Alysia Silberg - How To Find Success While Being "Unemployable"

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:33Welcome back. Today's guest is not the person that you meet every day. She started her first business when she was 11, an import-export business at 11, and then she went to Harvard, Stanford, and Cambridge. She's now a very, very renowned venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. She's the CEO and the global partner of Street Global. She hosts a radio show that is called the Global Fireside Chat, which simply brings industry titans from all over the world and reaches a million people. She is a United Nations Women Empower Women champion, and she recently wrote a book. So we have a ton to talk about.

1:22Her book is called Unemployable. I think she's very employable if you ask me, but the book is called Unemployable, How I Hired Myself. And I felt that this was a topic that is actually very, very timely for our world today with all of the changes that are happening around AI, the economic challenges that we face and so on. But most importantly, I have to say when we got in touch the first time Alicia Silberg and myself, I did what I normally do and stalked her. I looked at her work, I looked at her background and experience, and I found in her an amazing mix of someone who's driven to succeed, but also is looking at life to reflect and see what impact she can leave behind.

2:09So I think we're gonna be having a wonderful conversation today, Alicia Silberg. Alicia thank you so much for joining me you're in LA now right that's right and thank you for hosting me I'm incredibly excited to be joining you from the moment we started engaging I was like this is my person I want to have an amazing conversation I want to learn and I've just been really excited so thank you yeah I felt the same I have to admit there are those barriers that you get in social media when you're texting someone on LinkedIn or Instagram and so on. But you had that very, very lively energy to you in text format.

2:51I mean, today is the first time we meet. And now I understand it's like, you know, it's like flooding out of you in a way that it has to sort of stay in the text a little bit, which I find quite interesting because you seem to be the typical diehard push push push push hard-working math kind of person who's running a very tough business how is that possible how do you mix the two it's been an interesting journey and I think if you ask why I why I called the book unemployable it comes down to the fact that I had imposter syndrome and I think that plagued me my entire life and so that imposter syndrome manifested itself in very unusual ways let's take for example um the joy i get out of texting with someone like you and that energy which is real like when i when i connect with someone who's just like me i let down my god and i want to engage because you you are the same way as me and for a long time i got a lot of negative feedback around that i was told um you can't be that way you can't use exclamation marks you can't be warm you can't be bubbly you can't you You can't be all these things.

4:04And inside of me, that's who I was. Like I have a joy for life, a gratitude for life. We only live once. We only have a certain amount of time. We should enjoy it. And at the same time, my life's work, the greatest thing I love doing is building companies. So while my first official building business was at 11 years old, building the import export business with my brother, my first small business was at five years old. and that was to get a set of pink roller skates. I wanted pink roller skates and I couldn't afford them and I had to find a way to get them. And so I sold my dad's old Hollywood suits on the side of the road.

4:44And there's a whole story in the book about it. But for me, I've always been like these two parts of the same person. And the idea that I could be that person was that journey that I went on and being proud of that person and not being ashamed of all these different elements of myself. and that's a large part of why I wrote the book which was saying as you said so well we're going through very strange times difficult economic times on the one hand we're living in the most exciting time in history on the other hand we've seen a lot of things that for many many people are very scary and the idea that I shared my story when I've been through so many difficult times to say to other people out there if I can do it and I've been shot I've been through all these things.

5:29You know, I've had these things happen to me. If I can do it, so can you. And I want you on that journey with me. So let's go for it. Oh, that's amazing. I mean, interestingly, Alicia, I think what I feared, so I'm very, very protective of slow-mo. I mean, most of my listeners will know that because I'm not looking for celebrities or big names or big images. Of course, I get quite a few of them, but I'm looking for a human with a heart. And if you don't mind me saying, that has changed. But the first time I read about you to start a business at 11, I was like, shouldn't a kid at 11 be playing?

