And what makes human beings so special is curiosity. And yet we spend all our time dowsing it and smothering it. Dr. Sanjay Sarma, President, CEO and Dean of the Asia School of Business. Among a host of accomplishments and impactful contributions to education, science and technology, Sanjay Sarma is most well known to us MIT folks as the VP of Open Learning. The history of learning is an old one. But if you ask anyone why do we teach the way we do, they'll say because someone else did. It's tradition. The institutions we've created are based on a fallacy. The fallacy is the professor has the pen, the student's brain is a sheet of paper. All the teacher has to do is write on the sheet of paper and declare victory and the learning is done. And then we'll test them. That's not how learning occurs. Hi friends, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for being with us ever since we started Endgame some years ago. The conversations have been invariably elevating and animating. At least from my personal point of view, it's been a tremendously rewarding experience. And I'm hopeful that you could be further supportive of us by way of clicking on the subscribe button, watching every episode as much as possible, if not as fully as possible, and also joining us as a member of the Endgame channel. I can only promise you that whatever we're going to be doing going forward will try to make Endgame a better experience for all of you. Thank you. Hi, friends. Today, we're honored to have Sanjay Sharma, who is the dean of the Asian School of Business, which is based in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. And it's also in collaboration with MIT Sloan. Sanjay, thank you so much for coming on to our show. Such a pleasure, Geetha. Thank you. If you've been to many places around the world, tell us how you grew up in India. You know, I grew up, I'm very lucky. I'm very privileged. I grew up upper caste family, very educated parents. My father was a very senior civil servant, a physicist. My mother was a teacher and a great, she loves history. All my relatives, my grandparents, et cetera, very well read. I was very privileged. And I grew up with conversations about history and math and physics and politics and Gandhi, you know, so I was a lucky guy growing up. And you went to IIT. And was that your personal decision or that would have been shaped a little bit by your mom or dad? When I was uh, but not an easy school to get in. Yeah. Um, but my, when I was 14, um, so like, uh, my, my grandfather, uh, was in the military. He actually served in, in Malaysia, um, in during World War II. So when I was about 14 or maybe 13, my, uh, my mother and my aunt sat me and my cousin down and said, listen, boys, you know, we're educated, but we're not rich. So if you get into IIT, things will be easier for you. And, uh, so I started studying for IIT and yes, I did get into the Indian Institute of Technology. My cousin ended up going to the military actually and did very well in the military. Um, and, uh, so I met my wife at IIT as well. And so I'm a hardcore IOT guy. My father's a PhD from IOT. I have many cousins there. And then you decided to go to the US. Why, why the US? So actually I didn't decide to go to the US initially. I went to work for, I wanted to do the thing that my parents at least wanted me to do and take the most unsafe job I could, which is I went to work at a company called Schombreger, um, out in the oil industry in Scotland, north coast of Scotland. I was based in Aberdeen. And then I had a wobbly knee, uh, and it started getting particularly wobbly while I was there. So I took a leave of absence and I went to CMU. Uh, that's how I ended up there actually. And then you went on to UC Berkeley. That's right. Yeah. Well, while you pursued all this academic, you know, journey, uh, what would have been some of the noticeable changes that you might've seen with respect to India that you might've seen with respect to yourself? That's a good question. You know, when I, um, India in the eighties was still coming into its own. Um, For years, India was, uh, we in India were always, um, confused. You know, what, what was our role? Well, we second class, it was not behind the, and Curtin was more allied with the, uh, with the Soviet union. Um, and, uh, uh, in 1983, India won the cricket world cup. I cannot begin to explain what a difference that made because it was a come from behind victory. And I just today, my classmates sent to me a WhatsApp of that moment. And I still, my, the hair on the back of my neck stills begins to stand around that time, some things started to happen. You know, we saw Indians do well. We saw cricket and just for the first time, uh, from before independence, you know, from, uh, uh, from over 30 or 40 or 50 or even a hundred years previously, Indians began to wonder if maybe they could take on the planet. And I was part of that generation. So when I graduated from IIT, I went to CMU and I found, you know, I did pretty well, you know, and my classmates are doing really well. And meanwhile, a few Indians are starting to do really well. The North Coast love, for example. So there was an emergence. There was a sense of maybe, maybe, and, uh, Berkeley that became more clear. You know, we had some people like Arun Mazumdar and others were done very well. And, um, so there was a sense of, uh, possibility that was in the air. You know, we all had it, uh, it was quite special and a few of my classmates started to sell companies and do really well, you know, what, what is it that makes, you know, the Indians so curious, so argumentative, so into that war of attrition, you know, healthily rambunctious. And, and, you know, we've, we've seen so many storytellers coming out of India in the last few decades, I would argue. And, and they've done so well that we're not seeing as much of in perhaps China. I mean, China has done fantastically in terms of innovation in science and all that, right? But, but they're, they're not as great storytellers at perhaps the Indians. And I've been making the case that the Indians are just naturally, you know, they like to make a point publicly or, you know, to whoever is in the room. Uh, you know, first of all, English, I mean, let's not, uh, it's not, uh, uh, it's a, we have to sort of put it out there. Indians benefited from English. Um, and, uh, Indians, uh, are articulated English, right? Because many of us, especially those who grew up in, um, in the educated classes, we're very, you know, our English, English is pretty much a first language, almost for us, but I think there's something a little deeper. Um, it's a highly diverse society. Yep. the uh India and ethos also perhaps due to uh religion is one of a lot you know a lot of religions in India I mean within each religion there are a lot of uh sex um and each sect sort of uh argues I didn't say sex by the way it's a sect yeah it's a sect with a T the sects uh argue with each other it's a very open -minded religion right um um but things like now I can talk about sex kama sutra other things right so there's a lot of diversity of thought and so a lot of parsing even in the Islam in India for example there's Sufism there's Shia there's Sunni there's Buddhism there's Jainism so um but I think just naturally the culture is extremely uh uh the word is uh dissect there's an element of dissecting things almost too much actually and so that is one piece of it Um, the other is a focus on math and focus on logic. Right. the entrance exams are brutal, absolutely brutal, right? So you can't have, you know, something you don't, and there's no two ways about it. In fact, the most profound compliment you could pay to a young student when I was in high school was the, the Hindi, a Hindi English word, that guy's a fondue. And you might say, what the hell does fondue mean? That person has their fundamental straight. Interesting. Like in physics or math, right? So, um, so anyway, being fondue, being, getting a fundamental straight and being very clear, that was such a important thing in our, in the ethos in the eighties, you know, um, I think all those things sort of add to it. Would, would you make the argument that it might correlate with the fact that India has been graced by so many civilizations in the last few thousand years, and it's been able to, I would argue that it's been able to embrace multipolarity in a good way when putting aside colonization, right? And it's been able to extract wisdom from any external civilization that would have visited India, and that has made you a lot more resilient and has made you a lot more capable of embracing multipolarity. Yeah, I would say there's some, I would say that's true because there's a deep sync criticism in the way India operates, right? Um, that diversity, that fabric, that those cross currents are very fundamental. Um, and when I grew up, uh, uh, in fact, my, my father was telling me a couple of days ago