Josh Hart with Rory Sutherland and Elfried Samba on AI, people and the future of work

25:44Because we've democratized the research, there is now the belief that the instinct is no longer valuable. And therefore, you get a lot of people saying, oh, well, if the science tells us this, this is what we should do. Whereas actually, it's as much an art as it is a science to build something worthy of someone's attention and desire. And it's not quite so straightforward. But one of the interesting things is there's a lot of tech bros going out in the market right now saying, hey, guys, you can listen to all your customers and then just build them exactly what they're asking for, and you're going to have a successful business.

26:12Oh, yeah. And everyone's like, oh, that's such a good idea. Why didn't I think of listening to my customers? Well, obviously, you know, a great product person or a great creator will listen, but they will listen for things that everyone else isn't listening for. Well, actually, most innovation is actually speculative, but it's all... I mean, if you look at, actually, most really major innovations, they are not an incremental improvement upon what already is. They're someone noticing a metric that everybody else has overlooked and doubling down on it. So if you think about it, these two examples I always give is Uber didn't really improve the experience of riding in a cab.

26:53What they did is they massively transformed the anxiety of waiting for a cab because you had a little nap. And Apple, you know, at a time when the whole Silicon Valley crowd were obsessed with what computers could do, asked a completely orthogonal question, which is, what does it make you feel like while you're doing it? Yeah. Okay. And so nearly all innovations, I think, are actually a... This is why they often require marketing, because you need to get the customer to stop paying attention to the old benchmark and start noticing the new benchmark, if you like. And so innovations are very often things that nobody asked for because they weren't even looking at the thing at the time or even conscious of the thing as a problem.

27:33And then you come along and you have a little map and you suddenly solve a major problem for people and then they notice. But again, not many people, if you ask people what you want from a taxi firm, they'd say, I want the taxi to turn up quickly. They wouldn't say, I'd like a lower sense of anxiety and uncertainty while waiting.

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29:11The way I used to say Uber innovated was that they broke the compliance, the regulation actually. They did that as well. The big novelty of Uber in my mind was that it was illegal to hail a private hire car. But suddenly we all put a phone in our hand, which I'm holding here, and you could suddenly just effectively put your phone in the road and you could hail a private hire car. And they just found a way around that regulation, which then said, because it may have been that the demand was always there. You're absolutely right. You were effectively hailing a car with a phone rather than a hand.

29:37Yeah, that's it. And it just broke something. To be honest, Airbnb probably broke a whole load of local. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure. Because you're basically operating a hotel. Yeah, all those Airbnbs, the mum and pop Airbnbs that would exist all over the country, just disappeared into Airbnb. You know, anyone could do it. But again, when those technologies came about, it was a bunch of people that created the laws that said, you can't do this. What happened? The young people say, well, we'll work our way around it. Because you're not even thinking about the actual problem that's happened, right?

30:09Because I think a lot of the times there's this quote that everyone always uses the Henry Ford like, oh, if you ask people what they wanted, they would ask for a faster horse. And they say that that's why Steve Jobs just made intuitive decisions. But he didn't. He just observed what people were actually doing versus what the trends that everybody was speaking about. So we'd realize that actually, even though he was an elitist from an intellectual's perspective, he wanted to create products that anybody could use intuitively, right? Yeah. And I think that that level of humanization, because if you think about how the world's been built until this point.

30:43It's only when I did NLP that I realized that there's four different types of learning, right? And that's how you realize that the educational system and how we basically structured everything is completely wrong and focuses on one benefit, which is digital thinkers. So if you can read and download data and speak in facts and figures, the current world is gamified towards your benefit, right? But then there's three other types, which is auditory, which is listening, visual, which is seeing. And then there's the biggest one of all is kinesthetic, which is how we feel, our gut, right? And that's where trust lives.

