Ryan Cohen on GameStop's turnaround: cut corporate headcount from 1,400 to 400, collectibles now a third of revenue

back or like, oh, you could actually see like a taxi cab and we were shooting in in, you know, the 1800s, so like we got to pull that out, so just go in there with the with the the pen tool and like, you know, replace it with AI. Uh, anyway, we have our first guest of the show. We have Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop.

Can you hear me, Ryan? How are you doing? I can hear you. Okay. Sorry, we have we have serious serious technical difficulties today. Um, but I believe we have you here on the phone. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you today? I'm doing well. How about yourself?

We're doing great. Uh, we'd love to just get uh the story of GameStop from your perspective, kind of how you tell it now. Uh, you're a couple years into this project. uh would love to kind of get the the high level just to set the stage. Where do you want to start?

Um maybe the original idea like when did you think you'd become involved with this company? I originally invested as a passive investor. Mhm.

Um, I had a few conversations with the management team and the board of directors and I realized that saw a lot of stuff that you read about but you don't really believe until you actually engage with them.

And as we went through conversations, I went from passive to active and uh filed the 13D I believe in uh August of 2020 and then I joined the board in January of 2021 and um the rest is history. The long story short is there's been a lot of changes at the company.

Um, a lot of cost cutting, uh, a lot of rationalization, focusing on the basics of running a profitable business and a lot of it was getting people out of the way. um a board of directors that had perverse incentives, a management team that had perverse incentives.

Ultimately, what you see is that when people don't have their own money on the line, they don't give a [ __ ] And they're focused on all kinds of other stuff that ultimately doesn't matter to shareholders. And a lot of it was getting that out of the way so that we could actually focus on the business.

And um you know you see it in the results of the business today versus where it was not just when I joined the board but you know you look at the results even prior to that. It's uh it's a tough business. Yeah totally.

Well what do you think uh the mainstream media gets wrong about the GameStop story uh today or has gotten wrong throughout uh the whole saga? [Music] That's not an easy question to answer. Um because we're talking in generalities and sure I don't want to stere you I can't stereotype in general.

Um everyone thinks they know. The mainstream se media thinks they know. I'm running the business and they seem to have greater visibility into the business than I do. So everyone has an opinion as opposed to actually just focusing on the results.

And in general, the news should just focus on the results instead of uh comments from the peanut gallery, right? Yeah. Let's let's let's talk about Q2 specifically. What what made that one of the biggest quarters in years?

It's a it's a focus on running a a business like an owner and cutting costs and making money and leaning into the areas of the business where there's margin potential just trading cards and then getting rid of the bloat. Um, as an example, uh, I was just looking at this earlier today before we spoke.

2021 there were 14 over 1,400 people in corporate. Um, Wow. Today there's like 400 people. Wow. Yeah. And we're more productive today than we were in 2021. SGNA has come down by like 50%. So people build teams, they hire people. Ultimately what that means is they delegate their work to someone else.

You end up taking on this crazy cost structure and it works when the business is growing but doesn't work well once you uh the business stops growing and that's where GameStop was. And uh physical retail is tough. Yep. How much of that corporate restructuring going from I think you said 1,400 people down to 400.

How much of that is just reorient reorienting around a players aligned incentives picking the best person to actually run a specific initiative versus using technology using software using AI? Is there any sort of narrative around that that you've found success with? It's both. Mhm. Even finding the right people though.

Yeah. You know, you don't you don't know. I mean, I've been interviewing people for a long time and you meet people I meet them and I get really excited cuz they're really good at the interview process and they know how to say the right thing. So, what does that mean?

Means they've got really good public speaking skills. So, they overindex there. And then you actually when you look at their execution skills, they're not great.

So, Uh, I've been as equally excited as people that I've hired that have worked out as I have been of people that I've hired that I wasn't excited about and then they prove to me that they can actually execute. So, you know, the results speak for themselves.

You you really only know once you put people someone in the position and you see what they're capable of. They can tell a great story. they can put together a great PowerPoint presentation, but you don't you don't actually know until you see what they're what they can actually do.

So, there's no question that artificial intelligence and just broadly speaking, technology has increased productivity. Um, you know, that's that's been a big benefit. And then doing more with less. Yep. You take a Z salary. You have billions of dollars of cash on hand.

