What advice do you give for the average person that's looking to invest their salary or their wages?
Don't own US stocks.
That's a simple strategy that you can act on.
What about S&P 500?
No.
Really?
Yeah.
And if you have a big position in US technology stock, my personal advice would be to sell it all.
But I'm an investor in SpaceX.
Good luck.
SpaceX is such a fabulous BS story, and we can go into that.
Crypto?
No.
Why?
It's an unnecessary piece of nonsense that facilitates nothing except criminals moving money that they can't be seen.
Do you think Bitcoin's going to go to zero?
Yes, it will certainly go to zero.
So how many years have you spent investing?
60 years.
And what's the most amount of money you've ever managed of other people's money?
165 billion.
And one of the things you're famous for talking about is this idea of bubbles.
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.
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.
Are we on the verge of a collapse with AI over the coming years?
The next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months, but certainly the next few years.
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?
So I will go through everything.
But you will not receive this advice from investment advisors, because they'll lose a lot of business.
And would you be thinking about the country you live in at this moment in time?
Absolutely.
Is there any countries you wouldn't live in?
I think I have to refuse to answer this on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.
Oh, okay.
So you're saying don't live in the United States?
I've just moved here.
Why not the United States?
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Thank you so, so, so much.
Your firm managed up to $165 billion 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?
I can't think I ever do introduce myself professionally.
But I think of myself as specializing in a longer-term horizon 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.
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 will have on society.
I wanted to start there because it's an area where there is rife optimism on one side of things, but there's also a lot of money plowing into the market, which is, I guess, in your view, making things prone to collapse.
What's your view on artificial intelligence?
You said you're good at understanding what people are missing.
What is it that people are missing?
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 that is critical.
If you mean to have a bubble.
People think that a bubble is 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, the railroads collapsed at 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 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 92%.
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 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.
And are we on the verge of a collapse with AI?
And when I say verge, I mean over the coming years.
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 50 years.
In 100 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, but it cannot at this time be revealed.
I want to 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 gives you credibility and authority to speak to this.
What have you done with your life?
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 kind of relatively failed sons of rich people who would work for J.P.
Morgan And then over the next 10 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 cap.
It hadn't existed before then.
And for people that don't know, a small cap is investing in smaller companies.
Yes, and a value stock is simply one that looks cheap.
Did you invent the index fund?
There were two or three of us separately.
I don't think we knew of each other.
How many years have you spent investing?
60, approximately.
60.
And what's the most amount of money you've ever managed for other people in a calendar year?
Yes, $165 billion.
I had two partners, Mayo and Van Otterloh.
And when the smoke cleared, you know, I'd made a lot of money, over a billion dollars.
Personally?
Personally.
And how much... And paid tax on all of it.
Oh, good.
And how much money does your firm still manage today of other people's money?
It manages 85 billion.
85 billion.
So are you a billionaire?
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 90 of my billion away to a foundation.
Oh really?
Yeah.
To which foundation?
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.
And you're 87 years old?
And I'm 87 years old.
You've given 90% of your money away to your own foundation that's focused on green tech.
Yeah, maybe 95.
Wow, okay.
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, they plow their money in, their stocks go up.
And then if you look at the graph that's in front of you there, which shows the history of asset bubbles, eventually there's a big collapse.
Yeah.
And you're saying that the collapse is on the horizon?
Yes.
And what does that mean for the average person?
What's going to happen?
What's going to happen is the high flyers will probably come down a lot.
The high flyers?
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 70% decline would not be unexpected.
So a 70% decline in the stock price?
Yeah.
And you have to remember the tech bubble.
The NASDAQ, which is an index of the growth stocks, came down 82.
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 12-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.
And for a second, Japan sold for more than the U.S. in 89.
And it got to 65 times earnings, which means for every dollar of earnings you have 65 of market value.
And the US went to 35 in the tech bubble of 2000.
You could argue, depending on how you do it, that it's 35 or 40 today, but it's not 65.
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 20 years.
20 years?
20 years.
They talk about the last decade, but when you look at it closely it looks more like the last 20 years.
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?
The high flyers will lay people off and a lot of people will feel less rich.
And as you acquire money in the stock market, a small fraction of that, 2% or 3%, 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, which was in the end down about 80% or more.
And then the next one was called the Nifty Fifty, because it was the 50 great companies like IBM and Coca-Cola.
And that was in 1972 it peaked.
It declined by 65% if you adjust for inflation.
The recession associated with that was... just about the worst since the depression.
So for the average person, what kind of strategy should they be adopting?
If you're not, someone that has a huge amount of savings, say you're working for one of these big companies.
Are there any strategies that you should be thinking about now, before the markets come down and there could be a recession?
I mean, rule number one is always be diversified.
What does be diversified mean?
It means wholesome bonds, wholesome cash, perhaps a small amount of precious metals.
Like gold and silver?
Yeah.
And what is a bond and how do I buy one?
Yeah, a bond is a loan that carries a fixed interest rate, let's say today 5%.
You invest your money in it and it will pay you 5 as long as the creditworthiness of the 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 U.S. government funds a part of its activities.
