We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. My guest today is futurist, entrepreneur, and author Ross Dawson. Ross is the founding chairman of Advanced Human Technologies Group and his latest book is titled Thriving on Overload. It's somewhat of a survival guide in this new era of exponential information. In this episode, you will learn how to ensure the information you consume is serving you best, frameworks used by billionaires to connect information into meaningful patterns to build deep knowledge and insight, the different levels of attention and focus and how to harness the one you need at any given time, why the best investors are masters at synthesizing these principles and leveraging information

Starting point is 00:00:38 productivity, the current state of artificial intelligence, which industries Ross believes will generate the billionaires of the future and a whole lot more. Ross brings a vast amount of experience from multiple fields, and I think he'll get a lot out of this one. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Ross Dawson. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to The Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerbie, and today I'm super excited to have with us, futurist Ross Dawson.

Starting point is 00:01:27 Ross, welcome to the show. Awesome to be here. Thanks, Trey. Now, to kick things off, I wanted to address the title I just threw. out there and what you do for a living because it's not very typical. Having the title of futurists could attract a lot of speculation. So why don't we just start by describing what exactly you do as a futurist and what it is you don't do? There are many types of futurists or people call them foresight professionals in some cases. There are many disciplines and many approaches.

Starting point is 00:01:56 There are 43, I think 44 at last count, university programs around the world that train, educate people in foresight practices or PhD programs. There's a lot of rigor and discipline to the art and science of thinking about the future and many, I suppose, philosophical differences, as you would expect, in any discipline. So my particular approach is, I suppose, to the broader consensus in the discipline, which is you can't predict the future. The future is inherently unpredictable. However, we do have evidence. We have hints and guesses and clues and things that give us some way to think in a structured way about the future. So it's not as if we know nothing about the future. We do have some evidence which allows us to make some educated ways of thinking about the future.

Starting point is 00:02:47 And that includes not necessarily predicting, say that we predict that this will happen, but that there are these potential paths. And these are the things which could shape those parts. And these are the things we could influence the ways in which we can shape those paths to potentially be more favorable to us as individuals or as companies or as a society. So my role as a futurist as I see it is to help leaders, organizations to think more effectively about the future, to probably think more about the future than they might have otherwise, so that they can act better in the present by understanding some of the those forks in the road. We all need, I think, almost everybody needs to think more about the future than they do.

Starting point is 00:03:31 We get pulled back to the present. The present is very demanding. It's demanding of our attention. There's all sorts of things arising at all fronts. And so we pull back to the present. And so it does require some discipline. It does require us to make an effort to carve out the time, to realize the energy is important to be thinking about,

Starting point is 00:03:52 you know, not just next month, but next year, three years, five years, seven years, if we want to have a successful organization or successful investments in five years or ten years, we do need to have some kind of a sense of what the world will look like, what will be shaping that and what is we can do to take advantage of those or to be able to make those trends even better. I love that, and I agree that living in the future and working and thinking about the future is important. Jeff Bezos, back when he was CEO of Amazon, used to say that he had the best job in the world because he got to live in the future. And if you think about it, if you think of a

Starting point is 00:04:25 company like Amazon, wouldn't it be nice to have the foresight and kind of know what the future might look like to better understand the opportunity you might have had back in the, say, early 2000s after the dot-com bubble and buying a stock like Amazon? I certainly didn't have that foresight back then, and I don't think a lot of people did. But it is important to understand where we are going. And so we're going to talk a lot about that as well as the daily distractions that come along the way. One theory that you've had and held for a long time is that the economy would become more and more centered around individuals instead of major corporations over the long term.

Starting point is 00:05:02 And that's proving to be, I think, very correct. COVID seemed to really accelerate that experiment and that type of economy. But there's also been a considerable amount of disruption of work along the way with that model we saw through COVID as well. So has anything from the pandemic reshaping? your thinking around an individual-centric economy? I suppose it has, if anything, accelerated, I just as accelerated and brought more to BIP, shifting from an economy where organizations at the center of the economy to one where the

Starting point is 00:05:33 individuals are the center of the economy. And so this has been manifested in a number of ways. Part of it is that power more broadly is shifting from institutions to individuals, from governments to citizens, from organizations to their customers, to health institutions to patients, and from employers to employees. So this particularly particularly put in the current job situation. And so that's one thing, is that individuals have more power. But we're also starting to see that organizational boundaries are blurring. So more and more people are, in fact, the majority of Fortune 500 companies are using,

Starting point is 00:06:11 say they are using extensively in some form external labor, be they freelance a platform, distributed innovation, a whole array of different ways in which they are not just using their staff. So this starts to build a world in which it is more and more tenable to be an individual, to have many options to be able to create not just a business, but also a portfolio of different work opportunities, and to have more and more choices around that. So this trend has, I think, been very evident for the last decade, has accelerated further. And I don't see nothing which is pulling us away from that. In fact, if we start to push forward, for example, looking at the rise, potential rise of distributed autonomous organizations.

Starting point is 00:07:00 So crypto or blockchain-based organizations where essentially the original description of Vitalik Buteran, who is the founder of Ethereum, who came up with the concept of distributed autonomous. made organizations, is that it is automation at the center, humans at the edges. And so this is where essentially the AI or the systems or the structures or the processes in the middle are the ones that are essentially the managers, allocating work, allocating resources, having structures to do that. And the actual work has been formed by individual humans, who again, of course, have choice in their participation in that. We're seeing more and more ways in which value creation has been distributed across

Starting point is 00:07:42 arrays of individuals as opposed to just these economic entities called organizations. And so going back to the sort of the what's happened in COVID is this, the grand experiment, as I've called it, of individuals going, working from home, has meant that they've said, hey, well, actually, this is not too bad. And when things go back to relatively normal, I'd like to have a bit more of this. And so that's, again, part of that power to the individual and forcing organizations to rethink. how it is they are structured in terms of physical location, how it is their structures in terms of giving autonomy to individuals to be able to create value. And of course, you know, all

Starting point is 00:08:21 effective leaders have understood for a long time that you can only achieve anything at scale if you're giving autonomy to talented people as opposed to directing them what to do. Very interesting. It's been a while since I've heard people talk about decentralized autonomous organizations, like the Daos of the world where such a hot trend word, maybe like six months to a year ago. and I feel like it's kind of fallen off just from my personal experience, just not seeing it as much in the threads. And I think probably that's partly tied to the fact that a lot of crypto prices have just declined. So rapidly, maybe it fell out of popularity fairly quickly. But is the concept there actually something viable that you foresee becoming, you know, catching hold for real in the near future?

Starting point is 00:09:02 If you catalog the array of organizations that call themselves down today, that there's a lot and it's growing rapidly. However, I feel that those are relatively crude manifestations of the original vision of Daos. I mean, they are simply aggregates of individuals, you know, using crypto platform, sometimes using voting structures to be able to achieve their aims. And they were in the news recently when there was a Dow, which was trying to buy the original Declaration of Independence failed, but it was, yeah, that didn't need necessarily crypto structure to do it, but it was an effect of aggregation. So I think it is inevitable.

