Our “No limit” podcast features 7investing advisors Luke Hallard and Krzysztof Piekarski breaking down investing-related topics.

Episode 14 of No Limit has Luke saying goodbye to the alpine slopes while praising Krzysztof for his wholesome view on paying for Twitter’s blue verification check. Meanwhile, AI is starting to really scare people, including people who know what they’re talking about and who wrote an open letter about slowing down and not advancing much further until we establish proper frameworks. Luke wonders if organizations and companies involved are ethically minded enough or just going full blast at humanity’s expense and doom. But, the tools we have now are truly staggering and Luke dives into some of his most recent use cases.

Krzysztof’s book of the week is The Grid which made his April recommendation for 7investing a seeming no-brainer: our electrical grid needs lots of help and companies are positioning themselves to make lots of money by fixing the oldest machine without which our society would fall apart — so lots of talk about batteries and electricity.

We end the conversation with some fascinating stats about home-schooling in the age of ChatGPT and the rise of the Indian economy which Luke suggests may deliver some great investments in the coming years. Krzysztof wisely asks Luke to tell him which ones, but that’s for episode 15!

Transcript

Luke: Hello and welcome to the latest edition of No Limit with Krzysztof and Luke, a 7investing production. This episode 14, today is the 29th of March. Krzysztof, as ever, is a delight to see you. How’s it going?

Krzysztof: Good morning to you, Luke. I heard it’s the end of your ski season

Luke: Woohoo. Yes. My last 24 hours, the, we got 11 inches of new snow last night, and so I’m going, I’m looking forward to like an eager. Getting up there and, uh, tearing it up for the very last day before I head to San Francisco.

Krzysztof: Oh, that’s astounding. Skiing is, is is hard, like in the sense that, you know, you’re cold and you’re on the lifts. Right. Takes a lot out of you. Right. Do you get kind of acclimated? Do you get, do you get kind of used to the season as the season goes on?

Luke: yeah, for sure. Uh, you develop like a bunch of muscles that you like wither during the non-key months. Uh, like just being an altitude, like I was exhausted for the whole first couple of weeks until the body goes, oh heck, I need like a bunch of extra red blood cells and then you can start being like, fit again.

So yeah, you definitely do, but then you also accumulate injuries. Uh, like I’ve wiped myself out in two pretty big accidents, both of which took me out for a week each. So yeah, it’s all part and parcel. All good fun.

Krzysztof: Yeah. Live and learn, right.

Luke: You got it.

Krzysztof: you are so, yeah. You are so British. Live and learn

Luke: stiff, upper. Yeah.

Krzysztof: Yeah.

Luke: How about yourself? I didn’t ask you on the show, but uh, you had that, uh, accident a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month or two ago now you made a full recovery from that.

Krzysztof: Oh yeah. That was uh, that was peanuts. 

Luke: And you’re still, uh, you’re still beating up the big guys and, jujitsu.

Krzysztof: I am most certainly not Yeah. You know, the better you get the, the better your opponents get and. and, uh, I’m not in the phase where I was going every day. You know, it’s one of those things if you go every day, you start thinking about it and breathing and living it. Um, I’m kind of down to three days a week, which is enough to kind of

Luke: Okay,

Krzysztof: I’m kind of treading water. Yeah.

Luke: you could, uh, you’re ready to defend your family’s honor if it comes to it

Krzysztof: I can’t if, if, if it came down to that, I think I could defend my, my family’s on earth and yours too. If anyone ever messes with you, look even looks at you the wrong way. I got you

Luke: I’ve got enemies. Watch out. I’ve got enemies. Hey, I tell you what, one of my potential enemies is Elon Musk. I’m, I am not a Twitter blue subscriber. And, uh, he’s about to make a bunch of policy changes, which means a kind of have to pay the $7 a month.

I notice you’ve done that already. What’s your experience of suddenly getting the blue tick?

Krzysztof: I trust Elon, and it’s interesting, even though my politics and his don’t often align, I, I, I’ve been following his story now for so long, I was pretty deep into trying to understand who this human is, so I’m sure I have a bias and blinder.

I often end up thinking like, this guy knows a lot more than I do in terms of engineering and how to build a product and my own two pennies on the issues. Probably just pretty far inferior and ignorant compared to what he’s offering. So the way I think about it is I have learned to use Twitter I think in a very powerful and effective.

Put it this way. I’ve met a lot of people and followed a lot of rabbit holes that were generally educational and had value in terms of networking and, and connections that taught me an immense amount that I otherwise would not have. And so for. Paying $7 a month for, at this point, the value that I’m getting , I would pay a lot more, put it that way. 

Luke: Has your experience improved materially as a result of paying you seven bucks, or you just feel a bit more kind of morally balanced? You’re paying for the value you get?

Krzysztof: I don’t know is the thing. I don’t, it’s, it’s hard to say for me, honestly, because I, I guess I have a pretty clear window on how I use it and why I use it, so it certainly hasn’t gotten worse. The bots seem to be less effective. There’s that, but I didn’t really have a huge issue with them beforehand, so I’m still continuing to use it as I did.

