Chief AI Architect: How to Make AI Your Strategic Partner in 40 Minutes | Conor Grennan

Conor Grennan 0:00 Look, even if the technology doesn't change from today, it can still wipe out twenty-five percent of entry-level white-collar workforce. [upbeat music]

Marina Mogilko 0:06 Conor Grennan is the Chief AI Architect and founder of AI Mindset, a training organization helping people to adopt AI into their daily life.

Conor Grennan 0:15 Reinventing a process gets noticed way more than you just doing more work.

Marina Mogilko 0:18 New tools drop daily. You're using it a few times in a week and wondering, "Am I already behind? How do you even keep up? And if I don't figure this out, my job is gonna disappear?"

Conor Grennan 0:28 So first of all, don't stress, right? Everybody's going crazy with, "Oh, I just made this into this." Don't worry about that. To me, like a power user is using it across everything from home to work and back again, and also are having long conversations because this is not Google, this is a companion.

Marina Mogilko 0:44 In this conversation, Conor reveals why we naturally misunderstand AI, how to transform AI from a search tool into your most powerful companion, how to navigate the changing job market, and what skills actually matter when nobody knows where the technology is headed. Conor, thank you so much for doing this. I'm so excited to be talking to you. You're teaching thousands of future business leaders AI. You're talking to huge companies, teaching their leadership. Can you introduce yourself in sixty seconds and tell me why people should be listening to you when it comes to AI?

Conor Grennan 1:19 Thank you so much for having me. It's really an honor to be on your, uh, show here. Yeah, so I'm Conor Grennan. I am Chief AI Architect over at NYU Stern School of Business here in, uh, New York City, and a lot of what I do is I run AI Mindset, which is a training consulting organization. We train big organizations and kind of like everybody, but on a completely new way of thinking about AI. It's a behavioral framework rather than just, "Hey, here's a few features a- and a tool that everybody should use," and the idea is when you're actually sitting with people in the room, a lot of them are just using it, you know, a couple of times a week or a few times a month-

Marina Mogilko 1:54 Yeah

Conor Grennan 1:54 - or just for a couple of different things.

Marina Mogilko 1:55 And for queries.

Conor Grennan 1:56 And for queries!

Marina Mogilko 1:57 Just, just asking questions, really basic.

Conor Grennan 1:58 So, so that's, that's exactly,

Conor Grennan 2:00 exactly... We can end the podcast right now. That was it, right?

Marina Mogilko 2:02 [laughing]

Conor Grennan 2:02 Like, the idea is that when they are using it, um... Well, two things are sort of going wrong with the statistics, I think. First of all, imagine if you were in a big room, and you said, "Hey, who here is using Excel?" Every hand goes up, right? But if you say, "Who's using, uh, it and knows at least forty formulas and has done one half-million-dollar deal?" Like, three investment banker hands go up. So everybody's, quote, unquote, "using it," but who's actually really using it to change how they work and how they do everything? To me, like a power user is using it across everything from home to work and back again, and also using it, like, thirty times a day, and also are having long conversations because, as you said, this is not Google. It's not Google Search.

Marina Mogilko 2:40 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 2:40 This is a companion.

Marina Mogilko 2:41 Yeah. Uh, when it comes to people who are listening to this, and they're like: "Okay, I'm using it maybe couple [chuckles] times a week-

Conor Grennan 2:48 Right

Marina Mogilko 2:48 - and I feel like I'm falling behind because everyone around me is sharing, like, 'Oh, I just started using this new app, and it transformed everything that I do.'" What should these people be doing now?

Conor Grennan 2:58 Yeah, uh, so first of all, don't stress, right? Everybody's going crazy with, "Oh, I just made this into this." Don't worry about that. The most important thing people can do is just take whatever tool they're comfortable with, and by that, I mean ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or Copilot, whatever it is, it doesn't matter, and just start applying what they are doing using this tool. [chuckles] So people keep thinking... I think this is the problem, why people were saving, like, the ten thousand prompt libraries, and it didn't make any sense except FOMO, basically.

Marina Mogilko 3:26 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 3:26 But what I would say is just take this and realize, "I have to do a certain amount of things during the day. Here are the things that I do either at home or at work." It almost doesn't matter. "And

Conor Grennan 3:35 what am I doing? I'm usually just trying to figure that out by myself or maybe going to Google every once in a while." And imagine you have sort of this magical, [chuckles] brilliant, uh, fairy godmother next to you all the time that is just always at your fingertips. So don't worry about, "What's the latest tool, or GPT 5.2, what does it do?" You don't need ten PhDs in your pocket. You just need some help every day.

Marina Mogilko 3:54 Mm-hmm, and what is, like, the use case that you think is the most transformative? So for me, for example-

Conor Grennan 3:59 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 4:00 ... asking Gemini to read my email and put things into my calendar-

Conor Grennan 4:05 Right

Marina Mogilko 4:05 ... that's already a game changer. I'm like, "Really?"

Conor Grennan 4:07 It's amazing.

Marina Mogilko 4:07 "Finally."

Conor Grennan 4:08 It's amazing.

Marina Mogilko 4:08 All the school emails, like, everything, they just go into Calendar, and I automatically add my husband to everything.

Conor Grennan 4:13 Amazing.

Marina Mogilko 4:14 The best. Has there been a use case for you, where you're like, "Oh, my god, just try this, and your life is gonna change. You will understand the power of AI?"

Conor Grennan 4:22 I think for me, it's really just sort of like brainstorming and having conversations, so I do a lot of writing. And so a lot of what I do is-- I actually do a lot of teaching and writing, right? So in both those things, uh, AI has been really powerful, 'cause I'm a writer by background, so I, I think I'm a, a good writer, but the idea is it can always be better. So I just take what I've already written and just throw it into, like, for me, it's like Claude maybe or Copilot or Gemini or ChatGPT and say, "Just make this more readable." So I'm not asking AI to do a first draft of something-

Marina Mogilko 4:49 Mm-hmm

Conor Grennan 4:49 ... right? Because then it's hard to get the AI out of it. It's write your first draft first. Always, always, always, and then just put it in and say, "Hey, how can I make this better? This is my audience. Like, what am I doing wrong?"

Conor Grennan 4:59 And for me, it's: Make this more readable. What are the stats that are in here? That's number one, and the second use case for me, again, me as a sort of a creator and entrepreneur, is I'm just trying to figure out, like, what am I missing? Here's what I'm doing right now, but I use, you know, and, you know, the thinking models essentially of these things. So you can kind of say, like, "Hey, think a little longer," or something like that, and we'll just give you a... It's, it's almost like having a co-CEO or a co-founder or a co-idea generator with you to say, "You know what, Conor? I know you've been doing it this whole, this way this whole time, but have you thought that maybe that's flawed?" And if you ask it to poke holes in your argument, it's unbelievably impactful.

