← Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Brendan McCord on Going Big with AI: Autonomy, Truth, and the Future of Humanity
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- [00:01]
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Brendan McHord
Pets, we are bombarded with questions on social media of the moment. You know, like things that are. That seem really, really important or urgent. And here's what I would say. For 2,500 years, humans have asked questions of themselves, big and small. And there is a small set of questions that has consistently risen to the top. In other words, primary questions about what it means to be human, what it means to live a flourishing human life. And so if you dedicate your life and your work to one of those questions, you can guarantee two things. One, that you're going to be going big. You're going to be thinking about a big question, and two, you will never solve it. And you have to be okay with that, right? Because, like, these are perennial questions. They're primary for a reason. We will never really know what it means to be human, what it means to live a good, a flourishing human life. But, man, if there's something you want to dedicate yourself to, I think it's one of those types of problems.
- [01:37]
Kevin Gentry
Welcome to the Going Big Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Gentry, and this is the place where we celebrate bold moves and big ideas. Each week, I sit down with inspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, and change makers who are making a significant impact in their careers and in their communities. Whether you're looking to level up your leadership, pursue your passion, or just get inspired to take your next big leap, this is where those stories come to light. Now, if you're listening on iTunes, YouTube, or anywhere else you tune into podcasts, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you'll never miss an episode. Now let's dive in to what it means to truly go big. You know. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. You're in for a fascinating discussion today. My guest is someone who is a technologist, a highly successful entrepreneur and a philosopher. And as you're going to quickly see, this is all pretty amazing. Brendan McHord is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School and then served in the United States Navy more than 610 days submerged emerged in a submarine, where he's credited with helping to develop the Pentagon strategy for artificial intelligence. It's pretty amazing. And after his service, he started two AI related companies which he ultimately sold both of them for a combined more than $400 million. And then pivoted into the area of philosophy, where he grounded a lot of his own personal think into the ideas around the future of artificial intelligence. And he developed and started a nonprofit organization called the Cosmos Institute, which is designed to help take a look at artificial intelligence and its role with respect to human autonomy, truth seeking and decentralization. And I think you're going to see that he has a pretty strong view about what artificial intelligence role is for the future. Well, I should say what philosophy's role is with respect to AI into the future. But Brendan, it's such a pleasure to have you today and just to kick us off because you're extremely well positioned to be able to answer this question. Artificial intelligence, how big is it with respect to our future? Is it getting bigger by the year, by the month, by the day, by the minute? Give us a sense of how you see the consequential nature of it.
- [04:24]
Brendan McHord
Thanks, Kevin. Yeah, great to be here. So three ways that you can think about how big artificial intelligence is now and is likely to be in the future. One is you think about what is the size of the infrastructure built, and it really is one of the largest in history. You heard the announcement from President Trump about Stargate, this massive data center. You add it all up and you're talking about easily, easily north of a trillion dollars in AI compute by the end of this decade. And that's building a kind of fabric of intelligence for humanity. So it's something that I think is the scale of, but may eclipse the printing, the industrial, the digital revolutions. Second thing is that you've got a race for control among governments and governing bodies. They are trying to apply a vision, often a top down vision of different orientations. From China implementing a kind of automated social control vision, EU trying to constrain development based on human rights concerns. Different visions clashing. The third, and I think most important for us at Cosmos, is that AI is a kind of invisible mediator of human life. People don't, you know, it's shocking to them when they hear this, but AI mediates about 20% of waking life on the planet for humans and that is going to go up and not down. So it's becoming a kind of, you could call it an operating system for civilization, you could call it a hidden structure of human thought. For those reasons, this is the most consequential thing that we think we could be working on right now.
- [06:10]
Kevin Gentry
Wow. Well, that's a. That's a pretty powerful foundation to lay for this conversation. And I think, you know, so many of us are just trying to grasp all this. So that helps me, I think, ask this question and it goes into the going big context and it goes to you personally. Let's, let's get to know you a little bit better. How did you go on all these divergent paths from, you know, pretty serious higher education to military service, United States Navy, artificial intelligence, philosophy. And how does it all kind of come together together? Or does it tell us a little bit more about your own journey?
