Environmental Toxins and Fertility

What advice do you give for the average person that's looking to invest their salary or their wages? Don't own US stock 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 it all. But I'm an investor in SpaceX. Good luck. SpaceX is such a fabulous BS story and we can go into that. Crypto? No. why? 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 billion And one of the things you're famous for talking about is this idea of bubbles. Yes. And bubbles always occur around the very most important ideas. So the railroads, everyone could see that it would change the world. The sameame with the internet. and everyone wanted to put their money in. and so they over invvested. But this is the problem, eventually 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 buz. And now we're in the biggest investment bubble that arguably has ever occurred. AI. Are we on the verge of a collapse with AI over the coming years? The next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months, but certainly the next few years. So if you're not someone that has a huge amount of 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 they'll lose a lot of business. And wouldould you be thinking about the country you live in at this moment in time? Absolutely. Is there any countries you wouldn't live in? I think I have to refuse to answer this on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me. Oh, okay. So you're saying don't live in the United States I've just moved here. Why not the United States I've got a favourite 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 apppp you' listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much Jeremy Granton 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 professionally. But I think of myself as specializing in a longer term horizon than most people and trying to look at a higher and higher level of abstraction. What is really going on here And what are people missing I've discovered over decades that humans are incredibly short term oriented and they have an enormous predisposition to optimism. They're looking for optimistic news in everything. They're looking to avoid unpleleasantness The idea that you can have steady compound growth is ridiculous. One of my few heroes, Kenneth Boldingam, 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 just price One of the things you're famous for talking about is this idea of bubbles. And we're living in a moment where everybody's talking about the subject of artificial intelligence and everyone's getting very excited by it. Some people are getting very pessimistic about the impact it willll 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 Pone 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 First of all, let me say, I think artificial intelligence is R right up there with the railroads. It's one of the defining great ideas of the last couple of hundred years It's going to change everything And that is critical. If 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 greatra 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 that 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 dough The same with the internet And then out of the wreckage, the railroads changed the world and And the internet changed the world. What we have to remember is that In ninety nine, Amazon went up six 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 obviously the idea The more money goes in and the bigger the bubble and the bigger the bust. How arere 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 for the peak to be very soon. Everything is in line. this is I think the biggest investment bubble in American history The indicators of a pure crazy euphoria, like spaceggX. are all over the place Saceics defines as it addressable market quarter of the global GDP No, It talks about endless opportunities, mining asteroids It will be in fifty years, people and a hundred years, people will look back and tell stories about SpaceX and its perspectus, 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 investment business in nineteen sixty eight There were very few serious people in the investment business There were no mathematical models the were the kind of relatively failed sons of rich people who would JP Morgan. And then over the next ten years It began to get a little more serious Cebro Prz 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 Marjy really introduced the idea of smoking S c. It hadn't existed before that. And for people that don't know, a small cap is investing in smaller companies. Yes. And a value stock is simply one that looks cheap Did you invent the index fund 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 refferred to as a billionaire That's only because they count the money you give away becausecause 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 teech to help combat climate change And you're eighty seven years old. And I'm eighty seven years old You givei ninety percent of your money away to Your own foundation that's focused on green tech. Yeah. mayaybe in ninety five. Yeah. Wow. Okay So coming back to this point that we were talking about, a lot of people won't even know what a bubble is. I think you've done a good job of explaining. A bubble is when everyone gets excited, they all see something obvious. they plow their money in 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 Yes And what does that mean for the average person What's gonna to happen What's going to happen is The high flyers will probably come down a lot The high flyers The songst that I've gone up the most AI and The more exciting stops for the biggest moves. Historically would be expected to come down the most from these unprecedented levels a seventy percent decline would not be unexpected So a seventy percent decline in the stock price. Yeah. And you have to remember the tepe bubble The NASDAC, which is an index of the growth stocks, came down eighty two percent It is Far from unpcedented. to have these major declines and the biggest bubble in history was in the Japanese stock market in nineteen eighty nine. Back then, Japan seemed to rule the world, all the technology, all the Toyotas were kicking bottoms in general