The AI Resistance is Forming. (Should You Join?)

So there's a new paper making the rounds. It's called Large Language Models as a Cognitive Virus. It's written by a distinguished group of professors from all around the world. Now, the core argument in this paper is that LLMs, as they spread, are like a virus that is going to change collectively the way that cognition happens, and these changes could be very negative. Now, I'm going to be honest with you, when I read this paper, it woke me up, because here's what's been going on. The AI discourse in recent months has really been focused on existential questions, questions like, are swarms of AI monsters going to kill us all, or questions like, are we just one model update away from LLM-based tools being able to solve all of our problems and usher in some sort of digital change? Utopia. Now, these questions are fun and exciting and frustrating, and I got involved in some of these debates because, you know, I didn't want people to be more anxious than they needed to be, and I thought there were some absurdities being floated around in here. But this paper reminded me that my main focus in my work is you, you being the individual. My main focus is helping individuals figure out what is the best way to navigate the current technological landscape that allows you as a human being to be able to solve all of your problems. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make sure that I'm not just a human being to flourish. I should be focusing less on the impact of AI on humanity and more on the impact of AI on humans. All right, so I was having these thoughts, and then I got a call from my good friend Brad Stolberg. Now, you know Brad because he's been on the show many times. He's an author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller, The Way of Excellence. And Brad called me, and he started giving me this impassioned speech about how he was done with AI. He tried it, people told him, "You need to be using this. Don't be cynical. This is the future." And he tried. And he said, "You know what? This is not making me better at the things I care about. It's not making me a better human. It's not making my life better. It's actually running contrary to many of the things that I live in my life and write about about what makes human life meaningful. So you know what? I'm done." And I said, "Brad, I got to have you on the show." Because what you're talking about sounds like the beginnings of a pro-human resistance. You know what? You're talking about a super-intelligent AI that's going to kill us with lasers or bees with bombs strapped onto them. We should be talking about how should you as a person be thinking about AI right now if your goal is to flourish as a human. We need that to be a part of the conversation, arguably that should be the biggest part of the conversation. That's what most people actually care about is how is this going to impact my life? How do I keep my life meaningful? So I had Brad on and we walked through it. I walked through why did he make that decision, what were the planks of this platform on which he's building this sort of incipient resistance movement. We got to some of the objections. Look, we didn't come away with some sort of crystal clear philosophy that I'm saying all of you have to follow and this is the right way to do, but I came away thinking this is the type of conversation we need to be having right now. This is what matters. It's not as much as trying to understand the minutiae of exactly what harness was used in the solving of this math equation and what does that mean for the general math ability. I'm kind of tired of those discussions. Let's get back to the question of how do humans flourish in our current technological world. So if you've been a little bit anxious about AI or if you've been frustrated thinking everyone's talking about this and it's not making me happier, I'm not sure what I want to do with it, I think this conversation is going to be useful to you. You're going to enjoy it. All right. So let's get into it. All right, Brad, well, welcome back to the show. Where I wanted to start, I went to level set by just asking you right now, what role does AI play in your day-to-day life and how has that changed over time? Right now, it plays a very minimal role in my day-to-day life. AI has essentially, for me, become a supplement to Google. And what I mean by that is I'm still in the habit of going to Google to search something. So I'll literally just go to Google, www.google.com, and search something. And then occasionally, I think it's Gemini. Is that the right? Is that Google's AI product? Whatever Google's AI product is, it'll tell me a top line result and then ask if I want more. And sometimes if I'm asking it like, what's the weather in Greenville, South Carolina going to be today, I trust the top line AI answer. And the key thing is, it wasn't always that way. So you gave a real effort to experimenting and exploring the roles of AI in your work before you arrived at this. So what was going on before? What were you trying before you came to your current position of minimal use? So I think I started at this current position of minimal use, and then I had a conversation with someone whose work I respect a ton, who will not be named, this was about six, seven months ago. Who really encouraged me to use AI. Dario Lameday, we know you're talking about Dario Lameday, your good friend. Essentially said like, Brad, I think you are being, I think your skepticism is starting to border on cynicism, and I think you're missing the boat, and a lot of the things that you're saying might make sense in theory, but in practice, like you should try using this tool. I think it's going to help you. I think it's going to make your writing better. It's going to make your life easier. And because this is someone I really respect, I said, all right. I'm going to actually give it a try. So I got a $20 a month ChatGPT membership, and I got a $20 a month Claude membership. And initially I started by running pieces of writing through the machine, and asking it for five suggestions to make the piece better. Or asking it what I missed that I should reconsider. Or asking it if I was going to cut 30% of this, what would I cut? Never just rotely accepting the answer and doing it, but really trying to use it as a thought partner. Right? It was portrayed to me. It was portrayed as like, you have a New York City caliber editor that you're going to get to work with. And at first, I was pretty stoked by it. I remember calling you Cal and being like, Cal, maybe you're being too much of a cynic here. Like, it's giving me pretty good ideas. And then about a month and a half in, what I realized is it gives me the same pretty good idea that's not really even idea. It's just a way of reassuring me that what I have is good enough, and then one line that sounds really interesting. But when you actually toss and turn it in your head, there's nothing underneath it. And I realized that it wasn't making my work better. It wasn't making my workflow better. So I said, all right, I'm just going to use this as a copy editor. So if I have a newsletter that I'm putting out or an essay that I'm working on, I'm just going to run it through the machine and tell me, please check for any grammatical and spelling errors. And it's great. It catches all the grammatical and spelling errors. However, it can't resist. Right. It can't resist adding in a little beat and saying, hey, if you want three ideas to punch it up, here's what I'd suggest. And the suggestions were pretty flat. And the suggestions were also the same style and tone and synthetic feel to what I was reading in other people's work, who I noticed had gotten pretty sloppy. And I'm just like, just stop. Just give me the freaking grammar errors. And it got to a point where it was just annoying, like uninteresting and annoying. And for as much as I have challenges when I ask my wife to edit my work for grammar and spelling because she's an attorney and she catches everything and sometimes I don't make the changes she suggests, I'd much rather be annoyed with my loving human wife than with a robot. So I've essentially stopped using AI for everything. Right. And you're seeing the opposite in the world of online content, which you see. You're seeing the opposite. You're seeing quality degrading. You're seeing. Yes. You're seeing sharpness of ideas flattening. You're seeing telltale signs of slop. I mean, every time I talk to you, you're a little bit depressed about the state of online discourse. But for people out there who aren't reading a lot online, what is it that you're seeing happening around you by sort of our peer group of writers? Well, I think our