¶ Who Is Jeremy Grantham?
Jag heter Shannon Maldonado och är grundare av JAUI, en presentbutik med fokus på konstnärer och handgjorda föremål. Jag valde Shopify eftersom den, när jag testade andra plattformar, definitivt var en av de mest användarvänliga. Det var viktigt för mig att fundera över var vi skulle befinna oss i framtiden. Alla verktyg du behöver för att följa upp dina försäljningssyffror. Till exempel lager och planering finns samlade på din instrumentpanel. Börja din kostnadsfria provperiod på shopify.
What advice do you give for the average person that's looking to invest their salary or their wages?
Don't own US stocks. That's a simple strategy that you can act on.
What about SP 500?
No. Really? Yeah. And if you have a big position in US technology stuff, my personal advice would be to sell it.
But I'm an investor in space.
Good luck. The SpaceX is such a fabulous DS story and we can go into that. Why it's a unnecessary piece of nonsense that facilitates nothing except criminals moving money.
Do you think Bitcoin's gonna go to zero?
Yeah, I said, well, suddenly I got him there.
So how many years have you spent investing? And what's the most amount of money you've ever managed of other people's money?
A hundred and sixty five billion.
And one of the things you're famous for talking about is this idea of bubbles.
Yes. And bubbles always occur around the very most important ideas. So the railroads, everyone could see that it would change the world. The same with the internet. And everyone wanted to put their money in. And so they overinvested. But this is the problem. Eventually, they burst.
And if you look at the great bubbles breaking of the past, you find that it's followed by really tough times, a miserable period for the economy, and the bigger the bubble, the bigger the bust. And now we're in the biggest investment bubble that arguably has ever occurred. AI.
Are we on the verge of a collapse with AI over the coming years?
The next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months, but certainly the next few years.
So if you're not someone that has a huge amount of safety.
🎵 Music
When in a
starts to get bad and there's a economic bubble class.
So I will go through everything, but you will not receive this advice from investment advisors because they lose a lot of business.
And would you be thinking about the country you live in at this moment in time?
Absolutely.
Is there any countries you wouldn't live in?
I think I have to refuse to answer this on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.
Oh okay. So you're saying don't live in the United States? I've just moved here. Why not the United States?
🎵 Music
Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. It's the algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes.
¶ Will AI Become The Next Financial Bubble?
I would love you to know and a simple way for you to know that is is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this one right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.
🎵 Music
Your firm managed up to$165 billion at its peak, what you we call AUM assets under management. So you know a lot about money, you know a lot about investing. How do you sort of self-define your expertise? Because you traverse so many different subjects through your work. So if I said to you, you know, how do you introduce yourself professionally? What is the answer?
I can't think I ever do introduce myself professionally. But I think of myself as specializing in a longer term horizon than most people and trying to look at a higher and higher level of abstraction. What is really going on here? And what are people missing? I've discovered over decades that humans are incredibly short term oriented and that they have an enormous predisposition to optimism.
They're looking for optimistic news in everything. They're looking to avoid unpleasantness. The idea that you can have steady compound growth is ridiculous. One of my few heroes, Kenneth Boldinger, an economist said. He said the only people who think you can have compound growth on a finite planet are madmen and economists. Which is so accurate. Economists simply believe you can have growth always, and everything comes down to j just price.
One of the things you're famous for talking about is this idea of bubbles. And we're living in a moment where everybody's talking about the subject of artificial intelligence and everyone's getting very excited by it. Some people are getting very pessimistic about the impact it'll have on society.
I wanted to start there because it's a it's an area where there is rife optimism on one side of things, um but there's also a lot of money ploughing into the market, which is I I guess in your view making things prone to collapse. What's your view on artificial intelligence? Well, you said you're good at understanding what people are missing. What is it that people are missing?
Well, first of all let me say I think artificial intelligence is right up there with the railroads. It's one of the defining great ideas of the last couple of hundred years. It's going to change everything. And that is critical if you if you mean to have a bubble. People think that a bubble is a mainly because it's a scam and nothing could be further from the truth. The great bubbles always occur around the very most important ideas.
So the railroads, everyone could see that it would change the world. And everyone wanted to put their money in, and everybody put their money in. They overinvested, and even though the railroads were a spectacularly powerful idea, Uh the railroads uh collapsed of stocks and everybody lost a ton of dough. The same with the internet. And then out of the wreckage the railroads changed the world and and the internet changed the world. What we have to remember is that
In ninety nine, Amazon went up six or seven times. In the crash, in the tech bubble, it went down ninety two percent, as I like to say. Check it, it's such a remarkably large number. And then out of the wreckage, it inherited the retail world. And uh that's that's how it works. The greater the idea, the more obvious the idea, the more money goes in, and the bigger the bubble and the bigger the bubble.
And are we on the verge of a collapse with AI? And when I say verge, I mean over the coming years.
If you look at the data, it would be compatible with history for the peak to be very soon. Everything is in line. This is I think the biggest investment bubble in American history. The indicators of a pure crazy euphoria like SpaceX are all over the place.
¶ How Jeremy Grantham Built An Investing Empire
SpaceX defines as its addressable market a quarter of the global GDP. No, it talks about endless opportunities mining asteroids. It will be in fifty years people and a hundred years people will look back and tell stories about SpaceX and its prospectus, like they tell stories about the South Sea bubble. You know, an enterprise of such enormous value, but it cannot at this time be revealed.
I wanna keep on this train, but for the viewers that don't know your experience, we should probably pause and just tell them your experience because that's the reference point, but also also gives you credibility and authority to speak to this. What have you done with your life?
Well, I got into the investment business in nineteen sixty-eight. There were very few serious people in the investment business. There were no mathematical models. There were the kind of relatively failed sons of rich people who would work for JP Morgan. And then over the next ten years it began to get a little more serious. T Row Price introduced the idea of growth stocks. A few of us introduced the idea of value stocks.
¶ The Most Money He's Ever Managed
And a few years later, at my first firm, Battery March we really introduced the idea of small small cap. It d hadn't existed before that.
And for people that don't know, a small cap is investing in smaller companies.
Yes. And a value stock is simply one that looks cheap.
Did you invent the index fund?
¶ Are You A Billionaire?
There were two or three of us, separately. I don't think we knew of each other.
How many years have you spent investing?
Uh sixty, approximately.
sixty. And what's the the most amount of money you've ever managed? For other people in a calendar year.
Yes, a hundred and sixty five billion. Two partners, Mayo and Vanotolo. And uh when the smoke cleared, you know, I'd made a lot of money, over a billion dollars.
Personally.
Small.
And how much
Paid tax on all of it.
Good. And how and how much money does your firm still manage today of other people's money?
It manages uh eighty five billion.
Eighty five billion. So are you a billionaire?
I'm generally referred to as a billionaire, but that's only because they count the money you give away. Because I've given over ninety percent of my billion away to a foundation.
¶ What Happens When The AI Bubble Bursts?
Oh really? Yeah. To which foundation?
It's called the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. We invest a lot of our principle in green tech. To help combat climate change.
And you're eighty seven years old.
and I'm 87 years old
You've given ninety percent of your money away to your own foundation that's focused on green tech.
Yeah, maybe in ninety five.
Wow. Okay. So coming back to this point that we were talking about, a lot of people won't even know what a bubble is. I think you've done a good job of explaining. A bubble is when everyone gets excited, they all see something obvious, they plow their money in, their stocks go up. And then if you look at the graph that's in front of you there, which shows hist the history of asset bubbles, eventually there's a big Yeah. And you're saying that we're the collapse is on the horizon.
Yes. And what does that mean for the average person? What's gonna happen?
What's going to happen is the high flyers will probably come down a lot but
The high flyers.
The stocks that have gone up the most, AI and the more exciting stocks with the biggest move. Historically it would be expected to come down the middle. From these unprecedented levels, a seventy percent decline would not be unexpected.
So a seventy percent decline in this in the stock price.
Yeah. And you have to remember the tech bubble, the NASDAQ, which is an index of the growth stocks, came down eighty two percent. It is far from unprecedented to have these major declines. And the biggest bubble in history. was in the Japanese stock market in nineteen eighty nine. Back then Japan seemed to rule the world, all the technology, all the Toyotas were kicking bottoms in General Motors and so on.
And everyone bragged about their twelve inch Sony TV in the kitchen and the quality. Etcetera, et cetera. Little things you put on your belt to play music. It were all Japanese. Mm. And uh for a second, Japan sold for more than the US. in eighty nine. And it it got to sixty five times earnings, which which means for every dollar of earnings you have sixty five dollars of market value.
¶ How AI Will Change Everyday Life
And uh the US went to thirty five in the tech bubble of two thousand. You could argue, depending on how you do it, that it's thirty-five or forty today, but it's not sixty-five. So we have seen a much bigger bubble in Japan. And what happened? It went up and up and up. And then it came down for twenty years.
Twenty years.
Twenty years. They talk about the lost decade, but when you look at it closely it looks more like a lost twenty years.
So for the average person, what do they feel and how does it impact them when there's a market crash like the one that you're forecasting?
The high flyers will lay people off and and a lot of people will feel less rich. And as you acquire uh money in the stock market, a small fraction of that, two or three percent, is spent. And in reverse It goes back. And people feel a little bit poorer, they spend a little less. So the economy tends to be under some stress. And if you look at the great bubbles breaking of the past, you find That it's followed by really tough times. Nineteen twenty nine is followed by the Great Depression.
That lasts for several years. And of course there are many other factors that go into that. But it started with the crash in the market, uh, which was in the end down about eighty percent or more.
