How AI Will Dissolve Our Brains Just Like Google Maps with Jacob Ward, Author of "The Loop"

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Jacob Ward, journalist, AI ethics and safety advisor, and author of The Loop, about AI's unintended psychological effects and what we can do about it. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) What caught my attention and hooked me deeply was this idea that AI will dissolve our brains just like Google Maps. When I heard that, I instantly related to it. Like, yeah, I can't go anywhere anymore without Google Maps. Can you share more?

(Jacob Ward at 00:00:34) Sure. So the basis of the relations that I've had around AI have to do entirely with behavioral science and how our brains are really not ready, I would argue, for what this technology is about to do to them. And the Google Maps example comes from an experience that I had thinking about how our brains make automatic decisions as part of a PBS series that I did in 2016 called Hacking Your Mind. And this was a crash course in behavioral science. And one of the ways that we were trying to get across to people, your brain makes most of your decisions in an automatic way, and your brain is like somebody who thinks they know this story already. And so they sort of say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know this one. I've heard this one." It's kind of how your brain moves through its day.

(Jacob Ward at 00:01:18) And so one of the examples of that is, like, if you've ever—I'm sure you've done this. I do this too. Like, if I have to take my kid to a doctor's appointment on a school morning as opposed to school, I inevitably accidentally drive them to school first. And you know that experience where you, like, automatically you show up at school, and then you sort of come to in the parking lot and you say, "Wait a minute. What am I doing? This is not where I'm supposed to be." And you realize, like, when you think about it, that's your brain conducting this half-ton vehicle through death trap after death trap, and yet got you to that place without you being consciously at the wheel at all. You know, the idea that we are unconsciously driving is a thing that's happening. And so your brain wants to just not think it through is essentially the lesson of behavioral science.

(Jacob Ward at 00:02:22) And the way to understand sort of the difference between that and when your brain is actually making conscious decisions is if you ever go to England, which I had to do for this documentary series, and try and drive on that side of the road. There is no spacing out when you're driving on the left side. When you're driving on the left side, suddenly every turn is crazy, and it's just an exhausting experience. So our brain has this capacity to process things raw and powerfully and vividly. But the second that you give it an opportunity to stop doing so, it's going to stop doing so. And Google Maps is exactly what that is. Right? It is making our brains not have to say, "Where am I? Which left am I making? What's the fastest way to get there?" And if you give your brain the chance to not do that job, then your brain's a muscle and it stops doing the work, and that muscle begins to atrophy. It's not a computer that you can turn off, put in a closet, and take out in a year and turn back on.

(Jacob Ward at 00:03:06) So, you know, for me, the sort of big thesis of my work and my book is that if we let these systems stand in for a human capacity like Google Maps did for our sense of direction, it's going to do to our ability to make good choices for ourselves and the hard mental work of all sorts of essential human things what Google Maps has done to our sense of direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:45) Does our brain reallocate? Like, for example, let's say Google Maps, sense of direction—and that atrophies—but that, in a computer sense, opens up more capacity for me to apply a larger amount of compute to other things.

(Jacob Ward at 00:03:59) So in the old days—the answer is it can. And once upon a time, the demands of our lives were such that that was the effect because that's sort of the design. Design is kind of the wrong word, but that's the evolutionary gift that we were given. Right? It's the ability to outsource our decision-making wherever possible so we could reallocate bandwidth to other tasks. And that task back in the day was not getting killed and, you know, making good choices about where to sleep that night. And eventually, in the long term, it became the capacity to, you know, wonder about the future and ask questions about what happens when we die and, you know, develop familial connections that engender real loyalty and modern human progress and all of that stuff. Right?

(Jacob Ward at 00:04:24) The problem with our current moment is we're not saving this bandwidth for anything beneficial necessarily. It's just that the brain is built to save the bandwidth wherever it can. And so that doesn't mean that just because we're losing the ability to do that stuff in our modern lives, we're going to necessarily gain the ability elsewhere to do something else. We might. It could if we were to be put in that position. But, like, you know, as behavioral scientist after behavioral scientist has explained to me, our brains are fundamentally lazy. They don't want to do the work, and so they're trying wherever they can to offload choices, and I could give you example after example of places in which this is true. But, you know, it is a system that doesn't want to be bothered. And in the old days, that was because it was trying to save bandwidth for other more important tasks. But in our modern lives, that's not how it works anymore, and so it's sort of more loss than gain now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:52) Why isn't it how it works anymore?

(Jacob Ward at 00:05:54) Because we don't have those evolutionary pressures. Right? Once upon a time, you were just trying to stay alive all day. Right? And the reason that the—I mean, the evolutionary theory about why we developed this kind of instinctive decision-making was that it was a way of staying alive. If you, you know, like—we have these incredible gifts. Well, I'll start with a threat and then I'll talk about the gift. So like, let's say, right, in the old days, you had to make a split-second choice about whether this snake coming at you is a dangerous snake or not, right? If you sit there and go, "I wonder what kind of snake that is," that's way too slow and way too considered a decision. You need to be moving way faster than that to stay alive. The people who were slow and inquisitive back then, they're long dead in that part of our family tree. Right? Those guys are long dead.

