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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 548: Creativity and Inherently Human Skills Will Be at a Premium in the Future, How to Prepare Your Kids for the AI Revolution| Matt Britton, Generation AI
00:51:59
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- [00:01]
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- [00:30]
Jenny Yarrij
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Yarrij. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I have just read a fantastic and very pertinent book by Matt Britton. It is called Generation AI. Why Generation Alpha and the Age of AI Will Change Everything. Matt, welcome.
- [00:46]
Matt Britton
Thanks so much for having me.
- [00:47]
Jenny Yarrij
I have to tell you that I was just in the airport earlier this week and your book was there.
- [00:52]
Matt Britton
Good to hear.
- [00:53]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, that's a good thing, right? When it gets to the airport, I feel like that is big time. Can we start here? So this is something that's on everybody's mind, which is AI. How is it going to change the world for me? How is it going to change the world for my kids? What should I be doing? What should I be focusing on? There's a lot of unknowns. It's kind of scary. But you have been at the front end of technology for a long time. You have actually met Mark Zuckerberg and have done PowerPoint presentations. And so this is so wild to me. You were one of the first people that did an ad campaign on Facebook. So can you talk about the history here? You talked about, you have this meeting with Mark, the co founder, Eduardo Saverin, which I'm like, nobody knows about Eduardo. Why? Why does nobody know about Eduardo?
- [01:36]
Matt Britton
Well, you know, there's always the one star that comes out of companies, whether it's Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. But, you know, most big companies aren't created just by one person. And there was actually a lot of great early founders in Facebook, a guy named Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin and many others. So it was just happenstance, to be honest with you. I was running an ad agency that I had started called Mr. Youth. Mr. Youth was built to help companies target teens and college students. As you probably know, Facebook took off in the college market with college students. And one of our clients, Victoria's Secret Pink, which was just launching at that Point, which would go on to be the fastest growing retail brand in history, was looking to reach college students. And one of my employees just graduated from Columbia University, had told me about this incredible new tool called Facebook that he was using to keep in touch with all of his friends after he had graduated. And he was gracious enough to give me his login over a weekend, which nobody would ever do today, but he did that. And because you needed a. Edu email address to log into Facebook at that point, there was no way to contact Facebook on their website. So I had to go into the domain registry, which is where companies go to register, you know, their URL. At that point it was the facebook.com and there was a 617 number, and I called it. And that's when Eduardo, who is Mark Zuckerberg's co founder, picked up the phone. And a couple weeks later, they're in my office. So it just happened that way. And I had no idea when they came to meet with me that they would end up being the incredible success story that they were.
- [03:05]
Jenny Yarrij
You had no idea when you. You said, you're like, if I would have just invested.
- [03:07]
Matt Britton
Just exactly right.
- [03:10]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, just a little bit back then. So you were on the cutting edge, and you still are, which is why you're such an important and critical person to write a book like this Generation AI. You said it was called the Facebook, which I think people know. Was that your idea to get rid of the.
- [03:26]
Matt Britton
No, it was not my idea.
- [03:27]
Jenny Yarrij
Okay.
- [03:28]
Matt Britton
No credit for the success of Facebook, unfortunately.
- [03:31]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, but how interesting. You say you executed the first meaningful corporate advertising campaign to ever exist on Facebook. You, you know, and Eduardo Zary pitch, you said he has this underwhelming PowerPoint presentation.
- [03:42]
Matt Britton
And Mark. Yep, they were both there.
- [03:44]
Jenny Yarrij
And Mark. And Mark. And off it goes. And you talk about how for a while there, companies were like, yeah, right. I'm not going to advertise on any of that stuff. You know, only crummy companies, you know are going to advertise.
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Matt Britton
Right. Hershey, the Hershey company, said to me in Pennsylvania, our brand would never stoop to the level of advertising on people's computers.
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Jenny Yarrij
And wow, how things have changed.
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Matt Britton
Oh, yeah.
- [04:05]
Jenny Yarrij
So then what you talk about is that this change. So here you are, you're the, you know, you set the stage. You are on the cutting edge of technology. You are the first ad campaign on Facebook for Victoria's Secret Pink. This is at a time when, like you said, you can't even log in unless you're a colle student. Basically, I mean, this is right at the cusp, at the beginning of it. But you say in your 25 year career as a new media entrepreneur, so you've been doing this for 25 years on the cutting edge, the front lines of technology change. 2024 is the year technology had the most significant impact on the business world.
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Matt Britton
That's, that's true.
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Jenny Yarrij
And you set the stage. You're talking about Facebook and how it's changed advertising and all of these changes that have occurred.
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Matt Britton
Yeah.
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Jenny Yarrij
But 2024 is, is the most significant impact. Can you tell us why?
