Kris Safarova  00:47

welcome to the strategy skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com and we have some gifts for you. You can get five reasons why people ignore you or ignore anybody, ignore me, and those are based on my experiences and my experience of working with clients over many years. And you can get it at firms consulting.com forward slash on the room. You can also access episode one of how to build the consulting practice at firms consulting.com forward slash build. And it is f, i, r, M, S consulting.com forward slash build. Many people think it is just firm consulting, but there is s in between. And you can also get the overall approach used in well managed strategy studies at firms consulting.com forward slash overall approach. And lastly, you can get McKinsey and BCG main resume example, which is an actual resume that led to offers from both of those firms. And that specific template works at any level of seniority, an amazing template, highly recommend. And you can take a look at it at firms, consulting.com forward slash resume PDF. And today, we have with us John McGuinness, who is a law professor at Northwestern University, who teaches courses and constitutional law and law and technology, and he has published originalism and the good constitution with Harvard University Press and accelerating democracy with Princeton University Press, and his current book is why democracy needs the rich. John, welcome. Well, delighted to be here, John. So let’s start with your story growing up and going through your early education. What experiences you feel really shaped the way you think about law and politics today? That’s a good question.

John McGinnis  02:41

I think it mostly is my family. So my father had a large influence on me. He had a very realistic view of politics that tempered any ideals with a strong sense of how politics worked, and the limits of politics compared to other ways of making progress in society. So I think that was an important influence on on me. I think also was just my own reading. I read pretty early on commentators who are interested in politics from Buckley, two more series, two more theoretical people in politics. Of course, I’m very familiar with Tocqueville and his view of democracy in America and how that works. So that would be, those would be some of the important influences. I think it would be family. There’d be some classic books like democracy in America. And then, of course, professionally, I’ve become very steeped in the founding era, which I think also brings a kind of scientific realism to politics. Indeed, the Federalist Papers somewhat brag about being having a scientific view of the way man operates in politics. One way of understanding them is they’re part of the Enlightenment. Man becomes an object of science, and so predicting how he will behave and how he will combine to take power in politics and how he needs to be restrained is really very important. The central question I think about politics is, how do we build state capacity. We need a state while preventing that capacity from being abused. And that question has been central to constitutionalism, really, from 1200s if you go back to the Middle Ages, they were dealing with that. They. One hopes one’s made some progress in it through the American constitution. So that kind of hard headed realism, I think, came from my family. It was confirmed by reading some of these classics, like democracy in America and the Federalist Papers.

Kris Safarova  05:15

Do you remember one book or paper that really was kind of a defining moment when you realize this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

John McGinnis  05:24

I don’t actually, I was very influenced in what I wanted to do. I originally wanted to be an essayist. Now sort of come back to doing a bit of that at a place called Law and Liberty. So I was very influenced by just people who wrote essays, from people who from bacon and Hazlet, these essayists influence to me as something I was interested in. And also I very much liked argument from early on, so I wanted to get in debates with people. And some of the topics I have certainly my current book is one which I think not everyone will agree with, but I think puts a point of view across that’s rarely heard and that I think needs to be heard, and so that’s something I’ve always been interested in doing. Let me put it this way, I’ve always had a contrarian sensibility to what other people are saying, I tend to like to think about whether we could say something a little different, if not the opposite,

Kris Safarova  06:28

very interesting. And we definitely need thinkers like that, because otherwise, who will make sure that we actually not having a lot of blind spots and operate in a way that is dysfunctional and destructive to humanity. You mentioned your father, and I can say growing up, no one was talking about politics. I did not have many people talking to me to begin with growing up. So it is very different experience that you had. I wonder if you could share with us some key things you learned from your dad.

John McGinnis  07:00

Well, my father was really a self made man. He grew up lower middle class family and no ended his ended his life having been on Wall Street and relatively successful on that and so he was a man of, I think, a kind of powerful and energetic mind. And so one here was one insight from him, which I think was very powerful, particularly because he was not an academic. So one day he told me, Well, you know, if tax a if taxes are very high, they actually impose two costs. One is sort of the obvious cost to take away money from people, and that disincentivizes them from working. Everyone talks about that, but then he said, Well, when the government gets the money, then people, rather than spending their time creating things and making deals and being productive, what they’ll do is they’ll try to get the money from the government, and yet that’s a second cost to society. And that, I think, is a very profound insight indeed, really, not too long from the time he was saying that that was the time that idea rose in economics and an idea called public choice, the idea that we actually shouldn’t think about the world in terms of the public interest and the private interest. There’s always all. People are always relatively focused on themselves. They just have different constraints, and politics is just a different arena for private interests. That’s the key insight of public choice. And from that, I think, follows that in the public world, people will cooperate and agree to try to get things for themselves, not just for the public interest. And my father very sharply made that point, I think, in a very concrete manner. And I remember that and thinking that was quite a striking point. And it is very striking because I’m sure my father did not read any academic literature, and this, yet, I think, is a profound point about politics that he came up with on his own.