that, uh, you know, in his, uh, in his family compound, of course, comes from the word kampong. In his family compound, our family compound, there was a dargah, a Sufi dargah, where the Muslims would come and pray, and then they would come and hang out and have tea with my grandfather. So that fiber was very fundamental, I think. And then there are different views, even within any one religion, there's so many different views you have to parse, you know? Absolutely. So I do think that adds a lot to that culture. Talk about curiosity. You talk a lot about this. You know, I am deeply concerned, actually, that all over the world we try and stamp it out. You know, let me take a little bit of a side digression here. You know, the first Industrial Revolution ended with interchangeable parts, right? It's falsely attributed to Eli Whitney, but it's actually the military complex because shells had to go into different battles. and wheels had to be replaced in war very quickly. Interchangeable parts. I actually think that this last century, the century just concluded 20 years ago, was about making interchangeable people. And what that means is you could build a factory from Japan in India or in China and you would get the same quality. But people had to become very interchangeable. And what that also means is people had to do what they're told. And curiosity is a bother. Curiosity gets in the way. And what makes human beings so special is curiosity. And we know these circuits, novelty, curiosity, that trigger a circuit called a dopaminergic circuit. Dopamine flows. Babies are fun and interesting to watch because they're curious. It's because they're playing to get the mind -body connection going. They're discovering boundaries. And yet we spend all our time dousing it and smothering it. And we have all these things in the English language even. Curiosity killed a cat. All good things come to those who wait. To me, keep curiosity alive is probably the greatest gift I got as a child. You ask me about my upbringing. That ability to be curious, to be playful, to make jokes, to ask silly questions, to explore, to have the luxury, to explore odd things in conversation, in reality, to read a book. To me, that's the greatest gift I think we can give to human beings, especially in the age of AI. We train everyone to be robots. Real robots are just about a show off. Would you have been innately curious without being evoked or approval by your parents? I think so. I'm an idealist. I think every child is born curious. Every kitten is born. That's why we find kittens cute. Curiosity, to me, is a basic human trait. And culture and society and everything else is about. in my view, to some extent, shaping it and, you know, into bow tie pastel or into spaghetti. We try to shape it, but to me, it's essential. You've alluded to this in the past where curiosity gets defined by a person who gets stuck on a desert, sees water in a glass, and he or she always sees it as a half glass full. Whereas people that are not as curious may see it half empty. How do you universalize, you know, nations or communities around the world that they're on that desert, seeing the water as half full? Look, I mean, culturally, what is a culture? Culture is telling people what to do, what not to do, how to behave, how not to behave, right? Often we look at American culture. When I was speaking like that, why are they respecting their elders? You know, I can't believe that, you know, this, you know, this musician, um, you know, has spiky hair or, you know, said dropped an F bomb or, you know, has, uh, tattoos. And it's all about what you can do. That's in some ways what culture seems to do to be able to see possibilities, to be able to say, why not? Why can't I do this with this? Why can't I do this other thing? That is creativity and curiosity is that amazing elixir, you know, that unleashes that. And to me, it's actually less a matter of, uh, eliciting it and more a matter of not dousing it and then channeling it to some extent, but not too much, right? So, um, I, I just wish we could let the dopamine flow, you know, the deprivation entails some degree of curiosity, right? Yeah. How do you, how do you manufacture that deprivation so that people increase their degree of curiosity? Well, certainly hunger, you know, hungry animals going to look right. Uh, one of the, uh, sad benefits of being a growing up in a country that was colonized for many years and, uh, you know, suffered at a suffered massive losses as a result of the colonization is that, uh, there's a lot of hunger out there. So, you know, so being a fun do as I said earlier, getting a fundamental straight and really understanding things, looking for that aha moment is, is, um, it's celebrated. I remember this one day that my classmate and I, we wanted to figure out what acidity, there's a measure called pH was, and we sort of didn't get it. This is an exponential scale, et cetera. And then finally there was that moment. And this was in, this was 45 years ago. And I remember the two of us sitting together going, got it. We finally got it. The fact that I remember it. And the curiosity to get it, and the fact that if we didn't get it, we wouldn't have gotten into IIT. Amazing. Yes, deprivation does create it. But I hope it doesn't take deprivation. I hope we can do it in a more joyous way. You know, a lot of the kids I went to grad school with came from families that were very, very well to do. And they had it. I hope it doesn't take that. I want to put this in the context of Southeast Asia. Right? What would it take for a Malaysian or a Filipino of Vietnamese, a Cambodian, Myanmarese, Bruneian, Indonesian, to be the CEO of Google, the CEO of Microsoft, the CEO of PepsiCo, the CEO of all these giants, that the Indians just managed to do it almost flawlessly. And we're not even seeing the mainland Chinese doing it at the kind of scale. Well, as I said, I mean, in the Indians do have the advantage of English. Um, the other thing I'll say is the Indians are assertive, but softly assertive. You know, in other words, uh, the assertion doesn't go away, but it comes in very soft gloves. Um, I think those are important traits, but there are examples, you know, the CEO of Broadcom, you know, chairman of Del Monte. So there, there are certainly examples. I actually want to go back to that moment in 1983, when India, when the cricket woke up, right? You know, I was there by the way. I lived in India for three years. I saw that. Yeah. I saw that with your father, right? Yeah. So when your father was in this South Asia, um, it was an awakening. It was, I can do it too. They did it. I can do it. Right. And then combine it with the pressures and combine it with the celebration of being a fondue, being someone who gets their fundamental straight. You know, my wife, by the way, also went to IIT and she had a better rank than me. Right. So it's a, it's a, it's a sort of a, a, um, it's a push and a pull and a channeling that came through go together. Well in India, in the eighties, seventies, sixties, I don't know if it's still there. Um, maybe it is, maybe it's not, but I've lived outside the country for many years, but I think it can be created. It's been created in other countries. Right. It's a long way. now that you've spent some time in Southeast Asia, what are some of the things that you think we could do to kickstart the process? Well, I think English is certainly something I've, I've been quite vocal about. You know, Indonesia probably doesn't have any more than 10 million people that speak good English. We get that number to a hundred million Southeast Asia probably has about 60 or 70 million. Most of those are Filipinos, Malaysians and Singaporean, right? We get that number up to about three to 400 million. And I think we'd be at a different place. Well, you know, um, it's sort of a weird time for small for language. Right. You know, Chad GPT can translate from English to Bahasa like that. Yeah. So maybe language is going to go away. Maybe we can all, we'll all be talking to each other in each other's languages in our own languages and the translation, but at the same time, uh, the corpus of AI is trained on English. Right. So English is winning and unfortunately, um, language has become very important. I do think that, um, English is a very fundamental thing. I will say though, that, um, I was giving a lecture actually as we the other day and someone asked me, but Sanjay, you're, you're blessed with good English. But I told this person that actually I have students from other parts of the world who don't speak very good English, but it can construct a narrative beautifully. And that trumps the language. In other words, they speak, they may speak broken English. but the construction of the narrative is so powerful that the English doesn't matter. It almost, it almost makes the narrative even more powerful, right? So I think there's a deeper thing there, which