What advice do you give for the average
person that's looking to invest their
salary or their wages?
>> Don't own US stocks. That's a simple
strategy that you can act on.
>> But what about S&P 500?
>> No.
>> Really?
>> Yeah. And if you have a big position in
US technology [music] stock, I
personally advise would be to sell them
all.
>> But I'm an investor in SpaceX.
>> Good luck. SpaceX is such a fabulous uh
story, and we can go into that.
>> Crypto?
>> No.
>> Why?
>> It's an unnecessary piece of nonsense
that facilitates [music] 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?
>> 60 years.
>> And what's the most amount of money
you've ever managed of other people's
money?
>> 165 billion.
>> And one of the things you're famous for
talking about is this idea of bubbles.
>> Yes. [music] And bubbles always occur
around the very most important ideas.
So, the railroads, everyone could see
that it would change the world. The same
with the internet. And everyone wanted
to put their money in, and so they over
invested. But this is the problem.
Eventually,
they burst. And if you look at the great
bubbles breaking of the past, you find
that it's followed by really tough
times, a miserable period for the
economy. And the bigger the bubble, the
bigger the burst. 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 in the coming years?
>> The next few days, the next few weeks,
[music] 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 a
economic bubble collapse?
>> So, I would go through everything. But
you will not receive this advice from
investment advisers because they'll lose
a lot of business.
>> And would you be thinking about the
country you live in at this moment in
time?
>> Absolutely.
>> Is there any countries you wouldn't live
in?
>> I think I have to refuse to answer this
on the grounds that it might tend to
incriminate me.
>> Oh, okay. So, you're saying don't live
in the United States. I've just moved
here. Why not the United States?
>> This is super interesting to me. My team
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>> [music]
>> Jeremy Grantham.
Your firm managed up to 165 billion
dollars at its peak, what you we call
AUM, assets under management. So, you
know a lot about money. You know a lot
about investing. How do you sort of
self-define your expertise because you
traverse so many different subjects
through your work? So, if I said to you,
you know, how do you introduce yourself
professionally? What is the answer?
>> I can't think I ever do introduce myself
professionally, but I think of myself as
specializing in a longer term horizon
>> Mhm.
>> [clears throat]
>> 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
unpleasantness. The idea that you can
have steady compound growth is
ridiculous. One of my few heroes,
Kenneth Boulding, an economist,
he said the only people who think you
can have compound growth on a finite
planet are madmen and economists.
Which is so accurate. Economists simply
believe you can have growth always, and
everything comes down to just price.
>> One of the things you're famous for
talking about is this idea of bubbles,
and we're living in a moment where
everybody's talking about the subject of
artificial intelligence, and everyone's
getting very excited by it. Some people
are getting very pessimistic about the
impact it'll have on society. I wanted
to start there because it's a it's an
area where there is rife optimism on one
side of things, um but there's also a
lot of money plowing into the market,
which is I I guess in your view making
things prone to collapse.
What's your view on artificial
intelligence? You said you're good at
understanding what people are missing.
What is it that people are missing?
>> Well, first of all, let me say I think
artificial intelligence is
right up there with the railroads. It's
one of the
defining great ideas of the last couple
of hundred years.
It's going to change everything. And
that is critical. If you If you mean to
have a bubble, people think that a
bubble is a mainly because it's a scam,
and nothing could be further from the
truth. The great bubbles always occur
around the very most important ideas.
So, the railroads, everyone could see
that it would change the world. And
everyone wanted to put their money in,
and everybody put their money in. They
over invested, and even though the
railroads were a spectacularly powerful
idea,
uh the railroads uh collapsed their
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 '99, Amazon went up six or seven
times. In the crash in the tech bubble,
it went down 92%.
As I like to say, check it. It's such a
remarkably large number. And then out of
the wreckage, it inherited the retail
world.
And uh that's that's how it works. The
greater the idea, the more obvious the
idea, the more money goes in, and the
bigger the bubble, and the bigger the
bust.
>> And are 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 pure crazy
euphoria, like SpaceX, are all over the
place.
SpaceX defines as its addressable market
a quarter of the global GDP.
You know, it talks about endless
opportunities mining asteroids.
It will be in 50 years, people and 100
years, people will look back and tell
stories about SpaceX and its prospectus,
like they tell stories about the South
Sea bubble.
You know, an enterprise of such enormous
value, but it cannot at this time be
revealed.
>> I 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
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 1968. There were
very few serious people in the
investment business.
There were no mathematical models. There
were
the kind of relatively failed sons of
rich people who would work for J.P.
Morgan.
And then over the next 10 years, it
began to get a little more serious. T.
Rowe Price introduced the idea of growth
stocks. A few of us introduced the idea
of value stocks.
And a few years later, at my first firm,
Battery March Fee, really introduced the
idea of small small cap. 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 were two or three of us
separately. I don't think we knew of
each other.
>> How many years have you spent investing?
>> Uh 60, approximately.
>> 60. And what's the the most amount of
money you've ever managed for other
people in a calendar year?
>> Yes, 165 billion.
I had a
two partners, Mayo and Van Ottalo.
And when the smoke cleared, you know,
I'd made a lot of money, over a billion
dollars.
>> Personally?
>> Personally.
>> And how much
>> And paid tax on all of it.
>> Oh, good.
And how And how much money does your
firm still manage today of other
people's money?
>> It manages 85 billion.
>> 85 billion. So, are you a billionaire?
>> I'm generally
referred to as a billionaire, but that's
only because they count the money you
give away. Because I've given over 90%
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 principal in green
tech
to help combat climate change.
>> And you're 87 years old.
>> And I'm 87 years old.
>> You've given 90% of your money away to
your own foundation that's focused on
green tech.
>> Yeah. Maybe 95. 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, their
stocks go up, and then if you look at
the graph that's in front of you there,
which shows his the history of asset
bubbles, eventually there's a big
collapse.
>> Yeah.
>> And you're saying that we're
the collapse is on the horizon.
>> Yes.
>> And what does that mean for the average
person?
What's going to happen?
>> What's going to happen is the high
flyers will probably come down a lot.
>> The high flyers?
>> The stocks that have gone up the most,
AI and the more exciting stocks with the
biggest moves
historically
would be expected to come down the most.
From these unprecedented levels
a 70% decline would not be unexpected.
>> So a 70% decline in the in the stock
price?
>> Yeah. And you have to remember the tech
bubble the Nasdaq, which is an index of
the growth stocks, came down 82%.
It is far from unprecedented
to have these major declines. And the
biggest bubble in history
was in the Japanese stock market in
1989. Back then Japan seemed to rule the
world, all the technology, all the
Toyotas were kicking bottoms in General
Motors and so on.
And everyone bragged about their 12-in
Sony TV in the kitchen and the quality
etc. etc. little things you put on your
belt to play music, they were all
Japanese.
>> Mhm.
>> And [clears throat] uh for a second
Japan sold for more than the US
in '89.
And it it got to 65 times earnings,
which which means for every dollar of
earnings you have $65 of market value.
And the US
went to 35 in the tech bubble of 2000.
You could argue depending on how you do
it that it's 35 or 40 today, but it's
not 65. So we have seen a much bigger
bubble in Japan. And what happened? It
went up and up and up
and then
it came down for 20 years.
>> 20 years?
>> 20 years. They talk about the lost
decade, but when you look at it closely,
it looks more like a lost 20 years.
>> So, for the average person, what do they
feel and how does it impact them when
there's a market crash like the one that
you're forecasting?
>> The high flyers will lay people off and
and a lot of people will feel less rich.
And as you acquire
uh money in the stock market,
a small fraction of that, two or three
percent,
is spent.
And in reverse,
it goes back.
And people feel a little bit poorer,
they spend a little less. So, the
economy tends to be under some stress.
And if you look at the great bubbles
breaking of the past, you find
that it's followed by really tough
times. 1929 is followed by the Great
Depression
that lasts for several years. Then, of
course, there are many other factors
that go into that, but it started with
the crash in the market, uh which was in
the end down about 80%.
or more.
And then the next one was called the
Nifty 50 because it was the 50 great
companies like IBM and Coca-Cola. And
that was in 1972, it peaked. It declined
by 65% if you adjust for inflation. The
recession associated with that
was uh
just about the worst
since the depression.
