From Unboxing Phones to Unpacking AI with Noah Kravitz, Host of the NVIDIA AI Podcast

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Noah Kravitz, host of the NVIDIA AI Podcast, about his journey through the tech landscape and how he's charting the broader impacts of AI. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:19) Hey, what's the deal? You got a Razr back there. That's how you know how old I am. Yep. What's about the old phones?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:00:26) I used to cover the mobile phone industry for a living. I was a, whatever you want to call me, journalist, blogger, did a bunch of YouTube stuff. And so when I moved into this basement office, I wanted to set something up for the background with all the calls and the podcast and stuff. And so this just kind of — I had kept a small collection of keepsakes from those days. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) I noticed you didn't use the word influencer. How much do you hate that word?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:00:55) It is what it is. I tend to only think of it negatively when, with my kids, if it comes up. And, you know, they get it. I mean, we all watch videos and follow social media in our own ways and stuff, but they sort of get, you know, the connotations of that word. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) Yeah. Yeah.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:01:20) You know, if anything, I'm just a little bummed that I did the whole YouTube thing before my time because, you know, we weren't — like, who was big back then, man? I don't — with all the stuff that came out about him, I hesitate to say PewDiePie's name, but, you know, he was real big back then, and there were some people who were, like, big, big time. We were big in the tech vertical, but the numbers aren't like they are now. You know? So that's my only, you know, my only sort of twinge I feel, is like, oh man, these folks are making money that, you know, we didn't have — the scale wasn't there to make that kind of money back then. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:02) But you're making money now. You're doing well.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:02:04) My life is fine. I'm not complaining. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about what you're doing now. You're running marketing. You were at NVIDIA. Now you're running marketing. You still do — like, what's the deal?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:02:14) So I've worked freelance, self-employed, most of my life, most of my adult life. So these days, I host NVIDIA's AI Podcast. I do that as a contractor. I'm currently also doing some writing for them as a contractor. I've done that kind of off and on. It's marketing, you know, marketing stuff, comm stuff, that kind of thing. I have a couple of other clients that I do content, mostly writing for, a little bit of video stuff. And then, yeah, I've done it all through my own agency. Technically, you know, it's an LLC agency. It's mostly been an agency of one. I made a run when I first started it — my goal was to get enough work that I needed to hire people to help, and I did that and pretty quickly realized I don't like managing other people's work. Like, collaborating is cool, but, like, being responsible — you know, it's just hiring's hard, so it might not have been the right people also. But, yeah. So it's been kind of a one-man show. And I have started over the past — I mean, over the past year or so, but really in the past, like, month or so, I've started leaning into building little AI apps and kind of AI-powered workflow automations for some clients. So I'm starting with a couple of friends' businesses to kind of keep it keep it low-key, and, you know, the mistakes will be forgiven as I go. But I'm leaning more into that, getting kind of excited about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:49) So one of the things that I like to do when I get to talk with other hosts, especially ones that have been doing it for, you know, seven-plus years, is I want to know some things about you that your audience might not know. So you have people that have been listening to you for seven years. Right? And so what's some of the things that they would know about you, some things that in your personal life or professional life that come up a lot? And we'll start with that. What are some of the things that they would know?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:04:17) So I'll preface this by saying that before the NVIDIA pod, I've been, you know, writing and sort of — I always hesitate to call myself a journalist because I have a lot of reverence for, like —

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:34) Actual journalists.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:04:35) Yeah. Not discrediting any of the work I've done, or the people I've worked with, or anything like that, but just kind of — I've been writing and publishing and then, you know, getting into audio and video for, like, as long as — I mean, I started when I was in high school. I wrote for the school paper, but I also freelanced for a local paper. I was getting $20 an article to write about high school sports. So, but I did — in the, you know, we were talking, I don't know if it was on air or off air, but about the phones behind me. I covered the mobile phone industry during the aughts for most of the decade. I was at a website called PhoneDog for a long time and then did some stuff with a couple other websites after. And the PhoneDog stuff, I did a lot of YouTube, and that's kind of how we actually made our mark was with these YouTube channels. So the point of all that is that there are things that people who followed me back then, you know, sort of know about me that folks who follow the NVIDIA pod now don't, just because that was more sort of intimate and personal in a lot of ways. A lot of unboxing videos and review videos. And so that was just like — there were no production values. It was me with a camera going, and I'm just babbling for fifteen minutes as I play with the phone. And so, you know, I think I spilled the tea about myself a lot more back then. But I think I talk about my family a fair amount, not by name, but kind of more to reference. Like, we just did an interview with the head of AI at Roblox. And so —

