Up-Skilling the Nation: Mike Spaeth on AI’s Race Against the Skills Gap

AI power-broker Mike Spaeth doesn’t mince words: if we fail to reskill fast, automation will wipe out one in five jobs. He points to Texas’s Alpha School, where AI squeezes a whole school day into two turbo-charged hours—proof that the education rulebook is already being torched. Spaeth calls out companies hoarding the “time dividend,” insisting that every minute saved by bots must be plowed back into people or productivity gains will evaporate. He cites Malaysia’s nationwide up-skilling blitz and even recommends Karpathy’s two-hour language-model primer, turning lofty ideas into a step-by-step survival kit. Stick around to the final beat, when the crew dares you to hit replay in 2035 and judge whether we chose equity—or let AI widen the divide.

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documenting the front lines of the AI revolution the AI Rebels Podcast hello everybody and welcome again to another episode of the AI Rebels podcast I as always am your co host Spencer and I am here with Jacob and we are very excited to have Mike Speith here with us who is the global vice president of the US Artificial Intelligence Institute which I'm sure there is so much baked into that title Mike and we are really excited to dig into it and the cause that you're supporting can you tell us a little bit about yourself thank you for coming on we're really excited to have you yeah I'm excited to be here you know as I was talking to you about before I'm a big fan uh saw the or listen to the NASA session and then also AI company with one employee was the was the other one yes yeah I I spent a lot of time in the car my son is on a uh travel basketball team so there you go ha ha ha we drove 14 hours and and you guys you guys help me along the way glad we could help that's a long drive you made it go you made it go faster good glad to hear it well tell us tell us how you got to where you are Mike how did you end up as a the global VP of the US Artificial Intelligence Institute what what brought you what brought you there yeah you know I was thinking about this journey before I got on here you know it really the funny thing is it started on a bring your son to work day and this was like I may have been 8 years old and my uh my dad took me to go see the mainframes in his in his in his office this was like I mean I'm gonna date myself through this whole thing but this is when mainframes were the only option right yeah yeah yeah you know the days of Big Iron and I I was able to go in the room and like and the room was gigantic and you know kind of touch these huge machines in a refrigerated room and it was after punch cards but but it was pretty cool to see and then you know from there I I remember I saw a Matthew Broderick movie called War Games which was like yeah and then got hooked on you know Pac Man and asteroids and Missile Command and what's funny is that you know there was no AI then because I remember playing Pac Man and if you basically knew the route you could play forever and the and the same with asteroids right there was no you know there was no like okay we're gonna make this random it was basically like the you know if you followed a certain path you never lose so um yeah and that's kind of where I got you know passionate about technology um and passionate about what what the capabilities were and then I was also thinking about um you know my first job in at a college um the laptops were kind of just came out and we used to go to meetings with multiple laptops because they would break like they were so they were so flunkey I yeah and I put like Sim City on my laptop and then I love that and then had to the classic throw it to the side and just bring out the second one if you're like half your luggage was laptops oh my gosh those are big too those are not small machines it was like the first color monitor on a laptop yeah so the pixels would bust and um but yeah that was kind of like what I was thinking about when the when the journey started um and I was you know at at a college I had a brief time in politics I went to DC and worked Clinton Gore and um wow yeah local US senator dating myself once again right hahaha um not Obama the farm yeah yeah yeah and then after that you know still passionate about technology and it was you know the internet just started and it was a great time to get a job you basically qualification was like you have to have a pulse right right right I went on an interview and like right after the interview you know I was like well you know I'm really interested and they're like well over there is your desk and I was like oh my gosh I like walked over and they're like just start and I'm like alright here we go hahaha it's like that easy and then one of my first customers was Amazon and they only had like 200 employees just books just books and it was it was their it was personalization that I was working with them on and it was called collaborative filtering so it was kind of like early ish AI so it was basically you know saying if people bought this book you're in a group of other people who then liked this book right and it was by a single author yeah then I you know uh got extremely excited cause I was like wow I mean you guess what book I like that's pretty cool crazy yeah that was like my first taste of like you know what what AI was capable of it's amazing how far back the roots of AI go I don't think people recognize that that it obviously