is, I think you said that earlier, constructing the story, constructing the narrative, empathizing, presenting in a way that the other person is going to appreciate. Actually, Indonesia has a long history of that, right? all the actually wonderful performance arts that are here. Bringing that back, I think maybe something that needs to happen, but I do think that the powers of expression clarify the powers of thought. It is often said that writing is the highest form of thinking, and writing and expression clarify thinking in my view. We always have our PhD students at MIT, at Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard present, because I think that writing and presenting are like having an open house in your brain. You're going to clean up your house before someone comes in. You talked about the front part of the brain being a CEO. Explain that. So this was the prefrontal cortex. In studying, learning, I spent a lot of time with my neuro amounts of stuff, and I learned a lot from them, but also from studying some of the psychology, how animals think, et cetera, et cetera. So the great apes have much less of this. This thing on the front is a prefrontal cortex. This is the seal of the brain, so we can plan. An ape can't really plan that far ahead. It can plan a lot more than a cat. We can regulate. We can do scenarios. We can anticipate. thing, we shouldn't think of it as a limited pool. We can develop it. So, when I was preparing for the IIT, I was developing this. When we do mindfulness or meditation, we tell this in one way to look at it is we're telling the brain, this guy is boss, as opposed to letting our thoughts wander. So, this is a very powerful thing and we all know it. We prefrontal cortex in how our executive functions operate. This meditation or mindfulness help increase cerebral capacity of any human being? I would argue that meditation gives the brain a discipline. So, I mean, by the way, I describe it as You know, when you have a laptop, for example, you have an operating system and then you have programs running on it, like Microsoft word or PowerPoint or your browser. But the kernel, the process underneath is the word process is the, is the operating system windows or Mac OS or Android. Now that thing has to run even if the browser crashes, that thing has to run. And that thing, if the browser starts occupying too much memory or, you know, goes a clock, it has to say, okay, buddy, shut down, right? You're draining the battery, shut down that process. The operating system, the parent, the adult is what this is. And what mindfulness does is tell the rest of the processes. This guy is the boss and he tells this guy, you're the boss, act like the boss and be a witness to those other thoughts. Don't get wrapped up and lose perspective. That's what mindfulness does in my, in my view. Interesting. Take that to your book grasp, right? How, how do you think we could, or we should re -engineer or re -architect learning? I mean, look, I mean, I think we, um, the history of learning is an old one, but if you ask anyone, why do we teach the way we do, they'll say, because someone else did. Then you go back 50 years. Why did you, why do you do it that way? Because someone else did it's tradition. It's not based on how, um, learning really ought to occur. In fact, a parent's instincts and a child's instincts are much closer to what we should be doing than the institutions we've created. The institutions we've created are based on a fallacy. The fallacy is the professor has the pen or the teacher, the student's brain is a sheet of paper, all the teacher has to do is write on the sheet of paper and declare victory and the learning is done. And then we'll test them. That's not how learning occurs, right? What, what's actually happening. is, and I've said this before, it's like a plant growing. So the child, or the learner, by the way, this is true of adults as well, so it's not just a child, but the learner is creating a model of the world, and you feed the model what it needs when it wants, not when it's convenient to the teacher to dump it. You don't give a plant a lifetime supply of sunlight or potassium on day one at declare victory when the plant needs nitrogen or potassium, or whatever, you give it to. So the fundamental approach here is we've got to give agency back to the learner. We've taken it away, right? That's what GRASP talks about. And then the other thing is when you learn something, you've got to act on it. You've got to build something. It's actually a founding principle of MIT and the Asia School of Business. It's called action learning, or men's at manners, mind and hand. When you exercise what you've learned, when you put it out, that's when the learning truly occurs. Until that time, you're simply getting familiar with the material and regurgitating it in an exam. And that's the problem. Draw the picture concretely in terms of what could or what happened with somebody that's getting an undergraduate degree. Would he have to spend four years on campus or this person needs to spend a little bit more time so that he experiences or she experiences a bit more action learning outside campus? Yeah, first of all, I think get out of the classroom. The classroom is a cage where these learners sit there and the teacher just sort of dumps stuff and leaves. So now do they have to get out of campus? Well, I think we need to redesign the campus. Actually, MIT was a pioneer in labs, making students work in labs. Now, you can simulate reality to some extent on the campus, but beyond that, you got to get out into the real world. So could he's talked about it, the walking, talking philosopher, You were very pathetic. You walked around practical philosophy. You looked at real problems and you talked about it. So we have to get out of the bullseye that's a classroom, turn the campus into simulation, remove lectures, especially in the era of Khan Academy and other stuff. Just watch video lectures, for God's sake. Don't waste the in -person time, right? The in -person time should be a studio and then get into the real world and apply it. I also think we've over rotated on degrees. I think we need to dial back because the degree has become a proxy for status, not necessarily an indication of learning, especially effective and useful learning. So I think for a number of reasons, yeah, let's get people out in the real world. You've used the phrase precision agriculture as a metaphor, right, for grasp. Right. Yeah. Draw the picture. What needs to happen? Well, what I would do is yes, I used I do in fact use the precision agriculture metaphor, which is great, I think. You know how you just put a little bit of water, a little bit of what, you know, onto the plant and it grows much more optimally. Yeah. You know, I remember when I was in IIT, which is a good school, you know, my IIT was actually designed by a consortium of universities led by MIT, the one in Kanpur, the one in Kanpur. And I remember doing all these courses on fluid mechanics. And honestly. I always wondered why I was learning it. Within my first week in the on the oil rig. Stuff just started to flow. Pardon the pun. I understood shock. Shock is a term and, you know, when you reach supersonic velocities. I understood turbulence, I understood laminar flows, I understood fluids, I mean, just amazing. Context is such a wonderful thing. It's like if I just toss a bunch of books and they're in a pile, it's not learning. But if I create shells and say, this is where the books in your beautiful library, the books on fluid mechanics go, here's where the books on philosophy go, here's why you need fluid mechanics, here's why you need philosophy. Suddenly, you have a much clearer mind and things slot into place and context creates the slots. By the way, another thing is we talked about, you know, explaining stuff, narratives. When you have to explain it to someone, as I said, it's like having an open house. Well, if your books are well organized, you're going to be much better off in your open house because people are going to come in and see how the knowledge is organized. So putting stuff out, explaining, narrating is another way to organize your thoughts. How do you argue with somebody who believes philosophically in a case study format as opposed to action learning? I'm not going to mention the schools. Yeah, I'm a big believer in case studies, actually. I really am, because case studies is really a study of the past, right? Whereas action learning is all about ideation in the room. And getting things done with your hands, getting your hands dirty. Yeah, so I think that case studies give a lot of context because they let you, they force you to take things you've learned and put them in context and then examine them from three different directions, 3D. But I would argue, especially as an engineer, that action gives you a whole new perspective because case studies are still very