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:18) Oh, nice.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:06:19) Yeah. So my younger — that one's not out yet. I don't know when this will go live, but it'll probably come out in June. And my younger son, who's 11, plays a lot of Roblox with his friends. So we talked about him, you know, sort of referenced that the whole time. Right? I have an older son who's in high school who's getting into, you know, Python scripting and robotics and kind of basic machine learning stuff. So I'll reference him a fair amount. Let's see. People — well, people know I did the phone stuff. People know that I earn my living primarily as a writer and developing content, and I'll talk about, you know, using AI tools in my other work. People know I live in Oakland, California. I reference that. Yeah. There's probably more stuff — you know, they don't know about me that's coming to mind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:21) So yeah. What's some stuff that, if you were sitting down with a longtime fan, like, what's some of the inside stuff they might not know?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:07:30) So I'm a drummer. I mentioned that because my drum kit, my little drum space is sort of behind the camera, so I'm seeing it out of the corner of my eye. I've been playing music forever. Music's been a huge part of my life forever. So that's a big thing. A lot of people assume that I work full-time for NVIDIA just because of, you know, the podcast. I don't. I turned down a full-time job with them ten years ago because remote work wasn't a thing back then, and we had just had our second kid. And the commute from Oakland to Santa Clara, where they are, is brutal. When there's no traffic, it's forty minutes, which is, you know, not insignificant. But when there's traffic, it can be two hours. It's just awful. So, you know, had I taken that job and invested at least once, you know, there'd be a good chunk of stock-related money in my bank account that's not there. But, you know, it's all working out. It's fine. But, yeah, I don't work full-time for them. I grew up on the East Coast. Grew up in Upstate New York mainly. Lived in Brooklyn out of college for most of a decade before moving out West. So I've been out here for twenty-odd years now, maybe twenty-one years, but originally an East Coaster.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:51) Oh, nice. I have family in Westchester.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:08:53) Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Just outside the city. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:56) Yep. Yep. It's on the way. And then I did some software projects in my early twenties where I spent several months traveling between Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:09:05) Oh, wow. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:06) Lots of beef on weck on that trip. Yeah. Yeah.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:09:09) So I grew up outside of Schenectady, which is straight north from the city, and then you're hitting areas out into Western New York. But I went to a bunch of — or not a bunch. I went to a handful of concerts at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, went to basketball camp once over there. One of my best friends lives there now. Shout out to Doug. Sorry. Mega Doug, as we call him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:33) Not a dog. Yeah. Yep. Not regular Doug.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:09:35) No. Mega Doug. Mega Doug.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:37) Mega Doug.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:09:37) 100%. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:38) Yeah. I've got something called MegaBed, and it's where I have bolted together, permanently fused, two queen-size beds into one giant bed, and we had a custom headboard for it. So it's like just one. Because what was happening was we have three kids, and so they're all under the age of seven currently, and so they'd all pile in. And I was like, I was like, I need something more.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:09:59) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:59) Right? Right. Right. And we had a pretty big room, so I was like, let me just buy some bolts and, like, drill holes and get, you know, contractor on it. And it's worked. I haven't had to retighten those bolts since two years, which is perfect.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:10:15) I did something like that in college, but it was two single mattresses on the floor with nothing holding anything together. So, you know...

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:23) Little different. Little different. Duct tape holding it together. Yeah. Exactly.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:10:27) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:27) That sounds like college.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:10:29) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:30) Oh, awesome. So you mentioned, you know, a couple times about, like, journalist. I feel when I hear journalist, I think of those people that are reporting on the front lines of war, people that are helping WikiLeaks get the — like, people that are putting their lives on the line to find out about truth. So when I'm looking at myself and I think about journalist or I'm a curious person, so, like, I'm, you know, a little bit of that. I don't like the word influencer, but I've come to terms with it over time because my original connection of influencer was, like, Kim Kardashian hawking lip gloss. And I'm like, that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just curious. And so I'm somewhere in between influencer and journalist and curious person. But is that what you were meaning when you were talking about you don't like to say you're a journalist, but you kind of are?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:11:17) Yeah. I mean, so I came up — you know, I'm 50. Right? So I —

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:23) You're 50? Holy crap.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:11:24) I'm 50. Right? I know. Wow. The shaved head makes me look younger. Yeah. So I came up — you know, I went to college in the nineties, and my senior year of college, people in one corner of the computer lab — most of the computer lab was VAX terminals way back — but in one corner of the computer, people started using this thing called Netscape. Right? So when I got out of college and I moved down to New York and I wanted to pursue writing and I wanted to pursue, you know, again, like, journalism, not journalism. I don't know. But I wanted to write. I went and got freelance gigs where I could get published in print because that was how you got jobs. You had to have a portfolio of clips, and, like, people weren't publishing on the web, you know, anywhere near the extent they are now or even that they were, you know, ten years later. So I always had a similar reverence for, like — I thought of it as newspaper. I mean, the term was newspaper men back then, you know, newspaper people. And, you know, I didn't pursue that avenue. I tried to get — I had an internship in a magazine for, like, a minute, but I was always very driven by — like, I wasn't even driven by it, but it was kind of like this. If I'm working, I either need it to be something really interesting where I feel like it's a step towards another goal — so getting published — or I need to be getting paid and feel like it's worth it. And I had an internship in a magazine where I was not getting paid, and I was basically, like, doing grunt work and running errands. And that was the stepping stone to getting a job in publishing. And I was like, you know what? Like, I don't want a job. I want to write. But, yeah, I mean, I have one of my closest friends who I met back in college is a photojournalist who teaches photojournalism at a university. He's had, you know, he had a picture of — it actually, it's funny because it wasn't front lines, but it was like a USO performance during, I guess it was the Iraq war maybe, on the front page of the New York Times. Right? So that is, like, a different level of reverence to me, as you were saying, you know, than, like — I wasn't going out and chasing stories. I had companies — I mean, I had to, like, build up to this. But once we got established at PhoneDog in particular, or even before that, I wrote freelance for a website called PowerBook Central that covered, like, the Mac ecosystem way back in the day. And sort of once we got established, I had companies who were asking if they could send me products to review. Or in the phone days, you know, asking me to come to their event where they would serve food and drink, hoping that you would write about what they were, you know, what they were hawking. And so, again, like, I don't mean any disrespect to the work I did or the work my peers did at all, but that to me was not quite the same level of, like, you know, of going out, hitting the front lines, or digging around in the streets or whatever it is to unearth the story, different kind of thing. I've had — we had, well, we've had a few people on the NVIDIA pod. One in particular comes to mind who were journalists, you know, tech journalists at big-name outlets who've been doing this forever and have written books about, you know, how AI got started at Google or about, you know, whatever, kind of the backstory of these different companies, Uber, Twitter, all these different companies. Right? And so I think of those folks as, you know, sort of capital-J journalists as well. But, yeah, you know, my thing — I was a blogger. We — so there's the show CES, right, the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas every January. And the first year that I went to it or maybe the sec — I went to it a few times back in the day. And either the first time or the second time I went, they had different badges for press and for bloggers. And press got, like, I don't know, the better lunch, you know, and bloggers were, like, a little bit second tier. So, you know, it is what it is. But I always thought of myself as kind of a blogger, journal-blogger. Like, I wasn't actually a YouTuber in certain ways because there was kind of a community of YouTubers, so that's kind of all they did. And it was its own thing. And YouTube was, like, an extension of the stuff we were doing at the website, and then it sort of grew into — you know, in a lot of ways, it was more important than the website. But, you know, all these sort of sub-communities bubbled up during that time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:35) How do you think about content creation with AI? Like, did you see — sorry to put you on the spot. We need to prep —

