Brice Chalamel is back on Beyond the Prompt, this time as Head of AI Strategy and Adoption at OpenAI. After helping lead AI adoption at Moderna, he explores what it really takes to change how people work with AI, why trust has to be earned, and why successful adoption is ultimately as much about people as technology.
After helping lead AI adoption at Moderna, Brice Chalamel has a new goal at OpenAI: help create 1,000 AI adoption success stories across large organizations.
Brice takes Henrik and Jeremy inside how work happens at OpenAI, where Slack has largely replaced internal email, agents help process information and draft responses, and some workflows are already moving agent to agent. But as AI takes on more responsibility, Brice argues that trust can’t be mandated. It has to be earned.
The conversation goes beyond tools into what it actually takes to lead people through change. Brice explains why, in a ten-step journey, nine steps may only be halfway, why our existing mental models shape how we respond to AI, and why leaders need to listen before trying to change someone’s mind.
They also explore Brice’s idea that AI could move us from “knowledge workers” to “intelligence workers,” a personal story about his mother using ChatGPT while caring for his father with Alzheimer’s, and why the benefits of AI need to extend beyond the people already living in abundance.
Key Takeaways
Brice's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bricechallamel/
Website: powerofwhy.ai
00:00 Intro: From Knowledge Worker to Intelligence Worker
00:30 Meet Brice Chalamel
01:18 From Moderna to OpenAI
04:50 The Mission: 1,000 AI Success Stories
07:45 How Work Happens at OpenAI
08:59 When Agents Talk to Agents
10:56 Trust Has to Be Earned
15:22 Brice’s Principles for Change
16:45 Nine Steps Is Halfway There
25:21 The Mind Game
30:24 Why Leaders Resist AI
35:28 The Human Side of AI
37:37 When ChatGPT Became a Lifeline
41:56 From Knowledge Worker to Intelligence Worker
43:37 Agency in the AI Era
46:31 Who Gets to Benefit From AI?
51:39 What Our Fear of AI Reveals
56:18 Listen Before You Think
01:03:07 The Debrief
📜 Read the transcript for this episode:
[00:00:00] Brice Challamel: When I scan my Slack and email and document messages with an AI chief of staff, an AI agent, and I draft the replies with these agents by dictating my perspective on most things and let them do the writing and, and organize all the thoughts in the right fashion and manner, I am no longer a, a knowledge worker. I'm an intelligence worker. And this is an elevation of the surface of work that I think is one of the defining changes of our lifetime, right? As defining as going from writing to printing. Hi, my name is Brice Chalamel. I'm Head of AI Strategy and Adoption at OpenAI. I joined OpenAI with the dream of inspiring 1,000 success stories for large organizations, and I can't wait to discuss with you the key principles that have enabled me to meet with them so far, including one that I'm gonna call the mind game. [00:00:52] Jeremy Utley: Brice, you have a new job. Congratulations. Um, folks who have heard this podcast for a long time love and are obsessed with our first conversation with you when you were head of AI at Moderna. Would you quickly give an update on what is your new job and why did you take it? Just as a starting point. Yeah. [00:01:08] Brice Challamel: So thank you so much. I'm now, uh, head of AI Adoption and Strategy at OpenAI. I didn't take the job. I pretty much made the job, if I'm honest. I, we had ongoing conversations with OpenAI for a while, uh, because of the partnership between Moderna and OpenAI, something that has been public and, and that has made a number of, uh, opportunities for announcements and partnerships and, uh, two-way synergies in the way that Moderna has helped OpenAI, uh, with its roadmap, uh, especially around life science and, uh, research models. And OpenAI has been tremendously helpful to Moderna's reinvention story throughout COVID, the transition from COVID to cancer treatments, and the ongoing motion for next-level research. And, uh, at some point, this formalized in a number of, of ways. For one thing, we had a business case at Harvard that is now a mandatory business case for anyone who does the Harvard MBA. It's called Democratizing AI at Moderna. And, um- [00:02:12] Jeremy Utley: Okay, no big deal. Are you just... Are we... Wait. Sorry, I meant to say, Brice, do a little humblebrag here for a minute. Come on. Let's keep going. I love it. [00:02:20] Brice Challamel: No, wait Well, as always, the story feels more impressive from the outside than when you're in the inside. [00:02:27] Jeremy Utley: That's [00:02:27] Brice Challamel: true. But what happened was lovely, I think. No, right. Wait, wait, you're not [00:02:29] Jeremy Utley: teasing, you're not teasing it. [00:02:30] Brice Challamel: We had relationships with Karim Lakhani, who, uh, leads the data and, and, uh, AI department at Harvard, and also, uh, the D3 Institute, which is probably the Harvard equivalent of the d.school at Stanford. They had already made a case on Moderna about how Moderna had faced the hypergrowth of the, the COVID situation. So the team and Moderna were in constant interaction, and they said: "We would love to do another case on, uh, how you manage the AI." So there were dozens of interviews, mine among others, but also Stéphane Bancel, the CEO, Tracy Franklin, the chief digital and HR officer, who is de facto a chief work officer, if you want to think of it this way. We gathered... It's, this is a lot of work, actually, to do those cases. It's pretty humbling to see that team. It's a, it's a, a team of six or seven contributors from Harvard who ran interviews for four months, gathered a lot of document, write all the appendixes. Those are very, uh, important knowledge products. And so I was very, very grateful that there was this level of scrutiny and interest and, uh, thoughtfulness going into capturing that moment and that story. Because when you're yourself in the, in the throes of actually doing the thing, you can't always take a step back, look at it, package it, explaining, make it a shared best practice for others. So that happened, and of course, it was not lost on OpenAI that there were signals like this. There were podcasts like the one we're recording together, books and book chapters about the whole thing. So we were in conversation with OpenAI, and at that point, Moderna was, uh, on the tail end of its zero to one AI adoption story. And not to say that this is the end of the adoption story because there are so many... This is just the first paragraph of the first chapter But that zero to one part is very important. It is a critical part because if you mess it up, uh, the next steps are gonna be harder of the journey, right? Because the first step was kind of a stumble. And so this was something important to, to discuss, to share. And I was asking myself how, how is it possible that there are so few of those stories? I would have expected that there would be a thousand AI adoption stories, and people wouldn't know where to look at, and then the scholars will look at all of them and say, "Huh, these are the three hundred most interesting," and they part into that category. But this is not how it went. How it went is about a dozen companies had a story, and most of them were not full adoption, thousands of agent stories like the one that, that I was living on a daily basis. And so my next thought was, how do we create those thousand stories? How do we go, uh... Because we talk about those lofty objectives about let's make AI beneficial to mankind. But how does that happen concretely? Well, there are millions of organizations that are beneficial to mankind. These are governments and school systems and hospitals and enterprises. They are, almost all of them, beneficial to mankind. If you want to think of it this way, almost any of those organization is a greater good organization. If you think of retailers, they ensure food security. If you think of transportation, they help children go to school. If you think of, uh... You, you know what I'm saying, right? So being beneficial to mankind is being beneficial to the organizations that are beneficial to mankind, right? If we're not there, then we are not true to the mission statement of delivering the promise of AI. And so that's where the conversation went with actually a collection of, uh, leaders at OpenAI, not just one. And, um, and progressively that collection landed in a part where they welcome me to join the company with the mandate that I had proposed to them, to create a thousand stories and narratives of great adoption to inspire the world and to make AI genuinely beneficial to mankind. That's awesome. And at that point, the fun fact about this, and we'll conclude there, is that I didn't interview at OpenAI. Uh, I thought I would. Uh, they said, "All right," like, "Come over. Here are the conditions." And I said, "Wait, aren't you going to interview me?" And, and then the, the answer was, "What more are we gonna learn about you after working so intensely with you for the past three years? We're done. If those conditions work for you, let's do this. Let's join because this is the type of inspiration and dedication that we need here and that we, and that we also stand for here. And this is my... Really, this is my tribe, right? Like, this is the place where I feel at home is in this kind of environment, so. [00:07:23] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, I was gonna say, maybe, maybe we start there as like what's different working at OpenAI versus working in another organization? What are the... And the reason I'm curious about it is