curated and there's still assimilation. I mean, imagine if you're training to be a soldier. How much can you learn in simulation? it's when you're in the real world and the first bullet, you know, that you go, Oh my God, it's a different world. So that's why I think getting into action is an unfortunate analogy. I admit right now in the period of war, but getting into action, I think just puts a whole new perspective on things and sending young people out on projects. You know, send them to, you know, let's say an agriculture project, go work and see if you can improve yield, spend three months. I mean, it's hard to replace the value of that. Agree. I want to push on this a little bit. We've seen, and we kind of talked about this earlier, we've seen how the internet has been able to democratize information. But it just hasn't seemed to be able to democratize ideas as well and economic capital as well. as a result of which we're seeing not only polarization of conversations, but inequality of a number of attributes, call it wealth, income opportunities, all that, all that good stuff. How do we, how do we remedy this? You know, the educational standpoint, you know, yeah, look, I mean, the internet is not just one thing, right? And it's a way to put our knowledge. It's also a way to, it's a business. It's a way to attract eyeballs and get people addicted. And these two are fundamentally in conflict. Um, in addition, polarization happens because of confirmation bias. If you say things, I believe I'm more likely to do more of it. And that's another form of addiction. And I think that the business model of the internet, which is to get people's eyeballs attached has trumped the democratic possibilities of the internet. Just last week, the surgeon general of the United Nations started talking about putting warning labels on social media. I think it's about time. I think we've crossed many thresholds, right? I mean, if tick tock gets banned in America, um, it's being banned for political reasons, et cetera, right? I mean, you know, geopolitical reasons, but it may not be a bad thing from the perspective of safeguarding young and old minds, right? So I, I actually think we need to put the internet back where it's supposed to be. I don't, I'm a little bit skeptical of regular over -regulating it, but when it comes to social media, Jonathan hates written. he's reminded us newer times. I think we're in a very, very strange time right now and we have to regulate it. Do you see nation states as being able to remedy this? Well, I mean, China has a limit on how much tick tock young people can watch. Um, I do. think so. I think they're not being driven though by notions or interests in things like improving human outcomes. I think they're being driven by other things. And then there are all these lobbying, right? So the internet is this amazing thing. And then we have AI, which is a whole other shebang that's going to just enter the picture, right? Stage left. It's going to enter. But I don't think that our politics necessarily lines up with steering these epic making technologies in the right direction, unfortunately. Yeah. I'm not quite pleased with how economic development has somewhat been influenced by the inability to create or democratize ideas and the ability to distribute capital, right? And we're seeing a rising case of central fatality of economic development where primary cities are enjoying faster growth than secondary cities, much less regional cities, right? And I'm kind of speculating that if the internet would have served the role a little bit better of democratizing ideas, democratizing or helping democratize economic capital, things would have been different. And at the rate that central fatality keeps on rising, as opposed to central frugality of economic development, the political calculus is moving in one direction only, right? All across the world. And how do you see nation states or governments going forward being able to move the political calculus back to the center, or wherever it needs to be, so that there's better redistribution of, call it welfare and all the other public goods? Look, I think the, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, it's a frightening, what's happening is frightening, right? And then of course, when people go to the big city, because that's where the action is, like fireflies, they also find it less affordable, you know, fertility rates drop, you can't afford to have kids. So it's not a recipe for the long term for success. It is a good recipe if you want to make good numbers for the next quarter, and you're a media company, or if you're an internet company, and so on. I really feel that we need to wake up the dopamine in the, in the outside cities, we need centrifugal dopamine, you know, we need idealism, we need people to say, I will say, start a company, I will help my school. Uh, this idealism, uh, good news is it's happened before, you know, uh, growing up in India, you know, Gandhi did that by this idealism. Uh, I didn't, my family isn't from the front of the four or five major metropolises. It's from, you know, halfway between Midrass and Calcutta. And, uh, but my grandfather, my great -grandfather joined the freedom movement. He was a Barristale lawyer and he burned his British clothes and burned his law degree. And of course, threw his family into, into poverty, but idealism could be distributed. Uh, and this, this distribution of, uh, curiosity, getting people to sort of be inspired. That's where a great leader, I think can make a difference. You know, you know, you make reference to history a lot. My, my concern is that exposure to social media. I think puts you in a corner or puts humanity in a corner where they're going to suffer a lot more from historical amnesia because the communication as as Jonathan Haight aptly pointed out that it forces people to just communicate with each other as opposed to with their predecessors and that historical amnesia I think is a discount or will create a discount in nation building because you don't you don't look back in terms of the mistakes and successes that your predecessors would have gone through. Yeah you know I completely agree with that. I do think that we're all in the now with my group with my homies you know the people I agree with right and that's the polarization it's the instantaneous gratification which by the way is a different kind of dopamine rush as opposed to this curiosity thing I'm talking about you know so we do we've you know it's a it's an opt it's an optimum for the short term companies can make money there society is going there we sort of legitimize it by saying look it's democratized content production you know anyone can be youtube influencer or a tick tock influencer but influence for what how is it lifting you know what is the macroeconomic difference it's very micro so yeah I mean unfortunately I think that's a very profoundly limiting and self -limiting factor you know what did George Santayana say right oh yeah those who forget history are destined to repeat it my version of that is those who forget Santayana and Santanya are destined to learn of him you know. Salya let's talk about the value proposition of getting an MBA right and and I I want to I want to push you a little bit here you know with what Elon that aptly pointed out right he he he hates MBAs he hates I mean he recruits engineers or people and I want to I want to combine find that with what you had alluded to earlier in the sense that, you know, it doesn't matter what degree you have, it matters more about how well you do the job, right? Putting your answer in the context of those two, you know, observations. I mean, look, there's a founding principle in education, which is this will make you better. And the question we need to ask, frankly, is, does it? Are you better off spending four years of your undergrad working? Are you better off spending two years or your one year of your MBA working? Does this get you ahead? And it's not just monetarily. It also doesn't make you better at your job. Now, I'm a bit of an idealist. I think that abstractions help, right? When you do an abstraction, you're able to elevate your thinking, you're able to translate, you're able to use analogies from across fields. I do believe that. And I think that a good education can help and you can see it. The problem is at what point are we over it to rotating? Are we overdoing it? At what point are we not focusing on that and just throwing in stuff just for the sake of throwing in stuff? So my view is that the degree, uh, the MBA at ASB is really good. We have small cohorts there. It's highly immersive. They do action learning, they go to MIT, right? It's fantastic. And we have, and we make sure that the students are great, but does the MBA as a whole work? I'm not convinced. You know, my wife's in HBS grad, by the way, I'm the CEO of an MBA school. I'm an engineer. I don't have an