The Guy Who Took ChatGPT to Market is now Warning Us About It.: Zack Kass

0:00Everybody knows about ChatGPT, but few people actually know the mastermind behind bringing it to market. And no, I'm not talking about Sam Altman. I'm talking about Zack Kass. There are few things more controversial than AI right now. Some people hate it, and some people love it. And when it comes to what this technology means for the future, nobody has the perspective or the background that Zack has. And I guarantee you that his approach to where the technology and society are headed will absolutely shock you. Zach has spent over a decade at the center of the AI industry, culminating in leading the go-to-market strategy at OpenAI, bringing the technology to hundreds of millions of professionals around the world.

0:43He had every reason to keep being the industry's biggest cheerleader. It got him wealth, status, and a seat at the table. But instead, he stepped back at the peak of his career because he believed that the current direction of technology made a promise to society that it has since broken. His big swing wasn't leaving OpenAI. It was standing at the front of the very people building the future and naming the real threat that everyone else is missing. As a society, we are standing on the precipice of a major technological revolution. If we get it wrong, the consequences are dire. But if we get it right, Zach argues that we could be standing at the doorstep of what he calls the next renaissance.

1:28A world where technology finally delivers on its oldest promise, driving down the cost of what it takes to live a good life and opening it up to everyone, not just the wealthy few. This is the story of Zach Kass. Welcome to Big Swings Only.

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2:27Why do so many people hate AI? And why is your perspective on AI so surprising when people hear you speak?

2:36Zack Kass: I don't think most people hate AI. I think they hate the idea of what AI might do to them. And they hate the story that is being told about the costs associated with it. Most people do not hate air conditioning. Most people do not hate antibiotics. Most people do not hate planes, trains, and automobiles. Most people do not hate the internet. Most people do not hate vaccines. Well, that one's a little more complicated. that. Most people do not hate refrigeration. Most people do not hate electricity. And the reason that 99 % of people like most of the technologies I just listed is because they have advanced the human experience over time.

3:22Zack Kass: They have diffused it to the benefit of the average person such that the average person cannot imagine their life without these technologies because they have raise the standard of human living. And for most of human history, the technologies that we invented, we didn't really have to ask in an acute moment, should we adopt this technology? Because the diffusion took so long. By the time it reached the individual at the end of the chain, people were desperate for it. I mean, plumbing is a great example, right? By the time plumbing arrives at a lot of places on earth that only recently received fresh water, including, by the way, India and a lot of China and much of Africa.

4:07Zack Kass: The debate wasn't should we install plumbing in these places? The debate was how have we slept with ourselves that plumbing didn't arrive here sooner? How have we felt comfortable with the idea that technology should be reserved for this group but not for this group? The very interesting thing about the AI debate is no one is arguing anymore. Will everyone get AI? Which is a fascinating thing to consider because the diffusion debate was always the problem. Who will get this thing? And you don't hear the debate around, well, will a child in Africa get AI? You hear the debate around, what will a child in Africa do with it and won't it harm them?

4:47Zack Kass: And the reason for this, the reason that we have made the AI debate about harm instead of opportunity is the context in which it is arriving. Which, frankly, is a pretty sad, absurd context, because for the last 30 years, two things have happened, related but actually orthogonal. One, we have become horribly addicted to our machines, our devices, and they have harmed our brains in observable and unobservable second-order ways that we are still finding out. and these machines have caused real dehumanization and real anti-social patterns but they also principally have fed us the worst news on earth they have told us all of the terrible things that are happening all the time we gave kids smartphones when they turned 12 on average in the united states that's when gen z got their smartphone and it instantly started displaying them porn gambling violence comparison in the most addictive way and we have the gall to be like why are you so unhappy why why would gen z be twice or three times more likely in some parts of the u.s to be depressed and anxious than the prior generation well pretty fucking obvious we told them all of the horrors of the earth the most the most innocent empathetic creatures Most adults cannot metabolize this information, right?

6:24Zack Kass: Einstein could barely metabolize this information. He talked about discovering awful things and it making him really sad. A 12-year-old should not know about most of the conflicts on earth. They should know about the conflicts on the playground with other kids and how to resolve them. They shouldn't even know about their parents' conflicts. So that's the first problem. And ignoring that is perilous because it ignores the thing that we must atone for before we atone for anything else. Giving kids smartphones and access to the horrors of the world is a cardinal sin. And we have to acknowledge all of the damage it's done in order to move forward.

7:09Zack Kass: It's not that the world got worse. It's that we told everyone all the awful things that were happening and we didn't let them look away. And in fact, we incentivized companies. We built trillion dollar businesses on the backs of these businesses or on the backs of these content farms. But a second thing happened that is even in some ways more absurd and more sad, which is while we made telecommunications and entertainment and gambling and pornography dirt cheap, while we gave everyone with access to the internet infinite reams of awfulness and spiritual dereliction, we made housing, healthcare, and education 300 % more expensive.

7:57I mean, consider that, right?

7:59Zack Kass: Like there's a Faustian bargain. There's a world 30 years ago where we go everyone's going to get a smartphone and it's going to make everything inexpensive that means everyone's going to get porn but everyone's also going to get a better house less for less money nope we gave everyone a smartphone we gave everyone the internet and they got dopamine dirt cheap they got vice and sin and spiritual bankruptcy dirt cheap and they got the pillars of a beautiful world, 300 % more than their parents. Why, through that lens, would many people be excited about the next wave of technology?

8:45Zack Kass: That seems pretty reasonable. It seems pretty reasonable if you're a young person staring at this moment you go cool so i go to i sleep for on off for five hours a night on average that's what gen z boys are doing i've got eye problems because i'm addicted to blue light my parents house is prohibitively expensive ai is going to take my job apparently and make me more addicted to this machine sorry what am I missing and why would a parent who's watched what this moment has done to their kid feel any better so my argument in all this is we are in a moment in time where our human's relationship with the technology that was meant to lift us up is actually corrupted and it's corrupted principally by the screen we are experiencing this moment in time where the screen has done so much damage to our brains and didn't deliver on a promise to make things less expensive such that we live in this absurd economy.

