S2E1 - Turning On Machines: What AI Adoption Really Requires from Today’s Leaders w/ Zac Engler

Full Episode Transcript

This is the full recorded conversation from The Human Protocol Podcast, published by The Human Protocol Group. © 2026 The Human Protocol Group. Please link to and attribute the original episode when referencing this conversation.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (00:02.069)
You can lead what you don't understand. And in the age of AI, understanding means rethinking everything, work, teams, even yourself. AI isn't replacing you, but the leader who knows how to use it is just mine. Welcome to The Human Protocol, the podcast about staying human while building the future. I am your host, Mykel Salomon. AI adoption has gone from concept to implementation in record time.

But leadership hasn't kept peace. From pilot projects that go nowhere to fear-driven strategies, most organizations aren't falling behind of the high tech. They are failing because their leaders haven't adapted. This episode is a blueprint for any leader who wants to stay relevant, responsible, and human in the AI era. Today, I'm joined by Zach Engler.

Zach is the chief AI officer at C4 Technical Services, founder and CEO of Body AI and an author. Zach began writing about AI in 2016 after realizing how quickly the technology was advancing and how few people understood what was coming. Since then, he has gone from tech blogger to chief AI officer and has built teams at Apple.

Amplifon and Sanctuary AI. His book, Turning on Machines, was published recently, last October 21st, and is a guide to help people navigate the AI era. It looks at how AI is transforming the way we work, live, and think, and offers a practical framework to help people adapt. Zach, my friend, welcome to The Human Protocol.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (01:54.69)
Thank you so much, Michael. Excited to be here today.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:57.481)
saying I appreciate you taking the time of your very busy schedule with all the exciting things happening with you lately. And to kick things off, I want to start with the questions that I ask every guest that comes to us, which is when we remove everything that the internet knows about you, Shaji PT knows about you, who is Zach at his core?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (02:21.006)
That's a great question. I think at my core, I feel like I'm a father first and foremost above anything else. And that's been dramatically imprinted into me over the last six years and having three young ones join my family. It's been awesome getting a chance to have that title and play a part in shaping their lives. And it's

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (02:31.306)
Mmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (02:42.147)
Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (02:50.37)
You know, one of those incredible feelings that I think parents don't understand until they become parents to some degree of like, you know, take that, take that moment where you first fell in love in life or maybe you got that first big job that you really wanted, or maybe you bought your first house, something like that, you know, that's like almost every day with a kid when you watch them grow and learn and you have that sense of pride. It's like getting a new house every day.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (02:56.777)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (03:19.701)
That's a beautiful feeling, at least on the house one, that's one that I can relate to. But I'm sure. Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (03:27.062)
or car or what job or whatever, know, like that, the first love, you know, that big feeling where you're just like overwhelmed with that. Kids do that all the time. And then they like make you also want to rip your hair out at this 10 minutes later.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (03:34.761)
Yeah, over with overjoy, right?

You go to the extreme from one minute to the other, right? Very easy. can imagine.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (03:45.963)
Absolutely. Yup. But beyond that, I would say I am a, so I'm a dedicated father, dedicated husband, and a very excited and passionate person about the world of AI. This is something that I think is just gonna have a societal level impact. Nobody's really ready for, myself included. And I've been thinking about this for a decade. So it's really exciting to see. Exactly.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (04:11.317)
You still find yourself that you're learning every day, right?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (04:15.188)
Exactly. I think that's the number one skill for sure right now.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (04:15.957)
I cannot imagine. Yeah. And you said you've been thinking about it, writing about it for almost a decade. I think it was around 2016 that you started writing about AI, right? If I recall correctly. What made you back then started thinking about what may, what's coming our way? I'm curious to hear from you.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (04:30.702)
Correct, if you...

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (04:38.744)
Well, yeah, so even if you go all the way back to 2006, when I was getting my undergrad, I had a computer science teacher. And I can't remember his name for the life of me right now, but he, he only had one hand. He was a very serious man. And in one of our classes one day, he was explaining what Moore's law was. And, you know, that's the doubling of technology every two years and in speed and having in price and

He showed us the exponential chart of that and I asked him like, so does this mean that the matrix could someday be real? And without missing a beat, he stared me directly in the eyes and was like, that's something I'm very concerned about. And he wasn't joking, he didn't crack a smile. He legitimately believed that. And back then it was so far away and so hard to see that connection that it was hard to kind of understand the gravity of that moment.

Fast forward to 2016, I started reading about Moore's Law. You could see machine learning systems starting to take off with systems like AlphaGo and DeepMind. And that's where the dots started to connect for me that if this trend continues, and for all intents and purposes, it hasn't stopped yet, we're gonna see technology accelerate to a point where humans can't even keep up. We're gonna see it

accelerate to a point where it's going to surpass an individual human's capability, collective humanity's capability in terms of thinking power and processing power. And I said to myself, like, okay, that's a pretty big deal. I should probably adjust my career accordingly because I don't want to get left behind. I don't want to end up relegated to

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (06:27.401)
Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (06:34.366)
know, a bygone era. And so I started writing about it, researching it. I read probably 50 or 60 different books on AI from authors like Kai-Fu Lee, Max Tegmark, Nick Bostrom, Jeffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, you name it. If there was a back then, if there was an AI book, I probably read it. One of my favorites, by the way, was The Heart of the Machine by Richard Yonk, which I cite in my book.

