You’re Not Stuck. You’re Swimming in the Wrong Direction | Alec Litowitz - EP 827

26:05Ultimately, it's how you, it's not just the journey, it's how you take the journey. And so my because is that in all these cases, and I, again, good things, bad things, things I've screwed up and otherwise. The because is always that I want to make it an act of anybody working with me forever. I keep saying the words, I want acts of commission, not omission. I don't want to live my life by having not made a decision. So my because in every aspect, how I do relationships, how I do at work, how I did squash. These are all I want to make acts of commission. That is my because. I want to be the author.

26:44Then my follow-up question to that would be, you are obviously someone who is passion struck. What does passion struck mean to you? It's funny, when I built Magnetar, I was debating about whether to have certain values that we elucidate or illuminate. Do we have any, do you have to have them written? Do you not? You can debate this. Well, if everybody understands them, should you have to write them? And I decided early on that I don't think there's anything wrong with writing them down. And I whittled it down. I had a lot of them. And number one for me was integrity, which is my definition is how do you act when no one's looking?

27:18The other is insight, because our job was to gather insight and invest and pass it on to investors. But the third was passion. And I think that passion is, look, I know you've had Angela Duckworth on, I love her books. Passion, where does passion different from grit? And I do think it is a little different, but I just wanted to highlight that when I was willing down as the son of a linguist, I had lots of words at my fingertips, but I did choose passion as one of the three that I thought would define what I built at Mad Guitar and what I wanted from the culture and otherwise. I think passion does many things.

27:55Someone asked me at a prior time, what do you have? And I know when you're a child, when you're younger, sometimes your motivation is external. I want to please, I want to do other things. I feel like the better, and people ask me all the time, how do you compensate someone? Can you motivate someone with compensation? I'm a believer ultimately that passion is the internal drive, that it just, there's nothing as powerful as passion or drive. It's innate, it's in you. Obviously there's some point at which if you successfully, probably, I don't have to ask my parents, go through childhood and you switch and it becomes less imposed on you and more that you impose it on yourself.

28:34So for me, it is that engine that is always, I could say I want to have agency and I want to be the actor, but it is, I don't know. I basically would say, what is that? That's a passion for life. Life lived a certain way. I don't want to lift the lollipop down to what's at the core. I have a hierarchy, but I do think that there's something about passion as being this core energy and core driver that infiltrates everything you do. And again, I differentiate that with an outcome. Passion doesn't mean you're right all the time. It means that the motivation is authentic, that it's not coming from outside, that it's coming from in you.

29:13It's not a response to something. It's a response effectively to wanting to, not in the Steve Jobs, I think it was him, put a dent in the world as much as, it doesn't have to be a dent. It can be a scratch, a nick. It's to touch reality. That to me is just touch reality. And by the way, we can go into that. I have the absolute pleasure of having lived a life where I get to touch it a lot with very few constraints. But I talk in my book about Shackleton and the endurance and his story in Antarctica. One of the books that I've read that really transformed my thinking was Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

29:51He had a much, much narrower scope of an environment and ability to exercise agency. And so I'm fascinated with people that have passion to survive challenges that many of us would never survive. I've been lucky I've not had some of the challenges. I'm incredibly respectful of people that have been through circumstances that I haven't. I've been through races that I impose on myself. There are occasional times where I've had something imposed on me, but I'm in awe of the people that find meaning and purpose and passion to get them over the hump of things that I can't even imagine enduring. I try to go back every year and reread Man's Search for Meaning, which is always a difficult exercise, but I've learned for me the best way to do it is by listening to it on the audiobook.

30:40But one of my favorite things that he talks about in the book is how you can find meaning in different ways, meaning a lot of us find it from our career. But one of the ways that he talks about finding is through hardship, either us going through a hardship or another way you find meaning is through your love and care of someone else. So that could just be your love of your spouse, or it could be your love of someone who's going through a hardship where your meaning changes to supporting them through it. So that is always one of my favorite aspects of the book. And I think, as you just said, passion kind of works the same way.

31:18Angela and I, when I was writing my first book, had this interesting dialogue where I was trying to tell her that passion and perseverance are great, but unless you have another layer underneath them, it can be misdirected. And so I was trying to get her to come to my way of thinking, which intentionality plays a huge role in where you apply your grit. She looks at it as self-control, but it's the same thing. if you have grit and you're not aligned to your values you're not aligned to where you're taking your life then all of a sudden that grit can go in the opposite direction that you want your life to go was basically my message to her and i think for so many people today with all that's hitting us if you're not able to adapt to those environments that we're finding ourselves in And you could suffer some huge consequences if you're not preparing your mind for success in the next human era, as you explain in your new book, about how you're thinking about this.