Kris Safarova  09:23

It makes a big difference to grow up next to an original thinker, because original thinking is so rare right now.

John McGinnis  09:31

Yes, I think that’s right. And my father was completely unafraid to take the opposite view. Indeed, I think he liked, I think he preferred, and sometimes would take the opposite view, even we weren’t sure it was right. So that certainly that that sensibility was very important. Growing up, he was a kind of provocateur, and created energy around them. He really wanted to, as I said in his. Eulogy. Wanted to wreak himself on the world, and that had an energizing and effect on everyone he met, at least for any length of time,

Kris Safarova  10:12

John and in terms of how you think about the world now, and how you used to think about the world, was there any changes, any meaningful changes, in how you view the world as you continue your journey, I

John McGinnis  10:27

think not very much. My friends and I’ve had friends now for 50 Years tell me that I seem to be pretty much unchanged in appearance and in thinking, although many of them have changed their ideas, so I actually can’t say that. I really think that if you had seen me in seventh grade and when I would talk about things like the filibuster in the Senate, you would have said, well, what would he have done? Well, maybe you’ll be a political scientist or a law professor or something like that. So I don’t, I think, alas, I’m was a relatively predictable child, someone who was likely to to do something like that. And certainly, I think of you seen me in the family, I think that was also true, because I think I was of my brother and me more like my father, more more argumentative, more indeed, when I even went to college, I remember very well some of my college classmates finding Me overly argumentative and saying that. So I think that that that that’s been a characteristic. So I think I’ve always been very similar saying, pretty similar view. I mean, I think I’ve been what’s called a classical liberal, someone who puts a kind of ordered liberty at the center of government trying to protect that liberty, but not an anarchist trying to protect an effective state to protect liberty. And that’s been my view always, and of course, it’s how I think that works has changed my book originalism and the good constitution focuses on something that most people don’t think much about, but I think it’s central to protecting our liberty, which is the nature of our Constitution, and it’s and the fact that it’s entrenched, by which I mean it’s hard to change. It can only be changed by a great consensus of people, by a super majority vote, and that’s quite, I think, important, because that allows people to plan. It makes sure that we it’s very hard to add or change things in the Constitution that already have a great consensus. Because our politics, as anyone learn those who looks at it, our ordinary politics, is very changeable. It depends on all sorts of things, personalities, events that may actually distort our view of what’s what’s really important and what’s really a good policy or a good structure. And so it’s important to have a constitutional politics that, while can change, is a little more impervious to those short term distempers.

Kris Safarova  13:27

Of course, in working with students when you became a professor for the first time, and then now you have been professor for a while, what surprised you? What did you not expect?

John McGinnis  13:42

Well, I think the thing that’s most surprises me is how relatively and it’s gotten worse, how ignorant of American history many students are, and that’s, I think, a real problem. As a great historian, Gordon wood has said, being ignorant of the history of your country is like not having a memory of your own life, because the polity depends on our history in some sense, I think the the American Revolution, the Civil War, they’re still with us. They’re still dynamic presences in our politics, if you don’t really understand what was at issue there, and the sensibilities they created in our society, our society is sort of mysterious, I think, to you, and you’ll, you’ll, you’ll be both confused, and you also, I think, will Have will think that anything that’s currently happening is more important often than it is, because you won’t understand that there are these structures in our society and sensibilities and traditions in our society which tend to bring us back to some of the central themes, even if for a while. We’ve gotten off kilter because some, some event has made people react in some way. So it makes people I think so. One more reason, also I think history is it’s somewhat comforting, at least if you think the history of America has generally been a good one in the sense that there’s been progress, people are materially much better off. And people, I think, do joy even more rights than they did, at least in the similar area, they haven’t lost too many economic rights, at least compared to many other industrial societies. You think that’s a positive story, and you don’t know that story, I think you’re going to be just also more anxious, perhaps, than you should be. I mean, for instance, for me, I’m not very enthusiastic about really, any of our political actors at the moment, but one thing that comforts me is, I look back to the 1850s and we had a series of presidents from variety of political parties that I think all historians now think are very mediocre, and yet we survive them.

