Matt Pitcher and he gave a TED
00:38:01
talk and the TED talk is about what it
00:38:04
was like for him to meet 100 people who
00:38:07
had won the lottery. So, he had a
00:38:09
partnership as a financial planner with
00:38:11
the uh British lottery. And every week
00:38:13
someone wins the lottery and then he
00:38:15
goes in and meets them a week later
00:38:17
after they've discovered they've won the
00:38:19
lottery.
00:38:19
>> Wow.
00:38:20
>> But what he did did is he looked back at
00:38:22
his history and he had lots of different
00:38:23
things that he was doing, but he looked
00:38:24
back at his history and he connected
00:38:26
some dots and he said, "Hey, wait a
00:38:27
second. There's something that only I
00:38:29
can talk about. There's something that
00:38:30
is that is my thing that I've
00:38:32
experienced that I live through that
00:38:34
I've sat in those living rooms. I've sat
00:38:35
eye to eye with those people and only I
00:38:37
can talk about that." And because of
00:38:39
that TED talk, he's he's had half a
00:38:41
million views in the first few weeks and
00:38:43
you know, his business is obviously
00:38:44
going to explode and all of those kind
00:38:45
of things because he found something
00:38:47
that only he could say. I believe that
00:38:49
every person has something that's human
00:38:51
that only they can say that's highly
00:38:53
relatable. You shared with me an
00:38:54
interesting philosophy. Uh when we first
00:38:57
met, I did my first episode on Diary of
00:38:58
a CEO and it got millions of views. And
00:39:01
I said to you, why is it that my episode
00:39:03
got millions of views, but a few weeks
00:39:05
ago there was a billionaire CEO who only
00:39:08
got a few hundred thousand views. And a
00:39:10
few weeks before that, there was a
00:39:11
billionaire CEO who only got a few
00:39:13
hundred thousand views. And you said,
00:39:15
Daniel, relatable beats impressive.
00:39:17
>> Yeah.
00:39:17
>> And a lot of people think that they have
00:39:19
to cure cancer or launch a rocket to
00:39:22
Mars or that they have to win a Nobel
00:39:23
Peace Prize or float a company on the
00:39:25
NASDAQ. And actually each individual
00:39:27
person, we have to discover what I would
00:39:30
call your personal intellectual property
00:39:31
or your personal intellectual capital
00:39:33
and your personal story, your personal
00:39:36
playbooks, you know, your your triumphs
00:39:38
and your disasters, the things that
00:39:40
you've done that are interesting to a
00:39:42
certain group of people that you can
00:39:43
quantify, that you can describe, that
00:39:45
you can give me what it was like. Those
00:39:47
are your personal playbooks. Now once
00:39:49
you have personal playbooks, you have
00:39:51
the ability to turn that into all sorts
00:39:53
of products and services through AI. But
00:39:55
you but it starts with having personal
00:39:57
playbooks.
00:39:58
>> I think this is the key mistake that a
00:39:59
lot of content creators are um making,
00:40:02
which is because it's easy to make stuff
00:40:03
now, it's tempting just to churn stuff
00:40:05
out.
00:40:06
>> Yeah.
00:40:06
>> Whereas I'm making less content now in a
00:40:10
world of AI. If you look at my LinkedIn,
00:40:11
I used to post, if you go back like
00:40:14
three or four years, I was just churning
00:40:16
stuff out my quote picture, anything
00:40:18
fluffy, like just fluff
00:40:19
>> data.
00:40:19
>> Yeah. Now I go, well, if everyone can do
00:40:21
it, the reason why my LinkedIn, you'll
00:40:23
see almost every post I post now is a
00:40:25
human story about something I've gone
00:40:27
through, you'll see photos of me, you'll
00:40:28
see photos of my family.
00:40:30
>> You're saying stuff that only you can
00:40:31
say.
00:40:33
>> Yeah. So, we all have to find what is
00:40:34
the thing that only you can say. And no
00:40:38
robot, no AI could ever say that because
00:40:41
it hasn't lived that experience.
00:40:43
>> Yeah, it's got all the data. It's got
00:40:44
all the knowledge, but it's got no lived
00:40:45
experience. And also from a business
00:40:48
perspective, an AI can never stand on a
00:40:50
stage. An AI can never host a dinner
00:40:52
party. Uh an AI can never meet someone
00:40:54
face to face and put their hand on their
00:40:56
shoulder and say, "Hey, I've been
00:40:57
through what you've been through and
00:40:58
you're going to be okay." Right? So all
00:41:00
of those things AI can't do. So once you
00:41:03
discover something that only you can say
00:41:05
it it becomes a superpower.
00:41:06
>> I think my best performing post this
00:41:08
year was actually me proposing to my
00:41:10
fiance a prime prime example of
00:41:12
something that is irreplaceably human
00:41:14
which is getting down on one knee and
00:41:16
telling another human being that you
00:41:17
love them. There's no AI that has ever I
00:41:20
mean listen
00:41:20
>> it's never experienced it.
00:41:21
>> Yeah. Exactly. So and there's something
00:41:23
so human about that.
00:41:24
>> It's relatable. It's not impressive.
00:41:26
It's relatable. Um from first principles
00:41:29
I ask myself which type of content am I
00:41:32
making is creating the the strongest
00:41:33
parasocial relationship
00:41:35
>> with the person on the other end. If I
00:41:37
post on my LinkedIn everything happens
00:41:39
for a reason. Am I how much have I moved
00:41:42
the needle on our our relationship my
00:41:43
relationship with you? Probably zero. If
00:41:46
I talk about something more human, some
00:41:49
struggles that I'm having uh from a
00:41:50
human perspective, if I'm more honest,
00:41:53
authentic, and open or vulnerable about
00:41:55
the experience I'm going through, like
00:41:57
streamers who sit there for seven I
00:41:59
think did I say this last time that I I
00:42:01
asked a streamer a couple of questions.
00:42:03
>> And I asked the streamers like, "What do
00:42:04
you do?" And he was like, "Oh, nothing.
00:42:05
I just sit there and
00:42:06
>> sit for seven hours and watch Judge Judy
00:42:07
with the audience and we chat." I say,
00:42:09
and this is a prime example of
00:42:10
Parasocial.
00:42:11
>> They actually talk to you. They go chat.
00:42:13
Let me know if you think X Y or Z chat.
00:42:16
Drop W's in the chat. That's a friend.
00:42:19
>> That's the closest thing to a friend.
00:42:21
It's the strongest parasocial
00:42:22
relationship.
00:42:23
>> Well, you said about the football game
00:42:24
where the loudest cheers in the audience
00:42:26
came for those streamers who were just
00:42:28
connecting with people.
00:42:29
>> They've built friendships basically with
00:42:30
their audience. So, of all, I think in a
00:42:32
world of AI where justformational
00:42:34
content, which is this thing happened or
00:42:36
this is what the gut microbiome is, is
00:42:38
going to become commoditized. The thing
00:42:40
that isn't commoditized is content that
00:42:42
creates relationships with audiences and
00:42:45
then as you say then converts that
00:42:46
relationship into stronger experiences
00:42:49
like IRL events and so on and so forth.
00:42:51
I've got a couple more ideas that I I
00:42:53
haven't fully shared with the world yet
00:42:55
but I'm just I'll wait for the right
00:42:56
time about all of this stuff.
00:42:58
>> See it's not one piece that is adding
00:43:00
the value. It's the ecosystem of pieces.
00:43:02
So it's having something to say that
00:43:04
only you can say. Let's call that your
00:43:05
personal playbooks. Let's call that your
00:43:07
personal intellectual property. It's
00:43:09
having the people or your community that
00:43:11
you're going through life with, right?
00:43:12
That's called that your ideal customers,
00:43:14
your ideal personas if you want to make
00:43:16
it a clinical definition of in marketing
00:43:18
speak that that gives rise to a personal
00:43:21
brand. When those two things touch, you
00:43:23
then end up with a personal brand,
00:43:24
right? As if by magic, you end up with a
00:43:26
personal brand because you've got
00:43:27
intellectual property and you've got an
00:43:28
ideal customer who connects with that
00:43:30
and then you you are the person who
00:43:31
embodies it. So you you give rise to
00:43:33
that. And then the question is, well,
00:43:35
how do you make money from that? Well,
00:43:37
you productize it. You create products
00:43:39
and services. And it's the product and
00:43:41
service ecosystem that makes money. It's
00:43:43
not one product or service. It used to
00:43:44
be that you could just have a a product
00:43:46
or service that you offer. And now it's
00:43:48
the product and service ecosystem. The
00:43:49
people that I see making the most money
00:43:52
at the moment, they don't do one thing.
00:43:54
You don't do one thing. Right? So, if I
00:43:56
look at uh your personal P&L, you've
00:43:59
probably got 27 different ways that
00:44:01
money came and hit your bank account
00:44:02
last month. There's speaking, there's
00:44:04
podcasting, there's AdSense revenue,
00:44:06
there's sponsors, there's shareholdings
00:44:08
in different companies that you've got.
00:44:10
Um, there might be some one-to-one
00:44:12
coaching that you might have done. There
00:44:14
might be an appearance fee. There might
00:44:15
be some book royalties. There's multiple
00:44:17
books. Uh, there might be some software
00:44:18
that you've launched. So there's all
00:44:20
this stuff that sounds crazy and chaotic
00:44:24
in a pre-AII world, but in a postAI
00:44:26
world, it's not that hard to create all
00:44:27
these different products and services
00:44:29
and to be launching different things and
00:44:30
to be going on a journey with people and
00:44:32
having a product and service ecosystem.
00:44:33
I'm the same, by the way. I've probably
00:44:35
got 20 different things that, you know,
00:44:37
that I'm involved in at any given time.
00:44:39
>> I was reading yesterday that the for the
00:44:41
first time, I mean, I was reading a few
00:44:42
things. One of the interesting things I
00:44:44
read is that Spotify said their best
00:44:45
developers haven't written a line of
00:44:47
code since December thanks to AI, which
00:44:49
again is a whole another conversation.
00:44:51
Maybe we should touch on that. What are
00:44:53
the occupations that you genuinely
00:44:56
believe won't exist 5 years from now as
00:44:59
we know them?
00:45:00
>> People say lawyers are going to be
00:45:01
disrupted.
00:45:02
>> Well, I recently had a law legal case
00:45:05
that I had to resolve and it was going
00:45:07
to cost us £50,000. So, $60,000
00:45:11
uh as a start the process with a law
00:45:13
firm. We took matters into our own hands
00:45:15
and we used Claude and we actually fixed
00:45:17
the process and resolve the process by
00:45:19
spending 20 a month, $20 a month. And
00:45:22
Claude gave us a coaching session on how
00:45:24
to handle it. Gave us multiple decision
00:45:26
tree pathways. Gave us the documents
00:45:29
that we would need. Gave us an Excel
00:45:31
spreadsheet of do say this, don't say
00:45:33
this in the negotiation. And it made me
00:45:35
realize, my goodness, what a lawyer's
00:45:37
going to do. Uh because if all they do
00:45:40
is charge for time for money to
00:45:42
regurgitate contracts, I don't need that
00:45:44
anymore. Right?
00:45:45
>> Multiple reports say legacy legal tech
00:45:47
and data firms have lost roughly 20% of
00:45:50
their value so far in 2026.
00:45:52
>> 280 billion was wiped off the value of
00:45:54
publicly traded companies like that in
00:45:56
the last week. Like it's wild. Um
00:45:59
because we're not going to need that. I
00:46:01
don't believe we're going to need these
00:46:03
business models as they currently stand.
00:46:05
I think they're going to have to change
00:46:07
and adapt. I think a lawyer needs to
00:46:08
take a completely different shape. Part
00:46:10
business coach, part lawyer, part prompt
00:46:12
engineer. They're going to be the key
00:46:14
person of AI in the room who the
00:46:17
lawyer's job will be to work with you on
00:46:19
your AI prompting and help you get the
00:46:21
resolution. You're probably going to
00:46:23
need a lot less of a lawyer's time. Blue
00:46:25
collar work has been devalued. And we've
00:46:28
seen people who work with their hands
00:46:29
and people who uh turn up to your house
00:46:31
and fix your house in a devalued role.
00:46:35
And it could be in the next, you know,
00:46:37
uh, couple of years. These are the roles
00:46:39
that are elevated the most and that
00:46:42
plumbers regularly earn more than
00:46:43
lawyers simply because the nature of the
00:46:46
economy has changed. One thing I've
00:46:47
learned over the last 25 years is the
00:46:49
pendulum swings. Things that very few
00:46:52
things stay the same. There is always
00:46:53
this swinging pendulum. And the swinging
00:46:55
pendulum is like, oh yeah, white collar
00:46:57
work behind a screen is the high value
00:46:59
thing. Oh, no, it's actually blue collar
00:47:01
work with your hands. You talked about
00:47:03
supply and demand. We dis the government
00:47:06
disrupted the natural way children go
00:47:09
out and find opportunities in the world
00:47:10
by making university loans come along.
00:47:13
And they said, "Oh, everyone can just
00:47:14
take out a university loan and go to
00:47:16
university. In fact, you must and you
00:47:17
should go go to university. Get yourself
00:47:19
in debt or else you'll never get a job
00:47:21
anywhere if you don't do a university
00:47:22
degree." And lots of young people who
00:47:25
should have been plumbers, electricians,
00:47:27
and concreers and brick layers went off
00:47:30
and became a m got a master's degree in
00:47:32
the mating habits of butterflies and you
00:47:34
know some random degree that doesn't
00:47:36
have a job attached and they ended up in
00:47:38
60 70 $80,000 worth of debt to get this
00:47:41
degree that no one was asking for. That
00:47:43
market distortion means that we now
00:47:45
don't have many plumbers and
00:47:46
electricians and the blue ocean is now
00:47:49
being a trades person.
