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Something You Should Know
The Serious Problem of Picky Eaters & Will AI Make Us Dumber?
00:51:31
How picky eating became normal, whether AI will shrink or expand our brains, and what your profile photo says about you.
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- [00:01]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
I'm Alex Honnl, professional rock climber and founder of the HONL Foundation. I wanted to let you know about a brand new season of the Planet Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas
- [00:13]
Helen Veidt
and big solutions from the people leading
- [00:15]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
the way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservationists of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:33]
Mike Carruthers
Today on something you should know Are men bigger babies when they're sick than women are? Maybe Then are you or your kids picky eaters? It can lead to real health problems and it never used to be a thing.
- [00:48]
Helen Veidt
When parents did start regularly saying, hey, if you don't like it, I'll make you a peanut butter and jelly, or I'll make a quick macaroni and cheese. All of these options that became available. It really prevented kids from learning to like a broad range of foods.
- [01:03]
Mike Carruthers
Also, what makes a good and bad Online profile photo and a deep dive with one of the pioneers of AI on what it can do for you.
- [01:13]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
The AI opportunity is not to know more, it's to compute more. And this breaks people's brains because most people, again, are thinking about this as just a better way to search the Internet. But in fact, ChatGPT is not best as a search engine, it's best as a computational partner.
- [01:28]
Mike Carruthers
All this today on something you should know. You know what's weird about hair loss? It doesn't happen all at once. You just sort of notice it one day. Huh? I've got three brothers. Every one of them has lost his hair. And so when I noticed mine was thinning a few years ago, I didn't want to wait around to see how that turned out. That's when I found hims, and what sold me was how simple it was. No appointments, no waiting rooms. Everything happens online. You answer a few questions, a licensed medical provider reviews it, and if treatment makes sense, it just shows up at your door. I use the spray maybe 30 seconds a day, and from everything I've read, starting earlier really matters. For simple online access to personalized and affordable care for hair loss, ED, weight loss, and more, visit hims.com Something that's hims.com Something for your free online, visit himss.com Something Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for full details. Restrictions and important safety information. Individual results may vary based on studies of topical and oral minoxidil and finasteride. Something YOU SHOULD know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should with Mike Carruthers. So when men get sick, do they get sicker than when women get sick? It's a pretty interesting question and one we're going to start with today on this episode of SOMETHING YOU SHOULD know. Hi there. I'm Micah Ruthers. So there is a scientific basis for the idea that when men catch a cold or get the flu, they get hit harder than women do. And if a fever is involved, men can run a little hotter and their illness can last a little and their illness can last a little longer. Now, this has been attributed to hormones. Testosterone may suppress immune response, which allows men to get sicker, while estrogen in women appears to enhance the immune response. This phenomenon, it's called man flu, is not exclusive to humans, according to one researcher. He explained that males tend to be the weaker sex across an entire range of animal species when they're sick. He said maintaining the ability to mate is more important to males than getting better, which lowers their chance of a rapid recovery. And for females, it's just the opposite. And that is something you should know. This is probably going to sound a little weird, but I've been waiting a long time for someone to speak on this topic, the topic being picky eaters, because I've long suspected that a piece of the puzzle of the whole discussion about diet, obesity and health is picky eaters. Kids who are picky eaters and don't eat their vegetables or other foods grow up to be adults who are picky eaters who don't eat their vegetables and other foods. What's so interesting is that some of us assume that children are naturally fussy, overly sensitive to taste and texture, and simply are not capable of liking adult food. But it turns out that wasn't always true. In fact, for much of American history, children were anything but picky. They ate what adults ate and often loved it. Spicy food, bitter food, vinegary pickles, even coffee and oysters were normal parts of an American child's diet. So what changed? How did American kids become some of the pickiest eaters in the history of the world? And if picky eating kids become picky eating adults, what are the consequences of that? That's what we're talking about with Helen Veidt. She's an award winning historian, associate professor of history at Michigan State University and author of a book called How American children became the fussiest eaters in history. Hey, Helen. Welcome to something you should know.
- [05:50]
Helen Veidt
Thanks so much. I'm so happy to be here.
- [05:52]
Mike Carruthers
So you have the data? I don't. But it seems to me, just from observation, that kids are pickier eaters than they used to be and that parents indulge it, that they will make something for themselves for dinner, and then something different for children. And when I grew up, that was not the case. Not in our house. It was, this is what's for dinner. And you were expected to eat it or try it, but if you didn't like it, well, it was kind of too bad. And I wonder how that changed. How did it change where parents indulge kids? Picky eating.
