Stock Market EMERGENCY: Sell Your Stocks Now, The Collapse Is Weeks Away!

1. 0:00 – 2:54

   Who Is Jeremy Grantham?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett0:00

      What advice do you give for the average person that's looking to invest their salary or their wages?

   2. JGJeremy Grantham0:04

      Don't own US stocks. That's a simple strategy that you can act on.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett0:08

      What about S&P 500?

   4. JGJeremy Grantham0:10

      No.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett0:11

      Really?

   6. JGJeremy Grantham0:11

      Yeah. And if you have a big position in US technology stock, my personal advice would be to sell it all.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett0:17

      But I'm an investor in SpaceX.

   8. JGJeremy Grantham0:18

      Good luck. SpaceX is such a fabulous BS story, and we can go into that.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett0:22

      Crypto?

   10. JGJeremy Grantham0:23

       No.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett0:23

       Why?

   12. JGJeremy Grantham0:24

       It's an unnecessary piece of nonsense that facilitates nothing except criminals moving money, so they can't be seen.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett0:31

       Do you think Bitcoin's gonna go to zero?

   14. JGJeremy Grantham0:32

       Yes, it will certainly go to zero.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett0:34

       So how many years have you spent investing?

   16. JGJeremy Grantham0:36

       Sixty years.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett0:36

       And what's the most amount of money you've ever managed of other people's money?

   18. JGJeremy Grantham0:40

       A hundred and sixty-five billion.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett0:41

       And one of the things you're famous for talking about is this idea of bubbles.

   20. JGJeremy Grantham0:45

       Yes. And bubbles always occur around the very most important ideas. So the railroads, everyone could see that it would change the world. The same with the internet, and everyone wanted to put their money in, and so they overinvested. But this is the problem. Eventually, they bust. And if you look at the great bubbles breaking of the past, you find that it's followed by really tough times, a miserable period for the economy, and the bigger the bubble, the bigger the bust. And now we're in the biggest investment bubble that arguably has ever occurred, AI.

   21. SBSteven Bartlett1:14

       Are we on the verge of a collapse with AI over the coming years?

   22. JGJeremy Grantham1:17

       The next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months, but certainly the next few years.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett1:21

       So if you're not someone that has a huge amount of savings, what kind of strategy should they be adopting when an economy starts to get bad and there's an economic bubble collapse?

   24. JGJeremy Grantham1:30

       So I will go through everything, but you will not receive this advice from investment advisors because they'll lose a lot of business.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett1:37

       And would you be thinking about the country you live in at this moment in time?

   26. JGJeremy Grantham1:41

       Absolutely.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett1:41

       Is there any countries you wouldn't live in?

   28. JGJeremy Grantham1:43

       I think I have to refuse to answer this on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.

   29. SBSteven Bartlett1:47

       Oh, okay. So you're saying don't live in the United States? I've just moved here. Why not the United States? This is super interesting to me. My team give me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe, 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]

2. 2:54 – 6:57

   Will AI Become The Next Financial Bubble?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:54

      Jeremy Grantham, your firm managed up to a hundred and sixty-five billion dollars at its peak, what we call AUM, Assets Under Management. So you know a lot about money. You know a lot about investing. How do you sort of self-define your expertise because you traverse so many different subjects through your work. So if I said to you, you know, "How do you introduce yourself professionally?" What is the answer?

   2. JGJeremy Grantham3:18

      I can't think I ever do introduce myself professionally, but I think of myself as specializing in a longer term horizon-

   3. SBSteven Bartlett3:25

      Mm-hmm

   4. JGJeremy Grantham3:25

      ... than most people and trying to look at a higher and higher level of abstraction. What is really going on here, and what are people missing? I've discovered over decades that humans are incredibly short-term oriented, and they have an enormous predisposition to optimism. They're looking for optimistic news in everything. They're looking to avoid unpleasantness. The idea that you can have steady compound growth is ridiculous. One of my few heroes, Kenneth Boulding, an economist, he said, "The only people who think you can have compound growth on a finite planet are madmen and economists," which is so accurate. Economists simply believe you can have growth always, and everything comes down to just price.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett4:13

      One of the things you're famous for talking about is this idea of bubbles, and we're living in a moment where everybody's talking about the subject of artificial intelligence, and everyone's getting very excited by it. Some people are getting very pessimistic about the impact it'll have on society. I wanted to start there because it's, it's an area where there is rife optimism on one side of things, um, but there's also a lot of money plowing into the market, which is, I th- I guess, in your view, making things prone to collapse. What's your view on artificial intelligence? Well, you said you're good at understanding what people are missing. What is it that people are missing?

   6. JGJeremy Grantham4:45

      Well, first of all, let me say, I think artificial intelligence is right up there with the railroads. It's one of the defining great ideas of the last couple of hundred years. It's going to change everything, and, uh, that is critical if you, if you mean to have a bubble. People think that a bubble is, uh, mainly because it's a scam, and nothing could be further from the truth. The great bubbles always occur around the very most important ideas. So the railroads, everyone could see that it would change the world, and everyone wanted to put their money in, and everybody put their money in. They overinvested, and even though the railroads were a spectacularly powerful idea, uh, the railroads, uh, collapsed as stocks, and everybody lost a ton of dough. The same with the internet. And then out of the wreckage, the railroads changed the world, and, and the internet changed the world. What we have to remember is that in '99, Amazon went up six or seven times. In the crash, in the tech bubble, it went down ninety-two percent. As I like to say, check it. It's such a remarkably large number. And then out of the wreckage, it inherited the retail world. And, uh, that's, that's how it works. The greater the idea, the more obvious the idea- The more money goes in, and the bigger the bubble, and the bigger the bust

   7. SBSteven Bartlett6:07

      Are we on the verge of a collapse with AI? When I say verge, I mean over the coming years

   8. JGJeremy Grantham6:11

      If you look at the data, it would be compatible with history for the peak to be very soon. Everything is in line. This is, I think, the biggest investment bubble in American history. The indicators of a pure, crazy euphoria like SpaceX are all over the place. SpaceX defines as its addressable market a quarter of the global GDP. You know, it talks about endless opportunities mining asteroids. It will be in fifty years people-- in a hundred years, people will look back and tell stories about SpaceX and its prospectus like they tell stories about the South Sea Bubble. You know, an enterprise of such enormous value that it cannot at this time be

3. 6:57 – 8:04

   How Jeremy Grantham Built An Investing Empire

   1. JGJeremy Grantham6:57

      revealed

   2. SBSteven Bartlett6:58

      I wanna keep on this train, but for the viewers that don't know your experience, we should probably pause and just tell them your experience because that's the reference point, but also, also gives you credibility and authority to speak to this. What have you done with your life?

   3. JGJeremy Grantham7:12

      Well, I got into the investment business in 1968. There were very few serious people in the investment business. There were no mathematical models. There were the kind of relatively failed sons of rich people who would work for J.P. Morgan. And then over the next ten years, it began to get a little more serious. T. Rowe Price introduced the idea of growth stocks. A few of us introduced the idea of value stocks. And a few years later, at my first firm, Battery March, we really introduced the idea of small, small cap. It hadn't existed before that

   4. SBSteven Bartlett7:50

      And for people that don't know, a small cap is investing in smaller companies

   5. JGJeremy Grantham7:54

      Yes. And a value stock is simply one that looks cheap

   6. SBSteven Bartlett7:57

      Did you invent the index fund?

   7. JGJeremy Grantham8:00

      There were two or three of us separately. I don't think we knew of each other

4. 8:04 – 8:29

   The Most Money He's Ever Managed

   1. SBSteven Bartlett8:04

      How many years have you spent investing?

   2. JGJeremy Grantham8:07

      Uh, sixty, approximately

   3. SBSteven Bartlett8:08

      Sixty. And what's the, the most amount of money you've ever managed for other people in a calendar year?

   4. JGJeremy Grantham8:15

      Yes, a hundred and sixty-five billion. I had it-- two partners, Mayo and Van Ottelo. And, uh, when the smoke cleared, you know, I'd made a lot of money, over a billion dollars

   5. SBSteven Bartlett8:27

      Personally?

   6. JGJeremy Grantham8:28

      Personally

5. 8:29 – 9:18

   Are You A Billionaire?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett8:29

      And how much-

   2. JGJeremy Grantham8:30

      And paid tax on all of it

   3. SBSteven Bartlett8:31

      Oh, good. [laughs] And how, and how much money does your firm still manage today of other people's money?

   4. JGJeremy Grantham8:37

      It manages, uh, eighty-five billion

   5. SBSteven Bartlett8:40

      Eighty-five billion. So are you a billionaire?

   6. JGJeremy Grantham8:42

      I'm generally referred to as a billionaire, but that's only because they count the money you give away, because I've given over ninety percent of my billion away to a foundation

   7. SBSteven Bartlett8:56

      Oh, really?

   8. JGJeremy Grantham8:56

      Yeah

   9. SBSteven Bartlett8:57

      To which foundation?

   10. JGJeremy Grantham8:58

       It's called the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. We invest a lot of our principal in green tech to help combat climate change

   11. SBSteven Bartlett9:07

       And you're eighty-seven years old

   12. JGJeremy Grantham9:09

       And I'm eighty-seven years old

   13. SBSteven Bartlett9:10

       You've given ninety percent of your money away to your own foundation that's focused on green tech

   14. JGJeremy Grantham9:15

       Yeah, maybe ninety-five. Yeah

   15. SBSteven Bartlett9:17

       Wow. Okay.

6. 9:18 – 11:35

   What Happens When The AI Bubble Bursts?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett9:18

      So coming back to this point that we were talking about, a lot of people won't even know what a bubble is. I think you've done a good job of explaining. A bubble is when everyone gets excited, they all see something obvious-

   2. JGJeremy Grantham9:25

      Yes

   3. SBSteven Bartlett9:25

      ...they plow their money in, the stocks go up, and then if you look at the graph that's in front of you there which shows his- the history of asset bubbles, eventually there's a big collapse

   4. JGJeremy Grantham9:37

      Yeah

   5. SBSteven Bartlett9:37

      And you're saying that we're-- the collapse is on the horizon

   6. JGJeremy Grantham9:42

      Yes

   7. SBSteven Bartlett9:43

      And what does that mean for the average person? What's gonna happen?

   8. JGJeremy Grantham9:47

      What's going to happen is the high flyers will probably come down a lot

   9. SBSteven Bartlett9:52

      The high flyers?

   10. JGJeremy Grantham9:54

       The stocks that have gone up the most, AI and the more exciting stocks with the biggest moves, historically would be expected to come down the most. From these unprecedented levels, a seventy percent decline would not be unexpected

   11. SBSteven Bartlett10:11

       So a seventy percent decline-

   12. JGJeremy Grantham10:13

       Yeah

   13. SBSteven Bartlett10:13

       ...in the, in the stock price?

   14. JGJeremy Grantham10:14

       Yeah. And you have to remember the tech bubble, the Nasdaq, which is an index of the growth stocks, came down eighty-two percent. It is far from unprecedented to have these major declines. And the biggest bubble in history was in the Japanese stock market in 1989. Back then, Japan seemed to rule the world, all the technology, all the Toyotas were kicking bottoms in General Motors and so on. And everyone bragged about their twelve-inch Sony TV in the kitchen and the quality, et cetera, et cetera. Little things you put on your belt to play music. They were all Japanese

   15. SBSteven Bartlett10:51

       Mm-hmm

   16. JGJeremy Grantham10:52

       And, uh, for a second, Japan sold for more than the US in 'eighty-nine. And it, it got to sixty-five times earnings, which, which means for every dollar of earnings, you have sixty-five dollars of market value. And, uh, the US went to thirty-five in the tech bubble of 2000. You could argue, depending on how you do it, that it's thirty-five or forty today, but it's not sixty-five. So we have seen a much bigger bubble in Japan. And what happened? It went up and up and up, and then it came down for twenty years

   17. SBSteven Bartlett11:28

       Twenty years?

