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GORDON EARLE: [00:00:00] Today on A Williams Life, I'll be talking with classmate Jon Myers, a self-taught inventor and entrepreneur who has spent many years founding and investing in technology companies designed, in his words, to make the world a better place. Jon is specifically focused on developing deep game-changing technologies in many areas of business, ranging from healthcare and energy to the defense industry.

We’ll talk to Jon about all of this while also diving into the world of artificial intelligence, to which Jon has devoted a great deal of time and energy in recent years. As part of our discussion, we'll explore the pluses and minuses of this incredible technology, which is impacting every aspect of our lives.

Prior to joining the ranks of tech entrepreneurs, Jon spent 15 years as a bond trader and salesman on Wall Street. His work reminded me of the outlandish stories that Michael Lewis told in his 1989 book Liar's Poker. So on that note, Jon, welcome. 

JON MYERS: Thanks for having me, Gordon. 

GORDON EARLE: I wanna start with the years just before high school. I know that you’d lived in Japan and Los Angeles and other places, but you moved to Southern Illinois during your high school years. and it seems an unlikely place for a tech entrepreneur to come from. So tell us about your life in Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi. 

JON MYERS: Yeah. I moved to Alton, Illinois, which is about 10 miles north of East St. Louis. in sixth grade. That's the time of life when kids become sort of self-aware and aware of their world. So I moved there from the West Coast, L.A., and I moved my senior year in high school to Boston. And both of those coasts were what you would consider to be current, but Alton itself was like going back in time.

About a decade actually. But it was such an unusual place. It was still full of extraordinary people, who became extraordinary friends, and we had experiences that could fill a book. 

GORDON EARLE: Right. What was so unique about that? It was, you say, very different from both coasts. Was it a rural community? Was it like American Graffiti or something going back in time? 

JON MYERS: It was totally like American Graffiti. When I first saw American Graffiti, I cried. It was very emotional because, and that was about the Fifties, right. So, moving from L.A., we’re in fifth grade there, there were girls talking about sex, and drugs, and this and that, was already around.

Right. And, Alton was so innocent, and sweet in a way. I was really lucky to have moved there and had that experience. But, the scenes of driving the cars, driving through the drive-in, right to where all the kids would hang out in their cars. That’s exactly what my high school life was like.

Some of the more entertaining things that happened in that high school were the fights in the middle of the parking lot, where different gangs or people would face down each other. You had to be careful which washrooms you went into. So there was one time where there was a dance, and the dances took place in a park, in an outdoor kind of venue.

There was another gang called the Water Tower Gang. For some reason they wanted to pick a fight with us, and they got in their cars and were chasing us through town over the hills. Flying over the hills, if you go fast enough, you get airborne.

We were airborne and landing, and this and that, and we ended up at a dead end. They pulled in behind; the driver got out and went back to his trunk, pulled out a gun and pointed it at the other car. I did not wait around to see what happened. I was up and over the fence through a farm field, and I worked my way back home.

I don't think any shots were fired. I think the gun upped the ante enough that those guys pulled out and went away. But those kinds of dramatic things happen every now and then. 

GORDON EARLE: Wow. Let's focus on high school for a second. Describe a little bit, socially. What kind of education did you receive there? 

You’re smiling.

JON MYERS: Pretty much none. The high school was very mixed and the educational system was not particularly good. English class, my junior year English class, I would bring a book and just sit in the back of the class and read it because the teacher spent all of her time, all class time, every single day teaching the kids in the front who were sincerely interested in learning how to read.

Maybe they read at a third grade level. I was all for that, but it left me with nothing to do except read books of my own choosing, not necessarily highbrow. 

GORDON EARLE: It’s tough. I know you moved your senior year to Wellesley. Was that the path to Williams, or how did you find out in this high school journey about Williams, and why did you decide to go to the college?

JON MYERS: I didn't know anything about Williams. Wellesley High School was a different experience and I welcomed it because there was real education going on there, and that was fun. 

In terms of colleges, I didn't really know anything about New England colleges, but I figured, I’m here in New England. There’s not a single place in the Midwest I’d be interested in going. So I figured, well, I’ll apply to small schools. For some reason, I wanted a small school, so I applied to all of them, and I got into them all. But I loved it. I thought Williams was so pretty. So that was the choice that I made.

