Kris Safarova  00:47

welcome to the strategy skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is strategy training.com and we have some gifts for you. You can access episode one of how to build a consulting practice at firms consulting.com forward slash build. You can also download the overall approach used in well managed strategy studies at firms consulting.com forward slash overall approach. And you can get McKinsey and BCG winning resume, which is an actual resume that led to offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at terms consulting.com forward slash resume PDF, and it is a great template to use at any level of seniority. So if you’re currently updating your resume because you’re worried about AI layoffs, which is, unfortunately the reality right now for many people, or you’re thinking about another role in another organization, or even within your current organization, updating your resume is always a good idea before you need it. And today, we have with us two very special guests back for round two, Elizabeth McBride and Seth Levine. Elizabeth is a journalist, author, consultant in finance, women’s rights and technology, and Seth is a partner at Foundry, a venture capital firm based in Boulder, Colorado, which he co founded in 2006 Seth, Elizabeth, welcome.

Elizabeth MacBride  02:09

Thank you. Thanks so much for having us again. Yeah, great.

Seth Levine  02:13

Yeah. It’s great to be back,

Kris Safarova  02:15

and you guys are on a very, very busy schedule now promoting the book. Maybe we can start briefly from the event that occurred yesterday and some key things you learned from it that could be relevant to our listeners.

Elizabeth MacBride  02:28

Oh, yeah, that’s a pleasure. So we had one of so we’ve been doing a whole, whole round of podcast interviews and other work with the media to get the word out about capital evolution, which is the name of our book. And yesterday, we were very lucky to have a launch event at the World Bank. I’m a consultant there, and the World Bank library had held a launch event, which was also broadcast in a webinar format as well. And I was saying, Seth, before we jumped on this, this podcast, that there were two really interesting things that happened. One was that after the end of the session, a young woman who had been our IT consultant came up and was sort of taking us on about this question of capitalism versus socialism, and she was saying how much she believes socialism is the right answer for the United States. So it’s really interesting to engage with her on that, and also to get into some of the definitions of socialism and capitalism. And you know, it was also very interesting that she was a young woman, and So Young is in, like, late 20s, and we were talking about the fact that so much of this drive towards socialism in the United States seemed to be, seems to be coming from young people who are disillusioned with capitalism because they’re having a hard time. And our book is really arguing that you shouldn’t throw basically, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? We’re saying capitalism is a flawed system. We need to always be working on making it better. But in fact, it’s still the best system that we know. So that’s one thing I don’t know. Seth, if you want to jump in, we’re having kind of the only

Seth Levine  04:20

thing I would add is, I jokingly asked Elizabeth whether her parents paid her rent. And she said, Yes, I guess it came up in the conversation. I was, I was at this event, but I was virtual, not not there in person. And, you know, listen, I think I mean part of why I think it’s relevant, because we were talking about this before we started recording. And Kris said, well, our audience, you know, they are, they believe in capitalism. And Elizabeth then responded, which I think is exactly right, which is partially why we wrote this book. It’s really important that they, we all understand that there are actually a lot of people out there, nearly half of people under 40 now don’t think that capitalism works, and they would rather try something else. I think that’s why. Well. Donnie, you know, was elected. There’s, I mean, ds the democratic socialists of America. It’s almost impossible for people of you know, my or our age to even imagine this, like 20 years ago. But, you know, DSA members are have been elected in, like, huge cities in the US, right, not just now in New York, but also prior to that, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, interestingly enough, a couple of those cities have kind of like swung back in the other direction, because, lo and behold, it turns out socialism doesn’t work. And it has literally, and I mean literally, like never in a single instance, actually worked. And we were sort of talking about that, and I mean, Kris lived it growing up in a different way than, sort of, we experience it by studying it and reading about it. Me. Elizabeth, me. But anyway, I just would add that in there, because I think that, I think that people, it’s easy when you’re sort of in the business community, to think like, these are silly fringe ideas, and they are those, but they’re also, you know, being considered by quite a few people. And again, this a woman, that young woman who worked at the World Bank, and by by all accounts, really believed it like I think it wasn’t that she was being insincere. I think she was being quite sincere. And unfortunately, I think, in our minds, maybe misguided. I was joking with both Kris and Elizabeth. I have three kids, sort of all in that age, age group of sort of very young adults now and and one of my I gave Kris copy the book. We had a few copies sent to us before they were released. I gave them to each of the kids. And one of my daughters said, you know, well, I don’t know that. I believe in capitalism. And I I thought, well, that’s that’s interesting coming coming from our background. And, you know, I was, I tried to remind her that, like my grandfather, didn’t graduate from high school, and here we are, you know, leading this incredibly privileged life for a whole bunch of different reasons. And And anyway, encourage her to read the book.

