Sooner or later, the millennials and the Gen Z are going to take over the worlds of business and politics. Are they ready? Jen Du Plessis’s guest thinks they are. George Chanos is an author, speaker and is the founder of GeorgeJChanos.com. He is also the former Attorney General for Nevada. Find out how George got into politics, how he started his business and his plan throughout the pandemic, and find out what his new book, Millennial Samurai is all about. Look towards the future and learn why George believes that millennials are the next leaders in this technological age.
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The Future Of Leadership: How New Generations Will Shape Business And Politics In The Technological Age With George Chanos
I am so delighted to have with me George Chanos who served as Nevada’s 31st Attorney General. I will tell you a little bit more about him here shortly. Thank you so much for joining us, George. It’s been a whirlwind of us trying to get together. I’m glad it happened.
Thank you, Jen. I’m glad to be here.
I’m so excited. Let me tell you a little bit about him. While serving as Nevada’s Attorney General, he successfully argued in a 9 to 0 case of Whorton vs Bockting before the Supreme Court in the United States. You are probably going to have to tell us what that case is because those who are not attorneys don’t know what that case is. Before serving as Nevada’s Attorney General, he had a distinguished legal career representing individual and corporate clients on all matters relating to the growth and management of their businesses. It’s what you are doing as well. You are still helping people. He has served on numerous boards, both civic and corporate and has been serving for years as the Chairman of Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop, which I had never heard of until you were on our mastermind.
I’m learning a little bit about that. I’m sure our readers want to know about that too. About a rapidly growing 100 plus unit ran by a unit business franchise, ran by Millennials, which happens to be something that you are interested in. We want to talk about that at length. I can’t wait to get in. There are so many topics I want to talk to you about. I want to start with you. How do you go from being an attorney that is working in the corporate business world? To me, it’s very confining because we all know when we think attorneys, it’s in that square. I don’t see you that way at all, George. I see you as this person who is so fluid. How did that happen? Where was this tipping point of this apex that you were like, “I can’t be in the confines of this, I need more out of life?”
First of all, I have had three main guiding passions throughout my life. They have been art, politics and business. These are the three things that always seem to have drawn me closer to them. When I was very young, my interest in politics formed when I was six years old. I was in the car with my mom. It came over the radio that JFK had been assassinated. My mom pulled the car to the side of the road and started crying. That became a lifelong fascination with politics. We went back to our little apartment, watched the news. I saw this outpouring of international grief, love and support for this fallen hero. I was mesmerized. By the time I was ten, I knew that I wanted to be president. I was going to be president in the year 2000. I would be 42 years old. I would be one year younger than JFK. I mapped it all out by the time I was twelve. I began to follow that process.
I had another epiphany moment when I went back to work in Washington, DC I was an intern for Senator Paul Laxalt after serving as student body president at the university. He invited me back. It was during Abscam. That was during the political corruption trials of the Abscam co-conspirators. I was in the Russell Senate Office Building. Elevator doors opened up and walked the Abscam co-conspirators with their wives. I take one look at their faces. They are essentially death walking. I knew that I did not want to be one of them. That created another epiphany moment. I thought, “What do I need to do to do what it is that I would like to do and avoid the pitfalls that these men fell into? I need to get into business. I need to make money. I need to be able to sit across the table from a billionaire or somebody who is trying to influence me. I need to be able to say, ‘I don’t need your money.’ If I can do that, that’s the time for me to go into politics.”
[bctt tweet=”The secret to growth is being able to pivot and adapt to changing circumstances more rapidly and efficiently than others.” via=”no”]
I went off to law school. I worked for the San Diego Office, one of the largest firms in the world. I learned my trade and became proficient at what I was doing. The American Lawyer referred to the associates at this firm as the Dobermans. I was one of the Dobermans. I learned to be a very resourceful and effective lawyer. I saw that Vegas was growing by leaps and bounds. I had a history and gone to college here. I worked for Senator Laxalt. I decided to come back to Vegas and open up my own shop. I did that. I grew that. It was very successful. I started doing some real estate deals. I made quite a bit of money in real estate. I’ve got a knock at the door.
I was at the Trinidad fight at the MGM and in walks the managing partner of the state’s largest law firm. He says, “George, I have been thinking about you.” I said, “What about?” He said, “The attorney general is resigning to become a Federal judge. The governor has empowered me to find his replacement. You would be great.” It took me back to when I was six. I thought this was my destiny. It took me back to when I was twenty. I thought I finally have enough money to say yes. I said yes. I shut down my law practice, I gave it to my associate. I took a huge pay cut and became Nevada’s 31st Attorney General. I loved the job, the law, making decisions, the gravity of the position and arguing before the United States Supreme Court. I loved all of that but I hated politics.
