But you can't solve AI. Power is seductive. AI is way bigger than Trump.
This is Gavin Newsom, and this is Jim Vandehei.
All right, Jim. Thanks so much for taking the time and joining us. And on, you know, every damn week's an interesting week. Every day is an interesting day in the world we're living in. But I thought I'd just start. I was reflecting. I saw an old article literally this weekend from Tom Friedman. I think it was from probably a decade or so ago, and maybe even longer, when he was writing that book, "The World Is Flat," and he challenged every politician to wake up and ask and answer the following question every single day. And he says it's the question we don't answer. And I thought, in the context of all the work you're doing and what this book brings to the fore, particularly around the anxiety with artificial intelligence, I'd ask you the following: What world are we living in, and what are the trend lines you think define the world we're living in today?
I think we're living history in a fairly dramatic way in that I feel deep in my bones that unlike any period in my life, I'm 55, so a tiny bit younger than you, not much. I feel like we're headed into a year or two that we'll be thinking and writing about a hundred years from now. And the reason I feel that way is mainly because of artificial intelligence. A little bit because of politics, but mainly because artificial intelligence to me is seeping into every company, every job, every screen at a velocity we've never before witnessed. And I don't see any scenario where it slows. And in fact, every scenario that I can think of, it intensifies and it has a dramatic effect even if in the moment it doesn't feel that dramatic.
And it's going to hit at such a velocity. And it's going to hit at a time where I don't think we're at our very best. We don't have kind of the best and brightest rising into positions of power across business, across media, across government to be able to manage what could be up there with not the Great Depression in terms of poverty or the revolution or civil war in terms of bloodshed, but in terms of the effect it could have on society. I think it could be that dramatic. And it's going to hit when our politics just feels so fragile, right? You're going to have President Trump there for two years. He's going to feel like he's losing power because the clock is ticking. He's losing talent around him. Any restraints that he had will be loosened. So it just feels like we're headed into this period of really dramatic change at a time where I don't know that we're at our fittest to be able to deal with it.
It's interesting. I think about the players versus the game. Do you think, I mean, what it, you know, I think about in the context you're saying media and in business, the leadership vacuum, obviously even in politics, but is that, I mean, is that because of the quality of the individuals or is it the structures, the system that's been created, the algorithms, the rage, the incentives for bad behavior? How do you analyze that?
I love that question and I'd be curious for your take on it. I don't think it's the people at all. I don't think there's anything about the nature of competence, the nature of the country. In fact, I think that algorithms have been terribly misleading to people. And I think media in some ways is very misleading because people naturally have a negativity bias. And media has a negativity bias in that it just more people read those stories, watch those stories. And so I think people get a false portrait of what this country actually is because of what's on their screen. It feels more hopeless. It feels more trivial. And it feels like the most competent people are not on the public stage. Whereas I fundamentally believe, and I genuinely really want to hear your take on this, I firmly believe the reason that I'm rooted deeply in long-term optimism is that I don't think my view of humanity has changed. I think 80% of people in this country are good people. They do the right thing for the right reason even in difficult environments. You don't necessarily see them represented on your screen. You don't necessarily see them showing up within your algorithm and they might not necessarily be on Fox or MSNBC, but they fundamentally do exist.
But you have this mismatch because people lost trust in institutions. And so institutional leaders have kind of lowered their profile or had their profile lowered. And then in that vacuum, it's been filled by people who are often loudmouths or they're provocative or they're an extremist in some format. And my hope is, and my belief is, that politics is like markets. They ultimately correct. They ultimately self-correct. And so my hope is that a response to kind of the politics we've had over the last, say, 8 to 10 years is that people are realizing, and I think this is true, that we have a lot of competence, but we've never needed competence more than ever. Like you can't solve AI, you can't steer AI, you can't protect against a biological threat or a chemical threat. You can't combat a cyber attack if you don't actually have people who are highly, highly competent, who have deep experience and have studied these topics and really understand how to be able to respond to those.
And I think in all likelihood it might take a national emergency for a real resurgence of this. But I believe it's there. And I believe that if you, and the reason I, what I tell young people, and your kids are a little younger than mine, but what I tell young people is that if you go back through the history of the country, we create a lot of chaos and then we clean it up and we always leave ourselves a little bit better. And that's kind of the nature of us as a people, us as a country. And so technology and politics right now is extremely messy and in some ways like we've created a real mess. But I believe in the human capacity to restore that, to fix that, and to ultimately leave us better off. I don't know how we get there. And right now, I understand why some people feel hopeless. I'm long-term not hopeless because I've seen us do it before.
