The AI Tool Is the Last Decision | Josh Norris | GTM Strategist

It's just like cutting out parts of the job description that allow one manager to manage a larger team. I'm seeing that a lot more than I am like eliminating IC roles.

What's happening to those people?

Go get other jobs. Take IC roles again. I'm seeing a lot of sales managers take AE roles. I'm seeing a lot of people leave tech.

Welcome to Vlad on Leadership, interviews with technical leaders and operators about the leadership questions AI makes more difficult. I'm your host, Vlad Moskovski. I coach senior technical leaders and founders who are excellent at the job that's keeping them stuck. Hey Josh, welcome to the show. Great to have you here.

Thank you, Vlad. Good to be here.

So you work with a lot of startups and I'm curious, what are you seeing are some patterns in how they are using AI?

I would say there's one big pattern where everyone feels a lot of pressure to adopt AI very quickly, and there's this feeling like if you are not doing all of these things with AI, then you're not a real business. You are behind the times. You're not gonna be able to compete. Um, most of those experiments with AI fail though. There, there is such a thing as, as trying too many things, trying too hard, going too wide with how you apply AI. And there is such a thing as trying to use AI for something just for the sake of trying AI with something. Yeah, you, you hear that, oh, you should be using Claude Code and this and that and this tool and in it in, and there are so many tools out there that everyone's talking about and everyone feels pressure to use all of them. So a lot of people, especially founders, in my experience, will pick up all the tools everyone's talking about and try to find a way to use them as opposed to figuring out what their business needs right now, and then figuring out the process to get there, and then finding where AI can help and bringing on the tools they need as opposed to the tools they feel pressured to be using.

Mm-hmm.

So there's a lot of that. However, those use cases on this side where you have a really clear purpose and you have a clear goal. Can absolutely make what would've been considered 6 years ago to be an impossible feat now possible.

So AI is for sure an augmenter, it's a multiplier, but if you focus, my, this is the sense that I'm getting is if you focus, if you have FOMO about the tools, If you focus on the tools and that's your goal, or that's your objective is to use all the tools, you're completely going to be led astray. And I could imagine the pressure of trying to keep up with everything is so intense for people.

Yeah. Yeah. If you use the tools for the sake of using the tools, you will miss the point and waste time. The, the most common example of that that I see these days is people opening up Claude Code to try to build their own version of some simple thing for themselves, and then they realize A couple days in, maybe a week in of working on it, part of each day, they realize, wait, I don't know how this thing is architected. I don't know how Claude designed it and built it. I can't go in and make changes and support it. It's either bloated up to the point where you can't make surgical changes anymore because it all gets out of whack, or people realize that the thing they thought they wanted it to do is actually not the thing they need to do. So the whole product, the whole project is scrapped. I see that all the time right now. Um,

I'm guilty of that. Yeah.

And I've, I've done it too. It's a lesson learned the hard way. Um, I, I feel like I'm staring into the abyss of clogged code all day, every day, a lot of the time. And, and it's exciting, but also you need to know why you're working on what you're working on at the same time. Yeah. I see this with buy versus build decisions in larger companies and teams buying tools. I see this in early stage founders who haven't quite figured out, haven't quite figured out the, like the market they're selling to or exactly what problem their product is going to try to solve. And so they, they're kind of spread a little all over the place, so to speak.

No, it's very interesting as a, as, as founders, I feel that there's always been pressure of you can only do a certain number of things because of limited resources, limited time. And there has to be prioritization, but it seems that AI is pushing this even further and deeper into the FOMO area. And I'm wondering, how do you work with those founders around not focusing on the tools? What's the rhetoric? What's the story that you tell them? Is there a metaphor? How do you get them to really focus and prioritize the business needs, as I understand it, rather than the tools?

I always tell clients and I tell everyone, I always say the tool is the last thing, the last decision you make, the last thing you should think about. So it's, it's not necessarily a way that I discipline founders on keeping the eye, their eye on exactly where they should focus or teach them discipline around any of this. It's, it's just a, it's a framework that applies to everything. It applies to buying tech. For your team, if you're operating a team in a company, it's, it's a framework for building your own little mini products to do things for yourself. The tool is the last decision you make. So you need to figure out the problem you're solving or what's the goal of what you're trying to achieve. And then you try to find the best fit solution for the situation to achieve the goal. You, you plan out what you're gonna accomplish and you end up distilling it down into choosing the method of accomplishment, which would be the tool.