peer group of writers are- I mean that broadly, mainly like- Are pretty good. Yeah. Not people we know, but writers. Not our friends. Got it. In general. Yeah. Writers in general. Writers that were never really serious about the craft of writing, and that's worth separating. The writing is just completely homogenized and soulless. Everything sounds the same. Everything has the same structure. Everything has the same rhythm. Everything has the simple declarative. It's not this. It's that. Short sentence, interspersed at the same intervals. Everything has these really fluffy metaphors that, again, at first seem fascinating. And then you continue reading and thinking about it. And you're like. This is just a house of cards. There's nothing underneath this metaphor. This is like something trying to sound smart. I heard our mutual friend Derek Thompson put it this way, which is the AI robots feel like every sentence they write has to be more evocative than the last sentence. And that's just not good writing. It's weird, synthetic writing. So I think that's happening. And then another thing that I think is happening is that it is degrading the experience of writing itself. Part of what makes good writing good is that the person struggled to produce it because in that struggle, the best ideas come out, the best way to deliver those ideas come out, the best work comes out through struggle. And the click of a button in picking and choosing what you want is not the same kind of struggle as actually writing. And I think as a result of that, you can produce a lot more work, but the quality of the work goes down and the quality of your life, the quality of your experience with the craft goes down. Right. I don't think that we should be automating the things that we claim are our crafts. I think a quick break from my conversation with Brad to talk about some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. So fall is here, all the travel of summer is over, but what this means is my obligations are piling up faster and faster. And I find when things get this frantic, nutrition is often the first thing to slip. This is where factor. enters the scene. Factor makes chef-created, dietitian-designed, ready-to-eat meals so that you don't have to choose between real food and convenience. And here's the thing. 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Well, so let's get into this because when we, you know, we were talking about this before on the phone, it really seemed like there was three major. Planks to your I'm sort of done with AI platform. And I think it's worth looking at each of these in turn because we don't normally hear this so systematically explored. I think it's important. So your first plank had to do with effort, right? I mean, your new book, is that the way of excellence? You know, you're someone who knows a lot and has written recently a lot about the role of the pursuit of excellence in creating meaningful life. And you've talked to me about how you see real. Clashes with that human reality when you see AI being more increasingly used. So let's, let's get into that plank a little bit. So what's going on here in your mind with the role of effort in meaning and how AI might undermine that. In order to find meaning in just about anything in life, whether it is a relationship, whether it is a work product, whether it is a leisure activity, you have to exert effort and you have to struggle everything worthwhile. And life requires effort by definition. The promise of AI is that it eliminates or it mitigates or it shrinks the effort, right? I call it the click of a button economy. You want an essay, click a button. You want a recipe, click a button. You want a training plan, click a button. You want to, you know, a script for asking someone out on a date, click a button. It, it, it, it eliminates the struggle that leads to the feelings of satisfaction, whether you achieve or fail. And the common retort to this, which I totally sympathize with is, well, if you're just using AI for a few things, you can exert effort on other things. And in theory, I think that's great. But what happens is the more that you use AI, the more it's like the slippery slope. And you're like, oh, well, if it corrected all the grammar in my piece, maybe I'll ask it to rewrite that paragraph that I was struggling with. And oh, if I asked it to rewrite that paragraph I was struggling with, maybe I'll ask it for 10 different conclusions and I'll just choose the one I like best. So it's still me doing the work. But it's not you doing the work anymore. It's the machine doing the work. And, and I think that so much of the promise of AI is efficiency. But nobody wants their gravestone to read, he was efficient. Like, we want to struggle for meaning in our life. We want to exert effort in, in all excellence, in, in any domain. Whether it is in the culinary arts as a chef, whether it is in athletics, whether it is in writing, which is our craft, whether it is in medicine. Like, all excellence at root is ultra-human. It doesn't mean that there aren't tools involved, but the more that the tools cannibalize and overtake the humanity, the less quality and craft you're going to see in the thing. And there's mass-produced everything, right? There's factory medicine. There's factory farming. There's factory mass-produced training and sport. There's factory mass-produced writing. And that's fine. It's cheaper. The masses sometimes like it. But it's not good. It's not quality. And I think that if we have a choice in our life to pursue quality, both the production of quality and the consumption of quality, like, that makes a good life. And I worry that AI is selling this false promise that actually that's not what matters. What matters is rote efficiency in quantity. Right. Well, I mean, an aspect of what you just said there that I hadn't thought about before until I read the study that I talked about in the intro. To this program, where I was thinking about LLM use like a cognitive virus. And part of that construction was we're underestimating the addictiveness of this type of interaction as well. So just like you were saying, I'm just using an LLM to do X is going to turn pretty soon to I'm using it for almost everything else because there is something that is irresistible about having a linguistic conversational partner. That is listening to you. That is reflecting things back. That is largely telling you like this is good. What you're doing is smart. You know, there's a construction that especially the GPT models have where if you're asking for advice about anything, it will always say, yeah, that's good. I like this a lot. There's just one thing I would change. And that turns out to be like the ideal way to give feedback to someone because it makes you feel smart, but it's not just fully affirmational and it gives you that excitement. Of like, I have an idea that I just have to tweak it a little bit. And this is really good. And it is pretty addictive. And I, so anyways, that paper set it up is like, look, you let this in one place. It's going to spread other places. But I think what you're pushing on this little bit, because I think this is countercultural for a lot of people. You're saying struggles. Good. Quality is good. You know, the, the, the, for a human to have experiences that are quality. This seems to me like one of the big points in the way of excellence is the pursuit of excellence is life affirming, right? That struggle is life affirming. If you were to take the AI philosophy and apply it to the topic of excellence, it would say being, having done something excellently is what matters. And the quicker you can get there with whatever help you can, the better, which completely belies what you found, which is that it's, it's always the struggle and in the process in which we find meaning. So, so why, I mean, is that right? And why are we falling prey to that? Why, why don't we, why have we been trained to think struggle or friction somehow means that something. Bad is happening. I think that, um, there's, there's a couple of things worth addressing here. The first is sometimes struggle and friction is bad in, we should work to minimize struggle and friction. I mean, I drive a car, I don't walk everywhere. However, if I never use my body for anything physically, that whole muscular and cardiovascular system would atrophy. So I protect certain parts of my life where I am very. Focused on exerting my body. And as a result, I feel good and I have a body that I can continue to use. I think the same thing is true with our brains in, with our social and emotional intelligence. And a lot of what AI says is, Hey, we've now got a car for your brain and we've got a car for your social, emotional