- [06:26]
Helen Veidt
That's the big question. I spent more than 10 years doing historical research on that very question. Why are kids so picky today? Where did mass childhood pickiness come from? And why do so many of us today believe that pickiness is natural and inevitable? Because the first thing you see when you start looking at historical sources is that children in the past didn't used to be picky. There are plenty of Americans alive today who can remember a different culture around children's food from the mid 20th century. But if you go back even further, if you go back to the 19th century, it was really difficult. Different. Children ate what, you know, sound to us today like just incredible things. They ate tons of vegetables. They ate spicy sauces and lots of vinegary, fermented pickled dishes. They ate all sorts of organ meats and shellfish. They loved coffee. And that's really the thing. When Americans imagine why children ate things in the past, they usually imagine two things. One, they think, oh, it must have been scarcity. Kids must have forced food down because there were no alternatives, and otherwise they would have starved. Or they imagine it was discipline. Parents in the past were super harsh. They forced children to eat food they hated. And what you see is that it was neither of those children who were, you know, didn't have enough food, were not picky, but children with plenty of food. The richest kids in America were eating really diverse, broad diets. And Americans hardly talked about discipline when it came to food. They assumed that children would eat like themselves. Parents indeed, would give children family meals and assume that they would eat them and they wouldn't provide alternatives. But they didn't see this as a form of discipline and certainly not of punishment. That was, for many Americans, just natural and also logistical. Before refrigerators or highly processed Foods most Americans didn't have edible food to give children as an alternative if they hesitated to eat family meals. And what we see as a result is kids just emerging as curious, wide ranging omnivores from a really young age.
- [08:49]
Mike Carruthers
And so what changed? How did picky eating become a thing? I mean, when I was growing up, you know, we ate what was served for dinner. And yeah, sometimes, you know, my mother would cook. Every once in a while she decided to cook liver. And God, it was the worst thing I ever ate. I can still imagine that taste. I just. But at least I tried it. And there were probably a lot of other things that I, that I tried that I would not have tried if she hadn't made me that I ended up liking. So something changed.
- [09:23]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
Mm.
- [09:24]
Helen Veidt
That idea that there, there isn't an alternative. There's no parallel dinner that you have access to that, that there's a family dinner and you know, if you don't want to eat it, you don't have to. But there's not anything else that's an enormously effective tool in teaching kids to try and like things. Another if I were gonna give one answer to what changed, the, the single umbrella answer that I would give is hunger. Now, that could be really misinterpreted. So let me explain. In the 19th century and early 20th century, kids really expended a lot of energy. They walked long distances, they did a lot of chores, they played outside at the same time. There was very little snacking in American culture. They might have had occasionally bread between meals, but there wasn't this culture of constant grazing that we have today. And children came to meals with really big appetites back in earlier decades. And if you've ever gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach, you know how powerfully hunger can, can, can make you interested in food. So that's one thing. They used to be much Hungrier in the 20th century. A few things changed around that one. Kids started moving less. They. They were less likely to. To do heavy chores, less likely to walk long distances. They were much more likely to. Snack snacking culture emerged along with all these products that really encouraged it. And also milk drinking. We tend to think of milk as a really benign thing and maybe a natural and timeless part of children's diets, but it really isn't. It was only in the early 20th century that nutritionists started saying that children should drink large amounts of whole milk. A quart a day was standard advice for, even for toddlers. And all of that contributed to kids just not being nearly as Hungry at meals. So even when children didn't have alternatives, they were less likely to take the same kind of avid interest in meals that earlier generations had because of so much snacking. At the same time, when parents did start regularly saying, hey, if you don't like it, I'll make you a peanut butter and jelly, or I'll heat up a can of soup, or I'll make a quick macaroni and cheese. All of these options that became available, it really prevented kids from having the opportunity of learning how capable they were of learning to, like, a broad range of foods.
- [12:05]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, I would imagine that convenient foods, frozen foods, things like that, like those frozen Mac and cheeses or frozen anything that if a kid says, I don't like this, it's pretty easy to say, okay, Johnny, I'll throw in a thing in the microwave and you can have that for dinner. And it's an easy solution. So Johnny eats his dinner. But it's setting this whole problem up.
- [12:27]
Helen Veidt
Right. It can be a really vicious cycle because not only do children learn they don't have to eat the family meal, they'll never have to experience hunger if they don't. You know, if they don't eat the family meal, they're also just not getting a chance to acquire a broad range of taste. I mean, one interesting thing today is that when you hear the phrase acquired tastes, it's almost always synonymous with what we call adult food. In the past, people didn't really have something called adult food or children's food. And acquiring taste was really something that happened at a time when a child weaned, like, really early. Like in late babyhood, early toddlerhood, kids were acquiring the taste of their food culture.