Uh how do you plan to allocate it over the next two to three years? I don't want to I don't want to go too long term. There's um we don't have a gun to our head. So it needs to be a situation where the downside is limited and the upside is really high.

And um that's a different calculus than the world of private equity or or venture capital or any money managers where they're incentivized to deploy capital because they get management fees.

In this case, a fancy way of saying is it's risk adjusted and I I don't want to lose money and I I want a situation where there's a good chance of making money and a really low chance of losing money. So, it needs to be a pitch that is pretty much down the middle.

Um, does that mean you're waiting you're waiting for a for a crash? You never know what's going to happen in the financial markets. They can go from uh from green to red and and they don't flash yellow. So when that happens, we'll be in a position.

But yeah, I just feel like it's not I just feel like it's notable that you have all these, you know, digital asset treasury companies that are just market buying, you know, obscene amounts of of uh, you know, Bitcoin and and other tokens and and you guys are, you know, uh, taking a longer view. Yeah.

What are you excited about uh in the core business over the next few years between retail, online, you you mentioned trading cards. Can you unpack a little bit more about some of the the key initiatives like the customer behaviors that you see as uh really big opportunities? I tried a lot of different things.

So I originally went in um with the the Chewy playbook was we focused first on consumables. So, we had a lot of success on pet food, treats, litter, things that you could put on auto ship.

And then it went from focus on consumables, getting customers on auto ship to we're going to be the everything pet store and we're going to expand our catalog and we're going to add all these hard goods.

So, I had all these preconceived biases where I was going to copy the Chewy Playbook at GameStop and basically be like the everything store for gaming.

And we um I hired a bunch of fancy people from both Amazon and Chewy and we expanded the catalog and we added a bunch of product and um most of that product didn't sell and we ended up marking it down and taking a big hit and it cost shareholders a lot of money cuz once you have the product trapped in stores you got to mark it down in order to move and get it out of the stores.

Um whereas within the consumable space if we ever bought it if we ever overbought inventory we just waited and ultimately you know bought too much cat food or whatever it ended up selling. Y so physical retail is very very very different than e-commerce and uh I spent a lot of money to figure that out.

And so what I learned is that we went into all these categories and a lot of uh we took some significant hits on losing money. We lost money. It's that simple. by trying to expand into all of these categories that were not core to the GameStop customer. And then along comes collectibles.

And obviously after expanding into categories where there's very little success, your risk appetite at that point is pretty low. All of a sudden we see that they're like the GameStop customer really. When it comes to trading cards, there's a strong appetite for for trading cards. And that category has done very well.

And we've gone from like 10% of our sales to over close to a third probably for the full year is going to come from collectibles. And um that's remarkable. Congratulations. Yeah. Um I I want to I I want to know more about the collectibles thing. Let's let's table that for a second.

And I'd love to know more about uh where you see the traditional video gaming market going. Uh I'm I'm experiencing kind of whiplash because I see uh mobile games and and freetoplay growing and micro payments happening. EA is getting taken private.

Uh you have a lot of stuff going on in that end, but then you also have Palmer Lucky kind of bringing back the Game Boy and the N64 with Chromatic and I know you're you're partnering on that. Um what are you excited about?

What does the shape of the traditional sort of like video game market look like over the next couple years? The video game market is definitely going from physical to digital. So, our ability to play in the digital world is limited.

There's a lot of money that's being spent and um we've taken a capex light approach like a a a pretty risklight approach to the digital world. If there's not a a clear path past us being able to to make money and a a payback period that's that's pretty attractive, then uh this isn't a story of like moonshots.

So there's no moonshots that are being done like we're we're focused on real returns. Yep. Uh what about wearables, virtual reality?

Uh we heard a story about the Meta Quest or the the Meta Rayband displays and uh a friend of ours went and had to test them at Best Buy and didn't have a great experience and it feels like uh if we do enter sort of like a wearable era, there's a renewed demand for instore experiences.

Is that on your radar at all or is that more of like a you know futuristic thing that you'll deal with it when it comes down the pipe? I mean, the when I think about wearables, the Apple Watch is a good product. When I think about the MetaQuest, I mean, it's a joke.

