Former OpenAI Lead Zack Kass: How AI Will Change Society Forever

I'm super excited to talk to Zach Cass today he's a former leader at open Ai and he's an AI futurist in his own right so I'm really excited to get the inside scoop on what's Happening next in AI as well as with all future Tech what we call digital disruption he calls the next Renaissance and he's got some big ideas for how the rest of the

century is going to evolve for organizations for workers and how technological change is actually going to impact things Way Beyond technology should be a great conversation Zack I wanted to talk a little bit about just your sort of you know approach toward AI your like you know kind of view of the world from here you know you you kind of branded at the

next Renaissance in this kind of explosion of of technology and capabilities um why do you call it that what what does that mean to you and what are the implications we so I studied history at Berkeley um and what we sort of forget about is that um the known universe

what we you know what we know of the universe today hasn't always been a known universe and uh it actually takes a lot of discovering of Technologies things like the telescope things like submarines to expand our understanding of a known universe and this is what the this is what the first Renaissance actually was about right it wasn't just High flutin thinking

it was political thought it was advancements in military industrial complexes it was advancements in sciences and it was it sort of came at the same time as we massively expanded it was the first major expansion of human potential what one person could do in the first uh in you know

the chapter prior to the first Renaissance paled in comparison to what one person could do after and some of this was you know the way governments were informed some of this was the way that you know we started embracing far more technology um cities started to sort of expand people started to

gather and sort of like exchange thought more and the the easiest way that I found to to explain to people what I thought would happen was by sort of comparing it to this initial event now obviously things are going to happen more logarithmically um but it's not sufficient to say that humans will expand our potential because something else is clearly going to happen which is like what you

and I know about the universe today is going to feel sort of silly compared to what we're going to know about the universe in you know 10 20 years um and and and sort of forever more so I mean at the risk of asking you to predict the future like how how is this all unfolding how like what aside from

like the you know the twetter AI answer like how how is the way we understand the universe changing now and how is it positioned to change you know in the next 20 years or whatever time Horizon yeah so the easiest way to to think about the ways in which the universe is changing let's talk

about known and unknown Universe first let's just Define these things it's helpful a known universe is basically everything that exists around us that we can sort of consider a discrete or a finite problem so if a calculation can solve this thing we can consider it a finite problem and it exists in our known universe if there is no calculation for it either because we don't even know that it

is a thing or because the variables are just too infinite right like for example a finite problem in this case is how do we get to Mars an infinite problem or an indefinite problem is how do we get to the Andromeda galaxy or how do we get to a Galaxy beyond that it's just not even something that we could really make sense of today because we just don't lack the tools to fully understand

and we don't even know where we would go in the Andromeda galaxy to begin with um or or what we might face as we go out there oh obviously bio and Life Sciences molecular Sciences particle Sciences you know have this probably the largest scope of known universe finite problems that we can sort of

point at and they are starting to make incredible grounds because in a world where we unlock human potential we can start supercharging the experts that we have and so you know if there are 10,000 oncological researchers in the world because the aperture for oncological research is just very small for reasons that you know listeners can can make sense of the one answer is we could just make

more of these people but that's really hard we don't have the infrastructure to do that the other answer is we supercharge these people and so what we're going to see is in in sort of the very short order the answer to the question what if there were like 10 million oncological researchers what if there were 10 million people studying molecular science particle science Etc and this is going to

lead to the breakthroughs in novel science that we're sort of expecting Fusion Quantum um AGI Etc and and as a reminder open AI was 90 people when we shipped chat gbt uh sorry 90 people when we ship gbt 3.5 and 130 people when we ship chat gbt yeah small teams are very capable now uh for the

reasons I described and so in short order I think the obvious answer is when it going to unlock a lot of what we consider finite problems things like cure for cancer you know is something that I think we know we can solve and I think we're going to solve it what's the meaning of life is going to remain probably an indefinite problem for a long time and and is there a God is going to remain

an indefinite problem for like there are things that will remain in our sort of unknown Universe outside the scope of what we can solve for for quite a while in the next 50 to 100 years my prediction is that just like the first Renaissance evolved our understanding what the social contract could look like introduced Enlightenment thought which led to among other things democracy and new

forms of government my prediction is that the next 50 to 100 years outside of Novel Sciences will see the me the biggest changes in understanding of social contract and you know Sam has talked about this a lot of people have talked about this in a world where work becomes less critical to actually running Society where value creation gets less expensive iive redefining how Society should

work is going to require a bunch of people to think about it and a bunch of like quite honestly conflict within governments to redefine those things and so if you're looking at 50 to 100 years out my bold prediction is new government like truly like democracy may not be the final State and we are probably destined for something and by the way I'm a free market or capitalism might not

even be the free market solution um we just don't know yet because imagining these things just will require major updates to how we understand the universe to work okay so I'm just pausing because there's like like eight trillion things to unpack like just in the scope of what you just said um

and there's there's so many places we can take this but I guess um Zack as you talk about that there's like there's an optimism I hear in your voice right like like we can unlock this human potential um but so much of of this like the the word that comes to mind obviously very topically