Yeah. Without taking the bait and going deep down the rabbit hole, I could not agree with you more. And I'm curious just in sort of challenging you back. I'm curious just from the newsroom perspective in all of your history. I mean obviously political, but at Axios today, what in terms of how you imbue that mindset, that construct, which I deeply agree with and I think the overwhelming majority of people agree with, how do you do it in the context of what you're feeding every single day? I mean the challenge you have in this market to break news, to just, you know, and you're writing a book about simplifying, but part of that is also about going faster and, you know, and moving with the speed that is required at this moment obviously in a world of AI.
Yeah. I mean the way that we've personally attacked it at Axios is we don't have an editorial page. We ask our reporters, we hire people of domain expertise. We ask them not to pop off on social media. Whatever. We're one small player in a big ocean, but I do think that works. I think that gains the trust of really influential readers. I think we're at this weird point and like you're living it, right? You're a governor and you're doing a podcast. Like we've got this weird moment where I feel real sympathy for the consumer because people always ask me, is media worse than ever or better than ever? And I'm like, yep, yes, it's both. Simultaneously, there's more good high-quality content available to you and me or anybody of the 5 billion people around the world that have internet connectivity than at any point in humanity across any topic at any time of day. At the same time, sits next to that a lot of pollution, a lot of garbage, a lot of stuff you should never see, should never want to see, stuff that plays to your worst impulses. They sit in equality.
And unfortunately, the only hero in this story, at least for the foreseeable future, is you, the individual. You have to make the decision, which of those paths am I going to go down? Who am I going to follow? What am I going to read? What am I going to watch? And you have to do that against a backdrop of these algorithms that know the poisons of your brain better than you do, and they play to your worst desires, your worst impulses.
I will say having now traveled to a bunch of colleges recently, I'm now a little more optimistic than I was a year or two ago because I feel like young people now realize it. They're still staring at their damn phone like I am, but they realize there's a perversion to it. They realize they shouldn't be doing it. They realize deep in their soul something needs to give. Something needs to change. And you don't really get change until you have this realization that like, man, something's wrong, right? And I always liken it to this idea of like we've kind of been on this bender. We've all been drinking way more than we knew that we should and we know now, okay, we got to sober up. Well, we actually now got to quit drinking and we got to do the steps to getting sober. But my hope is that that's where it leads because you can't, you live this as a governor, you live it as a candidate. You can't extract technology from politics, from media, really from business. They're all interlinked in really like complex ways. And so to fix whatever needs to be fixed, you kind of have to fix it all.
And that's why I really think we're probably at the cusp of a moment where it's going to require a societal fix. I don't think whoever you wave a magic wand and you get the best president you want, you get President Gavin Newsom. You can't really change unless the other parts of the system change. And I write a newsletter to business, to CEOs. So I have thousands of CEOs that I write to every week just about what's happening with AI and politics and how to think about things. But one of the things I try to stress with them is in some ways if the individual is the hero of the media story right now, the only person who can make those determinations, business leaders are really the only people in positions of power where people still respect them if they work at their individual company. And I think all of us that lead people, whether you lead a state or whether you lead a 500-person company like I do at Axios, we need to take a more traditional view of leadership and the responsibility that comes with that.
And it's not just that we get money and power. It's that we get to shape how people think and how people behave. We get to model how people look at, like just look at politics in the last like six, seven, eight years. Not to critique, not even just to dump on Trump, but like the way that the language that he uses and the personal nature of it. Look how quickly that filtered into the White House, then through Washington, now everywhere. And I've noticed that you probably noticed with your staff running at the governor's mansion, like how quickly what you and I do gets emulated almost instantly. And that's true of any person in any position of power, whether you're running a sports team or a country.