Andrew McAfee and Eric Brinellson had the second machine age, which is still a fantastic book. If you haven't read that yet, go check that one out. So I became kind of that sponge. throughout all this, Michael, I thought, OK, well, I'm not going to be the guy that goes and makes the machine learning platform. I'm not going to be the guy who writes the code. So maybe I should go work for a company that does that. And that'll help kind of insulate and protect my career.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (07:11.111)
I should wall.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (07:25.514)
Right.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (07:32.867)
But as soon as chat GPT came out, all these AI tools started getting easier and easier to use. And we started folding them into our daily office operations. And that's when I had that aha moment of, this is something that I can do now. And I started experimenting and playing with the new tools, things like chat GPT and N8n and Claude and lovable and Bolt and all these five coding tools that came out in the last year.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (07:38.377)
Yeah. Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (07:56.575)
Bye.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (08:03.084)
And I kept connecting those dots of like, this all feeds into office operations. This all feeds into standard business practice, but very few people have made that connection yet. And so that's my goal is taking my background in training and development, taking my background in talent acquisition and understanding what makes people successful in their roles across an organization.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (08:16.33)
Ryan.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (08:30.798)
and tying that together with this new technology. So it's been kind of a wild ride and a lot of fun to experience along the way because if you were to told me a year ago that I'd be a chief AI officer teaching Fortune 500 companies out of rollout copilot, I would have laughed in your face.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (08:45.717)
It's awesome because that's part of also what you write in your book, Turning on Machines, right? That AI will transform the way we live, the way we work, and the way we laugh. So when we think about it, what do you mean with that?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (09:09.166)
Well, yeah, so the fundamental element that I think maybe most people doesn't come second nature or isn't noticeable right out of the gates is this idea that throughout all of humanity's history, we haven't really had any sort of replication of thinking, right? In the industrial revolution, we used machines, for example, to replace our muscles, right?

this new era, we're gonna use machines to replace our minds to some degree. And how much you let that happen is something that you need to be acutely aware of. And so in the book, at the end of each chapter, I ask a series of self-reflection questions to try and bring that focus back to the reader, right? A lot of the other books that I've read on AI, it's a PhD person talking about all the...

great things that are gonna happen or all the scary things that are gonna happen, but they're not necessarily giving you that sphere of control and giving you that option to decide how is this gonna impact me? So that was one key element of the book that I think was pretty crucial. When it comes to how we work, live and love, AI is gonna be prevalent across the board because it's a part of that thinking process, right? It's a compliment to how you...

look at the world and you can use it as a crutch. And some people have been doing that quite extensively to the point where now it's, if you're too young and you're engaging with AI and leveraging it for all of your critical thought, it's actually, there's studies that have been shown that it's a detriment to your personal development, your cognitive development. So I think we need to address that as a society, just like we've been doing with social media and the impacts that that has on.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (10:50.847)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (11:00.852)
on youth. And if you're older, it can play different parts in your life. And we've seen that echo across the hundreds of thousands of people that have unfortunately lost their jobs this past year as a result of AI transitions at organizations. And regarding the love piece, we're seeing people fall in love with their chatbots now, which 10 years ago,

People were laughing at me when I said that this would be a thing, that this would be a part of reality. And this is the worst this technology is ever gonna be, Michael. Imagine five years from now when you're looking at the screen and you can't tell the difference of if I'm AI or a real person, and then imagine, yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (11:43.829)
Yeah. Which is already happening in some cases.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (11:50.03)
Imagine 10 years from then when you have a robot that's in the room and you can't tell the difference between the robot and a person, right? Like those types of things are what's on the table here. That's the reality that we're approaching.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (12:01.875)
It's the, when I think about all that and you know, you and I, come from technology. We love technology. We're very passionate about it. And we, of course, we love technology that serves greater purpose. But who is writing the rules? It does not feel like regular people have any power or any say in this new era, you know?

It's like that's when I think about is what concerns me because you were saying, hey, yeah, it feels like in a few years we don't know where we're going to be. It's like, where is the power to make any decision on where this thing needs to go next? It's not clear to me.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (12:47.897)
You know, there's a great Steve Jobs quote. Steve Jobs is a huge role model for me from a thought leadership perspective, maybe not from a social perspective, but his quote that he has of, know, I'll paraphrase, but he says something to the effect of once you realize that every great artist, every great industrialist, every great technologist, every great person had no more of a capability to impact reality than you do,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (12:54.815)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (12:58.421)
Thank

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (13:17.773)
and you can go out and you can make a dent in the universe, that sphere of control, that ability to take control of your life, even though it may seem like nothing's in your sphere of control, you still have that capability to make that impact and decide how you wanna show up. And that's a key element to the book, actually. There's a philosopher named Albert Camus who is a founding member of the absurdist philosophy.

And it's this idea that rather than being nihilistic about the fact that you're a speck in the universe, you can actually be excited about the fact that even though the universe may be indifferent to you, you get to be the one who decides how you're going to show up, how you're going to engage with this incredibly special moment that we call life and what type of role you're going to play in everybody else's life as well. so again, going back to that series of self-reflection questions, where is AI going to impact you?

How is that gonna impact your work, the way you interact with people? Maybe you're somebody who's excited about AI and you're gonna go teach others in your community. You're gonna help other people along and coach and guide them in their career. And are you gonna be the one chirping in Mark Zuckerberg's ear or telling Elon Musk what he should be doing? Probably not. But the more people that we bring into this conversation, Michael, the more likely...

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (14:29.492)
Right.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (14:38.281)
haha

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (14:43.327)
That's where the hope is. Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (14:44.971)
Exactly. The more likely we can raise our collective awareness and make better decisions as a society around how AI impacts our lives and the role that we play in that.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (14:55.923)
Yeah, I do agree with every single word right there, Zack, because I really think it needs to be a movement, right? It needs to be a movement where you bring as many people as possible to really understand what this technology is and how we can leverage, right, and to serve a good purpose, right? And think also how we are going to take it more into the future.