I found out that politics was not for me. I found out that even though I had been a student of politics my whole life and I knew that there was a level of dysfunction, I didn’t understand the gravity of the dysfunction. My ego made me think that I could make a difference. The truth was that I would have been Don Quixote of Windmills. I would have been swimming in a very toxic pool. I didn’t want my life to be that way. It wasn’t a question of having the skillset and money to do it. It was also a question of, “Do I want to live this life?” It was very polarizing. My views were not polarized. I was not far right or far left. I was a centrist. I was a socially Liberal Republican, which is an oxymoron. Not all Republicans that are pro-choice believe in some reasonable gun control, support the LGBTQ movement and want to see criminal justice reform.
I have views that conservatives would consider Liberal but I have views that Liberals would consider Conservative. I don’t fit into a menu where the Republican Party can give me a menu and say, “This is what you believe.” The Democrats can give me a menu and say, “This is what you need to support.” I’m not that kind of guy. I choose my issues one by one and my candidates individual by individual. I make informed decisions about how I think about issues. I believe very strongly in the Second Amendment but I also believe in reasonable background checks. I personally don’t endorse the idea of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in the hands of civilians.
I know the law better than most people know the law. I know that under the Heller decision authored by Scalia, who was a very Conservative jurist, that our rights under the Second Amendment are not unlimited, that we do indeed have an individual right to bear arms but it is not an unlimited right. When you understand what the constitution says, what it means and what its history means, you don’t fall into either camp that has these rigid belief systems. The Second Amendment is completely inviolate or all guns are bad. You just don’t.
Do you consider yourself to be a constitutionalist?
I am a constitutionalist.
As you’re explaining it, that’s where my husband and I fall. We want to protect the constitution. That’s what it’s about for us.
Part of that is understanding what the constitution says and what it means. Under the constitution, the Supreme Court defines what these terms mean. If the Heller decision authored by Scalia with concurring opinions from the other justices, defines the scope of the Second Amendment, then that’s the scope. It’s not what you think, what I think or what somebody else thinks it is. That’s not the constitution. The constitution is they tell us what it is. They interpret it. That’s what it means.
Unfortunately, that’s what we are seeing, that change going on. I thank you for explaining that. It does help me understand why your outlook on things is so broad. The first time I met you, I was like, “I don’t understand.” We all do that. We stereotype people based on titles. I was like, “The title isn’t matching him.” It’s when we talked about your artwork behind you and all the things that you love. Thanks for sharing that. It has brought you to where you are. This is something that I imagine you are eating up all the changes that are going on from a technology standpoint. Let’s talk about that part. Before we do that, I want to talk about businesses. I know you are a business strategist. What is it that you help businesses strategize in doing? There’s growth and I get it. I get the sense as a little more to growth in what you are consulting.
Think of Napoleon Hill. He has got his generals down on the field. Napoleon Hill has a helicopter perspective of that. He sees the entire terrain. When I was twelve years old, I read a book called Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy, who was considered the Father of Advertising. He talked about this helicopter perspective. This stuck with me, this idea of rising above and looking at the big picture. For many years in advising clients, you would come into me and you would say, “George, I’m having this problem with my business. I have a partner that isn’t carrying their weight that is doing things that they shouldn’t be doing. My industry is morphing and changing. My competitors are stealing my trade secrets,” whatever it happened to be. I would have to rise above and look at all the different angles. I would try to understand your industry and understand your business if you can believe it or not, better than you do.
I would do research. I would read. I would look at your industry. I would do everything I can to learn about your industry. I would learn about you. I would learn about the people that are opposite you that you are having a problem with. I would look at it from all perspectives. When you are on the ground in the middle of the problem, in the heat of battle, you are not necessarily going to be the person that has the objectivity to do that, to rise above the fray and to look at all of those different issues. You may think you are in a dispute with a partner. You may think that you are in the right and they are in the wrong. You have arrived at that conclusion. You think you have thought it all out. You are firmly entrenched in that position.
I would require that you switch positions and pretend you are the other person. I would ask you to tell me the story from their perspective. If you were arguing their position, what would you be saying? I try to get that information out of you because I would need to see what the other side is. As a strategist, I’m a problem solver, essentially that’s what I have been. Most people have come to me with problems. I have found solutions to their problems. It doesn’t always have to be a problem. It could be you are coming to me and you are saying, “I want to grow my business.” I would look at more than just growing your business. I would look at the issue of where is your industry going? Where is your business going? What happens when we do grow your business? Do you have the infrastructure to support that?
It’s the direction that we will be moving in. You have this plan of growing your business in this direction. Is that the optimal direction? Is there another direction that you are not thinking about that might be more lucrative, sustainable, consistent with emerging trends in your industry? If you come into me and say, “I want to grow my business,” I’m not just going to develop a plan for how you can manufacture more widgets or close more deals. I’m going to develop a comprehensive plan that allows you to be successful to be your best self, for your business to be its best self and for you to grow sustainably, in a way that will stand the test of time, in a way that looks out over the horizon over the next years and positions you for what’s going to happen then. That’s what I do.
