I'm a believer in this technology. I believe that the cheaper it is, the more people will use it. So, even if we assume that models will get smaller for the same level of intelligence, the demand to actually have more compute is going to be enormous. And the reason why you want to have the compute close to you is not only in terms of performance. As a national security threat, I'm not saying this will happen, but it could happen that China or US or whoever decides to stop exporting compute to the rest of the world. If that happens today, Europe has zero AI at the scale of data the data center.
For over a decade, technology has promised to make life easier. Social media was meant to connect us, we were told smartphones would simplify our lives, and now artificial intelligence promises to lift even more daily burdens. Yet these advances also raise an important question: when do tools enhance human creativity, and when do they replace the very experiences that give life meaning? While AI holds immense promise, many people face challenges coping with current technological advancements that ‘redefine’ human communication, work, education, and democratic values. Today, we examine societal and cultural impacts of AI, identity, inclusion, governance, education, and community well-being. And are speaking with Nacho de Gregorio, author of TheWhiteBox, one of Medium's most-followed AI analysts, for a level-headed conversation about both the remarkable potential and the real limitations of AI.
NACHO DE GREGORIO
Thank you. I'm really glad to be here.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Well, we're glad to learn all you know, because it's such a fast-changing landscape. I can't believe, just a few years ago it wasn't like this. So you've spent years explaining AI to both technical and non-technical audiences. For you, what is the single biggest misconception about AI that has actually gotten worse maybe? What are people focusing on that doesn't matter nearly as much as they think, and what are they ignoring that you think really matters a great deal?
NACHO DE GREGORIO
Oh, wow. That's a really good question. I would say that the biggest misconception is this idea that AI is going to take all of our jobs. There's no evidence at all that this is going on, and I can get into the reasons why this won't happen, at least in the short term, due to cost. Meaning AI in several instances is way more expensive than the alternative in humans.
But if you analyze the technology from a more technical perspective, there are problems everywhere. It's not reliable enough. It has several other issues that, you know, it doesn't show any reason why we should suspect that this massive job displacement that we're seeing, the claims and so on. There's a famous quote by Charlie Munger that is, “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” If you look at the people that are saying these things, they are mostly people that have massive bets on this being true. Investors, founders of these AI companies that are trying to disrupt. Of course, they are always in this never-ending spree of raising capital, so they have to be really strong with the claims. But if you actually look at the numbers and see how the penetration of this technology on companies and in general in society, it's far more limited than we are told. And also if we look back in history and at previous disruptions, let's say electricity, PCs.
There was a really famous quote with personal computers by Robert Solow. It said, “PCs are everywhere, but in the statistics.” Meaning, these disruptions are—you can see the value in the technology, but they take time. PCs took more than two decades to really hit the spot in which it was an impact on society as a whole.
Electricity took around four decades. The steam engine took almost a century. So these things take time and there is always this idea that this time is different. Who knows? But right now, if we look back at history, there's no precedent at all. And yes, revenues are growing faster.
You're seeing some big winners in theory already. But again, I talk to companies for a living, and I really struggle to find examples of executives and companies that have adopted AI to a scale that really warrants the type of discourse that we hear by the so-called experts that claim that the world is ending.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So what do you say to people who are knowledge workers? They're coders, they're lawyers, they're people who—obviously journalists, that was already going down because of the evolution of the media landscape—and teachers. What do you say to those people who have lost their jobs or have had to reskill and adapt so quickly? Or maybe they haven't lost their jobs, but they are feeling the burden of their colleague losing their job, so now they have to run on this hamster wheel. So I'm not into the negativity, I just really want to know how we can prepare because even if it's not tomorrow and even if it's not next year, we are biological beings. Of course, we're not AI robots and we're not built to accelerate at those speeds. So how do we cope with it? What is your answer to them?
NACHO DE GREGORIO
For sure. To be clear, I'm not a Luddite. I'm a really big power user. I use the technology a lot actually, and I always incentivize people to adopt it. There's this famous saying that is, “AI won't take their job, but someone who uses AI will.”
Adopting technology is something that I would encourage everyone. It's a skill that has to be developed. If you look at the layoffs, most of the layoffs have nothing to do with productivity caused by AI. You clearly see there's something else going on, and that something else is just these people had to make a decision to either accept that they made a mistake or blame this magical thing. But yeah, it's true that for some cases, software developers, the job is changing. I don't want to sell this idea that things are going to stay the same way. It's being adapted to this new way of working. Again, software developer is a good example. You were saying lawyers, perfect example too.
You can do more with less in these places already, for sure. What I'm saying is that this idea that you can use AI in a business case to displace humans, it doesn't make sense. And the reason it doesn't make sense is because, as an automation tool, it makes far too many mistakes.
There's a thing—I don't want to get too technical—but there's a thing called the nines of reliability, meaning you need to offer a certain level of reliability to your customer. For example, with the cloud, with all these apps we use, Instagram and so on and so forth, we have very high requirements, around five nines.
This means 99.999% accuracy or uptime in the case of clouds. For agents, we're just on that first nine. This sounds great, like, “Oh, an agent is accurate nine out of ten times.” That seems good. At scale, it's terrible because the amount of mistakes that occur over a period of time is enormous. So there's a reliability problem there. And also the cost. You have NVIDIA themselves, who are at the center of all this boom, one of the more senior leaders acknowledged that they were spending more on AI than in humans. So there's a lot of this discourse saying AI is cheaper, therefore I can substitute humans. Not true. And even when we look at the technology itself, it's more of a copilot. It's more as an augmentation of human capabilities than something that you can meaningfully use to displace people. So I will say, however, that yes, I do believe that companies may downsize a little bit over a period of time. Diffusion will take much longer than people realize. But yeah, I believe margins will compress and over a certain period of time, companies will start to make these more. But what I'm completely rejecting is this idea that labor is going to end, that we're going to just go to the beach and have AIs work. That sounds amazing. I don't see any evidence at all of that.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And just the betting on it, I agree. It's not going to be overnight just because of the social unrest, but you raise questions about, of course, who pays for it. Out of all the billions that have been invested in it, my understanding is right now very few have actually recouped their investment...
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...So how will they recoup their investment? I mean, some of these are companies that already have a revenue stream like Google, but others don't actually have a revenue stream. So what are their behind-the-scenes plans for recouping their investment? Because then it gets a little bit more ruthless in terms of affecting the future of work because they have to make it back some way, right?
Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. I don't think they can guarantee that they will make their money back. We need to trace back and see, okay, all this investment, how much is actually equity or investments from Microsoft and Amazon and so on? For the first period of this boom, it was mostly, yeah, I agree, it was mostly cash from these very cash-rich companies in Silicon Valley. However, the cash reserves are going to zero. We think places are already negative in, I believe, the case of Amazon. And for next year, they're expected to spend 94 percent of every dollar they earn. It's just the level of investment is that.
So what we're seeing now is there's a growing participation of debt and debt financing. And that is where things should start to get worrying. The reason for this is that, if it's a technological boom or investment cycle that is mostly equity, the impact is fairly innocuous because it's these companies, right? It's the cash these companies are spending. They're betting on this. If things go sideways, there are still hundreds of billions of dollars in annual cash flow. So they should be fine. Nobody is going to bet that Microsoft is going to disappear tomorrow. The problem is when debt is in the mix. Why? Because first, with debt, you never actually know the extent of how much debt there is on this. There's a lot of shadow borrowing. There's a lot of people who didn't realize they are participating here. And if people start defaulting, that is where you actually start to see the impact spread across the economy. In the 2007 crisis, the reason that it was so bad is because mortgages were at the center of the issue.
With this technology, we're already seeing, as an example, life insurers, which are very important players in all of our lives. People are using them for their annuities and other stuff. These people are engaging in riskier and riskier debt financing to data centers. The idea they're doing this is because they have huge liabilities over the long term. They have to pay these annuities back. So they have a lot of cash now and a huge liability in the future. So what they do is lend this money to other people. And of course, the riskier the borrower, the higher the interest and the higher the return. So they are very incentivized to get riskier and riskier, and they are getting into these data center deals, which are basically financing some of the data center build-outs. And, of course, the idea is, as the tenant of the data center is this big tech corporation, everything should be fine. But if you actually look at the agreements, there are ways for these people to back out if things got really bad.
I'm not trying to call doom here, but it's true that the moment that you get debt into the mix—and it is happening, and it will get worse throughout the decade. If things go south, which I'm not saying they will, they could, I don't know. If they go south, it's really hard, much harder to measure what the impact will be, and the more that there is, the more likely there is a bad outcome in general.
I'm not convinced they will get the return. I have an alternative view in this regard, meaning, for these people, for the big corporations, I'm not sure if they are convinced themselves they will make a return here. But again, they see no other way out. They have to make this bet. Why? Because what's at stake is becoming the platform of the world. If you assume that everyone is going to be using AI for basically everything, if you are the people that are providing this technology to the world, even if you lost money on these bets at the beginning, you're still going to become a much more important corporation, almost a cultural icon, basically. So they have an incentive, even if the returns are unclear. I have my reservations about the other people in the mix with the investors, the venture capitalists and so on. I think a lot of them will lose a lot of money. But again, who knows? I cannot see the future.