No. So you look, society becomes how we behave. We are our behaviors. And so I think it's important. I mean, there's that old sort of, I don't know if it's true or not, but the billboard down at the 405 freeway in Los Angeles that says you're not stuck in traffic. And you go, you know, takes about 20 minutes. You get a 100 yards closer to the billboard and below the blazing title of you're not stuck in traffic, in parenthesis, in small letters, it says you are traffic, which is emotion, right? When you always say, "Honey, I'm stuck in." You are traffic. Society again becomes how we behave. And so, I totally agree with that. That said, um, I agree with you on business leaders. I have, I don't know if you can see them here, but I've got all these damn knee pads that I'm selling on my Patriot site for all those CEOs that are selling out for the corporations, for many in the media that sold out to the current powers that be, to law firms that are selling out. So, what the hell is going on in that context? These folks know better.
Yeah. And what you just described, I agree with, but they're not doing better and they're not modeling that better behavior. Why?
Power is seductive. I think tribalism is seductive. I think we've not elevated and rewarded people who actually show great character. They're out there. I know who you're talking about. There's people that I'm amazed at, people that I know in this town who are friends of mine, really smart people, and they say things that I know that they believe to be total and they do things that I know that them as an individual, they don't want to model that. And there's just something corrupting about that. Particularly when you get to the very, very top and that's why I tend to think about whatever is going to fix this is kind of bottom up. It is like it might be people at small businesses and it might not be people running the big three tech companies, but it might be the next layer. At some point, we're going to realize this that there's a reason that there's certain values that have sustained throughout history because it actually is a good thing to be honorable. It's a good thing to be honest. It's a good thing to do the hard thing even when people aren't looking.
And I truly believe that these things, they ebb and they flow. And I believe that there is a resiliency to us that we don't give ourselves credit for. And I'm not diminishing that. The critique when I say this is, oh yeah, whenever you're either you're privileged or you're on drugs. But I don't think I am because I do spend a ton of time trying to talk to people at different levels of business and I try to watch people. The test that I give is like when people say, "Well, I think most people are," and I'm curious if you think, do you think, I think most people are good. I asked this question at a dinner party the other night, but most people said no, they actually think most people are bad. And I'm like, "Oh man, I hate that." And the reason I think most people are good, the test I give people is, well, think about in a given year how many people you run into that you can make an appraisal of their character. And you get to define the attributes of what you think is good, but we probably congregate around similar ones. And most people say I had 90, 95% of people that I personally come into contact with are good people. They're doing the right thing. I don't see them in my algorithm. I don't see them on TV shows. Well, really? You think you just happen to be the one person who ran into a sampling of 90% are normal? Like that's most people, but to your point, these people who are getting power,
like they're not exhibiting power and they're not, I don't think they're respecting power. Like ultimately, we're going to be judged for how we carry ourselves. And you know, I guess the older I get, the more I think about this, but I think it's such a privilege to be in a position of power where people listen to us and want to emulate the things that we say and do. And I just, I hope, and I think this is happening, that there will be a reaction to whatever we've gone through for the last, it's not just 10 years. It's not just Trump at all. This is a 20-year slide away from institutional respect. We could dissect the Catholic Church, the evangelical church, unions, business, especially big business, tech, and then we could look at politics. It's all those institutions that have declined simultaneously and you can't have this country which is such a beautiful thing, like the fact that you and I are having this conversation, that you're a governor, I get to run a company, we're entrepreneurs, we got to benefit from whatever that animal spirit thing that exists within our DNA, man, it's like those are such beautiful things and somehow we have to get back to an appreciation of that.
And especially with younger people, like you have kids, I have kids. I think about this all the time and I'm actually writing another book for later this year about this topic for how young people could think a little bit differently about this moment because it is actually by many measures an exceptional time to be alive and you have a lot of freedom. You have a lot of power. This country despite all of the bad decisions we've collectively made, it's still the most beautiful thing I ever created. It really is. Like you think about it, like you can say that we're pissing it away, but like 20 years of doing that, we're still pretty strong compared to everybody else, which is what you have to compare it to.
I love it. And I also love that, you know, we all need to be loved. We all want to love. We all want to be protected, connected, respected. There are the universal values. People that, you know, can't stand me, they love their kids, they love their community, they love their church, they may love their Rotary Club, they may love whatever it may be. And so that's, I can't substitute that. Humanity is universal and I think it resides in all of us and that's inherently good. And so I'm completely aligned with your thinking and not with those that think we're, you know, our nature and, you know, there's been plenty of political philosophy books about, you know, our inherent nature is evil and destructive. But I couldn't agree with, I align deeply with your thinking. Not just because I want to believe that, because I absolutely believe that and I see evidence of that every single day. And also see that, why do you think it went off the rails? Like what, why do you think we got?