I just chose Williams because it looked nice and felt good when I visited. 

GORDON EARLE: So you arrive at Williams, in the fall of 1971. What was your initial reaction? Did you feel as though you fit in? Did you have to adjust or what? 

JON MYERS: Your question is anticipating the answer. I didn't feel like I fit in at all.

It was shocking to me; the kids there were so sophisticated. I didn’t even know there were prep schools. I didn’t know anything about the New England culture, the Northeast culture. And I didn’t know what kind of education those kids got, but I learned real quickly they were really well prepared for Williams, and I learned at the same time, I was not well prepared at all for a college at that level. Okay. So it was terrifying. I think, the friends, the initial friends I made were those, if you’re terrified, if you identify in a certain way, you look for other people who don’t feel they belong.

A lot of my early friends were definitely people who didn’t feel they belonged. I worked outta that, but initially that’s just where I gravitated to, because I was looking for some sort of people that I could relate to. 

GORDON EARLE: So it was through that means that you began to find your way. At what point, if ever, did you feel comfortable, fully comfortable at Williams? 

JON MYERS: Middle of junior year? Basically, by then I’d reconnected with people who I could relate to because they were the athletes. Which in high school I was, before I moved to Wellesley, and they were fun-loving. Not necessarily the best students, but really genuine people.

I found an affinity and I felt really lucky to have found that group of people, like Tom Villanova, Tony Kroker, Gus Nielsen, Vinny McLaughlin.

GORDON EARLE: Who I know are friends to this day. 

JON MYERS: Yeah, And, I’m grateful to them, for that friendship. Peter Kiernan was also a friend.

Now Peter went to prep school, but he was just such a great guy and so funny that I felt very fortunate. Dodd House was also great 'cause there were a number of super people there, Tommy Detmer and Kiernan, yourself. Even though we lived parallel lives, not super close friends, but Dodd House was a great experience.

So, from junior year on, I felt like I had found my people. Before that, I was not happy with the friends that I had, and wasn't comfortable academically. So, junior year was where that started to change. 

GORDON EARLE: Looking back on the experience now, are there any classes or professors that stand out, and may have influenced the rest of your life?

JON MYERS: I spent a lot of time in the darkroom over in the art building, because I loved photography. I thought it was wonderful. It was a creative expression that I could do and I was good at. So I had one guy, Nick something or other, who was a graduate of Williams. Nicholas Foster was a brilliant artist, I thought.

And he was a mentor. He was not with the school, but he mentored me and that was fun. Stoddard was great. Oh my God. What an inspirational teacher and what a Williams legend. Oh my gosh. I loved Art 101. 

I cannot recall the names of many of the professors that I enjoyed, but there were one or two, one for sure in economics that I loved, macroeconomics. I thought macroeconomics was fascinating. It was open-ended. I hadn't planned on majoring in economics. I thought I’d be a scientist or something, maybe even a doctor. But in order to maintain my grades, enjoy life, and adapt to the standards that a Williams education required, I thought I'd better take an easier course load along with economics. I enjoyed it; it was a really interesting topic. 

GORDON EARLE: And because you lived across from me, as I said earlier, there was some partying going on. 

JON MYERS: Yeah, that just comes from the experience of Alton. Just the camaraderie that I got so much out of for some reason. Right. I didn't understand what an intellectual life was at that time. I just didn’t. I think a lot of people, you obviously understood that better than me, and pursued it and took advantage of what Williams had to offer for that.

I probably will always remember a guy, God bless him, who was the reason why I didn’t take econometrics, ’cause this guy, Henry, whatever his name was, got up and started writing equations on the board that I just couldn't make any sense of the first day of class. It was like my first English class when Chris Alberti started debating a James Joyce novel with the teacher.

I thought, oh my God, this is . . . who’'s James Joyce, what are you guys talking about? What are you? How are you even, like, you just don’t read it end to end and go, well, that’s a good book? No, you gotta, like, rip it apart and analyze it. And what's that about? 

GORDON EARLE: Let’s move on from Williams, because after Williams you attended business school at Northwestern, then spent 15 years working on Wall Street for some of the most prestigious firms in the business, including Goldman Sachs. And in preparation for our talk today, I reread Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis’ book about being a young bond trader in the 1980s, because that was also the time where you were a young bond trader on Wall Street.

