Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsch.

Welcome to Meta Views, recorded live in front of an automated audience.

And today we're coming back to two subjects.

I think we'd like to talk about one AI and the other ideology.

So we're going to talk about the ideologies of AI.

Sounds like quite a provocative subject.

And our guest today, Chris Hood.

Chris, we like to start every episode of Metaviews by talking about the news.

And, you know, we do this partly because, you know, the history of media, quite frankly, has a lot to do with using the news as a way to stay current, sort of stay up with it all, but also because we have a daily newsletter here at metiviews, and perhaps serendipitously, our latest issue sort of looks at what we're calling the illusion economy, and it suggests that while AI certainly in my lifetime, is reaching a very substantive level, it's never kept up with its promises.

Right.

It always seems that the narrative of AI is one step ahead of what is actually being delivered.

And so this was us speculating on, will there be consequences to always having that debt of expectations?

And we use the executive orders and the big announcement in terms of, you know, the Trump administration aligning itself with AI as one of the themes or pillars of its policy agenda, whether real or not, because we'll have to wait and see.

But really, this is when we turn to our guest and say, is there any news that you've got an eye on?

Is there anything that you've been following?

This could be personal news, could be world news, could be industry news.

What do you think our audience needs to know or should be paying attention to, given how chaotic and overwhelming our world tends to be?

Yeah, I think we could touch a little bit on the announcements that came out yesterday, press release, et cetera, about Trump administration coming out and in supporting and talking about how they're going to invest in the AI space.

But I think you also have to understand and read between the lines which you're alluding to, which is that really what they're talking about is building infrastructure, building buildings to support AI development.

Very little of this is actually in the AI progression or what AI can become.

And there's a big difference between buildings and infrastructure and energy to support AI and the capabilities of AI itself.

There's a lot of theoretical stuff that is out there.

There's a lot of, you know, we talk often, and what my book is about is a lot of the hype that is out there.

And I think, you know, you.

You just sort of touched on it, where the marketing or the description of what AI is is usually ahead of where AI is.

In my book that is getting ready to be published, the research that I did actually shows that the belief in AI, what we believe AI is capable of and what its real capabilities are is about a seven year gap.

And I kind of alluded to, you know, too much Star Trek, too much sci fi in terms of the media interpretation of what AI is capable of versus again, you know, there's just not enough, I use Columbo as an example, any big, you know, TV fans, not enough actual research and understanding and investigation into what AI is capable of.

And so because of this gap, we are talking about things like the cure for cancer, which will AI help us cure cancer?

Absolutely.

I firmly believe that that is what it will be capable of doing.

Will it do it next week?

No.

Will it do it within the confines of building this building and then we can solve cancer?

Probably not.

At some point though, and I believe probably in my lifetime AI will help us cure cancer.

But it's not going to do it next week.

It's probably not even going to do it this year.

We've got a ways to go for it to be able to do the things that we're talking about it doing.

And so we go back to this recent news in the press release.

You've got to make sure that you understand what's actually being discussed.

We're just talking about building more buildings to support and house computers that are going to help us build the AI of the future.

Although the energy issues and the energy needs of AI are such that I've been skeptical as to whether government as we know it is nimble enough to create the policy environment to make that happen.

And you're quite right to say it's a long timeline when you still have to build the buildings and build the energy plants.

But let me ask you as a quick follow up, what do you think the consequence of this is?

Right?

That perhaps the vagueness or the lack of nuance that says all jobs are going to go away, cancer will be cured, which sure, inevitably those things may be true.

But I think you're correct in saying the timeline is not going to happen anywhere near as fast as I think the popular perception is offering.

Is there a consequence to that?

Is that going to create know a second AI Winter where the funding for a lot of these startups is going to go away?

Is that going to create, you know, consumer disappointment?

I'm, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, I mean I have predicted that there may be an AI bubble burst this year.

People and consumers more precisely, are becoming a little bit more aware of the difference between hype and reality.

Like when you hype that, hey, an AI agent is going to be able to do everything for you and then you buy a product and it doesn't do everything for you, you're stop, you're, you know, you're.