Marina Mogilko 5:36 Yeah, and, and this is the mindset change, right?

Conor Grennan 5:38 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 5:38 Because you're going from, "Oh, I'm just asking questions," to, "I treat this as my career coach. I treat this as my co-writer." W- what is this mindset shift? What do you teach your students?

Conor Grennan 5:50 Yeah, the mindset shift is everything, right? And mindset's a little bit of a, I don't know, like, I don't love the word, [chuckles] even though my company is called AI Mindset, but it's because it feels like it's kind of like nothing. But what we mean is that this is a behavioral shift, and, and what I mean by that is when we're going and talking to big companies, I mean everybody from, you know, Walmart on down, right? It-- The idea is every company tends to treat this as a digital transformation, and what a digital transformation is, you know very well, right? It's-... You're taking a new product and replacing the old product, but that product kind of does the same thing, right? You had, uh, you know, pencil and paper, now you're using Excel, or you had, you know, fax machines, now you're using email.

Conor Grennan 6:27 The thing about that is that you're just moving from one tool to another tool that does essentially the same thing. So that's what a digital transformation is. But imagine now we have something that does something wildly differently. It's, it's helps you think in a new way. Like, I ask people all the time, "Hey, what does, you know, ChatGPT replace?" 'Cause you can always say what something replaces-

Marina Mogilko 6:46 Mm.

Conor Grennan 6:46 -right? Like, you know, uh, you know, again, email replaced the fax machine, and the hammer replaced the rock. [chuckles] And you can always say what something replaces. But with ChatGPT, there's no answer, right? It's a new way of thinking. It doesn't-- Some people say Google Search, but it doesn't really replace just search.

Marina Mogilko 7:00 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 7:00 It replaces a, a million different things. So if that's the mindset where you're like, "This isn't something that's replacing something, this is as if I have a new person next to me-

Marina Mogilko 7:10 Right next to me.

Conor Grennan 7:11 -able to help me with anything," Like, if you spill coffee on your shirt, it's gonna help you. Like, if you need to brainstorm, it's gonna help you. If you need to process information, it's gonna help you. If you need to figure out a 12-year-old's birthday party, it's gonna help you. It's, it's so broad, that narrowing it down to use cases can get, uh, overly limiting, so it's that new way of thinking.

Marina Mogilko 7:28 Yeah. Uh, I heard you say when you just write down things that you're doing, you can take a picture and send it to ChatGPT-

Conor Grennan 7:34 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 7:34 ... and, like, ask what are the tools that can speed it up. And something that I've realized is really working for me right now, there is, like, even for early adopters, like, memory is such a core thing.

Conor Grennan 7:44 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 7:44 Right?

Conor Grennan 7:45 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 7:45 And every app, it remembers all your interactions with it, it remembers your goals-

Conor Grennan 7:49 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 7:49 ... your passions, things you're trying to avoid. And so I started doing more strategic things with the ChatGPT and Gemini, I like them both, and Perplexity. I- like, I'm [chuckles] I'm trying to use all of them-

Conor Grennan 7:58 Love it

Marina Mogilko 7:59 ... for different purposes. But what I realized, if I start talking about my strategic goals and where I'm headed, then every answer is targeted to that goal. And like, when I'm asking even, like, about the hotel in New York-

Conor Grennan 8:12 Yeah, yeah

Marina Mogilko 8:13 ... like, and ChatGPT would be like, "Marina, you're trying to slow down. You're trying to do this, this, and that. You should choose this hotel 'cause it's only 10 minutes away from the studio."

Conor Grennan 8:22 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 8:22 Like, starting-- Do you feel like for everyone who's just brand new to this and has used ChatGPT a couple times, would you say integrating AI, uh, the best way to start integrating AI would be talking to it about your strategic goals first and, like, describing who you are?

Conor Grennan 8:36 Abso- absolutely, and I love that example that you just gave on the hotel, so let's break that one down for a second, right? So Google, or let's call it Google Search, I don't mean Gemini here. You just say, like, "Hey, what's a good hotel that's generally near the studio?" Right? And so Google will sort of, like, look, and it'll give you a deterministic response. It's like, "Okay, these are all within three blocks." But imagine if you had a friend that really knew the area, right? And you're like, "Conor, my best friend in the world, where should I stay? I know you know New York." I'd be like, "Yeah, Marina, like, knowing you, what I would say is that this hotel's great, but you walk out, it's a little seedy. And this other one's right next to a Whole Foods, and I know you like to run every day or something like that, and this is actually right near a park. And also, you wanna get to the studio a little early,

Conor Grennan 9:14 but guess what? There's a subway that takes you there in five minutes. You don't have to be next door. You're gonna wanna be here. It just, it'll inspire..." Do you know what I mean? Like, it's-

Marina Mogilko 9:20 Yeah

Conor Grennan 9:20 ... it's a wildly different result because of that.

Marina Mogilko 9:23 It is.

Conor Grennan 9:23 And that's the thing, people are using it just as a search, like a command, response, walk away. And one thing on that, our brains have trouble because it looks like a search engine, and so your brain treats it like a search engine. In the same way, if we saw a baby sitting right here in our podcast studio, which would be phenomenal, by the way, you'd automatically talk to it like a baby. You wouldn't think, "How do I talk to this thing?" Right? You just do it instinctively.

Marina Mogilko 9:41 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 9:41 But that's the thing, when your brain sees something like a ChatGPT, it's actually literally is our research, it literally looks like a search engine, so your brain literally goes into that mode-

Marina Mogilko 9:50 Mm

Conor Grennan 9:50 ... command, response, walk away. "Which hotel should I use? Which..." Instead of, "Hey, this is your friend that you're texting," and then instead of command, response, walk away, you'd never do that if you had Jeff Bezos in the room, and you were asking him a question. You'd have a conversation, and so that's what you have to overcome. That's why we call it a mindset.

Marina Mogilko 10:05 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 10:05 It's literally things in your brain you have to overcome.

Marina Mogilko 10:07 Exactly. Yeah, it's a friend or now, for me, it's more like a coach.

Conor Grennan 10:11 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 10:11 Like a professional coach that has access to all the information, something that Jeff Bezos was advised by his career coach.

Conor Grennan 10:18 Right. Yep.

Marina Mogilko 10:18 And I just ask them these questions.