Well, I think, you know, it's interesting. You know, I wrote a book 15, 18 years ago that five people read about institutional apathy, about, you know, change coming from the bottom up. This really came out of Obama and the self-organizing communities and what that represented and ultimately leads in many respects the conversation that I look forward to having with you in a moment here. And that was this notion of platforms and this notion that social media was going to bring us together, not divide us, that it was going to amplify those, you know, the more positive and enlightened voices and not necessarily create this polarization that we've experienced. And I got that wrong. I think a lot of us did in, you know, back in 2010, you know, 2011, when we had this sort of, you know, do no harm, break no glass mindset about what these platforms ultimately can do, the sort of these armies of Davids construct.
But yeah, but you know something that, you know, I started, I talked about in the book, we went from social, local, crowd, cloud, and I remember talking about going from search to suggest, which was sort of the, you know, just leaning into not Gen AI but AI at the moment and what algorithms meant. And a guy came out a few years later with a book called Filter Bubble and I was like, wow, I remember being at a TED talk and, you know, this fact that we're in these filters and all of a sudden it goes to the answer to your question. I think these algorithms and how, you know, it was seeking and searching us as opposed to the other way around. And, you know, led me to this podcast, Jim, where, you know, my son was telling me all about this guy, you know, that was organizing all the college campuses, Charlie Kirk, and I'm like, how the hell do you know about Charlie Kirk? And it was, Charlie was finding him on his Chromebook. And so were the Tate brothers. And I was like, what the hell's going on? And so in some ways, you know, you talk about the power that we have as individuals. I worry that we're powerless increasingly in a world that's driven by these algorithms, that's driven by the amplification of rage and fear and how much we do get and receive in these devices that become our consciousness. And the power of just a handful of people to determine what we think, how we feel, who we love, who we hate.
I think that's right and I definitely, there's parts of me who share that fear and certainly there's tons of evidence about all the downside effects and I probably would agree on the downside effects. I will say that those same technologies could be used differently, right? They can be used to organize, they can be used, the thesis of your book, it could be used for good, right? And it's not too late. I think people really, it's only since COVID that people have really understood the power of algorithms and really understood that they were no longer in control, that there was something in the background that was really messing with their minds. That realization now is in full. And I think you're starting to see people have much better conversations about what is the right relationship to have with technology. How do you actually find and appreciate the reality that you have? And then how do you reconnect with people? Like I really do, we're starting to see some evidence of this. We have at Axios, we have local publications in 43 cities and one of the things that we are seeing is that as the technology gets better, we are starting to see a return to where people want more human connection whether it's at dinner parties or events. And I have a theory that there's going to be an equal and opposite reaction to AI. The better that the AI gets, the more people are going to seek out each other, seek out humanity, seek out nature, and that could help clean it up.
And actually even LLMs in some ways, if I want to have like a positive spin on this, LLMs unlike algorithms, they have a, their incentive structure is for accuracy. It's not for manipulation. Right? If you're creating a machine like an LLM to be really useful, it has to spit out truth. It has to spit out things accurately. Whereas an algorithm was all about attention. It was all about addiction. Well, guess what? All of us have perversions and we tend to get seduced by those perversions. Whether it's gambling or pornography or just looking at stupid cats or funny memes, like we're all susceptible to that. LLMs could be different. But I think that too is going to be, that's hitting just as people are sobering up from what hit them with algorithms. And that's why I worry if you don't have more people thinking more deeply about this topic, this transition into AI is going to be really bad. And the early signs are awful. People hate the damn thing. Like the idea that 80% of people hate data centers when 99.8% don't live anywhere near one should be an alarm bell. Like, well, how the hell do you hate something you've never seen and has nothing to do with your life?
Because it's a metaphor for something new that scares the hell out of them, even more so than social media scared.
And it gives them the power to be exactly against what they're anxious and concerned about. I couldn't agree with you more on that.
Also couldn't agree with you more. The tech genie's out of the damn bottle. So this notion that you can stuff it back in and we could shut all this down is so deeply misleading. Good people actually follow that line of thinking and we'll only be left wanting, more angry, more distrustful as a consequence. And I think responsible leaders need to make that point. There's got to be a response. We have to be responsible in how we steer the technology. And that's harder than just being opposed to the technology and calling for moratoriums and putting your damn head in the sand, which I think is politically attractive in the short run. Very damaging in the medium, obviously, and long run.