MBA. so one of the things that I think we need to look at is the efficacy and the durability and the impact of learning. And that is a question we should ask of all degrees. What I ask my, uh, now 22 year old to go get an MBA at some point from, you know, any old programmer. No, I wouldn't at some point, depending on her place, does she need to learn accounting and maybe that'll help her. Yeah, sure. So I also think that we need to seriously consider unbundling this bulk purchase lock -in that we do with degrees and let people try before you buy, you know, make it more cost -effective, more capital -effective, but yeah, I'm actually a skeptic of, uh, of, uh, I think we need to rethink the degree a little bit, in fact, very significantly. Not just about MBA, just about every other degree, right? All degrees. Yeah. Because the, I mean, look, in the U S tuition debt is $1 .8 trillion in rising. And it's mostly not, you can't eliminate your debt through bankruptcy. Crazily. I mean, think about it. You know, we professors, we can say to students, you know, young person, it's going to be good for you to get a degree, but is it probably not. So I mean, I've written about extensively, I don't think people would be shocked to hear me say, I think that academia has to really confront the questions that society is posing to it. I mean, it's one of the political footballs in the US presidential elections now. How did academia find itself in this position? So yeah, I think it's fair to say is the idea. What also bothers me is how the cost would have gone up so dramatically. I mean, you know, at a time when you went to school, almost the same time, you know, I went to school, it was so much cheaper. And there's this lingering question about, you know, that rate of return, right, on how much you're putting on a table for your kids' education and all that. Right. So how do you how do you answer to that sort of a suspicion or skepticism? I think it's first of all, the skepticism is totally justified. You know, the the. uh, president of Harvard, Larry Backer, who just stepped down, um, he was two presidents ago. He did a lot of work on, uh, on the cost of education. And he visited me actually shortly before, um, in the interim, between being president of Tufts and before being president of Harvard. Um, and we were just chatting about it. And he's, he explained to me that what's happened in the U S education system is, uh, this spiral, right? Um, professors are tenured based on their research for research. You need teaching assistants, teaching assistants get a lot very involved in education. You need a lab, you go to fund, uh, you raise funds from someone, you build a beautiful building, but then you can't, you don't have money to maintain the buildings. You take debt, right? But then you build another building. Now you had to take debt to maintain that. And all this causes a spiral of costs in the U S. So, and also I think that a lot of U S universities are addicted to fundraising. And for all that, the costs keep going up. This has to stop. Education has to go back to thinking about the value it provides and being fairly compensated for that value. And I think that discipline is going to take a long time coming. I think so. And you know what? The other concern that I'm seeing or that I have is how, you know, in China, education is something that you can't game. The U S is a place where you can actually game the system, right? If you got more money, you can send your kids to the private schools that supposedly deliver better quality, right? As opposed to the state schools, it starts with the high school. And to some extent, there are a lot of extent, the tertiary level of education. How do you with, with the, and I'm going to jump on this, you know, AI in a bit, but how do you see AI being able to equalize education all across the planet so that, well, I'm not trying to sound like a socialist, but the less ability for anybody to game the educational system, probably the better for humanity. As long as you can back up the narrative with good quality education, good quality of education. Is that the right way to think about this? No, I absolutely think that's the right way to think about it. Look, our education, I mean, my argument is our education, the way we educate is bad and the private schools are less bad, right? If we fundamentally rethink learning, which is not easy to do, the way the incentives are lined up, the way teachers are trained, the way the content is created, even the educational complex of textbooks, exams, all that stuff, it's very hard to do it. So don't get me wrong. I don't think it's easy, but if you actually do it right, I think we could teach more cost effectively. Students would learn better. The outcomes would be better for society. If you focused on curiosity, on true learning, durable learning, I would reduce the amount of content. We also, we're packing 10 pounds into a five pound bag, and then we had, it's like a hot dog eating contest, you know? And then we measure how many hot dogs they ate. It doesn't matter if they retain it, you know? It's sort of crazy. So I think that if we fundamentally rethink learning and focus on learning, focus on the fundamentals, if you've reduced the curriculum and focus on what's relevant, I think that actually addresses it. But right now, it's a battle of deficiencies, not a battle of efficiencies. Now, in terms of AI, look, you know, I became a slightly better than mediocre. I would say maybe just a little bit better than mediocre tennis player. My best tennis playing buddy was the wall in my backyard, because it returned every ball. But I tried to play with my other mediocre friends. They wouldn't return every ball, so it wasn't really as effective. So would Federer. I mean, he would return every ball. Federer would, but I don't have access to Federer. Although, by the way, you may have seen his extraordinary speech at Dartmouth. Fantastic. Inspiring. It was a hell of a speech. Oh my God. AI could be that wall. AI done right becomes the sparring partner to get your fundamentals straight. It's quirky. It's gonna make mistakes or keeps you on your toes. But to me, AI done right actually could make a massive difference to education. Doesn't replace the ultimate human coach, though. It just democratizes a little bit more. The student who wants to have the ball come back somewhat more regularly. And if you've seen Sal Khan's TED Talk or his videos using a chat GPT and then GPT -40, I mean, you know, those are there. The challenge right now is too expensive. We need open source models. Actually, the real challenge with AI overall is Nvidia makes a lot of money, the chips are in short supply, servers are expensive, and most people can't access it at the rate they need to. So democratizing AI and unleashing creativity may be a reset moment where we are all back to the starting gates, but for that, we need to get our populations lined up. When you say democratizing AI, are you in that camp that believes that it ought to be open source? I absolutely think it ought to be open sourced. A lot of the AI today is server -based with massive, getting access to Nvidia chips right now is the big problem, and they have a huge lead, and that's why it's such a geopolitical football between America and China. So access is expensive, the servers are expensive, the power, the consumer, and of course, a lot of these things are closed. Now you have open source, I think we will see not large language models, but smaller language models, which are more efficient, things that can run on your phone. We'll see local competition become much faster. I was just reading today about Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation working on some new approaches to packaging. So I think we will see a lot of breakthroughs. We are extrapolating from two points of rate close together. I'm actually quite hopeful that AI will get quite commoditized because of the amount of money being poured into it. Right now, it's very, very centripetal. There are a few people who have a lot of power, a few companies. That scares me a bit because it has that propensity to elitize further the pre -existing elitization of economic order. Yes, yes, it's a very existential thing. But the good news is, you know, China isn't sitting around, India isn't sitting around, the rest of the world is going, my God, you know, we're also worried. As a Southeast Asian, I'm worried because the guys that are going to be able to invest massively are the Americans and the Chinese, not the Southeast Asians. But if you take a look at the VC investment on AI, the US, a couple of years ago, I think the VCs invested 36, 38 billion dollars. China, 28 billion. Europe, only 8 billion. I mean, it shows you right there, the extrapolation of where things are and where things are going to be. And Southeast Asia is not within that Asia figure of 26 to 28 billion. It's mostly