Yeah. So you're describing a kind of pyramid scheme that I wasn't aware of all the different elements of the puzzle. In terms of the average person, if it's their life insurance, we don't know how this is all funded, so we see something like a repeat of the real estate housing bubble.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there are some parallels with the 2007 crisis. The difference here is that now the one that has to provide the payment is Microsoft instead of a working-class worker. So the risk of having a liquidity crunch, meaning people stop paying back their loans, in theory is much lower. But again, the moment you start taking this very high risk, I mean, some of these players in the industry, I would say one, CoreWeave, are massively in debt. So what they're saying, in the order of five to one relative to revenues, meaning for every dollar they earn in sales, they are borrowing five. Of course, it's very easy to see what happens if for whatever reason these people lose the ability to pay back. If we look at the AI labs too, like OpenAI and Anthropic, they are massive cash burners. That's why they're going to go public in order to raise, I would bet, a hundred billion dollars each.
They need this extra liquidity to continue the fuel. This is not something weird. Every single investment cycle of such a disruptive technology has been the same way. We saw it with railroads, with fiber at the beginning of the century, late '90s, beginning of the century. These things need to be financed at first. It is what it is. The problem here is if things go south like they went south in the early 2000s, things can get really bad. Yeah.
So there are a few different threads there that are really interesting. We're having that data center build-out as you describe. Europe coming a little bit late to the game because, well, I think it's very important because it's the governance and guardrails, which I'm not sure sort of the situation now with the EU AI Act because they've rolled back their initial aims.
But, you know, there are other threads there in terms of what you're talking about because another answer to this question of how large AI companies would get their money back is going back to that question of the future of work. How do they make that financially feasible? Well, maybe it is through plans of offering solutions that really do replace a vast majority of workers, and in which case that's something that the companies that they can sell these services to, that's seen as an advantage because it's AI slaves—a group of slaves. As opposed to the workers that are costing you so much. So as you say, of course, AI makes mistakes, but you just need maybe a few managers or overlookers to check those mistakes or even an AI overseer to check the mistakes.
Yes. On the topic of Europe, I have been very critical of Europe's stance on AI for years. I'm European. I'm from Spain, so I should know. Europe is very late to this race, at least relative to the US and China. It not only doesn't have a strong AI lab here. Well, we have DeepMind in the UK, if you want us to consider the UK part of Europe, at least spiritually. But the progress largely is happening in the United States and in China. Also to make things worse, I would argue that the real moat here, the real competitive advantage, is compute.
The reason the US has such a strong position is the fact that they own the vast majority of compute. I believe Google is 25 percent of the world's accelerated compute. When I say accelerated compute, I mean AI compute, just Google alone. So the gap is massive, and it's also massive relative to China. But in the case of Europe, we don't have data centers here. And the problem here is that if you really want to own this technology, you need to have compute locally. Of course, if things got bad—this is not going to happen, I believe—but if things go bad and for whatever reason the US shut down compute to the rest of the world, Europe basically wouldn't have AI at all. And every single AI model you use here in Europe, the request is to the US or China, probably the US. So that is a national security threat for Europe. Now I'm not that concerned about the AI itself because you can use open models, and I believe that open models are going to be really good over the long term and more than enough for most tasks.
The bigger problem here is the actual infrastructure. Not only do you require amounts of liquidity, we have been discussing trillions of dollars. You need around 50 billion for every gigawatt, and you need dozens and dozens of them. So we're talking about massive investment that I don't see nation-states in Europe capable of doing. Just to give you an example of how different things are, Meta, the US company, is going to spend more on AI this year than Germany is going to spend on defense, the state of Germany. So it's not like we can just start building this stuff. We're competing not only against the US as a whole but against companies that have state-level budgets.
So it's not a simple thing. Also, Europe is much more divided. We're different countries with different cultures in many regards. It's not that clear that everyone is going to rile up around a French champion. I don't see that so likely in the short term.
So a tough stance, and to make things worse, we don't have energy security. So it's a really complicated situation for Europe. But again, hopefully from seeing all the latest events with export controls on models, that Europe realizes, okay, we need to ditch all our previous efforts, focus more on regulation and actually start doing something about this technology. But it's a tough spot, honestly, and the US isn't stupid in this regard, and they're seeing that one of their major allies is struggling and also, at the same time, it could be tempted for Europe, you know, to get closer to China and access their compute for cheaper, et cetera.
So the US is really trying to prevent this with this idea of the PAC Silica. So they're trying to make sure that whatever happens, Europe adopts American technology, both AI and the underlying infrastructure. But I would think that if Europe wants to really not be someone with a pet state of others, I think it needs to start ramping up investment, decreasing regulation and some really tough decisions. I don't think I should name them here because it's probably too controversial, but there are going to be a lot of those tough decisions to make in Brussels over the next years.
Yes. And so of course you mentioned China and what they're able to do with less compute. You talk about the massive compute in the US, which is also very expensive. Okay, so there is a trade-off there. So sometimes, I mean, fingers crossed, maybe when you come a bit late to the game, you can see the difference of different models and see what's working.
One way is to follow the cheaper or more efficient model in China? What are the trade-offs there? Do we really need the massive compute when a lot of AI tasks can be done with less? And then that's more environmentally stable. Just outline that for people who don't fully understand.
Oh, that's a great question. I mean, you can be late and win. Apple is a perfect example of a company that is usually never the first, but eventually takes over the market. So there's definitely a precedent to that. And yes, sure, if we can take the assumption that we might be overbuilding, or at least the US might be overbuilding. I don't believe that.
Even though models can become smarter and pack a higher level of intelligence per size, let's call it that way, that would actually mean less compute. But this is really—I know this is something that everybody says, but I'll just say it too—this famous Jevons paradox, meaning if prices fall, demand increases.
So even if we take the assumption that, yes, we are allowed to do more with less, meaning we don't need the huge models to do most of the stuff, I agree. But even then, if you do that and prices fall, you're just opening the market to more demand. In history, it's always like that. People assume that demand will just stay the same if prices fall, and demand is very much a function of prices. So when prices fall, demand will rise. We don't realize also how much of a shortage we have of compute right now. One of the reasons AI is so expensive is because there's a lot of demand for the supply that we have.
Again, I believe I'm a believer in this technology. I believe that the cheaper it is, the more people will use it. So even if we assume that models will get smaller for the same level of intelligence, the demand to actually have more compute is going to be enormous. And the reason why you want to have the compute close to you is not only in terms of performance—when we think about this, the latency of the responses of these models. The closer the GPUs are to you, the faster. We're talking about milliseconds, but it does make an impact in the long run. And also, again, as a national security threat, I mean, I'm not saying this will happen, but it could happen that China or the US or whoever decides to stop exporting compute to the rest of the world. If that happens today, Europe has zero AI. And by zero, I mean zero. I mean at the scale of data center AIs. There are also AIs on our devices and so on. I'm not talking about that. But it won't happen. And again, this Pack Silica deal showcases that there's a willingness to cooperate and so on. But again, we saw how a few weeks ago, the US decided to not release certain models to anyone who is not American. It was just shut down for everyone because Anthropic didn't have a KYC, Know Your Customer, pipeline, so they could not differentiate if a customer was from the US or not.
So they just closed it for everyone. But it's a sign of the change of times, meaning that could happen again. It could be weaponized more and China could do the exact same thing eventually. So it's important that not only we have our own models, even if they're open, even if they're coming from China or the US, fine, but they're located here and also the infrastructure. We need the infrastructure here. It doesn't make any sense to hope that, you know, external parties that may not share your interests and incentives in the future have the key to shutting down your complete operation.
Yeah, exactly. And we leave ourselves in Europe open to vulnerabilities as we have with NATO and reliance on assistance from America for various things, which one is grateful for, but it really makes things difficult when you can't act autonomously. And there are all kinds of questions around the surveillance economy.
Exactly, and by the way, that's precisely what the US wants from us, more initiative on our side, especially in the NATO topic that you were mentioning. They are tired, and in a way it's perfectly understandable, of footing the bill for the rest of us. So I think Europe needs to—
Stop this—needs to start to not depend so much on external parties, be that the US, China or whoever, and start having some sovereignty across critical technologies. I'm not saying this me being negative against China or the US. This is not about rivals or anything. It's just about making sure that if things go bad for whatever reason, that Europe's Continent stays solvent.
Yes, so there is that bigger question of AI in the military. As you talk about, even a one percent mistake or a one percent of one percent mistake is a huge issue. We can move too quickly and just disable our own critical thinking and reliance on diplomacy and negotiation. So what are your wider reflections on that?
Maybe you're more flexible about governance, but I think on that level, national security is hugely important to make sure this doesn't become a runaway train that we can't control in terms of national security. And how do we make a technology that just really meets our needs but doesn't just... It has to be aligned to what we want, our own security.
I mean, yeah, you're alluding to these AI safety topics, right? How we're going to deal with a technology that is so powerful that, you know, it could destroy humans or hack the world and all this stuff that we're hearing. I have a tough situation here because on the one hand, I completely understand what we mean here. We need to be very careful of how we weaponize this technology. Totally fine. But at the same time, this doomerism is being used as a weapon for what we call regulatory capture.
Again, I'm not going to say names, but there's a lot of pressure inside the industry to regulate their industry and say, "Why would an industry want it to be regulated by the government?" It's just a way to stifle competition. Let's give you an example. If I am a company in the US, I'm very annoyed, and it's true, by open Chinese models. So what best I can do is just fearmonger about the open models, meaning models that are free to download, being so incredibly dangerous that they should be banned. Fine. If that was true, I would get it. But if you do that, you're basically handing the keys to the castle to two or three companies in California that are now in control of this super powerful technology. So I am not in favor of having this technology in the hands of a few private corporations.