9:52Zack Kass: And we're exacerbating the problem right now because we're not actually addressing that issue. I mean, some people are doing it. Yuval Harari, Jonathan Haidt. I have stood shoulder to shoulder with these people outside of school districts fighting for safe spaces for kids in classrooms. I was one of the first teachers at UVA to tell my students who cannot bring a device into this classroom, I start every keynote by telling people to put away their phone. I am doing what I can to point attention to the screen as a demon, which I think it is. But the policymakers are still ignoring it, in part because Meta's tentacles are wrapped around them, but also in part because it's actually not popular.

10:34It's still not a

10:37Zack Kass: politically popular idea to take phones away from kids, which is crazy. It's still not a particularly popular, politically popular idea to create social media bans for certain age groups or device policy limits. So I think we got to start there. The other thing I think we need to acknowledge is everything else that we are talking about right now, future of work, data center job creation economic spoils it doesn't actually it doesn't address the root issue which is the average young person's future of living what is the future of their life look like and if you cannot show people a straight line between new technology and lower cost of goods well then you have failed as a society because every technology for the in the history of human experience has driven down the cost of goods and services over time and expanded access ai will certainly do the same but at some point it's no longer a technology failure housing healthcare and education are not prohibitively expensive because they must be they're prohibitively expensive because we've chosen to make them that way.

11:57Zack Kass: The screen in front of you that you're viewing me on used to cost$20 ,000. Now it costs a hundred bucks. Why? Well, we deregulated that at market and a bunch of people who make TV screens started making them less expensive until the market was flooded with TV screens, supercomputer in your pocket, flight around the world, thousand dollars in some places. Why can you drive across Los Angeles for $10 in an autonomous vehicle, but a trip five blocks away in an ambulance might actually bankrupt you.

12:29Zack Kass: Well, policy.

12:33Zack Kass: An antisocial government that has been in power so long, we forgot what it is like to have a good government that haven't been held accountable for all these decisions. And they're now pointing at the technologists. And I'm not trying to relieve the technologists, but there is a way out of this. and it is putting unrelenting pressure on policymakers to allow AI and other technologies to do for housing, healthcare, and education, the pillars of a great society, what it did for our TV screens and our supercomputers and all the other things in our life that feel dirt cheap. Why can I get gas station sushi for$7?

13:07Zack Kass: But if I go to college for four years, I'll be indebted for the rest of my life. How does everything we allow to get less expensive get less expensive? technology. And until policymakers stand up and say the brave thing, this data center is first going to power housing, robotics to build cheaper housing, or hospitals to provide lower cost of healthcare, or free Khan Academy or other online education services. And by the way, it won't power gambling or pornography. Like, what an interesting policy measure. I don't know if it'll work because gambling and pornography power a lot of data center build-outs, but it would be an interesting approach because you don't hate technology.

13:57Zack Kass: You hate right now what it is being used to do, which is warp our brains. That's a very reasonable take. If all the next wave of data centers does is make us more spiritually bankrupt, I don't blame any young person for rioting. at all. Good for you. But if we can, if the next wave of technology plus policy, right, pro-housing, pro-human policy can diffuse the benefits of this technology to the average person, we're going to talk about AI the way we talk about electricity, right? Only the the yeomans and the, and the, you know, the, you know, the, the only, only the, the, the, the groups that refuse to use technology will, will, will continue to fight it.

14:43Zack Kass: And by the way, the other reason I can prove this is I go to China about three times a year and I go to China for three reasons. One, I really like Chinese people. I also really like Chinese food to I, um, they want to know what is happening in America because Americans don't actually go to China. And there's a lot that I can talk about. Actually, I'll start over. I go to China for three reasons. One, I really like Chinese people and Chinese food. It's an amazing place. Two, there is a lot to learn. And one of the things to learn is that 80 % of Chinese people view AI as a means to make life better.

15:27Zack Kass: Why? Why does AI poll so well in China? That is an important question. Now, some of this and the cynic in people go, well, the Chinese people are lying about the polls. I've been on the ground. Chinese people are pretty excited about AI and they're excited about AI, I think, principally because they live in a world where the internet and the mobile device built a new middle class. The young people in China remember that their grandparents literally nearly starved to death. I mean, China's middle class is born from abject poverty. We don't really know what that's like because the U.S. has been so far out in front for so long economically.

16:06Zack Kass: I mean, we had poverty. We had abject poverty 50 years ago, but not like the Chinese, right? The Chinese were starving to death until very recently. And policy measures to diffuse the benefits of technology to the average person were put in place. China has 45 ,000 miles of high-speed rail, So the average Chinese person can get from Beijing to Shanghai for$100 in a comfortable seat. The American mind cannot comprehend some of this. Xi fires hospital administrators whose health care doesn't get better, faster, cheaper year over year because he's like, we keep inventing new technology. Why would you not actually build better hospitals?

16:41Zack Kass: What's your excuse? So the average Chinese person is like, cool, AI is going to make us even better. Sure. And that is the context in which this technology is arriving. They don't view it as more social dereliction or spiritual dereliction. They view it as cheaper living, more opportunity. So we have an opportunity. We have an incredible, important opportunity right now to not let the policymakers point at the technologists and blame them. It's true that meta is a bad act. I mean, I think a bad actor, but it's also true that Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and all the people who've been in power for 50 years could have made everything less expensive by now.

17:23And they chose not to.

17:24Zack Kass: The technology was there to do it. We could have built more housing. We could have built more schools. We could have done so many things to make this stuff better. And we just chose not to. Let me summarize before I ask my next question to make sure we're on the same page, because it sounds like what you're saying is a big reason why people don't feel positive about technology is because in the last 30 years, we haven't been given very good reasons to believe that things are going to necessarily get better because the tech has not, there hasn't been a clear enough nexus between the technological advancement and the improvement of people's everyday lives.

18:00And then also when you think about it, it's just from a second.

18:03Zack Kass: And actually to your point, there's been a degradation in their everyday life. One, exactly. That's a very important distinction. And then you also have the reality from a psychological perspective of the availability heuristic. You know, when Jaws came out, everybody was afraid of a shark attack, even though it's statistically unlikely. But since it's always in your face, you think it's more likely. Now, when you think about the algorithms, a lot of the time it's on social media and with YouTube, whatever it happens to be, we're feeding people the darkest parts of humanity, because that's what people resonate with the most.

