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Simon SinekSimon Sinek

The AI Skills Nobody is Teaching (And Everyone Needs) | AI Expert Ethan Mollick

Be honest: AI makes you a little nervous. Maybe you're afraid it'll take your job. Maybe you're overwhelmed by all the advice about prompts and agents and which chatbot to use. Or maybe you're just quietly hoping it'll all slow down. Ethan Mollick says we're underestimating our own agency in the age of AI. Instead of worrying about what AI will do to us, we should focus on what we choose to do with it. Ethan is a Wharton professor, the author of the bestseller _Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI,_ and the writer behind “One Useful Thing,” one of the most popular newsletters on AI, work, and education. He's spent twenty years studying how people actually use technology, and he's become the go-to voice for making sense of AI without the hype or the doom. And in his new book, _Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI,_ he explores what comes next as AI moves from a tool we prompt to a presence we live and work alongside. In this conversation, Ethan shares the practical playbook most of us are missing and makes the case that our experience, taste, and point of view aren't things AI replaces. They're exactly what make us better at using it. In this episode you'll learn: ➡️ Why young people are NOT "AI natives" (and why experience is the real AI advantage) ➡️ The $20 decision that instantly upgrades how you use AI ➡️ Why AI agrees with everything you say + the simple prompt that fixes it ➡️ How to make AI write in YOUR voice instead of sounding like everyone else ➡️ The "jagged frontier": what AI is surprisingly bad at (and why that's your opportunity) ➡️ Why taste may become the most valuable skill of the AI era ➡️ How much agency we really have over where AI takes us Ethan believes that the future of AI isn't something that will just happen to us… It's something we get to build together. This… is _A Bit of Optimism._ + + + To pre-order Ethan’s new book, _Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI,_ head to: https://co-existence.ai/ Want to hear more from Ethan? Check out his Substack “One Useful Thing”: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/ + + + Chapters 00:00:00 The Human Competitive Edge in an AI World 00:02:05 Why Ethan Became the Go-To Practical AI Expert 00:03:30 The Internet Showed Up: Why AI Feels Familiar 00:05:54 Feeling Overwhelmed by AI Advice? You're Not Alone 00:08:52 The Pendulum Swings: Blue Collar vs White Collar and AI 00:12:14 Getting Practical: How to Actually Use AI Better 00:20:40 The Voice Problem: Why AI Writing All Sounds the Same 00:25:48 The Apprenticeship Model Just Broke 00:29:43 Art, Intention, and the Joy of Human Creation 00:33:57 The Death of Movie Stars and the Rise of Taste 00:37:49 Models, Apps, and Harnesses: Understanding AI's Three Layers 00:38:43 Privacy, Security, and Trusting AI With Your Data 00:41:47 The Education Crisis: Teaching When AI Does the Work 00:43:35 Your Brain on Technology: From Phone Numbers to Critical Thinking 00:50:09 The Conversation Trick: Using AI to Actually Learn 00:52:58 What Keeps Ethan Up at Night About AI 00:54:57 Your Agency in the AI Revolution + + + Simon is an unshakable optimist. He believes in a bright future and our ability to build it together. Described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” Simon has devoted his professional life to help advance a vision of the world that does not yet exist; a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do. Simon is the author of multiple best-selling books including _Start With Why,_ _Leaders Eat Last,_ _Together is Better,_ and _The Infinite Game._ + + + Website:http://simonsinek.com/ Leaderful: https://simonsinek.com/leaderful Podcast:http://apple.co/simonsinek Instagram:https://instagram.com/simonsinek/ Linkedin:https://linkedin.com/in/simonsinek/ Twitter:https://twitter.com/simonsinek Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/simonsinek + + + #SimonSinek

Simon SinekhostEthan Mollickguest
Jun 16, 202658mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:05

    The Human Competitive Edge in an AI World

    1. SS

      So when you're interviewing for a job and everybody's good because of AI, how do I stand out and, and get a job that's still, that they still need to hire for? I'm fascinated by that.

    2. EM

      Like, if Claude is really good at running your company, Claude's also good at running every other company, and there's no variation between them. And generically high quality with no variation means there's no moats or com- competitive edge. I think humans who bring competitive edge to this one way or another just by providing variation, if nothing else-

    3. SS

      Yes

    4. EM

      ... is a useful way to think about problems, right? You start to care a lot more about the taste of that person than you do about the entire organization built to deliver the product.

    5. SS

      We're all a little afraid of AI. Even the people who love it are a little bit afraid. Some of us are afraid it'll take our jobs, or make us dumber, or change everything so fast we'll never be able to catch up. It doesn't help that most AI experts fall into one of two camps. They're the doomers, or they're the zealots. That's why I wanted to talk to Ethan Mollick. He's an AI expert who refreshingly is neither. Ethan's a Wharton professor studying how AI, entrepreneurship, and innovation impact our work. He focuses on how employees actually use these tools rather than how they're theoretically supposed to improve our work. His New York Times bestseller, Co-Intelligence, and his popular Substack, One Useful Thing, have become the go-to resources for all those people trying to make sense of AI without losing their minds. Ethan believes we have more agency over AI than we think. It's our experience, our taste, and our genuine points of view that are things that AI can never replace. And that's important, because the choices we make about how we integrate AI personally and at work as a society will shape what it becomes. If you like this episode, please remember to subscribe. This is A Bit of Optimism.

  2. 2:05 – 3:30

    Why Ethan Became the Go-To Practical AI Expert

    1. SS

      You are very popular right now. [laughs] What were you... I know you teach entrepreneurship and other things. Before AI, what was the, what were you teaching that was the, the, the hot thing?

    2. EM

      In addition to AI stuff, my other thing I really care about is games and educa- and, and education at scale, two related things. I've done a lot of work on using video games for teaching, so I was, I, I was, as the brand says, not famous, but known in that space of thinking about games and, you know, teaching at scale, how do we teach transformationally. So that has been something I've worked on for a long time, and the AI work was sort of in parallel to that.

    3. SS

      And was it your own personal curiosity about AI that, that sucked you in? Or was it that you, you were forced to use AI in the work that you were doing 'cause it had to, 'cause it made it better?

    4. EM

      I went to business school and my PhD program at MIT, and I worked with the MIT Media Lab with their AI group. So, um, Marvin Minsky, who was one of the fathers of the field, and I was the non-technical guy in the group. So I was the person who had to explain to other people what AI was, how it worked. When we'd go talk, have technical conversations, I'd come along. I, I've been AI adjacent or involved for 20 years, but always in the sort of non-technical, like, how do we use this, how do we explain it role. And everybody else was technical 'cause it wasn't really working out. Like, AI had limited use cases, and so when GPT-3 came along and started to be- make a splash, little, and then ChatGPT after that, I was sort of well-positioned in this world of someone who'd been thinking about and explaining this for a while in, in a non-technical

  3. 3:30 – 5:54

    The Internet Showed Up: Why AI Feels Familiar

    1. EM

      world.

    2. SS

      The reason I was really interested in talking to you, 'cause I, I, to be honest with you, I try not to have AI guests on. [laughs] And the reason is, is because they generally come in one of two flavors, right? It's the greatest thing that ever happened, and it's gonna make the world a better place, or it's the worst thing that ever happened, we're all gonna die. And the conversations are, for obvious reasons, a little lopsided and one-sided, and they usually have some vested interest in one opinion or the other.

    3. EM

      Yes.

    4. SS

      And the reason I wanted to talk to you, to be honest with you, is yours is just more practical. It's not it's the savior. It's not it's gonna kill us all. But it's kinda like, well, it's here, you know, kinda like the internet showed up. What's the best way to use this thing? And, and it's a, it's a little more down the middle.

    5. EM

      Yes. It's nice to be in a place where being somewhat pragmatic makes you unusual. Um, that's not usually the place where you get publicity for being the non-bombastic version.

    6. SS

      It's true.

