This week's guest on the Empowering Leaders podcast is a truly remarkable thought leader,
Geoffrey Cole, recording from Los Angeles today and his incredible insight into the
world of digital media, the internet, and the future of all things digital communication.
You'll hear Geoff talk about chat GBT as the biggest disruptor and change to society since
the printing press and personal computer, which in itself is an amazing conversation.
Geoff shares the secrets to Elon Musk, the four key pillars to Musk as he describes them.
He says you can never count him out, describes him as the Thomas Edison of the 21st century
and a quintuple disruptor given the breadth of work that Elon Musk is doing.
You want to hear that conversation.
His thoughts on microchip manufacturing being the most important and indestructible sector
in the global business world, as well as a deep dive into TikTok, Chinese government's
And where social media is heading for future generations.
It's conversations like this with Geoffrey Cole that inspire the work we do at Alita.
Head to alitacollective.com to check out our work, in particular, our signature program,
Thought leaders like Geoff Cole, we love sharing information on how to learn and how to share
and how to collaborate with different people.
And that's what we do with Alita Connect.
We bring together groups of five or six thought leaders from around the globe.
You don't have to be an internationally recognized expert.
Like Geoffrey Cole to be part of that community.
We love sharing that with people from entrepreneurial backgrounds or the arts or sport or social
So I'd love you to check it out.
Head to alitacollective.com.
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like this one with Geoffrey Cole.
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Geoffrey Cole was described in 1999 by then American Vice President Al Gore as a true
visionary, providing the public with information on how to understand the impact of media.
For over three decades, Geoff has been at the forefront of media and communication technology
and served as advisor to governments around the world, as well as some of the most influential
businesses like Ericsson, Telstra here in Australia.
They're Wes Farmers, AT&T, Coca-Cola, NBC, CBC, ABC, and countless others on how to navigate
their digital future.
Geoffrey Cole is the founder and directs the World Internet Project, a long-term longitudinal
study looking at the effects of computer and internet technology conducted in over 35 countries.
Geoff, it's always fascinating to chat with you.
I really appreciate you taking the time today.
Luke, it's been a while since we were on the radio.
It's great to be back.
Really, it's nice to be talking to you.
And to reach some of Australia.
I know I'm going to learn a lot, as I always do, whenever I get the chance to sit down with you.
I'm a father of four, Geoff, and I think if you were able to survey parents in the developed
world, my thoughts are the number one concern and topic of conversation would be the addictive
algorithms of social media that are really making it hard for our kids to focus.
And you've got a great ability to look into the future.
Where does this obsession with being on our phones end up for future generations, in your view?
Well, I think it's really important to look into the future.
I think it's really important to look into the future.
Well, first, and it's really important, when we talk about the impact of phones and technology,
the positive impact has been extraordinary.
The reach it gives us around the world, what Mark Zuckerberg says he intended with Facebook,
I'm not sure I believe him, the ability to connect, the ability to really be part of
something is phenomenal.
Unfortunately, it hasn't worked out that way.
What we're really finding is...
We're sort of insulating on these phones.
We're not interacting as much with the world.
We're comparing ourselves unrealistically to people on Instagram.
We know that Gen Z, the first generation that has had digital technology their entire life,
even before COVID, is the loneliest generation filled with the most anxiety and depression.
So clearly, these things have...
They have not worked out the way they're intended or intended to work out.
And when you have four kids, you have to be an activist parent.
Sometimes you'll pay a pretty serious price for that.
But you really have to know how much they're on, which things they're doing.
But it's changed.
When I grew up, the rules of parenting, parents all said the same three or four things.
Look both ways before crossing.
Don't ever get into a car or...
Take candy from a stranger.
And one or two other things.
Now there's a whole new set of rules about digital technology.
Don't ever tell anybody where you are.
Give out information you don't have to.
Don't ever meet anybody who you don't know.
Digital technology has transformed childhood.
And frankly, not to sound like an old guy critic, not a whole lot for the better.
I feel the same myself.
Is that you're trying to stay in touch.
With your kids, it's almost the impossible task.
I was talking in this format with an expert on cyber safety who's done remarkable work
around the world in trying to enlighten parents on the problems of your kids having access
to that in the privacy of their own bedroom.
And she said to me, I would much rather my teenage child at midnight walked around the
block in her pajamas.
I'd feel more safe than actually allowing her in her own room with her own phone because
of I know what's out there.
I know the possibilities of people who can...