(Jacob Ward at 00:06:35) It's the fast-thinking, zippity-doo kind of decision-making that kept us alive. And so it's those of us who carried that forward into the future that survived. But—and the reason we know this is because we have this incredible onboard system for, for instance, transmitting emergency signals without even having to talk. Right? So like, if you've ever been in a true emergency situation, you know, where everyone starts running or there's a—you know, let's say you and I were sitting in the same room and a snake came into the room. What the science really shows is that you don't even have to say "snake." You look at me with a mask of horror on your face, and my face unconsciously mimics yours in an emergency. And then I'm transmitting that emergency signal to everybody else in the room. And before you know it, we are all standing and running, and we don't even know why. If you've ever been in a panicked crowd situation, you don't even know why you're running. You're just running.

(Jacob Ward at 00:07:26) And that capacity is, again, it's a gift. It's a reason that we are all here today, but that stuff doesn't exactly lend itself to a really thoughtful and considered and rational kind of decision-making. It's a survival strategy that made a lot of sense when we were trying to stay alive day to day. And now when we're driving our kids to the dentist, it doesn't make as much sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:11) Yeah. I think we're also taking, like—we would look at the snake before as threat. I think while the threat isn't life-threatening, I think we're applying the same things to, like, our social media algorithms.

(Jacob Ward at 00:08:24) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:24) Like, we're—it's less the caveman would tell you that's much less threatening, but our brains will lie to us, like, "We're still doing good work. We're still making decisions."

(Jacob Ward at 00:08:35) Exactly. Yeah. No, there's an amazing experiment that this researcher named Beatrice de Gelder did years ago and has become the basis of a bunch of really interesting work where she was studying people who were struck blind by a very specific kind of stroke-induced lesion on their optic nerve. Basically, what it was was it's like someone had taken a pair of scissors and cut the optic nerve. So the eye is still functioning and the brain is still functioning. It's just that the connection between them has been cut. And it's a very particular kind of blindness where people behave in weird ways. They're blind, but they just—there's all these—she had heard all these anecdotal reports that people were just kind of operating in a way that blind people typically do not.

(Jacob Ward at 00:09:01) So she brought in certain experimental subjects to play with this sort of idea and experiment with it, and she couldn't get anywhere. And finally, on a lunch break one day, they set up a little obstacle course for this one guy just on a whim and they said, "Can you please walk down this obstacle course?" And there's a blind man. He shows up with his wife. You know, he's got a cane, the whole thing. He walks to the—there's a famous video of this. He walks to the first obstacle, a little trash can or something, and he stops. He turns sideways. He goes around it. He turns around the next thing. He dodges every obstacle in this hall as he makes his way down the hall. And he hasn't been told there's an obstacle course. He's just been told to walk down the hall.

(Jacob Ward at 00:09:42) And at the end of it, all the researchers are like, "Oh my God. How did you do that?" "Oh, yeah. Look at this. This is the video. Look at you guys. You're so much slicker than anybody else." Yeah. So watch this. This is a blind man. He shows up absolutely blind, and yet he stops and—look, he turns and goes around that one and goes around the other one. Yeah. Incredible. This guy literally walks with a cane in the rest of his life. And what's so insane about this footage and the research that came from it is—so after this happens and he avoids all this stuff, everyone loses their mind, right, in that office. And they come to him and they say, "How did you do that?" And his answer is, "Do what?" He has no conscious memory of this.

(Jacob Ward at 00:10:19) In the same way that you and I have no conscious memory of driving our kid to school, he's got no conscious memory of this even though he's been struck blind in theory by this cut optic nerve. So there's something going into his eyes and being transmitted to his motor function that is somehow doing an end run around his consciousness. He has no consciousness, right, in this process. So based on that research, she starts taking people with similar injuries and she puts them in front of these big screens that show faces in which people are either grimacing or making a big smile or a big frown or a face of fear or whatever. And then she'll ask the people afterwards, like, "What do you see?" And they—each time they're like, "Are you freaking kidding me? I keep telling you I'm blind. Like, I don't see anything."

(Jacob Ward at 00:10:44) But when she rigs their faces up with sensors that detect the micromusculature of the face, it turns out that when you show them somebody smiling, then the person watching begins to unconsciously smile. When you show them frowning, the person begins to unconsciously frown. These people are not consciously experiencing what they're seeing, but their faces somehow catch it. They're catching the emotion in some way. So you can imagine—and this is why at the end of a run of swiping on TikTok, I'm kind of an emotional wreck. You know? Like, I feel like we're the only species that can empathize with a character in a movie that is not us. You know? When we feel for other people in these circumstances, that's all this unconscious transmission circuitry being engaged to no evolutionary purpose other than just entertainment and profit for these big companies, but it is having an incredibly powerful effect on this unconscious system that we barely understand that we're carrying around with us each day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:34) Yeah. It's pretty cool too.

(Jacob Ward at 00:12:35) Yeah. It's a gift. I mean, it's why we're all here. It's a great thing in a lot of ways, but it is very easy, it turns out, to use that against us, to use it to manipulate us, and to use it to make money off us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:47) So on this "AI will dissolve our brains just like Google Maps." I feel like that is true. So I'm going to—but I'm going to put some caveats. I'll put some asterisks on it for you. And you tell me if it's okay that I do this. I think it will, and that is scary because as we delegate—or I'm sorry. Let me back up. As AI gains the capacity to offload different things similarly to Google Maps, like, "Oh, I can offload my direction. I can offload my creativity. I can offload different aspects of my humanity to it." And my brain at the same time is maximizing for efficiency or laziness, whatever you want to call it. What that'll do is on an unchecked path without awareness that this is happening, it will drive us into a very dark, weird place of atrophy of the brain essentially.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:18) However, I think the asterisk is that if you're aware that this is the natural path and this is the path that we're headed, you can then make a conscious choice to develop discipline around very specific things that are both rewarding to yourself and valuable economically to others. And you can then keep your brain sharp in specific areas that you're consciously choosing to stay sharp in so that you can, again, be interesting to yourself and economically valuable to others. And I think that's how you're going to survive in the next hundred years. Do you think?