    7. EM

      But also, those, the other problem with those two opinions is they tend to eat the world, right?

    8. SS

      Yeah.

    9. EM

      If you think that we're getting a machine god who's gonna save us all, then, you know, all that matters is discussing that, right, just like any other sort of religious belief. And if you believe that we're all gonna die, how can you have a conversation about anything other than, you know, this is gonna doom us all?

    10. SS

      Yeah.

    11. EM

      And the fact is, this is a general purpose technology. It's gonna affect everything we do one way or another.

    12. SS

      Yeah.

    13. EM

      It's worth spending some time on that, and it, some of those effects will be good, some will be bad.

    14. SS

      I do remember the sort of the rise of the internet. I'm old enough to remember it, and the conversations were somewhat similar, m- maybe less, less dramatic on, on either side.

    15. EM

      There was a lot of positive energy at that time.

    16. SS

      Mostly positive.

    17. EM

      Yeah.

    18. SS

      But, but there was lots of conversation, like I remember people who, you know, there were the zealots who believed that the internet and everything online was gonna replace everything. You know what it is? It's the difference between eating to live and living to eat, you know? And if you leave it to the technologists, they think all technology is living to eat.

    19. EM

      I mean, they literally made protein powder shakes. I don't remember, Soyent, where you're supposed to just have-

    20. SS

      I remember Soylent. I remember

    21. EM

      ... for, for people, for people who thought eating was too annoying. Why are we spending all of our time worrying about eating when we could just get it taken care of, right? It's a different view of efficiency, but it's also a view that kind of blinds you to the fact that technology is the most human activity, right? We're making tools for ourselves. How we use them, how we adopt them, how we regulate them, those are gonna have big influences. You know, AI is more self-directed than most technologies, but we still have a lot of

  4. 5:54 – 8:52

    Feeling Overwhelmed by AI Advice? You're Not Alone

    1. EM

      agency over what happens next.

    2. SS

      I mean, I know from my own experience, most people are misusing or underutilizing the technologies that are available to us, and I'm already getting to the point where I'm turning on- You know, social media or listening to friends or reading an article, and I'm already feeling overwhelmed by all of the advice of people telling me that I should be using it like this, and I be- sh- setting up an agent to run my life, and setting up an agent to do my marketing, and setting up an agent to do my finances. I'm already overwhelmed by all the advice of how I should even be prompting the machine to the point where I'm almost backing off and shutting down because one minute Gemini is the, you gotta only use that one, the next minute you gotta only use ChatGPT, the next minute oh, you gotta only use Claude. It's all too much already, and for anybody who's not predisposed to, like, be all in, that reaction, I think, is pushing some people away, believe it or not.

    3. EM

      Well, absolutely. I mean, look, I am, I am a nerd of the old school, so I like getting into the details of stuff and partially like explaining them, which is, I think, part of why you have me here. But also it is overwhelming. I mean, part of what's actually interesting is AI's gotten easier, right? Not to be too, you know, too evangelistic about it, but, like, it used to be that stuff mattered. Like, you had the, like, all those little details, like prompt engineering mattered. So it mattered how I phrased things. It mattered if I said, "You know, you are a physicist," it was better physics if I said, "Think hard about this," that mattered. If I offered bribes, that would matter. Uh, we've been testing all that. None of that matters anymore. The models have gotten good enough that if you're good at giving instructions like a human to humans, you probably do okay with this. And similarly, all the models are getting good quite quickly. So whether you use OpenAI or ChatGPT, they're, like, ChatGPT or, uh, Gemini or Anthropic, they're all three of those are pretty solid. There's, like, one or two hints I'd give people, but otherwise it's really just use it for stuff and don't stress how you're using it 'cause you'll figure it out.

    4. SS

      Also, when we talk about, like, AI's gonna take away all of our jobs, and by the way, those are the technologists saying that. When one of the things that I also love is the technologists are also very fond of saying, you know, things like 80% of the jobs ig- today didn't exist 20 years ago, which mean it's fair to say that 80% of the jobs in 20 years we can't even imagine. And to your point about prompting, it wasn't that long ago where the technologists were telling us prompting is gonna be the thing, and people are saying, "I'm gonna get a degree in prompting," and the technology got good enough in just a few minutes that that literally went away.

    5. EM

      Yeah, and I, I think that that is part of what makes this kind of interesting, right, is we can't imagine the jobs, but we, we'll keep trying, and also not imagining the jobs does get nerve-wracking when, like, you know, AI is here and it's like, "What is the job?" Well, I'm, I'm not 100% sure. I mean, I think there's both legitimate reasons to worry about jobs. These systems are very capable and very competent-

    6. SS

      Yes

    7. EM

      ... and they do change, they impact real work. This is not electricity in the same way of, like, we need to figure out a way to u- harness or use this thing.

    8. SS

      Yes.

    9. EM

      There's a real impact.

    10. SS

      I've talked about this a little bit. I actually think that, you know, nature pours a vacuum, markets correct. When we have a bubble, the stock market will at some point, not of our choosing, correct itself, and it, it, all systems seek eq- equilibrium at some point. I'm fond of saying that in the '70s

  5. 8:52 – 12:14

    The Pendulum Swings: Blue Collar vs White Collar and AI

    1. SS

      and '80s, robots started to enter factories, and the blue collar world said, "Hey, we're gonna lose our jobs," and the, and the white collar world said, "It's the future, baby. Progress stops for no one. Reskill." You know? And you know, the pendulum doth swing, and, and 'cause y- your plumber doesn't care about AI, the carpenter doesn't care about AI, the mechanic doesn't care about AI. The people who care about AI are the knowledge workers.

    2. EM

      Yes.

    3. SS

      And you know, it's the future, baby. Progress stops for no one. [laughs] Reskill, baby. [laughs]

    4. EM

      Yeah, that, I mean, that's a really sen- I mean, there is a co- comeuppance, but there is another thing, right? Like, if you look at the last three industrial revolutions, there's either two or three, I mean, that's all we've got, right? And the, the reason they worked out wasn't because the technology made everything great alone. It was because there was also labor fought against, you know, capital, and you had a whole bunch of fights happening. Unionization is how the benefits got spread around, right? The technology doesn't naturally do that. What's really interesting is we're gonna have a similar fight here, right? Like, AI, we already have good data, right? AI is pretty good at being a doctor. It's getting better at being a lawyer all the time. Like, most lawyers I talk to see a trajectory where not too long from now you will be able to get as good advice for not the most complicated issues from the AI, if you're not already, right? And there's ongoing debate about this. But the thing is, lawyers are not going to be quiet about losing their jobs, and it turns out a lot of Congress is lawyers and a lot of people donating money are lawyers. And I'm willing to bet that you're going to see laws passed in every state that you need to have a lawyer, officially, a human, sign off on something, even if they're worse than AI, right?

    5. SS

      Yeah.

    6. EM

      So part of this, like, there is a little bit of, "Oh, it's your comeuppance, white collar workers," but it's also like, no, no, they've got the, like, there, there are fields that are not gonna go easily, right?

    7. SS

      Yeah.

    8. EM

      And, and you know, doctors, lawyers, it's gonna be interesting. Coders re- really do not have the protection that doctors or lawyers or actors or other kind of guilds or associations do. So we'll see a lot of conflict over these issues in the near future.

    9. SS

      Lobbying for our own interests is not a new thing. So for example, for years there have been people who trying to, to, to raise money for the government, you know, where we can get more income. The, the average lifespan of a dollar bill is about one year. The average lifespan of a coin is something like 30 years. And so the proposal to move dollar bills to dollar coins because it would save the government, you know, untold billions per year in printing and all of the rest of it, and the reason we haven't done it is because of the ink and paper lobby, because they like those billions being spent on them to make new dollar bills every year. And so, you know, we're used to doing things that are not to our advantage because of lobbyists, and this is just another thing where those who have access to power and those who, who have influence will protect their interests, as you said.