Kris Safarova  16:06

John, and what do you think are some things that are happening in America right now that people think is more important than it is because they just don’t understand, don’t know American history

John McGinnis  16:17

Well, I think, for instance, they think the phenomenon of Trump is completely unprecedented, and I don’t think it is. I think many people would have felt in their society like Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson, who became president in the 1818, 28 and was completely different from the other presidents before much more, he would have been thought very uncouth, very much, not a gentleman, someone who had fought duels, who was certainly not well born at all. And people would just have thought, well, this isn’t the kind of person we should have as president. And yet he shook up society and and and did some problematic things, certainly problematic, I think, particularly with with the Native Americans at the time. And yet he also brought in people to our democratic policy. Democracy, democracy is it’s not ruled by elites. It’s ruled by the average person, or at least, gives average person much more influence than in a monarchy or an oligarchy. And elites, I think, have trouble understanding that and but that’s that’s a theme in American history. If you go back, you’ll have elites bemoaning, effectively, the the uncouth people who seem to be having a lot of influence and shaking things up and doing it in a way that really they don’t like at all. So I quite understand it, because I often feel like like someone like George Washington, his party in Jacksonian America, the part the parties of my youth don’t seem recognizable to me. And that’s another aspect that one should recognize about history, that political parties are machines to win power, and they’re going to change in kind of dramatic ways, because they’re going to put together different coalitions to win power. And that’s certainly true now, for instance, the Republican Party, which certainly is not the Reagan Republican Party of my youth, but it seemed my hope, my hope, so long as we have the constitution that doesn’t change, we have freedom of speech. When we people go astray, there’ll be corrections. There’ll be corrections going forward, and we will lose power who we don’t like, who seem to do things that are not sound, and yet they may actually have brought in a few things that will be retained. I mean, even, even, I think even, however much one dislikes Trump, my prediction is some elements of what he does will be retained by the next Democratic president, something he will add to the polity.

Kris Safarova  19:27

John and if we look on the other side, are there specific things happening right now in the United States which people not really paying attention to they don’t think it is that important. But actually, for somebody who knows American history, you understand that it is important that we need to pay a lot more attention to this.

John McGinnis  19:45

Well, I think people do think this is important, although I don’t think they think it’s enough important. And I think people don’t look at American history and see how technology has changed. America is really a force. Particularly because Americans are sort of in love with novelty from our beginning, right from our beginning, we weren’t some hidebound society. We liked the next new thing and the next new thing today is AI. I end my most recent book, my first I have a book called accelerating democracy, which is all about trying to prepare democracy for a world of faster change. And the end of my book why democracy needs the rich, talks about the rich in the future, and particularly their effect with respect to AI, because nothing is more important. Nothing is more transformative than AI. Let me just give you an example of that before I talk about its importance generally to society. So I’m a law professor, and sometimes I get questions from students online now I ask, ask chat GBT, what their answer its answers would be, and its answers are consistently better than the answers I would give. They’re crisper, they’re more direct, more I think, more generally, more accurate. I mean, I like to look at them, but that’s that’s a dramatic change, where you can have answers to complicated, nuanced questions coming from machines that are better than experts. And I am not alone in this, not just, I think, other than the world expert in the field, at least the most advanced AI models will give more accurate and better answers than the or than the so called ordinary expert. That’s my, that’s my that would be my argument. So that’s quite transformative. I think you can see there. Moreover, it’s central now, as always, technology has been to our national security. Who wins the quote the AI race is very important in a world where there is still authoritarian, indeed totalitarian, powers. And so my book ends and points out that it’s not the government that’s going to be able to create advances in AI. It’s going to be wealthy entrepreneurs backed by wealthy investors. And you might also worry, and people correctly worry about, well, how are we going to regulate AI? How are we going to avoid existential threats? Maybe the AI is going to take over. But again, it’s not government that’s going to be very successful at doing that, because they don’t really have, can’t hire the talent for that. They really don’t know what the what the way of doing, or even be, what the threats exactly are, and what the rich are doing now is stepping up and creating institutes to try to focus on that. Elon Musk, I think, is even has this idea, the only way to contain AI is to join it. So he’s has a company called neuralink, in which his ultimate idea is that we’re going to be able to link up to AI, and that’s the way we’re going to control it, and that’s certainly not something that’s going to come from the government. So I think technology that that, that is the technology has always been a driving force in American history, and today, because of technological acceleration driven by the relentless increase in computation, and particularly AI, it makes it all the more important, in some sense, what’s going on in ordinary politics, I think, is going to be swept away in 10 years by what’s going on in AI. AI is going to raise so many different questions. Those will be central to politics, rather than the ones we’re talking about now. And let me just end it on this point. If you look at American history, you understand that, because when you look at some of the debates that are going on in the 1960s between Nixon and Kennedy, what they’re debating about turns out to be completely irrelevant. So as another great historian says, mostly in politics, we live with illusions, right? We actually don’t understand actually what’s important. And that’s also something that’s very useful in understanding history, that people are, people are in a kind of fog. Largely, at least the democratic politics isn’t a kind of fog. No, there are far seated thinkers who think, who sees what, who see what is important. And that would be my claim about the importance of AI that is being central. But a lot of the issues today no one will remember in 2030, years.

