The Global Freelancing Boom and You! | Freelancer.com's CEO, Matt Barrie

0:00Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the quality of people. you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

0:42And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great big candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

1:25Is AI going to take your job? Another way to put it is, where is everybody? Like, where did all the workers in restaurants go? Where did all the workers in the airplanes go? I just was reading today, JetBlue has to cut down on flights because there aren't enough air traffic controllers. Where did everybody go? Well, I have on the man who has the answer, and it's Matt Barry from freelancer.com. Things have changed so much since the last time he came on. He came on in 2017, and the world has gone from 3 % of people doing freelancing work to upwards of 40 % of people doing freelancing work. And now AI, is that going to just change everything for the better or for worse?

2:04We talk about all these things, talk about the economy, worst case scenarios, best case scenarios. But most of all, it's just fascinating. Is AI going to take your job or anybody else you know? Here's Matt and I talking about it. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

2:36Matt, we last spoke six years ago, and I feel like the freelancing world has a billion percent changed. What an incredible time to be alive. I mean, and be a freelancer or be an entrepreneur. It's incredible now. I mean, in 2020, I was reading that only 3 % of the workforce were freelancers, And now it's up to 40 % of the workforce does some sort of freelancing work. What are they all doing? What's happened to the world? I mean, other than the pandemic. Well, I mean, every job in the world now can be done with a computer pretty much from anywhere in the world. Software has, you know, eaten everything.

3:10It's all moved into the clouds. And human-computer interaction has got so good that, you know, people on the other side of the world can work in a team on pretty much any profession in real time. At the same time, you've got whole huge numbers of people have gone online around the world in emerging markets as the internet's kind of grown everywhere and getting skilled up, getting trained up. And now with artificial intelligence, everyone in the world can now perform at the elite level in a whole variety of skills. You can now illustrate at the level of an elite illustrator, even though you might not have any design skills whatsoever.

3:42You can write copy. You can program using chat GPT. It's just an incredible time. and the whole space is moving so quickly with all the tooling that's now available for freelancers that is all powered by AI. Yeah, and like a lot of people go back and forth on the AI component of this. And I'm still interested in the economics of why people are leaving the kind of regular workforce for freelancing. But a lot of people worry, will AI take their job? So let's say I was going to hire someone to make a logo. Well, now I could just go to MidJourney or Dolly or any of these AI graphic tools and say, get me a logo.

4:19Give me 5 ,000 logos I'm going to pick from and this is what I want. And do it in the style of Salvador Dali and boom, it does it. Like, is there going to be a human need for many of the typical freelancing jobs? Absolutely, because you still need someone to drive all the tools. My mother would be completely unable to go to mid-journery and figure out how to use it. And also people are very time poor, so you always need to get people to do things for you, Even if you know how to do the particular work, you've got to get people to assist you with that. You know, these tools basically are super skilled everyone.

4:52It lifts the ability of everyone around the world in a variety of different categories, and that's going to increase. And the world is desperately short in skilled labor. All around the world, you know, every female on the planet needs to have 2.1 children to maintain the population. And across the Western world, the birth rate is way below the replacement rate. Even in Bangladesh today, the birth rate is well below the replacement rate. So we're critically short engineers, critically short computer scientists and programmers. In some countries like Japan, it's so pronounced that in 2011, Unicharm, which is the largest manufacturer of diapers in Japan, says we've now produced more adult diapers than baby diapers.

5:28Right? So there's a huge... That is an unbelievable... That's the statistic of the day. So there's a huge need for skilled talent. And, you know, like all technologies in the past, you know, technology can be disruptive temporarily, but it does create more jobs in the end than it takes. Although, you know, I will say the advances that are happening in AI, you know, one week in AI seems to be one year in any other field or field of research. We'll kind of see where it ends up. But, you know, what we're seeing right now is that basically it's giving superpowers to people around the world. No matter what your skill set is, you can now, you know, work in all these different areas at the elite level.

6:04It's incredible. It reminds me of like in the nineties where people would spend a lot of money hiring others like freelancers to make their websites, but then making websites became ridiculously cheap, at least at the basic level, because you could just use WordPress or something like that. But still probably now more people than ever are hired to build websites because you still need, no matter what, a human component to really manage the process. Like there's always, it seems like a human component, no matter what the technology is. That's right. And people are very time poor. There's so many things you can do in the world now that you're hyperconnected, right?