32:26And I'm just going to digress one more second here. When I was at Lowe's, those of us who were deemed high potential had to go through this analysis where they brought in psychoanalysts from Korn Ferry, of all places. is anyone who was in the top right quadrant who they thought could be a C-level someday had to go through this assessment. And the lead psychoanalyst brings me into the office at the end of the discussion. And she basically brings up Marshall Goldsmith's book, what got you here isn't gonna get you to where you need to go, John. And she said to me, the most important thing in the future is gonna be EQ.

33:00And I remember to this day, I looked at her and I said, EQ is extremely important, but I think you're absolutely wrong. I think the most important thing in the next era is going to be adaptability. Because I know I've had to change myself like seven or eight times. And I think this, I was an outlier. I think this is going to be the norm in the future. And I was interested, because that's the name of your book, The Adaptability Quotient, what your thought is on this. I think I'm going to agree with you. Let me frame my thought on, and maybe it'll touch a little bit on Angela, who I don't know, but I admire and respect.

33:39I would say the following, and I know you had Epstein on earlier, and I have not read his new book. I read Range probably twice, but I would say the following, I would say that we're in a very, part of the reason I wrote the book, right? All the money's going to charity. So I wrote it because I was worried about the moment we're in. And I'm going to use your phraseology, but I'm worried about the environment we're in. And in a lot of environments, Shackleton was in an environment where the weather, the ice was visible. Frankel was an environment very visible, you know, concentration cap, et cetera.

34:09We're in a very unique moment because it feels like it's invisible to some people. And I think that's why some people still say IQ and EQ because they're using the wrong map. So let me draw the map that I see and why I agree with you and why I think adaptability is the meta skills. Here's how I view it. In the first industrial revolution, we manipulated atoms and we use that to make devices, steam engines. We offloaded some of the agrarian work and we moved on. And second industrial revolution, we manipulated atoms again. We made production lines. We moved to cities. We made electricity, railroads.

34:44Again, we changed the physical structure of something. Tools made tools. And then in the third industrial revolution, we didn't manipulate per se atoms. Of course, they're always manipulated, but it was something called bits. And we were able to offload storage retrieval computation. But once again, it changed how we work. This time, AI, and I think we're in a fourth industrial revolution, we are at the physical side of it. So what's happening? Data centers, semiconductor chips, power, special materials. There's an incredible growth that's occurring from massive production of something. And that is causing constraint on copper and it's changing prices, et cetera.

35:24But what is being produced this time is not the same thing. What is being produced right now is tokens. And tokens, while they're bits, are different. Tokens have, and especially for you, have meaning. A bit, a chisel and a hammer don't care if they're next to each other. A bit doesn't actually matter if it's next to another bit. But a token, I always use the example like if I say to you, hey, let's go to the bank of the river. I got to go to the bank to withdraw money. You can bank on it. All the same word, completely different because of how I placed him in a sentence. AI understands that. LLMs understand it.

36:03They have meaning. And because they have meaning, they can generate meaning. That means that this is not just the fourth industrial revolution. This is the second cognitive revolution. The first one is when we learn language. When I could sit, everything prior to that was grunts. It was in your head. That meant that I could think about the future. I could say, hey, there's an animal around the corner, you, me, you go that way, I go this way, we're going to have a dinner tonight, let's plan, organize. That was what separated humans. This is the second cognitive revolution, but there's a synthetic participant in the way you think.

36:36And where I'm going to tie this back around to, I'll stop there, I could go further, we can go much more deeper about what the implications of the production of knowledge and what happens in regime shifts, because this is where I've made my money studying, understanding, and taking advantage of regime shifts. This time, because this one is so big, as I'm about to explain, I had to write a book about it and not so much warn people, but give people the tools how to take advantage of it and to use uncertainty as an edge as opposed to something to fear. But let's just step back for a second, go back to the environment.

