This Skill Makes You Dangerous In The AI Era

Navigating the AI Era's Critical Thinking Crisis People say AI is turning us into the stupidest generation in history. I don't buy it. The real danger is what I call the crisis of critical thinking, because in the age of AI, anything can be faked and a lie looks exactly like the truth. That's where we need critical thinking. For those of you who are new here, I trained as a monk and then went to MIT and then spent many years running and advising companies as ACEO as a board member. And one thing I've learned is this. When machines can outsmart all of us, the only ability that will matter is your own judgement. So in this video, we'll cover 5 distortions that hijack your judgement everyday and one simple tool in each case to improve how to think more clearly. Learn to see all 5 and you'll feel like a genius catching what everyone else is missing. Let's start our story with one of the most expensive phone calls ever. In January of 2024, an employee working in the finance department at the Hong Kong company called Aroop, got a message from his CFO about transferring $25 million and he thought it smell fishy. So the employee asked the CEO to get on a video call to confirm it. All right, no problem. The CFO got on a video conference along with a few team members and they walked the finance employee through a step by step process to transfer the money. Now the employee was super proud of himself because he insisted on in person instructions from his CFO on a video conference. So he transferred the money and days later he and his company found out that every person on that call was a deep fake. A deep fake is a fake video or voice made by AI to look and sound exactly like the real person. The faces, the voices, all of it was generated by AI from clips of the CFO scraped from the Internet. And of course, the money, it was gone forever. This is a true story. This is the world we live in right now. You know, we've all heard that saying, finding the needle in a haystack. But now you have to find the real needle from the haystack of fake needles that look exactly like the real 1. And this is exactly where critical thinking comes in handy. And by the way, if you want one idea every week that helps you think more critically, please subscribe to my newsletter every Tuesday. One insight, one tool, one practice. Link is below, is totally free. How to Test Authority: Lessons from Theranos Failure What makes it hard to find that real needle are 5 distortions. Three of those distortions come from the outside. I call them the asks. We spell it ASC, and it sounds like ask because that's the whole point. Let's start with the first Test authority, because that's the force that can fool the smartest people in the room, a question that nobody asks. Some of the smartest investors threw hundreds of millions of dollars at a company called Theranos, but forgot to ask one very important question. Theranos was hailed as one of the pioneering companies that could run hundreds of blood tests on a single drop of blood. All the tests that would typically require someone poking your arm with a needle and taking several tubes of blood. It was a brilliant idea. The company raised $700 million from marquee investors. The company was valued at $9 billion at its peak. The founder and CEO of the company was Elizabeth Holmes, and she was such a dynamic and charismatic woman. She dropped out of Stanford at the age of 19 and she would work 20 hour days and she wore a black turtleneck just like Steve Jobs. And she had a deep baritone voice. She talked like this all the time, and people noticed that she barely blinked when she was giving answers. I can't do that. She had a sense of a noble purpose, and for 12 years she kept the technology secret. She was running a medical devices company that felt like a tech company from Silicon Valley. Except that none of it was true. The core technology had never worked as promised. When a Wall Street Journal article cracked the facade open, it turned out the Miracle Machine was just a box that couldn't do anything she had promised. And eventually the company collapsed and Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison. That's where she is right now. So how does that happen? How do the sharpest people in finance skip the basics? Let's look at 3 signs where critical thinking would have saved the investors. First, the Halo effect. Fairness had one of the most impressive boards on the planet. Two former secretaries of State, a retired 4 star general, and former CEO's from major companies. Brilliant people, powerful people, influential people. But did they know anything about blood chemistry or medical devices? Absolutely not, but nobody asked. Second, the FOMO. Nobody wanted to miss the next NVIDIA or Apple or Google. And Elizabeth Holmes made the investors feel like the train was leaving the station all the time. Nobody asked. And 3rd, the Velocity. A reporter asked Home 6 times how the companies technology actually worked and he never got a straight answer. She said chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal, which is translated into a result that meant almost nothing. Could a real medical breakthrough meant to diagnose your health ever avoid any scrutiny at all? Absolutely not. But nobody asked, and that story keeps repeating itself. Enron, FTX, we work the 2008 financial crisis. In every single one of those cases, people replace their own judgement and let the charisma, the credentials, and the confidence of others destroyed their reality. And the key take away action item here is pretty simple. The first skill about critical thinking is just asking a simple disarming question that nobody else has bothered to ask. What needs to be true for this to be real? That's the question. This is where AI can help too, by the way, but only if you use it correctly. So if someone makes an impressive claim, go back to AI and ask. Show me the evidence that supports the claim. Show me all the evidence that challenges it. What needs to be true for this to be real? Theranos was a $9 billion failure of critical thinking, an expensive lesson in bad judgement. But the same magic tricks are played by lawyers and marketers every single day all around us. Spotting Marketing Spin: The Art of True Lies That's where we go next to the land of true lies. You know, big companies don't lie to you anymore. They don't have to. They have something better. The smartest companies on earth have one dark art. How to create true lies. Start with the phone that's in your hand. Now, I really like Apple products, so I'm not dissing on them. But if you watch how Apple talks about their products when they launch them, it's a master class of marketing gymnastics. Today we're raising the bar with an all new iPhone that is unlike anything we have created. You know when you listen to that line carefully, you realize that they didn't say anything. All they said was we've created something. Knew that we hadn't created before. Well, that's what new means. Those are just word noodles, perfectly edible. But if you were a critical thinker, you won't be able to digest them. Here are some verbal tricks. One trick is up to the company will say