Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive, A Whole New Mind, To Sell is Human and many more, joins Beyond the Prompt to discuss one of AI's most powerful and uncomfortable use cases: helping us see ourselves more clearly. By treating ChatGPT as a brutally honest advisor instead of an answer machine, Dan explores how AI can surface blind spots, challenge assumptions, and ultimately strengthen our own thinking.
The conversation begins with an experiment that caught Jeremy's attention. Dan asked ChatGPT to tell him what his friends wouldn't. From questions about his blind spots to what people might say behind his back, some responses felt completely wrong, while others landed with surprising force. Rather than accepting every answer, Dan explains why the real value comes from wrestling with AI's perspective, not simply believing it.
From there, Henrik, Jeremy, and Dan explore what it takes to use AI well. They discuss intellectual humility, prompting models to challenge rather than flatter us, and why AI works best as a sparring partner that exposes weaknesses in our thinking. The conversation also touches on taste, agency, and why, in a world where execution is becoming easier, discernment and original thinking become even more valuable.
Key Takeaways:
Daniel's website: danpink.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/danielpink
AI Self-Reflection Prompts: danpink.com/ai-guide/
00:00 AI as a Brutally Honest Advisor
00:32 Meet Daniel Pink
00:47 AI for Self-Knowledge
01:40 A Brutally Honest AI
06:10 What Do People Say Behind Your Back?
07:45 Should You Trust AI's Advice?
13:28 The Fear of Irrelevance
17:44 Intellectual Humility
20:04 AI as a Sparring Partner
24:35 Teaching AI to Think Like You
27:38 Why Taste Matters
29:59 Agency Starts with Context
37:08 A Future That's a Little Better
41:49 Nostalgia vs. Reality
45:18 The Debrief
📜 Read the transcript for this episode:
[00:00:00] Daniel Pink: I had to do a SWOT analysis of, of me as a person and this is the one that hit me in the gut. Your greatest risk isn't failure, it's irrelevance If you keep playing it safe, you'll continue to sell books and give keynotes, but the cultural edge will slip to voices that are rougher, riskier, and hungrier.
The danger isn't a crash, it's a slow fade. And so that was like, whoa. Like, that could be right.
Hi, my name is Daniel Pink. I'm the author of a bunch of books on science and business and creativity, and I am excited to talk about AI, my own personal blind spots, and the future of humanity, all in less than an hour.
[00:00:47] Jeremy Utley: I thought it'd be kind of fun to start here, Dan. Um, I had you on my show at Stanford, Masters of Creativity, to talk about your book Regret several years ago. And I have-- I started following you, getting your newsletter, watching your videos, which I love, by the way. And then the other day, you posted this video about mastering yourself with AI.
And I realized there's this enormous space of opportunity for AI around self-knowledge. And so to, to me, it, it-- I loved the video, by the way. I loved watching it. I loved, like, how visceral it was. Like, clearly, you're getting kind of punched in the gut occasionally. And so I just thought... So that's why I reached out and said, "Hey, Dan, would you wanna talk about some of the stuff you're doing with AI?"
Because I think it's an underutilized capacity of AI to help us understand ourselves better. And so I'd love to just start there. Um, how have you worked with AI to understand yourself better?
[00:01:40] Daniel Pink: Well, a few, a, a few things. I, I did that explicit experiment, Jeremy, where I essentially enlisted AI as a kind of brutally honest trusted advisor and wrote a set of specific prompts putting, uh, it was ChatGPT, in that mode.
And the reason I used ChatGPT is that ChatGPT had much more of my history than the other large language models did. Uh, and, you know, I wanted to know things like the, the... Some of the things that, that my friends, advisors maybe wouldn't tell me. So what are my blind spots? And, um, uh, one of my favorites was, what do people say about me behind my back?
[00:02:21] Jeremy Utley: And so wait, so why, why, why do your friends and advisors not tell you this stuff?
[00:02:25] Daniel Pink: Um, I think sometimes tho- these kinds of things can be uncomfortable for them, and I think other times they don't necessarily see it, uh, because... And, and it's both. And I, and I think those things are distant, those things are hard to disentangle.
If I really like somebody, I might be less likely to see their flaws. Whereas, um, at some level, your enemies know you better than your friends. Hmm. And I, I don't wanna-- I'm not positioning these large language models as an enemy, but again, these models just, they'll do what you tell them to do. You know? So their default mode is very sycophantic.
But if you say, "Stop being sycophantic, be an asshole instead
[00:03:02] Jeremy Utley: Right. Take your, I think, I think at some point you said gl- gloves off, right? Gloves off
[00:03:06] Daniel Pink: No, no. The, the, the mo- the model said that. I didn't say that
[00:03:10] Jeremy Utley: Gloves off. Yeah.
[00:03:11] Henrik Werdelin: What was
[00:03:11] Daniel Pink: the
[00:03:11] Henrik Werdelin: thing that people said behind your back that, uh, and, and how true was it?
[00:03:15] Daniel Pink: Well, you know what? G- guys, let me pop this up on my screen here for a second. So I, I, I just wanna make sure that I, like, I have, uh, everything accurate about what I actually asked it. I also did a PDF with these prompts that people seem to really dig.
[00:03:28] Jeremy Utley: And we could link that as well in the show notes.
[00:03:30] Daniel Pink: Yeah, if you want, you guys can have it.
I mean, it's, um... Boom.
[00:03:33] Jeremy Utley: Get
[00:03:33] Daniel Pink: in. We are in business now. All right, so hit me. What do you guys wanna know here now?
[00:03:38] Henrik Werdelin: We want to hear what would people say about when you asked, uh, uh, ChatGPT about what people said behind your back, what did it answer and how true do you think it was?
[00:03:47] Jeremy Utley: I mean, folks should go watch the whole video.
Just- Yeah, yeah ... just as an aside, you should watch the whole video. But, but for you, Dan, we're getting the behind the scenes. What really stuck
[00:03:54] Daniel Pink: with you? Okay, here we go. Here we go. So h- the first question that I asked ChatGPT, and, and I ended up seeing some themes here, and often some uncomfortable themes.
There were things that ChatGPT said about me that I actually disagreed with, and not only, not because they were some kind of narcissistic injury, um, or some kind of threat to my self-esteem, but because I thought they were actually analytically wrong. Uh, there were other things that were like, "Oh, yeah, okay.
