Final Thoughts on Toxicity and Climate

I've had many leading experts on this show, including Matthew Walker, and they've all said the same thing about sleep. They've said it's the biggest positive investment you can make in your own performance. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you're consistently tired, poor decision making will follow and eventually cause other things to fail in your life. So if you're looking to optimize your recovery, you should start looking at what you're sleeping on Our sponsor, Helix, makes high quality mattresses tailored to your body. It doesn't matter if you run hot, sleep on your side, or need something firm. Helix has a mattress for you. And I asked them recently to send one to a member of my team, and Juan received it. And we travel a lot. So when he's home, quality sleep really matters. And he told me he's getting the best sleep of his life. and the data backs it up with eighty two percent of people in a Helix study saying they saw an increase in their deep sleep. And with a one hundred and twenty night trial, you've got four months to prove it to yourself. You can get twenty seven percent off at helixsleep. com slash diary. That's Hixleep. com slash diary. What advice do you give for the average person that's looking to invest their salary or their wages? Don't U st. That's a simple strategy that you can act on. What about SMP five hundred? No. Really? Yeah. And if you have a big position in US technology stock, my personal advice would be to sell them all. But I'm an investor in SpaceX. Good luck. SpaceX is such a fabulous DS story, and we can go into that. Crypto? No. Wh? It's an unnecessary piece of nonsense That facilitates nothing except criminals moving money, that they can't be seen. Do you think Bitcoin's going to go to zero? Yes, it will certainly go to zero. So how many years have you spent investing? sixixty years. And what's the most amount of money you've ever managed of other people's money? one hundred sixty five million 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 over invvested. But this is the problem Eventually, they b. 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 b. And now we're in the biggest investment bubble that arguably has ever occurred. They are 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 savings, what kind of strategy should they be adopting when an economy starts to get bad and there's an economic bubble collapse? So I will go through everything, but you will not receive this advice from investment advisers because theyll lose a lot of business 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, donon't live in the United States. I've just moved here. Why not the United States I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. 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, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. but also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you listing to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so so much Jeremy Grantth Your firm managed up to one hundred sixty five billion dollars at its peak, what we call AUM assets under management. So you know a lot about money, you know a lot about investing How'd you sort of self define your expertise because you traverse so many different subjects through your works. if I said to you You, how do you introduce yourself professionally What is the answer I can't think I ever do introduce myself definitely 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 We've discovered over decades that humans are incredibly short term oriented And they have an enormous predisposition to optimism They're looking for optimistic news in everything. They're looking to avoid andpleleasantness The idea that you can have steady compound growth is ridiculous. One of my few heroes, Kenneth Bolding, an economist He said the only people who think you can have compound growth on a finite planet. a madmen and economist which is so accurate Economists simply believe you can have growth always and everything comes down to Pice 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 an area where there is rife optimism on one side of things But there's also a lot of money plowing into the market, which is 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 R up there with the railroads. It's one of the defining great ideas of the last couple hundred years It's going to change everything And that is critical. if you mean to have a bubble People think that a bubble is 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 over invvested. And even though the railroads were a spectacularly powerful idea the railroads collapsed at stocks and everybody lost a ton of goough. The same with the internet And then out of the wreckage, the railroads changed the world and and the internet changed the world Well we have to remember Is that In ninety nine, Amazon went up six hundred 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 that's how it works. The greater the idea The more obvious the idea The more money goes in The bigger the bubble and the bigger the busust Howre we on the verge of a collapse with AI? When I say verge, I mean over the coming years If you look at the data It would be compatible with history 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 Baceics defines as its addressable market quarter of the global GDP No It talks about endless opportunities, mining asteroids. It will be in fifty years, people and one 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 cannot at this time be revealed. I want to 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 gives you credibility and authority to speak to this. What have you done with your life Well, I got into the invvestment business in nineteen sixty eight There were very few serious people In the investment business There were no mathematical models the wor kind of relatively fail 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 Cbro Price introduced the idea of growth stocks A few of us introduced the idea of value stocks And a few years later at my first firm Battery Marjery really introduced the idea of smo Sall cat. They hadn't existed before then 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 Sid you invent the index fund? There are two or three of us separately. I don't think we knew of each other How many years have you spent investing sixty approximately. sixty. And what's the most amount of money you've ever managed for other people in a calendar year Yes, one hundred sixty five billion I had it Two partners, Mayo and Van Ottolo And when the smoke cleared, you know, I'd made a lot of money over a billion dollars Personally, personersonally And how much and paid tax on all of it? Oh good. And And how much money does your firm still manage today of other people's money manages eighty five billion eighty five billion So are you a billionaire I'm generally Referred to as a billionaire 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 Oh really? Yeah. to which foundation? It's called the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the environment We invest a lot of our princial in green tech to help combat climate change eighty seven years old And I'm mayy seven years old You give a ninety percent of your money away to Your own foundation that's focused on green tech. Yeah, maybe in ninety five Yeah w. o 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 The stocks go up. And then if you look at the graph that's in front of you there which shows the history of asset bubbles, eventually there's a big And you're saying that we're The collapse is on the horizon And what does that mean for the average person? What's going to happen What's going to happen is high flyers will probably come down a lot H flyers The stompsst that I've gone out the most AI and The more exciting stocks for the biggest moves. Historically would be expected to come down the most from these unprecedented levels a seventy percent decline would not be Unneexpected. So a seventy percent decline in the stock price? Yeah And you have to remember the tech bubble The NASDEC, which is an index of the Grth 