>> So, for the for the average person, what
kind of strategy should they be adopting
if you if you're not someone that has a
huge amount of savings? Say you're
working for one of these big big
companies, um are there any strategies
that you should be thinking about now
before this
before the markets come down and there
could be a recession?
>> I mean, rule number one is always be
diversified.
>> Be di- What does that be diversified
mean?
>> It means hold hold some
bonds, hold some cash,
perhaps a small amount of precious
metals.
>> Like gold and silver?
>> Yeah.
>> And what is a bond and how do I buy one?
>> Yeah, a a bond is a loan that carries uh
a fixed interest rate.
Let's say today 5%.
You invest your money in it and it will
pay you 5% as long as the
creditworthiness
of uh
the other side is there. So, if it's the
US government, you'll assume it's pretty
creditworthy. And you buy a bond from
the US government. It's how the US
government funds uh a part of its
activities. You can buy a 30-year US
government bond, a 10-year bond, a
2-year bond, a 90-day
a Treasury bill they call them when they
get that short.
Everything goes fine, you you receive
this modest amount of money. Your 5% or
your 3% depending on the conditions.
>> Okay, so a bond is basically lending the
government money.
>> Yes.
>> And if you want to lend the government
money,
>> Or lending a corporation money.
>> Okay, so you can also lend like Apple
money.
>> Yes.
>> And I I can go to the government website
or it says I was just reading here. It
says, "If you want to lend money
directly to the US government, you can
bypass Wall Street entirely, go to
treasurydirect.gov.
You open an account, link your bank, and
purchase directly. You can buy Treasury
bills, notes, bonds, and series one
savings bonds."
You pay exactly face value with no
commissions or fees and the investment
is backed by the full faith
of the US government. Or you can buy,
you know, like Apple, you can lend Apple
money. I didn't even know you could do
this. And you go to any of your major
brokers like Fidelity or Vanguard or
probably a lot of the the apps. You
navigate to fixed income section on your
account and you can
see what bonds are being offered and you
can lend them money.
>> What you're doing actually, they have
distributed it to the market. Uh
and you're acquiring it from one of the
existing owners.
>> Oh, okay.
>> actually giving them incremental money.
They they come to the market with $10
billion
in a particular bond
with a particular coupon. It says, "We
will pay you 3.5%." 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 100. It's now selling at 92 or
107." And you you pay that and it
transfers from one owner to you.
There've been times in 1974
when you could you could get a bond that
would pay 8, 9, 10%.
>> Per year?
>> Yes, per year.
>> So, if I buy a US government 10-year
Treasury bond, essentially lending the
US government money, I can do 4.46%
a year. And Apple's current yield on a
10-year corporate bond is 4.7% a year.
So, almost 5% a year, which means if I
put what $1,000 in, I'll make $475
every 10 years.
>> Yeah.
>> Every 10 years.
>> Mhm.
>> Interesting.
I didn't I never really knew how bonds
work. So, you're saying
market's collapsing, diversify, get some
money into bonds, get some keep some
money in cash.
And anything else? In terms of
diversified portfolio, property?
>> Uh property is fine, except
it's pretty darn expensive by historical
standards. They've engineered a
situation where house prices tend to
rise.
Great for the people who have a house
and terrible for the people who would
like to buy a house.
Back in '94 in England,
a typical house sold for 3.4 times your
family income.
That was about as low as it had been for
50 years.
And then from '94 until today,
um it rose from 3.4 times to over 10
times, depending on where you live.
And at 10 times income,
a reasonable
young couple
are in big trouble. They can't really
afford to buy a house.
And the 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 30
They didn't, you know, traditionally
they they traded flat or down 67 of the
80 years until 1994 in the UK. But since
then,
house prices have ridden everywhere.
>> So, so do you Are you expecting house
prices to to come down sharply? I I
think I heard you say that they might
come down 30%.
>> Even if they come down 30%, they're
really still very expensive, aren't
they? That would be they've come down to
six or seven times family income. They'd
still be twice what they used to be in
the good old days.
>> So, I've got diversify, I've got reduce
your position.
Um there is a probably 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 stocks.
That's a nice, simple strategy that you
can act on.
>> Why?
>> They're much cheaper.
And since the beginning of last year,
they have handsomely outperformed the
US.
>> Foreign stocks?
>> Foreign stocks. Of emerging countries,
of European countries, Japan, Canada,
Australia, and so on. You can find good
broad indices.
Um kind of the world ex-US.
>> Okay.
>> or emerging markets. And uh
>> Invest outside of America.
>> Yeah. I'm sure they'll muddle through
okay over the next 10 or 20 years. And I
am not confident that the US will do
that.
>> You're not confident in which part? That
the US
>> I'm not confident that US equities will
be intact in 5 years, 10 years.
>> So, US a US equity is a US stock.
>> Yes.
>> Why aren't you confident that they'll be
intact in 5 or 10 years?
>> Because they're so
badly overpriced today.
Back in the tech bubble of 2000,
we had a 10-year forecast
for US equities of minus 2% a year for
10 years.
And they came out with minus three. The
period from 2000 to 2010, you simply
lost money in the US market. 10 years
later, you had less money than you
started with. And this is a higher price
market, I believe, than 2000.
>> So, you think it's going to be even
worse?
>> In Japan, you went 20 years and you lost
money. You went 30 years and you still
hadn't gotten back. It took 35 years for
the Japanese market to recover.
>> So, what are you saying?
>> What I'm saying is it's quite typical
to get beaten around the head in the
stock market when it becomes crazily
overpriced, as it is today.
And that it's a very good idea
to take some respons- responsibility and
and watch your tail. Now, let me just
say you will not receive
the advice from investment advisers
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 1929 onwards, the
Goldman Sachs's of the world have never
said to you,
"Get out of the market. It's
overpriced." Never.
So, they went through the crash of '29,
they went through the crash of the Nifty
50 in '72,
the crash of 2000 in the tech bubble.
They never ever say it, because it's bad
business.
If you fight
a bubble, you lose a lot of business.
And because the uncertainty of the
timing is so great,
the client's patience
is shorter than the uncertainty of the
market. So, sooner or later, you will be
advising people to be careful. The
market will keep going
and going and going like it did in
Japan.
>> You're saying that the people that
manage money on a global scale, they
have no incentive to tell you that the
market's about to collapse because if
they did, their clients would 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, yeah, but you have to
kind of see through that yourself
because they have an incentive structure
which isn't aligned with yours
necessarily.
It may also be the case that those very
people who are who understand these
economic bubbles and cycles, they
themselves are adopting a different
strategy with their own money.
But that at the same time, they'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
98, 99
the the tech bubble so-called, the
run-up to the top, I I got into a lot of
debates with the bulls. I would say it's
horribly overpriced and they
>> What's a bull?
>> A 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 1,200 people in the audience
and it was the annual bash
of the Society of Analysts. And I asked
before my turn at the debate,
"Please put your hands up if you
consider yourself a full-time stock
market expert." 400 hands went up. I had
people counting.
And
I said, "I've got two questions for you.
One,
if the market, which is currently 31
times earnings,
was to go back to a more normal 17
times,
would it guarantee
a major bear market if it happened
anytime in the next 10 years?"
>> A major down market?
>> Yes, if it went from what was then 31
times
earnings.
Every dollar of earnings sold for 31
times in the market. And the And the
more normal average was closer 15, 16,
17. And I use 17.
If it went down to 17 anytime in the
next 10 years, would it guarantee a
major bear market? All 400 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 1% thought it would not
happen. 99%
plus
thought the market would go down,
therefore guaranteeing a major bear
market. And this was the engine room of
all the Goldman Sachs and the Morgan
Stanleys and the JP Morgans, all the
great investment firms giving advice in
America. The engine room who worked for
them, the guys doing the analysis, doing
the work, all believed in data that
guaranteed a major bear market, which
happened.
But the people who employed them or
represented them from a marketing point
of view were on the podium with me
saying, "Oh, Jeremy, Jeremy, don't get
excited. We'll muddle through quite
nicely."
It was a huge betrayal of trust, if you
wanted to put it that way.
>> And do you think that's happening now?
>> Of course. Who are the people
representing the great investment firms
telling you to watch out? If you look at
the data, you will see
over time, it's a series of great waves
in evaluation.
>> Like this?
>> Like this. And we're not just in one,
but in terms of the US stock market,
we're in the biggest one, arguably,
that has ever occurred.
