The Mind on Fire | OpenAI's Brice Challamel on Stewardship, Questions & What AI Asks of Us

There is a question a lot of us are sitting with right now, even if we haven't said it out loud. If AI can generate the idea, write the memo, design the prototype, and iterate faster than I ever could, what exactly am I for? And I've been sitting with that question for a while, and I think it might be the most important question of our time. Not because it's frightening, but because the answer is where something new begins. And today's guest might be one of the few people alive who can help us find out. When I reached out to Bryce Chalamel recently, the first thing he said was that he was one of the biggest fans of the creativity and innovation team at Google, a small, quiet lab where we both spent time in that truly believed human creativity was worth developing, not just optimizing. And that message stopped me because Bryce is now head of AI strategy and adoption at OpenAI. He spent years at Moderna during the pandemic helping embed AI into an organization in a race against time where the stakes weren't efficiency, they were lives. And he has been inside the machine at some of the most important moments of the last decade. And he still thinks what we were doing in that little lab matters. Today we find out why and what it means for you. Whoever you are, whatever you do, wherever you are in your relationship with AI right now. Brice, welcome to The Future is How.

Thank you so much, Frederik, and I'm so glad and grateful to be with you. I have to say also for our audience that when I joined Google back in 2016, you were one of the first to welcome me, that on the onboarding for Google as a whole, your team had a session about the importance of design thinking. And of renewing our perspective to the world. That was a mandatory part of everyone coming to the company, and that's how I even got to, to know you on day one. And that ever since I have been enlightened and probably also deeply powered throughout the last decade by the things that I started to learn on that day with you and that we're going to be discussing today.

Thanks so much, Brice. It's an honor to have you on. And, um, before we go anywhere big, I want to start somewhere small and real. So tell me your Friday morning and how it started today. Walk me through it and tell me what role, if any, AI played in it.

So today was a very common day in my life. I started by meeting some customers and I meet them mostly at the leadership level. And in this case, I'm preparing a contribution to the leadership team of a large pharma company that is adopting AI and OpenAI's technology. And we were discussing how best to approach it. And there's really two options there that we were discussing. One of them is I would say leadership and Q&A. And the other one is to leverage an AI platform, in this case Codex, and to get a little bit hands-on, which could be also mouths-on because more and more we speak to AI rather than type to AI, and to drive the conversation with AI intelligence by the side of those 60 leaders and myself. And we discussed the pros and cons with the team that is in charge of preparing that meeting, which happens at the end of May. And at the end of it, they said that this was that they had to think about it, that this was a bold proposition that we were making to embed AI into the very fabric of that day with their leadership team, and that they wish I could put a few notes together for them to take back to the CEO of the company and discuss it with them. And what I did, because we had recorded the conversation, is I went straight to Codex where I have an agent that does this and skills to that effect, which created an HTML page exactly to the request that they asked. From that HTML page, a beautiful PDF document with 5 pages that is fantastically well organized and gorgeous, but also very clear. In here is the situation. Here are the stakes. Here are the 2 options. Here are the trade-offs. And here is the moment, the components of your choice. And I just finalized this. I think it took 5 minutes and 22 seconds. I remember it because there's always something magical about seeing those moments. And I sent them this gorgeous document, which I could of course edit to their liking because it's made in code. And in a way, I realized when I sent it to them that this was the essence of how I work. I work now constantly with AI and with the coding part of AI, I must say. And it is the topic that we address, but at the same time, the way we work together, because of course, I think they expected me to jot down notes, probably out of memory or out of the transcript and to write something, but I really have evolved from authorship to stewardship.

So let me ask you, how did the minutes before the meeting or the hours before the meeting start for you today?

You mean from the moment I woke up?

Absolutely. Yes.

You mean a typical morning in my life? First, I am sometimes I say surrounded by beauty and love. I live with my two children, with my wife, and we have two cats. They are kittens. They are one year old. So my day started surrounded by cats and children. And my wife used to say, it's in French, but it works in English too. Would you bring me a coffee by any chance? And I say, if I bring you a coffee, it won't be out of chance, it'll be out of love. And so it became Coffee by Annie Love. And so now when I wake up, the first thing that I do is I bring her a Coffee by Annie Love. This is the way we call them.