Conor Grennan 10:19 It's phenomenal-

Marina Mogilko 10:20 Yeah

Conor Grennan 10:20 ... but that's the thing because, again, that turns it into a conversation. But why is it hard? So I think that, you know, in terms of getting hyper, hyper practical here, 'cause we can say all we want, like, "Oh, just talk to it like a person," but that's like saying, "Just eat less and exercise." There's a reason why we can't just eat... Maybe you can. I, I, I have a hard time with eat- eating less and exercise. But why do we have a problem with, like, getting on a treadmill? We have a problem getting on a treadmill 'cause our brain prioritizes quick rewards and conserving energy-

Marina Mogilko 10:44 Yeah

Conor Grennan 10:44 ... and a treadmill doesn't do those things. So it actually has nothing to do with the treadmill or how many features a treadmill has. It has everything to do with why our brain stops us. Same thing here. This is our research that we uncovered over two years here, is that it's not that people don't wanna treat

Conor Grennan 10:57 it like a human or don't see the value in it, it's that your brain is actually literally doing something where it's treating it like a search engine because of how neural pathways-

Marina Mogilko 11:04 Mm

Conor Grennan 11:04 ... and automation work in your brain, and that's why we have to come up with new paradigms and frameworks to get people through that.

Marina Mogilko 11:09 What if Conor's one piece of advice to shift your mindset, redesign habits, started with the right tool? Our biggest problem was simple: too many creative people with too many brilliant ideas. We are a production team that runs on brainstorms, case studies, interview concepts, story angles, potential guests. Ideas come at us from every direction, and honestly, it used to be absolute chaos. Different notes on different people's computers, messy boards that looked more like abstract art than action plans, and then came the worst part, spending hours manually turning all that creative energy into an actual work plan. Here's the thing, we kept losing context between steps, and great ideas would just vanish, and then we tried Miro Flows. Here's what happened. We did our usual chaotic brainstorm, threw everything on the canvas, all our raw ideas, and then Flows turned that mess into a structured, strategic document in literally one minute. But here's when it gets better: that document became a living product roadmap. As the new interviews got scheduled, Flows automatically updated the timeline. When a case study got approved, it flows straight into our production calendar. Guest confirmations instantly synced with our content pipeline. We weren't just organizing ideas, we built a system that keeps organizing itself. The entire workflow, from brainstorm to published content, now runs through connected workflows. No blank prompts, no switching tools, Flows just take what's already on our board and all that context we've built and transform it into the next steps of our project. Each one flows into the other because the entire canvas is the prompt. What used to take hours of manual work now happens automatically, and because we can save these flows as templates, we're not starting from zero anymore. Same brilliant chaos, but now it actually goes somewhere. If your team has more ideas than structure, try Flows in Miro. Your future self will thank you. And let's return to our discussion about integrating new tools into your daily routine.

Conor Grennan 13:14 So the tools change so rapidly, right? [chuckles] Like you were just saying-

Marina Mogilko 13:17 I know.

Conor Grennan 13:18 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 13:18 How do you keep up with that? [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 13:19 I... Okay, I'm so glad you said that because you know what? I would say to people out there, you don't have to keep up with it, right? Like, you kinda do 'cause [chuckles] you have this.

Marina Mogilko 13:27 Yeah. [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 13:27 I kinda do-

Marina Mogilko 13:28 Yeah

Conor Grennan 13:28 ... 'cause of my world, but, I mean, 99.9%

Conor Grennan 13:31 of the population doesn't. Why? Because the things that just came out, like, literally, like, last night, right, like, or, you know, or, or the day before, whatever it is, it's, you know, Gemini, it's Claude 4.5, it's ChatGPT, you know, 5.2.... the difference of what that gives you is not significant to 99.9% of the population, right? Because, again, we don't need 14 PhDs in our pockets. You don't need anything like that. And so when I think about even something like Excel, even something like that, what I tell people is, "Don't worry about the tool. The tool's gonna be fine." In the same way, you know, you don't have to buy the best treadmill out there. You just have to put on running shoes and go outside. Now, that's hard [chuckles] because of how our brain functions and what our brain prioritizes just through our limbic system. But when I think about, okay, practically speaking, let's say you have to do this task and you're thinking, "Well, what's gonna do that? Like, I have to build a spreadsheet. What- or I have to build a slide deck. What's gonna b- do best on that?" What I would say to people as a s- especially as a starting point, but even if you're, feel like you're pretty confident, don't worry about the tool that's gonna do it the best. Think about your process, right? So just to give you a quick example, if I could, so I was working with a CEO of a big bank here in New York City, and he was asking me, like, "Well, can it help me determine whether we should open, you know, an office in Denver?" I was like: "Well, not really, 'cause it's not a good answer machine. It's a good process machine." He's like, "Oh, that's kinda what I need." I'm like: "Okay, but hold on. Like, let's talk about how would you do that?" So he's like: "Well, here's the process I would take without AI." And every step of that process, there were probably 12, I was like: "Okay, here's how AI helps you here. Here's how AI helps you here."

Marina Mogilko 14:51 Mm-hmm.

Conor Grennan 14:51 So it's really about breaking down, rather than getting an answer, think about your process and just have the AI w- walk you through and help you through each step of that process.

Marina Mogilko 14:59 You just basically upload the process into ChatGPT, and-

Conor Grennan 15:02 That's-

Marina Mogilko 15:02 Yeah

Conor Grennan 15:02 ... exactly. And, and the same thing, like, with slide decks. P- how long have people been whining about-

Marina Mogilko 15:07 [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 15:07 ... it doesn't create, like, amazing slide decks? It's like, yeah, man, that's your job. That's why you get paid. Like, don't offload that. Instead, say, "Hey, this is the message I'm trying to create, uh, ChatGPT, help me. What should I put generally on every slide?" It's like this. "Okay, what do you think would be impactful as a visual?" This kind of thing, and then go and build the slide.

Marina Mogilko 15:22 And you just go to-

Conor Grennan 15:22 It's not like everything-

Marina Mogilko 15:24 Go to Gamma.

Conor Grennan 15:24 Yes. [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 15:24 Upload. [chuckles] The Gamma does beautiful presentations.

Conor Grennan 15:27 Gamma, and NanoBanana now.

Marina Mogilko 15:28 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 15:28 Like, there's a ton... Beautify. There's a ton of slide deck things, but ultimately, it's your process that this is gonna help.

Marina Mogilko 15:35 What are your top three tools that you use?

Conor Grennan 15:37 Okay, so in, i- in switching order, [chuckles] because these things always switch, I would say, uh, I just love Claude 4.5 Opus. I think it's a really powerful writer.

Marina Mogilko 15:47 For writing, yeah.

