Surviving and Thriving in the AI Renaissance — Zack Kass

What should I study in college? The act of becoming maniacally obsessed with exploring deeply, passionately observing information, novel concepts, ideas, changing your mind, changing other people's minds about anything is more interesting than that thing economically. Go study something you love. It is increasingly hard to actually predict what you should study to make a lot of money. But I can assure you that you will always be hireable if you can prove to your employers that you are capable of learning. If you have proven that you can learn, then your ability to adapt will become, in and of itself a critical economic advantage. That is an opportunity early to invest in learning how to learn. Most people in this world go through life having never appreciated what it is to actually master something. Caring deeply about anything is in and of itself maybe part of the meaning of life. But also that's what you need to experience to know what it feels like to learn something new maniacally.

Okay, Zach, welcome to the show. Why do you call the coming AI Revolution the next Renaissance?

Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. And I, I, I think that there's a lot of things that are going to happen in the next, well, 20, 30, 40, 50 years that don't necessarily, won't necessarily feel like anything that we've experienced. And it is helpful though, when talking about what could come next or what will come next to describe it in terms that people can at least sort of relate to in a historical comparison. And the best one that I can come up with and the team and I have come up with is the First Renaissance, which was this sort of chapter in which human potential expanded across a bunch of different realms. Science, politics, sort of the birth of a lot of modern thinking happened during this, you know, hundred year chapter marked sort of sandwiched between two some sort of weird chapters. And I actually, I like the idea of the next Renaissance in particular, because people are sort of feeling like we're at a low point geopolitically or at least a local low point. Economically, things have felt a little strained, although on any relative basis they're doing quite well. Again, this is all sort of local, but principally, I think we are entering a next Renaissance because what we understand one person can do, what we understand the capability of an individual or of a team to be, will sort of change dramatically. And I think that will give way to an incredible new world of creative expansion. So my guess is we see the birth of instruments and new genres of music, geopolitical changes marked, I think actually by improvements in our understanding of politics and economics theory, obviously massive improvements in novel sciences. So our understanding of particle sciences, material sciences, molecular sciences, life sciences, huge improvements. And very likely we will see an economic explosion or, you know, improvement Cambrian event because of gdp, you know, massive amounts of new productivity.

So exciting times ahead. Now, what would you say are the main characteristics of the people who are going to thrive in this coming renaissance versus the people who might struggle?

Yeah, well, I think the. I'll start by saying I think most people will, on any relative basis, live a better life than the one that they live today. Now, it's not clear that, and by the way, on what measure is better, so we'll start by that. But I think it is very likely that we're approaching a future where fewer and fewer people suffer for a lack of water or lack of food or lack of access to healthcare. There may be other issues that we face as a society. But my guess is, based on the question that you're asking, who is going to truly thrive, meaning who will relatively outperform their peers? I think it'll be sort of two major features of those individuals. One, those with exceptionally high personal agency. So those who are. Who see themselves as the writer of their. Of their book, as the author of their. Of their story, and for whom intrinsic motivation has never been an issue, maybe for whom access to opportunity has been an issue. Bad luck may have been an issue in the past. And those things will start to sort of give way, I think, to an opportunity. Where do you want to do something? Okay, you get to do that thing. So agency will be one. And then my guess is adaptability, curiosity, and sort of these deep humanistic qualities that inspire people to, or allow people to sort of go lots of different directions. Because it's one thing to be. To be very motivated, it's another thing to be very motivated to say, I'm going to do this thing. This is the only thing I want to do, and I'm committing my life to it. Well, that's fine in 1950, where that job is pretty clearly going to exist for a long time. And if you can get into school to do it, you're guaranteed to get it. Well, that may change in a world where getting a degree in computer science may no longer actually get you a job in computer science by no fault of your own, simply because the job of the computer scientist may go away. And so the ability and willingness to say, okay, I'm going to get back up and do something else because I'm curious or adaptable or just sort of deeply interested in something else. Sam called us out at HBS at Harvard Business School. I think late last year, he said, the future is not going to be about not failing. There'll be plenty of failures. It's just going to be much faster iteration cycles. People are going to pick themselves up much, much faster. And again, we're already entering this chapter. We're already starting to see that people are able to create lots of lives that they could never have. I mean, could you have imagined running the business you're running when you were in college? And the answer is maybe. Maybe you could tell that story, but probably not. And so what got you here is sort of this incredible circuitous road that has just never really existed in human history. Not, not in the way we understand it. And I think that's just. That trend is going to continue.

