Leidy Klotz, professor at the University of Virginia and author of Subtract, joins Jeremy & Henrik on Beyond the Prompt to explore why we instinctively add rather than subtract when solving problems. From a simple Lego experiment to organizational design, he explains how additive bias leads teams to accumulate tools, meetings, and complexity over time. In the age of generative AI, where creating content and workflows is effortless, this tendency becomes amplified. The conversation explores how leaders can design systems and environments that protect focus, sleep, and what truly matters.
Leidy Klotz has spent years studying a simple but overlooked phenomenon: when we try to improve something, our first instinct is to add rather than remove. He shares the Lego bridge experiment that sparked his research and explains how this additive bias scales from small design decisions to entire organizations. Over time, companies accumulate reporting lines, meetings, software, and policies without questioning what no longer serves them.
Henrik and Jeremy explore how AI tools intensify this pattern. When generating ideas, launching projects, writing code, or producing content becomes effortless, the temptation to add grows stronger. The cost of producing information drops, but the cost of consuming it rises. Without guardrails, organizations risk what Leidy calls “organizational indigestion.”
The discussion moves from insight to implementation. Leidy outlines practical ways to counteract additive bias, including stop-doing lists, default kill dates on projects, and designing environments that make subtraction visible and acceptable. In a world of accelerating AI output, leaders must intentionally decide what to remove, what to protect, and what truly matters.
Key Takeaways:
Subtract: amazon/Subtract-Untapped-Science-Leidy-Klotz
In a Good Place: amazon/Good-Place-Spaces-Where-Thrive/
Leidy's Speaking: https://leidyklotz.com/
Clip from Bear: Subtract - this is how you do better
00:00 Intro: Our Instinct to Add
00:28 Meet Leidy Klotz
01:15 The Subtract Idea
02:56 Organizations Get Bloated
03:49 Scandinavian Design Mindset
04:32 New Book: In a Good Place
05:59 AI Abundance and Indigestion
08:12 Curate Context, Not More
11:38 Cues and Stop-Doing Lists
15:00 Default Debt and Kill Dates
17:10 Odysseus Contracts and Biases
21:28 Reengage the Physical World
29:17 Bike Shedding and Priorities
36:10 Making Is Thinking
49:16 The Debrief
📜 Read the transcript for this episode: how-to-subtract-the-most-underrated-skill-of-the-ai-era-with-leidy-klotz/transcript
[00:00:00] Leidy Klotz: More organizations die from indigestion than starvation.
Over time, organizations add and add and add and spend less time thinking about subtraction, and that gets them into the situation where. They're bloated.
When we try to solve problems, our first instinct is to think what can we add to make this situation better? Um, then consequently we neglect this whole other class of options, which is like taking away from the existing situation to make things better.
Hi, my name's Leidy Klotz. I'm a professor at the University of Virginia. Um, I'm the author of two books that don't talk about ai, subtract and in a good place, and I'm really excited today to talk about how the ideas in those books relate to ai.
[00:00:42] Jeremy Utley: I gotta say Leidy. I know your work has moved on since Subtract, but I refer to Subtract probably once a week. Even just last week, I pulled it off my shelf and was showing somebody and talking about it. It comes to mind for me a lot in this age, and so I, I think it'd be really fun to talk about that and talk about all sorts of other stuff.
But before we do. For audience members who don't kind of know the basic premise of subtract, would you just lay that out just so everybody kinda has a common understanding of the conceptual foundation of this conversation?
[00:01:15] Leidy Klotz: Yeah. I mean, so Subtract is this a book that I wrote, but also, uh, you know, scientific finding that was on the cover of nature, that when we try to solve problems, our first instinct is to think what can we add to make this situation better?
Um, and. Then consequently we neglect this whole other class of options, which is like taking away from the existing situation to make things better. So that's the abstract description one. You know, a story that's really helpful with it is actually how I initially conceptualized the research study. I was playing Legos with my son, who was three at the time, and we were building a bridge, right?
And the problem we had basically was the bridge wasn't level. Um, and so I went to solve this problem. I turned around behind me to grab a block to add to the shorter column on the bridge. And by the time I had turned back around, um, he had removed a block from the longer column. And again, it, it, it's just this really crystal clear illustration of what I did in that moment is what we tend to do, which is like, here's a problem, I'm gonna solve it and I'm going to add by solving it.
And if there wasn't a three-year-old there, I would've overlooked this whole other class of options. So, um, that's the basic idea and it applies. Across, you know, not just Legos obviously, but how we organize our time and how we take in information and, and all sorts of things.
[00:02:31] Jeremy Utley: So, uh, uh, yeah, obviously my mind immediately goes to time.
But before we go there, one thing I just am curious about is, I love the simplicity of the Lego example. How is the tendency to add manifested, say in an organizational context? Yeah, I mean, you've been studying this a lot. Where else have you seen that subtraction would be a more elegant solution, but folks don't think of it or am I, am I reading too much into it?
Say folks don't
[00:02:55] Leidy Klotz: think of it. No, I mean, I think what what makes it interesting is that, you know, the real world is complex systems and you, uh, like an organization is a complex system. It's not a discreet Lego problem. But over time there's the organizations add and add and add and spend less time thinking about subtraction.
And that gets them into the situation where. They're bloated. I think there's a, is it Bob Sutton always says this and he's quoting somebody else, but more, more organizations die from indigestion than starvation. Um
[00:03:26] Henrik Werdelin: mm-hmm.
[00:03:27] Leidy Klotz: And I think that, I mean, there's a lot of good reasons for this. When you're, when you're first starting something, it makes sense to have.
Reporting lines and, and more employees and protocols and you keep doing that and doing that and doing that and don't spend as much time kind of going back and saying, okay, what no longer serves us. Um, so that's how it might apply in like an organizational situation.
[00:03:49] Henrik Werdelin: It's interesting how we talked about Scandinavia, obviously coming from Denmark and, and the Scandinavian design background where it's very much been the saying here for a long time things are not done when you can't add more to it, but when you can't take more away.
And I think, you know, then when you come into other cultures and you see how their design background and obviously it has more audacity to it, visual and so, uh, it really resonates. I wanna also just make sure that you mentioned your new book, because I think Jeremy and I implicitly love the subtract stuff, but we talk a lot about environment design and systems design, and obviously your new work kind of like touched small about that.
Do you mind just talking a little bit about, uh, your latest work?
[00:04:32] Leidy Klotz: The next book is called In a Good Place. It comes out in April. It's about how, um, how the spaces where we live, work, and play can help us thrive. Um, and it's basically trying to show people this connection between our, our physical environment and these core emotional needs that we all have for connection, growth, and agency.
Uh, and so yeah, it's very rooted in the, in the built environment and the, the Lego study. Henrik is the, like that's, I mean, that's Danish too. Actually. The Lego study was like kind of the spark. But I, my background is in engineering and architecture and design and certainly the, you know, those examples of elegant design were always kind of inspiring me and you're wondering like, why can't we do more of this?