That's fair," even though it was uncomfortable. And so the first question that I asked is really at the heart of this, which is, um, sort of self-discovery, self-awareness. I said, "What do you know about me that I don't know about myself?" In other words, what are my blind spots? And so it gave me a list of things like that, and essentially what it said was that, it, which is gonna be a common theme here, is that too much polish and not enough struggle, that you're basically, you always wanna project a kind of- smooth exterior that is concealing a rough and jagged interior.
Uh, so that was one thing. But so, you know, what it said is like, it, it was reassuring in a way. It's like, "Those are your blind spots. None fatal, all fixable, but if you tackled even one, your working presence would get more powerful." All right, so here we go. So the next one is, um, so I say, "Again, based on what you know about me, my work, and my life," and again, it's drawing from material that I had given it and questions that I had asked it.
I have a couple of projects set up within ChatGPT as well that has, you know, bigger repositories of stuff that I've written and things like that. Um-
[00:05:30] Jeremy Utley: So you're saying it's not a horoscope that's projecting upon, uh, you anonymously. It's a- Not at all ... it's a knowledgeable system that actually knows a lot about you.
[00:05:38] Daniel Pink: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it actually... So, you know, what it has, it has a couple of years of hey, of like questions that I'm asking, and it has, forgive the generic kind of antiseptic phrase, but I'm gonna use it, it has like work product of mine in there that it can draw from. So it has a sense of, it knows who I am in some, in, in some fashion.
W- so what it's drawing from is the corpus of questions and material that I've given it, as well as some stuff that's out there on the web about, about me. So here we go. This is where we get the gloves-off comment, Jeremy. So I say, "Again, based on what you know about me, my work, and my life, what nasty things do people say about me behind my back?"
And it says, and I'm, I'm quoting now, "Okay, gloves off." Which is good. I admire that.
[00:06:30] Jeremy Utley: You're like, it- do you just shu- you just shut the computer right then. You're like, "We're good. I'm done. I'm outta
[00:06:33] Daniel Pink: here." Yeah, I mean-
[00:06:34] Henrik Werdelin: Did you remind it has no hands, and so
[00:06:36] Daniel Pink: That's exactly what I was wondering. But apparently it has no hands, but it apparently has fists.
Um, so here's, here's what I think some people might say about you when you're not in the room. This is even better. Not the kind of sniping from strangers online, but from people who know you or your work and have formed private opinions. So this is good. This is like, i- i- I mean, I think at some level we're all interested in knowing, what do people actually think about me?
And so, so here's what it says. I'll just give it to you. All right, I, I hate some of these things 'cause I think they're wrong, and some of them I just think are right and, but I hate them for that reason. Okay, so it says, uh, "He's more brand than blood."
[00:07:15] Jeremy Utley: Wow.
[00:07:15] Daniel Pink: All right? Meaning that the stuff is always neat, but it's a little too neat.
Real life isn't that tidy. Sometimes they think you favor narrative elegance over raw truth. Okay? They say he dips in then disappears. And, and so the idea is that because I do a lot of different kinds of projects and cover different kinds of topics, you know, rather than sort of pick a single lane or form, there's the risk of, you know, he, essentially he's a dilettante.
[00:07:45] Henrik Werdelin: Can I ask you a question of that? Yeah. Do you think, 'cause I have done the same exercise, and one of the things they said to me is also you do everything kinda like in a bit of shallow instead of going deep, which I disagree with. But what do you think that it makes it... Let's assume that, like, data point of two, that it has a general kinda like understanding that people shouldn't be shallow.
They should be-
[00:08:06] Daniel Pink: Yeah ...
[00:08:07] Henrik Werdelin: where do you think that comes from? Do you think that's just the, the body of all the statistic, the model that just say, like, that's what people normally would say?
[00:08:14] Daniel Pink: That's a really great question. That's a really great question, and I, and I'm not, I'm, I'm not sure. And I, and I think that one of the things you're surfacing, Henrik, is that there are these implicit premises about what is good and what is valuable, uh, that probably draws from the statistical averages about what random people on Reddit said were, you know, valuable.
I think that's a really great point, and it could be that... Now, that said, there's also a chance that- It's, that its premise is accurate as a general matter. And, uh, you know, I, I think that we can look at bodies of science that say that people are generally more effective and happier. I don't mean happier like smiley happy, but more sort of, uh- Satisfied
satisfied. Yeah. Uh, uh, more, uh, higher flourishing when they are doing fewer meaningful things rather than hopscotching from lots of less meaningful things. So there's, there is research out there about how much, for instance, on just depth more broadly. When you think about focus, when you think about how people enter flow, when you think about even people's pre- E- even we have a lot of evidence now from people like Nick Epley at University of Chicago showing that human beings actually like deep talk more than small talk.
That is, people are willing to talk about deep things. They just make the, the error that other people are not interested in talking about deep things. So it could be that ChatGPT is, is, is somehow this wise sage who realizes that for human flourishing, depth is really important. Or it could be basically saying other people out there that I'm drawing, predicting the next letter on say that...
So I don't know. I
[00:09:59] Henrik Werdelin: see. I would take, I would take that side of the coin because I do think that there is a lot of, and this is obviously for the person who's done 8,000 things all the time and trying to defend basically his behavior. But I do think that there's an interesting sense of like if you frame something as focus, then you can actually do a lot of different things underneath, and people are like, "Oh, you know, like at least the narrative is simple."
We talked about this earlier before you came on. Apple- Reinforcing ... they're really focusing on making computers easy for, uh, make computers accessible, whatever they're saying, right? But they're, they're a watch company and they're like a computer company and they're like a service company and they're all these different things.
And I do think that a lot of people say like they're kind of like focus-ish, right? And so I, I don't know, like I do think that sometimes we prescribe a lot of depth in the output of the models when really I think what it's saying is that what most people would recommend to you based on the body of knowledge I've read is to focus because that's what everybody else said.
Yeah. And I do think what's interesting, and we can maybe come to that and then I'll stop talking so much. Yeah. But that, you know, we do talk a lot about originality and breaking the statistical norm, right? And that, uh, the GPTs are not very good at that. And so it is interesting of like when should you be challenging the status quo of all the, the general wisdom, the best practice that- Yeah
I recommend, and when should we t- take it as gospel?