Chat GPT was this new novel interface and approach but it really has been building for a long long time well I'm fond of saying uh that that AI was invented on AOL um because of that reason uh you know it's it's mostly just poetic license when we look back in you know 30 years and do the history of all this I think that we're gonna you know kind of pin the the advent of AI a little bit earlier than than we would right now just because of we're probably gonna associate it with essentially the rise of algorithmic content in general right it's very it's fascinating yeah yeah you have the Turing machine whenever wherever that was like in the 40s was yeah actually they're still using it like as as the as a benchmark especially robotics to say if it can pass the Turing test as a robot then the capabilities are you know are are there right yeah yeah exactly right after Amazon I can remember I went and worked with uh Barnes and noble and it was the same thing it was like collaborative filtering recommending recommending books I remember being in a meeting and they were tracking on the New York City subway how many people were using a Kindle and not reading a hard copy the first week you know they came into the board meeting and there's like they're like don't worry 1% you know everybody still got books and then the second week they're like oh yeah it's a little bit more then like the third week they're like it's 25% hahaha like oh it's like 50 like in a month it went from zero to 50 oh my gosh yeah that I mean that was another that I mean that showed the the and we're seeing it now how rapid it can be yeah yeah I was just about to say so you're no stranger then to uh witnessing you know technologies that that take off really rapidly yeah in in adoption it's it's interesting that I I see a very common sentiment reflected on on social media and in media in general as well uh AI is quote unquote you know the tech revolution that no one asked for but when you look at the user numbers it's a very very different story and so I I I just wonder when does the the dam start to break for some people there are some people I read their articles they're anti AI and like there's some tells here I suspect that you were using Claude you know um and and I just see it sneaking in everywhere um yeah yeah for both good and bad but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts what what do you think is holding people back from kind of admitting that they enjoy AI and that there is you know consumer incentive for these AI companies to exist yeah well I saw one of your early podcasts that you mention that you meet people and they're like oh yeah I just tried open AI last week or yeah chat GPT last week and you're like all the time yeah really yeah yeah still still happens yeah right and I mean but the thing is it's you know it's kind of goes back to this Barnes and Noble Kindle thing it's moving so fast right yeah that's you know one of the reasons I joined the US Artificial Intelligence Institute because it's moving so fast there's the you know possibility if not the reality a lot of people are gonna be left behind right mm hmm you know there's yeah there's a chance I I'm not sure but there could be 20% unemployment higher and if we don't look at that now and start on the education process that that could be a reality and it would be you know it's kind of up to us to make sure that that doesn't happen and we immediately those people who are like oh I just gave it a try right yeah yeah exactly I'm curious cause I think AI is this incredible 2 edged sword where it could either lift the entire population together or it's gonna widen the rift it's gonna the rich are gonna get richer and the poor will get poorer I'm like what are you and us Artificial Intelligence Institute what are you trying to do to avoid the ladder to hopefully improve the life of everybody yeah one of the things we're seeing is in a country let's say like Malaysia um the entire country also has the opportunity to lift itself up and the government is smart enough to say okay we're gonna train our employees train our citizens train our students and they have the opportunity to you know become a world power so it's kind of the you know it can level all playing fields for countries states sovereigns I'm so glad you brought that example up cause I was literally telling Jake in a text right before we jumped on here that and I don't apologize to this other podcast I don't remember what the podcast was cause I was talking to a friend I heard it secondhand um but essentially you know um there was a podcast I'm gonna look it up later and I'll put it in the description for everybody um but essentially the idea that the host were discussing was that AI represents potentially the most massive transfer of intellectual property and or you know not property um intellectual I'm gonna use property cause I can't think of a better word right now but you know not strictly legally speaking intellectual property from you know the to to borrow the the the social academic term you know the global north to the global south right where um suddenly you know if you're sitting in in in Kenya whereas previously you probably you know a lot of these materials that that we have access to here in in the United States a lot of these websites a lot of these legal journals etcetera you know probably were not accessible very at all and now you can at least get you can you you you have a machine that can reproduce a lot of that material