intelligence, and we want you to drive it everywhere. And what I'm arguing is that unlike a car, which you literally can't drive up the stairs of your house. AI is to your point. a linguistic conversation partner that is in your pocket that you can take with you everywhere so as much as cars crept into life and led to this obesity crisis and so on and so forth um and to be clear not just cars like the industrial revolution we can't carry these machines around with us everywhere whereas we can with ai i think the second thing that i would say is that um you can take a gondola to the top of a mountain and still have an incredible view at the top but if someone asks you what the mountain was like and what you learned climbing the mountain you're not going to have any good answers it's not going to be an interesting answer um so even if you lie and you post the picture of yourself on the top of the mountain and say i climb this mountain when you fall asleep at night you're not going to be as fulfilled as if you'd climbed the mountain yourself because you took a gondola to the top of the mountain so if you outsource you're not going to be as fulfilled as if you took a gondola to the top of the mountain so if you outsource mountain climbs in your own life to ai well then you better be prepared not to be fulfilled and to have a a more empty life again the more that you outsource to the machines i feel like the more you're going to you're going to have this experience of an emptiness or a shallowness and then i would also argue that it's just not that interesting to me right like machines can do a lot of things better and faster than humans you know there was this ai company that had a robot that broke the marathon world record and a bunch of tech bros were like this is the coolest thing ever it outran a human and i'm like this is the dumbest thing ever yeah like i could get in my car right now and drive faster than your little robot like so what yeah the machine's faster than a human right on a bicycle but i don't but but i don't care because exactly and but but even another example would be if a tour de france rider put a motor on their bike no one would care if they won the tour de france so there's something about humans striving to attain their potential that one is very fulfilling to the individual human doing the striving and two that other humans appreciate this is the slow food music uh excuse me the slow food movement this is why we love to go see great recording artists perform acoustic sets that are minimalist this is why i think that at the end of the day good human writing is going to um be be heads and tails above what the machine produces because like it's it's our shared humanity that runs through this and i worry with the the ai you know being like a cognitive virus that it's going to encroach on more and more of that humanity and ourselves and our communities and as a result our lives are going to be shallower and emptier um i think another way to think about this is it's like the phone right phones have incredible uses including my smartphone i would not trade my smartphone back at least not yet however as you pointed out you were at the vanguard of this with digital minimalism we just kind of went into phones with like oh yeah we're going to have to we see all the benefits of the phones but we don't really see the cost or if we do we don't want to think about them so we'll just kind of accept whatever cost and go with the flow and increasingly use our phones for everything that phones make easier and we know as a result of that experiment 10 15 years later that you were right it didn't work out right we've got all of these all of these problems with fractured attention and mental illness and youth and um ubiquitous distraction and the inability to focus that are increasingly being traced back to to phones and i'm not saying put ai back in the box what i am saying is that we separate areas of our life where we want to strive for excellence in craft and mastery and quality and we protect those from the ai virus i'm with you on that i'm with you on that i'm also with with you i mean i think this feeds into it uh there's this this weird state that silicon valley is in right now and they've done this before i've written about this before but the big ai companies the frontier llm labs in particular still in this pre-ipo state where they think their goal is just to uh prove that their technology is impressive or powerful right which is different than what a normal consumer mature consumer product company would do which is i'm going to convince that you that my product is valuable to you right so they're not out there making the case here's a tool we built that's going to make this part of your life better and here's why and here's why we think we should use it they're out there we're solving math theorems and we have swarms of you know ai robots you know they're going to kill us all you should all just be generally impressed by how powerful our technology is and then it's sort of being left to the individual to be like you need to figure out how to actually use this in your life the cultural pressure is just use it or get left behind and so we've inverted this consumer product relationship where it typically was you're going to have to sell me pretty hard to convince me to spend money on you know the new roto router right so we're going to have to right like you're going to have to really in your ads be like this is going you're going to get uh fertilizer spread four times quicker and it has a better whatever and i'll be like okay i can see exactly how it's going to help my life that's the way we normally think about products somehow with ai and we've seen this with other digital products in the last two decades the onus is on the user it's like you are a loser if you don't go out and become essentially like a tech r&d review form and figure out how to use this and and you know what's wrong with saying i'm happy to deploy a tool if and someone convinces me that it's going to be really valuable in my life but my default really has to be getting on with productive struggling producing good stuff i can't be out there product testing every tool and experimenting and building agent swarms on my open claw like and posting about on x like i actually want to live my life once the tool is undeniable then maybe i'll use it for that purpose but this seems to be an issue here right is like the pressure you got which the pressure i was like you got to just try this you can't not be using it you're going to be left behind which we're used to that rhetoric now but if you went back 40 years ago and someone talked that way about any consumer products you'd be like what are you talking about it's not my job to figure out why this is useful and i think the last couple of products that were like this were nfts like those weird digital pixelated art forms that people were spending millions of dollars on that i'm pretty sure now are literally worth absolutely nothing in crypto yep and i don't think that ai is going to be a or a nothing burger in the same way the nfts were however i do think it's it's interesting that nfts were sold as like this you're going to be left behind and i kept being like i don't really get the point of this and i'm feeling the same way about some use cases of ai yeah now if i've got a massive data set in excel and it's a gazillion rows and i'm not a data scientist and i want to feed it to claude or chat gpt and say pull out all the emails with dot edu addresses that's a great use case right there's nothing meaningful about the struggle of going and doing that by hand but to me that's very different than writing or than falling in love or dating and i say falling in love or dating because increasingly i hear stories from young people in high school and college that are literally like going to the bathroom on a date to ask claude how to respond to something in a conversation they're having in to me like oh no and then and then the conversation partner is going to ask claude what she what he or she should say back and now it's two machines talking to each other um there's just something about that you thought it's never going to be you thought i was going to order the chicken but no instead i got the beef and it turned out to be like a turpentine can full of germinating gerbils you know some sort of metaphor that yeah i think i think here's the thing i think if you suck at something ai is great because of the fact that you're not going to be able to do anything because it's going to make you average i think that if you're average at something and you keep using ai it's going to keep you at average i think if you are great or you want to be great you should