I don't think that it's a good outcome for anyone. I believe that a lot of these issues and fears are being driven by this pressure, this incentive to actually achieve that. On the other hand, I do understand the fears of this technology. I study this technology for a living. There are some things that have to be taken care of.
And it's true, for example, in terms of cybersecurity, that these models may be hitting certain thresholds that may warrant heavier, you know, monitoring and making sure that diffusion is somewhat controlled. But this is the tension. I get that, but at the same time, I fear that can be used as a weapon to shut down AI from all of us and have it in hands of the selected few that increase inequality even higher. That could be one of the biggest transfers of power, you know, the selected few that for whatever reason are allowed to use the technology while the rest are not.
I've heard that argument. I guess my concern, and I don't have a full picture of it because although I've interviewed people from the Pentagon and others, AI in the military or in us, because there are so many data points on all of us, and we know because it works so quickly, it's so exponential and accelerated beyond the rate of the average human thought, that those mistakes can just be massive.
So yeah, surveillance capitalism aimed at us, the average consumer, and all those protections are important. But when it enters a war situation, when it enters the military, drones and all this, I'm not talking about Terminator-type things, but I'm really talking about we have some wars going on, and when AI is in the military, there's a big black box around that. I don't know exactly how it's used, and it's only going to increase. And when the people who design the technology say they don't know exactly how it works, look, that concerns me when it comes to war, right?
Yeah. I mean, we need to make sure that AI is not used in a way that, as you're citing, for mass surveillance and so on. What I'm rejecting or I'm fearful of is the fear of that being used to achieve other means. I'm not looking forward to having AI-enhanced drones. Not something I'm looking forward to at all. But at the same time, what I don't want is these people weaponizing the fear that we have for very good reason on these possible outcomes to regulate their way into domination. I would argue it is just a bad outcome. So I know it's not the best response ever, but we need to find a way to find the sweet spot, meaning we should be able to prevent AI from being used for mass surveillance and other types of weaponry. But at the same time, the way to avoid that shouldn't be just mass regulation that basically builds a regulation castle that no one else can participate in but them.
That's the tension here and what we must avoid. I would argue that the more open the technology is, the less risky it is. I'm completely on the other side on this topic than these people. And again, the difference between my opinion and theirs is that they have a lot of money on their line of securing that goal. I'm not invested in these companies, so I'm just spreading my concerns of what could be, in my view, a really, really, really bad outcome.
So in terms of global AI governance, and I know that you're more flexible on that than others, say, within the EU. If it's a menu of the different governance options, who do you feel is doing it right? Or, "I like this, I don't like this."
In Europe?
Where we are in coming towards a global AI governance solutions because there's a lot of different propositions and actors in that. So who do you think is doing it right? Where should we go, in your opinion? Where should we be going towards?
That's a good question. I would say that the more open this technology is, the better. And it's ironic that right now the country that is spearheading that approach is China, among all places. I do believe that the technology should be open.
And to be fair, even in Washington, there are a lot of voices of people that are super pro-open source, for example, David Sacks. So it's not something that the US has just relinquished at all. But yeah, the problem with the US investment in AI is that it's private, and it's really hard to couple private investment and making money, a return on that investment, with open models. They're giving them for free. But it's a recipe that works. China was three or four years behind two years ago. Now, it's being measured in months, and in some cases, I would argue they are at this point basically on par.
And you're asking, okay, how do they do this? Because they have around 50 to 60 times less compute than the US. So there's a huge compute gap. There's an infrastructure gap. And you wonder, okay, how is it possible? And there are several things they're using. We don't have to get into that. But the truth is that one of the things they're doing is that they are all publishing open research. All the Chinese labs, they are using the discoveries from the others to improve. And as a whole, the Chinese ecosystem is becoming really, really good. I think both Europe and the US should do the exact same thing. Europe should start from, just do something. We just have Mistral here, and we have a couple of neo-labs, meaning small AI labs that have emerged recently that don't have a product yet, so I cannot really say what I think about them, but they show some promise because the researchers behind them are really good. In the US, they have gone the complete opposite way. They've gone progressively more into closed source and basically don't release research. And just imagine if OpenAI and Anthropic decided to share research between them. We would have much better AIs today than we have today.
The fact that we are getting only what's the product of a competition of both, competition is good, but if they can actually share the information, the US ecosystem as a whole would be much, much, much better. So I'm concerned in that regard. I think the US should pivot back into open source, which is what they did traditionally with Google.
It's just that is how it was up until ChatGPT and all these new labs started shutting down research. Research is open by default. So, we should be looking at China and say, "Okay, wow, they're catching up. Why?" The answer is this. It's because they're sharing information.
And if you look at the models, they are basically like mixtures of all different breakthroughs that they assemble between the different labs. So from the government's perspective, I think we should be pushing much harder for open releases. It's a pity that there's a lot of lobbying as we speak against that in Washington. In terms of regulation, I don't have really strong opinions on this. I just reject the European stance of regulating before doing. I think we should first do something, and then we'll figure out how to regulate it. I'm not against regulation per se. I'm against it being used as a way to not progress. You know what I mean? There's a really strong data point that I think illustrates this point really well. **Europe gets more revenues from fines on American technological companies than from European technological revenues.**That is something that should wake up a few people in Europe and say, "Okay, we cannot regulate our way out of this problem. We need to start pushing and driving innovation." And to be fair, we have ETH Zurich in Switzerland. We have... It's not Europe, but you get the point. We have great universities and great talent here in Europe, and we are wasting this talent, and they are actually leaving for San Francisco because taxes are much higher here.
Whatever the reason is, each one has their own. We need to find a way to keep these people here.
Yeah. I mean, it's funny because we've been doing interviews on AI since before the general rollout. Instinctively, I guess, coming from the arts, coming from a background in the humanities and education, I was instinctively on the side of governance, at least from what we had seen. We were guinea-pigged, and particularly young people only experienced social media, you know, they came of age through screens.
And so having seen what that has done to some vulnerable people in the population, and then the rollback of, you know, that was too much. That affected their wellbeing, you know, their mental health, these are all really important. I am instinctively on believing, or hopefully maybe this is wrongheaded, that innovation could exist alongside governance.
You know, just don't do something just to see if it could. Let's see what happens then, and then try to correct it, because sometimes it's too late. Sometimes people are committing suicide because they have... now we're seeing emotional relationships with AI. We see all these other unintended consequences.
I mean, is there not a midway where we could have governance alongside innovation? Why does it have to be that human alignment is at odds with innovation? Do you know what I mean?
No, no, it makes sense. Of course.
We have to regulate to prevent all these really bad outcomes that we have learned to associate with this technology. And to be fair, it's the industry's fault. It's because the incumbents in this industry have been pushing this narrative for years now. AI is going to destroy everything. So, it's the industry's own fault that we've reached a point where people are really scared about AI. What I'm saying is that they shouldn't be. I'm not blaming them because the people that are bringing the technology are pushing this exact narrative. But what I'm trying to tell your listeners is to listen to who are the people pushing these very negative agendas. And then look what their positions are and how much money they're raising. You can actually track these doomsday claims, and they're always weeks before a certain massive investment round. They're not speaking to you or me, they're speaking to investors. Their job is not to make you feel better. Let's put it that way. Their job is to raise money. They will have to say whatever has to be done to raise money.
So what I am afraid of is that people may weaponize regulation by spreading fear as a way to relinquish even more control of our lives to these people. I'm not rejecting regulation and I completely emphasize that it's true that there's a lot of concerning, at least, conversations around this technology, and I get it. But most of this is more conversation and fears based on unsubstantiated claims than actual facts. And that is the tension that I see because I see the technology, I see the claims and say, "That is not true." But again, these very attention-grabbing headlines are the things that people see. And that, of course, generates a lot of anxiety. I talk to executives for a living, and these people are very seasoned individuals that are experts in the technology as a whole, and they do feel the same fear that normal people do. And again, it's all this weaponization of fear that is causing this. But it seems like the industry is realizing that this is not the best PR in the world, and now they're trying to step back or give back some of these claims and try a positive note. But in many ways, the damage is done.
Yeah. That makes sense. You know, I've seen and I have heard that argument that, "Don't trust them, trust us, because we can govern it and they're too small." So then it becomes a way of leveling the playing field from other up-and-comers, right?
That does make sense. But on the other hand, for me, it sort of feels like a perhaps false equivalent. That is one argument for selling doom and gloom. But the other argument is it's very real when people lose jobs, and it's very real when people have... I know whether you say it's marketing, you know, a loneliness epidemic, and yet people are really feeling lonely, you know? That's why people go down these rabbit holes, say, on social media, they search for something that can solve the problems, the emotional needs that they have. So I think that while that does make sense, there are some other real things going on in society that may not be an exaggerated response.
They may be very real responses to things. It's just like a simple metaphor. You know, we talk about our brains, us being biological beings, we're not made to accelerate at the levels that AI is... Like, it's fine if the technology is able to cope with it, but are we able to cope with it?
So, you know, drowning in data. This is an old statistic now. I think it was a few years ago we were saying that data was doubling every two years. I think with AI it must be doubling every year possibly. It's hard to get the statistics. But we as biological beings... I mean, look to the animal kingdom. You know, sometimes we're just not able to keep it all in our brain. If you let a fox into a chicken coop with all the chickens, it gets a sensory overload, and then it gets this predatory frenzy where it just starts killing the chickens. Doesn't even eat them. It has this instinctual overload.