Very interesting. Yeah, when I work with clients, I run into this problem all the time. And then I have this great framework that I call the bracket framework that I learned from somebody, Sam Kaner. He's got this great book on participatory facilitation. And basically, you can imagine it as multiple brackets. So, the bigger bracket is what's your biggest goal and objective? And then within that, there are a number of smaller brackets. And so you break that up into smaller and smaller and smaller. So maybe the bigger bracket has 4 other brackets inside of it. And it's a visual way to realize how do the small pieces fit into the bigger piece. And it's like zooming way out. And I find that when people are able to go through that exercise and zoom way out, then suddenly they can see all the smaller pieces in that context. And there's this aha moment.

Mm-hmm. They need to, they need to recognize though that tools are just things, AI tools included, and the things have to have a purpose. And so by definition, your goals for your business, the problems you're trying to solve are part of the bigger picture. They are zoomed out a stage or two from the tools themselves. That's the part that has to click. If someone's zooming out and they're like, oh my God, everyone's using AI, I should use AI too, they end up in the same place. They need to make sure that they're looking at the picture in the right level.

Yes. Yeah. They have to focus on the right goals and the goal can't be the tool. Last time we spoke, Josh, you drew a line between what AI actually does better than people versus the hype. And I'm wondering, where is that line for your clients in terms of Where's the place where AI should be the thing? Not forget the tool, just like the methodology of using an intelligence like this versus what is hype and should be done by humans still?

I think that we have seen multiple categories of AI applications built and failed on current and recent models and, and states of AI. I don't want to say that these categories are always going to fail when you try to build them with AI, because AI is going to be getting better. But over the last few years, we've seen AI-written content just completely automated, no human at the last step doing any edits. We've seen AI SDRs doing completely automated outreach. We've seen AI completely making your pitch deck. We've seen AI— that's a handful of examples, but those sorts of fully automated applications where the thing that AI does directly touches a prospect or a customer or an investor or some other person in your audience for content, that kind of thing. I think that trend is not coincidental. I think that as AI advances, people become better at discerning what is made by AI and what's not. It's like, it's an arms race. AI's gonna get better and more realistic, and, and we're gonna get better at detecting, and it's, it's going like this. It's like a cybersecurity situation versus hackers. Mm-hmm. So. And, and I do think that AI still holds and will hold for a long time a stigma where something made by a human is perceived as higher value in a lot of cases. So if you're making a whole bunch of AI content and people can read it and they're like, that reads just like ChatGPT, it has all the right tells, we know that's not your real idea or your real thought. You didn't put time and effort into that, and therefore why should I put the time and effort in to read it? And that's just one example. So Customer-facing things, prospect-facing things, audience-facing content, final drafts of things. Really, there's a pattern where AI hasn't been as good at that as it is the first draft or back office tasks. There's a reason that AI is so good at software engineering. It's because if it messes up, it's not a big deal. You can catch it and fix it and it doesn't harm your reputation because it doesn't touch customers like directly, but the product will have bugs and stuff, but you go fix that and then it's fine. And software engineering is a very, you know, when you've done it right because it works. And, and so if you have the knowledge of how to do the project and how to write the code, then it's like binary. Did it work? Yes or no? And so AI can learn how to write the code and just do the thing, but the judgment call of what to build, that's a different story. And, and AI's still not quite there to that. If you put that into other categories, AISDR failed because it didn't understand, it didn't have business acumen to know how to conduct good outbound strategy. The first AISDR companies would just spray your entire TAM with the message. They weren't looking for, is it the right time to show up to this company or not? And they weren't doing deep enough research. So more recent, AISDR-type products and automated outbound products don't spray the entire market. They are more discerning about the time they choose to send those messages, and they do a lot deeper research. And they work pretty well. They work decently, a lot better than the first generation. The best applications I've seen for AI are like, they're, they're not customer-facing. It's not, there's always that human in the last step running a check, editing the thing, confirming that it's good. That's one difference. And then the other difference is this is going to be a little more niche toward GTM people, GTM teams. If you have a massive corpus of context that the AI has built on about your company and your narrative and your buyers and all of that, then anything that it makes downstream for a GTM purpose is going to be better. So as time has gone on, AI's gotten better at maintaining that corpus of context. So you asked which applications are working and which, where are patterns in the failure. I think those are the patterns I'm seeing. If you're able to maintain a large mass of corpus of context and then keep a human in the loop, there are a lot of applications where AI is actually really good. But if you lose those 2 things, if AI is like right, like the last step, making a final version of something. People pick up on the patterns. And if you aren't able to maintain that corpus of context, then AI doesn't have the material to work with that it needs. And then also, especially in GTM, you're, you're straying farther away from knowledge-based work and more into judgment-based work. So there's not a binary right or wrong way to do the job. And AI struggles when there's ambiguity with that.