Kris Safarova  24:45

John, how do you think our listeners should think about AI?

John McGinnis  24:49

Well, that what they should think about AI as, as something that is a general tool, cognitive tool of cognitive. Of intelligence that can be added to almost any task and improve it and dramatically change it. So that’s one way they should think of it. That’s the kind of intellectual how it’s going to change society we kind of sprinkled into everything we do, so it’s not a special purpose tool. So from education to how we organize the electricity grid to weapons of national security, absolutely everything, how they should think about it personally, is, I think, Central, because the question is, what’s your comparative advantage in a world of AI? Well, my view is it’s being more human. So let me take the example of law. So I think in five, six years, AIs are going to be writing not only the first draft, but the second and third drafts of briefs doing the transactional work we do, it’s like the back office is going to be run by AI. They’re going to be producing most of the product. So what is the lawyer going to be doing in that world? Well, they’ll be overseeing it. They have to make sure the AI hasn’t run amok, although I think there’ll be other AIS to watch with the other AIs. Are teams of AIS, right? So I’m not, I don’t think that’s likely to happen. There’s a lot of discussion of hallucination of AIS, but that’s not so. What are we what are we going to be doing? Well, I think it’s going to be persuading clients to do what they ought to do, which sometimes is hard to do, and I’m not sure they’re going to just be persuaded by an AI that might take a human touch, at least so long as we have juries, for instance, which I think we’re going to have around, is still arguing before juries. So things that are, that may be skills of a dramatic actor as much now as the skills of a lawyer. So that’s, I think, a huge issue for any law student today, but anyone in any job is to think not only of what how they today interact with AI, but how their skills are going to work six years from now, and I tend to think they’re much more in the human psychology area than the cognitive area, just because, just as a calculator, we don’t add anything, or at least I do a bit just to make sure my mind is still working, but I would never do that professionally. I would use a calculator. That’s going to be true much more across the board. We’re not going to do those cognitive things, but we’ll outsource them to the AI. So what does that mean we’re going to be doing? Well, that means, I think we’re going to be much more in the persuasion, the human bonding enterprise, which I don’t think is going to go away, at least any time soon.

Kris Safarova  28:09

John and how worried are you about people losing their ability to think, the ability to write, the ability to actually solve difficult problems, because each time they have a problem, each time they need to think about something, they go to AI,

John McGinnis  28:25

well, I think that is a worry. I think that is a worry particularly for you know, I’ve actually a 10 year old daughter, and it’s a worry for me. She how to force her to do that, and particularly in a world where it’s not clear that writing will have that many returns of AI is doing such a good job. Why? Why? Why do it? And yet, it seems to me an important human skill for sort of human flourishing, to understand how to write and put your own thoughts in order, even if, even if a machine could do it better, even if you could give a prompt to a machine for the same essay, and it would write a better essay, which I think it will do very soon, at least For the vast majority of people, because I don’t know people have different talents, and there are only a few people who are truly amazingly talented. And even those, it’s not obvious to me that AI will not overtake so I do think that’s right. And so I think that makes educate, it makes the process of education very hard here, because we have to educate people in a world where they can use AI, but in some sense, have to be independent, and that’s an enormous conflict. And I see it at home. I see it at school, and my ideas. I guess would be that there’d be some areas which are just fenced off from Ai, but other areas where AI is all in so very bifurcated in that sense. So you don’t let AI, you go back to blue books and ask people or essays. But there are other things where you tell people, well, let’s write a paper with AI. So we have, we have just a we have two modes of education, the AI plus education and the AI restricted education. We take both of them.