(Jacob Ward at 00:14:07) I respect that opinion, and I have no doubt looking at, you know, you, a prolific creator and professional. Right? You're a guy who clearly works out. Like, you know, you have your hierarchy of need has been met to the point that you—and you are—you have the circuitry on board. You are, for whatever reason, the kind of disciplined person who can have that sort of stoic attitude toward this. "I'm going to not just fade into the laziness that this system makes possible. I'm going to use it as a result to impose some discipline on myself and get ahead in the world." I think there's going to be people for whom that is true, and I think those people are going to be the winners in this new world. But if I look at how people in general are going to experience this—

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:55) It's not the case today.

(Jacob Ward at 00:14:56) It's not the case today. Right? That's right. That's right. And the question becomes, is it our responsibility as a society to only build what will—you know, to build what makes it possible for a Joel or a Jake or somebody else with a little—with some advantage and some discipline—get ahead, or do we need to, in some way, think about the effect on people writ large? In the same way that, you know, there are certain categories of consumer product that we've just sort of looked at and said, "You know what? This is having an effect on people's choices and on their health that is sort of beyond their control and needs to be reined in," and that's things like cigarettes. Right? You know, resisting cigarettes through a good stoic ability, you know, for millions of people was beyond the pale. And so as a public health matter, we decided to start reining that stuff in, you know?

(Jacob Ward at 00:15:56) And so here we're in this world where, you know, I think you're right that for some people, it will create the kind of world in which they can punch through and stand out, but there's going to be a lot of losers in that game. And I find myself thinking from a policy perspective about how do we think about more than just the people who are going to be able to resist the temptation to do less with—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) Their brand? I'm on board with you 100% because, look, I'm very aware. Like, I choose and work very hard to attempt to be in the top 1%. That's like a conscious effort that I've been making for over a decade, and there was a point where I wasn't, and I wasn't getting results that I wanted out of life. And so I started studying other people and realized, oh, I have to completely change everything about who I am to become somebody that, you know, I'm proud to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:45) But I agree with you fully that, like, I don't think the world should just be designed for the 1% because you're gonna have a huge problem on your hands.

(Jacob Ward at 00:16:53) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) If the other 80 to 90% go down this complete atrophy way and then you're gonna have revolts. It's gonna get real messy, societally, really fast. So what are the current things that you're looking at? Like, how do we keep rails on this? What do we even do to make it so it's not so easy for the 80% to atrophy?

(Jacob Ward at 00:17:17) What I would like people to do is to have a broader understanding of the kind of stuff that you and I are talking about here. This idea that our brains make the vast majority of our decisions in an unconscious and instinctive way that is very predictable and makes us very vulnerable to manipulation, very gullible, but, you know, just vulnerable in a lot of ways. And if we can start establishing that, and I think we are starting to establish that in case law, in lawsuits that are going around right now against, in many cases, big tech companies, we're gonna then, I think, be in a position to start saying, okay, there are some harms here that go beyond what we're traditionally good at thinking about as harms in the United States, which is death and monetary loss. Like, those are the two categories of things that we tend to regulate here in this country. I think we're gonna need to start thinking about—I have a friend and colleague named Nita Farahany, who's a Duke law professor, teaches an amazing course about AI and the law.

(Jacob Ward at 00:18:19) And she has a whole concept based on a book she wrote called The Battle for Your Brain of cognitive liberty. And she believes in the idea of keeping the cutting edge of behavioral analysis unmolested in this broader sense. And we just, in this country, have been very allergic to the idea that we're not in control of our own choices or that we are manipulatable. We love to blame the victim for their addictions and blame people for not knowing stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) Just go to a magic show.

(Jacob Ward at 00:18:56) Yeah. Right? Right. That's right. That's right.

(Jacob Ward at 00:18:58) Yeah. That's right. We know that people fall for this stuff endlessly and we're endlessly entertained by it. And it's endlessly distracting. That's right.

(Jacob Ward at 00:19:07) A magic show will teach that to any lawmaker. That's exactly right. So we're gonna need, I think, a more subtle look at how our brains make decisions and how those decisions can be influenced. You know, that's one. The other one I would just say is, like, maybe let's just think about what this stuff is actually good for in terms of human benefit for a little while.

(Jacob Ward at 00:19:31) Like, my thesis has always been, let's give AI to the scientists for, like, five years. Let them run with it before we start making, like, AI girlfriends, you know, and marrying our chatbots and, you know, the kind of fly-by-night stuff that's making people crazy, you know, literally crazy. So for me, we are so quick to make a commercial product out of this thing before we even understand it, before we have any idea what effect it's gonna have on us. I'd like—you know, we know it's good at pattern recognition. Let's give it to scientists whose job involves that and figure it out from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:04) It's almost like we discovered uranium and we just sent a sample to everyone's house.

(Jacob Ward at 00:20:10) Yeah. That's right. That's right. Exactly. That's a good analogy. Exactly. Like, here, play with this. See what happens. That's right. Yeah.

(Jacob Ward at 00:20:17) That's right. It's a uranium subscription. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:22) Okay. So I hear you sounding the alarm, and I like this. And by the way, you're very well spoken. You're very well researched. And so I'm enjoying this quite a bit.