In a world where AI gives us more data than ever, the leaders who stand out are the ones who also listen to their body's intelligence. That's why I've created a free Somatic Intelligence Toolkit with practical exercises and use cases. Grab your free toolkit below. Now back to our conversation. It makes me think of Discernment, judgment, but also skill sets. Yeah. The thing that I'm seeing, the pattern, is that the people who spend a lot of time with AI are having to learn new skills or ways of being. And what I mean by that specifically is, for example, if you used to do, let's say, data analysis, and now AI can do a bunch of that, now you're spending more time on something else, and that something else is maybe the discernment of, is this good or not? Is it properly done or not? Where are the mistakes that were made? Or maybe you're doing something else that you didn't used to do. So, do you think that there are some new skills emerging because of this technology? And what might they be? I'm curious what you're seeing from the human side, since this, our conversation really is more than about tools. It's really, I'm curious about the human side. Yeah. So, what's it doing for the people that are being impacted by this?

You definitely have to learn a new set of skills. And if you don't learn that new set of skills, you probably won't have a job on some time horizon. And I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. I think it's just a thing. I like to draw the analogy back to the late '90s leading up before the dot-com bubble, but just the hype that led up to that. The internet was now getting into everyone's homes. Everyone had personal computers and, and that opened the door for the application layer of the internet to be made. So websites and bringing everything online, that's the era when search was being built and payments went online and eventually shopping went online. All of the things that we would do in person. Were being moved onto the internet. This was before SaaS. And I think we're seeing a really similar shift right now. The internet had a lot of bad outcomes. A lot of bad things happened and a lot of good things happened. A lot of potential and opportunity opened up and a lot of people had to find new jobs. And I think we're in a really similar state now. The difference is the internet did not promise to do our jobs for us. And AI is trying to do that. The internet promised a new platform, a new surface in which to do the work. So instead of having to go to the store to buy something, I can click buttons to buy something. So the store opens an e-com store or a different person starts an e-com store selling the same thing. And this guy goes out of business because he didn't think to get online. The place we did business moved. Online. With AI, we are creating a whole new surface in which to do work again. But the unique part this time is one of the promises of AI is that it's gonna do the work instead of the human. And we don't know yet if that's gonna be the case in the long term for everything, but it has been the case for something so far. There's a little bit of talk every year about how AI is talking about taking all these jobs, but in reality, it doesn't actually do work that well. And the tokens are really expensive and you still need people, but we also see layoffs happening all the time. So we don't, like, the dust is in the air. We're in the middle of the change. We don't know what it's going to look like on the other side. If you play it out very far, let's say that we do continue advancing the models, uh, to the point where they're just really good at all the stuff that you try to get them to do. When they're posted online, and then you put the models inside creating little entities so that you've got millions of individual versions of the best large language model at the moment running separately. Give them all memory, give them all lived experience, more or less. They're all doing different things for different people, and they can remember what they did. They're not limited to sessions in the same way. Well, then you create memory over time. And experience of the world, then if you put them into physical bodies like robots doing work and stuff, you, you end up closely approximating a person. And if you can just say, let's assume for the moment we suspend our disbelief and say we're going to create a digital mind that is almost as capable as a, as a person at doing thinking work, and then we're going to create a physical body that's almost as good as the human body doing physical work. and articulation and stuff, or maybe even better, who knows how far that goes. You could feasibly make a bunch of those things and have them do all the jobs. Yeah, no, it's like— I don't know where the line is going to be between what we make capable with AI systems and humans doing the work. There's a line somewhere perhaps that we haven't reached yet where AI reaches a limitation. Maybe it never does. So I think the best way to adapt to the times is to learn, just like in the internet boom, learn how to use the internet, learn how to use AI because the world is changing. We don't know what the world is going to look like after the dust settles, but yes, you have to learn new skills. You have to learn how to work with the models. Every single job will be touched by AI at some point, including blue-collar labor and trades if we get robotics to actually work well enough. People are going to try to do that. Let's make robot plumbers. Every job is eventually going to be attempted with it. We don't know where it's going to be successful or not. We don't know, is creativity going to be the limit? Is durability and dexterity going to be the limit for robots? We have no idea. But yeah, to defend yourself, learn the skills, embrace the technology, you really don't have a choice, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately. We don't know what the world's going to look like.

