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Neuroscientist: Why AI is Making Leaders Toxic · Mork Unfiltered

• speaker-0: this is gonna do to what leadership to leadership what social media did to a gen generation of teenagers' brains. speaker-1: America has poured billions into this stuff and the only thing we're getting back is just exhausted people. speaker-0: The leader is the problem a good chunk of the time. speaker-1: One of the reasons people burn out is a lack of agency. speaker-0: See people are literally losing judgment, the ability to have judgment. speaker-1: We've all seen the emails where like, my god, there's a dash here or this was totally written by speaker-0: AI is fast food for your brain, it really tells the story. speaker-1: Where should you really focus on not using AI? Welcome back to Mork Unfiltered, folks. 25 years. 25 years. That's how long today's guest says it took him to write his latest new book out due November 17th. And this is after the guy's already written six other books. Okay, this is not easy stuff. This man coined the word neuroleadership, built the Neuroleadership Institute, a firm that has advised two-thirds of the Fortune 100, and has helped more than 20 million people. Understand how their brains work and the implications of this on their lives. He wrote the business bestseller Your Brain at Work and he created the Scarf Model. Five words that explain why supposedly smart people react so badly to perfectly reasonable decisions. Raise your hand if you count yourself among one of those people. And today we are going to talk about why companies are waking up with an AI hangover. What happens in your head the day your career stops making sense? Why the same five forces continually decide whether a board meeting works and whether your teenager even talks to you? And of course, we're gonna talk about his new book. This is Mork Unfiltered, and this is Dr. David Rock. David, welcome to the show. speaker-0: Thanks, Mor thanks so much, Patrick. I almost called you more for a second. Thanks so much, Patrick. Pleasure to be here with you. And I just want to correct one thing, being a researcher, I want to always be accurate. this the new book is my sixth book. So don't tell me I've written seven, I'll freak out. But there's there's there's five and then this is the sixth book book. So it's been a heck of a journey. But yeah, no, these sound like fun fun conversations. Look forward to digging in. speaker-1: Six six books is that is an incredible amount of work. I wrote one book and it took me three years and was one of the hardest things I've ever done. And I always tell people, don't write a book until unless you're incredibly passionate about this the subject. But let's let's dive right in. I want to get into start with your your early days. What was going on in your life in the late 90s that sent you looking for a different explanation of how people operate the way they do? speaker-0: it's a it's a great question. I was I was starting to coach people professionally. I was I was like coaching like business people and creative people and folks on and and there was no like there was no good theory for what we were doing. And I started to work with companies on like turning managers into coaches. And that's still one of the biggest challenges companies have is their managers need to be more like coaches, right? We we started to do this work and there was just there was just no good theory for how any of that worked or why it didn't work and why managers never coached well and all this. And I I'd been personally reading about the brain since I was literally about 15 years old. I'd been like reading everything I could. I had this fascination with how the brain worked. And I'd done quite a lot of mindfulness practice when I was young as well. So I'm I'm I'm a real observer of my own attention. And I think because I started that early it settled into my brain maybe more than If you start later. So it's a very good circus to notice and switch attention. And so between being fascinated by the brain and then a a mindfulness practitioner, I was like, maybe there's something in how the brain works that explains how coaching works and also why managers are so bad at it. That's where it started. and I just got curious and I I started just literally interviewing every neuroscientist I could get hold of. And It turns out I could get hold of quite a lot if I travel and I I was traveling a lot, because we had a a business around the world. And so I go and meet them and and I would just at the time, this is around 2000, just after 2000, I'm that old. I there was this this pattern that that just kept appearing everywhere. And it was because for the first time in history, scientists started studying brains interacting. Right. So, you know, in a neuroscience sense. Before this, you'd look at a brain and you'd say, how does the brain see? How does the brain hear? How does the brain remember or something like that? But it's never like, what happens when two brains like chat? the technology wasn't there, there w the computing power wasn't there, but also just we couldn't peer into the brain in real time in a meaningful way until about that time. And then there were these breakthroughs and this whole field emerged called called social cognitive effective neuroscience. And I started getting close to the people running that field and building that research and And it just it became so clear that there was some kind of pattern in kind of why we do what we do in in brain research and no one was synthesizing it. My my the the sort of big opportunity I had was that scientists don't talk to each other to try to synthesize. speaker-1: Yeah, it's crazy. speaker-0: Right. They do their own individual work. And I realized at one point I shifted from sort of coaching and managing to like leadership and change. At some point I realized what we're really studying was leadership and change. Right. As we realized that it was well, this leadership is is thinking or influencing other