Kris Safarova  30:32

Do you think that people will feel very uncomfortable with all the writing books, novels written by AI? Would you not think that they would want to actually read a book written by human

John McGinnis  30:43

Well, I’m not sure about that. If the the AI book were really entertaining, no, would it make a difference that they say is written by a real person? I’m not sure about that at all. I think as long as it’s entertaining and interesting. I think it’ll be probably enough, and maybe also be a transition. Because one thing one notes, even I know with my daughter, my daughter is much more comfortable with a lot of technology than I am, so they’ll grow up in it. So won’t be surprising. Or another example, whereas with my colleagues, I find explaining I teach a course in cryptocurrency, and they, a lot of them, think cryptocurrency is just crazy, and that’s not true of my students, and that’s not surprising, because, you know, their whole life has been going from screen to screen, and so the idea that you have a currency that’s essentially on the screen and isn’t it’s not a surprise to them. So I don’t think that. I think ultimately what will matter is so. So certainly in some competitions, I agree there’ll be human competitions that people will be only interested in humans. For instance. A good example of that is chess. Chess. Now the best AI can easily beat the best Grand Master, and we still have a chess competitions between humans. And so maybe that’s one way we’ll see. We’ll have kind of competitions in writing. Maybe we’ll make kind of, we’ll again, have a world, as you asked me, where we’ll have, just as we have an AI in world, we’ll have an AI out world, where we’ll be interested in the competitive aspects of it. On the other hand, with something like novels, people are just interested, really, ultimately, in enjoying the novel, rather than seeing who wins. So I’m not, I’m not at all confident that AI’s novels will not be widely read within 15 years.

Kris Safarova  32:54

John and building on what we already spoke about, comparative advantage for someone who is listening to us right now, and they really worried about remaining valuable in the world? Let’s say they are a senior manager, or they are a junior partner at the major consulting firm, or their senior manager at Microsoft. What would you recommend they do?

John McGinnis  33:17

Well, I think again, the issue is they, my general view is to become more human, by which I mean focus on the human emotional skills, the face to face skills that I think at least for a while, humans will either be better at, or even if they’re not better at, other humans will not really be comfortable in outsourcing to machines, because, alas, I don’t think most. I think within three or four years, they very few, for very few matters, will the machines not be better or, you know, of course, with maybe some oversight. So that’s the other thing you could do. You could work a lot with machines. Work a lot with the latest version of AI. And so that’s always a good idea, because then you’re upgrading your own skills, because you’re using AI and figuring out its strengths and weaknesses and melding them together. So that’s certainly something you should be doing. But long term, I think you should be figuring out also about how you can be just a more persuasive human, a kind of more empathetic human. This comes to me sort of a surprise was I think I would have maybe a change. I think I would have mocked those ideas when I was when I was young, but AI really forces you to think about it, because it forces you to think about comparative advantage. And I don’t see the comparative advantage at almost any cognitive task in five years.

Kris Safarova  34:58

Such a different world where. Living in now, and it’s such a sharp, big change that people were not ready for.

John McGinnis  35:05

Yes, I do think it’s going to be a big, a big, a big change, and now there’ll be some bottlenecks to it, because a lot of people won’t want to change. And we also might see one political response might be to try to regulate AI, just try to delay it. The problem with that is, and why don’t think that’s likely to happen is that’s so connected to national security, I think it’s gonna be hard to delay AI itself. And then once you have it, I think it’s gonna be very hard for people to say, Well, you can’t use it for a job, or even if it’s doing a good job. I think that’s going to be a very hard thing for a government to do, particularly because AI and our social media is going to make it clear that the AI is doing better than others, and you’re paying a big cost. So I don’t think that will happen, but that certainly could be a I mean, as you know, there was at one time this idea of Luddism, Luddites, they were unhappy by the competition that came from the looms, the machines that weave things, and went and destroyed them. So that’s a possible political movement. As I say, I think this is even so much closer to national security. I just don’t see it working, though.

Kris Safarova  36:30

John and how worried are your students about the future?

