Investing for a Post-AGI World | How AI Changes Money

Hello. I wanted to take a few minutes and sit down today to discuss something that's been very top of mind for me recently, and that is how AI and automation and AGI and that whole conversation actually materially impacts you right now for your financial and career decisions. And now there's lots of discussions out there about how AI is going to change the world, how AGI could impact jobs, could ruin the economy, it could end money as a concept. But beyond just learn how to get good at AI, how does that actually impact us right now in the financial investments and career decisions that we make? So in the next few minutes, I'm going to cover four of the central ways in which I believe AI should materially impact your decision making right now. And my directive or my goal for this video is that if you watch all the way through, you listen to the four points, at least one of them is going to change how you approach decision making in regard to AI finance and career over the next year. And this is not an axiomatically sound argument. I'm not laying out some grand structure on how AI is going to change the world. These are four independent nodes or thoughts or ideas that you can use to then deduce, okay, what are the set of decisions that I should make? And you'll see what I mean once we get through the first one right here. So I have points one and two right here. I have three and four on the other end of this outrageously large whiteboard. And let's get to a word from our sponsor before we jump into point number one. And on that note, over 10 million people now have heard me speak about the upcoming copper shortage and the massive trends and financial moves we're seeing across precious metals as a whole, right? Gold, silver, and copper being some of the best performing assets period of 2025 and are trading near all time highs. And that is so much so that the GDXU ETN is up over 1000% in the past year. 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And so if you want exposure to gold and copper through a company with exposure to the price of a strong pipeline of diversified development projects, holdings in multiple other mining companies and reputable institutional and insider backing, then Gold Mining Inc. or GLDG on the NYSE may deserve a closer look for you. And as always, make sure you review their public filings for important information regarding the company and their projects. And that includes the most recent annual information form, always a good thing to look at and all the technical reports available in them. And those are linked right here or in the description as well. That said, thanks to GLDG for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it. Okay, so that in mind, the first idea here, let's go ahead and underline this, is the discount rate. And the discount rate is a financial concept that relates to the fact that you right now would prefer having money in this moment versus that same amount of money in 10 years. And that's an extreme example, but let's just think through the concept here. So if I said, would you rather have a million dollars right now or a million dollars in a year? What would you say? The million dollars right now. And there are a few reasons for that, right? Number one is security. You'd rather have it now. You could die in the next year. Something bad could happen. There could be an economic catastrophe. Who knows what could happen? You would rather have it now. Also, that money is not static. It can grow. If you have money now, it can earn in the stock market. You can buy bonds. You can make money from that money over the course of the next year. But you start to ask, okay, what if the decision is between a million dollars now and $1.1 million in one year? And what if it's 1.02 or 1.2 instead of the 1.1 that you're going to earn in that year? And if you think that you can make 10% a year in the stock market, then maybe you would rather have a million dollars now than $1,080,000 or an 8% return a year from now. But whatever those numbers are for you, the rate at which you discount future cash flows or money in the future, that is your discount rate. And so the big idea here that I've been toying around with in my head is I think AI and the possibility of AGI and automation should increase our financial discount rate. Basically, what it means is we should prioritize future cash flows less because the future is more uncertain. For example, 10 to 20 years from now, maybe AGI has automated nearly all white-collar work. Maybe we don't have to work because money is useless because we all live in a utopia. It's universal high income. Or maybe the opposite. Maybe there was a massive recession because so many people were displaced from jobs and hyperinflation and who knows what. But basically, AI is a very credible threat to future cash flows, which in turn means we should discount those cash flows or any future earnings, and you'll see how this connects materially in a second, compared to rather having that cash or those returns right now. Now, that's the long way of saying the future is more uncertain. So we should prioritize safety, security in a financial sense right now. And so I'll give you an example, a Roth IRA, right? That has been the cornerstone of personal finance for decades and for saving for retirement. And one of the big things we talked about on this channel is using tax-advantaged accounts, right? So I'm not saying that's worthless, but let's assume for a second that you think AGI is going to radically reshape the world economy on the order of the next 10 or 20 years. Then do you want to lock up most of your money or a lot of your money or your savings in a vehicle where you're highly penalized for taking them out in the next 10 or 20 years? You essentially want to lock down a lot of that liquidity, knowing that as a 20 or 30-year-old, you're only going to be able to use that and get the yield from it 30 to 40 years from now. And the answer there is not a binary yes or no, but should that impact the way in which you approach that decision? Probably. For example, maybe if you're very bullish on AI, your approach is just any cash flows that are more than 15 years out, I'm going to discount to zero. I assume the world is going to be so radically reshaped by AI on the order of the next 20 years that because I don't know what the financial world will look like, I don't want to become illiquid. I don't want to threaten my finances now to get returns more than 20 years out. And there's a lot of ways, again, in which that can manifest itself. If you think about things like buying versus renting, that plays into that dilemma. You think about tax advantaged accounts, and then also the kind of assets that you choose to invest in. So again, in sum, your discount rate has gone up because of the uncertainty, financially speaking, due to AI, automation. And this is all something for you to