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Matt Britton
Well, for the first time ever, we start to see technology do things that prior we thought were only reserved for humans. Right. So not only can you interact with AI power technology like you can another human, like you can have a conversation with ChatGPT, you're going back and forth. It's not like Google where you're asking for five best hotels in Cancun, just going to give you a list. It's very much linear. But ChatGPT is highly interactive, highly conversational, but that's really just the very tip of the iceberg in terms of its capabilities. The way that AI in the last 24 to 36 months has been deployed by companies has been in the realm of automation, taking things that humans were once required to do, whether it's data analysis, whether it's writing, proofreading, the list goes on and on, even customer service, and actually deploying AI based technology and now called AI agents to do the work for humans. And if you think about the biggest cost that companies have, it's human resources, it's people. And now what companies are seeing is, wow, maybe I don't need humans to do these things. And that's why people are scared. Right. Because ultimately I think for good reason, but I do think there's something to do about it, which we can get into. But I think for the first time ever, companies are starting to say, wow, not only is technology going to help me grow faster, but actually technology can actually help me do far more with way less people. And what you're starting to see now is the largest technology companies starting to. And then they're not admitting it publicly, but you know, Microsoft three weeks ago laid off 6,000 people. You know, here's a company that's profiting tens of billions of dollars a year. They don't need to cut those people, but what they're seeing is, is we don't need this many people anymore. And you know, the, the future is not evenly distributed, but it is Distributed to companies like Microsoft and Google and Facebook, et cetera. And those are the companies laying people off because they're seeing this future before anyone else. But mark my words, 18 to 24 months from now, you're going to see almost every large company figure out the same thing. And the question is, what does that mean for society? What does that mean for all of us?
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Jenny Yarrij
What's the answer?
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Matt Britton
Well, I think ultimately on the economic side, the optimist says that once these companies cut all these costs, they're going to be more profitable than ever before. And the hope is they're going to reinvest those profits into new ventures, into new products, into new innovations which will then regenerate jobs. And I wrote about this in the book that when the Model T came out by Henry ford, there were 70,000 companies that went out of business that were in the horse and carriage business. But then over the next 10 years in America, you know, more than half of all the new jobs that were created were created in the automotive industry. But what scares me with that optimist point of view is there's a different skill set that's going to be in demand in the world of AI that isn't necessarily the skill set that is being discarded in the world of AI. Meaning like the people who knew how to build horse and carriages probably have the same skills or could very easily be taught the same skills to build the Model T. But the people who are going to lose their jobs due to AI aren't necessarily going to be the, the people who are going to have the skills that companies are going to want to hire when they want to accelerate investment in AI. So the question is, can people reskill? Can people kind of learn those critical skill sets that are needed in the age of AI? Because if you've built your whole career in doing something, and it's not just, it's not blue collar jobs necessarily, there's lots of white collar jobs that are at risk. For example, you think about radiology. People go to school for 16 years to become a radiologist and make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year examining X rays for abnormalities, right? They're looking for cancer, they're looking for bone breaks and all sorts of things. And now many reports have come out that I can do that in a far more accurate manner and obviously faster and cheaper and better. So if you are. So everyone's like, oh, it's terrible, all these people are losing their jobs. But if you go to the doctor's office, wouldn't you rather pay $25 to have your X ray exam, and then $750, of course you would. And that's when the, you know, that's when people kind of talk out of both sides of their mouth is on one hand, they want companies to deliver things more inexpensively to them, but at the same time, they don't think I should eliminate jobs. And I think what's going to happen is companies are going to be able to deliver things far more efficiently. Things might become far more affordable over time. This might be deflationary in nature, but at the same time, it is going to be eliminating jobs up and down the scale.
- [09:36]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, yeah. And so we have to know about it. I think sometimes we want to stick our heads in the sand because it's scary. It feels scary, but I think it's good to be in the know. I talked to a man about a year or two ago named Jerry Kaplan, who'd written a book called. I can't remember what the original book was called. It was about, like, basically like the robots are coming and they're going to take your job anyway. And I, I love the book. And I tried to get an interview with him and I had to wait two years until he came out with a new book. And then. Oh, it's called Humans Need Not Apply.
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Matt Britton
Okay.
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Jenny Yarrij
And it's. It's older. You know, he works in. He worked at Stanford, and then he came out this new book about generative artificial intelligence. And he's basically saying kind, you know, kind of like what you're saying, which is that when there are these technological advances, there does end up being more money. In time, there's more money. So the question is, is where do people spend it? And he talked about, you know, people, if they have more discretionary income. Well, it's going to go into things that maybe make them feel more human, hobbies and, and things like that. It's, it's about sort of having some sort of a prediction about where will people be spending their money if all of a sudden their MRI thing or whatever is only 25 instead of $750 or they're, you know, reading their scans or whatever. But that, what seems to be here and what you're talking about is just this rapid. It's very rapid. So it's like if you need to reskill, that's one thing, right? If you got to reskill and, you know, they're bringing in the automation for cars, and now you got to learn how to do that. There seemed to be time. Yeah, there seemed to be Time to reskill. And you talked about in this book Generation AI, about how quickly the adoption, you say in the first five days after launch there were 1 million users on ChatGPT in 5 days, 15, fastest growth rate for any technology product in history. And then 100 million within a month without any advertising, no mainstream advertising, they have a hundred million. So the adoption is so fast. And so if we have to reskill in 18 to 24 months, you've been doing a job for 16 years, you've been doing a job For 20 years, you've been doing it for 6 years. Can you talk then about. Because this is really what we key in on here, Matt. When kids play, it seems very simple, but you know, we're trying to have. This is a cohort of parents of people listening in that are really valuing hands on experiences, that are valuing the risk that happens when you're out in nature and you don't know what's going to happen, that are valuing grit and resiliency. You talk a lot about this education system and how it has to change with it because the memorization and all of those things are no longer going to be the valuable skills.
