Daniel Priestley: Why plumbers may out-earn lawyers by 2029

1. 0:00 – 4:03

   Intro

   1. SBSteven Bartlett0:00

      I was looking at the top ten jobs that are most likely to be disrupted by AI, and I really do worry about this.

   2. DPDaniel Priestley0:05

      So the nature of the economy is changing. For a long time, blue-collar work like plumbers, electricians, bricklayers has been devalued. But it could be in the next couple of years, these are the roles that are elevated the most, and that plumbers regularly earn more than lawyers. And for the last twenty-five years, I've been building companies from scratch, and I've been through the global financial crisis and COVID, but I have never experienced what we're experiencing right now. I've never seen more fear for the disruption that is coming. And my real bear case for AI is that every time you go on AI, your request is going off to a big computer in a Walmart-sized building somewhere, and those big ginormous computers, they last three to four years before they need to be replaced. And this year ahead, we're gonna spend six hundred and fifty billion, and that could cause a massive financial collapse. That's the thing that I'm worried most about. However, I've never seen more excitement for the opportunities that are in front of us.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett0:56

      So let's talk about in a world of AI, what are the skills that survive?

   4. DPDaniel Priestley1:01

      So I really believe that everyone should build a little bit of a personal brand. Not like to become an influencer, but position yourself with a group of people who know who you are and know what you do and could enroll you in their opportunity. Second one, if there's one skill set that everyone should be learning at the moment, it's how do entrepreneurs think, how do entrepreneurs behave, what are the skills that make an entrepreneur successful? And entrepreneurs just simply follow six steps, and we do it over and over and over again, and we'll go through the six steps.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett1:27

      So are there any particular opportunities that you think that anybody listening right now could pursue to make money?

   6. DPDaniel Priestley1:32

      So I think one of the best opportunities is-

   7. SBSteven Bartlett1:34

      That is such good advice that we don't hear enough. This is super interesting to me. My team give me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe. Sixty-nine percent of you that watch this show frequently haven't yet hit the subscribe button, and some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button, if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double-check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you. Do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you wanna hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of The Diary of a CEO, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show. [upbeat music] Daniel, I think we're living in the most interesting, opportunistic, terrifying time to be an entrepreneur, a professional, to really be anybody, because this is a moment of such fundamental change. And I really wanted to have this conversation with you today because I wanna understand how you're thinking about AI from an opportunity standpoint as an entrepreneur, but also just for everybody that's working in a normal job and who is at risk of having their, their career, their livelihood, their identity, their qualifications made redundant because there is now an alien amongst us that can do so much. So this conversation really is about giving people answers. It's about being honest with them about what's coming, and it's about preparing them, setting them up so that they have an advantage in the face of the future we face. So give me the thirty thousand feet view.

   8. DPDaniel Priestley3:29

      Well, my background for the last twenty-five years has been building companies from scratch. And I've been through the dot-com, and I've been through global financial crisis, and I've been through, uh, Brexit and COVID. I have never experienced what we're experiencing right now. I've never seen more excitement for the opportunities that are in front of us, and I've never seen more fear for the disruption that is coming. We are living through transformational times that is very similar to two hundred and fifty years ago, where the end of the agricultural age ended and the beginning of the industrial age began.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett4:01

      I would argue that it's more significant

2. 4:03 – 10:00

   Why The Rise Of AI And Robotics Forces Us To Redefine Our Place

   1. SBSteven Bartlett4:03

      'cause there's two forces that kinda keep me up at night. The first force is AI, which is... You can think of it as just the replacement of the human brain from a sort of productivity standpoint. And then the other is robotics, and the problem is they're coming in at the same time. And I was watching-- I don't know if you saw this the other day.

   2. DPDaniel Priestley4:21

      I did, yeah.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett4:22

      So I'll put this on the screen for anyone that's watching the video right now. But this is a demonstration that took place in China of how advanced their robots are. And I had to check multiple times to make sure that this wasn't fake. They are doing backflips and landing perfectly on their feet. And so when you combine intelligence with the disruption of our physical form, our muscles, our body, our ability to pick things up and move them through, through time and space, it begs the question, like, where do we-

   4. DPDaniel Priestley4:50

      Where do we fit into all of that? Strangely, there's something called the Jevons paradox, and the Jevons paradox is a paradox where when we think something is gonna completely disrupt the way that we, uh, live and work, it often has the opposite effect. We thought that YouTube was going to completely wipe out television, and it's true that Hollywood lost tens of thousands of jobs, but YouTubing created five hundred to six hundred thousand jobs at the same time. And it used to take a hundred and fifty people to make a te- a TV show or a movie, and now it's five to ten people making YouTube videos as a little team, and they can have a wildly successful YouTube channel. With the Jevons paradox, if we currently said that in order to have a successful software company right now today or in the last few years, you needed to have ten thousand customers and you needed to have a team of fifty people and you needed to raise one to five million dollars to get a, a software company off the, off the ground, if all of a sudden the cost and the commitment... drops dramatically to have a software company, and you only need 500 customers to work it, to make it work, and you only need two people on a team to make it work, and you only need a tiny bit of funding to make it work. What happens is, like YouTube channels, you can end up with literally millions of tiny little software businesses that are super successful for five to 10 people, and they do something niche and they do something special. They don't look like traditional software companies either. So a traditional software company would just do the software, whereas these little software companies might do software, plus they might do dinner parties where the clients get together, they might have an annual ski retreat, they might have a podcast and a YouTube channel that goes with it, and all of that could be done by five to 10 people using AI tools. So the Jevons paradox would basically say that there is millions of unmet needs, and that those unmet needs are not explored because the cost to explore them is too high. But because the cost to explore those has come down, then now we can actually have millions of businesses that never existed that we didn't even know we needed to exist.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett6:45

      I was sat here the other day with Dara, who is the CEO of Uber. He turned around Expedia, made it super profitable. Turned around Uber that was losing two billion, made it generate about nine billion in revenue, 10 billion in revenue. And, uh, he sat there and said to me that their 9,000 couriers and drivers won't have jobs in the future. And I'm, and I-- So I sit and go, "Okay, so what are, what are they gonna do? Are they all gonna start businesses somewhere? Do they..." And also, I think one of the interesting things about AI is the speed of transition.

   6. DPDaniel Priestley7:08

      Mm.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett7:09

      With the Industrial Revolution, there's a little bit of a delay because infrastructure took time to build.

   8. DPDaniel Priestley7:13

      It takes a long time to build.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett7:14

      But this is the first innovation that I've lived through that is built on-

   10. DPDaniel Priestley7:17

       It's instantaneous

   11. SBSteven Bartlett7:18

       ... the internet.

   12. DPDaniel Priestley7:19

       The minute an AI learns how to be a lawyer in one place, it can be a lawyer in every place.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett7:24

       Yeah.

   14. DPDaniel Priestley7:24

       The minute it learns how to diagnose a disease in, in one location, in one hospital, it can diagnose a disease in every hospital in the world. So it's this instantaneous rollout, uh, because it sits on top of a, a network that already exists.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett7:37

       This is what actually Boston Dynamics said to me. I was watching a video of their new robot that's working in factories. It's a humanoid robot-

   16. DPDaniel Priestley7:42

       Mm-hmm

   17. SBSteven Bartlett7:42

       ... that can work in factories, pick things up, move things around. They said, "The great thing about robotics is if one of our robots on a shop floor in Boston learns something, all of our robots learn it."

   18. DPDaniel Priestley7:51

       It's, it's wild.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett7:52

       [laughing] I was like, "Fucking hell." So yesterday, Tesla built... And they took this wonderful photo because they built the world's first Tesla Cybercab. And if anyone doesn't know what a Tesla Cybercab is, it's the first ever fully autonomous car that doesn't have a steering wheel-

   20. DPDaniel Priestley8:10

       Mm

   21. SBSteven Bartlett8:10

       ... and it doesn't have pedals.

   22. DPDaniel Priestley8:12

       Yeah. You just hop in and there's, there's no steering wheel, no pedals. You can't take control even if you wanted to.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett8:17

       The Cybercab is the company's answer to vehicles like the Waymo. The two-seater coupe unveiled in 2024 comes without a steering wheel or pedals. It's guided by AI, and they're now making them. The first one was made yesterday. Again, 100, over 100 million people's job is to drive, and you can get one of these now for Elon's saying $30,000. Um, you can rent them, lease them, you can buy a bunch as investment assets and set them out.

   24. DPDaniel Priestley8:44

       Set up your own fleet and connect them to different networks like Uber and all of those sorts of things. And the cost to move around is gonna go through the floor because, you know, my Uber to come here today was probably $50. Uh, and that will probably be six or $7, uh, once that is rolled out. So the thing that with the Jevons paradox is it doesn't mean that everyone gets the same job and that they get, like, uh, there's just more of exactly the same jobs. It means that the transformation creates exponential growth as a result of the transformation in an unexpected way.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett9:16

       Mm.

   26. DPDaniel Priestley9:16

       So growing up, my mom worked in newspapers, and there was probably half a million people working in newspapers as journalists and all of those sorts of things, and that has dropped by 80% in the last twenty five years. But at the same time, the number of people who are bloggers, the number of people who have Substacks, the number of people, uh, who are doing the kind of work of journalists and actually making money as a result of content creation has gone 100, 100x. So, uh, I think it's something like three to four times more people now make their money in a way that kinda looks like a journalist than there ever were journalists prior to the technology that disrupted journalists. So it's not that, it's not that those exact same jobs, uh, are, are replicated, it's that something similar emerges as a result.

3. 10:00 – 16:19

   The Birth Of The Interest Algorithm

   1. SBSteven Bartlett10:00

      I understand this, and I, when I read about the Jevons paradox, I, like, ran it through my head multiple times to, to understand, like, how it fits in different industries. But there is a part of me that still thinks this is slightly different because in the example you gave where there was a, a content creation industry that was then disrupted by a content creation industry, I go, yeah, the, the, the skill of intelligence was still, of human intelligence, was still rare and scarce and only humans had it.

   2. DPDaniel Priestley10:31

      Mm.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett10:32

      So the disruption of a content creation industry to a different content creation industry was still owned by humans. That transition was still a human one. But in such a world where AI agents can make-- If you go on a lot of social media platforms, I shan't name which ones, it's just pure AI slop now.

   4. DPDaniel Priestley10:45

      Yes.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett10:46

      It's just people's agents churning out content that they haven't touched or done anything about. And then I was-- I th- we, I started saying to you, uh, before we started recording that what we're gonna experience, and what I think a lot of people don't fully embrace about this idea of becoming a content creator for a living or building a personal brand, is when you look at some of the graphs, and I'll throw the graphs from the Financial Times article on the screen, there's now a plateau of people spending time online-

   6. DPDaniel Priestley11:08

      Mm-hmm

   7. SBSteven Bartlett11:08

      ... for the first time in history. Well, in the first time in internet history. Gen Z especially were the first generation to plateau-

   8. DPDaniel Priestley11:15

      Yeah

   9. SBSteven Bartlett11:15

      ... in their time spent. But the amount of content, the amount of AI agents, the amount of people that are now choosing to make, to do content as a living is exploding.

   10. DPDaniel Priestley11:23

       Yes.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett11:23

       So you have a supply and demand issue where there's a set amount, really like a set amount of hours cons- sort of consumption hours, and then you have this huge exponential explosion in available content because a kid in Mumbai-

   12. DPDaniel Priestley11:37

       Yeah. The attention-

   13. SBSteven Bartlett11:38

       ... can produce-

   14. DPDaniel Priestley11:38

       ... is a limited resource.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett11:40

       But content isn't though.

   16. DPDaniel Priestley11:40

       And content is unlimited.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett11:42

       Now.

   18. DPDaniel Priestley11:43

       Yeah. And, and more so. So AI slop is just rolling in, and... Uh, also, AI slop doesn't do it justice. Some of my favorite things to watch is AI generated.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett11:51

       Same. Same.

   20. DPDaniel Priestley11:51

       I'm enjoying AI. So think about it a little-- W-when it comes to personal brand, think about it a little bit like an airport. That the airport [clears throat] has got this fog that is rolling in. If your airplane is already above the fog-

   21. SBSteven Bartlett12:03

       [chuckles]

   22. DPDaniel Priestley12:03

       Then you'll con- you can continue to fly. But if your airp- airplane is not taking off already, then the fog is gonna keep you on the ground. So like, for example, you've invested so much into your personal brand, and people will s- come along to see you live, and they would love to go to a dinner party series that, you know, involves you, and they-- there's a whole community around DOAC, right? So all of those things means that your airplane's already up in the air, you can continue to fly. But if you were starting two years from now or a year from now, or maybe even six months from now, and you weren't smart about it, there's just too much AI-generated content. You won't get traction. You won't get, you won't get that lift-off moment, uh, the same way. That opportunity is coming to an end because of that AI-generated content.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett12:46

       What I'm seeing in the algorithms, we do some data analysis every year on the variance of performance of pieces of content we prod-produce on different channels. Now, I've been making social media content for fifteen years, so I have a bit of a sort of a mental history of like every year us doing this, this particular data analysis to see-

   24. DPDaniel Priestley13:02

       Mm-hmm

   25. SBSteven Bartlett13:02

       ... the variance between the worst thing we post and the best thing we post. And this year we did the same-- we ran the same analysis with my data science team, led by Austin and my team, to see if the variance between the worst thing we post and the, and the best thing we post is getting bigger. Because what that kind of is a proxy of is, is the algorithm caring less and less and less about how many followers I have? And is it caring more and more and more about whoever posts the most interesting thing today? Which is if I was building a social media company and my primary objective was to retain people, I wouldn't care if you have two followers and Steven has five hundred followers. I would just care about who posts the best thing.