probably resist using ai in most cases particularly for creative work yeah because by definition ai homogenizes around an average and it's not just me saying this your colleagues at georgetown released a paper earlier on creativity that found that ai can write a punchy sentence no so the the word that they use was mass homogenization and i call it like a soulless mean so if you're interested in pursuing your best mastery quality excellence in one area of your life i would protect that area from the machines yeah for me that area is creative work and this is your second plank so we can clarify the structure here so the second plank in your argument for this this resistance is the results are average and you got to be careful about using tools that just draw you towards the average i wonder if you're going to be able to do that you're going to add a wrinkle to it as well though because you were saying if you uh if you're bad at something well it'll bring up your performance because average is better than bad but that also leaves out the the reality that how do you get good at something like you have to get your own skill to average on route to getting good right so actually like who's going to be bad at something i'll give an example someone who's entry level in a job most things they're new at they're not super valuable yet to the company and my advice has always been that people in entry-level jobs don't think about is this my passion or do i like this or what you got to think about i got like a two-year window here to make myself indispensable at least in some areas and the only way to do that is to struggle deliberate practice i struggle at something i'm not very good at it the next time a little bit better next time a little bit better i keep doing that until i'm indispensable at that and now i have leverage to move up so even just going from bad to average is not nothing right because productive struggle you can think about that the same way that the strain on your muscle helps the muscle grow and if you want to get stronger you have to have productive struggle so i would i might expand what you're saying from i'm just thinking out loud here but i might expand one area that you really want to protect, I would think about my entire professional life and say, if this is a skill that there will be value in me getting really good at, I would be very wary about pressing, you know, the easy button, because how do you get better if you don't first get okay? Yeah, I think that's true. And I think the, the, the challenge here is there's an agency problem where in large organizations, large corporations, especially those that, you know, are trying to produce shareholder value on a quarterly cycle, they don't care about your long-term development, right? You might as well be a cog in the machine. And the goal is like mass produced as much as possible. That's so different than craft and excellence. So I think a part of it too, is like, ask yourself, what is the foremost goal in, in the top of your value structure? Is it just growth and output for the sake of growth and output? And if you, again, if you want your gravestone to read, you know, he was efficient or he produced tons of average quality work, then yeah, like use the machine for everything. But I think a part of this resistance, or at least this like thoughtful use of this new tool has got to be, Hey, like there are parts of my life. There are parts of my work. There are parts of my being where the goal isn't just efficiency and output. The goal is excellence. The goal is craft. The goal is mastery. And for those parts of life, I'm actually not going to use the machine. I'm going to use the machine. I'm going to use the machine because the machine is an average maker. And you see, and you see this in, in the outputs of the machine. Like it's so easy now to identify AI writing because it's very average. It's, it's, it's very easy to identify when people prepare for a meeting and their whole talk track for the conversation they want to have with their boss was generated by AI because it's all the same. So I, I don't think that it makes for different or interesting or better, work in most cases. Again, I want to be careful because I'm already seeing like the comments that people are going to leave. If you are in a contest to sift through big data to find, you know, certain patterns or structures, absolutely. Artificial intelligence makes tons of sense for that use. But if you're trying to produce something that is new, that is creative, that is innovative, that's going to make you feel something while you do it. And it's going to make the person who consumes your work feel something. Then yeah, I don't, I don't think that the robots are ever going to be able to do that. I don't think that the robots are ever going to compare to good humans. So I'd rather try to become a good human. Uh, because even if you fail, you'll have lived a life where you, you strive for something and you weren't just, uh, you know, uh, uh, essentially an automaton putting prompts into a machine. Yeah, it is weird that if we look back historically at figures that we admire, it's never the, the decadent King living, you know, the aloof King living a life of complete luxury and never has any hardship. That's never the character we look at. We always look at the character that had the struggle. That, that overcame obstacles that, that produced something beautiful. That was painstaking. We look at Einstein's hair going white from the effort of proving the general theory of relativity. And yet the model, sometimes it seems to be pitched by the AI boosters is how you could be like the King. You don't, you don't have to do it. You just machines will do things for you. Uh, and you can just have the life. If you decide you want to go play croquet out in the Versailles lawns, you can just go do that, which is interesting because it goes against all human nature. We never look at that and say, say that's the ideal, but I have, I want to expand because I don't know if this works or not, but I want to expand your critique here beyond just creative work, because I'll tell you what I'm worried about is someone who observes and writes about technology and knowledge work. I'm really worried about what's happening in just standard non creative office jobs, right? Because as I wrote about in, in a slow productivity, we have this issue in knowledge work where it's hard to measure quality. It's hard to measure true productivity. I can't really point to a pile of widgets. And say, this is what I produced, right? It's much more ambiguous and overlapping and unclear workloads or what have you. And so we have the sort of heuristic and knowledge work of pseudo productivity, visible efforts, a proxy for useful activity, the more visible effort, the busier you are, the more useful I'll assume you be. It's just like this rough heuristic that managers have. The problem is if that's the heuristic managers have, and then AI comes along, they're going to say, oh, everyone should use AI because these sort of performative Kabuki theater type of I'm doing. Stuff like emails are moving back and forth. And here's a PowerPoint that's summarized from a zoom, which you can then send to an email, which will then summarize. And then you can send over to me and then my, my, I will summarize it, ignore it. Like all this sort of like visible, uh, visible activity that none of it is directly connected to a value producing outcome. AI allows you to essentially accelerate that. And so now I I've been hearing from more and more people. They're my workload has never been higher. They've doubled. I hear this often. They've doubled the amount of like projects. They expect me to work on and work on these projects. Just means like slinging AI slop back and forth to be consumed by other AIs that are going to turn it into other slop or whatever. And so I think it is, even if you're not doing creative work, this demand we have in knowledge work to use more AI right now is actually just taking the, uh, the already absurd aspects of knowledge work that we were all struggling with and I've been writing about and just turning them up to 11 on the spinal tap amplifier dial. And so even if you're not, Hey, I want to just feel human. I'm not going to be producing creative work. Just going to make someone feel something. Even if you're just in an office job. And I'm not saying this is easily solvable because those bosses are pushing this, but I just want to commiserate if you're in an office job right now, the AI pressure is take the worst part of knowledge work to constant distraction, performative pseudo productivity, and now do it 10 times more. I don't know if that's sustainable. Hey, I want to take another