- [06:46]
Brendan McHord
Yeah, the submarine to philosophy pipeline. Yeah. So I've always admired people who were not one thing. My heroes are the kind of like Forrest Gump type characters or maybe the people that. Where you look at their career and you say this is basically a sustained protest against the possibility of living one life. And the scientist E.O. wilson nails it when he says that specialization is for ants. He studied ants, actually, so he knows a thing or two about that. But I admire experts, don't get me wrong. But I think range and consilience, trying to bring stuff together is crucial as well. I actually think that it's really important part of what it means to live a flourishing human life. I think, you know, to discover and develop our gifts, we've gotta be in varied situations. We have to be exerting ourselves, trying things out, learning what is our harmonious whole. You mentioned like kind of getting to know me. So I think the bit of insight I'll share there is that my mom and dad are opposites in many respects and they modeled this for me. My mom is very conservative historian, Roman Catholic, military family. My dad, on the other hand, very left leaning, pacifist, physicist turned environmental lawyer. And so they showed me how you could kind of debate on topics through reason. For example, they also threw me into things like art and poetry one week and then, you know, math competitions the next. And so I learned to, you know, develop myself in these varied ways. And partly that's like a personal quirk, you know, partly that's like just how I was raised. But I do think society depends more and more on those unlikely integrations. Steve Jobs has this great quote that technology is not enough. It's technology married with liberal arts married with humanities that yields the results that make our hearts sting. And I think he's right about that. It makes for the really transcendent product experiences. In my own work at Cosmos, the way I think about that is that if you Separate the people who are thinking about philosophy, the people who are thinking about humanities from the builders. You're going to have your thinking done by a kind of detached philosopher and you're going to have the building done by a short sighted or non humanistic way of looking at it. So for me, going big means embrace the mashup. That's how we build a future that's worthy of our highest aspirations.
- [09:39]
Kevin Gentry
Well, link to that and thank you. Do you believe that you've always thought big? Whether it was maybe your parents upbringing or how they had you sort of thinking about the world and your future, or just how you approach different stages of your life. Have you sought to do things in a big way? You've gone big, or did you just kind of go big as a consequence? If you wouldn't mind comment on that.
- [10:04]
Brendan McHord
Yeah, I think that, I mean from very, very early age I was raised to think about public purpose or raised to think about like, how do you help other people? And I wasn't taught that in terms of like, these are the things you do, you know, you do philanthropy. I wasn't taught any of that. It was more like a virtue culture where we, you know, my, my mom in particular tried to raise us to think about like service to others. And so this like found expression for me in the military. It's also why my brother joined the military, why my sister joined the military. Two of us were submariners, one was a medical doctor in the battle of Mosul when we finally defeated isis. So we all served. But it was only later that I thought about, after selling companies, what I really could do to change the world. It was only later. And that was like, yeah, I had my kids, I had my second of two kids. I sat there, if anyone's ever sold a company before or had kids, you know that both of these things or one independently put you into a like, reflective posture. And so for me, that was what did it. That was what began this journey into philosophy and into cosmos.
- [11:24]
Kevin Gentry
Nice. Well, I want to dig into that a bit too. That's obviously, I think, very interesting to all of us who are part of this conversation and listening to this. But let's take it a little bit back to these divergent paths that you've taken in education, military technology, entrepreneur, now as a nonprofit leader. The sort of philosophy elements. What, where does artificial intelligence, when did that sort of start? Or how did it get to the point where you, where that just became such a very important part of things.
- [11:59]
Brendan McHord
Yeah, so my very first job was doing underwater acoustics at the Naval Research Laboratory. And I was 16. I loved math. I was modeling how sound bounces around underwater. I went to MIT and I kept working on that underwater, you know, sound propagation stuff. I then joined the military, became a submarine officer, spent 610 days underwater.
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Kevin Gentry
And by the way, Bren, I got to interrupt you that what is it like to spend 610 days? And I'm sure that question has been asked before, but that's a little mind boggling. What, what does that mean to spend 610 days underwater? That's its own thing, I guess.
- [12:34]
Brendan McHord
So what it means is if you add up all the time when you're submerged below the waterline, that's 6, 10. The longest from when I saw the sun to when I saw the sun was more like 66 days. I say more like. I know precisely because you don't, you know, you have time to count, you know, these things on submarine. And so that's what it means. And some of it's underwater, some of it is also under ice. And so you're really in very unique parts of the world, parts of the world that maybe no one has ever been before. And you're on a submarine with, on the order of 150 men, in my case, doing missions away from email, weeks removed from your last shower. It's a very surreal world and existence. But I loved it. I would do it again. And it's a key part of the, of the story for me.
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Kevin Gentry
Fascinating. Well, that's probably where they have its own story, but I'm sorry to interrupt you. Okay, so, so, so there you've gone to that part of your, your life's journey. Keep going.