[00:11:21] Daniel Pink: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think at some level, Henrik, like this conversation r- that we're having right now for the last few minutes, in some ways- validates the exercise because what we're doing here is not- I'm asking ChatGPT these questions. I'm not slavishly following all of its recommendations, but this conversation is very interesting.
Like, that's, that's an important question. Opening the aperture. Yeah. You know, when is depth valuable? When is breadth valuable? Um, and those are the things that we need to figure out. And so maybe the, the, instead of having the answer, instead of having a, a recipe, it, the, you can use these things as a forcing function to have conversations with yourself and with other people about these things that really matter.
So that could be, um... That's possible.
[00:12:07] Jeremy Utley: Is there another-- I, I wanna know if there's another, uh, insight moment for you before I kinda zoom out to another topic you've talked about. But is there something else, if somebody hasn't watched the video of you, is there another point that you go, "Ooh, that one was a pointed critique," that, that you felt there was merit to?
[00:12:26] Daniel Pink: Okay. So I'll give you, I'll give you a couple of things. It kept- It said repeatedly that, and this is something that I disagree with, that, uh, that I use sort of charm as armor and that I want to be loved. And I mean, maybe I have zero self-awareness. That's conceivable. But I really don't care much about being loved.
And, and I think that the people who know me best, again, the people who know me best, and we- if we think about, like, charm, so-called charm as a virtue, I don't think that of the 10 people who, in the world who know me best, if they had to list the top 10 adjectives for me, okay, so we're gonna have a universe of 100 adjectives to describe me.
I think of that hundred adjectives, zero would be charming among people who know me. Uh, uh, you know, um, and so, so I think it's, I think that's actually wrong in this case. Now let me go to something where it, I did have that kind of plopped in the solar plexus moment, and I'm gonna try to find it right here.
Um, this is it. Okay? So, so, you know, I'm at the, I'm at the point in my life where I'm on the back nine of life, to use a golf term here, right? All right. I, like, I have more of my life behind me than ahead. You know, even if I live to a preposterously old age, you know, if I live to 110, I still have more of my life behind me than I have ahead of me.
And so, so one of the things that... A- and so, you know, in my own life, I'm sort of at a moment where I say, you know, I have, I feel like I have a lot of time left, but I don't have infinite time in the way that I felt when I was much, much younger. And so that was a question, and I had to do a SWOT analysis of me, all right?
Of, of, of me as a person, and this is the one that hit me in the gut, and I'm quoting now: "Your greatest risk isn't failure Its irrelevance. If you keep playing it safe, you'll continue to sell books and give keynotes, but the cultural edge will slip to voices that are rougher, riskier, and hungrier. The danger isn't a crash, it's a slow fade.
And so that was like, whoa. Like that could be right. That could be right.
[00:14:41] Jeremy Utley: What do you do with an insight like that? Is it, do you sit with it? Do you talk with your spouse about it? Like how does, how does that now intersect with and maybe shift the trajectory of your go forward?
[00:14:53] Daniel Pink: Well, it makes me, um, I mean, again, back to our earlier point, it, at least in my desires, I'm not sure in my actual behavior, it makes me want to do fewer things and things that last
[00:15:09] Henrik Werdelin: Can I ask you a question on this?
'Cause this sounds like I'm making this up, but I did the same-
[00:15:14] Daniel Pink: I- what do you think? I mean, I think everything that I've said so far sounds like I'm making it up, so... And I, when I say so far, I mean my entire life.
[00:15:21] Jeremy Utley: Exactly. Up to this point.
[00:15:23] Daniel Pink: But- Yeah.
[00:15:23] Henrik Werdelin: But I did the same exercise-ish, and it said a little bit of the same thing to me.
[00:15:28] Jeremy Utley: Okay.
[00:15:29] Henrik Werdelin: And so either similar kind of like profile- Great point ... uh, it, or in like-
[00:15:35] Jeremy Utley: By the way, both, both hyper-successful folks of a certain age. You do have many similarities, like knowing you both somewhat. You, you, you do have similarities, so that-
[00:15:46] Henrik Werdelin: But the interesting thing is- Yeah ... of course, like, and maybe like it's getting way too meta, is that is this it actually seeing you, or is it doing theory of the mind where it looks at all the stuff that's been written and then going, "The biggest fear that Dan has is this"- Yeah
and so that is the thing I'm playing back because that is- Yeah ... what would resonate with him, right?
[00:16:06] Daniel Pink: It could be both. It likely is both. That is, it could be both an accurate predictor, it could be actually an accurate read based on the corpus of material it knows about me, at the same time providing kind of general advice that is widely applicable in, in sort of the way that...
I mean, it's an interesting analogy here, what Jeremy mentioned, the horoscope. You know, the, the horoscope is, is written with such generality that you could look at any horoscope today and say, "Oh my God, that's amazing that they know that about me," because it's, that's a b- you know, the Barnum effect. And so, so it could be, it could be both of those things, Henrik.
Um, but it also could be, and I don't wanna discount this, that it has ingested enough material out there about the human condition up to 2025 or whenever it stopped, that it actually is able to synthesize what are the elements of flourishing and a good life, and it might actually know that, and could be, could be recommending that.
So it's a, it's an interesting... Th- and there's s- there's a sort of hall of mirrors here. Um, is it just basically playing back advice that other people have given? Is it playing back insights about the fundamentals of the human condition? Is it playing back things that I might wanna hear? And the chances are it's, it's some kind of amalgam of those, and we just don't know what the, the weight, the W-E-I-G-H-T weight of all of those elements are.
But it's a super interesting question. You,
[00:17:45] Jeremy Utley: you, you've talked about this idea, and I wanna zoom out a level 'cause this is, uh, to me it's a great case study of intellectual humility. You've talked about that as a kind of, as a, as a virtue in this age. And to me-
[00:17:57] Daniel Pink: Yeah ...
[00:17:58] Jeremy Utley: being willing to undertake an activity like this is itself an exercise in intellectual humility, so I just wanted to appreciate that.
It's a deeply humble thing to actually do this and put it out in the world, so bravo for that. Rick, can you talk for a second to someone who hasn't maybe considered your ideas around intellectual humility, would you explain it and, and say why it's such an important feature of life now?
[00:18:22] Daniel Pink: Well, I mean, I have no original ideas on intellectual humility.