And going to be really hard for your party, right? Because you have like, it's very soothing to hear Bernie Sanders say, "Shut it down. Pull the plug." Pull the plug on what? What are you going to pull the plug on? Like you can't, there's no scenario whatsoever where you can limit the technology. The truth is as a company that uses AI all the time, has for two years, if the technology never got better, if you just stopped it where it's at today, it can do all of the good and bad things that people fear. There's nothing you can do to reverse this. All you can do is figure out how do we now get everything from our academic institutions to our hospitals to our governing structures to our businesses to just our general population ready to try to take advantage of something that we do have an inherent lead on, try to steer it in the best possible way for the maximum number of people, which by the way, I actually think the AI companies want that outcome because they realize that if this thing just makes the rich richer and the powerful more powerful, that the pitchforks are going to be out and people are going to want to shut it down, they're going to realize they can't shut it down. Well, then what happens? Like bad things happen at that point. And I don't think we're ready for that.
I think the minute that something, if we have a big cyber attack, like let's be honest, you and I have these conversations with the companies all the time. Every one of those people tells you and me that in the next six months there's going to be a catastrophic attack probably on either the water system, the electrical grid, or our ability to access our bank accounts. What do you think people are going to do when they can't get to their bank accounts for three or four days?
Yeah, this isn't hugging face anymore. No.
People are going to be pissed off and they're going to want something and they're going to want to shut it down and well, they've been told you can shut it down. You can't shut it down.
Right. So it's going to be a very complicated moment for the country when we hit that point. And I think we will. It doesn't have to be a bad, bad catastrophe. I don't think we're going to destroy humanity in the next year, but I think that there's a high likelihood that something unnerving happens and it's going to require really smart people to make really difficult decisions in a really tense moment. And you got to ask yourself, is the system ready for that? It's not ready for that.
It's not ready for that. Not as currently designed and not how we're operating within that system. So, it's interesting to me and it's been interesting to a lot of people and it's, you know, and you've gotten so much attention as a consequence. You've looked at the peril certainly and you've made a sober case for the peril and the challenges of truth and trust, but you've also made a case and you've leaned in unlike any of your colleagues from my perspective on the promise of AI and you did it early and you're a guy that actually knows the difference between fable and sonnet and, you know, you actually, you know, with respect, I don't hear a lot of that nuance in Washington DC and I don't mean that as a cheap shot because I'm on the receiving end of too much of that so I'm not trying to talk past people but it's interesting how you have as a consequence perhaps, is it your entrepreneurial background, is it just that mindset you have, is the operating system that you've embraced as a going back even your time as a journalist that you've been willing to embrace this, learn about it, try to sort of dominate it as opposed to allow it to dominate you.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think I realized early on, now three years ago, the power that this was going to have. I'm not a technologist at all. I know nothing really about technology other than I needed to distribute content.
And I realized early on that it was the first technology that spoke Jim. Like it actually was like a fluent technology. So it's something I probably could figure out. And I thought back then I was like, I need to understand this technology so I can explain it to my employees, put it to work for the company, but also explain it to readers. So I made myself a lab rat. I've put every piece of information, everything I've ever said, done, every MRI, every blood test, everything I have is in the machines. And I don't advise people to do that necessarily, but I don't have that much to hide. But I did it because I really want to understand what works and what doesn't work. And I want to be able to shape it in a way that's really healthy for my company, healthy for me, and ideally healthy for readers. And it's been very eye-opening. Like it has made me I think 10 times more useful in terms of I'm able to do a lot more, a lot more quickly. I've been able to integrate it pretty fully into our company in really healthy ways. Not ways that ever affected journalism, but just stuff that is, that there's so much that you can automate that people don't want to do that then you can unleash people to do the things that require a human brain to do. Creativity, human connection, so on and so forth. And so I've seen the good and the thing that what I've tried to preach to younger people is like there's good and bad. And what sucks is the debate is destroy humanity or Elon would never have to work. We're just going to lay around and have robots rub our feet. The truth is it's somewhere in the middle and to me, especially for younger people,
you are living history. So just learn about it, play with it, understand all the ethical and philosophical things that we're grappling with, going to have to grapple with. Put it into practice because when you get into the workplace, you're going to need to be able to utilize this as a force multiplier. So don't put your head in the sand. Use the technology. Be ready to be the best person who does whatever you choose to do using this technology like I would have with a computer or calculator or whatever in the past and then take the time to really understand how you feel about it so that we're not 20 years into it before you start to take a stand and expect certain things of politicians or businesses or people in positions of power on this topic. You know it's coming before it actually hit. And that's what we've tried to do with nuance. And it's a tough one to get nuance, right? Because it's like everything, it just wants to go to the extremes.
