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Modern Wisdom · 3 min · Aug 17, 2026

Abundance can let some people disengage and others overperform

Zack Kass links falling reading, biking and swimming rates to smartphones and an economy where young people can opt out, not AI alone. He argues the same abundance lets highly motivated people excel.

Zack Kass

Co-founder & President, Korza

Built OpenAI's sales, partnerships and solutions teams through ChatGPT's launch; now advises Fortune 1000 boards.

About this segment

Zack Kass links falling reading, biking and swimming rates to smartphones and an economy where young people can opt out, not AI alone. He argues the same abundance lets highly motivated people excel.

From “AI DEBATE: “Most People Have No Idea What’s Coming””, Aug 17, 2026. Watch the full episode

“we actually created a world where we told kids, you can do whatever you want, and a lot of kids said, cool, I'll do nothing.”
Zack Kassat 37:42 · Modern Wisdom37:42

Takeaways

  1. Smartphone-era declines predate current generative AI.
  2. Greater abundance can make opting out economically possible.
  3. High-agency users can turn the same tools into outperformance.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 43:53A narrow AI goal led to an unintended cyberattack6:30
  2. 55:27Automated AI research could sharply change the pace of progress6:03
  3. 2:05:56AI competition can concentrate power and reward risky behavior5:39
  4. 8:32Political protections can slow automation even when technology is ready5:55
  5. 1:26:17AGI design should separate capability from autonomy3:22
  6. 1:22:34Scenario scrutiny turns AI forecasts into concrete decisions3:50
  7. 1:54:36AI policy should focus on diffusion, not just model development4:15

  8. 36:31Abundance can let some people disengage and others overperform2:38

Up next · Lex Fridman PodcastWhy Khabib's father had him compete in every combat sport11:12

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 36:36

    We're observing, just so we're clear, already what I, I mean, I wrote about this. We called it idiocracy. I borrowed from the Mike Judge film, which I thought was cute. but obviously it's not cute when it when you see it play out in front of you gen z is less likely to read on average less likely to ride a bike and less likely to swim than millennials for the first gen generation in many we're observing cognitive decline and people keep attributing it to ai and i and it's and then you go back and look and actually jonathan height started writing about this pretty early and um the the the data suggests that actually this starts 2012 right about the time that we gave every kid a screen it pronounces in 2015 when the average teen in the developed world stopped doing a summer job and then it pronounces again badly in 2020 when we take kids

  2. 37:20

    out of schools and move classes online and it's even more specific than that it correlates to when social media became maximally maximally um It's not popular, but smartphones. Yes, but 2012 was when we gave the kids smart – a lot of the Gen Z that became afflicted got the smartphone in 2012. My point in saying this is we associate this as a technology problem. I actually think it's an economic one. I think that we actually created a world where we told kids, you can do whatever you want, and a lot of kids said, cool, I'll do nothing.

  3. 37:53

    Like a lot of people have turned their brain off because you can. You can do effectively nothing and survive, which is like economic progress, which is the economic progress result of, you know, people just not caring. that apathy has a has an underbelly which is pretty amazing which is gen z has all these incredible new uh over performance features the best chess players are getting younger and younger the best athletes are getting younger and younger jacob collier all these incredible musicians so you're watching people over perform that use the technology to their advantage and i think it's this new pronounced k-curve driven by agency and my my only hot take this is all i'm going to leave this with we created a world where so many people can subsist and that actually is progress and then

  4. 38:44

    we create a world where so many people can overperform and that is also progress we have to we now have to account for the new consequences of those worlds where you can do anything and that means for some people nothing and that means for other people a ton which is a major promotion on a world where you had to work in the mines or you had to work in the fields in order to survive Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance,