No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:31:41 · Glenn Fogel
[00:31:41] S0: Yeah. Well, look, I'm very blessed. I've been very lucky in my life that I'm in a business where I could pretty much do what I'd like to do. And sometimes people ask me, why do you continue to do what you're doing? And I said, because I think part of this is doing something good. And, yeah, we're not curing cancer. I know that. But I think that travel is a very important thing for a lot of people. It really adds to their their lives. You know, we can do it better. Look. Our mission is to make it easier for everybody to experience the world, and I believe that does improve everybody. It improves the world by getting people to travel more, experience other cultures, other people, etcetera. And if we can do it right and make it easier, that's great. I wanna be part. I wanna help do that. I do believe that's adding something. And, that's part of the everybody needs to understand, I believe. Why are you doing what you're doing? You only get one life. You get one life now. Sometimes people don't have choices at all. That's the only job they have. They need to afford to be able to support their family. I got that. Believe that. I know that. But for people who have a little bit of ability to choose, I'd say choose wisely. Choose wisely because you will not get that time back. And some people have different ideas on what will they believe their life should be and that whatever it is, it's long term for going that path. That's great. My biggest fear too much is people who've taken paths that in the end, they're middle aged or later, and they're a little bit wistful about, gee, I wonder if I had done it next. And I'll be perfectly honest and well, hope not to many of my law school classmates, I hope, but I fear that too many of them, they chose going to law school because that was just kind of like a path. Then they became lawyers just because, you know, that's normally what you do when you come out of law school, couple of lawyers. I didn't, but many people did. And then it paid really well and it was easy in their comfort zone. And then later in life, it was kind of like, gee, what did I do? And that's when I think everybody should really think hard about making sure you choose wisely.
00:33:57 · Elad Gil
[00:33:57] S1: You know, one thing we've talked about quite a bit is the AI impact on jobs. And, you know, there's this claim jobs apocalypse and all these other things coming. Would love to hear your views on that and how you think about that.
00:34:08 · Glenn Fogel
[00:34:08] S0: So it is really interesting. I mean, we take it in terms of the general sense of technology being job replacement. That's something that happened forever. We well, look at the way the agrarian societies went more towards urbanization as technology passed, industrial revolution. We can go through anything like that. And so we know that happened. The issue that's really interesting though is the speed of the change. So if you look right now where we are, I've seen it happen over my time just this company. So at the beginning of the company, we were dealing at booking.com or we acquired booking.com. They were doing hotel reservations in over 40 languages, which meant all the content, All the scripts, everything was in 40 languages, and this customer service, 40 languages, all that. It's wonderful. And there were a lot of people involved with that because all the translation is now in the oh, it's it's, like, 2005. All the translations are being done by human beings. There's no machine translation at all at the time. And all those customer service human beings, we had to have people in all these 40 different languages and that. That was a big deal. Now now we have machine translations. All those jobs are gone. There's nobody doing anything. That's those all those jobs disappear. So what happened to those people? Where did they go? What are the tops are they now taking? What are they doing in sec? So that's an example where we see that happen in real time. And now we have the issue not only of Apple, now the fear of, well, will I get a job coming out of university because all the jobs seem to be gone because what was necessary was an analyst at a financial department, a bank, or a corporation's job was not being done through basically AI. So the job started, what's going on, how's it going affect? Now we know also the other side, that new jobs aren't gonna be created. We all know that also by history. We're looking at the problem of this, the speed of job, well, disappearance and new job creation. Those rates are not happening probably the same rate. And the second thing is, what about the people who are not able to make that change? So I think well, I always think about the typical person I think about is a 50 year old truck driver.
00:36:26 · Glenn Fogel, Elad Gil
And when the person who was making a very nice living and felt very good about himself because he or she is driving an 18 wheeler across The US and getting responsible, helping contribute to a good job there. And now all of sudden, that's completely automated. Mhmm. You're out of a job. What are we gonna how are we gonna retrain that pro? What's that person? That person's gonna feel really bad. And we've seen in society how these type of forced dislocations have caused problems in the past when you look at that. And I'm concerned that there's not enough thought being done about how are we going to deal with these changes if they happen too quickly or not. Society is whole, absolutely. It's always benefit from technology and creating and being able to do more things. But we have to how are we gonna deal with the flip side, the cost that come with it. [00:37:18] S1: Do have a do have a specific viewpoint or proposal in terms of what we should be doing there?
00:37:22 · Glenn Fogel
[00:37:22] S0: Well, I'll tell you one thing that we do here at our company. One thing that we're always doing is trying to upskill people. I'd say every day, I'm talking with my head of the my CHR overhead of, you know, how can we do the best training? How can we get people so they are ready for the future? How do we get them so they are becoming AI literate? It's quite a word that these AI be able to do AI. And that's really important because even if we end up that we can't replace or retrain or put someone else, at least they are better skilled for a job somewhere else. And I feel a real obligation for that. Now that's that's our point. I think everybody should be thinking that way too. It's good for our company. It's a positive for our life for somebody to be able to use new tools in a better way. They're more productive. That's great. It's good. But it also helps them for their career. Now, sometimes I could see somebody in short term saying, I don't wanna spend the money for that. And it's not the right way to think about it. Now, we could have governments coming in with certain types of programs trying to come up with ways, but retraining by governments over the last fifty years really hasn't worked out so well. So I'm not sure that's the right way to go either. But I do believe this is something that I really would like to have more conversation about how to do it because I do I am concerned if we end up in a situation where people will start rejecting technology because of fear, that would end up being bad for us as a society, and by the way, other parts of world are not gonna have that problem, and they will be disadvantaged, I assure you, in China. They not having that same thing about, Oh, AI is bad, and we shouldn't do it. That is not what's happening there. So I really think we got to talk honesty and openly so we have the right conversation and do not end up on the bad side of people coming out and rejecting what actually are going to be good for society.
00:39:15 · Elad Gil, Glenn Fogel
[00:39:15] S1: That makes sense. Yeah. It's interesting too because I know that, I know at least one group that has rerun consumer surveys on AI because there's this claim right now that people are very negative on AI. And it turns out it depends on what the question you ask is. [00:39:28] S0: If you [00:39:29] S1: ask people, do you love using ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude and all that, they're like, we love it, we'll pay more for it, and it's wonderful, helping our lives in all these different ways or it's helping our kids with school or whatever it is. Then if you ask them, are you worried that AI will come and destroy your life and take your job and ruin your career? Then, of course, people are like, I don't like it. And so I think the the questions are being asked a certain way on purpose. And I think to your point, we need to be level headed and say, okay. What's the real implication for different areas of the economy? How do we make sure that people benefit overall? And how do we make sure that people can participate? And that's very different from, you know, taking a pure doomer view or taking a pure sort of negative view on what's coming. So, you know, I appreciate your perspective on that.