And, uh, hard pressed to say there’s been much difference one way or another for me.

Luke: Okay, you’ve maybe you’ve got

Krzysztof: Is that what

Luke: jujitsu. I’ll, uh, I’ll have to go work on that. I think I’m gonna have to pay my seven bucks anyway, otherwise it’s gonna break for me in mid-April. So look out for the blue tick

Krzysztof: Yeah, I think that that ethical piece is, is not a small thing. When I know I’m using this thing so much and I’m getting so much value, $7 to help the the ecosystem go is I think, completely justified.

Luke: Very wholesome. Okay. And if you’re not following Krzysztof on Twitter and you’re listening, by the way, there’s definitely more if you’re listening than you’re following. Go check him out. He’s at seven Flying Plaus and I’m at seven Luke Hallard. Hey, uh, getting off that bit of self-promotion though, I do see Elon allegedly.

And signed up to something else along with a bunch of other folk, possibly even like overnight. I woke up at 4:00 AM I got woken up by raccoons on my patio and uh, ended up down like a Twitter rabbit hole. And I, I ran into an open letter. Did you see this from the Future of Life Institute?

Krzysztof: No, I did not.

Luke: Yeah. Interesting. I, I’m not sure if I agree with what it’s suggesting, but it’s a very interesting point, To give you the exact summary. Essentially this foundation, uh, have proposed that the world pause giant AI experiments. They’ve put out an open letter to, uh, especially to kind of big AI founders, people like Musk, Sam Altman, I guess folk like that.

They’ve got over a thousand signatures, and what they’re suggesting is, we should take a deliberate stop, take a breath rather than charging kind of headlong into the singularity, you know, possibly the end of humanity as I was kind of getting a bit wistful about a few weeks ago.

And, um, stop developing models that are stronger than G P T four, which is incredible. Like I’m paying. 20 bucks a month for G P T four, myself. Now I get so much value out of it. , and they’re saying we should actually, rather than continuing develop deeper and deeper models, which might have emergent capabilities that we don’t really understand, let’s take a breath and try and make sure these things we’re developing. Are, kind to humanity, basically. We can make sure they’re safe, they’re giving good information, um, but essentially trying to rein them in before they get a little bit too far ahead of us. Would you think about that?

Krzysztof: So yes, I did see the sl. It’s so fascinating because this is a topic that I’m about to start teaching in my Consciousness of Animals class 

Luke: Hmm.

Krzysztof: and the last, the last portion of the course will be dedicated to this question of what are humans in the age of ai, whether we becoming, including there’s a new movement out there.

That is, is putting forth a provocative case that it would be better for the earth to have humans destroyed, you know, to make us go away. Because if you think ecologically George Collins said this a while back, you know, we’re like a bad case of fleas for planet Earth and the planet will be fine, but we’re killing all these other species and so forth that if you’re serious about ecological health and you gotta consider humanity as a problem, and maybe AI is one way that, earth will solve this problem, we’ll kind of do it to ourselves. I think Luke that there is much wisdom in what’s being asked in this open letter. We’re being counseled to have a little patience. Right. A little forbearance. That might be the better word.

Because, uh, this tool it feels to me more powerful, right. Than our capacity to handle it. That’s the basic Right. I also. that humanity does not have within itself the capacity to slow down. We’re too impulsive as a whole in the self-interested parties, the ones that do not think, uh, in a networked way, ecologically, somebody out there will continue developing.

Luke: That, that’s my concern. Right. The signature is to the open letter. These will be the sort of ethically minded organizations that kind of buy that idea, but there’s still gonna be a ton of companies and probably a ton of government backed actors who are gonna charge on regardless.

Krzysztof: Yeah, and that kind of reminds me of the gun debate in the United States

Luke: Right.

Krzysztof: it seems, it seems to me wise to have serious control over automatic weapons. For example, the counter-argument that you hear is that, but then the bad guys are the ones left with them, and then you’re defenseless. And I think on, in a, I don’t, without , gets messy and complicated fast.

I, I get that, but the cynical or skeptical part of me understands that if you take the moral wise path, you will still leave yourself vulnerable to the bad actors, and that could in fact be true. It seems like the missing piece in all of this for me. is this idea that’s we can’t, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right?

That in the end you people have to sacrifice something to get something, and we’re not so good at the sacrificing part, right? , we wanna feel safe. We, we, we wanna do the right thing, we wanna take our time with ai. But to do that would have, we’d have to sacrifice, let’s say profits and whatever. And so we wanna, we want both.

And then in the end, I, I, it saddens me to say this. I’m skeptical of our ability to hit pause, even though it’s the obviously wise thing to do.

Luke: I think I agree. And there’s an interesting idea I hadn’t thought of. Uh, did you listen to the Sam Altman, um, co-founder of OpenAI, interviewer with Lex Friedman this week?