Wonderful.

It's been going on for 18 years. My day starts, I don't drink coffee myself ever. And so, which makes it all the more a gesture of love that the first thing I do in my, in my morning when I wake up is I do something for the person that I love the most in the world, a Coffee by Annie Love.

Wonderful. Thanks for sharing that. And what would be the first thing you ask AI or you type in AI? What would be the things that you're most curious, most curious about? Like every morning, probably, right after you—

It really depends on the day, but very often the first thing that I ask AI is to ask me questions. Right. I, we go back to the opening that you made about the fact that what is left for us when AI has the answers. And if we take a step back, we are surrounded by people who have a lot of answers. My father, who passed away a year ago, was the type of man who had all the answers. And one day my mother told me, you know, I asked, what do you think is the main difference between my father and I? And my mother said, your father has all the answers and you have all the questions. And I found this so striking and interesting. And so in a way, for a long part of my life, I've been surrounded with all the answers and that didn't stop me from thinking on my feet. And it made me someone much more curious in a way, because I couldn't fight with all those answers. They were like the definitive answers, right?

Yes.

And so I'll give you a concrete example because that happened this morning too. I'm working right now on partnership frameworks with organizations that want to onboard on AI and that are eager to find how OpenAI can help them. There are so many ways, and in a way it's overwhelming for everyone because the past technology revolutions, we are very much within the same form factor. If you think of the evolution of photography, the transition from a digital photography, from an analog photo— no, photography camera is very seamless. It's the— if you take DSLRs, it's like the same shape, the same form. You just have sensors that are different. And even if you take the compact cameras that we had and now the mobile phones, we don't have to relearn a lot. It's a very seamless transition for us. The form factor is the same. And even a step back, if you think of the transition from typewriters to computers, we had keyboards, we have keyboards, and it's the same keys at the same place. And they are at that place because of typewriters. The reason why there's a QWERTY keyboard in English and an AZERTY keyboard in French is to avoid the jamming of the keys because they were typed too quickly. And so we used to have a page on top of the keyboard and now we have a screen in front of the keyboard, but it's the same thing. We have just reproduced the form factor of the keyboard and the page with the keyboard and the screen. And so there's a long tradition of easing the process of transition for the user by simply continuing the form factor and injecting technology into it. And I have dozens of other examples like this one. In the case of AI, however, it's one of those transitions in which it doesn't matter the form factor in the end. We need to profoundly rethink how we behave at the core. Instead, for instance, of browsing documents and reading them, we need to expect to be briefed on documents and what's in them. Instead of writing documents, or we need to expect to manage AI teammates who write documents. It's still us, but there's a layer of abstraction on both sides. And in this way, we're no longer exactly knowledge workers. We don't read knowledge and write knowledge. We receive intelligence briefings and we produce intelligent instructions. We're intelligence workers. And that transition from knowledge workers to intelligence workers, I think, is one of the defining concepts of our lifetime, right? It is the delivery of the promise of computing and the internet bundled all together. Within direct voice conversation. It's pretty phenomenal. And even though the form factor, you know, evolves, our behavior has to completely change. And that's one of the parts that I find the most thrilling because it's the first time. If I go back from this, how do we support companies? Because we are providing a technology. We're also providing a platform with a lot of tools and interfaces and components and connections to other platforms. But we're also a catalyst of change and how we show up across those 3 components, technology provider, capability, uh, platforms, catalyst of change is a decisive, uh, choice. And so, because I was struggling with that question, I asked Codex to organize a 30-minute interview on those topics to propose to me the categories of the questions that we review the interview together. And that then I would answer one question after the other. And I spent half an hour this morning answering 20 questions one by one in 7 categories on all the topics of the type of partnerships that I would dream to establish. And at the end of this, my mind was much sharper on what I really wanted to do, regardless of whatever answer I come up or AI come up or we come up with together. I had clarified a lot of my assumptions because the way that AI helped me and pressure tested my own mental model on this topic. Was irreplaceable in this case.

