Julian Dorey Podcast - #6 - Innovators & Levitators

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

SOLO POD - Prominent venture capitalist, Kai-Fu Lee, estimates that automation and AI will bring about at least 25% NET job losses over the next two decades. While predicting *exactly* how this would translate across job types in the future is next to impossible—might there be a “mindset” we can all adopt to approach it?   In this episode, Julian turns to an unlikely source for inspiration… ~ YouTube FULL EPISODES: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  YouTube CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  ~ Show Notes: https://www.trendifier.com/podcastnotes  TRENDIFIER Website: https://www.trendifier.com  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey  ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io  Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Steve Jobs did not view himself as a tech guy. He did not view Apple as a tech company. People don't understand this. Steve Jobs legitimately thought he was an artist and his canvas or his recording studio were the devices that we use and the reasons we feel good using them. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where is the nuance? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions.

So I heard this story a few years back. It was from a guy who would know. And it went something like this. There was a young A&R executive at Interscope back in 1997. Now, an A&R executive is essentially talent acquisition and talent management at a record label. So anyway, this kid was in Detroit, I think on business, and he got a tip while he was there. And somebody told him that there was this guy who performed in a club at night downtown and that the kid should really go over and give him a listen.

So he says, what the hell i'll listen goes and watches the kid perform and he was blown away so the executive gets his hands on a mixtape that the performer put together bolts back out to la and walks into the office of the head of A&R at Interscope. And he says, I got a mixtape. I saw this kid live in Detroit. It's one of the best things I've ever heard. So the executive says, sure, let's give it a listen. They pop in the tape, they listen to a couple songs, and the executive turns it off. He says, it's great. It's great.

But he's perplexed. And there were two reasons why the head of A&R was a little bit perplexed about this tape. Number one, it was a gangster rap tape, and the rapper was white. Now, this is 1997. It's about a month or two after biggie had been murdered tragically and six seven eight months after tupac had been murdered so two 25 26 year old rappers who had essentially invented gangster rap and had put rap at the center of the universe on the map were tragically taken gunned down in the streets over the past year and rap sat at a crossroads now interscope understood this better than anyone because tupac had been on their label his entire career they had worked

with dr dre for years and they understood that whatever they marketed next in rap was really potentially going to define the bridge to the next generation so the fact that this was a white rapper giving some hard gangster lyrics was certainly risky to say the least. That really hadn't been done before. The second problem was the lyrics.

The abilities on them were incredible. And the vocabulary, the rhythm, the rhyming, the speed, the switch ups, unbelievable. But the executive said, in my life i have never heard lyrics that harsh and to put that in perspective interscope was a label that had managed death row records directly for the last five or six years so if they're telling you lyrics are a little bit insane they're clearly clearly nuts. Now, what I heard is that essentially, you know, there were lyrics in there like, I'm going to chop up your girlfriend, put her in the trunk, take her out on ice, and eat her with Chianti and fava beans like the Anthony Hopkins movie. So they were definitely beyond the pale.

But nonetheless, the A&R exec said, I'll tell you what. Take the tape down to Andre and Jimmy. Tell them my reservations, but tell them I think it's phenomenal talent, and I'll go with whatever they say. So the young kid takes the tape down to Andre and Jimmy, and suffice it to say Andre and Jimmy went bananas. And Andre and Jimmy are Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine Jimmy Iovine was a co-founder of Interscope Records one of the biggest business legends in the game of music of all time and Dr. Dre is obviously maybe the greatest producer in the world so Dre came back upstairs and said we got to sign this kid right now

and the rest was history. Sid, do you have any idea who the kid was? I have a feeling. Yeah, what do you got? Eminem. Yeah, I mean, it was kind of obvious, but Detroit, white rapper, 97, of course, it was Eminem. So we know how his career ended up, obviously still going strong almost 25 years later, one of the greatest musicians of all time, period. So I remember when I heard this story, obviously it was pretty mind-blowing.

And the guy who was telling me the story then went on to explain to me that in a couple months there was this documentary coming out that he was involved with. And the documentary was called The Defiant Ones. This was 2017. Did you ever see The Defiant Ones. This was 2017. Did you ever see The Defiant Ones? No. I have to watch it now. I didn't even know it existed.

Like, if you are even remotely a fan of music, I know you're a big fan of music, it is, it's like porn. I mean, it's like, it's the greatest thing if you like music at all. Is it on Netflix? No, it's like, it's the greatest thing if you like music at all. But no, it's on HBO. But essentially, The Defiant Ones was a documentary being put together about the aforementioned Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine. And it was about their two careers, how they came from totally separate backgrounds and also different expertise, right? So Jimmy was more of, he came up as a producer, but really morphed to the business side.