in high enough resolution that it's it's it's worth reading you know like it as as we all know we we we all use the technology there are there are significant pitfalls to it there are hallucinations etcetera but more often than not it it works um and and yeah like I'm so glad that you brought that up because I think it's such an overlooked point um that uh if it does get embraced in the right way like people can use it to level the playing field anyways yeah just had to jump on my soapbox about that for a second yeah to to that point too it's almost like it's an equalizer as far as education yeah right yeah now you don't have to go to Harvard because you have in your back pocket a Harvard PhD right and I find that my work too it's like you know I'm not the most technical person I up to very recently worked in the space industry and yeah I didn't really have a space background obviously um rockets and satellites it's very technical right but but I'll tell you I it became I became much less reliant on the rocket scientists because I can answer those a lot of the questions myself that I used to have to go to them for and I was crazy I was kind of beholden to them right so yeah I would say hey I need a response to these 10 questions and it would be like what's the satellite um you know uh sensors and like you know the revisit time over the planet and I was like you know I was like I listen I need this in like a week could you and the week would pass and I was like oh come on we really need this and then it got to the point where like I don't need you at all I just created this thing in like a day that I used to have to wait two weeks for you to do and it's better than you would have given me yeah which is crazy like the thought that I mean that's this that's like the colloquial phrase right like it's not rocket science and like we're literally with rocket science using AI you can you can duplicate the work of a rocket scientist into an understandable framing for a non rocket scientist it's just it's wild what you can do yeah and these were rocket scientists right so I was working with asking questions to rocket scientists and I don't have to be a rocket scientist to be able to answer their questions yeah yeah so on a on a slightly slightly shifting gears here you said that AI literacy should be a a fundamental right um what in your opinion would a world look like where that's true what are kind of like some of the the first changes you'd expect to see made in pursuit of that goal yeah uh that's a great question and I think one of the first steps to get towards that is you know why doesn't a country and there's kind of rumors out there that Saudi Arabia has done this but why doesn't a country just buy a open AI$20 a month license for like every citizen right you know and supposedly Saudi Arabia is doing it it hasn't you know I've read some places that it's already happened but it hasn't been confirmed so you start there right everybody's got the license right and then from there you know based on sector based on position it's like everybody's now equal right you know everybody's you know a PhD and what happens in the in in a world like that I don't know right ha ha ha yeah so so what do you think is the like what differentiates it's what comes to mind is I don't know if you've seen the movie The Incredibles where the villain yeah he says once everybody's super no one is and that's like his evil plan is to make everybody a superhero so I'm curious taking that applying it to AI what do you think is then going to differentiate like what comes to mind is art if everybody can be an artist what is art if everyone can be a rocket scientist what makes a great rocket scientist then like what what do you think starts to differentiate greatness when all of this is available yeah I mean first of all can I use that example because it's pretty awesome yeah definitely yeah Incredibles right yeah yeah so like when the playing field is even I mean is it just who can prompt the best you know and if so you just does the US artificial intelligence agency just treat you know teach people how to prompt right I you know I I I I think you know one of the or one of the things we're focusing on is educating people beyond the buzzwords right like every industry has you know has buzzwords technical buzzwords like training and parameters and tokens and that becomes intimidating right but it you know people in the industry like it right because it makes us feel smart right we know what token is right but um right sort of right so so then you know you gotta get past that because I think that's intimidating right like a whole dictionary of words that they don't understand that language so I think we need to get them you know don't use those words right explain it to like what you're explaining to a third grader right and if you explain it that way then they you know then the entire population can get past that you know initial hurdle of being intimidated yeah it's it's a sticky problem to solve I think that one of the important things uh maybe maybe an underrated um thing in my opinion is just just the proliferation of good AI art um there's been a lot of there's been a lot of AI videos etcetera posted you know everywhere um but in my opinion none of them has like really you know been compelling and so I think that that a a a major turning point for AI art will be well AI in general will be when you know someone makes a a hit single with using Suno something like that and