What You Can Learn From Asking AI for Brutal Honesty About Yourself - with Bestselling Author Daniel Pink

22:51Jeremy:And then you vary some control condition and you test against the desired outcome. So for example, newsletter title, expected click-through rate based on whatever you're going to do, right? Okay. Then what the Karpath, if you run the auto research loop, then the AI agent will vary the newsletter title and then remeasure click-through rate. If it's better, it will then call that the better version and try to iterate to make it better. If it's worse, it will say previous is better. Now let's try a different iteration. But I think Karpath, he does it like 20 times and sometimes it'll take an hour, but it will clinically, so to speak, if you've commissioned a series of sub agents, think about what's the underlying reasoning of the hypothesis, what outcome variable am I attempting to improve?

23:35Jeremy:And obviously it's, it's easier with something like code where the code either runs or doesn't, and it runs more quickly or it doesn't. Right. But you can do it with a lot of non kind of code tasks, a lot of knowledge work tasks. But to me, it's a great example of, it's one thing to say, um, generate 50 alternatives. It's another thing to say, here's what my historical click-through rates are, deduce the principles of what actually works for my audience, and then run these 50 that you generated per the principles against my two and rate them, right? That's also possible, but it's really actually knowing that it's possible.

24:11Jeremy:And so to me, it's really valuable to recognize that even some of the stuff that folks say is mundane, you're just like a turn of the screw away from turbocharging. That's about what you're describing as a much smarter way to do it. I mean, you know, like the method I just described to you in, you know, two years will seem incredibly primitive. Can I ask a selfish question? I'm doing a bunch. I said it, then I do. I'm building a bunch of agents. And through your work, you work with a lot of different people. And obviously you were, you've been a speech writer at one point. And so what I was curious about before this call was if you were to give a agent the ability to articulate its thoughts better back to me, like you're coaching basically an agent on how to communicate thoughts to me as a person.

25:10How would you go about giving that advice to the agent? What I think I would do, I would give it, you know, 10 or a dozen pieces of writing or interviews or something like that, that I like, that really speak to me. And then I would say, what are the common denominators here? What are the common elements here? Help me understand why I like these things. Essentially deconstruct my taste here. And then based on that deconstruction, then reconstruct something new along those kinds of principles. That makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure how well it would do on that, but it might.

25:47Jeremy:No, it does well. And the important thing is for you to interact. Like I had Ed Catmull on the show a long time ago. I asked AI, hey, what are 10 titles? Comes back, eh, nah. I go, I like number three and four. Can you do 10 more like that? Comes back kind of mid, as the kids would say. I go, I like number 13 and 14. Can you do 10 more like 13 and 14? And then the third round, I go, what's wrong? Oh, I didn't say why. so then i said i like number 13 because of alliteration i'm kind of a sucker for alliteration okay and i like number 14 because there's a veiled uh you know movie reference in number 14 could you take alliteration and movie references as design criteria and generate 10 more the next 10 honestly y 'all i couldn't choose between them but it was because i like whereas in the previous instance i'm saying read my mind imagine why i like that's a good point yeah in the next case I actually say, here's what I think now, leveraging what I have told you, try again.

26:45Jeremy:And so it's at every stage, I mean, to your point about sparring, the other half of sparring partner, Dan, is you've got to throw some punches too. You've actually got to push back. And people sometimes get mediocre, but they're like, yeah, I can't do it. It's like, well, if you're working with a human collaborator, would you just be like, Dan sucks. I'm going to ask somebody else. Or would you say, no, no, no, hang on. I don't think you get what we're talking about here? And that's where I think actually both parties need to play more of a sparring role. It's a great argument. I mean, you know, one of the things that these kinds of examples show is that our own thinking is often invisible to us.

27:24And this offers a tool to make your thinking visible. And it seems like making your thinking visible is a way to strengthen your strength in your thinking. Yeah. What is... Well said. You said you just wrote a conventional speech. What is your advice then for young people today in this fast-moving AI world? I mean, I didn't go full spectrum on advice for young people here. I was really focused on a group of art and design students and trying to show them it's like, you guys have an advantage in this world because it used to be that people could have a lot of ideas, but not the capacity to execute it.