37:09Because my argument is AI looks like a tool at the interface. I use it, but it creates an environment. And the reason it's obvious is because go to part one of this revolution, which was social media. What was the deal? The deal was that I'll upload attention and you will give me connectivity. Is that the trade we got? I think that we got excessive loneliness. We've got more people saying they have fewer friends or no close friend, all on the heels of coincident. It's correlation. We'll get studies. Studies are coming out. I think it will show, I'm not going to say I can guarantee it, pretty confident it's going to show some causality to social media.

37:45Clearly, if you look at the studies of how much time young people spend directly person to person, it's gone way down from what it was when we were children. So there is the fact that social media has created an environment. It feeds based on algorithms. It feeds extremes, right? You think that everybody thinks you're crazy and you think everybody's crazy because you only see the extremes. So we offloaded our belonging and we got a very thin thing back from it. And I think it's going to wind up having been incredibly challenging for humans and especially for young people because we did it one person at a time.

38:21Back to my language, we all made an act of omission, but the result was we live in a particular environment right now. It's not just a tool. It has changed how we think and how we interact with each other. Now comes along an unbelievably fluent oracle that can tell us things and seems smarter than us. And it's not just a tool to help complete a sentence or it changes the environment in which you think. Language is in your head. It takes a question. It goes and compresses. It's not a search function that gives you a million pages and a Google search. It already pre-compresses it down to one answer.

39:02It changes the water in which you swim and think. That is more than a tool. I'm not saying both of these, and I'll come back to it, could be used to augment you. But we chose to use social media in a way, most of us, to atrophy. I'm very worried about us doing the same thing with AI. So when you turn around and you sit and say, we'll come back to agency and choice. But it's very easy to have a drop in agency. My book, I consider to be a repair kit for agency. Why? Because I can easily live in the world that is shown to me. It's comfortable. I can easily not have cognition, just have it do it for me.

39:40I think I'm thinking, but I'm not really. I'm offloading it and I'm getting a thin version back. That's the reduction of agency. And I understand that these changes are making the world uncertain. And we can go into my definition, which I go into the book, risk and uncertainty are not the same thing. But without delving into the difference between those, uncertainty is what everybody feels right now. And it's easy then to go and just have your identity be on the people, oh, well, these people on this social media channel, these are my people and I feel my identity. And where you really need to have your identity should be to be adaptable.

40:15That's how you survive this, right? If you go look at Shackleton, if you go and look at Frankel, part of what they did is they were adaptive to their environment, even in the smallest of ways. We can talk about how Frankel did it. And why does that matter? Because if you have judgment and agency or grit or any of those things, they point in a direction. IQ and EQ are very helpful for navigating a world as you understand it. But when the environment changes, when we have a change that is, in my opinion, the biggest one, this one is different. It is not the same as all the industrial revolution before.

40:51It is a technology at one level. It is an environmental change drastically different than all the others. That requires a moment for people to choose how they act in that. And we made a bad choice once over the last 20 years. Let us not do it again with our cognition. Or we wind up listening to other people, listening to the AI, and you become an avatar. Or as my young kids will say an NPC, a non-player character. That's the opposite of agency. So IQ is valuable. EQ is valuable. The analogy sometimes I give is my Ironman swim. I used to do Ironmans. And here's the analogy. Let's say IQ is my stroke, my engine, how fast I can swim in one direction.

41:34And EQ, for anybody who swims, is if I can get in a group of people and work together, then I can draft off of them and we can go even faster because it's 20 % more efficient. We can just all go harder and then get a break, go harder and get a break. But when the current's moving fast, when the wind is moving fast, when the world's changing super fast, what do you need to do? You need to lift your head up because you could be swimming with another group of people exactly super fast in the absolute wrong direction. AQ is the ability to look up and go, you know what? Am I even exercising my grit, my EQ or IQ in the direction of the world?

42:11Because let me tell you what's not agency. Doing all those things right in the world that isn't reality. Adaptability is what says, am I in the right frame? Things are changing so fast. If I'm on the wrong course, who cares if I'm swimming with another group of people? Blockbuster was swimming really fast, giving you popcorn and raisinets inside a store that was selling you DVDs. Wrong frame. Netflix had the frame. It doesn't matter. Adaptability is what says you're touching true reality as it is right now. And without it, no matter what you do in the wrong frame, that's not agency. You're not touching reality.