Lewis describes a world of mostly, if not exclusively, young men who were working hard and partying very hard, who were taking huge financial risks and sometimes, in some cases, getting rich at the expense of their customers. What was your experience? 

JON MYERS: Oh, it was a wild time. Bonfire of the Vanities and Michael Lewis's book were true to life. Bonfire of the Vanities was more eccentric possibly than my [00:14:30] life was. 

GORDON EARLE: Masters of the universe. 

JON MYERS: Yeah. But that's how people thought of themselves, and if you think back to that time, some fundamental things were happening: one, Microsoft introduced the Excel spreadsheet.Probably the greatest invention in high-tech software ever, with the possible exception of large language models. But the Excel spreadsheet gave people a way of parsing cash flows that was unprecedented, and understanding these very simple instruments called bonds in a way that was deeper than the market understood, which allowed them to take advantage, create sort of mirage around – quote, unquote – financial products and sell ’em off and leave a lot behind for the firm, and themselves. We were also in an environment where inflation had run away.  

Bond prices had fallen dramatically; bonds used to trade around a hundred cents on the dollar, give or take a few points. All of a sudden there were bonds trading at 50 cents on the dollar. That created just incredible discontinuities in arbitrage opportunities and missed valuations. So some of the opportunities to take advantage of those things were staggeringly profitable.

So that kind of created that environment. A big banner, I couldn't believe – customers of one of the firms I worked for didn't have a problem with it – but there was a huge banner on the wall that said, “Size for juice.” Well, what did that mean? It meant, get a trade as big as you can for as much spread as you can.

If I were a customer walking in there, I’d go, well, who’s the other side of that trade? Right? Right. But that was the ethos. There was so much money being made, and the people were getting paid like professional athletes. I guess they still do. I really lost track.

But back then it was crazy how much money you could make, and for what, actually. Just goofing with a spreadsheet, and being a little creative and, but there’s just so much money that you could make, as a firm and as an individual, that it created a very heady environment. 

GORDON EARLE: In a Williams sponsor seminar that you participated in last year, you used the word “deceit” to describe the bond trading culture in Wall Street. What did you mean by that? 

JON MYERS: Well, that's not a very kind term, but – 

GORDON EARLE: Is it accurate? 

JON MYERS: Yeah. 

GORDON EARLE: Okay. Yeah. 

JON MYERS: So I left the business, and maybe we'll get into that, but one of the reasons I left it was that it was just so morally repugnant that we were taking, and I was, I did the second subprime deal ever.

I brought in the lender, Southern California lender, and I just thought, these guys are criminals that are making these loans to these poor people. Then, the Wall Street firm I was with at the time, we were packaging those loans just like they were Fannie Mae securities. But these were subprime, these were loans to people who couldn’t afford to take them, right at extraordinarily high interest rates, with a high degree of default risk. We were packaging those cash flows into various products, some of which were rated “AAA.”

Which was insane. Right? It’s those AAA securities that became the standard fare of the subprime business and ultimately destroyed, almost destroyed the banking system. In 2000, when was it? Nine or whenever? I thought it was going to destroy the system a lot sooner than that.

GORDON EARLE: Right. Were you around for 15 years in that system? 

JON MYERS: Pretty close to it, yeah. From ’81 to ’95 or six. Right. Something like that.

GORDON EARLE: You alluded to why you left Wall Street, due, in part if not in whole, to a traumatic personal event that you experienced, and I'd like you to tell us about that.

JON MYERS: Yeah, so by this time I was in San Francisco, I was looking for a way out. I wasn’t sure how to engineer that because it was still so lucrative, and I was maybe uncreative and unsure of myself, so I stayed in the business. But I was sitting in front of the monitors, Bloomberg monitors, and doing what I did every day, which is, like, look at these orange digits and numbers and words on Bloomberg, and had a phone bank there with buttons you could push to talk to your customer and all that kind of stuff. But I noticed maybe around 10 in the morning that I was having trouble seeing the monitor. That mild anxiety morphed into some real serious concern, because within an hour I couldn't read anything and everything around me in the room was looking abnormal.