00:47:52
There's a phase a lot of companies hit
00:47:53
where they're no longer doing the most
00:47:55
important thing, which is selling. And
00:47:56
they get really bogged down with admin.
00:47:58
And it's often something that creeps up
00:48:00
slowly and you don't really notice until
00:48:02
it's happened. Slowly momentum starts to
00:48:04
leak out. This happened to us and our
00:48:06
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00:48:07
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00:48:57
>> Steve, what are you doing?
00:48:59
>> Uh, just making myself a delicious
00:49:01
coffee
00:49:01
>> from the freezer.
00:49:03
>> From the freezer. Have you not heard
00:49:04
about Contier?
00:49:04
>> No.
00:49:05
>> Oh my gosh. This is going to change your
00:49:07
life. A couple of months ago, the
00:49:09
founder of this business called Matt
00:49:10
sent a big shipment of this coffee to
00:49:14
our office in London. What most people
00:49:15
don't know is that the processing of
00:49:16
coffee takes out a lot of the taste. So,
00:49:18
what they do is they flash freeze it at
00:49:21
the optimal moment when it's most tasty
00:49:24
and they send you in the post the coffee
00:49:26
in these little frozen ice cubes. Now,
00:49:28
Matt sent a big shipment to my office. I
00:49:30
moved it to the kitchen. I said to the
00:49:31
team, "Knock yourselves out." And then I
00:49:33
saw so many messages in our Slack
00:49:35
channel of people going, "Oh my god,
00:49:37
what the hell is that? It's so
00:49:38
delicious." All I have to do is pop it
00:49:40
out in the morning using the little
00:49:41
button on the back of this thing. I pour
00:49:44
my hot water in and I mix it and that is
00:49:48
done. You can get $30 off your first
00:49:50
order of Cometier coffee if you go to
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cometier.com/stephven.
00:49:56
Try it and please Instagram DM me,
00:49:58
LinkedIn me and let me know if you love
00:50:00
it as much as I do. I was looking at the
00:50:03
um top 10 jobs according to AI that are
00:50:06
most likely to be disrupted and it said
00:50:08
things like drivers with Mackenzie
00:50:09
estimating 30% of them will be automated
00:50:11
by 2030 customer service representative
00:50:13
and call center reps which I used to be.
00:50:15
>> Mhm. Same
00:50:16
>> 50% headcount reductions after AI roll
00:50:18
out according to some estimates some go
00:50:20
up to about 80%. I actually saw a tool
00:50:22
on my timeline yesterday that is real
00:50:25
human voice indistinguishable from
00:50:26
humans that's just launched and is
00:50:28
causing a huge stir. So that they're
00:50:30
thinking that will replace even more of
00:50:32
the customer service roles. I I did
00:50:34
speak to the CEO of Cler TLDDR as he
00:50:37
said we currently have 7,000 employees.
00:50:39
We're going to be able to get down to
00:50:41
3,000. He said after summer because of
00:50:44
um AI and we'll be using our existing
00:50:48
team members that are in customer
00:50:50
service roles to do more sort of bespoke
00:50:51
white glove VIP
00:50:53
>> VIP stuff will go up. In fact, Jean's
00:50:55
paradox would suggest that a lot of the
00:50:59
dehumanizing repetitive work will go
00:51:01
away. But actually, if there are AI bots
00:51:05
that are really good at setting
00:51:07
appointments for a VIP human person to
00:51:09
have a conversation, then that work will
00:51:11
go through the roof. Because one of the
00:51:13
reasons that people, like right now,
00:51:15
most companies wish they could have more
00:51:17
VIP conversations, but the appointment
00:51:19
setting, they don't have a lot of the
00:51:20
low-level appointment setting stuff
00:51:22
happening. And if the appointment
00:51:23
setting stuff, if the cost of that goes
00:51:25
to zero, then the the the affordability
00:51:27
of the VIP level treatment um becomes
00:51:31
you know becomes uh much more feasible.
00:51:34
>> Retail cashes, admin assistants,
00:51:36
bookkeepers and payroll clerk, sales
00:51:38
development reps, warehouse workers with
00:51:41
um Amazon and others reporting that
00:51:42
robots now assist or replace labor in a
00:51:44
roughly 40% of fulfillment tasks. And
00:51:46
that Boston Dynamics video, which I'll
00:51:47
put up on the screen, shows a humanoid
00:51:49
robot working in a factory. What's nice
00:51:51
about some of this is that many of the
00:51:53
jobs here are jobs that a lot of people
00:51:55
don't actually like doing. They are
00:51:57
repetitive and dehumanizing. They're
00:51:59
late night. They're early mornings. So
00:52:02
potentially,
00:52:04
provided there is a Jeins paradox that
00:52:06
something happens that's more fun, more
00:52:07
humanizing, more interesting, more VIP,
00:52:10
more chaotic, and you know, all of that
00:52:12
sort of stuff. It could be a very
00:52:14
positive thing.
00:52:15
>> Fast food workers. Um, or
00:52:16
>> I used to be a fast food worker.
00:52:18
>> So did I in McDonald's? I think it was
00:52:19
two days. I did two years at McDonald's.
00:52:21
>> Oh, really? Because this disruption is
00:52:23
happening at record speeds. Where do all
00:52:25
these people go? Because, you know, even
00:52:27
in examples, oh, they could do AI
00:52:29
labeling. They need to be upskilled and
00:52:31
trained. And I worry that the rate of
00:52:33
disruption isn't going to meet the rate
00:52:35
of creation of new opportunities.
00:52:37
>> And I really do worry about this. Like I
00:52:38
think people wonder why I have these
00:52:39
conversations on this podcast over and
00:52:41
over again. My philosophy to talking
00:52:42
having conversations on this podcast is
00:52:44
basically I'll say to my team I'll say
00:52:46
Steve you want to have a conversation
00:52:47
about
00:52:48
>> you know this particular subject the gut
00:52:49
microbiome and I'll say
00:52:51
>> we've covered it
00:52:52
>> which basically means I'm no longer
00:52:54
curious y
00:52:55
>> I have the answers I know about the
00:52:57
trillions of gut micro and I know how
00:52:59
the gut brain access let's move on
00:53:00
>> I keep having these conversations about
00:53:02
AI because I feel like I'm getting no
00:53:04
good answers
00:53:05
>> okay so here's what's interesting there
00:53:07
is something which you have which is
00:53:10
this elite mindset which is how do I
00:53:13
organize society
00:53:15
so that everyone gets a job and everyone
00:53:18
does stuff right and this is this is the
00:53:20
trap that many people have fallen into
00:53:22
and it's actually at the root cause of
00:53:24
socialism so the root of socialism is
00:53:26
that I know better than everybody else
00:53:29
and I will come up with a way of running
00:53:32
society so everyone gets looked after
00:53:34
that's the top down mindset the crazy
00:53:37
mindset that actually works is if If we
00:53:41
give people education and training and
00:53:43
we make opportunity transparent and we
00:53:46
actually let people know what's actually
00:53:47
happening in the market and we give them
00:53:49
price signal data, they will
00:53:51
selforganize and reorganize and they
00:53:53
will have a bottom-up revolution and
00:53:55
they will find amazing interesting
00:53:57
things to do. The money is in the
00:53:59
economy, right?
00:54:00
>> You think that's true?
00:54:01
>> That's called capitalism.
00:54:02
>> I know, but
00:54:03
>> capitalism works
00:54:04
>> in the UK. Let's take the UK as an
00:54:05
example, cuz we're all just screaming at
00:54:07
each other about brown people. We're not
00:54:08
talking about the the real alien, which
00:54:10
is like the fundamental economic
00:54:12
disruption of AI. Yeah. There's a report
00:54:14
that came out yesterday showing that
00:54:15
unemployment in the UK has hit
00:54:18
>> it's 25% up and youth unemployment has
00:54:20
grown by more than 25%.
00:54:22
>> It's like 16.1% of people that are
00:54:23
between 16 and 24 unemployed now.
00:54:26
>> Yeah.
00:54:26
>> And we're still not talking about the
00:54:28
economy. We're talking about brown
00:54:29
people.
00:54:30
>> When people feel that they can't get
00:54:31
ahead, they look for somebody to blame.
00:54:33
And this is historically consistent.
00:54:36
What is really happening is that the
00:54:38
government has become so big in the
00:54:40
economy. The the UK government is now 45
00:54:42
to 50% of all spending in the UK
00:54:44
economy. That's essentially a socialist
00:54:46
or it's getting socialist. Every amount
00:54:49
of government spend is a market
00:54:51
distortion regardless of what it's for.
00:54:53
And I'm saying there plenty of things
00:54:54
governments should be spending money on,
00:54:56
but all government spending is a market
00:54:58
distortion. It's not market driven. And
00:55:00
there is a monopoly on spend. So
00:55:01
therefore, it is a market distortion.
00:55:03
The more government spending you have,
00:55:05
the more market distortions you have.
00:55:07
>> What do you mean by market distortions?
00:55:08
>> So a market distortion is where the
00:55:10
markets are not really able to function
00:55:13
because there is some big organization
00:55:15
like the government spending money and
00:55:17
taking away price signals and taking
00:55:18
away the realities of the market. So a a
00:55:21
great example is what happened with
00:55:23
student loans. So rather what in a
00:55:25
capitalist society what would have
00:55:27
happened is that young people would have
00:55:29
heard oh my goodness there's a shortage
00:55:31
of brick layers. Have you heard that
00:55:33
brick layers are making £300 a day? Wow,
00:55:36
I would love to make £300 a day. I'm
00:55:38
going to go be a brick layer. Guess
00:55:40
what? It's a brick layers apprentice.
00:55:41
I'm going to go and be an apprentice.
00:55:42
I'm going to get paid to learn this
00:55:44
trade. And there would be a market
00:55:46
driven pull towards being a brick layer.
00:55:48
A young person would get a job at a bank
00:55:51
and the bank would say, "Hey, can we
00:55:53
please pay for you to do a finance
00:55:55
degree because we need more people
00:55:56
who've got a finance degree and we will
00:55:58
actually pay for you to go through
00:56:00
that." So that's a functioning market.
00:56:02
It's basically based on uh needs and
00:56:04
wants and things that are needed within
00:56:06
the economy. What the government did is
00:56:08
they created a what's called a market
00:56:09
distortion. They said to all young
00:56:11
people, we are going to give you as much
00:56:14
uh lending as you like to go out and
00:56:16
take whatever university courses you
00:56:18
want. Um there's no price data, there's
00:56:20
no signaling data. It's just you if you
00:56:22
want to borrow £50,000, you can go to
00:56:25
any course. If you're really interested
00:56:27
in the breeding habits of butterflies,
00:56:29
go and do a master's degree in that. and
00:56:32
um you know, happy days, right? You you
00:56:34
could it doesn't matter whether there
00:56:36
are jobs associated with it, you must go
00:56:38
and get a a university degree. So, they
00:56:40
set up an entire system that pushed
00:56:42
young people to go get £50,000 worth of
00:56:45
debt and do a degree that no one was
00:56:46
asking for. That's a market distortion.
00:56:48
We now have a bubble of over 280 billion
00:56:51
pounds worth of uh debt that will
00:56:53
probably never be repaid. Uh we have a
00:56:56
entire generation of young people who
00:56:59
are saddled with this debt that takes
00:57:01
away all motivation. There's no point in
00:57:03
working because they pay such high taxes
00:57:06
every single time they make a payment to
00:57:08
pay off their student loan. They they
00:57:10
pay 600 but the debt goes up by 650.
00:57:14
Right? It's it's absolutely insane. And
00:57:16
that's a classic example of governments
00:57:18
meddling with the markets creating a
00:57:20
market distortion. And now we have
00:57:22
hundreds of billions of dollars worth of
00:57:24
people who are very angry, very upset uh
00:57:26
because they are trapped in a student
00:57:28
debt that will not go away for decades.
00:57:30
>> Rashi Sunnak, the former prime minister
00:57:32
of the UK wrote an article last week
00:57:34
which you might have seen where he said
00:57:36
that if the UK fails to fix its
00:57:38
productivity problems and seize the AI
00:57:41
opportunity, the country risks becoming
00:57:44
a tourist theme park.
00:57:46
>> Yeah. Not even a good tourist theme
00:57:48
park. you know, there's there's, you
00:57:50
know, there's not a lot, you know, at
00:57:52
least a lot of other countries have
00:57:54
beaches and mountain ranges and ski
00:57:56
resorts and, you know, the UK doesn't
00:57:58
have a lot of that. We have to let
00:58:00
markets function. The issue that we
00:58:01
have, and this is this is actually a
00:58:03
trap that you're falling into is trying
00:58:05
to figure out top down, how do we
00:58:07
organize society, which is socialism,
00:58:10
right? The top down approach of trying
00:58:11
to fix this problem for everybody is the
00:58:13
socialist mindset. And it does it it
00:58:16
doesn't work. If you were the prime
00:58:17
minister
00:58:18
>> Yeah.
00:58:18
>> and you you can see the future that's
00:58:20
coming.
00:58:20
>> Yeah.
00:58:21
>> What would you do?
00:58:22
>> So the number one thing the UK needs to
00:58:24
do is reduce government involvement
00:58:25
where we need to get the government
00:58:27
spending down less than 35%.
00:58:30
>> Where'd you cut?
00:58:30
>> Right. So the key thing that you need is
00:58:33
that you need well there's loads of
00:58:34
places to cut, right? Like getting
00:58:36
involved in trying to do wind farms and
00:58:39
solar farms and all of this 40 billion
00:58:41
and all this sort of stuff. Preventing
00:58:43
companies from accessing natural gas
00:58:44
that is just sitting under our feet is a
00:58:47
crazy thing to do. Spending 20 billion
00:58:49
trying to give away one of our islands
00:58:50
to someone is a crazy thing to do.
