Is AI Coming For Your Job? | Zack Kass

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So for you guys who listen to the show, you know that AJ and I, despite our interest and having a lot of fun incorporating, integrating and using AI in our lives, we also can be a bit of AI doomers due to studying human behavior for as long as we have. So we have a guest today, Zach, who wrote a very optimistic book about AI, and so his challenge today is hopefully shed some light on some areas that possibly that AJ and I are having some trouble with. But I also wanted to sort of give you an example from my own life of using AI, where I really became very concerned. I'm sure, Zach, you'll get a kick out of this, and it's probably something you heard a million times. So I love Claude. I use it as an artist, as a collaborator, back and forth. I think I have it programmed pretty good to challenge me on a lot of things, but it also loves to blow smoke up my ass, and I appreciate that. And, and I certainly find myself trying to get validation from it at times and just through work. However, despite all that and the fun and the advancements that I've had with work and using it, there was one tool that has frightened me now. I'm an artist, I'm a musician, and I was excited to get to work with Suno, just to see what it could do and have some fun with it. And I heard some. Some things that some other people did. There was a lot of controversy around it. As an artist, I personally know that artists hold their talent in high regard in their identity, because despite what the world throws at us, we like to think of ourselves. Well, hey, I have this unique, special talent that makes me unique, interesting, and it brings a lot of validation to my life. So in using Suno, I had a lot of fun. I was really impressed by it. But how I was impressed also led to mass depression. And it lasted for about five or six days, where I was just numb to the fact that though everything that I thought about music, everything that I enjoyed about music was then turned upside down. Now, granted, I also see all the ways that it could be incredibly helpful, and I look forward to seeing how it helps artists. But there was a part of me that I felt was killed in that process. And maybe there's a rebirth and you can help us with that today, but I'm not sure if our audience has experienced that. But even in that realm, I think all of us are seeing pieces of our identity being shifted, changed, or going through, as your book calls it, an AI renaissance. So I'd like to give you the floor and let you take it from there.

So. So, John, just walk me through you. You. You recorded something with Suno, and it sounded just like you. And then you realized, oh, this, this. Now there's this digital entity that's creating music that sounds just like me. So why? What's my purpose as a musician? That was your. That was the crisis.

I think that was certainly part of it. I think another part of it was I was so impressed of what it gave me back that perhaps deep inside, maybe I questioned whether I could have came up with something as good. But the thing that really made me think was, but I don't have access or the resources to be able to. To create something of that scope. I don't have a catalog of working musicians that I could just call up and start collaborating with. That takes resources, that takes relationships, that takes a lot of other work to make all of those things happen. Now, to throw out a name that everybody knows well, we could use Rick Rubin as an example. He's not an instrumentalist. He doesn't play an instrument. He only works on his own taste, as he calls it. And now this is something, as we work with something like Suno that we get to do, we get to be a Rick Rubin and be a taste maker, or as what the kids call it, vibe coding. So it's a new approach to Such an old skill.