Krzysztof: It’s in my, it’s in my cue.

Luke: Really good. Um, so an idea he put forward was that, um, it’s probably positive in the far future that there are many ais developed by different labs, and if we do get these kind of emergent capabilities, Essentially you’ll have, you know, lots of different ais with perhaps different motivations and then in some ways they’ll become self-regulating with each other.

Sounds like such a bizarre thing to say, but you know, almost kind of, we are kind of creating these gods effectively. Let’s just create a whole bunch of them and hopefully they’ll regulate each other cuz we won’t be able to.

Krzysztof: Yeah. One thing I I would like to bring up for our listeners is that the, my, my understanding of the AI landscape is still that the current ai, the chatGPT version of it is nothing. Close to, uh, general ai, which is the, the kind that we’re really worried about, the kind that could teach itself and basically think for itself without parameters and the, the people ha that have been working in this field now for decades continue to say that as fast as the bounded AI is learning, that that is still.

Nowhere near, uh, the, the, the call it, the, the scary one, and that the gap there is still, uh, huge. And I do remember actually seeing a Twitter poll about this question and like, how many years do you think it will take for the gap to be closed? And if memory serves right, Elon piped in and said he thinks it’s 10 years or, , which is op, which is opposite to what the experts are saying.

Well, other experts beyond him.

Luke: Well, I suppose that’s in the spirit of this Paul’s AI paper, right? It might be closer than we think. So that, that would suggest that we should suddenly start to behave fairly cautiously if we’re in this field. And, if it’s gonna develop in a way that’s bad for humanity, um, we’re probably not gonna know about it until it’s too late.

Krzysztof: Yeah. Uh, it does not give me the warm fuzzies to tell, to tell you the truth. I mean, we already know, right? That a human, we run on primitive software because we’ve been evolving for 300,000 years. it, you know, in, in hunting, GRA gathering kinds of groups and all of a sudden the technological industrial revolution is only what, 200 years ago?

So like, basically not even the blink of an eye. And we can’t handle what we already have. Right? We’ve software and computers and the internet. It’s already too much for us. Social media, that’s a great example, right? That’s a perfect example. That’s what, 20 years. . And now from the front lines at a university, my students are telling me they are depressed, anxious, addicted.

Uh, they walk into the classroom, you know, eyes on the glu, like all of them, every single one. And when I tell them, put your phones away at the door when you walk into this room, it’s a challenge, right? But they self-diagnose that way. So point being, already, we have too much power and not.

Capacity to deal with it. So now that the robots are here, like, my goodness

Luke: I totally agree with all of that, but at the same time, , if we do put pauses on ai, like these capabilities are so exciting and seeing the step up from G P T 3.5 to four, like I’m using them both. It’s incredible. And seeing what developers have, where they can do, they have even more capabilities than I do, even as a paying user.

Like, heck, I really wanna get this stuff and I wanna see what G PT five and six look like, and how they can make my life in, you know, immeasurably better in ways I can’t imagine. Um, but at the same time, I don’t want ’em to murder me. So, let’s see. Yeah,

Krzysztof: Yeah. The old, yeah. Yeah. I, I wanna ask you, uh, I just haven’t had the time and bandwidth really to. Go through all the tutorials and so forth, but I also paid for the subscription to version four. Can you gimme an example of, of what a big difference you noticed between the two models are.

Luke: um, a lot more depth and sophistication in the results I’m getting. Like I said a couple of times, I’ve put the same question into both and I’ve just got a more nuanced answer from chatGPT four. Um, I think three or 3.5 is kind of optimized for speed. Um, so four is definitely slow. It’s kind of ponderous watching the words trickle out, but you’re getting a better quality, uh, conclusion.

Krzysztof: Okay. I signed up for the, uh, development, um, when you connect the, the AI to the internet, right. That

Luke: All right, cool. I haven’t, I haven’t played with that. Right,

Krzysztof: but I believe I was put on the wait list and I’m still on it, so I haven’t experienced that because that’s a big, that I think will be the mind blowing one

Luke: Yeah.

Krzysztof: when we’re not limited to, I believe September of 21, which is two years ago.

Luke: That’s it.

Krzysztof: I can’t wait to see that. I’m in the process of updating the picture for seven investing because I’m the only one not wearing a jacket and tie. So I look, so I look like a, you know, uh, a hooligan, a hooligan for from off the streets. But I was trying to upload a photo of myself and have. add a jacket and tie any kind of, it’s, it’s, it still looks AI ish, so I don’t think it would work, although that, that might actually be pretty cool. So I don’t know if you’ve used the robot in this way where you actually upload text and I mean the pictures or other stuff.

Luke: Yeah, I should check out, uh, I, I’m using Mid Journey, but I think you have to pay to use Mid Journey version five, but apparently that is like, it’s producing incredible results of real people. so yeah, that’s probably the way to go. If you wanna do like a real flying platypus in a suit soon, there’s no way to get you in an actual suit.

