Why Fear Kills Curiosity and What That Means for AI - with Chantel Prat, Cognitive Neuroscientist

25:43Chantel Prat:I'm also thinking really intimately about what I want to be better at and what I don't care about being better at for these reasons, because we are going to co-adapt and whatever we off put, it should be. I think as a discerning human, I think we should think or learn and acknowledge our biases in these areas because I think it interacts with expertise. Do I think this is something that AI could be better at than I am? And certainly there are plenty of spaces for that. And is this something I don't care about being good at? So like that to me is the magic place for if we're going to offload something.

26:22Chantel Prat:And I think otherwise it's like, what do I want to be better at? How can AI help me be better at something or even point out areas for me to be better? But I think we have to be really intentional about the difference between being better and doing better because if you're you know like if you're let's say for instance something that doesn't happen anymore but used to on social media you'd like make a post and then they would say do you want this to be funnier and i would be like how rude like absolutely you think you can be funnier than me, number one. Number two, do I want my post to be funnier or do I want to be funnier?

27:02Chantel Prat:That's different, right? Because if you start just writing boring stuff and then letting it make your post funnier, I think that takes, maybe not, maybe not. Maybe you could be like, oh, that really is funny. And I learned from that. And now I want to, you know, write a post more like that. But I think you have to think about whether you want your thing to be. Well, I mean, one thing I really resonate, Chantel, with this idea of you're not going to get better at whatever you give the AI, but it's it's worth asking, what do I want to be good at? And for example, I mean, I remember when we were in high school or college, you know, it was a bragging right.

27:37Like how many phone numbers you knew. Right.

27:40Chantel Prat:I don't know if you remember this. Like and it's kind of it's a proxy for how close is our relationship, like whether I know your phone number. Right. Yeah. Right. I no longer pride myself on whether I know someone's phone number because it's irrelevant. And I have offloaded that task to a smartphone and it's no longer that there was a point in my life when I did want to be good at it. It's no longer needful. But to your point, the question isn't, am I better at knowing phone numbers? It's, am I better at being in touch? Right. Am I, if I'm more in touch with people whose numbers I know less, then actually that's a net benefit, right?

28:13If I'm less in touch, then maybe I should devote more attention to memorizing phone numbers. I don't know what the corollary is.

28:20Chantel Prat:And I think it also goes to like navigating, right? It was so funny because I just had this whole conversation with my daughter who's visiting about, I don't know why, somehow like a picture of a dance club in the 70s came up. I have no idea how this happened. The idea that people dance in the 70s, that was before my time even. But then in my time, how did we arrive at a place? How did we navigate to a place without a phone? Right. And how did we do all of these things? And I realized that navigating is a skill that to me is like if you do wind up in a new place and you don't have cell signal or your phone dies and people like forgot how to ask for directions or you have no sense of where your hotel is compared to where you are.

29:08Chantel Prat:And that's interesting. And not everybody cares about that. And some people do. but almost everybody is worse at it than they were when I was a kid, you know, and I told her about like me one time trying to, I was skipping school and trying to wind up. I'm from California. I was trying to wind up in Santa Cruz at the beach and I went the totally wrong way and wound up at my dad's house in the middle of a day where I was supposed to be in school. And it was like 200 miles the wrong direction, but I thought these things were familiar and I could navigate in this way and I could learn, but it was just, it's different, right?

29:42Chantel Prat:So it's not that that's better or worse. I just think that we want to be mindful about what we want to be good at and what we want to do well, because those are not like produce well, because I don't think those are the same. On the thing on skills, maybe this is just an ask for help. So I've been going through a bunch of organizations that are trying to kind of re-found themselves, you know, to become AI native. And one of the things we've done is we've identified where do you need humans in the loop and where do you need specifically humans in the loop for that organization? Because it could be humans in the loop somewhere else, right?

