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Hello and welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I'm very excited for you to be here and I'm very excited for this conversation.
I have on the line, Zach Kass.
How are you doing, Zach?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Zach, you are the author of a new book.
It's called The Next Renaissance, AI and the Expansion of Human Potential.
I'm going to give a quick bio of you, but please fill in the gaps when I'm done.
Give us a little bit of added context as you see fit.
You're the former head of go-to-market at OpenAI, where you helped build the company's sales solutions and partner teams, as well as launched ChatGPT, the fastest growing consumer product in history.
You are a 16-year AI veteran who studied history and computer science at Berkeley, and you've spent the last five years advising over 350 Fortune 1000 boardrooms and 15-plus heads of state on leading in an AI-driven world.
That sound about right?
Yeah, it sounds nice when you say it.
It sounds weird when I say it, but yeah, I agree.
Cool.
I'm really excited to have this conversation.
I thought the book was great.
Again, it's called The Next Renaissance and it's a little bit playful because the AI in Renaissance is sort of highlighted or featured there.
I would love to just kind of start this conversation really, really broadly, which is...
Talk to me a little bit about the current state, as you see it, of AI, why you wrote this book now, and if your sense of AI, like my sense is, was that 2025 was really the year it became real as much as it was real before that.
But for me personally, in my work and in my life, 2025 was the year that AI began to really feel real useful in a really fun interesting, creative way.
And so I'm wondering from your perspective, given that you've worked on this for so long, do you have that same sense?
Do you have the sense that people are also starting to get a sense of what it is?
Or is it something else?
Do you feel like it's still an unknown and a great big question mark for most people?
Even as you said it, it sort of had me It had my mind racing.
I think one of the problems today is that.
Well, one of the problems as it relates to the AI discussion is that AI is a bad catch-all.
And in particular, when people talk about using AI, they're misappropriating the term use and often AI, because we've all been using ai for quite some time and for 15 years now ai has been very prevalent in most of the developed world.
Vector search i mean google search is predicated on a lot of modern machine learning practices, the use of ai in sort of managing the grid and energy planning, the preventative maintenance on an enormous amount of industrial industry.
So your use of use has sort of sparked a reminder that when people talk about using AI, what they're actually talking about in this moment often is a consumer app, one of Gemini ChatGPT Claude.
Yep.
Or more advanced consumer apps or prosumer apps like Cloud Code or ChatGPT Enterprise, but this interface that feels that sort of very explicitly augmenting their work.
When, in fact, our work has been augmented for a decade plus by modern AI and most of the industries that we are sort of exposed to have been benefiting from this technology for quite some time.
And this is why I think 2025 was important for people's appreciation of what the technology will do.
But I think it actually sort of scratched and made it real for many people in a way that I think is very important.
But 2% of the American population has still been in an autonomous vehicle.
Mm-hmm.
So we are nowhere near, I think, actually knowing what real adoption of life-changing autonomous systems or artificial intelligence looks and feels like.
And that's probably fine because we all need to update a bunch.
But I do think 2025 was an important year for many people to actually just see how magical this technology can be, even in really, really rudimentary ways.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Great.
I want to really focus our conversation here today on the world that we often have conversations here on Chasing Excellence as it relates to health and happiness and living with our hearts on fire.
And I thought the best place to start and maybe to spend a good amount of our time today is to walk through through or look at AI through the lens of something we have here on the show called the mindset continuum.
So I'm going to give you a little bit of context of what that is.
Our listeners will certainly recognize it.
And I want to talk about AI through the lens of that mindset continuum and then continue the conversation from there.
Cool.
Yeah.
All right.
So, really briefly, the mindset continuum is something that allows us to create a little bit of awareness, or a lot of awareness, around our mindsets at any given time or in any given context.
And it's important to remember, important to recognize that we're never in one mindset all the time.
We're shifting all of the time based on context and experience and all sorts of other things.
And we sometimes joke that inside of a 20-minute CrossFit workout you can visit every one of these stages of the mindset continuum once or twice.
And so, again, it's a fluid process.
But the goal of the mindset continuum and the reason why we talk about it is that to bring some awareness to where is our head right now.
How are we thinking about this problem, this challenge, this opportunity ahead of us?
And with that awareness begin to nudge ourselves up the continuum if we determine that where we are right now is not a particularly helpful place.
And so the continuum has five stops along the way.
The first is the victim mindset, which has a sort of like, this is happening to me feel to it.
One notch from there is the pessimist, which mostly just sees all problems.
From.
There is the optimist, which sees possibilities but might lack preparation for the challenges ahead.
Then there's the realist, which acknowledges both good and the hard truths. of what might come.
And then finally, at the pinnacle, is what we've called either the competitive mindset or the warrior mindset, which is a realist age mindset, but with a dose of agency and a dose of action.
In other words, the warrior or the competitor Sees challenges, sees problems and leans into them, because they know that on the other side of that is growth, and what they want more than anything is growth.
So that's our mindset continuum.
And what I'd love to do with you right now is to walk across each one of those and just get your sense of what does it look like to have a victim mindset today, in 2026, as it relates to AI?
And then we'll do it along the spectrum or along the continuum.
And then we'll kind of continue from there.
So again, you've been thinking about this.
You've been having these conversations.
You wrote this book.
What does it look like today in your mind to have a victim mindset around AI?
I want to be careful to answer this because I think there are people who whose lives are hard right now for no shortage of reasons, both in the developed world and not, who probably have every right to look at you and me and say life sucks, life is awful and there's not much I can do about it right now.
And the problem is that those people's, On a relative basis, those people's problems are even still somehow less awful than most of our problems were 2000 years ago.
