Building Better Humans in the Age of AI: Dr. Vivienne Ming on Hybrid Intelligence, Curiosity, and Your Unique Voice

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The worst AI on its worst question was better than the best of my very bright UC Berkeley students. But that's not the story that interests me. The only thing that interests me is, how can I make us better? I don't really care what it can do on its own. I use AI to make my life harder, not easier, but harder in the ways that make me better. It wasn't the AI, it was the human that predicted this amazing success. It is now, more than ever, truly your unique voice that makes you valuable. I'm Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail.

Welcome to And Now Love. We talk a lot about what it means to be human, the early imprints that hold us back, and how we can heal to unlock our true potential. But what happens to that human potential in a world? Being faced with rapidly, I mean rapidly changing a I. Our guest today has the most fascinating perspective on this. We are talking with Doctor Vivienne Ming. She is a theoretical neuroscientist, a serial entrepreneur, and she calls herself a professional mad scientist. Don't you love that? Vivienne has done everything from using machine learning to reunite refugee families, to inventing AI that helps manage her own sons diabetes.

She just released an incredible book. I'm in the middle of reading it called Robot Proof. When machines have all the answers, build better people. Her whole mission is about how we can build ourselves up so that technology amplifies our humanity. Instead of replacing it. Vivienne, may I call you Vivienne? Please do. Vivienne. Hi. Thank you for being here. We are so honored. It's absolute privilege. I'm thrilled to have a chance to talk about this. And I've done a number of interviews around the book, but there are so much about jobs. Or how do we teach kids worthwhile questions. But I think what it means for us and our lives and our relationships are at least as worthwhile, if not more.

Yes, and I admire this perspective that you have that there are, unless this has evolved since I read this a few days ago, because everything changes so quickly that there are certain human traits that we're going to hold on to as humans, and that can help us direct our best use of AI. I mean, even the title of the book came from a conversation years ago. I was invited to the Department of Education. This thing that used to exist. They said, Doctor Ming, how do we robot proof our kids? Which simultaneously, I thought someday that would be the great title for a book. But I also understood that what they wanted was an easy answer.

Like what is the one magical skill? The programing or calligraphy? Who knows what? But what is this one magic skill that would guarantee a great job and a super productive American economy? There isn't something like that. You know, when I look at all the research that I've had, I've had the chance to do over a couple of decades now because this has been around long before GPT entered the world. The real story entered enough hasn't changed. Not only has enough changed in the last three weeks, it hasn't changed since that conversation 15 years ago, and it's probably the same story I might have shared with interested parents in the Bronze Age, which is it is kind of fundamental and foundational human capital, like curiosity and resilience and life meaningfulness, working memory span and and creativity.

These are the things that almost certainly always have predicted positive life outcomes. And the interesting twist here. With some legitimate fears people might have about AI is if you want to look at it positively, not dreamily or utopian, but realistically and positively. It's a forcing function. A lot of the things that used to secure a good life but maybe weren't very enriching, like how well can you analyze the spreadsheet on a crank every day, over and over again, become much less valuable because you can get that for free from any phone. And instead, it's those things I just walk through these foundational skills.

What in my book, I call meta learning, learning how to learn. These are the things that not only have almost always predicted positive life outcomes, but now I've had the chance to do some experiments, have students working with eyes, and look not at natural human intelligence all by itself and not intelligence all by itself, which never really interested me. But what about hybrid intelligence as a self-appointed mad scientist? What are the cyborgs in the world look like in the best sense? And it turns out they are curious. e. when they're told that they're wrong. It's a learning experience, not a reason to collapse or hide.

They have perspective taking. I think that's one of my most interesting findings that people that are really good with working with AI understand the motivations of other human beings well, and fluid intelligence. So that's just four of many constructs we could talk about. But those four, I think, tell a really rich story, both because what do they mean in our actions with AI? But what do we mean with one another? If you have a good enough answer to keep looking for a better one? Are you curious if you're told that you're wrong? Do you just give up? Are you. Do you have intellectual humility? These little things that we don't teach in school and no one ever takes a class in.

And yet they say so much about our life outcomes. And now there's this thing in the world that you can pull out of your pocket, and it's better than some of the best humans at things that used to be the center of our careers. So I think the truly wonderful look at what's left is that it's being human. Humans are better exploring the unknown than any modern AI is. Maybe that won't hope forever, but it'll hold for a while, I say with some genuine expertise here. And so now we have the chance to lean in to what makes us truly human. Because interestingly, now that finally makes us truly valuable.