28:09And now you can have the capacity to execute just about anything, I mean, in a remarkable kind of way. And so the scarce ability is less that capacity to execute than the capacity of discernment. You have to know what's good and what's not. And I think that people who are trained as artists and designers know that. That's kind of part of the, it's inculcated in being a designer and being an artist. You begin to develop your taste. You begin to understand that in the world, some things are good, some things are less good, and that distinction matters. And actually having a point of view matters.

28:49like great artists, great designers, they have a point of view. And so a discernment and a point of view is incredibly powerful. And so if you look at the dynamics of art and design education, that's what it's teaching. You're building a point of view. You're building a set of practices. And that is not true in a typical kind of college and university where you're not doing that kind of thing. The other thing is that AI trains on other people's work, but if you're an artist or designer, you're training on your own work. And one of the things I think about taste is that taste is developed much more by creating than consuming.

29:25And I think there's a general advantage. Certainly, I don't think there's any doubt about this, that actively creating is better for you than passively consuming. I think that's true. I mean, just as a general proposition about human flourishing, that has got to be true. So this is really focused on art and design and the importance of taste in a world where executing anything is possible, but not desirable.

29:55Jeremy:Can you talk for a second about the idea of agency? We're kind of flirting with it a little bit. But to me, there's this incredible, if I think about, if Henrik were to ask me the same question, you kind of go towards taste, which makes sense given your audience, Dan, or the audience of the commencement speech. For me, I think a lot about agency as the attribute to be developing, taking initiative, being proactive, being, as my friend and colleague Bernie Roth says, being a cause in the matter rather than an effect. Yeah. Can you talk for a second about, because right now, this moment, it can either be highly agentic, maybe pun unfortunately intended, it can be highly agentic, or it can be highly kind of a loss of control.

30:40Jeremy:You have studied agency for decades. What are ways of honing or strengthening the instinct around agency? Set aside AI. I'm not asking you an AI question. I'm asking you a human question. How do we strengthen our sense of human agency, given that I think it's actually all the more important now? I would start by not putting the entire onus on the individual because individuals operate in context, they operate in situations, they operate in environments. And you want to be in an environment that gives you plenty of autonomy, but not essentially boundless autonomy. So some kind of bounded autonomy is the best way to have the agency.

31:23So I think that's one thing. The other thing is that on agency is that you want to be able to take chances without getting clobbered if it doesn't work. and could you say a little bit more about that well i mean if you if you look at i mean you have a lot of companies i want to i sort of go back to the idea that even though agency is a concept that we often attach to the individual and we should attach to the individual um individuals operate in context and the context shapes their behavior and their capacity to exercise agency more than we might realize so there are people in companies companies oh we We admire failure.

31:59Failure is good. We don't big. And then somebody makes a mistake and they get their ass kicked because of that. And so everybody around says, OK, this is not true.

32:07Jeremy:So therefore, what I'm going to do is my job is not to get fired. My job is not to get in trouble. And and so that's extremely that's extremely agency thwarting. You know, one problem with agency is that that word has been hijacked a bit by the poked folks out, Jeremy, in your part of the world. Same word. Well, I mean, you know, high agency has become a kind of a tech bro coded phrase for people who are, you know, willing to work all day and all night. And it really means it really means something else. What does it mean to them? It means that people should be like them. Oh, interesting. I think that's what it means.

32:52Yeah. It means that people should have the same values that they have and the same work schedule that they have. And if you're not, you're not high agency. And, you know, another way to look at agency is basically, I mean, are you self-directed? Are you self-directed? Are you pursuing things for your own sake? Do you have your own set of values, your own point of view? Are you powered by your own engine? Or are you waiting to be powered by some other engine that somebody hooks up to you? or you're a sailboat, you just go wherever the wind blows you. And so I think that that's what it is. But, you know, I mean, I believe that agency, self-direction, that kind of personal autonomy is fundamental to the human condition.

33:36That in many ways, the essence of human existence is that we want to be self-determined, that we want to have some sovereignty over what we do and how we do it and who we do it with. And in many ways, this offers sort of an overly simplistic but still useful explanation for much of human civilization, is that much of human civilization, much of human history is about one group of people trying to control another group of people, Right. So if you think about agency, autonomy, self-direction, the opposite of that is control. Right. And so people have only two reactions to control. They comply or they defy.