because you have fresh perspective. Right now stuff is still weird. Like, pretty soon you're gonna become institutionalized. It's gonna become normal. So right now, while it's still weird, what's the weird ways of working you're, you're seeing at OpenAI versus other places you've been? [00:07:46] Brice Challamel: Even my arrival story is pretty unusual by any standard, by the way, and is a demonstration of what is going on, which is a very Inspired, grounded, but also fast-paced way of working. One of the first thing that surprised me when I joined OpenAI is how few emails we exchanged. I have barely received in my six months at OpenAI any internal email. I'm not even sure it happened at all. We do share emails when there's a customer or, uh, a third party that needs to share information with us, but ninety-nine point nine percent of my communication happens on Slack. And the reason is, it forces you to do short messages and go straight to the point. Those messages are made public, they are shared. Most of them are driven in an agentic way, and by this I mean we all have agents who read and scan the, the Slack channels for us and surface the signals. And we most often draft a lot of those messages that we send and cross-send across channels with our own agents, and then we can read the drafts and, and make some corrections if we want to, and then send them, right? But- [00:08:59] Henrik Werdelin: Do you ever have agent-to-agent kind of communication? [00:09:03] Brice Challamel: So this happens for every well-ingrained processes. For instance, when you want to access a software, when you have an IT problem, when you have a expense or HR, uh, topic. So for those processes which require very little human oversight, in ninety-nine percent of the case, the person's gonna say, "Yes, of course," now it's agent to agent. [00:09:26] Henrik Werdelin: I'll give you the, uh, the reason 'cause I... That, of course, is also a little bit like customer service. You need to change your password, right? But I'll give you a little bit of background. So the, one of the business I work on is called Ottos, and, and we try to build a million startups over the next 10 years with the idea that we can empower this everyday entrepreneur to build a business. Now, a thing that we've done is that we have equipped everybody with an AI co-founder, and what we stumbled into was that we could, of course, have the humans talk to each other. But if you are somebody in Texas and you want to improve your open rate of your emails, what we found was to create a communication platform for the agents where that person's agent can talk to the thousands of other people's agents and saying, "Hey What have you guys done? And then if there isn't a solution, then, um, we finance in network that the agents can do some testing and then report back to the OL network. Now, when you've done that for a little bit, what is difficult to unsee is how efficient it is to operate on the agent-agent level, and then define what are the interaction models when they talk to a human. So for example, now we, we have a new feature on the system, it's much easier for us to just let all the agents know so they can tell their humans at an appropriate time that is to send an email to everybody. Tell your, tell your human [00:10:44] Jeremy Utley: whenever it's appropriate. Yeah, that's great. [00:10:46] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah. So I was wondering, like, it... what's your thinking on the communication layer currently is in Slack, which of course require attention- Yes ... of a human sitting and listening. But- [00:10:55] Brice Challamel: Yes. So this is a great point you're raising, and it's some, it's a much bigger point than Slack, by the way. It is the point of AI as an operating layer for any of the large organizations that I mentioned, and their ecosystem. Not just the organization, but I mentioned hospitals, but they are part of an ecosystem with electronic health records, with regulators, with, uh, patients and patient associations, right? So, and then those agents could also communicate. I will say one thing. It is both a capability topic. Can the agents, uh, manage that amount of information? Are they reliable? And so on. And it's a very, very close cousin, which is a trust topic. And here we need to be mindful that even entrusting your communications, your emails, might seem a trivial thing, because we manage dozens of them every day, but it's actually very critical. Uh, the way that my emails are received and that I understand them, or that they go, same thing for my Slack messages, same thing for the document, uh, comments that I read, that I write, the revisions that I approve, that I don't. We have signals from all over the place coming to us that we need to process and send back 90% of it could potentially be done with agents, but when do I trust them for it? And it's not just that they do the right thing, it's also that they do it the right way. Like, when do I trust an agent to speak in a tone and voice that captures the nuance of my relationship with the person that I'm, that I'm interacting with, right? And I'm not there yet. On that one, I'm not there yet. This is one of the reasons why I read the drafts before I send them. Sometimes it's a bit too formal, and I'm afraid that the person on the other side, if it's not an agent but a human reading this, they think, "Huh, uh, is our relationship not where I thought it was?" And this is not something that I intended. It's something that the agent just did by default. So we need, as practitioners of change and the passionate geeks that we are, to be very mindful that we can't, uh, dictate trust. It can only be earned. And the way to earn trust is to have an organic and to have a reflective perspective on what AI can and can't do, how it works. And then after hundreds or thousands of iterations, after seeing a number of demonstrations, some of them technical, some of them are intuitive, we're going to pull ourselves out of the loop progressively. Even having the drafts placed in your outbox or in your Slack channels for you to approve is already a step forward that would be daunting to almost everyone as we speak. [00:13:33] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah, and you c- and you can also have different topics, right? You know, I mean, like I have... My, uh, my bot reads my school emails. The alternative is I do not read them at all, right? And so, like, it's also what is the, the job to be done and how much trust is involved in that specific task, you know? [00:13:52] Brice Challamel: And how much do you trust your bot to recognize the difference between a school email that is just about the school calendar and a school email that's about your child who has a serious problem and that needs your urgent care, right? So- [00:14:03] Henrik Werdelin: That's why my kid didn't come home from school today. No, I'm kidding. [00:14:07] Brice Challamel: But you see what I mean? [00:14:08] Henrik Werdelin: This is [00:14:08] Jeremy Utley: where- Update, update [00:14:09] Brice Challamel: the skill file. [00:14:10] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah ... [00:14:10] Brice Challamel: you can't just read the, like, who sent that email, and you have to actually read the email, and it requires judgment. So All I mean to say here is that I think at this point we all start to have the vision of an ecosystem of agent that speak to each other. This was something that became very visible to a lot of people when OpenClo started becoming a topic. All right? And, uh, this system that had a lot of agents writing and reading from each other, keeping papers, and we can see that this is a possible future, that the, I would say, the rule-based approvals, the technical iterative improvements of a workflow, a supply chain, a payment reconciliation, maybe those things don't need as much human time as we invest in them currently. Maybe our time would be better invested elsewhere. And so in this way, it's a promising future. But this is going to require a lot of thoughtfulness in the rules we establish, in the access we give to the agents, and we are gonna need to earn trust. [00:15:21] Jeremy Utley: Can we take a step back? Because I want... I, I, I love, I wanna put a placeholder on trust must be earned, not dictated. That's, that's huge. Are there other principles like that? Like, if you, if you go back to your objective of 1,000 success stories, and trust must be earned, not dictated, is call it one, you know, principle you've derived. Are there other principles like that as you start driving for 1,000 success stories? Like, and if there's, like, a Bryce's Ten Commandments, let's get there, or whatever it is, right? I don't know. But, like, I wanna hear as many of these as possible. [00:15:54] Brice Challamel: It's funny that you say this because I do have a lot of those. Uh, let me give you two or three that are top of mind for me, right, that matter to me. One of them is whether you think you can or you can't, you're probably right. So I'll I'll pause there because- [00:16:08] Jeremy Utley: Okay. So pause there. Now give us, give us two or three more, and then we'll let Enric choose which one we go through first. So the first one is, whether you think you can or you can't, you're probably right. [00:16:17] Brice Challamel: Yes. Another one is, you can't think of your people as a solution as long as you think of them as a problem Another one is in a 10-step journey, when you've done nine steps, you're halfway there. Another one is when you hesitate between two things, choose the third. So I do have a collection of those. I'll stop there. [00:16:39] Jeremy Utley: Okay. Uh, Henrik, Henrik, where should we go? How about you choose one, then I'll choose one. [00:16:43] Henrik Werdelin: Okay. I like them all. Um, I think the one that I'm intrigued on is the idea of what I refer to as the very long first mile, that when you're nine steps in, you're halfway there. Could you talk a little bit more on that? [00:16:57] Brice Challamel: Yeah. So we have plans, we have objectives and achievements and milestones that we're looking forward to and that we're working towards, right? And we understand that this is a multi-step journey, and we kind of understand the steps. We tend to misunderstand the fact that when on the paper you've done 90% of the work The 90% that you've done is most likely the condition to do the last 10%, which is the work that actually matters. But when you get there, you're exhausted because you've actually already done 90% of the work, and yet this is when you should be the clearest in your mind, the sharpest in your thinking, the most available to anything that can happen because you're there in the tenth step towards the milestone that you had given yourself. And the combination of, you know, exhaustion of the first nine steps and of the typical nature of the last one, which is the moment when it all takes shapes and when it takes prime time, when the world learns about this, when you start to have, you know, the, the impact feels really a-alive. That's the other half, right? And if you can anticipate this, if you understand that you're gonna go through a 10-step journey and that at, at the ninth step you need to have a good reset mechanism to be at your very best for the tenth step because it's the other half of your energy, then you're probably gonna be more successful. [00:18:31] Henrik Werdelin: Can I ask a follow-up on this? And I'll tell you a little story. So in some of the companies that I'm involved in, we get internship emails, and it used to be that the more effort people have done on the email or the, the application, the more likely they were to get the internship because we could see that they had put in real effort. Now obviously, increasingly, people were writing these, uh, letters with AI, so we applied AI to reading them. Now you had a human-to-human workflow that now is agentic to agentic, and basically the workflow doesn't wo-work anymore. Is there the case also that sometimes when you've done the nine steps and you're about to do the tenth, not only are you tired and you have to go to private time, but you also realize that maybe you had walked the, the wrong first steps, or at least like where you're heading now is no longer relevant because you have to rethink the internal journey? [00:19:24] Brice Challamel: Well, that's exactly what I meant when I said that's when you need your sharpest mind. That's exactly what I meant, that most likely the 10-step journey was very different after nine steps That most likely at that point, what you thought was the end line doesn't look at all like what you initially, you know, had in mind. And that if you're not reactive, if you're not ready to question every assumption, to walk back every one of the first nine steps and, and look back at them with a critical eye, you're gonna fail the tenth step because you're gonna do it exactly the way you planned initially, which is just the wrong way, and you're gonna do it out of exhaustion. In the case that you mentioned of the essay what I find so interesting is that probably the first nine steps are the ones which should be agentic at some point, and the tenth step is where the human should come in. I'll give you another example. We meet a lot of leaders of large enterprise or large, uh, organizations at OpenAI, and it's one of my roles to meet with them. I get to discuss a lot with the other people that meet them with me, with the account teams, with the account directors, with the, uh, the technical experts that discuss with them. And I've been doing this for decades now, and some of them are-- First, they're young. This is a youthful company, OpenAI. Another thing that struck me, by the way, is how young everyone is. It's a very youthful company. So they, they haven't done anything for decades, much less meeting, uh, C-suite leaders. And they come with a very intense story in their mind, which of course makes it harder to listen to the other story coming at them because they have so much in their mind that they need to deliver- [00:21:01] Jeremy Utley: They, they being the young people. [00:21:03] Brice Challamel: Yes. They being the- Okay ... the, the- The [00:21:05] Jeremy Utley: OpenAI team comes to a meeting with an executive with a mind full of a story they wanna tell, which keeps them from being able to hear the organizational leader. [00:21:13] Brice Challamel: In some cases. Okay. [00:21:15] Jeremy Utley: Just making sure [00:21:16] Brice Challamel: I was tracking the- And in, and in this case, because there you have different types of seniorities there, right? Like some of them are very senior, very, very seasoned at this, but not all of them. And in this case, I would argue that they have done the nine steps, right? But they are losing clarity on the tenth step, which is to pay full attention to the story of the, of the leader that's, that we're meeting, and to make sure that it's their story that matters. Let's say you have a leader whose company is about to undergo a merger or to, uh, leave the helm of a larger group and to be by itself. That story is huge. It's bigger than the industry story, it's bigger than the product story, it's bigger than the technical story. It's a story that probably, uh, means the world to them. And if you haven't done that research, if you haven't paid attention to the latest articles, earning calls, to the weather reports of that organization at that moment in time, you might miss it because you're so prepared with your first nine steps that you're not thinking to pause everything you plan to show or to demo or to explain, to ask yourself, "All right. I have all this behind me. My background work is done. I, I, I, I earned my seat at this table. It's gonna be fine. Now let's pause and consider, who are these humans who are gonna be there? What is their story? What is their mind state? What is their mental model? What is happening to them right now? How can I be of service to them right now?" And that's the tenth step. [00:22:46] Jeremy Utley: Is that... A- and this I, I'm just speculating, I have no idea. I've heard about the, I don't know if it's called the deployment organizations, or there's some kind of a consortium of either consultancies and things like that that OpenAI has partnered with. Is that an attempt to address that, the kind of perception gap there between young folks who are enthusiastic but maybe not as adept at interacting with senior leaders, or, or not? [00:23:14] Brice Challamel: I don't, I'm not sure. I don't think so because there is something Pretty beautiful in brilliant young minds being- Of course ... exposed to senior leaders. [00:23:27] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. [00:23:27] Brice Challamel: Yeah. And I say this because the whole story that I just narrated, I don't want you to misunderstand it for me being at any point whatsoever frustrated with the young people at OpenAI. If anything, I have a huge amount of love and respect for them. It's more me thinking about the, because we're talking about this, about the 10-step journey, and the number of times that I, after nine steps, was exhausted and lost clarity, and that I learned from it. And making sure that they show up at their best possible, that they gain as much as they can possibly gain from seeing seasoned clients and customers and leaders who have so much to bring to the conversation, and that everyone comes out of this enlightened and inspired. And I really love the moment when a 20-something, a brilliant engineer or product manager or expert in life science or in manufacturing or, you know, meets with someone who's in their 60s, who's been through four rounds of complete transformation of their industry, who's lived in five different countries, and those two perspectives connecting together in those- Yeah things that we call executive briefings. They are extraordinary situations that I think bring a lot to the leaders, because suddenly they are inspired by the youthful perspective of someone who has a dream in mind that they've never heard before. And, uh, hopefully the, the brilliant minds that we have at OpenAI that come and meet the leaders, they also get a, some form of grounding of the huge impact that their Intelligence that their work is about to have on the world [00:25:15] Jeremy Utley: Hmm. Okay, let's go to another one. Let's go to another one, and I, I choose this one, and Henrik, you get the next one queued up. Whether you think you can or you can't, you're probably right. Can you drill into that principle a little bit? [00:25:29] Brice Challamel: So I, I call it for myself the mind game, right? The mind game because, um, it is played entirely in your mind. If you think you can achieve something and you believe in yourself, and you never let any adversity come in the way of your ideal, right? And you're okay to lose this analog of, of another principle that I hold dear is like, you know, it doesn't matter that you lose your delusions as long as you keep your ideals. And it's hard because when you've lost twenty of your delusions on how the world should be, you need to be very sure that you kept intact and pristine your ideals, the reason why you were in this journey to begin with. But if you can do this and let any form of adversity come your way because you believe that you can, then you're