And reach your kids in your bedroom.
Do you think we've grasped when I get the positive part, I get the connection part,
but has that been superseded by the negative part in your mind?
I think the negative is dominating.
That's quite a statement that you'd rather your kids were out walking the street at midnight,
but I understand it.
But think about it in simple ways.
Once again, to play on the old guy part, I grew up and when I was in high school and
I wanted to call my friends.
One line in a house, more often than not, their parents would answer.
They would know I was calling.
They would grill me a little bit and we'd chat.
Then they'd let me talk to my friend Dave.
Well, the first thing these phones have done, one of the first complaints we've heard for
15 years now is parents say, we don't know who our kid's friends are.
They communicate with...
And incidentally, that's the first step to knowing your kid may be headed in a bad direction.
So yeah, I don't want to...
I don't want to sound like a complainer.
I mean, part of being a generation or two ahead of them, we're not supposed to like
We're not supposed to like the way they talk.
That's the way it's supposed to be.
And that's normal.
I've been going on since every generation since the Greeks.
But something really special, really powerful is happening with digital technology.
Yeah, I explained that to my kids.
I went to boarding school and we had the one pay phone and you got a slot.
Once every two weeks to either call home or if you're lucky enough that you had a girl
you thought you might be able to get access to.
And you had your 15 friends in the queue behind you listening to every word that you were
Yeah, but your kids' eyes roll over when you...
They roll their eyes when you tell those stories.
When I was a kid, I walked seven miles through the snow to go to school.
That's what they expect.
And on that note, Jeff, I had the first experience of TikTok with my teenage daughter not too
And she said something to me along the lines of, are you on Team Johnny Depp or Team Amber
And I said, what are you talking about?
And then she showed me her TikTok account, which I'd never seen before.
And that had been disseminated, that court case that went on for months and months into
these 30-second soundbites.
And I looked at it and I thought I'd been watching for five minutes.
It was 45 minutes later.
It was so good to get you into the next clip.
How big is TikTok?
Becoming a big presence?
Well, first of all, that was a pretty amazing case.
An A-plus movie star, a girlfriend who was making allegations about things left in the
bed that are best on set on this podcast.
Really, you couldn't have scripted better drama.
But incidentally, just to digress for a second, that's not kids.
I'm following this trial right now of Sam Bankman.
Sam Bankman freed the guy from FTX who was worth $32 billion before it collapsed and
all the incredible fraud and drama of crypto.
But TikTok, the goal of...
And this isn't said with any disrespect.
The goal of all these digital services, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snap, the goal is to keep
Because as they keep you there, they can serve you advertising.
And that's how they make their money.
And there's nothing inherently in evil about that.
You know, since we were kids, broadcast television made their money by putting on content we
wanted to watch and selling advertising around it.
The problem is the things that TikTok and Facebook and Instagram have to do to keep
Some of it is really interesting stuff.
And that TikTok's filled with that.
But some of it, Facebook learned earlier.
The best way to keep you on the site was not to throw you and make you excited and
It was to get you angry and riled up.
And that anger was what kept you watching or appealing to your puritan interest.
And TikTok is this amazing combination.
People I take very seriously really do believe that information is going back to the Chinese.
I have no evidence of that.
I'm not sure what the Chinese would do with the fact that you spent 45 minutes looking
at the Amber Heard Johnny Depp case.
But people, you know, people I really respect do think the Chinese are monitoring.
But it is truly, it is every technique of addictiveness that you will find with almost
any other stimulant.
It is really giving you a constant hit, whether it's likes.
Whether it's fast cutting.
It is really to keep you there and get you to watch.
And it sounds like it worked for you with Johnny Depp.
It got me, Jeff, in a way that I couldn't believe.
I would have thought that I was, you know, that sounds egotistical.
I didn't have an interest in it until I did.
And then the way it was so smart that you wanted to see the next clip.
But I was just fascinated by it.
I'm in the sandbank.
How are the Kardashians in their 10th season?
People who have never done a thing in their life.
And yet fans can't stop watching.
You also feel like you're intruding into something you shouldn't be part of.
I think that's part of the Depp Heard case.
All those celebrities.
We learned all that with OJ 25, 30 years ago.
And you mentioned the Chinese government.
I mean, part of governments around the world are banning government employees from having
access to TikTok.
As you said, people you respect and you're connected into serious levels of business
Eavesdropping people.
I mean, that's a huge potential.
