The Exchanges

Q So if you had to give somebody a really tactical internet built list of things to read as a young man, what would those be? Like what would be the seven books that you'd be like, start here and then expand?

A So, you have to read Plato's Republic, and you have to do it, I'm convinced, with a tutor or in a group. I say this because I read it three times alone, in a corner, in a chair, after putting my kids down, and I was just, like, puzzling over it, and I didn't get quite as much out of it, right? And I'm, I'm a sharp guy, but, like, it's very hard to read these texts alone. So then I started going evening classes at St. John's College. I started doing tutoring with a guy named Mike Millerman, who people should check out. He's great. And that unlocked it for me. And why I say you gotta read that is that, you know, someone, I think, uh, maybe Bertrand Russell, I forget, but said, uh, all of, uh, philosophy is a footnote to Plato. And it's kind of right. Like these debates, he frames them really genuinely, really broadly. So I would say, read that. The next thing that I w that mattered a lot to me to read was a book called The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich Hayek. And this is, I think, a good argument for why liberty is important. Like, you know, why freedom is something we cherish. He lays out an argument based on the usefulness of liberty. Particularly sacred is this essay called The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization. It's chapter two. And you can read that. It's like 16 pages or something. And that's wonderful. I would recommend Democracy in America. But it's very long.…

AI assessment note: “So, you have to read Plato's Republic... The next thing... The Constitution of Liberty”

Q uh, we're not very happy, in fact. But simultaneously, there don't seem to be very many examples, or, or counter me here. Are there very many examples where technology was introduced, and, uh, it became worse for society to earn? Now you could make the argument, tech could make us less happy, which you could say social media did in some ways, but like, has that ever happened through history?

A Yeah. So locally it has, right? So if you have like a group, a community, um, a region of, I don't know, Indonesia that's set up around the sewing machine, like that's what they do. They produce clothing, textiles, they sew, that's what they've been trained on. And then you have an automated sewing machine that can do that. Then what do we expect? Well, we expect to have dislocation, job loss, that sort of thing. The key there is that this is a, This is a moment for adaptation where it doesn't take these people off of the map. What it means is that the next thing that they need to do is now in view or get that they get kind of a motivation to figure out what that next thing is. So we're a highly dynamical system. Like we're constantly adapting and every opportunity that technology, um, Uh, obviates for the individual, meaning everything that technology can handle with automation simply opens up a new frontier. That's what I hear when I see the CEO saying, Hey, this thing, your job as you know, it is over. The other side of that coin is like the job you didn't know was needed. The door just opened.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. So locally it has, right? So if you have like a group”

Q guy who was the honor graduate for his class at the Naval Academy, um, like, There was no higher compliment you could give that guy. And then you sold a couple companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. You've raised hundreds or tens of millions, uh, built sort of the literal underpinnings of AI. What do you think it is about you or your framework that makes you keep winning?

A Oh, that's a good question. I mean, that's not an easy question to answer, um, with humility at all. But I think what, so my mom taught special needs kids for 36 years and she was an extremely committed educator. And I think when you talk to people who are the sons and daughters of educators, they sometimes have an advantage because it was like drilled into them, the practice of learning and the love of learning. And my, my parents really succeeded in getting us to think about things like honor That are like essentially dead now, you know, like, um, virtue culture type stuff. And so it was this combination of like, um, really big emphasis on education, big emphasis on like, you know, serving others, higher causes, like self transcendence in a way that kind of just worked. And then the other thing I'll mention is that my parents were as different as can be. My mom was historian, Roman Catholic, conservative, military family. My dad was like a physicist, pacifist, super, you know, very left-wing, environmental lawyer, and this created like very interesting conditions where I sort of thought about the world as being not one thing, and I kind of, um, it put me in these different, you know, spheres that, um, That I carried with me through my career. Like, nothing I've done in my career looks like anything else I've done before. I can, like, stitch it together. But it's been a big ad…

AI assessment note: “it was this combination of like, um, really big emphasis on education”

Q coming for you. If you don't make that move, you're going to be out of work, not only in our company, but also across the industry. There's not going to be demand for people who are working like there were five years ago. So my question to you is what is going to happen with AI and jobs and what will happen to our human need to labor with AI?

A So I think like, If you're a CEO, you've got to ready your team for like, for the future, like as you see it, you don't know. I don't know like where the thing, where, where things are headed. It's an unknowable future, but you've got to make an attempt and then get your team focused on. And so you got to jolt them sometimes. And I see it in some of those letters where it's like, Hey, this job won't exist. But I think underneath that is probably a lot more positive story. In other words, like you sort of have to separate like the work of the CEO, To like rest attention to this and say like, you know, stop doing the thing the way you were doing the thing and start really taking this seriously from the underlying mechanic. And the way I kind of visualize it is like the economy is going to grow and it's going to be this like, you know, growing sphere that on the surface will have all sorts of cracks, you know, and all sorts of like tectonic relocations and shifts and stuff like that. And so I think more jobs will arise out of this growth out of, but there'll be unpredictable, um, categories of jobs. And by now I think people have analogized this a lot to the past, but like a hundred years ago we had an 80% agrarian economy. We were like farming. And if you had told people that we would have a one percent Agrarian, you know, one percent were in agriculture. They would have been all…

AI assessment note: “I think more jobs will arise out of this growth out of, but there'll be unpredictable”

Q It's sort of like, how do you, how do you as a normal person deal with this in your day to day? On one hand, if you don't use AI, you'll be left behind. On the other hand, what if AI starts to control you? So, so how do you create personal boundaries on it, basically?

A So I think that's really good framing, actually. So, um, it's kind of a Scylla and Charybdis effect, where you, the world is very complex. Like, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay called As We May Think in the middle of the 20th century about how we were gonna experience this, like, mountain of information, and we needed something like the computer. You know, he was like writing a long time ago to handle it. And so I think this is a key fact is like the world is complicated. There's a lot of information. If we don't use AI, we will simply be left behind. I think we have to like embrace that fact. Like it's not optional. You could live a kind of a life like throw, you know, and like in, you know, in the woods, I guess. But for us who want to be part of civilization, we have to use AI. Okay. Then the question becomes, how do we use it? To achieve our goals while not having a kind of erosion. I'll talk about like what that means. I would frame it as the debate between agency and autonomy. And for most listeners, they'll be like, well, those are the same thing. Like, why are you talking about these? They're not the same thing. And I'll, I'll try to illustrate it this way, which is agency is about if you have, and I, by the way, I think that people get this wrong because agency is a very popular word in 20, 25. I think people are talking about it slightly wrong. The philosophical definiti…

AI assessment note: “I would frame it as the debate between agency and autonomy.”