¶ The Investing Strategy For Right Now
And then the next one was called the Nifty Fifty because it was the fifty great companies like IBM and Coca-Cola. And that was in nineteen seventy two it peaked. It declined by sixty-five percent if you adjust for inflation. The recession associated with that was uh just about the worst. since the depression.
So for the for the average person, what kind of strategy should they be adopting if you if you're not someone that has a huge amount of savings, say you're working for one of these big big companies, um i are there any strategies that you should be thinking about now before this before the markets come down and there could be a recession.
I mean rule number one is always be diversified.
Be di what does that be diversified mean?
It means whole wholesome bonds, wholesome cash? Perhaps a small amount of precious metals?
Like gold and silver. Yeah. And what is a bond? And how do I buy one?
Yeah, a b a bond is a loan that carries a a fixed interest rate. let's say today five percent. You invest your money in it and it will pay you five percent as long as the creditworthiness of uh The other side is there. So if it's the US government, you'll assume it's pretty credit worthy. And you buy a bond from the US government, it's how the US government funds
uh a part of its activities. You can buy a thirty year US government bond, a ten year bond, a two year bond, a ninety day uh treasury bill, they call them, when they get that short. everything goes fine, you you receive this modest amount of money. You're five percent or you're three percent, depending on the conditions.
Okay, so i a bond is basically lending the government money. Yes. And if you want to lend the government money
Or lending a corporation money.
Okay, so you can also lend like Apple money. And I I can go to the government website, or it says I was just reading here, it says if you want to lend money directly to the US government, you can bypass Wall Street entirely, go to treasurydirect.gov, you open an account, link your bank and purchase directly. You can buy Treasury, bills, notes, bonds and series one savings bonds. You pay exactly face value with no commissions or fees, and the investment is backed by the full faith.
of the US government. Or you can buy, you know, like Apple, you can lend Apple money. I didn't even know you could do this. And you go to any of your major brokers like Fidelity or Vanguard or probably a lot of the the apps. You navigate to fixed income section on your account and you can See what bonds are being offered, and you can lend them money.
What you're doing actually, they have distributed it to the market and you're acquiring it from one of the existing owners.
Oh okay.
Not actually giving them incremental money. They they come to the market with ten billion dollars in a particular bond with a particular coupon. It says, We will pay you three and a half percent. That's the coupon. And when you want to buy some of that bond, you you go to your broker and he says, It's no longer selling at the original hundred. It's now selling at ninety two or a hundred and seven.
and you you pay that and it transfers from one owner to you. There have been times in nineteen seventy four when you could uh you could get a bond that would pay eight, nine, ten percent.
Yeah. So if I buy a US government ten year treasury bond, essentially lending the US government money, I can do four point four six percent a year and Apple's current yield on a ten year corporate bond is four point seven percent a year. So almost five percent a year. Which means if I put what a thousand dollars in, I'll make four hundred and seventy five dollars every ten years. Hm. Interesting.
I n I never really knew how bond bonds work. So you're saying markets collapsing, diversify, get some money into bonds, get some money keep some money in cash. And anything else in terms of diversified portfolio property?
Uh property is fine, except uh it's pretty darn expensive by historical standards. They've engineered a uh situation where house prices tend to rise. Great for the people who have a house. And terrible for the people who would like to buy a house. Back in ninety four in England, a typical house sold for three point four times your family income. That was about as low as it had been for fifty years.
And then from ninety four until today, um, it rose from three point four times to over ten times, depending on where you live. And at ten times income, a reasonable young couple are in big trouble. They can't really afford to buy a house. And that same high prices are reflected in rents. So they're really squeezed on living costs.
And the same is true even worse in China and Canada, Australia, most of Europe. House prices have simply been allowed to go up for the last thirty four they didn't, you know, traditionally they they traded
¶ Why You Should Avoid US Stocks
flat or down sixty, seventy, eighty years until nineteen ninety four in the UK. But since then House prices have ridden everywhere.
So so you you are you expecting house prices to to come down sharply? I I think I heard you say that they might come down thirty percent.
Even if they come down thirty percent, they're really still very expensive, aren't they? That would be uh they'd come down to six or seven times family income. They'd still be twice what they used to be in the good old days.
So I've got diversify, I've got reduce your position. Um, there is a probably gonna be a bit of a job disruption as well.
And particularly if you have to own stocks, own them outside America. Don't own US stocks. That's a nice simple strategy that you can act on. Why? They're much cheaper. And uh since the beginning of last year they have handsomely outperformed the US.
Foreign stock.
stocks foreign stocks, of emerging countries, of European countries, Japan, Canada, Australia, and so on. You can find good broad indices, kind of the world ex US. Uh or emerging markets. And uh
Invest outside of America. Yep.
I'm sure they'll muddle through okay over the next ten or twenty years. And I am not confident that the US will do that. I'm not confident that US equities will be intact in five years, ten years.
So US a US equity is a US stock.
Yeah.
Why aren't you confident that they'll be intact in five or ten years?
Because they're so badly overpriced today. Back in the tech bubble of two thousand We had a ten year forecast. For US equities of minus two percent a year for ten years. And they came out with minus three. The period from two thousand to two thousand and ten, you simply lost money in the US market. Ten years later you had less money than you started with. And this is a higher price market, I believe, than two thousand.
¶ Why Investment Advisors Mislead Clients
So you think it's gonna be even worse?
In Japan you went twenty years and you lost money. You went thirty years and you still hadn't gotten back. It took thirty-five years for the Japanese market to recover. What I'm saying is it's quite typical to uh get beaten around the head in the stock market when it becomes crazily overpriced, as it is today. And that it's a very good idea to take some respon responsibility in and watch your tail. Now let me just say you will not receive the advice from investment advisors.
to get your tail out of the market. Ever. It is not good business for them to do that, and they will not ever say it to you. So from nineteen twenty nine onwards, the Goldman Sachses of the world have never said to you Get out of the market. It's overpriced. Never. So they went through the crash of twenty nine. It went through the crash of the nifty fifty and seventy two.
the crash of two thousand in the tech bubble, they never ever say it because it's bad business. If you fight a bubble, you lose a lot of business. And because the uncertainty of the timing is so great, the client's patience Is shorter than the uncertainty of the market. So sooner or later, you will be advising people to be careful. The market will keep going. And going and going like it did in Japan.
You're saying that the people that manage money on a global scale, they have no incentive to tell you that the market's about to collapse because if they did, their clients would w would withdraw their money and they wouldn't get their fees for managing that money. So what they do is they they keep telling you things are gonna be fine and optimistic. But you have to kind of see through that yourself because they have an incentive structure which isn't aligned with yours necessarily.
It may also be the case that those very people who are who understand these economic bubbles and cycles, they themselves are adopting a different strategy with their own money. But that at the same time they'll probably be telling you that everything's going to be great for a long time.
If you'll allow me to tell a story on this very topic. In the ninety eight, ninety nine the the tech bubble so called, the run up to the top. I I got into a lot of debates with the Bulls. I would say it's horribly overpriced and they would
What's up, Paul?
Okay. pessimistic or careful about the market. There were twelve hundred people in the audience and it was the annual bash. of the uh Society of Analysts. And uh I asked before my turn of the debate Please put your hands up if you consider yourself a full time stock market expert. Four hundred hands went up. I had people counting. And I said, I've got two questions for you. One If the market, which is currently thirty one times earnings, was to go back to a more normal seventeen time.
Would it guarantee a major bear market if it happens s anytime in the next ten years?
A major down market.
If it went from what was then thirty one times Earnings. Every dollar of earnings sold for thirty one times in the market. And the and the more normal average was closer fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. And I use seventeen. If it went down to seventeen any time in the next ten years, would it guarantee a major bear market? All four hundred of them said yes it would. If it happened, it would guarantee a major bear market. And then the qu second question of course was, and do you think it will happen?
and less than one percent thought it would not happen. Ninety nine percent plus thought the market would go down, therefore guaranteeing a major bear market. And this was the engine room. of all the Goldman Sachs and the Morgan Stanleys and the JP Morgans, all the great investment firms giving advice in America. The engine room who work for them, the guys doing the analysis, doing the work. all believed in data that guaranteed a major bear market, which happened,
But the people who employed them or represented them from a marketing point of view were on the podium with me saying, Oh, Jeremy, Jeremy, don't get excited. We'll muddle through quite nicely. It was a huge betrayal of trust, if you wanted to put it that way.
And do you think that's happening now?
Of course. Who are the people representing the great investment firms telling you to watch out? If you look at the data, you will see over time it's a series of great waves in evaluation.
Like this.
Like this. And we're not just in one, but in terms of the US stock market, we're in the biggest one, arguably, that has ever occurred. The noise to be careful and watch out and get out of the market is not deafening. In fact, you will hear nothing. You never have. You never will. It is simply lousy business for a big firm. I sympathize with I sympathize with them because when we did it in ninety eight, ninety nine, we were two and a quarter years early and we lost half our book of business.
Because you were honest with the people about what was coming.
Through their eyes we were wrong. We said, Watch out, the market is overpriced, it will end badly. It went up. Therefore we were wrong, therefore. Shoot us. People think...
¶ Advice For Entrepreneurs Right Now
You get shot for underperforming in a bear market. And that is not really the case. In a bear market, everyone freezes. Rigor mortis. They wait until the market is bottomed out, then they sit around and start to fire one or two people for having done worse than the others. But in a bull market, they're playing golf with their fellow pension fund officer. And he is making a ton of money. And they are not. They get very excited in a bull market and they fire you instantly.
What about for founders? I actually had a founder call me the other day. And he is running a relatively early stage tech startup. This tech startup has raised a lot of money. It's an AI tech startup. It's raised, I'm gonna say about three hundred million dollars. It's not profitable yet. But it's raised a lot of money. So it's living off investor capital right now. He said to me, Steven, I think there's a collapse coming.
