The Serious Problem of Picky Eaters & Will AI Make Us Dumber?

When men get sick with a cold or the flu, do they actually suffer more than women — or just complain louder? Some fascinating research suggests there may be real biological differences in immune response between the sexes, which could explain the infamous “man cold.” I break down what scientists have discovered and what it really means. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29229663/ Picky eating feels normal today — separate meals for kids at the dinner table is often the norm. But it wasn’t always this way. For most of history, children ate what adults ate or they didn’t eat at all. Helen Zoe Veit, award-winning historian, associate professor at Michigan State University, and author of Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History (https://amzn.to/3OolXKY) explains how and why picky eating became so common, the serious problems it creates — and why it doesn’t have to be that way. Will artificial intelligence make us intellectually lazy — or is it about to unleash a new wave of human potential? Zack Kass, one of OpenAI’s first 100 employees and author of The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential (https://amzn.to/3MoYM2I) argues that tools like ChatGPT are only scratching the surface. He explains why AI may not replace human thinking but amplify it — if we use it wisely. People form powerful judgments about you within seconds of seeing your online profile photo. Are you trustworthy? Competent? Approachable? Research shows the ideal expression isn’t a huge grin or a stone-cold stare but something more nuanced — and getting it right can influence how others perceive you professionally and socially. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2025/04/02/should-you-smile-in-your-profile-photo-heres-what-research-shows/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS QUINCE: Refresh your wardrobe with Quince! Go to ⁠⁠https://Quince.dom/sysk ⁠⁠for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! HIMS: For simple, online access to personalized and affordable care for Hair Loss, ED, Weight Loss, and more, visit ⁠⁠https://Hims.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠ for your free online visit! SHOPIFY: Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠ DELL: Dell Tech Days are here. Enjoy huge deals on PCs like the Dell 14 Plus with Intel® Core™ Ultra processors. Visit ⁠⁠https://Dell.com/deals⁠⁠ PLANET VISIONARIES: We love the Planet Visionaries podcast, so listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you're listening to this podcast! In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:28Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:44Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, are men bigger babies when they're sick than women are? Maybe. Then, are you or your kids picky eaters? It can lead to real health problems, and it never used to be a thing. When parents did start regularly saying, "Hey, if you don't like it, I'll make you a peanut butter and jelly, or I'll make a quick macaroni and cheese," all of these options that became available, it really prevented kids from learning to like a broad range of foods. Also, what makes a good and bad online profile photo? And a deep dive with one of the pioneers of AI on what it can do for you.

• 2:24Speaker 01

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• 2:39Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:22Mike Carruthers?

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• 4:09Speaker 02

  Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today. Something you should know. With Mike Carruthers.

• 4:22Mike Carruthers?

  So when men get sick, do they get sicker than when women get sick? Pretty interesting question, and one we're going to start with today on this episode of Something You Should Know. Hi there, I'm Mike Carruthers. So there is a scientific basis for the idea that when men catch a cold or get the flu, they get hit harder than women do. And if a fever is involved, men can run a little hotter, and their illness can last a little longer. Now, this has been attributed to hormones. Testosterone may suppress immune response, which allows men to get sicker, while estrogen

• 5:06Mike Carruthers?

  in women appears to enhance the immune response. This phenomenon, it's called man flu, is not exclusive to humans. According to one researcher, he explained that males tend to be the weaker sex across an entire range of animal species when they're sick. He said maintaining the ability to mate is more important to males than getting better, which lowers their chance of a rapid recovery. And for females, it's just the opposite. And that is something you should know.

• 5:43Mike Carruthers?

  This is probably going to sound a little weird, but I've been waiting a long time for someone to speak on this topic. The topic being picky eaters. Because I've long suspected that a piece of the puzzle of the whole discussion about diet, obesity, and health is picky eaters. Kids who are picky eaters and don't eat their vegetables or other foods grow up to be adults who are picky eaters, who don't eat their vegetables and other foods. What's so interesting is that some of us assume that children are naturally fussy, overly sensitive to taste and texture, and simply are not capable of liking adult food. But it turns out that wasn't always true.

• 6:25Mike Carruthers?

  In fact, for much of American history, children were anything but picky. They ate what adults ate, and often loved it. Spicy food, bitter food, vinegary pickles, even coffee and oysters were normal parts of an American child's diet. So what changed? How did American kids become some of the pickiest eaters in the history of the world? And if picky-eating kids become picky-eating adults, what are the consequences of that? That's what we're talking about with Helen White. She's an award-winning historian, associate professor of history at Michigan State University, and author of a book called "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History."