today is disruption right like like it it feels like to get here like basically absolutely every part not just of Technology but every part of human social structure is potentially disruptable here and you know I I guess my thought is like sometimes when you disrupt things or when there's

winners and losers there's resistance or there's push back um you know to what degree do you see that being the case is there risk here here um you know how do we navigate it and how do we like how do we make sure it unfolds in a positive way so yeah so similarly to you I have to pause to sort

of collect because there's a lot there let me let me start by just giving my priors so my priors are I grew up in Santa Barbara California to to uh to parents who who are are are doctors and work in

in the medical field and um I observed a really Charming uh you know childhood and then went to Berkeley and studied uh study history and computer science and then went and worked in ml and and I had lots of personal you know Strife along the way but but have lived a relatively Charmed Life

by any universal standard past present future probably so I see the world as being a really accept place and I'm not naive but I do want to admit my priors because I think it's very easy to to to sort of look at these things and say well of course he thinks this that being said if you study

history one of the great things that you learn is that the world gets better all the time it is very hard to read a bunch of history books and arrive at any other conclusion than today is the best day ever to be born and in fact the beauty of of The Human Experience and the Really the E

the reason that arguing are humans good or bad is so easy is because if humans were actually bad we never would have arrived here after we crawled out of caves like the fact that we have all the things that we have the fact that the world is as safe as it is for most people and that it gets safer

all the time is a testament to the fact that we are just building a more aligned Earth and more aligned human Human Experience and that's not to say we aren't fallible and that we don't have lots of uh you know problems but it is to say that our problems are diminishing and so I don't think the onus is actually on me to prove that the world is going to get better I actually think the Honis

is on someone else to say this is the peak of civilization um so I'll say that now that being said it's true also that disruption breeds a lot of like conflict some of that conflict is really healthy some of that conflict is like problematic someone asked me last night I was I was I gave a talk last night and someone said like isn't it true that like there will be so much change that

it'll just become this like violent era of change and I actually think that like the reason that we've had so much sometimes so much conflict in the past if you if you go back and study periods of like long periods of Waring uh and and and conflict it's often when there's no progress and in a world where you're not making progress where you look around and you're like it's a zero

some game we're not making any progress we're not inventing new technologies we're not living longer we need to like it's a scarce resource game we just need to fight and to to like we need to conquer in a world where we start making much of technological progress where people look around and they go wait we might cure cancer suddenly suddenly it's like very concerning that we you

know might die at War like the interest in that suddenly you know plummets and so I think that what we're going to find is a world where conflict in you know interpersonal conflict becomes far less interesting to people because we're going to start to observe the world in a very uh net like

uh positive net sum game um versus versus Zero Sum now it's also true that our generation is going to pay a ton of sacrifices because of this progress all generations do I think our sacrifices whereas many generation sacrifices were economic right if you had studied the greatest Generation you

watched them grow up in a depression and they had less than the generation before them and if you had extrapolated you would have said oh the world is getting worse but in fact we we know that to be this short dip our generation's conflict I I think is going to be emotional not economic I think the hardest part for us is going to be facing this new normal which is whiplash rapid change and the the

sort of separation of a of of work as a source of identity and when we sort of talk about the one of the great risks I think of the AI Revolution it's going to be the fact that our work is going to change so much and so frequently and so arriving at a at a net positive outcome this sort

of like Utopia Panacea in the distance is going to require that people actually probably overcome the short-term and maybe even medium-term pain of accepting that even if the world is economically better which it it certainly will be and and I get so much flak for this but it is impossible

to argue that it has never been less expensive to be alive I mean so many of the things we consider Commodities today Staples were luxuries 20 years ago and so I get all this I get I actually get a lot of vital online because people are like how could you be so naive and and I point to to

things in their lives and I say what do you think your parents would have paid for this be it an antibiotic that hadn't been invented I mean it's like you you cannot observe the world and see any see it for for what it is unless you're willing to actually go back and imagine what it would have been like living in the world 50 or 100 years ago that doesn't change the fact that a lot of people

look at what I'm saying and say that's wrong corporations are greedy the world is getting worse and I you know if if I can't work I'm not going to make money and I just totally disagree with that I think the world is going to be economically so much better and emotionally probably pretty grieved and overcoming that conflict is going to is going to take a lot of work now the one other

thing I'll say and we can come back to this or you can expand on this when people ask me what's the next great conflict I don't think it's between two Nations I really don't I think we have reached this sort of this Flat Earth point where it's like really not in any nation's interest especially nuclear equipped Nations to fight and a hot War would just be like so untenable you know we would

just I don't think anyone wants it I do think that there is a future conflict between people and the state I think there's a world where we wake up in 20 30 40 years and we go oh we have all the things that the state has been promising us it's just not the state that delivered it right it's technology and that's going to be one of these moments where people go I wonder why I'm paying

