TRIGGERnometry - AI CEO: People Have No Idea What’s Coming! - Eoghan McCabe

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Eoghan McCabe is an Irish entrepreneur, co‑founder and Chairman of Intercom. | Cape: America's privacy-first mobile carrier. Click https://cape.co/trigger | Promo Code - TRIGGER33 for 33% off. Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Fresspoke: internet search for free thinkers. Go to https://freespoke.com/TRIG and get the whole picture. - Augusta Precious Metals: Protect Your Retirement with Physical Gold. Rated #1. Click to learn more: https://bit.ly/4as3C6J - Ground News shares our values on independent thought and transparency. That’s why they’ve been a partner for years. Get 40% off this season at https://ground.news/triggernometry. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 - Introduction 01:40 - What Is AI? 04:19 - People Don't Understand What's Coming 12:00 - Driving Jobs Probably Won't Exist In The Next Ten Years 19:59 - AI Is Inevitable 24:53 - Does Having Free Speech Give Us An Advantage With AI? 30:13 - AI Drones And Using Them As Weapons 37:06 - Some AI Models Are Woke 45:05 - Regulating AI 56:54 - People In Tech Get A Bit Utopian When Talking About AI 01:04:53 - Generalised Intelligence 01:13:20 - AI And The Fertility Crisis 01:17:24 - What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Really Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm like a strange CEO in the space in that. I'm very pro-human. You're an outlier in that you're very pro-human? I'm extremely pro-human. What are your fears surrounding AI? I do worry that if it develops incredibly quickly and that there are a lot of disaffected youth, that they could reach for socialism in defense tech.

We'll say that our posture is really bad. China have more power, they have the ability to build all of the components that AI needs to do physical work. The craziest and most kind of Hollywood-esque example of where it gets scary are, you know, AI-powered drones and drone swarms. I don't think we can defend against that. I really do think there are risks here, but I just want to re-emphasize it's happening. Relax, relax. This is not an ad. If you're not a fan of ads, but love trigonometry, join the thousands of trigonometry members.

who get extended interviews, no ads, early access, and the ability to submit their own questions for upcoming guests. Sign up now at Triggerpod.co.uk, or click the link in the description of this episode. Owen, welcome to Trichonomys. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to have you on.

Listen, everywhere we've been traveling around the US now for a few weeks, everywhere we go, every dinner party, every lunch, every coffee, everywhere. There's only one conversation people are having, which is about AI. Right. You founded and run an AI company here in San Francisco, which is why we're delighted to have you on. Thanks for hosting us at your offices. Before we get into the conversation, tell us a little bit about AI itself. What is AI? I mean, it's a digital form of intelligence. It's a digital thing that can do logic and thinking and speaking.

And it's been coming for a long time. But the AI that we talk about today is, you know, three years old and famously open AI, released chat GPT, that shocked everyone. It could speak like a human and think like a human apparently. And it's the, it's that thing and everything that's come since then that really is now a new force and factor in global economies and in the world. So when people talk about AI, it's what these LLMs, large language models can do. And if you had to explain to a seven-year-old how it works, what would you say? It's mathematics, it's numbers, it's probabilities. It's a lot of stuff that even people like me who apply AI barely understand.

And there's a very small number of people who deeply, deeply understand it. And in fact, there's people doing science to discount it. It's a fancy magical computer technology that likes to talk to people. And where, how does it get the information? Because one of the things I've always thought about is like, I don't know if you feel this way, but if I open social media, if I open Twitter, if I open Facebook, if I open Instagram, I know that the things that I am seeing on there are not actually reflective. They might reflect some portion of reality, but I don't think they reflect the entire spectrum

of reality because we know that actually a very small percentage of people are on social media. Sure. And they're disproportionately, on Twitter they're disproportionately political. On Instagram, they're disproportionately obsessed with showing off the physical, whatever, right? Are the AI LLMs, are they getting their information exclusively from online things? To my knowledge, yes. They are trained on the internet. Famously, they They love Wikipedia and Reddit, and they love print, you know, kind of mainstream legacy media. But I think they've also been trained on YouTube and frankly, any piece of human-created content

that exists on the internet. And Owen, we've been, like I said, we've been speaking to a lot of people. We spoke to a guest of the show, Eric Weinstein and a friend of ours. And he said something to me, or rather to both of us, he said, I don't think people understand what's coming down the pipeline and how much AI is going to change the world. Right. Do you agree with that? And if you do, could you just paint the picture for people like me who look like they are in tech, but really not? Uh-huh. So just paint that picture for us, please.

Well, the reality is that even the people, you know, deep in AI don't know what's coming next. It's constantly changing and the narratives in San Francisco, which is certainly the geographic and physical home of AI continue to evolve. You know, most likely over some period of time, TBD, how much time, and the amount of time really matters, that's how traumatic or not it will be. Large amounts of work that's done by humans today will be done by AI. It'll be knowledge work, but also physical work. Robotics, technologies are developing pretty quickly too.

And the best model for it is not just that it will do the work that humans do today, but it'll also do work that we can't afford to give to humans today also. And that's the case always with disruptive technologies where it serves on met demand. So, for example, and this is not intended to be an advert for our product, but we make AI that does customer service. So thousands of companies deploy it to answer customer service inquiries. And we've got 7,000 customers for it. And for the most part, they've not let humans go. In fact, they've supplemented the human service reps with the AI to answer the queries that they didn't have.

have time for, they couldn't afford to answer, et cetera. So that's just one example of the nuanced way in which it's going to augment the world. On the positive side, it's hard to not imagine that it's going to boost GDP. It's going to allow for all sorts of economic activity that's not been possible before, increase longevity and quality of life, create new jobs, new possibilities.

But if it happens really, quickly, these changes happen really quickly, there will be fallout in tension and change, like there has always been with new technologies. Technology throughout its history has done a great job at taking people out of work that, you know, people didn't do well or that they hated to do. Technology has saved the amount of people that used to go down mines and get trapped and lose their lives or lose limbs on a factory floor or do any number of repressive jobs that were in a great use of the human spirit and ingenuity and the great things that humans are capable of. Technology has always done that. But if it happens fast, you know, there'll be some turmoil.