And do you think that in past revolutions where we've seen some huge amount of change and we've had to shift humanity, have we leaned in to humanity to make those shifts successful? I think what's interesting is you look at the invention of the Jacquard loom and the impact it had on the largest industry in the world at the time, outside agriculture, which was weaving everyone. You want to make a little bit of extra money, whether you're in a village in, in India or England or Africa, you did a little weaving for the family and you traded it outside and suddenly, overnight, none of that was valuable anymore because there's one little place in the Midlands of England could do all of the weaving.

Everybody needed so much cheaper than anyone else could do it. And so you might wonder, then, what did that change? Well, what it meant for the first hundred years was a whole lot of change and disruption and honestly, a whole lot of misery for many people, even as it eventually led to something better. And I think understanding that change is both of those things at the same time. Now, idealizing the industrial revolution is having brought us the good parts of the modern world, or only the bad parts of the modern world, or envisioning that they happened instantaneously. The minute someone made an invention, everything changed.

It isn't the way any of that happened. But what's interesting here is in automating weaving. What it didn't really do was take away the core cognitive labor. So maybe you don't have to make it by hand anymore. Now you could think up the designs and have the loom to it. And so eventually we have the fashion industry and, you know, the factory line driven on water power and then coal power freed up people from farms, but predominantly to go work on factory lines. So again, we don't have a big change in the cognitive story of humanity here. There's something a little more complicated. You know, maybe the core of our conversation isn't around labor, but it's worth noting, like the common thing people will say is, you know, all these previous times, the new technology invented more jobs than it destroyed.

Eventually, I happen to agree that it's very likely AI creates more jobs than it's destroys. But unlike all of those previous technologies where as soon as there was a new job, it was a new job for people here, there's kind of a threshold. Whatever that new job is, it has to rise above what existing AI can already do. Otherwise, there isn't a job for people. So in other words, the demand for new jobs will occur. But will the supply? Will people be ready to fill those jobs or enough people to meet the demand? And that's kind of part of the economic story of what we're looking at. It's a little nerdy of a story, but understanding, that's why it matters to me.

To answer your other question, what does it take to flourish in an AI rich world? Curiosity, fluid intelligence, perspective taking, because we're not building that into our kids and and our communities. And so when the demand comes for a generation that can bring that not just into their personal lives, but into the workplace. I don't think we'll be ready to meet that demand. And that that worries me. Yeah. So I mean, there's this occurrence now where we're giving our kids these devices, and I have this big concern about how much that replaces that curiosity, the imagination, the imaginary friends, that the experiences that we typically have learned from in, in our growth.

And and if all of that goes missing, then, then we can't fill these positions like you're describing unless there's something that's still in the unknown that I haven't yet thought of, which is a ton of stuff. But something about this specifically that could come to pass that that help in a healthy way replaces imagination. I can't imagine that. Well, it's interesting because again, there's no average person. And so when you ask a question about how did the revolution affect everyone? Well, if I did everyone differently, but probably a whole lot of people, it hit really hard. AI affects everyone differently.

I had the chance to run an experiment in which I asked these very bright UC Berkeley students to make predictions about the future. And it turns out, despite being bright, they don't know a whole lot about the price of oil or whether there be a war in Uganda. So they weren't very good at these predictions. Then I asked AI's to make these predictions. Some big ones like GPT and Google's Gemini, and some little ones you've never heard of before unless you're an AI nerd. The worst AI on its worst question was better than the best of my very bright UC Berkeley students. Wow. And if that were the end of the story again, it's reasonable to be worried about what the future is going to bring.

But that's not the story that interests me. Let's go back to hybrid intelligence. What happens when those very bright students have this amazing tool and there's no average student? So some of them do exactly what I think you are worried about in those comments. They just say, GPT, tell me what the price of oil will be. And when we look inside their brains, it sort of loosely goes from working on a hard math problem to watching TV levels of cognitive engagement. So they kind of tune out and they just copy the answer. That machine gave them into the answer box and that's it. And they don't take it in.

It doesn't become part of. They don't take it in. They feel like they know the answer, but in fact, they really don't. And in fact, that's one of the the tensions. One of the paradoxes is people using AI, people using Google just searches will often feel like they know the things that technology is giving them, when in fact they do not. But that's the largest group. But it's not the only group. But if I jump all the way over to the most positive part of this experiment, we have this small group of students who, when they had AI help, they didn't just do better than the best humans, they didn't just do better than the best AI's.

