A former OpenAI researcher went on Diary of a CEO and said there’s a 70% chance AI ends badly for humanity, told his wife they shouldn’t have more children because they’d never enter the workforce, and gave up $2 million by refusing to sign a non-disparagement clause to say it publicly. Joe asks Paula Pant, OG, and Jesse Cramer to react — not as AI experts, but as people who’ve watched the internet, robots, computers, and cars all supposedly end the economy, and as people who actually know what to do with your money when the world feels uncertain.
What You’ll Walk Away With
- Paula’s case for being a negative 10 on the worry scale: why 60% of jobs that exist today didn’t exist in 1940, and why AI is more likely to create new categories of work than eliminate work entirely
- Jesse’s case for a four: why knowledge is being commoditized the same way gasoline was — and what that means if your competitive advantage has always been what you know
- OG’s framework for separating the parts of your job AI will gladly take from the parts it never will — and why that distinction is more useful than panicking about either half
- The Jevons Paradox: why making something cheaper almost always creates more demand for it, not less — and why that applies to patents, legal filings, and every other knowledge-work category people think AI will eliminate
- Safe, evolving, or replaced: the roundtable verdict on CPAs, software engineers, and customer service reps — and the Capital One research that reveals why some people actually prefer talking to a machine
- Why learning the AI tools right now — even if you’re 58 and four years from retirement — is the modern equivalent of learning email in 1993
- JL Collins’ line that applies to careers just as much as portfolios: flexibility is the only true security
- Should you buy an AI sector fund? OG, Paula, and Jesse each answer — and the answer that surprised everyone is probably not the one you’d expect
- Why OG’s Triple Bypass bike race analogy is the best career advice in the episode: if you’re always ready, you never have to get ready
- The window tax trivia that AI got spectacularly wrong — proving, on an episode about AI taking all our jobs, that it can’t even count windows yet
Why This Matters Now
The fear is real. The timeline is uncertain. And the people most likely to be okay are the ones who are building flexibility into their finances and their careers right now — not because AI is definitely coming, but because it’s always smart to be ready for the thing that might come.
From the Basement
Paula Pant, OG, and Jesse Cramer react to a former OpenAI researcher’s apocalyptic Diary of a CEO interview — and spend most of the episode arguing about whether to panic, which jobs survive, whether to buy the AI sector fund, and what OG’s fighting robot would do to Jesse’s house. Doug arrives with window tax trivia that AI generated incorrectly — which Joe caught just before air — and handing one of our contributors a huge win. Financial Action Month is coming next week: five episodes, a bingo sheet, and more to come.
Resources Mentioned
Stacking Benjamins Community — stackingbenjamins.com/basement
Diary of a CEO — Steven Bartlett interview with Daniel Kokotajlo, former OpenAI researcher
Tony Robbins interview with Ray Kurzweil — referenced for additional AI perspective; linked at stackingbenjamins.com
Afford Anything episode 693 — Paula Pant interview with Dr. Ben Zweig on AI and the workforce; affordanything.com/episode693
Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors (PFLTI) — Jesse Cramer; upcoming AMA episode 19 and episode 150 personal AMA
Anthropic Skill Jar — free AI training; referenced by Paula for learning Claude features
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh — referenced for the Zappos customer service model
OG financial planning calendar — stackingbenjamins.com/og
Stacking Benjamins Newsletter (The 201) — stackingbenjamins.com/201
Our Topic: How AI could reshape jobs and personal finances.
He Risked Everything To Warn You: No One Is Ready For What’s Coming, And The AI Companies Know It! – YouTube (Diary of a CEO Podcast)
During our conversation, you’ll hear us mention:
- AI job displacement
- Knowledge-worker disruption
- AI extinction fears
- Technological adaptation
- Future job creation
- Career pivots
- Human judgment
- Information commoditization
- Data-entry automation
- Higher-value work
- AI augmentation
- Legal careers
- Financial planning
- CPA evolution
- Software engineering
- Customer service
- Human connection
- Workforce adaptability
- Career flexibility
- Fixed-cost reduction
- AI skills training
- Building custom GPTs
- AI’s jagged edge
- Retirement readiness
- Income disruption
- AI sector funds
- Efficient markets
- Global diversification
Our Contributors
A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.
Jesse Cramer
Another thanks to Jesse Cramer for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from Jesse on his show, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors – The Best Interest, on Spotify.
Learn how you can work with Jesse by visiting The Best Interest – Invest in Knowledge.
Paula Pant
Check out Paula’s site and amazing podcast at AffordAnything.com
Follow Paula on Twitter: @AffordAnything
OG
For more on OG and his firm’s page, click here.
Doug’s Game Show Trivia
- On average, how many windows are installed in a newly built single-family home in the United States?
Mentioned in today’s show
- AI Automation and the Future of Your Job
- Ray Kurzweil Predicts AI Will Change Humanity Completely by 2030 – YouTube
Join Us on Monday!
Tune in on Monday when we break down the latest Social Security developments and share how to maximize your benefits while avoiding costly mistakes.
Miss our last show? Check it out here: Ryan Hawk on How Ordinary People Become Exceptional (And the Actions That Actually Compound) SB1871 | Stacking Benjamins
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] opener: Doug once narrated a podcast so well, Spotify sent him a thank you card. Other credit scores check his report for inspiration
[00:00:19] Doug: I don’t always explain money, but when I do, I prefer Stacking Benjamins.
[00:00:24] opener: Stay stacky, my friends
[00:00:35] Doug: Live from the basement of the YouTube headquarters, it’s The Stacking Benjamins Show
[00:00:50] Doug: Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and recently, the popular podcast Diary of a CEO featured a former employee of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and the guest implied we’d all be out of a job very, very soon. Today, we’re doing something new, our reactions to another podcast discussion. Do we think AI is coming for our jobs now that an expert in the field says it’s inevitable?
[00:01:16] Doug: What should you do to prepare? How can you structure your investments to minimize any damage? We’ll cover all of that on today’s show. And if the thought of your income going away wasn’t heavy enough, of course, we’ll also feature something far more serious, our year-long trivia challenge. Jesse crept up on OG last week, and Paula’s been on a tear lately.
[00:01:40] Doug: Will the race keep tightening, or will OG continue his quest to break the record? And now, a guy who must be nearing the record for hosting the most roundtable episodes of a money podcast, it’s Joe Saul-Sehy.
[00:01:57] Joe: Hey there, Stackers, and happy Friday to you. Welcome back to the Stacking Benjamins show. I am Joe Saul-Sehy, and we, we have done a lot of these roundtable episodes, but today I think is the best one, because
[00:02:09] Joe: Well, let’s get Doug back on screen here. Doug, how are you, man?
[00:02:14] Doug: I’m great, Joe. You know, I’ve recently lowered my expectations for myself, so now I’m thriving.
[00:02:20] Joe: It’s perf- you might have to lower them more, ’cause you remember when the internet was gonna eliminate our jobs?
[00:02:25] Doug: Remember that? I remember that very
[00:02:26] Joe: clearly.
[00:02:26] Joe: We wouldn’t have a job ’cause of the internet. Yeah. Or when robots were gonna get rid of manufacturing, remember that?
[00:02:31] Doug: Absolutely.
[00:02:31] Joe: It was all gone.
[00:02:32] Doug: Yeah.
[00:02:33] Joe: Well, all those standards were lowered for all those people, and yet they kept their job.
[00:02:38] Doug: Here we are.
[00:02:38] Joe: Computers were gonna eliminate offices. Remember that one?
[00:02:42] Doug: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:02:43] Joe: Remember when cars were gonna eliminate the horse and buggy? Oh, wait.
[00:02:47] Doug: Oh, . Oops.
[00:02:50] Joe: A- Back up … AI, AI might be different. Might be different. Is it different? We don’t know, but somebody … Luckily, we got a team of roundtable participants who are not AI, at least as far as you know they’re not AI.
[00:03:05] Joe: First one, clearly not AI, sitting across the card table from me, Mr. OG’s here. How are you, man?
[00:03:11] OG: Excited to be here. Thanks for having me. First time caller- … long time listener.
[00:03:15] Joe: Definitely not AI. Definitely not AI. If
[00:03:18] OG: there’s a way to do it, though, I’m, I’m game.
[00:03:20] Joe: He’s like, “I’ll be the, I’ll be the test rabbit.”
[00:03:23] Joe: And, uh, high over Manhattan, she’s not AI, from Afford Anything, Paula Pant is here. You’re not AI, are you?
[00:03:30] Paula: Unless I’m extremely advanced AI. Oh. I mean, I’m, I’m just coming in through a screen. You don’t know. Maybe someone, like, really vibe coded the heck out of me.
[00:03:41] Doug: Paula does look like one of the characters out of Ex Machina, that movie.
[00:03:45] Joe: Oh, she … D- that was some real AI. Doesn’t she? Paula has no idea what you’re talking about, Doug. When you, when you said, “You know that one movie,” Paula could have shook her head yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, that movie.
[00:03:55] Paula: Yeah.
[00:03:56] Joe: Yes.
[00:03:56] Paula: Wasn’t there some movie with Scarlett Johansson? I heard about it only because- Her. Ah, yes, yes.
[00:04:02] Paula: I haven’t watched that one either. Her.
[00:04:03] Joe: That’s right.
[00:04:03] Paula: That’s the- It’s called Her … that’s the one I have heard of.
[00:04:05] Joe: You could say that about everything. I haven’t watched that one either.
[00:04:08] Paula: Yeah.
[00:04:08] Joe: I haven’t watched that one. It’s true. Well, luckily you’re here on this podcast, so we gotcha on this one. And from the wilds of upstate New York, where AI makes beautiful trees, beautiful lakes, Jesse Cramer’s here.