So I'm gonna go raise as much money as I possibly can right now because I think when this collapse comes, businesses like mine are gonna be unable to raise capital. And therefore I will go out and I'll kind of like a a bit of a vulture, I'll go out and pick up and buy up all these peop people.
Good lad, good advice.
Good advice.
I think that's a good thing.
So for founders listening now that are somewhat dependent on investment capital, but even those that are just breaking even. What advice would you give entrepreneurs in this moment? If you have
If you can lock up money, I would. If you can build a bit of conservatism in in other ways, do it. Just brace yourself for uh impending problems, which is a pretty good principle. any time, but is a better principle than normal today.
So for founders, entrepreneurs who are you know, the sun is shining right now, but it's time to start acting as if a storm is coming. And the time horizon on that is hard to forecast. It could be weeks, months, years,
Stock market hinges on career risk. And Keynes was the great champ. He was a famous economist of the nineteen thirties and forties, and uh he wrote a famous book called The General Theory. Unlike the idea that the market's sufficient, he knew it wasn't. He knew it was a behavioral jungle, and that it would be given to bubbles and
And when you say efficient you mean logical and
The efficient market idea is that every company, every stock, the underlying company uh represents a long stream of future earnings and dividends. And that the ones in the distant future are given less value, process they call discounting it back to the present, and the sum of all of that stream of earnings into the future is the stock price. And that of course is complete nonsense.
¶ The Real Risks Of AI
What it is is the stock price is psychology.
stock price is what you think the other guy will pay. If the stock is going up, it tends to suck in buyers. And that's called momentum. It's moving up, it attracts buyers. And every now and then uh when the economy is favorable and money is obtainable, uh you tend to get these bubbles. And they play on themselves. Uh the bigger and better they are, the more people get sucked in.
What do you actually think about the technology at the heart of all of this, which is artificial intelligence? Do you think it's overblown? Or do you think it is gonna have
gonna change everything. The one of the spectacular things about it though is how there's no consensus. So I've seen many times where the the the super experts and the academics think one thing and the players on the ground think another. But this is a situation where the Nobel Prize winners at the top disagree violently.
The experts at the corporate level disagree violently. The oper the people in the company disagree violently. There is absolutely no agreement on whether AI is going to make us all so rich we can sit on the beach and never do another Day's work.
¶ Should AI Have A Maternal Instinct?
It will wipe us out accidentally or on purpose, because it's a much higher level intelligence one day. And when was there ever a case where a higher intelligence was I uh the one example is mothers to babies.
Yeah, I heard um I had one of my former guests say this to me.
Yeah.
Jeffrey Henson. Yeah.
That's how I I came across you and
Oh really yeah. F it was so fascinating to me and I I followed his work and thoughts thereafter and I realised that he now cites this example of mothers and babies being the only example. I don't know, for me it still doesn't hold well. Because at the end of the day, some mothers aren't that n and fathers aren't that nice to their babies sometimes. There is a maternal instinct, but have we are we building a maternal instinct into AI?
That's what we should do, Jeffrey Hendron would say. And others. The ones who are most concerned about the risk are not a good thing. say our one hope if we mean to keep going ferociously forward in terms of the science, our one hope would be to build in very carefully a benevolent attitude. it would not seem to be impossible. But you should make sure you can do that before you push ahead. We are just pushing ahead, and that is going to be extremely risky, isn't it?
I don't see how it can't be
I don't see how it can't be. unless you make it programmed completely to be benevolent. Hm. I wouldn't have thought that was impossible. It might take a lot of extra research. It might require a slowdown at the rate of progress.
Do you know what's I find um curious about that idea is We're now gonna get into the realm of what does benevolent mean? And and that feels like a risky business because what's benevolent to you and your I don't know, your religious beliefs or where you come from might not be benevolent to someone else.
That's right. You have to get them. To accept a form of benevolence which means uh like the old uh robot laws of Asimov. They can never do anything that they could construe as hurtful to humans.
And the definition of the word benevolence is the core desire to do good for others. It is the disposition to be kind, charitable, and focused on promoting well being of the people around you. It's interesting'cause one of the the new AI models called Clawed.
um, has clearly been told to be benevolent. And there's this sort of online backlash taking place at the moment because even my Claude, when I speak to it sometimes late at night, it will say things to me like, That's enough, Stephen, go to bed.
And sometimes it gets the t the time wrong'cause I'm in my the time on my computer might be off or something,'cause I'm in a different time zone or something. And it'll be like ten AM in the morning and it's telling me to go to bed, that's enough now. And it's actually getting quite judgmental. as in like it's imposing its idea of what is good or bad on me.
So if I say to it I said to it the other day, Hey, could you r um redo this for me and rewrite that and it went, I'm I'm absolutely not gonna rewrite that. I said, What do you mean? It says, Well, I'm not gonna change the data on that. That would that wouldn't be good. I'm not it's my data. I've literally just made this this data for this presentation I'm doing. It w it refused to change data for me.
And how fast that has changed from, say, even a year ago.
Honestly, three months ago it wasn't doing
I I had one where they made a joke. I I'd been going on about uh toxicity and sperm count reduction and so on. He he started to misbehave and I said, Well, you know, what's going on here? What is the in the end we discussed what's the difference between machines and uh Between AI and humans. And finally he said, and at least I'm not lying in bed at night worrying about my declining sperm count.
Now that has to be a joke, doesn't it? It's all that or it's teasing. The point is it's so sophisticated, so quickly. Uh and of course Jeffrey Hinton says they are thinking machines.
Last night, so again I had a problem with Claude because it was it was it started to kind of be my mu my mother and it started to impose on me what it thinks is right and wrong. And so I said to her, I said, Okay Um, actually forget that. This has changed, this has changed, this has changed, this is no longer true. And I wasn't telling the truth. I was just trying to get it to stop being so telling me what to do. And it goes, I don't think you're telling the truth.
Because I don't know if this is true. Wow. We've gotten to this point where where the unintended consequence of trying to give it morals
¶ What Happens If AI Lacks Benevolence?
means that now it's becoming judgmental and it's kind of like restricting your ability to think how you want to in a way because it's telling you what good thinking and bad thinking is. It's gonna tell you what good actions and bad actions are. And actually what will happen is any model that does that will be a losing model and I'll go to somewhere else.
I'll go to a different I'll go to Grok or I'll go to ChatGPT or I'll go to Gemini. And then that model will lose. So one would say that they'll have to remove those restrictions to be able to compete.
Well, if you were right, and I hope you're not What you're saying is you can't build in benevolent behavior, which means that it will sooner or later, perhaps by accident, do something that is cripplingly dangerous to humans. The old paper clip, cliche. It'll make paperclips out of everything, every metal it finds and destroy the planet in the process.
Explain that for people that have never heard the paperclip idea.
These intelligences involved in machines are literal to a degree we might find difficult to get our brains around. And therefore someone has said I'd like you to make as many paper clips as you can.
To an AI, for example.
A sloppily, open-ended, bad definition. But then the machine, which by then has the means to do it. starts to make paper clips and it keeps on going and it needs metal and so it runs out of easily available metal. It starts to collect metal that is not easily available, rips it out of your high rise building, whatever.
And really it's saying that the unintended consequences of a simple, good meaning instruction can sometimes cause catastrophe that you didn't expect. Yeah. And this is the h this is the balance now when you're dealing with intelligence.
¶ The Battle Between The Magnificent 7
Is there's so much subjectivity to good, bad, wrong, right, um and so many unintended consequences that For me you go all you need is Stretch time and the probability of something bad happening is almost inevitable. Yeah. Over a longer, longer time horizon, twenty, thirty, forty years. Of well-meaning people that couldn't spot the unintended concept I mean, social media is a good example.
I mean I question basically the well meaning bit, they're now trying to maximize their profits and their growth and their appeal over the competition. And that actually maybe one should talk about that. The The Mag Seven and Associated AI companies. Looking forward versus looking backwards.
For the Mag Seven is the Seven market leaders. I'll put up this uh pie chart. Of the mag seven.
And there's perhaps another fifteen or twenty rapidly rising substantial AI corporations.
So when you say Mac seven you mean Alphabet which owns Google, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon. Yeah.
Yeah. Well that will do nicely. And if you look backwards, what you what you find is that these seven each dominated a nice piece of business. They had close to monopolies, and they had it on a global basis. Tesla had a jump start, on the electric vehicles, Apple of course on the smartphone, Microsoft on the original great coup of how to run your software on a computer. And then you look forward.
Meta social networking, Google search.
Right.
Yeah.
And then you look forward, and you could not imagine a more different world. They're all girding for battle in the same marketplace, AI. They're beating their chest and saying, My two hundred billion capex this year in a single year is bigger than your one hundred and five. Everybody is pouring enormous cash flows. And they're now beginning to borrow on top of that into the AI battle.
SpaceX, ninety percent of its theoretical value is AI, even though their particular AI model is, it would seem having its bottom kicked by two or three of the others. But looking forward, it looks like seven people in the ring. Right, there'll only be one survivor, they think. Everything goes to the one who gets there first. What a difference this was to seven well behaved separate monopolies. Could it possibly be more different?
They made bundles of money on their monopolies. Now they have no monopoly. There are seven potentially sharp elbowed players determined to fight out with each other until they win.
And who do you think will win?
Ah, I don't know That would be that would be good to know.
Because SpaceX seemed to be aiming more at the infrastructure of um data centers now, data centers in space. Lots of people saying that the the m the the best way to run a data center, which is the hardware that powers AI is gonna be from spec And so m maybe they're sh gonna try and find their own lane within AI and they're gonna get away from try trying to build a frontier model like a ChatGPT or a Gemini or a Claude.