   26. DPDaniel Priestley13:38

       The best stuff, yeah.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett13:39

       So we did that analysis, and it's, it's an almost perfect graph that looks like this. And this is the variance increasing.

   28. DPDaniel Priestley13:45

       Yep.

   29. SBSteven Bartlett13:45

       Which actually means that, okay, Steven's taken off from the sky, but every day I wake up, increasingly-

   30. DPDaniel Priestley13:51

       Mm
4. 16:19 – 20:11

   Could AI Trigger The Next Financial Crash?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett16:19

      And the thing, the principle there that allows you to see what the future might look like when it's exponential and not linear is imagining any rate of improvement. And so this is how I think al-always in my business is when I'm thinking about which bet to make, I imagine if there's just five percent rate of improvement per quarter, eventually this happens.

   2. DPDaniel Priestley16:37

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett16:37

      And so with some things we've done on this show, we started two years ago, and for the first eighteen months-

   4. DPDaniel Priestley16:43

      Mm-hmm

   5. SBSteven Bartlett16:43

      ... it didn't work. And then six months ago-

   6. DPDaniel Priestley16:45

      Yeah

   7. SBSteven Bartlett16:45

      ... it exploded because eventually the rate of improvement got to the point where it was viable.

   8. DPDaniel Priestley16:49

      Yeah.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett16:50

      And now it's the single most important disruptive thing we've ever done. And I think about what I-- the example I just gave there of agents. I'm like, if you just imagine any rate of improvement, just imagine one percent-

   10. DPDaniel Priestley16:58

       Mm-hmm

   11. SBSteven Bartlett16:58

       ... a year. And obviously it's way more than that, but imagine one percent a month. Eventually, we get to a point where a team of agents can build-

   12. DPDaniel Priestley17:04

       If nothing, if nothing disrupts it, one thing that is very likely to happen in the next three years is the whole thing comes crashing down. It doesn't financially make any sense to build the data centers that we're building.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett17:15

       But you're not saying that AI is gonna disappear.

   14. DPDaniel Priestley17:18

       The technology itself is remarkable, but the financial model just makes no sense whatsoever at the moment.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett17:24

       At the moment.

   16. DPDaniel Priestley17:25

       Right.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett17:25

       Which is kind of typical of bub-bubbles, right?

   18. DPDaniel Priestley17:27

       So over the last hundred and eighty years, there have been infrastructure build-outs that have bankrupted the economy consistently again and again and again. In fact, there's a pattern. Whenever we spend more than three percent of the overall GDP of the economy on an infrastructure build-out, it bankrupts the economy briefly for ten years, right? So this happened when we did railway tracks. In fact, it happened twice in the U.K. and twice in, um, the USA. Then we bankrupt ourselves putting the electrification grid in place. We bankrupted ourselves putting, uh, highways in place. Now, there's something that makes this worse than ever beforeAnd that is that when we built train tracks, they lasted for a hundred years. When we built roads, they lasted fifty-plus years. The telecommunications group, uh, fiber optics, thirty years. All of these investments were multi-decade investments that we could get benefit from and, and, and leverage for decades. Data centers last three to four years before they need to be replaced. So we are building something that has a three to four-year life cycle that costs hundreds of billions, and it has to be replaced every few years, and there is no financial model attached to this that justifies it at all. So one thing that I'm predicting is that in twenty twenty-nine, a hundred years after the Great Depression, we will see a massive financial meltdown based off the back of these data centers that are being, um, developed at the moment.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett18:51

       And for someone that doesn't know what a data center is.

   20. DPDaniel Priestley18:53

       So it's like a big Walmart or an airport filled with computers, and those computers are running AI, right? So every time you go on AI, you're actually, you know, your request is going off to a big computer in a Walmart-sized building somewhere. But those GPUs, those, uh, computer stacks, those big ginormous computers, they are like iPhones. They last about three years before they get superseded. This year ahead, we're gonna spend six hundred and fifty billion. Six hundred and fifty billion sounds like so abstract. It's the equivalent of giving every single person in America an iPhone Pro with AirPods. But here's the crazy thing, ninety-five percent of people who are being given the, the free, uh, iPhone are not willing to pay for it, and the tiny number of people who are willing to pay for it, they're only willing to pay twenty dollars a month, most of them. So this twenty dollars a month, everyone's getting a free iPhone [chuckles] effectively, and then a small five percent of people are willing to pay twenty dollars a month. The numbers are just astronomically out of balance.

   21. SBSteven Bartlett19:56

       The numbers are astronomically out of balance. So what happens next? You're predicting in twenty twenty-nine there's a financial crash.

   22. DPDaniel Priestley20:01

       There's not a zero percent chance that the financial model around what the-- what we've launched with AI is catastrophic. It's a huge financial problem that very few people are talking about.

5. 20:11 – 24:16

   The 6 Entrepreneurial Skills You Must Learn To Survive The AI Era

   1. SBSteven Bartlett20:11

      So let's talk about in a world of AI, what are the skills that survive and like what, what are the professions that you believe survive? You've got children, Daniel. When, when they come to you and they say, "Dad, um, I'm hearing about all this AI stuff and I've seen these robots in China doing backflips, what should I be learning now to make sure that the next twenty, thirty, forty years of my career is prosperous?"

   2. DPDaniel Priestley20:35

      It's the entrepreneurial skill set that is the most important skill set. It is essentially the skills of identifying an opportunity, prototyping fast and cheap experiments to see if you've got something that people want, taking it to market, making your initial sales, scaling up to your addressable market, and then exiting and then coming up with a new idea. Because even if you're in a big corporate, they're gonna wanna prototype things, they're gonna wanna spin out new products, they're gonna wanna come up with new initiatives, and we need to step through that process of, is this a good idea or not? Can we validate it? Can we scale it, right? And you wanna go through that process as fast and as cheap as possible, the way an entrepreneur would.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett21:15

      And on that first point of identifying a good idea, now, is there any way to know if the idea that I have is a good idea or a bad idea?

   4. DPDaniel Priestley21:25

      Yeah. This is a step that entrepreneurs call validation, and the rookie entrepreneurs that fail, they don't do this step very well, right? So they don't do market validation, they don't do product validation. They simply get excited about an idea, and then they go all in on the idea. And what really experienced entrepreneurs do is that we come up with ways to do fast, cheap experiments. So for example, last year I had two ideas, and I, I actually kind of liked one a lot and I liked one a little bit. And what I did is I set up a waiting list campaign, and I basically invited people to join the waiting list for idea number one, and about seven hundred and fifty people joined that waiting list, and they filled in a set, a set of questions so that I knew that seven hundred and fifty people were interested in this idea. This was my favorite idea. And then the second idea, I invited people to join that waiting list, and four and a half thousand people joined that waiting list. [chuckles] So even though this wasn't my favorite idea, it was way more exciting for people and way-- it, it was sitting on top of a much bigger need. So off the back of collecting four and a half thousand people on the waiting list and collecting all the data and the information, we went to some angel investors about a week later after doing that, and we raised quarter of a million pounds, so about three or four hundred thousand dollars, and all of that took about a week or two.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett22:44

      With that example, how do you know that the business itself and the delivery of that idea actually meets their expectation? 'Cause I can think of multiple examples where someone clicked on an idea that I had, but actually the delivery of that idea-

   6. DPDaniel Priestley22:59

      Yeah

   7. SBSteven Bartlett23:00

      ... fell short of expectation. Because sometimes things can sound good when you, you see the flyer or the poster-

   8. DPDaniel Priestley23:06

      Yeah

   9. SBSteven Bartlett23:06

      ... or whatever, but the reality of the experience is actually not that great.

   10. DPDaniel Priestley23:10

       So let me walk you through the six steps quickly. Step one is called founder opportunity fit, and founder opportunity fit is finding something that you wanna do. Step two is validation, right? So this is where we actually try and see, is there a market? Could we, could we build something? Could we sell something, right? So that's two, validation, can we build it? Can we sell it? Step three is called product market fit, and this is the next step where you're actually trying to figure out, can we actually make this live up to people's expectations so that they really like it? Is there a group of people who buy this and they're happy with the purchase? And we wanna do that carefully and cheaply. And then finally, once people say, oh, well, the next step, once people say, "Yes, we can do that," we go to market, and go to market is making sales. And then after going to market, we scale up, right? Step five. And then the final step is we exit. So we go through those six steps, and we call that a value creation loop, and that value creation loop goes through those six steps, and each step has its own little job, and what we're trying to do is just validate, go to the next step.Achieve the milestones, go to the next step. And, and that's how we do it as entrepreneurs.

6. 24:16 – 35:20

   The New AI Gold Rush: Business Opportunities Most People Are Missing

   1. SBSteven Bartlett24:16

      So in a world of AI, are there any particular opportunities that you think are, um, new and exciting that anybody listening right now could pursue to make money, whether it's passive income on the side or to leave their current role and pursue entrepreneurship for?

   2. DPDaniel Priestley24:30

      Well, the starting point is that everything is an opportunity, because what do entrepreneurs do? We find things that could be done better, faster, cheaper, or with more emotional benefits.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett24:39

      But has AI created any particular interesting opportunities in your view that you think that's a, a huge arbitrage opportunity?

   4. DPDaniel Priestley24:45

      I think one of the best opportunities is a small SaaS company. So Software as a Service was an elite level business opportunity that very, very few people could enter. That was something that only t- maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of founders at most globally could have a software company. So it was very, very elite. And the reason it was elite is because it was very, very hard to mobilize the talent required to build a software company. You probably needed f- you know, maybe 10, 20 or 30 pr- uh, developers to build a software product that would actually be a good software product. You needed to raise millions of dollars to get through the costs of developing software, uh, companies, and you probably needed 10,000 customers to have a break even software company. Now, because of AI, all of those costs have massively come down, and there are software companies that are wildly profitable that have 500 customers or 1,000 customers. They service a tiny little niche. Uh, they attach a community and some media and some training to those little software niches. So one of the most exciting things is that if you essentially said that I would like to take what I know, turn it into a playbook, take that playbook, ask AI to advise me on what software we could create, and then use AI tools to build out that software, you're able to get very deep into that journey for almost no money.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett26:06

      I was thinking about this the other day because in my company we're rebuilding our entire ATS ourselves. So an ATS is basically the system you use when you recruit people.

   6. DPDaniel Priestley26:16

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett26:16

      Everyone's name goes into the ATS. It's kinda like a, uh, like a search engine-

   8. DPDaniel Priestley26:19

      Applicant tracking system. Yeah.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett26:20

      Yeah, like a database of where candidates who have applied for your company currently are. And over the c- last couple of years, I've paid tens of thousands of-

   10. DPDaniel Priestley26:26

       Mm-hmm

   11. SBSteven Bartlett26:26

       ... dollars every year for an ATS for my companies. And this year I thought, you know what, actually I reckon we could build an ATS in a couple of weeks ourselves.

   12. DPDaniel Priestley26:33

       Of course.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett26:33

       And it could be bespoke to us. So we started that project. I saw the, the first version of it yesterday. We started a week ago.

   14. DPDaniel Priestley26:38

       [laughs] Yeah.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett26:38

       And the first version, the, the [laughs] the version of it I saw was like, oh, this is significantly better than what we were using before because it's bespoke.

   16. DPDaniel Priestley26:45

       Yeah.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett26:45

       And this made me think about the, the opportunity of creating software generally, which is that in a world where it becomes, as you say, like cheaper, easier, faster, we're all gonna be using more software, but we're probably not gonna be paying other people for their software, especially when it's these kind of tools, productivity tools and systems.

   18. DPDaniel Priestley27:07

       If it's purely a tool, it's very easy to replicate, but if it's a tool that comes with a community, if it comes with education and training, if it comes with agents, like-

   19. SBSteven Bartlett27:16

       Education and training?

   20. DPDaniel Priestley27:17

       Yeah. So like for example, if you were to do an ATS, right, an applicant tracking system, a, a hiring tool, and you had the DOAC, uh, system and method that I can go and attend the training as to how you onboard people, how you create culture, how you do things at DOAC, I'm now interested in the software because it comes with that exciting training. If there was also a boot camp that I could go to that was attached to that product, if there was also an annual retreat or a dinner series, if there was also, uh, some funding opportunities that came with that. So once upon a time you were just simply going to focus on creating a software tool because that was so labor intensive and also it had a natural moat or protection around it that you didn't have to get creative. But now we live in a world where the AI lets you to build the product pretty quickly. It helps you to do all these other things that we talked about, and suddenly it's actually quite a, a fun product that you c- that you can spin up. What you've already created would've probably cost $500,000 in six months.

   21. SBSteven Bartlett28:18

       Oh my God.

   22. DPDaniel Priestley28:18

       Not-

   23. SBSteven Bartlett28:18

       Six months? I wish

   24. DPDaniel Priestley28:19

       ... not, not that long ago.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett28:20

       Yeah. It would probably cost-- It would've probably taken about 18 months total end to end.