Dr. Dre came up as a rapper and producer and really morphed to producer side and then later turned that into business with Jimmy Iovine. Amazing, amazing documentary. But one of the many guys who was going to be interviewed in the documentary was eminem i mean they had a who's who gwen stefani tom petty before he died rest in peace bruce springsteen obviously jimmy and dre um p diddy like everyone was in this documentary

so when i watched a couple months later every time eminem was on the screen it was electric because eminem is like a great interview because how he is in the booth and how he is rapping is almost like how he is talking too like he doesn't talk like the rest of us he he puts sentences together like almost in a beat and has like great big words and vocabulary to make you feel audacious. Like it's just, you get pumped up listening to it. So he has a line in the documentary where he's asked about how he would describe Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. And he says, so Dr. Dre is the innovator and Jimmy Iovine is the levitator. And I remember hearing that and I was just like, that's amazing. Like that's dead on because Dr. Dre is the guy

who creates amazing products, amazing music, just has the ear of a God. And then Jimmy Iovine is the guy who figures out how everyone is going to enjoy this in every possible way they're going to enjoy it as a businessman. It's a pure yin and a yang. So this always stuck with me. Now fast forward to last week. Nothing to do with Eminem. Nothing to do with the documentary. I'm reading this book by Kai-Fu Lee called AI Superpowers.

Kai-Fu Lee is a major venture capitalist in China. He was raised in the United States, educated in the United States, worked in the United States, and even ran Google China while Google was still in China, which they're not anymore. And after Google China was, I think, either ended or starting to end back in 08, 09, Kai-Fu Lee decided to found his own venture capital firm called Sinovation Ventures. And he's been a major, major player on the tech scene in China, which has really boomed over the last decade. So he wrote this book in 2018, talking about the US and talking about China, where they overlap in tech, where they're different and kind of where it's going. And at one point, he's talking about the

automation of jobs and the next decade or two decades and what it's going to look like for all of us. Obviously, machines can do more now. They can do more tomorrow. They will be able to do more tomorrow and the next day and after that, and they'll continue to take away some human needs to perform tasks. And we're going to get into some of the things he said, but a question I had for myself right away was, okay, if I can't determine exactly what kinds of new jobs are going to be around 20 years from now, it's kind of hard to predict. How can I determine what types of broad skills me and everyone else should have or should look to have around their interests to remain relevant in a future economy. And this is when the M&M quote popped into my head. Sounds stupid, but bear with me business, whether it's one owner and a bunch of great employees or two owners or three owners and a bunch of great employees, they have to have a healthy combination of the innovation and the levitation.

It's so simple, but it's so true. So that's how I created a hypothesis to answer the question. Now we're going to dig into it step by step. So let's start by going back to Kai-Fu Lee. Now, Kai-Fu Lee was a part of a study with, I think it was one of the big four. I think it was McKinsey, but don't quote me on that. We got to check that. And what they found is that over the next 10 to 20 years, and he was writing in 2018, so it, when I say net, that means that that includes new jobs that are created by whatever innovations we have added to the jobs we lost, which means we're losing a lot of jobs forever because we're not, there's a lot of human things that aren't going to be relevant now before you freak out immediately and i think correctly kai fu lee pointed out that the number is actually more like half that it's about 20 to 25 percent and the reason for this

i mean the common ones society uprising against it, government regulation, and he said literally plain inertia. So either way, 20 to 25 percent jobs net is like a lot. coronavirus, when we were talking about the potential impacts of this, they were saying, you know, we're looking at 20 to 30% at least temporary unemployment. And that was like the end of the fucking world. Now we're talking about that, but it's not temporary. The economy is not going to recover and suddenly recreate those jobs. We are talking about 20 to 25% of society out of a job. And that's a whole different issue, like how you deal with that. What I want to focus on is how you don't end up in that 20 to 25 percent. So there's two types of jobs that Fooley – do you say Lee or Fooley?

You know what? Fooley to be safe? Yeah, I mean we should check that on video, but either way. Sorry, Kai. Maybe I'll call him Kai. I like that. So Kai talks about two types of jobs that are in danger here. The first one is a one-to-one replacement as he calls it. So the simplest, highest level types of jobs i have the answer kai fu is hyphenated so lee is it's lee okay lee is the answer so we're going to call him lee or kai we're going to leave out the fu anyway the first type of job that is very replaceable is called a one-to-one replacement so think of it this Taxi drivers and Uber drivers, they drive a car. Right now, cars can already drive themselves. Google's doing it, Tesla's doing it, and they're doing it with ease. But they got to get billions and billions of miles for data so that the government has proof and everyone doesn't lose their minds when the first car actually kills somebody and all that stuff so it's not officially here yet but the moment it's here anyone who's a driver of any

sort is gone because their overhead and their capital that's not needed the other types of jobs and mind you this is a smaller percentage we talked about he said 48 and then 20 to 25 overall right after all the adjustments. The smaller percentage of jobs that will go but still a big percentage are what's called ground up or as he calls it, ground up. This can include quote-unquote blue-collar jobs, and it can include white-collar jobs. So some simpler jobs, like we'll call them jobs that don't require a college education. You look at fast food workers, especially like at the cash register or in the delivery line, right? The drive-thru. So right now, let's use the drive-thru example.

