Adaptability

I was a Coast Guard officer from 1996-2001, specializing in intelligence and law enforcement.

I was a trader at Lehman Brothers from 2001-2008, specializing in index arbitrage and ETFs, though I did a fair bit of macro prop trading, too.

I have been a writer since 2008, publishing six books. I even got an MFA in writing.

I have done some other stuff, too, like teaching, public speaking, and DJing. I have done a lot of different things.

I can’t tell you how many people were absolutely fungooed when Lehman went bankrupt. They were traders, or sales traders, and were incapable of doing anything else.

Here is the thing. Adaptability is the number one key to success. Not intelligence. Not work ethic. I used to think it was work ethic, but it is not. The ability to do different things will determine whether you succeed or fail.

Now, I am talented in a bunch of different ways, and not everyone has been endowed with those gifts. But if you are trading cash equities and someone asks you to trade cash municipal bonds, you should be able to make that transition, right? And it would be a good thing—you would learn something new and be more marketable in your career. But a lot of people don’t want to make that transition. They define themselves as a cash equities trader, and they want to spend 40 years trading cash equities. As someone who has seen the evolution of the cash equities business since the late 1990s, the number of people who were doing that in 1998 who are still doing it today are practically zero, owing to changes in technology. And the reality is that we all face obsolescence someday. People are breathlessly jacking off over AI and all the white collar workers it is going to put out of work—which is probably true. There are a lot of keyboard warriors out there who are going to have to adapt and find something else to do. It will be a painful process, and the race will be on to find a job that is immune from obsolescence. Well, there are jobs like that for sure, like plumbing, but not everyone is cut out to be a plumber. People will still need haircuts. People will still need someone to tend to their teeth. I think about this sometimes, too. Can AI write newsletters or trade? Ken Griffin says no.

I mean, there used to be a point in history where you could work in a factory out in Western Ohio, at the dildo factory, and make dildos for 40 years and retire at age 62 and get your crappy Social Security check and watch Fox News for the rest of your life. Some people still do it, and that’s what the unions want, but that kind of safety and security doesn’t exist anymore. They will build robots to make dildos. We will have self-driving trucks. We will put the fucking longshoremen out of business someday, too. It always surprises me how few people have transferable skills, and how even fewer people try to cultivate those transferable skills. They want to put Part A into Slot B forever. Don’t understand it, don’t want to understand it. I’ve quite liked my career of bouncing around, doing different stuff. The reality is that I can do practically anything, subject to certain limitations. I’ll never play basketball, obviously. My hands shake, so I can’t wait tables, do nails, or be a surgeon. And realistically, even if I wanted to be a surgeon, it is a little too late for me to go back and get the requisite education, at age 51. But yeah, I can do a lot of different things. Could I work at Meta? Probably. Could I work at a gold miner? Probably. Could I work for Target, Philip Morris, Wal-Mart, or anywhere else? Probably. All you have to do is try. Be open-minded. Be willing to try anything. I know some geriatric Wall Street dudes who eventually got bounced out of the sell-side and then were…completely stuck. I never want to be in that position, and there is a good chance I never will be.

I think the AI doomers and the UBI peckerheads have a very pessimistic view of what people are capable of. You lose your job to a robot, so you should sit at home and collect a check for the rest of your life. Jesus. I think this follows a general trend of low expectations that has been progressing for a few decades now, probably since the early 1990s. Clinton eviscerated welfare benefits. Did we stack up the bodies of starving people like cordwood? Of course not—people scrambled and found work, which is what most rational people do when their next meal depends on it. Here is another thing that nobody does anymore. Can’t find any work in town? Then go somewhere else! Geographic mobility has actually been going down, way down in recent years. Now, some of this is because of technology—you can Zoom from anywhere, but some of it is because people are less adventurous than they used to be. Move across the country for a job? Pack up the kids and the dogs in the family truckster? Nobody does it anymore. They’ll stay in the old house with the 25-year-old microwave and the shag carpets and live at the subsistence level for the rest of their lives. Come to think of it, maybe we should have low expectations. But like I said, people will scramble if their next meal depends on it. You could always work for the government.

This will take on a whole new meaning if we ever have a recession. You don’t have to be adaptable in an expansion. You do in a recession, when everyone gets riffed and you find yourself in competition with 500 other people for a job. Wall Street people understand this intuitively, and it seems that a big bank goes tits up every decade or so, most recently Credit Suisse. Then it turns into a game of musical chairs. The fact is that none of us are indispensable. I saw people laid off at Lehman who shouldn’t have been laid off. But when firms get into expense-cutting mode, productivity matters only to an extent, and good people are thrown out, too. We are all replaceable. This doesn’t pertain to adaptability, but if you work at a big firm, you should be in a big hurry to make yourself irreplaceable. In cases like this, knowledge is power. They have a tough time firing the person who knows how everything works and knows where all the bodies were buried. When I left Lehman, the partner I left behind was working like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. It was a big hole that didn’t get filled for a while. Anyway, as you have probably seen in the news, the layoffs are starting. People are attributing it to AI, but it is probably more than that. I have written before in my financial newsletter that tech firms have massively overhired in recent years, and that when the recession comes, tech firms were going to account for a lot of the layoffs. That seems to be panning out.

So you have to be prepared to do anything. None of us are above putting on a bow tie and tending bar for a little while. If I were reduced to that unhappy state, I would put on that bow tie with a smile and try to be the best I could be in that job. There are unglamorous jobs, but there are no undignified jobs. There is dignity in all work. Putting in an honest day’s work is commendable no matter what you are doing—even shoveling shit. By the way, the garbage man makes pretty good money these days. When I was a kid, we used to make fun of the garbage man. You want to end up like that? These guys are making $80,000 a year. Honestly, I think if there is such a thing as an undignified job, it is an influencer. Good money, I suppose, but you have to sell your soul (and sometimes your ass)—very few people are being truly authentic in that line of work. It’s one of the reasons I’m paying less attention to my social media activities this year—one day I hope to completely pull back and become a private person again. I want to be like Sade, still putting out bestselling albums, absolutely no social media presence. I doubt Barry Hannah would have a Twitter account—he didn’t even have a computer when he was alive. Wrote all his books with pen and paper. There is something about that which appeals to me.

I just want you to entertain the possibility that the thing you do to make money might not exist in three, five, or ten years. Quick story—as you know, I recently built a house, and the other day I asked Perplexity what the value of my house was, as it’s not on Zillow (because it’s a new house). It came back with an optimistic appraisal, but a decent appraisal. Good night, real estate appraisers. AI is coming for your job. It will take a while—these things always do, and we probably won’t see the full effect of this for about ten years. I’m not a futurist. I have no idea where this is heading. But it is the people who are adaptable who will suffer the least.