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 seem 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 et cetera, et cetera. Little things you put on your belt, play music. they were all Japanese. And for a second, Japan sold for more than the US in ' eighty nine. And it got to sixty five times earnings, which means for every dollar of earnings, you have sixty five dollars of market value. And the U.S 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 twentywenty years. twenty years They talk about the last decade, but when you look at it closely, it looks more like a last 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 money in the stock market A small fraction of that, two or three percent Band And in reverse goes back. When 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 last for several years. then of course there are many other factors that go into that But it started with the crash in the market which was in the end down about eighty percent I'm not. And then the next one was called the Nifty fififty 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 Just about the worst since the Depression So for the average person, what kind of strategy should they be adopting? If you're not someone that has a huge amount of savings, say you're working for one of these big big companies 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 What does the B diversified mean It means wholesome Bonds, wholesome cash Perhaps a smaller amount of precious metals. L gold and silver. Yeah And what is a bond? and how do I buy one? Yeah, a bond is a loan carries 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 credit worthiness of The other side is there. So if it's the U.S. government, you'll assume it's pretty creditwthy you buy a bond from the US government. It's how the U.S government Fers a part of its activities. You can buy a thirty year U.S. government bond, a ten year bond, a two year bond a ninety day. treasury bill, they call them when they get down short Everything goes fine. You receive modest amount of money You're five percent or your three percent depending on the conditions Okay, so a bond is basically lending the government money. 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 can go to the government website, or it says I was just reading here 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 a treasury, bills, notes, bonds and series one savings bonds. You pay exactly face value with no commommissions or fees and the investment is backed by the full faith of the U.S 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 apps, you navigate to fixed income section on your account and you can See what bonds are being offered and you can lend the money What you're doing actually, they have distributed it to the market And you're acquiring it from one of the existing owners. You're not actually giving them incremental money 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 hundred and seven And you pay that and it transfers from one owner to you. There have been times in nineteen seventy four. when you you could get a bond that would pay eightcent nine, ten percent. A ye Yes, per year. So if I buy a US government tenure Treasury bond esssentially lending the US government money. I can do four point four six percent a year A'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 one thousand dollars in, I'll make four hundred seventy five Dollars Yeah over ten years Interesting I never really knew how bo bonds work. So you're saying Marketss collapsing, diversify, get some money into bonds, get someoney, keep some money in cash. And anything else in terms of diversified portfolio property Property is fine except It's pretty d expxpensive by historical standards. They've engineered a situation where house prices tend to rise It' greatreat for the people who have a house and terrible people who would like to buy a house Back in ' ninety four in England typical house. so 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, It rose from three point four times to over ten times, depending on where you live and a 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 thirtyot. They didn't, you know, traditionally they tradeed flat or down sixty, seventy to eighty years until nineteen ninety four in the UK. But since then House prices have ridden Everywhere. So are you expecting house prices to come down sharply? I think I heard you say that they might come down thirty percent evenven if they come down thirty percent. They're really still very expensive funding That would be 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 Diversify. I've got reduce your position there is probably going to be a bit of a job disruption as well Particularly if you have to own stocks, own them outside America. Don't own. US stars. As a nice simple strategy that you can act on. Why They're much cheaper And since the beginning of last year, they have handsomely outperformed the US. Foreign 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 X US or emerging markets. and Invest outside of America I'm sure they'll muddle through OK over the next ten or twenty years. And I am not confident that the US will do that. You're not confident in which part the U I'm not confident that US equities will be intact in five years, ten years So US a US equity is a US stock. Yes. 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 period from two thousand to twenty 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 in two thousand. So you think it's going to be m 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 are you saying What I'm saying is it's quite typical to 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 responsibility and watch your tale Now, let me just say, you will not receive The advice from investment addvisers. get your tail out of the markcket 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 scis of the world have never said to you Get out of the market. that's overpriced. neverever So they went through the crash of twenty nine, they 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 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' about to collapse because if they did, their clients 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 going to 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 understand these economic bubbles and cycles, they themselves are adopting a different strategy with their own money But at the same time, they're probably going to 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 bubble so called The run up to the top I got into a lot of debates W the bulls. I would say it's horribly overprzed and they would It was a bull Bull is someone who is extremely optimistic about the stock market and a Bear, someone who is pessimistic or careful about them mind There were twelve hundred people in the audience and it was the annual bash of the Society of Analysts. And I asked before my turn at 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 O. If the market, which is currently thirty one times earnings was to go back to a more normal seventeen times Would it guarantee a major bear market if it happens anytime in the next ten years A major down marker. Yes. 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 more normal average was closer fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. And I used seventeen If it went down to seventeen anytime 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 second question, of course, was, and do you think it will happen 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 all the Goldman Sachs and the Morgan Stanleys and the JP Morgananss, 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 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 c 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 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 them. 