You said something very interesting that we grew up in a world that pretended to have all the answers. That's, I think, how we got educated. Bryce, when you went to school, when I went to school, I think we thought that there's all the answers out there. It's in a book, it's in the teachers, it's, you know, somewhere. Now we're living in a world where we probably have more questions than answers. And I think that's a more honest approach to how the world that we live in actually functions. And you also said something that I will take away to tomorrow morning, and that is that asking AI to ask you questions first thing in the morning can be that spark of curiosity where you're not looking for an answer, but you're looking for a better question that, as you said, sharpens your mind, sharpens your thinking, helps you to explore different answers, different ways of thinking about something. I love that. So thanks for sharing that.

And I have to say, questions, I just wanna add one thing is that those questions always make me feel a little bit uncomfortable in the good way. I'm like, oh wow, that's a great question. I'm not prepared to answer that question. Let me take a step back and think on that question. And I always feel at the edge of what I can actually answer to because most people that I know have kind of made an image of myself in their minds and ask me the questions that they think I can answer. And most often they're right. I love that. But AI doesn't I don't have that kind of preconception, so it asks me the question that needs to be answered, whether I can or can't. And there's something pretty thrilling about the way that AI interviews you because it's a very, very good interviewer. Makes you uncomfortably at the edge of your comfort zone, right?

Yes. What would be an example of such an uncomfortable question recently that you got asked by AI?

One of them is just, so I was working on movie night recommendations. What are we going to watch as a movie with my family? And I asked the AI to ask me questions about our habits, about the movies we like, we don't like, and so on. And the AI went into a series of questions about why do we watch movies, with whom do we watch them, what happens when someone feels isolated and it's not their choice because we're a family of 4, and what are the geometries of the family that work great with movies. If I watch a movie with my wife without the children, or with my son without the girls, with my daughter without my wife and son, what kind of movies are those? And the further we went with those questions, the further I realized that I was just starting, as I usually do with the ask me questions, to just prepare a little bit of— I wanted to write a small app that kind of remembers what we've seen and proposes always the best, freshest movie at any given time. And I found myself deep into the fabric of the relationship at my home between the four of us.

Wonderful.

Just out of this, you see what I'm saying? And realized, of course, and of course, that the choice of a movie is not only a small and trivial topic, but it's actually a profound marker of how we relate to one another in my household. And an expression of love. Because if someone says, okay, I don't like that side of movie, but I will, I will be there with the three of you because this is a consensus. It's a little sacrifice and an act of love because we don't all like the same types of movies. And this is typical of the journey because Every little trivial act of daily life, if you take it with an additional moment of intelligence and questioning, suddenly becomes a moment when you have to reveal to the surface things that you've not really considered before. Even movie night is actually a profoundly emotional, psychological, and relational topic.

Amazing.

Yes.

And I see you maybe next time when you deliver your first coffee to your wife and you get a question that surprises you, that is making you a little bit more uncomfortable, you take it to the coffee machine again and you prepare the second coffee and have some time to think about that, which I think is a beautiful segue into what I want to talk about next. And you said something that genuinely stopped me when I first read it. You said there are no more individual contributors, that everyone, whatever they know, is already leading a team. So tell me what you mean by that, because I think most people listening right now think of themselves as solo. Responsible for their own work, their own output. What do you see that they don't?

So first, I want to do two caveats before I dive into the topic. The first one is that when I say everyone, I mean every person who has the huge privilege to live in a developed economy and have access to a computing device and to an AI model, which is a minority of mankind. And I want us to never ignore and dismiss the fact that there is a majority of mankind who doesn't have access. And the ability for everyone to have access has to stay on top of our thoughts all the time.

Thanks for sharing that.

