#139. Ashley Recanati: Your AI Battle
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Ho, ho, ho. Oh, man. That was an amazing conversation. I mean, I always learn a lot from all the podcasts that we do. But honestly, after listening to this conversation today and being a part of it, I have a newfound appreciation just kind of for like the state of affairs we're in as just normal everyday people.

when it comes to AI. - Yeah, and I finally don't feel so alone anymore. I feel like I've always been the one that's been talking about or bitching about

the future with AI. Yeah, bitching is a good word. Yeah, but now you understand. I do, I do. You kind of get it now, don't you? I know, I know. Although it's not all doom and gloom, I think our guest was very practical in his perspective and his approach. What are the things we should all be thinking about just as normal everyday people in terms of how we can protect ourselves from AI, how we should start framing things and looking at

just our jobs, our life, really in the near future. Our guest is a researcher on a lot of futurist topics. He is the author of AI Battle Royale, How to Protect Your Job from Disruption in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, his new book. We get into all of that. So without further ado, please give it up for Ashley Reconati. She's a living and a living love of mine.

Ash, man, it's been a long time. It has been a long time since I haven't been on the show, right? Oh, it's been a long time since we've just even seen each other. Yeah, well, there was a bit of a few lockdowns here and there. But even before that, it was like a long time, right? But we've known each other for a while now, huh? Yeah.

Yeah, it's good to see some familiar faces in town. I have to say that, especially with all the departures and stuff going on and a lot of fresh arrivals coming in, but it's nice to, you know, be able to see the good old faces, you know? Yeah. How you been?

It's good. Doing very great. Got a lot of projects going on, different things rolling and that really keeping me busy. So it's quite interesting. I think I feel like I'm going through this, even like a new phase or what. So it's very energizing and reinvigorating and things. Hell yeah, hell yeah.

I mean, it's crazy. I didn't even know. I mean, obviously, we're going to get, I want like, Howie especially is going to be very interested in kind of your expertise on the subject of AI. But I had no idea you were even into that stuff. Like, I've known you for a long time, and I had no idea. And then all of a sudden, I learned about this book you wrote.

Yeah, AI Battle Royale, how to protect your job from disruption in the fourth industrial revolution. Did I get that right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. And it's important because the words are very important. You know, I talk about...

disruption, not automation or replacement or something. You got to look at it in a broader picture because it's not necessarily going to be jobs disappearing or what, because if you just look at it like that, like it's one or zero, then you're going to think, okay, this job, there's some things I do that cannot be automated. So, you know, screw that I'm safe, but actually no, there could be many different things that could happen.

Yeah. Part of it could be outsourced. Part of it could be, you know, it could just change in the nature there where you have 10 people today, maybe you only need seven people later, or maybe you only need four people later. So there could still be jobs, but just less than we have right now. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think oftentimes, at least from like, non experts like myself, when we think about it from the outside, we did think of it very binary, right? Oh, either it's black or white, this is going to happen.

But the possibilities really are on a spectrum, like you're saying. Well, take for instance, people at the cashier in a grocery store. When you look at some old science fiction, even recent science fiction series or movies or what, they would have it with a robot replacing the cashier and putting the stuff in the bag and everything for you. I think I even saw one recently was like a Baxter robot doing this. But in reality, what happened is you just...

have the QR scan code and then it's for the consumer or the, the, the purchaser himself to put the stuff in the bag and everything. Cause that's the hard part is putting the things in the, in the bag, you know, that's your dexterous action that you have to do there. And so, yeah, they just handed that task over to the consumer. So now it's for us to have to do that. And as a result of the cashier has been automated. Now, not all of them have been automated cause you could still have a little problem with the QR code that doesn't work or something. Uh,

problem with the bar count scan or on a discount or something. But there were maybe before you had 10 cashiers. Now there's only three cashiers left for those who still want to go through it the old way. Well, okay. From a personal individual level, what do you think of those automated cashiers at the grocery stores? Because I feel like there's two camps. Some people don't like it because they feel like they have to do all the work themselves now.

And from like a corporate level, you know, from in terms of like job displacement, all that blah, blah, blah. Right. And then on the other hand, it can move things along pretty quick if you get the hang of it. It seems like a pretty cool way to do things. I go I walk into the convenience store now. I don't have to deal with anybody. I can just grab something, scan it and go and be on my way. There's no lines.

Yes, and it's going to keep on improving. I mean, this is one stage of the thing, but it will keep on improving in the direction of really frictionless transaction, you know, so you can just make it the most simple for people. That's really the trend. And you see this at airports, but it's not really working that well, and people are a bit more...

anxious when they're at the airport and stuff. So they still keep people there. But little by little, this is the direction that things will go. And so when I was saying like, don't just think about automation by a robot or something, you have to think about

part of the task being outsourced, outsourcing doesn't mean it goes to China or wherever. It could also just mean, well, it goes to the customer. It's for the customer to do this themselves. If you look at a Sephora store, for instance, I used to work in Sephora. We still have currently beauty assistants who are the people that serve in the shop. And you have this in all types of retail stores. But now you have another model which is emerging, like you have with the Harmay stores, where

There is no one inside the shop there to help you and to assist you to buy products. You're free to roam as you wish through the aisles. You can take photos of the products. You can do your own research with your smartphone and you do your own education. And people that go there, they're usually educated by a handful of KOLs who tell them like, okay, what is the kind of product that they like or something? And there's no more...

you know, there's no more people working in the retail there in this case. Is this in Shanghai you're talking about? Yeah, this is in Shanghai. So wait, we're talking about the Hermes store? Hermes, yeah. They have like a few shops. There's one on Anfuru, one in Sintendi, right? So they don't have any employees working in the retail stores? They don't have people that are there to assist. They don't have anyone following you down the aisles with a little bag and everything telling you buy this and buy that and things like this. Yeah, there's no salespeople in there. They just have someone at the cashier or something, right? Oh, I see. They really decreased on the staff in this shop. So this is another case where

Maybe your company isn't doing this, but another company comes up and does this. And so your company can be in danger because they're able to do this and keep costs lower and then sell the product at a cheaper price or you're at the risk of your company being disrupted by a competitor. So either your company has to automate its own staff and then you...

At the risk of your job being disrupted or they get taken over by these rivals that are, you know, leaner in a sense. So that's more like a case of corporate disruption. So when you hear people talking about these different, uh,

They have these debates about, you know, is AI going to change things? And oh, but before we've seen this play out and there's new sectors that emerge and everything, they're talking about different concepts. The concept of new sectors coming out that replace old ones or existing sectors that just boom beyond, you know, like the sector for elderly health care, for tourism, things like this. These existed before, but they could...

have the potential to grow bigger. That's more a case of sectorial disruption, like, okay, yeah, we had the horse replaced by the car and stuff like that. But here with the case that we're seeing with AI is more about

no matter what the sector is, or even in a sector that is doing very well, the, you know, the CEO can just show up and say, okay, you know, we're going to, we had a great results last year and everything, but guess what? Anyways, we're going to decide to cut off half of our accountants or half of our marketing team because we simply are able to achieve the same objective now with less people. So is that already happening? Yeah. These things happen in companies. Yeah. Yeah. What are the, okay. So,

just from a macro perspective, and I'm probably oversimplifying the whole concept and dumbing it down a little bit, forgive me. But if we just back up a little bit, as far as I know, and I haven't done much research on AI, to be honest, Howie's really the one that's been going down the rabbit hole. And from everything that I'm hearing, from the things you can see online, the thought leaders in this industry that are talking about it, it seems like

Basically, it's being split into two camps of thought. One camp is like they're the doomsayers. Like AI is eventually going to kill us. We have no idea what we're opening. This is Pandora's box. We need regulations. We need to stop, you know, halt development right now until we can get our minds around this thing. Like this thing could really end us.

And then I feel like there's another school of thought that's, I don't hear as much, but I know they're out there. They're saying, look, this is a tool for humanity. This is something that can really push us forward. These things have happened before. Great technologies that change the game and change the paradigm have come before, and we've always been able to implement them in our society and move progress along.

Where are you on the spectrum? Well, first of all, I want to take the opportunity to kind of, like you say, backtrack, because you asked me how I got into this to begin with.

And so I started maybe like a decade ago. I always liked reading stuff and I was more interested in history for a long time. And at some stage, I don't know, my interest started turning towards the future and I started devouring a lot of books about the future, you know, the industries of the future, the fourth industrial revolution, all these, you know, there's been a big trend since the past decade of these things coming out. And in all of these books, I noticed that they all mention

the fragility of the job market in a short-term, mid-term future. And there was like a consensus amongst all the experts that there's going to be a tough job here to retrain the workforce. So I wanted to myself find books that kind of explain, okay, what are you supposed to do? What can you do as an employee? Because it's really nice seeing all these people talking about the problem. And some of them, they write entire books talking about the problem. Like if you look at Martin Ford and The Rise of the Robots,

He spends a lot of time explaining and trying to convince the audience of the problem. I'm like, great, but then what's the solution? And when you look at it, all of the solutions that are out there are more targeting, uh, governments saying things like, oh, we need to do a, you know, universal basic income or, I don't know, some form of that, a negative income tax, uh, or, you know, taxing more on the rich to redistribute the wealth and things like that. And first of all, I'm a bit skeptical of those solutions because I don't think that they can work everywhere. Uh,

I mean, that's great. You know, you talk about this for the US or something, you know, what about Sudan? Or what about, you know, Morocco or Vietnam or what? I mean, you can't, it's not something you can implement everywhere. And anyways, there's a lot of issues that come with these solutions. But my main problem was that this is great, but it's not something that the

average Joe can implement. So I wanted to know what can we do as workers, as employees in a company, as mid-level managers, as office workers, as production workers, whatever, no matter where you are, what can you do as a person to improve your chances? And so I was, I searched at length for a book that really focuses on this and I couldn't find anything. And I found that really, that was like a shocking moments to me when I realized that there was nothing written on this topic.

And so I started, you know, really researching it. And at the time I was already kind of preparing writing something and I always wanted to write something. And I was so I start with an article here, an article there. And I just thought, you know, this is really an interesting topic that I was already immersed in that I really wanted to plunge through and and get out, you know, and I thought like there's something really valuable lesson that can be learned here that I could spread out to people.

To help them to prepare. And, uh, this was something like five, six years ago. And, uh, so that's really when I started going out, you know, to, uh, to write a book. And then, you know, I met this, uh, publisher and everything. So they, they, they helped me out with this. And, uh, that's when, you know, so I got the book that came out earlier this year, um,

It was probably the first book, actually, that came out mentioning ChatGPT and everything because I did include that in there because it came out and I obviously tested it and I saw the disruptive potential for this. Earlier iterations of ChatGPT? Well, when it came out, ChatGPT 3.5, when it came out at the end of last year, I was kind of like submitting the revision copy and everything for the book by then. And yeah, I included that. It didn't really... It didn't change the...

fundamentals of everything that I wrote about. It's just like there's a new technology that comes out that's going to accelerate some of the things, but it doesn't change the fundamentals. But it was something interesting that you do have to mention in there or else people see the book, okay, this is pre-Jet GPT, it's trash now, you know? But yeah, so that was like what

what kind of got me into that. And I think part of my background also, because I was finance controller for a long time. So I was challenged both with, I mean, my task was basically reducing costs and making processes more efficient and automating on the one hand. Yeah. And on the, yeah, in factories in France that were like going towards the brink of bankruptcy that you had to redress in a very short period of time. So I really had to make some quick decisions there and analyze things and see where you can cut costs.

And then coming to China where it's a booming market, year-on-year sales at the time were expanding by 70%, whether I was in the factory, whether later on I was working at the Sephora stores. And so there was more like, okay, you have like today we have 20 stores. Within two, three years, we're going to have 100 stores.

how do you cope with that when you need to do the statistics, you know, produce the profit and loss sheet for each store and everything? How can you, you know, you're expanding 70% year on year, but we're not adding stuff 70%, you know, year on year. So you have to be able yourself your challenge yourself to make your own processes more efficient and to automate and things like that, you know, using coding and things like this, that's where I really got into this on a personal level. And at the

at the same time I saw some other areas where some industries where they had like so much space for making things simpler with less people and automating and factories to collecting statistics and doing work like that and

And I was like showing the guys, I was saying, look, we could do this like a lot more faster and you can get rid of 20 people here. But at the time, the cost of a person was like four or 500 CNY per month. You know, I'm talking, this is in Zhejiang. And so they just looked at me. They didn't really care about it back then. You know, this was back 2006, 2007.

Uh, now obviously things have changed, you know, it's like back then when you looked at a Chinese restaurant, there was so many staff, right. That would come and greet you. Now the situation has changed because the salaries have gone up a lot and they're being a lot more careful about that. And now you have the QR codes where you scan and you just order yourself and you know, they, uh,

they found ways to go down on the cross. But anyways, these are the kinds of things like the kind of background where I'm coming from. So I don't have like a, uh, PhD in computer science from MIT or something. You know, I'm not that kind of, uh, background when I come at this angle. And a lot of people who write books about this do come from that background. But, uh,

some of them probably don't really have that much experience of, you know, how companies operate. Like real world experience. Yeah, real world experience. Like real world implementation instead of just coming from an academic perspective. They have this kind of rosy view that, you know, companies will use it in a beneficial way to employees to help augment them in something. And some of them will. I mean, some companies will. I think we'll have two profiles of companies. One which is

just trying to automate the most in order to really reduce labor costs and have the cheapest product possible. And then some that are going more in the direction of developing their team's agility and using these tools in that direction, in that sense, you know? So that's really the two extremes. And there'll be, that's, you know, the two extremes of the spectrum. There'll be a lot of different types inside and even within a company based on the style of the manager or what you could have different styles emerge. But I think that's really how it's going to play out. And I'm not sure which one is going to be the most successful in the end that, you know,

time will tell. Well, do you see, do you predict a lot of asymmetry in those two types of companies? Yeah. Those two profiles? Oh yeah, I think it's, I mean, some will be more creative than others. Some will probably be more just taking some ideas and just doing them the most efficient way possible. Like the way they do in China, you know, just you scale something up and then you just become very difficult to compete with it. That's how they become number one in solar energy and all these things, electric vehicles now. But it's not really where the

most of the innovation comes from necessarily you know the innovation comes because you know well you got tesla to put a factory here and everything so everyone can learn from them how this works but yeah that's how i kind of got into this whole topic on ai but really again focused on the jobs because that's another problem that i see and i see this a lot in podcasts and interviews and everything when people talk about oh we're going to do something about ai and jobs is that

They start asking questions, they start talking, and then they just go on the side. They just diverge towards different topics still related to AI. But the problem with AI is they're just... It's so vast, the issues that you have with AI that it's very hard to stay on topic, to stay focused on this. And that was a big challenge for me writing the book, to not talk about other issues that you have all these ethical problems with AI. So I did have to talk a little bit about it, obviously, because you can't escape it. But I try really to focus on the job aspect. So...