I think that I think that increasingly people are are getting there um I have a little TikTok account that I've been doing recently that's all AI generated videos that I did with VO3 and and they're doing pretty well um it's really funny cause I I label every single one of them as AI because like uh I I don't wanna get you know my my videos struck down or anything I don't wanna deal with that um but inevitably I always have one or two people commenting on every video just like this is AI guys look out this is AI I'm like yeah I told you yeah it's right there in the title um but I'd be curious uh have you seen do you have have your finger on the pulse at all in in in the art world um and and and the use of AI there I saw a podcast recently um and the guest was Brian Eno and he you know he said hey the same thing happened to me 50 years ago when I use the mood synthesizer 56 yeah plus right yeah like you're cheating right you're not using a a guitar right so it's he's like it's the same thing it's an available tool to make music and I've he's followed all of those new releases of available tools so just another one yeah no I love that I think it's this is like a bigger thing that I feel like keeps coming up for some reason as we've talked that that this is a new technology but it's this is not a new process we're going through this process of technological upheaval is we should have like a playbook for this like since the wheel this has been happening you know and for everyone to be all crazed about it still I think speaks to human nature how fast we forget and also how scared we can become of something new but this really the same principles we've applied in the past have to be applied now it you know there's nothing crazy going on here maybe it's just like it's a recency thing right that we think this is extremely big obviously I think it's extremely big and probably the biggest thing that's ever happened but maybe it's only because it's recent right maybe the same thing we went the same society went the same thing when anesthesia was invented right they were like wait I don't I don't have to be cut open and feel pain they're probably like right what is this witchery yeah where there's a there's an interview with David Bowie in the I think it was in the late 80s where he's talking about the internet and the and he's talking about how his experience with the internet made him feel like he was interacting with like you know an artificial being like something something else entirely so I've wondered if if there's some of that as well here with artificial intelligence where's you know people are using it and it's a little bit of a too spooky a feeling for them exciting but at the same time getting into uncanny valley territory right where um the lines between you know reality and and the internet become just thinner and thinner by the minute um and whether you think that's good or bad I think it's a reality that you have to you have to reckon with and you have to confront um well one of the tragedies now is that are just popped in my head one of the I find tragic is that David Bowie is not alive right now to use this technology he would love AI either that or he would hate it and we would get something interesting out of it either way yeah right he would love it I have an interesting David Bowie story so yeah I lived kind of near him uh in in in New York City and the one thing about him he lived in New York City for like 20 years nobody actually saw him so he moved amongst people but no one ever no one ever was you know he'd be at a restaurant interesting he went to a same coffee shop like every day but nobody at the coffee shop ever really saw him so he oh my gosh for 20 years and no like David Bowie sightings no like David Bowie stories just interesting he's like maybe he had that still in the Enigma yeah yeah huh well I live near Lou Reed and I'd see the guy every day well Mike I'm curious so you're on this mission to educate the world help everybody become educated in AI what what's the starting point like what does this curriculum look like to upskill the population yeah so one thing that's important it's for different levels so there's a whole program for K through 12 and there's another program for higher ed then there within corporations or within governments there's based on uh knowledge base so there's a program for uh C level people that's uh high level there's a program for technical people and it's a certification so basically it's self paced there's videos and books and content then there is an assessment uh that they have to graduate from and then in the higher levels that they also have to submit like a transformation plan which is pretty cool to actually look through some of those um and at the end they get you know usaiai certified and then they can use that throughout their career um so if you're high school grad you can use it to get into college if you're in college you can use it to get a better job if you're at a job you can use it to hopefully get a better job and then outside professional life you can you know manage um you know as you know ton of ton of personal things beyond test so kind of slightly tangential to this but following following up on this um one thing that that has been interesting to watch with the internet internet safety is there's kind of a very narrow band of people demographically that that have Learned to be safe on the internet right it's kind of like like younger I believe the age ranges like