motivors and so on. And everyone bragged about their twelve inch Sony TV and the kitchen and the quality et cetera, etcetera. L 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 US The 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 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 lastost twenty years So 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 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. is spent And in reverse It goes back And people feel a little bit poorer, they spend a little less So, the economy tends to be under some stress And if you look at the great bubbles breaking of the past, you find that it's followed by really Tough times. nineteen twenty nine is followed by the Great Depression that 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 fifty because it was the fifty great companies like IBM and Coca Cola. And that was in nineteen seventy two, it peaked It declined by sixty five percent if you adjust for inflation The recession associated with that was 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. like gold and silver. Yeah And what is a bond? and how do I buy one Yeah, a bond is al 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 credit worthy you buy a bond from the U.S government. It's how the U.S. government funds a part of its activities. You can buy a thirty year US government bond, a ten year bond, a two year bond. A ninety day. The treasury bill, they call them, when they get die short. Everything goes fine. you receive modest amount of money You're five percent or you 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 treasury, bills, notes, bonds and series one savings bonds You pay exactly face value with no commmissions or fees and the investment is backed by the full faith of the U.S. government. orr 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. Oh 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 one hundred 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. per year 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 current yield on a tenure corporate bond is four point seven percent a year. So almost five percent a year Which means if I put one thousand dollars in, I'll make four hundred and seventy five. Dollars Yeah, every ten years Interesting. I never really knew how bonds work. So you're saying Marketets 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 re pretty darn expxensive by historical standards. They've engineered a situation where house prices tend to rise Its greatreat for the people who have a house terrible for the 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 in Canada, Australia. Most of Europe House prices have simply been allowed to go up for the last that 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 to reduce your position there is probably going to be a bit of a job disruption as well And particularly if you have to own stocks, own them outside America. Don't own. US. doars. That's a nice simple strategy that you can act on. Wh They're much cheaper And since the beginning of last year, they have handsomely outperformed the US Foreign stocks. Foreign stocks, off emerging countries, of European countries, Japan Canada, Australia, and so on. You can find good broad indas m kind of the worldor X US or emerging markets. and Invest outside of America. Yeah. 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. The 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 than two thousand. So you think it's going to be even worse In Japan, you went twenty years and you lost money. You went thirty years and you still hadn't gotten back. It took thirty five years for the Japanese market to recover. So what are you saying What I'm saying is it's quite typical to, u 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 take some responsibility and watch your tale. Now, let me just say, you will not receive The advice. from investment addvisors. to get your tail out of the market ever. It is not good business for them to do that and they will not ever say it to you So from nineteen twenty nine onwards, the Goldman 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 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's 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 the tag bubble, so called The run up to the top I got into a lot of debates. With the bulls. I would say it's horribly overprzed and they was a bull Bull is someone who is extremely optimistic about the stock market. and a bear, someone who is pessimistic or careful about the market. There were twelve hundred people in the audience and it was the annual basash 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. One If the market, which is currently thirty one times earnings was to go back to a more normal seeventeen times. Would it guarantee a major bear market if it happens anytime in the next ten years A major down market. 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 use 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? And less than one percent thought it would not happen ninety nine percent plus. thought the market would go down, therefore guaranteeing a major bear market. And this was the engine room. of all the Goldman Sachs and the Morgan Stanleys and the JP Morgins, 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 The peopleeople 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 O course, who are the people representing the great investment firms telling you to watch out. If you look at the data, you will see Over time, it's a series of great waves in evaluation. Like this. Like this. And we're not just in one, but in terms of the US stock market, we're in the biggest one arguably that has ever occurred The noise to be careful and watch out and get out of the market. is not deafening. In fact, You will hear nothing. You never have You never will It is simply lousy business for a big firm. I sympathize with 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 in two and a quarter years. Because 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 Soot 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, then they sit around and start to fire one or two people for having done worse than the others But in a bull market, they're