How a Turkey Voted for Xmas: Ricardo Semler on Why One Boss Wants the End of All Bosses.

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. My guest today, Ricardo Semler, is a rather unusual fellow. He started his life as a corporate executive. He ran all sorts of Brazilian companies, and yet he's known as a maverick. In fact, one of his book is called Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace. He's also the author of The Seven-Day Weekend and the upcoming pamphlet, The End of the Boss. So here we have a boss who is predicting, forecasting The End of the Boss. He is joining us from Sao Paulo Airport. Ricardo, nice to have you on the show. Would you describe yourself as an anti boss boss?

00:01:19 Ricardo Semler: Bit of an iconoclast in the sense that I never saw much rhyme and reason to the way people run businesses. And so I think I started and I started very early at 17. My father, was already 70, and I just jumped into the business world from a rock group that had been with me for five years. And I said, this is very silly, and we're controlling people, seeing what they're wearing, what time they're coming to this, putting booklets together about what they should be doing. And so I think from the very start, I was saying this just seems wrong.

00:01:55 Andrew Keen: So tell me your full story. You I wouldn't say inherited your business, but you were thrown in the deep end by your father. This was in Brazil. Right?

00:02:03 Ricardo Semler: This is in Brazil. He had he'd come from Austria as an immigrant, started a manufacturing business in the shipping business, and, made all these equipment pumps and so forth. And he was always expecting me to take over. This was his thing. You know? And, so when the time finally came, it was early for me. I was 17 to 18. He was already close to 70. He was ready to go. And I just kind of dropped in out of nowhere, and it was all very strange to me. And after about just shortening the story, after about two years, I realized that nobody was gonna let me do my thing, which was to take away the constraints and the boarding school aspects of school of business. And he I then said, I'm let me go do something else. And I'll come back, and I'll stay on your board and so forth. And I went and started tried to buy a ladder company, which had 200 employees. So I had a little bit of that entrepreneurial drive already. And, when I was signing a contract to buy this other company for $1 because it was terribly indebted, He came to the law office and says, stop. Stop. Stop. I'll give you majority of the company. And at that time, it had a 110 employees. It was in a bit of trouble. And then so we had to diversify very quickly. And long story short, about eight years later, we had, 5,100 employees and 14 offices, and we were on our way. And I it took me about twenty years or more to prove that you can run a business with any of the boarding school aspects. So we started saying in the beginning already, the eighties, work at home. And people would say, but wait a second. I need all kinds of thing. What do you need? I need a Telex machine. So we bought 60 Telex machines, which were a 150 pound machines, and we would send it to people's homes and say put it there. And one of our guys actually put it into his bathroom, and that's where he sent his Telexes from. So we were in the mid eighties, we had shown very easily that there's hybrid work. There's all kinds of silly things that we're concerned with, which were really military structure that was in place and weren't necessary. And to this, they are not. If you look at the military structure that we know, it's in business everywhere because it came from West Point to the railroad long time ago. And since World War two, nobody's done anything of any good with that pyramid. Not in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran now. It's useless. That pyramid is long gone. And so when I talk about The End of the Boss, I'm just saying that the idea of the pyramid is no longer useful nor valuable, and so you have to pay the one the number one person every time more. So when you look at, let's say, Elon Musk's package and it's equivalent to the sum of all of his employees together for five years, you say, oops. Right? And then someone who's a snake charmer goes to the stock market and says, here's a 5,000,000,000,000, a million people on Mars, and you say, sure. Why not? But that is the fault of a system that is not based on anybody anymore except, one person who's telling a story at the top and a lot of people who are spinning it in Wall Street for somebody's, interests. That's kinda silly.

00:05:38 Andrew Keen: So, Ricardo, is the system broken, or did it ever work?

