AI Hustle: News on Open AI, ChatGPT, Midjourney, NVIDIA, Anthropic, Open Source LLMs: AI's Impact on Legal Jobs: Brian Beckcom's Perspective at VB Attorneys

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Welcome to the AI chat podcast, I'm your host, Jayden Shaper.

Today on the podcast, we have the pleasure of having Brian Beckham with us.

Brian is the founding partner and owner of VB Attorneys.

This is a law firm based in Houston, Texas.

He's an award-winning trial lawyer and has done a ton of really impressive things, including

hosting his own podcast.

We're super excited and we're going to be talking about the convergence of AI and the

law on the podcast today.

So welcome so much Brian to the show.

Great to be here, Jayden.

Thanks for having me.

I'm really looking forward to this.

This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart.

I'm a lawyer, but my undergraduate degree is in computer science.

I've been interested in technology for 30, going on 30 years now.

Matter of fact, when I was in college, I had one of the first email addresses, which was

totally useless because there was nobody else to email, but the convergence of technology

with a lot of the professions, including my profession is something that really, really

excites me.

So thanks for having me on the show.

Yeah, super excited.

So that's actually one of the first things I wanted to ask you about.

I saw that you have a degree in computer science.

Talk to me a little.

I feel like, I know when you go into law, you can get your basic degree, a degree going

to law school and whatnot.

And I have a number of friends that have gone on to do this and very few, if any, have I

ever heard doing a computer science degree before going on to law school.

So it's your motivation or direction with that.

Yeah, great question.

The short story is when I was a senior in high school, this was 1990, 1990, I basically

hacked the computer.

I got put, we had 30 connected because there was no internet back then, but the computers

were connected, literally by cords.

I hacked in, I changed everybody's grade to an A. I thought it was the funniest thing

ever.

The teacher did not think it was funny and put me on a standalone computer.

That was kind of the start of my interest.

As I go to Texas A&M, and I was a general studies major, didn't really know what I wanted

to do other than play basketball.

I was on the basketball team at Texas A&M.

That was really my number one interest.

But I had liked computers since high school, and I started taking some computer classes.

It just kind of went from there.

I didn't realize when I decided to be a computer scientist that I would have to take linear

algebra and differential equations and four different calculus classes, and matrix math

and stuff like that.

It was kind of tough.

I also got a degree in philosophy because I was interested in both of those topics.

In any event, I tell people that I spent four years in college with a bunch of dorks in

a computer lab, and I didn't want to do that my whole life.

So I went to law school, right?

And now, 20 years later, what do I do?

I hang around behind a computer with a bunch of dorks.

Like everybody now.

So it's kind of a circuitous route, but I can tell you that knowing about technology

and seeing the development of technology over the last 30 years has been an absolute bend

in my law practice.

It's helped me in more ways than I can count, and I'm really, really glad not only that

I have the computer science degree, but also that I have the philosophy degree because

I think they're complementary degrees.

So that's kind of the short story.

Yeah.

And I think that a lot of people are actually jealous of you right now because I feel like

as we see with this big AI boom that's happening right now, we're seeing ways that AI is literally

proliferating into every single industry, every single niche, and it's automating so

many tasks.

And a lot of people, I think, feel like some of the more intense ways AI can help is kind

of out of grasp.

It's out of reach beyond just using chat to help them with some things.

And so I think kind of having that experience and in your background for always helping

you really set your law firm apart and push it forward beyond what others are able to

do because of your background.

I'd be curious to, you know, we've had other people on the show that have talked a little

bit about AI and law.

So I'd be curious to pick your brain and kind of see what your thoughts are on that.

Specifically, how do you see AI technologies impacting the future of legal research and

case preparation?

I'm assuming this is an area, it's kind of hot right now.

A lot of people are talking about it.

There's been some high profile cases of this going wrong, of course, for lawyers using

chat to PT that cited, you know, cases that never existed and they get in trouble and

stuff.

How do you kind of see this in the future?

Yeah.

So I think before I answer that question, I think it's important to know what a, what

chat to PT is like, what, what is a large, what, what is a large language mod like fundamentally

what that is?

And I've actually, I've actually, I've actually taken some courses about how to build a large

language model from scratch, like a blank slate starting with nothing.

What would you do to start to actually program a large language model and to be, there's

some complications to it.

I don't want to get into the technical weeds, but essentially it's a statistics and probability

machine they take.

For example, they'll take, they call them tokens.

People think of tokens.

Tokens can be a word or tokens can be a series of letters or it can be one letter.

It doesn't really matter.

But when you hear the term token, that's what we're talking about.

So large language models basically break down, uh, senses and paragraphs and multiple paragraphs

and longer than that into tokens.

And they, so you, like for example, let's have, let's use English.

Let's say you've got a token that is typically three letters long.

And so we'll use the letter D. What is the chance that the word cat will appear next?

And then it calculates those probabilities and it creates basically a matrix that shows

all the different words and what the probabilities are.