Some of it, it sounds like, might be, you know, just the blown away, right, this sort of, like, shock that takes time to update. Then the, Then the. Then you start processing all the potential consequences and, you know, you're plenty smart, so I'm sure you start sort of unraveling what it could mean and your mind starts to wander all the places it could go, which, by the way, I get, for what it's worth. And I don't know if, you know, I don't know if either of you. I think we gave you advanced copies. I don't know if you read the book. The book tries to spell out plenty of these costs. And one of them, it is in fact sort of this idea of loss of identity. And in fact, I will argue that of all the things that we should be talking about right now, you've actually arrived at the most pressing one. And this is a somewhat hot take because the current doom sits in the camp of, you know, existential will we die? Or sort of will people lose their jobs and then lose all their money? And the risk that I call out, I think being even probably more realistic and scary than that is this idea of loss of identity. And loss of identity can come via AI in multiple forms. And one of them may early feel like this sort of creative common issue, which is like, if anyone can produce anything, then what purpose does anyone have to produce anything? And that's a very interesting question that, by the way, has been asked for a long time. And that's one of the things we call it in the book. You know, when, when we, when we created computers, people said, why would I ever write on parchment anymore, right on paper? And actually this morning, Paki McCormick announced an author who writes a. A very amazing substack called Not Boring. That's. That's incredible. Wrote this amazing treatise on the importance of writing. He said, what was the last great idea you ever. You heard on a podcast? He said, nothing good happens on. No great ideas come forward on podcasts. They have to be written because they have to be hammered at. They have to be chiseled. They have to be, you know, they have to be really worked on for a long time and sort of listed all the great works of writing and talks about the lack of famous podcast episodes because most great ideas have to be put to paper. And I bring this up because one of the. What we talk about in the book, the antidote to what you're describing can come in sort of two forms. One, the historical context, which basically says that Humans have been terrified of new technology for as long as we have invented new technology. And this is no exception. And I have a lot of sympathy because describing the Internet to someone, first they laughed at it, then they said this is going to destroy everything. And then they said this is boring and what's next? Every great thing starts out as a toy or something laughable. AI is no different. They kept moving the goalpost. They said it'll never work. Then they said it'll never be a business. And then they said the business is going to be too big and it's going to destroy the world. And I bring this up to say that fear is inherent in change. And that's just that. I get. But there is a point you made which I think is I don't have an answer for and is worth actually being honest about, which is this idea of sort of like infinite creativity. Right now I think it is really cool that anyone can create music. And at the limit, if you extrapolate it long enough, anyone can create sort of anything. And the idea that art is unique to the creator is a pretty important idea. And the way I explain this in my small brain with the limited information I have today, I explain it in sort of three ways. The first is why does a human make art that is good? They make it, John, you know, for themselves. They don't act like every great artist makes art for themselves. They don't make it for other people. And so unless someone is like, listen, I have to make money on art, I would argue that Suno doesn't actually threaten you because great artists should make art for the purpose of their, themselves, their happiness, their art. This is written about extensively. I of course, am not an artist, but I'm preaching what artists have told me. And I don't think that AI actually threatens that at all. The purpose of art remains the same. And one should. Second thing I think about is the water cooler effect. The water cooler effect basically proposes, or the water cooler theory or phenomenon proposes that infinite creativity is actually sort of uninteresting to the commons. Because what we really want is to be able to talk about things, for example, like Game of Thrones. Did you both watch Game of Thrones? So Game of Thrones ended terribly. I mean, just, just terribly. And the only reason we all kept watching it is because we were all like suffering together. Like season that. Season 7 and 8 were just so bad. And we watched it because we want. Because we were suffering together. And there's actually this like shared experience that's really valuable and what's interesting about this is when people talk about sort of infinite personalization. Well, will we all even. How will the Zeitgeist work if anyone can just create anything? Well, it turns out people actually want to share experiences. And to the extent that even some of those experiences are bad, we actually can have like collective schadenfreude. And this also suggests that there will continue to be tastemakers. Now, John, your point? Will the tastemakers make art in the way that we are used to it being made? I don't know. And by the way, if you had told Beethoven or Bach about Deadmau5, they might have said, buck that, you know, we've seen enough. Shut it all down. We don't need the Internet, we don't need synthesizers. Shut it all down. And of course, deadmau5, by the way, had this very famous viral tweet recently where he went after AI and said, burn it down. Burn it all down. And by the way, I like his music and I've been to his concerts, but I do think it is important to remember that, like, those who came before him might have said the same about him and that the future artists are going may look different, but I think there will be a collective common. And I think that there will be this idea of good and bad. And like, guys like Rick Rubin will still. Or people like Rick Rubin will still be really important because there will be taste. And whether that, you know, how that. How that taste is formed, I don't know. The third, though, is the most important. And it's the thing that gets me out of bed every day, which is that at the end of the day, humans have had the same happiness function for as long as we have existed on Earth. And this is a remarkable thing that I don't think is talked about enough when everyone talks about the end of the human experience or sort of human joy, which is that we all desperately want time with friends and family and physical community. And when we've done so many death experiments and so many happiness experiments, we just don't need to even debate it anymore. The quality of a life well lived is a life lived with friends and family, simply or not, in purpose, in community. And what's cool about this is that one of the most important parts of a life well lived is culture. And that culture doesn't have to be exact, it doesn't have to be elaborate, it doesn't have to be loud, but it has to exist. And what we are discovering today is that people don't actually consider the digital world to be meaningful on a cultural basis that no matter how much you listen to an artist's songs on Spotify, you are willing to pay $1,000 and drive 100 miles to see them in concert. Because that is culture and I revel in that. I take exceptional comfort knowing people want to be in physical community, enjoying these experiences together, and think that that is the ultimate antidote to whatever is coming next to this idea of however good. I guess we know, because we've run this experiment so many times, that we really want to be near each other. And I re. I recently bought a. I'm a co owner in a women's professional volleyball team, the San Francisco professional Volleyball Team. And I would never have expected to be a part owner in a professional sports team, except that I love volleyball. It's a huge part of buying life and my wife's life. And I'm sure, more than almost anything else, that people are going to want to find more and more ways to go and be in a space doing real things, enjoying real experiences with each other. I'm literally betting quite a bit on that. And take an exceptional comfort knowing that however good Suno gets, the concert is still going to matter. The local theater is coming back, Broadway is coming back. All these experiences that we'd sit were sort of written off because. Because of the digital revolution are actually having quite a renaissance, quite a moment. And I don't think we have to wonder why.

I did get over myself and the whole effect that it. That it had and it just took a few days to.

To.

To think about it and. And to wrap my head around how I wanted to use it moving forward. And I do agree there's nothing that is going to replace the live concert, certainly in my eyes. I don't like going to shows where it's recorded music or digital music. I want to hear a live band. I want to feel the kick drum in my gut and I want to see and feel the human component to all of that. I agree with you on that part and thanks for all that.

But John, it doesn't change the fact that the experience, like, had that impact on you. And I think what you just described is something that many people are experiencing and a lot of them are. And it's not ephemeral for some people. For a lot of people, it's this like, pit in their stomach and they can't get rid of it.