Krzysztof: right? That’s right. That’s, that’s right. I did type in my name and I say, and I did write, uh, you know, my name plus suit and tie, and I got. Pictures of very polish looking like people that were not me, . I was like, oh man.

Luke: Cool. Hey, so, um, so I wouldn’t check in with you cause I’m heading home soon and Katrina tells me I have a box of magic mind waiting for me when I get there. So we’re talking about like super intelligent ais. Are you still taking this stuff? Are you, are you feeling super intelligent yourself?

Krzysztof: not this morning. Uh, but , I feel, I

Luke: why you’re so sleepy looking?

Krzysztof: yeah, I, I don’t know what’s off. Something’s off with me this morning, Luke, but I love this stuff. I generally, generally love this stuff. Here’s how it fits in my day. I only eat dinner at 6:00 PM so I’ve taken to doing a workout in the morning first.

I drink a glass of athletic greens to get my vitamins, and then I have a coffee from about nine till 11. Coffee gets me through to about one, and then around 1:00 PM I take my magic mind.

that gets me to dinner basically, that feeling, the feeling of the, the magic mind juice creates this sensation for me that’s a little bit like coffee, but unlike coffee, the, something happens where I think I deepen in creativity, I don’t quite understand it, but , like coffee gets me energized, but this.

Makes me more excited about new ideas than I feel when I’m not, when I’m not drinking it. So it kind of plays two roles for me, the get me through to dinner, get me through the fast energetically and creatively. I get a. and also this is pretty important. I don’t feel many of the negative side effects of, um, stimulants or neutropics or shakiness or weird stuff, I just kind of feel pretty like I’m riding a good wave.

Luke: Cool. All right. Sounds like a strong endorsement. I’m looking forward to checking out when I get back to London next week.

Krzysztof: Yeah, I’d love to hear what you think, and what kind of smart things you’ll have to say.

Luke: Awesome. So, if you’re taking magic mind yourself, let us know on the Twitters what you think, what your own results have been.

So, Christoph, you’ve been, uh, reading as ever, I gather. What’s your latest?

Krzysztof: Lee’s book is called The Grid, the Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future.

Luke: I don’t know. Interesting.

Krzysztof: it was Bill Gates’, uh, one of his five favorite books in 2016. So it’s a little dated, I guess, seven, seven years now. But two things I, I think is extraordinarily well written. The author, Gretchen Bki, B a K k. Is an anthrop, uh, cultural anthropologist, which is the same thing that my wife is curiously enough, but I never, uh, it, it, it’s just the highest level of writing that, that I think you could come across.

It’s so engaging, so thoughtful, and I’m a sucker for good pros, so. Some people might think, oh yeah, reading about the electrical grid, that’s gonna suck. Um, I had the exact opposite experience just on that literary level. The other thing is, it is kind of astonishing to me that something like electricity, which is now such a fundamental part of our life, including here in Texas, I’ve.

Recently, twice in two years for an extended period of time during a very cold freeze. And you get reminded very quickly just how miserable life gets. Not that we can’t make a fire anymore, you know, and like survive, but when so much of our modern day life revolves around devices and you can’t, for example, go to work and do work without the internet or your.

It’s shocking. It’s truly shocking what a dominant force of electricity has become. So what’s even more shocking to me was how, and she talks about this a little bit, how when we walk around day to day, at least, maybe I’ll speak for myself, you don’t know, you kind of block out things like utility poles and wires.

and even how any of it works, right? I was so stupidly ignorant about the grid that it ki I kind of became, uh, temporarily embarrassed for myself, , like, how could , you know, when I put the two things together, the force of electricity, how essential it is and how I knew nothing about it. I was like, how could this be 

Luke: a, okay, I think I understand this stuff. What’s a surprising fact then that I might not be aware of?

Krzysztof: Oh my goodness. Maybe this is an in interesting thing that, um,

renewable energy, so there’s the old grid and all the new, new renewables come coming online. and I thought something like renewable energy is just a good thing any way you slice it. But it turns out that, utilities have a business to run and things like renewable energies sometimes add a whole nother layer of complexity to how the old school operations.

So for example, when you have surges of energy coming online from, say, too much sun or too much wind, that could actually overpower the grid. So all of a sudden the way we are evolving, the way our grid is evolving, it’s not just good and bad, old and new, or we want more new, more renewable. It’s a way more complex algorithm that’s evolving.

So that’s one thing to to consider. And this actually segues to why for the most part, I, I started looking into this. You will now see me focusing a lot more on batteries as, as investment opportunities with, with this understanding now the deeper understanding I now have of the grid. You also learn that one of the key components in technological, maybe barrier, to an effective grid is storing of electricity in that it was the technological in, uh, we still weren’t there yet, so to speak, to, to solve that problem, but we’re, we are now.

And so the opportunity from an investment standpoint in investing in, call it battery storage or figuring out ways to, uh, harness the surplus. Of electricity that we make is such an, a crucial problem to solve. And the effect of that problem, uh, the, the consequences of of solving that problem were not, are immense, absolutely immense.