42:48You're not getting real feedback loops. That is a problem. So that's effectively how I see the world and why I wrote the book. I know there was a lot there probably to unpack. Alec, I could go in so many different directions with this because you and I have been exploring the same thing from different angles. What I'm hearing you say is if AI increasingly becomes part of the environment in which we think, where's the line between augmentation and surrendering our agency? And then what I heard you think, how do we make sure that AI is expanding our cognitive range rather than shrinking it? And something that's so interesting to what you're talking about is in my own thinking, I have been going back to the start of the industrial revolution myself, because I look at the words of Henry David Thoreau when he says the mass of men are leading lives of quiet desperation.

43:46And I think he was right, but I expand it to what I think the mass of men is leading today is a life of quiet disorientation. Because when he said that at his point in time, which was the late 1800s, early 1900s, we were just at the beginning part of the first industrial revolution and it was a world with walls. Now we don't have walls and so this disorientation takes root because of that and so as I've been examining this I look at what Jonathan Haidt has done in his books where he is firmly putting the blame on youth mental health crisis as the evolution of social media and the smart device.

44:33And I think he is right in some ways, but I think he is wrong in some ways. Where I think he gets it wrong is I think it's just an accelerant of something that's been building up for 200 years underneath the surface. And what we're experiencing now is a further flame that is taking that accelerant and turning it into a wildfire? Let me try to square the circle. Maybe I can help, maybe I can't. And of all places, I'm going to grab it from structural anthropology. So go back to Claude Levy-Strauss and we'll see if this applies as a part of consilience of different frameworks and frames. So one of the things that Claude Levy-Strauss talks about are hot and cold societies.

45:15And hot societies are when technology changes come and things rapidly change and they're disorienting to people. And this happened in the first and second industrial revolutions. But there is something in those time periods that he calls, I said, hot and cold, cold stabilizers. This can get into chaos theory. There's a lot of places that we can go with this. but you get these hot movements, but you need something that stabilizes society. And back in those days, we had trusted institutions, churches, religion. We had, because it wasn't, we weren't yet fully into the cities, you had local neighborhoods, people that you belong to clubs with or organizations with.

45:59There was a ballast, if you will, that kept order, despite the fact that the world was changing. You mentioned that quote, at the beginning of my book, I have a, William Blake's one of my favorite poets, and I start the book with a poem by him, Auguries of Innocence, which was written right at the first industrial revolution. I think you were talking about the second, but either way, he wrote about, his poem was, wow, there was nature and beauty, and it was right at the beginning of the first and what's going on. And I think that if you go back, a lot of people will say, well, Alec, we've had these prior ones, and I did the same thing exactly as you.

46:35I went back to look. And I do think this one's different, but here's one of the reasons why, and let me finish, that connecting the dots. And that is that, so we had these stabilizers, but starting around the mid 20th century. And so maybe I'm not going back as far as you might want to go, but we started to lose them. And if you go look at what happened, even during the time where I was a child, I'm about to turn 60, we started to lose religion. I'm not saying religion's good or bad or any particular one, but it was a stabilizer. And we started to have fewer people interested in religion. We certainly have a drop in trust in institutions.

47:10We certainly have had a drop in whether you had unions or, and again, I'm not suggesting these things are good or bad. The point is what has replaced the stabilizers? You go back and say, well, one of the stabilizers, being the son of a psychoanalyst, was that you had a childhood and you grew up in a family. and there's another great sociologist very smart and he was a polyneth actually but at any rate Pierre Bordeaux and Pierre Bordeaux talks about habitus and that is so think about psychoanalytics being your relationship with your parents and all that habitus is the environment in which you grow up and whereas when I grew up it was the local community it was my parents main influence Our children are growing up in a digital habitus, right?

47:58It's a very different type of environment. This environment that stabilized us a long time ago now comes into a destabilizing moment that has not just social media. It's been happening, and I agree with you before. I could spend my whole lot of time delving down to where and how did those cold stabilizers break down? But we knew that it wasn't just immediate at social media. It had been in the process of breaking down. And what happens when you have a breakdown of these cold stabilizers? Here's the problem with what it does. It forces people who, when you, and this is from chaos theory, when you feel unstable and unmoored and disoriented, you grab what's next to you that floats.

48:39And what floats is an identity that you can attach onto a channel in social media where people, you belong. These are what I call shallow stabilizers. Those are not your friends. They're not your family. These are shallow versions of the real thing. They're the artifact I call of true friction. You don't want the artifact. You want the real thing. So the question becomes, how do you get back a stabilizer? How do you wind up? One of the things that I didn't articulate when I was younger, talking about when I was younger, is the concept of stable self provisional answer. And that stable self starts being, well, what is your identity?