Uh the all of the virtual reality stuff doesn't feel like like who's going to walk around with these [ __ ] glasses on their head? Like, it's just it doesn't it does not seem like that's the future. But if we could sell a product and we can make really high margins, then obviously we're going to sell the product.

But we're not investing in um in in virtual reality or in in the metaverse unless there's a clear path to being able to deliver results for shareholders. Yeah. Yeah. I meant more just as like Apple does have the Apple store network.

Uh other companies that are trying to get into wearables and might need intore demos don't have one of those. But uh yeah, I mean your your rationale makes a ton of sense.

It's so interesting to think about the dis, you know, when when I hear you talk, Ryan, it's you're you're everything you say aligns with thoughtful capital allocation and yet the the broader like world seems to believe that this is this is just about being, you know, kind of this is, you know, it doesn't it's moonshots.

the other there there's there's uh CEOs out there that have effectively meme stocks and they just act and talk a lot differently. Yeah. Than you do. No, this is refreshing. Um what what do you think about some of the the uh conversations?

There's been uh I guess rumors that uh the admin is interested in companies moving to byianual uh reporting instead of quarterly reporting. Do you think that's smart? what what kind of moves from the admin uh this year have you been uh particularly uh interested in? I like reducing cost.

So if it costs us less money than to report by annually then by all means uh I think it's important for shareholders to have visibility into how the company's doing and then making a determination whether they want to stay invested or not. But we have an opportunity to reduce our costs.

I mean, it's a it costs a lot of money to be a public company. Yeah. We spend a lot of money on audit fees. So, that hurt me at Chewy. That hurts me at GameStop. Uh they they charge us a lot of money.

So, if it me if it ultimately means we spend less money on being a public company than and it makes us more efficient, then that's that's fantastic. Uh, I I've I did did I didn't mention it, but thank you for Chewy. I've been uh a subscriber for probably a decade.

Uh, you know, it's uh it's been the backbone of my household. My uh my dogs Thank you as well. Uh I'm interested to hear your your take on kind of uh evolution of e-commerce. There's a lot of chatter about agentic commerce and people buying through products through their chat apps. Have you looked into that?

Do you have a a a current uh framework for thinking about the the adoption rates of people buying stuff through an LLM? Um Amazon started selling pet products in the late 90s and they were they were doing okay. Mhm. Chewy comes along. We originally wanted to start off selling jewelry.

We actually bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry. We went I went to a trade show and I bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry. We set up the website and everything and then I was shopping in a neighborhood pet store and I had a um at the time like a five or six pound teacup poodle.

Uh, and I kept on going to this neighborhood bed store every few weeks and I run into the office. By the way, I don't wear jewelry. I was not passionate about the C. I didn't know anything. That's important. Like, you were just kind of It was picking like this seems like a good marketing business and it's light.

You can ship. Yeah. It was a little too mercenary. Like you got to get into the, you know, build something that you want so you can give yourself feedback. Yeah. And but you think like your intuition is like there's margins in jewelry and so like you can make money.

There was there was a blue Nile at the time that had really gross high gross margins and I was like we can do we can do well in online jewelry. Um anyway, I went to this jewelry trade show. I bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry.

Um, and then I was shopping kind of at the same time every few weeks at this neighborhood pet store for my poodle. And I was way more interested in the pet category than I was in jewelry. I understood the customer. And so I ended up selling the jewelry. I ended up getting like 80 or 90 cents on the dollar. Mhm.

Uh and I went into the pet category and I liked that I well I understood it. Uh I I liked the predictability of the industry. I like the fact that like once you're a pet owner, you're buying pet food pretty much for the rest of your life. And um and and we shifted. And so Chewy comes along.

since 2011 and I took the playbook from Amazon. So, the focus on fast shipping, having a great selection, being able to get onto the website, add an item to the cart and check out. Our average checkout time was like less than two minutes. Wow.

So, you know, you think about like GoDaddy and I don't know if you've ever bought a domain name, but you go through the check out process, they're trying to upsell you on like a gazillion stuff. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, Chewy is like average checkout time less than 2 minutes. We're not trying to upsell you.

It's like, we're going to get you your pet food as fast as possible at the best price. So Julie comes along in 2011 and completely completely disrupts the industry. Yeah. And we disrupted the independence. We disrupted Petco and PetSmart.

