I think the greatest brand destruction over the last 18 months is the US brand abroad, and AI. So with America, Trump has been convinced that this was his defining moment of being known as the president that liberated the Middle East. But I think the Trump administration will be known for criminal corruption and incompetence. And that incompetence is bubbling up. And then the second greatest fall is AI. And also Sam Altman, who's gone to the dark side. And I'm an AI optimist. But here's what we fail to understand: these techs, they do not have our best interests at heart.
Scott, I often come to you to help myself form my opinions on some of the most sort of consequential issues going on in the world. And when I look at some of the quotes from the CEOs of these AI companies, I've got one here from Elon that says, 'AI and robots will replace all jobs.' What's your view here?
I think it's mostly the catastrophizing is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to say my technology is so devastating that it's going to shift society and you should invest at this crazy valuation. And the data doesn't reflect that there's some big exogenous meteor coming for the employment market. But I believe it's actually going to create more jobs than it destroys. But the scary thing for me is that because of AI and because of these frictionless relationships that people are engaging in online, I think a lot of young people are losing the ability to endure rejection. But I think a more important technology in terms of how it's going to change the world and what will create more shareholder value is not AI. It's really...
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Scott, welcome back. I often come to you to help myself form my opinions on some of the most sort of consequential issues going on in the world because I find you always have a very interesting perspective. And one of the things that's been front of mind for me, and I think the audience as well, is this subject of artificial intelligence. It's moving incredibly quickly. It feels like a moving target. And I think I saw some stats the other day that said the subject of artificial intelligence is less popular as an industry than even ICE in the United States.
In part because the big CEOs of these companies are saying that our jobs and our way of life is going to be fundamentally disrupted, and people don't feel like they have a say in that. We didn't choose this.
What's your perspective on everything that's going on?
There have been few brands that have fallen further faster in the last 18 months than two brands. The United States brand abroad. We used to be the enforcer of the operating system to keep rogue nations in check. The US is now that rogue nation. So the US brand abroad, for the first time in history, more people feel that China is a force of good in the world than the US. That's never happened before. So the brand US has fallen furthest fastest. The second greatest fall is AI. Your view of AI is directly correlated to your wealth. The only cohort that has a positive rating of AI is people making over $200,000. Because generally speaking, wealthy people look at AI as something that's fueling their portfolios, and wealthy people are the biggest users of AI. So they see it as a positive. They see it as innovation. They see it as the S&P going up. But if you're an average middle class person, what you may see is that your electricity bills have gone up and you don't even have access to invest in these companies. And you see some statements from people, Sam Altman saying, 'Stop complaining about energy costs. Think about the amount of energy it takes to raise a child.' So they haven't really managed the brand well. In the last 18 months, it's gone from something kind of scary, but we can be optimistic and a wealth creator, to something that's very scary and something that's a wealth creator for the wealthiest already. The brand in the last 18 months has had tremendous, tremendous erosion.
When I look at some of the quotes from the CEOs of these AI companies, I've got one here from Elon that says, 'AI and robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables instead of buying them from a store. The challenge will be fulfillment. How do you derive fulfillment and meaning in life?' And Sam Altman said, 'By the end of 2028, more of the world's intellectual capacity could reside inside data centers than outside them.' And when I went through Sam's blog several times, I mean, he's talking about a fairly dystopian future. And many of the CEOs are, I mean, even Amodei at Anthropic talks a lot about, you know, his bear case for AI and the job disruption that will follow. And so I think I'm trying to get clarity for myself, really, on like what is the truth, what's marketing, and what's the truth. And I want to add another point, which is I hire a lot of people, and I'm already finding that our framework, specifically for entry-level roles, has quite radically changed. And so I didn't believe this stuff, like a lot of people told me about, oh, Sam Altman, these guys, they're doing marketing to make their company seem powerful. But then when I noticed a change in my own behavior when I'm sifting through these CVs, I thought, 'Oh, maybe things are going to change.'
I think it's mostly [__] and catastrophizing and a means of fundraising. Every technology in history goes through a similar arc. There's some catastrophizing, there's some job loss, that increase in productivity results in additional margin, new business opportunities, and employment growth. I don't see any reason why this would be any different. And I think that catastrophizing and talking about this massive destruction in jobs is a way of saying or justifying the massive investments these companies want enterprises to make in their companies. Because if you look at the amount of capital they have committed and the valuations of these companies, one of two things needs to happen in the next 5 years, at least in the US. There either needs to be a trillion dollars in incremental revenue from new products from companies that have licensed AI. So L'Oreal does a big site license with, say, OpenAI. Does it come up with new products? It's like, how does it justify that investment? We're not seeing a lot of AI moisturizer or cars that are built by AI. I mean, there's AI has hit industrialized robots at Amazon, but there's not a lot you would call new AI-driven or AI products. AI plays a role in the background, but it's very hard for companies right now to point to incremental growth or revenues from AI. So, in order to justify these valuations, then they have to say, all right, there's going to be massive cost savings or efficiencies. And there's some examples. I think Meta has just announced new layoffs because of efficiencies they're getting with AI targeting. So, one of two things needs to happen in the next three years. Either these companies' valuations need to be cut by 50 or 70%. Or you need a massive destruction in the labor market that creates tons of efficiencies that their customers can then flow to the bottom line. And I think what the CEOs are saying is that there's going to be massive efficiencies. I also think that you sound more interesting and it makes your technology sound more seminal when you say it's changing the world and we don't know how to control it. And quite frankly, I find it a little bit obnoxious that some of the founders and key figures in AI catastrophize just about the time they take a secondary and peace out to the Cotswolds. That's not helpful. I'm Dr. Frankenstein and I've created this monster, but I don't know how to deal with it. So, I'm going to go peace out to Saint-Tropez. That's just not very helpful. They always talk about the peril. It's like, well, what do you mean by that? So, the first big fear, catastrophizing, is just this unprecedented job destruction. They've been talking about that for three years, but let's look at the data. The unemployment rate in the US is 4.5%. Among youth, it's 8.8%. That is slightly below the historical average. The number of new business permits or new businesses started per capita in the United States has doubled in the last 10 years. And we hear about, well, what about Meta? They announced they were laying off, I think, 8 or 10,000 people yesterday. 2019 to 2025, they went from 16,000 people to 80,000. So even if they go back to 60,000, it takes them back about 24 months. So I don't doubt that there'll be a real dip or a severe V down in certain industries, customer service, probably the legal field. But I believe over the medium and the long term, it's actually going to create more jobs than it destroys. And I think some of the catastrophizing is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to say my technology is so devastating that it's going to shift society and you should invest at this crazy valuation.
Oh, 100%. I'm wrong all the time, Stephen.
No, but I mean, like, what would have to be the case for you to find out that you were wrong in terms of how you've reasoned up from the first principles of your thinking there?
Job destruction, layoffs.
But what would you have misunderstood for that to be the case? Like, what did you miss, would you have misestimated for that to be the case?