At some point in time you're not going to invest or, you know, your personal funds into those types of products anymore.

And so, yes, also, we just have too many investments in AI.

There are thousands of AI startups that are getting investments and at some point in time, again, you just have too many.

And so, yeah, it's very possible that maybe not a winter in terms of traditional AI winter speak, but some sort of potential bubble burst, maybe similar to the dot com, where financing stops, where some of the really strong AI products begin to materialize.

But look, we're looking at somebody like a Google that is investing billions of dollars into training new models.

And it's not even at a point where it can sustain what it's saying it can sustain, you know, in terms of deliverability and accuracy and privacy and results and all those, those things that consumers expect out of it.

And so, yes, I think most definitely the end result may be that we have a little dip down in the next year or two years before we really get back into the groove of building products, AI products that are actually meaningful.

Now, paradoxically, we've kind of bled into our second segment that we have at the start of every show, which we call WTF or what's the Future?

Partly because we are a future centric podcast, we like to encourage our guests, our listeners, to be imaginative when it comes to the future.

But this is also meant as an intuitive question.

We want your kind of gut response.

What do you see in the future, Chris?

What's on your event horizon that you think our audience needs to know about?

Flying cars.

And they'll be here tomorrow.

I'm going to hype it.

Look, it's interesting because I'm about to release my second book and I'm actually begun research for my.

Can you share the title?

Yeah.

The second book that is due out, depending on when you are listening to this particular episode, is called Infallible.

And it's a play on words of infallible.

But we put the AI here, it's sort of like, there you go, we get the little AI and fail in the middle of that, so we get the infallible.

But the next book that I've begun to research is what do we see as being the trends for consumers in the future?

And I'm not talking about necessarily what are the next trends.

I think there's a lot of hypothesis on what we think the next trends are.

What's the trends after that that we think will actually occur?

A good example of this is I think there's a lot of people out there that feel like the metaverse will become a thing.

And so in the next five years, we might be able to do virtual shopping.

Maybe VR is a little bit more powerful forms of ar.

Maybe we get some integration into other forms of senses, like, can I get scent out of my VR experience?

Can I get taste out of my VR experience?

And so if we think of the metaverse and VR types of shopping is the next thing.

What's after that?

And I think that's where we have to begin to explore.

And I think it is definitely multi sensory.

We can again, leverage lots of different types of mediums to kind of think through this and everything from Ready Player One, the movie to or Book to Star Trek.

Do we see situations where we go into, you know, Star Trek's.

The holodeck.

Yeah, holodeck.

I said it right for a minute.

I was like, what's the thing?

So, you know, do we see a holodeck type of experience in our future?

There's a lot of things out there that we can look forward to in terms of what has been designed in our mediums.

And I do think that we're going to strive for some of that.

Like, instead of airdrop delivery by drones, will we get to a teleportation system that I can actually place an order on the future Amazon and have it delivered instantaneously to me, I think there's a lot of really interesting perspectives when you think about not what's next, but what's after next.

And think about it from that perspective.

Right on.

And to your point about VR, I always thought, you know, while VR is meant to collapse space, I'd like to see it collapse time.

Right.

You know, allow me to spend five minutes in the VR and think it was eight hours.

Right.

And have that type of immersive experience on a coffee break.

Yeah.

But again, to your point, we're getting into the sci Fi side of this, and if you wouldn't indulge me in a Brief tangent.

Before we get into our kind of feature conversation, I sort of saw an argument you were putting forward which I thought was interesting, which was that customer journeying is obsolete.

And I felt you were almost evoking it there when you were talking about the changing ways in which we are experiencing reality.

Might you briefly unpack that as a final appetizer before we get to our main meal?

Yeah.

Well, if we think about customer journeys and in the traditional sense, a business that partakes in what we call customer journey mapping, which is actually going through the process of outlining the touch points they're called in terms of, okay, they found us by social media, they came to our website, they got to the shopping cart, like that type of experience.

They made a purchase, the purchase was successful, and then after that purchase, then they get an email notification like, whatever that journey is, we call that the customer journey.

But if you start to kind of dissect this in a couple of different ways, the first thing is they're called touch points.