I took this question off of a place called Poly Market, where experts bet money on these questions. They did almost as well as experts betting millions of dollars on things like the price of oil. And so in an hour, a naive but smart kid became one of the smartest things on the planet, which could make you really hopeful. What was different between them and all of the kids that just did whatever that AI told them and turned their brains off? Well, I already told you, but here we really measure it over the course of an actual experiment. It was curiosity, fluid intelligence, intellectual humility, and perspective taking.

It wasn't the AI, it was the human that predicted this amazing success. So as someone who's been working in this space for more than 30 years as an academic and a philanthropist and an entrepreneur, I really want to. The only thing that interests me is, how can I make us better? I don't really care what it can do on its own. I'm there's moments that, you know, humans shouldn't be bent over and fields picking lettuce if they don't have to be. I'm I'm all for automating some things. But the thing that truly gets me excited is when a kid learns a thing they would never have learned otherwise, or when a family makes a deeper connection with one another, or someone who is alive who otherwise would wouldn't have been diagnosed and treated accurately.

AI has a real potential for a role in that. Not because it's immagini, because it can make doctors and teachers and everyone else a little bit better. But it turns out it can't do a very good job of that. If it's just like a magic genie that gives you all the right answers, because we tend to just shut off our brains then, and that has its own costs. So yeah, it is. It's a messy story, but I guess if I would try to summarize it in a way that offers at least a little bit of takeaway if if your listeners are familiar with the Danny Ketamine Nobel Prize winners book Thinking Fast and Slow. Sometimes in psychology we talk about deep versus shallow cognition.

If you really want to look at the difference between the people that don't engage deeply with AI, and they just do what it tells them and those that do, it's that depth or even just social media. You're seeing news stories coming through. Are you just sharing them without thinking about them? Or every now and then does one catch your attention? And you go and you do the research and you think about it and you push back, or you ask your AI, hey, tell me why I'm wrong instead of why I'm right. That sort of dynamic enriches us. It's what we call in my work productive friction. Everyone wants to sell as technology that makes life easier, but it turns out technology that challenges us to be better in the long run produces so much more than just an easy answer.

Like it is in the human experience. Engagement with each other is we don't even question. It's just part of what we do. And so there's an engagement that we could ought to have with AI. AI you ask it a question and says, well, take the north route and you could say, okay, but you could also say, I was thinking about the south route. What about the south route? Is it is it that kind of thing or or even like you said, I should take the north route, but I don't understand. Give me a reason why or what happened to northeast. How people go deep can be again, their own sort of thing. But here's a really concrete example.

And this is AI, but it's one that's been a part of people's lives for a while now, which is Google Maps or Ways or Apple Maps, all of these. This is a prediction I made nearly 20 years ago, which sounded really provocative at the time, but felt like a pretty safe bet to me. And it turns out it was accurate, which is overreliance on automated navigation would causally lead to higher rates of dementia. Not because certainly anyone at Google intended to make and Alzheimer's Machine or the Google Maps when you use it, does it make you better? I travel all over the world and just like that, anywhere in the world, I know where I'm going.

That's a real value edge. You can't say that about a lot of technologies, but automated navigation truly helps. But every time I over rely on it, I get where I'm going, and I'm just a little bit worse when I arrive, because it turns out. Sure enough, in the your sense, the research has shown that overreliance on animated navigation reduces memory performance and leads to some early indicators of cognitive decline. Mild cognitive impairment that that is indicative of things like Alzheimer's. So there's one technology that is very much kind of AI, though only in one targeted area, widely used. And you've got this tension.

You're genuinely better when you use it, but maybe you're a little bit worse than what you started when you turn it off again. And so every year I give a couple of lectures at UC Berkeley, where I live here. And one of my challenges to the students in my class is invent a version of Google Maps that gets you where you want to go, but you arrive better than when you started. And there's some I mean, these are very smart, sophisticated kids, so they come up with lots of very cool, AI rich ideas about how to do this, which is all great. I love a phenomenally over complicated, nerdy solution to a simple problem.

I'm. I am that kind of person too. But then I close with this simple thing that I actually do. I open up Google even when I'm in Berkeley, and I say, how do I get to the supermarket? Because how would I know what the traffic conditions are? But here's the one thing I don't get to do follow that route. Now. My job, the little game that I don't have to play every single time. But I do have to play regularly. The little game is using what I know about Berkeley or Manhattan or London or Paris. I have to get to my destination and beat Google, but taking a different route. Maybe it didn't know that that unprotected left turn was a bad idea.