Ground zero for the job that was going to go away was radiologists. You could scan billions of images and radiologists... kid, mama, don't let your daughter grow up to be a radiologist because that job's going away. The new job listings for radiologists in 2026 is up because what it ends up is that while scanning the image is important, it's a small part of the job. The value out of a radiologist is diagnosing the illness and then coming up with a treatment plan. And that's as important as ever. The number of coders, job listings for coders year-on-year is up 11%. So people who understand how to use these technologies and come up with different prompts or different means of vibe coding, that demand has gone up because now AI can be applied to almost any startup. Where I will be wrong is if there is sustained job destruction and the new jobs created and new businesses and the employment those jobs create doesn't keep up with new jobs. And there is a scenario, you don't need 100% unemployment like Musk is predicting. At 20% unemployment, the French had a revolution, in Weimar Germany turned very ugly. At 20% unemployment, especially among youth, especially young men tend to get very angry and take to the streets. So you could see a V that's so severe, even if there's a job recovery, if it hits 20% unemployment, that could cause real civil unrest. But I just look at the data. I look at the employment numbers. If you didn't know there was this seminal technology that very smart people were predicting a job apocalypse around and you just looked at the data, you wouldn't know there's anything going on there. The data doesn't reflect that there's some big exogenous meteor coming for the employment market.
Is there a case that this technology, because it's, you know, built on the internet, so it has inherent rapid distribution? Every day Anthropic release a model, ChatGPT release something, it spreads across the world very quickly and everybody's updating their technology at the speed of light, unlike the Industrial Revolution where you had to build infrastructure and physical infrastructure. Is there a case that because of the speed of this technology and the proliferation of it, that it will be unlike the revolutions of the past?
Right, that's the fear, that the V is so severe and so vicious that we don't have time to recover, and even if there is more jobs on the other side, that there's too much civil unrest around the V. But so far the V doesn't be decelerating or diving as quickly as people had predicted. I was kind of reminiscing on the way over here. I moved here almost four years ago. The first thing I did, I got off a plane at night and I went to this amazing party at Annabel's, this Brazilian party with all these hot people everywhere, and I thought, I love London. And the next morning I woke up feeling pretty hungover and my team said, 'You have this podcast with this young guy.' And I said, 'Cancel, I'm hungover.' And they said, 'No, he's really up and coming. You'll like him. He's a nice kid.' And I came into this little place in Shoreditch or wherever with all these like cool coffee houses. I had no idea who you were. And within two years, you were [__] everywhere. It was like I'm in the airport and I see your banner on your book. And then I get on the plane and the safety video has you in it. I'm like, make him stop. And my point is, where I'm going with this, is this place is like, I mean, it feels like the Googleplex. You're hiring like crazy. You're one of the most technically sophisticated people I know in media, and yet you're hiring a bunch of organic things, walking around and eating and going out and drinking and having kids. So you're the example. Old media is going to lose jobs, but you're creating... how many people have you hired in the last 24 months?
Across all of our companies? About, I'd say about 220.
Okay. And those are high-paying jobs. Those are young people probably making six figures plus. That's a lot of employment. So is the BBC or is the Daily Mail or whatever laying off people? Yeah. But I'm not sure they're laying off people faster than you're hiring them.
Yeah. And what I found is that we're hiring a different type of person, and AI fluency is becoming increasingly important. I say the other thing is the only thing I noticed was 60 days ago, I consider myself to be head of recruitment. We have a recruitment team downstairs and I own a recruitment business. But as I go through that inbox, people that I otherwise two months ago would have been, you know, jumping to hire, I'm now pausing because there's new technology that's been launched by these companies in America that means there's alternative solutions, and that's what's giving me pause. People do need to consider ways that they can upskill themselves with these technologies.
The labor market is definitely reshaping and it might reshape faster, but I'm not sure it's going to be the apocalypse. There'll be winners and losers. For example, for the last 30 or 40 years, the unemployment rate among college grads has been lower than non-college grads. It's shifted this year. The unemployment rate among non-college grads, because of the boom in vocational work, is now lower than the unemployment rate among college grads. And if you think about it, you're like, okay, well, that's bad for new college grads. But at the same time, all of these data centers need carpenters, welders, plumbers. So there's been booms in other parts of the employment market. But yeah, the employment market's absolutely reshaping. But when I graduated from business school, a lot of it, quite frankly, is your generation is spoiled. What do I mean by that? When I graduated from Berkeley in 1992, 40% of us had a job on graduation day. Meaning 60% did not have a job. I would bet that kids in my class at Stern, I bet 40% of them were starting their own business because with AI. When I graduated, there were two entrepreneurs in my class, and the second person was my co-founder. We were the only business started in the Haas School of Business from 1992. I would bet there's going to be 30 to 50 businesses that are started on graduation day. There's kids dropping out of their second year of business school to start businesses because they just raised $10 million in a Series A. Now, you have to have certain skills, a certain type of personality, a certain facility with technology. I'm actually quite excited about this. We're starting to see an uptick in productivity, which should result in incremental profitability. Will some people be on the wrong side of the trade? Absolutely. Do we need to do a better job of providing more unemployment, more retraining? Denmark spends 2% of GDP on retraining and vocational training. We spend 0.02% in the US. So we're not good at retraining. We're really bad at it, actually. We're not good at taking care of the people on the wrong side. But as a global, in terms of global employment, I just don't... I think that catastrophizing is dressed-up fundraising.
What do you think about what Elon's doing with Optimus? Because if you bring those two forces together, you got Optimus robots, these humanoid robots, where he says there'll be... I mean, some of the quotes that he said, I mean, it might be marketing, but he's predicting that you won't need to be a surgeon because there'll be so many Optimus robots that are more advanced than any surgeon on earth. So Optimus robots will be doing surgery. And if you combine intelligence with sort of physical power that comes from these robots, it does beg the question where human skills remain outside of the relational stuff and serving Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's one of the things I contend with. I'm like, you're seeing in China especially how robots are really changing production lines. And I saw this video the other day of, I think it was in India or Bangladesh, where they had their factory workers have cameras on their heads so that they could film their hands because they're intent on replacing them with robots. This combination of intelligence plus robotics feels like it's two tsunamis at the same time.
I think that's right. But let's use the surgeon as an example. I think the robot in the context of surgery will be not a replacement but a supplement. And that is there'll be a large class of surgeons who know how to weaponize robotics to be better surgeons and, quite frankly, do two surgeries a day instead of one. I think most brain surgeries take four or six hours. Using robotics and precision instruments, a great neurosurgeon will be able to increase the productivity and the accuracy of their surgeries. My big tech stock pick of '25 was Alphabet because it was trading at a P of 17. I just saw it as being ridiculously cheap because everyone thought OpenAI was going to put it out of business. My big tech stock pick for '26 is Amazon because I think where robotics really hit the rubber meets the road in terms of shareholder value is the collision of AI and industrialized robots. And there are 400,000 industrialized robots in the US and there's a million at Amazon. So Amazon has two and a half times the number of industrialized robots as the rest of the nation combined. But the notion that we're going to have someone in our house bringing our tea, a robot, I don't buy that at all. I think that automated robotics, the collision of advanced manufacturing in China and using AI with robotics, will yield tremendous advantage. Amazon is saying they're going to double their largest business, which is their retail business, by 2032 without an incremental hire using robotics, industrialized robots. And they were early. They made an acquisition 10, 15 years ago of a robotics company called Kiva. But the notion that there's going to be a robot bringing me my tea here, oh, that's [__]. The scary thing for me that I'd want to know more about is weaponized industrialized robots as warriors because I wonder, you know, there's just... you can go some weird places. But again, I think AI and robotics, yes. This notion that we're going to have robots serving us our food or in our house, I don't see that.