Getting back at your question about the two camps. Um, yeah, there, there, there are these two camps and then there's a third camp that's saying like, it doesn't really matter whether you're, uh,

whether you believe it's going to, you know, the Robocopalypse scenario or the, you know, this is going to make our life abundant and we don't have to work anymore, a rosy scenario. Because they say that this level of technology, if you're talking about like artificial super intelligence, we're nowhere near to that. So it's going to take a long time to get there. So it doesn't really matter what, you know, you think it might do. But the reality of the question is that

And the reason why there's so much debate around it is because we don't even understand our own intelligence. So it's kind of hard to understand like, okay, what can artificial intelligence be? How can we create an artificial intelligence, a truly artificial intelligence, which is at the same level as a human being intelligence or that goes beyond that? How can you define that? It's very difficult because we don't understand ourselves to begin with. So this is also part of the problem because if you don't know what...

what it is, then you don't know at the current stage how far are we from achieving it. You don't know where it is and you don't know when you pass the point of no return. You can't put it on a radar or something. There's no way we're in uncharted territory. The benchmarks are not clear. It's already past the Turing test benchmark.

benchmark right which we originally thought it was going to be the idea of what AGI was but it's not yeah so the Turing test is a bit that's kind of like not really used anymore as a metric because you think you know I mean yeah you could have some some sort of AI that can you know always duplicate or something until you know even some adults into thinking that it's a person when it's not but that's not really necessarily the metric for intelligence anymore so

So people have kind of like backtracked on that. And then there's the matter of like, okay, even if it can dupe someone, it doesn't mean that it's understanding anything of what it's doing. It doesn't mean it has consciousness. That's the whole, the Chinese room arguments where, you know, if you want to put it in a modern way, it's like, okay, if I can, I can just,

If I'm reading Chinese and I use Google Translate to translate everything, then I could explain what this Chinese text says, even though I don't read Chinese. That's kind of the argument. So that's what a computer and AI is doing, basically. It's receiving your questions. It's receiving your questions, and it's using statistics to provide their words that fit together to make a sentence to provide an answer to it. But it's just really advanced statistics. And a lot of the issue stems from...

this, the terming itself of artificial intelligence is a very spooky kind of definition. And it was done back in the time half a century, 70 years ago, in 1956 or 57, the guy came out with this concept because there was all these different branches of research coming out and he used this term, he coined the term artificial intelligence to kind of encompass this whole different, you know, variety of fields that were popping up. And

Once I saw this very funny, I thought it was interesting definition of artificial intelligence when someone on Twitter was asking like, so what is AI? And a guy answers to him, he says, it's a bad choice of words that, you know, dates back to 1957. Because I

Because that's really what it is. And that's where a lot of the issues that people are starting, you know, they think about Terminators and all these kind of things. And obviously Hollywood helps to feed all that over the years. Yeah, the whole Skynet thing. But it's just, it's a lot of statistics really, you know? So can these statistics lead to, you know, some nukes being sent out or something? Well, yeah, who knows? I mean, there can always be a glitch in the system, right? Maybe the problem is with having nukes in the first place. So I think I want to just...

Step back for one second before we continue down this path, because I feel like this idea, in particular to your expertise in the book that you wrote and all the, I guess, the main topic that you're interested in, which is the job market and how it may be displaced by AI or automation. So it's more like, in my mind, I want to have more of an open discussion about possibilities. Yeah.

Because none of us are experts. None of us are AI engineers, like you said. We're not economists. But we do understand different aspects of the economy. We do understand different aspects of corporations, and et cetera, et cetera. For the most simple question is...

Is AI or automation going to be replacing jobs in the future? And I think universally we can say, yes, that is going to happen. Well, it's already happening. Yes, it's already happening. And in terms of how much that is happening, I don't know the statistics of that. Maybe it's something that you have...

learned about? Because I feel like, okay, so let me back up for one second. It's a couple of steps in this conversation. I feel like we can talk about current, like what's happening right now. Then we can talk about the near future, the next two years. I don't think we can go really past that, right? And then just open the minds. What is the future? Five, 10 years, right? I think. I mean, so far in the Western economies, we have a situation where unemployment is very low. So there's different ways that you can see the future in terms of

jobs and the impact of technology on the future. So the different scenarios that are out there is going to there you'll have you always see people that say, okay, we're going to face massive unemployment. So far, it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't happen.

But I don't think that's the direction we're necessarily going to go to in the short term. Some people think, okay, we might just have new laws that enable people to work less. So instead of plugging in 40 or 35-hour weeks, we'll be doing 30 or 25-hour weeks. That way there will be still enough work for everyone. There is a scenario whereby people will not need to work anymore and you'll have universal basic income. There's also –

There's also the fact that what we see a lot is jobs mismatch happening where people are, they want to do a certain kind of job, but there's too many people that want to do this job. But then the society needs people to do this kind of work and no one wants to do it. So there's also these kinds of problems that happen. So it's quite complex to see this and then it's going to

diverge per country. So it's really hard to see, but what we have been seeing and what is so far the trend, and this is not new with AI, it happened since the computers are out. And since the 1970s, the real trend that has been happening is that we're having less jobs in the middle class, which we call middle class jobs. So if you look at the different jobs that exist in the spectrum from like really low end jobs, like, you know, working at a McDonald's or really high end jobs, like being a surgeon or an executive manager,

When you look at all the jobs in these different levels of income, the ones that have evolved downwards over the past 50 years and even more in the past 20 years are the jobs at the middle level. So these are especially office and administrative jobs, some of the manufacturing jobs for the US, but that's also related to China's joining the WTO. Yeah.

And you'll have different jobs in this middle class level, which is the biggest employer right now. I mean, it used to be like 60% of the jobs. Now it's going under 50% of the jobs and it's still going down. And that's where we're having less and less jobs over time. Are those the type of jobs that are more like routine and repetitive type labor? Yes. And you got two types in there. You got the routine labor, which is manual. So this is more like a warehouse or

production, manufacturing, these kind of jobs. And then you have the routine jobs, which are behind a computer. And so those are the ones that are being the most automated. So it's around half of the jobs in the US that are considered like routine jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And those are the ones that are the most at direct threat right now. So the future, what the biggest economists like David Otter believe is that we're going towards a future where you'll have...

People that have very good jobs, because these jobs are growing too high level jobs, there's actually an increase in demand for these kind of jobs, what you call highly cognitive jobs. And then you have an increase in demand and the low end jobs at the other side of the spectrum for people like, you know, delivering your food or cutting your hair or stuff like this. So you're going to have basically...

Kind of wealthy people on one end and the poor people that serve them on the other end. And in the middle, there'll still be a middle class, but it'll be maybe just 10, 20% of the society. So you're kind of going towards a society of haves and have-nots. And that's like the main worry right now.

So it'll be even more polarized than it already is. Yeah. This is in terms of, it's not in terms of politics or what, it's in terms of wealth income. Yeah, yeah, with the wealth gap, right? You have the elites and then you have the... And you're saying that before even the topic of AI coming in, this trend was already happening. This trend was already begun, yeah. It can only accelerate now with AI because AI, it's predicted to be targeting mostly these routine recurrent tasks and jobs.

Oh, wow. That's scary. That reminds me of that Matt Damon movie, like Elysium. Elysium, yeah. Right? That's basically what it was. Can you go to the rich world? But that's scary though. It is kind of like that with the gated communities and things. I get it. And you have people, they're even going to gated cities or what. So Shanghai is a very safe city. I wouldn't say it's only rich people in Shanghai, but when you look at Dubai, Dubai is really... You have both...

You have the rich and you have the poor, but it's very much like you got this kind of Elysium field over there. It's very separated, you know, and it's a very safe place. So you got these safe havens for rich people. Yeah. They're like emerging throughout the world and the different countries are competing for these to have these people within their, you know, their borders in their area. So they're trying to incentivize them to come. So it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be crazy to say that perhaps maybe, uh,

one of the largest threats of AI in general is maybe the social unrest it could eventually lead to. This again is just the part, I mean, we're just talking about the impact of AI on the job market. There's a lot of other aspects after it, right? So it can do a lot of other problems, I think. Like it could, you know, you could end up not making decisions anymore. So the rumor has it that we make around 30,000 decisions a day and, uh,

It's quite, you know, you get a kind of mental tiredness from having to make a lot of decisions sometimes. I make like two decisions a day. And it's obvious. Like, what do I want to eat? Yeah, but I mean, no. So you could have AI just now decide what kind of whiskey you pour in the glass. And based on a variety of factors and...

But it could do this for a lot of things. And then suddenly you're making less and less decisions. And you're a grown-up, but imagine your kids growing up with this AI making more and more decisions for them. They've just become accustomed to it and they just let it make more and more decisions for them. And in the end, what are you? So going back to the current again, in terms of the current...

that we have with AI. I also view it as AI and robotics, not just AI, because I feel like when robotics catches up, because it's not there yet, that's a whole other discussion, right? Including the job market. But in terms of just pure AI, which is where we're at right now, and that's still not at AGI, still not at superintelligence. And AGI means artificial general intelligence, which is basically like

Human level. Like human level. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer and closer. And there are rumors that we may already have been there. But I think currently a lot of discussions that I have with friends and other people is how do you prepare now? Because you can't, like I said, you can't really prepare. You can't prepare yourself. You can't have your traditional life.

you know, moving up the corporate ladder kind of mentality anymore, I feel like for many people. And judging by what you said, it sounds like that's something that you also have to keep in mind. Is that, is that something that you think that is true? It is one of the issues. Totally. I mean, if I take my own case, uh,

My very first job when I graduated, the first job that the only first job that I can find, you know, I graduated from a business school in France at the beginning of the century. And I was looking for a job in different, you know, in marketing and finance, anything I could find. And the first job I was able to find was that of translator slash chauffeur. Because there was this, so there's this American company, they were doing active work.

in France. So they did their first acquisition in the UK and then they were buying companies out in France, manufacturing companies, factories. And so they would appoint this English guy from the UK factory to go to France and to redress these companies, you know, to try and make them profitable within a short time. So this guy was very good. The only problem is he didn't speak French and he doesn't know how to drive on the right side of the street. So that's where I came in. And

So I was there, you know, I was at the first witness for everything going on. You know, I was in the first row for all of the discussions, all of the negotiations with labor unions, handling strikes, hiring people, firing people, all this stuff. So I was really in the middle of that in the center and it was really a good job experience. And because I was acquainted with the management through that and this, I was a good guy. Then I eventually landed a real-time job there as finance controller. But my point is,

Within 10 years, I would never have access. The door to this company, I would never get through it because there would be no need for drivers or for translators. They would just...

use technology to do this. They wouldn't have someone to do this. So, and a lot of cases, yes, the ladder is going to have like a big hole in the middle. So you're not going to be able to climb up this ladder. It's going to be very difficult. And I think of this in my case, but I mean, think about all the immigrants who arrive in the US or who arrive in Europe and, you know, who start off like with, uh,

little odd jobs or what, but then their kids are able to go to school and they're able to get more like a middle-class job. And then maybe later on, they're able to climb the thing. But I mean, there's a big risk here that the ladder is broken and that the people at the bottom will stay at the bottom and that there's no more social mobility. So that's also one of the side effects. Like the rungs of the ladder are being taken away. That's kind of the case, yeah. But wouldn't there be... I'm just playing devil's advocate, but wouldn't there be...

other doors that would open in the corporate ladder scenario that we just can't think of right now? Wouldn't there be other ways, other means? It's always possible, yes. It's always possible that there's things we don't think about. So I mean, we can't fathom at this stage because the world changes and that's what people in the past said. They say, oh, if you look at the jobs today, like 80% of them didn't exist a century ago or something. So yeah, new jobs can come out, but you need to know like, okay, now what it is that

these jobs will be because i mean again when you answer this question about what your strategy should be it also depends you know where you're at right now how old you are and everything if you're like 20 years old you still got half a century to plan for that you're going to be working flexible right i think you have to be very flexible you have to be very young right now yeah you got to be flexible be ready to pivot right be ready to cross someone over to a spin move well actually you just mentioned something that let's just kind of talk about a little bit more um

Previously, when talking about different industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, it displaced a lot of jobs, but also created a lot of jobs. This time, this fourth technological revolution, as we were saying, is not comparable almost because recent revolutions were...

They were not cognitive revolutions, right? They were just tools, like literal tools that humans can use and that can easily be displaced. Right, for manual work. Yeah, especially for manual labor, right? But we're talking about something that, especially when it gets to AGI, which is not far, it's going to be able to...

literally replace the human itself. So what is that? How does that break down then? The first point, like you mentioned, is that the old tools would replace manual labor. So you could always find a refuge in cognitive labor, working at an office on a computer with data. So that was the go-to place to get a good salary. And now this refuge is being encroached on by AI. The

The second thing is that the tools of the past were focusing on just one function. So it was like a tool, just like, you know, a punching machine would just do this one thing. If you have like, you know, no matter what the toy would just focus on one task, but now with

more broader AI, or with a thousand different narrow AIs, you can find every single task that you have to do could be done by AI, or it could be done, again, through a combination of AI and outsourcing. So you mentioned earlier that there's different technologies than AI, and obviously you have to take those into account too. There's a lot of technologies. There's drones, there's modular manufacturing, there's origami manufacturing, there's

augmented reality there's assisted reality there's mixed realities there's vr there's so assisted reality for instance is where you have the glasses and you have a little camera there and someone else can see exactly what it is that you see and they can add in little information on the camera that you see on your glasses to tell you like you know like errors or whatever to help you to do something so you could be doing your job for instance if you're uh

If you take the guys, the kuai di, right? How do you call those in English? The course years or delivery men? Delivery men. Yeah. While the guy is doing the delivery, at the same time, he could just come into your house and fix the pipe or do some electric work or something, even though he has no qualification for this, but just because he has the glasses and there can be some dude in North Africa who's guiding him on how you do this. Not even a dude. It could just be...