[00:04:21] Joe: How are you, man?
[00:04:22] Jesse: Beautiful drop ceilings as well
[00:04:24] Joe: Yes. Is
[00:04:25] Jesse: that
[00:04:25] Joe: AI?
[00:04:25] Jesse: This is, this isn’t a real… This is not a real drop ceiling. This is a AI manufactured background.
[00:04:30] Joe: Yeah, all the Zoom chats, the one that wants you to be really professional, they’re like, “You gotta get the one where it looks like a drop ceiling with a door in the background.”
[00:04:38] Joe: Correct. Like that’s, that’s what everybody goes for.
[00:04:40] Jesse: But you know, they all have cool titles too. All the backgrounds have these intricate titles, and this one is just called Corporate B Level Hellscape, and so that’s what, that’s where I am right now.
[00:04:50] Joe: As you’re toggling through all of your different-
[00:04:53] Joe: different backgrounds, “Oh, Hellscape? I’m going with that one.”
[00:04:55] Jesse: Oh, sign me up.
[00:04:57] Joe: Well, man, speaking of Hellscape, Steven Bartlett on the popular show Diary of a CEO recently interviewed a gentleman who is a former OpenAI researcher, uh, Daniel, uh, Cocotillo. Let’s say doom and gloom gets a new definition, guys.
[00:05:14] Joe: Gets a brand new … You thought the bar was low for doom and gloom? It is now lower. Like, it is scary. I’m gonna play you a clip. It’s gonna be a couple minutes long clip so we can kinda get the gist of what they talked about. It’s the intro to this particular episode. I’m gonna play that right after we have our beginning break so that everybody can hear what the stakes are according to Janiel- Daniel Cottillo.
[00:05:43] Joe: Easy for me to say. Cocotillo. And then I wanna dive into this. Is AI coming for your job? But first we have a couple sponsors who help us keep on keeping on. We’re gonna hear from them, and we will be right back with our reactions to this latest Diary of a CEO kind of episode that everybody’s talking about.
[00:06:05] Joe: Because if you weren’t afraid before the break, you’re gonna be afraid about three minutes after we take this break, if you haven’t heard it. We’ll be right back. When my dad died, my mom had money available right away, even though many of her assets were tied up in things like my dad’s 401. But that was because of life insurance, and Ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy.
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[00:07:14] Joe: Okay, let’s begin with a clip. This is the beginning of an episode of Diary of a CEO that says, “He risked everything to warn you. No one is ready for what’s coming, and the AI companies already know it.” Let’s hear the intro to this episode
[00:07:31] clip: The scary open secret in the AI industry right now is that it’s possible that we’ll end up essentially creating a new species that ends up ruling the world with a seventy percent chance that this goes horribly wrong like human extinction.
[00:07:41] clip: That’s one possibility. There’s many more. It’s quite chilling what you’re saying. Yeah, it’s, uh, it gets me down sometimes I basically told my wife, like, “Let’s not have any more kids. It’s too uncertain. I don’t think they’ll ever join the workforce.” Everybody should be afraid that their jobs are gonna be lost, and I know this because I went to OpenAI in 2022.
[00:07:59] clip: What I did there was forecasting as to what the next couple years might look like, and unfortunately, most of the world is kind of asleep at the wheel and doesn’t really realize what’s going on with AI. So I resigned.
[00:08:07] clip: I read it somewhere that you lost $2 million for not signing an anti-disparagement clause, meaning you couldn’t criticize the company.
[00:08:13] clip: Yes, for reasons I’m happy to get into. But the main thing I’ve learned is when I go talk to people at Anthropic and OpenAI about forecasting, they’re like, “It’s not gonna take that long. You need to shorten them again. Get them back to 2027 or 2028,” because these powerful CEOs, Dario or Sam or Elon, are racing each other to be in control of the most powerful AIs and are literally afraid that if the other guy gets there first, he might become dictator.
[00:08:33] clip: I mean, Anthropic is on track to be the entire economy
[00:08:36] Jesse: by 2030,
[00:08:37] clip: but none of these people should be trusted with that much power. So this is the most important thing happening in our lifetimes, probably in all of history, in fact, and it’s very important that it go well. So I think that there’s a lot we can do to, like, steer things in a better direction.
[00:08:48] clip: There’s loads of benefits that we could get from AI if we do it right, and if we do solve the problems, then things could be absolutely amazing for everyone.
[00:08:54] Joe: He then, during this episode, goes into exactly how he thinks things could be amazing, but he also puts the chances that we are going to be amazing is very, very low ’cause he thinks that, uh, we’re all gonna continue to fight with each other, and then the robots ultimately win.
[00:09:07] Joe: So how’s that for doom and gloom, Paula Pant?
[00:09:10] Paula: I mean, it is doomy and gloomy.
[00:09:12] Joe: Some pretty… The forecast for the next 30 years is, uh, slightly overcast with, uh, chances of storms. I wanna start off this way. First of all, in terms of the three of you… Now obviously, just to set the stage here, if you’re new to Stacking Benjamins, none of us are AI experts.
[00:09:31] Joe: But we are money experts, and we are people who have seen industries come and go. We all have lots of… We’ve seen lots of changes in the workforce. We’ve seen lots of changes with different innovations that were going to wipe everything out. But this guy, Daniel, he wrote a piece in 2021 that is scarily correct in 2025.
[00:09:53] Joe: I won’t go into it too much, uh, ’cause you can find it elsewhere, but in 2021 he predicted where we’re gonna be today, and now everyone’s telling him we need to speed up the pace because his predictions are way too slow, that we’re gonna get to the fact that none of us have a job way, way earlier than was already predicted.
[00:10:10] Joe: But let’s put it this way. On a scale of one to 10, 10 is that you’re packing your bags right now and you’re just gonna go off and move into the woods because y- you’re not gonna get a job in the next however so long. Your job’s… it’s coming for you. One, you’re not worried at all. Where would you put yourself?
[00:10:24] Joe: Paula, let’s start with you since I called on you earlier. 10, super worried, one, not worried at all.
[00:10:29] Paula: I would be negative 10.
[00:10:31] Joe: Negative 10.
[00:10:32] Paula: Meaning, uh, if- No,
[00:10:33] Joe: don’t give me meaning yet. Don’t give me meaning. I get it, but past one.
[00:10:38] Paula: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m below one.
[00:10:39] Joe: Yes. Yes. OG, how about you?
[00:10:43] OG: I didn’t know that we could create our own scales.
[00:10:45] OG: Um, I have to give some context. I think there’s parts of my jobs, ’cause I have multiple jobs, I think there’s parts of parts of my jobs that will, uh, be gladly replaced by AI, and there’s other parts that will never. So I’ll give myself, based on the weighting of all that, um, a two. How’s that?
[00:11:06] Joe: Okay. That was more than I wanted, ’cause I was gonna get context later, but Jesse, one to 10?
[00:11:12] Jesse: Uh, four or five.
[00:11:14] Joe: Okay. Let me start with Paula. Paula, why aren’t you buying the hype?
[00:11:20] Paula: I am a believer that AI is going to create new categories of work that do not exist today, and if you look at the data, if you look at the number of jobs… I actually just pulled this up right before we started recording.
[00:11:33] Paula: An MIT economist named David Autor found that 60% of the jobs that people do today did not exist in 1940. So if you think about that, that technological acceleration between 1940 and now, if you go even back further and, like, imagine you were talking to somebody from the 1900s and you say, “Hey, in 2026, 2% of people are gonna work on farms,” you know, they’d be like, “Oh, does that mean you’re all starving?”
[00:11:59] Paula: Like, no, we actually have too much to eat in most parts of the world. We have all of these new categories of work that, like, didn’t exist then and, and this is only going to accelerate that.
[00:12:10] Joe: Jesse, you’re on the other end of the scale. We gotta call you the worrier even though you’re only a four. Uh, what are you seeing that these two aren’t…
[00:12:16] Joe: So if Paula’s -10 and you’re plus four, 14 delta between the two of you. What are you seeing that Paula’s not seeing?
[00:12:25] Jesse: Our delta is bigger than the scale itself. It is. I don’t… Uh, what I’m seeing, it’s not maybe that I’m seeing something that the others aren’t seeing, it’s just that I recognize, you know, as a worker in this economy, I, I think I know what some of my strengths are, and I try to play to my strengths.
[00:12:40] Jesse: And at least I’m in a position where I look at some of my strengths, I compare those strengths to, to AI itself, and I come to the conclusion that I have competition and that I feel replaceable in a way that I didn’t necessarily feel replaceable five years ago. Knowledge is being commoditized, much in the same way that gasoline is commoditized.
[00:13:01] Jesse: I mean, there was a time where each of us had, had knowledge in our own arenas and our own specialties that you could say that the average person simply did not have access to. Like Paula, you have knowledge about real estate market and what it means to run a, a rental real estate business that 99.9% of the population simply does not know.
[00:13:22] Jesse: They could know it, but they would have to work really, really hard for it. And, and you can make the argument now that the average person with an internet connection can spend a couple days on Claude, and it’s not that the person themselves are gonna know more than you would, Paula, like that’s not true, but you could make the argument that the AI model itself knows as much about real estate if not more than you.
[00:13:46] Jesse: The AI model knows as much if not more about financial planning than, than OG or I. And I, I still think there’s a human element that’s gonna be really, really hard to replace. But the, the knowledge itself has become commoditized in a way that I don’t feel like it was just a few years ago.
[00:14:01] Joe: Oh, gee, I remember 10 years ago the game was, at, at some point in the near future truck drivers are gonna be replaced, right?