• 7:10Mike Carruthers?

  Hey Helen, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Thanks so much, I'm so happy to be here.

• 7:15Mike Carruthers?

  So you have the data, I don't, but it seems to me, just from observation, that kids are pickier eaters than they used to be, and that parents indulge it. That they will make something for themselves for dinner, and then something different for children. And when I grew up, that was not the case, not in our house. It was, this is what's for dinner, and you were expected to eat it or try it, but if you didn't like it, well, it was kind of too bad. And I wonder how that changed? How did it change where parents indulge kids' picky eating?

• 7:49Speaker 03

  That's the big question. I spent more than 10 years doing historical research on that very question. Why are kids so picky today? Where did mass childhood pickiness come from? And why do so many of us today believe that pickiness is natural and inevitable? Because the first thing you see when you start looking at historical sources is that children in the past didn't used to be picky. There are plenty of Americans alive today who can remember a different culture around children's food from the mid- 20th century. But if you go back even further, if you go back to the 19th century, it was really different. Children ate what, you know, sound to us today like just incredible things.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  They ate tons of vegetables. They ate spicy sauces and lots of vinegary fermented pickled dishes. They ate all sorts of organ meats and shellfish. They loved coffee. And, and that's really the thing. When Americans imagine why children ate things in the past, they usually imagine two things. One, they think, oh, it must have been scarcity. Kids must have forced food down because there were no alternatives and otherwise they would have starved. Or they imagine it was discipline. Parents in the past were super harsh. They forced children to eat food they hated. And what you see is that it was neither of those. Children who were, you know, didn't have enough food were not picky.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  But children with plenty of food, the richest kids in America were eating really diverse, broad diets. Um, and Americans hardly talked about discipline when it came to food. They assumed that children would eat like themselves. Parents indeed would give children family meals and assume that they would eat them. And they wouldn't provide alternatives. But they didn't see this as a form of discipline and certainly not of punishment. That was for many Americans, just natural and also logistical. Before refrigerators or highly processed foods, most Americans didn't have edible food to give children as an alternative if they hesitated to eat family meals.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  And what we see as a result is kids just emerging as curious, wide-ranging omnivores from a really young age.

• 10:12Mike Carruthers?

  And so what changed? How did picky eating become a thing? I mean, when, when I was growing up, you know, we ate what was served for dinner. And yeah, sometimes, you know, my mother would cook. Every once in a while she decided to cook liver. And God, it was the worst thing I ever ate. I can still imagine that taste. I just, but at least I tried it. And there were probably a lot of other things that I, that I tried that I would not have tried if she hadn't made me that I ended up liking. So something changed.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  That idea that there isn't an alternative, there's no parallel dinner that you have access to, that there's a family dinner, and you know, if you don't want to eat it, you don't have to, but there's not anything else, that's an enormously effective tool in teaching kids to try and like things. Another, if I were going to give one answer to what changed, the single umbrella answer that I would give is hunger. Now, that could be really misinterpreted, so let me, let me explain. In the 19th century and early 20th century, kids really expended a lot of energy.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  They walked long distances, they did a lot of chores, they played outside. At the same time, there was very little snacking in American culture. They might have had occasionally bread between meals, but there wasn't this culture of constant grazing that we have today. And children came to meals with really big appetites back in, in earlier decades. And if you've ever gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach, you know how powerfully hunger can, can, can make you interested in food. So, that's one thing. They used to be much hungrier. In the 20th century, a few things changed around that. One, kids started moving less.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  They, they were less likely to, to do heavy chores, less likely to walk long distances. They were much more likely to snack. Snacking culture emerged, along with all these products that really encouraged it. And also, milk drinking. We tend to think of milk as a really benign thing, and maybe a natural and timeless part of children's diets, but it really isn't. It was only in the early 20th century that nutritionists started saying that children should drink large amounts of whole milk, a quart a day was standard advice for, even for toddlers. And all of that contributed to kids just not being nearly as hungry at meals. So, even when children...

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Didn't have alternatives. They were less likely to take the same kind of avid interest in meals that earlier generations had because of so much snacking. At the same time, when parents did start regularly saying, hey, if you don't like it, I'll make you a peanut butter and jelly, or I'll heat up a can of soup, or I'll make a quick macaroni and cheese, all of these options that became available, it really prevented kids from having the opportunity of learning how capable they were of learning to like a broad range of foods.