right, you can. If, however, you doubt yourself too much, and we all have an, uh, a measure of doubt, like it's very human. We all have an imposter syndrome. We all have insecurities. We are all sensitive to, uh, external pressure, opinion, you know, uh, setbacks, and if at the core you're like, "I always knew that this was gonna fail, and this demonstrates what I always knew, that it was gonna fail," there you, there you already- Mm got it. Then, yeah, you're gonna fail because the moment you stop in the face of adversity because that adversity meets the opinion that you had to begin with, you, you're failing. And actually, you failed way before this happened. You failed at first when you thought you couldn't because you failed deeply at the mind game. [00:27:13] Jeremy Utley: Now, now why is this unique? I, because it, it feels like it's a principle that transcends, you know, the AI moment. Can you explain why it has become a principle of how you approach the thousand-story objective? Why is this one of your core principles that you gravitate towards? [00:27:31] Brice Challamel: Because my, my main stakeholders right now are large organization leaders. They receive tremendous pressure from the boards, from other leaders, from the media. They're under huge pressure. Like every survey we have, every interview we, we enter into, we meet with leaders who tell us pressure stories to, uh, understand You know, uh, get the signal and work towards the best possible value of AI in their organization and for their mission. And yet most of them are not in direct contact with the technology. Most of them don't use it on a daily basis. They don't take part in the decisions that the company makes about AI. Those decisions are most often made in another part of the company than at the CEO's table. And for that reason, they have this very uncomfortable situation of receiving the pressure and the pressure being in their name while not having the knowledge and the comfort and the control that goes with daily work with AI or daily decision-making about AI. And in this way, by the way, Stéphane was an outlier and part of the success story at Moderna because he always was a power user of AI, and he always wanted every AI decision to come to his table, which made him very different from, I would say, uh, a lot of the other stories that I've heard out there. [00:28:59] Jeremy Utley: I think, I think this actually is a really important point, Bryce, and I, I just wanna drill into it for a second. I, I just saw, uh, the CEO of Axios recently wrote a piece. I, I think I sent it to you, Bryce. I know I sent it to Henrik. I think the, the title was something like Confessions of an AI Lab Rat, and his whole premise was the stuff that he's trying as a CEO. And just to kind of put a bow on what you're saying, and one, to pressure test it with you, but two, just to reinforce it to the audience, you're saying, "Why is your... the mind game so important?" It's because senior leaders are under incredible pressure, and most of them don't have the relief of the augmentation and uplift that comes from AI. And so there's tons of pressure and no relief. [00:29:44] Brice Challamel: They don't have the relief, and they don't have the self-confidence that goes with it. If you've been using AI for three years straight, and at home and at work, and you've been part of every decision from the moment it was an API to the moment there was a product like ChatGPT, to the moment when agents were, uh, you know, came of agent. Then if you've been at every bit of that story, you're pretty much on top of your game. You understand what you're dealing with. But if you're not, that pressure meets another pressure, which is the pressure to come up to speed with something that is going very fast and that you've not onboarded in the initial stages, and that you're not using yourself. [00:30:24] Henrik Werdelin: Why do you think some people like your old boss... Why do you think some people naturally kinda like get, uh, attracted to that newness, and why do you think some do not? [00:30:36] Brice Challamel: This is such a, a great and profound question I'm not sure that I know the answer because I have also seen some senior leaders who are normally very attracted to technology novelty, but did not jump on the AI bandwagon. Senior leaders who were very good at doing macros in Excel spreadsheets, who were very good at the deterministic type of technology, the one that is right, the one that you know you can trust, and who would say, "All right, but AI just said you had to glue the cheese to the pizza," right? Uh, AI is useful to talk like a pirate, but I'm doing real work here. And those were not idiots, and those were not people who were shying away from technology. It just was not their breed of technology. Their mental model of technology was not there for this. In a way, I think what says me is that I have children and cats. So I have two children, two [00:31:34] Jeremy Utley: cats. Don't say cats to the Barkbox guy. Come on. [00:31:37] Henrik Werdelin: I mean, like, I don't... we should cut the interview now, or I don't know, like, if I should just [00:31:42] Jeremy Utley: make it go. Henrik, the fastest way to get Henrik out, to chase him out of an interview is to mention cats, Brice. You know this. Come on. [00:31:50] Brice Challamel: This is his trigger word. And they are my beloved kitten, all right? So maybe clarify this. [00:31:53] Henrik Werdelin: I mean, like- They [00:31:53] Brice Challamel: are almost always by my side, like- [00:31:56] Henrik Werdelin: I think maybe the reason why people don't trust AI is get promoted to them by the cat guy. I mean, like, that could be the whole answer. [00:32:04] Jeremy Utley: This [00:32:04] Brice Challamel: is so good. Well, I will say this, there are more cat guys than you think, Henrik. I'm not sure that you made other friends by saying this today. Yeah. But I will read it to you, all right? I, for one, love all the cats and all the dogs and all the companion animals that everyone has- Yes ... because they are very precious to us. And by the way, we had this discussion earlier about we only become human because of human society, and that's the sign of consciousness. [00:32:28] Jeremy Utley: Hmm. [00:32:28] Brice Challamel: And I had a moment of pause because I think my cats have a form of consciousness, and they're not part of the human society. They are part of the cat society. But I want to say this, the relationship to a cat is very special because you can't explain things. You can always talk to them and reassure them with the sound of your voice. You can indicate, you can mimic. There's a number of ways to communicate, but this is not a deterministic systemic relationship. Right. You can't call the cat and it comes, right? Like- [00:32:55] Jeremy Utley: Just, just to be clear, what you're saying there, Brice, is you're making a call back to the kind of leader who's comfortable with a kind of relationship and a kind- Yes of technology. Maybe they aren't thinking in terms of how they relate to a pet, for example, which they can't communicate in a deterministic manner with other than, you know, through maybe brute force training methods or something. [00:33:16] Brice Challamel: Yes, and what I'm saying is that if you enjoy Iterative relationship building with children and cats, which is very tentative at first, requires a lot of humility, is gonna fail as often as it succeeds, but is going to take you to a great place, then you're probably more ready than not to welcome AI in your life. [00:33:38] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. [00:33:40] Brice Challamel: Right? Uh, if, uh, you are the type of person who loves Excel macros, that you can spend hours fine-tuning an Excel macro that's gonna do exactly what you intend for it to do, you're surrounded by people that you give an order to, and they understand the order, and they execute it exactly as you meant for them to, and that you have mostly built around yourself a deterministic ecosystem of responses, then probably AI is going to come as a juggernaut of alien intelligence, which you're gonna have a hard time completely figuring out. And so that's why y- your question gave me pause, Henrik, is that it's not so much anymore a question of are you a, a technophile or are you a Luddite? It's more a question of what is your relationship to signals and, and interactions and other sorts of intelligence, and the way that you can adapt to them and learn with them and grow with them because, of course, both in, for the kitten and for my children, they are not stable either. They, they evolve with time. My children today are 12 and 14. It is not at all the same type of interaction as when they were, uh, seven and nine. And that also has in its own way prepared me for the evolution of AI, right? Because I, I live in a constantly evolving world. [00:34:58] Henrik Werdelin: Is that the reason why increasingly the people that I hear get to work at companies like AI are not just the classic engineering type with the engineering mentality, but it's philosophers and artists and people who understand how to social engineer themself through a business environment? [00:35:18] Brice Challamel: That's, that's right, and I'm surrounded by them at work, by the way. There's a, a wonderful person, I won't name names because... But there's a wonderful person sitting in the desk next to mine who's an artist. That's their trade, their craft, and their know-how, and they're bringing an artistic perspective to some of the things that we are building with AI, right? And their mind works in a completely different way than almost anyone else that we're surrounded with. And