[00:14:08] Joe: ‘Cause we’re gonna have these trucks that drive themself. In this latest Diary of a CEO piece, he’s talking about knowledge work is completely gonna be under fire. Like, knowledge workers. So the game has kinda flipped. We’re not worried about the truck driver, we’re worried about the lawyer being replaced, or we’re worried about the person who’s coding, or we’re worried about maybe the financial planner.
[00:14:28] Joe: We’ll talk about that or the CPA. Tell me more about your context, because you said in some areas it’ll be great, in other areas it won’t. But what if the knowledge part is taken off the table for you? What does that mean for your career?
[00:14:42] OG: Well, I think what, what Jesse is talking about, I, I would use different words.
[00:14:46] OG: I would say that it’s not the knowledge that is gonna be commoditized, it’s information that’s commoditized. Anybody can look up the tax bracket or a Roth conversion idea, or how much to earn before you have Medicare surcharges. The difference is then how to apply that At least where we are right now, and I suspect in the future it’ll change, but at least where we are right now, there is still a very real sense of, you know, the AI tools like being supportive, you know, in terms of whatever you feel like you wanna do.
[00:15:25] OG: That doesn’t mean they’re not gonna change. In fact, they probably will, but I’m not concerned about it because I think in every time throughout all of history, any time that there’s a new technology, it’s … And I think this is maybe what Paul was getting at, it’s like, it just raised everybody’s standards.
[00:15:42] OG: You know? It made us work on the next higher, best thing. And so yeah, I, I, I do think that there’s not gonna be a lot of people who come out of college, just taking financial planning as an example, and do the traditional, and I say air quotes traditional, because it’s maybe, Joe, how you got started, how I got started, but I don’t think that’s how it’s gonna happen in the future, where you start by doing grunt work.
[00:16:06] OG: You know, you start by data entry, and that’s how you learn how to do planning. Because why would you do that? In fact, as an business owner, why would I pay anybody to do data entry when I can have the same efficacy in terms of, you know, how good the data entry’s gonna be, and take one 100th of the time to do it?
[00:16:28] OG: Like, literally it’s upload a document, it’s done. That doesn’t mean there’s not gonna be financial planners, it just means that they do the next higher thinking along the way. So I’m not concerned about it in the sense of like replacing jobs. I think it’s gonna replace data entry and that sort of thing, and it’s just gonna force people to move, you know, maybe this is what Paul was talking about.
[00:16:49] OG: You’re just gonna move to the next higher, better use of your time.
[00:16:53] Joe: But that’s not the part that scares me. The part that scares me is that, you know, because OG’s talking about it as, as doing some of the data work, but that, uh, there’s a difference between wisdom and data- Mm-hmm … and the human brings the wisdom.
[00:17:06] Joe: But increasingly, people are talking about how they use AI as a sparring partner because it’s so wise. Mm-hmm. ‘Cause it’s giving me the best course of action to take. So if AI gets to the point that it’s picking out the best option for all of us anyway, it’s no longer t- best use at data entry. Somebody’s like, “Why wouldn’t I have that be the lawyer?”
[00:17:25] Joe: Because the chance of me winning versus the chance of a human winning, and a robot, AI, is probably gonna do the job more efficiently, come up with the right strategy to win the case, find the loophole that the human won’t find as quickly, and can present it to the judge more eloquently than a person can without ever messing it up
[00:17:44] Paula: Hmm.
[00:17:45] Paula: Well, w- in the case of a lawyer, for example, number one, in that example, the AI is an augmenter. So, you know, you can use an AI to augment that research, to, uh, look for your blind spots, spot the unknown unknowns, use it as a sparring partner, go through iterations of what you think the opposing counsel might say.
[00:18:04] Paula: In a courtroom specifically, I, number one, I imagine that most judges, at least in our lifetime, are going to require that a human lawyer actually represent their clients. They’re probably not going to accept– or that a client represents themselves, I guess, but they are not going to accept, like, a submission from AI, so there will have to be an individual there.
[00:18:24] Paula: But number two, there’s also, let’s get out of the courtroom and go to more broad uses of the legal system, Jevons paradox, which states that the cheaper something gets, the more we use it. So as the cost of filing patents, filing trademarks, as the cost of that goes down, more patents filed, more trademarks filed, more, like, just more and more and more innovation takes place.
[00:18:49] Paula: Now the barriers to entry are a lot lower than they were. The internet was the first great barrier to entry lower-er because you no longer had to have a brick-and-mortar business, and AI is now, like, amplifying that to the next level, where it’s making the barriers to entry so low that a person with an internet connection can file a patent even if they have no money and no connections and, and, and they can be super scrappy at the age of 17
[00:19:16] Joe: What about the people though in the middle then?
[00:19:18] Joe: If you’ve got the person who files the patent and you don’t have- Mm-hmm … so many people in that patent industry anymore, those people all lose their jobs.
[00:19:25] Paula: No, no, they don’t lose their jobs, but they, their jobs might look different than, you know, maybe they’re working on challenges. Like, you know, maybe rather than, like, the rote patent filing, they’re working on challenges to a patent.
[00:19:39] Paula: They’re working on more co- like representing more complex disputes around that.
[00:19:43] Joe: But isn’t that-
[00:19:44] Paula: They might… Mm-hmm.
[00:19:44] Joe: But isn’t that like saying that, uh, when electricity came, that the people who were doing gas lamps, that those people weren’t gonna lose their jobs? They were just gonna then work on gas for other causes, gas for other things versus the gas lamp.
[00:19:59] Joe: Yeah. I mean, there were plenty of people who got displaced.
[00:20:02] Paula: Sure, but in aggregate, the invention of, of electricity has grown more jobs-
[00:20:07] Joe: Right …
[00:20:08] Paula: than it has cut.
[00:20:10] Joe: I agree with that, but I think there still is job displacement- Sure … where somebody has to take on a new, a new, completely new field possibly because your field now is no longer doing what it used to do.
[00:20:20] Paula: Yes, but you can always go into a field that’s adjacent. So journalism is a great example. As legacy media h- jobs in legacy media have shrunk, more journalists, trained journalists, can go into journalism adjacent fields like podcasting, uh, or like being a Substack, uh, newsletter writer, all of the content creation opportunities.
[00:20:39] Paula: Is it legacy journalism in the way that it used to look? Newspaper journalism? No. But is it journalism adjacent? Yes. And the same thing can happen in, in every industry. There are going to be adjacent verticals that you can pivot into, and the people who will succeed the most are the ones who are most eager to pivot, the ones who are most adaptable.
[00:20:56] Joe: I want to get into that in a minute. Uh, what I’d like to talk about is just a few different roles, and you guys give me whether you think this is over the next five years safe, evolving, or by five years from now if we’re replaced. You ready, Jesse? CPA. Are CPAs safe? You think it’s gonna evolve? You think they’re gonna be replaced by
[00:21:17] Jesse: AI?
[00:21:17] Jesse: Evolve Yeah, evolve. I do think about all the human relationships in place and all the trust that’s in place, and I think about the ways, I mean, CPAs in particular, how ingrained they are in terms of like it’s not just mine, your tax return, it’s business returns and it’s, it’s nonprofit returns, and it’s all the planning work and consulting work that CPAs do.
[00:21:35] Jesse: I mean, they’re still gonna exist. But is that… I think, I think it was you, Paul, who used the word augment. Like, is their role gonna be augmented by AI and data processing and data entry? And just think of like, think of all the spreadsheet work that a CPA does, and think about how good these AI models are at spreadsheet manipulation and doing all that stuff.
[00:21:54] Jesse: Like, it’s definitely going to evolve. That’s my thought.
[00:21:57] Joe: Oh, gee, let’s go to one we’ve seen a little bit already. Software engineers.
[00:22:01] OG: Well, I don’t know anything about software engineering, let alone like the broad title of that. I, I would say that I do know there are some, like, coding people that are having some issues presently, you know, in terms of having Claude do it for you.
[00:22:18] OG: The thing that we have yet to see, and maybe this is just kind of the hype and then we come back down to reality, there’s really not been any sort of evidence of productivity increase yet. There’s a lot of money being spent. There’s a lot of stuff being built. There’s a lot of uproar over, you know, which small town’s gonna have the data center and which big town got to avoid it, and all the issues with powering all that stuff and cooling it.
[00:22:46] OG: But then I think about some of the ancillary benefits of that, and we’ve been trying to get more power on the grid, so to speak, in Texas for a generation because nobody wants to use anything other than Gas and coal and oil. And it’s like, well, maybe this is the impetus for other sources of energy, whether it’s nuclear or solar, better efficiency there or whatever it is.
[00:23:14] OG: Because it’s like the companies who want it are gonna create the exponential demand that will then power, pardon the expression, the innovation and, um, you know, and maybe get that across the board, and that benefits… Or across the, uh, across the finish line, and then that benefits everybody, ’cause all of a sudden now there’s robust power and it’s cheap because the data centers use so much of it that they had to build so much of it that, you know, whatever.
[00:23:41] OG: So I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that all this spending on AI tokens and all this sort of stuff has actually translated into increased productivity yet. Uh, I suppose eventually it will, but-
[00:23:53] Joe: Well, and what I think is fascinating about what you’re talking about, I read a piece last week, OG, about how Silicon Valley, the hot thing right now, is solving all these problems around data centers, around l- let’s try to not use so much water.
[00:24:04] Joe: Let’s try to have a self-contained area. Let’s try to make them quieter. Let’s do all these, all these things. So when there’s a profit motive attached, all of a sudden the engineers go, “Oh, yeah, we can solve this problem.”