• 13:28Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, I would imagine that convenient foods, frozen foods, things like that, like those frozen mac and cheeses, or frozen anything, that if a kid says, I don't like this, it's pretty easy to say, okay, Johnny, I'll throw in a thing in the microwave and you can have that for dinner. And it's an easy solution, so Johnny eats his dinner, but it's setting this whole problem up.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Right. It can be a really vicious cycle, because, you know, not only do children learn they don't have to eat the family meal, they'll never have to experience hunger if they don't, you know, if they don't eat the family meal, they're also just not getting a chance to acquire a broad range of taste. I mean, one interesting thing today is that when you hear the phrase acquired taste, it's almost always synonymous with what we call adult food. In the past, people didn't really have something called adult food or children's food. And acquiring taste was really something that happened at a time when a child weaned, like really early, like in late babyhood, early toddlerhood, kids were acquiring the

• 14:33Speaker 03

  taste of their food culture.

• 14:35Mike Carruthers?

  And so here we are today, where the kids have gotten very picky, parents have indulged the pickiness, parents eat one thing, kids eat another. Yeah, it's not like the good old days, but so what? What's the big problem?

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Well, there are several problems. Pickiness affects kids' health and their quality of life in profound ways. It also affects parents' quality of life. I think for many American parents today, the thought of children just cheerfully and gratefully eating and enjoying everything that they enjoy is so strange that it sounds like science fiction. Like, they can't even imagine how much easier their lives could potentially be. Kids have really gained a lot of weight as a cohort. Childhood obesity was really rare just a few decades ago.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  It's more than quadrupled in this country since the 1970s, and now more than a third of American kids are either obese or overweight. And not just obesity, but also their limited diet, the limited amount of fiber that many kids get, the limited amount of plants that they're eating is leading to problems. There's growing heart disease among children. Type 2 diabetes is rising among kids. When I was a child, type 2 diabetes was commonly called adult onset diabetes because it was so rare in childhood, but that's changed. It's even affecting kids' growth.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  That's something that parents don't think about, but if children don't get enough nutrition during their childhood growth spurts, they won't necessarily reach their full potential height.

• 16:25Mike Carruthers?

  Doesn't this sound a lot like the missing piece of the puzzle that never gets talked about when we talk about obesity and lousy diets that people are eating? That it starts with picky eating in childhood? I want to find out more about this. I'm talking to Helen White. She's author of the book "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History."

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 17:18Speaker 05

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• 17:46Mike Carruthers?

  So Helen, you know, parents are smart people. What keeps them from seeing this or saying, "Well, wait, we need to introduce other foods to little Johnny and little Suzie because they'll need those other foods like vegetables and things to be healthy?"

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Parents have been put in an impossible position because they're really worried that if they do the sort of thing that you're talking about, if you say like, "I'm sorry, but this is the family meal, there's no other meal," parents have heard that they could really mess their child up psychologically. That's where a lot of this came from, is claims by psychologists in the 1940s and 50s that food was a psychological minefield. And if that parents did it wrong, they could permanently scar their children. You now hear on the internet and social media, you hear claims that, you know, telling your kid they have to eat a certain thing will lead them to have no sense of their own authentic

• 18:50Speaker 03

  preferences or taste, will lead to them having no sense of authentic fullness, and thus will lead them to overeat. You hear that you can give a child an eating disorder by trying to tell them to eat certain things. Parents just feel completely paralyzed. And there's a lot of anger and frustration among parents because they've been put in this impossible position where most parents don't want their kids to be picky. They would love it if their kid ate more widely, but they've been told not to do the very things that American parents used to do to raise these healthy, wide-ranging eaters.

• 19:28Mike Carruthers?

  And so this whole talk about if you tell a kid he has to eat this, it's going to mess him up in any number of ways. Is there evidence that that is true? Because it sounds like baloney to me.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  There is no good evidence that it's true. None of these claims were originally based on robust comparative studies. These claims originally came from a bunch of Freudian psychologists. Most notably, Dr. Benjamin Spock, who wrote the bestselling childcare book of the 20th century. And it was very much a Freudian. And there was a lot of interest in the ways that mothers, especially mothers, were potentially forming their children and projecting their own anxieties onto kids. But there was absolutely no research. And to me, one of the most compelling things is that back in the 19th century,

• 20:23Speaker 03

  when American parents expected children to share their meals and didn't provide alternatives, kids grew up to be wide-ranging eaters with healthy body weights and healthy relationships to food. Obviously, that's a generalization, but it's generally extremely true. Problems like mass obesity and eating disorders and other dysfunctional relationships to food only emerged in the second half of the 20th century, only became common then. So to say that these old-fashioned parenting methods cause these eating disorders or obesity, it just really makes no sense when you look closely.