00:05:43 Ricardo Semler: I think it worked because the idea that everything was moving so slowly when you think about it. And, you know, think between first and second World War, the French up to nineteen thirty something teaching people trench warfare and so forth. Making that change to now we're doing this, now we have tanks, now we have this, that worked fine for a while. And it worked very well through the end of, World War two. Then suddenly you have gorillas. Suddenly you have drones. And you have people who can put something into a water reservoir or you can have somebody who's hacking. This the thing of dragging 25,000 marines through the mud in Camp Pendleton is an absolutely silly concept, which is kind of leftover, but that's not useful anymore. So when you look at GM or when you look at SpaceX, it doesn't matter. You're looking at very pyramidal schemes in which the people who really know something or have no interest and no motivation to take that information up the chain. The people at the top don't really have a lot of respect for the whole thing. They're just telling people what to do. And they look at it from an AI perspective, and they say, I'm not gonna use these people anymore anyway. So it's just me thinking up this whole thing, brilliant strategist, and we'll just tell people what to do. So it's just outmoded.

00:07:06 Andrew Keen: What are the companies in your view that are doing things differently? We often talk about Patagonia on this show in terms of its, social philosophy. We sometimes or we used to talk about some of the Silicon Valley companies like Google doing no evil and having a relatively flat architecture in terms of organization. We talk about them less now. But are there companies apart from your own that are recognizing that they need to do things dramatically, radically different today?

00:07:40 Ricardo Semler: In '83, Andrew, I was invited to go and speak to a group of people in Amsterdam at the Krasnapolsky Hotel. And there was Anita Roddick and Ben from Ben Cohen from Ben and Jerry's and Yvon Chouinard from Patagonia. And they wanted to create something called social responsibility, which nobody had ever heard. And so I went and talked to them. I looked at it. I looked down there with maybe a 100 and something people, and I said, you know, you guys look like you walked your way back from Woodstock. And, this idea is just gonna become whitewashed and greenwashed by companies into their marketing cliche, because, essentially, shareholders and the whole rationale of, the structure of capitalism as we know today is not interested in any of that except as marketing, fodder for the cannon. So, I'd say there were a lot of companies, Patagonia itself, the Roddicks originally.

00:08:45 Andrew Keen: Although Roddick is a controversial figure, whereas Patagonia it's very rare to hear anyone say anything bad about Patagonia.

00:08:52 Ricardo Semler: Oh, and Patagonia is similar to the Mondragon Cooperative in

00:08:55 Andrew Keen: Spain. In the cooperative in Spain, which I know you would know quite well.

00:08:59 Ricardo Semler: So there's a lot of examples, but there today, you look at Haire, you look at Bordsorg, which is 15,000 nurses in The Netherlands. These are organizations that have gone the way of the self management. But I don't think self management alone is a solution, either because leadership itself has not gone away. There's no reason to say we have to be so flat that we do we are just cooperative. We don't need a leader, or we'll use someone temporarily. It's really an issue of, can you have these people validated by people below? That's one question. So we have groups of 10. These groups of 10 people choose their own leader every six months or they validate them with a with an anonymous survey every six months. And the person gets an add on for being a leader.

00:09:51 Andrew Keen: So when you say we, Ricardo, who are you talking about?

00:09:54 Ricardo Semler: Oh, sorry. I meant the these this group of companies that I still have. But we also set up a consultancy business in The Netherlands, which is a very strong which we worked with now 208 companies that have adopted a little bit or more of this. So we is a little bit more. We did work, for example, at ABN AMRO, which is an enormous Dutch bank, with 400 and something branches. And we looked at it and we said, guys, with the branch managers who's at the top of that little pyramid and makes decisions and decides everything, this isn't going anywhere. So the first thing you need to do is fire 399, branch managers this week, and they agreed. And the only reason they agreed, and that's the reason why more companies haven't taken this on, It's like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. You know? There's no interest at the top. It is against their self interest, let's say, to say that they're gonna be validated or voted from below. I'm sure Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg would be terrified of the idea of having the people decide whether they keep their job or not. So nobody's asking. So I think there are many. ABN AM are in that place as an example. There are examples.

00:11:09 Andrew Keen: But So you're talking about a what? An endless sort of referendum on authority within companies? There should be a perpetual churn in a sense? So you're not doing away with I mean, your pamphlet is called The End of the Boss, but there'll still be people making decisions within corporations. Right?