But I think it's also. It's also a great illustration that I think one of the reasons we don't subtract a lot is because we think it's going to be easy because the end product looks easy. But you're exactly right that it's like this is when you get to the classic Danish design or Scandinavian design that looks really simple.
It's actually farther along the design continuum and something that's very ornate. 'cause you have to solve the problem and then you have to say, okay, how could we keep this problem solved while taking more things away? And it's a, a good illustration that. The end product of subtraction is amazing, but oftentimes it's more steps to get there.
[00:05:52] Henrik Werdelin: And I think, you know, obviously that is very topical In a world where vibe coating is now makes the, the cost of production very easy. Have you done thinking around when you are trying to. Create an environment for yourself that leads you towards that good behavior of subtracting.
[00:06:12] Leidy Klotz: Yeah.
[00:06:13] Henrik Werdelin: How do you contain yourself when a new idea is a clock coat prompt away when 10 new features get added in seconds and that you don't really like?
We're used to live in a world of scarcity, and so our mind is very much wired at that and this abundance. Kind of world is new to us. And so how do we create organization or design structures for ourself to kind of prevent us from coming from growing ourself?
[00:06:42] Leidy Klotz: One way I think obviously is that like the, the cost of consuming information is now more than the cost of producing information.
Right. And that's a flip, and that's something, I mean, that's like a philosophical thing that I have to, to keep in mind, right? Um. Not just for myself, but also for the things that I'm putting out into the world. Um, it's like, okay, somebody's going to have to read this. Is it worth their time? Is it different enough than what else is out there?
As far as like, I think obviously. AI is a, a tool, right? And it can be used to exacerbate these basic tendencies that we have and it can be used to correct them. And I mean, if you use AI as like subtractive prompts on ai, it's can be really helpful, right? Um, so I think. Just something as simple as, okay, I've got 150 really good words here.
How, how would you boil this down to 100 words? And it can give you ideas for that, and you could do that with code. I've, I've heard, um, I don't, this isn't my area of the coding, but like when I talk to subtracting two people who are working, they're like, oh, we all have this technical debt. That's a huge problem in all these organizations.
And it's actually quite simple, relatively to say. Okay. AI helped me clean up the technical debt, which otherwise would take a lot of time. So, um, I think a combination of reframing your mindset, um, about the, you know, the cost of producing and consuming information. And then also, you know, thinking about how do you use these tools to, to actually streamline the amount that that's going out there.
And one more to add is just being really cognizant of like what I put, I use the, I'll upload like my. Previous work, um, and kind of use that to iterate on and just being really conscious about what you're putting into the, into the models or into the, I use Claude and like the knowledge base and like what I'm putting into the knowledge base.
I found that putting more stuff in there doesn't help. It's putting the right stuff in there that, that does help.
[00:08:40] Jeremy Utley: Say, say more about that or can you give an example of what's the difference between more stuff and the right stuff?
[00:08:46] Leidy Klotz: So for example, like I've got my new book written, right? And it's like, I wrote this, this isn't, I mean, AI helped, but not like, it doesn't write as well as I do.
That's like one of the things that I, that's one advantage that I have. So upload the book and now I'm doing like marketing stuff and it's like, okay, how would you pitch this podcast from the book? And it, it's, um, you know, it's actually more helpful to just put the chapter that. Is relevant to this podcast than to put the whole book and certainly more helpful than like putting the whole book plus the table of contents, plus other stuff that I've written adjacent to the book.
So, as you know, as powerful as it is, it does seem like it gets distracted the more things that you put in there. And if you can really like you, like no, this is the thing to work from, um, and curate in that way, I, I get much better results.
[00:09:34] Jeremy Utley: There's some interesting here, uh, Henry and I kind of nerd out sometimes on, on, um, you know, prompt engineering, context engineering.
[00:09:41] Leidy Klotz: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:42] Jeremy Utley: I wonder if there's something of a curve, um, so to speak, in terms of number of words and ideal output, and there's two problems that users probably face on one end. You talk about here is providing too much context, right. I gave a whole book and asked for a marketing copy when really a chapter would've been sufficient.
Too many words on the other end of the spectrum, I, I think a lot of early users of AI are, are they've been trained by search to have the exact right four words. Right? Right. The staccato marketing prompt to subtract beyond the prompt or whatever. Right? Yeah. I'm, I'm making this up. Right. It's like, whatever.
The few, and we have been conditioned to say, whatever the fewest number of words, that is a magical incantation to the Google algorithm is kind of good. There's something, it's for sure we don't wanna give too much information, and I agree there's a laziness there. I'll just upload my book and then have it do it.
Right? Yeah. But the other danger is I give far too little information and I find myself often, especially with early users, saying, you have to tell AI much more. So it's this weird balance you most people need to, to probably add. And then once you get in the habit of adding, then you need to be really thoughtful about have I had it too much?
I don't know if you have, if your experience aligns with that.
[00:10:58] Leidy Klotz: No. Yeah. I, and I think the, um, for me, like the prompt, I actually turn off the typing and do voice on the prompt because that just, I think, I would never have put it this way, but like breaks me outta that magical Google incantation, right? It's like now I'm just talking.
That seems to get much better results and kind of frees me from like, trying to refine the prompt. So definitely on the prompts, I, I give more information than I otherwise would have. Um, but I, I still think, you know, if you put useless stuff in there, it's not going to help the model. But it is. You do need to, I do, I do recognize that I'm prompting it in different ways than I would prompt Google.
[00:11:38] Henrik Werdelin: Why do you think it's so difficult for us to understand this lesser small kind of thesis, and what can we do to create triggers for ourself to kind of go more into this abstract mode than the
[00:11:53] Leidy Klotz: Yeah.
[00:11:54] Henrik Werdelin: Mode?
[00:11:55] Leidy Klotz: I mean, I think to break it down, there's two, two basic reasons. One is that we we're just less likely to think of it cognitively, and I would, I would argue that that stretches across cultures.
The second part is that it's not as accepted culturally for whatever reason. And that's where I think like the Danes have an advantage, right? Because this is something that is, um, so to, to deal with the first problem of not thinking about it, like you said, cues, I think were your exact words, but building those cues into your every day, uh, processes and not relying on yourself to think of subtraction in the moment.
Right? So a simple example that I use in the book is just. When you're doing your to-do list, can you also force yourself to come up with an equal amount of stop doings, right? And you could see how you'd build that into an annual review process, or you could. Build it into an AI prompt, right? It's like, you know, give me five new headings, but also tell me which are the five worst headings that I should get rid of.
So again, like the idea there is how do you think about where you make important decisions in your day-to-day routine or in, in your workflows or whatever, and then build the subtraction in so that you're not relying on yourself to, um, to think of it in the moment. That also builds in some permission, right?
If you think about this in an organizational context, if somebody's, I mean, one of the big problems in organizations, right? If you think of yourself as a new employee, the way that you show you're doing a good job is often by like doing stuff and adding and like showing up. And so if you're able to, for people like that.