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 two and a quarter y becausecause you were honest with the people about what was coming Well, through their eyes, we were wrong. We said, watchatch out. The market is overpriced. It will end badly It went up. therefore, we were wrong, therefore shoot us People think you get shot for underperforming in a bear market. And that is not really the case. In a bear market, everyone freezes. rigam mortis. They wait until the market is bottomed out, thenen 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 relelatively early stage tech startup This tech startup has raised a lot of money. It's an AI tech startup It's raised I'm going to say about three hundred million dollars profitable yet But it's raised a lot of money. So it's living off investor capital right now He said to me, Stephven I think there's a collapse coming. So I'm going to go raise as much money as I possibly can right now becausecause I think when this collapse comes, businesses like mine are going to be unable to raise capital and therefore I will go out and I'll kind of like a bit of a vulture. I'll go out and pick up and buy up all these people. Good lad, good advice. Good advice. I think. 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 can lock up money I would. If you can build bit of conservatism in in other ways, do it Brace yourself for impending problems, which is a pretty good principle anytime but is a principle of normal today So for founders entrepreneurs who are the sun is shining right now But it's time to start acting as if a storm is coming. Yes And the time horizon on that is hard to forecast. It could be weeks, months, years. Stock markocket hinges on career risk. Kynes was the great champ He's a famous economist. of the nineteen thirties and forties. And he wrote a famous book called The General Theory Unlike the idea that the market sufficient, he knew it wasn't He knew it was a behavioral jungle and that it would be given to bubbles And when you say efficient, you mean logical and course too. The efficient market idea is that Every company, every stock, The underlying company 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 summer of all of that stream of earnings into the future is the stock price. And that, of course, is complete nonsense What it is is the stock price is psychology The stock price is what you think the other guy will pay. stock is going up tends to suck in buyers And that's called momentum. It's moving up, it attracts buyers. and every now and then, When the economy is favorable and money is obtainable you tend to get these bubbles. And they play on themselves 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 What do you think it is going to have? It's going to 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 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 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 Dayayss work H It will wipe us out accidentally or on purpose becausecause it's a much higher level intelligence one day And when was there ever a case where a higher intelligence was benevolent in a sustainable way to a lower intelligence The one example is mothers to babies. Yeah, I had um I had one of my former guests say this to me Jeffreyon. Jeffre Hson yeah. That's how I came across you I really Ied to follow your podcast was because that was such a brilliant podcast It was so fascinating to me. and I followed his work and thoughts thereafter and I realized that he now cites this example of mothers and babies being an example. I don't know for me it still doesn't hold well because At the end of the day, some mothers aren' and fathers aren't that nice to their babies sometimes. There is a maternal instinct But have are we building a maternal instinct into AI? That's what we should do, Jeffrey Henon would say and others the ones who are most concerned about the risks say are 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 benevolent attitude It would not seem to be impossible But you should make sure you can do that before you push ahead. We arere just pushing ahead and that is going to be extremely risky, isn't it? Well, 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 I wouldn't have thought that was impossible. It might take a lot of extra research. It might require a slowdown the raid of progress Do you know what I findm curious about that idea is We're now going to get into the realm of what does benevolent mean 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 like the old robot laws of Aazimoth But 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 wellbe of the people around you. It's interesting because one of the new AI models called Claude has clearly been told to be benevolent And there's this sort of online backlash taking place at the moment because even my claud, when I speak to it sometimes late at night, it will say things to me like That's enough Steen go to bed I don't like w And sometimes it gets the time wrong because I'm in the time on my computer might be off or something, because 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 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 redo this for me and rewrite that? And it went I'm absolutely not going to rewrite that. I said, what you mean? It says, Well, I'm going to change the data on that. would that wouldn't be good I this' my dat. I'veiterally made this data for this presentation I'm doing. It refused to change data for me. And how fast that has changed from, say, even a year ago? Honestly, three months ago, it was I had one where they made a joke. I'd been going on about toxicity and sperm count reduction and so on. He started to misbehave. and I said,, you know, what's going on here? What is in the end we discussed what's the difference between machines and AI and humans. and finally he said And at least I'm not lying in bed at night worrying about my declining sperm cap Now that has to be a joke, doesn't it? It's or b that or it's teasing The pointint is it's sophisticated so quickly. And of course, Jeffrey Hinton says they are thinking machines. Last night. So again, I had a problem with Claude because was it started to kind of be my mother and it started to impose on me what it thinks is right and wrong And so I said to, I said, Okay. actuallyually, forget that this is changed, this is changed, this is changed. this is no longer trutue. 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 I goes I don't know if this is true. Wow. We've gotten to this point whereere the unintended consequence of trying to give it morals 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 going to 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 Grock or I'll go to ChatuBT, 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 whichich 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 paper cllips 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 that 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. Yes. A sloppily open ended Bad definition But then the machine 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 balance now when you're dealing with intelligence Is there so much subjectivity to good, bad, wrong, right 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 overver a longer time horizon, twenty, thirty forty years Well meaning people that couldn't spot the uninted I mean social media is a good example I mean, I question Basically the well meaning b They're now trying to maximize. their profits and their growth and their appeal over the competition actuallyually Maybe one should talk about that. the MAG seven and associated AI companies. lookingoo forward versus looking backwards So the Mag seven is the Seven market leaders, I'll put up this pie chart Lovely Of the Max seven And I've got another g. And there's perhaps another fifteen or twenty rapidly rising substantial AI Corporation. So when you say Mac seven, you mean alphabet, which owns Google. Navidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon. Yeah. Well that will do nicely And if you look backwards, what you find that these seven each dominated a nice piece of business. They had cllose to monopolies And they had it on a global basis Tesla had a jump start on the electric vehicles of course, on the smartphone Microsoft on the original Great Cu of how to run your software on a computer And then you look forward. Meta social networking, Google search, R. G video search. V video chips. 