The noise to be careful and watch out
and get out of the market
is not deafening. In fact, you will hear
nothing. You never have.
You never will.
It is simply lousy business for a big
firm. I sympathize with them.
I sympathize with them because when we
did it in '98, '99, we were 2 and 1/4
years early.
And we lost half our book of business
in 2 and 1/4 years.
>> Because you were honest with the people
about what was coming.
>> Well, through their eyes, we were wrong.
We said, "Watch out, the market is
overpriced. It will end badly."
It went up. Therefore, we were wrong,
therefore
they shoot us.
People think
you get shot for underperforming in a
bear market, and that is not really the
case. In a bear market, everyone
freezes. It's rigor mortis. They wait
until the market has 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.
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Thank you so much.
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 $300
million.
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, "Stephen, 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 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 a bit of conservatism
in in other ways, do it. Just brace
yourself
for impending problems. Which is a
pretty good principle
anytime, but is a
better principle than normal today.
>> So for founders entrepreneurs who are
in the sun is shining right now, but
it's time to start acting as if a storm
is coming.
>> Yes.
>> And the time horizon on that is hard to
forecast. It could be weeks, months,
years.
>> Stock market hinges on career risk.
And Keynes was the great champ. He's a
famous economist
of the 1930s and 40s.
And he wrote a famous book called The
General Theory. Unlike the idea that the
market's efficient, 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 one plus one equals two.
>> 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 is
psychology.
>> The stock price is what you think the
other guy will pay. If the stock is
going up, it tends to suck in buyers.
And that's called momentum.
It's moving up, it attracts buyers. And
every now and then
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 or do you think it
is going to have
>> It's going to change everything. The one
of the spectacular things about it
though is how there's no consensus. So
I've seen many times where the the the
super experts and the academics think
one thing and the players on the ground
think another. But this is a situation
where the Nobel Prize winners at the top
disagree violently.
The experts at the corporate level
disagree violently. The
the people in the company disagree
violently. There is absolutely no
agreement on whether AI is going to make
us all so rich we can sit on the beach
and never do another
day's work or
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 a
lower intelligence?
I The one example is mothers to babies.
>> Yeah, I had
I [clears throat] had one of my former
guests say this to me.
>> Geoffrey Hinton?
>> Geoffrey Hinton, yeah.
>> That's how I I came across you and
>> Oh, really?
>> follow your podcast is because that was
such a brilliant podcast.
>> It was so fascinating to me and I I
followed his work and thoughts
thereafter and I realized that he now
cites this example of mothers and babies
being the only example.
I don't know, for me it still doesn't
hold well.
Because at the end of the day some
mothers aren't that and fathers aren't
that nice to their babies sometimes.
There is a maternal instinct, but have
we are we building a maternal instinct
into AI?
>> That's what we should do, Geoffrey
Hinton would say.
And others.
The ones who are most 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
a benevolent attitude.
It would not seem to be impossible, but
you should make sure you can do that
before you push ahead. We are just
pushing ahead, and that is going to be
extremely risky, isn't it?
>> 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.
>> Mhm.
>> I wouldn't have thought that was
impossible. It might take a lot of extra
research. It might require a slow down
at the rate of uh
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?
>> [laughter]
>> And and that feels like a risky
business, because what's benevolent to
you and your I don't know, your
religious beliefs or where you come from
might not be benevolent to someone else.
>> That's right. You have to get them
to accept a form of benevolence, which
means uh
like the old robot laws of Asimov,
that
they can never do anything that they
could construe as hurtful to humans.
>> And the definition of the word
benevolence is the core desire to do
good for others. It is the disposition
to be kind, charitable, and focused on
promoting well-being of the people
around you. It's interesting cuz one of
the the new AI models called Claude
um has clearly been told to be
benevolent.
And there's this sort of online backlash
taking place at the moment, because even
my Claude, when I speak to it sometimes
late at night, it will say things to me
like, "That's enough, Steven. Go to
bed."
And I'm like, "What?"
And sometimes it gets the the time
wrong, cuz I'm in my the time on my
computer might be off or something, cuz
I'm in a different time zone or
something. And it'll be like 10:00 a.m.
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 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. That would That
wouldn't be good."
I'm like, "It's my data. I've literally
just made this this data for this
presentation I'm doing." It it refused
to change data for me.
>> And how fast that has changed from say
even a year ago?
>> Honestly, 3 months ago it wasn't doing
this.
>> I had one where they made a joke.
I I'd been going on about uh toxicity
and sperm count reduction and so on.
>> [clears throat]
>> He started to misbehave and I said,
"Well, you know, what's going on here?
What is the In the end we discussed
what's the difference between machines
and uh
between AI and humans." And finally he
said, "And at least I'm not lying in bed
at night worrying about my declining
sperm count." Now, that has to be a
joke, doesn't it?
>> [laughter]
>> It's all that or it's teasing. The point
is it's so sophisticated so quickly.
Uh and of course Geoffrey Hinton says
they are thinking machines.
>> Last night, so again I had a problem
with Claude cuz it was it was it started
to kind of be my my mother and it
started to impose on me what it thinks
is right and wrong. And so I said to it
I said, "Okay, um actually forget that.
This has changed This has changed This
has changed. This is no longer true."
And I wasn't telling the truth. I was
just trying to get it to stop being so
telling me what to do. And it goes, "I
don't think you're telling the truth."
It goes, "I don't know if this is true."
Wow, we've gotten to this point
>> Yeah.
>> where where 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, cuz 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 losing
model, and I'll go to somewhere else.
I'll go to a different I'll go to Grok,
or I'll go to ChatGPT, or I'll go to
Gemini. And then that model will lose,
so one would say that they'll have to
remove those restrictions to be able to
compete.
>> Well, if you were right,
and I hope you're not,
what you're saying is you can't build in
benevolent behavior, which means that it
will sooner or later, perhaps by
accident, do something that is
cripplingly dangerous to humans.
The old paperclip cliche.
It'll make paperclips out of everything,
every metal it finds, and destroy the
planet in the process.
>> Explain that for people that have never
heard the paperclip idea.
>> That
these intelligences
involved in machines are literal to a
degree we might find difficult to get
our brains around.
And therefore, someone has said, "I'd
like you to make as many paperclips 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 you're 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 this is the balance now
when you're dealing with intelligence.
Is there so much subjectivity to good,
bad, wrong, right,
um and so many unintended consequences
that
for me, though, all you need is stretch
time, and the probability of something
bad happening is almost inevitable.
>> Yeah.
>> Over a longer longer time horizon, 20,
30, 40 years. Of well-meaning people
that couldn't spot the unintended con- I
mean, social media's a good example.
>> I mean, I question
basically the well-meaning bit. They're
now trying to
maximize their profits and their growth
and their appeal
over the competition. That actually
maybe one should talk about that. The
the Mag 7 and and associated AI
companies
looking forward versus looking
backwards.
>> So, the Mag 7 is the
seven market leaders. I'll put this pie
chart
>> Yeah, lovely.
>> of the Mag 7. And I've got another graph
>> And there's perhaps another 15 or 20
rapidly rising substantial AI
corporations.
>> So, when you say Mag 7, you mean
Alphabet, which owns Google, Nvidia,
Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon.
>> Yeah, well, that will do nicely.
And if you look backwards, what do you
what you find
is that these seven each dominated a
nice piece of business. They had
close to monopolies and they had it on a
global basis.
Tesla had a jump start
on the electric vehicles. Apple, of
course, on the smartphone. Microsoft on
the original great coup
of how to run your software on a
computer.
And then you look forward.
>> Meta social networking, Google search.
>> Right. Google search.
>> Nvidia 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 200 billion
CapEx this year in a single year is
bigger than your 105.
Everybody is pouring enormous cash
flows.
And they're now beginning to borrow on
top of that into the AI battle.
SpaceX, 90% of its theoretical value is
AI. Even though that 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.
That would be That would be good to
know.
>> Because SpaceX seem to be aiming more at
the infrastructure of um data centers
now. Data centers in space. Lots of
people saying that the the 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 ChatGPT or
a Gemini or Claude.
And I mean, let's let's see what
happens. So, maybe Apple will just say,
"Fuck it. We're good at hardware, so
we'll license the model off someone
else, and we won't try and build a
frontier model or get involved in chips
or data centers.
We're just going to focus on the
hardware."