For sure. For sure. Now, I discovered your work through a talk you gave in Arizona last year, and I actually owe you a big thank you because as a result of that talk, I actually changed my business model. I was already leaning in this direction, but your talk was like, right, I need to really. I really need to make this change. So basically, the thing that you said, that it was actually the main thing I took away from that whole event, but it was something along the lines, was something along the lines of if you're going to survive the future as an entrepreneur, you have to design for the things that AI can't do. And those are going to be things like human connection, the natural world, these real sort of relational, humanistic qualities. So as a result of that, we're running our first live experience. Now, this, this October, we're taking 30 leaders to do the Camino de Santiago in Spain. And it's totally changed the way I'm. I'm working and everything. So I owe you a big thank you, Zach. I want to say thank you for that, and I want you. Can you just expand on that? Like, you know, the future is. It really is important if you're especially in the entrepreneurial world, to really be focusing on the things that AI can't do and really optimizing for the human side of.

It's so interesting. First of all, thank you so much for sharing that. That means that. That's. Yeah, that means quite a bit. And I mean, look, you're in a better position to explain it than I am, I think, given. Given that you are sort of living it. But why don't I, Why don't we do this? I'll provide sort of a primer and then you can elaborate to the, to the audience and why you made this decision, because I do think it's more interesting coming from you on a practical basis than me on a theoretical one. But my theory is not, in my theory, a core belief now, but that sort of is playing out in pretty real ways, is that people are so fixated right now on all of the things that AI will automate and not enough on the things that it won't. And it is very easy for most enterprises to, especially the leadership in most enterprises, to gesticulate and sort of pontificate about all the things that AI will sort of change in their business, and then to tell everyone, okay, go do these things. And it's much harder to say, well, actually, what are we not going to change? And what do we need to be sort of retrenched in? And the reason I say this is because this is sort of how it's playing out. Sort of CEOs are rapidly kind of hitting the spam button on AI, the staples easy button, with some really sort of negative consequences to culture, to customer experience, to productivity. Even in some cases now, AI is having a profound economic impact. So I'm super excited about that. But it is hard for people to appreciate that in a world where machine intelligence gets much less expensive and much more capable than human intelligence, the human brain is not actually valuable for its ability to compute things. And when you appreciate that, when you just sit with that, you say, okay, well, then what is my brain going to be good for? And how will I differentiate? And after you do enough analysis, you quickly realize that so much of the last 10 years has basically taught us that trust, human experience and connection, brand reputation are becoming even more important in a world where anyone can create content and anyone can build a website. And all of these barriers that used to present to businesses are gone now, evaporated. And that's just going to happen faster and faster. And so your content itself may become easier and easier to produce. And so what makes your business interesting? Well, it could be that the network that you build becomes far more interesting and the experiences that you provide people become far more interesting. And so sort of, I'll let you expand there. But that's the theory, and it's meant for lots of business leaders. And by the way, it only works under the assumption that the business leaders are capable of actually doing all the things with AI that they should do. So it's somewhat of a luxury belief because it starts from the position that businesses will automate the things that they should automate. Now, not a lot of businesses, some businesses simply won't even do that. Some businesses are going to lose the ability to actually chart their own course because they don't adopt AI in time and actually just fall by the wayside. But I'll leave that there and let you expand on it.

Well, yeah, for me, it's just really simple. I just realized that there's a lot of what I'm currently doing is going to be made redundant. So I have to basically steer the ship in such a way where what I'm doing is going to be relevant and in high demand in the future. And I think as we become increasingly technological and we become more and more things do become automated, the need for human connection is going to increase exponentially. So why not design for that? Why not particularly help leaders find that connection? You know, so that's kind of why, that's why we're doing this Camino in October.

You know, what do you think of the work that you do today? What do you think will be made most redundant?

I'm not sure, you know, like I've seen, I've seen AI generated interviews, for example, and that's the, that's the majority of the work I do is interviews. So even that isn't safe, you know. But yeah, I'm not sure. I think I'm, I'm in a fortune position with the work that I do. It's, it's like I sent out a newsletter today, for example, seven insights. And this is something I release one every month. And I put as much thought into every sentence in that newsletter as I can over the course of a month. And it's not just like, it's like as much soul and as much life as I can fit into. It's one of those insights. So I'm really trying to optimize for the human side of things now going