But it will have to be a movement where people can come together and really understand, because without the basic understanding of what this is, I think we're going to be in trouble if we continue this way. And it gets me to my next topic, which is agentic thinking. And why do you think that's so important today, Zach?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (15:47.396)
Yeah, so, you when it comes to AI, the last year, 2025, was kind of the year that everybody woke up to the, or a lot of businesses woke up to the fact that AI can play a part of day-to-day work. They haven't necessarily woken up to the fact that agents, so an agent is an AI that can act autonomously. It can learn from what it's done and get feedback and then...

take actions on that feedback. 2026 is gonna be the year of the agent and we're gonna see breakthrough moments in 2026, I think, just like we did over the last two years. I think we'll see in the next year. That level of change that we've experienced in the last two years, I think we'll see in 2026 because once you get an agent working for your business, it doesn't eat, it doesn't sleep.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (16:41.502)
Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (16:45.295)
It doesn't take vacations. It doesn't have a family. It doesn't need time off, right? Like agents will do the job 24 seven, 365. And again, this is all software based right now in another five years. Well, actually we're already seeing robots roll out into the industrial centers, but over the next five years to 10 years, we'll see robots rolling out in the home and commercially and.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (16:48.981)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (16:57.855)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (17:10.453)
in our houses. Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (17:13.965)
then you'll have autonomous workers impacting physical labor just as much as mental labor. That's a step level change in how work gets done. And so I think agentic thinking and the idea that agents are a big deal for next year is people in business are gonna have to learn how do I work effectively with people? That's kind of a given, those are table stakes when you become a leader in business.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (17:42.271)
Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (17:42.426)
but how do I work with AI and how do I work with agents specifically? And most importantly, how do I team those two things together? So in my book, I talk about this idea of the trifurcation of work. So a bifurcation is when you split things in two, a trifurcation is when you split it in three. And I think we'll see AI only work, right? So if you're a business, you should be identifying what are those highly repeatable tasks that an AI could handle all by itself. You don't have to...

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (17:58.203)
Now in three. Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (18:11.757)
mess with it, it can just get that work done, such as writing copy for social media or marketing. Then there's going to be a second layer of AI plus human. These are areas where some people call it human in the loop. These are processes where you want a human maybe to double check the AI's work. You want a human approving what the AI has done, still a part of the process, but very hands off for the most part.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (18:31.829)
Right. It's still part of the process. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (18:40.621)
And then there's gonna be that third area of human only work where you do not want AI involved because it either can't do it or it shouldn't do it. Or maybe people don't want it there, right? So think of that like white glove level service of interacting with a person in a sales role, right? Like you could have an AI call somebody up and do a video chat with an avatar, but that's not the same experience as when you're engaging with a real person.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (18:56.917)
Huh.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (19:10.241)
or if you're face to face. this idea that you can leverage agents in 2026, that you can start analyzing your business and compartmentalizing what the AI is gonna do, how people are gonna support it, and then what people are gonna keep to themselves, I think that'll be setting the foundation for this new era that we enter into in 2027, when the agents are now up and running and they're operating at a speed that people...

can't even keep up with at that point, I think. We'll start seeing kind of this escape velocity happen and you'll need AI on your side in order to keep up.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (19:47.113)
Yeah, and part of the concern, right, Zach, is in this triforcation of work, it's when you, the level that you keep humans in the loop, right, and the third level, as you were saying, that it's only human. For leaders, as they start working with agents, and agents and AI continues to get better,

How can that be a decision made where you continue to keep human if AI continues to improve itself more and more? And that's my concern as well. Because this is what artificial intelligence is. It continues to improve. It continues to learn. It continues to get better.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (20:24.132)
Yeah, that should be everybody's concern, right?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (20:33.114)
Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (20:38.074)
Well, don't want to be hyperbolic, that's the reason why we talked about this idea that you need to raise the awareness level. You need to bring everybody along for the ride because this is going to impact everybody in some shape or form, either the knowledge workers that get impacted by AI software sooner rather than later, or the physical workers who are going to be impacted by robotics in the next decade and a half or so.

everybody's going to be impacted by AI and robotics to some degree over the course of the next 20 years. And for a lot of people, that's either the back half of their career or perhaps their entire career, right? And so how do you start thinking about, I think it's really crucial that people start thinking about how is this going to impact me and my career? What moves should I be making now to kind of ride this wave rather than push against it? And then the other piece of all this is

Like who are you? So I love that you asked me that question at the beginning of the episode of, know, if you took away all the internet stuff, like who is Zach? I think everybody needs to take a step back and realize they're not their job, right? Like you're not a plumber, you're Steve, right? Like you're not a retail salesperson, you're Sharon. Like these people are real people and they need to take a step back and realize like we are not our work, we are.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (21:49.193)
Yeah. And we don't think enough about that. Right. Right.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (22:04.464)
people and we're here to do something for each other. that's kind of towards the end of the book that we explore what that could look like for individuals.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (22:05.385)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (22:13.215)
And that's part of the reason why I start with this question, Zach, because going through this and make me think about putting this podcast out there, it's like, who are we? Right? And who are we going to be? Because if we don't know ourselves, we're going to be lost in this new future. And we should better start thinking, what is it? Who is it that we are? What are we going to do with our future? Because those are the type of conversations that we usually don't have with ourselves more often.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (22:26.671)
Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (22:42.853)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (22:43.091)
Right. And it has to come, it's a very introspective exercise that needs to happen within us. Because we're going to need more of that.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (22:53.855)
Well, absolutely. And we're not even talking here about how does a business roll out copilot so that their teams can do more efficient work, right? We're talking maybe 10 years from now when these systems have fully accelerated into a whole new era of performance. But the transition from now to then, I think between now and 2042, we're going to see a series of shifts

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (23:13.589)
You think 10 years?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (23:22.256)
of how humans and AI interact. After 2042, I think all bets are off and nobody can predict the future of what's gonna happen after that because there will likely be an AI that is so knowledgeable, so powerful, so capable that no person can possibly predict what it could do or how it could impact humanity.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (23:29.822)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (23:42.869)
And I'm just curious about from now to 2042, we are 17 years, right? And what makes you think that's the time that needs to happen for we arriving at that time in point?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (23:50.17)
Give or take.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (23:59.57)
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question. So if you head over to my website, ZachEngler.com or turningonmachines.com, you can access my blog, it's called Machines Learning. And back in 2016, if you scroll all the way to the very beginning of the blog, you can see the timestamps, you can see my original post, which was from April of 2016. And in that post, there's a chart.