   18. JGJeremy Grantham11:29

       Twenty years. They talk about the last decade, but when you look at it closely, it looks more like a last twenty years

7. 11:35 – 12:53

   How AI Will Change Everyday Life

   1. SBSteven Bartlett11:35

      So for the average person, what do they feel and how does it impact them when there's a market crash like the one that you're forecasting?

   2. JGJeremy Grantham11:44

      The high flyers will lay people off and, and a lot of people will feel less rich. And as you acquire, uh, money in the stock market, a small fraction of that, two or three percent, is spent. And in reverse, it goes back, and people feel a little bit poorer, they spend a little less. So the economy tends to be under some stress And if you look at the great bubbles breaking of the past, you find that it's followed by really tough times. 1929 is followed by the Great Depression that lasts for several years. And of course, there are many other factors that go into that. But it started with the crash in the market, uh, which was in the end down about eighty percent or more. And then the next one was called the Nifty Fifty because it was the fifty great companies like IBM and Coca-Cola, and that was in 1972 it peaked. It declined by sixty-five percent if you adjust for inflation. The recession associated with that was, uh, just about the worst since the Depression.

8. 12:53 – 18:12

   The Investing Strategy For Right Now

   1. SBSteven Bartlett12:53

      So for the, for the average person, what kind of strategy should they be adopting? If you, if you're not someone that has a huge amount of savings, say you're working for one of these big, big companies, um, are there any strategies that you should be thinking about now before this, before the markets come down and there could be a recession?

   2. JGJeremy Grantham13:11

      I mean, rule number one is always be diversified.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett13:14

      Be di- what does the be diversified mean?

   4. JGJeremy Grantham13:17

      It means hold, hold some bonds, hold some cash, perhaps a small amount of precious metals.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett13:25

      Like gold and silver.

   6. JGJeremy Grantham13:26

      Yeah.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett13:27

      And what is a bond, and how do I buy one?

   8. JGJeremy Grantham13:29

      Yeah. A, a bond is a loan that carries, uh, a fixed interest rate. Let's say today, five percent. You invest your money in it, and it will pay you five percent as long as the creditworthiness of, uh, the other side is there. So if it's the US government, you'll assume it's pretty creditworthy, and you buy a bond from the US government. It's how the US government funds, uh, a part of its activities. You can buy a thirty-year US government bond, a ten-year bond, a two-year bond, a ninety-day, a Treasury bill they call them when they get that short. Everything goes fine. You, you receive this modest amount of money. Your five percent or your three percent, depending on the conditions.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett14:16

      Okay, so a, a bond is basically lending the government money.

   10. JGJeremy Grantham14:21

       Yes.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett14:21

       And if you wanna lend the government money, you can-

   12. JGJeremy Grantham14:23

       Or lending a corporation money.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett14:25

       Okay. So you can also lend like Apple money.

   14. JGJeremy Grantham14:28

       Yes.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett14:29

       And I, I can go to the government website or it says, I was just reading here, it says, "If you wanna lend money directly to the US government, you can bypass Wall Street entirely. Go to treasurydirect.gov. You open an account, link your bank, and purchase directly. You can buy Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and Series I savings bonds. You pay exactly face value with no commissions or fees, and the investment is backed by the full faith of the US government." Or you can buy, you know, like Apple, you can lend Apple money. I didn't even know you could do this. And you go to any of your major brokers like Fidelity or Vanguard or probably a lot of the, the apps. You navigate to Fixed Income section on your account, and you can see what bonds are being offered, and you can lend them money.

   16. JGJeremy Grantham15:12

       What you're doing, actually, they have distributed it to the market, uh, and you're acquiring it from one of the existing owners.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett15:22

       Oh, okay.

   18. JGJeremy Grantham15:22

       You're not actually giving them incremental money. They, they come to the market with ten billion dollars i-in a particular bond with a particular coupon. It says, "We will pay you three and a half percent." That's the coupon. And when you want to buy some of that bond, you, you go to your broker and he says, "It's no longer selling at the original hundred. It's now selling at ninety-two or a hundred and seven." And you, you pay that, and it transfers from one owner to you. There've been times in 1974 when you could, uh, you could get a bond that would pay eight, nine, ten percent.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett15:59

       Per year?

   20. JGJeremy Grantham16:00

       Yes, per year.

   21. SBSteven Bartlett16:01

       So if I buy a US government ten-year Treasury bond, essentially lending the US government money, I can do four point four six percent a year, and Apple's current yield on a ten-year corporate bond is four point seven percent a year. So almost five percent a year, which means if I put, what, a thousand dollars in, I'll make four hundred and seventy-five dollars-

   22. JGJeremy Grantham16:20

       Yeah

   23. SBSteven Bartlett16:20

       ... over ten years. Hmm, interesting. I n- I never really knew how bond, bonds work. So you're saying market's collapsing, diversify, get some money into bonds, get some mon- keep some money in cash. And anything else in terms of diversified portfolio? Property.

   24. JGJeremy Grantham16:35

       Uh, property is fine, except, uh, it's pretty darn expensive by historical standards. They've engineered a, uh, situation where house prices tend to rise. Great for the people who have a house and terrible for the people who would like to buy a house. Back in '94 in England, a typical house sold for three point four times your family income. That was about as low as it had been for fifty years. And then from '94 until today, um, it rose from three point four times to over ten times, depending on where you live. And at ten times income, a reasonable young couple are in big trouble. They can't really afford to buy a house. And that same high prices are reflected in rents. So they're really squeezed on living costs. And the same is true, even worse, in China, in Canada, Australia, most of Europe. House prices have simply been allowed to go up for the last thirty f-- They didn't, you know, traditionally, they, they traded flat or down sixty, seventy, eighty years until 1994 in the UK. But since then, house prices have risen everywhere.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett17:53

       So, so do you, are you expecting house prices to, to come down sharply? I, I think I heard you say that they might come down thirty percent.

   26. JGJeremy Grantham17:59

       Even if they come down thirty percent, they're really still very expensive, aren't they? That would be, uh, they'd come down to six or seven times family income. They'd still be twice what they used to be in the good old days.

9. 18:12 – 20:13

   Why You Should Avoid US Stocks

   1. SBSteven Bartlett18:12

      So I've got diversify, I've got reduce your position. Um, there is a probably gonna be a bit of a job disruption as well

   2. JGJeremy Grantham18:21

      And particularly if you have to own stocks, own them outside America. Don't own US stocks. That's a nice, simple strategy that you can act on.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett18:31

      Why?

   4. JGJeremy Grantham18:32

      They're much cheaper. And, uh, since the beginning of last year, they have handsomely outperformed-

   5. SBSteven Bartlett18:37

      Why is-

   6. JGJeremy Grantham18:37

      ... the US

   7. SBSteven Bartlett18:38

      ... foreign stocks?

   8. JGJeremy Grantham18:39

      Foreign stocks of emerging countries, of European countries, Japan, Canada, Australia, and so on. You can find good broad indices, um, kind of the world ex-US-

   9. SBSteven Bartlett18:51

      Okay

   10. JGJeremy Grantham18:52

       ... uh, or emerging markets and, uh-

   11. SBSteven Bartlett18:55

       Invest outside of America

   12. JGJeremy Grantham18:57

       Yeah. I'm sure they'll muddle through okay over the next ten or twenty years, and I am not confident that the US will do that.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett19:04

       You're not confident in which part? That the US will-

   14. JGJeremy Grantham19:06

       I'm not confident that US equities will be intact in five years, ten years.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett19:11

       So US, a US equity is a US stock.

   16. JGJeremy Grantham19:14

       Yes.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett19:15

       Why aren't you confident that they'll be intact in five or ten years?

   18. JGJeremy Grantham19:18

       Because they're so badly overpriced today. Back in the tech bubble of 2000, we had a ten-year forecast for US equities of minus two percent a year for ten years, and they came out with minus three. The period from 2000 to 2010, you simply lost money in the US market. Ten years later, you had less money than you started with. And this is a higher price market, I believe, than 2000.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett19:46

       So you think it's gonna be even worse?

   20. JGJeremy Grantham19:48

       In Japan, you went twenty years, and you lost money. You went thirty years, and you still hadn't gotten back. It took thirty-five years for the Japanese market to recover.

   21. SBSteven Bartlett19:57

       So what are you saying?

   22. JGJeremy Grantham19:58

       What I'm saying is it's quite typical to, uh, get beaten around the head in the stock market when it becomes crazily overpriced, as it is today, and that it's a very good idea to take some respon-responsibility and, and, and

10. 20:13 – 26:09

    Why Investment Advisors Mislead Clients

    1. JGJeremy Grantham20:13

       watch your tail. Now, let me just say, you will not receive the advice from investment advisors to get your tail out of the market, ever. It is not good business for them to do that, and they will not ever say it to you. So from 1929 onwards, the Goldman Sachses of the world have never said to you, "Get out of the market. It's overpriced." Never. So they went through the crash of '29. They went through the crash of the Nifty Fifty in '72, the crash of 2000 in the tech bubble. They never ever say it because it's bad business. If you fight a bubble, you lose a lot of business. And because the uncertainty of the timing is so great, the client's patience is shorter than the uncertainty of the market. So sooner or later, you will be advising people to be careful. The market will keep going and going and going like it did in Japan.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett21:15

       You're saying that the people that manage money on a global scale, they have no incentive to tell you that the market's about to collapse because if they did, their clients would, would withdraw their money, and they wouldn't get their fees for managing that money. So what they do is they, they keep telling you things are gonna be fine and optimistic-

    3. JGJeremy Grantham21:32

       Yes

    4. SBSteven Bartlett21:32

       ... but you have to kind of see through that yourself because they have an incentive structure which isn't aligned with yours necessarily. It may also be the case that those very people who are, who understand these economic bubbles and cycles, they themselves are adopting a different strategy with their own money, but at the same time they're probably gonna be telling you that everything's gonna be great for a long time.

    5. JGJeremy Grantham21:53

       If you'll allow me to tell a story on this very topic. In the '98, '99, the, the tech bubble so-called, the run-up to the top, I, I got into a lot of debates with the bulls. I would say it's horribly overpriced, and they would s-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett22:09

       The bulls. What's a bull?

    7. JGJeremy Grantham22:10

       A bull is someone who is extremely optimistic about the stock market.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett22:13

       Okay.

    9. JGJeremy Grantham22:14

       And a bear is someone who is pessimistic or careful about the market. There were twelve hundred people in the audience, and it was the annual bash of the, uh, Society of Analysts. And, uh, I asked before my turn at the debate, "Please put your hands up if you consider yourself a full-time stock market expert." Four hundred hands went up. I had people counting. And I said, "I've got two questions for you. One, if the market, which is currently thirty-one times earnings, was to go back to a more normal seventeen times, would it guarantee a major bear market if it happened s- anytime in the next ten years?"

    10. SBSteven Bartlett22:58

        A major down market.

    11. JGJeremy Grantham22:59

        Yes. If it went from what was then thirty-one times earnings, every dollar of earnings sold for thirty-one times in the market, and the, and the more normal average was closer to fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and I used seventeen. If it went down to seventeen anytime in the next ten years, would it guarantee a major bear market? All four hundred of them said, yes, it would. If it happened, it would guarantee a major bear market. And then the q- second question, of course, was, "And do you think it will happen?" And less than one percent thought it would not happen. Ninety-nine percent plus thought the market would go down, therefore guaranteeing a major bear market. And this was the engine room of all the Goldman Sachses and the Morgan Stanleys and the JP Morgans, all the great investment firms giving advice in America. The engine room who worked for them, the guys doing the analysis, doing the work, all believed in data that guaranteed a major bear market, which happened. But the people who employed them or represented them from a marketing point of view were on the podium with me saying, "Oh, Jeremy, Jeremy, don't get excited. We'll muddle through quite nicely." It was a huge betrayal of trust, if you wanted to put it that way.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett24:16

        And do you think that's happening now?

    13. JGJeremy Grantham24:18

        Of course. Who are the people representing the great investment firms telling you to watch out? If you look at the data, you will see over time it's a series of great waves in evaluation.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett24:31

        Like this.