forward, you know, so, so my, my guess, my observation is it's true. Those insights may in fact feel redundant. I would push back maybe, maybe far be it for me to tell you how your business will play out, but it does seem like interviews are going to be, you know, Hollywood was like, oh, they're going to, they're going to, they're going to emulate all the actors, likenesses. I don't know, CGI is, is, is not as popular as people think. And live action stunts and live action, you know, edits are way, way more popular, it turns out, than the CGI stuff in most cases. Like, like Sinners is a great example. I don't know if you've seen it, but so much of that film is so well done because of how, how much they did in, In. In Live Action, in, In. In, In Live Edit. And they're. The real effects are incredible, which I think you're seeing audiences sort of respond to saying, actually we don't want the fake thing. So I would say with that as a sign. I bet your interview work is safe. I acknowledge that. I think your insights themselves. What is fascinating about the insights business and just the thought leadership business, and where I think influencers should be wary, where I think influencers are actually going to start to struggle, is that everyone is now going to have these ideas, like discovering things is going to be less complicated. Your insights may not feel novel anymore, but people may in fact just want to hear from you. Like there is. And that is something that, that won't be made redundant, which is your brand. And so I think there's. What's. What is going to be tricky to figure out for anyone is how much of what I am doing can be. Is a ChatGPT prompt and how much of what I'm doing is actually sort of uniquely me and, you know, unique to what I. To what I can offer the world. And I'm reminded of this all the time. You know, we produce a newsletter too, called the Next Renaissance. I love the newsletter. I think a lot of the insights are novel. The truth is deep research. If you spend $200 a month on OpenAI, you could probably produce something similar. If you went down, you know, if you. If you did your own work for an hour, an hour and a half. And the reason I think that newsletters are going to maintain popularity and sort of podcasts is because they serve as a water cooler. It's like a shared source of culture and people can discuss them. And so again, it comes back to what your unique advantage may in fact be. The community you're building around the content you're producing and creating space for people to actually explore it together.

Yeah, well, I think what I was trying to say there was like, whenever I am writing those insights now, whenever I am writing that newsletter, like I'm trying to include as much of my own internal, subjective experience as possible, as much narrative as I can, and my own kind of thoughts on it, because that's something that AI can't do. It doesn't have any subjectivity. So that's what I was thinking. And the other thing that I wanted to sort of highlight here, which I heard you speak about before, is it's going to be super important going forward. The ability to learn how to learn. This is going to be crucial. Can you maybe expand on this as well?

So one of the. Yeah, you, you were taking good notes. Thanks so much. One of the things that we talk about in the book the Next Renaissance, that I sort of repeat as often as I can to anyone who will listen is the story I tell is, or the anecdote I provide is that every high schooler in the world that I've ever met has inevitably asked me the same question, which is, what should I study in college? And almost all of their parents have asked the same. Right, so what are they asking? They're asking actually, how do I make a lot of money? It's a veiled. It's a veiled, thinly veiled attempt to ask my advice for how they can ensure an optimal economic outcome. And I have a very bad answer as far as they're concerned, which is, it doesn't matter. You know, there is a rapidly declining correlation between your major and your economic outcome that is going to be pronounced pretty soon by this sort of new class of high schooler that doesn't go to college and actually flourishes economically, which I think we're about to see, because it's not even spelling the end of the American academic institution. Most smart kids can't get into college in very competitive states. Or you can, but maybe you decide that, like, the college you got into isn't actually worth the tuition because that's also increasingly common. And so we're now seeing, I think we're going to start seeing a world where there are some colleges that you simply should not go to. And without naming names, these are probably private, you know, potentially liberal arts schools that have historically gotten by, you know, on a. In a world where everyone has to go to college. And so you can just, you sell a product that people have to buy. But if you're charging $60,000 a year for a degree that isn't actually really regarded in the private sector, and you're teaching students skills that aren't super fungible. Well, why. Why would you go to college? And so what I tell. I tell people this and, you know, of course everyone hates it because they just want. They want an answer to how they can get rich. But, but what I do say, which I think is novel and thoughtful, is go study something you love because it is increasingly hard to actually predict what you should study to make a lot of money. But I can assure you that you will always be hireable if you can prove to your employers that you are capable of Learning a lot. If you have proven that you can learn, then your ability to adapt will become in and of itself a critical economic advantage. And in a world where that is going to change a lot, the only thing I can guarantee is that you're going to have to learn a lot. You're going to have to learn more by many standard deviations than any generation prior. And that is an opportunity early to invest in learning how to learn. The act of becoming maniacally obsessed with exploring deeply, passionately observing information, novel concepts, ideas, changing your mind, changing other people's minds about anything is more interesting than that thing economically. It could be that that thing also is the thing that introduces you to your spouse or introduces you to a bunch of friends. I mean, we know life has proven for many people that obsessing over something is a great path to joy and satisfaction. That like caring deeply about anything is in of itself, maybe part of the meaning of life. But also that's what you need to experience to know what it feels like to learn something maniacally. Most people in this world go through life having never appreciated what it is to actually master something, having never appreciated what it is to actually obsess over something. And, and I say this, you know, maybe this, maybe, maybe that's not true, maybe not most people, but, but I, but I imagine it is. I sort of, I imagine that many people in this post industrial world have never concerned themselves with the idea of like truly, deeply, passionately obsessing over something in a way that, you know, you know, a cub superfan obsesses over the Chicago Cubs and can tell you every, you know, every player that's ever played or the score of every game, you know, for the last five years. I mean that's, there's a little bit of autism going on there, but, but, but I think I just remind people constantly that the most interesting and exciting thing you can do now for your own happiness probably, but also for your own economic outcome, is to learn what it feels like to just know something much further than you thought possible. Because now you'll know how to do it again and again and again and again. And that will, that will present incredible opportunity.