younger Gen X through the millennials are pretty good at avoiding online scams but then outside of those ranges both younger and older are very very vulnerable to online scams and so in some ways I think that we've kind of lost like the internet safety debate along the way right like at some point we just kind of stopped doing it uh and so I'd be interested to hear in your perspective what are some things that we could do to potentially and and obviously you know we can't we can't foresee the future completely but uh what do you think are some things that we can do to avoid this happening with AI yeah I think it's on the education side right so if people feel comfortable or understand its capabilities they can maybe easily identify a a deep fake right there's part of the training in in um education process in general is like saying OK is this video real is this not and trying to get better at that you know it sounds basic and simple but you know going through that process can can be helpful yeah just start at basics and start'em young haha I mean with my kids at home right it's it's a struggle right even though they know I work in this you know I work in AI you know they're still on the on you know at their 10 11 um there's still a difficulty for them because it's it's not even their fault it's not really being taught to them in school I even say you know I say to them if somebody has a problem at your school that you're using AI for your homework call me right I'll I'll be like listen you know they're gonna use AI to do homework they should use AI to do their homework yeah right if you got a problem with that you know you're you're you're behind right it's the same thing remember I saw a Sunday live episode and they were like oh don't use internet for your homework now you think like what not use the internet for your homework yeah same thing absurd we can tell we can tell if you use the internet for this yeah now it's ridiculous yeah yeah so so how do you and I'm sure you're you received feedback both positive and negative here but how do you marry the traditional education system of developing individuals developing that those internal skills and knowledge banks with AI I know that's a huge concern we've had some professors on teachers where it is a concern that people will just they'll no longer have the internal knowledge cause they can just rely on AI similar to you know we've had Google forever but AI is just kind of the next next level of that how do you marry that how do you help individuals continue to progress personally while also involving AI yeah I mean I don't have the answer to this but I've thought about it quite a bit and it's almost like when the calculator was first invented everybody's gonna be everybody was like oh you'll never learn your times tables right seven times seven's 49 right and it's but it's like so what why do you even have to know that so I think that it's gonna be the creativity of of the prompting right to be able to say okay answer this question okay now frame it based on this thought process no find it here add this part because I think this is gonna be important and then obviously when you we're done with that is reviewing the material making your own human based changes and coming with an output that would be better than 100 people could create yeah I think that another thing um following up on that I and I think that David Wood professor at BYU uh made this point as well I think that one thing that we're going to see um in education is is we're going to have to start probably challenging students a little bit more in different ways right give them more challenging problems to work on problems that force them to think through the problem a little bit first before they're able to even prompt the AI right um I mean I deal with a lot of those problems at work right'cause I I I I I'm a a developer and you know I'm working on some new platforms right now that are requiring me to stitch things together in ways that you know are not commonly found online right and so I'm having to think through everything that I do before I go in and I say hey I need you to implement this plan for me right um because you know nobody's writing code by themselves these days who cares I don't care about writing the code I just want to plan it and another thing that I think we'll see is I think that we'll see the rise of like handwritten essays again um for two reasons like one like there is a time and place for LLM usage in AI or excuse me in education and then there's a time and place for them you know not to be used right and I think that sometimes you gotta have students to you gotta have students uh you know demonstrate their own thinking truly and and fully their own thinking right and so I think that we'll see um greater use of of of in class you know um writing assessments things like that um yeah yeah the handwritten will be verifiable right that it can yeah exactly so we're now we go back to that and then there's also a lot of a lot of studies around around memory and and knowledge retention regarding computer usage and typing versus handwriting um showing that handwriting something uh excuse me writing something out by hand you you remember it a lot uh better than than if you were typing it out um and and personally I'm I'm a full digital native I think that those studies are probably a little bit overblown I do everything on my computer but you know when I step back and I look at it I'm like yeah I can see the merit and