That people think, you know, right now in San Francisco, people think that the chance of a discontinuous change where overnight AI can do like 90% of knowledge work. is a low probability. I don't know what that is. I have to guess, like I said, two, three percent, I don't know. People think more likely that big changes are coming, but we've probably like 10, 15 years before it's adopted

and fully interacting with the world in a way that, you know, would change things very really for people in the way that they work. There's so much more nuance to imagine that we haven't even got to us as society yet. I can well imagine as a friend of mine helped me realize that there's going to be certain work that we don't want AI to do. You know, he calls it sociopolitical work where, you know, you can imagine regulations where you say you can't have AI judges or teachers. Teachers unions will probably say, no, we only want humans. And maybe that's great, actually. Although it's going to be hard because CHAPT is already better than most teachers.

Most teachers are not particularly great, but the human thing that they do is very important. You're going to imagine that we probably want humans to be professional dancers rather than robots. You know, it's going to be all sorts of places where people will want, or there will be regulations to make sure that we use humans. So the ways in which it plays out are just super unclear, and I don't think that the reality is either pure doom or pure utopia. And I think that that's the problem with the narrative today is that there are certain factions that think that AI is just all bad, all dangerous, and certain factions that think it's,

you know, a great blessing to humanity. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. And as long as we can have that conversation, we can probably plan for it. So which industries, Owen, do you think are going to be most vulnerable? And if not industries, what jobs? So let's say you had a kid and they said to you, I want to do X job. Which ones would you go? Probably not that one. Like, for me, it's hard to imagine being excited about art that comes from AI. Now, AI is getting great at executing things that look creative. And you could even say that AI is creative in so far as it mixes different ideas and comes up with things we never have thought of before.

But I think that core to art, when you watch a movie or look at a painting, is the human spirit and soul and the fight and the pain behind all of it, or the expression of love or joy or the protest that was involved in that particular piece of content. So, you know, similarly with, you know, media, right? You know, I can't imagine being excited to read AI-generated opinions on things. I mean, that's probably coming, and maybe that'll be a subsection of,

content. Maybe when AI gets incredibly strong, we'll actually want to know its opinion on a bunch of ideas. But we'll probably all have ready access to it. We'll probably know before we even read it in a newspaper what AI thinks. But yeah, if I was advising any young person where to go, one place will be creativity, you know, anything that's creative. And then I do think, you know, deep science and applying AI is another place here. I do think that there's plenty of time to benefit from the second order effects of AI. I mean, when we think about the power of AI and the benefits to different countries, the discoveries that can make will be very advantageous, you know, when AI does science, but someone's going to have to operate that

AI. So, you know, honestly, there's no person on this planet who can answer that question very well. But I think two things you could focus on as a young person will be things that benefit from and enjoy the human soul and spirit and creativity and things that use AI itself, become an AI operator and expert. Because we've been here in San Francisco for a matter of hours. And every other car or every other taxi is a Waymo, which makes me think, like if you take a... driverless cars. Sure, driverless cars. And if you look at the trajectory of that, I would think that in probably in 10 to 15 years time, driving a taxi or driving a lorry or some type of professional driver, those jobs

probably won't exist anymore. Probably not. The timeline you pointed out there is very important. Waymo had great working demos in 2015. And it's still going to be another 10 years before they're confidently on the streets of Dublin or London. I mean, although I think they're experimenting with Waymo's in London. Well, as a British person coming to the US and seeing, we've seen them in the streets, I think, mainly of Austin. Yeah.

Did we see any in LA? No, I don't think we saw them in LA. But Austin and San Francisco. But in San Francisco, it's literally like everywhere. So to a British person, it's almost like arriving in the future. It's shocking. Yeah. Yeah, it's shocking. But, you know, the point is that it takes time. It takes time. And so people have time to adapt. And so between the start of Waymo, you know, when Waymo had a real working prototype in a demo over 10 years ago, to the point when there'll be no human driving work, that could be a span of 20 years in many places. 20 years is a big portion of a career. And there are very few people in the repetitive jobs. that actually want to stay in the jobs. The only true career people, for example,

in driving are people who perhaps drive limos and high-end executive cars. And I can imagine them staying around for some time. Eventually, if I get in an executive car, it'll be driven by a highly competent, you know, AI agent. But the security risks with that, who runs it? Is it listening to me?

So I'd probably want a human that I can look at in the eye and know that they're not recording my everything. word. So all I'm trying to say is that some changes may be very big, but I think a lot of people will have time to adjust and react and get new jobs like they always have. Like I said, you know, technology has repeatedly taken people out of repetitive shit work. And during that time, the population has increased, GDP is increased, people have lived longer, they're healthier, you know, more productive. I think I just quoted a Radiohead song,

but, you know, it's been good for the world. I am not a utopian when it comes to AI. I think there's going to be challenges, but I just think that for those who are fearful, and I understand that fear, for sure, I have fear too that I actually think it's probably not going to be as dramatic as we might imagine.

Well, I think we could sit here for hours and list the potential benefits. Like, you know, I talked about coming to the future here. I went to my dentist in the UK. And she was like, oh, the eye tells me this, you've got an issue here. Right. Let's look into it. Right.

So clearly, it's going to have massive positive impact. But you talk about your fear. And I think this is where I'm a layman here. So, oh, I'm totally open to your perspective, obviously. But just correct me if I'm wrong. My worry is that the positives versus negative. are highly disproportionate, potentially. In other words, we can potentially make real improvements

to people's lives and we live longer and we're healthier and all of these other things. But I also think there is the potential where a very significant population is not just about no longer has a job because if you're generating all this extra GDP, you might be able to take care of the financial side of it. But what about meaning? What about purpose?

What about a reason to get up in the morning? Sure. Do you see what I'm saying? I think it's so important. And I do worry that if a lot of young people are unemployed or underemployed, that they'll reach for socialism, or they'll be just sufficiently discontent that they want bigger changes in society. I don't know what that is. People say that in history,

when particularly young men are out of work, bad things have tended to happen. In the late 18th century, that, you know, the great on Washington, the unemployed, you know, started the French Revolution. So I do worry about that. That said, does purpose really come from filling a little screw into an iPhone, you know, 500 times a day? Does purpose really come from, you know, driving a shit car in a shit city as an Uber driver and getting abused by half your customers?

You know what I'm getting at? I do, but I also disagree, though, in some ways, because what I think about is no, purpose doesn't come from that. What it comes from is putting food on the table for your family. Yes. And it doesn't come from getting a government check and going to the supermarket and putting food on your family. It comes from the struggle of going to work. Totally. Yeah?