the battery can last up to 36 hours. That's exactly like me saying this video will have up to 1 billion views if only 12 of you show up. Well, I still told the truth. Another trick is as low as a credit card company will offer you as low as 0% interest as long as you qualify perfectly and behave perfectly miss ones and is 24% compounding every month on everything. Another trick is the phrase starting at At the time I am recording this the Tesla Model 3 is starting at $37,000 in the US. But if you want all-wheel drive, well that's actually $47,000. One faster acceleration, $55,000. Oh you want the self driving activated? Well that's extra $1200 per year forever. Everything we hear is layered up, sanitized, manicured, curated, brilliantly engineered true lies. So here's one actionable move and it works on everything. I call it the question mark move. It has 2 steps. First, train your ear for the shiny words, the word tricks that we talked about, They're just empty calories up to starting at clinically proven, recommended by experts. Second, when you hear one of those phrases, repeat that claim in your head with a question mark at the end. So when you hear up to 8 times faster, change that to up to 8 times faster. What does that even mean exactly? Faster than what? Once you start thinking about it, once you start cutting through these true lies, you'll start seeing critical gaps between the promise and the product. Now the next skill is trickier, creating a gap between what they're selling and what you're willing to buy. Escape Groupthink: Challenge Popular Consensus Let's go there next to see what everybody knows. Group thing stops you from thinking on your own. There is a famous experiment where researchers brought one real participant into a room with seven others already sitting in there. Everyone was shown one line and then three other comparison lines, and everyone was asked which comparison line matched the first one. The answer was obvious. There was no optical illusion. There was no trick. Only one of those 3 lines matched the original 1. But one by one, the seven people give the wrong answer. The 8th person who was the participant ended up giving the wrong answer too. The experiment went on for a long time. Three out of every four participants went along with the wrong group answer. But here's what the participants didn't know. Those seven who were sitting there were hired actors. They were told to give the wrong answer confidently. The experiment was never about about the lines. It was about whether a room full of confident people could make you sway your own judgment on something so obvious. And later on, the participants themselves confessed that they had known the right answer all along. They just couldn't stand to be the only one in the room with a different viewpoint. When everyone around you believes something to be true, you stop asking for proof. Because 1000 people can't all be wrong, can they? Turns out they can be. It happens all the time. Massive crowds can believe in things with no basis at all. The Salem witch trial, the Tulip mania, the bank run during the Great depressionthe.com frenzy. The wisdom of the crowd is a real concept, but so is mass hysteria and groupthink. And here's another surprise from the same experiment. When just one of those actors started giving the correct answer, most participants also started giving the correct answer. It just took one person to disagree, that's all. So the action item is this. When everyone around you agrees, go find that person who disagrees. Now how do you break that spell in the age of AI? Well, when everyone around you agrees, make AI your voice of dissent, your devil's advocate. Tell it to give you an opposite argument. Make the strongest case that this consensus is wrong. And by the way, you don't have to become the person who doubts everything. Just remember that 1000 people believing in something doesn't automatically make it true. Avoid AI Dependence, Overcome Self-Deception, Strengthen Judgment Those were the three outside distortions. But we are in an age where AI is the biggest generator of ideas and biggest generator of distortions. So let's go see what AI knows. MIT researchers ask people to write essays in two ways. One group used their own brain and outside research, and the other use ChatGPT. The brains of ChatGPT users showed the least amount of brain activity compared to the other group in just minutes. After both groups finished, they were asked to quote at least one line from what they had written. The ChatGPT group couldn't quote a single line of what they had just created. You know, AI tools give us an easy and powerful way to create infinite content. Instead of thinking creatively or thinking critically, we outsource all of it to AI. So in those kind of situations, I have a simple solution. When I am working with AI, I use two lines way more often than anything else in the prompt. Be precise and please verify. I even take the output from Chachi PT for example, to Claude or Gemini to verify it. Ask one of your AI engines to review the other one's work. They're just mathematical beings and it is your job to constantly verify their output. And now we go to the 5th and the most difficult critical thinking skill. Fighting what you want to be true. There is one source that you will never Fact Check because you trusted completely yourself. We don't lie to ourselves on purpose, we just want something to be true so badly enough so we stopped checking years ago. I had these two friends. One day the male friend of mine sat me down over coffee and told me how deeply he was in love with my woman friend, and from that day on he would not stop talking about her. He truly believed that they were made for each other. One day I gave up and I finally had a heart to heart conversation with her and I told her everything that I had heard. I told her how deeply this guy was in love with her and I confessed to her that I hadn't seen such devotion anywhere else in my life. And she smiled and said something that I have remembered to this day. His love for me is not enough of a reason for me to fall in love with him. That was very wise. Now what does this have to do with critical thinking? It's got everything to do with critical thinking because we want something to be true just because we want it so deeply. But that doesn't make it true. We all get stuck in our own self deception. We believe in what we want to believe. The most important question for the critical thinker is this. What am I refusing to see? Because I need this story to be true today. What's real and what's fake, What matters and what doesn't. It's all stirred together so completely that you can barely tell it apart. And when the world gets this foggy, your judgement becomes that much more crucial. I think the answer lies in staying close to reality and investing in your own judgement, in your own critical skills. That's what this video was about. And sure, the fog won't lift anytime soon and it is hard to see at a distance, but that doesn't mean that you're lost. It just means you have to drive slower. The road can be long and it can wind, but it still leads you home always. I'll see you next week. Thank you and I love you.