Daniel Priestley - How To Build A Multi-Million Dollar Business From Scratch

35:28I'm 19, he's 37. He's starting a business. He goes from zero to 6 million in the first year and I get to be his apprentice. I get to work closely with him. And to me, that was where I got my entrepreneurial apprenticeship doing two years working for an entrepreneur. In my company, there's been something like 12 different people who've worked for me and then gone off and started a multimillion dollar venture. so you know they picked up their entrepreneurial apprenticeship and they're off doing something in the world so um if what what should someone do move towards working closely with a founder who inspires you would be a step towards entrepreneurship move towards a more meaningful problem if you have a feeling that your work is not meaningful if you're looking at the work that you do and you say this is just a this is just a nonsense job this is not a i'm not solving a meaningful problem here.

36:19I'm just, you know, I'm shuffling paper around desks. I'm plugging things into a spreadsheet. I'm doing work that just distracts people. It's meaningless. You've got to move towards meaning. You've got to move towards speed where things are happening fast. And you've got to move towards being part of a smaller, more dynamic entrepreneurial company that may end up putting you as a founder at one point in the future, but I wouldn't worry about that for most people. I wouldn't worry about starting a business. Yeah, correct. I mean, In a very interesting way, I think my most profitable, most rewarding startup ever was Google.

36:57Right? I didn't start it. Honestly, I mean, I didn't start it. I didn't run it as the founder like I did with others. And I never, and I wasn't even in the first few thousand people. But I had a very entrepreneurial role within Google as Google was maturing a little bit. So, you know, I came in and we had the UK, the US, the Japan, the big countries basically were established creating, I think at the time,$8 billion a year, which of course, yeah, of course, when you really look back now at, you know, at what we built out of that, you go like 8 billion was nothing, right? But, you know, when we were actually at that stage, we were like, okay, we're the biggest people on earth, like we, right?

37:45And my role was to build emerging markets. So I started to say, you know, I think the strategy at the time when I walked in was the next billion. So how can we create the next billion dollars? And I remember vividly one of those meetings where I said, I think it should be the next 4 billion. And then every one of the business leaders, my peers, looked at me like, come on, man, that's our quota. And I was like, I think it should be the next 4 billion users. right at the time google was basically yeah uh you know i think we had a billion users around the world that's it in those big countries you know us japan and so on and so forth and that was creating the eight billion dollars and i said no we need the next four billion users imagine even at the cheaper price of ads uh you know the kind of inventory that and i so i took that project and it was my project for seven years and it really did deliver i mean it it really I think not only was my favorite entrepreneurial work ever, but it was also, I think, the biggest impact I ever had, even bigger than the Google X years.

38:50I was going to say, isn't it incredible just that moment where you spoke up in that meeting and said, I think it should be 4 billion users who we've overlooked. And it was obviously that that put you on the radar of Larry and Sergei. It was that one moment. It's funny, in the course of your life... You'll be surprised. I think you will be upset with me when I say that. The moment that really defined me at Google was when we were at the very first sales conference. And my boss at the time was Nikesh Arora. And Nikesh was a harsh manager. He was an amazing teacher. He was super straight, right? But he was harsh.

39:27He pushed hard. And so people feared him. And I have a brain defect. So I really saw the human in him. And I really never feared him. I adored him, right? Anyway, we had this sales conference, and Nikesh being so specific. You know, we were four regions reporting into him. I was tiny, like literally nothing. I think we were like a$12 million part of the business or something. And he said, okay, each of you gets 20 minutes on stage. You tell us about your region. And basically, he said, you prepare your slides. You come 6 p.m. the day before you rehearse. I'll give you comments. You come again at 9 p.m., rehearse again.

40:05And then you wake up at 6 a.m. We're rehearsing at 7 a.m. And then the talk is at 10 or something like that. Right? That's very much unlike me. I'm an entrepreneur. I normally don't use slides at all. Anyway, I did exactly what he said. And I dissected the$12 million, which compared to Region 1, which was like$2 billion. Who would listen to me? Anyway, somehow the first slide of my presentation saying region four was a jungle because, you know, Africa was part of my region and, you know, parts of Latam where I was advising and so on. And it was a foggy jungle. So it was basically sort of like the quest into the unknown.

40:46And somehow, because of my brain defect, I get on stage. and instead of doing what we rehearsed three times, I have that slide and I go like, fuck it, I'm not going to talk about the revenue. And I started to talk about the reality of what it's like to live in emerging markets when you don't have access to Google at all. Okay. And I could see Nikesh, I'm not making this up. I could see Nikesh looking at me from the front row, waving his hand with the kill sign. I'm like, I'm going, I didn't know if he was saying, I'm going to kill you or, you know, kill it and leave, right? Anyway, I attempted to look the other way.