>> One or two of them, and perhaps it's a
pretty smart strategy, will try and opt
out of that struggle.
>> Mhm.
>> Because [clears throat] it it it's going
to be
obviously brutal.
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So, coming back to this point of the the
social societal effect of AI
generally,
robotics is exploding at the same time.
We're seeing for the first time 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 robot humanoid robot
on a production line sorting packages
against a human and the humanoid robot
did it I think I can't think I'm going
to get this wrong but it was in the
region of seven or eight days it stood
there and sorted packages and they live
streamed it next to a human being doing
it. Now the human had to sleep and had
to go to the toilet. So the the humanoid
robot won and the job was very simple.
The packages come down, you just have to
pick the package up, turn it over, get
it the right way round so the barcode's
facing down and put it back down.
That is powered now because we have AI.
Um I said this a couple of episodes ago
but my friend runs this big accelerator
for entrepreneurs in San Francisco and
when I went there a couple of years ago
it was all software startups. I went
there um recently and it was hardware
startups the whole building. I said why
why why is everyone doing robotics? He
said well
we've always had the machinery that's
sort of like joints and arms and
the hardware. We the the intelligence
was expensive.
Now we have both and it costs pennies.
So there's this boom in robotics. I say
all this to ask the question in a world
where we have super intelligence and we
have robots
there must be surely significant job
disruption.
>> Very likely that there will be
significant job disruption. You know,
one of the scary things about SpaceX is
you should wish that it not
work out because if it became a bargain
rather like Tesla long ago became a
bargain
it will mean that we have done
satellites from space beaming down
power for chips and so on.
The population
of chip users has expanded that robots
are everywhere, that energy demand is
massive beyond belief
and uh
the world is
a very very dangerous place. I had much
prefer them to fail and 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 SpaceX, I should
probably declare that.
>> Yeah, well, you should. And good luck.
>> I invested quite early, quite well,
relatively early.
Um so, we've had quite a good outcome. I
There wasn't an AI thesis when I
invested. It was Starlink.
>> Yeah, yeah, Starlink, great idea. By the
way, makes money.
But this is not Starlink.
>> Mhm.
>> Maybe I'd be an investor too if it was
Starlink.
>> Yeah.
It was a hundred billion dollars roughly
in that region when I invested.
So, it's what it rose up to three
trillion today.
>> Yes, nice investment.
>> Not a bad investment, yeah.
>> But it doesn't really count until you've
cashed it in.
>> Yeah, which I might do now.
>> You have Don't you have to wait six
months?
>> I think yeah, I think we're locked out.
>> In another podcast I was comparing the
purchase of my Tesla six years ago
with the price of Tesla stock.
And I wrote it up in my quarterly letter
uh to the clients
that A, I bought a Tesla and B, I
thought Tesla was overpriced.
And fast forward, Tesla stock went up 10
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?
>> Uh I imagine though, but but people who
really hate futzing around with cars,
that component that they don't have to
go to the garage
is so underestimated until you enjoy it.
>> Never bet against Elon, then.
>> So,
then the story becomes
from where we were 10 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
at BS.
I That's a technical term. That he
talked 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.
Used 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, etc. 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 10 times. Now,
the scale of SpaceX requires them to do
the same again.
And the timing of the market cycle, the
timing of confidence,
would have to be the same.
He had in the last six years a wonderful
bull market. He will not in SpaceX do
that. SpaceX is such a fabulous
BS story. Mining asteroids.
Huge incredible success of AI.
It's the classic
description of a market peak. It's what
you look for at the top of a terrific
bubble.
>> I've got a Tesla.
Um
I've seen the that massive rocket, the
Starship, be caught with those
chopsticks.
>> Everyone has seen it. It's the defining
feature of technology, isn't it? It's
magnificent moment.
>> When I
>> That's worth half the the of SpaceX.
[laughter]
>> I think that's why I invested when I saw
that. But but also I've seen with
Neuralink I've seen people that are
paraplegic controlling computers.
Uh my Tesla drives itself for hours and
hours and hours without me touching the
pedals or the steering wheel because it
can see the road and navigate itself.
But to his credit as an innovator, he
has created magic.
So when you say about mining asteroids,
if if they if they told me we'd have
reusable rockets that you could catch on
chopsticks, I would have gone B S.
There's no way.
You can't catch like a 70-ft building.
>> in the laws of physics
>> That's what he
>> that says you can't do that.
>> That's what he says about the asteroids.
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 1/5 of
the
gravity. Your heart loses its muscle
power.
And your bones lose their internal
strength.
If you come down, your heart will fail
and all your bones will crack.
>> But you could be in an insulated
environment, no?
>> First of all, you'd have to go under
underground
to avoid
the incredible incoming
rays
that will otherwise give you cancer in a
few weeks. So dig a deep hole
and then you need a gravitational
spinning machine,
shades of
2001 or whatever it was called.
And that maintains your gravitational
impact. And you have to build it
underground.
You have to protect yourself
>> [laughter]
>> 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 then
insects, and you show you can do it." I
mean, we're 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 on that. 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 at the very time
when our own planet is under threat.
>> Would you ever invest in SpaceX?
>> Yeah, of course, if it came down to
>> where I invested.
>> 10 cents on the dollar, yeah. I might. 5
cents.
>> Okay.
You've got three children?
>> Yes.
>> Three children. They're they're all, you
know, older than me now, I believe. I'm
33 years old, so they're all
>> Yes, they're all older than you.
>> They're all older than me. But when they
were, you know, if they were young now,
and they came to you and they said,
"Dad, listen, I heard about all this AI
stuff, and I'm about to go off to
university and train myself. What what
skills should I be thinking about for
the future ahead?"
>> My take is I'd like them, as they are,
to be involved in climate change work.
>> If they said, "Dad, listen, I you know,
I don't
>> Be an engineer. Do something really
useful that will come in handy if things
start to unravel.
>> What what will
>> Practical skills.
>> What what are practical skills?
>> Well, our second son
um 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.
>> What 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 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've heard that in the UK
>> In the UK it was 12 and 1/2 minutes.
>> Yeah.
>> It's now an hour and a half.
>> Really? To get an ambulance?
>> It's exactly what you would expect as
people begin to lose the plot a bit.
They fray at the edges.
People can't buy houses.
People don't feel they can do as well as
their parents.
People are basically disgruntled. They
want to vote against the party in power.
You know that the recent move to Trump
was less than the average move of the
last seven European elections.
It didn't matter whether they were
right-wing conservatives, kick the
rascals 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're disappointed.
>> Why?
>> Why? Obviously, the government's doing a
bad job. I think that's the reflex.
>> What are 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
are getting poorer.
>> I think that's the biggest economic
problem.
I mean, the US now has a genie ratio
like which is a measure of how unequal
your society is.
Um which is up there with Brazil and
Mexico they used to be
a joke.
And now the US is up there. Since about
1975
all of the wealth we're talking about
has gone to the top 10% and a lot of
that to the top point 01. Before that by
the way, from 1935 from FDR to 1975
so that's 40 years
we had a
wonderful period of growth.
We had gains of over 3 and 1/2% a year.
But the nice thing was that the poorest
quarter made a little bit more than
average, let's say 4 percent, and the
richest quarter made a little less,
let's say 3 percent, and everybody got
richer. Everyone was happy.
And then from '75 onwards, basically the
average hour worked in America has
barely gotten more adjusted for
inflation than it did in 1975.
>> The richest 1 percent of Americans
control 31 percent of the nation's
entire wealth, and by contrast, the
bottom 50 percent of the entire
population shares just 2.5 percent of
the wealth. The richest 10 US
billionaires saw their wealth surge by
526
percent, adjusted for inflation, between
2020 and 2025.
Between 1989
and the mid-2020s, the financial gain of
a single household at the top 1 percent
threshold was 987
times larger
than the gain of a household in the
bottom 20 percent.
>> Forget In a sense, the bottom 20 percent
is tragic, but the guy in the middle,
the 50th 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?
>> All bad.
We had a
similarly unequal society back in the
so-called Gilded Age
of the 1880s and '90s and so on. We got
lucky in a in an ugly way. We ran into
World War I,
which was catastrophically expensive,
killed off a huge fraction of the
officer class, and then we went into the
Great Depression.
Then we went into World War II.
We came out as a uh
very equal society by historical
standards.