Like a live tutorial. It could be AI. I'm just saying in the case where AI is not that performant, I'm just saying you could also use this as a case like this. What about with Elon's Neuralink? It could just be like, you wouldn't even have to have something on your glasses. It'd just be like in your...

in your head. That's still the way it is. That's the way it is. I'm talking about technology. Don't open that up. I'm talking about technology that exists today at that stage. You have a assisted reality. It's something that isn't like, well, meta is already have a prototype for that. Stuff like that. The glasses. Meta is different because it has AI metas. Okay.

I mean, it depends which one you're referring to. I thought you were referring to the Quest. I saw a headline one time and they showed some glasses they were experimenting with. Yeah, the Quest 3 or their Quest models, those have AR. Then they have the more simpler models that they do with Ray-Ban that are just with a camera and you have some AI, but there's no augmented reality or anything on those. Well, hold on. I want to address one thing, though, that you guys were saying before in terms of this fourth industrial revolution is

In terms of like, it just can't be comparable with anything previous. And I kind of feel that way too. I kind of get that. But let's rewind the clock, right? Let's go back in time and let's say we're now at the birth of the internet right now. And we don't know anything about the future. We're just there.

Wouldn't we also be saying with the internet, like, oh, this cannot be comparable with anything previous. And who knows what this can lead to? I mean, it's the freaking internet, right? Like, wouldn't that also be an example of a time where a great technology kind of changed and disrupted everything?

And it was not comparable with any technologies that came before it. It's comparable with what happens before because this is like – so whether you look at the internet or AI or electricity or steam, these are the kind of technologies people refer to as general purpose technologies. And so it's really the ones that are the most – like they're very broad. They're going to hit all sectors and they're very deep in their impact and it's very long lasting and it really just changes everything. Not just work but the whole –

The concept of how to live through society. Yeah. So these are very big, you know, they cause a huge change or a huge upheaval. And for the internet, yeah, totally. At the time, typically when you hear people today like asking like, oh, should our company get into AI? I'm like, well, I mean, did your company get into internet? You know, they're like, yeah, we did. It's the same thing. Yeah.

It's the same thing. But back at the time, companies were wondering, should we get into the internet or not? And today, everyone is – it's not a question. It's no longer a question. But the agenda of the internet and the agenda of AI are very different. So internet in its agenda is very different from the past revolutions. But internet, what does it do? It basically enhances communication. AI is more something which can do a lot of things. And one of the things it can do is –

change the equation for labor, you know, reduce the labor amount in that equation, you know? Yeah. I think just in its most simplest terms, in my mind, is that all previous innovations or revolutions that we've went through, like fire, the wheel, machinery, technology, internet, electricity, etc. These are all, yes, general purpose use that will affect the way you live through society, but they will not replace the human being.

Period. I think. You know what I mean? That's the biggest difference. It's not replaceable. You're not replacing a human. You're replacing what a human interacts with. And eventually, the way it's supposed to go, which is still, I think, the card's out there, right? We're not exactly positive 100%. We're going to hit AGI. We're going to hit the singularity, etc. Or super intelligence. But...

The way we're going, it's supposed to, and the timeline's getting closer and closer, and the reason why it's such a big deal is because if that hits, it's human replacement. I mean, in terms of labor, in terms of... Like on a mass scale. Yeah, like once it combines robotics, then it's basically another human. The reason I don't really get into the whole AGI, ASI debate is because you don't need that to replace humans in work. It's...

You don't need that. You can have like a thousand or thousands of narrow AIs that can do anything.

our job, you know, for a lot of jobs, not all of the jobs. If you're really at the high levels, then yes, you need to have some more general kind of AI that can understand all the different, you know, that can connect the dots between really disparate elements where there's no, you cannot put it under a single denominator to quantify like, okay, should we do this action versus that action? There's just too many parameters to take into account. That's like really when you're making strategic decisions and things. So for this, I think the existing AI, even with chat GPT or what, it's not going to be good enough.

But the majority of jobs out there are not like this. So, you know, when I hear like these people I read in a book saying like, yeah, the AI is not ready to take the managerial seat, the manager's seat or something. It's like, yeah, I agree. But the problem is, you know, 70% of the people, they don't occupy the manager's seat right now. That's the people that I'm concerned about. So my book is not –

targeting the leaders and what... Because there's already a lot of books out there that target them, that tell them how do you harness big data, how do you use AI for your... Do your digital strategy and everything. There's a lot of books on that. I'm targeting the employee. But this is also current though because I feel like right now you're only basing on current. The current technology, the level of AI currently. Yes, 70% of jobs are not going to be in that managerial position. But

as innovation continues, yeah, that literally can be replaced. Well, I also think it's really eye-opening and a little funny what Ash said too. And it really opened up my eyes in terms of we often think like it needs to be like this crazy super intelligent technology, like artificial super intelligence, right? To replace us. And that's kind of like giving our own intelligence a little too much credit because

Like most of our brain function and most of our tasks do not require artificial super intelligence, right? It can be a very just like normal type of like basic intelligent brain.

And it could already replace most of us, right? So it's like we're completely like overestimating. It's like only Superman can replace me. It's like what? Yeah, it can replace a lot of the dull work and what they call the bullshit jobs and everything. And this is why some people say, well, it's a good thing because that way everyone can do more creative stuff and right. But I just –

I have a hard time imagining picturing everyone, you know, like putting on the white clothes and working in a lab or something to develop new technology. I wish that that could happen, you know, and we'd, you know, we'd accelerate, we'd really be able to go to Mars and everything and do really cool stuff. But I just don't see that happening, you know?

It's like a huge transformation and it might happen at some day, maybe two decades later we will be there. My question is what do we do in the meanwhile? How do you play your cards right to stay out of the water for as long as possible? Because it's going to get brutal. I think I believe, and I'm sounding like you would believe as well, it's stages. It's not like tomorrow all of a sudden we're going to wake up and be like, oh fuck, everybody's job's gone. It's going to come in stages. Right now AI is a tool for productivity. Exactly.

It's going to help people. If you use AI, like I use AI all the time to help me do my day-to-day, get me through the day-to-day in a very more efficient way. And many people do that, right? What's next, right? Until eventually where I was just saying that it's going to become human replacing. Then that's, I mean, yes, there are certain jobs already it's human replacing, but in terms of mass. So it depends what you do in your job and how much of your job can be automated. If it's like

less than say 20 30 you can find other things to do with that time and so this kind of admits you and this is the case the famous cases with uh bank tellers back in the 70s and the 80s when they started rolling out atms in the states there was people coming out saying well this is going to be the end of the job of the bank teller but then it because you know the bank tellers back then that's what they did they would you know trade cash with you know give change and stuff and take their

customers cash and put it in the bank. And suddenly these tasks were no longer required. But what they actually found out was that by liberating their time, by freeing their time from this, the bank teller was able to sit down and spend more meaningful time with the customers trying to sell them, you know, this mortgage here, this product there and everything and, you know, screw them

Screw them that way.

This little story, usually when people tell it, they stop the story around 2010 or what, and that's when the charts stop and they don't continue them. But then I actually went into the statistics and I looked at what happened after that. And well, obviously you had the financial crisis in 2008 that really hit the bank tellers like a lot of jobs. But even after that, the jobs of bank tellers have kept on going down. So they peaked in, I think it was in 2007 or something. What is that correlated to though?

Well, so there was over 600,000 bank tellers in the States. Now there's like less than 350,000. So it just keeps on going down. And what is it correlated to it? That's a good question. I think, well, you had the finance crisis to begin with, but then there's technology. There's, you know, there's FinTech. There's online banking. Online banking. Online banking and, you know, app banking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't need as many. For the common day-to-day activities, you don't need to go to a teller. The only time, even for me, I don't go to a teller until I actually –

cannot make it happen through my web or my app, right? I have to talk to somebody. That's the only time. Right. So there's different kinds of impacts that technology can have on the job, whether it's AI or the technology. One of it is going to be like freeing up some of your time. So if it's like 20 to 30%, again, you know, you can be kind of

spend that time to do better stuff, the stuff you never had the time to do, to do more meaningful stuff, more value added tasks. But if we're talking about like 70 to 80% of your time that can be replaced by AI, then you're in a more dangerous place there. Oh yeah. I feel like not everyone is going to immediately know like, oh, this is what I'll do with my time now. I think a lot of people will be lost. A lot of people without their kind of real jobs, they'll be lost. Their sense of purpose will be lost.

harder to find i feel um and that's scary because i think about myself and i'm like okay like i like i wouldn't really know like if everything i could do was replaced by ai like what else would i do

I also think about, you were mentioning earlier how, well, first of all, there's many different camps of people, right? You were mentioning it with like the doomsayers and then you got the people that's very- Well, I don't want to let Ash off the hook because he never actually answered that question. Oh, oh, oh, please, please, please. Yes, yes, yes, please. Let's not let him back. Yeah, he kind of deflected. Let's not move on yet. Yeah, he rerouted the conversation. Exactly.

I kind of gave a hint that I don't really, I'm not part of the doomsayers in the sense of thinking like, yeah, there's going to be like this Terminator scenario thing. I don't buy into that. I think that's overblown and I think it's very dangerous entertaining this kind of debate because it dilutes

It's distracting, you know, people from the real problems, the real core problems. Like there's real issues that need to be tackled and that people need to really look at. And specifically, you know, particularly one of them being the job market. There's other issues too. But the job market is one problem and it's being distracted by this like, you know, whole thing.

Like Terminator narrative, right? Terminator narrative. Sensationalist narrative. Because even if that were to happen, that's not anytime soon, right? But what you're talking about today, about the job market changing drastically in the near future and now, is something that we're facing. There's something that we're facing. It's here. It's not that near later future or whatever that timeline is because nobody knows. So why even... Exactly. So why even...

dwell on that. And that's actually where it leads me to this other question, which is, you have a lot of other people that also focus on what you're talking about, which is the immediate future, the immediate present. What are the concerns that the general society have, whether it's through jobs or even just culturally, right? But

A lot of people think positive in terms of, yeah, it's going to replace jobs, but it's also going to give you more time to be more creative, to give you more time to, I don't know, spend time doing things you love, et cetera, et cetera, without getting into the economics of how you're going to get paid and stuff like that. You still got to make a living first of all. But I think that falls down to the corporations. So my question is,

Is there an ethical consideration that these companies need to have in terms of balancing AI versus human labor? Because that's on the corporations. It's not on the common person, right? It's the leaders of companies deciding on

If they're going to, you know, push the AI agenda or keep a balance or something like that. Yeah, I hope so. Because I feel like there's that hope, right? Yeah, I hope so. But my advice to anyone is hope for the best, plan for the worst. You can't just lay back on your couch and say, okay, well, this is the company's problem or it's the government problem and I'm going to wait for them to solve it. Yeah, don't leave it in their hands. That's not my advice. I mean, some people might do that and some people are going to like take action on themselves and educate themselves and see, okay, make up a strategy about what they're going to do and...

When you look within five years down the road, we'll see how those people are each faring. But even beyond... I'm not even talking about the workforce. I'm just talking about in terms of the responsibilities of the corporations, right? Now, obviously, we are all realistic people here. We're not going to think the corporations are going to be thinking for the workforce. Well, the corporations only have a responsibility to their shareholders. Exactly, to themselves or the shareholders. And the reason why you have all these books out there talking about digital, how you...

How you can, you know, surf on the whole fourth industrial revolution wave is because they want to be sure that the company is able to survive and to, you know, harness this and to grow with the AI and everything. Because if ever it doesn't, if they get disrupted by a company like Apple or Tesla or whatever, who's able to, you know, get them through technology, right?

The company will go bankrupt. The shareholders are going to lose their money. The CEO is going to get fired. Everyone loses. But if the company is able to compete against them by reducing their costs and firing part of their employees, what's going to happen? The shares are going to go up. The shareholders are unhappy and the CEO is going to get a fat bonus. To the employee, the result is the same. They just lost their job. So

That's why there's no books on this. There's no books explaining for what the employee's got to do because no one cares. People only care about the CEOs and the shareholders. And that's where I'm trying to, the angle that I'm trying to take here. I think that's so great because what I was trying to get at is all the positive speak that I've heard from people talking, I just feel like they're not living in reality.

You know what I'm saying? They're not living in reality. And what you just said right there, I think, is something that is really important. You can't just hope that the corporations and the government is going to help lead the way to make sure society is going to be good. Fucking greedy people, man. Well, I mean, at least from the speaking to corporations, I mean, the entity of a corporate interest is just intrinsically like the interests are just

different than the interest of its workers. Yeah. The stakes are just too high. I mean, you can't just lay back. The stakes are too high. Take a corporation, for instance. They could think, okay, well, I got two options here. Either I train my workforce to get on with this stuff and understand this stuff, and I got to go through it to train them through it. And are they even willing to do it in the first place? Because they just, okay, we're forcing them to train this stuff. Or...

I could just go out on the, you know, freelance.com or whatever and find some giggers who will do the job for us. And wow, the giggers are doing a very good job. Why don't we just use the giggers instead of these people? Because giggers are paid by the click, not by the clock. So the giggers know this. They're the first ones to start using ChatGPT. It's not employees in the company that are using ChatGPT. The first ones to get on any kind of technology that can help you be more efficient and faster are going to be giggers because they're out in open competition with everyone. And when you talk about giggers, you mean like freelancers? Yeah, freelancers.

Yeah. That's another thread. It's the gig economy, which is gaining. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's a huge one too. And that's actually a really interesting insight. It's like the people working in that gig economy are actually the early adopters, right? Because they depend on it. They don't have a safety net. They got to be on the cutting edge and finding all sorts of crafty ways to try to get a leg up, right? When you're working in that economy, I guess. Going back to the whole corporate thing,

I mean, everyone's, whether you're a corporate entity or you're just an individual person, like your most basic mode is survival. And oftentimes, I think what helps a company survive is not the same thing as what helps an employee survive. Oftentimes, those things are at odds, right? So I think, Ash, let me ask you then, without giving away too much of your book, because I want people to get it.