• 21:03Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  And the good news is that parents can stop worrying so much that they'll hurt their children. It's really the opposite.

• 21:10Mike Carruthers?

  It just seems like such nonsense, you know, that it doesn't seem normal. Like, so what are we supposed to do? Cater to, you know, Johnny just wants french fries today. Or, you know, Suzie wants mac and cheese every day. Well, you know, that's not good. Talk about doing damage to a child. You've got to know that no vegetables is not a very good idea. And, you know, I remember too, like back in the...

• 21:41Mike Carruthers?

  I don't know how many years ago, these books came out, cookbooks telling you how to hide broccoli

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:49Mike Carruthers?

  or whatever into food that they would like, so that they're still getting their vegetables. Well, that doesn't really address the issue.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  No, it's, I mean, I, obviously, I think kids are fully capable, not only of learning to like all sorts of vegetables, but of knowing, of knowing that they're eating them while they're liking them. Of course, I mean, that kind of strategy can be a good way, if you already have a picky eater, to introduce vegetables and then say, hey, that taste you really enjoyed, that was actually pureed kale, and here it is again, you know, so I'm not, I wouldn't condemn that method out of hand. It's just unnecessary. The thing is, parents used to believe that they were wiser than preschoolers when it came to food. And we lost that confidence, but we didn't lose it in a bunch of other realms.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Like, kids throw temper tantrums, or complain, or whine, or cry around all sorts of things today, and parents don't take those kinds of protests all that seriously. For example, if a kid refuses to brush his teeth, or refuses to wear a seatbelt, or refuses to put on pants, or shoes, or to wear snow boots in a snowstorm, or to go to school, all these kinds of realms, parents are just really confident today. We're like, oh, no, you might be sad in the short term, but I'm confident that this is best for you, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna help you to do this, and you're gonna take a bath, or brush your teeth, or put on sunscreen, or whatever it is, even if you don't want to, because I'm the parent, and I know this is best for you.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Parents used to have that kind of confidence around food, too. And I think one of the most important parts of this project is helping parents to regain the confidence, not shaming them. There's actually a lot of shame around this issue. A lot of parents just feel devastated, because they're so scared, because they've really been told that they're gonna hurt their kid if they do the wrong thing. But to help rebuild parents' confidence, that they really are wiser about food than kids, just as they're wiser about all sorts of other things.

• 23:53Mike Carruthers?

  Well, there's also the problem, I imagine this certainly contributes to the problem, is that there isn't family dinner like there used to be. We're gonna stop at McDonald's, and you can have this, or you can have, you can get whatever you want, or we'll pull over to Burger King, and so... You know, you can have whatever you want because because there isn't a meal. It's fast food.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, fast food or also, you know, processed food in the home. Like, marketing really encouraged Americans to have personalized diets in the 20th century and definitely still today as well. This idea that you shouldn't have family food, that people have these really elaborate sets of personal preferences, nobody ever thought that in the past. Like, it's not like Americans in the past were clamoring to eat differently from each other, they really weren't. Communal eating was was the ideal and the norm. But the fact, as food became processed in factories, shelf-stable, as things like fast food became more available, it became possible for Americans to eat differently

• 25:02Speaker 03

  than their family members. At the same time, marketers were really sending the message that this was a kind of consumer freedom, that this was healthy, that it was really good for kids, and what we see is family eating habits fracture.

• 25:17Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it's interesting, you know, I have children that have grown and we tried to always introduce new foods, and it's amazing how many foods kids, if you expose them to it, will like them. I mean, both my boys like broccoli, and, you know, a lot of kids don't, a lot of people don't like broccoli, they love it. But if we had thought, oh, kids don't like broccoli, he'll, you know, he'll never eat that, well, then he would have never tried it. And that if you give him a chance, maybe they'll find things they like.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I heartily agree with that. I have three children myself, and I parented extremely, extremely differently than most American parents, just because I was immersed in this totally different world with very different food rules, and I followed a very different script than most parents and wasn't afraid that I was hurting my kids as I did it. One rule that parents have heard that's also a myth is that you kind of have a certain number of chances, like you parent, today, there's this rumor that like, once a kid has tried a food seven times, or sometimes you hear 11 or 15, and if they still reject it, then you know they really like it. But no culture before ever pinned a number on the, you know,

• 26:32Speaker 03

  the amount of times you can offer a food. You can really just keep offering the food. Children do sometimes have really big reactions when they're first trying a food. Sometimes they make huge faces. They might gag. They might say they don't want it. Just keep trying. That really is how almost all humans did it in history up to the 20th century. You know, there was, there were a limited number of family foods. This is what the family was eating. If you try enough times, the kid eventually learns to like it. And this, this has just been the pattern that we see over and over again, not just in the United States, but around the world and for millennia.