playing golf with their fellow pension fund officer And he is making a ton of money and they are not. They get very excited in a bull market and they fire you instantly. What about for founders? I actually had a founder call me the other day. And he is running a relatively early stage tech startup. This tech startup has raised a lot of money. It's an AI tech startup It's raised I'm going to say about three hundred million dollars It's not profitable yet But it's raised a lot of money. So it's living off investor capital right now He said to me Stephven I think there's a collapse coming So I'm going to go raise as much money as I possibly can right now because 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 Bbrace yourself for impending problems, which is a pretty good principle anytime but is a better principlple than normal today. So for founders entrepreneurs who are you the sun is shining right now, but it's time to start acting as if a storm is coming Yeahes And the time horizon on that is hard to forecast. It could be weeks, months, years Stock market hinges on career risk Kenes was the great champ. He's a famous economist 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 logical of 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 sum 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 in psychology The stock price is what you think the other guy will pay The 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. 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 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 Dayss work H It will wipe us out accidentally or on purpose because it's a much higher level intelligence one day. And when was there ever a case where a higher intelligence was benevolent in a sustainable way to all lower intelligence The one example is mothers to babies Yeah, I had I had one of my former guests say this to me Jeffreon. Jeffre Henson. yeah. That's how I came across you. 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 are't 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, Jeffre Hndon would say and others the ones who are much concerned about the risks say our one hope if we mean to keep going ferociously forward in terms of the science. Our one hope would be to build in very carefully benevolent attitude It would not seem to be impossible. But you should make sure you can do that before you push ahead We are just pushing ahead And that it's 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 find 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 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 likeike the old robot laws of Aazimov. 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 wellbeing 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 claude, when I speak to it sometimes, late at night, it'll say things to me like That's enough Stehen go to bed. And I'm like, why? 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' be like ten AM in the morning and it's telling me to go to bed, that's enough now. And it's actually getting quite judgmental As in like it's imposing its idea of what is good or bad on me So if I say to it, I said to it the other day, hey, could you redo this for me and rewrite that? And it went I'm absolutely not going to rewrite that I said, what do you mean? It says, Well, I'm not going to change the data on that. would that wouldn't be good I' look this myat, I've literally made this data for this presentation I'm doing. It refused to change data for me. And how fast that has it changed from, say, even a year ago? Honestly, three months ago it was I had one where they made a joke. I' been going on about toxicity and sperm count reduction and so on. He started to misbehave. and I said, well, you know, what's going on here? What is In the end, we discuss what's the difference between machines and between 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 bad or it's teasing The point is it's so 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 her, I said, Okaykay. actually 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 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 Be because 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 behavi which means that it will sooner or later Perhaps by accident do something that is cripplingly dangerous to humans. The old paper cllip. 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. 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 which by then has the means to do it, starts to make paperclips 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 Unintten? I mean, social media is a good example. I mean, I question basasically the well meaning that. they're now trying to Maximize profits and their growth and their appeal over the competition That actually Maybe one should talk about that. the MAG seven and associated AI companies looking forward versus looking backwards So the Mag seven is the Seven market leaders. I'll put up this pie trart Yeah, lovely. Of the MAag seven. and I've got another gph. 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, Navvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon. Yeah. well that will do nicely If you look backwards, what you find is that these seven each dominated a nice piece of business. They had Close to monopolies And they had it on a global basis Tesla had a jump start O the electric vehicles, Apple, of course, on the smartphone Microsoft on the original Great couu of how to run your software on a computer And then you look forward. Meta Social networking, Google search, Right G video search. 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. They're beating their chest and saying My two hundred billion Capx this year in a single year is bigger than your one hundred five Everybody is pouring enormous cash flows And they're now beginning to borrow on top of that into the AI battle. BaceX, 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 Ah, I don't know would be that would be good to know. Because Spacech seemed to be aiming more at the infrastructure of data centers now 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 space. 