Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:23:21 · Kevin Ryan
[00:23:21] S0: Yeah. So... And for example, we're having a a conference called Deep Tech New York that we own. It'll be the first time in January on the on the twenty eighth, twenty ninth around there at New Lab. We'll have 200 people, and we're gonna be companies are gonna be presenting science and technology breakthroughs in energy and nuclear, in materials, science, things like that. And so I think it's really exciting. I think that's gonna grow in New York for a while. So what gets my antenna up is, you know, applications that are vertical applications. So I'm not thinking about a Roomba that is gonna be in your living room. That's something that the Chinese are gonna dominate over time. But there are very specific applications that occur in b to b businesses that are still enormous, enormous. So I'm excited about that. The energy side, you know, that problem and opportunity is not going away. So very bullish on nuclear, on battery technology, on transformation, on geothermal, on... You know, watching what's happened in solar in the last fifteen years is mind boggling. The costs have come down 90. It's the cheapest energy in the world, growing like crazy. Those things are gonna continue to happen. We're gonna continue to need more energy, we need to continue to get more efficient. So I love that field as well. I think we haven't done much in transportation, but you know, the role... Everything's going electric. And so I was an early investor in Archer, which is a publicly traded company for helicopters, but it's happening in planes. It's happening in trains. It's both driverless and electric. You know, that's a trillion dollar opportunity.
00:24:59 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:24:59] S2: Kevin, I always like to say that I come to work every day in 2035. I walk in. My job is to live in 2035 to 2036. If we Fast forward to 2036 in your mind. What do you see? What do you like? What's just like the stuff that you take as like almost terra firma of of of how you view the future?
00:25:23 · Kevin Ryan
[00:25:23] S0: Yeah. I mean, I'm... I I believe most of what people are saying in technology, even though it will take a little bit longer than people think. But do I think that... Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if we're getting close to 50% driverless cars in New York City by then. And I wouldn't be surprised if we're at easily 50%, 80% new electric cars that's happening right now, but also buses, subways, everything. I do think that we will have dislocation of jobs more than we would like. We'll absorb some of them, but I I think there'll be a spike in unemployment starting sort of starting a little bit now. We can already see that new hires are having trouble getting jobs, but I think that's gonna accelerate. So I think there's 10 to 20,000,000 jobs that will will lose over the next five years. Some of those will be picked up in other areas, but some won't be. So these are pretty big dislocations, and I think that we will get the price of energy down. I think that we'll cross over the curve on emissions. The really good news is the carbon emissions, for example, in The UK are now half of what they were in 1990. That is an untold story. China has hit peak emissions. They'll start going down. US has as well. So emissions will go down. The amount of fossil fuels we use has never gone down, but I think we get to the point where the supply goes up and the demand doesn't go up that much, and so prices will come down. All of that is good for the economy.
00:27:03 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:27:03] S2: Let's take a minute to talk about job loss because I know your value system and my value system are aligned to. You don't really want 20,000,000 people losing their job overnight like that. That is not gonna build the society that I think we all want. One thing I see Kevin is that many jobs that people don't want. So back office at a police station literally just doing reporting. The part of the jobs where nurses and doctors are just documenting something that can be done so much easier, more easily. We've observability businesses were like, no, you don't need to tell us that the telephone pole is tilted because like a device could tell us that, and so you didn't need to drive three hours to then drive three hours back to tell us it's in fact tilted. Lots of crappy jobs are gonna go away, which actually then allow those same people to keep their jobs and do more important work that where where humans are more necessary. So I I do have like a bit of an element of optimism where we're gonna get rid of the jobs that actually no one wanted to do quickly. But you're absolutely right that we won't replace all the jobs. How do how do we not have chaos here in America?
00:28:11 · Kevin Ryan, Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:11] S0: Yeah. And it's too early to know whether that will really truly be chaos or not, because as you said, we don't have enough doctors. We don't have enough nurses. Yeah. And so if nurses can be twice as effective by using technology, we don't even need to get rid of any nurses. We're just gonna give better care to people, and that's really important. And you're also right. We have a company called Glacier that helps do recycling of garbage at waste plants. Right now, 50% of those jobs are not filled. They can't get people to do it, and so your garbage right now is not actually getting recycled even though you think it is. And this can be done with a a camera and a robot arm that can pick out the glass and the plastic. No one wants that job. It's it's slightly dangerous. It happens in the middle of the night. It's cold. It's terrible. And so feel good about that. And we've also seen, not forget, in the last thirty years, think of the input of computers. When I started my career, which was forty years ago, the guy next to me, who had started seven years before, did not have a computer as an investment banker. He did models for M and A for billion dollar companies by hand. And we introduced computers. It's hard to imagine. It's not like a thousand years ago. [00:29:31] S2: I don't think that job sounds really tough.
00:29:31 · Alexa von Tobel, Kevin Ryan
[00:29:31] S2: I don't think that job sounds really tough. [00:29:33] S0: Yeah. And so if I said to you at the time though, every banker's gonna have a computer, they're gonna be very powerful, Does that mean there'll be far fewer bankers? And the answer is, Well, wait a second, no, there's like 10 times more bankers than there were. So the introduction of technology did not necessarily eliminate all those jobs. You walk into a restaurant and the system is all computerized, whereas twenty years ago, there was just a woman who had a pad of paper and looked at where the tables were full or not. It's not clear that we lost jobs there. So we'll absorb a lot of it okay. New jobs get created along the way, and some are better, some are worse. Thirty years ago, there weren't yoga instructors to speak of in New York. People forget that. There weren't soul cycle classes. These are all mostly new, and tens of thousands of people are doing that. So we'll absorb a bunch of them. It just depends on the rate. If we lost 10,000,000 jobs over five years, that's actually very small in the scheme of US economy. If we lose 10 job... 10,000,000 jobs in a year, it'll be harder to absorb. [00:30:43] S2: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. It's gonna be the rate of absorption. Yeah. And