30:15Like, so for BarkBox, for example, we make dog toys. And one of the humans we need in the loop is a guy called Derek. He make, you know, he's the head of design and he makes what we think is BarkMagic. He makes these crazy, quirky, wonderful toys that no AI algorithm can make right now, right? And he and his team.

30:33Chantel Prat:Like this? Like my radish? Oh, my bark box radish. Oh, that makes me so happy. Thank you, Derek. Oh, thank you, Derek. But here's the question for you. And here's like the thing that's a mind knuffle for me. The more that I'm trying to define what is it that Derek can do, almost the less I need Derek to do it. because the sheer fact that it's difficult to explain what his cryptic mind kind of creates, it makes it more difficult for me to get an AI algorithm to do it. And so how should I think about this thing of the uniqueness of the brain when there's like this urge and need for corporate America to define everything, put OKRs on it, put K...

31:21I've literally had this conversation where somebody asked me, what's the KPI of Bark Magic? and be like, you can't freaking define it. That's the whole point. Do you understand what I'm trying to get to? It's like, we have this interesting thing where you say, what do you want to be good at? It wouldn't be magic. Exactly right. So we have this interesting conundrum now where I might have things that I feel that I'm good at, but I might not have the vocabulary to really explain it. And the better I become of explaining it, the less it becomes a unique quality of mine.

31:52Chantel Prat:Yeah, I would say I think this is a problem I can't solve for you because I'm really in it. So I can give you my version of this is like there was an experiment that came out in Nature in 2025 where a large language model was trained on like 60 ,000 pieces. Maybe this is an extreme example, but I believe it's my lane of the same question. So they fed this large language model experimental data from 60 ,000 different tests. There are 625 tasks and tons of tons of undergraduates doing these tasks. And the model could learn to predict behavior better than any existing cognitive model designed for one type of task.

32:42Chantel Prat:And so I found myself asking the question, like, this model does not think. It really does not have. First of all, it's doing dramatically different tasks in exactly the same way, using exactly the same statistics. So whatever it's doing, it's doing, it's behaving like a human using a very different mechanism that humans use. But I found myself asking like, OK, I'm a cognitive psychologist. So my whole jam is understanding the black box, understanding how attention and memory and procedural knowledge, all the things you can and can't describe, limit, constrain and support human behavior. But I'm like, if we don't need it, you know, if this model can do it without those things, am I trapped?

33:29Chantel Prat:Is cognition real? Is that like we don't know what consciousness is. Right. So, like, I think that what you're describing is like, how do we think about this thing if we can't quantify it? If we can't put it into words, which is now the coin of the realm, because the large language models know what they know by reverse engineering our language. Is it important or what is it? And so then I'm like, wait, you know, so I'm in the I'm in the world. in this sort of identity crisis where it's like, am I the human mind trapped in the, is the human mind even like useful? Is it limiting? You know, so I'm sorry.

34:03Chantel Prat:I can't solve that problem, but I think I understand it. It sounds like at the very least, Derek has job security. And I think that's really the important thing. You definitely have job security. I had one question that I wanted to go to, like a totally different direction, but Henrik, do you want to wrap this one? You started talking after I, I think. No, but if somebody, I mean, I tell you like, Like after all these years, when somebody shows you a product in the wild, it still like makes your day. Like it makes me so profound happy. So like I'm still a little high over that. So thank you so much.

34:34No, take it away. So I didn't even know that about you, but I've been a BarkBox subscriber for maybe eight years or seven years.

34:44Chantel Prat:So I mean, and I'm tailoring that to my dogs. And I know if they're a thrasher or a this or a that. So you got the individual differences in there. We got a three dog subscription. Oh my goodness. And they know, like now it's a bark bag. It's not a bark box, but they somehow know when that thing comes in the door, they're just like, and I love it. It's because don't you spray it with like bacon perfume, Henrik? Isn't that right? That's how they know. We did used to do that. Okay. So, so I have, I have kind of a different direction that I want to take this. I'm very curious from your kind of psychology expertise and what we were talking about earlier, kind of going back to the beginning of the conversation with novelty, with learning.

