← The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: AI Safety Expert Predicts The Next 20 Years! Will It Really Take All Jobs?
00:36:29
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- [00:00]
Alex
Something we think about a lot in
- [00:01]
Steven Bartlett
the diary of a CEO is distribution.
- [00:03]
Alex
Because we could have the most interesting guests in the world and the most thought provoking conversation, but if nobody can
- [00:07]
Steven Bartlett
find us, none of that really matters.
- [00:09]
Alex
And this logic applies to pretty much any business. Whatever you're selling, however good it is, distribution often is the determining factor of whether you win or whether you lose. And this is why it's interesting to me that so many vacation rental owners are essentially invisible to a huge chunk of their potential market without even realizing it. Let me explain. Booking.com is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world. And since 2010, it's helped over 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. That's a huge pool of travelers actively looking for places to stay. So if you've got a vacation rental that isn't on booking.com, that means you're missing out on being seen by millions of travelers already searching their platform. Getting listed takes 15 minutes, and nearly half of new hosts get their first booking within a week. If you need that kind of global reach for your listing, which I assume you do, then head to booking.com to
- [00:59]
Steven Bartlett
start your listing today. You must hear a lot of rebuttals to this when you say it, because people experience a huge amount of mental discomfort when they hear that their job, their career, the thing they got a degree in, the thing they invested a hundred thousand dollars into, is going to be taken away from them. So their natural reaction for some people is that cognitive dissonance that, no, you're wrong, AI can't be creative. It's not this, it's not that, it'll never be interested in my job. I'll be fine. Because you hear these arguments all the time, right?
- [01:32]
AI Safety Expert
It's really funny. I ask people and I ask people in different occupations. I'll ask my Uber driver, are you worried about self driving cars? And they go, no, no one can do what I do. I know the streets of New York, I can navigate like no AI. I'm safe. And it's true for any job. Professors are saying this to me, oh, nobody can lecture like I do. Like, this is so special. But you understand it's ridiculous. We already have self driving cars replacing drivers. That is not even a question if it's possible. It's like, how soon before you fired?
- [02:07]
Steven Bartlett
Yeah, I mean, I've just been in LA yesterday and my car drives itself. So I get in the car, I put in where I want to go and then I don't touch the Steering wheel or the brake pedals. And it takes me from A to B. Even if it's an hour long drive without any intervention at all, I actually still park it. But other than that, I'm not driving the car at all. I mean, obviously in LA we also have Waymo now, which means you order it on your phone and it shows up with no driver in it and takes you to where you want to go.
- [02:34]
AI Safety Expert
Oh yeah.
- [02:35]
Steven Bartlett
So it's quite clear to see how that is potentially a matter of time for those people. Because we do have some of those people listening to this conversation right now that their occupation is driving to offer them. And I think driving is the biggest occupation in the world, if I'm correct. I'm pretty sure it is the biggest occupation in the world.
- [02:54]
AI Safety Expert
One of the top ones, yeah.
- [02:56]
Steven Bartlett
What would you say to those people? What should they be doing with their lives? Should they be retraining in something or what time frame?
- [03:03]
AI Safety Expert
So that's the paradigm shift here. Before we always said this job is going to be automated, retrained to do this other job. But if I'm telling you that all jobs will be automated, then there is no plan B. You cannot retrain. Look at computer science. Two years ago we told people, learn to code. You are an artist, you cannot make money. Learn to code. Then we realized, oh, AI kind of knows how to code. And getting better. Become a prompt engineer. You can engineer prompts for AIs. It's going to be a great job, get a four year degree in IT. But then we're like, AI is way better at designing prompts for our AIs than any human. So that's gone. So I can't really tell you right now. The hardest thing is design AI agents for practical applications. I guarantee you in a year or two it's going to be gone just as well. So I don't think this occupation needs to learn to do this. Instead I think it's more like we as a humanity, then we all lose our jobs. What do we do? What do we do financially? Who's paying for us and what do we do in terms of meaning, what do I do with my extra 60, 80 hours a week?