Show that subtraction is valued. Also give them a way to make subtraction visible. So again, taking that to do and stop doing example up to maybe an annual review, right? It's like, here are the three things that I'm going to do. They're new and amazing next year. Well, what are the three things you're gonna stop doing that are new and amazing?
Next year? You're showing that it's valued. You're getting the information from the person, and you're avoiding a whole bunch of useless work in the, in the forthcoming year. Again, building it into the process, uh, and then. Dealing with the, is this socially acceptable or is this just, you know, or a cultural norm trying to make it so that the subtractions are noticeable?
Um, so there's a lot of ways, I'm sure, that people subtract to improve their lives and to improve organizations. And one of the problems is that once you've done that, it goes out of sight and out of mind, right? So we're surrounded by all these examples of like, okay, here's this. Here's this book I wrote, and it's my contribution to the world and the book, the, the 10 things that I didn't do so that I could Write the book are not Visible.
Yeah. And, and, but yet, I, the only reason I could write that book is thanks to those 10 things. I've got a professor friend who, um, she's like, oh yeah, when I, I was telling her about this and she says, oh, when I say no to something, I actually leave it on my calendar. So if she says no to this committee, and you know, I'm just too busy.
Oh, that's great. Like put the committee time on her calendar and then she'll know when she's like doing her highest value work, like writing or meeting with the students, like this time brought to you by this other,
[00:15:00] Henrik Werdelin: you know, one thing that might be fun also, so, you know, my, my career has been all about building companies and so this incubation process, and we have this process we call the default debt, and that is that we assume that our project should be killed.
And so we put a kill date on it.
[00:15:16] Leidy Klotz: Yeah.
[00:15:16] Henrik Werdelin: And so if it, if, if we think it's good enough to survive, we actively have to choose to kinda like make it go on instead of just keeping it. 'cause obviously you get stopped and then. And then you kind of like have stuff that lingers forever. And an entrepreneur's time is the only real value thing they have.
Right?
[00:15:32] Jeremy Utley: Right.
[00:15:32] Henrik Werdelin: And so it remind me a little bit of, you know, another process you can create is just to say, this project will automatically die, or this meeting will automatically not happen if x have not fulfilled. So instead of having, I guess, weekly meetings, you can have, like, we, we don't have this meeting except if these kinda like, uh, things happens.
[00:15:51] Leidy Klotz: Yeah. I love that. I mean, and that's, yeah, you're flipping the, flipping the default to subtraction, which is, you know, the opposite of what it normally is. Um, does everybody do that? Is that a common thing or is it more like in your,
[00:16:02] Henrik Werdelin: I don't think so. Like at pre-high, which is my incubator. We've just done that for a long time.
'cause what we did see was a lot of entrepreneurs, they were told that they basically just to kind of like plow through it. Mm-hmm. And good things would happen. And I think our mental model we're just, you know. Much Jeremy's kind of work on more idea is better, but for that to hold true and for that to be possible, you also kind of need to create, you know, if you wanna be promiscuous on the ideation, then you also need to be very disciplined about the, the way that you are, you're saying no to stuff.
And so the default debt just came in and has been like a, you know, pre for a while.
[00:16:38] Jeremy Utley: You know, one, one thing I'm thinking about is I've got a friend at OpenAI, or I should say one of the labs, but we can say OpenAI. 'cause now we know, um. One thing that Sam has been very vocal about is if there's a meeting on your calendar that isn't delivering value, let me know.
And what I like is that shifts the burden of responsibility. Instead of my responsibility to show up to meetings, it's my responsibility is to be a detective for unproductive meetings. And I think there's something about that is similar to Default Dead. I wanted to come back for a second to these kind of apriori.
You know, you said something, I wrote it down. So you're, you have to have cues so you're not relying on yourself to think of it in the moment, um, about sub the value of subtraction. I think there is kind of a metacognitive layer here that is really interesting to me because there's all sorts of things that we need to be aware of when we're in the moment and we're not likely to be aware of it.
I mean, another one that Henrik and I have talked about at length on this show is the Einstein bias, the tendency of a human to settle for good enough. And one of the best ways to undermine that bias is to know I'm probably gonna settle. Right. So, yeah, I just take those two. I've kind of started framing this personally for me as what I call an Odysseus contract with yourself.
Mm-hmm. Where just like Odysseus kind of told his men, strap me to the mast because I know when I get in that valley with the sirens, I'm gonna be tempted to, uh, to you subtract. I, I'm gonna be tempted to add or to use elling, I'm gonna be tempted to satisfies for what's good enough. Right. So I, I like the idea of an Odysseus contract.
My challenge, or kind of the meta challenge to that is it feels like there's almost an unending list of things that we should probably be aware of ahead of time. Right? It's called every human cognitive bias.
[00:18:29] Leidy Klotz: Really. Yeah.
[00:18:30] Jeremy Utley: How do we even think about that? So anyway, I just, I put that out there. I'd love to hear what you think.
[00:18:34] Leidy Klotz: Yeah. No, I love, uh, I think that. Well, as Henrik was describing the, this, you know, default to stop things. I mean, that also works against the status quo bias, right? So you could almost think of the, it's not as if the, I mean, the interventions that you would make for your Odysseus tied to the mask could deal with multiple biases, right?
Yes. Yes. Um, so it's not like you need to have an intervention for each one. You could just think about like, okay, here's right. Here are the default patterns that are going to be the ones that most get in my way. And it's not, it also, you don't really care about dealing with every single bias that has had an article written about it in the academic literature.
You care about the ones that are, you think your people are most susceptible to in this situation, and then you would design your protection accordingly. Yeah, I
[00:19:23] Jeremy Utley: like that. I like the
[00:19:24] Leidy Klotz: idea of designing that though deliberately because it would also force you to think about like, what's going on here, right?
Because like that just awareness. Goes a long way when people are thinking about it.
[00:19:35] Jeremy Utley: Well, and that's the beauty of system prompts, right? With ai, it has these system prompts, which are, the way I like to think about system prompts is like custom instructions for example, is there are parenthetical instructions to the model that precede your explicit instruction, right?
But so these parenthetical instructions, you can take this Odysseus contract and you can tell Claude, Hey, I know my tendency is always gonna be to add. Please protect me against that tendency. And the system instruction can actually act as, you know, the, you know, Odysseus' sailors or whatever, um, which I think reduces the cognitive load or the burden on the human to have to remember that in the moment,
[00:20:15] Leidy Klotz: right.
[00:20:16] Henrik Werdelin: I think the, we were talking about this the other day, that the app and getting the startup land, the about Us page is kind of good. 'cause that is something that you can emotionally connect to as a customer,
[00:20:26] Jeremy Utley: right?
[00:20:26] Henrik Werdelin: But increasingly, this about me page that you have to give to your agents are gonna be important, right?
Because all these things are not necessarily default in the models. Yeah. And so your first principles where you have strong biases, you probably need to write these about me pages, is now for just how the models wanna inter interact with us.
[00:20:46] Leidy Klotz: Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, you do kind of put in what you want for the project, but it's like.