00:58:52
There's all sorts of crazy things that
00:58:54
the government is spending money on.
00:58:55
Bureaucracy is a crazy spend. Do you
00:58:57
know that the um Birmingham City
00:58:59
Council, they wanted to migrate from SAP
00:59:03
to Oracle
00:59:04
>> and from a CRM system with SAP to a CRM
00:59:07
system with Oracle, a software system,
00:59:09
right? So they wanted to migrate from
00:59:11
one software system to another software
00:59:12
system. They thought that it would cost
00:59:14
£19 million which in itself is a very
00:59:17
high amount to migrate from one software
00:59:18
to another software. It cost £220
00:59:20
million.
00:59:21
>> So are you saying that you think the
00:59:23
government should just do less stuff?
00:59:24
>> They should be involved in less stuff
00:59:26
because what's happening right now is
00:59:28
that there is so
00:59:31
much government spending that the
00:59:33
benefits for succeeding are being eroded
00:59:35
by taxation and people are just leaving.
00:59:38
See, here's the thing. There's with
00:59:40
capitalism, the only benefit of
00:59:43
capitalism is the creative
00:59:44
entrepreneurial process, right? That
00:59:46
creative entrepreneurial process that
00:59:48
produces amazing companies and amazing
00:59:50
innovations and it creates stuff that is
00:59:52
better, faster, and cheaper for
00:59:54
everybody's lives. That comes from
00:59:56
capitalism. But if you take away the
00:59:58
incentives for doing that, you
01:00:00
essentially don't have that happen
01:00:01
within your country. And then as soon as
01:00:03
you don't have that, you don't have any
01:00:04
economic growth. And then as soon as you
01:00:06
don't have any economic growth, all
01:00:08
you're left with is the debt. And the
01:00:10
debt erodess your economy and kills your
01:00:12
economy and you don't have any growth to
01:00:15
counterbalance the debt. So you enter a
01:00:16
downward spiral. And that is basically
01:00:18
the same socialist scam that happens
01:00:20
over and over again everywhere that it's
01:00:22
tried. You're essentially trying to get
01:00:23
rid of the worst elements of an economy,
01:00:25
which is cronyism and extraction. But
01:00:28
that happens under socialism. you just
01:00:30
simply lose the one thing that doesn't
01:00:32
happen under socialism which is the
01:00:34
creative process, the entrepreneurial
01:00:36
process, the innovative process that
01:00:38
creates new value in the economy. So
01:00:41
what we've currently done in the UK,
01:00:43
we've taken away all incentives for
01:00:46
people to be in the UK and to succeed.
01:00:49
I'm sure you know people personally who
01:00:51
are no longer in the UK as tax
01:00:52
residents, who should be in the UK as
01:00:54
tax residents. They like the UK, they
01:00:56
enjoyed living in the UK, but what
01:00:58
happened? they left. You and I had a
01:01:00
debate with a guy a year ago and he
01:01:03
said, "Oh no, people are not going to
01:01:04
leave the UK. We can tax them as high as
01:01:06
we possibly can. We can ramp up the
01:01:08
taxes."
01:01:08
>> Gary Stevenson.
01:01:09
>> Yeah, Gary Stevenson. And Gary's
01:01:11
prediction was that rich people are not
01:01:13
going to leave. And he also predicted
01:01:15
that the house prices are going to
01:01:16
explode and that we're going to have
01:01:17
these horrible house prices. What's
01:01:19
happened? Housing market has gone flat
01:01:22
because people are leaving. the
01:01:24
economically active produ producers,
01:01:26
providers, they have left in their
01:01:27
droves and the economy is now in real
01:01:30
trouble. If you ask anyone who has left,
01:01:32
what do they tell you is the reason that
01:01:33
they left the UK?
01:01:34
>> Well, it's one of two things. It's
01:01:35
generally, I think they feel a sense of
01:01:37
pessimism about building their future in
01:01:39
a place that that feels like it's
01:01:41
unmanaged decline to some people.
01:01:44
>> And then the other cohort will say tax
01:01:46
reasons,
01:01:47
>> high taxes and and it just feels like
01:01:49
you can't get ahead. And also the third
01:01:50
I'd say is they they think that talent
01:01:52
is elsewhere. So they think they have a
01:01:54
better chance of getting capital and
01:01:55
talent employees if they move to America
01:01:57
or Dubai or wherever else.
01:01:58
>> Yep. And if you go to Dubai low taxes
01:02:01
and if you go to America lower taxes um
01:02:04
more opportunities. So we are living in
01:02:07
a time where you know a lot of countries
01:02:09
are exploring this socialism thing and
01:02:11
unfortunately it's a scam. But even
01:02:14
what's interesting is even your mindset
01:02:16
is we need to fix this top down as
01:02:17
opposed to fix it bottom up. With AI, we
01:02:20
need to give people price data, price
01:02:21
signals.
01:02:22
>> What does that mean?
01:02:23
>> It means that they need to be able to
01:02:24
see what's happening in in the economy.
01:02:25
A young person needs to know that
01:02:28
someone's making a lot of profit. They
01:02:29
need to be able to see there is
01:02:31
opportunities to do this, there's
01:02:32
opportunities to do that. They need to
01:02:34
also see, oh, this is no longer an
01:02:36
opportunity. So, this was great. This
01:02:38
was a great opportunity 5 years ago, but
01:02:39
it's not such a great opportunity now. A
01:02:42
lot of young people are going to
01:02:43
discover, oh, wait a second. I could get
01:02:45
into house renovations because a lot of
01:02:47
houses need renovating. And they go,
01:02:49
"Oh, cool. I've heard about someone
01:02:50
who's making money doing that. I'm going
01:02:51
to go do that." So, that's just having
01:02:53
access to price data.
01:02:54
>> When I look back over the last couple of
01:02:56
years, data from Henley and Partners in
01:02:58
2023, it says 3,200 millionaires net
01:03:02
left the UK. In 2024, 9,500 millionaires
01:03:05
net left the UK. In 2025, projected
01:03:09
16,500
01:03:11
millionaires are expected to leave the
01:03:13
UK, which is a record outflow. And
01:03:16
predictions that have not yet been
01:03:17
published warn that the trend is likely
01:03:20
to continue into 2026. When you think
01:03:23
about this, like I guess there's two
01:03:24
questions, which is why does this
01:03:26
matter?
01:03:26
>> Mhm.
01:03:27
>> And then the next question is what
01:03:28
should I do about it on an individual
01:03:30
level?
01:03:30
>> So why does it matter is because 1% of
01:03:32
people pay for 30% of the bills and uh
01:03:35
10% of people pay 60% of the bills. So
01:03:38
if those people leave then those bills
01:03:40
get passed on to everybody. We've seen
01:03:42
this here in New York. So we're at the
01:03:44
moment we're in New York and this
01:03:46
socialist mayor Mandani has basically
01:03:49
just come out today and said we need to
01:03:51
put everybody's taxes up because we need
01:03:54
to spread the bills of the city across
01:03:56
all the residents um because people are
01:03:58
leaving. Right. So he wants to propose a
01:04:01
9.5% tax rise on all people uh who who
01:04:04
own homes regardless of the value of
01:04:06
those homes. So essentially when rich
01:04:09
people leave they leave behind a lot of
01:04:11
bills that everybody else has to pay
01:04:14
that they were previously paying.
01:04:16
>> In his February 2026 preliminary budget,
01:04:19
New York Mayor Zorhan Mandani proposed a
01:04:22
9.5% property tax increase to address a
01:04:25
projected 5.4 billion budget shortfall.
01:04:28
This proposal acts as a last resort
01:04:30
alternative to his preferred plan which
01:04:32
was increasing taxes on top earners and
01:04:34
corporations to fill the revenue gap. H
01:04:37
>> he promised free stuff and he promised
01:04:39
that everything was going to be paid for
01:04:41
for free. Nothing is free. Someone has
01:04:43
to pay for everything. If the rich
01:04:44
people leave, there is not people who
01:04:46
can pay for all the free stuff. And
01:04:48
that's what New York is suddenly
01:04:49
discovering. So why does it matter?
01:04:52
Because rich people essentially create
01:04:54
the growth. They are the high taxpayers.
01:04:57
whichever way you want to say it or
01:04:59
discover or discuss it. It is a small
01:05:01
group of people who pay a lot of the uh
01:05:03
taxes, you don't want those people to
01:05:04
leave the economy. What do you do about
01:05:06
it? The number one thing to do about it
01:05:08
is you need to identify the opportunity
01:05:10
that's right for you. That's called
01:05:11
founder opportunity fit. What you're
01:05:13
looking for is an opportunity where you
01:05:16
can earn money no matter where you are
01:05:18
in the world. If you're somewhere that
01:05:20
you don't perhaps like being for any
01:05:22
reason, you can pick up and move. Um, so
01:05:24
the best kind of businesses and the best
01:05:26
kind of opportunities at the moment are
01:05:27
the ones that are not geographically
01:05:29
limited to a particular city.
01:05:30
>> It says that in New York, personal tax
01:05:32
income remains pretty strong, but
01:05:34
business tax collections have started to
01:05:36
soften. Recent reports show they are
01:05:37
roughly 378 million lower than initially
01:05:41
projected as business formation slows
01:05:43
down in New York.
01:05:44
>> Yeah, it's the same story. We've seen
01:05:46
this over and over again. Um, socialism
01:05:49
is like a hot stove that every
01:05:50
generation has to touch for themselves.
01:05:52
that essentially every generation of
01:05:55
young people, they think they've
01:05:56
discovered something new. They think,
01:05:57
"Oh my goodness, what if we just go to
01:05:59
the rich people and take it off them and
01:06:01
give it to everybody else and we'll
01:06:03
redistribute the wealth." And even
01:06:05
though it's been tried for 180 years
01:06:08
since KL Marx came along, uh it just
01:06:10
doesn't work. It it is a disaster and it
01:06:13
ruins economies over and over and over
01:06:15
again. And trying to offer lots and lots
01:06:17
of free incentives without any
01:06:18
productivity gains is a downward spiral.
01:06:21
What's your bare case for the future of
01:06:24
AI?
01:06:24
>> Well, the bare case is that we have
01:06:26
something called the angles pause. The
01:06:27
angles pause is what happened in the
01:06:29
industrial age where for 50 years all
01:06:31
the wealth went to the top uh because of
01:06:33
the new technology of the
01:06:34
industrialization. When we went from
01:06:36
agriculture to industrial age, that new
01:06:39
technology displaced so many people that
01:06:41
there were revolutions off the back of
01:06:42
it.
01:06:43
>> I mean, this is going to be even faster
01:06:44
and more disruptive.
01:06:45
>> Yeah, it's very disruptive. Yeah. I said
01:06:48
this once before in a conversation I had
01:06:49
about AI, but I went to my friend's
01:06:51
accelerator in San Francisco, which used
01:06:54
to be a software accelerator. And when I
01:06:55
walked in there and went around, he has,
01:06:57
you know, so hundreds of entrepreneurs
01:06:58
in there building stuff. I was like, why
01:07:00
is everyone building robots? And he was
01:07:01
like, oh, because and he showed me this,
01:07:03
I said this in a couple of episodes ago,
01:07:04
showed me this frying pan which had an
01:07:06
arm, a robotic arm attached to it. And
01:07:08
he was like, cook your dinner for you.
01:07:09
>> Yeah.
01:07:10
>> And and he was like, so 10 years ago,
01:07:13
the expensive thing wasn't actually the
01:07:16
robotic arm. He's like, "All these
01:07:17
pieces, all these, they've been around
01:07:19
for for decades." He goes, "The
01:07:20
expensive thing was the intelligence."
01:07:22
>> He goes, "Now it costs sense. Back then
01:07:23
it would have cost me tens of thousands
01:07:25
to to buy the intell intelligence that
01:07:28
would know how to make your omelette for
01:07:30
you." So he goes, "What you're seeing
01:07:31
now is we're actually in the the
01:07:32
Renaissance age of robotics." And I
01:07:34
looked around everywhere. I was like,
01:07:35
"Oh, there's what's that machine over
01:07:36
there?" He goes, "That makes your
01:07:37
perfume for you in the morning." Yeah.
01:07:38
>> You tell it how you want to smell today.
01:07:40
It makes it has all the sense loaded in
01:07:42
and it'll make you and you can see the
01:07:43
making
01:07:44
>> anything that is currently got a
01:07:46
Bluetooth in it will have intelligence
01:07:47
in it. So your toothbrush will tell you
01:07:50
whether you've brushed your teeth well
01:07:51
enough and book it'll probably be the
01:07:53
thing that books an appointment for your
01:07:54
dentist uh and all that sort of stuff.
01:07:56
>> I'll go even further. I'd say even
01:07:58
things that don't like my bed sheet my
01:08:00
bed sheets my pillows my mattresses
01:08:02
>> and they they will all have access to
01:08:03
agents and all that sort of stuff. My
01:08:05
bare case for AI is not about the
01:08:07
intelligence side of things. I generally
01:08:09
believe that more intelligence means a
01:08:10
better society. Um, there's never been a
01:08:12
situation where lots of intelligence was
01:08:14
a bad thing. Um, so I think intelligence
01:08:16
has a pretty strong bullcase to it, but
01:08:19
financial bubbles are a real thing and
01:08:21
I've lived through a couple of them. And
01:08:23
what I've discovered is that they have
01:08:24
widespread massive impacts on all sorts
01:08:27
of areas of society that you wouldn't
01:08:28
even expect. And my real bare case for
01:08:32
AI is that we overinvest in these data
01:08:34
centers. We cause a massive financial
01:08:36
collapse. uh and that we wipe out
01:08:38
pension funds. I don't know if you know
01:08:40
this, but they're packaging up the debt
01:08:42
for these financial uh assets and
01:08:44
they're selling that to um pension funds
01:08:47
as private credit. So all of these huge
01:08:50
data centers, what they're doing is
01:08:52
paying 6% above inflation as a packaged
01:08:54
up debt. They send it over. Now when
01:08:57
they go to the pension funds, they say,
01:08:58
"Oh, this is backed by Google and backed
01:09:00
by Microsoft and backed by uh Amazon."