For sure. For sure. You know, it strikes me that the ideal school situation would be you go somewhere and you know, once you've reached a certain ability, they actually teach you, right? Here's, here's actually how you learn. Here's like the skill of meta learning, for example. Then once you have that in place, it's all about exploring your interests and seeing which are the areas of like high resonance for you and then creating the conditions that really facilitate you to go down that path deeply. You know, that would be the ideal learning environment and experience, I think.

Yeah, I just remember as a kid, like I became exceptionally obsessed with baseball cards and. Then, and that led me to obsessions with building. I built a ham radio with my dad and then learned Morse code with my dad. And then that led me to learning how to program. And it's easy to say, oh, you would have figured these things out. And I'm just not sure that's true. I'm just not sure that like starting with something simple or, you know, or benign or you're non economic isn't actually the most important thing to do. Anyone can tell you should obsess over learning to write code. But if you, if you've never actually taken the time to become obsessed with something, you're not gonna. It's gonna be very hard for you to become a great programmer unless you deeply care about it because you don't know what it takes. You just don't know what it feels like to actually study something for 100 hours a week. And for most people that is a unbearable amount of time to do something right. For most people who I think are quite capable, by the way, that's the other thing I think most people are quite capable. They just don't actually, there's no pattern for them to say, oh, I know now that the next level gets more fun and more fun and more fun, et cetera.

This makes me think that I probably have one of the best jobs in the world. So like every year for our company we pick a summit, right? So one summit each year and I pick a subject. So this year it's on coaching. Last year it was on attachment. The year before that it was on addiction and recovery. Year before that it was psychotherapy. So I spend a full year then interview interviewing say between 30 and 40 of the world's leading experts on this one subject. So I just get to go so deep and really just know it inside out, you know. So I'm very lucky that way. But I suppose that's not really relevant to what we're talking here. But the. I wanted to ask you a quick.

That is. I mean, that sounds exact. I mean, now that you've gone deep on a subject, you know what it is like to go deep on a subject and you now realize that like just when you think you're deep, you realize, oh, you haven't scratched the surface. But for most People going deep on coaching is reading a few coaching books and being like, look, I became obsessed with coaching this year. And then you can say, well, let me tell you what obsession with coaching looks like.

Yeah, I suppose so. I suppose so. So I'm going to read a quote here, right? And I'm going to follow up with a question. So this is from John Maynard Keynes. You probably heard it before, but let's just read it anyway. So for the first time since his creation.

Before you start reading this quote, can I ask, does this quote derive from his paper the economic possibilities of our grandchildren?

I'm not sure. Very possibly. I'll read it out and you can tell me, right? So for the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem. How to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him. So my question is, are humans ready for a world of abundance psychologically? Can we deal with the free time not having these economic pressures on us?

So that that quote is derived from the third paragraph of John Maynard Keynes or the third, the third chapter of John Maynard Keynes paper, the economic possibilities of our grandchildren, which I've memorized having read it enough. And, and I mean it's funny, the reason I asked at the outset is, is this from that. Because Keens has written so much and the economic possibilities for our grandchildren has. Is now the. One of the things that people are so excited to talk to me about and the reason for it is that I have based so much of my writing and thinking on that paper.

Wow.