The mission of OpenAI is to make AI beneficial for mankind, and we really mean it. So we are thinking all the time about how do we make AI accessible to people who don't have connectivity, who don't have smartphones, who maybe don't even have electricity. How How do we make this a, a better offering for the whole of the human population than just the few privileged people who have access to this? And at the moment, everyone means everyone like you and I, and probably everyone listening to this podcast, cuz if you're listening to this, you are among the happy few privileged people who have connectivity, electricity, and the goodness of, of the modern world. The second caveat I want to bring here is that you mentioned in that question the sense of ownership, and that sense is still completely ours. I don't mean by saying that we all have teammates. That we are not in charge anymore. We just have more support than we used to. But in this way, I think of us more like the, if you would, the CEO of a small startup that is made of AI components, but we are the CEO. And at the end of the day, we make the decisions and those decisions are ours. And if they go right or if they go wrong, it's on us. So with those two caveats, let's dive into the topic. AI is not just one thing. It is at least four things that we can use in good intelligence and be the architect of how we use them. The first is assistants. So what I did this morning when I wrote that beautiful 5-pager, which was an HTML site and then a PDF, it was an extraordinary act of assistance, right? Instead of taking my notes, painstakingly writing what I remembered, and then trying to put it into good form and shape, AI was an assistant to me, did note-taking, did the document production, I could just send it and that's as good as it gets. The second is expertise. And certainly there's a little bit of expertise that went into this document, but I can ask AI about almost anything at this point and get some level of expertise, technical expertise, right? I can ask about astronomy, about biology, about life sciences. I can ask about statistics, about, you know, social behavior. And one of my daily habits is when I have time in my car, when I commute and go somewhere, I pick any topic that comes through my mind and I launch AI conversation and I just engage with the topic with the AI voice to voice. Instead of listening to a podcast or to, sometimes listen to a podcast or to music, and I just dive into the expertise. It's like having an infinite encyclopedia and opening a page at random. And I ask the strangest questions and I have a fascination for all the way it always leads somewhere, right? Like where do all the languages come from and why did they separate in branches? And what does the difference between Eastern languages and Western languages say about the way our civilizations went? And then, boom, you're in for 20 minutes of conversation. So that's expertise. Amazing. Yeah. The third is coaching and mentoring. AI should not be taken as a psychologist, which it's not, much less as a therapist, which it is absolutely not. But within the boundaries of a healthy situation, asking AI, how do you think I should go about to position myself for a job that I dream to have? Or based on the transcript of that conversation, of that meeting that I had yesterday, how did I show up and how could I maybe show up better and have better skills and presence to really deliver my message because I felt that I was a little bit off in that meeting and please guide me. And most often you are going to get very useful feedback and guidance. It's one voice out of many. You should not restrict it to just the AI. It's also useful to go meet with the humans who can help you, but certainly it's a useful voice. And then the fourth is the creative partner, something that you and I truly cherish. AI is a fantastic ideation partner, never tired of yes anding. Any idea that we come up with, it's going to say yes and something, and yes and something that would never cross the mind of another human. I'll give you an example. I was working on biases recently, and I was doing this really traditional thing about the old white judge. You know, you say, draw an image of a wise judge, and you almost always have an old white man with a beard, with a hammer, with an American flag, and there's so many biases in there. And I can spot 5 or 6 biases in that image that immediately jump to my mind. It's a man, he's old, there's an American flag, like, like, you know, there's a lot there that is not, that was not in my question and that goes straight into the answer. But then there's a list that goes beyond of like 15 or 20. And one of the points of AI was, huh, it's a human. And it didn't even cross my mind to question the fact that when I asked for a wise judge, why would it be a human? It's a typical thing of AI to highlight that the bias is a difference to human, that a wise judge could be a god, could be digital, could be like so many other things that are human. And I just found it funny when I was reading the end of the list. So there's something there also about the creative partner. And so when we saw, when we see those 4, you know, personas of sorts, the assistant, the expert, the coach, the creative, then we're a team of 5 because we are still there. We are, we matter a lot. We are the orchestrator. And we are the decision maker, we are the owner, but now we can play any combination of those four on ourselves and start to really have a great panel of advisors and of contributors because they can produce assets, all of them that work with us on any given topic. And the truth is, if you have a great assistant, a great universal expert, a fantastic mentor, and an unstoppable creative partner, your mind is on fire. And, uh, this is going to be the first time that I'm going to start to touch about the topic that you opened with. AI is the human mind on fire. It is not something of loss. It is something of extreme gain.

Beautiful. You described a shift recently from author to steward, and I find that one, probably one of the most quietly radical ideas I've encountered in a long time. Because authorship says, I made this. Stewardship says something different. So what does a steward actually do?