50% taxes to a body that you know doesn't actually produce value anymore and and so there's a whole other thing there which is like this introduces this idea of a new form of government I think we get there because a lot of people are GNA be like wait a second what why are we being governed

in such a way that like it doesn't allow that you know the technology to serve us fair enough um and it's like like we we could spend we could spend a lot of time talking about you know the future of governance and and and and part of me definitely wants to don't get me wrong um but I want I want to zoom in on one thing you said specifically Zack which which is about

work changing and and like our relationship with work changing so like can can we dive a little bit deeper on that like how do you see the nature of work changing over the next five to 10 years one of the things that I that I'm struck by is like so many of the people that I have the conversations

about this with the future work you know I'll often like explore their job and ask them if they could have understood their job 10 years ago and for most people today the answer is no I couldn't have understood it one year ago frankly sure and and I think you know podcasting is particularly interesting because it's just it requires so much you know sort of Novel technology uh you I think

you could have understood it 10 years ago but but there a lot there's just a lot of work today that like required so many updates to technology and I preface that by simply saying like I don't know and no one does I think it's going to be one of these um you know arrival moments where we sort of appreciate that like most of our life is actually filled with exceptionally wrote work

and I think one of the great Awakenings in this next Renaissance is going to be realizing that our technology has sort of tethered us to our devices and that we associate screen time with work time when in fact we have a device addiction epidemic and most of the time on the device is actually just rote wasted time it's not a ton of like deep critical thinking imagination curiosity courage

and if you decouple your rote work from your like strategic work what I think many people would find is like actually you know they we live even in like developed High you know high value societies fairly wrote monotonous lives that I don't think are driving the satisfaction that we would have

wanted from the technology we created so my guess is one of the tenants of the future of work is appreciating how much work we do that doesn't actually serve our happiness function um that there is in fact a lot of work we do that like makes us you know that makes us happy and a ton that doesn't that's going to be I think one major breakthrough and just like a tenant of the future

of work the other thing that I think happens is we will probably redefine what it means um to uh have a work week which is to say I think a lot of work will actually start to feel almost peace meal in a way that's like very upsetting to some people but like could work out really nicely and you're starting to see the world move in that direction and I don't mean like you will work

out of the office sometimes I mean that like some work you you like do some work and then you won't do some work and that it will actually just feel a lot more sort of episodic and periodic because the idea of a career is just probably going to sort of melt away and that's not to say that people won't have specialization I think they might but I think it's going to be far more interesting um

to to operate in a world where like everything feels more fungible um and and sort of like like you know plates that you know tectonic plates that sort of move um where the pressure zones are beyond that it's actually I think really hard for me um to to sort of point at anything

my prediction is that like we end up probably working less you know I don't know where that ASM tootes but we are working less than we than we did in 1960 for example the average work week was 57 hours now it's about 45 so it is coming down Japan just passed a four four- day work week law which like went pretty unannounced and they and they they did so because they want people to

procreate more but they're doing it because they can they have the labor productivity to now say hey you know what we have so much productivity in the workforce we can actually just get people to work less and go spend more time with their families having kids that to me is one of these incredible watershed moments that I think we're going to look back on and be like oh wow like a

a country was like Hey we're willing to compromise some economic value for like future gains this I just think is going to become more common I I I I think I think we're going to just say hey like what is what does it mean to actually work hard and and what does what does a long work day look

like and I think both of those things are just going to you know change a lot so let me let me play um I love that vision and it's it's super exciting and it's super optimistic and I I feel like I have to advocate for some of the Skeptics who are like Zach I don't buy that you know I I think that there's like real opportunity for a hellscape here um you talk about tension between

you know citizens and the state I'm curious about tensions between like employees and you know kind of Mega corpse or or or you know larger organizations like I is this a risk and I guess where I'm going with this is you know there's this world where it's more fungible where it's

more you know I I'll choose deliberately to take the negative lens where it's more like gigging versus like this this full-time steady salary job which in some ways we're already seeing um but is there a risk that we're going toward a world where you know these these large corporations get more

and more of the pie and they can do more and more of it without you know human workers and you know like it's just kind of a double-edged sword like there there's just less work for us and that impacts our uh you know our finances that's certainly a possibility but let me tell you so I

think that the world where we have like a bunch of like a few Mega corpse and they all have automated the this the the labor Pipeline and we live in this like you know uh six sense sort of hellscape um which is so funny to me by the way I just want to pause the really amazing thing about all of

these dystopian films is that they can account for flying cars but they cannot account for um like uh Michelin star on demand food right like it's like a very weird world where you s like it is where our bra goes we are not we are willing to be like oh here are all the things that technology could

wreck but like M if you could do all those things like if you can have flying cars if you can have floating like transforming you know in the Ready Player One World right yeah something would have had to go so wrong to have all of that and not have you know incredible sort of utopian outcomes

as well yeah and I think um it is so easy for us to imagine all the downsides because we have a we have a negativity bias that served us when we crawled out of caves and yet in fact the world just keeps getting better and it like it would have been very hard to describe you know this