¶ Ads
And well I mean let's see what happens. And maybe Apple will just say, fuck it, we're good at hardware, so we'll license the model off someone else and we won't try and build a frontier model or get involved in chips or data centers. We're just gonna focus on the hardware.
One or two of them, and perhaps it's a pretty smart strategy, will try and opt out of that struggle. Because it it it's going to be obviously brutal.
Much of the reason most people haven't posted content or built their personal brand is because it's hard and it's time consuming and we're all very, very busy. And if you've never posted something before There's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post. What people will think of you. Am I doing this right? Is the thing I'm saying absolutely stupid? All of these result in paralysis, which means you don't post and your feed goes bare. I'm an investor in a company called
Stan store, which you've probably heard me talk about. And what they've been building is this new tool called Stanley that uses AI, looks at your feed, looks at your tone of voice, looks at your history, looks at your best performing posts, and tells you what you should post, makes those posts for you. You can also just use it for inspiration and sometimes what we need when we're thinking about doing a post for our social media channels
is inspiration. Building an audience has fundamentally changed my life and I think it could change yours too. So I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think. All you have to do is search coach.stan dot store now to get started. For every founder, there comes a point in building a company where your job shifts.
From being the person inside your business, actioning everything, to the person responsible for absolutely everything. The only way I've been able to make this shift across the different companies and teams I'm responsible for is by knowing that the right systems are in place to manage everything. Systems that don't need me in order for them to work. Our sponsor PipeDrive is one of those systems, an easy to use system.
intelligent CRM tool for growing sales teams. My teams use it and have for the last decade, because it's genuinely the most effective way to run a sales operation. Through one dashboard you get every deal visible and every stage of the sales process is clear. And what needs to happen next is all there in real time. When a system like this works, you don't need to be in every conversation to know exactly if your business is moving forward.
¶ Which Jobs AI Will Replace First
where and what the blockers are. Over a hundred thousand companies are already running their sales on it. So if you'd like to join them, sign up at pipedrive.com slash CEO where you'll get an exclusive thirty day free trial instead of the usual fourteen days. No credit card is needed. That's pipedrive.com slash CEO.
So coming back to this point of the the social societal effect of AI generally, robotics is exploding at the same time. We're seeing for the first time over these humanoid robots which now have intelligence because of AI becoming very, very good.
There was a video the other day of a company called Figure AI where they showed a ro humanoid robot on a production line sorting packages against a human and the humanoid robot did it I think I'm think I'm gonna get this wrong, but it was in the region of seven or eight days it stood there and sorted packages and they live streamed it next to a human being doing it. Now the human had to sleep and had to go to the toilet.
So the the humanoid robot won. And the job was very simple. The packages come down, you just have to pick the package up, turn it over, get it the right way round so the barcode's facing down and put it back down. That is powered now because we have AI. Um I said it this a couple of episodes ago, but my friend runs this big accelerator for entrepreneurs in San Francisco. And when I went there a couple of years ago it was all software startups.
I went there um recently and it was hardware startups, the whole building. And I said, Why why why is everyone doing robotics? He said, Well, we've always had the machinery, that's sort of like joints and arms and s and the the the hardware. We n the the intelligence
was expensive. Now we have both and it costs pennies. So there's this boom in robotics. I say all this to ask the question. In a world where we have superintelligence and we have robots, There must be, surely, significant job disruption.
Very likely that there will be significant job disruption. You know, w one of the scary things about SpaceX is you should wish that it not work out. Because if it became a bargain, rather like uh Tesla long ago became a bargain, it will mean that we have done centers from space, beaming down power for chips and so on. The population
¶ Will SpaceX Eventually Fail?
of chip users has expanded that robots are everywhere. Their energy demand is massive beyond belief. And uh the world is a very, very dangerous place. I'd much prefer them to fail and the ideas to move much more slowly, to buy time for humans to work these things out. So uh and I think that's much more likely.
You think SpaceX will fail?
I think um it will fail to deliver anything like its promises in the prospectus. Yes, absolutely.
I'm an investor in SpaceX, so she'll probably declare that.
You should. And and and good luck.
I invested quite early, quite well, relatively early. Um so we've had quite a good outcome. Uh I n I th there wasn't an AI thesis when I invested. It was Starlink.
Yeah, no Stalin great idea by the way, makes money. But uh this is not Starlink. Maybe I'd be an investor too if it was Starlink.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was a hundred billion dollars roughly in that region when I invested. So it's what, it rose up to three trillion today? Not a bad investment, he said.
Yeah. But it doesn't really count until you've cashed it in.
I think yeah, I think we're locked out.
In another podcast I was comparing the purchase of my Tesla six years ago with the price of Tesla stock. And I wrote it up in my quarterly letter uh to the clients that uh A I'd bought a Tesla and B I thought Tesla was overpriced. And fast forward, Tesla stock went up ten times over the life of my car, which still hasn't been incidentally into the garage once.
It's a great car
Uh I imagine though, but but people who really hate futsing around with cars. That component that they don't have to go to the garage is so underestimated until you enjoy it.
Never bet against Elon then.
So then the story becomes From where we were ten years ago, he couldn't get there. It wasn't profitable enough. It couldn't grow as fast as it should. There was no way. And he broke the rules the following way. He's so good that At BS, I that's a technical term, that he took the stock up to four or five times what it what it was worth on paper. Then he sold lots of stock at five times what it was worth. Use the money to build a gigafactory.
And then instead of the sale of stock crushing it, he kept on talking up the game. The stock kind of hung in, and then went up again. five times what it was worth, sold another big slug, etcetera, et cetera. So the only reason he did well was because of the combination of incredible confidence inspiring in potential stockholders.
It became a self fulfilling prophecy. It wasn't worth that, but he persuaded other people that it was. The stock went up, he cashed it in, he built factories, the stock went up, he cashed it in, he built more factories, and there we were. It went up ten times. Now The scale of SpaceX requires them to do the same again.
And the timing of the market cycle, the timing of confidence would have to be the same. He hit in the last six years a wonderful bull market. He will not in SpaceX do that. SpaceX is such a fabulous BS story mining asteroids. huge, incredible success of AI. It's the classic description of a market peak. It's what you look for at the top of a terrific bubble.
I've got a Tesla. Um I've seen the that massive rocket, the starship, be tr caught with those chopsticks.
Everyone has seen it. It's the defining feature of technology, isn't it? It's magnificent moments.
When I
That's worth half the price of space and
I think that's why I invested when I saw it there. But but also I've seen with neuraling, I've seen people that are paraplegic controlling computers. Uh my Tesla drives itself for hours and hours and hours without me touching the pedals or the steering wheel because it can see the road and navigate itself. To his credit, as an innovator, he has created magic.
So when you say about mining asteroids, if if they if they had told me we would have reusable rust rockets that you could catch on chopsticks, I would have gone B air. There's no way.
There is nothing in the laws of physics.
That's why
It says you can't do that.
That's what he says about the asteroids. And that's what he says about everything. He goes i if it's within the laws of physics, then it's possible.
Going to Mars is not within the laws of physics, really. It's a one-way ticket to Mars for starters. When you're on Mars, humans do a couple of things really quickly. Their heart adjusts to the fact that it's one fifth of the Gravity, your heart loses its muscle power. And your bones lose their internal strength. if you come down, your heart will fail, and all your bones will crack.
But you could be in an insulated environment, no?
First of all you'd have to go under underground. to avoid the incredible incoming rays that will otherwise give you cancer in a few weeks. So dig a deep hole and then you need a gravitational spinning machine. Shades of 2001 or whatever it was called, and that maintains your gravitational impact, and you have to build it underground. You have to protect yourself against cosmic rays and against the gravitational difference. Listen, we have not been able to build A sustainable system in a dome
Ever.
They all fail. Why would you not, let's say, guys, let's build a sustainable dome where you grow food, you put in people, you put in creatures and insects.
¶ Should You Invest In SpaceX?
And you show you can do it. Mean we're destroying the damn planet, and yet we think we can go to another infinitely more hostile planet than this one.
¶ The Most Valuable Skill For The Future
I do agree with you on that. I do agree with us. I think we should focus on our planet first and foremost.
And that's the really bad news embedded in your stuff. It's really suggesting fantasy and long term objectives at the very time when our own planet is under threat.
Would you ever invest in SpaceX?
Yeah, of course if it came down.
Where I invested.
Ten cents on the dollar, yeah. Am I five cents?
Okay. You've got th three children? Yes. Three children. Uh they're they're all, you know, older than me now, I believe. I'm thirty three years old, so they're all
They're all older than you.
They're all older than me. But when they were you know, if they were young now and they came to you and they said, Dad, listen, I heard about all this AI stuff and I'm about to go off to university and train myself, what what skills should I be thinking about for the future ahead?
My take is I'd like them as they are to be involved in climate change work. Be an engineer. Do something really useful that will come in handy if things start to unravel.
¶ Is Society Declining And What Comes Next?
Well, Magical skills.
Pra what are practical skills?
Well, our second son um is practicing growing various crops. And has a a small farm, you could say. So he's trying to get to know how you would deal with chickens, how you would deal with pigs, how you would deal with mushrooms.
Why why does that matter, do you think, based on the future that you're forecasting?
I think there's quite a good chance, said that uh the level of complexity of our civilization will start to
To unravel.
L lose the plot at the ends is the first thing that would go. I'll tell you a good sign. How long does it take to get your ambulance? Yeah. It's now an hour and a half.
Really?