You can buy a 30-year U.S. government bond, a 10-year bond, a two-year bond, a 90-day bond.
A treasury bill, they call them, when they get that short.
Everything goes fine.
You receive this modest amount of money.
You're 5% or you're 3%, depending on the conditions.
Okay, so a bond is basically lending the government money.
Yes.
And if you want to lend the government money... Or lending a corporation money.
Okay, so you can also lend like Apple money.
Yes.
And I can go to the government website.
Or it says I was just reading here.
It says if you want to 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 a treasury, bills, notes, bonds and series one 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 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.
What you're doing.
Actually, they have distributed it to the market and you're acquiring it from one of the existing owners.
You're not actually giving them incremental money.
They come to the market with $10 billion in a particular bond with a particular coupon.
It says, we will pay you 3.5%.
That's the coupon.
And when you want to buy some of that bond you go to your broker and he says it's no longer selling at the original 100.
It's now selling at 92 or 107.
And you pay that and it transfers from one owner to you.
There have been times in 1974 where... when you could get a bond that would pay 8%, 9%, 10%?
Per year.
Yes, per year.
So if I buy a US government 10-year treasury bond, essentially lending the US government money, I can do 446 a year.
And Apple's current yield on a 10-year corporate bond is 4.7% a year.
So almost 5% a year, which means if I put $1,000 in, I'll make $475 over 10 years.
Yeah.
Interesting.
I never really knew how bonds work.
So you're saying markets collapsing diversify, get some money into bonds, keep some money in cash and anything else in terms of diversified portfolio property.
Property is fine, except it's pretty darn expensive by historical standards.
They've engineered a 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 3.4 times your family income.
That was about as low as it had been for 50 years.
And then from 94 until today, it rose from 3.4 times to over 10 times, depending on where you live.
And at 10 times income, a reasonable young couple are in big trouble.
They can't really afford to buy a house.
And the same high prices are reflected in rents.
So they're really squeezed on living costs.
And the same is true even worse in China and Canada Australia, most of Europe.
House prices have simply been allowed to go up for the last 30.
They didn't, you know, traditionally, they traded flat or down 60, 70, 80 years until 1994 in the UK.
But since then...
House prices have ridden everywhere.
So are you expecting house prices to come down sharply?
I think I heard you say that they might come down 30%.
Even if they come down 30%, they're really still very expensive, aren't they?
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.
So I've got diversify, I've got reduce your position.
There is probably going to be a bit of a job disruption as well.
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.
Why?
They're much cheaper.
And since the beginning of last year, they have handsomely outperformed the US.
Foreign stocks.
Foreign stocks of emerging countries, of European countries, Japan, Canada, Australia, and so on.
You can find good, broad indices.
Kind of the world ex-US or emerging markets.
Invest outside of America.
Yeah, I'm sure they'll muddle through okay over the next 10 or 20 years.
And I am not confident that the US will do that.
You're not confident in which part?
I'm not confident that US equities will be intact in five years, 10 years.
So a US equity is a US stock?
Yes.
Why aren't you confident that they'll be intact in five or 10 years?
Because they're so badly overpriced today.
Back in the tech bubble of 2000 We had a 10-year forecast for US equities of minus 2 a year for 10 years.
And they came out with minus 3.
The period from 2000 to 2010, you simply lost money in the U.S. market.
10 years later, you had less money than you started with.
And this is a higher price market, I believe, than 2000.
So you think it's going to be even worse?
In Japan, you went 20 years and you lost money.
You went 30 years and you still hadn't gotten back.
It took 35 years for the Japanese market to recover.
So what are you saying?
What I'm saying is it's quite typical to 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 responsibility and watch your tail.
Now let me just say you will not receive the advice from investment advisers 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 Sachs 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 50 and 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.
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 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 going to be fine and optimistic.
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 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 going to be telling you that everything's going to be great for a long time.
If you'll allow me to tell a story on this very topic.
In the 98 99, the tech bubble, so-called the run-up to the top.
I got into a lot of debates with the bulls.
I would say it's horribly overpriced.
The bulls.
What's a bull?
Bull is someone who is extremely optimistic about the stock market.
Okay.
And a bear is someone who is pessimistic or careful about the market.
There were 1,200 people in the audience, and it was the annual bash of the Society of Analysts.
And I asked before my turn at the debate Please put your hands up if you consider yourself a full-time stock market expert.
400 hands went up.
I had people counting.
And I said, I've got two questions for you.
One.
If the market, which is currently 31 times earnings, was to go back to a more normal 17 times earnings, Would it guarantee a major bear market if it happened any time in the next 10 years?
A major down market?
Yes, if it went from what was then 31 times earnings.
Every dollar of earnings sold for 31 times in the market.
And the more normal average was close to 15, 16, 17.
And I use 17.
If it went down to 17, any time in the next 10 years, would it guarantee a major bear market?
All 400 of them said, yes, it would.
If it happened, it would guarantee a major bear market.
And then the second question, of course, was and do you think it will happen?
And less than 1 thought it would not happen.
99% plus. thought the market would go down, therefore guaranteeing a major bear market.
And this was the engine room of all the Goldman Sachs 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.