34:21But I don't think the highest form of human existence is to be compliant. And I don't think it's to be defiant. I think it's to be engaged. And the way that people engage is by getting there under their own steam. And yet, the whole history of the world is about one group of people trying to control another group of people. And those people sometimes respond with compliance and other times respond with defiance. But those are darker chapters of the human story rather than the brighter chapters of the human story.

34:50Jeremy:Your own steam is such a cool metaphor. I would say as an observation, I mean, Henrik and I both have young kids. I know you have kids that are a little bit older. Yeah. I deal with, for example, I mean, certainly at school, but college students say at my church, like I had a couple of students who are studying CS come to me at my church and they're saying, you know, it's hard to get a job right now. And I found like maybe because of the entrepreneurial bent, I found myself saying, well, you don't want a job. You want a customer, you know, And I realized while I'm talking to them, what they mean by job, and I'm curious if there's an intersection here with your idea, let me look, a bounded autonomy versus full autonomy.

35:27Jeremy:They've never been in a position to self-direct. Like they've had professors, give them assignments. And in a weird way, what they need with a job is a boss to give them the next assignment. And so to me, and like one of them said, you know, Roblox hasn't been developing anything new. And I said, why don't you make an app? And think about a student's mindset. Okay. I said, why don't you make an app? He goes, no, they have way too many applicants. I said, no, I don't mean write an application. I mean, make an app and show up to the company saying I solved the problem. And if I had been speaking Swahili, Dan, it wouldn't have registered any differently.

36:04Jeremy:It was, and he said to me, he said, I've never thought about just solving the problem that I see. I only think about applying for jobs. What do we do for young people right now when, I mean, to your point about self-direction, you know, and the opposite of self-direction, I love that you said it's control. In some ways, they've been conditioned to seek environments of control. Yeah. And is that a good thing? I mean, is that, is control actually bounded, you know, autonomy? No, no, control is, with control, the boundaries are too tight. You know, again, I think that what you want is you want a wider playing field, but not necessarily an infinite playing field.

36:48And, yeah, no, I mean, I do think that this is another topic altogether, you guys, but much of American schooling is built around compliance. There's no question about that. There's no question about that. Can I throw in, here's my last question for you, which might take it a little bit adjacent to where you are. I think there's a lot of reasons why you can be very worried of what's going on. And I heard somebody do a commencement speech the other day about AI and the kids were booing, right? I saw that. So there's like this kind of going from kind of like being nervous to be a little bit angry.

37:25One theory I would post is that we have not been very creative or very good of visualizing or bringing to life a vision of the future with this abundance that resonate with people. So increasingly, I'm asking people like, hey, what does this look when things go well? And the other day we talked to a professor at MIT and one of his points was, hey, this is actually going to be this beautiful time where you can change careers at all times. So you should be able to, even if you pick the wrong thing to start with, kind of do stuff that you're more passionate about. And I know you've been writing about that, too.

37:59Do you have an example of a world in the near mid-future where things go right with all this AI that you sometimes articulate? I could possibly paint a vision and it would be wrong. But I think directionally, I think we know what it looks like. and I'll give you an analogy on this. I think what it looks like is the world where AI is woven more deeply into our lives is a world that is going to be a little bit better than today. It's not going to be, you know, so, I mean, and the reason I say that is this is why I, I mean, I've seen this movie before and I've written about this before. I'll give you one example of it.

38:46So 27 years ago, 26 years ago, As you'll recall, we were at a pivot point where we're entering the 21st century. You know, it's a big, scary thing. And what I did, in fact, you could probably see some of the books. I just saw them the other day. I have some of the books back. They're somewhere on that shelf over there. And what I did is I went to eBay and I bought and I started looking for a bunch of books about projections that people were making for the year 2000. And what you had, the distribution was basically like this. 40 % incredible dystopia. As you know, famously, there were Paul O 'Reilly saying, we're going to run out of food.