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:41) You for this.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:16:41) That's why I'm here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:42) Did you see that video going around of OpenAI's new...

(Noah Kravitz at 00:16:46) The thing from yesterday as we record this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I made sure to check it out last night because I knew I was coming on a podcast, and I was like, alright, if I'm the AI guy, I've got to be ready here. Yeah. So sort of two separate answers, right?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:17:02) The AI and content creation—if you're not using AI in your work, you should start. And you should be responsible about it, and that's a big word that we can talk about or not talk about, whatever. But you should do it responsibly, and you should start almost whatever your line of work is because that's where the puck's going, to use that phrase, right? I spent—so ChatGPT launched in late 2022, and that wasn't the first AI thing by a long shot and not necessarily the first generative AI thing because Midjourney and DALL-E were—you know, people were using those that year.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:17:55) But then ChatGPT came out, and everybody freaked out. And the beginning of 2023, I remember this very distinctly because I was sick. I had a flu or something, and I was in bed and having weird dreams and the whole thing. But I spent a lot of time just learning everything I could about LLMs and chatbot tools and all this stuff, thinking, "Okay, I'm going to build a system that does my writing work for me. And in the morning, I'm going to go down to the basement where my office is, I'm going to punch a couple of buttons, I'm going to put my feet up and sip my coffee, and the work will come out." And, you know, it wasn't like that. It's still not like that. But that was kind of the thing, the moment where I thought, you know, in a lot of ways, this is more interesting.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:18:48) Figuring out how to use these tools to make my writing process more efficient is more interesting to me than the writing that I'm doing. And, you know, that was writing-for-hire work, right? It's not my opinions. That's kind of a different thing.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:19:07) And I pretty quickly got to a point where it was like, okay, these tools can be useful. These AI tools can be useful for getting started. They're useful for certain things in my writing workflow, but they're not cranking out final product or even final first draft products. And so that's still my mentality.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:19:34) And a lot of that responsible thing is, you need to be—at the very least, you need a human being who is expert enough, hopefully, in what they're doing or at least responsible for the final product to be reviewing and editing as necessary before anything ships. But, yeah, I mean, the easier these tools have gotten to use, and I sort of—I like to say that my hands-on coding skills top out at prototyping, right? I've built a lot of prototypes, a lot of MVPs. But, you know, if you're shipping production code, I'm not the guy you want writing it.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:20:16) But now a lot of these tools are, you know, no-code, low-code, so it's very visual. And then the AI prompting is natural language. And so if you know how variables work, if you know how basic programming logic works, if you can read and understand JavaScript even if you can't necessarily write it from scratch, that's kind of where these tools are now, and you can do so much with them. So, yeah, AI and content development is, I think, here to stay at 100%. Now I've forgotten what you're saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:54) How long until you're replaced? How long until you can't tell if this is just my digital twin or if it's actually me conducting this interview?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:21:04) Oh, right. The second part was the OpenAI thing, which gets right to this. I mean, that's a great question. Probably not long, honestly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:14) Two years. That's what I think.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:21:16) Okay. Yeah. I mean, depending on how we're defining digital twin, really don't know, et cetera, I would even say one year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:29) Yeah. I'd buy that.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:21:31) Yeah. I mean, I did a project that wound up on Coursera. It was through a third party, but it's on Coursera. It's a very beginner, high-level overview of Gen AI, using Gen AI in marketing. And they wanted to do an experiment.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:21:56) So I worked with them to develop the course and write it, and then we used—I'm not going to name the tool because I wasn't very impressed with the results—but we used a digital avatar tool. And so it's an avatar of me delivering—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:14) I've seen a lot. There's a lot of those out there.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:22:15) There's a lot of those out there. Yeah. And I didn't think this was very—the final output was a lot of me going, "Welcome to Generative AI in Marketing," because this particular tool, you train it by recording yourself talking for, you know, however long they need, right?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:22:38) And the tool is—or the model is—really well trained on text-to-voice. But at least at the time we used it, and this is only a few months ago, it didn't understand anything about facial expressions. Even its ability to emote in voice was relatively limited. And I'm a—I talk with my hands, and my face goes, and the whole thing. I used to teach way back in the day. I taught K–12, and kids would make fun of me for, you know, doing this all the time, whatever.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:23:12) And so even doing multiple takes and trying to keep myself—you know, because the directions are, "Try to keep your hands still. Don't gesture too much, but don't keep a stone face because that'll be weird." And so for me, the in-between was difficult. But the net result was just super weird to me, right?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:23:32) But even still, that was a very cheap tool that used very little data to train. You know, now—to what you're asking about with the GPT-4 Omni release yesterday—and they're not the only ones, you know, getting into emotion AI. I work with a company called Hume the year before last who—you know, they're one of—there are others, but they've been kind of on this for a while. The whole idea of being able to analyze emotions from audio and video coming in and then be able to use that, you know, going back the other way as well to synthesize. I mean, it's all moving so fast.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:24:21) And last year, everybody sort of agreed it's all moving so fast. This year, I don't know what you've seen. I've seen, you know, backlash, people getting frustrated. Where's GPT-5? And, you know, they said this was going to replace us all already, and it hasn't. What's going on? And it's still moving really fast, maybe a little more behind the scenes, or maybe there's more emphasis now on downstream applications that businesses will actually pay to use and all that kind of stuff. But the foundational research is still moving really quickly. So, yeah, I don't think we're all that far off. What's his name? The LinkedIn guy, Reid Hoffman.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59) Yeah. Did you see that thing?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:25:00) Yeah. I didn't watch it. I watched a very short clip, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:03) If you cut into it and not knowing it was a digital twin situation, you would be very impressed.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:25:11) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:12) But when it's expressed as digital twin, you're so critical of it.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:25:16) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:17) Yeah. So, yeah. And, you know, to your point, the people who I see complain in the comments, they're just complainers. They just, like, complaining people. They'll complain no matter what.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:25:27) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:27) You got a million dollars. "It should have been three." Right? You know? "The taxes I'm going to pay on this are stupid. I don't even want the money." It's like, okay. So I find complainers are complainers. Happy people are happy people. For me, I'm like, don't try to change people. Just surround myself with good people.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:25:45) It's good. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:46) Yeah. But to your point, if you've been in the space for a while and you've watched the progress of technology—story time, I went to show my wife that video of OpenAI's Omni, and she was like, "Okay. Cool." And I was like, "You didn't get the weight of it." And I was like, "So hold on a second."