Or maybe I know that I can sneak through this pedestrian spot in the old city in Paris that doesn't really show up on the maps. Whatever it is I have, it doesn't matter whether I get there faster or not. What matters is that I thought about it, and that's the thing that is at risk of missing from our lives if we over rely on AI. Yes. And did any of your students come up with that as an option? I have, I'm thinking particularly of the lecture I give in the entrepreneurship for engineers course, which I bet you can guess. Entrepreneurship for engineers at UC Berkeley involves a lot of very, very bright young minds that would never stumble across the easy answer when $1 million answer is staring at them.

So no, they don't usually come up with this, that simple thing. But, you know, sometimes you can leverage technology to make things better. Sometimes it's these very simple techniques. When I wrote the book itself, I used a lot of AI help. But you know what? I never let it do Gemini. In this particular case, I never let it right anything. So instead of using AI to make writing easier and let me tell you, I don't love writing. I don't like writing code. I don't like writing words. I would write out a draft chapter and then say, Gemini, you are my nemesis, my lifelong enemy. You've pointed out every mistake I've ever made to the world at large.

Here's the new chapter of my book. Tell me an excruciating detail why I'm wrong and what I can do about it. And what's kind of clever about AI, modern chatbot AI is then I could go and say, you know what? Actually, I was wrong. You are my next board audience. That doesn't know why any of this is meaningful to them. Why is it not connecting and how can I make it feel more relevant? And so in that sense, using and I do this throughout my work and my math and my my writing and everything in between is I use AI to make my life harder, not easier, but harder in the ways that make me better. What I would hope for most people is to find in themselves that we can get nerdy here, that dope, ominous signal that isn't about, oh, I want to watch the next short video, but instead it's saying somewhere over that distant hillside behind that failed answer to that math question.

Beyond that book that feels impossible to write is a better you. And here's the dopaminergic signal, this this intrinsic signaling system in your brain that says, do the hard stuff now and eat the cheese at the middle of that maze later, when unfortunately, in most of our lives, these same signals are saying right now, right now, right now, if get all of the short, easy cheese you can, but trust me, it tastes so much better aged and training your brain to seek those long return rewards that you demonic happiness. Interestingly enough, AI could have a role in that if you use it that way. Well, that's, I think one of the absolute beauties of the human experience is taking on these challenges.

Not even speaking of AI, just taking on human challenges, ways that we learn, ways that we're curious, ways that we're creative. And coming out the other end of that sort of more full, more human, more loving. And, you know, why wouldn't you take on this cohort, this companion in AI, to help you do those things? I am far from interested in forcing AI on anyone. In fact, my dream version of it is it just sort of disappears in some sense into the background and you understand that it's just you. It's like a little gang control system that's just turning you up to 11. Let me cite some nerdy research again.

There was a really provocative paper out of China in which they did the kind of research you could only do in the modern age. They read using AI. Every scientific paper published since GPT came out, hundreds of thousands of papers, and they were able to essentially score it by how much AI support that paper had. Then they looked at two things. The individual comes of scientist. Depending on how much AI support they had and the outcomes of science. Depending on how much AI support a given subdiscipline had, and it tells diverging stories. Scientists who make a lot of use of AI right? More papers get more citations.

They excel in their career. Hey that's great. AI is great for scientists. Subdisciplines of science have less novelty, fewer innovations, and everyone starts researching the same questions because of course, they have the same AI genie whispering in their ear and telling them, oh, you should do this one thing no one else is doing except it's saying the same thing to everyone. I think the scary and wonderful part in this moment in history is it is now, more than ever, truly your unique voice that makes you valuable. Everyone is getting the same really good, solid answer. Out of this kooky technology that's available virtually for free in your pocket.

So I don't need that from my employees. I don't need that from me or my kids or my students. I need whatever thing they would say that is only them. I think that's a little terrifying because that's not how we were really brought up. You know, we went to school to learn how to give the right answer to a known problem, and now AI can do that better than us. So now what I want is for you to be able to ask the most interesting question for an unknown problem and to cite one more study, but I think it touches on relationships in general, not just teachers with eight year olds as they this group of researchers ran this nice controlled study, but in real classrooms with real kids, and found that teachers that were trained to praise interesting questions instead of right answers, their students separate measures of curiosity went up in just six weeks, and they started asking obviously way more questions.

And then when new material got introduced in class, they dive into it without any additional prompting. We still have an education system, and maybe a lot of our fears as parents as well, are still bound up in a world that is a little born out of the Industrial Revolution. You know, I need you to work a factory line, even if that factory line is kind of white collar and intellectual, it's still you should be giving the exact same, but maybe esoteric answer. Is anyone else with the same job? Now? I've already got that for free. I need you to say what no one else would say. And in that sense again, wow, what an amazing opportunity in history.