Starting point is 00:09:37 There's more and more, I think, very, very, very interesting entrepreneurs that I know that are discussing ways to be able to reshape their organizations at DOWs in the not-ttoo-distant future. So I think we're going to see not just more of that in the news, but more actually substantive shifts to new organizational structures. And I think the broader point being here is that traditional organizational structures have a limited. The limited company has many benefits. It has a lot of flexibility, has a lot of structures, obviously thrived in the Darwinian evolution of the economy over the last centuries. But we can certainly envisage and I think imagine that there are going to be more adaptations or variations on economic structures.

Starting point is 00:10:22 So we're starting to see there are already a legislation in at least one U.S. state to enable Daos to exist where there is necessarily a human center or director. or core, and we will see more legislation enabling that, whether the legislation is there or not, we will see more and more of these structures flourish. And, you know, I suppose a parallel to this is the very much discussed, the network state by Bilaghi Sirin Vassan, which has just come out, which looks at this idea of conglomerates of individuals declaring themselves as ultimately sovereign entities. And so that's an organization of a kind. You know, we think of nations and corporation is quite different. They are, of course, at the moment, but there could be some blurring

Starting point is 00:11:04 of that as we evolve. Fascinating. And one of the main reasons I wanted to touch on your background is to give the listeners an idea of the amount of information you are continuously digesting to create strategies for companies in vastly different industries. Your new book is all about how to thrive with the relentless amount of information that is directed at us daily. How has your experience working in these different industries shaped your frameworks that you lay out here in the book. I wrote an article 25 years ago called Information Overload Problem or Opportunity. And by view, of course, at the time, that there was an opportunity. Of course, since then, we have also quite a lot more overload.

Starting point is 00:11:46 And this has been shaped, not just in my time. So this was actually coming from financial markets. So I went for Merrill Lynch, worked for Thompson Financial. I was the Global Director of Capital Marks of Thompson Financial. and what I saw in the financial markets was that this was a place where people had more information than anyone else. And this was particularly the time when, you know, early in their days of the internet or pre-internet, and their ability to create value, to be able to make trading decisions, to assist their clients, to be able to structure effective deals was based on their ability to take an unlimited amount of information

Starting point is 00:12:20 and to be able to make better decisions from that. So that's the original place that I saw this and built my thesis. And so since then, as you said, in becoming not only doing this kind of work with major organizations, but being a futurist specializing in quite a few different industries. So most of my work looks at the future of particular industries. So I do have specific deep expertise in future financial services, media and technology. But I also do substantial work in the future of education, government, retail and health. And I also do a lot of work on future of work and future of organizations. So all of these domains, of course, mean that I, myself, I have quite a lot of information that I have to deal with in my everyday work. So

Starting point is 00:13:07 when I give my speeches, one of the most common questions the end is, how on earth you keep on top of everything? And partly my book is a way of cataloging what I have observed myself doing, but also the many people that I know and have worked with over the years who I describe as information masters, those people who are inherently able to thrive, prosper, just to be excel in a world of unlimited information. And many of them are investors, be they professional investors, individual investors, institutional investors. I do a lot of work with the institutional investment community or venture capitalists, where I think it's a lot more interesting in the sense that they have far less quantitative data to be able to assess when you're looking, of course,

Starting point is 00:13:52 at early stage companies compared with the public companies. One thing I loved about the book is your ability to distill a bunch of concepts down into visuals and actually even talking about how powerful that idea is. So it shows how deeply you've thought about something and how well you can explain it to somebody else if you can put it into some kind of easy to understand visual. And the visuals that stuck out to me were around the five powers that you created. or identified. So if you would,

Starting point is 00:14:20 help us understand what the five powers are to manage information overload and maybe we go through them one by one. Certainly. Purpose, framing, filtering,

Starting point is 00:14:29 attention, and synthesis. So to just expand a little on those. Purpose, we need to know why we look at information in the first place. There's a universe

Starting point is 00:14:40 of information. A lot of it is tantalizing. Oh, that looks interesting. But if there's no reason why, good reason why we should be looking at it, then perhaps we shouldn't be. There's other information where they do have a good reason to look at that.

Starting point is 00:14:52 And so this starts really from our higher order objectives. What is it we want to achieve? What are our goals? What are our objectives? Partly digging down into that, where do we want to be an expert? Because I believe that we all need to be world-class experts, whatever it is we choose to be. And so we need to choose those things.

Starting point is 00:15:09 What do I need to be expert at? Who do I want to become? What the areas of my health or my family's health or well-being that I want to be interested in? What are the, you know, or even what are my passions? You know, there's something I am passionate about, whether it's the football or a art or other things, these are other things which there is a reason why. So that purpose is this has to be the starting point for us to understand what

Starting point is 00:15:35 information is relevant to us. And if we're just focused around particular investment portfolios, again, we can have a frame around that, you know, the why, but also the framing of those areas of interest. us, you know, what Warren Buffett calls the circle of confidence, being able to find, this is the areas in which I can be and want to be an expert, and this is the path I can be an expert, this is the reasons why, and I can frame that, and this guides me in being able to work out what information is relevant to me and what is not. So the second one is framing, and this is particularly critical, because information is information. It's not knowledge. It's not

Starting point is 00:16:12 expertise. It's not understanding. It's not the ability to make better decisions. So we need to pull the information together into frameworks that are actually represent our understanding of what the world looks like, of how this economy is working, what's happening in this industry, what's the nature of this company, what is driver's successor? And so this is where we can use some structures, you know, this idea of connected thinking, it's this idea of connecting the dots, how do we pull together the pieces to build our level of understanding? And I believe that visual tools are particularly valuable in this. There's a number of different structures which we can use,

Starting point is 00:16:51 that we can use mind maps or concept maps or just as a number of ways to build networks between concepts, a number of tools that we can use to frame our thinking, to literally build our frameworks for thinking, which enables us to understand. The third power is that of filtering, where from all of the world information we see, we need to be able to choose what it is that matters to us,

Starting point is 00:17:12 what actually assists our thinking, and what is irrelevant or even detracts from our thinking. So this is a, you know, a part of us to be able to say, well, what sources do we use? What sources do we not use? Well, one of the nature of how we use different, you know, when I describe as portals, be they in terms of digital device, going direct to media, going to individuals, going through aggregators, setting those up correctly and so on, but also being able to understand what it is that enhances our mental models,

Starting point is 00:17:44 And that includes, of course, looking for contradictory thinking, things that can involve or improve our thinking, as opposed to simply confirming or contradicting our feelings to be able to be effective in this everyday, perhaps almost every moment process we have of filtering the information which we are barraged with. So attention is critical. And I think this is not just about focus. I think we shouldn't be thinking, say, we either focused or we're not focused. there are many different types of attention that we need to give. One of them is simply scanning. All right, here are my set of sources. This is the thing which I think will find information.