- [13:12]
Mike Carruthers
And so here we are today, where kids have gotten very picky. Parents have indulged the pickiness. Parents eat one thing, kids eat another. Yeah, it's not like the good old days, but so what? What's the big problem?
- [13:26]
Helen Veidt
Well, there are several problems. Pickiness affects kids health and their quality of life in profound ways. It also affects parents quality of life. I think for many American parents today, the thought of children just cheerfully and gratefully eating and enjoying everything that they enjoy is so strange that it sounds like science fiction. Like they can't even imagine how much easier their lives could potentially be. Kids have really gained a lot of weight as a cohort. Childhood obesity was really rare just a few decades ago. It's more than quadrupled in this country since the 1970s. And now more than a third of American kids are either obese or overweight. And not just obesity, but also their limited diet, the limited amount of fiber that many kids get, the limited amount of plants that they're eating is leading to problems. There's growing heart disease among children. Type 2 diabetes is rising among kids. When I was a child, type 2 diabetes was commonly called adult onset diabetes because it was so rare in childhood. But that's changed. It's even affecting kids growth. That's something that parents don't think about. But if children don't get enough nutrition during their childhood growth spurts, they won't necessarily reach their full potential height.
- [15:02]
Mike Carruthers
Doesn't this sound a lot like the missing piece of the puzzle that never gets talked about when we talk about obesity and lousy diets that people are eating that it starts with picky eating in childhood? I want to find out more about this. I'm talking to Helen Veidt. She's author of the book How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History.
- [15:26]
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- [17:03]
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- [17:33]
Mike Carruthers
So Helen, you know, parents are smart people. What keeps them from seeing this or saying, well, wait, we need to introduce other foods to little Johnny and little Susie because they'll need those other foods like vegetables and things to be healthy.
- [17:52]
Helen Veidt
Parents have been put in an impossible position because they're really worried that if they do the sort of thing that you're talking about, if you say like, you know, I'm sorry, but this is the family meal, there's no other meal. Parents have heard that they could really mess their child up psychologically. That's where a lot of this came from is claims by psychologists in the 1940s and 50s that food was a psychological minefield and if that parents did it wrong, they could permanently scar their children. You now hear on the Internet and social media, you hear claims that telling your kid they have to eat a certain thing will lead them to have no sense of their own authentic preferences or taste, will lead to them having no sense of authentic fullness and thus will lead them to overeat. You hear that you can give a child an eating disorder by trying to tell them to eat certain things. Parents just feel completely paralyzed and there's a lot of anger and frustration among parents because they've been put in this impossible position where most parents don't want their kids to be picky. They would love it if their kid ate more widely, but they've been told not to do the very things that American parents used to do to raise these healthy, wide ranging eaters.
- [19:14]
Mike Carruthers
And so this whole talk about if you tell a kid he has to eat this, it's going to mess him up in any number of ways. Is there evidence that that is true? Because it sounds like baloney to me.
- [19:29]
Helen Veidt
There is no good evidence that it's true. None of these claims were originally based on robust comparative studies. These claims originally came from a bunch of Freudian psychologists, most notably Dr. Benjamin Spock, who wrote the best selling child care book of the 20th century. And it was very much a Freudian and There was a lot of interest in the ways that mothers, especially mothers, were potentially forming their children and projecting their own anxieties onto kids. But there was absolutely no research. And to me, one of the most compelling things is that back in the 19th century, when American parents expected children to share their meals and didn't provide alternatives, kids grew up to be wide ranging eaters with healthy body weights and healthy relationships to food. Obviously that's a generalization, but it's generally extremely true. Problems like mass obesity and eating disorders and other dysfunctional relationships to food only emerged in the second half of the 20th century, only became common then. So to say that these old fashioned parenting methods cause these eating disorders or obesity, it just really makes no sense when you look closely. Yeah, and the good news is that parents can stop worrying so much that they'll hurt their children. It's really the opposite.
- [20:56]
Mike Carruthers
It just seems like such nonsense, you know, that it doesn't seem normal. So what are we supposed to do? Cater to, you know, Johnny just wants french fries today, or, you know, Susie wants Mac and cheese every day. Well, you know, that's not good. Talk about doing damage to a child. You've got to know that no vegetables is not a very good idea. And you know, I remember too, like back in the, I don't know how many years ago these books came out, cookbooks telling you how to hide broccoli or whatever into food that they would like so that they're still getting their vegetables. Well, that doesn't really address the issue.