But then the realist of me says, and boy, are we not prepared for. It, right? But what a remarkable moment. So how do we prepare for it? You know, there's what we could say about ourselves. There's what we could say about our kids or our employees. And it isn't. Those are wildly different questions, but there's some interesting dynamics. So let's note three areas that we could change. One is kind of my area and my peers, which is changing AI itself. How do we build AI's that don't just give you easy answers, they give you what you need. And maybe in that moment, you didn't need the answer. You needed a hint.

You needed a misdirect. You needed a provocation. And so I have a project that we're working on called Project Socrates, where we're working on an AI that doesn't give answers, but it gives you what you need to grow. Or rather, it kind of balances those two demands. It only gives you the answer. You truly need to stay engaged. While its real job is to grow you like a like a real tutor ought to be doing. On the human side, we already noted what is truly valuable in people's lives. I'll add a few more in like resilience. I think I mentioned before or like meaningfulness, early cognitive development, like working memory span.

There's so many different human factors that we could be actively developing. And here's what I think is important. Some of my work is about kids and about education or early cognitive development, because that's when it's easy to change things. But social skills, emotional intelligence, creativity related skills, as far as we can see, these are changeable throughout our lifetime. Some of those low level cognitive things, maybe not so much not when you're an adult, but these others like building a sense of purpose or resilience or perspective taking, are truly on the table. It doesn't mean it's easy to change, nor does it mean you could show up and I can give you a lecture.

It's not that kind of learning. It's very experiential. You want to become more resilient. Let me give it a definition. From a psychology perspective, your probability of finding success, affair, experiencing failure. Well guess what? If you're not experiencing failure, you're not going to grow in your resilience. So if you're not willing to let your kids experience failure, or if you're scared of it or your your company can't risk employees making mistakes, nobody's growing because that's how your brain is built. If this little structure in your brain called the interior cingulate nucleus, and some other ones as well, aren't lighting up every time you make an error, then the whole cascade that leads to learning never starts.

No mistakes, no learning. I think one of the things maybe we really appreciate is the power of peer role models. So maybe there are things you're good at that you can really role model for the people around you. The most obvious one is if you are a parent, be the person you want your child to be. It's the biggest impact you will ever have in their lives and side benefit you. Get to be that person who I assume is someone you would admire as well. I'm not saying that's easy, but that is what I'm saying is that effort is worthwhile. But peer modeling, I mean, the fine someone that has some of those traits that you admire, but maybe you don't and spend some time working with them.

That's huge. Last sort of area is about like policy and leadership. What does it mean if you have the privilege to be influential in your community or be a leader within an organization? And I think maybe that's the most uncertain and underappreciated one. But I just gave an example involving little kids that I guarantee you holds with adults. Are you only praising right answers, or are you really celebrating people that ask the interesting, unexpected questions? Because if it's only right answers, then no one will take a risk. No one will go out and find something amazing and new. Well, again, we live in a world where the right answers are free in your pocket.

And by the way, also in the pockets of all of your competitors. So what is it changing in your life to? Why were you praising the thing you're already getting for free? Praise the most valuable thing in the world? A new insight, even if it's wrong. We as leaders are terrible at that. We grew up in a world we are whole job as a leader was to manage uncertainty and make it go away. We actually want to foster uncertainty because again, that's what humans are uniquely good at. Were terrible at it, but it is our unique strength and we should celebrate that and maybe take some of the sting away. And all of this aversion we have to uncertainty.

If you felt more comfortable. Uncertainty is where I learn and where I grow. Uncertainty is where the most powerful new change happens. Then we've changed our relationship with it and with the world. That is huge. Actually, I mean, we're we humans are just sort of a beautiful mess. I mean, I mean, beautiful that and the fact that we're each, you know, unique. And I like to think that inside each of us there is a curiosity. Some of us don't know how to bring it forward, don't have the time, don't have the ability to have the energy to do that. But it's it's there. And you mentioned in your book, I thought this was really interesting in that I think you were working for an organization called Guild.

I was a chief scientist of guild, and certainly that was a heady time. We ended up on the cover of The New York Times and The Atlantic. And yeah, it was really. A. Fascinating experience. And like many companies, well, I guess you were assisting companies who were typically hiring, say, top tier people coming out of top tier schools. I thought it was fascinating how you were able to use I don't even know all the right words because this is not my my field. But you were able to use AI or data driven material to help discover that that's not the be all end all that that you're missing out because there are so many other people who have a creativity that they actually want to use, a curiosity that they want to use, and that they're not, as you're suggesting, just there to give you the right answer.