    10. EM

      And not necessarily badly, right? Do we want all lawyers out of a job is an open question. A lot of people will be like, "Yes, yes, please." But like-

    11. SS

      [laughs]

    12. EM

      ... you know, I, I mean, already, uh, actually lo- there's some early evidence that the number of cases being submitted to judges is expo- exploding exponentially where people are pleading their own cases with AI law. And like, how do you deal with that? It used to be that we had a filter, right?

    13. SS

      Yeah.

    14. EM

      So the secondary thing is you had to convince a lawyer to take your case, and if they did a bad job they would be punished, and if it, you got a hundred-page legal brief, a person wrote that, and that was an indicator of real effort. But now it isn't. How do we deal with that kind of system? So we're gonna have all of these ripples in all kinds of areas that'll require policy changes, regulation changes, societal changes, even if we don't have sort of a apocalyptic AI event the way we were talking about earlier.

    15. SS

      So let's, let's go from the theoretical to the practicals.

  6. 12:14 – 20:40

    Getting Practical: How to Actually Use AI Better

    1. SS

      And as we sort of said before, which is a lot of people who aren't technologists are underutilizing or, or misutilizing this, this remarkable technology. Some are still using it as a glorified Google. Goog- Google to search, this is more of an answer machine, but still, it-- I, I mean, we all do that because it is a very simple and fantastic use case. The more nuanced and complex prompts, I think, I know I'm underutilizing. Like, I ask for an answer, even if it's something g- that has some depth, but I don't ask it to write a report or make an interactive, you know, dashboard of the data that... I'm not, I know that I'm not doing that, and I'm already a-ahead of some in terms of my utilization of the thing. I have two, two questions. One is, you're teaching students, you're teaching a lot of grad students at business school. Is it a false belief that just because people are younger, they're all in on this technology? Or are they also sort of bumbling and fumbling their way as they, as they learn about it?

    2. EM

      So we actually have a paper on this, like, so I think what people think, I hear this term i-in the internet, we're talking about digital native all the time. People talked about this, right? Like, kids these days are good at using the internet. And indeed, like, if you talk to somebody who grew up with TikTok, they will know all these intuitive ways that, you know, as an older person, you will not understand. Like, "Oh, that's cringe." There's a bunch of rules and slang and approaches that you wanna take, and I think that that model kind of carries through. The younger people get the technology, it does not hold for AI. Like, I talked to, like, a CHRO and was like, "Oh, the kids these days, they're, they're AI native." I mean, they're not AI native. You're just talking to Claude. They're conduits to Claude. Like, if you ask for a report, they'll give you a beautiful report. They have no idea what's in that report. How could they? They have no knowledge of this. They're just giving you what Claude says. And we actually found some evidence on this when we did a study at BCG, at Boston Consulting Group. We found junior employees were often much worse at using AI. They seemed like they were using it well. They were adopters. But how could they judge whether something was good or bad? I think this is a rare case where the more experienced you are, and sometimes the older you are, the better you're going to be at using AI if you decide to use it. Because you can intuitively grasp, how do I give instructions? AI works enough like people that if you give an instruction, and you're good at a field, you'll intuitive be like, "No, no, I understand what went wrong there. You're thinking about this. You should be thinking about that."

    3. SS

      Yeah.

    4. EM

      Even though the AI is not a person, it doesn't think, you'll know what kind of information to expect to get good answers. So I think actually experience really does matter. If you think about how our education system is built, we're, we're actually-- Schools are in chaos. I mean, they're always in chaos, right? Universities have always been in chaos. This is not new. You know, people are cheating with ChatGPT, but we actually know the pathway forward, right? Like, it's gonna be a little bit messy, and it's been like, we'll do in more inc-- We did this with calculators. We'll do more in-class assignments. Outside of class, we'll use AI tutors, which turn out to be very effective at controlled experiments. We'll make them work better than we do now. In class, it'll be active learning. We'll figure it out. I'm not worried that we can't figure it out. I am worried about the next stage. I, I teach people to be generalists at Wharton, and I-- they become a specialist the same way we've taught specialists for four thousand years, which is apprenticeship, right? I send them off to work for whomever, right? They go work, you know, they go work at, you know, Bank of America or whatever, and they learn the job, and everyone gets a good deal. They get a little bit of income, but not as much as they would probably deserve. But they get a chance to prove themselves, and they learn the ropes by doing grunt work over and over again. The middle manager assigns them grunt work that they don't wanna do anymore and gets to evaluate whether this person's any good or bad for moving up the ladder. And it's been a great mechanism, and that just broke, right? Because every junior person knows less than ChatGPT, and they would rather just use ChatGPT, and they'd be kind of dumb not to use ChatGPT or Claude to give you answers because it's better than what they could do. And every middle manager would rather delegate to the AI than a flawed human who takes forever to give them an answer, and it isn't as good.

    5. SS

      Yeah.

    6. EM

      And so everyone's just doing AI work to each other, and I think that that is exactly the problem that you're talking about here, which is the danger is that we lose the talent pipeline. There are solutions to it, but they're going to require a fairly radical change in how we think about talent pipelines.

    7. SS

      H-how much of this is kind of like art? And, and, and here's where my brain is going, right? Which is I am an art fanatic. It's the thing that I love more than most things, and I am totally fine with AI making art. It doesn't bother me. I'm totally fine with AI making music. It doesn't bother me. However, when I hang something on my wall, I like knowing that a person conceived of it. I like knowing that a person made it because when I buy a piece of art, I'm not just buying the visual thing on the wall. I'm buying the story that goes along with it. Or for example, I was listening to some music this weekend. Uh, I was listening to Jon Batiste's Beethoven Blues album, which is, if you haven't heard it, spectacular. Now, could AI make a blues version of a Beethoven sonata? One hundred percent it could. But the joy that I got from listening to that music was not just the music that I was listening to, but I was smiling that a person had the creativity to, to come up with this, and that was part of my joy. When we look at the work product, you know, there's two things we're, we're neglecting, which is I like thinking.

    8. EM

      Right.

    9. SS

      I enjoy debate. I enjoy making my head hurt at difficult things. I enjoy learning the same way a painter likes painting and a musician likes playing music and, and composing. Where is the human desire to want to learn? And then will our schools, but especially our places of work, allow for that to happen, or will they all become so obsessed with efficiency that we actually, even if we wanna learn... You, you see where I'm going with this.

    10. EM

      And there, there, there's ten million directions from here, right? So I, I wanna put a pin on the art thing 'cause it's actually really important and interesting, which is, you know, obviously, there might be a, a rise of our more artisanal human-made things. Uh, it's more-- The most direct version of this, by the way, is when you have AI write poetry or long-form fiction, there's often a lot of things wrong with it. But because we're used to, if we read something that reads beautifully, and it's effortful to read, we assume that there's a purpose behind it. So we spend our own effort figuring out the holes. Like, for example, the AIs are very famous at weird analogies, right? So it might say, "This conversation's like a gap-toothed smile." Now, that is not meaningful, but if you spend some time thinking about it, you're like, "Oh, how is it like it?" And you will reach a feeling of meaning, right? If that was, you know, Lazlo Kraszner or someone else writing this set of stuff, and I was reading it, I'd be like, "Oh, this person thought hard about that analogy, and I should spend-

    11. SS

      Yeah

    12. EM

      ... the work to do it." If it's the AI doing it- You know, in some ways it's beautiful, but the meaning comes from me, and am I being cheated because I have to create the meaning that has no intention?

    13. SS

      So the intention-

    14. EM

      Big questions are

    15. SS

      ... the intention no longer belongs to the artist. The intention now is shifted to the, to the listener or the viewer.

    16. EM

      Viewer, right? And maybe it always has. Definitely the novel stuff. But like, so that's one angle that's kind of interesting.

    17. SS

      Right.