Starting point is 00:18:21 I'm going to efficiently scan through those. Then they're going to spend some time. I want to assimilate something. All right, this is something which is worth by spending my time on. I'm going to spend my time on that. I'm going to assimilate that into my thinking. And that is a different form of attention. You also have deep diving where we actually say,

Starting point is 00:18:38 I am going to go and spend a block of time. I'm going to cut out everything else. This is where I'm actually developing my frameworks. I'm being able to think in depth around what it is that makes sense, what does make sense of my models, how do I enhance that? You might be writing, you might be designing a framework, you may be thinking something through and process. But there are other types of attention as well,

Starting point is 00:19:00 which includes exploring where you say, all right, I am going to go an adventure. I'm going to find something which I never would have found otherwise and trying to unearth that serendipity of finding things. And this attention is then also about scheduling. What times will I do particular activities? Then the final power, and I believe the most powerful and the most important in a way the most relevant to investors is synthesis, because we need to pull all this together.

Starting point is 00:19:26 This is literally about this process of building understanding, building a knowledge of the world, knowledge of the markets in a way that we can sense better than other people, where the opportunities are emerging, how things are shifting, and where we can best invest to be able to place the best return. And that's an ongoing process of being able to take the pieces of the puzzle and to put them together and continually evolve our mental models because the world is changing. We can't have fixed mental models, but that act of synthesis is not about saying, all right, I know. I've worked it all out because in fact, you may have worked it out, but tomorrow the world is going to be different, and you need to continue evolving that, pulling together the pieces, synthesizing the ideas

Starting point is 00:20:12 to have the best, you know, the most valid, never right, but better understanding of the world, which means that amongst other things, you can invest better. I would agree. I would agree that the masters of that would be Warren Buff and Charlie Munger, maybe Buffett even more so than Munger as far as adopting and renewing his frameworks. But I'm going to pull some quote, out of your book, and one of them is actually from Charlie Munger here. It says, I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person's brain because it understands the most fundamental models, ones that will do most work per unit. When people hear mental model, they might instantly

Starting point is 00:20:54 think of things like Occam's Razor, where the simplest idea is the best, for example, and there's other shorthand type of mental models that are out there. But my understanding is that you actually think about mental models quite differently. So how would you define a mental model and how would you advise our listeners on developing mental models for themselves? So the first frame is that, you know, as you say, people use mental models to talk about particular, I suppose, in a way, heuristics, you know, talked about the circle of confidence from Warren Buffett before.

Starting point is 00:21:25 There's, you know, the map is not the territory, which is very true. and it is very useful to be able to think about how we understand the world. But these that go deeper than that, where we need to, you know, if we come back to the psychological or psychologist definition of mental model, it is simply the models that we build our brain on how the world works that inform our actions. So when we are born, you know, we see a rattle. We work out, oh, when you shake the rattle, it rattles.

Starting point is 00:21:53 And when I smile at my parents, they smile back. And so there's this simple, similar. point start to build a model of the world. When I drop something, it hits the ground. And as we get into more complex situation, we build richer and rich mental models. So whenever you respond to a situation, be that a social situation or a car driving by in the road, that's built on your mental model of the world. This is where I'm going to position myself in a queue to be able to get to the front faster. It's your mental model around how it is that queue works. It's not conscious, but it is essentially your model of the world. So anything that we do,

Starting point is 00:22:28 do. Any action we take, any word that we speak is in fact based implicitly on the full extent of all of our experience in our lives, which is build up the mental models that we have. So some portion, some small portion of those mental models we can be conscious of. And many others are unconscious. That is our intuition. That is the gut where we can sort of say, I feel this is right. I can't consciously explain why. But that is, in fact, based implicitly on the full depth of the mental models of you built up through your experience of the world. So what I believe is that we need to understand that frame and to concentrate on building richer mental models, ones which have more facets to them, which are more robust because they can deal with more variety in circumstances,

Starting point is 00:23:15 and we can demonstrate to be more effective over time. And so this is a cognitive thing. All of this is about our human cognition. We have some wonderful technology tools, but still by far the most extraordinary thing in the known universe is the human brain as investors. The single thing which will drive our results is going to be in applying our human brain, our cognition effectively, and enhancing our cognition. So in a way, all of this frame around thriving and over the line is saying, how do we enhance our cognition and enhance our thinking, be better at perceiving all of the signals the world sent to us in order to be able to have a better model which results in better decisions. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:28:17 understand and recognize. And I know that going to the brain, our brain operates in this way where we kind of connect the dots, if you will, based on almost an emotional attachment to what we learn or some kind of experiential element to what we learn. And I'm kind of curious how that might tie into this quote from Elon Musk where he said, it's important to view knowledge as a sort of a semantic tree. Make sure you understand the 44 fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches before you get into the leaves and the details or there's nothing for them to hang on to. So connecting these dots and creating the semantic tree, what are some ways that a tree model in particular might help us process information faster?

Starting point is 00:28:59 So in the book, I identified three structures for how it is we build our frameworks, you know, trees, networks, and systems. So a tree is, in fact, a hierarchy. Things have subsidiary elements and we can build structured hierarchies for thinking where things fit. Now, if we drill into this, I think one of the most important concept is that of logical levels and what is something which is a higher logical level

Starting point is 00:29:26 or what is something at a lower logical level? So whenever we might get to a particular concept, we might say, well, what are specific examples or instance of this concept? What falls under this concept? What is a lower logical level? Or what is a high logical? What is this an example of?

Starting point is 00:29:43 What is this the things that fall into that? Or what are things that are a peer level? So this is all being taught, all taught in the pyramid thinking, which is Barbara Minto, which is the foundation of a lot of the thinking structures of McKinsey and many other consulting forms. That's essentially what it lays out. So whenever you get a report from a major strategy firm, we'll have this kind of thinking behind it.

Starting point is 00:30:06 You'll have some structure and some rigor around the logical levels, what is received. But this is something which we can start to apply for ourselves, I think, in being able to understand the structure of things. If we've seen this idea of connecting the information, all right, we have something come in. Being able to connect it to other things is what gives it value. And when we can start to connect in, is this a similar type of instance to something? So let's, I suppose, give me an example of our industry. How about space tourism?

Starting point is 00:30:36 Okay. One of the things you could categorize at the same level are all the companies. All right, so all of these companies are at the same logical level. So then at the higher level, we've got the industry. All right, so then start to think, well, what is the industry? Well, if you fact, so for example, Virgin Galactic is squarely a space tourism company. But in fact, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos is one, is yes, doing space tourism, but that's only really, is just a sideline or a bit of revenue or a bit of public attention for some broader, broader objectives of exploring and creating. in value from space. And similarly, SpaceX has got its space tourism is, again, an element of it.

