Episode #21 - Tad Smith

My next guest is Tad Smith, American business leader, former President and Chief Executive Officer of Sotheby’s, and seasoned media and entertainment executive. Tad Smith is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and Horace W. Goldsmith Fellow, and has spent decades leading major companies in media, entertainment, and global commerce. His executive career includes serving as CEO of Reed Business Information, President of Local Media at Cablevision, and President and CEO of The Madison Square Garden Company before being tapped to lead Sotheby’s in 2015. During his tenure at Sotheby’s, he repositioned the 18th-century auction house and ultimately oversaw its sale in 2019. Smith also serves as an adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. In this episode, Smith joins a wide-ranging, urgent conversation about artificial intelligence, creative work, and what happens when machines begin talking to each other at scale. He unpacks the implications of autonomous AI agents, emergent behavior, and the shrinking gap between persuasion and consciousness. The discussion moves through art, NFTs, human intention, and value in a world of machine-generated abundance, touching on religion, narrative, and purpose as anchors of humanity. Smith offers a sober but optimistic framework for thinking about the future, arguing that human-created meaning, experience, and connection may become more valuable, not less, as intelligence accelerates.