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 beating their chest and saying My two hundred billion Capates this year in a single year Bger 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 It's 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. Ruthless players. determined to fight out with each other until They win And who do you think will win I don't know That would be that would be good to know Because Spacech seem to be aiming more at the infrastructure of data centers now at data centers in space. Lots of people saying that the best way to run a data center, which is the hardware that powers AI is going to be from Bace And so maybe they're going to try and find their own lane within AI and they're going to get away from trying to build a frontier model like a trat GBT or a Gemini or Claud And I mean, let's see what happens. And maybe Apple will just say,, we're going 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 going focus on the hard work. One or two of them and perhaps pretty smart strategy will try and opt out of that struggle because 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 Stanstore, 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. 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Our sponsor of PipeDrive is one of those systems an easy to use intntelligence 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, 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 dot com slash CEO where you'll get an exclusive thirty day free trial instead of the usual fourteen days. No credit card is needed pipeedrive d. com slash CEO So coming back to this point of the social societal effect of AI generally Rotics is exploding at the same time. We're seeing for the first time ever 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 humanoid robot on a production line sorting packages against a human And the humanoid robot did it. I think I think I'm going to get this wrong, but it was in the region of seeven 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 humanoid robot won. And the job was very simple. The packages come down. you just have to pick your package up, turn it over, get it the right way aroundound, so the barcode's facing down and put it back down That is powered now because we have AI. I said it 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 recently and it was hardware startups, the whole building. I said, whyy is everyone doing robotics? He said, Well We've always had the machinery the sort of like joints and arms and the hardware 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 super intelligence And we have robots There must be Surely significant job disruption. Very likely that there will be significant job disruption You know, one of the scary things about SpaceX is You should wish that it not work out. Because if it became a bargain, Rather like Tesla long ago became a boggin. It will mean that we have done sent us from space. Beaming down power for chips and so on population Chip users has expanded that robots are everywhere The energy demand is massive beyond belief and the world is very, very dangerous place I' much prefer them to fail. The ideas is to move much more slowly by time for humans to work these things out. So And I think that's much more likely You think SpaceX will fail I think it will fail to deliver anything like its promises in the prospectus. Yes, absolutely I'm an investor in space, so should probably declare that. Yeah well, you should And good luck Ireressed quite early, qu well relatively early So we've had quite a good outcome. There wasn't an AI thesis when I invested. It was Starlink. Yeahalling a great idea, by the way, makes money This is not styling Maybe I'd be an invest to at one stock. 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. Yes, nice investment Not a bad investment, yeah. But it doesn't really count until you've cashed it in. Yeah, whichich I might do now Don't you have to wait six months? I think yeah, I think we're locked out. In another podcast, I was comparing the purchase of my Tesla six years ago the price of Tesla stock And I wrote it up in my ortly letter to the clients A I bard a Tesla and B Tesla was overprzed And fast forward, Tesla Scott 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, isn't it? I imagine though People who really hate flopsing around with cars. 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 They wasn't profitable enough. couldn't grow as fast as it should There was no way. And he broke the rules the following way He's so good BS That's a technical term that he toed the stock up Four or five times what it. what it was worth on paper Th then it saw lots of star F 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 spark kind of hung in. and then went up again five times what it was worth, sold another big slug, etca, etc So the only reason he did well was because of the combination of incredible Cidence inspiringing 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 Scale of sppaceX requires them to do the same again 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 Space that BaceX is such a fabulous Thees story mining asteroids Huge, incredible success of AI It's the classic description of a market peak is what you look for at the top of a terrific bubble I've got a Tesla Um I've seen that massive rocket, the Starship be caught with those chopsticks. Everyone has seen it. The defining feature of technology, isn't it It's magnificent moment When That's worth half the price of. I think that's why I invested O. But also I've seen with neuraling, I've seen people that are paraplegic controlling computers My Tesla drives itself 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 they had told me we would have reusable rockets that you could catch on chopsticks, I would have gone BS There's no way. You can't catchure like a seventy foot g. There's not in the laws of physics That's what says you can't that. That's what says about the asteroids And That's what he says about everything. He goes if it's within the laws of physics, 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 run Mars, humans do things really quickly Their heart adjust to the fact that there's one fifth of the. Your heart loses its muscle power And your bones lose their internal strength If you come down Your heart will fail and all your balance will crack But you could be in an insulate environment now First of all, you'd have to go underground to avoid The incredible incoming Rise that will otherwise give you cancer in a few weeks. So dig a deep hole And then you need a gravitational spinning machine chades of two thousand one or whatever it was called And that maintains your gravitational impact And you have to build it underground T Against cosmic rays and against the gravitational difference Listen, we have not been able to build a sustainable system in a dome 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 And you show you can do it Man we're destroing the damn planet And yet we think we can go to another infinitely more hostile planet than this one I do agree with you. I do agree with us. I think we should focus on our planet first and foreost That's the really bad news embedded in your stock. reallyally suggesting Fantasy and Long term objectives at the very time when our own planet is under threat. Would you ever invest in SpaceX Of course if it came down. to. where I invested Ten cents on the dollar, yeah. I might. five cents Okay. You've go Three children Three children. They're all, you know Older than me now, I believe. I'm thirty three years old, so they'es 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 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 If they said Dad, listen I don't Be an engineer, do something really useful that will come in handy if things start to unravel What will practical skills?r What are practical skills? Well, our second son . is practicing growing various crops and has a small farm, you could say. So he's trying to get to know how you would deeal with chickens, you deal with pigs How you would deal with mushrooms? Why does that matter, do you think based on the future that you're forecasting. I think there's quite a good chance that the level of complexity of our civilization will start to to unravel. Lose the plot at the ends is the first thing that would go Tell tell you a good sign How long does it take to get your ambulance? I' I don't In the UK, it was twelve and a half minutes. Yeah. It's now an hour and a half. Really h. That's exactly what you would expect as people begin to lose the plot a bit. They fray at the edges People come buy houses People don't feel They can do as well as their parents. Pllo Basically disgruntled They want to vote against the party in power You know the recent move Trump was less than the average move of the last seven European elections It didn't matter whether they were right wing conservatives, kick the rasicals out. leftft wing. French, kick them out And why do you want to kick them out? Because you don't think things are going well, you're not feeling Really happy It disappointed. Why Why, obviously the government's doing a bad job. I think that's the reflay. 