31:18And the problem is, so I was speaking to a friend of mine that's a teacher, and she realized that there was a group of girls in the class that just couldn't get this physics lesson that they were trying to put across. Then you realize, okay, there's a tool called Music GPT. you guys love Drake I'm going to take this put it on MusicGPT and present it to you as a song the recall went all the way through the room right because they just adapted how they actually transform information so it sticks and people can actually utilize it now think about what the schooling experience becomes when you start to focus on experience which is kinesthetic right and the best way to determine how this works is a car salesperson will basically show you the features like like read it out to you so that that taps into your digital.

32:11They'll make you listen to the stereo or the engine that taps into your audio. They'll make you see the car, how it looks, the design, and they'll make you sit inside and ask you, how does it feel? Do a test drive, right? That's all tapping into the four areas of how you learn. But if you think about how most things are built, it's based on IQ, but computers will do that better than us all day. The other things that we need to tap into, which is why I think that a lot of, the trend that I've seen with a lot of young people is two spectrums. One, they've kind of no longer trust the corporate dynamic today because they realize that when push comes to shove, corporations are going to pick profits over people, right?

32:50And they realize that actually it's better for me to be loyal to mom and dad. That's a quicker way for me to buy a house than going into this rabbit hole of working for a corporation, right? Inheriting a house is a better way, a better strategy, right? So the loyalty is more there. And on the other side, it's actually, why don't we just build the things that we wish existed, right? So you're seeing the two spectrums. That's what I'm seeing a lot. Because it's like, well, what other options have you got, right? You know that the route you're going to go in there is as soon as Rory was saying that first, as long as the business is doing well, then you're safe.

33:23Now you don't even know whether you're safe. You don't know. The risk of building your own thing and working somewhere in the immediate, in the current, how things are happening right now, it's basically the same, right? So just on the not safe thing, bearing in mind the audience we have here today, I think that we may not know if we're safe, but there's one way to certainly be unsafe, which is not to learn. So, you know, I think it was the CEO of Microsoft. I'm terrible with names, but I'm sure. Satya Nadala. There you go. Thank you. Anyway, he said this great line, which stuck with me. Unfortunately, the name didn't.

33:57but he had this great line and it was, it is, we're moving from a world of know-it-alls to a world of learn-it-alls. And I think that, you know, I'm lucky because in the product engineering, you know, it's always been learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. What's new, what's new, what's new. And a lot of people maybe haven't had that same intensity of experience of always having to learn what's coming up and feeling like an idiot all the time because something's new and you are now in the old and you're the legacy. I think that the real opportunity, and I did tell my colleagues this when we started buying in Claude Cowork, is this is the greatest thing I can do for you, is buy the hottest technology of this moment, give you tokens, the currency of AI, and say, go nuts.

34:43You know, this is it. I can help. We can coach. We can teach. We can do all of those things. But ultimately, we can give you access. And it's going to require you to become a learn-it-all. and that is it's a big ask of different people in organizations but if you spend the money and you take the time and you do the care you can give people something that i think is kind of beautiful which i've never in my life been given the opportunity to give someone something truly beautiful to give someone a trade give someone a skill set that they need they don't want they need so that they stay competitive and relevant in the future is something i think every organization needs to take very seriously.

35:22And I think that if you want to retain staff right now, what people are going to be looking at is how are you adapting to this new changing technical landscape? How are you embracing it and making sure that your people are learning about it so that they feel that they're part of this thing happening in the world? Because the only thing worse than the uncertainty is the certainty of what would happen if you don't learn this stuff. I was actually going to ask the question, and you put it beautifully there, because a lot of leaders are probably struggling with how do they introduce AI to their workforce in a way that they don't feel threatened by it.

35:57So what do you think is the best approach? How should an organization approach AI when it comes to introducing it to their people? You guys got any thoughts on that? Oh, crikey.

36:15It's quite problematic because the ideal solution would be to make it highly voluntary. However, it has to be at the very least. That won't work. However, some sort of participatory approach will probably work best. But the other thing is actually, I work with a culture design company called Gaping Void. And one of the best power plays, which very, very few leaders ever adopt, is to say, I'm not really sure about this and I'll need you all to help. There's a very, very weird thing where people at the top of organizations feel they always have to project the pretense of knowing the answers to everything.