And we'll get to this when we talk about the realist debate.
This is sort of the AI problem in a nutshell, which is...
AI today, both on a consumer basis, as you use the technology, and sort of on a global macro basis, presents lots of downsides including, but not limited to, as we point out in the book you may recall idiocracy, the risk that we realize that critical thinking is not of material importance to survival and stop doing it.
Certain percentage of the population has already done that.
That, by the way, predates AI, just so we're clear.
That's an economic issue, not an AI issue.
And we've created so much economic abundance that you don't actually have to think hard for the village to support you anymore.
And if you are born in the right place at the right time, you can turn your brain off.
Order DoorDash.
Sit on the couch, doom scroll all day fine.
If you're worried that AI is making that problem worse, you're actually right.
But it is the people who are opting into that who are guilty.
And what I argue is the freedom to do nothing actually comes with the cost of doing nothing.
We can't create a more perfect world without actually realizing that a more perfect world means that many people will get to if they want.
Do nothing.
Mm hmm.
And when people describe AI and idiocracy, I remind them that this is the cost of giving people what they need to survive at sort of a very low cost.
I also remind people that this is a chance on the flip side to give people a lot more opportunity to learn a lot more.
Second risk is dehumanization.
Dehumanization is similar to but different than idiocracy.
It says that at some point, people will discover a greater interest in their virtual reality than their physical one.
I worry about this a ton, especially with the younger generation.
And a lot of parents will say, AI is exacerbating this problem.
And I say, you know what?
You're right.
And also...
Gen Z is so miserable right now that they have all sort of collectively at the same time almost agreed that they don't want to be addicted to the device anymore.
People like Jonathan Haidt have worked really hard to pass anti-device legislation.
And there's a bunch of attention being paid now to young people and the device addiction including, by the way, adults too.
And so when people like AI is going to suck us all into a virtual digital reality, I say I don't actually think that's true.
I think it may make things a little worse for a period of time, but actually we're quickly proving that we want to reject this.
We want to be in the physical world.
The third is bad acting.
And the thing I don't think people talk about enough is this risk of low resource bad actors.
Also true.
What one person can do today is a lot more than what one person could do 20 years ago.
And this is true for both good actors and bad actors.
Yeah.
I'm anxious about this.
We need to pass policy to make it terrifying for low-resource bad actors to pull at the fabric of society.
For sure.
And also, the wheels of time turn in favor of the good actor.
And the last is identity displacement, and this is the one I'm most sensitive to with the victim mindset.
A lot of people will say AI is replacing...
AI is replacing my place in the world.
And sometimes they point to the economic consequences, but often what we write about in the book is they're pointing to the emotional ones.
Many people don't actually worry that AI is going to force them to starve, for reasons we can talk about later.
But a lot of people who are worried about job displacement talk about their purpose.
If AI can do their job, what is their purpose to the tribe?
And I remind them that We are constantly discovering new purposes.
And I point to, by the way, all of our ancestors, who were automated out of their jobs so that we could find new purpose.
But that victim mindset is the hardest one.
It is the single hardest one for me to overcome, because it is the place where most people feel the greatest threat.
Artists feel like their work is being copied and easily replicated.
A lot of knowledge workers feel like their work is becoming redundant or, in some cases, fully automated.
And you're sort of left with people saying well, if AI is just going to do everything for us, what's the point?
And there is an apathy that comes with the victim mindset at sort of the current moment.
That is, I think, actually quite hard to overcome, because if you talk about the upside, you sound like a sycophant.
You sound like a techno oligarch.
And if you want to help them make sense of the moment, it actually requires a bunch of historical context that many people are not interested in listening to.
And you probably figured this out.
In the mindset journey, if you're in a victim mindset place...
Very hard to rationalize historical context.
Very hard to put anything in sort of its place in perspective.
And that makes it pretty challenging for anyone to sort of have an interesting discussion with you about the upsides or the ways to mitigate the downsides.
Mm-hmm.
Love that.
Yes.
Let's move to the pessimist and the optimist side of things, because they're often obviously two sides of the same coin.
Right.
And maybe we can stick on that identity displacement idea, because I think that that is really a very interesting thing in the book you talk about.
Especially as it relates to like for whatever reason, we've attached a lot of our identity to our work.
And I think when I see you know you can't go on the Internet without a hundred hot takes of why AI is going to ruin everything.
And a lot of those is it's going to take all the jobs.
It's going to, as you said, displace all of this identity.
Right.
And so can you talk to us a little bit about looking at AI.
What does it mean today to look at it as a pessimist?
And what would it look like today to look at it as an optimist?
Knowing that most people haven't done the work that you've done and don't understand the history, but also the parallels which you do a really good job of in the book, drawing parallels between other technologies that at the time were really disruptive but ultimately, inside of that disruption, built something that we would now consider great right.
Skyscrapers, I think is one example that you give, right?
Yeah, skyscrapers were probably really scary when they first came up, but now they've completely rebuilt how we think about cities and nobody today is going to say let's knock down all the skyscrapers, right.
So just walk us through a little bit, the pessimists and the optimists.
What are those mindsets look like today?
So the skyscraper example is actually a super interesting one as it relates to the pessimist.
So as the victim mindset says, and pardon my French, this is fucked.
I'm fucked.
Everything's fucked.
You can blurt that.
Whatever.
You're listening to this.
But we are headed off.
The road is ending.
We're driving.
We're driving on a cliff.
And this is happening to us.
Some you know by sort of the.
You know the technocracy is sort of forcing this awful technology onto us and we're all in trouble.