Is that obviously something you've heard before, but you're not sure about?
It goes back a ways.
The Australian government was one of the first to ban the government itself from using Huawei
equipment with the belief that Huawei phones and Huawei servers were implanted with listening
And this is not watching the Johnny Depp trial.
This is business and sending those messages back to Beijing.
I don't have the expertise to know if that was true, but governments, including the American
government, ended up banning Huawei.
TikTok is alleged to have done that.
The Chinese seem to really use these things as stalking horses, as a way to build beachheads
and to really gain information.
And it's at one time, Trump, I don't even like to think of Trump as president, but one
of the things he was threatening to do was to make TikTok.
He was trying to make TikTok illegal, something that's still being talked about.
I mean, our greatest hope is it's already been three, four years for TikTok.
It's time for a new obsession.
And Jeff, you're big on and understand disruption, perhaps better than anyone I've ever met.
And you go to Google.
It was the ultimate disruptor in lots of ways, wasn't it?
It redistributed so much wealth and money, did it immediately.
Google transformed the advertising business.
The phone business.
The advertising business.
The button book business.
The encyclopedia business.
And I could go on.
Just made them all irrelevant.
But, well, let me let you finish.
Well, I was going to ask, has Google itself been disrupted now by chat GBT?
Is that a real thing?
One of the signs of leadership, not that I should be telling leaders how to think,
but one of the things I tell them they need to do is to be prepared and expect to be disrupted.
Well, Google didn't need me to tell them that.
When Google came on the scene, having been invented in a garage in the Silicon Valley
in 1999, when Google came on the scene, it didn't invent search.
There already was Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista.
They just did search so much better than anybody by letting you know how many people linked
to what you were searching for rather than how often it was mentioned.
First time you used Google, you could see it was vastly superior.
So Google turned this into one of the three biggest companies in the world, but they knew
that they could be disrupted.
It's taken 20 years, but they expected this disruption as soon as 2002 or three.
I used to, I call this the Schmoogle case, and what Google expected was five or six of
If we were friends, we might get together and we could create a new search engine that
we'd call Schmoogle.
And if Schmoogle were better than Google, that's a big if.
Google was pouring billions of dollars.
It was hard to be better than Schmoogle.
Microsoft spent billions trying and creating Bing.
Bing turned out to be a little better than Google in a couple of ways and not as good
Nobody bothered because it wasn't much better.
But if we could create a much better search engine, a big if, we'd send it to all our
friends and we'd say, try Schmoogle.
It's better than Google.
And they would because they're our friends, and if they instantly saw it was better, they'd
take Google down and put Schmoogle up.
Google expected this.
Well in 2023, Schmoogle came along.
It just wasn't called Schmoogle.
It was called Chat.
It did something better than Google.
Google expected to get disrupted.
They issued a code red across the company.
They brought the founders back, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
But the problem was Larry and Sergey were 25 when they invented Google.
It's been 25 years.
They're both 50 this year.
They're two of the richest men in the world.
In the last 25 years, they've been leading not the good life, the greatest life with
airplanes and islands.
And it also turned out that Sergey, for example, hadn't read source code since 2004.
But they are back.
I don't think Google is going to be disrupted to the point that it disappears.
We can talk about big companies that have disappeared, but Google and every country
Except three has 90% or greater market share.
Because of Chat, they may end up ultimately at 35, 40% market share.
You can build a great business on 35 or 40%, but it also hurts when it comes down from
There's no way they hang on to 90%.
But the disruptor has been disrupted, is being disrupted.
That happens in a lot of places.
Blockbuster, which just didn't exist.
Blockbuster, which just didn't exist.
Blockbuster, which disrupted the movie theaters, disrupted by Netflix.
The iPod, not Pad, but the iPod, the music device, which disrupted music sales, got disrupted
by Apple's own device, the iPhone and the iPad.
The disruptor being disrupted is common.
And Jeff, Microsoft jumped in and they bought 49% of ChatGPT pretty quickly for $10 billion.
They're obviously waiting for their moment to fight back.
Is it that good, ChatGPT, that it will ... I mean, that's significant, isn't it?
If you halve Google's market share around the globe, it's a big win for the new disruptor.
Well, first of all, Microsoft had a score to settle, which I mentioned earlier.
The score of pouring billions into Bing and it not going anywhere.
Some people, myself included, call ChatGPT the ultimate revenge of Bing, because Chat's
going to be built into Bing.