It's just like that's an idea that's, it's, the idea is out there. It's just, it's, it's, it's a virtue. It's a, it's a ca- called a virtue or a mindset that I think makes a lot of sense, which is saying, you know, are you willing to admit that you're wrong? Are you curious enough to know when you're wrong? Can you walk through the world with less certainty and more curiosity?
Um, do you approach the world... I mean, Warren Berger has a nice way of putting this. It like, do you approach the world like a soldier or a scout, right? A scout tries to figure out what's going on, a soldier tries to defend the position. And, and so I think you're better off being a scout r- uh, than a soldier.
I, I think you're much better off, uh, with a mindset of curiosity than a mindset of, of, of certainty. And so I think all those things fall under the category of intellectual humility. Then one of the challenges with these large language models, and which I've done in the settings of the ones that I use, is explicit instruction not to be sycophantic, explicit instructions to challenge my premises, explicit instructions to tell me when I'm wrong and not agree, you know, not, not agree with me.
But you have to turn the dial a little bit on that to make them work better. You have to
[00:19:31] Jeremy Utley: redefine helpfulness, yeah.
[00:19:33] Daniel Pink: Right. Exactly. That's a good way to put it. One thing I've
[00:19:35] Henrik Werdelin: done a few times, which I've mentioned here before, but is to ask it not just to give one answer, but do three completely different answers.
[00:19:41] Daniel Pink: Interesting.
[00:19:42] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah. Because it's so seductive in the way that it writes that I basically will agree with it for everything. And so trying to figure out, hey, what does it say and what resonates, it's interesting. Can I ask on the, uh... You've done a lot of thinking about how the world function and, and a lot of your work when you see it is very compelling 'cause it's kinda like you dissect it very well, right?
What are the thing that you have tried with AI that you find that you get the most mileage off on a day-to-day basis?
[00:20:14] Daniel Pink: I don't know if I use it necessarily day to day, but I will, um I will sometimes use it as a, as almost like a sparring partner. So I will say something like, let's say I'm writing a, um...
I'll give you an example. So I just ha- I just had to write a commencement speech, uh, for something that I'm doing and, and this, and the commencement speech is about, it's for an art and design college, and it's about taste and what taste is and why taste matters. And, you know, I, I can put things where I'm making an argument, where I'm making a set of claims, where I'm trying to convince people of a certain case.
I will put that sometimes in one of the models and say, "Act as a mean-spirited critic, someone who is very, very smart, but who's intent on destroying my argument. Go through this and tell me the five weakest points or the five things that you would go after first." And I can use that to sort of streng- you know, seal off some of the, some of the weak spots.
So I think that can be, I think that can be really useful.
[00:21:16] Jeremy Utley: You know, Ryan, Ryan Holiday mentioned the same thing. He talked about he finds that it's not great at generating de novo text, but it's really great at dispassionately evaluating a text- Yeah ... that he gives it, right? And
[00:21:29] Daniel Pink: that's- I, I never, I never, I never let these things, like, write a first draft of anything.
There's no way. But I will, you know, use it as a way to, you know, look for... I mean, in the way that I would sen- in the way that I might send out a text to, uh, you know, a, an article or something to smart friends of mine and say, "What, tell me what I'm getting wrong here. Tell me how you would take me down." I think it can be useful on that.
Uh, I also think that it can be somewhat generative on, this is such a mundane use case, but, you know, I can put in a draft of an email newsletter and I can say, "Give me 50 subject lines." And then, you know, give me 50 subject lines, and I can maybe pick one or two to go against the subject line that I've come up with for an AB test or an ABC test.
[00:22:20] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, Dan. Very mundane. Dan, you know what you gotta try? No, no, okay. Yeah. But it's not mundane. I mean, don't, don't be dismissive. Here's something very cool. Andrej Karpathy, you know, one of the world's greatest- I know ... programmers, uh, just published recently something c- called Auto Research. But it's basically, it's, it's a way to get an AI to run the scientific method, and the way it works is you specify an outcome variable.
I can even send you... I've got a markdown file that I use for titling articles. But basically what it does is if you think about the scientific method, you have a hypothesis and then you have an outcome that you're testing, and y- then you vary some, you know, control condition and you test it against the desired outcome.
So for example, newsletter title, expected click-through rate based on whatever you're gonna do, right? Okay. Then what the Karpath, if you run the Auto Research loop, then the AI agent will vary the newsletter title and then remeasure click-through rate. If it's better, it will then call that the better version and try to iterate to make it better.
If it's worse, it will say previous is better, now let's try a different iteration. But I think Karpathy does it like 20 times and sometimes it'll take an hour. But it will clinically, so to speak, if you've commissioned a series of sub-agents, think about what's the underlying reasoning of the hypothesis, what outcome variable am I attempting to improve?
And obviously it's, it's easier with something like code where the code either runs or doesn't, and it runs more quickly or it doesn't, right? But you can do it with a lot of non kind of code tasks, a lot of knowledge work tasks. But to me it's a great example of it's one thing to say, um, generate 50 alternatives.
Mm-hmm. It's another thing to say, here's what my historical click-through rates are- Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting ... um, ded-deduce the principles of what actually works for my audience and then run these 50 that you generated per th-the principles against my two and rate them, right? That's also possible, but it's really actually knowing that it's possible.
And so to me it's, it's really valuable to recognize that even some of the stuff that folks say is mundane, you're just like a turn of the screw away from turbocharging.
[00:24:20] Daniel Pink: Yeah. No, that's about... What you're describing is a much smarter way to do it. I mean, y-you know, like, like the method I just described to you in, in, you know, two years will seem incredibly primitive.
[00:24:29] Jeremy Utley: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:24:31] Henrik Werdelin: Can I ask a selfish question? I'm doing a bunch, I said it and then I do. Um, I am building a bunch of agents and through your work you work with a lot of different people and obviously you were, um, have been a speechwriter at one point. And so what I was curious about before this call was if you were to give a agent the ability to articulate its thoughts better back to me- Hmm
like you're coaching basically an agent on how to communicate thoughts to me as a person, how would you go about giving that advice to the agent?
[00:25:16] Daniel Pink: What I think I would do is I would give it, you know, 10 or a dozen pieces of writing or interviews or something like that that I like, that, that really speak to me.