I can see the argument there um it'll it'll be really interesting to see what happens there's a guy that I am friends with on Twitter Max Sparrow he has a company called Pangram and they offer AI detection and and they partner with a lot of schools to do this but one his AI detection better than anything else I've used like this is not a paid ad like genuinely it works and 2 we've had a lot of really interesting discussions he and I about just the the nature of AI and its role in you know in in in the education environment and essentially his take is that he doesn't actually like oppose AI at all in the education environment that's not why he's building this company he actually is very very supportive of it but he believes that teachers need to have the tools to be able to properly evaluate you know their students and and part of that is you know you gotta know if someone's using a calculator on a math test or not right so you gotta know if if someone's using AI on a on a writing assessment or not uh huh um and then from there you know it's up to the teacher to decide whether that's something that they allow and they just you know raise the standard for what is good writing from a student or if it's something that they don't like they're like hey you gotta redo this lots of interesting questions ahead yeah that I mean that's a great point because something like uh like this happened to me this morning I had a meeting with someone last week where they then had to really think about the role they were gonna play in the organization so they came up with a a document and they're like this is the role I think I I could play I looked at it I'm like wait a minute he ai'd the whole thing he didn't really think so then I was like I'm gonna AI him back so I took and I said ask questions based on his ideas so then I hit send AI to pack a bunch of like questions that were obviously AI he could then take my questions and answer them in AI and then I could oh my gosh further clarification in AI it'll be just you know and you could tell I could tell immediately and I know he can tell too the way I ask my specific questions like oh can you further explain to me how you work this it's not just a role it's a transformational business opportunity ha ha ha ha yeah ha ha ha oh yeah oh yeah yeah it's gonna be very intriguing to see which organizations move first I've been a little discouraged with the education system that it's been so slow I mean I can't blame it lots of organ knots of industries and organizations are moving very slowly and the education system's not known to be a pivoting very quickly but what Mike I'm curious if you have any thoughts on this as you've been pushing this cause worldwide what's missing like what what's missing on a worldwide scale or just a macroeconomic scale that's preventing governments school systems from actively teaching artificial intelligence well the thing is is like what if a country does right what if a country not to name countries but what if a country gives out the open AI chat GPT license for 20 a month and then they totally revamp their education system scrap it start from zero they have the ability to be a world power if they're not a world power anyway right so it's almost like hey this is a chance for everybody to part every every country every government to participate scrap the existing educational system give everybody the the license and you can compete you know who knows what will happen so it's in the US I don't you know it's gonna be hard it's been done the same way for a long time still two kids taking penmanship right yeah on that note um and and in the US this isn't as much of a problem but how do you view it seems like perhaps a precursor to you know universal AI literacy is universal internet access um how do you view that in the context of the US I mean increasingly it's we're almost getting free Wi-Fi just by default of of it you know lots of unsecured Wi-Fi everywhere but it's not necessarily it's not strictly a public utility or etcetera right do you believe that that's something um that we would need to accomplish first or do you think that they they're kind of co concurrent goals where it's like hey just start rolling out you know AI usage to everybody and as people get internet access they also get AI yeah more the ladder it should that should happen right yeah it it will happen and it maybe it's that same country that says everybody gets a license everybody gets you know internet access totally revamped our education system it's gonna take off no matter who it is and it's possible with Starlink now that country signs an agreement with Starlink automatically everybody gets wireless right yeah I was I was gonna bring that up like I have my friends and everyone I know will know that I have I have many disagreements with Elon Musk but the potential of Starlink to reach you know underprivileged communities is is really powerful and I hope that it's something that he leans into more um if there's any chance that that he's listening to this lean into it more than you are do that um because it's yeah it's just amazing that you know any I I could be sitting in the Australian outback and you know I can be chatting with uh my computer 200,000 miles away whatever it is I don't wanna do the math right now I don't remember how big the earth is so with that in note um with that in mind uh one of the kind of big differentiators right now with AI is access to large infrastructure right um do you think that