Like if I go up to a drive-thru and i say first of all i'm talking through like a box mic and everyone talks with you know a different use of language and and english and things like that so if i go to order a big mac that's what it says on the menu big mac maybe i say like yeah can i get a mac so what it requires the reason I give that example is because the human being on the other end immediately makes a process understanding that I meant a big Mac, even though I didn't say big. You have to have that because a machine may not be able to understand that. It's like you ever get on the phone with automated messages and they're like press five if if please say this word right here and or press five and you say the word and they're like i'm sorry i didn't and you're like

shut the fuck up that's what i said right yeah that's a prime example but we're pretty close a good example to see how close we are is actually google who you're going to hear me refer to a lot because they're doing a lot with, I mean, it's Google. But if you have a Gmail, you'll notice or you'll start to notice now that when you go to reply to an email where you already got a response, when you press reply, there will be a bunch of gray text. And the gray text, all you have to do is press enter and it will suddenly appear if you choose to do that. And that gray text is machine intelligence reading the context of the message you just received and writing out a potential reply. Now, when you start looking at this, if you haven't already, you're going to find it's eerily accurate. It's kind of creepy. The guy who's running that at Google is one of their lead AI researchers, a guy named Ray Kurzweil, who's huge in the whole artificial intelligence space. But that concept that he's

creating through Gmail, which is written text, is the same kind of concept that will replace jobs like a drive-through line attendant at a fast food restaurant because as long as they can process what an order is and then be able to translate what that is to get it created on the production line of food guess what no more need for a human being to do it now on the white collar side of these ground up jobs, this is where it gets dicey because this is where people technically spend a lot of time and money on education. And now you're looking at potentially voiding it depending, you know, how young or old you are. It's worse if you're younger and already invested in learning about this stuff stuff but one example that's really already happened is

wall street traders i mean they got automated away big time in the 2000s even for years companies have been building fiber optic cabling underneath the ground across the united states underneath the atlantic ocean to make trades able to be executed on the new york stock exchange from minnesota or california in a nanosecond or a micro nanosecond or whatever it is compared to two seconds and things like that and what that allows is what's called algorithmic trading now we've all heard of the algorithm on instagram youtube all this shit same idea traders create coders create algorithms that say if this then that and those algorithms trade on the marketplace throughout the day based on what was coded in and that's what runs the majority of the volume in our marketplace now.

So all the guys who used to be screaming on the phone, whether it's Jordan Belfort down in the boiling room or boil room, whatever it's called. Or the guys sitting in the field on Wall Street and screaming at each other trying to trade this stock for that stock. It's gone. Like that's already going away. If anything, these guys are making a lot less money now than they were 15 years ago. Another job that's going to start going away probably somewhat soon that's really sad is radiologists. So radiologists are doctors. They go to school for what, like years it's a long it's a long time it's a long time and it's a tough job they read cat scans mris

they're the guys responsible for properly diagnosing or clearing up you know if you're negative situations where we're getting tested for the most serious of diseases or the simplest fractures or breaks or whatever. And what's been happening is a lot of companies, including Google – I know for a fact Google is one of them. They've been collecting data, going around and buying up any previous MRIs and scans that they can get their hands on. And they're collecting what the reads were by the radiologists, what the diagnosis ended up being, and then using machine learning to determine why that was the case. And that is all creating a big data repository,

which is then stored and used by future algorithms to properly diagnose diseases, problems on MRIs, things like that. So that's not far away. And those guys are going to be looking for jobs. I have a friend of mine who's actually in a company that does that, and it's pretty real. So another thing that Kai-Fu Lee referred to that was really interesting is he brought up two MIT professors, Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson. So these two guys are kind of gods in the tech space and the next era and determining like what the next industries look like. And they wrote a couple books, which are both awesome, very popular. One in 2014 called The Second Machine Age. Another one in 2018 called Machine Platform Crowd. And one of the topics that they really do focus on is what employment looks like and how it's changing and how technology is changing it. So Kai, or Lee as we say, broke down one area that he thought they really nailed, which is when the two of them basically described three different types of people who will be highly sought after in future economies and already are.

The first type is highly skilled workers. These are guys who have the ability to take complicated information from all different sources and combine it all into one story that makes sense to then use to add value somewhere. So you say, what the fuck did you just say? Let me give you an example. Nate Silver, the statistician. Nate Silver has been the head statistician for FiveThirtyEight for a while now. He rose to prominence in 2012 because he ran data simulations of the Obama-Romney election and had – he was working for the New York Times back then and incredibly nailed like a lot of the states.

He had the electoral votes down to a science. science and what was amazing about it is he ran all kinds of simulations monte carlo simulations whatever the fuck simulations took them all together and then analyzed them to make predictions that turned out to be very prescient and after that obviously he got the contract with abc and espn where he is today running 538 but nate is a perfect example of a highly skilled worker so that first explanation i gave think of it like nate silver the second kind of worker they mentioned is what they call a superstar which frankly is exactly what it sounds like a superstar is someone who is the very best at what they do now you say why is that even important to bring up? Duh, that's always been the case.