John McGinnis  36:35

That’s an interesting question. I think they are pretty worried about the future, I’ve noticed a great deal of anxiety in our students, more anxiety than ever before. I think it’s hard to know what that is. Could it possibly be the pandemic? Could it also be even the sense that they really are not given much responsibilities early on again, something you come from history. John Quincy Adams, who became our sixth president. He was his father’s secretary at 14 years old, and traveled across the continent from Netherlands, I think, to Russia by himself, of course, traveling back that mean getting on an airplane, those and we can’t, I don’t think we could imagine giving uh, or being comfortable with that. And yet, of course, that for those who survive that enterprise, develops a kind of resilience that I don’t think many of our students have, and so that’s, you know, that’s something like to see I figured out, help us divide. Give more more more accountability, more jobs early on, to to young people where they feel they have some agency and accountability and therefore don’t feel quite as anxious was. I think that’s the background to this problem that we face, even beyond AI. Of course, AI is gives legitimate reasons for anxiety, but I think our whole culture has really taught, tended to fail in making people more, feel more, give a sense of agency, early on, a sense of accountability, early on,

Kris Safarova  38:34

John and if you feel comfortable, could you share some of the ways you use AI in Your work, in your life?

John McGinnis  38:40

Oh, well, sure. I certainly ask it to critique my essays and my now my articles. I asked it to proofread my book, for instance, and it was very useful in that. So, though, so those are useful things at the moment, what one wonders? It’s at the moment. It’s at the point where I’m starting to wonder about it, in the sense that I’m feeling, well, it’s like almost a co author. It could be a co author, and how do I address that? It really hasn’t been so it’s been more like an editor beforehand, but could actually even start to write things. And how do I think about that, if it, if it writes things, though, under my direction? Well, that though, it’s like, how is that? Are we moving from a situation where it’s been like a really great research assistant, which, of course, I’ve had before in students to being and I’ve had also co authors. So co author, and how do I think about even the credit of that or and should I not use it? But why shouldn’t I use it if it’s going to make a better product for people to read? Right? Isn’t that the point to make a. A product that is both as reader friendly and as insightful, and is as thought about all the issues as I could and I think that’s increasingly going to be a question for academics. How do we think about the credit that AI deserves at the moment, I think those who understand aI have a big advantage, because it certainly can be a marvelous a marvelous research assistant at every stage of a project. I think that’s right. And then also, I ask it for advice. I ask it for advice. You know, sometimes I have issues with my 10 year old daughter, and I ask it for helpful advice about how to how to address these, these issues. And sometimes it gives useful advice. I even ask it for some of its medical advice. And at least the literature suggests that it’s medical advice is pretty good, pretty pretty sensible, and more much faster than going in and seeing a nurse or something like that and so so again, it’s just underscores that it’s a general cognitive purpose tool. It’s not just in my academic life. It’s in really every aspect of my life that I think of using AI. I mean, one area I’m thinking of using it is to critique how I use my time, for instance. So how, how give it some examples of how I’m using my time and given looking at my work and other aspects. How should I think about using my time more more efficiently and to create a more flourishing world for myself and my family?

Kris Safarova  41:54

John, and if someone listening to us right now and listening to what you were sharing, they may think that, okay, so maybe then I should not be investing in my critical thinking skills, my writing skills, because if AI will be doing all this work, why should I do it? What would you tell them?

John McGinnis  42:13

Well, first of all, you have to evaluate the AI. So that’s always going to be there’s a phrase going up to be the human in the loop, and I think that’s true now, again, I don’t want to overemphasize that. I think we’re gonna have AIS evaluating other AIs. I mean, I think it’s a mistake to think that we’re just gonna have these individual AIs. We’re gonna have teams of AIS, and are you really gonna add something to evaluate them in 10 years? I’m not wholly confident of that. That’s why I fall back on the other aspect, on being more human. I mean, again, I think there’s something to be said for writing on your own, or you don’t want to wait, not want to outsource your Christmas letter to other, to an AI. So I think ultimately, it’s really going to be as much a question of your identity as I think your career, for some of these skills, right? Some of these about being your own pride and things of that sort was, I’m skeptical that in the long run, it’s going to be easy to compete in many, in most areas, really, almost in all areas, cognitively, with AI. So it may be a question of pride. And again, the interest in maybe participating in the more these more these competitions that I think are going to grow up, we might, might think we’re going to have a kind of virtual world, by means which I don’t mean only, although I think this will be also true, people will be feeling, they’ll feel as if they’re on a yacht or climbing a mountain, without the dangers associated dangers of that, and have a very similar experience, but we’ll have virtual experiences in the sense we’ll have kind of competitions, we’ll be writing, we’ll agree to read one another’s stuff, and have clubs and things of that sort in which we actually aren’t using AI, and that, I think, could be an important part of what It is to be human in a post AI world. So I think one should think about that, as opposed to thinking that all of these skills are going to be employed in the workplace. Because I’m certainly today they are, because it’s very important to evaluate the AI, but in 10 years, I mean, do we evaluate the calculator? We don’t evaluate the calculator looking at it be silly to spend our time doing that. And I’m not sure why. We’re not going to see a world like that in in 10 years for for a lot of things like writing a writing a brief or a contract or. Accept it maybe, and accept all the most high value issues. So one thing else, the other thing I tell my students is, don’t worry about AI just be a superstar that doesn’t comfort all of them. Because maybe at the very highest value of legal work, where price cost is no concern, will always want to hope that the human can add something, even if it’s very, very, very unlikely. So So for superstars, I think there’s foreseeable future. I think there will be a return on some human skills, how much they’ll actually improve things, but I think there’ll be the perception at least. Let’s have them around. The difficulty is having seen a lot of law students, most aren’t superstars. All very good, but not surprisingly, they’re the superstars are few and far between.