Well, I've argued that we no longer actually have to touch anything, so the mere terminology is probably outdated.

Next, no one goes through a linear process in their life anymore.

So if you go to the grocery store, odds are you're also probably paying a bill on your phone while you're at that grocery store.

So we have all of these intersecting types of experiences that create a multidimensional style of mapping, one by which it's not necessarily what's happening from the moment I come into your store to the moment I leave your store.

There are these intersection points where I might be engaging with other customers or other products and brands that are directly either in relationship to your product and brands or even a competitor.

Like, if I'm in a store and I don't like the prices, I'm looking up your competitors while I'm standing in your store to find other, you know, other pricing and other opportunities.

So the more you recognize this kind of multi dimensional and even multisensory style of experiences, then you could argue the traditional customer journey map no longer applies.

Well, and it's funny, you evoked my own experience, which is I'm often listening to podcasts while I'm shopping.

And wouldn't it be wild if in the middle of that podcast they're like, oh, Jesse, go check out aisle five.

Right.

That would be a very interesting, perhaps anticipatory way of, to your point, an experience, not the journey.

But see, there's a great example.

Like, you're listening.

You're grocery store shopping or you're at Target, you're listening to a podcast, a personalized ad comes on for the store you're in about a product you're looking for.

Believe it or not, that technology is already available to us.

We can already do that.

And yet we are continuously kind of trying to silo out people's experiences to say, well, look, while you're in our store, we're only going to focus on the things that you might do or need to do while you're in our store.

Yes.

And not be able to share, reveal.

You know, we could talk about privacy concerns potentially on that or any other number of aspects.

But it's not that the technology can't do it, it's that the companies are unwilling to do it.

Well.

And I would go and we should move on to the main course because I could talk about this for a while, partly because I feel, and I'm thinking about my grocery store in particular, they are risk averse to creativity.

They barely are pushing the flyer.

That hasn't changed in three decades.

They are not at all thinking about the customer experience.

Right.

They're treating it like it is this old school market and it isn't.

And to your point, the technology that they have available to them, even just within their own app, within their own loyalty marketing is phenomenal.

And I wish they did more.

So it's frustrating having these kind of what ifs when we know they don't.

Man, I hope his computer didn't die.

Come back, Chris.

Okay, good.

It was just the Internet, not your computer.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Oh, look, it happens.

I, I live in the country, so.

I'm near Los Angeles, so we've got winds and we've got fires going on.

So if it goes out again, I will apologize.

And anybody who is listening to this.

And is like, hey, the beauty is it happened while I was speaking and then I was able to pause.

So we will pause again and it makes a very convenient edit point.

And we were right by the feature.

So it works.

If it goes out again, I apologize.

And I'm beyond your Internet.

Yeah, it's beyond your control.

And like I said, I've had it happen to me and I'm a speaker and I've had it happen during a virtual gig during the pandemic.

So I can relate.

Well, let's, let's, let's go quick.

Yes.

Okay, take a pause and then you're going to see the screens and we'll rock and roll.

Now, Chris, I got to ask you only because as a wordsmith I love playing with words.

The ideologies of AI.

You gotta unpack that for me because I love the way Unfailable, which I thought is a fantastic title for a book.

And I noticed ideology was kind of front and center on the COVID So please help us understand the ideologies of AI.

Well, it really boils down to this belief system.

We sort of touched on it before.

The belief in what AI is capable of doing has created this.

This ideology about AI.

It's almost a religious state where, you know, I, I use some examples in here, but everybody overnight became an AI expert there.

The things that were in the past that weren't AI powered all of a sudden now are AI powered.

It's like your email.

Oh, powered by AI.

Well, your email has actually been powered by AI for about five years now.

You know, like, all of these things have all of a sudden become, you know, infallible.

Like, you know, that's.

That's what I wanted to play off of is that this, this belief system in AI has created an infallible belief that is, in a lot of cases, wrong.

And so a lot of what I cover in my book is kind of trying to dissect why we have this belief system and trying to pinpoint the difference between fact and fiction, but really positioning it in a way that, that belief in AI, in AI is driven by marketing and is driven by, you know, we can look at a lot of different examples in our past, whether it's like the snake oil salesman on the side of the road to, you know, the gold rush of, you know, the California.