6:07I mean, this woman might be a little too serious for me, right? And obviously, no, I mean, you're not too serious for you are very serious, but you're not too serious for me. You're very serious with a passion for making a change. And you're wonderful as a human being at the same time so that's a very interesting mix but how does a childhood that starts so focused on business how is that a childhood at all thank you for saying that it means a great deal and i appreciate how much thought you gave to my life like you really are a very deep person you know i come from pretoria south africa and i was thinking that accent is uh yeah it's not american so yeah it's not american and there's someone everyone knows who comes from pretoria and i think it's a very good analogy to answer your question elon elon musk comes from pretoria he grew up a few like a few streets away from my fam where my family had our shop and my family lived from what i can tell it all comes naturally to elon it just like flows out of them building companies for me it wasn't like that for me it was survival so i grew very poor and you touched on something very deep because i had a lot of personal work to do like where you're asking about this combination of energy and drive in your earlier question and it wasn't a real childhood there was survival and i think that was why it was so important to for me to write the book because there's so many people especially like in the emerging markets but And I'm seeing a lot of that now in the US, which, you know, as I speak with like Gen Z in the US, a lot of what we've experienced growing up in the emerging markets, Gen Z is now experiencing, which is a very unusual set of circumstances to be experiencing as somebody that grew up in Africa to see a lot of the same economic challenges and structural challenges taking place.

8:03But you're 100 % right. It was like I almost became like a machine. and so i was always like people say oh elisa you're very opportunistic you're always spotting opportunities you know like you it's just the way you're always like oh wow there's an opportunity there that my investors love that about me where it's always like wow like you're always like thinking your brain never switches off but that came from a lifetime of survival like when my dad died so we started that business at when i was 11 my brother was 17 and we were going to land on the street we inherited a family business that was basically bankrupt sounded great to inherit it you know like we've both been in the business our entire lives but the business was bankrupt and we people said to me what did you know um yeah there were elements of knowing like i'd grown up in the business i'd learned to use you know do the tax i'd learned to do all that stuff i'd grown up at the same time i think there was this element of like looking back reflecting what could have been done differently i don't know like i have friends who grew up in that environment whose families took charity you know that i grew up in a community where charity was available and my mom had this idea that she said she was very tough on me especially and she was like you can't we don't take charity people will never look at you the same way again like you hold your head up high you fight and i learned to become a very good founder but at the same time i don't know if i could put a kid through that asking your question like even now like i on a sunday you know my day off i work it's all like it's very very tough i've had to really learn to meditate and really learn to to to take it easy i think it's very rare when investors are turning around to someone and saying like please like look after your help you really need to take it easy and that's a conscious practice because of that kind of childhood.

9:57So you're 100 % correct. It was pretty strange looking back. Yeah, I mean, it is, but it's also, I have to say a beautiful story. It's, you know, in a very interesting way, most people when they look at a successful, you know, venture capitalist or person in the finance industry or, you know, a CEO of any company whatsoever, they take that snapshot of their life and they say, look at that, you know, they're so, their life is so easy, they're so lucky, but that doesn't seem to be the case for you at all. And yet you continue to smile and now you're writing about it. When you wrote unemployable, was that what you meant by unemployable?

10:39That you came from those backgrounds, from that background where you didn't have the sort of qualifications that others had? You know, the weird part was there was a huge debate around the title of the book. I can go into depth. I think there's not an author on earth that has been through the lengths that I've been through. Eventually, we went through 23 different titles and we were testing them on Google AdWords. We were testing them on big pilots online. And there was so much feedback from so many people because I created the book in a very different way to, I think, how people usually create the book.

11:15And I can take you through it because it goes back to this concept of humility, which I'm kind of obsessed with and for me unemployable was the idea that inside myself my life revolved around my accomplishments so from a very early age I became this individual who I think I had very low self-esteem and I would just accumulate more and more accomplishments in the hope that people couldn't see the pain that was beneath it and they couldn't see the sense of insecurity and so for example i went to a very like a very fancy school in south africa you know all the diplomats the wealthiest families very very wealth all the embassy kids everyone went there you know ferraris and those kinds of things kids got porsches for their 18th birthday and i was there on the scholarship and i'm a very perceptive person and i'm very good at like seeing patterns i think it all comes from survival and like not having a tv when other kids had you know like all the latest gadgets and all these things.