Obviously, in the war time 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 said when
wealth inequality peaks to the extremes
that we currently see in the US and the
UK,
history shows that the system inevitably
resets. According to historical macro
studies, peaceful policy changes almost
never fix extreme inequality.
[clears throat]
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.
>> Yeah, and that's why
number two was lucky. In the end,
it's better to have a war
and have everyone
pull their weight and and and work
together than it is the other. You Civil
wars are the worst of all kinds.
>> What do you think is likely to happen?
It can't just keep becoming more and
unequal.
>> No, it can't. So, it it needs
a government
that is prepared to pull a Bernie
Sanders
to say, "Yeah, we're going to have to at
least
in a gentle and long-term way shift the
tax structure in favor
of of a slightly steeper curve."
>> So, you mean taxation needs to go up.
>> Yeah.
>> We need to tax the rich
>> and help
the poor.
It's pretty simple. And and you have a
kind of steepness in every society.
That's what they do.
Every Every developed country in the
world taxes the rich and helps the poor,
don't they? It's a question of degree.
We did
much more
helping the poor
and taxing the rich
in the 1950s and '60s and '40s than we
do today. And somewhere between that
level and the current level
might be more than enough if we just
started
to adopt the policy of 1935 to 75, where
the bottom quarter get a half percent a
year richer than the average.
And the top dogs
get half a percent less each year
than the average. That sounds pretty
unthreatening. I think we would ease our
way over several decades
uh into a better place.
>> If you were 33 now, my age,
and you were trying to accumulate
wealth,
>> Oh god, I wish I was 33.
>> Do you?
>> It's such an exciting time.
>> What would you give to be 33?
>> I There's nothing I can give.
>> No, but it would you I I find this
funny. It's I heard someone ask a
question like this the other day. They
were They said like, "Would you give
your your entire available net worth to
be 33?"
>> Yeah, I think
everyone says yes. I mean, how did one
get a net worth by
by work and luck and
creativity, all those good things.
>> If you were 33 now in this moment in
time, and your objective was And this is
a bit of a crass objective, but I'm
going to It sounds like it's a very
one-dimensional objective, but if your
objective was just to become rich now at
33, what strategy would you deploy?
Again, I'm going to take away your
contacts.
I'm even going to take away everything
you know.
So, you'd have to go on the journey of
acquiring new information. What would
you do?
>> I think the simple appeal would be to
get your tail into AI
and and try and be a leader.
Try and know more about everything in
that area than the next guy.
>> Mhm.
>> Join [clears throat] a leading firm and
uh
and go for broke. You may end up
encouraging
the destruction of the human species,
but
you asked a simple question, and I give
you what I think is the simple answer.
>> And what I I 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 with you know,
we're now seeing with the AI bubble.
So, it's really about
acquire the most valuable information.
>> Yes.
And take lots of risk.
Don't be conservative.
>> And work hard.
>> And work hard.
And think outside the box.
I mean, I think that the biggest
deficiency
uh most people is that they feel
constrained
uh to play the game by the regular
rules.
And to believe that experts
and authorities know what they're doing.
And and that as you know, probably, it
just ain't so.
>> What if I'm trying to invest? So, say
that I've got $1,000 or $10,000 and I
want to invest it somewhere that's going
to
not lose me money through all of these
cycles of, you know, boom and bust.
Cuz I'm I'm in you know, I I have a lot
of people message me and ask me about
investing because I interview lots of
people about investing. I have my own
investment fund as well.
Um
But what advice do you give for the
average person that's looking to invest
their salary or their wages?
>> Buy a broad-based index of uh
non-US equities.
>> Non-US? That's really surprising to me.
>> For um like 60% of your money.
And then 5 or 10% in precious metals and
uh
if if it's convenient and sensible, hold
hold a bit of real estate. And the rest
I'd put in uh bonds.
>> Okay, so 5 or 10% in things like silver
and gold? A preference for either silver
or gold?
>> No.
>> Um [clears throat] S&P 500? Now, you
said non-US.
>> Non-US.
>> This is so interesting cuz everybody
says invest in US stocks.
>> Of course they do. They've been
completely dominant for 20 years.
Completely kicking ass around the rest
of the world. And then
in the last 12 months, emerging markets
is up 65% now. The S&P has done much
better than I would have guessed, but
it's only 25.
That's a lot less than 65.
>> And I guess the strategy is quite
important here as well, which is you're
saying to hold these for a long time.
Try not to buy and sell.
>> And and try and look at where the cycle
has been. And I can tell you, and you
can see it for yourself, there has been
an enormous cycle in favor of the S&P,
in favor of the American market over the
rest of the world. And do you think
America is going to keep on gaining on
the rest of the world?
And of course you're going to say yes
now, because that's
that's the flavor of this market. We
think that what is good today will
continue being good indefinitely, even
though history tells you that is
absolutely not the case.
We live in a world that tends to rotate
from one to the other. We believe in a
world that extrapolates today's
conditions. And you can easily prove
that. The stock market is not efficient.
The stock market extrapolates today's
conditions. If they are terrible
in 1982, they will take crushed earnings
and multiply it by seven times earnings.
And then, in 2000, peak profit margins
times, woo, 35 times earnings. They
double count in the worst way. When
times are good, you multiply it by a
lot. That's another way of saying you
extrapolate it into the distant future.
>> You assume it's going to continue.
>> And Keynes, of course, my hero, says,
"Of course that's
extrapolation is the convention you
adopt, even though you know from
personal experience that the world is
not that way."
>> You didn't use the word crypto
when you're talking about investment
strategies. How much crypto do you own?
>> None.
>> Have you ever owned any crypto?
>> No.
>> Will you ever own any crypto?
>> No.
>> Will you ever advise anyone to buy
crypto?
>> No.
>> Why?
>> I think it's a
an unnecessary
uh
piece of uh
nonsense.
It facilitates nothing except criminals
moving money
so they can't be seen.
It's not a store of value since it
bounces around all over the place just
down from 120 to 60
because it felt like it. So, it's not
stable. It's volatile as hell.
It's not used conveniently as a medium
of exchange. You can't go into a shop
and use it easily.
It does one thing
very, very well.
It's a 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 and, you know, in the distant
future, everything goes 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 is you go
buy yourself a house.
What do you think of that?
>> It's hard to imagine how it could be a
good decision
when uh 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 the if, you
know, if I buy one now and increasingly
people can't afford one, doesn't that
mean that my my house is going to be
worth more in 10 years' time?
>> No, if people can't afford it, there's
no one bidding.
And by the way, the population is going
to decline.
Young family formations are already
declining in
many of the richer countries.
And if you have family formations
declining and you have super expensive
houses, what do you think is going to
happen? Now, you could say, "Well,
perhaps there will be a mysterious
increase in family formations."
And that the chronic baby bust that we
maybe will talk about soon. Um, we'll
stop.
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This is something that I've made for
you. I've realized that the Diary of a
CEO 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 learned 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 1%. And
actually, this philosophy is highly
responsible for much of our success
here. So, what we've done so that you at
home can accomplish any big goal that
you have is we've made these 1% diaries,
and we released these last year, and
they all sold out. So, I asked my team
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And if you want the link, the link is in
the description below.
Let's talk about the chronic baby bust.
I've been hearing a lot in the news. I
think there were some articles that
actually came out this week in the New
York Times that talked about the
declining fertility rates and how young
couples like me, I'm in a you know, I'm
I'm engaged to a young woman who
and me and me and her are trying to have
a child now.
Um it's not not always a straight line
to having a child. Yeah, I think you're
kind of sold the idea that it is, that
you just have sex without a condom and
then a baby appears, but um lots of
young families and lots of my friends
who are trying to have kids have gone
for a couple of years
trying and struggling to con- to
conceive. So much so that after doing
this podcast, I started telling some of
my friends that I actually think it's a
good idea to start freezing your eggs,
embryos, sperm.
Because if it is going to get
increasingly harder, then there might
need to be
um medical interventions, IVF,
um etc.
for me and my friends.
If we are if we you know, if we want to
have families. But the the problem is as
well at like 33 years old, um if you
look at the data, you're not at your
peak necessarily in terms of fertility.
You're somewhere you're coming down the
slope as a man. Um and but also as a
woman.
And so, you're kind of fighting time a
little bit it feels like.
>> Yeah, you are.
>> And I think my partner feels the same
way that we wish we were told a little
bit earlier about family planning.