• 27:11Mike Carruthers?

  So we've been talking about getting children to like foods that they claim not to like. But what about adults? Getting them to like foods that they maybe all their life say that they didn't like. And I think a really good example is cilantro. So talk about that. Talk about cilantro.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  It's a very polarizing food. And some people do have special genes that allow them to detect these aldehydes in cilantro that others can't. So to some people, it really tastes sopier than others. But what I found fascinating was that if you go to places in the world where cilantro is just ubiquitous in cuisine, and there are lots of places in Latin America and Asia where cilantro is just everywhere, you don't find cilantro lovers and cilantro haters. Everybody likes it, even people with exactly those same genes. So you can find people who talk about, you know, I'm one of those people for whom cilantro tastes like soap, but I learned to like it because I ate it every day. I made myself eat it. I put it in different kinds of things.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  I tried to reconceptualize the way I thought of it. And low and behold, after a certain number of exposures, I began to enjoy it.

• 28:22Mike Carruthers?

  You learn to love it or you learn to tolerate it?

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Well, I think you can learn to really enjoy things, not just to tolerate it, but to like it.

• 28:31Mike Carruthers?

  Well, as I said in the beginning, I've long suspected this is a piece of the puzzle when it comes to diet and obesity and health, that picky eating is a problem and it needs to be addressed and you've addressed it really well. Helen Weitz been my guest. She is an award-winning historian, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University, and she's author of the book, "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History." And there's a link to her book in the show notes. And Helen, great. I appreciate this and a great job. You explained it really well.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Oh, thanks. I really appreciate that. That's, that means a lot coming from you.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors, great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade: Hydrates Better Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 30:11Mike Carruthers?

  There is a growing concern that AI is making us dumber. Why struggle to solve a problem when ChatGPT can do it in seconds? Why wrestle with an idea when AI can outline it, draft it, polish it, and be done? But what if we're looking at this all wrong? What if AI isn't shrinking human intelligence, but expanding it? What if we're at the beginning of something more like a renaissance than the robot apocalypse? When most people think of AI, they think of chatbots or those impressive little AI-generated images and videos in their social media feeds. But according to my guest, that is barely scratching the surface of what's happening and what's coming.

• 30:56Mike Carruthers?

  Zack Kass was one of the first 100 employees at OpenAI, and he has spent his career on the front lines of artificial intelligence. He believes AI could dramatically expand human potential, and he has some compelling evidence and examples that might completely change how you see this moment in time with AI. He's the author of the book, The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential. Hey Zach, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Mike.

• 31:28Mike Carruthers?

  So can you give me some examples, when you use the word Renaissance, to describe what AI is doing? I mean, that's a, that's a big word, and so some examples of what you mean by that?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  So, last year, we discovered our first antibiotic in 60 years because of AI. We split HIV out of DNA last year because of AI. Baby KJ, the infant in the United States, received the first custom gene therapy, discovered thanks to AI and CRISPR to cure it of a previously deadly and immutable disease. And we pointed to these things and we said, "Look, we're gonna, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna make these novel scientific breakthroughs," and people sort of poo-pooed that stuff. Well, last week, AI, which had long been considered, you know, bad at math, suddenly started solving mathematical equations that had, that are novel and open-ended, and even

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Terrence Tao, broadly considered the greatest living mathematician, is starting to raise his hand and say, "Hey, these machines are getting really good at, at open-ended mathematical problems." So what does that mean for scientific discovery? We're gonna find out, but all of the indicators here seem to be blinking pretty bright that we are gonna supercharge our ability to learn more about our known and unknown universe.

• 32:52Mike Carruthers?