About me is a different thing. Also, of course, like these models have the same biases that humans do, right? Like one of
them.
[00:21:00] Jeremy Utley: Mm-hmm. All
[00:21:00] Leidy Klotz: of them. Yeah.
[00:21:01] Jeremy Utley: Yeah,
[00:21:01] Leidy Klotz: yeah. And which makes sense. I mean, but it, uh, I, we just saw a paper came out like a couple months ago that was basically replicating our stuff, uh, that we did five years ago on subtraction in AI and saying like, yeah, the AI neglect, subtraction the same way that, that humans do.
And that was validating for our research, but also just. A clear illustration that all of these things are baked into the ai, which makes that even more important to put about me
[00:21:28] Henrik Werdelin: on your new work. I think all of us are trying to figure out what is the architecture of our lives in this world where we increasingly sit home alone, where we increasingly talk to bots instead of people.
There is definitely this, I feel, emerging culture of you. Everybody wants to get out a little bit more and kind of feel something. I wonder what your perspective is in what are the things that people have not designed, and that could be a physical design or kind of like a conceptual design into their lives that they should be aware of or just start to kind of plan for.
[00:22:06] Leidy Klotz: I was listening to your po so it's Nicholas Thompson, right? That's the Atlantic CEO. Yeah. So, and he, I think it was him talking about the kid in the bathtub trying to compete with the phone. Um, it might have been one of you. Yeah,
[00:22:19] Jeremy Utley: yeah, yeah. We were, yeah, it was one of our friends who had mentioned that.
Yeah.
[00:22:22] Leidy Klotz: Okay. Yeah, so the, the idea being that like, okay, I am my kid's in the bathtub, that's giving me a certain level of dopamine, and, but then my phone has a notification and that overrides it, and my kids having to compete with this thing that's really hard. I don't know, like the dopamine stats, but I kind of think about our surroundings the opposite way of that, which is like there is no freaking way that a screen can do what the world can do, right?
I mean, maybe dopamine is one, one point, but we have evolved, survived, or died based on being able to interact with the physical world around us, and we're wired to. To need to do that. And so even just, if you look at it, you know, a screen is whatever colors you put on there, it's still two dimensional. And basically going to one sense, it's our dominant sense, but it's still just one sense.
And our surroundings are multi-dimensional. They're, they hit all of our senses. They are constantly changing and they're like hitting these deep needs that we have that have evolved, you know, forever. So, um. That's a mindset shift that I think is really important, that it's like, Hey, if, if we really want to enjoy life, if we really wanna be happy, we have to like reengage in this relationship with our surroundings.
[00:23:40] Jeremy Utley: I mean, I, I agree. I agree philosophically, however, having children like you do, I know.
[00:23:46] Leidy Klotz: Yeah.
[00:23:46] Jeremy Utley: The best way to trigger an absolute meltdown is to take away the device. What is true of children, I believe is actually true of adults, right? I mean, people are totally addicted. So while I think philosophically we probably agree that it feels like the built and physical world is better, there's a lot of data.
I mean, there are people who are literally that whose lives are consumed with games or social media or whatever,
[00:24:09] Leidy Klotz: right? Right. But that's addiction, right? It's like addiction. The definition of it is it's taking you away from a, a. Something better that you could be doing. And so I'm not saying, I'm not saying it's not powerful at all.
I'm not, and I'm not saying that, you know, um, but I, I, I just like, that's not where the happiness is coming from. It's the same as alcohol, right? It's like this is like an addiction to alcohol is not making the alcoholic happy or making them thrive. And so just remembering all the great things that are out there in that relationship with our surroundings.
And, you know, Henrik, your original question was about how do you design this and. I think some of it is just going back to, to paying more attention to it. Right? I mean, a lot of the ways that we've made it easier to navigate in the world. So like GPS is an example right now. Now you don't have to know the no directions as well.
And again, it, I'm not saying don't use GPS, I'm just saying that some of these technological advances have taken us away from this relationship. Same with even just air conditioning, right? Or sealing off. Building so that they can heat and cool to a specific temperature, and now you don't need to know about opening windows and getting airflow through and which cuts you off from the external environment.
So just like engaging with your physical surroundings more I think is a big, big kind of first step towards designing it. Because it's not so much like the exact design, it's more that you're doing it. It's like that you're now designing.
[00:25:38] Henrik Werdelin: But I wonder if you have to design things. One, the problem with the real world is outside of my 6-year-old who goes, daddy, daddy, daddy.
Which is kind of like its own notification system,
[00:25:49] Leidy Klotz: right?
[00:25:49] Henrik Werdelin: You know, going for that walk with my dog or going to have a cup of coffee with my wife, whatever, like all these things that I really enjoy. What they don't have is a little red number in front of it. Right? What they don't have is something that flash in front of my eyes
[00:26:05] Jeremy Utley: a
[00:26:05] Leidy Klotz: hundred percent.
[00:26:06] Henrik Werdelin: And so I al almost feel that, and maybe there's a question, a statement, man's question, but I, I wonder what there are of systems out there where you can almost like. It sounds pathetic, but reverse engineer a little bit like the notification universe of the screens that makes us so addicted. And then actually create them available in,
yeah,
[00:26:26] Jeremy Utley: yeah.
Well one, can I point my
[00:26:28] Henrik Werdelin: wife would go around and
[00:26:29] Jeremy Utley: say,
[00:26:29] Henrik Werdelin: ding.
[00:26:30] Jeremy Utley: Well, lemme point to one paper because I think it's, I've been thinking about this paper a lot. I think it's relevant and maybe it will even abstract beyond the kind of, call it digital world a little bit. Clay Christensen, you know, the Innovator's Dilemma, Harvard Business School professor, when the graduating class of 2010 was leaving Harvard Business School as a very different world than they entered into, right?
In 2008, the market crashed and they're leaving, and they wanted Christensen to talk to them, not about disruption. But about personal lives, how do they make decisions that matter? And Christensen delivered What? What became one of the most famous speeches at Harvard Business School that later became one of Harvard Business Review's most famous articles, which later became a book as well called, how Will You Measure Your Life?
And what Christensen basically observed is. What's true for organizations is true for individuals. The marginal cost decision that organizations make that lead them to make wrong strategic decisions are just as true for humans. And he basically observed that. We tend to over rotate. I'm very, I'm obviously simplifying here, but as humans.
We tend to be gratified by immediate feedback and rewards. And so we tend to invest the marginal unit of effort towards that, which gives us immediate feedback. And so he said, for example, at my job I get a quarterly performance review, or I close the deal or I make the, I write the book or whatever, right?
And so I'm getting feedback, he said, whereas with my kids, I don't learn if I'm a good dad. I don't put my hips on my, on my hands, on my hips for like 20 years and say, honey, we did it right. And so he said what he's observed is. People. Therefore, when they have an additional 30 minutes, they say, I'm gonna invest it in work because I get the immediate feedback.
This predates certainly ai, but this observation largely predates the social media revolution. To me it, it speaks to something about our hard wiring. And I have been thinking a lot about this in the age of AI because now the competition isn't between kind of say, dinner time with my family and one unit of work.