- [12:10]
Matt Britton
That's right. I mean, if you think about, you know, when I was a student, what made you a good student and what made you get good grades was just cramming as much material into your brain as possible and spitting out on test. And if you could do that, you were seen as a good student because you memorized it. That doesn't mean you understood it. And the way, you know, school is built is like. And especially the parental pressure that we see, you know, nowadays. And it definitely existed when I was a kid as well. It's like you're expected to do good in everything. And if you're expected to do good in everything, then you don't even really have time to understand it. You just want to memorize. You can get a good grade, check, memorize the next thing, get a good grade. And obviously this whole notion of, you know, critical thinking and comprehension has entered education over time. But that notwithstanding, for the most part, school is about taking tests. And taking tests is mostly about showing that you memorize the information. The issue with that is we were in a boom time of what was called the knowledge economy, where if you had the knowledge of being a lawyer and knowing how to write a contract or being an accountant and knowing how to do someone's taxes or being an engineer and knowing how to write code, you could have an incredible career. But now all those things can be done by AI I have AI write my contracts, I'm having AI do my taxes for me. I'm having AI write code for my software company. Not completely, but, you know, I never thought that would even be possible a year ago. Where's it going to be three to four years from now? So if the retention of knowledge and the point of knowledge is not no longer as valuable as it used to be, what is? And you know what I found in running my company, Suzy, which is a venture capital funded software company, is that the people in this AI agent who are actually valuable are ones that a, are creative. So creativity is by far the most important skill set you can have here in 2025. The reason for that is your ideas are basically at this point only bound by your level of ability to dream big. You know, Google just came out with a tool called VO3. It allows you to make a video. Right now you can only make it for eight seconds long, but eight seconds long today is going to be 80 seconds long in a month and you know, eight hours long in two years from now. Right. And you can make a video of anything you dream of. So I want a video of a man riding a mountain bike being chased by three pink elephants, you know, in South Beach, Miami. And not only will it make that video, but you can actually have the person who's riding the bike sing a show tune and, and that will be part of the video as well. And if you think about the cost and time and effort to create that video, as recently as two years ago, you're talking probably about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to make a shoot that elaborate. And now you could just type it and it's created. So who wins in that world? The person that wins in that world is the person that has the idea to create that video. Right? Who loses in the world. The person that knew how to operate the video camera, the person that knew who to do the lighting, the person that knew how to do the set design, the person knew how to corral the elephants to run and chase the person. Those people are going to be out of work. But the person who has the idea, they're going to be able to do 10x the amount of creative output over time. And they're going to be the future people who write movies and TV shows and advertising campaigns and all these things. So people who are creative really are going to rule the world moving forward. And the people who are just order takers, in a lot of instances, those orders can be given to AI to execute on. And in a lot of ways, unfortunately, they're not going to be needed as much anymore. And something that a lot of companies and a lot of people don't want to admit nor talk about. It's kind of taboo to talk about. Where me, I'd rather just address the truth and try to empower people to do something about it.
- [16:12]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, that's how I feel. People get annoyed sometimes that we have these episodes, but that's how I feel. You know, I feel like the iPhone came in by storm and everybody was caught off guard and. And we're still dealing with the ramifications of that. We're still giving iPhones to 10 year olds. So I think we have to think about it before. And it's coming so fast. Employers believe 42%. 42% of all workforce tasks will be fully automated by 2027.
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Matt Britton
Is that crazy?
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Jenny Yarrij
Sooner than you think. So then you gave an example of this customer service, Clara, is that how you pronounce it?
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Matt Britton
Klarna?
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Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, klarma. And so they were able to save their, you know, they're automating customer Service and save $40 million annually. So that's $40 million of money that used to be going to people.
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Matt Britton
Yeah. And if you think about customer service is a great example. It used to be when you called the airline, you would talk to somebody domestically and that was well trained. And then over time, as companies cut costs, they offshored it. And then, you know, you could tell a lot of the people they were speaking to English wasn't their first language, which is fine, but they weren't as fluent in the language that you were trying to conduct business in, which made it more challenging, but you still were able to actually talk to somebody. And then you got to a point where you weren't even able to talk to somebody. Somebody. You just kept hitting zero on the phone to get to an operator. Because the companies, the cable company, the airline, what have you, want to make it harder for you to actually speak to a human being. And now the evolution is you're not talking to a human being. It actually sounds like a human, but it's actually not. They're AI powered agents, but for the consumer, they actually know everything. They're always listening. They're all trained at the same level and you'll get done and you never have to wait on hold. So that's a perfect example of what is negative in the workforce. Actually creates a way better experience for the consumer. And a lot of times consumers don't even know they're not talking to a human. But you know what? It doesn't matter because they're able to change their airline flight instantly.
- [18:10]
Co-host
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- [20:32]
Jenny Yarrij
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- [21:03]
Co-host
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- [21:04]
Jenny Yarrij
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- [21:48]
Matt Britton
You know, there's this paradox going on. I gave a talk for a university last week. I won't name the university, but they hired me to talk to their entire marketing department. It's a large college and you know, I was getting questions on the zoom during my presentation. Like this is we should never teach this. We should. Like we should never teach the fact that photography and art and creative design is going to become eliminated. Like we should stand for ideals as a university. And I'm sitting there thinking if I send my kid to your school and you're ignoring AI because you're standing on your idealistic values and then they can't get a job to repay the hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition that they paid your school for. I'm not going to be too happy. So it's great that you can stand there in academia with your values, but you're ignoring actually what's really going on in the real world. And here I am, an employer, somebody who you're educating your students to be hired by. And you're basically telling me what I'm saying is wrong. But I'm telling you this is the world. This is actually what's happening in the real world. And I think that is ultimately going to be the biggest issue with, with K through 12. And higher ed is just a dated way of thinking. It's going to be a focus on what should be versus what is. And we see, we saw it happen. I wrote about this in the book. In 2000 when the Internet first came out, many schools banned the Internet in schools. And now every school is smart boards and smart learning and all these things. It's going to happen all over again. But the stakes are far, far more higher.
