The Pyramid Was Always Wrong

All right, we're rolling. Well, Matthew, it's great to see you again. Welcome to the show.

Yeah.

Thank you, good to be back. back, I don't know. Feels like I'm-

it's bummed that you don't have all the

a pleasure.

albums behind you. That was a cool conversation, that you actually had that record player and albums. Did you say it was in the embassy in UK? ⁓

I know.

Yeah.

It was in the ⁓ Ambassador residence.

In the residence, okay.

And so I've replicated it back home in Kentucky.

And that was just to break the ice, right?

That was the idea that I if it was like I knew exactly who I was meeting, I would try to put stuff from their hometown or as close as I could get to where they grew up in the UK and find like, you know, whatever Arctic monkeys or Roxy music or Dire Straits or something that sort of says how old the people were. And then, and myself included,

That's so great. Hahaha

and then for bigger gatherings, because we did lots of big ones, it would just be like, hey, go have fun, put on what you want. And that kind of idea of like, tiny amounts of agency in an otherwise kind of formal setting.

Alright, that's cool.

Was there a connection that emerged that was maybe the most memorable or impactful in terms of like a person and a song or an album?

for sure. Yeah, yeah, for sure. President Obama came to stay spring of 2016. And it was the day that Prince died. So like he put on the Purple Rain album and like, weirdly, like just there we were. I was gonna say dancing, but that's not exactly what was happening. But it was just kind of cool to.

Ugh. There was a moment.

It was a moment. It was a moment.

Soaking in the purple rain. Well, we had a conversation fairly recently with Karen Howe, who wrote Empire of AI. And we were talking a lot about the perils of centralized power that we're starting to see as AI becomes more of a dominant force in our lives. And so we were really excited when we saw your book, The Power of Giving Away Power. That felt like sort of the antidote to a lot of what we were hearing.

There we go.

To start off, if you could tell us a little bit about sort of the pyramid trap and I guess the constellation solution and how that might kind of apply to this strange moment that we're in.

in a nutshell, guess it's easier to start with sort of the enemy of the story, which I think is the pyramid or the triangle. And I think most things that start out in triangle form are kind of doomed to fail. I mean, the food pyramid's been discredited. Maslow's hierarchy, like right before he died, that's the famous one, like, you know, the priority of your human needs. He never put it into a triangle. And at the end of his life, he's like, it's not, it's not a hierarchy. doesn't work like that at all. They're all kind of overlapping with each other, but it just got locked into our minds because it's a comforting shape and it makes the world seem orderly and stable. And it does provide a kind of order and a kind of stability. It's just not the only kind, which is what I try to get into in the book. ⁓ The United States isn't a hierarchy. Like Kentucky, where I live doesn't report to Washington or the city of,

Yeah. Yeah.

Berkeley doesn't report to Sacramento, right, at all. And so at every level, at every kind of scale, it's kind of a fractal pattern that emerges, I think, which I call the constellation pattern in the history of the United States. ⁓ That's a different kind of stability in a different kind of order where you can be a star, like stand out as your own person, but connect to other stars and form something bigger than you ever could all by yourself. So that's

No. Hmm. Hmm.

So I kind of set up that slightly oversimplified world of the pyramid versus the constellation and how that plays out in the business world, in cultural world, wherever.

Yeah. There's a lot of these like epic, what I would call like epic misunderstandings, like get propagated. Like Darwin, the survival of the fittest, know, thinking like the strongest, no. The one that fit, like a puzzle piece. He wasn't talking about being fit and being strong.

Totally.

Mm-hmm.

No, and there's a, but there's a whole tautological thing. All it means to be fit is to survive. So it's not even like fitness means anything. It's just like the survive, those who survive survive. And you're like, ⁓ got it.

Right. No. Right. And we, there's this tendency, I guess, like maybe that's just the way people grab power is to adapt these things into pyramids, you know, and then placing themself on the top. Like, where are you? Where are you? Where am I in the pyramid? Like, why are people obsessed with where they are in the pyramid?

Yeah! Always. well. Well, that's it. so that obviously happens. Right. But what I find fascinating is that. let's say people get sick of that. Right. And the corporate setting is filled with this. So the CEO gets the memo, hopefully a while ago, that like, hey, lording power over people isn't such a great idea. Bossing every round top down with sort of it's been out of favor for a while. So then what we all do is do the opposite, which is bottom up, which feels better for like five minutes. And I would argue.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. You

just nearly as bad, maybe not just as bad. Because if you think about it, let's say you're the CEO or whatever, and you institute a bottom up review of fill in the blank, you are asking every woman and man on your team to think of themselves as above or below someone. So you're reinforcing the pyramid just in the reverse order. It's not a new shape. It's not a new way of thinking about yourselves and those around you at all. It's identical.

Mm-hmm. Yes. Mm-hmm. Right. And it's almost like it's still thinking about it. You just don't want people to think about it. There's nothing to think about. There's no, where am I in reference to them? Who cares? Like as it pertains to what? You know, it's just connectivity either way. And that's what we don't focus on is the connectivity.

Totally. Well, Rob, mean, I think. Totally. you know, like I mentioned the Maslow one, another one that there was a wonderful New Yorker article, I guess there was some researcher, ⁓ a junior researcher on this very famous scientific paper, you know, back in the day, I'm going to make it up 50s or 60s, something like that, ⁓ about the alpha wolf, right? And this young researcher and the and he worked for the famous guy who got the

Okay.

paper published in whatever journal it was, like Nature or something like that. And this young guy had spent like the whole last 30 years or whatever being like, please unpublish this. I was there. This data is total crap. And finally he succeeded, which is why they wrote the article. And the young researcher's point was like, all of this stuff about the alpha wolf, which by the way, spread to alpha male, to alpha. I mean, that term is in our culture because of this paper. And he's like, we studied wolves.

Mm-hmm.

in captivity. I imagine studying mankind by studying prisons. I mean, you can learn something, but you can learn something about man or men and women in prison. Great. But turns out you go back and you study wolves and they behave a lot like other mammals, know? And so it's not captivating. And so we took that one idea from that one paper and just ran with it for decades.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And even in these examples, your, you know, these nature examples, they're often baked inside of scarcity, right? This idea that there's not enough for all. But then you have this, you know, combativeness and maybe, you know, strength matters. But in a world where scarcity is not, you know, the number one concern, it has no purpose. It's kind of lost its function.

