From Knowledge Worker to Intelligence Worker: Why Human Judgment Matters More With AI - with OpenAI’s Brice Challamel

27:16Jeremy:like it's a principle that transcends, you know, the AI moment. Can you explain why it has become a principle of how you approach the thousand story objective? Why is this one of your core principles that you gravitate towards? Because my main stakeholders right now are large organization leaders. They receive tremendous pressure from the boards, from other leaders, from the media. they're under huge pressure. Like every survey we have, every interview we enter into, we meet with leaders who tell us pressure stories to understand, you know, get the signal and work towards the best possible value of AI in their organization and for their mission.

28:08And yet most of them are not in direct contact with the technology. Most of them don't use it on a daily basis. They don't take part in the decisions that the company makes about AI. Those decisions are most often made in another part of the company than at the CEO's table. And for that reason, they have this very uncomfortable situation of receiving the pressure and the pressure being in their name, while not having the knowledge and the comfort and the control that goes with daily work with AI or daily decision-making about AI. And in this way, by the way, Stéphane was an outlier and part of the success story at Moderna because he always was a power user of AI and he always wanted every AI decision to come to his table, which made him very different from, I would say, a lot of the other stories that I've heard out there.

28:59Jeremy:I think this actually is a really important point, Bryce, and I just want to drill into it for a second. I just saw the CEO of Axios recently wrote a piece. I think I sent it to you, Bryce. I know I sent it to Henrik. I think the title was something like Confessions of an AI Lab Rat. And his whole premise was the stuff that he's trying as a CEO. And just to kind of put a bow on what you're saying, and one, to pressure his answer with you, but two, just to reinforce it to the audience, you're saying, why is the mind game so important? It's because senior leaders are under incredible pressure and most of them don't have the relief of the augmentation and uplift that comes from AI.

29:40Jeremy:And so there's tons of pressure and no relief. They don't have the relief and they don't have the self-confidence that goes with it. If you've been using AI for three years straight and at home and at work, and you've been part of every decision from the moment it was an API to the moment there was a product like ChatGPT to the moment when agents were, you know, came of an agent. Then if you've been at every bit of that story, you're pretty much on top of your game. You understand what you're dealing with. But if you're not, that pressure meets another pressure, which is the pressure to come up to speed with something that is going very fast and that you've not onboarded in the initial stages and that you're not using yourself.

30:24Why do you think some people, like your old boss, why do you think some people naturally kind of like get attracted to that newness and why do you think some do not? This is such a great and profound question. I'm not sure that I know the answer because I have also seen some senior leaders who are normally very attracted to technology novelty but did not jump on the AI bandwagon. Senior leaders who are very good at doing macros in Excel spreadsheets, who are very good at the deterministic type of technology, the one that is right, the one that you know you can trust, and who would say, all right, but AI just said you had to glue the cheese to the pizza, right?

31:10AI is useful to talk like a pirate, but I'm doing real work here. And those were not idiots, and those were not people who were shying away from technology. It just was not their breed of technology. Their mental model of technology was not there for this. In a way, I think what says me is that I have children and cats. So I have two children, two cats. Don't say cats to the BarkBox guy. Come on. I mean, like, I don't know if we should cut the interview now. I don't know if I should just make it go.

31:42Jeremy:The fastest way to get Henrik out, to chase him out of an interview, is to mention cats, Bryce. You know this. Come on. This is his trigger word. He love it. Kitten, all right? So let me clarify this. They are almost always by my side. I think maybe the reason why people don't trust AI is get promoted to them by the cat guy. I mean, that could be the whole answer. This is so good. I will say this. There are more cat guys than you think, Henrik. I'm not sure that you made other friends by saying this today, but I will read it to you, all right? I, for one, love all the cats and all the dogs and all the companion animals that everyone has because they are very precious to us.

32:21And by the way, we had this discussion earlier about we only become human because of human society and that's the sign of consciousness. And I had a moment of pause because I think my cats have a form of consciousness and they're not part of the human society. They are part of the cat society. But I want to say this. The relationship to a cat is very special because you can't explain things. You can always talk to them and reassure them with the sound of your voice. You can indicate, you can mimic. There's a number of ways to communicate. But this is not a deterministic systemic relationship. You can't call the cat and he comes, right?