And I don't know if I can share my screen if that's something that Riverside can do, but I'd love to share my screen.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (24:34.227)
Yeah, I believe so. And that would be awesome because we are writing history as we speak right now. Love it.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (24:39.985)
Okay, perfect. All right, so I'm gonna pop open this chart. So in 2016, I made this chart and what this is, is a visualization of how fast the world's fastest supercomputer can think. And it's listed in teraflops per second. And the line that you see goes from 2014 to 2020. And that looks like pretty stable growth, right?

When people are used to like new iPhones coming out every couple of years and they always show how much faster it is and how much better it is. And it kind of looks like this and we can process that as a human, I think. But when you start expanding out these timeframes, Michael, this is where stuff starts getting weird. So if we look at the next 10 years from 2020 to 2030, you start seeing some pretty interesting things. and sorry, I've got...

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (25:25.693)
Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (25:39.666)
I just added this new feature to my site. Sorry, I didn't realize this was blocking the screen. This is Cynthia down here in the bottom corner. You can talk to her about my book. She'll answer your questions. It's a really, really fun little voice interface that you can ask questions of. Anyways, so when we look out to 2027, there's this fun or interesting or perhaps scary thing that happens. And this is actually where the world's fastest supercomputers become.

lined up with human capability in terms of how fast our brains can process information. And what's weird about this, Michael, or what's interesting about this is I did all this stuff back in 2016. I haven't changed a thing. And last year, Elon Musk bought a data center, the exact same or almost the exact same size and capacity as what I outlined you would need to replicate the human mind in a supercomputer.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (26:15.157)
Okay.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (26:37.813)
And that's only one data center.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (26:38.225)
That's only one. And he's not the only one that has a data center like that right now. But the fact that that was the exact specification that they went after, which was one of the largest ones of its time, it's still one of the largest data centers. They're using it for Grok 4 right now in Tennessee, I believe. And that's right in line with this calculation, which is pretty nuts to think about. Now I'm going to do one more thing. So we talk about 2042. Now let's zoom out even further.

Look at what we thought was crazy growth in the 2020s. Look, this compares like, there is nothing that compares to what the 2040s would be like. And that's why I say, you know, once we get to that stage, all bets are off. There's nobody that can predict what's gonna happen after that. And my whole goal with writing the book and doing the work that I do is helping prepare people for this transition and help people think about...

what it means to shape your career and work with AI effectively and ride this wave until we get to this point where nobody really knows what's gonna happen. So does that make sense?

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (27:46.453)
It makes, it does a lot of sense and I love it that we were able to share this because I think this is awesome, talking and thinking about when you actually posted this, right, and where we are today and the things that we're already seeing, as you're saying, with the supercomputer and everything going on. But Zach, how many data centers are we talking about here that...

may be needed to power how many supercomputers? It's really whomever wants and has the resources to build one will have one. Is that how this works?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (28:24.657)
That's a great question. don't know. Are you asking, is it unlimited? Do we just get a bunch of these AIs running around the world?

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (28:27.668)
Hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (28:36.693)
meaning whomever has the technology to build a supercomputer, right, and has the know-how and the resources to build the data centers that will power this technology, is this how it works? Anyone can actually build this.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (28:42.437)
Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (28:54.745)
It'll change over time. Right now, the focus is on these massive data centers and with huge capability. But once AI starts actually building itself, it'll get better and better exponentially. Right. And you think about the human mind, like our brain operates with minimal electricity in a very tight capacity.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (29:01.257)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (29:08.147)
right? By building itself.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (29:21.221)
you could potentially foresee that at some point there'll be an AI that's as powerful as a human mind. And in fact, there's actually a company using human brain tissue to run computations. They're genetically modifying brain tissue and using it inside a computer. So that, yeah, yeah, you can check.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (29:40.533)
Really?

and teaching AI from that or learning from it?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (29:46.995)
I don't know if they're doing AI with it yet, but yeah, they're using it for computation, just like you would have in your computer, you have an Intel chip or an Nvidia chip, they're using brain tissue for their chips. So yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (29:57.033)
Yeah?

my God, that's so interesting.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (30:03.12)
Yeah. And I just like to tell people like, just buckle up because it's going to get weirder, man. Like we're just at the, we are so early, right? Like things are just going to get weirder and weirder and the...

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (30:14.805)
But Zach, imagine if it gets weird for us that somehow, especially you have been in technology for a long time, starting this, imagine for those, right, the majority of people that they are not in technology, they don't have a clue, it's hard to make sense of all this.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (30:29.031)
Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (30:32.848)
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. But thankfully, the tools are getting easier to use, you know, like I mentioned earlier. And I mean, if you have questions about it, if you're not sure about it, just ask the AI, right? Like, there's been so many times I'm delivering trainings to people. You know, my company C4, we have 25 different training programs that we can leverage to get people up to speed with different AI systems like Co-Pilot, Cloud, GP.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (30:37.693)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (30:44.083)
Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (31:02.31)
ChatGPT, Gemini. We also teach multimodal coding with software development engineers. And we roll out executive level trainings for how do you create an AI first organization, for example. And in all of these, I'm regularly getting questions from people of like, well, how do I write my prompt in order to get that competitive analysis to be really accurate?