You know, make it incremental progress on the book. Now with these Ironman suits, it's like 10 units of work or a hundred units of work, and I was already struggling as an unwired human to make the decision for my family, you know, per Christensen's framework. Now I feel, what hope do I have to choose between kind of the unwired one unit of time and a hundred units of output that my competitors are great.
Uh, does that resonate? And if so, how can we start to design given that the, the economic incentives are being stacked even harder against us.
[00:29:15] Leidy Klotz: Yeah, I, I agree. This concept of bike shedding, that's something I talk about in my next book, but it's, um, basically the classic illustration of this is there's a committee convened to talk about a nuclear power plant, the construction of a nuclear power plant, and they have a meeting, get all the important stakeholders there, and they're talking about the nuclear power.
The engineers and architects present and you know, people ask some softball questions 'cause they don't really understand. And you get past this discussion of the nuclear power plant in like 15 minutes and then there's time left in the meeting. And so they're like, well what should we do at this time?
And they start talking about the bike shed that's going next to the nuclear power plant. And everybody has an opinion, um, because it's just easier to grasp, right? So it's like, okay, what color should it be painted? What kind of racking system should we have? And everybody can talk about the bike shed. And I think it's, uh.
That's where the name comes from. But it's basically this tendency to prioritize small and knowable things over big, meaningful, unknowable things like, you know, what's gonna happen to your kid? Because it's like, yeah, it's 20 years down the road. Plus you're never gonna be able to connect the specific thing that you did in that moment to a positive or negative.
Outcome is just messy. You know, you're moving the needle a little bit. You hope you are. I think. Part of that is, you know, kind of relentlessly focusing on what matters, right? For yourself. Um, but then also for the people that you're working with or that are working for you is like continually, like at the nuclear plant example, if you brought to them the actual things that were important that they could talk about, about the nuclear power plant.
You know, instead of maybe the engineering details you talk about, okay, the, these are the three basic safety approaches and here's how we should talk about them, and I really want your opinion on them. So breaking it down into like important but manageable. But yeah, that's a fundamental way of thinking that predates, predates ai that seem
[00:31:04] Henrik Werdelin: to come back to, I think, the premise of your book of we have this other prejudism that we call structures defined outcomes.
Yeah. And that seemed to be even more important. As you're just describing it, I have date night every Friday with my wife. Right. And we, we have at least once a week where we walk the dog. Yeah. And it's like a really religious thing, right? Like we always,
[00:31:24] Jeremy Utley: yeah.
[00:31:24] Henrik Werdelin: You know, nobody messes with date night. And I really think that it is so easy to cancel the date night, right.
Because you, like there are stuff that comes up and hopefully we'll be man for 15 years and hopefully we'll be married forever. And so, uh, it does seem to me that when you have the issue that Jeremy outlined. We almost have to get these things into some kind of like architectural system for ourself.
'cause otherwise, of course dinnertime will lose out when you can otherwise do a hundred people's work.
[00:31:57] Jeremy Utley: It's almost like, uh, it's almost like Stephen Covey's, have you seen this illustration of the sand and the rocks? You know, if you put the sand in the jar first, you can't fit any rocks in, there's no room.
Okay. Yeah. But if you put the rocks in first, this is like, you know, seven habits of highly effective people, right?
[00:32:13] Leidy Klotz: Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:13] Jeremy Utley: Find your big rocks, put them in first, and then you can pour the sand in and sand will fill all the way around it, right?
[00:32:20] Leidy Klotz: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:20] Jeremy Utley: And to me, the phrase that came to my mind was, I was thinking about this is big rocks before bots.
Like you have to be, you have to know what are your big rocks. And then Este, I mean, Hendrick to your point, right? You're, I mean, you may not know this lady, Henrik is helping thousands of entrepreneurs start new companies. Yeah, I saw that. It sounds like Henrik, if I put this framework in your life, Henrik has premeditated.
Not on Friday night. I'm not helping thousands of companies. Right. And he is decided that my time with my wife is so important that the sand's gotta fed around that. Mm-hmm. I, this, this, it highlights the importance of these very human decisions and establishing as Hendrik as you're saying, architecting systems.
To protect us from our base or impulses. Right. If you're wondering on Friday afternoon whether you should keep helping a thousand entrepreneurs or, or do dinner with your wife, you probably go,
[00:33:14] Henrik Werdelin: I'll add another one. I'll add another one that I, I use open Claw, the new bot for some stuff, and one I've asked it now is that, uh, I work New York Hours, but I'm offering in Europe and so mm-hmm.
And I tend to get long and I want to get sleep and my kids wake up in the morning, but, so I've now gave the bots a command saying I. Aspire to basically be sleeping by 11 o'clock. And so now at 10 30, all the bots are just going like, Hey, I'll, you know, I'll ask them like, you know, can you install this new thing?
And they're like, I can do that, but it's coming up to 11 o'clock, so do your, should we push it to tomorrow, dude?
[00:33:50] Leidy Klotz: Yeah.
[00:33:50] Henrik Werdelin: And it's kind of interesting, like I have to hack myself otherwise, I'm just so easily seduced by these things that, that I'll, I'll, I'll stay up all night.
[00:34:00] Leidy Klotz: Yeah. I think going back to your question about the design prompts to like reengage with the world too, right?
I mean, you could use something as simple as like, when I'm looking at my phone, like space before screen. So I look at my phone as like, wait, have I checked out this place that I am? Right. Like really taken it in. Um, and so you can, knowing that the addictive power of the phone, you could certainly use that to, to help you engage with your surroundings more.
I'm sure there are things that you could Yeah, like build in. That the, the technology could augment our regular experience in the world, right? Like, hey, now look over here, or whatever. And as simple as like just getting the phones out of the system right. Or getting the screens out of the system. So you know, it's change
[00:34:43] Jeremy Utley: your default.
Right? That's like, and that's, that's behavior design one on one. Just leave, eliminate
[00:34:48] Henrik Werdelin: that. I saw somebody who had made a shortcut where before you open one of the social media apps, it basically ask you to breathe three times. And then it goes like, do you still, do you still wanna open it?
[00:34:59] Jeremy Utley: Yeah.
[00:34:59] Henrik Werdelin: And so it's gonna lie a little high.
[00:35:01] Jeremy Utley: That's so good. There's something about mantras. I mean, I'm just riffing with you all now, but I just heard, I've heard a bunch of structures, defined outcomes, default. Dead. Dead, sorry. Default dead. That's different. Um, light of you saying space before screen. I wonder if there's something about encoding these truths in catchy, almost like you could think about it as choruses, right?
There's a recent earworms tend to stay in your head. Right. I wonder if one way, and I love by the way, Henrik, your statement to hack yourself. I wonder if one way to hack ourselves is to define what are these mantras in kind of a memorable slogan so that our kids can repeat it right.
[00:35:40] Leidy Klotz: Yeah,
I,
[00:35:42] Jeremy Utley: you guys into that, you guys that there was a weird silence there.