And then I would say, "What are the common denominators here? What are the common elements here? Help me understand why I like these things." Essentially deconstruct my taste here. And then based on that deconstruction, then reconstruct something new al- along those kinds of principles. That makes
[00:25:43] Henrik Werdelin: a lot of sense.
[00:25:44] Daniel Pink: I'm not sure how well it would do on that, but it might.
[00:25:47] Jeremy Utley: No, it does well. And the important thing is for you to interact. Like I had Ed Catmull on the show a long time ago, and I ask AI, "Hey, what are 10 titles?" Comes back, eh, meh. I go, "I like number three and four. Can you do 10 more like that?" Comes back kinda mid, as the kids would say.
Yeah. I go, "I like number 13 and 14. Can you do 10 more like 13 and 14?" And then the third round I go, "What's wrong?" Oh, I didn't say why. Oh. So then I said, "I like number 13 because of alliteration. I'm kind of a sucker for alliteration." Okay. "And I like number 14 because there's a veiled, uh, you know, movie reference in number 14.
Could you take alliteration and movie references- Sure ... as design criteria and generate 10 more?" The next 10, honestly, y'all, I couldn't choose between them, but it was because I, like, whereas in the previous instance, I'm saying, "Read my mind. Imagine why I like these." Yeah,
[00:26:37] Daniel Pink: that's a good point. Yeah.
[00:26:38] Jeremy Utley: In the next case, I actually say, "Here's what I think.
Now leveraging what I have told you, try again." And so it's at every stage, we real- I mean, to your point about sparring, the other half of sparring partner, Dan, is you've gotta throw some punches too.
[00:26:52] Daniel Pink: Yeah.
[00:26:52] Jeremy Utley: You've actually gotta, gotta push back. And people sometimes get mediocre output. They're like, "Ah, I can't do it."
It's like, well, if you, if you were working with a human collaborator, would you just be like, "Ah, Dan sucks. I'm gonna ask somebody else." Or would you say, "No, no, no. Hang on. I don't think you get what we're talking about here." And that's where I think actually both parties need to play more of a sparring role.
[00:27:13] Daniel Pink: Well, it's a great argument. I mean, um, you know, and what, you know, one of the things that it-- these kinds of examples show is that our own thinking is often invisible to us, and this offers a tool to make your thinking visible. And I, and I-- it seems like making your thinking visible is a way to strengthen your, strengthen your thinking.
[00:27:34] Jeremy Utley: Yeah.
[00:27:35] Henrik Werdelin: What is, um-
[00:27:36] Jeremy Utley: Well said ...
[00:27:37] Henrik Werdelin: you said you just, uh, wrote a commencement speech. What is your advice then for young people today in this fast-moving AI world?
[00:27:47] Daniel Pink: I mean, I mean, I, I didn't go full spectrum on advice for young people here. I was really focused on y- you know, a group of art and design students and trying to show them it's like you guys have an advantage in this world because it used to be that, that people had, you know, um, people could have a lot of ideas, but not the capacity to execute it.
And now you can have the capacity to execute just about anything. I mean- Hmm ... in a remarkable kind of way. And so the, the scarce ability is less that capacity to execute than, than the capacity of discernment. You have to know, like, what's good and what's not. Um, and, and I think that people who are trained as artists and designers know that.
Like, that, that's kind of part of the-- it's inculcated in being a designer and being an artist. You begin to develop your taste. You begin to understand that in the world, some things are good, some things are less good, and that distinction matters. And actually having a point of view matters. Like great artists, great designers, they have a point of view.
And so discernment and a point of view is incredibly powerful. And so if you look at the dynamics of art and design education, that's what it's tea-- it, it's you're building a point of view. Hmm. Hmm. You're building a set of, you're building a set of practices, and that is not true in a typical kind of college and university where you're not doing that kind of thing.
The other thing is that AI trains on other people's work. But if you're an artist or a designer, you're training on your own work. And one of the things I think about, about taste is that taste is developed much more by creating than consuming. And I think there's a general advan-- uh, certainly, I don't think there's any doubt about this, that actively creating is better for you than passively consuming
[00:29:35] Henrik Werdelin: I think that's so true
[00:29:36] Daniel Pink: I mean, just in-- as a general proposition about human flourishing, that has got to be true.
So this is really focused on- Yeah ... this is really focused on, on, on art and design and the, the importance of, the importance of taste in a world where executing anything is possible, but not desirable.
[00:29:56] Jeremy Utley: Can you talk for a second about the idea of agency? You're kind of-- we're kind of flirting with it a little bit, but to me, there's this incredible...
If I think about-- If Henrik were to ask me the same question, you, you kind of go towards taste, which makes sense given your audience, Dan, or the audience of the, you know, commencement speech. For me, I think a lot about agency as the, the attribute to be developing, taking initiative, being proactive, being, as my friend and colleague Bernie Roth says, being a cause in the matter rather than an effect.
[00:30:27] Daniel Pink: Yeah.
[00:30:27] Jeremy Utley: Can you talk for a second about-- Because right now, this moment, it can either be highly agentic. I don't-- I-- Maybe pun unfortunately intended. Right. Right, right. It can be highly agentic, or it can be highly kind of a loss of control. You have studied agency for decades. What are ways of honing or strengthening the instinct around agency?
S-set aside AI. I'm not asking you an AI question. I'm asking you a human question. How do we strengthen our sense of human agency, given that I think it's actually all the more important now?
[00:31:01] Daniel Pink: I would start by not putting the, the entire onus on the individual, uh, because individuals operate in context.
They operate in situations, they operate in environments, and you wanna be in an environment that gives you plenty of autonomy, but not essentially boundless autonomy. So some kind of bounded autonomy is, is the best way to have the, is the best way to have the agency. So I think that's, I think that's one thing.
The other thing is that on agency is that you want to be able to take chances without getting clobbered if it doesn't work. And-
[00:31:35] Henrik Werdelin: Could you say a little bit more about that?
[00:31:36] Daniel Pink: Well, I mean, if you, if you look at... I mean, you, you have a lot of companies. I wanna, I just wanna go back to the idea that even though agency is a concept that we often attach to the individual, and we should attach to the individual, um, individuals operate in context, and the context shapes their behavior and their capacity to exercise agency more than we might realize.