And although we have more sophisticated brains, when does that moment snap for us? Because I see people... I work with students too, and I see them accelerating, and I see a lot of it affecting us. We have climate change, we have overheated, overcrowded brains, and the anxiety is actually real in terms of our biology maybe is not able to cope with it, right?
No, absolutely. I don't want to tell people how to feel or not, of course. What I'm trying to say is that it's actually a positive note, meaning most of these fears are driven by unsubstantiated claims. It's not based on data. That's what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to actually be positive about all this. Meaning, many of the comments, the negativity, for example, the water consumption of data centers, all this stuff is very, very exaggerated, and the situation is not as bad. With that said, I was discussing it before with the AI washing point, meaning some CEOs are using this technology to fire people, of course. And I do talk to a lot of people, and they're seeing a lot of resistance to change in companies, and I get it.
If you're being told that you're going to be substituted with this technology, why would you provoke your own dismissal? It's totally fine. And my problem here is that I know that it's not true. I know that the claims that these people are being told are not true. So I'm trying to serve as a counter lever to this idea and try to tell them, "You're going to be fine." I'm not trying to dismiss their feelings at all. I completely understand it, and my partner herself, she's a creative, like you. And she sees some of the things I do with AI. I'm the most uncreative person in the world. I'm the opposite of talent when it comes to art.
I don't know about that. Well, writing. Writing is a communicative art.
Yeah, I'm good with words. I'm terrible with a brush.
Let's put it that way. And she sees the things I do with AI, and she's impressed, like, "Okay, I'm going to lose my job tomorrow." And one of the things that I tell her is, "Not at all, because if I am capable of doing this with my very limited creative brain, just imagine what you could be capable of doing with the same technology."
Meaning, yes, it might elevate mediocrity. It might mean people like me, who are the most untalented person in the world when it comes to art, can do cool stuff. But people that are very artistic can do amazing things. And also, one of the things I also wanted to mention, considering that you have a focus on art, is this idea that we have assumed that if AI becomes great at art, we won't need human art anymore. And that is simply not true.
For example, this is not art, but chess, for example. It's been decades since machines are better than humans at chess. Like, the best player in the world who can play today is an AI. And yet, chess tournaments, human tournaments, are at all-time highs in interest.
It is, and you can think about other examples, watches, leather shoes. There's something in our system, how humans are wired, that make us, let's say, very inclined or that we aspire or we respect and admire the best amongst us. To be particularly human. Nobody watches AI chess tournaments. If you get what I mean? Even if the level of chess you're going to see there is better than humans, but we're still enjoying human chess, et cetera. So even if AI were to become this great artist, it's not clear to me at all that it just means that everyone else will go away.
No, of course, we will learn to appreciate the best amongst us as we continue to do in the areas where AI is already better than us.
Yeah. Well, that's the thing that I see people when they see the level of excellence, which is not to me... with someone coming from the arts, coming from writing and painting and some other arts that I've been exposed to throughout my whole life, is that I don't feel that perfection is the pinnacle.
The personal POV or the collective perspectives of all those voices that go into it is really what's important. Individually, they say mastery is 10,000 hours, but it's really more than that. It's a lifetime of devotion that gives it that special flavor of engagement. And with athletes too, yeah, you're not going to get to maybe run as fast as a cheetah, but you see the struggle and you see it's a life story that goes into it.
Now that's me, right? And it may be for most people who really love an art form or a sport or whatever. But a lot of people, this is what happens with next generations, you get used to the taste of the artificial perfection, and you confuse that that becomes the new standard for excellence.
And then the contribution of the individual worker or the small contributor becomes less valuable. One, it becomes expensive, so we're talking about, again, the future of work, but the future of work in art.
Then who's important is still the director or the composer, the overall creator who has these agents under them, but it eliminates... I mean, we're talking about, down the line, those who contribute in smaller ways who are not the authors. But all the people who made that possible suddenly become kind of that's the redundancy.
And I don't think that the human contribution is redundant. And I like the little flaws. All the little invisible ways they contribute. But ultimately, when things get expensive, even the art CEOs, the director, the overall, "I'm going to make a Netflix show," and now it's cheaper with AI, they cut corners, and then the people who commission those things cut corners.
So it is a real concern, and I think that the future of art is probably, for me, I mean, even though it implicates me, is probably the least of it. I'm not even selfish about that. But I think that when you train yourself on the artificial, you get used to industrialized creativity, then suddenly, we can't hear the difference.
If you play artificially recorded music to animals, they know. They don't like that. They have a taste for what's natural, birdsong as opposed to a recording. Humans, though, we kind of can consume anything, and we start to accept that.
To me, the fast food of it. And that is a concern, not because it isn't better in some ways, not because it hasn't been able to do more than 10,000 hours of mastery. But it does say to other people, "You're not needed." And what happens to those people, I don't know. Anyway, it's not a new argument, but it is an important argument.
Yeah. No, totally get it. What I would say here, and again, I'm a very positive person, okay? And you mentioned...
I am too, actually. It doesn't sound like it, but I am.
No, you know, I mean, you're playing devil's advocate, meaning you're kind of echoing a lot of the fears people around you and around me have. And I completely understand that. That's why I try to insist so much that a lot of these messages are just exaggerations. But anyway, you mentioned excellence.
Now, the thing about AI and excellence is that it's not guaranteed. In AI we have something that we say that is, "AI can only learn what can be measured." You can measure math. Two plus two equals four. You can measure code. But can you measure great art? I mean, I could probably go in the street right now and ask about High Renaissance artists, and some people say da Vinci was the best. Others say, "No, he was a fool. Michelangelo was better."
Or people will say, "No, I would prefer Giotto because it was more imperfect," as we're saying. Like you can see it was more artistic and less in search of perfection like maybe Raphael. So, it's a spectrum. And in many cases, great art lies a little bit in the eyes of the beholder.
In the same way of writing. Some people love the way I write, some people hate the way I write. It's really hard to measure great art. The reason I'm saying this is that when we have a domain, say art and many other areas, where it's not clear cut when an AI is making progress, when AI is achieving greatness, it's really hard for them to learn and become better. Meaning, what I'm trying to say is I do see AIs becoming superhuman on math. I don't see right now with the current recipes AIs becoming superhuman in art. What I'm trying to say with this is that it could be perfectly viable that AIs will forever be worse than us in art simply because it's not mathematically guaranteed to achieve greatness because it's very subjective, it's a spectrum, it's really hard to measure.
So I get this question a lot, is how do I waterproof myself against AI? The first thing I would say is use it. Don't be a Luddite, okay? Try it, test it. It's not going to substitute you in anything, it's going to make you better. That is one thing. The other, if you really want to waterproof yourself is focus on non-verifiable domains, meaning areas where measuring progress is something that is not fully objective, fully measurable by math, like math itself. And art is one of those. So when people say AI is going to replace artists, no. And you had a great point on this. For some work, it will decrease prices and make it much harder to sell things. I completely get that. But human art isn't going away. It won't go away because, again, for what I've just explained, and second, because we humans appreciate human art.
And that's what it is. And I would never buy an AI-generated picture to hang on my wall. I would definitely buy a human-created painting. So that emotional part is always neglected, and they say, "Oh, people are going to be rational. AI is subjectively better. I'm going to just see AI art from now on."
"I don't care about human art." No. There's a part of us that really appreciates the best amongst us.
Yes, of course. And of course, there's a market and it's an investment for people, so that when it's infinitely reproducible, then of course that does print the... So just talking about money terms, you don't want to see something so replicatable.
But that is not always the human story of it. That's just more about what they want to make sure they get a return on their art or investment. But no, I don't have a doom-laden output on the future of art or AI eliminating it. It's just that there's a lot of small workers who are not, they're in collectives, and then...
There are large companies, and they realize they're redundant. So if you're not, this is an issue. Most of us are born into this world without an entrepreneurial spirit or without those who we were able to model ourselves on, entrepreneurs or people who are natural leaders. I'm not saying that everyone is a natural follower. I think we can learn all these things, but it's not that we're all made to act that way in the world. And so unless you really have that agency... So we have to all learn how to be CEOs, right? And is there enough room for that many CEOs in the world? That's the real thing because it's kind of expecting people to be CEOs and assertive, and that might not be in their nature and there might not be a market for it, and yet we're told we have these announcements.
Like Sam Altman says the first one-person billion-dollar company is coming. That's coming down the line. So it's an interesting concept, companies with one CEO and no employees. But, you know, it's not feasible. Like, that mathematically doesn't work in a planet of over eight billion people or going towards ten billion people. How many CEOs do we have the capacity for? So that's just me interjecting that bit of common sense.
So the thing is, how do we prepare? We talked about creativity. We haven't yet talked about how to be creative on this question of the future of education, and what are the other intelligences we need to strengthen in order to counterbalance the dominance of AI. How do we evolve our education systems to educate ourselves for the future? Are universities themselves becoming redundant? They're facing issues where professors are like, these take-home exams, you can't do that because you see so much AI fraud or the 15-second AI-written paper.
Our whole metrics... I don't even like that word metrics because I don't even believe that's the purpose of education. How do we move from this education model built around memorization, synthesis and written expression to something that maybe asks more of... Maybe it's an opportunity to do more with education because something needs to change there too.
No, and I will give you that. You're totally right. I agree with you that the future of AI will benefit more the more entrepreneurial people amongst us. That is true. I believe it to be true, that AI allows you to do more. But not everyone is wired to be more, and I see this a lot in Spain. Spain is not a very entrepreneurial country, let me put it that way. And most of my friends actually just want to do their job and go back to their wives or their husbands and do their thing and to their kids. I'm more like an entrepreneurial guy, but I'm surrounded basically by people that are not like me.