And we were delivering your consumables at a better price, faster with an easier experience backed up by great customer experience. And so, um, you don't necessarily have to be first to the game in order to be successful. Amazon was first to the game, but we focused on the category and we were successful.

And that's kind of what's interesting in technology in general is like you have these technology companies that are trying to do everything, right? Amazon's trying to do streaming. They're trying to do e-commerce. They're trying to do everything.

And then all of a sudden, you have Netflix that is really successful in streaming. You have Chewy that's really successful in pet food. Yeah. So, if you focus on a category, you could be very successful. How did you process the DTOC e-commerce era? It was like really hot in Silicon Valley.

Every MBA was raising venture capital. slap a $250,000 brand on a white labeled product and raise some money and then it kind of fizzled out. But like how were you processing that at the time? What's your post-mortem like? How should people think about bu building brands going forward? Is there still opportunity for us?

building brand was acquiring one customer at a time and making sure that they got their pet food or whatever the hell they ordered from us the best price really quickly. That's how you build a brand. It's not spending a bunch of money on, you know, Pets. com, a Super Bowl commercial.

It is focusing on the the best marketing is word of mouth. So, you allow a customer through word of mouth. You have a great customer experience. You deliver the product really quickly at a great price and you have a happy customer.

And that was the way to build Chewy was getting big market leadership and making sure that customers were really happy. What are the three like key lessons from Chewy that you feel like you and the GameStop team are applying today? um running efficiently.

There's no question that like we ran very a a focus on uh on you know Chewy was they're so different. Thing is is you think like e-commerce and and and physical retail are the same. And that's where I I made a lot of mistakes cuz I showed up like a wise guy at GameStop.

I thought I had all all the answers, but e-commerce and physical retail are very very different. Yeah. So, in general within physical retail, what I've learned is like you want to you have to run lean and you're better off having less inventory than more inventory.

So, um I cost shareholders a lot of money by taking the Chewy playbook at GameStop.

And then I learned physical retail which was uh a muscle that I had zero memory and it was on making sure that when you get the product you sell it very very quickly because if you don't the product depreciates very quickly whereas with chewy if I overbought I sold the product very quickly it didn't matter.

So they're not the same. They're uh they're not the same. It it the reason why in general both concepts have worked out is cuz you know you you you keep on I have my own money on the line. So not going to stop until I figure it out. And you're him. But but it costs a lot of money to figure it out. Skin in the game.

The man's in the arena. Uh people have said you're you're too Yeah. People have said you're uh too bold as a CEO. Uh do you think the traditional concept of a of a buttoned up uh CEO CEO that maybe shies away from controversy uh should uh is is obsolete or or should be forgotten. I don't even know what a co means.

I want at the end of the day I want whoever's in charge if it ends up successful they end up doing really well and if it ends up not being successful they lose a lot of money and call them call me the janitor for all I care the end of the day their incentives should be aligned with common shareholders so um that's the most important thing is the incentives are are generally aligned.

Yeah. You're the loudest shareholder. Yeah. Um how do you decide how do you decide what battles to fight because you got a lot of stuff coming your way at any given point? A lot of opportunity. What's your framework? My framework is what's going to move the needle.

like if if we can if if we can make 80% margins uh but the upside is limited it's not going to move the needle then I don't care if if it's able to translate into billions of dollars of shareholder value and it's scalable then we're talking so there's a lot of things that are like small time and yeah we can make a lot of margin but there's there's not a lot of upside in terms of shareholders, then who cares?

But if it translates into into something meaningful and scalable, then then I'm interested. Do you think do you think power packs could be that? Uh what do you think? Well, the chat is going crazy. They want to know they they want the the update from your side. Power packs is interesting.

power packs, physical and digital. Um, is very interesting. We we we can't get enough inventory. So, that's always a good I don't want I don't I don't want to say anything cuz I mean users can uh Do you see customers can figure out for themselves? Yeah.

Do you see it as the same sort of like it's more consumption focused so it fits within the Chewy model? Is is is that the right way to think about this as opposed to you know you you you're you're there's less risk of getting stuck with a bunch of inventory. Are we talking physical or digital?

Uh physical I would imagine would be like the place where there's inventory risk in some regard. But uh if if you view it as more of a consumption product uh then like the Chewy story, there's presumably less risk in uh holding a bunch of inventory. I like the trading card space. Okay.