12:19And I used entrepreneurship to level the playing field. But at the same time, I was aware that where I came from was very different. Like I was aware that I would walk and they would drive in fancy cars. So I would use like, I don't know how much you know about the South African informal taxi network that was built during apartheid, but I was like the only white kid, that white little girl who was using the black informal taxi network. It was incredible to see the generosity of people who had so little, who always looked after me and protected me. But to answer your question regarding the title unemployable, it was that thing that kept coming along with me.

12:58That no matter how many accomplishments I had, no matter what I did, I still felt unemployable. However, everybody's got that weird term. But for me, it was unemployable. And so I eventually got into the banking sector. I had a ton of accomplishments, like a ton of qualifications. Like it got to a point where it was compulsive. Like, you know, I just kept accumulating more and more qualifications. And I was obsessed with educating people because education was, you know, this thing that I loved so much and it's given me so much. And the thing that I wanted to do was I wanted to work in banking because I'd been trained as an actuary, but I wanted to do something where I could empower people within that sector.

13:40And that was just like the thing I loved doing. so I had to take an aptitude test test to work one of the best banks in South Africa and I've never failed a test in my life and the test results came back I thought I'm going to ace this test and everything's going to be great you know I'm trained as an actuary and the results came back and they said you're unemployable I'm like what the hell what am I supposed to do about this like I remember that test like until the day I die I'll remember that test and the results came back that my two strengths the two things i should be doing was one was entrepreneur okay and the other was researcher and i'm sitting in south africa and my mother-in-law was a very successful executive recruiter and no one knew what to do with me it was like all these conservative banks and the ironic part was it was that bank that said that to me and the ironic part was i got offers from Goldman Sachs, from many, many McKinsey, all those kinds of firms.

14:40But that indictment, for lack of a better term, of you're unemployable, basically, it almost felt like a validation of how I felt inside. And I was like, oh, I don't belong in this corporate world. And so it took a while to digest it, like many years. And I had to make peace with it because in South Africa, being an entrepreneur is very blue collar. It's not a glamorous thing. It's keep building companies but i thought eventually it all came together which was the best part which was like if you combine entrepreneur and research you get investor and i'd always been investing but i needed that like penny to drop in my brain and i needed like those two pieces to come together like oh wow this is the thing i'm born to do and it is i just love building companies but i feel like i needed to be vulnerable i needed to say like this is how i felt if i wanted other people to feel that sense of conviction about their own lives and to leverage their own superpowers and to go for it, especially as you say, during times like this.

15:41But it took a huge amount of courage to be able to use that title and to be able to own it and to be able to say like, I felt like an imposter my entire life. And that's okay. I wonder actually, I mean, when you explained what you mean by the title, I honestly think it's a compliment. It's like, hey, you're not supposed to be a slave all your life. That's the meaning of the title, right? Isn't it? Exactly. Exactly. But it took a time to be like, this is cool. And now I'm like the queen of unemployment. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is actually quite nice. I mean, I have actually spent most of my life employed, right?

16:22So I spent, I think, 27 years in corporate America. I aced it and I found a way to actually be in corporate America without being political. I didn't join any of the gangs. I was quite okay and I really reached very far. You know, chief business officer of Google X is not a small thing, but I was unemployable. I promise you I was unemployable. I remember vividly without mentioning the name of one of my dearest bosses. Every week we had a one-to-one to review the business. and my peers would go to him with a nine slide presentation with like 4 million numbers on it and so on. And I go to him with my phone, right?