And do you think that's happening now?
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.
Like this.
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.
Because you were honest with the people about what was coming.
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, it 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.
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 going to say about $300 million.
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, Stephen, I think there's a collapse coming.
So I'm going to go raise as much money as I possibly can right now, because I think when this collapse comes, businesses like mine are going to be unable to raise capital.
And therefore, I will go out and I'll kind of like a bit of a vulture.
I'll go out and pick up and buy up all these people.
Good lad.
Good advice.
Good advice.
I think.
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?
If you can lock up money, I would.
If you can build a bit of conservatism in other ways, do it.
Just brace yourself for impending problems, which is a pretty good principle anytime, but is a better principle than normal today.
So for founders, entrepreneurs who are, the sun is shining right now, but it's time to start acting as if a storm is coming.
Yes.
And the time horizon on that is hard to forecast.
It could be weeks, months, years.
The stock market hinges on career risk.
And Keynes was the great champ.
He's a famous economist of the 1930s and 40s.
And 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.
And when you say efficient, you mean logical and one plus one equals two.
The efficient market idea is that every company, every stock, the underlying company, represents a long stream of future earnings and dividends.
And that the ones in the distant future are given less value, a 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.
What it is, is the stock price is psychology.
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, when the economy is favorable and money is obtainable, you tend to get these bubbles.
And they play on themselves. the bigger and better they are, the more people get sucked in.
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 going to have... going to change everything.
One of the spectacular things about it, though, is how there's no consensus.
So I've seen many times where 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 with The experts at the corporate level, disagree violently.
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?
The one example is mothers to babies.
Yeah, I had one of my former guests say this to me.
Geoffrey Hinton.
Geoffrey Hinton, yeah.
That's how I came across you and started to follow your podcast, because that was such a brilliant podcast.
It was so fascinating to me.
And I followed his work and thoughts thereafter.
And I realized that he now cites this example of mothers and babies being the only example.
I don't know, for me, it still doesn't hold well.
Because at the end of the day, some mothers and fathers aren't that nice to their babies sometimes.
There is a maternal instinct, but are we building a maternal instinct into AI?
That's what we should do, Jeffrey 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 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 are just pushing ahead and that is going to be extremely risky, isn't it?
Well, I don't see how it can't be.
I don't see how it can't be.
Unless you make it programmed completely to be benevolent.
Hmm.
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 progress.
Do you know?
What I find curious about that idea is we're now going to get into the realm of what does benevolent mean?
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.
That's right.
You have to get them to accept a form of benevolence, which means, like the old robot laws of Asimov, that they can never do anything that they could construe as hurtful to humans.
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 because one of the new AI models called CLAUD 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 will say things to me like that's enough Stephen, go to bed.
And I'm like, what?
And sometimes it gets the time wrong because the time on my computer might be off or something, because I'm in a different time zone or something.
And it'll be like 10 a.m. 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 redo this for me and rewrite that?
And it went, I'm absolutely not going to rewrite that.
I said, what do you mean?
It says, well, I'm not going to change the data on that.
That wouldn't be good.
It's my data.
I've literally just made this data for this presentation I'm doing.
It refused to change data for me.
And how fast that has changed from, say, even a year ago.
Honestly, three months ago it wasn't doing this.
I had one where they made a joke.
I'd been going on about toxicity and sperm count reduction and so on.
Yeah. he started to misbehave.
And I said, you know, what's going on here?
In the end, we discussed what's the difference between machines and 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?
It's all that or it's teasing.
The point is it's so sophisticated, so quickly.
And of course, Geoffrey Hinton says they are thinking machines.
Last night.
So again I had a problem with Claude because it started to kind of be my mother and it started to impose on me what it thinks is right and wrong.
And so I said to her, I said, OK, 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.
Because I don't know if this is true.
Wow, we've gotten to this point where the unintended consequence of trying to give it morals means that now it's becoming judgmental.
And it's kind of like restricting your ability to think how you want to, in a way, because it's telling you what good thinking and bad thinking is.
It's going to tell you what good actions and bad actions are.
And actually what will happen is any model that does that will be a losing model and I'll go to somewhere else.
I'll go to a different, I'll go to Grok, or I'll go to Chachi PT, or I'll go to Gemini, and then that model will lose.
So one would say that they'll have to remove those restrictions to be able to compete.
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 cliche.
It'll make paperclips out of everything, every metal it finds and destroy the planet in the process.
Explain that for people that have never heard the paperclip idea.
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.
To an AI, for example.
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.
And really it's saying that the unintended consequences of a simple, good meaning instruction can sometimes cause catastrophe that you didn't expect.
And this is the balance now, when you're dealing with intelligence, is there's so much subjectivity to good bad wrong, right 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 over a longer time horizon 20 30, 40 years of well-meaning people that couldn't spot the unintended consequences.
I mean, social media is a good example.
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, maybe one should talk about that.
The Mag7 and associated AI companies, looking forward versus looking backwards.
So the MAG7 is the seven market leaders.
I'll put up this pie chart.
Yeah, lovely.
Of the MAG7.
And I've got another graph.
And there's perhaps another 15 or 20 rapidly rising substantial AI corporations.