18:32And then as a result, when something new comes, they're going to assume that it's going to be more negative. And now this is an extrapolation. I'm wondering when it comes to the distinction between the Chinese perspective as it relates to AI and the American perspective in general as it relates to AI, I wonder how much of that faith in the technology being used to improve the everyday life that exists in China that doesn't exist here comes as a result of the Chinese faith in Chinese institutions and policymakers to ensure that it steers in that direction. And in America, we have less faith in the powers that be to steer us in that same positive direction.

19:16Zack Kass: I would avoid using the word faith in China because it's actually, it's not a place that, I actually, strictly out of like semantic purpose, I think that the, I think Chinese people have a agreement with the government, which is that they will give up a lot of liberties in exchange for a lot of economic benefit. Yeah. And that agreement is tacit in most cases and spoken in some. And with very few exceptions, including some universities and private dining rooms, most Chinese people don't even talk about the government. It is not. It is a thing that exists, but the party is is left unspoken. and it's it's a ghost in the machine um president she is revered but not actually discussed in in media except for state media and and actually social media influencers cannot you just you know you don't talk about the government at all unless you want your your stuff to be banned yes there is an incredible confidence that the chinese people have in the technology because of a recency bias but also you made the right point which is there's a attention bias that plagues the americans that doesn't plague the chinese because their social media is not and again this is a free speech issue i would much rather live in the u.s but their social media looks nothing like ours right kids social media in china is filled with mostly educational content there is no beauty influencer until you're a certain age.

21:03Zack Kass: There are time limits. There are time of day limits. Kids cannot scroll endlessly unless you like hack your device. And they figured out pretty well how to stop VPN. So even VPN access goes in and out in China if you want to access American media. and it is a you know pretty clear violation of civil liberties that we enjoy in the u.s that i think are important but it is consumer protectionism and in in the case of the party it is party protectionism because it the party doesn't actually want people one of the reasons that i'm welcome in china and i'm particularly welcome is that i'm willing to get up in front of a room of thousands of Chinese people, and I do, and tell them that the device is destroying their lives.

21:56Zack Kass: I'm very willing to say, and I spoke at the business school, at the Tsinghua Business School a month ago while I was there, and in front of, I don't know, dozens of professors and hundreds, almost a thousand students, I said, look, I'm really bullish on China. There's lots stuff you're doing well but if i had to bet if i had to bet against you my bet would be that none of you are actually capable of maintaining meaningful relationships for much longer like when i start talking if i don't actually call out the demon in the room they will not look up and it's not because i'm not interesting it's because they have normalized staring at their phones wow for everything meals doesn't matter and um and the party hates it the party sees this not as a means to control people, but actually as a potential loss of the individual.

22:50Zack Kass: They're not so hell-bent on securing power that they are willing to, or they are, but they see the loss of the self as being really problematic. It also is destroying their birth rates. Oh, yeah. And this is the point we were getting to earlier. The dehumanization effects of social media and the device are having, which come at the same moment that a lot of people are now making enough money that they don't need a family in order to survive, right? For a long time, you needed a family unit to survive. You don't need that anymore. A lot of people can live on their own. A lot of people can afford a home on their own in China.

23:31Zack Kass: That's great because people aren't, there are very few homeless people in China and housing, healthcare, and education are getting less expensive in China. Huge wins. and also families are not economically necessary anymore. And if young men and young women are staring at their devices all the time, the Chinese have a huge problem. So they passed, I don't know if you know this, Singles Day is the biggest day, it's the biggest holiday in the world that no one, it's certainly the biggest holiday in the world no one knows about. Holy might be bigger in India in terms of the number of people who celebrate.

23:59Zack Kass: But in India, Singles Day is like their Valentine's Day time. Oh, quick thing. Did you say India or China? Holy in India is bigger. got it and then okay it's probably bigger than any other holiday on earth but the second biggest holiday on earth perfect okay is uh singles day in china it's like it's valentine's day it's a weekend now it's valentine's day times five you you you have to be there to to appreciate it the entire country turns into a celebration of dating and it's and it's so couples celebrate They usually do stuff, but singles celebrate, and every bar, every club pops off for Singles Day, and they do now a weekend of it.

24:46Zack Kass: In fact, I have a friend in Santa Barbara, shout out, who met his wife who traveled from Inner Mongolia to Beijing to celebrate Singles Day. So that's like, at the time, probably a five-hour train ride. and it's it's understood that if you're a single girl your parents are like go out for singles day go get yourself a husband and the government has to promote this as a means to convince people to get together and it's one of these holidays where it's understood that like you don't want to be on your device as much because you want to be looking around you got to keep your head up to find your to find your uh soulmate but this is all to say to go back to the you know i don't know how we got here but to go back to the original point of your question yes the chinese government is trying to do their best in a very specific way to diffuse the benefit of this technology to the average person and they by the way there are policy measures that are not talked about enough that china uh have passed that i think should come to the u.s one of them they passed a non-resident tax a long time ago vancouver did the old double uno reverse vancouver had this problem, I don't know if you know, but like in like 2010, the Chinese, out of fear of their currency deflating, but also in an effort to sort of hedge against any political issues, started buying up Canadian real estate.

26:11Zack Kass: And they loved the Vancouver real estate because it was closest to them. Well, it destroyed the Canadian housing or the Vancouver housing market because 40 % of downtown became vacant and young people couldn't afford to live in downtown Vancouver. So Vancouver passed a non-resident tax. They might as well have called it an anti-Chinese landowner tax. But they basically said, if you own a building in China, if you own a home in China and you don't live in it, we're going to charge you 5 % or 10 % a year. So it's going to cost you a ton. You cannot speculate on Vancouver housing. And it worked tremendously well.

26:45Zack Kass: It is a beacon of what could happen if we got brave enough to pass non-resident tax, which is my most progressive policy promotion. I don't believe in government to pass a lot of good taxes, but this would be an amazing one. Well, the Chinese passed a non-resident tax in most major cities. If you own a home in the city and you don't live there, you pay a premium. But then Xi went a step further and said, you can't get a mortgage on a second home. So he said to the Chinese people, you cannot speculate on housing. You buy a home, you buy the nicest home you want. We're going to build tons of nice homes.