think through for your own life, right? But maybe a higher discount rate means to pursue returns more aggressively for the next five years. Maybe it means hedge, which we're going to get to in a second here. But in sum, to tie that together, I believe, and I'm taking actions based on this, that your intrinsic discount rate in regard to your personal finances and career has been raised due to the possibility of AI automation, AGI, etc. And the much harder question is by how much, again, and how does that play into decisions, which would be a six-hour spiel that we won't have time for in this video. That's number one. Number two here is an AGI asset class. And what I mean by this is we have the traditional delineations of investments out there. We have the stock market, we have the bond market, we have real estate and precious metals and collectibles. But what if a up-and-coming delineation of any kind of asset and one that will radically affect the performance of said assets is essentially the litmus test of would they survive AGI. Said differently, as AI progresses, what are the set of assets that we believe are going to benefit from or not get eliminated by AGI slash really good AI versus those assets that will just go to zero if something like that were to happen or if AI was just to incrementally get better at 30, 40% a year compounding over the next five, 10, 20 years. And I think you've seen that a little bit, right? You've seen that angle on SAS, you've seen it on precious metals, but I think that's just the start of a much wider delineation, again, of investments. So your equities, your bonds, your private market assets, etc. of what's going to survive AGI. What is the financial hedge against AGI? And again, here, the much harder question is, well, how does that actually materially represent itself? What is going to survive? Is it real estate in the Bay Area or in the Mediterranean? Is it precious metals? And if it's public equities, what set of companies are going to have that kind of moat versus others? Those are much harder questions. But again, I think as a lens, as an additional vector or vertical that you can use to analyze all kinds of investments, I think the question of are they part of the AGI asset class, so to speak. I think that's going to be a very useful one and it certainly is on the rise. So those are the first two points. The third one is much more specific. This is going to be relevant to you if you are younger. And a lot of you are, like 30% of you guys going to 25. Let's pull this over. Okay, number three right here is the ROI of college. Now, I'm going to spend much less time on this because it's, I think, more commonly discussed. But basically, a lot of the value of college used to actually be about the education. And I think that's changed and that now you can make a pretty good argument that college is only about, number one, networking. Number two, the signal that you were able to get into a gated university or basically just the brand of the school. And then number three, the kind of like, I don't want to say social experience, but like coming of age thing, like getting out into the world a little bit. And I'm not saying those things are worthless at all. Those can be and are incredibly valuable. But it depends, right? It depends upon, for example, the school, upon the people at the school, upon how socialized maybe you were. And so all those things drastically affect the ROI of some universities, less so others, but certainly some. And all that has to be looked at relative, right? This is a return relative to the cost, not only the yield itself. And so I think if you are younger and you think about school through the lens of, hey, the value here in large part, especially as AI continues to improve, is not the education itself, which is probably available out there, which you have a genius in your pocket that can create custom lessons for you on. But the value instead is the social experience. It's the networking. It's the brand. How does that affect how I should look at that set of decisions around education, whether undergrad, whether higher ed? And again, this is a much more popular conversation. So I'm sure you've thought about all of this before, but if not, I highly suggest you think about that angle on it before you commit to, say, a $300,000 undergrad yourself. I'm going full Brian Johnson here. Let me just explain what I mean by this, though. I see kind of two high-level paths. And my argument here is that in a world where, let's say, the AI bull case and we have universal high income and everything is great and money or your career doesn't matter as much, accumulating resources does not really matter, then what does start to matter? Your quality of life, right? Your health, keyword health. I think people will start investing a lot more heavily in their health, and I think they should reasonably because they can. They can choose to prioritize it more. And then also there's the possibility for the first time in human history that we can feasibly use technology to extend our lifespan, maybe not forever, right, but for a long period of time to have an extra 10, 20, 50 years with the people we love and care about and want to spend time with. And if that's even a possibility, if we could have 10 or 20 or 50 more years with our great grandkids, with our parents, with our partner, what is that worth? And how does that financially tie back to now, both in terms of 20 extra years of compounding, but also just in terms of life? As technology accelerates, I think people will invest more in their health right now. And to add on to that, at the end of the day, okay, let's say AI continues to get better at a 30, 40% clip a year, and that's super conservative right there, then for you to actually generate value as an individual in the economy, the minimum bar goes higher and higher. Performance matters more and more. And so forget cosmetics and how you look, but just in terms of performance, if people optimize more for performance, generally they're also optimizing more for health. And so I think whether people start to work more and harder because of AI or less or not at all, I think a fourth shift we see and we start to see there is investment in health and prioritization of health. That one is less financial for this video, but I think it is a really important one. And it's just a fun idea to play around with, but how does AI and health tech start to work back to right now and how we spend our time and our money and pursue career decision. That in mind, y'all, these were the four points. This is actually, look how big this whiteboard is. But anyway, that's what I wanted to cover in this video. I hope you walk away with it with an interesting idea in mind. If not, I have failed and let me know what you're thinking about this subject in the comments. And that in mind, I appreciate y'all being here and I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.