And then it uses some recursive programming, which just means programming that kind of refers

back to itself and it puts it in context.

So all, all large language models are doing is trying to predict the probability of words

in the context in which they appear.

So if you understand that, then the magic, because when you use them, they, they basically

they appear like freaking magic.

It's like talking to somebody on the other end.

But if you know that all they're doing is probabilistic or statistical reasoning, then

it kind of changes your relationship with a little bit.

So now let's move it to the, to the law situation.

Okay.

I can tell you that I've been using chat GPT and other kinds of chat bots and large language

models in my practice for almost a year now.

I've told my team, I've got a team of people that work for me a while back.

I said, this is coming.

It's absolutely a game changer.

It's as big of a game changer as I've seen in 30 years.

Let's get in front of it.

And what I've discovered in the law practices for research, it's good, but not great.

You have to check the work that they call hallucinations.

They say these chat bots hallucinate.

You could just call it being wrong.

And they're confidently wrong a lot of the times.

Like when you, when you say, are you sure about, yes, I'm sure, even though they're

dead wrong, they act confident.

So what does that mean for humans as it relates to the professions and law in particular?

What it means is somebody has got to check the work and it's going to get a lot better.

But you're always, I don't want to say always, at least for this foreseeable future, you're

going to have to have some sort of human eyes that judge the, the, the ultimate outcome.

So in terms of legal research, it's incredible, but it's not perfect.

There are some other applications in which I think it is absolutely incredible.

So I'll give you a perfect example.

When I, I'm a trial lawyer, and one of the things I do as a trial lawyer is I send written

questions to the defendants in my case, to the, to the people that have been negligent,

answer these questions.

And we used to have to generate these all out of our brain, type them up, figure them

out.

Now I can say, I can literally explain to a chat bot, I can say, I'm a plan of sword.

This is generally what the case is about.

This is what the defendants are saying.

I need you to generate a list of 20 questions that I can send to them that'll focus in on

this issue.

And boom, two seconds later, you've got 20 incredible questions.

The other thing you can do is like, if somebody files a lawsuit and then you can amend that

lawsuit, have a different lawsuit, you can say, Hey, compare these two and tell me what

the differences are.

And it'll write out a paragraph.

Now there's all there, you know, you could do that in word processors already with track

changes and stuff like that, but the output you get here is better.

And here, here's a final kind of example of how I've used it, which is really surprising

to people.

So whatever your definition of creativity is, you can use chat bots, come up with ideas

to come up with creative ideas.

So I was having a little bit of a problem.

I do a lot of cases for people that are heard in the Marine in the Marine industry.

And one of the things that the insurance companies always say, I'm always representing somebody

who's been hurt or somebody who's been killed, they always say it was your fault, right?

You should have stopped the work.

You have the right to, you shouldn't have done it if it was so unsafe, you should not

have done the work.

They say that in every single case.

So I was messing around with the chat bot a couple of weeks ago and I said, what's the

best kind, you know, did a nice prompt?

What's the best counterargument to this?

And it's a five paragraph closing argument that was, it was good.

I mean, tons of work needed to be done, but the kernels inside of it, the ideas inside

of it were awesome.

So here, so that's a very long way of saying it's a AI and chat GPT large language models

are an absolute game changer, not just for lawyers, but for all professions that, you

know, a profession is basically manipulating information.

Any job that is fundamentally about manipulating information is going to benefit from these,

from these AIs and these chat bots, but for now for the foreseeable future, you're going

to have to have human overseers and you're going to have to have people that know the

subject in order to oversee them.

So for example, you have to go to law school in order to understand how to read cases and

research cases, understand how they fit in and stuff.

You're still going to have to do that with LLMs and chat bots, because if you don't understand

that there's no way you can oversee it to begin with, if that makes sense.

Yeah, for sure.

100%.

And it's interesting to, I think right along the lines of what you're saying, I've heard

from a number of people say, oh, like I tried chat GPT for XYZ, I did like a garbage job.

And it's like, at the end of the day, the better your input prompt is, the more you know

what you're doing and the more you know what you're talking about, the higher quality the

result of the output is going to be.

So if I say, you know, like write me a article about XYZ, it's just going to just kind of

free flow.

But I'm like, and include these statistics and these numbers reference this and that

and you kind of put the whole thing together.

The quality of the output is like a hundred times higher.

So yeah, I imagine the more you know, the better of a lawyer you are, you know the ways

to ask the questions to prompt it to get you a better result, essentially, I'm sure.

Promps are, what you're doing with a prompt is you're programming your program.

And now you're programming me using the English language or whatever other language it is.

But if you look at it like writing a program in English, it makes a lot more sense.

I think where people get stuck a little bit, Jayden, is at least with the LLMs and the

AIs right now is they think it's just like a form of a search engine.

It's just like a Google, hey, find me five recipes for scrambled eggs.

What's the best recipe?

You know, all this stuff that you can already do on Google and Bing and the other search

engines, if you look at it instead is like a collaborator, somebody like somebody you're

collaborating with and you're asking questions and delving a little bit deeper and things

like that, it works far better.

