What Will Usher in the Next Renaissance with Zack Kass, Author & Former OpenAI GTM Lead

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Zach Kass, author and former OpenAI go-to-market lead, about his latest book titled The Next Renaissance, AI and the Expansion of Human Potential. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) Alright. So you have a book. It launched January 13th this year. Tell me about this. It's The Next Renaissance. Why'd you write this book?

(Zach Kass at 00:00:29) I think first, we spoke about it last time, right? Did we tease it last time? Yeah, we did. Alright. So what I said last time, if I recall, is I wrote the book because I wanted to make sense of my own ideas. My principal interest was to write down what I believed and then actually figure out how I could defend those ideas. Like, that was the whole idea. And in the process, found out that I didn't believe some things, and I really believed others. And when you prepare to publish something, you know, spoken words are ephemeral, written words are permanent, and you really don't want to defend terrible ideas in the court of public opinion for your whole life. So I sort of became really clear in what I believed and what I didn't, but I still didn't know for whom I wrote the book other than myself. And then something happened. My daughter was born in October. And by the time the book published in January, it was very clear to me that I wrote the book for parents. And in particular, I wrote the book for parents who are trying to figure out how to talk to their children about their future without fear in their voice, of which there are many.

(Zach Kass at 00:01:34) And I only recently, both as a father and as a spokesperson for an industry that has really struggled to explain itself to the average person, and as someone that has spent a lot of time in boardrooms with companies trying to make sense of this, I now realize that every single person who is building an AI strategy, who wears a fiduciary hat when they talk about AI—how do I make more money for my business? How do I improve profit margins?—is also wearing a hat that is sort of taking up more and more real estate on their head, which is a hat as a parent or an uncle or a grandparent or someone responsible for someone else. And it is really inescapable right now, this sense of ownership and responsibility that people have for the next generation, which I think is great. I think the moment merits that. A lot of people are like, yeah, I figured out I can make more money. I'm also trying to figure out what my kid is going to do or what world they're going to live in. And that is for whom the book was written. And that is ultimately why I wrote the book: to provide a sense of reasonable optimism and to marry these ideas that you can be both a good business person and an empathetic, rational human. And that actually you sort of have to be both those things, especially as a leader trying to inspire people to believe in a better world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:54) What was one of the ideas that you had when you went into writing the book that you were like, this is weak, this isn't going to hold up, and you ended up removing it?

(Zach Kass at 00:04:05) There were, well, there were a few that we removed. I don't know that I went into the book with—that's a super good question. I don't know that I went into the book with weak ideas, but I definitely—I think a lot of the ideas we removed actually, I had super high conviction in and then was like, oh, that's not going to help. One of the things I had really high conviction in is that we should write—so, you know, we wrote these three sections about healthcare, financial services, and education, about the sort of short medium-term futures of these industries. And I had planned to write about manufacturing and the physical world and robotics. And was like, that's super important to explain to people how the physical world is going to change and how industry is going to change. And I realized that one of the chapters in the book, this idea of societal thresholds, totally contradicted that chapter, which is that I think the physical world is the least likely to be really disrupted in the short medium-term, because it will require so much policy update and infrastructure update that is just not likely to happen quickly. And one of the bets that I've since made is that I think it's quite likely that we see a cure for cancer before we see roads full of autonomous vehicles, or roads full of autonomously driven vehicles. Right? Meaning that plenty of vehicles will be autonomous capable, but not actually driverless. And so that was one of these ideas that I realized that there are a lot of infrastructure and policy changes that are going to be required that aren't going to happen, but you don't need a lot of policy and infrastructure to cure diseases. You need really well-funded bio and life sciences companies, which—and those are showing up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:06) Also, the manufacturing's easier. So, like, if I just got the green light from God today to fill every car on the road with autonomous vehicles, the amount of time it takes to cycle through that and the consumers to—what is it? The average life of a car is like twenty years, right? And so even if we have it all today, it's still—but if you have a cure for cancer, that's what? A couple weeks to mass produce it once it's figured out?