- [04:19]
Steven Bartlett
You've thought around this corner, haven't you?
- [04:22]
AI Safety Expert
A little bit.
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Steven Bartlett
What is around that corner in your view?
- [04:26]
AI Safety Expert
So the economic part seems easy. If you create a lot of free labor, you have a lot of free wealth, abundance. Things which are right now not very affordable become dirt cheap. And so you can provide for everyone, basic needs. Some people say you can provide beyond Basic needs. You can provide very good existence for everyone. The hard problem is, what do you do with all that free time? For a lot of people, their jobs are what gives them meaning in their life. So they would be kind of lost. We see it with people who retire or do early retirement and for so many people who hate their jobs, they'll be very happy not working. But now you have people who are chilling all day. What happens to society? How does that impact crime rate, pregnancy rate? All sorts of issues nobody thinks about. Governments don't have programs prepared to deal with 99% unemployment.
- [05:24]
Alex
What do you think that world looks like?
- [05:27]
AI Safety Expert
Again, I think a very important part to understand here is the unpredictability of it. We cannot predict what a smarter than us system will do. And the point when we get to that is often called singularity. By analogy with physical singularity, you cannot see beyond the event horizon. I can tell you what I think might happen, but that's my prediction. It is not what actually is going to happen because I just don't have cognitive ability to predict a much smarter agent impacting this world. When you read science fiction, there is never a super intelligence in it actually doing anything. Because nobody can write believable science fiction at that level. They either banned AI like Dune because this way you can avoid writing about it, or it's like Star wars, you have this really dumb bots, but nothing super intelligent ever. Because by definition you cannot predict at that level.
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Steven Bartlett
Because by definition of it being super intelligent, it will make its own mind up.
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AI Safety Expert
By definition, if it was something you could predict, you would be operating at the same level of intelligence, violating our assumption that it is smarter than you. If I'm playing chess with superintelligence and I can predict every move I'm playing at that level, it's kind of like
- [06:44]
Steven Bartlett
my French bulldog trying to predict exactly what I'm thinking and what I'm going to do.
- [06:49]
AI Safety Expert
That's a good cognitive gap. And it's not just he can predict you're going to work, you're coming back, but he cannot understand why you're doing a podcast. That is something completely outside of his model of the world.
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Steven Bartlett
Yeah, he doesn't even know that I go to work. He just sees that I leave the house and doesn't know where I go
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AI Safety Expert
buy food for him.
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Steven Bartlett
What's the most persuasive argument against your own perspective here?
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AI Safety Expert
That we will not have unemployment due to advanced technology.
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Steven Bartlett
That there won't be this French bulldog human gap in understanding and I guess like power and control.
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AI Safety Expert
So some people think that we can enhance human minds either through combination with hardware, so something like neuralink, or through genetic re engineering to where we make smarter humans. Yeah, it may give us a little more intelligence. I don't think we are still competitive in biological form with silicon form. Silicon substrate is much more capable for intelligence. It's faster, it's more resilient, more energy efficient in many ways, which is what
- [08:00]
Steven Bartlett
computers are made out of, the brain. Yeah.
- [08:03]
AI Safety Expert
So I don't think we can keep up just with improving our biology. Some people think maybe, and this is very speculative, we can upload our minds into computers. So scan your brain, kind of comb of your brain, and have a simulation running on a computer and you can speed it up, go, give it more capabilities. But to me, that feels like you no longer exist. We just created software by different means. And now you have AI based on biology and AI based on some other forms of training. You can have evolutionary algorithms, you can have many paths to reach AGI, but at the end, none of them are humans.
- [08:41]
Steven Bartlett
I have another date here, which is 2030. What's your prediction for 2030? What will the world look like?
- [08:52]
AI Safety Expert
So we probably will have humanoid robots with enough flexibility, dexterity to compete with humans in all domains, including plumbers. We can make artificial plumbers, not the plumbers.