world around us to 100 years ago and and yet here we are despite all the conjecture now I do think that the risk of sort of technological hemony is an interesting one but but there are like a bunch of competing forces that we're already starting to see one of them is told by the open AI story right

so just again reminder open AI was 90 people when it shipped GPT 3.5 or or 100 130 when it shipped chat gbt and 200 when it shipped gbt 4 I mean it's just like very small teams are capable of a whole lot and that has a double-edged sword if you're an incumbent because it both means that like sure

you could run your company a lot leaner and and you know that could have Economic Consequences it also means that individuals are going to be able to do a lot right and so for every for every small team that a company can sort of you know crunch down to create a bunch of value there's going to be another small team that's like oh we can build a competitor to this thing and someone

you know I had dinner with um a um a leader in Bon Life Sciences about two weeks ago and they said you know want to know the new competitor to our company it's the hobbyist it's it's the expert hobbyist in a garage like there's a non-zero chance that someone cures cancer in their garage which by the way there's there there's actually precedent for like if you had said to someone the

the the Next Great Wave of companies is going to be of technology companies is going to be built out of garages if you had said that to someone in 1950 they'd be like how right IBM computers are cost like5 million dollars and they and they require an entire room that was like the the state of play in 1954 when an IBM researcher went on national TV and said they were going to solve

machine translation in the next five years so if you describe that world to someone at that time they'd be like computers are so expensive there's no way that someone's just going to buy one of these and build build a company in their garage I think that we are approaching that world where individuals are so capable that we're just going to see incredible competition from all corners of

the world the other thing that I think is going to happen is we are going to enter a world where people are not going to tolerate a lot of the employment experiences that they put up with today because actually the deflation in the world is going to mean that people can just work less and people fight me on this but I just I'm so sure of this outside of government cont government sort

of regulated oligopolies monopolies where there is no price competition we are going to see crazy crazy price competition and that this idea that like corporates are greedy and they they behave in their own self-interest sort of true and it's also true that like for every company that's like we're not going to lower prices there's a company that's like we're GNA Drive price down because that's our

advantage and then everyone has to follow spirit and Frontier are the best examples of this right I mean you could fly across the country for $70 today which is like just crazy to think about and for every gillon's you know I don't know what what your fancy for every aroan there's a Costco

and there are luxury ends in the market and there are commoditized ends in the market and I don't think I there's idea that like corporations are going to Rally together and like keep everyone from accessing the goods and services that they want is crazy especially as we observe the cost of the AI inference just plummeting and that to me is actually one of these great markers that I that

I point to when people are like how do we know that the world is going to get better economically deep seek is the best evidence that there will not be a technological hemony because you won't be able to tax a service that is effectively free and by the way your AI is going to run on your device pretty soon and when that happens it means that it will truly be unmetered and

anytime the world has access to unmetered critical resources there's a Cambrian economic explosion this happened with water and then food stuffs and then electricity and then the internet driving the cost of these critical resources to zero is exactly what the world wants in the pursuit of of sort of e you know shared economic outcome and yeah I'm like look it is very hard for me

to imagine a world outside of like the Pharma case which is by the way remember a government regulated oligopoly where if you discover a drug you can control it for seven years that's because the governments allow that um but there's just very few Industries like that where we will where we won't see incredible price competition and I think the the you know the consumer ultimately

wins this battle and then it's like you know the cost of cost of living made plummet so far that like people are like I don't want to work yeah you know or I don't want to work this company or I don't want to work this much and that's going to be the sort of optionality that people get in the future well and the garage model is particularly exciting to me and I I mean yeah

we we've seen this before but uh it sounds like Zach like you're also seeing a world that kind of skews more toward you know what I what I kind of call in like more extreme cases like like the the one person AI shs that like with this unlocking of human potential you can have corporations of one because if someone has an idea or a vision you know potentially AI can do everything else

to bring that to Market and make that a reality and I mean this is deliberately like an edge case but it but is this kind of directionally where you see the economy going uh absolutely it and it doesn't just apply you know it's easy for people to be like oh fine technology will will the push back I get is people go technology will get expensive I you know what happens when techn

technology gets less expensive everything else gets less expensive and in a world where you can create software without code we're gonna move to a world where you can create Hardware you know just as fast as you can create software today and then it's like everything else sort of follows suit Sam has this Sam Alman has this prophecy that we'll see a a trillion a billion

dollar company a unicorn of one person in the next two years totally totally reasonable I mean a timeline exactly who knows but um I am so excited by the fact that like running a small why do people not run a small business today it's not because people don't want to be their own boss it's not because everyone doesn't have some passion project they want to share with the world

it's because the cost of running a small business is super high and it's not like even the economic cost it's like all the stuff that goes into it and even the most favorable Nations Estonia for example which make like running small businesses as inexpensive as possible cannot automate all the things that come with bookkeeping accounting taxes lawyers like they try but it's like you still have

to do all these things AI just reduces the need for these things so far that I think we're going to see a bunch of small businesses show up I think people are just G to like create a bunch of um you know uh John cison always reminds people that everything in the world is a passion project and the world is actually just this Museum of passion projects more people want to create

