Why Artificial Intelligence Is More “Big Bang Theory” Than Big Bang

Summary

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Episode Overview

Title: Why Artificial Intelligence Is More “Big Bang Theory” Than Big Bang
Date: April 25, 2024
Host: Pablo Torre
Guest: Josh Tyrangiel (Washington Post columnist, former Bloomberg Businessweek editor)

This episode explores the reality of artificial intelligence (AI) in 2024: what it is, who profits, who’s at risk, what’s hype and what’s real. Rather than framing AI as a looming civilization-ending force or a magical thinking machine, Torre and Tyrangiel examine AI as a tool deeply tied to capitalism, regulatory chaos, and everyday applications—with a healthy dose of skepticism for its world-changing claims. They dissect the core drivers shaping AI’s trajectory, the true winners (spoiler: it’s not always who you think), and how sports, law, and daily life are being transformed (or not) by the technology.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Is AI, Really? (03:35–06:34)

• Indefinable & Ideal for Hype
  • AI lacks a clear, universally accepted definition; this vagueness is exploited by companies to market anything as "AI-powered."
  • Notable Quote:
    “Artificial intelligence has no definition. Like, none, right? ... Because it has no definition, it’s the perfect thing for people who want to sell, right?”
    —Josh Tyrangiel (03:54)
• What’s Under the Hood
  • At its core, AI is software—a massive allocation of computing power to probabilistically generate outputs.
  • The real breakthroughs are happening in hardware: chipmakers like Nvidia and data/power infrastructure companies are the biggest winners.
• AI’s Strengths
  • Best at structuring data and cleaning up messes (e.g., improving logical flow in writing), but not particularly great at style or creativity.
  • People who discover practical, low-cost AI "hacks" in their work are quietly getting ahead.

2. Winners, Losers, & The Capitalism Engine (05:38–08:02)

• Where Money Flows
  • Hardware/energy: Major gains for those building the infrastructure.
  • Software: Only the very best survive; mediocre AI products struggle in a cutthroat environment.
  • Power users: Individuals exploiting AI for daily improvements are quietly outpacing the laggards.
• Comparison to Early Internet
  • Early Internet adopters whipped past their competition—something similar is happening now with AI.

3. AI Apocalypse? The Real Risks & the “Doomer” Narrative (08:02–10:28)

• Industry Doomerism
  • Tech leaders publicly fret about AI extinction risk, but keep racing each other in development anyway—a contradiction Tyrangiel finds suspect.
  • Notable Quote:
    “You’re making it, you’re gonna keep making it and you want to compete with each other, but you want to avoid extinction ... Either this is fantastic marketing ... or there’s something real.”
    —Josh Tyrangiel (08:57)
• Real Risk or Hype?
  • Tyrangiel isn’t convinced by the extinction scenario: “I’ve yet to be persuaded about the extinction level risk. … It’s a tool. It’s a tool like a lot of other tools human beings have created and have used to destroy lots of human values throughout civilization.” (09:15)

4. The Human Carnival: AI’s Key Players and Their Incentives (10:28–13:35)

• OpenAI’s Origin Story
  • Began as a non-profit with Elon Musk and Sam Altman, but fell out over direction—Musk left and started his own AI venture, xAI.
  • Notable Quote:
    “It’s classic Marvel stuff, right? Like, yes, Elon and Sam start out together… somewhere along the way, motives change…”
    —Josh Tyrangiel (10:28)
• Tech CEO Trustworthiness
  • Everyone, even those who call for regulation, is deeply incentivized by unprecedented financial stakes (upward of $30 trillion over 10 years).
  • The sector’s ambiguity allows for both sincere enthusiasm and aggressive self-interest.

5. The Regulatory Chess Match (13:35–18:53)

• EU: FOMO & First to Regulate
  • Spurred by prior tech losses, EU creates regulation focused on AI’s outputs, not its internal tech—hoping not to lose out again on the next economic boom.
• US: Slow Off the Mark
  • Congress is behind; celebrated moments like Schumer’s “AI dinner” are years behind Europe’s advances.
• Why the Delay?
  • In the US, virtually all AI is developed by private companies, not the federal government, so profit—not public good—is the key driver.
• Big Takeaway:
  “You cannot disentangle AI from capitalism. You just can’t.”
  —Josh Tyrangiel (18:53)

6. “Open” vs. “Closed” AI Models: Ethics or Self-Interest? (19:07–21:33)

• OpenAI Closes Up
  • Sam Altman now argues for keeping OpenAI’s models closed, citing dangers if dangerous actors gain access.
• Meta (Zuckerberg) Swings Open
  • Zuckerberg releases Llama as open-source (helping Meta catch up via crowdsourced improvements); presents as transparency, but it’s a self-serving catch-up mechanism.
• Moral of the Story:
  “None of them are pure.”
  —Josh Tyrangiel (20:46)

7. The Realities of Government Regulation (23:36–28:42)

• What Should Government Do?

  • Tyrangiel argues for more focus on practical, public-serving uses—like smart traffic lights, emergency management—plus privacy and enforcement.
  • The US still lacks even a basic digital privacy law.
  • Notable Quote:
    “There's no one in this entire podcast you should trust. Okay? There's not even Snoop Dogg.”
    —Josh Tyrangiel (25:02)

• Digital Privacy Is Foundational

  • Until basic questions (ownership over biometric and performance data, like voices and faces in deepfakes) are legislated, real governance is impossible.

• No Easy ‘Kill Switch’

  • “There’s no kill switch on anything. … We build systems. … There’s no single switch to shut off any of these things.”
    —Josh Tyrangiel (29:39)

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Major Segments, Quotes, & Timestamps

AI is best understood as software with lots of computing muscle

• “AI is an unfathomable amount of computing devoted to a task you simply wouldn’t expect.”
  —Josh Tyrangiel (04:55)

The tech CEO becomes the trust barometer

• “You really need to evaluate the person running your AI company. But … none of them are pure.”
  —Josh Tyrangiel (20:46)

Digital privacy and data ownership loom ever larger

• “The players are really paranoid about the data. So it makes sense to spend $20,000, particularly when you’re making a lot more than $20,000, to go to a place that can teach you all this stuff ... and then you can go back and yes, the teams have some data on you, but you’re protecting your own.”
  —Josh Tyrangiel, on MLB players (40:07)

On where AI is likely to land for most people

• “Over time, human beings tend to take amazing things and make them pretty mid.”
  —Josh Tyrangiel (31:31)

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AI, Sports, and Data: Case Study in Modern Impact (32:02–44:36)

• AI hasn’t “solved” sports, but has dramatically improved training, especially in data-rich, repeatable-action sports like baseball.
• Consultancy example: Driveline Baseball uses high-speed video and AI models to help players optimize performance; player paranoia over data ownership has led to clauses in union agreements.
• Basketball isn’t as easily optimized due to its chaotic, non-repeatable in-game decisions; baseball, with discrete, measurable motions, aligns better with AI analytics.