we do have people who are interested in philosophy and, and human behavior and cognitive psychology and social dynamics. All of those things are going to come in play, right? They already are in play, uh, yeah, at so many levels. They're in play to understand AI and how it works, but also the impact it has on us. And when we were first discussing about the dangers of AI, everyone was talking about the paperclip, uh, juggernaut, right? That you tell AI, "Make paperclips," and then suddenly it's, it's destroyed the Amazon forest to, to just create fuel for a factory that does paperclips. Which I also understand is a completely misunderstanding of the original story, but let's not get into that rabbit hole. But there was the fear at hand there, right? Like being overwhelmed by agentic or AI, uh, loops that get out of control. And what happened really, and it was the first thing that really deserved our attention in terms of real major and systemic threat, was the influence on people's mental health Which was not at all something that we heard in the first months of AI models being released. And there are some very dramatic cases that are currently being litigated and that you-- it, it breaks your heart when you read them, period. Like you... If your, if your heart is not broken, this means you don't have one. But this is the tip of the iceberg because there are a lot of other cases that are not litigated, but they are still happening with people kind of losing footing with AI or, or kind of going into some strange place where they are, you know, uh, in some form of danger. And then there's the whole other part of it, the immense number of people who are reclaiming their mental health thanks to AI, who are having the thoughtful conversation that they could never had with a friend or with a peer or with a family member, that are suddenly finding a way to express their most intimate thoughts at the quiet hours in the middle of the night when they are awake because of them, and no one would be there to listen. And, um, I have shared this in an article, so I'm okay to share it here too, but this is the case of my own mother. My father passed from Alzheimer two years ago now, almost, and, uh, the last, uh, months of my father's Alzheimer journey with my mother as his main caretaker was an ordeal for her. And, uh, that's a time when I invited her to AI, which has started to be reliable enough and predictable enough in the way that it interacts for her to simply state how she felt or ask for feedback because sometimes it's two AM, three AM. She was living in another country, and I wasn't there to be with her. And she called ChatGPT Gepetto. You know, like in the, in, in like... And, uh, because GPT, Gepetto. And Gepetto was there for her on a number of things, like how to repair the, the modem for the internet because my dad used to do this and he can't do it anymore. How to understand this thing that he said that she can't make sense of, and just, uh, her own self-expression. And she told me a number of times that AI had been a lifeline to her in that moment of her life, and that is, still is to this day. And I wrote an article about this. It is about the three women in my life, my mother, my wife, and my daughter, and how they relate to AI. And because those stories The, the other reason why I love AI, the other reason why I want [00:39:00] Jeremy Utley: And they, they don't get as much, they don't get as much airtime, right? I mean, we hear about the tragedies a lot more than the triumphs, and that's a [00:39:07] Brice Challamel: shame. There are no good news article because of course the news are not great or good organizations. They are businesses that need to make a profit. And it's hard to sell an article about, uh, someone who went through the difficult last months of their spouse's Alzheimer's, uh, as well as you say, a topic about AI just, you know, caused the death of a number of teenagers, whether it's right or wrong, because I doubt it's only AI, but that's for the justice to decide, and everyone really has their own responsibility. But you're right, like the full spectrum is happening. And what I wanted to say is that it's, it's pretty extraordinary that no one had that in mind when the first AI models were released. There-- I heard of, uh, about like a dozen different fears of how AI would impact the world. None of them related to the huge spectrum of how this would influence our mental health, and that's why we need cognitive, uh, psychologists and behavioral experts to work with us because it's a, it's a, a quintessential part of the AI, uh, environment to understand this. [00:40:07] Henrik Werdelin: I heard from somebody I'm not sure if this is true, but what I heard is that one of the reasons why we're getting closer to fusion energy is because you need to be able... The issue were previously that you need to have a force field when the two electrons kind of like collide, and the force fields was very difficult to, um, be keep, kept intact and like a balloon, if suddenly there was an impurity, then suddenly it would, uh, it would break. Now, I don't think a lot of people, when they think about the wonders of AI, they think about that we might get clean, [00:40:41] Jeremy Utley: uh, abundant energy out of it, 'cause obviously it's a fusion conversation, [00:40:46] Henrik Werdelin: but it's led by AI. When you tell the story about your mother, one of the things I reflect on is that it seems that we, as people who work a lot with AI, have failed in visualizing for people some of the good things that could happen that is believable and that feels present to them. Back to your point about the CEOs, right? So I get the sense that there's a lot of fear out there now about where society will go, what it will mean for people's jobs, and all those different things, and there are very few of stories of helping people who are senior that feel alone, uh, and how it helped them or help you come up with like new discovery, like clean, abundant energy. [00:41:32] Jeremy Utley: Is, is that what Superabundance is about, Henrik, as an aside? Or Bryce, do you know? I was just looking. I, I, I feel like Bryce, maybe you recommended that book. But to me it's interesting 'cause I agree with you, Henrik, that, that we have failed to paint a great picture, and if it's true that Superabundance is about it, one of like the, you know, the celebrated thinkers of our time has dedicated an entire book to it, and still we don't know many... I, I don't know. I'm just like, I'm, I'm yes and-ing you. [00:41:56] Brice Challamel: No, but it's, uh- I love this topic because there are a number of thinkers of this, of the abundance economy, and they have a huge point, which is that products are made more easily, that ideas flow more efficiently, and that we now have the incremental capability of sharing knowledge and intelligence with AI, right? When I scan my Slack and email and document messages with an AI chief of staff, an AI agent, and I draft the replies with these agents by dictating my perspective on most things and let them do the writing and, and organize all the thoughts in the right fashion and manner, I am no longer a, a knowledge worker. I don't receive and read and, and, and scan knowledge one piece by one piece by myself, and I don't write every word of every email that I sign anymore myself. This would be knowledge work. I'm an intelligence worker. I receive the... an intelligence briefing on the surface of all the signals that I need for work, and I produce what I hope is an intelligent recommendation perspective on all those signals that I redistribute throughout the organization. And this is an elevation of the surface of work that I think is one of the defining changes of our lifetime, right? As defining as going from writing to printing. And in this way, we are part of something that is, uh, bigger than us and that is going to support the abundance economy [00:43:26] Jeremy Utley: What, I just, I just wrote that down. It's so profound. From knowledge worker to intelligence worker. [00:43:33] Brice Challamel: Yes. [00:43:33] Jeremy Utley: I don't, I, I don't think I've ever heard it put that way before, but I think it's- But what's so [00:43:37] Henrik Werdelin: nice with the story that you mention is that I think it has human agency. I feel a lot of the big story that are told, universal basic income, for example, it takes away agency from humans. And it... And so I think what most people hear is that, A, we're screwed, so that's kind of the one story, and the second story is, yeah, but we're not screwed 'cause, like, they're gonna do it all, but at least they're gonna give us all the bacon they make. And I think what I like about the way that you position the story is not that they are making it and you're just sitting passive receiving, but you're actively becoming a better version of what you want to do, and I just don't hear that story a, a lot. [00:44:17] Brice Challamel: And it's the opposite, Henrik. It's the opposite because the number of messages that I read and that I couldn't read before, like you mentioned with the school messages, right? And the number of messages that I send and, and workloads that I influence have exploded in number and really deepened in, in, uh, in their nature. And in this way, my influence is way more consequential than it has ever been before. My agency and my impact are much more consequential than they were before AI, when there was only so much knowledge I could read and so much emails that I could write. And so it's not just that we're not losing agency, it's that I think we are having a surge of agency alongside a surge of, of cognitive elevation, of the type of work that