And they are going to end up at 30% or 40%.
These are the early players.
Just as I mentioned, Google came along when there was AltaVista and Ask Jeeves and Yahoo.
These may just be the early ones and they may get disrupted.
But yes, Microsoft does not want to be left out of the search world this time around.
And they're going to do everything in their power.
And Jeff, ChatGPT, to me, is the first AI tool that most of us can really understand
because it's brilliant.
And you can't believe the pieces it writes when you give it a couple of bits of information.
Elon Musk has described artificial intelligence as something that if we don't build an off
switch, could reduce humans to the level of a domestic cat.
Where do you sit on AI in the future?
Well, first, he says it's the greatest threat to humankind, more so than nuclear war.
Musk incidentally, is an early investor in ChatGPT, or OpenAI.
The company that developed Chat.
Everywhere you look, you see Musk.
Incidentally, we'll talk about him later.
Musk is this towering presence.
And I think the secret to understanding him, then we'll get right into AI.
I think the secret to Elon Musk is to understand that he's a genius, he's a visionary, he's
an asshole, and he's an immature brat.
I don't like using words publicly like asshole, but there's no comparable word.
And those four things, if you took the asshole away, it would all collapse.
That's fundamental to his personality.
The immature brat, anyone who was a Tesla knows, if anyone who doesn't know this, go
to Google and you can hear this, Teslas, thanks to Musk, all have a farting function.
He built in the car.
You can choose from the type of farts and you could press it on demand.
And farting is the quintessential definition of an immature teenage boy.
Having been an immature teenage boy, I know that.
So that's Musk and Chat.
AI, the amazing thing about AI, and it's almost hard to believe this.
This is now October 21st.
11 months ago, AI wasn't even on our radar.
It had existed, we knew it as a concept, but everything we're thinking and worrying about
in AI has been for the last 10 months.
We've never seen anything like that.
Within two months, it reached 100 million users, which is remarkable, although after
that, Mark Zuckerberg's alternative to Twitter, Threads.
Threads got to 100 million users in five days, but a week later, Zuckerberg admitted
reluctantly that almost nobody was using it, and it's disappeared.
Chat has stayed and grown.
But within two months, people were saying, this is the most important innovation since
I thought that understated it.
I thought within three months, it was the most important innovation since the personal
I thought it was the most important innovation since the personal computer.
I thought within three months, it was the most important innovation since the personal
I thought within three months, it was the most important innovation since the personal
And I really believe it's probably going to be the most important technological innovation
Everything we're afraid of, with one possible exception, everything we're excited about,
The fear of unemployment, the fear of losing our creative process, the one fear I still
don't quite see is the existential threat of humankind uh the skynet or the how the computer
there i can't quite see that connection but even if it's a remote possibility we ought to be careful
but ai this is the year of ai you know in hollywood the actors and writers are on strong
they settled the writers guild but the actors are still on strike over ai it terrifies everybody
because we know something really important has happened but we're not sure how it's going to
affect us and and jeff you've your history of understanding this as well as anyone going right
back to the uh the world internet project that's a big statement that you know the most significant
change since the printing press or the personal computer is is you can you put that into context
for people well clearly the writers in hollywood saw the threat and wanted to change their
constitution accordingly around how significant chat gbt what what sort of areas do you see it
hurting employees or where does it benefit have you got some thoughts on how it's going to come
to life well the unemployment i mean even before ai i've been writing about what automation is
going to do to unemployment we know that every driver job is on a slow path to oblivion every
path to elimination today machines can read x-rays better than doctors or technicians so we're not
just talking about manual or i don't want to call them low level but mid-level jobs machines have
already put many paralegals out of work because their job is to search legal cases which now can
be done a thousand times faster and more complete so we know unemployment
ai just accelerates it the fear for the actors is they've made films which the studios own the
studios have hour two hour long hour if you're looking at uh martin scorsese's film that opens
this weekend three hour and 37 minutes of leonardo dicaprio and robert de niro they only need a
minute and they can make a movie they can have machines take their images
and their voices and that's their fear that they're going to be used for commercials for movies
some of that's exciting you know dead actors can be making movies for the next 200 years
but there's the concept of ownership uh writers are terrified you can go to chat right now and
say write me a script for a robin williams like movie and in this case robin williams is gone
uh with this plot and it's still it's not
going to be uh ready to shoot in front of a camera but it can be pretty darn good and may
need a tweak so the fear is they're going to be made irrelevant the other fears are you know just
as calculators which came around in the 1970s have made only older people still able in most
cases to do multiplication tables where all these skills that we've developed in our brains
younger generations are not going to be able to do that so we're not going to be able to do that