01:09:03
and then they say, "Oh, you know, it's a
01:09:04
6% um financial instrument backed by
01:09:07
these huge companies." But
01:09:09
unfortunately, the mathematics of
01:09:11
spending 600 billion a year on something
01:09:13
that only has a three or four year
01:09:15
lifespan, every single time in the last
01:09:18
180 years that we've spent more than 3%
01:09:20
of our economy on an infrastructure
01:09:22
buildout, we've ended up with either a
01:09:23
massive recession or a depression.
01:09:25
>> Did you hear the Anthropic CEO? For
01:09:28
anyone that doesn't know, Anthropic is
01:09:29
one of the large AI companies. Yeah,
01:09:31
they're they're the maker of Claude. Did
01:09:33
you hear what he was saying the other
01:09:34
day in the article he wrote about his
01:09:36
concerns?
01:09:37
>> Yeah. Yeah. I I saw at Davos.
01:09:40
>> Yeah. He wrote it just after he left
01:09:41
Davos. Um Daria Amed.
01:09:44
>> Yeah.
01:09:45
>> He said, "Humanity is about to be handed
01:09:48
almost unimaginable power, and it is
01:09:50
deeply unclear whether our social,
01:09:52
political, and technological systems
01:09:54
possess the maturity to wield it. I
01:09:57
believe we are entering a right of
01:09:58
passage, both turbulent and inevitable,
01:10:01
which will test who we are as a species.
01:10:04
We are considerably closer to real
01:10:06
danger in 2026 than we were in 2023.
01:10:10
If the exponential continues, which is
01:10:12
not certain, but now has a decade long
01:10:15
track record supporting it, then it
01:10:17
cannot possibly be more than a few years
01:10:18
before AI is better than humans at
01:10:21
essentially
01:10:22
>> everything.
01:10:23
>> Everything. The same AI enabled tools
01:10:26
that are necessary to fight autocracies
01:10:28
can be turned inward to create tyranny
01:10:32
in our own countries. There is an
01:10:34
alarming possibility of global
01:10:36
totalitarian dictatorship. AI is so
01:10:39
powerful, such a glittering prize that
01:10:43
it is very difficult for human
01:10:44
civilization to impose any restraints on
01:10:47
it at all. And he said this remarkable
01:10:50
thing about um in that essay about
01:10:52
imagining if there was an island with
01:10:56
50,000
01:10:58
>> geniuses on it
01:10:58
>> a billion a billion geniuses on it.
01:11:01
>> Yeah.
01:11:01
>> What would happen to society? And I
01:11:04
think there's I don't know like do you
01:11:05
know what I hope I'm really wrong about
01:11:07
this but when I think about this idea
01:11:09
that there's 50 million geniuses on this
01:11:11
brand new island
01:11:13
>> and I ask myself
01:11:14
>> I'm willing to work for free.
01:11:15
>> Willing to work for free. when one
01:11:17
learns something, they all learn
01:11:18
something.
01:11:20
>> You just take that as a first principle.
01:11:21
You go, hm, society is going to be very,
01:11:23
very, very, very different. And maybe
01:11:25
all of the advice we've been giving for
01:11:27
the last 5, 10 years about how to be
01:11:29
successful, how to be an entrepreneur,
01:11:30
how to succeed in business, maybe
01:11:32
>> it's for an economy that no longer
01:11:33
exists. Yeah, we're going for we're
01:11:35
going from a fundamental industrial age
01:11:38
economy to a AI age economy, right? That
01:11:41
is that is different. We will have
01:11:43
different economic models. We also have
01:11:45
a problem of aging. For all of human
01:11:47
history, we've had a small number of old
01:11:49
people at the top and a lot of young
01:11:50
people at the bottom. And we now have
01:11:52
65% of all wealth in the economy is held
01:11:54
by people over 65. And then you've got
01:11:57
the financialized economy and the
01:11:59
government economy which is inflationary
01:12:01
and that they pump money in as stimulus.
01:12:04
So while the entrepreneurs are making
01:12:06
everything cheaper, even free, the
01:12:09
governments are actually inflating the
01:12:10
economy and the financial systems
01:12:12
inflating the economy slightly faster
01:12:14
than productivity gains. Right? So
01:12:16
what's happening is the entrepreneurs
01:12:18
bring down the cost of everything and
01:12:20
the governments and the financial system
01:12:22
top it up with new stimulus. According
01:12:24
to the rules that the government runs
01:12:26
by, as AI creates huge deflationary
01:12:30
impacts, they can actually just inflate
01:12:32
the economy like unbelievably. they can
01:12:34
pump huge amounts of stimulus into the
01:12:36
economy. So this whole idea of um UBI,
01:12:40
universal basic income, it actually
01:12:42
stacks up from economic fundamentals
01:12:45
basics uh principles uh where you can
01:12:49
actually provided you're getting the
01:12:50
productivity gains where things are
01:12:52
costing zero because of AI, you can
01:12:54
actually just pump money into the
01:12:55
economy and give give money away for a
01:12:58
period of time while we're going through
01:13:00
that transition. Hopefully that prevents
01:13:02
massive craziness from unfolding. And
01:13:05
hopefully as a result of having a huge
01:13:07
amount of intelligence, we find really
01:13:10
interesting fun ways to structure
01:13:12
society and do things.
01:13:14
We're not necessarily leaving utopia. We
01:13:17
shouldn't necessarily be grieving the
01:13:18
loss of shitty jobs and grieving the
01:13:21
loss of dehumanizing
01:13:24
low connectivity jobs. We have ruined
01:13:28
the way that we pair bond. We've ruined
01:13:30
the way that we do community. We've
01:13:32
ruined the way that families run. We've
01:13:35
got people working two jobs just to
01:13:38
survive. Like that's not something to be
01:13:40
grieving the loss of. We need a new
01:13:42
system. Maybe AI is going to actually
01:13:44
give us the breathing room that we need
01:13:47
to actually create a system that gets us
01:13:49
back to a little bit towards the way
01:13:51
that humans have flourished.
01:13:52
>> Are we going to go to towards UBI?
01:13:54
>> It seems like in the short term that
01:13:55
would have to be the case. So Sam
01:13:57
Alman's over here working to build open
01:13:58
AI, working 24 hours a day. Let's just
01:14:00
say theoretically.
01:14:01
>> Um we're going to have to take some of
01:14:03
his hard work away and give it to
01:14:06
theoretically we're going to have to
01:14:07
give it to someone who is maybe not
01:14:10
working.
01:14:11
>> Yeah. And I mean Sam Alman, funny
01:14:12
enough, he actually backed a study
01:14:14
called Open Research in 2024 that looked
01:14:17
at the impact of UBI. And it showed that
01:14:20
recipients who received UBI, which is
01:14:23
money basically given to them, worked
01:14:25
fewer hours and earned less money than
01:14:26
the control group. Instead of using the
01:14:28
freedom to find better jobs to improve
01:14:30
their education, many participants
01:14:31
simply dropped off the workforce or
01:14:33
reduced hours for leisure, resulting in
01:14:36
a net decrease in household income
01:14:37
despite cash payments.
01:14:38
>> Yeah, humans want stuff to do. We need a
01:14:41
we need a meaningful struggle. We need
01:14:43
something that we um that we're up to in
01:14:44
the world. And that is that is a very
01:14:46
difficult thing. The likely thing that I
01:14:48
think will probably happen is that these
01:14:50
data center investments will be so
01:14:52
catastrophic financially that
01:14:53
governments will have to bail them out.
01:14:55
And then the governments will have to
01:14:56
own all the data and all the data
01:14:58
centers and then the tech companies will
01:15:00
have to essentially pay royalties back
01:15:02
to the government over long periods of
01:15:04
time to manage this kind of uh
01:15:05
infrastructure buildout. So you'll have
01:15:08
to have something where the government
01:15:09
actually owns the primary asset and that
01:15:12
is the thing that pays for the UBI. I
01:15:13
mean we're we're kind of theorizing and
01:15:15
just kind of
01:15:16
>> we're going to find out.
01:15:17
>> We are going to find out.
01:15:17
>> This is going to be on the internet
01:15:18
someday.
01:15:19
>> The mathematics bend reality at age at
01:15:21
about 2029 once you the financial
01:15:24
engineering required to make this thing
01:15:25
work. You need something like a 45 times
01:15:29
growth in the number of people paying
01:15:30
for subscriptions and the number of
01:15:32
businesses. Like you take something that
01:15:36
is over the last uh 5 10 years there's
01:15:39
been a product that has gone exponential
01:15:42
which is ampic and GLP1 weight loss
01:15:45
drugs the amount of spend to build out
01:15:48
and satisfy that demand is actually
01:15:50
pretty minimal. Those companies spend
01:15:52
about 20% of their revenues building new
01:15:54
factories to produce new GLP drugs.
01:15:57
Right? So capex is about 20% of revenue.
01:16:00
We're seeing with the AI stuff, capex is
01:16:02
hundreds of percent of revenue, right?
01:16:05
So, it is a financial feat that we've
01:16:08
never attempted before.
01:16:10
>> I've had so many founders speak to me
01:16:11
and say, "Why didn't this particular ad
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that I ran on this platform work for me?
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Maybe the copy wasn't good, the creative
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01:16:20
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01:16:22
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01:16:23
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01:16:26
game. And this is where LinkedIn ads
01:16:28
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01:16:30
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About 130 million of them are decision
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If you want to give them a try, head
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Terms and conditions apply. We have
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For those of you that don't know, every
01:17:20
single time a guest sits here with me in
01:17:22
the chair, they leave a question in the
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diary of a CEO and then I ask that
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incredible conversation cards. These
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companies. So, what we've done is we've
01:17:52
bundled them together and you can buy
01:17:54
both at the same time. And if you want
01:17:56
to drive connection and instill habit
01:17:58
change in your company, head to the
01:18:00
diary.com to inquire and our team will
01:18:02
be in touch.
01:18:03
>> Let's bring this back to uh
01:18:04
>> back to reality,
01:18:06
>> the reality of the person listening and
01:18:08
uh the pressing questions they have
01:18:09
about all this stuff and what they
01:18:10
should do. Is there anything else that
01:18:12
you would give people that are listening
01:18:14
right now in terms of advice to be able
01:18:16
to weather the incoming turbulence that
01:18:19
the CEO of Anthropic describes there?
01:18:21
Yeah, look, the things that I know are
01:18:23
good for people is I really believe that
01:18:26
everyone should build a little bit of a
01:18:28
personal brand. So, a personal brand
01:18:30
means that 2 to 20,000 people know who
01:18:33
you are. They know what you do. They
01:18:35
know you what your experiences are like.
01:18:37
They could approach you about an
01:18:39
opportunity that would be a good
01:18:40
opportunity. So, build a bit of a
01:18:42
personal brand. Don't be invisible uh in
01:18:44
this particular time because you know it
01:18:47
is one of your assets which is to take
01:18:49
some of your knowledge some of your
01:18:50
playbooks and to let people know that
01:18:52
that exists. So I think build a bit of a
01:18:54
personal brand. Second one is have a go
01:18:58
at entrepreneurship, right? Join an
01:19:00
entrepreneurial team, do an
01:19:02
entrepreneurial side hustle, read some
01:19:04
entrepreneurial books, watch some
01:19:06
entrepreneurial um videos that are out
01:19:08
there. start the process of thinking,
01:19:10
okay, the school system taught me to be
01:19:13
a standardized uh employee, a
01:19:15
standardized labor. Uh the school system
01:19:17
wanted me to fit in with an office or a
01:19:19
factory, but actually there's this whole
01:19:21
other way of creating value which is
01:19:23
non-standardized called
01:19:24
entrepreneurship. This is spotting
01:19:25
opportunities and coming up with
01:19:27
solutions to it. So, you know, play
01:19:30
around with the game, even if it's a
01:19:32
small game. Like you might notice that
01:19:33
there are dirty cars on the street and
01:19:35
you might say, "You know what? I'm going
01:19:36
to go and knock on doors and wash the
01:19:38
cars and see if I can make a couple
01:19:39
hundred bucks in a day because I've seen
01:19:41
an opportunity. I've seen something
01:19:43
that's wrong and I I'm going to go and
01:19:44
have a go at fixing it."
01:19:45
>> A lot of founders are telling me, Mark
01:19:47
Cuban said the other day that one of the
01:19:48
great opportunities now is
01:19:50
catering for the gap between small
01:19:52
business owners that don't know how to
01:19:53
use AI and helping them learn how to use
01:19:55
AI.
01:19:56
>> Yeah. Huge, right? Join a join a join a
01:19:59
founder team and help them do that. Um
01:20:00
as I said as well 65% of all the
01:20:03
businesses by valuation are people over
01:20:06
65 now. So there is a mathematical
01:20:09
certainty that 2/3 of the businesses
01:20:11
that run the economy by valuation have
01:20:13
to change hands in the next 10 15 20
01:20:15
years. So this is a massive business
01:20:18
opportunity. Uh baby boomers want to get
01:20:20
rid of their businesses. They want to
01:20:22
retire. Baby boomers are willing to fund
01:20:24
you to buy their business if you present
01:20:25
yourself well if you've got a little bit
01:20:27
of a personal brand. So, that's a that's
01:20:29
a huge opportunity. So, look into that.