  So help me bridge this gap, because you just talked about... What AI has done in the last year that sound remarkable. When I think of AI, I think of ChatGPT. It helps me write a better email. That's a very different application than, you know, the things you just mentioned. So how does that work? How does, how does AI do what those things that you just said?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  This highlights maybe one of the critical issues with the public perception of the technology that I think is pretty understandable.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  The rise of ChatGPT is important because it gives everyone with access to the Internet a pretty reasonable understanding of what the technology can do to a, to a limit. It has also caused incredible myopia because now people are like, wait a second. How could this machine that creates dumb videos? How could that thing actually spur a new era of human innovation? And it's like, well, it's because way more stuff is going on. And if you want to know how capable it is, find one of your smartest friends who know, who is working on a really complex, open-ended

• 34:15Speaker 01

  problem and watch them use AI to help solve that problem. And for engineers working on, you know, software development, they'll tell you it's getting really good at that. For mechanical engineers or civic engineers working on plans for architects or they'll tell you it's getting really good. And you start to appreciate that actually these apps are scratching the surface of what the technology can already do because most people in their day to day aren't trying to solve novel concepts, right? And most of us are not doing complex math. And so the technology can sort of very sufficiently meet our needs without us ever actually appreciating all the other things it can do.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Most people don't even realize how good, for example, autonomous vehicles are because they haven't even been in a Waymo yet. And this highlights this, this increasing sort of adoption gap between what the technology is capable of and what people are actually using it for, which is why there's, you know, a public perception issue. To say nothing of the fact that I don't think the industry itself does a very good job of explaining what this technology can do apart from, as you put it, writing better emails and creating funny videos.

• 35:29Mike Carruthers?

  When you say AI is really getting good at, if you ask these experts, they'll tell you AI is getting very good at this. Well, my understanding is that AI is a system that has access to all the knowledge that there probably is out there. So the knowledge already exists. So what is AI doing to create new answers to questions that aren't already out there?

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Ah, here's an interesting way to understand the question you asked. What the average person thinks of AI is in many cases what the internet has actually been for quite some time, which is this library. And what the internet offered people was this sort of theoretically unmet information. And as soon as ChatGPT came out, people said, okay, well, now we have better Google search. That was like one of the things people used it for. So people said, okay, now we can get faster search. And it again misses the point, which is ChatGPT is not best as a search engine, it's best as a computational partner, it's best as like cognition. And so the way, what I try to explain it to people as is you're talking about the difference

• 36:36Speaker 01

  between unmet information and unmet intelligence. And it's not perfect. This is where, you know, we'll start splitting hairs. But if you gave, if you pointed all of the, for example, complex math problems that we have, which we're starting to do, adding GPT 5.2 or Axiom model, which is, which is the state of the art mathematical model, what you get is not more information, it's more cognition. The AI opportunity is not to know more per se, it's to compute more.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  And this also breaks people's brains because we don't really have a modern comparison. Most people, again, are thinking about this as just a better way to search the internet. But in fact, it's a much better way to make sense of incredible amounts of information. And the way I explain it to some people is imagine if you could infinitely model. And pretty soon, we're going to start to be able to do a whole lot more complex analysis about everything. And the consequences of that are pretty clearly meaningful scientific discoveries. So advancing the frontier of what we know and also meaningfully reducing the cost of how much it takes to create things, goods and eventually services.

• 37:58Mike Carruthers?

  So the concern so many people have, and I'd like to hear your response to this, is that if AI can do so many things and can solve so many problems, that we're all just going to get really stupid, much like the way that, you know, people used to have to remember lots of people's phone numbers in their head, but now they don't, so they don't. AI is going to be doing everything for us, so we don't have to, so we won't.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  I'll answer the question, which is, will AI make us dumber? My answer is actually no. What will make us dumber, which has been happening for a while in the developed world, is economic abundance. And this, people don't like to hear, but I have to remind people that we started to see the current trends in Gen Z, which are not great, that they appear to be the first generation in many to not be smarter than the last, on average. They are less likely to read, less likely to ride a bike, less likely to swim. And that trend showed up pre-generative AI. That trend showed up circa Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind, 2019,

• 39:06Speaker 01

  when he started talking about the fact that developed nations were asking less and less of their children because parents were more and more afraid to create discomfort with their child. What I think we are observing is a population that just stopped asking a whole lot of its young people. And a lot of young people decided that they would do nothing, right? You want to, you want to sit on your phone all day? You want to sit, you want to sit around and play video games all day? You, you can, you can order DoorDash, you can check out. And that's not an AI problem, that's something else. That's an agency problem, that's a personal responsibility problem. What we are also observing is that Gen Z will have a near standard deviation higher occurrence of Genius and Savant.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  And when I travel around, and I, and I have a selection bias, obviously, I talk to parents. My observation is about 70% of them see their child as much smarter than they were at that age. Because they have access to tools and technology that, that, you know, their parents could not have imagined. And they're using these tools and technologies to overperform across multidisciplinary arts, science, culture. More chess masters under the age of 20 now than above the age of 40. Most companies are doing away with their college degree requirements because they're realizing that actually lots of smart people are showing up everywhere. And so we're observing this interesting K-curve that's pronounced by agency.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Like if you want to do a lot, you can do a ton, way more than your parents. And if you want to do nothing, you can do less than almost anyone in human history. Because we don't ask much of anyone anymore. So when people are like, isn't AI going to make us dumber? I'm like, if you want it to, I mean, optionality, comfort has a cost. And for, in the developed world, what we are observing is that cost is percentage of the population says, I don't really care, I don't, I don't want to do much.

