In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Friday Wrap-Up: A Guru of Simplification and the AI Slowdown Debate

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

On this week's Friday Wrap-Up, Marthe Skaar calls in from Singapore to catch up with Nicolai Tangen, joining from New York, to break down his podcast conversation with Jon McNeill, author of “The Algorithm" and a leading voice on simplifying business processes. They discuss his rule to question every requirement before automating, and why speed has become a competitive necessity. The conversation also turns to the growing debate over AI safety, fueled by Anthropic's Dario Amodei's call to slow down development. Nicolai reflects on his trip to the Canada Investment Summit, and shares a humbling annual tradition with friends. Tune in!Listen to In Good Company with John McNeill, author of “The Algorithm”: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/jon-mcneill-the-algorithm-behind-tesla-and-spacex/id1614211565?i=1000789947914The Friday Wrap-Up is hosted by Marthe Skaar, Chief of Communications and External Relations, together with Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, and produced by Isabelle Karlsson. New episodes of In Good Company air every Wednesday, with the Friday Wrap-Up following each week to break it all down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone and welcome back to a Friday wrap-up. I'm still Marteskar. I'm Nicola Dangen. And this week I'm in Singapore and you're Nicola, you're in? I'm in New York. So a bit of a time zone difference here. This week's episode featured John McNeil. Who is he in Nikolai? Well, he is one of the gurus when it comes to simplification of processes. He worked with Tesla, with Lulu lemon and so on. And I think the book he wrote, called algorithm is so powerful. And basically what it talks about is that you have to question absolutely everything that you do. You have to delete unnecessary steps. You have to simplify everything, accelerate the speed, and then automate at the end. It's so important for so many

companies, including us in the fund. Yeah. It's really fascinating. I have it in front of me. It has a very red cover. And the first thing that you addressed is you should question every requirement. But why is that so important in business? Because we just take so many things for granted. And there are so many stupid rules from prior times that we have just never questioned. And people just take it forgiven. There are so few people who just really try to push the barriers and get rid of necessary rules, which are there for no reason.

So really, really important starting point. And I think it also alludes back to what we talked about earlier, about younger and older companies, right? but the younger's, maybe don't have all this legacy and all these things. Second rule is delete every step. Well, you don't necessarily want to delete all the steps, but you certainly want to delete everything, which is superfluous and unnecessary.

Ideally, you want to delete so many steps that you delete one too many, and then you have it to actually add it back. And that's something that also, you know, Ellen Wisch talks about in his book, the importance of doing that. That's what they're done in SpaceX. that's how they work in many different ways. Yeah, exactly, because the rule is actually delete every step that is unnecessary. If you apply that to the fund, what type of step can be deleted and what can't?

Well, that's what we are going through now. Of course, there are many steps that we have to have for compliance reasons, which are necessary for the governance structure and so on. But there are also things in terms of reporting frequency, how often you revalue assets such at real estate and so on, which we are questioning and which we are changing, which is basically simplifying what we do. Now, one of the things which is interesting is that when you get new people joining your firm, they oftentimes question things that you do.

But within a month, they just take the rules for granted and then don't question them anymore. So important when new people join your firm that they keep a list of all the things that they think it look very stupid and then that you basically get a rundown. within a month. Yeah. So ask them for feedback within a month. Yeah. You do quite a lot of that.

But okay, so it's simplify and optimize and then at the end it's automate. And he really talks about the importance of doing that last. Really important. And what can go wrong if you don't do it? Well, really important because when you automate and sometimes when you put AI on top of things, it's like pouring cement on top of a process.

And if the process is not simple enough, you just waste a lot of energy. So that's really, really important. Now, I think it's interesting because this all kind of simplification thing and abstraction. It's something that I love, not only from business, but I like it in art too. So, you know, I'm a big fan of abstract art where you reduce images down to its kind of smallest denominator. And it could be so powerful and so beautiful. And I think the same goes for business. Signal the same things. Yeah. But how many companies do you think are like jumping straight to automation now when you think about AI and everything, just adding AI to a bad process.

It's a very common mistake that people do. I'm sure we do it some places too, but you just really, really have to work on all the steps first so that you don't lock in kind of unnecessary complexities. I think that's really, really important. Now, before you automate, you also want to accelerate the speed. And, you know, the better something works, the more you can speed up, There was a racing driver. I think it may have been Schumacher, who said that, you know, for the perfect machine, speed is a unifying force. And there really is some truth to that.

We've talked about speed for the last two episodes as well. Like, is speed the whole game now? For sure, it is important. It's something that's become clearer to me when you look at kind of the Chinese speed, the speed by which innovation happens. I think to be competitive now, speed. is totally key. And then also, John, he talks a lot about running post-mortem, so learning from mistakes.

And you also, a couple years ago, encouraged actually Norwegian businesses to do more mistakes so that they could learn from them. So, like, how important is this part? Well, first of all, it is important to create a corporal culture where you can make mistakes. And, you know, in our country, we have a very important. big public sector where it's not allowed to make mistakes. You are judged on not necessarily what you do, but just by the fact that you don't make mistakes. And it's, it doesn't, it holds back creativity, it holds back innovation. It's very, very important to have room for making mistakes.