32:55Jeremy:Just to be clear, what you're saying there, Bryce, you're making a call back to the kind of leader who's comfortable with a kind of relationship and a kind of technology. Maybe they aren't thinking in terms of how they relate to a pet, for example, which they can't communicate in a deterministic manner with other than, you know, through maybe brute force training methods or something. Yes, and what I'm saying is that if you enjoy iterative relationship building with children and cats, which is very tentative at first, requires a lot of humility, is going to fail as often as it succeeds, but it's going to take you to a great place, then you're probably more ready than not to welcome AI in your life.

33:38Jeremy:Yeah, yeah, beautiful. If you are the type of person who loves Excel macros that you can spend hours fine-tuning an Excel macro that's going to do exactly what you intend for it to do, you're surrounded by people that you give an order to and they understand the order and they execute it exactly as you meant for them to, and that you have mostly built around yourself a deterministic ecosystem of responses, then probably AI is going to come as a juggernaut of alien intelligence, which you're going to have a hard time completely figuring out. And so that's why your question gave me pause, Henrik, is that it's not so much anymore a question of are you a technophile, are you a nulite?

34:20It's more a question of what is your relationship to signals and interactions and other sorts of intelligents and the way that you can adapt to them and learn with them and grow with them. Because of course, both for the kitten and for my children, they are not stable either. They evolve with time. My children today are 12 and 14. it is not at all the same type of interaction as in there were seven and nine. And that also has, in its own way, prepared me for the evolution of AI, right? Because I live in a constantly evolving world. Is that the reason why increasingly the people that I hear get to work at companies like AI are not just the classic engineering type with the engineering mentality, but it's philosophers and artists and people who understand how to social engineer themselves through a business environment.

35:18That's right. And I'm surrounded by them at work, by the way. There's a wonderful person, I won't name names because, but there's wonderful person sitting in the decks next to mine who's an artist. That's their trade, their craft and their know-how. And they're bringing an artistic perspective to some of the things that we are building with AI, right? And they are mind works in a completely different way than almost anyone else that we're surrounded with. And we do have people who are interested in philosophy, in human behavior, in cognitive psychology, in social dynamics. All of those things are going to come in play, right?

35:51They already are in play at so many levels. They're in play to understand AI and how it works, but also the impact it has on us. And when we were first discussing about the dangers of AI, Everyone was talking about the paperclip juggernaut, right? That you tell AI make paperclips and then suddenly it's destroyed the Amazon forest to just create fuel for a factory that does paperclips. Which I also understand is a completely misunderstanding of the original story, but let's not get into that rabbit hole. But there was the fear at hand there, right? Like being overwhelmed by agent tick or AI loops that get out of control.

36:27And what happened really, and it was the first thing that really deserved our attention in terms of real major and systemic threat, was the influence on people's mental health. Which was not at all something that we heard in the first months of AI models being released. And there are some very dramatic cases that are currently being litigated. And it breaks your heart when you read them, period. Like if your heart is not broken, this means you don't have one. But this is the tip of the iceberg because there are a lot of other cases that are not litigated, but they are still happening with people kind of losing footing with AI or kind of going into some strange space where they are, you know, in some form of danger.

37:12And then there's the whole other part of it. The immense number of people who are reclaiming their mental health thanks to AI, who are having the thoughtful conversation that they could never have had with a friend or with a peer or with a family member that are suddenly finding a way to express their most intimate thoughts at the quiet hours in the middle of the night when they are awake because of them and no one would be there to listen. And I have shared this in an article, so I'm okay to share it here too, but this is the case of my own mother. My father passed from Alzheimer's two years ago now, almost.

37:47and the last months of my father's Alzheimer's journey with my mother as his main caretaker was an ordeal for her. And that's a time when I invited her to AI, which has started to be reliable enough and predictable enough in the way that it interacts for her to simply state how she felt or ask for feedback because sometimes it's 2 a.m., 3 a.m. She was living in another country and I wasn't there to be with her. and she called chat GPT Gepetto you know like in the and because GPT Gepetto and Gepetto was there for her and a number of things like how to repair the modem for the internet because my dad used to do this and he can't do it anymore how to understand this thing that he said that she can't make sense of and just her own self-expression and she told me a number of times that AI had been a lifeline to her in that moment of her life And that is still is to this day.