36:56And actually, admissions of ignorance and uncertainty are A, surprisingly powerful in terms of getting people to come with you.

37:09And bizarrely, people, but in this case, I think it's the only intellectually honest response because we haven't got a clue. I mean, if you take the advertising industry where I've worked for 35 years, I keep surmising, no one listens to me. I keep saying, look, we've always worked on the basis of a client requests an advertisement or briefs us with a problem. And then we go through a whole strategic process and then eventually we produce some form of communication. I said, that makes absolute sense if the production of those communications is massively expensive. So Fabergé eggs, I've always said, look, the reason you had to commission a Fabergé egg was the gold was very expensive, the craftsmanship was very time-consuming, you couldn't just have a load of people just grabbing hold of gold and making random eggs.

37:54Actually, with AI, does it work backwards? Will production companies simply produce advertisements unasked for and then go and find a buyer? Now, that sounds really weird to everybody in the advertising industry until I said, no one went to the Beatles and said, we want to commission a song about a submarine. okay and my contention is it's a bit kind of clay christensen innovators dilemma that actually the people at the tail end of the process if what they do suddenly becomes monumentally less expensive and they're monumentally more productive may find it makes more sense to actually generate content and then collect the upside rather than spending their lives waiting to be asked now i don't know Now, to be honest about this, I throw this out because I simply see it as a perfectly plausible possibility.

38:44Will it happen like that? Absolutely no idea. But generally, the direction of travel is from people commissioning. I know there was this huge trend for customisation in the early days of the internet. Do you remember that? Where people had the deranged idea that everybody wanted to design their own shoes. And it turns out they really don't, do they? Okay? You know, I mean, you'd think categories like watches, shoes, etc. would have been dominated by customization. Turns out they're not. People want to actually see something, fall in love with it, buy it. And so, I mean, to some extent, to argue that this is actually a journey we're making together where all ideas are welcome, and fundamentally what we've just got to do is get rid of ambiguity aversion.

39:28Because I think the need to be decisive and to look as if you know everything in a field where things, first of all, there's a mixture of good and evil, which I don't think we can deny here. I mean, some of the threats from this are absolutely monumental. So I think that urge to actually pretend you have no sense of ambiguity about this. One very, very good advisor, who's the advisor on the AI to the Commonwealth, he was at a conference in Dublin, said the first thing you've got to do with AI is stop treating your relationship with it like your relationship with a football team. In other words, you either hate them or you love them and it's unquestioning and so forth.

40:02You've got to be very, very happy with degrees of discomfort, by the way. And so, you know, being enthusiastic about something while also being cynical about it is quite difficult. But it's the only, to be honest, I think it's the only healthy response to take. Well, the first thing that you said there was, you've been saying this to the advertising industry, but they're not listening, right? And really, where Rory started to be all over the place was on TikTok, talk because who's listening to rory the new people that are trying to build a new world because rory's providing a contrarian view to what um uh everybody else is deeming even not thinking about so going back to that whole question of the people that have built how things are today are the ones that are saying oh well we don't need any more people because we think that we've clocked it but really what rory's saying that actually if you look at the problem from a different perspective because of AI, there's actually more things to be built.

40:59I'm actually very optimistic because I asked this to a few people that I know, which is if you ask somebody what they did, chances are they do one of 20 jobs, right? Chances are. An engineer, a doctor, you usually know what it is. Are you telling me with the amount of challenges, problems, things that are out there in the world, that that's the only jobs that exist? Are those the ones that we've settled for based on our conventional knowledge right now? I think that once people start to say, what are the actual problems out there that we've already been thinking about? That's when you'll start to see new roles and new opportunities that are going to start to be...