35:26And I wonder if there are differences in regards to age. You know, and you mentioned that like a Holland days at 51 or is very different than a Holland days at 15. So I keep thinking of this hitchhiker's quote, or I'm actually going to read it. It's from Douglas Adams, who's the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote this in a nonfiction piece. He said, and I quote, I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies as people. One is anything that's in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary. It's just a natural part of the way the world works.

35:57Two is anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Three is anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things, which is just perfect, right? And I wonder, could you talk about why that is from a neurological perspective? And then what are what are the and then maybe we could just have a conversation on what are the implications of that on humans today in the age of A.I.? But like, why does that progression happen from its normal to its exciting to its against normality over the course of, say, 40 years of life?

36:32Chantel Prat:I think your intuition and what a brilliant what a brilliant quote. I think your intuition that it's about eggs Benedict is correct or that it's related is like, you know, of course, like when you're born, you have no statistics, you have no expectations. And so if it was there when you were born, then it's in the water. And I think this is the same thing also with like it might have been there is like when we have cross-cultural experiences, right? Or we meet somebody who works differently than us. Like if it's true of us, if it's true of the environment we inhabit when we're born, it's in the water.

37:05Chantel Prat:it's taken for granted. It's normal. But, you know, up through sort of our teenage and becoming years, again, you could actually probably plot this. So I would go like one step nerdier, if you don't mind, and say that it depends on the type of input. So things like wavelength of light, for instance, you know, you might be like three or four years old, and that you've like experienced for all the variety there is. You've experienced all the wavelengths of light that your retina can detect. And so your brain kind of closes and it's like, there are this many colors. And by the way, people actually, some people have four cones.

37:42Chantel Prat:Some people have two cones. So like even that is a thing that we may experience differently. And we don't even have names for the colors that people who have four cones. But anyway, I digress. But whatever you have, when it stops changing, your brain goes, boom, that's the way it is. And I'm not taking in new things. So there are different types of input that vary over your lifespan. And once you've gotten like this many statistics and you're like this, it's not changing anymore, like then that kind of concept crystallizes. And so in teenage years, these kind of open things, you know, these relational things, these what are my future potential things, I think are still really, you're trying to figure out who you are, how you're different from others and who you wanna be when you grow up.

38:27Chantel Prat:So I think that the tools around you are just an exciting kind of. It's a way to pull it in, incorporate it. Yeah. Right. And not even only the tools, but the culture around the tools. Right. So I think that like. Interesting. If there was a new tool and somehow it became unpopular with a, like a up and coming generation, then I think people, especially imagine that a new technology was created specifically for older people. So like, I don't know, monitor their children or so, you know, like I think that it's probably like a cultural thing too. But I think that this statistic taking and like, what do I think the likelihood of this technology or this kind of input leading me to good things?

39:12Chantel Prat:As you become older, you think you've figured the game out. You really feel pretty confident about your eggs, Benedict, and your career and your skills. Not everybody. But on average, you know, with more data, things start to level out, especially if you have a kind of narrow pocket of expertise, I think, then this new disruptive thing, right? I think truthfully, the likelihood that any new thing is going to be better than what you already know goes down as you have accumulated a lifetime of experiences. So I think that new technology, including AI, is a way of highlighting our own, the biases that we already have toward newness or oldness as we move through our experiences.

40:07Chantel Prat:And I'm seeing this in my lab. And after our first conversation, Jeremy, I'm thinking about this a lot because what I'm observing and the people around me is that some younger people who don't know the game and don't know what works are very eager to have other people tell them what works. They're very eager for advice. And those I think are more eager to sort of have AI do a thing for them or show them how to do a thing or make decisions for them because they don't have a history of success. And I think that, you know, as I checked in with myself and on this panel, I was on an AI at South by Southwest.