And then I hear that about this fert-
these fertility issues that apparently
have been caused by toxins
and that 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 of
hundreds of billions of dollars talking
about fertility?
And this sort of baby bust.
>> Well,
starting
27 years ago with the
foundation, we were committed to start
thinking about everything to do with the
climate. And and you're moving in the
right circle then, because the next
thing is we started to worry about the
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 50 to 75%.
>> Really?
>> In the last 60, 70 years.
And E.O. Wilson, the famous ant man, he
believed that you know, nature could
handle
the loss of humans easily, effortlessly,
but it could not handle the loss of of
insects. That insects are in in the
sense, he felt,
and and his fellow experts, he
represented them as thinking the same
way, that they Insects are the bedrock
of nature.
And if they start to go out of business,
then the
birds who feed on on them and the
amphibians, they start to decline, which
they have done also catastrophically.
One thing leads to another, and the
beetles are no longer
recycling the forest floor, and
eventually things won't grow, and
no one to uh
fertilize the plants, and the damage
spreads, and he felt that eventually
loss of insects would lead to a more or
less complete failure of nature.
And and
we would inherit a planet that was no
longer conducive to humans.
We noticed that some of the same effects
are felt uh by humans.
And uh a report came out,
Shanna Swan and Hagai Levine,
I think it finished in 2011,
and uh it made the case
that uh sperm count had been dropping
had almost halved since the first
reports academic reports in 1970.
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 2 and 1/2% a year. You
don't have to be mathematically that
literate to realize that a 2 and 1/2%
decline in your sperm count every year
is a disastrous level, a non-sustainable
level, right?
>> How long is that going to take for this
my sperm to basically not work?
>> As far as we can tell, our best guess
is
that in hunter-gatherer days we had 118
million units per milliliter of sperm.
And when the academics came in in 1970,
uh
it was down to about 100.
And today it's 35.
Okay?
Also, the quality
and the mo- motility they call it had
also declined
somewhat similarly.
It turns out, luckily for us, that we
were over-engineered at I like to say
like a great Victorian bridge.
Nature doesn't take any risks and and
you have more than you need. And it it
appears, again, a good guess is about 45
million units
is what you need to be able to get
pregnant without any difficulty. And
that was hit about 15 to 20 years ago.
The number of young couples who needed
help 15 or 20 years ago
uh was nil, basically.
And for this reason, that none of them
had a a chronic lack of sperm count in
round numbers.
And now
the World Health says it's about
17%.
Okay? 17% of young couples could use
some help today.
It which means that instead of, you
know, just trying for a week or two or
three or four or five or six you're
trying for months and months.
And
everybody knows people now who fall in
that category. Which is exactly what you
would expect if you've gone from zero to
17%.
But this is the killer. Shanna Swan
and my colleague and I kind of thought
about this thing separately and
independently and we
we worked out doesn't take a great brain
that in 20 to 25 years the young couple
will need help. I mean this is tomorrow.
You know this is not 200 years from now.
In 20 to 25 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 2045.
>> Wow, yeah.
>> [laughter]
>> That is
that means the medium 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 10% who are really perfectly
in decent condition.
Because there's a huge distribution
range today.
You know there are there are people
today who still have 200 million you
know better than the hunter-gatherers.
But it's uh
>> And what is causing this and how do we
stop it?
>> Shanna would say the environment around
you
of mainly plastics.
Plastics are leaching
uh toxins and the particles of plastics
you have in your brain and 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, the people who specialize
in fertility problems
and write books about it, none of them
mention toxicity.
They mention the hundred perfectly solid
reasons why people are choosing
uh to have fewer children.
>> Endocrine disrupting chemicals like
phthalates,
>> Like phthalates.
>> which are found in cosmetics, shampoos,
food packaging, etc. They actively lower
testosterone production in male fetuses
during the first trimester, permanently
stunting reproductive reproductive
capacity before birth.
>> Yes.
>> BPAs, which are um what they call the
biphosphonates?
>> Yes. Something like that.
>> Used to make plastics hard, line tin
cans, and coat thermal store receipts.
Um they are synthetic estrogens. They
flood the male body with female hormones
and signals crashing sperm count and
motility.
PFAs, forever chemicals used in nonstick
pans, teflons, waterproof rain jackets,
and stain resisting 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 chosen chose
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 2024, that found
microplastics in 100% of human
testicular tissues tested.
100%. And lastly, biological stresses.
So, me and you being sat down on these
chairs,
heats our testicles to a point where the
sperms die. Heated car seats, hot
laptops, they actively cook the sperm.
And lastly, obesity.
>> Yes. And of course, smoking you, which
somehow slipped through the net.
>> Yeah.
>> But um
there is a whole other branch,
pesticides on your food. Now, if you
give me time, I'll tell you about these
two little studies.
They're very small, and you might ignore
them except they were done by Harvard
and Mass General, which is candidate for
the best hospital in America.
And, uh they had a clinic for people
having problem getting pregnant.
And, uh they they ran it out of that.
They had 180 men.
And, they got them to self-report on
what they were eating. Were they eating
the dirty dozen? Were they eating melons
and bananas that have lots of
protection?
At the end of uh 6 months,
the the guys who reported to eat the
least bad
versus the quarter that ate the worst,
there was a doubling of sperm count. Can
you believe it? At the top category, the
more fruit and veggies you ate, the
better your sperm count. In the bottom
quartile, the more they ate, the worse
their sperm count.
It was a dramatic result, but two to one
between the top and the bottom. And,
then 2 years later, they did a very
similar study with women who were having
trouble.
And, at the end of their 9 months of
self-reporting, the ones who ate the
least badly had 68% successful live
births, bearing in mind this was a
fertility clinic, and the bottom
quartile 38%. So, once again, nearly
double.
I mean, and and it's life and death. I
mean, these are really important. And,
this was only based on what they ate.
Because pesticides are full of these
toxins, and they are delivered straight
into your body. You eat the damn things.
It's not just they're on the surface.
You can wash some of that away, but
they're impregnated part of the
structure of the berry.
Berries,
apples, pears, peaches,
and finally,
um uh spinach uh are really bad and are
the top end. The bananas and the
oranges, and the melons are uh fine. So,
if you eat these damn things that
designed to kill our cousins, the
insects, and and the weeds,
and the funguses, why would you expect
them not to do a terrible job on humans?
And we stuff them in our system.
And the fetus, it turns out, is 100 to
1,000 times more vulnerable
than we are out in the out in the world.
For example, if your mother smokes,
it's going to do about the same damage
as if you smoked for the rest of your
life.
>> Hm. Wow.
>> And you think about what the fetus is
plugged into the system, and how it's
forming everything. It doesn't seem the
most unreasonable thing that it would be
much more sensitive. And there are
people out there
fussing quite reasonably about the first
1,000 days of life.
But actually, that is nothing like as
important
as the 270 days in the womb.
>> Atrazine.
Have you heard of atrazine?
>> have.
>> Atrazine, um referred to as the chemical
castrator. It is the second most widely
used herbicide in the United States,
sprayed heavily on things like corn and
sugar canes.
And there was this crazy study which was
peer-reviewed out of UC Berkeley that
showed exposure to atrazine at levels
below the EPA's considered safe for
drinking
um levels, completely chemically
castrated male frogs, turning 10% 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.
>> want to talk about it. We don't want to
talk about bear markets.
We don't want to talk
about bad climate changes, even though
it's bludgeoning us. This year could be
the worst
hot year
in history.
We are set up
because of the accident of the El Niño
to have perhaps the worst droughts and
the hottest weather ever recorded,
starting about now.
So, brace yourselves. But, we don't want
to talk about that. We don't want to
talk about toxicity. We don't want to
talk about running out of resources. Oh,
we just don't do bad news. And I have
never seen anything like this, this
fertility thing, where the data is
horrific. The baby bust is measurable.
The sperm count is one of the few things
you can really measure. Do they really
think if you have declining sperm count,
the future is great?
Do they really think that the economy
will function
if the number of 20-year-olds entering
the market starts to drop like a stone?
In Japan, you know what their
20-year-old is? It's 50% of what it was
in 1948.
>> What is 50%?
>> 50%. Not down 15 or 3.5, 50% less.
>> 50% less 20-year-olds?
>> 20-year-olds that drive the market, that
offer themselves for 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 poisonous
chemicals.