27:21Zack Kass: I mean, Shanghai has some of the nicest apartments in the world, by far. And there are beautiful homes in the suburbs surrounding Shanghai and Shenzhen and Beijing. But he said, if you want to buy second homes, you can, you just got to do it with cash. So you can't borrow. And it drives down the demand for housing. Yeah. Which is great because it doesn't actually drive up any, you know, the homelessness in the process. It just says, look, I'm going to make speculating on housing slightly less interesting. And it's one of these measures that even Ron, it's one of these points now where Ron DeSantis and Mom Donnie are arriving at the same conclusion, which is crazy.

28:04Zack Kass: Mom Donnie passed this PDA, this is called a billionaire tax. It's a PDA tax, which says if you own a second home in New York City, you pay a higher tax on it. And Ron DeSantis is now saying, if you own a home in Florida that you don't live in, I'm going to charge you more on it. But he's spinning it. He's like, I'm going to charge residents less on tax. Fine. Call whatever you want. I don't care. Just don't let people speculate on housing. And it's one of the ways that we're going to survive this moment. And by the way, this comes back to another point. If we keep talking about the future of work, my head's going to explode.

28:38Zack Kass: Not because I'm tired of the debate, but because there's a bigger one to have and we can have it right now in a really interesting way. It's the future of living. How do I know this? If a recent college grad has to work until he's 90 or she's 90 to afford their parents' house, what difference does the future of work make? Designing the perfect jobs until kingdom come in an absurd economy where it doesn't matter what your job is, you're not going to be able to get the life your parents were promised or get. It doesn't work. And this, again, is the confidence that the Chinese people have in the government to allow young people to do better than their parents, which our young people in the U.S.

29:21Zack Kass: And basically, actually, you want to look at the three countries that hate AI the most, Germany, Canada, U.S., and the three countries with the most disillusioned young people. Yes. So it's not a coincidence. It's not at all a coincidence. If you grow up in an absurd economy that has had unbelievable technological progress, why would you look at this moment with much hope? Have you ever walked out of a meeting feeling really good about it, and then 10 minutes later someone's messaging you saying something like, wait, what did we actually decide in that meeting? That gap between what happened and what anyone remembers is exactly what Granola AI closes.

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32:05They carry that same quality into bedding, bath, kitchen essentials, and furniture, all designed with the same care. I use Quince and so should you. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to Quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was me. That's the best way to support the show. Yep. Yep. And one of the things that you talk about as we enter this potential AI renaissance is essentially we have to have a renegotiation of the social contract.

32:44The established ways of doing business and living life will fundamentally change if the technology becomes what it could potentially become. We can talk about unmetered energy, unmetered intelligence, those types of things. If we get to that point, we have to have a completely different conversation. So can you talk about the potential renegotiation of the social contract that needs to happen and then what the future could look like if the technology fulfills its promise?

33:12Zack Kass: We are vilifying technologists who point to the stars because we go, why? Why would you? Well, there was a time where mega projects were awesome and it's how people move forward. Kennedy's great speech. We will go to the moon, not because it's easy, but because it's hard. Yeah. It's 80 % popularity in the polls. Now people say this and they go, you're an idiot. You're insane. You're a narcissist. We don't even talk about exciting stuff anymore. So AI arrives against a backdrop where everything's more expensive not everything the pillars of a great society are more expensive dopamine and social dereliction and spiritual dereliction are dirt cheap and we've stopped describing a beautiful city on a hill we stopped describing all the ways in which the world could be so much better and the social contract that people keep talking about negotiating i'm like cool maybe but what if we just described high-speed rail it exists china's built 45 000 miles of it what if we literally just what if a president ran on the idea of hey i'm going to connect every major american city through high-speed rail we're going to do it and we're going to do it less expensively that doesn't that's not a new social contract that's a big interesting project that is imminently achievable that would give everyone a belief in social and uh improvement and mobility through physical infrastructure cool let's do that let's let's describe the ways in which we are going to improve American schools through by removing physical devices from them and making ed tech something that doesn't require the child's attention.

34:47Zack Kass: What if we also described a way in which everyone could get a great college education without paying the rest of their life for it? Imminently doable, not hard, requires telling the universities they no longer have tax exempt status there is a bunch of stuff to do that doesn't require some esoteric philosophy right yeah it's just like people do this we can do it we we can we we can do these things we could build in 1980 we built in the 1980s the united states built 18 million new homes in the 1990s we built 17 million new homes in the 2000s we built six and we haven't recovered since it's nimbyism like yeah robotics would make housing less expensive but also just build more housing let build more housing and don't let people speculate on it cool well sorry i just no this is great this this is a really good point because essentially when we think about the concept of a social contract, it's very, like you said, it's very ephemeral.

35:58It's very esoteric and just nebulous in general too. When I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about your description is truly just a more practical social contract where we say, all right, let's essentially take big swings, do big things with the new technology that we have. Because you're saying that from essentially in order to do this, there needs to be a blend of a cultural shift in the zeitgeist where we start to believe that we can and should do big things and actually try to make big changes at scale. But then at the same time, we recognize that the government plays some role in creating incentives that could either incentivize or disincentivize the behaviors that move us forward.

36:44And what's interesting is coming into this, I was okay, AI is the big swing and it's part of it. But what you're saying, and tell me if this is a fair conceptualization, it sounds like it's not just AI, it's technology in general. And if technology in general fulfills its promise, it drives prices down, increases the rate of technological advancement. And we now have an opportunity to actually have a meaningful conversation about the trajectory of humanity and what meaning and purpose actually means to us as humans. Is that a fair synopsis?

37:18Zack Kass: I should have just said that at the outset.

37:25Zack Kass: Let's just make that the podcast.

37:31Oh man, it's brilliant. It's brilliant because you really created a record scratch here because you're saying, listen - Hold on.

37:39Zack Kass: Is it that brilliant or is it actually like a - I mean, you saying that but isn't it pretty reasonable here's the thing this is not this is like it's a it's taking big swings is something we've been doing for a long time that we just stopped doing stopped yes well here's the thing i i recognize that the sign of a brilliant insight is that it looks obvious in hindsight because it's you can see it you can see the the forest from the trees you you get that and again and i said said this to you off camera i think it's the fact that you are somebody who's not just coming at this from a techno-optimist with a recency bias.