So I'm honored and tickled that you would reference it because I don't directly reference Keynes in part because Keynes is not, it's just not reading for everyone. And quotes from that. I mean you've read the paper, it's some. Well, maybe you haven't. But he doesn't really write in a way that a lot of people can relate to, I believe. So he called for in that paper, among other things, a 30 hour workweek. And this paper came in the midst of or at the outset of the Great Depression, at a time where everyone was sort of bemoaning the fate of the world, how things would, how much things would get worse and how we had probably reached the peak. And Keynes wrote this paper to basically say not only counter narratively but juxtapositionally, you're wrong. And in fact this is a short term pain against the backdrop of a bunch of new long term gain. How right he was. He could have never appreciated. And he predicted, by the way, the 30 hour workweek in 100 years. The paper was written in 1930. So I, I mean, you talk about prescient. I mean, it gives me goosebumps just thinking about this guy sitting around being like, no, everyone's got it all wrong, by the way, at a time where, like most of the world was still dying of starvation. I mean, when he wrote, it's easy for me to say this now, the world's going to be fine because we're truly achieving food safety everywhere. And everyone's like, oh, microplastics and heavy metals. And I'm like, we crawled out of caves and we used to die. Not too long ago, we died of starvation and we were making exceptional progress. Progress. His question then, therefore, in this backdrop to everyone, was, are you actually prepared for what really is about to come, which is in a world of exceptionally abundant and inexpensive technology, a place where humans don't make work their primary source of identity and purpose. This is a question that I think philosophers and psychologists and behavioral psychologists, etc. For the next few hundred years are going to have to sort of grapple with. And I don't know that there's an obvious answer on the other side of it, but I would say that I believe that humans were not necessarily born to work. I have not seen any evidence to suggest that we must have work to have purpose. And I have seen a lot of evidence to suggest that we don't. That when you review all of the death studies and there have been so many, at this point you can stumble into studies done on people on their deathbeds. Precisely. No one says they worked more.

They wish they worked more.

Yeah, precise. Sorry, sorry. Precisely. No one says they wish they had worked more. Precisely. No one says they wish they had made more money. Now, the studies are not done of people dying of starvation, and deathbed studies are done usually in developed worlds where it is appropriate to sit next to someone's bed and say, let's talk about your life. Which is not necessarily true in sub Saharan Africa. I mean, you can't. It's very inappropriate to go spend time with a mother and her dying children in sub Saharan Africa and say, let's talk about your life and what are you most proud of? And so these studies have this confirmation bias, but it actually highlights something I think critical for me, which is in a world that will experience increasing amounts of economic prosperity, where more and more of these deathbed studies will become appropriate and eventually we probably live in a world where these deathbed studies can be, should, you know, can be done with anyone. Where it is acceptable to sort of ask anyone what do they wish they'd done in life? Because everyone has access to a lot of things in life which I think is very near. I would be surprised if we ever hear the answer. I really wish I had worked more. Now the counter argument to this is we don't wish we had worked more because work is so prominently featured. And what we in fact need to do is adjust appropriately. We need less work, but we still need some work. Which I think is the best and most reasonable counter argument to these deathbed studies. But it also therefore doesn't account for a lot of the happiness and life satisfaction studies that are done in places that contrast, you know, Tokyo, Japan with parts of Costa Rica, you know, exceptionally dense economic, prosperous zones that are terribly depressed with very poor economic zones that are thriving, you know, emotionally, that are just overjoyed. And these blue zone studies, places where people live a standard deviation or 2 standard deviations longer than the average population. And I don't know if you're familiar with blue zones, but, but, but the blue zone studies basically identify seven places. I think it's seven places on Earth where people live, you know, close to 100 years. Lots. You know, they've identified a few features or it might be 11 places, I can't remember. They've identified features of these places. None of them, none of them have anything to do with how much they're working, what they all have to do with. So that the themes include religiosity, community, walkable cities or walkable communities, multi generational households. There is a point at which you can live truly in the wealthiest place on earth, surrounded by every concierge doctor on earth. I mean, you can be Brian Johnson, dedicate your life to living longer and he's going to be outlived, likely by some old woman who smoke, who used to smoke a pack of cigarettes, who's surrounded by her friends and family playing bocce in, you know, in, in Sardinia, Italy, I mean, which I think is one of the blue zones. I just think we have enough evidence, I really think we have enough evidence at this point to suggest that the, that our reason for at least, at least our, our most observable purpose and reason for living today is friends and family and physical community. I think the evidence is so overwhelming at this point. It's not like it's a little mixed and we have to sort of glean. And that tells me that John Maynard Keene's challenge to all of us, which is what will man do when faced with the question, what can I do? What should I do? I think it's pretty simple. We should spend time with our friends and family. We should build physical communities that we want to be in and live meaningfully and deeply in these communities. Exploring the world and eating good food, the way that people have done for a long time. And the idea that we'll run out of things to do suggests that people in Tokyo should be much happier than people in Nosara, Costa Rica. But that's just not how it plays out. It's just not true. Going, going, going, going, having everything at your fingertips does not in fact make a happier person and it arguably has made a much more miserable person. Now we will see, we will be forced to reconcile. And I will say what Keynes calls out in the paper subtly is this idea of the transition period, which I think is going to be really weird. I mean, if you ask me, the greatest sacrifice that our generation is going to pay is actually going to be our generation and maybe the next making sense of a world where our purpose cannot be derived from our work because our work cannot actually be static enough to derive meaningful long term purpose and identity where there's more of an ephemerality to the value of our work. So we can say, I'm really glad I did this thing today, but I also know that I'm not necessarily going to do it for much longer. That to me is going to be the great shock and emotional toll that our generation has to pay. That I think is going to teach a lot of future generations how to actually think about their own relationship to work and life.