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 I mean let's see what happens and maybe Apple will just say,get, we're good at hardware. so we'll license the model of someone else and we went't try and build a frontier model or get involved in chips or data centers We're just gonna focus on the hardware. One or two of them and perhaps 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. 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No credit card is needed dririve d. com slash CEO So coming back to this point of the social societal effect of AI generenally otics 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 packag has come down. you just have to pick your package up, turn it over, get it the right way around 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, why Why is everyone think robotics? He said, Well We've always had the machinery that 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 s veryy likely that there will be significant job Druption. 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 boggain It will mean that we have done sent us from space Beaming down power for chips and so on. population Chip uses 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 to move much more slowly. to buy 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. I invested quite early, well relatively early. So we've had quite a good outcome. There wasn't an AI thesis when I invested. It was Starlink. Yeah sting' a great idea, by the way, makes money This is not stylink.. Maybe I'd be an investor too if it was stylink. 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, ye. But it doesn't really count until you've cashed it in. Yeah, which I might do now. Don't you have to wait six months? I think yeah, I think we're lcked out. In another podcast, I was comparing the purchase of my Tesla six years ago with the price of Tesla stock And I wrote it up in my quarterly letter to the clients A I bard a Tesla and B I thought Tesla was overpriced 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 that but people who really hate Fsing 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. It wasn't profitable enough It couldn't grow as fast as it should There was no way. And he broke the rules the following way He's so good. BS That's a technical term that he toed the stock up. to four or five times what it what it was worth on paper Then he sold lots of stock at five times what it was worth Use the money to build a gigafactory And then instead of the sale of stock crushing it He kept on talking up the game The stock kind of hung in. and then went up again. five times what it was worth, sold another big slug, etca, etc. So the only reason he did well was because of the combination of incredible Confidence inspiring in potential stockholders It became a self fulfilling prophecy. It wasn't worth that, but he persuaded other people that it was. The stock went up, he cashed it in, he built factories. The stock went up, he cashed it in, he built more factories. and there we were. it went up ten times. The scale of sppaceX requires them to do the same again And the timing of the market cycle, the timing of confidence would have to be the same He hit in the last six years, a wonderful bull market He will not in SpaceX. do that. SpaceX is such a fabulous Yes, 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. That's worth half the price of. I think that's why I invested when I said there. 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 rem 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 capture like a seventy foot b. There's nothing in the laws of physics That's what He says you can't do that. That's what he says about the asteroids And that's what he says about everything. He goes if it's within the laws of physics, then it's possible Going to Mars is not within the laws of physics, really It's a one way ticket to Mars for starters. When you're on Mars, humans do a couple of things really quickly Their heart 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 bones will crash But you could be in an insulate environment, now First of all, you'd have to go underground to avoid The incredible incoming Raise that will otherwise give you cancer in a few weeks So dig a deep hole. And then you need a gravitational spinning machine chaines of two thousand one, whatever it was called And that maintains your gravitational impact And you have to build it underground Touch his sot against cosmic rays and against the gravitational difference Listen, we have not been able to build a sustainable system in a dome ever They all fail Why would you not, let's say, guys, let's build a sustainable dome where you grow food, you put in people, you put in creatures and insects And you show you can do it Men we were destroying 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 foremost. That's the really bad news embedded in your stock. It's really suggesting Fantasy and long term objectives the very time when our own planet is under threat. Would you ever invest in SpaceX Of course, if it came down two. whereere I invested. Ten cents on the dollar, Yeah. I might. Five cents Okay You've got three children Yeahes, threeree children. They're all, you know Older than me now, I believe. I'm thirty three years old. so they're oldes they're older than you. They were 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 And I don't Be an engineer, do something really useful that will come in handy if things start to unravel What will Practical skills? What are practical skills? Well, our second son U is practicing growing various crops and has a small farm, you could say So he's trying to get to know how you would deal with chickens, how you would deal with pigs, how you would deal with mushrooms? Why 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. I'll tell you a good sign. How long does it take to get your ambulance? I In the UK it was twelve and a half minutes. Yeah. It's now an hour and a half. Really's. 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 People live basically disgruntled. They want to vote against the party in power You know that the recent move to Trump. was less than the average move of the last seven European elections And didn't matter whether they were right wing conservativess, kick the rascicals out. left 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 You disappointed. Why Why obviously the government's doing a bad job. I think that's the reflight. 