41:36Well, I mean, obviously you for social media, right? I mean, if we just play it back, I mean, that narrative has existed for you in your life. Yeah, the early days of my career, people used to ask me, what do you do? And these are people that are paying my salary, right? They're like, what do you want us to call you, right? Is it a community direct? Like, what is it, right? So even the concept of community is still new, right? Being someone in charge of social media wasn't a thing before social media. And then social media erupted because of the internet and because of the different platforms that came into existence.

42:06And even now, what was a Facebook or an Instagram person a minute ago now needs to be a video content creator as opposed to an image content creator. And it's all transforming very quickly. And the people that were writing tweets, you had to be an amazing wordsmith. You have to be an amazing visual person. and you have to be an amazing animation person. In all those three different areas, that just happens so quickly. And that was one job that didn't exist however long ago. I do wonder, though, in your example of the creative industries, whether, you know, if people have more time, you know, the thing I've noticed and probably everyone in the room that's using AI, if they're not filling their...

42:43If they haven't gone through the obsessive... Once you're over the obsessive hurdle of, like, filling every moment of every day with trying to, like, make the robots do what you want, which is enjoyable, but, like, you eventually realize, okay, you know, I'm more productive, great. Maybe I could take that time and not just try and learn more stuff about AI for a minute and do something else. I think what I realized was I could spend more time being more considered and thoughtful and going deeper into tacit knowledge about problems that I had in front of me, rather than being more reactive. So I think a lot of us in our working lives are so reactive.

43:15And I actually think the degree of reactiveness we have misses a lot of depth that we could be discovering in the problems that we're facing. And we could be reflecting upon it. We could be taking more time to make decisions. And I'm wondering if what AI actually does isn't speed things up even further, but creates an opportunity to slow down. When you do a creative project, and I've spent enormous money on building creatives, I get very, you know, I've messed it up sometimes. We've done it too fast. We've spent the money. Oh, the date's up. We don't have the brief right. It's not right. Oh, God, let's just do something.

43:47Oh, we've done it. How much money did you spend? And everyone's just chasing and chasing and chasing the outcome. Maybe what company could change is not necessarily reducing headcount, but increasing thought capital that goes in to the things that they choose to do. Because actually, once you've run a few businesses, you begin to realize what really matters is what you did, not how long it took you to do it. Of course, of course. Was the outcome meaningful enough? And I think that's maybe, I don't know, an optimistic view of how we could reallocate people's time to be more thoughtful on the decisions they are being asked to make, because I think we are in a dangerously reactive society now.

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45:52You saw it in COVID, right? A lot of people's biggest life changes happen because of opportunity to have, to think and reflect during COVID because they have more time, right? Like, would I have started a business if it wasn't for COVID? Probably not, right? Because you were just going with emotions, right? And then the handbrake happens, and now you're thinking, oh, so we're in a very interesting time in the world. what do I want out of life is to have time to reflect, right? And if you think about companies like Google, some of the biggest innovations to come out of Google have come from them allocating time for team members to actually build things, right?

46:26So you have two different types of leaders. You get this very powerful technology that comes in. One says, let's cut the cost and let's save money. The other says, let's give people more time so they can build new solutions and new things. That's two different approaches. And I've got to say, for those listening and those here, one of the very, very senior executives at one of the very big AI businesses I was asking about the productivity gains in other words, how much money are you saving? And they said, by and large, 3 % to 5%. And that's very interesting, right? Because the narrative does not match that statement.

47:01So if you speak to real people, real companies selling this en masse, on large, 3 % to 5 % right now. And I think that people have fired as if it was going to be 50 % productivity and now they're all reeling and dealing with the consequences. But the reality here, and this is, I think, powerful when you have these conversations at work with your peers who are like, can't we just, you know, can we not just like, let's not make more money this year, let's just kind of reduce the cost. You know, you can only do it so much. By the way, there are precedents, certainly, of technology being adopted by companies in order to look current, which are almost certainly massively deleterious to productivity.