The pessimist in this case, in my experience is often very willing to say well yeah, there are plenty of good things could happen, but look at all the bad things that likely will.
They're more willing to acknowledge the fact that 2 billion people still don't participate in the global economy because they couldn't use technology, or that we gave them access to the Internet but the devices were too complicated, etc.
Or the fact that we still have an enormous percentage of the human population without regular access to clean drinking water and fresh produce.
And that there are lots of technological solutions to these things.
They're willing to sort of look at those things and say yeah, there are a lot of problems, but actually AI isn't going to be the panacea, and here's why.
And usually the here's why introduces, I think, some reasonable but ultimately sort of problematic arguments, which is that modern society is actually a Faustian bargain.
So whereas...
Many pessimists are willing to say, yeah, the human experience does get better over time.
Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens and Nexus.
The brilliant author of Sapiens and Nexus is sort of one of these people who and there are some great thinkers in this camp who basically talk about the world is in chaos.
These are his terms to describe.
And that AI is going to exacerbate this problem.
That democracy is sort of doomed because look at the risk of misinformation and disinformation.
Look at the rise of bad acting.
Look at the empowerment of these things.
And as it relates to identity displacements, What a lot of pessimists will believe is they'll say sure, you know fine, maybe we solve the economic problem, but it will happen in this very unfair distribution.
And you remember in the book probably the section where we talk about the distribution problem, which is the description of what happens when we automate things at an uneven rate or what happens when value or sort of accrues in a sort of jagged, awkward way.
Super reasonable risk.
And Whereas the optimist, on the other hand says well yeah, but the wheels of time sort of turn in favor of justice.
And today is, in fact, the best day ever to be born.
And there's really no evidence to say that that won't be true tomorrow.
I don't know how exactly this is going to sort itself out, but I think it will.
And it is that sort of hope.
It's that willingness to step through the portal.
With a belief that it can get better.
That, I think, in fact, in this case, separates the pessimist from the optimist.
I think they're often both willing to look at the same data, but they arrive, or and they arrive at different conclusions.
It's why Eric Schmidt and Yuval Noah Harari are both brilliant people who have learned an enormous amount about this technology in history and can look at the moment through paradoxical lenses right.
One of whom sort of says yeah, this is an incredible precipice, and the other who says this is a terrifying one.
And neither are victims in this case.
But one of them is sort of and you can make the argument by the way that one of them has an enormous financial incentive, which they do, but others are sort of in similar camps.
They just draw different conclusions.
And I actually think some of this is, frankly, comes down.
This is my take.
I think a lot of this just comes down to disposition.
Like when I meet people who think that the world is going badly.
I get a strong sense they would believe this almost no matter what.
Like I am often struck by the fact that most people who believe the world is not going well probably would have found themselves believing this wrong.
In almost any circumstance.
Yep.
And I'm reminded of this constantly because I live in Santa Barbara, which is an amazing place.
And Santa Barbara selects for people who feel really good about the way things are going, for some obvious and non-obvious reasons.
And you can drive sort of a mile up or down the coast and find people who live almost identical lives, who are like no, this is Everything's wrecked.
LA in particular has this very negative sentiment about it right now.
And...
It isn't actually born from facts.
It's born from a collection of people who share a disposition and all sort of enjoy.
I think, to a certain extent, the pessimism.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Or they commiserate together.
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Oftentimes, if not all the time, the victim, the pessimist and the optimist are all just telling themselves a story about the context that they're in.
And so the story that everything's broken or everything's breaking isn't true.
It's just the story, right?
The story that Santa Barbara is great is just the story of people in Santa Barbara.
Same with Los Angeles, same with anywhere else in the world.
And as we move into this realist conversation, which is the one I really want to talk to you about, the realist oftentimes is the one doing the least amount of storytelling, because they're at least trying to see both sides of it.
They're at least trying to get through the stories that are often born out of fear or confusion or a lack of understanding.
And they're trying to see things as clearly as possible.
And I think that that's what your book does a really, really good job of.
It doesn't say everything's going to be amazing.
It says hey, if this happens and this happens and we avoid this and we keep this in mind, then the potential is huge.
But if we don't, then the potential for it to go badly is also there, right?
And so I'd love your sense because again, I'm putting this label on you, so push back if you don't agree to it.
But I think that you're a realist as it relates to AI, because you have a really good sense of where it's come from and you have a really good sense of where it could go again, both in the positive and the negative.
But how do you think of, like, what is your mindset around AI?
Is that realist label applicable?
Well, first of all, I appreciate being seen.
I certainly tried to write the book that way, you know for the listeners edification, because you know we send a bunch of galleys out in the world.
You don't get a ton of feedback.
You don't get a ton of objective feedback on a book, actually.
It's the worst part.
Hunter S. Thompson once said the worst part of writing a book is that someone smart might read it.
And I...
I'm a better orator than I am a speaker.
Writing is very hard.
Especially writing in sort of a nuanced, funny way, which is how I prefer to speak, is really hard.
And what I tried to offer people was an honest view to the average person of where we were in this moment, with as much objectivity as possible.
Having spent a career inside the industry and having talked to a bunch of people and it was sort of the book that I figured.
If you round it up, you know, maybe not as well written, but if you round it up the average opinion of people in the industry, I think you'd arrive at something like this book.
Frankly,
And so, in that sense, I love being.
You know what's a greater compliment than being called a realist when you aim to write a book like that?
I also acknowledge that, like I have biases, and we you know you read the book, so we call it biases in the book as being one of these critical frames for how people are going to read it.
And I sort of try to remind people as they open the book that, like they are going to read this book one of a few ways, as you talked about in the mindset continuum, depending on their disposition right.