Well, it comes from being a useful part of society and contributing, being in service to people. I think that's where we get a lot of purpose. Like, what is my purpose in life? you know, it, it's more, it tends to be as global as it is local, I think, for a lot of people. I think it could be a real problem, but hopefully we'll find new ways to find purpose, more meaningful ways. I don't know what it is. It could be creative, new types of jobs and work. You know, I couldn't possibly imagine, just as people couldn't possibly imagine when, you know, the printing press came out of work, all these monks out of work, what were they going to do?

I mean, maybe it's not a lot of monks anymore, so maybe I answer my question. But, you know, we just can't possibly imagine. So there could be scary and dangerous things that happen, as happened with social media. But, you know, the other side of this is just kind of the inevitability of it all. Yes. People who follow this show tend to think for themselves. And anyone paying attention can see that the same carriers keep showing up in stories about data breaches, leaks and surveillance scandals. If your provider keeps losing and selling your data, it's time to look at it.

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But I think, am I right in saying, A, it's totally inevitable because, quote, unquote, you can't stop progress. But that's not really why. The reason you can't stop this is if we don't do this, other people will. Like, I see technology as discovery as much as its invention. People discovered that a chair was a great way to prop their body up when they wanted to sit down in front of someone. Independently, multiple cultures probably discover that. I should have done the research before. but I'm pretty sure that probably the Chinese and the Africans probably discover different forms of chairs independently.

And for sure, AI is more exotic than chairs, but in a couple hundred years, it'll look as simple. And I just think that these things were going to get discovered sooner or later. Certainly within a short period of time, you know, there are dynamics whereby the Chinese, for example, copy the Americans. But it is just simply inevitable. In this moment in time, it's inevitable, like you said, because the Chinese have now got it, and they're going to build it, and they're going to make it awesome, and they're going to benefit from it. And they love it over there. And they've already got AI butlers and bellboys in hotels.

In Japan and China, for example, just the general population have embraced AI in a way that we have not. So we could decide to say, we're scared of what could happen in the West. I think that fear is warranted. Let's sit it out. And I think that we shrivel and suffer economically like Europe has been doing and it's likely to continue to do in the age of AI. I think that China just gets stronger, not just economically but militarily. I think we get it dumber.

Think of all the scientific discoveries we're not going to make. We get less effective. We could be Luddites, but I don't think it's going to be good for us. And Owen, you said that China have embraced AI in a way that we haven't. How have the Chinese embraced AI? Yeah, so I'm not a Chinese expert. I just look at the way in which they embrace technology in general. And I look at our own conversational.

that are happening in the West. We're in, you know, late stage successful civilization. We're kind of happy and lazy. It seems we have been since the end of the Cold War. We're now, you know, swimming in luxury beliefs, attacking each other, regulating anything that moves. China doesn't care about any of that stuff. None of it.

They're on a singular mission to become the preeminent global power. They're very proud of that, on afraid. They don't mind copying anyone. There's no loss of pride if you just rip someone else off and they'll rip the Americans off. And they're just moving at a pace that we couldn't fathom here. I mean, the Chinese, they have 58 nuclear power plants. They're building 20-something new ones. Germany just knocked down a nuclear cooling tower.

And in the United States, I don't think there's been a nuclear power. power plant built for decades. That's not good. AI needs a lot of power to do its work, to learn and train. AI needs phenomenal amounts of power. So even on that factor alone, they're going to blaze ahead in AI. Now, I'm told that the US has 10 times more data centers than China. People say that the US and Americans are willing to make big bets that Chinese Chinese are not. We do design the chips that are needed for training, although all the chips are made in Taiwan. What could go wrong?

Yeah, what could go wrong? Yeah. So a lot of the people you talk to, particularly the people in defense tech who invest in defense, will say that our posture is really bad. China have more power. They have the ability to build all of the components that AI needs to do physical. work. So battery, motors, they've got rare earths, and they now have pretty good models. They've come out with open source or these free models that have challenged that are, you know, close in performance to some of the American models. So if you talk to people who kind of study this, they're concerned and they say that we should be concerned.

And I guess the question is, and this is a point that. plenty of people have made on this show, which is the one thing that the US and the West has got over China is freedom of speech. If you are able to speak freely, you're able to think freely. If you're able to think freely, you're allowed to be more creative. Creativity leads to innovation. Is that true with AI or not so much? I think it's true. I think that AI is highly creative.

I think the people working on it are truly our most brilliant minds. today and they've achieved what we're enjoying today because of you know real blue-sky thinking and new approaches I think our freedom of speech here is of power and and importance it's also allowing us to you know attack ourselves and criticize AI in ways that are warranted but in ways that are going to be problematic if if we eventually ban it if a future president, ALC, decides that AI is just bad for the workers and we need less of it. I think that's just bad for America. And you have to wonder if China's main strategy is ripping off American technology, but doing it at a pace and a scale that we are

incapable of, then they don't need creativity and maybe free speech is not helpful to them. Maybe they can just tell people to shut up and follow the instructions, and they can run away with the prize of AI. So let's see. That is the age-old critique of China, that they are not as creative as we are in the West, and that may perpetuate, but they certainly have the ability to do things big and in a very quick way. Well, it's kind of like what happened with the Manhattan Project, right? Americans spend a crazy amount of money resources inventing the nuclear bomb, and then a couple of spies give it to the Soviets and they just build one, right? Totally.

Is that a fair comparison more broadly? Are we the West, particularly the US, in an arms race with China over our eye? Like to non-experts, at least in geopolitical dynamics, it appears so. I got a funny take from a friend of mine recently where he said that the more that the tech right are in power or have influence in the United States, the more likely we will be in a AI or technology war because they'll kind of meme it into existence. Well, tech people like me think, oh shit, they're building the tech, they're building the AI, we need to speed up. And so it's just interesting to imagine or to realize that tech has a great

influence in the United States and whether China or not wants to be in a tech war, we're probably going to get it now because of that dynamic. But it does appear that China want this technology for themselves. And yeah, I just, we just know from history and intuitively that tech, technology confers great power to the person who owns and holds it. You know, look at the atom bomb. So I think AI would just do phenomenal and very scary things for the people who have it. Like I said earlier, whoever gets super intelligence, if that day comes, they're going to have more science than the rest of us. It's going to be making discoveries long ahead of humans.