39:29There's going to be mass starvation everywhere. that by the year 2000, you're going to have, you know, four oligarchs presiding over this scorched earth of 8 million impoverished people. All right. So you have this like, if we don't all die in a nuclear holocaust, all right, that's like 40%. All right. Then you have like 50 % are like, no one's ever going to have to work. It's going to be mass leisure. You're going to spend your entire days having sex without consequence, eating everything that you want. It's going to be this incredible utopia. And then you had 10 % saying, it'll be a little better.

40:08And what it is, it's a little better. I mean, I think that 2026 is a little better than 2000. I mean, you're just thinking about it in terms of healthcare. Think about all the diseases that used to be fatal. Things like prostate cancer used to kill people. Breast cancer used to routinely kill people.

40:27Jeremy:In that time, you had in China, you had tens of millions of people leaving poverty. I mean, so in 2000, I had dial-up internet. Now I have in my pocket a supercomputer connected to everyone in the world. It's a little better. I mean, are there problems? Yeah, there are huge kinds of problems. We haven't done anything about climate change. Inequality is going to kick our ass at some point. There's still human suffering out there. But you know what? It's a little better. Well, yeah, I agree. So that's my that's my hot take, Henrik. I'll take that. I like it. Some people would beg to disagree. Some people would say, talk to me, talk to me.

41:09Jeremy:You know, no, I'm not in that camp. But as I kind of as I pulse check the public discourse, I don't think it's consensus that things are a little bit better. I think there's a lot of people who feel like things are worse. and I wonder whether the goalposts keep moving, you know, and whether we are perpetually in a state of relative to my imagined ideal, you know, things are worse. But to me, I agree with you, I mean, it's unequivocally, it's hard to, it's hard for me to paint the picture of why they're worse. And yet what I do hear is some people think things are worse, you know? There's, there is zero question, Jeremy, that some people think that things are worse.

41:49And that is a cognitive bias that some people have about basically the sort of the golden, the goldenness of years gone by. But if you put them into a real life situation where you had to go back. Right. Right. They're not going back. You wouldn't do it. That's not to say that what's happening now is perfect. I'm just saying that it's better. And 25 years is a blink in human civilization. And even then, if you just take the number of people on the planet in those last 25 years who have left poverty, that is a huge win. If you just take things like in this country, in our country, 25 years ago, in the year 2000, it would have been political suicide for a politician to say that two men or two women should be permitted to marry.

42:49And now it's the law of the land and is becoming uncontroversial. I had the same argument with a same discussion with my dad. He's 87. I grew up in Denmark. and I was making the point that the world was, you know, like a much more fragile place. And he reminded me that the first time he tasted an orange was when a soldier, you know, a British soldier threw it to him from the tank after Denmark got liberated. Right. And I was like, OK, here's the point. I do think sometimes we do forget that.

43:20Jeremy:It's all relative. What you have to do is you have to put people into a scenario where it's like almost like a Black Mirror episode. and say, you have a choice. All right. You think that the, you know, let's go back even a little bit further. When we talk about like make America great again. All right. So let's go back to the 1950s. All right. You want to make, you want to go back and live in 1950s America. That's great. Here you go. If you're black, you probably do not. All right. If you're a woman, you want to go back and you're a woman, you can't get a credit card under your own name. You want to go travel somewhere?

43:59Air travel is limited and prohibitively expensive except for the elite. Life expectancy? 20 years less than it is today. So you can go back there. But I think that if you actually weigh the actual facts, rather than comparing this kind of golden nostalgia that you haven't thought about carefully.

44:23Jeremy:It's a vibes sentiment versus reality. and I think the problem is you know it's like those who don't know history are destined to repeat it I think there are a lot of folks who just who don't have an actual gut check with the past that they are idealizing yeah I will make sure that we stop on time because I am the time keeper of this podcast and so with the wise word that you know the future will be a little bit better. Uh, yeah, I think, I think we'll hold the, it's the perfect place to stop. Thank you so much for coming. I really, really appreciate it. It's really interesting. I appreciate it.

45:00I really, it's super interesting. Uh, some of the questions you had about that exercise, um, that I hadn't thought about before. So I really appreciate that. There you go. Cool. All right, guys.