Quote on Moneyball, phase two

• “The first version of its relevance was showing off how management … could find a new way to value and exploit labor. … The second phase is actually labor: now they’ve seen how management values baseball players. … Now, AI is pretty important to figuring out how to do that.”
  —Josh Tyrangiel (36:41)

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The Coming Data Paranoia (Law & Beyond) (41:45–43:58)

• Tyrangiel predicts that the paranoia and desire to own performance/biometric data currently dominant in MLB is spreading to other fields—law, business, more.
• AI’s ability to scan court records (“reverse engineering an outcome from all that data”) could radically alter how lawyers (and, ultimately, professionals in many sectors) work and negotiate.

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Entertainment vs. Optimization: Will AI Make Sports More Fun? (43:58–48:41)

• Entertainment Will Survive Optimization
  • AI will “demystify” some elements, but fundamentally, people will always have to hit the ball, round third base, and be human: “The fun will still be there.”
• Sports leagues have been adapting rules to keep games entertaining, sometimes as a response to AI-driven efficiency (e.g., MLB’s rule changes, NFL’s innovative kickoffs).
• Ultimately, the drive for profit and market share will ensure that games adapt to remain fun for fans.

Philosophical Wrap-Up

• Tyrangiel is "long on humans," not just capitalism—people will adapt technology to fit their needs, even as tech moguls and systems chase efficiency.

Memorable closing quote:

• “Everybody has a grand idea until they meet the guy who’s like, is he going to get my food here faster?”
  —Josh Tyrangiel (48:32)

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Conclusion

• AI is neither magic nor apocalypse: it’s powerful, it’s everywhere, but it’s subject to the messy reality of human incentives, regulatory fumbles, and society’s capacity for adaptation (and mediocrity).
• Tyrangiel and Torre offer a clear-eyed, nuanced look at AI’s present and future, offering skepticism about overblown risks and promises, and practical insight into where the tech is—and isn’t—making the biggest difference.

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment / Topic | |------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:35 | What AI really is—lack of definition and the “magic” analogy | | 05:38 | The hardware winners; practical daily uses of AI | | 08:02 | Apocalypse worries, industry calls for regulation, and skepticism | | 10:28 | Altman vs. Musk; motivations, trust, and the “Marvel” backstory | | 13:35 | The regulatory chess match (EU and US compared) | | 18:53 | Capitalism: the real engine & entanglement of incentives | | 23:36 | Real government priorities; digital privacy as the crucial unsolved issue| | 29:39 | The myth of the AI “kill switch” | | 31:31 | Why AI is more “Big Bang Theory” (mundane) than “Big Bang” (apocalypse) | | 32:02 | AI’s impact on sports—MLB, analytics, data paranoia | | 40:07 | Personal data ownership and independent training for MLB players | | 43:58 | Entertainment vs. optimization—will sports still be fun? | | 48:32 | Closing: “Is he going to get my food here faster?”—AI’s true test |

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Tone:
The episode is conversational, skeptical, often humorous, and unglamorously realistic—anchored in the belief that society is more likely to “mid-ify” miraculous technologies than to destroy itself with them. The message: AI is powerful, but don’t buy the hype or the fear—understand the systems, the incentives, and the persistence of the ordinary.

Transcript

[Pablo Torre]

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

[Josh Tieringal]

There's no kill switch on anything. I mean, I don't want to scare you, but, like, there's no single switch to shut off any of these things.

[Pablo Torre]

Right after this ad.

[Narrator/Announcer]

You'Re listening to Giraffe Kings.

[Pablo Torre]

So the reason today's episode is about artificial intelligence is because pretty much everything seems like it is on the table right now, up to and including the possibility that we're already floating around in, like, Matrix style amniotic fluids and living in a simulation. But even the more grounded takes like the one that Microsoft's head of AI gave as a TED Talk last week sound like this.

[Josh Tieringal]

It is clear that we are an inflection point in the history of humanity. On our current trajectory, we're headed towards the emergence of something that we are all struggling to describe, and yet we cannot control what we don't understand.

[Pablo Torre]

And so I really wanted to understand where the we are with artificial intelligence right now. Not by talking to a tech CEO or one of these doomer profits, but to my friend Josh Tieringal, a journalist who is now at the Washington Post, who has an especially sharp understanding of power and capitalism's winners and losers, a sense that he'd honed as editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, where he had interviewed Tim Cook and Barack Obama, and then also as the guy who launched the TV show Vice News Tonight for HBO, which earned, by the way, an incomprehensible 41 Emmy nominations. And last year, Josh was sitting around wondering what he should do next.

[Josh Tieringal]

And so the Post called me and basically was like, hey, would you be interested in being a columnist on AI? And the main attraction, aside from, like, being interested in the subject, is like, I'm a tourist. Like, I'm a licensed tourist. Tourist. I'm allowed to go with this credential, the Washington Post, which still has some meaning into all these places and be like, hey, show me your cathedrals. Feed me your local food. Tell me what's going on here. And more often than not, they'll do it.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, tell me where I might get mugged. Also.

[Josh Tieringal]

But it sometimes helps to tell people you're a tourist, right? Because if you show up with, like, a crappy wheelie bag and a big smile, they're like, sure, we'll talk. What harm could you possibly do? Let's talk. Let's show him the new model. Let's. So it. It's somewhat strategic, but it's also somewhat true. It's Like, I don't claim to know everything about AI. I'm genuinely interested in how people present it. And what I tend to keep finding, and this is true for AI and for banking and for media, is that, you know, every trade is a conspiracy against the layperson in some way. And if you can find the conspiracy, you can also tend to find what's real.