Wow, there's so much in there. It makes me think like governments should be essentially just be studying blue Zones as a template for how to create societies and then trying to build societies accordingly.

You know, like people have done this. So here's the thing, it's not like we don't know. I mean, this is the other thing. If you. It's not like this is also not just plainly observable. You can go study Blue Zones to come up with all the data,

but

if you ask any person, when are you happiest? I mean, unless they're a psychopath. And by the way, this is of critical concern. I think there are a lot of psychopaths in positions of power globally because psychopaths are more resilient. And so it's not even that psychopaths are sort of manipulative, it's actually that they are willing to do the things that a lot of people are not in order to achieve power. This, I think, is very misunderstood. People point to narcissists as being the ones who trick everyone else. And it's like, you know what, A lot of politicians on earth are in fact in the position they're in because their pain tolerance is so obscenely high. You cannot imagine how many times someone like Donald Trump had to say, I'm going to get back up. No one. I mean, it's easy to say what you know. And by the way, not, not to make this, I don't want to make this about American politics right now, but I just don't think anyone, anyone really appreciates how much resilience it requires to do what any global politician has done. You just have to keep going in the face of everything else. Most people don't want to do that. And it is a job uniquely equipped for psychopaths because they're not really responsive to most pain issues. And the reason I think psychopaths present such a great threat to the world now is that they don't respond to the traditional incentive structures because they're not actually interested in friends and family. Right. There's something else going on and I think they're. We're seeing a perversion right now globally, away from our most core. Maybe not more than ever, but certainly right now it feels like there's. We're drifting further from deep familial values. And I think that one of the things we're going to start to observe pretty soon is that governments know, just as people know, that friends and family are the most important thing and physical communities matter more than anything. And there's just not a lot that we can do at a federal level to actually affect that. I mean, you can pass like more family friendly policy for sure. Where this boils down to, and this is what I will leave us with on this topic. I have this very, very firm belief now that the local government is actually the most important government of the future, notwithstanding geopolitical, notwithstanding major geopolitical events like wars. Even tariffs right now for most people on Earth matter less to them than their government building their local government building protected bike lanes or, you know, installing speed bumps or building better sidewalks or investing in better schools. Even something as sort of so economically disruptive as tariffs matter less than a lot of the work local governments are doing right now to improve physical community. And it is a very important reminder that I think the future is actually told at the hyperlocal level. What is the household you build. What is the dining room table you build? What ingredients do you put in your food? How do you gather people then? What families do you bring into your home? How do you all gather? What parks do you go to? How. How are those parks lit? Can you go after five? Do. Do they allow vagrants in the parks? Do. Is the local government flipping about drug use in the parks? Are people allowed to pee and poop in public spaces? I mean, these are actual decisions that I think materially affect people's lives way more than so many of the other decisions that get made. And I saw this in San Francisco and went crazy. It was a local government so obsessed with performative, moralistic behavior, right? This, like that, you know, this crazy, almost, you know, sociopathic local government that just wanted to tell everyone how, you know, all their moral positions at this, at the cost of local living. It's like this great lesson in. In how exactly not to run a government. I mean, they made every mistake you could imagine. And I came out of that experience realizing that not only did I not want my local government talking about all these federal issues, I cared less and less about these federal issues than ever before. And I cared more and more about all the things that were happening right next to me. So I moved home. Part of this, I moved home to Santa Barbara, where I grew up and became obsessed with urban planning and city management and actually have aspirations of running for mayor of Santa Barbara one day. And in the process, got to know a guy named Eric Klinenberg, who's a professor at nyu, who wrote a book called Palaces for the People, which I recommend to everyone. Now, Eric and I have different political persuasions, but we arrive at a very similar conclusion, which is that the most interesting thing governments can do is invest in local infrastructure and that rebuilding the spaces, the physical spaces in which we live, is more important than almost anything else. Now, in a world where AI is going to solve so many things it cannot actually AI cannot solve, does a mother want to take her kids to the park nearby to play with other kids? Because if the answer is no, that's a problem. And that's a problem that, like, no president can actually solve for. There's something else going on there. And those kids are at a massive disadvantage to. To kids who. Whose physical communities are inviting to them.