Authorship means I made this. Stewardship means I meant this.

I meant this.

I meant this. This is the expression of my intent. It doesn't matter. I've worked a lot, so I, back in the days, and you would find it if you would look for it, I published a book which is in French. You'll never know how bad it was, but I did this. With a game of cards in the book. There were 36 cards. It was a book about personas to stimulate your imagination. And there were 36 illustrated cards. I didn't do the illustrations. I don't have that skill set, not at that level, not at that speed, not at that level of professionalism. Like, I, I love to draw, but not like this. But I had an idea of the characters I wanted, and I designed the personas, and I drafted questions and slogans and some descriptions, and I started briefing the illustrator on how I imagine the illustration to go, right? And the illustrator finalized some extraordinarily beautiful images of the personas. And it was a, uh, with iterations, they would first do this with a pencil, then I would agree to this and we would put some color shades and things like this. And I would say, okay, and then we'd go into the last form. So I didn't do this, even though the cards are in the book and the authorship still is mine, by the way, right? It's a type of contract that is called shared authorship in which you describe who meant the thing and who executed it. And the Property belongs to who meant it, and you have to describe exactly what you said, but you cannot completely alienate the person who executed from the rights of it. There are, there's a subtle negotiation there. And I'm back there 30 years later, back to my first love of doing illustrated cards for, you know, imaginative purposes, working with an illustrator. I met the game, the design, the book, the method, but they helped me a lot to get it through the finish line. And they accomplished a lot of amazing work of art in the process of this. And so today I delegate in part still to other humans and in part still to other AIs, and I try to find the right combination of both. It's always a decision, even what combination of both you're gonna get. But as a steward and as a manager, I mean for something to happen, and then I negotiate with the world how it's going to take shape.

A lot of people still wonder how to use AI better. They're looking for the answer, like, how can I use AI better in my work, in my private life, in my relationship? Whatever that means. I think we need to ask a different question, and that is, who do we need to become as human beings? Do you have an answer for that?

My hypothesis here is that we need to become who we've always been, and that because this is not new to us. Like, we have a blessing with the humans, which is we have infinite adaptability. We are, we are not born fully baked. Actually, when we are born, we are very fragile. If you take the example of a A phone can just be born and then get up on their legs and then run. Like no human can do this. We are born very premature. We don't have a lot of instinct. We don't have a lot of skills. Like if we don't meet someone who teaches us how to speak by the age of 8 or 10, we won't be able to anymore. There's a brief moment in time when we can acquire speech and after which that capability is just gone for us. And so in this, in so many different ways, We are empty vessels who are willing to, ready to take any sea. And we've taken so many different seas, and this is our relationship to technology, right? We've adapted to printing, we've adapted to industry, we've adapted to urban life, we've adapted to computing, we've adapted to electricity, we've adapted to the radio. Think of the radio. How crazy is this? You know, 100, 150 years ago, someone starts to speak in your living room, and then if you change channel, someone else speaks in your living room, and then another person. You can't listen to all of them, so there's always going to be something you didn't hear. And, uh, and you're going to be deprived of a lot of knowledge because there's like 20 people speaking at the same time into everyone's living rooms except yours. And, and our mind had to adjust to this tremendously. And this is a long time ago compared to, well, a short time ago in the history of mankind, but a long time ago compared to our own lifespan.

Yeah, that's probably where FOMO was born.