Elizabeth MacBride  06:58

So, yeah, I think it would be really interesting to hear your thoughts about that, Kris, but you’re in charge of the podcast, so you’ll guide us where you want us to go, but, but I also think some of it is a question of the language we use, right, I think. And in fact, as I talked to that young woman, we got deeper into it and and we found more room for agreement than disagreement, right? She was saying, but utilities really that that should be managed in a socialist way. And she was saying, we need universal health care, which is something Seth and I have long argued for as well. So it’s not these. These lines aren’t as hard edged as we, as we like to think. It’s just, I think that area of government control of the economy is is incredibly dangerous, right? And so that’s, that’s where you end up really screwing things up if you embrace that.

Seth Levine  07:54

Elizabeth, tell the second half of that story, though, that we were, you were telling me because, or telling us because it’s so interesting and powerful. Yeah.

Elizabeth MacBride  08:03

Okay, I will, and then let’s Yeah. So it so. So the other thing that happened at this World Bank event is that we started the conversation, and one of the team members at the World Bank who had just joined the bank from Nigeria, obviously, people from all over the world work at the bank. He was listening from his home, about an hour away from the bank, and when we started the conversation, he was so engaged in the ideas that he jumped in his car and raced to get there so he could meet us in person before we ended the event. And that’s you know, he was so engaged in entrepreneurship, and this idea of, we need to build things really rapidly in his country, and we need to do that based on capitalist principles. And he had all these practical ideas for for how you build a system based on free markets in a very income and resource constrained environment. So it was just, it was like this classic example, right? Of people who have lived in places where the system is really not working, versus people who live here in the United States where it’s beginning to, you know, we’re questioning whether it works, but there’s so much about it, that’s great, and this dichotomy was striking.

Kris Safarova  09:24

And it is also sad to see how so many people don’t realize the power of American dream and how beliefs that they may have maybe killing it in a way.

Elizabeth MacBride  09:36

Yeah, yeah. So do you think that people who are embracing socialism are are beginning to kill it.

Kris Safarova  09:46

Well, I don’t want to accuse anyone of anything as humans. We always do what we believe is in our best interest. Even a parent who sacrifices everything for their child is doing because they believe it is in their best interest to help. A child. But I think that from my perspective of living in many, many countries, well, not many, but quite a few, and working and studying and seeing different types of systems, I can say that having an opportunity to build your own life that really, yes, it’s difficult and there is discrimination and it’s hard, and you have to really, basically almost kill yourself working, but at least you have a shot. At least you have a chance. And if you’re very persistent and diligent, most likely you will be at least relatively successful in breaking out of whatever orbit you are in when you, for example, arrive to United States or another country similar to United States. And I think that this is such a gift for people to live a system like that.

Elizabeth MacBride  10:50

Yeah. And I think our book is really about, how do we maintain and restore that system here where it’s beginning to to falter, or where it has been faltering? So, yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. I mean, my my great grandfather was an Irish coal miner, right? Yeah, so we’ve all lived parts of this story,

Seth Levine  11:12

and it’s and I think it’s important to recognize that, you know, as much as we push back against this young woman and others who you know, maybe have a different world view, different economic view. One what you said, I think, is absolutely right, Elizabeth, there’s probably quite a few commonalities, right? I mean, we saw this most recently with Mamdani going to visit Trump in the Oval Office. And I think everyone expected there to be, you know, fireworks and and, you know, whatever, fisticuffs. And it turns out they agreed on at least the sort of, sort of the things that led to this moment, right? So there’s actually quite a bit of commonality there, not surprising. I mean, the double digit percentage of people that voted for Mamdani voted for Trump, they obviously have very different prescriptions for what to do about it, but this idea that people are struggling is something that they at least could share. And I think that you know when, when we talk about this young woman that you met at the World Bank being sincere, I think people are sincerely concerned about sort of the the ability to achieve the American dream, and the ability to do what we just described right, which is in a couple of generations to go from not graduating from high school to, you know, to being at the sort of Top of the finance world, or, you know, the top of the business and journalism world, like, I think that that is truly under threat. And part of what we talk about in the book is not abandoning capitalism to, you know, to address it, but but to recognize that the type of capitalism that we’ve been operating for the last, in particular, 50 Years hasn’t really been serving us as a economy, and that really includes everyone in the economy, right? I mean, I think that obviously there’s some people that have done quite well, but the argument that we make is that actually, really everyone would do better if everyone did better, right? And, you know, some of that’s just a stability argument, right? And we’re at a moment in time which is not, doesn’t feel particularly stable, and stability and rule of law is pretty important for people that, you know, want to innovate and start companies and, you know, increase their station in life. And, you know, and some of it’s just a practical reality of having extracted from the middle class, from labor, if you will, for so long that there’s not a whole lot more to extract. And so we need to figure out a way to lift them up. Now our argument is, how do we make more capitalists? We want more people. Want this young woman to have a stake in the market system. And you can sort of understand, if people don’t have that a stake in that system? Would they want to try something else and a radical thing to try sounds like socialism, even if history says it never works.