They are either opening the book believing that things are getting better or worse.
And I often ask people Patrick, when they ask me how are things going to go or where are we in the AI journey, which was a question I used to get asked
I don't get asked as much anymore, but I used to say to people where do you think humans are in the human experience?
And in the States, I would ask people, what inning are we in?
What inning are we in?
And the most common answer was second inning.
So it was basically distributed between second and ninth inning.
Those were the two modes by far.
And then one day someone gave me third inning, which was amazing.
I was like, whoa, what is that?
But most people believe we're very early or very late in the human experience.
And that basically tells you also where you think we are in the AI experience, because how can we be late?
In the AI experience, where the human experience is going to be really long.
So my goal was basically to describe to people where I thought this technology was going, as told by the history of other technologies.
It's funny.
I don't even love... Maybe I shouldn't admit this.
I don't love the title of the book.
We wrote the title of the book to appeal to a larger audience, because the first renaissance was this interesting moment in history.
For all sorts of reasons.
That is sort of well-documented.
And it actually followed the late Middle Ages, which was this awful period.
And what I like to remind people of is, if you were alive during the late Middle Ages, you would have had every reason to believe that the world was ending.
Half the population was lost.
I mean, literally, we lost half the population during this period.
We made very little scientific progress.
Wars, famine... bad, broken political systems, it wasn't great.
And today is a much better time than the late Middle Ages.
But if you're feeling down, remember that things can get better.
That's sort of one of the reasons that we wrote it.
What I actually wanted to call it and sort of may call the next book is unmetered intelligence.
And unmetered intelligence is the most real, objective way that I know how to describe the current moment from a scientific, historical perspective.
And what I mean by that is, I think that we are approaching a world where, just like electricity And foodstuffs and water before it, have sort of commoditized and utilitized intelligence may as well.
That the idea that you will compete on the basis of how smart you are, for much longer maybe, sort of is a complicated theory at best.
And that...
That idea, which you can hate or disagree with, but that's the core premise, as you probably recall, at the outset of the book, asking what could go right with unmetered intelligence and what could go wrong is the whole point of the book.
And the whole point of the book is to say how do we make sure this goes well and how do we make sure we mitigate all the costs?
And I do still think, you know, you pointed out, does it require stories?
I do still think it requires telling stories.
And I think you get to sort of handpick a lot of them, or we get to handpick stories that we tell ourselves.
But it proposes, it sort of just explores what it would look like if intelligence was in fact a resource, which I think it is.
And what would happen if intelligence, like other resources, became you know something that you stopped staring at on the meter?
What would, what w?
What would we, what would we all do?
Right.
I want to go back a little bit to the identity displacement conversation because I think that's where the realist mindset becomes really important.
Because I think, as we go forward over the next and you know the timeline probably, or you can predict the timeline certainly better than I can, but over the next two five 10, 15 years, I think this identity placement or displacement as you talk about in the book, is going to be a really big part of of what's to come.
And my thesis, kind of coming out of the book, is if you're not in, more often than not, in the realist mindset, you're going to face a harder road than if you are.
And you write this in the book.
As the Renaissance unfolds, one of the hardest adjustments we will face, and perhaps the greatest emotional sacrifice we will have to make, is extricating our job from our identity.
That's the real cost.
That might sound liberating in theory, but in practice it will feel like a loss for many.
And you talk about in the book, how we're sort of in this transition period now and the transition period is going to be very difficult.
And so I guess the question in there is, or the point in there is, to be able to counter that transition to me requires as clear a sense of what is happening and what might happen as we can get.
And so can you talk a little bit more about what you see happening as that, or within that identity displacement like what should we prepare ourselves for?
What should we be clear eyed about?
Because one of the things we talk about here on the show is you know, we've got three big pillars, which is health, happiness and hearts on fire.
And that last one is just living a life of purpose and meaning.
And again, like we've already talked about, work is often, for many of us, a big part of that purpose, a big part of that meaning.
And one of the things you're writing about in the book is that's going to be an issue when jobs become perhaps not something you do for your whole life, right.
Or this idea of what a career is might change entirely.
So just can you kind of walk us through that, what you imagine happening in this area of life, so that we can begin to prepare ourselves, so that we can begin to see it clearly?
So I'll tell a story that we tell in the book, which I think is I don't know, I think it's the best part of the book.
Like if I tell people, if you read one section, read this because I'm really I consider myself like pretty sensitive to the average person's, like I don't think about myself as being callous to the average person's experience.
And I also am, like myself, actually quite sensitive to lots of things that I think most economists are not.
And I wrote this section on identity displacement having studied a particular group, which is the longshoremen.
And I'll tell the long story if you're okay with it because I think it paints this better.
October 1st, 2024, the longshoremen of the United States went on strike.
And the 45,000...
Men and women, 95 percent male union walked off the job site.
So in this case the ports on the eastern seaboard that morning and halted the import and export of goods through by sea and some other stuff.
And basically like shut down an enormous part of the American economy for two days or three days.
And the head of the longshoremen, the second most powerful man in the supply chain economy, went on CNN on the morning of October 2nd, did a long, like a 60-minute sit-down interview, during which time at one point he pointed at the camera, very calmly said to the camera, to the American people, you have no idea how powerful and dangerous I am.
I will cripple you.
He was talking about the American economy.
And I was fascinated.
I had this unsettling.
I mean I think anyone watching it could have extrapolated that this is the beginning.
It's not super hard to sort of piece together that this is a critical moment that represents many other critical moments.
Here was a labor union going on strike, and he...
And what he said.
What he demanded on the camera was not safer working conditions and it was not more money.