38:45And I wrote an article about this. It's about the three women in my life, my mother, my wife, and my daughter, and how they relate to AI. And because those stories, they are the reason why I love AI. They are the reason why I want...

39:00Jeremy:They don't get as much airtime, right? I mean, we hear about the tragedies a lot more than the triumphs. And that's a shame. That's not a good news article. Because, of course, the news are not great or good organizations. They are businesses that need to make a profit. And it's hard to send an article about someone who went through the difficult last months of their spouse's Alzheimer's, as well as you said, a topic about AI just, you know, caused the death of a number of teenagers, whether it's right or wrong, because I doubt it's only AI, but that's for the justice to decide. and everyone probably has their own responsibility but you're right, the full spectrum is happening and what I wanted to say is that it's pretty extraordinary that no one had that in mind when the first AI models were released I heard of about like a dozen different fears of how AI would impact the world none of them related to the huge spectrum of how this would influence our mental health and that's why we need cognitive psychologists and behavioral experts to work with us because it's a quintessential part of the AI environment to understand this.

40:07I heard from somebody, and I'm not sure this is true, but what I heard is that one of the reasons why we're getting closer to fusion energy is because you need to be able, the issue were previously that you need to have a force field when the two electrons kind of like collide. And the force field was very difficult to keep kept intact. and like a balloon, if suddenly it was an impurity, then suddenly it would break. Now, I don't think a lot of people, when they think about the wonders of AI,

40:38Jeremy:they think about that we might get clean, abundant energy out of it. Because obviously it's a fusion conversation, but it's led by AI. When you tell the story about your mother, one of the things I reflect on is that it seems that we, as people who work a lot with AI, have failed in visualizing for people some of the good things that could happen, that is believable, and that feels present to them. Back to your point about the CEOs, right? So I get the sense that there's a lot of fear out there now about where society will go, what it will mean for people's jobs, and all those different things.

41:19And there are very few stories of helping people who are senior that feel alone, and how it helped them or help you come up with like new discovery, like clean, abundant energy.

41:32Jeremy:Is that what super abundance is about, Henrik, as an aside, or Bryce, do you know? I was just looking. I feel like Bryce, maybe you recommended that book. But to me, it's interesting because I agree with you, Henrik, that we have failed to paint a great picture. And if it's true, the super abundance is about it. One of the celebrated thinkers of our time has dedicated an entire book to it. And still, we don't know many. I don't know. I'm just like, I'm yes-ending you. No, but it's, I love this topic because there are a number of thinkers of this, of the abundance economy. And they have a huge point, which is that products are made more easily, that ideas flow more efficiently, and that we now have the incremental capability of sharing knowledge and intelligence with AI, right?

42:18when I scan my Slack and email and document messages with an AI chief of staff, an AI agent. And I draft the replies with these agents by dictating my perspective on most things and let them do the right thing and organize all the thoughts in the right fashion and matter. I am no longer a knowledge worker. I don't receive and read and scan knowledge one piece by one piece by myself. And I don't write every word of every email that I sign anymore myself. this would be knowledge work. I'm an intelligence worker. I received an intelligence briefing on the surface of all the signals that I need for work.

42:56And I produce what I hope is an intelligent recommendation and perspective on all those signals that I redistribute throughout the organization. And this is an elevation of the surface of work that I think is one of the defining changes of our lifetime, right? As defining as going from writing to printing. And in this way, we are part of something that is bigger than us and that is going to support the abundance economy.

43:27Jeremy:I just wrote that down. It's so profound. From knowledge worker to intelligence worker. Yes. I don't think I've ever heard it put that way before. But what's so nice with the story that you mentioned is that I think it has human agency. I feel a lot of the big story that are told, universal basic income, for example, it takes away agency from humans. And so I think what most people hear is that, A, we're screwed. So that's kind of the one story. And the second story is, yeah, but we're not screwed because like they're going to do it all, but at least they're going to give us all the bacon they make.