Conor Grennan 15:47 Um, I love Gemini 3 as just a deep, deep thinking tool. I think it's phenomenal. It also integrates with all my Google stuff best. ChatGPT, uh, i- is my everyday. It's like it kind of had replaced Google for me. Like, if I just have a question like: "Wait, what is this again? How long does an oak tree live?" I don't know why I'm asking that, but, like, it's- ChatGPT is my great sort of, like, uh, go-to, and then Copilot. Like, when I'm working with a lot of companies on Copilot, we do tons of Copilot integrations. Copilot's getting smarter and smarter and smarter, so those are kind of like... Sorry, I gave you four, but those are the four that I'm kind of switching between every day.

Marina Mogilko 16:20 But basically, you're using the, the, the m- the LLMs, right, of the world, not, like, specific smaller apps.

Conor Grennan 16:26 I really like that, and, and here's the reason why, and it's even the reason why I answer that way when people ask, 'cause there's maybe a couple of tools that I use. But the problem is, i- in the history of technology, we're always looking for sort of like the better thing.

Marina Mogilko 16:38 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 16:39 Right? It's like, well, so... 'Cause I get asked all the time, like: "Well, what's better, you know, Claude, ChatGPT?" I'm like: "It's not

Conor Grennan 16:44 relevant," but it's sort of like saying: "Well, is this, you know, $900 bottle of wine better than this $800?" It's like, do I- I don't know. [chuckles] Like, I have no idea-

Marina Mogilko 16:52 Yeah

Conor Grennan 16:52 ... because your taste buds only go up to, like, $80. Well, maybe not yours-

Marina Mogilko 16:55 [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 16:55 ... but mine, right? So point is, it doesn't matter which one is better. It matters which one feels more comfortable, natural with what you're doing and where are you going. And so when we over-index on, like, the specific tool, like some of these, you know, s- slide deck tools, even though they're great, I would say, get used to having this companion, 'cause that companion's gonna get you n- uh, sorry, one other thing, I do it a lot with law firms. With law firms, they're like: "Well, what's the best legal tech?" I'm like: "I think they're all pretty good, but what if you just had a companion through ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Claude, that was just helping you, and you could just talk to it?" Then it's not about what treadmill is better, it's, are you putting on running shoes and getting out there?

Marina Mogilko 17:33 Yeah, I love that. And also, like, with LLMs getting better and better, it's just you keep coming back to them.

Conor Grennan 17:40 Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Marina Mogilko 17:40 Uh, it's... Yeah, y- is there- do you have a tip for, for example, like ChatGPT knows a lot about my queries-

Conor Grennan 17:46 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 17:46 ... 'cause I also use it as Google, and I, I feel like the, the reason is because the output is so well-structured compared, even compared to Gemini. I just love when it gives me bullet points-

Conor Grennan 17:58 Mm

Marina Mogilko 17:58 ... and bold text, and emojis. It's just the visual part. I think they nailed it. How do you transfer from, so you say Claude is amazing-

Conor Grennan 18:07 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 18:07 ... now I wanna try it for writing.

Conor Grennan 18:09 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 18:09 How do you transfer

Marina Mogilko 18:10 all the knowledge from ChatGPT to Claude?

Conor Grennan 18:12 I think these tools are so good now that, um, you can actually transfer pretty easily. So now I have kind of like co-CEOs for AI Mindset in Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. [chuckles] And the way I did that-

Marina Mogilko 18:23 Uh-huh

Conor Grennan 18:23 ... was ChatGPT, uh, essentially, like, knew everything about me, right?

Marina Mogilko 18:27 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 18:27 'Cause you talked about the memory-

Marina Mogilko 18:28 Yeah

Conor Grennan 18:28 ... it's so powerful. So what I asked ChatGPT was, "Listen, create, like, a 10-page document on, like, everything you know about me, but you're, like, really distilling it down to the essentials." Like, what do I like? How do I think? Like, what do I like? What do I like in outputs? All that kind of stuff. And then I just take that, [chuckles] and I toss it into Gemini, and Gemini gets it right away.

Marina Mogilko 18:44 Interesting.

Conor Grennan 18:44 Claude gets it right away.

Marina Mogilko 18:46 Mm-hmm.

Conor Grennan 18:46 So you can almost transfer your memory-

Marina Mogilko 18:48 Easily

Conor Grennan 18:48 ... over to each single one, and that is the really powerful thing to me.

Marina Mogilko 18:51 I love that. Have you- do you have any queries that people would wanna use, especially towards the end of the year, you know?

Conor Grennan 18:59 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 18:59 I was just interviewing the founder of Opus Clip-

Conor Grennan 19:01 Oh, wow

Marina Mogilko 19:01 ... and he told me this, uh, query that he uses. He asks ChatGPT, or whatever, I think he was using Gemini, um, "If you could give me advice six months ago-

Conor Grennan 19:10 Mm

Marina Mogilko 19:10 ... based on my queries in the past six months, what that advice would be?" And I asked my ChatGPT, and my ChatGPT was like: "Marina, you're trying to control everything in your life."

Conor Grennan 19:20 [laughing]

Marina Mogilko 19:20 "Like, you're trying to control your kids, your dog, your business. You need to chill." And I was like, "Yeah."

Conor Grennan 19:27 So res- did it resonate?

Marina Mogilko 19:28 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 19:28 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 19:28 And, like, let's, let's build a strategy for 2026 based on this.

Conor Grennan 19:33 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 19:33 Do you have anything like this that's super powerful because your LLM has, has the memory about you?

Conor Grennan 19:38 When you tell your large language model... I say it almost in every prompt just to make sure. I'm like, "Push back, push back, push back," 'cause it pushes back, and-

Marina Mogilko 19:45 Mm-hmm

Conor Grennan 19:45 ... okay, I'm, I'm anthroporphi- anthropomorphizing, but it push it back. Don't you find it kind of pushes back lovingly [chuckles] and empathetically? It's probably- 'cause it's not saying, like, "Marina, you idiot!" It's probably saying, like, "Marina, you're doing a lot of stuff," right?

Marina Mogilko 19:56 Oh, oh, it's, it's always... It's the nicest per- [chuckles] person-

Conor Grennan 19:59 So nice.

Marina Mogilko 19:59 "Marina, you're so amazing."

Conor Grennan 20:01 Isn't it the best?

Marina Mogilko 20:01 "You're so mu-"

Conor Grennan 20:02 I love-

Marina Mogilko 20:02 I love it.

Conor Grennan 20:02 Everybody's, like, the sycophancy doing. I'm like, "That's g- I love that part!"

Marina Mogilko 20:05 You're now used to it.

Conor Grennan 20:06 You are. [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 20:06 You're like, you expect everyone to treat you that way. Oh, my God. [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 20:10 They should. They- we can learn a lot from AI, I think.