is expected from our brains and from our, uh, our experience, and this dual surge is putting human right back at the center of things. [00:45:20] Jeremy Utley: Well, so, so one thing that I wanna drill into this word agency for a second. We talked with Dan Pink about it recently. You know, he's a great student of human agency. Do you have thoughts, Brice, about... Because I don't think it's necessarily a given that this moment will result in greater agency. I think it can. It can also... I like to say i- if you wanna be lazier than ever, there's never been a better time to be alive. Yeah. And if you wanna create more value than ever, there's never been a better time to be alive, right? It's, it's both. So do you, especially as a father and as a manager, do you have tactics or mindsets that you employ to cultivate agency in others? [00:45:58] Brice Challamel: Well, whether you think there will be more agency or not, you're probably right [00:46:04] Jeremy Utley: Yes [00:46:06] Brice Challamel: We're back to the mind game because this is not something- But [00:46:08] Jeremy Utley: how, how do you, how-- Like think about your kids or think about your team. How do you help them be more agentic? [00:46:15] Brice Challamel: Yeah, this is not something that we get to... This is not a spectator sport. Life is not a spectator sport. We are a part of this. We make decisions toward this. We get to choose. You're right in the way that you say maybe if you're lazy, this is the best time in your life to be lazy. But if I'm honest, and this also is going to somehow bring closure to the abundance economy conversation, what abundance are we talking about? Like two out of five humans are starving. Three out of, out of five humans have difficulties accessing food or latrines. In developed countries, most people have very poor financial health and physical health. They are challenged by a legal system, by tax system, by obligations, by the amount of work that has come back to them, which we call shadow work, out of the evolution of, of, uh, the modern economy. They can't possibly understand the notion of abundance because they are completely outside of the realm of abundance, and I cannot possibly accept or understand that we think that the era of work is over as long as there are people who struggle to eat or who struggle to stay alive or to keep their children alive out of just not having the modicum of support for their financial health, for their food security, for their physical health. So this is not a world that is about to be out of work. And the abundance we're talking about, I'm grateful for it among the circles of society that are going to benefit from this, but it needs huge distribution. It needs to benefit the whole of mankind. Like if we don't mean this when we say AI beneficial to mankind, then I don't know what we mean anymore. And, uh, I think eighty percent or so of the human population has access to a mobile phone. So two out of ten people will simply never hear or, or be able to use AI to begin with because they don't even have a device for it as long as we don't create one and distribute one, and that's gonna be a while because it needs electricity, energy, recharge, like you name it. And for the eight out of ten people that are left, what is the AI gonna do for them? Like how is it gonna show up in their life to create even a semblance of that abundance we've just been mentioning? So, uh, I want just for everyone who-- for us, uh, you know, as a group of friends and, and thinkers about this topic and for our audience, people who are listening to this, to realize that there's a duality here to the abundance economy, and there's a duality to the topic of is AI gonna beat me out of work. As long as everyone is not safe, healthy, you know, in good financial care, in good food security, there's work for everyone on this planet, and we-- I can't get to it, my seeds and get to it [00:49:00] Jeremy Utley: I would just say the, to, as a corollary, I, I'm so inspired, we have to almost just like just pause there and then go next chapter of the conversation 'cause there's nothing to add there. But as a corollary to your comment, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're probably right. I, I would, I observe this is true regarding AI as well. Whether you think AI can or whether you think AI can't, you're probably right. And in that sense, I feel it's almost like a Rorschach. You know? Like it's, y- you say what's there. And I know people who go, "Oh, yeah, I can't get AI to blank," and I go, "Yeah, it's 'cause you don't think it can." Or, or even worse, Bryce, you don't want it to. And if you don't want it to, my... AI has this annoying tendency to perform to one's level of expectations, and if you don't want it to or you don't think it can, it won't. You know, I get emails from lawyers, for example, or, or, you know, accountants, whatever, and they go, "Yeah, I can't get it to do this," and I go I can. Do, do you want it to or do you want to decide that it can't do it? 'Cause if you already want to decide it can't do it then you shouldn't be surprised that it do- doesn't [00:50:09] Brice Challamel: I think you hit the nail on the head there, Jeremy, that the, the mind game is not won in the mind, it is won in the heart. Because it depends on what moves you. You need to want things to succeed. I find my inspiration in a lot of different spaces, but I find it mostly in friendships like ours, uh, in the relationship with my children, for whom I'm, I, I want, whom I want to inherit a better world than the world we live in today, and that they will be a part of building it, too. Like, this is going to be on them also. They're also players in this. And I've traveled a lot. I've met so many extraordinary people in my travel and I, I found in all of them, in all of those relationships, a deep grounding and a sense of duty to them, and, uh, because not all of them have as much privilege as I've had, uh, to even be on this podcast, to, to work at OpenAI, to have access to energy, to devices, to AI and all this, and I, I owe them to, to invest my privilege into their wellbeing. At least that's what moves me, and this is why I always start with the principle that yes, like, this is possible and we're gonna find out how. Even if I can't figure it out right now, we need, we need to find how. [00:51:35] Jeremy Utley: Invest my privilege in their wellbeing. That's beautiful. [00:51:39] Henrik Werdelin: I'm definitely worried that we will live in a world where there's gonna be people inside the walls and outside the walls, right? Like, I think knowing both of you, I think you'll echo that it'll be best to live in a world with no walls at all. [00:51:54] Brice Challamel: We already live in this world, Henrik. I, [00:51:55] Henrik Werdelin: I, I agree. If I may, [00:51:57] Brice Challamel: if I... I think one of the most... Another thing that I want to, another aphorism of sorts The vast majority of our fears have already happened to us, and this is why we fear them, because we've been there, and we come back with scar tissues or with realizations. Uh, I met, uh, the other day a group of artists who were very afraid about the future of their craft in the world with AI. But then I listened to them and I asked them questions about the last ten, twenty, thirty years. It's been a pretty rough twenty, thirty years for them of con-continuous challenge to exist and to surface in a very noisy world with their art and to be able to, to live, uh, make a living of their art. And in this way, the fear they project on AI is something that has already happened to them in an increasing way over decades. And because they are in that momentum, what they see ahead of them is the escalation of it. It might be that AI is a curse for artists. It might also be that it's a boon for artists. You see movies that are blockbusters right now, like Obsession or Backrooms. Most of them are, uh, uh, almost already in a, in this very interesting dual relationship with AI because they are born out of- Mm-hmm ... AI tools and technologies, and yet their authors denounce AI and AI's impact on society. [00:53:27] Jeremy Utley: Right. [00:53:28] Brice Challamel: Here we are having the dual perspective in this environment that w- they couldn't do what they are doing without AI, and yet they mean to make a profound statement on the danger of AI for society, which they do every time they have a chance to interview. And I think that this is representative of what most of us have. We have been through hardships. Anyone who is in this, in this life has been through hard times, and this is why we need to be kind with one another, because everyone around us is going through a silent struggle that we don't know about. And, uh, but it's real. It's there. And if you ask them and spend time, you will learn about it. And they tend to project it with the novelty. The novelty of AI is, of course, feeding their imagination, which is a survival mechanism, and it's feeding it to the point that they fear the continuation and the expansion of hardship that's already happened to them. [00:54:20] Jeremy Utley: It's a projection. It's a scapegoat. It's something to be worried about that I can name rather than kind of this just malaise or ambiguous existential dread without a name. [00:54:31] Brice Challamel: Because if you take the top science fiction topics and you rank them in order, maybe the number one of them is alien life, and then right behind it is artificial intelligence for decades and decades of science fiction novel writing. And there it is It's happening [00:54:50] Jeremy Utley: That's, you know, that's actually a really fantastic rebuttal, Bryce. I mean, uh, the, the