49:18If my identity, because I'm disoriented, comes in some answer, I believe this because it makes me a part of the group and that is safe. Then even when it's obvious that I should update and adapt, I won't. So here's my point. My point is all these destabilizers have led to a lot of people fixing their identity on an answer because it's stabilized them as part of a group. When you and I are saying, guess what? The world you're entering in right now, you have to relocate that identity to being adaptable. Relocate it. Because if you have an identity stuck to an outcome, you will defend that answer.

49:58If you have an identity stuck to adaptability, you'll update when the world changes. But everybody over this period of time has slowly and slowly, and then all of a sudden, that's how you go bankrupt, slowly at first, and then all of a sudden has been geared and been gearing people toward, I'm better off if I have an answer because given the destabilization, given the way that things have arisen, I get more reward from being in this group. And I'm not looking at it and objectively deciding whether that's the right answer. I just get the reward. And if I'm forced to think about another possibility, you're forcing me out of my identity.

50:35And it's the only thing that I have left keeping me afloat. I don't want to let go of it. So I long would it answer to that question. Well, and part of what I think is happening to people is when we're in these environments that people are finding themselves in today. Where we treat people around us as resources for what they can produce rather than as sources of inherent value and agency. What do you think is going to happen? So that's why I believe employee disengagement, people feeling burned out, the loneliness epidemic, people feeling hopeless, mental health rising. I think we keep treating these things as separate things when they're symptoms of this larger gap that you and I are describing.

51:27We agree 100 % on that. I always like to disagree even with myself because otherness is the only source of value. I know a lot of people want to find channels where they agree with people. I tried to do the opposite. And that is how you should use AI, because anything that differs with you is the only place where you could potentially learn, right? Somebody who completely agrees with you, there's nothing to learn from that. But in this particular case, I think we have the same philosophy around that, which is, I think what you're saying is, hey, and go back to what I said earlier. This is a frame you have.

51:56It is a systems thinking perspective. There's people in all the, which is why I wrote the book, probably why you wrote yours. My book does have, it has sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, systems thinking, information theory, cognitive science, neuroscience. Because, and I'm not an expert on any of them, but sometimes when people are stuck from their perspectives going, oh, this is the reason for it. Oh, that's the reason for it. They don't step back and go, oh, wait a minute. There's a structure underlying it. It's what I talked about when I got the JDMBA and the math.

52:27It's like there's an underlying structure here that appears to be hidden. And when you said that the walls disappear and that's disorienting, the mental image I have actually that some of what you and I are talking about and worried about is, at least for the young people, is, but you know what just showed up is really comfortable furniture. Just lull you in, boy, you sit in it and you just, this is really comfortable. I'm part of this group. I don't have to tax my brain. And you just start slowly not wandering. And you don't explore anything. and it's just really comfortable, but you now have no agency.

53:04You're not interacting anymore. You've just sat down and it's of course always fine occasionally to rest, but this is something that I was saying before. So the effects that you and I are talking about, which is frankly, makes it hard. Unlike Shackleton, unlike Viktor Frankl, they're invisible. It's an invisible enemy here of agency. And yet we have that the risk is you and I can decide that we see this. I don't want to say it's red pill, blue pill, but if enough other people don't, we're going to make a collective decision. We just did it with one technology. Are we going to do it again? For me, it's like part of the problem of you seeing this, I see it again, we both see it, is that it's an invisible thing.

53:47You only see it over time by what it does to you. And right now you're in the middle of this change. It's not, shouldn't be lost on anybody that those who are adaptive that are looking for patterns go, oh my God, I see what's coming. And other people who are comfortable sitting on the couch, they're in it. I'm reminded of the joke that the old fish is swimming in the water and two little fish are swimming in the other direction. And the old fish says to the young fish, how's the water, boys? And the two fish swim on and one looks at the other and goes, what's water? I'm not sure people know the water they're swimming in right now.

54:24the metaphor as i was reading the book that really had me like leaning in to the book is that we have spent so much time building this map that we think is the map that is going to guide us in the future but as you explain that map is no longer matching the terrain that we're living in and i think what people don't realize is that their mental map is now outdated which is exactly what you and I have been talking about for the past 15, 20 minutes. So let's just, before we close out with a couple more questions, let's go back to Shackleton because I think it's one of the best examples from the book.