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Steven Bartlett
That felt like the last bastion of human employment. So 2035 years from now, humanoid robots. So many of the companies, the leading companies, including Tesla, are developing humanoid robots at light speed. And they're getting increasingly more effective. These humanoid robots will be able to move through physical space, make an omelet, do anything humans can do, but obviously be connected to AI as well. So they can think, talk. Right.
- [09:37]
AI Safety Expert
They're controlled by AI. They're always connected to the network. So they are already dominating in many ways.
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Steven Bartlett
Our world will look remarkably different when humanoid robots are functional and effective. Because that's really when, you know, I start thinking, cry. Like, the combination of intelligence and physical ability is really, really doesn't leave much, does it, for us human beings, not much.
- [10:09]
AI Safety Expert
So today, if you have intelligence through Internet, you can hire humans to do your bidding for you. You can pay them in Bitcoin, so you can have bodies, just not directly controlling them. So it's not a huge game changer to add direct control of physical bodies. Intelligence is where it's at. The important component is definitely higher ability to optimize, to solve problems, to find patterns people cannot see.
- [10:34]
Steven Bartlett
And then by 2045, I guess the world looks even more, which is 20 years from now.
- [10:43]
AI Safety Expert
So if it's still around, if it's still around, Ray Kurzweil predicts that that's the year for the singularity. That's the year where progress becomes so fast. So this AI doing science and engineering work makes improvements so quickly we cannot keep up anymore. That's the definition of singularity point beyond which we cannot see, understand, predict, see,
- [11:07]
Steven Bartlett
understand, predict the intelligence itself, or what
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AI Safety Expert
is happening in the world. The technology is being developed. So right now, if I have an iPhone, I can look forward to a new one coming out next year. And I'll understand it has slightly better camera. Imagine now this process of researching and developing this phone is automated. It happens every six months, every three months, every month, week, day, hour, minute, second. You cannot keep up with 30 iterations of iPhone in one day. You don't understand what capabilities it has, what proper controls are. It just escapes you. Right now, it's hard for any researcher in AI to keep up with the state of the art. While I was doing this interview with you, a new model came out, and I no longer know what the state of the art is. Every day, as a percentage of total knowledge, I get dumber. I may still know more because I keep reading, but as a percentage of overall knowledge, what? We're all getting dumber. And then you take it to extreme values. You have zero knowledge, zero understanding of the world around you.
- [12:14]
Steven Bartlett
Some of the arguments against this eventuality are that when you look at other technologies like the Industrial Revolution, people just found new ways to work and new careers that we could never have imagined at the time were created. How do you respond to that? In a world of superintelligence, it's a paradigm shift.
- [12:34]
AI Safety Expert
We always had tools, new tools which allowed some job to be done more efficiently. So Instead of having 10 workers, you could have two workers and eight workers had to find a new job. And there was another job. Now you can supervise those workers or do something cool. If you creating a meta invention, you're inventing intelligence, you're inventing a worker, an agent. Then you can apply that agent to the new job. There is not a job which cannot be automated. That never happened before. All the inventions we previously had were kind of a tool for doing something. So we invented fire. Huge game changer. But that's it. It stops with fire. We invent a wheel. Same idea, huge implications. But wheel itself is not an inventor. Here we're inventing a replacement for human mind. A new inventor capable of doing new inventions. It's the last invention we ever have to make. At that point, it takes over. And the process of doing science research, even ethics research, morals, all that is automated at that point.
- [13:43]
Steven Bartlett
Do you sleep well at night? Really well, Even though you spent the last 15, 20 years of your life working on AI safety and it's suddenly among us in a way that I don't think anyone could have predicted five years ago? When I say among us, I really mean that. The amount of funding and talent that is now focused on reaching superintelligence faster has made it feel more inevitable and more soon than any of us could have possibly imagined.