40:45Chantel Prat:I said, you know, these same students are probably too willing to trust me when I tell them like a thing is the right thing to do. And so I'm really thinking about teaching them how to discern advice, whether it's coming from me or AI or their boss or whatever, like how to be a critical thinker in the face of advice. advice whereas someone like me or somebody you know 10 years older than me might be overly convinced that they already know the right thing so i i talk about intellectual humility and how you know i said learning is a key value for me but the truth is that if you think you already know the answer you will feel zero curiosity and if you feel zero curiosity your brain is not set up to learn and that's just if you think you already know the answer that doesn't have anything to do with if you have a skin in the game, you think this thing could, you know, if you feel insecure, you think it could be better than you, you think it could take your job, then it's like not just not knowing the answer, but feeling some kind of threat.

41:44Chantel Prat:That would cause you to actively sort of create these defense mechanisms and move away from this new experience, whether it's AI or a coach. But it doesn't seem to be just an age thing if people are good or bad at AI. There seem to be almost a personality that some people seem to really be curious and like the newness and leaning to and so on. What do you think makes the difference between people who are kind of good at it or not? Well, I would say, I don't know. That's the first thing I would say in the space of intellectual humility. Our brains do give us a recipe for curiosity, which I think is important.

42:25Chantel Prat:What I don't know is, are people better or worse at it at time one, or are people more or less willing to learn how to work with it? So from my perspective, I would guess that the biggest difference is how willing someone is to learn and to partner with it. So one of my favorite models of curiosity by Matthias Gruber and Charon Ranganath is called the PACE model. And like I said in the beginning of our conversation, when your brain sees that there's a possible information reward in the future, it responds in the same way it would if it sees calories out there to be glad. It gives you dopamine.

43:05Chantel Prat:It gives you something that dopamine is a feel good chemical, but it also energizes learning. And it's also a neuroplasticity catalyst. If I asked you two questions, um, give you two trivia questions and asked you, do you, and you didn't know the answer to either, but you are more curious about one than the other. And then I give you the answer to both. You're going to remember the one that you were more curious about because your brain is saying, I think that reward is going to be more important. So it gives you dopamine up front, which actually lets you lay the memory. So I think curiosity is really key, but curiosity requires some preconditions and the first precondition.

43:45Chantel Prat:So the P in the PACE model is prediction. So you need to know that you don't know. You need to be aware that this is something new, so unfamiliar. So your previous predictions fail. And that's where if you think you know the answer or you think you're already perfect at this thing, you think there's no growth edge, you won't feel curious. But the second is really critical. And I think this is probably the biggest barrier for AI, and that's appraisal. A is appraisal, and that's appraisal of safety. So imagine that you find yourself in a new neighborhood. You make a wrong turn. You thought this was going to be the place where your favorite, I was going to say record shop.

44:24Chantel Prat:Like I have not been. Go there. Go there. To Tower Records. You know that you're safe. There's a Virgin Record store. Totally. We're tracking with you. That was strange. My brain. But, um, you know, are you excited to explore this neighborhood? Are you trying to get the hell out? There's a safety component there because, you know, we think curiosity is good and it is, but also we know curiosity got the cat killed. When your brain is curious, it actually turns down the signal on things associated with the risk of the unknown. So before it makes you feel curious, it says, am I safe here? And I think that in the space of AI, we're talking about psychological safety, job safety, evaluative safety, like as someone else, you know, monitoring my performance, all of that stuff.

45:10Chantel Prat:So if you understand that there's a growth opportunity and if you feel safe, then that's predict, appraise. The curiosity is the third step. And the fourth is exploration. So I suspect that it's mostly safety. Yeah. Because also, you know, some people might be really motivated to learn AI because they think maybe they're not curious, but they think this is going to be the way I get employed, right? Or like their employer has thrown a carrot, like the first person to use this is going to blah, blah, blah. So you could be motivated for different ways, but that the curiosity is intrinsically a driver for E, which is exploration.