    18. EM

      Right? And then I think the sort of second one is, you know, uh, is on thinking about developing some of these kind of, you know, how do you develop intuition? And we actually have a way of doing that. We, we know how to train people. Like, we could teach people to be experts, but the problem is it's effortful. Um-

    19. SS

      Yeah

    20. EM

      ... and so you, you're, like, there's always been this sort of view that I, you know, I told you early on, I make ga- I made games for education, and one of the most depressing things you learn is you can make something incredibly fun, but first of all, it's only 80% fun. It's not as fun as actually doing a thing for fun. And second of all, learning is effortful, and if you're not doing effortful work, then you're in trouble. And now for the few areas that we intrinsically care about, for you, you know, it might be art history or music, or maybe for some people it's math and science. Maybe for some people it's, you know, it's a sport they care about. Whatever you, we are effortful about and intrinsically motivated, you're like, "Why isn't all learning like this?" And the problem is you don't care enough about it. Like-

    21. SS

      Right

    22. EM

      ... and so, but I still want you to learn math even though you don't wanna learn math. I still want you to learn American history. And the, and if you shortcut that through AI giving you the answers, you learn nothing. We, we have enough experiments to show that. So making people essentially lift mental weights becomes the problem in a world where you, there are shortcuts.

    23. SS

      Y- you know, I find there's a great irony in all of this, which is the problem actually doesn't lie with AI, which is we've been on this steady drumbeat, this, this path to this point where we are c- you know, discomfort avoidant. The concept of ghosting is, is a thing where you just avoid a difficult conversation, or you see it now, uh, particularly among young people, where they're more comfortable with quitting a job than having a, a difficult conversation or getting negative feedback. And, and then the idea that we've become so end result-oriented, you know. As, as capitalism has become short-term focused and more focused on a shareholder supremacy, shareholder value over the quality of the product or customer satisfaction or employee satisfaction, you start to see we become more results-oriented, and we've left out the work product. This is not a new concept. AI is just the most exaggerated form of being results-obsessed at the expense of the effort, the work, or the journey to get

  7. 20:40 – 25:48

    The Voice Problem: Why AI Writing All Sounds the Same

    1. SS

      there.

    2. EM

      Well, and, and just to take another path from that, I mean, part of this is what makes AI at work so challenging, right? Because if you want productivity gains, you just, you'll get 100 times more PowerPoint, right?

    3. SS

      Every day.

    4. EM

      Like, if my job is producing a PowerPoint, like, so it requires you to rethink what the work is.

    5. SS

      Yeah.

    6. EM

      Uh, and so what the work product is can't be the same thing. I mean, even the most basic way, coders can write 100 times more code than they could before. If they are embedded in an organizational process where it takes two weeks to do a, you know, a product sprint as they, as they often call them, right? So each, there's standup meetings every day, and the assumption is the coder will write X number of work. The product manager will do this. The designer will do this. The marketing people will do this, and suddenly one person's 100 times more productive. What does that even mean for an organization becomes a problem. So part of this is our systems, we're coming back to that theme we've been developing throughout, which is human systems are not built, uh, for an AI world. We have-

    7. SS

      Yeah

    8. EM

      ... we are effort, you know, school wasn't built for a place where anyone could write your essays, right? Like, you know, and, like, work wasn't built for people to be able to produce PowerPoint on demand without thinking about it, right? Fiction wasn't built that I could write as many papers. The law clerks and courts weren't built for anyone to be able to bring up a case. That's not a problem. That happens at every industrial revolution. It's just all happening at once everywhere, and sometimes the AI wins, sometimes human systems win, sometimes we both lose. But that's where I'd watch the adjustment happening.

    9. SS

      I'm gonna go backwards a little bit here. Let's go back to practical, which based on classroom and in the, in the business world, 'cause I know you study that as well, what are better simple ways that we could be using the technology available to us? Like I said, most people are mis or under-utilizing the tool, and, you know, I'm overwhelmed by the people giving me advice as to how I should be doing things and what I could be doing. But, you know, from a, from a, just a, a basic standpoint, how can somebody level up just 1 to 10%?

    10. EM

      You can get more than 1 to 10%. I take no money from AI labs, so you don't sound like a sh- I don't sound like a shill. But you have to end up paying 20 bucks a month to one of the big three companies is what I'd recommend, either Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Anthropic's Claude, and you have to actively pick the best model available at that point, which is a, what, you'll have access to what are called thinking models, and those will change over time, but you have to actively select that. It defaults to a lower one. You will get huge impact improvements just from picking the most recent model and using it. The second thing I would say is AI has gotten quite good. So y- there's kind of three phases of AI. There's prior to ChatGPT, where mostly when we talk about AI, we'll be talking about how you use, you know, data analysis basically. There's all this talk about algorithmic fairness and price mining and all the, like, you know, p- customized pricing. All of that came from prior to ChatGPT. Then ChatGPT kicked off generative AI and what I will grandiosely call, 'cause it's the title of my book, my previous book, um, co-intelligence, where you'd work back and forth with a chatbot to get an answer, right? I'd type something to chat, it would give me an answer. Now we're in a new phase which I j- which is called agentic AI, and it's really just three or four months old practically.

    11. SS

      What does that mean? What does that mean?

    12. EM

      An agent is an AI system that can independently go do work if you ask it to.

    13. SS

      So agentic is just the, the adjective of agent.

    14. EM

      Agent, right. So agentic is an AI agent, and there's marketing terms around it, but it's an AI that can do, uh, work. The most important thing to realize is how good the work is and how long the work it is. There's this paper by, uh, and test by OpenAI, so you always take it with a grain of salt, but I've, there's been independent enough assessment, I feel good about it, called GDPVal. And what they did was they took people representing 5% of the US economy, so journalists and product managers and lawyers and private investigators, and with an average of 14 years of experience. They had them each create a really hard problem that they face in their field. They hired another set of people with 14 years of experience to do it. Took them on average seven or eight hours to do the work. The, and then they had the AI do the same thing. Took about 15 minutes for the AI. Then they had a third set of experts come in and spend an hour evaluating the outputs from each of these, not knowing whose is whose, and voting on which they liked better. And when this came out a year ago, the best AIs in the world were getting about 48%. 48% of the time they were tying or beating humans. The latest models as of when we're recording this, uh, are at about 84%. So 84% of the time, the work that they do, seven hours of human work are equivalent to or better than a human. What that means, going back to the practical piece, is you would probably save three times effort and three times, uh, cost if every complex job you'd give it to AI- And even if it took you an hour to put it together and evaluate, even if you had to give up 30% of the time, you would still save time and effort. So one of the things I think you're doing is not using AI and giving it hard enough tasks to do.

    15. SS

      Okay. And, and so that's the other thing, which is the value of the AI, where efficiency is not how quickly it can solve the problem, but how quickly you can evaluate whether it got the problem right.

    16. EM

      Which again, brings back to expertise. An expert can look at this right away and be like, not just it's wrong, but like often it's wrong because of a specific problem that you should have either specified better or the AI is stupid about something, and sometimes you can instantly get, "Oh, it's never gonna get this 'cause it's too subtle and I can't communicate the point. I'm just gonna do this myself." But sometimes you're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, this is a rookie mistake, and I should remind it that when it writes articles to not just factually explain everything, but explain it with a story," or whatever your thing is.

    17. SS

      Right.

    18. EM

      And then it's

  8. 25:48 – 29:43

    The Apprenticeship Model Just Broke

    1. EM

      better, right? So evaluation, feedback, these are things experts are good at, and the AI responds really well to that.