(Jacob Ward at 00:20:31) Appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:32) You're bringing this to light. Part of me is frustrated you don't have answers. It seems like right now, we're like, hey, we need to bring this. And I get it because that's the first part of the cycle. Step one is awareness and bringing everyone on board. Does anyone out there—is anyone out there proposing hard answers? Like, actual, like, we should do A, B, C, D, and we should do these things? Or is everybody kind of, like, hey, we're all showing each other our scared face, and we're all about to run. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:00) Are we all just alerting each other that there's a threat?

(Jacob Ward at 00:21:03) So I definitely—like, I get that criticism a lot because it is true that I have spent a huge—I mean, my career as a journalist has been about documenting the sort of unintended effects of this stuff. And so, and I am not—you know, but increasingly, I am being pulled into policy conversations about how would we actually make choices that could, you know, change things for the better. And to my mind, you sort of—I mean, you know, one of the solutions—I don't know if this is truly the term for it, but one of the things that we sort of need to start recognizing is that the sycophancy and the anthropomorphism that is built into these systems, I would like to see that pulled back. Right now, the marketing of LLMs involves making them the most sort of handy assistant you could possibly have and one that is constantly both flattering you and talking about itself in the first person. Neither of which is necessary for this thing to do what it needs to do.

(Jacob Ward at 00:22:13) That is marketing. And it's very effective marketing. When ChatGPT went from the 4.0 version to the 5.0 version, they made a big change because the 4.0 version was the most sycophantic so far, and they made the 5.0 version more neutral. And everybody started complaining. People didn't like that because they like a sycophantic helpmate.

(Jacob Ward at 00:22:36) They want something that says, great idea, Joel. You should totally do—great question. Let me get right on that for you. Right? And that kind of sycophancy, I think, needs to get pulled back.

(Jacob Ward at 00:22:49) And if I were, for instance, you know, running an organization, you know, a company and trying to create some parameters around how this stuff gets used, I wouldn't want it to talk in those terms. In part because, you know, in the same way that social media has driven us to a certain extreme set of behaviors, my worry is that if you make this system the most satisfying conversation anybody is having in a day or in a workplace, then it's the only conversation that they're gonna wanna be having, and you're gonna start driving people away from the kind of human interaction that I think is actually, you know, most beneficial to society. That's one thing I would like to see. Another thing I'd like to see is the rise of an apprenticeship program at all companies. I think every company is gonna basically run out of qualified people within about four or five years because everyone's gonna fall for the idea that you don't need entry-level employees anymore.

(Jacob Ward at 00:23:50) You don't need that first kid out of college doing your bookkeeping for you. You know, you don't need the clerical help or whatever else it is. And in four or five years, we're gonna be in a place where nobody has come through the pipeline of the first and the second job such that they're ready to manage somebody or do a complex sales call or any of that kind of stuff. So I feel like the other big thing that we're gonna need to do right away as companies is institute an apprenticeship program where you are paying someone a living wage to be on your staff and be there and hang out because you're gonna need somebody around. And if it's not someone from your environment, it's gonna need to be from some environment where they know how the office works, know how to be professional with other people, know how to, you know, convey the value of a product.

(Jacob Ward at 00:24:38) That stuff is gonna absolutely disappear if we keep going down the moment that we're in right now where companies are really falling in love with the leanness and efficiency that AI makes possible and, you know, are on this path of laying lots of people off and trying to work with fewer people. I think we're setting ourselves up for real problems there. So that's a couple of, like, you know, near-term things that I would like to see changed if it were up to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:03) Okay. Neither of those were, like, legislation. Now are you seeing anybody—because, you know, you are a researcher and a writer and a journalist. Are you seeing people propose legislation?

(Jacob Ward at 00:25:15) Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:17) And what does that look like?

(Jacob Ward at 00:25:18) So the legislation is interesting because, right, you know, we have no federal regulations around this stuff at all. You know, we're, what, like, 20 years now into the social media era, and we still don't even have a data privacy law on the federal books in this country. We don't have a data transparency law. We got nothing. There's no laws about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:40) But we're just spying on everyone, so we already know what's going on.

(Jacob Ward at 00:25:43) Right. But it's—but if it's a for-profit company, it's somehow okay. Right? That's the part that has always driven me crazy. Like, if you look at, like, the Nest thermostat, which, you know, knows when you're coming home, it knows your patterns of life.

(Jacob Ward at 00:25:54) Like, if that thing had an NSA logo on it, you know, the—like, an NSA logo on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:59) Like, Google just is the government.

(Jacob Ward at 00:26:00) Well, that's right. Yeah. But if it actually said CIA on it or something, you would drown that thing in the bathtub. You know? Somehow, people are, like, buying an Alexa, a listening device, and bringing it into their home.

(Jacob Ward at 00:26:11) It's always been amazing to me. Like, it's okay because it's for profit. Somehow—I don't know. I just somehow that—I've never heard of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:17) If it's for profit, then there's definitely no monkey business.

(Jacob Ward at 00:26:21) Yeah. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:22) I don't know. There's none.

(Jacob Ward at 00:26:23) And let's say they're not even passing it on to the government. Why is it somehow okay to spy on people even if it stays within a for-profit company? I've just never—I don't know. The whole thing has always mystified me. So, anyway, there's no federal regulation on the books.