41:25And then at the other seats, there was Larry, Sergey, and Eric Schmidt, our CEO at the time, who were so drawn in, unlike how they were when the revenue presentations were made. And so anyway, Nikesh pressures me. So I finish in 18 minutes instead of 20. And as I'm now, you know sort of going to collect my stuff and leave the company that's my expectation from disobeying him larry sergey and eric stand up and they clap for like a you know a standing ovation of two three minutes the entire room 7 000 people at the time and that completely shifted the company the company was like hold on we're making enough money it was still the years of don't be evil and we were very driven by the mission and i sort of started my conversation by the mission which was organize the world's information and make it university accessible and useful and i said well it's not accessible to to more than you know six billion people around the world so what are we going to do about that right and yeah one of one of those moments in a way it's starting a company when did you decide that you were going to change the speech like when i held the clicker in my hand i know i mean think about it you just have no you were just tapped into something you You were tapped into an energy that I've had certain talks like that myself where I gave a speech, I changed it right there on the spot.

42:50And it was like almost a spiritual energy was flowing where it's like there's a bigger game. There's a bigger story to tell. Exactly. Yeah. You said it. You said it. If you didn't have purpose, you don't want to do this. So I left Microsoft to go to Google, even though my intention was to retire after Microsoft. So literally, I got the call from Google eight months before my set retirement date. Okay. And I said, I'm going to go to make a difference. And then suddenly, I'm sitting there talking about growing the business from$12 million to 14. That didn't feel like what I stood for. So one of the things I wrote about in my book, Entrepreneur Revolution, was that the entrepreneur has three brains.

43:35And it's loosely based on the three brain model, which is a massively oversimplified such an interesting way yeah it's an oversimplified model but i have personally seen it witnessed it felt it myself that i do have three brains and everyone i work with has got three brains so i talk about the reptile which is this um fight flight freeze and it just basically wants uh sex and food entertainment and revenge and it's like these are the time these these are the main things that that it really loves and it's not very good at entrepreneurship it's not good at entrepreneurship at all. And then the middle part of the brain, which was your manager, wants to complete tasks and get rewards.

44:16That's it. It's like, it's the autopilot. And the autopilot, it just craves this idea of like, complete the task and get a reward. And that's what your manager is sitting in the audience, representing that part of the brain, which is like, oh my goodness, this is off task. This is like not completing a task and getting a reward. I'm not sure i'm not sure what the dopamine loop would be on this right so it's like you're doing something that's different and then there's this next high level part of the brain which is where everything comes from which is the visionary and it wants to improve the world and it wants to do something of great meaning and inspiration and passion and at a very much a i think there was a study in india about farmers who received their annual pay in one lump sum.

45:04And then by the end of the year, they were completely out of money and they were down to survival. And they actually did IQ tests and discovered that when people had an abundance of money, they had a standard deviation higher IQ. And when they were completely in scarcity, they had a standard deviation lower in IQ. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. So our ability to problem solve, if we're in reptile mode, we are a standard deviation lower IQ. And if we are in this different mode, now, one of the reasons that we get into this higher mind is not through pleasure or dopamine and rewards and all this sort of stuff.

45:48It's by selecting a big problem. So the way that we engage that part of the brain is by literally thinking about a problem like, how do you get 6 billion people to have access to the world's information? How do we create accessibility to billions of people for this technology? So when you give your brain a problem that's that big, the reptile brain says, no idea, I'll just sit on the sidelines. That's not sex, food and entertainment. I don't know about that. There's no revenge in that. Exactly. the autopilot says i don't know how the dopamine reward loop works with this i don't know what tasks to complete i don't know what i get rewarded for just yet so i'll just sit on the sidelines but the visionary opens up and says god how would i do that how would that happen who would i have to connect with who would i need to pitch who would i what resources already exist that we could reorganize to get that done so it's only through the deliberate pursuit of a massive problem that we can open up the best parts of ourselves.

46:51This is so profound, actually, not even in business only. I think the idea of that the higher brain is where the compassion, where the love for others that drives you to make a difference exists, is actually something that really requires reflecting upon. Because when I speak about artificial intelligence, I sort of say that my confidence is that the more intelligent those machines will become, the more they will align with those values. Because you can easily see that the smartest of all of us don't want to destroy the planet for profits, right? You have to be dumb in the middle in that execution brain of tasks and reward in order to be able to tell yourself, okay, I'm going to build a project and market it and advertise it.

47:38And it's going to destroy the planet and waste people's time and lives, but it's going to make me money because that's task and reward. She's quite eye-opening, actually. I think it really describes the problem of our world today. It's the manager mind, the autopilot mind that would chop down every forest in order to manufacture more paperclips. Yeah. If that's the task, if that's what I've been told to do, then I'll go and do that. I'm only single-mindedly focused on that. That's the part of AI we do need to fear, I think. but if we can transcend that and we can say what are the world's most meaningful problems you know i share all of your fears around ai but i also have there's a couple of things that i do feel positive about growing up in australia i was guaranteed education and i was guaranteed healthcare and i was guaranteed infrastructure so born in 1981 in australia there was never even a question that you wouldn't go to a great school that you wouldn't be able to go to a great hospital um and that the police the education system the legal system all of that stuff just worked there was not like that was just the backdrop of every australian's life that we it just was never even a question and what i do hope for artificial intelligence is that billions of people who don't currently have health care education and like legal systems and all that sort of stuff, that suddenly and very rapidly, they get the onset of those things, that they have effectively one of the world's best general practitioners in their pocket.