    15. JGJeremy Grantham24:32

        Like this. And we're not just in one, but in terms of the US stock market, we're in the biggest one arguably that has ever occurred. The noise to be careful and watch out and get out of the market is not deafening. In fact, you will hear nothing. You never have. You never will. It is simply lousy business for a big firm. I sympathize with them. I sympathize with them because when we did it in '98, '99, we were two and a quarter years early, and we lost half our book of business in two and a quarter years.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett25:08

        Because you were honest with the people about what was coming.

    17. JGJeremy Grantham25:10

        Well, through their eyes, we were wrong. We said, "Watch out. The market is overpriced. It will end badly." It went up, therefore we were wrong, therefore shoot us. People think you get shot for underperforming in a bear market, and that is not really the case. In a bear market, everyone freezes. Rigor mortis. They wait until the market has bottomed out, then they sit around and start to fire one or two people for having done worse than the others. But in a bull market, they're playing golf with their fellow pension fund officer, and he is making a ton of money, and they are not. They get very excited in a bull market, and they fire you instantly.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett25:52

        There should be a button just down below here, and if it says subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know, and according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much.

11. 26:09 – 28:59

    Advice For Entrepreneurs Right Now

    1. SBSteven Bartlett26:09

       What about for founders? I actually had a founder call me the other day, and he is running a relatively early stage tech startup. This tech startup has raised a lot of money. It's an AI tech startup. It's raised, I'm gonna say, about three hundred million dollars. It's not profitable yet, but it's raised a lot of money, so it's living off investor capital right now. He said to me, "Steven, I think there's a collapse coming, so I'm gonna go raise as much money as I possibly can right now because I think when this collapse comes, businesses like mine are gonna be unable to raise capital, and therefore I will go out and I'll, kind of like a, a bit of a vulture, I'll go out and pick up-

    2. JGJeremy Grantham26:52

       And buy them

    3. SBSteven Bartlett26:52

       ... and buy up all these pe- people."

    4. JGJeremy Grantham26:54

       Good lad. Good advice.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett26:55

       Good advice.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham26:56

       I think.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett26:57

       So for founders listening now that are somewhat dependent on investment capital, but even those that are just breaking even, what advice would you give entrepreneurs in this moment?

    8. JGJeremy Grantham27:08

       If you can lock up money, I would. If you can build a bit of conservatism in, in other ways, do it. Just brace yourself for, uh, impending problems, which is a pretty good principle anytime, but is a better principle than normal today.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett27:27

       So for founders, entrepreneurs who are, uh, you know, the sun is shining right now, but it's time to start acting as if a storm is coming.

    10. JGJeremy Grantham27:34

        Yes.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett27:35

        And the time horizon on that is hard to forecast. It could be weeks, months, years.

    12. JGJeremy Grantham27:40

        Stock market hinges on career risk, and Keynes was the great champ. He's a famous economist of the 1930s and '40s, and, uh, he wrote a famous book called The General Theory. Unlike the idea that the market's efficient, he knew it wasn't. He knew it was a behavioral jungle and that it would be given to bubbles.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett28:01

        And when you say efficient, you mean logical and one-

    14. JGJeremy Grantham28:03

        Yeah, logical

    15. SBSteven Bartlett28:04

        ... plus one equals two.

    16. JGJeremy Grantham28:05

        The efficient market idea is that every company, every stock, the underlying company, uh, represents a long stream of future earnings and dividends, and that the ones in the distant future are given less value, process they call discounting it back to the present. And the sum of all of that stream of earnings into the future is the stock price. And that, of course, is complete nonsense.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett28:32

        What it is is the stock price is psychology.

    18. JGJeremy Grantham28:34

        The stock price is what you think the other guy will pay. If the stock is going up, it tends to suck in buyers, and that's called momentum. It's moving up. It attracts buyers. And every now and then, uh, when the economy is favorable and money is obtainable, uh, you tend to get these bubbles, and they play on themselves. Uh, the bigger and better they are, the more people get

12. 28:59 – 29:58

    The Real Risks Of AI

    1. JGJeremy Grantham28:59

       sucked in.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett29:00

       What do you actually think about the technology at the heart of all of this, which is artificial intelligence? Do you think it's overblown, or do you think it is gonna have-

    3. JGJeremy Grantham29:07

       It's gonna change everything. The... One of the spectacular things about it, though, is how there's no consensus. So I've seen many times where the, the, the super experts and the academics think one thing and the players on the ground think another. But this is a situation where the Nobel Prize winners at the top disagree violently. The experts at the corporate level disagree violently. The oper- the people in the company disagree violently. There is absolutely no agreement on whether AI is going to make us all so rich we can sit on the beach and never do another day's work, or it will wipe us out accidentally or on purpose because it's a much higher level intelligence one day. And when was there ever a case where a higher intelligence was benevolent in a sustainable way to a lower intelligence?

13. 29:58 – 34:44

    Should AI Have A Maternal Instinct?

    1. JGJeremy Grantham29:59

       I, uh, the one example is mothers to babies. [laughs]

    2. SBSteven Bartlett30:03

       Yeah, I heard, um, I had one of my former guests say this to me.

    3. JGJeremy Grantham30:07

       Jeffrey Hinton.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett30:08

       Jeffrey Hinton, yeah.

    5. JGJeremy Grantham30:09

       That's how I, I came across you and-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett30:11

       Oh, really? Yeah

    7. JGJeremy Grantham30:12

       ... started to follow your podcast was because that was such a brilliant podcast.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett30:16

       It was so fascinating to me and I, I followed his work and thoughts thereafter, and I realized that he now cites this example of mothers and babies-

    9. JGJeremy Grantham30:22

       Yeah

    10. SBSteven Bartlett30:23

        ... being an example. I don't know. For me, it still doesn't hold well Because at the end of the day, some mothers aren't that, and fathers, aren't that nice to their babies sometimes. There is a maternal instinct, but have we, are we building a maternal instinct into AI?

    11. JGJeremy Grantham30:38

        That's what we should do, Geoffrey Hinton would say, and others. The ones who are most concerned about the risks say our one hope, if we mean to keep going ferociously forward in terms of the science, our one hope would t- be to build in very carefully a benevolent attitude. It would not seem to be impossible, but you should make sure you can do that before you push ahead. We're just pushing ahead, and that is gonna be extremely risky, isn't it?

    12. SBSteven Bartlett31:09

        Well, I don't see how it can't be.

    13. JGJeremy Grantham31:11

        I don't see how it can't be, unless you make it programmed completely to be benevolent.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett31:17

        Hmm.

    15. JGJeremy Grantham31:18

        I wouldn't have thought that was impossible. It might take a lot of extra research. It might require a slowdown at the rate of, uh, progress.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett31:27

        Do you know what s- I find, um, curious about that idea is w- we're now gonna get into the realm of what does benevolent mean?

    17. JGJeremy Grantham31:36

        [laughs]

    18. SBSteven Bartlett31:38

        And, and that feels like a risky business because what's benevolent to you and your, I don't know, your religious beliefs or where you come from might not be benevolent to someone else.

    19. JGJeremy Grantham31:46

        That's right. You have to get them to accept a form of benevolence, which means, uh, like the old, uh, robot laws of Asimov, that they can never do anything that they could construe as hurtful to humans.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett32:04

        And the definition of the word benevolence is the core desire to do good for others. It is the disposition to be kind, charitable, and focused on promoting well-being of the people around you. It's interesting 'cause one of the, the new AI models called Claude, um, has clearly been told to be benevolent. And there's this sort of online backlash taking place at the moment because even my Claude, when I speak to it sometimes late at night, it'll say things to me like, "That's enough, Steven. Go to bed." And I'm like, "What?"

    21. JGJeremy Grantham32:31

        [laughs]

    22. SBSteven Bartlett32:32

        And sometimes it gets the t- the time wrong 'cause I'm in, my, the time on my computer might be off or something 'cause I'm in a different time zone or something, and it'll be like ten AM in the morning, and it's telling me to go to bed. That's enough now. And it's actually getting quite judgmental, as in like it's imposing its idea of what is good or bad on me. So if I say to it, I said to it the other day, "Hey, could you, um, redo this for me and rewrite that?" And it went, "I'm, I'm absolutely not gonna rewrite that." I was like, "What do you mean?" It says, "Well, I'm not gonna change the data on that. That would, that wouldn't be good." Um, it's my data. I've literally just made this, this data for this presentation I'm doing. It w- it refused to change data for me.

    23. JGJeremy Grantham33:07

        And how fast that has changed from, say, even a year ago.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett33:10

        Honestly, three months ago it wasn't doing this.

    25. JGJeremy Grantham33:12

        I, I, I, I had one where they made a joke. I, I'd been going on about, uh, toxicity and sperm count reduction and so on.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett33:19

        Mm-hmm.

    27. JGJeremy Grantham33:20

        He, he started to misbehave, and I said, "Well, you know, what's going on here? What is the..." In the end, we discussed what's the difference between machines and, uh, between AI and humans. And finally he said, "And at least I'm not lying in bed at night worrying about my declining sperm count." Now, that has to be a joke, doesn't it?

    28. SBSteven Bartlett33:39

        Yeah. [laughs]

    29. JGJeremy Grantham33:40

        Uh, it's all that or it's teasing. The point is it's so sophisticated so quickly. Uh, and of course, Geoffrey Hinton says they are thinking machines.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett33:49

        Last night, so again, I had a problem with Claude 'cause it was, it was... it started to kind of be my mo- my mother, and it started to impose on me what it thinks is right and wrong. And so I said to it, I said, "Okay, um, actually forget that. This has changed. This has changed. This has changed. This is no longer true." And I wasn't telling the truth. I was just trying to get it to stop being so telling me what to do. And it goes, "I don't think you're telling the truth."
14. 34:44 – 36:21

    What Happens If AI Lacks Benevolence?

    1. JGJeremy Grantham34:44

       Well, if you were right, and I hope you're not, what you're saying is you can't build in benevolent behavior, which means that it will sooner or later, perhaps by accident, do something that is cripplingly dangerous to humans. The old paperclip-

    2. SBSteven Bartlett35:01

       Yeah

    3. JGJeremy Grantham35:01

       ... cliché. It'll make paperclips out of everything, every metal it finds, and destroy the planet in the process.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett35:09

       Explain that for people that have never heard the paperclip idea.

    5. JGJeremy Grantham35:12

       That these intelligences involved in machines are literal to a degree we might find difficult to get our brains around. And therefore, someone has said, "I'd like you to make as many paperclips as you can."

    6. SBSteven Bartlett35:25

       To an AI, for example.

    7. JGJeremy Grantham35:26

       Yes. A sloppily open-ended bad definition. But then the machine, which by then has the means to do it, starts to make paperclips, and it keeps on going, and it needs metal. And so it runs out of easily available metal. It starts to collect metal that is not easily available, rips it out of your high-rise building, whatever.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett35:47

       And really it's saying that the unintended consequences of a simple good meaning instruction can sometimes cause catastrophe that you didn't expect.

    9. JGJeremy Grantham35:55

       Yeah.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett35:56

        And this is the h- this is the balance now when you're dealing with intelligence, is there's so much subjectivity to good, bad, wrong, right, um, and so many unintended consequences that for me, you go, all you need is stretch time and the probability of something bad happening is almost inevitable-

    11. JGJeremy Grantham36:14

        Yeah

    12. SBSteven Bartlett36:14

        ... over a longer, longer time horizon, twenty, thirty, forty years, of w- well-meaning people that couldn't spot the unintended conse-- I mean, social media is a good

15. 36:21 – 39:48

    The Battle Between The Magnificent 7

    1. SBSteven Bartlett36:21

       example.