So, we have uh we GameStop has a lot of assets. We have the community and the brand that allows us to if you look at digital power packs, we've kept uh we've kept it pretty limited in terms of being able to get into the digital category and and frankly, it's not a marketing thing. We just we can't get enough inventory.

And it's the same thing on the physical thing, but digital is more scalable. Um, so if we had a choice between physical and digital, because digital is more scalable, we're going to go towards digital.

um can't get enough inventory at at least at a price where we can I mean you you can buy inventory at a 110 or 120% market value but we're not going to we're not going to start doing stupid stuff like that. How do how do you see the collectibles landscape evolving over the next 5 years?

It feels like different players have picked a focus whether that's live uh traditional auctions uh something uh you know like like you just discussed um as well but like what what is what is the shape of the market going forward uh in your view they're all connected like if you look at the overall collectible space it's looked at as a st store of you and it's been that way for decades.

If you look at trading cards, you it's like nostalgic to, you know, I I I grew up. Uh I didn't I collected trading cards a little bit, but there's definitely a comeback right now on trading cards. So, it's looked at as a store of value. Whether that continues or not, who the who knows?

I mean, everyone is like, well, it's going to continue. Everyone thinks crypto is going to continue. Nobody knows. Y uh but but we're having a lot of success when you look at our assets right now. Like the the way it stands right now is we're selling the product very quickly.

We can't get the more inventory we have, we could sell the product. So we're going to run efficiently and if we can sell the product, great.

And if it happens where we can't sell the product, then we're going to adjust and uh you know, we're going to lower our costs and going to focus on on on the things that make sense. Do you have a do you have a take on Laboo?

I feel like uh if I find out about it, I'm ultra late and I might have topt ticked it when I finally uh learned about that, but it seems like it's uh somewhat important to the collectible boom, the story there. Uh do you have any idea what's going on? We I don't Do we sell Laboo right now? I don't think we sell Lubu.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just wondering like uh Yeah, it's like kind of an odd strategy. It has some of the unboxing characteristics. Uh very popular. Seemed like it just kind of emerged out of China out of nowhere. Uh I was wondering if you had tracked the market at all. No. Should we sell it? I don't know.

It might be too late. I have no idea. They're very They're very demonic in our view. Yeah. We we we we think they kind of just don't have the right vibe and uh I feel like there's plenty of other collectibles that would be more on brand personally. How how do you what was that? Is it females or males? I don't know.

I think it's all sorts of people buying them. I saw Tim Cook had one so everybody's How are you thinking about uh how do you think about M&A on the in the collectible space?

I'm sure people come to you all the time with sort of platforms that maybe have some scale but not quite uh the scale that you have that that would love to sell to you but obviously companies are bought not sold. So I'm curious uh if you've if if it's something that you would explore in the future.

They don't come to us as often as you think because they know well um they probably go to private equity or venture capital or these fancy hedge funds before they come to us cuz uh I want to make sure that I'm I'm uh I care about cash flow and the price that I pay.

So yeah, we don't uh we see some deals, but it's hard to compete against guys that are or girls, whatever, that are getting management fees. Do you think uh do you think AI uh plays into the collectibles world at all?

Just this idea that like if you have a piece of IP, you can instantiate it maybe much quicker across a whole host of images and videos and kind of build out an intellectual property world faster. Is that actually an accelerant to the collectible trade?

I in general I have been I'm the person that's very cynical when it comes to emerging technologies. Sure. So, uh like autonomous driving as example like everyone with like GM, Ford, all of the big OEMs, they're finished cuz there's going to be autonomous driving. No, it's it's uh when it comes to AI, it's a big problem.

At some point, the computers are going after the humans. And I don't think it's that far away. I think that the sci-fi movies when it comes to AI, I feel it. I feel like there's going to be a big problem when it comes to artificial intelligence. And at some point it's going to be the computers against the humans.

China versus the US. Who's going to be the winner? Who the [ __ ] knows? But we got big problems with AI. And it's interesting cuz you can't stop human innovation. And we've got this insatiable appetite to go into these technologies like artificial intelligence that are very disruptable.