That's exactly right. Because at the time, an educated person could read every newspaper, but suddenly they couldn't listen to every radio channel. And so the notion, which was of course, was always very deceptive, that they could understand everything and know everything, was materially impossible. You had to accept that you were going to miss out. And then this is when you would have, if you're lucky, the joy of missing out, JOMO, because the more you're missing out, the more intentional you've been about what you are capturing, what you are doing, the more choices you are making. And what an extraordinary chance for us to not have just one radio station. That we have to listen, that everyone feeds on. But to have the choice of 20 and to have the joy of missing out on 19 because that one, the 20th, is the one we like to be on, right? The joy of missing out. Like today with you, I have the joy of missing out on everything else the world has to offer because, oh wow, I'm with Frederik G. Pferdt and we're having this conversation. And this has only accelerated since, but I think our ability to constantly reinvent ourselves, to constantly find new ways to leverage technology and elevate ourselves and rethink who we are is going to keep being exhilarating. I'm actually, I'm part of the people who think that there is no technology evolution that will ever threaten us as humans, ever. That as long as we love to explore and sample the experience that is life, as long as we have problems to solve, as long as we have loved ones to please, as long as we make coffees by any love, there will be something for us to experience and to enjoy, right? And the more technology, uh, the better. And this, it comes with downsides, with, you know, impact on, on environment. Uh, sometimes the transition between the old world and the new world is a bit too slow and then we fall within the cracks. Sometimes our children are exposed too early to technology that is not meant for them. And there are things that, that shouldn't be happening. So I am conscious of all those limitations, what I'm saying, but profoundly, I think as long as we are driven by the motivation of love, of helping other people, of make a good contribution on this, on this earth, we will find that technology serves us.

Beautiful.

Does that answer your question?

More than that. Yes. And continue on that thread with the radio metaphor that you just shared and the fear of missing out, but also the joy of missing out. And I think the radio was invented 1890. You know, back then, I think people were listening, as you said, to one channel. And then as the second channel, the third channel, and like 20 channels appear, people were giving the choice to choose what they're listening to. And just fast forward to today where everyone can actually be their own radio channel and giving people an inside view of what they're thinking, how they're thinking, what they are working on, what they're contributing to the world and so forth, but also share opinions, to be honest. I think that's a very different world that we are now living in, right? And I think you're absolutely right. People adapted. And people were probably not ready in the '80s, '90s to all have their own radio channels. But now I think we are ready towards that. But let's look into the future. What can we imagine? And maybe we draw one of your 36 imagination cards. What can we imagine that's, that not a lot of people can see right now where this is going to lead to? So take us into, into your mind and how you not predict the future, not kind of like do some, you know, foresight here, but like really imagine what's the world that you want to live in, that you want to build for your children, for your wife, for your friends, for the people that are living on this planet.

So one of the things that I think a lot these days is you— I want to exactly continue the thread that you're on because it's exactly where I am also. So We go from an environment in which first very few people have a work related to their thoughts. We talked a few minutes ago about the privilege to be living in this day and age and in the Western world. It is the first time in the history of mankind that an autonomous society has more people that live from their thoughts than live from their hands. It's never happened before and it doesn't happen elsewhere. Suddenly we're inventing whole societies where thinking is the main line of work, which when you, when you just pull it and take a step back is extraordinary. And then we start to feed that thought process that is emerging in Western societies with a lot of input, the radio, the television, the internet, exponential curve of input that constantly feeds the way people think. But the one thing that has not been externalized yet is how are those input process in our mind and what are the inner workings that transform them into the output of our opinions, of our decisions, of our expressions, of our behaviors in, in all sorts of situations. And I don't know that we are faring very well as a society. There are a lot of unhappy people. There are a lot of lonely people. Uh, there are a lot of radicalized people. And not that I don't think you shouldn't be, there are a lot of reasons to be, but I feel their angst, I feel their anger, I see it all the time. And we have ways to monitor this that tell us that it's more than it's ever been. And I think and hope that AI gives us a chance to externalize our mental models, to question them. When we go towards code, I started with code, and code is a bit frightening, but it's going to be something that's just going to be there at our fingertips, where we can say, create a small application that does this, that does that, and then the AI is going to create code for us. When we do this, we need to explain how what enters the app has to be processed to get out of the app. Even if it's for meal planning, even if it's for, you know, like simple things of everyday life, for preparing the movie night, you have to take a step back and think about what it meant to make a decision for the movie or to prepare for the meal or to organize a meeting or to make a decision for your health or for, you know, if you are someone who has a dependent, an elder person or a friend or a child who is dependent on you. And now we have to externalize our mental model, but it's an extraordinary chance because suddenly we can put it out there and take a look at it. We can put the entire machinery of our mind and how it's currently working on the screen, on the paper, on the page, in the conversation, and take a look at it and think, that's the way I'm thinking about this right now. What if I toggle off that Assumption. What if I use that glider to push a little bit more towards that kind of opinion that I've had in the past, but I've never completely explored? And I hope that the ability of AI to run and support and increment the way we think about the world in those societies that have more thinkers than doers is a chance for us to start doing the real work of society, which is to challenge, improve, and share our mental models as an externality, not as an internality, not as something that is inside of me and that I can't express, but something that is certainly outside of me and I can show to you and we can work on together. And if I take the very simple examples that I just shared about movie night or meal planning, the option to say, this is how we decide how we make the meal, then suddenly my children have a chance to say, hold on, I wish to put one more factor in how you decide. There's this or that that is dear to me. And then suddenly we're smarter together. The very way that we are intelligent together starts to enhance and to get better. Now you take that and you put it into clinical trials. You take that and you put it into manufacturing for automotive, into healthcare processes for elderly people, into the platforms of entertainment that we use for video games or for 3D animations or for narrative entertainment. And then we have a real conversation. How are ideas crafted, right? Our songs and our dances and our movies, how our meals are spent, how our healthcare journey is decided. We have not have that discussion and it's hard for us to be on top of them, but with AI we can. So that's, that's the world that I hope. And I'm already seeing this in a lot of different dimensions at work, at home. I'm starting to see this emerge. I know that this will not be the daily life of everyone as of tomorrow, but I think as a society, we're going to more and more be able to transfer things that were always to the effect of hidden internal skills and tastes and capabilities. Into a platform of intelligence that we can share and discuss with others.

