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JB John Borthwick On How I Invest with David Weisburd

“If you go back and look at what happened with ATMs, … a lot of experts, a lot of researchers believe that ATMs would displace bank tellers. In fact, they didn't. ATMs rolled out. They became mass available. … They did not displace bank tellers. What displaced bank tellers was actually the phone.”

How I Invest with David Weisburd · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“If you go back and look at what happened with ATMs, … a lot of experts, a lot of researchers believe that ATMs would displace bank tellers. In fact, they didn't. ATMs rolled out. They became mass available. … They did not displace bank tellers. What displaced bank tellers was actually the phone.” — John Borthwick, How I Invest with David Weisburd

David Weisburd asked what ordinary white-collar workers should do about AI. Borthwick says job displacement will come, but not in the way people expect. His advice is to use the tools deeply, beyond the packaged consumer apps.

Transcript

How I Invest with David Weisburd Around 1:02:05 into the episode
John Borthwick

…actually legible. And so, yes, I believe that, you know, a business that's being digitized is fairly simple compared to some of these sort of other areas. But I also believe that a large piece of that is not being legible. And so I think that we're now starting to make that legible accessible.

David Weisburd

…layer, on the founder layer. What about on the everyday white-collar layer? What should the average white-collar employee be thinking about in terms of how they should be making themselves anti-fragile to AI in the future and how they should make sure that they have a place in the world tomorrow?

John Borthwick

…that people talked about over the last couple of years, we haven't actually seen it manifest the way people expected. And I do believe there will be job displacement, but I also believe it's going to be different to the way people expect, right? So if you go back to like something in recent time that is like ATMs, if you go back and look at what happened with ATMs, everybody, a lot of people, a lot of experts, a lot of researchers believe that ATMs would displace bank tellers. In fact, they didn't. ATMs rolled out. They became mass available. They became broadly available. They did not displace bank tellers. What displaced bank tellers was actually the phone. And so once the mobile phone, the iPhone came along, that actually started to displace bank tellers in a meaningful way. So it wasn't ATMs. So I do think that technology is going to transform the way white collar jobs operate, but it's going to be different to how we expect.…

David Weisburd

I love that advice of become a user. Dr. Alexander Wisnar-Kross, who I talked about earlier, he says if when it comes to AI, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. So you have to be the one that's actually disrupting the one that's using the tools. And for the first time in history, it's…

John Borthwick

Yeah. So one of the sort of motions that I've had to like teach myself is in the last year, two years is that actually saying to the, you have this, we've been, we've trained ourselves and we've been trained by technology that you have these products and you go to the product to do something. So…

David Weisburd

want to take things to completion?

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