- [13:37]
Brendan McHord
Yeah. And so then fast forward, get off a submarine and it's 2012. And a lot of people think about the AI moment as happening with ChatGPT. I think that's right. But there have been moments prior when people really took notice because AI had done. Some breakthrough had happened. And in 2012, AI was beating humans at something called ImageNet. So AI was starting to be able to look at images and make sense of what objects are present in those images. That was astounding to people that it could do that better than humans. I got off the submarine, I jumped into that world, I took a class with Andrew Ng. Many people have gotten into AI in that way, an online class. And I joined a startup working on AI systems. And the rest is kind of history. But the way my career then played out was I kind of went with where the most important thing I could be Doing was I heard the Secretary of Defense talk about how us needed to get serious about AI. I sat in the back of the crowd, I thought, and I don't know everything there is to know, but I'm working on it at a startup. I'm a submariner. Maybe I could help here. And so I jumped in. And then fast forward, I'm writing the first strategy for the department, putting together the first applied AI efforts for the department, managing a Google project that became very, maybe I'll say notorious, but Project Maven, where thousands of people protested, said, look, big tech should not work with the government. And so I felt like I was at, you know, had a front row seat on history at that moment. And, you know, Brendan, if I could.
- [15:33]
Kevin Gentry
I'll cut on there because you're a very modest guy, a humble guy. I know you. But what does it mean to develop the strategy for the military's use of artificial intelligence, which is, if you can. Can you give us some perspective? What does that mean?
- [15:48]
Brendan McHord
Yeah, well, so we. There had been many AI projects within the department, over 600. And most of them were not really going anywhere. They were kind of, I don't want to say hobby projects, because they were serious projects, but they weren't scaling and getting out to war fighters. Then along came a project called Maven that delivered AI systems into operational use. And the task before us was, how do we take something that's working and how do we scale it? And I thought about that and, you know, through the work that I had been doing with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on North Korea stuff, the work that I have been doing with Project Maven and in Afghanistan, I was asked to put that together by the Deputy Secretary. And it became. It was a document that's part of our national defense strategy, a classified document, but it lays out how we move forward to scale AI systems. And it also brought me into contact with a lot of great builders in the private sector. I mean, I won't name names, but I went to the very best, thinking, look, I may not know how to do this, but so and so surely does. And if I were to mention the names, you would agree. And so I went around and they were very helpful in thinking about how this had worked at the places it had worked in industry.
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Kevin Gentry
All right, so keep going. You. You do this and then. And then at some point you're done and you move into the. The entrepreneurial side.
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Brendan McHord
Yeah, I got out and I said, look, a lot of people get out of the Department of Defense and they try to monetize their involvement in the Department of Defense. I said, I'm not going to do that. I don't want to do anything that has to do with the Department of Defense. And I want to prove that I can start a company because I had never done that and have it succeed. And so the next few years, that was kind of what I spent my time doing. And my private sector involvement at that time broke down into a combination of starting two companies, both insurance focused companies, but very, very AI centric, and then also leading the AI efforts in a holding company that tried to buy businesses in sleepy sectors and apply AI to them so they would grow. This is a model that I think now is becoming more and more popular as people see the promise. We were very early in this. This is like 2018, 2019. You buy a company that sells scrubs that does things that are not the sexiest, although they can be made. So. And you apply artificial intelligence and you try to make those companies grow. That was the thesis. Very exciting stuff. But so I did that. And after selling these two businesses, then that was when I really kind of like took a breath and started to think about what do I do with the rest of my career? What do I model for these little humans that my wife and I have just brought into the world? What do I even believe in? And that was really shocking to me that I couldn't really write down. If you're listening to this, it's actually very hard. You just take out a piece of paper. Can you write down 10 things you believe in? And if you can, great. If you can't, that's okay too. But can you then sort of reason through, like, why is it that you believe those things? And that was what sparked the search for me.
- [19:25]
Kevin Gentry
All right, so you're, you're still a young guy and you decide that a nonprofit is the best way to kind of pull all these things together. Which is, which is awesome. But what is the problem you're working to solve through this nonprofit, exactly? I mean, I, you know, described your issues, your sort of mission, but help us understand what you saw based on your values, your. Your principles that needed to be done and could be done through a nonprofit.
