Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci
The AI Expert Who Will Change Your Mind About AI - Josh Tyrangiel
04 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of AI in today's society?
We got hypnotized by social media, where for the last 20 years, it kind of showed up on your phone. It was easy. Oh, it was fun too, right? But it turns out there were some harms. And those harms were known by the companies that made social media. Some of those companies now make AI. And so if you were a passive consumer of AI in the way we have been of social media, we're screwed, man.
AI is so much more powerful than social media. So you actually have to demand what you want from it. And you have to make a market for the good stuff. When I talk to the guys running the labs, They're working on technology that nobody has ever made before. It's volatile. They have huge competitors. They have trillion dollar caps that they're looking at.
They have investors who are saying, where are the returns? They have energy issues. They have computing issues. You know what they're not thinking about? Boy, I hope this works out great for the Republic. That's actually on us. And so we have to know what to do. We have to know what we want out of it. And then we have to insist that they deliver.
Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Josh Thuringell. The title of the book is AI for Good. Wow, Josh, I got to get into this with you. How real people are using artificial intelligence to fix things that matter. And so I am a believer in what you're saying. And so I appreciate you coming on the show because I think we have to proselytize this more.
But let's go to your career, if you don't mind, because you got an interesting career, my friend, your media technology storytelling intersection. And the book reads very breezy, Josh, so you know how to write. OK, but tell us a little bit about your background and tell us what drew you to the AI conversation, which I think is the most important conversation that we're having right now.
Yeah. So I'm, look, I'm a career journalist for the most part, but I grew up in an era where it was very easy to move between writing, editing, digital and television and documentary. And so to me, to stay in one lane is kind of boring. So I just kind of veer around the highway, wherever the most interesting possibilities are. I spent about a decade at Time Magazine. I
Literally did everything the place had to offer. I started writing the, you know, you remember those old three-inch obits they used to run on the front? So that was my first job. Ended up as the number two at the magazine. Went to Bloomberg for a while. And I think I actually, we actually met at Bloomberg many, many years ago. I was the chief content officer and ran Bloomberg Business Week.
Ran the TV over there.
Was Dan Calaruso there at that time?
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Chapter 2: How has Josh Tyrangiel's career influenced his perspective on AI?
Um, and ever since I've just been kind of going where the, where the best funnest opportunity is. Um, so in 2023, right when chat GPT came out, uh, a good friend of mine was then running the Washington post op-ed desk and the way he just, he called me and he said, look, it's a hellscape down here with AI. It's like, it's an information hellscape. We have, uh,
journalists who can't really quite figure out or explain the tech. We have subjects who seem to be racing ahead without telling us what it's good for, what it's doing. Our readers are furious. They're really angry that this thing is like showed up on their desks. And they offer me the chance to do a column for a year and just kind of chronicle it. And so, listen, I was like, sounds great, right?
Let me dive into the deep end of this. Um, long story short, after about eight weeks, I realized it was not all that different from writing about money because everybody was focused on raising and spending and their future valuation and very few people, you know, what they would do.
And I know you remember this in those first couple of years, basically they'd say, well, it's going to cure cancer or on the other side, no, it's going to end civilization. And I just don't believe that those extremes are really the outcomes.
And so what I ended up doing is going hunting for reality and trying to find people who care about the things that normal people care about, healthcare, education, government, human connection, and just diving in to see what could we do with this stuff? What can we do with it today, not 10 years in the future? How hard is AI to work with? What are the possible gains?
And I found a whole kind of AI counterculture of people who just don't get written or talked about enough. So that's really what the book is.
Okay. So, you know, we have Stanley Kubrick. We have the Terminator, James Cameron. We have Elon Musk. We have this, I mean, I mean this, did you read this Sam Altman article by Ronan Farrow? Oh yeah. Okay. So we have, I mean, we have a group of people involved in this thing that to me, I would worry about some of these people, you know, maybe not Elon because Elon's worried about this.
So that makes me comfortable, but I don't know. You tell me. So we're okay. All these different types of people, there's no existential threat.
I wish there were more types of people, to be honest. You know, there are four to six people who run the big AI labs. and who are really in charge of most of the advanced technology, that's not enough in my book, right? That's a concentration of incredible power in the hands of just very few people.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do journalists face in understanding AI technology?
I mean, one of the ideas behind Doge was, well, let AI run everything. Well, it turns out government is for people and by people, and AI misses a bunch of stuff. It can help us. It can make us more efficient, but not without a human in the loop. So the notion that you're just going to set programs free, I think, is delusional. I think it won't work. I think it creates dangers.