   26. DPDaniel Priestley28:24

       And you've done it in a week.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett28:25

       Yeah. And so everyone else can do it in a week. And in fact, i- if anyone, if that's anyone's business right now, there's gonna be 1,000 new ATS systems a day. One's gonna trend on Twitter, you know, people are gonna download that one, then they're gonna jump ship because a new one emerges and it's better, it's more agentic or whatever. And so again, I think are we seeing software generally become a commodity?

   28. DPDaniel Priestley28:45

       What we're gonna see is we're gonna see all business opportunities be like YouTube content. I mean, if I went back 25, 30 years ago and said there's gonna be 10-person unfunded little TV studios that produce content every single week for almost no money, y- you, you would think that's crazy. I mean, Seinfeld used to cost $5 million an episode. Um, The Simpsons and Friends, these were all multimillion dollars per episode. And we've now replicated that that can be done like by a tiny little team for free every week.

   29. SBSteven Bartlett29:17

       It's interesting 'cause the minute we say that the answer is to do these things that are now easy and free and cheap to do, it's almost like we, we then don't acknowledge the fact that if everyone's doing it, it's no longer a valuable thing to do.

   30. DPDaniel Priestley29:29

       It's less valuable.
7. 35:20 – 44:39

   The One Human Advantage AI Still Can’t Replace

   1. DPDaniel Priestley35:20

      Here's something that's interesting. Throughout all of history, whenever you find societies that have low social mobility and hyper com- competition, there's lots and lots of festivals. So you go into medieval times, they've got a festival for every season. They've got a festival for every life event. There's just constant festivals. You go into rural Africa, rural India, and it's festivals, festivals, festivals, right? Weddings, funerals, seasonal festivals. It's a huge part of human culture that we have lost in big cities. Like, we don't do a lot of festival. Or ra- it's rare that we do a lot of festivals, these real world experiences. But I don't necessarily think it's a blue ocean because, uh, as soon as people realize how much people want to do festivals and want to do real world experiences, a lot of companies can also add this to the mix. I think what is defensible is community, experience, and embracing the constant chaotic change and coming up with new stuff all the time.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett36:17

      One of the bets I'm making, and it goes back to what I-- like, again, reasoning up from first principles. If the question is, what can I do that an AI agent or AI could not do, and especially in the context of what humans will continue to need-

   3. DPDaniel Priestley36:29

      Mm-hmm

   4. SBSteven Bartlett36:30

      When you were born, Dan, you were born with a bunch of needs, and those needs like fundamentally haven't changed. One of them is like connection.

   5. DPDaniel Priestley36:35

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett36:36

      I think you'll always be able to discern what is real human connection from artificial connection. I remember being sixteen years old in, in my psychology class at the back when they told me about the rhesus monkeys experiment, where they got a rhesus monkey, this little small little monkey. They pretended that its mother was a wire mesh. So they made a wire mesh mother. The rhesus monkey grows up to be a psychopath because its, its fundamental human need of connection is not met. They then did it with a, a cloth, and the rhesus monkey grew up to be a bit more stable. And then obviously they showed the examples where the rhesus monkey actually had a physical flesh mother, and it was, it was fine. So I, I say this to illuminate the fact that we have fundamental needs, that if not met, there will be consequences. One of ours is connection. So as a content creator, I can sit here and I can tell you what happened today, right? I can say, "At six o'clock, this guy broke into this bank, and then he left." I think that's a commodity now.

   7. DPDaniel Priestley37:28

      Mm.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett37:29

      I think the thing that-

   9. DPDaniel Priestley37:30

      Yeah

   10. SBSteven Bartlett37:30

       ... I can do as a podcaster, as a behind-the-scenes content creator, as a streamer-

   11. DPDaniel Priestley37:34

       Mm-hmm

   12. SBSteven Bartlett37:35

       ... this is why I'm so bullish on streamers, is they're making irreplaceably human content. There's no AI that can-- An AI can tell you what menop- what happens in menopause. An AI can't tell you its experience of menopause.

   13. DPDaniel Priestley37:46

       Yes. We need to find something that only we can say as humans. And every single person has this, by the way, but a lot of us overlook what we can say as a human. I recently came across a financial planner, and his name is Matt Pitcher. And he gave a TED Talk, and the TED Talk is about what it was like for him to meet one hundred people who'd, uh, won the lottery. So he had a partnership as a financial planner with the, uh, British Lottery, and every week someone wins the lottery, and then he goes in and meets them a week later after they've discovered they've won the lottery.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett38:19

       Wow.

   15. DPDaniel Priestley38:20

       But what he did, did is he looked back at his history, and he had lots of different things that he was doing. But he looked back at his history, and he connected some dots. And he said, "Hey, wait a second. There's something that only I can talk about. There's something that is, that is my thing that I've experienced, that I lived through, that I've sat in those living rooms. I've sat eye to eye with those people, and only I can talk about that." And because of that TED Talk, he's, he's had half a million views in the first few weeks, and y- you know, his business is obviously gonna explode and all of those kind of things because he found something that only he could say. I believe that every person has something that's human that only they can say that's highly relatable. You shared with me an interesting philosophy, uh, when we first met. I did my first episode on Diary of a CEO, and it got millions of views. And I said to you, "Why is it that my episode got millions of views, but a few weeks ago, there was a billionaire CEO who only got a few hundred thousand vie-views, and a few weeks before that, there was a billionaire CEO who only got a few hundred thousand views?" And you said, "Daniel, relatable beats impressive."

   16. SBSteven Bartlett39:17

       Yeah.

   17. DPDaniel Priestley39:17

       And a lot of people think that they have to cure cancer or launch a rocket to Mars, or that they have to win a Nobel Peace Prize or float a company on the NASDAQ. And actually, each individual person, we have to discover what I would call your personal intellectual property or your personal intellectual capital. And your personal story, your personal playbooks, you know, your, your triumphs and your disasters, the things that you've done that are interesting to a certain group of people that you can quantify, that you can describe, that you can give me what it was like, those are your personal playbooks. Now, once you have personal playbooks, you have the ability to turn that into all sorts of products and services through AI. But you-- but it starts with having personal playbooks.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett39:58

       I think this is the key mistake that a lot of content creators are, um, making, which is because it's easy to make stuff now, well, it's tempting just to churn stuff out.

   19. DPDaniel Priestley40:06

       Yeah.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett40:06

       Whereas I'm making less content now in a world of AI. If you look at my LinkedIn, I used to post [laughs] If you go back like three or four years, I was just churning stuff out-

   21. DPDaniel Priestley40:16

       Quotes

   22. SBSteven Bartlett40:16

       ... on my Link- quote, pictures, anything fluff-

   23. DPDaniel Priestley40:18

       Yeah

   24. SBSteven Bartlett40:18

       ... like just fluff.

   25. DPDaniel Priestley40:18

       Bit of data.

   26. SBSteven Bartlett40:19

       Yeah.

   27. DPDaniel Priestley40:19

       Yeah.

   28. SBSteven Bartlett40:20

       Now I go, "Well, if everyone can do it" the reason why my LinkedIn you'll see almost every post I post now is a human story about something I've gone through.

   29. DPDaniel Priestley40:27

       Yeah.

   30. SBSteven Bartlett40:27

       You'll see photos of me. You'll see photos of my family. Because again-
8. 44:39 – 47:51

   These Jobs Will Disappear Within 5 Years

   1. SBSteven Bartlett44:39

      I was reading yesterday that the, for the first time, I mean, I was reading a few things. One of the interesting things I read is that Spotify said their best developers haven't written a line of code since December-

   2. DPDaniel Priestley44:48

      Mm.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett44:48

      Thanks to AI, which again is a whole nother conversation. Maybe we should touch on that. What are the occupations that you genuinely believe won't exist five years from now as we know them?

   4. DPDaniel Priestley45:00

      Well-

   5. SBSteven Bartlett45:00

      People say lawyers are gonna be disrupted.

   6. DPDaniel Priestley45:02

      L- l- well, I recently had a law, a legal case that I had to resolve, and it was going to cost us fifty thousand pounds, so sixty thousand dollars, uh, as I start the process with a law firm. We took matters into our own hands and we used Claude and we actually fixed the process and resolved the process by spending twenty a month, twenty dollars a month and Claude gave us a coaching session on how to handle it, gave us multiple decision tree pathways, gave us the documents that we would need, gave us an Excel spreadsheet of do say this, don't say this in the negotiation. And it made me realize, my goodness, what are lawyers gonna do? Uh, because if all they do is charge for time for money to regurgitate contracts, I don't need that anymore, right?

   7. SBSteven Bartlett45:45

      Multiple reports say legacy legal tech and data firms have lost roughly twenty percent of their value so far in twenty twenty-six.

   8. DPDaniel Priestley45:52

      Two hundred and eighty billion was wiped off the value of publicly traded companies like that in the last week. Like it's wild, um, because we're not gonna need that. I don't believe we're gonna need these business models as they currently stand. I think they're gonna have to change and adapt. I think a lawyer needs to take a completely different shape, part business coach, part lawyer, part prompt engineer. They're gonna be the key person of AI in the room who the lawyer's job will be to work with you on your AI prompting and help you get the resolution. You're probably gonna need a lot less of a lawyer's time. Blue collar work has been devalued and we've seen people who work with their hands and people who, uh, turn up to your house and fix your house in a devalued role and it could be in the next, you know, uh, couple of years, these are the roles that are elevated the most and that plumbers regularly earn more than lawyers simply because the nature of the economy has changed. One thing I've learned over the last twenty-five years is the pendulum swings. Things that, th- very few things stay the same. There is always this swinging pendulum and the swinging pendulum is like, oh yeah, white collar work behind a screen is the high value thing. Oh no, it's actually blue collar work with your hands.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett47:02

      Hmm.

   10. DPDaniel Priestley47:02

       You talked about supply and demand. We dis-- The government disrupted the natural way children go out and find opportunities in the world by making university loans come along and they said, "Oh, everyone can just take out a university loan and go to university. In fact, you must and you should go, go to university, get yourself in debt or else you'll never get a job anywhere if you don't do a university degree." And lots of young people who should have been plumbers, electricians and concreters and bricklayers went off and became a mas-- got a master's degree in the mating habits of butterflies and you know, some random degree that doesn't have a job attached and they ended up in sixty, seventy, eighty thousand dollars worth of debt to get this degree that no one was asking for. That market distortion means that we now don't have many plumbers and electricians and the blue ocean is now being a tradesperson.

9. 47:51 – 50:02

   Ads

   1. DPDaniel Priestley47:51

      [laughs]

   2. SBSteven Bartlett47:52

      There's a phase a lot of companies hit where they're no longer doing the most important thing which is selling and they get really bogged down with admin and it's often something that creeps up slowly and you don't really notice until it's happened. Slowly momentum starts to leak out. This happened to us and our sponsor Pipedrive was a fix I came across ten years ago and ever since my teams across my different companies have continued to use it. Pipedrive is a simple but powerful sales CRM that gives you the visibility on any deals in your pipeline. It also automates a lot of the tedious, repetitive and time-consuming parts of the sales process which in turn saves you so many hours every single month which means you can get back to selling. Making that early decision to switch to Pipedrive was a real game changer and it's kept the right things front of mind. My favorite feature is Pipedrive's ability to sync your CRM with multiple email inboxes so your entire team can work together from one platform and we aren't the only ones benefiting. Over a hundred thousand companies use Pipedrive to grow their business. So if something I've said resonates, head over to pipedrive.com/ceo where you can get a thirty-day free trial, no credit card or payment required.

   3. DPDaniel Priestley48:57

      Steve, what are you doing?

   4. SBSteven Bartlett48:59

      Uh, just making myself a delicious coffee.

   5. DPDaniel Priestley49:01

      From the freezer?

   6. SBSteven Bartlett49:03

      From the freezer. Have you not heard about Cometeer?

   7. DPDaniel Priestley49:04

      No.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett49:05

      Oh my gosh. This is gonna change your life. A couple of months ago, the founder of this business called Matt sent a big shipment of this coffee to our office in London. What most people don't know is that the processing of coffee takes out a lot of the taste, so what they do is they flash freeze it at the optimal moment when it's most tasty, and they send you in the post the coffee in these little frozen ice cubes. Now, Matt sent a big shipment to my office. I moved it to the kitchen. I said to the team, "Knock yourselves out." And then I saw so many messages in our Slack channel of people going, "Oh my God, what the hell is that? It's so delicious." All I have to do is pop it out in the morning using the little button on the back of this thing. I pour my hot water in, and I mix it, and that is done. You can get thirty dollars off your first order of Cometeer coffee if you go to cometeer.com/stephen. Try it and please Instagram DM me, LinkedIn me and let me know if you love it as much as I do. [paper rustling]

10. 50:02 – 52:22

    What Happens To Workers When AI Replaces Their Jobs?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett50:02

       I was looking at the, um, top ten jobs according to AI that are most likely to, to be disrupted, and it said things like drivers with McKinsey-

    2. DPDaniel Priestley50:09

       Mm-hmm

    3. SBSteven Bartlett50:09

       ... estimating thirty percent of them will be automated by twenty thirty. Customer service representative and call center reps, which I used to be.