It's interesting because, well, I guess one could argue that we already have robots in our houses, but they just don't move. So the quite the leap really is, would you allow a robot to move through your house? Because I mean, a Hoover is a robot. A fridge is kind of like a robot, especially the smart fridge. One could say a TV is a robot, a smart TV, but the difference is they don't move through our house. Or would we allow the Hoover to move itself? And then once we allow that, would we allow it to potentially bring us something?
Yeah, I get it. I just don't... the stuff I've seen on actual application of these robots, and keep in mind these individuals, the job of the CEO now is, it used to be to underpromise and overdeliver. Now it's to overpromise and underdeliver and create a vision that creates cheap capital so you can pull the future forward. My understanding is three years ago we had a million autonomous Tesla taxis on the road and that did not happen. In 2016 Musk said, or 2017, there was going to be autonomous driving was two years away. So their job is to predict a very exciting future. I also think Musk in particular is very good at saying, 'Look over here,' as he stuffs a rabbit into a hat. I mean, Tesla is an automobile company, so he's got to create a story to justify its 155 times earnings when most automobile companies trade at 10 or 15. So it's robots, it's space, it's connectivity with AI and autonomous and robots. It's constantly look over here because I think it's very difficult to justify the valuations he's raising money at. So, and to be clear, he as much as anybody is able to pull that vision forward. He's launched... 90% of the rockets sent into space have been by SpaceX. But this is a company that's trading, that has $16 billion in revenue with 8 billion in profits, and it's going to go out in its IPO at a projected valuation of 90 to 110 times revenues. When Google went public, it went out at 10 times revenues and it was growing 10 times as fast. So, what is this? The key attribute of an innovator right now is storytelling. And that is to make sure the promise is way ahead of the performance such you can access cheap capital and pull the future forward. But a lot of this stuff I find is a lot of jazz hands.
He's always, he's, you know, he's often known for being wrong about his timelines. But he does seem to deliver magic to the world.
The best product in my mind, the two products that have changed my life from a technology standpoint, most underrated product is AirPods. If AirPods alone, you know, Tim Cook just stepped down, were its own product, it'd be a Fortune 50 company. I think it's... I don't even think it's technology. I think it's the most profitable, ubiquitous piece of jewelry in history. I just walk around with them in my ears now, right? And then the best product I think of the last few years has been Starlink. I just think it's absolutely... I've done podcasts from planes. I can talk to my sons on FaceTime. That product is, you know, all airlines are flying the same tin can, same routes, same bad food, a real point of differentiation for them, and also in maritime. I think Starlink is the best tech product. So, power to him. When they go public, is SpaceX an amazing company or is it overvalued? The answer is yes. Two can be true at the same time.
What do you think of Tesla? Because for me it's magic. I don't think people in Britain realize this or other parts of the world, but for me, the first time I got in the Tesla that I got in LA and pressed the location and took my hands off the wheel. All I had to do is occasionally look forward, which they're removing now. And it took me three and a half hours to Joshua Tree without any intervention.
And the safety record in it is safer than if I had driven myself there.
It's just magic to me. And then when I watched this, the space rockets come down and be caught with the chopsticks. Incredible. How this is just magic. Incredible. And so when he... I've got to be honest, when he says that these Optimus robots are going to be... I go, do you know what? He's delivered a lot of magic in the past that no one would have thought possible. Can you even imagine 10 years ago him saying that, what people would have said if he said, 'We're going to launch this massive sort of 70-foot skyscraper into the air and then we're going to catch it on chopsticks.' Staggering. Incredible. And then we're going to relaunch it again and then we're going to catch it again. You would have gone, impossible.
Edison of our generation. But you asked about Tesla. I bought a Tesla. Incredible product, far superior to anything on the market. He deserves credit for inspiring the EV race, which will be good for the environment. But the reality is everyone's caught up. The fastest growing automobile company in history is BYD. BYD is basically 80% of a Tesla. Some people would say 100% of a Tesla for 40% of the price. If there wasn't a ridiculous tariff war right now, BYD I think would be the number one EV in the United States. It's eating Tesla's lunch. In addition, what I think is going to happen about Tesla, credit where it's due, changed the market, inspired the EV race, good for the planet. But when you look at its valuation right now, I think what you're going to see is when SpaceX goes public, there's a lot of money in the market that wants to get some of that Musk... what you were talking about, this guy is incredible. I don't care how expensive it is. I want to invest behind Elon Musk. I get it. That money is about to come out of Tesla, which people are finally figuring out is just a great car company that should be trading at 30 times earnings, not 150. And it's going to go into SpaceX. So, I think the boost, the retail surge in SpaceX you're going to see, and the valuation they're planning to go out at is just extraordinary. Some of that is going to come at the cost of Tesla. I just think people are waking up to the fact that Tesla's a great auto company. It should be trading at about a fifth of the valuation it is.
Now, on that point, what jobs do you think will be impacted by AI? I've heard you talk about logistics and transport. I think London have just announced that Waymo and Tesla's full self-driving technology are on the way. They've greenlit Waymo, for example.
I'd hate to be a truck driver. To me, a long-haul truck driver is the first place. Trucks can drive between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. when there's no traffic on the road. I don't think it's a very good job. What's interesting about, or one of the things interesting about truck drivers, it's the biggest employer of non-high school grads in America, of non-high school graduate males. It's the biggest employer. It's actually one of the two or three, I think, biggest jobs by number of people in the United States. I would think within 10 years we're going to have very few long-haul truckers. Obviously, customer service, it feels like that will likely go away.
Yeah. But where I see job destruction in my world is that I used to, anytime I got an agreement from anybody, an advertiser for a contract, an employment agreement, whatever it is, I'd send it to my lawyer and say, 'Can you review this?' And because the bills, there's latency in the bills, it probably cost somewhere between 400 bucks and 2,000 to review every contract, right? Because I'm a narcissist and I think I signal by having a name-brand law firm. And so they hire some kid at 80 to 120 bucks an hour and they charge me 4 to 500. Right now I say to the person in charge of that project, and they say, 'Well, I'm sending the contract review to our lawyer.' I'm like, 'No, no, no, no. Put the agreement, describe what we're looking for, ask Claude or ChatGPT to pretend it's a $1,200-an-hour lawyer, an employment lawyer or contract lawyer, and ask them to review this document, redline it, and do the same thing at another LLM.' And then you make those changes. Congratulations, you are now a senior associate at a law firm. I probably spend $100,000 or $300,000 a year on legal fees across my organization. I think I'll cut that easily by a third this year. So, that's one way I see it.