55:05His mission changed completely, for those of you who aren't familiar with his story, once the environment changed because he had to make different decisions. but I don't think Shackleton ever abandoned the larger purpose, which was getting his men home. How do leaders know and how do individuals know when to abandon their plan, their life plan, their company plan without abandoning the mission? That's an excellent question. And I, of course it would be nice if people read my book, but I highly encourage people to read the book about his expedition called The Endurance, which is a book about Shackleton's expedition.

55:44It's probably the greatest adventure story that everybody will think is fiction if it weren't for the fact that it's real. And it might be the best real adventure story that ever occurred. And you're 100 % right around changing the mission. I think that here's my answer to your question. And this goes back, I think I alluded to earlier, and maybe this will be helpful in answering it, or you could all answer it and you could say, no, I want to dig deeper. When I talked earlier about stable self provisional answers. What I meant, the question that you're asking me or I'm interpreting it as what stays and what changes, what's allowed never to move and what's allowed to move.

56:21And so you said that he had a mission. His mission was to be the first to cross Antarctica. That was his mission. He's been an explorer. And there was always a submission. Hey, I'd like to cross with everybody alive. I assume that was a submission. It wasn't stated, but it was a, But as soon as his boat got crushed after 10 months being in Antarctica in the ice, and I have been to the South Pole, by the way, I've been to Antarctica, I've been to the South Pole, so I can speak with a little bit more. I think fewer people have been to the South Pole on the top of Everest, so I could speak a little bit about what it's like there.

56:54But you're right that he said, you know what, that mission is no longer available. What ensues, though, is not just that one decision, great, get back. It's an unbelievable story of adversity and a constant changing of the environment and a constant state of adapting. So my response to your question is that here's for me what never changes. What never changes is your values. And that means sort of morals, ethics. What do you hold dear? My parents, a psychoanalyst, told me something I still believe. Some listeners probably disagree with me, but I've held it and I like it. And that is your character is your character, but you can change your behavior.

57:35And your character is like what makes up your values. You could always change your behavior. You can learn. But so some values have to stick no matter what. And then the other thing, ironically, that I think becomes critical is the thing you and I are working on, which is that your identity as being adaptable. is itself something that can't ever change. Because the minute that changes, you're fixed on an answer and the world will eventually show you an environment that it's no longer applicable to. So where I'm changing, I'm not, I'm answering your question, but I guess what I'm saying is let's go to the hierarchy.

58:11Your purpose, which was, it's part of your values. It's, I'm the steward of 28 men. Whatever your purpose is, that stays. But your mission to achieve that purpose, it's like a hierarchy. It moves slowly. Someone would go, Alec, I thought mission is something that always stays. But obviously, if you don't have a boat anymore, the mission has to change, okay? It can be very sticky mission, the word mission. But at some point, it is subject to being rewritten. Strategy can definitely change, right? Definitely change. And so I view that as that when I say stable self, I think that is your value should never change and your method for remaining adaptive.

58:55My book is basically a how to kit this in a world of uncertainty. This is how you should make adaptive decisions. It doesn't say you should have this answer. It's a much more abstracted level of it doesn't matter what the conditions are. If you follow these processes, whatever is new, it's an updating mechanism, a formula. It's not IQ or EQ. Those are traits and they're stuck. Maybe you can increase your EQ a little bit, but those are stuck. And soon IQ is going to be downloadable. That's not going to separate people. Anybody who says IQ, someone could say EQ, but EQ is a tool you use when you know what frame you're in and you know where you're headed.

59:35It is not something that tells you EQ and IQ don't say, you know what? I'm in the wrong room. Once you're in the right room, they're very useful. So my answer to you around that is that the stability is in your values and in your identity as being adaptable, right? I identify with these values, identify with this methodology for being adapted. Everything else has degradation. Strategy can change very quickly. Mission less quickly, but it can change. I know people, that's why you can get into Simon Sinek's why. What's your mission, vision? What's your why? and it depends on where you think he places the why or where you personally place it.

1:00:14But I think of mission as being something that moves slow. It's like a glass. I don't know, probably people know this. Glass of liquid. It moves very slowly, right? Go to churches in Europe that are really old and you'll see the bottom is more thick than the top. It moves very slowly, but it still moves. So I think about those two things as being things that never change. And the line basically I think about as, and how do you know which is pretty simple. And then it's all about feedback loops, right? Agency, the way that you, and I think others on your podcast have talked about, agency requires feedback, right?