49:16They have one of the world's best psychologists in their pocket. They have one of the world's best architects, engineers, computer developers, that they have healthcare, education, and legal system pretty much ready to go in the pocket to discuss issues, to basically create a new backdrop for one to two to three billion people who don't have those things in even a small measure. And hopefully, that is one of the greatest things that AI does do, that it gives that Australian, the Australian upbringing I had, that it brings some of that backdrop to people who don't have that backdrop. Which I have to believe is possible.

49:55As a matter of fact, you know, when I speak about AI, I celebrate that. I openly say that this is the upside. But for me, it's the bad humans that will try to abuse that. That is my fear. And I always say openly that, by the way, if any of our listeners have not listened to some of my conversations on AI, go to YouTube and listen for, you know, search for Mogad. The emergency meeting that you did with Stephen Barlow was great. Yeah, the emergency meeting actually got upwards of 7 million listeners. That was just an immensely useful conversation. Yeah, I think it's important that everyone gets updated on the topic.

50:36So please go ahead and do that. But yes, you're also right there, I think, Daniel, that we have such a potential for a utopian world. And it is very, very possible if we mitigate the systemic error, as I call it, the systemic error of that monkey execution brain in the middle that just wants to get the tasks done within the system. And then now they can do them 2000 times faster and soon 20 ,000 times faster. Yeah. And that's where we need to be careful. The other thing that I'm worried about is the neo-feudalism. Neo-feudalism or feudalism was basically the system of having kings, queens, dukes and earls and then peasants plebs and soldiers and fodder completely dispendable humans so essentially a very very very ultra unequal society and it was built on automation it was built on the fact that everything was automated everything of value came from the land and that was a completely automated process so for me i draw a very clear parallel that But AI being digital soil will make the digital landowners extremely wealthy and everyone else will become plebs and serfs.

51:57So that's a concern for me. One of the things that should be a concern for the wealthy, the very ultra rich, is that eventually people rise up. In the deck of cards, they encoded rules for how society should work and should be governed. and there's a lot of coding in the standard deck of cards. But one of the things that they encoded was that the ones could become 11s, that an ace is either a one or an 11, and essentially the ace represents the bottom tier of society, and when it's oppressed, it overthrows the king. It is more powerful than the king. Basically, the ones become 11s. The pitchforks come.

52:34The revolution comes. And they built that into the deck of cards. There's a lot of symbolism encoded in there, but that is one thing that every wealthy person who's who's secretly saying wow this is pretty incredible i'm just making 100 million dollars out of ai technology right now should also be thinking well actually let's not turn those ones into 11s let's not take society and oppress it to the point where they feel the need to overthrow if we can actually build a society that works for everyone as entrepreneurs we have markets we have wealthy markets we want to we want markets to sell to we want people to have money to spend we want people to feel happy in their lives so that they can work and produce great work and that they can you know be part of our businesses in more ways than one so we have to kind of get deliberate around how we want to build society it puzzles me the meaning of the word wealth and maybe again i have quite a few brain defects but this is a prominent one within it because i've lived a very wealthy life that i've given up on completely because it bugged me.

53:40I really didn't enjoy it at all. And in a way, if you really deeply understand what's about to happen, we are about to shift the manufacturing method of wealth in the world from scarcity to abundance. So everything that we've created as humanity has been a product of our intelligence. Every problem we've created has been a problem of our limited intelligence, if you want. And our limited intelligence is what abused others, abused the planetary sources in order to create that wealth. It's the mentality of if I need to protect my village, I need to kill the tiger. And in a very interesting way, if you have enough intelligence, you can create more tigers and just give them enough food so that the village is protected anyway.

54:29And I think because of the abundance of intelligence that comes with AI, we could literally have a world of abundance. I mean, I joke about that. I don't joke, actually. I think it's a very near future. But I sort of shock about this by saying that if we figured out nanophysics a little more than where we are today, it wouldn't be too far in the future where you could walk to a tree and get, you know, harvest an apple and walk to another tree and harvest an iPhone, right? Literally, from a tech point of view, the cost of reorganizing particles to create an iPhone is exactly the same as creating an Apple.

55:05But somehow, those with wealth and power don't understand that. They still compete for wealth for that segregation of power. It almost feels that if I have everything, that's still not good enough if others have it too. right it seems that the battle for wealth and power is I should have what others don't have otherwise I don't feel good about my wealth and that's ego at its at its very core really And I don't understand why that is because, you know, in my lovely little apartment, which surely is not the kind of apartment that the former chief business officer of Google X should be living in.

55:51Yeah, I love that. Often I get camera crews here and they go like, oh, we expected you to live in a mansion. And I'm like, it is a mansion. I love it in every possible way, right? And the reality is in my mind, I'm completely confused. Like, why would I need more than that? It takes more effort to clean it. You start to walk longer distances. It consumes more power unnecessarily. It's a strange, humans are a strange creature. we one of the happiest times most people can relate to is when they have nothing yeah when i say nothing i mean probably your basic needs yeah like here's the thing i get interviewed all the time on podcasts and they always want to ask the question about how did you get started and they want to talk about like the very beginning of sleeping on a mattress on the floor and like if i take myself back to the time of having absolutely nothing materially it was an amazing adventure.