we're not going to develop we know that's true of cursive writing because machines will be right
there to do it for us so we will lose the ability to do some things without the machines but on the
other hand those machines are always there and then there are the big uh the big issues of will
it take control of our nuclear weapons and there i'm still a little skeptical jeff i want to come
back uh fascinating uh to think about how quickly that's evolving but uh
got to go back to elon musk on your uh summation there he's bought twitter it's converted to a new
brand x how's that going to play out for elon if walter isaacson has a new book out that goes into
great detail it's part of the asshole in musk and as i said that's an essential part that made him
want to own the town square that made him want to buy he realized pretty quickly after
he made a bid that he overpaid and tried to get out of it then he got stuck with it and he's been
pillared because the value has gone close to zero but one thing you're not hearing i think he's
building a really interesting new platform and it may take a year or two it may have made sense
that you had to get rid of the twitter name incidentally for the first five months oh it
was like prince formally or the singer formerly known as prince
now you don't see people saying x parentheses twitter you're seeing the twitter sort of
disappear he may be on to something you can never count him out i mean he is the thomas edison of
the 21st century steve jobs was extraordinary and i don't you can't minimize anything steve jobs did
but all his innovations were within one area that doesn't make them less wonderful but musk
musk is a quadruple actually you could say a quintuple disruptor first you know his first
company it wasn't him by himself was paypal which changed payment systems completely and
which really reached its height during covid as cash is now really rapidly disappearing tesla
is a triple disruptor the obvious disruption is the electric battery disrupts the
internal combustion engine but it's also a disruptor because tesla has no automobile dealers
it completely disrupted the dealer network you buy it directly from tesla dealers who frequently
are powerful people in their communities dealers hate this in america they've gone to eight states
and made it illegal to buy a car directly that's going to end and then the other disruption of
automobile advertising is one of the biggest advertisers in the world in america if you buy
an average price thirty two thousand dollar general motors car over two thousand dollars of that thirty
two thousand goes to advertising mostly television tesla has become the biggest automobile company in
the world bigger than all the others combined and has never spent a penny on advertising and to go
and once again i don't want to disrespect brilliant people but space x richard branson and i love
richard branson but richard branson took an airplane and went up really high it was a great
accomplishment jeff bezos with his penis rocket which is exactly what it looked like bezos with
an amazing i can't launch a rocket but it went up for nine minutes and came down musk space x is
already deleted and i'm not going to talk about it in the next episode but i'm going to talk about it in the next episode
the guy is remarkable but he is a jerk and an asshole and a genius and a visionary and we're not
going to fix the two bad parts so i understand i'm that some of this has become apocryphal stories
that he's got 11 kids none of which live at home which maybe leans into the asshole part as well
i don't think he's been a good father although a couple of the kids were test tubes will you i mean i
to be gossipy but one of his one of his wives not grimes he was married to divorce married again
divorced and then got engaged again but they only married twice he's a jerk but you know these so
keep so keep the jerk part don't marry him try not to be his kid maybe you shouldn't even work for
him but we're all benefiting from uh what he does hey jeff i talked to you about driverless cars
before the race to have them on the road has that slowed down at all or is that going to be a big
part it has slowed down i'm a little disappointed some of that was covet also this is one area
where musk has not been the best turns out in my opinion there are a couple of competing
driverless car systems i don't think
the tesla is the better one and eventually tesla may have to admit that there's the waymo
attached to google but it has slowed down people have been much more resistant there have been a
number of accidents not a high number they've been very high profile and the one thing we don't know
we know how many lives driverless cars have taken we don't know how many lives driverless
cars have taken we don't know how many lives driverless cars have taken we don't know how many
have saved at this point but people are being much more resistant to driverless cars than we
expected the problem is not the technology we just authorized driverless taxis this week in los
angeles the issue is infrastructure government regulations and public acceptance i thought it
would be by 2023 or four we're looking now probably the end of the decade jeff curious to get your
on this one i'm coming to you today from melbourne australia and you're a regular visitor here in
australia over many many years and been to melbourne a lot and done a lot of work with
australian business but you will know that this was a city that was locked down as much as any
city in the world through the covid period and i think more than any city in the world
our kids missed two years of school in this city effectively it feels like the biggest social
experiment at scale in uh in human history in recent times and when we look back in
20 years or so from now jeff what are we going to have learned about that particular time
we're going to learn that we overreacted we didn't understand we could have done much better