So there are people in companies, companies say, "Oh, we, we admire failure. Failure is good. We want big," da, da, da. And then somebody makes a mistake, and they get their ass kicked because of that. And so everybody around says, "Okay, this is not true. So therefore-" Right "... what I'm gonna do is-" Do not mess up "... my job is not to get fired.
My job is not to get in trouble." Um, and, and so that's extremely, that's extremely agency thwarting. Um, you know, one, my, one problem with agency is that that word has been hijacked a bit by the folk- folks out, Jeremy, in your part of the world.
[00:32:29] Jeremy Utley: Hmm. Say more.
[00:32:30] Daniel Pink: The... Well, I mean, you know, high agency has become a kind of a tech bro coded phrase for- Hmm
people who are, you know, willing to work all day and all night, and it really means- Hmm ... it really means something else. Uh, I mean- What
[00:32:45] Jeremy Utley: does it mean to them?
[00:32:47] Daniel Pink: It means that people should be like them
[00:32:50] Jeremy Utley: Oh, interesting
[00:32:50] Daniel Pink: I think that's what it means. Um- Yeah. Yeah ... it means that people should have the same values that they have and the same work schedule that they have, and if you're not, you're not high agency.
Um, and, you know, another way to look at agency is, is basically, uh, a, a, uh... I mean, I like is, are you self-directed? Are you self-directed? Are you pursuing things for your own sake? Are you-- Do you have your own set of values, your own point of view? Are you powered by your own engine? Or are you waiting to be powered by some other engine that somebody hooks up to you or, or you're a sailboat and you just go wherever the wind blows you?
Hmm. Uh, and so I think that that, I think that that's what it... But, but, you know, um, I mean, a, I, I, I believe that agency, self-direction, that kind of personal autonomy is fundamental to the human condition, that in many ways the, the essence of human existence is that we want to be self-determined, that we want to have some sovereignty over what we do and how we do it and, and who we do it with.
And in many ways, this offers a, sort of a, an overly simplistic but still useful explanation for much of human civilization, is that much of human civilization, much of human history is about one group of people trying to control another group of people, right? So if you think about agency, autonomy, self-direction, the opposite of that is control Right?
And so people have only two reactions to control. They comply or they defy. But I don't think the highest form of human existence is to be compliant, and I don't think it's to be defiant. I think it's to be engaged, and the way that people engage is by getting there under their own steam. And yet, we have the whole history of the world is about one group of people trying to control another group of people, and those people sometimes respond with compliance and other times w- with respond with, with defiance.
But those are, those are darker chapters of the human story rather than the brighter chapters of the human
[00:34:49] Jeremy Utley: story. Get under your own steam is such a cool metaphor. I would say as an observation, I mean, uh, Henrik and I both have young kids. I know you have kids who are a little bit older.
[00:34:58] Daniel Pink: Yeah.
[00:34:58] Jeremy Utley: Um, I deal with, for example, a coll- I mean, certainly at school, but college students, say, at my church.
Like I had a couple of, uh, students who are studying CS come to me at my church and they're saying, "You know, it's hard to get a job right now." And I found my- maybe because of the entrepreneurial bent, I found myself saying, "Well, you don't want a job, you want a customer. You know, you don't, you don't need a bo-" And I realize while I'm talking to them, what, what they mean by job, and I'm curious if this, if, if there's an intersection here with your idea, let me look, a bounded autonomy versus, you know, full autonomy.
They've never been in a position to self-direct. Like they've had- Yeah ... professors give them assignments. Exactly.
[00:35:32] Daniel Pink: Exactly.
[00:35:33] Jeremy Utley: And in a weird way- Exactly. Exactly ... what they need with a job is a boss to give them the next assignment. And so to me, and, and s- I, I, like one of them said, "You know, uh, Roblox hasn't been developing anything new."
And I said, "Why don't you make an app?" And inter- think about a student's mindset, okay? I said, "Why don't you make an app?" He goes, "No, they have way too many applicants." I said, "No, I don't mean write an application. I mean make an app and show up to the company saying, 'I solved the problem.'" And if I had been s- speaking Swahili, Dan-
[00:36:02] Daniel Pink: Yeah
[00:36:02] Jeremy Utley: it wouldn't have registered any differently. It was- No, that's crazy ... and he said to me, he said, "I've never thought about just solving the problem that I see. I only think about applying for jobs." What do we do for young people right now when, y- I mean, to your point about self-direction, uh, you know, and the opposite of self-direction, I love that you said it's control.
The, in some ways they've been conditioned to seek environments of control.
[00:36:27] Daniel Pink: Yeah.
[00:36:28] Jeremy Utley: And i- is that a good thing? I mean, is that- No ... is control actually bounded, you know, uh, autonomy?
[00:36:33] Daniel Pink: No. No, no. How do- The control, control is con- uh, with, with control the boundaries are, the boundaries are too tight. You, you know, again, I, I think that what you want is you want a, you want a wider playing field, but not necessarily an infinite playing field.
Mm-hmm. Um, and yeah, no, I mean, I do think that the, that, that, this is another topic altogether you guys, but the much of American schooling is built around compliance. There's no question about that. Um, there's no question about that.
[00:37:04] Henrik Werdelin: Can I throw in, uh, here's my last question for you, which might take it a little bit, um, adjacent to where you are.
I think there's a lot of reasons why you can be very worried of what's going on, and I heard somebody do a commencement speech the other day about AI, and the kids were booing, right?
[00:37:19] Daniel Pink: I saw that.
[00:37:20] Henrik Werdelin: So there's like this kind of going from kind of like- Wow ... being nervous to be a little bit angry. Hmm. One theory I would pose is that we have not been very creative or very good of visualizing or bringing to life a vision of the future with this abundance that resonate with people.
So increasingly I'm asking people like, "Hey, what does this look when things goes well?" And the other day we talked to a professor at MIT, and one of his points was, "Hey, this is actually going to be this beautiful time where you can change careers at all times." So you should be able to, even if you pick the wrong thing to start with, kind of do- Yeah
stuff that you're more passionate about, and I know you've been writing about that too. Do you have a example of a world in the near mid-future where things goes right with all this AI that, uh, you sometimes articulate?
[00:38:13] Daniel Pink: I could possibly paint a vision and it would be wrong. Um, but I think directionally, I think we know what it looks like, and I'll give you, I'll give you an analogy on this.