Starting point is 00:31:17 So we think, all right, well, the industry which contains this, well, there's actually some adjacent industries. Is there's space tourism, there's planetary exploration, there's external space exploitation. So if we think, all right, so then what are some of the adjacent things around those companies? All right. So we have the governmental entities. So NASA or various many countries around into the world now, not just the China, Russia, US, but dozens of other countries have space programs various kinds. So you've got some of the external things there. Then you look at some of the, all right, what are the things below the companies, all right? Thinking about some of the employees, some of the expertise, some of the science, some of the institutions, the academic institutions,

Starting point is 00:31:55 and also some of the thinking about, again, some of the underlying research. All right, so what are the things underlying this? These are different types of research into rockets, into fuel science, into resource extraction, some of the communication technology. and so on. So this is just a little bit of an example, but it starts even just a very, very quick off-the-cuff example, I think starts to give some sense of, all right, well, you can see where some of this ideas fits into these different plants and already, I suppose, unfolding these overlaying industries in which these companies fit and starting to, in fact, get a better sense of, no, these not just space tourism companies, but there are different

Starting point is 00:32:32 aspects of those. So that's just as one way of being able to think, well, here are different levels in which we can start to have a tree which represents the space tourism industry. And I might, after this, actually sort of sit down and actually draw out space tourism as a tree or as a network and be able to explore some of the ideas because it starts to, all right, this elucidates, and I understand it, what the industry in. What are the drivers? I think some of those logical levels have been, all right. So you've got industry level.

Starting point is 00:32:59 But again, what are the motivations? I think that's a higher logical level. Oh, yes, of course, profit. But there's not just that. There's the desire to expand our universe as humans, which is a fairly natural one as humans, but there is also the drivers of planetary change here, which are suggesting we might need some or want some other resources. And I think that starts to tie into a relationship to other industries of, well, why do we need those resources? So we start to build, I think, a whole structure as we start to think about it in terms of these logical levels.

Starting point is 00:33:34 That's fascinating. So speaking of Virgin Galactic, you know, and Richard Branson, let's say, it appears most billionaires and Branson's one of them have a type of practice for either note-taking or journaling. And you reference this in the book, but Bezos makes his executives, for example, convey their ideas in six-page memos. And the point is just that you can't, in his opinion, write a six-page memo without some deep thought and getting some clarity of thought, which is debatable, right? But that seemed to work quite well for Amazon. Warren Buffett has a quote that says, some of the things I think I think I find

Starting point is 00:34:08 it don't make any sense when I start trying to write them down and explain them to people. And if I can't stand applying pencil to paper, you better think through it some more. So in your book, you write, quote, the most effective way to distill your thoughts is to write an account that includes a visual summary of your logic. I was kind of curious.

Starting point is 00:34:28 What exactly do you mean by this? So writing is indeed extraordinarily valuable. in clarifying our thoughts. I think that Buffett quote is great. Yes. All right. I know what I'm talking about. I'll be writing down.

Starting point is 00:34:41 Well, all right. I start to see the flaws in my thinking as I write that down. But to get more rigor, I believe some kind of a visual representation is even stronger, is even more powerful, is even less subject to being able to represent an idea in a compelling but not necessarily structured or rigorous way. So in the book,

Starting point is 00:35:04 I describe some of the tools, which we can visual tools, which can use to represent things. It's really about the relationships between ideas. If we have a core idea, what are the elements that support it? Does this idea support this other idea? Does this, do I put, I'm putting a counterpoint to kind of can I visually represent that as a counterpoint? You know, what are the actual elements of my argument? And what is, if I put those on a page, how would those be related? So a concept map is a very valuable tool.

Starting point is 00:35:34 In a simple form, it says, okay, here's ideas. You draw a line and you write on that line what the relationship is. This idea supports this one. This one contradicts it. This one is an example of. And you can start to then lay out the relationship between the ideas. And this takes effort. But it leads to a far, far clear argument.

Starting point is 00:35:58 So a wonderful example is to look at it. an economist article. So economist articles have a very common structure. They start with an anecdote. They end with a bit of a throwaway line, I suppose, a conclusion line. They have a few pieces which they expand on throughout. And what you can actually do with the economist article is to actually take, all right, well, actually, this is the core idea. This is the count, and there's always counterpoints in there. They always present in one side. They always say, well, there's other reasons to think about that. So it's always gives you, it never gives you a once, you know, this is the way it is.

Starting point is 00:36:34 It's always giving you some nuance to it. And you can actually pick out those different elements and write those down on the page and actually say, oh, these are the core elements, these are way related, these are supporting arguments, these contradictory arguments. This appears to be the conclusion or this is the cautions around that idea. And it's very valuable when going through any content that you believe is really rich, whether you've written it yourself or someone else at. You want to pick that, pull that apart by representing that visually.

Starting point is 00:37:03 Interesting. Let me first just say that this book is chock full of resources and actionable resources. I don't think I've found a book quite this dense with amazing resources since reading something like, you know, the four hour work week or some kind of book that just says, here's some tools you can actually put into place and hear the websites and apps. You lay out a few of them for note taking and journaling. I'd wonder if you could just share with the audience a couple of them that you might recommend if they want to start following the billionaires lead and actually journaling for themselves.

Starting point is 00:37:32 So I'm just pulling that back to a broader question, which is how do we take all the information that we see and put that in the structured forms? Because, yes, in terms of just journaling, you know, I think we're just writing. You know, simple documents are great. But when we start to see the complexity of the world out there and pulling that together, there's a broader structure. And so this is not all covered in depth in the book, but there is a simple. an associated course, which goes in a lot more detail into this. But this is this frame of saying is capture, transfer, and repository. So the first point is capturing the information that we see.

Starting point is 00:38:08 So this could be something, you know, a lot of people just copy and paste, or they may use a bookmarking tool. But there are also some other interesting tools. There's web clippers, which enable us to take portions of the things we see on the web and to put them into our app. There's readwise, which enables to take our notes from Kindle and transforms where we want to go, there's a wonderful tool called Hypothesis, which is an open source platform for being able to take notes on anything that we see in a shared environment.

Starting point is 00:38:39 Even when you're listening to podcasts, for example, there's a tool called Snipped, which enables you to take an audio snippet and transcribe it and pull it into your notes. So from all of these ways where you are capturing information, you're then looking at sometimes having to transfer it. And so there's various tools around this and your Zapiers and other systems for transferring information. So there's a bit of a structure for how you can do that effectively, depending on how you're clipping it and where you're putting it. The final point is the repository. This is where I'm putting all of the things that I find. One of the really interesting developments over the last years is being the very strong rise of what I call connected note-taking,

Starting point is 00:39:18 where you are able to pull notes together, but also put them in a structure, see how they're So Rome Research is a software tool which many VCs investors I sign to use. That's given rise to the term Rome cult, where people can capture information, store that, build a whole lot of structures around it. Obsidian is a open source alternative, slightly different, but very powerful. That's one which I use. There's LogSec, which is a bit more geeky. But these are all a little bit geeky, but they're very powerful.