1:00:49Adaptability, you can study cybernetics doing this. An adaptive system, its behavior is governed by feedback. So if you're Shackleton and you have this mission and you want to know, should I change it or not? There was no way to get feedback about his mission to cross Antarctica when he had no boat and no way to get them. The mission changes because that feedback loop is gone. Now I'm going home. Now the process of going home, he gets unbelievable amounts of tried that, didn't work. This happened. It's an unbelievable story. I can't even, some of the stories you can't even make up, but it's a constant state of feedback loops.

1:01:26And so if you're getting feedback loops that are updating you, then you're probably on the right target. When you hear nothing back, when there is nothing to get a feedback loop on, then you're probably on the wrong mission and it has to be updated. And that could be an external event. It could be internal. But I consider that sometimes you're not getting feedback. You're asking the wrong question. And that's in my book. But ultimately, if you've done the right things and you're not getting feedback or the feedback is saying you're in the wrong room, that's when you change what room you want to be in.

1:01:59And there's a methodology for doing that. But there are some things, regardless what room you're in, that you bring along with you. And one is what you stand for. And the other is I brought with me my ability to figure out that now I'm in the new room. If this turns out to be the wrong room, I have the ability to get into the next room. That as an identity is persistent over time. And I'm afraid that the news for people is I foresee a very high pace of change now, Now, which is why I even left Magnetar, why I wanted to model with this environment, the second cognitive revolution, and why I even wrote the book is I'm saying to people, here's the source code.

1:02:41Here's the decision making process, not the answer, the process for knowing, am I in the right room? Am I not? When should I abandon? When should I not? When do I use grit? When do I use curiosity? As your other guests, when do I shrink the box, which I call exploit? And when do I keep exploring? I think my book relates to yours and theirs, maybe on a more even, and I haven't read yours yet, on a meta level of the meta skill on top, which says, you need a structure that tells you where to point the other things. And it's especially true when you have regime shifts, and people don't like uncertainty and change, and their identity likes to be stuck.

1:03:24But that is going to be dangerous right now. And even if you think and act, not acting keeps you safe. It doesn't because you're swimming in the water, no matter what, you're already in the new environment. So if you don't change, and you start acting, you're going to get no feedback. And you're going to, by the way, sometimes the smartest people are the best at convincing you that the old room is still valid. It's almost a detriment. They can talk, you know, EQ and IQ, I can talk to you and convince you that still room is still right. When you and I know, I say it, once a regime shift happens, it never goes back.

1:04:02They're irreversible. We never go back to a world where we don't have information on the internet. We're not going back to a world without AI. So you have a choice to be either a resistor, say it's not there, an adopter where you use the tool, or an adapter. And an adopter thinks it's a tool and an adapter is the one that says, this isn't just a tool. It not only is a tool I can use, and it can be used right to augment. I think there's good uses out of it, but it changes me, the user, when I use it. Unlike a chisel and a hammer or a spreadsheet, this changes my, what I see, how I think. And that means if I'm a resistor or an adapter and not an adapter, I haven't really thought out far enough about how this all fits together.

1:04:51And that's why the book, some people have called it, I think it's gotten good reviews so far now, but some people say it's dense, but rewarding to get through because I'm trying to give people the tools to take that last step to becoming an adapter because it's the toolkit you need. That almost above all else, which is what you said earlier, that's the defining skill of the next era. It's certainly not IQ. and EQ is helpful. It's this ability to know what frame you're supposed to be taking all your other attributes and pointing them. I think the last thing you just said, Alec, is the soundbite for this episode.

1:05:25And I just want to give a couple testimonials about your book from people I know and who are friends. One is Stephen Kotler, who's the author of The Art of Impossible and the Rise of Superman, called it a clear, compelling guide to thinking under pressure. Eli Finkel, who's another guest who's been on the show, calls it a deep, important, and compulsively readable book among the best works of nonfiction I've encountered in a decade. And that's a ton coming from Eli. And then I'll just read Book Below's comment about it, that you make a quiet, but pressing case that raw intelligence will never carry us through the next decade.

1:06:07What matters is how quickly we can update our thinking when the ground shifts. Alec, your book came out the week that we're doing this recording. It's available everywhere for people who want to purchase books. Where can people find more information on what you're doing beyond the book? I have a Substack somewhat new to me this year that I write not just about the book, but I write thoughts and I'll continue to write thoughts. So it's free. So people can look me out on Substack. That's probably the best place. For my family office, we have a, it's called Qstar Capital is Qstar Cap. And so Qstar is one way to see what we're up to.