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. As in the economic environment. The economic environment The ric are getting richer, the poor getting pre I think that's the biggest economic problem I mean, the US now has a jinny ratio like which is a measure of how unequal your society is 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 we're talking about has gone to the top ten percent and a lot of that to the top point zero one Before that, by the way, from nineteen thirty five from FDR. nineteen seventy five So that's forty years. We had 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 madeade a little bit more than average. Let's say four percent And the richest quarter made a little less, let's say three percent Everybody got ricer. Everyone was happy And then from seventy five onwards, basically the average hour worked in America 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 over a household in the bottom twenty percent Forget in a sense. The bottom twenty percent is tragic, but the guy in the middle fiftiet percent time He has Unhappy also And when your average guy is unhappy because he's not doing very well You know you have a problem What is that problem? this inequality we're seeing across the Western world What does history tell us happens next? or bad We had a Similarly unequal society back in the so called gilded age of the eighteen eighties and nineties and so on We got lucky in an ugly way. We ran into World War I which was catastrophically expensive, killed off huge fraction of the officer class And then we went into the Great Depression Then we went into World WarI We came out as a Very equal society by historical standards. Obviously in the wartime, you pull together and The social contract 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. Acording 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 Number one, total civil collapse and state failure. numberum two Mass mobilization warfare, or number three Total revolion And that's why T was lucky In the end betteret to have a war have everyone pull their weight and and work together And is the other. Civil wars are the worst of all kinds What do you think is likely to happen It can't just keep becoming more unequal. No, it can't. So it needs The government that is prepared to pull up Bernie Saunders to say Yeah, we're going to have to At least in a gentle and long term way Shift the tax structure. in favor 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 you have a kind of steepness in every society. That's what they do 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. tightening the ridge 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, to adopt policy of nineteen thirty five to seventy five, where the bottom quarter get a half percent a year. Richa than the average 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 into a better place. If you are thirty three now, my age And you were trying to accumulate wealth. Oh God, I wish I was thirty three. Do you? It' such an exciting time What would you give to me thirty three There's nothing I can get. No, but would I find this I heard someone ask a question like this the other day they they said like, would you give yourour entire available net worth to be thirty three Yeah, I think Everyone says Yes, I mean How did one get a net worth by I work and luck and creativity all as ood. If you are thirty three now in this moment in time and your objective was, and this is a bit of a crass objective, but I'm going to 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 going to take away your contacts I'm even gonna takeil everything you know So you'd have 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 try and be a leader trying to know more about Everything in that area than the next guy Join a leading firm and and go for broke. you may end up Encouraging the destruction of human species. but You asked a simple question and I give you what I think is a simple answer. And what I hear 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 It's really about Aquire the most valuable information? Yes and take lots of risk Don't be conservative. and work hard and work hard and think outside the box I mean, I think that the biggest deficiency most people is that they feel constrained playay the game by the. Regular rolls and to believe that experts and authorities know what they're doing And that as you know, probably, it just ain't so What if I'm trying to invest? So say that I've got thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars? And I want to invest it somewhere that's going to. not lose me money through all of these cycles of, you know, boom and bust Be I'med 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 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 non US equities Non US. That's really surprising For sixty percent of your money. And then five or ten percent in precious metedals and If it's convenient and sensible, hold a bit of real estate. The restant put in Okay, so five percent or ten percent in things like silver and gold. A preference for either silver or gold SMP five hundred No you said non US. Non US This is so interesting because everybody says invest in US 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 Yes and 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 to the buy and sell. 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 andP, 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 So 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 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 And then in two thousand, peak profit margins times, ooh, thirty five times that is Double count in the worst way timimes 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 going to continue. And Kainnes, 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're talking about investment strategies, how much crypto do you own? Have you ever ownned en cryptor? No Will you ever earn any crypto? No, Will you ever advise anyone to buy crypto? No I think it's the unnecessary Oh piece of Nonsense It facilitates nothing except criminals moving money they can't be seen 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 It does one thing Very, very well It's say means of speculating beautifully. Do you think Bitcoin's going go to zero? In the distant future, yes, it will certainly go to zero, but It may take a long time And you know, in the distant future, everything comes to zero. So What about property as an investment? Because 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 kind of told that's how you start to accumulate wealth as you go buy yourself a house What do you think of that It's hard to imagine how it could be a good decision when there's such an increasing fraction of people C can't afford And there is a political resistance here. Doesn't that just mean that if you, if I buy one now And increasingly people can't afford one. Doesn't that mean that my house is going to be worth more in ten years time. Oh, if people can't afford it, there's no one bidding. 