44:03And I think what I like about the way that you position the story is not that they are making it and you're just sitting past it receiving, but you're actively becoming a better version of what you want to do. And I just don't hear that story a lot. And it's the opposite, Henrik. It's the opposite. Because the number of messages that I read and that I couldn't read before, like you mentioned with the school messages, right? And the number of messages that I send and workloads that I influence have exploded in number and really deepened in their nature. And in this way, my influence is way more consequential than it has ever been before.

44:44My agency and my impact are much more consequential than they were before AI, where there was only so much knowledge I could read and so much image that I could write. And so it's not just that we're not losing agency, it's that I think we are having a surge of agency alongside a surge of cognitive elevation, of the type of work that is expected from our brains and from our experience. And this dual surge is putting human right back at the center of things.

45:20Jeremy:So one thing that I want to drill into this word agency for a second, We talked with Dan Pink about it recently. You know, he's a great student of human agency. Do you have thoughts, Bryce, about, because I don't think it's necessarily a given that this moment will result in greater agency. I think it can. It can also, I like to say, if you want to be lazier than ever, there's never been a better time to be alive. And if you want to create more value than ever, there's never been a better time to be alive, right? It's, it's both. So do you, especially as a father and as a manager, do you have tactics or mindsets that you employ to cultivate agency in others?

45:58Well, whether you think there will be more agency or not, you're probably right. Yes. We're back to the mind game.

46:08Jeremy:How do you think about your kids or think about your team? How do you help them be more agentic? Yeah, this is not something that we get to. This is not a spectator sport. Life is not a spectator sport. We are a part of this. We make decisions toward this. We get to choose. You're right in the way that you say, maybe if you're lazy, this is the best time in your life to be lazy. But if I'm honest, and this also is going to somehow bring closure to the abundance economy conversation. What abundance are we talking about? Like two out of five humans are starving. Three out of five humans have difficulties accessing food or latrines.

46:51In developed countries, most people have very poor financial health and physical health. They are challenged by the legal system, by tax system, by obligations, by the amount of work that has come back to them, which we call shadow work out of the evolution of the modern economy. They can't possibly understand the notion of abundance because they are completely outside of the realm of abundance. And I cannot possibly accept or understand, but we think that the era of work is over as long as there are people who struggle to eat or who struggle to stay alive or to keep their children alive out of just not having the modicum of support for their financial health, for their food security, for their physical health.

47:41so this is not a world that is about to be out of work and the abundance we're talking about i'm grateful for it among the circles of society that are going to benefit from this but it needs huge distribution it needs to benefit the whole of mankind like if we don't mean this when we say ai beneficial to mankind then i don't know what we mean anymore and uh i think 80 percent or so of the human population has access to a mobile phone so two out of ten people will simply never hear or be able to use AI to begin with because they don't even have a device for it. As long as we don't create one and distribute one, then that's going to be a while because it needs electricity, energy, recharge, you name it.

48:22And for the eight out of 10 people that are left, what is AI going to do for them? How is it going to show up in their life to create even the semblance of that abundance we've just been mentioning? So I want just for everyone who, for us, you know, as a group of friends and thinkers about this topic and for our audience, people who are listening to this, to realize that there's a duality here to the abundance economy. And there's a duality to the topic of is AI going to beat me out of work? As long as everyone is not safe, healthy, you know, in good financial care, in good food security, there's work for everyone on this planet and I can't get to rob my season, get to it.

49:00Jeremy:i would just say the two as a corollary i'm so inspired we have to almost just like just pause there and then go next chapter of the conversation because there's nothing to add there but as a corollary to your comment whether you think you can or you think you can't you're probably right i i would i observe this is true regarding ai as well whether you think ai can or whether you think AI can't, you're probably right. And in that sense, I feel it's almost like a rush rock, you know, like it's, you say what's there. And I know people who go, oh yeah, I can't get AI to blank. And I go, yeah, it's because you don't think it can, or, or even worse, Bryce, you don't want it to.

49:42Jeremy:And if you don't want it to, my AI has this annoying tendency to perform to one's level of expectations. And if you don't want it to, or you don't think it can, it won't, you know, I get emails from lawyers, for example, or, or, you know, accountants, whatever. And they go, yeah, I can't get it to do this. And I go, I can, do you want it to, or do you want to decide that it can't do it? Because if you already want to decide it can't do it, then you shouldn't be surprised. It doesn't. I think you hit the nail on the head there, Jeremy, that the mind game is not one in the mind. It is one in the heart.