- [21:44]
Helen Veidt
No, it's, I mean, I obviously, I think kids are fully capable not only of learning to like all sorts of vegetables, but of knowing, of knowing that they're eating them while they're liking them. Of course, I mean, that kind of strategy can be a good way if you already have a picky eater, to introduce vegetables and then say, hey, that taste you really enjoyed, that was actually pureed kale. And here it is again, you know, so I'm not, I wouldn't condemn that method out of hand. It's just unnecessary. The thing is, parents used to believe that they were wiser than preschoolers when it came to food. And we lost that confidence. But we didn't lose it in a bunch of other realms. Like, kids throw temper tantrums or complain or whine or cry around all sorts of things today, and parents don't take those kinds of Protestants all that seriously. For example, if a kid refuses to brush his teeth or refuses to wear a seatbelt or refuses to put on pants or shoes, or to wear snow boots in a snowstorm or to go to school. All these kinds of realms. Parents are just really confident today. We're like, oh no, you might be sad in the short term, but I'm confident that this is best for you and I'm gonna help you to do this and you're gonna take a bath or brush your teeth or put on sunscreen or whatever it is, even if you don't want to, because I'm the parent and I know this is best for you. Parents used to have that kind of confidence around food too. And I think one of the most important parts of this project is helping parents to regain the confidence, not shaming them. There's actually a lot of shame around this issue. A lot of parents just feel devastated because they're so scared, because they've really been told that they're going to hurt their kid if they do the wrong thing. But to help rebuild parents confidence that they really are wiser about food than kids, just as they're wiser about all sorts of other things.
- [23:39]
Mike Carruthers
Well, there's also the problem. I imagine this certainly contributes to the problem is that there isn't family dinner like there used to be. We're going to stop at McDonald's and you can have this or you can have, you can get whatever you want or we'll pull over to Burger King and so, you know, you can have whatever you want because there isn't a meal. It's fast food.
- [24:03]
Helen Veidt
Yes. Yeah, fast food. Or also, you know, processed food in the home. Like marketing really encouraged Americans to have personalized diets in the 20th century and definitely still today as well. This idea that you shouldn't have family food, that people have these really elaborate sets of personal preferences. Nobody ever thought that in the past. Like, it's not like Americans in the past were clamoring to eat differently from each other. They really weren't. Communal eating was the ideal and the norm. But the fact as food became processed in factories, shelf stable, as things like fast food became more available, it became possible for Americans to eat differently than their family members. At the same time, marketers were really sending the message that this was a kind of consumer freedom, that this was healthy, that it was really good for kids. And what we see is family eating habits fracture.
- [25:03]
Mike Carruthers
Well, it's interesting, you know, I have children that have grown and we tried to always introduce new foods. And it's amazing how many foods kids, if you expose them to it will like them. I mean, both my boys like broccoli and you Know, a lot of kids don't. A lot of people don't like broccoli. They love it. But if we had thought, oh, kids don't like broccoli. He'll never eat that well, then he would have never tried it. And that if you give them a chance, maybe they'll find things they like.
- [25:35]
Helen Veidt
Yeah, I heartily agree with that. I have three children myself, and I parented extremely, extremely differently than most American parents, just because I was immersed in this totally different world with very different food rules. And I followed a very different script than most parents and wasn't afraid that I was hurting my kids as I did it. One rule that parents have heard that's also a myth is that you kind of have a certain number of chances like you parent today. There's this rumor that once a kid has tried a food seven times, or sometimes you hear 11 or 15, and if they still reject it, then you know, they really like it. But no culture before ever pinned a number on the amount of times you can offer a food. You can really just keep offering the food. Children do sometimes have really big reactions when they're first trying a food. Sometimes they make huge faces. They might gag. They might say they don't want it. Just keep trying. That really is how almost all humans did it. In history, up to the 20th century, you know, there was. There were a limited number of family foods. This is what the family was eating. If you try enough times, the kid eventually learns to like it. And this. This has just been the pattern that we see over and over again, not just in the United States, but around the world and for millennia.
- [26:57]
Mike Carruthers
So we've been talking about getting children to like foods that they claim not to like. But what about adults getting them to like foods that they maybe all their life say that they didn't like? And I think a really good example is cilantro. So talk about that. Talk about cilantro.