China. Yeah, look, I think what will end up happening, though, and this is wishful thinking about the lucky circumstance that might arise. Is that enough caveats there? Is that open source AI from the US will proliferate? If you go to Hugging Face, for example, there's so many more. GitHub, right? And then it'll proliferate. The parameters, the training will become more verticalized. It'll be, you know, train in Bausar, train in this, train in that, train in Indonesian legal canon, right? And I'm hoping that it'll get more commoditized as a result. And there'll be other breakthroughs that'll make it less, you know, accumulator, which is one group accumulates all the power. I have a, I have a sense that might happen. And that might be the saving grace, but otherwise, I'd be very concerned about what you're saying. And in fact, we should be concerned because that's where it's going. Well, let me test you with the following observation or concern. if the guys that are going to be able to invest would only just be to China and the US, right? Aren't they likely to be the biggest beneficiaries by being the creators? And it sounds like everybody else is just going to be a consumer or an enabler at the rate that it's going to get commoditized as you aptly pointed out. Well, what does that mean though? First of all, by the way, Apple is sitting on $60 billion of cash when it last looked. And they just decided, they just had to give in and say, well, we'll just use open AI, right? And then we sent. Pissed off somebody. That means that even Apple can keep up, right? I mean, Apple's just completely missed it, right? Google invented the transformer. 2017, our sheets was funny at all and somehow Gemini is not even in the equation. So it's a very fast moving thing. Now, um, if you sort of break it down, what is making money from AI mean? How does open AI make money? It's a subscription. Well, matter just open sourced and I'm working, uh, both at the Asia school of business and with other students in creating many server farms on campus to do AI and it's open source. And at some point this generation of AI will sort of begin to saturate. Right. So I think once that happens, how does open AI make money? Because I won't pay the $20 subscription. Then what does creation mean? Well, now you're writing apps to the stuff. Well, yes, I mean, the U S has a big advantage. India has a big advantage. China has a big advantage. Estonia has a big advantage. You know, the countries where there's a lot of innovation, um, that's where the action should be, but I don't think that country should rule themselves out, I think there's actually a huge opportunity to be creative with AI apps. So you actually believe that AI is going to be the fridge and Southeast Asians can be the coke makers. That's very well put. I'll give an example. That's that's. Well, you know, I have a sort of a positive view and let me explain. For example, large companies, the big bamits will be very shy about using AI. Here's why, because unlike computer programming, which is a deterministic AI statistical, it's error prone. It hallucinates and makes mistakes. So let's say you have a customer service bot, right, and you're big airline and it makes a mistake. Well, you're a big target. You can get sued. Small companies, like in Indonesia, right, I was at the airport and there were a lot of people returning from the Hajj. So let's say a travel agency in Indonesia that manages people going on the Hajj and they want to customize in Bahasa and maybe get the Hajj visa and also maybe let them go to other parts of Saudi Arabia while they're there, although it's terribly hard there and it's another tragedy that's brewing right now. But that can be done with AI. because it's a mom and pop or a small business, the accountability is going to be much greater compared to a large company. Air Canada had a chatbot go rogue, and it offered benefits to a passenger, and Air Canada said, oh, it was a chatbot. Sorry, we won't give it to you. The passenger sued and won in small things. So the big company is a big target. Small companies, especially the long tail. Actually, I think in harness AI a little bit better than the big companies in the short term. So let's get moving. Okay. That sounds hopeful. Let me ask you this. There's this observation about how AI is really just a hallucination, and it depends on the hypnosis that's being infused, imbued, or injected into the hallucination. My predisposition is that the hypnosis or hypnosis are just not being done in an adequately multidisciplinary manner because of this technological hubris. They don't want to rope in the environmentalists, the sociologists, the economists, the spiritualists, the philosophers, and all that. Intuitively, there's this risk of this getting uni -polarized or uni -disciplinized, and it might just be not benign, the result of the hallucination. Is that the right way to think about this? By the way, it's interesting. I was reading about how human consciousness evolved and our ability to scenario plan, and there's quite literally a theory called the stoned ape theory, where apes or early humans ate hallucinogens and started to hallucinate. and the sense is that the hallucination, when controlled, became our ability to plan and scenario plan. That's literally, there's a theory. I'm not convinced it's the right theory, but as a philosophical scaffold, it's interesting, isn't it? AI is, in fact, simply playing out the next word and the next word and the next word, and it's crafting things. It's such a, you know, predictive typing, right? And it's sort of stunning that it turns out that it can sort of reason and because human language and trains knowledge, it pulled in all this knowledge so you can ask it questions and it gives you mostly sensible answers, right? But you're right. It doesn't have a soul. We don't think through things like, what does it mean to have this power? You know, ethics is a bit of an afterthought. There's many people not thinking about it, but it's all a rush. It's like the internet to getting eyeballs. and serving a purpose and perhaps getting rid of a job and getting a cost -benefit analysis. My view is that many economists will disagree that the argument is that technology begets, productivity goes up, and more jobs are created. But this is such a shock to the system. I actually think the societal impact is going to be very significant. We'll create just like we're going to have climate refugees, we'll have tech refugees, people who lost their jobs because of this. And I don't think we've taken a sufficiently holistic societal view of this. And I worry deeply about it. And I think it's urgent. And the companies, you know, it's like this race because everyone's looking for the next quarter. What did you do with AI? How did you cut jobs? And they're going to have to do it. Large companies will struggle because of the risk profile that I explained. So in the meantime, I think there's an opportunity of a small companies, but that's a very short term thing. We have to think societally, we need to get everyone from the from the ethicist to the shaman involved. I'm not getting that sense. I've been spending the last couple of years in that part of the world where people are just so damn good technologically, but I don't think they're having enough coffee or discussions with the other guys from the other disciplines. And it's just intuitively, I just don't think it's going to land at the right spot. Look, Jeffrey Hinton quit Google because he's concerned about it. AI was crafted. I think the term AI was coined by a guy called McCarthy, MIT guy at the dot conference in I think the 50s. We need a new dot with conference. We need to really sort of think about it. Rishi Sunak hosted an event. You know, it was a start, but I think we need a lot more of this. And we need to have this. Look, this is such a, it's like a nuclear weapon, right? I mean, it's not as destructive, but maybe very impactful in society. I really feel that everyone. needs to know about this and start thinking about it. Uh, it can't just keep up on us. That's what's happening. Well, you know, I would argue that, you know, non -proliferation of nuclear was relatively very successful because of the nature of the polarity of the global order. And it's terrifying. It was, it was bipolar then became unipolar. It was terrifying, but now it's so multipolar. I think the proliferation risk is much higher with respect to anything that could cause harm on humanity. Call it nuclear, call it AI, call it cyber and all that good stuff. Yeah, because it's so, exactly. So there's no, uh, you know, Manichaean opposition, right? Which sort of balances itself out. It's like this circular firing squad and just one person has to pull a trigger. Right. So yes, I agree. And with AI, uh, especially because, uh, There are two things about the nuclear programs. One is that they are national. Here it's multipolar