00:11:34 Ricardo Semler: Yeah. The difference is it's The End of the Boss as we know that somebody chose a boss, somebody anointed a boss, somebody got a $100,000,000 package. The difference is, what are we trying to do here? And we ask everybody. We put it together. We put together a mission or a target or something that people are willing to do. And then every six months, we ask the people of every group of 10, is this the right person to continue doing? If it's not, the person is not fired. The person goes back to being one of the nine. And so it's a very gentle system, which says we've decided on something we wanna do together. Is it collective? No. Because it does have authority and leadership, but the person is put in place for six months. And they're put in place from March to September. So they can neither be credited or debited for the result. In a sense, if you think about it, it's the difference between Singapore and Switzerland. You know, Switzerland has seven guys. Nobody has a slightest idea who they are. They rotate, and they've been doing this since the fourteenth century. It's working out fine. Now can you do it dictatorship wise and create a city state out of nowhere for a while? Sure. You can, and Spartacus did too. But it runs out, and a few hundred years is a better example.

00:12:49 Andrew Keen: So you're saying that Singapore should adopt the Swiss model that the single authoritarian leader ultimately doesn't work?

00:12:56 Ricardo Semler: Of course. Because it's gonna it's now my son, then it's the sun's sun, and soon you have King Jong Un.

00:13:04 Andrew Keen: You've argued that the crisis of our age is three part. Correct me if I'm wrong. On the one hand, our education system doesn't work. On the other hand, our corporate structures are in crisis. You've talked about that as well. And you've also talked and written about the crisis of our personal lives. Forty percent of marriages, for example, end in divorce. Are these crises of education and our personal lives and our corporate world, are they interconnected? Are they part of the same broader phenomenon?

00:13:43 Ricardo Semler: Yeah. And I don't I'm not sure they're a crisis, but let's leave that for a second. But they are one common denominator, which is relevance, for example. You see in schools people starting to talk about PBL, project based, learning. We're talking about in our schools, we're talking about something called relevance based learning, which is if you cannot teach Shakespeare connected to a rapper, you're not able to reach anybody. And people will regurgitate things on exams, which they couldn't possibly take a year from then. And that is true for our personal lives as well. We're still we need to redefine success entirely when we say, will you marry this person until death do you part? That is about the silliest question anybody could ask. And so when you do have an eleven year marriage and it ends, people say, oh, I'm so sorry that your marriage was a failure. What the hell are you talking about? It was beautiful. 10 out of 11. There was wonderful things that happened, great kids, and so forth. The cycle ended. And the same thing with career. If you look at today, Andrew, depending on who you ask, let's say my kids were from there, one of 16, 16, 17. They're gonna live to a 100, 100 10 probably. They have time to be an architect, for twenty years, go back to school, do medicine, be a doctor for twenty years, go back to school, be an engineer for ten year, and still retire for ten years. And this is totally out of the question because we're asking them at 17, what do you wanna be for the rest of your life? So it's the stupid questions we're answering and that we're looking at these cycles and saying, if they stayed eleven years in a company, but then they got fired, it was a failure. We need to redefine that entire

00:15:30 Andrew Keen: Well, but work and personal are different. I mean, you I know you got five kids. Are you on your first marriage, Ricardo?

00:15:36 Ricardo Semler: Third.

00:15:37 Andrew Keen: Third marriage. So you got five kids from three marriages. I'm guessing that in the two marriages that didn't work, one of the partners was slightly or more disappointed. Nobody enjoys that kind of failure. Are you ex expecting everyone to live in such a philosophical manner that they can just move on to the next marriage, the next job, the next career?

00:16:04 Ricardo Semler: If they the part of the pain is that they were expecting it to last their whole life and it didn't. So their parents and their friends and everybody's saying, oh, what a shame. Now if they redefine success as meaning every cycle of marriage or career or job has to be valuable and has to be, worth and meaningful. The moment that ends, you're moving on to something else. And if that means three marriages, one marriage, six marriages, two jobs, four jobs, nine jobs, it doesn't matter as long as each of those cycles was considered success. And if you first consider that the cycles will be shorter, you will have much less pain when the time comes to move on to a new one.