So the prompts, like I suggest to people in my law firm when they're doing it, tell it

what personality to a dog, give it context of why you're asking the question, what you

want, like be specific about what you want the output to look like.

So what I'll do sometimes is I'll say, I'm a planisaur, I represent John Smith, John

Smith got hit by an 18-wheeler and is paralyzed, the trucking company says it was his fault.

They're saying it was his fault because he was driving fast enough on the highway and

he should have been driving faster.

Give me five reasons that's a bad argument, write me a two paragraph closing statement

and suggest 10 questions I can ask that will figure out whether this defense is true.

So that's one prompt, right?

Yep.

Whereas in a Google search, you just literally write one sentence or a few words.

And so I have that big prompt, I get the output and then you start playing with the output,

like you're not done yet.

So I say, all right, add five more questions, take away this paragraph of the closing argument,

replace it with this.

And you kind of, it's basically an interactive process where you're asking questions, you're

modifying things, you're sharpening things.

And so when you look at it through that framework, it works phenomenally well.

If you look at it as just a souped up search engine, it frankly doesn't work that way.

I mean, like for example, I have, like you said, I have my own podcast and one of my

podcast managers is, he started me use AIs to write my show notes, like the announcement

notes.

And it's awful.

I mean, it is so bad.

It sounds nothing like my, I like to speak with small words, simple language, not a lot

of adjectives.

I have a particular style I like to speak and write with.

I see these show notes and it's like, Brian Beckham has an illuminating most fascinating,

interesting, they talk again, it's all these adjectives and it's so breath.

And the first time he did this, I said, did you write that with an AI?

He goes, yeah.

And that'll work.

But what you got to do is you got to say, okay, take out the adjectives.

And then you got to say, maybe feed it some of the things I've written before and say,

this is Brian Beckham style, write the show notes in this style and you got to kind of

keep, in other words, you can't just tell it one time to do it and expect it to be perfect.

So yeah, it's kind of, it's actually kind of funny to see how if you don't check it,

it'll be like completely obvious, at least to me.

I don't know if it's the other people when an AI is writing something.

And by the way, there's a famous, have you ever heard of the Turing test?

Yeah.

Okay.

Do you know generally who Alan Turing was and what the Turing test is?

Yeah, but explain it for the audience.

So Alan Turing was a British mathematician and computer scientist during World War II

who broke the Nazi enigma code, basically made the first computer.

And he had, he has this thing called the Turing test, which is once you can't tell the difference,

whether something on the other side of a screen is a human or not, then we've reached artificial

general intelligence.

A lot of people think we've, we've, we've, we've passed the Turing.

Big debate.

Some of these chatbots.

Yeah, big debate.

I can tell you, it's absolutely crystal clear to me when I see these chatbots that we haven't,

that we have not passed the Turing test.

I mean, it, maybe they can fool you for just a little bit, but after a while it's pretty

obvious that you're not dealing with a human if you know what I mean.

Yeah, definitely.

But something that you said I really like and I just want to highlight it because I

think this is really useful for the audience.

I feel like I for one am not creative enough when it comes to prompt engineering to, like,

for example, style, right?

I do show notes for my podcast as well.

It's very similar, right?

Like I, I find it's hard for me to be like, say in like a professional yet sort of casual,

like finding all the right keywords to get it to do my exact styles incredibly hard.

So I actually ended up doing what you mentioned, which is whenever I want something to sound

like me, I just give it like an article or an essay or like a big thing that I've written.

And I'm like, just copy this.

And I've done that in a lot of different ways where like, I'll find maybe someone else's

piece of content like a YouTuber even or something, right?

Oh, like recently I was helping someone make a SAS product, like video walkthrough demo

kind of like video.

I needed a script for it.

AsciiGPT and it sounded like ridiculous.

It was like, this little, yeah, like you said, this illuminating piece of technology will

dazzle you when I'm like, Oh my gosh, like this is so cheesy.

So like what?

Yeah.

Like I copied the transcript, gave it to him said just copy like this style and it gave

him a great one, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's funny.

Dazzle.

Yeah.

I told the guy was like, I haven't used the word.

I forget what word it was, but it was a similar word.

I was like, I haven't used that word 15 years, you know, and it's like every other sentence

is like an exclamation bar.

You know, I'm not that.

But the point is, is that they're, they're, they are trainable.

They're teachable.

Oh, so you can.

So I'll tell you what I did with my show notes.

So Sam Harris is a podcast.

He's got podcasts I've been listening to for a decade.

I like the style of his show notes, or I just fed him a bunch of his show notes.

I fed one of the as much of his show notes.

I said, this is Sam Harris's show notes, write my show notes in the same style.

But the, the, the, the cool thing about it is, um, so in order to be, I'm, I'm stepping

into some deep philosophical ground or I'm about to, in order to be conscious, uh, one

of the things that has to exist is memory.

You have to have memory in order to be conscious.