- [27:15]
Helen Veidt
It's a very polarizing food. And some people do have special genes that allow them to detect these aldehydes in cilantro that others can't. So to some people, it really tastes soapier than others. But what I found fascinating was that if you go to places in the world where cilantro is just ubiquitous in cuisine, and there are lots of places in Latin America and Asia where cilantro is just everywhere, you don't find cilantro lovers and cilantro haters. Everybody likes it, even people with exactly those same genes. So you can find people who talk about, you know, I'M one of those people for whom cilantro tastes like soap. But I learned to like it because I ate it every day. I made myself eat it. I put it in different kinds of things. I tried to reconceptualize the way I thought of it. And lo and behold, after a certain number of exposures, I began to enjoy it.
- [28:08]
Mike Carruthers
You learned to love it, or you learned to tolerate it?
- [28:11]
Helen Veidt
Well, I think you can learn to really enjoy things, not just to tolerate it, but to like it.
- [28:17]
Mike Carruthers
Well, as I said in the beginning, I've long suspected this is a piece of the puzzle when it comes to diet and obesity and health, that picky eating is a problem and it needs to be addressed. And you've addressed it really well. Helen Veidt's been my guest. She is an award winning historian, associate professor of history at Michigan State University, and she's author of the book How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History. And there's a link to her book in the show Notes. And Helen, great. I appreciate this. Great job. You explained it really well. Oh, thanks.
- [28:52]
Helen Veidt
I really appreciate that. That means a lot coming from you.
- [28:57]
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- [29:26]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
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- [30:33]
Mike Carruthers
There is a growing concern that AI is making us dumber. Why struggle to solve a problem when ChatGPT can do it in seconds. Why wrestle with an idea when AI can outline it, draft it, polish it, and be done? But what if we're looking at this all wrong? What if AI isn't shrinking human intelligence, but expanding it? What if we're at the beginning of something more like a renaissance than the robot apocalypse? When most people think of AI, they think of chatbots or those impressive little AI generated images and videos in their social media feeds. But according to my guest, that is barely scratching the surface of what's happening and what's coming. Zach Kass was one of the first 100 employees at OpenAI, and he has spent his career on the front lines of artificial intelligence. He believes AI could dramatically expand human potential. And he has some compelling evidence and examples that might completely change how you see this moment in time with AI. He's the author of the book the Next AI and the expansion of Human Potential. Hey Zach, welcome to something you should know.
- [31:47]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
Thanks for having me, Mike.
- [31:49]
Mike Carruthers
So can you give me some examples? When you use the word renaissance to describe what AI is doing, I mean, that's a big word. And so some examples of what you mean by that.
- [32:03]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
So last year we discovered our first antibiotic in 60 years because of AI, we split HIV out of DNA. Last year because of AI, baby KJ, the infant in the United States received the first custom gene therapy discovered thanks to AI and CRISPR to cure it of a previously deadly and immutable disease. And we pointed to these things and we said, look, we're going to make these novel scientific breakthroughs. And people sort of poo pooed that stuff. Well, last week, AI, which had long been considered bad at math, suddenly started solving mathematical equations that are novel and open ended. And even Terence Tao, broadly considered the greatest living mathematician, is starting to raise his hand and say, hey, these machines are getting really good at at open ended mathematical problems. So what does that mean for scientific discovery? We're going to find out. But all of the indicators here seem to be blinking pretty bright that we are going to supercharge our ability to learn more about our known and unknown universe.
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Mike Carruthers
So help me bridge this gap because you just talked about what AI has done in the last year. That sound remarkable. When I think of AI, I think of ChatGPT. It helps me write a better email. That's a very different application than the things you just mentioned. So how does that work? How does AI do those things that you just said?
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Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
This highlights maybe one of the critical issues with the public perception of the technology That I think is pretty understandable. The rise of ChatGPT is important because it gives everyone with access to the Internet a pretty reasonable understanding of what the technology can do to a limit has also caused incredible myopia because now people are like, wait a second, how could this machine that creates dumb videos, how could that thing actually spur a new era of human innovation? And it's like, well, it's because way more stuff is going on. And if you want to know how capable it is, find one of your smartest friends who know who is working on a really complex open ended problem and watch them use AI to help solve that problem. And for engineers working on software development, they'll tell you it's getting really good at that. For mechanical engineers or civic engineers working on plans for architecture, they'll tell you it's getting really good. And you start to appreciate that actually these apps are scratching the surface of what the technology can already do. Because most people in their day to day aren't trying to solve novel concepts, right? And most of us are not doing complex math. And so the technology can sort of very sufficiently meet our needs without us ever actually appreciating all the other things it can do. Most people don't even realize how good, for example, autonomous vehicles are because they haven't even been in a waymo yet. And this highlights this, this increasing sort of adoption gap between what the technology is capable of and what people are actually using it for. Which is why there's, you know, a public perception issue. To say nothing of the fact that I don't think the industry itself does a very good job of explaining what this technology can do, apart from, as you put it, writing better emails and creating funny videos.