00:16:45 Andrew Keen: So we need to be, what, resilient? Is that one of the arguments in your way of thinking that we have to accept that? As you know, I you're currently talking to me from Sao Paulo Airport in Brazil, but I know you live in, in San Diego in Southern California. So you're also familiar with the at least the Silicon Valley cult of failure. Are you suggesting we should turn failure into a kind of cult or redefine the word failure, not use it as the f word? Figure out other words to describe life. Is life itself just a series of failures in a sense?

00:17:24 Ricardo Semler: No. Not at all. What I meant to say is that if there's a seventeen year I had an eighteen year marriage with three kids. How could that possibly be a failure? And so the idea, wait a second. You have to be resilient. You have deal with failure. I'm not dealing with failure at all. I did a wonderful eighteen years, which at a certain point ran out. And I have three kids and I have things and I have memories, and so there's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't approach failure at all. It's just another definition of, success.

00:17:51 Andrew Keen: But is yeah. I don't wanna be too personal here, but does your ex wife agree with you on that? Did she just did you both just walk away and say, well, we had eighteen years of fun. We and now we're moving on to the next adventure.

00:18:05 Ricardo Semler: I have with my first, wife. I have a son who's 27 here in Sao Paulo. I had lunch with her today, and we were talking about things and my new wife and who's a friend of hers and so forth. I my feeling is that it's not necessary to go the way, but people are predisposed, of course, by society, by all the definitions to make it a very difficult, long, wrangling decision, but it is unnecessary. That's what I meant by saying that it's not a failure in itself. It's a cycle that ended. I had two words, two three words, which were kind of gimmicks to think about this. One of them is, you know, when you the feeling you get, Andrew, when you leave a restaurant and somebody validates your parking ticket and you say, oh, that's good. They're treating me right. It's not the $6 or $35. No. There's but it's that. So, I'd say one of the days of that you look at your days, and if one of them is a validate you know, today was a validate, and the gimmick is was today worth it? You know? What I did and so forth. Or is today one day that you're just paying your dues, which I call the dues day.

00:19:12 Andrew Keen: So maybe the advice then for people, for people who are in the process of getting divorced, maybe go to a restaurant and have your parking validated. Will that make them more thoughtful about the situation?

00:19:25 Ricardo Semler: I think if they look at their week and they say, look, five of these days were dues days and two were valid days, whereas that was the other way around. The if that keeps going for a while, that marriage is finished. Now you recognize it or not, but it's finished. And that's the same with the career with a job. You know?

00:19:43 Andrew Keen: Yeah. No. And, look, I know. I've been through marriages myself, and I've had many careers, all of which ended one way or the other in failure. So I'm not I understand what you're saying.

00:19:54 Ricardo Semler: And what's this failure, really? Did they end in failure, or they just ended because they had no reason to go?

00:20:00 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, I need to spend more time going to restaurants and having my parking validated to think more creatively on this. I wonder if there's there are two things come to mind, Ricardo, in terms of your philosophy. The first is a cultural element. It seems to me again, I don't wanna generalize too much, but a lot of the most original, unusual, and sunnier philosophies come out of Brazil. Is there a cultural element to where you're coming from? I'm not sure what kind of childhood you had. Your father must have been rather open minded to hand his company over to a 17 year old. Did you grow up on the beach in Brazil?

00:20:39 Ricardo Semler: It wasn't the beach or the surfing, but for example, my father in Vienna, when he was 19, he was doing therapy five days a week at Freud's clinic. Not with himself, but his clinic.

00:20:53 Andrew Keen: Right.

00:20:53 Ricardo Semler: And he spent his whole life doing, Freudian analysis and therapy and so forth. So, yes, he was more open to thinking about what does this really mean. And then, Brazil, I think, is easier for you to turn carts over. You know? And, in that sense because people are less dogmatic, it's less old. It's less stodgy. And so people say, oh, yeah? And I think they're willing to look at it. When I wrote my first book out of nowhere Which

00:21:26 Andrew Keen: one was this? Is that Maverick or another one?