Same thing with computers in terms of being able to interact with them.

They have to have memory of the previous, in this case, previous prompts of previous

answers.

And the, the amazing thing about some of these chatbots is they have a, I have a massive

memory, like way more than our memory.

It'll remember its mistakes.

It'll remember stuff you've fed it before.

It'll remember the style you've talked about.

And so it, it, it does, you know, large language model, it does learn over time using modeling

human language.

So it gets better, which is, which is super cool.

I think like the more you use it, the more fine tune you get.

Was it so, you know, and I can actually, I've got this lawyer that I deal with all the time

who writes literally like an 18th century English barrister.

It's hilarious.

I don't even know if he knows he's doing it, but now when he writes me letters, I tell

my AI, I say, respond to this letter.

Here's what I want you to say, but I want you to write it in the same style.

Me thinks thou doth protenest too much about, you know, and it's, it's funny to, and so

you can really have a lot.

That's funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's hilarious.

You know, I think something that's interesting, and I think maybe we get close to the turn

test with this because I tend to agree with you as far as the quality that it is at right

now.

Like not bad.

It's good.

It's like automatically incredible.

Something that, you know, you see right now is there's a ton of different companies out

there that are allowing corporations to fine tune on top of OpenAI or other AI models.

Even OpenAI just launched like a fine tuning thing for ChatGPT.

I think it would be incredible if every conversation you specifically have on your ChatGPT account,

this may be a third party that does this or someone else, but it takes that, it can tell,

you know, when you ask it to redo something that you didn't like the first one, you like

the second one better.

It remembers like what you're asking about, so all of a sudden it's like making data on

your businesses or your cases or your style or the way you do things, putting that together

and then it all of a sudden has a memory about you, your tone, the stuff that you're working

on, the things that you do, your work clothes and jobs, it can pretty much get all of that.

And I think at that point we'll come to a much closer place with that, which we're not

quite at right now, but yeah, very interesting if we could get it to essentially replicate

us in a way, become like our own personal.

That exists already, and there are multiple companies that are doing that right now.

I had a guy on my podcast who's created a personal AI.

Is she basically inflection or is she doing the personal.ai, that thing?

I think it's called, as I recall, it's called perpetuity AI.

I'll look that up and let you know, but basically what it does is it reads all your data and

then you can train it, but for instance, if somebody texts you and says, where do you

want to go dinner tonight?

If you wanted to, it'll say, well, my favorite two restaurants are this restaurant and that

restaurant.

What do you think about that?

It'll have an entire conversation with people that you don't even realize, I mean, it's

going on without, and right from you at all.

So that's already kind of here, and to me that's just like the natural extension of

I am out of the office this week.

If you really need, you need, you can contact this phone number, call my secretary, you

know, the auto.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is just a more robust, more robust version of that.

But of course, a lot of these issues, and this is, it's pure luck that I have a philosophy

and a computer science degree, but these, a lot of these issues are not technology issues

per se, Jaden.

They're philosophical issues.

They're issues about what it means to be human, what it means to interact with another potentially

conscious entity.

What gives us value like, you know, you hear a lot about, oh my gosh, these AIs are going

to take all these jobs.

What are people going to do?

Where are they going to find meaning if they don't have a job?

And the truth of the matter is, for the vast majority of human beings in their world, their

jobs effing suck.

They're terrible.

Yeah.

We're lucky that we like our job, but for most people, it's terrible.

And the idea that we would trap these people forever in these shitty jobs is immoral.

And there's no rule, by the way, that says human beings have to get their personal meaning

of fulfillment out of work.

Like where did that come from?

That wasn't the case for 10,000, over all of human history until recently.

And so what I think you're going to see, and there's a bunch of downsides with AI that

we can talk about or not, but there's a bunch of positive aspects to it.

And I think one of the biggest positive aspects to it is it's going to take away the drudgery

type work, the work that nobody, nobody really wants to do.

And that's going to put a lot of people out of jobs, but those jobs aren't that good

right now.

And they're going to find other sources of better sources of meaning, more important

sources of meaning.

So I think there's a lot of really positive benefits.

But I...

Where do you...

I'm so curious to pick your brain on this and, you know, having a philosophy and a computer

science degree, there's so many things I would love to pick your brain on.

But specifically, right, this is the big argument.

Everyone's kind of debating it right now.

You know, Samuel, the CEO of OpenAI.

He says he really believes that UBI is going to become absolutely essential.

Where do you...

What do you see?

Right?

Like, for example, I saw an article today, makes perfect sense, Gizmodo, tech journal.

They had like a bunch of different language departments.

They had their English language, they had their Spanish, they had Italian, whatever.

They just laid off and fired everyone on the entire Spanish Gizmodo.

Like that whole company is just shut down because they said, we're just going to use

an AI and it's going to rewrite the English one and now it's the Spanish one.

They didn't want to use Google Translate, I guess, in the past because sometimes the

translations were a little funky, but when you get AI to rewrite it, it understands the

full context and everything and it's really good, apparently.