(Noah Kravitz at 00:26:04) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:06) She's making meatballs and spaghetti. She's like, "I don't care."

(Noah Kravitz at 00:26:08) Meatballs. Go watch it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:12) Yes, sir. Yep. So I said, "All right. Let me try to put this in context." And I quickly Google searched for where it was ten years ago in 2014 as generative AI generating this pixelated thing in Google Image Search. And I was like, "Look, we went from that to that in ten years. And this stuff grows exponentially. And we imagine on a normal progression scale. So it always is going to happen faster than we expect."

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) And so I'm less interested in saying it's not here today or it's not what it's promised or it's not the perfect imaginable version of it today, so we're going to completely stick our head in the sand. And I'm more of a, "What speed is that missile moving and where's the target?"

(Noah Kravitz at 00:26:59) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:59) You know?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:27:00) Yeah. I mean, I think 2023 was kind of a rough year for me work-wise because I work—like I said, you know, I work freelance. I'm self-employed. But I've had a lot of long-term clients, right? And so there was a long-term client I'd been working with that, you know, sort of wound down to a natural—this project, this team got kind of reorged, and I was sort of—I missed the people, but I was ready to move on work-wise in late 2022, I guess, during 2022.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:27:16) And I didn't—and this is part of why I don't, you know, I've never sort of grown into a big agency where I'm managing people because my brain doesn't work that way. So I didn't sort of realize that people were getting laid off in the tech industry, which is where I work, and other places too, but, you know, can't really speak to that so much. But people were getting laid off from full-time gigs in the tech industry. And, you know, the team I was working with for five years is being disbanded and everything.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:28:09) And then contract work, which is what I make a living off of, also tightened up because, you know, they do the layoffs, but then all the other budgets shrink as well. And so 2023 starts, and ChatGPT has been out for, you know, a month or so and all this stuff. And I'm sort of—half of my brain is happily knee-deep in Reddit threads and user forums, dev forums, and stuff, reading about AI agents and agentic frameworks and, you know, BabyAGI and all these sort of open-source experiments where people are doing—looking ahead to sort of kind of where we are now or a little bit ahead of that. And then the other half of my brain is freaking out because I'm going to be replaced, right?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:28:56) And I've eased up on my thoughts about people being replaced in part because my own situation has gotten better. And so, you know, just being a human being, my first thing is always, are me and my family okay? And so in that role, do I have work? Do I have income coming in? Yeah, we're okay now. Okay. Cool. But then also, you know, last year was a lot of—businesses weren't ready yet. They—everybody was talking about AI and sort of generative AI. What can I do, what can I do, et cetera, et cetera?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:29:38) But businesses were sort of trying to figure out, how do we even deal with this? And we're still in sort of hiring-freeze or tight-budget mode and all that. But then, also, there weren't as many downstream applications. So there were these LLMs, ChatGPT, sort of universal assistant for everything. But it wasn't like, you know, Adobe had incorporated Gen AI into their whole product suite that people are used to using. Or, you know, there were some—you know, Jasper and some writing tools that some people knew about, but it wasn't broad, right?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:30:17) And so this year, I've started to see more interest on that end, more kind of business adoption, more sort of, you know, businesses thinking about how do we transform and putting some money into that and some time into that. And then I've also just seen more—I'm getting more inbound pings about, you know, little projects or full-time roles or whatever it is. So it kind of feels more optimistic economy-wise. That being said, things are still moving really quickly.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:30:51) And so I still have sort of latent—I think because my own situation is better, my brain is able to go back to the bigger picture of, what's going to happen when the economy is inevitably transformed by the power of AI and automation and all that stuff? And I don't really know. I mean, if, you know, automate—I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:24) I don't know.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:31:25) Hit me. Tell me. I mean, I think I know where you're going, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:30) All right. So I have actually put a lot of thought into this.