We don't know what it's going to look like. But for now, I think for the next, let's say, 12, 18 months, I have this theory, and I'm curious what you think of it. My theory is that some of the skills will be obsolete, but the skills that will become more and more important are the ones where discernment, critical thinking, strategic planning, zooming out and focusing on the goals, these kinds of skills are going to become more and more important because traditionally I spent a lot of time in large companies. And so what you have typically is you have workers that do tasks, then you have people above that that think a little more strategically, and then you have people above that who think even more strategically. And the time horizon of what you're thinking about corresponds to the level that you're at in the organization. If I'm individual contributor level, the task that I'm thinking about is over the next hour or maybe even day or a few days. And if I'm the CEO, I'm thinking about 3 years out, 5 years out. So, I would argue that right now the thing is all being flipped upside down. So, what do you think of that hypothesis?

Well, I'll add to it the pattern that we're seeing, people are trying to replace AI or replace individual contributors with AI. And that's actually not worked out that well uniformly. There are some areas where it has and a lot of areas where it hasn't. Middle managers are the most hit that I've seen. It's not necessarily the ability to do a job, like a productive job, an IC level job typically. And it's not the high level thinking, strategy, critical thinking, that kind of thing that you get at the executive level. It's management. It's like coaching your team, developing your team, making sure your team is being productive. It's the management layer that's being hit first. So I would add a level of complexity. The job itself, if you're a designer, clicking buttons in Figma and making something look beautiful and useful. If you're an engineer, typing on your computer and making the code that does the thing. If you're A salesperson talking to customers and getting sales. That is actually, we're seeing those teams get smaller, but you're, we're not replacing them entirely. I've seen entire middle management teams get flattened at companies with thousands of people. They would have the manager, the director, the senior director, and the VP, and then now suddenly it's VP, manager, individual contributor, like flat. They've just erased entire layers in the org because they don't need it anymore. One manager can now manage 15 people, whereas before it was 6.

Why is it changing?

Just as an example. Um, I'm seeing that the most— hello. I think it's because the, the, the main places where managers had to put their time in the past are now being occupied by AI. So reviewing the code of junior engineers, AI can do that pretty well. Reviewing sales calls with sales reps and pointing out things they could do better, AI is really good at that. Practicing with your reps, AI is pretty good at that, like roleplaying and whatnot. If you are, if you're a manager now, you don't have to worry so much about a lot of that type of work, so you can focus on hiring. You can focus on career development because people don't want their career, internal career coach. Let's figure out your career path in the company. They don't want that from an AI. They want that from a person. Yeah, so it's just like cutting out parts of the job description that allow one manager to manage a larger team. I'm seeing that a lot more than I am like eliminating IC roles.

What's happening to those people?

Go get other jobs, take IC roles again. I'm seeing a lot of sales managers take AE roles. I'm seeing a lot of people leave tech and work at non-tech companies. I'm seeing a lot of people just go work for newer companies. If you worked at a, I don't know, Seismic, a couple thousand people in the company, something like that. I don't know, many thousands of people most likely in Seismic. If you worked for them, that's like a legacy SaaS company that did not have an AI basis before AI appeared, and then they've had a really hard time adapting. People are leaving that company and going to work. For, I don't know, Anthropic, pick an AI company that's newer, that's got a more current product that people actually need.