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 it's going to happen you could say, well, perhaps there will be a mysterious increase in family formations And that the chronic baby bust that we maybe we'll talk about soon U We'll stop. Since I'm ungry Cham Mun Kakan I don't speak Vietnamese, but this show can because of AI videoide technology from our sponsor, HeiGen. I get messages every single week from those of you listening to the Dire ofver CEO 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. HeiGen 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 one hundred seventy five languages We're up to twenty languages now and we're not the only ones using it. HeyGen 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 dot com slash do. That's hEyg n dot com slash d d D AC. seeee you there This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that the Diire ofververs here 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 learnted is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of 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 one percent 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 colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diaries. We have 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 about the decline in fertility rates and how young couples like me are in a you know, I'm I'm engaged to a young woman who mean me and her are trying to have a child now. It's not not always a straight line having a child, I think you kind of sold the idea that it is that you just have sex with that condom and then a baby appears. but 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 conceive. So much so that after doing this podcast, I Ive started telling some of my friends, I actually think it's a good idea to start freezing your eggs, embryos, sperm becausecause if it is going to get increasingly harder, then there might need to be Medical Inventions, IVF etcetera. For me and my friends if we are if we, you know, if we want to have families. But the problem is as well, at like thirty three years old If you look at the data, you're not at your peak necessarily in terms of fertility, you're somewhere coming down the slope As a man but also as a woman And so you're kind of fighting time a little bit, it feels like. Yeah, you are. 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 about these fertility issues that apparently have been caused by toxins And the sort of chemicals in our environment You have spent a long time thinking, writing, talking about this. Y. I guess the first question is why? Wh 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 Well Scoting twenty seven years ago with the Foundation. we we werere committed to start thinking about everything to do with the climate. And you're moving in the right circle then because the next thing is we started to worry about the catacosmic decline 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 fiftycent to seventy five percent in the last sixty, seventy years And Io Wilson, the famous annt man, he believed that you know nature could handle the loss of humans easily, effortlessly But it could not handle the loss of insights The insects are in the sense he felt And his fellow experts, he represented them as thinking the same way that the insects are the bedrock of nature. And if they start to go out of business, then they Birds who feed 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 a recycling the forest floor and eventually things won't grow and No one to fertilized the plants and the damage spreads. and he felt that eventually Loss of insights would lead to a more less compte complete failure of nature. and and We would inherit a planet that was no longer conducive The humans We noticed that some of the same effects I felt by humans And a report came out Chana Swan and Hagi Levin. and get finished in twenty eleven And it made the case Sperm cow. been dropping I almost halved since the first reports, academic reports in nineteen seventy. 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 accelerating 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 point a half percent decline in your sperm count every year is a disastrous level, a non sustainable level, right? How long is that going to take for my sperm to basically not work? As far as we can tell Our best guess is But in Hunter Gatherer days we had one hundred eighty million units per milliliter of sperm And when the academics came in in nineteen seventy It was down to about one hundred And today it's thirty five Also the quality, and the motility they call it had also declined somewhat similarly It turns out, luckily for us that we were over engineered I like to say like a great Victorian bridge Nature It doesn't take any risks and you have more than you need. And 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 itit bout fifteen to twenty years ago The number of young couples who needed help fifteen or twenty years ago with no Basically And for this reason, that none of them had a chronic lack of spam cap and round numbers And now The Wor Health says it's about seventeen percent Okay, seventeen percent of young couples could use some help today. whichich means that instead of you know, just trying for a week or two a three or four or five or six You're trying for months and months and Everybody knows people now who fall in that category whichich is exactly what you would expect if you've gone from zero to seventeen percent But this is the killer. Sean is Swan And my colleague and I kind of thought about this thing separately and independently, and we We worked out doesn't take 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. Dr. Swan's projection indicates that if the current rate of decline continues unchecked, The medium male sperm count is on track to hit zero by twenty forty five That is so That means the median couple is not going to happen children without a lot of help 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 maybe ten percent who are really perfectly in decent conditions Because there's a huge distribution range today You know, there there are people today who still have two hundred million, you know, better than the hunter gatherers But it's And what is causing this? and how do we stop it Sano would say the environment around you of mainly plastics Plastics are leaching Toxins particles of plastics you have in your brain. in your body which we now know is quite substantial are also leeaching Toxins And these toxins are what they call endocrine disruptors. they mess with your hormones You should expect them to lower your fertility. And yet People who specialize infertility problems and write books about it. None of them mention toxicity They mentioned a hundred perfectly solid reasons why people are choosing to have fewer children Eocrine disrupting chemicals like phalates which egg valads, which are found in cosmetics, shampoos, food packaging, et cetera atively low testerone production in mallefeces during the first trimester, permanently stunting reproductive reproductive capacity before birth Yes. BPAs, which are What they call b bip phosopphylates. Yes, somethingomething like that. Used to make plastics hard, lin tin cans and coat thermal store receipts. They are synthetic estrogens. They flood the male body with female hormone signals, crashing sperm count immotility PFAs for other chemicals used in non stick 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, thero Trojan horse, one of the shocking things that I read was that it's been discovered that they are physically embedded in human placentas. Yes. Isn't that amazing? Breast milk and human testicles. And there was a major study I think we all heard about in twenty twenty four that found microplastics in one one hundred percent of human. icular tissues tested cent And lastly, biological stressors. So mean you being sat down on these chairs heats our testicles to a point where the sperms die, heated car seats, hot laptops. And lastly, obesity Yes And of course smoking you somehow slipp through the net. Yeah. But There is a whole other branch pesticides on your food If youll 