Wow. So, yeah, a lot. A lot in there. A point about the psychopaths being empowered. I've actually often wondered about this, because these are the people that are shaping our societies. And then whenever I think about people say at the top end of big tech organizations in Silicon Valley, for example. And some people have commented that these characters might be quite far along the autistic spectrum. I don't know, like quite say left brained. And these people are creating technologies that everybody in our culture is using, smartphones, et cetera, et cetera, social media and all the rest. And you just wonder, you know, like if these technologies are coming out of these, out of these people whose priority in life is definitely not family and friends and these relationships, then that is having an impact on the culture at large. I don't know, I'm just, just a

thought and I buy that, I buy that. And I would go, I would go a little further as to say, I think that when you sign up to be a fiduciary at one of these technology companies, it's your obligation to actually subvert like it is. It is required by the government to actually put policy in place and, and to, and to protect people because it is the fiduciary responsibility to make Facebook as big as possible. And it's the parents job to protect their kids. And it's in, in, in, at least until recently, the government's job to, to help protect kids. And so I think what we're going to realize is, you know, Philip Morris was supposed to keep selling as many cigarettes as possible to as many people as possible. That was the purpose of an institution. And capitalism has its, has its limits. There are points at which capitalism, those two is supposed to be measured. And I think this is just, people forget about this all the time. They say, how could they say, well what, Tell me about the business you run. I mean, I always say this to people, tell me about the business you run. Okay. They tell me about their business. Okay. You know, would you sell this to, you know, pick a thing, you sell this to this. Okay, well let's sort of play that out. It's very easy for us to grandstand. We would never, I would never do that. I, well that's not true. Lots of businesses get, you know, like, do, do bad things because it's their fiduciary responsibility to, to honor the, the shareholders. And by the way, I'm a free marketer. I just also think that there's a real importance to personal agency for parents to say, hey, it's this company's job to sell this thing. And it's my job to make sure that my kid's safe.

I don't know, I'll never forget walking into the supermarket in my local town and there was A big sign in the back wall, Help. I'm not going to name the supermarket Help Ex Supermarket beat cancer. And it was this campaign to target breast cancer or something. And then below the sign was a big wall of cigarettes that they were selling. It's like this is the whole problem, you know, and the issue, yeah, I totally agree. I think the issue is that it's an incentive alignment problem where these people are incentivized to make profit. But if you could change that such a way where they're incentivized to do things that were for the well being of the wider ecosystem of the planet and the society, then that would do a lot of the legwork and making things better.

You know, the incentive structure changes when we put guardrails in place to require that you can't operate outside. Like it's the government's job to say, hey, you actually can't make profits at the cost of the well being and privacy of young children. That's very reasonably the government's responsibility as it is a parent's responsibility. And then per the rules of society, things work that way, right? You can't sell cigarettes within, you know, I think three mile, three square miles of a school or something like that. Two square miles of a school or school zone. Great. I mean I, I have no issue with economic incentives as long as you have counterbalances. And I think it's, it's super important now to remind both parents and, and communities and governments that you know, this is, this is how these things work. And it's very easy to fantasize about a world that, you know, companies behave in global, you know, they can, they can wrap their head around all of these other things. It's actually really hard for any given company to do that. And when you see companies do this, you almost laugh at them. I always laugh at these companies who are like, oh, we're, you know, we're X, you know, we're, we're, you know, B Corp or whatever. These are these like semi profit corps. I'm like, oh God. And you know, they always, they're like 5% of their profit and it's mostly performative. They give themselves a pat on the back. But they're still manufacturing their goods mostly of plastic in China and in workshops run by, you know, people underage. It's like, you know, of course, right, you're, you're, you're, you're a fiduciary, you're financial fiduciary. That's what you're supposed to do, do yeah, yeah. And by the way, individuals do this. I mean, I remind everyone of this. Would you pay the least amount of taxes possible? Yes. You have a financial responsibility to your family to pay less to the government, and everyone should do that, even if it means that your community has less money. And so it's your, it's, it's the job of the taxman to set, you know, tax policy that, that allows you, that doesn't allow you to subvert taxes. I mean, this is just doing good, I think is so easy for people to say, but it actually requires a system of law and order where the rules are designed to collectively serve individuals. Because otherwise it is really imperative that every individual maximize the rules to their family's advantage, obviously, within reason, because, you know, it's quite hard otherwise.

Yeah, yeah. Right. So we've only a few minutes left, Zach, so just gonna, I'm gonna ask a two part question here. Right, so let's hypothetically imagine there's an individual listening to this, and they are. Work has been the central source of meaning in their life for, you know, pretty much their whole life. And they're realizing now, like, holy shit, I need to diversify my identity away from work. What would you say to that man? And the second part is, because I don't have a lot of time, I'm going to ask another question on top is how can that person best approach learning AI and how to master AI for what's coming? Those are the two questions.