(Intro Narrator at 00:31:33) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:34) Cool. So I freaked out when I saw OpenAI in 22–23—

(Noah Kravitz at 00:31:38) Yeah. Early 23. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) I took two weeks off, and I was just like, I have to wrap—I went through the stages of grief, right? The stages of loss, and I'm like, okay. So what I—the what—my whole take from all of that was for myself was this is what's going to happen. And it's going to start pessimistic, and it's going to end optimistic.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:32:01) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:01) Pessimistically, we're going to completely consolidate and destroy roles and industries overnight faster than we've ever been able to before, because we no longer have the logistic nightmare of, like, actually getting a car to the population while they transfuse horses and cars, right? We can now deliver this—everyone already has a computer and we can still deliver—

(Noah Kravitz at 00:32:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:23) Immediately and consolidate industries overnight. There's going to be a lot of pain there. And as a people, we're going to have to figure out how to bridge that gap, reallocate people to whatever the new thing is, but we're going to have to figure out how to deal with this incredibly quick switch versus a long period that's delayed by just the laws of our nature, physical physics, right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:46) So now on the positive side here is money is simply a medium into which we exchange value with one another. The idea of us exchanging value with one another will never go away. That's timeless. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:04) What that value is changes. So I'm less concerned about there's not going to be any money and there's not going to be any business, and I'm more concerned with where's the puck headed, what is elapsing and at what rate, and where do I need to position myself so that I'm conducting value transfer in such a way that I'm profitable? And so that is—I feel horrible for the people who don't have advanced business skills to handle this, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:38) Or a ten-year lead-up in experience and relationships, because relationships are everything—

(Noah Kravitz at 00:33:43) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:44) To handle it.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:33:45) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:46) So I think as a people, we're going to have to be really diligent—Noah, you, I, and lawmakers and the people that are in this—

(Noah Kravitz at 00:33:52) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) To figure out how to handle that transitionary pain—

(Noah Kravitz at 00:33:56) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:57) Because it's going to happen. But long-term, it's not like the sky is going to fall, and we're going to fall back to the eighteen hundreds.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:34:01) Right. Several years ago, I interviewed a person named Kai-Fu Lee for the NVIDIA pod, and he's actually been on twice. We only had, I think we only had two repeat guests in my tenure anyway. But anyway, Kai-Fu Lee, I may get details wrong, so forgive me, audience. But he used to run Google China, and he since left and started a VC company called, I think it's called Sinovation Ventures, and he has published several books.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:34:44) And so the first time he came on, he was promoting a book called AI Superpowers, and then the second time was a book called AI 20-something. I'm looking to see if it's on the bookshelf down here. There's AI Superpowers. I don't see the other one. It must be upstairs.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:35:00) Anyway, it doesn't matter. So he introduced me to this idea of AI-powered post-scarcity. Right? So kind of like the utopia vision. Right?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:35:14) So advances in AI will eventually lead to discoveries—so novel physics, fusion and fission, you know, whatever it is, like unlimited clean energy, whatever these sort of details are—that will then usher in this era where, like, nobody is wanting for anything, or at least anything vital to survival. And so, you know, I got really enamored of this idea because that's what I would like to see happen, frankly. Right? Like, there are people who really want to go explore the universe, people who want to live forever, you know, that kind of stuff.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:35:58) Right? When I think about all this stuff, you know, my hopes and dreams, sort of as naive and maybe, whatever you want to say, bleeding heart or whatever, are that, like, if this technology can really lead us to breakthroughs so that, like, people don't have to want for things...