[00:35:44] Henrik Werdelin: Totally. No, no, no. But I, I just feel I've interrupted and spoken so much and I feel guilty when we have such an incredible guest on No, no, no. That I'm like grabbing the microphone all the time. But I will give you one more of these sermons. So a few one, uh, I have this one that I call Making us Thinking, which is where often I feel like instead of getting stuck, I basically start to kind of do something, uh, which I.
I really enjoy too. I, I stole it for somebody, but now that's, now it's mine.
[00:36:10] Leidy Klotz: Well, that's a, I mean, that was one thing that I wanted to bring up on in this conversation about ai, right? Because I see students and I see how, how I, how I work, and it's definitely like. Making is thinking. Right? And if, if the AI takes out the making process, you're not doing the thinking and, and you've just gotta, again, it's like, of course there are times when you don't wanna do the thinking.
It's very rote and boring. But there are all other times where it's like, no, the, the thing here is the the thinking, and that's where I'm getting the benefit and I can't. Subtract that out.
[00:36:39] Henrik Werdelin: But I guess there's a little bit of that 'cause you do subtract that, that is often what you subtract now into Jeremy's laziness point.
Right. You know, we, we do become these cognitive, you know, diabetics where we've kinda like have basically said yes so many times to the bot. That we just forget that sometimes we have to, you know, stop and go like, Hey, and like, should I just think like, it sounds compelling, but is this really the best argument?
And so even the trick saying, don't suggest me one thing, suggest me three whitely different things. Yeah. 'cause at least, so then you're self prompted to kind of have a decision about them instead of just taking the, what is the other one? The, the devil is in the default.
[00:37:23] Leidy Klotz: Uh, David Epstein's written some interesting stuff about this on his substack about just like the cognitive ease and like the deficits there, um, and or the risks there.
And we we're thinking about it as people who have, like, we've learned what we've learned without ai, right? So for us it's like, yeah, there's a little bit of a harm because we're, we're not doing our peak thinking. But when I see college students do this, or when I think about my 11-year-old doing this, it's like not only are they not getting the ideal outcome, but they're not even learning how to do the thing.
Right? And so they don't, they're not developing this capability that makes them. Better in some way than ai. Um, which is super
[00:38:05] Jeremy Utley: scary. And, and, and concerningly, I think actually this is, maybe it's too big, it's a societal thing, but concerningly the things that we as experienced individuals and managers and leaders have delegated to younger people that give them the ability to do it.
We're now able to prompt AI to do, and now young folks are no longer given the at bats. Like the failures required to get to success are being eliminated because now we can prompt an AI to do it and manage it. It's, it's an interesting challenge societally to think about the opportunity for learning by doing and learning by making is being eliminated perhaps for a class of people, at least in the conventional workplace kind of apprenticeship model of, uh, on the job training.
[00:38:53] Leidy Klotz: Yeah.
[00:38:53] Jeremy Utley: Cognitively, especially.
[00:38:55] Leidy Klotz: You all have to turn this into a mantra. But yeah, I think the thing that I see, and the last thing I would want is people not to be using ai. Like when I talk to my students, no, you guys, you need to understand what this can do, but you also need to understand what you can do that it can't do.
And so it's like this engaging and but also being deliberate about, about how we're splitting up the tasks.
[00:39:16] Henrik Werdelin: So on the cheat sheet of your new book, one is to. Per the bike shed argument, try to atomize some of these bigger kind of decisions or problems that you have to solve. So they are easier for more palatable.
The rocks are smaller, if you like. What are some of the other things that, as you're talking to your students and you think they might not read your book, what is the thing that they, uh, that they should make sure they think of?
[00:39:44] Leidy Klotz: With the new, I mean, I think the space before screen is the first part and you know, the just getting en engaging, right?
Whatever it's gonna take to engage with your surroundings. Um, I think the next one is, you know, it's not so much the exact design. It's like having a say in the design. Like it feels good to have some level of control over your environment and that is, uh, that is something that they all have the opportunity to do.
Um,
[00:40:12] Henrik Werdelin: could you give an example of that?
[00:40:13] Leidy Klotz: Well, uh, so like open office versus closed office, right? There's like every 10 years there's a new article in the New Yorker that's arguing the opposite of what the one 10 years before about, which is better. It's like mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Of course, it depends on the details and the company and so on and so forth.
But I'd argue that what's more important than the office layout is whether people feel like they have a say in the office. Do people feel like they have some control over being in this space and over how this space works? Right? And so it's things like. Yeah, you can give them a, if they have an office that they can design, that's one thing.
If they have a, a cubicle that they're allowed to modify. So that's flexibility of the space, but also like the legibility of the space. You think about these offices where people come in and they're. If they don't know how to get to the shared rec room, or they feel like the shared rec room is off limits, then it's not serving its purpose.
So like making it flexible, making it legible so they can see how to use it. I think that is a, that's an example of where like agency is this thing that. Is so fundamental and should be the first consideration that we have in designing and making spaces, and yet we go to paint colors. Right. And because it's easier to think about.
[00:41:23] Henrik Werdelin: We, uh, when we did BarkBox, one of the things that I think we did well was we, I designed them as homes where you could work from, instead of basically offices
[00:41:33] Leidy Klotz: in the
[00:41:34] Henrik Werdelin: offices. 'cause I wanted it. So I, in each on the floors there was a huge kitchen
[00:41:39] Leidy Klotz: uhhuh,
[00:41:40] Henrik Werdelin: and that was because that's always where the cool kids hang, right?
But also it's such a natural way, place to kind of relax and kinda like turn off your way of, of thinking. And what we observed was that people really failed at home and it became a place where we didn't have to bribe people. For, you know, for the drinks because it was just a nice place to, to be. And so I, I always said it's easier to make a office, you know, a a, a kitchen or a home efficient than it is to make kind of like an, an office cozy.
Um, and obviously in Denmark we have this notion of huga, which is this kind of like, uh, oh, I
[00:42:20] Jeremy Utley: love huga,
[00:42:21] Henrik Werdelin: artificial created, uh, intimacy and it really works. Same thing, like people could bring their docs to the office. A normal office didn't have a place for dog and human to be together. Mm-hmm. And so we created these kind of sofa seating areas that was not sofa, but they were more like these boxes that kinda like sat around different places where you could cuddle up with your dog and there would be like a place where the leash could be and stuff like that.
[00:42:49] Leidy Klotz: Yeah.
[00:42:49] Henrik Werdelin: And so, I mean, like all the stuff you're saying super resonate. 'cause like I've seen the, the actual result of how you can affect culture by creating. A space that promotes a different type of, of feeling.
[00:43:02] Leidy Klotz: Yeah. And I mean, that's amazing. I, I'm writing an article for the Wall Street Journal now about that, and I, I'll have to look.
Are there pictures online of the
[00:43:10] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah, yeah,
[00:43:11] Leidy Klotz: yeah.
[00:43:11] Henrik Werdelin: You just serve BarkBox, BarkBox, uh, office. Then I'll look, come up.