[Pablo Torre]

I want to be a proxy here for truly, not just tourists, but morons. Like, help me understand this thing that I've committed to believing is the most important technology since what, since the smartphone, since high speed Internet, since. How are you characterizing this in your head?

[Josh Tieringal]

Okay, so let me, Let me just start with one very important thing. Artificial intelligence has no definition. Like, none, Right? And I have heard from people who've said, oh, good, well, of course it does. It's like really, like, point it to me. And so because it has no definition, it's the perfect thing for people who want to sell, Right? Because nobody knows what it is. Everybody thinks it has this incredible power. And so you could package anything as AI, right? There's AI inside. And people are like, oh, oh, so.

[Pablo Torre]

Many pitch decks, I imagine, got edited in the last year and a half.

[Josh Tieringal]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

And.

[Josh Tieringal]

And truly just with like, you know, find and replace.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right? Yes.

[Josh Tieringal]

And so there is no definition. It is very powerful when used properly. But the most important thing to know is AI is software. There's a great quote from the magician Penn Jillette, right? And he talks about magic is sometimes just having worked an unfathomable amount of hours on something people just wouldn't expect.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

And that's basically AI. AI is an unfathomable amount of computing devoted to a task you simply wouldn't expect. So when you type something into ChatGPT and you're like, now do it like Snoop Dogg, all it's doing is devoting this insane amount of computing power to probabilistically giving you a result, to add.

[Pablo Torre]

A couple of izzles.

[Josh Tieringal]

To add some izzles. And you're like, oh, my God, Snoop Dogg is in there. And it's just endless amounts of computing power, right? So, like, bring it down to its basics. That's what it is. But that computing power is the real star. And that's why, like, companies like Nvidia, which make these incredible chips, are the ones that are now trillion dollar companies, right?

[Pablo Torre]

So the winners here, let's just frame it from. I want to also sportsify this whenever possible. But the people who are winning right now, the chip makers.

[Josh Tieringal]

Yeah. The people who actually make the hardware that allows the computers to run all of these probabilistic decisions are killing it. And the other people who are killing it are the ones who are making the data centers and the power centers to power the data centers. So, like, if you make energy, you're doing great. If you make chips, you're doing great. If you make, like, kind of okay AI software that's, like, a half step better than your competitor, you're probably not going to make it. Like, it's just too competitive out there. The other people who are winning and are, you know, I hate to say it, but, like, are people who figured out that AI is pretty useful. Like, it. I use it in my own life in ways that I feel very reluctant to boast about.

[Pablo Torre]

But, like, I don't. And so tell me what you're doing.

[Josh Tieringal]

So my editor is like, well, do you use AI when you write? Like, yeah. He's like, what? Like, not to write it? Like, I don't. Because it's you traitor.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right?

[Josh Tieringal]

I use it because it can unf your paragraphs.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

Like, it's really good at logical sequencing. It's not great at style. If you ask an AI to write something for you, you will get the best 10th grade version of a bad Snoop Dogg impression. Of a bad Snoop Dogg impression. Or, like, it'll kill it on, like, the ninth grade Great Gatsby essay. But, like, that's not all that useful to me or to you. But what it's really good at is structuring data, right? So that's what it does. So if, like, I'm struggling on a paragraph in the middle of a column, and I'm like, what? I've been working on this for a half an hour, and it's just getting more and more tied in knots. I'll cut and paste it and say, put this in logical order in bullet points, and like, three out of four times I'm like, oh, oh, yeah, great. Thank you. And then I just move on and start to write, and I'm back on track. And so for people who figured out little hacks about the way AI can supplement their lives, like, you're winning because it's not very expensive. Everybody's trying to get you to use it. And so much like the early Internet, there were a bunch of people who, like, seem to suddenly have moved into the left lane on life's highway. And you're like, yeah, I don't know if I'm down with that. But then they get really far ahead. Like, that is happening. Like, I'm seeing individuals do that.

[Pablo Torre]

We've hit the over on when is the apocalypse going to be mentioned already in a conversation about AI. So where are you, apocalyptically speaking?

[Josh Tieringal]

So I've yet to see where the apocalypse comes in. So when I entered the chat, right, I started writing about this, I started reporting on it. About a year ago, a bunch of the AI makers signed this open letter, basically saying we would like governments to intercede with our work to make sure that there's no issues. Extinction risk.

[Narrator/Announcer]

Tonight, a stark warning that artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity. It comes from dozens of industry leaders, including the CEO of ChatGPT, Creator OpenAI. The experts signed the statement which says mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

[Josh Tieringal]

I'm sorry, what? You wait, you're making it, you're gonna keep making it and you want to compete with each other, but you want to avoid extinction. And so I was like, okay, well, either this is fantastic marketing because like our product is so powerful it could cause human extinction.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yes.

[Josh Tieringal]

Or like there's something real. I've yet to be. Be persuaded about the extinction level risk. I think there's a lot of other risks, but like it's a tool. It's. It's a tool like a lot of other tools human beings have created and have used to destroy lots of human values throughout civilization. I don't really see that as a primary risk yet, really.

[Pablo Torre]

Okay. So I enter this through the lens of the two characters that I think maybe people are most familiar with when it comes to AI, which is Sam Altman, who's the head of OpenAI, who I want you to help explain and describe here. And also Elon Musk, who has been. And this is sort of like the, the story of their relationship has been a doomsayer. Weirdly and conspicuously and maybe understandably, AI.

[Expert/Analyst]

Is.

[Josh Tieringal]

Perhaps.

[Shane Battier]

More dangerous than say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production. In the sense that it is. It has the potential, however small one may regard that probability, but it is non trivial. It has the potential of civilizational destruction.

[Josh Tieringal]

And so just to rewind, OpenAI, which is the maker of ChatGPT, was started as a nonprofit with a tremendous amount of investment from Elon Musk. So you know this is like classic Marvel stuff, right? Like, yes, Elon and Sam start out together. We're going to make AI for the good of humanity. And it's all going to be nonprofit and Somewhere along the way, motives change and, you know, there has been a falling out that I think has been well chronicled.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

Musk became discontent.