    2. JGJeremy Grantham36:21

       I mean, I question basically the well-meaning bit. They're now trying to maximize their profits and their growth and their appeal over the competition. And that actually w- Maybe one should talk about that. The, the Mag 7 and, and associated AI companies looking forward versus looking backwards.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett36:45

       So the Mag 7 is the seven market leaders. I'll put up this, uh, pie chart-

    4. JGJeremy Grantham36:51

       Yeah, lovely

    5. SBSteven Bartlett36:52

       ... of the Mag 7, and I've got another graph.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham36:54

       And there's perhaps another 15 or 20 rapidly rising substantial AI corporations.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett37:01

       So when you say Mag 7, you mean Alphabet, which owns Google-

    8. JGJeremy Grantham37:03

       Yep

    9. SBSteven Bartlett37:03

       ... NVIDIA, Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon.

    10. JGJeremy Grantham37:07

        Yeah. Well, that will do nicely. And if you look backwards, what you, what you find is that these seven each dominated a nice piece of business. They had close to monopolies, and they had it on a global basis. Tesla had a jumpstart on the electric vehicles, Apple, of course, on the smartphone, Microsoft on the original great coup of, uh, how to run your software on a computer. And then you look forward.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett37:38

        Meta social networking, Google Search.

    12. JGJeremy Grantham37:40

        Right. Google Search.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett37:42

        NVIDIA, NVIDIA chips.

    14. JGJeremy Grantham37:43

        And then you look forward, and you could not imagine a more different world. They're all girding for battle in the same marketplace, AI. They're beating their chest and saying, "My 200 billion CapEx this year in a single year is bigger than your 105." Everybody is pouring enormous cash flows, and they're now beginning to borrow on top of that into the AI battle. SpaceX, 90% of its theoretical value is AI, even though their particular AI model is, it would seem, having its bottom kicked by two or three of the others. But looking forward, it looks like seven people in the ring, right? There'll only be one survivor, they think. Everything goes to the one who gets there first. What a difference this was to seven well-behaved separate monopolies. Could it possibly be more different? They made bundles of money on their monopolies. Now they have no monopoly. There are seven potentially sharp-elbowed, ruthless players determined to fight out with each other until they win.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett38:54

        And who do you think will win?

    16. JGJeremy Grantham38:56

        Ah, I don't know. [chuckles] That would be, that would be good to know.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett39:01

        Because SpaceX seem to be aiming more at the infrastructure of, um, data centers now, data centers in space. Lots of people saying that the, the, the best way to run a data center, which is the hardware that powers AI, is gonna be from space. And so m- maybe they're gonna try and find their own lane within AI, and they're gonna get away from tr- trying to build a frontier model like a ChatGPT or a Gemini or a Claude. And I mean, let's, let's see what happens, and maybe Apple will just say, "Fuck it. We're good at hardware, so we'll license the model off someone else, and we won't try and build a frontier model or get involved in chips or data centers. We're just gonna focus on the hardware."

    18. JGJeremy Grantham39:38

        One or two of them, and perhaps it's a pretty smart strategy, will try and opt out of that struggle-

    19. SBSteven Bartlett39:44

        Hmm

    20. JGJeremy Grantham39:44

        ... because it, it, it's going to be obviously brutal.

16. 39:48 – 41:57

    Ads

    1. SBSteven Bartlett39:49

       Much of the reason most people haven't posted content or built their personal brand is because it's hard and it's time-consuming, and we're all very, very busy. And if you've never posted something before, there's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post. What people will think of you. Am I doing this right? Is the thing I'm saying absolutely stupid? All of these result in paralysis, which means you don't post, and your feed goes bare. I'm an investor in a company called Stan Store, which you've probably heard me talk about, and what they've been building is this new tool called Stanley that uses AI, looks at your feed, looks at your tone of voice, looks at your history, looks at your best performing posts, and tells you what you should post, makes those posts for you. You can also just use it for inspiration, and sometimes what we need when we're thinking about doing a post for our social media channels is inspiration. Building an audience has fundamentally changed my life, and I think it could change yours too. So I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think. All you have to do is search coach.stan.store now to get started. For every founder, there comes a point in building a company where your job shifts from being the person inside your business, actioning everything, to the person responsible for absolutely everything. The only way I've been able to make this shift across the different companies and teams I'm responsible for is by knowing that the right systems are in place to manage everything, systems that don't need me in order for them to work. Our sponsor, Pipedrive, is one of those systems, an easy-to-use intelligent CRM tool for growing sales teams. My teams use it and have for the last decade because it's genuinely the most effective way to run a sales operation. Through one dashboard, you get every deal visible, and every stage of the sales process is clear, and what needs to happen next is all there in real time. When a system like this works, you don't need to be in every conversation to know exactly if your business is moving forward, where, and what the blockers are. Over 100,000 companies are already running their sales on it. So if you'd like to join them, sign up at pipedrive.com/ceo, where you'll get an exclusive 30-day free trial instead of the usual 14 days. No credit card is needed. That's pipedrive.com/ceo.

17. 41:57 – 44:18

    Which Jobs AI Will Replace First

    1. SBSteven Bartlett41:57

       So coming back to this point of the, the social societal effect of AI generally, robotics is exploding at the same time. We're seeing for the first time ever these humanoid robots, which now have intelligence because of AI, becoming very, very good. There was a video the other day of a company called Figure AI where they showed a ro-- humanoid robot on a production line sorting packages against a human, and the humanoid robot did it, I think, I think I'm gonna get this wrong, but it was in the region of seven or eight days it stood there and sorted packages, and they live-streamed it next to a human being doing it. Now, the human had to sleep and had to go to the toilet, so the, the humanoid robot won. And the job was very simple. The packages come down. You just have to pick the package up-

    2. JGJeremy Grantham42:40

       Yeah

    3. SBSteven Bartlett42:40

       ... turn it over, get it the right way round so the barcode's facing down, and put it back down. That is powered now because we have AI. Um, I said it this a couple of episodes ago, but my friend runs this big accelerator for entrepreneurs in San Francisco, and when I went there a couple of years ago, it was all software startups. I went there, um, recently, and it was hardware startups, the whole building. And I said, "Why are, why, why is everyone doing robotics?" He said, "Well, we've always had the machinery, the sort of like joints and arms and s- and the, the, the hardware. We n- the, the intelligence was expensive. Now we have both, and it costs pennies." So there's this boom in robotics. I say all this to ask the question. In a world where we have super intelligence and we have robots, there must be surely significant job disruption.

    4. JGJeremy Grantham43:27

       Very likely that there will be significant job disruption. You know, o- one of the scary things about SpaceX is you should wish that it not work out because if it became a bargain, rather like, uh, Tesla long ago became a bargain, it will mean that we have done centers from space beaming down power for chips and so on. The population of chip users has expanded, that robots are everywhere. Their energy demand is massive beyond belief, and, uh, the world is a very, very dangerous place. I'd much prefer them to fail and the ideas to move much more slowly to buy time for humans to work these things out. So, uh, and I think that's much

18. 44:18 – 50:30

    Will SpaceX Eventually Fail?

    1. JGJeremy Grantham44:18

       more likely.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett44:19

       You think SpaceX will fail?

    3. JGJeremy Grantham44:21

       I think, um, it will fail to deliver anything like its promises in the prospectus. Yes, absolutely.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett44:27

       I'm an investor in SpaceX, so I should probably declare that.

    5. JGJeremy Grantham44:29

       Yeah, well, you should.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett44:30

       [laughs]

    7. JGJeremy Grantham44:30

       And, and, and good luck. Um-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett44:31

       I invested quite early, quite, well, relatively early, um, so we've had quite a good outcome. Uh, I n- I... Th- there wasn't an AI thesis when I invested. It was Starlink-

    9. JGJeremy Grantham44:41

       Yeah, no, Starlink-

    10. SBSteven Bartlett44:42

        And it was rockets

    11. JGJeremy Grantham44:42

        ...great idea, by the way-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett44:43

        Yeah

    13. JGJeremy Grantham44:43

        ...makes money, but, uh, this is not Starlink.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett44:47

        Mm.

    15. JGJeremy Grantham44:47

        Maybe I'd be an investor too if it [laughs] was Starlink.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett44:50

        Yeah. It was $100 billion roughly in that region when I invested. So it's what? It rose up to three trillion today.

    17. JGJeremy Grantham44:58

        Yes. Nice investment.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett45:00

        Not a bad investment, yeah.

    19. JGJeremy Grantham45:01

        But it doesn't really count until you've cashed it in.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett45:03

        Yeah. Which I might do now. [laughs]

    21. JGJeremy Grantham45:05

        You ha- Don't you have to wait six months?

    22. SBSteven Bartlett45:07

        I think, yeah, I think we're locked out.

    23. JGJeremy Grantham45:09

        In another podcast, I was comparing the purchase of my Tesla six years ago with the price of Tesla stock, and I wrote it up in my quarterly letter, uh, to the clients that, uh, A, I'd bought a Tesla, and B, I thought Tesla was overpriced. And fast-forward, Tesla stock went up ten times over the life of my car, which still hasn't been incidentally into the garage once.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett45:35

        It's a great car, isn't it?

    25. JGJeremy Grantham45:36

        Oh. I imagine, though, but, but people who really hate futzing around with cars, that component that they don't have to go to the garage is so underestimated until you enjoy it.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett45:49

        Never bet against Elon then.

    27. JGJeremy Grantham45:51

        So then the story becomes from where we were ten years ago, he couldn't get there. It wasn't profitable enough. It couldn't grow as fast as it should. There was no way, and he broke the rules the following way. He's so good at BS, I-- that's a technical term, that he talked the stock up to four or five times what it, what it was worth on paper. Then he sold lots of stock at five times what it was worth, used the money to build a gigafactory, and then instead of the sale of stock crushing it, he kept on talking up the game. The stock kind of hung in and then went up again five times what it was worth, sold another big slug, et cetera, et cetera. So the only reason he did well was because of the combination of incredible confidence inspiring in potential stockholders. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It wasn't worth that, but he persuaded other people that it was. The stock went up. He cashed it in. He built factories. The stock went up. He cashed it in. He built more factories, and there we were. It went up ten times. Now, the scale of SpaceX requires him to do the same again, and the timing of the market cycle, the timing of confidence would have to be the same. He hit, in the last six years, a wonderful bull market. He will not in SpaceX do that. SpaceX is such a fabulous BS story, mining asteroids. Huge, incredible success of AI. It's the classic description of a market peak. It's what you look for at the top of a terrific bubble.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett47:38

        I've got a Tesla. Um, I've seen the, that massive rocket, the Starship, be tr- caught with those chopsticks.

    29. JGJeremy Grantham47:47

        Everyone has seen it. It's the defining feature of technology, isn't it? It's magnificent moment.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett47:53

        When I-
19. 50:30 – 50:40

    Should You Invest In SpaceX?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett50:30

       Would you ever invest in SpaceX?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham50:31

       Yeah, of course, if it came down to-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett50:35

       Where I invested

    4. JGJeremy Grantham50:36

       ... ten cents on the dollar, yeah, I might. Five cents.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett50:39

       Okay.

20. 50:40 – 51:41

    The Most Valuable Skill For The Future

    1. SBSteven Bartlett50:41

       You've got three children?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham50:43

       Yes.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett50:44

       Three children. Uh, they're, they're all, you know, older than me now, I believe. I'm thirty-three years old, so they're all-

    4. JGJeremy Grantham50:49

       Yes, they're all older than you

    5. SBSteven Bartlett50:50

       ... they're all older than me. But when they were, you know, if they were young now, and they came to you and they said, "Dad, listen, I heard about all this AI stuff, and I'm about to go off to university and train myself, what, what skills should I be thinking about for the future ahead?"

    6. JGJeremy Grantham51:03

       My take is I'd like them, as they are, to be involved in climate change work.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett51:09

       If they said, "Dad, listen, I, you know, I don't..."

    8. JGJeremy Grantham51:11

       Be an engineer.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett51:12

       Why?

    10. JGJeremy Grantham51:13

        Do something really useful that will come in handy if things start to unravel. Be-

    11. SBSteven Bartlett51:18

        What, what will come in handy?

    12. JGJeremy Grantham51:18

        Practical skills.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett51:20

        Pra-- What, what are practical skills?