38:20You appreciate the philosophy and the history and the entire trajectory of humanity. And when you zoom out and widen your aperture, then you can say, hold on. We are at this really exciting inflection point, but we're hyper-fixating on these negative things where the ultimate outcome of the hyper fixation on negativity is going to keep us stuck but if we zoom out we could say hey everybody we can have a really serious conversation about how we can make things better we we i have

38:47Zack Kass: to remind people in these moments that mothers pregnant mothers expecting mothers smoke and drank for thousands of years and people go what the fuck does that have to do with anything i go we've been we've been damaging our bodies and our future generations with vices for so long it took us 20 years to figure out social media was bad for the kids i'm not actually saying there won't be more problems i'm saying that it's we now live in a world where we can really quickly stare at the bad stuff and go this is bad yeah we also now live in a world where people are like make it better immediately or I'll riot.

39:26Zack Kass: And I, I, yeah, I will kill you if this gets any worse, uh, for much longer. The, the, the impatience is not a bad thing. I think I actually just wish people routed their, their ire at the right places. Like instead of saying no data centers, the pro-human movement is cool. This data center needs to power hospitals and it needs to power Khan Academy classes for every every kid in the neighborhood take it a step further i don't care make it like it needs to make uh all wi-fi for children free like i i don't care pick pick your thing that's clearly good because there's a ton of ways in which data centers power good stuff and then insist that the data center in your neighborhood first goes there

40:18Zack Kass: but it is paramount to saying we don't want power lines and it's like well no what you don't want is a casino to be you know to what you don't want to live next to a casino but you do want to live near a hospital and you do want that hospital to be powered by power lines you do want to live near a grocery store and you want that grocery store to be powered by power lines and the infrastructure that ai is going to produce is is so much bigger than the stuff on the app i actually think that the the strangest thing about this moment too is the reason big swings are so hard for people to conceptualize right now is that the diffusion of the technology has happened so quickly that they no longer think about AI in a mystery.

41:01Zack Kass: It's no longer magic. We went so fast from AI that makes magical images where anything is possible to being like, no, AI is slop. It's like, no, the current generation of AI is slop. But if you actually make an infrastructure, it's electricity it's it's it's a current of of intelligence and by the way i'm not saying it doesn't disrupt a bunch that again i'm not like i don't sit here going this will solve all problems i'm saying this will solve the current set of problems and it will create more right yes see i'm with you i'm with you and i think again this goes back to what i was talking about with we have to renegotiate our relationship with the way the world fundamentally works because it ain't it it ain't working right now because the thing is we have so many conflicting directions when it comes to interests and then a lot of the people who are in power are conflicted in a way that makes it fundamentally difficult for them to do their job and so i'm wondering from your perspective do you think that most people in the united states have conflicting interests actually no they not the people i'm talking about the politicians though so it's the people who have their hands on the steering wheel.

42:14Zack Kass: So why do the politicians have conflicting interests? Like, why don't they, why wouldn't they want housing, healthcare, and education to be less expensive? And by the way, this is a serious question. I don't know. Yeah, 100%. And I don't think it's that they don't want that. They have limited political capital and they have to, if I'm being 100 % cynical, not 100 % cynical, it's just real. It's like, if somebody pays you to get a job, then your loyalty is to them first. And so it's not the everyday person who wants lower prices, who's bankrolling these campaigns. It's people who have money and the people who have money, they have interests as well.

42:49And those interests might not always align with the interests of the individual people. So why is everyone not clamoring for campaign finance reform?

42:58Zack Kass: Like, why are we not actually talking about the... I mean, I think a lot of people are talking about their politicians being bought and sold, but they're talking about it in terms of wars. and I'm like yeah okay we're funding the wrong wars sure also why is why is university prohibitively expensive sorry just to go to make this point even even simpler the big swings issue is a result of it would seem special interest policy yeah government corruption yeah and a an electorate that has become cynically disillusioned with its government's ability to accomplish anything. 100%. And let me add something else too, Zach, because it's a populace that is disillusioned, over-informed, under-informed, and misinformed too.

43:55Because when you think about the focus, campaign finance, I mean, it's a direct, precise, laser-like precision on what one of the core issues that we're facing is but it is a very deep meaty issue that is not easily understood just instantly like something that is a little bit more salacious that can be uh weaponized algorithmically so it's easy to divide us with things that are not very not very important but

44:26Zack Kass: very emotionally urgent at the time right so here here's why your podcast is important and here's why all the I'll look to the camera this is important here's why your podcast is important here's why all the listeners need to care taking big swings isn't just important because it might make you a lot of money it's not important because it'll be deeply fulfilling which it will be almost always it's important because your kids are watching yeah it's important because we gave up on big swings circa 1990 and we started to vilify people who started taking them and we created this really pernicious recursive loop of antisocial special interest policy, the tyranny of incremental gains set in.

45:12Zack Kass: Politicians started talking about housing, health care, and education getting 5 % or 3 % better year over year or term over term. And if you're going to try to do something really impressive, whether or not you succeed, you're showing people around you that trying to do something order of magnitude better or different is something worth trying to do. Which actually speaks to the message I deliver on stage, which is at the very end, I tell everyone, optimism isn't naive. It's actually a moral obligation. And I tell people, I say, if you cannot get out of bed happy in the morning, I understand. My heart breaks for you.

45:55Zack Kass: I get it. I've been depressed in my life. I know what it feels like. But if you have kids, you have an obligation to tell them and yourself why the future is going to be better than the present. It's a moral obligation. And people before me have said this. There's philosophy attached to this. But the cynicism that erodes our trust comes from the fact that we let the leaders in this nation off the hook for 40 years by not being optimistic. We let them win elections, pass policy, stir excitement, stir their base on cynicism and pessimism. And we stopped looking to the stars. We stopped looking to what was possible.

46:39Zack Kass: And we started describing the ways in which we were harmed and ways in which people were going to harm us more. and there there's nothing more noble than trying to do something really amazing whether or not you succeed because it tells people that it's important to do yes oh by the way you don't even have to do something amazing the other thing i remind people is big swings sitting at your dining room table and describing small ways over time that you are going to fight for the family to make their lives better for a lot of people a big swing is just taking phones away at the dinner table like i I actually want to normalize the idea that doing something really big and hard doesn't actually require doing something that is seemingly impossible.