- [35:50]
Mike Carruthers
When you say AI is really getting good at, if you ask these experts, they'll tell you AI is getting very good at this. Well, my understanding is that AI is a system that has access to all the knowledge that there probably is out there, so the knowledge already exists. So what is AI doing to create new answers to questions that aren't already out there?
- [36:15]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
Ah, here's an interesting way to understand the question you asked. What the average person thinks of AI is in many cases what the Internet has actually been for quite some time, which is this library. And what the Internet offered people was this sort of theoretically unmetered information. And as soon as ChatGPT came out, people said, okay, well now we have better Google search. That was like one of the things people used it for. So people said, okay, now we can get faster search and it again misses the point, which is ChatGPT is not best as a search engine, it's best as a computational partner, it's best as like cognition. And so the where what I try to explain it to people as is you're talking about the difference between unmetered information and unmetered intelligence. And it's not perfect. This is where we'll start splitting hairs. But if you pointed all of the, for example, complex math problems that we have, which we are starting to do at a GPT 5.2 or axiom model, which is, which is the state of the art mathematical model, what you get is not more information, it's more cognition. The AI opportunity is not to know more per se, it's to compute more. And this also breaks people's brains because we don't really have a modern comparison. Most people again are thinking about this as just a better way to search the Internet, but in fact it's a, it's a much better way to make sense of incredible amounts of information. And the way I explain it to some people is imagine if you could infinitely model and pretty soon we're going to start to be able to do a whole lot more complex analysis about everything. And the consequences of that are pretty clearly meaningful scientific discoveries. So advancing the frontier of what we know and also meaningfully reducing the cost of, of how much it takes to create things, goods and eventually services.
- [38:20]
Mike Carruthers
So the concern so many people have, and I'd like to hear your response to this, is that if AI can do so many things and can solve so many problems, that we're all just going to get really stupid. Much like the way that people used to have to remember lots of people's phone numbers in their head, but now they don't, so they don't. AI is going to be doing everything for us so we don't have to, so we won't.
- [38:45]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
I'll answer the question which is will AI make us dumber? My answer is actually no. What will make us dumber, which has been happening for a while in the developed world, is economic abundance. And this people don't like to hear. But I have to remind people that we started to see the current trends in Gen Z, which are not great, that they appear to be the first generation in many to not be smarter than the last. On average, they are less likely to read, less likely to ride a bike, less likely to swim. And that trend showed up pre generative AI. That trend showed up circa Jonathan Heights, the coddling of the American mind 2019, when he started talking about the fact that developed nations were asking less and less of their children because parents were more and more afraid to create discomfort with their child. What I think we are observing is a population that just stopped asking a whole lot of its young people and a lot of young people decided that they would do nothing. Right. You want to sit on your phone all day, you want to sit, you want to sit around and play video games all day, you can, you can order doordash, you can check out. And that's not an AI problem, that's something else. That's an agency problem. That's a personal responsibility problem. What we are also observing is that Gen Z will have a near standard deviation higher occurrence of genius and savant. And when I travel around and I have a selection bias, obviously I talk to parents. My observation is about 70% of them see their child as much smarter than they were at that age because they have access to tools and technology that their parents could not have imagined. And they're using these tools and technologies to overperform across multidisciplinary arts science culture. More chess masters under the age of 20 now than above the age of 40. Most companies are doing away with their college degree requirements because they're realizing that actually lots of smart people are showing up everywhere. And so we're observing this interesting K curve that's pronounced by agency. Like if you want to do a lot, you can do a ton, way more than your parents. And if you want to do nothing, you can do less than almost anyone in human history because we don't ask much of anyone anymore. So when people are like isn't AI going to make us dumber? I'm like if you want it to. I mean optionality comfort has a cost. And for in the developed world what we are observing is that cost is. Percentage of the population says I don't really care, I don't want to do much.
- [41:22]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, wow. But the other concern is that AI is going to and people say it's already happening taking jobs away, that it's doing things that people, it's doing things better than people can do them. So we don't need people anymore.