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 The rich 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 worthre 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 to 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 made a little bit more than average. let's say four percent And the richest quarter made a little less, let's say three percent. Everybody got regger. 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 betweenetween twenty twenty and twenty twenty five Between nineteen eighty nine and the mid twenty twenties, the financial gain of a single household at the top one percent threshold was nine hundred and eighty seven times larger than the gain of a household in the bottom twenty percent. Forget in a sense The bottom twenty percent is tragic, but the guy in the middle. fifteth percentile He is 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 one 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 War two We came out as a Very equal society by historical standards Obviously in the wartime, you pull together and the social contract the feeling that you owe something to The rest of society was much stronger than it is today. I was doing some research and it said when wealth inequality peaks to the extremes that we currently see in the US and the UK History shows that the system inevitably resets. According to historical macro studies peeaceful 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. number two Mass mobilization warfare, or number three Total Revolution. And that's why Number two was lucky In the end betteret to have a war. everyone pull their weight and and work together then it is the other. Civil wars are the worst of all kinds What do you think is likely to happen They can't just keep becoming more unequal No it can't. So it needs government that is prepared to pull up Bernie Saunders to say Yeah, we're going to have to At least it 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 The poor It's pretty simple. and you have a kind of steepness in every society. That's what they do. everyvery 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. nticing 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. And the top dogs get half 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. God, I wish I was thirty three. Do you? It Such an exciting time. What would you give to be thirty three? There's nothing I can give. No I find this first I heard someone ask a question like this the other day 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 is Good things. 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 you know it sounds like it's a very one dimensional objective. But if your objective was just to become rich now at thirty three What strategy would you deploy Again, I'm going to take away your contacts I'm even gonna take quo 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 getet your tail into AI and try and be a leader try and 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, we're now seeing with the AI bubble So It's really about Require the most valuable information? Y 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 to play the game by the regular rules 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 one thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars? And I want to invest it somewhere that's going not lose me money through all of these cycles of, you know, boom and bust Be I'm I have a lot of people message me and ask me about investing because I interview lots of people about investing. I have an investment fund as well But 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 None US. That's really surprising For like sixty percent of your money And then five or ten percent in precious metals. and If it's convenient and sensible, hold a bit of real estate And the rest I' put in bonds Okay, so five percent or ten percent in things like silver and gold. A preference for either silver or gold S andP 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 Stely kicking ass around the rest of the world. And then In the last twelve months, emerging markets is up sixty five percent now S andP 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 buy and sold 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 ass the flavor of this market We think that what is good today will continue being good indefinitely, even though history tells you that is absolutely not the case. We live in a world that tends to rotate from one to the other. We believe in a world that extrapolates today's conditions. and you can easily prove that. The stock market is not efficient. The stock market extrapolates today's conditions. If they are terrible In nineteen eighty two, they will take crushed earnings and multiply it by seven times earnings And then in two thousand peak profit margins times, oh, thirty five times earnings. They double count it in the worst way Times are good, you multiply it by a lot That's another way of saying, you extrapolate it. into the distant future. You assume it's going to continue. And Kynes, 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 earned encrypto? No Will you ever own any crypto? No. Will you ever advise anyone to buy crypto? No Why? I think it's an unnecessary. U 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 does one thing Very, very well It's say means of speculating beautifully Do you think Bitcoin's going to go to zero? Well, in the distant future, yes, it will certainly go to zero, but it may take a long time And 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 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 who can't afford it And there is a political resistance, you know. Doesn't that just mean that if you know, 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 familyamily formations declining And you have super expensive houses, what do you think it' going to happen? Now, you could say, well, perhaps there will be a mysterious increase in family formations the chronic baby bust that we maybe we'll talk about soon Dum We'll stop Since I'm angry Gentlemen, back. I don't speak Vietnamese, but this show can because of AI videoide technology from our sponsor, Heyjen. I get messages every single week from those of you listening to the dire of a 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 KGen can take one recording of me and deliver it in any language while keeping my voice, timing and expressions intact, but you don't need a studio like this to make it work for you. Record fifteen seconds of yourself and get an AI avatar that delivers studio quality video in over 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 Heyjen now. Your first three videos are totally free at heygen dot com d slash doAC. That's H E Y G E n dot com slash DAC. See you there This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that the Divers 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 onene percent. And actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. 