They brought it up because of geography. What they posited is that now, even way more than 10 years ago, like now, and then obviously in the future, You can go out if you're a small business, big business, depending on how much money you have or resources available. You can go out and find talent to do jobs where you used to have to hire people who lived close to you so that they could come into the office and do it. As a prime example, some guy running a company with 100 employees 10 years ago needed to hire some average schmo named tim to run his it he's got to pay tim 105 g's benefits hear him bitch and moan all the time and he sucks at his job or his average at best as i pointed out at the beginning but now he doesn't have to hire tim. He can probably hire Sue from California for a quarter of the price and no benefits and no bitching.

And she's 100 times better at the job because she doesn't need to physically be there. She is a superstar. She is reachable. And by the way, Sue probably has 100 contracts like that because she needs to spend three hours a week on each client. So not 100, but you get the point. The third type that they brought up. Is what's called owners. And owners are really simple.

They're guys who have capital. They're guys who have money to invest. And add into the economy. And drive innovation and companies. And profit. So if you don't have money right now. You need to figure out how to get money. To be able to even be an owner. So I really like these three. They give an idea of the type of person you have to be.

I definitely think there's overlap. I think within high skilled workers, there's a lot of superstars, right? And then obviously within superstars, a lot of them are high skilled workers so they're very broad and like i said at the outset we're not we can guess some types of jobs that are going to be around like if you want to sit here and bullshit and say like robot mechanic is going to be around yeah probably will we don't know what that looks like though right so it's really hard to get exact predictions down. But what I wanted to do was take it another layer deeper than McAfee and Brinjofsen did. And I wanted to take it to where we can talk about some of the soft and hard skills that we can use to then relate to the things that we are interested in to continue to drive value or the things that make us feel

a sense of purpose, even if it's not the exact subject matter we're interested in. Does that make sense? So that's where the levitators and innovators idea came in. So what I've done is I've defined the two so I can be clear with that up front. So let me read those off. I define, and this is me doing it, so put this on me, but I define innovators as those who have the ability to make, create, or invent a unique product to fulfill their target customer's needs. They do this by leveraging trained craftsmanship in a specific area by creating products, technology, or art from scratch.

And by seeing creativity and innovation where others see blank space. So by the way, good news for you. Yeah, this absolutely includes like singers, artists, actors, creatives. The caveat is we all know guys like that and girls like that, they don't make money unless they're the best. That will continue to be the case. But yeah, we're going to continue to value the beauty of the human spirit and what it can come up with.

So that includes the arts. I got a question. Yeah. These innovators and levitators, do you have to be the highest talent? It seems like for the medial jobs, like you don't – maybe they won't be there. How can everyone be the best? Oh, it's a great question. We're going to get to that because we're going to use examples, to your point, of people who are the 1% of the 1% of the one like once in a generation people which is

not relatable at all but then we're going to talk about how at their companies and then even at 20 person businesses you have employees throughout now that will also be the case in the future who fit one of those boxes strongly so it's a great question we will get to that because what i don't want to do is be like, hey, you got to be Steve Jobs. Like let me go jump out the fucking window now. That's not happening. Sorry, Steve. But anyway, so great question from Sydney over here. That's something we'll get to. Now, levitators I defined as this, those who have a strong ability to imagine and strategize solutions for their customers in the most efficient, effective, those are some nice buzzwords from business school,

and simple ways. They do this by leveraging soft skills like empathy, charisma, and relationship building, as well as other skills like critical thinking, finding new angles, and of course, problem solving. Quite simply, levitators are visionaries. A little annotation to that too. Whether you are a levitator or an innovator, there's different levels to it, but you have to be a problem solver. That's like the number one. It's the number one skill you need. We problem solve when we have a conversation with our girlfriend or significant other, whatever. Like there's literal problem solving that happens in that. It's every part of life. they have to be they got to be on the ball with that all the time and we'll talk about that but

there are rare people who fully exhibit both you can't put them in one box or the other because when you're talking about levitators and innovators like let's say you have a pure innovator he's probably still going to have some some concepts that relate to being a levitator too and vice versa. But then there's some people who legitimately cook the soup and sell it fully. We'll give an example. But as I said, I'm going to go through four examples. I have two different types of levitators just to be really specific on two very different guys to give you an idea. I'm going to go through an innovator example, and then I'm going to go through an example of both. And after that, we'll talk about your question you asked about how you relate this to the everyman, to you, me, and everyone else. So the very first example here is what I call a charismatic levitator.

And the example I'm going to use is Steve Jobs. Now when you look in the context of the 20th century into the 21st century, and you're asking yourself which individuals had the biggest effect on humanity. I'm not saying Steve Jobs is the answer. I'm saying he has an argument to be the answer. And it's not ridiculous. So let's start with the thing that ties all these people together and is something that we talked about levitators really need, which is problem solving. Steve Jobs had one of the greatest runs of problem solving I've ever seen and will ever see. What people forget is that when he came back to Apple in 1997, so he left the company he founded in 1986 or 85. He was literally kicked out company he founded gone see you steve goes to sow his oats

or whatever for 11 12 years creates a company called next computing which was not totally successful but also ran pixar during those years and that was very successful. So he gets back into Apple in 97. And remember, Steve Jobs died 14 years later. We know that when he died, he had had an indelible effect on all of us. And Apple was already the biggest company in the world. What we forget is that when he came back in 97, Apple was one bad product away from being gone.