47:39So in an extreme case, we have the typewriter, okay? once the typewriter was invented, you had to type all your business letters because you looked like an amateur if you sent handwritten letters. It ultimately meant that because most people in business didn't type, everything was written three times for the sake of appearances. I mean, undoubtedly, had you banned the typewriter, you probably would have created an enormous increase in productivity in American companies. Now, what I do feel about this, by the way, is that the amount of money being invested in it is actually unconscionable. If you consider the opportunity cost of what would have happened if you'd spent the money on healthcare, on roads, bridges in some cases, on welfare, to spend trillions of dollars on entirely one thing based on the assumption that this is going to produce a winner-takes-all result, which I don't think that's a safe assumption.

48:34Everybody's assuming there's going to be another Google, another meta, another, you know, network effect winner takes all player here. And it's possible. But actually, it's equally possible that this becomes a bit like Wi-Fi. You know, it's a commodity. It's universally available. Different people build very successful businesses on top of it. But no one dominates it to any particularly exciting extent. Like the Internet? But there's no, you know, we've, okay, we've seen these winner-takes-all effects at least play out for a time. Obviously, Amazon, obviously Google, okay? But I think what we're experiencing right now, so I do hear that.

49:14But, I mean, there's nothing actually about the technology itself, I would argue, that makes that inevitable. But then what we're seeing, so right now, what we're seeing across the major investment players, so we may have heard yesterday, Anthropic, or maybe it had been this morning, like 2 a.m., Anthropic are about trying to beat OpenAI to the IPO. So it's going to be a trillion-dollar market listing. It's mental, like massive numbers. And independent of whether we think it's going to be a winner takes all, I don't think AI itself is the thing that you can protect so much. I think the thing that they're all trying to build is harnesses.

49:48That's why the real war that went on was Cursor built its harness. Then I think OpenAI built their harness. And the harness is an IDE. it's basically the way you interface with the AI. Everyone was trying to own the harness at one point. Cursor came out and then they got that 60 billion sellout valuation potential from Elon Musk a couple of weeks ago. You have anti-gravity with Google. You have Claude Code, which is its own quite magical harness that people fell in love with. That is, to me, the defensible product that they're creating, in the same way that VS Code was to some degree defensible for how long?

50:26I mean, the other thing is that consumers may actually want something suboptimal because it makes more sense to them. Okay? This is sort of VHS world. Or Apple. Yeah. I'm an Android user as well. Don't worry. Yeah. One thing is that no one is putting any money into making the interfaces with these things more interesting. Yeah. Because they have an interface which is like something from the web in 1997. Yeah. You type into the thing and then it writes back to you. Yeah. There is no real correlation between the kind of things that tech people find exciting and what consumers find beneficial. Okay, so just to give an example, I'm so fucking old, I can remember using a thing called Lotus Notes.

51:10Does anybody remember this? Yeah. Okay, right, okay. Now, we all complained about Lotus Notes and went, this is shit. I mean, Waitrose was using it five years ago. They used it five years ago. And the interesting thing is, it's something occurred to me that the Outlook email and calendaring system I currently use isn't any better than Lotus Notes was when we all complained about it in about 1997. There's been absolutely zero progress in fields like email, calendaring, etc. And there are whole areas which people spend hours of their day doing, which have basically stagnated, possibly because nerds just don't find working on it very interesting.

51:46I'm terrified to disagree with you because you're so smart. But why is it so shit? It is really shit. It's such a good point. I mean, it's just awful. I would argue email has undertaken a massive transformation. There is a company across the road from us here called Slack, which is a very, very big internal communication tool that took what was effectively... No, no, no, it's another fucking thing. It's young people who treat WhatsApp as if it's a business communication tool, right? It's where my kids send me pictures of a funny dog, right? And then suddenly I discover people are inviting me to business meetings.