I couldn’t really focus on anything. So I think I called Bonnie, my wife, and said, I gotta go see somebody. This is not good. I told the people in the room, I’m outta here. Somehow, some way I drove myself to a doctor’s, and that doctor took one look at me and goes, you gotta go to UCSF, the top hospital in the area, and you gotta do that like now. 

So I go there, and basically I get in, and fortunately the head neuro ophthalmologist, 80-something-year-old guy, wonderful guy, was there. Or maybe it was the next day that I saw him, I can't recall. but this was still going on. He was like looking at me going, oh my God, I’ve never, in all my career, seen this happening right in front of me.

It was an odd thing to have happened. I couldn't control my eyes. The Max Headroom, the way the line kind of flips, right, on the old TVs. When the line would flip and you’d have to, like, set it. Well, my line was flipping all the time, and left and right, up and down.

So the world was uninterpretable. The lights were still on, but I couldn't make any sense of  the visual world. So by that second day, I was done. I had to give into it totally. Okay, something’s really wrong. And that began a journey of multiple physicians and multiple diagnoses.

This guy, this 80-year-old, wonderful man, William Hoyt, just kept saying, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that, that those guys said it was, I think you're gonna get better and I don’t know why this is happening, ’cause in that part of the brain, you shouldn’t have a stroke. There’s just not enough blood flow. 

I took him at his word and I decided on my own and in talking with Bonnie, my wife, that there was a spiritual element to this. That if there is – and I do believe there is – this is a very complex multidimensional universe with consciousness that’s outside our imagination.

If one of those took enough interest in me to say, “You are not being true to yourself, you should get outta this business that is morally a bad fit for you, and that you want to get out of, but you’re stuck. I’m just gonna take away your ability to do it.” So I dealt with it at a spiritual level, and I made the bargain that I got the message from somewhere. Okay. And I am done. I’m out. I’m completely out. I’m not gonna segue my career to a hedge fund or something else, which would’ve been the logical thing to do. I’m just done. And I’ll figure it out. 

GORDON EARLE: It’s really interesting, ’cause virtually everyone would find a medical reason for what happened, and you’re locating it in the spiritual zone.

JON MYERS: Yeah. Well, how else are you gonna deal with these things? Yeah. I think our human understanding of the world is extremely limited. I’ve had plenty of personal experiences that convinced me of that. So I was totally willing to accept a spiritual challenge, and when I made that choice, I did start to get better and the sight started to come back, and within a few months, I was able to navigate. It took a few years to be completely like normal, where I didn’t notice the subtle effects of that. But I was functional within, say, five months, six months. I attribute it to that, ’cause there was no treatment and the diagnoses were horrifying.

They still are. By the way, when I go in and have a brain scan, the neurologist, I get the call. And I’ve only had this (done) once ’cause it’s a waste of time. But a neurologist calls me and says, can you come into the office? We really need to talk. And I told ‘em, look, I know what you saw.

I know what my brain looks like and I’m not coming in to talk to you, because there’s no point. I’m fine. That's just the way I've lived it.

GORDON EARLE: You're really your own advocate, looking at the medical system and saying, I know what's going on with me. You think, but I’m gonna follow my path.

JON MYERS: Yeah. Look, I have a lot of respect for Western medicine, but I have a lot of respect for non-Western medicine as well. Ultimately, I think medicine would be better if we merged more of the spiritual element with the amazing tools that Western medicine has developed. They’re amazing, but they know we’re not automatons. 

GORDON EARLE: So you didn’t go back to Wall Street. How did you figure out what to do with the rest of your life? 

JON MYERS: I owe a lot to Bonnie for a lot of things throughout my life; Bonnie’s my wife. She was remarkably supportive.

We have a friend who is in the same business and his wife told my wife, “What? You let him leave? I would never let so and so leave the business.” Bonnie was a hundred percent behind me, and said, we’ll figure it out.So we lived off of savings.

Fortunately, getting paid like a professional athlete left us with some savings, and I had always been fascinated with technology. Even on Wall Street, I was on the technical committees, the tech development committees at Goldman and Drexel and yada. So I was somewhat familiar with the process and I figured, well, here we are in Silicon Valley.