I mean, anytime in history, I've used the pet rock as an example.

In AI, you package it up, you put a pretty bow on it, and it's supposed to solve all of our problems.

And that is not the case.

And that is where, you know the title and this concept of infallible, because it is obviously, and it's not infallible.

And what that ideology is.

Are you concerned at all that, you know, over the next four years with a bullshitter as the President of the United States, that that is ideology will be further amplified?

Or do you think that there's only so far that pushing this forward into the future works?

At some point, businesses start going, wait a minute, this isn't doing what you said it would.

No, I.

It's coming from investors and it's coming from corporations, big tech that want to sell it I mean, that's what this is.

It's.

It's a sales grab.

It's a money grab.

And, you know, there's some really good examples of this.

I don't know if you've seen the commercial from Salesforce with Matthew McConaughey, who's sitting out in the rain and saying, you know, basically the premise is, you know, I'm out in the rain, my food is getting soggy because I didn't use an AI agent to help me reschedule my dinner reservations.

Well, if you really dissect this, it becomes pretty obvious that it's nothing more than sales and fear of missing out if you want to say FOMO and, you know, and, And.

And trying to appeal to our lack of intelligence.

Right.

I mean, at what point in time do we actually believe that we're so ignorant that we can't tell that it's raining outside, you know, and.

And that we can't change our reservations on our own?

Why do we need AI to do that?

Or why would we believe that the restaurant is going to keep our reservations outside and serve us outside while it's raining?

Like, these things are creating problem statements for which there is really no actual problem for, and billing it as well.

I can solve this fictitious problem that.

You have, but when does the other shoe drop?

I mean, is it after, you know, these companies have bought these products that don't have a return, that don't, you know, fulfill the expectations they had?

If it's not AI, it's going to be something else.

Right now, it's AI.

The flavor of the year is AI.

Everywhere you looked, it was generative AI.

They shift the narrative.

Right.

Why did they shift the narrative?

Was because they started to recognize that the populace was.

And consumers were less interested in generative AI because of the flaws that it has, so they needed to reframe into some other AI that is supposedly more powerful and more beneficial to you.

So it becomes a moving target that we never reach.

Exactly.

So I would say if we don't hit that bubble burst, like I'm suggesting, we might, then somewhere towards the end of this year, depending on people's realizations of AI agents and people getting a little bit more familiar with what AI can And can't do that.

It will be another form of AI that will become the focus.

And so we talk about a hype cycle.

What we're actually seeing is that forms of AI are layered on top of each other to continue the hype upward.

So we never get to the point where we become familiar with what reality is.

And all of that is intended to directly drive sales.

Right on.

And that's what makes it an ideology in the sense that you're chasing an idea you're, you're not actually chasing.

It's, you know, it kind of evokes, you're chasing the white horse, right?

It's the heroin addict who never actually achieves the high, but becomes a junkie nonetheless.

Cause they're chasing that myth.

And I wish I could share your optimism and confidence that, you know, the air will run out by the end of the year.

I mean, on some levels, their money could run out by the end of the year.

Because it does seem that the anthropics and OpenAI's of the world are burning, burning through billions literally at a pace that is just not at all sustainable.

But at the same time, your argument makes me worry that they will just keep putting out new and more ridiculous targets that allow them to keep pushing this further and further and further.

Meanwhile, maybe it's military spending, maybe it's public sector spending that becomes the next sucker.

The way in which maybe companies will start waking up to the idea of now, we shouldn't be spending money on this.

If, you know, Elon Musk and the rest of the crew get the US Government as the big customer to be throwing money at this, that could sustain them for a little bit too, right?

Well, yeah, but again, we've got to understand that it's AI today.

I mean, look, 10 years ago, there's an app for that, right?

Like everybody needed an app.

Before that it was a.com.com, right?

So AI just happens to be the thing right now.

But, but let's see.

Imagine if quantum computing became bite sized and you could have a quantum computer, build your own quantum computer at home, right?