- [14:12]
AI Safety Expert
We as humans have this built in bias about not thinking about really bad outcomes and things we cannot prevent. So all of us are dying. Your kids are dying, your parents are dying, everyone's dying. But you still sleep well, you still go on with your day. Even 95 year olds are still doing games and playing golf and whatnot, because we have this ability to not think about the worst outcomes, especially if we cannot actually modify the outcome. So that's the same infrastructure being used for this? Yeah, there is humanity level death like event. We're happening to be close to it, probably. But unless I can do something about it, I can just keep enjoying my life. In fact, maybe knowing that you have limited amount of time left gives you more reason to have a better life. You cannot waste any.
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Steven Bartlett
And that's the survival trait of evolution, I guess, because those of my ancestors that spent all their time worrying wouldn't have spent enough time having babies and hunting to survive.
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AI Safety Expert
Suicidal ideas. People who really start thinking about how horrible the world is usually escape pretty soon.
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Steven Bartlett
You co authored this paper analyzing the key arguments people make against the importance of AI safety. And one of the arguments in there is that there's other things that are of bigger importance right now. It might be world wars, it could be nuclear containment, it could be other things. There's other things that the governments and podcasters like me should be talking about that are more important. What's your rebuttal to that argument?
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AI Safety Expert
So superintelligence is a meta solution. If we get superintelligence right, it will help us with climate change, it will help us with wars, it can solve all the other existential risks. If we don't get it right, it dominates. If climate change will take 100 years to boil us alive and superintelligence kills everyone at 5, I don't have to worry about climate change. So either way, either it solves it for me or it's not an issue.
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Steven Bartlett
So you think it's the most important thing to be working on.
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AI Safety Expert
Without question, there is nothing more important than getting this right. And I know everyone says it, you take any class, but you take English professor's class and he tells you, this is the most important class you'll ever take. But you can see the meta level differences with this one.
- [16:44]
Steven Bartlett
Another argument in that paper is that we all be in control and that the danger is not AI. This particular argument asserts that AI is just a tool. Humans are the real actors that present danger and we can always maintain control by simply turning it off. Can't we just pull the plug out? I see that every time we have a conversation on the show about AI, someone says, can't we just unplug it?
- [17:04]
AI Safety Expert
Yeah, I get those comments on every podcast I make and I always want to get in touch with a guy and say, this is brilliant. I never thought of it. We're going to write a paper together and get a Nobel Prize for it. This is like, let's do it. Because it's so silly. Can you turn off a virus? You have a computer virus, you don't like it, turn it off. How about Bitcoin? Turn off Bitcoin network. Go ahead, I'll wait. This is silly. There's a distributed systems. You cannot turn them off. And on top of it, they're smarter than you. They made multiple backups. They predicted what you're going to do. They will turn you off before you can turn them off. The idea that we will be in control applies only to pre superintelligence levels. Basically what we have today. Today, humans with AI tools are dangerous. They can be hackers, malevolent actors. Absolutely. But the moment superintelligence becomes smarter, dominates they no longer. The important part of that equation, it is the higher intelligence I'm concerned about, not the human, who may add additional malevolent payload. But at the end, still doesn't. Control
- [18:09]
Steven Bartlett
is tempting to follow. The next argument that I saw in that paper, which basically says, listen, this is inevitable, so there's no point fighting against it because there's really no hope here. So we should probably give up even trying and be faithful, that it will work itself out, because everything you've said sounds really inevitable. And with China working on it, I'm sure Putin's got some secret division. I'm sure Iran are doing some bits and pieces. Every European country's trying to get ahead of AI. The United States is leading the way. So it's inevitable. So we probably should just have faith and pray.
- [18:48]
AI Safety Expert
Praying is always good. But Incentives matter if you are looking at what drives these people. So yes, money is important. So there is a lot of money in that space. And so everyone's trying to be there and develop this technology. But if they truly understand the argument, they understand that you will be dead. No amount of money will be useful to you. Then incentives switch. They would want to not be dead. A lot of them are young people, rich people. They have their whole lives ahead of them. I think they would be better off not building advanced superintelligence, concentrating on narrow AI tools for solving specific problems. My company cures breast cancer. That's all. We make billions of dollars. Everyone's happy, everyone benefits. It's a win. We are still in control today. It's not over until it's over. We can decide not to build general superintelligences.