Totally. So I write about power in my book, which is weird because it's a word I almost never use in real life. ⁓ I didn't come up with the title, The Power of Giving Away Power. I use it twice in a short title. But you think about it, and to your point on Zero Sum, there's like, you can lord power over others. You got that. You can then hoard it all to yourself. We know what that looks like. Sort of just...

Mmm.

loneliness and alienation. And then well-intentioned people who think lording and hoarding are bad, they're like, I know, we'll divvy it up and share it, which kind of sounds better. Except again, I think Rob, to the point you were making, divvying it all up also assumes there's a finite amount of it. Like power is something you mine, like coal in Kentucky. ⁓ But it's not. And the leaders who inspire me is like, no, no, power is something we can make with and through one another. And it's infinite. If we decide to

Great. it.

behave with certain habits and mindset.

And that's like a direct correlation to, think, what you bring up with Mary Parker and like her assessment of four types of meetings, right? Like there's the meeting where one person wins, where they're hoarding power. There's the meeting where everyone else gives in. And then there's this compromise meeting that sort of feels good, but you know, she points out like it's co-creation that really is what moves things forward and makes change, right? Where people kind of harness their abilities as stars, I suppose, create new light together. you might say.

Totally. And the example she uses, Mary Parker Follett, who's like one of these sort of forgotten amazing leaders, lived 100 years ago. Peter Drucker, everyone's heard of. Harvard Business Review asked 200 business gurus around the globe, who is your guru? And they published this article called The Guru's Guru. Peter Drucker, unsurprisingly, number one. Then he reveals a few years before he died that he had a guru, and it was Mary Parker Follett.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

She appears nowhere, not once on the list of gurus gurus. And I'm going to say the word gurus a lot, but she was the gurus gurus guru. And she's amazing. And he said, he said, um, every good leadership idea we've ever had came from her and she's been erased. the story she used to use a hundred years ago. She was like the Ted talk.

Hmm.

Mosodotter Ted Talk speaker of the day, almost exactly a hundred years ago. ⁓ And she had, people were electrifying their homes back then. And she and her, I mean, it was like a wife. mean, they were lifelong partners. ⁓ And she and her partner, Isabelle, had this little cabin up in Vermont and they'd saved up enough money to get electricity. So they're really sited and the electrician comes over and Mary lays out her plan for the house.

And the guy shakes his head. He's like, Nope, can't do it. Won't work. She's like, why? He's like, your house will burn down. It's not up to code. She's like, well, what do we do? And then he's like, you should do it like this. And he draws a sketch and she shakes her head. said, no, sir. He said, why not? And she said, I won't live in a house that is lit like that. It's unlivable. And so if they compromised, which we're all sort of taught is a good thing. And there's the point why she thinks compromise is not a good outcome of a meeting. ⁓ If they compromised half her house would burn down. and half her house would be unlivable. Right? And so she said, well, what does happen? And she said, we all know this in real life. We do this all the time. ⁓ they make something together. They make a new plan for the house that meets code and that she likes. Neither of them came to that encounter with that fully formed in their head. In fact, not formed at all. And it didn't compromise. They made something. And she said, we think that's mundane, but it's actually magic.

Right.

And I do think that connects to the magic and you guys know a lot more about AI than I do, but you know, and I'm newish to using it myself, but you hear, mean, people have that excitement of like, this feels like we're making something together.

Yeah. And then some people bring hierarchy to it and they say, are these going to be our overlords and replace our human overlords? ⁓

and the other choice is either we're the boss of them or they're the boss of us. Pick one. And I think.

Right. Yeah,

Mm-hmm.

which is ridiculous when you're talking about a screwdriver.

Exactly.

Well, I think that's where co-creation is also really impactful too. Cause right now we're seeing, you know, businesses, lot of companies are kind of dragging their feet in terms of like figuring out how to best bring these tools into their operations. But individuals are co-creating like crazy. They're figuring out all kinds of ways to, whether it's just sheer conversation and learning new things and figuring out, you know, better ways to improve their lives or their careers, or whether it's actually sequencing the technology and creating agents that that move levers on software, like that stuff's really happening right now. And that, that's kind of a new type of co-creation where compromise, I guess, isn't even necessarily involved.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

there's a lot of parallels when you think about, you know, giving machines agency, which I don't know that we give them agency or anything. think it's just that machines do things ⁓ and they have rules that we provided for them. And those rules were either explicitly or implicitly provided. And we have this new technology where we can provide rules implicitly. And that's interesting. I'm super powerful, but scary. ⁓ But yeah, this idea that if you're gonna implicitly instruct the machine, the idea is that we're giving it some level of agency. We can get caught into words, I guess so. ⁓ But there's a parallel between you know, giving people agency within cities or organizations and, then giving these machines agency as well. ⁓ and how much to give them when, you know, when should someone else be in the loop? When do they need oversight? When don't they, what kind of decisions are okay? Which kind of decisions are not okay? Like you can buy ink for my printer, but you can't, you know, decide that I need a nose job.

That's vivid. Yeah. Yeah. But it reminds me, I was listening to your interview with Dan Golden. the former head of NASA?

You might

that. I thought that was fascinating, your discussion. I loved what he was talking about, think, fabulous manufacturing and this whole idea of like, I know, we won't make anything anymore. And it's sort of like it was done on, know, save money, save time, save hassle and everything is like all that was lost when you don't. And so often that's done in the context of

Mm-hmm.

Right.

sort of jobs and important economic stuff. But I thought his point was much more central, like what you just lose as a person and as when you farm that out. I think in the work you guys care about, it's just like, and co-creation, mean, it's such a sort of touchy feely sounding, like it's not a great phrase. It just sounds like a group hug, which is not, I think what you guys mean. It's certainly not what I mean. And when I was out doing my book tour, When you're talking about doing something other than the pyramid, many people are just like, I know, it must be sort of either anarchy or communism or something. Like everyone on their own or one big giant collective. And it's like, not really. And it's more normal. mean, families look like this.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right, mean, no one would, like a bottom up family is ludicrous, a top down family is ludicrous, a marriage looks like that,

Hmm. Yeah

very few

Yeah,

things would survive in a triangle.

that's interesting because when you think about, yeah, and when you think about the way that we're sometimes trying to organize data for these systems, it's similar to what you're describing. You're creating these relationship nodes between entities where, you know, someone can be your sister and your best friend and all these different things so that the people's interconnectivity can exist on a lot of different planes. And that's obviously true in life as well.