[00:24:17] OG: I mean, you know, not to dive too deep into it, but yeah, anytime that there’s, anytime there’s an opportunity to make money, people are gonna try to be capitalistic in that regard.
[00:24:28] OG: And the subset of this conversation, I suppose, is how does this affect your investing? You don’t have to go after trying to buy the latest and greatest AI tool because every company is focused on the singular motive of profitability in whatever form and fashion that takes, in whatever business they happen to be in.
[00:24:47] OG: So you don’t actually have to, like, try to figure out, well, which company’s gonna profit from this? Well, every company is trying to profit from everything all of the time. So it’s just, it’s a super easy way to invest, ’cause if Coke can figure out how to make faster Coca-Colas with less energy usage and make more money to share, for shareholders- Cha-ching
[00:25:06] OG: because they just got rid of a floor of engineers because they can frigging AI the crap out of it, that’s good for you ’cause you own Coke stock and they’re trying to make money. I think there’s a lot of evolution coming. You know, Paula talked about farmers, and internet was supposed to take away all of our jobs It just created all new jobs.
[00:25:28] OG: I don’t think that the jobs that are here today are the ones that are around in 30 years from now. I think it’s a different thing. We still need people to fix my AC unit when it takes a crap in the hot summer. Someday maybe there’s robots that can climb on your roof and hang shingles, but until that day comes with high degree of reliability, you still need people to do that, and build fences and dig holes and-
[00:25:53] Joe: You did see robots, uh, in Asia now running a half-marathon for the first time without tripping, being
[00:25:59] OG: able to- I saw a robot that literally tripped on the starting line.
[00:26:02] Joe: I saw
[00:26:02] OG: that too. I didn’t see one run the, run the marathon. And to what end? Like, that’s the other th- Like, wow, your robot… I am looking forward to the day where I can send my robot to go fight Jesse’s robot though. Because I’ll be like, “Yo, listen, this Jesse Cramer dude- … he says some bad shiznit about you.
[00:26:20] OG: I’m just saying, whatever you wanna do with that.” And like set him to like aggressive rage machine. Like, zzz, you know? And then it just like shows up on Jesse’s door one day. It’s like, “Yo, you and me’s got a problem.” Jesse’s like, “I ain’t got a problem. My robot’s been talking a lot of trash, so y’all can get after it.”
[00:26:37] OG: And then there’s like the big robot fight. You know, like- … Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, but real.
[00:26:41] Jesse: Be careful what you wish for.
[00:26:42] Doug: Oh, Doug. OG’s got a vis- vivid imagination. He’s, he’s put a lot of thought into that.
[00:26:47] OG: I have, actually. Way
[00:26:48] Doug: too much thought. That’s scary.
[00:26:50] OG: It’d be kind of fun.
[00:26:51] Jesse: I like how when, when OG thinks about fighting, he kind of reverts back…
[00:26:53] Jesse: I mean, y- you said “y’all” more time in that two minutes than in the rest of your podcast appearances combined. Like, you got full Texan there, y’all.
[00:27:02] Joe: He got- Yeah. It was bad. And the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em motion. Some yo’s. Paula, here’s a, here, here’s one that’ll make people groan. You ready? ‘Cause we’re already- Uh-huh
[00:27:09] Joe: two-thirds of the way there. Customer service reps.
[00:27:13] Paula: Hmm.
[00:27:13] Joe: The few that are left, are they replaced?
[00:27:18] Paula: I think that field will evolve. So you think about the Zappos model. What Zappos did with customer service reps was they, they created a, a new category where people would call into Zappos and get connection, like real human connection.
[00:27:34] Paula: Like Zappos, uh, and Tony Hsieh wrote about this in his book Delivering Happiness, which I strongly recommend. Great book. Great book. Zappos would celebrate the customer service rep who would spend eight hours on the phone with somebody for no other reason than it was clear that that person was lonely and just wanted someone to talk to, and so they would just chit-chat.
[00:27:54] Paula: And like any other company would’ve called that, quote-unquote, “wasteful,” but Zappos actively celebrated it, and that became part of what made Zappos so unique and made it stand out. It was a differentiating factor in a crowded field. Anyone can sell shoes on the internet, but not everyone can make you feel like, “If you’re lonely, just give us a call.”
[00:28:15] Paula: Um- That’s so interesting,
[00:28:16] Joe: yeah.
[00:28:16] Paula: Yeah. And so I think that that type of evolution in customer service, okay, in a world where the boilerplate template is automation and AI, how do we as a company differentiate ourselves so that when you buy hand sanitizer or when you buy cottage cheese, you think of us first?
[00:28:36] Joe: We talked about this on a recording that our Stackers are gonna hear next week that, so you’re saying, Paula, we win by going back to 1973 when you would call when you would call- … a place and there were no robots. By going back there, we’re good. But very seriously, Capital One’s model, which is really interesting to me, is that if someone has one of their higher end credit cards and they have a very high credit score, they send those people to people.
[00:29:03] Joe: If someone has a lower credit score and has had difficulties with credit cards and maybe has one of their beginner credit cards, they do not send them to real people. Now, it, it isn’t cost-cutting why they do that. It’s because somebody with a lower credit score has said, “I might be a little ashamed of the question I’m gonna ask.
[00:29:21] Joe: I don’t wanna be in front of a real person. I’d much rather talk- Wow … to the machine. It’s easier for me to do business with Capital One and take care of my credit issues if I talk to a machine.” Wow. People with higher credit scores wanna talk to a person. They don’t wanna talk to a machine because their, their socially acceptable question is gonna be much better.
[00:29:39] Joe: So it’s pretty wild, Paula, to see kinda what you’re talking about- Right … on the Zappos end with Capital One.
[00:29:44] Paula: Wow, that’s a great example of like deep customer research leading to differentiation. You know, and I think that’s a big portion of how brands are going to compete. AI enables it such that there’s now just a, a richer tapestry of ways that any company can differentiate their brand.
[00:30:02] Paula: And, uh, so I think we’ll s- we’ll start to see a lot of creativity flourish in every domain of running a business.
[00:30:09] Joe: The reason I talked about running, speaking of running a half marathon, had nothing to do OG with running a half marathon. It was that the dexterity that it takes to work on a roof, you were talking about shingling a roof, is quickly, those concerns are quickly changing I saw the same one where the the robot biffed right at the beginning of the half marathon, but one actually finished the half marathon last year.
[00:30:30] Joe: And think about all the changes in roads and, uh, the changes in, you know… What’s going on, Doug?
[00:30:37] Doug: Well, you guys are talking about… I’m thinking about OG’s, uh, and Jesse’s smackdown that’s inevitable, and I actually just saw a video of two robots in a ring fighting. And they were doing these unbelievable, like, spin moves, and one’s head, just like OG’s talking about rock ’em, sock ’em robot, one of the heads actually fell off and was dangling by the wires.
[00:31:03] Doug: It continued fighting- … as though that never happened. It was terrifying. And also pretty badass.
[00:31:11] OG: That’s what I’m talking about. It’s like, like the head’s swinging and it’s still, it’s like one hand and he’s, like, putting it back on and like- That’s exactly what happened. You know? It was
[00:31:19] Doug: crazy.
[00:31:20] Paula: Am I the only person on this roundtable who’s not watching robot videos?
[00:31:23] Paula: I, I guess
[00:31:24] Joe: I’m… I think that’s two of us- Why aren’t you? … ’cause this is all new to me. I’m watching, uh, Capital One customer service videos, which is not much, not much better. All right. Coming up in the second half, we talked about some of what the threats are, and hopefully allayed some fears. Although, if you go back and listen to this, uh, wonderful but very scary interview, he still thinks there’s a 70% chance we go extinct.
[00:31:46] Joe: And he goes into why robots are gonna take over the world. Let’s say that it happens slightly. Uh, you do take a pay cut, 30% pay cut. How do you go about- We go slightly extinct? We, we go slightly extinct. Let’s say that you go partly extinct. Don’t know how that happens. But let’s say you take a pay cut because your job is ubiquitous and you’re competing with robots.
[00:32:06] Joe: Or let’s say that, uh, they don’t need you like they used to need you s- because some of the thought that went into your job has been marginalized. I don’t know. Are these things to think about, you know, in a SWOT analysis, right? What is T for? T is for threat in… i- if you do a SWOT analysis. Should we pay attention to the threats?
[00:32:23] Joe: And then on a financial side, let’s finally get to the part that we are very good at, not predicting technology changes, but about money. We’re gonna talk about, uh, all the things that maybe you can do to protect yourself, whether this happens or some other thing comes along. If AI continues and everything goes great, well, I think we’re…
[00:32:43] Joe: you guys will all have some moves that can help us anyway. All right. At the halfway point of every Friday Stacking Benjamins show, we have this fantastic year-long… Talk about robots fighting, no robots here. We are fisticuffs, hand-to-hand combat when it comes to trivia, and man, do we have quite a barn burner going on, Doug.
[00:33:02] Joe: It didn’t look like this. It looked like it was over about six weeks ago, and OG was just staring at this record of 18 wins in a year and, um, counting down the moments till he passes it, but that’s no longer the case. Don’t get me wrong, he can- He can still get the record, but it’s tightened
[00:33:19] Doug: Yeah. Well, I mean, he was like the Tiger Woods of our trivia competition.
[00:33:23] Doug: Everybody just assumed he was gonna blow past Jack Nicklaus and win every major for every year for the next 40 years, and he came to a screeching halt, and it appears OG may have as well. Because while OG’s sitting at a very respectable nine wins so far already this year, Jesse’s sitting right behind him…
[00:33:42] Doug: Or excuse me, Jesse’s robot is sitting right behind him at eight, and, uh, Paula’s knocking on the ring saying, “I want in, too.” She’s got five wins. So it is a tight race right now.