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 a candidate for the Best hospital in America And they had a clinic for people having problem getting pregnant And they ran it out of that. They had one 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 Six months the guys who reported to eat the least bad versus the quarter that at the worst There was a doubling of sperm count. Can you believe it at the top category The more fruit and veggies you we, the better your sperm count in the bottom quartile, the more they e, the worse their sperm count was a dramatic result. two to one. between the top and the bottom And that 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 at at least badly had sixty eight percent successful live bursts, bearing in mind this person Ty clinic and the bottom quartile thirty eight ccent So once again, nearly double I mean, and it's life and death. I mean, these are really important. And this was only based on what they are becausecause pesticides are full of 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 berry. Berries Apples pies peaches And funnily spinach are really bad and at the top end the bananas and the oranges. and the melons are fine. So If you eat these damn things, they're designed to kill our cousins, the insects 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 in out in the world For example, if your mother smokes going to do about the same damage as if you smoke for the rest of your life And you think about what the feater says 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 actually That is nothing like as important Asby two hundred and seventy days in the womb Not Tzine Have you heard of acteses Atrazine referred to as the chemical castrator It is the second most widely used herbicide in the United States spreayed 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 and levels chemically castrated male frogs 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. We avoid the topic because it's 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 climate changes, even though it's bludgeoning us, this year could be the worst Hot ye. in history We are set up because of the accident of the Elmino to have perhaps the worst rroughts and the hardotest weather ever recorded, starting about now So rise 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. We just don't do bad news. But I have never seen anything like this This fertility thing Data is horrific Baby Bust is measurable Sperm count is one of the few things you can really measure What do they really think if you have declining sperm ca The future is great 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. this fifty percent, notot down fifteen or three point five, fifty percent less. fififty percent less twenty year olds twenty year olds that drive the market, that offer themselves military service. What do we do about this We have two things We've got to Detoxify the world whichich is intellectually easy. You ban pooisonous chemicals And we've made In the EU Pretty good stop 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. It's one country Denmark or the EU or the UK. wants to look after its chemicals, they will live longer and have better health if the U S. wants to put their corporations First who will have shorter lives. Do you know the life expectancy difference between the US 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 No, absolutely not. Brits fly over here. and actually we had my barber 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 and I really just don't feel good. He says everyvery time I come over here I don't feel good. And and my team used to fly over here before I moved here for a couple of weeks a year to film the show. And whenever we'd fly back not only would I'd be much fatter But we'd all feel a little bit more like sluggish is the way I'd describe it, fromr 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 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 U.S. 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 frog was called Arazine Arazine which the EU banned over two decades ago. 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 U.S. and the FDA has banned eleven. In terms of food, the US allows potassium bromate, which is a known carciogen, canc causing used to make fluffy dough bread. and BHA 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 lastly, the US 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 U.S 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 the US is historically allowed. PFAs levels in drinking water drastically higher than the EU, theited the European Union considers safe Let us just say that the EU is forever giving exemptions and extensions is far from perfect and has a lot of corporate pushbacks And it's just much less bad in the U.S. And the U.S. 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 actionable piece of advice for anyone listening that might find this all quite overwhelming because you know lots of things around us from receipts to the pans we use to range 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 Yca, Y UKA 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 square out of one hundred. There's EWG's Healthy Livving app, which is the scientific Gld standard, run by the Environmental Working Group, a major toxic chemical watchdog. You can scan barcodes or search for food, cleaning, supplies or cosmetics. They'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 ya, which is clear ya. 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, say, like a shampoo or relation to your Amazon or Target or warm up basket, it automatically pops up with an alert telling you about the ingredients list that is within those chemicals. But I think that gives something a little bit actionable and arms you with at least a tool to navigate this craz 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 impossible, and I think donewell and Sone could make money at it. What 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 Pgnant 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 P. And that's a huge fraction and it's easily acquired You know, 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 compared to that. No cosmatics No bad fruit or make it organic That is easy. It will save you 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. 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 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 even Quite a few generations after that I also think it would be great if Western governments around the world made the costs of B child carere but also Fertility treatments significantly lower And they will You know, I had a couple of conversations on this podcast with very successful women, including Rhonda Rousey, who was in tears because she was on a I think her fifth or sixth round of IVF treatments and she just found out just before she walked into the studio that it hadn't gone well and watching her cry about it and get very emotional, meant 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 that's what they want in their lives about family planning, which is like getting your eggs frozen or your embriases frozen. me and my partner actually went and did it. We G got our embryos frozen whichich was a, you know, it's not it's both expensive, extremely expensive. especially here in the United States and different and psychologically Butalructive Yeah brutal. Yeah know, we, you know, me every day for of weeks injecting her with these chemicals and 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 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' kind of thirty five and we thought, yeah, we'll think about that later But it turns out not to be the case for many people. If you'll allow me to go back, you asked 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 Friendsly of attacking chemicals. whichich we should. Anyway, but it's intellectually easy. Ban the suckers, okay Now P putting pressure on the corporations to back off so the governments can do it be A good idea, not easy. Corporations have enormous power, unprecedented power in the U.S very substantial power in the 