Yeah. And we're good at it and we're sort of better at it than we think. And to Dan Golden's point, those skills, atrophy, and the sort of habits, habits and patterns and language, of course, you talked about also body language. mean, it all kind of counts.

Right.

Is that sort of like last time we talked, we were speaking a bit about your, your grandfather Jacques and, he was sort of fighting against, it, was it the mechanical mindset? Is that sort of what he was getting after is like, don't lose this, these human skills because we over automate everything.

Yeah, he... Totally.

I love that concept.

Yeah, and he wrote it at the end of it. lived to 104, so he had a good innings, as they say over in the UK. And he, and very lucid right up to the end. And he wrote this 42 books, wrote and edited 42 books. But one of the last ones was called From Dawn to Decadence. So you can tell by the title, he didn't think things were heading in a great direction. But towards the end of his life, and he wasn't someone who talked a lot about himself. He never mentioned himself when he was writing, but he was asked by one of, think his former students,

home.

Yeah.

Hahaha.

contribute to this book called Living Philosophies. And it was a short essay, everyone was asked to write a short essay. ⁓ E.O. Wilson wrote one, wonderful Mortimer Adler. And so he, I guess, said fine. And so he did it. And that's where I came across the phrase where he said, looking back on my life, I guess if you had to draw a thread through all the things he cared about. And he grew up in Paris, we talked about he grew up in Paris as an only child at the outbreak of World War I, born in 1907. Most of his friends were grownups because he was the only child and his parents ran an artist salon. And like all these grownups went off and the men just either didn't come back because they were killed or came back shell shocked. We'd probably say PTSD now. Um, and so we tried to commit suicide at, or, or was suicidal at age 11 and the parents whisked him off away from Paris and ultimately to America. Anyway, so he said, looking back on it all, I guess I decided to devote my life to fight the mechanical. And he said, and I don't mean machines, machines only tyrannize with our permission or acquiescence. And so I've been thinking about that in the context of all this, these AI articles that I'm reading and trying to understand. That it's us, we can, the mechanical mindset is a human tendency.

Hmm. huh. Yes. Yes, yes. ⁓ And what's funny is there's a lot of people talking about the current form of LLM not being mechanical, being ⁓ probabilistic, and that we need a more mechanical version of this. I'm sort of one of those that feel like.

and not a very healthy one.

Life is always going to be two parts. There's going to be some determinism and there's going to be some probabilistic and there's room for both. I think intelligence isn't necessarily deterministic at all. Sometimes intelligence just happens. It just emerged. It's an emergent property.

Yeah. It's interesting, know, back to Mary Parker Follett, 100 years ago, she's writing and the big trend that she's fighting against ⁓ in the 1920s is scientific management. And I forget the name, there's a famous guy who, don't come to me too late, but anyway, who was the sort of godfather of scientific management. And he would measure how many steps each worker took, picture just sort of

Mmm.

know, 1920s factory work ⁓ as America's booming. And you'd measure each stride and treated men, mostly in this case, women, as machines, And it was actually popular not only for efficiency, but because human management was associated with sort of arbitrary, think of like Dickensian, think of like Scrooge, just like jerky, angry, patronizing bullies in charge.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

So actually the people who were drawn to scientific management, was protection for workers against arbitrary jerks of which I guess there were plenty back then as now. And so she came to that and she's like, no, no, it's not angry jerks. It's not pick one, angry Dickensian bosses top down or treating men like machines. So she called it like my business, she said, is to try to rehumanize business.

Mm-hmm.

bring humanity and all our complexity. And that's again, where I think AI can be really helpful is we are very good at tuning out complexity because it's except all innovation and evolution requires difference. And you discover difference through complexity, not factoring it out, but radically factoring it in.

Hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the idea that AI can help us see the nuance, right? Or at least factor in the nuance and still remain in that cognitive load comfort zone that we like of simplicity. It's like our GPS, we don't now have to plan every turn and figure out the fastest route, just have to follow the instructions but we ultimately can ignore them

Well, and I know, you know, it's also interesting sort of like what we account for and what we don't, you know, what we can't. mean, and this sounds sort of silly, but I was trying to explain to our kids how real it is. The number of spousal fights that I just picking on spouse, like arguing with each other about directions in a car. I mean, I grew up in the backseat of a car witnessing plenty. I'm sure you all did too. And it's like, those are largely gone. I mean, I'm sure they've shifted, shifted elsewhere, but like,

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

It has absolutely reduced that level of anxiety and unproductive tension that existed there. That counts in the plus column,

Yes. Yep.

I think the flip side though is ⁓ if you start blindly following your GPS and then you all of sudden it goes away for whatever reason and you weren't paying attention to where you were going, you can end up out in the middle of nowhere with no idea how to get back,

Yeah. Yeah. I was at this, was telling you guys, I was at this family camp, no electricity, sorry, no electronics. And somebody was asking me a question, like, why is the AI industry pushing AI so hard? If it's going to cause us not to, use our brains. this same idea that the calculator and memorizing phone numbers and all of the technology that have like, you know, allowed us to not have to, think in that same way. And the idea like, you know, why are we pushing it so hard if this is, if this is something that was, that's bad for people. ⁓ And I couldn't help consider the irony because we were at this camp where we're all learning how to make a fire like we did these activities woodworking make a fire archery you know and I was like I was literally looking at the board of all the activities that we were there paying to do now which were all considered chores at one time and I'm like if you went back to the 1900s and you and you told them that this room full of humans didn't know how to do any of these things

Yeah.

I'm sure they would be confused as how we survive.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm going to take us on a weird tangent now, I think just about calculators and math, I mean, I think it's amazing. Like I was okay at math. I wasn't like a math person, but I did fine. You you figure out the rules. sort of got good enough grades all along the way, all the way through calculus. And then the minute I was allowed to stop, I stopped. And then I discovered late, you know, this amazing website called betterexplained.com, which is guy in Seattle. it just explains calculus, it first starts with like how people invented algebra and then how calculus came about and how to visualize it and how to think about it. It is unbelievable. And it's like, I sat through a year of calculus at a really good school. And I just think of the amount of human hours spent teaching and quote learning math. And nobody ever gets at, forget the calculator for a moment, like how do you... It's an incredibly powerful concept that almost everyone, like I paid attention, tried hard, got good grades. And like, that was never a concept in my mind until I discovered betterexplained.com. And I think in all these other realms, ⁓ for the time that we've freed up not having to do calculations, what do we spend that time and energy on?