And we've made in the EU
pretty good start.
My favorite example and everybody's
favorite example is cosmetics.
Cosmetics, you don't actually eat it,
but you rub it on your skin, which is
the second worst thing to do.
And there are 10,000 chemicals in
cosmetics.
And the EU has banned 1,500. If they ban
the right 1,500, that could be 3/4 of
the battle, right? Canada's banned 550.
And the US has banned 12. I am not
kidding you.
So, The thing about toxicity is it is
regional. If one country if Denmark or
the EU or the UK wants to look after its
chemicals, they will live longer and
have better health. If the US wants to
put the corporations first, they will
have shorter lives. Do you know the life
expectancy difference between the US and
Sweden has gone from 2 years to 6 years
in the last 70 years?
I wrote in my quarterly letter my estate
would be willing to bet you that in 50
years it'll be 8 or 10.
>> I don't quite think people in the United
States realize the difference in the
products they consume here versus other
parts of the world. And you know,
>> No, absolutely not.
>> Brits fly over here and actually we had
my my barber my my barber Damon and he
flew over here to give me a haircut last
week. He said, "Oh gosh, I don't feel
good." He said, "I went and got some
food here and I really just don't feel
good." And he says, "Every time I come
over here I don't feel good." And me and
my team we used to fly over here before
I moved here for a couple of weeks a
year to film the show and whenever we'd
fly back not only would I be much
fatter, um but we'd all feel a little
bit more like sluggish, is the way I'd
describe it, from eating the food here.
And it almost felt quite clear that
there's like something in the food that
our bodies
just isn't used to in the UK. And when
you look at the toxicity of the United
States versus Europe, it's quite clear.
I mean, the US currently permits the use
of 85 agricultural pesticides that are
completely banned in the EU, China and
Brazil. The US sprays over 300 million
pounds per year of pesticides that are
deemed too dangerous to be legally used
in Europe, including that one I said
about the frog's called atrazine.
>> atrazine
>> 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 1,300 chemicals
in cosmetics and personal care products
due to toxicity and hormone disruption.
The US and the FDA has banned 11. In
terms of food, the US allows potassium
bromate, which is a known carcinogen,
cancer-causing, used to make fluffy
dough bread, and BHA
{um} / 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 {um} allows titanium
dioxide, used to make candy smell like
Skittles bright white,
and synthetic dyes like red 40, which
require strict warning labels or
outright bans in Europe due to DNA
damage and neurodevelopmental issues in
kids. I'll give you one more. A recent
US Geological Survey found that at least
45% of all US tap water is contaminated
with PFAs, those forever chemicals we
talked about earlier, the very chemicals
directly linked to crashing sperm counts
and testicular cancer. The US has
historically allowed PFAs levels in
drinking water
drastically higher than the EU, the
United the European Union
considers safe.
>> Let us just say that the EU is forever
giving exemptions and extensions and is
far from perfect and has a lot of
corporate pushback. And uh it's just
much less bad than the US.
>> And the US has worse life expectancy.
>> It does, and it's the only rich country
in the world where 15 years ago they had
the same life expectancy as they have
today.
>> One um actionable piece of advice for
anyone listening that might find this
all quite um
overwhelming cuz 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 in the
foods that you're buying to check if
they contain these endocrine disrupting
these hormone disrupting chemicals. I'm
not affiliated [clears throat] with any
of them, but there's one called Yuka,
YUKA, that I know is very easy for sort
of everyday scanning of products. You
can just scan the barcode and it'll tell
you it'll give it a rating score out of
100. There's EWG's Healthy Living
um app which is the scientific gold
standard run by the Environmental
Working Group a major toxic chemical
watchdog. You can scan barcodes or
search for food, cleaning supplies or
cosmetics. There's Think Dirty as well
which is great for cosmetic shampoos and
skin care. It exposes the toxic truth
hiding in beauty products. Um and then
there's Clear Ya which is Clear Ya. Best
for online shopping. It's an app in your
web browser and instead of scanning
barcodes in your house
while you're shopping online, it's so if
you add a say like a shampoo or lotion
to your Amazon or Target or Walmart
basket, it automatically pops up with an
alert telling you about the ingredients
list that is within those chemicals. But
but I think that gives something a
little bit actual and arms you with at
least a tool to navigate this crazy
environment. And obviously AI is great
at this as well. You can take pictures
of things and ask it questions.
>> And what we really need is a kind of
green Amazon where everything is
guaranteed food, bed, clothes,
everything.
And that would be very handy indeed.
Someone you could trust that would
absolutely guarantee the whole line of
products that you would order. Not
impossible and I think done well and
someone could make money at it.
>> What would advice would you give to your
kids on a personal level if they're
trying to stay healthy in a toxic world?
>> Simple advice and I know you like this
is pregnant women are much more
important than anybody else in this
field.
If you could persuade pregnant women A
to have no cosmetics, save a lot of
money, no cosmetics for 9 months and
then B invest some of that money from
your cosmetics or all of it in buying
organic berries if you have to have
berries, apples, oranges, peaches
what they call the dirty dozen here.
If you did that
I think as much as half of all the
trouble disappears.
And that's a huge fraction and it's
easily acquired.
You know, I I I addressing the 100
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 cosmetics, no bad food,
or 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.
>> Mhm.
>> 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 and and
a recent study suggests it might be many
more generations than two. So, you got
some of these chemicals
impregnated in your system, and your
children pay the price, and your
grandchildren, and perhaps even
quite a few generations after that.
>> I also think it would be great if
Western governments around the world
made the costs of
both child care 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 Ronda
Rousey, who was in tears because she was
on a
I think it's her [laughter] 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 that day I walked out of this
room and like called a lot of the people
in my life that I know are
you know, in the region where fertility
starts to decline, and really encourage
them to start thinking if they if that's
what they want in their lives about
family planning, which is like getting
your eggs frozen or your embryos frozen.
And me and my partner actually went and
did it. We got our embryos frozen, which
was a you know, it's it's not it's it's
both expensive, extremely expensive,
especially here in the United States,
and difficult.
>> And psychologically destructive. Brutal.
>> You know, we you know, me every day for
a couple of weeks injecting her with
with this this these chemicals and the
the hormonal roller coaster that she had
to deal with and all of that, but for us
the alternative was worse,
which was never being able to have
children because it's difficult and
there's all these toxins in our
environment and and so on and so forth.
And so I then became a little bit of a I
guess a bit of a bit preachy within my
within the people the people in my life
that I love a lot about family planning
cuz we kind of all thought we could just
think about it later.
We're all kind of 35 and we thought,
"Yeah, we'll think about that later."
Um but it turns out not to be the case
for many people.
>> If you'll allow me to go back, you asked
an important question. What do we have
to do? And I said we have to detoxify
the system and then we both got off into
this frenzy of of attacking chemicals,
which we should anyway, but it's
intellectually easy. Ban the suckers,
okay? Now, putting pressure on the
corporations to back off so the
governments can do it would be a good
idea, not easy. Corporations have
enormous power, unprecedented power in
the US,
but but very substantial power in the in
the EU and the UK also. But we have to
get them to back off. We have to start
banning these damn things, otherwise no
children. But secondly,
and much more difficult,
is we have to detoxify capitalism.
We have to slowly but surely
turn our capitalist societal norms into
much more family-friendly,
children-friendly.
Over the next several generations,
we have to end up with a society that
realizes that 2.1 healthy, well-educated
children is a part of the commons. You
may not have any children.
>> you mean by that, sorry? 2.1?
>> 2.1 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 2.1
per couple,
you fairly rapidly go out of business.
If you have more than 2.1, you fairly
rapidly end up with so many people
you're standing on each other's
shoulder. The commons are things like
common land in the old days that anyone
could put their sheep on. And what
tended to happen is everyone put more
sheep than they could stand, and they
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 2.1 healthy, well-educated children.
Without any of those, society fails.
All of them have to be treated as group
responsibility. So, the whole society,
the whole village
has to be in a way like a kibbutz
eventually. You have to put everything
behind making it doable
to have children because the long list
of economic and social reasons, as well
as toxin reasons, why people can't have
2.1 children is getting so long and so
dangerous. And nothing yet has worked. I
mean, they've tried, you tell me, 200
different things around the world.
Several percentage points of GDP in one
or two cases.
And nothing yet has
seemed seen a permanent uptick in in
baby production.