Bye. See you. Like they were that close. And Steve Jobs came in and completely turned around the ship. He wasn't even named a full-time CEO until until 2000 like he he wasn't even ceo until the end of 97 but he was effectively running the company like the whole story's wild but a few things he did i'm just gonna go through the highlights and it's still like a lot but crazy like he deserves it number one he came in and he said all right show me the products what are we

selling now and they showed him like 85 fucking project products they were all called like inspire on 1648 the cvx 47.5 and he's like two weeks into listening to pitch decks on all this shit and he says stop it stop if i can't understand what the difference between all this stuff is the customer can't. Congratulations, we now sell four products, not 85 or 75, whatever it was. And he made it simple. He said, if you want to buy a desktop, a laptop, and there was like one other thing in there or something, one or two other things. He said, that's what we sell. And we sell one of each. And people are like, yeah, but you're going to give the customer less choice. He said the customer doesn't want too many choices.

They can't figure it out. So that was the first brilliant thing he did. That worked out pretty well. The second thing, after he successfully launched the iMac desktop and really changed what a computer felt like in your home and also how it performed as an operating system, he scratched the itch.

That's a famous phrase people use in business. But essentially what it means is he looked at something in his own life that drove him nuts and said, how can we fix this? So back in like 2000, 2001, the first MP3 players were coming out. And these were little, I remember I had a little one. I was and these were little i remember i had a little one i was a really little kid but i had a little one it was a little piece of shit plastic whatever it stored like 20 songs the the graphics were terrible it broke in like a week and i think you had to like record it off the radio like it wasn't compatible with computers like you have no idea it was bad

so this is what mp3 players look like and steve jobs said this is bullshit he said first of all if i turn on an mp3 player i should be able to get to a song i want to listen to in two maximum three clicks he said secondly like why can't i make this compatible with a computer and store my song files on a computer that's what i should do and thirdly like what what's what's the deal with the storage like there's only 20 30 40 songs on these things let's get a thousand on there so they created the ipod and the ipod the, the way Steve Jobs marketed it, Levitator, he said, I'm going to put a thousand songs in your pocket. It's a very famous line now. And that's what he did. He didn't even put a power button on the thing. He told his engineers

and his designers, we're just going to have a button that people like hold in and they'll just know to hold it in and it does other shit too, but that's going to be how it turns on. And they're going to get to a song in two or three clicks and they did and it took over the world everyone got an ipod so then he leveraged that and he realized like the entire music industry as brilliant as they were creatively they lacked every bit of it technologically. And at the beginning of the 2000s, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, for the first time they encountered massive disruption with piracy on the internet. Do you remember LimeWire? Yes. That makes me feel so good. Thank God. thank god i used um i think it was youtube to mp3 so i'll download my songs from youtube put

them into mp3 files mp3 files load them into itunes and then oh i still do that oh my god i dead ass still do that and all that stuff i do it for like videos like where i just want the audio of the video oh well i guess that's one way to do it. Oh, gee, there we go. I love that. So, yeah. So Napster, LimeWire, all these piracy platforms, you know, what are you going to do? Prosecute everyone in the world for sharing music? No. But Steve Jobs said, look, it's still, there's viruses all over the place. A lot of the file formats, they're not coded correctly. A lot of them are low quality.

It's not convenient for people. But he knew the music industry didn't know what to do about it. So he realized he had just put an mp3 player that was his with his software in everyone's pocket. And so he corralled the whole music industry, all the big execs and said, Hey, we're going to create iTunes, it's going to be a centralized platform. And congratulations, we're going to sell all your songs for 99 cents. And it was like a hostage situation. What are they going to do? Say no. They said yes. And it was a good decision by them. So Steve became the most important person in music through an MP3 player. That's brilliant. He followed that up with the two enormous home runs to close out his life.

And one thing people don't realize is it was the iPhone in 2007, we know that, and the iPad came in 2010, and then he died in 2011. What people don't know is that the iPad was actually created before the iPhone. he wanted to create a tablet that was between a laptop and a phone per se, where every other company was trying to create a really cheap laptop. He said, fuck that. We're going to create something that's very powerful, but it's going to be portable. It's going to make you feel good. It's going to be like a little notebook in your hand.

And while they were creating that, he scratched the itch again. He looked around his engineering teams, his design teams, and at himself, And while they were creating that, he scratched the itch again. He looked around his engineering teams, his design teams, and at himself, and they all had something in common. Just like they had hated their MP3 players a few years before, they all hated their phones. They were plastic, the buttons sucked, they couldn't text, the flip phone thing was weird. They wanted something touchscreen and easy. They wanted something that could store things actually and wasn't low on data. New phones came out every five minutes. You know, remember like the Envy and the Razr?