So, yes, it's true that we're talking about a technology that allows us to do more and do stuff that we couldn't do before, that benefits those that have a bias for action. They ask me, "What is the best skill you can have in AI?" I would say it's curiosity and a bias for action, meaning having the tendency to try out stuff and take risks, and that stuff is going to be a huge asset for you. And I don't have a great answer to say why someone who doesn't have those skills will be as successful. I don't know. So in that regard, yes, I agree with you that not everyone is wired that way, and that could create tension in the future when we're thinking about technology that really democratizes a lot of stuff.
It can do a lot of stuff well enough that it can actually destroy jobs in that regard or reduce demand in some sectors, and that could be bad for people who are not as comfortable in trying new stuff. So yeah, in that regard, I fully agree, and I don't have a great answer to counter your argument. As for education, I have really strong thoughts here. You had a great point. You were mentioning that, yeah, should we be challenging the way we do education today, which is so focused on memorization? And the answer is yes, wholeheartedly yes. We should be rethinking or reframing education as something that we assume there's an AI on our side helping us with whatever part of that has to be helped with.
Here, again, as I'm a positive person, I like to take the positive stance here and think of how AI can help instead of impact negatively on education. And one of the things I'm most excited about is what we call aristocratic tutoring, which is essentially the opportunity to have a single student have a tutor for themselves. And we have precedent for this in history: Alexander the Great, John Stuart Mill, Ada Lovelace and Elizabeth I of England—who in Spain we hate with a passion. She was really bad to us, but she was very successful that way. All these people had in common that they were raised with a tutor, and they were all massively successful. This cohort can be just me cherry-picking famous people, but there's a tendency there.
And there was a famous study called the Two Sigma method a few decades ago that showed that students that were tutored performed around two standard deviations above the average. That places them in the top two percent of students. You cannot just assume that this single study is enough to convince the world that this is the best way. But it makes sense, right? Having more cognitive bandwidth from an AI tutor attending to the kid and helping them with different issues he or she may have, repeating exercises, redoing them. These things are infinitely patient, so they can just help along the way and adapt to the speed of learning of each individual person.
And there's actually an actual use case right now in the world. It's called the Alpha School in Texas, and they're doing this approach. They have human teachers that they call guides, but essentially they are the ones guiding the classroom and deciding what is going to be learned today. And then each kid gets a two-hour block of work with an AI. And they are again scoring two standard deviations above the rest of the nation. And we're talking about normal kids, and they're obtaining amazing results. One of the great things is that classes last only two hours a day, and the rest of the day they are doing social skills, trying to work on this entrepreneurial muscle, building a company or just simply playing with a drone or playing with other kids.
And that's great to me because one of the things that I see with younger people from younger generations than mine—I wasn't as exposed to social media and tablets as the ones that came after me—is that they struggle with a lot of social skills. I see this opportunity to stop using these iPads or tablets all day and have AI do most of the digital work and us go and socialize more. Again, I'm going against a little bit of some of my intuitions. I was saying before that AI is not going to displace jobs and so on. But even if in the event that happens, you can also turn it and see it in a positive note. It is an opportunity to go back into the physical world a little bit more, from a time where we're all so hooked on these digital devices all the time. And I feel particularly bad for kids that have been raised on an iPad.
Yeah, it's a funny contradiction because I was speaking with someone from Facebook. Actually, it wasn't an interview, it was just a casual thing. But they have these kinds of goggles and there are tracking devices. So it's kind of a contradiction because I always think, oh, that would be more screens. But I haven't tried it. If you can have that embodied learning, or maybe you're outdoors and maybe you're dictating to your AI assistant or whatever, but you're able to be in the open air, I mean, that could be a more embodied 360 experience. I'm learning from the world at the same time I'm just kind of talking through my ideas.
So it seems contradictory that it's kind of a screen right in your face, but at the same time, if used properly. The real question is how do you educate particularly young people to use them in a way that respects their neuroplasticity and everything? Because that's something... I'm actually for a lot of these restrictions on social media until a certain age because we've seen unless they're in a family where they really understand the harm.
But not all parents are necessarily giving that to the child, so it is helpful to have some kind of regulation, in my opinion. People find ways around it, but it's a problem when the neuroplasticity and the childhood of one's life, the garden of learning, when that gets contaminated by something that doesn't have the child's or the young person's best interests at heart, that's a real issue. So it kind of seems a little bit like a Steinerism school, the one you're describing in Texas. I think that's open. But I think we can't just let children have an open reign to some of these technologies without that kind of guidance because they might not know. And it's very addictive, too. We know that. They're designed to be addictive.
Yeah. Yes, yes. And I'm also at least partially in favor of decreasing screen time. I'm a big screen time hater, basically. I'm not a fan of social media. I limit my social media a lot, personally. And I don't have kids, but if I had one, I would be looking forward to trying to control this and make them be more in the street and play with kids and do what kids have always done. I'm not an expert on this topic, so I would just say that I could see AI really helping us, contrary to the intuitions of most, use screens less. Again, Alpha School is an example that we're seeing this. Out of the eight or ten hours they're in the school, six hours there are no screens. They're just playing or doing things with other kids. That idea appeals to me a lot.
I don't know if it's just a single example. But going back to what you were saying about education and what we're going to do with the future of universities and so on, I think they have to progress in a way that says, "How can we use this tool to do more with less?" In that regard, maybe we'll see that we start to value other skills beyond memorization. We could focus on maybe, what have you done with that? I always like to say that with AI, it's not what you know, it's what you do with what you know. Meaning, if we have a tool that allows you to do stuff, I'm going to evaluate you as a student for what you've done with all these capabilities and tools instead of me judging how much about 14th-century Italian paintings you know.
So yeah, I'm also a big fan of project-based learning. I mean, obviously, artists traditionally, but everyone, when you make something, it's not just memorization. When you make something out of that knowledge, when you pass it forward, we know that when you learn something and then you teach somebody else, it really stays with you. That's when it becomes something that you can refer to constantly because it's a part of you.
We're talking a little bit about your childhood. But before we go into that, we're talking about education, which is the main way we get at a young age informed about the world. But in later life, obviously the media is there to constantly educate us, and we've seen a huge decline in the Fourth Estate. Now I think the FBI and Europol have warned that, very soon, up to 90 percent of online content could be synthetically or partially synthetically generated.
The deepfakes, the large language models making it difficult for people to discern reality and even trust in a shared truth. We've seen also that can affect elections, democratic discourse and just accelerating, as you were talking about, raising fears and reactions. So how do we... I don't want to retreat into cynicism about this, but how do we protect that Fourth Estate in journalism to make sure it really does share truth and share our values? Because it seems to be on the decline.
Yeah. I don't have an awesome or great answer to that because I don't think anyone does. It's true that at least from my perspective, I'm someone who is exposed to a lot of content on the internet as part of my job. I am naturally skeptical of anything I read these days. I just assume that it's wrong. And especially if it's coming from social media, I just assume there's an agenda or something. They're telling me something halfway, not really giving all the details or portraying it in a light that gets a reaction, right? At the end of the day, we are an attention-grabbing economy, at least on a digital level.
So the more polarizing you are, the more clicks you get, the higher the revenues. It's a really broken incentive, but it is how social media works today. My personal stance there is to try to be very careful of the things I read on the internet, and I verify most of the facts. So if I read something, I will go probably to ChatGPT and ask, "Is this true?" And it's true that these tools are really great to actually critique other stuff. So they will say, "No, this is accurate for this, this is inaccurate for that," et cetera, and it gives me a more credible idea of what I'm reading.
I would say that I believe in the future there's a thing called the endurance theory, which essentially says that the more we see this synthetic generated content on the internet, the less people will become attracted to all this stuff, and eventually, people will stop using social media. Like, would you use a social media where everything is AI-generated? I don't know. I wouldn't. So I think there's going to emerge a set of AI-free communities on the open internet where you have a guarantee via KYC or whatever methods to verify you're a human, that you're talking to a human. There are ways, let's put it that way, to ensure that you're interacting with a human at all times. It's true that this human could be using ChatGPT on the back. But there are ways to show that at least you're not talking to a bot. That is something that we can do. We can make the internet human-proof, and I think we're going to see a lot of pressure in that regard in search of a little bit more truth and less, let's call it garbage, because to me, most content is just garbage, or how we call it these days, slop.
I'm a big hater of... and me as a writer, someone who has all the incentive in the world to use AI to push more content, I never use AI for writing. One, because it's terrible writing in my view. I hate it with a passion. Sounds terrible in my opinion. And also because to me, writing is a tool to learn. I rarely speak about things I haven't written about before. That gives me exposure to all my own issues with my own thinking, and it allows me to correct and have a better and more nuanced view of what I'm about to say.
So I try to avoid speaking about anything I haven't written about before. That type of healthy use of AI is something that we should be promoting in the sense that you shouldn't be outsourcing everything to this technology. And in fact, there's already research, I believe it was MIT, that showed that it actually makes us worse. If you lean too much on AI, there are even some claims that it shrinks your brain. I don't know. But it certainly worsens your output overall instead of using the tool as a way to enhance critical thinking or whatever.
Yeah, I think so. And I think it's about brain health as well. As I say, that might be subjective to say that the AI writing is worse. Because it's so crammed, I mean, it might be excellent in terms of cramming all the data, although it seems if I look at it, it seems to repeat itself and so many redundancies and not to mention errors, but it's not for the human brain.