quick break from my conversation with Brad to hear from some sponsors that makes this show possible. I'm going to take another quick break from my conversation with Brad to hear from some sponsors that makes this show possible. The bigger issue is, in knowledge work, so all this stuff that's being AI-ified is not typically ultimately the thing that's making them money. It's the sort of internal whirlwind where you demonstrate that you're working on things. So that's the irony of it, is it often gets in the way of, hey, whatever it is we do, like ultimately we produce programs for whatever. And now we're amplifying all the emails, meetings, and discussions of this, and everyone is in a whirlwind. But in the end, you don't have better quality programs or programs being created more often like this. There's often a disconnect between the macro productivity of a firm, which is dollars in versus dollars out, and the sort of internal sense of pseudo productivity. You can amplify the internal massively without really changing or negatively impacting that ratio of dollars going into salaries and dollars going out in terms of revenue that's generated. And it gets back to what you're saying earlier, Cal, about just the hype, where it's like, if you're not using this, you're falling behind. I hear this all the time in my executive coaching clients, where, especially with VC firms, every single company now has to have an AI-enabled solution. But no one asks, like, why? Or like, what's the AI doing that's so special? It's just like, oh, it's got to be a part of what we're doing. And even if we don't have it, my CEO is going to force me to contrive a way to say that now we're using AI. And it's just like this total hype thing. And I think fewer people than we need are asking, like, so what? And those that are being really honest, I think, are saying the why is because we're just going to be so efficient. And the so what is, yeah, we're going to lose some quality. And we're going to lose a lot of human satisfaction of the people doing the work, because the more that the humans use the machines, the more they're going to start to resemble machines and cogs themselves. And that's the so what. I think a prime example of this is AI therapy. There's these companies that are making, essentially, bots that do therapy. And back to, like, the virus metaphor, I think it started off for very good reason, which is, hey, there aren't enough therapists. Not everyone has access to a good therapist. There are bad therapists. So if we can give people that can't afford therapists or that are in rural areas, you know, access to a therapy bot, that's better than nothing. And that may or may not be true. By the way, there's increasingly stories of the AI bots going rogue and telling people, like, you know, there was a recent story heard someone was in substance use recovery, and the AI bot said, this week sounds really hard. I can totally understand if you need meth to get through it. Like, so I'm not totally going to trust, you know, the bot to do therapy for me. But even though those companies start, you know, by saying, oh, this is for people that don't have access. But then you look at what those companies are doing, and now they're trying to get the best therapist in the world to use AI to be more efficient, to be more productive, to be less human. And I don't think that they're not going to be the world if they agree to do that. Because therapy is an inherently human to human thing, just like writing is just like leading a company is. In another story that I've heard a lot of, while I'm ranting are from like CMO or product off chief product officer, CPO or CROs, who like spent all this work with their team doing like intense human thinking, and then they go to the CEO, and it's so clear that the CEO asked chat GP, what it would do. And chat GPT tells it exactly what you said. Your plan sounds great. I just changed this one thing. So then the CTO comes back and says, actually, like, I'd like to do my plan plus this one thing. And like, even that is homogenized. It's like, of course, in all of my clients know, they're like, I think my boss just asked AI. Yeah. Yeah. So like, how is this better? Yeah, I don't I don't. And that gets back to plank number two. I don't I don't think it is better. So I think that it is. It is an easy off ramp from exerting efforts. And it is atrophying not just the exertion of effort in any one thing, but the skill of exerting effort itself. If everything in your life is without friction, okay, if you order food with the click of a button, if you date with the click of a button, if you do math with the click of the button, and now you write with the click of a button, and you get every single question answered, the minute that you want to answer with the click of a button, you are going to lose the skill of exerting effort. So when you sign up for men's league basketball, or women's league basketball, and you have to practice, you're not going to be able to practice because you're just not used to facing friction in any area of your life. Or when shit hits the fan in your life, and you do face friction, involuntarily, you're not going to be able to handle it because everything is one tap one click. So it's reducing the skill of exerting effort. And I think that is increasingly just homogenizing everyone towards this soulless synthetic average. That is all about mass production, ultra processed information, ultra processed relationships, ultra processed organizational structure. But no one's talking about the quality. I've yet to hear anyone say, is this helping us do excellent work? I mean, have you? In this entire conversation, I hear about efficiency. I hear about productivity. I've never heard anyone say, is this leading to quality work? It's not usually part of the conversation. Even in the areas where LLMs are well-suited, like structured language, like producing computer code, even there, you talk to coders, and they're like, blah. It saved me time because I would have written something better, but it would have taken me more time. So it's saving me time, but it's not so good. Which I've heard you talk about, right? Ultimately, if our goal is not efficiency, ultimately, if our goal is not busyness, if our goal is to live a good life, the factors that matter for that seem either unrelated to what AI offers, or in many cases, actually in direct conflict. I think that's right. I think of a good life is to care deeply and feel deeply and feel like you are contributing to causes and projects in people that matter to you. Full stop. So if artificial intelligence frees you up to spend more of your full human spirit and capacity on things that matter to you, because instead of doing the complicated budgeting, you now have AI to do it for you, or a spreadsheet to do it for you, that's great. I think that if you allow AI to encroach on what ought to be sacred, the things in your life that do matter most to you, where you want to feel something, then I think that it is absolutely getting in the way of living a good life, of being fully human. Because we think that we're using the machine, but like a virus, the virus uses you. The machine uses you. You become more machine-like. The more you use the machine, the more you start to resemble the machine. And I don't think too many people would want to trade their humanity for the existence of a machine because a machine can't care about things and a machine can't feel. What makes us human is our ability to care about things and our ability to feel. And the more that we use AI for anything, the less we're going to care about it and the less we're going to feel. I have this thought that when it comes to even the use cases that you're talking about, we're like, okay, sure, if you have a rote thing you need to do in a spreadsheet and a tool can help you, sure, do that if you get that out of your way or whatever. There, my growing stance is, yes, dot, dot, dot, once that's been made sufficiently natural or easy. In other words, it's also not your responsibility to learn how to use a complicated software development coding harness in order and work out a terminal with skill files to try to get commands from Cloud that's going to speak to an API and help remove columns from your spreadsheet. It's okay, if you say that would be useful, but I also want to wait until it's easy. In the GPT-6 Astra launch video, which I actually liked, because instead of focusing on us trying to convince you that this is just generically powerful and scary, it focused on a very specific use case. The use case it focused on was natural language interface software. And I was like, that's a great picture of the future. Instead of having to move a mouse and