56:44It was an incredible time. So there were times where I was a pizza delivery driver because I wanted to be able to get free pizzas. And, you know, that was a major perk for the job. And I was living five people in a three bedroom house and we would stay up all night drinking and we'd do crazy, you know, go out to nightclubs that were on the other side of town. So simply because they had slightly cheaper drinks and all sorts of things like this at the early stage, when you look at what happens when you become wildly wealthy, a lot of your life is built around segregation. Most of my very wealthy friends, they live behind gated communities.

57:22They live on the very top floor of buildings that are also protected around the building. They have security teams. They make sure that they travel in cars that are definitely not public transport. They fly private. They will spend a fortune on a yacht that parks 50 meters offshore of a beach where they are essentially everyone on the beach is having a connected experience sharing the beach with others and then they're having a segregated experience on the on the yacht so there's something strange about this like desire for segregation or status but it's not really linked to happiness it's not really linked to fulfillment because you take the happiest times you're probably at a festival with people in a concert scenario you probably you're deeply connected with others in the happiest times of your life and when you're isolated and segregated you're probably feeling unhappy even even if you are on a yacht even if you are mostly mostly unhappy I mean you'll be amazed how many billionaires desperately call for my help on happiness it is it is I mean I if you take ratio like percentage of billionaires that are miserable as compared to percentage of normal humans that are miserable, as compared to percentage of poor humans that are miserable, you'll be blown away.

58:45It seems that as soon as you get your basic needs met, the typical Latin American coffee bean collector, right? I had this incredible woman. I worked on a Columbia coffee farm for a few days. And, you know, grueling work, grueling work, because, you know, Colombian coffee farms are on mountains. And you have to carry like all of those kilograms and you take them up to the storage place. And it's just a difficult job. And you do that eight hours a day. And she's 64. She looks like 27, honestly. Like she's so young and so clearly healthy and happy. And I asked her and I said, how long have you done that for?

59:25And she said, I started when I was 16 until 64. And I said, are you happy? She said, I'm the happiest person on earth. and I said how come and she said I have nature I have I'm surrounded by people that love me I have all the food I need and I have time for myself and the people I love what else do you want right so so that as compared to the billionaire that's looking at the yacht next to him and saying why is this two feet longer yeah it's just it's staggering it's a glitch yeah and most people don't recognize that this does happen for billionaires. One of the very hard things for billionaires is the wall that they have to build emotionally with the world.

1:00:11So when a billionaire scrolls through their Twitter or their Facebook feed, they see all these problems that they could theoretically solve in a phone call. So you see problems or issues. As a normal human being, you see problems or issues as just news events that you have no ability to solve, no ability to impact and you just like if you see some someone starving or someone who's in trouble you go that's horrible but I can't do anything about it but for someone who's a billionaire you look at that stuff and it's constant you go I could do something and I'm choosing not to and so there's this kind of there's this kind of like emotional barrier or emotional wall you have to build if you are so resource rich which you know is part of this isolation I met some of the happiest people in Uganda, in rural Uganda.

1:00:59I met an amazing entrepreneur, a woman who she was picking trash off of a trash heap and her children, a couple of her children had died and a couple of her children were with her. And then an aid agency said she could get a micro loan of$50 to go and buy some chickens and breed the chickens and that they would set her up. So she became a chicken breeder and then she got up to 400 chickens. She traded some of her chickens for two goats and she became a goat breeder and then she traded some of her goats for pigs and she became a pig breeder and when i met her she she said this is my farm these are my chickens my pigs my goats that's my cow right and she she had the energy of rupert murdoch saying this is my global empire of newspapers right she had this energy of like this look what i've achieved i've gone from nothing to having this and she was supporting her village around her and she was just this powerhouse you know this amazing woman who had who'd basically entrepreneured her way into this position of influence within her community and she was an employer and someone who could feed the people around her it was amazing to see amazing and with a 50 loan it's a 50 micro loan followed by 150 micro loan followed by a 300 micro loan and then she paid it all back and she had transformed her life and the life of her community for about a revolving line of credit of 500 bucks.

1:02:27Yeah. Don't get me started. I will now shout and scream because, you know, how many of us would go and spend those$50 on another pair of shoes or whatever that they don't really need? And it, again, staggers me because like you, I know many billionaires that in reality, if they drop$50, they would literally not look at it. Okay. Yeah. If they drop$5 ,000, they would not look at it. Well, there becomes a point where it's not worth returning things that you're not going to use because it's not worth your time to put them back in a box and send them back to wherever they came from. Yeah. I'm almost in that category now where I bought some shirts that don't fit me right.

1:03:10And, you know, they're$100 per shirt or like a little bit more. and I just had the thought of like oh now I have to go to return them it's my time it's not worth my time to return these and it's like a weird thought of like how stupid is that how how strange that I'm probably not going to return these I'll just put them but then why is it so so I I push myself into a very clear experiment when I unfortunately not all coffee shops that I go to allow you to tip the barista but if they do I will give what is equivalent to the coffee I bought okay and and i will tell myself you know if i had dropped my coffee they would have given me another one for free so i might as well give them the free one as if i dropped my coffee or something like that right and in a very interesting way you know when i go and buy a sandwich and it's five dollars or three dollars i will say i will try to tip a five dollars or three dollars okay and and it's a practice because even I would go like, yeah, but$5 for a coffee to tip the barista is too high.