- [41:37]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
First I will say I'm sympathetic to anyone that whose job was, was lost recently by due to AI or anything else. I mean that's, that is not, that's just period. I mean let's be clear. It's not clear I should say in, in the unemployment data that actually that's what's going on. It's the unemployment seems flat right now job creation is down in manufacturing, which is the least exposed right now to AI, especially in the United States. So there may be economic issues. It seems like they're more likely to be related to tariffs than AI. But I think what we're going to find is that humans want humans to do a lot of stuff. And that in fact, what we face is an incredible amount of change, an incredible amount of disturbance, but not actually an economic issue as much as an emotional one. I observe this as a time where we're going to reboot the economy and probably redefine work. And I bet there's more and better food on the table when it's all said and done.
- [42:43]
Mike Carruthers
I think if you ask most people, they would say that things are changing faster than ever. Is that true?
- [42:53]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
Yes. Well, let's say this technology is improving faster than ever. There remains this theory of societal threshold, which basically says the future is certainly not defined by what a machine can do. It is defined by what we want a machine to do. And that is a good thing. And we should be very deliberate about the things that we do and don't want to automate in our lives. There is plenty of stuff that we should automate that would save us a bunch of headache, cost despair. 45,000 people die on the roads every year. Why are we not clamoring for autonomous vehicles? I do not know. Well, I do know when we write about it, but there's plenty of virtuous friction. There's plenty of stuff in our lives that we should continue to strive for and that automating has actually harmed. And things like online dating proved this. Giving everyone access to everyone in an online dating pool has destroyed the fabric of a lot of relationships because everyone feels like they constantly have another choice. So there is a very important line that we're going to start to tow between the things in this world that we should automate, that preserve, that enhance our humanity, and the things that we should not that destroy it. And we should remember all the time that the purpose of technology is to allow us to be more human, to achieve greater sense of humanity.
- [44:17]
Mike Carruthers
From your vantage point, what are you seeing in terms of new applications of AI that people are starting to use or are just down the road on the horizon that will be here soon that are different than what we've come to think of as AI, which is ChatGPT.
- [44:37]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
Yeah. So my favorite right now, and I think there are two really interesting unlocks that most people haven't thought about. The first is people who have used a lot of ChatGPT or Gemini or some other product have created a long context, a lot of memory and asking really deep introspective questions. Most people spend their entire lives and sort of flirting with the idea of self actualization and deep psychotherapy. These machines are not meant to be therapists, but they can unearth incredible understanding that you can then work on with another human. And so asking these machines to challenge you about things, about self truths, right? Like what do you think I struggle with most? Or what do you think is is a hard truth that my friends and family would want to tell me based on everything that I've talked to you about. There is an incredible amount of context in this diary to help people start to really face, you know, amazing opportunities for, for deep introspection and challenge. I do not recommend using it as a therapist. There is a fine line here. The other thing that I think people are not using it well enough right now is to make sense of a lot of things that have previously been gated for only the elite tax law, right? People are like, I don't know how to save, you know, I don't know how to do my taxes well, well guess who does, right? People who don't can't afford great attorneys. Guess what? You now have a very good attorney, probably a better attorney than you've than any of your wealthy friends have. People who like wander and are constantly wondering how something works, are super curious and used to exploring long Reddit threads. This machine has an encyclopedic understanding of the physical world. It can help you learn really quickly. And I love taking photos of things that I don't know what they are and then later that day putting them into ChatGPT and asking them to explain it. There's just a lot of personal growth and development, but also unlock of traditionally elite services that start to democratize what only the very wealthy have long had.
- [46:43]
Mike Carruthers
I'll bet, because I've thought of this myself before. You ask ChatGPT or Gemini or whoever, something deeply personal like that, you stop and think, who can see this? Where does this go? Where is this being stored? Could this come back to bite me? And you would say what?
- [47:03]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
There are two things to say here. First, if you use Google or Gmail or any other service, you should be asking that question constantly. Anyway, so if you, you know, if you send email over the Internet, this is a question that you should be asking. And you have an agreement with Google that says it will not sell your Gmail data, it will sell all your search data, it won't sell your Gmail data And that's important. ChatGPT actually has a, has a contract or has had a contract that says it will not sell your data. And that's changing with its ads product. And so I recommended to everyone that to either use a find a service provider that will not sell your data or upgrade to a subscription. Pretty simple in my opinion. Make sure that you are not the product. I like a relationship with these technologies where I know I am paying them for a service and that data is private. And again, what I would remind people is if you use the Internet, you have been exposed to this issue for a long time. Like it's, it's not a new issue. You just have one more vector, you have one more, you know, service provider that you have to make sure you have a secure relationship with. And this is important. We, we sacrificed way too much at the altar of, of attention and likes with social media and, and Meta and Facebook profiteered on incredible privacy for way too long and, and, and destroyed a lot of lives. I mean, you know, teens were serving ads for makeup when they would search for, you know, am I pretty enough? I mean, that's just so disgusting. And they should be held accountable. And we should now also make sure that we are building relationship to a technology that doesn't prey on us. And it's possible. There are a lot of service providers, a lot of people want to give you AI applications that do not prey on your privacy.