As an overall strategist, I have been doing that for years. You do something for tens of thousands of hours. I don’t care if it’s golfing, playing tennis, singing or whatever it is. I have probably put in $50,000 billable hours in solving complex problems and developing strategies over the years. When you do that, when you invest that much time, you develop a certain proficiency. One of the other things that happen when you do this in all these different industries when the problems are constantly changing day by day, industry by industry, individual by individual, you become what they call a polymath. You become someone who is a very broad learner as opposed to a deep learner. I’m not a deep learner. If you put me in a room with Ray Kurzweil who understands artificial intelligence way beyond what I understand about artificial intelligence, he would be the guy to talk to about artificial intelligence. I wouldn’t. I might know more than you do or I might know more than the average person does but I won’t know more than a deep learner.
[bctt tweet=”However you feel about them, millennials will be at the tip of the generational sphere as humanity encounters the technological revolution.” via=”no”]
It seems like a fiduciary. A fiduciary who doesn’t know about brokerage firms or stocks doesn’t know about options trading, doesn’t know about every mutual fund. As a fiduciary, it provides that holistic outlook that says, “We might want to pull back in this area and move forward in that area. Go talk to the expert in that area.” I certainly understand that. I love that you talked about emerging trends. By the way, I want to say something too that you had said something in our mastermind, “Stop limiting your business growth.” That hit home with me. I still have written it down. It’s a very simple phrase. I don’t want to limit myself but I think that we do tend to limit ourselves by saying, “I want to grow to here. Not that I want to grow vertically and horizontally in a complete spectrum.” For whatever reason, that hit me very well. We think very linearly when it comes to growth like the shotgun approach.
You talked about Capriotti’s. I have been Chairman of the Board of the company for several years. I have two young Millennials that run the day-to-day operations. My partners could tell you the cost of pickles. I couldn’t. I don’t know anything about it. I provided mentorship and guidance to them over the years but they run the business. I don’t run the business. I don’t have an office in the business. They come to me when they have problems that they need solving. They are entering into big deals, big transactions that they need help in negotiating. These are the types of ways that I add value. Let me tell you what Capriotti’s has done. First of all, we are one of the fastest-growing QSRs in the United States.
What does it stand for?
It’s Quick Service Restaurants. We acquired the company years ago. We were about 40 stores. We have 120 stores that are open and operating profitably but we also have about 150 and climbing stores in the pipeline. By the end of the year, we expect to have 400 in the pipeline. One hundred and fifty in the pipeline that signed franchise agreements paid non-refundable deposits and that will be opening. We have moved our franchise inquiries from 1 a day to 10 a day. During the pandemic when most restaurants were devastated, many sit-down restaurants closed. Something like 70% to 80% of the high-end restaurants closed and went out of business. The other sit-down restaurants where he had by as much as 40% or 50% are losing money or closing. The quick-service restaurants lost sales of about 30%. We had double-digit revenue increases during 2020, during COVID, double-digit revenue increases. Same-store sales increased by double digits. We also acquired a new company called Wing Zone, which has 66 stores, during the pandemic. Growth is good. You want growth.
What do you contribute that grow to? I know you are going to talk about something called ghost restaurants.
That’s another area that we are pioneers in. We were looking at ghost kitchens years ago before most anybody was into the field. Ghost kitchens are someone who takes out a warehouse. They buy a warehouse or they lease a warehouse. They create multiple kitchens, 50 kitchens, 100 kitchens in this large warehouse. They lease out those kitchens to restaurant tours. I have a footprint on my QSR, on my typical Capriotti’s of about 1,500 to 2,000 square feet. It goes to the kitchen. My footprint might be only 200 square feet. In a normal restaurant, I might have fifteen employees on a rotation. In a ghost kitchen, I might have 2 or 3 employees. The costs of operation are radically different.
In the restaurant business, you have your rent, your labor and your food costs. These are your three primary costs. In a ghost kitchen, I reduce my rent and my labor. I reduced 2 of my 3 costs dramatically. That makes me that much more profitable. Most of our customers are ordering online. They are either ordering online through us or Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash, Postmates or whatever their favorite app is. They go on that app. They order. The driver comes, picks up the food and then delivers it to the consumer. It doesn’t matter if the driver is driving up to a 2,000 square foot QSR restaurant or up to a 200 square foot kitchen inside of a ghost kitchen industrial building. The customer is getting the same product.