Kris Safarova  13:49

As you were promoting the book and speaking about the book, what surprised you about how it has been received so far?

Elizabeth MacBride  13:57

So I think the biggest surprise for me has been that there’s this. So we’ve been talking to people all over but a lot of people in the media, and today, we just had a podcast interview with a lady who runs an interview podcast for NGOs, for nonprofits and things like and organizations, and it is the sense it with which they view the business leaders as the enemy. That’s what I would say surprised me right when, when Seth and I come forward and say, Okay, actually, our research uncovered a lot of instances of business leaders acting in community oriented ways, you know, generally, maybe too much, and we can have an argument about where the right accountabilities are in the system, but there are a lot of business leaders who are taking actions that will change the world in ways that probably most people believe in right. They are changing their investments, for instance, in the case of Larry Fink, to invest more in alternative kinds of energy and away from fossil fuels, for an instance. But, but what you hear as we’ve been out talking about the book, is this disbelief that businesses could ever do something good, and that is just a strange I feel like it’s a strange kind of construct that’s taken hold in our very divisive media and political environment.

Kris Safarova  15:30

And even if you take a business owner who is not actively involved with community, but is generally just a good person, and he has people he hired and provided jobs for years and years and years. This is also a contribution. It is much bigger contribution versus if he was just at home watching TV right every day because he had money from his family, right?

Elizabeth MacBride  15:55

It’s not, yeah, it’s not an easy thing to build a business and and employ people, right? It’s incredibly hard thing. And in fact, I remember when I was just a young journalist, we had this it was, like deeply ingrained in us as a local business journalist, that jobs were really key, right? In every story you would report, a new business is opening up, and these were the number of jobs, and that that kind of like conversation has entirely gone away, not entirely probably, I’m sure, there are instances of it, but, but to a large measure, gone away in our conversation.

Seth Levine  16:30

I also think we’ve, we’ve entered this world where, like we don’t, we don’t allow for sort of gray area, right? You’re either on the right side of some issue or the wrong side, and it’s a teeter totter, and there’s, there’s no sort of middle area, right? So you’re either, like, actively working for whatever thing we’re talking about, or you’re by debt, you’re definitionally against it. And I think that that’s wrong, and in the example you just described is a good one, which is, like, you know, there are plenty of people that are living decent lives, let’s say just, let’s say raising their children to have, you know, good moral compasses and to be good good people, right? And I think there’s lots of room to argue about exactly what that is. And I think it’s actually a good thing that there’s not one, you know, here’s the checklist for being a good person. But there’s lots of commonalities, right? I think most people could agree on quite a bit of that, and that’s or operating a business and employing people like, hey, that’s what I’ve got capacity to do, right? I think that’s really important. And I think we sometimes forget, like not everyone, either should be, wants to be, can be whatever, out in the streets marching for this thing, or, you know, like radically changing the system, or whatever, like, most people just want to live decent lives decently. And I think we, we’ve kind of forgotten that. And there, there is this sort of polarization black and white thinking and and, you know, I think that that’s a I think that’s unfortunate. I think it’s a mistake. I actually think it’s a little bit of a byproduct of neoliberalism. I think it actually, it exists on both the right and the left, for sure. But I think neoliberalism, in some respects, sort of taught us to like, think and speak in this black and white manner, and it’s invaded our politics. It’s invaded everything.

Kris Safarova  18:13

And as you were having these discussions, how much the topic of AI came up?