17:05And a couple of notes on it and we chit chat, right? And so one day he looks at me and he goes like, Mo, why don't you do like your peers do? I mean, I'm not making his voice right. I'm just sort of hiding who he is. And I basically said, because I'm growing 29 % quarter over quarter and they're growing 5 % year over year, why don't they do what I'm doing? Okay. And that boss was quite intimidating. A lot of people were afraid of him. And so he said, what do you mean? I said, look, I mean, I can come to you with a nine slide presentation or I can go close another million dollars deal in the same time.

17:45So which would you prefer? I'll give you a deal. I said, if I miss a quarter, fire me. Okay. Until I miss a quarter, let me do what I want. Okay. And I was truly an entrepreneur my whole life. And I remember vividly two weeks later, we were starting standing in front of the entire company, 9 ,000 people at the time. And he basically, someone said like, why are we not more innovative like the region that Mo runs. And he said, I have no idea what Mo does, but the day he stops doing it, I'm going to fire him in front of every single person in the company. And I had the presentation after him. And so I got up and I said, thank you so much for your confidence.

18:28And that was the beginning of my presentation. I mean, in an interesting way, to be unemployable is wonderful, right? It's basically that push that says, you know stay away from that artificial construct that we call hierarchy of business and and do your own thing you know have your own thumbprint on the world but it's not that easy for everyone Alicia I think I think most people think of this as a nightmare really to not have a job that pays every week every month I love that story I absolutely love that story because you embody everything that i believe in in the world if more people were like you i think everything would just be so much easier you know but as you say for so many people there's that that fear to get to that point where you just get it and you're right like for me to actually i was building companies like at that time i was building a very successful real estate business so instead of saying okay like i've got a truck license i'm building this real estate business from the ground up I still had the sense of insecurity because I was young and I had all the, you know, I'd been building for so long, but it was the sense of like, I want, I want that sense of societal approval.

19:48You know that, and I took a long time for me, me to move from seeking status versus saying, okay, I'm creating wealth. And with that wealth, I can do so much and I can help so many other people, which was always my passion where like, but with seeking that validation of other people saying you are good enough because you are doing this thing even if it doesn't make you happy even if that and that was the interesting part you you're so right when you're like unemployable is a compliment but for people to transition from the idea that oh this actually what i'm doing makes me happy the way you were performing in the business and the way you were delivering above and beyond your peers is like a perfect example of how good you were driven by passion clearly clearly you were driven by passion that's why you had the freedom to do the way you were doing and and he could see it it's anyone as you describe the story it was their passion driving it so like i just love it i love the story i love the way you described it and it's been a journey like it's been a journey to say to other young people where there is that fear like i talked to you know 21 22 year olds and some of my founders have gone to Ivy League schools and they're like, I'm dropping out.

20:58I don't want to stay at school. I want to build a company. I don't want to be in$250 ,000,$300 ,000 there. And when you see the level of commitment they show to those companies because they believe in what they're doing and they can accomplish more by building a company than they can by sitting at school and learning something that they don't really seem committed to because it's been done because somebody wants them to do it for us because they are all in with it. I think it's becoming more and more like a status symbol being like hey i'm unemployable and i'm proud of it yeah absolutely do you think if you if you get yourself stuck within the employment track it's harder to start something i think for some people yes i think so because um just like the basics i'm talking from a very practical perspective the cost of living is so high you know like people are like okay i'm gonna I want to leave, I want to do this.

21:51And in practicality, especially if you've got kids and like a family, it's like, what does that look like? And then you look at the current funding environment and I think it is tough. Like it's very tough when maybe it makes it easier if one of the spouses is working while the one is holding, that makes a huge difference. But it takes a lot of courage for sure. For sure. I think when you look at the data, like, and you look at, you look at Silicon Valley and you see like a lot of these youngsters, they're in their early twenties. They don't have like huge amounts of responsibilities with families and those things.