Exactly. It doesn't take you on that journey that is personal. I mean, at least for creative writing, invented stories or plays or things like that, we have a different pace. The pace of our brain is not the pace of AI, definitely. So I do worry about the brain health of consuming too much of that because it's going to be that we need—brainwashing used to mean to hypnotize someone to believe something, but we actually need a brain washing of the AI, of being too full of digital artifacts and things that our brains weren't made for. So I wanted to go into your life. You talked about your childhood. I mean, I guess, what were you like as a young boy?
I don't know what brought you to your current curiosity about AI and technology and society, but if you bring us back to your childhood.
Also a great question. I've never been asked that on a podcast, so I actually appreciate it. I would say I had a very happy childhood. Very, very normal, very standard. I'm a single child, and my parents were very clear on you have to socialize. You have to be with kids, around kids. You have to be out there as much as possible. And that's something that I believe they nailed in that regard because that allowed me to be comfortable around other people. And also from a very young age, they pushed me onto the English language.
I went to an English school even though I was in Spain, and that opened a lot of doors for me. As for how I ended up where I am, I'm a very curious person, I would say. The best attribute I have. I'm not a genius or anything. The best attribute I have is I'm very curious. I'm always learning. So basically, I've modeled my working life in a way that weaponizes this instinctive curiosity for everything. And I decided to channel it into AI. So basically, I get paid to state my opinions on things. So I feel myself to be extremely lucky where I am.
I came initially from... well, I'm an engineer by craft. And then I went into management consulting, PwC, PricewaterhouseCoopers. But I realized I was not meant to work for others. It's funny because you were describing that a lot of people are not meant to be founders or entrepreneurs. I'm the complete opposite. I was not built to work for others, let me put it that way. I was fine, but I just really cherished this idea of working for myself and taking risks and doing stuff, not in an ordinary way. And I would say my job today is all but ordinary. I have a really weird job. My mother still struggles to explain what I do to her friends, even after all these years.
But I think that's an asset. I think it's something that I enjoy particularly about what I do. And also I believe that my job kind of represents, in a way, somewhat the job of the future, meaning not just focused on being in an office and doing routine work, and instead being out there and monetizing opinions and continuously learning about new stuff. And I believe those are skills that are potentially quite valuable. Maybe I'm just projecting what I'm doing myself and I'm completely wrong on this. But I do think that if it's a technology that really pushes knowledge into everyone's hands, what determines your value is going to be more about what you do with that. Meaning everyone is going to have an encyclopedia in their pocket. Anyone has the tools to do stuff, so the ones that are successful are the ones that actually do something. I know I've deviated a lot from your initial question.
No, I believe that wholeheartedly. I also think, but it raises kind of the question I wanted to ask you before, because when it's very outcomes-based, what you do with it, it's, "Oh, it's okay if you have an assistant," but hopefully if you have some integrity, you don't want to have it do everything for you and you just sign it.
That's wrong. But by making sure that your voice is your writing, you're not outsourcing your writing to AI, originality was really important. And I still think even as flawed as it might be sometimes, because that's your personal perspective. That's your burning need, the thing that you feel is some idea you've had for a long time and you want to put into the world. It's important to you. It's not important to an AI that comes scraped from all over the world and people you're plagiarizing without realizing.
But I do have a concern that some people, when it just becomes object or outcome-orientated, well, they almost don't care about the originality even. Even the originality, the inception of the idea is, "Oh, even if the AI could brainstorm it for me, that would be okay. I mean, as long as I do something in it and it gets out there, it's fine." I just worry about the value system that people have and that they grow up with.
Yeah. I do think we have to work a lot in having a healthy relationship with these tools. Not just on the topics you mentioned, but from an education perspective, we have to push healthy use. The technology cannot be used as a way to outsource your thinking. It cannot be used as a way to outsource your lack of connection with humans. I worry a lot about all this stuff. It's true that AI could make these things worse if we don't really help. Luckily, I believe that most of these people will be forced to not do that. For example, the people who rely too much on using AI to do homework as a student or to do work. These people are going to be hollowed out because the work is going to be mediocre.
I'll say it like this. I believe AI writing is, for the most part, tremendously mediocre, and there's no reason why this will change anytime soon. And so, the more I talk with you about this, the more I realize it's true, and you have a great point. I actually had never thought about this, that we also need to work just as much on healthy use of this technology. And it's true that depending on how you use it, what separates you from being a good user of the AI or one that is actually negatively impacted by the technology.
Yeah, I think it is. I wish I could have that same confidence in terms of seeing how exponentially it has improved, and we've seen how translation has improved. It used to be just dire, but now... So I do believe, I mean, I write. I write stories. I really believe in writing. But I can see a future when it could become excellent. Not the same, but close. So I don't want to say that writers will be useless. I just think that I can see it getting there, and then the value comes down to, as you say, seeing a live sporting event or seeing a live writer.
Maybe now you have to just recite it live. Now I know it's from you because you've spontaneously told me that story. I can just sort of see that as being the market, because then I know it's a living being behind it all.
Yeah. No, that's a great point. I would say on this topic that these fears. I cannot see the future, so I don't know what ten years from now, maybe we have superhuman AI writers. The only thing I would say is that the recipe to get there doesn't exist right now. As far as that, I can say with 100 percent confidence. If that will change in the future, who knows? But right now, we don't have the recipe. We do have a recipe to create superhuman mathematicians, I believe. I do think we have that.
And music is getting there. It's not that I'm for it, I just see it being close, and I see that maybe not everyone is as discerning. They're like, “Oh, well, I don't really care. It's pretty good. Let's go with that.” But that's the way people are. I mean, it's a little bit like fast food. 150 years ago, a vast majority of us were connected in some way to agriculture, and we were making our own food, we were hunting... Who's doing that today? I don't even know what the percentage is. And we don't care. If it comes to our table, we don't care. It's nice. We have more selection. So I want to be really clear in case I'm misquoted on this.
I love writing. There are so many writers, novelists, poets, playwrights and screenwriters who have changed the way I see the world, and many I've interviewed for this show. And so it makes me sad, but the statistics say that reading for pleasure is down 40 percent over the past 20 years. Reading for information may be up, but people are already reading fewer books. So I can sense a future when those people might not be bothered whether a human is behind it all, or maybe, you know, down the line they may be drawn into novelties like interactive fiction, you know, the illusion they're co-writing a story when all they're doing is choosing A, B or C. And it makes me very sad.
So I'm not saying it's the end. I just, fingers crossed, I'll always want the human. But anyway, I want to get more into your childhood memories.
If we had superhuman writers, again, going back to the chess example, Larry's example, I think, and you were saying the live example. I think people will search for that. Even if AIs become really, really good at writing, I still believe people are going to cherish the imperfections in the characteristics of human writing.
No, I believe it 100 percent. But when it's just having a lot of conversations, and also my direct family and upbringing with the artists, the filmmakers, the dancers and stuff. Well, dancing is a bit hard. You want to watch robot dancing to really understand what bad is. It is bad.
But most of those... Gradually, I've seen the evolution from before the rollout of AI: "It's not going to happen." A year later, "Ah, it's not... Music is not going to be..." And I hear their responses, and then it gets to be that the people who've been most positive are not people of our age. It's even older, and what they're saying is, “Oh, it's getting good, and I'm glad I got all my stuff done before. Now I have my body of work behind me.” So basically, they're in their 70s and 80s, and they're grateful that they did it before. So that's just my feedback from talking to hundreds of these creatives.
The last thing I would say with this topic, and we can end this part here, is that even if all these fears materialize, there's also what I was saying before about costs. For the longest time, we thought AI was going to be cheaper than humans right now, and the reality is that it's not.
And a lot of the technology we're using right now in our hands, like ChatGPT and so on, it's very subsidized, meaning they are losing money on most of these products. So even if we do get into a world where AI is better than us in most stuff, it's going to be a long time before we see that at scale because the economics won't be there for quite some time.
Well, that's great. They'll pull the plug on things, and then we'll have to... Those who know, those who've put their 10,000 hours in, who've been makers and creators for years before, well, then we'll be okay. But anyone else who just learned to do it by pressing a button, well, they'll be back to where they were.
But anyway, just a little bit, these are kind of personal questions, but I think that they're really important when we think about AI and the future and that frontier. What were some of your early experiences? What was the first thing of beauty that you remember experiencing in the world that woke you up to that?
As a counterpoint to AI. I'm thinking about nature. For you, what awakens curiosity and learning.
Hmm. I have a weird response to that. I'm going the wrong way around. I'm learning to appreciate nature, for example, more and more as I get older. My family here in Spain is from a rural area here in Spain. So I live in Madrid. I live surrounded by concrete. And every time I go down there, I feel different. And I have a dog, and I go on very long walks in the countryside, let's call it that way, and it feels incredibly beautiful and something that I actually cherish way more. So you asked me what is the first thing I see beautiful.
I would say it the wrong way around. I don't have any particular memory in that regard. To the contrary. Now, the older I get, the more I appreciate the simple things in life, and nature is a big one.
Yeah, sometimes we take it for granted because it's all around you. You can't see it, but then when you go to the well, there's so much beauty. I mean, the art collections in Madrid, oh la la. So, I mean, they're supreme. I could just spend a week at the Prado. But yeah, so there's a lot of beauty there in the cities too.