There's lots of money that's that is being poured into it. But what the future looks like, we have to be very very very careful. So artificial intelligence, it scares me. I mean, I I like the productivity benefits, but um AI once the robots come after us scares me. What's your timeline there? It's faster.

It's faster than I would have thought. When I look at what's happening, I don't buy into emerging technologies, but when I look at the advance advancements in AI, this is no joke. And we have to be very very very careful about what's going to happen to artificial intelligence.

Where do you think we are in the market cycle? Do you think it's uh you think it's 1999 uh February of 2000? Does that is that even worth comping to or do you comp to something else in AI? It feels early. Doesn't feel like we're at the end. It feels like we're like the second or third inning, but who the hell knows?

But at a high level, um I think that it's I think we have to be very careful when you think about the future of humanity and whether AI is going to benefit the future of humanity. I don't know.

I would uh if I was running a dictatorship and someone made me king and you told me should we move forward with this technology, it's not clear to me whether moving forward with AI is going to benefit everyone.

It's definitely going to benefit the few that are invested in the industry, but there's going to be a lot of people that are not going to benefit from artificial intelligence. So, chat GBT chat GBT is depending on paid users right now.

They can't, you know, if they killed off humanity, that'd be kind of bad for business. Isn't there a way to solve that alignment issue?

You know, we've if you look at the tractor trailer the US in the 1800s and the tractor trail I think it was like 80% of the population was working on the farm and then all of a sudden tractor trailer comes along and few centuries later it's like 2 to 3% of the population is working in farming and you would have said how the he the hell can the US economy adapt to something that's so disruptive and we did.

But when it comes to artificial intelligence, I feel like it's different. Uh maybe I'm biased from some of these sci-fi movies, but there is going to be a lot of wealth inequality that's created. I don't I don't like it. I mean, there's there's there's opportunities to be had. There's no question about it.

But is it better for humanity in aggregate AI? What do you think? Well, I yeah, I I think for me, uh I think it's very straightforward to imagine the dark sci-fi timeline, but it feels farther away.

I mean, at least in our corner of the internet, people have been reacting to uh uh Carpathy's interview with Darkeesh that was uh I think went live Thursday night.

And it feels like uh the debate right now is is is AI frontier lab progress slowing down is it just autocomplete uh or uh and if it's autocomplete and we don't have uh and if basically if the rate of progress is slowing down are is there massive overinvestment right now and what I'm hearing from you is simultaneously uh generally kind of the the doomer point of view which I think is fair, but at the same time it doesn't sounds it doesn't sound like if you were running a a hyperscaler you'd be ramping up capex right now.

Are we smart enough as a society to understand what the benefits are and what are the downsides? And everyone has perverse incentives. So someone who's in the AI industry is going to tell us how AI is the best thing since sliced bread.

But in general as a society, if you think across like human evolution over centuries, do I want to take this emerging technology and is this going to benefit the human population in aggra over the long term? Do you what happened? What happens when AI becomes smarter than us? Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

Do you think the solutions government intervention just good stewardship by the leaders of the foundation model labs? Like who actually who actually has the responsibility of stewarding the new technology most effectively? It's governments and it's ones who are f who have a long tenure.

You look at America, you know, the presidential cycle is four years. So, I don't know if that's necessarily long-term incentives. Yeah. Um, but who cares about where humanity is going to be? Not in four years from now. not when they check out but in a hundred years from now.

Who's got a long-term focus on this emerging technology and who cares about humanity over centuries but we have to be very very careful about this technology. What what was your view on social media a decade ago? It was quite popular for a period to say that social media was destroying humanity.

Uh and maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Uh we seem to have found a way through. But do is your view that that AI is as bad as people once maybe thought social media would be?

like what what specifically when you think about you know one one of the things we laugh about internally is uh just how easy it is to clock when somebody uses AI to generate like a cover letter cover letter or a job application right it's like a really good way to just get your cover letter application ignored is just to generate it with chat GBT it's just beyond obvious and I'm sure your your team has seen a lot of this too but I'm curious like what do you think the before we get to the you know sci-fi I doomer scenario where the computers rise up and destroy us all.

Uh what what's kind of like the immediate impact uh that that uh you're worried about? Social media is one of the worst things that happen to humanity. If you look at Instagram, people are so easily manipulated. They filter videos. They filter pictures.