- [19:44]
Steven Bartlett
I mean, the United States might be able to conjure up enough enthusiasm for that. But if the United States doesn't build general superintelligences, then China are going to have the big advantage, right?
- [19:56]
AI Safety Expert
So right now, at those levels, whoever has more advanced AI, has more advanced military, no question. We see it with existing conflicts. But the moment you switch to superintelligence, uncontrolled superintelligence, it doesn't matter who builds it, us or them. And if they understand this argument, they also would not build it. It's a mutually assured destruction on both ends.
- [20:18]
Steven Bartlett
Is this technology different than say nuclear weapons, which require a huge amount of investment and you have to enrich the uranium and you need billions of dollars potentially to even build a nuclear weapon. But it feels like this technology is much cheaper to get to superintelligence potentially, or at least it will become cheaper. I wonder if it's possible that some guy, some startup is going to be able to build super intelligence in a couple of years without the need of billions of dollars of compute or electricity power.
- [20:52]
AI Safety Expert
That's a great point. So every year it becomes cheaper and cheaper to train sufficiently large model. If today it would take a trillion dollars to build superintelligence, next year it could be 100 billion and so on. At some point a guy on a laptop could do it. But you don't want to wait four years for make it affordable. So that's why so much money is pouring in. Somebody wants to get there this year and lucky and all the winnings Litecoin level award. So in that regard they both very expensive projects like Manhattan level projects, which
- [21:26]
Steven Bartlett
was the nuclear bomb project. Right.
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AI Safety Expert
The difference between the two technologies is that nuclear weapons are still Tools, some dictator, some country, someone has to decide to use them, deploy them. Whereas superintelligence is not a tool, it's an agent. It makes its own decisions and no one is controlling it. I cannot take out this dictator, and now superintelligence is safe. So that's a fundamental difference to me.
- [21:54]
Steven Bartlett
But if you're saying that it is going to get incrementally cheaper, I think it's Moore's Law, isn't it, that technology gets cheaper?
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AI Safety Expert
It is.
- [22:01]
Steven Bartlett
Then there is a future where some guy on his laptop is going to be able to create superintelligence without oversight or regulation or employees, et cetera.
- [22:10]
AI Safety Expert
Yeah. That's why a lot of people suggesting we need to build something like Surveillance Planet, where you are monitoring who's doing what and you're trying to prevent people from doing it. Do I think it's feasible? No. At some point it becomes so affordable and so trivial that it just will happen. But at this point, we're trying to get more time. We don't want it to happen in five years, we want it to happen in 50 years.
- [22:38]
Steven Bartlett
I mean, that's not very hopeful.
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AI Safety Expert
Depends on how old you are.
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Steven Bartlett
Depends on how old you are. I mean, if you're saying that you believe in the future people will be able to make super intelligence without the resources that are required today, then it is just a matter of time.
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AI Safety Expert
Yeah, but so will be true for many other technologies. We are getting much better in synthetic biology, where today someone with a bachelor's degree in biology can probably create a new virus. This will also become cheaper, other technologies like that. So we are approaching a point where it's very difficult to make sure no technological breakthrough is the last one. So essentially, in many directions, we have this pattern of making it easier in terms of resources, in terms of intelligence, to destroy the world. If you look at, I don't know, 500 years ago, the worst dictator with all the resources could kill a couple million people. He couldn't destroy the world. Now we know nuclear weapons, we can blow up the whole planet multiple times over. Synthetic biology we saw with COVID you can very easily create a combination virus which impacts billions of people, and all of those things becoming easier to do
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Steven Bartlett
in the near term. You talk about extinction being a real risk, human extinction being a real risk. Of all the pathways to human extinction that you think are most likely, what is the leading pathway? Because I know you talk about there being some issue pre deployment of these AI tools, like someone makes a mistake when they're designing a model or Other issues post deployment. When I say post deployment, I mean once a chatgpt or something, an agent's released into the world and someone hacking into it and changing it and reprogramming it to be malicious, have all these potential paths to human extinction. Which one do you think is the highest probability?