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:24) Mm-hmm.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:36:24) That's, you know, sign me up for that camp. You know? And then time went on, and I started thinking about, like, well, isn't there already enough food on Earth to feed everybody? It's just a matter of it, like, not getting to the right people at the right time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:42) And the governments withholding it from their people.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:36:44) All those things about, like, it kind of comes back to, like, people. Right? It's not the tech. It's not the natural resources. It's the way people are managing them.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:36:55) And so, like, I think I'm leaning towards what you described, and it's something that, you know, hosting the podcast, I don't actually spend all that much time thinking about my own opinions on these things, if that makes any sense, because I'm mostly, like, you know, I'll host a pod, and then at the dinner table, I'm telling my family about this amazing work that the guest is doing. But, yeah, I mean, I think I tend to believe—you know, tend to agree with what you said about industries being, like, you know, it's that thing where, like, it happens slowly and then all at once. And it's kind of that thing. Even if, you know, folks are complaining it's not happening fast enough, like, it is that thing, and we are headed towards this massive transformation at a faster pace than we've ever seen.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:37:56) I'll stop there because I'd just be repeating what you said. I don't know. I don't know how much faith I have—I want to be optimistic—I don't know how much faith I have in governing structures and the way resources are allocated to really benefit, you know, everybody.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:38:16) But then again, I think it still holds true that if you look at the actual statistics about, you know, human quality of life writ large, humanity is better off now than it's ever been. Right? So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:32) Well, let's play with incentive alignment. Okay. Because you mentioned a couple things, and I have not thought a ton about this before, so I'm more, like, stream of consciousness.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:38:40) And this is great. As we record this, this is prep. I'm going to this dinner tonight that's, like, a—it's actually this very structured thematic thing about AI safety, which, you know, is another one of those weird, nebulous words that has a specific meaning to certain people. But so this is good prep for me to sound smart tonight.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:01) Or stupid.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:39:04) You know what? If I feel smart, I'm good. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:08) So we talked a little bit about, like, the short term of consolidation. And then now let's look forward. And I am—we could talk about two things. We'll talk about incentive alignment as a very important thing on the super long term, and then we could talk about that, like, in relationship to utopia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:31) So I tend to be financially conservative. I tend—yeah. I was raised with high discipline, entrepreneur, so I'm, like, a little crazy too. Right? And so I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to these different issues that are grazing the political landscape.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:48) I like to say I'm not a part of either party. I like to take each individual issue and just discuss those on its own merits. Right? Because that's easier. So I don't like the idea of giving everything to everybody. Right? You just give handouts to everybody, you can get lazy and things like that. But I also like the idea of ushering in the abundance that we're receiving from a collective species and spreading that out and distributing it. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:14) So I was thinking about—I was hearing a college student talk about, like, this utopia and how they—a very communistic-style situation. And I was like, that doesn't work to the end that you have a demand on someone else's time to provide the product, service, or life and increase in livability. However, if we can transition that to a robot and the robot is created by another robot—

(Noah Kravitz at 00:40:44) Is it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:44) And that chain is there, and it's just essentially all IP that kicked off that chain. Right. But if we can get the labor to be done by the robot and the labor of making the robots to be done by the robot, at that point, I think that that model has a much better chance of survival because now if you're the doctor, Noah, I'm not demanding—

(Noah Kravitz at 00:41:05) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:05) Through enforcement from state police that you serve me. You know what I'm saying? You shouldn't have to work. So when we can switch that demand from the humans to the technology, I think that utopia will start to be more realized. I actually look at all of humanity as, like, these two sides that are ultimately coming together to this conclusion. Everybody's saying the same thing, but using different words. Right? We're all arguing. We're all on the same road trip with the same destination. We're all just arguing on how we get there. Right? So, now to the point of, it's like this utopia and the governing structures. Now you made a brief aside about, well, even if all this abundance did exist and these robots could do all of this and we could, you know, have this utopia, would the powers that be allow it?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:41:47) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:47) Right? And I thought that was a very discerning point. I thought that was very good. That was very, very good because you can have amazing technology that's constricted. So then the question becomes incentive alignment.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:41:58) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:58) And the incentive of them to oppress is to control. So for the people that are just pure control freaks, you probably have a problem. Right. But for the people who are control freaks, to what end? For the people that are control freaks to the end of making sure that they've got great products, services, and goods, and that they have a great oasis around them, and they have a wonderful experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:21) I think we've got that side of things solved. So then we'll just have to deal with the megalomaniacs that are people who want to control people for the pure sake of controlling people. And if we can just eliminate all those, I think we're good to go. So I'm going to start the riots and the rallies. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:42:39) And I'll do my lowercase-j journalist thing, reporting on them from afar, from safety, because I'm older now. I don't have the strength to physically fight.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:51) We will—yes. Yes.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:42:52) No. No. If push came to shove, but that's another story. Yeah. You know, so there's been a bunch of talk, a lot of it coming from OpenAI in the past couple years about universal basic income. Right? And they conducted a study, or they're conducting a study now or something, and this whole idea of, like, you know, AGI is going to transform things so much, so quickly, that we're, like, we're going to need a safety net, and UBI can be a safety net. Right? And then recently, and maybe even at the event yesterday, I think—I think Sam, but I don't know, whoever—it was somebody from OpenAI was talking about, and this isn't the first time, talking about, like, well, maybe it's not universal basic income. Maybe it's universal basic compute.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:43:44) And so everybody gets a slice of, you know, GPT-7 or whatever it is at that point. Right? So, like, every citizen of the U.S. or the world, you know, is given a slice of compute. And so there are a lot of comments, you know, like, "Bro, you can't eat compute. You can't sleep in compute." Right? But what does that necessarily mean going forward? And it comes back to kind of what you said about money being this somewhat arbitrary way to express and collect and trade value. And so it doesn't have to be money. Maybe it's something else going forward.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:44:23) So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that—I've always liked to complain about politics I don't agree with, but I've never really studied, you know, politics and economics and how all this stuff works, so I don't want to get out too far over my skis. But, you know, haves and have-nots—I was born, I was dealt a really good hand when I was born, and my parents, you know, I lucked out. And so I've always been on the have side of haves and have-nots if you want to look at things that way. I've never been, like, you know, "I don't have to work anymore" kind of have. Right?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:45:10) But, you know, I've had a good, comfortable life. But the idea, to me, I've always just been bothered that there are people who don't have enough. And so, you know, to me, it's like, well, that should be priority number one if we get to a point of post-scarcity. But I also am old enough to get that it's not—it's not even that it's not that easy, not that simple. It's more—I mean, I guess it's not that simple because there are so many stakeholders who, that's not, you know, their value system, kind of thing.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:45:45) So, yeah, I mean, I don't have a good answer, and I don't necessarily disagree with, you know, the sort of partial vision that you just laid out or lots of other people have laid out necessarily. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know. If we get to a point where the robots can make the robots and those robots can do the dirty work, so to speak. Right? And we've got some of that already. We've had it for years. We have autonomous vehicles, drones doing, you know, safety inspections on high-risk construction sites or, you know, bomb-diffusing robots or, you know, whatever it is. We've already gotten to a little bit of that. But if it, you know, if somebody ever masters the laundry-folding robot, right, like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:34) Elon.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:46:37) Whoever it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:38) Elon. Have you seen it? Have you seen it? I have not. You haven't seen his laundry folding?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:46:43) I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:43) No. Oh, the clip is fantastic.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:46:45) Is it really? All right. I'm going to look at what we're talking. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:48) It's one of my favorite clips. Yeah. He—it's his, you know, bipedal robot folding laundry. I showed it to my wife last night. I was like, "Look, honey. It's coming." I was like, "I'll buy you one the moment one's here."