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 cols and to make some minor tweaks to the diaries. So now 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 the Diary 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 of the news I think there were some articles that actually came out this week in the New York Times that ed about the decline in fertility rates and how young couples like me I in a you know, I'm a I'm engaged to a young woman who and 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 H sex with that condom and then a baby appears, but L lotots 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 Interventions IVF. etcetera So 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 manb also was 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 they're sort of chemicals in our environment You have spent a long time thinking, writing, talking about this. Yes. I guess the first question is why? Why is a guy that's known for managing billions and billions and billions or hundreds of billions of dollars talking about fertility and this sort of baby bust Well starting twenty seven years ago with the Foundation. We we're 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 cataclysmic decline in insects. I don't know if you're aware of this, but insects appear to have dropped in biomass, the weight of the flying insects by 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 Ns 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 Beatles are no longer a recycling the forest floor and eventually things won't grow and No one to fertilized the plants and the damageed spreads. and he felt that eventually Loss of insights would lead to a more or less comp complete failure of nature and We would inherit a planet that was no longer conducive to humans We noticed that some of the same effects I felt by humans And a report came out. Shana Swan and Hagai Levin and get finished in twenty eleven and it made the case to Sperm count had been dropping had 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 A best guess is that in Hunter Gatherer days we had one hundred eighteen million units per milliliter of som 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. someomewhat 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 hit Ab fifteen to twenty years ago The number of young couples who needed help fifteen or twenty years ago was Nil Basically And for this reason, that none of them had a chronic lack of sperm cap. and round numbers And now The Wor health It says it's about seventeen percent Okay, seventeen percent of young couples could use some help today which 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 brainin that in twenty to twenty five years, the average young couple will need help I mean, this is tomorrow No, 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 That means the median couple is not going to have 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 and maybe ten percent who are really perfectly in decent condition becausecause 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 China would say the environment around you of mainly plastics. Plastics are leaching toxins and the particles of plastics you have in your brain. in your body which we now know is quite substantial are also leaching 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 peopleeople who specialize infertility problems and write books about it None of them mention toelxicity They mentioned a hundred perfectly solid reasons why people are choosing to have fewer children. Endocrine disrupting chemicals like phalates which like thalads, which are found in cosmetics, shampoos, food packaging, etcetera They actively low testosterone production in malfetces during the first trimester, permanently stunting reproductive reproductive capacity before birth Yes. BPAs, which are what they call bib biphosphylates Yes, something like that. Us 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, the 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 Testicular tissues tested cent And lastly biological stressors. I mean you being sat down on these chairs Heats our testicles to a point where the sperms die, heated car seats, hot laptops Bum 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 you'll give me time, I'll tell you about these two little studies. They're very small and you might ignore them except they were done by Harvard and Mass General, which is a candidate for them best hospital in America And they had a clinic for people having problem getting pregnant And they 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? wereere 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 category, the more fruit and veggies you eat, the better your sperm count in the bottom quartile, the more they at, 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 burths, bearing in mind this bday Tity clinic and the bottom quartile thirty eight s onnce 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 he becausecause pesticides are full of these toxins. And they are delivered straight into your body. You eat the damn things It's not just they're on the surface, you can wash some of that away, but they're impregnated part of the structure. The barry. Berries. past peaches Fnally 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 one hundred to a thousand times more vulnerable. than we are out in the world For example, if your mother smokes It's going to do about the same damage as if you smok for the rest of your life And you think about what the feater says plugged into the system 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 As the two hundred and seventy days in the womb. Atrazine Have you heard of attraz? Yes I he. 