The AI Revolution Isn’t What Silicon Valley Promised — with Josh Tyrangiel

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**Scott Galloway** (1:47)
Episode 411 411 is a phone number you can call to get information. In 2011, Prince William and Kate Middleton got married. I was really hoping that Dye and Prince Charles were going to name their kid Shamu. That way he would have been Shamu, Prince of Wales. Or better yet, maybe name him Up. So it would have been Up, Chuck and Dye.
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**Josh Tyrangiel** (2:13)
Go, go, go.

**Scott Galloway** (2:23)
Welcome to the 411th episode of The Prof G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Josh Tyrangiel, an award-winning journalist who writes for The Atlantic, created Vice News Tonight on HBO, and previously ran Bloomberg Businessweek. We discuss his latest book, AI for Good, How AI is Transforming Government, and what the next wave of automation could mean for American workers. So with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Josh Tyrangiel.
Josh, where does this podcast find you?

**Josh Tyrangiel** (2:57)
I'm actually in the Podcast Office at The Atlantic right now.

**Scott Galloway** (3:00)
Wow. That's a good wrap. The Podcast Office at The Atlantic. Hipper, whiter things have never been said.
Yeah.

**Josh Tyrangiel** (3:10)
It's better than bunker in Soho.

**Scott Galloway** (3:13)
There you go. So let's bust right into it. Your new book, AI for Good, takes us inside government agencies, hospital schools and the Pentagon to show how real people are actually putting AI to work.
What was the inspiration for this book?

**Josh Tyrangiel** (3:28)
The inspiration was probably just a whole lot of bullshit to be honest in the sense that I was covering AI.
When I would go out to the valley, what I would hear from people zealot-eyed on both sides was on the one hand, this is about to change everything for the better. Utopia is coming. We have to move really quickly. We're going to cure cancer and we're going to mitigate climate change. Then on the other side, I heard this very familiar like, no, come with me if you want to live. AI is going to change everything and turn us into a sort of zombie apocalypse in which we're enslaved mentally to the machines.
I was writing a column at the time for The Washington Post, and as a columnist, you're like, well, this is great. We've got warring factions, power, and money.
After about eight weeks of that, I just got exhausted of it because it was hype, and it was hype driven by financialization on both sides often. So I was having this conversation with a guy named Danny Hillis, who's a legend of computing. He created Cloud computing. He's in his 70s now, and I was venting about this early AI scene to Danny, and Danny just has the patience of the Buddha, and he's seen everything. So he smiles at me from the Zoom screen, and he's just like, you need to separate the tech from the tech companies, because then you're going to start finding interesting things, like real experimentation and real people with values. Until you do that, you're just going to be stuck in the hype cycle, and it embarrassed me to realize that I had not thought one could do that. I thought during these eight weeks of just frantic coverage, like, oh, right, well, they own all the technology. In fact, people have been experimenting with tech outside the walls of these megalopolises for a long time. So, as soon as I did that, I just discovered this whole new frontier of people who were experimenting with AI to solve things that I actually care about, and that they care about, and it was just a completely different scene. It was almost counter-cultural, to be honest.