Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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.
00:39:08 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:39:08] S0: If in some sense some of these jobs maybe are made up and actually people will be happier not ushering bits from one place to another on a screen or something. I'm curious how you think about searching for one's vocation. You texted me one time something that stuck in my head, is that we all have some sort of moral duty to steward our gifts. If you agree that that's true, curious for you to expound on that. But that that then reframes success and failure in a cool way that maybe cuts through this priestly class thing of like looking to others to tell us what to do versus looking internally. Can you expand on that?
00:39:50 · Jeremy Giffon
[00:39:50] S2: I think there's something even just aesthetically bad about waste. One of the worst things you can waste is your gifts, your skills, attributes, things that you're uniquely good at, things that you can do for others that you might be able to do that others can't. For me one of the great challenges has been trying to understand how to best, first of all figure out what they are, is easier said than done. And then figure out how you can use them. There's kind of two modes, guess one is that you use them in a very pure and unadulterated way and you don't try and integrate your work with how you use your gifts and this would be the person who has a day job in order to support their craft or something. And then the other perhaps more ambitious version is trying to integrate commerce and their work with their gifts. This gets into the like, should you pursue your passion thing and it's really difficult but you said something to me which is the thing that you are spending most of your time on really ought to spark and utilize your sort of genius and gift and if you're not doing that like it's obviously not the thing that you should be spending most of your time on. There's proxies for this, people who are having a lot of fun at their job or like it's a very strong indicator that you've combined the two well.
00:41:12 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:41:12] S0: What do you think the future of finance looks like? The 80s and the last era was built by those people from KKR and leveraged buyouts whereas those firms are obviously really important and really big but they were started a long time ago and in many cases they're still run by people that were the founder or close to the founder getting up there in age. What do you think the next wave of finance look like?