But the idea that you have this, the same way you use it as a sort of partner and assistant, that makes sense to me in these realms.
Thank you for tuning into Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. Let's say, you know, we get it right in the U.S. We have checks and balances on it.
What about our adversaries or what about somebody developing this sort of technology where they take the code from Anthropic and they hijack it and they bring it down to Africa or they send it to China? Worried about any of that? Oh, yeah.
Listen, I think and you saw the Trump administration's worried about it because they pretty rapidly changed course yesterday. So just to make sure the listeners are up to speed, the Trump administration put David Sachs in charge of both AI and crypto. David is a very smart guy. He's also an investor. And his attitude toward AI was, please go. Go as fast as you can.
And by the way, here's some of my money so that I can make some profit on this too. So that's all well and good. There's really good cases for why we should stay out of the way and not regulate. Get as good as we can faster than our adversaries. A couple of weeks ago, Mythos, which is Anthropic's most advanced code tool, comes out.
And it turns out, as you know, it exposes vulnerabilities in pretty much every possible cybersecurity route. And Anthropic voluntarily submits mythos to financial services companies, banks, the government. We can't let this kind of thing loose in the wild. Trump administration didn't insist on any of that.
Yesterday, I think they realized how fast this is moving and that it will be deeply unpopular if an AI product is in the hands of bad actors and takes down our financial system and takes away all the privacy controls that we actually need. And so they should. And they signaled, maybe we do need to regulate this because it's deeply unpopular. So I'm definitely worried about it.
Do you think Anthropic will resolve its situation with the U.S. government?
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Chapter 4: How are real-world applications of AI improving healthcare?
And so Cleveland Clinic, they did just one massive thing, right? There's a very talented doctor from an emergency room doctor, a very talented ICU nurse. And the two of them both were on what's called the sepsis committee. Inside Cleveland Clinic. Now, sepsis is the most deadly thing in America and around the world. It's an infection. It looks like about 30 other things.
We haven't ever been able to really fully cure it, right?
The crazy part is we can cure it. if we detect it. If we detect it, it's just an infection. You treat it with antibiotics, it goes away. If you find it too late, it kills you. And the way the nurse described it to me, she said, yeah, it's like you see a body rotting from the inside out. You can smell sepsis inside a body.
But because it looks like so many other things, it can often show up and kill somebody inside a hospital, right? Cleveland Clinic was losing thousands of patients a year, and it's one of the best healthcare institutions in the world. So they went on this mission. Some of it was training nurses and doctors to be on the lookout for it. And then they brought in a sepsis detection, AI driven tool.
You let the tool loose on its own, and it does a couple of things. It'll detect some sepsis, but it'll also beep all the time. It'll distract doctors from other care. And they're so busy in an ICU that they'll just turn it off because they've got other things that are more concerning. So for about a year, these two doctors and their teams worked with the AI team at a place called Bayesian Health.
They tweaked the algorithm. They tweaked the noises and the language. And a year and a half later, they'd reduced sepsis mortality by 40% in the hospital. And so that's a couple thousand people who are living, not entirely because of AI, but certainly AI played a role. And the recipe there, which is the same everywhere, is you got to have talented people who actually give a shit.
and are willing to do extra work to make sure that you get the best out of the AI. But, you know, there was a human being in a back room monitoring Bayesian when I was there. Lovely woman named Dana, looking at every time it pinged every flag and she would determine, is it right? Is it wrong? Give the machine feedback.
And Anthony, I mean, as you know, like a blade server isn't going out to help a patient, right? So if a couple minutes went by with a serious alert, she'd get out of her chair, she'd go to the bedside, and she'd call the doctors over and say, look at this. And they'd assess. And if it was right, treat with antibiotics right away. That patient is alive and saved. And oftentimes, no damage.
And if not... For me, I thought it was the most encouraging stuff that you've written about. I think that's the messaging that, you know, I did an interview myself. I'm obviously pretty bullish. I had Peter Diamandis on the show for his new book. And I'm obviously very bullish on AI and the prospects of AI. And even for some reason, though, I'm not ultra worried about the
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Chapter 5: What role does human oversight play in successful AI implementation?
The people are going to be the thing that gets you to the end zone.
One of the brilliant things about the book is that you're talking about the enhancement of human judgment. And you're talking about humans using the AI and not necessarily being replaced by the AI. And so let's say that I'm a human listening to this interview. what would you say to a human to get started?