00:21:29 Ricardo Semler: Yeah. It was in Brazil. It was before that. It was called Turning the Tables. They've never I never made it to English. But that one in that turning the tables, I sent to 17 publishers and 16 of them declined. And they said nobody's gonna buy this from a I don't know what I was, a 27 year old. What is this? An autobiography of a 27 old business? Forget that. So 16 out of 17 said no. Okay. The seventeenth said, sure. Let's try this. And it spent two hundred and two weeks, on the bestseller list. That's a typical Brazilian phenomenon. It did well in most other places or in The UK, for example, it spent, I think, seventeen weeks. So it did fine. But Brazil was the one that first said, sure. Why not? Let's think about it that way. But, yes, I think Brazil has Brazil or Australia, there's a few places that are kind of orbiting the first world, and are easier to think about things from scratch.

00:22:24 Andrew Keen: It's interesting that you think a lot and you write a lot about education, about corporate life, about personal life, but I don't see a lot about politics. Is that because maybe you're having observed Brazilian politics up close, authoritarianism, the rest of Brazilian political history over the last forty years? You're not particularly optimistic about politics as a fix for things?

00:22:56 Ricardo Semler: When I was this was 90, so I was just about 30. The party that then put, Fernando Henrique Cardoz and few people in the presidency, they called me and they said, let's look at you running for mayor of Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo already had 19,000,000 people. And I said, well, let me see if I can leave something completely new here. Otherwise, not worth this. Can you give me how long do we have? We have a year and a half. And I said, let me take a year and let me every day go to a part of the city and see sewage and education and prisons and so forth. There was even a an incident where I went to one of the, women's prisons, and I got caught by one of the women and, eight or 10 of them held me back, and they had to find a way. And they were just kidding with this whole thing. But it was all the real what I meant to say is it's the real world that I went to the hospitals and so forth. And I looked at that to see whether there was anything I could add because simply taking the opportunity of having, being kind of a celebrity status at that point in Brazil and using that to become a mayor kinda seems very silly to me. So I spent a year doing that with all kinds of groups and programs and so forth and finding solutions for looking for solutions for and what I came up with wasn't acceptable to them, which was really kind of a Swiss style, which is to say, look. The city is already divided in 96 districts. Let's create a district president, which is elected for a year, which is renewed. So you see here that my thought process is always the same. And my one my ex wife used to say, look. You've only had one good idea in your whole life. You just keep applying it to everything. But that's what this is. That in politics, for me, it was the same idea. You have one president of the district that has to live in that district, is reelected for a year, and the committee of these 12, rotating committee, decides on issues of the city. And I, as a mayor, help curate. And then, of course Yeah.

00:24:59 Andrew Keen: It reminds me a little bit of the citizen assembly idea that's been resurrected from antiquity.

00:25:06 Ricardo Semler: Yeah. Or sun or anyway, the whole rationale is has been there for a long time. It was in Athenian democracy. There's nothing new on this end in that respect, but it is in no one's interest. And I think that is the same thing that happens with the corporations or happens with the armies. You wanna ask a general whether he wants to be validated by the people. No way. You know? So I think we're stuck here in the same place. The people who had the power, they were understanding of it, and they thought intellectually it was valid. And the one

00:25:40 Andrew Keen: Sorry. Go on.

00:25:41 Ricardo Semler: No. And the reason one of them said, look. I have 2,200 jobs to fill, which are confidence jobs once the mayor gets elected. So I have to explain to 2,200 people why I'm not giving them a job. So there's all kinds of other obstacles in politics as well. But in the end, Andrew, politics is really just an expression of where people are going. There is no Trump. There is no Putin. There is 30% of the population that is giving support to these rationales, to these concepts. And then you have one person who understood, what populism will do for you, and you get a Viktor Orban out of nowhere.

00:26:19 Andrew Keen: Or a Bolsonaro or a Trump. You mentioned that your first wife joked with you that you only ever had one idea or you've only ever had one idea in your life, which you keep recycling. What is that idea?

00:26:33 Ricardo Semler: It's basically that if you take away the obstruction of school kids, of employees in the manufacturing, people who are being are in the city, people who are deciding on jobs, that people that self drive and that people will take themselves in places that are much more noble, much more interesting than if you, set it up for them.

00:27:00 Andrew Keen: Is the problem then, Ricardo, in a modern sense or certainly in a twentieth century sense, many sociologists observe this bureaucracy, is it? Organization, is this what holds people back from your sense of self realization?