[Josh Tieringal]

He started criticizing the organization, saying that it fell behind and is no longer competitive. He then offered to become the President of OpenAI to save it. When Altman and others refused, Musk left, withdrawing. Sam, who I've spoken with and is very nice guy, he doesn't believe that AI is harmless, but he also thinks that the way to make sure that it is maximized is surprisingly through OpenAI and its responsible development of artificial intelligence. I definitely grew up with Elon as a hero of mine, you know, despite him being a jerk on Twitter or whatever, I'm happy he exists in the world, but I wish he would do more to look at the hard work we're doing to get this stuff right. Responsible development in their world means we're going to be the stewards of the model, meaning we're not going to open source this so everyone can work on it. And we're going to exercise what are called temperature controls so that it's not racist and it's not sexist. You can actually just dial down the temperature on the number of parameters so that it's, you know, less creative, less wild.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

More normie.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

The racism terror alert scale.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

They can toggle between the colors.

[Josh Tieringal]

Let's just narrow that down. And then on the other side, you have Elon, who I think genuinely believes that there is some risk here. But also Elon had a falling out with the company that is furthest ahead and decided to start his own AI company called xai.

[Narrator/Announcer]

The company's goal is to focus on truth seeking and to understand the true nature of AI. Musk has said on several occasions that AI should be paused and that the sector needs regulation.

[Josh Tieringal]

Elon benefits tremendously if by raising the alarm, everyone else's progress slows down. But it is impossible to disentangle that sort of like pure capitalism that is coursing through everyone's blood from the. Also a genuine enthusiasm for technology. But when I say pure capitalism, I just want to. I want to put a number on it that is a real number from multiple firms. We're talking about upwards of $30 trillion of added economic value over the next 10 years, potentially. But they're all these conflicting incentives. And that's actually what's the most fun about observing it is like it is the human carnival. Like, AI has brought out all of this, like, wicked behavior, but also incredible ingenuity in people.

[Pablo Torre]

But so the question of how does one invite responsibility? Where's the government in this?

[Josh Tieringal]

Slow. I mean, a little slow off the mark, to be honest. Like, what's interesting is the eu, European Union for years has been famous for like, being very bad at regulating technology. And so what it would end up doing is like all the, you know, best Internet companies are in America or in China.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

The.

[Josh Tieringal]

The EU has almost none, largely because they would just penalize them. So the EU five years ago really got started on AI and through this one guy who is a Romanian member of the European Parliament, who's a lawyer, really smart guy, he, like found a way to thread the needle. And what they decided to do is don't regulate the technology, regulate the output of the technology. Imagine living in an America where meta Google, like none of the biggest stock market movers existed in the United States and you got no value out of. That's basically all of Europe, right? Like, the top five stocks that have moved the American stock market over the last 15 years are all Internet tech stocks. Europe has none. And so the FOMO of AI has been enormous for them. And I think this guy Dragos Tutorace, who's the Romanian guy, basically was like, okay, we can't do this again.

[Expert/Analyst]

It is true that there are many who compare the arrival of artificial intelligence with the first industrial revolution, with the arrival of the engine. And it's true that if we look at the impact that artificial intelligence has and has the potential to have, it is such a profound impact that it's going to have. It's going to change the value chains in our economy, economies is going to change the way we interact in society, with the way we interact among each other as individuals, and is also going to change the way we do politics, the way our democracies are structured and function. So it is true, it is an enormous potential.

[Josh Tieringal]

We have to figure out a way to do smart regulation that actually encourages some development. And at the very last minute, there's one. Well, there's really two European AI companies, but there's one AI company called Mistral is French. And they too were like, yo, don't do this again. Like, we need to be a player. And so they didn't want to miss out on another 20 years of like a boom economy. And they moved pretty quickly, but they're also methodical. Like, they took their time. They just, they started early. And so they passed a regulatory regime a couple months ago. It's really smart. And they did it with not a ton of fanfare. And meanwhile, in the United States, I.

[Pablo Torre]

Didn't know about that.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Josh Tieringal]

And about a year ago in the United States, Chuck Schumer started making a bunch of noise about like, well, this is a big deal. We better get everybody in here. The potential societal benefits from AI are astounding, from medical advances in innovative materials to fusion energy and so much more. But we also must recognize that AI poses monstrously complex challenges. We're going to have like the last supper of last suppers with everybody. And he did it. He got everybody to come to a table in Washington. And there's a great picture, but they're like four and a half years behind at that point. And there was a lot of noise about, oh, we're going to figure this out. And it's been really quiet since the EU kind of like slipped in there. It establishes differences. Like it says, like, hey, if you're using AI to sort your wardrobe, that's probably a low level risk. Like extinction isn't happening because you're like, does this brandy top work with these genes? Like, you're probably good.

[Pablo Torre]

Speak for yourself.

[Josh Tieringal]

But at the top level, yeah, if there's risk, you're going to have to comply with a regulatory regime. And it looks, you know, like this. And here's how we work it. So they've done it. And now there's a lot of talk in, in the US about like, well, is there a way we just sort of quietly adapt this humbly and just get on it. The smart thing too is like for Europe, which is famously sort of anti tech.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Josh Tieringal]

They're really saying, like, come do business over here. And we're good, we got you. We're not going to penalize you too much. And companies see it and they're like, oh, this makes sense. So, yeah, they got out in front of it.

[Pablo Torre]

But I guess the doomerism in me is now noticing, wait a minute. Okay, but there's the profit motive, there is the economic incentive to me to be maybe more risk seeking than a neutrally incentivized government might be.

[Josh Tieringal]

Oh, listen there. All of your fears about AI are largely going to be fears about capitalism. Like, make no mistake, this is, you know, a lot of people think, oh, AI, it's a big technological or scientific advance. And in the United States, we just all default to like, oh, it's a moon shot. And we think back to NASA. And in the 1960s, at one point, the United States government, the federal budget, 4.5% of the budget was going to NASA. Just insane. This is not a federal project. AI is not a federal project. It's all private. It's all massive technology companies, most of whom are pretty entrenched because it takes a ton of money to, as we. As we talked about, like, to do that much computing. You already have to have a lot of money.