Elizabeth MacBride  18:17

Of AI? A lot, a lot. Yeah. People are very worried about it, I think rightly worried about it, because they see a big labor market disruption. And of course, we just saw stats today right about the number of layoffs being higher this year than than any year since the beginning of the pandemic. And we also know that how hard it is for young people, new college graduates, to find jobs. So this is very much a reality, and people are very worried about it. We don’t have prescriptions for it in the book, because, well, the AI world is changing so fast, but the prescription we do have for it is the same that we suggest for this moment of turmoil, which is to work with people, to form coalitions, to recognize that the economy is undergoing a radical transformation, and then the one and we also so I Think what we didn’t write about specifically to say this is the answer to AI, but it is a whole chapter in our book, is the idea that if productivity is going to rise so much that it replaces the need for labor, which is essentially what could happen with AI, then what we really Need is the system to distribute the earnings of companies in a way that’s not taxes, because we all kind of recognize that’s a drag on the economy. And what we’ve suggested is the ownership economy. Different forms of the ownership economy may be a way to cushion the blow, cushion some of the disruption of AI well.

Seth Levine  20:00

Me add a couple things there. And this is AI is an area where, actually, Elizabeth and I have a kind of a nice debate between each other. And, you know, I describe myself as a techno optimist. I mean, I’m a technologist, I’m a technology venture capitalist, like I recognize I have, I have skewed you and rose colored glasses when it comes to this sort of stuff. And despite that, I recognize that AI is already being disruptive and will continue to be disruptive. But I would say a couple things. I think it is a mistake to attribute all of the job losses that we see today in the economy to AI. I think we’re in the middle of a, let’s call it a recession. We’re probably there or close to there, that’s being driven by a bunch of different things, right? Including higher prices and caused by terrorists, for example, and and some other things. I also think AI has become a little bit of a convenient backstory for companies who want to get rid of some some people, and so they say, Well, we’re gonna we’re gaining efficiency, right? But I think most actually, if you really read most of the announcements of at least the larger companies around AI, they’re more forward looking saying, Hey, we don’t expect to hire as many people because we think we’re going to be able to get more productivity out of out of more people. That’s more that than it is necessarily firing people now. But that said, established companies in the United States are net job losers. They always have the net job losers. And I think we need to remember that the way you combat job losses in the US is through I’m gonna say startups. I don’t mean technology startups. I mean new businesses writ large. They have always been somewhere between 100% and 100 and call it 10% of job creation the United States businesses in their first and second year of operation. So the solution here is to lean into, I’ll say, the innovation economy, but I really do mean like all all forms of small businesses, because I think that’s that’s how we continue to create robust jobs. And then the last thing I’d say is, I think we should differentiate between sort of short term disruption, which I think is real and significant and not dissimilar to what we saw, let’s say, in the 90s, when we started outsourcing manufacturing and a lot of plants closed, and we did a horrible job of figuring out how to retrain former factory workers. So, like we maybe, let’s learn from that. But I would differentiate that from what effect does aI have and increased productivity have, sort of across the landscape of our economy. I mean, if you go back 100 years or so, 35% or so of the of the entire workforce made their living on a farm, right? And now it’s like 2% it’s really small. And so we, we automated farm later labor out of existence, which is true, 100% true. And employment is significantly, you know, larger and stronger than it was back then. So it’s not I want to. I’m trying to say these things to sort of, I don’t know, backstop my somewhat optimistic view overall. But I’m also, I’m trying not to sound dismissive about it, because if your if your job went out of existence because of AI or your company said, Hey, we’re gonna release 10% of our workforce because we feel like we’re being more more profitable. Now, part of what they’re saying is we don’t think we have growth opportunity right now in our economy, and so the real fix for this is actually to grow the overall economy more. But that aside, but I’m not trying to dismiss that as, like, that’s a real thing. But I also want to be able to take a step back and say, Hey, from a systems level perspective, like, Are there examples of this sorts of, sort of disruption happening and us, you know, sort of growing as an overall economy, absolutely. And have we done things really poorly in in some situations, including in the, you know, sort of urban migration that happened in the, you know, early 1900s as we left the agrarian economy like absolutely so we should learn from that, from the manufacturing outsourcing that I reference as well. Could you

Kris Safarova  24:14

elaborate on your advice for our listeners, in terms of them as individuals, being ready for being laid off and how to still be able to be in a position to provide for your family?