And now that you mentioned it, I would say that, yeah, one of my earliest memories, in fact, is going with my uncles to the Prado, and I'm a really big art fan. Perhaps because I appreciate how bad I am to the point that I'm in awe at what some other people were capable of doing. My partner lives in Washington, so I travel a lot there, and I went to the National Gallery there and there was a Da Vinci there. So I'm a great art appreciator, let's call it that way. So yeah, I would say I remember, and I do remember this when I was quite young, going with my uncles to the Prado and seeing Las Meninas and so on. That I do remember. So that could be a candidate for your previous question. I would say so.
Yes. Well, of course, certain Spanish artists have really gotten into not only the beauty, but also being able to face the psychology and also present, talk about showing us war. Yes. And then of course you mentioned Velazquez. So it's interesting that you mentioned Da Vinci because he's that artist who is on the cusp of science, who it's hard to believe he was so far ahead of himself. I wonder what he would've made of AI.
Wow. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm more of a Michelangelo fan, I would say. But there's always this debate of who is the best. I'm leaning more on Michelangelo. But yeah, I mean, just imagine what these people, great masters of art, would be capable of doing with such a technology. Who knows? Maybe they would despise it. There is a chance that they would not like it at all. So who knows?
Well, yeah, there's that pride of doing it for yourself. It is an interesting question. I am also on the side of Michelangelo in terms of full scope because I think Da Vinci really kind of had a... He was at odds with being an artist. His output wasn't huge, but once he figured out his formula, it was like, “Okay, now I know my formula.”
“I don't have to do that many more paintings. Let's be an engineer. Let's think about flying machines. Let's think...” So his curiosity, I think being an artist, and also like Picasso, he had an infinite curiosity and reinvented things. So I think that that's interesting. I mean, of all the artists, Da Vinci was one perhaps compared to any other visual artist who really helped explain
The writing becomes almost as important. The story, this is what you were talking about, becomes as important as the thing itself. The work itself is not everything. It's the life behind it.
I completely agree on that, and it reminds me of a conversation I have with my own partner. She's more of appreciating the actual art. I am more someone who appreciates the history behind the painting. So yeah, absolutely on point on that, yes.
Yeah. You talk about how you grew up in a rural area. I mean, I'm wondering what some of the things that your parents... I mean, when I think about Spain also, there's appreciation, also in France, for the quotidien, for the fabric of everyday life, and the slowness of time, and relationships, and the long midday meal, and just the art of life, the joie de vivre.
So I'm wondering, what are some of the things that your parents and your community taught you, and teachers in your life taught you to care about, taught you to love? Yeah. It's true that I was raised in Barcelona, so I was raised in the big city. But my family, the rest of my family, is from the countryside. So I spent most of my summers there. So yeah, I was exposed to both. And perhaps for that reason, I can see what you mean.
And I see it even today, that the people in the cities move at a different speed than those in rural areas. When I talk to my friends from those areas, it's what you're describing. It's a very laissez-faire, very calm, no annoying society—perhaps no ambition to achieve great things in life beyond just being who you are and being fine with yourself, having your family, having food on the table and it's a slower... I'm certainly envious from what you can tell of their approach. I am not that way at all. Even though, yes, I have this Spanish blood in my surrounding, I'm filled with people that are more focused on, especially when you compare with the American way of thinking.
We have to work. I have to go become rich. I have to be successful, and so on. The Spanish people are nothing like that, and that really shows with the contrast when I travel a lot to the United States. So I see both worlds a lot, and I don't know what's better.
I would say one is probably better to make more money, of course. But I try to fall in between both. I do work quite a bit. I'm very, I would say, ambitious too. But when I talk to my parents and when I talk to my family, it helps to ground myself and say, “Okay, not everything in life is about being at the edge of the technology, and maybe I could just chill down for a few weeks and just eat a lot, eat healthy food, drink a pacharán and be around my family and friends.” And you learn to see both worlds a lot, and that is really helpful. But I have to acknowledge that, and I would be lying to you if it's otherwise. I tend to be quite ambitious and not like the average Spaniard in that regard. Yeah.
Yeah. It's important, but it also is important for those moments, as we say, **we need the empty spaces for the inspiration.**If we're constantly racing, we can't even appreciate what we've arrived at because we're now going on to the next destination. There's a funny little story I'll tell you. My friend, he was traveling around France and he was French, so he decided they would go and surprise his parents at the end of their trip.
So they planned it. They would book this thing at a hotel and a very nice restaurant, and they'd set it up. He knew a month in advance he was going to surprise them. And when he arrived, they took his parents out and his dad looked so disappointed and he says, “Well, why?”
“We did all this stuff for you, and we surprised you.” And he says, “Yes, but you knew this for a month, and you deprived me of the pleasure of waiting.” And this is a very French and maybe it's also a very Spanish thing, very European, the pleasure of waiting. This is something AI, I think, does not understand. And perhaps America in general, if you generalize, does not understand. Because he told that story to his American friend, and his American businessman friend said, “Why wait?”
Now, people will think that you're exaggerating, you're not exaggerating. I think the cultural gap in this regard is massive. And I see it a lot because my partner has family there too, and it's just a different mentality. I'm not saying better or worse. I'm not trying to position myself in that regard. But for sure different, and the way we Europeans treat life is different. Yeah.
So obviously we are both living in cities that have huge tourism. I'm in Paris, you're from Barcelona, and live in Madrid. Many people come to Europe for that change of pace. And as I was listening to you about the slowness of and the hesitation for valid reasons of the EU to really go full heart into AI without thinking.
Maybe that is a little sweet spot that we could... If we're not going to get there sooner, we could be the detox center. So you're all going so fast that now your brains are fried, and you don't even know how to... Then you come here, and then it'll be like this is an AI-free zone. Or this is a trusted source zone. Maybe we won't get there faster, but if we can create wellness depots, that could be an alternative. It's a big market, wellness. It's a big market, tourism. We know that if there was no tourism in Paris, it would just stop. So I'm just saying maybe that's another way. We go there, but we don't have to get there as fast. And then when they're tired and exhausted, they can come back to Europe.
In some ways, it is already happening and Europe is kind of evolving into the world's museum. So we're kind of seeing that. My concern in that regard, I would be totally fine if we become the tech center of the world as long as the economy continues to grow. My problem here is that with globalization, we are exposed to our economies in particular, for example, China, and the impact that we're seeing is massive. So for example, this past week, Volkswagen, one of the largest German car manufacturers, announced 100,000 layoffs. I don't know what percentage of the company it is, but we're talking about 100,000 people are going to be laid off. And I think that's a sign of the times. Our decisions to not commit to progress are catching up to us, and I'm particularly concerned because we in Europe have big welfare states.
What can I tell you? I mean, you're living in France, the largest welfare state in the world, probably. And Spain isn't particularly very behind in that regard. You need to make money to pay for that welfare state. And I believe European welfare states are the crown of Europe, and I think we could be at risk of losing them.
And the chancellor of Germany, Merz, already said that there is the need to perform very strong reforms to the welfare states because it's not sustainable. And the question here is, can you make our current state of living and quality of life sustainable if we decide to not compete? That is kind of my concern. I would be totally okay with outsourcing AI to the US and China, particularly the US, which is where we seem to be heading, as long as we can maintain our source of life and quality of life. But can we? That's the question. Yeah, France and Spain have tourism.
We're the two largest countries in tourism by a long shot. The third one is the US, but we're talking about 20 to 30 million people more for each one of us. So we are probably more resistant to this change. But countries like Germany, more reliant on industrialization and having strong industry, if it becomes at risk we decide to not compete. Germany decided to give their entire car manufacturing industry to China. They just served it to them on a silver platter. That is the type of mistake that really risks Europe stopping being Europe.
What I mean by Europe stopping being Europe is about the welfare states. What makes Europe great is the fact that no one is left behind. There's good social security, there are enough jobs. We're not great at that, but there are jobs. People can live well here, and they're not forced to move at 200 percent speed like in the United States. That is great, but if we decide to stop progressing, how are we going to pay for that? That's kind of the question that bugs me, and it has bugged me for a while, because I don't know how much you've looked into the numbers, particularly in Spain. And just to give you a small data point for your listeners to reflect on, for every ten euros my dad gets in his pension, it is paid with debt. So Spain is borrowing money and using that money to pay part of my dad's pension.
Two and a half euros out of the ten are a mixture between debt and what we call transfers between the administration, the IRS and Social Security. Meaning Social Security is not sustainable to the point that it has to borrow money from the IRS, from the taxpayer money that would go into social spending, healthcare, education stuff, and instead use it to pay pensions. So you can either grow your way out of this problem, which is what the US is trying to do, and China, or you can cut spending. I don't think the last one is something that anyone wants to hear. So I am concerned that we've decided we're not going to grow, we're going to just let others do the progress. We'll regulate. That doesn't scale, that doesn't grow, and when that happens, the alternative is going to be a really painful decision, and I don't want to be there when that happens. Let's put it that way.
No, you're right to be proactive and we can't just avoid the future. We have to look towards it. But another thing that you open up the question when people are feeling the downsizing of companies and they're seeing the loss of their jobs, it has been proposed that we'll have a universal basic income, depending on what country you're in. I mean, but also who pays for that? Because if you already have ailing social welfare systems, how does that work? I mean, who is putting out interesting solutions to that?
No, absolutely. And if we put ourselves in a situation where AI generates and accrues most of the value, we have to tax the living daylights out of them. And that's totally fine. I mean, I get it. We have a 100 trillion economy in the world. If AI becomes 80 percent of that, of course, who's going to pay for all these services?