45:09Jeremy:Yeah. Thanks for making it. Thank you. And we're back. What a fun conversation, huh? Really, really was great energy. Really, really enjoyed it. I will start to throw some stuff in the spirit of high-paced energy. I thought bounded autonomy is interesting. I've heard it from other people before. I never really thought about it as much, but this idea about creating boundaries for yourself to make sure that you don't have completely decision paralysis. It's kind of a paradox of choice. I do think that is an interesting thing, right? And I think that goes from everything from investing to finding ways of compounding value.

45:47So focusing a little bit by creating boundaries around what you do and stuff like that. I thought that was really interesting. The other thing, and then I'll pass the mic, was I do think that there is an interesting about having a point of view when you talk about it in the context of artists. But I like the idea of having courage enough to say, I don't have data to back this thing up, but I do think this is what's going to happen. He obviously at the end made this passion plea of like, you know, the future, the near future is going to be a little bit better, right? And I think that is actually like a little bit of a superpower today, both for business leaders and for innovators and entrepreneurs, but just not to be an asshole about it, but just saying, hey, I have this thing that I believe and this is this.

46:30So what do you think?

46:31Jeremy:Yeah, on that point about taste, I thought that was really well said that taste has developed through creating, not just consuming. I think that's a very underappreciated point. And so it's worth consideration. Taste is created through creating or cultivated through creating. The other thing on agency, talking about bounded autonomy, I love the point. It's one of those points that I would never actually think to ask. And I'm so glad he took it this way because the realization that agency is not merely an individual characteristic, but is recognizing we operate in context and context really matters.

47:10Jeremy:You know, I met, uh, years ago, I taught a class with Laszlo Bach, who was the head of people ops at Google at the time. And he, you know, probably the youngest person in the U S with the most remit across a major company like Google. And he said something fascinating. He said, uh, and they do, they do extensive data analysis on people's performance at Google. As you might imagine, they call it people operations. And he said, one of the things they've discovered, we'll love this. What do you do when someone is underperforming? you don't fire them you move them yeah he said because people tend to revert to the mean and if you they're underperforming it's more often than not a function of their context than their ability provided a certain kind of you know recruiting standard he said and by the way what do you do if someone is a star performer you never move them because if you move them they will revert to the mean.

48:08Jeremy:And it's a really fascinating thing. And so anyway, I know I've known, I mean, I taught that class with Laszlo probably 15 years ago, and I've known performance as a function of context. I've never thought about agency as a function of context. I think agency is an individual thing. And to me, it's actually beautiful as parents, as managers, as teachers to say, what is the environment I am creating here? Am I enabling agency to flourish and recognize it? Because it's really easy to make agency. It's about that person, their low agency or their high agency, rather than pointing to the environment.

48:46Jeremy:This context is not conducive to agency. I think it's actually a really radical and powerful refrain. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. Anything else? I mean, you know, we kind of got to, Dan said this, and I really liked this quote, you know, our own thinking is invisible to us. And that I think is that one, you know, if we go back to the top of the episode, we, we brought Dan on because we saw his video and we said, oh, that's a super cool use of AI, like for personal discovery. Let's talk about that. And then we kind of went all over the place, which I knew we wouldn't. I'm happy we did.

49:19Jeremy:But going back to that starting point, part of what's valuable with that sparring partner and that kind of modality of collaboration with AI is it's not what AI says, but how it makes your own thinking visible to you. It's sometimes in reaction to the wrong thing. Like if you think about it fully, half of the things that he said were illuminating were things he disagreed with. So it's not just AI said this and it's brilliant. It's it helped me realize I disagree because of X, Y, Z. And it wasn't until I had something to react to that my own belief was evident. I think that's a really powerful thing there.

49:56That's awesome. I think that concludes the episode, sir. I think, what should the secret word be?

50:05Jeremy:Code word? Autonomy. Agency. Bounded autonomy? I like bounded autonomy. Or context? I don't know. But we will send people a book if they send us a little note on what they liked and the disliked about the show. And then they get a free book. Yeah. You send a love note, you get a book. Send a love note, get a book. Or hate mail. I will take something that people don't like either. Gloves. As long as they say in the hate mail, gloves off. I prefer something that's nice, though. Send us hate mail. But really, send us love letter. Oh, send us a love letter, but mostly the latter. We welcome all mail, especially fan mail.

50:48Jeremy:And then, bye-bye.