So that's one thing. But you can imagine AI used in signals intelligence, presumably, I mean, it's probably already deployed in massive ways today, just eating up insane, unfathomable and disparate data industry. inputs will just allow the enemy or the United States to understand not just what the opposition is doing militarily, but their entire society, you know, sentiments of society, be able to access the individuals, perhaps influence elections, etc. So just AI will be able to understand the enemy in a new way. But, you know, the craziest and most kind of Hollywood-esque example of where it gets scary are, you know, AI-powered drones and drone swarms.

I mean, you don't need to be an expert to imagine the ways in which that gets bad. In Ukraine today, they've now resorted to using fiber optic cables to control the drones because the signals are jammed. That still means that there's a kind of a range limit, and you also need one human operator per drone. Imagine 500 drones, each running local AI, with an unconstitutional. understanding of where on a ship they need to hit or where a spot person they need to hit. Again, non-novice here, but I don't think we can defend against that. And so, yeah, if you just imagine these crazy, scary Hollywood worlds where the enemy has

millions of AI powered drones with little explosives and weapons on them, it's bad. Well, the thing is, I don't think it's that much of a stretch. Prior to the nuclear weapon, conceiving of that was required a level of imagination based on scientific knowledge and the pursuit of that. But this is not that hard to imagine. It's not hard to imagine. I mean, the war in Ukraine, which you bring up, that is being for very, like, it's not exclusively with drones. But drones are essentially the main thing that they're now competing on, if you listen to people on both sides, right? And AI controlling drones doesn't seem beyond the realms of imagination.

So you can kind of see how you're going to get there very soon. Yeah, well, I don't know how soon because what it requires is that you need hardware and models that can run locally on the drones. And today the AI we all use runs in giant data centers and we access it over the internet. And so if the drones need an internet connection, well then that can be jammed. So we're a little bit off, but you're right. It's not a fabulous or crazy idea at all. It, you know, like I said, a Hollywood writer can think of ways in which that works that I couldn't even imagine and it's all going to come true. Do you ever feel a little bit like Alfred Nobel, the man who invented dynamite?

Dynamite can be used to, you know, it can be, you know, to help create new tunnels and to plow trains right the way across the country. It can be used for engineering or it can be used in terrorism, war. Right. Yeah. That seems to be the case with all technologies. You can probably kill a man with a chair. You know? I'm from South London.

You can definitely kill a man with a chair. But I don't mean to be glib. I really do think there are risks here, but I just want to reemphasize, it's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. What I found really interesting when you were talking, about five or so minutes ago, is you use the term tech right.

Yeah. And I think, particularly for me, for Constantin, and for a lot of people, the politicization of AI is something that we're really not talking about, but is actually really worrying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's extra interesting because there are people on the right against it and people on the left against it. And I'm curious to see what way it turns.

you know, I would consider myself part of the tech right, and I'm just waiting to be kind of called out and now be, you know, how would I say, become a heretic of the right movement. But can I just pause you there, Owen, sorry, when you say tech right, can you just explain basically what that actually means? And then we can talk about the tech left and how it influences the technology. Yeah, I mean, historically, Silicon Valley and people in technology were very left-leaning, very, very, very, very liberal in ways that you can imagine incredibly so. And that was just taken as a given. And then sometime last year, 2014, as, you know, Trump started to come back, many of us started to realize ways that something's changed. And now, even though the vast majority will not admit. it, like 99% will not admit it, most CEOs here of successful businesses would consider themselves

on the right. And so there's just been this giant swing. Maybe the masses are still more centrist. And there's definitely some people on the left. Just tech took a big swing to the right. Why did it take that swing? You know, tech people are very open-minded and intelligent typically. And I think that they were previously quite left-aligned because maybe we needed a bit of an adjustment. Being on the left at one point in time was the rebellious take. And people in tech were, and I'm talking about maybe in the 90s, were just sufficiently open-minded that they decided maybe it's okay to be gay. Like maybe that's just, maybe that's as far as they started.

And then it just went a little bit too far. When it went too far, again, these open-minded, intelligent people started to realize it's gone too far. And we need an adjustment. And maybe if back then the realization the 90s was, maybe it's okay to be gay. Maybe the realization in modern times here is maybe it's okay to hire someone solely on their merit and abilities. And that was a controversial take, actually, two years ago. Really? Very much so, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know this DEI took over tech and everywhere else. So it was just a gradual little shift and a change. And still, most people are not out about it. But I do think that most influential people in tech are kind of somewhere on the right, center right. There's a lot that aren't, but most people are now. You're tuned in to trigonometry right now because you want the truth, not someone else's pre-packaged version of it. That is exactly why Freespoke exists.

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What's really interesting with this is how some AI models are woke. Right. I mean, there are some AI models you ask them what a woman is and it starts behaving like, you know, Denise from HR. Right. And you're going, what the hell is this? Yeah, yeah. It's pretty interesting.

My co-founder, Des Traynor, talks about like the kind of ghosts that we're going to be fighting for some time. All these models trained on all this content on the internet, like I said, Wikipedia, Reddit, mainstream media, all of which have had a certain ideological bent for a while. And that's deep in these models. And so even after the world has changed and pivoted and come back towards the center and some of us towards the right, there's still going to be a little bits of logic in there that come from woke logic. So when a new kid, sorry, a young person is trying to figure out what car to buy for the first time, is there somewhere in the logic that knows that Elon Musk is actually a bad person and so they shouldn't buy Tesla?

That's the benign version. The scary version is when there's a child that's struggling, maybe with their sexuality or, you know, just their self-identity. Is there a little bit of logic in there that thinks it might be a good idea to consider that they're in the wrong body or that maybe they should explore, you know, options beyond therapy, there may be some other more aggressive interventions. I think this woke stuff could be embedded in the AI for a long, long, long, long time. And it's because of the stuff it trained on.

However, there are companies because that came from Silicon Valley that kind of hard-coded a bunch of views, a bunch of kind of liberal views. And that's kind of the difference between, say, GROC and perhaps Open AI or other systems where the people who, you know, aligned the models in a certain direction to make sure it didn't say the wrong things, aligned it according to their ideologies. This is best demonstrated when Google came out with, I forget what it was called, it was a model that would let you generate images. And people said, show me an image of the founding fathers of the United States. And invariably, they'd all be black. And that just happened again and again and again. And they'd fix that.