    2. SS

      Here's the other problem, which is I remember when I wrote my first book, right? Everybody told me, everybody in the publishing world said, "The most difficult thing for any author is quote unquote 'to find their voice.'" Right? To have a voice. Now, it's a very hard concept to understand, you know, what voice is. Essentially, it's when you read my words, they are of me. They're my, they're my personality. They're, they're my point of view. It's not just nicely written, but it is, it is of me, right? And it's very hard to do for an author. And I have found that AI can write beautifully, but it has no voice, and if you ask it to have a voice, it's gonna always have voices that are available to it in the, in the world, in other words, published people, but not you. And so most writing will start to just sound the same. I mean, I'm already seeing it. I'm getting AI-generated emails in my inbox, and they're all basically the same email.

    3. EM

      It's not X, it's Y. It's doing the heavy lifting here. The thing that keeps me up at night. Um-

    4. SS

      Exactly

    5. EM

      ... you know, this is a load-bearing argument, uh, the staccato three sentences, but, you know, word, word, word-

    6. SS

      And I'm starting to just delete them all-

    7. EM

      Yeah

    8. SS

      ... because they're all familiar.

    9. EM

      Yes. It's a one-

    10. SS

      And none of them stand out.

    11. EM

      Right. And I push back, I'd say it's not that it doesn't have a voice. It has a voice, right? A singular voice that is-

    12. SS

      It has a voice

    13. EM

      ... of voice or ChatGPT. And it's actually not a bad voi- Like, if I was get... If I didn't see it 4 billion times a day-

    14. SS

      But it's not your voice.

    15. EM

      Right.

    16. SS

      It's a voice.

    17. EM

      And it's a perfectly good voice, right?

    18. SS

      Yes.

    19. EM

      It's a little dramatic. It just sometimes is like it, it loves transitions too much, obviously loves, you know, em dashes too much, but it's not your voice, and that is another thing that is like developing your voice. Now, a lot of people can't, right? Like, not everyone's a good writer. No matter how much-

    20. SS

      Right

    21. EM

      ... we teach them writing, they don't get it. Ghostwriters have been around forever, right? I'm glad, you know, that writing is something I do and have an established voice. I know plenty of people who use ghostwriters to do their kind of work. I agree on the AI voice. Now, I will say you can get it significantly more like you, not for the kind of long form work of a book. But a tip here, if you wanna do this, is give AI a large sample of your writing and then say, "Write, uh, two pages summarizing the style of this," and the instructions on how to write in this style. And then you paste that into your custom instruction and you say, "Write in this style." It will not-- It will be a slight parody of you, but it will be infinitely better than if you just say, you know, "Write like this famous person."

    22. SS

      Right. Um, I, I mean, I did something recently as an experiment, which is I walked around the living room just talking into Claude and said, "Write an op-ed in the style of Simon Sinek. Here's the idea." And I just walked around the living room for about three or four minutes, and then it gave me a pretty remarkably written article. Then I said, "Fact check it." And it said, "Well, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong, [chuckles] that's wrong." I said, "Okay, go offer me what I could say to make it factually correct." And the thing that I enjoyed about doing it, which is, you know, it takes 80% of my time to make a shitty first draft, and then editing is reasonably efficient and a lot more fun to really just clean something up. Most of the time is the, is the first draft, right? And so here I got a shitty first draft in a few minutes, and then I sat down and with it, you know, it fact checked it, which was so efficient. I didn't have to go do all the research myself, although I did double check all the research just to be sure.

    23. EM

      As you point, the error rates of these things are dropped. If you use a modern model-

    24. SS

      But, but-

    25. EM

      ... it's not making mistakes the way-

    26. SS

      But it's not making mistakes the same way. I have to say, it was actually kind of fun to edit it in my voice with my sense of humor, and the last finishing touches, I realized I could put my voice. I was pretty impressed. I was pretty impressed. Now, I could cheat because I have wr- written enough that

  9. 29:43 – 33:57

    Art, Intention, and the Joy of Human Creation

    1. SS

      it can know my style, and I wouldn't say it was perfect, but it was, it was scary good.

    2. EM

      Yeah. I mean, there's a few things going on there. One of those is this idea of disruption to writing, and I mean, there's costs to everything, right? So one option of writing the crappy first draft is it's your crappy first draft. So I always recommend some crappy first draft because otherwise the AI's ideas will take over your ideas. It's very good at ideas and your, uh, like you will find you can't brainstorm. But with that said, I find this kind of a similar loop of like editing is a weird way of approaching a pro- Like, it's not how we used to do it before, which is like I can get something written in my form and then I edit it. You know, I'm sure some writers have worked that way for years. But-

    3. SS

      Yeah

    4. EM

      ... that's a disruption to writing that might be better, right? It might be where it's hard to know. Suddenly you're a factory, you know, producing first drafts that-

    5. SS

      Yeah

    6. EM

      ... you know, took all the time and... Or maybe some people are just really good at editing and they weren't good at draft writing, and suddenly they're more productive than they were before.

    7. SS

      I think this is one of the future jobs that we underappreciate, which is not just that jobs are new, but that the weight of the job will shift.

    8. EM

      Yes.

    9. SS

      To your point, you know, we've always celebrated the writer and editors have always been like just there. If you work for public relations or you work in magazines, like the person who's the writer who wrote the press release, they're the person who went to school to write the press release, and we just sort of like the editors are just- The, the lower paid, you know-

    10. EM

      Right, right, right, right

    11. SS

      ... you know, failed writers, you know, quote-unquote. But now I think the writers, I think that the balance will shift.

    12. EM

      I think we're gonna see that across lots of jobs, by the way, to come back to the job thing. So jobs are many tasks, right? A writer does... Like as a writer, you're in charge of writing and editing and fact-checking all the... And the AI does some of that work. It shifts the burden of what you do, but it doesn't take away everything. And I think what we're gonna see in a lot of jobs is this idea of bottlenecks, that the AI is good at some stuff, but bad at other stuff. We, I, we call this the jagged frontier of AI in our early papers on this, which is it's good at some things, bad at some things you wouldn't expect. Where it's bad, right, writing perfectly in your voice, getting a joke right, like suddenly the demand for your labor is higher there, right? And your value is higher. It might have been that your jokes were not what was getting you, like that was not your main deciding factor. But if you're better at jokes now, suddenly there's value.

    13. SS

      Yeah.

    14. EM

      Same thing's happened in coding, by the way. It used to be that writing really clean code was a really good skill. Now the AIs write most of the code, being an architect is good. Being an engineer manager is good.

    15. SS

      Yeah.

    16. EM

      The jobs change. What's important and what isn't important changes, and that changes who's good or bad at it too, creating new opportunities and new risks.

    17. SS

      You may have instead of 100 coders, you might have 50 or 30 working on the team, but they're still human beings with egos, insecurities, you know, lack of sleep, all of this stuff, and there's still somebody overseeing the project who has to manage all the messy human stuff regardless of how good the technology is. I, for one, believe that doubling down on human is gonna become even more important now because we still have to take care of the people who are working on the products with their AI, uh, uh, agents.

    18. EM

      Oh, absolutely. And, and also when I wanted something coded in the past, I had to hire a company to do it. Now there might be a coder working for every two-person team, and more software's being created than ever, right? So the jobs are unimaginable in the future is sort of an annoying thing to say. I think it is annoying because I think we actually have some idea of what this looks like, which is not that coders are replaced by, you know, prompt engineers, but that the job of coding changes.

    19. SS

      Yes.

    20. EM

      The demand for coding shifts from giant organizations where a thousand people work together programming to now dispersed, and your car dealership might have a coder building customized software for you around the, what the managers want of the team. You might have two developers working for you rather than outsourcing web development that are, you know, evolving things. The nature of software and the jobs change, and I think that that is a missing piece of this puzzle also.

    21. SS

      A- and I think the other thing we aren't appreciating, which is the more things get good, right? 'Cause it used to be that quality would help you stand out.

    22. EM

      Yep.

    23. SS

      That if you were smarter, a better coder, a better writer, a better this, a better that, whatever it was, being good at something made you stand out from the crowd, right? If the quality of, let's just say everything, gets slightly higher or a lot higher, then it commoditizes so many products.