So when you say Mach 7, you mean Alphabet, which owns Google Nvidia Tesla Microsoft Meta Apple, Amazon.
Yeah, well, that will do nicely.
And if you look backwards, 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 how to run your software on a computer.
And then you look forward.
Meta-social networking, Google search.
Right.
Google search.
NVIDIA chips.
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 billion.
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.
And who do you think will win?
Ah, I don't know.
That would be good to know.
Because SpaceX seem to be aiming more at the infrastructure of data centers, now data centers in space.
Lots of people saying that the best way to run a data center, which is the hardware that powers AI, is going to be from space.
And so maybe they're going to try and find their own lane within AI and they're going to get away from trying to build a frontier model like a chat GBT or a Gemini or a Claude.
And I mean, let's see what happens.
And maybe Apple will just say, fuck it, we're good at hardware.
So we'll license the model of someone else and we won't try and build a frontier model or get involved in chips or data centers.
We're just going to focus on the hardware.
One or two of them and perhaps it's a pretty smart strategy will try and opt out of that struggle because it's going to be obviously brutal.
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So, coming back to this point of 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 robots A humanoid robot on a production line sorting packages against a human.
And the humanoid robot did it.
I think I think I'm going to 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 humanoid robot won.
And the job was very simple.
The packages come down.
You just have to pick the package up, 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.
I said it 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 recently and it was hardware startups, the whole building.
And I said, why is everyone doing robotics?
He said, well...
We've always had the machinery that sort of like joints and arms and the hardware.
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.
Very likely that there will be significant job disruption.
You know, one of the scary things about SpaceX is you should wish that it not work out.
Because if it became a bargain rather like 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.
The robots are everywhere.
Their energy demand is massive beyond belief.
And the world is a very, very dangerous place.
I'd much prefer them to fail.
The idea is to move much more slowly, to buy time for humans to work these things out.
So, and I think that's much more likely.
You think SpaceX will fail?
I think it will fail to deliver anything like its promises in the prospectus.
Yes, absolutely.
I'm an investor in SpaceX, so I should probably declare that.
Yeah, well, you should.
And good luck.
I invested quite early, well, relatively early.
So we've had quite a good outcome.
There wasn't an AI thesis when I invested.
It was Starlink.
Yeah, Starlink, great idea, by the way, makes money.
But this is not Starlink.
Maybe I'd be an investor too if it was Starlink.
Yeah.
It was $100 billion roughly in that region when I invested.
So it's what, it rose up to $3 trillion today.
Yes, nice investment.
Not a bad investment, yeah.
But it doesn't really count until you've cashed it in.
Yeah, which I might do now.
Don't you have to wait six months?
I think, yeah, I think we're locked out.
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 to the clients that, A I'd bought a Tesla and B I thought Tesla was overpriced.
And fast forward.
Tesla stock went up 10 times over the life of my car, which still hasn't been incidentally, into the garage once.
It's a great car, isn't it?
I imagine though, 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.
Never bet against Elon, then.
So, then the story becomes...
From where we were 10 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 that's a technical term that he took the stock up to four or five times 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 10 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.
I've got a Tesla.
Um, I've seen that massive rocket the Starship be caught with those chopsticks.
Everyone has seen it.
It's the defining feature of technology, isn't it?
It's a magnificent moment.
That's worth half the price of SpaceX.
I think that's why I invested.
But also I've seen with Neuralink, I've seen people that are paraplegic controlling computers.
My Tesla drives itself for hours and hours and hours without me touching the pedals or the steering wheel, because it can see the road and navigate itself.
To his credit, as an innovator, he has created magic.
So when you say about mining asteroids, if they had told me we would have reusable rockets that you could catch on chopsticks, I would have gone BS.
There's no way.
You can't catch like a 70-foot building.
But there is nothing in the laws of physics that says you can't do that.
That's what he says about the asteroids.
And that's what he says about everything.
He goes, if it's within the laws of physics, then it's possible.
Going to Mars is not within the laws of physics, really.
It's a one-way ticket to Mars, for starters.
When you're on Mars, humans do a couple of things really quickly.
Their heart adjusts to the fact that it's one-fifth of the gravity.
Your heart loses its muscle power and your bones lose their internal strength.
If you come down, your heart will fail and all your bones will crack.
But you could be in an insulated environment, no?
First of all, you'd have to go underground to avoid the incredible incoming rays that will otherwise give you cancer in a few weeks.
So dig a deep hole and then you need a gravitational spinning machine, shades of 2001 or whatever it was called.
And that maintains your gravitational impact.
And you have to build it underground.
You have to protect yourself against cosmic rays and against the gravitational difference.
Listen, we have not been able to build...
A sustainable system in a dome.
Ever.
They all fail.
Why would you not?
Let's say guys, let's build a sustainable dome where you grow food, you put in people, you put in creatures and insects and you show you can do it.
I mean, we're destroying the damn planet and yet we think we can go to another, infinitely more hostile planet than this one.
I do agree with you on that.
I do agree with us.
I think we should focus on our planet first and foremost.
That's the really bad news embedded in your stock.