Elizabeth MacBride  24:28

Oh, boy, that’s a tough that’s a good and interesting and hard question. I actually had included it in the list of questions for our World Bank event yesterday, because I think more and more people are going to be called upon to be entrepreneurial with whatever expertise they have. And that’s it’s actually a different kind of entrepreneurship than coming up with a startup idea or being an app builder or a tech. Founder or a young person coming out of school, that’s one style of entrepreneurship. There’s another style that comes from your skills, right, where you’re a hairdresser, or you’re, you know, an HVAC, which are things that you know are coming back into into vogue right now for young people, but I think for people our age, who are who have built up an expertise in the information economy and in this sort of like the global cities model that we’ve been living in for the past couple of decades. It’s pretty hard, but So the advice I would offer, and I’ve and I’ve done it like I’m a single mom. I’ve been self employed since, I don’t know, in 20 years, or something like that. And I have made it work on my expertise and my skill and talent as a writer.

Elizabeth MacBride  25:55

First of all, you have to be really, really scrappy. My friend Elaine po felt has a book that’s called Straight Street fighting. I think you have to be a Street Fighter as an entrepreneur if you’re going to be this kind of like solo entrepreneur in the expert space, trying to make your way. I think some of the areas that are still where it’s still possible to make a living in this much less writing, because that has been overtaken by AI way, less editing, which is one space where information professionals used to be able to be solopreneurs, but now the places are events and teaching and coaching, So they’re definitely like the face to face. Be there with your client, build relationships. I actually know a lot of people here in Washington, DC who were laid off, a lot of people who were in the information economy, but working for the government, who are now becoming elementary, middle and high school teachers. And so those are areas that those kind of face to face interactions, where I think people whose skills are being replaced by AI that that’s the direction to go.

Seth Levine  27:11

And I’ve watched Elizabeth be incredibly scrappy, resilient, right, open minded, right? I mean, I think it takes a certain amount of, like, being willing to just sort of step back, right? I think what hasn’t worked is, and I think this is a little bit of what we did wrong again, in sort of past instances, where you just, sort of people have the skill set they have, and you just, you keep going after the same thing. And I think you need to be willing to be a bit more adaptable, right? And so that might mean experimenting on a couple of things. Again, it’s easy to, sort of, like, project this onto Elizabeth, because I we’ve been such close friends for over a decade now, and I’ve watched her go through this like, how do I, how do I adapt to a changing landscape? The last thing I’d say is, I mean, I think everyone should lean into AI, right? I think it’s a mistake to sort of treat it as the enemy. And it may be to some extent, if you’ve, if you’ve been, you know, let go. And you believe the reason is because, you know, your job has been sort of automated away by AI, but, but I actually think that so I can understand that, you know, the sort of reticence to embrace it, but I think that that’s a mistake, right? AI is, is we’ve just scratched the surface, frankly, on what we do with AI. And I think most people, frankly, don’t use AI as much as they say they use AI, right? It’s, you know, it’s the same as whatever dieting or running or something like that, like, we never quite we’re not, we say we’re doing more than we are. But I think that it’s over time will become more and more important. And I think the thing to do is become expert in it. No different, by the way, than the advice that, you know, when my 21 year old kids are saying, hey, you know, Dad, what do you think we should be doing? You know, around AI and they have different majors. One’s a studio arts major, one’s a environmental sciences major. So like, you know, they’re out ones out in the field, doing stuff. One is doing, you know, doing things very viscerally with her, with her hands and but I still say, like, I think you guys need to be experts at AI in what, in whatever way it relates to the work that you’re doing. And I think that that’s important advice for everyone. And I one of the things I wish I had more time for was more time to just explore, sort of how to use AI. In my job, I use it a lot, but I’d love to, I’m always asking people what they’re using, what tools are using, how they’re using it more effectively. So not to write for us, right? None of this book was written in any way by AI. We might have had a sentence or two where we asked AI to help us with a sentence we couldn’t quite get right, but none of the book was written by AI. So yeah, we’ve had this sort of joke about it, but that, but, but using AI for whatever it is, in our case, maybe some research things like that. I mean, there are there? Are great use cases across a lot of jobs, and become expert so you can bring to your next opportunity, not just yourself, but here’s here’s me, and here’s like my army of agents that help me do the things that I do, whatever that job is, and

Kris Safarova  30:13

just to build on it quickly, if someone is not sure where to even start, what would you recommend they do in terms of starting to educate themselves.