[00:33:53] Joe: Yeah, if P- Paula gets to six, we are, we’re looking at we could have a change before the end of summer, which would be amazing.
[00:34:01] OG: Sorry, what, what are the current scores? I’ve been, uh, absent a little bit.
[00:34:04] Doug: Yeah.
[00:34:05] OG: No, I didn’t… I seriously, I wasn’t paying attention.
[00:34:07] Joe: Like, in the last two minutes- You have nine … nine- Jesse has
[00:34:09] Doug: eight …
[00:34:10] Joe: eight
[00:34:11] Doug: And Paula has five
[00:34:12] Joe: 9-8-5, yeah. All right. Oh. Those are the stakes, OG. Okay. Let’s talk about, uh, f- what we’re doing with those stakes.
[00:34:19] Joe: We’re gonna have a question. Doug?
[00:34:21] Doug: Here’s our question this week. Joe, hey there, Stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Today marks the anniversary of England finally getting rid of one of the weirdest taxes in history. For more than 150 years, they taxed people based on how many windows their house had.
[00:34:39] Doug: Since glass was really expensive, the more windows you had, the Richard they, the richer they Richard?
[00:34:45] Joe: I think it’s they be Richard. What does Richard have to do with it?
[00:34:50] Doug: Uh, the richer King Richard figured you were. People hated this tax so much they’d actually brick over perfectly good windows just to avoid paying it.
[00:35:00] Doug: Others painted fake windows onto the sides of their building so that they could l- actually look richer. Can you imagine? You call up your contractor, “Uh, yeah, I wanna cover up this beautiful bay window with your finest red blocky things.” A- and the contractor’s like, “Sir, that’s gonna make your house look dark and damp, and you’ll probably get exposed to the vapors.”
[00:35:21] Doug: And you’re like, “Sure, but it’s gonna save me 12 quid in taxes next year. Get on with it.” Under England’s old tax code, our basement would’ve been considered a studio apartment with optional daylight. We’re still not even sure if the dryer vent counts as a window or just our primary source of oxygen.
[00:35:39] Doug: Honestly, I don’t know why people wanted all those windows anyways. They’re just more stuff to wash. Plus, every time somebody says, “Look at this beautiful natural light,” what I hear is, “Awesome. Now people will know I only dust when the US wins the World Cup.” So here’s today’s trivia question. On average, how many windows are installed in a newly built single-family home in the United States?
[00:36:03] Doug: I’ll be back right after I ask Joe’s mom if we can crack the door at the top of the stairs for more than 20 minutes a day.
[00:36:09] Joe: Wow, I didn’t even know there was gonna be a question, Doug. I thought we were just getting- … a soliloquy about window, window maintenance. Good stuff. Uh, OG, average American home built today, how many windows?
[00:36:26] OG: That’s gonna take me a while to think about. I just gotta think of how many windows are in my house, so
[00:36:31] Doug: hold on. Oh, geez. And then subtract. Uh-
[00:36:35] OG: Yeah, obviously.
[00:36:36] Joe: Oh, Jesus, 87.
[00:36:37] Doug: I just noticed that I failed to mention when this tax was abo- I said it was abolished on this day in history, but I did not say this day in 1851.
[00:36:48] Doug: The tax started in 1696 and was a- abolished in 1851.
[00:36:54] Joe: But it is important to your answer about how many- If that helps you … windows a new modern construction house today. You gotta know when it was abolished to get that right.
[00:37:02] Jesse: Did the tax have a name, Doug? Was it the… Did it have a s- specific name?
[00:37:07] Doug: Uh, it may have.
[00:37:08] Doug: I, uh… My research did not surface that answer.
[00:37:12] Jesse: Got it. It’s good research.
[00:37:14] Paula: It seems like the obvious workaround would be to just have a home with one very large window-
[00:37:19] Joe: And that’s it …
[00:37:19] Paula: right? If, if, if- Yeah, I mean- … I mean, in, in that tax structure.
[00:37:23] Doug: In 1696 they weren’t making one really large window.
[00:37:27] Paula: Hmm.
[00:37:28] Joe: I do know that for our adventure- If they had AI,
[00:37:30] Paula: they could’ve innovated that.
[00:37:31] Joe: They could have. See? They d- they don’t know. All the great things that… This guy didn’t even talk about that in Diary of a CEO. Didn’t talk about that at all. This is why, by the way, in a lot of the old towns I found out that, uh, in Europe, why the buildings have such little frontage, but they’re really long and narrow, s- ’cause you could build it as deep as you wanted and not pay more tax.
[00:37:51] Joe: It was all the frontage.
[00:37:54] Doug: Frontage. OG, you got an answer for us yet?
[00:37:57] OG: I’ve just listened to you guys chat.
[00:37:59] Doug: We don’t know.
[00:38:00] OG: Um, so, um, this is the average… Uh, just to clarify the question, then, this is the average number- … of windows installed in the average new build in America?
[00:38:12] Doug: There you go. Yes.
[00:38:13] OG: What year is this, uh, data based?
[00:38:15] OG: I-
[00:38:16] Doug: it’s current.
[00:38:18] OG: Current, okay. Yesterday. And, um, would you consider a door a window or, or- … is the glass on the door considered a window?
[00:38:26] Doug: I’m s- sorry, sir, you have exceeded your allotted question a- allotment.
[00:38:31] OG: What about, like, the dormer things? So you may now just pre- Those would be considered windows even though they are not-
[00:38:35] OG: present us with
[00:38:35] Doug: your
[00:38:35] OG: answer … usable. Um, I’m gonna take the number in my house and divide it by two and add a few, and I’m gonna say that the number is, um- Lucky number 21
[00:38:55] Joe: 21. Jesse, what are you gonna do with that?
[00:38:57] Jesse: I’m going definitely higher than that. I’m counting a lot of small things as windows though, ’cause I, as far as I know they’d be windows. So I’m gonna say, um, 44.
[00:39:10] Joe: 44 windows. Paula Pant, how many windows are there in a Manhattan apartment?
[00:39:19] Paula: Oof.
[00:39:21] Joe: Negative three.
[00:39:23] Paula: Aye. Oh, no.
[00:39:27] Paula: All right. So I’m trying to think of the size of a new construct- uh, the size of new construction typically, I’m gonna guess maybe 2,500 square feet. Hold on. Is this- this is for all single family homes? Detached single family?
[00:39:44] Joe: Detached single family.
[00:39:46] Paula: Okay. If you have a series of three windows, but and that they’re all next to each other, like, uh, okay, never mind, I’ve answered my own question.
[00:39:54] Paula: It would be- Because if the… Okay, never mind. I’m going to go, let’s see, per- You talking about one of those French pane
[00:40:01] Joe: things that were fake where the plastic came out and you wash the whole thing, then you put it back in?
[00:40:04] Paula: Y- yeah, yeah, exactly. My parents had it. That’s one window. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OG, what was your answer?
[00:40:10] Paula: You said 21? I’m gonna go 22.
[00:40:16] Joe: 22. Goes for the middle. All right, we got OG at 21, we got Paula at 22, Jesse 44. Is Paula gonna tighten the race? Is Jesse gonna tie for first? Is OG gonna get back on the march toward the overall win and, and the record? We’re gonna find out. We’ll be right back. OG, you kicked us off with 21, everybody else went higher.
[00:40:38] Joe: How you feeling?
[00:40:39] OG: Um, I feel pretty good. I think everyone, um, overestimates the number of windows that are in, at the average house. You guys almost, like, live in, like, really fancy houses.
[00:40:51] Joe: Jesse, your house is very fancy, but that’s just ’cause you live there. Uh, how you feeling about the answer of 44?
[00:40:57] Jesse: OG lives in a dungeon.
[00:40:58] Jesse: He lives in a robot dungeon, let’s be honest. He lives in a robot dungeon. It’s dark. He needs to focus on his, you know, electronics, his soldering. He’s got a welding mask on. A welding mask counts as a window, OG. I don’t know if you knew that. I, I like my chances. Don’t know for sure, but I, I, I like my range, ’cause why?
[00:41:18] Jesse: So, uh, anything above 32, 33. F- 22 to
[00:41:25] Joe: 44, so splits at 33 up.
[00:41:27] Jesse: I, like,
[00:41:27] Joe: I, you know- 33 up … I’ve
[00:41:28] Jesse: got a shot. I’ve got a shot.
[00:41:29] Joe: Which means, Paula, you got 22 to-
[00:41:31] Paula: Yeah …
[00:41:32] Joe: 32 and a half. You’re looking good.
[00:41:33] Paula: Yeah. So I, I, I have a narrow band, but I think I have a reasonable band, you know? Uh, so that, yeah.
[00:41:39] Joe: A narrow band, but the best band.
[00:41:42] Paula: Yeah, exactly. Yes. Exactly.
[00:41:43] Joe: Absolutely. We’re gonna find out if it’s the best band. Doug, who’s g- taking home the win?
[00:41:53] Doug: Well, hey there, stackers. I’m certified home inspector and guy who spent most of his childhood staring through a glass block basement window, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. You remember those things, eight feet off the floor, eight inches tall, and apparently designed to make moving people look like you were tripping balls.
[00:42:11] Doug: Maybe those old English homeowners were onto something, though. Turns out Joe’s mom isn’t cheap. She’s just a master level tax strategist. Brick up enough windows and eventually you stop worrying about taxes, fresh air, and the future. Before the break, I asked you how many windows are installed on average on a newly built single family home in the United States.