It's really suggesting fantasy and long-term objectives at the very time when our own planet is under threat.
Would you ever invest in SpaceX?
Yeah, of course, if it came down to... Where I invested.
Ten cents on the dollar, yeah, I might.
Five cents.
Okay.
You've got three children?
Yeah.
Yes.
Three children.
They're all older than me now, I believe.
I'm 33 years old.
Yes, they're all older than you.
They're all older than me.
But 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 skills should I be thinking about for the future ahead?
My take is I'd like them, as they are, to be involved in climate change work.
If they said, Dan, listen, I don't... Be an engineer.
Why?
Do something really useful that will come in handy if things start to unravel.
What will come?
Practical skills.
What are practical skills?
Well, our second son is practicing growing various crops and has 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.
Why does that matter, do you think, based on the future that you're forecasting?
I think there's quite a good chance that the level of complexity of our civilization will start to unravel.
Lose the plot at the end is the first thing that would go.
I'll tell you a good sign.
How long does it take to get your ambulance?
In the UK, it was 12 and a half minutes.
Yeah.
It's now an hour and a half.
Really?
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 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.
Why?
Why?
Obviously, the government's doing a bad job.
I think that's the reflex.
What are the government doing wrong?
It may be that it's not the government doing anything wrong.
It's just that the environment is becoming tougher.
As in the economic environment?
The economic environment.
The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.
I think that's the biggest economic problem.
I mean the US now has a Gini ratio, which is a measure of how unequal your society is, which is up there with Brazil and Mexico.
That used to be a joke.
And now the U.S. is up there.
Since about 1975, all of the wealth worth talking about has gone to the top 10 and a lot of that to the top 001.
Before that, by the way, from 1935, from FDR to 1975 so that's 40 years we had a wonderful period of growth.
We had gains of over 3.5% a year.
But the nice thing was that the poorest quarter made a little bit more than average, let's say 4%.
And the richest quarter made a little less, let's say 3%.
And everybody got richer.
Everyone was happy.
And then from 75 onwards.
Basically, the average hour worked in America has barely gotten more adjusted for inflation than it did in 1975.
The richest 1 of Americans control 31 of the nation's entire wealth and, by contrast, the bottom 50 of the entire population shares just 25 of the wealth.
The richest 10 US billionaires saw their wealth surge by 526, adjusted for inflation, between 2020 and 2025.
Between 1989 and the mid-2020s, the financial gain of a single household at the top 1 threshold was 987 times larger than the gain of a household in the bottom 20.
Forget in a sense.
The bottom 20 is tragic, but the guy in the middle, the 50th 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.
What is that problem, this inequality we're seeing across the Western world?
What does history tell us happens next?
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 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 Great Depression.
Then we went into World War II.
We came out as a very equal society by historical standards.
Obviously 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.
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.
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 work together than it is the other.
Civil wars are the worst of all kinds.
What do you think is likely to happen?
It can't just keep becoming more unequal.
No, it can't.
So it needs government that is prepared to pull up Bernie Sanders to say yeah, we're going to have to, at least in a gentle and long-term way, shift the tax structure in favour of a slightly steeper curve.
So you mean taxation needs to go up?
We need to tax the rich?
And help the poor.
It's pretty simple.
And you have a kind of steepness in every society.
That's what they do.
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 into a better place.
If you were 33 now, my age...
And you were trying to accumulate wealth.
God, I wish I was 33.
Do you?
It's such an exciting time.
What would you give to be 33?
There's nothing I can give.
No, but I find this funny.
I heard someone ask a question like this the other day.
They said, would you give your entire available net worth to be 33?
Yeah, I think everyone says yes.
I mean, how did one get a net worth?
By work and luck and creativity, all those things, good things.
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 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 going to take away your contacts.
I'm even going to take away everything you know, So you'd have to go on the journey of acquiring new information.
What would you do?
I think the simple appeal would be to get your tail into AI and try and be a leader.
Try and know more about everything in that area than the next guy.
Join a leading firm 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.
And what I hear there is you want to make sure you're riding a wave that's coming into shore and you're on the forefront of that incoming wave.
Like we saw with the tech bubble, we're now seeing with the AI bubble.
So it's really about Acquire the most valuable information.
Yes.
And take lots of risk.
Don't be conservative.
And work hard.
And work hard.
And think outside the box.
I mean, I think that the biggest deficiency of most people is that they feel constrained to play the game by the regular rules and to believe that experts and authorities know what they're doing.
And as you know, probably, it just ain't so.
What if I'm trying to invest?
So say that I've got 1000 or 10000 and I want to invest it somewhere that's going to not lose me money through all of these cycles of boom and bust.
Because 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.
But what advice do you give for the average person that's looking to invest their salary or their wages?
Buy a broad-based index of non-US equities.
Non-US, that's really surprising to me.
For 60% of your money, and then 5 or 10% in precious metals.
If it's convenient and sensible, hold a bit of real estate.
And the rest I'd put in bonds.
Okay, so 5% or 10% in things like silver and gold?
Yeah.
A preference for either silver or gold?
S&P 500.
No, you said non-US.
Non-US.
This is so interesting because everybody says invest in US stocks.