- [48:47]
Mike Carruthers
There's one thing that happens every time you ask ChatGPT a question. Usually somewhere on the page there is, you know, chatgpt can be wrong. It makes mistakes. You should verify this information. How much should we take that into account? Or is that just legal mumbo jumbo or what?
- [49:11]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
I basically believe that AI is best used as a computational partner. It is best used not as a search partner, but as a machine to better compute information that you can factually verify. I prefer to use it as more of a calculator than a search engine. And in doing so, you dramatically reduce hallucinations. And what you create is a world where you can verify where the actual scope of the problem can be quite enormous, but it is verifiable in account. You can sort of back into the problem. And that I think is proving to be the best use of AI in the real world anyways. And this is why we're getting really good at these sort of, these closed problems like autonomous vehicles where you can sort of repeat the problem over and over and over until it, until the error rate just diminishes to near zero. But when you're doing Google Search or equivalent of Google Search with it, I would treat it with an incredible amount of care because while hallucinations have dropped dramatically, they still exist. And we shouldn't believe everything we read on the Internet blindly.
- [50:26]
Mike Carruthers
Well, that's proven to be some pretty good advice to not believe everything you read on the Internet. Well, I have to admit this conversation went in different directions than I thought it was going to go, and I really enjoyed it. So thank you. I've been talking to Zach Kass, one of the world's most sought after voices on artificial intelligence. He was one of the first 100 employees at OpenAI, and he's written a book called the Next AI and the Expansion of Human Potential. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for coming on and talking about this.
- [50:59]
Alex Honnold / Zach Kass / Scott Sigler
Brilliant. Thanks so much, Mike.
- [51:04]
Mike Carruthers
You may not have thought about it like this, but your online profile photo isn't just a picture, it's a snap judgment machine. Research shows people form impressions of your competence and trustworthiness in as little as 100 milliseconds before you've ever said a word just from looking at your picture. A study out of New York University found that subtle differences in facial expressions significantly change how trustworthy and capable you appear. And here's the interesting part. The perfect professional expression isn't a giant toothy grin. It's what researchers describe as a slight positive expression. Relaxed face, lips gently upturned. People with that look were judged as more trustworthy than those who had a stern expression without sacrificing perceived competence. If you're too serious, you look cold. If you're too smiley, you risk looking less authoritative. The sweet spot is controlled warmth, approachable, but not trying too hard. On a platform like LinkedIn where employers and clients are subconsciously asking, can I trust this person or can they deliver? That tiny shift in expression can tilt the answer. So no, you don't need a big grin like you just won the lottery. But you also don't want to look like you're about to deliver a performance review. Your face is your headline, so make sure it says the right thing. And that is something you should know. It's always appreciated if you would just take a moment and share this episode with someone you know so that they too could give it a listen and hopefully become a listener. And it helps us grow our audience and keeps the podcast going. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. I know you like interesting and thought provoking conversations and ideas, but because you listen to something, you should know. So let me recommend another podcast I know you will enjoy. It's the Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan has a real talent for getting his guests to share stories and offer thought provoking insights. Over the years I've sent a lot of people to listen and I get feedback from people who are so glad I introduced them to the Jordan Harbinger show recently. He discussed Scientology and the children who are raised in that organization. It's a fascinating conversation and he talked with Dr. Rhonda Patrick about how to protect your mind and body from the modern world. And it's tougher than you think. I've gotten to know Jordan pretty well. We talk frequently and I tell you he is a very smart, insightful guy who does a hell of a podcast. Check out the Jordan Harbinger show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [53:57]
Helen Veidt
If Bravo drama, pop culture, chaos and honest takes are your love language, you'll want All About TRH Podcast in your feed. Hosted by Roxanne and Chantel, this show breaks down Real Housewives, reality TV, and the moments everyone's group chat is arguing about. Roxanne's been spilling Bravo tea since 2010 and yes, we've interviewed Housewives royalty like Countess Luann and Teresa Giudice. Smart recaps, insider energy, and zero fluff. Listen to all about tragedy podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. New episodes weekly.