Starting point is 00:39:53 but ways where you can capture things, and then, for example, build networks of displaying the relationships which you see between things. And there's also tools such as Notion. And there's a whole array of competitors or ones adjacent to Notion, such as Airtable, though it's not as flexible or a few others, which enable you to, again, take highly structured notes and ideas and have different representations of the relations between them, which tend to be more, which are more relate, I suppose, structured or relational database in the classical database sense rather networked. Yeah, but this is an emerging area of thinking tools and what I call information productivity. So I'm a bit surprised, but very few people have used that word information productivity before. But I think that is what we need to be thinking about. How can we productive in information?

Starting point is 00:40:44 Information is the most valuable resource we will ever have. It's far more valuable than gold or oil or whatever it is that we think of. That's what drives all the values. we need to be thinking how do we make that information productive? What's inside our brains is the most important part of that. But to assist that is the set of tools for capturing, transferring, and building repositories which create, I suppose, this start to build our own frameworks day by day of the notes we are taking into something which is akin to knowledge rather than just a set of notes. Yeah, Richard Branson would say an idea not written down is an idea lost, which is, I love that quote. And information productivity, that's going to stick with me. There's a new term out there called information diet, which is, I think just shows you a sign of the times, right? Because we are, as you say, in and dated with information on a daily basis. And you are the information you consume. So instead of simply telling people to limit the news they take in or the mindless social media photos, I love how you framed it in the book, which is to discern.

Starting point is 00:41:47 the information that serves you best and shapes your quality of life. So understanding that you are in control and you can use this information how you want as long as it serves you in the best possible way. So since we have a limited amount of time on this earth, what are some tools we can use to ensure information is serving us and not the other way around? So this instance, I think it is the tool that we have is our brain and the way that we think about it. So, yes, there are tools.

Starting point is 00:42:17 And I think that there's a raft of interesting startups out there that are focused on combating misinformation, disinformation by using AI-based checking of, you know, sources and information. And so a lot of those are for corporate use. I think we want to see more much for individual use. So some tools like that out there. Also, you know, for a very long time, I've intended a long time to build a startup, which was based on be able to build assessments of both news outlets and individual journalists. There's a working on that problem at the moment.

Starting point is 00:42:53 So these are kinds of simple tools. But in terms of saying, what is it that serves us? What information serves us, that's our brain needs to be finally attuned to that. Any information we see. So one of the aspects is saying, does this information have positive or negative value for me? So information can not only have zero value, you can have negative value. Just simply by taking your time if it's useless or even worse, if it is incorrect or misleading or just takes you in a wrong direction.

Starting point is 00:43:24 So there's plenty of information that has negative value. There's also information that has positive value. And sometimes you need to find what that positive value is because that is a positive value in relation to your current mental models. How does this piece of information add value to my mental models? And this is partly in terms of another piece of the jigsaw of the puzzle. That's what we're all doing, is building our jigsaws, our maps of a particular industry, of a particular company, of understanding how we see the economy panning out.

Starting point is 00:43:59 And so a particular piece of information could fit neatly into our current structures. But we need to be highly sensitized to the surprises, the things that don't fit. And of course, we need to be balanced and make sure that it is not spurious. It is not something which is incorrect. But we need to be far more sensitized and far more looking for those things that don't fit our mental models because that means that we might need to adjust our mental models. And if we manage to incorporate them into our mental models, it means our mental models will be richer, will be more robust, will be more correct in this very complex world.

Starting point is 00:44:36 So we need to be looking for the surprises, very carefully assessing the potential for this to be at the broad level correct or incorrect, but also to add value to our mental models. And this comes back to then our ability to be flexible in the ways in which we're developing our mental models, in being able to actively look for, disconfirming as well as confirming evidence, and finding ways to integrate that into our ways of thinking. So that's coming back, information that serves us. Yes, there are a couple of preliminary filters in terms of relevance, accuracy, but then in terms of complementarity or ability to add value to existing models.

Starting point is 00:45:18 And that's something we simply need to be going through that cognitive process as we are exposing ourselves to information throughout. And the way we find that, again, is looking for the surprises. That is interesting because that doesn't quite fit. It's a lot more relevant than saying, okay, I found lots of lots of lots of things confirmed exactly what I thought before. I think we're all too guilty of that. So sticking with this theme of information diet, information productivity, you also

Starting point is 00:45:43 highlight this idea of an information portfolio in the book. And you reference Harry Markowitz, who created modern portfolio theory in 1952 and won a Nobel prize for it. And the theory, in essence, proves that if your portfolio is diversified, containing a range of investments that are not highly correlated in their performance, you will achieve a better overall return for the risk you take. And Ray Dalio is referenced a lot with this idea and the 15 uncorrelated bets being sort of the holy grail of investing. What are some ways we can build our own information portfolio? So this is a strong but not perfect analogy where we look at an information

Starting point is 00:46:24 portfolio saying if we have a single source, then that's dangerous. Just as we have a single investment, that's dangerous. It might do well, but it might not do. very well at all. So we need to look for multiple information sources, ones which gives us a diversity of perspectives. Now, what we are, where it's not a perfect analogy is what I'm looking for is not necessarily uncorrelated, but distinct. So this is around cognitive diversity. And so it's diversity of sources. So the sources could be getting information from different places and different kinds. But there are also any source which presents you with information will have its own frame, its own call it editorial perspective, the things which it sees that are

Starting point is 00:47:05 relevant, and its ways of interpreting those. So we must have diversity in our inputs, the way they're thinking, whether that in terms of media, or in terms of the people that we talk to, all the people that we listen to, in terms of the market perspectives that we take in. And so that's challenging where we need to look for what may be, well, we certainly are different, must be different, and potentially contradictory frames. We need to bring that together into our own models that we believe that we find is rigorous and solid. But that information portfolio is to be able to look for, you know, some of the frames are, of course, from different people that have different beliefs in way markets work. If we're looking for market information, I think from different countries is also relevant.

Starting point is 00:47:53 I think that in a way, external diversity is only a proxy for cognitive diversity. But we're certainly looking for anything which can give us some clues around these are people that might think differently. This is analyses that might be different. For example, not just taken from investment banks, but from activist organizations. Well, all right. So maybe they have a bias there or various think tanks. They may have biases there.