1:04:13They don't expect that. They expect a couple of coins. But in my mind,$5 for me, if I desired another coffee, I would have immediately got up and bought it. I wouldn't think twice. Okay. And in a way, it gives me more joy to give them the$5 than it actually does for me to buy another coffee and i i don't understand again why humans don't there's incredible joy in that yeah absolutely do you know what we need we need tip the farmer we need to have something where you imagine imagine this imagine there's some sort of a video screen portal and it actually shows you where the farming and the beans are happening and you can just tip the farmer and you say hey look we'll put an extra Because$5 to a farmer in Kenya is transformational.

1:05:02We should have a way of tipping the farmers. We should have a way of literally tipping each other what we don't need. I mean, in a very interesting way, yesterday I was on a podcast, Prof G, and he was asking me about what the oligarchs of AI should do if we were to change the world. And I was saying, I mean, with all due respect, of course, Elon Musk has had a very negative view on AI for quite a bit of time. And he speaks about the existential threats for such a long time. And we all know that there is really almost zero, less than 3%, 4 % of control code in AI. We have no control over what we're coding whatsoever.

1:05:45And if Elon Musk puts$3 billion into ensuring that there is AI control code, he could literally save the planet. okay and yet three billion dollars of course is a very large number of you know amount of money for most of us but for Elon it's you know six percent of his wealth or something like that okay one and a half percent of his wealth so so it's you know it's not a big deal and when you really think about it there is always that barrier of no no I'm going to keep my coffee but I'm not going to give five dollars to you know of coffee to the other person there there has to be we have to get past relying on benevolent oligarchs because that doesn't end well and that's never that's never been a recipe for society yeah so we're in in the time in 10 000 years of um feudalist uh structures there was never really a situation where a massive oligarch gave up all their wealth and power and just simply distributed amongst their people these things just don't happen some of the things that do have to happen is we need to say well if a lot of value is created from language models and data, we need to tax the data.

1:06:54So data usage, you know, so like for example, because here's what oligarchs need. Oligarchs need a level playing field. If one oligarch says, I'm going to give all my wealth away or I'm going to play by a different set of rules, they know deep down that the other oligarchs who don't play by those rules will eventually overtake them and buy their company and take them over and all this sort of stuff. so they i mean people people have these kind of very juvenile views of what it's like to be extremely wealthy but for the extremely wealthy they have massively wealthy rivals look at elon and mark zuckerberg fighting it out at the moment over hundreds of millions of people's accounts and billions of dollars worth of value you know these guys are physically going to step into the cage together and fight it out you know so the rivalries are real so if you say to elon well hey elon why you just give away your money here he's sitting there going because mark zuckerberg will take over and he'll he'll then annihilate me and that's how he might describe it and how it might feel for him what we need is a level playing field where the role of government you know we've so lost our way where what what is government for and all of this sort of stuff but if we can create systems that work and systems that move money around it's good for everyone it's even good for the oligarchs it's good for the entrepreneurs you don't want to live in a society where there is no middle class you can buy things you don't want to live in a society that doesn't have an educated work population you want to live in a society where there is a good symbiotic relationship between markets and entrepreneurs and value you know those those things are equally matched and equally balanced because it's no fun just sitting on a mega yacht by yourself watching the world burn that's not the joy that anyone wants to aspire to.

1:08:42Yeah, I think we should instruct part of the government reform is that every billionaire should have at least 40 minutes of silent meditation every day where they reflect on what they're doing with their life. You'll be amazed how... The ministry of meditation. Yeah, I normally... So I'm about to head at the beginning of August, I'm about to head into a, this year, unfortunately, only 25 days of a silent retreat. But I normally do 40 and 25 days of silence, I can guarantee you will give a lot of clarity about all of the shit I've done in my life. Like, you know, you sit there and in the first couple of days, you hum Pink Floyd music, you know, in the middle of the silence.

1:09:26And then eventually you stop and you go like, why did you do that? You know, why did you treat her that way? Why did she treat you that way? And you start to eventually end up with the questions of why am I here? Have I done well on it? And these are good questions if you ask me. And I think people need to have more of that silence instead of more meetings to make another million dollars. I was actually expecting, Daniel, that we were going to talk about entrepreneurship. But man, man, those topics is an incredible conversation. Let me ask a couple of questions at the end of our conversation. So they say, and I have to admit, I believe that was true about myself every time I was an entrepreneur, that we have entrepreneurs, we have almost naive optimism.

1:10:17Do you believe that to be true to start? And what is here today to be optimistic about, not just for entrepreneurs, but for all of us? So it is actually still the greatest time in history to be an entrepreneur and to be part of an entrepreneurial team. There is more money on the planet than ever before looking for a home, looking for investment. That's greater than any other time in history. The capital that you can raise is greater than at any other time in history, even for an idea or a small business. Secondly, the ability to organise labour, the ability to form teams of the right people. It used to be that you could only form a team of people who were geographically close.