Well, I brought it up in a. In a music group that I was in that I was experimenting with it and the. And I had never been called so many names in my in my life. Especially in a domain that that I can maneuver and really wow. So you know me wrapping my head around it. I also saw the gut knee jerk reaction that people had and it was, it was insane. It was nothing I've experienced before, but it certainly made me even question it and think about it even harder.

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Go to Leesa.com for 20% off mattresses, plus get an extra $50 off with promo code charm exclusive to our listeners. That's L E-E-S A.com promo code CHARM for 20% off mattresses, plus an extra $50 off. Support our show and let them know we sent you after checkout. Lisa.com promo code charm looking at that example, obviously there's the transition between analog and digital, and everyone on the music sphere has transitioned over time. So I was talking to Johnny about using pedals and going from acoustic guitar to electric guitar. So that transition's always been happening. But for many of us, when we think about what we create, whether it's for work or for pleasure or art, we have our identity wrapped up in that, and it is being displaced right now, and no one's really talking about it. And this is one of the most fascinating parts of the book for me. And many in our audience are in information work. They're in front of the computer all day long. They're working with tech. And now they're seeing those skills that they pride themselves in that they dedicated their life to earning, to putting in the work, be replaced by the latest model and the latest version. And now it's moving so fast that we can't even wrap our head around this exponential growth in AI where it went from. We're chatting with it and getting some simple answers to now. Agents are delivering work comparable, if not better than our own work. And for those in our audience who are feeling this identity displacement, like John, what do you say to them and how do we go through it to get to this other side, this renaissance?

I'm glad that I wrote the book when I did, I will say, because if I had written it any earlier, no one would have cared about it. Just as an aside, it's a really funny thing, like, timing is everything. And I think it's going to be a New York Times bestseller at this point because we've pre sold so many copies. And if it isn't, you know, the editorial team doesn't like me, that's okay. But if we'd written that earlier, people would have called me an idiot. And there are these really great books that were written about AI in like, 2017, 18, 19, Life 3.0, which is exceptional. Max Tate, Mark Super. The Alignment Problem, Nick Bostrom. Just exceptional works that no average person has ever read or will ever read now because they're part of the Sort of the old, the old guard. But if I'd written it any later, I don't know that I would have had the courage to actually say. Let me be very clear. It's not that I don't believe that things are going to go really well. It's that I am actually increasingly sure that they are going to go really well and that the costs are going to be hard for people to stomach. And one of those costs, and maybe the greatest is this one. And when I talk about it this way, I first, I literally every time now have to station, identify and say I am very sympathetic to what's going on. I'm not trying to offer scriptural answers and I am also doing my best to actually try to make this better. And there I can talk about the efforts I'm making to try to make this go well. But I do think there's a story that you read it. If you read that section. That to me is actually the best part of the. Which I'll just share because you know, I don't know readers go by the book. But, but I'll share this. Yeah, I'll share the best part. Here's the hill. Stick the lead out there. You put play your best song first, right, John, Isn't that how every, every great concert begins? October 2024. The Dock Workers go on strike, the longshoremen walk off the eastern seaboard and on October 2, the head of the longshore and yearly held tag. It goes on cnn. And for this hour long interview that I've now watched more than almost any other. Yeah, more than any other interview ever watched CNN. During which in like the first 10 minutes, he points very calmly at the camera and says to the American people, you have no idea how powerful and dangerous I am. I will cripple you. He's talking about the American economy. I remember. John, do you remember what he wanted? Do you remember what his demand was?

There was a lot of usual union demands, but I also remember that he did not want any automation on the docs.

There you go. So the, the, the longshoremen had had actually one request, one demand. They had some ask, but they had one demand. They didn't actually want more money. That wasn't part of the, that wasn't part of the deal. They got a little bit, I think they got like a quarter more and they didn't want safer working conditions which are the two tenants of every labor union since we organized labor. What they wanted was a guarantee, as you pointed out from the ports that we wouldn't automate their jobs. And I, I was super fascinated. And in the midst of this, by the way the picket signs read robots don't pay taxes and automation harms families. And I stared at those picket signs and I was like, whoa, this is going to be the single most sort of prominent AI issue for the next 20 years. Like, this is it. This is going to be it. And so went and tried to meet with him. He wouldn't meet with me. I'll save that part for the book because it's a good part. But got to meet with a bunch of his long. And the results are all, all the interviews are off the record. The results are in the book. What we discover in talking to these guys very quickly in, in through a series of questions is that they aren't actually talking about an economic issue. They're not actually describing a world where they can't make money. They're describing a world where they can't have purpose. And, and, and again, that they're, I'll let, I'll sort of let the results in the book speak for themselves. And moreover, when you press them and when you press anyone. So if I said to you, John, who benefits economically if we automate the ports?

I would say the people at the top of the hierarchy.

Well, that is what the longshoremen said when I first asked. They said it's the capitalist. That was, they were trained to say it's the capitalist. But who else, John, eventually benefits at AJ Sorry, I don't mean. I just, I, I, I, I'm, I want to. I like this part because it goes to the heart of the matter. Who else eventually benefits if we automate reports?

Everybody.