passion projects more people actually want to build things than than than than do because it's just hard to do it and I think we're just going to see a bunch of building happen it's uh yeah I I I'm like super energized by that like to to me that's like very much a best case scenario and I like I I love to imagine that that's how you know people get unlocked and and we can do

that right we can be self-employed there we can be empowered to like change the world in those much smaller groups if you're I don't know if you end up talking to these people but you know if you're talking to Executives VPS of larger organizations you know midsized organizations that are now you

know potentially going to be disrupted like what what do you tell them like is there a defense here do they just have to kind of wait and see what's what's the play so Le let's let's define what a what a high level or mid-level organization is first so I think defining a midlevel or highlevel you know mid-level or high level manager inside of a big company is like anything from a

technology company to a traditional industry to you know fill in the blank y and um I would say most of these people most of these people are not thinking about their company being disrupted right that's like not necessarily where their head goes what they're thinking about is their role being disrupted you really have to get to the board and this the sea Suite to hear people talk about you

know how will our industry fundamentally change um incidentally by the way young people at companies are like thinking about how their company will be disrupted because they're like they're looking up and being like will I have a job here yeah um and it's the mid-level and you know senior manager that are like you know I got to I got to make sure that I keep this like everything's going

great I have a good salary I have like a I pay an expensive mortgage let's just keep let's keep this train on the tracks until I retire um I spend a lot of time with boards so the so the advisory firm I run we do we do a lot of board advisory for Fortune 1000 in governments there is like

a there's sort of an even split between people who are like look um I know that the world is going to be disrupted but like here you know we have some really solid defensible position positions and and here they are and I'll talk about those in a second and then the other half which are like wow we're going to need to change a lot and I'm not sure that either is exactly right like I do think

that a lot of change will have to happen what I think it becomes critical is not whether or not someone believes that their industry is going to change but how they identify what their defensible positions are because companies that basically believe that they are great because they have

been great for a long time they are big they are you know like experienced etc those companies I think are in for a uniquely rude awakening I think it is very likely that a lot of these companies wake up one day and realize that just because they were big for a long time doesn't actually mean that they will be big forever and then in fact heft is no longer a strategic position more

similarly companies that say we're the smartest guys in the room you know quote unquote to you know the Enron uh documentary these are going to wake up very disappointed right intelligence is obviously becoming unmetered being brilliant is not it companies that identify that you know their brand is of critical importance their um Market trust and distribution is of critical

importance these are the companies that I think are going to do well whether or not they believe their industry is going to be disrupted quite a bit it's the ones who are actually seeing the future and saying these are the things that become unmetered and these are our new opportunity vector and this is why I'm so certain that the fortune 1000 is going to just go through dramatic change

over the next 20 years I think we're going to see more change in it than we saw in the last you know 50 because just a lot of companies aren't seeing this for what it is you know a lot of companies are like look we're safe because we're big we're safe because we have the smartest people in the industry um you know we're safe because we control all these patents oh man

like you know hearing people talk about like you know their defensive patents it's like look these are going to be obsolete soon right you just like the the scientific Paradigm is Shifting so fast so that I think is sort of how we is is how we approach it and and you know it's it's a lot of these senior leaders get it and and and plenty don't um and trying to convince them all

that that that the research was commoditizing was a task in and of itself um you know a lot of these companies were like we're going to partner with the best open eyes is the best and it's like look opening eyes produces incredible products but the research itself is a commodity and ending that it's not is just going to set you up for disappointment and then of course deep

seek shows up and there you go um it's also a reminder that Apple is very good at predicting the future because they sort of they sort of saw this coming but yeah that's basically the lay of the land yeah no it's it's super interesting and it like I I apologize because I'm gon to make this so insanely reductionist but I was gonna say like I was goingon to say that like the best defense

is still a good offense right like it's still taking an aggressive posture and thinking what are we going to do next to to grow what we're doing versus resting on our Laurels is that fair even though it's like insanely reductionist I think it's fair and look this funny thing about what you just said is like it's one of the things we talk about is that all of the Trope the more things

change the more they stay the same so all of the historic tropes are still playing out like yeah it's you know distribution is king turns out the the the app layer is actually the most important thing yeah um nothing actually commoditized at the limit like the United app is better than the Delta app despite the fact that everyone knows exactly how to build a great app um you know 17 years 16

years after the App Store it's like there's still a lot of you know disparity and so I think that I don't think it's it's it's reductionist at all to say that companies that like go out and like attack this are going to do a lot better than companies who who wait and the one thing I would add that that I that I didn't mention is a lot of companies are also identifying this what we study

in The Advisory business the negative space of AI so a lot of people are like okay what's openingi going to do next very few people are like what are they not going to do next and so actually exploring the the the designing around things that AI cannot do what what we call the negative space of AI in The Advisory firm that uh that's a super interesting project and and sort

of exploration for any company on on their path to figuring out what it is they are and aren't you know over the next 20 years so what what what are you seeing as as like I mean I'm sure we could talk for hours about this this one topic but like what are you seeing as like the big negative space