And you’ll see this, for example, in the supply and demand. Uh, currently, for example, the Tesla has with its mega packs, they, they. , I believe if memory serves right, the orders at the moment, uh, won’t be fulfilled until 2025 at going at max capacity. So there’s such a backlog that even Tesla monolith like Tesla won’t get to let alone all the low players in the.

Luke: Is that because they’re. Manufacturing capability is constrained cuz they have to like build these giver factories. Or is it also supply of raw materials like lithium and things like that?

Krzysztof: It’s, uh, it’s a, I believe a combination that for the most part, especially covid, there were supply chain issues, right? Uh, that most of the material had to go to the cars. But now Tesla is building a, its own independent. mega pack factoring Lathrop, California. So they are scaling as quickly as they can, but regardless, it’s still, anytime you have a situation where the demand is so much greater than the supply, you know, that’s a business opportunity.

I mean, in the basic Econ 1 0 1 way, right. Now I understand that’s not just Tesla, that’s the gorilla in the space that’s gonna have massive margin increases and massive revenue. And I mean, all kinds of good stuff that’s, uh, going to hit its, uh, balance sheet. But that there’s all these other players in this world that could, that have similar supply and demand.

Issues in their favor that are working in little niches of the grid because the this grid thing is, I love this idea, the biggest machine that we have, and it’s antiquated and it’s patched up and it has all these problems, and now you have entrepreneurs really trying to take advantage of this battery landscape now that the technology is finally good.

To put out in the world. So I haven’t been this excited about a new industry for me as an investor in a long time.

Luke: and without saying any names may be so apart from Tesla, are there other companies in this space that you are, you are looking at closely?

Krzysztof: Yes. There are two more right now that I’m taking a very, very hard look at. And you’ll hear, you’ll definitely hear about them from me. In the next two months, my next recommendation, I guess at this point, uh, this episode will release in April, right? So subscribers will know what my recommendation is for April.

And it is a, uh, small battery company that most people have never heard of, uh, with a extraordinarily unique catalyst and setup that if it hits, it’s gonna hit.

Luke: Very good. Well, nice to have, uh, uh, like you developing your expertise in this area. I always feel a bit weird as a seven investing advisor cuz I’m, I’m a bit like a platypus too and I’m all over the board. I don’t think I’m an expert in anything. Kind of more of a jack of all trades. and if I’m developing expertise in anything, it’s probably FinTech, but, oh geez, that’s boring.

Like I, I’d rather find something a bit more interesting to become an expert in

Krzysztof: This will tie together the things we’ve talked about this morning. Luke, here’s how I do things. I, my generalist sensibility gets me looking in a particular corner, right? . Then I get interested, I read the, the top level stuff, like, for example, batteries like YouTube, how do batteries work, right?

Just get edu basic education, right? Then I find a book that I think is the most recommended or gives me the the next layer of depth. Meanwhile, While I’m doing this, I’m on Twitter, and actually I begin following experts and I don’t therefore have to be the expert because I, I simply know who to look for.

And then we have our chatGPT buddy. Right? So now I know the questions to ask, for example, because I’m not an expert in batteries. What’s the difference between say, lithium ion and zinc batter? , that’s an important question for me. So type it up and chatGPT chatGPT four gives me the, the expert’s view on all of that.

Or maybe not. Maybe that’s, it’s still not there, but that’s the, you know, the, the point is like, spread the resources around and if you know what to ask, I don’t know if expertise is required. I, I, is what I’m saying.

Luke: Well, it’s like having like this world of experts, like real human experts on Twitter that’s, that are accessible because the nature of Twitter. And the world’s most kind of erudite librarian, I guess, with G P T four. Um, so yeah, you can develop your own expertise super fast. It’s actually quite, it’s quite interesting how it’s playing into a topic I would like to talk about today as well, um, around what’s happening with the homeschooling boom. Should we dive into that?

Krzysztof: Yeah.

Luke: Um, I, I saw quite an interesting Twitter thread by George Mack. And, uh, he just had a few days ago a bunch of interesting stats, what’s being ignored by the media, but will be studied by historians. Um, and I’ve just picked three, uh, three of these stats out of his.

Uh, wouldn’t mind chatting through with you, and one ties into what we were just chatting about, and it’s what George frames as the homeschooling boom. So, evidently I haven’t fact checked any of this stuff, but the, the sources look good. Evidently, in the early 1970s, uh, less than 80,000 kids were homeschooled in America.

at the end of 2021, 5 million kids were being homeschooled. And George’s insight there was, that was probably pandemic driven, like in, in many cases kids couldn’t go to school, so kind of parents got forced into becoming a teacher as well as trying to hold down their own jobs. Um, but many parents have realized actually they can do a pretty good job of this.

There’s an in interesting sort of investing question, you know, which companies are enablers and kind of helping this homeschooling boom. Um, is it a good thing? I think it probably is. Um, uh, but tools like G P T. Are really gonna, you know, potentially become like the ultimate tutor, helping, helping kids learn and understand and explore ideas in more interesting ways.