[Pablo Torre]

The infrastructure is so massive.

[Josh Tieringal]

So it is. You cannot disentangle AI from capitalism. You just can't. Okay, I'm going to give you one more twist here that's really delightful, right? Because you're right that the person running the company suddenly becomes an enormous proxy for whether you trust the company.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

So Sam Altman argues we need these models to be closed. You should not be able to look inside our model, because if you can, and you are an amateur bomb maker, why, what would you do?

[Pablo Torre]

Right, Right. I googled open AI, and now you're telling me that, oh, wait, this is closed.

[Josh Tieringal]

Enter Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg's also got a product called Llama, and llama is behind OpenAI.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

And Mark Zuckerberg isn't like, the most famously ethical tech CEO in our history. He is the person who, in 2016, said it was insane to argue that Facebook had any influence on a famous election. During a conference Thursday, he said the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea. Mark Zuckerberg, who is behind on Llama and who has this sort of checkered ethical history, maybe not the most forthcoming to members of Congress in the United States, enters the AI chat and says, oh, no, closing your model. Why? That is terrible. We're going to open our model. And so they open up Llama so anybody can see inside it, which, in the one hand, you're like, well, okay, open sourcing it. That seems very transparent. And on the other, again, capitalism is the fastest way to catch up to OpenAI, because all of a sudden, people are pouring in and testing and improving your model. And so the most important takeaway is that, yes, you really need to evaluate the person running your AI company. But the second most important takeaway is none of them are pure.

[Pablo Torre]

So how does Sam Altman feel to you as a trustworthy steward of all of this?

[Josh Tieringal]

So I sat with Sam Altman, talked to him a couple times, and I like him. He's smart, he's kind of funny. He'd fit right in in this room. You know, he talks about the fact that, like, man, he'd love to spend his time thinking about the consequences of AI, but right now, he's thinking about why this engineer won't talk to this engineer.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

He's very relatable. And to his credit, he knows that one person shouldn't be responsible for AI. And at every opportunity he invites scrutiny of his decision making publicly and his morality. Which is exactly what you would do if you wanted to run the largest AI company in the world.

[Pablo Torre]

Right? Exactly, exactly. Our own destruction.

[Josh Tieringal]

And so that's why this is so hard to read and also kind of hilarious is like each move has a counter move. All of those moves together continue to advance these companies forward. And it's this, it's a very rare moment when you get this in an industry.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

Like it's a new industry funded with huge amounts of money concentrated in the hands of, of truly six or eight people. And so getting to know them individually, if you're wanting to know what's happening, it's a really handy way to understand what's going on.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

And meanwhile you have like, I, I presume, I mean the equivalent of, or literally Chuck Grassley being like, how can I see my kids photos in like a Congressional Oversight Committee meeting?

[Josh Tieringal]

I will say, everyone I've spoken to in the Valley says Openly there's like 12 to 15 people in Congress who they decide get it right. Which is not terrible. Although when you add up the numbers of people in Congress, it's kind of the. That fact.

[Pablo Torre]

I would have taken the under.

[Josh Tieringal]

Yeah, they say that there's 12 to 15 people who actually engage with them and get it. Everybody out there loves Gina Raimondo, who's a Secretary of Commerce and who's very smart and very business friendly. She's like a Rhode Island Democrat, but is also Mitt Romney at the same time, which is a very strange daughter.

[Pablo Torre]

Does dressage, does Olympic horse contests and.

[Josh Tieringal]

But very smart and also very practical.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

And so they feel like they can talk to her and she represents the interests well and she's very clear on where the no lines are. Some of these CEOs will also tell me that when they do have one on meetings with some of the senators who may be less in touch with technology and less knowledgeable about their phones, that they are just nodding and hoping that the meeting ends as soon as possible because there is no chance they can say something the other person's going to understand.

[Pablo Torre]

What in your perspective would be the thing that you wish the government was doing differently?

[Josh Tieringal]

Yeah, I guess there's two things. On the one hand, there are practical uses of artificial intelligence right now that would make our lives better. And so I'm a Pablo, I'm a patriot. I believe In America.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

That's right.

[Josh Tieringal]

And so I did a piece. I was looking at Operation Warp Speed, which is one of those things that may sound very familiar. It's how we got Covid vaccines in six months from zero.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

And so I was just reading up on it, and in May, we had nothing. And in the fall we had vaccines. And I'm not going to say that the reason was AI. There was a lot of stuff that went into it. But basically, Gustavo Perna, who is the general put in charge of it, he shows up in D.C. and he's like, I have three colonels, no budget, no plan. He sits in front of a bunch of consultants, all of whom are like, oh, well, we can do this. And nobody even understands the problem. And basically, he sits down with Palantir, which is a company co founded by Peter Thiel and a guy named Alex Carr.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yep.

[Josh Tieringal]

They come in and they say, look, we can show you we can make a digital twin of the United States for you.

[Pablo Torre]

At this point, I am watching this movie and I'm like, those are the super villains, by the way. Everything I know otherwise is these are military industrial complex guys. I don't trust them.

[Josh Tieringal]

They are military industrial complex guys. You shouldn't trust them. You shouldn't trust anybody. There's no one. I just. There's no one in this entire podcast you should trust. Okay? There's not even Snoop Dogg. Not even Snoop Dogg. Because, look, Snoop Dogg has a history. We know.

[Pablo Torre]

Snoop Dogg told me he was quitting weed. And it turned out to be just an advertisement for a new up that is still not over that.

[Josh Tieringal]

I wonder if Sam is in on that. With him.

[Pablo Torre]

It all. It all goes.