What are some things that the normal person, the average Joe, should be doing then? You keep talking about that. You keep talking about like, look, it's great to talk about the problem, but what are some solutions for the everyday person? Can you kind of shed some light on that? No, I mean, again, it's going to be very different if you're a student as opposed to someone already like 30 or 40 years old, already with a job, what kind of record track you have, everything. So it's really hard to...

give there's no silver bullet but there are obviously some uh principles that you can apply and uh you can't just go with the flow or something you can't just you know that that's no longer going to work it's not going to add your to your you know chances of success and of being able to ride the wave so you need to have a strategy and what is a strategy a strategy is really

getting to the basics is how do you get from this point to that point and so you need to know what it is you want to get to you also need to know what it is your current situation what is the as-is situation so i recommend that the people begin by doing something like a SWOT analysis where you look at your you know you do an introspection of your job you know where are you now what are you doing what are you good at what are you not good at and

And like, what are your threats, right? Yeah. And then, you know, yeah. And how is AI encroaching on this field or how could it technically encroach on this, you know, merging with other different elements, you know, like gigas or freelancers or outsourcing or all these things, like just be very creative and thinking like, okay, how can this come at me and work?

what else could I do, you know, for, to, to, to, to survive and what kind of skills do I need to get, you know, so that I can get on top of things. So there's different kinds of disruption to job. There's one type where it just like child GPT just makes something that used to be difficult, accessible to everyone. Like anyone now can write a nice email or something, uh,

Anyone now can produce images with mid-journey. So you don't have to be like that skilled or anything. So it basically devalues expertise. Like you see taxi drivers, well, you don't need to know the whole city now anymore because the app does it for you. So the expertise of the taxi driver is irrelevant now and anyone can do this for much cheaper. And if you look at the average salaries of taxi drivers in the UK, for instance, it's gone down in the past years.

And this is a typical threat. It's the democratization of something where the value of a skill becomes eroded by technology. Then you have another type of impact where technology is going to augment the worker. And in this type, you're going to have two scenarios. One that we discussed before where it actually frees some of the time from some of the grunt work so that you can do more interesting things. That's kind of like indirectly enhancing you because it gives you more time.

on condition that it doesn't take too, it gives you, you know, take all of your time, you know, replace everything. But then you have the other case, which is that really you're directly enhanced. And this is going to be a tool usually, which is a lot more difficult to master. If you look at something like I mentioned, ChatGPT or MidJourney, these, you look at a tutorial on YouTube within two minutes, you know how to use it. I'm talking about tools that you, takes many years of use and practice to get good with, you know, like Photoshop or

programming or even something like Excel when you really get into the depths of it, you know, and it leads to programming. These are tools like AutoCAD or SolidWorks or what. These are tools that can really like...

enhance the worker and make you much more productive so that you can do the job of like two or three other people. If you go for that kind of job, if you go for that kind of direction, then, you know, it can get really good. And it can be also combining different elements from left and right. But yeah, it's going to really, you're going to have this tool aspect where you want to ally with the tools and not fight against them. You want to ally with the tools because you're not fighting against the tools. You're fighting against other guys around you.

That's why the whole title of the book, Battle Royale, is that you have 10 people in the office now. Tomorrow, there's going to be only three or two left, maybe only one. How can you be that last person? Obviously, that person is going to be very computer savvy. Then you have

Other aspects that also help, the human touch is something that often comes up. It's obvious if you're like at contact with people, if you're able to work well with people, then they're going to want to come back to you and work with you. You know, if you're like a photographer or something, well, you have these, the trust that you build over the years working with people, getting work done well, being agreeable, going the extra mile for your customer, being able to see things that AI wouldn't see. Right.

to be able to provide an extra service that maybe they hadn't even thought of. And then they'll be like, wow, you know, okay. And like this, you build a reputation little by little. At some point, you might even get entrepreneurial wings and think, okay, you know, I could go on my own now, you know, and make a living off of this. So the human touch is something that is really important too. So if you're in a front office job, then it's good that you're able to like cultivate this so that you get the love of your customers and that way you

It's also a way to get value. If you're in a back office job, it's going to be a bit more difficult, though you could say that other departments within the company are your customers. But, you know, it's a bit more difficult to do because there you're under just one decision maker, which remains the company. Whereas if it's with customers, it's a bit more, you know.

ambiguous there so yeah there's different strings that you can play on and that you have to play on and you need to also like you know obviously you need continuous learning you need to build your social networks these things these are truisms that existed before but they become even more relevant in this age and uh and again you have to have a strategy and see where you can link to like for instance i often target uh one case that i know about quite well through my work is uh the case of accountants so someone doing accounting is a job that they're really like

square in the target of what can be automated to a high extent. If you look like someone who's doing accounts payable, they're basically receiving all the invoices from the suppliers and plugging them in the system. Now with something like optimal character recognition, these kind of softwares, which you even have on an iPhone now, you could just plug it directly into the system.

you know, theoretically. So this is the kind of thing like it's, they're really a threat. So what could an accountant, someone who's in this discipline, what could they branch out to to still remain relevant? Well, if you look at the history of accounting, accountants have been around obviously for thousands of years. You had them in Egypt and Mesopotamia and everything, but it's really grew as a profession only in a hundred years in the past century because government started implementing corporate tax laws.

saying that the company, they have to pay tax on the profit. So in order to see what the profit of the company is, you had to come up with this set of rules on how you calculate what goes in the balance sheet, what goes in the P&L, how you do depreciation, all these things. And that's when really all the companies had to start having accountants and the profession came up and there's schools teaching this as a profession. Because it got so much more complicated. Yeah, because it got so much more complicated and because it became mandatory. Now, what's the next thing that is going totally in this direction now? It's ESG.

environmental and social governance. This is the kind of thing now which is growing big time and there's already talks throughout, you know, in different governments, they're all talking about this, like, how do we get companies to track their carbon emissions, their carbon footprint, and to keep records of this in the same way that they do it with their accounting already? You know, how do you measure this? How do you track it? And it's something that eventually is going to become mandatory. And they're all looking at now how

Companies are even, you know, taking the first steps themselves to say, okay, how can we track this and how can we do this kind of job? This is a job. When you look at what it is that you have to do, the skills and the qualities that are in there, it's not something from like a guy from Greenpeace is going to do. No, it's an accounting job. It's an accountant job, you know, to collect the data, to like have it in the nice format and all that, to do all this stuff. It's really similar to accounting. So I think for people like, especially for young people, you shouldn't just go and think like, oh, I'm, I'm,

training to become an architect or to become like to work in marketing or something no you have to look at what kind of skills you like what is it that you like to do but what kind of skills you have also you know do you prefer working with figures with numbers on a computer all day long or do you prefer working with people are you very perfectionist or you know do you have attention to detail or are you more like you know just tinkering and you see if it works and you know you work by reiteration on very fast rapid clip in order to get something done so

what is your communication style? You know, you like to make histories and tell stories and anecdotes or are you very factual? Do you like to use figures or do you like to use more images and everything to communicate? There's all these different aspects that you need to

learn about yourself and then when you know this then you can know like okay yeah what kind of jobs is this relevant in you know and then and that's when you see some people that can do like a huge reconversion they can rebrand themselves into something that looks totally different but when you look at the skills that are involved actually it makes a lot of sense there's a common thread there

And so this is what you got to look at more than a job because the job might change. The job might disappear. The job might just morph completely into something different, which requires different skills, or it could change names. It doesn't really matter. But if you just focus on your skills, those things remain and those things will have, you know, relevance in certain jobs or other jobs. So this is more like the way that you can

look at it it's very unfortunate though that the educational system right now does not focus on this you don't have like questionnaires like and tests and everything to see what are your aptitudes and all these different elements that i just gave a few examples of just now so that's something that the educational system should change on and i think it's regrettable i haven't found apps that do this but i think there should be

market for this where you can do an app to help people to know themselves better and just know what it is that they're good at. And again, it doesn't have to be a job title. It can be more like, you know, you can see after what is the match with different kind of jobs, where is this relevant or not relevant, you know? Yeah.

And these are the kind of things that you have to look at. So there are, I was focusing more on younger people because this is a question that I see asked all the time. You know, there's always like a student that rises up and ask this question to whoever's talking the keynote speech or whatever. And the guy's always starting saying like, Oh yeah, that's a very good question. You know? And,

Whenever they say that, you know, it's going to be like, okay, he's going to answer beside the question. Yeah, because they don't know how to answer it. Or he's going to answer with a truism like, oh, do what you love, what your passion is or something. And it's like, it really doesn't help, you know? So it is a tough question. It's a very complex question because, again, these people, they have like half a century to go and technology changes really fast now. And so they're really at a loss. And so, yeah.

It is a tough question, but you have to spend a lot of time on that question and not just jump to the answer. Yeah, there's one thing you said earlier in this conversation really stuck with me. And I'm hearing it as you speak, too, in terms of addressing the tough questions around this topic, right? Because they are really tough. And like you said, they're so complex. And who knows?

You were talking about your book and you were talking about the fact that it's fortunate that you covered ChatGPT in your book because had you not, the whole book would have been irrelevant. And it just goes to show just how technology becomes irrelevant so fast, like the old iPhones. You have the new iPhone now and you have the different memory storages and different computers and hard disks that make ones a few years ago almost obsolete basically.

The same is with the conversation around this thing, right? Like the conversation evolves so quickly where a conversation today about this topic could be completely relevant a month from now. - 100%. - Right? And that's also, you know, that's another dynamic to this entire issue that's really fascinating and it's hard to wrap your mind around. Another thing from what you just said

In terms of trying to address that problem, like, what do you do? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think, like, I heard you say at least one of your first initial points was basically the given of you have to have great computer skills. And that makes, obviously, that makes perfect sense because as of now, computers are...

the human interface in which they use to use AI or any of these types of technologies, right? So that's the tool. And you have to be good at using that tool. Otherwise, you're not going to be connected to the new innovation. And that's changed a lot because in my day, when I was growing up, I remember very clearly somebody saying to me, because I've never been tech savvy. I've never been good with computers. Howie knows this.

And I remember like kind of being down to myself when I was young about that. It was like in high school or something.

um, and then I remember someone very clearly saying to me, someone older, right. Saying like, this is like a successful person, like saying to me like, Oh, don't worry. Like you'll like your workers will be good at computers. You don't need to be good at computers. That's a very good point. So actually I showed to the people, uh, that, that I talk with on this topic, uh, the relevance of computer skills based on your seniority, based on your age. So when you start working, uh,

If you come up and you go at the interview or whatever, or you start your job and your boss, probably just an intern, and he asks you, what are you good at? If you tell him, I'm really good at managing people, they're going to laugh. There's just no way you can get them to swallow that. But if you tell them that you're good at computers and that you know how to code and that you're good at this stuff, they're going to believe you. If you're bluffing, they'll find out sooner or later. It's something that young people can be credible with. This is the only...

credible item that they have, you know, anything else. They can't say like, oh, I'm an expert in marketing or I'm good at, you know, finance control or something that it's, there's just no way they can get away with that. But if they say that they're good at computer skills, this is something that people will believe in. So this is really like one of the best weapons that the young person has when they enter the job market. Now,

If you're a senior and you're good with computers, then of course that's good too. But what I'm, what I'm trying to say is that as you get older and as you know, you make more, um, as, as you get a track record in the company and everything, the computer skills become less relevant and management skills come more into play. So if you ask like a, you know, Warren Buffett or, or, you know, the,

Bernard Arnault or what, like, do you have good computer skills? Well, they don't need it because like you just said, they got tons of, you know, lieutenants working for them that have got great computer skills. They don't need to have this kind of skills. So yeah, it's, it's also, it is more relevant at the early stages. But is, but even that concept I feel is already outdated, right? Like let's say the, the, the leaders and high executives in a company of the future, do you think they'll still be able to get away with like not having good computer skills?

They need to be able to know what it can and cannot do so that they don't have these extravagant requests to their staff. Like when you look at Elizabeth Holmes, she asked for the computer, for this, what was it, the Edison machine, this size to be able to diagnose blood and everything. She was just making these outrageous requirements to her engineers who were like looking like, well, that's not possible. But she was like so adamant that they had to do this. And that's how, you know, Theranos went the wrong way down the hill. Computer skills.

are relevant. And again, that doesn't mean you have to jump into coding. You have to start really with where you are now and look little by little, you know, or else you're just going to like race ahead and you're going to tire yourself down for nothing without making any progress. So you got to really look at based on where you are now, you know, what is it? And maybe you don't have to jump into coding

Python or what, maybe you can start with getting to learn how to use Excel shortcuts and stuff like that to become more efficient as a starting point. Learn how to use a keyboard. Learn how to use formulas, functions, and things. But again, you really need to look at what kind of job you do.

I just got back from a business trip to India and it just so happens that when I was younger, I was really into Hindu mythology and stories like, you know, the Mahabharata, the Rig Veda and all these things. And when I'm over there and when I'm talking with these potential customers and everything, it's – you go out for dinner and everything, you have these long chats and everything, they really appreciate that.

a foreigner who knows so much about their culture. You have no idea like how much impact this has. You don't know all the shit that they get in India. They have a very bad soft power, you know? So whenever you talk about India to anyone, there's only two words that come to mind of people. It's like casts and rape.

So that's like just a terrible kind of image that people have hanging on around India. But if you actually know a bit about their culture and everything, and they see this, that you have this appreciation, that can go really far. And this is another thing. It's something that is completely underappreciated. And I remember when I was a kid and I went to school in this dodgy neighborhood in France. And once I told the history professor there, I'm like, look, man, this is

subject that we're doing is useless. History is not a useful subject. It's not going to help us get a job. Why are we even here? And the guy, okay, he was like a pure academic French, you know, so they kind of like despise, I think, the private corporate world or something. And he was just, he just nodded his head saying, yeah, you're right, you know?