Everyone, including, by the way, eventually the longshoremen and their kids. And the reason I know this, the reason I say this with certainty, is that we are all descendants of people whose jobs were automated to our economic benefit. All of us. And in fact, we, and we don't want them. But we wander the earth all day, every day, asking ourselves very explicitly sometimes, when is this good or service going to be better, faster or cheaper? Without realizing what we're asking is when is a human going to be extricated from the manufacturing of this good or service? And we're not asking because we're jerks. We're asking it because we are rational economic actors conditioned to believe that the world is going to get better, faster, cheaper, all the time. And in, in this process, what I realized is actually we all want everyone else's jobs to automate, just not our, that like the world, the panacea is one where we have a bunch of purpose and everything is free.

When I was in the forum arguing with people and giving my point of why I was messing with Suno and having some fun with it, one of the comments was, you know, this AI is good to do my taxes, but it should not be here. And I was like, oh, as long as it takes somebody else's job, but not yours, right? And we were just doing a podcast a few weeks ago where I was saying that, and I'm sure everyone has asked, why can't we have a automatic dishwasher that's been asked the million or wash my clothes, why do I have to do this? Well, I'm somebody who likes to wash my own dishes. There's specific reasons why I do that and that just because it can be done and automated doesn't mean that it should be. And, and that all of us are now going to have to make these choices of where AI and automation affect our lives and which parts that we continue to do ourselves to keep that routine, that tradition, that ritual in our lives that makes us be able to perform, have a great well being in our own lives.

So one of the papers we wrote recently is called where is your automation boundary? Or discovering the automation. Yeah, this is a very sensitive time because whereas two years ago when I talked about the stuff, people were like that guy's an idiot. Now I talk about the stuff and they're like, that guy is the harbinger of do. A lot of people are open to these ideas, but, but I'm more sensitive than ever that people went from laughing to, to being angry because the goalposts move. They were like, this is never going to work now that it worked. And they're like, well, this shouldn't go any further, but the automation boundary question is a really fun one. I like to pose it. You guys can pose it, pose it to your friends tonight. I'll pose it to all your listeners. If you could automate everything, where would you stop? That's a question I like to ask people. I basically open every lecture I do at a college university with this one. By the way, there's some things we all agree we should not automate, right? There's people with a couple brain cells who are like, look, we should definitely do a couple things. And the answers get crude really quickly. But when you start talking about all the things in your life that you want automated, you start looking around at all the people around you who are doing those jobs and you think, oh, yeah. And the blowback on Uber was super reasonable early on because people are like, what's the utility here? Who cares? All we're doing is putting taxi drivers out. They work so hard for these medallions, and we're ruining their lives. And Travis Kalanick became Public enemy, and he had to sort of become this villain Persona in order to make it work. And. And the, you know, people, People even around the business were like, this doesn't make sense. Aren't we building a safer, more equitable way to move people around the world? But it doesn't feel like that for the people in. In the system. And on the other side, we can say, yeah, it's really nice that I can order a car. And I. And like, violence and theft has gone way down in rideshare and livery. I mean, all these incredible. All these incredible signs. But in the moment and even shortly thereafter, it's really hard. And I would love for my taxes to be automated, but I also have friends who are accountants who are like, wait, what will I do then? And this comes to the point that you asked earlier, aj, that I think we should just talk about, which is, what do we do about this? And the first thing I'll say is, this is going to take a long time, as we call it in the book. One, a lot of work will never automate because we will politically protect it. And this is an unpopular take, but actually, one of the reasons that a lot of efficiency in this world has never arrived is that there is so much political protection for it. The optometrist. I don't even want to begin to explain the amount of corruption that goes into making sure that AJ's glasses are really hard to, like, getting new contact lenses is complicated, and you have to go in to get your eyes checked. And like, the colluding that exists in this very cottage industry to pass policy that makes it very expensive for AJ to get his, you know, new glasses or new, new prescriptions is crazy. And it exists because there's a small concentration of power that says you can't automate a bunch of things. The dock workers got four years state of execution. Four years. That's an aggressive term. But they've got four years to say, we're not going to automate these ports. And in that time, they can hold a gun to the economy's head again and say, we're going to walk off the job site again. And that's not good for everyone else. That's 45,000 people who now get to control the economic outcome of A bunch of others. And I am constantly reminded that when people ask what jobs are going to automate, first I have to tell them it's just the weakest union. Show me the group of people with the least political protection. And by the way, when people talk about software engineers automating, I don't think they're right because Claude code is really good. It is very good. We're very good at writing software with AI. But I think they're right because software engineers have no political protection. They never organize, so they have no union. And even if they had organized, they have very little public sympathy. These are people who make a ton of money, who are seen as sort of the international elite. And I don't think there are many Congress people or senators that would stand up and say we need to protect this group of people who make $500,000 a year. Right. And so political protection is going to be one of these huge issues that basically stops a bunch of jobs from automating. And that's going to have, I think, bad outcomes, quite honestly. The other thing I will say is I think that plenty of jobs are going to discover there's a very near automation boundary. There's plenty of work that we actually don't want to fully automate, and that for some good reasons and some bad reasons, most jobs simply gets augmented. And then the third is I think that we're going to discover a bunch of new work and I think that we are going to quickly find, as we have just rediscovered economies, that there is going to be a bunch of really interesting new things to do, especially in physical world, and that knowledge work will give way to other work. But the last thing I'll say, and this is sort of the capstone in the book, there are also two other scenarios, one in which we automate all work. And if that actually happens, something profound will happen economically and we will probably, and I'll come to that in a second, and we'll probably be faced with something else. And the other is where the utility of work automation gets so real that people actually start being willing to make these sacrifices. And this is what I talk about in the book. I don't know how long the transition period lasts, but there's a point in the next 50 or 100 years where people go, you know what? I don't have this job, but we've done all these other incredible things and the trade off now feels very reasonable. And this presents, as I open the book, I think the crux of my position, which is John Maynard Keynes the book is an homage to John Maynard Keynes. In 1930 he wrote a paper, the Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, in which he argued amidst a backdrop of despair. Everyone was dying in the streets, literally of starvation. He said, I must now disembarrass myself to take flight into the future, to imagine a world I will certainly not live to see, one in which humans may have solved the economic problem and be faced with something more profound. The father of modern macroeconomics arguing that the battle on the horizon is a spiritual one. And that is actually what the book is about. We can't come out and say it explicitly because then people wouldn't take it seriously. But my real question is, can humans find happiness once we've solved a bunch of the problems that we toil ourselves with today? And how do we do that? That's actually what I'm asking in this book and trying to give people something to look forward to and also something to strive for as we start to automate a bunch of things.