    24. EM

      Yeah.

    25. SS

      And so what I'm curious about and cannot predict and don't even have a thought about what happens here, but if e- everything just becomes generically good, then how do you stand out in a market now? And we've s-

  10. 33:57 – 37:49

    The Death of Movie Stars and the Rise of Taste

    1. SS

      we've kind of seen this with the rise of social media, where in the last generation that has movie stars, I think it's the death of the movie star. Nobody's really buying a ticket to go see a movie because a particular actor is in it. Like, like one battle after another. You know, lots of people went to see the movie. Very few went to see it because Leonardo DiCaprio was in it, you know?

    2. EM

      Right.

    3. SS

      And that's what the movie stars used to do. They used to make people go see the movie. Now we'd rather see the franchise, and we're more interested in Marvel than who's in it, and this is what I mean by commoditization. I'm so curious as everything becomes better and commoditized, TV channels, a- everything's commoditized. What's the thing that makes companies, products, and people stand out? So when you're interviewing for a job and everybody's good because of AI, how do I stand out and, and get a job that's still, that they still need to hire for? I'm fascinated by that.

    4. EM

      I think a few things are, are... There's a lot of things there again, right? Part of this, by the way, is writ large, right? Like if Claude is really good at running your company, Claude's also good at running every other company, and there's no variation between them, and generically high quality with no variation means there's no moats or com- competitive edge. I think humans who bring competitive edge to this one way or another, just by providing variation if nothing else-

    5. SS

      Yes

    6. EM

      ... is a useful way to think about problems, right? Like your sense of taste matters, right? And presumably it's why, you know, why people listen to you is like your sense of taste of who to talk to, the kinds of questions you ask, you know, is similar to the sense like do you like Rothko or do you like Rembrandt? Like there's different tastes that have different kinds of outcomes.

    7. SS

      Yes.

    8. EM

      The second thing is developing taste, right, is a bigger issue, which is how do we get people to develop taste? It's usually a casual, casual lifetime thing. That might be one of the new talents we teach people is developing a sense of taste, which requires, you know, experiencing broad things and making choices and having the vocabulary to describe your sense of taste and choices. I think that as people become bigger creators and they can do more, their taste matters more. Like directors may end up mattering more than ever because I understand what I'm getting with a Wes Anderson experience, right? And if he can direct a whole thing the way he wanted to, what would that look like?

    9. SS

      Yes.

    10. EM

      And we might find the same kind of thing with all kinds of other stuff. There's someone who has a particular taste in ice cream styles. Now you can make ice cream on demand because the AI will connect you through the APIs to a, you know, to a vendor that makes that product for you. So it kind of fits in of enabling one person to do much more. You start to care a lot more about the taste of that person than you do about the entire organization built to deliver the product.

    11. SS

      So good. I mean, I have my own biases and opinions, but I'm curious, is there actually a difference between Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude? I know Claude has a much more B2B focus, a business model. That means security is more of a thing because business wouldn't stand for, you know, any lapses in security maybe like customers might. Is there actually a difference?

    12. EM

      So there are. Um, just a half step back on the boring educational side of this. You, when you're thinking about AI now, you wanna think about three things, the model, which is the brains of the bunch, right? At the time we're recording this, that's Opus 4.7 from Anthropic's, that's a Claude model, ChatGPT 5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro. By the time you hear this, there will be slightly higher numbers on all of those things based on how things are going, right? But those are, those are the brains, right? The better your AI model is, the smarter it is at everything. It's better at negotiation, it's better at poetry, it's better at math, it's better at like... But that's the brains. Then you wanna consider apps. Apps are the tools you access these. For most people, when I say app, what they should be thinking of is chatgpt.com or claude.ai or gemini.google.com. That is an app. But the apps that people increasingly talk about when they use AI are things like Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, NotebookLM, which if you haven't used for, uh, Gemini is free and very impressive for research and gathering data. And those are very specific tools built for specific purposes. And then finally, there's what we call harnesses, which are how the AI can do things, right? So a harness lets the AI write code or do internet searches or make images

  11. 37:49 – 38:43

    Models, Apps, and Harnesses: Understanding AI's Three Layers

    1. EM

      for you. So right now, the three big companies all have roughly equally good, well, probably, you know, jockey for position-

    2. SS

      Yeah

    3. EM

      ... but they're all making very good m- brains. The models are all very good. Right now, Google has a, um, the most diverse set of products, of apps, but their main apps are probably weaker than Anthropic or OpenAI, and they have worse harnesses for the main app. So if you wanna use AI to do things right now, the most powerful tools are Claude Code or CoWork on your machine if you're using Anthropic or OpenAI's, um, Codex tool. And what makes those different is they sit, uh, they use your computer. So, like, you can give it access to your files, to your email. It can, you know, it can do work for you using your machine, your web browser, whether you like this or not, right, um, and, and do work. So because of that, those two are kind of jockeying back and forth for the lead, but all three of them are quite good. The models are good across

  12. 38:43 – 41:47

    Privacy, Security, and Trusting AI With Your Data

    1. EM

      all of them.

    2. SS

      So now let's talk about security, right? So we're all tired of Meta and all the other companies, you know, filling our computers with cookies, tracking our every movement on every website even after we've left their website and their product, and then we've all become very sensitive to turning off cookies, and data privacy is now a thing. You know, do I wanna give any of these AI models, do I trust any of these companies to have access to all my computer, all my browse history, all my finances, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?

    3. EM

      So it's a hard question, right? I mean, there, there are more secure versions where you can even run your own version of these tools, but they will not be as good as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google's. There's a couple kinds of security concerns you might have. One of them is, are they taking your data and using it to train their next model? If you pay $20, all of them have an option to turn off that training feature. Is that enough privacy for you? It's hard to know, right? There's open questions about whether or not someone's AI history will be searchable. Is, is it, you know, is it something that lawyers can demand to look at it, right, discoverable? There's open questions about, you know, what will companies do with this in the long term, even though they sign agreements with you. But on the other hand, you have Gmail probably has all your email in it, right? Like, these look like enterprise software applications at this point rather than sort of invasive individual tools. So do you tr- how much do you trust, you know, Google with your information or Instagram with your information? We're in that same kind of boat over again.

    4. SS

      The difference is, is as much as I don't want Google to have access to all my Google, my email, I know that it does, but I know that nobody can go out onto the web and s- and ask a query i- in, in a Google search to read my email and tell me something. I think a lot of us are afraid that somebody could just go onto ChatGPT or open, you know, one of the others-

    5. EM

      So they, they can't do that. They are not, they, you, there's no... It's just like Gmail in that way, right? There's no bleed over where there's just one giant inbox, and you're just barely holding it together, right? It works the same way. I mean, it looks like enterprise software. So that has its own risk, right? But the basic risk of, like, can someone just ask for something and get access to your ChatGPT? No. If they log in with a, you know, you have to do all the same things you do.

    6. SS

      Got it.

    7. EM

      Set up two-factor authentication. Don't leave yourself logged onto a computer. But it works, I, the analogy I would have is Gmail, right?

    8. SS

      Got it.

    9. EM

      Like, Google has all this information. They're obviously processing it and using it for their own purposes, but they're also not going to, you know, they've anonymized it in some way to try and create trust. It takes effort to hack into someone's Gmail. It's the same kind of boat, right? Now, whether or not we want, you want a company to have even more power over you, those are choices you get to make. But I don't think we should put this in a separate privacy category. The actual risk is if I let it have access to my computer, and it could use my web browser, you know, could someone convince my AI to send them all my money if it's, you know, if it's reading all my emails? And that is, you know, hasn't happened yet, but is not impossible.