Because by the way, a lot of people in my industry, I know this is sort of crazy, don't use it. I mean, I've implemented it throughout our organization and I use it in a lot of my stuff. It's also a great teacher. But some people don't. So how do you get them to reduce their fear and or intimidation?
Yeah, and mine too. I've got the number of people who have come up to me and said, I can't believe you use this stuff. The hard line, to be honest, is do you think a defensive crouch is a strategy? In what point of human history is curling up in a ball and saying, go away, ever done anything? And so I would say...
learn the tools, they're actually not hard to learn, 20 minutes a day for a week, and you kind of get a sense of what an LLM can actually do for you. You don't need to get advanced into agentic or coding, just understand what it can do, right? And then try to figure out like, what do I not want it to do? What are the behaviors I don't want it to do?
To me, the main issue is that we kind of got hypnotized by social media where for the last 20 years, it kind of showed up on your phone. It was easy. Oh, it was fun too, right? I mean, both of us were on Twitter going crazy, right? But it turns out there were some harms. And those harms were known by the companies that made social media. Some of those companies now make AI.
And so if you were a passive consumer of AI in the way we have been of social media, we're screwed, man. We're screwed. AI is so much more powerful than social media. So you actually have to demand what you want from it, and you have to make a market for the good stuff. So that's my main thing is like, when I talk to the guys running the labs, and I'm saying this with some sympathy,
They're working on technology that nobody has ever made before. That's volatile. They have huge competitors. They have a trillion dollar caps that they're looking at. They have investors who are saying, where are the returns? They have energy issues. They have computing issues. You know what they're not thinking about? Boy, I hope this works out great for the Republic. That's actually on us.
And so we have to know what to do. We have to know what we want out of it. And then we have to insist that they deliver it. And that means saying, yeah, I want this. I've talked to numerous senators, congresspeople. They have no idea what I'm talking about, right? You know that tech is not their thing. We have to insist that people actually run on these issues.
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Chapter 6: How can individuals and organizations effectively use AI tools?
And I'm sitting here lecturing at the top of the class like it's 1885. No wonder I'm losing them. And so she turned pretty much every lecture in her curriculum into a lab. She turned every quiz into a lab. And so those kids now, when they come to class, the computers are open because they're guiding them through a bunch of steps. But there's no silent note taking.
There's no question asking of her. She sets out the task. She says, these are your materials. This is the lab. This is what we're going to learn. Pair up. They talk to each other all the time. And before, they would never talk to each other in class. They're moving. They're experimenting. And the AI has actually scaffolded the whole lesson. And so she reinvented her profession on the fly.
One teacher, right? And that's not going to change the world. But that is the example I hope we see in all these realms 10 years from now is people say, oh, this is mine. This technology is mine. I'm going to make things that I care about better. I'm going to experiment. It's not going to be easy. But the difference between today and a much brighter future might be within this tool.
Really well said. All right. So we're down to the five words. Okay. I have five words for you. We pulled from your book. Give me a sentence. You ready? Five words. Innovation.
This is an incredible time for AI innovation. Incredible.
All right. We have really smart people and the AI is going to make itself better, right? Yep. The AI is going to innovate on AI. Technology. Now, when I say the word technology, what do you think of?
I think of advancing our culture and our society. Humanity. I think of people's best sides and the occasional worst sides. Extremes.
Yeah, no, I like the good and the bad. You know, I think of, I think it was one of the Google founders turned to Elon Musk and said that he was a species. I'm a species, I think. Josh, are you a species? Absolutely. Listen, we're awesome. Yeah, me too. We're fantastic. I would like to make more species actually. Okay. Government.
Fixable. It's fixable. But on the one hand, I think we've had 50 years. This is going to be longer than a sentence, Anthony. I'm sorry. On the one hand, we've had 50 years of creating this bureaucracy that isn't serving anybody. And I think what Elon proved is you can't fix government without bringing people along for the ride. And so I think it's fixable.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential risks associated with AI development?
You got to understand it. Get in the swimming pool. Don't be the last person into the swimming pool.
And don't be afraid. I think that there are people who, you know, to where we started this conversation, there are people who literally feel like they're going to open it and the Terminator is going to come out. That's not what's going to happen.
I got to hand this To a lot of my friends. We're going to get them to calm down, frankly. AI for good, how real people are using artificial intelligence to fix things that matter. Josh, thank you so much for joining us on Open Book today. Really appreciate it.
Anthony, my pleasure.