(Zach Kass at 00:06:35) Well, right. Presumably, the Marshall Plan if someone discovered a cure for cancer—I mean, this is where, you know, conspiracy theorists are going to show up. But people are—you know, I just want to take a moment. People are just like, ah, they already have a cure for cancer. They just don't want to have it. My retort—I have a couple retorts to this. I'm like, first of all, when you meet people in healthcare, you discover that people get into healthcare, almost all healthcare positions except for one that will remain unnamed but can be understood—most people go into healthcare because they really want to help people. Certainly care providers, but also even actually hospital administrators. Bureaucrats don't actually want the system to suck. There are just too many of them and they become bloated. Right? That's the problem with hospital administration, but most hospital administrators actually want to help people. And certainly people that go into bio and life sciences, people that do drug discoveries, people that spend their life toiling in a lab really want to find that discovery. Like, they're—you know, that is glory as much as it is money, and not much inspires a human quite like glory. Very little, actually, but the fear of death, maybe. You know? You can—two times you run faster than you could possibly imagine running: once when you're running from a lion and the other when you're running for a gold medal at the Olympics, but not much else could inspire. A million dollars is not going to inspire you to run quite like those things.

(Zach Kass at 00:08:19) The other reason that I—the other my other retort to people who are like, oh, they have a cure for cancer, and they've, of course, figured this out, is that the amount of coordination required to lock up the cure for cancer is quite remarkable. Like, it's just—there's a hero among us who would figure out how to leak this. And the third is there would be so much money in a cure for cancer. The reason we don't have these things is actually because all of the other things in healthcare that bio life sciences companies can work on are worth a ton. The next Viagra is worth so much money. The next improvement on Botox, the next GLP-1. And so the smartest people continue to glom on to these, like, you know, short-term iterations, and the cost to these moonshots—the cost of curing cancer has always historically been so enormous and basically uncapped. I mean, it was, you know, people would try to estimate it at like hundreds of billions of dollars of cost to scientists and labs and molecules. People are like, well, what's the point? I mean, we would have to raise many, many, many years of funding just to try to do it. And even then we'd probably fall short. But if you can collapse that time cycle, to your point, then yeah, it suddenly becomes imminently doable. And I think a lot of companies are going to start raising money just to moonshot this thing because the cost is going to come down. And then to your point, if we actually discover a cure—and again, multiple cancers can be cured without all cancer being cured—the Marshall Plan to actually produce vaccines or treatments could roll these things out in weeks, whereas updating physical infrastructure to accommodate autonomous vehicles in inner cities is just—it's going to take decades. Pedestrian traffic alone is going to make this nearly impossible in places like New York City where everyone just jaywalks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:56) Do you think, back to your comment on the physical world not likely to happen quickly, what do you think about the bipedal robots that are rolling out? That's our physical world. That's going to impact fairly. That's like five years, right?