Seth Levine  30:21

I would start with AI. I would go to, I mean, we’re so I should clarify. We are speaking in early December 2025, at this moment in time, Gemini is probably the best model. They kind of leapfrog each other. So I go to Gemini right now, and I would, I actually would start posing these questions to Gemini, right? It’s, it is. Maybe it’s a little recursive to say that, but it actually is. It’s a really good way to start learning AI is go to an AI, you know, tool, and say, Hey, I need to start learning AI. This is what I do. What start talking me through it and be willing to, you know, I think what, what people do is they treat AI like a search engine, and it’s not a search engine, right? So what you what the best uses of AI, and this is very different than search is that you need to give it a bunch of context, right? So you need to teach it about yourself a little bit, maybe upload some projects, spend some time. It’s called prompt engineering, but prompting AI with you know what what you are and what you do and what your background is, and here’s my LinkedIn profile, and here’s this, and here’s that, and then start asking it questions, and it’ll and over time, it gets to know you more and more. It’s a little scary that way, actually, and but that’s the way to get into it, right? Don’t just jump in and treat it like you would Google like if you’re going to just google search something, go Google search something if you want to use Gemini. Give it some some context.

Elizabeth MacBride  31:49

I was going to add two thoughts to that. So I was hanging out with some friends a couple of weeks ago, and we played this, this game where we all asked, it was just chat GPT, but we asked, What’s the scariest thing in the world to chat GPT? And it had a different answer for each one of us, because it already knew each of our deepest fears. And it was very interesting to see the differences in the responses. So creepy that way. Have you done that? Seth, have you done that?

Seth Levine  32:21

Kris, well, yeah, I was gonna tell this story. I was I had to get online on a app that hadn’t been on in a while, and it asked me a question, what’s my favorite song? And I guess something, and it wasn’t the right song, I guess, that I must have put in, you know, five years ago when I and so I went to chat GPT as well, because it I more use Gemini more at the moment, but, but chat GPT probably knows more about me. And I asked it, and it was and it said, I don’t know what your favorite song is, but here’s some guesses based on what I know, which was very funny, right? It was really amusing. And then at the very bottom, it said, if you tell me what it is, I’ll remember it. And so I it kind of popped into my head after these prompts of other songs, I realized which one it might have been, and so it turned out to be that one. So I immediately went over. It’s like, Hey, this is my favorite song. Because the next time that comes up, I’m going to probably forget it in a year, and then I’ll go back to chat GPT, and it’ll be like, hey, you know, here’s your favorite song.

Kris Safarova  33:15

So you have to tell us. What is it

Seth Levine  33:17

exactly I’m almost well, maybe it shouldn’t be embarrassed, Dead or Alive by Bon Jovi. I actually my first guest was paradise city by Guns and Roses, which probably is my favorite song. But in that moment, five years ago now, you have to tell me what yours are.

Elizabeth MacBride  33:33

So I have to say you are a you were a boy child in the 80s. That’s what I have

Seth Levine  33:39

to say. Clearly, I grew up as a boy in the 80s.

Kris Safarova  33:46

I want to wrap up with a few minutes we have left talking about what you learned from CEOs you spoke to. And I actually was going to focus a lot on it today, but we had so many other important things to discuss. So the first thing I wanted to ask is, across all your interviews, what did the best Well, all of them were incredible leaders, but what did they consistently see that you think others miss?

Elizabeth MacBride  34:14

Yeah, that’s a really good question. Well, they can the CEOs we interviewed now we did skew, probably, to the CEOs that have stepped forward as leaders in is societal leaders, right? They’re not, they’re not shying away from that role. So that’s it’s a skewed sample, but I think that what they’re embracing, that other people may be missing, is that businesses do have more responsibility in this moment, and that if you’re going to run a successful business, you’ve got to figure out how to navigate this incredibly difficult political environment, and you you have to be prepared for when it can hit you right when some of those waves. Of geopolitical turmoil can hit you, and not not shying away from that and being aware of the wider context. I’d say that’s what they’re doing, yeah.