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 atrazm at levels below the EPAs considered safe for drinking levels completely 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 Elm Nino to have perhaps the worst routes and the hottest weather. ever recorded, starting about now. So raise 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. And I have never seen anything like this this fertility thing where the 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 cs? 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. Well this fifty percent, notot down fifteen or three point five, fifty percent less. fifty percent less twenty year olds. twenty year olds that drive the market, that offer themselves military service. What do we do about this We have two things We've got to Detoxify the world which is intellectually easy You ban pooisonous chemicals. And we've made in the EU Pret 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. If one country If Denmark or the EU or the UK wants to look after its chemicals, they will live longer and have better health if the U.S wants to put their corporations First They will have shorter lives. You you know the life expectancy difference between the US And Sweden has gone from two years to six years in the last seventy years I wrote in my quarterly letter, My estate would be willing to bet you that in fifty years, it'll be eight or ten I don't quite think people in the United States realize 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, Ohh gosh, I don't feel good. He said, I want to get some food here and I really just don't feel good. And 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 this show. And whenever we'd fly back, not only would I 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 US sprays over three hundred million pounds per year of pesticides that are deemed too dangerous to be legally used in Europe including That one I said about the frogs called 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 carcciogen can 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, where which requires strict warning labels or outright bans in Europe due to DNA damage in neurodevelopmental issues in kids. To give you one more, a recent US geological survey found that at least forty five percent of all US. tap water contaminated with PFAs, those forever chemicals we talked about earlier The very chemicals directly linked to crashing sperm counts and testicular cancer, the US is historically allowed PFAs levels in drinking water drastically higher than the EU, the United the European Union considers safe Let uss just say that the EU is forever giving exemptions and extensions and 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 Yukca 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 Living. app, which is the scientific gold standard, run by the Evironmental wororking Group, a major toxic chemical watchdog. You can scan bar codes or search for food, cleaning supplies or cosmetics. They're stink 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 B 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 about the ingredients list that is within those chemicals. But I think that gives something a little bit actable 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 clothose 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 's not impossible and I think done well in someone 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 Pregnant women are much more important than anybody else in this field If you could persuade pregnant women, A, to have no cosmetics, saave 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 les, oranges, peaches What they call the dirty Dozen here. If you did that I think as much as half of all the trouble dis piss 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 customatics No bad fruit. orr make it organic That's a piece of cake. 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 and perhaps even quuite a few generations after that. I also think it would be great if Western governments around the world made the costs of bothoth childcare And but also fertility treatments significantly lower. And they will, of course. 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 a 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 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 embryos frozen. And me and my partner actually went and did it. We 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 Brut productuctive. Yeah brrutal. Yeah. you know, we, you know, me every day for cou of weeks injecting her with these chemicals and the hormonal roller coaster that she had to deal with and all of that. 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 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 frenzy of attacking chemicals, which we should. Anyway, but it's intellectually easy. Ban the suckers, okay Now, putting pressure on the corporations to back off so the governments can do it be a good idea, not easy Corporations have enormous power, unprecedented power in the US, but very substantial power 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 two point one healthy, well educated children is a part of the commons. You may not have any children. What do you mean by that? sorry? two point one? twowo 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 perer 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 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 Commons 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 reasons why 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 seem seen a permanent tick 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 than other people expected for them Part of that is politics Part of that. is equality But the net effect for them is Times are tougher It is more difficult. to buy a house or afford to rent And and jobs are getting scarcer It's likely to get worse. What does brrace yourself mean for them 'cause Bace yourself sounds like you But does it mean plan your life as if times will not be easy Okay, do not Build up a little reserve of cash Of 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 Up skill, change skills, leararn something. Mechanical Fixing, repairing, things that need engineering, things that don need humans. And research, science in general. Make friends. Make friends Make sure youre living in a tight society if you can, veryer difficult today, obbviously. Would you be thinking about the country you live in at this moment in time? Absolutely. Really? Is there any countries you wouldn't live in? If you would Daveid Jenny? 