    4. DPDaniel Priestley50:15

       Mm-hmm. Same.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett50:16

       Fifty percent headcount reductions after AI rollout according to some estimates. Some go up to about eighty percent. I actually saw a tool on my timeline yesterday that is real human voice indistinguishable from humans that's just launched and is causing a huge stir, so that-- they're thinking that will replace even more of the customer service roles. I, I did speak to the CEO of Klarna. TLDR is he said, "We currently have seven thousand employees. We're gonna be able to get down to three thousand," he said after summer-

    6. DPDaniel Priestley50:43

       Yeah

    7. SBSteven Bartlett50:43

       ... because of, um, AI, and we'll be using our existing team members that are in customer service roles to do more sort of bespoke white glove VIP-

    8. DPDaniel Priestley50:53

       VIP stuff will go up. In fact, Jevons paradox would suggest that a lot of the dehumanizing repetitive work will go away. But actually if there are AI bots that are really good at setting appointments for a VIP human person to have a conversation, then that work will go through the roof. Because one of the reasons that people-- Like right now, most companies wish they could have more VIP conversations, but the appointment setting, they don't have a lot of the low-level appointment setting stuff happening.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett51:22

       Mm-hmm.

    10. DPDaniel Priestley51:23

        And if the appointment setting stuff, if the cost of that goes to zero, then the V- the, the, the affordability of the VIP level treatment, um, becomes, you know, becomes, uh, much more feasible.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett51:34

        Retail cashiers, admin assistants, bookkeepers and payroll clerks, sales development reps, warehouse workers with, um, Amazon and others reporting that robots now assist or replace labor in a roughly forty percent of fulfillment tasks. And that Boston Dynamics video which I'll put up on the screen-

    12. DPDaniel Priestley51:48

        Mm.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett51:48

        ... shows a humanoid robot working in a factory.

    14. DPDaniel Priestley51:51

        What's nice about some of this is that many of the jobs here are jobs that a lot of people don't actually like doing. They are repetitive and dehumanizing. They're late night. They're early mornings. So potentially, provided there is a Jevons paradox that something happens that's more fun, more humanizing, more interesting, more VIP, more chaotic and, you know, all of that sort of stuff, it could be a very positive thing.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett52:15

        Fast food workers, um-

    16. DPDaniel Priestley52:16

        I, I used to be a fast food worker.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett52:18

        So did I in McDonald's for I think it was two days.

    18. DPDaniel Priestley52:20

        I did two years at McDonald's.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett52:21

        Oh, really?

11. 52:22 – 55:07

    What’s Really Happening In The U.K. Right Now

    1. SBSteven Bartlett52:22

       Because this disruption is happening at record speeds, where do all these people go? Because y- you know, even in examples, oh, they could do AI labeling. They need to be upskilled and trained.

    2. DPDaniel Priestley52:31

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett52:31

       And I worry that the rate of disruption isn't gonna meet the rate of creation of new opportunities, and I really do worry about this.

    4. DPDaniel Priestley52:38

       Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett52:38

       Like I think people wonder why I have these conversations on this podcast over and over again. My philosophy to talking, having conversations-

    6. DPDaniel Priestley52:43

       Mm-hmm

    7. SBSteven Bartlett52:43

       ... on this podcast is basically I'll say to my team, I'll say, "Steve, do you want to have a conversation about, you know, this particular subject, the gut microbiome?" And I'll say, "We've covered it," which basically means I'm no longer curious.

    8. DPDaniel Priestley52:55

       Yep.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett52:55

       I have the answers. I know about the trillions of gut microbe-

    10. DPDaniel Priestley52:58

        Mm-hmm

    11. SBSteven Bartlett52:58

        ... and I know how the gut-brain axis. Let's move on.

    12. DPDaniel Priestley53:00

        Yep.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett53:01

        I keep having these conversations about AI because I feel like I'm getting no good answers.

    14. DPDaniel Priestley53:05

        Okay. So here's what's interesting. There is something which you have which is this elite mindset which is how do I organize society so that everyone gets a job and everyone does stuff, right? And this is, this is the trap that many people have fallen into, and it's actually at the root cause of socialism. So the root of socialism is that I know better than everybody else, and I will come up with a way of running society so everyone gets looked after. That's the top-down mindset. The crazy mindset that actually works is if we give people education and training and we make opportunity transparent, and we actually let people know what's actually happening in the market and we give them price signal data, they will self-organize and reorganize and they will have a bottom-up revolution and they will find amazing, interesting things to do. The money is in the economy, right?

    15. SBSteven Bartlett54:00

        You think that's true?

    16. DPDaniel Priestley54:01

        That's called capitalism.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett54:02

        I know, but-

    18. DPDaniel Priestley54:03

        Capitalism works

    19. SBSteven Bartlett54:04

        ... in the UK-- let's take the UK as an example 'cause we're all just screaming at each other about brown people. We're not talking about the a- the real alien which is like the fundamental economic disruption of AI.

    20. DPDaniel Priestley54:13

        Yeah.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett54:13

        There's a report that came out yesterday showing that unemployment in the UK has hit-

    22. DPDaniel Priestley54:18

        It's twenty-five percent up, a-and youth unemployment has grown by more than twenty-five percent.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett54:22

        It's like sixteen point one percent of people-

    24. DPDaniel Priestley54:23

        Yeah

    25. SBSteven Bartlett54:23

        ... that are between sixteen and twenty-four are unemployed now.

    26. DPDaniel Priestley54:25

        Yeah.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett54:26

        And we're still not talking about the, the economy. We're talking about brown people.

    28. DPDaniel Priestley54:30

        When people feel that they can't get ahead, they look for somebody to blame, and this is historically consistent. What is really happening is that the government has become so big in the economy. The, the UK government is now forty-five to fifty percent of all spending in the UK economy. That's essentially a socialist, or it's getting socialist. Every amount of government spend is a market distortion regardless of what it's for, and I'm saying there are plenty of things government should be spending money on, but all government spending is a market distortion. It's not market driven, and there is a monopoly on spend, so therefore it is a market distortion. The more government spending you have, the more market distortions you have.

12. 55:07 – 1:00:40

    “Market Distortions”: The Hidden Economic Effects Of AI

    1. SBSteven Bartlett55:07

       What do you mean by market distortions?

    2. DPDaniel Priestley55:08

       So a market distortion is where the markets are not really able to function because there is some bigOrganization like the government spending money and taking away price signals and taking away the realities of the market. So a cl-- a great example is what happened with student loans. So rather than what, in a capitalist society, what would have happened is that young people would have heard, "Oh my goodness, there's a shortage of bricklayers. Have you heard that bricklayers are making three hundred pounds a day? Wow, I would love to make three hundred pounds a day. I'm gonna go be a bricklayer. Guess what? It's a bricklayer's apprentice. I'm gonna go and be an apprentice. I'm gonna get paid to learn this trade." And there would be a market-driven pull towards being a bricklayer. A young person would get a job at a bank, and the bank would say, "Hey, can we please pay for you to do a finance degree because we need more people who've got a finance degree, and we will actually pay for you to go through that." So that's a functioning market. It's basically based on, uh, needs and wants and things that n- are needed within the economy. What the government did is they created a, what's called a market distortion. They said to all young people, "We are going to give you as much, uh, lending as you like to go out and take whatever university courses you want. Um, there's no price data, there's no signaling data. It's just you-- if you wanna borrow fifty thousand pounds, you can go to any course. If you're really interested in the breeding habits of butterflies, go and do a master's degree in that, and, um, you know, happy days, right? You, you could... It doesn't matter whether there are jobs as-associated with it. You must go and get a, a university degree." So they set up an entire system that pushed young people to go get fifty thousand pounds worth of debt and do a degree that no one was asking for. That's a market distortion. We now have a bubble of over two hundred and eighty billion pounds worth of, uh, debt that will probably never be repaid. Uh, we have a entire generation of young people who are saddled with this debt that takes away all motivation. There's no point in working because they pay such high taxes. Every single time they make a payment to pay off their student loan, they, they pay six hundred, but the debt goes up by six hundred and fifty, right? It's, it's absolutely insane. And that's a classic example of governments meddling with the markets, creating a market distortion, and now we have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of people who are very angry, very upset, uh, because they are trapped in a student debt that will not go away for decades.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett57:30

       Rishi Sunak, the former Prime Minister of the UK, wrote an article last week, which you might have seen, where he said that if the UK fails to fix its productivity problems and seize the AI opportunity, the country risks becoming a tourist theme park.

    4. DPDaniel Priestley57:46

       Yeah, not even a good tourist theme park. You know, there's, there's, you know, there's not a lot, you know. At least a, a lot of other countries have beaches and mountain ranges and ski resorts and, you know, the UK doesn't have a lot of that. We have to let markets function. The issue that we have, and this is, this is actually a trap that you're falling into, is trying to figure out top-down how do we organize society, which is socialism, right? The top-down approach of trying to fix this problem for everybody is the socialist mindset, and it do- it doesn't work, right?

    5. SBSteven Bartlett58:16

       If you were the Prime Minister-

    6. DPDaniel Priestley58:18

       Yeah

    7. SBSteven Bartlett58:18

       ... and you, you can see the future that's coming-

    8. DPDaniel Priestley58:20

       Yeah

    9. SBSteven Bartlett58:21

       ... what would you do?

    10. DPDaniel Priestley58:22

        So the number one thing the UK needs to do is reduce government involvement, right? We need to get the government spending down less than thirty-five percent.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett58:30

        Where'd you cut?

    12. DPDaniel Priestley58:30

        Right. So the key thing that you need is that you need... Well, there's loads of places to cut, right? Like getting involved in trying to do wind farms and solar farms and all of this forty billion and all this other stuff. Preventing companies from accessing natural gas that is just sitting under our feet is a crazy thing to do. Spending twenty billion trying to give away one of our islands to someone is a crazy thing to do. There's all sorts of crazy things that the government is spending money on. Bureaucracy is a crazy spend. Do you know the, the, um, Birmingham City Council, they wanted to migrate from SAP to Oracle?

    13. SBSteven Bartlett59:04

        What's that?

    14. DPDaniel Priestley59:05

        From a CRM system with SAP to a CRM system with Oracle, a software system, right? So they wanted to migrate from one software system to another software system. They thought that it would cost nineteen million pounds, which in itself is a, a very high amount to migrate from one software to another software. It cost two hundred and twenty million pounds.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett59:21

        So you're saying that, you think the government should just do less stuff.

    16. DPDaniel Priestley59:24

        They should be involved in less stuff because what's happening right now is that there is so much government spending that the benefits for succeeding are being eroded by taxation and people are just leaving. See, here's the thing. There's-- With capitalism, the only benefit of capitalism is the creative entrepreneurial process, right? That creative entrepreneurial process that produces amazing companies and amazing innovations, and it creates stuff that is better, faster, and cheaper for everybody's lives, that comes from capitalism. But if you take away the incentives for doing that, you essentially don't have that happen within your country, and then as soon as you don't have that, you don't have any economic growth. And then as soon as you don't have any economic growth, all you're left with is the debt, and the debt erodes your economy and kills your economy, and you don't have any growth to counterbalance the debt, so you enter a downward spiral. And that is basically the same socialist scam that happens over and over again everywhere that it's tried. You're essentially trying to get rid of the worst elements of an economy, which is cronyism and extraction, but that happens under socialism. You just simply lose the one thing that doesn't happen under socialism, which is the creative process, the entrepreneurial process, the innovative process that creates new value in the economy.

13. 1:00:40 – 1:06:21

    Why So Many People Are Leaving The U.K.

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:00:40

       So what we've currently done in the UK, we've taken away all incentives for people to be in the UK and to succeed. I'm sure you know people personally who are no longer in the UK as tax residents, who should be in the UK as tax residents. They like the UK. They enjoyed living in the UK. But what happened? They left. You and I had a, a debate with a guy a year ago and he said, "Oh no, people are not gonna leave the UK. We can tax them as high as we possibly can. We can ramp up the taxes."

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:08

       Gary Stevenson.

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:01:09

       Yeah, Gary Stevenson. And Gary's prediction was that rich people are not gonna leave, and he also predicted that the house prices are gonna explode and that we're gonna have these horrible house prices. What's happened? Housing market has gone flat because people are leaving.The economically active pro- producers, providers, they have left in their droves and the economy is now in real trouble. If you ask anyone who has left, what do they tell you is the reason that they left the U.K.?

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:34

       It's one of two things. It's generally, I think they feel a sense of pessimism about building their future in a place that, that feels like it's on managed decline-

    5. DPDaniel Priestley1:01:43

       Mm-hmm

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:43

       ... to some people, and then the other cohort will say tax reasons.

    7. DPDaniel Priestley1:01:47

       High taxes and, and it just feels like you can't get ahead.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:50

       And also the third I'd say is they, they think that talent is elsewhere.

    9. DPDaniel Priestley1:01:53

       Yeah. Talent's leaving.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:53

        So they think they have better chance of getting capital and talent-

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:01:55

        Yeah

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:55

        ... employees if they move to America or Dubai-

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:01:58

        Yeah

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:58

        ... or wherever else.

    15. DPDaniel Priestley1:01:58

        Yep, and if you go to Dubai, low taxes, and if you go to America, lower taxes, um, more opportunities. So we are living in a time where, you know, a lot of countries are exploring this socialism thing, and unfortunately it's a scam. But even what's interesting is even your mindset is we need to fix this top-down as opposed to fix it bottom-up. With AI, we need to give people price data, price signals.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:22

        What does that mean?