Krzysztof: Okay. Are you, uh, are you asking for my, my take?

Luke: Yeah, for sure. As a, especially as someone who works in the education sector.

Krzysztof: This cuts both ways and I think, I think there’s a lot of advantage to doing it yourself. , especially if you do it, you know, not as a shortcut. If you, if you’re a parent who cares, or you’re a young person who cares and you really wanna learn a lot of school time, I would say is, is a waste, like, inefficient, sort of like, you know, it’s my feeling about most meetings, you know, people just like hearing themselves talk and then it, it just, right.

So you’re not learning nearly as quickly or as much as you. . But the other side feels to me that, that an embodied emotional and social intelligence is also necessary to, to have the full experience of what it means to be a thinking and effective human. And we know this, you know, from say, negotiators. And how people do in business, you know, business deals, it matters, right?

Luke, you know this in, in from your own career, right? Like, it matters how you show up to things. It matters to what extent you could empathize with another human. Understand what they’re saying, meet them on their, their wavelength, emotionally, socially, and somehow we’ll need to figure out how you could get that piece.

Of the human experience merged with say, the intellectual content downloading stuff.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. Ag agree and that that was a sort of challenge for, even for our grownups, right? Coming out of the pandemic, we all, to some extent, forgot how to socialize with each other, so we’ve had to relearn that.

Krzysztof: Yeah. And it’s not a small thing. It’s so I, yeah. I, I don’t know if, if I had a child, I don’t know if, if I, I probably would consider homeschooling seriously.

Luke: Hmm. 

Krzysztof: Plus maybe something like an athletic club right. To, to match the other end. Right.

Luke: Yeah, that’s good job, Melissa. Let’s dive into another one of George’s, uh, stats and insights and it sort of links to the last one. So, uh, a rise in homeschooling means kids will start building businesses earlier. Um, the ability to do this with just a smartphone and internet connection, so, and his stat is the highest paid YouTubers.

So if it, evidently today the highest paid YouTuber is an 11 year old kid called Ryan Cari, uh, who reviews toys on. And in 2020 he made $26 million. Uh, and he was nine years old at the time, so that’s pretty cool. Like the suddenly, uh, like the parents are farming their kid out to earn a ton of money and he’s probably having fun doing it at the same time.

Um, but it is interesting, and again, like an investing angle on this, right? Tools like Shopify, stripe, um, you know, these kind of fintechs so easy to start a business today and YouTube and these distribution platforms. Uh, but it’s, it’s kind of democratized, made it really easy to get started and potentially be successful in business.

I think this is a, you know, it’s an inflection point we’re all aware of that suddenly seeing nine year olds making millions and millions of dollars, probably makes it a bit stark, brings it home.

Krzysztof: You know, I, I want to examine an assumption in there. Because as soon as you said he’s probably having a good time doing this.

Luke: Okay.

Krzysztof: Uh, well, well, I haven’t seen any of these videos. Right. But I, I think I, I do know that in order to eventually be a, a genuine YouTuber with, with any kind of revenue, there’s a lot of, call it production, uh uh, you can’t just wing it.

Right. We could, we could assume.

Luke: Maybe, maybe start off winging it, but yeah. Okay. If you’re in that kind of dough, then yeah, you probably have a bit of a team behind you even.

Krzysztof: because as soon as you say he’s probably having a good time doing this, you know who I thought of a four year old Andre Agassi,

Luke: Okay.

Krzysztof: uh, or Serena Williams. You know, the tennis players who had the kind of maniacal parents that put a racket in their hand at age four or three and said, you go stand on this tennis court and you hit balls and you know, from agassi’s, uh, mature adult perspective, that was, that was borderline cruelty.

Or not, not even borderline. Right. That was abuse. . And so I, I, I wonder, I wonder, you know, if you’re a nine year old kid and you’re making 26 million on YouTube, how much fun like, I mean, unless these video, I mean, If I watch one of these videos and he’s kind of playing around with his toys, uh, in a sandbox, , and someone just happens to be filming him doing that, okay, you got me.

I doubt that’s the case.

Luke: Uh, fair. Okay. Good challenge. Maybe putting aside that particular case study. Um, I think there is definitely something about the ease of getting, starting and getting into business. You’ll probably see the first self-made teenage billionaire sometime this decade, um, because of technology as an enabler.

Krzysztof: There must be some wizard eight year old right now doing things with chatGPT that we can’t even begin to imagine. But speaking. Uh, Luke. I just had the best idea of my life, So I’m ex and I’m not e and I’m not even on on Magic Mind, and it didn’t even come from the robot, 

but I came across someone on Twitter who did the Meta thing and said, uh, Uh, he turned chatGPT four into his own personal business AI hustler, right? And said something like, you are an AI entrepreneur, right? I’m your human enabler. I’m gonna do exactly what you tell me to do.