- [19:53]
Brendan McHord
Yeah. So as this story unfolded, Right. I'm realizing, you know, here are a set of ideas that are really, really important for helping people flourish as individuals. And I'm keeping these in the back of my mind alongside the importance of the, of the, of the technology. Okay. And that's an important backdrop here. But here's what I saw that actually sparked action. I saw that the field of AI, this field that I'd been part of, but had never really looked at through a philosophic lens when I did, and I saw the ideas that animated it, I didn't like what I saw. What I saw was that you have two extremes that dominate the field. On the one side, you have the doomsayers. They have drawn billions to their cause. They are the intellectual incumbent and their prophecy is that AI will destroy us all. There is literally a book coming out. I'm not advertising this book, but it's called if anyone builds it, Everyone Dies. And the solution is to hit the pause button. It's to centralize control. It's to radically remake society on the basis of risk avoidance. And it is to do that even if it means forfeiting progress, forfeiting the upside and inviting tyranny. So that's one school of thought, and that is, as I said, the intellectual incumbent. Meaning in the practitioner community that is still, that is a dominant strand. On the other side you have the accelerationists. These are optimistic, market oriented types, things that I agree with at that level. But they are also those who in many cases would unleash AI as an end in itself. Meaning we think about technology as a means by which humans can flourish. But if you think about technology instead as the whole ball game, as technology is the end as human, humans being the instruments of an optimization process, of an exponential, transcendent kind of growth curve, that's a problem. These accelerations often would reduce humanity to a kind of variable in a thermodynamic equation or a link in an evolutionary chain, and not think about the dignity that has been expressed through lives lived and lost for generations. The irony of it, and I think it's more serious than ironic, but the irony of it is that both of those sides have grand imaginings. Both of those sides, I think, are the kind of Silicon Valley heir to the Christian end times theology, to the kind of eschatology. But they think about far flung scenarios, yet they only offer a diminished vision of the human life. So when you think about what it means to be human and what we're doing this for, on the one side it's we gotta avoid pain, we gotta avoid death. That's it. On the other side, there's no idea of a human good. It is abandoned. So I saw that both of these schools in the most important technology of our time are missing the moment. The choice we must make as builders cannot be stop everything or continue without thinking. We need a Genuinely positive, humanistic vision for the future of AI that's what we set out to usher in with Cosmos.
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Kevin Gentry
Fascinating. Well, you clearly have chosen a hole in the marketplace and love the way you've defined this. So going back to your philosophy, you mentioned human flourishing. Could you help define what you mean by that term, human flourishing? And why is that so important? How does that connect exactly your definition to what you're doing with respect to artificial intelligence?
- [24:01]
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- [24:31]
Brendan McHord
Yeah. So, you know, I think about human flourishing as a way in which we discover and develop our own gifts. I think about it as a way that we then use those gifts to live the life that we want to live. I personally draw a lot of inspiration from two thinkers on the subject of human flourishing or of the highest end of mankind. One is Aristotle, whose ideas of eudaimonia, activity that is in accordance with full virtue and this pursuit of excellence according to our natures, that's a big part of it. The other side is Wilhelm von Humboldt, 18th, 19th century German philosopher, who takes that and then makes it more kind of individualistic, more multifaceted, allows for more human types. I know that's a little bit kind of, you know, dense, but I just say that because, you know, having, having spent time trying to think about it, those are my kind of inspirations. And I want, you know, listeners to have a way to go back and, you know, look through that. But again, discovering, developing our own gifts. I think there's also a subtlety here which is like your vision for human flourishing, Kevin, is probably, you know, similar in some respects and very different in others from mine. And a huge part of this is what is your vision of the good life? Well, you know, that's not for me to decide. That is for you to decide to think about. And whatever vision of the good life you want to pursue seems to require a few things. It seems to require. I'll just give you an example. You need to be able to think about this, to deliberate on this, and to try to line up your actions according to that. In other words, you need some ability to self direct. Right. If I'M writing your script and you're just following it, then you are not able to pursue this kind of, this big important question. And so we can disagree wildly on what the definition is, but we need what I would call human autonomy, this self direction. And that ties into kind of a starting point for how we think about this colliding with AI. It's like the question is, do AI systems enlarge your range of self directed action or do they substitute for your decision making? Do they act as a kind of autocomplete for life? I would argue that if they do, and if they atrophy your ability to think about your own direction, your own path, that's a problem. That's a problem. The other two things I can talk a little bit about, I definitely want to talk about truth seeking because we just launched something very exciting with that. But truth seeking is a big part of what we're focused on. We think that in order to seek truth, we've got to have a clash of ideas. We've got to have contact with a lot of ideas. We think John Stuart Mill was right in this respect. We also have to ask good questions. And that goes back to Socrates. And so here again, do AI systems expose you to lots of different views? Do they surface counter arguments? Do they provoke or are they kind of sycophantic? Are they kind of in the business of flattery, in the business of nudging and setting some defaults that kind of dull your questioning habit? This is a very important question. Lastly, decentralization. So we know that freedom is something that thrives when you have local self governing groups, when you have systems that prevent or resist centralization. We also know that no central planner is going to be able to match the ability for a distributed system to act on and share knowledge. You know, like it's an impossible problem for a central planner to run the economy with any, with any, with any efficiency, let's say. And so similarly, we want AI systems to be decentralized by default. We want to have other possibilities of architecture than just one singleton superintelligence. And there are some real concrete efforts we're working on to try to make that the case. So those three things, Kevin, I would say, are the big philosophical leverage points.