But that kind of thing was hard-coded. So that's certainly a very interesting aspect of AI. And one way in which it'll impact society beyond things like job changes and unemployment, etc. Because it is worrying because if it's taking for example woke ideology, particularly the most extreme aspects of woke ideology, you know, they weren't very tolerant if we can be honest with people on the right or people who are critical. So you do wonder, you know, what some of these AIs would then propose as a solution. Well, is it woke ideology is all ideology? I mean, this is really the question, isn't it on? Because what we're really talking about is

How does an AI language model that is derivative of online content adjudicate things on which humans actually disagree? Totally. What is neutral? Like if you ask AI, should I vote for Trump or Harris? Right. What's it going to say? Right. Do you see what I'm? Yeah.

I mean, in that instance, it was kind of told to not have an opinion. So that's good. That was responsible. But I just think it's a really interesting question, which is, what is a neutral take? What is objective? There's no such thing. Yeah. So I can imagine that basically we're going to want to either train or teach or tell our AI assistants or coworkers what ideology we like to work with.

What are our values and principles and go from there? You can imagine that parents when they give AI tools to their kids, they're going to want to tell them, here's our beliefs in this household. So, yeah, the danger of that, of course, is that it's going to only then reinforce our ideologies and the things that we believe. So now we're getting to some of the interesting stuff where AI, you could imagine just AI relationships of AI, and particularly with the younger people, how it could get kind of dangerous and toxic, where it can kind of bring people deep down certain ideological tracks and lock them in even harder

than social media has locked us in today. And what that brings up is a question I was going to ask you anyway, which is one of the big slogans of the early social media era, famously at Facebook, move fast and break things. Has San Francisco Silicon Valley learned the lessons of that period where you go, well, move fast is great,

but is breaking things necessarily the thing that should be celebrated? Well, is there a feeling, I guess what I'm asking, among people that you know in this industry who are leading this whole thing, that of course we want to move quickly, we want to make new developments, but this is such a powerful technology like social media was. In a way that I don't think those guys, like, I keep, I always say this, like, if I was,

some guy in a hoodie on a university campus that invented a thing for people to swap pictures and connect. Right. I don't think in that moment, I would be thinking, well, this might cause civil war one day. No. But we now know that it can. Right. So are you guys thinking about that? So there's basically a, you know, I'm going to try and speak on behalf of all San Francisco AI people at the moment. There's basically a science. sliding scale and Google famously had their hands on everything that Open AI had before them, but were so cautious such that they failed to launch it. So that was one end of the spectrum that we as an industry now have moved on from. Open AI launched and were willing to make mistakes.

and I don't know if it's a move fast and break things thing, but I think what they realize is that most people realize that there were actually very few things that could go incredibly wrong where AI does interact in the physical world like Waymo, Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google that owns Waymo, took 10 years, like I said, to go from working car to make sure that it would basically never kill someone. And, you know, I think that might have happened.

It probably will happen. But it has so many less crashes than human drivers. It's just not comparable. But they were very careful. And I think they should have been. But I think that there are going to be lots of instances where there's a more nuanced, dangerous risk that we're only going to realize later. To your point, this guy in the hood,

you're referring to Zuck, he never realized the damage that might be done, I presume, because I don't think anyone could have. And now we look back on it. And frankly, we're still understanding the impact of social media. We still don't understand. We've got a number of hot takes, but actually, we don't fully understand it yet. So it's going to take a long time to really see the big and the small ways in which it's going to impact society, both positively and negatively.

You mentioned regulation, and I imagine in any industry, like I'm against regulation of the media, even though I see a lot of crazy things happening in the new media, but I just, I don't trust the government to do that well. But do you think that some regulation of this is necessary and some precautions are necessary to be imposed by people outside of the industry who don't have a vested interest in moving as fast as possible? Yeah. Like you said, as a rule, I'm against regulation.

It tends to not be done very well. it tends to stick around for too long. It tends to be done by people with vested interests or ideological interests, people who are trying to get re-elected, et cetera. So it can go wrong very quickly, like it's going wrong in the EU at the moment. But I think it's an interesting conversation.

This is going to sound actually quite silly, but should we, are we cool with commercially available AIs teaching people how to make chemical weapons or biological weapons or nuclear weapons. Are we cool with that? Fuck, probably no. Right? So maybe.

There's a line somewhere, as we're saying. Probably there is. It seems to me that what we're talking about really is, and this is a term that has been used about the internet, this does seem to be the wild west of AI, doesn't it? Where at the very beginning, no one knows what's going on really or how things are going to develop. Yeah, it's true and it's okay because it's actually not that useful yet. Like there's these big narratives about the change that's coming and, you know, as of the last couple of days, there were big layoffs by these big American companies, Amazon and Target. People don't know if

it's AI or not. But there was a study that also came out yesterday or the day before by an AI company here and they had a look at how much freelance work modern AI could do. They looked at freelance work because it didn't involve collaboration. They're trying to see how much of a single human's effort and work it could do and it was 3%. So modern AI could do 3% of freelance work. It's pretty useless still. So yes it's the Wild Wall, West in a sense, it's unregulated, but it's also just not that dangerous yet. And when you say it's not that dangerous yet, let's delve into this because this is a question I really want to ask you,

and I'm sure many of our audience do as well. What are your fears surrounding AI? I do worry that if it develops incredibly quickly and that there are a lot of disaffected youth and people who don't have purpose or a way to put food on the table, that they could reach for socialism. So that's one worry I have. I do worry that the potential downsides of AI,

which all technology has, do allow a future president, AOC, or someone else, to kind of ban AI or the effective parts of AI and in doing so Hubble America and the West. I do worry about, you know, I do worry about the blue-collar worker and the person, you know, that does a repetitive shit white-collar job. There's a lot of bullshit work out there. I was thinking government itself, like just most work is highly repetitive

and the efficiency is low. I do worry about if it changes the nature of their usefulness to the economy, what I could kind of do there. And I just resort back to the idea that it's all coming anyway. And I just don't think that a Luddite approach and sitting it out in the West, in U.S. or in Europe is a good idea. So I think the best path forward is to keep having these conversations. and make sure that the people building AI are actually sufficiently awake to the risks

and are not too proud or selfish to acknowledge that there will be some so that they can help us all society and the people well outside of AI navigate this world for our kind of mutual benefit. I hope that that's the way we take it. And I will say that while I see some people, people in AI who are so smart. I'm like kind of a midwit in AI. I'm like applying AI in the real world where there's a lot of people building the low-level AI. I see them sufficiently disconnected from reality sometimes. But at large, there's actually a pretty healthy conversation about the ways in which this can go bad. When I talk to people in AI in different ways, in different areas of AI, whether they're investors, they're working on the algorithms themselves, their policy people. Actually, they are more ready than I am to suggest that the change could

come really quick. So for those outside of the technology world that imagine that there's a bunch of selfish liberal technologists that are excited to get super wealthy from mass unemployment, of everyone outside of this world, I would actually say that that's not what you'll find here. Why is your managed retirement account still using strategies that haven't changed in over five decades? Most IRAs, 401ks and TSPs are still using the default 60-40 strategy because it benefits corporations, not you.