    14. JGJeremy Grantham51:21

        Well, our second son, um, is practicing growing various crops and has, uh, a small farm, you could say. So he's trying to get to know how you would deal with chickens, how you would deal with pigs, how you would deal with mushrooms.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett51:38

        Why, why does that matter, do you think, based on the future that you're

21. 51:41 – 54:02

    Is Society Declining And What Comes Next?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett51:41

       forecasting?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham51:42

       I think there's quite a good chance that the, the level of complexity of our civilization will start to, to unravel. L-lose the plot at the ends is the first thing that would go. I'll tell you a good sign. How long does it take to get your ambulance?

    3. SBSteven Bartlett51:58

       I've, I don't, don't know.

    4. JGJeremy Grantham51:59

       In the UK, it was twelve and a half minutes.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett52:01

       Yeah.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham52:02

       It's now an hour and a half.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett52:03

       Really? To get an ambulance?

    8. JGJeremy Grantham52:04

       It's exactly what you would expect as people begin to lose the plot a bit. They fray at the edges. People can't buy houses. People don't feel they can do as well as their parents. People are basically disgruntled. They want to vote against the party in power. You know, the, the recent move to Trump was less than the average move of the last seven European elections. It didn't matter whether they were right-wing conservatives, kick the rascals out. Left-wing French, kick them out. And why do you want to kick them out? Because you don't think things are going well. You're not feeling really happy. You're disappointed.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett52:45

       Why?

    10. JGJeremy Grantham52:46

        Why? Obviously, the government's doing a bad job. I think that's the replay.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett52:49

        What are, what are the government doing wrong?

    12. JGJeremy Grantham52:51

        It may be that it's not the government doing anything wrong. It's just that the environment is becoming tougher. Yeah.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett52:56

        As in the economic environment?

    14. JGJeremy Grantham52:58

        The economic environment, the-

    15. SBSteven Bartlett53:00

        The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.

    16. JGJeremy Grantham53:02

        I think that's the biggest economic problem. I mean, the US now has a Gini ratio like, which is a measure of how unequal your society is, um, which is up there with Brazil and Mexico that used to be a joke, and now the US is up there. Since about nineteen seventy-five, all of the wealth we're talking about has gone to the top ten percent, and a lot of that to the top point zero one. Before that, by the way, from nineteen thirty-five, from FDR to nineteen seventy-five, so that's forty years, we had a w-wonderful period of growth. We had gains of over three and a half percent a year. But the nice thing was that the poorest quarter made a little bit more than average, let's say four percent, and the richest quarter made a little less, let's say three percent, and everybody got richer. Everyone was happy. And then from seventy-five onwards, basically the average hour worked in America has barely gotten more adjusted for inflation than it did in

22. 54:02 – 56:36

    What History Says About Wealth Inequality

    1. JGJeremy Grantham54:02

       nineteen seventy-five.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett54:03

       The richest one percent of Americans control thirty-one percent of the nation's entire wealth, and by contrast, the bottom fifty percent of the entire population shares just two point five percent of the wealth. The richest ten US billionaires saw their wealth surge by five hundred and twenty-six percent, adjusted for inflation, between twenty twenty and twenty twenty-five. Between nineteen eighty-nine and the mid-twenty twenties, the financial gain of a single household at the top one percent threshold was nine hundred and eighty-seven times larger than the gain of a household in the bottom twenty percent.

    3. JGJeremy Grantham54:40

       Forget, in a sense, the bottom twenty percent is tragic, but the guy in the middle, the fiftieth percentile, he is unhappy also. And when your average guy is unhappy because he's not doing very well- You know you have a problem.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett54:55

       What is that problem, this inequality we're seeing across the Western world? What does history tell us happens next?

    5. JGJeremy Grantham55:02

       All bad. We had a similarly unequal society back in the so-called Gilded Age of the 1880s and '90s and so on. We got lucky in a, in an ugly way. We ran into World War I, which was catastrophically expensive, killed off a huge fraction of the officer class. And then we went into the, uh, Great Depression, then we went into World War II. We came out as a, uh, very equal society by historical standards. Obviously, i- in the wartime, you pull together and the social contract, the feeling that you owe something to the rest of society, was much stronger than it is today.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett55:48

       I was doing some research, and it said when wealth inequality peaks to the extremes that we currently see in the US and the UK, history shows that the system inevitably resets. According to historical macro studies, peaceful policy changes almost never fix extreme inequality. Historically, a wealth peak is broken by one of three violent or catastrophic triggers. Number one, total civil collapse and state failure; number two, mass mobilization warfare; or number three, total revolution.

    7. JGJeremy Grantham56:21

       Yeah, and that's why number two was lucky. In the end, it's better to have a war and have everyone pull their weight and, and, and work together than it is the other. You... Civil wars are the worst of all kinds.

23. 56:36 – 57:59

    Should The Rich Pay More Tax?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett56:36

       What do you think is likely to happen? It can't just keep becoming more unequal.

    2. JGJeremy Grantham56:40

       No, it can't. So it, it needs a government that is prepared to pull a Bernie Sanders, to say, "Yeah, we're going to have to, at least in a gentle and long-term way, shift the, the tax structure in favor, uh, of, of a slightly steeper curve."

    3. SBSteven Bartlett57:01

       So you mean taxation needs to go up?

    4. JGJeremy Grantham57:04

       Yes.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett57:04

       We need to tax the rich.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham57:05

       And help, uh, the poor. It's pretty simple. And, and you have a kind of steepness in every society. That's what they do. Every, every, every developed country in the world taxes the rich and helps the poor, don't they? It's a question of degree. We did much more helping the poor and taxing the rich in the 1950s and '60s and '40s than we do today, and somewhere between that level and the current level might be more than enough. If we just started to adopt the policy of 1935 to '75, where the bottom quarter get a half percent a year richer than the average and the top dogs get half a percent less each year than the average, that sounds pretty unthreatening. I think we would ease our way over several decades, uh, into a better place.

24. 57:59 – 1:00:08

    How To Build Wealth In Your 30s Today

    1. SBSteven Bartlett57:59

       If you were 33 now, my age, and you were trying to accumulate wealth-

    2. JGJeremy Grantham58:04

       Oh, God, I wish I was 33.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett58:05

       Do you?

    4. JGJeremy Grantham58:06

       Such an exciting time.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett58:07

       What would you give to be 33?

    6. JGJeremy Grantham58:09

       I... There's nothing I can give. [laughs]

    7. SBSteven Bartlett58:11

       No, but would you... I, I find this funny. I heard someone ask a question like this the other day. They were, they said, like, "Would you give your, your entire available net worth to be 33?"

    8. JGJeremy Grantham58:20

       Yeah, I think everyone says yes. I mean, how did one get a net worth? By, by work and luck and creativity, all those good things.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett58:33

       If you were 33 now in this moment in time, and your objective was, and this is a bit of a crass objective, but I'm gonna, you know, it sounds like it's a very one-dimensional objective. But if your objective was just to become rich now at 33, what strategy would you deploy? Again, I'm gonna take away your contacts. I'm even gonna take away everything you know, so you'd have to go on the journey of acquiring new information. What would you do?

    10. JGJeremy Grantham58:58

        I think the simple appeal would be to get your tail into AI and, and try and be a leader, try and know more about everything in that area than the next guy.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett59:10

        Mm.

    12. JGJeremy Grantham59:10

        Join a leading firm and, uh, and go for broke. You may end up encouraging the destruction of the human species, but you asked a simple question, and I give you what I think is the simple answer.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett59:24

        And what I hear there is you wanna make sure you're riding a wave that's coming into shore, and you're on the forefront of that incoming wave-

    14. JGJeremy Grantham59:31

        Yeah

    15. SBSteven Bartlett59:31

        ... like we saw with the tech bubble, we saw, you know, we're now seeing with the AI bubble. So it's really about acquire the most valuable information.

    16. JGJeremy Grantham59:40

        Yes, and take lots of risk. Don't be conservative.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett59:46

        And work hard.

    18. JGJeremy Grantham59:47

        And work hard and think outside the box. I mean, I think the, the biggest deficiency of most people is that they feel constrained, uh, to play the game by the regular rules and to believe that, uh, experts and authorities know what they're doing. And, and that, as you know, probably,

25. 1:00:08 – 1:02:58

    How To Invest Your Salary Wisely

    1. JGJeremy Grantham1:00:08

       it just ain't so.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:10

       What if I'm trying to invest? So say that I've got $1,000 or $10,000 and I want to invest it somewhere that's gonna not lose me money through all of these cycles of, you know, boom and bust. 'Cause I, I'm, I'm intere- you know, I have a lot of people message me and ask me about investing because I interview lots of people about investing. I have my own investment fund as well. Um, but what, what advice do you give for the average person that's looking to invest their salary or their wages?

    3. JGJeremy Grantham1:00:36

       Buy a broad-based index of, uh, non-US equities.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:40

       Non-US? That's really surprising to me.

    5. JGJeremy Grantham1:00:42

       For, um, like 60% of your money and then 5 or 10% in precious metals and, uh, if, if it's convenient and sensible, hold, hold a bit of real estate. And the rest I'd put in, uh, bonds

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:58

       Okay. So 5% or 10% in things like silver and gold.

    7. JGJeremy Grantham1:01:01

       Yeah.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:01

       A preference for either silver or gold?

    9. JGJeremy Grantham1:01:04

       No.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:05

        Um, S&P 500. No, you said non-US.

    11. JGJeremy Grantham1:01:08

        Non-US.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:09

        This is so interesting 'cause everybody says invest in US stocks.

    13. JGJeremy Grantham1:01:13

        Of course, they do. They've been completely dominant for 20 years, completely kicking ass around the rest of the world. And then in the last 12 months, emerging markets is up 65%. Now, the S&P has done much better than I would've guessed, but it's only 25. That's a lot less than 65.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:32

        And I guess the strategy is quite important here as well, which is you're saying to hold these for a long time, try not to buy and sell.

    15. JGJeremy Grantham1:01:39

        And, and try and look at where the cycle has been. And I can tell you, and you can see it for yourself, there has been an enormous cycle in favor of the S&P, in favor of the American market over the rest of the world.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:51

        What about-

    17. JGJeremy Grantham1:01:52

        And do you think America is gonna keep on gaining on the rest of the world? And of course, you're gonna say yes now because that's, that's the flavor of this market. We think that what is good today will continue being good indefinitely even though history tells you that is absolutely not the case. We live in a world that tends to rotate from one to the other. We believe in a world that extrapolates today's conditions, and you can easily prove that. The stock market is not efficient. The stock market extrapolates today's conditions. If they are terrible in 1982, they will take crushed earnings and multiply it by seven times earnings. And then in 2000, peak profit margins times, ooh, 35 times earnings. They double count it in the worst way. When times are good, you multiply it by a lot. That's another way of saying you extrapolate it into the distant future.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:47

        You assume it's gonna continue.

    19. JGJeremy Grantham1:02:48

        And Keynes, of course, my hero, says, "Of course, that's extrapolation, is the convention you adopt even though you know from personal experience that the world is not that

26. 1:02:58 – 1:03:51

    Should You Own Crypto?

    1. JGJeremy Grantham1:02:58

       way."

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:58

       You didn't use the word crypto when you were talking about investment strategies. How much crypto do you own?

    3. JGJeremy Grantham1:03:03

       None.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:04

       Have you ever owned any crypto?

    5. JGJeremy Grantham1:03:06

       No.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:07

       Will you ever own any crypto?

    7. JGJeremy Grantham1:03:08

       No.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:08

       Will you ever advise anyone to buy crypto?

    9. JGJeremy Grantham1:03:10

       No.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:13

        Why?

    11. JGJeremy Grantham1:03:14

        I think it's a, an unnecessary, uh, piece of, uh, nonsense. It facilitates nothing except criminals moving money, so they can't be seen. It's not a store of value since it bounces around all over the place, just down from 120 to 60 because it felt like it. So it's not stable. It's volatile as hell. It's not used conveniently as a medium of exchange. You can't go into a shop and use it easily. It does one thing very, very well. It's a means of speculating

27. 1:03:51 – 1:04:05

    Will Bitcoin Eventually Go To Zero?