We can only keep up with change so much until we start to hit a point that is a physical thing, a nervous system of overwhelm of this is too much change, there's too much uncertainty, it's happening too quickly. And there's something that I'm seeing in almost all of the people that I work with, whether they're CEOs or senior technical people, people who are Early adopters, people who are technologists, even these people, I'm seeing a sense of, I can't keep up. This is too much. I have a friend who's a CEO of an amazing company in the climate space, and he's, I don't know, he's 42 or something. He's like, I'm getting too old for this. He's like, I just can't keep up. It's too much.

I know that feeling. I think everyone's feeling it though.

Exactly. That's my point is everyone is feeling it.

Everyone's feeling it. And I think that, I think you need to get used to it. I think you need to learn to bear it. I don't want to say tough it out because that's got some connotation attached, but the world isn't going to slow down just because the human nervous system can't keep up with the pace of technology anymore. We created a system Where businesses have to move so quickly, and then you get international politics involved because some of this can be weaponized. The world will not slow down. Technology won't slow down. We could outlaw AI tomorrow because it's upsetting the job market and and people's nervous systems can't keep up with the change, and we're feeling overwhelmed. And every other country in the world will keep going, and then we can't compete in the market anymore, and the U.S. becomes I don't know France. So get used to it. I know the feeling, it's really uncomfortable and every generation's feeling it in different ways. I know that. And I think that's just the way it's going to be.

Yeah. I would say that get used to it and upskill yourself so that you can handle it. The capacity, you have the capacity. And this is something that I'm really curious about in the clients that you work with. Because I do believe that you can learn to hold more. You can learn to hold ambiguity and complexity in a way that doesn't overwhelm you and paralyzes you or makes you go all out of whack so that after working a bunch of years, you burn out, which is, by the way, burnout is at an all-time high. So, I think there is a way to learn. The people that you work with, what do you sense is their way of coping with this intensity? In the best of scenarios, in the best of examples. Well,

I'm thinking through, I'm thinking through the best and the worst. Yeah. I know people who have foregone all other areas of their life except work, and all they do is work and they grind and they tell themselves they're happy with that. And I think it's incredibly unhealthy. Be my guest if you want to go that route. I don't think that's the only answer. I think that what we talked about at the very beginning of the call where don't Feel pressured to do a thing just because that's where all the hype is and that's what everyone's talking about. Adopting AI for the sake of adopting AI. Don't feel that pressure. Stay focused on what's actually delivering results for you and for people who pay you money, your customers, your clients, whatever they are. That level of focus, I'd say, is part of it. I would say don't lose sight of your own health. You can't do anything, you can't learn anything new, you can't work or operate or, or think clearly to see ahead any of that if you're not sleeping, if you're not eating healthy, if you're not staying active. But I, I, I wanna get a little bit more specific. You said if, if people are feeling the ambiguity, if they're feeling the vagueness of the situation, they don't really know what, what to do. I want to, I want to get more specific about what all of that means. And you might have to repeat yourself just because I'm, I don't know if I'm getting exactly what you meant accurately, but what it sounded like is if, if people are in an environment where they're hearing a whole bunch of news across a whole bunch of areas in the world and change is going so fast and AI's doing this and AI's doing that, why aren't you doing this? You're falling behind. If you're feeling overwhelmed by that, you might need to cut out some of the channels. It sounds like you're Trying— you're, you're intaking too much information and you're hitting decision fatigue, or you are overanalyzing the decisions. So choose the channels where you take in information carefully. What is actually going to impact your day-to-day decisions? And pick a lane where you feel you're the closest to the skills you want to have. I'm not gonna go out and become I don't know, biochemical engineer specializing in protein folding. I'm not gonna try to do a career pivot into a place where I don't have that much experience. I'm gonna focus on what are my options in the short term and midterm, starting where I am now, building on the skills I already have and the experience I already have, and finding a path into the future from there. And then I'm I, I can just tune out things when I'm overwhelmed. I would, I would say be really careful with your information intake, especially the emotional charge of the information. Social media is really bad about this. The media in general is bad about this. So there's this negative emotional charge and yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff happening in the world, but if you're feeling overwhelmed to the point where you can't function and you're worried about your ability to exist in the world and have an income and all of that, maybe you should tune that stuff out. Clear your head and get focused on your life, your skills, and what you asked about skills, but your own job situation, income, skills, future prospects, that kind of thing. What else can I say that's specific to clients? What are founders today who are trying to build the companies of tomorrow doing? They are embracing the communities that have formed here in the city and in other places, finding other founders like them who think similarly. They are, we are maniacally focused on what we're building. We're not jumping between 8 projects at once. Pick 1, 2, maybe 3 projects and really focus on shipping. Get it, get it to where you can get people using it, get people testing it, try to get paid. And if it doesn't work, move on to the next one, but don't work on everything all at once. Mentorship, talking to people who are ahead of you in the process or older than you and doing things you aspire to do, something like that. Get lots of feedback. I'm thinking if your goal is to create a company where You're able to get paid and become like an AI founder who's more resilient to the changes in the market. Be focused really, really hard on the problems you're solving for a specific customer. Get really, really, really, really specific and then don't get distracted to other things. Don't build a bunch of other stuff. Build that business, be really focused on it, surround yourself with other founders who are doing the same thing. Yeah. Tune out negative emotionally charged media. I could go on and on, but