much of what we did was not necessary but i think we're also going to have to add we didn't know
all this we played it safe i think dr fauci who really was the best known spokesperson on this
in the world much of what he advocated for later on in his life was not necessary but i think
it was better than underestimating and seeing we had a million die in the u.s
to seeing 10 million die so i think you know ron desantis is running for president from
governor of florida is running on the platform that he was the sane one uh we he only saw that
at the end he could have also been the reckless one so but in retrospect kids should have been
in school the social toll was far greater than they were really not very much at risk for covet
what we probably should have done but i was not saying this because i didn't know this until
afterwards and other what we should have done is we should have really protected the most vulnerable
the oldest the people with chronic conditions and should have let the rest of the world get on
and you know i was i i couldn't get to australia for two years
finally could get there everybody i would have lunch with i mean with few exceptions would write
me the next day and say i got covet but it wasn't a lethal covet since since almost nobody in
australia got covet once you did end the lockdown it just spread like wildfire but not you know
being in spending part of my life in new york where it spread like wildfire and killed people
australia did save lives but at a
huge toll yeah and it feels like unless we actually have this uh important conversation
still we actually learn for whatever comes uh in the future so always fascinated to hear your
thoughts on that the danger is in the future we'll probably take it not seriously enough
and if it's a more serious virus that will be deadly i know you you study business you study
disruption and you advise big business on where it's heading and i always like asking you this
what's the business that looks to be the most
indestructible to you at the moment heading into the future that's pretty easy the most the most
valuable most important business on earth right now may get us into another war is microchip
manufacturing we uh you know during covid a lot of chips supplies shrank automobiles couldn't be
made people couldn't get home appliances uh we're so far past the stage where chips were
computers or just electronic devices they are literally every almost everything in our lives
has chips chips have become geopolitical the most important chip manufacturer in the world is tsmc
which is based in taiwan part of the reason the chinese want to get into taiwan tsmc is in a race
by building factories in japan and arizona
not be as vulnerable but chips if you could slot slow down or control the supply of chips and
they're only a handful of companies intel samsung tsmc a couple of others you can really destroy an
economy if you look at nvidia the growth of nvidia just in 2023 i would say that's the most
strategically important most lucrative industry of the current year
and why is it so tightly held jeff is it a technology it's hard to replicate and hard to
imitate in some sense it's it's very i mean chip manufacturing requires very stringent conditions
mass massive investment and when you talk about the tiny tiny size chips even the chinese with
all of their incredible resources have not been able to replicate what
tsmc makes uh it's why there's you know it's not just the chinese who engage in industrial espionage
but it's at a very high level it's a very tightly controlled technology fascinating jeff we have
been asking these questions around leadership and and yours is such a fascinating story being
ahead of the curve in terms of where the digital world is going for for more than three decades as
i said in the intro and we see leadership showing up in different forms and curious
about yours and the idea around these different dimensions of leadership are the patterns we see
regularly in different people whether it be someone from your world or someone from sport or
from the arts and want to ask you a series of questions here uh to finish starting with self
leadership jeff we feel like it's hard to have an influence on someone else unless you understand
yourself well how does that shine up for you in in the work that you do uh but the most i think
effective leaders i mean leadership is more than just raw ability it's the ability to communicate
to inspire those are the best leaders we've talked about a couple of leaders you know
mark zuckerberg jeff bezos musk are not necessarily that but the ones who can do it the best
really can excite and inspire but leader leadership is really being able to assess the
the opportunities and the threats you face being able to turn things around and incidentally
just to give you one example uh not always possible i came to the conclusion about seven
eight years ago that banks were in serious trouble that banks didn't understand their
customers very well and didn't provide very good service and banks in the 70s by giving their
customers automatic teller machines or cash machines in the 21st century by giving their
customers online banking
banks eradicated any personal relationship with the bank all of a sudden uh if you're in america
there's no difference between wells fargo and chase or in australia there's no difference
between anz and um you pick and then that yeah and now i put together i did a lot of study of
banks i'm fortunate i got a lot a number of the biggest banks in the world to pay attention and
say when you're running a bank you're going to have a lot of money and you're going to have a lot of
money and when you're finished i don't take anybody's money to do that but they said when
you're finished come and share with us what you found and i went to some of the biggest banks in
the world and i said here's your problem and this is what you need to do and almost to a ceo they
said to me we agree we agree this is what's wrong and we agree this is exactly what we should do