Starting point is 00:48:17 But if you can unpick that, they may be bringing together pointed research, which can actually be complementary to what you're thinking. So you're trying to say, let's make sure that all my information is described. sources cannot be described in the same way that I'm getting as diverse inputs as possible from as diverse array of thinking as possible. And that builds a portfolio, which starts to be robust against shifts around changes in reality, around things and unexpected worlds. Again, if we go back to the 2008 crisis, it was very easy to look for many people that had the same view on the debt structure of the United States. There were some signals which came

Starting point is 00:48:58 large amounts slightly mainstream, we provide a quite different perspective. And again, these were surprising. These were interesting at the time. But I think, you know, that's interestingness. This is interesting. And it doesn't mean that you think it's right. But that starts to mean that that should be a type of source you gravitate to as complement so that you do have a fully diverse portfolio of sources and perspectives in developing your own rigorous thinking. Fantastic. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination.

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Starting point is 00:52:34 and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income fund fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. I get the sense that there's a bit of a yen and yang in creating success. And just referencing a few more billionaires from the book, the yen being the efficiencies you create, like how billionaires Dan Eck of Spotify and Max Levchin, most notably of PayPal, say each day starts with the same very strict routine. And the yang would be play, for lack of a better word, or exploratory passion may be,

Starting point is 00:53:11 similar to how David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, DJs on the weekends. major festivals, it's almost like you create routines to then create freedom. What are some ways you advise people to strike a balance between these two things? So this is part of this point is beyond balance. Balance is a difficult word because it means that you are, you know, you've pulled in both ways. So it is about integration. How do you make these part of the whole? And so Yen and Yang is in fact a great metaphor there because the Yen and Yang are entwined.

Starting point is 00:53:44 They are one part of a whole. And that's what we need to be looking for, this equipoise, where these different facets of structure gives us freedom. And the ability to have these efficient processes means that gives us this within those efficient processes. Potentially, we can have things that are exploratory in terms of we can, you know, I believe that it is not a contradiction to say that you can do efficient exploration of ideas. You can just, you can wonder, you can browse the web forever and you can find some things, but you can't actually say, all right, I'm going to spend 20 minutes. and I'm going to try to find something I've never found before. And I think that's something which you, you know, it's constraints which give you the power to explore.

Starting point is 00:54:24 And I suppose one, the heart of a lot of this is meditation or more broadly what I think of as disciplines of enhanced cognition, ways in which we can bring ourselves to a point of balance in our minds, which means we are not being pulled off center by the, you know, the little ball of string of the side or these little things on things where we can be. in a centered points, a poise of equipoise. So Feldenchrist actually is a body discipline. I think one of the great metaphors from the Felden Christ is that you are supposed to from wherever you are, be able to move to any other position easily. You don't have to go through any other place. At any point, you are ready to move to any other position. You're always in this place

Starting point is 00:55:05 of balance, always ready to be able to, not to say, all right, let me pull myself together, so I'm ready to go to that. You're always this place of balance to move to where you want to be. I think that's what we need to do with our mind. I'm glad you brought up meditation. It seems to be another key that a lot of billionaires adopt. Ray Dalio credits meditation as the single most important reason for his success. And you've spent a year, I believe, living in a Zen dojo in Japan, mastering things like meditation. How did this experience help shape your ability to focus and to be more intentional with your attention? So the Zen dojo is the place where it was 24 hours. hours a day. In fact, it's a place of practice. And whilst I lived there and I meditated there,

Starting point is 00:55:51 I was during the daytime's a financial journalist. So I'd get on the train, go off and do my work, but meditating twice a day and be part of the practice of the community. But Zen, I think a couple of points around Zen meditation. One is that it is achieving that place of balance. It is moving to a point where you're getting your mind beyond that desire to go to the next thing. That's the nature of human minds. We're always this so-called monkey mind. We're always trying to get eager to be pulled off track to see the shiny thing and to have our attention grow to that. So the meditation gets to this place where we are at a place of balance.

Starting point is 00:56:30 It is this alignment of our mind with the alignment of our body so that we can not be pulled off track easily, but be at our center, be at this place of equipoise. But I think one of the interesting, very interesting, distinctive things about Zen meditation compared with many other types of meditation is that you meditate with your eyes open. And this is the principle in Zen. You say you're not trying to cut yourself off in the world. You are seeing the world. You are seeing reality. And when we're in a place of meditation, when we're getting our mind, when you finish meditating, you get up and you walk around and you're engaging with the world, but from a far more balanced place where you can start to see the things in my Zen master,

Starting point is 00:57:16 you know, said that this state helps us to distinguish between the trivial and the important. That's exactly what we need to do in everyday lives. It's what we need to do as investors. That state of meditation gets at this point where we can see far more effectively what matters and what doesn't. You mentioned earlier in the discussion that the whole idea, of this kind of build up to synthesis. You know, you interpolate, you digest all this information coming at you, you learn from it, you structure it, and it should come out in this form of

Starting point is 00:57:45 synthesis, and you've outlined five foundational elements that support your ability to excel at synthesis. So I'd love it if you could walk through the five foundational elements. Certainly. So what has to be at the foundation is openness to ideas. And we, if we're not open to ideas, then we are not able to keep track in a changing world. So this is the faster the world changes, the more we need to be open-minded, to be able to understand and to see ideas. And so this is something which is being demonstrated by science to be a personality trait, how open we are, to experience, to ideas. But it is something which has also been demonstrated that we can change, we can improve that. And we can, of course, in a judicial,

Starting point is 00:58:34 fashion, bring ourselves to be open to ideas that will change our mind. And this has to be the starting foundation. Building on that is creative connections where this is about connecting the dots. That's what synthesis is, is being able to bring together these different ideas to connect them in not just obvious ways. Oh yes. These are these two examples, same thing, these connected. But to perceive where those, there may be a connection, but it's not obvious a sense. That's the creativity. That's the value. That's the insight. That's what all inventions come from. That's what all deep insights come from is those creative connections. Again, that's something which we can nurture. My personal favorite is improvisational theater, which we don't all need to go down and get on the stage and do improv. But we can play games with our children. There's a great way to do it in terms of, you know, let's come up with them. Let's make up a story on the spot together, things like that, which start to help us to do that. The next level is, is integrative thinking, where we need to not just take different ideas and see the connections between them, but bring them into being one. And so this is this idea of where we

Starting point is 00:59:44 may have what appear to be opposites. And that's a great exercise. This wonderful way of, you know, F. Scott, Fitzgerald says something along the lines of, you know, the great minds are the ones that can hold two contradictory thoughts at once. And, yeah, still be able to function, I believe. Yeah, that's right. And that is absolutely true. That is truly, and so, if you've got investors, that it can only hold one idea in their mind at one time, I think that they are greatly disadvantaged. You need to behold the idea. Well, that's right. And that could be right too. Is there some way they could be both right, for example, and bringing that together and integrating those concepts. And that is a, you know,

Starting point is 01:00:23 the paradoxical thinking is one of the way this has been framed. And again, you know, a lot of studies have shown this is correlated to performance. This all leads to, as I described before, rich in mental models where your mental models are not necessarily entirely internally consistent. They actually have many facets to them. There's many ways in which you can think, you can think in a constructive way about an idea because you are adding to your mental models rather to replace them. You don't say, oh, I had this idea, or this idea that's wrong, I'll replace it with it. We are bringing it together to add more and more perspectives. And so Gregory Bateson says that wisdom comes from multiple perspectives.