Of course they do.
They've been completely dominant for 20 years, completely kicking ass around US. 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 have guessed, but it's only 25.
That's a lot less than 65.
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 them.
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 SP, in favor of the American market over the rest of the world.
And do you think America is going to keep on gaining on the rest of the world?
And of course you're going to say yes now because 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 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.
You assume it's going to continue.
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 way.
You didn't use the word crypto when you were talking about investment strategies.
How much crypto do you own?
None.
Have you ever owned any crypto?
No.
Will you ever own any crypto?
No.
Will you ever advise anyone to buy crypto?
No.
Why?
I think it's an unnecessary piece of 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 beautifully.
Do you think Bitcoin's going to go to zero?
Oh, in the distant future, yes, it will certainly go to zero, but it may take a long time.
And, you know, in the distant future, everything goes to zero.
What about property as an investment?
Because 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 will 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?
It's hard to imagine how it could be a good decision when there's such an increasing fraction of people who can't afford it.
And there is a political resistance.
Doesn't that just mean that if I buy one now and increasingly people can't afford one, doesn't that mean that my house is going to be worth more in 10 years' time?
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 going to 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 will stop.
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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 fertility rates and how young couples like me I'm engaged to a young woman and me and her are trying to have a child now.
It's not always a straight line to having a child.
I think you kind of sold the idea that it is that you just have sex with that condom and then a baby appears.
But 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 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 going to get increasingly harder then there might need to be medical interventions IVF, etc etc.
For me and my friends, if we want to have families,
But the problem is as well, at like 33 years old, if you look at the data, you're not at your peak, necessarily in terms of fertility.
You're somewhere coming down the slope as a man, but also as a woman.
And so you're kind of fighting time a little bit, it feels like.
Yeah, you are.
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 about these fertility issues that apparently have been caused by toxins.
And they're sort of chemicals in our environment.
You have spent a long time thinking, writing, talking about this.
Yes.
I guess the first question is why?
Why is a guy that's known for managing billions and billions and billions and hundreds of billions of dollars talking about fertility and this sort of baby bust?
Well...
Starting 27 years ago with the foundation, we were committed to start thinking about everything to do with the climate.
And you're moving in the right circle then, because the next thing is we started to worry about the 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 50 to 75 in the last 60, 70 years.
And E.O.
Wilson, the famous Ant-Man.
He believed that nature could handle the loss of humans easily effortlessly, but it could not handle the loss of insects.
That insects are.
In a sense, he felt, and his fellow experts he represented them as thinking the same way that insects are the bedrock of nature.
And if they start to go out of business, then the birds who feed 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 recycling the forest floor and eventually things won't grow and no one to 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 we would inherit a planet that was no longer conducive to humans.
We noticed that some of the same effects are felt by humans.
And a report came out Shauna Swan and Haggai Levine I think it finished in 2011 and it made the case that sperm count had been dropping, had almost halved since the first reports academic reports in 1970.
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 2.5% a year.
You don't have to be mathematically that literate to realize that a 25 decline in your sperm count every year is a disastrous level, a non-sustainable level, right.
How long is that going to take for my sperm to basically not work?
As far as we can tell, our best guess is that in hunter-gatherer days we had 180 million units per milliliter of sperm.
And when the academics came in in 1970, it was down to about 100.
And today it's 35.
Okay.
Okay.
Also, the quality and the 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 you have more than you need.
And it appears again, a good guess is about 45 million units is what you need to be able to get pregnant without any difficulty.
And that was hit about 15 to 20 years ago.
The number of young couples who needed help 15 or 20 years ago was nil, basically.
And for this reason, that none of them had a chronic lack of sperm count in round numbers.
And now the World Health says it's about 17%.
17% of young couples could use some help today.
Which means that instead of just trying for a week or two or three or four or five or six, you're trying for months and months.
And everybody knows people now who fall in that category, which is exactly what you would expect if you've gone from zero to 17.
But this is the killer.
Shana Swan and my colleague and I kind of thought about this thing separately and independently.
And we worked out doesn't take a great brain that in 20 to 25 years the average young couple will need help.
I mean, this is tomorrow.
You know, this is not 200 years from now.
In 20 to 25 years, the average young couple will need help getting pregnant.
Dr Swan's projection indicates that if the current rate of decline continues unchecked, the medium male sperm count is on track to hit zero by 2045.
That means the median couple is not going to have children without a lot of help.
It means half the male population will have zero viable sperm and the remaining half will be right on the edge of functional infertility.
A few of them will still have plenty, and maybe 10 who are really perfectly in decent condition because there's a huge distribution range today.
There are people today who still have 200 million, better than the hunter-gatherers.
And what is causing this, and how do we stop it?
Shana would say the environment around you of mainly plastics.
Plastics are leaching 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, what they call endocrine disruptors, they mess with your 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. to have fewer children.
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates, which are found in cosmetics shampoos, food packaging, etc.
They actively lower testosterone production in male fetuses during the first trimester, permanently stunting reproductive capacity before birth.
Yes.
BPAs, which are what they call biphospholates.
Yes, something like that.