52:19On WhatsApp, yeah. Fucking hell, I'm 60 years old. Fuck off. Nobody's actually from AI companies is going out and researching consumers and saying, what would you actually like? So I'll give you two examples that Alfred and I discussed yesterday of two examples that maybe will be better than Slack, I hope. The first one is Spotify. So Spotify is something that, for all good reasons, right, you kind of think it would be over by now, right? They came in, they sorted out the digital rights management for all the music, and they made it that we could globally experience all the songs we know and love anywhere in the world.

52:51At the same time, okay, loads of people have done that before. Apple had it. I think there's been like five or six different providers that do the exact same thing. But the thing that I noticed really recently was that I've been listening to what is the indie playlist on my Spotify, and it changes every day. And effectively, what it is, is it's AI identifying what music I love and trying to recommend me, but not recommending me by saying, hey, let me recommend you something. It just feeds me the trough of the music. I know what it's going to be like. So suddenly I go from someone who's never heard a new song in 15 years, as I'm sure many other people, you know, you've got your playlist on the equivalent iPod, and you're like, okay, I only know my playlist.

53:31Or maybe this is me. I only listen to my playlist. Now I'm like, I suddenly get to know new music. And I'm listening to new songs. And that is where, to me, AI, Spotify doesn't present itself as the AI business of today. But in my mind, it's a really good example of a business that really only has its differentiator in that it is leveraging AI right now because the digital rights are now becoming much more available through many more platforms. Amazon Music, for one, YouTube Music. They're all the same thing. There's a little group started on Twitter which was slightly inspired by my talk, Sweat the Small Stuff, and they're called a political action group called Quibble.

54:05And their whole function is to campaign to get government to basically work on minor irritations which are beneath the dignity of government, like cookie approval things, pop-ups, okay? One of the benefits of Brexit that was inarguable is that you could have got rid of that shit, okay? Where every time you visit a new website, you have to say, okay, seven times, okay? And one of the things that does intrigue me is that there is a divide between human happiness in terms of solving big problems like world peace, okay? which is not for most of us to do, unfortunately, and solving day-to-day irritations.

54:48Just an interesting question. How many people, when you use voice dictation, suddenly read back on what's been dictated and you find the sentence, oh, fucking hell, this voice dictation is really shit? Okay, right. This happens all the time. Okay, happens all the time. It seems utterly bizarre to me in some ways. And I worry about this because a large part of this is the status of the problem on which you work. So John Major, I had a big row with the political editor of the Financial Times, because he thought it was ridiculous. You won't remember this. There was a prime minister called John Major who set up something called a cones hotline, where you could report traffic cones that were basically blocking a road when nobody was doing any work.

55:31And you could demand that they were removed. And he, as the political editor of the FT, thought it was completely beneath the dignity of a prime minister to get involved with it. Funnily enough, it still exists, will you believe it? But my argument is, for most people most of the time, that's the thing that really annoys them. It irks them. It creates friction. It creates business inefficiency. And what's so weird about this world is that we introduce things, things like open plan offices, which I think should have been treated with extreme scepticism, unquestioningly assumed to be a benefit. Nobody can make a phone call ever again.

56:03No, no, no. Nobody can have a private conversation and so on. And actually they're antisocial because there's always one neurotic person around any table who doesn't like any noise, which prevents everybody else talking, in my experience. But I'm Welsh. I'm calibrated for noisy. It's fine. Shouting is our normal mode. But it does interest me that there's this weird mixture of kind of wild enthusiasm where certain things, we're unbelievably sceptical. If you wanted to go and buy cakes for all your clients who are listening online, okay, you'd have to do a cost-benefit analysis this and you'd have to go through this immense level of justifying yourself to the finance function.

56:45Partly because cakes are nice and enjoyable and therefore they're treated with suspicion by the finance function. And yet we make these enormous business decisions, like open plan offices, for example, and no one does any empirical work whatsoever. And even when you do do the measurement and it comes back negative, everybody just completely ignores it. So there's something weird going on here, I think, in terms of our assessment, our ability objectively to assess what's going on here. You know, we're in that weird kind of world where nobody considers the, I mean, this is my point about nobody considers, nobody in business ever considered the opportunity cost of investing in tech.