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Kevin Gentry
Wow. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I told you this was going to be fascinating. And thank you for bringing that to life. Now understand much better why you said the Cosmos Institute is about human autonomy, truth seeking and decentralization. On this podcast, the Going Big podcast I recently had, first former United States Senator Phil Graham and then Professor Don Boudreau from George Mason University, both talking a lot about economic freedom and free exchange, free trade. They both just recently co wrote a book that came out about this and they talk about that. There's no way that central planners can do better than a marketplace of people and a marketplace of ideas. So fascinating stuff. So you mentioned Socrates and Aristotle, you mentioned John Stuart Mill, you mentioned Humboldt. Just for those of us who are trying to grasp all this and are really intrigued by what you're saying, who have been some other influences on you, your, your, your personal philosophy, your beliefs that might help us really come to grasp of how we can really identify and develop our gifts and lead that meaningful life.
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Brendan McHord
Yeah, great question. So the, the two that I haven't mentioned here or that I've, I've, that have profoundly shaped my thinking, in addition to Mill, Socrates, Humboldt, Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, who your listeners will know as the French aristocrat who came to the shores of America in 1830, wrote Democracy in America, the best book on democracy, I think, ever written, which is extraordinary.
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Kevin Gentry
Particularly when you consider when it happened and how it happened. But yes, keep going.
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Brendan McHord
I mean, the whole world was experimenting with this. You had the revolution in France, you had the American Revolution, you had this experiment. Now kind of, we're checking back on it in 1830, right, because we're now a few years in, how's it going? And people in France are starting to kind of doubt, should we go back to the old, the ancient regime, the old way? Anyway, Tocqueville doesn't write about technology in that book. He spends 10 pages of a massive book talking about technology. He calls it the poetry of self reflection for democratic man. I won't go into that. It's a really weird way to talk about technology. I kind of love it. But why Tocqueville is relevant here is because he writes about trends that have merged with technology. In particular, he writes about how we in democracies have a tendency to offload, maybe our judgment to the majority, offload it to the state, offload it to an impersonal force. We no longer have favored men who sit above us in a hierarchy as we did in an aristocracy. And we're looking for sort of like, you know, this, this sort of guidance or to offload our thought. We do it that way, but when we do, we erode our capacity to think and choose and we take away the burden of thinking and the pain of living. Tocqueville's worried about this because he Thinks it turns us into sheep. He doesn't call. He doesn't say that. Actually, he says a flock of timid, industrious animals. So maybe he does, but. But a sheep is more of a modern way to describe it on. On X. But this is so important, I think, when we think about technology, because, you know, the possibility of soft despotism is real. The other thinker is Hayek. I am surprised that Friedrich Hayek. Friedrich Hayek. I'm surprised that he isn't bigger because his writing on the AI moment, again, not saying AI, but just on how he thinks about the use of knowledge in society, is incredibly relevant. He also is influenced heavily by philosophy of mind. He writes at the beginning of his career, in his 20s, about it, to start off his career, and then he writes it at the end in sensory order. And in both cases, he is writing about how the mind works and channeling his insights about the mind into political economy. So if I could wave a magic wand, I would bring a deep reading of Hayek back. Not a kind of what they published in. I think the New Yorker did one or two. There are these like kind of bastardizations of, of Hayek. But a deep, deep read of his system of ideas I think would be incredibly, incredibly important for the tech community.
- [33:53]
Kevin Gentry
Wow. All right, so I've got a couple of little sort of off questions and then I want to round this up and bring it to your sort of sense of going big and what advice you would share with others. But first, you know, a lot of folks who are involved in the nonprofit world obviously have to. You can't save the world if you can't pay the rent. They have to engage in fundraising from supporters of what they're doing. Any thoughts about the application of artificial intelligence to getting the message out, reaching new people? Do you utilize that or do you have any sort of thoughts to share for those who might be listening from that perspective?