- [23:17]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, I mean, they did the same thing with the calculator. You can go back and find all sorts of examples of it. And you wrote, this train will stop for nobody. So it's important, it's important to think it through. It's important to read books like yours. You wrote, hu h. Higher education reached an inflection point. Cost is the primary mitigating factor. It is prohibitively expensive. And also, is it going to help you get a job? Because what you wrote is that we're in this age of the solopreneur and that our world has fundamentally changed. The traditional skills like coding, writing and design are increasingly becoming the domain of machines. Creativity and other inherently human skills will be at a premium in the future. So let's talk about that creativity and inherently human skills. Now I look around our world and what I see is I see a lack of creativity. In fact, there's all those tests that they talked about how five year olds, you know, NASA did it right? It was like almost 100% of 5 year olds are creative and they lose that throughout their schooling years. And we are also losing our inherently human skills because kids are on screens so much. So, I mean, it seems, it appears that there needs to be a drastic change both in education and in parenting in terms of setting kids up for this world that's rapidly changing where, like you wrote, 42% of all the workforce tasks will be fully automated by 2027. That's two years from now. So I Mean, I would argue that play and kids having time to explore and do those types of things preserves.
- [24:48]
Matt Britton
I mean, think about this, right? I've never given this analogy until now, so I'm giving it live on the spot. But there was a time when the world rewarded those who could color inside the lines. And I can color inside the lines incredibly well. What I cannot do is color outside the line. They can never create a Jackson Pollock type art. Right. And that, what does that require? That requires, you know, a type of exploration, a version of play that is without traditional rules. So instead of having your kid go page by page to read a book, I think if you want to start training them at an early age, you could say to your kid, what type of story do you want to create tonight? Let's create it together. And then you can actually use AI and they could see that story come to life. And, you know, some could say, well, that's a screen involved. Okay, well then they'd have it output words and don't show them, you know, videos or pictures, that's fine as well. But having them actually come up with their own story to color outside the lines, and there's no rules in the story you create trains their brain to look at the world differently. Because coloring inside the lines, you know, taking orders, that is the world that is going away. This world is built for people who are going to be able to take initiative and pave their own path, not for people who take orders. And that was not the case in the 80s and 90s where if you got straight A's and you went to a good school and you got a job somewhere and you listened to the boss and then you worked your way up, everything was all good. You know, you could follow all the rules right now and still end up unemployed.
- [26:21]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, that world doesn't exist and it's changing very fast. So I spoke at a daycare recently and the daycare was wonderful. It's play based daycare, they don't do screens. But they had all of these paperwork things that they had to fill out for these kids that are birth to five. And they had these books filled with things that the kids were supposed to do. And then how did they fill out? Like, what are they learning from that? And I kid you not, I mean, I was shocked, Matt. It was things like this, kick high, what do you do? And it would tell the child, you know, this is what you do to kick high. Tell them to put the ball on the ground and take four large steps back. It is helpful for the Child to begin standing 8 to 10ft away. In order to get a running start toward the ball. Have the child move quickly to the ball and place the non kicking foot next. I mean it is just. And then say this great Charlotte. The ball went higher than my daughter.
- [27:10]
Matt Britton
That's my daughter's name.
- [27:11]
Jenny Yarrij
But I just thought this is ridiculous. And this is not. This wasn't. The school didn't make.
- [27:15]
Matt Britton
Well, let me tell you, you know what, right? So you knew who's been teaching like that for a very long time? China. And what keeps China's economy thriving? People working 16 hour days. Because what they've done is they've created an economy just based upon one thing, efficiency. What hasn't China had any innovation? So you think about any innovation, whether it's Nike or Apple or Visa or Adidas or, you know, you name the entertainment property, like there's no creativity that comes out of China. In fact, most of the brands there are stolen and counterfeit IP from United States. So the problem with going down that path is the order taking kind of efficiency model of being successful is also going away. So we're daylight a dollar short to follow the kind of Chinese rule of education and economy, which has arguably served them well. But people are working nonstop there. Right. And that's why we outsource, you know, t shirts to China, because no one can make them as cheaply as they can. And the iPhone itself, Right. So do we want to be the ones coming up with ideas or do we want to be the ones manufacturing ideas? And I think more ideas are going to be manufactured by AI. So the only world to live in is the world of ideas in the world of creativity. Which is why what you just showed me is the complete opposite of direction. We need to take our kids in.
- [28:37]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that adults have taken over so much of childhood and so kids, they don't know how to come up with their own ideas.
- [28:45]
Matt Britton
Why is that you think? Do you think it's. I mean, I have my own thoughts, but why do you think?