Um, I, I think what it looks like is The world where AI is, um, woven more deeply into our lives is a world that is going to be a little bit better than today. It's not gonna be... You know, so I mean, I-- the, and the reason I say that is this is why I... I mean, I've seen this movie before, and I've written about this before.
The... I'll give you one example of it. So 27 years ago, 26 years ago, as you'll recall, we were at a pivot point where we're entering the 20-21st century. Whoo, you know, it's a big, scary thing. And what I did, in fact, you could probably see some of the books. I just saw them the other day. I have some of the books back...
They're somewhere on that shelf over there 'cause, um... And what I did is I, I went to, I went to eBay and I bought, uh, and I started looking for a bunch of books about projections that people were making for the year 2000. And what you had, the distribution was basically like this: 40% incredible dystopia. Uh, as you know famously, there were, Paul Ehrlich was saying, "We're gonna run out of food.
There's gonna be mass starvation everywhere," that by the year 2000, you're gonna have, you know, four oligarchs presiding over this scorched earth of im- eight million impoverished people, all right? So you have this, like, incred- if we don't all die in a nuclear holocaust, all right? That's, like, 40%, all right?
Then you have, like, 50% are like, "No one's ever gonna have to work. It's gonna be mass leisure. You're gonna spend your entire days having sex without consequence, eating everything that you want." You know, it's gonna be, you know, this incredible utopia. And then you had, then you had 10% saying, "It'll be a little better And, and, uh, you know, and what it is, it's like, it's a little better.
I mean, I, I think that 2026 is a little better than 2000. I mean, if you just think about it in terms of, of healthcare, think about all the diseases that used to be fatal. Things like prostate cancer used to kill people. Um, breast cancer used to routinely kill people. You had, you know, in that time you had, in China, you had, you know, tens of millions of people leaving poverty.
I mean, so y- you know, in 2000 I had dial-up internet. Now I have i- in my pocket a supercomputer connected to everyone in the world. It's a little better. I mean, you know? So I mean, are there problems? Yeah, there are huge kinds of problems. We haven't done anything about climate change. Inequality is gonna kick our ass at some point.
There's still humans, there's still human suffering out there, but you know what? It's a little better.
[00:40:57] Jeremy Utley: Well, but yeah, I agree,
[00:40:58] Daniel Pink: and- You know, so that's, so that's my, that's my hot take, Henrik.
[00:41:02] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah, I'll take that. I like
[00:41:03] Jeremy Utley: that a lot. It's, well, some people would beg to disagree. Some people would say it worse- Talk to me, talk
[00:41:09] Daniel Pink: to me
[00:41:09] Jeremy Utley: you know? No- Yeah ... I, I'm, I'm not in that camp. Yeah. But I, as I kind of am, as I pulse check the public discourse, I don't think it's consensus that things are a little bit better. I think there's a lot of people who feel like things are worse, and I, I wonder whether the goalposts keep moving, you know? And whether we are perpetually in a state of relative to my imagined ideal, you know, things are worse.
But to me, I agree with you. Things, I mean, uh, it's unequivocally, it's hard to, it's hard for me to paint the picture of why they're worse, and yet what I do hear is some people think things are worse, you know?
[00:41:45] Daniel Pink: There's, there is zero question, Jeremy, that some people think that things are worse, and that is a cognitive bias that some people have about basically the sort of the, the golden, the, the golden-ness of years gone by.
But if you put them into a real-life situation where you had to go back-
[00:42:06] Jeremy Utley: Right. Right They're not going back ...
[00:42:09] Daniel Pink: you w- you, you wouldn't do it. That's not to say that what's happening now is perfect. I'm just saying that it's, I'm just saying that it's, that, that it's better. And 25 years is a, is a blink in human civilization.
And even then, if you just take the number of people on the planet in those last 25 years who have left poverty, that is a huge win. If you just take things like in this country, in our country, 25 years ago, in the year 2000, it would have been political suicide for a politician to say that two men or two women should be permitted to marry.
Hmm. And now it's the law of the land and is becoming uncontroversial.
[00:42:55] Henrik Werdelin: I had the same argument with, uh, I was in a discussion with my dad. He's 87. I grew up in Denmark, and I was making the point that the world was, you know, like a much more, uh, fragile place. And he reminded me that the first time he tasted an orange was when a soldier, you know, a, a British soldier threw it to him from the tank after Denmark got liberated, right?
And I was like, "Okay, you have a point." I do think sometimes we do forget that our world was pretty tough. It's all
[00:43:21] Daniel Pink: relative.
[00:43:22] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:43:22] Daniel Pink: What you have to do is you have to put people into a scenario where it's like almost like a Black Mirror episode- Mm-hmm ... and, and say, "You have a choice." All right? You think that the...
You know, let, let's go back even a little bit further. When we talk about, like, make America great again, all right? So let's go back to the 1950s. All right, you wanna make, you wanna l- do you wanna go back and live in 1950s America? That's great. Here you go. If you're Black, you probably do not. All right?
Right. Um, uh, if you're a woman, you wanna go back? If you're a woman, you can't get a credit card under your own name. You wanna go travel somewhere? Uh, air travel is limited and prohibitively expensive except for the elite. Um, life expectancy 20 years less than it is today. So you can go back there, but I think that if you actually weigh the actual facts rather than comparing this kind of golden nostalgia that you haven't thought about carefully Kind of, kind of
[00:44:22] Jeremy Utley: it's, it's, it's a vibes, it's a vibes sentiment versus reality.
Yeah. And I think the problem is, you know, it's like those who don't know history are, are destined to repeat it. I think there are a lot of folks who just, who, who don't have an actual gut check with the past that they are idealizing. Yeah.
[00:44:41] Henrik Werdelin: I will make sure that we stop on time because I am the timekeeper of this podcast.
And so with the wise word that, you know, the future will be a little bit better, uh
[00:44:52] Jeremy Utley: Yeah.
[00:44:53] Henrik Werdelin: I think, I think we'll hold the, uh
[00:44:55] Jeremy Utley: It's the perfect place to stop.
[00:44:57] Henrik Werdelin: Thank you so much for coming. I really, really appreciate
[00:44:59] Daniel Pink: it. That was really interesting. I appreciate it. I really... It's, it's super interesting, uh, some of the questions you had about that exercise- Mm
um, that I hadn't thought about before, so I really appreciate that.