Yeah, that's the question. You know, are we better off? the most interesting thing about it for me was, you know, my wife and I were just... sort of sitting on the front porch and she's like, what do you think? Do you think we could live the simple life like this farm? And I looked at all the activities and I looked at like taking care of the animals. I'm like, there's nothing simple about this. Like this is super complicated. It's not call Uber eats when you want dinner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You had to think about dinner in the fall, right, when you had to slaughter the chickens and put it in the freezer.

I back to my grandfather Barzan, I one of the things I think he's writing in the 50s at this point or 60s, and he said, and he was talking about sort of the modern, I guess what we would call a knowledge worker now, I don't think they called it that back then. in the context of sort of dreary corporate life, he said, serial non accomplishment is destructive to the soul.

Hmm. Mmm. Yeah.

And that's always sort of stuck with me as a related thing to fighting the mechanical. And it's just like, if you're not doing anything, making anything, some sense of whatever that is, I I love to cook. And so I would never want to stop cooking just because it's some sense of accomplishment. ⁓ And the act of doing that does good things to you that I think spills over into other areas. I say that like, I don't want to raise the vegetables or the animals. You know what I mean? Like, I like the cooking part, not the other part. I'm glad we have some.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Other people are passionate about those other things. But can I go back to the nuance point that you raised? think it was you, Rob. I did this little experiment. I'm chair of The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper in London. And ⁓ George Orwell used to write for it. He left the BBC to go work for The Observer and he called it the enemy of nonsense, which I just love. And we're sort of reviving that as not, I don't know if it's a tagline exactly, but a call to action, because we seem to be in a nonsense rich.

Yes.

environment on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of lots of things. So I did this little experiment. So I'm not a journalist, but I work with all these wonderful journalists. So I asked, I think it was chat GPT at this point, I said, okay, what do well-intentioned, well-read journalists continually get wrong about? And then I wrote the mining industry, big pharma, big tech. I just did sort of 15 big industries that we talk about a lot as a publication. It was fascinating, right? So it did the thing that you know it does. Eight seconds later, it's a 12-bulleted thing. And I thought, okay, but what's fun, not as an end of the thing, but as the beginning of a Follett-like co-creation, to then go sit with the women and men who, let's say, do mining or do oil and gas or do pharma or whatever. And you give them this list and you say, look, and you can say where you got it or you don't, whatever. And you say, does this ring true?

And they do like, oh, wow. You get some like, yep, yep, yep. What in that list is unfair? What is unsaid? What is something that oversimplifies some area that deserves more nuance? And it seems to me that would open up, we haven't done this yet, but that would open up really interesting conversations between people, no machine in the room, but machine assisted. to sort of get you to a place of constructive tension where someone starts to kind of flesh out their world more fully. That's where learning lives. That's where difference lives, energy, all that good stuff.

Mm-hmm. Well, that's a process that's enhancing the humanness that's happening, right? It's not running contrary to it. There are mechanical aspects to it, but it's something totally different than using automations to stamp out the good stuff that people do.

Right? That's what I think.

Yeah. I mean, think in our world, we think of it as like the difference between focusing on instructions versus objectives. And in business, it's been, and in coding, it's always been about the instructions. Even if you talk to folks that were developing, very often, more often than not, they would know the instructions, but not the objective. ⁓

Mmm. Yeah, which.

Now, now we have technology where you, you have to feed it the objective and it doesn't care about the instructions.

That's cool. That's interesting. mean, have you all read Donella Meadows? I can't remember if we talked about her in our previous chat. She died way too early. She Studied systems at MIT, taught at Dartmouth, studied under Jay Farrester, who I think is the guy who sort of invented systems thinking.

think so. Okay.

this. ⁓

Mm. You

And she did this great essay probably 25 years ago called leverage points in the system. And I won't bore the listeners here with it, but it's worth Googling and checking out ⁓ or your search engine of choice. but she basically says that like, we are all kind of wired, like when we see something go wrong. And the famous thing was affordable housing that Jay Farser, when she was a grad student, like affordable housing has been a giant problem sort of forever. And certainly in the

It was 67, I think was 70, it's Boston. ⁓ And so people always go for the most obvious sort of knob, she says. And we usually grab the wrong knob and turn it in the wrong direction, thinking that we're gonna... And her analogy, which I'm gonna get wrong and it's slightly confusing, but she's like, you're filling a bathtub or you're in a strange place with a shower and the water is like too cold and then you turn it and it's too hot and you just get stuck in this awful loop. ⁓ And so she says, we...

Hmm. Hmm.

That's just what we always do it in the exact reverse order that there's very little leverage at the point of taxation, building more affordable housing units. That's the obvious thing to do. And it just never works. often completely backfires. And then she kind of goes through the proper order to do it and rewriting rules and goals, which is what made me think of it. She's like, that's way better than turning the knobs to reset what the goals or the rules are. But the best thing is just changing.

Hmm.

a mindset, which is obviously the hardest thing to do. But if you can change how we all look at something, a shift of perspective will save you so much more headache and heartache ⁓ than all the interventions sort of lower down.

Mm-hmm. and we have this illusion that we lose control, but in fact, it's the opposite. know, it's, it's yeah, that's the, that's the thing I can't help on this hierarchy, not to go back to it and harp on it, but it feels like hierarchies still, it's even when we think it's in place, it's just an illusion to the people. Cause it just, it really, it's, really isn't there and that's

We have this illusion that we ever had it.

Yeah.

In my mind, makes it so dysfunctional is that it's not that there is a hierarchy and it's less effective. It's that you think there's one and there's not.

Hmm.

it does real harm it's sort of like stand out or fit in, pick one. And fitting in means bringing a subset of yourself or a subset of what, you shave off all the difference to try to conform. And it's like, you have lost so much in that. And...

Yeah.

What if everyone's doing that? Everyone's bringing these hobbled pieces of themselves to something. You can't really expect an amazing outcome.

I always think of like it, that sort of like ranking, rating, sorting, sifting, all we're all sort of good at that. It hasn't gotten us great places. ⁓ I was talking to someone who used to work at NASA. ⁓ I don't know what I'm actually talking about. So I'm quoting someone who does, but they were kind of talking about a pyramid and they're sort of like, Hey, those things work usually for one thing once. Like they could land a person on the moon.

Hmm.