Starting point is 01:01:05 We need to bring these multiple perspectives to bring. We need to be open to those. That comes back to what I was describing before as this diversity in your portfolios. It's the diversity of the sources, which gives you diversity of ideas. And what we can bring on top of that is what I describe is the states of mind for insight. And so there's some being wonderful advances in neuroscience over the last decade or so, which have actually showed us there are particular states of our mind in terms of activation of particular areas of our brain, in terms of certain brainwave patterns that are correlated with this experience of insight. I think we've all had the time where suddenly this idea has come to us saying, wow, I just got this new idea, I had this solution to a problem, or I've deceived something I hadn't seen before. And that is a state of mind.

Starting point is 01:01:55 And once we understand some of the ways to nurture that, we can actually get ourselves in the state of mind where that's wonderful flash of insight is more likely to happen. So these are some of the practices that I believe mean that we can enhance and significantly enhance our capability for synthesis. That last point is particularly interesting. And there's some of this in the book where you talk about different things that can put you in that state. So, for example, a hot bath or a long shower.

Starting point is 01:02:25 I've heard that Elon actually starts his day with a very long shower because you always hear about people coming up with great ideas while they're in the shower. What is it about? Is it certain just brain waves that are triggered by body temperatures or what's happening here from what you can tell? So there is a mid-to-low alpha state in the brain, so maybe 8 to 11 hertz, which is often correlated with inside. So part of what a shower does is it blurs the senses. So you can't necessarily feel the distinction between your body and the outside. It's all warm. It's all comfortable.

Starting point is 01:02:59 The sound of the showers, it blocks out other extraneous noises. You're really in a space where you can get to this point of relaxation of the mind. It's when you're walking around, when you're sitting at a table eating, when you're doing activities, you're always engaged. You're always getting these sensory stimulus. where it's almost close to be in a century deprivation, or I suppose all of your senses are comfortable. There is nothing extraneous. The sound, the feeling, the comfort, and you're dissociated from the rest of the world.

Starting point is 01:03:30 And that what pulls you back, and that brings your brainwaves to a certain state. You start to get certain parts of your brain start to be more activated. And that's where some of these connections in your mind start to form more naturally. Some of these problems start to be resolved. So Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter, at some points that it just says that he takes six hours a day because that's what gets him into the state of mind where these things come together for him. Another thing you've touched on there is the fact that the only constant in our lives has changed, right?

Starting point is 01:04:05 So that's especially true when you look back at the markets. So as recently as 2007, for example, the top 10 companies in the world by market cap included only one information technology company, which was Microsoft. And in 2021, eight of the top 10 were technology firms. And this is only if you don't include Berkshire Hathaway, who's the largest stock holding is Apple and Tesla, who's, you know, a lot of people who just consider it to be a self-driving car company at this point. It seems like over the past 20 to 30 years, the best way to become a billionaire was to focus in this tech space and build a platform that capitalized on human attention and interaction, what focus will create the majority of billionaires? In your opinion,

Starting point is 01:04:50 if we just have to play and try to predict the future a little bit here, I'm just curious, what focus will create the majority of billionaires over, say, the next 20 or 30 years? I think one of the first things we need to be thinking about is capital intensity. If we're looking at, well, there's some ways where some billionaires or trillionaires conceivably will be created, which are extraordinarily capital intensive. And there are others which are not capital intensive. And I think it's interesting as we seek to be billionaires as to which of those paths we might look at.

Starting point is 01:05:22 So the most obvious of all, I think, is AI. And in terms of the core platforms of AI, this is very capital intensive, not least through how much machine learning and AI specialists get paid these days. So that's where there is potential for massive application of the value of existing a large AI company, you know, essentially all of the whatever latest acronym you want to choose for your Apple's out of Amazon's Google's. But where there's less capital intensity is potentially the applications of AI. So we can say, all right, well, how can AI be applied to food supply chains, to how it is we buy cars to our exercise routines? There's any number of other ways where

Starting point is 01:06:05 we can so say, this is something which is mostly value creating. If I take the tools of AI and apply them, that's incredibly valuable. I think there's a good case, you know, that some of the real value is in learning, education. And so their population of the planet will reach 8 billion people on 15th of November, 2022, according to some estimates. And almost all of them, whenever they are, have a, you know, old enough will have a smart device, access to the internet, and the ability to educate themselves. So this points to not just economic restructuring, but the incredible value of education.

Starting point is 01:06:47 And this is education, of course, not just children, not just people around the world. I think that we hope that there's going to be some wonderful disruption of our current educational system and structures, but also lifelong learning. Because in a world, the farthest of the world changes, the more people need to learn. So I think there's an extraordinary case to that learning education. And this could include some advanced technologies, which is not just about presenting people with videos or lectures or so on, but how it is we can enhance our learning to potentially advanced technologies or brain technologies, which does bring us to brain interfaces. So it's probably the single thing I look at most in terms of advancing technologies is our brain computer interfaces. So obviously, Neurrelink is well known through Elon Musk's investment, but that's only one of a whole array of companies out there.

Starting point is 01:07:38 not necessarily the most promising. So there are many ways in which we could see these being applied, not just to those who, well, there is invasive, non-evasive brain computer invasives. There's ones which can assist people who do not have full control over their body, for example, which is massive market itself, but beyond that to those who choose to enhance their capabilities. I think that's a massive domain opportunity.

Starting point is 01:08:04 You know, it gets on to this thing of how we can move beyond itself. So gene editing and epigenetics together are domains where we could not just solve many of the medical challenges today, which people are prepared to pay unlimited amounts of money, but also to enhance our capabilities. And of course, there's a whole ethical minefield and debates which we need to be discussing. But there's again opportunities for us to enhance who we are. And so these are, again, massive opportunity fields. There's the whole field of, well, let's say either renewables on one frame, another is non-polluting energy production.

Starting point is 01:08:48 And there's a whole array of potential new technologies that may emerge, which can drive transformation of the industry. And the transformation of energy is pretty much in place. It's continuing to move faster than almost all past prognostications. but there are not only current trajectories for transitions of energy, not just production, but also distribution, but also the potential for new energy sources. So, I mean, I could go on, but I mean, these are some of the industries where I see that there's, all of which, all of which will absolutely be creating billionaires.

Starting point is 01:09:24 A lot of those industries are what you might find in Kathy Woods, ARC, ETF, their innovation ETF. So I'm kind of curious, do you think she's on to something here? I mean, she's saying that these are deep value companies because the tech is so new and early and should they take hold? We are on the very nascent stages and it could become something of order of magnitudes higher. So I'm kind of curious, would you say you fall into sort of that kind of camp? Yes.