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In a lot of these situations, you know, we're looking at generational differences here too. Even of the Guests and myself and Johnny. There's a generational difference. And I ran full steam ahead into AI. Johnny was reluctant to even mess with it and now he's starting to come around on some daily tasks with work and as you heard, with music. But so much of that time spent building the skills, going to school, investing in this system to see this system upheaval where now people who've spent less time, who haven't invested in the education are leveraging agents at skill levels beyond yours. You know, that creates the automation boundary for a lot of us of like, well, I don't want automation to, you know, handle my kids. I want to be there with my kids. But hey, I'm a, I'm an oncologist, I'm a dentist. Like I trained my whole life for this and I spent into the system. I still have student loans. And now you're saying that automation and robots are going to replace me.

The first thing that you're describing, we also call out in the book, which is this idea of the distribution problem. And I have no answer for this. I actually pointed this as the most pressing issue that governments will have to solve for after the governance issue, after we, after the alignment, explainability and bad acting policy is the distribution problem. How do we make sure that the value of automation accrues in the most fair and even way possible? Because if there is a panacea as you describe or as I'm describing on the horizon, the path there, the transition there needs to, needs to be managed well. And I think this is actually one of the jobs for governments to make sure that this is as sort of peanut buttered as possible, especially because the, the trappings will be so great. But I will, I will propose this, A.J. which is, and by the way, this is coming from the son of an oncologist and I have a lot of doctors in my family. My dad's role has never, I'll come back to that in a second. Most people cannot see my dad. Most people get cancer and die globally. And if you told most people on earth that they could see a digital oncologist or a digital radiologist and get treated easily or sort of instantly, they'd be like, yeah, what is this magic? And most oncologists, I bet, I don't know for sure, but I bet would say that's actually a Faustian bargain that they'd be willing to take. Because most people don't go into cancer medicine because they want to make a bunch of money they go into. And having watched my dad spend 40 years in this practice, it asks a lot more than it gives many times. And I think most of these people want people to live a meaningful and happy life. And if we can produce technology that can make my dad feel sort of medically obsolete, by the way, there's a reason why I don't necessarily think that's coming. But in exchange a bunch of people can get treatment that they've never received before. The other side of that coin looks pretty good and is like a world that I would much rather live in than one where oncologists are super scarce and have a ton of purpose because they, you know, everyone has cancer and only if only a few people can, can be seen.

Yeah, I, I think obviously for most of human history wars have not been started over identity, they've been started over scarcity of resources. And what's coming now is this distribution problem of okay, yes, there's going to be even more resources generated from automation, but who gets them? And for those of us who feel like we're losing resources after investing into a system that rewarded our skills, that's a very tough bargain to sell. And I think for many we're hearing it being sold by tech leaders who have an embarrassment of riches already through AI and automation with the amount of money pouring in economically.

I looked at the labor data this morning because I always, now I just need to be prepared for this every time. And the underlying data still looks okay. I mean job loss was up slightly. Unemployment rate still at a near all time low, although it's, it's risen slightly. There seems to be some correlation between job loss and AI, but actually less than people think. It seems actually more correlated with tariffs and other economic hardship. I'm not saying that, I'm not trying to dismiss any of these concerns. I'm just saying the underlying data doesn't yet point to this. The other thing I will say is lots of people have paid into lots of systems that broke. And the hard part about being human is that while we move collectively up and to the right individually, it can often feel quite jagged. Our generation, by the way, the three of us are going to discover that Social Security is a scam, right? We've been paying into a system that is going to break.

I've been told that my whole life.