01:20:31
Um, you know, Cody Sanchez, a mutual
01:20:33
friend of ours, she talks to people all
01:20:35
the time about how to buy a baby boomer
01:20:37
business and and take it over and run
01:20:39
it. So, um, you know, that's a that's a
01:20:41
great opportunity. Play with these toys
01:20:44
called AI tools. Someone has given you a
01:20:47
free iPhone which you can just use
01:20:49
called AI tools um on the free account.
01:20:51
That is such good advice that we don't
01:20:53
hear enough because I think people think
01:20:56
there's where I am right now in my life
01:20:58
and what I do and then there's like Sam
01:21:01
Alman and Elon Musk and I I either I'm
01:21:03
one or the other but actually what I'm
01:21:06
seeing as an employer who's employing we
01:21:08
probably employ I'd say 20 people a
01:21:10
month at current rate.
01:21:11
>> We're hiring 20 more people a month
01:21:13
>> is increasingly on our culture test when
01:21:16
we're screening who the right candidates
01:21:17
are. We're looking for some kind of
01:21:19
evidence that they're playing or messing
01:21:21
around with AI.
01:21:22
>> Yeah.
01:21:22
>> And one of my team members
01:21:24
>> is she was trying to figure out how to
01:21:27
get a 100 different documents
01:21:31
to synthesize and understand the data
01:21:33
within these documents. Now, there's two
01:21:36
types of people I can hire to do that.
01:21:38
There's the old fashioned way of doing
01:21:39
that where someone might sit there for
01:21:41
four or five weeks and try to figure out
01:21:42
how to get an Excel document to have the
01:21:45
right formulas. And then there's her who
01:21:47
we hired. Even though she doesn't have
01:21:50
skills in that particular thing, she has
01:21:51
no experience in it. But because of her
01:21:53
mindset and her agency, she went, "Hm,
01:21:55
maybe I could put this into Claude
01:21:57
Co-work and ask set up an agent to run
01:22:00
this for me
01:22:01
>> by the time dessert came." She pulled
01:22:04
her laptop over to me and showed it to
01:22:05
me. And she goes, "Stephen, I've ran all
01:22:07
those hundreds of documents um into this
01:22:09
file and I can see the sentiment on
01:22:10
every single post you've made on every
01:22:12
single social platform, including every
01:22:13
LinkedIn post you've made over the last
01:22:15
couple of years. And we can see that
01:22:17
actually even though these point posts
01:22:19
get more likes, these ones are actually
01:22:21
the best posts you're doing."
01:22:22
>> She did that by dessert.
01:22:24
>> Yeah.
01:22:24
>> That and I thought there a isn't that
01:22:26
interesting. How do you find people who
01:22:28
have that bias in the modern world where
01:22:30
they lean into change? She's not
01:22:32
curiosity, isn't it?
01:22:33
>> Yeah. It's curiosity, but there's also
01:22:34
something which is like and being fluid
01:22:37
about your identity and what you know.
01:22:39
>> Yes.
01:22:39
>> Which is she has no experience in that.
01:22:42
>> But I can try.
01:22:43
>> I can try.
01:22:43
>> And the one thing for anyone watching or
01:22:46
listening is that don't use AI as a
01:22:48
search tool. Don't use it the way you
01:22:50
used it a year ago. Give AI your hardest
01:22:53
problem and say, "Hey, help me to solve
01:22:55
this problem." So, for example, you
01:22:57
might say, "I'm really struggling with
01:22:59
these areas of my life. Here's all the
01:23:01
data. Here's all the information. Here's
01:23:03
the PDF documents. Here's the, you know,
01:23:05
the the backstory. Help me solve this.
01:23:08
Help me write it. What kind of piece of
01:23:09
software might I be able to use to to to
01:23:12
build here?" I'll give you a real
01:23:14
example. One of our team members used AI
01:23:16
to analyze all the sales calls for the
01:23:17
last 3 months and discovered a huge
01:23:20
opportunity. What they discovered is
01:23:22
that 75% of all of our sales calls, the
01:23:26
person who we were on the phone to
01:23:27
mentioned that their spouse was a
01:23:29
decision maker and that they needed to
01:23:30
talk to their spouse and that decision-m
01:23:33
because it was a family business and
01:23:34
that there was either a spouse or a
01:23:35
family member. There was no point in our
01:23:37
process where we invited collaboration
01:23:40
with other family members. So none of
01:23:42
our sales calls said, "Do you want to
01:23:44
bring someone along to the sales call?
01:23:45
Like would you like to have someone do
01:23:48
that?" The AI analyzed it, discovered
01:23:50
that opportunity, wrote a script as to
01:23:52
how to invite people onto the call so
01:23:54
that that you get all decision makers on
01:23:56
the call and now our sales conversions
01:23:57
are going up dramatically.
01:23:59
>> I think this is the the real bification
01:24:01
in terms of the employment market of
01:24:03
what we're seeing is certain people have
01:24:05
a a positive relationship to disruption
01:24:07
in technology and change. They get
01:24:08
excited by it where others fall into
01:24:11
cognitive dissonance where they they get
01:24:12
so concerned that it's going to take out
01:24:14
their business that they ostrich head in
01:24:15
the sand. And then the these other
01:24:18
people have this in inherent figure out
01:24:21
ability. I could say to a certain team
01:24:23
member of mine, here's a big problem and
01:24:25
they would grab onto this big problem
01:24:27
and even though they have no proficiency
01:24:29
in data or technology or AI or CL, they
01:24:32
will just they'll plug away at it on a
01:24:34
computer and they'll figure it out and
01:24:36
they'll use all available tools, not
01:24:38
their identity, what they learned in
01:24:40
university or their experience as the
01:24:42
only tool in the tool box. That's the
01:24:44
difference between employee mindset and
01:24:46
entrepreneur mindset. Entrepreneurs see
01:24:48
problems as opportunities. They get
01:24:49
excited by problems and they apply the
01:24:51
entrepreneurial process. And employees
01:24:54
say, "Hey, wait a second. I was never
01:24:55
trained for this. I was never told how
01:24:57
to do this. I was not given the rulebook
01:24:59
for this. So therefore, I'll just ignore
01:25:01
it. I'll stay away from it because
01:25:02
problems, it's not my problem." And this
01:25:04
is the big fundamental shift. We need to
01:25:06
say, "Hey, problems are great. We want
01:25:08
problems. And is this problem for me?
01:25:11
How would I test my assumptions? How
01:25:14
would I build something quickly and
01:25:15
cheaply? How would I then test that? How
01:25:17
would they I then scale that? Right? And
01:25:20
it's just those kind of few steps that
01:25:21
if you embrace those entrepreneurial
01:25:23
steps, then life becomes great.
01:25:26
>> I have a contrarian take that I think
01:25:28
writing is actually more important now
01:25:30
than ever before because writing is a
01:25:32
proxy of understanding. And in a world
01:25:34
of AI, what I'm finding when I look at
01:25:36
like my innovation teams or where
01:25:37
breakthroughs are coming from in my
01:25:38
company, it's actually someone had a
01:25:41
really good question.
01:25:42
>> Yes.
01:25:43
>> So they were like, could we
01:25:45
theoretically analyze all of our sales
01:25:47
calls using Claude to see if there's
01:25:50
something interesting in there? Now that
01:25:51
starts with someone understanding sales
01:25:54
calls, understanding the tools that
01:25:55
allow you to analyze them. They have
01:25:56
lots of reference points. They
01:25:57
understand lots of um variant things.
01:25:59
And that means they ask a really great
01:26:01
question. So for me, one of the ways
01:26:03
that I've been um been able to
01:26:05
understand more things is to to write
01:26:06
more often about them.
01:26:07
>> Can I go one step further?
01:26:09
>> And that is a process called pause
01:26:11
reflect document. And pause reflect
01:26:13
document. If you do it correctly, you go
01:26:15
into nature away from noise and away
01:26:18
from technology and you take a pen and a
01:26:21
paper and you sit in nature on a bench
01:26:24
and you just pause and just let some
01:26:27
boredom set in. You reflect on what's
01:26:31
going on. You try and zoom out to the
01:26:33
bigger picture. You do some journaling
01:26:36
and you do some dot connecting where you
01:26:38
say, "What are some of the dots that
01:26:39
have happened in the last 5 years? What
01:26:40
are some of the bigger picture impacts
01:26:42
that I've made? What are some of the
01:26:44
problems that I've struggled with? What
01:26:46
if this was possible? What if that was
01:26:47
possible?" We live in this incredible
01:26:50
fast-paced world where the one thing
01:26:52
that no one allows themselves to do is
01:26:55
to pause, reflect, document with a pen
01:26:58
and paper. And those people who I know
01:27:01
who are doing incredibly well are doing
01:27:03
more and more of this.
01:27:04
>> Yeah.
01:27:05
>> Yeah.
01:27:05
>> Same same. I mean, you're one of them.
01:27:07
You're a person who's I mean, look at
01:27:09
this.
01:27:10
>> Yeah.
01:27:11
>> This is a lot of books.
01:27:12
>> That's my head.
01:27:12
>> But you tweet every day. You post every
01:27:15
day. You're constantly experiencing
01:27:17
something in the real world, writing it
01:27:19
down to develop your thinking, which
01:27:21
Richard Fryman talks about the process
01:27:23
of understanding where you learn
01:27:24
something, condense it, so an average
01:27:26
person can understand it, then you share
01:27:27
it with the world to collect feedback on
01:27:29
that thought. He said that's the like
01:27:31
the fastest best way to learn. Yeah.
01:27:32
Yeah,
01:27:33
>> but actually in a world of AI where chat
01:27:34
can do all of that for me, we're
01:27:36
deferring our ability to sort of
01:27:38
condense, compress, and understand to an
01:27:40
AI because we think it's creating an
01:27:42
efficiency gain or a productivity gain
01:27:44
in the near term. Like maybe today's
01:27:46
email will will save you 30 seconds, but
01:27:49
that the tax you're paying I think is an
01:27:51
understanding.
01:27:52
>> And understanding is the is a proxy of
01:27:54
therefore, you know, writing great
01:27:56
questions.
01:27:57
>> I find myself writing more. I wrote a
01:27:59
memo this I was up till 2 a.m. last
01:28:00
night writing a memo.
01:28:02
>> Yeah.
01:28:02
which means you were up late thinking.
01:28:05
>> You were thinking clearly and that was
01:28:07
what you were really doing. A great
01:28:09
question I want people to reflect on. I
01:28:10
want them to think about the last 5
01:28:12
years and ask the question when did I do
01:28:14
something special
01:28:16
that impacted a certain type of person.
01:28:18
I can explain how I did it step by step
01:28:20
and how it felt and it would be of
01:28:23
interest to plenty of people. All right.
01:28:25
And that question contains what we
01:28:28
talked about earlier which is lived
01:28:30
experience feelings playbooks and
01:28:34
connecting the dots looking backwards
01:28:36
and actually coming up with some things
01:28:38
that only I can do things that only I
01:28:40
can say. So that that particular prompt
01:28:42
that particular question to sit in
01:28:44
nature and think clearly and memo and
01:28:46
and document and write a memo about it.
01:28:48
You know I I see so many people and you
01:28:50
and I have done this over the last
01:28:51
couple hours. We think so much about the
01:28:53
future and the uncertainty of the future
01:28:55
but a lot of value comes from just
01:28:57
looking backwards and connecting the
01:28:59
dots and then thinking what what is it
01:29:01
that I now know that I want to take
01:29:03
forward and add value to others. sort of
01:29:05
adjacent to that but related is another
01:29:07
thing I think a lot about which is um
01:29:10
trying to get more information and
01:29:12
experiences from a wide set of reference
01:29:15
points because when I think about
01:29:17
innovation generally innovation is the
01:29:19
connection of like two ideas or thoughts
01:29:22
or principles that someone else hasn't
01:29:24
put together so I think about the like
01:29:26
non-stick frying pan it was a guy who
01:29:29
was fishing and was trying to make get a
01:29:31
material so his tackle his fishing
01:29:33
tackle didn't stick together and his
01:29:34
wife walks past allegedly and says, "I'd
01:29:37
love some of that stuff on our pans."
01:29:39
And that ends up selling tens and tens
01:29:41
of millions of non-stick pans. And even
01:29:42
the even when you think about the
01:29:44
iPhone, that was a combination of a of
01:29:46
an internet device,
01:29:47
>> a music device,
01:29:49
>> and a telecommunications device
01:29:51
>> put together, which you rarely found
01:29:53
those three things in one space. Three
01:29:54
different reference points. To achieve
01:29:56
that, someone would have had to
01:29:57
understand music, the internet, and
01:29:59
phones.
01:30:00
>> Yeah. Yeah. And even Steve Jobs himself,
01:30:02
his skill stack contains typography and
01:30:04
design which is why why he was able to
01:30:06
disrupt Blackberry.
01:30:07
>> He stumbled into a calligraphy class at
01:30:10
university and loved calligraphy and he
01:30:12
was the first company to ever have fonts
01:30:14
and those fonts became a huge
01:30:16
differentiator on the first Mac and it
01:30:18
was only because he had like combined
01:30:20
calligraphy with uh with with computers
01:30:23
he created the font uh idea.
01:30:25
>> So maybe the future's owned by the wide
01:30:27
not the narrow in this regard.