[Josh Tieringal]

So these guys sit down and they're like, look, you what? In a military parlance, you need to see yourself. Which means you need to know, where are my troops? Where is the enemy? How am I positioning myself? And to give you an example, in order to. To produce and get vaccines in an arm, you need to know the state of plastic production in the United States at all times. Because you could make a bunch of vaccine. Where are you storing it? How are you getting it into vials? So they were able, in a matter of weeks, to get all of the data that he needed to put it on a dashboard so he could run the operation to get vaccines in arms. And the only reason we can do that is because it was an emergency. So all the things in government that would slow such a project ordinarily magically disappears. And in war, that happens all the time, right? And so the Department of Defense is actually, even though they're incredibly slow, they're pretty fast at getting AI into the battlefield in all sorts of ways that may be ethically challenging, but in general are, like, pretty effective. So I would love it if the United States could begin to tell the story of how AI can improve people's lives, because it would make it a little bit less scary. The other thing it would do is create a market that. For positive uses of AI. And the more we can say, oh, yeah, I really wanted to do X, Y and Z, the better off we're going to be. I mean, simple example, we all drive around with smartphones to navigate dumb traffic lights. Maybe we should have smart traffic lights that wouldn't be that hard to make a grid that actually understands. Simple example, there's an old person crossing the street. We can see it. You know, visual recognition can see it. Hey, don't change the light, right? Wait till they get to the other side. So there's lots of ways that the tech which exists right now could be integrated into our lives to improve it. So that would be one thing. The other thing is to get a regulatory regime in place as quickly as possible, because the more it's stabilized, the easier it's going to be to enforce. And right now, enforcement, we haven't even really talked about that, like, totally.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

What do we do?

[Josh Tieringal]

Because we don't even have a digital privacy law, Pablo.

[Pablo Torre]

I assume we're gonna put handcuffs on robots.

[Josh Tieringal]

I mean, maybe. Well, but. But we literally. We don't. We haven't even solved the first problem of the Internet.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right? The.

[Josh Tieringal]

In 1996, we passed a law, Federal Communications act, which basically said, like, well, you can publish stuff on the Internet, but you're probably not a publisher, you're a platform. And so this created the era that we all now joyfully live in, in which basically anybody could say anything defamatory or otherwise, but definitely the person who published it is not responsible. So we don't. We haven't solved that first problem, and there's no hope yet that we will. And so, like, I would like to see a simple digital privacy act so that, you know, Taylor Swift or anybody else shouldn't be subjected to deep fakes like, oh, maybe your voice should belong to you. Maybe there should be a criminal penalty if that is replicated and distributed without your consent, because then you really could put people in handcuffs. And by the time you put three, five, ten people in handcuffs, the word does tend to get out.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right?

[Pablo Torre]

The question of, does the Internet get To feel like a place governed by law, as opposed to the exact opposite, which is its promise. And also the hell that we all live in remains seemingly also an open question.

[Josh Tieringal]

Yeah, and the AI is just the accelerant of all of the worst and best of this stuff, which is why, like, am I worried about the existential risk? I am worried about the existential risk of human beings. This is an incredibly powerful tool that we invented, much like a bunch of other tools that we have invented from wheels and fire and poisons. Can we just govern it, like, a little bit smarter? Because if we can, I'm not really worried about existential risk now. I'm just like, could we just show some progress?

[Pablo Torre]

But in the movie that I think people have been playing in their heads, it's as simple as. It's as complicated as everything we've been talking about. It's as simple as. Can we unplug this thing? Is there a kill switch?

[Josh Tieringal]

There's no kill switch on anything. I mean, I don't want to scare you, but, like, there's no single switch to shut off any of these things. We build systems. Like, that's what civilizations are. And so we started as human beings as a group of little molecules, and we built a little system and. No shut off on that.

[Pablo Torre]

The jugular vein.

[Josh Tieringal]

There is no.

[Pablo Torre]

The only kill switch.

[Josh Tieringal]

Yeah, like, you need the. You need the hockey skate. Yeah. No, there's no equivalent. And so AI systems have been around for a long time, like, not as chatbots, but they're built into the Internet. They're built into your phone. There's no kill switch. These are all circuits intertwined in infinity. So, like, no, you can't turn it off.

[Pablo Torre]

And so it sounds like what you're suggesting is that we have been focusing so much on the upside, the seemingly infinite ceiling towards which all of us are. Yeah. Pointing our pitch decks and our fears and anxieties. And in reality, what you're saying is.

[Josh Tieringal]

What every new technology, people always focus on the very, very worst and the very, very best.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

So when TV came along, everybody's like, this is going to be America's classroom.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

Or this is going to rot their minds. And where it kind of ended up is like tonight at 9 on CBS, the Equalizer with Queen Latifah. And my hunch is that that's probably what's going to happen with AI, like, all things being normal. You're going to lift the floor on a bunch of people's performances, at their work, at a bunch of interactions with government and civil society production processes. Is there going to be some like peak tv? Yeah, there's going to be some amazing stuff. Is there going to be some real bad? Yeah, but over time, human beings tend to take amazing things and make them pretty mid.

[Pablo Torre]

Your argument is that artificial intelligence is actually, in ways that we need to really come to finally admit, a lot like young Sheldon.

[Josh Tieringal]

It could just be that the young Sheldon secret is the secret.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

It's like good enough. Yeah, good enough.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

This brings me to the field that I ostensibly work in, which is sports. Because sports, to be very blunt about it, is unlike reality in ways that are tempting for people who are obsessed with math and optimization. Yeah.

[Josh Tieringal]

And also like, look, I, I grew up in Baltimore and the signal event of my like public life as a child was the movement of the Baltimore Colts. They were robbed. It was, it was so embarrassing.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

And so I became a just devoted Baltimore Orioles fan. Like a huge O's fan.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah. A lot of text about the Orioles, which is truly a one way enthusiasm.

[Josh Tieringal]

Yeah, I've noticed, by the way, I've noticed. So I've always loved sports. I, when I was in high school, like a lot of kids, I went to a school that had senior projects. And so I called the.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

The head.

[Josh Tieringal]

Groundskeeper, this guy named Pat Sanerone, because back then we had the white pages where you could basically find anybody in Baltimore in the white pages. I called him and I was like, look, I could come work for you for free for March. And he was like, yeah, okay, just show up tomorrow. And then I got boots in a uniform.

[Pablo Torre]

And so when you look at sports through the lens of your current job, how much, how much optimizing is left? Like we've come so far post Moneyball into, you know, I've moderated panels at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference year after year after year, to the point where I've become numb and bored by it in many ways. And so what's new here?