If you are Google or Facebook today or back, then, you know, when I was doing that work ten years ago, or for that matter, Citibank or Nestlé, you know, I mean, literally, you know, the names of every elite student coming out of Stanford's computer science program or Harvard Law School, and there just aren't enough of them. Nothing. I would never say that people coming out of universities aren't good at their job. If it's the only thing you knew, it's predictive, although a lot of what it's predicting are these other things I've already listed. Like part of the reason you got into Stanford or Harvard is because you are resilient, but it's still it's still predictive, even a little above and beyond those.

So they knew all of these people, but they needed so many more. And so our job at Guild was to figure out how good you were at jobs you've never held. And if you are old enough, I guarantee you you are in our data set. We had 122 million people in our system. We would say, hey, Google this person as just as good at writing code as this, the Stanford graduates, but they don't have that same pedigree. So that was our business and it was hard. I don't let anyone tell you that. Again, AI is not magic building these systems that could understand people. In fact, honestly, we didn't build systems that just sort of took information and somehow said, oh, you should hire Vivienne.

What we did was we looked at what science had said, what makes a great employee? Well, one of the very first papers I read said, great employee is resilient. And so ever since that has been a part of my research area, is looking at the construct of resilience. And then we came across dozens of papers that showed, hey, resilience really predicts great employees. So rather than in reinventing what makes a great employee, what we used AI to do was could we look at people's sort of digital exhaust, if you will, the life you leave behind online and figure out who is resilient. And what we found was for every person that had that fancy, fancy university pedigree, there were ten to sometimes a hundred times as many people that were just as resilient as they are or that had, you know, just as much cognitive capacity.

But interestingly, I think one of the most provocative things we found was you might actually prefer someone with the foundation skills and not the professional skills. You can teach someone how to program. It's really hard to teach them how to be resilient. And so we even built systems that said, hey, this person doesn't know how to do the job, but they'd be an amazing intern because they will become an amazing employee in 2014, is what I was working on to try and understand what predicts career outcomes. I also happened to have a separate company, a nonprofit that was working on what predicts little kids long term life outcomes.

And so some of that early work is some of the work that inspired the book Robot Proof, but also that has inspired much of what I've worked on since. Like if we can see what what truly drives people towards an amazing, positive life outcome, why isn't that the entire game? Why isn't that what schools is about? Why isn't that what jobs are about? Or our lives writ large? But it turns out what some people would call hedonistic happiness that just that de-stressing that comes from, you know, and some indulgent snacks and some not particularly challenging media. It's not a bad thing in moderation, as most things aren't.

But it turns out, if that's the only kind of happiness you're finding actually predicts negative life outcomes, whereas this harder, slower process that brings its own rewards. But over time that really drives this positive, that kind of merchant that in just a forgive me, sort of bloody minded economic sense you want to employ for that, those are just better employees and they stay longer on the job. If their sense of purpose fits with what your company is doing. These people have lower all cause mortality rates. They have more friends. Yes, they earn more, but they're happier. What my favorite metrics of life outcomes.

They have higher walking speeds at age 65. So if we look across all of these dozens of outcome measures, people rich in these foundation skills are better off. But again, I don't think we've prepared ourselves for this. We still have this idea of, oh God, I don't want to be my job. I I'm telling you, you want my job. I don't mean the specifics of what I do, but what you want is waking up at 3:00 in the morning because you have a great idea, and you really want to get it down. That you want someone is is alive or has a better life because of something clever you did that comes from this kind of work.

And if we can rethink our relationships with work in those terms and see that value add our employees, our coworkers aren't just pulling a factory line lever. Both are really saying is this patient is unique. This problem I'm working on is unique. If it wasn't, maybe an AI, it may not do it better, but it'll do it a whole lot cheaper. What I'm adding is that every problem truly is unique, and I'm adding that into this problem space. I have a very nerdy paper I'm working on to human terms are. If you look at the ideas AI produces and the ideas humans produce, we are way out on the branches. Our lives are short and limited, but it gives us a superpower in the sense that what that produces is something unique in a real, measurable, and genuine sense.