(Zach Kass at 00:10:12) I agree. Although, what do I believe about this? So I think that we are—I think we are underestimating the importance of these things in manufacturing facilities, and I think we are grossly overestimating the importance and interest of these things in homes. Here's why. The cost initially is going to be quite high. I mean, you know, Tesla's going to charge $75,000 for their thing. And I mean, that'll come down. That'll come down to, let's say, $10,000. Maybe, you know, really aggressively less, but probably $10,000. A house cleaner—you know, I have a house cleaner. We pay a house cleaner $250 or $300 every Thursday. She does an exceptional job and we trust her a ton and we like her a lot. And that is not something I am clamoring to replace. Moreover, the math actually doesn't work out that great even at $10,000. And then people are like, well, this would be every day and it would clean a bunch of stuff. And I'm like, yeah, but then you start to really have to consider the utility of a thing that is watching you. And I'm like the first time one of these things walks in on a couple having sex, they're going to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Now we've invited an actual thing into the privacy of our home. And it's no longer an Amazon Echo that could be listening. Now it's like a thing that's watching and can do other things. I just don't think the utility is going to outweigh the cost on a financial or privacy and security basis anytime soon. I think the cost of these things is going to have to come way down. I think the utility is going to have to go way up before the average person is like, I want one of these things in my home. And then, of course, it's like, well, wealthy people might buy them, but why would a wealthy person buy them? They have staff. And then at $75,000, that's the cost of a staff member for a year. So what's it going to do? So I just think on a consumer basis, I don't get it. I still don't get it. I haven't gotten it for a while. I think the rejection of Amazon Echo and the other in-home listening devices—obviously, the utility there was super low, but I think even then people felt like it was creepy. And, you know, we roughly know that these things are going to be spying on us. Like, why? What are you trading for? That's my take.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:55) I'm pro. Like, if one existed right now for $10,000 or some $300 a month payment, I would get it. As long as it could do laundry and dishes—laundry and dishes. Like, if it could do those two things, I would gladly pay. We've had housekeepers and things. The problem is the turnover. So you're very lucky to have found someone long term that you trust, but our turnover—I mean, it's just, it's so messy dealing with the humans. And so if there was just this—and, obviously, there's going to be some mess with the robot. It's not going to work. It's not going to dock properly. Something might get clogged. There will be issues there too, so I'm not imagining that it's perfect. However, if the option existed for me today to pick up a $300 a month payment, because, you know, the moment they release them for $50,000 or $70,000—like, people are going to buy them up and finance them out, you know. The service providers will do it themselves. Like, the existing incumbent cleaning services will start buying them and renting them out. And so if I could get $300 a month for every single night when I go to bed, my laundry is completely folded and done, and my dishes are done, that's $300 a month worth of value to me. And I think so many people would pay for that.

(Zach Kass at 00:14:12) You're probably right. How many—you have three kids?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:15) Yeah. But the biggest amount of stress in our house is usually between my wife and the laundry and the dishes.

(Zach Kass at 00:14:23) Because she has to clean up. I clean up for myself. I don't think I appreciate that enough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:29) Like, I clean up for myself. I help as much as possible, but for her, she's taking care of, you know, the three—

(Zach Kass at 00:14:35) Three kids wins? I mean, I guess Figure seems like it has a pretty meaningful lead here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:44) Well, Figure is mostly rolling out into, like, BMW.

(Zach Kass at 00:14:48) But if you can do complex things in a factory, presumably, you can build a dumber one to do less complex things at home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) To answer your question directly, the person who's going to win is going to be the person that understands all the things that you don't like. They're going to make it a physical size that I could overpower it, like the average male could overpower. They're going to make it have hardwired security things in it where you can turn off the vision or you can figure out how to, with technology, bound it from, you know, entering certain places, or—I think whoever understands the consumer the best and why the largest group of people don't like it and can innovate and overcome through features, they're going to win. Just give the people what they want. You know?

(Zach Kass at 00:15:33) Yeah. I mean, when the utility outweighs the cost, and the cost in this case is money and privacy, obviously, it's going to happen. I just think it's going to proliferate way, way slower than people expect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:53) What do you think people expect? Give me some ideas. What do you think people imagine for time wise?

(Zach Kass at 00:15:57) My technologist—so, yes. This is another thing. Okay. This is something I discovered writing the book. So you and I sit here on our, you know—what's the opposite of an ivory tower? The reason I like your and my positions, and I sort of lump us together, is we have a pretty cool vantage that I think represents—we can see the future from a technology standpoint. We can see the future of technology, but from the standpoint of a non-technology elitist. That's sort of how I describe my position. I spend all my time in the real world with mid-market companies, small mid-market, and large and small enterprise, helping them figure out what AI means for them. And none of these people are talking about robots in their homes. And when we talk about robots in their homes, they go, that sounds insane. Now my friends in tech talk about robots in people's homes. And some of those people are like, as soon as the battery life is acceptable, it'll proliferate. And I'm like, man, I don't think so. There's not a policy gap. You don't need—you're not going to need to pass new policy. The batteries, you know, the batteries can get better. The cost definitely will come down. I just, I think people are going to take a while to be convinced of this. You know what I think is going to happen? I was thinking about this. People are going to go to the home of a friend and see this thing, and they're not going to see the dishes get done. They're going to see this thing, like, sort of putz around. Someone's going to be like, do you want to see it? Watch.