Marina Mogilko 20:12 [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 20:12 But it's that empathetic behaving thing. Obviously, it's not, uh, uh, uh, intrinsically empathetic, but it is empathetic behaving. And so for me, the things that I put in there are a couple of things. First of all, uh-... Feel free to push back, 'cause I'm not gonna get defensive, and I know it's not sort of like a dead thing, but it's gonna really help me. So that, other things I use all the time is just, like, "Just make this more readable. How am I think-" And then the biggest thing, I did this in, uh, so I just did Masterclass, if you know the brand Masterclass. So the thing I was doing in Masterclass a lot, this idea of never stop, right? Because why do we stop working, right? We stop working because, like, "Oh, I cannot bear to do another draft," or, "I can't bear to think through this one more time." But you don't have to. You can just say, "How would I make this better? What am I missing? What am I missing?" Like, five times in a row, it's not gonna get worse, or as soon as it does, you're like, "Okay, well, come back to this, come back to this." So I would say the biggest things are, first of all, always create your first draft and have it edited, make it more readable. But the biggest thing, I love, I love Opus Klose, by the way, I love that you interviewed him, is kind of toward the end of the year. Remember that your brain instinctively will say, "Conor, don't do any more work. You're exhausted." That's instinctive. You have to retrain it to say, "Just do this again. What's better? What am I missing? What am I missing?" That's the real power.

Marina Mogilko 21:20 I love that. When it comes to misinformation, right-

Conor Grennan 21:23 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 21:23 'Cause we go to AI for so many questions, and I notice sometimes that if I'm just-- especially when I'm in a single thread, like doing all my queries, and then I ask, like, a therapy question, and the answer is, like, "Oh, no!-"

Conor Grennan 21:37 [laughing]

Marina Mogilko 21:37 " ... I would never do that," how do you deal with that? Because I think, uh, Mustafa mentioned that sixty percent of Copilot AI queries are medical.

Conor Grennan 21:47 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 21:47 And they, like, they-

Conor Grennan 21:48 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 21:48 ... connected Harvard database to make sure the answers are correct. But do you ever go to ChatGPT for, I don't know, financial advice?

Conor Grennan 21:56 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 21:56 How should I restructure my portfolio?

Conor Grennan 21:58 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 21:58 Would you trust AI with that?

Conor Grennan 22:00 I think one of the mistakes people make, especially around hallucinations and especially around, well, you know, AI, I'm not gonna trust it because it gets it wrong. Like, humans hallucinate, too, right? Humans get things wrong, too. So what we always say, or I always say sort of on our team when we're working with these organizations, is: It's not a calculator. Like, if your calculator gave you a wrong answer, you'd throw it-- It'd be like smoking and burning up, right?

Marina Mogilko 22:19 [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 22:19 You'd throw it away. But if a person came on, and they were brilliant, they didn't know much about your company, but they were absolutely brilliant, you could-- trust is maybe the wrong word, but they were clearly doing amazing work product. You still wouldn't just say, like: "Hey, do this task for me, and then, you know, go off and do it." Like, no, you'd refine it with them. You'd go back and forth with them, et cetera. You'd sort of, like, teach them a little bit. You'd say, like: "I like that, but I don't like that." So what is the difference here? The difference is it's really acting like a human. That's number one. So if a human gives you medical advice, if your friend is like, "Oh, that, you know, burn on your arm looks like this," all right, is that person a, a dermatologist or are they not a dermatologist? And so if they're not, and it's important, I'm gonna fact-check it. The, the example sometimes I use is that a lot of things at work, you don't have to have exact precision. A lot of it's just brainstorming. How should I think about this? But if you are gonna go and meet, like, uh, you know, the, the, the chief marketing officer at Morgan Stanley, and you want some conversation starters, and your friend's like, "Oh, I think I read somewhere that, you know, he, he's really into, like, balloon animals," or something like that. You'd be like: "Oh, I'll bring my own balloon!" Right? You better get that right. Otherwise, like, you are-

Marina Mogilko 23:17 I know

Conor Grennan 23:18 ... screwed.

Marina Mogilko 23:19 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 23:19 So if you need accuracy, double-check it.

Marina Mogilko 23:21 How do you double-check? You just copy the answer from ChatGPT to Claude and ask it to double-check?

Conor Grennan 23:26 I do, but I, I don't even put it into another AI. If I really need something that I need to be right, I go to Google search, I go to the source, like, or I ask somebody or something like that.

Marina Mogilko 23:35 Mm-hmm.

Conor Grennan 23:35 Like, if you need something to be absolutely precise, like you're fixing a thing on an airplane, like holding the propeller to the... [chuckles] I don't know why you or I would be doing that.

Marina Mogilko 23:42 [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 23:42 But, like, but if it's that, you know that I'm gonna go to the actual manual. I'm never gonna rely on ChatGPT for something critical.

Marina Mogilko 23:49 Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think with all of that, like, we're going to cheap chats for all our queries, do you think we're losing memorization critical skills?

Conor Grennan 23:59 Okay, um, here's the thing. You have kids, I think, right?

Marina Mogilko 24:02 Mm-hmm.

Conor Grennan 24:02 Like, I have kids, they're in high school. They're a little, uh, further than yours. Um, and we do a lot with education. My son, who's,

Conor Grennan 24:10 uh, sixteen about to be seventeen, he and I do a lot of, like, you know, teaching together. We've taught at some amazing places and done keynotes together around this 'cause I think people keep expecting him to say, "Hey, everybody needs to use..." He's a junior in high school. "Everybody needs to use AI." And in a way, he's right. In a way, I'm right, too, when I say that. In another way, I mean, it does. Don't you think, like, it kind of-- it can really destroy critical thinking?

Marina Mogilko 24:30 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 24:30 I absolutely believe that, and that's, that's hard, 'cause how do you be such a-- How are you such an optimist about something that can destroy critical thinking? I guess what I would say is, this technology is here, and a lot of technologies have, you know, done away with what we would think are critical thinking skills and things like that. This is a new one. So if people are only using it to just get answers, it's sort of like... Remember, like, CliffsNotes and SparkNotes, stuff like that? There's two ways to use that, right? There's either, "Hey, like, you know, I don't have time to read Hamlet. I'm just gonna use this." But then that really diminishes your critical thinking, which is gonna matter when you get out into the working world [chuckles] and everything else.

Marina Mogilko 25:02 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 25:02 School matters for a reason. Or you use it as, "Hey, what's a new way of looking at this? What am I not seeing? Like, what did-- I didn't understand that scene three, act four, like, in this," like... And it's an amazing tool then, right? Now your critical thinking is getting even deeper and deeper and deeper.

Marina Mogilko 25:15 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 25:15 It's a personalized learning assistant, so it can help. It's really up to the individual. So it gets to the whole question of how do we switch, how do we, like, change education?

Marina Mogilko 25:23 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 25:23 But I-- It's not just does it kill critical thinking or does it not, but I think you're right. It can, so how do we prevent that?