00:27:21 Ricardo Semler: Think about it in the way of Henry Mintzberg or Gary Hamill, for example, and people were taking pickaxes at the idea of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy itself in a Confucian way is really the expression, a vehicle, a tool, an expression of the way people are considered when they're considered cattle. And so you say, I don't wanna ask people. They don't know. I know better and so forth. So when you're not asking people who their boss should be, how their work or life should be, when you're taking perfectly, fulfilled adults who are electing people, making decisions, and so forth in a family. And once they get to the company, you say, hey. Wait a second. You can't spend more than five minutes in the bathroom or ten minutes on this site, and we're policing you all the time. This boarding school is a real offense to every ad.

00:28:13 Andrew Keen: In our age of AI, Ricardo, everyone seems to be falling back on the h word, humanity or humanism. You haven't used it, but I'm getting the sense from what you're saying that thinking of a of yourself as a radical you're a radical humanist. Is that fair? I don't usually like that term, but it strikes me that maybe the h word can legitimately be used in terms of your thinking and writing and career.

00:28:47 Ricardo Semler: Yeah. I think if you take the cliches that are adapted to it, I think the idea that take strip away all this bullshit and all this that was necessary for the pyramids and for the hierarchies and for the authoritarians. Take this away and let people do things at the time they want for as long as they want, wherever they want, and you'll be okay. This is how we went from a 110 to 5,000 people. All of our offices were hybrid. There was no control. There were 14 offices around town. You could go to any of them any day. And so we had no idea how much people worked. Did they work hard? Did they work at all? Did they work only Mondays to Wednesdays? Doesn't matter because every six months, if you're not re, invited to your job by that group of 10, it's because you're not valuable. And if you worked extra hard, sorry. That wasn't enough. If you worked very little, that's fine as long as the results are there. And so it is a little bit, cruel in the sense also that it's a bit Darwinistic. But it is a humanistic rationale saying we're not interested in putting together we our whole manual was a 10 page set of cartoons about, caution and cares that you should take, and that was it. We've never had that. Even when we had 5,000 people, we never had more than that. And we had two people in the HR department.

00:30:13 Andrew Keen: But it requires senior people or perhaps a senior person like yourself, ironically, to take the risk because you know better than I do that all this sounds fine in theory, and it may have worked out for you. But most leaders are terrified of this, of the failure and the That's not the criticism that they're gonna get. So it really requires Faith. No. Faith and gambling. I mean, it requires someone who, in a sense, has everything to lose and, in a sense, has nothing to lose.

00:30:49 Ricardo Semler: Think about this. Companies used to last until twenty years ago, an average of sixty one years on the stock market. The new number is 21. Of those 21, you every day somebody is merged that's at a sold. What is that? That is failure. That is failure every three, four years. That's not and so what is the biggest gamble of all? Is doing it the classical way with the pyramid Because nothing could be worse than the record of companies, in terms of their ability to sustain the same ownership and the same leadership. There's no such thing. You'd sit back and you say, Jack Welch. Wasn't that wonderful twenty years? Jesus is a shadow of what was before because he never prepared it for anything except me, mister Jack Welch. And that's the same thing with anybody that you would mention today in the tech world. It's all about that one person, and it can't be. There's something wrong. You saw this with Alexander Wang at, I don't know, $500,000,000, worth the same as 20,000 engineers. There's something wrong with that. No?

00:31:55 Andrew Keen: You're an education reformer. Your Semler Institute makes all sorts of interesting, or Semler Institute makes Yeah. Is very much committed to education reform. What do you think of the current education system? Business schools, for example. Would you shut them all down, Ricardo? Did they do any good?