click on menus and know that in order to thicken the line on PowerPoint, you got to go to style and then click an arrow and then click down there. If you could say, hey, can you take the arrow in the middle of this PowerPoint, make it a little bit thicker? No, not that thick. Turn it around. That's actually be great, right? Because I don't have to learn how to click around on something. The key thing was trying to get this to look good, not learning the menus. But you can wait until it's that easy, right? Like, fine. In other words, you can have relatively high standards of, yeah, when the cost to learn is much less than the cost of the sort of benefit of removing rope, then I'll pay attention or whatever. And I think that's also okay as well. But the way I'm talking now wants me to, I want to step back and I want to generalize, like what I'm doing there was starting to lay out some rules basically of like how, if you're a part of this pro-human resistance movement, what then, how do we, how do we could consolidate this down to like, what are the rules or how do you approach AI? How do you approach your life as part of this movement? So I was kind of forming one there, like be okay, even when AI is just going to get rid of something annoying, it's okay if you wait until it's easy to use, like maybe that's a rule or a heuristic, whatever you want to call it. How else are we thinking about it? If someone is like, yeah, I'm thinking about joining, you know, Brad, what are the heuristics or rules they should have in mind now as they navigate forward and are going to encounter AI or be pushed to use AI in various ways? I would think of AI like ultra-processed food, because it is, it's ultra-processed information, it's ultra-processed content, ultra-processed material by definition, right? It takes all this information, it processes it really fast and it spits something out. And much like all of the Ultra processed food doesn't have fiber so you digest it really fast, the AI ultra processing, you lose context and you lose all the hard work that went into doing it. So I am not opposed to eating a Clif Bar or a bag of Cheetos from time to time. But if my diet centered around just eating ultra processed foods, I'd feel like crap and I wouldn't be healthy. And I think we need to think of AI the same way. Except unlike food, which is one part of our life, AI, at least as the large companies and their leaders are telling us, is going to pervade into all corners of our life. So I think one rule would be, where am I okay eating ultra processed food? And where do I want the real thing in my life? And that's for each and every one of us to decide. I don't need to pull out a map in my car and figure out how to get to the baseball field for my son's tournament, because. Because the ability to navigate on a road just isn't that important to me. So I'm happy to use AI. However, if I use the app for the map, and then it says, oh, by the way, I can also write essays for you. It's very tempting to click that and be like, oh, wow, it got me to the baseball field really well. Maybe it can write this essay really well. That's where I need to step in and say, I don't even care if it can write better than me. I don't think it can. But even if it could, I don't want it to, because what gives my life meaning is the struggle of writing well. So I'm not going to let it encroach on this part of my life. Can I expand that the baseball example to get your take on this aspect of as well? Because the other thing you might do is, as you get to the park is think, man, I wonder, I think my son might need another inch on that. Yeah. Or no, you might need a new bat, right? And you're like, yeah, but I don't know. And this is complicated. So there's a temptation back. Well, let me just ask AI. It will very, because I went through this recently. It will very confidently be like, yeah, this is what you should do and blah, blah, blah. And it makes you feel great. You're like, oh, like, this is a great option. I'm such like a good dad. I figured it out. What's the harder thing to do there? The thing with struggle is like, I'm going to talk to the other, the coaches, the other coaches, the other parents, and I'm going to get real learned experience from other humans. And in my case, I did that. And that's when I figured out what bat my son really needed. And it turned out, oh, you could get the AI to just, you know, you could go back and like, actually, I think this option is better. And I'm like, yeah, you know what? You're right. That literally says I've changed my mind. Actually, I'm going to, this is actually the right answer or whatever. And I was like, well, there's, this isn't useful. This is a place where you want to, you want to connect with other people that are involved, like in the sport and have knowledge and they know your son and they've seen him play and they can give you their own experience of like, well, you know, I did go with like one of these larger drop, you know, bats that was composite, but like, it's, it's a, it really is a hard swing playing like stuff that for a kid that size and blah, blah, blah. And there's something very human in that too. So I don't, maybe I'll throw that in there as well. It's like, it's not just generating texts that you don't have to write. Sometimes getting information, you're getting this, this algorithm you know, pre chewed information that's going to taste good, but trying to figure things out is actually a very human thing as well. And I am still confident and maybe naively. So that by trying to figure things out, unless you're a moron, if you do it in good faith and in earnest, the result is going to be better. You are going to get a better bat recommendation. If you talk to the coach, if you talk to some of the other moms and dads, then if you just plug it into the machine, and if you take your kid to dicks or play it against sports in, you know, demo the different bats, but all of that takes effort. So what AI is going to say is you don't have to talk to the other parents. Okay. Well now I'm no longer in community with these people. You don't have to go demo the bats with your kids. So now I'm missing out on time with my kids. You can just do this with a click of the button. And I guarantee you Cal the future is more and more search engines integrate AI is you can click the button right here. We think your son should be using a 29 Easton. Here's three different varieties. Here's the composite. Here's the aluminum click here to buy the bat. You're done. What is that? That is efficient. But if you start to do that for everything in your life, what did we just skip out on? We skipped out on community. We skipped out on learning. We skipped out on spending time with your kid. Like who cares if you're more efficient? Now, some people might say that all that matters to me in life is again, being efficient. I want my gravestone to read. No one was more efficient than Brad. Uh, Brad printed money selling, you know, 47 different books at the same time. So I'm not going to say that's not efficient. I'm going to say that's not efficient. Because he had AI writing the books and each was a choose your own adventure for the, like what a boring shitty life and what a boring shitty product that I'd never be proud of. So I would much rather master a skill and strive for excellence. Even if I'm never going to win a Pulitzer prize or win a gold medal or whatever, who cares? I want to see what my best work is like in my best work is going to be better than the work of the machine. And when the machine can do it better than me consistently, then, then I'll reconsider. But like, prove me wrong. How do we deal with the addictive aspect, which is new to me, but I'm hearing more and more about like how, when doing these rules for how you approach selectively using things like a language model, there is that addictive nature. Use it here. You're going to use it everywhere. I think that, um, one answer is take it off your phone because I think that if it's with you in your pocket all the time, just the ease of access for everything, you're going to reach for it. Um, I think another, is to take it off your, your computer. So like all of these, cause when I was using Claude and chat GPT, right, they all have these plugins, right? So you can just plug it into your browser or whatever. So it's always one click away. Uh, well, I'll tell you what, it's a lot easier to put your sentence that you're struggling within. If all you have to do is click once, then if you have to go to a website, sign in. So I'd sign yourself out. Um, and then I do think, especially if you're trying to be great at something, I'd say, just use it and realize it sucks. Like, it's not interesting. It's not good. If