50:18Because it depends on what moves you. You need to want things to succeed. I find my inspiration in a lot of different spaces, but I find it mostly in friendships like ours, in the relationship with my children, for whom I want to inherit a better world than the world we live in today. And they will be a part of building it too. This is going to be on them also. There are also players in this. And I've traveled a lot. I've met so many extraordinary people in my travel. And I found in all of them, in all of those relationships, a deep grounding and a sense of duty to them. And because not all of them have as much privilege as I've had to even be on this podcast, to work at OpenAI, to have access to energy, to devices, to AI and all this.

51:15and I owe them to invest my privilege into their well-being. At least that's what moves me. And this is why I always start with the principle that yes, this is possible and we're going to find out how. Even if I can't figure it out right now, we need to find how.

51:35Jeremy:Invest my privilege in their well-being. That's beautiful. I'm definitely worried that we will live in a world where there's going to be people inside the walls and outside the walls, right? Like I think knowing both of you, I think you'll echo that it'll be best to live in a world with no walls at all. We already live in this world, Henrik. I agree. If I think one of the most, another thing that I want to, another aphorism of sorts, the vast majority of our fears have already happened to us. And this is why we fear them because we've been there. and we come back with scar tissues or with realizations.

52:20I met the other day a group of artists who were very afraid about the future of their crafts in the world with AI. But then I listened to them and asked them questions about the last 10, 20, 30 years. It's been a pretty rough 20, 30 years for them of continuous challenge to exist and to surface in a very noisy world with their art and to be able to make a living of their art. And in this way, the fear they project on AI is something that has already happened to them in an increasing way over decades. And because they are in that momentum, what they see ahead of them is the escalation of it. It might be that AI is a curse for artists.

53:05It might also be that it's a boon for artists. You see movies that are blockbusters right now, like Obsession or Backrooms. most of them are almost already in this very interesting dual relationship with AI because they are born out of AI tools and technologies, and yet their authors denounce AI and AI's impact on society. Here we are having the dual perspective in this environment that they couldn't do what they're doing without AI, and yet they mean to make a profound statement on the danger of AI for society, or which they do every time they have a chance to interview. And I think that this is representative of what most of us have.

53:48We have been through hardships. Anyone who is in this life has been through hard times. And this is why we need to be kind with one another because everyone around us is going through a silent struggle that we don't know about. But it's really, it's there. And if you ask them and spend time, you will learn about it. and they tend to project it with the novelty. The novelty of AI is, of course, feeding their imagination, which is a survival mechanism, and it's feeding it to the point that they fear the continuation, the expansion of hardship that's already had to them.

54:21Jeremy:It's a projection. It's a scapegoat. It's something to be worried about that I can name rather than kind of this just malaise or ambiguous existential dread without a name. Because if you take the top science fiction topics and you rank them in order. Maybe the number one of them is alien life. And then right behind it is artificial intelligence for decades and decades of science fiction novel writing. And there it is. It's happening. That's, you know, that's actually a really fantastic rebuttal, Bryce. I mean, the point being, you know, if you say, you know, somebody says, hey, science fiction has been contemplating this dystopian future.

55:02Jeremy:Absolutely. Did you know it's the, I mean, it's credible, right? science fiction makes it credible because it's the second most cited villain of all time. Do you know what the number one most cited villain is? Aliens. And we should, and if, if it stands to reason that therefore we should be even more concerned about aliens, that argument holds water. And by the way, I'm hesitant to say argument because I don't mean that I was yesterday, I was in Chicago doing a couple of keynotes and a woman in the, in Q and a is always fascinating. and she asked me about her kids. And one of the number one questions I get, almost always from a mother, by the way, but a mother will say some version of, I am finding immense value from AI in my work and my kids are being told at school that their mom is cheating.

55:48Jeremy:And I find I'm having to hide, you know, and they think that I'm a millennial who just wants to burn the earth. And what I found myself saying, I said, ma 'am, I hear this question a lot. And I agree that teachers are putting in our kids' minds, you know, challenging things. But I said, the thing that I've learned is similar to what you just said a second ago about the heart and the mind. The mind game is one in the heart. It's not an argument that's going to win this person. It's love. It's kindness. You know, I spent I think I told you this, Bryce. I haven't told you this, Henrik. A couple weeks ago, I spent a full day in Central Park and Washington Square with a handmade sign that I wrote that said, AI is amazing.