even within the big countries. It's privatized. And the second, these companies are so powerful that what a single company can do in the US with the amount of venture capital that's going into it is more than an entire country can do in other parts of the world. So if Malaysia or Indonesia want to take on AI, it has to be a national program to compete with anthropic. Right? So in many ways, the dynamic is very different. And I just don't see the collective conversations, the collective wisdom being exercised in these topics. The other concern I want to point out to you is, you know, AI is being created by teenagers and people in the 20s and 30s, right? And the guys that are supposed to be regulating this damn thing, they're age 55 to 80. You know, that gap, just how do you make sure that this is going to be properly or wisely regulated? Right. And, you know, I'm noticing how governments in many countries or some countries are just opening the kimono without understanding much less being able to manage the risk. Well, this has been a problem, actually, in technology for some time. And you saw the the hearings in Congress about social media. Right. Or and, you know, the the TikTok guy actually held his own. I thought he did very well. Right. You talked about that. I saw. I was very impressed with him. But yeah, I mean, this is a very fundamental issue. The issue is that we have an incompatibility, clock cycles, knowledge, et cetera. You know, I hope people like you, you know, who have both the intellect and the and the influence gets. talking about this. And I think every part of the world needs to be represented. By the way, AI, there was an article by Ray Kurzweil that just came out, I think yesterday or something, where he talks about how AI is going to solve, you know, energy problems. Yeah, he's utopian. He's utopian. But actually, I will say that AI is going to change engineering pretty fundamentally. It's going to make us very creative. Oh, then I agree. Yeah, because we'll be able to design things much more rapidly. It's called the inverse problem. I isn't happening, you know, and I'm really worried about it. And all I can do is be worried about it. So it's all I also feel helpless, you know. But don't you think educational institutions have a role here? Yeah. I mean, not only in terms of bridging the gap between the creators and the regulators, but we're seeing this increasingly widening gap between policy postures and public opinions. all across the world, underdeveloped, developing, and developed economies, right? Yeah, I think education has two roles, right? One is, let's get people to be more critical thinkers about this, right? And that's not just educators, it's everyone. It's politicians, it's thought leaders, it's, you know, it's religious organizations, everyone's got to get into it. NGOs, everyone's got to get into it, that's one. I do think that research, behemoths, the MITs, the Berkeleys, the Stanfords, the Harvests, you know, CS4, the, you know, the IITs, the, you know, great universities around the world have to start examining this. And in some ways, it's also a beautiful thing because it puts into question things like, what does it mean to be human? What is intelligence? You know, some of the hubris came from the fact that we underestimated human intelligence. What is intelligence? What is morality? So it's a sort of a fundamental thing we need to get into. And so it may be exciting in addition to being an important duty. So I think educational resources institutions have a huge role to play in this. And it's beginning to happen, I will say, it's beginning to happen. And there are also nonprofit organizations in Washington DC and other parts of the world. The EU or Europe actually enacted a new AI regulation, AI law, right, which is risk -based, you know, it's a start, but it's not particularly nuanced. It's not a discussion, which is what needs to happen. The regulatory framework that comes out of Europe is a manifestation of how they're not, or they have not been a beneficiary of the digital revolution, right? Yeah, yeah, I mean, Europe, I think has to come to grips with its role on the planet and what's happening for a variety of reasons. Energy is one of them, demographics is another. And the technology innovation might go out, you know? I mean, the birthplace of the... for the last 500 years, they've been the, until only the last 50 years or 100 years, the US has emerged. Somehow Europe's managed to sort of fall behind and get into a defensive posture. There's no doubt about it. That said, I will give them credit for GDPR privacy. It's become a global standard. So, I guess it's going, but the point, I think your earlier point, which is it's so multipolar, there's so many moving parts, you know, that it's very hard to pin down exactly how this is going to pan out. And in fact, my worry is it may not pan out in a good way because it's, we're hurting cats, society. You know, this recent publication on The Economist about China's attaining scientific superpower. Have they left the station? No, I don't think so. Um, I mean, I think China is amazing. I've opened labs in China. I've been there many times. I might have so many students from China and their exceptional, um, many colleagues that I've in fact, uh, uh, very much in touch with, uh, but I think measures of creativity are always, um, fuzzy, you know, patents. If you said patents are good, well, everyone's going to file a patent. You know, I'll give you an example. I have dozens of patents. The vast majority of my patents, I will tell you honestly, yeah, not that good. I'm just telling you, you're being humble. The patents that matter, the blocking patents. It's very hard to measure what's a blocking patent, but you know, they look good on my LinkedIn page. I don't have a LinkedIn page, but you know, they go, they look good on your resume. so any metric can be gained. I'm not saying that I think China is doing exceptionally well. I just fundamentally question some of the pet metrics people use to predict, to measure, uh, creativity. One thing, uh, China has done a few things, right? I mean, it's really invested in talent all the way ground up, right? All the way from the grassroots. It's really invested in major programs, technical initiatives. I think that's great. Um, and I think it's, it's done tremendously well, but I have just. I'm not suspicious. I just, you know, I just think it's very hard to measure these things. So I think they, I read the economist article. I think it's a wake up call to the rest of the world. I think kudos to China, but I don't think it's that black and white. You know, Apple exported billions of dollars worth of products out of India last year. Is that a reckoning of what's to come? Well, I mean, I think that we are entering a new stage in the history of the planet that's greatly aligned now. Right. And it's political. It's energy. For example, uh, you know. I mean it's you know Saudi peace deal maybe partly about managed nuclear energy right it's no surprise that Iran and Qatar have a lot of natural gas the US I mean Europe needs natural gas and it's trying getting it from Russia yeah so I do think that the lines are being drawn I think that there's a big pivot happening in video export of chips to China is they strictly regulated now or any semiconductor manufacturing equipment so is it a sign of things to come I think for sure I think we're seeing a global realignment you know New World Order as George Bush called it but I actually think we're seeing a global realignment India has punched below its weight for many you know many decades and it was a matter of time before the pendulum swung but yeah I mean I think this is a signal moment What would Southeast Asia have to do? I would say that Southeast Asia has many things going for it, right? I mean, it's actually a much richer part of the world than India, but maybe it's challenge in the sense that India was a little desperate. So, you know, certain things took off in India, people had to fight, right? But Southeast Asia has many things going for it. But I think the most important thing is education. It's awareness, it's education. It is a sense that critical thinking and creativity are needed, not just because Southeast Asia has to emerge as an intellectual thought leader, but also because of things with climate change, which will affect Southeast Asia a lot. Southeast Asia is blessed with so many energy resources at a time the world needs them. And it should own its own future rather than being a victim or listening to others define its future. It should export ideas somehow to get there or the path is culturally dependent. But I think that's why Southeast Asia just doubled down. You know, if you've mentioned the word energy a few times, mentioned in video a couple of times, I'll pick up on those. Whenever you listen to Jensen Quangs, you know, talking anywhere, he keeps, you know, making