If I can decrease my costs, then I can pass those savings onto the customer. The customer gets a better value proposition. They are getting the same product. As long as they don’t need to eat inside and sit down, then the ghost kitchen option is the better option. We offer franchises to people who want to open up a franchise. You can become a franchisee of Capriotti’s by either opening up a QSR 1,500 to 2,000 square foot inline retail shop or you can open up a 200 square foot ghost kitchen for a fraction of the price. We offer both models. Some people want one or the other and some people do both.
That has come out as a result of the pandemic. It was around for a while but it was coming up as a result of the pandemic. I remember you saying something about the fact that in some of these ghost kitchens, there’s not even a human being. Some robots are dunking chicken or whatever they are doing, preparing food depending on the type of food that there is.
On the backend in the kitchen, we are in discussions with robotics companies about the possibility of creating robots. They already exist. We are putting them in our shops so that the robot would grab the frozen chicken wings. They would drop them in the deep fryer. They would pull them out and drop them on paper towels. They would take them and put them in a sauce bowl. They would mix them in the sauce. They would take them out of the sauce and put them in a box. They would close the box and put it on a conveyor belt. It would go out to the front where it would be served to the customer. This can all be automated.
We know what robotics can do in building cars and things like that. If you ever watch how it’s made, you know that robotics can do so much.
The Tesla Factory in Fremont, California has 160 robots, very little human involvement required.
Let’s go back to the question. To what do you owe the fact that you have grown double when everyone else is shrinking? What about the emerging trends and new things that are coming along that you talk about? I won’t say the name yet but the things that are coming along. What do you think it is that allowed for you all to grow so substantially during this time?
It’s the ability to pivot and adapt to changing circumstances more rapidly and efficiently than others. The minute we saw this coming, our entire corporate staff immediately went virtual. Over 100 people were all working in an office. We all went home. We all began working from home. We shifted our marketing, from marketing our existing retail locations to instead putting our advertising dollars online into marketing, online purchasing and online ordering. We increased the number of customers that were availing themselves. While everyone else was trying the lobby to open up their stores, we went digital.
It’s so simple but that’s exactly what you talk about all the time with the emerging trends and with the things that you talk about in your new book. Let’s go ahead and segue over to the new book, which is the Millennial Samurai. Interestingly, you called it the Millennial Samurai. I don’t even know what else to call it but it’s so much more than Millennial. You and I, we’re both Baby Boomers in this former era adapting to. Not just to Millennials. We need to be adapting to Gen Like and the Alpha Generation. We have Alpha.
It’s not about Millennials. The reason it’s called Millennial Samurai is that this whole new foray of mine into writing and speaking was inspired by my daughter who is a Millennial. I wanted to prepare her for the future. I have several nephews and nieces but my oldest nephew is also a Millennial. They were the original inspiration. Millennials have been given a bad name, a bad rap, where they have been characterized wrongly or rightly. They have been characterized as entitled, delusional and not embracing the Baby Boomer generation’s values.
I realized in looking at this problem that we are facing as a global community of both a problem and an opportunity, looking at the change that’s coming through the technological revolution, which I see as a tsunami of technological change, the Millennial generation, regardless of what we think of them, they will be at the tip of the generational spear as humanity encounters this tsunami. You and I will be older. I don’t know how old you are. I’m sure you know we are near what I am.
I was born two days after Kennedy was shot. My mother was so distraught. She worked for the Secretary of State under Kennedy.
Regardless of what we all think of Millennials, they are at an age where humanity encounters this tide of change, they will be the first major generation at the tip of the spear to tackle these problems. I will be older. I will be more of a liability than an asset. I will be a drain on the system as I get older. I’m not going to solve the world’s problems. People that are going to have to solve the world’s problems are going to be first, the Millennial generation, the 85 million of them, the Gen Z is along with them then the Alphas. The tidal wave is going to hit them. They are going to have to deal with it. That’s why it’s Millennial Samurai. I feel that my role, our role, the Baby Boomer generation is to do everything that we can to empower this generation, to enable them, to pass down as a legacy.
What it is that we have learned? What is it that we know that they don’t know yet that we can share with them so that they become more formidable, resilient, adaptive and better at dealing with these problems quickly? How they handle these issues is going to affect you and me. We have to hope and try to encourage them to handle them effectively and appropriately. Not the way we see it, but the way they see it. They are going to inherit that world. They are going to live in that world. All these subsequent generations are going to inherit to live in that world. How they see the world and how they want the world is very important. It’s important for all of us that they make good decisions. How can we empower them and educate them to make good decisions? As we see it, give them what information we have.