- [34:34]
Brendan McHord
Yes, great question. So I'll answer it on a few different levels. So one is that I think philanthropists tend to invest in individual reforms like education and healthcare and strengthening communities. And to be clear, those are huge, huge areas. But I would say to them, AI is a kind of leverage point that can transform our ability to solve problems, all of those, or make progress in all of those areas. So this question of, like, how do we shape AI is an. Is a cross cutting one for philanthropy. And I think there's not a broad recognition of that yet. We can talk, we can. It's easy to see that it's true. You know, shaping AI will influence education, shaping AI will influence healthcare, et cetera, et cetera, influence criminal justice. So this is an important kind of insight. The second insight is something I'm working on, which is, let's say you have somebody whose focus is historically on free speech. Well, in the case of Cosmos, we think about that as being the lifeblood of truth seeking, just as John Stuart Mill did. So there's a mapping of people who, like you ask them and they're like, I'm not an AI person. You know, I don't, I don't work in AI, but I do care about free expression. Well, great. The work that we're doing in truth seeking is where you should find a home. And in reality, the new battleground for free speech is artificial intelligence. Same with education. You know, our work on human autonomy, on how we self direct, how we think about these big questions that define, like, what the good life is. That's education, you know. And so I'm trying to kind of do a mapping. The last piece is more kind of like tactical, as you started to say, which is how do you actually use it? And I think we've been. I use it extensively. I use a combination of ChatGPT03. This will date the interview, Kevin, because somebody will watch it and they'll be like, oh, they'll laugh. And we're talking about 03. We're on 07. But I use O3 and I use Gemini 2.5. I use it extensively. I'm constantly kind of vetting my communications. I'm thinking about how to make things pithier and punchier. I'm looking at design and saying, look, what about. This is not intuitive? I'm constantly, for every communication, thinking through thumbnail generation, all that stuff, doing it. And this would require a pretty big team to do it. In the past, we have a really small team and we're able to do a ton. And the reason we're able to do so much is because I think we're all. We insist on going to AI to get creative about just the sort of back office of running a nonprofit.
- [37:30]
Kevin Gentry
That's fascinating. I use it often to organize and prioritize my own thoughts. And I'm always astonished about how AI does it so much better than I could ever physically or mentally accomplish it, but it's my thoughts. But it does a much better job of it and streamlines. Streamlines it and give it. It's amazing. It's just one, one example. All right, a different but related question, a moonshot question. If you had $100 million to direct towards something related to artificial intelligence. Perhaps what you're doing with Cosmos. What would it be that you think? And maybe 100 million is not enough, but whatever it would be, that would be sort of civilization changing in line with your mission and objectives.
- [38:16]
Brendan McHord
Yeah.
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Kevin Gentry
So easy question.
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Brendan McHord
Yeah. So I was asked this question once. And I'll just. This will be a small.
- [38:23]
Kevin Gentry
You were asked this question once.
- [38:25]
Brendan McHord
I was so interesting. It's an interesting story. So I was asked this question by one of the most legendary investors of our time. And I wish I could say his name and could probably figure out who it is, but it was in early 2019 and he had a line to the most senior senators on both sides of the aisle and the president. And he said, look, we need to spend $100 billion on AI. 100 billion, 100 billion. And he said, how would you do this, Brendan? And I had just written the AI strategy for the department. And so I was meeting with him at his office and he said, look, think about that and get back to me. And I spent the next few weeks thinking about that question. I, as I've always done in my career, called the smartest people I know to try to help me because I don't know the answer. And I put together a plan. That plan became the first version of the Chips and Science Act. Now, I don't know if that was the right thing to do. In fact, I learned subsequently that there is a real danger of trying to do the moonshot, trying to impose a top down vision. And the danger is very philosophically rooted. You do not have the information required to steer a complex system like that. Innovation requires variance. Top down tends to kill variance. It also creates points of failure and monoculture. It kind of hardens the present, whereas the task is really to kind of birth the future. And then that doesn't even get into the moral hazard and the capture, which definitely follow the money. And so I'm not suggesting, I'm not saying anything in particular about Chips and Science act rent seeking, but these are, these is fraught with peril. And so now what I think about is, okay, I think about the biggest points of leverage being one, adolescent education. How do we use AI to get mass education? It is going to be better. Already is at the information presentation aspects of education. Can we add on entrepreneurship and life experience? Can we add on curiosity and philosophic habits, these kinds of things? We need to think very holistically about the system of education for young people. It's going to Be the golden age for that if we get it right. The other thing is, of course, what we're doing at Cosmos, which is we want to develop a new kind of technologist. And the way I've thought about capital allocation is on the one hand, to advance ideas about human flourishing. Nonprofits are a great way to do that. You do not price those goods and sell them into an individual. You advocate for a kind of moral vision. That's where philanthropy, I think, works so well.
- [41:26]
Kevin Gentry
Well said.