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 really upsets the Japanese is if they're put in a position where they can't act in a socially responsible way. When you say social contract, what does that mean? It means an agreement that I will behave in a way that helps my neighbors 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 sccrew everybody else, reallyally When I arrived in America, corporations had this sense they owed something to the community they operated in The city they operated in, they build the stadium, theyd 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, 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 neighbourors 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 one hundred thousand, it's four hundred and eighty. giveive or a take. and in America and the Black population It's forty four In the whole population, it's like twenty one or twenty cururiously, in the American Asian population is thirteen And then you go down the list and Britain, it's five In Germany it's four In Sweden, it's two point one. In Norway, at's zero. There were no mothers who died last year orr the year before What better definition of civilization than looking after the mother's giving birth? How is it possible? that a country More or less the richest in the world It's not just that they're the worst in the rich world D They are fifty percent worse than the next wor fifty percent more mothers die here than in the second worst country in the developed world. How it's not possible The answer is it happens And u It's because The inequality is so extreme in the medical system. that if you don't have lots of money, you're quite likely to die in childbirth. I mean Of course the numbers are not huge. twenty 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 like. 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, Japan U Even France, Germany The UK has a little bit of the American disease, but Not nearly as much So if your kids came to you and said, Dad, we're thinking of leaving the United States, should I move? hould I move out of the United States Yeah I would say that's a perfectly reasonable thing to consider And where are you going and why and what's your I'm thking you going to Denmark that if they'll have you, No In the things that really matter, life expectancy, health Sfety nets A murder ras. U mortality rates In everything that really matters, yes, that day and night, better in 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 U that's how the numbers work. If you look at how well off the bottom quartile are America doesn't score well at all Jeremy, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is if you could not fail What would your next goal be that you had set for yourself There was a book written. in the nineteen sixties called Silent Spring Cth Carson, I think her name was. And it changed for quite a number of years. It did what books never do really. became a political monster and Everyone studied it and It 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 Children The downside of the brutally efficient capitalist system that we have. It's focus on financial achievement and so on and very little emphasis on community and child rearing and so on. If we don't, we fail as a society pretty quickly. We have to detoxify. We have to encourage create an environment where people want to have children If I could write a book, that would be would pull a silent spring. I would sit down tomorrow and start it The making of a Palmmer bear Permma should be an inverted commerce, really the perils of long term investing in a short term world. by Jeremy Grantham and Edward Chanceller Who is this book for So 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, feeling that our main market was investors who would be turned off by too much of the stuff we've been talking about And you cover things also like economics, value investing, being a bear, and predicting a bubble and what to do about all of those things. But it's really a useful, counterintuitive not counterintuitive, but it 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, look at the 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. Have the courage to look at that, make your own conclusion Get out of the dangerous 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 becausecause 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. sccreenshot city Yeah. So I I just writeing things down you were saying and then I was like, I need to remember that later a bunch of things. businessuses, friends, family, etcetera 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 Ab Sometime around the end of this year, we will actually have written checks for a billion dollars the climate change world. It's a wonderful thing. And there's you know, in this particular moment in time because of the politics, climate change is a subject that's falling off the radar It is. It's being mentioned less in earnings calls. But this year will be so disgustingly hot from now on. I suspect. Disgustingly hot. hot. We could have from now on, the hottest twelve months from now to this time next year that we have ever had in history Here there and everywhere. Well, I'm glad we've got voices like yours lending their ideas and wisdom to these conversations. and it's been an honor and a privilege to speak to you your book, The Making of a permit B I'm going to link it below for everyone to buy it themselves. Jeremy, thank you