yeah,

there's some thoughts.

This is great. I love what you're saying because it hits home to the things that we can control.

Yeah.

Right. The filters of the channels. Finding the right community, being product obsessed, and really focusing on building something that's of value, finding mentors, getting good feedback. These are all really concrete things. So I really love that, Josh. Josh, from a pragmatic angle, my last question to you, what would you say is your greatest hope for where we end up 3 to 5 years from now? If, if the things that we're seeing now keep going the way they are, what's your greatest hope?

Ooh, that's a good one. Have you seen the new movie that just came out called Disclosure Day?

I heard, I see, I saw trailers for it, but I haven't seen it yet.

Okay.

Steven Spielberg, right?

Yes. Yes. Rotten Tomatoes gave it, I don't know, 70 or 80%, and Rotten Tomatoes is wrong. It is a brilliant movie and I'll, I'll, I'll give the premise of it without spoiling anything because it's so timely and, and it's exactly what I'm thinking of when you ask that question. Mm-hmm. Whole bunch of data has been suppressed for 80 years by the government and private corporations about aliens. They're actually on Earth. We found their ships and crash sites and we have videos of them and we actually have specimens and all that. It's all been covered up and Someone tries to reveal it to the world. Disclosure Day is like what, what she calls it. She's not afraid of them. It's not like an alien invasion situation. She's not afraid of them. She says they're actually really nice. The, the evolutionary advantage that they had that helped them become a spacefaring, multi-stellar, becoming galactic species was empathy. And I think that my hope for the future comes from that. I, I've, I thought this before that movie and that movie blew my mind. And that's why I love it so much because it was saying the same thing. I think that over the course of technology, we have created weapons that can literally destroy the world in seconds. We have created an information system that spreads information instantly around the entire globe. We have institutions and people in power who use those systems to manipulate people and create not great environments. Let's just say containing all of the negativity in that for a second. We've grown our civilization to a point where we can destroy ourselves with a breath. The house of cards falls over. It's so easy now. And I think that we need a lot more compassion and empathy in our society and in our politics and in our business and in our institutions. I think we need people to have a lot more care for one another. I think a perfectly competitive, purely capitalistic, whoever owns the business makes all the money and they can do whatever they want with everyone else. That system doesn't work. We learned that in the last gilded era, in the beginning of the last century, 100 years ago now. And that's where unionization laws and worker protections and all of that stuff came in. Minimum wage laws, all of that. So we know purely competitive meritocratic capitalism doesn't work. There's somewhere in between for business that we need to find. There's somewhere in between for politics. And I think that The world has just, how do I say it? I don't know. Has the world gotten dangerous? Is it that we've created technologies that, that just have the potential to destroy us or inhibit the growth of society? And the only way to keep people from using them to do that, because they don't do it inherently. The existence of a nuclear bomb does not suppress a society or the existence of Social media doesn't like twist young people's ability to socialize or whatever on its own. It does it because people use it to do that. People design the algorithms, people deploy them, things like that. If we're going to prevent that from happening, we, it has to, it's empathy and compassion. The people who are making the decisions have to care enough about the people who have no power to protect them for no personal gain. That is the definition of Empathy and compassion in action, right? And I, I'm hopeful because I have to be. If we don't encourage that and develop that, then you're gonna end up with a class system, which is what we're seeing emerge. People calling, we're in the second Gilded Age. Inequality is so big. Billionaires are so different. The proportional difference between Elon Musk and a billionaire is as unfathomable to the billionaire as a millionaire