1:10:55Now you can form teams of ideological communities. It used to be that you had to sell to people who were geographically close, and now you can sell to people all over the world. The market sizes have never been greater. It used to be that it was very difficult to access the answers and to be able to get the knowledge, and now the knowledge is distributed so far and wide. It was very rare that someone could have a mentor conversation, and now you just go onto YouTube and there are mentor conversations. So this is the greatest time in history to be an entrepreneur. The second thing is that entrepreneurs solve meaningful problems, and we've never had a crisis of more meaningful problems that are washing up on the beach, right?

1:11:33So we have meaningful problems to solve. So the beauty is that right now, this is the greatest time in history to pick a meaningful problem and access and organize the resources to solve that and to make a lot of money doing it, to become very wildly successful doing it. So this is great. The risk at the moment is that AI has two superpowers. superpower number one is the ability to get you to over consume and superpower number two is the ability to get you to over create so if you go onto your devices and you spend two hours doom scrolling through social media and you never intended to do that then ai was able to successfully get you to over consume if you listen to music on spotify if you buy things on amazon that is the ai encouraging you to consume more than you intended.

1:12:19However, if you go onto other websites and use AI to generate a business plan or to ideate some products or to come up with ways of communicating your ideas more effectively to people far and wide, then AI is powering your ability to create. And one of the biggest distinguishers right now is that there is almost a wedge that is going to be driven through society and half the people or a small, a large group of people are going to be on the side of over-consuming and they're going to feel miserable like force-fed animals. They're going to be miserable because AI made them over-consume and there's going to be a small subset of society who are going to be joyful that they are able to take small ideas and turn them into big ideas through AI.

1:13:06They're able to take the seeds of possibility and turn it into the promise of productivity and they're going to be hyper-creating with AI. So one of the things that has to happen at this particular moment is that everyone has to make a deliberate and conscious decision to be on the creation side of that wedge and to use AI as a tool for creativity and to deliberately carve out time in the day to say, how am I going to interact with AI to solve one of the world's most meaningful problems, to organize people and resources and labor and capital to do something meaningful for the world? How do I play with AI for that objective?

1:13:45And how do I avoid overconsumption through AI? But you said overcreate. Do you think there is an economic impact for the abundance of creation that's happening right now? So, you know, it used to take an artist several weeks to create a work of art. And then, you know, with digital tools, it became a day or two. But now it's basically a prompt. you know someone like me who's an author who took quite faster than the average author four and a half months to write any book once I put my mind to it it seems that I can create a book every 15 minutes now so how does that impact society? Well you're speaking about the underlying economic model that has been in the background of our lives since you know the industrial age so the industrial age is defined by the Adam Smith notion of demand and supply tension and essentially that things that are in scarce supply become very valuable and profitable and things that are in you know a lot of supply become worthless you know that's not the only economic model that's ever existed and that you know we've had many different economic models throughout history and different ways of organizing society and essentially every time there's a major uplift or transformation in technology we tend to come up with new economic models and new ways of organizing society so as i've said the default here is that in a world where most things are automated we end up with digital kings and queens and digital plebs and serfs but we can choose at this point in time to transform that we can have an entrepreneur revolution where we teach people and we organize people around value creation and that we pioneer different sorts of products and services so for example people get an enormous amount of value going to something like burning man they get an enormous amount of value going and doing a group golf day they get an enormous amount of value going to concerts and hearing musicians perform and all of these sorts of things so there are types of things that give us enormous amounts of value that we're willing to pay for that are not necessarily about fulfilling our food and you know survival needs um where we are in society is we have to be asking the right questions rather than coming out with the right answers we need to be thinking about what is the what is the future state society that we want to live in and how do we get there um so every entrepreneur reverse engineers the future that's what they do we say this is what we're trying to build and how do we get to it all right so we start with a vision which a vision is just basically another way of saying what is it we're trying to create what do we what do we see the world looking like and then we say all right how do we reverse engineer that future most people are trained to forward engineer the past they simply say where am i now where have i been and what's the next logical step as opposed to where do i want to get to and how do i reverse engineer that That's a beautiful way to describe it, actually.

1:16:53And quite interesting as a mind shift for a lot of people, not even in business only, I think. The idea is that most of us are reactive to the past. You go into a relationship, he breaks your heart, you leave, you're now looking at the past and saying, how do I not do that again in the future? When in reality, you could say, I want my future to look like this. I reverse engineer that. It means that I need to start from a person that looks like that. I need to take those following actions. That's a beautiful way to describe a way of life, honestly. And that is an entrepreneurial, that's one of the absolute commonalities with entrepreneurs.

1:17:30They reverse engineer the future. So we need to get into this as a discipline where we all say, okay, collectively, what do we want to reverse engineer as a future? And I don't mean that to say that we try and organize society in a socialist or communist kind of way at all. I'd be a believer in the invisible hand of the market and all of those sorts of things. But what I do believe is that we need to have a North Star, a vision, an entrepreneurial vision of what we believe the future should look like. And I don't think it should be neo-feudalism. I have to take notes when I'm talking to you. You speak of those things as if they are in our hands.