[Josh Tieringal]

So that was the question I asked, which is, you know, what we've seen in the initial studies of AI in the workplace is like, they're great at making your really bad performers average quickly. So if you're a consultant and you're bad at writing decks, your decks get better real quick. If you're a lawyer and you're bad at writing briefs get better, it doesn't help the top very much, but it can really lift the floor. So I started poking around to just figure out like, huh, wonder if that's happening in sports. I spoke to Daryl Morey who is of course the dark prince of Sloan Analytics. And Darrell's like, yeah, there's not in the models. There's not that much more room for AI to help us because we have optimized pretty much everything. Now Darrell, true to his reputation, did say, well, now I am working on one thing that I can't tell you about that I'm pretty excited about.

[Pablo Torre]

He's finally going to cure James Harden of his strip club addict artificial intelligence.

[Josh Tieringal]

Well, that actually might work, but Daryl at least conceded to the premise, like, there's not that much room. He told me to talk to Shane Battier, famous Duke alum, also had a second act after his career. The Heat hire him. And for a couple years he is in charge of analytics and communicating those analytics to players, so to speak, to Shane Battier.

[Shane Battier]

And bad is like, look, the challenges are very different, basketball versus baseball. So in baseball I know if I have a certain launch angle and a certain exit velocity, which is, you know, physics based, it's a home run in every park from here to Tokyo.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Shane Battier]

It's a map. It's literally a physics problem.

[Josh Tieringal]

But what Baddier pointed out is like, you know, the NBA is full of essentially non repeatable motions leading to a repeatable motion which is shooting.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right? Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

Baseball is just repeatable motion. The two main things you do are throw a baseball and hit a baseball. And so where AI can really improve that is you've got statistics on one side which can tell you the outcome of any action and you have biometrics on the other which can show you how you get to an action and AI can merge those things. So Shane Battier is the person who's like, yeah, baseball man. That's where it's all going to come together.

[Shane Battier]

The incentives with baseball line up with the math perfectly.

[Pablo Torre]

There is like a fundamental, when I talk to like the analytics people on the basketball side, there is almost this jealousy of baseball because of the way in which the it's so turn based. It is so atomized to the point where every decision feels like you can isolate it.

[Josh Tieringal]

Yeah, it's like every, I mean, I don't know for your audience how many of them play blackjack, but like it's basically like the interaction between the pitcher and the hitter is between a dealer and a player and the card comes out and you know exactly what to do based on the card. It's not to say it's easy, but.

[Pablo Torre]

There'S an actual book on what the best response would be.

[Josh Tieringal]

Exactly. And so not only is there a book now there's a market. And this is where Moneyball. You know, the success of that book is just infuriating to anyone who's ever written because it is amazing.

[Pablo Torre]

My favorite book and also the thing I also am most jealous of.

[Josh Tieringal]

It's incredible. It's like we're 21 years in and it's still relevant. Not only relevant, but like newly relevant. Because the first version of its relevance was showing off how management, Billy Bean and the Athletics could find a new way to value and exploit labor. Which they did, right? Famously, Kevin Eucalyptus, the Greek God of walks. And so for several years, a bunch of general managers who are too stupid to notice are getting their asses kicked by the A's, all because Billy Bean and that team found a new way to value and exploit labor.

[Pablo Torre]

Right on base percentage.

[Josh Tieringal]

Exactly. Phase two. So now that for 20 years, now everybody's hanging on the game. Phase two is actually labor, because now they've seen how management values baseball players. They value power and they value strikeouts. And it turns out you can engineer your swing or your arm to do those things. AI is pretty important to figuring out how to do that. This sounds geeky, but it's really not. We all know what statistics are. That's the outcome. On the way in, there's all this video capture and motion capture and sensor data. Yes, that happens through cameras, which doesn't really naturally speak to statistics, but AI is this great translator of different data. And so now you can go to a Driveline, you can go to your own team, they can capture the data, and on an iPad, you can see what you're supposed to do to hit with more power. And if you hit for more power, you get more dollars. And so all of the baseball labor market is now really attuned to something that's driven by AI.

[Pablo Torre]

All right, so if you're not familiar with Driveline Baseball, which Josh just mentioned there, it's a player development company that now works with thousands of professional players and more than 40 all stars. It was started by a former software engineer and blogger named Kyle Botti, who also, by the way, got radicalized because he read Moneyball. And Kyle's big insight here with Driveline is that they could use AI to translate this high speed camera data at thousands of frames a second. And they could turn that into actionable real life techniques to increase fastball velocity, for instance, or bat speed. But another key thing for these players, their clients, which I did not realize until I read Josh's article about this, is that Driveline specifically and proudly is independent from these players, bosses.

[Josh Tieringal]

Imagine you're in your own workplace and you've discovered that for a little bit of amount of money, you can get really good, and you're going to get a big raise, and your employer knows it. And they're like, oh, well, why don't we work together on that? Well, you might, right? Like, they're like, oh, we'll pay for it. And that sounds great, but if they know how you got good, they also know how to train someone else to get good. They also know how you might get bad. And so having this independent training place that protects your biometric data, which belongs to you, is not a terrible idea. Now, the players that I spoke to are all very paranoid about. About their data to the point that it's actually in the last collective bargaining agreement. There's a little thing that says the players own their data, which is smart, very smart, and also born of the paranoia and hatred between baseball players and baseball owners, right?

[Pablo Torre]

These guys who have to go sometimes in arbitration to a neutral judge to say, I believe I am worth this. And their employer, their boss, who help them ostensibly get to whatever that statistical benchmark is, say, actually, this guy sucks. For these reasons, they're having their actual numbers perpetually used against them.

[Josh Tieringal]

Not to mention, the last 20 years have been about the one book we just discussed called Moneyball, in which management is ruthlessly trying to find cheaper edges to use players. So the players are really paranoid about the data. So it makes Sense to spend $20,000, particularly when you're making a lot more than $20,000, to go to a place that can teach you all this stuff, show you how your arm works, show you where the launch angle is. We'll give you updates. Pretty good service. And then you can go back and yes, the teams have some data on you, but you're protecting your own. Now, after my piece published, I heard from two baseball executives, one of whom said, these guys are crazy. What do they think we have that we would use against them?

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right?

[Josh Tieringal]

And the other who said, yeah, that's probably pretty smart.

[Pablo Torre]

One of those executives was like, look, I know you believe that money is important to me, but allow me to explain why it's not.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right?