Starting point is 01:09:51 And what I would say, again, coming back to portfolios, need to be looking at traditional investments as well as, I suppose, future investments. So a few points to make. One is that the pace of change in where value is created is going to accelerate. And the domains which I've described, I think, will, yeah, and some guys, we absolutely have massive value creation. One of the great challenges as investors is the timeframes that we take. There's many things we can say will inevitably happen, but the timeframes for them

Starting point is 01:10:25 to take to happen more unpredictable. and when are you invest in those is very important. So you can see a massive, this, you know, the dot-com bust is an example. Yes, the ideas were right. They all happened. They all came true, but there's a lot of money. You got plowed into them and then fell flat because it was invested at the, well, too much invested in the wrong way at the wrong time.

Starting point is 01:10:48 So I think the timeframes are critically important. And the other is the investment vehicles. So the other is finding the opportunities, which are the right ways to be able to invest. Of course, these are often non-public companies, and you need to be able to find the ways in a highly competitive environment to invest at the right prices in their companies which are going to shape these industries. But I suppose having taken those, I suppose, important frames around how it is we engage on that, yes, I absolutely believe these are the types of areas where there will be extraordinary

Starting point is 01:11:20 value creation in the future. You brought up AI, so I'd like to ask you a couple of questions around that. One is a lot of people seem to think that AI is coming for jobs like doctors and lawyers and things of that nature that used to be sort of the high earning jobs of well today still, but maybe the past in the near future. So do you think that's where we're heading the fastest when it is in terms of AI? Or do you see it in other ways like truck driving or other industries that it might take hold of first? My primary frame around AI and the future of jobs is how will AI,

Starting point is 01:11:55 humans be complementary. So we need to be looking at AI as to not jobs it will replace, but what jobs will complement and how do we redesign those roles so that humans and AI can both do what they are best at, each of them, to create better outcomes and hopefully better work for people. And I think that every single role from the, I mean, there are some roles which will be replaced and some of them will be machinery operation, which I suppose you could describe as truck driving as a complex machinery operation or rather operation of a machinery in complex environment, which is our roads. But in most cases, there are still other human roles which would be played in those logistics and infrastructure and so on. And in the case of your doctors

Starting point is 01:12:40 or your lawyers or any other knowledge work roles, AI absolutely has a place and has a complement. And what we need to be doing is to designing work and designing AI, and training humans so that they can be complementary in creating wonderful value in these roles. Now, that's my frame, but the challenge is that not all executives and leaders are thinking in this way. So I think that, you know, we do have very broadly two possible futures work, one which is very negative. We have technological unemployment, massive numbers of people laid off, you know, a small elite who is still designing the AI system. whatever, making money, and that is not a desirable future. We also do have a more desirable future of work, which is, I think, broadly, where more people are more able to express their

Starting point is 01:13:34 uniquely human talents supported by technology. And I think both are possible, but we do need to be designing our, as individuals in developing our skills and organizations in being able to envisage and to frame this future, which I believe will be the most successful organizations and of course as nations in terms of creating the transition opportunities for workers, the education and the economic structures that support this. So human work will change, but I absolutely believe that humans have three fundamental capabilities, expertise, creativity, and relationships that will always transcend the capabilities of machines. So I don't think we need to be worried by this. We just need to be taking the right approach.

Starting point is 01:14:20 There was a Google engineer, Blake Lemoyne, who came out recently stating that Google had achieved a sentient AI and that he had kind of experienced it firsthand, I think essentially doing a Turing test with it. And he's been put on leave because of his interviews. I've recently seen Demis Hesabas, the founder of Deep Mind, out doing interviews as well. And it's come up. And he's saying, no, no, no, this is much further down the road than we could imagine. And I tend to believe Demis, quite frankly, actually, about on the side of the table, but it was an interesting thought experiment, wasn't it, to think about what if, what if Google did have essentially an AI today? You know, what would that do to the value of the company? I just feel like

Starting point is 01:15:03 at the stock price. I mean, it's just so interesting to think that it might be that close. Is that your assumption as well? Are we far off from that? Are we closer than we think? my primary point around this is that we will never know. So, yes, the bot that Blake Lemoyne was talking with gave every appearance of being sentient. It certainly claimed to be. But I don't think that remains as well sentient. But in 10 years or 20 years, when the AHABots even more vehemently say they are sentient and please don't turn me off and I love you and I want to save humanity to what point do we start believing them.

Starting point is 01:15:41 And I'm not sure that we have any mechanism or being able to determine whether there actually is sentient. So I think we're going to have a divergence where some people start to believe that these AIs are sentencing. And it is clear to me that we will have many people who do fall in love with AI, some of which AI decide to, the people to fall in love with it, others just buy the buy. And there are plenty of people, you know, they will fight for a robot rights. and there's plenty of other people just say, look, they're just machines, get over it. And so I think the divide will have is that we are going to have increasing divides of opinion around whether or not these are sentient, but I do not really see that we have a valid way of being able to determine that they actually are or are not, when they are displayed all signs

Starting point is 01:16:25 of sentience, but they are certainly at this point, and then for the foreseeable future, simply manifestations of extremely clever algorithms. We've come a long way since this, but Demis brought it. up and I loved this take he had about seeing Deep Blue, you know, and Kasparov duking it out in a chess match. And he said his takeaway from that was just how incredible Kasparov's brain was and is because it was not only beating Deep Blue or competing with it to the highest level, but he can also go do a number of other things, whereas Deep Blue can't even play checkers. I just thought that was such an interesting thing to understand to your point earlier at these machines.

Starting point is 01:17:04 They might be advanced in a lot of ways, but they can't do everything yet. So we'll see. To be continued. Listen, we got a little off track there at the end, but I just couldn't help myself. I think it's just such an fascinating discussion and could just have a massive impact on a lot of companies. Google included moving forward. So the book is called Thriving on Overload.

Starting point is 01:17:24 And it is chock full of amazing resources that you really have to check out. So, Ross, I've really appreciated the time. Before I let you go, please hand off to our audience where they can learn more about you, the book, and any other resources you want to show. Sure. Well, I mean, just search me or the book, but I'm at rostorson.com on Twitter at Ross Dawson or LinkedIn. And the book is at thriving on overload.com. Fantastic. Well, excited for you. Congrats on the book. And let's do it again. Thank you. Pleasure. All right, everybody. That's all we had for you this week. If you're loving the show, don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app. And if you'd be so kind, please leave us a review. It really helps the show. If you want to reach out directly, you can find me on Twitter.

Starting point is 01:18:07 at Trey Lockerby. And don't forget to check out all of the amazing resources we've built for you at the investors podcast.com. You can also simply Google TIP Finance and it should pop right up. And with that, we'll see you again next time. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to millennial investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence.

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