[00:42:34] Doug: Well The correct answer was 32 fewer than what Jesse guessed, 10 fewer than what Paula guessed, and just nine fewer than what OG guessed, because the correct answer is 12 windows, making OG our winner. See ya. It has
[00:42:53] Joe: been a long time since OG’s been in the winner’s circle.
[00:42:56] Doug: It has been. Been a- It has been
[00:42:57] Doug: been a long, long
[00:42:58] Joe: time.
[00:42:58] Doug: I think there’s some irony here on this given our discussion today, and I, I need to, uh, chat about this a minute. I chose to use AI to help me derive this question. It gave me the wrong answer. It did. ‘Cause
[00:43:15] Joe: I said- Then Joe caught it … “That sounds like a lot of windows,” so I went and looked it up and it was-
[00:43:20] Doug: Joe caught it
[00:43:21] Joe: 12.
[00:43:22] Doug: It originally told me that the average house has 34 windows, so I went with that.
[00:43:27] Jesse: Come
[00:43:28] Doug: on. And by the w- That sounds like the right answer. By the way… I know. And by the way, Paula, uh, it, what it did get correct was that the average square footage of a single family, uh, detached home in the US is 2,405 square feet.
[00:43:43] Doug: So you were pretty close-
[00:43:44] Paula: Wow.
[00:43:44] Doug: Nailed it, yeah … with your average square footage. But Joe thought, “34 sounds like way too many. You’re probably wrong.” So right before we aired, I went and validated it, and while there isn’t any hard data, uh, the National Association of Home Builders, NAHB, says between eight and 15 windows for a 2,500 square foot house, so we kinda went i- right in the middle for the purposes of our show, and we, we used 12 as the number.
[00:44:09] Doug: Nonetheless, all of that gets you to OG wins today, but it’s… Here we are talking about will AI take all of our jobs. Not yet.
[00:44:17] Joe: Not
[00:44:17] Doug: today. Because it couldn’t figure this one out.
[00:44:19] Joe: Didn’t do it today. Not today. Yeah,
[00:44:22] Doug: Jesse,
[00:44:23] Joe: looks like you want to file a protest.
[00:44:24] Jesse: I just, you know, uh, eight windows in a, in a new house seems…
[00:44:29] Jesse: Or I guess wh- the answer we went with was 12?
[00:44:31] Doug: Yeah. Right.
[00:44:32] Jesse: Right? It was,
[00:44:33] Doug: it seems- The, the range from the NAHB was between eight and 15- Eight and 15 … and we sort of picked
[00:44:37] Jesse: the middle. You could pick the middle. It seems very low to me. It seems very low. But what do I know? Windows
[00:44:43] Doug: are expensive.
[00:44:45] Jesse: People who live in glass houses, you know?
[00:44:48] Joe: Well, here’s what you do, Jesse. If you’re, if you’re angry that OG won, take your robot, send it over to his house.
[00:44:54] Jesse: Will.
[00:44:55] Joe: And there, there you go. My robot said
[00:44:56] Jesse: 34. So did Doug’s.
[00:44:57] Joe: Yes. Let’s, let’s get back to our AI robot discussion. And, uh, Jesse, we’ll stick with you. Sun Tzu, the best battle’s the one that’s never fought, right?
[00:45:08] Joe: You prepare ahead of time. Mm-hmm. You don’t gotta worry about the battle. Daniel’s timeline is that, hey, by 2027, all the stuff he thought was 2032 is gonna happen. Everything’s moving faster than expected. Even if that doesn’t happen, should you still prepare just in case?
[00:45:26] Jesse: Uh, yeah. Well, I- it depends on, I guess, what we mean by prepare.
[00:45:30] Jesse: But, uh, I think preparing for change is, is in general just a good practice in your life. But, but what does that really mean here? I mean, or what am I trying to do? It’s like I’m trying to learn these tools, and I’m trying to implement them into my day-to-day work to make myself more efficient and just to try to understand that if it becomes ubiquitous, um, how I can be kind of ahead of the curve.
[00:45:50] Jesse: I think that kind of preparation is useful. That said, I, I was thinking in the preparation for this interview, I mean, one hard part of being a, a modern human, a member of society, is, like, finding this balance between you don’t wanna necessarily feel like you’re burying your head in the sand and, like, ignoring these kind of predictions.
[00:46:08] Jesse: But at the same time, if you take every prediction like this to heart, I think it’s just a recipe for an immense amount of stress and anxiety, uh, a- and existential dread. So I don’t really know how to find the balance there, uh, but I’m trying to… I’m doing my best, where I don’t wanna just deny the, the existence of AI.
[00:46:28] Jesse: Uh, but at the same time, if I truly took to heart that I was gonna lose my job in the next couple years… And, and what’s the one thing he said in the intro? Like, I was taking notes. He talked about, like, his kids. They chose not to have children because, uh-
[00:46:42] Joe: Don’t even enter the workf- ’cause, ’cause they would never have a job.
[00:46:45] Joe: Yeah. They would never be able to do- Yeah … anything in the workforce. They wouldn’t have any-
[00:46:47] Jesse: Yeah.
[00:46:48] Joe: Apparently, he associates work with meaning
[00:46:51] Jesse: There’s a little bit of, um, I mean, there’s a lot of existential dread, I feel like, in the way he’s speaking. And I don’t know, it sounds kind of… It’s a bit of a bummer to take that to heart.
[00:47:00] Jesse: Well, well, a- and
[00:47:01] Joe: it is a question
[00:47:01] Jesse: So finding the balance, yeah.
[00:47:03] Joe: That is a question. I mean, you could, you could just sit around and be bummed all day, or you could do something about it. I like where Jesse’s going, OG. Learn the tools, you know? Don’t just sit around and worry about AI. Like, begin using AI and see how the tools work.
[00:47:14] Joe: How else do you get prepared if, with the threat that your job might change or your job might be gone?
[00:47:21] OG: I mean, isn’t this true that your job might change or be gone regardless of what circumstances you find yourself in? So-
[00:47:27] Joe: Good point. So do it anyway …
[00:47:28] OG: I don’t know if you guys know this or not, but a couple weeks ago I did this bike race in, uh, Colorado.
[00:47:33] Joe: Doug, let the record show it only took him 43 minutes- … to finish a bike ride. Remarkable.
[00:47:38] Doug: Remarkable feat.
[00:47:39] OG: So I mean, I got this cool medal and everything. Um- Could’ve outsourced it to your robot … it says, “Oh my God, we can’t believe you finished.” We can’t. Um, in slightly under 15 hours too.
[00:47:50] Doug: Right.
[00:47:50] Joe: We didn’t think we’d need a medal for you.
[00:47:52] OG: I know. Sir, the, the, the finish line closed. We just, we met you out on the course, and we just wanted to go home.
[00:48:00] Doug: Remember, Joe, we talked about the Barkley Marathons, that race where- Oh, yeah … they always let one person in that they are sure is not gonna be able to finish. Right. And everybody’s wondering, are they the one?
[00:48:10] Joe: Right. Do you think OG was the one?
[00:48:12] OG: Yeah, if you don’t know if you’re, who the sucker is at the poker table. Um, but one of the guys that I was, um, there with, I was talking to Lissa about, you know, training and, you know, that sort of thing, and she says, “Oh, has he been, has he been training too?” And I said, “No, this is what he does for his life.”
[00:48:34] OG: He runs ultramarathons and does century bike rides, and, like, that’s his normal weekly activity. So he’s not training for it, he just lives it. A- and I think that’s probably a good way to think about all this stuff too. It’s like if you’re always planning for your future and thinking about the things that can go right, and occasionally thinking about the things that might not go so right, then nothing comes as a surprise to you.
[00:49:05] OG: It’s when, it’s when you don’t do any of those things that you have no flexibility and you have no sort of additional way to, to cope w- you know, with whatever happens. Because there’s probably a greater likelihood that you lose your job because you’re sick or hurt in an accident, you know? And there’s some chance that you get hit by a bus and you don’t wake up.
[00:49:28] OG: Like, those are also real probabilities. We spend almost no time thinking about that, and instead we think about, like, which, you know, Tesla robot is gonna be the strongest and fastest to get to Jesse’s 44-window house- … and just start throwing rocks around like crazy. Like, bet you wish they were bricked up now, Jesse.
[00:49:51] Joe: Lower taxes and not worried about the snow getting in. Yeah. Paula, he mentioned the F word, flexibility. Mm. It seems to me like pr- prepare for flexibility at the very least.
[00:50:02] Paula: Yeah. Uh, JL Collins has a great quote, “Flexibility is the only true security.” He says that in the context of your spending in retirement, but that broader principle can be applied anywhere, including of course how you manage your career.
[00:50:18] Joe: Well, it could be even around your money. I mean, flexibility with your money. Lower your- Mm-hmm … fixed expenses in case your income changes.
[00:50:23] Paula: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yes, flexibility is the only true security. In the context of AI, alongside flexibility, you have the opportunity for immense creativity. So, like, what I would encourage anyone to do is
[00:50:39] Paula: So Anthropic has this thing called Skill Jar, and it’s just free training on how to use all of their super cool features. So it’s totally free. All it requires is your time. Play around with that, and then go to ChatGPT and, like, learn how to build GPTs, and if you just do those two things, you are already, unless you’re in, like, a technical field, for the average person who’s in a non-technical field, if you just do those two things, you will already be way ahead of a lot of your peers, and that gives you, like, an edge.
[00:51:11] Paula: Because so much of what people need in the coming years is to have an edge over their competition in the job market.