Like you can go out to the local tech store, buy all the parts, build your own PC, come home, have a gaming system and be, you know, in heaven.

But what if quantum computing got commercialized, you know, beyond where it is today?

Well, I guarantee what you'll see is all of these commercials out there saying, well, you don't have a computer unless you have a quantum computer, right?

Your home is going to be invaded unless you have quantum security Right.

I mean, we talked about smart home smart cars.

Like, the reality is a lot of these things aren't smart.

They're automated in efficient ways.

But the difference between what we would consider smart and like, I've argued often, like even automobiles, I get the great argument that, you know, agentic AI is this next big thing because it's autonomous, just like smart cars.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but actually smart cars are not autonomous.

But you're evoking, I think, a deeper philosophical question which I will articulate as bluntly as I can, as politically incorrect as I can.

Are people getting stupider?

Yes.

Right.

Absolutely there are.

Because that seems to be what the context is.

There's a couple of different sides to this.

They're believing what they're told and we are lacking the critical thinking skills.

Now, I'm not going to get into politics one way or the other, but we have seen the ability of critical thinking skills broadly decline over the last several years, or, you know, five, six, seven, eight years.

And what generative AI has done is allowed us to continue to believe in what we're told.

And so before you could watch a commercial and you could be like, oh, that's not true.

Now we watch a commercial like AI or else you're going to be out in the rain eating dinner and we actually start thinking, wow, that must be true.

Right.

So, and look, I also teach, I'm a professor at a university.

I teach courses.

What I have noticed in the last two years is that as the increase of generative AI has gone up and as students have started to use generative AI for their assignments, the average grade has dropped.

And so the more that people use generative AI, the lower grades are getting.

And you could say, well, that's because, you know, they're, they're cheating, whatever.

It has actually nothing to do with it.

It's because they're not actually comprehending the materials.

Yeah.

They're not putting the thought in.

Yeah, I posted something.

Generative AI is not necessarily making us smarter, it's making us copy and paste experts.

Yeah.

Because that's all we're doing is we're just kind of copying, pasting directly in and then you don't comprehend what it is.

So yes, critical thinking is going down or going away.

We as a society are getting dumber in the process and we are just being force fed things that whether we want it or not.

Here's what you're going to do now.

And we, we've accepted it.

And it strikes me that the Fallacy of the ideology of AI is that it thinks when instead we need to be doing the thinking.

And there are many people who don't understand that.

So they are delegating their thinking, which means there's not any thinking happening at all.

It's just word salad with the copy and paste.

And as long as it gets a C, then maybe they're happy because they get by at the seat of their pants.

But let me take a relevant tangent and this is something I kind of wanted to ask you only because I feel to your point, the AI narratives have a force of gravity where in the consumer realm I think it's easier for us to engage it.

But I saw that you have an interest in the gaming industry.

It strikes me that in video games there's a different potential in theory for critical thinking, a different potential for different experiences.

And the video game industry, I think to your criticism, has kind of swallowed the AI ideology wholesale.

And we've seen this with the waves of layoffs that happened last year in the gaming industry.

And I'm not seeing anyone who has a confident view of what the future of the video game industry is.

And you're clearly a very smart critical thinker.

So I'd love to hear your take on the potential of video games, the current state of the video game industry, what your angle is on that, given what we've been discussing around the air of bullshit surrounding AI.

So I'll kind of start with a few things.

One, the layoffs within the video game industry, honestly actually have nothing to do with AI.

It's more business leadership, financial greed we'll toss in there.

But by that definition, I would argue all layoffs fall under that category.

But they're using AI as a cover, right?

Yeah, I would say not in the gaming industry.

So again, historically, AI has been in gaming for over 50 years.

All games pretty much have an element of AI in there.

So what we have to look at is the difference between AI within the games to help build logic based systems to help make games more interesting versus AI being used to replace humans to actually be creative and develop video games.

Right.

So two different use cases.

The use of AI to replace humans in the development process has only recently become a thing in say like the last year.

But the layoffs really had nothing.

It wasn't like somebody said, hey, we're going to lay off a bunch of people and we're going to replace them with AI bots and things to help us escalate.