we could potentially be seeing something similar to what has happened with with personal you know with with personal space launches where eventually the infrastructure gets to a point that like you Jake could go train a GPT4 sized model uh huh for relatively cheap um or do you or do you think that it'll continue consolidating yeah you know I I think the need for GPUs right mm hmm there's such a backlog and demand like uh you know I being in coming from the space industry only months ago um you know we work very closely with Amazon and Microsoft and Google GPUs for some of the processing of the satellite data the earth observation data and even these companies couldn't even get GPUs like you work with a you work with Microsoft and Google the employees are like I can't get them so no way I'm giving them to you yeah how do you not have them basically you're scrounging for these for these GPUs I probably you know there's a reason that damn stock is so high right when you get to see you're like this demand for this freaking piece of metal you're like wow yeah wild that's not gonna you know it's not gonna change right it's just I don't know I mean are people are we gonna be able to run models on our train models on a laptop I don't know you were like I know that's it it's funny all of our conversations I think on this podcast typically you know we'll have a guest on and whatever area whatever industry we talk we discuss and it kind of comes down to we'll have to see like this is so new and we're in uncharted territory that it's like yeah we have all these cool unique perspectives and it comes down to it it's like we haven't really seen anything like this this is another animal nobody knows what's gonna happen right no one can no one can get up there and say oh you know I think this you know I know this will happen yeah yeah I'm I'm really excited 10 years from now to come back and rewatch all of our podcast episodes maybe we'll still be owned by then who knows but come back and rewatch all of these episodes and see how many of the the predictions and prognostications were were on point and how many of them were just wildly incorrect right I mean just the future is so exciting for me I just saw this whole article about have you maybe you've heard of it Mike because you're in the space but um Alpha School in Texas have you heard of this so it's a school that has completely integrated AI into their curriculum so the students get all of the traditional so it's completely tailored to every single student so they're continually taking um assessments and all these things and it's like all of your education is done through AI for two hours a day so in two hours these students are able to get all of the traditional education that they need and the rest of the day so they're still at school they go to the school building they have two hours of traditional learning and the rest of the time they spend in pursuit of other interests whether that's painting music all of these things which I'm just getting so excited about this now because this is like this is one of the reasons I'm so excited about AI is because if you think about that OK students in the past would go to school for 6 7 hours a day right this is now you involve AI that shrinks to 2 hours all of a sudden there's 4 hours a day some parents would be like ugh my kids home for 4 more hours no they can now do so much more think of what kind of capacity that frees up for these students it's and that's just in this one example this will continue to happen over and over in every single industry where time will be opened up to enable us to now progress it's the same thing I was just talking about this with my wife over dinner because it was her birthday and I spent literally the whole day making this dinner and we got to dinner we have a one year old and we got to dinner and we sat down I was like man this dinner is great but this was all day yeah and I didn't even have to go catch the chicken that I cooked I I went to the store and bought this and over time society has shifted where we you know all of a sudden cities are a thing you can go to the store and buy food and now we have more time and that's the commodity that really matters is time that's what helps the human race progress is where a technological development arises it cuts down the time investment necessary for our current way of life right and we're then able to progress farther and I just think AI is the key that's what's that's what's gonna help us now elevate to the next level yeah they must we gotta invest in the right in the right ways of using it just had to add that caviar because I have to every time we talk about it it must have been thinking the same way though like when the tractor came out right yeah but obviously it's not a podcast they're all sitting on the porch and they're like this this tractor is gonna change everything right yeah now I have to be out there for 12 hours now I can only think about when like the bronze plow hit the agora in ancient Greece you know I bet that was crazy earth shattering oh my god they were like goodness now I have all this free time in the world right and then they have to make the plow exactly yeah well I this is my only prediction I'm gonna make when we look back it's a great idea to look back 10 years we'll all do it and yeah I think like three day work week four day work week I think that's gonna happen right I think universal basic income is gonna it's gonna happen right and it's almost