And the two tenants of every labor union since we organized labor.
What he demanded from the ports was a guarantee that they would not automate their jobs, that they would not automate the work on the ports.
And the picket signs read, robots don't pay taxes and automation harms families.
Mm-hmm.
And I was, you know, again, I was like, this is the first of many.
And sent him a long email.
He didn't respond.
He sent me something very different back.
But I ended up getting a chance to meet with a bunch of long-term and had a bunch of off-the-record conversations that were fascinating.
The results are in the book.
But basically, we asked a battery of questions, of which four were particularly telling.
One, do you believe you could be gainfully employed outside the union?
More than 90% said agree or strongly agree.
And, in fact, they talked about the fact that there were lots of other work that they were constantly getting asked about in other unions, or construction in particular, of which we have a shortage of workers right now.
Second, was anyone in your family in the union? over 80% said yes, a relative was in the union.
Third question, do you want anyone in your family to join the union?
Over 80% said yes.
And one said they were going to continue having children until they had a son, so that their son could join the union.
And the last question was, what is the most important part of your job?
What's the most important part of being in the union?
Multiple choice question, the mode, the most common rank ordered question.
Number one was community.
And You realize, even just with those four answers, that these guys again we only spoke to men 95 male union.
Don't see this as an economic issue per se, right?
The picket signs read robots don't pay taxes, automation harms families.
What they're actually saying is this is my village.
Don't break apart my village.
And one of the questions we asked.
I asked them sort of I mean, I admit somewhat callously, but also just curiously I said who do you think benefits economically if we automate the ports?
And reflexively, they were all trained to say the capitalists.
And so I said, okay, who are the capitalists?
I said, well, the capitalists are the port owners and the shippers.
Okay, well, who else might benefit economically if we automate the ports?
And that's the question that I leave hanging in the book.
And then I answer immediately, which is everyone including eventually, the longshoremen and their kids.
And the reason I know this is because we are all descendants of people whose jobs were automated to our economic benefit.
Every single one of us collectively.
And we don't pay any attention to their plight.
We don't give them a second thought.
What was it like when their job was automated?
And in fact the two most common last names in the United States are Miller and Smith, because we used to name ourselves after our profession.
And it's a reminder that most people have sort of a very direct line to people whose jobs were sort of shut down by the Industrial Revolution the Millers and the Smiths.
And I am sort of taken, after these conversations and all conversations sort of around this subject, by the fact that the longshoremen also really want taxes to be easier.
They would love, they admit, for the accountants to be automated.
They would love for the lawyers to be automated.
They would love for a lot of stuff to be much easier and much less expensive.
And that is also a reminder that all of us wander the earth every single day asking when is this good or service going to be better faster 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 don't ask those questions because we are jerks.
We ask those questions because we are rational economic actors conditioned to believe the world should get better, faster and cheaper constantly.
And when it doesn't, when it actually gets more expensive, we are very aggrieved.
Inflation, even marginal inflation, is so upsetting that it swings entire elections, right?
The president, no matter who is in office, is credited with the cost of goods and services declining or increasing.
And I tell this story and talk about this more than almost anything else, because I'm struck by the fact that almost everyone wishes that almost everyone else's jobs were automated, just not their own.
That we have arrived at a place where automation has sort of proven over time to create a world that is more economically abundant and more available and more accessible, more inclusive in most cases.
And it comes not at an economic cost, but at an emotional one.
That, like not many people, if you really press them, believe that AI is going to make them homeless or starve.
But that AI might actually render their place in the world harder to find.
And the book we open with.
You'll recall Patrick, the opening chapter, the intro, is an homage to John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in 1930 The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.
Against a backdrop of abject despair, people dying in the streets of starvation.
The father of modern macroeconomics wrote a paper and I've read it a lot of times.
I can quote it in which he said I must now disembarrass myself to take flight into the future to describe a world that I will certainly not live to see, one in which humans will have solved, or may have solved, the economic problem and be faced with something more profound.
Father of modern macroeconomics, arguing that, in fact, the spiritual battle was on the horizon, that there was something greater even than the economic problem, which is not how do we live, but how do we live meaningfully.
Mm-hmm.
And I am struck by that constantly.
I think that there will be work.
I think we will find more work to do.
I think that we will expand human potential, which will expand all sorts of opportunity and all sorts of different directions.
And I think the greatest, one of the greatest sacrifices of every person alive today in the developed world certainly is going to be figuring out what their role is, as the work changes frequently.
And a lot.
And it's not that we won't work.
It's that work.
The definition of it is going to be so fluid.
I think in many cases that it's just going to be super hard to attach our identity to it.
And, by the way, the other thing I will say just very economically either we automate all the work and something profound happens economically, or we don't.
And we're sort of left in the same marginal you know 2 annual improvement world that we live in, where we're like God.
Why didn't we, you know why?
Why haven't we accelerated out of this?
And and and you know, in 50 years we go God, I how it's, you know it's, it's 20 20 60, it's 20, 70.
Why are we still doing this thing?
And.
Yeah, you can't help but stare at this and go, there have to be better ways to educate.
There have to be better ways to heal and care.
There have to be better ways to provide than the ones that we are in today, which feel rudimentary and sort of pre-industrial in many cases, certainly the education system and the health care system in many cases.
Yeah.
I think that the answer is just going to come at probably an emotional cost for people.
Yep.
Yeah, I think this is in the Keynes paper.
He asked the questions, how will man occupy the leisure?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it reminds me what you just said.
And that reminds me of something that I believe Kevin Kelly said.
He's the technologist.