there's just one problem if i do the things you tell me to do i'm going to have a lot of money and
i'm going to have a lot of money to do our profits will disappear for the next two to four years
and they said keep in mind the average tenure of a bank ceo is three years i'll be long gone
i have absolutely no ability to look 10 years into the future and to do what's best for my
company the only ones who can really do that are the tech companies
jeff bezos right now he's handed over the ceo because he wants to have the world's
most public midlife crisis but as soon as bezos finishes that uh he probably may well come back
he'll be running amazon for the next 35 years zuckerberg will be running facebook or meta or
whatever he calls it so that we don't use the word facebook for the next 40 years larry and
sergey will be running google for the next 30 years and i'm going to have a lot of money and
alphabet for the next 30 and but for his horrible illness steve jobs would still be running apple
those guys can do what's in the best interest of their company most ceos who don't own most
of the company can't so even when you know what you need to do you can't always do it
yeah extraordinary when you think about it at that level isn't it the know the problem the
iceberg's coming but you can't avoid it for self-interest really is it i'm not going to
be here to be able to see that and the most famous australian just you know rupert murdoch
we think retired you never can be sure at 92 uh although we know his mother lived to be 103 but
rupert says he's retired but we'll see my favorite quote of the year jeff was um rupert had a very
brief uh recent engagement uh with a part didn't last more than a week and uh released a statement
saying we're looking forward to
spending the second half of our life together at 92 years of age that is someone who's planning
to live for uh a lot longer and not going anywhere anytime uh anytime so i did want to diverge for a
moment with the banking story i know you know that's that space world where does cryptocurrency
fit for you in in our world is that got a big future or not i think i really believe it does
uh it may not be bitcoin bitcoin may be too associated associated with
drug dealers and money launderers and terrorists crypto really does make sense it needs regulation
the problem with crypto when you know how you'll be able to tell that crypto is real
is when it stops being about a way to make massive amounts of money and it starts really
becoming a currency where you can buy things with it the ability to not have to
exchange money between australia or asia and the u.s where it's impossible not to get screwed
where you can compare prices where uh it's extraordinary i think crypto is real i think
it will prevail but you're going to have to get a lot of the early charlatans like sam bankman
freed and ftx out of the system and that's going to take a while one of the examples of that jeff
that was you know look at the emerging um
population in a place like india for example where a couple hundred million people recently
just got access to the internet and they have a lot of high skills we know in the finance world
and accounting and and the ability to be able to transact potentially directly with you know
someone for 30 or 40 to do some work that really is of great value and great importance do you see
that as being without how impossible it would be to try and do that with someone in a town in mumbai
can play a role if it becomes a secure trusted currency very much the case within india and then
also there are i think india has more citizens outside the country than any other country in the
world uh working and sending money home and that will change that and you know these poor poor
workers who are working as domestics or and send money home big chunks of it get
taken out in currency exchange it will allow india is now the biggest country in the world
that happened last year most international business has given up or largely given up on
china mostly for political reasons uh india fundamentally is an english-speaking country
with lots of other so i think this is this is going to be the indian the next 25 years are
going to be the real massive growth
of india hopefully not the population but the economy jeff we see ladies are really conscious
now in the environments we work in about the positive impact they have on others on a daily
basis in their environment and they are more conscious of that than ever does that make sense
to you the the idea that people are conscious of that more than ever now especially with gen z
this is a generation that is interestingly personally very conservative just just the
examples they drink less than any teenage generation they have less sex they're not
very interested in driving which was the most important thing in my life when i was 16
they don't take on lots of credit that's the personally conservative but politically very
much about saving the world changing the world they really every generation thinks they've gotten
somewhat shafted by the one that came before but in the case of gen z
not even factoring in covet they really have gotten somewhat shafted by debt by climate change
they have been handed one of the most difficult scenarios to live in and jeff you've had some big
visions the world internet uh project that has been a formation of a huge part of your working
life how have you gone about when creating a vision like that and sharing it and and so
successfully getting presidents and vice presidents to to take that with you how have you gone about
work on board and companies around the globe have have you gone about that briefly i was a television
guy and i thought television was the most important thing ever to happen to the world as far as
creating international culture and sharing some of the same values and i was always taught that
we blew it with television that television was the only mass medium we knew ahead of time was
going to be a mass medium there was no question in the 40s that radio listeners