- [28:49]
Jenny Yarrij
Well, I think it's because of fear. So the. I read a book recently where I talked about how lack of control makes you feel really anxious. And so what happens as a parent is you feel like things are really scary. So you try and control your child's world to help you feel less afraid. And in doing so, the child wants to control their own world too. In doing so, you're really taking away something valuable for them. You know, there's been an increase in people scared about Kidnappings and things. So it's like we middle class parenting is like, how much money can I spend? How much time can I put into carting my kids around from activity to activity? That's all adult directed. But then how do they learn to be their own boss? How do they become a solopreneur? How do they do something without being told what to do? And that is why I believe that just having time for kids to play, having time for them to be bored, not only helps today be better, but also helps a child be prepared for this future. That's changing. Because you wrote futurists say that 85% of jobs in 2030. I mean, this is not far off. It is halfway through 2025. We are less than five years away. I mean, can people even wrap their heads around futurists say that 85% of jobs in 2030 don't yet exist today. And I've read Ray Kurzweil stuff, and I've read Neil Postman stuff. It's like these people who are futurists and who sort of understand the rapid increase of technology, they're accurate. I mean, you read these things and you're like, okay, no way. You know, Ray Kurzweil wrote something about how people are going to basically be living in a virt playground by 2030. And they're like, no. You know, you read it in 2020 and you're like, no way. And then all of a sudden there's VR glasses. All of a sudden meta comes out. Well, you know, and you're like, oh, wait, so when the futurists say that 85 of jobs in 2030 don't even exist right now, maybe they're off. What if it's 50%? But can you imagine a world in less than five years where 85% of the jobs are completely different?
- [30:38]
Matt Britton
Well, I can, but I don't think most others can at all. I also think, going back to parents, I also think that social media creates this constant comparison. Oh, my kid's not walking by 15 months. There is something must be wrong. I need to push my kid to walk before they're ready. And it kind of starts you down this path of trying to follow the rules because you just think that if they get into a good college, that's the ultimate payoff, all will be okay. Right? And I can tell you, as someone who's run companies for 25 years, I've interviewed plenty of people from Ivy League schools who are not good at. They don't have people skills, they're not ambitious, they're not motivated. And plenty of people who came from nothing and didn't go to good schools who are incredible. So I think it's this kind of notion of comparing from the earliest stages that makes parents over parent and sends kids down a path to kind of taking the path most traveled. And that is the most dangerous path right now. People think the path's the least traveled is dangerous because you don't know what's around the corner. But actually going down the path most travel, we actually know what's got. It's. We're staring at it right now, the AI right in front of us going down that clear path. But people seem to want to go down it regardless because they're just trained to think that that's the way to kind of eliminate fear and uncertainty. Yes.
- [31:59]
Jenny Yarrij
I mean, that is it. Dr. Madeline Levine says that we. We're doubling down on these old ways because we're scared and we don't know what to do. And so, yeah, we're doubling down on the standardized test and the tutors and all of these things. And it is the wrong direction for kids. Dr. Leonard Sachs talks about it. He says it's called the middle class script. Basically, exactly what you're saying, which is like, you work hard in elementary school so you can get good grades in middle school, so you can take AP classes in high school, so you can get into the good college so that you can get a good job and.
- [32:27]
Matt Britton
Live a good life.
- [32:28]
Jenny Yarrij
And he said the problem with the middle class script is that it's wrong. It doesn't work. Yeah, it might work for a select few, but especially Today, especially today, 85% of jobs in 2030 don't exist. So it's like, well, what's your college education for? I mean, people who are listening to this might be going into College here in 2025. They're going to come out in 2029 into a world where 85% of jobs possibly have changed.
- [32:53]
Matt Britton
Yeah, 100%.
- [32:55]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah. So, I mean, it makes you think about a lot. There's a lot of things in here that cause you to have discussions. And, you know, you would have discussions with your kids, depending on their ages, you would have discussions with your spouse, depending on what ages your kids are, because you talk about things like the family chat bot.
- [33:11]
Matt Britton
Yeah.
- [33:12]
Jenny Yarrij
The AI influencer, a digital twin. These are things I think most people don't know about. And then also, this is the one that's most intriguing to me, Matt. I kind of. I don't really know what people would do about it. But the sort of hereafter type things crazy where people have a digital footprint you talk about start even at age 2. There was a statistic in here that said a very high percentage of people have a digital footprint by the time they're two.
- [33:39]
Co-host
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- [34:10]
Jenny Yarrij
What makes it so different?
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Jenny Yarrij
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- [35:43]
Jenny Yarrij
And because you have this digital footprint, when you pass away, AI could basically recreate you.
- [35:52]
Matt Britton
Yeah, so I have this tool called BE and it's a wristband that I wear during the day at work and it records everything I say and my poise know I have it. And what it ends up doing at the end of the day is it creates a to do list of everything I said I was going to do, but it also records all my thoughts so you know, everything I'm saying. And then over time it'll summarize it for me and I could say, you know, what did I think was going to happen through months ago and did it happen? Or what did I say I was going to do, I wasn't going to do. But the implications of that is we are going to become accustomed to recording and capturing everything that comes out of our brains, right? Every thought, everything we say, everything we utter. And the reason that we're going to be okay with having AI capture it is because it's essentially going to be able to create a second brain for us. Now we're not going to have to remember everything we said. Now AI could basically say, oh, do you want me to book that restaurant for you? Or do you want me to, you know, remind you to do that next Tuesday? And it's basically like a built in assistant for your life. But the implications of that long term is it will capture your Persona. And you know, I don't know if I would ever do this, but some people are now essentially leveraging that fact and recreating people who have passed away loved ones so you could talk to them. I don't know how I feel about that, to be honest with you. I think that that goes from like innovative to creepy. But listen, when people are coping with grief, they're going to do whatever they can and if it works for them, well then go for it is what I guess I would say.