But I think my core belief, having studied this and spent way too much time with my head in that damn machine, is that it is way better than most people think. It is an exceptional technology. It takes a lot of work to make it really good, but it is wildly, wildly, mind-blowingly good at a lot of things. And it is going to be exceptionally disruptive to every single job. Doesn't mean you're going to lose your job at all necessarily. We can debate that, but I do think it will change the nature of how we do what we do.
I want to talk about jobs in a second, but when was that moment, where was the wow moment for you? When, I mean, do you recall it? Remember the, was it chat that you were on that it was like, "Oh, damn. Yeah, this is different. This is not..."
I think it was even early. I think going back three years like when GPT-2 comes out. It was just, it wasn't that it was perfect. It was that you were an entrepreneur, right? One of the frustrations as an entrepreneur is you have this idea. You have this vision of something, but then you had to hand it to somebody to prototype and then to design it and then to get a mockup to see if it works. And I realized almost instantly like, "Holy, this design is as good as any design." Like a person would do. And oh my god, I can design it and I could even start to create a prototype. And so what would have taken me months and a lot of people was taking me at that time a couple hours, now taking me minutes. That was one. And then two was I fed early on a lot of health information into it. This was at a time where I had really gone down the rabbit hole of thinking about longevity and health and reading a lot on it and following a team and all that crap that I don't do anymore. We're at that age, buddy. I don't want to die.
But I realized how good it was and I started, I have a concierge doctor, right? So I started sending some of the results on things that I was thinking about for myself.
I'm sure he was very happy about that or she was happy about that.
But he actually liked it. They actually were like, "This is very accurate." And then the more I fine-tuned it, the better it got. And so I've just realized all of the possibilities and for those that play with it and say, "Ah, it's just an interesting search engine." The difference is you really have to put work at it. You really have to put a lot of information into it. You have to fine-tune it. You have to be somewhat creative and have new ideas that you're trying to explore with it. But if you do have those things, it is magical. And there's enough people that have that that it will work its way into every business. There's a, right now you're staring at a mirage. It doesn't feel that big because most companies haven't been able to integrate it because you can build things that are really cool. But the minute you throw it into a company, you got to deal with data pools, privacy, data security, and that just takes a while to work its way through. We'll work it through. I guarantee you because we have a profit incentive and we in some cases have a fiduciary responsibility to work its way through. It will get done. And so that's why I think it will have this very fast, very wide, very deep, very profound effect on all of us even if we don't feel it right this moment.
How was, do you remember that first meeting you had when you brought the staff together? You said, hey, time, I mean because you've, you're, well it's well defined that Axios, yeah, it's a requirement, you lean into this, you're not running away from it, from the intern to the boardroom everybody is playing with this technology, learning it and lean in. What was that like?
I do and it was, I'll tell you what it was like and it's a great lesson for any business and for any government but any school. I sat in front of the staff and I said, listen, I know a lot of you are nervous about AI. This is two and a half years ago. And I said, "From this point forward, I don't give a shit." And I'm not saying that to be rude. What I'm saying is, I'm going to give everybody access to the technology for free, and I'm going to bring people in to teach you how to utilize it for the very specific job that you do.
I'm not joking. Almost overnight, we went from unease and like fear to optimism, experimentation, and now very little. Like I mean people have like the same debates everyone else has about AI and kind of the future, but in terms of using it at work, they feel like they have control. When you give people control and you give people the tools, magically, they actually use them and they figure out how to be creative and be capitalistic about it. And what we're finding is people who didn't even think of themselves as technological like myself are suddenly finding that, oh my god, I could do things I never thought possible. We have a young woman from our finance department who now leads AI enablement because she had solved 20 problems in finance. I'd heard about it and said why don't you do that across a company. We have someone in sales who's now doing that across the company. And it just turns out that their brains tend to work in fact pattern recognition. They like to solve problems. They tend to be very persistent in their thinking and those people really thrive. And that doesn't mean that everyone will. I don't think most people will be sort of AI savants but it doesn't mean that you still can't use the technology for if you're a marketer to do marketing, sales to do sales, and to me it's just like the logical way you should approach any new technology within a business.