[00:51:20] Joe: Somebody was telling me just a couple weeks ago something that I saw when I took … A couple years ago I took MasterClass, had a, uh, just a, like, basics of AI. There was a guy from Google and a woman who was a social media woman teaching people how to use AI.
[00:51:34] Joe: But the Google guy talked about the jagged edge, about what things it’s good at and what things AI is not good at, and learning that. The gentleman I was talking to last week was talking about the more he knew about that jagged edge, what it was good at, what it wasn’t good at, and could kind of follow that, the, the less threatening it seemed, and much more power he felt over it, which I think is, Jesse, what you were talking about, using the tools.
[00:51:58] Joe: But let’s talk about using the tools, Jesse, ’cause let’s say I’m 58 years old. I wanna retire when I’m 62. There’s all this doom and gloom about my career, but four years, man. D- do I need to learn this if I’ve only got four years to go, or do you think this’ll help me during retirement too?
[00:52:15] Jesse: Yeah. Hmm.
[00:52:17] Jesse: There’s a good question. I, I kind of changed my answer as I thought about it for 10 seconds, ’cause at first I was gonna say no, you, you don’t really need to learn it. Like, you’re close enough to retirement that it probably doesn’t matter. But then I thought about, let’s think about today’s 80-year-old or 85-year-old who…
[00:52:33] Jesse: The World Wide Web was 1993, right? So today’s 80-year-old would’ve been in their late, what? Late 40s in 1993? Am I thinking about that… Is that math right? Someone check that math. I think that’s right. Sounds good.
[00:52:44] Joe: Close.
[00:52:44] Jesse: Would that person have benefited from learning the internet even though they were later in their career?
[00:52:49] Jesse: Like, I think the answer is yes. Or, like, learning how to use a personal computer even though they were later in their career, as personal computing became kind of ubiquitous in the ’90s and 2000s. Like, I think the answer is yes.
[00:52:58] Joe: Jesse, I know, I mean, I know at least in a single case scenario.
[00:53:02] Jesse: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:02] Joe: My mother-in-law told me before she died she felt more and more isolated during her later years because she never learned how to use email, and she didn’t text.
[00:53:12] Joe: And we would get together at Thanksgiving, and we’d talk about the hilarious videos we were sharing with each other online- Mm-hmm … about the email stuff that we were chatting about in an email thread, or the letters people wrote to us and she didn’t get. And, um, she said she felt increasingly isolated.
[00:53:27] Joe: She should’ve learned it.
[00:53:29] Jesse: Yeah.
[00:53:29] Doug: Jesse, I, I mean, I can speak from direct… I’m glad you used that e- example and even called out those years, because I can speak from direct experience that I was early in my career in leading IT departments in ’94, ’95, just as the internet was really coming on. It was incredibly challenging.
[00:53:48] Doug: Everybody was terrified because exactly for the, all of the same reasons. The same bullet points of risks that people are talking about now with AI, we were talking about in the IT field as the internet was coming on. And we talk about should a 40-year-old-ish person have retrained? The answer was 100% yes, and we knew it then.
[00:54:09] Doug: But one thing that has happened, at least over the course of those last 35-plus years, is that there are always some legacy systems or legacy technologies that people don’t wanna give up, either because it’s where their comfort zone is, or because the cost and pain of moving off of those things is really high.
[00:54:29] Doug: And so you need some people to s- stay back and keep making buggy whips and wagon wheels. Are you gonna be the lucky person that gets… All of a sudden then your salary skyrockets because you’re one of the last few people who still know that old programming language- … or know that old way to maintain that system.
[00:54:46] Doug: I mean, there are still subway systems in the US that run off of three-and-a-half inch floppy disks. And so there are still people needed that know that old technology, but banking on you being the person that gets relied upon is very, very risky. So I would absolutely, even late career, look into re-skilling yourself.
[00:55:09] Jesse: Yeah. I mean, I, I, I just think about, and I’ll, I’ll pass the baton after this, it’s Thanksgiving 2050. Today’s 58-year-old is then gonna be 82, and their grandkids are telling stories about sending their fighting robots over to each other’s house, and you’re sitting there- But I don’t have a robot … your s- your mouth is full of stuffing- I want a
[00:55:29] Joe: robot
[00:55:29] Jesse: you’re trying to think, you’re thinking about pumpkin pie, and right, you don’t have a fighting robot. You wouldn’t even know where to start with a fighting robot. Meanwhile, OG’s fighting robot is literally beating you at the Thanksgiving table. Is that the world we want?
[00:55:43] Doug: Absolutely.
[00:55:44] Jesse: I rest my case.
[00:55:45] Doug: Sounds incredible.
[00:55:46] Joe: I can see there’s some stacker out there who just got motivated, Jesse, by the fact that they could keep up with OG’s robot. Like, I don’t care about the rest of this, I’m gonna keep up with OG’s robot. OG, we’ve
[00:55:56] OG: said- Do you guys ever play, like, egg Olympics? Do you know what that is? Mm-mm.
[00:55:59] Jesse: Egg, like
[00:56:00] Joe: E-G-G? The one where you’re trying to drop eggs from, uh, further and further away?
[00:56:05] OG: No. No. I, uh, there’s probably a different name for it, but it’s like, you know, let’s say you’re gonna make some scrambled eggs for breakfast. So instead of cracking the eggs on the counter, you crack them against one another- And one is always stronger than the other, and so the winner keeps going. And so you always keep this winner going.
[00:56:26] OG: And like some, at some point in time you’re like, “Well, this thing’s been in my fridge for like, you know, like three weeks and hasn’t lost yet.” ‘Cause this is the champ. Like this is the master. Yeah. So that would be like my robot. Like I would just like- … we could fight. It’d be like a bracket. And then it’d be like the biggest robot keeps going, so.
[00:56:44] Joe: Again, the amount of thought he’s given to this, Doug, is creepy. We talk about multiple income streams. OG, we’ve talked about on the show before, having money come from different ways.
[00:56:52] OG: Robots.
[00:56:53] Joe: Just w- well, here’s the point. With AI, is it better time than ever to have multiple income streams coming in? I
[00:57:00] OG: mean, again, this goes back to my conversation a few minutes ago about like you don’t have to get ready if you’re always ready.
[00:57:07] OG: Yes, you should have multiple streams of income. Why, why do you need to wait until, you know, until your job’s about to be eliminated before you go, “Oh, I should probably frigging think about this.” Like, “Oh, crap, retirement’s around the corner. I should probably start saving money.” Yes, you should be doing that right now.
[00:57:23] OG: You should be exploring other things that you can be doing. It doesn’t mean you have to spend 100 hours a week working, but this, this should just be part of your life. You should be thinking about this stuff a lot. Preparation favors the prepared. You know, you can have all these, like, different analogies.
[00:57:42] OG: I guarantee Paula spends a lot of time just, like, hanging around on Zillow, right? You’re just always looking, ’cause you just- Mm-hmm … you know, you’ve got a sense of, like, what the market is in the area that you like to shop in, and every so often something pops up and you go, “Whoa, that’s a good deal.” And then you look and, and, and, you know, it, it- you have some interest around it.
[00:58:03] OG: You decide what you wanna do with it and you move on. So yes, you should be doing that stuff all the time.
[00:58:09] Doug: You know, it, it occurs to me, OG and Paula, that people listening probably hate these kinds of answers. You should always be flexible, or, you know, if you’re always ready, then, then you’ll be
[00:58:19] OG: ready. You know what people hate, Doug?
[00:58:20] OG: It’s, like, when people don’t button their shirts all the way up and they’re not tan and, uh, they got the chest hair hanging out. Just as a thing. I was thinking it just out loud, like, things that people don’t like. But go on. You tell us what else people don’t like. Notice, notice
[00:58:32] Joe: he didn’t say hairs with an S.
[00:58:34] Joe: He said hair.
[00:58:36] Doug: So-
[00:58:36] Joe: Singular …
[00:58:37] Doug: I think people get frustrated when they hear answers like this because we’re, we’re not able to give specifics about, well, if… Okay, if this current job or career that you have now isn’t going to withstand the changes into AI, what should you do? We don’t know, but we didn’t know when we chose our current careers, right?
[00:58:56] Doug: And n- none of us sitting here thought we would be here today 35 years ago when we were just starting out in the workforce. When I started, uh, I thought I was gonna be a tech writer. Got me into the IT world, quickly into project management, quickly… Then I just sort of worked through IT leadership. I had no idea I was going to do that, or that that was going to happen.
[00:59:16] Doug: So you don’t have to know. You don’t have to pick the one thing that is going to be your ticket out of here and be able to avoid the, you know, the changes that AI brings. But you gotta do something. You need to sort of pick a different path and be flexible as, as Paula said earlier.
[00:59:31] Joe: I love the idea of, of s- just staying on top of it.
[00:59:34] Joe: Yeah. What’s hot in your career? Where’s your career evolving? I remember many times in my career that sometimes people made themself a dinosaur because they’d- they wouldn’t change. They’re like, “Oh, I don’t need that new thing.” Right. And guess what? Then later on, the clients didn’t need you. Paula, last thing.
[00:59:50] Joe: We had a whole episode on AI. Diary of a CEO whole episode. Well, he’s had a few episodes on AI, right? Yeah. You’ve done AI on episodes. Jesse, I’m sure you’ve done AI episodes. More, more, more, this is what we’re talking about. Is it time to add the AI whatever fund to your portfolio?
[01:00:11] Paula: Mm. You mean add a…
[01:00:14] Joe: Yeah.
[01:00:14] Joe: You know how there’s sector funds?