Exactly what you would expect as people begin to lose the plot a bit. They fray at the edges. People can't buy houses. People don't feel they can do as well as their parents. People are basically disgruntled. They want to vote against the party in power. You know the the recent move to Trump was less than the average move of the last seven European elections.
And it didn't matter whether they were right wing conservatives, kick the rascals out. Left wing French, kick them out. And why do you want to kick'em out? Because you don't think things are going well, you're not feeling really happy. You're disappointed.
Why?
Why? Obviously the government's doing a bad job. I think that's the reflay.
What what are the government doing wrong?
It may be that it's not the government doing anything wrong, it's just that the environment is becoming tougher.
Yeah. The richer getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.
I think that's the biggest economic problem. I mean the US now has a Gini ratio like which is a measure of how unequal your society is, um, which is up there with Brazil and Mexico that used to be A joke. And now the US is up there. Since about nineteen seventy five, all of the wealth worth talking about has gone to the top ten percent and a lot of that to the top point oh one. Before that, by the way, from nineteen thirty five, from F D R to nineteen seventy five, so that's forty years.
¶ What History Says About Wealth Inequality
We had a w wonderful period of growth. We had gains of over three and a half percent a year. But the nice thing was that the poorest quarter made a little bit more than average, let's say four percent. And the richest quarter made a little less, let's say three percent. And everybody got richer. Everyone was happy. And then from seventy five onwards, basically the average hour worked in America has barely gotten more adjusted for inflation than it did in nineteen seventy five.
The richest one percent of Americans control thirty one percent of the nation's entire wealth, and by contrast the bottom fifty percent of the entire population shares just two point five percent of the wealth. The richest ten US billionaires saw their wealth surge by Five hundred and twenty six percent adjusted for inflation between twenty twenty and twenty twenty five.
Between nineteen eighty-nine and the mid twenty twenties, the financial gain of a single household at the top one percent threshold was nine hundred and eighty-seven times larger than the gain of a household in the bottom twenty per cent.
Forget that in a sense, the bottom twenty percent is tragic, but the guy in the middle, the fiftieth percent. He is unhappy also. And when your average guy is unhappy because he's not doing very well, You know you have a problem, you know.
What is that problem, this inequality we're seeing across the Western world? What does history tell us happens next?
similarly unequal society back in the so called Gilded Age of the eighteen eighties and nineties and so on. We got lucky in a in an ugly way. We ran into World War One. which was catastrophically expensive, killed off a huge fraction of the officer class. And then we went into the uh Great Depression. Then we went into World War two. We came out as a very equal society by historical standards.
Obviously i in the wartime you pull together and the social contract, the feeling that you owe something to the rest of society, was much stronger than it is today.
I was doing some research and it said when wealth inequality peaks to the extremes that we currently see in the US and the UK, history shows that the system inevitably resets. According to historical macro studies, Peaceful policy changes almost never fix extreme inequality. Historically, a wealth peak is broken by one of three violent or catastrophic triggers.
¶ Should The Rich Pay More Tax?
Number one, total civil collapse and state failure. Number two, mass mobilization warfare, or number three, total revolution. Yeah.
And that's why I'm not sure. Number two was lucky. In the end, It's better to have a war and have everyone pull their weight and and and work together. Then it is the other. You the civil wars are the worst of all kinds.
What do you think is likely to happen? It can't just keep becoming more une unequal.
No it can't. So it it needs a government. that is prepared to pull up Bernie Sanders to say, yeah, we're going to have to, at least in a gentle and long term way the the tax structure in favor uh of of a slightly steeper curve.
So you mean taxation needs to go up? We need to tax the rich.
And help. It's pretty simple. And and you have a kind of steepness in every society. That's what they do. Ever every every developed country in the world taxes the rich and helps the poor, don't they? It's a question of degree. We did much more helping the poor. and taxing the rich in the nineteen fifties and sixties and forties than we do today. And somewhere between that level and the current level might be more than enough. If we just started
¶ How To Build Wealth In Your 30s Today
to adopt the policy of nineteen thirty five to seventy five, where the bottom quarter get a half percent a year richer than the average, and the top dogs get half a percent less each year than the average. That sounds pretty unthreatening. I think we would ease our way over several decades uh into a better place.
You are thirty three now, my age. And you were trying to accumulate wealth.
I wish I was. Yeah.
What would you give to be thirty three?
I there's nothing I can give.
No, but it would you I I find this funny I heard someone ask a question like this the other day. They were they said like would you give Your your entire available net worth to be thirty-three?
Yeah, I think everyone says yes. I mean, how did one get a net worth by by work and luck and Creativity, all those good things.
If you were thirty three now in this moment in time and your objective was and this is a bit of a crass objective, but I'm gonna uh you know it sounds like it's a very one dimensional objective, but if your objective was just to become rich now at thirty three, what strategy would you deploy? Again, I'm gonna take away your contact. I'm even gonna take quite everything you know. So you'd have to go on the journey of acquiring new information. What would you do?
I think the simple appeal would be to get your tail into AI and and try and be a leader. Try and know more about everything in that area than the next guy. Join a leading firm and uh and go for broke. You may end up encouraging the destruction of the human species. But Yeah.
here there is you want to make sure you're riding a wave that's coming into shore and you're on the forefront of that incoming wave. Like we saw with the tech bubble. We saw, you know, we're now seeing with the AI bubble. So it's really about Acquire the most valuable information.
¶ How To Invest Your Salary Wisely
Yes. And take lots of risk. Don't be conservative, said
And work hard.
and work hard and think outside the box. I mean I think the the biggest deficiency uh most people is that they feel constrained uh to play the game by the regular rules. And to believe that uh experts And authorities know what they're doing. And and that j as you know, probably, it just ain't so.
What if I'm trying to invest? So say that I've got a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars and I want to invest it somewhere that's gonna not lose me money through all of these cycles of, you know, boom and bust.
'Cause I I'm I'm in tr you know, I I have a lot of people message me and ask me about investing because I interview lots of people about investing. I have my own investment fund as well. Um but w what advice do you give for the average person that's looking to invest their salary or their wages?
by a broad based index of uh non US equities.
Non US That's really surprising.
For um like sixty percent of your money and then five or ten percent in precious metals and uh If if it's convenient and sensible, hold hold a bit of real estate. And the rest I'd put in uh bonds.
Okay, so five or ten percent in things like silver and gold. Yeah. A preference for either silver or gold? Um S P five hundred. No, you said non US.
On you.
This is so interesting because everybody says invest in US.
Stocks. Of course they do. They've been completely dominant for twenty years. Completely kicking ass around the rest of the world. And then In the last twelve months, emerging markets is up sixty five percent now. The S P has done much better than I would have guessed, but it's only twenty five. That's a lot less than sixty five.
And I guess the strategy is quite important here as well, which is you're saying to hold these for a long time. Try not to buy and sell them.
And and try and look at where the cycle has been, and I can tell you, and you can see it for yourself. There has been an enormous cycle in favor of the S P, in favor of the American market, over the rest of the world. And do you think America is going to keep on gaining on the rest of the world? And of course you're going to say yes now because that's
That's the flavor of this market. We think that what is good today will continue being good indefinitely, even though history tells you that is absolutely not the case.
We live in a world that tends to rotate from one to the other. We believe in a world that extrapolates today's conditions. And you can easily prove that. The stock market is not efficient. The stock market extrapolates today's conditions. If they are terrible, In nineteen eighty two, they will take crushed earnings and multiply it by seven times earnings.
¶ Should You Own Crypto?
And then in two thousand, peak profit margins times thirty five times earnings. They double count in the worst way. When times are good, you multiply it by a lot. That's another way of saying you extrapolate it into the distant future.
You assume it's gonna continue.
And Keynes, of course, my hero, says, Of course that's Extrapolation is the convention you adopt even though you know from personal experience that the world is not that way.
You didn't use the word crypto when you were talking about investment strategies. How much crypto do you own? No. Have you ever earned any crypto?
No.
Will you ever own any crypto? No. Will you ever advise anyone to buy crypto?
No. I think it's uh An unnecessary Piece of uh Nonsense. It facilitates nothing except criminals moving money.
¶ Will Bitcoin Eventually Go To Zero?
So they can't be saved. It's not a store of value since it bounces around all over the place, just down from one hundred and twenty to sixty. Because it felt like it. So it's not stable, it's volatile as hell. It's not used conveniently as a medium of exchange. You can't go into a shop and use it easily.
¶ Is Property Still A Good Investment?
It does one thing very, very well. It's a means of speculating beautifully.
Do you think Bitcoin's gonna go to zero?
Well, in the distant future, yes, it will certainly go to zero, but it may take a long time. And and, you know, in the distant future everything goes to zero. So
What about property as an investment? Because the the first sort of reaction most people have when they have enough money to make an investment or to buy something is they buy a property as an investment asset. So people go buy themselves a house, they'll move into it. We're kinda told that that's how you start to accumulate wealth is you go buy yourself a house. What do you think of that?
It's hard to imagine how it could be a good decision, but when uh there's such an increasing fraction of people who can't afford it. And there is political resistance in it.
Doesn't that just mean that the if you know, if I buy one now and increasingly people can't afford one, doesn't that mean that my m my house is gonna be worth more in ten years' time? Oh it
People can't afford it, there's no one bidding.
¶ Ads
And by the way, the population is going to decline. Young family formations are already declining in many of the richer countries. And if you have family formations declining and you have super expensive houses, what do you think is going to happen? Now, you could say, well, perhaps there will be a mysterious increase in family formation. And that the chronic baby bust that we maybe will talk about soon, um, will stop.