But man, I go to these colleges, I do not like what they're getting taught at all. I think there's so much fear, so much BS being pumped into their heads. Some of it's real and you should have this debate about energy and. And I don't think people should use it to cheat. And I think you're in college to get your brain to learn how to think and to be creative, but at the same time, you better understand the technology and how to apply it to whatever field you're about to go into. And I think a lot of colleges are doing a disservice to our young people right now. And hopefully they're going to notice that and they'll make that shift. And it's hard for a big institution like a college to switch quick, but they're going to need to. This isn't a 20-year thing. It's a that thing.
And you know, and speaking of that, there was a sense, you know, when Dario came out and it was amplified by Musk in different ways, others amplified that 50%, you know, I mean Dario infamously, 50% of entry-level jobs will be eliminated by 2030, which is around the corner. Some felt like that's just proof that we're being hyperbolic about all of this, that this is going to be the age of abundance. There's this interesting dialectic in this respect about that where, I mean, you talked about the nature of jobs changing, not necessarily losing job, but you're worried. It sounds like I'm reading between the lines that this is coming much sooner than people think in a much more ubiquitous way and we're not necessarily prepared for that transition. Is that what I'm picking up or where are you on the jobs front in terms of more your contemporary thinking versus even where you were a year ago?
Yeah, I'd say I was probably more worried about mass job destruction a year ago. I think what I've learned at least at our company watching it unfold is that initially yes you can do more with fewer people but almost as quickly you realize oh my gosh there's all these new businesses that we could go into or new business lines that are going to be created because of this new technology. So for us net net we're going to end up adding more people. I assume that same dynamic will happen at other companies in other industries. A little bit different if you're in a regulated industry, a larger company, but I think the same dynamics ultimately hold. That doesn't mean there won't be pain. There's a lot of things if you're doing something that's rote and verifiable, like a lot of research, accounting, stuff like that, you're damn right, like the machine's going to do it better than you. And so, you better figure out how to use the machine to do the thing you're doing much better or you're going to get washed away. So part of it will be how quickly do businesses adapt and teach, how quickly does government retrain and get people in a position to be able to take on the new opportunities. So I think there's a way to navigate that successfully.
I thought, and we actually got Dario initially to go public with his concern. I thought he did a public service by saying it and that's why we asked him to was because we wanted people to realize that Dario believes it in his heart. I think he's a truth-teller in terms of what he says about the technology. We could debate whether he's delusional because he's staring at the machine too often, but he believes it in his bones that that could be the outcome of it. And that was a good warning to have cuz then we can have this discussion just like the discussion about hey can it destroy humanity is hyperbolic. But the fact that not one, two, but like 50 or 60 people have left these companies and all said the exact same thing. To me common sense dictates let's listen.
What are they actually saying? What could we do reasonably and responsibly to be able to prevent any of those really bad outcomes that a lot of smart people in positions of power think are possible. All this is solvable, right? I mean, in some ways, like because Trump is like just does things his own weird way. He doesn't get credit sometimes. But I actually thought that that meeting with tech leaders, the end result, if you look at that document, if you're not going to do government regulation, is not a terrible way to do regulation. If you actually do force your board to have a special committee to be able to study the risk, if you have to have an independent auditor and they actually follow through on it, the truth is the government does have ETH already. They're already reviewing these models for national security threats. I don't know why the government doesn't just admit that. They've slowed down Anthropic multiple times, but that's another thing. But like that's not a terrible way to look at it.
And so to me that goes back to that society-wide, like if we could roll back the tape a year ago and you had really smart people across these domains thinking about it. We knew all this stuff was coming. We knew the cyber stuff was coming. We know the bio threat stuff's coming. We knew there's going to be real worries about whether or not you could have catastrophic outcomes from this. So you want people who have real expertise studying it, anticipating this and then preparing business and government for all the different permutations. And that could have been done and it still could be done. It won't, but it could.