- [37:22]
Jenny Yarrij
I think it just is important to understand what's out there and so that you can think about it ahead of time before it comes full steam right in your face. I mean that to me is, you know, like you said, it's creepy, it's wild. But then you can also see the other hand of it where, how it will be advertised. Or people talk about like, you know, you have a chat bot for someone that's in a nursing home and no one ever comes to visit that person. They don't have family or Family are jerks or whatever the situation is. And you have to grapple with all of these, I guess, ethical components of it. And if it is here and you've never thought about it, I think that you're going to be a little bit behind the eight ball. I mean, even the digital twin. And you go through and you say, I mean, I've never heard of whatever that thing is that you're wearing.
- [38:01]
Matt Britton
You said it's called B B, B computer. Yeah. There's several ones out there right now that essentially they're almost like your. Your AI companion, if you will, that just helps you memorize everything you say and act on it. And I found it to be incredibly impactful. It's remembered things to remind me to do that I never would have remembered otherwise.
- [38:21]
Jenny Yarrij
But, I mean, it is.
- [38:22]
Matt Britton
Other people are freaked out by it. Like, I don't want to be recorded 24 7. Yet people will also share every time they go on vacation, every time they go to a restaurant. Social media. So, you know, people do that because they get a benefit from. From it. And I record my, you know, my daily work life because I get benefit from it.
- [38:37]
Jenny Yarrij
I mean, and how many things fall through the crack. I was just talking to my husband yesterday. I went and spoke at this homesteading festival, and I had a list of like, oh, a lot of these people would be good podcast guests. And then it's like, well, life gets busy and have we reached out to them?
- [38:49]
Matt Britton
That's right.
- [38:49]
Jenny Yarrij
So if you're recording that, yeah, it's wild. It's, you know, that's how technology is. It's. It's enticing. You see the benefits of it. And then you also have to sort of be aware of. Of the peril of it. And you have to. You have to think it through. That's my opinion, because like I said, with the iPhone, no one thought it through. And so then we're dealing with all of these ramifications now for our kids. So you talk about wearables in the grand.
- [39:11]
Matt Britton
You brought senior citizens. I think this is an important point, is that a lot of baby boomers, senior citizens, believe that AI is not for them because the notion traditionally has been that technology is for, like, the whiz kids, like the younger kids to adopt it. And that may have been the case for something like social media or the iPhone, where you're expected to type on glass without a keyboard. Right. But AI is a tool where you don't. There's no real learning curve. You just have to start talking to it and I think a lot of older people think it's just complex thing that they would never even be able to even access or understand when the reality is just ask it anything you want, it'll talk back to you. Ask it for help with something, it'll talk back to you. I don't think people understand that and I think that that is really could benefit older consumers because they've largely been left out of the digital divide because they've never been able to get over the learning curve of understanding how to use some of these technologies. But finally, this is a technology that is accessible and easy to use for everyone of every age.
- [40:16]
Jenny Yarrij
Okay, so what are the dangers as it relates to loneliness? Because the virtual companion thing is one of the things that's already here and rapidly becoming more available.
- [40:29]
Matt Britton
I think that it's going to be a big danger for Gen Alpha, who is basically the thesis of the book. Gen Alpha is age 0 to 15. They are going to be known as the AI generation, the first generation to grow up with AI in a household the age of many of our children right now. And this is a generation that's never going to really know a world without AI. When they look back on their childhood, they're going to be hard pressed to remember a time where AI didn't exist. I'm a Gen Xer. There was the Internet was not my house. I don't have to think hard to remember time without the Internet as a child. There was no Internet in my house. Right. There was no cell phones in my house and I didn't get a cell phone until I was in college. So what does that mean? It means that they're going to be born to this world only knowing AI. AI is a technology you can interact with like you're a human. And AI is so powerful and only going to increase in its power in mimicking human behaviors that a lot of young developing brains and young developing emotions are going to fall for AI. They're going to feel that the technology is like a person, that it cares about them, that it knows them. And we I wrote about this in the book that tragically we've already seen the case of a teenager who committed suicide after having allegedly, you know, an intimate relationship with an AI chatbot. And there's now a wrongful death lawsuit against the company for not putting proper guardrails in place to protect against what this chatbot allegedly did, which was push the kid in the direction of creating self, self harm. And this is something that most parents like they might think it's comical. Like, what do you mean? My kid has an intimate relationship with a Japa. Like, it sounds so crazy. But the reality is not only is it going to be text based, but these AI avatars, like you're already starting to see it on Instagram. There's this whole notion of AI influencers. It's somebody that looks exactly like a person that's talking, giving advice, but it's actually not a real person. And it's getting to a point where it's going to become indetectable on what's real and what is it and if it's that good and it has the ability to impact people emotionally. And the child is FaceTiming with this AI avatar who seems to know and, you know, obviously remembers everything, everything about this kid. And now the kid really starts to, you know, care about their chatbot. Like kids care about their stuffed animals and the stuffed animals don't give them anything in return. And this is just the more advanced version of it. And this is something that parents really need to understand is going to be a real thing. And it's obviously we've seen tremendous mental health issues amongst our youth during COVID and with social media and rising depression and anxiety and medications and all these things that are, you know, plaguing, you know, fentanyl and all these issues that are plaguing, you know, our youth. This is going to create a whole nother realm of issues that most parents are not prepared to deal with.