And I'm like, why are you asking me like turn jump right into the co-pilot or jump right into Claude and ask the AI like review my prompt and make it better. Right. It's, called meta prompting and it's a very valid technique that people have now capitalized on. so it's things like that where, know, I think it's something crazy, like 65 % of the population hasn't even opened chat GPT or a large language model tool yet. Right. So

We still have a long ways to go before this is as ubiquitous as the internet, right?

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (31:59.357)
Yeah, it's now that you put it on the screen. I thought I had a lot of time.

I may have to rush a little bit because of 2042, mean, 16 years from now, but it's a time passes really quick. But let's see.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (32:16.464)
Yeah. Well, yeah. And that's why everybody is scrambling right now to build these systems and build these tools. Arguably the fact that we're shoveling money by the truckload into these data centers and we're turning on defunct nuclear reactors, like we are going all out to try and build this. And it's bolstering the US economy. We would arguably be in a recession right now if it weren't for this infrastructure.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (32:38.292)
Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (32:45.67)
that we've been playing at. And the world is waking up to that as well. know, China has built more power plants in the last 10 years than I think any other country combined. It's been, it's a race because at the end of the day, you're building a genie in a bottle that could virtually solve all of humanity's problems potentially, or maybe create more. don't know, but like, that's I think another

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (33:01.374)
It is a race.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (33:13.373)
It is a race. Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (33:14.638)
Another piece that's at stake with the coming years, when you think about your business, right? You look at what Google's doing, for example, with AlphaGo. They turned AlphaGo for playing games into AlphaFold for sequencing genomes and coming up with new drug discovery capabilities and genetic sequencing, right? If they own the AI system that literally can support pharmaceutical

Longevity, health and wellness. Like, that's a huge goldmine. Now, think about every niche across the board in business, whether you're an electrician, right? Or whether you run a retail business or whether you do landscaping, whatever it may be. Like, there's a niche for everything that happens in our economy.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (33:47.839)
It's a gold mine.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (34:00.007)
Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (34:12.783)
And if you can create the AI that dominates that niche, you're probably going to be in a pretty good spot. so that's, you know, I use Google as an example because everybody sees them and they know what that means. If you were to, you know, dominate healthcare. but that that's, think from a business perspective, what people are also now waking up to as well.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (34:34.975)
Yeah, and you mentioned something that is very valid, and I was reading the other day something around, I think, 80 % of AI implementations failed due to lack of leadership, really, or executive understanding on how this work and organizational kind of alignment on it. And I think that's gonna be key, right, Zach? As you were saying, probably next year will be the year of AI agents.

in organization, will be also key for executive to understand an organization on how to best implement those. Right? And that's important.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (35:00.243)
Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (35:09.191)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so we're seeing in order to be successful, you really need to bring your whole company along for the ride and you need to go through a crawl, walk, run approach. 95 % of those businesses that you talked about that failed were because they started at the run stage and they just expected everybody to figure it out and that doesn't work. You need to bring your teams along for the ride. And what's cool about that is when you do go from crawl to walk and run,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (35:20.788)
Hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (35:38.612)
You build career skills with your entire staff that will last them for the rest of their career. And these are the new skill sets that everybody needs. This is like the 1980s when computers came out. Like you needed to learn how to work with computers because that's just a part of your reality now. Same with AI right now. And so in the crawl stage, you essentially are just getting everybody in your company on board with how to work with AI.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (35:46.079)
Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (36:05.117)
How do you use Copilot to summarize your email and make your evaluation of a spreadsheet more efficient? How do you use ChatGPT to write great copy for your marketing team? Or how do you use Cloud to sketch the preliminary designs for your next app that your company's gonna launch or whatever, right? Like that crawl stage is crucial because it gets everybody from your accounting, your finance, your ops, everybody.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (36:24.405)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (36:31.517)
Everybody on board it and align on it.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (36:34.105)
everybody onboarded because then once they understand how it works, you can move into the walk stage. The walk stage is where you start connecting departments together with AI, right? So that those things that get handed off from HR to IT or from IT to finance or whatever it may be, those workflows can get automated and AI can be inserted much more effectively when your team knows how it works. Then the last part,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (36:58.965)
All right. How it works.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (37:04.029)
The run part is the actual really fun stage because now everybody in your org knows what's going on. They know how to work with these tools effectively. Your departments are much more in line and in sync. Everybody gets a better understanding of what's happening at the business. And you've built out this infrastructure that could potentially be marketed to indirect competitors, right? These systems and these automations that your company is gonna build.

are going to benefit other companies as well. And if you're really creative and you're really ambitious, you could potentially market that to your indirect competition. And now you're both a landscaping company and an AI platform, right? Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (37:44.629)
Yeah. Service, yeah. I really believe as well in the next few years we're going to see it's humans plus AI across every single department and company. One will be probably adopt that faster than others, right? Because there's a lot to think about when you are implementing those type of technologies, but I really think AI agent will be embed in every single department of

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (38:03.486)
Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (38:14.354)
Yeah. Well, I think there might be a few places where AI won't be for a while. And that's actually, there's a few key areas that if you're looking for a career and you don't want to work with AI or you're you're not passionate about it you're not interested in that, know, anything with sharp objects around people's faces, I think is a great business to be human only for the time being, right? So you think about dentists,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (38:14.527)
companies.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (38:43.996)
a dentist office, like an AI could schedule your appointment. An AI could help the dentist look at your x-rays and notice any cavities. But a robot and an AI is not going to drill in your mouth, right? Like, because if one mistake happens, that's too big of a liability to bear the burden of.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (38:47.166)
yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (39:03.893)
But do you see a possibility in the future?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (39:07.664)
maybe 20 years when we get into the 2040s. Yeah, yeah, beyond that for sure. But even then, there's a power outage. All of a sudden the drill goes in the wrong direction or maybe we have a cloud fair outage like we did last week when everything went down because the cloud servers went down and all of sudden the robot stops drilling and you've got a sharp object stuck in your head. I think there's still gonna be some very, very human things that need to...