- [41:27]
Brendan McHord
And then we also know that when you have systems that promote truth seeking or promote autonomy, how do you scale those? Well, in that case, private markets are pretty important. And so I want to put some to work on helping to scale these companies of the future and backing the best. I call them philosopher builders. And so I think that I think a lot about capital allocation. I think about, you know, there's a university piece of that we created an AI lab at Oxford that I think is doing some incredibly groundbreaking work on truth seeking and reason that is actually really perfectly suited for university. So I would, I would advocate stepping back and saying, how do we use the pieces of, you know, the current institutions, but do it in a very, very decentralized way to avoid the kind of, I won't say sclerosis, but the hardening, the hardening of top down approach.
- [42:26]
Kevin Gentry
Yeah, that's pretty cool. Okay, thank you. So, speaking of really smart people, I was just with a mutual friend of ours, Tyler Cowan, and I told him I was going to be doing this conversation with you, and I asked him for a suggested question. And so he asked, how do you speak to the demoralizing effect of AI as we begin to think that we're not as smart as we thought we were, or that AI is smarter than us even maybe related to my earlier question about how AI is better at organizing my thoughts than I am. Do any comment on that? Tyler is amazing, of course. By the way, Tyler just named to the time magazine Philanthropy 100 the most influential people in the world in the area of philanthropy. A phenomenal guy, but that's his question for you, Brendan.
- [43:20]
Brendan McHord
Yeah, I think Tyler is, he's a board member. He's wonderful to have on the board. He's just this incredible interstitial figure, I guess, where it's like normative political economy. And then he's in Silicon Valley working and talking with opening Anthropic and the best of them. So Tyler's a great example of the kind of world crisscrossing that we need to have more of. I would Say, you know, it's an interesting question. So demoralization, I think, about what? Why does that affect human flourishing? And one way to explain it is there's an idea in ancient Greek called eros, which is, you know, the root of erotic. But I don't mean it that way. I mean it as like the desire to know. The desire to know and be curious. If you are demoralized, then maybe you lose some of that critical eros that pushes you towards figuring stuff out, wanting to learn about what the good life is. You sort of lose motivation, and I think maybe I'll tie it to that, in which case it is a difficulty. I don't think that eros needs to be extrinsically reinforced. Or maybe I don't agree with what I just said, but I think one can have it within. Even in a world of things that are smarter than me, I can be curious to know. I mean, think about your kids. I think right now I'm smarter than my 5 year old and my 3 year old. They're pretty sharp, but they're still pretty damn curious. They're not demoralized because Daddy knows more. I'm not demoralized because when we talk to ChatGPT, it knows more than both of us. What I worry about is the autocomplete for life effect. I worry about. I do not want people to be. To go from active agents to passive subjects. I do not want us to depend on algorithms to tell us what to think and what to do. And the temptation is going to be stronger than ever because as you said, Kevin, it organizes your thoughts better than you do. So as a thought experiment, like a thing that can decide better on different measurements of how we would define better, do you just listen to it? Do you just become kind of an organ? Stop. And I would say the answer must be emphatically no. We must.
- [45:42]
Kevin Gentry
Right? No. That's a great way to look at it. In fact, I want to give it more thoughts. Right. I should be motivated to respond accordingly to keep getting stronger and better.
- [45:52]
Brendan McHord
Yeah, but this is a big choice for us as people, and we have to choose while we remember what it means to choose.
- [45:59]
Kevin Gentry
Right.
- [46:00]
Brendan McHord
The last thing I'll say on this is like, you know, the downside case. Demoralization, autocomplete for life. I think the other thing I think a lot about is we. We believe that AI can be something that raises human potential, that it can be something that helps us see truth. And it is with this vision that we launched the partnership with fire. Your listeners will Know foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Incredible organization. The best in the business when it comes to defending free expression. And they have historically focused on like a lot of the legal safeguards for that, but are very aware and really at the forefront of thinking. Like, look, free speech issues are going to converge with the future of technology. And so we put a million dollars to work, we put our money where our mouth is on this issue to try to say, look, builders now have the future of free thought and expression in their hands. We need open source solutions that are experimented with. We need them urgently. We announced this at a Free Press event last week. So it's very hot off the press, off the Free Press, but we're very excited about this. The possibility that AI could become a kind of shadow sensor where the hidden rule kind of throttles the dissent or the liability, fear chills the speech that is so important to get ahead of. So I just encourage you if you're thinking about these issues. We are putting out some thought pieces and we're putting dollars behind it.
- [47:48]
Kevin Gentry
Oh, that's great. Well, fire is amazing and Greg Lukianov has done such a good job. Now you've given me a great idea. I need to have him on the Going Big podcast as well. Well, Brendan, I like to conclude with two questions, the first of which is thinking of a younger version of yourself. What you know now, what would you tell that younger version of yourself to do any thing differently? Now, I know you're still young, so your window is a little tighter, but what advice would you give that younger version of yourself?