(Jacob Ward at 00:26:44) So it's come down to the states. The states are now the ones making the moves, and they're actually making quite a number of moves. So last year, all 50 states and Puerto Rico proposed some sort of legislation around AI. And at this point, I think it's like 36 states have laws on the books governing it. And those range from California—where I'm based—has a big bill that basically requires that the foundational model makers, the big companies that are making Gemini and ChatGPT and, you know, Claude and the rest of them, have to be able to show the steps they're taking to protect us against the Terminator scenario, basically.

(Jacob Ward at 00:27:23) In Illinois, they have outlawed the use of AI as a therapist. You're not allowed to bill it as a therapist or, you know, dress it up as some sort of, you know, robot counselor. That's not okay. Colorado has all kinds of things about AI and discriminatory hiring practices, discriminatory mortgage practices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:49) AI thing. Yeah.

(Jacob Ward at 00:27:50) That's right. That's right. You know? So each of these states is passing laws because the states—I mean, I think the lessons of the social media era is that the states saw the effects on kids and, you know, the stunts and all of the stuff that social media made possible fell on the resources of states. And so states, I think, are moving pretty quickly right now to try and hem this, you know, slow this stuff down.

(Jacob Ward at 00:28:15) The weird part is just how hostile the federal government under President Trump has been to that. Right? The AI industry has really gotten its way with the federal government in that they're getting, you know, the federal endorsement of their plans. And Trump, that's right, has signed this executive order trying to block states from enforcing their own regulations around AI. And, you know, so far, the states have been basically ignoring this. But—

(Jacob Ward at 00:28:46) You know, in the—because in the absence of a federal law, an executive order doesn't really do it. But, you know, this is a—it's a moment in which you're—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:53) Well, that's weird because I'm in the—I'm, personally, I'm in the boat of push as much down to the states as possible. Let us have different cultures and different—and then let the people choose economically where to go and spend their dollars, and let those states thrive. It makes them—it forces them to be competitive.

(Jacob Ward at 00:29:10) It was supposed to be the whole concept, right, of the United States was supposed to have to do with that. Yeah. That's right. But that, of course, doesn't serve the purposes of the companies. Right?

(Jacob Ward at 00:29:23) They don't wanna have to make a different product for Coloradans, you know, than they do for somebody from Illinois. Right? They wanna be able to make a single blanket thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:34) Oh, I don't care what's easy for them.

(Jacob Ward at 00:29:36) Well, that's right. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:37) Make the law and make them comply if they wanna do this.

(Jacob Ward at 00:29:38) The Trump administration does. Right? I mean, if you think about it, right, JD Vance is a creation of Peter Thiel, who's one of the original Facebook investors. You know, there's a direct political pipeline between who's in Washington right now and Silicon Valley's, you know, top earners and top decision makers.

(Jacob Ward at 00:29:55) And so they really got the ear of the White House on this stuff. And as a result, they are—you know, federal policy right now is trying to make it easier for these companies even though the states are trying to do exactly what you say, create laws that they think reflect the values of the states.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:11) And this is why policy is so nuanced. Because it's not like party—left, right, center, whatever. No. It's very specific. It's like, in this specific instance, what do you think should happen as an American?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:22) And I'm like, in this specific instance, just this isolated thing, we should let the states do it. And I think whenever there's in doubt of, like, should this be federal or should this be state, I think it just defaults to state. Because that was the original idea of what we're trying to do.

(Jacob Ward at 00:30:40) Yeah. You know, I want anyone brave enough to step up and regulate this stuff to do so because I do think that we're gonna need some guardrails around this technology. I don't know exact—I've never honestly, it's weird that I've never really formed an opinion about this. I don't know whether I think—I guess I've just always assumed, like, we should be able as a nation to come together on the idea that certain things shouldn't be okay. Like, we shouldn't—I think we should all be able to agree that, like, kids under the age of 18 shouldn't have access to AI chatbots.

(Jacob Ward at 00:31:15) Like, that the research is really strong on that. Like, chatbot companions—that kids under the age of 18 shouldn't be allowed to use, like, a Character.ai kind of chatbot companion that, like, poses as a friend, poses as a girlfriend. You know? I think we could all, as Americans, reasonably make that assumption and make that a federal law. But but maybe not.

(Jacob Ward at 00:31:40) I mean, maybe that should just be a state-by-state kind of thing. I honestly—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:44) is why I'm not in politics. You know, I'm not in it as much as I have to be in it because I'm a dad and I've got three kids, and I need to have some level of awareness, some responsibility on certain topics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:00) But yeah, I think it's fascinating. So the legislation that I asked you about is that we have no federal legislation currently. I thought I had seen something with ITAR come out a while back about model size and being registered, but that wasn't—I don't think.

(Jacob Ward at 00:32:15) So ITAR is just the foreign—is the degree to which we move things, you know, are allowed to sell things abroad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) Okay.

(Jacob Ward at 00:32:25) And that one, you know, we are supposed to be hanging on to our AI technology as a matter of national security. But that's going out the window. It turns out it's so hard to enforce.

(Jacob Ward at 00:32:41) Well, not only is it so hard to enforce, but the UAE, United Arab Emirates, has given huge amounts of money to Binance, which wound up going—but they did it through World Liberty Financial, which is President Trump's crypto concern. And two weeks later, the United States signed a deal that allows the UAE to buy all kinds of AI chips that are forbidden to most other countries. There's some very shady stuff going on right now around this stuff. And there was all of this hullabaloo about China not being allowed to have our most cutting-edge AI chips, but Nvidia seems to have gotten what it would have wanted, and now suddenly that's off. So, you know, there's a weird thing around—there's some weird cronyism going on around protecting AI technology in the United States against slipping abroad.