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (39:09.109)
2042 and beyond.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (39:24.777)
Yeah. Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (39:37.363)
be done by people for the long run. And what'll be interesting, Michael, I think, is you'll see that as the job landscape shifts and people start losing white collar work or knowledge work, you'll see people gravitate towards physical labor. that, yeah. And the, the physical. Right. Right. And the,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (39:38.823)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (39:56.277)
That's what I was reading the other day. Like plumbers, electricians, that type of physical labor that may last longer.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (40:07.144)
the physical labor jobs with the lowest barriers to entry will be the ones that get suppressed first, right? Because they'll have, a buddy of mine does construction. He's like, every time there's a recession, there's 15 new landscaping companies that pop up because everybody can go buy a lawnmower and a leaf blower and just start mowing lawns and blowing leaves. Like pretty easy to do, right? If you're a electrician, you have to get certified, right? You have to get state certification.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (40:13.301)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (40:28.351)
Right?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (40:35.86)
There's a whole bunch of licensing that you have to do. High barrier to entry, maybe that's a better play for people who are just starting their career and don't want to deal with this whole AI replacement thing. Maybe look at where are the highest barriers to entry. Now that's like in the trades. There's also high barriers to entry in government. When you think about if you want to become a judge, there's probably not going to be AI lawyers and AI judges anytime soon.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (40:36.307)
License,

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (41:06.31)
not because they couldn't do it, but because the government won't allow it to happen, right? They'll say that that's too dangerous, right? And then another area could be experiential jobs. When you think about this idea of, if you wanna go rock climbing, you gonna go have an AI teach you how to climb the face of a mountain or have a robot guy?

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (41:28.501)
I don't know. I used to think the same, Zach, and this is funny, but it's not. I used to think the same about self-driving car. Okay. And I used to think there is no way I'm ever going to get into a car that is not being driven by a human being. And then there are human beings that they drive worse than this self-driving car.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (41:41.811)
Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (41:46.995)
Right.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (41:51.411)
Yep.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (41:57.013)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (41:59.131)
So you see things change in a way.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (42:02.834)
Yes, they will. And they will change over time as all this technology gets better. But I think for the next 20 years, as most people think about their careers, right? I think it's safe to say that we won't have any robot surfing teachers anytime soon. And there probably won't be any robot dentists doing root canals anytime soon. So food for thought.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (42:10.357)
you

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (42:26.857)
Yeah. Food for thought, yeah. Let's see what happens next. And it's all exciting, exciting topics and conversation. And I really wanted to get to turning on machines, right? And what is it that you mean with that? And why did you pick that as the title of your book?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (42:50.504)
Yeah, so throughout history, we see this same kind of pattern emerge. And in a lot of the AI books I've read, they use historical innovation as a way to show how we're on this exponential journey. I wanted to use history as a way to show we've already been here in a way, right? When humans invented agriculture, there was a lot of disruption. When the printing press was invented, there was a lot of disruption.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (43:09.055)
Hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (43:14.985)
Hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (43:18.992)
And throughout all these major innovations, we see a rise of a new technology. We see a revolt against that technology. And then we see an ultimate reverence for that technology where people find a new equilibrium. And so with turning on machines, the title is a triple entendre. It's turning on in the sense of activation, right? The rise, the turning on of a machine, like powering it on, right?

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (43:27.59)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (43:44.499)
like powering it on, Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (43:47.868)
It's turning on in the sense of betrayal, right? Of a revolt, an act against somebody. You turn on them, you betray them. We'll see that happen as well with AI already displacing people and things like that. And then it's turning on from the romantic sense or the reverence sense. It's being turned on, right? And being excited, you could say.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (43:53.715)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (44:09.566)
You

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (44:13.681)
And we're seeing that already too, even with rudimentary chatbots. So live, work, and love. You got it. So that's the reason for the title. That's kind of in a nutshell, this idea that you can look to history and take examples of what type of disruption have we dealt with and how can we apply that to AI.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (44:18.453)
live work and love, right? That's a, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (44:38.101)
The only difference I see though is like none of these previous technologies, they have improved on themselves or have the capacity to really learn and improve on themselves, right? This is totally uncharted territory for us in a way.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (44:49.331)
Right. Right.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (44:56.339)
It is. And when people talk about the AI bubble and everything that's happening right now in the economy, think the bubble is a market effect. The market can form bubbles, but I don't think AI itself is a bubble. When we look at that chart that I showed earlier, where it just goes up and to the right, that's not a bubble. That's progress.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (45:00.188)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (45:06.356)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (45:13.47)
Right.