You know, you look at these young people, their expectations, their lack of work ethic. China has censored all of this stuff for good reason because it's so easy to manipulate the layman. And so in general when I look at social media I say well has it benefited humanity or is it been toxic?

It's there there's no question that social media is is toxic. Um AI clearly will increase productivity but at what cost? At what cost? I think we have to be very very careful when when public company CEOs talk about how much efficiency they're getting out of AI.

Do you think that they're actually getting efficiency out of AI or do you think they're just uh pushing their teams harder to be more efficient and uh they want to blame blame the impact on on AI? It's both. It's both. But AI without question increases productivity.

But, you know, again, it's short-term versus long-term.

So, if you're running Johnson and Johnson or pro or Proctor and Gamble and you can use artificial intelligence and you could reduce your cost structure cuz you've got all these humans that are doing these mundane tasks and all of a sudden you realize the computers are going to do it better. Well, duh.

You're going to reduce your cost structure. But all of a sudden when you when you have all of these people that are unemployed and the demand for your product goes away, what's better?

You want to keep people employed and have some kind of self-worth and working hard and making money or do you want to replace them and give them universal basic income? And then what does that mean? Does your consumption and demand for your product in aggregate go up or go down as a result of artificial intelligence?

I don't know. But I one thing I know for certain is that the CEOs, if they can reduce their cost structure in the short term, they're going to replace they're going to take computers over humans. But is that better for humanity over the long term? You tell me. everyone on UBI over the long term.

How does that make them feel? People need a purpose. You don't you don't think we'll create new jobs? I mean, we created email jobs. A lot of them could go away and the world wouldn't be too much different. Artificial intelligence feels different. Yeah. I just wonder if we compete on other things. It feels different.

Like we could still have we could still have hierarchies and competitions on things that only humans can do. I mean, we already do this with sports and all sorts of things. Um there there's probably still some sort of like reproductive battle to try and get to the top of the stack.

Even if you don't need to go and work to make money, there are still other things that you do with your time to raise your status in society. Um but I don't know. It is it is a bizarre future to think about. I just wonder if it's five years, 10 years, 50 years away. We're in an era of instant gratification.

That's the American system. Is that now now now? Mhm. Innovation, making money today. But when you think about 10, 20, 30 years from now and artificial intelligence, what what does the world look like? It's it's not about job displacement.

It's not about control, but is artificial intelligence going to control us or will we control artificial intelligence? And you would argue that social media already controls how we feel daytoday. We open our phone and decide our mood based on what's happening in far away places that we have nothing to do with.

Social media is a big problem.

What's it's so easy if you look at the divisiveness in this country, social media, whether you're a conservative, you you go on Instagram and you're you're a conservative and then all of a sudden you get, you know, these algorithms serve you all kinds of things that are going to make you mad.

And if you're a liberal, you all of a sudden go on social media and you see all kinds of media that's going to make you mad. Why is it that ultimately humanity like it it comes down to human? What why do we have to lose something in order to appreciate what it feels like the only neutralizer is death and war.

doesn't have to be that way, but it feels like the only way we can ultimately appreciate something is if we we actually lose it. It's it's very very very sad. But that's what it comes down to. There's so much in divisiveness in America.

If we can just all come together and figure out command things that we both agree on, but instead we figure out the reasons why we're going to be divided and the politicians divide us. And well, I think a lot of people have agreed a lot of people on social media have agreed that they like you a lot.

So there's there's there's there's one white pill in there. Yeah, there's somebody until they don't until they don't. Well, hopefully it doesn't. Do they like me over the long term? I don't know. We'll find out. Yeah. We true true leadership is not about dividing people.

It's figuring out how do we bring people together over the long term that benefit humanity? Yeah. Uh h how do you apply that that that sort of thinking to video games? because there was a lot of fear-mongering about violent video games causing kids to become violent.

Uh the government did step in and regulate video games with the ESRB. Uh every game is given a rating and young kids, you know, they they can figure out a way to get access to some violent video games, but it's, you know, parents are more in control now.

And I feel like we more or less got the good outcome and and people can enjoy video games responsibly. And of course there's some negative scenarios, but in general I feel like uh video games have been just like a cool cool medium for artists to tell stories. There's wide variety of experiences.