I think that has been a natural correlation over the last year, but the layoffs actually had more to do with poor financial decisions and again, ultimately greed.

And so also in the gaming industry, just more broadly, the gaming industry goes through these natural loops, which means it takes, it takes usually four to five years to develop a game.

You publish that game and then at the end of that time you're usually actually letting people go before the next game comes up.

So a combination of you had Covid, you had overhiring, you had a lot of ramp up, that all had to get settled out.

And it just so happens that all of that was happening at one of the natural cycles which created the highest amount of layoffs in industry history.

All of that just was coincidental.

And I don't really attribute any of it, maybe 5% of it to actual AI.

Okay, so putting all of that aside and putting it into context, we are at a position now where AI is starting to take roles away from creatives, natural talent.

And especially when we're looking at a creative industry where you want real artists and you don't want generative AI stuff, it is becoming an issue.

Gdc, the Game Developers Conference, that happens every year, they just did a State of the Gaming industry report where they survey all of the game developers and it clearly shows that there is a big concern with the introduction of generative AI into the creative space.

So I think this is a topic that's going to continue to get noticed, it's going to continue to escalate.

No different than what we are seeing across the board.

When somebody says, well, I don't need any customer support people, because I can just let AI do it all for us, right?

That is going to eventually have a boiling point, a tipping point.

And I think we're going to see some reversals both in gaming and across other industries as it relates to removing jobs.

Because if you really want to think about this long term, in a paradoxical point of view, if we get to a point where AI makes companies more efficient to the point you don't need employees anymore, well then who are your consumers buying your products?

Yeah, I mean this was when people used to talk about advertising becoming so precise and specific and meeting people's demands before they need it, it kind of to me concluded the same thing.

Well, that's the end of capitalism, right?

If people don't have demands, if they don't have desires, they're not consuming.

You just have one company meeting it all.

And then again, that's a completely different economic system.

So this is why I really like your approach around ideologies.

Because when you follow the logic of a lot of this stuff, it just doesn't make sense.

That's right.

It results in a world that is so absurd, you're like, no, it's not going to play out that way.

And I suspect you and I are both of a certain vintage that we remember the things that were promised in the dotcom era, we remember the things that were promised in the social media era.

And they didn't happen.

Other things happened.

Right.

Like, you know, they still had transformative effects, just not the ones that people were predicting at that time.

Right.

Like it usually works out in a different way.

And I feel something similar is happening now that these tools are doing stuff perhaps more modestly than people are claiming, but they are not going to result in the society or the direction that everyone's talking about.

It's going to be something completely different.

So I wanted, within the notion of games, you know, I've often felt, and I mean this in the context of critical thinking because I feel that that is where we struck in this conversation.

The key pain point right there is the false solutionism of Silicon Valley where they're looking for solutions to problems that don't exist.

But critical thinking is a problem that really does exist, that's having consequences in our politics, consequences in our culture.

I am curious what role you think play can have in fostering critical thinking.

I say this because you clearly have a lot of critical thinking.

To what extent, either as a parent or as an educator, do you think about how to foster that critical thinking?

And again, as someone who has an angle in the gaming industry, do you see potential there or no?

Is this about getting people to read books?

I think one of the things that games broadly do is even if we.

Let's just set aside critical thinking for a minute and just focus on logic, you could say they're one and the same, but for the conversation, not one of the same for the conversation.

Let's just say logical puzzles, like even putting together a jigsaw puzzle, playing a game like chess, where there's some logic involved.

If gaming did nothing more than allow people to enhance how they logically look at the world, then that's a great starting point.

I think the critical thinking part is a skill that one we're not teaching in schools or we're not teaching well or behind the individuals who are teaching critical thinking.

There's often bias or other forms of agendas that prevent true critical thinking.

And so I'm not going to say that you can't learn critical thinking skills within a game, especially if there's a storyline like let's say you're given a quest and the quest has multiple different paths and then you're trying to figure out how do I optimize this process so that I can go on the right path strategically.

And again, maybe there's some logic in there and how to determine that outcome.