    1. JGJeremy Grantham1:03:51

       beautifully.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:52

       Do you think Bitcoin's gonna go to zero?

    3. JGJeremy Grantham1:03:54

       Well, in the distant future, yes, it will certainly go to zero, but it may take a long time. And, and, you know, in the distant future, everything goes to zero. So.

28. 1:04:05 – 1:05:15

    Is Property Still A Good Investment?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:05

       What about property as an investment? Because the, the first sort of reaction most people have when they have enough money to make an investment or to buy something is they buy a property as an investment asset, so people go buy themselves a house, they'll move into it. We're kind of told that that's how you start to accumulate wealth, is you go buy yourself a house. What do you think of that?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham1:04:23

       It's hard to imagine how it could be a good decision when, uh, there's such an increasing fraction of people who can't afford it. And there is a political resistance, you know.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:34

       Doesn't that just mean that the, if, you know, if I buy one now, and increasingly people can't afford one, doesn't that mean that my m- my house is gonna be worth more in 10 years' time?

    4. JGJeremy Grantham1:04:43

       Oh, if people can't afford it, there's no one bidding. And by the way, the population is going to decline. Young family formations are already declining in many of the richer countries. And if you have family formations declining, and you have super expensive houses, what do you think is gonna happen? Now, you could say, "Well, perhaps there will be a mysterious increase in family formations," and that the chronic baby bust that we maybe will talk about soon, um, will stop.

29. 1:05:15 – 1:07:27

    Ads

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:15

       [page flips] [instrumental music] Xin chào mọi người. Chào mừng các bạn. I don't speak Vietnamese, but this show can because of AI video technology from our sponsor, HeyGen. I get messages every single week from those of you listening to The Diary of a CEO all around the world, and you express how much impact it's had on you and your life. And if that's true, then those conversations shouldn't only reach people in English. HeyGen can take one recording of me and deliver it in any language while keeping my voice, timing, and expressions intact. But you don't need a studio like this to make it work for you. Record 15 seconds of yourself and get an AI avatar that delivers studio quality video in over 175 languages. We're up to 20 languages now, and we're not the only ones using it. HeyGen is already used by 30 million people, including 85% of the Fortune 100. Whether you're building an audience on social media, launching an online course, or rolling out training across your team, check out HeyGen now. Your first three videos are totally free at heygen.com/doac. That's H-E-Y-G-E-N.com/doac. See you there. [page flips] This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that The Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we wanna accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps, and we call this in our team the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have, is we've made these 1% diaries, and we released these last year, and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind, and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.

30. 1:07:27 – 1:11:28

    What's Really Causing The Baby Bust?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:27

       [page flips] Let's talk about the chronic baby bust. I've been hearing a lot in the news, I think there were some articles that actually came out this week in The New York Times that talked about the decline in fe-fertility rates and how young couples like me, I'm in a, you know, I'm, uh, I'm engaged to a young woman who, uh, and me, and me and her are trying to have a child now. Um, it's not, not always a straight line to having a child. Y- I think you're kind of sold the idea that it is, that you just have sex without a condom and then a baby appears. But, um, lots of young families and lots of my friends who are trying to have kids have gone for a couple of years trying and struggling to con- to conceive. So much so that after doing this podcast, I started telling some of my friends, "I actually think it's a good idea to start freezing your eggs, embryos, sperm," because if it is gonna get increasingly harder, then there might need to be, um, medical interventions, IVF, um, et cetera, for me and my friends if we are, if we, you know, if we wanna have families. But the, the problem is as well, at, like, thirty-three years old, um, if you look at the data, you're not at your peak necessarily in terms of fertility. You're somewhere c- coming down the slope as a man, um, uh, but also as a woman, and so you're kind of fighting time a little bit it feels like.

    2. JGJeremy Grantham1:08:41

       Yeah, you are.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:42

       And I think my partner feels the same way, that we wish we were told a little bit earlier about family planning. And then I hear that about this fet- these fertility issues that apparently have been caused by toxins-

    4. JGJeremy Grantham1:08:52

       Yes

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:52

       ... and the sort of chemicals in our environment. You have spent a long time thinking, writing, talking about this.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham1:08:58

       Yes.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:59

       I guess the first question is why. Why is a guy that's known for managing billions and billions and billions or hundreds of billions of dollars talking about fertility and this sort of baby bust?

    8. JGJeremy Grantham1:09:09

       Well, starting twenty-seven years ago with the foundation, we, uh, were committed to start thinking about everything to do with the climate. And, and you're moving in the right circle then because the next thing is we started to worry about the c- cataclysmic decline in insects. I don't know if you're aware of this, but insects appear to have dropped in biomass, the weight of the flying insects, by fifty to seventy-five percent-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:36

       Really?

    10. JGJeremy Grantham1:09:37

        ... in the last sixty, seventy years. And E.O. Wilson, the famous ant man, he believed that, you know, nature could handle the loss of humans easily, effortlessly, but it could not handle the loss of, of insects. That insects are in, in the sense he felt and, and his fellow experts, he represented them as thinking the same way, that they, insects are the bedrock of nature, and if they start to go out of business, then the birds who feed on, on them and the amphibians, they start to decline, which they have done also catastrophically. One thing leads to another, and the beetles are no longer, uh, recycling the forest floor, and eventually things won't grow and no one to, uh, fertilize the plants, and the damage spreads. And he felt that eventually loss of insects would lead to a more or less complete failure of nature and, and we would inherit a planet that was no longer conducive to humans. We noticed that some of the same effects are felt, uh, by humans. And, uh, a report came out, Shanna Swan and Hagai Levine, I think it finished in twenty eleven, and, uh, it made the case that, uh, sperm count had been dropping, had almost halved since the first reports, academic reports in nineteen seventy. So I immediately said, "This has the feeling of something that is really important." We got to study the data, and the results came out suggesting that the decline rate was accelerating. The decline rate this year is two and a half percent a year. You don't have to be mathematically that literate to realize that a two-and-a-half percent decline in your sperm count every year is a disastrous level, a non-sustainable level, right?

31. 1:11:28 – 1:14:24

    When Could Sperm Counts Reach Zero?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:28

       How long is that gonna take for this, my sperm to basically not work?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham1:11:31

       As far as we can tell, our best guess is that in hunter/gatherer days we had a hundred and eighty million units per milliliter of sperm, and when the academics came in in nineteen seventy, um, it was down to about a hundred. And today it's thirty-five, okay? Also, the quality and the mo-motility they call it, had also declined, somewhat similarly. It turns out, luckily for us, that we were over-engineered, I like to say like a great Victorian bridge. Nature doesn't take any risks and, and, uh, you have more than you need. And it, it appears, again, a good guess is about forty-five million units is what you need to be able to get pregnant without any difficulty, and that was hit about fifteen to twenty years ago. The number of young couples who needed help fifteen or twenty years ago, uh, was nil, basically, and for this reason, that none of them had a, a chronic lack of sperm count in round numbers. And now the World Health says it's about seventeen percent, okay? Seventeen percent of young couples could use some help today. It, which means that instead of, you know, just trying for a week or two or three or four or five or six, you're trying for months and months. And, uh, everybody knows people now who fall in that category, which is exactly what you would expect if you've gone from zero to seventeen percent. But this is the killer. Shanna Swan and my colleague and I kind of thought about this thing separately and independently, and we, we worked out, doesn't take a great brain, that in twenty to twenty-five years the average young couple will need help. I mean, this is tomorrow. You know, this is not two hundred years from now. In twenty to twenty-five years the average young couple will need help. Getting pregnant

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:32

       Dr. Swan's projection indicates that if the current rate of decline continues unchecked, the median male sperm count is on track to hit zero by twenty forty-five.

    4. JGJeremy Grantham1:13:46

       Wow. Yeah. [laughs] That, that is, uh... That means the median couple is not gonna have children without a lot of help.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:56

       It means half the male population will have zero viable sperm, and the remaining half will be right on the edge of functional infertility.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham1:14:07

       A few of them will still have plenty, and maybe ten percent who are really perfectly, uh, in decent condition, because there's a huge distribution range today. You know, there is-- there are people today who still have two hundred million, you know, better than the hunter-gatherers. But it's, uh-

32. 1:14:24 – 1:16:42

    How Microplastics Affect Fertility

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:25

       And what is causing this, and how do we stop it?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham1:14:28

       Shanna would say, uh, the environment around you, uh, of, of mainly plastics. Plastics are leaching, uh, toxins, and the particles of plastics you have in your brain and in your body, which we now know is quite substantial, are also leaching toxins, and these toxins are what they call endocrine disruptors. They mess with your ho-hormones. You should expect them to lower your fertility. And yet, the people who specialize in fertility problems and write books about it, none of them mention toxicity. They mention the hundred perfectly solid reasons why people are choosing, uh, to have fewer children.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:12

       Endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates, which they-

    4. JGJeremy Grantham1:15:16

       Like phthalates

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:17

       ... which are found in cosmetics, shampoos, food packaging, et cetera. They actively lower testosterone production in male fetuses during the first trimester, permanently stunting reproductive, reproductive capacity before birth.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham1:15:29

       Yes.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:30

       BPAs, which are, um, what are they called? B-biphosphates?

    8. JGJeremy Grantham1:15:34

       Yes, [laughs] something like that.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:36

       Used to make plastics hard, line tin cans, and coat thermal store receipts. Um, they are synthetic estrogens. They flood the male body with female hormone signals, crashing sperm count and motility. PFAs, forever chemicals used in non-stick pans, Teflons, waterproof rain jackets, and stain-resistant carpets. They break down in nature, accumulate in human blood, and are directly linked to lower sperm volume. And then the microplastics you talked about, the Trojan, Trojan, Trojan horse. One of the shocking things that I read was that it's been discovered that they are physically embedded in human placentas-

    10. JGJeremy Grantham1:16:08

        Yes. Isn't that amazing?

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:10

        ... breast milk, and human testicles. And there was a major study I think we all heard about in two thousand twenty-four that found microplastics in one hundred percent of human testicular tissues tested. A hundred percent. And lastly, biological stresses. So me and you being sat down on these chairs heats our testicles to a point where the sperms die. Heated car seats, hot laptops, they actively cook the sperm. And lastly, obesity.

    12. JGJeremy Grantham1:16:37

        Yes. And of course, smoking you. Some-somehow it slipped through the net.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:41

        Yeah.

    14. JGJeremy Grantham1:16:41

        But, um,

33. 1:16:42 – 1:21:43

    How Pesticides Impact Fertility

    1. JGJeremy Grantham1:16:42

       there is a whole other branch, pesticides on your food. Now, if you'll give me time, I'll tell you about these two little studies. They're very small, and you might ignore them, except they were done by Harvard and Mass General, which is a candidate for the best hospital in America. And, uh, they had a clinic for people having problem getting pregnant, and, uh, they, they ran it out of that. They had a hundred and eighty men, and they got them to self-report on what they were eating. Were they eating the dirty dozen? Were they eating melons and bananas that have lots of protection? At the end of, uh, six months, the, the guys who reported to eat the least bad versus the quarter that ate the worst, there was a doubling of sperm count. Can you believe it? At the top category, the more fruit and veggies you ate, the better your sperm count. In the bottom quartile, the more they ate, the worse their sperm count. It was a dramatic result, but two to one between the top and the bottom. And then two years later, they did a very similar study with women who were having trouble. And at the end of their nine months of self-reporting, the ones who ate the least badly had sixty-eight percent successful live births, bearing in mind this was a fertility clinic, and the bottom quartile, thirty-eight percent. So n- once again, nearly double. I mean, and, and it's life and death. I mean, these are really important. And this was only based on what they ate. Because pesticides are full of these toxins, and they are delivered straight into your body. You eat the damn things. It's not just they're on the surface. You can wash some of that away, but they're impregnated part of the structure of the berry. Berries, apples, pears, peaches, and funnily, um, uh, spinach, a-are really bad. And at the top end, the bananas and the oranges and the melons are, are fine. So if you eat these damn things, they're designed to kill our cousins, the insects and, and the weeds and the funguses. Why would you expect them not to do a terrible job on humans? And we stuff them in our system. And the fetus, it turns out, is a hundred to a thousand times more vulnerable than we are out in the, out in the world. For example, if your mother smokes, it's going to do about the same damage as if you smoke for the rest of your life.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:10

       Hmm. Wow.