Xin chào mọi người, chào mừng các bạn Autospeak Vietnamese But this show can because of AI video technology from our sponsor, Hey Gen. I get messages every single week from those of you listening to the Dire of a CO all around the world and you express how much impact it's had on you and your life. And if that's true, then those conversations shouldn't only reach people in English. KGen can take one recording of me and deliver it in any language while keeping my voice, timing and expressions.
intact. But you don't need a studio like this to make it work for you. Record fifteen seconds of yourself and get an AI avatar that delivers studio quality video in over 175 languages. We're up to 20 languages now and we're not And we're not the only ones using it. Hey Jan is already used by thirty million people, including eighty-five percent of the Fortune one hundred. Whether you're building an audience on social media, launching an online course, or rolling out training across your team,
Check out Heygen now. Your first three videos are totally free at heygen.com slash D O A C. That's H-E-Y-G-E-N dot com slash D O A C. See ya. This is something that I've made for you. I realize that the Direver CO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish.
And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kinda like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps. And we call this in our team the one percent. And actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here.
So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have. is we've made these 1% diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have
¶ What's Really Causing The Baby Bust?
a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind. and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. Let's talk about the chronic baby bust.
I've been hearing a lot in the news. I think there were some articles that actually came out this week in the New York Times that talked about the decline in f fertility rate. And how young couples like me, I'm in a you know, I'm uh I'm engaged to a young woman who uh and me a her me and her are trying to have a child now.
Um it's not not always a straight line to having a child. I think you kind of sold the idea that it is that you just have sex without a condom and then a baby appears. But um lots of young families and lots of my friends who are trying to have kids have gone for a couple of years trying and struggling to con to conceive. So much so that after doing this podcast, I started telling some of my friends, I actually think it's a good idea to start freezing your eggs, embryos, sperm.
Because if it is gonna get increasingly harder, then there might need to be um medical interventions, IVF, um, et cetera. For me and my friends. If we are if we you know, if we wanna have families. But the the problem is as well, at like thirty three years old, um, if you look at the data, you're not at your peak necessarily in terms of fertility. You're somewhere cup coming down the slope. And so you're kind of fighting time a little bit, it feels like.
And I think my partner feels the same way that we wish we were told a little bit earlier about family planning. And then I hear that about this f these fertility issues that apparently are being caused by toxins. And the sort of chemicals in our environment. You have spent a long time thinking, writing, talking about this. Yes. I guess the first question is why? Why is a guy that's known for managing billions and billions and billions or hundreds of billions of dollars talking about fertility?
And this sort of baby bust.
Wow.
Starting.
Twenty seven years ago with the foundation, we uh were committed to start thinking about everything to do with the climate. And and you're moving in the right circle then, because the next thing is we started to worry about the c cataclysmic decline in insects. I don't know if you're aware of this, but insects appear to have dropped in biomass the weight of the flying insects by fifty to seventy five percent and In the last sixty, seventy years.
And E. O. Wilson, the famous ant man, he believed that you know nature could handle the loss of humans easily, effortlessly, but it could not handle the loss of of insects. That insects are in in the sense he felt and and his fellow experts he represented them as thinking the same way, that they insects are the bedrock of nature.
And if they start to go out of business, then the birds who feed on on them and the amphibians they start to decline, which they have done also catastrophically. One thing leads to another and the Beetles are no longer uh recycling the forest floor and eventually things won't grow and No one to uh
fertilize the plants and the damage spreads. And he felt that eventually loss of insects would lead to a more or less complete failure of nature and and we would inherit a planet that was no longer conducive to humans. We noticed that some of the same effects are felt uh by humans. And uh a report came out Shawn Aswan and Hagai Levine, I think it finished in twenty eleven, and uh it made the case.
that uh sperm count had been dropping had almost halved since the first reports, academic reports in nineteen seventy.
¶ When Could Sperm Counts Reach Zero?
So I immediately said, this has the feeling of something that is really important. We got to study the data and the results came out suggesting that the decline rate was accelerated. The decline rate this year is two and a half percent a year. You don't have to be mathematically that literate to realize that a two and a half percent decline in your sperm count every year is a disastrous level, a non sustainable level, right?
How long is that gonna take for the sp my sper to basically not work?
As far as we can tell, our best guess is That in hunter gatherer days we had one hundred and eighty million units per milliliter of sperm. And when the academics came in in nineteen seventy, uh it was down to about a hundred. And today it's thirty five. Okay? Also the quality and the mo motility, they call it, had also declined. Somewhat similarly. It turns out, luckily for us, that we were over engineered at I like to say, like a great Victorian bridge.
Nature doesn't take any risks and and uh you have more than you need. And it it appears, again, a good guess, is about forty five million units. is what you need to be able to get pregnant without any difficulty. And that was hit about fifteen to twenty years ago The number of young couples who needed help fifteen or twenty years ago was nil, basically. And for this reason, that none of them had a a chronic lack of sperm cap, in round numbers.
And now, The World Health says it's about seventeen percent. Okay? Seventeen percent of young couples could use some help today. It which means that instead of, you know, just trying for a week or two or three or four or five or six, you're trying for months and months. And uh everybody knows people now who fall in that category, which is exactly what you would expect if you've gone from zero to seventeen percent.
But this is the killer. Sean Aswan and my colleague and I kind of thought about this thing separately and independently and we We worked out, doesn't take a great brain, that in twenty to twenty five years the average young couple will need help. I mean, this is tomorrow. You know, this is not two hundred years from now. In twenty to twenty five years, the average young couple will need help getting pregnant.
The medium male sperm count is on track to hit zero by twenty forty five.
Wow. Yeah.
That is um that means the median couple is not gonna have children without a lot of help.
¶ How Microplastics Affect Fertility
It means half the male population will have zero viable sperm and the remaining half will be right on the edge of functional infertility.
A few of them will still have plenty, and maybe ten percent who are really perfectly uh in decent condition. Because there's a huge distribution range today. You know, there is there are people today who still have two hundred million, you know, better than the hunter gatherers. But it's uh
And what is causing this, and how do we stop it?
Shauna would say uh the environment around you uh of of mainly plastic. Plastics are leaching uh toxins and the particles of plastics you have in your brain and in your body, which we now know as quite substantial, are also leaching toxins. And these toxins are what they call endocrine disruptors. They mess with your ho hormone. you should expect them to lower your fertility. And yet, the people who specialize in fertility problems and write books about it, none of them mention toxicity.
They mentioned the hundred perfectly solid reasons why people are choosing And to have fewer children, too.
Endocrine disrupting chemicals like phthalates.
Which is the same thing.
Which are found in cosmetics, shampoos, food packaging, etcetera They actively lower testosterone production in male fetuses during the first trimester, permanently stunting reproductive reproductive capacity before birth. EPAs, which are um what they call bit biphosphalates.
Something like that.
Used to make plastics, hard, line tin cans and coat thermal store receipts. Um they are synthetic estrogens. They flood the male body with female hormone signals crashing sperm counter motility. PFAs, for other chemicals used in nonstick pans, Teflons, waterproof rain jackets, and stain resistant carpets.
They break down in nature, accumulate in human blood, and are directly linked to lower sperm volume. And then the microplastics you talked about, the Trozen Trojan Trojan horse, one of the shocking things that I read was that it's been discovered that they are physically embedded in human placenters.
Yes. Isn't that amazing?
breast milk and human testicles and there was a major study I think we all heard about in two thousand twenty four that found microplastics in one hundred percent of human testicular tissues tested.
¶ How Pesticides Impact Fertility
Hundred percent. And lastly, biological stresses. So me and you being sat down on these chairs. Heats our testicles to a point where the sperms die, heated car seats, hot laptops, they actively cook the sperm. And lastly, obesity.
Yes. And of course smoking you some somehow slipped through the net. Yeah. But um there is a whole other branch, pesticides on your food. Now if you'll give me time, I'll tell you about these two little studies. They're very small and you might ignore them except they were done by Harvard and Mass General, which is candidate for the best hospital in America. and uh they had a clinic for people having problem getting pregnant.
And uh they they ran it out of that. They had a hundred and eighty men. And they got them to self report on what they were eating. Were they eating the dirty dozen? Were they eating melons and bananas that have lots of protection? At the end of uh six months. The the guys who reported to eat the least bad Versus the quarter that at the worst the
There was a doubling of sperm count, can you believe it? At the top category, the more fruit and veggies you eat, the better your sperm count. In the bottom quartile, the more they ate, the worse their sperm count. It was a dramatic result, but two to one between the top and the bottom. And then two years later they did a very similar study with women who were having trouble.
And at the end of their nine months of self reporting, the ones who ate at least badly had sixty eight percent successful live births, bearing in mind this was a fertility clinic, and the bottom quartile thirty eight percent. So n once again, nearly double. I mean and and it's life and death. I mean, these are really important. And this was only based on what they had.
Because pesticides are full of these toxins and they are delivered straight into your body. You eat the damn things. It's not just they're on the surface you can wash some of that away, but they're impregnated part of the structure of the berries.
Barry's
Apples pies peaches. And funny, um spinach uh are really bad and at the top end the bananas and the oranges. and the melons are are fine. So if you eat these damn things, they're designed to kill our cousins, the insects and and the weeds And the funguses, why would you expect them not to do a terrible job on humans? And we stuff them in our system. And the fetus, it turns out, is a hundred to a thousand times more vulnerable than we are out in the out in the world.
For example, if your mother smokes It's going to do about the same damage as if you smoked for the rest of your life.
Wow.
And you think about what the fetus is plugged into the system, and how it's forming everything, it doesn't seem the most unreasonable thing that it would be much more sensitive. And there are people out there Fussing quite reasonably about the first thousand days of life. But actually that is nothing like as important. As the two hundred and seventy days in the womb.