00:32:18 Ricardo Semler: I spent years teaching MIT MBAs, top four years at Harvard Law School. It's not that I don't understand where they're coming from. I do. I think it's just outmoded, outdated, and obsolete. It's not necessary anymore. So we even created, and we're just about to launch this, we created what we call an untethered MBA, which is like an untethered high school, which we also have. Basically, it says this, we have 10, a cohort of 10, can be at a company, can be at somebody's warehouse, can be at a school. And these 10 get together, and they have a whole program on their dashboard of what they need to cover in a year or two years or three years to get an MBA. Instead of looking at case studies that are ten years old, fifteen years old, and have a right and wrong answer almost, we take the case of the day or the week. So we'll feed you, is SpaceX worth a trillion dollars or $2,000,000,000,000, or is it worth nothing? And look at it. Here's their prospectus. Here's and so we feed what we call reading the business world every day to these cohorts. We create and we created a master's program where we have former executives, former CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, etcetera, who come on, on request, on demand to talk to the group. And they have a software they can take their own cases of life and in their own business life and look into it and so forth. And then they can they need to look at depreciation or retail, this and that. They just call in people. And they, the cohorts, can use the credits to hire the professors. So if it has a high rating and they're willing to pay the price out of their, monthly credits, they'll hire a great guy from Stanford or to Harvard, and they'll they're the ones who are on demand, calling this

00:34:17 Andrew Keen: So you're turning things on its head. What about AI? A lot of people see AI as deeply revolutionary, although it seems to be, only compounding, economic intellectual inequalities of one kind or another. Is AI the problem or the solution, Ricardo?

00:34:40 Ricardo Semler: I think it's irrelevant in the same sense that electricity is irrelevant or that Internet is irrelevant, etcetera, because they're just, the tide is rising for all of the boats. And that is the new, that is the new way of thinking. I think it is already, when I do you know, when I use I'm fighting, let's say, an issue with Fable and say push back on this and that. I noticed that I'm already having trouble intellectually keeping up. This wasn't the case six months ago or a year ago, but now I'm having trouble keeping up. There's some thoughts and there's some ideas that I say, shit. I never thought of that. So I think AI is just an obvious, format around us that's there. It's nothing in itself. It's gonna get more intelligent than us. And, hopefully, we're not gonna become domesticated pets, over the next ten, fifteen years. But, essentially, it's beyond us. You can't do anything without it. I think it's silly. Anybody who says, oh, what comes from there is slop and hallucination. That's very silly. We run things now through four LLMs. There's nothing left of slop or hallucination at the end of that, and you can't live without it. But these groups of 10 in a company or these groups of 10 cohorts in high school, they need it. They can use it. They're gonna read the world. For example, our kids in school, they get a cohort of 10 teens. They get daily news. Okay? So their daily news might be something that's happening in Iran, and they're trying to figure out what's happening. They get connected immediately through Slack and Zoom with the school in Tehran, And they talk to kids there. And they bring in a master from New Zealand who lived, I don't know how many years, and understands the price of oil. These kids are 10 times as informed as their parents in an hour's worth. And so the whole idea when you see the whole pushback grassroots mothers, no. We have to, you know, veto the even in Sweden and other places, no more smartphones and the screens are screwing up. What are they screwing up? They're screwing your ability to memorize the periodic table. Right? That's really what you're saying. You're saying no one will study, Milton and Schuster if they have TikTok as an option. So we have a system that grades TikTok and video games, etcetera, during their use of the cohort, and we find we've mapped all of the abilities, and we map it to the curriculum. What do you want? You want a core curriculum or our school in Baghdad, for example? You want an Arab curriculum? Ours in Fukuoka. You want a Japanese curriculum? And we'll tell you what we ticked off, item on one zero one point forty six when he played, Call of Duty. But if he plays Call of Duty all day long, it doesn't go anywhere because he'd already tick that item.

00:37:38 Andrew Keen: What's your greatest regret?

00:37:42 Ricardo Semler: Probably, not pushing through enough with my own convictions. Because every time I have these, I end up hearing a lot of people saying, well, there's this and that. Consider this. Consider that. And I don't think I had enough courage. I don't have enough. I've never had enough drive to become a billionaire. I have no use for that kind of money. The business was already much too big for me. There's already much too much money. It's already a problem. And, it's silly. And so going to foundation and so forth. So I've never had the talent, the ability, oh, make this a billion dollar this. But I think my regret is not at now I'm 67, and I'm starting some of these new things, still. But pushing through them with absolute conviction that we're gonna get to the end is something I don't have. So I don't I'm not those make it or bust, entrepreneurs. I end up being a little bit more conservative, which I think bothers me.