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AI Safety Expert
So I can only talk about the ones I can predict myself. So I can predict, even before we get to superintelligence, someone will create a very advanced biological tool, create a novel virus. And that virus gets everyone, or most everyone. I can envision it. I can understand the pathway. I can say that.
- [24:54]
Steven Bartlett
So just to zoom in on that, then that would be using an AI to make a virus and then releasing it.
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AI Safety Expert
Yeah.
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Steven Bartlett
And would that be intentional or.
- [25:03]
AI Safety Expert
There is a lot of psychopaths, a lot of terrorists, a lot of doomsday cults we've seen historically. Again, they try to kill as many people as they can. They usually fail. They kill hundreds of thousands. But if they get technology to kill millions of billions, they would do that gladly. The point I'm trying to emphasize is that it doesn't matter what I can come up with. I am not a malevolent actor you're trying to defeat here. It's the superintelligence which can come up with completely novel ways of doing it. Again, you brought up example of your dog. Your dog cannot understand all the ways you can take it out. It can maybe think you'll bite it to death or something, but that's all. Whereas you have infinite supply of resources. So if I asked your dog exactly how you're going to take it out, it would not give you a meaningful answer. It can talk about biting, and this is what we know. We know viruses, we experienced viruses, we can talk about them. But what an AI system capable of doing novel physics research can come up with is beyond me.
- [26:14]
Steven Bartlett
One of the things that I think most people don't understand is how little we understand about how these AIs are actually working. Because one would assume, you know, with computers, we kind of understand how a computer works. We know that it's doing this and then this, and it's running on code. But from reading your work, you describe it as being a black box. So in the context of something like ChatGPT or an AI, we know. You're telling me that the people that have built that tool don't actually know what's going on inside there.
- [26:44]
AI Safety Expert
That's exactly right. So even people making those systems have to run experiments on their product to learn what it's capable of. So they train it by giving it all of data, let's say all of Internet text. They run it on a lot of computers to learn patterns in that text. And then they start experimenting with that model. Oh, do you speak French? Or can you do mathematics? Oh, are you lying to me now? And so maybe it takes a year to train it and then six months to get some fundamentals about what it's capable of, some safety overhead. But we still discover new capabilities in old models. If you ask the question in a different way, it becomes smarter. So it's no longer engineering how it was the first 50 years where someone was a knowledge engineer programming an expert system AI to do specific things. It's a science. We are creating this artifact, growing it. It's like an alien plant. And then we study it to see what it's doing. And just like with plants, we don't have 100% accurate knowledge of biology. We don't have full knowledge here. We kind of know some patterns. We know, okay, if we add more compute, it gets smarter most of the time. But nobody can tell you precisely what the outcome is going to be given a set of inputs.
- [28:08]
Steven Bartlett
What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode.
- [28:13]
Alex
If you want to listen to that
- [28:14]
Steven Bartlett
full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.
- [28:22]
Alex
Something we think about a lot in
- [28:23]
Steven Bartlett
the diary of a CEO is distribution.
- [28:25]
Alex
Because we could have the most interesting guests in the world and the most thought provoking conversation, but if nobody can
- [28:29]
Steven Bartlett
find us, none of that really matters.
- [28:31]
Alex
And this logic applies to pretty much any business business. Whatever you're selling, however good it is, distribution often is the determining factor of whether you win or whether you lose. And this is why it's interesting to me that so many vacation rental owners are essentially invisible to a huge chunk of their potential market without even realizing it. Let me explain. Booking.com is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world. And since 2010, it's helped over 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. That's a huge pool of travelers actively looking for places to stay. So if you've got a vacation rental that isn't on booking.com that means you're missing out on being seen by millions of travelers already searching their platform. Getting listed takes 15 minutes, and nearly half of new hosts get their first booking within a week. If you need that kind of global
- [29:18]
Steven Bartlett
reach for your listing, which I assume
- [29:19]
Alex
you do, then head to booking.com to
- [29:21]
Steven Bartlett
start your listing today.