Marina Mogilko 25:29 So you have two kids.

Conor Grennan 25:30 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 25:31 What are you telling them about the future of the world powered by AI? What should they be learning, and what skills are becoming obsolete?

Conor Grennan 25:39 I mean, you and I live in this world, right? And we're, we're watching it every day, and it is very hard to tell what's going away and what's staying. You can kinda tell in the short term, but we could never have predicted where we are right now either. So it's easy to say to people, "Oh, we have-- we need, like, adaptability. We need curiosity." But it drives me a little nuts when people say that, because what does that mean? Like, we were talking before we came on air-

Marina Mogilko 26:03 Yeah

Conor Grennan 26:03 ... right, about, like, practical, right?

Marina Mogilko 26:04 Mm-hmm.

Conor Grennan 26:04 Practical is always more interesting. And I hate when people are just like, "Oh, you know, uh, just be more curious." I'm like, how do you tell somebody to be more curious? So what I tell, uh, you know, our kids and what I-- it's kind of the same thing I tell with-... at scale, tens of thousands of people in, in, in one single organization, which is, it doesn't matter if you're curious or not. Like, you can behave in a curious way, and so what does that look like? Well, let's give you some steps. First, understand sort of, again, like what we do, which is like, what is the brain malfunctioning here? Like, what are these three paradigms? What are these steps? All that kind of stuff, and take them through what it's

Conor Grennan 26:34 not and what it is. And then say, "Just lean into what you are passionate about." And I don't mean that as a pithy kind of like, "Oh, do what you love," 'cause I actually don't believe that [chuckles] as- I come from a business school, we don't tend to work in that way. But what I do think is that no matter what you do, AI can enhance it and come up with a new way of doing this. This is what's so interesting about this technology is that the history of technology has been the creators of the technology or the service have always defined, like, what the role-- like, if you invented the computer, you know that we need silicon chips and keyboards and delivery mechanisms. But that's not the case anymore. [chuckles] The leaders of, uh, certainly OpenAI, Anthropic, everywhere else, they don't know, right? The leaders of companies, they don't know. The only people that are gonna be able to figure it out is from the bottom up, right? People whose in a j- whose, uh... somebody who is in a job, really getting fluent on this, really shifting their behavior, not just telling some, you know, somebody telling them, "Use some new tools." Shifting their behavior and then looking at what they do every day, their bottlenecks, and working with AI to really innovate dramatically on what that person, individual does.

Marina Mogilko 27:36 Mm-hmm.

Conor Grennan 27:36 That's why it's so critical to upskill entire organizations.

Marina Mogilko 27:38 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 27:39 And I kind of say the same thing to the kids. It's like, all these organiz- all these jobs are still gonna be around. Maybe there's fewer of them, but if you can reinvent a way of doing things with AI, you're gold.

Marina Mogilko 27:47 'Cause nobody knows what's-

Conor Grennan 27:48 'Cause nobody knows!

Marina Mogilko 27:49 Yeah, it's, it's what I'm realizing. [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 27:51 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 27:51 Like, the more, the more I'm talking to people, nobody knows.

Conor Grennan 27:55 Nobody knows.

Marina Mogilko 27:55 Nobody understands, and it's up to you to come up with an idea and say, like: "Hey, I think this is the right way to do this."

Conor Grennan 27:59 Exactly.

Marina Mogilko 28:00 And, uh, if it's a good idea, people will listen.

Conor Grennan 28:02 Hundred percent.

Marina Mogilko 28:03 Have you seen how hiring is changing with AI? 'Cause a lot of people are struggling to find jobs, especially entry-level. Like, I think AI eliminated 30%. It's just like, it's a big number.

Conor Grennan 28:12 Yeah, I mean, the potential is there to, to eliminate that, right? It's-- and that's where all these new sort of statistics around what these models can do is fascinating. I know Dario Amodei over at Anthropic said exactly this. He's like: "Look, even if the technology doesn't change from today, it can still wipe out 25% of, uh, entry-level, white-collar workforce,"

Conor Grennan 28:29 call it. So when I'm looking across, like, the whole spectrum, I don't see it happening yet, necessarily. What I do see is the potential is there, and that's a pretty big difference, right? So, like, right now, where AI is right now, even if it didn't advance for the next ten years, which is obviously not gonna happen, if people were using it correctly, you can take these teams of, you know, ten people and probably reduce it down to two people. So it's not that you can get rid of everybody, but just that one person can do way more work. Now, here's the, the really [chuckles] hard part, right, is that the work that it can do is sort of like entry-level work. But then how do the ent- those entry-level people then learn how to do those skills so that they can kind of like-

Marina Mogilko 29:09 Yeah

Conor Grennan 29:09 ... go and become managers-

Marina Mogilko 29:09 Yeah

Conor Grennan 29:09 ... et cetera, et cetera? That is unbelievably hard. I'm not sure how to solve that problem, but what we do know is it's not, um, about getting rid of your people and replacing with AI. A, that can't happen for the very simple reason that AI doesn't know what quality looks like. AI can do a tremendous amount, and the answers are in there. But in, like, if you and I were sort of... You know, if, if you were a marketer and I wasn't, and we both used ChatGPT to, in twenty minutes to come up with a new shoe brand, mine would look, uh, great, right? 'Cause I went from nothing to this shoe- But you, as a marketer, I know that's, that's not your background maybe, but, but this idea is, because you know what quality looks like, you'll produce something extraordinary.

Marina Mogilko 29:43 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 29:43 'Cause you know how to steer it.

Marina Mogilko 29:44 Mm-hmm.

Conor Grennan 29:44 You know what's right and wrong, et cetera. So we still need people with domain expertise everywhere. We probably realistically just need fewer, but I'll also say that companies have been very slow to change their hiring processes.

Marina Mogilko 29:55 Uh, any advice for people who are struggling to get hired?

Conor Grennan 29:57 Yeah, I do, actually, and, and being at, uh, at, at NYU Stern, at the business school, this has been my passion for the last twelve years, which is: How do people get hired? It's actually the, one, the big reasons I went to Stern [chuckles] in the first place is that, like, doesn't that just break your heart when people are struggling to find work?