Our budget is a hundred dollars. Don’t do anything illegal. And right, that’s the frame. And what’s great is he’s, he’s then publicly sharing all the steps and all the results. How is it possible that you and I don’t start up our, uh, our own, uh, Luke and Krzysztof, uh, side venture? 

Involve the robot and say, we wanna start a company that does good for the world, right? Some side, side project, and we wanna get filthy rich doing it, and save the world and get filthy rich. Tell us what to do. And then we, we, uh, drink our magic mind, uh, every day. And, and how could we go wrong?

Luke: Okay. I like it. All right, let’s go. Let’s do it. Is this a podcast project? We’re gonna, uh, use the podcast to talk about how, what, like, how our business venture is developed.

Krzysztof: All right.

Luke: All right.

Krzysztof: Is there one more? One more, uh, insight.

Luke: Uh, yeah, there’s batch this bunch in there. Go, go check out the thread, George. Underscore, underscore mac. Um, there’s some stuff that’s probably not investing related to do with. Testosterone and, uh, people not being romantic with each other, but one I think does have an interesting investing link is don’t ignore India.

2023 is a year. India becomes the world’s largest population. So it’s the world’s fastest growing large economy in 2020. Um, in 2017, there are 357 million Indians online. There are now 840 million Indians online, 60% of the population, and here’s the interesting bit. 2021, India exported more in software than Saudi Arabia did in oil.

Um, basically exporting like software services, um, generating $133 billion. For the country versus 113 billion in oil exports from Saudi. That’s quite interesting. I I, I don’t have any investments in India myself, but it’s certainly a market we should start turning our eyes to perhaps.

Krzysztof: Absolutely. Here’s another tip for our listeners. I’ve, I’ve been hearing about this, uh, now for over a year, maybe two years, because I follow. Quite closely. The, uh, thinker, Rin Vasan, I believe his last name is. He has, uh, he’s a polymath. You’ll hear interviews with him last four hours and longer, which was, uh, they’re real fun for the treadmill if you, if you’re into that kind of thing.

And, uh, he’s one of those, I think, global geopolitical thinkers that. Tech trends with what’s happening in the world at large, that when you listen to him, uh, it’s almost like being fed through, you know, water through, uh, fire hose kind of situation. He’s been talking about India as the obvious emergent power of the world now for several years.

And I believe his main point, you, you alluded to Luke, it’s not just that population wise, they’re getting to the top, but it that all of these people that are, uh, I believe he says they’re now coming online. So it’s one of these shifts in the economy that’s not just about the demographic, but demographic of people who are in a culture that is tech-minded, internet connected, and all of a sudden, like in the tidal wave coming online, and I believe India is doing the right things to support this kind of infrastructure, that’s what’s gonna make India the, the powerhouse as opposed to say, some other highly populated country that has say the opposite kind of like, Uh, you, you would say China, right, is, has a inhibitive firewall.

Like you can’t do X, Y, and Z. Whereas India’s saying, no, here’s money to do X, Y, and z.

Luke: Yeah, to totally agree. Um, and I guess also the, so they’ve got these demographic completely different demographic issues. Like China has now a declining population and a demographic time bomb about to go off over the next decade, whereas India has an huge number of young people and they, they, this, they’re going through this population explosion.

Um, and as you say, at the same time, it really is a culture that. Got sort of education and success at its core. You know, there are a ton of very smart kids in India. I’m actually a, a, a person of Indian origin myself. Uh, my grandmother was, um, half Bangalorean and I spent like some time out there, uh, with work from working for h s bbc, but I spent like a few months in a few different Indian cities.

It’s an incredible place with just a ton of energy and a ton of very smart bl folk. So yeah, definitely you need to start looking at this through an investing lens.

Krzysztof: Yeah. And I would love, you are much more skillful at looking at international companies. You’ve made several investments like that for us at seven. Uh, seven I, right. I, I Homework assignment wise, I would love to see what you would come up with. From starting at the very tippity top, like taking this as a lead India.

Right. How do you say narrow down that that impossibly large initial query to say 10 companies that are worth poking around at. Is that something you would, that that would interest you?

Luke: Having seen this stat is something I plan to do over the next couple of months. I think it is complex because when you don’t live in one of these markets and you’re not immersed in the culture and you don’t speak. You know, any of the hundreds of dialects and languages, um, there can be things that are opaque and it’s hard for a kind of outsider to understand.

And, you know, for all of, for all of the fantastic things about India. It’s actually pretty low on the kind of corruption index. You know, they do have a lot of social issues and so, you know, I, I dunno an an example, but we think about like luck in coffee in China, right? Whether it was just like a complete fraud of a business and.

It took like an outside investor to really spot that, and then the company came collapsing down. I’m sure there’s a bunch of fantastic businesses, but also a bunch of really quite dubious businesses in India. And so I suppose what I’m saying is you have to have that bit of filter perhaps as well.