(Noah Kravitz at 00:46:59) Exactly. Right? All right. Tesla Optimus bot folds the laundry. Let's go. It's folding.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:10) But thanks, Josh. Yeah. But it's getting there. Yeah. And, again, you don't have to—I was looking at autonomous lawnmowers the other day. They are a little bit slower—

(Noah Kravitz at 00:47:21) Is it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:22) But they can just run for, like, two or three hours.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:47:24) What—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:24) Who do you care? Like, why do you care? You're not—you're off doing other things anyways.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:47:29) Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:30) By the way, just curious, not to sidetrack. Yeah. But if you—I actually went down this rabbit hole, so I grew up with that, like, have-not. And then I worked really, really hard and did all that stuff. And then I got really curious as to, like, why, if more people—if 80% of millionaires are people who were have-nots who became that—why isn't there more of an effort to help the people who are in poverty out of poverty? And so I was thinking about that, and then I started listening in to some other people who were writing about the subject. A lot of motivational speakers who, like, made, like, tens of millions of dollars, and then they came from nothing. And then they started talking about that exact topic, and it turns out that most of the people who are, like, in poverty don't actually really want to get out of poverty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:19) Now I'm not saying—and first of all, there's different levels of poverty. Okay. There's entirely—there's levels where you live in the bushes. Right. And, like, in a—out in the wild, basically, like, not in modern civilization. Then there's different layers inside of modern civilization. There's different reasons for it. There's addiction, there's all different types of stuff. Sure. But that was my first thought, was, like, if all of these motivational speakers I listened to made their way out of poverty, why aren't they helping their communities? Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:48) And then one of them, specifically Les Brown, it was, like, one of my favorites. He gave this, like, great, like, hour-long dissertation on why. And he, like, went back to his community where he was from when he was growing up, and he tried to, like, you know, do all this, but they just—the stories they tell themselves inside of that place actually keeps them there more than anything.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:49:10) Right. Interesting. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:11) Because that's not—you're in your spot in life right now because of the story you tell yourself. You tell yourself, "I'm really creative, and I don't like managing people, so I'm not going to have a multi-person," so you don't have a multi-person agency.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:49:20) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:21) Right. If you just, like, woke up tomorrow and you're like, "Actually, I'm really good at managing people. I have a multi-person agency, and it makes $10 million a year." If you say that to yourself long enough, you're going to likely make that—

(Noah Kravitz at 00:49:25) I have—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:25) Come true.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:49:31) Right. Right. Right. Interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:32) Yeah. Yeah. It's weird how that works. Right? Yeah. Have you ever caught yourself doing stuff like that?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:49:39) I'm sure I have. I mean, yeah. You know, my approach to work—I mean, my approach to life, like what you said, you know, has been governed by certain stories, right, certain narratives, whatever. At least it was governed by that for long enough that even if I don't think about them consciously these days, you know, that outlook on, like, the managing thing. When I was at Phonedog, when I started, like, the website already existed. They existed largely to resell wireless service at the time. Right? And then they started posting phone reviews because there was interest. And so I originally responded to an ad looking for freelance phone reviewers. And then it just sort of took.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:50:32) And so we built out this editorial arm, and I eventually had the title of Editor in Chief, and we had five or six people as regular contributors. It was a little bit of a cush situation for me because the understanding was I would be sort of the de facto person guiding the editorial team. But when it came to the hard stuff, like how much can we afford to pay you, et cetera, I wasn't on the hook for that stuff. So it was a good situation, right?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:51:10) But I enjoyed working with people. And it's not that I don't enjoy that. It's just I've always had this thing about, like, I don't like managing other people. Right? So to your point, if there was a shift, there was an opportunity that was too good to pass up, and part of it was I had to manage some people. Yeah, I could figure it out, and there would be stuff about it I didn't like, but there'd be lots of stuff about it that I do like because that stuff I've already been doing just without that manager title or some of those responsibilities. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:45) And then also, you have to factor in how you want to spend your time.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:51:48) Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:49) Like, what's your age?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:51:50) Well, that's always been a long—since day one, I approached work initially out of college as like a game. And for me, winning the game was having more free time than people who work full-time jobs. That was my mindset.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:08) And you got that.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:52:09) Right. And I got that. And there's been things I've missed out on along the way, stock options, whatever. But it is what it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:17) Dude, you wouldn't trade thirty years of nine to five for some stock options. Are you kidding?