You could see the bubble forming, and the internet. The internet bubble was forming. My timing’s always way too early, so I thought the internet bubble would blow up maybe by 1998. So I thought, I can’t go into venture capital, even if they would have me in my early forties, ’cause they're just gonna blow up.

So I thought I will try to put myself into situations where I can learn how to be a high tech entrepreneur and found companies, etc. The first company I actually founded was with Vinnie McLaughlin, class of ’76. A lot of people probably remember Vinny as being somewhat controversial, but heart of gold, funny as all get out. He’d been in trucking, and he wanted to create a new company and pull his team out of JB Hunt, in an interesting corner of the trucking business. And so, I played a role in that. basically I found the private equity funding that  would back that.

It became a billion dollar company called Cardinal Logistics. That wasn’t high tech, but that was a really informative experience for me. I started hanging around with other entrepreneurs; initially, I wasn’t meeting the highest quality of them. It took a while. I hooked up with one guy, and we worked together to create a company that ended up being called MedeAnalytics.

GORDON EARLE: What was the value added there? What were you doing to, in your words, make the world a better place while still being disruptive? 

JON MYERS: The dominant way that people tried to understand their data was using companies like Informatica, Business Objects. What these companies would do would be, like, one-year consulting contracts, and it’d take ’em a year to develop some sort of kludgy software solution that would pull data from the tape drives and present it to the people running the company, financial data and the latencies and the software. 

It was just horrific. These solutions were horrific. Half the time they failed, and  they were costing companies a lot. Millions of dollars. And they weren’t really solving the problem. In healthcare, there’s so much money changing hands, and what people running the healthcare companies needed was realtime information.

How do you get realtime information off these tape drives and these legacy systems? Very challenging, ’cause they're not designed to facilitate that. But what we did was, we created one of the very early forms of ETL or extract, transform load. That’s just software that's designed to go in and extract data.

And then we figured out a paradigm. Where we could port that data to Ukraine. A lot of talented Russian trained programmers back then. And they would turn it around overnight. And then we created a third element, which was a SaaS platform. This was 1998. So SaaS—there was no term “SaaS.” We were one of the first. Salesforce obviously gets all the credit, but we were one of the first to make use of the web as a user interface for people to do work. And in this case, the work was, “Look at my financials one day after they hit the tape drive.” So now I have real-time information, and I’m able to slice it and dice it any way I want, right away.

The returns to these systems – like Kaiser, one comes to mind. Within a week after we turned it on for Kaiser, they’d found $20 million they didn’t know they had, that had they not made a claim against the U.S. government for it, would’ve expired. They would’ve lost it in another two weeks. It had a time stamp on it, and they didn’t even know they had it. So that gives you some sense of how powerful that paradigm shift was. Now it’s all done that way. 

GORDON EARLE: That was an example from healthcare. Where else and how did you make decisions on what to focus on and what to prioritize?

JON MYERS: Random walk. Okay, I wish I could say there was some conscious plan, but I threw conscious planning out the window when I made the switch outta Wall Street and just committed myself to the unknown. So really, the things that I’ve focused on have been – there's a criteria list, right?

Does it do harm? Can it do good? Is it an interesting problem intellectually, right? And, is there a way to make money off of it? ’Cause I've got a family. So there’s that kind of loose criteria, but a lot of it’s random walk. It’s trusting that opportunities will appear. 

GORDON EARLE: And they have Jon; you’ve started another company called Dickinson Corp., which in your words,quote,  “will change everything from tires to plastics to energy production.” Tell us about that. 

JON MYERS: I would put that one at the top of transformative companies that I’ve worked on. So two nuclear engineers and I founded Dickinson. Our initial mission was to find a way to transform carbon dioxide to a useful material. We concluded very quickly that the material would have to be nanoscale in order to deliver enough value to underwrite the process of transforming the CO2. So we went ahead and we have multiple patents on that. We did figure out a way to do it, but that company has evolved since then, so I left that company, five, six years. Five years into that project and what the company does now – you can look it up, DickinsonCorp.com. They’ve developed a process that allows them to engineer a lot of different materials, which has immense implications across a whole bunch of applications.

GORDON EARLE: Just very briefly, such as? 