Uh it feels like we as humanity got through that test and whereas maybe we're still in the middle of the of the fight for positive social media and maybe just at the beginning of the fight for positive AI outcomes. Uh h what lesson should we take from like how humanity uh dealt with video games?

I think the Chinese have restricted their children from playing video games. I let my kids play video games. Doesn't b unless they're playing like Mario Kart. Yeah. But you look at these like Call of Duty, they're killing each other. I I want positive influences. I want things that are healthy.

I want things where people are going to learn. Mhm. Blowing someone's head off, exposing it to young people. Governments, you know, you look at America, it's the land of the free. It's great.

It works well for immigrants cuz they come from places where it's [ __ ] and they come to America, they have all this freedom and their gratitude.

They're they're grateful, but then you look at people where they don't necessarily have that level of gratitude and they come to America, you give them all this freedom and they destroy themselves. So, do I want my kids going and playing Call of Duty, blowing each other's heads off?

And then you look at the Chinese and they're restricting the ability to play video games, and you say, "Well, they're censoring versus we're free. " Well, what's better for humanity? having boundaries and having rules or just letting people do whatever the hell they want, destroy their lives.

Have you ever thought about getting Have you ever thought about getting into politics? I was born in Canada. There are some positions you could still run for. Which ones? Senator. Yeah, I think you could be I don't know if you can be senator, but you could be maybe, right?

Isn't the mayor of New York not born in America? Or going what is it there? There was a saying my uh my heard you could be a city councilman, maybe. Yeah, cuz they'd kill me. Well, you could go to Canada. You could be prime minister of Canada. Too honest. I'm too honest.

I'd have to be full of [ __ ] And I have to be fair, they couldn't handle me. They couldn't handle me. Politicians, they're like diapers. They start to stink. They get They start to stink very quickly. I couldn't play the [ __ ] No. So, you you want to tell people what they want to hear. Yeah.

And I'm not playing that game of what they want to hear. But when it comes to artificial intelligence and social media in general, is it beneficial to society and humanity as a whole? I don't like him. I don't like him. That's extremely honest. Dumor confirmed. Yeah, that's fair. Well, thank you so much.

This has been really a great interview. Uh, thanks so much for calling. Yeah. Anything else? Anything else that we missed? You know, we'd love to Anything else that you're working on that you want that we didn't touch on? We'd love to talk about. You guys got anything else? I think we're good. Uh, last question.

What what's your what's your relationship like with Roar and Kitty? You guys talk much um ask him. Okay. Yeah, we'd love to have him on the show. Maybe we'll get him on the show. That'd be a lot of fun. He's uh you know, we're we're we're pretty new to the live streaming thing.

I always enjoy talking to people who uh operate in the same medium and so good conversation. Yeah, we don't want to be traders. we want. I'll have a conversation with him that if he's focused on decades and centuries, not on making buck. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I like it. Well, yeah.

Well, we're rooting for you for the next decade, for the next century, for the next millennia. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic. Yeah, great chatting, Ryan. Cheers. Yeah. Have a good one. Bye. Good fun. What a wild day on TVPN. Thank you if you're tuning in for the first time.

Uh the AWS has an outage, so there are pieces of the show that aren't working. Uh we're cobbling stuff together, but we appreciate you checking out our show. Every day we go live at 11:00 a. m. Pacific. We talk about technology and business. We interview CEOs just like Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop.

Uh we interview folks in the private markets, the public markets. Uh we've interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Armstrong, we have Brian Chesy on the show tomorrow from Airbnb. We have Palmer Lucky on the show tomorrow from Anderil. Uh and uh uh we go all over the place.

We talk to early stage companies, public companies, uh everyone in between, but we always love focusing on technology and business. Don't do a lot of politics here. There are plenty of other shows for that. Uh we don't do a lot of AI dumerism here though, but there is a place for it. There's a place for that, too.

So, we'd love for you to subscribe to the channel. Uh, you can follow us on Spotify. This show is released as a podcast as well. We have a 20inut version. We also have a newsletter, tbp. com. You can go and subscribe and get a daily update from us on what's happening in the world of technology and business news.

Uh, we have another guest coming in to the studio, a live guest. Uh, but first I need to tell you about fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and ondemand clusters.

And are we ready for our next guest? I think we have Zack off.