6:39There's so many distractions, whether it's work or whether it's Instagram or whether it's, you know, communicating with people or whatever it is. You know, the time is increasingly precious. And so you do need people to help you no matter what it is. And if you look at some of these professions and what's happened over the last decade or two with the internet and with software and so forth, you know, look at a graphic designer. You know, 20 years ago, graphic designers, their bread and butter, at least, you know, amongst the people I knew that were doing graphic design was, I'll design for you a logo, and, you know, I'll do that for a few thousand dollars.

7:07And then afterwards, what I'll do is I'll do a stationary set for you with business cards, and that'll be like a little bit more. And, you know, it was all kind of that level of sort of work. You know, over the last decade, graphic designers don't really, in the West, don't really do that anymore. They're up the stack now. They're designing apps, they're designing websites, they're designing businesses, right? They can now hire freelancers who can program to help them kind of turn their dreams into reality. And with AI, it's going to be another leap again, where, you know, the AI will probably design the app and the website for you, and you'll be more of a conductor or the editor or the producer or the cinematographer saying, I want it to be a little bit different, maybe a bit more color there, add a feature so we can, you know, do the following.

7:47And, you know, the nature of work is going to be more and more higher level and more, you know, the production level and the directing level than maybe on the tools pushing pixels around the screen. And, you know, let me ask this. I wonder if this is true for Australia and around the world. Again, freelancer.com is a global site. There's about 60 million users. It's around the world. I wonder if you're seeing the same thing we're seeing very particularly here in the US, which is after the pandemic, it seemed like nobody went back to work. Like every restaurant was complaining to me, oh, we don't have anybody.

8:17None of our old employees came back. Where did everybody go? Did they all go to freelancer.com? A lot of them did, actually, yes. So there's been three major points in the world in the last decade where you've had this discontinuity of disruption that has occurred in the marketplace for work. We saw it originally in the global financial crisis where, you know, even though that was mainly in the US for the most part, you had three things happening. You had businesses going online looking to do things cheaper because obviously of all the layoffs and everyone's trying to cut costs. You had a lot of people looking for work online.

8:52and then you had the third phenomenon, which was a lot of people were creating businesses because they're like, you know what? I lost my job at Lehman Brothers. Yeah, I've got six months before I kind of will take it seriously and get back into the workforce. Why don't I kind of build that startup that I was always wanting to build or go help my wife with her shop? She always want to get a website put together. I'll kind of help her with that. We saw that again in the pandemic, three things were happening, you know, people looking for work online, businesses looking to cut costs, but a lot of startup businesses were happening and, you know, people were kind of, you know, let's build a little drop shipping website or on Facebook, I can sell a particular product I found off Alibaba or, you know, I could build a game.

9:26That was very popular. Lots of games were being developed and so forth. And we're seeing it again today with all the layoffs that's happening in tech where, you know, I think last year, there was like 170 ,000 layoffs in technology companies in the US and, you know, people are doing the same thing. They're like, you know what? I'm not going to go back working at a big tech company or what have you. I'm going to do my own startup. Here's a chance for me to kind of go out there and do it myself. And, you know, we're seeing a big boom in, you know, software development apps. We're seeing a big boom in games and so on.

9:54Like what kind of games? Like when I think of a game, I think of these really high-tech 3D, you know, super games that take a thousand man years to build. Like can someone just go on freelancer.com and say, oh, I could build a game? Like how do you build a game? Absolutely. You come in and you just kind of write out a brief and you say this is kind of how I want it to work. And there's all sorts of freelancers, all the way from individuals right up to professional agencies that will do it for you. for any budget, really. I mean, there's one that happened, like, as we speak, they're building a game around war and strategy.

10:27There'll be, you know, there's missions, special events, and an entire campaign storyline. They're implementing a play-to-player feature and a play-versus-machine model, et cetera. And you can do this stuff very, very, very inexpensively, about one-tenth of what, you know, you expect to cost if you went to local agencies. And, you know, the talent is incredible today. You know, any skill set you can possibly imagine, you can hire kind of the snap of your fingers by just posting a project and it's there. Basically, the global economy benefits. So you have people in third world countries who are doing this labor cheaply.

10:56And you have people like who are laid off from Amazon last week. They have maybe a little extra cash to hire somebody from some other country through a site like freelancer.com or Upwork or whatever. They can lay out the cash to build a game, build a website, build a store, whatever. That's right. So who actually will restaurants all go out of business because there's not going to be any waiters anymore? Well, I mean, there is an issue with restaurants. Why would someone be a waiter? But yeah, I mean, it's a pretty amazing phenomenon because what's happening is, you know, France is a pretty magical place because, you know, the 66 million people are on the marketplace.