What's the role of feelings in that? Because when you describe that, you know, now more people are using their mind to do the work instead of their hands. And I think we saw in the past that machines could help us do the work on the field that we did with our hands and our feet better. And we had machines supporting us. Now we are at an age where our machines help us to think better. Is the next edge maybe feelings and how emotions are, you know, processed, worked with, expressed, and so forth?

Yeah, I love this question because on one hand, our emotions drive the intent to begin with. Why are we doing something? Why would we wake up and do a Coffee by Any Love? It's an emotion topic. And then they drive our perception of what is right or wrong. Why would my children ask for another way to prepare the meats? It's emotional to them. It's not just rational.

Absolutely.

And then why at the end, yeah, why at the end we prefer a solution than another. It's almost an aesthetic judgment. It's a matter of almost culture and taste. And while all this is happening and our emotions are channeled towards intention, towards contribution, and towards expression of the artistic finality of what we do, they're also, I think, given a chance to be better channeled and for us to remain in control of them and not the other way around, because instead of being abruptly thrown into social media with super abrasive topics that are thrown in our face by troll farms, we get to have some Socratic companionship through AI that is an assistant, an expert to coach a creative, and that helps us take a step back, reflect, document, understand. And I feel that the type of emotion that I have when I work with AI, and I still have a lot, they are much more pleasant and conducive to a good experience for me than the type of emotions that I have when I'm on X, formerly known as Twitter, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, or any of those platforms, which always drove me to the edge of my seat emotionally, right? In so many different ways. And I find that the interaction in an AI-augmented environment, even with my colleagues and my loved ones and my friends, suddenly the emotions become the sails of my boat. And not the storm on my boat. Suddenly they are something that even though it's extraordinary and impressive and beautiful, it is in the service of the motion that I'm in and not something that is just shattering me. And so I hope that we find an increasingly better place with our emotions. These are such early days. We'll see how that plays out. But I agree with you that emotions are important and the way they translate into perception and judgment. And I find also, I don't know what you think, but that The way that our emotions play out in the relationship with AI in the majority of cases can be channeled to a better extent and is more soothing than what it used to be when we were in a digital environment.

Absolutely. Yes. So we are moving from working machines to thinking machines to feeling machines, maybe, or working intelligence to—

I don't know that they feel, but they understand the language of feelings. And so they are great listeners. We come back to using AI to ask you questions. The way you're going to answer those questions— has it ever happened to you, Frederik, to cry in an AI conversation?

I think I was at the edge many times feeling something that I haven't felt before, I would say. Mirroring something to me that I haven't looked at before in that way, or that went deeper than I expected. So I was on the edge, I would say, many, many times, crying when I engaged with my many AIs that I have a very good relationship with.