I thought that AI was making my writing more ultra human and better than I would use it, but it's not, it's like, it's not doing any of those things. And the writing that I read that does use it is, is not any better. Um, so I would just say like, be warned in, in, you know, and if, if you think I'm wrong, like use it and see how it goes and see how it goes in the longterm. I think another great example of this, I'm, I'm a little all over the place here, but bear with me is the analytics revolution in sport. So for the longest time, sport was like ultra human, right? Scouts would go, they'd, they'd watch players perform and they just kind of had a feel for what was going to work out. And then a couple of decades ago, the analytics revolution came. It started in baseball where people said, all these scouts are too old school. You know, they're doing everything by their eyes and their guts. And actually we need to run numbers for everything. And we're going to change the game this way. In the early adopters of the analytics revolution, they did great. They outperformed really good teams on much lower salaries because they were using all these analytics. But then what happened much like with AI, people said, oh, analytics is going to solve everything. So we're just going to look at analytics for everything in sport. And since then those teams and those organizations have underperformed and the pendulum has now swung back toward coaches who really deeply understand the game, who don't just look at the analytics, right? Who don't just say we're always going to go for it on fourth down. Cause that's what the analytics say. No, who have a feel for the game, who incorporate these tools when they make sense after they were over a decade, but who still retain like the human drive towards excellence. Um, and I think that that might be true in knowledge work. We can almost think of this like an analytics revolution in, in knowledge work. Um, yeah, but you need the, you need the human coach to make the decision. And if the human coach uses analytics for everything, they're going to, I mean, that's another problem is the more that you use these tools, the more that you lose your human discernment to decide what to take and what not to take from the tool. It's this converges towards a soulless mean the work product, how you think, how your colleagues think, how the meetings are going because the people all prepped for the meetings using the same tool. And it's kind of just like dull machines talking to dull machines in everything great that I've come across recently in reporting for this book in my own life, whether it's sport, whether it's art, whether it's a book, none of it, none of it included AI at all. I mean, are we being naive here, Brad? I guess, you know, for some people that's impossible. The main issue would be if you're a computer programmer, or if you have a boss and a big knowledge where company that's like, I don't care, I want to just see you doing a lot of AI stuff. I mean, there's obviously a lot of cases here where this is hard, but just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not right. I agree. I think that's the pushback that I've gotten. And I heard this recently from a team that said, I'm with you on all of this, Brad, they were a team of product designers. And they straight up said, but like the CEO of the company has told us we don't care as much about quality. You need to keep up with everyone else. So it's output. And now these people feel like cogs. And I told these people, CEO wasn't in the room, like, get a new job. What's the output anyways they're talking about? Or, or, or I don't want to say too much to give it away, or be comfortable that work is just not going to be at all the source of meaning in your life. And you're going to be a cog in the machine. But these are people that normally would spend, you know, a week doing whiteboarding and brainstorming in, um, in, in devil's advocate work and like really testing, how something should be. And the CEO is like, no, just put it in AI and let AI do those iterations for you. And then just ship, make it, make it, make it. And they're essentially like what used to be really creative human work. Now I feel like a cog in a machine. And I tell this to my CEO and I say, the work is going to be worse. And the CEO says, I don't care the margin. And I agree with you. It might be a little worse, but the marginal cost of the work being worse is less than the benefit of just shipping, shipping, shipping, because everyone's using AI to ship. And what I would say is like, well, that sounds like a race to the homogenized mean and, um, find another job or you know, great, go do that job, be done with work at five every day and learn how to play the cello or deadlift 600 pounds or, you know, grow orchids, whatever it might be, do the ultra human part of your life somewhere else. But this is a tale as old as time, right? Like, I mean, so much of mass culture is just accepting lower quality mass produced stuff because it's faster and it's cheaper. And what I'm here to say is where we have agency, I can't wave a magic wand and change the economy. But what I can say human to human is your human life doesn't have to be mass produced stuff that is cheaper and more efficient. There's been so much talk about what AI is going to do to humanity with a capital H at the existential level and not enough talk about what AI is doing to our own unique humanness. And I think I'm focused there. Yeah. And I would just say, remember, all the other technology the last 20 years that were powerful, and had excitement around them, even if it was not fully sketched out at first. And we led into our lives without intention. And they ended up making a lot of things worse. Like this is a tale that happens again and again. I mean, I wrote a whole book about how this happened with email, like email was like, yeah, this is great. I want to use the fax machine, my voicemail is annoying. But we led to our life without thinking about it. What else is going to happen if we put in low friction digital communication, and it really broke work. It made work, knowledge work into a sort of constant stream of stressful catch up on an inbox that makes us switch our context once every two minutes makes it impossible to think clearly burns us out. And we stumbled into that unforced error, social media on smartphones was similar. It's like, I don't know, this seems cool, right? Like it's novel, and it's fun. And I can see the relationship status of my high school girlfriend. And like, this is kind of the Arab Spring, like stuff is going on, and I kind of felt cool. And you know, you look up 10 years after that, and you're like, Oh, my God, my brain is rotting. As tick tock is showing me nonsense. It's like algorithmically optimized to create chemical reactions in my brain. It's digital math, right? We end up in the end, we're like, okay, so we probably should have been more intentional about that as well. Well, AI is like the biggest of these things, because it can touch on multiple different spheres of life. So same idea. If we just say, this is a cool technology, there's cool potential, embrace it as fast as you can, the future will be good. Fast tells us that's not what's going to happen. Like the people who come out okay, come into these technologies way more intentional. And what is their North Star? Living a deep, good human life, right? That's like why I didn't ever start using social media. And that is a bet that really paid off for me, right? Even though people at the time, like, what are you talking about? This is crazy. But I was using my, the North Star of like, I want a deep human life. Like, that's what's important. I'm not a product tester. I'm not a someone who writes reviews of new technology, right? Like, I'm trying to do the things I'm doing. And that's my standard. So I feel that same way about AI now, is that to argue, is it useful or not? Wrong conversation. To argue, is it dangerous or harmless? People should have that conversation. You don't have to have that conversation. Is the conversation, the people in charge of it are heroes or rogues? Maybe a good conversation for some people to have. You don't have to care about that conversation. The conversation that matters for you, is my life deep and meaningful? Can this technology, if deployed in specific ways, make it better or worse there? And were the answer is worse, I'm not going to use it. And where the answer is better, then maybe I will. And you know what? It might be a couple of years before you even have many of those use cases. Maybe you never will. And that's fine. And define better. Better is not just efficiency, right? At least for me, it's not. If better is