00:38:42 Andrew Keen: And then what most frustrates you? I mean, you're clearly an idealist, an iconoclast. As you say, you think very differently to most people, and you behave very differently to most people. But is there stuff that frustrates you, particularly in human nature? I mean, you present this as if it's all obvious, and if we were all in these small teams, the world would be a better place, and you may well be right. But what most frustrates you about people? What would you change if you could flip a switch?

00:39:16 Ricardo Semler: I think that the cattle aspect of fear, I think, is the one thing that probably holds everything back because it's wonderful to see people. I had an incident, today before I came here to the airport. I was talking on the cell phone on the corner, and a motorbike came up on the sidewalk, and the guy tried to snatch my cell phone, which is a typical happening in Sao Paulo. People are all looking. It's this stupid gringo here talking on his phone in the middle of the street. But I grabbed it back. I don't know what happened. Some kind of reaction. I grabbed it back, and the guy went off. So you think, oh, son of a bitch. These criminals. It never occurs to me. I think humanity is a wonderful set of people who are pushed into situations, but I think it's accepting the idea that there's nothing you can do. If you look at today, all of the dictators that are in place, right, in America, in Russia, in Hungary, in Turkey, wherever you go, and decreasing amount of them. Somebody's letting somebody's feeling okay with being dictated and a new absurd surrealism where you said, did he actually say that? Everything sounds like fake news. Every time I see a real comment from any of these guys, I think it's fake news. So I think it's more that humanity tends to fall back into this rule of, okay. Let's see what's gonna happen, and I can't really do anything alone. I think that's the bit that I would change if I could.

00:40:48 Andrew Keen: And finally, Ricardo, you said you were 67 years old. You for people watching, you look a very young 67. Spending a lot of time, I'm sure, on the beaches of Brazil or San Diego. You also noted that people are gonna live to a 100, a 110. Say you live to a 110, so you have another forty, forty five years left. What haven't you done that you still want to accomplish in your life?

00:41:16 Ricardo Semler: The personal things that have been left to the side because I started working at 17. I started going crazy and so forth. I had when I was, 21, I was, visiting a plant in New York, manufacturing plant, and I faint. So they sent me to lay clinic in Massachusetts, and I spent three days there according to the guy, amortizing all of their machinery. At the end of that, I said, what's wrong with me? He had a big stack of things. He said, absolutely nothing. He said, let me show you something. He took me to the, cardiac ward, and there, he said, look at the menu. And I said, why am I looking at the menu? He said, see, there's a white, omelettes and all this stuff. I said, why am I looking at this? He said, because you're gonna be using it very soon. You're the most advanced case of stress I've seen at 22 years old and so forth. So what do I do? He said, take an aspirin, two aspirins eight times a day. I said, what's that gonna do? He said, absolutely nothing. I will remind you eight times a day that you have a big problem to solve. So I went back. I was leaving the office at midnight and so forth. And I said, I'm gonna retrace Marco Polo's road. And that took a hundred days, a hundred and two days to do in a time in which there was no communication possible. And I spent a lot of that time buying and selling camels and going over the, to the Taklamakan Desert and so forth. And that brought me to a point I stopped using watches exactly then. And I said, shit. This, I can't measure this in minutes and dollars and metrics, etcetera. There's gotta be a better way. And so I'd say what's left for me, be it ten or twenty or thirty years, whatever I've left, is figure out a way to slow down this rationale ahead that's always, oh, I can do that too. Let me start a project. Let me do schools. Let me do this. Let me do a new book. And that part, I haven't learned yet even spending a lot. I just spend again, two weeks in a monastery in Morocco. Spend two weeks in a monastery in Japan. So I'm trying hard, but, it's very far from me still to be able to calm the mind, etcetera. That's the one thing I'd rather do.

00:43:22 Andrew Keen: Well, I don't have a boss, but if I was gonna have one, I wouldn't mind having Ricardo Semler. He seems the most anti boss like boss imaginable. In fact, one of his new pamphlets is The End of the Boss. Ricardo, lovely to talk to you. A very refreshing, innovative conversation, and best of luck with everything you're doing. I hope you'll come back on the show in the next forty years.

00:43:47 Ricardo Semler: Would love to. I'd hopefully not forty years, even before that. Thanks so much, Andrew.