[Pablo Torre]

But.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

But.

[Pablo Torre]

Okay, but. So the biggest change right now that people are underrating seems to be that athletes are already in baseball, specifically, already keen to the ways in which biometric data and their own personal analysis of themselves is something that should be proprietary and not open and accessible to your employer.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right?

[Pablo Torre]

Which feels like it is a warning to Everyone about that, whether you're an athlete or not.

[Josh Tieringal]

I think it's coming for everyone in some way. Maybe not in the same way that baseball is, but like, I have some friends who are lawyers.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

One of the things that's amazing about the law is like, you know, there's no analysis of juries, there's no analysis of opening statements. Like if you knew certain questions led to certain responses across the great history. And remember, they're court reporters, so we have transcripts. Yes, AI can do natural language processing.

[Pablo Torre]

Oh, I love this.

[Josh Tieringal]

Can you imagine reverse engineering an outcome from all of that data?

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

So your firm might want to invest in that.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

And you as a lawyer would definitely want to know it.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

Opening statement analytics.

[Josh Tieringal]

It should happen.

[Pablo Torre]

There's also so funny to me, there's.

[Josh Tieringal]

A big, I mean, but Pablo, this is so far ahead of where we even are. There's a big story in New York right now about a cop who's a crooked cop, and a bunch of the people who put away got together and became lawyers. And what they discovered through their own analysis of a bunch of the other arrests was that this cop had hired a prostitute to testify in nine separate murder cases that he had prosecuted that he had brought to the court. So like, forget natural language processing of opening statements. How about just frequency of expert witnesses across the court system?

[Pablo Torre]

Just the stuff that's hiding in a giant essentially drawer full of paper.

[Josh Tieringal]

Exactly. So imagine the ways in which that could be brought to your workplace and then what's your relationship to your employer? So if you're in a law firm, you both benefit from winning. Theoretically, it doesn't work like that for everybody. And so in the places where your interests diverge, owning your performance data is going to be a thing like I'm, I'm quite confident. And that performance data is coming for everyone.

[Pablo Torre]

That brings up, I think, the fan concern here. Again, let's think about the consumer, the people who are both the story and yet generally ignored when it comes to how we write the movie in our heads about what's happening here. The trade off fundamentally, and this is, I think, a larger theory that I have about sports and in modernity and late capitalism, the trade off is between efficiency and entertainment. And so you're describing the ways in which optimizing is still possible, in which these edges can be gained, even post Moneyball. And the question is, do you think it's going to get more fun for us watching this?

[Josh Tieringal]

I think it'll be just as fun as it's always Been. That's the weird part is, like, a lot of it will be demystified, but you still have to hit the ball.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right?

[Josh Tieringal]

You still have to look insane as you round third base. You still have to scream at somebody. Like, I do actually think the fun will still be there. And that understanding doesn't necessarily negate our ability to enjoy things. There's certainly elements where, like, unregulated. It's going to get out of control. Like, baseball was un. Watchable. Oh, yeah, they changed six, seven years.

[Pablo Torre]

All of these laws, so to speak, to make people do things that are entertaining again.

[Josh Tieringal]

Yeah. But I think that's also because those people were lazy and disagreeable.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

Like, if. If you're the commissioner of baseball and you just think, well, people like baseball, no matter what, you're out of a job, man. Like, nobody has a right to exist. And so I think what it's gonna lead to is, like, more activism, more like awareness that, like, things change more quickly. But if you move in step with it, these are still games we're going to enjoy. I think it will expose the phonies pretty quick, though. Like, if you're not aware of what's happening inside your game and you're not willing to take chances, you're going to lose. And so, like, I look at somebody like Adam Silver where if you. If, if I told you 10 years ago, all right, well, there's going to be a play in tournament. And by the way, LeBron's not guaranteed to get in. Steph Curry might get out like the first night. Oh, there's going to be an in game tournament. Oh, and they might switch the way games are refereed in the middle of the season. And tell no one. First of all, David Stern would have broken a table with his hand and you'd be like, no, come on. But they've been responsive, Right. And so, like, they've had to.

[Pablo Torre]

They've had to adapt because of market pressures.

[Josh Tieringal]

Exactly. And they. And you got to give them credit for doing it with, like, no problems. They know that's the new rule of the game. Even the NFL, which is like, you know, a little shady sometimes, they've been adaptive, they've moved quickly, and that's everything from streaming to this crazy new kickoff.

[Pablo Torre]

Rule that sounds like it goes to. I mean, and in the NFL, it's actually. There has been more fun because the analytics have suggested actually be more risk seeking. Go for two, you know, like, go for it.

[Josh Tieringal]

Go for two. And like, also a adopt this, like, absolutely bonkers Thanksgiving family Game kickoff rule, where it's like, gotta be between, like, I don't even know what that rule is.

[Pablo Torre]

Right.

[Josh Tieringal]

But I am a fan because I think what they've figured out is, like, these things are going to change swiftly because the edge is going to force us to change them. And if you don't, the game won't be fun. So I think that the proper management of this is going to ensure that you and I have a really good time yelling at the TV for many years to come.

[Pablo Torre]

And that is because, to bring it full circle here, the primary motive here is money.

[Josh Tieringal]

Yes.

[Pablo Torre]

In so many words. Again, you. You are. You're long on capitalism.

[Josh Tieringal]

I'm long on humans. I. I think capitalism is a great invention for the most part, and that it has spurred a lot of innovation. And we. We are living better because capitalism forced people to invent things and make changes to the world. But ultimately, like, I'm long on humans finding ways to adapt technology to make their lives better, however they define better. And that even though there's six or eight people really controlling the AI world right now, you know, nothing's more stubborn than a person who just wants to watch the Equalizer. And so it's like the anti Mike Tyson. Like, you know, Mike Tyson's famous quote, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. In tech, it's like, yeah, everybody has a grand idea until they meet the guy who's like, is he gonna get my food here faster?

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right?

[Josh Tieringal]

And I tend to think that's where it's gonna net out.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

Josh, thank you for what turns out to be one of the most bizarrely inspirational conversations I have had on this show.

[Josh Tieringal]

It's been my pleasure.

[Pablo Torre]

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out a Meadowlark Media production and I'll talk to you next time.