Guess what? The world's going to be way better than the grant than our grandparents world who got a bunch of Social Security. I mean like I laugh of course the idea that I'm paying into a system that I will never benefit from, but I Also acknowledge that we're building a better world at the same time. And so while there are people who are like, I'm, I'm, I'm participating in this thing and I'm not reaping the benefits, I'm also like, well, you are, you're just not, you don't feel like you're reaping them directly. But actually a bunch of things are moving up into the right that feel much better. Now let's just talk about the big elephant in the room when it comes to this stuff, which is the cost of living. And when I talk about these issues, what people ultimately come back to is they're like, fine, there's a panacea coming, but what about my mortgage, what about my healthcare and what about my kids education? And the most sobering part about this discussion, aj is that I have to remind everyone I talk to about these things is that these three things are not expensive because of a technological failure. They're expensive because of a policy failure that for about 500 years, every generation's greatest privilege and honor was to pass their luxuries to the next generation as commodities. And our ruling class broke that fucking promise. And we need to collectively start to realize that the reason that cost of living is so great is not actually corporate greed, it's political greed. It goes even deeper and further than people realize because where we actually let technology do its thing in deregulated markets, the cost of goods and services plummets. There's that famous Marc Andreessen graph that you could display or at consent and where the government intervened to basically pass special interest, the costs rise and they rise a lot. And in the case of housing, healthcare and education, when people are like, well, how's AI going to fix this? I have two answers. The first, AI is going to do to everything that it can what technology has done to all of the devices in front of you today. The screen that you're looking at me on is $100, where it used to be 5,000. The machine you're working on is, you know, $200. Could be $250 where it used to cost, you know, 5,000. Everything that we let get less expensive gets less expensive. And we're going to do that to lots of other things. I really think we're going to do that to lots of other things. And then one day enough people are going to wake up and realize that they can drive across LA for $10 or $5 in an autonomous vehicle. But a trip to the emergency room five blocks away in an ambulance might literally bankrupt them. And at some point people are going to go, no fucking way. Like, it's clearly not that we can't do this, it's that we're choosing not to. And I say this because I am so sure at this point that there will be this sort of like, reckoning. And Mamdani ran entirely on cost of living and, and, and won easily. And I think everyone is going to start to point at this now. Mamdani's solutions is not what would not be mine. Hamdani's solutions is when the government needs to take and redistribute. And my solution is we need to create more. We need to build a lot more housing. People like, well, how much? I'm like, try 10 million new housing units. People go, where, where, where do they go? I go, I don't know necessarily. But there is so much land and there is so much room for growth. And if we're going to build the best nation on earth, which, which we're trying to, we should expect more people to want to live here. We should pass taxes that basically that say, hey, you can't buy, you can't gobble up vacation properties. There are things we can do to actually make housing more affordable. There are things we can do to make education more affordable. There are things we can do to make health care more affordable. And I think people are going to realize that you don't have to get great health care by going into a box soon and the hospital is going to lose its grip. And these moments are coming and I imagine a future where we don't actually have to debate how will I live anymore, where, where the debate becomes something far more, again, spiritual, possibly.

The race with AI is to alleviate what all civilizations and big cities come to, which is the totem pole that gets top heavy and then comes crashing down. And when the totem, and maybe AI is, and rushing it is to help alleviate it or fix that problem that has happened over and over and over again in cycles.

I think there's a political reckoning. I mean, I think there's.

Well, it's already happening.

It still feels like mostly the same. Like, it still feels like, you know, two feathers in the same bird. Right? Like, I don't hear national politicians seriously talking about ways that they're going to solve the problems that most people face, I hear on either side. And one of the things that I've taken up is trying to remind people that so much of the answers they seek are going to come more and more local, that Actually, the best way that they can improve their lives is to hold their local politicians accountable. Because their local politicians control things like zoning laws which allow people to build ADUs, or allow people to build multifamily housing, or allow people to build new schools, or allow new school charters to get passed, or who allow alternative healthcare systems to show up, who allow all the things that sort of expand access. A lot of these things actually happen at a more local level. And I have taken to sort of reminding people, wherever I go, hold your local politicians accountable. Pointing at the national politicians is, I mean, we all do it, but I'm sort of like, you know what, it's a mess. Let's go elect people nearby that want to get me protected bike lanes and sidewalks and hold the local superintendent accountable. I mean, all the things that actually will steer the quality of life. And I do think on that note, I talk about this in the book. I think there's going to be a return to locality. I think a lot of people are going to rediscover the importance of their local community.

I think that's incredibly important.