    10. SS

      Right. So obviously because you are, you know, you teach this, you embrace this, you allow your students to use it, I assume. I don't know how to ask this, which is how do you ensure that your students are learning-

    11. EM

      So, yeah

    12. SS

      ... if they are allowed to use these tools to learn? [laughs]

  13. 41:47 – 43:35

    The Education Crisis: Teaching When AI Does the Work

    1. EM

      So I went viral first in education with my syllabus right after ChatGPT came out, the first version, which uses what we call GPT 3.5. And, you know, that was around for a few months. GPT 3.5 was pretty flawed. Like, it would make up arguments all the time. It would obviously hallucinate. It felt like a, you know, like a smart, you know, uh, ninth-grader or something like that, right? And so I teach college courses, I could tell. So I, my original policy was use AI for everything you want. You're accountable for the output. That was great for four months until GPT-4 came along, um, which is now obsolete. It was good for a while. And it was as good as my students across some things, not across all things, but enough that a low-effort student was, was worse than GPT-4. And I can no longer tell people, "Just use AI." I can tell because the AI was giving them the answers, not being the answers. And we've seen this over and over. There's a lot of studies that show if you just use ChatGPT to get answers to questions, you think you're learning, even if you're not cheating. You think you're learning, and you're not learning-

    2. SS

      Yeah

    3. EM

      ... because the AI gives you the results. But it turns out we actually know pedagogically how to solve this problem. We did this with calculators, right, with, in school, which is we can do in-class testing. We can make you use the AI for some stuff and not for others. So for my classes, I'm looking at entrepreneurship. So output is in some cases, like I, I gave all my students, for example, what I called the, um, Voight-Kampff test, which is the name of the Blade Runner human test, but I made my own version of it. And they had to launch their startups using AI, but based around areas they were experts in, experiences they had had, knowledge of the world they had had, a viewpoint they had, which kept them in the picture. And then they also had to do a lot of in-class stuff, right? We had to have a discussion about these things. I actually had them use AI tutors that asked them questions. They had to use an AI to build a case study with, and I set up the AI so it wouldn't give them all the answers. It would challenge them to come up with a case study information. So there's things we can do, but it does require changing how we teach.

    4. SS

      But the reality is technology does affect our brains. Like, so, I mean, I'll give you

  14. 43:35 – 50:09

    Your Brain on Technology: From Phone Numbers to Critical Thinking

    1. SS

      a, I'll give you a real-life one-to-one example, right? My, I, my mind, I used to have a steel trap- ... for phone numbers.

    2. EM

      Yeah.

    3. SS

      I knew everybody's phone number. You told me, gave me a name, I'll tell you their phone. I, and I didn't have to memorize it, I just heard the phone number and I had a steel trap for phone numbers. It was just, it was just how my brain worked. And I, in the early days of, I bought a Casio digital diary. I got it for my birthday, I remember. You know, it had 2K of memory. I think I upgraded to the 6K when it came out.

    4. EM

      Wow.

    5. SS

      It was like hardcore, right? And it was the most remarkable thing, and I programmed all the phone numbers from my memory into the device, and then slowly added more and more phone numbers as I learned them. And my brain was like, "Okay, if that's what you want, fine. I can't remember a single phone number anymore."

    6. EM

      Hm.

    7. SS

      And if we, you have to remember that the, like The Iliad and The Odyssey were oral traditions.

    8. EM

      Yes.

    9. SS

      You know? This book that we were forced to read in school that's a, that's like, you know, 800 pages. You know, ba- go back a f- you know, a couple of hundred years, and it was like, "Son, it's time I tell you the story of The Iliad, and you will tell your son the story of The Iliad." It was in oral traditions that people remembered, but because of the printing press, our brains just stopped remembering stuff.

    10. EM

      Yes.

    11. SS

      So this has to have an impact on our intelligence. There's no getting around it.

    12. EM

      I mean, absolutely. I mean, look, my, my grandfather, um, was an engineer who built like the fire suppression systems for Cape Canaveral, and his like dissertation was writing, doing a single piece of matrix multiplication. I have no idea how to do what he just did, and he used slide rules to do it. I have no idea how to use a slide rule. My kids have not learned cursive, right? Like, we give up stuff all the time.

    13. SS

      Yeah.

    14. EM

      The whole idea of technology is o- on purpose, we give up things that we used to be able to do-

    15. SS

      Yes

    16. EM

      ... to machines so we don't have to do them anymore.

    17. SS

      Agreed.

    18. EM

      And every time we face the same choice about what's valuable and what's not. And what I worry about, like the, the default version of that is bad, right? I mean, we've seen this happening with like, you know, you can argue short form video has killed reading because it's more entertaining to do that. I don't need to spend the effort reading the book to get there. Okay. That was a bad choice. We are going to have a ton of these choices, right-

    19. SS

      Yeah

    20. EM

      ... around AI. It doesn't hurt your brain, but it is a choice that you can hurt your brain with, right? As an educator-

    21. SS

      Yeah

    22. EM

      ... part of my job is to get around that problem anyway.

    23. SS

      Yeah.

    24. EM

      People can survive a lot without reading very well. They can survive pretty well without doing math. They don't have to learn American history. Like there's some degree of, of making this a requirement.

    25. SS

      But this, but, but this is a slippery slope, right?

    26. EM

      Yeah.

    27. SS

      Because now, now we go down the path of, "Oh, you don't need university." And there's a whole movement that you don't need to go to college. And what we forget is you may not need the subjects that you learn at college, but going to higher ed teaches you to think critically, it teaches you to, to argue with people who have way more education than you and form strong arguments to take them on. It also teaches you adulting. And so my problem isn't that technology replaces, that, that there are sacrifices. Like I accept that I don't have to have a memory for phone numbers because of technology anymore. That, that, that, I accept that. My concern is that thinking, the ability to think is the sacrifice here, and that's way more s- uh, damaging than, than remembering phone numbers or the, you know, remembering The Iliad.

    28. EM

      So I push back. I don't think it destroys your ability to think. I mean, I think for a lot of people it gives them even more ability 'cause they have a conversation partner at their level who's willing to discuss a topic. As long as people have any curiosity about the world-

    29. SS

      Okay

    30. EM

      ... right? All of this is prosthesis for thinking. I mean, books were prosthesis.

  15. 50:09 – 52:58

    The Conversation Trick: Using AI to Actually Learn

    1. SS

      argument that you're making here is, and I don't know how many people have done this, which is where you use the talk function where you can actually have a conversation backwards and forwards with the AI as opposed to typing, and I think the case you're making is the idea, and I like, uh, is that you can debate with someone at your level so you're not explaining to somebody who's not at your level. You're not feeling dumb or trying to keep up with somebody who's more experienced or smarter than you, but rather that you can go backwards and forwards and, and learn at the way you like to learn. And I, I've tried this where I, I'm having a debate or conversation backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, and I'll say things like, "Oh, wait, are, is what you're telling me this? But I think this." That I think is really, really interesting to your point.

    2. EM

      There's two other tricks there. One is the AI is sycophantic, so if you're having a debate with it, it's gonna agree with you.

    3. SS

      Yeah.

    4. EM

      So you have to tell it to act like a critic, right?

    5. SS

      Yeah.

    6. EM

      Like if you say... And then the second is you wanna take advantage of the meta piece also, the learning piece of saying, "Actually, halfway through, tell me what I'm doing wrong with my arguments. How can I be more persuasive? What patterns am I missing in discussion? Give me some examples of those patterns and how I could have used them." So again, back to the effort piece, if you're willing to do the lifting yourself of asking the questions-

    7. SS

      Yeah

    8. EM

      ... like everyone always says they wanna come to office hours and have this debate with professors. That's-- Most people don't come to office hours. You sit as a professor and you're waiting for somebody to come and debate to you in the great issues of the day, and you sit alone in your office during the hour that people are allowed to come to you 'cause they have other things to do. I think that we overestimate how this, this sort of shining city on a hill where we'd sit down and debate and have these discussions, like that's not how most things work.

    9. SS

      Right.

    10. EM

      Now we have a tool that can do that. If you're interested, you can do that without having to come to my office hours.