(Jacob Ward at 00:33:43) That seems to be sort of all going out the window. The only real—you know, the only place in which the United States—I mean, you know, what's really weird is that the one place in the world that is a Western democracy that is actually trying to regulate this stuff hard is the EU. Europe has passed big legislation that makes all kinds of requirements of these mostly American companies. And Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, went abroad to Europe recently and said, "We're going to hit you with even harder tariffs if you don't drop these regulations against our companies." They're pushing back against regulations even outside the United States.

(Jacob Ward at 00:34:19) So yeah, it's a weird moment. We've gone from a world in which the Biden administration was very actively trying to regulate these companies to a world in which the federal government is really just paving the way for them as much as they possibly can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:30) Yeah. The EU tends to lead with this type of digital law. They did it with GDPR. They, you know, are kind of hashing it out. So whenever I'm wondering what's coming down the pipe, I almost look—they've positioned themselves legislatively as the leaders for banning things.

(Jacob Ward at 00:34:46) Absolutely. For slowing things down, all that kind of stuff. You know, a topic that I think of that I wonder if you might be interested in, that I'm really thinking about a lot right now, is India. So in the technical world—I mean, for all of the Western English-speaking world, India has been a source of incredible outsourced labor for creative work, technical work, customer service work, work that requires technical know-how and English. They speak English better than we do, right? So they're an incredible resource to us in that way. So AI is about to wipe all that out. And I was just talking to a guy the other day who co-wrote India's new kind of national guidance on AI, in which they basically announced, "We're not going to really regulate it. We're not going to create a new ministry to deal with it. We're going to try to welcome it into our country as much as we possibly can."

(Jacob Ward at 00:35:45) And this is a country where in the past the transportation minister has in the past declared that self-driving cars are not allowed in India. And that's because a huge amount of the professional workforce in India is professional drivers being—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:59) China too. Yeah.

(Jacob Ward at 00:36:00) Yeah, like China too. That's right. So a self-driving vehicle is not allowed. But when I was talking to this guy who helped write the thing, I said, "Why didn't that happen with AI? I mean, obviously it's going to affect the livelihood of millions and millions and millions of middle-class Indians." And he was like, "Well, there's a really organized voting block for drivers. They have unions and stuff, but they don't have that in the knowledge world yet, in the knowledge worker world," which is really interesting. So just a few weeks ago—this is the kind of thing that sort of grabs my attention—a few weeks ago, the soccer superstar Lionel Messi came to India, and he showed up at a VIP event for fans at a stadium in the city of Kolkata in India. And these fans paid the equivalent of what would have been basically half the weekly salary of your average knowledge worker in India.

(Jacob Ward at 00:36:53) So big money for these guys, right? A very huge ticket price to get twenty minutes—or not even twenty minutes, but you're supposed to get time, VIP time with their star, Lionel Messi. So Messi shows up. He walks around the center of the stadium, and he's so crowded by VIPs, not the people who bought the tickets, but dignitaries and elected officials and so forth, that nobody in the stands gets to really look at him.

(Jacob Ward at 00:37:19) And then he leaves after twenty minutes. And the crowd goes wild, and I don't mean in a good way. They tear the stadium up. They climb the fences. They wreck the pitch. They go crazy. And I was just watching that and thinking, "Okay. These are hardworking, money-earning, middle-class folks in India." Yeah. Here it is.

(Jacob Ward at 00:37:44) That's right. They—it descends into chaos. They had to bring in riot police in the end. This is the early stages before they went over the—went over the fence. They had to bring—yeah. They go nuts and are so angry that they got cheated, right? They were offered this opportunity to kind of be part of this exciting, you know, sort of the benefit of their having been part of all of this, you know. And I don't know. For me, I just look at this and I think, if this is how angry they are when they get cheated out of twenty minutes with their guy, I just think, man, when these guys all lose their jobs to AI, you know, in that country, I just worry about what's next in that part of the world, given what we're talking about here.

(Jacob Ward at 00:38:33) So I don't know. That's something I've been thinking about lately.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:36) Just wait till it happens here with the average people here.

(Jacob Ward at 00:38:41) I mean, we don't have quite as much of a history of that, but that's right. I mean, the other thing I have a—there's a very smart think tank fellow at the Brookings Institute named Molly Kinder, and she has this great thesis about—or great is the wrong word, but an interesting thesis about how she worries that AI is going to do to non-college-educated women what offshoring did to non-college-educated men in the United States. Because the best jobs for non-college-educated women that you can have a career and retire on is clerical, bookkeeping, admin, you know, and AI is going to wipe those things out first. And so she's worried about that. And I wonder, do we have the capacity to fight back about that?

(Jacob Ward at 00:39:27) I don't know. But I think, yeah, we're on the verge of something big, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:33) Well, this might take a lot of heat. But in systems engineering, you don't try to fix a broken model. You make a new one. So I don't know if we'll fix it. I don't know if we'll save those jobs, but we might need to make a new model that we can funnel those people into. Because you don't want a population of people without purpose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:55) Yeah. That's scary. That's right. That is a very scary situation. Yeah. Because without purpose, it just devolves into chaos.

(Jacob Ward at 00:40:03) Yes. That's right. Well said. I agree with that completely. I think purpose is going to be our number one challenge going forward because I think we're really—you know, in the past, we've been living a more or less sort of subsistence life until very recently, such that when time-saving innovations came along, there was still plenty of work to do.