AI's kind of take everything humans have discovered and average it all together, and that's powerful, and it has its own value, but it kind of lives right in the middle of human experience. But our lives are out in the long tails and the far branches truly know one of those long tails is the same. Truly, human intelligence is genuinely, mathematically different than that average intelligence the AI gives you. Which means there's a point to us we still have something truly unique to offer, but you got to have the courage to offer it. Being that genuinely unique version of yourself is what the world has always needed, and we should finally start celebrating.

That, I think so well, and I mean, that's what we're about here, you know, sort of minus the AI. And thank you for helping us bring this in because it's not going away. We're we believe that we're at a place in this world where if we don't find and celebrate our uniqueness, discover who we truly are, and work from that rather than what we were told, we should be all what the world says we should be we. That's where we give our gifts to our communities. That's where we find our best life. That's where we move forward in a life that's constantly changing, where we're evolving, where we're learning, where we're using that curiosity, that good stuff that we we came with, that we got mixed up with when we were told, oh, no, you're just going to be an attorney.

You know, there's nothing else for you or or everybody in the family is an electrician. Yeah, yeah. I mean that's putting it in simple terms, but but to be able to look inside yourself and say, see, you know that it's not resonating. It's not that's not me. It's not feeling good and not dismiss that which I think we're prone to do. We don't trust ourselves often enough. We don't have confidence in our ability to be unique. And I think that a lot of our struggles are world wide. Struggles come from that in that we don't respect our own unique qualities enough to share them with the world. And what the world needs is, just as you say, those unique qualities.

I mean, look at a classroom filled with 300 students. How many are really raising their hand and giving an answer because they can't, because they don't have the right answer, and the idea of having the wrong answer. As you said, it's humiliating. We've been told to step back from that experience. Interesting enough, my wife and I published a paper together again a while ago, 2012. I think it was just as a reminder that AI existed before GPT came along. In this case, we used what's called natural language processing, so AI to analyze people's conversations, and we looked at students having conversations in classes, university classes.

So this is online discussion forum, 30,000 undergrads in biology courses, 30,000 MBA students in an economics course. And I think one of the things that was most fascinating isn't what distinguished the students that passed their courses from the ones that failed it. That was pretty easy and maybe not surprising. The ones that passed the courses talked about the course, the ones that failed it, talked about the weather, or they socialized. But the most fascinating thing was the difference between the students, not just that passed or got A's, but the difference because we didn't just look at the grade they got, we looked at how long it took them to graduate and the quality of the job they got afterwards.

The very best students, by those deeper measures were distinguished from. Students had also got A's but didn't have those outcomes. Not by being right, but by being wrong. The best students were regularly wrong. What we saw in the average student is they were actively hiding their misconception for themselves, by which I mean they just cut and pasted whatever was in the book or in the course, while these other students would explore and be wrong because they're being taught about collective bargaining agreements with examples about auto workers, and maybe they go and explore what it means for nurses.

Well, nurses are different, and the nature of it is different as a regulated industry, for one. So they get some details wrong. But our system said like, if we graded these students based on whether they were a right or not, the slightly worse students will get the higher grade, but it's the ones the chances and explored that ended up with better lives. Our brain isn't always giving us the full story, and that sense of learning versus unlearning when when the learning goes up. But it feels the exact opposite. AI can really fuel that in ourselves, but so can our relationships. At my nonprofit, the Human Trust, where we work on these big philanthropic missions is crazy.

Ideas come in, Doctor Ming, you know, how do we reduce political polarization? France. Doctor Ming, how do we improve global hiring of Kenyan citizens? Or even just simply my daughter is dying and no one knows what to do? Well, I'll tell you. For my fresh out of university employees, I throw up a crazy case on a whiteboard, literally, and I say, go pitch me ideas about this thing. What could be going on? Every time someone pitches me, I then take ten, 20, 30 minutes to explain in detail why they're wrong. And then as soon as that's done, I need to pit them to pitch me a new idea. And if you're 20 and your whole sense of self-worth has been that you've been able to give right answers to known questions, that is brutal.

But it's an engine of discovery. Every now and then, one of them pitches a truly amazing answer that could be the solution to the problem. It doesn't happen very often. Usually it's the engine. We're grinding through these ideas so that we can understand this unknown problem better. I jokingly say, the reason I call myself a professional mad scientist is that if we knew the right answer, it wouldn't be science. And if anyone else was doing it, it wouldn't be mad. So this is what the process is, and it is really hard for someone early in life. But if you're like me and you had the brilliant life strategy of ruining your life early and then having to start all over again, you're not nearly as worried about whether you're doing it wrong, because you can't have done it more wrong than I did in the 90s.