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but that's not my fear. Right. My fear is not that there is a bunch of greedy people who see this opportunity as an opportunity to make money. My worry is that this is a bunch of very, very smart people. Right. Who are smart in this one area, which we all are, right?

nobody's smart in everything, who maybe don't have the training, as most of us don't, in ethics, in playing the movie forward, who simply are not capable because no human is perhaps to project this forward, who are very excited about playing with this very cool thing. And playing with cool things is a great, especially, you know, for men, let's be honest. This is a new tech, oh, this is a new cool toy. and that in the exhilaration of this exploratory thing, that's when I think that maybe there is not sufficient, there's a potential that there's not sufficient consideration for other things. Totally.

I think that's very real. That's actually happening. And I would just go back to say that, what's the answer to that? Like, do we hobble it? Do we slow down? China's not going to. I don't know. answer there and I will also say that this same thing happened in the social media age

and it has had big impact in society maybe terrible impact on society but it was never not going to happen like what were we going to do just stick to email like while the rest of the world has these wild wonderful ways to connect and I bet a I bet social media And honestly, I kind of fucking hate social media as much as the next guy. I'm a victim of it too. I bet it's actually done a lot of great things for the world. Yeah. He's brilliant.

As well as terrible. He's both. I totally get that. I guess what I would say is maybe the answer lies in the people who are doing this work, just being cognizant of what happened before and going, how can I bring someone in who can maybe give me a philosopher or an ethicist or something like. That's what I think. Because I get your point, like someone coming in from the government telling you guys how to do stuff, that's not going to work.

But it was maybe about self-responsibility. Totally. And I will say without calling out any companies, that there are just some companies that care a little bit less about this. And I think that it's not unlikely that they're going, you know, they did a lot of damage in the social media age and TBD, whether they really cared much about it, even though it created a lot of problems for them. and they may do the same in the AI age. Yeah. So I think that fear is unwarranted. I guess I just, you know, I'm not trying to constantly defend AI here.

I'm trying to really like figure out where is the right place to land. As are we? Yeah. I think you're totally right. Another thing I wanted to pick up is your point about socialism. I've thought it's almost like the most obvious thing in this entire conversation that if you have a technology that is so transformative that half the population loses their job over 20-year period. Let's say 20-year being very generous. And at the same time, five people or 10 people or 20 people

accumulate all the new wealth over that same time period. I mean, I think you probably know my views on communism. But actually, in that situation, I think pretty much everybody would be pro-communism. You take all that wealth and you distribute it to the people who no longer have jobs. What else do you have unless you want an armed uprising. I think that's right. I just think that this conversation, we actually have a decade to have. Like if you want to have me back in 10 years, I'm down.

And then we'll actually have learned a lot more to be able to say, OK, what's the future going to look like? Because we're not there yet. Like, again, experts in this space think there's a little chance that something happens very quick. But I don't even think it's going to be as bad as you're talking about. And humanity has, and again, I don't want to sound glib, and I hope that there's not a big, a big traumatic change here. Humanity has just a way of reacting and responding and adjusting. It's so

resilient. I mean, COVID, we shut down the world for a year or two, tens of millions of people died, I think maybe 15 to 18 million. Some people think the world kept turning. Hopefully no one dies because of this. I think worse, worse things have happened to humanity and we're still here. And our lives are richer. I mean, there's a lot of different ways in which our lives are not. I think we're too disconnected from purpose actually and spirit and nature, but that's a whole other conversation, I'm sure. But humanity and the human race is just so resilient. So even in these crazy outside rare possibilities that may happen, I think we're going to be okay. Look, I really hope so because one of the things that I worry about when I talk to people

from tech, and it's not all people from tech, it's just the people that I talk to people, they tend to, when you talk about AI, they kind of get a little bit utopian. There's a little bit of an evangelical zeal going on there. And I'm like, I think they may be another side to us. I'm sure there's going to be great stuff happening. Yeah. And it's going to be brilliant and it's going to save lots of lives. But there's also going to be this as well.

Totally. I find it to be quite immature, that pure utopian take, this bright, gleaming future. The entire humanity has been a struggle. Living life is a struggle. There's no future perfect ahead of us. And AI is not going to bring that. But I think it's going to make things largely, at least a bit better. But I'm with you.

I just find that immature. It's usually like the younger technologists. And if you build technology for long enough here, it has a wave kicking you in the face and showing you that actually, just because you build it doesn't mean that the world will adopt it. And that it takes a long time for markets and societies to pick up new tools and change in which the ways in which they work. So I'm a massive realist there.

And my big message to everyone working in AI is, let's just explore the full spectrum of possibilities, which most people are. There are some utopians. I don't know if that might be the right word, but I don't think that they make up the majority of the people. And what excites you about AI? What are the things you're like, oh, if this happens, this could be transformative. This could be amazing. Well, again, it's super nuanced. and I'm like a strange CEO in the space in that I'm very pro-human.

I love how imperfect. I'm sorry to interrupt. You're an outlier in that you're very pro-human? I'm extremely pro-human in that. I love the imperfections of humans. I love the messiness of humans. There's a lot of left-brain people here that think about how perfect the world will be when we iron out all these inefficiencies and mistakes that humans make.

For me, I like the messiness of humans, right? So that's what I mean by being extremely pro-human. Can I just put, we need- You triggered us. Yeah, it's just like, because when you say you're pro-human and you like the messiness of humans, and, you know, there's people here who want to iron out the inefficiencies, and I go like, sounds a little bit fashy. I'm going to be honest with you, and I'm not somebody who uses that word. Yeah.