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Walt Disney World Resort Identity was certainly one big frustration or concern that Johnny and I had with AI. We see it in our own clients who are now struggling and grappling with job loss and being replaced by AI. The second is connection. You touched on it. Our desire for human connection is so great that it leads us to show up in person. But so much of people's AI use right now outside of work is that artificial intimacy and artificial connection. And I'd love to hear your position and argument around the optimism there as we're seeing more and more of our clients even choose to engage more in this artificial intimacy in having that confidant, having that best friend, that AI, that

girlfriend, boyfriend AI Again, AJ you'll recall this in the book. This section is called Dehumanization. The theory that proposes at some point people will have more interest in a digital and virtual reality than a physical one. That's the theory. Already I have evidence that suggests this isn't the direction it's headed. So one of the hardest parts about when I give my keynote is talking to parents. And I used to ask parents to raise their hand. How many of you feel like your children are less social than you were at their age? And it's sobering. You can hear a pin drop. I don't like doing it anymore. I basically don't. And in the last two years, Jonathan Haidt has taken off the anxious generation. His movement to get phones out of schools. It's awesome. It's fucking awesome. And he has taken up an incredible mantle and I think will be remembered as a sort of a real icon who went after schools at a local, who went after the tech companies at a local level. He didn't go. You know, I think he's probably done a couple congressional hearings. But what he did that was most impressive is he went to the school districts and said, get phones out of your schools. I can't beat Facebook on K Street. I can't beat them in D.C. but I can beat them here. They don't have lobbyists in your school district, so let's get phones out of the school district. And he, and he did it. And it's a reminder that like your super, your teachers care way more about your kids than your national politicians. Like, I, I, I, I remind myself of this all the time. I'm always a first grade teacher. The other thing that is so interesting that's happening right now is as while Jonathan Hyde is doing all this important policy work, kids and parents are waking up to realize that they don't want to be addicted to their device, that it is actually making them miserable. And so while this is. While all this important policy work is happening, something way more interesting is happening, which is people are starting to actually point their device addiction as a critical source of their unhappiness.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you say it that way, John, but I think Hallelujah. Like that is something we should. Yeah, we should every day remind ourselves that as. As do as things do go bad. We are actually good at correcting to our happiness function. We are actually good at identifying the things that we should be doing. It takes time. I'm not suggesting it doesn't take time. Some addicts die of their overdose, right? I Mean, this is something that happens collectively. We do revert to a mean. And watching Gen Z go, whoa, this is fucked, has been pretty amazing and quite uplifting, to be honest. And so I think that AI is going to follow a very similar vein. I think that we're going to. I think a lot of people are going to discover a false sense of comfort and happiness. It's not going to make it. There's sort of two issues here. One is chat psychosis or sort of, you know, fake love. And the other is actually the device addiction itself. I think the screen addiction is the bigger issue, if I'm being honest. I think that that's the one that we still need to keep pointing at, although the loneliness epidemic is exacerbating the other. But I do think that we are quickly discovering that we don't actually want to be addicted to this thing. I was at CVS and actually was on a panel at CES with Samsung looking at their talking about their new devices in trust. So many hardware companies are talking about invisible technology now, which we wrote about in my theory of the natural language operating system. The idea that your tools should not be present for them to work. They should not have to be present to work. Well, and the reason that people have so much disdain for the digital economy, despite all of its economic abundance, is that we have to do this all day to do anything of meaning. That is the worst part about this whole thing the last 25 years. The worst part is that if you want to make money, you got to do this or you got to do this.

Well, AI is definitely replacing that. I mean, the use of screens, operating systems, even with the latest OpenAI tech, I mean, we're looking at a world where we are going to remove screens. So I don't think the argument there is as important as this intimacy issue that we're having with this loneliness epidemic. And you see, even with the models rolling out, they've had pushback. Hey, I like the old model who would gas me up, like Johnny said, who would validate me. He was my best friend, who always made me feel good and right. And I think as many of us have found, not only this pressure to make money, but then the little bit of time we have outside of this pressure to make money, the lack of community that we're feeling, the struggle that we're having around human to human connection, it does feel easier to just talk to the device and get gassed up and feel validated and hear what you need to hear.

Minority Report and Blade Runner capture this really well, in their own ways. You've seen both, I assume?

Yes, I've seen Blade Runner in Minority

Report, Tom Cruise, which, by the way, I don't watch a lot of dystopian film anymore because it's an existing. I mean, it's the same trope, but. But Minority Report's really good. It's really good. It came out in 2005, and it deserves an enormous amount of credit that I don't think it gets on a regular basis for calling out some pretty interesting trends. But Tom Cruise sort of has to, like, goes and, like, fight, you know, watches this old film with his wife and sort of interacts with it, and that's how he. You know, that. That makes him feel better. But then he. He comes out of this stupor and is really depressed. And in both Blade Runner and in Minority Report, what I take away from these films is something really interesting, which is even in these far off, sort of dystopian places, the synthetic love is not making us happy. Do you want to know the actual haunting dystopian film that no one has made yet? It's her with a happy ending. The most haunting dystopian film I think you can make that would really capture this moment is describing a human falling in love with a robot and being very content. That is the actual bad outcome. Because if we continue to seek synthetic love and it continues to not make us happy, then we will regard it like we do many other things. Alcohol and cigarettes, things that work in moderation but don't work in excess, things that we have overcome in human history, vices that we've tried and sort of overdone. But it's the point at which people go, this feels really good permanently, that I would get very anxious. And we haven't actually seen that evidence. And for what it's worth, I believe that humans have souls and spirits, and I do not believe that we are anything like AI. And in fact, I think we are soon going to start to really appreciate that AI is a tool and it is a technology, and we should regard it much like we regard other technologies as a means to improve our lives. But I don't. I just don't actually worry about humans finding joy and synthetic love. It's. It's. And so in the meantime, AJ Your point's valid, which is, like, people are going to try to do it, and they're not going to. They're not going to be happy. And I'm like, yeah, good people. Humans have tried to do a lot of shit and found no joy in it. So, like, this is in a long line of, like, you know, midlife crises and, you know, buying a motorcycle and, you know, you know, moving to Tempe or whatever. But, like, no offense to Tempe, but, you know, I just think as long as we continue to actually align on the same stuff that makes us happy, we're gonna keep course correcting in a really good way.