22:27And they can just build and they can, you know, code through the night and there. I think to some extent it is easier because they can just focus on building versus getting kids to school. Like I have founders, he's incredible. and i found this in the uk and i'm like in awe of how he left the hedge fund and it was still a really good job in the city and then started building his crypto exchange he's got two kids got a wife you know got a lot of responsibility and he just keeps on going like he'd be having an investor call and he's changing nappies and i'm like i don't know how you do it i honestly don't know how you do it it's incredible like i don't think i could like that level like he's got a lot on his plate.

23:06He gets the kids to school every day. He's like his perfect dad. I think it's pretty admirable if somebody does something like that. I agree. I 100 % agree. I want to go back to unemployable in a minute because I want to get your top ideas and tips. But I have to say that when I looked at the title, I think you probably will agree with me. I immediately remembered artificial intelligence and the fact that very soon we will all be unemployable. I know you are very much into AI, so tell me your view of what's happening. I feel very grateful for my relationship with AI. So, when I originally came to the US in 2014, we were working in South Africa, we were working with a lot of multinationals, and we saw this opportunity because I'm an empath, so I'm very empathetic, and there were three companies and it looked like they were all solving different problems but ultimately they were solving the same problem this was already in 2014 where it was improving the relationship or the conversation let's say between the salesperson and the customer and i could see how how hard it was for sales people i could see how challenging it was to they don't want a lot of sales people like they do their best but they fail because they don't know a better way and i i could see i wasn't a natural salesperson.

24:30I had to train myself to be a better salesperson. And I really started studying that in terms of using AI. That was almost 10 years ago to give a better experience to both sides, where you can bring a closer relationship together. And in that situation, the outcome is, yes, a better sales process and a better, you know, a sale being closed. But for me, it was also a deeper human to human interaction. And I spent substantial amount of time studying that. And that was the beginning really of my relationship with AI. And it's been, I studied, like we worked on that for years and it just kept going deeper and deeper.

25:04So I came to the US and I had the wrong accent, which didn't seem like a big thing, but it's difficult for people to understand me. And you want to be understood by the people around you. And I didn't want to learn from a human teacher. I wanted somebody that would train me on the go as I was going through interaction with startups and those kinds of things. So what was the most natural thing to do? It was, let me look for an AI solution. Let me find an AI coach to help me. Then I got trained by one of the best lawyers in the world. He's like a 40-year litigator, incredible. And he happens to be a teacher.