Maybe, you know, try and use your Twitter network. I’ve got a bunch of Indian friends at home back in London. You know, try and use people, you know. evaluate and understand whether whether these companies actually add up until they make sense.

Krzysztof: I would love to follow you on this journey and if, and, and to hear what you might have to share with us. The process, just, just what you were describing, right? We have a lead, you have some connections, you have some, some. , uh, limited experience in the country, but, but with all these other tools, it seems like you are like a prime example of someone who could probably find a few gems.

Uh, I’d love to, I’d love to keep up to date with, with how you go about that.

Luke: I’ll, uh, I’ll be digging into it and actually I do have a link. So, um, I got interviewed. Out a year and a half ago by a, um, another sort of investing community Indians invest globally. So I’m gonna use this as a, a, uh, opportunity to go reach out to the guys I chatted to. They’re some really smart guys who’ve built quite a big investing community, chatting about exactly this topic.

Try and get some of their top tips.

Krzysztof: Oh yeah. Fantastic. 

Luke: Yep. So, uh, so pretty, pretty long all over the place conversation as ever. We’re coming up to an hour of recording time. We skipped it last week. So you are up for a game of, uh, three conversations game before we close this week.

Krzysztof: Yes, as long as I’m not the one asking questions.

Luke: You can answer. You can answer. It was, it was my tone and I do have a couple of questions for you. Let’s see. So, uh, quick reminder, if you’re tuning in episode 14, I’m gonna pitch three conversation topics to Christoph. He’s gonna put a line through one of them, and then I’m gonna pick one of the other two.

and then he’s gonna give us a minute of wisdom on that topic and he has no idea what I’m gonna ask him. Um, I did start writing these for episode 13. So my first one is 13 related, um, conversation. One, some cultures are strongly superstitious. For example, the Western Number 13, the Chinese. Number four.

Does it make sense for hotels and offices to skip those numbers when they build their buildings? Uh, question number two, which of the seven deadly sins is most dangerous to an investor? And I can remind you what they are, , pride, greed, wrath, envy, last gla sloth.

Um, and then question number three is you are a very well-read chap and that huge bookshelf behind you. Which book do you wish you could live? A work of fiction. Which work of fiction do you wish you could live in that world?

Krzysztof: Oh wow. . Oh, what a great question. My mind’s exploding cuz I, I, I, that’s the one I want to answer, but then I’ll stumble all over myself. Uh, let’s, uh, let’s nix the, uh, let’s nix the superstition question.

Luke: Alright. And I kind of, I kind of wanna ask you about the deadly sentence, but go on. You, you wanna talk about books, so I’m gonna give you that, that bit of rope. Tell me about which book you’re gonna live in.

Krzysztof: Ah, this is impossible. I can’t do it. Luke, uh, my

Luke: Christoph, if you’re not on the, if you’re not on the video, Christoph’s now staring at his bookshelf trying to spot a world he he can occupy. Maybe look at the whiskey first.

Krzysztof: Yeah.

Luke: This is the trouble of being too widely read

Krzysztof: This is impossible. This is, this is maddeningly impossible, in part because so many books are horrible. You know, I mean, the things that happened in them are, are, they’re fun to read about, but you, you don’t wanna live in that world.

Luke: Looks like the answer might be one. Flu over the Cookie’s. Nest

Krzysztof: Hmm.

Luke: Have I defeated you with a question that’s too close to your

Krzysztof: You have to. Wow. You’ve defeated me. I can’t even give you an honest answer. You know what we’re gonna do. So I’ll acknowledge defeat, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll pay the consequences, but I’ll get you an answer next time we talk. If, when I’ve had two weeks to really talk, think about it, I can give you a very short answer to the question you wanted to ask, cuz that’s obvious to me.

Luke: Go then. Go on then I’ll give you a pass.

Krzysztof: Yeah. The se, the seven sins, uh, the sin is most deadly to an investor’s.

Luke: Very good. Yeah, they’re all pretty 

Krzysztof: obvious reasons. Maybe

Luke: hubris, I’ve, I’ve definitely got some, some hubris from being a bit prideful at the peak of my portfolio. Spiking in 2021, got a bit big for my boots. Yeah.

Krzysztof: yeah. That’s, uh, I mean, uh, that’s why it’s the thing that brings down all the ancient. , uh, heroes in all the stories. There you go, right? Reading any play and it’s always pride that brings him down. Luke, it was a real pleasure catching up with you. I hope you have an amazing last day on, on the bunny slope. You can do it. You can do it Just point your skis, you know, uh, like that. safe travels home, and next time we talk right, you’ll be back, uh, back eating crumpets and, and, uh,

Luke: Yep.

Krzysztof: crumpets and drink and tea, correct

Luke: got it. Yep. Looking forward to it. Fabulous. Great energy, Krzysztof.

Krzysztof: All right. Take care.

Luke: Take it easy, buddy. And if you enjoyed today’s episode of No Limit with Krzysztof and Luke, give us a follow on Twitter and maybe share the episode with a friend. Until next time.