47:18Zack Kass: A big swing is deciding you're going to go to the gym every day for six months and then doing it. A big swing is telling your kids that you're not going to stare at the phone during their volleyball game ever again. Imminently doable, really hard to rewire your brain, really important to show them that when they look up after a play, whether they won or lost the point, you're watching. That repairs households. That repairs communities. That eventually repairs cities and then a nation. The spiritual awakening and revival that we all crave requires small but incremental big swings. Every family deciding they're going to do something that's really hard in service of each other, even if it's not impossible, that will repair us.

48:09Zack Kass: That will go a long way in convincing people that they can have a good relationship with technology and that AI, like all the other technologies, can eventually be pro-human and serve us. Brilliant. Oh my goodness. Simone, you see, we bring him on. He cuts a promo for us. I appreciate that, Zach. No, and I agree. Speaking legitimately, hey, I agree. I think it's so important because, again, it's that optimism. I love seeing that as a moral imperative. It's crucial. And if you don't have that underlying belief, then you're not going to take those big swings and you're not going to achieve the things that you could in your life or have the quality of life that you could possibly have simply because you didn't believe you could.

48:51And one of the things that I really appreciate about your approach and your vision for the future is the focus on community. And part of that is the ability to communicate effectively. And so we had a fun back and forth before the show started. I want to get your thoughts on the importance of communication. What is myth and hype about the status of human communication today? What do we need to change in order to make sure that we can have the communal aspects of that positive future that you see?

49:24Zack Kass: so your argument earlier was uh we are getting worse at communication and my take is maybe in the short term but in the long term we we've never basically been better right 90 of the population 92 i think now is literate that number used to be 50 years ago that number was 70 100 years ago that number was was 40 or less 30 um we're definitely getting better at communication we're also hyper aware of what other people are saying so we're far more attuned to how stupid some people's ideas are and to your point earlier we've created this barbell in communication interest so you basically at this point in the in you know it's like i watch love island i admit it i watch my watch love island how can you keep your eyes open let me explain i can i'm actually quite willing to explain why i watch this there is a certain amount of um pop culture that i find like i i don't actually enjoy social media it creeps me out so i don't use it uh my team uses my instagram i don't watch we don't watch tv otherwise pop culture is quite fun it creates a water cooler effect there's a zeitgeist it creates this idea of like shared um shared culture same reason I watched the last season of Game of Thrones.

50:48Zack Kass: I hated every episode, but I needed to finish the show. I mean, it was terrible. It was so bad, but you needed to finish the show because you wanted to be able to talk to people about it. Love Island is a fun thing to watch with my wife because it's a chance to turn off my brain, which is really helpful, and a chance to do something that millions of people are doing at that same moment that has no meaning right it is paramount it is tantamount to me to watching the world cup uh group stages right these games don't really matter watching or you know germany beat uh beat paraguay by 40 points whatever 40 goals it doesn't really matter but everyone is watching it together so it's fun so i think that we are actually getting better at communication we're also there are two problems One of them I just described, the polarities are becoming enticing, right?

51:43Zack Kass: Extremism is drawing all the attention. But the other problem is Derek Thompson called this out and I really liked it. And he cited a professor who I can't remember. It's the unicontext problem or the uniculture, unicontext, which is that like everything is amalgamating now. It's like there are days where you're like, I don't want to, I know this. I you don't need to I'm putting words in your mouth but I'm sure there are days where like I don't want to do this podcast again I can't like I can't record more content and the reason for that is not that like truly it's probably not that you don't enjoy talking to people you clearly do it's not that you don't think their ideas will be valuable it's you're like what is anyone going to say at this point that is new how could we introduce ideas at this point that actually feel new and at what point am I just part of the amalgamation of content I feel that I mean I social media is really hard for me because I'm like what what new thing needs to be said and that is not actually communication it is culture information it's it's society yes to some extent the individual ability to to express their opinions to each other has a separate problem which is the dehumanization problem.

53:00Zack Kass: And that's the one that you were really asking about. And that is the one that concerns me the most. An individual's interest in a virtual reality over a physical one and the degree to which it harms their ability to communicate with other humans. That's right. The ideas online are getting sharper thanks to AI, thanks to people learning more. The average kid can... Dude, I speak at high schools. The average high schooler asks me insanely smart questions to say nothing of the questions that junior high schoolers ask right it's that the average high schooler can't look me in the eyes very well that's the part it's the dehumanization of the current culture that is so disconcerting and i think that conflating that with communication which has its problems right is different i think it's actually the the this like anti-social ways that has swept through not I mean I used to say Gen Z but it's everyone now and not everyone it's a lot of people now who struggle with eye contact who have normalized I was at dinner the other night and we have a practice putting our phones away and I was watching a table across from us and this dad probably looked up three times and he would do this thing where he'd be on his phone he'd look up to be like oh yeah and he'd interrupt his kid and he'd go back to his phone and I was like dude you might as well just change like you should just be chain smoking cigars it's there's no way that is a healthy family I don't know it's not that he was like busy with work and couldn't come to dinner it's not that he was really focused on something and then re returned he was somewhere else quasi participating that's not a communication problem that's an anti-social dehumanization problem that is that is upstream of communication It's not that he's interrupting his kids.

54:44Zack Kass: It's not that his ideas are half-baked. It's that he's not present. He's not there. He's somewhere else. That's bad. That's super bad. And the extent to which AI and data centers proliferate that problem, we should riot. We should say no. I mean, riot's the wrong word. I'm not trying to incite violence. We should say no. We should say we don't want that. We don't want that world. to the extent that data centers can make all of the stuff he's doing move to the background so that he is required. Maybe he doesn't want to be there, but is he required to at least pretend that he wants to be there? That's a good world.

55:21Zack Kass: That's the world that we want to live in. And the communication problem is, I think, downstream of something much greater, which is this presence, this quasi, this antisocial presence that people can, oh, I was there. No, you fucking weren't. No, you weren't. You were physically there. You were spiritually gone. And by the way, you are spiritually gone. You haven't been there for quite some time. this is powerful and i i love the specificity too zach because it's you're right when you think about communication that entails a lot and again going back to why i appreciate your perspective because it's informed historically there's no doubt that communication skills and capacity have improved over time on a macro level we're seeing a deviation here but making it very clear that it's in interpersonal communication, in vivo, one-on-one, human-to-human interaction, and then also the antisocial effect of communication, or of technology, rather, pulling us further apart, so we're not even present.