So I think anyone who says, wow, I've dedicated most of my life to a job, and that job provides me a ton of purpose, what I would say to anyone, the question I would ask is, is it the community? So is it the, is it the job itself? So the work itself is critical to your happiness? And so you hear this a lot with actors. For example, there are these jobs, actors, chefs, there are a few jobs where people are so committed to the work itself that they do it at incredible economic cost. That the job itself, you know, they always say, but for, but for the, you know, but for the whatever. I, you know, it would. And the, the, that, that group of people, I, I, it's harder to solve for, I admit. If you say, listen, I have to do this thing because it is the only thing that I've ever loved and it is the work itself. I don't have a great answer today. Honestly. My, my, my principal challenge is to, you know, explore, you know, is it susceptible to AI and is it susceptible to automation? And if so, are you in a position to sort of find other things. If not then then you know, you're fine. For people whose jobs purpose is primarily found in their community, the people they spend time with, then I have great news for them which is they will likely always they will continue to find community and what they're, what their, what their, what they've identified as the important importance of a shared set of values from people within close proximity and that they will be fine, that that will exist plenty. What they need to make sure they do is not live an insular life. Because what a lot of people do is they live sort of permanently online. So much so that their work community is their only physical interaction. And this is the big scary moment when work starts to automate. Even if people are economically okay, if they find that their physical community is sort of evaporating or getting thinner and they cannot supplement it with offline community outside work, then we're going to have this very sort of, I think short term but very real sort of cultural dearth where people are just perpetually online in home, in isolation. And I worry about that a ton. And so what I challenge people to do is find physical community. Which comes back to my point earlier that the communities in which we live need to be places that we want to spend time. We cannot fill the world with strip malls. And as much as I like a dive bar, I'd rather it not be predicated on alcohol. I do think that we need to find physical spaces that people want to live in areas that you know that in spaces that don't revolve around a vice. And then the last question is what should people, I understand is what should people do to prepare or what should people explore?

Study Someone who wants to learn how to be really effective with AI, what would your first steps be? Let's say you're starting from scratch.

I would tell anyone who wants to be effective with AI to start using there are so many tools in the market it and I tell anyone to start to go explore them. And if you want to know what. So my advice to people is always if you want to read the white papers, you can, you can go super granular and read about the science, you want to read about the application layer, you can, you can go download the apps and you can read the blogs from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Gemini. You can read about the products they're building. And then if you want to really abstract, you can go read the life sciences blogs, you can go read the healthcare blogs, the education blogs. These companies who are applying AI and are starting to imagine what their futures might look like. The really cool thing is AI as a tool for education has never been better. So if you really want to know where to start, describe yourself, describe what you're trying to accomplish to ChatGPT, and watch it give you an incredible list of resources and places to go explore that I probably couldn't produce without actually knowing who you are, where you live, or what you're interested in. And until very recently, I think even now, the Next Renaissance newsletter is recommended by ChatGPT in a lot of prompts, which I'm tickled by, but there's just no shortage of places to go explore. And then if you really want to make a career in it, my recommendation is not to take accreditation courses. That's wasteful. And the weekend university is a great reminder that you can learn a lot without going to a traditional school. And all of these traditional schools have a fiduciary responsibility to come back to my point earlier, to sell you things. You know, Cornell and Wharton have a responsibility to themselves to sell you AI accreditation courses. You don't have a fiduciary responsibility to take them. And there are a bunch of smart people on YouTube that want to teach you about AI for free simply because it is their passion. And there are tons of these channels popping up all the time filled with really smart, interesting content that is free. It doesn't give you a stamp on your LinkedIn page, but it turns out you probably don't need that anyways. And, and I recommend going there and exploring that stuff.

Brilliant. Okay, Zach, that's, that's all I have time for, but I want to say thank you so much. This has been incredibly interesting and yeah, really, really interesting. So where can people find you online? Where, when's the book out? The Next Renaissance.

The Next Renaissance is. Well, I, we just, I. Wiley Publishing just just signed us for a two book deal, so the Next Renaissance is moving out a little bit. But I'll have an, I'll have a pub date for you soon and you can send that to your folks. Zachcast.com features my newsletter, the Next Renaissance, which is, which I really like as a, as a starting point. And then the books, the Next Renaissance and the Next great company will be out the first later this year and the next, this time next year.

Thank you, Zach.

Thank you so much. Thanks for, thanks for having me. And, and yeah, looking forward to our next conversation.