[bctt tweet=”We are living in the most extraordinary period in human history. Embrace the change and take advantage of it to live an extraordinary life.” via=”no”]
We have five generations in the workforce at the same time. No time in history have we ever had five generations at one time. It’s imperative that we all understand each other. I love that you were saying that as Baby Boomers, we need to help them. I agree with that. I also think as Millennials, they need to help us. I consider myself to be very techie. I have been doing a show. I’m one of the veterans in shows. For years, I have been doing this. I consider myself to be very techie. Many Baby Boomers and many Gen X-ers are not techies at all. The Millennials need to look in the rearview mirror and bring us along just as much as we need to push them forward. This was the push generation too that Gen X-ers were pushing their kids out constantly. I do agree with you. Both of my kids are Millennials and very successful. My son is an Inc 500 business owner. He owns a business that debuts at 234 and Inc 500. I don’t look at Millennials as bad because my kids are great. Every generation has them.
It sounds like you have got some Millennial samurais.
I totally do. We are creating that arrow for my daughter. She has already got it but she’s making a shift in what she’s doing for a living, very similar to what she’s doing. It’s enough of a shift that we are starting to help her build and make that sword. She can be the spear of it so that we can take a step back in one of our businesses. It’s great what’s going on. It started in 2020. It’s funny how the 21st century came along. We are years into the 21st century. We are realizing that there’s this thing called leadership and what it looks like. It’s collaborative. It’s team-oriented. It’s community-oriented. It is a new way of working where we have freedoms that we didn’t have before but yet having more productivity and more efficiency as a result of it. As I was browsing through the digital version, I can’t wait to get the real version so I can dig in the digital version of your book. These opportunities are ahead of us. We need to take advantage of them as quickly as we possibly can. That’s why you want to get in the hands of how many people?
I’m giving away the digital version for free. I would like to get one million people to download the free digital version. That’s my goal.
That’s wonderful to learn about it. I send it off to my kids to read as well. I wanted them to read it. I have to read to my husband. He can read but he is not a reader. He likes reading his car magazines. That’s what he likes reading. I have been debriefing him on everything that I have been reading in it. It’s an exciting time. If someone who’s reading this show is a Millennial, what are you telling them? I’m going to go to the extreme and say the Baby Boomer rather than the silent generation of the builders to go to those two extremes because that’s where the biggest spread is.
The message isn’t different. The book is not simply for Millennials. It’s titled the Millennial Samurai because they will be at the tip of the generational spear. It has equal application to Baby Boomers. Think of it like this. If I were to drop you off in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest and I were going to give you a duffel bag, we can think of certain things that we would both want in that duffel bag. You might want water, a compass, an instrument that allows you to light a fire or something to cut with. There are some certain things that you would put in that duffel bag. What I have done is I have tried to think of all the things that a human being needs to know. I haven’t covered everything. I have only covered 182 chapters. There are 1 to 3 pages each. They are very easy to read. They are very quick for the short attention span reader, Millennials or people that don’t like to read.
Your husband might love this book because he can read 1, 2 or 3 pages like a magazine. I personally prefer reading magazines as well or articles. I enjoy reading articles or papers that people have written, to do a lot of my research as opposed to a book. Often a book is repetitive. A book on positive thinking might take 200 pages to tell you what they could have told you in two pages. What Millennial Samurai doing is I have taken each of these subjects, character, courage, commitment, compassion and issues that are facing us, globally warming, racism, incarceration, criminal justice reform, all of these issues, issues that will face us in the future, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, 3D printing, the internet of things, cloud computing, Longevity Escape Velocity, asteroid mining.
I have taken all of these topics. I have done the research and the exhaustive reading so that you don’t have to. I have condensed what I have learned into short bite-size chapters that you can easily digest, that will not take up much of your time and that you will learn a tremendous amount of new information that’s extremely relevant to the next years that you are going to live in or that your children are going to live in. You are going to get what I have, which is a broad base of knowledge, a broad familiarity with all of these different issues. There are so many ways that that can empower you that it’s incredible.
First of all, as you are trying to solve a problem, you can and draw from all these different disciplines and all these different things that you have learned. You can apply them to any given problem in many cases. You are also going to be aware of all of these changes that are going to occur and how those changes are likely to affect your industry, your life, your relationships, your religion or your community. What’s important for people to know is that we are living in the most extraordinary period in human history. Let me tell you why I say that. Stephen Hawking, before he died in 2014 told us that the singularity, the moment in time when machine intelligence eclipses human intelligence will be the greatest event in human history. Greater than fire, the wheel, space travel, the internet, anything that we have ever conceived or are even capable of conceiving with our limited intellectual capacity. This is coming.
Ray Kurzweil, who is the Head of Artificial Intelligence for Google, who Bill Gates says knows more about artificial intelligence than anyone he knows. Ray Kurzweil tells us that this singularity could happen as early as 2029. That’s right around the corner. The greatest event in human history is happening. First of all, that’s pretty powerful stuff in and of itself. Kurzweil goes on. We have never had an occurrence like that. That’s like a meteor hitting. We’ve got Kurzweil saying that’s not the end of it. That by the 2040s, artificial intelligence will not be our equal. It will be a billion times more capable than human intelligence. We lack the intellectual capacity to even imagine what intelligence that is a billion times our own even means. This is all coming in our lifetime and in your children’s lifetime.