(Noah Kravitz at 00:52:22) No. I, when I was at—so NVIDIA had their first GTC, is their big annual conference, and they had it in person for the first time since COVID. It's been like four, maybe, that were virtual only. And so I went down. We did a bunch of podcast tapings in person, which was fun, and I got to see some friends who I've known. Because, you know, way back in the day, I was doing the freelance writing work and stuff. So I was working with other people in person sometimes, whatever. So there's people I've known for a while. And one of them was teasing me. She's like, "Man, if you would just stuck..." I was like, "The job wouldn't have lasted. The commute would have killed me, and I've never held full time. It's just kind of how I'm wired." And she was like, "Yeah. All you had to do was just vest once. If you'd just gone one year, the stock's grown up so much since then." And I was like, "Yeah. But it's worked out for me in other ways, and I'm fine. And sure, I'd love to have that money in the bank. But to your point, Joel, it wouldn't have worked. I would have been complaining about the commute and sad that I was missing out on stuff."

(Noah Kravitz at 00:53:29) Your kids, my kids were doing because they were really young at the time. All that stuff. So it is what it is, and who knows? Maybe this next phase of my career, you know...

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:39) You're not going to regret it on your death bed.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:53:42) You're not going to regret it. Nobody ever says "I wish I'd worked more" is what they say. I'm sure there are some people, but I'm not worried.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:48) There are. But look, if you have enough money to meet your needs and do what you need to do with your family, those moments—because I'm in it right now. I know your kids are a little bit older than mine.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:54:00) But you've got, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:01) Yep. But I'm experiencing it right now. It's like we made the decision, my wife and I, for her to stop working so that we could homeschool the kids. So right now, I have the main house is over there, and then I have 1,100 square foot recording studio. And I have like a one-minute walk between work and home. So I go over for lunch, come over, record some stuff, go back over, see the kids. They're in their different classes and doing their different things.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:54:25) Oh, that's amazing. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:26) I'll take them outside for some rec time. Right? And so I was like, "Look. For the, what? For the 80K a year she was making, I was like, yeah, we have less money." We have less money, but look at what we get. Look at what our kids get. So it's just better.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:54:41) I heard somebody, and I wish I could remember his name or even just the name of the company, but I don't. So shout out to anonymous founder. I heard somebody, I think it was a video I watched, not in person, give a talk. And at least part of it was about the phrase "lifestyle business" and it being a dirty word in, you know, sort of startup circles—probably tech-related because that's the bubble I've been in, but whatever. And he was talking about how he's so glad he runs a lifestyle business because he has the time and bandwidth for other things also, right? And the line that stuck with me was he's like, "The way I look at it, if I can afford to buy somebody lunch and not worry about the financial hit, I'm good." Right? And that's kind of—I've been in spots where I spent $20 on something and freaked out about it for days because—and again, dealt a really good hand. Always have known I have safety nets, like, to go to family or, you know, I'm older now, and there are other safety nets. But just the way my anxiety goes, money is something that I've always worried about and always will to some extent. Right? And I've had long moments in my life where I'm like, "I'm really hungry, but I shouldn't buy a slice of pizza because, you know, it's that worry that this is going to be the $10 that tips everything the wrong way." So, you know, everybody's got their thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:20) But I do that too, but with 10 and $50,000 purchases. So it doesn't go away. The number just changes. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:28) Right. Right. Yeah. Oh, should I do that? Should I make that investment? Should I make that move? Yeah.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:56:33) It's like, I don't know. Yep. Yep. No. Totally. Totally. But yeah, for the longest time—and so I technically live in the city, but I'm in a neighborhood where it's, you know, stand-alone houses with some of them are quite small yards, and I live on a hill. So our backyard sort of slopes dramatically. And then beyond the fence, there's a sort of small canyon. I mean, it's beautiful. I love it. But just point being, it's not like a lot of land, but people have their little things, right? And so you're talking about your setup with your recording studio. For the longest time, I fantasized about somehow building a concrete platform in the back that was level, and then getting one of those prefab office shed buildings put in. And that would be my office, and it would be soundproofed enough that I could have my drums back there and everything. And now what I have is—well, wait. I don't have any back neighbors, and the side neighbors are far enough away that I can just have my drums in the basement, and I work from home, and I can just go play in between work things. And you know what? There it is. I've dreamt about that for twenty years, and, you know...

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:47) Now it's there.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:57:48) Now it's there, and it's amazing. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:50) Yeah. It's these little things. To your point, I tell my wife, I'm like, "It's so easy to want more and to get trapped in that more loop." So I tell her, like, my measures for success are us being able to take the family to the grocery store and not have to worry about what we're getting or not buy the expensive brand. Or to go to the gas station and to not think about it and just, you know...

(Noah Kravitz at 00:58:13) And so, you know, if AI can usher in the age of unlimited groceries, there you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:19) Well, dude, we did it. Noah, this was fantastic.

(Noah Kravitz at 00:58:23) Yeah. This was super fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:24) I think we just became best friends. 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 would 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.