But you're also going to be critically thinking through the steps to figure out how you're going to approach this and how you might solve that particular problem.

Gaming can introduce critical thinking skills.

I think gaming has a higher opportunity to teach things like compassion, collaboration, communication, teamwork, all of those types of things that we need when we are actually having conversations with each other.

I might not see eye to eye to you on whatever the factor is, but I'm going to respect you enough to listen to what you want to say and then be able to critically think about what you want to say to be able to have a conversation.

So if we can teach alternative skills that are also being not taught appropriately and we can do that in gaming, then the next step becomes, well, okay, how do we really get to those critical thinking steps?

And unfortunately, the biggest problem with critical thinking is being able to accept that your answer is wrong.

And we are in a world right now where if I've used kind of the basic argument, if I say the sky is green, somebody out there is going to say, no, the sky is blue or the sky is black because it's nighttime.

And no one, very few people would be willing to actually walk outside and look up at the sky and see if it's actually green.

And there are.

Go ahead.

I was going to say you started with no one and then you said very few people.

And I think that's the key nuance because you're absolutely correct in the sense that if one says red, the other says blue.

If one says up, the other says down, down.

And there is a knee jerk reaction to the discourse in our culture.

But I also liked where you went in terms of you started with logic and at first I was sort of failing to see where you were going with it because I actually think the potential with games is not just logic, but emotion because that's what you sort of got to with compassion and collaboration and, you know, disagreement.

Right?

Like I would love to see games teach conflict resolution and conflict mitigation because there's a lot of conflict in games.

So there, there would certainly be, you know, you could earn points, earn badges, right, for, you know, helping to mitigate such incidents.

But I, it's the emotion side that I think makes the sky is green, sky is red.

Because people lose.

They, they a become overwhelmed by their emotions, they become threatened by other people's emotions and they're not able to kind of balance their logic and their emotions in equal measure so they can empathize with who they're disagreeing with, find that common humanity and go, well, why do you see the sky as red?

That is a very peculiar situation.

And to have that kind of dialogue.

Going back to Star Trek, and I use it often, it's the Spock versus Kirk analogy, right?

Are you a Spock or are you a Kirk?

And you know, we could argue that none of us, you know, is, is either.

But that is how we argue.

That is how we also critically think.

And when you are so passionate about a particular topic that you can't see past the reality of that particular topic to accept that you potentially are wrong, the lacking of a logical process, then you can get into critical thinking.

Well, let me actually go research this.

Let me actually go and look it up online.

Let me read other reviews.

Let me look at both CNN and Fox and see what they both say and then try to determine, like, there's.

So many things, or assume that both of them are completely wrong and there's a third option.

And then you can ask yourself, now, why would they both be wrong?

Oh, ratings, oh, advertising dollars.

Like, there's natural process that you can go through, but if you're unwilling to ask the right questions, then you're always going to believe you're right.

And this is where I'll push back very slightly on something you perhaps even unconsciously said in the middle of our conversation where you said, well, you know, I don't want to get political.

And I think, especially Americans, I think what you mean to say is you don't want to be partisan, right?

You're not trying to champion a certain part because you've been political this entire conversation, right?

Like everything you're saying is a small kind of politics.

It's, you know, not partisan, it's not ideological.

It's again, going back to a public interest or a public good, right?

Where you're sort of suggesting that in a democracy you need an informed citizenry, right?

You need people who have literacy, who have critical thinking, who can understand policy and legislation so they can then debate it and participate on it rather than go bad guys, bad policy, you know, or whatever the kind of jingoist dialogue goes.

So in trying to wrap this up, I want to bring us Back to ideologies.

Let's put this purely in the business context because I think you made a really good argument in terms of the sales logic and the marketing logic of how AI is being driven, often pushed.

What do you think the counter is to that?

If you were speaking to a company, if you were speaking to a board of directors and they're like, Chris, we're feeling overwhelmed with the amount of trusted vendors that we've been working with forever and they are now telling us we must upgrade to this AI package or we must start training for these new AI features.

What is your strategic advice on how they cope?

Right.

Do they just hold their breath and go underwater and go with the flow or is there a saner strategy here?