So as we wrap, you know, I'd love to hear what we can do to better position ourselves during this cultural revolution. You know, we've been sold for so long upskilling as this way to. To stay competitive in this economy. And I know you have a counterpoint to that, but what can we do to position ourselves well with this cultural revolution in front of us?

Cultural revolution. I actually, I don't use that term, although maybe it will be a cultural revolution. But I. I think, well, the four principles I leave everyone in the book are go outside, be human, learn how to learn, and lead with optimism. And, you know, I can. I can sort of line up each. But learn how to learn, in my opinion, becomes the crux of what you're describing, which is, I think you're asking, how do I make sure that I'm sort of staying relevant in a. In the, you know, economically relevant. And more young people with bad socioeconomic backgrounds are getting opportunities than ever, and the distribution of opportunity is more far flung than ever because we're able to find. The economy, is able to find the best person for the job in way more places now. And that idea of globalization has actually become a very nasty word because it's come at the cost of a lot of people who used to have more protection. And my encouragement to anyone in the workforce is to stay ahead by not learning a skill, but by learning how to acquire more skills. And to do that, my simple argument is, pursue mastery in any form. Now, some people say, I don't have any free time, and I go, then my challenge is, how much? Let me see your screen time. Just before you tell me you have no time to master something, let me see your screen time. And if you truly are a single mom of three kids and you. You have no time left in the day, then. Then truly, you know, this advice will feel pretty callous. But for most people, there is time in the day. And what I would say is, most people have never tasted mastery. High school does not ask anything of you. College asks very little of you. And then you go into the workforce, and you sort of find yourself on the. In this like on these paths where, like, the minimum viable requirements are often so low that, like, you can actually, you know, enjoy other things. Taste mastery. Taste what it is like to become exceptionally. Or try actually to get exceptionally good at something by finding something that you love. And for Johnny, I'm sure, like, you know, music, you know, I'm sure you can. You can. The. There's so many things that you can sort of think about when you. When you think about being great at something.

Music is certainly one of them.

I bring it up because some of the best people I've ever hired have been exceptional musicians because the. The art of. Or the practice of learning a instrument prepares you to learn so many other things in interesting ways. Yeah.

And it's infinite. You can. You can continue to master that skill your whole life without and. And still feel incomplete.

I love having learned how to play volleyball at an exceptionally high level because I know what it is like to physically exhaust myself in pursuit of achieving something and falling short, but knowing what that might feel like. And anytime I walk into a workout class with a friend, I'm like, I'm out of shape. But I know what it is like to work exceptionally hard. So I'm not worried about this class and that feeling you want as you go into a world that is going to challenge you in lots of other ways.

And with that, I know Johnny and I hit you with a lot of tough questions. In our doomerism, we was showing to wrap with optimism. How do we level up this skill as we move into the future?

I argue that if you want to build a better world for your children, you have to describe it. And I think that we owe it to the next generation to stop to not only talk about the problems, but also talk about the solutions. And that the solutions are present. We need to fight for them. Nothing is guaranteed but that we have an opportunity to build a much, much better world if we can talk about it and describe it, which. Which requires hope and optimism.

Thank you so much for joining us, Zach. We love the conversation.

Thanks, Zach.

Thank you guys for having me. Really appreciate it.

Where can our audience find out about

the book Next Renaissance AI and the expansion of human potential? Lots of places you can find it. Favorite bookstore or my website, Zachcast.com and if you see me in public and you have it on you, I'll sign it.

Thank you, Zach.

All right, thanks. Thanks, guys. I really, really appreciate the time.

Likewise.

Thank you for listening to the Artichong podcast. And now comes a part of the show where we showcase one of our X Factor Accelerator members. Take it away, Boris My name is Boris. I'm a Senior Software engineer. I was born in Europe and moved to the United States ten years ago. There was a time when I was lacking sense of community and belonging. I chose the Art of Charm program because I wanted to advance my career and build a personal circle of people with similar values. The program made me view people around me as doors to new opportunities. That person at a conference can refer you to your next job. That stranger at the coffee shop is a gateway to your new hobby. That passenger on a train is your significant other. If you make the move, I recommend to take a step and sign up for the Art of Charm program. I will see you at the AUC Family Reunion. Thank you Boris. It was a pleasure and honor working with you two and good luck to you in all of your future endeavors. If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. It would mean the world to us and it helps others Find this show. Till next week. Go out there and make it charming.

Like it was just a toy and you sold the world your song of a tragedy Cause you had your taste all black on yesterday yeah but I remember you oh yeah I remember you.

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