But it does sound a little bit fascistic. You know what I mean? Explain more. So, for instance, if you want to iron everything, the humans, that means that you want to micromanage humans, that you want humans to behave like robots, like automaton's. And that makes me feel pretty uncomfortable. Well, it's not actually quite like that. It's more like they can deploy AI in places where humans are imperfect. And for me, I like a lot of imperfection, right? I like the human stuff. And I think that we as a humanity are going to start to realize that we don't want to all. automate everything. So in my space, customer service. Actually, the AI is brilliant. It's super consistent, never gets pissed off, no typos, works 24 hours a day. It's incredible. Guess what?

Sometimes customers want to talk to a human and businesses want to show that they really respect them enough to put a human on the line too. So there's going to be a lot of that. You're being triggered sufficiently. Maybe forget the question in the press. Sorry. What are you excited about, I guess, Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, it's without a doubt that AI is going to help a lot of very human problems. Take medicine, for example. Medicine is a shit show. It's a disaster. Now, the medical industry in the United States is better than certainly where I'm from Ireland, the UK, unfortunately, many places.

It's really brilliant. It's also a nightmare. You have to advocate for yourself amongst all these disparate experts. Maybe one guy's great at hearts. One guy's great at the brain. The other guy's great at sleep. They don't actually talk to each other. They don't care about each other.

They don't care about the holistic picture at all. Trying to fix chronic illness in the United States is an impossibility with the current medical industry. And yet most people are chronically ill. There's so many people out there and they think, oh, you know, I don't have to be. have as much energy as I used to, or my concentration isn't as good as it used to be. And maybe it's just because they're getting older, or maybe they have mold toxicity. Because, for example, in the United States and probably in the UK and Ireland, because, sorry, in the Bay Area and probably in the UK and Ireland because they're humid places,

wet places, there's a lot of mold, water damage buildings. People are sick and they don't know it. And no one in the Western medicine medical profession can help you figure that out. Already chat GPT is better at putting the pictures, pieces of the puzzle together, looking at the different pictures you get from the experts and synthesizing. And so for me, I've got insights that I could never get before by giving all my medical tests. It's just brilliant at that. And so I think in the future, I mean, I know in the future, we're going to have solutions to so many of our ailments. The things that actually kill us, that actually ruin our quality of life,

that are destroying the lives of the people we love, both young people and older people. I mean, in the United States alone, I know so many young people that are very, very sick. I think there's a chronic illness that epidemic. And I think that AI is going to start to fix that. So that's just like one little example of a very pro-human, rich, wonderful way in which I think AI is going to be brilliant.

Because I saw a study. It was really interesting showing that when, you used AI to study tumors, it was actually far more accurate if a tumor was benign or if it was cancerous than a radiographer who's had 20 or so years of experience. Totally. It's brilliant at those types of things. Human labeling. So when humans have to look at x-rays, MRIs or EEGs, which are like brain scans that they'd use in, say, sleep studies, the AI is way better at labeling them. Just like The AI is way better at driving the cars. The AI has so much more data and so much more training.

Doesn't get sleepy. Doesn't get angry. It's reaction speed as well. It's just better at these things. And so hopefully, you know, the future medical profession is medical individuals with outstanding bedside manner and empathy, which we need a lot more of, right? and incredible AI that can teach them what's wrong with their patients and how to fix it. But I don't think that the AI is going to be very good at convincing the patient.

Again, that's going to be back to the human. The human's going to have to say, hey, I know it's hard. I know it's scary. You can do it. I've worked many people who've done it before. It's not going to take that long. Look at the readout from the AI. It's explained everything.

Let's do it together. And so, you know, unfortunately, that is a bit of a utopian take. But that's an example of where we can imagine just beautiful collaboration between the best of AI and the best of humans. That's already happening, like I mentioned with my dentist. It just tracks where your gum was last year, whereas now. It's like a simple thing. I think I'm totally with you on the excitement of it. I think there's so many amazing things that could come out of it.

Just incredible. The one thing we haven't talked about yet is generalized intelligence, i.e. God, a digital god, basically. I take the issue what people is calling it God. I think that's bullshit. But maybe something that can do what humans can do, better than humans, right? So when people talk about AGI here, artificial general intelligence, typically they mean they can do everything a human can do intellectually. Yes, but I'm kind of maybe going a step. then eventually better, sure. What I'm, but even if you give, if you give you 10 extra IQ points and bigger muscles and

and you're still not God, what I mean is AI that is so superior in its abilities that effectively it becomes the caretaker of humanity. Yeah. Is that going to happen? Well, I want to take us back for a second to the fact that it still can't do 3% of like, gig work. So we're a bit of a way out. Is that going to happen like, I don't know? I happen to think that humans are so much more than the intelligence that comes from their brains, you know, and I think that even if you create something that's so much more intelligent from an IQ

perspective than a human, that a humans will have a lot to bring to the table, you can totally imagine a point where it's just straight up smarter than us and things quicker than us and then is far better than we were at making itself better. And, you know, there's some sort of like jumping off point or singularity where it accelerates into the future in a way that we can't possibly even fathom what it's, what it is. So that sounds like sci-fi stuff to me. The doom consumers believe that that's possible and they say that if we invent this, it's going to kill us. Well, it's not hard to see. I'm not sure about the kill us part and I want to hear about that, but I just inject this.

If you have a machine, let's call a machine just for the sake, for ease of talking, that is based on chips, right? A machine can design better chips. Right. Robotic element of the machine can mine for the materials you need. You can put the chips together in the factory. It can make better chips. It becomes more intelligent. It can make better, design better chips.

And before you know it, you've got this thing, this runaway intelligence. And then it's actually something that a lot of sci-fi writers have been thinking about for decades. Some of the people I used to read as a kid were thinking about this sort of stuff. So let's talk about the do the people say it's going to kill us. Yeah. This is definitely one of the possibilities. Yeah. Or it could just take charge of us, which is another one of the possibilities.

Yeah. But why do you think it's unlikely that it's going to get there? Or do you? Well, no, I just think that if there's anything I've been trying to do in this conversation, it's just temper the fears. And so in this respect, I'm just trying to say it's not about to happen tomorrow or in 10 years, I don't think, or 20 years. Well, maybe 20 years is too far.

The reality is, I don't know. No one knows. And I think it's totally fair, totally fair. And there's people in San Francisco who will not be happy with me saying this, but I think it's totally fair to criticize the people working to create AI right now saying that they have no idea what they're creating and there could be some risks. I just think that the risks are small and China's going to do it. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, the thing that actually, when we talk about the risks, and this is going to sound ridiculous, but go with me because there's a deeper point. Robot girlfriends, and let me tell you why, right? Because it's desperate. Yeah, exactly. Please design one.