- [48:20]
Brendan McHord
Okay, I'm going to answer this. The first thing that came to mind. So my wife became a mental health counselor at the same moment that I studied philosophy. We were both in tech. We both had hard pivots, great pivots.
- [48:33]
Kevin Gentry
How did you all meet? Where did you meet?
- [48:35]
Brendan McHord
We met at Harvard Business School. We were classmates and so we were in business and tech and stuff. But this was her passion. It is her passion. And so. And so this comes from that work where there is something called internal family systems. And I won't get into what that means, but suffice it to say you, you learn upon reflection that some of the things that made you great, some of the things that, like drove your work ethic are very, very well developed. And for me, it was this idea that smart is as smart does. It's a phrase my mom always used to use. But it was a kind of guilt driven thing where it was like I knew that every Saturday morning, if my butt wasn't in the seat, you know, working, I was, like, out of place. It was not the right, you know, I needed to be working. And the leisure thing, good for your.
- [49:23]
Kevin Gentry
Parents, good for your mom.
- [49:24]
Brendan McHord
Yeah, no, it was great. But the leisure thing, I learned the importance of leisure. And anyone who knows me will be like, no, Brandon, you didn't learn that. But like, contemplating, thinking, it's like, that's really key. And to get it, you have to develop a muscle. So I started reading three, four hours a day. And that would have freaked me out before because I was like, what am I doing? I'm wasting my time. I gotta be building. And so you have to, I think, be self aware enough to realize the parts of you that have been starved and the parts of you that are extremely, maybe overactive. That's what I would tell myself, the younger version.
- [49:58]
Kevin Gentry
Wow, that's great advice. Thank you, thank you for sharing that. I wonder if it's too late in my life to change in that way. Well, thank you. That's. That's very good. All right, so, so, so going big. I mean, artificial intelligence, what you've done, you've gone big in so many respects. But for those who are listening, you know, the whole theme and idea of this podcast is to inspire people to cast a big, bold vision. And just as you've done a couple times, it's what attracts people to do big things. It's the moonshot to some degree. And again, not to be prescript, to be top down, but what advice would you give to our listeners about how they might think about going big?
- [50:37]
Brendan McHord
We are bombarded with questions on social media of the moment, like things that seem really, really important or urgent. And here's what I would say. For 2,500 years, humans have asked questions of themselves, big and small. And there is a small set of questions that has consistently risen to the top. In other words, primary questions about what it means to be human, what it means to live a flourishing human life. And so if you dedicate your life and your work to one of those questions, you can guarantee two things. One, that you're going to be going big, you're going to be thinking about a big question, and two, you will never solve it. And you have to be okay with that, right? Because, like, these are perennial questions. They're primary for a reason. We will never really know what it means to be human, what it means to live a good, flourishing human life. But, man, if there's something you want to dedicate yourself to, I think it's one of those types of problems.
- [51:44]
Kevin Gentry
Wow. What a great way to conclude this conversation. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you've been inspired too. Brendan, if people want to find out a little bit more about Cosmos, just, just Google. I mean, what, what's, what's any advice you'd, you'd have for those who've been intrigued by this conversation today, to find out more.
- [52:00]
Brendan McHord
Yeah. So two things. One is go to our website, www.c cosmos-institute.org and then the other thing is sign up for our substack. We put out a combination of thought pieces on like, you know, what are the roots of why is decentralization even important? We talk about it so much. Why should we care to programmatic stuff like, hey, we're doing something with Aspen Institute or we're doing something at a pop up city in San Francisco next week like those kinds of things and you can get involved and there's a lot of ways to get involved. So sign up. Those are the best avenues to kind of get involved with Cosmos.
- [52:42]
Kevin Gentry
Wow. Well, really applaud what you're doing and it's great to have you here today and I can't wait to have you back in the future with your new, new thing. I'm sure there will be something even further or just one, what you're able to achieve with what you're doing at Cosmos. Brendan McCord, it's been a pleasure having you today.
- [52:58]
Brendan McHord
Likewise. Thanks Kevin.
- [52:59]
Kevin Gentry
Thanks for tuning in to the Going Big Podcast. I hope today's conversation left you feeling energized and ready to tackle your biggest goals. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps spread the word and it gets these inspiring stories out to more people. You can also find more content, resources and updates at our website, Going Big podcast dot com. Remember, the only limits are the ones you don't challenge, the limits that you impose on yourself. Keep pushing, keep growing, and above all, keep going big. See you next time on the Going Big Podcast.