Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:32:18 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jeremy Giffon
[00:32:18] S0: Our friend Jesse thinks about it this way, he refuses any algorithm in his life including news which is just an algorithm. It's like how do you know what's going on? He said well people tell you. [00:32:27] S2: Yeah, that would be my takeaway. The freedom versus impact question. [00:32:32] S0: Do you believe that trade off's real?
00:32:35 · Jeremy Giffon
[00:32:35] S2: Yeah, I think it's real. One of the questions I'm interested in is classes of guys, archetypes, genres, whatever. There seems to have been this type of person that's largely gone extinct. Unfortunately, I think this is probably all just explained away by technology which is sort of a boring but maybe accurate explanation. The Theodore Roosevelts or the Andrew Carnegies of the world who are able to spend a lot of their time in leisure, a lot of time away from their business. Carnegie for example is arguably still the richest person or very close to the richest person that's ever lived. That's probably a technological thing. But I'm fascinated by this idea of is that necessarily true? Does the idea that you have to be working twenty two hours a day to get these sort of world changing outcomes, is that necessarily true? I think Larry Ellison is like the contemporary figure who sort of bucks this trend and he claims to have started Oracle very much with the intention of being able to disappear for two weeks to sail and still by all accounts sort of like drops in and drops out and Can you still be a player and not be jacked in twenty fourseven? I don't know the answer. It's unfathomable that the president of The United States could be off the grid for a month, probably impossible because of technology. But is that true in business? Is a lot of hard work performative? Maybe. In the case of Carnegie it's interesting because he was self conscious his whole life about joining this sort of society, maybe at the posters of his day. He knew that for him money wasn't gonna be enough and he wanted to be accepted into society and be well read and be amount of letters and do writing and stuff and in that sense there's nothing new under the sun. I firmly believe this to be true that the end state is just posting. The amount of billionaires and founders who turn to Twitter they accrue their wealth or start a podcast
00:34:19 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jeremy Giffon
[00:34:19] S0: or buy a new business. [00:34:21] S2: Yeah, start a YouTube It sort of is the end state and I think one way that you could look at that is just that once you accrue wealth you want to accrue fame, the other way of looking at it would be that wealth is less valuable and you actually realize that the scarce asset is tension and influence and so you're almost hedging against the sort of rapidly devaluing nature of your money and then trying to switch to what is actually scarce.
00:34:21 · Jeremy Giffon, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:34:21] S2: Yeah, start a YouTube It sort of is the end state and I think one way that you could look at that is just that once you accrue wealth you want to accrue fame, the other way of looking at it would be that wealth is less valuable and you actually realize that the scarce asset is tension and influence and so you're almost hedging against the sort of rapidly devaluing nature of your money and then trying to switch to what is actually scarce. [00:34:44] S0: I find it very interesting that call it the seven or eight people that you and I know that we're most interested in are not posters. There's sort of some interesting opposite. They've resisted the temptation. That makes me wonder if it's almost like a trap. But it's such an interesting concept that hard work is performative is the phrase you used. It actually makes me wonder that hard work being performative thing, how you're thinking about this AI and job displacement question, which you and I have talked a bunch about. I'm super personally interested in. It seems to be the issue around which people are rallying for the anti AI fears is that it's gonna destroy jobs in a way that prior technology changes didn't because it's so ubiquitous, it's intelligence, and it's moving so fast that even if you compare it to prior tech changes, which all displaced jobs or changed jobs or whatever, it happened more slowly. And that's why this one's so scary. It gets at questions about what is work really in the modern sense, especially white collar work. I'm curious how you're thinking about like AI and job displacement.
00:35:46 · Jeremy Giffon
[00:35:46] S2: The short to medium term prognosis is hard to speculate on and could very well be bad. A friend of mine, he has kids in college and he has a 10 year old and he's very worried about the kids in college but not the 10 year old and I think that is directionally correct. Maybe from the 10 year old's perspective, look I think it's great. I think first of all, anything that can be automated should be automated. I think it's really hard to argue against that when you really really think about it. The notion to me that I might be in the last years of my life where I ever have to sit down in front of a computer and like do things with it is tremendously liberating. On the jobs thing, I don't really understand this idea of we're at peak jobs or we're gonna run out of jobs. To me, it's very obvious that every white collar job is like totally fake and made up in the sense that these are not contingent for shelter and food and medicine and other necessities, like I'm not talking about those. But most jobs do not touch those or if they do they touch it in a very very derivative way. What is your job as an allocator? Well, because capital is inherently inflationary, you can't just leave it alone. This is one like the great maybe evils of money is that once you get it you can't just leave it alone because then it goes away. So you have to do something with it and this creates this entire whole thing. My job is when you have money and you don't want it to go away, you have to give it to someone, you give it to a bunch of people, I take it and I put it into things that are productive and then hopefully you don't lose your money, get more money. Is this useful? Is this good? Yeah, sure. It's not real and it's like fun and useful but not in a direct way. To me, there's like unlimited amounts of jobs that you can create in those sorts of scenarios. We're gonna have unlimited wants and desires and our economy is solely driven by our unquenchable desire to consume things. So we're gonna come up with new things to consume and now again in the short term and medium term that might be volatile and there might be a lot of job loss and that's not good and there could be a lot of despair. In the long run, we're just gonna invent new things to do. We've already solved all of our problems. The worry about, oh we're not gonna have more jobs. It just doesn't really resonate.
00:37:56 · Jeremy Giffon
We just make up stuff for us to do and that's sort of the whole point of it. And that's good. It's better than being idle. Maybe more people should be idle. There's all sorts of ways that this shows through the cracks. The work from home thing I think is like a strong indication of most people don't have forty hours of work to be done. They maybe have forty hours of meetings to sit in or they have forty hours that they have to be on standby. Work from home I think wouldn't be that important. Let's imagine a version where you work on a factory line and you can set up the microcosm of the factory in your backyard, but you still got to be on the line ten hours a day. Yeah, I guess work from home, maybe you can have lunch at home, you don't have a commute anymore, but it's not like this huge improvement. The reason people are so attached to work from home is because they actually have like two or three hours of work to do per day and there's a lot of your time at the office where you're just sort of Yeah and so work from home Fridays is a soft launch of the four day work week and I think this is all fine. The fact that we can continue paying people to work from home and work four days a week is just a sign that we need less labor time out of people than we used to and we're still able to be just as productive.