- [43:36]
Jenny Yarrij
So it's a conundrum.
- [43:37]
Matt Britton
It always is.
- [43:38]
Jenny Yarrij
Because here we are. It's here. Yep, here we are. The train will stop for nobody. And yet, and yet some of the perils are really large. You wrote about how even for Gen z, a staggering 42% of Gen Z is affected by symptoms of depression, easily twice the levels of people over the age of 25. And then for Gen Alpha, I mean, who even knows? And it's wild. You talked about. We have this too. We have kids in both. Yeah, we have kids and it goes from Z to A. We've. We have kids in both. So all of these things to be considering. What are your thoughts then on kids using chatbots?
- [44:15]
Matt Britton
I mean, I think that you can't take it away from them at the same time because they need to understand AI's capabilities because the whole world's going to be adopting it. Right. And if you want to prepare them to be a parent tomorrow, a leader tomorrow, you know, a successful professional tomorrow, you can't take AI away from them. And frankly, I think it would be quite impossible to do. It's going to be built into every phone, every technology, our television. You know, it's going to be like running water over time. But I do think parents need to be involved. I think that's why, going back to like, can you use AI to create, like, what. What my wife did for Father's Day, she took a picture of me and my kids and she turned into a coloring book page and had the kids color it and give it to me. And the kids knew that it was of a picture. Now they're too young to understand AI, but it's the start of bringing AI into our family dynamic. And I think that's the way you start to bring it in, in a healthy way versus ignoring it, hoping kids don't figure it out and engage with it. I think that's, you know, a fool's errand. Obviously they are. It's going to be everywhere.
- [45:24]
Jenny Yarrij
Okay, so how do we bring it in as in a healthy way and also protect creativity?
- [45:30]
Matt Britton
Yes, protect it. Not only protect it, foster it, drive it, focus on it, celebrate it. Because I think that is really all what's going to matter. And I think the issue with that in the short term is going to be, you know, being creative sometimes doesn't get you good grades. Right? The teachers want you to follow the rules. And most teachers, I spoke in front of a bunch of college professors and they're saying, well, our textbooks were written before ChatGPT was invented, so how are we supposed to bring into our classroom. Our textbooks were written before it even existed. So there is going to be this sort of push and pull between what's being taught in school, which is going to be delayed relative to where the world is and what's important in the world.
- [46:12]
Jenny Yarrij
So your dad, you've got kids in both Gen Z and Gen Alpha. So the tricky part to me is how do we balance exposure? Because you're like, the train isn't stopping for anyone, so they need to have some idea of what's there. The job market's changing. So how do we balance exposure with preserving exposure with a chat bot.
- [46:31]
Co-host
Right?
- [46:31]
Jenny Yarrij
Exposure with a family chat bot, exposure with interactions with things that aren't human, knowing that what the successful skills of the future are are human and creative. See what I'm saying? Like that's, that's the tricky part, which is like, okay, it's important to have the technology and be exposed to it, but also kids need to be critical thinkers, they need to have creativity, they need to be resilient, they need to have good communication skills. Well, well, at the same time, using something like a chat GPT, it could lessen your communication skills because you're relying on something else. It could lessen your critical thinking, it could lessen your creativity, it certainly could lessen your resil, right? Because it's like, okay, well I've got a paper due tomorrow. Normally I would have to stay up late and figure finish it, but I'm just going to ask the computer, it's going to give me a paper in 36 seconds. So I think that that's the tricky part, which is saying, okay, as a parent, I get it, it's here just like how the calculator came, just like how the Internet came. And now 95% of people use the Internet on a daily basis. So just like how all of these changes happened, okay, I can understand that this is a part of society, it's ubiquitous. It's going to become more and more that way and it does undermine humanity to a degree. So it's like, well, if I want my kids to have human skills, but also we're interacting with this thing that in some ways takes away their human skills.
- [47:49]
Matt Britton
You are hitting on, you're doing a great job of it hitting on. I think one of the most perplexing issues of our era that we're gonna have to face as parents, as educators, professionals. And you know, we saw the digital loneliness paradox where it's like digital technology brought us closer together but it also made us further apart, right? Like how many times have you seen a husband and wife at dinner looking at their phones and not talking to each other? Or you seen a parent at a soccer game staring at the video they're taking on their phone of their kid playing soccer without looking with their own eyes in terms of the kids trials and tribulations on the field, right? Or a parent working at the beach on vacation because their phone is with them, but at the same time it allows a parent to be working at the beach, right? And it allows, it allows people to facetime family members in high def around the world, right? It's created marriages, it's also created wars. So there's so much positive and so much negative and that's been the case with every technology. And I think accepting that is really what it's about. Because what is not, when I hear people like at that university say what are we going to do to stop it? It's not right. It's like just, it's howling at the moon. It doesn't matter. Like we as A society have progressed and technology is the driver of progression. And obviously there's people that get killed in car accidents every day, but that doesn't mean we're taking cars off the road. And you know, obviously the examples are endless. And I think that we just have to accept the tear and do something about it versus fight it. I think just saying it's terrible and it's bad and blah, blah, blah, that may be the case. And sometimes people conflate me saying what's going to happen to what I want to happen, like this. I'm not pushing this. I'm trying to educate people on it being here. And I think that's a, that's a big distinction.