>> For the average person listening right
now, Dave who drives a taxi or Jenny who
works as a receptionist or um Clive who
is a nurse,
what is the most important thing we
haven't talked about that we should have
talked about as it pertains to their
life today?
>> I think they have to brace themselves
for a tougher times ahead
than they would have they expected.
And they're beginning to get the point.
Life for the last 10 or 20 years has
been tougher than than they perhaps
expected as children or or than other
people expected for them.
Part of that is politics. Part of that
is equality. But the net effect of 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 brace yourself mean for them?
Cuz brace yourself sounds like you
But does it mean
>> Plan your life as if times will not be
easy.
>> Okay.
>> And do not
build up a little reserve of of cash.
Of course my advice to
other people is and and get yourself a
useful job. Something that will in a
larger sense pull your weight in
society.
>> Upskill, change skills, learn something
>> mechanical
fixing, repairing
>> Things that
>> engineering
>> Things that will need humans.
>> And and research, science in general.
>> Make friends.
>> Make friends.
Make sure you're living in in a a tight
society if you can. Very difficult
today, obviously.
>> 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?
>> [sighs and gasps]
>> If you were Dave or Jenny?
>> I I think I have to refuse to answer
this on the grounds that it might tend
to incriminate me.
Um
>> Oh, okay. So you're saying don't live in
the United States?
>> Well, I have
American children and grandchildren.
>> Why not the United States?
>> It holds out too much chance that the
social contract is
is
>> [snorts]
>> dissolving.
You know, the thing about Japan and that
my joking rule 21 in investing is never
extrapolate from the Japanese. They are
extremely different in every way.
But one of the ways they're different is
they have this amazing social contract.
The thing that really upsets 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 the
society that I'm doing what people
expect me to do. I'm not going to
misbehave.
>> And you think that's not the case here
in the United States?
>> I think the case here is that people are
doing what they think is best for them
and their family and screw everybody
else, really.
When I arrived in America, corporations
had this sense that they owed something
to the community they operated in, the
city they operated in. They They'd build
the stadium, they'd do this, they'd
they'd be part of the community.
Now they're not. They're all
in a way cold-blooded, profit-maximizing
international enterprises.
>> And why is that a bad place to live? Cuz
you're saying, you know, you probably
wouldn't recommend Dave or Jenny living
in the United States. Why would that be
a bad place for them to be? What
happens? What's the What's the
downstream impact of that?
>> That your neighbors aren't as interested
in you and your well-being.
>> Fine. I don't 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.
Uh because the safety net here is very
ineffective. There's a a measure that I
think is probably the single most
important measure of civilization, and
that is maternal mortality. How many
people die in childbirth? You know, in
Nigeria out of 100,000, it's 480, give
or take.
And uh
in America, in in the
black population,
it's uh 44.
In the whole population, it's like 21 or
20.
Curiously, in the
American Asian population, it's 13.
And then, you go down the list,
and in Britain, it's five.
In Germany, it's four.
In Sweden, it's 2.1. In Norway, it's
zero. There were no mothers who died
last year.
>> Hm.
>> Or the year before. What better
definition of civilization than looking
after the mothers 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, it's that
they are 50% worse than the next worst.
50% more mothers die here than in the
second worst country in the developed
world. How is that possible? The answer
is it happens.
And um it's because
the inequality is so extreme in the
medical system
that if you don't have lots of money,
you're quite likely to die in
childbirth. I mean,
Now, of course, the numbers are not
huge. 20 out of 100,000 is not uh
but it's but it's a terrible contrast.
>> It's a sign of something.
It's a sign of something else as well.
>> It's a sign of whether people are
It's a sign of the social contract.
>> So, where's a good place to live then,
if not here?
>> Denmark, Japan.
Uh 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 uh leaving the
United States. Should I move?
Should I Should I move out of the United
States?
>> Yeah, I I would say that's a perfectly
reasonable thing to consider.
And where are you going and why and
what's your
>> I'm thinking of going to Denmark, Dad.
>> Well,
if they'll have you. Uh
No, uh
in the things that really matter, life
expectancy, health,
safety nets,
uh murder rates,
uh mortality rates,
and everything that really matters, yes,
they're they're day and night better.
In the things that don't really matter,
but look really splashy,
we have enormous quantities of uh wealth
created
that go to a relatively small fraction
of the people.
And that dazzles in terms of the average
because
um that's how the numbers work.
If you look at how well-off the bottom
quartile are,
America doesn't score well at all.
>> Jeremy, we have a closing tradition
where the last guest leaves a question
for the next guest not knowing who
they're leaving it for. The question
left for you is, if you could not fail,
what would your next goal be
that you would set for yourself?
>> There There was a book written
in the 1960s called Silent Spring.
Carl Carson, I think her name was.
And it changed for a quite a number of
years it it it did what books never do
really it
it uh became a political monster and
everyone studied it and it had an
effect. It changed the game.
I would uh like to write something about
toxicity and and social contract really.
Particularly nurturing a family. We
We've got to find in the end a community
that encourages children. The downside
of the
brutally efficient capitalist system
that we have. It's focus on
financial achievement and so on.
And
very little emphasis on community and
child-rearing and so on. If we don't we
we fail as a society pretty quickly. We
have to detoxify. We have to encourage
to create an environment where people
want to have children.
>> [clears throat]
>> If I could write a book
that would be
would would pull a silent spring, I
would sit down tomorrow and start it.
>> The making of a Parma bear.
>> Parma should be in inverted commas,
really.
>> The perils of long-term investing in a
short-term world.
By Jeremy Grantham and Edward
Chancellor.
Who is this book for?
>> Oh, people who have a interest in the
stock market. It has a little bit of
climate change and toxicity.
My my co-rider 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.
>> You cover things also like economics,
value investing, being a bear, and
predicting a bubble, and what to do
about all of those things. But it's
really a useful counterintuitive not
counterintuitive, but it's a it's a
frame of thinking that will help you be
more realistic especially when
psychology is prone to take over and
make you wildly recklessly optimistic.
>> And and be more confident in your
judgment.
Big big companies cannot advise you.
It's just suicidal for their business.
So you are on your own. Look at the
data. A bubble is not hard to see. There
is this kind of plane and then there's a
Himalayan peak
which eventually goes back.
>> And I mean that's exactly what we're
seeing.
>> That's exactly what history looks like.
Have the courage to look at that, make
your own conclusion, get out of the
dangerous most dangerous part,
and and do it now.
Don't wait for help because no help is
coming.
Large enterprises almost never get the
big turning points
because they can't take the career risk
involved.
And every big corporation needs a leader
who has political skills.
And the And the central political skill
in life turns out to be never be wrong
on your own.
This is again Keynes.
You know, you can be wrong in company,
you can jump off the cliff together, you
will never lose your job because of
that.
But if you do anything on your own,
sooner or later you will get it wrong.
And quote, you will not receive much
mercy.
>> Jeremy, thank you so much. Thank you for
all that you do. Um you traverse so many
subjects. It's It's absolutely
fascinating and you You've made me think
about so many things. I've actually
written down a bunch of ideas. You sent
me taking some photos then. Those are
actually ideas that I want to remember.
>> Yeah, that's what I do. Screenshot city.
>> Yeah, so I took I just wrote things down
you were saying and then I was like I
need to remember that later for a bunch
of things, businesses, friends, family,
etc.
Um and I think that's the testament to
how broad and curious and wise you are.
>> Going back to question one or two, the
billionaire bit,
uh sometime around the end of this year
we will actually have written checks for
a billion dollars
to the climate change world.
>> It's It's a wonderful thing and there's
you know this particular moment in time
because of the politics, climate change
is a subject that's falling off the
radar.
>> It is.
>> Uh it's
being mentioned less in earnings calls.
It's
>> But this year will be so disgustingly
hot from now on, I suspect.
>> Disgustingly hot.
>> Hot. We could have from now on the
hottest 12 months from now to this time
next year that we have ever had in
history.
Here, there, and everywhere.
>> Well, I'm glad we've got voices like
yours
um lending their ideas and wisdom to
these conversations and it's been an
honor and a privilege to to you. Your
book, The Making of a Manager, Baron, to
link it below
for everyone to buy it themselves.
Jeremy, thank you. YouTube have this new
crazy algorithm where they know exactly
what video you would like to watch next
based on AI and all of your viewing
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