But actually now I know that he was actually – we were both totally wrong. And I was kind of – I think it's so bad of him to not defend his profession because the history is something very useful to have this kind of general culture, you know, that your cultural breadth and everything. Even here I was giving the example in India with potential customers. But even like when you're in the company, suppose you have like this –

cocktail party or this dinner or the barbecue Thanksgiving or whatever organized by the company, any of these kind of occasions where the bosses are there and they see the staff and everything. If you have two staff that are just as good, they just do the same, you know, they excel at their job at the same level and everything, but one of them is unable to hold their, uh,

you know, a sophisticated conversation, whereas the other one has this really breadth of, you know, intellectual depth and this cultural knowledge and everything, you know, you obviously want to have like at the upper management levels, people who know things and people, you know, who read in papers and who have a bit of history, knowledge and things like this, you know, it does make a difference, you know? Yeah. I'll give you another example. When I was a kid, I remember when I was, once I had my dad, he was working with Russians at the time. This was obviously before the war. And

there were some russians that came over for dinner with the translator and everything and you know he just told them you know he just told them to make conversation yeah my 12 year old kid he's into like history and world war ii stuff and everything and the russians asked me like okay so what was uh what was the the russia's uh best tank during world war ii and i answered right away so there was the yosef stalin too and then there was like this huge like

heated debate like just exploded between the russians you know they were down with the vodka by then and everything and it was just like and and the translator couldn't keep up and everything and my dad just thought it was so funny and everything because they were arguing like one of them was saying no it's the t-34 and then the other one you know they were coming up with all these different things and and then i told him you know i corrected myself i said yeah the t-34 is the tank that helped them win the war because it was mass produced and everything but the most sophisticated upgraded tank that they had was the joseph stallion too you know and they're like wow and everything you know that okay you know let's drink to that and everything you know and just

This kind of thing. Props like respect. Yeah. And my dad was really proud of me. You know, this kind of kid that enlightened the Russians. Because this is, again, this is like hitting on the pride of Russia. You know, this is like they suffered big time during that war more than any other country. And so it was, you know, it was just something really, it's just a detail. It's a story, you know. But I mean, it's just to show that a lot of things matter, you know. Even like having culture matters and can make a difference at a certain stage in work. Oh, for sure. And it brings a whole new light on the kind of...

the cliche of like the tech nerd, like they could be like, they're probably like great at programming, great at coding, but they probably lack social skills. Right. That's the stereotype. And it kind of sheds a whole new light on that. And I think in this day and age, like,

I don't know. I think the whole computer skill thing for the young generation is already a given. I can't imagine a young kid growing up these days and not having really good computer skills. I just think they all know many applications. It just seems like they all already do because that's the world they live in, right?

But you'd be surprised though, because I just started giving lessons at this business school and I asked the kids and they're like 19, 20 year olds. And I asked them at the beginning, you know, I did this quick quiz and everything and you get to know them better and ask them who knows how to code. And none of them, like half of them had used like ChatGPT or Midjourney or something, but none of them knew how to code. I was a bit surprised. Like they didn't really have any knowledge of coding. So I thought that was like a given, you know. Well, that's a surprise. Yeah. So I was a bit surprised about that out of 15 kids, you know.

Well, that actually brings me to a question that maybe we didn't really explore yet, which is in terms of the near future and what the workforce is going to look like.

What do you think are some of the, I guess, major categories or types of jobs that may be a little more safe in the near future as opposed to the ones like you said, the accounting or whatever that might be displaced a bit sooner? Well, again, like I said, the accounting could evolve to incorporate different kind of stuff based on their skills, but you have to be a flexible person and not…

label yourself as an accountant. You have to be more open when you define yourself and what it is that you're good at. That's why you have to explore yourself and to know what you're good at. So that's a very difficult question, again, what you just asked about which jobs will be, because there's probably names that don't exist yet. So people think of, I mean, I could tell you things that I read about that people say, okay, like with the AI, you're going to have people tasked with making sure that it's ethical and maintaining it ethical. You're going to have people tasked with

explaining to human beings the results that come from the AI, like, okay, why is it giving this kind of judgment, you know, or why is it giving this kind of result and everything? Because it's quite a black box, right? So you want to still know why, you know, did I not get the job for this, you know, that I tried to postulate for what, you know, it can give you things like this.

And it could create jobs like this, but are these going to be high paid jobs? You know, I don't know. That's the other thing. Right now you have jobs that are created by AI that make it look like it's AI.

AI, but actually there's humans behind it. It's what you call artificial, artificial intelligence. So jobs like this could be like, well, you have the moderators. So these are people like in Kenya, for instance, who are going to be reviewing photos and videos at day's length to see like, okay, is there anything that should be censored because someone's committing suicide or someone is killing someone or something like this? You're going to have people who

they're on their computers and they're just delineating objects and saying, okay, in this photo, this is a car, this is a tree and everything so that, you know, they're helping for the whole object recognition thing to kick in. These are jobs that pay nothing, you know, they're really low paid jobs. So when you look at the future jobs, like, yes, it's going to birth new jobs, great, but are these good jobs, you know, are these high paying jobs? That's the next question. Like where are they getting replaced with, right? What's the quality there? So I think that what you need to do is to be able to be good at certain things, which you're really good at, but you also need to have a better, um,

you need to have this broader kind of skill set, a minimum skills on other things. It's what the ideal, they call the T expertise kind of shape thing. So something where you're really good at, but you also have this transversal, you know, skills in other areas. So you mentioned, for instance, the computer geek, the computer geek needs to have social skills too. It's very important. It's a generalist with specialties. Yeah. Right. The, the, the social butterfly, if you're really good at, at people's skills, well, you know, you don't want people to just say, oh yeah, that's a social butterfly or a,

a careerist or something, you know, no, you want to be like, okay, they remember you first for an expertise in something. And then on top of that, for the fact that you have a powerful network of people and, you know, if they're looking for something, then you can help them out.

But it's very important, again, to have a strategy to know what it is that you want to go towards, what it is that you want to do. Because when I see people now, like the other day I was in Paris and I saw these people, you know, they just got their MBAs and everything, this couple. And the guy was like, yeah, I'm looking for a job in tech, but he wasn't more precise. And his girlfriend was like, yeah, I'm looking for a job in a cosmetics company doing this and everything. And then later, you know, it turned out that she was a trilingual English, French, Russian and everything. So it targets...

much more, you know, what it is that she wants to do and where she comes from and everything. And then I can think of, yeah, well, you know, I know these, I actually know like one or two Russian people that are actually, you know, looking for, you know, and, and I can see how to help. You make those connections. Yeah. I can make connections in my head to know what to help her. The other guy was just like really with a blunt, you know, like, oh, I,

I can do anything, you know, then yeah, you don't know how to help them and you don't want to help them because you're afraid if you're going to vouch for this person that, you know, it's a bad connection that you make then, you know, because your reputation is at stake too. So this is, we're kind of diverging here to the whole social network kind of thing, how you use it, how you leverage it and everything. But it's also something very important to be able to do this and do it well, because then that's how you, again, you build up,

what could in the future, you know, because one of the past could also be going a full entrepreneur. And when you do that, you then you're going to look back at your, you know, your whole the history of your life, you know, gonna be like, shit, you know, now that I need to find like backers, bankers, investors, vendors, customers, employees, partners, and everything. It's too bad. I didn't spend more time with those people I knew back then who worked here and there and everything. And I was being so highbrow and everything, because now like, actually, that would have been cool thing. But now it's too late. You can't just go to someone when you need them.

You want to go to them before and be nice with them and everything so that you create this connection kind of thing, right? That's really, that's so interesting. The duality between like having like being very specific about like being really good at something and also at the same time making sure you broaden your horizons in terms of kind of that T-shape you're talking about and being more like a jack of all trades, more like a renaissance kind of perspective, renaissance man kind of perspective. Yeah.

I think, you know, just from a personal standpoint, I think that was like I look back on my life now as an adult and I feel like that's probably something I would have changed about myself. Is that I feel I was too much of a jack of all trades kind of person. And I was like, OK, at a lot of different things. But I never had like that one thing that I was like, OK, that's my thing. Like no one can touch me on that. Like I know what the hell I'm doing.

I never had that side. And that always ate at me. I've always regretted that. We've had conversations about that off air. And so what you're saying, I feel like really rings true. Like even like my kid, when he grows up, I feel like that is something I never really thought about in that way. And now that you said it, it just makes it so much clearer and so much more vital.

for the future that they have that kind of like that, that T shape, be really grounded and good at something and be, you can be known for that thing, but also spread your wings. Right. And so you have this open envelope to kind of collect more opportunities and funnel more things in your way. Um,

Yeah, I just want to say I think that was really strong. It's important when you do it, and when you do it with something that you enjoy doing, obviously, then it doesn't feel like you're a punishment, you know? Yeah, yeah. But to get back to your question, Javi, because I didn't really answer it, but I mean, so I... Honestly, I don't have a crystal ball into saying, like, what is going to be the big jobs of the future or not or what now.

Some people do, there's people that are like tasks, it's their full-time job to do this kind of prospection and everything. So if you look in the US, for instance, you have the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they have a website, which is pretty cool. They have a lot of data on there. It's really interesting. You can download it, play with it and everything. And they make projections on the 10-year horizon saying like, okay, you know, how much,

And, you know, will the job of like an air pilot or, you know, executive manager, what, how many more, how will this evolve in the next 10 years? No, they, of course, they don't always get it right. And it's funny, it's interesting because they also review this, you know, they also show like, okay.

Last year compared to 10 years ago, how far did they err down the wrong side? So no one has a crystal ball for this and we don't know. But there are other dynamics to take into account. And there's one thing which we haven't talked about, for instance, is the demographics. So the demographics are –

in the West and in China even are one of declining population at term. You know, now we have an aging population. We expect by 2030 to 2035 for the baby boomer generation to completely exit the workforce. And that should lead to, you know, a shrinking of the active workforce today in the States is something like 150 million people. And it's growing year on year because then you have immigration is also in the US, but

at some point in certain areas especially there where they're not really that open to immigration these populations are going to go down so there's also a challenge for automating in order to compensate for this loss of people working so in china for instance you have 900 million workers uh that's the size of the active workforce it's projected that by 2050 there will only be 700 million workers so if you take that delta of 200 million workers

That's bigger than the entire US workforce today. And this is just jobs that will be lost between now and 2050. Yeah. Right. So then in a situation where if you're in a country or even in a world with a declining workforce...

Shouldn't AI be kind of like a welcome thing then? It's really like the devil is in the details. Like what AI can do, what do people want to do, what jobs are going to be relevant and jobs are not relevant. It's just, it's really complex kind of situation. So it's not easy to really see through this. And that's why there's really no easy answers, but you do need to be aware of it. You need to prepare for it.

Where you are, you do need to have a strategy. You need, do you need to look forward based on where you are now, you know, and, and, and try and like anticipate and make a plan. I think what you were saying before, uh,

was enough of an answer in terms of the near future workforce or career possibilities. Because like you said, there's no answer. Nobody has that crystal ball clear reading. Nobody, right? And there may even be careers that we can't even fathom right now. But there are guiding principles you can have as a person, professional person working that can guide you

At least keep you from failing or losing perspective in the workforce. So things like you said, creating your social network, right? Updating, making sure that you're practicing social proper etiquette, right? Number two, being flexible, knowing your weaknesses and strengths, right? Flexibility in terms of pivoting, in terms of understanding what the current market's like and what the current market may need in the near future. Right?

These are just simple principles that you can only answer yourself, that nobody can tell you which way to go, but you have to kind of build it yourself. And ideally, it could be like at the crossroads between something that society needs and something that you're passionate about. I read about this example once in this book, and there was this guy, I can't remember, he was doing this job, maybe like at Wall Street or something, and he was making good coin, but he was not really happy with it. And I can't

I can't remember if he was laid off. Maybe he was replaced by a quant or something at some point, right? But his passion was bike riding. He's like a big bike guy, right? So he loves just going bicycle and tracking all around and everything. So he found his passion in real estate after, like the most kind of sector you wouldn't think of because he became specialized. He opened a real estate company. He became specialized in...

taking the people there. Whenever he would show them a house, he would take them, he would have bikes and everything ready and he would take them for a bike ride all around through the neighborhood to the school where the kids would go and everything and try to like just show them this whole thing. Yeah, it's just awesome. And because he presents himself like that. So the people that come to him are also people that, you know, usually will have kids or they like biking too. It's like this whole thing

That's smart. He became really into that. And it's like, so he's not, I don't know if he really enjoys real estate, but he enjoys the bicycle thing. And he's putting his passion into a job that he was able to develop like this. And so, yeah. And that's a huge value add. Because think about it. If you're trying to buy a house and you're a family, you want to know what the neighborhood's like. It's very differentiating. You want to know what the school district is like. Like, these are all questions you would...

you all have already. Yeah. And for sure. And most realtors probably be like, Oh, if you have time, you know, take it upon yourself to go around the, around the neighborhood. It was a kind of a blue ocean thing that he just, that's a great idea. I want to ask a question for Howie actually going back a little bit to the question that he originally asked in terms of kind of like what, which, what kind of jobs are, are safer in your opinion, Ash,

Because you had said kind of more of the middle class routine jobs are probably the most vulnerable to AI.

What about the creative sector, creative jobs? From what I at least see, what little I know, that seems like it's also really vulnerable because, like you said, with a mid-journey, you can kind of create pictures. There's all these new ways AI is helping creatives to develop art or images or sound, music, all types of things. Motion picture.

How vulnerable do you see the creative sector in general? If you're, let's say, like a filmmaker. There's a lot of aspects to that question. So...

First of all, like creative, you have to define what is creative because everyone has creativity coming in point at some point. Creativity for me is about being able to solve problems. That's, you know, tough problems. And people that you call creative, maybe they don't enter in creative in my definition because you might have like an architect who just repeats the same old lame patterns, you know, copy paste here, there and everything. Some people who do that in the music industry or what they, they're probably not that creative. Yeah.

What about like a filmmaker then? Well, then you have filmmakers or people in the advertisement agency. So then it's also like the question of like,

Where are they working right now? Are they working in the company as a department or are they working like as an outsource service where this company specializes in filmmaking or in, you know, studio post-production or something like this? And then it touches on another question, which is like a very deep question about within the company. I'll get to the creative thing in a bit, but I mean, it touches on to the question of when you have the company.

What does the company do internally and what do they do externally? And this goes way back like a century ago. This guy called Ronald Coase, I believe, he did this whole study about why companies

exists but also then why the company would have employees and his reasoning was or what he came up with was to say like if every time the company has a need they had to go out into the open market to try bargain with someone to see okay who can do this for them the transaction costs are too high so it's better for the majority of tasks that they do especially the repetitive ones to get employees so that's where the employees came from and you just give them like the standard operating procedure and that's why most of the employees do standard recurrent tasks because

Because if they didn't, then you would just go from someone from the outside if it's a one-time ad hoc thing that you have to do. And that's why we have the problem today with AI. So...