So anyways, the whole Spanish one shut down.

I can see that happening in everything and everywhere, right?

So many jobs.

What do you think happens to those people?

Do you think that AI is going to, you know, create a need for universal basic income?

What do you think the solution is to that problem or that, you know, occurrence?

It's a fantastic question and so like the core reporters and videographers in the legal

industry are, that's a, I would not want to be in that starting out in that field for

the same reasons you talk about.

UBI, Universal Basic Income is this idea that everybody, I think it was kind of popularized

by presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

It's got to, so the, basically the idea is everybody gets a, some sort of income just

by virtue of being a member of whatever country it was used in the United States, just because

you're in the United States.

You get a, you know, you get basic healthcare and you get enough to provide for some basic

needs.

The pushback on that is, well, then nobody will want to work.

Everybody's going to stay home.

Everybody's going to sit there and they're going to play video games all day long.

Well, who do you hear that from?

You hear that from the rich billionaires that require manual labor and have to have cheap

labor.

Of course they're going to say that because they, they rely on, in many ways, taking advantage

of people that need the money.

I mean, the Amazon warehouses are a human rights fucking disaster.

The fact, I mean, they, they have timed restroom breaks.

What in the hell are we talking about in 2023?

Yeah, it's pretty.

It's a grown person.

It's horrendous.

Like it is awful.

And the people that are complaining about people not going back to the office are the

people that run those kind of companies.

So of course they're going to say, who gets their meaning in having to ship boxes all

day long and as a 40 year old adult has to ask permission to go number one.

I mean, they're not, let me tell you something.

People aren't getting their meaning from those kind of jobs.

If they are more power to them, but those kind of job, it's, it, it, what I, what I

would say is it will be a good thing when robots and AI take over those jobs and it

will create so much additional time for people to spend time with their families, been time

with their kids, pursue their hobbies, go get physically fit, spend time in nature, go,

go do something, you know, do charity work for your fellow man.

I mean, we ought to be rooting for this is my point.

And if it takes something like universal basic income to make it happen, I would, I

would support that 100%.

And my, I guess my point is, I think this idea that UBI discourages people from working

is a stupid argument.

It's the argument that is being made at the people that are making the argument or the

people that are exploiting people that have these low level crappy jobs.

So I'll, you know, as a lawyer, one of the things I've, I've, I've kind of been trained

to do is to look what the underlying motivations are when somebody does something.

And I can tell you, this may not surprise you, 99% of the time follow the money.

So when somebody's arguing, for example, that all the, all these low level workers,

they need to come back to the office, ask yourself why there's, are they saying that

because it's better for the people to come back to the office?

Are they saying it because it's better for them?

And I think, you know, the answer to that question most of the time.

Yeah, 100%.

So do you think then universal basic income would be the solution?

Do you think enough people would be displaced or do you think that the jobs that AI creates

will fill in the gaps there?

I think it'll be a combination of both.

I think what you'll find, I'm already seeing this a little bit on the very social media sites.

Basically, people are creating their own personal brands and their brand is their job in many ways.

And so, you know, you can take some extreme examples that were celebrities will, you know,

they'll get paid millions of dollars to hold a certain kind of drink and drink, right?

But there's people all across the country that are doing this.

So I'll give you an example from my life.

So I'm totally obsessed with Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

I practice jiu-jitsu almost every day.

And Instagram is where all the jiu-jitsu people hanging out.

And they have people have personal brands.

They make money from making training, videotapes and stuff like that.

I actually, I think the thing that we want, in my opinion, is we want to take robotics and

AIs and get rid of all the jobs that suck.

Right.

And all the jobs that are treachery, all the jobs that nobody really wants to do.

And that trees up time.

Like, let me ask you this question, Jayden, if you didn't have to work to make money,

what do you think you'd do with your time?

Oh, yeah, I have a lot of I have a lot of passions and things I'm interested in.

I do like this is fun for me.

So some some level of it may be the same thing I do.

Honestly, on the podcast, like I find a lot of fun from it.

But yeah, I mean, definitely, there's a lot of things I'd probably spend more time with my family.

Yeah, I probably need to spend more time thinking about that question

because it's not quite the option yet.

But I do I do find a lot of joy in what I do.

Yeah. So let me ask you this question.

If if you had the option to spend more time with your family and pursue more of your hobbies

and stuff, do you think you would have less meaning in your life or more meaning?

Yeah, I think I definitely would find hobbies that give me a lot more meaning in my life, for sure.

Yeah. And I think I think most people are like that.

Like you and I are fortunate in that I I get a lot of fulfillment out of my job.

I get to represent kids, families, husbands and lives and real people

that are very bad situations and I can make a difference in their life.

That gives me a lot of fulfillment.

So I like my job and I do give meaning for my job.

But if that went away tomorrow, I would find meaning somewhere else.

I would find meaning helping young kids by teaching kids jiu-jitsu, for example,

I would find meaning. I have three children spending more time, more time with my kids.