When you have a tsunami, you look around and you see a lot of rapid and radical change that’s occurring based on our lives, based on the years that I have been around, I have not seen this level of change that has been occurring over the last several years. Political change, in particular, social change. When a tsunami comes, the first thing that happens is you see the water level rise on the beach. You start to see water on the floor. You don’t see the big wave and the tsunami. What we are seeing in my view is the water on the floor. It has been brought about by the first wave of the technological tsunami, which is our cell phone and social media.
This cell phone has 100,000 times the computing power that NASA had in 1969 when they put a man on the moon. They needed a room full of computers. If I went back in the past, traveled back for years, I walked into that room of scientists with this phone and I said, “In years, everyone is going to have one of these. It’s going to have 100,000 times the computing power that you have in this room. Every individual will have one in their back pocket or their purse.” They would think I had lost my mind. Stewart Brand says, “If someone is talking about the future and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, they don’t know what they were talking about.”
The future is science fiction. It is very much going to be like science fiction. You can see that just by looking at what would have happened if I went back with the phone years ago. They would have thought I was crazy. When I’m telling you that artificial intelligence will be one billion times or when Ray Kurzweil was telling you that, it doesn’t matter if it’s one billion times. It could be 1,000 times. It could be one million times. It could be double what human intelligence is. Even double would be a huge, massive development. We know that there are going to be these massive changes. What do we need to know to be able to take advantage of these opportunities? Not run from them, not be afraid of them, not be frightened by the change but embrace the change, run towards the change and take advantage of the change to live an extraordinary life. What do we need to know to do that? That’s what I have tried to put in this book. That’s why it’s your duffel bag.
I feel and I hear what you were saying about the first wave coming through. It’s coming on the shore and everything. We also know that everything gets sucked out before the tsunami comes. Voice technology is something that I’m hearing a lot about. I interviewed someone on my show about voice technology and how powerful this is becoming that we can talk to Ms. Siri. You have to say that when you are in a room with these things. They will respond to you, Ms. Alexa. When you are talking to them, doctors are going to be able to tell the artificial intelligence is going to be able to tell that when you say the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs. They are going to be able to tell you where your ailing, that you have a heart condition, that you have a liver condition. All this technology is already here. It’s being tested. I know that that’s happening in creating this big pool that’s happening on the shoreline. What is the sock out? What does that look like? There is that happens and then the wave comes in. What do you see as being that? Is it our lack of adaptivity?
First of all, there are going to be a lot of economic disruption in employment in particular, which is why people like Andrew Yang talk about a universal basic income. There are going to be millions of people who are unemployed. Think about it. First of all, McKinsey Consulting tells you that 47% of the global employments of the jobs that exist are susceptible to automation based on existing technology.
They are from New York. I have seen the guy talk several times and it’s scary.
The number one job for an American male is a truck driver. Those jobs are gone. There are three million truck drivers. Chrysler Daimler was doing cross-country trips in driverless semis with a passenger sitting in the cab. They have been doing that for years. Those jobs eventually are going to disappear. Uber drivers, there are 3.9 million of them. Next year, there may be 5 million of them. Once they have driverless vehicles that are truly driverless, those jobs are gone. The number one job for an American woman is a clerical worker. Those jobs will be gone. The franchise food worker, there are 8 million of them. Most of those jobs will be automated. The business economic imperative is that you want to reduce costs and increase profitability. Anything that can be automated will be automated.
What some people don’t realize is that this goes much deeper than drivers, real estate agents, title companies. These jobs can be automated. Lawyers can be automated, journalists. Amazon owns The Washington Post. The Washington Post has an algorithm. During the 2016 election, they used that algorithm to author 500 articles. All the editor had to do is type in a one-sentence instruction, “Give me a 750-word article that says Donald Trump is a horrible person. Hillary Clinton is a horrible person.” The computer would generate a brilliantly written exactly 750 words article. They ran 500 of these articles during the 2016 election written by a computer. They received 500,000 likes. No one knew that they were written by a computer. God knows how many they have written since 2016 by a computer.
They are licensing that technology to other newspapers around the country. Journalist jobs are threatened. Lawyer jobs are threatened. All these different professions are threatened. Weare either going to experience massive economic disruption and unemployment, for which we are going to have to pivot and adapt in some way. Some people argue that. This new technology will also create millions of new jobs. It will. The question is how will we train people for these new jobs that will be created? At the turn of the twentieth century in early 1900, we created the public education system for the industrial revolution. We were moving from an agrarian society to an industrial society. We created the public education system to teach people to get off the farm and to learn how to operate a machine. We are moving from the industrial revolution to the technological revolution. The technological revolution will dwarf the industrial revolution. I don’t see a new educational system for the technological revolution. I see us continuing to try to use the old public education system that was created for the industrial revolution. That won’t work.