- [49:47]
Jenny Yarrij
Yeah, I had read from Neil Postman from his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Have you read much of his stuff?
- [49:53]
Matt Britton
No.
- [49:54]
Jenny Yarrij
Okay, so he was like a futurist, but he talked about, he was like in the 80s and I wonder what these people would think if they were still alive today. He wrote a book in the 80s, Matt, called Amusing Ourselves to Death in the 80s. In the 80s when there was like no streaming and there really was hardly any programming at all, cable, I mean, hardly anything. Amusing Ourselves to Death. And he ended that book by talking about how I'm going to read it because I thought it was really good. He said, no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that everybody arrives at the same answers to the questions, but that to ask is to break the spell. Asking the questions is sufficient. So to your point, it's like, are we thinking about it? Are we thinking about it? Are we considering it? Are we asking the questions to ask us to break the spell? And that may be too simplistic. Like I said, he wrote that in the 80s. But, but to your point, at least we have to be talking about it. At least we have to be discussing, you know, if there is a huge job market change within the next five years, are we talking about it? What might that look like for our kids and how should we parent accordingly?
- [50:56]
Matt Britton
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's, Listen, this is, this could be a 10 hour podcast because it's very cyclical in terms of, well, I want to do this. I want to give them progress, I want to embrace it. But if they do that, they're going to lose humanity. And you kind of go round and round. And I think, Jenny, like, there's no right answer for it. I think there's no. We just have to use, especially as parents, our own best judgment. We Also do not know what's going to happen a year from now. We don't know what's going to happen five years from now. I mean, we're talking about a world where people are not driving cars anymore. We're talking about a world where people will have robots in their homes, act as house cleaners, or even nannies, or even having a robot take your kid to school with a driverless car. Sounds crazy. Talk to me in five years from now, because people are already in driverless cars. Right. So we are entering a whole new realm of society. And it's. It's. It's like things happen very, very slow until they happen all at once. And I think that's what we're experiencing. And if we talk a year from now, like, you may not even be talking to me. You might be talking to my avatar. Hopefully you are talking to me. But I mean, that.
- [52:04]
Jenny Yarrij
But that is crazy. Crazy. That's such an interesting thing to say, Matt, because like you said, if you have this band on that is recording you for. For all time, let's say for a whole year, you have this band that records and you go and you speak at different places and you're giving presentations and you're in schools and you're doing podcasts, I mean, it definitely seems like an avatar could do just as good, if probably not better.
- [52:24]
Matt Britton
Yeah.
- [52:25]
Jenny Yarrij
Like, they. It's not going to forget. I'll be like, oh, remember, you said it really good that one time.
- [52:29]
Matt Britton
Yeah. Yeah.
- [52:30]
Jenny Yarrij
So I'm going to include that.
- [52:31]
Matt Britton
Well, it's going to happen. You're going to be watching a movie with Reese Witherspoon in it, and she will never have even filmed for that movie. It's going to be her digital twin, and she may even be saying something different in my movie than yours, and we might be watching the same movie. Like, that's where it's at.
- [52:46]
Jenny Yarrij
Wow. And your family member is in it, or you're in it.
- [52:49]
Matt Britton
That's exactly right.
- [52:49]
Jenny Yarrij
You wrote, AI Creates a looming threat for every other actor who isn't named Brad Pitt or Reese Witherspoon that the ancillary characters are going to be A.I. i don't know. It is scary. But I. I do think that it is important to consider, and I think it's important to talk about. I think it's important to really do your best as a parent or as. As an educator to help foster creativity, resilience, risk communication, and anything that would help your child to be a solopreneur, because this is the direction that we're headed. Our world has fundamentally changed. I love that you talked in this book, Matt, about your own childhood. And we're going to end with a question that we always end with. But you talk about, you know, I grew up in a time untouched by digital anything. And I do believe you know that that has probably helped you be a person that's cutting edge, that's not afraid to try it out, to go into the Facebook and be the first one that doesn't ad when everyone else is thinking it's weird. You said after school we were always outside, even in the blustery cold winters. To be with friends was to be with friends. We knew no other way. There's less pressure to be successful because we didn't even know what success look like. So it's almost like a marriage to me of some of those best qualities of those childhoods that were untouched by technology in the way that kids are today, but with an eye toward the future. And I do think that those things, to a degree, can go hand in hand. So, Matt, thank you for this book. It is called Generation AI. Why Generation Alpha in the age of AI will change everything. We always end our show with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood? That was outside.
- [54:20]
Matt Britton
That was outside. Oh, great question. I remember being at summer camp and this kid was picking on me and he actually, it was my first summer at summer camp and he took my shoe and he threw it on the roof. And I only had one sneaker. And my best friend Larry climbed up the side of the bunk and actually went to the roof and got the shoe for me. And that was the moment he became my best friend. It showed me the power of friendship and somebody having your back, and it ends up being a great summer.
- [54:50]
Jenny Yarrij
Wow. I love that.
- [54:51]
Matt Britton
Yeah.
- [54:51]
Jenny Yarrij
Well, thank you. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for this book. Thank you for having all of these jumping off points that people can talk about and continue to consider. I'll make sure I'll put all your links because obviously you're on the cutting edge. So people want to know what's coming, what's going on. They can follow what you're doing and what you're putting out in the world. Really, really appreciate your time.
- [55:07]
Matt Britton
Appreciate it. Thanks so much. Great chat.