I forget which book he talked about, but I love the question, which is, when technology does what technology always does, we have to at some point ask the question what are humans for?
And I think that's what you're getting at with.
What we're talking about here is the opportunity is to ask that question and to answer it in ways that we are not currently really even ready for, because we haven't been forced to ask that question.
We haven't been forced to answer that question.
But one of the things that might come is that we can ask ourselves that question is what is our purpose when we extricate the work from it?
Well, that's an awfully interesting question, even if it's one that is very scary, because in that question is a whole lot of uncertainty, and humans by nature dislike uncertainty.
Yes.
I mean, fundamentally, yes.
I will caution.
The one thing that I caution and I suppose this is for the record and for your listeners and for my own sort of Yeah.
In the interest of sort of being fair and academic part of my struggle with sort of saying well, what's going to be our purpose when technology does everything?
There are two issues with this.
First is that for many people, the idea of a panacea is laughable.
And in fact I'm insulting to them by even proposing that we will solve housing, healthcare and education through technology.
Because by the way, those are not Issues of technology, those are issues of policy.
And it's true.
I mean, I talk about this in the book.
I mean, I take aim at the current ruling class very clearly in the book.
It's the closest I get to populism by saying I believe that everyone should have access to housing, health care and education.
I believe the reason we don't is because politicians haven't enabled it and that this is a this is this is a squarely an inflation by policy issue.
And that talking about solving for the purpose when a lot of people are like cool, how do I pay rent?
Is something I'm very sensitive to and want to acknowledge.
Like we have a long ways to go before we get to actually say, oh, what do I really want to do today?
Right.
And also illegal automation exists and is quite prevalent.
And I think one of the great and I call this out in the book one of the great risks in all this is the populism and sort of populist And you're seeing that now bipartisan, you know Governor DeSantis came out and said you know, we shouldn't be buying what they're selling in regards to AI.
And, of course, you've seen this all over the left.
Bernie Sanders is sort of principal among these people.
And what they're all saying is, you know, we don't want any of this.
And this is sort of this AI catch-all.
They're describing it as the new villain, the boogeyman.
There is a very good chance that a lot of AI promise doesn't arrive for quite some time because we simply policy it into oblivion.
I mean, that happened with nuclear power.
Part of the purpose of the book is to remind people that like we could have abundant energy, but we don't because the politicians said no.
And it's not because we didn't solve it.
It's because they said, nope, this isn't good.
The right did it to protect oil and gas.
The left did it to protect the environment.
And That's a serious risk.
And I think one of the reasons that I don't sort of just stand up on the hill and say oh everyone, figure out what you're going to do tomorrow, because you're going to get to do anything you want, is that a lot of people feel really far from it.
And the government still exists.
And when people are like, well, what jobs are going to automate first?
I'm like, well, you know, it probably will come down to the weakest union.
Like the reason that software engineering is such an acceptable take as a job.
To automate isn't actually, in my opinion, because cloud code is so good.
It's because the software engineers don't have a union.
They're never organized.
And by the way, not only have they not organized, they are exceptionally politically unpopular.
No politician is going to die on the hill to protect software engineers.
And it's like you know people are going to be like who cares that this 500000 a year salary person can't find work now, right?
That's just not, that's not something that is going to fly.
And so it's a very reasonable take, but other jobs far less so.
Just because AI can automate driving does not mean that the truckers are going to be out of business tomorrow.
And I think we should not begin to pretend that a lot of political interest is going to go into protecting jobs that are exceptionally dangerous, kill a lot of people and create economic hardship, just because it will serve a political agenda.
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Last thing, warrior mindset.
You have in the book, the four principles of thriving in the era of AI.
And again, the warrior mindset is the one where we Don't wait for challenges.
We don't wait for problems, but we do our best to lean into them.
And I think that that's really what you're talking about in the last section of the book.
The four principles are adapt and anchor, learn how to learn, optimize for humanistic qualities and lastly, lead with optimism.
I'd love to go through each one of those briefly as we wrap up this conversation, so that we can give folks a sense of what it looks like to assert their agency as best they can as again, as we go into whatever the next five, 10 years is gonna look like as it relates to AI.
Adapt and anchor, what does that mean?
We, for a long time now, people have been talking about adaptability as this core quality.
And my issue with adaptability as a core quality is, is it taken alone? adaptability is populism.
It is when you ask people to describe their least favorite friend.
So not the least favorite person in their life, not their enemy, but the least favorite friend, the person that they sort of ostensibly like but can't stand.
Almost always, It is the person who is least likely to be consistent in their values or their beliefs right.
A lot of people actually sort of love their asshole friend or their jerk friend who they vehemently disagree with, because they know they can consistently disagree with this person.
They believe in something.
They just don't necessarily agree with what they believe in.
It's the person who constantly says just the right thing, who's constantly appealing to the biggest audience.
They can find that people are sort of most irked by.
Because you realize that this person is actually solving for something kind of gross which is like general popular appeal.
And when you constantly tell people that they should be adaptable, you're actually reinforcing this idea of infinite adaptability.
We wrote about this called the adaptability trap.
And the adaptability trap is basically my way of discouraging or encouraging people to actually not be adaptable to their mission, vision and values.
And so when I say anchor, what I mean is anchor on your mission, vision, values.
Be committed to something.
Stand for something.
And in many cases that thing actually should be helping other in service of others.
A place that you want to create, a place that you want to live or build time with family right.
Whatever it is.
And what you should be adaptable to, I argue, is how you do it.
My core belief is that people should become more adaptable to their ways and means.
And the problem with that is that many people, our grandparents in particular if your grandparents are alive, mine are not.