[00:43:15] Leidy Klotz: And also, if you think about what's nice about a home, it's like, yeah, I control this. Like I can do what I want in this space. And, um, so that's, that's really cool. And, and. One of the other ways to kind of give them that agency is to force the agency opportunities, right?
So maybe you don't feel like moving the furniture around, but if you go into a kitchen, now all of a sudden you have to like search around, find the stuff, maybe you decide where to set your food, and all of a sudden you're interacting with the surroundings, which is. I mean, that's the ultimate, like hacking where you're, you're not just giving them a reminder, you're actually having them physically do it.
So that's, that's really neat.
[00:43:51] Jeremy Utley: Mm mm I feel like, like we should,
[00:43:52] Henrik Werdelin: last one, there's always three things
[00:43:53] Jeremy Utley: should probably,
[00:43:54] Henrik Werdelin: oh, but I want more.
[00:43:56] Jeremy Utley: You want three things?
[00:43:57] Leidy Klotz: You want three, you want three growth. I think the growth hack is like, we don't do a great job of moving amongst the spaces to which we have access.
Um, and so I think how can you. Explore spaces that are like beyond the edge of your comfort zone. Whether that's, you know, someplace that you don't go in your office, some new way to use your house. There's an example in my book that everybody seems to love is like, one of my friends, the Lees, they have four kids.
And at the time they did this, they were all, four of the kids were like under seven. So it was insane. And they, um, it's like your life, Jeremy, but they had a. So what they had done, they, I asked them how it was going. Like I asked you at the beginning of this conversation, Henrik, and they said, it's going great.
We've taken to eat dinner outside. And I'm like, what do you mean? And they're like, no, like outside is just the default for dinner all throughout the year. And they're like. It's like expanded our square footage. It's made it so that when the kids spill, we don't even care. It's made it so that when they get done eating, they can like run around and not disrupt everybody's dinner, it's quieter, blah, blah, blah.
It's so much better. And this was like a space that they had available to them and it just required them to like go a little bit outside of their boundaries and um, kind of fundamentally changed how they were living. And so if you can think about analogs to that, whether it's how you move through your day or whether it's like your personal space, just using.
Using spaces that you have available to you in different ways
[00:45:19] Henrik Werdelin: and I guess to you put a AI spin to it. As Jeremy were talking about and you were mentioning too, like this ability now that to talk to your agent is probably allow you to say, Hey, I have 30 minutes where I have to slip, think through something, I'll go for a walk and basically just put on Goggle BT or whatever, and then have a conversation as I'm going through the forest is probably useful.
[00:45:40] Leidy Klotz: Yeah, that's awesome. I, um, that's, uh, certainly. One of these amazing new capabilities that we have that we should totally take advantage of. And we, we process things differently that with, based on the spaces that we're in, right? So if you think about the things that you remember. They're often associated with a place, um, right.
So it's like, maybe it's a field trip from middle school just by taking you out of this familiar environment into a new environment. So you could even like align the walk with what you're hoping to do on the task, right? So if you wanna, yeah, if you wanna think of new ideas or you wanna remember this thing, then go somewhere new.
I do this with, with parenting, with, um. My son, if it's like an important conversation, I will talk to him about it in a, in any spot. Just hoping that
[00:46:25] Henrik Werdelin: he would, by now he's gonna be freaked out. Like he go like, dad, we haven't been here before. What are we gonna talk about?
[00:46:30] Leidy Klotz: Here comes the birds and the bees talk.
[00:46:32] Jeremy Utley: So lighty. So lighty. I'll, I'll give you a gift in closing. Um, okay. We, at the D school, we tell folks to take a wonder. Wonder, which is basically what you're saying. It's like, take a walk with your problem. When you take a walk with your problem, I borrowed this, the actual physical idea from Sister Corita Kent, who is the nun in charge of the School of the Immaculate Heart, this like radical art program.
And she would teach art students to make a finder, which is basically what, what's written on it, I'll tell you in a second. But basically it's a piece of cardboard with a hole through it. And they had to, as they walked around, they had to look at the world through the hole, and it basically constrains your vision.
And then she would give art assignments where, you know, like if I say, say I looked at the screen like this. My assignment is to draw only what I see here, but now make it 10 times bigger. Right? And then take this and, and actually look at my drawing and make another drawing, but only of what I see through this of my drawing.
So she would do stuff like that. Well, I basically borrowed that idea and said, Hey, if you have a problem you're trying to solve. One way to think outside of the box is to get outside of the box. So literally stand up, take your problem, and you can just say, how would insert the blank, do blank or solve blank.
And so. You go, Hey, we're trying to build trust. And you go on a walk around the neighborhood, you're like, and you see a UPS truck, and you're like, how does UPS build trust? Oh, brown, they have a color that signifies, you know, deliverability, right? And then you, and then you look at the playground and you go, how does a playground build trust?
Oh, the ground is soft. Okay, how, how, what bearing does that? But all of a sudden. By having a problem in mind and by constraining your vision, the world starts serving up solutions to you that when everything's available to you, actually you can't find. Right.
[00:48:23] Leidy Klotz: Yeah,
[00:48:25] Jeremy Utley: it's a fun one.
[00:48:26] Leidy Klotz: It is a fun, I, I, it's, I'm not, not saying anything 'cause it's not good.
I do that with my students in class. We, uh, I'd have a class on like sustainability in the built environment. It'll go outside and be like, okay, look at how would this leaf solve this problem? I don't have the box. That would be a better way to do it because it would, the artificial constraint actually makes it better in that case.
[00:48:45] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, yeah. Because you can't, you can't say, how would the world solve this problem? That's too big. And actually that's a really interesting, uh, uh, analog to ai. When you ask AI a question, you are saying, how would the internet answer? Right. When you, when you provide constraints, you're actually focusing, I don't want the internet to answer.
I want the leafs answer, or whatever it is. Mm-hmm. Which is kind of a cool full circle connection I hadn't thought of.
[00:49:12] Henrik Werdelin: That's awesome.
[00:49:13] Jeremy Utley: That's, thank you so much for spending time done. Lighty. Well done.
[00:49:16] Henrik Werdelin: Jeremy Audley,
[00:49:18] Jeremy Utley: Henrik of Lin. What do you think? Uh,
[00:49:21] Henrik Werdelin: as we. We talked about, like I had a good friend who passed recently and I think, you know, as we were talking off air on this, and I'm listening to this, like I, I am really a victim of my fascination of AI and its seductive nature and I, and so what I think really hit home for me was what I think is the task for at least myself, but I would imagine for a lot of other people of figuring out how do we.
How do we create an architectural environment around ourselves that allow us to have a balanced relationship with this magical technology, but still not have it suck us in for time, not have us, suck us in for laziness of thought, not having sucked in for biases that we have in the world that is encoded into the technology and all these different ones.
So, I mean, like. He was inspiring and had incredible energy, and I always kind of like pretty humbled by being able to have a conversation with somebody like that. But for me, actually more profound because it suddenly was an hour spend and the vocalization of this kind of feeling that I haven't expressed, which is, Hey, I need to probably start to create guardrails, uh, from my own behavior with ai.