But I have a podcast company, not nearly the industrial behemoth this thing is, but I keep asking everybody, how do we use AI to do this? And I find that they're getting better at it and it enhances our work, but we're still hiring. Again, I think it's a supplement. And if you want to protect against AI, it's pretty easy. I've said this for a while. AI is not going to take your job. Someone who understands AI is going to take your job. So, what I tell people is have a second screen. And that is always have a second screen open that has nothing but AI on it, LLMs. And anything you get digitally, port it into your AI screen and start playing with it.
Do you know that quote is so interesting because I've heard that quote a lot, that AI won't take your job, someone that understands AI will take your job. And as you said it then, I thought, you know, I was thinking about different roles in my team and my open roles that we haven't hired for, and I thought someone with AI will take your job, but they won't just take one job, they'll take five of those jobs. And so if you think about an analyst, right, we've got Molly downstairs, analyst for my investment fund. We were well intent on hiring maybe five analysts for my second fund. We only need Molly now because Molly's got two agents that she works with and two Mac minis, and she's got a setup that screens the inbound interest and also goes proactively into the market looking for new opportunities and pulls them back into her, runs them through a framework, scores them, prepares them for the IC. So Molly, enabled by AI, she's probably taken out five jobs. And this is, I think, even with the law example, that lawyer that's using these models probably doesn't need to have five junior lawyers now if they're really, really competent with them. And if you think about an executive assistant, so with executive assistants, we might, for our executives, would have hired maybe probably 10 EAs in total. Now, you really need one that is powered by AI to do all the travel, one that does all of the scheduling, and then one that meets people at the door. So, you need three versus potentially 10. And this is kind of what I'm saying. In most roles, but not all of them. There are still some roles when I looked at the org chart where I go, actually, you know, this sales, a lot of the sales we do from a media perspective are take someone for lunch, whine and dine, call them, relationships, pitch the deck. Those kinds of things seem to be completely untouched.
But let's continue down that path. You no longer need five Mollies than you'd want. That creates additional EBITDA margin. Creates a more profitable Diary of a CEO empire, means you can raise more money and then you go buy more podcasts or invest in them who hire more people. So, and it creates a faster cycle of money and new ideas. And when we were walking in here, you're talking about acquiring podcasting and you're getting into CPG and you're getting into different forms of media and you're driving growth and innovation. Will some people be on the wrong end of it? My mom was a secretary. She started as a typist. Typists went away. She oversaw the secretarial typist pool at a law school downtown and I worked in the mailroom in high school. But my mom realized that the hard part of her job was interacting with the senior-level executive and she became an executive assistant and she never made a lot of money, but she made good money. Realizing the typing was the easy part of her job. The hard part was managing some dude's life. Right. So accounting should go away. But what you're saying is there's actually more accountants this year than there was last year because accountants, the smart ones, are moving into wealth management and tax optimization, which keeps getting more and more complicated. So yeah, do you have an onus to update your skills to understand new? I remember when I first moved to New York and they hired an assistant for me and she came in and said, 'Oh, I don't use computers.' And I'm like, 'Well, you can't work here.' So it's like to say you're not going to learn AI or at least the basics on how to use it, it's like being in 1998 and saying, 'Well, I don't use PCs.' So I don't... Yeah, you got to update your skills. The cycle time's decreasing. A lot of people will find themselves on the wrong side of the trade. I have to force myself to use AI. I don't, you know, the part of your brain around understanding new technologies begins to die, right? I can no longer perceive a calendar. I can't tell you what I have next. For some reason, I used to be able to do fantastically... I could do a Scotsman accent, Stephen, like no one's business a few years ago. That part of my brain has died. And when I try to do an accent, it sounds like a dead language that twins speak to each other and it offends everybody. There's parts of your brain that die. And the part where you can understand new technologies or at least have the will to learn them starts to go away as you get older. I have to force myself to play with these new technologies. Everyone who wants to make more money or wants to hold on to their job should have the same onus to learn these new skills.
On that individual level, there's people listening now that want to make sure that they have the skills, their kids have the skills of the future, right? What are some of those important skills? I mean, you've got kids. What would you say to them?
I get asked that all the time. What is the skill? So, the honest answer is I have a view, but nobody knows. Do you realize 10 years ago in private schools, the biggest incremental investments in curriculum were two things? Computer science and Mandarin. How's that worked out? Like, thank God my kid knows Mandarin. I mean, said nobody right now, but they thought it was going to be computer science. And you could argue that hasn't worked out as well as everyone thought. I would say that the enduring skill is storytelling, and that is that your ability to look at data, create a narrative arc, and then communicate that story in a compelling way via all the different mediums, whether it's podcasting. I think you have to write well to be a great storyteller. But if you think about the most successful people in the world, at the end of the day, they're usually storytellers. The great CEOs, I read Jeff Bezos's 1997 letter to shareholders where he focused on those three principles and I'm like, take my money, right? I see even a guy like Alex Karp at Palantir walking around doing a live earnings call on his phone. It's very compelling. Jensen Huang, you know, when he does these giant Buffett-like stadiums where he gets up and he's like a rock star. That's storytelling. Technology is, I think, going to create an equalization among the product. Reverse engineering created parity among manufactured products. I think most technologies are going to converge and we're seeing that convergence in AI models. So I think the point of differentiation is relationships, right? Do I want to work with this person? Do I know about their kids? Do I like them? At the end of the day, I have three different law firms pitching me business, three different investment banks, three different CRM companies. Who do I have the best relationship with and who do I want to work with? So storytelling, it sounds very [__], but the ability to establish strong relationships with other sentient beings. I still believe that everything reverse engineers to biology. I think a certain fundamental understanding of the sciences, those seem to be pretty enduring. You know, my oldest said he wanted to be a marine biologist. I'm like, who are you kidding? You got seasick. I mean, at 18, what you want... You want them to be smart, good people, aggressive, support them becoming their own person, which I've had trouble with. I want them to be mini-me. And then helping them find something they're great at. But telling your kid, 'No, you need to go into this because this is where the future's going.' Nope, we don't know. We know the basics. I would want my kid to be able to write well, to be able to look someone in the eye, to be competitive. You know, I encourage them to play sports, to do chores, which they do none of. But other than that, I don't know. What do you think are going to be the skills of the future? I think it's really difficult to know.
I think what you said about relationships is really important. You said storytelling, and I think storytelling is a proxy of sales and persuasion. And whether that's persuading an investor to believe in you or people to come and work for you or customers to come and buy your thing. So I think storytelling and sales is going to be an enduring skill.