    17. DPDaniel Priestley1:02:23

        It means that they need to be able to see what's happening in, in the economy. A young person needs to know that someone's making a lot of profit. They need to be able to see there is opportunities to do this, there's opportunities to do that. They need to also see, oh, this is no longer an opportunity. So this was great. This was a great opportunity five years ago, but it's not such a great opportunity now. A lot of young people are gonna discover, oh, wait a second, I could get into house renovations 'cause a lot of houses need renovating. And they go, "Oh, cool. I've heard about someone who's making money doing that. I'm gonna go do that." So that's just having access to price data.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:55

        When I look back over the last couple of years, data from Henley & Partners, t- in 2023 it says three thousand two hundred millionaires net left the U.K. In 2024, nine thousand five hundred millionaires net left the U.K. In 2025, projected sixteen thousand five hundred millionaires are expected to leave the U.K. which is a record outflow, and predictions that have not yet been published warn that the trend is likely to continue into 2026. When you think about this, like, I guess there's two questions, which is why does this matter?

    19. DPDaniel Priestley1:03:26

        Mm-hmm.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:27

        And then the next question is, what should I do about it-

    21. DPDaniel Priestley1:03:29

        Yeah

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:29

        ... on an individual level?

    23. DPDaniel Priestley1:03:30

        Um, so why does it matter is because 1% of people pay for 30% of the bills and, uh, 10% of people pay si- sixty percent of the bills. So if those people leave, then those bills get passed on to everybody. We've seen this here in New York, so we're at the moment we're in New York, and this socialist mayor, Mendoni, has basically just come out today and said we need to put everybody's taxes up because we need to spread the bills of the city across all the residents, um, because people are leaving, [laughs] right? So he wants to propose a 9.5% tax rise on all people, uh, who, who own homes regardless of the value of those homes. So essentially when rich people leave, they leave behind a lot of bills that everybody else has to pay that they were previously paying.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:16

        In his February 2026 preliminary budget, New York Mayor Zohran Mendoni proposed a 9.5% property tax increase to address a projected five point four billion budget shortfall. This proposal acts as a last resort alternative to his preferred plan, which was increasing taxes on top earners and corporations to fill the revenue gap.

    25. DPDaniel Priestley1:04:37

        Hmm. He promised free stuff and he promised that everything was gonna be paid for for free. Nothing is free. Someone has to pay for everything. If the rich people leave, there's not people who can pay for all the free stuff, and that's what New York is suddenly discovering. So why does it matter? Because rich people essentially create the growth. They are the high taxpayers. Whichever way you wanna say it or discover or discuss it, it is a small group of people who pay a lot of the, uh, taxes. You don't want those people to leave the economy. What do you do about it? The number one thing to do about it is you need to identify the opportunity that's right for you. That's called founder opportunity fit. What you're looking for is an opportunity where you can earn money no matter where you are in the world. If you're somewhere that you don't perhaps like being for any reason, you can pick up and move. Um, so the best kind of businesses and the best kind of opportunities at the moment are the ones that are not geographically limited to a particular city.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:30

        It says that in New York, personal tax income remains pretty strong, but business tax collections have started to soften. Recent reports show they are roughly three hundred and seventy-eight million lower than initially projected as business formation slows down in New York.

    27. DPDaniel Priestley1:05:44

        Yeah. It's the same story. We've seen this over and over again. Um, socialism is like a hot stove that every generation has to touch for themselves. That essentially every generation of young people, they think they've discovered something new. They think, "Oh my goodness, what if we just go to the rich people and take it off them and give it to everybody else, and we'll redistribute the wealth?" And even though it's been tried for a hundred and eighty years since, uh, Karl Marx came along, uh, it just doesn't work. It, it, it is a disaster, and it ruins economies over and over and over again, and trying to offer lots and lots of free incentives without any productivity gains is a downward

14. 1:06:21 – 1:09:25

    The Bear Case For AI: What If The Future Isn’t As Bright As We Think?

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:06:21

       spiral.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:21

       What's your bear case for the future of AI?

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:06:24

       Well, the bear case is that we have something called the Engels pause. The Engels pause is what happened in the industrial age, where for fifty years all the wealth went to the top, uh, because of the new technology of the industrialization. When we went from agriculture to industrial age, that new technology displaced so many people that there were revolutions off the back of it.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:43

       I mean, this is gonna be even faster and more disruptive.

    5. DPDaniel Priestley1:06:45

       Yeah. It's very, very disruptive. [laughs] Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:47

       I said this once before in a conversation I had about AI, but I went to my friend's accelerator in San Francisco, which used to be a software accelerator, and when I walked in there and went around, he has, you know, so hundreds of entrepreneurs in there building stuff. I was like, "Why is everyone building robots?" He was like, "Oh, because..." And he showed me this, I said this in a couple of episodes ago, showed me this frying pan which had an arm, a robotic arm attached to it, and he's like, "Cook, cook your dinner for you."

    7. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:09

       Yeah.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:10

       And I, and he was like, "So ten years ago, the-"expensive thing wasn't actually the robotic arm. He's like, "All these pieces, all these, they, they've been around for-

    9. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:19

       Hmm

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:19

        ... for decades." He goes, "The expensive thing was the intelligence." He goes, "Now it costs cents. Back then, it would've cost me tens of thousands to, to-

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:25

        To build one

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:26

        ... buy the intelli- intelligence-

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:27

        Yeah

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:28

        ... that would know how to make-

    15. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:29

        Yeah

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:29

        ... your omelet for you." So he goes, "What you're seeing now is we're actually in the, the Renaissance age of robotics."

    17. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:34

        Yeah.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:34

        And I looked around everywhere. I was like, "Oh, there's... What's that machine over there?" He goes, "That makes your perfume for you in the morning."

    19. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:38

        Yeah.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:38

        "You tell it how you wanna smell today. It mix- It has all the scents loaded in, and it'll make you..." And you can see the making of-

    21. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:44

        Well, everything that has currently got a Bluetooth in it will have intelligence in it. So your toothbrush will tell you whether you've brushed your teeth well enough and book y- It'll probably be the thing that books an appointment for your dentist, uh, and all that sort of stuff. So-

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:56

        I'd go even further. I'd say even things that don't, like my bedsheet, my bedsheets-

    23. DPDaniel Priestley1:08:00

        Bedsheets

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:00

        ... my pillows-

    25. DPDaniel Priestley1:08:01

        Yeah

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:01

        ... my mattresses.

    27. DPDaniel Priestley1:08:02

        And they, they will all have access to agents and all that sort of stuff. My bear case for AI is not about the intelligence side of things. I generally believe that more intelligence means a better society. Um, there's never been a situation where lots of intelligence was a bad thing. Um, so I think intelligence has a pretty strong bull case to it. But financial bubbles are a real thing, and I've lived through a couple of them. And what I've discovered is that they have widespread, massive impacts on all sorts of areas of society that you wouldn't even expect. And my real bear case for AI is that we over-invest in these data centers, we cause a massive financial collapse, uh, and that we wipe out pension funds. I don't know if you know this, but they're packaging up the debt for these financial, uh, assets, and they're selling that to, um, p- pension funds as private credit. So all of these huge data centers, what they're doing is paying 6% above inflation as a packaged up debt. They send it over. Now, when they go to the pension funds, they say, "Oh, this is backed by Google and backed by Microsoft and backed by, uh, Amazon." And then they say, "Oh, y- you know, it's a 6%, um, financial instrument backed by these huge companies." But unfortunately, the mathematics of spending six hundred billion a year on something that only has a three or four-year lifespan, every single time in the last 180 years that we've spent more than 3% of our economy on an infrastructure build-out, we've ended up with either a massive recession or a depression.

15. 1:09:25 – 1:13:56

    The System Is Breaking: Why Our Economy No Longer Matches Reality

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:25

       Did you hear the Anthropic CEO? For anyone that doesn't know, Anthropic is one of the large AI companies.

    2. DPDaniel Priestley1:09:30

       Claude.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:31

       Yeah. They're, they're the maker of Claude. Did you hear what he was saying the other day in that article he wrote about his concerns?

    4. DPDaniel Priestley1:09:37

       Yeah. Yeah. I s- I saw. At, at Davos?

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:40

       Yeah, he wrote it just after he left Davos, um, Dario Amodei.

    6. DPDaniel Priestley1:09:44

       Yep.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:45

       He said, "Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. We are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023. If the exponential continues, which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it, then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially-"

    8. DPDaniel Priestley1:10:22

       Everything

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:23

       ... everything. "The same AI-enabled tools that are necessary to fight autocracies can be turned inward to create tyranny in our own countries. There is an alarming possibility of global totalitarian dictatorship. AI is so powerful, such a glittering prize, that it is very difficult for human civilization to impose any restraints on it at all." And he said this remarkable thing about, um, in that essay about imagining if there was an island with 50,000-

    10. DPDaniel Priestley1:10:57

        Ooh

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:57

        ... geniuses on it.

    12. DPDaniel Priestley1:10:58

        Or a billion. A billion geniuses.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:59

        Or a billion geniuses on it.

    14. DPDaniel Priestley1:11:01

        Yeah.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:01

        What would happen to society? And I think there's... I don't know. Like, do you know what? I hope I'm really wrong about this, but when I think about this idea that there's 50 million geniuses on this brand-new island-

    16. DPDaniel Priestley1:11:12

        Mm-hmm

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:13

        ... and I ask myself-

    18. DPDaniel Priestley1:11:14

        And willing to work for free

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:15

        ... willing to work for free. When one learns something, they all learn something.

    20. DPDaniel Priestley1:11:19

        Yep.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:20

        You just take that as a first principle. You go, "Hmm, society is gonna be very, very, very, very different." And maybe all of the advice we've been giving for the last five, 10 years about how to be successful, how to be an entrepreneur-

    22. DPDaniel Priestley1:11:30

        Hmm

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:30

        ... how to succeed in business, maybe-

    24. DPDaniel Priestley1:11:32

        It's for an economy that no longer exists.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:34

        Yeah.

    26. DPDaniel Priestley1:11:34

        Yeah, we, we're going thr- we're going from a fundamental industrial age economy to a AI age economy, right? That is, that is different. We will have different economic models. We also have a problem of aging. For all of human history, we've had a small number of old people at the top and a lot of young people at the bottom, and we now have 65% of all wealth in the economy is held by people over 65. And then you've got the financialized economy and the government economy, which is inflationary, and that they pump money in as stimulus. So while the entrepreneurs are making everything cheaper, even free, the governments are actually inflating the economy and the financial system's inflating the economy slightly faster than productivity gains, right? So what's happening is the entrepreneurs bring down the cost of everything, and the governments and the financial system top it up with new stimulus. According to the rules that the government runs by, as AI creates huge deflationary impacts, they can actually just inflate the economy, like, unbelievably. They can pump huge amounts of stimulus into the economy. So this whole idea of, um, UBI, universal basic income, it actually stacks up from a economic fundamentals, basics, uh, principles, uh, where you can actually, provided you're getting the productivity gains where things are costing zero because of AI, you can actually just pump money into the economy and give, give money away for a period of time while we're going through that transition. Hopefully, that prevents massive craziness from unfolding, and hopefully, as a result of having a huge amount of intelligence, we find really interesting, fun ways to structure society and do things. We're, we're not necessarily leaving utopia. We shouldn't necessarily be grieving the loss of shitty jobs and grieving the loss of dehumanizing low connectivity jobs. We have ruined-The way that we pair bond, we've ruined the way that we do community, we've ruined the way that families run. We've got people working two jobs just to survive. Like that's not something to be grieving the loss of. We need a new system. Maybe AI is gonna actually give us the breathing room that we need to actually create a system that gets us back to a little bit towards the way that humans have flourished.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:52

        Are we gonna go towards UBI?

    28. DPDaniel Priestley1:13:54

        It seems like in the short term that would have

16. 1:13:56 – 1:16:09

    Should AI Wealth Fund Society?

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:13:56

       to be the case.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:56

       So Sam Altman's over here working to build OpenAI, working twenty-four hours a day, let's just say theoretically.

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:14:01

       Hmm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:02

       Um, we're gonna have to take some of his hard work away and give it to, theoretically, we're gonna have to give it to someone who is maybe not working.

    5. DPDaniel Priestley1:14:11

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:11

       And I mean, Sam Altman, funnily enough, he actually backed a study called Open Research in twenty twenty-four that looked at the impact of UBI, and it showed that recipients who received UBI, which is money basically given to them, worked fewer hours and earned less money than the control group.

    7. DPDaniel Priestley1:14:27

       Mm-hmm.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:27

       Instead of using the freedom to find better jobs to improve their education, many participants simply dropped off the workforce or-

    9. DPDaniel Priestley1:14:33

       Played PlayStation

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:34

        ... reduced their hours for leisure, resulting in a net decrease in household income despite cash payments.

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:14:38

        Yeah. Humans want stuff to do. We need a, we need a meaningful struggle. We need something that we, um, that we're up to in the world, and that is, that is a very difficult thing. The likely thing that I think will probably happen is that these data center investments will be so catastrophic financially that governments will have to bail them out, and then the governments will have to own all the data and all the data centers, and then the tech companies will have to essentially pay royalties back to the government over long periods of time to manage this kind of, uh, infrastructure build-out. So you'll have to have something where the government actually owns the primary asset, and that is the thing that pays for the UBI. I mean, we're, we're kind of theorizing and just kind of-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:16

        We're gonna find out.