of AI where organizations can capitalize okay so this one is the one that gets me out of bed every day and this is of of all the reasons that I'm optimistic this is it like you know I would just say to listeners like if you're only going to listen to one bit this is the thing I would listen

to what what I what we talk about and like what I present in the book and and what I present in my talks is this idea that we are building machines that have human intellectual equivalence that is what AI is is pursuing right now that is decidedly not human emotional equivalence right like there

is a reason Jeff that like you and I could have done this exchange over email um we could have had our AI agents probably just have this conversation and then you know set sent it out as like sort of hologram recordings there's like a bunch of you know uh uh ways that we could have communicated this information that actually wouldn't appeal to the market because there is something unique

about our tone our intonation yeah are like physical mannerisms that change the story that that like mean that like the information isn't actually the words that come out of our mouth it's something it's something else that's going on and and studying that is you know people been doing that for thousands of years but it's like actually a pretty interesting study in why

we connect with each other AI is very good at computational workloads and very good at human intellectual equivalence and increasingly so and not at the other stuff and so when we talk about what AI is going to solve for and what it isn't I basically tell companies to start optimizing for their most humanistic qualities hiring for adaptability courage curiosity wisdom empathy

right the the sort of that list goes on when young people are like what should I study in college I'm like look it doesn't matter there's a decline ining correlation between your major and your economic outcome assuming that's what you're optimizing for study something you love because the act of learning is going to be the thing that gets you to where you're going right

picking a thing and being great at that thing is is hugely problematic and great lifelong Learners have all these unique qualities that that many people don't and you know to to tell a personal anecdote this sort of like hit home for me so hard um four months ago my my dad who's an oncologist

actually um uh in Santa Barbara won the won a Lifetime Achievement Award uh from the breast cancer Association of America and a a patient of his came to speak at this award ceremony she had five minutes at at the Le turn I mean by the way I cried this whole night like it was this like powerful moment for me and like I remember a lot of it but like when she spoke like I remember it

word for word she stood on the lect and she said for the th 30 second she talked about her patient outcome she described you know having survived breast cancer and gone on to live a fulfilling life and she was giving back to the community alongside my dad and then for the next four and a half minutes she talked about how my dad made her feel during her treatment and she described

the fact that she had gotten this diagnosis and then gone and seen four oncologists and gotten the same four prognosis and the same four treatment recommendations and so the the algorithm was sort of had optimized what she should do she wasn't she wasn't a a a candidate for any trials and it was like look this is what you should do right then she said the thing that I just will never

forget and then I just like tell people and truly anyone who will listen she she basically was like look I chose Dr Cass because of how much hope he gave me and in the course of my treatment what I came to realize this is her words not mine is that you know in a world where the research and and and the the the therapy is basically a commodity where everyone knows exactly what you should do because

the commuter has become so smart she said the bedside manner is no longer a feature it's the product and I was like yeah like like it just like it hit me all at once and I was like yeah that's that's right yeah and for me it was like I'd always seen my dad as this very smart man

who was curing people and saving people's lives because he was brilliant and here was this woman who was celebrating my dad because he was kind and empathetic and curious and and and hopeful and that was and you know by the way he's 76 and still practicing because of that right like he you know

is probably in I don't know's he's gonna listen to this is he as sharp as he once was I don't know like that I don't know is he as empathetic and curious and kind as he's ever been yes is that what matters most in a world where the therapy starts to commoditize yes and so I think we're just gonna see this we're gonna see the negative space of AI drive us to a much more humanistic

place because in a world where AI is human intellectually equivalent or far superior and it's not emotionally equivalent the world is just gonna grossly value you know just just incredibly over indexed on soft skills and I think that's where individuals and corporations are going to are going to differentiate the most yeah uh yeah thanks thanks for sharing that Zach you completely

knocked me off where I thought I was going to go with this because I to be honest I had had like quite an emotional reaction to that so so thank you um for sharing that um yeah um so sorry where do I want to take that um the reason I had an emotional reaction to it is a um my dad uh worked

his whole career in in health care and help people with chronic pain um and B because I lost him to cancer last year um and the care that he got was so so important like you really understand the um the value of it right and and to me one of the things that I saw and you know it sounds a little

bit tribe is that in healthcare like the health piece is getting more and more commoditized right like it is we have the technology but the care is really what matters right like the care is what people remember and if you don't treat these people like people like that is like kind of the whole ball game so I I thank you for saying that I I really appreciate it and honestly it um

it gives me a lot of Hope uh I mean Jeff I'm so sorry for your loss and I appreciate you sharing that and um yeah I mean I it's hard not to I mean yeah like I I realized in that moment why I was so proud of my dad because he you know he he he he inspired people and I don't think I had ever fully

appreciated that that's actually what medicine had become about and in some beautiful way probably is what the world is going to become about it's just like this this is the inevitable direction of most jobs where what we know starts you know you and I can be an expert in most things in about 30 minutes yeah I mean expert is is relative but like we could we we could we could get pretty deep on