There are life lessons to be learned in moments like that. Yes, and we've spoken to many people who share similar stories, how they've come to do whatever it is they're doing that is, in some fashion, helping humanity. They only came to it by getting themselves sort of in a position, being out of control on some level. And from that they rose and figured out that whatever it was that they thought was their intention wasn't. So can you share a little bit about your experience? Yes. So I'll be happy to share. I and I'll try to keep it tight. But it's a good story. Even if it's a hard story sometimes.

I actually grew up in this little valley that Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck wrote about. And the title of that book, What's the Pastures of Heaven? So according to John Steinbeck, I grew up in the pastors of heaven, and on some level I did. My dad was a doctor, my mom was a teacher, coastal California, and my dad had grown up poor, and I was going to win the Nobel Prizes that he didn't get the chance to win. Boy, is that not a good thing to put into a little kids head. Like to this day? This book I wrote is a failure because it didn't win a Pulitzer Prize, and there was genuinely a part of me that was upset.

It doesn't qualify for the book of awards, and I was still upset that it wasn't nominated. This is the thing that ruined my life. Was this level of self-destructed perfectionism. I'm supposed to Nobel Prizes, and quickly it became any time in elementary school if I wasn't winning Nobel Prizes, I was a failure. So then by high school, I'm sleeping through my classes. Fortunately, I'm clever enough to do well on exams and standardized exams. And so I get to go to university where no one's holding my hand anymore. And even then I could show up at the finals and still barely pass courses that I wasn't attending.

But then you start taking courses like Differential Equations, and if any of you happen to know what I'm talking about, it turns out you can't fake that. I ended up flunking out and ended up homeless for a big chunk of the 90s. And in fact, at any time during that period, I could have just gone home and confessed to everything because I was just keeping it all a secret. But I thought I deserved it. I was a failure and I deserved to be homeless. And yet, when a night came, when I was essentially planning that this would be the end, I needed a reason to be alive. And I was not a good enough reason.

And being honest with myself, you know, just making my parents proud of me wasn't a good enough reason. I needed something else. So maybe the most valuable lesson I ever came started with this proposition, which is maybe I will never be happy. But that doesn't happen. Have to be why I am alive. I could find another reason to find value in my life. When I finally did confess to my parents where I was and made this commitment. Live a life that makes other people's lives better, not as some self elevating idea. Just how am I going to find meaning in my life and stay alive? And suddenly, after a couple of years, you know, working at a convenience store and then, crazily enough, running an abalone farm that deserves its own book someday, I suddenly had the money to go back to school, and it was crazy.

I did my whole undergrad in a single year. I got perfect scores in every course, same school I flunked out of. But every day I'd sit in the front row and I would think, how can I use this? How can I use it? How can I use it? How can I use it? I'll add the little coda here that I was wrong. You know, it took a while all the way through grad school, meeting someone who had the terrible decision to fall in love with me, and I fell in love with them, and finding other parts of my life to change that. I could be happy. I found happiness not by seeking happiness. I found happiness by doing the right thing.

And what I want to do with this life is figure out clearly. Change is hard. It shouldn't be what I went through. You know, most people are never going to come back off the street. And I don't think I am so special. Just it wasn't magically me. Lots of circumstances gave me a second chance at life, or maybe 100th chance at life, and I finally took it. So instead, how do we find those growth experiences without it being the crucible, without it being brutal and and destructive? Because that doesn't have to be part of growth. Growth means challenge. It doesn't mean self-destruction. The only thing I will say is, I wish more leaders in Silicon Valley or around the world have profound personal experiences with failure, because I think that too many of the lives of decision makers are lives that have never known failure and means they don't really understand it, or how how fragile life can be.

And is just an important component in our human experience. It definitely is. Yeah. And well, I feel better about the human AI shared experience. Thank you so much and I hope that our audience does too. And your book is so prominently noted on the wall behind you, and I hope that our viewers will take part. I'm really finding it fascinating. And you are just the the greatest gift. I can't thank you enough for sharing and I have so many more questions for you, but we'll have to make it happen on another day. And I know that you're traveling and speaking and working, and you've got your family and your philanthropic group, and I am ever so grateful to you for all that you're doing.

It is an incredibly privileged reality that anyone cares what I have to say. So I do have the one advantage. Of course, I'm always right about everything. So take that as. You will. There you go. What a good place to start. Thank you again. We're honored to have you here. Thanks. Please follow, rate and share this podcast, this fascinating podcast, and pass it along to someone who might need it. This is and now love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. And don't be afraid.