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:15:17

        We are gonna find out.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:17

        This is gonna be on the internet soon. [chuckles]

    15. DPDaniel Priestley1:15:18

        The, the mathematics bend reality at a, at about twenty twenty-nine. Once you-- the financial engineering required to make this thing work, you need something like a forty-five times growth in the number of people paying for subscriptions and the number of businesses. Like you take something that is, over the last, uh, five, ten years, there's been a product that has gone exponential, which is Ozempic and GLP-1 weight loss drugs. The amount of spend to build out and satisfy that demand is actually pretty minimal. Those companies spend about twenty percent of their revenues building new factories to produce new GLP drugs, right? So CapEx is about twenty percent of revenue. We're seeing with the AI stuff, CapEx is hundreds of percent of revenue, right? So it is a financial feat that we've never attempted before.

17. 1:16:09 – 1:18:05

    Ads

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:09

       [page flipping] I've had so many founders speak to me and say, "Why didn't this particular ad that I ran on this platform work for me?" Maybe the copy wasn't good, the creative wasn't strong, but usually the problem is they're not having the right conversation because that ad never reached the right person. And if you're in B2B marketing, that is much of the game, and this is where LinkedIn Ads solves that problem for you. Their targeting is ridiculously specific. You can target by job title, seniority, company size, industry, and even someone's skill set. And their network includes over a billion professionals. About a hundred and thirty million of them are decision makers. So when you use LinkedIn Ads, you're putting your brand in front of the right people. And LinkedIn Ads also drive the highest B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks in my experience. If you wanna give them a try, head over to linkedin.com/diary, and when you spend two hundred and fifty dollars on your first LinkedIn Ads campaign, you'll get an extra two hundred and fifty dollar credit from me for the next one. That's linkedin.com/diary. Terms and conditions apply. [page flipping] We have finally caved in. So many of you have asked us if we could bundle the Conversation Cards with The 1% Diary. For those of you that don't know, every single time a guest sits here with me in the chair, they leave a question in the diary of a CEO, and then I ask that question to the next guest. We don't release those questions in any environment other than on these incredible Conversation Cards. These have become a fantastic tool for people in relationships, people in teams, in big corporations, and also family members to connect with each other. With that, we also have The 1% Diary, which is this incredible tool to change habits in your life. So many of you have asked if it was possible to buy both at the same time, especially people in big companies. So what we've done is we've bundled them together and you can buy both at the same time. And if you wanna drive connection and instill habit change in your company, head to thediary.com to inquire and our team will be in touch. [page flipping] Let's bring this back to, uh-

18. 1:18:05 – 1:18:57

    Why Building A Personal Brand May Be The Safest Career Move Today

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:18:05

       Back to reality

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:06

       ... the reality of the person listening and, uh, the pressing questions they have about all this stuff and what they should do. Is there anything else that you would give people that are listening right now in terms of advice to be able to weather the incoming turbulence that the CEO of Anthropic describes there?

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:18:21

       Yeah. Look, the things that I know are good for people is I really believe that everyone should build a little bit of a personal brand. So a personal brand means that two to twenty thousand people know who you are. They know what you do. They know y- what your experiences are like. They could approach you about an opportunity that would be a good opportunity. So build a bit of a personal brand. Don't be invisible, uh, in this particular time because, y-you know, it is one of your assets, which is to take some of your knowledge, some of your playbooks, and to let people know that that exists. So I think build a bit of a personal brand. Second one is

19. 1:18:57 – 1:20:43

    Why Everyone Should Try Entrepreneurship In The AI Economy

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:18:57

       have a go at entrepreneurship, right? Join an entrepreneurial team, do an entrepreneurial side hustle, read some entrepreneurial books, watch some entrepreneurial, um, videos that are out there. Start the process of thinking, "Okay, the school system taught me to be a standardized, uh, employee, a standardized labor. Uh, the school system wanted me to fit in with an office or a factory, but actually there's this whole other way of creating value which is non-standardized called entrepreneurship." This is spotting opportunities and coming up with solutions to it. So, you know-P- play around with the game, even if it's a small game. Like you might notice that there are dirty cars on the street, and you might say, "You know what? I'm gonna go and knock on doors and wash the cars and see if I can make a couple of hundred bucks in a day because I've seen an opportunity, I've seen something that's wrong, and I'm, I'm gonna go and have a go at fixing it."

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:45

       A lot of founders are telling me, Mark Cuban said the other day that one of the great opportunities now is catering for the gap between small business owners that don't know how to use AI and helping them learn how to use AI.

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:19:56

       Hu- yeah, huge, right? Join a, join a, join a founder team and help them do that. Um, as I said as well, sixty-five percent of all the businesses by valuation are people over sixty-five now. So there is a mathematical certainty that two-thirds of the businesses that run the economy by valuation have to change hands in the next ten, fifteen, twenty years. So this is a massive business opportunity. Ah, baby boomers wanna get rid of their businesses. They want to retire. Baby boomers are willing to fund you to buy their business if you present yourself well, if you've got a little bit of a personal brand. So that's a, that's a huge opportunity. So look into that. Um, you know, Cody Sanchez, a mutual friend of ours, she talks, uh, to people all the time about how to buy a baby boomer business and, and take it over and run it. So, um, you know, that's a, that's a great opportunity. Play

20. 1:20:43 – 1:23:59

    How Playing With AI Tools Today Could Change Your Future

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:20:43

       with these toys called AI tools. Someone has given you a free iPhone, which you can just use, called AI tools, um, on the free account.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:51

       That is such good advice that we don't hear enough because I think people think there's where I am right now in my life and what I do, and then there's like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and I c- either I'm one or the other. But actually, what I'm seeing as an employer who's employing-- we probably employ, I'd say, twenty people a month at current rate.

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:21:11

       Mm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:11

       We're hiring twenty more people a month. Is increasingly w- on our culture test when we're screening who the right candidates are, we're looking for some kind of evidence that they're playing or messing around with AI.

    5. DPDaniel Priestley1:21:22

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:22

       And one of my team members is she was trying to figure out how to get a hundred different documents to synthesize and understand the data within these documents. Now, there's two types of people I can hire to do that. There's the old-fashioned way of doing that-

    7. DPDaniel Priestley1:21:39

       Mm-hmm

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:40

       ... where someone might sit there for four or five weeks and try to figure out how to get an Excel document to have the right formulas. And then there's her, who we hired, even though she doesn't have skills in that particular thing, she has no experience in it. But because of her mindset and her agency, she went, "Hmm, maybe I could put this into Claude Cowork and ask, set up an agent to run this for me."

    9. DPDaniel Priestley1:22:01

       Yes.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:01

        By the time dessert came, she pulled her laptop over to me and showed it to me, and she goes, "Steven, I've run all those hundreds of documents, um, into this file, and I can see the sentiment on every single post you've made on every single social platform-

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:22:13

        Yeah

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:13

        ... including every LinkedIn post you've made over the last couple of years. And we can see that actually, even though th- these point, posts get more likes, these ones are actually the best posts you're doing." She did that by dessert.

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:22:24

        Yeah.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:24

        The... And I thought there and thought, "Ah, isn't that interesting?" How do you find people who have that bias in the modern world where they lean into change? She's not technical.

    15. DPDaniel Priestley1:22:32

        It's curiosity, isn't it?

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:33

        Yeah. I- it's curiosity, but there's also something which is like, and being fluid about your identity and what you know.

    17. DPDaniel Priestley1:22:39

        Yes.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:39

        Which is she has no experience in that.

    19. DPDaniel Priestley1:22:42

        But I can try.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:43

        I can try.

    21. DPDaniel Priestley1:22:43

        And the one thing for anyone watching or listening is that don't use AI as a search tool. Don't use it the way you used it a year ago. Give AI your hardest problem and say, "Hey, help me to solve this problem." So for example, you might say, "I'm really struggling with these areas of my life. Here's all the data, here's all the information, here's the PDF documents, here's the, you know, the, the backstory. Help me solve this. Help me write a-- what kind of piece of software might I be able to use to, to, to build here?" I'll give you a real example. One of our team members used AI to analyze all the sales calls for the last three months and discovered a huge opportunity. What they discovered is that seventy-five percent of all of our sales calls, the person who we were on the phone to mentioned that their spouse was a decision-maker and that they needed to talk to their spouse and that decision-making, because it was a family business and that there was either a spouse or a family member. There was no point in our process where we invited collaboration with other family members. So none of our sales calls said, "Do you wanna bring someone along to the sales call?" Like, "Would you like to have someone, uh, do that?" The AI analyzed it, discovered that opportunity, wrote a script as to how to invite people onto the call so that, that you get all decision-makers on the call. And now our sales conversions are going up dramatically.

21. 1:23:59 – 1:25:27

    Employee Vs. Entrepreneur: The Mindset That Will Define Winners

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:59

       I think this is the b- like the, the real bifurcation in terms of the employment market of what we're seeing, is certain people have a, a positive relationship to disruption in technology and change. They get excited by it, where other, others fall into cognitive dissonance, where they, they get so concerned that it's gonna take out their business that they ostrich head in the sand.

    2. DPDaniel Priestley1:24:16

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:17

       And then these, these other people have this in- inherent figure-out ability. I could say to a certain team member of mine, "Here's a big problem," and they would grab onto this big problem, and even though they have no proficiency in data or technology or AI or Claude, they will just... they'll plug away at it-

    4. DPDaniel Priestley1:24:34

       Yes

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:34

       ... on a computer, and they'll figure it out, and they'll use all available tools.

    6. DPDaniel Priestley1:24:38

       Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:38

       Not their identity, what they learned in university or their experience as the only tool in the toolbox.

    8. DPDaniel Priestley1:24:44

       That's the difference between employee mindset and entrepreneur mindset. Entrepreneurs see problems as opportunities. They get excited by problems, and they apply the entrepreneurial process, and employees say, "Hey, wait a second. I was never trained for this. I was never told how to do this. I was not given the rule book for this, so therefore, I'll just ignore it. I'll stay away from it because problems, uh, it's not my problem." And this is the big fundamental shift. We need to say, "Hey, problems are great. We want problems. And is this problem for me? How would I test my assumptions? How would I build something quickly and cheaply? How would I then test that? How would I, I then scale that?" Right? And it's just those kind of few steps that if you embrace those entrepreneurial steps, then life becomes great.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:26

       I have a, a c-

22. 1:25:27 – 1:28:10

    Why Writing Is Becoming A Superpower In The AI Age

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:27

       contrarian take that I think writing is actually more important now than ever before because writing is a proxy of understanding. And in a world of AI, what I'm finding when I look at like my innovation teams or where breakthroughs are coming from in my company, it's actually someone had a really good question.

    2. DPDaniel Priestley1:25:42

       Yes.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:43

       So they were like, "Could we-"theoretically analyze all of our sales calls using Claude to see if there's something interesting in there. Now, that starts with someone understanding sales calls, understanding the tools that allow you to analyze them. They have lots of reference points. They understand lots of, um, variant things, and that means they ask a really great question. So for me, one of the ways that I've been, um, been able to understand more things is to, to write more often about them.

    4. DPDaniel Priestley1:26:07

       Can I go one step further?

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:08

       Yeah, please.

    6. DPDaniel Priestley1:26:09

       And that is a process called pause, reflect, document. And pause, reflect, document, if you do it correctly, you go into nature, away from noise and away from technology, and you take a pen and a paper, and you sit in nature on a bench, and you just pause and just let some boredom set in. You reflect on what's going on. You try and zoom out to the bigger picture. You do some journaling, and you do some dot connecting, where you say, "What are some of the dots that have happened in the last five years? What are some of the bigger picture impacts that I've made? What are some of the s- problems that I've struggled with? What if this was possible? What if that was possible?" We live in this incredible fast-paced world where the one thing that no one allows themselves to do is to pause, reflect, document with a pen and paper. And those people who I know who are doing incredibly well are doing more and more of this.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:04

       Yeah.

    8. DPDaniel Priestley1:27:05

       Yeah.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:05

       Same, same. Sim- I mean, you're one of them. You're a person who's-- I mean, look at this.

    10. DPDaniel Priestley1:27:10

        Yeah. [laughs]

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:11

        This is a lot of books.

    12. DPDaniel Priestley1:27:11

        That's my head.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:12

        But you tweet every day. You post every day. You're constantly experiencing something in the real world, writing it down to develop your thinking, which M- Richard Feynman talks about the process of understanding, where you learn something, condense it so-

    14. DPDaniel Priestley1:27:26

        Yes

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:26

        ... an average person can understand it, then you share it with the world to collect feedback on that thought. He said that's the, like, the fastest, best way to learn.

    16. DPDaniel Priestley1:27:32

        Yeah.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:33

        But actually, in a world of AI, where ChatGPT can do all of that for me, we're deferring our ability to sort of condense, compress, and understand to an AI because we think it's creating a, a- an efficiency gain or a productivity gain-

    18. DPDaniel Priestley1:27:44

        Mm-hmm

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:44

        ... in the near term. Like, maybe today's email will, will save you thirty seconds, but the, the tax you're paying, I think, is in understanding.