1:18:10And I have to admit, sometimes I feel they're not because of that future digital kings and queens scenario. So I am very, very strongly optimistic about the power that the individual has over the machine itself, but not over the redistribution of wealth and power. I think humans, through their behavior, can influence the machine, the artificial intelligence machine. Each and every one of us can influence the Instagram recommendation engine just by making the right choices of what we like and what we don't, right? But none of us can influence the redistribution of wealth and power to meta unless we all jointly decide that we're going to give up on threats.

1:18:53Things happen slowly then they happen very very quickly. Throughout all of history there becomes a natural turning point where if too much wealth accumulates and too much power accumulates in one person's hands or one organization's hands the tools of revolution come out and when i'm talking to the wealthiest people that i know i always say it's not a matter of if wealth will be redistributed it's just a matter of how because it always like throughout all of history eventually the pitchforks come out the ones turn into 11s the aces go from the bottom of the pack to the top of the pack and the game resets there comes a point when you're playing monopoly where it's not fun for the other players anymore i know i remember one person has one person has won clearly they've won and everyone's landing on their hotels and their houses and and the game is no longer fun for the others and what's interesting about that moment is that what almost always happens is that the people who are not having fun they just stop playing They get up and they leave.

1:19:59And this is the problem that people who want to accumulate even more wealth and power have. There eventually comes a point where either people stop playing or they tip the board over and they say, we're not playing this game this way anymore. We're starting the game again. So these are revolutions. Wealth is like a mountain. And there's water that lands on top of the mountain and trickles down the mountain through the rivers and the streams. And it ends up in the lakes. and the lakes are the big wealth creators, the businesses, the technologies, the things where money always ends up. If you think about AWS as a business, it's a lake because all the other web businesses have to pay into that thing and then all the money ends up into the AWS lake and Google is a lake.

1:20:42So there needs to be a way to put the water back onto the mountain so it runs through the streams and the streams don't run dry and it still ends up in the lake, right? It still ends up back in there but if you can keep this going then the whole mountain flourishes. If you just hoard the money in the lake and then the rivers run dry and then everyone on the mountain is starving, this is not a desirable situation for anyone out there. So even the lake owner, right? So the beauty is that we just simply have to have an ecology, not an economy. We need to have an ecological approach where in an ecology, things cycle.

1:21:19They cycle through and everything thrives. We end up with abundance because it's cycling, it's moving. In an economy, we're trying to constrain, we're imposing constraints. We end up with pools of wealth and capital that has nowhere to go. And that's not desirable for wealth managers. Wealth managers want somewhere to put it. We just have to have sensible ways to make sure that that ecology and that cycle keeps flowing. Beautiful metaphor. I agree with you that you said it several times, the pitchforks will eventually come out. perhaps not my favorite scenario, but it seems inevitable. Yeah, but things can change very rapidly.

1:21:59Throughout all of history, for example, there was times in Britain where one person became extraordinarily wealthy and they introduced a 99 % wealth tax. And that wasn't that long ago. It was the Duke of Wellington. The Duke of Wellington, I actually know his descendants. And they said that the Duke of Wellington was the wealthiest person in the world at the time and then they put a 99 % wealth tax in and just in one generation, boom, they redistributed the whole thing. So throughout all of history, there are peaceful ways of transferring wealth. There are all sorts of ways of transferring wealth that don't involve violence or revolution and also that are good for people, that are good for, you know, that fit without values.

1:22:40For example, it fits with most wealthy people's values, the idea of meritocracy and earning it and simply just passing on truckloads of wealth to the next generation the next generation the next generation who didn't earn it and it actually makes them miserable and they end up with drug addictions and gambling habits and all this other stuff this is of no one's benefit either so you know there are certain ways that the game can be fun for everyone to play and win we don't want to have a situation where you know we all end up I don't think universal basic income is going to make people happy either.

1:23:15The idea that you just get money for nothing and there's no struggle and there's no creativity. I don't think that's the answer. But I think we're smart enough to come up with a society that works. I would hope so. So when you talk about the game being fun, let me close with this one question, because I actually think we have spoken about so much that I will invite my listeners to go back and listen to this and take notes. because believe it or not, everyone listening, I will listen back to this and take notes. You may have seen me scribble with my phone a few times because there are some very profound ideas that were shared here.

1:23:49So fun, making the game fun. So Daniel, you spoke about purpose and you said that you tend to see yourself as someone who used the method of entrepreneurship to solve meaningful problems. What is happiness to you? uh well happiness has different levels there's the happiness that i have in having a family and passing on the gift of life to family and to raising raising family there's the happiness of work where i'm doing meaningful work and i'm enjoying meaningful work there's the happiness of struggle right where i've engaged myself in in hard problems and i feel that it may work out or it may not work out and that in some way I am going to do things or take actions that could tip the balance between things working out or not working out.

1:24:39So there's this kind of like enjoyable, meaningful struggle. And, you know, all of that fits kind of my tapestry of happiness. What is happiness? And then also there's the happiness of knowing that I'm not the main character in the world, that actually I'm just part of the tapestry. Three generations, four generations from now, no one at all will know me or remember me or have any of that. And three steps removed from my circles, no one cares. There's actually a great profound joy and happiness and release in knowing that I'm just part of a tapestry, that we are all part of this incredible intertwined game or soup or tapestry that we are all stitched together somehow.