I love to read. I would find meaning in reading more books.

So I guess what I'm saying is what we want is we want AI to take care of all the stuff

that nobody else wants to do.

And that will free up time to do whether it's your job or whether it's hobbies

or whether it's something else for free up time to do stuff that's much more human.

I mean, you know, let's think about it for a little bit.

Is it, you know, like using the Amazon warehouse as an example, is it is it is it natural?

Is it good for people to be inside all day long?

Doing manual labor under very strict conditions, dehydrated, no water, no rest and breaks.

Is that is that the way and you know, I could give you an example from my life

when I first started practicing logic and I had to show up at a giant steel structure

that had 50 floors and I was on the 45th floor and I had to go to a little box

and where I had to wear these these clothes that like I had a noose around my neck

all the time and I had to put it on every morning at eight o'clock

and I had to get in my car and I had to drive and traffic for 35 minutes.

And then I sat in this box with a bunch of other people that were sitting in boxes

right next to me for nine hours a day and then I would get in my car

and I would fight traffic for an hour going home.

I would take all that stuff off, have a couple of beers and go to bed and repeat it.

People have been the people that do that for 30 years.

Is that is and at the end you get a gold watch.

I mean, is that really how we want to be spending our lives?

I mean, nowadays I look at these and this this has, you know, quarantine,

I think, taught us this.

I look at these big skyscrapers sometimes and I'm like, boy,

that having to spend your old life in one of those things sounds like,

I mean, that's terrible.

Like, who wants to do that?

I want to go hiking outside, you know, stuff like that.

So, yeah, it is very interesting.

I know for me, like specifically, I worked an office job then during COVID.

We went to working from home and eventually I just like it opened my eyes.

I'm like, I don't have this 45 minute commute both ways.

I don't have to just kind of kill time when I'm out of things to do

because, you know, I finished my tasks for the day,

but everyone's kind of kicking around the office.

Like there's so and I get to spend time with my kid for lunch.

I go and eat lunch with my kids and it's like so much more,

so much more fulfilling.

I found that and it was around the end of that when they started talking about,

okay, we're going to start looking at coming back to work,

coming back to the office and all that.

They're making the reopening plans,

coming back to the office plans.

When I kind of had, during COVID,

I started thinking about other things I wanted to do

and I kind of started to pursue those in the last couple of months

and just decided, okay, like I quit.

I choose not to ever go back to work.

I don't know everyone's like different about the go back to the office.

Some people like it, some people don't.

For me personally, I was like, I will, after the experience,

I'm like, I'll never work an office job again if I can help it.

I'd like, I just will choose an alternative.

If it's less money, if it's less flexible, if it's less whatever.

Fortunately, I now can make my own hours and do my own thing with what I do,

but yeah, that was just my decision.

And so I think, yeah, I think along those same lines,

I'm actually quite in the same camp of like a lot of the things AI does.

And it's interesting too, because right now we have the two things.

We have AI, that's kind of the intelligence, the brain.

It's replacing a lot of jobs and industries.

There's also robotics, which is becoming very big

and pairing the two of them is becoming incredibly powerful.

So you see a lot of people complain about like,

the robots replaced the burger flippers in McDonald's,

people complaining because it's taking the burger flipping jobs.

And it's like, well, was that really like someone's dream job?

That's my first thing.

But once we start like pairing these things,

I think it's going to get very interesting

because it's going to get to a point where we have,

like you have, for example, Tesla has their Optimus like humanoid robot.

There's a number of other firms making these humanoid robots.

Pairing that with AI is going to,

you'll essentially be able to train these things to be an electrician

a plumber.

Blue collar jobs is the next ones to see some major disruption,

probably in the five to 10 year time span.

But it's going to be very prevalent around a lot of industries.

And if there ever is the big breakthrough that,

you know, everyone hints at with nuclear fusion or fusion or whatever,

where we get like energy, very, very cheap or low,

cheap energy, humanoid robots and AI, it's like,

there will be, we will have to shift fundamentally

how we do things as a society, whether that's

however we end up doing that.

And I think humans, yes, we'll have to find new ways of finding fulfillment,

new ways of doing things.

A lot of people think it's like conspiracy theory far out there.

This thing's not going to happen.

Like looking at what's the technology and the advancements right now

is 100% coming down the pipe.

And it's just kind of like, in my mind, the question of like,

how do we respond?

What do we do?

What does it look like?

How do we prepare?

But it's going to happen.

You're exactly right, Jayden.

I could not agree more strongly with you.

Everything you just said is going to happen.

It is going to happen.

It is the only way it won't happen is if we destroy ourselves.

But I'll tell you, there's one of my favorite books of all time.

It's called The Beginning of Infinity.

It's by a physicist named David Deutsch.

And he talks a lot about the future of the scientific discovery,

the future of humanity and stuff like that.

And the bottom line is, given enough time, we will solve all of these problems.

We'll solve climate change.

We'll solve energy.

You name it.