I have the exact same experience. I have been moved more often than I care to admit by an AI conversation, and I have found myself crying a number of times at the realization, the profound realization of things that I was suddenly able to surface within the conversation with AI on topics that were difficult for me to express to begin with, but that I, it would've been hard for me to discuss with another human, but was easy for me to discuss with AI and sometimes just started from a very simple conversation and came to a very moving place. And in this way, uh, the, the AI has no feelings. Let's just acknowledge this once and for all. It doesn't feel anything, but it understands the language of emotions and it is able to help us deal with our own emotions to the point that sometimes they are very profoundly emotional conversations.

So I want to make this conversation land somewhere practical because I think the most dangerous thing that can happen after conversations like this, that I very much enjoy, and I think it's, uh, it's wonderful. So thank you so much, Bryce.

Of course. Thank you.

So, so the, the, Most interesting that can happen after a conversation like this is that someone listens, feels something, and then opens their laptop and does exactly what they were doing before.

Yes.

So if someone is listening right now on a run, in their car, doing dishes, or petting their dog, or whatever they do, and they feel something shifting in how they think about themselves and AI, what's the one experiment you would give them? Something small, something they can try before next Friday. Shouldn't be a tool, not a framework, an experiment.

Yeah. So let's stick with exactly what we've been discussing, because I think that will seal perfectly this conversation. As soon as this podcast is finished and you are, and you're done with it, I want to speak to you, the listener, on the next topic that comes to your mind. Instead of asking AI for an answer, ask AI for a question. That simple thing, whether it is the relationship with your dog or the decision at work, a philosophical topic, uh, you know, we, we have brain trained for decades to perceive, I would say, an open command line, like, you know, the Google search bar or the Amazon search bar as a way to ask something and get an answer. But the truth is we can also go to it and ask a question, like for a question, right? Like, and so I would propose this simple experiment on any given topic, even a small trivial topic, ask AI to ask you one question or maybe even three questions. Say, hey, ask me 3 questions on this topic, whichever questions you think are going to help me think about this in a clearer, better, smarter way. And I can't wait for you to find out where that leads you because it will lead you in a new territory and you'll probably be grateful for it.

Love that. Thanks for sharing that, Brice. I want to close with something I do with every guest, but I've never done it with someone who has sat where you've sat. 5 questions, 1 breath between each, no preparation, no perfect answer, just what's true for you right now.

Let's go.

Ready?

Yeah.

What about AI actually frightens you? Not a risk to manage, but something you feel in your body.

How deeply it can understand us.

What would the 10-year-old version of you think is most beautiful about the world where we're building?

Infinite possibilities.

What's the question you're carrying right now that no one in AI is helping you answer?

What is the next move?

One capacity, not a tool, not a skill, something interior you'd give every person to carry them through the next 10 years, what is it?

Empathy.

And finishing this sentence, the future I'm working to make real is?

A world of shared beauty and love that respects and elevates the human condition for all of us.

Beautiful. Bryce, thank you so much for the honesty, for sitting in those uncomfortable questions, and for carrying something forward from that little lab that the world needs right now more than ever. If something in this conversation shifted something in you, even just a little, I want you to do one thing before you close this episode. Send it to one person. Not because it's a great podcast, but because someone in your life is sitting with the same questions you started this episode with. What exactly am I for in a world where AI can do so much? And they haven't found the words for it yet. Maybe this conversation gives them those words. That's how ideas that matter travel. Not through algorithms, through one human choosing another human and saying, "I thought of you when I heard this." And if today helped you see the future a little differently, if you're walking away with a new word, a new question, or even just a little more curiosity about what you are becoming, then this show did what it exists to do. The future is not something that happens to us, it's something we built from within. And it starts with conversations like this one and the person you shared with next. You'll find Bryce on LinkedIn. You find him everywhere. He writes a newsletter. He shares his thoughts online. And if you're new here, welcome. Every other Friday, a new conversation drops. In between, the next letter arrives. One question, two perspectives, one experiment. And you can find it typing in next letter in into your favorite AI search engine or wherever you find your information. It's free and always will be. Until next time, from within, I'm Frederik G. Pferdt.