At the same time, what happened then is that the frontier and later on in the 90s and everything, and Nike was one of the first to do these, Nike, one of the things that you saw was that more and more companies, they would outsource certain types of their work and they will only keep the core stuff internally. So now you have like a lot of companies that, you know, okay, they will go outside to do their tracking of their data or to do their social media or to do their advertising or to do their marketing.

their accounting or what. There's so many things that can be outsourced and they only keep like a few core activities or really like sensitive information activities like in the finance department or what internally and the rest they outsource. Now,

that you have this Gen AI coming out, then, okay, they had outsourced advertising and the advertisers are the first ones to be using this. And they can get, you know, are they really reducing their price when they use this? Or they keep charging at the same price? Are they delivering the product faster or what? That's the question, because then the company itself is going to be like, well, wait a minute, they're just using

gen AI, if they're not using gen AI, then that's a problem because, hey, the other guys use gen AI and they could do it faster than, so you have to use gen AI. But wait a minute, if you're using gen AI, then I can use it myself, right? So why do I need you in the first place? So there's this whole, it's this whole disruption as to what is the frontier between what the company should outsource and what they should do internally. And a lot of things are coming back internally now. And they're thinking like, oh, we don't have to like

Even before that, with the iPhone and everything, why do you have to pay the hefty fee for a recording studio and a post-production and everything? And this is the company that my stepmother does, by the way. So she's been suffering a lot from this in France because now a lot of people, they're like, well, this phone is also a multimedia studio in itself. So the quality isn't as good. I'll give you that. But when you take into account the price difference,

It's good enough. And that's the kind of problem that is going to happen for filmmakers and a lot of other professions like this. And you can see this, an early example of this is with a technology that you have before, which is not that high-end technology, but it's just the answering machine. So before, when you wanted to call a hotline, you would have, the company would have people there that would answer the phone and talk with you.

And then now what you have is not full automation, but a mix of automation and outsourcing. You call the number, typically when you call the bank or something, you're going to, you know, for English press one, for Spanish press two. And then you go through this whole labyrinth of different like, you know, numbers and everything on this backtone music. And then at the end of that, you're going to end up

if you're lucky, with someone who picks up the phone and, you know, hello, sir, you know, and he's going to be like in Bangalore or someplace like that. So it's a mix of automation and outsourcing. And it's a very unpleasant experience, but it's become the new normal. This subpar has become the new metric that everyone now is doing it now, except for a few outsiders like Zappos, the shoe company or something, you know, but I mean, the majority of people, they just go down to this level. So it's

less good than before, but it's deemed good enough when you take into account the price difference. And this kind of paradigm is going to come in a lot of other areas. So for creativity, this is one of the risks that's out there. If you're like in a creative company or in an ad agency, this is one of the big risks that's out there that they start wanting to do things on their own, you know, and bouncing ideas on their own. So maybe the company might hire someone internally to do their advertising and it'll be cheaper than, you know, having to pay TBWA or these companies, you

So they will still be an employee doing this, if you wish, but it's going to be like at a much lesser cost whereas before it was feeding five or six people on the other side, right? And then when you look at creativity, to get back to that topic, like...

When do you actually exert creativity? How often are you creative? It's really challenging assumptions. It's really looking in different ways. There's a whole way to do this creativity thing, and there's not a lot of schools that actually teach that, and there's not a lot of people that actually use that. So I think a lot of the phony creative people, the fake creatives, are going to have a bit of a problem. They're going to be using this AI thing and finding it really cool, but other people are going to be finding that they can use it too because we get back to the whole democratization thing.

thing. So the expertise in itself goes away. Now there is a certain level of expertise where you can do things that I think the AI might not be that good at doing, you know, like in the prompting and things like this. I can give you an example. I saw a not

too long ago where someone was presenting to us it was the interior store design so there was this big Italian fashion brand that was coming up to this design school asking them okay we want you to redesign this new store that we have you know and I think it was Valentino or something but whatever it is an Italian fashion brand and one student came up with this design and it looked really nice and everything but it was kind of bland it was just very you know she played it safe doing this whole like thing like you know really in this style of the times and everything and

So I said, okay, you know, yeah, that's, you know, nothing bad, nothing good. Okay. And then the second student came out and she did something that looked really different and really interesting.

new and kind of weird in a sense but at the same time it had a touch of something kind of cozy that didn't look too off you know and we couldn't really put you know it was like this je ne sais quoi that was in there and then she revealed it after to the people she showed she showed them a picture because there was like all these kind of like round shapes of the room and these roman arcs and things like this and she revealed after this uh photo of the ancient roman thermal bath and

And this was the inspiration actually that she used for the design of the store. So she mixed something which was a bit wacky and weird, which kind of like if you look at what a wound curve is for creativity, it was kind of going far off of what is familiar to us. But at the same time, on this other level by...

anchoring it with something in the past that you know familiar was it yeah something familiar in an unconscious collectiveness then collective and consciousness sorry it was bringing it back into the middle to something where you know we found it quite aesthetically pleasing and this is the this was the one that you know they they went for in the end because they thought yeah that's pretty and it was connecting obviously with the history of the italian fashion brand so this is an example like

You could prompt the AI in this direction saying like, you know, give me something that links this to that, you know, or give me, you know, produce me some material that mixes, you know, Lovecraft with, I don't know, Black Mirror and written in the style of Charles Dickens or something, right? But

Here, it's still like there's a creative element that comes from the human. So I think that the tools are great in order to ping pong ideas with or it prevents you from having this writer's block where you're just facing a white page and you don't know what to do. So it can get the conversation. It can get it started, you know, especially when you're alone and you don't have anyone to brainstorm with. So Child GPT can be fun for that. So can Midjourney and these other tools. Sorry, that's obviously the ones I use the most. I keep citing them. But yeah.

I think that they still have some ways to be augmented by this technology, if you wish. Yeah. But there might be fewer later on because this is going to actually help, you know, the water is going to go down and you're going to see who's, you know, who's wearing pants and who's not, you know, and some people are going to be in trouble for sure. You know, it's funny. I can relate that to...

in the film world before we shot on film and then digital video came, DV, and a lot of the old school cinematographers were very, I guess not buying into DV because first of all, the quality difference, you're getting much shittier quality, especially when it first came. But,

But it opened up the floodgates for so many people to be able to shoot quote unquote cinematic footage, right, on DV for a fraction of the price, a fraction of the technical skill, right? And that became a big conversation. That's because whenever you have this democratization, it leads to commoditization. Yeah.

Exactly. And then what you said, I think is so on point, it kind of separates the men from the boys. Because yes, you're going to have a flood of people using whatever this technology is or whatever. And you're going to see a boatload of shitty crap. But you're also going to see this one person from Bumblefuck saying,

all of a sudden have an opportunity. He's a genius to create this amazing piece, right? So yes, you're going to separate the men from the boys. And I totally agree on that. There's another thing that I want to point out is the use of AI in its current form. So I know I've seen people, I've talked to some people that use it to directly create artwork or actual representations of their job.

Personally, I don't feel like it's there yet. I don't think it can hit that level that, at least from my perspective, writing a script or creating maybe reference images that might be okay, but in terms of script writing, no way. But what I use it for that really helps me is I make it ask me questions to answer to get to that point. So I like what you're saying. It's like you're using that as a tool to get you somewhere that

And hopefully that helps you as a creator create something that might be able to link things that you would not be able to link in that moment. And so when I was telling you that idea before we started recording, I was telling Justin that I had this idea for a concept for this series I'm making. And I was playing around with all these different ideas and it was going nowhere. And then I just prompted ChatGPT, I said,

I'm kind of going nowhere right now. Ask me 10 questions to sort of streamline my thought process to get me somewhere. And also start asking me questions of like my life. You know, what are things that I experience in life? What are my most, like the things that I'm most interested in? And as I was writing those out, I started linking them together. That's how I got the AI. That's how I got the, you know what I mean? You know what I'm saying? And yeah,

I linked it together and all of a sudden, oh, I got excited. I started writing out this small thesis of a statement for a film. That's so exciting. Yeah. So exciting. One thing that was really fascinating too before, Ash, when you were talking and I was asking a question about, we're talking about this kind of the creative industry, right? And its impact, AI, its impact on that. It's also kind of fascinating to think about

It's true. Like, even if you work in a creative field and your job is creative...

Like how much of that time are you truly being creative in your job, right? Versus how much of the time are you just kind of really just task oriented? Because there's a lot of creative jobs out there that also involve a lot of tedious, just task oriented things that aren't like really creative, quote unquote, right? So that's also really interesting to think about in terms of even if you are in a creative job,

The amount of time that you're actually truly being creative where truly an AI as of now might not be able to replace you, that portion of time might be smaller than you think about your own job. Also, to go back, AI also kind of the democratization of these tools also in a way exposes... I mean, this applies to every industry, right? I'm just picking on creatives for a second, but also exposes people...

or exposes a lot of the creative professions in terms of, oh, were you just relying on the tools or was that genius inside you? Because once it's democratized, and like you said, some kid in Idaho who doesn't have any formal training in this stuff, but now that it's so easy that he's saying access to the same tools that everyone else has,

Now his genius can be really kind of on display versus someone who might have been working in a big advertising firm or a big, you know, creative firm, something like that, where maybe they were on the same level as that person.

right and now like everyone has that opportunity so it kind of exposes like you say almost the boys from the men from the boys yeah we see this play out before i mean if if you look at like uh selling things online before if you wanted to sell something online you had to create the website you had to use you know dreamweaver flash or whatever you had to be able to know how to use these tools and then you know the guys who did it well well you know they built amazon and ebay and stuff like that today anyone can just

You don't need any knowledge. You just create a store on WeChat or whatnot, and you can just go ahead. So who becomes the best seller now with this whole WeChat store thing? So it's just a different paradigm when anyone can do it now, no coding knowledge required. And for the creatives, yeah, it's the same thing. Like anyone can, that's where the ideas are really going to come out. It's going to focus more on this. So.

So that's why I don't really do this distinction between creative jobs and non-creative jobs. Because I think every job, like you can have a – there's a plasticity in it for creativity. And, you know, you have problems in my job. I mean, if I have a problem, like, I don't know, some department, the fire department or something comes and says, oh, you know, you have to shut the company down because who knows what. And, you know, how do I deal with this problem? If I got people that come, they're not happy. How do you deal with it? They're not happy with their raise or what. How do you – what other –

strings can you play with if you can't give them money? You know, there's got to be something else. You got to start getting creative to think about this. You know, how are you going to deal with your competitors? How are you going to deal with situations as they arise? You know, this is a manager's day-to-day job. You're going to have challenges and you're going to have to be kind of creative to think about it. So as opposed to the creative job, sure, they got creative moments and everything, but I mean,

it's the same as anyone. You know what I mean? You want to know how often they're creative. You look at Donald Draper in Mad Men, you know, how often does he actually have those sparks coming up, right? It's not the whole time in every season, right? I mean... Versus how often is he just drinking and hitting on chicks? Yeah. Do you ever think about...

Just kind of pivoting for a little bit, because I know we're really focusing on the present right now. But let's go to that next step that I mentioned earlier, which is a little bit more in the future now. The fun stuff. Yeah. And now it becomes a little bit more opinions, and we're just shooting the shit, right? Just having some fun with this a little bit. A little speculation here. So, I mean, let's call it the post-labor economy, right? Where...

You know, the emergence of AGI and automation displaces the majority of the workforce. We're in that reality. So what do you think that means? Have you thought about it? Like, what do you think that means for society? And what are some of the big changes that we would probably have to face?

because of this? Do you ever think about that kind of stuff? - Yeah, I don't spend too much time on that because like you said, it's so crazy that it's kind of hard to really think about anything. And so it's not, you gotta choose your battles, right? So I could always just throw out some thoughts about that. But I mean, again, if you have this, suppose you have this working in the US or something, how does that erode the US's competitiveness in the world? If other places people are working and in the US you're not working. Suppose you have this everywhere in the world, okay.

Is there really going to be enough money created by this to support everyone or is it only going to support people in Western countries? I mean, there's this whole – there's some dynamics that are not really taken into account when they do this. But let's just say for a minute that we forget about this and we try and focus. Okay, if we don't need to work anymore, what will people do?

It's an interesting question because, you know, you always think like, okay, work is not just there for getting money. It's also to keep you busy, to get your neurons running and all that, even though for some people it's- It's also the identity. It's for the identity. Right. Today, if you ask, what do you do? You know, and I hate having to answer with a job title, but that's what people do these days. So what's going to happen in a world where you no longer answer with a job title? What could it be?

it could be something creative if you're you have that kind of penchant you know like oh well i i paint and i do you know whatever i like to do and there are so many things that i would like to do but you always think of the things that you would love to do because you don't have the time to do it but then when you suddenly do have a lot of time do you actually do those things you know your your kind of morale kind of goes down when you have nothing you know and you don't have this status thing and everything so maybe we need a complete reset on where the status comes from and it can be from something else from like

You know, if I do paint oil painting or something, but I post about it and I'm like in this, there's these competitions and everything for who does the best one. And if I win like the sixth prize or something, then that's something that I can be proud about, you know, but you need something to have the status come up. And so there could be things like that. I'm sure there's still going to be work necessary in research. So if we could direct more people going towards research, potentially.

towards R and D and, you know, developing new stuff, then we can become a more advanced society. And there's really, there's, there's a long ways to go there. I mean, you know, you could have like the, you know, when you have like the Dyson sphere and things like this, I mean, it's kind of science fiction ideas. Like, you know, why, why don't we go towards that direction, you know, to become later, you know, to colonize, uh, uh,

the solar system and beyond, you know, there's so many things that are imaginable, you know, so many problems that have yet to be dealt with in physics and, and quantum physics. And, uh, I mean, in quantum mechanics at the very small level or in, or in the larger levels, you know, so there's like just so many things that are, that could be done. And it's, it's a pity that we can't focus on those problems because we're too busy, like, you know, producing food and, and, you know, making toys and making, you know, things that, you know, like,

like that we have to spend our time on because there's no machines doing this for us. So there's like so many things that you could think about that we could be able to do, but for sure it needs to be organized because or else we're just going towards straight chaos because people are going to be like, okay, there's nothing to do. What, you know, what next? So there, there was this funny story actually by, uh, Lee Kai-Fu with, uh, what's it? Choo Choo Fan or something. The, they did like this, uh,

half science fiction, half, you know, kind of analysis thing about the future. I think it's called AI 2042 or 2046 or something. And there was one of the stories where this is exactly what happened. There was no longer a need for work. So the government introduced universal basic income. And what happened after a few months or years was it was total chaos with rights and everything because people were bored

shitless you know they had nothing to do so what they eventually did what they eventually did they eventually reintroduced work where people were actually working they were doing this in vr so they would put a helmet on and they would be working on this like construction site or something to build something in some far-flung country and so they everyone had a job to do using the helmets and everything like to do some you know job that was necessary in some other place and what people found out actually some people found out was that actually

there was no work going on anywhere. They were just doing this in VR. To keep them busy. To keep them busy. But everyone thought it was real. And there was like this whole like stick and carrot kind of thing to help them, you know, to see like who's performing the best and everything. So it's just to keep them busy, but also like keep their status and keep them proud about doing something, you know? Kind of like the Matrix. Yeah, I was exactly thinking because...