were going to embrace radio with pictures so what i was taught was we should attract people before
they had television gone back to them every year to see how television changed their lives
cut to the late 90s i think it was pretty easy to see the internet was going to be a lot more
important than television it's going to change everything i even but even believing that i
underestimated massively because you know keep in mind when we
started everybody connected to the internet through a hard wire and a pc on the desk we
never anticipated social media and a phone in our pocket that would connect us uh but so we
start just believing that it was going to be really important we started tracking and we were
i think smart enough to know was going to be important lucky enough to have caught that it
was a lot more important than we expected and people always
want good information and got started getting invited sharing our work and insights and it's
been a lot of fun jeff we see uh ladies very uh curious and through curiosity that's how they're
constantly learning and developing themselves is curiosity something that's shown up a lot in
in your life and your thinking yes i mean just tell you too much is to imply that i figured life
out and everybody should listen to me but i can just tell you i i think i have a pretty
short attention span and my goal is to just as always you know always be learning always finding
new things and uh but i think that's that's not i have the secret to i think most people
do want to reinvent themselves i i i'm on what i call jeff 6.0 and hopefully there's another
two points ahead of me hey jeff communicating with clarity is something we also talk about as
of leadership and you've got a great way of storytelling and you uh you make the complex
seem really simple it's it's a gift of yours is that something you've communicated with
intentionally have you really given thought to that or is that just you i was hired as a professor
at ucla and i taught very large classes and i found that i had to amuse myself more than the
students i had to keep myself interested or i'd get bored and happily it seemed to work so i've
always been a part of that and i've always been a part of that and i've always been a part of that
and i've always been a part of that and i've always been a part of that and i've always been
very grateful that people seem to like listening and how important has collaboration been for you
along the way in your work jeff no i mean to really compare to have people verify to share
ideas absolutely indispensable nobody does it alone man final two questions for you and
incredibly appreciative of your time as always who's been the greatest leader in your life
that's you know i don't think i've ever been asked that
somebody who was a leader while i was alive but as i you know being an american and believing in
american history we're being challenged unlike any time before but will prevail abraham lincoln
was the guy who i thought faced the most impossible odds never compromised what he believed in and
true inspiration really remarkable also one of the most eloquent human beings
who ever walked the face of the earth also pretty
darned impressed and take immense inspiration from nelson mandela a couple of amazing answers
there historical uh legacy of uh of epic proportion isn't it when you think about
both of those figures in in you know american life and world life isn't it now at nelson mandela it's
um remarkable um legacy that's been created uh we're a bit obsessed with collaboration the final
question is and you've collaborated i only started half the list i could have spent another half an
hour of all the organizations and i'm not going to be able to do that because i'm not going to be able to do that
that you've worked with and you work around the globe is profound is there been someone you thought
i'd love to collaborate with them on one of your particular areas of passion is there a name that
springs to mind or you've perhaps already done it there are you know believing there were fortunately
i've been lucky enough to collaborate with most of the really successful companies i would have
liked to have collaborated with one or two companies that
were failed that might have survived but failed the company i would have loved to have gotten my
hands on although i don't know what i would have done was kodak one of the greatest you know 25
years ago one of the three best known brand names on planet earth the average person in a developed
country 25 years ago spent 50 000 in their lifetime on photography it's now you talk to
they will take 10 000 times more pictures than i did and their total expenditure will be 50 in
their lifetime i would have liked to have worked with the music companies as the internet came
along i i really like i i really like saving things fixing things repairing things even more
than building so did kodak just missed digital they didn't believe that invented digital but
they were making so much money on
film they just couldn't stop and unfortunately they brought nothing special to the digital world
and i mean a lot of those companies that just went by the wayside and kodak still still makes
some money doing medical imaging but they were a fundamental part of billions of people's lives
amazing story jeff i'm always uh taking notes always fascinated to chat to you and uh with
the world changing at a rapid rate that probably always happens to me but i'm always taking notes
but it feels with ai and the way i did it a little faster these days even even by your
yeah i don't think it's just uh i don't think every generation thought things changed quite
this fast yeah an amazing time and it's great to have someone with your wisdom and i really
appreciate you sharing it today great to catch up with you again thanks for your time thank you luke
it couldn't have been more fun great questions and i really enjoyed it thank you for listening
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