01:30:28
definitely become more of a generalist,
01:30:30
become more curious and go out of your
01:30:33
comfort zones, right? The the industrial
01:30:35
age asked us to simply specialize and do
01:30:37
one thing over and over. The grandfather
01:30:39
of capitalism is a guy called Adam Smith
01:30:41
and he said ultimately efficiency is
01:30:43
about doing one thing in the process
01:30:45
over and over and over, but he said it's
01:30:47
going to destroy the human spirit. He
01:30:48
actually wrote about the fact that that
01:30:50
destroys the human spirit. having to
01:30:51
just twist this knob over and over that
01:30:53
creates the most value in the economy,
01:30:55
but it's horrible for you as a human.
01:30:57
And what and he recognized that problem
01:31:00
from the very beginning. What we've been
01:31:02
trained to do is just twist the knob,
01:31:04
twist the knob, twist the knob, do the
01:31:06
same thing over and over. What we need
01:31:07
to relearn how to do is allow us to
01:31:10
become more human and say, "Actually,
01:31:12
I'm going to explore nature. I'm going
01:31:14
to explore this weird passion that I
01:31:16
have for um, you know, particular
01:31:18
theater companies and how they run. I'm
01:31:20
going to go and explore this thing about
01:31:22
like entrepreneur accelerators. Um, you
01:31:24
know, I'm going to combine things. It's
01:31:26
those rare combinations and you need to
01:31:28
trust your instincts that you're
01:31:29
actually pulling on a few threads and
01:31:31
bringing them together. I do that while
01:31:35
still focusing on a job, etc. Because I
01:31:36
do this for a living.
01:31:38
>> So, I get to sit here, you know, someone
01:31:40
walked in before you and they were
01:31:41
talking to, you know, Alex Honold was
01:31:42
talking to me in that chair before you.
01:31:45
That's why the little taipe statues
01:31:46
behind us about, you know, then you've
01:31:48
talked to me today about this, then the
01:31:49
next person will talk to me about
01:31:50
neuroscience and bringing a human brain.
01:31:52
And that's allowed me to kind of connect
01:31:53
these interesting reference points. What
01:31:55
I'm saying here is you don't need to
01:31:56
like
01:31:57
>> quit your job and go and live in Peru to
01:32:00
to to orchestrate your life in such a
01:32:02
way. I think you just need to be really
01:32:03
intentional about resisting the urge to
01:32:07
be a narrow person and to identify too
01:32:09
much with one's identity. And so when I
01:32:12
left my former business, one of the
01:32:14
chapters I wrote my book is how do I now
01:32:16
resist all my labels? Because now I'm a
01:32:18
social media CEO. And it's so tempting,
01:32:21
>> yeah,
01:32:21
>> to gather around social media people, go
01:32:24
to social media parties, put it in my
01:32:26
bio, get social media opportunities, and
01:32:28
just go further and further and further
01:32:29
down that narrow line. So that's why I
01:32:30
went and worked in psychedelics and
01:32:32
biotech. I worked in cancer biotech. I
01:32:35
started to DJ. I started a podcast
01:32:37
called The Diary of a CEO. I tried to do
01:32:39
as many things as I possibly could to
01:32:40
remain wide. Yeah. And your superpowers
01:32:43
are extra superpowers when you take them
01:32:45
somewhere new.
01:32:46
>> So if you've got social media
01:32:48
superpowers within the social media
01:32:50
bubble, everyone's got those
01:32:51
superpowers. But if you go and take them
01:32:53
into a completely new place, you
01:32:55
discover that actually what you what you
01:32:58
learned over here becomes a massive
01:33:00
differentiator over here.
01:33:01
>> Is there anything else the audience need
01:33:02
to know about the big opportunities you
01:33:05
see as we head into the future?
01:33:07
>> We all want the future to be bright. We
01:33:09
all want the future to be uh amazing and
01:33:11
we love the idea of trying to improve
01:33:14
the world. One of the best ways to
01:33:16
improve the world is to improve your own
01:33:19
situation because the world is made up
01:33:21
of people who have their own situation.
01:33:23
You know when we try and fix every
01:33:24
problem on the planet it feels
01:33:25
completely crushing and it feels so much
01:33:27
weight on your shoulders. when you
01:33:29
actually say what's my opportunity like
01:33:31
if I could if I improve the world by
01:33:33
building myself a really great business
01:33:35
that helps a few people that helps 500
01:33:37
clients do something and if I'm actually
01:33:40
out there adding value in my unique way
01:33:42
and I'm finding a way through this AI
01:33:44
weird adventure that we're going on
01:33:46
that's actually helping the world right
01:33:48
so you're bringing yourself forward
01:33:50
you're discovering something I really
01:33:52
want people to resist the trap of trying
01:33:54
to fix everyone and fix everything try
01:33:56
and figure out what is your opportunity
01:33:59
What is your way of adding value to
01:34:00
others? What is your way of getting
01:34:02
paid? What is your way of doing creative
01:34:03
entrepreneurship? Uh what's your
01:34:05
contribution to the world? And that is
01:34:07
actually a contribution.
01:34:09
>> Is that difficult to do? Because I think
01:34:12
it assumes certain level of
01:34:13
self-awareness that is not always easy.
01:34:18
>> If you find it difficult to do, find
01:34:20
someone who inspires you and see if you
01:34:22
can join their team. So that's totally a
01:34:24
valid move as well, right? just get onto
01:34:26
a team where someone's figuring this
01:34:29
stuff out. Um, you know, follow your
01:34:31
inspiration and sometimes your
01:34:33
inspiration is to start something.
01:34:34
Sometimes your in inspiration is to help
01:34:36
propel something forward, being part of
01:34:38
someone else's team who does inspire
01:34:39
you. Self-awareness is is a skill that
01:34:41
we all have to learn. We're all on a
01:34:42
crash course with reality. Every single
01:34:44
one of us is on a crash course with
01:34:45
reality. There's a lot of narrative on
01:34:47
on the internet that everybody can live
01:34:49
their dream, you know, and I
01:34:54
wonder whether every it's good I wonder
01:34:58
whether it's good advice to tell
01:34:59
everybody to like quit their job and
01:35:00
pursue their dream.
01:35:01
>> I believe that the new size of business
01:35:03
that makes the most sense is small and
01:35:05
dynamic and lean and is probably close
01:35:08
to 10 to 50 people. Um, and that is the
01:35:10
new size of company that is really
01:35:13
shaking things up and doing stuff. In
01:35:14
fact, it's probably 2 to 20 people. I
01:35:17
think that being part of a small,
01:35:20
dynamic, vibrant, entrepreneurial team
01:35:23
is a great place for people to go and
01:35:26
have a look and explore. Does that mean
01:35:28
that everyone's suitable to quit their
01:35:30
job and go start something from scratch
01:35:31
with a blank piece of paper? Probably
01:35:33
not, right? That's that's a particular
01:35:35
role called the founder. Not everyone's
01:35:37
ready to be a founder. In the same way,
01:35:39
everyone could probably get a black belt
01:35:41
if they if they joined a martial arts
01:35:42
and stuck with it. But not everyone can
01:35:44
start as a black belt. That's not where
01:35:46
you start
01:35:46
>> even in those numbers. So if we said
01:35:48
everyone's gonna have, you know, a team
01:35:50
of 10 to 50, those numbers suggest that
01:35:53
one in 50 or one in 10 people are going
01:35:56
to be a founder.
01:35:57
>> Possibly a lot more people are going to
01:35:58
be founders. I really believe a lot more
01:36:00
people are going to be founders. I also
01:36:01
don't think it's wildly unnatural to be
01:36:03
a founder. If you go through all of
01:36:05
history, most people worked in little
01:36:07
family businesses. That was actually the
01:36:09
vast majority of people. Mo, you know,
01:36:11
most businesses never got past 30
01:36:13
people. That our natural way of being is
01:36:15
in family groups and tribal groups and
01:36:17
little groups of less than 150 people.
01:36:19
We've built up this idea that to be a
01:36:21
founder means Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or
01:36:23
something massive like that and that
01:36:25
you're trying to build something that
01:36:26
changes the world. I've got so many
01:36:28
friends and clients who it's them, their
01:36:31
assistant, and uh someone who's like
01:36:34
head of customer development, and
01:36:36
there's three or four of them, and
01:36:37
they're having a great time, and they're
01:36:38
doing 600, 700 grand worth of revenue,
01:36:40
and they got loads of flexibility.
01:36:42
Everyone takes their kids to school.
01:36:43
Everyone finishes up at 4 4 p.m. Um they
01:36:47
can travel, they can live and work
01:36:48
anywhere. Um you know, that's really
01:36:50
cool. This is your most recent book,
01:36:52
Lifestyle Business Playbooks: How to
01:36:54
Have Fun, Freedom, and Fulfillment with
01:36:56
Your Own Business. You've written a lot
01:36:58
of books. You could have written a book
01:36:59
about anything. What's this book about
01:37:02
and who is it for?
01:37:03
>> This book is about the times that we're
01:37:04
living in, right? So, what I'm trying to
01:37:06
do, I'm trying to give people some hope.
01:37:09
There's such a negative narrative that
01:37:11
AI is going to wipe out everything and
01:37:12
that technology is going to destroy
01:37:14
everything and that, you know, all this
01:37:16
negativity about the times that we're
01:37:19
in. I'm trying to create a
01:37:20
counternarrative that actually more than
01:37:23
any other time in history, you could
01:37:25
live and work from anywhere. You could
01:37:27
have a group of 500 to a few thousand
01:37:29
clients all over the world. You could
01:37:31
add value to people in a unique and
01:37:33
interesting way. You could have a career
01:37:35
that's based on randomness and
01:37:37
creativity and fun. And that there are
01:37:39
some new rules to play by. and that if
01:37:42
you learn the playbooks of
01:37:43
entrepreneurship and if you learn the
01:37:44
trends that are unfolding that actually
01:37:47
it could work out really really well for
01:37:49
you.
01:37:49
>> A lot of people want to, you know, they
01:37:50
want a side hustle, they want passive
01:37:52
income. What's your general perspective
01:37:54
on the reality of being able to generate
01:37:56
passive income and a side hustle? I
01:37:58
think passive income reflects people's
01:38:00
desire that they currently feel that
01:38:02
they're working really hard and they
01:38:04
hate work and they hate going to work
01:38:06
and that earning money is a horrible
01:38:09
thing and therefore they just wish it
01:38:11
would just kind of take care of itself.
01:38:13
The truth is that when you discover what
01:38:15
I would call a lifestyle business where
01:38:17
you work a reasonable amount of time and
01:38:20
you have a lot of fun with great people,
01:38:22
you don't necess the as if by magic the
01:38:25
desire for passive income just
01:38:26
evaporates. you go, "This is this is
01:38:28
better than passive income because I'm
01:38:29
on a creative journey and I'm making
01:38:31
great money and I'm having a lot of fun
01:38:32
and I'm expressing myself." I think
01:38:34
passive income ultimately comes from
01:38:36
assets. It's not it's not passive
01:38:37
income, it's asset income. Um, you're
01:38:39
either going to have to create an asset,
01:38:41
which could be a business that is a
01:38:42
digital asset. Um, or you make so much
01:38:45
money in your lifestyle business that
01:38:47
you own traditional assets like houses
01:38:49
or stocks and shares and all that sort
01:38:50
of stuff. Um, but I'm not really
01:38:52
focusing people on the idea of passive
01:38:54
income. I'm focusing on the idea of
01:38:56
having a lifestyle business that
01:38:57
supports the way you want to live.
01:38:59
Anyway,
01:39:00
>> a lot of people would would want that,
01:39:01
but they're scared, right? They're
01:39:02
scared that they have to quit their job
01:39:03
and I've got a mortgage to pay. I've got
01:39:05
kids. So, it's easier said than done,
01:39:07
Daniel.
01:39:07
>> Yeah. So, that that's why in the
01:39:09
playbooks, playbook one is called a side
01:39:10
hustle or an apprenticeship. So, an
01:39:12
apprenticeship, let's say let's say you
01:39:14
currently earn $100,000 a year for uh a
01:39:19
really big corporate, but you know
01:39:21
that's not your future. An
01:39:22
apprenticeship might be that you join
01:39:24
four boards for 20 25,000 each and you
01:39:27
actually work with some startups that
01:39:29
are more entrepreneurial and you take a
01:39:32
position where you have four companies
01:39:34
that are paying 25 grand. So you still
01:39:35
earn 100 grand a year but now you've got
01:39:38
four smaller startups that you're
01:39:40
learning from and they're learning from
01:39:41
you and you're learning from them. So
01:39:42
that's that's a version of an
01:39:44
apprenticeship. Um, an apprenticeship
01:39:46
could also be that you go from working
01:39:48
for a big traditional company to getting
01:39:50
a job that pays almost as much but with
01:39:52
a smaller, more interesting business
01:39:54
that you can learn from a founder. A
01:39:56
side hustle is where you do stuff on the
01:39:58
side and it's open and shut. You build
01:40:00
your entrepreneurial confidence. So
01:40:02
those are like starting points and then
01:40:04
after that and the these are not
01:40:06
designed to make a big leap financially.
01:40:09
After that we talk about a twoerson
01:40:11
scout team scouting an opportunity. We
01:40:13
talk about a fourperson fire starting
01:40:15
team getting something started. We talk
01:40:18
about an eightp person core team running
01:40:20
a really cool little lifestyle business.
01:40:23
So it it it's not like people think that
01:40:25
they have to go from zero to 100 in one
01:40:27
jump. And it's like no, there are little
01:40:29
steps along the way that make this
01:40:30
really easy.
01:40:31
>> I think uh it's really important with
01:40:33
all of this advice to like know your
01:40:34
nature and to know who you are and kind
01:40:36
of honestly to like know what you want
01:40:38
from life,
01:40:38
>> which a lot of people don't and they're
01:40:40
handed what they want from life from
01:40:41
like scrolling on Instagram or LinkedIn.