I had a Razr. It was my first phone. Yeah, and then there was like a new one like a month later. Like it was so confusing. So he said, all right, fuck the tablet. That's that's like eight inches we're gonna make that a phone he said we're gonna take the ipod we're gonna put it in the phone we're gonna take the computer internet we're gonna put it in the phone and we're gonna take the phone and make it a touch screen easy to use phone boom created the iphone and then he just extrapolated it and put other features on it to create the iPad he had already created a few years later.

Steve Jobs created things we didn't know we need. That's the ultimate problem solver. Now, again, the things that separate a charismatic levitator, though, are beyond that. And he exhibited a lot of charisma doing those things. But to be really specific on that point why i say steve is a charismatic levitator for one thing steve jobs did not view himself as a tech guy he did not view apple as a tech company people don't understand this. Steve Jobs legitimately thought he was an artist. And his canvas or his recording studio were the devices that we use and the reasons we feel good using them.

So that didn't just mean to him that they needed to work the best and have the best software and be the easiest to use they needed to look a certain way in the software and the hardware it's why when you pull out a macbook right there is a feeling you get it's sleek it it invites you in and you feel like you're a you're a part of something opening that up i remember my first time opening one up and i was like holy shit what have i been doing all my life whereas when you open up like a little bit you know a lenovo think pad it's like what is this all right it's like plastic it's got a little mesh on it like no one gave a shit they just put whatever hardware they wanted to put in it and they thought that'd be enough for you to want to use it. That's not how Steve thought.

So when Steve got back to Apple in 97, there was a young guy who not nearly enough people understand or know about. But this guy, Johnny Ive had just been named the head of the design team at Apple. And he wasn't telling anyone, but Johnny Ive was about to leave because he was getting sick of this place. And then Steve came and Steve and Johnny met each other. And Johnny was a brilliant designer and Steve was an artist. And the two of them bonded and they felt the same way about product. So where before Steve had come back, Apple worked like they would have their engineers build a product and give it to the design team and say, work around what we built. Steve went to Johnny and they turned that process on its head. And he said to the design team,

we're going to lead with design and tell our engineers to figure out what to put how to make the design work and that was i don't know if that's ever been done before or since in technology but it changed the game and he got to put his brushstroke on the world by being an artist in his head and the charisma that came with that and the way that he led and motivated people to at his company including hardened engineers to think like how's the customer gonna feel when they touch this product for the first time instead of like what does the interface look like what can it do what do? What are the chips in it? No, no, no. He said, how are they going to feel? And he made the entire culture of the company come back to that. And that all leads to the last point that made him so charismatic.

And it was his mission in the world and his mission, therefore, for Apple, his baby. You look at companies, they all have a mission statement. If it's a one-person company with a domain, they have a fucking mission statement. Frankly, I find most of them either eh or bad. And then, you know, there's some good ones out there. And the cynic in me says that, you know, like a huge company who has a great

mission statement just hired some agency to come in and they made it sound great. That's probably not fair. I'm sure some of them legitimately came up with it. So don't take that all the way. But I'm not sure that Apple ever had a mission statement written down. They didn't need one. Steve Jobs preached the mission of the company every day he wanted to take the power of institutions and put it in the hands of individuals so that individuals could rise up and change the world by harnessing technology and i didn't do it justice to how he worded it but that's what he wanted to do and to to really bring this point home there's a great speech on youtube that i promise you is 14 of the best

minutes you'll ever spend if you go to youtube and type in steve jobs marketing it'll come up and you know it's steve jobs right after he returned to apple in 97 speaking to like 50 apple employees he's wearing flip-flops and shorts and he's talking through what apple's all about and i'm not going to play the whole video for you we don't have time for that but i do want to play is about a 50 second clip from the video that really encaptures how steve jobs approached everything at the company top down, leading with that vision. What we're about isn't making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple's about something more than that Apple at the core its core value is that we believe that

people with passion can change the world for the better that's what we believe and we've had the opportunity to work with people like that we've had an opportunity work with people like you with software developers with customers who have done it in some big and some small ways and we believe that in this world people can change it for the better and that those people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do yeah i mean that that really says it all but go watch that video steve jobs ultimate example of charisma as a pure levitator. Because he wasn't the guy who physically created the products. He wasn't a coder.

He wasn't a technologist like that. He was a guy that understood what needed to be accomplished with the product and how they were going to do it and do it better than anyone else. Now the second kind of levitator I want to bring up is what I call a data-driven levitator. This is somebody, and again, I'm going to go back to it because it's obvious, but then you break it down and it's important to you actually see why it differentiates them. But data-driven levitators are unbelievably prescient problem solvers through trends. I mean, this is called the Trend to Fire show, so it makes sense. But the best example of a data-driven levitator is Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos is not charismatic at all. You ever seen his man talk no yeah well you're not missing much and no disrespect he's the richest guy in the world and he deserves to be and that's the point jeff bezos is a once in every fifth generation trend follower. That's really what I'll call him. He had from day one an unbelievable ability to spot broad trends and find the best narrow lanes to go through. And then formulate the core focuses that they were going to put all their resources on as a company at Amazon to build out and grow into the future. So in one way, the number one data point he's always had, and it's common sense, but very few people actually follow through with it in their industry,