56:27Jeremy:Change my mind. and I sat and talked to human, real human beings for eight hours in the blistering heat in the middle of New York. And I was not there to debate at all or, or to even retort. But what I learned was one, these are wonderful. Everybody who counts me, they're wonderful people from all walks of life. Bryce, to your point, even artists, you know, I got, I have people who are walking through Central Park with all of their dolly of gear talking about how AI is destroying their profession, but how also it makes it way easier to plan shoots in the park and coordinate because there's so many people, you know.

57:00Jeremy:So it's complicated at the very least. But I realize with each of these people, they have come by their beliefs, not rationally, but as a matter of the heart. And the way to, I believe the way if one were to attempt to engage these people is not a matter of reasoning. It's a matter of caring. and I don't know exactly what to make of that except say I think perhaps a lot of people who are in our audience who listen to this show probably have naysayers or critics that are perhaps vitriolic and antagonistic and I think it's perhaps maybe just it's a useful realization for me and I'm curious here if you all agree or have additional thoughts to conduct oneself with a sense of compassion a sense of empathy, a sense of care because if it becomes an argument, it's already, the battle's already lost, so to speak.

57:56I completely agree that you're going to get another of my phrases, which is listen before you think. And it's hard because we're constantly thinking and we're constantly trying to get our thoughts out one way or the other. And I love the way you've done this because you've made the time to listen before you think. It's also what you're doing on this podcast and I celebrate you and commend you for it because I listen to all the episodes and I'm always amazed by your ability to listen, which is so rare and so precious. And the act of listening, and I mean really listening, not just hearing, but listening intently and with a desire to understand another mental model than your own, another perspective, another background, is probably the path to understanding, which is a path to compassion, which is a path to love, right?

58:43because you can't dictate for people lead with love, right? Like, wait, how?

58:49Jeremy:But at least do the first step, which is to lead with curiosity. And if you lead with curiosity, you're going to find that there's a million life stories around you and that people who are highly antagonistic of AI care. They would never antagonize if they didn't care. Yeah, that's really well said. They would simply push off and move on to the next conversation. Yeah. Because they care, you should pay attention. Because something is happening there that is deeply meaningful to them and that therefore should be deeply meaningful to you. And you're among the minority of people who genuinely care about this and have a perspective about this.

59:27And making the time to listen to them first, it kind of lowers the emotional temperature in the room because they feel that, all right, they are hurt. They're not antagonized or not, you know, brutalized. You know, when we convince people, it comes from the Latin cum and vincere. Vincere means to tie with ropes, right? Cum vincere, tying with ropes. You're a convicted felon because the attorney has made so many demonstrations, has the proof, the witnesses, the demonstration, your fingerprints, that you're tied with the ropes of their argument and you're convicted, you're a convicted felon. So convincing and convicted is the same word, right?

1:00:05every time you're convincing someone, you're tiling them with the ropes of your arguments and making them feel like a felon. This is no way to drive a conversation. And this is going to lead only one place, it's them, even if they cave, feeling brutalized and ashamed, and it will come back. Like you will hear of it again in a different form because no one who feels this way is going to let it go.

1:00:30Jeremy:We should have Henrik Dave McCraney on the show. He wrote this book, How Minds Change. And he actually has, he's studied canvassers, the only successful canvassing organization in the history of political kind of movement. He has studied them. He did a deep ethnographic study to understand what are the mechanisms of how minds change. And it strikes me that that could be a really interesting, and Bryce, maybe if you want to be a co-interviewer, you could. But as an example, he said the publisher really wanted to call it how to change mind. And he said he wouldn't do it because it's not about coercion.

1:01:05Jeremy:It's rather a study of the observation of how a mind changes. And I think that may be a topic of interest for our audience. It's just under if you really want to engage compassionately and lovingly in this moment. I think being a student of some of the stuff that Dave McCraney has written about could be cool. So, Dave, if you're listening, we want you. And this is one of my nightstand books, right? No way. Are you serious? Yes, that I've read. Okay. So then you get to be a special guest co-host. I'm going to reach out to Dave right now. I would probably never be saying these things and discussing this with you this way if I hadn't read it.