So, okay, if everybody was out without a job, and we just already established that a lot of times our career or occupation or job is our identity to many people, right?

Now, if you lose that, then I started thinking it's almost like coinciding with the advent of virtual reality. I mean, also augmented reality to a certain extent, but extended reality. And it's almost like that social currency becomes metaphysical, right? So whatever happens in that virtual world, right?

If you're building construction in Sudan or wherever, or you are a warrior on top of a mountain like a massively multiplayer or online role-playing game, and your statistics as this brave warrior becomes your identity. Because you're not working, but you still need to have some sort of social currency in your tribe and beyond. Right.

So what is that currency then? If it's not, I'm not a filmmaker, but you know what? I'm a level 60 warrior. Exactly. And that is me. But it could be related to passion. So if your passion is fishing or whatever, then it's about the biggest fish you got, even if it's in VR. Yeah, even if it's VR. Well, it's all psychological, right? Because like what you're saying, and I've been down that rabbit hole of video games too, where you identify so much with your character or your profile in this game that

And you are like, like just like truly like proud of that person, right? Like when you achieve something or you have a high ranking, like you, it affects you just like it would in the real world, quote unquote. So, so it's totally psychological. Yeah. So like that, that's,

But don't you feel like it's funny? Like it's, it's both paths are kind of growing, but they're both expanding and growing and advancing at the same, like parallel. Well, it's a possibility that the metaverse becomes so enmeshed with our reality that it's just, the line becomes blurred, you know, because, so it's not like, you know, now I know how much time I spend on the phone per day or something, but later you won't know because you just have the helmet on, you turn it on or not.

And yeah, it could be like, so it's no longer like, it's the same, the line between a video game, the, you know, the classical thinking video game is for kids. And then you have work where this line is going to be blurred too. And it's going to be like, okay, what you call video game, no longer called like this anymore because work has become, you know,

a game also and game has become a work or something, you know, it's going to be a completely meshed reality at that point, right? Like, how do you even like, where is there a line between the realities anymore in that phase? Well, because if it gets to the point where most of the workforce is replaced by automation and AI or robotics, the, even from a corporate level, I mean, if most of the society, the population is, is,

busy in their virtual world, it's, I mean, no skin off their game because if they're very focused on whatever they're doing, like, it's probably going to make only a few huge companies, you know, in the world or something like that. But I mean, it's possible that we have like different ways of getting, so you could have like a basic, you know, universal income or something. And then on top of that, you get,

points or income based on different things that you do either because you're very good at this shooter game or because you're very good at fishing because but different things also because you do gym you know you do sport you run you you keep physical activity based on your physical activity you will get a salary also because that means you're less costly to society later on in life so

There's a lot of different elements that could be taken in account. And also what you do when you post something, how many influencers do you have and everything? There's a digital currency there to have based on if you're going to post something about perfumes or something, maybe you're not going to get any money off that. But if you post something on dogs and cat food or something, maybe you will because you have a lot of followers who also have dogs and everything and you're like a big –

on dogs or something like this so based on what you are and this is something that could be backed by blockchain so this is something that there's been studies that have been done and they say oh based on with this you know if you got money based on your facebook post or something would be just small fractions of a penny so it makes nothing but that's because we're looking at the current situation but when you got the metaverse and every single movement you do you know every breath you take every move you fake is going to be like recorded and seen and and it can be like you know

measured and tracked, then you were at a whole different game. You could throw a monetary value to every single move you make. Based on who looks and who's interested in you. And the whole system would be super optimized to marketing. Like you wouldn't like, like just tracking like who the people are watching if there happened to be dog owners or pet owners. Like it would be, everything would be so super optimized. Yeah. Because I feel like, so one thing was that identity. When I asked the original question about this post-labor economy, um,

I mean, one was the identity, right? But second was, that was on my mind is the, what is currency? What is going to be money, you know, cash value in the future in this situation? Because it could change, right? So right now everyone says that data is the new gold, right? Data is the new gold. It's the new black oil or whatever. And

If that's the case, then, you know, we all generate data and our data has different values based on how many friends we got, how many, you know, followers we got or whatever you want to call them. So based on what data you generate, you should get money. You know, you should be the one getting this. Why is it going to these like Facebook or whatever? That's like total crime there. That's like a big problem that should be solved at some point. And I think it will be solved eventually because you're going to have privacy rights. So it's like, oh, they're not allowed to use your data, including your shadow data, which you're going to, you know, use...

be emitting tons of once you're in the metaverse but you can give it to them if you know in exchange of a monetary compensation so there's going to be this deal that's going to happen where okay you they can't use your data unless you agree to it in exchange for compensation and what is what is going to determine this transaction cost it's going to be based on an algorithm which tracks you know your value and your value is going to be different again whether you're using you know uh

showing off perfume or what, based on, you know, who your followers are. So if you're walking out and this can be an O2O thing too, you know, if you're walking out on the street and based on how many people see you wearing those super cool Nike shoes, uh,

And then they look into their own thing and want to say, okay, you know, I'm going to store that in my own thing and in my own virtual wardrobe. And maybe one day I'll actually want to buy it or license it for myself, you know, whatever the payment will be back then. Then you could get a small part of that income because you're the one who branded this out to them. You know, you're the one who was like showcasing it. And that's just an example, but it could be a lot of stuff, you know, about your achievements, about whatever you do, you know. But it kind of almost sounds like a pyramid scheme too. Yeah.

Right? Like you show, then they show, then like all the money, like everyone gets commissioned off of all the- Yeah, but you do this kind of seamlessly because it'll be so small a part of income that, you know, it's like really builds up based on a lot of stuff. So some people, but I'm just saying like right now, it's just not fair because you have like a handful of KOLs who are getting all the money and the tech companies that are getting all the money and everyone else, you're just getting free likes and stuff on the internet. You know what's funny? It's almost, so I recently got a NIO.

And once you get into their ecosystem... The car, you mean? The car, yeah. Once you get into their ecosystem... So on their app, first of all, they have a store. So you can buy a lot of products that are NEO products, even food, actually. And it has a cash value and it has NEO points next to it, which is the value of 10% of the dollar. Now...

Basically, you can accumulate points by checking in. You can also accumulate points by sharing on social media, by going to certain events and then sharing a photo from the event. And there's different values to those points. And a lot of people do it because they can exchange that. Redeem it for something. Redeem it for actual products. And because there's a cash value to those points, the point actually has value. Yeah.

And as a digital currency, pretty much, right? Now, using that as, you know, let's multiply that to this new future where every little thing you're doing, and it's not just one brand, it's everything you do in life is monetized, right?

and that money is almost like the US dollar, which is universal, that could be used to buy many different things. I like that concept. I don't like it in terms of I think that should come to life, but I like it because it makes sense. And I think that it is a possibility. I don't like it in terms of the fact that it means that you have to share in order to make a living. But I mean, again, it's one way to go. There could be other things too. If you win like...

like tournaments or something like, you know, for, for painting or for driving a racing car for, for whatever, you know, whatever the passion is, but you can focus more on passions, you know, instead of, instead of on work. So everyone has passions, right? I mean, things that they'd like to do and,

It could be something more related to this, you know, whatever the people like, you know, there's always going to be like aficionados for a certain thing, you know, and with the internet, it can be like the most quirky thing, but you're still going to find people that have common, you know, like-minded people. And you can gather with those people, even if you got distance and everything with VR, it's going to be more immersive. So there's a lot of things that can happen. Then these people can decide, okay, we're going to start, you know, putting money into this or something. And, you know, whoever wins this thing, then they get the money or something. You know, it's like, there's always things that can happen within communities. Yeah.

Do you think more people should be worried?

Or having this type of conversation. About AI and jobs? Yeah, just future. Well, he wrote a book on it, so I would think you would want more people. Well, why I'm asking is that I feel like most people around me aren't, they don't really think about it. I think in China, there's quite a conversation about this. In the past year, I've seen, you know, I mean, I published in March, and ever since I started, you know, doing like some conferences and stuff. And at the beginning, you know, I usually ask, okay, who's worried about their job or what? And you'd have...

There's more and more hands that rise up each time now. And I'm talking not just like the accounts payable person. I'm talking like consultants at McKinsey and stuff like this. They're also worried because now the people, they could just query ChatGP to get their whole strategy

And I've heard people in big companies telling me, you know, so the public companies where there's information online and when they query chat GPT on, you know, what should our strategy be for next year or something, they say, you know, it comes up with pretty much 80% right. You know, like we take some of the stuff in there, we copy paste some of the snippets for our, you know, or board of directors or whatever, when you do our master plan for the next couple of years, you know, so. Yeah.

It's not, you know. Especially with GPTs now. I mean, what we can see, what GPTs can do, not chat GPT, but GPT, right? Yeah, yeah. Especially if you formally train it properly. I mean, that's what I did. I trained the honest drink GPT, trained it with some of our basically transcripts from our shows. So what's the difference between a GPT and a chat GPT?

Do you want to take it? The GPT is more, it's the technology in itself that's under there. The chat GPT is just what the open AI came up with. Oh, that's like their brand of, okay. It's like their product. But the GPT basically, it's like you give it a lot of the big data sets and then it's got, it's the large language model thing that it learns from and everything and it produces something based on this. Okay. So it's all the same thing except chat GPT is just open AI's.

branded product. And GPT, it's basically a dumbed down version. You don't have to be a coder to be able to train a GPT. And also, just to clarify, I guess you guys were using this lingo before and I think I know, but so AGI is, what is that again? Human level intelligence. So that's human level intelligence. So that's different than super intelligence.

That goes beyond. ASI is something like in the future, hypothesized. ASI is intelligence which is superior to ours. Superior. So it can go from AGI to ASI in the blink of an eye. We don't know where the front is. Yeah, we don't know. Because once AGI is established, then... Why does it stop there? Yeah, we don't know where the event horizon is. Well, that's what... I mean, a lot of experts have talked about the problem that a lot of us as human beings, we have an issue with...

with being able to visualize or even comprehend the technological advancement scale, right? Like we look at it in terms of time and... The exponential rate. Yes, sorry, it's the exponential rate. But we look at it in terms of like the way we view time, but in actuality, like the 1x, the 10x, the 100x, et cetera, the way it multiplies that speed, it's so...

that we can't really compute it. We can't conceive it. You know? And so it doesn't make sense to us. Mathematically, it's like the Big Bang. It's like an explosion. Like there was nothing and then there's everything. Yeah, but it's factual in the grand scheme of things in terms of translated towards time. It makes sense. But for us, it's like, no, it doesn't make sense because we don't fathom that 10x, 100x. What does that mean? And that's why there's, when you see the technology expanding at a rapid clip, the companies are not really aware

you know, taking up the full, uh, this at full, the full measure of this and not, not really like, uh, harnessing it at the best that they can. So there's a gap between what the technology enables us to do and what governments are doing and companies are doing. Cause they're a bit slower. You know, first you have the, the really like those that are at the Vanguard who are going to be do it, then you, the companies will follow. And then the governments are going to be last, you know, with legislation. I mean, they're the slowest. So, so,

I see this for the employees, again, getting back to the topic. I see this as an opportunity for them because...

the company like there's all these new cool tools that are out and the company hasn't used them efficiently 100% yet within the company or else you know there's probably like 30% of the guys who would be gone already so this is the moment for the employees to shine so if you're there in your office cubicle and you got this technology available you should use it right away to see how it can make you a better worker before your company snoops in and looks at what you're doing and then says you know and then you can be the one who spearheads the change and

you know, faster than the guys and the other cubicles beside you. And then you become like the, uh, the herald for change within the company. And you can show them like, yo, look at what we can do with GPT. You know, we can improve our, you know, the operations at our front office. We don't need to be such, you know, to have these people that have, you know, a six years experience or what to be able to respond to a customer request. We can just have this, you know, and, uh, or we can do, you know, whatever kind of changes to get better customer data too. Cause AI does more than just,

automating stuff. I could also help you in different ways in the business. It can help you with, uh,

internal controls. It can help you on a lot of different aspects. But if you show this and you show this to your company that you're the guy out there who knows your business, whether if you're in marketing, for instance, you know how marketing works, but you also know how the tech works and you're using it, then they might put you in touch with tech people in the company if they have them. And if they don't, they'll find maybe some people from the outside or what, like consultants or something, but you'll be the ones working with them. And you can kind of like

steer the game on your own terms and just make sure you have a job at the end of it, that you're still valuable for the company. Well, you increase your value a lot. You increase your value, yeah. You got to stay up to date. And you buffer yourself, right? It's like that protection you're talking about. But don't you feel like... So this is a thought that I have in my head because I personally try to keep up to date with what's going on. But at the same time, I'm not a programmer. I'm not that deep. I just like to know what's going on and play with some of the tools so I know how to use it if I need it.

The only thing that I feel like it could feel a little bit overwhelming is the rapid change that keeps happening. So how, like,

How deep can you go? The only reason why I feel like I can go deep is because I'm not as busy as I used to be. But if I was as busy as I was before, I would not be able to keep up to date. I'm totally overwhelmed. It's not possible to keep up to date. It's just impossible. There's just so much stuff all every day. Like I'm in these group chats and stuff and I just see this stuff like coming out all the time on LinkedIn and everything. And, you know, because obviously my post is a bit like tweaked towards this kind of

news and everything. There's just these plugins, these new things, there's new spaces and everything. It's just like, it's just impossible to keep up to date with everything that's going on and to keep on your day job, like you say and everything. But I mean,

I feel so overwhelmed. It's going very fast. There's been a crazy acceleration this year. So yeah, it's really hard to make sense out of the noise. Just this past month has been ridiculous. Once we, right after recording this podcast, where it's going to be irrelevant, this whole conversation. Once we leave the studio, it's going to be like, oh, it's all irrelevant now. So last week, Justin and I were recording, and that was when the whole open AI fiasco was happening.