point being, you know, if you say, you know, somebody says, "Hey, science fiction has been contemplating this dystopian future." I go, "Absolutely. Did you know it's the..." I mean, it's credible, right? Science fiction makes it credible because the, it's the second most cited villain of all time. Do you know what the number one most cited villain is? aliens. And we should-- And if, if it stands to reason that therefore we should be even more concerned about aliens, that argument holds water. And by the way, I'm hesitant to say argument because I don't mean that. I was... Yesterday, I was in, uh, Chicago doing a couple of keynotes, and a woman in the... And Q&A is always fascinating, and she asked me about her kids. And one of the number one questions I get, almost always from a mother, by the way, but a mother will say some version of, "I am finding immense value from AI in my work, and my kids are being told at school that their mom is cheating, and I find I'm having to hide, you know, and they think that I'm a millennial who just wants to burn the earth." And what I found myself saying, I said, "Ma'am, I hear this question a lot, and I agree that teachers are putting in our kids' minds, you know, challenging things." But I said, "The thing that I've learned is," similar to what you just said a second ago, uh, about the heart and the mind, the mind game is one and the heart, it's not an argument that's gonna win this person. It's love. It's kindness. You know, I, I spent... I, I think I told you this, Bryce. I haven't told you this, Henrik. A couple weeks ago, I spent a full day in Central Park and Washington Square with a handmade sign that I wrote that said, "AI is amazing. Change my mind." And I sat and talked to human, real human beings for eight hours in the blistering heat in the middle of New York, and I, I was not there to debate at all or, or to even retort. But what I learned was, one, these are wonderful... Everybody who came up to me, they're wonderful people from all walks of life. D-Bryce, to your point, e-even artists, you know? You got... I have people who are walking through Central Park with all of their dolly of gear talking about how AI is destroying their profession, but how also it makes it way easier to plan shoots in the park and coordinate 'cause there's so many people, you know? So it's complicated at, at the very least. But I realized with each of these people, they have come by their beliefs not rationally, but as a matter of the heart, and the way to... I, I believe the way, if one were to attempt to engage these people, is not a, it's not a matter of reasoning. It's a matter of caring. And I don't, I don't know exactly what to make of that except to say I think perhaps a lot of people who are in our audience who listen to this show probably have naysayers or critics that are perhaps vitriolic and antagonistic. And I think it's perhaps maybe just it's a useful realization for me, and I'm curious here if, if you all agree or have additional thoughts to conduct oneself with a sense of compassion, a sense of empathy, a sense of care, because if it becomes an argument, it's already... the battle's already lost, so to speak [00:57:55] Brice Challamel: And I, I completely agree that you're gonna get another of my aphorisms, which is listen before you think. And it's hard because we're constantly thinking and we're constantly trying to get our thoughts out one way or the other. And I love the way you've done this because you've, you've made the time to listen before you think. It's also what you're doing on this podcast, and I celebrate you and commend you for it, 'cause I listen to all the episodes and I'm always amazed by your ability to listen, which is so rare and so precious. And the act of listening, and I mean really listening, not just hearing, but listening intently and with a desire to understand another mental model than your own, another perspective, another background, is probably the path to understanding, which is a path to compassion, which is a path to love, right? Because you can't dictate for people lead with love, right? Like, wait, how? But at least do the first step, which is to lead with curiosity. And if you lead with curiosity, you're gonna find that there's a, a million life stories around you, and that people who are highly antagonistic of AI care. They would never antagonize if they didn't care. [00:59:05] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. That's [00:59:05] Brice Challamel: really well said. They [00:59:06] Jeremy Utley: would [00:59:06] Brice Challamel: sniff yourself and move on to the next conversation. [00:59:08] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. [00:59:09] Brice Challamel: Because they care, you should pay attention because something is happening there that is deeply meaningful to them and that therefore should be deeply meaningful to you. And you're among the, the minority of people who genuinely care about this and have a perspective about this, and making the time to listen to them first, it, it kind of lowers the emotional temperature in the room because they feel that all right, they are heard, they are not antagonized or not, you know, brutalized You know, when we convince people, it comes from the Latin cum and vincere. Vincere means to tie with ropes, right? Like cum vincere, tying with ropes. You're a convicted felon because the, the attorney has made so many demonstrations, has the proofs, the witnesses, the, the, the demonstration, your fingerprints, that you're tied with the ropes of their argument, and you're convicted. You're a convicted felon. So convincing and convicted is the same word, right? Every time you're convincing someone, you're tying them with the ropes of your arguments and making them feel like a felon. This is no way to drive a conversation, and this is gonna lead only one place, is them, even if they cave, feeling brutalized and ashamed, and they... And it will come back. Like you, you, you will hear of it again in a different form because no one who feels this way is going to, to let it go. [01:00:30] Jeremy Utley: We should have Henrik Dave McCraney on the show. He wrote this book, How Minds Change, and he actually has-- He's studied canvassers, the only successful canvassing organization in the history of political kind of movement. He's studied them. He did a deep ethnographic study to understand what are the mechanisms of how minds change, and it strikes me that that could be a really interesting... And Bryce, maybe if you wanna be a co-interviewer, you could. But as an example, he, he said, um, the publisher really wanted to call it How to Change Mind, and he said he wouldn't do it because it's not about coercion. It's rather a study of the observation of how a mind changes, and I think that may be a topic of interest for our audience. It's just under... If you really want to engage compassionately and lovingly in this moment, I think being a student to some of the stuff that Dave McCraney has written about could be cool. So Dave, if you're listening, we want you. [01:01:25] Brice Challamel: And this is one of my nightstand books, right, that I've read. No [01:01:29] Jeremy Utley: way. Are you serious? [01:01:31] Brice Challamel: Yes, that I've read. [01:01:32] Jeremy Utley: Okay. Okay. So then, so then you get to be a special guest co-host. Well, I, I would probably never be- I'm going to reach out to Dave right now ... [01:01:37] Brice Challamel: I would probably never be saying these things and discussing this with you this way if I hadn't read it, and, uh, of course, because it's been influential to me also. And, uh, I'm, I'm so glad that you surface it because I love these books, and I think it's very important for us to understand how minds change, why sometimes they are stuck in the process of change, what we can do about this to look at precedents. Everyone changes their mind at some point in their lives. Uh, in the Western culture, almost every child believes in Santa Claus until they don't. So everyone has had to change their mind and in the process to kill a dragon, which is to accept and acknowledge the fact that you've been lied to by the people who are the most precious to you But in exchange, they gave you a sense for the wonderful, for the marvelous, for the magical. And in this sense, they have planted in you a seed that whether you think this is possible or not, you're probably right because if you want to believe that a magical being brings wonderful things to your home, then for a while you're going to believe that this can happen and you're gonna make a mental construct around it. And this sense of magical is worth the disappointment of learning that your parents kind of betrayed you. It's a part of [01:02:53] Jeremy Utley: your bigger journey. They're giving [01:02:54] Henrik Werdelin: you something truer than truth. You guys are saying that Santa Claus does not exist? [01:02:58] Jeremy Utley: And that's a wrap. And that's a wrap [01:03:01] Henrik Werdelin: Bryce, you're, you're a very, very fascinating person. I'm always get very inspired when we have these conversations, so thank you. What a treat. [01:03:09] Jeremy Utley: I mean, come on, Henrik. How, who are we to get to talk to such amazing people? Okay. Can I just start with one thing that he ended with? I love it. If we don't mean this by abundance, then I don't know what we mean. He talked about people having access to food and sustenance and meaningful work. It warms my heart to know that such people are in the middle of AI conversations right now. [01:03:34] Henrik Werdelin: I think one thing that's fascinating is when we talk to people like him who have had such a success getting AI