56:24So it's deeper than a skills issue. Skills is just the tip of the iceberg, because we have a cultural issue where we are, even though we might say we give lip service to the fact that, oh, you know, you shouldn't do that. There's really no true cultural force that's forcing anybody or really compelling them not to do that. And then there's a complete lack of presence too. That is a one word that has been coming up more frequently in these conversations I've been having, just presence, the ability to be there. And for you, it's clearly something that you and your family have cultivated with intentionality.

57:01Even though you are surrounded by the tech world and you're at the forefront of it, you're still optimizing for human connection.

57:09Zack Kass: can you tell us about how you prioritize that in your life well i'm i married a woman i fell in love with a woman who could lose her phone and notice two days later which is has there are moments where i'm like i don't know where this person is uh and uh but adley is uh she's a special soul. She's a, she is, um, yeah, she's the most amazing woman I've ever met. And she's a first grade, she's a Waldorf teacher. So she found a community that celebrates, um, the things she loves in this world, most nature and children and wonder that also happens to vilify the device, uh, that where it's like the phone is not welcome at the school.

57:58Zack Kass: Teachers shouldn't have their cell phones out ever. Students are not allowed to bring phones on campus. Parents are encouraged to put them away, et cetera. I actually got barked at. I left and was walking off campus, took out my phone to check my email and the principal saw me and she's like, put that away, please. Wow. And so it's true. I've tried to cultivate it, but actually I was just drawn to it like like we have we we have created a a place our home our community where it's just not it's not part of our it's not part of our lives the way it is for so many people just to a certain extent that where i don't even relate to the problem i i have to like project i have to talk about it a little i see it a lot um but like adley will bark at me if the phone is within eyeshot of our daughter it's just it's not even just like hey frankie's looking at you it's like hey frankie can see your phone that's my daughter's name frankie can see your phone put it away um so it has always mattered it also i said this in 2020 when ai started when i started to realize how much better it was getting in 2021 when we launched gbd3 and i've said it every day since and now it's become pretty mainstream as technology gets better the humanistic qualities become more accentuated.

59:19Zack Kass: This is true. This will continue to be true. Storytelling becomes more powerful when everyone can have access to the same ideas. Novel ideas obviously have unique power. And if your mind can process and comprehend and produce novel ideas, you'll be uniquely advantaged. But even if you can't, storytelling is really powerful. And I figured out how much communication, I figured out how much human qualities mattered to me over the last 39 years of my life. But the moment that really had the most profound effect was the moment that I realized why my father was so important to me and to his community.

1:00:02Zack Kass: He, for context, is a doctor. He's an oncologist. He is a very celebrated oncologist who in the 80s and 90s, like all oncologists, was a mad scientist. He was like, they were trying to create drugs in real time to save people's lives because you had to throw spaghetti against the wall. I mean, if you were dying of cancer, as most people are, you're willing to do anything it takes. And when we didn't have particularly good drugs, it required a lot of experimentation. He was also a lawyer before he was a doctor. And I, growing up, had talked about him and saw him as a really smart person. Like that was my, my vision of my dad was, was my, my identity was sort of attached to his, his identity as a brilliant person.

1:00:46Zack Kass: And he won a lifetime achievement award from the Breast Cancer Association of America, um, three or two years ago, as I was finishing the book. And I went to this award ceremony, the first of three lifetime achievement awards he would receive over the next 18 months. Very excited to hear people talk about how smart he was. I had never actually, he he's, he doesn't like public speaking, public events. And so I'd never actually been to a space where people talked about him in public. And a patient of his stood on stage just before he received his award to present him with it. And she spoke for five minutes about my father.

1:01:25Zack Kass: For the first 30 seconds, she talked about her patient outcome. She had survived cancer and was now giving back to the community. And for the next four and a half minutes, she talked about how my dad made her feel. and she described getting a cancer diagnosis and going to see three oncologists and getting the same three prognoses and the same three treatment recommendations and she said two things I will never forget. She said she realized after the third identical prognosis and treatment recommendation that the doctor was no longer the smartest thing in the room. That the medicine and technology had progressed so far that anyone with an internet access could tell her her next best course of action.

1:02:04Zack Kass: And then she said that the bedside manner was no longer a feature, it was the product. And that moment changed my life to such an extent that it is now the story I will tell anyone who will listen over and over because it helped me realize in that moment that my father is not important to his community because he is brilliant. He's important to his community because he is courageous and compassionate. The two words that she would describe most in that talk, I now think about my father the most and realize that I loved him as a kid for the same reason that she loved him as a patient. It's not that he knew everything.

1:02:40Zack Kass: It's that he was willing, he was brave enough to say the hardest thing and compassionate enough to do it with a degree of care that helped me. Whatever it was I was experiencing, I believe that he both knew it was going to be okay and he was willing to help me get there. Or in some cases, told me how hard it was going to be. and I he stood on stage and then said a thing that I would not have said he said to a room full of his peers and patients and community leaders he said I am past my intellectual sell by date he has since retired by the way he's 78 years old he said I'm past my intellectual sell by date but I've never been a better doctor the technology has progressed so far that I can now care for every soul and spirit who walks through my doors.

1:03:28Zack Kass: He said, I'm no longer a mad scientist. I'm a caregiver.

1:03:36Zack Kass: You know, and I think for anyone who's ever, first, for anyone who has survived breast cancer in the last 40 years, that survival rate went from 35 % to 91%. It's a reminder that we don't hate technology. It's a reminder that lots of technology serves us really well, including drug discovery. It's also a reminder that the more the technology advances, the more we expect from the individual. And whereas my father may have once been a mad scientist, he is now the guide of a soul and spirit, either to the afterlife or somewhere else. We should celebrate that. And it's not my father we should celebrate.

1:04:19Zack Kass: We should celebrate the people who are doing the drug discovery such that the people who on the other side of it can actually be great caregivers. And if your father is a surgeon, I'm sure he has recognized the importance increasingly placed on surgeons and those who have been seen as doing work while a patient is asleep in the pre-op and post-op is growing. By the way, and your dad knows this. Why do people, why do doctors get sued? Well, we used to be like, well, doctors get sued for malpractice. Actually, there is no correlation between patient outcome and malpractice. There is a huge correlation between doctor perception and malpractice suit.