We'll solve artificial intelligence.

We'll solve cancer.

Every single problem we're solving will get solved given enough time.

So, and this applies to robotics and things like that, that robots are,

they're here.

I mean, they're already here.

If you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking about becoming a doctor,

you might want to think twice about becoming a radiologist.

Because right now, AIs are a million times better at reading MRIs than actual humans.

That, the run of the mill radiologist that looks at films, that job is host.

Now, that doesn't mean there won't be people that'll have to,

like we were talking about at the beginning of the podcast,

oversee the AIs that are looking at the films.

And in order to oversee the AIs that are looking at the films,

you have to have some knowledge of radiology yourself.

So, it's not like humans are just all of a sudden not going to have to do anything.

And I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Wally.

But Wally has a freaking phenomenal scene after, you know, the first,

the first part of the 20 minutes where nobody spits just the two robots is incredible.

But then they show everybody up in space.

And that's like supposed to be an Aldous Huxley, Grave New World type of,

for people that don't know that book.

Aldous Huxley wrote this book called Grave New World, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago,

where basically all your needs were met and it was terrible.

Like its whole point was you would never want that.

And that's kind of what Wally is trying to, so that's one direction we can certainly go.

But the other direction we can go is every single piece of drudgery

that you have in your life is essentially taken care of by something that never gets

tired, never complains, wants to do it every single time.

I mean, that sounds fairly cool to me, you know what I mean?

Like I'd love to be a, I'm a golfer in addition to playing jiu-jitsu.

I'd love to ask an AI, hey, what am I doing wrong this way?

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And then take another video.

Did I do it right?

Well, you did this right and this right, but you didn't do that right.

I mean, like that kind of stuff sounds pretty cool to me.

Interestingly enough, when you mentioned the radiologist, same with surgery.

I just saw in this article that they had an AI mixed with a robot and it just completed

like what was considered an impossible surgery.

It was impossible to remove this tumor without like, you know, pretty much damaging the patient.

And they were able to do it with like super, super high precision.

I don't know if you've seen them, but like these robots that are like removing

the peel off of a grape with like incredible precision.

And yeah, there's a lot of industries I feel like are definitely going to see some

massive disruption and it's going to be AI and some version of AI and robotics that

replace a lot of that.

What advice would you give to two groups of people?

Number one, let's say professionals, maybe, maybe in law school, maybe other areas that

are, you know, going for professional degrees, white collar jobs and seeing the writing on

the wall that AI eventually will replace them.

And number two, for people currently in jobs, like, you know, it's like chat,

she BT hasn't replaced coders.

Okay.

One one side tangent that I got to bring up.

I went to this recent AI conference and there was this like,

phrase that I just heard over and over again from virtually all of the like heads of all

the big companies, like Brice and IBM, like all the big companies, they had their heads of AI

there and all their AI people.

And there was this phrase everyone kept saying, which was like,

you won't be replaced by AI, but you will be replaced by someone that's using AI.

And the idea is like, don't worry about AI, because if you just learn AI and become really

good at it, like, you're not going to get replaced.

And like, I get where they're coming from.

But also, I feel like a lot of people are going to be replaced by AI.

And like, if we don't just admit that fact, we're just doing them a disservice.

So what advice would you give people that are professionals or studying to become

professionals looking at the landscape ahead with this massive disruption on price?

That's a very deep philosophical question.

And I would say two things in answer to that question.

First of all, as it relates to the future of work, if you're looking for jobs that are

unlikely to be taken over by robotics or AI anytime soon, then you want jobs that require

high level of human interaction.

So for example, I saw this study not long ago about basically had a list of the jobs that

were least likely to be taken over by AI anytime soon.

You know what the number one job was?

Nursing, which when you hear it is obvious because what does a nurse do?

A nurse is about face-to-face contact and making people feel comfortable.

So jobs like that, or now there will come a time when that job is taken over by

robotics and AI too.

But in the short term, those are the type of jobs.

Any job that just involves pure, the pure processing of information,

which is most professional jobs, are in trouble.

Any job, like in the manual labor context, any job that requires human strength

is going to get taken over by robotics.

And so those are the jobs that I would be worried about.

But here, and this is a philosophical belief I have.

This is what I would tell people about, but they're both working today and they're worried

about the AI and people that are looking to enter the workforce and they're worried about AI.

What I would say is, if you don't have an insatiable curiosity to learn new things,

you're dead in the water.

And so I have this insatiable curiosity.

As you can tell, I've already taken a course on large language models.

I've now had a program of why am I doing that?

I know if I don't, that I'll be rendered irrelevant.

And I know that standing still, you're falling behind if you're standing still.

So in my law practice, I've run this business for 20 years.

We were on YouTube 20 years ago.

We had a website when nobody else was doing this.

I was paperless 10 years ago.

So when quarantine happened, it was like it didn't even happen in my law firm.

We didn't even notice it.

We were already ready for it.

And I'll tell you when, like in my business, I talked to law firm owners,

hey, I don't ask them, hey, are you guys back in the office?