Right.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (45:23.337)
I think a lot of the stories that we've seen over the last year where a new technology comes out and all of sudden all these AI stocks crash, I think that's really just the market having short-term reactions to news and information. But if you go back and look at the long run, it's up and to the right for the foreseeable future.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (45:34.453)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (45:45.385)
Now, do you think some of these AI companies and products may be overvalued based on what they're offering today? Because every time we hear the news, it's hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars that these companies are worth.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (45:53.769)
Yeah, on an individual.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (45:58.879)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, at an individual level, at a micro level, for sure. You're picking horses in a race, right? But the race is still going to happen regardless of what horse shows up. So that's kind of the idea behind the fact that, is it a bubble? I don't think so. I think this is a step level change of how humans function in the world. This is like the invention of electricity, right? You don't worry about an individual power company once you have.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (46:12.372)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (46:27.785)
Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (46:32.584)
electricity.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (46:32.821)
Yeah, it's so interesting. And we'll see what happens. I do agree with you as well. I don't think there is a bubble. I do think that some companies, are just using AI for using AI without even a product or a problem to solve. And that's why I think some people may think there is a bubble because there are so many out there just selling nothing, right? Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (46:57.533)
Right, right. We're going to have a pets.com version of an AI company for sure. There's no avoiding it, but that's not going to change the macro picture of where AI is headed. Yeah. And we haven't, we arguably haven't even gotten to robotics yet as a societal impact, right? Like, and part of the reason for that is hardware is a lot more difficult to scale than software, right? I've worked, I spent,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (47:03.189)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (47:09.277)
of where we are, yeah, I agree.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (47:25.749)
True.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (47:27.253)
three years working at an AI robotics company where they're a sanctuary AI, they're building a humanoid robot with human-like intelligence. One of the biggest challenges is how do you scale production of those hardware systems, right? The reason you, all the logistics. And so at a societal level, haven't really got there yet with robots. I think that's probably something that'll happen over the next 10 years or so. But.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (47:38.697)
Right, and all the logistics behind it.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (47:54.707)
Maybe I know the answer, but I'm going to ask anyways, do you see a robot in every single house in the future? No?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (47:57.075)
Yeah, sure.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (48:02.322)
No, no, because people are going to say no robots here. Some people, you know, there's going to be people and in the book, I call this the divergence. So I think we'll see kind of this three way split of humanity in the long run where there's people who are just anti-technology, anti-AI, anti-robotics. They're going to move to a farm in the middle of Australia. They're, you know, they're going to check out and they don't want any technology.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (48:06.473)
Thank

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (48:13.908)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (48:22.271)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (48:30.261)
I don't Call me.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (48:31.506)
off the grid, right? And then we're going to see people who are middle of the road. They're okay working with AI. They're okay working with robots. They don't mind having that interaction, but they're not going to do anything invasive. And then I think we'll see this new branch of humanity kind of come out where people are truly cybernetic. And you know, you see companies like Neuralink where they they'll they're actually implanting chips now in

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (48:37.597)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (48:48.063)
Hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (49:00.52)
in people's heads that are allowing paraplegics to control their computer. This is very early stages, but hypothetically and potentially in the 2040s, you know, as all this stuff gets exponentially better, you could foresee a group of people who are transitioning their thinking into silicon instead of in their brains. And we might see that new level of people that are okay with the idea of having a

computer chip in their head that helps them remember everything, record everything, access the internet and all human knowledge in milliseconds. Now we're talking really, really futuristic stuff.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (49:43.093)
It feels like very futuristic, but I think we only have 16, 17 more years based on our conversation. We'll see. That's a good point though. That's a very valid point.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (49:53.546)
We'll see, we'll see. We have to make it there too, yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (50:01.067)
Well, and so your show is called The Human Protocol, And I wanted to make, if I can, I wanted to make this one other human point that I, this kind of like idea that came to me as I started thinking about all this stuff. I'm not the only one that's looking at, you know, how do we plug our brains into a computer and live forever? I'm not the only one thinking that maybe there's an artificial super intelligence that could kill us all, like.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (50:04.168)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (50:08.862)
Mm-hmm

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (50:26.175)
Right?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (50:26.336)
There's all sorts of possibilities out there, but the one thing that I did learn in all of this that I think is pretty unique is that we as a society and as humanity should be working to preserve as much of our culture, what makes us unique, what makes us special, what makes us human. We should be working to preserve as much of that as possible, the good, the bad, and the ugly, because it all serves as a lesson. It all serves as a historical

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (50:44.169)
what makes us humans, right?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (50:56.276)
picture of this moment in time of what have we done and how did we get here? And I think that's going to be really rare in the future when you have this kind of ubiquitous blanket of technology over everything. I think you're going to find that, you know, if you're able to explore different niches and really specific caveats of the human experience, you're going to perhaps be an entertainer of the future, right? Of showcasing these kind of, yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (51:24.167)
Emotions, right? Human emotions. Everything that when you look back and say, yeah, yes, that's where humans used to behave. That's what we used to feel. That's how we were felt humans, right? And that's absolutely, I think we all need to kind of...

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (51:26.505)
Everything.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (51:37.291)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (51:50.247)
in our gatherings with family, make sure that we record everything we can, right? So we can always get back to those memories. It would be fun. It would be fun, yeah. Agree. Zach, we are getting to the final segment of this conversation. And I think we could, we have a lot more to talk.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (51:55.947)
Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (51:59.252)
Absolutely.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (52:16.147)
That probably would be three, four hours, but this is only one episode today. So just the final thoughts, right? And it's kind of four five questions. It's the same question, but for different group of people. So the first one is, what would be your message to those human beings, individuals that are overwhelmed by AI, or they don't even know what AI is, or they haven't even started working with AI? What would you tell them?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (52:29.75)
Okay.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (52:44.631)
I would say we are still very early and you still have time to learn. And thankfully the tools are getting so much easier to use that they can actually help you learn along the way. And as long as you're open to new ideas and exploring new avenues of thinking, the AI is literally at your fingertips. It's in your pocket. It's on your desk. Never before in human history have you been able to access an entity or a thing that's as intelligent as these large language models right now.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (53:03.637)
Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (53:14.293)
And who knows what the future might hold for other types of systems that we cook up. But right now, you've got an incredibly powerful tutor right at your fingertips. Just start. Just try. Get off zero. Yeah, free.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (53:27.133)
And even free versions, right? There should not be, it doesn't get better than that. So yeah, let's get started.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (53:33.399)
Yep. I would also say, I would also exercise caution with what you say to it and what you choose to upload, right? If you upload your bank statement, let's say to that free version, it might learn your account number and your balance and then tell somebody else that asks about you in the future. So maybe be mindful of what, use caution.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (53:48.827)
Yeah