[bctt tweet=”There is a lot to learn about what’s going to happen. Be informed. Understand what’s happening so that you can take advantage of it.” via=”no”]
It will be interesting to see what happens with universities in the form that they are and the experience.
I don’t think they should exist in the form that they are.
The biggest concern however is the loneliness and the emotional. We have more lonely people in the Gen Z. The Alphas will be the loneliest because they don’t have that comradery. That’s what I’m most concerned about. You even look at the physique of younger generations over our generation and older. The physique has changed. I have noticed that my grandkids are not like my kids were at all. They were like these little avatars walking around. It’s amazing what is happening. What’s important to recognize is that suck out is going to be all the loss. As an individual preparing for that, there had been some new changes with Mac and Microsoft Outlook, the look that came out of how it looks over the months. We are moving more towards a lack of typing. It’s funny you say that. This is my keyboard. It’s not attached. It’s not right in front of me all the time. I move it around because I find that I don’t have the need for it as much as I used to. I have experienced that in the last months. I can do a lot more voice technology for almost anything I want to do. That’s coming as well. We won’t be learning how to type like we used to because we won’t need to.
I worry that we won’t be remembering how to talk. My daughter has her own house. She has got housemates. Some of those housemates stay in their rooms. They are on their computer all day. They are texting. They are not talking. They are not using their phones to speak. When they do come out of the room, they don’t have eye contact. Their ability to converse is beginning to atrophy. There’s this transition that is occurring between the real world that you and I grew up in, played in, did sports in and learned into the digital world, a digital environment. If you think about it, as human beings, we all have brains and we all have an emotional system. Our emotional system can be triggered. Our dopamine releases. Slot machines in Las Vegas triggered dopamine releases. Video games triggered dopamine releases. Participating in digital worlds and digital fantasies may make you feel good.
If you have a life in the real world that doesn’t make you feel good and then you go to the digital world and that life gives you the emotional sustenance that you need, where are you going to spend your time? You have a choice to live in the real world. You have a choice to live in the digital world. Some people are finding the digital world to be more attractive, especially young people. Their real-world experience has become so unattractive. Fifty percent of them graduated from college and can’t find a job that requires a college degree. Many of them are facing hopelessness and despair because they live in communities where they don’t feel there’s a way out. They don’t have hopefulness. This shows a movement towards a digital kind of experience.
People like you look at the NFT space, which I’m getting into. I’m an artist. I love to create. This is a very interesting space for me to create these NFTs. When you look at that space, there are people like MetaKovan, who bought the Beeple at Christie’s for $69 million, a digital work of art that he paid $69 million for. He was creating a metaverse and a world in the digital environment that you can go into. It will have these museums that will feature this digital art. It will have other things. It will have raves where your avatar can dance with other avatars. God knows what it will have. It will create a digital experience. If people are spending eight hours on their phone or their laptop, they may be spending more time when you have these virtual experiences. You’ve got augmented, virtual, experiential reality. Millennials prize experience over everything else.
Even our coins, we look at all of the coins. I was telling you about my son. He’s creating his own crypto inside of his company. People will trade within his company. Bitcoin is there and a few others don’t mean more are going to be coming in. We are going to have this different type of money. Look what happened to our actual coins. There’s a coin shortage everywhere because of COVID.
There are 5,000 ICOs, Initial Coin Offering. It’s not just Bitcoin. There are thousands of these.
He has his own coming out too. His company is Option Alpha. I think he’s calling it Option Coins or something. He has a multimillion-dollar company. Being with that to be sold. He’s trying to position it for sale to the tune of around $250 million. He has one letter of intent that came. He passed up on it. He wasn’t quite ready to sell because he knew he could triple it. We will see what happens.
I would love to talk to him and learn more about what he’s doing.
We will connect with you. He’s having a great time putting this together. It’s tremendous.
I would imagine he’s probably doing something with NFTs too.
He’s starting with that. I was talking to him about that. He’s starting to look in that direction if he’s not already done it. He has got a couple million in Bitcoin. He was in on it early. I’m sure he’s already thinking that if not already way past what I think.
That’s what you want to do. You need to be in the information flow.
I feel like I’m in the river. I’m not running the boat. I’m in the boat.
As long as you are in the flow, you are receiving the information that is relevant, then you are in the right place. Think about it. In 1998, there was ICAP. There were domain names. If you were in that flow in 1998, then you were buying up dot-com names. You were profiting from that. If you were in the information flow in 2010 when Bitcoin was $0.08 apiece, you were buying them up. That new activity is NFTs. I missed the 1998 dot com craze. I started buying certain domains in probably 2000. By then, most of them were gone. I wasn’t paying attention in 2010 when Bitcoin was $0.08. I wasn’t buying it. I am very much at the beginning of the NFT space. I have a fund. I’m going to be designing and minting, working with artists from all over the world, designing and minting NFTs. We are at the inception of that new opportunity. There will be ups and downs.