57:23And so we, one of the things, you know, my employer, WPP, has spent a few hundred million investing in AI. I think it's probably a good thing to do. But nobody said, well, without money, you can hire all of the world's best copywriters for the next 15 years. Would that actually be a more valuable thing to do? Perfectly worthwhile to us. But strangely, tech has this magical property, which is that money spent on tech is automatically assumed to be both future-proofing you and increasing your efficiency, and therefore it doesn't receive the same scrutiny as money spent on anything else, least of all human beings.

58:00The interesting thing as well is that there was a stat that said, obviously investors and private equity etc etc they always have a theme for the year or for a moment and right now it's AI etc etc etc and the funny thing is whatever the biggest theme was for each year over the last 15 years the biggest company to come out of that period was not aligned with that theme right so that just shows that everybody goes into this herd mentality they're all building towards one side and somebody says well actually you guys are getting this all wrong you're not solving the actual problem and they build something completely on the other side and that ends up becoming the biggest company.

58:39Apparently you're a watch enthusiast. Watch dealers get together and they basically decide what's going to be the big thing in a few years' time. They'll pick some particular watch. It's a very important skill. There need to be enough of them that the market's actually large. You can't just pick an individual watch because there's only one of them. But it's got to be scarce enough that you can create complete insanity around people competing for this watch. And effectively, they'll pick some sort of arbitrary watch from, you know, four years ago that's no longer made, and they'll just effectively ramp the whole thing up.

59:13Swatch and AP. Yeah, well, that was genius. In fairness, I think that's so radically weird that I'm not sure there is much, you know, but that was an extraordinary calibration. But, I mean, collective insanity, I mean, individual insanity, it's actually Nietzsche, so probably not the best person to quote, But he always says that individual insanity is comparatively rare. Collective insanity is the norm, pretty much. And we're much, much more subject as human beings to collective insanity than individual insanity. Just to bring us to the... I think we're in our last five minutes. So just to bring us into the thought that my colleague mentioned to me that I had to ask.

59:54Of course. So we've got this situation in the UK, which is the people are becoming long-term sick. This is a real problem that everybody in lots of businesses are facing. How do we deal with long-term sickness? It is coalescing with a moment where companies are doing mass AI adoption. So you've got companies trying to apply AI into their workforces, and you've got a load of people who are at home and immobile or unable to work. I think one of the really interesting opportunities that we've presented with, I think it's the Mayfield report. It was saying that we're the countries like 400 billion.

1:00:28Someone nod or shake their head at me, the 400 billion-ish number. Anyway, effectively, our economy is majorly suffering due to the number of people not working at the moment. And there has been public investment around AI going into kind of the public sphere, saying, okay, great, let's invest in the young people so that at least they become, or at least the people that aren't working, so that they can kind of adapt. I have this like inner fear that I'm wondering about is how do we make sure that the people who are off today don't come back tomorrow to a world that's changed too much? Because what's going to happen over the next two to three years is that the way we work, it's going to be like learning Excel all over again, learning how to use a computer all over again, how to interact with a computer.

1:01:14I mean, forget like how to Google, right? You ask a question, it gives you an answer. But in the new world, you ask a robot to go and do something and you're like managing a team of robots. It's a very different type of work that we do when we interact with AI. So one of the things on my mind is, you know, apart from obviously the benefits of like keeping people off work, like from going off work, which is what you like us. How does one focus in the rehabilitation process to get them skilled up to this new world? Because that's going to be a real challenge, I think, for the kind of economy at large to make sure that we don't miss the moment as a country.

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1:02:35Apply today and earn a welcome offer of$1 ,500 cash back after you spend$50 ,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership. Terms apply. Learn more at go.amex.graphite. You may luck out a few times in that sometimes the talents that make you quite a valuable user of AI may be the very talents that were punished at school. So we may discover, you know, we may discover, I don't think this will be, you know, the solution to everything by any means, but I think there will be a group, just as entrepreneurialism doesn't really correlate that well with how people did at school.