The skill that is the biggest threat that people are, young people are losing, especially young men, and this is a skill and it's hugely underrated, is the ability to endure rejection. And because of AI and because of these frictionless relationships that people are engaging in online, I think a lot of young people, especially young men, are losing the perseverance, endurance, willingness to hear no. Whether it's expressing friendship, whether it's applying for a job you're not qualified for, whether it's approaching someone and expressing romantic interest, I think a lot of young people, especially young men, I think they can have a frictionless relationship online and they're losing this sense of resilience and aggressiveness. So I think that skill, when I mentor young men, the first skill I try to reincorporate back into their life is what I call no. And that is I need you to go out. I need you to go put yourself in the agency of strangers, whether it's a church group, a sports league, a writing class, and I want you to make an overture, an expression of friendship. Hey, do you want to grab the Arsenal game or come over my house and watch it? And then most of these kids, when you ask them what they want, they usually want two things. The men I mentor, they want to move out of their parents' house and they want a girlfriend. And so once we do the friend approach, then I say, 'Okay, find someone you may be potentially interested in. Ask them out for coffee.' And this is the goal. The goal is no. Because what's going to happen is you might get a no. Probably going to get a no. And then I'm going to call you the next day and I'm going to say, 'Are you okay?' And the answer is going to be yes. Is he or she okay? The person who said no? Yeah, they're fine. Because... And I'm boasting. The secret to my success is rejection. I ran for sophomore, junior, and senior class president of my high school. I lost all three times, and based on my track record, I decided to run for student body president where I went on to get this lose. Never bothered me. I mean, I mourned and I moved on. Every entrepreneur, how many nos have you gotten?
Oh, [__] hell. Yeah, more so than anybody.
I mean, so any person you look at and think that person has made more money than I would have thought, or any person who's hanging out with someone much higher character and hotter than them, has one thing in common. They either have very rich parents or, more likely, they're comfortable with no. So, and unfortunately, I think young people, especially young men, are becoming less and less resilient to no. Apply for jobs you're not qualified for. Apply to graduate programs you shouldn't get into. Approach people who you perceive as being cooler and hotter than you and express friendship and romantic interest. That is the key. You want to punch above your weight class, get out a big spoon and get ready to eat [__]. That is the only thing that is common across all great entrepreneurs who are self-made is they have the ability to mourn and move on.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It was inspired by listening to Adam Neumann on that podcast a couple of weeks ago. He did one with Rick Rubin, I think it was, and in it he tells the story of sitting in the back of the cab with Masa, who's the owner of SoftBank, and he was going to ask him to give him $300 million. And Masa turns to him and says, 'You're just not ambitious enough.' And he says by the time that 23-minute cab drive had finished, Masa had offered him $4 billion and he had signed a little napkin thing that Masa had in the back of the cab. And that story and other stories like it have inspired, have made me realize that like some of the game in life and success is what I now call selling yourself long, and most of us go through our lives selling ourselves short. And I think in part because we don't see ourselves on an exponential curve. We see ourselves as a fixed state. This is who I am. This is what I'm worth. But you've almost got to like factor in your own exponential improvement. If you take you from 21 to now, how your intelligence and wisdom and connections have all compounded. But you would have sold yourself at the value of you at 21 years old. So I actually now think in every season of my life I've sold myself short. When I was 18 years old, I sold 20% of my company for 5K, $5,000. And then I thought that was... I couldn't believe it. I was celebrating in my room at the time. I was stealing Chicago Town pizzas to feed myself. And then a couple of years later, I sold another 30% of my company for 300K and I thought I'd hit the EuroMillions, right? That company ran up and was on the stock market for many hundreds of millions many years later. I thought, God, I've sold myself short my whole life. So assume I'm doing the same now. And if I assume that, how... what would I say? What opportunities would I go for? And I think that for me, that applies...
apply to everybody. I think it's self-fulfilling.
Yeah. There's something about imagining where you want to be in five years, outrageously, and reverse engineering back. But the moment you took that 300K, you really needed it. I mean, that was so it's a function of your opportunity set and what's actually the market says to you. I think pricing is a signal. I struggle with pricing, and what I tell whenever we're writing a proposal or okay, whatever I get back, I'm like, okay, increase the pricing 30 or 50% more because pricing is a signal, and it's you can always take the price down, and the client, the person will always come back and ask for the price down. But I mean, quite frankly, and this is sexist, I think men are better at imagining an unrealistic self, and women are more measured.
And I think that's one of the things that has held back women as entrepreneurs, and the fact that not as much capital has been available to them because the people allocating capital have been white dudes from Stanford or Harvard. 40% of VCs are from two schools. I think it was Charlie Munger who said someone who has a crazy vision of their own potential, that's stupid and obnoxious. His attitude was never bet against that person because occasionally they're right. And so for we talked about Musk, for a guy to think I'm going to raise so much money and command technology that I can be responsible for 90% of launches and control 70% of the Earth's low orbit satellites. That's pretty arrogant. So yeah, I agree with you. And you know it. Let me put it this way: if you're going to err to the upside, because the market will bring you back on its own.
That's so true. Um, Sam Altman has been in all the news lately, in part because of this article that the New Yorker did, two reporters there, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz. Um, which was this article, and then he responded with this blog post here two years ago. I thought Sam had a really good brand because he was out in Congress. He was saying this tech, you know, he was asking for regulation. It seemed it has turned unbelievably quickly, unbelievably fast.
Well, we've said this before, he's a proxy for all of AI. I think the greatest brand destruction other than the US over the last 18 months has been AI and also Sam Altman. But we keep falling into this trap over and over, and that is something happened through the 70s, 80s and 90s, and that is America used its heroes used to be athletes, government officials and actors, and then there was a dramatic decline in attendance to religious institutions. But people still have really big questions and want sort of an authority or a godlike figure. The closest thing we have to religion is technology. Most people don't understand it. It has a mystical feel to it. I have no idea how my phone works. I can ask it anything and it comes back with a relatively authoritative answer that I trust. Similar if I was talking or praying. Like most of the time when we're on AI, we're kind of praying. We're sending a question into the echo to a being thinking it's smarter than us and it's going to come back with an empathetic, loving, correct answer. So the new Jesus Christ was born in the 90s, and that was Steve Jobs. And he was taken from us early, like Jesus Christ. The idolatry of innovators has absolutely gone crazy. And the new Jesus Christ, if you will, are these tech CEOs. And here's what we fail to understand: they do not have our best interests at heart. They are not concerned with our emotional well-being. They are not going to comfort us when we're older. They are there, and they play a key component in capitalism to do anything that is required to get their earnings up one cent per share every day. And they will make incremental decisions that justify the harming and self-harm of teen girls. Sheryl Sandberg, the weaponization of our platforms to make the coarsening of our discourse, Mark Zuckerberg, I mean, the radicalization of young men, the people running YouTube, we keep thinking that the newest tech CEO is going to save us, that this guy cares. Sam Altman was the gay son we all wanted. Like super nice, super friendly, hushed voice, 'Well, senator, I'm worried about that as well.' Right. These guys would sleep with their cousin for a nickel. That's their job. Their job is to increase earnings. They're not here to save us. We're supposed to elect people who put in guardrails for them. So everyone is saying or asking me, can we trust Sam Altman? I'm like, no. And we shouldn't have to. We should have regulators putting in guardrails on AI. We should be testing these things. Government agencies should be testing these things. We should be ensuring that these technologies are not used to surveil Americans, right? That we would still have cartoon characters on cigarettes marketing to 12-year-olds if we hadn't put in place regulation. And the tobacco executives would claim that they weren't marketing to young people. Ford would still be pouring mercury into the river if we didn't have an EPA and regulation. So Sam is doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing. The latest hero that's going to save us is Dario Amodei. We've decided he's the good guy. Now the villain's journey in tech is the same. Some compelling person we think is a wonderful guy, and it's almost always a guy, occasionally a woman. You know, we need to do better gender balance. That was Sheryl Sandberg in the workplace. And then we find out that they are doing their job, and that is doing anything they can legally to increase shareholder value, regardless of whether it prevents a tragedy of the commons or not. And then we get angry at them. The journey from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader gets shorter and shorter, but they all follow the same path. And then 18 months later, we realize that they too will say and do whatever they can to try and delay and obfuscate regulation. And that sometimes when we don't have a government with a lack of domain expertise, with a lack of insight, with people who are a cross between The Walking Dead and The Golden Girls and don't understand these technologies, that when these technologies are allowed to run just free with no regulation, they do bad things. So Sam Altman is the latest person we've discovered as Darth Vader, who's gone to the dark side. It happens with all of them because they're doing their job. We as citizens aren't doing our job, and that is we're not putting in place elected officials that regulate these companies. So yeah, can we trust Sam Altman? No. But we shouldn't need to trust him. We should be able to trust that we have smart elected officials that will regulate these companies.