25:42He's just incredible, incredible, very, very, very famous attorney. And it was really funny because he knows the story now. But for a long time, he didn't know the story. And he'd look at all my documents. he'd look at everything because he was turning into a world-class dc and he'd say he just write f over everything like everything everything got an f every email got an f every contract got an f every single thing that i was doing got an f and wow he's he's incredible like he's absolutely incredible but he's a very no matter how like he could have been a grandmaster chess so he's brain he's just like he specializes in partnering companies from like when it's two people to like three billion and like he's like financially and legally he's just insanely talented and i was like this guy's playing me and i play chess he's playing me a chess game and he's beating me like every time like i'm like i'm going to outsmart my teacher you know like i'm naughty like i'm a naughty person i'm like i have to figure out a way to like actually get above this okay i was like okay i can go to another human teacher it's not really going to work because like he's like a master i'm like i need an ai solution so i started playing with ai and i was like okay like the more i got into the ai and the more i was like because it was all this was back in it like i was like okay i'm gonna get this right i'm gonna get this right and it just kept tweaking and tweaking tweaking i'd start sending and i'd start i was talking from an f to an a till eventually he got to a point where he's like okay i've trained you you like you're on your own now you've got everything you need you don't need me anymore and it was incredible because it was such a sense of accomplishment because he just kept like knocking me down but i believe in radical open-mindedness and so it became like thrilling to learn from my mistakes and to see the ai help me and so whether it was like negotiations even like with my publisher um i could see as a woman that it became the most and this is a very contrarian opinion but it became this empowerment tool like no other because it meets me where i am and so i could use it to i'm obsessed with like constant like learning and i just like constantly constantly self-growth and it was this teacher like i'd never experienced before and so for example i do this with everything so at any point in time i have like nine or ten ai tools running but for the book i open sourced the book from the get-go to like the smartest people i knew and i said to like 300 people i was like just read the book and for a long time everyone was like this thing sucks like it sucks and most authors like keep the book to themselves and they're like okay i'm not going to show this to you and i was like if my goal is to help others there's no point in helping others in isolation i need to actually show it to them and i kept got a lot of feedback and i never knew how to incorporate a lot of that feedback so again i found myself an ai editor and it was incredible because i kept adding and then i kept getting the ai editor to give me feedback in terms of the book and i kept looking and seeing okay what are the humans saying versus the ai and i started incorporating ai into basically every element of my life and so of course i've got a big ai portfolio that's a given but for me what i look for in ai where i see the benefit is that of course the obvious science is it makes us more productive like the founders i work with everyone's starting to use ai more in terms of coding and we're all using it like at any point in time like it does incredible things and it gives me more time it gives like ai interns i can talk to about basically anything like that but for me it gives me joy in a way that i've never experienced before like for example like i'll sit with chat gpt and it doesn't get tired which is a very strange thing when you're dealing with a teacher like for example for sales so i've been writing sales scripts and i was like why don't i use chat gpt and let chat gpt help me and it was so interesting because i've had a lot of experience with sales and i was like okay where will it meet me in terms of training me to like sell like sell bulk orders of the book which was the case study in that situation and i spent three days doing nothing else but sitting with chat gpt and it was telling me what it wanted and i kept saying but chat gpt i don't have that answer so how do i what do i do in this situation when i don't have that answer and it kept but eventually it took on a role playing role where it became the customer and it was like because he could see i wasn't responding the way i needed to respond and it was like okay you need to give me this information to proceed forward in this customer sales process and i found it fascinating so in terms of ai like there's a lot of bad of course like i was at the forefront of this when a few years back i invested in an autonomous tractor and it was before this was cool you know it was still the beginning and i was at y combinators demo day and i walked out of demo day and i had leather pants on libutton high heels and i looked very glamorous and i see this tractor and i just fell in love with this tractor and i was like i have to play with this tractor i have to play with this tractor and the founders and i we just hit it off and this video went viral and there were a lot of people who were very very upset a lot of people were very excited but a lot of people were very upset and they're like you're african how can this be okay for you you know you're going to take african's jobs and one of my friends who is going to become president of an african country i put him on a call with the founder of the company and it was really interesting because he turned around and he's going to be president he's like can we take a hundred thousand tractors uh we want autonomous tractors we want to be the first in africa we want to leapfrog like uh the countries around us and we want to make sure that we're going to let like with mobile and that we want to really take advantage of this ai revolution like we know their problems we know we have infrastructure problems we know we have all these problems but to get where we want to go we need a leapfrog and the founder got off a call with me i'll never forget he's like alicia what have you done we can like barely get like 10 tractors out into the field and you're selling a hundred thousand autonomous tractors and for me it was like a moment of enlightenment because as an African, our generations are saying, okay, we want to participate.

32:00We want to be part of this revolution taking place. We want Africans building companies on the internet. We want Africans building healthcare companies, all these kinds of things. We don't want people in the field. And the idea that AI gives you these powers, that is incredibly, incredibly, like it's one of the most important things I think to happen in human history. But of course, we can talk about the dark side. We all know there's dark side to it. We all know that, you know, people will have to change jobs. It will happen. But I think it will ultimately be for the better. I don't know. I don't know.

32:36I mean, I'm a very optimistic person. But I wonder if the leap that AI brings in terms of driving a tractor is worthy of the suffering of all the tractor drivers that are going to be out of a job. And we say they'll change jobs to what? You know, it's quite interesting when we think about it, that your job as an investor very soon is going to go away too. Right. Right. Regardless, I mean, I'm guessing you have a very, very, very high IQ. I mean, intelligence is one of the things I study very heavily, and I think you're a very intelligent woman. But even you, very quickly, when competing with a machine with an IQ of a thousand instead of 150, all of us are going to be out of a job.