But one of the cute things about grandparents is that they are so often anchored to their ways and means.
They often have like physical ledgers on which they write things.
They have these, you know, cute old habits that everyone thinks are really sweet.
And most of these habits are sweet because these people are living these sort of like very simple, cute lives.
And they are anchored in their habitual nature.
The problem with sort of celebrating that as a young person is that you're not going to accomplish what you want if you can't be willing to change how you do it.
And that to me is the idea of separating your mission, vision, values from your ways and means.
And you should be very clear on one, because the world is going to change a ton and you should be super clear on what it is you want and how you're going to and what it looks like, and you should be really adaptable to how you get there.
Got it.
Number two, learn how to learn.
This one is not a hot take.
And I think of all the things I write, this is the one that people, like everyone sort of nods with.
Whatever you believe in, a lot of people are like, yeah, and it sounds good for what it's worth.
It's the idea that young people ask me all the time, what should I study in college?
My answer consistently is it does not matter.
What they're asking, by the way, is how do I make a lot of money?
And that's fair.
That's a fair concern.
It's what young people are sort of conditioned today to worry about to some extent, because the cost of living is rising.
And I'm like, look, it doesn't matter.
There is a fast declining correlation between your major and your economic outcome, such that no prediction here could be accurate.
And in fact, as of four months ago, the average American male wage The average wage for an American male with a college education, without a college education has intersected.
So it's not even clear you have to go to college in order to be economically successful or viable.
And there are clearly majors that are net negative in terms of ROI, right?
I mean, we don't have to go through that list for fear of spooking someone or their mom.
Yeah.
But what I do remind people of is if you're going to go to college, remember two things.
First, the point of college is to make mistakes that you are not comfortable making in front of your parents.
It's to learn how to be an adult, period.
Like that is the purpose, especially of an American education and American higher education.
And I love it.
I celebrate American higher ed at every opportunity, not because we are, you know, teaching people really complex skills.
In some cases, we are, you know, STEM cases.
But in most cases, what we're actually doing is raising people to learn how to live on their own and make friends, which is not something that high school always offers.
And I'm like, look, go to college and be social.
Be human.
And also I tell people study something you love for the act alone of exploring an idea, not because it's going to get you a good job and make you a bunch of money, but because you're excited by it.
And that is the closest you will have come for most people to the idea of mastery.
And mastery is this, you know, it's been written about thousands of times.
There's nothing I'm going to say here that you probably haven't talked about, but it's this important thing that people should experience, because it gives people an idea of of what it is like to really deeply learn about something.
In a way that almost no high schooler is ever challenged to do.
And in that people can start to experience one, a more fulfilling life, but two, what it means to actually get good at something which again, is not something that high school teaches you.
And that is how you learn how to learn.
The process of exploring something very deeply because you're excited by it gives you a taste of what it will be like to learn lots of things.
And in a world that is going to change a lot, Especially in a world, in a labor market, where your employer may not care about the skills you have but your ability to acquire new ones, proving that you can do that hugely economically beneficial.
Yeah, and I imagine the first two there adapt and anchor and learn.
To learn in combination is going to be a real power play right.
If you can anchor to the idea that I'm a learner, if you can anchor to the idea that I am adaptable and that I can figure it out, then you become really potent learners, in terms of both your own personal growth, your own personal opportunity, but also, to your point, the opportunities that might come to you as it relates to work.
Patrick, I'll use you as an example.
I mean, I listened to a couple of your podcasts when you invited me on.
When you were growing up, someone explaining a podcast like no one could have explained a podcast to you.
And so, somewhere along the way, you discovered that you wanted to live this healthy, this sort of healthy, deeply fulfilling life, and you wanted to talk to other people about it.
And if you were committed to this idea that you would run a gym, for example, or that you would do a certain thing, Like I am a trainer.
That's what I am.
Well then, you sort of limit your ability to actually inform and influence how other people think about their own wellness journey.
And the willingness to sort of say I want to make the world better by helping people discover Heart on Fire and I'm going to be open to how that happens is how you arrive running a successful podcast.
And only through that, right?
You can't first decide you want to do a podcast and then figure out what you want to do.
That won't get you anywhere.
But you also can't be like.
The only way I'm going to do this is by being a dietician or by being a trainer.
Well, then you can't live in Southern Maine.
Then, you know, you got to move to a very populous city.
Yeah, totally.
Love that.
Great example.
All right, let's keep going.
Optimize for humanistic qualities.
What does that mean?
Well, so this is one of the three most annoying errors in the first print.
So if you get a first print of the book you did, you'll realize that the title of the section is Optimized for Humanistic Qualities.
And then in the section, it's called Be Human.
And we rewrote it as Be Human.
So the next edition of the book, the first 30,000 have this.
Yeah, be human is the actual principle.
And it is exactly what it sounds like.
You know, if it weren't so, if it didn't sound so silly and if it didn't make me feel like I was sort of being callous, to the moment, I would describe myself as a humanist, which I think is ultimately what I am.
Like I, when I talk about the life I want to live, it is actually quite simple and it is surrounded by friends and family and physical community.
And I think that having now seen all of the death experiments and all the happiness experiments, I'm pretty convinced that this is actually what everyone also wants.
Everyone who's not a psychopath.
It basically arrives at the same happiness function.
And we sort of talk about the happiness function in the book.
This idea that what people really want in this world is to be human.
And that the purpose of technology should amplify the human experience.
What it means, what we can do, and ultimately how much joy an individual can achieve.
And in the spirit of the warrior mindset and the heart on fire, nothing delivers more than the idea of just being deeply human being, with yourself, in your you know, in your body, exploring the world.