And you know, I get these answers like, oh, we were back in the office three weeks after,

or we're back in there.

And you know what I think when I hear that?

In my, seriously, in my mind, and I'm sorry if anybody is on your listeners are offended by this,

but if you are a tough luck, tough enough, people that think and say those things,

when I hear that, I go, God, you're an idiot.

Like how much time are you wasting?

How much employee time unnecessarily gone to the office every day from eight to five?

For one reason, Jaden, one reason, because that's how we did it in the past.

And if you can't get past this legacy thinking that like this is how we've always done it,

then you're in trouble, my friend, you were in trouble.

If any, if you ever, if this noise ever comes out of your mouth,

why are you doing it that way?

Well, this is the way we've always done it.

If you ever say that, you're in trouble.

I'm serious for them.

You better, you better be, you better be constantly curious and working on learning new things.

Because we're at a, there's a concept in physics called a phase change,

which is like when, when something changes just like dramatically.

So it's not just like a kind of a smooth change.

It's like, boom, all of a sudden, everything's different.

We're in the middle of the phase change right now, convinced things are moving so damn fast,

Jaden, it's going to make people's heads spin.

I mean, there'll be, you know, it will be shocking to people how quickly AI takes over

everybody's job.

And if you're not running to stay a little bit ahead of that, then you're in trouble.

So I guess my advice would be to people, don't be afraid of change.

Don't be afraid of the future.

Embrace change, embrace the future because, you know, there's not many things that are

sure in this life.

One thing is sure is things, so things will change.

Yeah.

And if you don't like that, then that's, then that's a personal weakness and you need to work.

Okay.

Because of your, your background of philosophy, I just have to ask, this is a very big philosophical

and debate question in AI.

And I think you'll understand the implications as goes to the military, this goes to everything,

but specifically in the law.

Do you think that we will or should ever replace judges with AI?

If you mean, if by judges, you mean judgment on like a case,

people to decide the case, you know, I, that's hard to say my first inclination

is not anytime soon because a big part of the jury system in America and a big part of the

judgment system, it's more about just the actual words that come out of people's mind.

It's more about the, it's more about more than the documents.

It's about like the subtle human, like when I say something, it's not just the noise that

comes out of my mouth.

It's like, it's like the inflection in my face.

And like, like if you, if you like fake smile, people know your fake smile and if your hands

are like, if you're, if you're crossed over and stuff, there's all sorts of this subtle

messaging that goes on that is, by the way, some people think, well, why would we trust

that?

Well, we would trust that because it's the result of a hundred thousand years of human

evolution.

Like if you're, if like your instinct is telling you this person is lying to you,

you better pay attention to your instinct because you're probably right.

And your instinct is there for a reason.

And so I think it's that, that, that in particular is a lot, at least when it comes to jury trials,

is a lot like nursing.

There's such a human element to it.

Now there'll be tax lawyers and contract lawyers that won't have any jobs anymore.

Contracts are going to be, basically contract lawyers are going to be programmers because

they're going to start using smart contracts that are on the blockchain and using blockchain

technology.

That's a whole nother discussion, but, but essentially you're going to, instead of having

a piece of paper that says, if I do this, you pay me this, if I don't do this, this is what

you get to do, which is basically what a contract is.

And you'll have a piece of paper that'll say that.

And if, if somebody doesn't honor their side, then the lawyers get involved and you go through

the legal system.

Well, smart contract will basically say, if I do this, then automatically without any human

interaction, this, you will get this much and whatever it is.

Like, if I transfer this much Bitcoin to this account, then automatically the title to this

property will transfer ownership to, like the smart contracts would require far less human

intervention.

So there'll be tons of things like that.

And it's the same thing in medicine, like radiology, that field is not long for human,

for humans, although there will, again, there will, there will have to be people that will

program the radiology computers or have to be people that oversee it.

But then nursing, nursing is not in any danger anytime soon, as far as I can tell.

So it's like every profession, certain, certain jobs within the profession will go away and

the jobs that require the most human interactions will be around at least for the foreseeable

future.

Yeah, I tend to agree with that as well.

And I really appreciate your insights there.

That's one I hadn't quite hashed out in my, in my mind.

And I think, I think you're spot on with that.

Thank you so much, Brian, for coming on the show today.

It has been absolutely incredible getting, grabbing your insights.

If people want to learn more about you, your books, your law firm, anything, where did

they, what's the best way to contact you and find you?

Go to Brian Beckham.org.

That's where my writing, my photography, my podcast is, and that's B-R-I-A-M-B-E-C-K-C-O-M

I tell people it's like Beck.com and C-K-C-O-M.

Or you can go to my, if you want to learn about my law firm, it's BB Attorneys.

That's B as in Victor.

B as in Brian.

Attorneys, BBAttorneys.com.

All one third.

I'm on all the social medias under my own name.

Wonderful.

Thank you so much.

I'll make sure to leave that in the show notes for the listeners listening.

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.