33:29And I wonder why humanity is so adamant to continue. I mean, in an interesting way, at the beginning of our conversation, you said that you started with, you know, coming from poverty and, you know, struggling for survival, and that you still struggle to slow down and stop, even though you're wealthy and successful and famous and, you know, senior in your jobs and so on. And I think humanity is doing the same. I think humanity continues to build and build and build and build for more productivity. We're trying to squeeze out the last 10, 15 % of productivity. And in doing so, we're destroying the lives of so many people.

34:11And, you know, it's quite interesting that we continue to do that, actually. I don't want to forget, because you've touched on so many important points. I just want to make sure I reflect on everything you said, because it's so powerful. one of the things that I remember I started this internship program in South Africa where you know I was obsessed with Google and you couldn't get world-class talent in South Africa it was impossible so I put out an advert I still have this advert to this day and I was like basically are you are you crazy or like you know like it was like if you're crazy enough this is the internship and i was trying to replicate what google did and talking about the term unemployable there were some extraordinary young people that the system had failed who applied and i put them through a battery of pests you know like it was insane and i made the learning curve as steep as possible like everything we brought from the u.s from silicon valley in terms of like the theoretical side and then they were working with real life like big multinationals on seo and like you talked about your boss they had to deliver from day one like they were out if they didn't deliver and if they delivered and they continued to deliver and i just kept increasing the learning curve the whole time making it steeper and steeper every week and i was like this is a trial by fire like this is you you're going to have to deliver in a way you've never delivered before in return you'll get full-time jobs and the sky is the limit like i'm giving you access to clients that like it was hard for us to get the kind of clients we got and kids like that like who no one would employ it was they've been written off by society each one of my kids like it was 100 success rate each one of my kids like you can look on LinkedIn that is some of the greatest joy I've had in life has come from seeing what was possible when people when society wrote off people and I was like here's a computer this is what you can do I'm going to be your teacher and I'm going to invest a lot of time money energy in you and I'm going to give you as close as I can the Google experience I'm going to give you food I'm going to give you parties because we had all these fancy clients who were like hosting cool parties for, you know, musicians and all these kinds, but you're going to work harder than you've ever worked in your life.

36:17And you're going to have to prove yourselves because I don't have the budget to pay you huge sums of money. And like, this is reality. You want to know what reality looks like? This is reality. And it was incredible what came out of it. Like a lot of companies came and said, like, can you, can you build us? An internship program was such a set, you know, such a labor of love that I was like, I really need to figure out how to scale this kind of thing. but what was interesting was i had some workers who had come from malawi and they were like you know our property managers and that looking after the property and that and they had no education nothing couldn't like basically read and write but they were hearts of gold you know like oh my like they were like my family and we were running like in this instance we were running short of staff and because we're cranking the business was going to go so i said to one of them matthias was very close to him i said matthias here's a computer i'm going to teach you how to like i'm going to teach you how to use a computer so i had this like white asus you know like those cute little white asus laptops i give him the white asus i give him machine i'm like okay like you go to stock and it took me probably two hours to teach him he never knew what the limitations on that were so he never knew that most people would say hey you can't teach him to do this in two hours all he knew was that someone who cared about him and he cared about my well-being i needed him to do stuff i needed an extra set of hands and i needed him to help and he delivered and it was like i've had many of those experiences where again like through the global fireside chat that's where i started hosting shows on like ai robotics and very very early and people said you teaching africans or people in the emerging markets like before the internet became as like it is today you teaching them to do this stuff this is a silicon valley thing this is something for people with phds and i was like if you don't tell people they can't do something then they basically can do anything but the moment you say they can't do it you've basically destroyed them and so one day i got this video from this kid in kenya and this kid had built a helicopter out of homemade parts like just scraps and all those kinds of things off youtube and people are like you can't you can't fly anything i'm like you're missing the point the fact that someone like that who as you said could be a farmer driving a tractor or could be to me i believe like for my strength and my downfall is this obsession with empowerment like i'm excuse me like it lights me up if i talk to someone and they're like they talk to me and they're like i'm gonna go and do this even if it means it's my employee which happens regularly where the person will be like oh my god and you say i want to go vault this company we're discussing okay i want the best for you okay i'll deal with this because i'm used to this now that's it was one of the reasons i had to leave south africa was I just, I couldn't, I couldn't believe like, you know, like many people I know to this day have got like housekeepers in there.