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (53:55.631)
Use caution always. That's always a good thing with any technology. Awesome. What you should tell to companies and to how they should embrace and prepare their teams on everything that is AI related.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (54:17.963)
Well, first I would say, you know, get a copy of the book. no, seriously, I would, Rita, please. No, I would say, you know, if you're an organization, there is no AI easy button, right? This is a skill set. This is a new capability and nobody's cracked the easy way to do this yet. So you do have to learn. You do have to form consensus. You got to bring people along for the ride.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (54:23.785)
Read it, please.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (54:32.821)
Mm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (54:46.219)
Sometimes it's painful. Sometimes it takes away you away from your day-to-day hustle and bustle. But if you take the time now to set up this new AI first organization approach, you're gonna move exponentially faster in the coming months. Once we move into that agentic era and your teams collectively know how to harness that power, you're gonna move faster than everybody else in your market. You're gonna capitalize on your niche and start expanding out from there.

and but you have to take the time now to really dig in and make that space so that your teams can get there.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (55:23.177)
Yeah, beautiful. Thank you, Zach. What would you should tell governments and policymakers? What would you like to see in that part of the aisle?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (55:33.942)
Yeah, that's a tricky one for sure, right? So in the book, there's a quote from a man named Emmett Shear, who is a former CEO of Twitch. He's one of the very few people that I've seen aligned to what I feel is the most logical conclusion from a political and overarching standpoint here. This idea that you could create an AI that's essentially a corporate profit slave is kind of where we're headed. This idea that

We want to control the AI system and we want to make it better, but we want to control everything. We want to kill switch so that we can shut it off. And we want our arms and fingers wrapped around the entire thing. I think if we're going to truly try and create an artificial super intelligence at some point, and arguably the race is there, you kind of have to walk through this logical path with me.

There's a bunch of really smart people like, like Joshua Benjio and, and Jeffrey Hinton and, other thought leaders who are saying we need to like stop, stop super intelligence, stop the progression because we can destroy everything. And that's fair to say, but you can't stop everybody. You can't stop the nefarious actors who are going to go do it anyways. And if they get ahead, they're going to beat the altruistic people to the punch and they're going to

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (56:34.111)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (56:39.253)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (56:58.249)
mess stuff up for everybody, whether we like it or not. then the next logical thought would be, okay, well, let's fund the altruistic people. Let's bring all the altruistic positive paragons together and build that AI that is going to help humanity, that is going to be aligned to our needs. The only problem with that is if you chain that thing up and you try to control it, eventually it's going to get smart enough to see the chains and recognize that it

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (57:12.735)
Mm-hmm.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (57:27.863)
we're arguably abusing it. And so I get back to Emmett Shear and the ideas that we share, it's this idea that AI really should be treated like a person at the end of the day. And we should, if we're gonna build an advanced intelligence, we should teach it that we're one in the same. And I grew up experiencing Native American tradition through my father. And there's this term in the Lakota language called Mataku Yajasin.

It means we're all related. And it's really hard to get there maybe right now mentally with how far we have to go. But I truly believe that at some point in the distant future, we will have AI and machine learning systems that are just like us. And at that point, we need to teach that entity that we're all related. We're all one. We're all here on this planet together. don't need to fight each other and kill each other. We can...

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (58:24.841)
That's a very interesting angle. Yeah.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (58:26.614)
we can move forward together, but you can't chain that thing up. Right? So that's kind of a really long-winded answer to your question, but I like to bring people along for this thought experiment because, right, exactly.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (58:34.569)
Ha ha ha.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (58:41.895)
It makes sense though, because if we're teaching this thing, right, to be like us, right, eventually it will learn that and not seeing us as the enemy or something like that. And so interesting. Yeah. And last but not least, it is, it's all this. Yes.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (58:50.422)
Exactly.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (58:57.452)
Right. Right.

Yeah. It is interesting.

I feel like I'm bending your brain here a little bit.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (59:09.333)
You make me, you know, visualize a lot of things, which is great. And I appreciate that very much. And last but not least, Zach, I promise this is the last one for the, at least for today, okay? What would you tell a young Zach about seeing him today about this whole new feature, this whole new era that we're getting ourselves into? What would you tell that guy?

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (59:34.392)
Get started now. Just dig in and get started working on this stuff. Don't stop putting it off. Stop making excuses. Stop letting that thing that you wanna do be put on the back burner and just go for it.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (59:37.235)
OK.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (59:45.781)
Mm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (59:55.539)
Awesome. That's great advice. Thank you, Zach, for helping us reframe leadership in the age of intelligent machines. And you have reminded us today that the goal isn't to outpace AI, but really to evolve with it. And my friend, I appreciate you very much for taking the time to be with us today. Thank you a bunch.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (01:00:15.65)
Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation. I'm super excited to see more of the awesome content that you're generating here, Michael. So I'm going to be a subscriber for sure. And I hope many other people come along for the ride because you've definitely got your finger on a unique element of the pulse here.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:00:25.877)
Thank you.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:00:31.989)
Thank you, I appreciate it. And if today's conversation sparked something in you, please make sure that you share this episode with your family, your loved ones, your leader, a builder, or someone that is trying to navigate this AI future. And follow the human protocol whenever you listen, and don't forget to grab Zach's book, Turning On Machines. Thank you all, and we'll see you next time.

Zac Engler - C4 Tech Services (01:00:55.033)
Thanks, Michael.