I want to welcome in Gary Cohn. This is our first Unleashed in-person guest. Gary, good to see you.
Good seeing you. So, I'm hoping this all works. I mean, this is all good. This is good.
Well, hope for the best. Yeah, I appreciate it. Well, congratulations on your new show.
Thanks, Gary. I appreciate it. You've been rolling with us since day one, so it's good to see you. Um, you using Muse yet?
No, not at all. Not a fan.
Uh, look, at this point, I'm not comfortable giving up my personal data, my personal information.
Well, what could go wrong? By the way, I have enough trouble managing my life knowing my own personal data. I like giving it to someone else. That's not in my comfort zone right now. Is it, are you really, like, you've been at the markets for eons, Gary. Are you surprised on how bullish the market is? NASDAQ record highs because of an AI agent.
Yeah, look, I am a little bit surprised. Like, we all knew this was coming at the beginning of the discussion about AI. Everyone talked about it being a productivity tool. You know, whether it's productivity in the HR department of a large corporation or it's productivity for you and I. So, the fact that we've gotten to the point where we're now seeing productivity tools, I don't think anyone should be surprised. The question will be is how well do they work and what's the risk for putting all of your personal data in one place.
Like right now, I don't know. I'm not bold enough to say there is no risk and I'm surely not bold enough to put my data in.
Yeah. No, you and me both. I'm not using this, like, it's not going to happen at all. Um, what does it mean to the human workforce though if we have agents like this running amok on our phones?
You know, look, at the end of the day, I believe that AI will be a productivity boom for this country. And if you want to grow the size of your economy, you want to grow the population, you want to grow wealth, you need to grow GDP. If we can grow our economy and we can become more productive, it's good for all of us. There's no real losers in productivity gains.
I had, you know, Apollo chief economist Torsten on the show yesterday and he brought up a really good point that more AI will mean more labor displacement. So people are going to lose their gigs.
Well, I think everyone assumes that in the beginning if the economy grows and GDP grows, which is what happens in productivity, you actually create more jobs or you don't lose jobs because you need more jobs for what's going on in the economy. I mean, right now the employment data that everyone had been fearing a year ago, a year ago if you roll back, you know, everyone was worried about huge unemployment in the United States because AI was going to displace all these workers. We haven't seen that happen right now. You know, even as the Fed chairman said, we're at full employment right now.
80,000 jobs a month this year.
Yeah, we're basically full employment right now. If you think of all these data centers and infrastructure that needs to be built, if we continue down this path and they can get built, there's just going to be enormous demand for more and more workers in the system.
What role does government play? And you've been in the room with all these folks in containing the spread of AI agents.
Well, look, I think the government has a role in all of our lives, and we shouldn't deny that. But the first and most important thing is that we don't get 50 states with 50 sets of different regulations. That would be disaster.
That would be a disaster. Let's start with the worst. You think that's where we're going though?
I hope not. But look, we seem to be evolving down a path where every state's looking at AI, looking at data centers through their own lens, not looking through a global lens where we're in a global competition. We're clearly in a competition with China on AI evolution. The second point I would make is we do not want to stifle creativity in this country. We want an open playing field where small, medium-sized, large companies and startups today can get involved in the AI space and create products whether it's a bot or an agent for you or it's something that large corporations use. And so we never want to be in a position where we're regulating creativity. We want to inspire creativity. Again, we need to win the AI race. We need to win it. Our biggest competition is China. On the flip side is to the extent that AI gets involved in creating products, we have product regulation all over the United States today. You know, we've got an FDA, we've got an automobile, we've got a transportation, we've got regulators for every industry out there. If you're going to build a product in that space, you're going to have to abide by the rules within that product.
Where does this AI regulation roll up to? I mean, do we need a new AI?