1:06:46And then probably we'll see as a result of this, I'm certainly going to do fewer podcasts and I don't have another book coming out. This might be a one and done, but the best place probably to see what I'm continuously thinking is my sub stack, to be honest with you. And I do that. And like I did for the book, just this is my way of trying at any rate to give back for anybody who wants to listen. And the beauty of it, when I think you're headed down that direction as well, is the beauty of adaptability is that I believe everybody has the capability to wield it. IQ and EQ, I know a lot of people with higher IQ and higher EQ than me, but I just don't think it's the defining still going forward.

1:07:22And the beauty is that it's great that the one in that I really truly believe is, everybody is born with and humans are exceptional at. and the beauty of a human, and there are some species that can attempt this. We are by far the best. And the last thing I'll say is that we evolved through adaptation by luck, mutations, and then some take hold. Humans can adapt in our lifetime. It's an incredible gift. Why would anybody want to give that away? When you have the ability, every listener here, everybody who's not listening, has the ability to take the environment and to say, great, show me how I can get the most use out of social media, how I get the most use out of AI, which I agree with you is about expanding the set.

1:08:05And then how do I ward off the negatives? It can be done. It's an act of commission. You have to get up, you have to act, but it could be the moment where we really do see what the most humans can do is. It's there. It's waiting to be done. We just have to make it a conscious act of agency. That's what I hope everybody does. And I appreciate that you and your guests are all contributing to that, writing it, taking your time. I hope I'm a tiny little helpful piece of it, I hope. But I just want everybody and be a part of people that are moving it forward. I'm very pro-human, all human, just pro-human.

1:08:41And so I appreciate you having me on and letting me speak my part. Alec, it was great to have you. Thank you so much for joining us on PassionStruck. Thank you for having me. I hope that conversation with Alec gave you a new way to think about adaptability. His analogy about swimming in the wrong direction is a powerful one because it reminds us that effort alone isn't enough. Sometimes we don't need to swim harder, we need to lift our heads, look at the current, and ask whether we're still moving toward the right destination. And with that, we've reached the end of our interview series portion of The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World.

1:09:18On Friday, I'll be doing a recap solo episode. However, over the past several weeks, we've explored this idea from so many different perspectives. Angela Duckworth helped us to understand how much our environments shape us. Marty Slugman showed us the importance of agency, the belief that our actions can make a difference. David Epstein challenged us to think differently about expertise and the experiences that prepare us for an uncertain future. Jared Diamond helped us to think about adaptability through the lens of leadership. Cole Brower showed us what adaptation looks like when you're alone in the middle of the ocean.

1:09:55Marissa Franco took us inward in our relationship with ourselves. Alex Edmonds explored how our collective environments can distort our judgment. Scott Simon and Gregory Stock reminded us of the courage required to ask better questions. Peter Gray brought us back to childhood play curiosity and the development of independence and now Alec has challenged us to lift our heads question the framework operating within and recognize when reality itself has changed but there's one more piece of the story I want to explore this Friday I'm gonna bring the entire series together in a special solo episode I'll look across these conversations and the themes we've uncovered agency identity curiosity relationships, belonging, environment, and adaptability, and explore what they reveal about the human need to know that our lives have significance.

1:10:47Because adapting to the world is only part of the challenge. We have to ask what kind of world we're adapting to, and what that world is telling us about our own value. And that brings us to next week. On October 6th, I'll be launching my new book, The Mattering Effect. In a special solo episode next week, I'll take you inside the book and explain the ideas behind the Great Erasure, the Mattering Gap, and the Mattering Tax, and why I believe the erosion of human significance has become one of the most defining challenges of modern life. Here's a preview. Being needed is not the same as mattering.

1:11:25Being needed communicates, what you do is valuable to me. Mattering communicates, You are valuable to me, and your presence makes a difference. And if you're in the Tampa Bay area, I'd love to see you in person on launch day, October 6th at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, where I'll be celebrating the launch of the mattering effect in a conversation with Linda Hurtado from Fox News. So this is the final interview in the Adaptive Human series, but it is also a bridge into what comes next. I'm John Miles and as always stay curious, stay intentional and stay passion struck.