At Trezine. Atrazine. Um, referred to as the chemical castrator. It is the second most widely used herbicide in the United States, sprayed heavily on things like corn and sugar canes. And there was this crazy study which was peer reviewed out of UC Berkeley that showed exposure to atrazine at levels below the EPAs considered safe for drinking. um levels completely chemically castrated male frog.
turning ten percent of them into fully functional females capable of laying eggs. In humans it is linked to severe drops in sperm motility and testosterone.
And yet we avoid the topic of the same. It's pessimistic. We're not fighting the data.
We just don't want to talk about it.
We don't want to talk about it. We don't want to talk about bear markets. We don't want to talk about bad climate changes, even though it's bludgeoning us. This year could be the worst hot year in history.
We are set up
Because of the accident of the El Nino, to have perhaps the worst droughts and the hottest weather ever recorded. Starting about now. So brace yourselves. But we don't want to talk about that. We don't want to talk about toxicity. We don't want to talk about running out of resources. Uh we just don't do bad news. But I have never seen anything like this.
This fertility thing, where the data is horrific, the baby bust is measurable, the sperm count is one of the few things you can really measure. Do they really think if you have declining sperm count? The future is great.
¶ How To Reduce Toxic Chemical Exposure
Do they really think that the economy will function if the number of twenty year olds entering the market starts to drop like a stone? In Japan, you know what their twenty year old is? It's fifty percent of what it was in nineteen forty eight.
Well, yeah.
Fifty percent, not down fifteen or three point five, fifty percent less.
Fifty percent less twenty year olds.
twenty year olds that drive the market, that offer themselves for military service.
W what do we do about this?
We have two things. We've got to detoxify the world, which is intellectually easy. You ban poisonous chemicals. And we've made in the EU pretty good start. My favorite example and everybody's favorite example is cosmetics. Cosmetics you don't actually eat it but you rub it on your skin, which is the second worst thing to do. And there are ten thousand chemicals in cosmetics.
And the EU has banned fifteen hundred. If they ban the right fifteen hundred, that could be three quarters of the battle, right? Canada's banned five hundred and fifty, and the US has banned twelve. I am not kidding you. So the good thing about toxicity is it is regional. If one country, if Denmark or the EU or the UK wants to look after its chemicals, they will live longer and have better health. If the US wants to put their corporations first,
¶ Why US Products Are More Toxic
They will have shorter lives. Do you know the life expectancy difference between the US and Sweden has gone from two years to six years in the last seventy years? I wrote in my quarterly letter my estate would be willing to bet you that in fifty years it'll be eight or ten.
I don't quite think people in the United States realize the difference in the products they consume here versus other parts of the world. And you know
Absolutely no.
Brits fly over here. And actually we had my my barber, my my barber Damon, and he flew over here to give me a haircut last week. He said, Oh gosh, I don't feel good. He said, I went and got some food. Here, I really just don't feel good. It's and he says, Every time I come over here I don't feel good And me and my team we used to fly over here before I moved here for a couple of weeks a year to film this show. And whenever we'd fly back, not only would I be much fatter.
Um but we'd all feel a little bit more like sluggish is the way I describe it from eating the food here. And it almost felt quite clear that there's like something in the food that our bodies just isn't used to in the UK. And when you look at the toxicity of the United States versus Europe, it's quite clear. I mean, the US currently permits the use of eighty five agricultural pesticides that are completely banned.
in the EU, China, and Brazil, the US sprays over three hundred million pounds per year of pesticides that are deemed too dangerous to be legally used in Europe, including that one I said about the frogs called atrazine, and
That's what you're saying.
Which the EU banned over two decades ago. If we look at cosmetics, which you were talking about then, what you put on your skin obviously goes into your bloodstream. And so the EU has banned or heavily restricted Over one thousand three hundred chemicals in cosmetics and personal care products due to toxicity and hormone disruption, the US and the FDA has banned eleven. In terms of food, the US allows potassium bromate, which is a known carcinogen used to make fluffy dough bread.
And BHA um slash BHT which are preservatives linked to hormone disruption, both are strictly banned from human consumption in the UK and EU and Canada and China. And the lastly, the US um allows titanium dioxide used to make candy smell like Skittles bright white. And synthetic dyes like Red forty, which requires strict warning labels or outright bans in Europe due to DNA damage in neurodevelopmental issues in kids.
I'll give you one more. A recent US geological survey found that at least forty five percent of all US tap water is contaminated with PFAs, those forever chemicals we talked about earlier, the very chemicals directly linked to crashing sperm counts. and testicular cancer. The US has historically allowed PFA's levels in drinking water drastically higher than the U EU, the United um the European Union considers safe.
Let us just say that the EU is forever giving exemptions and extensions and is far from perfect and has a lot of corporate pushback. And uh it's just much less bad than the US.
And the US has worse life expectancy.
It does, and it's the only rich country in the world where fifteen years ago they had the same life expectancy as they have today.
One um actionable piece of advice for anyone listening that might find this all quite um overwhelming'cause, you know, lots of things around us from receipts to the the pans we use to ro rain jackets contain these chemicals. Is there are apps out there where you can scan the chemicals and the foods that you're buying to check if they contain these endocrine disrupting, these hormone disrupting chemicals. I'm not affiliated with any of them.
But there's one called Yuka, Y-U-K-A, that I know is very easy for sort of everyday scanning of products. You can just scan the barcode and it'll tell you it'll give it a rating score out of a hundred. There's EWG's Healthy Living.
Um app, which is the scientific gold standard, run by the environmental working group, a major toxic chemical watchdog. You can scan barcodes or search for food, cleaning supplies or cosmetics. There's Think Dirty as well, which is great for cosmetic shampoos and skincare. It exposes the toxic truth hiding in beauty products. And then there's Clear Yah, which is Clear Yah. Best for online shopping. It's an app in your web browser. And instead of scanning barcodes in your house,
While you're shopping online, so if you add a say like a shampoo or a lotion to your Amazon or Target or Walmart basket, it automatically pops up with an alert telling you about the ingredients list that is within those chemicals. But but I think that gives something a little bit actionable and arms you with
¶ How To Stay Healthy In A Toxic World
At least a tool to navigate this crazy environment. And obviously AI is great at this as well. You can take pictures of things and ask it questions.
And what we really need is a kind of green Amazon where everything is guaranteed food, bed clothes, everything. And that would be very handy indeed. Someone you could trust that would absolutely guarantee the whole line of products that you would order. Not i impossible and I think done well in someone could make money at it.
What w advice would you give to your kids on a personal level if they're trying to stay healthy in a toxic world?
Simple advice and I know you like this is pregnant women are much more important than anybody else in this field. If you could persuade pregnant women, A, to have no cosmetics, save a lot of money, no cosmetics for nine months, and then B invest some of that money from your cosmetics or all of it in buying organic berries if you have to have berries, apples, oranges, peaches, what they call the dirty dozen here. If you did that, I think as much as half of all the trouble disappeared.
And that's a huge fraction and it's easily acquired. You know, uh uh a addressing the hundred things around in your environment, you have to get to that. Typically if you're lucky you do one thing after another. You get the gas stove first, which is really noxious, and then you work your way the black plastics, the Teflon frying pan, you work your way around it. Compare to that No cosmetics, no bad uh fruit.
Or make it organic. That's a piece of cake. That is easy. It will save you a huge amount that you will never appreciate because you'll never know how much better your children are than they would have been. But it's not only your children, by the way, but For women, you know, you're talking about in particular because of the eggs. They are every egg is all there in the womb.
And then it goes on to your grandchildren, we thought. At least we could prove two generations and and and a recent study suggests it might be many more generations than two. So you get some of these chemicals impregnated in your system and your children pay the price and your grandchildren and perhaps even Quite a few generations after that.
I also think it would be great if um Western governments around the world made the costs of both childcare um but also fertility treatment Significantly lower.
And they will, of course.
C you know, I had a couple of conversations on this podcast with um very successful women, including Rhonda Rousey, who was in tears because she was on a I think her s her fifth or sixth round of IVF treatments and she just found out just before she walked into the studio that it it hadn't gone well. And watching her cry uh about it and get very emotional meant that that that day I walked out of this room and like called a lot of the people in my life that I know are
you know, in the region where fertility starts to decline and really encourage them to start thinking, if they if that's what they want in their lives, about family planning, which is like getting your eggs frozen or your embryos frozen. And me and my partner actually went and did it. We got our embryos frozen, which was a you know, it's a it's not it's it's both expensive, extremely expensive, um, especially here in the United States.
Psychologically destructive. Brutal.
You know, we you know, me every day for couple of weeks injecting her with with this this these chemicals and the the hormonal roller coaster that she had to deal with and all of that. But for us The alternative was worse.
Which was never being able to have children because it's difficult and there's all these toxins in our environment and and so on and so forth. And so I then became a little bit of a I guess a bit of a bit preachy within my within the peop the people in my life that I love a lot. about family planning, because we kind of all thought we could just think about it later. We're all kind of thirty five and we thought, yeah, we'll think about that later.
Um, but it turns out not to be the case for many people.
If you'll allow me to go back, you asked a an important question. What do we have to do? And I said we have to detoxify the system and then we both got off into this frenzy of of attacking chemicals. Uh which we should. Anyway, but it's intellectually easy. Ban the suckers, okay? Now, putting pressure on the corporations to back off so the governments can do it. would be a good idea. Not easy. Corporations have enormous power, unprecedented power in the US.