to a billionaire. It's a factor of 1,000. So if you can imagine having $1 million, a billion is unfathomable. And now we've created a whole other tier of the same distance out proportionally. If we don't want that to continue and pull us apart, we have, we have to change the way the world works into a more empathetic way. And I think that one very tactical specific example of this would be, let's play AI out 3, 5 years in the future. We've automated a lot more jobs. Robots are getting into manufacturing in the next few years and, and more people are being put out of work and they can't upskill fast enough because business is moving faster than education. Let's say we're going to have to have a very, very serious conversation as a society about taxation and universal basic income. There's already, it's 15% of the population right now has a hard time finding employment of any kind. They're not in the workforce. There are a lot of reasons behind that. There's a lot of research behind it. It's mostly shifts that happened in the last 50 years. It's not super recent, but they're not even in the workforce and we're talking about unemployment as part of the workforce. It's just gonna get worse and we really have to think about how do those people live? What do they do? So I've got tons of thoughts about what society looks like in a world where AI does most of the production, food, housing, construction, repair, designing new technologies, manufacturing new technologies, new objects, operating markets, extraction of resources, manufacturing, all of that. People are gonna be more focused on entertainment. Mm-hmm. 'Cause you got time. People are gonna be more focused on spending time with each other. Hopefully you either end up in a Ready Player One situation or you end up in people are offline hanging out situation. I think it's, we're going to have both, but like, we're

going to have both.

Yeah. I think the really tactical explanation is universal basic income coming into the political discourse.

Yeah.

And there are going to be so many different examples of that.

And I love your emphasis on empathy and compassion. It's, it's I agree with you completely. I think that it is so necessary to develop these qualities in people. And in a way it's very much against capitalism, but in a way it's almost the next evolution of what needs to happen in order for us to see the society that we really want to inhabit.

I don't even know if I would say it's against capitalism. I think if you try to distill the meaning down into 2 words, you could probably end up there, but it's a much more complicated Today, we would not define capitalism the way we did 100 years ago. 100 years ago, it was you start a business, you own the means of production and all the profits. You pay people as little as humanly possible, make them work as much as humanly possible, and they'll do it because everyone needs a job and everyone, you know, there's nothing to do in the cities except work in the factories. So you're going to go work on a farm, you're going to work in a factory, take your pick. Neither, neither is very pleasant. 100 years ago or more. Over time, we've added more rules and more guardrails to protect the worker. And I think, I think the true definition of Western-style capitalism, the values behind it that we originally designed it around was if you try, uh, and, and, and fail and fail and fail and succeed and fail and succeed and fail and succeed, you're trying to learn, you're learning new things, you're working hard. You can improve your own life. That's the entire value system distilled down, I think. And some of that system has been breaking, and that's important to talk about, but it's not like the topic we're talking about now. But I think if we can preserve that, where if you learn the new skills, if you work hard and try to do the new thing and, and all of that, the system will help you improve your life. That, that's what we'd have to just keep our eyes on. Yeah. We don't have to, I'm, I'm not trying to get political, but we don't have to have mega corporations, global conglomerate corporations pulling $7 billion of profit while doors fly off of airplanes and food contains known carcinogens and people die because their insurance won't cover their procedure while the company pulls billions in profit. We don't have to have both of those things happening at once.

Nice closing thoughts, Josh. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's good to have you on the show.