1:03:11We may well find a useful group of people who simply didn't like or weren't well attuned to conventional education who suddenly turn incredibly valuable here. That would be interesting. So people who didn't almost work well in their, you know, found it overwhelming, found it difficult. I mean, school and higher education was really designed to produce administrators for the British Empire or something. I mean, you know, the whole purpose of these things was to produce a reliable managerial cost. And actually, you know, the demand for those people may be diminishing, I think. I hope so. And we talked about the fact that actually, instead of like student finance being how it is right now, instead of like getting people into 30, 40, 50 grand of debt, it's probably more now with what the prices are, you should actually give people the opportunity to learn where the world is going and actually give them a fund to be able to start building solutions to problems that currently exist that no longer need to exist.

1:04:13So instead of getting people to work for more people, why don't you actually create a fund so that people can build the future so they're not left behind, they're actually building where the world is going. I think that's an interesting thing, because if you think about entrepreneurship in Britain, it's not as big as in the US. So what we need to be able to do is make sure that we build that fire back into, because if you look at the crop of the entrepreneurs we have here, we have some of the best in the world, but enthusiasm, backing, and a system that actually fosters that. It's the scaling that's the problem, not the staffing.

1:04:45And it's just like, instead of it being student financing, just be business or building financing, and then give people the opportunity to build a future. Then you get people that are still intact, and it's actually very useful, and it's building jobs, building new opportunities. An interesting policy thing which I keep proposing is that you should be able to take your student loans and spend them on anything you like. Isn't that what happens at the moment? I mean, I didn't go to university. So I assumed like all these videos of kids being like, I spent it all in my first month and I'm living off hot noodles.

1:05:14Well, by the way, most people, if you give them lump sums, it's one of the great myths is that if you give people lump sums, they'll do stupid things. If you give people constant welfare payments, they'll be responsible. Doesn't really work. Lump sums, people are surprisingly responsible with, generally, particularly if they get the idea that this is a one-off. But my view is that if you want to take the money and rather than giving it to a university, you want to buy a van because you think that'll improve your employment prospects most, that seems to be perfectly legitimate. Lending someone money and saying you have to spend it on education is just an absurd subsidy and effectively creates a kind of arms race, an educational arms race.

1:05:57And so one of the things you could do generally, I think, to eliminate poverty would be to give everybody access to a reasonable amount of money early in their life. Another idea which is even cleverer is I think Roger L. Martin, the Canadian business guru, argues at the moment you get, what is it,£11 ,000,£12 ,000 of your income is tax-free, okay, and then you pay tax on the rest. Roger Martin in Canada wanted to make it so the first £250 ,000 Canadian dollars you earned in your life was tax-free, after which you paid tax on all income. And the idea was you gave people forward-weighted, flexible capital.

1:06:37And once people have a certain amount of money they can draw on, their consumption behavior becomes, and their investment behavior becomes much, much more intelligent. I feel very grateful to be here today and to be able to meet both of these guys. I feel very lucky to meet some of what you want to say is that they should never meet their heroes because they'll hate them. And I've always thought Rory's a fascinating speaker, businessman, and creative. And I'm happy to say that I don't think he's an absolute. So I think that walking away from that with that feeling is nice. So I think we've learned a lot today.

1:07:17We've discussed creativity, AI, how we bring these worlds together, how we apply them at work. And I like to think that I will walk away personally with knowledge that you're not a villain. Which is quite nice. Don't be evil. So far, so good. Although the property taxes doesn't do you any favours. No, no. Property is just an extractive form of wealth. Thank you so much for being here. And obviously everyone, as I'm meant to be promoting Ulife, go to ulife.com and Ulife, Ulife, Ulife. Thank you, everybody. Thank you very much indeed.

1:08:19We'll see you next time.

1:08:26You're welcome. Columbia. Engineered for whatever.

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