45:53Chantel Prat:And it also just helps you learn better. So given the same number of experiences, the same skills, the same background, if you feel curious instead of threatened, the benefit you'll get from each interaction with AI will be higher. My last question for you is you worked on kind of neural linking stuff, right? Brain to brain stuff. So how far are we from us being connected to these AI brains? What will happen? Give us kind of like the neat to know of what we're about to endeavor. Far. We're really far, honestly. And even then, I mean, the resolution, I say we're closer because we have different technologies for stimulating the brain.

46:38Chantel Prat:So we can read out what's happening in a brain with very high fidelity. Like we can tell which object a person is thinking about with pretty high accuracy in a if you put them in a tube and they lay still, not when they're moving around in the world. But to encode an idea into someone's brain, we have like, we're just very, very far away from the technology. I mean, the things that we did once upon a time were sledgehammer level, like, you know, make a wrist twitch and make someone hit a button, like nowhere near sort of tip inception level thoughts. what I said then is still true. Like the best kind of mind control is words.

47:17Chantel Prat:And even that is very, very imperfect. But like what we could do by forcing someone to sit still and tipping neurons out of whack is so much more expensive and less effective than saying a thing to them that I can't imagine that that's going to change our world dramatically. I think the reading out and translating, maybe having an AI in the middle, somebody who can read from my brain, read from your brain and get some kind of a codex that helps you communicate and find alignment if your theory of mind sucks. I think that would be exciting. We've actually talked on this show about with a couple of times about this, the opportunity space around, call it English to English translation, Jeremy English to Chantel English, right?

48:00Or the transmission and the reception, you know, you could encode it by Enneagram, right? If you're an Enneagram five, the way you hear something or whatever. But I think that codex idea is really cool. And I don't think many people are kind of scratching the surface right now, but I don't know why you wouldn't, in a team especially, why you wouldn't have your whole team's Enneagram numbers and then say, hey, how am I going to tell Henrik this? Well, the way it's communicating Henrik is XYZ. I've seen recently on a bunch of these founder email chains that people are creating these mockdown files that we are creating anyways for all these agents we are creating.

48:39So the soul.md and all these like person.md files that are creating out of OpenClaw. People now start to share that with each other so that as a way to basically say, this is who I am. And so if you're going to try to communicate or have your agent to communicate with me, here's a way for you to do that exact thing. And so - It strikes me that there's some hubris there Because in a way you set yourself up to being uniquely exploited. It's like, here's my DNA, feel free to do something. You know what I mean? Like if someone knows exactly how to communicate with you, it stands to reason they probably know exactly how to exploit you.

49:21I mean, going back to Chantel, your statement that words are the best way to incept an idea. If someone knows perfectly how I mean, I don't I don't have the scientific language for this. Right. But it's like, I know that acai berry absorbs a free radical. Right. It's like, you know, the acai berry that's going to make Henrik say yes. It's somewhere in that. Yeah, it's like the sold out in the file there. Right.

49:49Chantel Prat:I want to add one little thing to that. I think it's fascinating. This idea is fascinating, even though I can only barely understand what you guys are. I do know what a markdown file is, but I can only barely understand what format that would take. It strikes me that like my Instagram algorithm understands things about me that I don't understand about myself. And I try and reverse engineer it. I'm like, wow, I'm getting a lot of like porcupines eating crunchy food. What does that tell me about me? And so in some way, like having, it is a huge amount of feedback, these things that have your behavior and that learn to give you the inputs that work for you have a different level of awareness.

50:28Chantel Prat:It's kind of like your, you know, your partner. Not all of it is when you were trying to describe the job of Derek, is that the magician? They have a lot of information about you that they can make explicit that you might not have about yourself. And I think that could be a really important, even a self tool. And then you decide what you want to share or how you want to share, you know, it'd be great if there was like sliders. I'll take 75%, 25 % transparency or only sharing this, not this. Yeah, and I think, you know, because I do think that obviously with the best way to predict the future is to make it, right?