(Zach Cass at 00:17:46) It's gonna come do the laundry. And for a while, that friend is gonna be a weirdo. That's my take. And I think that's gonna happen for multiple years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:57) Yeah. I mean, most likely, it will. And then at one point, the person will look over and see a messy dish sink. They'll be listening to the Modern CTO podcast, and they'll hear about the new robot for $2.99 a month. And they'll be like, you know what? Screw it. I'm not doing it. I'm gonna call them. I'm not doing that. I'm calling them.

(Zach Cass at 00:18:16) I agree. Now let's go back and ask, why did the iRobot—why did those vacuums fail?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:24) So the, you know, iRobot as a business failed. They just went under, like, a couple months ago.

(Zach Cass at 00:18:27) But yeah. And it's topical. But why did those vacuums fail? Why did the autonomous vacuums fail?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:34) I mean, I have a Roborock, and it's the greatest device I've purchased in the past five years.

(Zach Cass at 00:18:41) Well, now we're talking about a separate issue, which is that you, as a technologist, are sort of enamored with some of this technology that the market clearly is not. But most homes do not have an autonomous vacuum, and the autonomous vacuum companies have not fared well. So my question is, why not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) So the reason why I got—I just got it eight months ago. And the only reason I got it is because it was, like, $1,200 or something. And that's a lot of money for a vacuum. And I was talking to one of my non-technology friends, and he told me, he's like, you've gotta try this. He's like, I know it sounds crazy, but you've gotta try this. And I said, alright, fine. So I bought it on Amazon so I could return it if it's—because I was like, there's no way these things are good. You've seen all the videos online. I had completely dismissed them. And then about, you know, eight months ago, I got one. And we have a dog, and the primary function is to clean up the dog hair. And so it's been the coolest thing. I walked in on my wife in the kitchen, and she was staring at the wall, and I was like, what are you doing? She's like, normally, I'm vacuuming right now. I don't really know what to do. But it's not perfect.

(Zach Cass at 00:19:49) But what you're describing is actually my point, which is that there's utility, and people don't see it. It's not glaring enough. If it were so obvious to everyone that this vacuum was gonna save their marriage or improve the quality of their life—no, no. I mean, but obviously, your relationship can withstand the death of a vacuum. But I just continue to talk to my friends in technology and try to remind them that most of these things are gonna happen. The reason that OpenAI—the reason that ChatGPT and Claude have proliferated so quickly is not that the technology is amazing. I keep reminding people of this. It's that it's so cheap. You cannot overestimate people's willingness to try things when they are free, and you cannot overestimate someone's willingness to not do something when there's friction—when there's financial friction, especially when that thing is obviously the right thing to do. And this is, you know, why does everyone on earth not—why does everyone who can afford it not see a really good primary care physician? Why does everyone not use Function Health or Prenuvo? Why does everyone not go, you know, get a gym membership that's really cheap? All these things have obvious utility, and a vacuum in this case—the way you describe it—sounds amazing, and yet most homes don't have autonomous vacuums. And the reason for this, I think, is that we still observe robots in the house with a degree of weirdness and scrutiny that I think is gonna ratchet up as soon as that thing has eyes and hands and looks like it's walking near your kid, and you're like, uh, I'm willing to do the dishes. Or, like, let's switch to bamboo cutlery and plates.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:49) I don't disagree. There's gonna be pockets of people that respond in all sorts of different cultures. It's going to be different. It's gonna be amazing. But from a timeline perspective, do you think that we're gonna see these robots roll out in, like, five years, ten years? When do you think we're gonna see them in the houses?