Or like the D-Day landing is really good. But what is it? Eight years later, we couldn't get someone back on the moon. And all the cleverness and heroism that actually went on after, you know, day four after D-Day, that starts to look very different how people organized and self-organized and did really interesting, courageous, bold things to win there. And we sort of don't give enough credit to those ways of organizing.

yeah, that's a good after the after the hierarchy crumbled away in the moment. Yeah. So what are there? Are there organizations out in the world that you feel like are doing the work of giving power away? I feel like our books might have something in common in that we're trying to offer like really practical solutions but they're they're almost like so practical that they're

Yeah, then what are you left with? Yeah.

easy to ignore or hard to even fathom implementing.

I yeah, I know. it's, I put some in the book and a really cool one that's so hard to talk about because when I say the brand, it's like everyone pictures the opposite of what I'm saying, which is Visa. Cause it's not like people have great associations with credit cards these days. You know what I mean? But, but D Hawk, who's the dude who dreamt it all up is amazing. Right. And he, his vision wasn't for, he didn't want people in debt. He hated debt and his whole, he just wanted

Mm-hmm.

Was reading that. Mm-hmm.

electronic cash and he won. And the cool part that did succeed, which we don't really think of is he wanted tiny little banks. It's all back to Rob, your point about rules and goals. You know, he got Bank of America, this giant bank back in the late sixties, I think it was, to come up with a whole new system that wouldn't give it any more power than his tiny little regional bank outside of Seattle. And that is a radical system that turned Visa into the largest commercial organization in the history of the planet. know, with like $15 trillion of transactions a year, whatever. And obviously it's changed. He just passed away a few years ago. And it long ago, he got sort of, you know, he was no longer involved in it. But that vision he had of a system that was very constellation like non-hierarchical led to this amazing unlocking of value and potential and all that good stuff. Of course, the internet itself is a great example. And Vint Cerf

Mm-hmm.

Vince Cerf, who I've gotten to know, who's just an amazing mentor and person. And he came to speak to the embassy when I was serving in London. this was a time, think the Edward Snowden revelations had all come out. It was just a tricky time when it's always been tricky, sort of big tech and he was at Google. So we brought a lot of young activists and young member of our teams from across the political spectrum to hear him talk and, and then he answered questions. ⁓ I remember one person said something, something, something, the internet. And he said, you you all talk about it like it's a thing and it's like one thing. He's like, it's, it's, he's like, not only is it not one thing, it's, it's the way he looks at it, like millions of things and hosts and, technically, of course he's thinking that way, but he said, more important. said, you know, it's a verb in the early days. It was like, would you like to internet work with me?

Mm-mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And he tells a story and you could just see everyone leaning forward. And he's like, it was like asking someone. said, so, you know, you're at UCLA, you ask Stanford, would you like to dance? And they said, yes. And then he said, we asked the Swedes, would you like to dance? Yes. Norway? Yes. We asked France and they said, no. Like, it was like asking someone to dance. And I thought that was so sweet that this sort of like, it is human ⁓ in that level. And of course, and I don't know a lot about systems architecture. I think you guys do, but.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Technically, his TCPIP protocol was considered an unreliable network because it could not guarantee connection. Networking wasn't new. You'd establish a connection and never let it go. He's like, no, no, let it go. Let go of that power and control and look what you can get. It became the most reliable network ever by being unreliable. I think there's wonderful about

Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, think I ⁓ keep coming back to this, like there's a middle ground, like you said, it's not bottom up, it's not top down, it's something else. ⁓ And I think that's where people struggle is like, well, where am I? Where am I? Where do I fit into this then? And I think your point is you don't...

Yeah.

Don't worry about that. What are you trying to do? And who do you need to talk to?

Well, okay, so I want to go back to your family camp and sort of like really sort of mundane. I tried to write this up, it got cut from the book, but I still think there's something there. ⁓ I was going back 1776, obviously our declaration, but also Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith. ⁓ And the famous line, probably the most quoted line from that is, you do not rely on the butcher, the baker or the brewer for your dinner.

Sure.

Right. And his point being you do not rely on the benevolence. So you don't rely on selflessness on behalf of the baker, the brewer. And so we've kind of run with it for the last 240 whatever years is like, oh, it's not selflessness. It is selfishness that motivates everybody. And you're like, well, just let's go back to the butcher and the baker and the brewer, draw them as stick figures on a whiteboard and you as the person getting beer and bread and beef. And it's like, what's going on between all those stick figures?

Hmm.

It's something's going on. It is not selflessness and it is not selfishness. It is, and again, not a great word, but the interdependence in a small town, you know, of, between them all. And it's this weird, wonderful mixture. We live it every day. It's very human. It's complicated. It's beautiful. Let's not factor it out. Yeah, there we go.

Yeah.

the original internet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, touching on what we were getting to earlier also, like with the rate of adoption kind of lagging with companies, but a lot of people working with this technology, I think there are companies that have unique opportunities to kind of work in that middle area that we've been talking about where, you know, there are people high up that can. can develop objectives and goals that they want this technology to meet. And then they can find the people in the organization who've already been playing with the tools and have ideas for ways to improve workflows that are going beyond just kind of adding a conversational layer to something that they already have clear instructions for. Like they actually have ideas for how they might start connecting systems within a company to improve workflows. And I think that's where there can be a lot of co-creation, but there are also kind of does have to be a redistribution of power because why would someone, you know, get excited about automating their job away? And that's sort of been proposed as like the end game of this technology by some people, but you know, there's opportunities for designing a new company together because you could argue that the sort of hierarchical structure isn't sustainable and AI might bear that out. and the companies that decide to kind of rethink their image might survive while others don't.

Yeah. one approach sort of, again, at the whiteboard level, not having played this out, but it's sort of like. I think in the way I try to resist or tease out sort of pyramid thinking from constellation thinking and that non-hierarchical ways of creating really good things together is to be really wary of the word solve. Because people love, especially in the tech world, it's like we solved it. And it's like, okay. And I see that, you know, it's fun to have that feeling. ⁓ It's like, would you want to solve your child? No.

Mm. Hahaha

Would you

Yeah.

want to solve your marriage? I hope not. Right. And so what I think we really mean is, is resolve. And then I usually spell it re hyphen solve. And so what that has in it is you, you, do something for now. And so in the case of a business context, or even that example about journalism and trying to get better about clearing up misunderstandings, cause we all have blind spots. We just don't have to be blind to them.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Being aware of a blind spot makes you better the next time, then you'll have another one. So this idea of like taking difference and then integrating it into a new hole, like the Mary Ballett did with the electrician. But then you're always looking for more difference again to then reintegrate. So you're always hunting for difference. And so the whole team should just be delighted by difference and then devise ways to integrate it, look for more and get into that positive loop.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. it's interesting to hear that because we do historically tend to think of software in terms of solutions. But when you think of almost all the software we encounter, it's clearly not ⁓ a solution. It's close to a solution. It's pieces of a solution, but it's very rarely an actual solution. And it's always changing. It always needs to be updated and added to or taken away from like that.