into Moderna, and obviously now, you know, trying to do this a thousandfold time, they tend to be pretty philosophical. They don't come in and saying, "You know, here's five ways to get AI into your organization." In fact, they're deeply philosophical, and I think the first thing that I took away, which I think is profound, is this thing about listening before thinking, not only because I'm really shit at it myself, and it's, you know, it's reminded that I have to be better at it, but also because that so often I think people who teach AI and work a lot with it, they walk in, and to his point, they're kind of like, they feel they need to convince people. And so not only does it seem to be a bad strategy, 'cause nobody who already feel that they have, like, a specific point of view p- is probably being convinced by somebody who wants to convince them. But to his point, they probably have all these other things going on in their world that is much more important for them. Their company is about to get merged, you know, they're about to spin off to a different division, whatever it is, and this idea of using ChatGPT is just not that important to them right now. But obviously then he tries to explain to them is that all these things that they would like to achieve can be achieved faster if they embrace this new technology. But I think the first thing that is profound for me is just the almost spiritual nature of conversation that people who are successful often have. And I feel embarrassed for this podcast because we like to be very concrete, like what is one thing that people can take with them tomorrow? But I think the more that we do this, the more we are kind of realizing that, A, a lot of these changes are not about AI at all. They're about people, and they're about visions for the future and all those different things. And I'm trying to figure out how to wrap my brain around my My urge to be very concrete with what seemed to be a practice which is much more about almost teaching people a pedagogy of thinking that leads to this adoption instead of kind of just teaching people what the result is. [01:05:52] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. Yeah, the, the mindset, I mean, "The Mind Game" I feel like is actually the perfect kind of title for this episode because even though it's only one of the principles that he kind of introduced, and one of the even fewer that we ended up discussing, it feels like you're right. And I don't know if it's actually Mind Game or even if perhaps a better title or just kind of banner for our reflection purposes is The Heart Game. Mm. Because it strikes me that, that it's actually not even about the mind so much. Mm. And to your point about the kind of, um, you know, a quasi-religious element, that's not to say anything about faith or, but, but rather this kind of sense of, I would say, when you say religious, what I hear or what I resonate with is this, it's a reverential approach. There's a sense of reverence that I feel is, is marked with people like Bryce and people who are in the trenches and, and trying to help others. It's not irreverential as opposed to call it pragmatic, you know, to, to, to kind of... I don't know if that's the spectrum, but how do you think about that? [01:06:54] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah, I think I like the word pedagogy a lot. You know that in the school systems there are schools like Montessori, and when we hear of Montessori, we understand that it's a way of teaching kids- [01:07:08] Jeremy Utley: Mm-hmm, [01:07:09] Henrik Werdelin: mm-hmm ... um, you know, different, uh, methods. [01:07:13] Jeremy Utley: It's a worldview. [01:07:14] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah. And we don't necessarily... We realize they have to learn that two plus two is four and other things, but Montessori, for example, have like, "Well, here's the framework of how to think about it." And it's a very philosophical approach to teaching. It's almost that when it comes to integrating new technology or new ways of leadership or anything, there is of course like leadership books and stuff like that, but in many ways, pedagogy have like many components. It have the tools, like we don't use plastic in the classroom, I think is one of the Montessori thing. We use things that can break, so kids understand when they drop a plate, it'll break. But there's also kind of like very concrete things they have to do. And I think in the many ways, some of these conversations we have with these leaders that are profoundly great of introducing and using AI to achieve their goals, they seem to almost have a pedagogy approach rather than a tactic, if you like. Does that make sense? [01:08:16] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, I'm trying to think of a pithy way. Is it, you know, doctrine not dogma? I don't know. I'm just kind of playing. [01:08:21] Henrik Werdelin: Hmm. Um, the other thing that I thought was interesting, and maybe that's not an AI thing either, but like that people see a technology that lands in front of them as a progression of the past that they've just been through. So let's say the last X amount of years has been tough for people because of COVID, because of, uh, polarization, because of world dynamics, because of all these different things that's going on. Now, if you then land a new thing, then your natural inclination will be this will be a extension or an acceleration of the feeling that I already have And people were nervous just before AI dropped in 2020, and then kind of get popularized maybe in '22, '23. And so back to the point about the heart game and where, where we should meet people, of course people are anxious because they were already anxious, and now this new thing that is alien to them is introduced, and so they'll just kind of like extending. And so I don't know, I thought it was very thought-provoking of how do you look at where people have already been, and how do you then, as they walk into the future, help them see that they are not... This is not a spectator sport, but this is one that where they can manipulate. [01:09:45] Jeremy Utley: Well, uh, and, and just building on your, your comments about kind of i- imagining the future, it was a, it was an epiphany to me to think about sci-fi and how it shapes our perceptions and how AI is kind of the second most, you know, uh, vilified e- element of sci-fi. And interestingly, how the first most, we give no valence whatsoever to aliens. I mean, I realize there's conspiracy theories and all that stuff. Nobody is, is really seriously thinking about aliens destroying the Earth, for example. Um, and- [01:10:18] Henrik Werdelin: But if they actually brought that, now that they're going to the dark side of the moon, and we know there is water, let's say they came back with kind of like something soon, because that seemed to be not completely unrealistic. [01:10:31] Jeremy Utley: You're, you're saying it's not, it's not, uh, there, it, it hasn't crossed the kind of reality threshold that AI has. [01:10:36] Henrik Werdelin: The adjacency that you're talking about- [01:10:38] Jeremy Utley: Okay, yeah, uh-huh ... it's- So it's, it's adjacent. It's, it's not adjacent possible yet, whereas AI is now adjacent possible. Garbage can [01:10:45] Henrik Werdelin: theory was bouncing around in the, in the garbage can of, of science fictious, and then suddenly- Mm it came out and became near, and so suddenly you had the problem, the hu- like, the humans and the, and the technology kind of like interfacing. [01:11:00] Jeremy Utley: Um, the only other thing, I mean, there, I could just recap the entire episode, but the only other thing is a n- note to self here. I do want to... I'm gonna reach out right now to Dave McCraney. I, I had no idea that Bryce was a fan of Dave's. I know we've had Dave on the show, or we did a joint episode in the early days of the podcast, so it'd be really fun to have him come and talk about his expertise. Yeah. And then I also know he's working on a... I, I haven't checked in with him in a while, but I know he's working on a new book on, on genius, and so it could be interesting to learn about that. But, but, uh, yeah, [01:11:31] Henrik Werdelin: I'll take that as an action item. Specifically in the context, I think of, of Bryce's point about leaders that are afraid of not necessarily technology, but this specific type of technology. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The thing that doesn't, that is not binary. It gives you an, a weak, weird answer. It always answers, and you don't know if it's a right and wrong one. It is a, a reflection back to you. Um, and so- How to make people like that comfortable with this technology would be a fascinating conversation to have with him because he might have an idea of how to introduce that concept. [01:12:13] Jeremy Utley: Coming soon. Shall we say coming soon? Coming soon. Dave, if you're listening to this, we love you. Can't wait to talk to you about this. All right, uh, as always, thanks for listening to this podcast. We appreciate your engagement. We appreciate your emails, your questions. If you have guests that we should talk to, we want to talk to them. We've, uh, especially if you look at, at the past few episodes, right? From a cognitive psychologist to a leading researcher, to a, you know, to a book on governance, to, I mean, across the spectrum, we're trying to talk to as many different voices and areas of expertise, even far beyond AI as possible. So your recommendations mean a lot. Hit us up, make an introduction, share the love. And with that- And with that, there's only one thing left to say. Is that right, Henrik? Or two? Bye-bye. Bye-bye.