Marina Mogilko 30:11 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 30:11 Right? And with AI, I think that we're in a, a zone right now where the opportunity is absolutely colossal for this reason. It requires- understanding AI and really using AI well, uh, is, is an incredible tool because you don't have to learn anything. You don't need to be a coder. You don't need to be anything. Literally, all you need to be able to do is talk like a human, and everybody can do that. That's number one. But number two, and this is the really important thing, it's not enough to just go into a job interview and say, "I know how to use AI." 'Cause everybody can say that, and it's sort of like Excel thing. Everybody uses it, but people are using it to make a grocery list or something like that-

Marina Mogilko 30:43 Yeah

Conor Grennan 30:43 ... not to

Conor Grennan 30:44 transform, you know, how a, a hedge fund operates. [chuckles] So what does that actually look like? So this- so we actually have a, a course, right? This generative AI for professionals that helps give people this exact skill, not just reinventing how they work, 'cause that's not the Holy Grail to me. The Holy Grail is, can you invent the work of everybody around you? So if you go into a job interview, and this is what I tell everybody to do, go into a job interview prepared with what they do. What are the th-- like, they'll have given you a sense of what you should do. So go in there and say, like: "Hey, here's my domain expertise, but let me just show you what I would do with AI and how I would reinvent this process." Because, folks, and you know this, too, right? Anyone can do this with Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT. You don't have to come up with it. You just have to monitor and steer it.

Marina Mogilko 31:27 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 31:27 So say, "Here's how I would change this role to even potentially put me out of a job," [chuckles] right? I mean, senior leaders would love that, but here's the really Holy Grail. This is the kicker on all this. This is the kicker. Such a ChatGPT thing to say.

Marina Mogilko 31:39 [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 31:39 My gosh, I take it back. But here's the really important thing. Say, "And here's how the team can use this in a very different way. Here's the exact workflow. Here's what I would change. Here's how I would think about it," because we want to upskill a team. You don't want to just hire somebody to come in and do AI differently. You want somebody to come in and change the way it's done around that person.

Marina Mogilko 31:57 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 31:57 That, to me, is the Holy Grail.

Marina Mogilko 31:58 I love that, and it's the whole business opportunity. When I look at, like, all of the brick-and-mortar business, even like tech businesses, there is so much that could be done. Where-

Conor Grennan 32:08 So much, so much

Marina Mogilko 32:08 ... for someone who wants to start a business, where do you see the most opportunity?

Conor Grennan 32:12 I almost think starting a business is your best bet right now. [chuckles] Don't you, kind of, right?

Marina Mogilko 32:16 I've heard so many people say, "In two years, you're either an entrepreneur or, or you're dead." [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 32:21 Right? I mean, don't you think that, though? Because think about it in two ways. First of all, we have no idea where this thing is going to-... poke its head. In other words, we have no idea if it's just gonna wipe out marketing or something. We have no idea if it's gonna wipe out writing or coding. We don't know, and it's not because the tool can't do it, it's because we don't know how fast the world around us will adapt to that tool.

Marina Mogilko 32:39 Mm-hmm.

Conor Grennan 32:40 So given that nobody knows, not even Sam Altman or Dario Amodei or anybody else, or you or me, or you had Mustafa Suleyman on the other day, phenomenal interview you did with him. He doesn't know either, right? So if these people don't know, then how can anybody know? So here's what I would say: being an entrepreneur, even if you're an entrepreneur alongside with what you're doing, I kind of call it the parallel resume. Do both, right? If, if you care about this, Gary Vaynerchuk has a great thing on this, where he's like, "Work the extra hours." Like, I know nobody wants to hear it, but work the extra hours. But here's how you do it. You build something that you think can, um, transform how your team was already doing that work. In other words, once you sort of, like, create a process for people, that's what people want. They don't want-

Marina Mogilko 33:17 Mm

Conor Grennan 33:17 ... just like somebody who can do AI, because that, it's-- people don't always recognize it. It's sort of linear in the amount of growth you can provide for an organization. But if you're an entrepreneur, this is how I started. I'm not sure how you started, but certainly in this field, for me, I just created a framework like, "Well, what do I think is missing from how AI is taught?" And I just started going out, talking to a million people, testing it out, testing it out, testing it out. And then finally, it's like somebody's like, "You know, if you come and give a workshop at our asset management firm, like, you know, how much do you charge?" And I named, like, some crazy amount. They're like, "Okay, great." I'm like, "Really?" Like, so-

Marina Mogilko 33:48 Easy. [laughing]

Conor Grennan 33:49 Right, exactly. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be an AI. Like, if you can use AI to come up with a new kind of marketing or a new kind of operations or a new kind of legal or something like that, people are looking for those narrow use cases that can be expanded to others, that are rep- uh, repeatable. I think it's the best time ever to be an entrepreneur.

Marina Mogilko 34:07 It's, it's all about strategy, right?

Conor Grennan 34:09 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 34:09 And even, like, what, what I see, I have thirty-five people on my team-

Conor Grennan 34:13 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 34:13 ... and I see all of them as entrepreneurs.

Conor Grennan 34:15 Right.

Marina Mogilko 34:16 Some of them are multiple clients, right? It's not just they're working for me. And you can be an entrepreneur within your workplace-

Conor Grennan 34:22 Yes

Marina Mogilko 34:23 ... because you are reinventing the process, and then a lot of companies are now hiring abroad, and, like, there are people who are marketers, but they do marketing for multiple companies because they built a process that works for them.

Conor Grennan 34:34 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 34:35 It's just such a fascinating time.

Conor Grennan 34:37 This is the perfect way to say it. You could be an entrepreneur inside of your organization in a way that you never could before, and why is that? Because, and they've proven this out a million different ways with, uh, uh... Harvard Business School did this with Procter & Gamble. They're showing that one person can essentially create a synthetic team around them. So what's always holding back-

Marina Mogilko 34:55 Mm

Conor Grennan 34:55 ... entrepreneurs? "Well, I don't know how to code. I don't know how to market. I don't know how to do operations, legal," whatever it is, or, "I'm not a good leader." All of a sudden, you have these AIs. That can be a great proxy for that. Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect, but imagine where you were before. And so what that means is that inside of your company, you can reinvent a process. Now, here's what I recommend people do. Reinventing a process gets noticed way more than you just doing more work, right? Reinventing a process-

Marina Mogilko 35:19 One hundred percent.

Conor Grennan 35:20 Right, it's-

Marina Mogilko 35:20 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 35:21 And if you say, "Hey, we have re..." 'Cause now all of a sudden, they're

Conor Grennan 35:23 tracking ROI. But even more than that, reinvent the process and then show how you can share it with others. Show how you can make it repeatable. I was working with this big private-- I do a lot with private equity, and the head of this private equity firm was saying, "Hey, we have five guys on this team. We're gonna invite two more analysts to join that team." But I told these five people, "If you can do this work without those two, I'll give you the money," and which is a great way to sort of, like, drive innovation in a way. But what I'd also say, and what I said to him is, "That's not the Holy Grail." The Holy-- 'cause they'll just come up with a system that works for them. They have to come up with a system that's kind of agnostic to who would use it. They have to come up with a system-

Marina Mogilko 35:57 Mm

Conor Grennan 35:57 ... a process that's repeatable for everybody else. You are now in an organization, wherever you are, in a corporation, sitting out there somewhere, working on a process. You can-- That's gonna be your IP. Figure out how to do that process better with, with AI. Start repeating it across the organization. That will get noticed. And then what I would say, and you'd probably say too, right? Go off and start a little side gig.