It’s still going to go up in the long run because we are not going backward. It was funny. I was talking to somebody, an uncle or something. He’s in his 80s. We’ve got lots of families. He was saying, “The internet is a flash in the pan. That’s why I’m not going to do it.” I said, “Uncle Darius, it’s not a flash in the pan. It’s here to stay.” He goes, “It won’t matter because I’m not going to be around that much longer.” I’m like, “That’s fine.” It is harder because I have to make a phone call to him to communicate with him. I would like to share pictures of what I’m doing with my family, his great-great-grandnieces and nephews.
It’s much harder to communicate with them. I have to go out of my way to make sure I call him. That’s okay. There are going to be some little danglers there. Part of this show is breaking through glass ceilings. We are breaking through multitudes of glass ceilings. This is where you want to be. I love that you are doing the charge for it. I know that you are going to be talking about even more of these topics when I get a chance to see you here out in San Diego. If you want to give away one million of these eBooks, what is the best way for someone to get one million of the books? Not that they are going to go get one million but how they can start sharing it.
They would go on MillennialSamurai.com. They would download the digital eBook. It’s free. It’s 444 pages but it’s very easy to read. You don’t have to read the whole thing. You can pick and choose the chapters that you want to focus on and that you want to read. You can read it over time. You don’t have to start at the beginning and move to the end. You could start at the end, move to the beginning. It’s all broken down into these short bite-sized chapters that are only 1 to 3 pages each. They are very easy to read. You will learn. I guarantee that virtually half the book will tell you things that you do not know. How do I know that? When I was writing it, the things that I put in the book were things that amazed me and that I did not know at the time that I wrote it in 2019.
Imagine how much more is in there. You will have to do another addition as things start changing. I’m sure NFTs aren’t even in there.
It says on the cover right here Book One.
You knew this was coming. You are ready for it to come. George, it has been so fun having you here, hearing all of the things. You are further downstream but I’m catching up. I’m in a boat behind you. I’m hanging onto that one. I thank you so much for coming here. For everyone, please go and check out his website. You confront him. Find out what he’s going to be talking about on LinkedIn, Instagram and social media so that you can see where he’s heading, where he’s at, where you can catch him speak. Most importantly, if you are reading this and you are with a major institution of some type, George is also a speaker. Get him to come. Inspire people about what the changes are to come so that you can be the straw that stirs your business and your industry in this whole big global economy. Take him up on his offer to come and speak at your events as well.
I would love to speak at anyone’s event. I can also do breakout group sessions with your executives or with your attendees, question and answers. There are a lot to learn about what’s going to happen. It’s about being in the information flow and understanding what’s happening so that you can take advantage of it.
You should coin it IF instead of AI. It’s the Information Flow that’s happening. Who would ever think that talking to an attorney would bend up in where we are at talking about what’s going on? You understand why I brought George on to share his story, his ideas and thoughts with all of us. Thank you again, George, for being with us.
Thank you, Jen. I appreciate it.
Thank you, everyone, for reading. I appreciate that you take time from your day. Please, do us a favor. Scroll down on your iPhone. Give us a great five-star rating. Write us a great little review down there. We would love to hear what you loved about this particular episode. We will catch you next time.
Important Links
- https://www.Amazon.com/Millennial-Samurai-Mindset-21st-Century/dp/1688563334
- http://MillennialSamurai.com/
- http://GeorgeJChanos.com/
- Ogilvy on Advertising
- Wing Zone
About George Chanos
George J. Chanos, Esq. served as Nevada’s thirty-first Attorney General. He administered Nevada’s Department of Justice and acted as the state’s chief legal officer and advisor. While serving as Nevada’s Attorney General, he successfully argued (9/0) the case of Whorton v. Bockting, 549 U.S. 406 (2007) before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Prior to serving as Nevada’s Attorney General, Mr. Chanos had a distinguished legal career representing individual and corporate clients on all matters relating to the growth and management of their businesses. He is an author, speaker and business consultant. He has served on numerous boards, both civic and corporate and for the last ten years has served as Chairman of Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop Inc., a rapidly growing one-hundred-plus-unit QSR franchise whose Millennial owners—his partners—he continues to advise and mentor.
Mr. Chanos is a father and an uncle. His daughter, Alexandra, is currently attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and his nephew, David, is a graduate of San Diego State University. They are both Millennials and are the inspiration for this book. For more information on the subjects covered in this book and on related topics, visit GeorgeJChanos.com and MillennialSamurai.com.
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