Seth Levine  35:11

And I would say, I mean, the other comment out, and again, we, I mean, we were so lucky to interview people like Jamie Dimon and Dan Schulman, who’s now the CEO of Verizon, and Lisa green Hall, who basically invented impact investing, and a whole bunch of other really interesting people. So they’ve all kind of been successful, and maybe that’s why this is such an interesting question. But they were very, sort of circumspect about their roles and their jobs, right? I was even Jamie, who’s pretty successful. Lack of a better way of saying it. There wasn’t a lot of ego there, right? I mean, it was a lot of a very sort of thoughtful, circumspect I really rely on, you know, others and and and my team. And there was a lot of that that felt, that did not feel like lip service. And I in my day job as a venture capital. I mean, I’ve met, I’ve met 10s of 1000s of CEOs. I’ve worked directly, you know, on whatever. I’ve been on 100 boards, let’s say, and I’ve worked directly with with several 100 CEOs, very, very closely. And not all of them are like that, by the way, but, but the successful ones tend to be much more circum, circum. And some of the cues that I would give as examples are, you know, people who use we versus i right plural pronouns versus singular pronouns as a really good tip off, people who tell stories about others as opposed about themselves and or and or where their stories are more about other people being the heroes, rather than themselves being the hero. Those are some commonalities that I’ve noticed, both in terms of the people that we interviewed, as well as just sort of successful other successful CEOs. And I think a lot of it also boils down to sort of being able to successfully put yourself in other people’s shoes like I think that it is a mistake, by the way. I think this is true of investors, right? I mean, it’s someone once told me, really early on, I’ve been in venture for a bit of venture capitalists for 25 years, and early on in my career, someone said to me, basically, paraphrasing, but like, never forget, you’re not the market, right? Like you are you. You do not You’re not representative of anything and and I think that so I’m giving this the same advice to VCs as I as I am sort of describing it as success, as coming from successful CEOs like you need to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes, as opposed to think that everyone thinks like you do, or should think like you do. And those are some common traits that I think we see, we saw in our interviews, but also that I just see across the, you know, hundreds and 1000s of CEOs that I work with.

Kris Safarova  37:47

Did they mention anything about what they think about AI? In my world,

Seth Levine  37:51

everyone has to be talking about how anything AI is right? I mean, it’s a little bit of the emperor’s new clothes like, you know, I think there is a wide spectrum around how people are really utilizing AI in their businesses? Most companies now are using AI for CO piloting of some kind, let’s say, right. So that’s definitely happening. And a lot of AI usage is sort of like, how do we make people slightly more efficient or more effective at their jobs? That’s like 95% of the use cases, right? Or and, or people aren’t using it much at all. And I’m trying to describe it in a way, because I feel like everyone feels like they’re behind in AI, because everyone’s talking about how amazing AI is. But I don’t know that that most people are really, really, really using it the way that people think that most people are using it. So you’re probably, if you’re listening to this and you’ve done anything with AI, you’re probably right in the middle of the pack, at least in terms of your so you’re not behind. And then, you know, we do have some edge case companies where people are really leaning into it, in you new and unique ways, where they’re really have a group of agents, right? They’re using agentic AI, and they and they’re running sort of in the background, so they set them off on a task, and then they go do something else. And so they look more like actual workers than they do, sort of like a tool set that is, is enabling workers. And so I just, I want to differentiate those two things. So, but, yeah, everyone, and everyone is talking about AI, it’s just, and that may be a little bit of the product of my world. I mean, my wife is a developer and also owns a bookstore in one of the one of the buildings that she redeveloped. I you know there, I’m sure she uses AI, and we haven’t had a long, deep conversation about it, but like, you know, she’s selling books, right? I mean, it’s, you know, she’s, she’s, I don’t want to extrapolate too much from the tech world. It’s not that I don’t think main street businesses should be using AI. It’s just that, you know, their, their main business is people walk into the bookstore and sell, you know, and they sell books, or in the broader sense, you know, she redevelops buildings, and she’s working with contractors, like, yeah, AI is helping on the margin, but it’s not like a big part of their business.

Elizabeth MacBride  39:56

I can, I could just add that in this first. Ring I wrote, I think about 10 profiles of the disruptors, the of the disruptor list that CNBC puts out every year, and that, for me, was a reset to be more positive about AI. It wasn’t generative AI, though those companies are using AI genuinely like, for breakthroughs in medicine, for breakthroughs in like, field harvesting, like, there’s, there’s this, right? Really cool combine that rolls over a field and can identify weeds and kill them with a laser, right? So things like that are really, if you think about it, or like, where we should be directing more of our conversation to that deep, innovative economy. And again, Seth and I are both worried about that in the construct of the larger construct of capitalism, right because some of our capital flows to those truly the big innovation companies is getting broken right now because of some of the geopolitical and the political issues in the United States.

Kris Safarova  41:03

And if you look at the people you interviewed, just as humans, did you notice anything different about their mindset and the way they view the world?