Did you see this article he wrote in response to having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house?
I read this article without reading it. So there's been death threats on his life. And let me be clear, there's absolutely no justification whatsoever for this. And it needs to be... I don't even like it when people yell at JD Vance when he's skiing with his family. We don't want to be that nation. In the West, if you're operating within the confines of the law, which Sam is, he deserves to live in peace. It is sad. Do you realize in the US now there's more people working in private security than there are cops, really? Because there's always going to be a number of people who are likely, I don't know about the perpetrator here, who are mentally ill and who will find an excuse. Essentially, the makeup usually of these perpetrators or these criminal actors is they're usually young men looking to restore their social capital through what they perceive as a historic act of violence against a famous person. This has gone on for a long time. He's now famous. I don't think it's fair. I've seen some people try to equate AI's dangers as if these acts of violence are somehow justified. They're not. There's no justification for a healthcare executive being executed in the streets. There's no justification for violence against Sam or attempted violence against Sam and his family. I think it's young men with a lack of opportunity, mental illness, and unfortunately access to firearms everywhere. But it's always happened. I don't make the connection that somehow it's more justified. I think famous people, one in three presidents has been shot at.
So the more famous you get, quite frankly, the more personal risk there is because someone is going to decide that taking you out for whatever reason is going to restore their social capital. Actually, if you look at assassination attempts and violence, it's actually gone down. But these stories are cinematic and very interesting and they get a lot of attention. But I think it's a shame we live in a society, especially in the West, where they have to endure that kind of risk. One of the really most lovely moments I've seen, I don't know if it was the Danish or the Norwegian prime minister who stepped down, they applauded and he got on a bike and rode home.
I thought you can't do that in the US. You know, Obama's kids still have Secret Service protection.
So there's definitely something I, quite frankly, blame it on big tech that tries to convince people that this person is their enemy and this person is evil. Sam's not evil. I don't know him personally. I sat next to him at this party I went to, but he's doing his job. Quite frankly, we're not doing ours.
Do you think he's a nihilist? And I don't really know the definition of the word nihilist, but I guess it's someone who believes that life is essentially meaningless.
I think there's a nihilist vein running through big tech where a lot of them have go bags. They have a plan for if things get real. If there's a zombie apocalypse or there's a revolution or there's a massive pandemic, they have definitive plans and they've spent tens of millions of dollars. They meet their pilots at Oakland airport. They get on their Gulfstream 650. They fly to New Zealand, to Auckland, and they have a bunker built out.
Oh, there's a lot of them.
There's a lot of go plans amongst the wealthy. And sometimes it's not as dramatic. Sometimes it's just a home, nuclear attack, cyber attack, revolution. But I would say amongst billionaires, I would bet conservatively one in three have some sort of go plan. And that's nihilist. And also, to a certain extent, I think wanting to be an interplanetary species is a little bit nihilist.
Also, you know, if they're saying that in the future people aren't going to have jobs and there's robotics and there's this AGI, this superintelligence which is going to be smarter than everybody. And even if there was a 1% chance, a 1% chance that these doomer predictions around AI could come true, I would stop. A 1% chance of humanity sort of self-imploding or destroying itself. Wouldn't a rational person stop?
Well, okay, you're Oppenheimer. It's going to take three million American deaths to invade Japan. Japan will not surrender. And you've been charged with splitting the atom. There was much more than a 1% chance that our ability to split the atom and then show we would use it against a civilian population would result in the end of the world. Should he have stopped development of it? So a lot of scientists, nuclear scientists, killed themselves. They committed suicide because they were convinced once we'd split the atom and used it against civilians, it was the end of the world. It was just a matter of time before we all were using nuclear devices. So I think you keep moving forward. And nihilism, where nihilism impacts these people. Let me go back to the go bag. I talked to one of these people. He outlined his plan for me. Right.
Yeah. Outlined his plan. His plan B if things get really ugly, right? And my view was, okay, boss, let's play this out. Something happens. There's an event. It's too dangerous to stay here. You meet your pilots at the airport. I mean, things really get real. People scouring for food. People become feral. Like, you don't think your pilots are going to kill you and your wife? Like, what do you think's going to happen? You don't think the people in New Zealand are going to be like, let's go take the rich guy's? Like, it strikes me that these are such misallocated efforts and capital that if you're really focused on your own future, whether you're wealthy or not wealthy, that your resources and your talent should be allocated towards trying to make this place a little bit more habitable, not trying to colonize Mars, not having a go bag. And this is part of the problem with the 0.1%. There are 900 billionaires in the United States and I would imagine 300 of them give money. They're responsible for 20% of all political donations. And that 20% number is misleading because they can be more strategic. So unions are big givers, but they just give money to whoever's pro-union. So it's not that strategic. Billionaires can allocate capital to a specific issue, really ramp it up. So they have a disproportionate amount of control over our elected population. And the problem is the 0.1% are not invested in the health of America. Why? They don't have to put up with TSA lines. They fly private. They don't have to put up with shitty healthcare. They have concierge medicine and access to the best medicine in the world. They don't have to put up with 40% of third graders can't read or write. Their kids go to amazing schools that spend on average $75,000 a year on their kid versus $15,000 at a public school, $10,000 at a public school in a low-income area. They don't need police. They have private security. Where I live in Soho, there's no homeless. As far as I can tell, there's no crime. There's no cops. There's cameras everywhere and private security everywhere. My point is, they are no longer invested in the well-being of America. They've totally dissociated from the investments required to make America a better place because they're sequestered from it. They're no longer invested in the well-being of America. And what I find strange about this nihilism is that these individuals think that they are no longer as invested in the well-being or the safety of the world. I think that's very unhealthy.