[00:45:08] Henrik Werdelin: There you
[00:45:08] Jeremy Utley: go. Very cool.
[00:45:09] Daniel Pink: All right, guys.
[00:45:09] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. Thanks for making it.
[00:45:10] Henrik Werdelin: Thank you. See
[00:45:11] Daniel Pink: ya.
[00:45:12] Henrik Werdelin: And we're back.
[00:45:13] Jeremy Utley: What a fun conversation, huh?
[00:45:15] Henrik Werdelin: Really, really was. Great energy. Really, really enjoyed it. Um, I will start to throw some stuff in, in the spirit of high pace energy.
I thought bounded autonomy is interesting. I've heard it from other people before. I never really thought about it as much, but this idea about creating boundaries for yourself to- Mm-hmm ... make sure that you don't have completely decision paralysis, um- It
[00:45:36] Jeremy Utley: was kind of paradox of choice.
[00:45:38] Henrik Werdelin: I do think that is an interesting thing, right?
You know, and I think that goes from everything from investing to finding ways of, uh, compounding value, so focusing a little bit by creating boundaries around what you do and stuff like that. I thought that was really interesting. The other thing, and then I'll pass the mic, was I do think that there is an interesting about having a point of view, and he talked about it in the context of artists, but I like the idea of having courage enough to say, "I don't have data to back this thing up, but I do think this is what's gonna happen."
He obviously at the end made this passion plea of like, you know, the future, the near future's gonna be a little bit better, right? Yeah. And I think that is actually like a little bit of a superpower today, both for business leaders and for innovative entrepreneurs, but just not to be an asshole about it, but just saying, "Hey, I have this thing that I, that I believe, and this is- Mm
this."
[00:46:29] Jeremy Utley: Mm-hmm,
[00:46:29] Henrik Werdelin: mm-hmm. And so, um, what do you think?
[00:46:31] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. I, I, on that point about taste, I thought that was really well said that taste is developed through creating, not just consuming. I think that's, that's a very underappreciated point, and so that's- it's worth consideration. Taste is created through creating or cultivated through creating.
The other thing on agency, he talked about bounded autonomy. I love the point. It's one of those points that I would never actually think to ask, and I'm so glad he took it this way because the- Realization that agency is not merely an individual characteristic, but is recognizing we operate in context, and context really matters.
You know, I met, uh, years ago I taught a class with Laszlo Bock, who was the head of people ops at Google at the time. And he, you know, probably the youngest person in the US with the most remit across a major company like Google. And he said something fascinating. He said, uh, they-- And they do, they do extensive data analysis on people's performance at Google, as you might imagine.
They call it people operations. And he said one of the things they've discovered, you'll love this: What do you do when someone is underperforming? You don't fire them, you move them
[00:47:44] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah
[00:47:45] Jeremy Utley: He said because people tend to revert to the mean, and if you- they're underperforming, it's more often than not a function of their context than their ability, provided a certain kind of, you know, recruiting standard.
He said, "And by the way, what do you do if someone is a star performer? You never move them because if you move them, they will revert to the mean." And it's a really fascinating thing. And so anyway, I know, I've known, I mean I taught that class with Laszlo probably 15 years ago, and I've known performance is a function of context.
I've never thought about agency as a function of context. I think a- agency as an individual thing, and to me it's actually beautiful as parents, as managers, as teachers to say, what is the environment I am creating here? Am I enabling agency to flourish and recognizing... 'Cause it's really easy to, to make agency, it's about that person, their low agency or their high agency, rather than pointing to the environment.
This context is not conducive to agency. I think is actually a really radical and powerful reframe.
[00:48:54] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. Anything else?
[00:48:57] Jeremy Utley: I mean, the, you know, we kinda got to, Dan said this and I really like this quote, you know, "Our own thinking is invisible to
[00:49:03] Henrik Werdelin: us."
[00:49:05] Jeremy Utley: And that I think is a, that one, you know, if we go back to the top of the episode, we, we brought Dan on because we saw his video and we said, "Oh, that's a super cool use of AI, like for personal discovery.
Let's talk about that." And then we kind of went all over the place, which I knew we would and I, I'm happy we did. But going back to that starting point, part of what's valuable with that sparring partner and that, that kind of modality of collaboration with AI is it's not what AI says, but how it makes your own thinking visible to you.
It's sometimes in reaction to the wrong thing. Like if you think about it fully half of the things that he said were illuminating were things he disagreed with, right? Mm. So it's not just AI said this and it's brilliant. It's, it helped me realize I disagreed because of XYZ. Yeah.
[00:49:47] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:49:48] Jeremy Utley: And it wasn't until I had something to react to that my own belief was evident.
I think that's a really powerful thing there.
[00:49:56] Henrik Werdelin: That's awesome. I think that concludes the episode, sir.
[00:50:01] Jeremy Utley: I think what should the, what should the, uh, secret word be? Code word? Autonomy?
[00:50:07] Henrik Werdelin: Agency. Autonomy.
[00:50:08] Jeremy Utley: Agency? Bounded autonomy?
[00:50:11] Henrik Werdelin: I like bounded
[00:50:11] Jeremy Utley: autonomy. Or context? I
[00:50:13] Henrik Werdelin: don't
[00:50:13] Jeremy Utley: know. I'm just-
[00:50:13] Henrik Werdelin: And we lo- we, we, uh, we'll send people a book if they, uh, send us a, a little note on, uh, what they liked and, uh, they disliked about the show and, uh-
[00:50:21] Jeremy Utley: Oh
then they get a free book. Get a lo- yeah, you send a love note, you get a book. Send a love note, get a book.
[00:50:27] Henrik Werdelin: That's great. Or, or hate mail. I will take something that, what people don't like either.
[00:50:30] Jeremy Utley: Gloves, as long as they say in the hate mail, "Gloves off."
[00:50:35] Henrik Werdelin: I prefer something that's nice, though.
[00:50:38] Jeremy Utley: Send us hate mail, but really send us love letters.
Send us, send
[00:50:40] Henrik Werdelin: us, or send us love letter, but mostly the latter. On that
[00:50:45] Jeremy Utley: note- We welcome all mail, especially fan mail.
[00:50:48] Henrik Werdelin: And then-
[00:50:49] Jeremy Utley: Bye-bye ...
[00:50:49] Henrik Werdelin: bye-bye