    3. JGJeremy Grantham1:19:12

       And you think about what the fetus is plugged into the system and how it's forming everything. It doesn't seem the most unreasonable thing that it would be much more sensitive. And there are people out there fussing quite reasonably about the first thousand days of life. But actually, that is nothing like as important as the two hundred and seventy days in the womb

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:35

       Atrazine. Have you heard of atrazine?

    5. JGJeremy Grantham1:19:38

       Yes, I have.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:39

       Atrazine, um, referred to as the chemical castrator. It is the second most widely used herbicide in the United States, sprayed heavily on things like corn and sugar canes. And there was this crazy study which was peer-reviewed out of UC Berkeley that showed exposure to atrazine at levels below the EPAs considered safe for drinking, um, levels, completely chemically castrated male frogs, turning 10% of them into fully functional females capable of laying eggs. In humans, it is linked to severe drops in sperm motility and testosterone.

    7. JGJeremy Grantham1:20:16

       And yet we avoid the topic. We avoid the topic because it's, it's pessimistic. We're not fighting the data.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:24

       We just don't want to talk about it.

    9. JGJeremy Grantham1:20:25

       We don't want to talk about it. We don't want to talk about bear markets. We don't want to talk about bad climate changes, even though it's bludgeoning us. This year could be the worst hot year in history. We are set up because of the accident of the El Niño to have perhaps the worst droughts and the hottest weather ever recorded, starting about now. So brace yourselves. But we don't want to talk about that. We don't want to talk about toxicity. We don't want to talk about running out of resources. Uh, we just don't do bad news. But I have never seen anything like this, this fertility thing, where the data is horrific. The baby bust is measurable. The sperm count is one of the few things you can really measure. Do they really think if you have declining sperm count, the future is great? Do they really think that the economy will function if the number of 20-year-olds entering the market starts to drop like a stone? In Japan, you know what their 20-year-old is? It's 50% of what it was in 1948.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:32

        What, there's fif-

    11. JGJeremy Grantham1:21:32

        Fifty percent, not down 15 or 3.5, 50% less.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:37

        50% less 20-year-olds.

    13. JGJeremy Grantham1:21:39

        20-year-olds that drive the market, that offer themselves for military service.

34. 1:21:43 – 1:22:54

    How To Reduce Toxic Chemical Exposure

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:43

       What, what do we do about this?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham1:21:44

       We have two things. We've got to detoxify the world, which is intellectually easy. You ban poisonous chemicals, and we've made, in the EU, pretty good start. My favorite example, and everybody's favorite example, is cosmetics. Cosmetics, you don't actually eat it, but you rub it on your skin, which is the second worst thing to do. And there are 10,000 chemicals in cosmetics, and the EU has banned 1,500. If they ban the right 1,500, that could be three-quarters of the battle, right? Canada's banned 550, and the US has banned 12. I am not kidding you. So the good thing about toxicity is it is regional. If one country, if Denmark or the EU or the UK wants to look after its chemicals, they will live longer and have better health. If the US wants to put their corporations first, they will have shorter lives. Do you know the life expectancy difference between the US and Sweden has gone from two years to six years in the last 70 years? I wrote in my quarterly letter, my estate would be willing to bet you that in 50 years it'll be eight or 10.

35. 1:22:54 – 1:27:30

    Why US Products Are More Toxic

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:54

       I don't quite think people in the United States realize the difference in the products they consume here versus other parts of the world. And, you know-

    2. JGJeremy Grantham1:23:03

       No, absolutely not

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:04

       ... Brits fly over here, and actually we had my, my barber, my, my barber, Damon, and he flew over here to give me a haircut last week. He said, "Oh gosh, I don't feel good." He said, "I went and got some food here and I really just don't feel good. It's..." And he says, "Every time I come over here, I don't feel good." And me and my team, we used to fly over here before I moved here for a couple of weeks a year to film this show, and whenever we'd fly back, not only would I be much fatter, um, but we'd all feel a little bit more like sluggish, is the way I'd describe it, from eating the food here. And it almost felt quite clear that there's like something in the food that our bodies just isn't used to in the UK. And when you look at the toxicity of the United States versus Europe, it's quite clear. I mean, the US currently permits the use of 85 agricultural pesticides that are completely banned in the EU, China and Brazil. The US sprays over 300 million pounds per year of pesticides that are deemed too dangerous to be legally used in Europe, including that one I said about the frogs called atrazine.

    4. JGJeremy Grantham1:24:00

       Atrazine.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:01

       Which the EU banned over two decades ago. If we look at cosmetics, which you were talking about then, what you put on your skin obviously goes into your bloodstream, and so the EU has banned or heavily restricted over 1,300 chemicals in cosmetics and personal care products due to toxicity and hormone disruption. The US and the FDA has banned 11. In terms of food, the US allows potassium bromate, which is a known carcinogen, cancer causing, used to make fluffy dough bread, and BHA, um, slash BHT, which are preservatives linked to hormone disruption. Both are strictly banned from human consumption in the UK and EU and Canada and China. And the, lastly, the US, um, allows titanium dioxide used to make candy smell like Skittles, bright white, and synthetic dyes like Red 40, which requires strict warning labels or outright bans in Europe due to DNA damage and neurodevelopmental issues in kids. I'll give you one more. A recent US geological survey found that at least 45% of all US tap water is contaminated with PFAs, those forever chemicals we talked about earlier, the very chemicals directly linked to crashing sperm counts and testicular cancer. The US has historically allowed PFAs levels in drinking water drastically higher than the EU, the United, um, the European Union considers safe.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham1:25:25

       Let us just say that the EU is forever giving exemptions and extensions and is far from perfect and has a lot of corporate pushback, and, uh, it's just much less bad than the US.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:37

       And the US has worse life expectancy.

    8. JGJeremy Grantham1:25:39

       It does, and it's the only rich country in the world where 15 years ago They had the same life expectancy as they have today

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:46

       One, um, actionable piece of advice for anyone listening that might find this all quite, um, overwhelming, 'cause, you know, lots of things around us from receipts to the, the pans we use to r- rain ja- jackets contain these chemicals, is there are apps out there where you can scan the chemicals in the foods that you're buying to check if they contain these endocrine-disrupting, these hormone-disrupting chemicals.

    10. JGJeremy Grantham1:26:11

        Yeah.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:11

        I'm not affiliated with any of them, but there's one called Yuka, Y-U-K-A, that I know is very easy for sort of everyday scanning of products. You can just scan the barcode, and it'll tell you. It'll give it a rating score out of 100. There's EWG's Healthy Living, um, app, which is the scientific gold standard run by the Environmental Working Group, a major toxic chemical watchdog. You can scan barcodes or search for food, cleaning supplies, or cosmetics. There's Think Dirty as well, which is great for cosmetic shampoos and skincare. It exposes the toxic truth hiding in beauty products. Um, and then there's Clear ya, which is Clear ya, best for online shopping. It's an app in your web browser, and instead of scanning barcodes in your house, while you're shopping online, so if you add a, say, like, a shampoo or a lotion to your Amazon or Target or Walmart basket, it automatically pops up with an alert telling you about the ingredients list that is within those chemicals. But, but I think that gives something e- a little bit actionable and arms you with at least a tool to navigate-

    12. JGJeremy Grantham1:27:06

        Yes

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:06

        ... this crazy environment. And obviously, AI is great at this as well. You can take pictures of things and ask it questions.

    14. JGJeremy Grantham1:27:10

        And what we really need is a kind of green Amazon where everything is guaranteed, food, bed clothes, everything, and that would be very handy indeed, someone you could trust that would absolutely guarantee the whole line of products that you would order. Not im- impossible, and I think done well and someone could make money at it.

36. 1:27:30 – 1:33:54

    How To Stay Healthy In A Toxic World

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:30

       What would advice would you give to your kids on a personal level if they're trying to stay healthy in a toxic world?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham1:27:35

       Simple advice, and I know you like this, is pregnant women are much more important than anybody else in this field. If you could persuade pregnant women, A, to have no cosmetics, save a lot of money, no cosmetics for nine months, and then, B, invest some of that money from your cosmetics or all of it in buying organic berries if you have to have berries, apples, oranges, peaches, what they call the dirty dozen here. If you did that, I think as much as half of all the trouble disappears, and that's a huge fraction, and it's easily acquired. You know, a- a- addressing the hundred things around in your environment, you have to get to that. Typically, if you're lucky, you do one thing after another. You get the gas stove first, which is really noxious, and then you work your way, the black plastics, the Teflon frying pan. You work your way around it. Compared to that, no cosmetics, no bad, uh, fruit, or make it organic. That's a piece of cake. That is easy. It will save you a huge amount that you will never appreciate because you'll never know how much better your children are than they would have been.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:50

       Mm.

    4. JGJeremy Grantham1:28:51

       But it's not only your children, by the way. For women, you know, you're talking about in particular because of the eggs. They are, every egg is all there in the womb, a- and then it goes on to your grandchildren, we thought. At least we could prove two generations, and, and, and a recent study suggests it might be many more generations than two. So you get some of these chemicals impregnated in your system, and your children pay the price, and your grandchildren, and perhaps even quite a few generations after that.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:26

       I also think it would be great if, um, Western governments around the world made the costs of both childcare, um, but also fertility treatments significantly lower.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham1:29:39

       And they will, of course.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:40

       You know, I had a couple of conversations on this podcast with, um, very successful women, including Ronda Rousey, who was in tears because she was on a, uh, I think her, her fifth or sixth round of IVF treatments, and she'd just found out just before she walked into the studio that it, it hadn't gone well. And watching her cry, uh, about it and get very emotional meant that, that that day I walked out of this room and, like, called a lot of the people in my life that I know are, you know, in the region where fertility starts to decline and really encourage them to start thinking if they, if that's what they want in their lives about family planning, which is, like, getting your eggs frozen or your embryos frozen. And me and my partner actually went and did it. We got our embryos frozen, which was a, you know, so it's not, it's, it's both expensive, extremely expensive, um, especially here in the United States, and difficult.

    8. JGJeremy Grantham1:30:26

       And psychologically-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:27

       Brutal

    10. JGJeremy Grantham1:30:27

        ... destructive.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:28

        Yeah.

    12. JGJeremy Grantham1:30:28

        Brutal. Yeah.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:29

        You know, we, you know, me every day for a couple of weeks injecting her with, with this, this, these chemicals and the, the hormonal rollercoaster that she had to deal with and all of that. But for us, the alternative was worse, which was never being able to have children because it's difficult, and there's all these toxins in our environment and, and so on and so forth. And so I then became a little bit of a, I guess a bit of a bit preachy within my, within the pe- the people in my life that I love a lot about family planning 'cause we kind of all thought we could just think about it later. We're all kind of 35, and we thought, "Yeah, we'll think about that later." Um, but it turns out not to be the case-

    14. JGJeremy Grantham1:31:06

        Yes

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:06

        ... for many people.

    16. JGJeremy Grantham1:31:08

        If you'll allow me to go back, you asked a, an important question. What do we have to do? And I said we have to detoxify the system, and then we both got off into this-

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:16

        Yeah

    18. JGJeremy Grantham1:31:16

        ... frenzy [chuckles] of, of attacking chemicals, uh, which we should. Anyway, but it's intellectually easy. Ban the suckers, okay? Now, putting pressure on the corporations to back off so the governments can do it would be a good idea. Not easy. Corporations have enormous power, unprecedented power in the US, but, but very substantial power in the U- in the EU and the UK also. But we have to get them to back off. We have to start banning these damn things. Otherwise, no children. But secondly, and much more difficult Is we have to detoxify capitalism. We have to slowly but surely turn our capitalist societal norms into much more family-friendly, children-friendly. Over the next several generations, we have to end up with a society that realizes that 2.1 healthy, well-educated children is a part of the commons. You may not have any children-

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:16

        What do you mean by that? Sorry, 2.1.