These are some of the most concerning conversations I've had. So, like one of the things that happens when you have a podcast and you, you know, interesting people come on and you start hanging around with more interesting people and more powerful people is you get a world, you get little peeks into new worlds that you didn't know existed. You kind of get to see behind certain curtains. And I remember having a particular conversation in London at a kitchen table where someone was describing one of these AI CEOs to me and basically making the case that they believe there's a roughly 10% chance, I think they said seven if I'm not misunderstanding, percent chance that it will result in the end of the world, some sort of catastrophic event. But they really didn't care because they think that being the person that summoned this new intelligence amongst us was probably more consequential than whatever happens. And like, if I wasn't privy to, again, hearing this secondhand from someone I know who knows this person extremely well, I know he knows him extremely well because they hang out. Him telling me that, I wouldn't have believed this. I would have thought that's nonsense. I would have thought to myself, you know, they must be kind because they have kids and they're, you know, but actually now I very much believe what you're saying about this nihilism where I don't actually believe they give a damn. Some of them, I actually don't believe some of them give a damn. I actually think some of them are playing a game and they're playing a video game with our futures.
Or the incentives. Look, in the United States, when I was growing up, my dad's boss had a slightly bigger house and he drove a Cadillac and we drove a Gran Torino, but we were members of the same country club and his house was a five-minute drive away. And maybe my dad's boss got to fly business class and we flew coach. The delta in having money, having a decent, you know, having a middle-class life and an upper-class life was like this. Now the delta is this. Let's look at air transportation. Flying on Spirit Airlines is a humiliating, dangerous experience. United Airlines: economy, economy comfort, economy plus, business class, first class. Oh, wait, that's not enough. Let's go to private. There's charter. There's fractional. There's a Cessna Citation. There's a Bombardier Challenger 300. There's a Global 650. Now there's a new G7. The delta in your life, in your healthcare. My mom was very sick when I was very young. And when I think about how humiliating it was for the two of us having her endure cancer when we were underinsured, it was a devastating, traumatic, humiliating experience. Now, if I need, I take Lunesta when I travel because I have trouble sleeping. I have a medical concierge company. They get me the drug delivered within two hours to my house. I have NAD treatments. They arrange for someone to come to my house when it's convenient for me and do it in my living room. I can text my doctor. I have a medical kit with all these things in it. If I'm abroad, I can text my doctor and say, 'My son's not feeling well.' They FaceTime me. I open the kit. They can tell me exactly what to do. The healthcare I am receiving right now, I have my blood taken every three months. They send it to some lab in Norway with PhDs who can tell me that I have less than a 7% chance of any cancers as evidenced by a lack of whatever it is, antibodies, the cancer cells. The healthcare now for the 1% is dramatic. And it's all the same thing. The bottom 99% of Western societies are essentially being optimized and monetized to make the life of the 1% just unbelievable. The life you can lead in the 1% is so dramatic and so incredible. Broader selection set of mates. Your kids have better healthcare, better educational opportunities. You have influence. People want to know you. So the incentives to not be rich but to be very rich are so incredible. And the way you get very rich is through stock options typically in technology that I think the incentives are so great that people will make incremental decisions and ignore the fact that, oh, one in 18 girls who are self-harming in the UK cite Instagram as a reason for that. Well, let's fund research that maybe creates some doubts because once I become a billionaire, I'll be a better person. And they're getting so much criticism and so much shitposting and it's so competitive and there's fewer and fewer winners that become much bigger, right? It used to be five companies won and got hundreds of millions of dollars. Now one company wins and gets tens of billions. So you can see how incrementally this path to Darth Vader is pretty tempting. So I think they just get caught up in this competition and they lose all sight. Also, my co-host on the Pivot podcast said something that was illuminating to me. I was walking down the street with my sister and a homeless person kind of stirred. There was a lot of homeless people because the homeless shelters turned out everybody, and she jumped out of her skin. And I said, well, that was a bit of an overreaction. He's not going to hurt us. And she said, 'You know, you're 6'2", 190. Easy for you to say.' You understand? Women walk around in a constant state of fear. And that fear is rational. And it really struck me. And then Kara said, 'These guys don't understand anything about victimization because they've never been victims. They're traditionally white males who have grown up in upper-income households and they've never really understood what it's like to be a victim.' So they don't put in place the safeguards. It's so competitive that it's just easier for them to give money, some strategic money to key people and ensure that they're not regulated such that they can get to be billionaires because all the incentives are do whatever is required to win. Sam Altman isn't going to be remembered for being a good or a bad guy. He's going to be remembered for the guy who either was the number one AI company or blew it. That's what he's going to be remembered for. And right now he's blowing it, it appears, right? But people are going to look back and say, 'Well, he didn't go public. Anthropic ended up being worth more. It was kind of a disappointment financially, but he was a good guy.' That's not what he's going for. And quite frankly, that's not what our society rewards.
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I think your assessment of AI in terms of it creating more opportunity than it destroys is accurate. I also think that in the near term, all of our lives are going to be quite different. I spend a lot of time on this podcast. We've spoken to a lot of the big CEOs from AI companies and tried to parse through this, and I've never really gotten to a solid conclusion of what the future looks like. But do you have a case for the future where this technology is the first that actually delivers on the promise of making us more human? There's talk about loneliness. There's talk, you know, algorithms are going to get more attentive. But I have this thesis that potentially, you know, social networking said it's going to connect us and make us more human. That's kind of the narrative of all these tools. But maybe this technology renders us only useful for that which humans can do, which is the relationships thing you were talking about and connection and being out touching grass with our friends and family. Is there a utopia?
Just with social media, it has some real upsides. I would argue at this point Meta is actually a net negative. It's, I think, done so much damage.
But with AI, there's a lot of upsides. A really encouraging piece of data I saw is that when you spend time on social media, it takes you to the extremes. The algorithms see money and more ad revenue in figuring out if you're conservative or liberal and then demonizing the other side and tickling your senses. Right.
Yeah. I'll get served a video of Ted Cruz or Viktor Orbán looking like an ass because I'm a progressive and that makes me happy. And then they elevate content of some progressive, of AOC calling out somebody and I start to hate the other side. What they're finding with AI is it's actually people who spend more time in AI, it's actually moderating their views because AI is about taking the median or the average of every piece of data. Also, do you notice how nice AI is?
'Great question, Stephen.' You know, no matter what you say or how stupid it is, it won't say, 'That's a really stupid idea, Stephen.' It'll say, 'I can understand why you're asking this question.' And generally speaking, because it looks for the median of things, it looks for the average. What is the most often used seventh word after these six words are strung together?
That it's pushing people towards the middle. It's actually having a moderating effect, which I find very encouraging. I think old people in senior care who maybe have lost family members or don't have a lot of relationships in their life, I can see AI characters playing a big role in their life. I've believed for a long time that the biggest danger of AI is not weapons, it's not income inequality. We voted for income inequality or contamination of our elections. I mean, all of these things are big issues. The biggest downside of AI in my view is loneliness. And that is, and we talk about this a lot, AI is convincing people they can have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen with an algorithm. Why go through the effort of having friends when you have Discord and Reddit? Why go through the hassle of getting a job when you can make money on Coinbase or Robinhood supposedly? And why would you go through the effort of trying to have a romantic relationship when you have lifelike synthetic porn? And the young male brain, I think, is especially susceptible to this. Men aged 20 to 30 are spending less time outdoors than prison inmates. 42% of men 18 to 24, and we talked about this on your last show, have never asked a woman out in person. So people are starting to believe they can have a reasonable facsimile of life. And what they need to know is that 40% of the S&P, our economy, is trying to sequester you from the most important and rewarding thing in your life, and that is your relationships. So my prediction for America is we will never be as prosperous. Incredible prosperity, incredible economic growth, and massive loneliness, depression, anxiety, and obesity.