1:01:42And of course, because it's been influential to me also. And I'm so glad that you surfaced it because I love these books. And I think it's very important for us to understand how minds change. why sometimes they are stuck in the process of change, what we can do about this to look at precedents. Everyone changes their mind at some point in their lives. In the Western culture, almost every child believes in Santa Claus until they don't. So everyone has had to change their mind. And in the process, to kill a dragon, which is to accept and acknowledge the fact that you've been lied to by the people who are the most precious to you.

1:02:23but in exchange they gave you a sense for the wonderful for the marvelous for the magical and in this stance they have planted in you a seed that whether you think this is possible or not you're probably right because if you want to believe that a magical being brings wonderful things to your home then for a while you're going to believe that this can happen you're going to make a mental construct around it and this sense of magical is worth the disappointment of learning that your parents cannot betray you. It's a part of - They've given you something truer than truth. You guys are saying that Santa Claus does not exist?

1:02:58Jeremy:And that's a wrap. And that's a wrap. Bryce, you're a very, very fascinating person. I'm always getting very inspired when we have these conversations, so thank you. What a treat. I mean, come on, Henrik. Who are we to get to talk to such amazing people? Okay. Can I just start with one thing that he ended with? I love it. If we don't mean this by abundance, then I don't know what we mean. We talked about people having access to food and sustenance and meaningful work. It warms my heart to know that such people are in the middle of AI conversations right now. I think one thing that's fascinating is when we talk to people like him who have had such a success getting AI into Moderna and obviously now, you know, trying to do this a thousand full time, they tend to be pretty philosophical.

1:03:50They don't come in and saying, you know, here's five ways to get into your organization. In fact, they're deeply philosophical. And I think the first thing that I took away, which I think is profound, is this thing about listening before thinking, not only because I'm really shit at it myself and isn't, you know,

1:04:08Jeremy:it's reminded that I have to be better at it, but also because that's so often, I think, people who teach AI and work a lot with it. They walk in and to his point, they're kind of like, they feel they need to convince people. And so not only does it seem to be a bad strategy, because nobody who already feel that they have like a specific point of view, it's probably being convinced by somebody who wants to convince them. But to his point, they probably have all these other things going on in their world that is much more important for them. Their company is about to get merged you know they're about to spin off to a different division whatever it is and this idea of using chat dpt is just not that important to them right now but obviously then he tries to explain to them is that all these things that they would like to achieve can be achieved faster if they embrace this new technology but i think the first thing that is profound for me is just the almost spiritual nature of conversation that people who are successful often have.

1:05:11And I feel embarrassed for this podcast because we like to be very concrete, like what is one thing that people can take with them tomorrow. But I think the more that we do this, the more we are kind of realizing that a lot of these changes are not about AI at all. They're about people and they're about visions for the future and all those different things. And I'm trying to figure out how to wrap my brain around my urge to be very concrete with what seemed to be a practice which is much more about almost teaching people a pedagogy of thinking that leads to this adoption instead of kind of just teaching people what the result is.

1:05:52Jeremy:Yeah, yeah, the mindset, I mean, the mind game, I feel like is actually the perfect kind of title for this episode, because even though it's only one of the principles that he kind of introduced, and one of the even fewer that we ended up discussing, it feels like you're right. And I don't know if it's actually mind game or even if perhaps a better title or just kind of banner for our reflection purposes is the heart game. Because it strikes me that, that it's actually not even about the mind so much. And to your point about the kind of, um, you know, a quasi religious element, that's not to say anything about faith or, but, but rather this kind of sense of, I would say when you say religious, what I hear or what I resonate with is this, it's a reverential approach.

1:06:37Jeremy:There's a sense of reverence that I feel is marked with people like Bryce and people who are in the trenches and trying to help others. It's not irreverential as opposed to, call it pragmatic, you know, to kind of, I don't know if that's the spectrum, but how do you think about that? Yeah, I think I like the word pedagogy a lot, you know, that in the school systems, there are schools like Montessori. And when we hear of Montessori, we understand that it's a way of teaching kids different methods. It's a worldview. Yeah. And we don't necessarily, we realize they have to learn that two plus two is full and other things.