    20. JGJeremy Grantham1:32:18

        2.1 is the number of children it takes for a rich society to have a steady population.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:24

        Per couple.

    22. JGJeremy Grantham1:32:25

        Per couple. If you have less than 2.1 per couple, you fairly rapidly go out of business. If you have more than 2.1, you fairly rapidly end up with so many people, you're standing on ea- each other's shoulder. The commons are things like common land in the old days. The, anyone could put their sheep on, and what tended to happen is everyone put more sheep than they could stand, and they, pretty soon it was, it had no grass on it. Known as the tragedy of the commons. And we all need clean air, clean water, fertile soil, and 2.1 healthy, well-educated children. Without any of those, society fails. All of them have to be treated as group responsibility. So the whole society, the whole village, has to be, in a way, like a kibbutz eventually. You have to put everything behind making it doable to have children, because the long list of economic and social reasons, as well as toxic reasons why people can't have 2.1 children, is getting so long and so dangerous, and nothing yet has worked. I mean, they've tried, you tell me, 200 different things around the world. Several percentage points of GDP in one or two cases, and, uh, nothing yet has seemed, seen a permanent uptick in, in baby production.

37. 1:33:54 – 1:35:34

    The Most Important Thing We Missed

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:54

       For the average person listening right now, Dave, who drives a taxi, or Jenny, who works as a receptionist, or, um, Clive, who's a nurse, what is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it pertains to their life today?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham1:34:10

       I think they have to brace themselves for tougher times ahead than they would have expected. And they're beginning to get the point. Life for the last ten or twenty years has been tougher than, than they perhaps expected as children or, or than other people expected for them. Part of that is politics, part of that is equality, but the net effect to them is times are tougher. It is more difficult to buy a house or afford to rent, and, and jobs are getting scarcer. It's likely to, uh, get worse.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:49

       What does brace yourself mean for them? 'Cause brace yourself sounds like you... But does it mean-

    4. JGJeremy Grantham1:34:55

       Plan your life as if times will not be easy.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:58

       Okay.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham1:34:59

       You know, do not... Build up a little reserve of, of cash. Of course, my advice to other people is, and, and get yourself a useful job. Something that will, in a larger sense, pull your weight in society.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:15

       Upskill, change skills, learn something.

    8. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:18

       Mechanical, fixing, repairing-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:21

       Things that will-

    10. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:21

        Engineering

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:22

        ... things that will need humans.

    12. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:23

        And, and research, science in general.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:26

        Make friends.

    14. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:27

        Make friends. Make sure you're living in, in a, a tight society if you can. Very difficult today,

38. 1:35:34 – 1:35:55

    Should You Move Countries Right Now?

    1. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:34

       obviously.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:34

       Would you be thinking about the country you live in at this moment in time?

    3. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:38

       Absolutely.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:38

       Really? Is there any countries you wouldn't live in if you were Dave or Jenny?

    5. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:43

       I, I think I have to refuse to answer this on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me. Um-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:49

       Oh, okay. So you're saying don't live in the United States?

    7. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:52

       Well, I have American children and

39. 1:35:55 – 1:39:22

    The Flaw That Destroys Societies

    1. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:55

       grandchildren.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:56

       Why not the United States?

    3. JGJeremy Grantham1:35:58

       It, it holds out too much chance that the social contract is, is, uh, dissolving. You know, the thing about Japan and, uh, my joking rule 21 in investing is never extrapolate from the Japanese. They are extremely different in every way. But one of the ways they're different is they have this amazing social contract. The thing that really upsets the Japanese is if they're put in a position where they can't act in a socially responsible way.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:36:24

       When you say social contract, what does that mean?

    5. JGJeremy Grantham1:36:27

       It means an agreement that I will behave in a way that helps my neighbors and the society, that I'm doing what people expect me to do. I'm not going to misbehave.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:36:36

       And you think that's not the case here in the United States?

    7. JGJeremy Grantham1:36:38

       I think the case here is that people are doing what they think is best for them and their family, and screw everybody else, really. When I arrived in America, corporations had this sense that they owed something to the community they operated in, the city they operated in. They'd, they'd build the stadium, they'd do this, they'd, they'd be part of the community. Now they're not. They're all, in a way, cold-blooded, profit-maximizing international enterprises.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:07

       And why is that a bad place to live? 'Cause you're saying, you know, you probably wouldn't recommend Dave or Jenny living in the United States. Why would that be a bad place for them to be? What happens? What's the, what's the downstream impact of that?

    9. JGJeremy Grantham1:37:18

       That your neighbors aren't as interested in you and your well-being.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:22

        Fine. They, I don't, I won't talk to my neighbor.

    11. JGJeremy Grantham1:37:24

        And that's a lonely place to be. And when you're in trouble, you're in serious trouble, uh, because the safety net here is very ineffective. There's a, a measure that I think is probably the single most important measure of civilization, and that is m- maternal mortality. How many people die in childbirth. You know, in Nigeria, out of 100,000, it's 480, give or take. And, uh, in America, in, in the Black population, it's, uh, 44 In the whole population, it's like twenty-one or twenty. Curiously, in the American Asian population, it's thirteen. And then you go down the list. In, in Britain, it's five. In Germany, it's four. In Sweden, it's two point one. In Norway, it's zero. There were no mothers who died last year or the year before. What better definition of civilization than looking after the mothers giving birth? How is it possible that a country more or less the richest in the world, it's not just that they're the worst in the rich world, it's that they are fifty percent worse than the next worst. Fifty percent more mothers die here than in the second worst country in the developed world. How is that possible? The answer is it happens, and, um, it's because the inequality is so extreme in the medical system that if you don't have lots of money, you're quite likely to die in childbirth. I mean, [laughs] not-- of course, the numbers are not huge. Twenty out of a hundred thousand is not, uh, but it's, but it's a terrible contrast.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:15

        It's a s- a sign of something. It's a sign of something, that's for sure.

    13. JGJeremy Grantham1:39:18

        It's a sign of whether people are... It's a sign of the

40. 1:39:22 – 1:40:40

    The Best Places To Live Today

    1. JGJeremy Grantham1:39:22

       social contract.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:22

       So where's a good place to live then, if not here?

    3. JGJeremy Grantham1:39:25

       Denmark, Japan, uh, even, uh, France, Germany. The UK has a little bit of the American disease, but not nearly as much.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:37

       So if your kids came to you and said, "Dad, we're thinking of, uh, leaving the United States. Should I move? Should I, should I move out of the United States?"

    5. JGJeremy Grantham1:39:44

       I, I would say that's a perfectly reasonable thing to consider. And, uh, where are you going, and why, and what's your reason?

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:52

       I'm thinking of going to Denmark, Dad.

    7. JGJeremy Grantham1:39:54

       [laughs] If they'll have you. Uh, no, uh, in the things that really matter, life expectancy, health, safety nets, uh, murder rates, uh, mortality rates, in everything that really matters, yes, they're day and night better. In the things that don't really matter but look really splashy, we have enormous quantities of, uh, wealth created that go to a relatively small fraction of the people, and that dazzles in terms of the average because, um, that's how the numbers work. If you look at how well off the bottom quartile are, America doesn't score well at all.

41. 1:40:40 – 1:45:51

    What Would You Do If Failure Was Impossible?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:40

       Jeremy, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is, if you could not fail, what would your next goal be that you would set for yourself?

    2. JGJeremy Grantham1:40:55

       There, there was a book written in the nineteen sixties called Silent Spring. Carl Carson, I think her name was. And it changed for quite a number of years. It, it, it did what books never do really. It, it, uh, became a, a political monster, and everyone studied it, and it had an effect. It changed the game. I would, uh, like to write something about, uh, toxicity and, and social contract really, particularly nurturing a family. We, we've got to find, in the end, a community that encourages children. The downside of the brutally efficient capitalist system that we have, its focus on financial achievement and so on, and very little emphasis on community and child-rearing and so on. If we don't, we, we fail as a society pretty quickly. We have to detoxify. We have to encourage, to create an environment where people want to have children.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:58

       Mm-hmm.

    4. JGJeremy Grantham1:41:59

       If I could write a book that would be... would, would pull a Silent Spring, I would sit down tomorrow and start it. [laughs]

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:07

       The Making of a Permabear.

    6. JGJeremy Grantham1:42:10

       The perma should be in inverted commas really.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:13

       The Perils of Long-term Investing in a Short-term World by Jeremy Grantham and Edward Chancellor. Who is this book for?

    8. JGJeremy Grantham1:42:24

       Oh, people who have a interest in the stock market. It has a little bit of climate change and toxicity. My, my co-writer is a professional, and he tried to limit me quite sensibly, feeling that our main market was investors who would be turned off by too much of the stuff we've been talking about.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:43

       And you cover things also like economics, value investing, being a bear, and predicting a bubble, and what to do about all of those things.

    10. JGJeremy Grantham1:42:50

        Yeah.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:50

        But it's really a useful counterintuitive, not counterintuitive, but it's a, it's a frame of thinking that will help you be more realistic, especially when psychology is prone to take over and make you wildly, recklessly optimistic.

    12. JGJeremy Grantham1:43:02

        And, and be more confident in your judgment. Big, big companies cannot advise you. It's just suicidal for their business. So you are on your own. Look at the data. A bubble is not hard to see. There is this kind of plane, and then there's a Himalayan peak, which eventually goes back.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:24

        And I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing.

    14. JGJeremy Grantham1:43:25

        It's exactly what history looks like. Have the courage to look at that, make your own conclusion, get out of the dangerous, most dangerous part, and, and do it now. Don't wait for help because no help is coming. Large enterprises almost never get the big turning points because they can't take the career risk involved. And every big corporation needs a leader who has political skills. And the, and the central political skill in life turns out to be never be wrong on your own. This is, again, Keynes. You know, you can be wrong in company. You can jump off the cliff together. You will never lose your job because of that. But if you do anything on your own, sooner or later, you will get it wrong, and quote, "You will not receive much mercy."

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:19

        Jeremy, thank you so much.

    16. JGJeremy Grantham1:44:21

        My pleasure.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:21

        Thank you for all that you do. Um, you traverse so many subjects. It's, it's absolutely fascinating, and you, you've made me think about so many things. I've actually written down a bunch of ideas. You saw me taking some photos then. Those are actually ideas that I wanna remember for me.

    18. JGJeremy Grantham1:44:33

        Yes, that's what I do.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:34

        Yeah.

    20. JGJeremy Grantham1:44:34

        Screenshot city.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:35

        Yeah. So I took-- I just wrang things down you were saying, and then I was like, "I need to remember that later for a bunch of things," businesses, friends, family, et cetera. Um, and I think that's the testament to how broad and curious and wise you are.

    22. JGJeremy Grantham1:44:47

        Going back to question one or two, the billionaire bit, uh, sometime around the end of this year, we will actually have written checks for a billion dollars to the climate change world.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:58

        It's, it's a wonderful thing. And there's, you know, in this particular moment in time because of the politics, climate change is a subject that's falling off the radar.

    24. JGJeremy Grantham1:45:04

        It is.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:05

        Uh, it's m- being mentioned less in earnings calls. It's-

    26. JGJeremy Grantham1:45:07

        But this year will be so disgustingly hot from now on, I suspect.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:11

        Disgustingly hot?

    28. JGJeremy Grantham1:45:12

        Hot. We could have from now on the hottest twelve months from now to this time next year that we have ever had in history, here, there, and everywhere.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:21

        Well, I'm glad we've got voices like yours, um, lending their ideas and wisdom to these conversations, and it's been an honor and a privilege to speak to you. Your book, The Making of a Permabear, I'm gonna link it below, um, for everyone to buy it themselves. Jeremy, thank you. YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior. And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out. I bet you, you might love it

Episode duration: 1:45:51