[01:00:16] Paula: Right. Sector fund for AI? Yeah. My first inclination is I would wanna know what’s inside of that fund because are we talking about- You know, when they eventually IPO, uh, big public-facing companies like Anthropic or OpenAI, or are we talking about the cluster of infrastructure, the data centers, the suppliers who, who make the parts that go into that?
[01:00:41] Paula: Like the- Yeah. Lumen
[01:00:42] Joe: with the fiber optics
[01:00:43] Paula: between… Yeah. Yeah, or just, or the concrete companies, the cement companies, the flooring company. Like, you know what I mean? Like, are we talking about the materials and parts for all of the infrastructure behind it? Are we talking about the semiconductors, obviously.
[01:01:02] Paula: People often think about the very forward-looking things, but then there’s, number one, there’s all of the back-end infrastructure, and then number two, every industry is augmented by AI. And, and OG is correct in that it has not yet shown profitability, but we are in such early days where- Well, or, and even
[01:01:22] Joe: more importantly, what he said was productivity gains
[01:01:24] Paula: Right, yes, yeah.
[01:01:25] Paula: Yeah. Exactly. But we’re also still in the early days where everyone is, like, token maxing, and everyone’s just sort of like we’re basically all preschoolers who have been handed some Silly Putty and trying to figure out what we can build with the Silly Putty. That’s the stage of AI that, that we are all in in our industries right now.
[01:01:46] Paula: And so cool, when you’re on the playground and you’re figuring things out, yeah, you might not be productive because you’re still in the playground phase. But as AI evolves and as our skills with AI evolve, as we become better at prompting, as we become better at building out agentic AI models, you know, as we become, like, more efficient users and directors and, and orchestrators- I’m
[01:02:12] Joe: hearing no.
[01:02:13] Paula: Well, I think my position is that every industry is an AI industry- Which means then no … or, or soon it will be, you know? Don’t buy the
[01:02:21] Joe: sector. Yeah.
[01:02:22] Paula: I, I don’t know. I don’t know. Um, it’s not a no, it’s not a yes. It’s a I’m not even sure what is included in the term sector.
[01:02:32] Joe: Okay. Jesse, buy the sector?
[01:02:34] Jesse: Already own it.
[01:02:35] Jesse: Efficient markets indexing. I, I mean, my… I- it… you could ask me any question about any sector and at any price, and my answer would always echo this idea of the price reflects the value that the market sees in the future earnings of that sector already. And even if AI, you know, I, I look at the, the, what is it?
[01:02:55] Jesse: The hyperscalers and, and the people who are building the pickaxes, as it were, for AI, and, you know, a lot of these companies, there’s one here in Upstate New York. Well, actually, there’s two with Upstate New York connections, one being Corning, another being Micron, that if you look up at Corning Inc or you look at Micron and you look at their charts over the last two or three years, these stocks have gone bananas.
[01:03:14] Jesse: So to some extent it’s like do I invest in the sector? The idea is that other investors have already seen the future potential earnings from this sector, and I don’t know if there’s more juice left to squeeze there or not. I, I simply don’t know. I’m not an expert in that kind of field, but I do own everything.
[01:03:32] Joe: Talk about pivoting, by the way. You know, we talked about staying up on things and pivoting and going where… L- look at Corning. We talked a few, couple weeks ago, Doug, about, uh, Nintendo. Yeah. Nintendo used to be, like, a playing card company. Right. Um, but just these companies that change to go where the ball is.
[01:03:48] Joe: I mean, how much Corning cookware do I own, right? And, and, and now it’s an AI company. You’re like, wow. Uh, OG, buy the sector?
[01:03:57] OG: No. I, I already said this before, but, like, there’s no reason to, you know, uh, try to decipher which one of the, you know, 10,000 different companies that are gonna be the ones that are successful.
[01:04:13] OG: It’s, for all the reasons that Paul was talking about, it’s still in its infancy. Everybody’s still throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. It’s just easier to own every company in the world and just see what happens. I
[01:04:24] Joe: think it’s a great place to leave it. Thank you, guys, for a great discussion.
[01:04:27] Joe: We’ll link to, if you want more doom and gloom, I’ll link to the Steven Bartlett episode on Diary of the CEO. I
[01:04:32] OG: would say there’s another great AI quick podcast about 15, or 45 minutes. Tony Robbins just interviewed Ray Kurzweil a couple weeks ago. It was on his feed, and he has some equally intriguing thoughts about the future of AI.
[01:04:46] Joe: Interesting. We’ll also link to that. Let’s find out what all of you are doing this fine weekend. OG, you out on the bicycle in the Texas humidity?
[01:04:54] OG: Uh, nope. I am going to Michigan, so I will see you all later.
[01:04:59] Joe: Fantastic. You wanna get closer to the fires.
[01:05:02] OG: Yeah, it was pretty smoky in Colorado when I was there, too, but, um, nothing like what they’re getting up north, unfortunately.
[01:05:08] Joe: Yeah. Paul, uh, you’ve covered AI. You have an episode- Mm-hmm … of yours that we should listen to for more AI discussion?
[01:05:15] Paula: Oh, yeah. Uh, let’s see. There have been a few. Here, um, go to, uh, Jesse and then come back to me while I look
[01:05:21] Joe: up. I, I will. Jesse, you want a moment to pull up yours, too?
[01:05:25] Jesse: No, no, I’m, I’m good. I’m good.
[01:05:26] Jesse: And Doug, really good question. Micron, you said, is in Boise, Idaho. Uh, they are building one of the largest chip manufacturing facilities in the USA outside of Syracuse. Mm. So that’s, that’s the upstate New York connection. But as for stuff coming up on the podcast, let me pull up. Okay, uh, uh, this past Wednesday we published What Your Brokerage Statement Doesn’t Tell You.
[01:05:49] Jesse: And, uh, n- uh, then on August 5th, we are publishing AMA number 19, and we’re getting ready for episode 150 soon, which will be a bit of a personal AMA. So we’ve got some fun ones in the hopper.
[01:05:59] Joe: But specifically, I know that, uh, you were pulling all that stuff up, so you might not have heard my question.
[01:06:04] Joe: AI-specific episodes that you’ve done.
[01:06:09] Jesse: None.
[01:06:09] Joe: None. None.
[01:06:11] Jesse: None. I don’t think I have one. Uh, I’m looking, I’m looking here. All
[01:06:15] Joe: right. All right. Well, we’ll go to Paula, and we’ll come back and you can say yes or no.
[01:06:17] Jesse: Yeah. Go to Paula, then come back to
[01:06:18] Joe: me. Yes. Paula, give us some AI.
[01:06:21] Paula: All right. So episode 693, you can go to affordanything.com/episode693 to access it.
[01:06:28] Paula: It is an interview with Dr. Ben Zweig. He is the chief economist at Revelio Labs, and he studies the workforce, actually. His thesis is that the real question is not whether AI will replace your job, but rather which tasks within your job will be automated and what new opportunities that that creates. He discusses jobs not as individ- indivisible units that either exist or don’t exist, but rather bundles of tasks- Hmm
[01:06:54] Paula: that are constantly evolving. He talks about how ATMs, actually the development of the ATM caused more bank teller jobs to grow bra- because branches became cheaper to operate, and it freed up tellers to do higher value relationship work. So yeah, we, we cover a lot of that, so that’s episode 693.
[01:07:14] Joe: 693.
[01:07:15] Paula: Affordanything.com/episode693.
[01:07:18] Joe: And we’ll put that in the show notes as well, Stackers. Uh, Jesse, did you find one?
[01:07:23] Jesse: I don’t have any
[01:07:24] Joe: It’s all AI all the time. I, I don’t have any, I
[01:07:25] Jesse: don’t have any dedicated to AI.
[01:07:27] Joe: Not, not like a- That’s all he talks about is AI- yeah … at Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors.
[01:07:31] Joe: Thank you, by the way, everybody, for the great notes on yesterday’s special episode about pricing insurance. Next week, by the way, our last week in July, we are prepping for, everybody’s heard of Financial Literacy Month, we’re gonna have Financial Action Month. So we’re doing five episodes next week to get you ready for that.
[01:07:49] Joe: We got a bingo sheet. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. The fun starts on Wednesday, though, but five days of Stacking Benjamins, pinch yourself, that’s coming up next week. What’s coming up right now is Doug is gonna tell us one of the three things we should learn from today’s episode.
[01:08:03] Doug: Well, Joe, first, take some advice from OG and history.
[01:08:06] Doug: Anytime us humans have come up with a significant advancement, it’s really just raised the standards for what value add means. We’ll adapt and find a better use for our time. Second, don’t forget what Paula said when she quoted JL Collins, “Flexibility is the only true security.” Rather than digging your heels in on your current skill set, simply be ready and willing to learn.
[01:08:28] Joe: That’s why I stretch out every day, Doug, is to stay flexible. But anyway…
[01:08:33] Doug: Didn’t like that image. But the big lesson, history shows people will do almost anything to get out of paying taxes, which must explain why Joe’s mom keeps trying to brick over the door to the basement. Thanks to Jesse Cramer for joining us today.
[01:08:49] Doug: Be sure to check out his burgeoning podcast, It’s Filty: Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors. We’ll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com. Thanks to Paula Pant for hanging out with us today. You’ll find her fabulous podcast, Afford Anything, wherever you listen to the finest podcasts.
[01:09:08] Doug: And finally, thanks to OG for joining us. Looking for good financial planning help? Head to stackingbenjamins.com/OG for his calendar. This show is the property of SP Podcast LLC copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. You’ll find out about our awesome team at stackingbenjamins.com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots.
[01:09:35] Doug: Come say hello. And oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamins show.
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