Of course, we're going to tax these companies. And in fact, these companies are the first ones to acknowledge that it would be a good place to be. We can also discuss UBI, universal basic income. Of course, if that's sustainable, I'm all for it. There's some evidence and research to suggest that people become quite unhappy when they are just out of purpose, receiving money just to eat. I think—and I would kill myself. I'm exaggerating, but I would dread with a passion not having a purpose in life. Maybe it's just me, but I think that, and what research sort of suggests is that people do not appreciate that way of living. Maybe I'm wrong. It's just that I don't think we have a clear-cut answer for this.
And the reason for this is that, first, we are not that near, and second, as I said in this podcast previously, it will take much longer than we realize. Diffusion is much slower, and even if the technology becomes great, it has a lot of constraints: power and supply chain capabilities.
If China decides to block Taiwan, everything goes to zero tomorrow. So there's a lot of things that could go wrong and a lot of evidence in history to suggest that the diffusion of this technology and real impact on the economy will take much longer. And every single customer I have and executive I talk to, I ask him or her the same question: Are you seeing AI really penetrating your business to the point of being essential?
And the answer is always no, at least today. I cannot see the future. But the evidence right now does not point to a fast diffusion. So we have time to think about this problem and see how we relate to it. I believe the future is going to be taxation on this stuff.
If it really becomes a ten trillion dollar industry, of course we need to find ways to tax this and get the benefits for the rest of us, especially if we decide to just hand the keys of the castle to three or four people as some people in the US are trying. But again, what I don't want is for Europe to say, “Are we going to make these decisions before we actually commit to the technology?” I would prefer our leaders here in Europe to actually try and push for adoption and a more European effort in that regard, and then we can think about taxation. But the real threat for us right now is what we're hearing, the threat to the welfare states. This threat is very real, and no politicians in their right minds are mentioning this at all because it's an election-losing policy just to think about cutting welfare states.
But it's like the elephant in the room, right? It's there. Everyone can see it, or at least everyone who sees the numbers can see it, and no one is addressing it. There are two options. Do we grow our way out of the debt problem that we have so we can continue our welfare states, or we go the other way? And the problem with Europe is that everyone agrees we should go with the first option, but nobody is doing anything.
And it can be just acting too late. So even once you get the solution, then it just it's not good to be...
...You mentioned Europe as a museum, and part of what we're doing here at The Creative Process is we're building little museums of memory. What you've learned and what has been really important to you, and I think each life can be like a work of art. So speaking of, you have an unlimited... You have a Prado, your own private Prado. What are some of... And you can put anything in it because it's pretty big, right? Build for us your little museum of memory, of the people, the places, the arts, the sciences and the things that made you, moved you, made you think and have given your life meaning. What would you put in your personal museum of memory, and what do you think broadly is important for people to know and preserve?
Oh, wow. Well, I would put my partner. An easy answer. I'm normally used to the technical questions that nobody wants to ask. I think losing connection at incredibly fast speeds. I'm always thinking in the future. I'm very concerned that, as you were saying, we're seeing more and more synthetic generated content and things in the world, and that we might be losing the human touch in a lot of things.
I think you mentioned this explicitly today. And I fear that if we over-commit so much on an AI, we will lose the human touch and all this stuff. So if you were asking me what I would put in the museum, I will tell you what I definitely would not put in the museum is AI-generated stuff or memories.
I am someone who works in AI. My job is AI. I am paid to be at the cusp of AI, and I cannot begin to explain how much I dread a lot of the AI-generated stuff. It's borderline hatred. So if anything, if we're at risk of losing it all, if knowledge could disappear and so on, I would try to make sure that if we have to keep something, it's the human part and try to avoid putting anything AI-generated there. And again, I don't want to spread hatred towards AI. I just want to make a call for more healthy use of this technology. And if you get into LinkedIn, for example, and you read everything is AI-generated, that to me has created a level of rejection against that social network that I would probably say a bad word right now how I feel about it. So I fear that everything is going to become that way and I hate it.
For me, AI is a tool. It's not a friend. It's not a lover and will never be anything like that. To me, it's a tool. I will never say he or she. To me it's always it, and I do that on purpose because I don't want this technology to hijack my brain because we are desperate for connection.
We're desperate to anthropomorphize these things. So to me, I always try to focus on this being a tool, which I'm still going to use. I'm still going to try to reap the benefits of this technology.
But at the same time, I want to set boundaries. I want to make sure that whatever I do with technology, I remember that at the end of the day, it's a bunch of mushroom multiplications. It's a bunch of binary files in a server in Arizona. It's not my friend, and it will never be. And I believe that if we take this stance and be real with this technology in the sense that it's a tool, it's not something that is going to be our friend ever or anything like that, we will set boundaries and the world will be a better place. But it's true, and you had a great point today on that, that I think a lot of people in the world do not have that kind of relationship with the technology and are more inclined to give them a position in their lives that could be in the long run unhealthy.
It's about having that and at what stage we were and what age we were when we encountered it, and some people are more skeptical or naturally regard things with a critical mind, and some people are just accepting. And it doesn't mean that they're naive. Sometimes it's just for convenience. But I do want to ask, I'm not someone who gets drawn into AI, but I am curious. You talked about AI tutors. You talked about being able to really customize an experience. So this is a little research thing I'm doing in the scientific research realm that's not for industrial use, more individual, almost one-on-one nuanced AI applications where, I'm not saying you'd have an AI as a friend, but are there situations where that could be, even though it's semi-industrial, but it's so trained just on you and what you've shared with it, like a partnering that way? Even obviously you put up your psychological boundaries. That it's not dangerous or it can be more like a friend, not that you're putting your emotions into it, but because it's so trained on you. It's not trained on everything, you know what I mean? It's trained on you or just things you've given it. I don't know those use cases?
I believe that is the future of where technology is heading because as you're describing, these people that are trying to make money off all of this know that the more personalized these AIs become, the better they become to us and more essential and so on. So that is definitely the path they're heading towards. There are some products that are more focused on the human part. I mean, trying to have a closer relationship with you instead of helping you do the homework, helping you with your issues in life. And there are some companies like, well, it was acquired by Google, but Character AI does this.
There are some companies that are more focused on looking for that connection. The problem is, I don't want to come across as a hater, but I am very scared how people would react to that type of AIs eventually, the sort of dependence, reaching a point where they become dependent on them. I don't know if the answer is regulation. I don't know. I know I would be fine with them because I am someone who can rationalize this a lot, and the thing is that I know how they work internally. So for me, it's very easy to rationalize that this is not a human, this is math, okay? So I don't want to be unfair and say I'm just better than you.
No. I'm at an advantage in that I know the technology, therefore, I can rationalize what I'm doing every time I interact with it. So I think I would be good with this type of technology and I wouldn't get hooked on it and so on. But I do feel that a lot of people are perfectly wired and primed to be—I think the term we use in AI is one-shotted, becoming... this term of LLM psychosis, this idea that some people just at a point lose connection with reality. They become so embroiled and deep into these conversations with this technology that they lose connection in some sort of way.
And I read a lot of research, and that's why I'm partially concerned with this. A lot of the research behind some of these companies and the way they talk about these AIs feels very unhealthy. They always apply very human-like characteristics to them and it's not a good sign.
And maybe I'm just—this is my opinion and to each their own, but I don't like that approach at all. So even though that is definitely where the industry is heading: more personalization, more knowing about you, because the more it knows about you, the less you have to explain.
It becomes a much closer relationship, much better in general. But we're going to have to do a lot of work, and I believe psychiatrists and psychologists are going to have a lot of work in trying to set boundaries. In the same way you set boundaries with your partner, we need to learn to set boundaries with AIs. I don't know how to. I'm not an expert on this. I'm not the right person to ask for the solution to this. But I worry that the uncontrolled use of AI can really one-shot a lot of people in losing connection with what this really is. And I've seen people think they discovered new laws of physics because the AI convinced him or her that they had discovered this amazing thing.
They are very psychopathic for the same reason we were discussing before, which is that makes money. If the AI being inclined to give you praise is something that increases user retention and increases the likelihood that you come back, they are incentivized to be that way. But that is not a healthy thing because you should be capable of having an AI that says, “This is a stupid thing to say.”
“Stop saying that.” But if you don't do that, and you couple this with more personalization, you will reach a point where these people lose connection with the real world. And again, I'm not an expert on this, but I think we're going to see a lot of issues in the future, psychological issues arising from unhealthy behaviors with AIs.
Yeah. Well, I hope it's not a question of sensory overload, like the fox in the chicken coop. I mean, that's kind of an extreme metaphor, but it does happen. So really, thank you so much for all your in-depth consideration and work considering one of the great and maybe existential threats or important opportunities of our times. We can't go into this blindly. So you've given us so much to think about. Thank you, Nacho de Gregorio, for all you do to help us consider the technology we use so that it doesn't use us, and for raising important questions about the boundaries we need to set and healthy use of AI to ensure it is assistive and promotes human flourishing.
By helping us understand what we value and where we're going, we can consider possible outcomes and what we should do to ensure a positive future. Thank you for adding your voice to The Creative Process.
Thank you so much, Mia. It was really fun. I really enjoyed it and it really made me think. Usually, I go onto podcasts and people ask me the questions I'm used to. This is the first time I had to think like, “Wow, I wasn't expecting that question.” So I think I learned stuff even today. I've seen some things I could have thought about before that I hadn't thought about. So it's a really nice way to see AI from a less technical, more emotionally driven approach that I'm not used to. So I really appreciate that. It was really fun, and hopefully we can talk again soon.