was customer obsession. And that didn't just mean like, yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. Oh my God, thank you for your business. Oh, I'm so sorry you feel that way. How can we make it better? It actually meant making it better in that situation. And to be specific, he wanted to get products to people faster and faster. His ultimate goal is to get someone to click a button and the product's there like as crazy as that sounds like that's what he wants to do in life and jeff preached this through how they built their warehouses how they inventoried their products how they determine what product selections to have which leads to the second major point here that's so critical. He built this company brick by brick. Amazon, it's very hard to remember this, started in 1994. It started as a books company. That's what they did. They did books. They didn't do anything else. For five years, I think it was 94 to 99, they sold is he recognized how critical of a space books were

and how they were and at the dawn of the internet here an ultimate bootloader to being able to sell anything online by perfecting them first and disrupting the book market first so i got a video where he kind of breaks that down and does a way better job than I could. So I'm going to play that now. Well, three years ago, I was in New York City working for a quantitative hedge fund when I came across the startling statistic that web usage was growing at 2300% a year. So I decided I would try and find a business plan that made sense in the context of that growth. And I picked books as the first best product to sell online, which are making a list of

like 20 different products that you might be able to sell. And books were great as the first best because books are incredibly unusual in one respect. And that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far. Music is number two. There are about 200,000 active music CDs at any given time. But in the book space, there are more than 3 million different books worldwide active and in print at any given time across all languages. More than one and a half million in English alone.

In fairness to Jeff, he is better on camera now. He was a little scared there. But you heard about the books. And what you also should have heard there was that if Steve Jobs waited another five minutes to get into music, this guy would have taken over music. He understood the main patterns, the biggest demographic holds throughout society. And he chose books because it was the biggest one he said i'm gonna attack that and then he built that out one by one and the thing is as you get bigger building things out when you get really good at finding the core focus and just quadrupling down on it

and having success your company gets bigger you get get more money. You get more employees. You get more resources. You get more abilities. And you get the ability to move faster with everything. So over time, Amazon has been able to add business after business after business, faster and faster and faster because of said resources. So if you really want to extrapolate that, we all know Amazon's huge and we take that for granted. But go to Google, type in the history of Amazon.

I just did it for Apple, but I have never done it for Apple. Oh my God. There's a Wikipedia page called The History of Amazon. Scroll down to the timeline and just read that fucking thing scary how many businesses they're in and it's because of jeff bezos's pure laser focus on

exactly what was right in front of him following the data and then attacking it and he's done it over and over and over again and now he's worth after divorce like $130 billion right now? Tough life. Anyway, moving on. Now we're going to go to innovators. And I've talked about them already today, but it's a perfect example. I'm going to talk about the Google guys. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant engineers. I think they were PhDs at Stanford and dropped out when they came up with the Google algorithm. But these two guys invented Google in their garage, and they wrote a paper in 1998 that was essentially like the manifesto of what Google was going to be. It's one of the most shared academic research papers in the history of the internet. But they built out Google. There were already search engines, but their algorithm, to use that word again, that they built was just so incredible that it obviously took major market share right away. But within about two or three years, they were out of control growth. These were young guys. I think they were like 26, 27.

And they had a whole company to run. People to manage. A brand to manage. A brand to sell in public, figuring out how they're going to add all the other businesses that having a search engine that's a data machine allows you to then create. So as pure innovators, because they are literally in there engineering this, coding it, creating it, it's their baby. They looked at it and they said, said okay we need a levitator

so they called in eric schmidt who had been the ceo and chairman of a software company called novell and for the next i think like 15 16 years he left a few years ago he effectively ran the business publicly and sergey and larry were able to innovate the hell out of that company. I mean, Google started as a search engine and obviously it is, that's their core business now, but the number of tentacles they have in software, artificial intelligence, data research, self-driving cars. I mean, like we could sit here and go through a list of 600 things. And it's because these two are two of the greatest innovators of all time. In fact, I think they were both literally like CEO, like co-CEO or something like that until recently. And they just stepped down to become chairman so they could focus on nothing but innovation. So these are are these are pure guys that literally you know have innovated

their entire career you're killing me i'm not i i won't share that on camera that's this this is a children's show no so anyway the last example i'm gonna deal with a bad production assistant over here. The last example is someone who exhibits both. And I mentioned this earlier. It's rare to be a pure form of both. And it's none other than Elon Musk. Elon Musk is a pure scientist and engineer.

You ever listen to this guy talk i mean we're all playing checkers and this dude's it's not chess i don't know what he's playing but he is so fucking brilliant and he has companies where he like he's almost like the guy who you imagine is just sitting there smoking the dopest weed and just being like yo yo, like what if the world was upside down? Fuck it. Yeah, let's go draw that up right now. Newton's law, right? Like that is like that's how he thinks.