01:40:42
and they cool
01:40:43
>> I need to build a $5 billion AI company
01:40:45
etc. I think I've I've noticed with
01:40:47
myself that I started a business. I was
01:40:49
really I was ambitious about the goals
01:40:51
for that business and then you know I
01:40:54
ran that business for some time. I left
01:40:56
that business when I was what 20 maybe
01:40:58
20 years old. Went to work in Silicon
01:41:00
Valley as basically a consultant.
01:41:01
>> Mhm.
01:41:02
>> And that was okay for a time being but
01:41:04
then eventually I realized that
01:41:06
>> the money really doesn't m it's really
01:41:08
about like doing it with people you like
01:41:10
and having a and having a challenge. So
01:41:12
that then led me back into the ambitious
01:41:15
building businesses. Did that for six
01:41:16
years. But big big business around the
01:41:18
world
01:41:19
>> and then left that and then I went
01:41:20
through a period where
01:41:22
>> I guess I was kind of a consultant
01:41:23
freelancery type guy for a while again
01:41:26
fundamentally unfulfilling for me.
01:41:28
>> Yep.
01:41:28
>> Because going on a mission with a group
01:41:30
of people, an audacious mission really
01:41:32
regardless of what it is that filled me
01:41:34
up. It was never really about the money.
01:41:36
>> A lot of people discover this. A lot of
01:41:37
people discover that more is not better.
01:41:40
Uh, a lot of people discover that bigger
01:41:41
is not more fun. Do
01:41:42
>> you know what else they discover? They
01:41:44
discover that their idea of independence
01:41:47
and freedom is also not what they
01:41:49
thought. And this is like a quite a
01:41:50
contrarian take, but I have more
01:41:53
responsibility now than I've ever had.
01:41:55
>> Yeah.
01:41:55
>> I could choose less responsibility, more
01:41:57
freedom, and I would be less satisfied
01:41:58
and less fulfilled in my life.
01:42:00
>> Totally. Look at rich kids. They've
01:42:01
they've got everything taken care of,
01:42:03
and there's all this financial resource
01:42:04
around them, and there's nothing for
01:42:06
them to do. They live in a constant
01:42:07
state of depression. We love
01:42:09
responsibility. We love creative
01:42:11
tension. Uh we love being up to
01:42:13
something in the world. There's nothing
01:42:15
greater than being up to something to
01:42:17
being on a mission, especially with a
01:42:18
great group of people that you're
01:42:19
traveling through life with that you're
01:42:21
on this rock with. Um and you find your
01:42:23
group of people that you want to be up
01:42:24
to something with and you natter and you
01:42:26
solve and you get curious and you run
01:42:29
ideas past each other and you voice note
01:42:31
at 2:00 in the morning. You know, that's
01:42:33
that's where the juice is. That's where
01:42:34
the joy is. Um there's a chapter in
01:42:36
there that says know when enough is
01:42:37
enough. And it says that a huge part of
01:42:40
the times that we're in is you know we
01:42:41
live in a time of endless scrolling.
01:42:43
There's no cue that says you've been
01:42:44
scrolling long enough you know go to
01:42:47
bed. And it's same with business that we
01:42:50
think bigger would be better. Having a
01:42:51
bit bigger business another you know
01:42:53
another product another thing another uh
01:42:56
million would make you happier. And the
01:42:58
truth is it's it's not the it's normally
01:43:01
not the case. Well, what is the case
01:43:02
though is that we all need increasing
01:43:05
levels of challenge. It seems to me, you
01:43:07
know, this is why crosswords get more
01:43:10
difficult and video games get have
01:43:11
levels because they realize through the
01:43:13
studies that when something becomes
01:43:15
incrementally more difficult, you drop
01:43:16
into a flow state and motivation
01:43:18
increases and if it doesn't, then you
01:43:19
lose motivation. And so, I think this is
01:43:21
why even in my life, like I'm striving
01:43:23
to make things bigger and better because
01:43:25
it's actually just a proxy of like I
01:43:26
want to be challenged.
01:43:27
>> Well, there's a couple of things. You
01:43:29
can either go really big with one thing
01:43:31
and just be really really focused or you
01:43:34
can have challenge across a portfolio of
01:43:35
interests. One thing that is happening
01:43:37
to your generation, if I can be so bold,
01:43:40
cuz I'm just 15 years older or whatever,
01:43:43
is that you've taken all the energy that
01:43:46
normally went into kids and you're
01:43:48
putting it into business, right? And the
01:43:52
normal natural thing that is meant to
01:43:54
happen around this age is that you're
01:43:56
meant to struggle with a business or
01:43:58
struggle with a way of providing and
01:44:00
also struggle with raising kids and all
01:44:03
that sort of stuff. So there's this
01:44:04
reservoir of creative energy that is
01:44:08
meant to be divided amongst a few
01:44:09
projects. And I'm seeing a lot of people
01:44:12
that that misplaced maternalism or
01:44:14
paternalism goes into just one thing and
01:44:17
then we're expecting to get the joy and
01:44:20
the fulfillment that would normally come
01:44:22
back from family
01:44:23
>> and we wonder why that's missing. You
01:44:25
know, it's like, oh, I'm pouring myself
01:44:26
into the creation of these companies and
01:44:28
they're proxies for kids. And it's like,
01:44:30
why don't I feel this warmth back? Cuz
01:44:33
your biology is not wired to receive
01:44:35
warmth back from something other than a
01:44:38
kid. So this is happening because we're
01:44:40
not having we're not having kids. So one
01:44:42
of the things that uh well one of the
01:44:45
things I encourage everyone to do is
01:44:46
have kids because it's the best thing
01:44:47
ever and to have a portfolio of
01:44:49
interests that you don't have to
01:44:51
struggle to get to a billion. You could
01:44:53
say, you know what, the business
01:44:54
bucket's full at 3 million and I'm
01:44:56
really really happy with a revenue of 3
01:44:58
million in a team of 10 and now I want
01:45:00
to have a portfolio of interests that
01:45:02
includes health and fitness or travel or
01:45:04
teaching at a local uh you know youth
01:45:07
group, you know, or I want to play a
01:45:09
bigger role in my church. Like there's
01:45:10
all these other things that you say,
01:45:12
okay, these are the portfolio of
01:45:13
interests that that are more human.
01:45:16
>> Lifestyle business playbook. going to
01:45:18
link this book below for anyone that
01:45:19
wants to give it a read who is compelled
01:45:21
by the lifestyle that Dan has described
01:45:24
there where you can have fun, freedom
01:45:26
and fulfillment with your own business.
01:45:29
As you know, Daniel, cuz this is, I
01:45:30
think, is your seventh time being on
01:45:32
this podcast. Record breaker. We have a
01:45:34
closing tradition. The question that has
01:45:37
been left for you is, what fear have you
01:45:39
overcome to become who you are today?
01:45:45
You know, I grew up on the Sunshine
01:45:46
Coast. Uh, I dropped out of school or I
01:45:50
dropped out of university. I've got zero
01:45:52
qualifications.
01:45:54
Um,
01:45:56
I'm not particularly good at anything in
01:45:58
particular. I've got no skills. Yeah,
01:46:01
there's me at 21. I tell you, this was a
01:46:03
huge fear. Running my first ad in the
01:46:05
newspaper. I put everything on a credit
01:46:07
card just to run an ad in the newspaper
01:46:09
for $8,000. and it had to work or else I
01:46:12
was in serious trouble.
01:46:14
>> I've had a weird 25 years. I've boom
01:46:17
busted over and over again. Um, so I had
01:46:20
a massive boom in my early 20s, built a
01:46:23
$10 million company rapidly and then
01:46:25
lost it. And then I built another
01:46:26
multi-million dollar business and then
01:46:28
lost it. And then I got wiped out by a
01:46:31
co experience and had to reinvent the
01:46:32
business. And then I had a negative
01:46:34
experience with a co-founder and had to
01:46:35
reinvent the team. So I've had these
01:46:37
kind of like huge forif for for the
01:46:39
first 15 years it was boom bust boom
01:46:41
bust boom bust and the fear was is that
01:46:44
it would never feel a sense of
01:46:46
fulfillment. I'd never get to a place
01:46:48
where I could actually say it was all
01:46:50
worth it. Um and to just keep going and
01:46:53
going and going when I felt exhausted uh
01:46:56
was a massive thing. You know have a
01:46:58
family.
01:46:59
>> Yeah. and the fear of will I be able to
01:47:01
provide for the family and the fear of
01:47:04
uh will my business ideas be valued by
01:47:06
anyone else other than myself? Am I
01:47:08
doing something stupid? Am I doing
01:47:09
something um that will fail again? So,
01:47:13
it's been a lot of fear. Um but you know
01:47:17
what? It's been a wonderful journey that
01:47:19
every time I've pushed through that
01:47:20
fear, we get to the other side. And
01:47:22
actually, it's better on the other side.
01:47:24
It's even better. Had you known how hard
01:47:26
it would be, do you think that
01:47:28
21-year-old Daniel would have done it?
01:47:32
>> I don't think I had any other choice.
01:47:34
>> But if I'd sat that Daniel down and I'd
01:47:36
say, "Daniel, this is what's going to
01:47:37
happen in the next 20 years. You're
01:47:38
going to go up and then you're going to
01:47:39
lose it all. Then you go up, you lose it
01:47:41
all. You're going to feel like this at
01:47:42
this moment. It's going to be the worst
01:47:43
day. Then you're going to feel like this
01:47:45
and then this and then this and you're
01:47:46
going to be working hard the whole time.
01:47:47
Then you're going to lose faith."
01:47:49
Would you have done it?
01:47:50
>> Secretly, yes. And the reason for that
01:47:54
is I kind of I kind of like the roller
01:47:56
coaster. Feel like I needed to go
01:47:59
through boom bust boom bust boom bust
01:48:01
because I I secretly didn't want a
01:48:05
straight line. I think I think I
01:48:07
actually want the the the I want the
01:48:09
more interesting story. At 24, I was
01:48:12
offered $14 million for my company. Uh
01:48:14
and I blew it. I I screwed up the
01:48:17
negotiation and we ended up all walking
01:48:19
away from the deal. I think it would
01:48:20
have been the worst thing possible had I
01:48:22
had $14 million at uh at age 24.
01:48:27
>> So I've drawn a a little graph here on
01:48:29
this iPad. One axis is your success and
01:48:32
the other axis is time. Could you draw
01:48:34
for me what your career looks like in
01:48:36
terms of success over time including the
01:48:39
ups, the downs, etc., etc.
01:48:41
>> Well, if we just talk objectively what
01:48:43
other people would have seen. Um I do
01:48:45
this nightclub party and that's amazing.
01:48:48
And then I go and I get a job with a
01:48:50
mentor and then we build this business
01:48:52
that's like 6 million in its first year
01:48:54
and I'm like right close to it and we go
01:48:56
from zero to like 60 employees and then
01:48:59
I have a fight with my mentor and he
01:49:01
tells me go start your own business. So,
01:49:03
I go right down to start from scratch
01:49:06
again and I'm in I'm in a really
01:49:07
negative place. And then we get started
01:49:10
and suddenly I've got myself a
01:49:11
multi-million dollar business. And then
01:49:13
the government changes the law and we
01:49:15
have to reinvent that business. And then
01:49:18
we get a new amazing contract and now we
01:49:20
do a million a month. And this, by the
01:49:22
way, this is only like age 24. And then
01:49:25
we screw up the negotiation and it's
01:49:27
right back to the start. And then I go
01:49:29
to London and I start a new business.
01:49:31
And that goes really really well really
01:49:33
quickly and like one year in we've got
01:49:35
the palladium theater and we're doing
01:49:36
hundreds of thousands a week worth of
01:49:37
sales and then the global financial
01:49:39
crisis resets the whole business and I
01:49:41
lose the major contracts that we have
01:49:43
and and then I relaunch the business and
01:49:46
then co comes along and we're by by this
01:49:49
stage we're in uh 11 cities doing a
01:49:52
couple of million per city and then I
01:49:55
relaunch the business as a digital
01:49:56
business and it goes off the scale again
01:49:59
right I'm running out of space here and
01:50:01
Now we've figured out, okay, we own the
01:50:02
assets, we own the brand, uh we've got a
01:50:04
great team, we've got multiple
01:50:06
businesses, and at the moment, and this
01:50:07
is around the time I have kids as well,
01:50:09
and it and it starts to really uh become
01:50:13
more stable and more fun and uh less up
01:50:15
and down. But that was my starting
01:50:17
point. Up, down, up, down, up, down.
01:50:20
>> And this is over the period of how many
01:50:22
years?
01:50:22
>> This was this was from 20 to 35. It was
01:50:25
just boom bust, boom bust, punch in the
01:50:28
face, get back up, punch in the face,
01:50:30
get back up. Uh, zero millions, zero
01:50:33
millions, zero millions. I say all of
01:50:36
this because I think it's important to
01:50:39
people for people to realize the reality
01:50:42
of what it takes and how hard it is.
01:50:44
And, you know, oftent times if we want
01:50:46
to get, you know, have a high performing
01:50:48
podcast or write a great selling book,
01:50:50
we kind of describe it as a linear
01:50:51
journey. you're going to do this, then
01:50:52
you do this, then this is going to
01:50:54
happen, then you do this. Stick at it
01:50:55
for long enough, and then and then why?
01:50:57
But actually, in my experience, the
01:50:59
graph either looks like a boom and bust
01:51:00
cycle, which is kind of what I'm seeing
01:51:01
here in your graph, or it looks like
01:51:05
nothing, nothing nothing, nothing
01:51:07
nothing, something exponential.