11:33They're creating the future and they're creating opportunity and it's really changing lives. So, on one hand, yeah, you've got the guy who left Amazon in the US who's like, you know what, I'm going to start a game or I'm going to start a website or an app or what have you. And so, they're kind of creating the future and innovating and doing fun things. And on the other side, you've got people in emerging markets who are working in highly skilled areas and it's generating opportunity and income and tech jobs and skills are being generated and so forth. And so it's changing lives on the other side of the equation as well because, you know, globally there's a huge disparity in things like wages, right?

12:07The average wage in the US last time I checked was about$123 a day and the average wage in India was something like$2.25 a day. So there's like a 50 to 1 disparity. And those ratios might have changed a little bit, but the point is you can deliver high-paying jobs on one side of the equation in areas that desperately need them and lift skills up and build independence because the freelancers, they're all, you can choose when you want to work, what field you want to work in, how much you want to be paid and so forth. And at the same time, it's really, it's architecting the future of basically work.

12:39It's going to create a job rather than take a job. And I think a lot of people when they went off, you know, the stimulus happened and there was a lot of benefits and so forth. You correctly identified that a lot of people didn't go back to the traditional workforce. They're like, you know what, I can run my own business now. I can find ways to start things, side hustles even to supplement my income and I get to kind of, you know, be master of my own destiny rather than kind of clock in, clock out nine to five. And it seems like AI is this huge thing that's only just happened like yesterday that's going to completely change the nature of freelancing even like as we were already discussing.

13:10Like what skills are going to be the important skill sets to be a freelancer in the coming months, years, and so on now that AI has been introduced? It seems like you're going to have to have really good communication and project management skills. Like you said, people are going to have to be conductors of many different skill sets that AI is doing as opposed to necessarily having the skill yourself. That's right. I mean, the advances are – I mean, if you think about it, it's only since August of last year that Stable Diffusion came out, which kind of kicked off the whole arms race. And now you've got things like Mid Journey.

13:42You've got obviously ChatGPT4, which came out, which is game-changing. any sort of white collar job. Now, the AI will be able to figure out and probably do at the elite level. And so where the opportunity comes in is, A, now anyone's super skilled, anyone can use the tools, anyone can get in there and perform at the elite level across a range of different areas. And yes, the jobs move up the stack, just like they've moved it with every leap of technology. So you will be less sort of programming in Python and you'll be more saying, I would like to have an app that's like Uber for pets. Can you change the features here?

14:17Can you, you know, more of a product manager, more of a director, more of a conductor? You know, the styling, I don't really like the styling. Can you please make the styling a little bit more modern or a bit more sleek or a bit more like that website or generate a mood board for me based upon the following, you know, preferences or, and what have you. So, it's going to be really lifting productivity levels, both of the freelancers that do the work and also the speed at which companies can commercialize products. Because you'll literally be able to say, okay, They build me a company today and I want a website, I want an app, I want it to work like this, I want it to be in this sort of styling, and presto, it's there.

14:49Then you've got to have real challenges of, well, how do I sell it, how do I market it, and so forth. What are you seeing the most in terms of changes just in the past few months across the freelancer.com community? Definitely in design and copywriting. So, you know, copywriters now are less writing the copy themselves and they're more being the editor. So, ChatGPT, for example, can generate content in any field you want. But then you have to tell it, well, actually, do it again, but do it in a different style. Or I showed off an example. There's a friend of mine who runs Macro Voices, the podcast, Eric Towns and I had lunch with him the other day, and he's like, oh, you know, could you get it to write an interview transcript with me with Sergei Glazeyev?

15:26And it wrote the transcript as if the two of them were speaking. And he's like, oh, but it doesn't really understand that he might have a certain bias given his position in the Russian ministry. And so I said, chat to you, do it again, noting that he's in the Russian ministry and he might have a bit of bias. and rewrote the whole transcript. And he's just like, wow. Right, so you'll play more of an editorial role, like a cinematographer or a director or a producer sort of role where you'll look at it and go, okay, change that, change this, what have you. But the AI itself in terms of what it can generate would be incredible.

15:55I mean, like in a few weeks from now, you better say, make me the movie Top Gun 17 where Putin's fighting that with Tom Cruise and you hit a button and bang, the movie will come out the other side. That's literally weeks away. So it's pretty exciting times and the whole industry is going to change.