(Zach Cass at 00:22:11) This is why—just to go back to where we started this—this is why we removed it. I think physical AI is a ten to fifteen year timeline.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:25) Before it's, like, it's implemented in a way that's massively impacted the majority of people, not just the early adopters.

(Zach Cass at 00:22:31) Yeah. Yes. Yes. I think we should expect that this is just gonna take—you know, one of the principles of the book that I try to write about is that great technology is invisible or often becomes invisible. And so many people are fixated on the AI apps and products right now, and I'm like, this stuff is moving to the background. All of you are training your employees on a bunch of infrastructure that you're actually gonna start embedding in their workflows before you know it. And upskilling the workforce is valuable, but what you actually wanna do is be building AI as plumbing. And the most interesting ways in which we are going to improve the lives of people at home, I think, is going to happen through infrastructure that they don't have to actively see or engage with. And I think some of this is gonna come in the form of—I don't know. It's even hard to make predictions here. I would just say I think it's ten to fifteen years. I think, yeah, I think it's ten to fifteen years before we see physical AI improving the majority of people's lives in some very obvious, tangible way. Now, indirectly, there's gonna be a bunch of stuff that happens. I mean, we're already all beneficiaries of AI in invisible ways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:05) Absolutely. So I'm watching the time here. We've got about six minutes left. I wanted to make sure we talk about Korza. You're spending every day helping mid-market companies, enterprise companies. You're in the weeds, in the thick of it, helping them adopt AI, and you're launching Korza. Tell me about that.

(Zach Cass at 00:24:22) Former chief AI officer at Bain, Roy Singh and I worked on the Bain OpenAI partnership, and then we stared at this thing and we were like, man, there's a thing to be built here, which is the next generation technology services business for mid-market companies. And so that's what we're doing. And we're serving the market that has traditionally been sold a bunch of software and then paid a ton to train people on the software and paid massive subscription fees and training fees. And instead now we're trying to build—we're helping every company become a technology company, so that they don't train their next competitor. And acknowledging that, you know, most law firms have now realized that they're paying Harvey a subscription so that Harvey can eventually probably build a law firm or a Legora or whomever. And so we are building—if you rebuilt Bain or Accenture or Bain and Accenture tomorrow, how would you do it? And that's our goal. Another way we build ourselves is Palantir for the mid-market. And we're particularly interested in mid-market companies, some of which are private equity owned, but many of which are actually family business owned. And so where everyone is talking about private equity, which makes up about 28 to 35 of the market depending on the breaks in any given category, there's actually a big swath of companies in those categories that are owned by families that are not privately—that are privately owned not by institutional money, but by a trust and by, you know, a multi-generation group, and we wanna help those people. And I have—my particular charter at this point is to protect competition in the market and legacy, help businesses that have been around for a hundred years be around for another hundred more. Because there's a weird outcome in all this, which is that there's an economically optimal outcome, and there's a culturally optimal outcome, and they are not actually perfectly correlated. There are—you know, many people's favorite clothing company is a family business because clothing companies that build great clothing are not actually economically optimal machines. Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana don't optimize their bottom line. They optimize the quality of their clothing, which has these other knock-on consequences, and they become these incredible luxury businesses. And that's true for many of the family businesses that we love, which is why we need to protect these things from a consolidation event or an existential crisis. And that's what Korza aims to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:06) I love it. That's a good mission. Where can people go to find out more?

(Zach Cass at 00:27:09) Korza.com. We're hiring business consulting. If you are brilliant in a given category and you like working with executives to transform their companies, please apply. And we are hiring engineers. We are hiring engineers in São Paulo, Bangalore, London, and in a couple offices in the US.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:35) Excellent. Zach, we did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Zach Cass at 00:27:40) It's always great to hang out with you. Your—the both the tone and softness of your voice is quite soothing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) Oh, thank you for the kind words. I appreciate it, man. 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.