Seth Levine  41:12

Everyone we talked to was an optimist, which I think is interesting. Now, again, they’ve all been successful in one way or the other, not everyone. And by the way, we interviewed people who were workers. We interviewed people that run, started and run businesses that no one on this podcast have ever heard of. Like, you know, we wanted to get a lot of different stories. Not all of them ended up showing it showing up in the book. We interviewed probably 100 people. I don’t know how many show up in the book, but probably half that or fewer. So a lot of these conversations just informed our thinking. But really, across the board, people were really optimistic. And I that’s kind of my general view on humanity. I mean, I think that, I think that people are tend to be more more optimistic, right? And tend to lean towards positive thinking. And I think that that was definitely, from my perspective, reflected in the interviews that we, that we conducted.

Elizabeth MacBride  42:02

You know, I have noticed we interviewed more men than women, among the women we interviewed and among the women who are pretty high powered in the circle where I inhabit, like Dina, who was moderating our discussion yesterday. I have another friend, Sheila, that I talked to regularly, Lisa, who is in the book, very interesting. I think women leaders at the moment, of course, have less of a roadmap for how to be in the world, and so they really lean into ideas that are slightly on the alternative side, like the number of conversations I’ve had about manifesting, alternative, healing, spirituality, right? These are not conversations I tend to have with male CEOs, and I talk to a lot of them too. But in the Women’s Business Leadership community, there’s a strong kind of emerging idea that that is a way to succeed tap more deeply into that

Seth Levine  43:11

element of life, into your own humanity, is what you’re saying, into your own

Elizabeth MacBride  43:16

humanity and into your connections with common humanity, The idea that we’re all kind of swimming in the big sea, right? And I do think women. I mean, there are a lot of people who have argued this, right, that when in there’s evidence for it, when communities, nations, large bodies of people are are coming into trouble or in a disrupted state, women have a better women are more connected to that right, and more focused on how you restore the balance, how you bring things back into balance. So I hear a lot of that from women business leaders.

Kris Safarova  43:55

Thank you so much for sharing this. Yesterday I got YouTube had the summary of things I watched over the year, and they said, you’re a person who will find calm in every situation and will share it with people. That is so

Elizabeth MacBride  44:11

yeah, that is so Kris, you sound. You are a person who brings calm. I can tell from our two interviews, I really feel yeah

Seth Levine  44:20

and shares because of the work that you do. Yeah, YouTube knows you well.

Kris Safarova  44:28

Thank you so much guys for being here. I really appreciate it still using guys, even though it’s no longer appropriate to say but we are all from the time when it was completely normal. I feel very good when people say so. No disrespect here. So where can our listeners learn more about you? By your book? Anything you want to share, we

Elizabeth MacBride  44:47

have a website, which is www, the capital evolution.com, and both Seth and I have our own individual websites as well. But the most important thing you can do right now is. Buy the book and connect with us by reading the book and by sharing what you think of it on Amazon or in social media.

Seth Levine  45:08

Yeah, the book’s available everywhere at this point. So you can buy it from your local bookstore, you can buy from Amazon. You can buy it from Books a Million Barnes and Noble wherever you get your books, we’d love it if you’d leave a review and and reach out to us, let us know what you think. We wrote it. We wrote it and tried to put a bunch of ideas into the public sphere, in part to maybe change a few minds, but but also to get a bunch of feedback. And so we really, you know, it’s a big undertaking to do a project like this, and we’d love to hear from from listeners who turn into readers who, you know, have thoughts about about what we write.

Kris Safarova  45:44

Thank you again. So much for being here. I really enjoyed our discussion today, and it’s just a bottomless well of things we could discuss that would just pull in a lot of podcast episodes. So for everyone listening, the name of the book is capital evolution, and our guests today have been opinion reminder. Elizabeth van pride, who is a journalist, author and consultant in finance, women’s rights and technology, and Seth Levine, who is a partner at Foundry, a venture capital firm based in Boulder, Colorado, which she co founded in 2006 and our podcast sponsor today is strategy training.com and you can get some gifts from us. You can access episode one of how to build a consulting practice. And it’s actually a very, very powerful program. And we wanted to share episode one with everyone, because it can really help you start a business if you want to start one, or to manage a consulting practice if you’re managing one, which is common for our listeners, we have many people who are partners at consulting firms, major consulting firms, and you can get it at terms consulting.com forward slash build. You can also get the overall approach used in well managed strategy studies at terms consulting.com forward slash overall approach. And you can get McKinsey and BCG union resume, which is a resume that led to offers from both of those firms, at firms consulting.com forward slash resume PDF. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.