Yeah.

that never stops and that seems to accelerate too as the technology gets more complex and now we're talking about systems where those kind of updates are happening on a minute by minute basis even.

I often contemplate the idea that we learn this hierarchical nature from school, like teachers. We just emulate our teachers when we become bosses. That we act like our teachers, telling everybody what to do, be quiet, do what I say.

I am, I hope not alone among the listeners here of being a huge fan of Ten Burns and the work that he does. I don't know if you'll ever see, he's about to do a big one on the American Revolution, but he did jazz and country music and baseball, civil war, Vietnam, right? All of this wonderful American complicated history. So I got to meet him and he was given an award, the Liberty Medal. ⁓

Yes. Mm-hmm.

by the National Constitution Society. And we got to meet with him right before he accepted the medal. And so I got a chance to ask him a question. And I said, ⁓ Ken, what is your secret? Because I've watched almost all your stuff. And unlike lots of other stuff I see on public television, you never seem to fall into the two traps that so much programming does, patronizing on the one hand or pandering on the other.

Hmm.

You just never patronize and never pander. And he said, I haven't thought about it like that. He said, but by way of answer, let me just say this. I tell myself and I tell my team, never, ever, ever sound like a math teacher. And we all kind of laughed like you did. And we're like, I don't know exactly. He's like, look, a math teacher's important. I sound very anti-math teacher in today's discussion. ⁓ But he said, he said, what I mean by that is that the tone of voice, the language and body language he thinks, and I agree, of a Matthew is like, I am telling you stuff you need to know. And there's just a tone to that. And I think it is kind of a hierarchical thing, And he said, I don't want to ever be that I'm an explorer. We are explorers. We didn't know anything about jazz or the Brooklyn Bridge or Vietnam, but we've just spent six years or Muhammad Ali.

You huh.

diving into this world and we are sharing with you the excitement and the learnings of our exploration. And that language and body language of sharing what you've discovered on an exploration is pretty different tonally and substance to telling you stuff you need to know.

Yeah, 100%.

And I, yeah, and I think more of that.

Yeah. And if you think the lecture model, right, is not co-creation, it's just you sit there and listen. Well, I guess everything's some degree of it, but it's very high fidelity co-creation where the student is just supposed to sit in the desk and listen and consume, right? ⁓

Yeah, I mean, here's a tool that I've started to play around with. I, you know, it, well, I did it when I was overseas in the UK. I ended up doing these workshops. I started with one and then I did two with a hundred kids, high school seniors, a hundred kids at a time. By the end, I had done 200 schools, 20,000 British young people. And I didn't want to give them some, they didn't want to hear a lecture from some American ambassador. By the way, the reason I did it was.

Mm-hmm.

They had asked about, ⁓ Pew had done one of these studies, 40 countries, what do you think of America? What's your level of trust, respect and understanding of the United States by age group? And every country in the world, except for the UK, young people had a favorable, more favorable opinion than their parents and grandparents, except it was flipped on its head in the UK. ⁓ Because these young people didn't remember FDR and special relationship in Churchill and the Cold War. know, they just remembered more recent stuff and it wasn't

all that positive. So anyway, my wife was trained as an art therapist. So I'd get in and I'd get them to give me, ⁓ draw me a picture of something that frustrated them about America. And we would talk about it. But before that, which was actually the point I wanted to make, ⁓ or actually after I did the drawing exercise, I would just ask a whole bunch of questions up on the big screen and they all got clickers. I mean, now you can do it with your phone, but this was 10 years ago. And so the phones didn't

huh. Yeah.

You couldn't rely on the funds, but you know, old fashioned clickers, must've been at, you know, industry conferences where they have those things. And they maybe have a checkered reputation because of bad corporate presentations, but they're really kind of cool. And if you ask really open-ended provocative questions and people can answer anonymously and they see the collective results up on the screen, it's really fun. And it gets you as the presenter out of lecture mode, because you have no idea what the.

yeah.

what the answers are going to be. So you're kind of in that improv-y, I you think you know, you ask the question so you know that you sort of constrained it a little bit in terms of if you have multiple choice or whatever, but it keeps you alive. It keeps them alive. It's like, Ooh, we're making something together. This is fresh. And I just think of like bad corporate meetings. mean, know, Mary Follett loved meetings. She's like democracy, all the things we care about live, how people treat each other sitting around a table together.

Mm-hmm.

And just the standard corporate meetings, zoom or in person. It's like you're multitasking under the desk, trying to get the dog picked up or whatever. It's like, this is magic. This is so precious. We're sitting around with fellow human beings trying to make something. And I think using Mentimeter is one, but these comp just asking really quick, the top of the meeting, taking temperature of where people are cause there's so much, I everyone's going to be polite and nod their head, but there's so much difference lurking around that table.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And if you're looking for it and you can surface it in a safe way, that's a really good way to start, I think, new habits.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I'm with you. The word co-creation conjures up like, you know, some sort of kumbaya for a lot of people and, you know, they don't like it because creativity has like its compartment

Yeah.

But as we think of, just for lack of a better word, co-creation, and you think of sort of the McLuhan stuff, which we've talked in the past about he kind of sees it sort of very, almost mechanically, in the sense that if you look at 24 frame per second film, and you realize that our brains are filling in and smoothing out the frames. it's not, know, if we actually saw frame by frame, it would jump, but we, our brains kind of fill it in. And if you think about that, it means that, that when we watch something at 24 frames per second, you know, we're making up half of what we're seeing, half of what's there. Our brain is manufacturing, right? ⁓ And in that particular example, the idea is that, it's high fidelity, meaning

Mmm.

the frame before and the frame after really frames it. And it doesn't give us a lot of room to go out of that. It kind of creates a boundary. We're not likely to imagine something random in between. It sort of leads us to what we're going to imagine in between. And so his idea was that's like high fidelity because it really narrows the other person's imagination. We're still contributing to this thing and it is

So the idea is that as the observer, you're co-creating because the artist, just asynchronously, the artist did half, you did the other half. ⁓ And if you put co-creation, just looking at it in that mechanical way, conversing is co-creation. Like this conversation is just co-creation. everything's, and that's what we live for. It's like, it's what keeps us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

from going crazy is that we, whether we want to talk to each other, draw together, whether it's asynchronous or synchronous, whether it's art that looks like paint splatters that you do most of the art as the observer, or whether it's Vermeer where it's highly defined and every detail's in there. ⁓ We need a word, you know? We need a word that people don't turn out.