16:21look as a manager of people as an employer as an entrepreneur and as even an investor in startups i can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues, who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

17:04And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

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18:12Whenever someone says, well, ChatGPT can do this, but it'll never be able to do that. You know they're wrong. Like it's whatever you say that's never going to be able to do, eventually it will do it. And so the question is, at what point, I mean, with every change in technology in history, as you said earlier, there's always been more jobs created than lost. Like when horses were replaced by cars, more jobs were created than were lost in the horse industry. But will there come a tipping point where AI finally does the full human experience, the full human job, you know, in major industries? Well, yeah, you've got to remember that most jobs actually are not online jobs.

18:52Most jobs are actually physical jobs where you kind of have to go somewhere and, you know, pick something up and put it down. And until they've plugged ChatGPT into Boston Dynamics Atlas, we've got a bit of time left before Terminator. So it takes over. But yeah, certainly I think it'd be interesting when the software starts running itself, like, you know, ChatGPT gets given the source code to ChatGPT and said, you know, can you improve ChatGPT? It'd be pretty crazy. I think the other big crazy thing is going to happen is when they feed in every single academic paper every thesis that's been written by a PhD student, every bit of research known to man, and they'll say, okay, based on all that research, can you write a paper for a pill that will extend human life by five years or whatever it may be?

19:32I think you'll have a technological explosion that's going to come out the other side of that. And, you know, that combined with, you know, the feedback loop of the software writing the software, if ChatGPT can kind of write itself, you might get a pretty crazy sort of times. I mean, they talk about the singularity for years where at some point, technology will outstrip the ability. The pace at which technology improves will outpace the ability of the human mind to be able to comprehend it. And you'll end up like this big bang sort of phenomena where either man and machine will meld. And that's what Elon Musk is trying to do with Neuralink, where he's trying to say, well, maybe the future of humanity is being inside the machine.

20:10Or you might end up with a Terminator event where the chat GPT ends up driving Boston Dynamics Atlas. And then the AI figures out that humans are a threat and they're a waste of resources and you're trying to call for John Connor at that point. Or it might be the Peter D. Mandis model who runs the XPRIZE Foundation where he says it's the age of abundance and everything will be plentiful and you'll be sitting back with your feet up and every whim you want will be provided for and you might be in that sort of universal basic income sort of scenario where, you know, we've got that age of plenty, everything's provided for you, you don't have to do anything and everyone kind of just sits around playing World of Warcraft 15 or something or other which is generated on the fly.

20:48And, uh, you know, if you compare now to like, let's say even, let's say 50 years ago, think about it. Like you can already order food delivered to you. You can have a famous chef cook your food, have it delivered to you. Watch on your large screen TV, a hundred million dollar movie that was made by Steven Spielberg. and then sleep in your bed, which is monitoring all your vitals while you sleep. Like we already live like unbelievable digital gods. And what's gonna happen next is unbelievable. I guess the main thing that so many people are uncertain about is could this have a negative effect on their lives?

21:27Like, well, for instance, if you're a journalist, there's no reason to hire a journalist anymore. You could just say, hey, ChatGPT, there was this incident that happened today. They summarize it for me and run it in the paper. Like unless you're an investigative journalist, you're gone. I was about to say that, right? I actually think the quality of journalism has gone downhill a lot because the whole business model has been transformed by Google in that it's just how many clicks and views of a page you've got and how many ad impressions you've got. And as a result of that, it's really about can you write a real clickbait headline that gets people to click on a link, right?

22:02And the actual journalism has been reduced to 500 words and you probably know better than anyone, it's very hard to get more than one idea across in 500 words. And so what's actually been lost is the actual narrative of what actually is happening in the world. I'm on LinkedIn. I was maybe one of the 100 influencers at one point. And so I could post, you know, really long stuff that everyone would read. I wouldn't publish every week. I would publish once a year, something that'd be like 85 pages long. And I'd try and actually string together the narrative of actually what's going on. And that actually had remarkable pickup.

22:29Like, you know, I had an article that was read by a million people in two days when far around the world. So I actually think that there is a lost part of journalism, which is more of the long story narrative, the investigative piece and so forth. I think the quality of journalism has dropped dramatically. So I think there's still a place for journalism that chat GPT won't fill. But I think, you know, the run of the mill sort of stuff like, you know, the sports scores and comment on the baseball game or, you know, a stock market going up or down or world events or what have you. I think a lot of that can potentially, at a very basic level, be done by software and probably already is in a fairly big way.