JON MYERS: Such as, in improving while replacing carbon black in  tires, making them extremely durable. Such as, improving the performance of conventional plastics, strength, stiffness, and so forth, by 50 percent. Unheard of. In the plastics business, absolutely unheard of. There’s stuff I can't get into, but, it will have an impact in fusion, in magnetics, there’s certain properties that are just fascinating. You can 3D print the material. You could 3D print a car door. If you did that, the car door would be just as strong as a car door today (but) it’d weigh one 10th as much.

So the whole lightweighting of an automobile. If you use this material to make as much of that car as you could, maybe the car would be 50 percent as heavy and that would directly translate to using half as much energy. 

GORDON EARLE: Jon, let’s leave your life as a tech entrepreneur and focus now solely on artificial intelligence.

AI has been around for a long time, and now it’s catching fire. I’m wondering what’s different about AI today than existed, for instance, in the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies, but now it’s on everyone's mind. 

JON MYERS: Yeah. AI is around 50 years old. Why is it on fire today? It’s just the microprocessor.

At the end of the day, we’ve gone to four nanometer chips and we’re on our way to two nanometer chips. So it’s the amount of computing you can pump through a system and it’s entirely dependent on and the result of that. 

GORDON EARLE: That brings me to my next question because as you’re well aware of, and the world is well aware of, the Chinese launched a startup called DeepSeek, which has shaken up the AI community and Wall Street by introducing apps that apparently rival Chat GBT and Google's Gemini.

And as you just mentioned, it was developed with far less expense and far fewer microchips than American companies. And I’m wondering how you see this development and the significance of it. 

JON MYERS: While we were doing Dickinson, we figured out that about half the academic papers that were written in China were worthless deceits, so China is known for people and companies that make claims that are fabricated. No one invented that. Silicon Valley’s really good at that too. And China’s created remarkable companies that have blown us away. So where the truth is in DeepSeek, it’s hard to know. It’s too soon.

But take it on the face. Okay? So they’ve developed an algorithm that’s much more efficient and doesn’t require the same amount or sophistication of compute that’s almost inevitable, but can conserve the same function as some of these high end functions that American companies have.

GORDON EARLE: Should we be concerned? Our listeners may be concerned if the Chinese take the lead in AI. Should we be worried about that? 

JON MYERS: Sure. 

GORDON EARLE: Why? I can think of some reasons, but I'd like you to tell me what you think because we’re the “good guys.”

JON MYERS: The Chinese are, as individual people. They’re great. They’re the same as us. As a government, we have rule of law still; we have an extraordinary history of creativity. We have extremely creative thinkers. We should remain leaders in solving important problems for this planet. Not that the Chinese can’t; they absolutely can.

Why should we view them as competitors? Should we view them as partners? I don’t see how you can, ’cause they don't view us as partners, right? All you see is the fentanyl on the street, right? Comes from China, etc., etc. They’ve stolen a lot of our IP. I know that personally. So they have not behaved like partners.

If they do great, and we should too, by the way. 

GORDON EARLE: Let’s continue our discussion on AI by looking at some of the positives and negatives. I’d like you to talk a little bit about that. So the positives – ‘'ll just tick off a few. In medicine its’s generally agreed that it could result in more accurate diagnosis and treatment of patients and agriculture.

Predict climate change and influence food production. And in daily life, it gives us Alexa and Chat GPT. So give us some of your thinking, using an example or two, on what you think the positives are of artificial intelligence. 

JON MYERS: God, they're endless. You named some, and food production.

You can now drive, pull systems behind your John Deere tractor that are looking at the ground, using AI and are identifying which plants are the weeds. Right. That’s amazing. And it’ll pull ’em. Another solution that’s in place now is hydration. Water’s a scarce resource, and this can optimize the use of water in irrigation rather than flooding fields, right?

In diagnostics, human beings looking at images. I don't care how good a diagnostician somebody is, you can’t ask them to look at 500 pictures in a day. But you can ask a machine to do that, and it’ll do it really well. We will get into the disadvantages, but the advantage is yes, you can do molecular design, you know that can be helpful.

If one believes that fiddling with molecules is the way to cure everyone, I don’t necessarily believe that. But if you do believe that, then, doing molecular design for new drugs is a great thing. You can, there’s a company called Berg Health that has a fully built emulator of the human body and biosystems that runs at the (national) lab out in Long Island.