You have to have, you know, run pilots. I mean, this whole thing here that we're doing now is is a pilot. We don't know whether it's going to be successful. But if it's, you know, if it doesn't work, we're just going to can it and stop it and no big deal. So create an environment where people can fail, learn from them, fast, be extremely honest about what went wrong and what went right. I think that's key to improvement. Okay, so moving on to talk about the fund and the markets. And we have to address one thing that certainly have been talked about in the newspapers and market last week, and that is Anthropics, Dario Amadai, who wrote an essay calling for a slowdown when it comes to this new AI model coming out. And then we have Altman and

Musk also kind of shipping in here. What's your reaction to what's been going on the last couple of weeks? No, I think it's extremely interesting. Of course, the people you mentioned are really, they have the best view into the future of these models and what they can do. And so, they see not only what they release now, but also what's coming. And the speed of improvement in this model have just accelerated as you have models which just improve themselves, right? And so that's taking the speed up. We have seen some examples of where some of these models have gone wrong. So I think it's a very healthy sign that some of the leading voices here are talking in the same language. Now, it's very challenging to regulate this, partly because some of the people in charge don't particularly want to do it,

also because it's embedded in the various races we have within weapons, self-driving cars, medical research and so on. So it's kind of tough to hold yourself back when you compete with other superpowers. So it's a very complex situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I kind of have been linked into security as well, and that makes collaboration across country borders harder, and this is something that is noted by the Chinese last week as well. But we were quite early on, we're coming up in view on responsible AI,

where we also address that we closely follow the development of the regulation. We did that already in 2023, Nicolai. Yeah, we did. We talked about it in our expectations. document, we say that it is the board's responsibility to make sure that these kind of things are happening in a responsible way. I do think it's pretty well taken care of in Europe. We for sure have a lot of regulation in the AI space, less so in other places. But I do think we are well taken care of that in Europe. I think also what we've seen over the last week or so

is a bit more voices on the importance of adopting AI across society. Very important article in the FD by Mario Draghi, who in a way says that we need to adopt it to keep our standard of living because otherwise we cannot compete with Asia and the competing companies elsewhere in the world. Mark Carney mentioned the same in Canada. They're really deploying it across society. Some countries are good in doing that. For instance, Singapore, where you are and and interesting to hear your view on that. Yeah, so yeah, it's very impressive here. So Singapore actually is second in the world when it comes to individual,

the AIU, so it's about 60%. I just saw that the global average is 18%. So certainly about that. But I think what is interesting in how had they gotten to that number, because it's not just individuals. It's also the government, and it's a government funder program who pushes and are pulling into the company so that the companies can actually pull on the same resources and it's subsidized for them.

So that means that it's strolled in across their workforce here. And you certainly can see what's coming out of that. So it would be interesting to follow. But you mentioned Canada because you have been in Canada this week and the business form. Yeah. What are you doing? Well, Mark Carney, the prime minister, basically made this Investing Canada summit,

invited the big capital owners across the world to come and listen to the investment case of Canada. And very, very impressive how during 15 months they are taking down red tape, they are getting speed up, they are making all types of regulatory approvals, much simpler, taking down tax levels and so on. And so they are really welcoming foreign investors and doing that in a structured way. So I would say that's really, really impressive to see. And people showed up and then of course we'll see what kind of deals come out of that. We have $75 billion invested in Canada.

So it's a big market for us. We are big owners of the big banks and so on. But there are potentially interesting things to do also on the renewable infrastructure space where we have a mandate. Okay, moving into the last section here. Because, Nikolai, once a year, you go into the mountains with a group of friends. And you call this the smartest friends you have. So, and then you say that you look into the future and then you reevaluate what you predicted last year.

And that this is what you did this weekend. So just down from the mountains. I mean, I spend a lot of time in the mountains generally during the weekends, but once a year we are a group of friends going up there. And we put on the tape recorder in the evening and we listened to what we predicted the prior year. And it's just so depressing. And I think many more people should actually look at what they predict and try to, you know, listen to the predictions a year later because it's just incredible. Well, we talk about, you know, where are financial markets going? What's happening in the Middle East?

What's happening with Ukraine? What's happening with a relationship between Europe and the US, US and China, all these kind of things. And wow, it's difficult to predict what's going on. And it's also difficult to predict what will financial markets do, given what's happening. It's just so complex. And in my mind, the only thing that matters now is just to be super agile. be opportunistic, have a strong balance sheet, you know, just be robust in everything you do in your procedures and so on, because this world is just impossible to predict. But at the same time,

so exciting. Yeah. And the reason why you're saying is so depressive is because you're actually not that right. No, because we get so many things wrong. You know, and in a way, you kind of think that's depressing. But at the same time, it's very, very humbling and it's why it's so humbling to work in the financial sector. Now, cool thing on Sunday, off to the West Coast, the US to meet with technology companies. We are meeting with a whole range in Seattle, San Francisco, Silicon Valley and so on. But basically, I'm traveling this time with our business delivery teams and our AI team. So it is to just see how they program, how they structure data, you know, what's coming and how can we change the way we do things in the fund from a programming

point of view and from a data structure point of view. So super exciting. And hey, look forward to sharing that next week. as well. Okay, great Nikolai. Happy weekend. Happy weekend.