Yeah.

Could just be listening to Purple Rain together,

No, it reminds me, I remember early days in my London chapter, I get there and I get one of the fun parts of the job of being an ambassador is you just get invited to these neat things and you often just get seated next to interesting people And so, it might be the queen of England, but in this case, it was Jimmy Carr of this famous British standup comedian. So I love watching standup, I've watched tons of it. And I think we're in a good era of standup. And so I'm seated next to Jimmy and I don't know him. And so I start asking a bunch of questions. What's it like to be a comedian? So I always wanted to know when he's trying out new stuff, you know, they never go to London or New York. You go to places like Louisville where I live or Leeds or some smaller place to test out your stuff. I'm like for 10 jokes, how many get a laugh? And he says, I'm pretty good now. Like three in 10 will get a laugh.

Mm-hmm. You

And he's like, that's it's like one in 10. I'm like, wow. He's like, by the time you get to the Netflix special, it's like 10 out of 10, because you've tested them all. And I was like, OK, so I got what I wanted. So I turned the other way. he said, Matthew, he's like, but let me tell you something. Jokes are strange things. If you play a song and no one likes it, it's still a song. And if you put a play on and everybody walks out, it's still a play. If you tell a joke and nobody laughs, it is just a sentence." And I was like, say that again. So he said it again. And I said, is that like Groucho Marx? Did someone famous? He's like, no, no, I just said that. And I was like, I'm going to tell everyone I meet that story. He's like, it's not a story. And I was like, well, whatever, that thing, that observation. And what I love about it is the comedian does his or her part. The audience member does their part. Together, they made a joke. To your point on, it's not 50-50.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yes.

But that was a co-creation. There's mutuality in that. And that's really cool.

Yes. Yeah, and I'm not sure where I read it. It might have been McLuhan, but the idea that low fidelity co-creation tends to be more likeable because we put more of ourselves into the art. So the people that speak in vague ways and everybody takes away their meaning are more likeable than the people are very specific. in what they say, which makes me oftentimes not as likeable as I want to be. it's an interesting observation about why some politicians can kind of connect better because they're low fidelity in how they speak. It's interesting idea.

Well, and there's a very tactical thing that when I was finance chair for the Obama re-election in 2012, I came back from Sweden and I said, look, I'll come do this job, but I don't want to move to Chicago. I want to move back to Kentucky. And he said, fine. So I commuted up from Louisville to Chicago. So I spent a ton of time on Southwest Airlines because that's a very reliable way of getting to and fro. I don't, you guys must have flown it around. And so they always win.

Mm-hmm.

yeah.

best customer serve, you know, they win that best airline and when they don't, they come in second and then they win again. So I meet this guy who's like an executive coach to the C suite of Southwest Airlines. And I was like, I love Southwest. Like, what is their secret? And he said, it's not a secret. Do want me to tell you? said, sure. So I passed this, I think this connects. And like the Jimmy Carr thing, it like really stuck with me. And they said, well, all right, so let's say there's a big snowstorm in Chicago or a lightning storm. And as far as I'm concerned,

Right, right.

That's always one of the two things that's happening in Chicago. You're trying to come home to Louisville. Now let's pretend you're a rival airline. You're not Southwest Airlines. so he did this little role playing thing. So it's like, you've canceled my flight. And then he pretended to be the non Southwest Airlines. I'm so sorry, sir. We have no flights for you. They've all been canceled. We're working on it. And he said, think about that. I called you, sir. I looked you in the eye. I told you the truth. Check, check, check. He said, now we'll do it. And I'm Southwest Airlines. You've canceled my flight to Louisville." Southwest Airlines person says, we've got to get you home. And then they turn sort of, and he pulls out a clipboard, which is hard to hear in audio, but they look and they show the clipboard, Louisville canceled, Lexington canceled, Indianapolis canceled. That's it. And he said, do you see the difference? And I said, not really. I mean, it felt better the second time. He said, well, there are two things going on. And the first thing is I've turned this from a standoff into a story. We've got to get you home.

You Yep

So now it's like, yeah, yeah, I want to get home and I'm on your side. that's, he said, but the second part, second part is much more important and much harder. And the fancy word he said, notice that the rival airline internalized all the bad news. We have no flights for you. No one had flights, right? The snowstorm canceled everything, but, we naturally embodied the bad news and what the, so the, the clever technique. Point two is externalize the constraint, put it on a piece of paper. And then you're shoulder to shoulder with someone looking at a common problem. Now, what do we do about this? And it doesn't mean that everything magically happens, but it just shifts the whole thing. And one of the things, and I love Zoom as an effective way to meet and cut down on travel, but what's missing often,

Mm-hmm.

is and I love, because maybe my .com 1.0 chapter, like I love whiteboards. I love whiteboards. I'm not good at drawing. My handwriting's crappy, but it just provides this thing that isn't you. That you just write something up there. And so it's a place you can get up, you can write sloppily, you can just go correct one thing. And it's kind of a simple way of making something together. That when you just kind of go around all the squares on Zoom and everyone says their piece,

Mmm.

Mmm. Yeah.

they're embodying, you know what mean? And so we've got to disembodied some of this stuff. But again, I think AI not knowing as well as you can provide this other thing that you then react to as humans.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and I think to your point, to my point, I'm thinking my kids, they definitely like their art the best. You know, they run over, like, look what I drew! Very excited. They like other people's art second best. They get excited, but not nearly as excited about their own art. They're just like, look at this, this is pretty cool. And then AIs are, they like third best ⁓ because there's no story and there's no other person. And there's no better. There's no like which one's better. It doesn't matter. It's what they like. There's the best. And, and therefore in the co-creation mode, when we're interacting with AI, we're really co-creating with it.

Yeah.

But in the end, it's our art. know, because there's no one else to take credit. ⁓ It's still ours and we're gonna be proud of it. And we're gonna probably like it best because we made it, even if it's not the best. And it just proves it's a tool. Like what does a tool mean? It means when you use a tool to make art, you get to take all the credit.

That's it. Yeah.

When you do it with another person you gotta share it.