I forget which one is the national lab. But the fact is, you can do drug trials on that. You can perfect your molecule and your treatment of disease without ever killing a dog. Without ever putting a human at risk. And that already exists.

So it’s extraordinary. Yeah. What the world that we’re going into is so different. 

GORDON EARLE: Let’s segue a little bit to maybe the less amazing and some of the less positive aspects. And those are also, I think, pretty well known, the spread of disinformation and propaganda. Access to violent imagery and deep fake pornography, the use of voice and face recognition to create what people are already saying as a surveillance society and the loss of personal privacy.

So as you just went through the positives; give us some of your concerns about AI. 

JON MYERS: Every one of those things that you listed are essentially perversions of human behavior. Toward one another. And so the challenge to humans is to be more human and to figure out what that means and to make it as unacceptable as possible to weaponize AI.

Because it’s easily weaponized. It doesn't have a moral character. It will do what you taught it to do. 

GORDON EARLE: Okay. Not that I wanna dwell on the apocalypse, but I recently saw a 60 Minutes piece featuring Nobel Laureate Jeffrey Hinton, touted as the godfather of AI. He warned that AI has the potential to – and these are his words, pretty dramatic – eliminate the human race. He gave the odds at 10 to 20 percetn in the next 30 years. This isn’t just anyone you know, it’s Jeffrey Hinton. The reason I think he believes that is that these systems become so intelligent, far more intelligent than humans. They can train themselves and they can program themselves and perhaps see humans as a threat.

How do you see that possibility that Hinton is laid out? 

JON MYERS: I guess nobody told Hinton, The Terminator’s already been written. He’s a little late. I don't know him personally. I think he enjoys the spotlight. Like Larry Kurzwell does too, And I think maybe the spotlight is just a little too high on these guys. 

GORDON EARLE: So glad I highlighted him here.

JON MYERS: Yeah. No, he’s a resource and he certainly had a significant impact on solving a critical puzzle that needed to be solved in order to make neural nets. I don’t find that to be remotely possible because the whole premise is false. The premise that machine intelligence is somehow a replacement for human intelligence, I think, is a false premise. It’s a mechanistic view of the universe, and I absolutely don’t believe this universe is mechanistic. 

There are information channels that we as human beings can tap into that are not copper wire or light fiber. One example is several agencies in the U.S. government have been doing remote viewing very successfully for 40 years. What’s remote viewing? It’s sitting in a room and seeing someplace else in the world. Accurately enough to bring and execute a lethal mission. Well, contrary to what some people think, the military takes lethality very seriously and they just don’t go around killing people for the joy of it.

Some rogues do, but in general, you’re talking about drones and that kind of thing? Yeah. Drones are just taking somebody out, because a person in a room figured out where that individual was without ever leaving the room. There's information that travels in other dimensions that we have access to.

These machines will never have access to that because we don’t even understand how that works, much less have an ability to replicate it in a machine. So I think we will figure out how to neutralize these machines if somebody starts creating terminator-like machines. That’s very possible, but we'll figure it out.

We’ll figure out how to defeat them. 

GORDON EARLE: Obviously what you’re saying, Jeffrey Hinton is the situation you described as overblown, but should we be scared, if that’s too strong a word? Or at least apprehensive of AI? And, why? 

JON MYERS: Well, there are a lot of reasons why. First of all, back to the human in the equations, the “we” link, unfortunately, because humans do not always act in a way that has well-being of others, or other living things, as a primary motive or a primary directive.

So humans are dangerous. And so any machine a human touches can be dangerous. That’s one. The second thing is that AI today, these neural nets, the AI that my company I’ve founded uses, is completely auditable. You can interrogate why it told you something. Then these neural nets, large language models, Chat GPT and so on and so forth, can’t interrogate them.

That’s a really critical problem that needs to get solved, because they’re unaccountable to anyone or anything. And that is going to be a very serious problem unless we solve it. 

GORDON EARLE: Okay. I'm gonna harken back to the webinar once more, because I understand everything you're saying about positive and negatives, but you put up a slide during your presentation that said, “Is AI going to create a better or worse world for our descendants?”