• 41:00Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, wow. But the other concern is that AI is gonna, and people say it's already happening, taking jobs away. That it's doing things that people, it's doing things better than people can do them. So we don't need people anymore.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  First, I will say I'm sympathetic to anyone that whose job was was lost recently by due to AI or anything else. I mean, that's that is not that's just period. I mean, let's be clear. It's not clear, I should say, in in the unemployment data that actually that's what's going on. It's the unemployment seems flat right now. Job creation is is down in manufacturing, which is the least exposed right now to AI, especially in the United States. So there are maybe economic issues. It seems like they're more likely to be related to tariffs than AI. But I think what we're going to find is that humans want humans

• 41:55Speaker 01

  to do a lot of stuff. And that, in fact, what we face is an incredible amount of change, an incredible amount of disturbance, but not actually an economic issue as much as an emotional one. Like, I I observe this as a as a time where we're going to reboot the economy and probably redefine work. And I bet there's more and better food on the table when it's all said and done.

• 42:21Mike Carruthers?

  I think if you ask most people, they would say that things are changing faster than ever. Is that true?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, let's say this. Technology is improving faster than ever. We are there there remains this this theory of societal threshold, which basically says, the future is certainly not defined by what a machine can do. It is defined by what we want a machine to do. And that is a good thing. And we should be very deliberate about the things that we do and don't want to automate in our lives. There is plenty of stuff that we should automate that would save us a bunch of headache, cost, despair. Forty five thousand people die on the roads every year. Why are we not clamoring for autonomous vehicles? I do not know. Well, I do know, we write about it. But there's plenty that we there's plenty of virtuous friction. There's plenty of stuff in our lives that we should continue

• 43:15Speaker 01

  to strive for and that and that automating has actually harmed. And things like online dating sort of proved this, giving everyone access to everyone in an in an online dating pool. Has destroyed the fabric of a lot of relationships because everyone feels like they constantly have another choice. So there is a very important line that we're going to start to toe between the things in this world that we should automate, that preserve, that enhance our humanity and the things that we should not, that destroy it. And we should remember all the time that the purpose of technology is to allow us to be more human, to achieve a greater sense of humanity.

• 43:55Mike Carruthers?

  From your vantage point, what are you seeing in terms of new applications of AI that people are starting to use or are just down the road on the horizon that will be here soon that are different than what we've come to think of as AI, which is ChatGPT?

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my favorite right now, and where I think there are two really interesting unlocks that most people haven't thought about. The first is people who have used a lot of ChatGPT or Gemini or some other product have created a long context, a lot of memory, and asking really deep introspective questions. Most people spend their entire lives and sort of flirting with the idea of self-actualization and deep psychotherapy. These machines are not meant to be therapists, but they can unearth incredible understanding that you can then work on with another human. And so asking these machines to challenge you about things, about self-truths, right? Like, what do you think I struggle with most?

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Or what do you think is a hard truth that my friends and family would want to tell me based on everything that I've talked to you about? There is an incredible amount of context in this diary to help people start to really face, you know, amazing opportunities for deep introspection and challenge. I do not recommend using it as a therapist. There is a fine line here. The other thing that I think people are not using it well enough right now is to make sense of a lot of things that have previously been gated for only the elite. Tax law, right? People like, I don't know how to save, you know, I don't know how to do my taxes well. Well, guess who does? People who don't can't afford great attorneys. Guess what? You now have a very good attorney, probably a better attorney than you've than any of your wealthy friends have.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  People who like wander and are constantly wondering how something works are super curious and like, you know, used to exploring long Reddit threads. This machine has an encyclopedic understanding of the physical world. It can it can help you learn really quickly. And I love taking photos of things that I don't know what they are. And then, you know, later that day, putting them into chat GPT and asking them to explain it. So there's just a lot of of personal growth and development, but also unlock of of, you know, traditionally elite services that start to democratize what what only the very wealthy have have long had.