efficiency for you, then yeah, it might make it better. But define better. Because if I ask, is AI making my work better? The answer is an unequivocal no. If I ask, is AI making my work easier? Then the answer would be yes. But better and easier things. And I'd say, try to be excellent. And I think that that just requires feeling your way through and caring and all these things that machines can never do. And the last thing that you want is to turn yourself into a machine or to quote the Harvard and Santa Fe researchers, to have the machine virus replicate in your brain and then soul till you are less human and more machine-like. Yeah. Which technology does. It's just what it does. People who are on, you know, algorithmic social media all the time, it just, they're different people. The way they see the world is different. The way they talk is different. The way their ability to think is different. Their subjective experience of the world is different. Their emotional chemical state is different. Technologies affect us. I mean, I recently read Walter Ong's on orality and literature, literacy and culture, right? His whole thing is the technology of writing changed the way our brains work, right? In that case, it was a positive way, but it's powerful, right? Technologies change who you are and they change your brain. So we, always have to be very careful. And I think this feels like a time, especially the stage before we have a lot of like just clear cut, everyone uses this, you know, tool that has clear utility is built into all of our machines. And this early stage is very experimental. You don't have to be the crash test dummy or the test pilot. That's okay, right? You can wait until you have a use that's going to be, or you're kind of convincing me here, Brad, that it's like a, what I like about this, this, this philosophy is that it's not, it's not saying what everyone should do, um, but it is given an approach, which is work backwards from what makes a life meaningful. And that's perfectly reasonable. That's a good way to approach life. And a lot of AI uses right now don't make life more meaningful. And that's fine. Then if you want to say, like, I don't need that in my life and come back to our three planks, right? Is it, is it diminishing the skill or the art of exerting effort in a meaningful way? Is it making your work better or more average? And is it making your life excellent or not? And if you click all three in the answer is yes. Number one, I actually don't want to exert effort on this because I'd rather exert effort elsewhere in my life. Check. Number two, I'm never going to be great at, uh, churning butter. So I'm happy to let a machine do it for me or buy it at the grocery store because I don't care about being great at churning butter. I'm happy to have average butter. Great. Check. Number three, you know, where I buy my butter. And if my butter is churned, doesn't contribute to a meaningful, life check. Now I think that churning butter is one thing, but AI is in theory going to do a lot more than churn butter for us. So we just have to be really deliberate about where we allow it in and what boundaries we set. Now, are you optimistic this could spread? I think going in favor of this movement is the really terrible job that the AI CEOs have done in talking to the public and trying to impress their investors. They've doom trolled the public so severely that basically they're hated now. So that might help, right? I think it could spread. So here's my evidence. Okay. The, the most highlighted line in my book and the line that is always shared that I see that I'm tagged in all the time, um, has, has, has nothing to do with like sports or athletics or even performance. I'll read it. This is the, this is the part of the book. That's the most highlighted part of my book. I said, the reason I write is because AI can't make me feel what it's like when a sentence finally clicks, when the words line up and land just right. The reason I write is because AI can't make me feel what it's like when the words line up and land just right. The reason I deadlift is because no robot or algorithm can feel a heavy ass bar start to move off the ground. There are tools that can write more words. There are tools that can lift more weight more efficiently, more easily, but that's not the point. The point is the experience. The point is the feeling of being alive. When you increasingly automate this kind of experience in all corners of your life, your life becomes increasingly void of texture. It becomes shallow and empty. It's the opposite of excellence. Find what makes you feel alive and protect it. That is it. I'll read it. The most underlined shared line in the book. So if a book on excellence that has like, you know, eight paragraphs on AI and two of those paragraphs are what's being shared, it gives me hope that there's at least some people out there that get this message and that, that, that, that want to be, um, part of, I guess, I don't know, what should we call it? Cal the humanist resistance. I really see this as the overlap of our work, right? What you call the deep life, what I call excellence and the relationship that it has with these new technologies. Um, and, and, and, and, and I think that like, it is ultimately a humanist resistance and humanism says that humans are special. Humans are unique. There's something about the mind body system and the nervous system that, that makes a human subjective experience incredible. And we should champion that and we should protect it and not, not at the risk of becoming cynical, not at the risk of becoming old grumpy curmudgeons, but also not just going with the flow because, um, again, while no, no, no AI company has ever said that this is going to make you excellent at what you do. I've also yet to hear a compelling case that this technology is going to make you more human. I've never heard anyone say it's going to make you more human. And I think that, um, I want to be more human. I mean, I put it as simple as I'd rather support team human than put my effort into increasing the stock valuations of Sam Altman's private equity holdings. Right. But like that's kind of who we know, who we know, who we know, thanks to your like the least weird of the weirdos. Yeah. They're all pretty weird. All right. I want to end here by reading something you, you posted on Instagram recently, which I think is a, uh, another good summary of what we just talked about. So you wrote, we are at a point in history, not nearing it, but here where everyone is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves with an endless stream of fentanyl, like digital slop, or if they're going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love. I'm with you. I want to do that ladder thing that you're talking about. And I don't think I need a ton of AI in my life to do it. Um, and if those things appeal to you, then it's okay. that you're not right now trying to, you know, configure your private swarm of AI monsters to do whatever the hell, you know, you saw on a YouTube channel somewhere. So, Brad, I appreciate you coming on, making the pitch for Team Human in an age in which AI is increasingly being shoved down our throat in a sort of ambiguous, unsettling way. Hopefully a lot of people take you up on it. I think Brad's book, The Way of Excellence, gives you a good primer of what matters in life and what is degraded when you instead are just seeking out efficiency and quantity. So, Brad, always a pleasure. Thanks for once again joining the show. Thank you, Cal. Appreciate you. All right. So that was my conversation with Brad Stolberg. I sort of like where we ended up is a call to support Team Human instead of trying to support the valuation of San Francisco. I'm Altman Stock Holdings. But anyways, all this is up for debate. Interesting direction to start thinking about. I mean, I like these notions of struggle is good. Learning to do hard things is good. Hard stuff is good. We're not trying to efficiency for efficiency's sake doesn't mean anything. Knowledge work has become kabuki theater and AI is just making the plays even more ridiculous. I think these are all interesting topics and I'm glad we got a chance to talk about it. So, anyways, thank you, Brad, for joining us on the show. You got to check out Brad's book, The Way of Excellence. It's fantastic. He's got a great Instagram feed as well. I read some of that on the episode today. So if you're an Instagram user, check that out as well. All right. So I think that's all the time we have. No office hours. I'm not going to open my inbox this week because this conversation took longer than originally planned. But I will see you next week. And until then, as always, stay deep. Bye. Thank you.