And you said the answer was not knowable. Why did you say, at least at that time, not knowable? 

JON MYERS: I don’t think it is. Okay. The future is not really knowable. I’d love to know where the price of gold is gonna be in a week. I have a certain opinion that’s about as far as it can go. Human beings are – it's, sad to say this – but we are really flawed, and maybe this is why we’re here: to learn how to become better at being a conscious entity. Right? I think we as humans have to examine ourselves and the more power that we imbue in something else, the more we are gonna be challenged to examine ourselves.

GORDON EARLE: The final question on AI then, is what to do about it. Is regulation the answer, as many have suggested, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt?

JON MYERS: I think regulation is always gonna be part of an answer, but we haven’t demonstrated that our bureaucracies are particularly good at regulation. We’ve tried, there are earnest people that work hard at it. If you face the fact that the government salary is maybe a tenth of what you can make in the high tech industry, are you gonna get the best people in government that are gonna be very effective at watching what these rogues might do in industry?

So the challenge is education. How do you create the kind of moral infrastructure that would minimize, by virtue of its existence, the risk of people running afoul? Regulation presumes that people will, and therefore we have to catch them. Same in the criminal system, right?

We assume that people are gonna break the law, and so we have people who are trained to catch them, prosecute them, yada, So I think that’s part of the solution. But the other part of the solution is: how do we make a better human being? What do we need to do? Because we're not raising great human beings right now.

GORDON EARLE: No. That’s a big question. 

JON MYERS: Yeah. I don’t know the answer. 

GORDON EARLE: I want to end this section on AI by bringing your career full circle. So you started on describing the culture on Wall Street where you were a bond trader in the 1980s. And we’ve been talking about Silicon Valley today, and I think there’s little question that there is a rightward shift in the attitudes of those in Silicon Valley, some of the biggest names who you know well and the alliances they're forming with the new administration, with others. How would you draw the comparison between the world you experienced in your early career and what we’re seeing in Silicon Valley today? 

JON MYERS: The old guys, the old guard, will tell you that felt they had a mission and in creating these venture capital companies and financing these companies, and their mission was to make the world a better place; and at least in part, create a return for their investors. That kind of stuff. But from a heart center, the young people today that are running these companies and that are attracted to them aren’t coming from there. The career choice is, do I go for Goldman Sachs or do I go for Kleiner Perkins? Where will I make more money? And that’s something that the old guard is very sad about. Right? That has nothing to do with right-leaning or left-leaning. It just has to do with higher and lower motivation, higher cause versus selfish. 

The right leaning and the left leaning, what a phenomenon. I really don’t know quite what to make of it, but some of these people saw, I think, an opportunity to buy a lot of power and they’re just mercenary enough to do it. I think some of the other people – there have always been conservatives in Silicon Valley.

Peter Thiel didn’t change his stripes. Mark Zuckerberg did, but he probably did it for convenience, right? Where is Silicon Valley on the spectrum, right and left? Well, the left is bereft of ideas and has been for a long time. It’s pretty stale; and the right, I think, is equally bereft of good ideas, at any rate. 

So, maybe some of these people, I think a lot of people, including people in Silicon Valley, just voted for someone to throw the soup out. And see what happens. I don’t know if that was wise or unwise. I’m just not gonna judge it, 

GORDON EARLE: Well, Jon, we usually end these broadcasts on a uplifting note. That’s a little bit of a somber note, but it gives us something to think about. 

JON MYERS: Well, Bonnie says that the way she looks at this – okay, is Bonnie’s gonna get the final word? She’s gonna get the final word, because her philosophy is, this is going to be a very interesting time.

I think that's helpful to me because if I say, “Oh wow, this is fascinating,” that's a lot better than saying, “Oh God, I'm so triggered.”

GORDON EARLE: Isn’t there a proverb that we live in interesting times, I believe. Chinese proverb. Well, that's a hopeful note to end up on and that's where we’ll end it.

I can’t thank you enough, Jon, for your time. You have flown the longest to interview with me. He came in from Hawaii. So again, thank you a great deal. It’s good to see you again after so many years. For our listeners, you can see photos of Jon’s life on our website, 75creates.com. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or classmate who might enjoy it.

Until next time, this is Gordon Earle. Thank you all for listening.