• 46:21Mike Carruthers?

  I'll bet because I've thought of this myself. Before you ask chat GPT or Gemini or whoever something deeply personal like that, you stop and think, who can see this? Where does this go? Where is this being stored? Could this come back to bite me? And you would say what?

• 46:41Speaker 01

  There are two things to say here. First, if you use Google or Gmail or any other service, you should be asking that question constantly anyway. So if you, you know, if you send email over the internet, this is a question that you should be asking and you have an agreement with Google that says it will not sell your Gmail data. It will sell all your search data. It won't sell your Gmail data, and that's important. Chat GPT actually has a has a contractor has had a contract that says it will not sell your data, and that's changing with its ads product. And so I have recommended to everyone that to either use a service, find a service provider that will not sell your data or upgrade to a subscription. Pretty simple, in my opinion. Make sure that you are not the product.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  I like a relationship with these technologies that where I know I am paying them for a service and that data. Is private. And again, what I would remind people is if you use the Internet, you have been exposed to this issue for a long time. Like, it's it's not a new issue. You just have one more vector, you have one more, you know, service provider that you have to make sure you have a secure relationship with. And this is important. We we sacrificed way too much at the altar of of attention and likes with social media. And and Meta and Facebook profiteered on incredible privacy for way too long and and and and destroyed a lot of lives.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, teens were served ads for makeup when they would search, you know, am I pretty enough? I mean, that's just so disgusting. And we they should be held accountable. And we should now also make sure that we we are building relationship to technology that doesn't prey on us.

• 48:18Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  And it's possible. There are a lot of service providers, a lot of people want to give you AI applications that do not prey on your privacy.

• 48:25Mike Carruthers?

  There's one thing that happens every time you ask ChatGPT a question. Usually somewhere on the page there is, you know, ChatGPT can be wrong, it makes mistakes, you should verify this information. How much should we take that into account? Or is that just legal mumbo jumbo or what?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  I basically believe that AI is best used as a computational partner. It is it is best used not as a search partner, but as a machine to better compute information that you can factually verify. I prefer to use it as more of a calculator than a search engine. And in doing so, you you dramatically reduce hallucinations. And what you create is a world where you can verify, where the where the actual scope of the problem can be quite enormous. But it is verifiable in in account. You can sort of back into the problem. And that, I think, is proving to be the best use of AI in the real world anyways.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  And this is why we're getting really good at these, as sort of these closed problems like autonomous vehicles, where you can sort of repeat the problem over and over and over until it until the error rate just diminishes to to near zero. But when you're doing Google search or, you know, equivalent of Google search with it, I would be, I would treat it. With an incredible amount of care. Because while hallucinations have dropped dramatically, they still exist and we shouldn't believe everything we read on the internet blindly.

• 50:03Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's proven to be some pretty good advice to not believe everything you read on the internet. Well, I have to admit, this conversation went in different directions than I thought it was going to go, and I really enjoyed it. So, thank you. I've been talking to Zack Kass, one of the world's most sought after voices on artificial intelligence. He was one of the first 100 employees at OpenAI, and he's written a book called The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for coming on and talking about this.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Brilliant. Thanks a bunch, Mike.

• 50:43Mike Carruthers?

  You may not have thought about it like this, but your online profile photo isn't just a picture. It's a snap judgment machine. Research shows people form impressions of your competence and trustworthiness in as little as 100 milliseconds before you've ever said a word, just from looking at your picture. A study out of New York University found that subtle differences in facial expression significantly change how trustworthy and capable you appear. And here's the interesting part: the perfect professional expression isn't a giant toothy grin. It's what researchers describe as a slight positive expression: relaxed face, lips gently

• 51:28Mike Carruthers?

  upturned. People with that look were judged as more trustworthy than those who had a stern expression without sacrificing perceived competence. If you're too serious, you look cold. If you're too smiley, you risk looking less authoritative. The sweet spot is controlled warmth, approachable. But not trying too hard. On a platform like LinkedIn where employers and clients are subconsciously asking, "Can I trust this person?" Or, "Can they deliver?" That tiny shift in expression can tilt the answer. So no, you don't need a big grin like you just won the lottery, but you also don't want to look like you're about to deliver a performance review.

• 52:11Mike Carruthers?

  Your face is your headline, so make sure it says the right thing. And that is something you should know. It's always appreciated if you would just take a moment and share this episode with someone you know, so that they too could give it a listen and hopefully become a listener. And it helps us grow our audience and keeps the podcast going. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 52:36Speaker 04

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