    20. DPDaniel Priestley1:27:52

        Mm-hmm.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:52

        And understanding is the, is a proxy of, uh, therefore, you know, writing great questions. I find myself writing more.

    22. DPDaniel Priestley1:27:58

        Mm.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:58

        I wrote a memo this... I was up till two AM last night writing a memo-

    24. DPDaniel Priestley1:28:02

        Yeah

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:02

        ... about my own industry.

    26. DPDaniel Priestley1:28:02

        Which, which means you are up late thinking.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:04

        Yeah. Yeah.

    28. DPDaniel Priestley1:28:05

        You are thinking clearly, and that was what you were really doing. A, a great question I want people to reflect

23. 1:28:10 – 1:31:34

    The One Question That Can Change Your Career Path

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:28:10

       on, I want them to think about the last five years and ask the question, "When did I do something special that impacted a certain type of person? I can explain how I did it step by step and how it felt, and it would be of interest to plenty of people." All right? And that question contains what we talked about earlier, which is lived experience, feelings, playbooks, and connecting the dots looking backwards and actually coming up with some things that only I can do, things that only I can say. So that, that particular prompt, that particular question, to sit in nature and think clearly and memo and d- and document and write a memo about it. You know, I s- I see so many people, and you and I have done this over the last couple of hours. We think so much about the future and the uncertainty of the future, but a lot of value comes from just looking backwards and connecting the dots and then thinking, "What, what is it that I now know that I wanna take forward and add value to others?"

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:05

       Sort of adjacent to that, but related, is another thing I think a lot about, which is, um, trying to get more information and experiences from a wide set of reference points. Because when I think about innovation generally, innovation is the connection of, like, two ideas or thoughts or principles that someone else hasn't put together. So I think about the, like, non-stick frying pan. It was a guy who was fishing and was trying to make... get a material, so his tackle, his fishing tackle didn't stick together. And his wife walks past, allegedly, and says, "I'd love some of that stuff on our pans." And that ends up selling tens and tens of millions of non-stick pans. And even the, even when you think about the iPhone, that was a combination of a, of an internet device-

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:29:47

       Mm-hmm

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:47

       ... a music device, and a telecommunications device-

    5. DPDaniel Priestley1:29:51

       Yeah

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:51

       ... put together, which you rarely found those three things in one space, three different reference points.

    7. DPDaniel Priestley1:29:55

       Well-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:56

       To achieve that, someone would've had to understand-

    9. DPDaniel Priestley1:29:57

       Yeah

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:58

        ... music, the internet, and phones.

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:30:00

        Yeah.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:00

        And even Steve Jobs himself, his skill stack contains typography and design-

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:30:04

        Typography, yeah

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:05

        ... which is why, why he was able to disrupt BlackBerry.

    15. DPDaniel Priestley1:30:07

        He stumbled into a calligraphy cl- class at university and loved calligraphy, and he was the first company to ever have fonts, and those fonts became a huge differentiator on the first Mac. And it was only because he had, like, combined calligraphy with, uh, with, with computers. He created the font, uh, idea.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:25

        So maybe the future's owned by the wide, not the narrow, in this regard.

    17. DPDaniel Priestley1:30:28

        Definitely. Become more of a generalist, become more curious, and go out of your comfort zones, right? Ex- The, the industrial age asked us to simply specialize and do one thing over and over. The grandfather of capitalism is a guy called Adam Smith, and he said, "Ultimately, efficiency is about doing one thing in the process over and over and over." But he said, "It's gonna destroy the human spirit." He actually wrote about the fact that that destroys the human spirit, having to just twist this knob over and over. That creates the most value in the economy, but it's horrible for you as a human. And what-- And he recognized that problem, uh, from the very beginning. What we've been trained to do is just twist the knob, twist the knob, twist the knob, do the same thing over and over. What we need to relearn how to do is allow us to become more human and say, "Actually, I'm gonna explore nature. I'm gonna explore this weird passion that I have for, um, you know, particular theater companies and how they run. I'm gonna go and explore this thing about, like, entrepreneur accelerators. Um, you know, I'm gonna combine things." It's those rare combinations, and you need to trust your instincts that you're actually pulling on a few threads and bringing them together.

24. 1:31:34 – 1:37:49

    Why Thinking Too Narrowly Could Cost You The Future

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:34

       I do that while still focusing on a job, et cetera, because I do this for a living. So I get to sit here, you know. Uh, someone walked in before you, and they were talking to me, and Alex Honnold was talking to me in that chair before you. That's why the little Taipei statue's behind us-

    2. DPDaniel Priestley1:31:47

       I know, yeah

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:47

       ... about, you know. Then you've talked to me today about this, and the next person will talk to me about neuroscience and bringing a human brain, and that's allowed me to kind of connect these interesting reference points. What I'm saying here is you don't need to, like-Quit your job and go and live in Peru to, to, to orchestrate your life in such a way. I think you just need to be really intentional about resisting the urge to be a narrow person and to identify too much with one's identity. And so when I left my former business, one of the chapters I wrote in my book is, "How do I now resist all my labels?"

    4. DPDaniel Priestley1:32:17

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:17

       Because now I'm a social media CEO, and it's so tempting-

    6. DPDaniel Priestley1:32:21

       Yeah

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:21

       ... to gather around social media people-

    8. DPDaniel Priestley1:32:24

       Yeah

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:24

       ... go to social media parties, put it in my bio, get social media opportunities, and just go further and further and further down that narrow line. So that's why I went and worked in psychedelics and biotech. I worked in s-cancer biotech. I started to DJ. I started a podcast called The Diary Of A CEO. I tried to do as many things as I possibly could to remain wide.

    10. DPDaniel Priestley1:32:41

        Yeah.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:42

        Um-

    12. DPDaniel Priestley1:32:42

        And your superpowers are extra superpowers when you take them somewhere new.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:46

        Mm.

    14. DPDaniel Priestley1:32:46

        So if you've got social media superpowers, within the social media bubble, everyone's got those superpowers.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:52

        Yeah.

    16. DPDaniel Priestley1:32:52

        But if you go and take them into a completely new place, you discover that actually what you, what you learnt over here becomes a massive differentiator over here.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:01

        Is there anything else the audience need to know about the big opportunities you see as we head into the future?

    18. DPDaniel Priestley1:33:07

        We all want the future to be bright. We all want the future to be, uh, amazing. And we love the idea of trying to improve the world. One of the best ways to improve the world is to improve your own situation, because the world is made up of people who have their own situation. You know, when we try and fix every problem on the planet, it feels completely crushing, and it feels so much weight on your shoulders. When you actually say, "What's my opportunity?" Like, if I could im- if I improve the world by building myself a really great business that helps a few people, it f- helps five hundred clients do something, and if I'm actually out there adding value in my unique way, and I'm finding a way through this AI weird adventure that we're going on, that's actually helping the world, right? So you're bringing yourself forward. You're discovering something. I really want people to resist the trap of trying to fix everyone and fix everything. Try and figure out what is your opportunity, what is your way of adding value to others, what is your way of getting paid, what is your way of doing creative entrepreneurship, uh, what's your contribution to the world, and that is actually a contribution.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:09

        Is that difficult to do? Because I think it assumes a certain level of self-awareness that is not always easy.

    20. DPDaniel Priestley1:34:18

        If you find it difficult to do, find someone who inspires you and see if you can join their team. So that's totally a valid move as well, right? Just get onto a team where someone's figuring this stuff out. Um, you know, follow your inspiration, and sometimes your inspiration is to start something. Sometimes your ins-inspiration is to help propel something forward, being part of someone else's team who does inspire you. Self-awareness is, is a skill that we all have to learn. We're all on a crash course with reality. Every single one of us is on a crash course with reality.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:46

        There's a lot of narrative on, on the internet that everybody can live their dream, you know. And I w-wonder whether [chuckles] every... W- it's good. I wonder whether it's good advice to tell everybody to, like, quit their job and pursue their dream.

    22. DPDaniel Priestley1:35:01

        I believe that the new size of business that makes the most sense is small and dynamic and lean and is probably close to ten to fifty people, um, and that is the new size of company that is really shaking things up and doing stuff. In fact, it's probably two to twenty people. I think that being part of a small, dynamic, vibrant, entrepreneurial team is a great place for people to go and have a look and explore. Does that mean that everyone's suitable to quit their job and go start something from scratch with a blank piece of paper? Probably not, right? That's, that's a particular role called the founder. Not everyone's ready to be a founder. In the same way, everyone could probably get a black belt if they, if they joined a martial arts and stuck with it, but not everyone can start as a black belt. [chuckles] That's not where you start.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:47

        Even in those numbers, so if we said everyone's gonna have, you know, a team of ten to fifty, those numbers suggest that one in fifty or one in ten people are gonna be a founder.

    24. DPDaniel Priestley1:35:57

        Possibly. A lot more people are gonna be founders. I really believe a lot more people are gonna be founders. I also don't think it's wildly unnatural to be a founder. If you go through all of history, most people worked in little family businesses. That was actually the vast majority of people. M- you know, most businesses never got past thirty people. The, uh, natural way of being is in family groups and tribal groups and little groups of less than a hundred and fifty people. We've built up this idea that, uh, to be a founder means Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or something massive like that, and that you're trying to build something that changes the world. I've got so many friends and clients who it's them, their assistant, and, uh, someone who's, like, head of customer development, and there's three or four of them, and they're having a great time, and they're doing six, seven hundred grand worth of revenue, and they got loads of flexibility. Everyone takes their kids to school. Everyone finishes up at four, 4:00 PM. Um, they can travel. They can live and work anywhere. Um, you know, that's really cool.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:36:51

        This is your most recent book, Lifestyle Business Playbooks: How to Have Fun, Freedom, and Fulfillment With Your Own Business. You've written a lot of books. You could have written a book about anything. What's this book about, and who is it for?

    26. DPDaniel Priestley1:37:03

        This book is about the times that we're living in, right? So what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to give people some hope. There's such a negative narrative that AI is gonna wipe out everything and that technology's gonna destroy everything and that, you know, all, all this negativity about the times that we're in. I'm trying to create a counter-narrative that actually, more than any other time in history, you could live and work from anywhere. You could have a group of five hundred to a few thousand clients all over the world. You could add value to people in a unique and interesting way. You could have a career that's based on randomness and creativity and fun, and that there are some new rules to play by, and that if you learn the playbooks of entrepreneurship and if you learn the trends that are unfolding, that actually it could work out really, really well for

25. 1:37:49 – 1:43:01

    Is Passive Income Real - Or Just Another Internet Myth?

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:37:49

       you.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:49

       A lot of people wanna, you know, they want a side hustle. They want passive income. What's your general perspective on the reality of being able to generate passive income and a side hustle?

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:37:58

       I think passive income reflects people's desire that they currently feel that they're working really hard, and they hate work, and they hate going to work, and that earning money is a horrible thing, and therefore, they just wish it would just kind of take care of itself. The truth is that when you discover what I would call a lifestyle business, where you work a reasonable amount of time and you have a lot of fun with great people, you don't necess- the, the- as if by magic, the desire for passive income just evaporates. You go, "This is, this is better than passive income because I'm on a creative journey, and I'm making great money, and I'm having a lot of fun, and I'm expressing myself." I think passive income ultimately comes from assets. It's not, it's not passive income, it's asset income. Um, you're either gonna have to create an asset, which could be a business that is a digital asset, um, or you make so much money in your lifestyle business that you own traditional assets like houses or stocks and shares and all that sort of stuff. Um, but I'm not really focusing people on the idea of passive income. I'm focusing on the idea of having a lifestyle business that supports the way you wanna live anyway.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:00

       A lot of people would, would want that, but they're scared, right? They're scared that they have to quit their job, and I've got a mortgage to pay, I've got kids, so it's easier said than done, Daniel.

    5. DPDaniel Priestley1:39:07

       Yeah, so that-that's why in the playbooks, playbook one is called a side hustle or an apprenticeship. So an apprenticeship, let's say, let's say you currently earn $100,000 a year for, uh, a really big corporate, but you know that's not your future. An apprenticeship might be that you join four boards for twenty f- twenty-five thousand p- each, and you actually work with some startups that are more entrepreneurial, and you take a s- position where you have four companies that are paying twenty-five grand. So you still earn a hundred grand a year, but now you've got four smaller startups that you're learning from, and they're learning from you, and you're learning from them. So that's, that's a version of an apprenticeship. Um, an apprenticeship could also be that you go from working for a big traditional company to getting a job that pays almost as much but with a smaller, more interesting business that you can learn from a founder. A side hustle is where you do stuff on the side, and it's open and shut. You build your entrepreneurial confidence. So those are like starting points. And then after that-- And th-these are not designed to make a big leap financially. After that, we talk about a two-person scout team scouting an opportunity. We talk about a four-person fire-starting team getting something started. We talk about an eight-person core team running a really cool little lifestyle business. So it, it, it's not like people think that they have to go from zero to a hundred in one jump, and it's like, no, there are little steps along the way that make this really easy.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:32

       I think, uh, it's really important with all of this advice to, like, know your nature and to know who you are and kinda, honestly, to, like, know what you want from life.