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 turnurn 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 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? twow point one is the number of children It takes for a rich society to have a steady population. Per 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 other's shoulder. The commons are Things like common land in the old days that anyone could put their sheep on And what tended to happen is everyone put more sheep than they could stand and pretty soon it was It had no grass on it. known as the Tragedy of the Cons And We all need Clean air Clean water Fertile soil And two point one 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 kibot eventually. You have to put everything behind making it Doable. to have children because the long list of economic and social reasons as well as toxic reasers. People can't have two point one children It's 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 nothing yet has seen a permanent in baby production For the average person listening right now, Dave who drives a taxi or Jenny, who works as a receptionist or Clive, who's 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 they perhaps expected as children or than other people expected for them Part of that is politics P of that is equality But the net effect of them is times are tougher. It is more difficult buy a house or afford to rent and jobs are getting Gasa It's likely to get worse. What does brrace yourself mean for them 'cause Bace yourself sounds like you But does it mean planan your life as if times will not be easy? A, do not Build up a little reserve of cash course my advice to O people is and get yourself a useful job something that will, in a larger sense, pull your weight in society. skill, change skills, learn something. Mechanical. Fixing, repairing, things that engineering, things that need humans. And research, science in general. Make friends Make friends Make sure youre living in a society if you can, very difficult today, obviously. Would you be thinking about the country you live in at this moment in time? Absolutely. reallyally. Is there any countries you wouldn't live in? you were David Jenn. 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. Well, I have American children and grandchildren Why not the United States? It holds out too much chance that the social contractors is dissolving You know, the thing about Japan and my joking rule twenty one and 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 It really upsets the Japanese as 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 an agreement that I will behave in a way that helps my neighbourors and 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, reallyally When I arrived in America, corporations had this sense They owed something to the community they operated in The city they operate again. they build the stadium. they do this. they 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 Becauseuse you're saying, you know you probably wouldn't recommend Dave W Jenny living in the United States. Why would that be a bad place for them to be? What happens? What's the downstream impact of that That your neighbors aren't as interested in you and your well being. Fine. I won't talk to my neighbor And that's a lonely place to be And when you're in trouble You're in serious trouble becausecause the safety net here is very ineffective There's a measure that I think is probably the single most important measure of civilization and that is maternal mortality How many people die in Chaba? You know, in Nigeria out of a hundred thousand, it's four hundred and eighty give or take. and In America, and the Black population It's forty four in the whole population It's Light twenty one twenty. Curiously in the American Asian population is thirteen And then you go down the list and Britain, it's fine In Germany is four. In Sweden, it's two point one In Norway at's zero. There were no mothers who died last year or a year before What better definition of civilization than looking after the mother's giving birth How is it possible that a country moreore 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 worse fififty percent more mothers die here than in the second worst country in the developed world. How is that possible The answer is it happens And u because 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. I mean Of course the numbers are not huge twentyenty out of a hundred thousand is not But but it's a terrible contrast. It's a sign of something. It's a sign of something. It's a sign of whether people are. It's a sign of the social contract. So where's a good place to live th? if not here Denmark P . Even France Germany UK has a little bit of the American disease, but Not nearly as much So if your kids to you and said, Dad, we're thinking of a Leaving the United States, should I move shouldould I move out of the United States No, I would say that's a perfectly reasonable thing to consider And Where you going and why and what's your I'm thinking you're going to Denmark that They'll have you No in the things that really matter Life expectancy, health Safety nets murder rates U mortality rates In everything that really matters, yes, that day and night, better And the things that don't really matter but look really splashy We have enormous quantities of wealth created that go to a relatively small fraction of the people. and that dazzles in terms of the average because 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 question left for you is If you could not fail Would your next goal be that you had set for yourself There was a book written in the nineteen sixties called Silent Spring. Carl Carson, I think I name And it changed Quite a number of years at We did what books never do really political monster and Everyone studied it and had an effect, it changed the game I would like to write something about toxicity and social contract really. particularly nurturing a family. We've got to find In the end, a community that encourages The downside of the brutally efficient capitalist system that we have Let's focus on financial achievement and so on and veryer little emphasis on community and child rearing and so on. If we don't, we fail as a society pretty quickly We have to detoxify. We have to encourage Cate an environment where people want to have children. If I could write a book that would be pull a silent spring, I would sit down tomorrow and start it. The making of a palmer bear Perma should be an inverted commas, really? pererils of long term investing in a short term world Jeremy Grtham Edward Chancellor Who is this book for Oh people who have a interest in the stock market It has a little bit of climate change and toxicity My co writer is a professional and he tried to limit me quite sensibly. feeleing 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's 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 companies cannot advise you It's just suicidal for their business So you are on your own Data Bubble is not hard to see. There's this kind of plain. and then there's a Himalayan peak. which eventually goes back. And I mean, that's exactly what we're saying. It's exactly what history looks like Cic. courage to look at that, make your own conclusion. Get out of the danger most dangerous part 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 skills. And the central political skill in life turns out to be never be wrong on your own This is again, Kynes 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. you traverse so many subjects. It's absolutely fascinating. and 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 want to remember. For me. That's what I do. Sreenshot city. Yeah. So I took those writing things down you were saying, and then I was like, I need to remember that later. a bunch of things. businessusinesses, friends, family, et cetera And I think that's the testament to how ude and curious and wise you are. Going back to question one or two, that Billion Ebittt Sime around the end of this year, we will actually have written checks for a billion dollars to the climate change world