Kris Safarova  46:00

John and how worried are you about muscle employment people feeling that they don’t really have a purpose because their work was taken away from them?

John McGinnis  46:09

Well, I do worry about that. I do think that’s worry. I worry. I think about my daughter about that. No, I think is a talented argument. Says she wants to herself when I ask her what she wants to be. Wants to be a writer. And I worry that, other than in this area, that I’ve talked about writing competitions, which might seem a little artificial, that hard to earn one’s living as a writer, even if we are very talented. And so that does worry me. I mean, I think we see a world of really huge wealth. But the question of, I do think the question of what actual meaning is is going to be a very tough one. Again, it may be created by these virtual rule worlds where people find meaning in those worlds that they that competitions are created for them, that, of course, we have, in some sense, a lot of artificial competitions. People run around a track that’s not something that’s earning any money, and people spend enormous amounts of time training for that. So I think humans are going to adapt to that. I mean, I myself am worried about that, as it seems like I lived, kind of surprisingly to this. Maybe the twilight of work for many people and work gives a lot of meaning, but I think there might be ways of simulating work that might be satisfying, and people will in this world that we imagine, I think, will be very wealthy. I mean, even even if, because there’ll be enough surplus to even to distribute it to people who aren’t earning a lot in that world, because the riches will have just economic growth that will go so fast that will be very easy to address those things. These are really speculative ideas. On the other hand, I don’t think myself, they’re more than 20 or so years away. What do

Kris Safarova  48:18

you think about how fair it is that somebody spent decades coming up with approaches, techniques and so on. Let’s say best approach to be a lawyer, just even different things that people came up with. They develop those things, and then it all is fed into AI, and they’re not getting any benefit from it anymore, and they may lose their job, right?

John McGinnis  48:42

Um, so I guess that the difficulty is that a lot of these things aren’t really different from what humans have done. Humans have done for a whole for centuries, right? They learn from other people and do better than the other people. So the so it certainly is problematic under our law, if AI takes copyrighted material right and uses it, but most material is not copyrighted, certainly the fact or Supreme Court cases, they can’t be copyrighted, and much of AI will just be using that to write persuasive reach. So I think the law is not a good area to make those areas of complaint, because law is kind of a public good, which comes largely from sources that have to be open to the public. So I’m not, you know, it’s difficult, but I’m not sure I think that there’s something unfair, except in the general sense that the world is moving so fast that people’s expectations are are not me. Meaning the world that they they expect it, but that’s a that’s a weaker sense of fairness, I think then people actually taking their work, right? I really don’t think that’s what’s happening, largely with AI, at least in law, because the work is is public. It’s not distinctive, it’s people are just using that to generate better predictions about what the public law is.

Kris Safarova  50:32

With the last few minutes we have together, I wanted to ask you for your recent book, what are the key things you want people to take away?