Yeah, there's an easy strategy.

That's the beauty of this, is that ultimately it's going to boil back down to who are your customers and what do your customers want from you?

And I think too often we get into this hype mode, fear of missing out something.

Somebody tells us like this is the next thing to slice bread, you have to do it.

And we decide, oh, let's jump on board without actually determining if it matters or not.

And so if we use a really simple critical thinking pathway, it's do my customers want something and then how am I going to build it?

I've preached a lot of times about it's customer first, technology last.

And what we're doing right now is we are putting technology first and then trying to figure out how our consumers are going to use it.

And so what you end up with is, you know, two really easy, quick ways to kind of think about this is if you go into your grocery store again, you usually have now an option, I could do self checkout.

And I'm sure there's plenty of people who want to do self checkout and that's fine.

It's there now for you.

There's a lot of people who completely disagree with self checkout and will want to go to an aisle where there's an actual person helping you.

Well, if I go to say Taco Bell and I go through the drive thru right now, I am forced to communicate with an AI agent who is taking my chatbot, who's taking my order.

Now we could argue maybe the, you know, things are a little bit more efficient, they understand you, you know, they can upsell you more efficiently, all those things.

But I don't get the option like you're forcing that on me.

Now if there was a way to say like I want to talk to a real person or I'm okay with talking with, you know, your chat bot, then great, you're providing the option.

But too often when you start with that technology and then try to shove it down your consumer's throats, your consumer is going to leave and go to a product, a brand that doesn't shove it down their throats.

This is why we see like Discover, the Discover card that all their entire advertising campaign is.

Yeah, you can call us and talk with a real person, not a robot.

So customer first, technology last.

And just to kind of finalize that topic, if, if I say, what is the problem I'm trying to solve for my customer and I talked with my customers and I figure out what that product in that pain point is and what they need, there are a thousand different ways I can solve that, and several of those are probably not with AI.

I desperately want to live in the utopia that you describe in which critical thinking is not only pervasive, but part of the organizational decision making structures.

Unfortunately, it doesn't feel like that's the world we're currently living in.

But hopefully, Chris, with your work, we will get there.

Our final segment of every show is our shout outs.

And this is really just to acknowledge that all of us kind of stand on the shoulders of giants, right?

That we've all been influenced by others.

So just like our new section, is there anyone you want to shout out?

Could be personal, could be great.

Living, intellectual, dead, intellectual, Hollywood B movie star.

Again, we're trying to put you on the back of your feet.

We want the intuitive answer.

But who would you shout out to let our audience know more about today?

Oh, I don't know.

The one.

The two people who popped into my mind because you touched on movies and obviously I'm a big movie fan, would be Steven Spielberg.

And then closely aligned to that would be Michael Crichton.

Oh, right on.

Michael Crichton.

He passed away.

But I have several of his books sitting over here.

And I'm often also asked, like, who's an author that inspires you?

I think the way that he writes and the way he brings some of that critical thinking, as we've talked about some of that real world perspective into the fictitious is really inspiring sometimes.

So if you haven't picked up a Michael Crichton book, any one of them doesn't matter, just go pick up one.

You can pick up Jurassic park since you're probably already familiar with it, but go pick up any Michael Crichton book.

Read it.

It's really intriguing, the thought process and the way he goes about things.

And not only that, I find his books are fun to read.

Like the pace moves fast and you become enveloped into the story.

I wish we had more storytellers like that.

I didn't know that he died recently.

Shout out to Ridley Funeral Home, but he excellent example in terms of our shout outs Now, Chris, I have to thank you very much for giving us a critical perspective on AI.

We've been trying to dig into AI as part of this podcast and it has been difficult to find guests who have the kind of critical thinking perspective you have.

So let us hope that it is infectious and that everyone listening now starts thinking about not just the customer, but the community, right?

The people who are fundamentally the users of this software and as Cory Doctorow would say, whether we need the inshinification of these services rather than keeping them functional and working as they should.

You can find meta views on all the usual social networks.

We appreciate, Chris, your time, we appreciate our audience's time and we'll be back soon.

Thanks again everybody.

We'll talk to you in a bit.