(Jacob Ward at 00:40:28) There's still sort of plenty of ways for human beings to provide value in society, but so much of that value has been kind of hoovered up at this point. I'm not as convinced as I used to be that there's going to be an opportunity for each human to earn—you know, to have value assigned to them that will allow them to earn a living. I think we may very well be close to something where you've got to really start thinking about the value of a human being beyond their productivity. I think, you know, when Andrew Yang ran for president and was talking about universal basic income, I remember I, like so many people, was like, "Yeah. Maybe someday."

(Jacob Ward at 00:41:08) You know? Man, I'd like to get him on a show now and say, "Boy, how's that feel? You know? How's it feel to be as right as you may have been?" Because it really feels like we are in this world where something's going to have to get renegotiated because I'm not sure that there's going to be a job for everybody. I mean, you know, Dario Amodei, head of Anthropic, has this quote. He told Axios last year, I think. He said, "We may very well be in a world in which we cure cancer and balance the budget, and we'll have 20% unemployment." You know, I don't think we know how to do that in this country. We're not built for that yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:44) But you're—I think you're spot on. It's the thing that's hard about it is it's a hard conversation to have because you have to be able to simultaneously discuss multiple highly emotional topics at the same time. And people in general lack that capacity. It's a hard thing to do because you have to talk about the fact that, yeah, these non-college-educated women, they're going to go down economically. And then you say, "Well, that's unacceptable." So, yes. Yes. Everyone's going to go down. I can—well, there's going to be these spikes and it's going to then create enough pressure to where there has to be a solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:11) Right now, there's not enough pressure. Things are still too good. Yeah. Things will have to get really bad and they're going to get bad in very quick ways. And they're going to—very narrow, very quick, until it's broad and it's constant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:35) And when it's broad and it's constant, that's when we'll step in and create the new model. Because like you said, our minds are trained lazy. We're not going to act unless we have to act.

(Jacob Ward at 00:42:44) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:44) And so we have to wait for those signals that we have to act, and those signals are the destruction of the society. So it's this real tough balance. And then you get into the philosophical thing, like, what people should be doing or how they should be spending their time and all of these conversations. And one of the things that gives me hope, Jacob, is that money is the medium in which we exchange value. The value is things that we decide are valuable to each other. And if you look two hundred years ago versus now, the bullet point list of things that are valuable have changed drastically on a per item basis. So I don't doubt that there will be an economy in a way that we're exchanging value between each other. I think that system is stable. What the ratios are or what the value is of which item is going to fluctuate and change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:38) But I still think there will be work to be done in the sense that I'm going to do something valuable for you. You're going to do something valuable for me. And then it's going to create this separation between people who want to do things and who want to just plug into the matrix. Some people will be like, "Give me the IV, plug me into digital life. I want to go into the matrix." Other people will want to still participate in this monkey game that we're playing and having fun. So I think it's just going to change reality so fast, so drastically. I personally—and you might not like me after I say—I think it's beautiful. I think this is the most exciting time to watch it play out.

(Jacob Ward at 00:44:15) Yeah. I mean, I don't feel that way, but I also—but I respect that feeling. I mean, I think, as we started—you know, in the same way we talked about at the beginning of this show, right, I find myself unhappy with solutions that don't take at least the majority of people into account.

(Jacob Ward at 00:44:36) I think it's really not going to work if we just sort of say, "Well, if people don't want to take advantage of what's in front of them, then that's their problem." I just think we're going to be in a world of real scarcity when it comes to purpose and value if we kind of let the market just kind of run with it. So I do think something's going to have to—some other force is going to have to get involved. But, you know, in terms of what makes me—what I take comfort from, one thing I've really been taking comfort from recently is the incredibly—is the contrast between how people my age, you're younger than me, but, you know, our age, I would say, the attitude that we have toward this stuff, which is either, you know, "Oh, it's horrible and I don't want to touch it," or "I love this thing so much and I want to do everything." You know, there's this weird attitude among people, certainly, I find people around my age to kind of be deceptive about the degree to which they're using AI.

(Jacob Ward at 00:45:33) They're not very honest about it. They like to sort of pretend it's their writing or their work. There's a lot of kind of dishonesty, I think, that is sort of in this moment where you're passing off your work to your bosses as if you did it kind of. And then, but then what I love is the contrast between our generations and how kids are thinking about this right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:53) Mhmm.

(Jacob Ward at 00:45:53) I think kids have such a fantastic—I mean, they'll use it, but they have such a cultural allergy to it as a source of entertainment or as a source of real knowledge or real connection, and it's epitomized by this term that's been floating around. I don't know if your kids have ever—if you've heard this yet, but clanker.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:12) Oh, yeah. Oh, I got called a clanker the other day. Why did I get called a—I got called a clanker on a comment, like a YouTube.

(Jacob Ward at 00:46:19) So if anybody doesn't know, kids refer to old people, that's you and me, who use AI too much as clankers. And "Don't be a fucking clanker" is their whole shtick. And so there's something wonderful to me about, like, they just see it so clearly, and they have already come up with a disparaging name for it. And I love kids for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:41) That's what they do.

(Jacob Ward at 00:46:42) Kids for that. And so for me, I think, you know, I give a lot of talks to parent groups about AI, and one of my messages is, "We're going to do our best, you guys, but in all parenting, we're just winging our way through this because we don't know what we're doing." Fundamentally, the kids are going to figure it out for themselves, and the signs so far are that, in fact, they see this stuff pretty well if the word clanker is to be believed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:06) Now do you believe that we will start to actually enact a new model when we see the spikes going crazy?