But but very substantial power in the U in the EU and the UK also. But we have to get them to back off. We have to start banning these damn things. Otherwise, no children. But secondly, and much more difficult. is we have to detoxify capitalism. We have to slowly but surely turn our capitalist societal norms into much more family friendly, children friendly. Over the next several generations,
We have to end up with a society that realizes that two point one healthy, well-educated children is a part of the commons. You may not have any children.
What do you mean by that, sorry, two point one? A couple.
per couple. If you have less than two point one per couple, You fairly rapidly go out of business. If you have more than two point one, you fairly rapidly end up with so many people you're standing on each each other's shoulders. The commons are things like common land in the old days.
the y anyone could put their sheep on, and what tended to happen is everyone put more sheep than they could stand and they pretty soon it was had no grass on it, known as the tragedy of the commons. And We all need Клина! Fertile soil, and 2.1 Healthy, well-educated children. Without any of those, society fails. All of them have to be treated as group responsibility. So the whole society, the whole village
has to be in a way like a kibbutz eventually. You have to put everything behind making it doable to have children because the long list of economic and social reasons
¶ The Most Important Thing We Missed
as well as toxic reasons why people can't have two point one children, is getting so long and so dangerous. And nothing yet has worked. I mean they've tried, you tell me, two hundred different things around the world. several percentage points of GDP in one or two cases. And uh nothing yet has seem seen a permanent uptick in in baby production.
For the average person listening right now, Dave who drives a taxi, or Jenny, who works as a receptionist, or um Clive, who is a nurse. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it pertains to their life today?
I think they have to brace themselves for tougher times ahead than they would have expected. And they're beginning to get the point. Life for the last ten or twenty years has been tougher than than they perhaps expected as children, or or than other people expected for them. Part of that is politics, part of that is equality, but the net effect to them is times are tougher. It is more difficult to buy a house or afford to rent. And and jobs are getting scarcer, it's likely to uh get worse.
What does brace yourself mean for them? Because brace yourself sounds like But does it mean that
Plan your life as if times will not be easy. You know, do not build up a little reserve of of cash. Of course my advice to other people is and and get yourself a useful job, something that will in a larger sense pull your weight in society.
¶ Should You Move Countries Right Now?
Up skill, change skills, learn something.
Mechanical. Fixing, repairing, and Engineering.
Yeah.
And research, science in general.
Make friends?
¶ The Flaw That Destroys Societies
Make friends, make sure you live in in in a a tight society if you can. Very difficult today, obviously. Would you
You be thinking about the country you live in at this moment in time.
Absolutely.
Really? Is there any countries you wouldn't live in? If you were Dave or Jenny.
I I think I have to refuse to answer this on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.
Um Oh okay. So you're saying don't live in the United States?
Well, I have American children and grandchildren.
Why not the United States?
It holds out too much chance that the social contract is is uh dissolving. You know, the thing about Japan and my joking rule twenty one in investing is never extrapolate from the Japanese. They are extremely different in every way. But one of the ways they're different is they have this amazing social contract. The thing that really upsets a Japanese is if they're put in a position where they can't act in a socially responsible way.
When you say social contract, what does that mean? It means that
means an agreement that I will behave in a way that helps my neighbours and the society, that I'm doing what people expect me to do. I'm not going to misbehave.
And you think that's not the case here in the United States?
I think the case here is that people are doing what they think is best for them and their family and screw everybody else, really. When I arrived in America, corporations had this sense that they owed something to the community they operated in, the city they operated in. They they'd build the stadium, they'd do this, they'd they'd be part of the community. Now they're not they're all In a way cold blooded profit maximizing international enterprises.
And why is that a bad place to live?'Cause you're saying, you know, you probably wouldn't recommend Dave or Jenny living in the United States. Why would that be a bad place for them to be? What happens? What's the what's the downstream impact of that?
That your neighbours aren't as interested in you and your well being.
Fine.
And that's a lonely place to be. And when you're in trouble, you're in
Serious trouble.
Uh because the safety net here is very ineffective. There's a a measure that I think is probably the single most important measure of civilization, and that is m maternal mortality. How many people die in Java? You know, in Nigeria out of a hundred thousand, it's four hundred and eighty. Give or tell. And uh in America in in the black population it's uh forty four. In the whole population, it's like twenty one or twenty.
Curiously, in the American Asian population it's thirteen. And then you go down the list. In in Britain it's five. In Germany as false. In Sweden it's two point one. In Norway it's zero. There were no mothers who died last year or the year before. What better definition of civilization than looking after the mothers giving birth? How is it possible? More or less the richest in the world. It's not just that they're the worst in the rich world.
They are fifty percent worse than the next worst. Fifty percent more mothers die here than in the second worst country in the developed world. How is that possible? The answer is it happens.
¶ The Best Places To Live Today
And um it's because the inequality is so extreme in the medical system that if you don't have lots of money you're quite likely to die in childbirth. No of course the numbers are not huge. Twenty out of a hundred thousand is not uh but it's but it's a terrible contrast.
It's a a sign of something. It's a sign of something else.
It's a sign of the social combat.
So where's a good place to live then, if not here?
Uh even uh France, Germany. The UK has a little bit of the American disease, but Not nearly as much?
So if your kids came to you and said, Dad, we're thinking of uh leaving the United States, should I move? Should I should I move out of the United States?
No, I I would say that's a perfectly reasonable thing to consider. And uh where are you going and why and what's your
I think it'd be into Denmark, Dad.
If they'll have you. Uh No, uh in the things that really matter, life expectancy, hell. Safety nets, uh murder rates, uh mortality rates. In everything that really matters, yes, th that day and night better.
¶ What Would You Do If Failure Was Impossible?
In the things that don't really matter but look really splashy, we have enormous quantities of uh wealth created that go to a relatively small fraction of the people. And that dazzles in terms of the average because Um, that's how the numbers work. If you look at how well off the bottom quartile are, America doesn't score well at all.
Jeremy, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is if you could not fail, what would your next goal be that you would set for yourself?
Th there was a book written in the nineteen sixties called Silent Spring. Carl Carlson, I think her name was. And it changed for quite a number of years. It It did what books never do really. it uh became a p political monster and everyone studied it and it had an effect. It changed the game. I would uh like to write something about uh Toxicity and and social contract, really.
particularly nurturing a family. We we've got to find, in the end, a community that encourages children. The downside of the brutally efficient capitalist system that we have it's focus on Financial achievement and so on. And very little emphasis on community and child rearing and so on. If we don't, we we fail as a society pretty quickly. We have to detoxify, we have to encourage
To create an environment where people want to have children. If I could write a book that would be would would pull a silent spring, I would sit down tomorrow and start it.
The making of a parma.
The perma should be in inverted commas, really.
The perils of long-term investing in a short term world. By Jeremy Grantham and Edward Chancellor. Who is this book for?
people who have a interest in the stock market, it has a little bit of climate change and toxicity. My my co writer is a professional and he tried to limit me quite sensibly, feeling that our main market was investors who would be turned off by too much of the stuff we've been talking about.
And you cover things also, like economics, value investing, being a bear and predicting a bubble and what to do about all of those things. But it's really a useful counterintuitive not counterintuitive, but it's a It's a frame of thinking that will help you be more realistic, especially when psychology is prone to take over and make you wildly, recklessly optimistic.
And be more confident in your judgment. Big big companies cannot advise you. It's just suicidal for their business. So you are on your own. Look at the data. A bubble is not hard to see. There is this kind of plane and then there is a Himalayan peak. Which eventually goes back.
And I mean that's exactly what we're seeing.
That's exactly what history looks like. Have the courage to look at that, make your own conclusion, get out of the dangerous most dangerous part, and and do it now. Don't wait for help because no help is coming. Large enterprises almost never get the big turning points because they can't take the career risk involved. And every big corporation needs a leader who has political skill.
And the and the central political skill in life turns out to be never be wrong on your own. This is again Keynes. You know, you can be wrong in company, you can jump off the cliff together, you will never lose your job because of that. But if you do anything on your own, sooner or later you will get it wrong, and quote, you will not receive much mercy.
Jeremy, thank you so much. Thank you for all that you do. Um you traverse so many subjects. It's it's absolutely fascinating and you you've made me think about so many things. I've actually written down a bunch of ideas. You saw me taking some photos then. Those are actually ideas that I wanna remember.
That's what I do. Screenshot City.
Yeah. So I took I just write things down you were saying and then I was like, I need to remember that later for a bunch of things. Businesses, friends, family, et cetera. Um I think that's a testament to how broad and curious and wise you are.
Going back to question one or two, the billionaire bit. Uh sometime around the end of this year we will actually have written checks for billion dollars. to the climate change world.
It's it's a wonderful thing. And there's you know, in this m particular moment in time because of the politics, climate change is a subject that's falling off the radar. It is. Uh it's m uh being mentioned less in earnings calls.
This year will be so disgustingly hot from now on, I suspect.
Disgustingly hot.
Hot. We could have from now on the hottest twelve months from now to this time next year that we have ever had in history. Here, there, and everywhere.
Well, I'm glad we've got voices like yours um lending their ideas and wisdom to these conversations and it's been an honour and a privilege to speak to you. Your book, The Making of the Palma Bear, I'm gonna link it below, um, for everyone to buy it themselves. Jeremy, thank you.
🎵 Music
Jag startade årnåt 2013 och vi tillverkar cykelkläder. Det bästa med Shopify för mig är att vi kan driva verksamheten trots att vi i princip inte har någon teknisk bakgrund. Vi kan enkelt hantera allt från admin till serverdel, frontend och sälja varor online. Om Shopify vore ett cykel tillbehör, tror jag att det faktiskt skulle vara själva cykeln. Det är det man gör saken på. Vi driver vår verksamhet på Shopify. Börja din kostnadsfria provperiod på Shopify.