And on top of that, he's a very eccentric personality. But he's a brilliant communicator, and he takes really complex topics and makes them – he has a strong ability to bring them into the middle of pop culture in an entertaining way to make everyone interested in them. And look, this guy does not think like you and I think. Again, we're all playing checkers. I don't know what he's playing but he was sitting in his dorm room at age 20 at upenn shit school just kidding yeah he went to penn i think he went to stanford too for a phd and dropped out like two days in or something but he's an innovator or a levitator he's both okay he's both because he's the ultimate, ultimate communicator, salesman, brand activist, how am I going to use my career to better the future of humanity?

I think that was almost word for word what he asked because we all asked that when we were 20. Yeah, okay. And so he took that topic and extrapolated it into five, five different ways he could do that through his whatever's going on up here. Number one, it was the dawn of the internet. This is like 1995. So he's like global communication networks, i.e. the internet. Number two, sustainability.

This planet, we're doing some things to it. We got to make it last. Number three, no matter what, the planet's not going to last forever. So we got to figure out how to go to other planets. So he had interplanetary connectivity. Number four, he had genetic research. And number five, he had artificial intelligence. Now, what he said to himself was, yeah, I'll be lucky if I get to three.

That'll be great. I'll be happy with that. Long story short, he's not even 50 years old. It's been 25 years and he has touched all five with companies that he's founded or has been in charge of. So with the internet, he had a maps company back in the day before Google Maps sold that for hundreds of millions, foundeded PayPal. Duh. For sustainability.

That's Tesla. Electric cars. Environmentally friendly. Something we all need. Interplanetary connectivity. Didn't he just do it? He just did a rocket launch to Mars. Or not Mars.

Not Mars. He did it to the... He wants to go to Mars. But he did it to the space station through SpaceX. And that's his other main company then with genetic research he's got a company called neural link which also happens to integrate his fifth topic artificial intelligence where he founded a company for that as well called open ai and then he's got other companies like the boring company that does all the tunnels and shit which is kind of of sustainability. The guy's a machine. But I bring him up too, because he is a absolutely a pure form of both. And the question that you asked earlier about, well, what about

the everyman? How do we all become levitators and innovators? Here's a prime example. I just established that this guy can do all this better than anyone on both sides but you know what his problem is exactly but specifically you know why because there's 24 hours in a day you have it and so does he and you got to sleep some of them two three six whatever it is he can't be on for both of those things all the time when those rockets go off successfully from spacex yeah he might he might have actually concepted one of them but he's got teams of thousands of people who put that together comprised of in that case mostly innovators but some levitators too right they got to to be able to convince NASA that they're going to do it and do it safely and partner with a government resource like that effectively and be the best company to do it. That're not all going to be that. In fact, 99.99999999% of us won't be. So how do we become levitators and innovators? Where do we tie in with those skills? Let's look at the four main companies of the guys that I just mentioned. Apple, Amazon, Google, Tesla, SpaceX too, but whatever.

These companies employ hundreds of thousands of people across them. And yeah, there's some regular, less cognitive jobs, replaceable jobs like delivery drivers, things where people that work in an Apple store. But there's a lot of jobs that are engineering, design, strategy, product, sales, HR. The list goes on and on. And every one of these jobs leans one way or the other and has some aspects of both in some cases. Now extrapolate that out to the regular economy, the non-huge companies, not the big corporations. There's a guy named Naval Ravikant.

I really hope I pronounced that right. I probably didn't. I'm really sorry. Should have studied that before. But the guy is brilliant. He founded a company called AngelList.com, which is a. The concept of true, movable, remote companies ranging from 1 to 20 people in the future economy where they fill in very specific niche gaps and solve a very clear problem and do it in a flexible way. And they're not – you know, through technology and interconnectivity, that's where everything's going. They're not tied to one geographic place doing it. And it's so true. I mean, that's what McAfee and Brinjolfsen are talking about when they talk about superstars and reachability, how you can get access to these things. You can be a superstar running a business that does $2 million a year. You may just provide the perfect kind of service.

Now, the brick-and-mortar, non-restaurant types, although even those things, I mean, who knows with delivery and all that stuff. But non-major service businesses, salons, restaurants, things like that, when you look at small businesses that sell products in places, that's going to be tougher moving forward. That's why you see retailers going out of business. That's only going to continue to happen. But the types of people that run those things can run businesses that maybe don't have physical products or are more in like the e-com game or something like that in the future. And maybe instead of having to have 60 employees because they got to have shifts, maybe they have 20. Maybe right now they sell in a tri-state area, but in the future, they'll be able to sell in 50 states and three other countries. These are realities, and it's tough to visualize.

We don't know exactly what it will look like. But the bottom line is my hypothesis of you better be able to create or be able to add that value to the masses through proper messaging and targeting is true. And that is innovation and levitation. So I'd love to get some people's thoughts on this. At the end of the day, you better be able to do these things no matter what. And I think it's actually a pretty good game plan to prepare. So that's all I got. That's it? It wasn't enough. I was thinking another hour. I was really buying into people's time, you know, investing it in me, but yeah, I'll let you go.

But give it a thought, get back to me or don't, but innovators and levitators. Thank you, Eminem. I'm Julian Dory. That's Sidney DiBernardo here helping me out, doing a great job. This is the Trendifyer Show. See you next time.