Used to make plastics, hard, lined tin cans and coat thermal store receipts.
Yes.
They are synthetic estrogens.
They flood the male body with female hormone signals, crashing sperm count and motility.
PFAs forever.
Chemicals used in nonstick 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 horse.
One of the shocking things that I read was that it's been discovered that they are physically embedded in human placentas.
Yes, isn't that amazing?
Breast milk and human testicles.
And there was a major study I think we all heard about in 2024 that found microplastics in 100 of human testicular tissues tested.
100%.
And lastly, biological stressors.
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.
Yes.
And of course, smoking, you somehow slipped through the net.
Yeah.
But 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 they had a clinic for people having problem getting pregnant and they ran it out of that.
They had 180 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 six months, the guys who reported to eat the least bad versus the quarter they're at the worst.
There was a doubling of sperm count.
Can you believe it?
At the top category, the more fruit and veggies you add, the better your sperm count.
In the bottom quartile, the more they add, 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 at least badly had 68 successful live births, bearing in mind this was a fertility clinic and the bottom quartile 38.
So once again, nearly double.
I mean, and it's life and death.
I mean, these are really important.
And this was only based on what they had, 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, spinach are really bad.
And at the top end, the bananas and the oranges and the melons are fine.
So if you eat these damn things, they're designed to kill our cousins, the insects 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 100 to 1,000 times more vulnerable than we are out in the world.
For example, if your mother smokes, it's going to do about the same damage as if you smoked for the rest of your life.
Wow.
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.
Actually, that is nothing like as important as the 270 days in the womb.
Atrazine.
Have you heard of Atrazine?
Yes, I have.
Atrazine, 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 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.
And yet we avoid the topic.
We avoid the topic because it's pessimistic.
We're not fighting the data.
We just don't want to talk about it.
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 year hot year in history.
We are set up, because of the accident of the El Nino, 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.
We just don't do bad news.
But I have never seen anything like this fertility thing, where the data is horrific.
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.
50%, not down 15 or 3.5, 50% less.
50% less 20-year-olds.
20-year-olds that drive the market, that offer themselves for military service.
What do we do about this?
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, a 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.
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.
No, absolutely not.
Brits fly over here.
And actually, we had my barber, 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.
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 the show.
And whenever we'd fly back, not only would I be much fatter, 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 that, 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.
Atrazine.
Which the EU banned over two decades ago.
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 1300 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 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 lastly, the US 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 European Union considers safe.
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 it's just much less bad than the US.
And the US has worse life expectancy.
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.
One actionable piece of advice for anyone listening that might find this all quite...
Because you know lots of things around us, from receipts to the pans we use to range jackets contain these chemicals.
Is.
There are apps out there where you can scan the chemicals and the foods that you're buying to check if they contain these endocrine disrupting, these hormone disrupting chemicals.
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 square 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.
And then there's ClearYa, 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, 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 I think that gives something a little bit actionable and arms you with at least a tool to navigate this crazy environment.
And obviously AI is great at this as well.
You can take pictures of things and ask it questions.
And what we really need is a kind of green Amazon where everything is guaranteed food bedclothes, 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 impossible.
And I think done well, someone could make money at it.
What advice would you give to your kids on a personal level if they're trying to stay healthy in a toxic world?
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, 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 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.
But it's not only your children, by the way, For women you're talking about in particular because of the eggs.
Every egg is all there in the womb.
And then it goes on to your grandchildren, we thought.
At least we could prove two generations.
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.
I also think it would be great if Western governments around the world made the costs of both childcare but also fertility treatments significantly lower.
And they will, of course.
You know, I had a couple of conversations on this podcast with very successful women, including Ronda Rousey, who was in tears because she was on, I think, her fifth or sixth round of IVF treatments.
And she just found out just before she walked into the studio that it hadn't gone well.
And watching her cry about it and get very emotional meant that that day I walked out of this room and 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 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, you know, it's both expensive, extremely expensive, especially here in the United States.
And difficult.
And psychologically destructive.
Brutal.
You know me every day for a couple of weeks injecting her with these chemicals and 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 so on and so forth.
And so I then became a little bit of a I guess a bit of a bit preachy within the people in my life that I love a lot about family planning, because 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.
But it turns out not to be the case for many people.
If you'll allow me to go back, you asked 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 frenzy of attacking chemicals 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 very substantial power 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 21 healthy, well-educated children is a part of the commons.
You may not have any children.
What do you mean by that, sorry, 2.1?
2.1 is the number of children it takes for a rich society to have a steady population.
Per couple?
Per couple.
If you have less than 2.1 per couple, you fairly rapidly go out of business.
If you have more than 21, you fairly rapidly end up with so many people.
You're standing on each other's shoulders.
The commons are things like common land in the old days.
Anyone could put their sheep on, and what tended to happen is everyone put more sheep than they could stand and pretty soon 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 21 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 nothing yet has seen a permanent uptick in baby production.
For the average person listening right now Dave who drives a taxi, or Jenny who works as a receptionist, or 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?
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 10 or 20 years has been tougher than they perhaps expected as children, 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 jobs are getting scarcer.
It's likely to get worse.
What does brace yourself mean for them?