reference to how he's going to be 10X -ing up to 30X -ing the capacity of the next GPU upon a pre -existing GPU, right? What doesn't get captured in the conversation is that it's going to require 10X energy. It's going to require 30X energy, right? Every time you put your two thumbs on a mobile for the compute and the store. I just, it boggles me because I don't think there's going to be enough renewables inclusive of nuclear geothermal solar wind hydro. that good stuff, that's going to be enough to energize whatever that next GPU is going to be at the rate that people are just going to be AI -ing the hell out of themselves. And it just inevitably creates much more relevance to the old paradigm, call it fossil, call it coal. I mean, you work with a slumber jay. Is that the right way of thinking? So I think if we extrapolate from what we're seeing for sure, that's the inevitability. Grids will be overloaded, energy where you get the energy is going to be a problem, renewables. There's only so much you can do. There's only so fast you can scale up, no doubt about it. The one saving grace is if the extrapolation is offset by a change in direction. So what are some changes in direction? First of all, if the focus goes to lower energy, yeah, why? Because it can run on your laptop, on your phone. If it runs on your phone, latency is lower. If it runs on your phone, you can use it when your connectivity is bad. Right now Siri doesn't work if I don't have connectivity. So for all these reasons, I think we'll see a second booster engine strapped onto this, which has to do with energy consumption and more local models, smaller models. Right now it's a little bit boil the ocean. So the AI, you know, you can ask chat GBT everything from how to make falafel all the way to, you know, the political history of Mongolia, right? Doesn't have to be. So I think what we will see is much more sort of verticalized AI that does it's fit for purpose, much smaller, small language models or small models with parameters and lower power. If that doesn't happen, I think we're on a path that is unsustainable, but I do hope that that'll happen. We're seeing the first glimpses of that actually. And I hope that that turn happens. Otherwise we're battling down towards an immovable obstacle. I'm smelling some inherent finite nature Yeah. Of scalability. Yeah. I think they're beginning to see it already, right? I mean, already. So what Nvidia has done is in my view, they have, I'm just talking to people I know on the Bay Area, I was there a couple of weeks ago, is they have in the GPU space, there's not even close, not just in their design, but how rapidly they generate new designs. They're really doubled down. So they have in the foreseeable future, it's very hard for someone else to catch up. But I do think that that runs into limits for all the reasons you explained. And we're gonna see those limits. Cost is over. became an issue, so others are innovating, right? As I said, large language models that are open sourced, smaller models, verticalized models that I just said, because the finiteness is looming, and the creativity is like a tube of toothpaste. You squeeze it, right? Eventually, it's going to come out from the sides. If you don't remove the cap, it's coming out from the side. So, I think we're beginning to see some alternatives emerge. But you have to look at it differently than chat GPT. Interesting. Apple, I was seeing some papers from Apple actually recently that talked about reduced models that are efficient, not as good, but much cheaper, and much take much less power. So, we can ease off from the frontier and explore other frontiers. You know, as I was reading this book, A Scale by Jeffrey West, it's just a fascinating book. And I mean, if you had read books throughout your life, you would have read maybe about eight billion words. But AI today can instantaneously read eight trillion words. And you start figuring out, you know, take that exponentially forward. I mean, will we be able to see humanity being able to have much higher cerebral capacity by of that development or less? You know, it's very interesting. Let me give you a two minute way of looking at AI. So when AI reads the words, it doesn't actually retain the words. It tosses them away. And in a several thousand dimensional space, it takes every word and gives it a several thousand dimensional vector. And it just adjusts it a little bit, and then a little bit, and then a little bit. So it actually doesn't rip off the words. It distills them into this thousand, 12 ,000, whatever dimensional space. Beyond a point in the current paradigm, you know, those movements go down, doesn't change a lot. The next tome it reads doesn't change things that much. So it saturates. Where I think the progress is going to be in things like logic, reasoning, which it's not that good at. Until recently, when you asked large language models to add numbers, it didn't actually add them like a child would do with an algorithm. It pattern matched, you know. So I think that we are fearful and excited, but I actually hope, maybe this is a visual thinking, that we wonder as to painted what humans, our 86 billion neurons are capable of. And human society is each brain with 86 billion neurons connected. So you have an idea, I have an idea, we brainstorm in this conversation, we have another idea. So I'm hoping that the human societal mind can more than keep up, and then there's judgment and there's other things. So I know it sounds a little bit romantic, but the AI paradigm is a little bit linear, and a little bit, it's a very narrow barrel, a long barrel, you know? And we're going to see that it's not as multifaceted as humans are. Over time, it'll get there. But I think that battle will play out for quite some time before AI has its comeuppance and realizes what it isn't. Just begin to see it now. You know, a few days ago, I was speaking at a panel with... a member of the cabinet here about AI, along with Google, somebody from Google. And somebody asked, you know, what, what should the role of AI be? And the both of us try to simplify the answer. I think at the end of the day, we would like for AI to make ourselves happier, healthier, wealthier, and smarter. That's right. Is that a possibility? I think so. And the planet more sustainable, hopefully. Well, yeah, sustainable. Forgot about that. But no, I think, I think that's, you know, I mean, I, I imagine a day, again, this all sounds romantic and cliche and maybe a little bit hackney, but what the hell. I think that we, there will come a day when, you know, that humane pen thing that didn't really pan out, but you know, you have a buddy, you have your guardian angel, right? That's helping you just live a happier life. Be better, you know, stop you from doing silly things, you know, without being too preachy about it. You know, hey, Sanjay, you might lay off that. You burglar, you know, can that be achieved? I don't know. I don't know. But if we can wake up human beings, self -efficacy, a sense of who they are and what they are, critical thinking, what I want, what I really stand for, what I care about my family, my health, the planet, you know, I think we have a chance to shape AI rather than having AI shape us. And I hope we sort of, that's why I really talk a lot about learning. We talked about it, right? Getting human awareness in the peripheries, the centrifugal aspect, as it was a centripetal aspect. The polarization I think is a way to, what it, you know, it's a way to sort of the opiate of the masses, you know, just sort of shut them down, right? And I think we can sort of If he can get them to wake up, I think there's a real opportunity. Last question. Why should anybody go to ASB? You know, we're going to completely, first of all, ASB is very focused on action learning. It's not just in education. It's about learning to think and do in the context of reality and learn abstractions, but then apply them. We have really fantastic faculty. And now we're going to take another leap, which is ASB can come to you. So we're launching something called Agile Continuous Education, where ASB is going to provide, for example, to an executive who wants to train her staff in AI, hybrid modules with action learning, with an equivalent of action learning, jam sessions thrown in your musician. We actually talk about it to real people, and we're going to bring it to institutions around the world. particularly in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. So I think ASB, because we're small, we have an opportunity to apply many of the principles. I've been talking about others have been talking about to transform ourselves. Interesting. Anything else we've missed? I think we've covered a lot. It's such a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much, Sanjay. Thank you. That was Sanjay Sharma, the Dean of Asian School of Business in Kuala Lumpur. Thank you. Inilla, endgame.