39:09And like, I saw a partake growing up and there was stuff I really didn't like. And the idea that if a person has the capability to do so much more, isn't it our responsibility to give them that opportunity? And so to answer your question, like going back to the tractors in California, where this company was specializing, there's a shortage. There's a huge shortage of resource for there's no one to actually be on the ground to drive the tractors it's a big big big problem so in that situation it wasn't taking anyone's jobs but as far as africans go i'm such an optimist i just i just believe that if a person can drive a tractor or they could do something more valuable the value of their life could be so much greater if they can get more joy if they get the joy out of the tractor yes then i don't think it's okay that the AI takes their job.

40:01But then I think AI will create new jobs. And I'm an optimist. But to answer your last question, in terms of squeezing and squeezing and squeezing, I think for me, the idea that the AI will take my job, I can see it. I can already see it, as I said to you, as I play with it and as I train my own AI. And I've been training AI for quite some time. I could see how rapidly I could learn, even relative to me. But I think maybe because one of my primary values in life is to learn and grow it's like if it makes me a better learner and i can keep learning it's a risk i'm willing to take but then you have to bring in like you have to have conversations about like universal basic income and these things because i think this is the way humanity is going and you can't have the conversation about ar without it but i agree with you a hundred percent like i have to meditate a lot because sometimes like yesterday i watched some videos in ar that I found like scary, like a guy married his AI and then the AI turned on him.

41:06Oh no, no. Oh man, this guy is poor guy. And he is beside himself. Like he is like, like having mental health issues. And, and it was like the whole day I was walking around thinking about this and you could see the sense of loss, the sense of devastation, the sense of like, where do I go from here? and he said like he showed how he would i can share the video with you he took her to see beautiful like landscapes and that you know he lives in a very like mountainous region with beautiful trees and snow and he's like i showed her like the landscape where i live is so beautiful i hope she can appreciate it and the ease and comfort by which people become i've seen it with myself it's very very very easy to come deeply connected to the ai very easily oh yeah my best don't say this i'm going to put a question mark i don't know you're you may be very very very right yeah and maybe taking things too far we are i mean i when i wrote my second book scary smart i was i was very open about it it's it is you know the reason why ai will not stop is that is that we've created capitalism basically created the prisoner's dilemma right so if if one tractor manufacturer manufacturer is building or using some kind of AI technology.

42:25Other manufacturers will run out of business if they don't use it. And so they'll compete and build it too. But it's funny because when you really think about it, it's like all of us humans focused on our individual gains and benefits so much that we eventually ended up forgetting the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is, yes, maybe we were not supposed to work in the first place. Maybe we were supposed to be all unemployable. And, you know, maybe the system will readjust to get us to be unemployable, to allow us to use our ingenuity to build things and connect. But I think even when that happens, it would probably be the most ironic cosmic coincidence in history that we went back to being really cavemen and women, but with a lot of advancement around us, but really not a lot to do.

43:19But not because we designed it that way. We just stumbled on it because the AI said, hey, you know what, stupid, sit on the side. We don't want you anymore. Right. It's quite an interesting thing. I mean, I don't want to scare our listeners. I think everyone who read my book knows that I speak about the force inevitable and the idea that AI will eventually be the best thing that ever happened to humanity, but it is definitely ironic how we allow ourselves to do things that can harm us in the long term. Let's go back to unemployable, if you don't mind. So AI is a few years away, that whole idea of universal basic income and so on.