    11. SS

      I wanna double-click on the two points you made because I think they're really valuable, which is remember that the AI is a sycophant, and you've got to tell it to criticize or critique and ask it to evaluate your thinking and help make your thinking stronger. Those are two brilliant, brilliant prompts that I think more of us should remember to improve the quality of our, our interaction with the technology.

    12. EM

      We were talking earlier about AI and writing. A piece that was missing in your conversation, you talked about using it for fact-checking. It's very good at that. I would use it more for initial research. All of the AI models have a deep research mode that's quite good, um, and will actually do research for you. But the thing you're also missing from that is when I write something, I have the AI evaluate from different perspectives. So I will have the AI like read it through as a reader who doesn't understand much about this topic and tell me what I need to change. Read this through as an expert who, you know, who's out to get me on social media. Where would they nitpick my arguments, right? Am I being irresponsible anywhere? Did any of my humor fall flat? So giving the AI... The personas don't change the AI's ability. So saying you're good at physics doesn't make you good at physics, saying you're a physicist, but it does make it talk like a physicist, right? Or a parody of a physicist. Talk like a cynic, talk like a critic, talk like a naive person.

    13. SS

      Yeah.

    14. EM

      You will get answers you couldn't get without going to a wide range of readers. Also true in entrepreneurship, by the way. Get feedback from the AI in different personas about your idea.

    15. SS

      This is very practical and very good. What are you actually

  16. 52:58 – 54:57

    What Keeps Ethan Up at Night About AI

    1. SS

      afraid of?

    2. EM

      I think we're in for a period of chaos, right? Indust-- Like let's say the Industrial Revolution works out like the last three did, like the AI revolution.

    3. SS

      Yeah.

    4. EM

      Living through it still sucks, right? Like Charles Dickens is basically just a story about how miserable the Industrial Revolution was, right?

    5. SS

      Yeah.

    6. EM

      Like you have haves and have-nots. You have social change. Even if everything works out fine, now we have better tools as a society, but I don't see a lot of action. You led this conversation by saying that, you know, people either doom and gloom or, you know-

    7. SS

      Yeah

    8. EM

      ... or everything's gonna be great. I find policymaking is in the same place right now. Either it's all gonna work out great, or we have to stop this whole thing, and neither of those are realistic outcomes. How do we help cushion people in on it if they're uninsured? Turns out training programs for new jobs never really work. Is there something we can do better this time around to, you know, reskill people? We're going to have negative effects on informa- on, you know, deep fakes are going to be everywhere. How do we deal with who we trust for information? There's a thousand little good and bad things that are gonna be happening all at the same time that are gonna be very complicated, and they're gonna get boiled down because of how social media and everything else works to either AI all bad, in which case you have a list of all these things that are a mix of real things, you know, and fake things about AI water use or whatever it is, and, and it's gonna be AI is bad or AI is great, and it is a thing. It's a technology. It interacts with people. You know, technologies are neither good nor bad, nor are they neutral.

    9. SS

      Yeah.

    10. EM

      They have effects on our world, and I worry that we're not taking this seriously. The other thing I worry about is people don't know how good these systems are. They are better than you think, right? I'm a, I have a doctorate. I, you know, I've been a professor for a while. I publish in journals. Like the AI writes a pretty damn good academic paper now, not just a parody of an academic paper, if you give it a data set to work from. It is proving math at a level where you really need to be one of the best math persons in the world to know whether the system is right or wrong. It's often right at this point. It is doing really good images and marketing work that beats most marketers in studies that we have of this. It be-- Like these are really good systems. Their development is not slowing down. So we have to start thinking about what we want the world to look like rather than just assuming it's all either gonna work out or not.

  17. 54:57 – 58:33

    Your Agency in the AI Revolution

    1. SS

      And how much agency do we as the general population have, or are we just the subjects? Are we just the pawns in this game between these three major companies, Microsoft, OpenAI, and, and Anthropic?

    2. EM

      So I think that we have-- there's two levels of agency we have. Level of agency number one is societal, right? Like there's a reason why people are floating, you know, data center bans, right? Because they think that'll be popular. The usual mechanisms of policymaking, of, of organizing, of, of, you know, writing letters to your congresspeople, those still work. The second is, uh, where I think there's even more agency. The AI labs are full of coders, and they have found an unreasonably effective way of making a tool that mimics human thought. Like it's weird the large language models work as well as they are. Like we have, we know they work technically, but we don't know why this is so unreasonably good. Like how can it do poetry and offer, you know, and, you know, interior decoration and write, you know, and, um, discounted cash flow analysis and, you know, a pitch deck about, you know, the Gettysburg Address? Like it shouldn't be able to do these things. It does all of this stuff. So we give them too much credit. They don't actually know much about how AI is useful or not in your field. Remember, this is a jagged frontier. It's good at some stuff, bad at some stuff. Your biggest source of agency is actually using it To positive use in your own job and work. Like a large part of what I post about is like, this is a way to help humans thrive with AI if we use it this way, rather than just automating away human work. And I think our biggest sense of agency is, okay, you have access to these tools, you know, Simon, how do you use that to expand your business to make sure that all the people who work for you, I've spoken to some amazing folks, they're all really smart. How do they do more than they did before? How do they do more satisfying jobs? There's a lot of agency there, and if then if you talk about it through your platforms, that changes things. And a lot of what I do is talk to executives and leaders at companies where I'm like, "We have-- You have to show people how augmentation, how this can be used to make humans thrive, how it can make your business thrive, rather than the default plan of like, 'If I fire everyone or replace it with AI, profits will be higher.'" Like, that's the dangerous thing. So to me, the real agency right now is let's find positive examples, and there are tons of them out there, use them and build them, uh, to make AI make the world a better place and not worse.

    3. SS

      I really appreciate this. Like you've given me... You've enriched how I can use this product. I, I'm gonna take you on. I'm gonna have the, the agency that you recommend.

    4. EM

      I think this is a moment for transformation.

    5. SS

      Yeah.

    6. EM

      And I, and I think people aren't being ambitious enough. E- everyone's like, "What if I record my..." Like it's not, you know... How would you reach every one of your audience members separately if you could do that? And why don't you just build it rather than waiting for it to happen? Like what does it look like?

    7. SS

      Well, I'm not sure I'm gonna use it that way, 'cause I like the artist. I take pride in the fact that when somebody's talking to me, that it is actually me, my opinions-

    8. EM

      Oh, I, I don't, I don't think it's about automating Simon, like creating a Simon clone. I, I never liked that. Like there's people who create Ethan bots. I don't, I don't think that's the way to... It's, you're talking to a, you know, a fake version, a parody of yourself.

    9. SS

      Yeah.

    10. EM

      I'm saying, what do I want people to accomplish in this world? Like how do I build a tool for everybody-

    11. SS

      Yes, that I believe in

    12. EM

      ... to taste my thoughts and beliefs rather than-

    13. SS

      And I, I, like I said, I would do a Simon AI with a very specific application-

    14. EM

      Yeah

    15. SS

      ... that it lives alongside, but I like people knowing that when they see me and they think it's me, it really is me, and that's-

    16. EM

      I, I agree. I mean, it's the same thing with my writing

    17. SS

      ... that's gonna be forever.

    18. EM

      I write all my own, you know, my own Twitter posts and everything else, and-

    19. SS

      Yeah

    20. EM

      ... you know, it's important to keep the muscles alive if nothing else.

    21. SS

      Ethan, such a joy. Thank you so, so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

    22. EM

      Thank you. This was a pleasure.

    23. SS

      [upbeat music] As always, thank you for watching. If you liked this episode, please subscribe to A Bit of Optimism for more interesting guests and even more interesting conversations. New episodes drop every Tuesday. But if you'd like more optimism right now, click here to watch another episode. Until next time, take care of yourself, take care of each other.

Episode duration: 58:35

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