Yeah. Yeah, but if you So this is a very regional example, but so I grew up in Boston, so I love the Red Sox and there is a men's bathroom on I-95 between New York and Boston where next to the mirror, someone had scribbled in like ballpoint pen, Yankees suck. And then someone scribbled it out and they wrote Red Sox suck and someone scratched that out and wrote Yankee suck. So it goes on and on for like a foot of this screed back and forth. Then someone came along, I assume a guy. ⁓

Mm-hmm. Duh. Mm-hmm.

came along with a green Sharpie and he circles the whole red sock, sock, Yankee sock discussion and circles it. And then he writes, and we all love baseball. Now, what, and the reason that stuck with me is it's like, and back to the sort of like, how get out group hug. It's like, and I haven't been back, but something tells me that settled nothing. And that people have gone back and written what Mr. Green Sharpie can do with his pen. There's something condescending.

Hehehe

Right.

about we all love baseball. And like Yankees Red Sox rivalry is not something to be dismissed you know what I mean? And so I think of like the purple Sharpie, so to speak, if you could go back kind of where you were going, Rob, and say, all right, well, what would you write to shift the conversation? And I think you would write, and this is for baseball people, ⁓ should the American league, which the Red Sox and Yankees are both part of, ⁓ eliminate the designated hitter rule?

Yes. Yep. Mm-mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Matthew Barzun (1:00:08) Now, all of a sudden, you've shifted it slightly. You're not asking to give up tribal allegiances or alliances, but you're, it's like, I don't know, maybe we have a good one now, but he's about to retire. And all of a sudden, you've just shifted it slightly back to where we started this conversation on rules. And if you did that, then you get people discussing, debating, whatever, mending and amending rules of a game they love. And when I think about our democracy, I think that's what we need more of. robb (1:00:14) Yes. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, I think you just helped me understand what there is not to like about the word co-creation because it doesn't allow argument. It sounds like we're all getting along where a good argument is super awesome. And it's a form of creation, right? We're creating something, but it doesn't have to be Kumbaya, and it shouldn't be. Matthew Barzun (1:00:38) or in a corporate setting. josh (1:00:49) Mm-hmm. Matthew Barzun (1:00:53) Yes. It shouldn't be. so, I I mean, the real, you know, it doesn't lend itself to a podcast, but the way I look at the world and to the point you just made is like a, you know, a two by two matrix up north, up north is tension. The Southern dimension, if you picture it like that, you can picture what I'm saying. Right. So it's like tension on top, no tension at the bottom over to the East, constructive over to the West, not constructive or destructive. josh (1:01:00) Should be forged in fire even, robb (1:01:12) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Matthew Barzun (1:01:30) And so if you think of the upper left-hand corner is destructive tension. We got lots of that. Think about Twitter on its bad days, cable news on both sides of the political spectrum. You know, we just lots of, and I call that fight it out. So we all know the fight it out world. That's where patronizing tone lives. When people are frustrated about that, they do the opposite. They go to the lower right, which is let's have no tension and let's build something together. That's hug it out. robb (1:01:34) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Matthew Barzun (1:02:00) But that's the kind of bad middle school science project where kumbaya, hug it out, nothing, there's no energy there. So it doesn't work. I think corporate, corporate leaders within a day, within a week, within a year are going between, oh, by the way, in that, that lower right-hand quadrant, hug it out. That's where pandering is. So they patronize, they pander, they patronize and pander. And finally, when they get sick of the upper left and the lower right, they go to the lower left and just sit it out. robb (1:02:09) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Matthew Barzun (1:02:30) So fight it out, robb (1:02:31) Yep. Matthew Barzun (1:02:31) hug it out, fight it out, hug it out, sit it out. And that, if you draw that, I call that the triangle of sadness. And that's, we're all stuck in this triangle of sadness. And the way out, which is always the case with these two by twos is the upper right, which is constructive tension, which is what you were getting at. And it's like, ⁓ so yes, you're arguing and you're looking for difference, but you're not trying to win. robb (1:02:38) Hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, right. Matthew Barzun (1:02:56) your argument because I would always do, there's a fun little trick I would do with the 18 year old kids in the UK, 20,000. I'd be like, hey, quick show of hands, who here likes to lose an argument? So no one ever, except for selling 18 year old boys in the back row, just to be contrary, but like generally no one likes to lose one. So why are we in the argument winning business? That's not a very good use of our time. So if we can, and to me it all hinges on difference. Don't demonize difference in the upper left. Don't dismiss it in the lower right. robb (1:03:04) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Matthew Barzun (1:03:26) Don't define yourself by it in the lower left. Just deal with it, work through it, delight in it. robb (1:03:26) Yep. Yeah. I think you also just explained really elegantly why people are so annoyed with the AI that's so complimentary all the time and always so agreeable. think like, why is that annoy us? And I think you just explained why. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's interesting. Matthew Barzun (1:03:41) Right? josh (1:03:42) Mmm. Matthew Barzun (1:03:44) It's stop pandering. Stop pandering. It's it's death. Yeah. And the flip of it, I was getting ready to for my talk with you guys and I came up with something I thought was interesting and new and it turns out it's deeply not new and had been addressed. But I talked to a friend who's smarter about this stuff than I am. And I said, I think it's really neat that like my kids don't, I love my children and they're well-behaved, have good manners, but they never say please or thank you to Siri and they never have. I used to, back when they were younger, I would be like, Hey, you should just say please. know, and I said, I think everyone says please and thank you to a chat GPT. I always do. And all my kids do. And then I guess Sam Altman or someone had basically said, my God, that could Jill, the amount of compute that is wasted dealing with please and thank you. And I thought. robb (1:04:15) huh. Matthew Barzun (1:04:36) ⁓ well, okay. don't want to like, but like, it's nice. And people are saying please and thank you because at some level it's our intelligence that's being spat back to us, extruded out. robb (1:04:43) Yeah. Yeah. It comes back The best way then to save on electricity is not put any words in it. Yeah, please. If that's what we're trying to do. Well, this was awesome. was really looking forward to this talk. It did not let me down. I enjoyed it a lot. Matthew Barzun (1:04:53) Yeah, there you go. Like, okay. Yeah, problem, problem resolved. Yeah. robb (1:05:14) You definitely have a life that I think most people would envy. Ambassador, UK, and then Sweden. How the heck did someone get that gig? That's amazing. Yeah. josh (1:05:24) you Matthew Barzun (1:05:25) for another time. Thank you guys for having me. I loved it. josh (1:05:29) Yeah, this was fantastic. Thanks, Matthew.