01:51:08
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
01:51:10
>> I mean, even this podcast, if you look
01:51:12
at the graph, it is nothing, nothing,
01:51:13
nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,
01:51:14
nothing exponential.
01:51:15
>> 2 million, 4 million, 8 million, 16
01:51:17
million. Yeah. And so the question for
01:51:19
me always becomes like what would it
01:51:22
take for you to survive either in your
01:51:26
story this boom and bust scenario
01:51:29
>> or in many of the things I've done in my
01:51:32
life this no man's land
01:51:35
>> period of no it takes a certain
01:51:38
something in someone
01:51:39
>> Yeah
01:51:40
>> to be able to weather such a storm and
01:51:42
well I guess what what is that you said
01:51:44
a second ago I had no choice. Yeah, I
01:51:46
had no choice because I have no skills.
01:51:48
I'm not good at anything. You know, I've
01:51:50
got friends who are good at coding or
01:51:52
good at editing or they're good at
01:51:53
designing. They've got accounting or
01:51:56
they've got dentistry or something like
01:51:57
that to fall back on. I have no
01:51:59
qualifications. I've got a driver's
01:52:00
license is my only qualification. Um,
01:52:02
and I'm all I'm good at is organizing
01:52:05
teams and getting people in the room and
01:52:07
getting them excited and essentially
01:52:10
encouraging them to work with me and and
01:52:12
build something together. So, I kind of
01:52:14
didn't have a choice but to keep playing
01:52:17
the game, keep trying.
01:52:19
>> And by the way, I wouldn't change any of
01:52:20
that. Like, there's there's no point
01:52:22
there where I'd go back and say,
01:52:23
"Actually, cuz where where I am now,
01:52:25
every single one of those crushing drops
01:52:28
is where I really learned something that
01:52:30
I leverage today." actually something I
01:52:32
said to someone who works in my team as
01:52:34
my business partner now, George Gibson,
01:52:36
when she emailed me two years ago asking
01:52:37
me to invest in a startup, a startup
01:52:39
that I myself had failed at. I basically
01:52:41
was trying to say, "This is not going to
01:52:43
work, but do it anyway because the
01:52:46
actual thing of value here might not be
01:52:48
the million-dollar exit. It's going to
01:52:50
be the lessons you learn from the
01:52:52
failure are going to then be leveraged
01:52:54
as I did at 20 years old when I went to
01:52:56
Silicon Valley and started talking to
01:52:57
people about this thing. I'd spent two
01:52:58
years failing and was getting paid
01:53:00
$70,000 a month to talk about this thing
01:53:02
as a 20-year-old with no qualifications
01:53:04
because I was one of the very few people
01:53:05
who had failed in social media and
01:53:07
therefore had a deep understanding and a
01:53:08
rare skill. You're no longer going on
01:53:10
BBC News night or in Forbes as the
01:53:13
person who did this, but of all the
01:53:15
things you've done in your life, this
01:53:16
great failing is going to be the most
01:53:18
valuable asset you have. And this is
01:53:20
what your story proves because every
01:53:21
time it goes higher.
01:53:23
>> Yeah, it really does. Yeah, it was it
01:53:24
was amazing. like the the like I can
01:53:27
tell you what the moments feel like at
01:53:29
the bottom and they're horrible and
01:53:31
alcohol's involved and uh you know like
01:53:34
wanting to just completely hide and you
01:53:36
know never be seen by anyone ever again
01:53:38
and then suddenly you go okay I mean
01:53:41
I've got this friend of mine who who's
01:53:42
an entrepreneur who's failed several
01:53:44
times and he says you feel like you're
01:53:45
on a tight rope and then you fall off
01:53:46
the tightroppe and you realize it was
01:53:48
only 6 in off the ground you know it's
01:53:50
not as bad as you think and you can hop
01:53:52
back on the tight rope and go and you
01:53:54
can go again But
01:53:56
every single time it's just gotten
01:53:58
better and better and better and bigger
01:54:00
and bigger and more more stable and more
01:54:02
like reliable.
01:54:04
>> There is another story which is one that
01:54:07
doesn't have the survivorship bias
01:54:08
because now Daniel, you've been wildly
01:54:11
successful. Walk down the street, people
01:54:13
know who you are. They, you know, you've
01:54:14
got millions of people that tune in to
01:54:16
watch you give advice. But there's also
01:54:18
a version of reality where that wasn't
01:54:20
the ending.
01:54:21
And I actually know someone who has
01:54:24
fought for 15 years to build businesses
01:54:26
all across the world
01:54:28
>> and they they just don't have that
01:54:31
self-awareness piece.
01:54:32
>> Mhm.
01:54:32
>> I don't know if I'm self-aware. Like
01:54:34
none of us can actually know cuz that
01:54:35
requires self-awareness.
01:54:37
>> We've all got our blind spots.
01:54:38
>> They'll continue to start businesses and
01:54:40
it's putting their family at risk now.
01:54:42
>> They go through the same boom and bust
01:54:43
cycle, but it never goes higher.
01:54:45
>> Y
01:54:46
>> and if you were to ask me objectively,
01:54:48
do I think they'll ever have the moment
01:54:49
you've had now? You have a survivorship
01:54:52
bias that I have. We did something, it
01:54:54
was hard, and then it paid off.
01:54:56
>> Here's the thing. There are no happy
01:54:58
endings. Uh, life ends abruptly.
01:55:03
One thing that happens when you get a
01:55:04
little older is you start discovering
01:55:07
that actually when when you're under 40,
01:55:09
you think everything ends well. And then
01:55:12
later on, you discover there are no
01:55:13
happy endings. Everyone dies. You get a
01:55:16
phone call one day and someone who is an
01:55:18
amazing person has a stroke.
01:55:21
And that's them. That's them hit. That's
01:55:23
that's it. What you thought of that you
01:55:25
thought they'd have 20 more years and
01:55:26
they don't. You know, their entire life
01:55:29
changes.
01:55:30
You you're left with the realization
01:55:33
that it's just an adventure. Sometimes
01:55:36
sometimes the happy ending that other
01:55:38
people would call as a happy ending or
01:55:39
an objective happy ending is actually
01:55:42
pretty miserable in the middle of it.
01:55:44
There are people who have everything.
01:55:45
you've met them and objectively they
01:55:47
have the houses and the cars and the
01:55:49
private jets and all that sort of stuff
01:55:50
and they're not particularly happy.
01:55:52
They're miserable. And then there are
01:55:53
some people who they lose all of that
01:55:56
stuff, but then they reconnect with a
01:55:57
group of friends and they're like
01:55:58
happier than they've ever been.
01:56:00
>> Something's given you this insight.
01:56:04
>> Yeah. So, someone very close to me, very
01:56:06
dear to me, recently had a stroke, you
01:56:08
know, and
01:56:10
yeah, you realize that the happy ending
01:56:12
is not guaranteed. In fact, the opposite
01:56:13
is guaranteed. you realize everyone
01:56:16
everyone dies, everyone decays, everyone
01:56:18
gets old. If you're lucky, you get old.
01:56:20
Uh and if you're unlucky, you don't get
01:56:22
old. Um so you have to there comes a
01:56:25
point where you have to release the idea
01:56:27
that you're going to have this happy
01:56:28
ending. You're going to have moments of
01:56:30
triumph and moments of disaster. You're
01:56:32
going to lose people. You're going to
01:56:35
have everything taken from you. It's
01:56:37
guaranteed everything is taken from you.
01:56:40
>> How did that change your perspective?
01:56:41
this loved one going through this,
01:56:45
>> you you realized that uh
01:56:48
you real or I realized that the mental
01:56:53
timeline of endless decades spreading
01:56:56
out ahead, endless amounts of health,
01:56:59
endless amounts of relationships
01:57:02
is not it's a it's a nice fantasy that
01:57:05
keeps us together, but it's not
01:57:08
guaranteed. And then the impact for me
01:57:10
is to treasure relationships.
01:57:14
Um there comes a moment
01:57:17
where I don't know if this has ever
01:57:19
happened to you yet, but you go, "Wow, I
01:57:22
didn't know that was the last
01:57:23
conversation."
01:57:25
Um, you don't realize this, but one of
01:57:29
the legacies that you leave behind, not
01:57:32
you because you've got this body of
01:57:34
work, but one of the legacies that
01:57:35
people leave behind is little voice
01:57:37
notes that they leave in your phone that
01:57:40
they leave in your WhatsApp
01:57:42
and
01:57:44
you listen back to some of these voice
01:57:45
notes and you go, "Wow, I didn't know
01:57:48
that was a treasure. Didn't know that
01:57:49
was a special thing." Um, and this
01:57:53
particular person who got impacted with
01:57:55
the stroke, he was wonderful at voice
01:57:57
notes. He he had this thing that he
01:58:00
would do called uh, it's not lost on me,
01:58:03
voice notes. And I don't even think he
01:58:05
knew he was saying this, but it was his
01:58:06
one of his favorite phrases, which was
01:58:08
it's not lost lost on me. So he'd he'd
01:58:10
leave a voice note and he'd say,
01:58:12
"Stephen, it's not lost on me how much
01:58:14
you're dealing with at the moment and
01:58:15
it's not lost on me that you are
01:58:18
responsible for a lot of people's lives
01:58:20
and all this and I just want to
01:58:22
acknowledge you." So, so he would leave
01:58:25
these voice notes and um and he did this
01:58:28
with everyone like it came out of the
01:58:30
woodwork that everyone got these lovely
01:58:32
voice notes from this guy and um
01:58:37
yeah, you you don't realize but like
01:58:39
literally that is a huge part of
01:58:41
people's legacies. You think you're
01:58:43
going to leave behind all this money.
01:58:44
You think you're going to leave behind
01:58:46
all of this big stuff. You think you're
01:58:48
going to leave behind some huge
01:58:50
financial structure. And in the end, you
01:58:53
leave behind some really touching voice
01:58:55
notes as as one of the things that will
01:58:57
be most treasured if you're lucky.
01:59:00
>> You've been listening to the voice
01:59:01
notes?
01:59:01
>> Yeah, I have. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really
01:59:04
nice. Really, really nice.
01:59:07
>> What is that emotion in your face,
01:59:09
Daniel? What's the range of emotions?
01:59:16
Um, it's just the deeper awareness that
01:59:21
the the the real, you know, we talk a
01:59:23
lot about technology, we talk a lot
01:59:25
about business,
01:59:27
but the whole game is relationships.
01:59:32
>> It's very easy to get that wrong,
01:59:34
>> isn't it?
01:59:36
>> Very easy for you to get that wrong
01:59:38
>> because um you're surrounded by such a
01:59:41
whirlwind.
01:59:44
And
01:59:46
people want so much from you. You know,
01:59:48
a lot of people want a lot from you. And
01:59:50
you think you have to lift people up
01:59:52
around you and you have to do this
01:59:54
heroic effort. Actually, little text
01:59:57
message, little voice note means a lot.
01:59:59
It's interesting. You for me, I figured
02:00:02
out that we're that we're on a rock. We
02:00:05
get a few little laps around the sun.
02:00:07
That's it. We get this. We like
02:00:10
literally pop into existence like an
02:00:11
electron spinning around a a neutron,
02:00:14
whatever it is, and we we get we're
02:00:16
we're on the rock. The most valuable
02:00:19
thing is that we're on the rock
02:00:20
together. Like you zoom out enough,
02:00:23
we're all just little dots. We're all
02:00:25
just little dots trying to figure stuff
02:00:26
out. Um and we're all trying to make
02:00:29
sense of our own lives and we're all
02:00:31
trying to ignore how, you know,
02:00:33
difficult things can be. And um but then
02:00:36
you realize that it's just the fact that
02:00:38
we are moving through time together. But
02:00:41
yeah, you you as I said, you hit a point
02:00:43
where you realize that uh there is no
02:00:45
happy ending. Unfortunately, there's not
02:00:47
uh you you you know the the ending is
02:00:49
sad. When you hit a certain age, people
02:00:52
that you really love get old get old and
02:00:54
die or they get illnesses. They lose a
02:00:57
big chunk of themselves in one fell
02:00:58
swoop. So, um, while those moments are
02:01:02
happy, while you've got those happy
02:01:04
moments, treasure those happy moments.
02:01:06
Really, really embrace them.
02:01:08
>> Do you have any regrets in this regard
02:01:10
that might help me avoid having similar
02:01:12
regrets?
02:01:13
>> I really don't. I'm really, really happy
02:01:16
that things like I'm really
02:01:19
the biggest relationships are with my
02:01:22
kids and with my wife and family
02:01:26
formation.
02:01:28
I've I've had unbelievably high highs.
02:01:31
Like I've been on the big boats. I've
02:01:33
flown on the private jets. I've had
02:01:35
parties in my honor. I've had big
02:01:38
paydays.
02:01:39
All of that cool stuff that people dream
02:01:41
of. Family formation is where like the
02:01:44
core the core of it. Like that's the
02:01:46
core of happiness for me, you know, the
02:01:49
the the intergenerational passing of
02:01:52
life. Uh which is which is kind of like
02:01:56
wow. like that that we I think we've
02:01:59
forgotten how cool that is. I think
02:02:01
we've forgotten the idea that you're
02:02:03
passing on consciousness and that this
02:02:06
being has their own consciousness. They
02:02:07
do their own thing. They come up with
02:02:09
their own ideas. They have their own
02:02:10
challenges. Um yeah, it's wild.
02:02:16
>> Daniel, thank you. We're done.
02:02:18
>> That was great. YouTube have this new
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crazy algorithm where they know exactly
02:02:22
what video you would like to watch next
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based on AI and all of your viewing
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this video is the perfect video for you.
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