I wanted to get your POV as well on all this war stuff that's going on over in the Middle East. What you thought Trump was trying to do and actually what happened because, you know, he's talking about, oh no, we said it would be six weeks, it's five and a half weeks, everything's going to plan. We're winning the war. And you're good at seeing through things. What actually happened in your view here?
I think that he was talked into by some of his security advisers and Netanyahu that his legacy could be restoring or making the Middle East more peaceful and being the president that severely diminished the capacity of what has been arguably the number one source of terror in the region and maybe even around the world for a long time. That this was his defining moment as a president to go in, that they were weakened, they were hobbled, and we had the military assets and the intelligence to go in and topple the regime, and he would be known as the president that liberated the Middle East. I think he bought into that.
Off the back of Venezuela.
Which was kind of a success.
Not kind of. That was arguably one of the greatest military operations in history, but it was a military operation. It wasn't a war. I mean, supposedly his guards didn't know what happened, and all of a sudden they were on the floor throwing up because there was some sort of crazy radiation or radio waves. Not a single American soldier killed, lifted him out. I mean, that was an incredible operation. I think he got drunk on that macho and that success and thought, well, I can do the same thing. And the problem with wars is that the enemy has a say. And what we have found since, I think a lot of our leaders believe that wars could ultimately, if you have a bigger army, will result in unconditional surrender on the other side. And there really hasn't been unconditional surrender since World War II. And all the enemy needs to do, whether it's the Viet Cong or the Taliban or the IRGC, all they need to do is survive and they win. In addition, I would describe the war as being operational excellence and strategic incompetence. I actually believe there was justification and some merit to the idea of a military operation that tried to take advantage of a weakened Iran whose air defenses were down to take out the IRGC or at least maybe provide cover for a revolution against the IRGC, to diminish their navy, diminish their nuclear capabilities, diminish their missile launch capability. I think there was real justification for that. The problem was the strategic incompetence here: not enlisting some European allies, not briefing Congress, not coordinating with Gulf allies, not recognizing the game theory around what happens if they start firing at ships in the Strait of Hormuz. It just was strategically incompetent. And now we're in a situation where we want to diminish their nuclear capacity. But the reality is if they can maintain an ability to turn off and on the Strait of Hormuz, that is probably more powerful than them having nuclear weapons. If you look at what happens if the fertilizer or the products that create fertilizer are further sequestered, you could have a mass starvation event around the world. And so we've essentially given them potentially a weapon that's more powerful than a nuclear weapon. And also we look like we have a bit of a glass jaw. We go in, we lose 14 soldiers. Tragedy for them and their families. The Russians are losing a thousand people a day and they don't show any signs of giving up. We look like this giant boxer who's the most skilled and biggest boxer in the world. We go in, argument over whether we should go in or not. But now if we withdraw, what incentive do the Iranians right now have to negotiate when every day this goes on, they look like the little guy that stood up to the evil America and Israel? I think this has been a disaster from a US brand standpoint. And I would argue that them blocking inbound and outbound traffic from Iranian ports is actually the way to go. But that lends itself to the argument we should have just continued with economic sanctions. But I have to own it. I thought military action was a good idea. I would argue, I apologize for the word salad here, that we've been at war with Iran for 47 years. Their first act to this regime in 1979 was to take 110 Americans hostage. 70% of the IEDs in Iraq were built in Iran. We have been at war with Iran for a long time. The question is whether or not this military action/war was worth it. And it looks as if it was so poorly executed on a strategic level that it has really diminished our brand. And we're now in the definition of a quagmire. If we leave, we look weak. And any nation we perform military action against just says start firing missiles at their neighbors. You know who summarized every war for the US right now, in this war, was Ho Chi Minh. When he was describing Vietnam, he said, 'They will kill a lot of our people. We will kill some of theirs. They will tire. They will go home.'
We killed a million people in Vietnam. We lost 58,000 and we left.
Right. So, Americans' tolerance for pain.
And I'm not suggesting that we should go on military misadventures. But this right now is no doubt turning out to be a giant win for the IRGC and a pretty severe loss for America that further alienates us from our allies and shows kind of our soft tissue around our willingness to actually finish the job. The other statement that kind of perfectly summarizes this war is: we broke it, now you fix it. We're leaving the world a much more insecure place, much more economically vulnerable. Gulf states thought that having a US military base was Kevlar and ended up just putting a giant bullseye on them. So, people are going to think twice before they cooperate with our US military by hosting bases. We appear to have not thought through getting our expats out of the Gulf, protecting the Gulf states. And I'm biased. I think the Trump administration will be known for criminal, for corruption and incompetence. And that incompetence is bubbling up. I watched a press conference of his last night where he said this, which kind of links to what you were saying.
They're delaying it because we don't know who to deal with. They are in, you know, they know who the leader is in this country. We don't know who the leader is in Iran.
And I just thought, do you know what? If I was running Iran, that's exactly what I would want. 'We don't know who to deal with, Trump. We don't even know who to negotiate with.' If he can't negotiate, he can't do anything. So I think the Iranians, potentially the IRGC, are saying, no, we don't even know who's leading, because then what can you do? You can't just keep bombing. That's not going to work. You also can't negotiate. So it runs the clock down. You can't affect regime change from the air. The Iranians are smart. They have distributed power.
So there's no kind of head of the snake to cut off. But also a lot of this is incompetence on our part. Do you know what we have done in the US to our diplomatic corps? We've absolutely gutted it. When Vance goes to Islamabad thinking he's going to do a deal, if you look at the history of every truce, of every deal, of every summit, 97% of the work is done before they hit the tarmac by diplomats who go through line by line and iron out and talk to each other and negotiate. We've gutted our diplomatic corps. Our counterintelligence operations have been gutted. So, we're kind of flying blind without instruments. And they think that JD Vance going to Islamabad for a TikTok moment where he tries to look presidential and then blames it on the IRGC, it's just not going to work. So I think a lack of investment in key areas, a lack of soft power, whether it's through cutting USAID, a lack of respect for our diplomatic corps and the engine room, like actually working with people and talking to them. I think this level of incompetence and arrogance is all bubbling up and you're right, they don't even know who to talk to. That's good. They don't even know who do we negotiate with. And by the way, you got to look at incentives. If I'm the IRGC, I'm like, all we need to do is survive. Yeah. Every day this goes on. And by the way, we're in the middle of what I'd call the first AI meme war. And that is Trump is communicating with truths on Truth Social and these macho videos and memes of him as Jesus Christ, but he's been bested by kind of the sloppy memes of the IRGC. Have you seen these Lego memes? They understand him better than he understands them. They are outstanding. And it's a group of 18 to 25-year-old probably people who look like this crew.
