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RS Richard Socher Richard Socher Founder and CEO of You.com, an AI search company, and of Recursive, a newer venture built around recursive self-improving AI for scientific discovery.

“if you care about the outputs of an industry or a company, then you love AI. If you get paid hourly, you probably hate AI.”

The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck · AI Research & Frontier Labs · September 2026

“if you care about the outputs of an industry or a company, then you love AI. If you get paid hourly, you probably hate AI.” — Richard Socher, The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck

Context

Matt Turck had just asked about the industry's stock defense of itself — that AI is going to cure cancer. Socher doesn't answer that directly. He reframes the whole controversy as a split between people who own the output of a business and people who sell their hours to it, then argues the upside case for AI is that it pushes more people into the first group.

Listen to the episode → More from Richard Socher → More AI Research & Frontier Labs quotes →

Transcript

The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck Around 26:51 into the episode
Richard Socher

…in late stage trials, they actually within six to 18 months have multiple different drugs in like late stage two trials already. And by the time they'll go public, it'll be with like eight plus different drugs that are then also much more likely to succeed because we have better predictive models.

Matt Turck

…controversial, whether that's the job question or the data center question. The number one thing the industry keeps saying as a way to justify why AI is a great thing is AI is going to cure cancer. What is your sense of the reality of that claim and what it's going to take to get there? There's

Richard Socher

a lot to unpack there. Maybe at a very high level, I think if you care about the outputs of an industry or a company, then you love AI. If you get paid hourly, you probably hate AI. And so AI in the positive instantiation of this future is a huge force towards more entrepreneurial thinking. If you're an entrepreneur, generally you kind of love AI because it's making your things more efficient. You just get more done. You have to like, you have an unlimited list of things to do if you're a startup founder or just running a company. And to have an AI do many of those things…

Matt Turck

Is that precisely the point that cancer is just extremely complex and ultimately a system problem

Richard Socher

that AI

Matt Turck

is uniquely equipped to solve? Exactly.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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