like Covid first test send everybody a check okay we got the process in place because if we do hit 20% employment that's gonna have to happen it's gonna say you need to you need to start trying some some exotic things economically at that point you gotta go places that you economics economics wow economists have ever dared to go I cannot speak right now apparently no it's so true like at school right the the day school day is only 3 hours right so that's you know there's there's nothing else you're gonna do you're gonna get this free time you're gonna take it you're gonna have a better life do what you that's out um as a result but it's the same thing with people you know in the field when the tractor came out right before sleep eat work sleep eat work nope seven days a week you had to right and all of a sudden they had all that free time they're like wow I do so as we're uh starting to get to the end I have I have one more hard question for you um so recently I have there there have excuse me I saw a study that that uh found that AI has increased productivity for workers at work but those productivity gains have not carried over to the companies themselves which sort of indicates to me that people are essentially you know doing less work um but achieving the same productivity uh how do we convince companies to then invest in reskilling their um employees into AI while avoiding you know massive unemployment is your opinion just like you know it's the unemployment is probably just coming haha or do you think that there is a way that we can avoid you know the path where we do have to have massive massive UBI um in the near term well I think like personally in my case you know it's easier to go through the task list right like okay these are the things I need to complete but the task list is in a lot of ways is endless and now I can add to the task list things that I I never could imagine that I ever get to it because I'm like so underwater with these tasks right so now I can actually think instead of like check box checking off the the tasks and I think over time even though maybe they're not seeing the ROI immediately right all of a sudden a new product is invented because somebody had an hour right to to think about it's very common at Google I mean Google had for a long time I don't know if they still do this but for a long time their Fridays were pretty much fully dedicated to just wacky projects and I'm sure that I could come up with some examples but they are evading me right now but a lot of the a lot of the big Google products came out of just you know hack sessions essentially yeah that's cool one of the coolest things they ever did right they're like I love Google hahaha yeah one day I have so Google brain hahaha these crazy moon shots right hahaha probably if they look at all those crazy moon shots it probably was billions of dollars say one of those crazy moon shots was attention is all you need and that's that's LED us to where we are today with LLS right like bringing things full circle yeah I love it yeah yeah we need more of that mentality for sure um Mike as we're wrapping up you have a unique perspective on this so what what advice would you give to individuals who are not actively using AI who need educated where should they start what should they do what advice would you give yeah you know I think listening to podcasts you know like like yours right self educating like you have the ability not to plug you guys check you said that check nailed it yeah no just like you know watch a podcast seriously I mean listen to a podcast but you know you're cooking turn it on right listen self educate right you know everybody has the opportunity to play in the field is is level right because of what you guys are doing people can just YouTube AI podcast boom and it's all Andres Krupathi and I may have pronounced mispronounced his first name um who was at Open AI for a long time right he has a it's like a 2 hour video that's just a really good beginner's breakdown of of you know what language models are and and how they work I highly recommend everyone go watch it um because I think I believe very strongly everybody needs just at least a base level of understanding of this technology moving forward like it's pretty funny Andre Kirby that's that's exactly where I started and was it really yeah that was like so refreshing that somebody so smart can make it so digestible no exactly I was I was really impressed with the way he breaks it down um cause it's hard for it's hard for technical guys like him to break it down both because you know they're they're they're science brained people and science brained people are not often communication brained um and second cause a lot of the a lot of the topics and and and uh concepts are pretty complex so anyways very very good video everyone go watch it yeah definitely love that well Mike it's been great having you on I think the cause you're pushing is crucial yeah if there's anything we can do please let us know I think everybody needs a baseline this is earth shattering what's happening around us right now with AI and it's important so thank you for the work you're doing good time to be alive right it is it's it's very at a bare minimum it's interesting hahaha bare minimum and I'd rather be living during interesting times than boring ones personally um yeah but I get why people get tired of it yeah hey guys I'm once again huge fan thanks for having me on thank you thanks Mike we'll stay in contact yes