1:25:23and that actually we're, you know, through time and space, we all just blend into one. I just posted about that literally last week to say that you're not the star of the movie. It's quite interesting that you bring that up. Why does that make you happy? Is it because it takes the responsibility off your shoulders? You know, like I'm not the main character here. That means I don't have to solve everything. Or is it because you don't want to be in the spotlight? Why does it make you happy? one of the most profound moments of my life when I was in my mid-20s I was making a million dollars a month worth of sales and I was I was the king of the kids I was paying for everyone to go everywhere I would hire out areas of nightclubs and restaurants and I had all the things right all the I had a cool car and a cool girlfriend and and her friends were this amazing set of great girls and we sailing adventures and all this sort of stuff and I'm thinking of myself as just the star of the movie, right?

1:26:22I'm definitely the star of the movie at that point in my mind. And I was dealing with all this stuff and I remember this one time flying out of Brisbane and I'm on a plane and I look down and there's this football match and there's these people kicking a football around and I can't see the ball, but I can see them moving towards the ball and I can imagine where the ball must be because of how they're moving. And I think to myself, isn't it hilarious to those stupid little dots that football is important and meaningful I can't even see it, but that is the focus of their life right now. And then I look at the audience, the arena of all the spectators, and I go, isn't it hilarious to those stupid little dots that they're focused on these people who are focused on a ball that I can't even see, right?

1:27:06So then I'm just kind of looking at this scenario. And then I can see all the cars driving around the city, and I think to myself, isn't it fascinating, all these little dots living out their dot lives in their little dot cars? and like they're comparing their dot car to someone else's dot car and I'm like looking at I look at the whole of Brisbane City and I think isn't that hilarious I don't know why I had this thought but I remember thinking they've all got a coffee table and on the coffee table there's a book or a magazine and they all like to them that's an important thing and isn't it hilarious that in all those houses they're just living out these dot lives I have no idea what they do to them it's important to them it's it's meaningful and I'm looking at society in this way and then it hits me this profound thing happened i realized that if any of them looked up into the sky they would see a red dot and a green dot on the wings and inside that little tiny metal tube is 150 little dots living out their life and then all of a sudden it hit me oh my god i am just a dot i'm just a dot and i went now it must have only lasted for three seconds But for three seconds, I completely felt that I was part of the soup.

1:28:23I felt like I was part of the tapestry, that all of my significance, all of my main characterness, all of my ego melted away. and I had an experience of what it feels like to just blend into the soup or the tapestry of society and to be part like like one with with it and I fell backwards into it and it was this moment and I tasted something that felt incredibly powerful it felt so overwhelmingly important that it was like this just glimpse into a different way here I was running in this direction trying to be the main character. And actually, it was completely eclipsed by the feeling of being just a dot.

1:29:08Yeah. And it is so profound when you recognize that all of the intricacies of our little lives, when you really, really zoom out, you turn out to be that one pixel that interestingly completes the canvas. So without that one pixel, the art is destroyed. But it's not what's within the pixel and how the carbon atoms are organized. It's that one pixel that you are that makes this whole thing stitch together and become something that's so beautiful. I love you, man. I think I get tons of guests here and we have amazing conversations. My favorite conversations are the ones where I tell myself, I'm going to have to really think deeply about what he said here.

1:29:54I'm going to have to think deeply about being that one dot in the canvas, which is beautifully described by you, but said in a way that's really an amazing reminder. The idea of solving meaningful problems, I think, is going to stick with me for quite a bit of time, knowing why I live my life the way I live it. But you taught me so many things about AI, believe it or not, being the sort of authority figure on the topic, speaking to millions every other week on the topic. You opened my mind to so much today, Daniel. I am so grateful for your time. I'm sure that you'll open the minds of our listeners as well.

1:30:35And I love the diversity of your view on life. It's incredible. Really grateful that you joined me today. It's been an amazing experience. Thank you for having me. And for all of you listening, I hope, no, I think you must have enjoyed this as much as I did. Once again, this is one of those conversations where there are those profound moments where you may think this was just another sentence, but if you go back and dig deep at some of those sentences, there is a whole book to be thought through. I'm planning to do that. I encourage you to go back and listen to this one more time and understand the profound shifts that are happening in our society and how the past of our soil-based land compares to our future of the digital land and how that impacts on every one of us and how optimism and commitment to doing meaningful things can change everything.

1:31:28I am very, very grateful for all of you to give me the opportunity to invite amazing, amazing thinkers on this podcast and have those conversations. It's all because you keep supporting me. So please do it. Keep supporting this podcast. Rate it five stars. Tell people about it. Share it on your social media. don't leave the expansion of this and the reach of those messages up to me. You can contribute to that and I'm really, really grateful when you do. Remember as well that there are times in our life where a little bit of silence and a little bit of space, a little bit of slowing down really gives you an opportunity to reflect on things that can take you very far.

1:32:09So it doesn't matter how busy you are this week. Please, please, please take a little bit of time to slow down. I love you all for listening and I will see you next time.