So,
[00:50:43] Jeremy Utley: mm mm. Yeah. The notion of protecting ourselves against our, you know, base or impulses perhaps, or our, at least to, not to say base, but a very natural impulse to doing more. And I love your examples around having your agents check in with you, Hey, it's kind of getting close to bedtime. Are you sure you want me to do this to me?
Just to pay you a compliment? It sounds like you're already beginning to architect some of that environment, and I realize with your friend's passing, there's, there's, there's the additional kinda weight of. Thinking about this question, are we living right? And I think it's actually funeral or no funeral memorial or no memorial.
We're all going to face that day. Our lives will come to an end and thinking, are we spending our time? A way that we will be proud of, I think is a really important question. And I thought the example of, you know, your date night ritual with your wife, it's, could you be more productive? Probably. Could the world get more startups out of Henrik if he spent his Friday nights, uh, supporting entrepreneurs?
Probably. But it almost makes me wonder what is Henrik for? You know, just to put it, put it to you, right. One thing is Yeah, sure. To facilitate and, and to unleash entrepreneurship. But I think another is to be a husband to your wife. And you have to, uh, in an age where it's so easy to keep commissioning agents, to build more startups, to say one thing a, an agent cannot do is be husband to my wife.
[00:52:16] Leidy Klotz: Mm-hmm.
[00:52:17] Jeremy Utley: How do I protect that, which is irreducibly Mine, I think is a question on everybody's minds. That
[00:52:23] Henrik Werdelin: resonated a lot. I mean, like we, I was making the joke with my wife the other day 'cause like I had installed Oum Claw and I was excited about it and I called my agent Iki and then I was lying in bed before bedtime and I was like, you know, hammering away on my phone talking to Iggy and she goes, you'd rather wanna talk to Iki right now than you wanna talk to me.
And I was like, ki kind of, uh, and you know, it was a joke right? But like also horrible because obviously this kind of synthetic thing that I could talk to at any time. So I, I do think it is very important. And I do also reminded of, um, so at, at autos, the startup that I do that help entrepreneurs, we are building thousands and thousands of, of startups.
And the other day I had a journalist from The Economist Beyond, and we went through. Um, this whole process and we built his startup and we started to run ads and had the first potential customers come in and in the middle of it, he goes, yeah, I can see how this could be a business, but I don't wanna make this.
[00:53:21] Jeremy Utley: Hmm.
[00:53:22] Henrik Werdelin: And so I think, you know, and I, I alluded to also in the conversation, I do think that we are this interesting point where we have to articulate our principles and our narratives because. We have to be able to tell it to the bot so it can help us become a better version of what we would, you know, the, the, the version that we'd like to be had this phrase need ask for a phrase called, um, your narrative is your source code.
And I do think that if we as humans have not necessarily had to define our source code, our being, our values, because we never had anybody that could help us as fast and could basically. Move us forward as fast as this technology. And I really think that without taking stock of, would I want to build this startup?
Is this a startup for me? Or would I like to write this email in this way? Or would I like to push forward this idea, whatever it is. And then, you know, we will, we'll go wherever the model will take us instead of where we would like it to go.
[00:54:26] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. Uh, knowing oneself has never been more important. I love actually the mechanism of a mantra or a motto, something that's, you know, pithy, repeatable, almost sing-songy in quality.
I think as we think about being parents, having mantras like the space before screen, I love that as a mantra. Love that. I love default dead. I love structures, defined outcomes. I think it's important that we codify these and, and they can't be universal values or else they, they're already in the model.
They have to be particular. They have to have unique resonance with you personally, your family, and that's what, in the entrepreneurial space, you probably call founder market fit or something, right? Mm-hmm. But personally, it's actually, it's about alignment.
[00:55:12] Henrik Werdelin: Hmm.
[00:55:12] Jeremy Utley: And growing in alignment with our values, which I, I love.
I, one other thing I wanna highlight from the conversation is this idea of system instructions or custom instructions to tell the model or to, to, to invite the model's assistance. In helping you think in the way you want to think.
[00:55:32] Leidy Klotz: Mm-hmm.
[00:55:33] Jeremy Utley: If you don't wanna fall subject to the addition bias, why not tell the model that you actually wanna look for opportunities to subtract?
We have an amazing, uh, thought partner now that can help us stay honest to, it's too late to be deploying another agent right now, Henry. And if we'll take the time to actually codify that and instruct a model, we actually get help being more of who we want, which I think is quite cool.
[00:55:59] Henrik Werdelin: It's kind of a subtle thing, right?
But I think when you talk about custom instructions, I think a mental model go to, we should instruct the AI to be in a specific way. It's where the object is the AI. But as we were realizing, of course, AI is more like electricity. It's a foundational technology. It's not like the web. So it's not like I used to have a magazine, now I'm gonna make a magazine online.
And so I think the reframe is really, the instruction is ironically not about the bot, it's about me. And so I have to basically look at it as a mirror and saying, when I instruct you to do stuff, what? What do I look like? I dunno. For me it sounds like a pretty profound reframe. I know it's, it's subtle, it's huge.
Uh, but I do actually think that most of us are snuff thought in this way.
[00:56:48] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. I like that Odysseus framing of knowing my own self. Therefore, how am I instructing you to behave? I think is kind of what's interesting is think about the Iliad, I mean is, is it the Iliad or the Odyssey? One of the two. I don't even know.
But it's a, it's kind of an ancient story, and you go of all the paradigms to be drawing upon. Now we're drawing upon these ancient stories. It's because the things that have been true about us are even more true and even more amplified now that we have this mirror of all of human knowledge can be reflected back to us.
What do I want of that? What do I wanna be protected from? What's my unique, you know, constraint that I'm putting on it, so to speak.
[00:57:30] Henrik Werdelin: Anything else we should add from this conversation? Thoughts?
[00:57:35] Jeremy Utley: I liked hearing about voice. Again, I really liked, uh, lighty's, characterization of Danish, or actually you said this, we talked about subtract at the beginning.
You said done is when you can't take more away. Yeah. I, I think that is a, that's a principle that could, that could be widely relevant to many listeners. Done isn't when you can't add anything more, it's when you can't take anything away.
[00:57:59] Henrik Werdelin: There's a link I should show on the show note. It's a, uh, clip from the TV show Bear, the, um, the chef show.
And there's this one scene that I send to my design teams all the time, which is basically where he comes in and he's being taught something. He basically gets yelled at and then he writes on a note, it's just subtract, and then he puts it down there and it is such a beautiful scene. I'll, I'll, I'll share it with you and, and with the, the listeners also.
[00:58:29] Jeremy Utley: Please do hit the link there if you enjoy it. And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the other link, which is write a review or leave five stars. Six, if six stars are available. Go ahead and hit that six star. We appreciate it. End
[00:58:42] Henrik Werdelin: with that. Bye-bye.
[00:58:44] Jeremy Utley: Bye-bye.