    7. DPDaniel Priestley1:40:38

       Mm-hmm.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:39

       Which a lot of people don't, and they're handed what they want from life from, like, scrolling on Instagram or LinkedIn. They think-

    9. DPDaniel Priestley1:40:42

       Old school

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:43

        ... I need to build a five billion dollar AI company, et cetera. I think I've, I've noticed with myself that I started a business. I was really-- I was ambitious about the goals for that business. And then, you know, I ran that business for some time. I left that business when I was, what, twenty, maybe twenty years old, went to work in Silicon Valley as basically a consultant.

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:41:01

        Mm-hmm.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:02

        And that was okay for a time being. But then eventually I realized that the money really doesn't ma- it's really about, like, doing it with people you like-

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:41:10

        Yes

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:10

        ... and having a, and having a challenge. So that then led me back into the ambitious building businesses.

    15. DPDaniel Priestley1:41:16

        Yeah.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:16

        Did that for six years, built big, big business around the world, and then left that, and then I went through a period where I guess I was kind of a consultant, freelancery type guy for a while. Again, fundamentally unfulfilling for me.

    17. DPDaniel Priestley1:41:28

        Yep.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:28

        Because going on a mission with a group of people, an audacious mission-

    19. DPDaniel Priestley1:41:32

        Yeah

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:32

        ... really regardless of what it is, that filled me up. It was never really about the money.

    21. DPDaniel Priestley1:41:35

        A l- a lot of people discover this. A lot of people discover that more is not better. Uh, a lot of people discover that bigger is not more fun.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:42

        Do you know what else they discover? They discover that their idea of independence and freedom is also not what they thought. And this is, like, a quite contrarian take, but I have more responsibility now than I've ever had.

    23. DPDaniel Priestley1:41:54

        Yeah.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:55

        I could choose less responsibility and more freedom, and I would be less satisfied and less fulfilled in life.

    25. DPDaniel Priestley1:42:00

        Totally. Totally. Look at rich kids. They've, they've got everything taken care of, and there's all this financial resource around them, and there's nothing for them to do. They live in a constant state of depression. We love responsibility. We love creative tension. Uh, we love being up to something in the world. There's nothing greater than being up to something, to being on a mission, especially with a great group of people that you're traveling through life with, that you're on this rock with. Um, and you find your group of people that you wanna be up to something with, and you natter, and you solve, and you g- get curious, and you run ideas past each other, and you voice note at two o'clock in the morning. You know, that's, that's where the juice is. That's where the joy is. Um, there's a chapter in there that says know when enough is enough, and it says that a huge part of the times that we're in is, you know, we live in a time of endless scrolling. There's no cue that says you've been scrolling long enough, n-n- you know, go to bed. And it's same with business, that we think bigger would be better. Having a bi- bigger business, another, you know, another product, another thing, another, uh, million would make you happier. And the truth is it's, it's not the, it's normally

26. 1:43:01 – 1:50:35

    Why So Many People Lose Motivation (And How To Fight It)

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:43:01

       not the case.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:02

       Well, what is the case though is that we all need increasing levels of challenge, it seems to me. You know, this is why crosswords get more difficult and video games get-

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:43:11

       Yeah

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:11

       ... have levels because y- they realize through the studies that when something becomes incrementally more difficult, you drop into a flow state and motivation increases, and if it doesn't, then you lose motivation. And so I think this is why even in my life, like, I'm striving to make things bigger and better because it's actually just a proxy of, like, sh-- I wanna be challenged.

    5. DPDaniel Priestley1:43:27

       Well, there's a couple of things. You can either go really big with one thing and just be really, really focused, or you can have challenge across a portfolio of interests. One thing that is happening to your generation, if I can be so bold, 'cause I'm just fifteen years older or whatever, is that you've taken all the energy that normally went into kids, and you're putting it into business, right? And the normal, natural thing that is meant to happen around this age is that you're meant to struggle with a business or struggle with a way of providing and also struggle with raising kids and all that sort of stuff. So there's this reservoir of creative energy that is m- meant to be divided amongst a few projects.And I'm seeing a lot of people that that misplaced maternalism or paternalism goes into just one thing, and then we're expecting, expecting to get the joy and the fulfillment that would normally come back from family, and we wonder why that's missing. You know, it's like, "Oh, I'm pouring myself into the creation of these companies, and they're proxies for kids." And it's like, "Why don't I feel this warmth back?"

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:33

       Mm.

    7. DPDaniel Priestley1:44:33

       'Cause your biology's not wired to receive warmth back from something other than a kid. So this is happening because we're not having, we're not having kids. So one of the things that, uh, well, one of the things I encourage everyone to do is have kids 'cause it's the best thing ever.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:48

       Mm-hmm.

    9. DPDaniel Priestley1:44:48

       And to have a portfolio of interests, that you don't have to struggle to get to a billion. You could say, "You know what? The business bucket's full at three million, and I'm really, really happy with the revenue of three million and a team of 10, and now I wanna have a portfolio of interests that includes health and fitness, or travel, or teaching at a local, uh, you know, youth group. You know, or I wanna play a bigger role in my church." Like, there's all these other things that you say, "Okay, these are the portfolio of interests that, that are, are more human."

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:16

        Lifestyle Business Playbook. Gonna link this book below for anyone that wants to give it a read who is compelled by the lifestyle that Dan has described there, where you can have fun, freedom, and fulfillment with your own business. As you know, Daniel, 'cause this is, I think, is your seventh time being on this podcast, record breaker, we have a closing tradition. The question that has been left for you is what fear have you overcome to become who you are today?

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:45:45

        You know, I grew up on the Sunshine Coast. Uh, I dropped out of school, or, or I dropped out of university. I've got zero qualifications. Um, I'm not particularly good at anything in particular. I've got no skills. [chuckles] Yeah, there's me at 21. I tell you, this was a huge fear, running my first ad in the newspaper. I put everything on a credit card just to run an ad in the newspaper for $8,000, and it had to work or else I was in serious trouble.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:14

        [chuckles]

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:46:14

        I've had a weird 25 years. I've boom busted over and over again. Um, so I had a massive boom in my early 20s, built a $10 million company rapidly and then lost it, and then I built another multimillion-dollar business and then lost it. And then I got wiped out by a, a COVID experience and had to reinvent the business, and then I had a negative experience with a co-founder and had to reinvent the team. So I've had these kind of like huge... For fif- for the first 15 years it was boom, bust, boom, bust, boom, bust. And the fear was is that it would never feel a sense of fulfillment. I'd never get to a place where I, I could actually say it was all worth it. Um, and to just keep going and going and going when I felt exhausted, uh, was a massive thing, you know?

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:58

        And you have a family.

    15. DPDaniel Priestley1:46:59

        Yeah. And the fear of will I be able to provide for the family and the fear of, uh, will my business ideas be valued by anyone else other than myself? Am I doing something stupid? Am I doing something, um, that will fail again? So it's been a lot of fear, um, but you know what? It's been a wonderful journey that every time I've pushed through that fear, we get to the other side, and actually it's better on the other side. It's even better.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:47:25

        Had you known how hard it would be, do you think that 21-year-old Daniel would have done it?

    17. DPDaniel Priestley1:47:30

        [exhales] I don't think I had any other choice.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:47:34

        But if I'd sat that Daniel down and I'd say, "Daniel, this is what's gonna happen in the next 20 years. You're gonna go up, and then you're gonna lose it all. Then you go up, you lose it all. Then you're gonna feel like this at this moment, and it's gonna be the worst day. Then you're gonna feel like this and then this and then this, and you're gonna be working hard the whole time. Then you're gonna lose faith," would you have done it?

    19. DPDaniel Priestley1:47:50

        Secretly, yes. And the reason for that is I kind of, I kind of like the rollercoaster [chuckles] . I feel like I needed to go through boom, bust, boom, bust, boom, bust because I, I secretly didn't want a straight line. I think, I think I actually want the, the, the... I want the more interesting story. At 24 I was offered $14 million for my company, uh, and I blew it. I, I screwed up the negotiation, and we ended up all walking away from the deal. I think it would've been the worst thing possible had I had $14 million at, uh, at age 24.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:27

        So I've drawn a, a little graph here on this iPad. One axis is your success and the other axis is time. Could you draw for me what your career looks like in terms of success over time, including the ups, the downs, et cetera, et cetera?

    21. DPDaniel Priestley1:48:41

        Yeah. Well, if we just talk objectively what other people would've seen, um, I do this nightclub party and that's amazing, and then I go and I get a job with a mentor, and then we build this business that's like six million in its first year and I'm like right close to it, and we go from zero to like 60 employees. And then I have a fight with my mentor and he, uh, tells me, "Go start your own business." So I go right down to start from scratch again, and I'm in, I'm in a really negative place. And then we get started and suddenly I've got myself a multimillion-dollar business. And then the government changes the law, and we have to reinvent that business. And then we get a new amazing contract and now we do a million a month. And this, by the way, this is only like age 24. And then we screw up the negotiation and it's right back to the start. And then I go to London and I start a new business and that goes really, really well really quickly. And like one year in we've got the Palladium Theatre and we're doing hundreds of thousands a week worth of sales. And then the global financial crisis resets the whole business and I lose the major contracts that we have. And then [chuckles] and then I relaunch the business, and then COVID comes along and we're at... By, by this stage we're in, uh, 11 cities doing a couple of million per city. And then I relaunch the business as a digital business and it goes off the scale again, right? I'm running out of space here. And now we've figured out, okay, we own the assets, we own the brand, uh, we've got a great team, we've got multiple businesses. And at the moment, and this is around the time I have kids as well, and it, and it starts to really, uh, become more stable and more fun and, uh, less up and down. But that was my starting point. Up, down, up, down, up, down. [laughs]

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:50:20

        And this is over the period of how many years?

    23. DPDaniel Priestley1:50:22

        Uh, this was, this was from twenty to thirty-five. It was just boom, bust, boom, bust, punch in the face, get back up, punch in the face, get back up. Uh, zero millions. Zero millions. Zero millions.

27. 1:50:35 – 2:02:36

    Survivorship Bias: The Harsh Truth Behind Success Stories

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:50:35

       I say all of this because I think it's important to people-- for people to realize the reality of what it takes and how hard it is. And, you know, oftentimes if we want to get, you know, have a high performing podcast or write a great selling book, we kind of describe it as a linear journey. You're gonna do this, and then you do this, then this is gonna happen, then you do this, stick at it for long enough, and then, and then Y.

    2. DPDaniel Priestley1:50:57

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:50:57

       But actually in my experience, the graph either looks like a boom and bust cycle, which is kind of what I'm seeing here in your graph, or it looks like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, something exponential.

    4. DPDaniel Priestley1:51:08

       Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:10

       I mean, even this podcast, if you look at the graph-

    6. DPDaniel Priestley1:51:12

       Yeah

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:12

       ... it is nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing exponential.

    8. DPDaniel Priestley1:51:15

       A million, two million, four million-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:16

       Yeah

    10. DPDaniel Priestley1:51:16

        ... eight million, sixteen million. Boom.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:18

        Yeah.

    12. DPDaniel Priestley1:51:18

        Yeah.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:19

        And so the question for me always becomes like, what would it take for you to survive either in your story, this boom and bust scenario?

    14. DPDaniel Priestley1:51:29

        Mm-hmm.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:29

        Or in many of the things that I've done in my life, this no man's land-

    16. DPDaniel Priestley1:51:35

        Long period of no feedback

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:37

        ... nothingness. It takes a certain something in someone-

    18. DPDaniel Priestley1:51:39

        Yeah

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:51:40

        ... to be able to weather such a storm and well, I guess what, what is that? You said a second ago, "I had no choice."

    20. DPDaniel Priestley1:51:46

        Yeah, I had no choice 'cause I have no skills. I'm not good at anything. You know, I've got friends who are good at coding or good at editing, or they're good at designing. They've got accounting or they've got dentistry or something like that to fall back on. I have no qualifications. I've got a driver's license as my only qualification. Um, and I'm... I... All, all I'm good at is organizing teams and getting people in the room and getting them excited and essentially encouraging them to work with me and, and build something together. So I kind of didn't have a choice but to keep playing the game, keep trying.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:19

        And I-

    22. DPDaniel Priestley1:52:19

        And by the way, I wouldn't change any of that. Like there's, there's no point there where I'd go back and say, actually... 'cause where, where, where I am now, every single one of those crushing drops is where I really learned something that I leverage today.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:31

        Actually, something I said to someone who works in my team, who's my business partner now, Georgia Gibson, when she emailed me two years ago asking me to invest in a startup, a startup that I myself had failed at. I basically was trying to say, "This is not gonna work, but do it anyway"

    24. DPDaniel Priestley1:52:45

        [laughs]

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:46

        ... because the actual thing of value here might not be the million dollar exit. It's gonna be the lessons you learn from the failure are gonna then be leveraged as I did at twenty years old-

    26. DPDaniel Priestley1:52:55

        Yeah

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:55

        ... when I went to Silicon Valley and started talking to people about this thing I'd spent two years failing and was getting paid seventy thousand dollars a month to talk about this thing as a twenty-year-old-

    28. DPDaniel Priestley1:53:03

        Wow

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:53:03

        ... with no qualifications because I was one of the very few people who had failed in social media and therefore had a deep understanding and a rare skill. You're no longer going on BBC News Night or in Forbes as the person who did this, but of all the things you've done in your life, this great failing-

    30. DPDaniel Priestley1:53:17

        Mm

Episode duration: 2:02:36