And I was following it real closely and I was like, I don't want to talk about it because it's going to be so out of date. And news like this kind of stuff is going to be old news real quick. From a personal level, Ash, writing a book called AI Battle Royale, what's your personal level of concern in the short term?

From myself and my job or? Just you. Yeah, just your general, like your personal outlook. For people, you mean? Yeah, just for people. I think it's quite bleak. Yeah. It's quite bleak. And again, I'm not the doomsayer saying that, you know, we're all going to lose our jobs and it's going to be massive unemployment. I don't really believe at that at the short term, maybe at a very long term, but I don't think that that's going to happen, you know, right away. Yeah.

But yeah, I think that there's going to be, it's going to be a lot of disruption happening and a lot of people that they might still have a job, but it might not pay as well as the job that they had before, you know, and they might need to get a second job and a third job, you know, and work with like three part-time jobs or something. So there's a lot of different ways that people are going to be disrupted. And I mentioned some of them. So I mentioned the case of, you know, democratization, augmentation and, you know, replacement and everything at the very long term in the second phase. Yeah. When the technology, as you said, it keeps on improving and everything, then you get to a second phase where it's no longer, uh,

complementing labor, it's substituting for human labor. That's the later stage and this has happened for some jobs already. If you look at the tollway cashier or something or a parking cashier, these are monotask jobs which are quite easy to automate. Certain cashiers in grocery stores now are being automated. Again, not all of them. Factory workers. Factory workers are being automated obviously but I don't like focusing on factory workers because people always focus on them and that's never been more than like 30% of the workforce at most.

And I'm more concerned with office jobs because these are the ones – well, these are the – with an algorithm, it's easier to, you know, scale up than with robots and for, you know, cheaper cost. So, yeah, my outlook is not really that great on the market. But, again, it really depends where you're at. You know, if you're 50 years old, if you're already executive level or if you're, you know, just a fresh graduate, it's a very different story. Well, talking about age in terms of – can you put –

just for my own clarity, just a general timeline. So you kind of mentioned first stage, second stage, right? First stage is kind of more the disruption of labor and jobs. Second stage is when it actually fully starts replacing jobs altogether. First stage, second stage, in terms of years, what are we looking at? What does that look like? Depends on the jobs.

Okay. It depends on the jobs. And even when I talk about full replacement, it's not necessarily the AI fully replacing. There could still be a part of labor, but it could go to someone else. It could be outsourced to someone or to someone, an intern that has, or a gig or to the customer. Like we said at the cashier, now it's the customer who has to scan this stuff themselves, you know? But like ballpark, I know it depends on a specific job, but-

I would think the difference would be maybe a matter of a few years between jobs or whatever. Like ballpark figure, are we talking about decades from now? Are we talking about just a few years from now? Are we talking within our lifetime, after our lifetime? What's the scale here? There's different possibilities. So at the beginning of the book, I actually did a chart where you see the historical unemployment in the US.

and you see, okay, what would it be like to reach what you said, like the tipping point scenario, what I call it, like when we reach something like 25 or 30% unemployment based on an increase average per year of 1%, 2% or 0.5%. And it gives you two timelines, which are like around 20, something like it was either 40 years, 30 years, or I think like 10 or 15 years or something. So it gives you like different timelines. And this is like your assumption that you can go with

And then knowing that obviously it's not going to be linear, you know, it could just be like very stable for a certain amount of years and then suddenly it's going to shoot up or something, you know? So like it did during COVID. And again, there's the technology doing this, but there's other factors too. You know, you have the financial crisis or COVID, this got a lot of people fired so that you would say like, yeah, it's because of this. But actually at the same time, a lot of the people didn't come back later. That's also because of technology, you know, like we had the example with the bankers. So

Technology can be hiding under something else, like a macroeconomic sudden factor that happens, like a war or something. But a lot of the people don't come back. It could be due to technology. So when you have this kind of framework of, okay, how long is it going to take? And then you see, okay, so this is how long you have to keep your head out of the water. Because by the time you reach 25% unemployment or something, you could expect maybe the government will come up.

something to avoid total chaos. Kind of have to. They kind of have to. So you kind of have to go with that assumption. So then the question becomes, how do you keep your head out of the water for that long? How do you survive for the next 20 years, the next 10 years or what? And so you have this

And then whenever you see a new technology come out, like a generative AI or whatever, this is, you don't have to panic or anything all of a sudden, like they do in the news. You just have to like integrate this new data into your hypothesis and see how that changes the curve line and how that changes your assumption. And then it changes your battle plan. Okay. Now I have to, you know, spend, you know, I have to be able to survive, like taking this in account for the next number of years. So that's kind of like how you, how you play the game. Yeah.

It's for everyone to make up what they are because it really it's depending about the job, you know, and sometimes you're going to be like, okay, this job is really not working, you know, for me. So maybe a monotask job in particular is very risky because there if it becomes automated, you're left with nothing to do. And then you have to see, okay, it's better that some cases you want to abandon ship. And some people have told me actually, the title of the book isn't that great, because it's

how to protect your job, but sometimes to protect yourself, you have to switch jobs. Sometimes you have to be really clear about that. Certain jobs, you can get promoted and you can climb the ladder. Certain jobs, you can't really. If you're a nurse or something, and I'm not saying a nurse is a job. I think a nurse is a pretty long-term stable job, but if you're a nurse, you can't just be promoted to doctor all of a sudden like that. It just doesn't happen. There's different qualifications involved. Yeah, so sometimes depending on the job and situation,

you might have to jump ship entirely right you can yeah you're gonna have to rebrand yourself and find something else to do that yeah okay well even just think about uh in 2000 when was it when uh andrew yang was running was that 2000 16 or something was it 16 was it was it 16 i i'm bad with yeah so and his whole thing was ubi remember yeah and and talking about uh

in fear of the... Job displacement. Yeah, job displacement for truck drivers, right, with robotic, not robotic, but automated self-driving cars. And now we're, what, seven years later, we're still not there yet. But...

It's getting close, right? And the Tesla truck has been- It seems it's inevitable at this point. Well, yeah, but automated driving is getting there. Well, just the entire logistics industry. It's getting there, right? And I mean, even me, when I'm driving my car and I put it on the autopilot, it's like, oh, it's pretty interesting. But anyway, the point is it's getting there because once it gets there, what is there? When it becomes safe enough that government approval has said, okay, yes, it's allowed on the streets, right? Yeah.

Once that hits... No more job. It's gone. So it's literally like... It's that exponential curve, right? So the whole time is kind of hovering down here. You're like, yeah, it's not really... Nothing's really happening. But once that technology hits... Skyrocket. That's just one job. Yeah, exactly. And it's a job that I really don't like that people are always taking it as an example because it's really...

I don't want to say it's irrelevant, but it's a very special kind of job, which is different from all other, most other jobs. Why? Because there's only one person in that truck. Yeah. So it's either there's a worker or there's no worker, but that's just specific to the truck driver. So you have to automate it a hundred percent. Yeah. It can't, there's no middle ground, but for other kinds of jobs. And again, what I said is not true. And I'll give you an example in a minute, but for the majority of other jobs, if you're working in an office, if you're working in a factory, if you're working at a restaurant, if you're working at a,

hair salon or whatever there you're not the only one there so it's like okay maybe you know where we have five stuff today maybe tomorrow we can only do with two or one stuff you know so that's that's

That's it's very different from the truck driver where there's all this middle ground. And for the case of the truck driver, we can see this already because you don't it's not allowed to have like the autonomous truck, but you can't have a truck which is remotely controlled. And we have this I don't have the name of the company now, but there's a Swedish company who arrived in the US and they took one truck driver and they put her in the office at the headquarters. And now she's monitoring 10 different screens, 10 different trucks.

that have no driver. She's driving them remotely. They're all on auto mode and sometimes she'll take over if ever there's an obstacle or if ever you have to do a specific action. But basically, you have one person now where there were two truck drivers before. So this, again, is the case. It's kind of like what I was talking about, assisted reality, where we were talking about before. But in this case, it's just someone remotely controlling trucks. And they can instantly shift people because it's 24 hours. Well, it's also the complexity of the job, right? So even like take...

Well, I don't know. Let's say like the hairstylist like you brought up, right? Like their job might not only be to cut hair, but they might have to look after the store. They might have to do a lot of maintenance things around the store, clean up and do some sales or like do some PR or whatever it is that a hair salon requires, right?

Whereas a truck driver in that example really only has one task, get from point A to point B. There is no other task there, right? It's not complex. I mean, I'm not a truck driver. I wouldn't know, but it seems like it's pretty direct. Just point A to point B, that's all you have to do. Whereas many other jobs have all these other tasks that are built into the main mission as well. Correct. Yeah.

Oh, man. You're right. There's so much to think about. Yeah. We can literally talk about this. We can talk for a lot about that. I mean, some of the safe jobs, obviously, like a haircutter is a kind of safer job, a gardener, because some of these jobs are quite cheap too, so it doesn't make sense to use a robot. Jobs where safety is involved. It'd be more expensive to use a robot in these jobs. If you use the air hostess job, or is it more correct to say air host? Anyways, the job on the airplane, there you're like...

You got life and death scenarios. You know, you got people that you need to keep comforted and everything. Small cramped space, dexterity is important and everything. This will never be automated. That's definitely farther away. That's farther away. You can never automate this. Because that has to do with robotics. You can automate small parts of this and they do already. Like some other tasks have been automated.

The task of showing them like, you know, before you would have the air hostess in the middle of the aisle showing you what to do, you know, how to put the mask and everything. Now they use a video to do this, right? So that's been automated. Now, if you need something, maybe some of the parts will be automated too, but some of the things you'll still need to have a few air hostesses, maybe less than before. They probably reduce the number of stuff on there. The pilot himself, right now, I think their law is like, you have to have three pilots on the plane or something. Maybe it varies per country, but I heard about one pilot and two co-pilots.

maybe you could like reduce that a bit. You know, I mean, the autopilot has been there for a long time, right? But you're always going to have to keep at least one on the plane because the fear factor, people are not going to want to go on the plane. But this is just, again, it's playing with people's psychology and this can change very fast. You know, you think people, you think like, okay, should we not use a robot police force and have, you know, get rid of policemen and people will be like, oh no, that's scary because you think about all these like,

terminator movies and everything but then when you see like what the cops are doing when they're shooting people and everything without you know because they're afraid for their life or something so they just shoot and ask questions after well then you think okay well at least a robot wouldn't fear for its life it's going to be you know think twice before it wouldn't like be rash and make an emotional decision out of fear right so i heard that san francisco now is experimenting and that they start having like this sort of like drone or robot police force or something in san francisco oh shit

I don't think American people will ever put up with that, though. They'll get so much pushback there. Precisely because of what you're saying. It's that image of this...

this like group of terminators. So you got that on one side. Robots guns. Hell no. Yeah. But then you got George Floyd on the other side. So you got one image fighting against the other. And at one point they might, they might just change, you know? So I take the example of the elevators before you always had a guy in the elevator back in the days. So they invented automated elevators back in the 1880s. And,

then you didn't have to have a guy in the elevator to, you know, the elevator boy. But the problem is people were afraid to take elevators. So they wanted to have an elevator boy in there for their safety. And then the elevator boys, when they were pissed, sometimes with their pay or what, they would go on strike. And then, you know, you'd have to take the stairs. And then what happened after they, you know, they had the skyscraper revolution. And then when they go on strike and you have to go up 30, 40 floors, that's no longer an option. So people really got pissed with the elevator boys. They started accepting

elevators without the boys and that job just became disappeared it vanished after that so this is the kind of example you know like so you see like you talk about the trucks for instance when in France it's a classic when the guys are pissed the truck drivers they block the major roads in France and everything and every it pisses off everybody same when there's a strike in the subway people are really pissed there's

You can't take the subway anymore. Now there's like one or two lines in Paris that are automated. And whenever there's a strike, those are the two only lines that are running. What do you think that's imprinting in people's minds? They're thinking like, well, why don't we automate the rest of them? And so these people that are going on strike, they're really not doing themselves a favor by doing that because people are seeing like there's an option now. There's an alternative where you can go just for a fully automated solution and get rid of these disgruntled workers. It's not if, it's just when. It's just when.

That's all it comes down to. Oh, man. There's a lot. I feel like there's a lot that we can talk about. And I feel like we're just scraping the surface here. Yeah, I used to always give Howie so much shit for coming in all doom and gloom about AI. I'd be like, what are you going down those rabbit holes for? And now I totally get it. I get it. After having you on today, Ash, I have a new...

level of appreciation, I think, for the situation that we're all in collectively. And again, we're just talking about work here. We didn't even get into the other stuff. We're just getting one little spoke of the entire wheel, right? You're exactly right. And I just want to reiterate, I think I said this before, but I just want to reiterate that

I was doom and gloom. And because I went down that path and this is when chat GPT 3.5 first started coming out. And, and before four, right around when four was about to come out, that's when I was my apex of doom and gloom. When Gregory Hinton left Google and you had, um, um, what's that guy named? Um, Ebenezer guy, Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Ebenezer screws. Sorry, Jeffrey. Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh,

Basically, you had a lot of these people coming out and basically spitting that doom and gloom story. And I was buying it. But now, after really listening and thinking and living it, I'm also feeling a little bit bleak about the future. But I also realized that I can't just sit back and be like...

doom and gloom, that's it. I have to do something about it. And knowing that in the near future, I am still in control of my fate. I'm still in control of my path until that long future. And I don't know about long, but that second phase comes until that comes,

I got to do something about now. Right. And what does that mean? It means being flexible. It means understanding my current situation. It means being up to date with technology. It means speaking to other people that are also following this. You know, I feel like that is the right way to think. Yeah. Like, well, I think like to Ash's book, it's also like, let's take accountability for ourselves where we can. Things are happening. Okay. This is, you cannot deny that and you cannot stop it.

So what are you going to do about it? You're not just in the Tang Ping, you know, in the Chinese way. You are responsible for your own education. Yeah, exactly. No one else. I agree. That's a perfect way to leave it right there. Ashman.

Thank you. Guys, this is a lot more fun doing it in physical as opposed to like on a team's screen or something. Oh, totally. This is why I refuse to do any remote podcasts anymore. I need to get them in. They need to be in Shanghai. They need to be in our studio. Honestly, this is the only way I feel to have a conversation that was face-to-face. 100%. Nice. Preferably with a drink. Cheers, man. Cheers. Cheers. All right. That was Ash. I'm Justin. I'm Howie. Be good. Be well. Peace. Peace.

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