1:05:01Zack Kass: People sue doctors they hate. They find reasons when there is a bad outcome to sue a doctor they hate and they forgive doctors who make mistakes, who, and this is like, this is a patently provable, empirical observable. Now, I mean, that'd be the right way to do this. I acknowledge, but it is, but it is how we perceive care. And the best surgeon I ever had brought Adley into the OR while I was going under and he said, now you can dream about your wife. Wow. You don't have to do this. You like doctors don't have to do this, but anesthesiologists are like, yeah, look, let's scrub her in, let's bring her in here.

1:05:44Zack Kass: It's an incredibly reasonable gesture that places the emphasis on this human connection that had previously never been considered or ignored. Now, we need to reinvent the practice of med school so that we actually emphasize these things, because I worry that doctors are not actually being trained on these things. But if we do, I think we are approaching a world of precision and humanistic healthcare where the patient care becomes far more integral. Yep. I agree 100%. Love this story for so many reasons. Like I mentioned, my dad's a surgeon, but both of my parents had cancer. Mom had breast cancer, dad had prostate cancer, both survived.

1:06:27And it was really interesting for my dad. He had a pretty bad accident. And so then he was on the receiving end of these emergency surgeries. And that's when he he's always known for being very personable. But he's like, that's when I fully appreciated the bedside manner because he got a surgeon who was who just kind of treated him as like it was almost like doing a procedure on a cadaver. OK, this this this like very robotic. Hey, does this hurt? Yeah. Yeah.

1:06:58Zack Kass: actually the worst pain that i've ever felt just no empathy at all and that it was very interesting for him to be on the receiving end of that because it gave he he would not describe it this way because he's humble but it gave him a greater appreciation of his empathy because he didn't realize how integral that was to to proper health care and my wife's a doctor too and she says that's the thing when she gets in with her patients she has great ratings i always compete with her because her ratings are always higher than anything I ever produce, but that's okay. She's great. And she's like, they love her because she listens.

1:07:35What kind of doctor? Family doc. Amazing. So she's on the front line, but it goes to what you said. It's the humanistic element that's going to really put people apart. And for you, if you're giving people advice, if they're taking their big swings and they're concerned, they're like, what should I even learn? What skills should I have. What would you say are the top skills to keep in mind while at the same time being true to yourself? Because I know you have a perspective on agility that's pretty unique too.

1:08:07Zack Kass: Well, I think one, this idea of behavioral adaptability, which is really important, you know, for the folks listening, they're already thinking about, hey, how do I achieve a lot? So behavioral adaptability, I think for a lot of people, they have an idea in their mind of who they need to be, which limits their willingness to take big swings. They want to take big swings in a direction that they think their identity needs to go, which I think is sort of backwards. I think what they should first do is describe, again, the city on the hill, the castle on the hill, their mission and vision and values, describe this ultimate outcome, and then work backwards to figure out how they need to get there.

1:08:42Zack Kass: And I would challenge most people. I think a lot of big swings will actually feel smaller. These are hard things that we've said we cannot do, but they don't actually have to be impossible and they don't actually have to be earth shattering in nature. I don't want to sound like a self-help guru, but I do think it is remarkable the degree to which I get emails constantly now from people who say, you changed my life because I went home and told my kids we're going to put away our phones and we protected the dining room table. That's a big swing that has a huge, huge change in your life. And it's a big enough swing that people email me to say how proud they are.

1:09:24Zack Kass: Very accomplished executives go, you changed my life because I reshaped my relationship with the device. The other thing I would say to people who want to take big swings is you need to learn how to learn because what you know, your skills today will feel potentially obsolete economically anyways in 10 or 15 years. But your ability to acquire more skills will never feel obsolete. And so taking a big swing also might be learning or mastering something that has no economic value because the nature of learning that thing will allow you to learn more. And this is what I say to every kid who goes to college.

1:10:05Zack Kass: He says, what should I study? I said, listen, unless you're studying math or physics at Stanford and Harvard, probably doesn't matter. I mean, there really is like a declining correlation between major and economic outcome. And of course, there are some outliers, EE and CS still and math and obviously physics. But for the most part, if you go to a liberal arts school or even a large university, large research university, what you study isn't going to make that big of a difference. So I tell every kid, study something you love. And for everyone trying to do something really big, it is okay if the only thing that big thing produces is your ability to do other big things.

1:10:41Zack Kass: Like there is an enormous amount of value in learning a language, even if you don't speak it regularly because you can learn more. We know this. I tell every young person who asks, how'd you get here? I go, look, I was not a great student. I barely got into Berkeley. Being great at volleyball was the most important thing I ever did because one, it taught me what it feels like to master something at a young age. It taught me what it's like to watch people who had, what it feels like, I should say. I didn't master something. I was a good setter. I then went to the US training camp and watched the great ones.

1:11:16Zack Kass: And you can get a glimpse of how much they sacrifice to be exceptional. Six hours a day, setting a ball in a gym. And you go, oh, maybe I don't want that. But you know what it is like to be exceptional at something and you've seen it and it does there are lots of things in this world to be exceptional and people go i'm not a great volleyball player i go okay is do you do you want to learn a language people's ah the kite surfing is really cool i go do it do something that you can be really good at or you can at least taste what it's like to be good at and it will give you i think what we don't give college and high school students anymore in the united states especially a taste of mastery We tell everyone, go an inch deep, a mile wide, pad your resume, do it for the apps, I heard the kids say.

1:12:01Zack Kass: And I'm like, cool. It's just not going to teach you what it feels like to be great. And if you're not great at something, it's going to be really hard to do something exceptional and big. Big swings generally are accomplished by people who can go very deep on something. Zach, this has been great. I appreciate you coming in and sharing your vision for the future, but especially giving the audience the hope and optimism they need to take their own big swings too. Now, before you go, I want to make sure you have a chance to let folks know about the book, the work that you're doing, and how they can work with you too.

1:12:36Zack Kass: I wrote a book, The Next Renaissance and the Expansion Human Potential. You can read it. I think the Blinkist summary is actually also pretty good. I have a sub stack. I actually recommend people, if they want to connect with me, my sub stack, which you can link here. I really like writing. That's where I like people following along. And I'll probably start doing some YouTube content maybe, I don't know, by popular demand. But most of my work centers around the idea of watching others or helping others tell bigger, more hopeful stories, which I hope your listeners will do. Amazing. Zach, thank you so much.

1:13:15Zack Kass: Really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me.