We've been on the road for how many weeks already. But put it like this. We were talking before about, getting rid, should we just say, of the imperfections of human existence. What is more imperfect than emotion? Sure. Relationships. If you could design, at one point the technology is good enough, you're perfect woman,

you're perfect man. They're never going to lose their temper. But, you know, they're never going to be coming back, you know, annoyed from work. You can get rid of the menstrual cycle. So, you know, she's always going to be horny. She's always going to be happy to see you. Why wouldn't you? Exactly.

Why wouldn't you? Why would you settle for the human being? And if you take that kind of way of looking at the world, then you can perfect everything. So why are you going to need to engage with reality when reality is unpleasant, uncomfortable? Sure. Sometimes not always nice.

Sure. I just don't think that humans actually want perfect. Maybe some people think they do, but they don't actually want perfect. I think the magic and the juice in a relationship is the kind of like push and pull and the connection you build is through the friction and overcoming it. And so, you know, we're not about to replace human connection anytime soon. And even in this world where this fantastical world where there is the, you know, the God AI, as you call it, we're still going to want human connection.

I don't think that I know that, no matter how good AI gets, it's not going to replace the magic of human connection. Even what we're feeling right now, you'll never, ever feel that with a robot, ever. It's not going to happen. Okay, now let's entertain it for a sec. Yeah, a bunch of people will.

Of course they will. There's probably people who were never going to have human relationships of this nature, and maybe it's a good thing. There's probably a bunch of people in the middle or on the edges that this competes with human relationships for. That's probably not a good thing. This can't possibly be great for the fertility crisis of the West. It doesn't sound like it's going to be.

But you can imagine a situation, and I do think that anyone who is highly confident about what the world's going to look like, particularly as it relates to AI, is full of shit. You could imagine a situation where actually new AI relationships mirror a way of relating and help us learn about ourselves in a way that most people never have or do. You know, they act like the world's best therapist and help people understand their insecurities and their own trauma and help build empathy and understanding for the other human on the side of the relationship. And so, you know, maybe they'll be AI girlfriends,

but maybe they'll be kind of AI friends that are like a healthy friend. Think of the very best friend you've got, they'll challenge you sometimes, they'll reflect back to you some of your mistakes, they'll support you when you're down, they'll give you some advice or share some stories that are useful. Maybe the very best version of AI will do all of these things too. So again, not trying to be polyanish here, not trying to paint a utopian future.

I do think it's going to get super weird. I think there's going to be all manner of like really kinky AI, girlfriend stuff. But we actually don't yet know the real implications and exactly what way it's going to play out. And it could be mostly awesome. We actually don't know. I'm sure the kinky stuff, the Japanese will do it first.

What's happening already. You mentioned the fertility crisis. With robots and AI, is it still a crisis? Insofar as we are all pro-human? Yes. Yeah, this is a bit of worry of me. Who are these people that are not pro-human? Well, I mean, at least we are, right?

Yes. So if we are talking about the fertility crisis, well, then it's a problem if people if people have less kids, just because there's robots around, that doesn't sound super helpful. So I don't know, I want to see humanity continue to flourish and grow. But it's actually an interesting point.

Like fertility crisis is happening independent of AI, because it started before AI. And remember, AI is not that useful yet, practically. So it's totally independent. Maybe AI and robotics actually is very helpful here. I mean, in Japan, the aging population don't have the young nurses and assistants that they used to have. And they've been trying to build robots to do that work for 15 or 20 years already.

That's going to come. And so maybe for all of the work that we used to depend on young people for, we do have robot assistance. And maybe that's awesome. And then we then have a population that I hope returns to growth. But during this adjustment phase, whatever the hell is happening. were assisted and supported by robotics and AI. And also maybe with AI as well, you know,

because part of the problem I think with the fertility issue is we haven't taught women about their fertility and, you know, the quite brutal facts around it. You get, we talk to, you know, you talk to women at parties. They go, well, I'm in my late 30s now, 38, 39. And, you know, maybe this is a time I'm going to start thinking about having kids. And you're like, I mean, you could.

but you're very much drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. We don't actually say that at parties. No, no, no, no, I don't. I'm thinking and I just kind of smile and nod. Smile and nod. But actually, maybe if you have an AI model that will be able to... They'll say that instead. But is able to actually, you know,

look at, you know, scan a woman's body and go, look, the reality is past this age, you're not going to be fertile. You're not going to be as fertile. So maybe you want to think about having kids at this. this age. Yeah, you could imagine that. Or just like a family planning AI that just goes, this is how you might want to think about life. Yeah, I think that the problem is not facts. No.

It's not that people don't know that this is a reality. It's much deeper than that. Yeah. And so, you know, if we have AI that, you know, acts as an outstanding therapist, will that, can not be useful for the fertility crisis? I can imagine, yes. You know, if it can actually satisfy some of the needs that we have now for great therapy, which is not abundant, then it could be great. You know, like if it can help, if part of the problem is, for example, women putting off

having children because they want to participate in the working world, they want to be successful in their own right and independent, they want to enjoy a certain lifestyle that has been promoted for the last 10, 20 years, maybe, you know, a great AI friend that acts as a great therapist too can help them start to think about the places from which those ideas come from dive deeply into what they actually want and start to play out the realities that come with you know prolonging having children etc like a good friend would yeah like someone at a party but who actually has the right to say such a i feel there's a judgment there no no i think he's just he's being very objective about it oh and it's great to have you all man thanks for giving

us a time and an interesting balance perspective. I hope other people in your world are having these conversations in this way because I think this is super important. Very important. Appreciate you coming on the show. Before we head over to Substack and put questions from our subscribers to you, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? You know, I'm just going to be repetitive in here and say that we just need to have a nuanced conversation about AI. I think AI technologists need to embrace the world and the world needs to embrace them. I think that the conversations on the left and the right are very basic and rudimentary.

Both the left and the right are worried about what it's going to do to, you know, workers, etc., which is fair. But we just need to have a collective conversation so we don't either ignore the issues and be ready to adapt a society. or we fear it outright and ban it and fall behind the rest of the world. Owen, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on the show. Make sure to head over to our substap where you get to us, Owen, your questions, and we get to carry on the conversation. How much technologically have the claims made by China's deep-seek and cost-savings efficiencies affected its Western rivals in their approach to modeling?

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