51:00And I think in many ways, when we created all these social media tools, we thought we were just making it exciting to share pictures of food. And little did we know, we were like destroying a whole generation's mental health. But I think if you take AI, I think obviously a lot of us who are building in this space now are trying to be very self-aware that we're not making the same mistake. And I do think that this can go two ways. To Jeremy's point, it can be used as something to be super manipulative, but it could also be something to really communicate much more about our true self, right? Whereas social media, if you're showing me in a dating profile through my social media profile, it would be all the vain thing that I want the world to see about me.

51:41If you ask an AI algorithm to completely mine everything I've ever written, everything that's on my desktop or my browser history, there'll be a much more truth kind of self-exploration. This is a Dan Shipper kind of point. And so I'll make sure to give him credit. And so I do think that there's this interesting argument that AI, while much more kind of intimate and intrusive, could also be something that could make us much more earnest and show much more of a broad spectrum to the world of ourselves. And that could be a good thing. Right.

52:16Chantel Prat:And to Jeremy's point, objective and nonjudgmental. Because we're always going to turn up the volume on the things that society has told us is good. Right, right. I really like that in the space of what do you want to be better at? I like the idea of partnering with AI to learn to be better at yourself and maybe to learn how to teach others how to communicate with you. Also sharing the sort of vulnerability and skepticism about giving people that code. Well, you know, I'll build on that. Maybe we can wrap here. I think to our closing remarks. But I was at a company on the East Coast a couple weeks ago on as being interviewed in a fireside chat.

52:54And one of the questions, it was an entertainment company. And so one of the questions that had come up is, is AI more creative than people? You know, it's kind of a typical question. And I found myself saying in that moment, I'm actually the comparison that I want to make is, am I Jeremy or not? Is it more blank than me? But am I more me than me with this? Right. And to me, that's actually the exciting kind of possibility space is how do we become more ourselves? I'm not so interested in the comparison between me and I. But wow, Jeremy augmented by AI to be more of who he wants to be. That's quite exciting to me.

53:41Can I just add a one point? And then I think we're about to get you out on time. I just wrote a piece on this, and I do think it's very important. One of the things that I've learned as I use AI a lot is that I need to understand myself much better for AI to really be an amplifier of what I want to be more of. But that requires all this self-work to figure out what are my core principles, what are my first principles, and all those different things. And so I've been trying to take basically all the work I do with my coach and then try to morph that into instructions to the agents that I have working for me so that they can now come back and present stuff that is more me.

54:18Which then is a little bit of a mindfuck when you then say, well, I also need a much more diverse set of thinking. So now I need to make versions of me that are different, but we'll go back to that.

54:27Chantel Prat:More me and less me. Yeah, exactly. Much less of more me. Thank you. You're amazing. This was so fun. Jeremy Utley.

54:41People thought they'll get like a conversation about the conversation, but no, they're getting a sing-along. It's, you know, hopefully we are pitch perfect, as they say. That's because Shatel has such a good energy, huh? Like you kind of feel a little bit chipper after the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Anybody coming from South by, I feel like they get the South by vibes. She clearly was inspired, you know, for you and me both, right. It's this idea of seeking input. I mean, she kind of before we were recording and then it was kind of, we started recording and then we weren't sure if we were recording yet.

55:13So I don't know exactly what folks will hear, but the whole premise of not knowing what you're going to learn going somewhere for the purpose of provocation, but not exactly knowing what the provocation will be. And how do you grapple with that as a successful person who's, who has opportunity costs to their time and who has kind of known deliverables with known value? How do you carve out space for inspiration? It's something that I feel like in the totality of our experience we had with Chantel was, was foregrounded a lot. What do you think about that, No, I think you're 100 % right. I think without good input, there will be no good output.

55:52And I think sometimes when I feel a little bit uninspired, it is basically because I've said the same bullshit over and over again, and I haven't really been out sucking in some information. And so I think for me, it's about making us thinking. So for me, it's about making things, and that's where I learn stuff. And I think you have to be disciplined about it. To your point, it's so easy to say, no, I should not listen to a podcast, or no, I shouldn't read an extra book, or no, I shouldn't go to this conference because I have other things to do. But yeah, it's almost like working out. You need to mentally make sure you don't get obese.