1:07:21But Montessori, for example, have like, well, here's the framework of how to think about it. And it's a very philosophical approach to teaching. it's almost that when it comes to integrating new technology or new ways of leadership there is of course leadership books and stuff like that but in many ways pedagogy have like many components it have the tools like we don't use plastic in the classroom I think it's one of

1:07:47Jeremy:the Montessori thing we use things that can break so kids understand when they drop a plate it'll break but there's also kind of like very concrete things they have to do and I think in the many ways Some of these conversations we have with these leaders that are profoundly great of introducing and using AI to achieve their goals, they seem to almost have a pedagogy approach rather than a tactic, if you like. Does that make sense? Yeah, I'm trying to think of a pithy way. Is it, you know, doctrine, not dogma? I don't know. I'm just kind of playing. the other thing that i thought was interesting and maybe that's not an ai thing either but like that people see a technology that lands in front of them as a progression of the past that they've just been through so let's say the last x amount of years has been tough for people because of covid because of the polarization because of world dynamics there's all these different things that's going on.

1:08:49Now, if you then land a new thing, then your natural inclination will be, this will be a extension or an acceleration of the feeling that I already have. And people were nervous before AI dropped in 2020 and then kind of get popularized maybe in 22, 23. And so back to the point about the heart game and where we should meet people. Of course, people are anxious because they were already anxious. And now this new thing that is alien to them is introduced. And so they are just kind of like extending. And so I thought it was very thought provoking of how do you look at where people have already been?

1:09:33And how do you then, as they walk into the future, help them see that they are not, this is not a spectator sport, but this is one where they can manipulate.

1:09:45Jeremy:Well, and just building on your comments about kind of imagining the future, it was an epiphany to me to think about sci-fi and how it shapes our perceptions and how AI is kind of the second most, you know, vilified element of sci-fi. And interestingly, how the first most, We give no valence whatsoever to aliens. I mean, I realize there's conspiracy theories and all that stuff. Nobody is really seriously thinking about aliens destroying the Earth, for example. But if they actually brought that, now if they're going to the dark side of the moon and we know there is water, let's say they came back with kind of like something soon because that seemed to be not completely unrealistic.

1:10:31Jeremy:You're saying it hasn't crossed the kind of reality threshold that AI has. The adjacency that you're talking about. Okay, yeah. So it's not adjacent possible yet, whereas AI is now adjacent possible. The garbage can theory was bouncing around in the garbage can of science fiction, and then suddenly it came out and became near. And so suddenly you had the problem, like the humans and the technology kind of interfacing. um the only other thing i mean i could just recap the entire episode but the only other thing is a note to self here i do want to i'm going to reach out right now to dave mccraney i i had no idea that bryce was a fan of dave's i know we've had dave on the show or we did a joint episode in the early days of the podcast so it'd be really fun to have him come and talk about his expertise and then i also know he's working on it i i haven't checked in with him in a while but i know he's working on a new book on on genius and so it could be interesting to learn about that but But yeah, I'll take that as an action item.

1:11:31Specifically in the context, I think, of Bryce's point about leaders that are afraid of not necessarily technology, but this specific type of technology. The thing that is not binary. It gives you a weak, weird answer. It always answers. And you don't know if it's a right and wrong one. It is a reflection back to you. And so how to make people like that comfortable with this technology would be a fascinating conversation to have with him because he might have an idea of how to introduce that concept.

1:12:13Jeremy:Coming soon. Shall we say coming soon? Coming soon. Dave, you're listening to this. We love you. Can't wait to talk to you about this. All right. As always, thanks for listening to this podcast. We appreciate your engagement. We appreciate your emails, your questions. If you have guests that we should talk to, we want to talk to them. We've, especially if you look at the past few episodes, right, from a cognitive psychologist to a leading researcher to, you know, to a book on governance to, I mean, across the spectrum, we're trying to talk to as many different voices and areas of expertise, even far beyond AI as possible.

1:12:47Jeremy:So your recommendations mean a lot. Hit us up, make an introduction, share the love. and with that there's only one thing left to say is that right henrik or two bye-bye bye-bye