a subject really fast thanks to Chachi BT how we communicate that how we inspire people to believe that is not a commodity and in fact is like yeah you know becomes like probably the most valuable thing going forward yeah well it's interesting to me um you know especially I I work with a lot of

people in you know it and in technology and and there's a risk and there there's like there's a profile and I'm sure people will be offended by me saying this but there's there's a risk of this you know kind of uh po I don't know if I want to say personality type or posture of just like I'm

an expert I hate working with other people just let me do my thing and like I'll be good at it because I'm an expert and it's like is this going to become extinct like like does that people side become the most valuable piece and does everything else get commoditized Jeff like you could I mean

think about it this way like you could be an expert in Ai and if you were like not pleasant this would just like not be a like you could know a ton about Ai and you know we we could have like an academically interesting conversation but it just like would not be a worthwhile podcast that like people would listen to and I'm reminded of this constantly when you know I I

my background in AI is interesting in so far as I've you know been at a very cool company a few very cool companies but there are far more illustrious speakers that people can hire telling a story matters a ton and like insisting that just because you know a lot you are you know

you are the most equipped to to teach neglects the fact that like Michael Jordan was a bad GM and you know like yeah the these like experts in their domain often struggle because it's not actually the you know the knowledge or information that they have that is like most critical to society

it's like yeah I mean I I I'm this is the thing that gets me out of bed this is actually the thing that like I'm most excited about like if we can if we can commoditize computation yeah I really believe move to a much more humanistic world yeah no that's that's that's awesome and it's

super it's super inspiring like I think like like that more human world I think is like like yeah it reminds you of what the technology is all about right like it's not technology for the sake of Technology it's technology for people to you know kind of live more fulfilling lives if I can say

that you arri you arrived at like the thing like it's hard for it's hard it's so hard for me to say that to people and like not um yeah it's like it's contrived it's like why do we build technology but like if you think about the problem long enough you realize that like the actual power of AI is in freeing us to live more fulfilling lives it's not actually stealing our fulfillment from us

it's like expanding the idea of like what could humans do because today you know even people who work these ninet to-5 that they don't really like are like what if open what if open AI takes my job and it's like oh yeah something profound might happen I mean like true there is a downside and and I'm not I don't want to be like so flippant yeah but also like what if we weren't meant to

work 50 hours like what if we were truly meant to commune you know uh Harari and like a few other you know historians I don't know if you read this stuff but like there there are some like pretty smart people that argue that humans were probably happiest when we were hunter gatherers yeah yeah I'm like a little mixed on that it's like the average life expectancy I think it was like

27 years or something but does it does introduce this it does introduce this question of like are we just in this like funny chapter right now where we think we need to work hard because like that's what we've been doing or are we actually like just destined for so much more you know you're you're making me reflect that it seems like um you know for the past hundred years or so we've gotten used

to this like this definition and this structure of work right between people and organizations and there's offices and we do this and this is kind of how our life is like and you know we we've we've convinced ourselves somewhere along the way that like this is the goal right like this is the end of History this is what we'll do forever and whether it's F fulfilling or not this is where

we're at and I feel like like one of the most exciting things about AI in the last you know a All Tech all all disruption in the past few years is I feel like we're starting to shake free of that and say hey maybe that's not the future maybe there's something else going on here or something else we can aspire to look I certainly you know I caught a glimpse of this in 2018 when I when

I you know the yes yes and I I think the hardest part here is that humans have such a recency bias such a negativity bias and such a confirmation bias like these like overwhelmingly powerful signals that we sort of like look for yeah um that it's it's so hard for us to like actually reme you

know explore the idea that our you know great great grandparents would have not believed this state like yeah how could you possibly just you know one of my one of my pride uh and fun facts is I'm a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin in fact I got so lucky on that lineage is that I have

a desk on which he wrote The Art of making money plenty my mom has his daughter's wedding band she she she's named after Sarah B Franklin and uh I'm very proud of this and it's also so funny to me to think like what would Ben like how could Benjamin Franklin have imagined this like he just could not

have right mean you know he the the the sort of The Godfather of like a lot of modern economic theory that we don't appreciate certainly the discover of electricity he could have extrapolated some things but like there's no way that he could have ever arrived at the internet right and I challenge to people is like the next Renaissance is really designed to like explore this idea of

like what if so much of what we know becomes du evolves and so much of what we don't know opens up to us you like I'm sure the humans will go explore space By the way like I'm certain that we will colonize Mars at this point like and and like you know go to other galaxies this is of course a very upsetting idea to people like well why don't we just like take care of Earth

and I'm like that's exactly what the spard said to mellan and Columbus they were like do not like why do you need to go anywhere take care of Spain yeah yeah like let's just make this better like you don't need to go anywhere it's like it's not a big deal and I think you know like this

like this idea that this is you said it best this idea this is like the Pinnacle is like no it's not it's very egotistical to look around and be like oh yeah like this is it I assure you this is not right like there's so much more to go and by the way even if there's incredible conflict there's

