1KHO 843: The Childhood AI Can't Replace | Brendan Steinhauser, Secure AI Now

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And I have really been looking forward to this conversation. This is the key thing of our time, of our day and age. We're going to be talking about AI. We're going to be talking about protecting our children. We're going to be talking about the rapid pace of change. We're going to be talking about how to prepare our kids for it. I'm the CEO of The Alliance for Secure AI.

**Brendan Steinhauser** (1:38)
Wow!

**Ginny Yurich** (1:39)
Brendan Steinhauser is here. Welcome, Brendan.

**Brendan Steinhauser** (1:42)
Thank you, Ginny. It's an honor to be with you.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:44)
Okay. I want to kick it off to let people know where they can go. If you go to secureainow.org, then you also have a phenomenal sub stack where you have all these articles that are coming out. But if you go to secureainow.org, it's going to link out to all the things that you need to know.
So besides being the CEO of The Alliance for Secure AI, you're also a homeschooling family who's trying to get outside.

**Brendan Steinhauser** (2:05)
That's right.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:05)
Yeah.

**Brendan Steinhauser** (2:06)
We live in Austin, Texas. We're a homeschooled family. We have five kiddos ranging in age from nine down to two.
And so it's wild and crazy at our house and we love it. And my wife and I, my wife, Randon, and I have owned a business together for many years. And now she runs the business and I'm doing this job, which I love doing. And we have a great life. It's, as you know, it's often hard, but it's good. And we really love our life that we have. And we wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:34)
Yeah. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. And you're getting kids outside in hot Texas and we're getting kids outside in whole Michigan. You can do it wherever, wherever you're at, you know, you just deal with the weather. But I want to talk about this path that you're on here. She talked about the company that you have with your wife, and then you become the CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, and you are appearing everywhere, frequent media commenter, you're in all the things, you know, newspapers, magazines, books, journals, TV.
So can you talk about where that interest in AI came from? Has it's been like a long-standing thing or is it newer?

**Brendan Steinhauser** (3:08)
Yeah, you know, I think about it a couple of different ways. On the personal level with our family, we're watching this trend happen in the last couple of years. Of course, this movement inside public schools in particular, but inside of kind of traditional schools, you know, more and more ed tech, more and more screens. And now AI is basically going to take all of that to the next level. It's highly addictive. AI is built to keep us engaged all the time, to keep us on our phones and on our computers. And so we just reject a lot of that. We want our kids outside. We want our kids learning on their own. We want a little boredom.
We want them to really be creative. And we're trying to raise our kids a certain way. We're trying to do the home education in the way that you talk a lot about and you've written about in your book, which is to kind of let them naturally learn and provide an environment of love and care and learning that they can often do a lot of self-directed learning with our support and counsel along the way. So watching this happen with society, happening with our own family and sort of the trends, watching this happen in our community in terms of technology and over reliance on technology. Then we see AI come about in the last couple of years and it gets even worse. And so we can kind of project out and see where this could go very shortly. So all that's going on at the same time, we're running our business and doing our thing. And then a friend of mine from graduate school, Mark Beale gave me a call a couple of years ago and said, I want to bring you in, bring your expertise and communications and government affairs into the AI space. And he started telling me, you got to read this book, talk to this person, read this article. And I thought he was crazy at first. What are you talking about? What is AGI? What is super intelligence? And one thing led to another. And he convinced me, hey, this is the fight of our time. And he's like, Brendan, I need you in this fight with me. And so we worked together. He brought me in. I started doing some consulting work for him and his company.