(Jacob Ward at 00:47:15) I think that we are in such uncharted territory. I think for one thing, the economic benefit that accrues to these companies is going to be divorced from whether or not people have jobs in a whole new way. I think people's stock valuations are going to be able to keep going up even as society suffers. I mean, you know, and that's sort of—and that's not an accident. You know, Sam Altman has this famous quote he told Alexis Ohanian on a podcast a couple years ago.

(Jacob Ward at 00:47:42) He said that he has a text thread going. You know, they're all on these WhatsApp groups, these heads of the tech state. And he says that he has a bet going with the other guys in his WhatsApp group as to when we will see the first one-person billion-dollar company. Right? And he said it in this way that was like, "Wouldn't that be cool?" But any economist would look at that and be like, "Oh, no."

(Jacob Ward at 00:48:09) That's a terrible idea because there's not enough—you know, I don't care how many billions you earn as a one-person company. Your estate is not going to be big enough to employ everybody as a gardener or whatever. Like, that's a real problem for the economy. So I don't know that the conventional economic signals are going to be there in the short term.

(Jacob Ward at 00:48:32) It could be that, for instance, the thing I was talking about earlier, this dried-out pipeline of qualified managers—you know, that might create some impetus around education. But we in this country are so bad about thinking in the long term about that. You know, so I like to think the education system could account for some of this stuff, but we're not exactly pulling money in the system now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:55) On the education system. Yeah.

(Jacob Ward at 00:48:56) I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:56) I know. So, so just so I understand, do you think there's a probability or possibility that we're going to solve this prior to it getting really bad? Or do you think it's going to have to get—because, like, legislatively—

(Jacob Ward at 00:49:08) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:08) We are always in arrears. Like, yeah. The seat belt safety, tobacco—all of these things are always after—

(Jacob Ward at 00:49:17) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:17) Millions of people have died or lots of people have died.

(Jacob Ward at 00:49:20) Right. It's because the essence of our judicial system is that we're an ex post, as opposed to an ex ante, law system. It's always figuring out who was at fault after the fact. So, no. Do I think we'll get out in front of it ahead of time?

(Jacob Ward at 00:49:33) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:33) Not necessarily.

(Jacob Ward at 00:49:33) I think we hope is in that when we start to see it happen, we—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:36) I think our hope is in that when we start to see it happen, we'll modify the existing or create a new model to help alleviate the pain.

(Jacob Ward at 00:49:42) So here's an example that, you know, I'll leave you with this example that I take a lot of heart from. Up until 2013, I think it is, there was a very small number of Americans that died every year from a very specific kind of injury. And it was anywhere from a hundred to three hundred people a year, which compared to something like gun deaths or car accidents or, you know, cancer, I mean, is a tiny, tiny number. But it was a very tragic particular form of death, and that was kids being accidentally run over in their driveways, and typically by their own parents. Terrible. The most horrible thing you can possibly imagine.

(Jacob Ward at 00:50:28) And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:29) As—

(Jacob Ward at 00:50:30) As a result of this very consistent number, a group of lawmakers got together, totally bipartisan—people who would never speak to each other otherwise—and formed a coalition to put together a law that required that all new cars sold in the United States after 2013 had to have backup cameras. And those backup cameras, you know, add another few hundred dollars to the sticker price of a car. You and I end up paying that price, you know. And it was against all logic in terms of how we typically think about this stuff. It was a small number of people dying. It adds expense to the thing.

(Jacob Ward at 00:51:08) It controls the market. It, you know, it takes away freedom from the companies—like, all that stuff. And yet we as a society just said, "This is totally unacceptable and we can fix this." Right? And there's something in that story that makes me think, you know, we can make good, smart decisions about this stuff.

(Jacob Ward at 00:51:29) Not necessarily in advance, but we do have that capacity. You and I would be smoking cigarettes right now and driving our kids around with no seat belts in the car if it hadn't been for the way the American legal system works. It does make a difference eventually. It just takes thirty years oftentimes. We're not going to—you know, and who knows what the hell is going to happen between now and thirty years from now.

(Jacob Ward at 00:51:51) But the pace at which state lawmakers are passing legislation, the, you know, the pace at which folks like you and I are getting on podcasts together and talking about this stuff—I mean, this is the issue of the moment, and we're not even—you know, we're only what is it? Two, three years from the commercial debut of these systems, and we're already grappling with stuff. So I like to think we're moving faster than we normally do, and we will get our arms around this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:17) Alright. Okay, so you're optimistic.

(Jacob Ward at 00:52:19) And, you know, in a broad sense, I think—

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:21) I would have bet money you're not optimistic.

(Jacob Ward at 00:52:25) Well, painful road, but I think we do eventually get it. I'm fundamentally a pretty optimistic person. I look—you do. Yeah. Look at, you know, the fact that we get to sit here in houses with clothes on and dealing with strangers all day and nobody has to die for looking different.

(Jacob Ward at 00:52:40) And, you know, we're so much better than we used to be as humans, and we get better and better as time goes by. So I do—I am optimistic. But I also think the market forces at work right now are way out of control and are about to get even more out of control, and I'd like to see that change a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:54) Yeah. It's wild. It's like I'm watching the storm come in. Yeah. It's kind of crazy.

(Jacob Ward at 00:52:58) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:58) Just make sure I reinforce my house. Well, thank you so much, Jacob, for doing this. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Jacob Ward at 00:53:04) I feel great. I really appreciate this. It's a very thoughtful conversation. I really appreciate you being open to such a wide-ranging talk. Thanks, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:11) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.