so much more to go what humans have proven is that we are exceptionally resilient and so there is not a world there's like I guess a world but like very few cases in which something could happen and someone could be like I told you so and I wouldn't be like you're right might not happen in our lifetime but it's coming like you know it we've been around a long time we crawled out of

caves once we have a lot more to go and I don't think it's working in Office Buildings I just I'm pretty sure yeah yeah um awesome that's super super exciting like I don't even know I I I've got a whole pile of other questions that are not really relevant at this point to be honest like I I don't want to go into some like nitty-gritty like bureaucrat like organizational detail I feel

like the big picture stuff is like so so much more interesting Um Zack is there anything you didn't cover that you wanted to talk about in terms of you know what's going on in your world or messages you want to leave people with that we haven't talked about we we played all the hits and quite honestly Jee I think what we should just do is schedule another time to follow up

on this in six months and you know I would love to yeah to let's just do a constant check-in and and maybe next time we can do it in person to sort of fulfill the fulfill the promise of be becoming more humanist uh no I think I would just remind everyone to pay attention to how how much better the science is getting and how much less expensive it's getting this is the deflation of

the technology deflation of the cost of the technology is the critical indicator and it is the single best argument I have to anyone who talks about technological hemony and and corporate greed I'm like look would Sam like to charge more for AI probably can he no not in a world where it just keeps getting you know really and maybe that's not even true I I shouldn't even

say that I think that Sam like would probably want give it away if he could but like it's it's it's likely that like some people in in AI would love to to capture more value it's really hard because it's just getting super inexpensive and the market is driving the cost down and this is just what happens yeah hey let me ask you this and if you don't want to get into it that's fine

but you know I I don't want to talk like you know the dirt on open AI That's that's not what this is about but you know one of the things I'm kind of picking up on is you know from your time there that like it seems like there's like a pervasive sense of optimism there about like you know a

culture of kind of like building the future and it's not just this like okay how can we you know make our next Buck it it's how do we shape the way the world is going to be I is that fair can you like unpack a little bit just just kind of the the culture and the mission of what was going

on there yeah I mean without you know speaking to how it operates today I can confidently say that um there were very few people at open a that I I spent time with who made any mention of the wealth that was being created and that may have been true at other you know I don't know if that was true at Google or or companies like that but you know the these like liquidity

events were just not things that that people spent much time talking about because the fascination and the fixation was with how do we build a a technology that like moves the world forward and the hardest part I think about um you know explaining this to people is that it sounds so self-serving and I suppose in some sense it is right like yeah you know would I admit if it was

a very greedy place I don't know um probably not but but I can confidently say that like it really is one of these places that you know to the best of my knowledge still where people are so excited about actually creating you know introducing the world to this exciting incredible technology that

could fundamentally change The Human Experience and the hardest part I think of like all of the you know In fairness I'll just call them out folks like Gary Marcus and Yan llon talking about how you know they've moved the goalpost so many times I can't even keep up with them anymore firstan was like oh it's not GNA be that great Gary was like yeah it's it's it's overhyped then

they're like oh it's going to destroy the world now they're like it's you know an ecological dis you know it's like they've moved the goal post so many times and I think the hard part about these people is if you predicated your career like Gary Marcus has on sort of like open AI is the bad guy um you you are drawing this like ex there's like this readership and followership that comes with

the fascination of finding a villain and a nemesis and my point is like sure that's one way to go about this but like there is also a world in which we are truly entering a net positive some game and you don't have to keep pointing at a corporate villain yeah like what if we were all now working you mean like and by the way I I have this like argument with like China Hawks too I'm

like yeah it's like what if what if like we're in a world where like there is there's just a bunch of positive some outcomes here um and you know it's like in that sense I suppose I'm naive but but I really do believe that like that's how many if not most people at open AI view this yeah that that we're going toward towards an age of abundance and that that gets rid of a lot of the

the conflict yeah totally sh sanker who you know brilliant guy a paler CTO yesterday said that he disagreed with Sam at some White House Event that you know he he Sam I the way he described this this is conjecture this is this is hearsay but Sam talked about hey you know we're not at war with China this isn't an arms race and Sean was like oh it certainly is and I think one that

serves paler because you know the talk of War purchases but I also think that like it's just it's just like an inappropriate thing to say in a world where like deep seek open sourced AI it's like you can't both believe you can't both believe that the research is commoditizing and that we're in an AI arms race this may just be one of these prize that's shared universally and in a world

where everyone can agree that they want you know Venezuela and Argentina to do better why can't we actually be in a world where we want China to do better like why do why do some things have to fail in order for us to to to benefit collectively I I'm not sure now with that said I think there are some institutions that are fundamentally broken obviously Insurance in particular health

insurance is one of them and these are usually propped up by by government institutions but that's for another conversation another time and uh you know to be continued absolutely Zach thank you so much for being here today I super super appreciate the conversation it's been really

enlightening for me hopefully for listeners too and yeah looking forward to uh part two thanks Jee