And that the purpose of technology that we have forgotten.
In the age of not AI but digital device, in the age of the screen itself, we have forgotten that most important principle that we were.
We invented all of this stuff actually to allow ourselves to just be more in our bodies and in our world.
Yeah.
Last one is lead with optimism.
Well, when leaders press me on how they're supposed to change their company or adopt this technology, I sort of keep finding myself coming back to the same idea, which is are you?
The question I ask people is do you believe that things are going well?
And do you think things are getting?
Are going to continue going well or getting better, or getting worse?
And, you know, most honest leaders are sort of they struggle with this.
And I say, well, how much do you like, do you tell stories about how the world is getting better?
Do you describe to your employees ways in which your company is going to build a better world.
Not make better margins, not make more money, but provide more access to your goods and services to more people to create a better world.
Are you describing this?
Because if you're not, you're probably terrifying people.
And it is really hard.
It sells politically to scare people.
It quite well, as we've discovered, it doesn't sell economically to scare people.
It's actually increasingly challenging to to terrify people from a, from a leadership standpoint, into incredible overperformance.
And I think even on a consumer marketing basis, the FOMO marketing is giving way to something else which is like more aspirational marketing.
Which is good, I argue, and also a reminder that we need, more than ever, leaders to describe a better world, such that we can live in it.
And it's not about not pointing at the problems.
I remind people constantly, you have to point at the problems to be honest about what they are.
And I don't think we often do that enough.
I think that cost of living is the single thing that every politician should be talking about.
And the big difference that I would take in political tact between the current political landscape and the one that I would want if I were a politician is by describing the obvious solutions to these pressing problems and a means to arrive there in a way that doesn't actually have to attack an enormous percentage of the population, in a way that doesn't describe the pie as just needing to be carved out which is what both parties do but a world where we can sort of deflate the cost of goods and services by technological intervention.
And that to me is what optimism looks like.
It is, or hope even.
And I argue in the book.
The last thing I argue is that it is not actually a it's not a nice sort of Sunday passing activity.
It's not, it shouldn't be seen as a navel gazing activity.
It should actually be seen as a moral obligation.
And what I say to most people is if you have kids, I think you have a moral obligation to describe a world that is better.
Not because it is guaranteed, but because if we don't, then what chance do we have?
Yes.
Love that.
Last question for you is you talked a little bit when we were talking about learning how to learn.
The question you often get from young folks or parents of young folks, which is you know what job in light of what's coming?
What job should I take?
Which is really a question is, how can I make as much money as possible?
Which, I would argue, is really a question of how can I reduce the uncertainty to a point where I'm comfortable.
And so I get a sense from folks as it relates to AI.
Really, the question is, I don't know how to deal with the uncertainty that I feel when I look out and I look at what's possible or what might be coming.
And so my last question to you is what advice do you have for those of us who do kind of sit in a place of uncertainty and fear around that uncertainty?
How do we get to a place?
What's your advice for us getting to a place where we are taking action in light of the uncertainty?
Not to get rid of it, because I don't know that that's possible, especially in this case.
But how do you move forward?
How do you encourage people to move forward in spite of that uncertainty?
I mean, this is it's.
It feels rich because it's coming from someone who has his own insecurities and his own fears and doubts.
I mean, I think it's You know I, I would ask you for the same advice, but I'm pretty clear on what I.
What makes me happiest?
I'm pretty clear on what joy looks like to me.
I'm pretty clear on what I want my life to look and feel like.
And I've realized that like outside of some like global catastrophe, it's imminently attainable.
Hmm.
And so much of why I do what I do is actually to remind most people, is to be a voice, by the way, of hope that doesn't sound crazy or sycophantic or, you know, stuck in an ivory tower.
And also like someone who's battled a lot of his own life journeys to sort of arrive at a place where I'm like yeah, technology has made my life better and worse.
And also, here's how I view my relationship with it.
And here's what I'm doing to sort of use it to improve, not detract from my happiness.
And Again the point of the book is to sort of spell out to people in very real terms what the upsides are and what the downsides are.
And if you are listening to this, you probably live in the developed world.
You probably have the means to sort of have some control.
I mean, unless you're really despondent, in which case my heart breaks for you.
But for most of your listeners, they probably have some agency and some control over their day.
And I think that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Seeing this technology as a means to enable and enhance their happiness function is imminently available.
Like they could immediately think about ways that this technology is not actually going to break them down, but actually build them up.
And outside of you know, outside of sort of that exercise, I think that it's very hard for anyone to sort of step into this void or step into the portal with any sense of comfort.
But once you start to actually consider the ways in your own life that you can be more fulfilled, by either automating things that don't serve you, or by learning about things that make you happy, or by, you know, discovering new opportunities for yourself, all the things that technology have offered.
It gives everyone, I think, a chance to say well, I don't know what the next hundred years will look like, but I know that I can make tomorrow better because of technology.
And for many people, honestly, the answer is probably, I say this, go outside.
I think so often we lose sight of the fact that technology can make us so much happier and better off because it has, for the last 20 years, trapped us.
And the device addiction is such a pernicious, awful addiction demon that we have conflated it with all other technological progress.
And if we could go back and change one thing about the current moment?
It's probably, you know, giving kids unbridled access to a thing that was going to trap their minds.
And, and that, that too, we will solve.
And once you appreciate that, like we can fix a lot of these things, it makes the uncertainty, I think, far less terrifying, knowing that like we do actually, you know, grow constantly.
It's a great place to wrap up.
The book is called The Next Renaissance AI and the Expansion of Human Potential.
Zach, the book is great.
This has been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Patrick.
Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
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