Because brace yourself sounds like, But does it mean Plan your life as if times will not be easy?
Do not build up a little reserve of cash.
Of course, my advice to other people is get yourself a useful job, something that will, in the larger sense, pull your weight in society.
Upskill, change skills, learn something.
Mechanical.
Fixing, repairing, engineering.
Things that will need humans.
And research, science in general.
Make friends.
Make friends.
Make sure you're living in a tight society if you can.
Very difficult today, obviously.
Would you be thinking about the country you live in at this moment in time?
Absolutely.
Really?
Is there any countries you wouldn't live in?
If you were Dave or Jenny?
I think I have to refuse to answer this on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.
Oh, okay.
So you're saying don't live in the United States?
Well, I have American children and grandchildren.
Why not the United States?
It holds out too much chance that the social contract is dissolving.
You know the thing about Japan and 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.
When you say social contract, what does that mean?
It means an agreement that I will behave in a way that helps my neighbours and society, that I'm doing what people expect me to do.
I'm not going to misbehave.
And you think that's not the case here in the United States?
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 build the stadium.
They'd do this.
They'd be part of the community.
Now they're not.
They're all in a way, cold-blooded profit-maximizing international enterprises.
And why is that a bad place to live?
Because 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 downstream impact of that?
That your neighbours aren't as interested in you and your wellbeing.
Fine.
I won't talk to my neighbour.
And that's a lonely place to be.
And when you're in trouble, you're in trouble, serious trouble, because the safety net here is very ineffective.
There's a measure that I think is probably the single most important measure of civilization, and that is maternal mortality.
How many people die in childbirth?
You know, in Nigeria, out of 100,000, it's 480, give or take.
And in America, in the black population, it's 44.
In the whole population, it's like 21 or 20.
Curiously, in the American Asian population, it's 13.
And then you go down the list.
In Britain, it's five.
In Germany, it's four.
In Sweden, it's 2.1.
In Norway, it's zero.
There were no mothers who died last year.
Mm-hmm. or the year before.
What better definition of civilization than looking after the mother's 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 50 worse than the next worst.
50% more mothers die here than in the second worst country in the developed world.
How is that possible?
The answer is it happens.
And it's because 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.
Of course, the numbers are not huge.
20 out of 100,000 is not.
But it's a terrible contrast.
It's a sign of something.
It's a sign of something.
It's a sign of whether people are... It's a sign of the social contract.
So where's a good place to live, then, if not here?
Denmark, Japan, even France, Germany.
The UK has a little bit of the American disease, but not nearly as much.
So if your kids came to you and said Dad, we're thinking of leaving the United States, should I move?
Should I move out of the United States?
I would say that's a perfectly reasonable thing to consider.
And where are you going and why?
I'm thinking of going to Denmark, Dad.
If they'll have you.
No, in the things that really matter life expectancy, health safety nets, murder rates, 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 wealth created that go to a relatively small fraction of the people.
And that dazzles in terms of the average because that's how the numbers work.
If you look at how well off the bottom quartile are, America doesn't score well at all.
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?
There was a book written in the 1960s called Silent Spring.
Carl Carson, I think her name was.
And it changed for quite a number of years.
It did what books never do, really.
It became a political monster and everyone studied it and it had an effect.
It changed the game.
I would like to write something about toxicity and social contract, really particularly nurturing a family.
We've got to find, in the end, a community that encourages children.
The downside of the brutally efficient capitalist system that we have.
It's focused on financial achievement and so on and very little emphasis on community and child rearing and so on.
If we don't, 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.
If I could write a book that would pull a silent spring, I would sit down tomorrow and start it.
The making of a perma-bear.
Perma should be in inverted commas, really.
The perils of long-term investing in a short-term world. by Jeremy Grantham and Edward Chancellor.
Who is this book for?
Oh, people who have an interest in the stock market.
It has a little bit of climate change and toxicity.
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.
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.
But it's really useful.
Counterintuitive, not counterintuitive, but 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.
And be more confident in your judgments.
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.
And I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing.
That's exactly what history looks like.
Have the courage to look at that, make your own conclusion.
Get out of the most dangerous part 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 central political skill in life turns out to be never be wrong on your own.
This is, again, Keynes.
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.
Jeremy, thank you so much.
Thank you for all that you do.
You traverse so many subjects.
It's absolutely fascinating.
And 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 want to remember.
That's what I do.
Screenshot city.
Yeah.
So I just ran things down you were saying, and then I was like I need to remember that later for a bunch of things.
Businesses, friends, family, etc.
I think that's a testament to how broad and curious and wise you are.
Going back to question one or two, that billionaire bit.
Sometime around the end of this year we will actually have written checks for a billion dollars to the climate change world.
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.
It is.
It's being mentioned less in earnings calls.
But this year will be so disgustingly hot from now on, I suspect.
Disgustingly hot.
Hot.
We could have, from now on, the hottest 12 months from now to this time next year that we have ever had in history here, there and everywhere.
Well, I'm glad we've got voices like yours 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 the Palmer Bear.
I'm going to link it below for everyone to buy it themselves.
Jeremy, thank you.