John McGinnis  50:40

Well, the key thing that I want people to take away is the rich now are being attacked. You know, the 1% Bernie Sanders, the famous Vermont center, says the rich billionaire shouldn’t exist. And I argue that they do a lot for society, more and for democracy. And I don’t just talk about, although it’s true that they invent a lot of things that give a lot of consumers a lot of value, but that they are important because they contribute to our democratic discourse, they actually have really varied views. And if you compare them to the world I’m in academics or journalists or entertainers, the views of those are very homogeneous. They generally lean very sharply to the left. And that’s not good to have a world that’s dominated by one political perspective. And yet all you think about that, that what I would call the what I call in the book The Clara, see reporters, they’ll report the news. Academics shape the next generation’s view of the world. Entertainers are tremendously important in the premises they have. They bring that are that are that are in built into the way they think about the world. So all that is a tremendous amount of influence, and the rich militate against that a bit. And moreover, we have, again, this is a realism about politics. Political scientist says that, well, a lot of politics works, not ideologically, but just with special interests, in other words, concentrated groups like companies or unions getting their way at the expense of taxpayers and consumers, and sometimes breathers of clean air and the rich, over time, have been given voice to the voiceless. In other words, they were very important in the environmental movement or in reforming education, where the where there are these special interests that otherwise have a tremendous amount of power, and just individually, people who are poor or even middle class aren’t going to have much of a voice there. So they perform a very important function in that respect as well. And I also note that they have been very important throughout American history in protecting minority rights. And again, minority rights have trouble in the democratic process, but in the abolition movement and the civil rights movement and the women’s suffrage movement, the rich have been extremely important and influential, and then finally, they produce a lot of public goods. It’s just not the case that the government is very good at producing all kinds of public goods, like museums, like the great universities. America has some of the great universities, largely from private donations. And that gives because they have a kind of freedom from the government, which is not surprisingly bureaucratic and not going to do as good a job. So there are all these things that the wealthy have provided to our society and our democracy, in addition to helping to create new new things. And that’s true, I think, of any democracy, but it’s particularly important for American democracy, because America, from the beginning, has been a commercial democracy, and that’s what’s made us, I think, one of the most successful nations in the world, and they remain exemplars of commerce. Their participation makes us think that we are, we are commercially minded. They bring that sensibility to society, and that’s part of what has made America great. Now we want to be clear, it’s not only the rich. We want to run society. One one of our founders said the society should be ruled by those who own it. That’s not true, but it’s not true today, even with the riches influence, they are just one of the elite groups, and the idea that everyone’s going to have equal influence is just an illusion of. All sorts of people have more influence than than than the average person. And what’s important is having a mix. And the rich actually bring a rich mix, as it were, to society, rich mix of different views, of views we would not get, certainly, as as as strongly if we just relied on kind of the more what I would call the Clara. See, though, the people who write, who write and try to influence for a living, the rich do it as an avocation. That’s actually great advantage, because we don’t want to be ruled or influenced only by those who are professional influencers. So that’s the advantage. They’re an elite that has extra influence, but they’re not professional influencers, and that brings a different sensibility and a commercial sensibility that is useful in a commercial democracy,

Kris Safarova  55:54

that is very true. And as you become more wealthy, you are no longer afraid to lose your source of shelter and food supply. I mean, to be able to put food on the table,

John McGinnis  56:07

they have an independence, and that’s been true right through American history, that when they support the abolitionists, some of their houses were burned down, right? But they have networks themselves. They can build up again. They don’t need to worry about their next meal. And it’s absolutely true that their independence is central to why they are valuable, because they can make greater that they have the resources to make greater sacrifices, which you can’t expect of people who don’t have them.

Kris Safarova  56:34

Absolutely not. John, thank you so much. You’re such an interesting person. I really enjoyed spending this time with you. Thank you so much for everything you shared. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your books, anything you want to share?

John McGinnis  56:47

Well, you can get democracy. You can buy it now. Advance Order copy. Why democracy needs the rich is on Amazon and it’s available. It’ll be available, I guess, in bookstores, and so it contains a lot of these ideas. And moreover, the sort of sensibility I expressed in this interview.

Kris Safarova  57:08

Our guest today was John McGuinness, who is a law professor at Northwestern University who teaches courses and constitutional law, and his book is why democracy needs the reach. And I hope you guys enjoyed this discussion. Such an interesting discussion. John, thank you so much. You’re welcome. And our podcast sponsor today is strategy training.com and we have some gifts for you. You can get five reasons why people ignore somebody in meetings, in important conversations. You can get it at f, i, r, M, S, consulting.com. Forward slash on the room. You can also access episode one of how to build a consulting practice, and that is something applicable if you’re building your own boutique firm, or if you are part of a large management consulting firm and you are leading a practice, or you are a senior person within that practice, and you can get it at firms consulting.com forward slash build. You can also get the overall approach used in well managed strategy studies at firms consulting.com forward slash overall approach, and McKinsey and BCG winning resume example, which is a resume that led the office from both of those firms. And it is a great resume template to use at any level of seniority, and you can get it at Friends consulting.com, forward slash resume PDF. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.