Marina Mogilko 36:17 And talk about-

Conor Grennan 36:17 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 36:17 ... becoming a Chief AI Architect [laughing] for your company.

Conor Grennan 36:21 Isn't that a great title? I love that title.

Marina Mogilko 36:22 And also, like, as a founder, I want that to happen. I want my, one of my managers to come up and say, like: "Hey, I don't want to do this manually anymore. I came up with a process. AI is gonna do that for me. I'm the test maker. I'm just gonna curate whatever AI is creating." That, that's, that's where I want-

Conor Grennan 36:40 But do you... And I love that you s- I love that you said this 'cause you are at, like... You are a manager. You are a leader, and for that coming out of your mouth to say, "That's what I want," I'm trying to tell people that all the time. Like, senior leaders want that from their people.

Marina Mogilko 36:51 Absolutely.

Conor Grennan 36:52 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 36:52 We don't want- We, senior leaders. [laughing]

Conor Grennan 36:54 Yeah, no, no, you're right, though. You're right.

Marina Mogilko 36:55 No, I mean, I don't want people to just spend hours of their days coming up with what AI can do. I want them to, to become managers.

Conor Grennan 37:02 Hundred percent.

Marina Mogilko 37:02 Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, what do you think is gonna happen? [chuckles] As someone from NYU-

Conor Grennan 37:07 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 37:07 ... what's gonna happen to universities? Do you think in ten years, do, do I need to be saving for my kids' college, or that's, that's obsolete by then? [laughing]

Conor Grennan 37:15 [laughing] You do. It drives me crazy when people are saying, like, "Oh, there won't be universities." I'm sure that we have said that throughout history. I mean, Harvard is older than the United States itself. NYU has been around for a long time. Universities are not going away because they don't just do one thing, right? Like, if, if universities

Conor Grennan 37:29 were simply, you go and you pressed a button, and you matrixed something into the back of your skull, and all of a sudden, you had that knowledge, okay, that's, that's one thing. But that's not what teaching is. I mean, like, right now, AI can absolutely, first grade through twelfth grade, it knows all that information better than any teacher we have, right? But, so why do we still have schools? We have schools because school is more than that. Universities are more than that. Universities are where you meet people, where you exchange ideas, where you actually sort of, like, bounce things off people who have really lived that experience, where you become, uh, you know, an adult and all this kind of stuff. It's not a transactional things. Now, now, if we're just talking about, like, online school, yeah, I kind of think AI can very easily replace a lot of online school, absolutely.

Marina Mogilko 38:09 Mm.

Conor Grennan 38:09 And I don't mean, like, you know, Zooming into a class. I mean just, like, something where it's like we get this-

Marina Mogilko 38:13 Like courses, yeah.

Conor Grennan 38:13 Yeah, exactly.

Marina Mogilko 38:14 We've already seen that.

Conor Grennan 38:15 Courses.

Marina Mogilko 38:15 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 38:15 Because why? Because all of a sudden, you're going from just, like, a course... And think about how teachers have to teach just by nature of how the human brain is structured. You have to go to the lowest common denominator when you're teaching twenty-five people. You can't take every single kid and understand exactly what-

Marina Mogilko 38:28 Yeah

Conor Grennan 38:28 ... each one of them needs. But AI kind of can, to your point about memory earlier, right? So yeah, universities are here to stay. I think that there's going to be definitely, [chuckles] um, a scythe that takes out kind of like the middle structure of universities.

Marina Mogilko 38:41 Mm.

Conor Grennan 38:41 We probably don't need so many. But yeah, there's, I mean, hundreds of thousand universities that will still remain because of everything they offer to the human experience.

Marina Mogilko 38:48 Yeah, I love that.

38:50 ... My last question is, what type of change influenced by AI do you want to witness in your life so you can say, "Yes, we did it!"? [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 38:57 Ooh, that's a good one.

Marina Mogilko 38:58 [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 38:58 So for me, um, so I, and, and my son, too, and, and my daugh- we go out to Nepal every year. We have a kind of a history of going out to Nepal-

Marina Mogilko 39:06 Mm-hmm

Conor Grennan 39:06 ... and teaching AI in schools and in nonprofits-

Marina Mogilko 39:08 Wow, that's amazing

Conor Grennan 39:08 ... and things like that. And I've, uh, I lived in Nepal for a while, and I, and I've seen in a country like that, which is one of the poorer countries in the world, what AI can do for those individuals gives me goosebumps, literally right now, right? Because if you think about it, they don't have tutors, right? You and I can afford tutors for our kids, probably, right? Like, they can't do that. They can't even... Like, I've seen the schools there, how the schools work. Now, all of a sudden, they have something on their phone that can be this incredible tutor. And education, it's not a silver bullet, but holy cow, does it really progress a nation. Same with medical. So I spend a lot of time in very remote areas where there's no roads or anything like that, and this idea in those areas is, if you cut yourself, or if you have something on your skin, or if you have symptoms or something, all of a sudden now, everyone with a mobile phone, and they do have mobile phones, has access to something resembling a doctor. Is it as perfect as a doctor? No, absolutely not, and you have to check it, and is there a risk? Yes, of course, all the disclaimers. But going, if your kid is sick, and your kid is coughing, like, you have kids, right? I have kids. Like, what's worse than when your kid is sick? You just want an answer. And so all of a sudden, you have these people who live in these very remote areas, have answers that they can help their kids. That, to me, is where I want to go. That's why, to me, it's more than just like, "Oh, let's sort of see how we can get corporate America to make more money." That's great-

Marina Mogilko 40:19 Mm-hmm

Conor Grennan 40:19 ... 'cause I profit from that.

Marina Mogilko 40:20 Mm.

Conor Grennan 40:20 We all profit from that. We're all having a good time with it. But, like, for me, it's like, it's humanity.

Marina Mogilko 40:24 Yeah.

Conor Grennan 40:24 And I really mean that. Like, there's an incredible things that we can do with humanity, and I'm dying to see that change.

Marina Mogilko 40:29 Oh, my God, I love it. Thank you so much, Conor.

Conor Grennan 40:31 Thanks, Marina.

Marina Mogilko 40:31 It was amazing. Very practical. We love that. [chuckles]

Conor Grennan 40:34 Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Marina Mogilko 40:35 Thank you.

Conor Grennan 40:35 That was a really fun conversation.

Marina Mogilko 40:36 Thanks a lot.