56:24Yeah. There's always, I mean, at the same time, what's interesting is consumption can be really gratifying in and of itself. You know, it's almost consumption for consumption sake rather than consumption for the purpose of advancing. You know, I heard Danny Meyer say once, ABCD to ABCD, always be collecting dots. So you can always be connecting dots. And the consumption is really collection, but the purpose of collection is connection. And so I think there's that, you know, tension and almost commitment to yourself, both to get inspired, but also to do something with the inspiration. Maybe that's the yin yang, I think, of work that you do.

57:06And I guess I do in part is that we get asked to go out and speak places and that forces you then to create an output. And so that is often the way that you connect the dots, right? Because you're being paid to say something interesting. Speaking of interesting, what do you think we should highlight from Chantel? You know, I thought that the whole conversation on curiosity was quite interesting to me. That your question I thought was quite insightful about if it's not age, what accounts for the difference in someone's willingness to engage with AI and the idea of curiosity. And she had mentioned the PACE model prediction appraisal, which precede curiosity and exploration.

57:48I thought the whole question about safety was really fascinating. And because AI is so often framed as a threat and is so often framed as something to be defended against, It's almost, it's the way it's framed prevents curiosity. And I thought, wow, if organizations really knew that speaking about AI in a way that is threatening keeps their people from being curious, I think they would speak about it differently. I 100 % agree. I mean, that was my biggest takeaway also, but I think it was quite a big unlock. I have this thought, and I think maybe we took it for something you said, but that there is these four steps of people going through AI learnings.

58:32Maybe I think it's Bryce who brought this up in a conversation we had, where one is you kind of use AI as Google. Two, you start to have a conversation with it. Three, you start to add context to it, maybe connect it to databases or MCP servers. And four, you start to kind of program or you create autonomous agents that go out and do stuff for you. And the thing that becomes increasingly complicated is that the more you're kind of in phase three, four, the harder it is for people who are in phase one, two, to understand what the hell you're talking about. There's no emotional really connection.

59:03It's like talking about having children to people who don't have children. But what I don't think I ever realized was it's not necessarily just a understanding. It's also a feeling of safety that when you start to talk about all these amazing agents you have running around doing stuff, then people are not getting curious about it. They're just getting increasingly scared. And so you need to find a way, even as an AI kind of educator, to maybe even just kind of like label that and saying, hey, and I think that's some of the stuff you do very well at your talks is that you do talk about these things in a very non-scary way, which I think is the reason why you invite people in that learning journey.

59:54It's amazing too how maybe because of the technical language or because of the number of things that you can do, I think fear is a very natural response just because it can be overwhelming. And it's a worthy kind of challenge. I don't have any ready answers, but it's a worthy challenge to say, how do we spark people's curiosity rather than trigger their fear? I think In fact, maybe just like sitting with that question and asking our audience even to sit with it, especially, you know, folks who listen to this show who are more AI forward, more AI native. It's almost like a good soul searching question.

1:00:30Is my enthusiasm scaring people or getting them curious? And what can I do with my enthusiasm to shift from kind of a threat to excitement? I did a workshop the other day with some folks and I, in a little bit of a different way, but kind of started the whole conversation about that, saying, you know, labeling this thing that I felt often that people got more scared than they got excited. And I think even by saying that out loud, it kind of had a big result. And so I think what you're saying resonates a lot. And so I think maybe, yeah, that would be my big takeaway after the conversation today.

1:01:09We'd love to hear. Maybe this is a cool spot for if folks listen and they have thoughts, drop comments in the YouTube comments and the podcast comments or feel free to write us as well. Let us know what are ways that you have found helpful to help people overcome fear and spark curiosity instead. I think we'd love to treat this as a community learning opportunity. And with that, I think we're going to say goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.