people's thinking. speaker-1: Exactly. speaker-0: You're either thinking or you're intr you know, trying to influence other people's thinking. I like, Right. And there's not a single and I remember typing in that day, neuro leadership, the neuroscience leadership. I remember Googling it. I wish I'd screenshotted it. There was like it said, Do you mean Euro leadership? Like, do you mean like leadership in the Eurozone? Because there wasn't anything anywhere, anywhere on the internet or anything that people had to do. Also true, also true. And anyway, so long story short, I was like, okay, well, it seems to kind of it seems like it would make sense to study the the the biological foundation of the thing that's is coaching leadership, learning and change, right? And so I sort of started on that journey and that that it sort of started slowly around 2001, 2000, 2001, sort of picked up steam over about six years, and then 2008 I published a journal, I started publishing a journal called The First Neuroleadership. journal. We started pu publishing real academic research. In fact, this textbook here is about maybe a quarter of all the the real research we published on the the real scientific foundations of this stuff. So we started doing real research and then started literally delivering a master's degree on this topic, which we lost an incredible amount of money on and had to stop after a few years. But started doing real research to like really try to unpack the neuroscience. And honestly I didn't know what we were doing all that for and we kept everything proprietary and kind of hidden. In a membership model. And we we just built this enormous body of research on what's the biological foundations of leadership, learning, change, c and coaching. But it all it all started with this insight that it that that like somebody should think about the biological foundations of this stuff. And if you look at there's something like a million books on leadership, yeah. And if you just put 10 of them up, ask AI to do this for you, you'll see that. ten books, basically most of the things they're saying are the same. Yeah. Right? They're all basic they're saying the same basic things. And so I was just like, okay, well there must be a biological reason why these things keep popping everywhere. And that's what I wanted to really understand. And what's the biological reason? And I've since and maybe we can come back to this, but I've since understood leadership is basically three brain challenges. And every single leadership book just addresses one of those three big brain challenges one way or another. and they're very biological and very consistent in every country, every level of leadership, every industry. Leadership struggles with three quirks of the brain that that I've been we've been studying all this time. It took twenty five years to be really simple. speaker-1: And what in in layman's terms for the average person watching, what is neuroleadership? How do you define that? What is it? speaker-0: Yeah. It's a it's a word that I coined, but it's really the lots and lots of people studying it now. It's just the neuroscience foundations of leadership, learning, change, and coaching. It's like what happens in the brain in in those situations. So it's just looking at these things from a brain perspective. So you think of neuroeconomics as looking at financial decisions from a brain perspective, right? Studying people making different financial decisions and the ultimatum game and all this stuff, right? Neuromarketing, they do a lot of eye tracking of what Which ads really influence people and looking at the brain and and influence and marketing, right? So it's neuro economics, neuro marketing, neuroleadership is looking at the brain and influencing people and motivating people and managing people and all of those things. So it's it's basically the everything's the HR function of an organization. Everything's but also that expands beyond that 'cause it's also training anyone in anything and culture change across the business and these days, what this AI thing is and how to actually use it properly. So it's it's Really just the brain and the human stuff is the best way to describe it. speaker-1: And this and then the the foundation of of this model, right, of this new way of looking at leadership is of course your scarf model. And and you've talked about this a thousand times and you've been asked this question a thousand times. But for the sake of everybody watching again, tell me t tell us a little bit what the scarf model is in sixty seconds. Like what what is speaker-0: I I wouldn't say the scarf model is the foundation of neuroleadership. I'd say it's one of the most important models within the field overall. It's one of the most helpful frameworks within the field because it basically describes why people do what they do. Right. it's the neuroscience of motivation, engagement, but also inclusion and psychological safety and belonging and also like conflict resolution and good teaming and it's like it's it's basically what your brain does when you interact with another human. Or when you imagine interacting with another human or when you're trying to influence another human. It's what the brain tracks in social context, right? Okay. And it's it's it turns out that there are five very specific things that the brain tracks in social context. And each one, the brain's looking out for like a potential like danger in in that context. So the f the S for in scarf is status. So the brain's trying to make sure you don't drop in status, like look bad. Okay. So each one of these could be a negative or a positive. Negative is much stronger, right? So if your boss if your boss says you're an idiot in in a meeting in front of other people and meet speaker-1: Your status is your status tanks. speaker-0: And but they but if they say, by the way, I like how you're dressed today, it doesn't balance it out, right? It's like Interesting. Interesting Very much so. Very much so status. speaker-1: The negative outweighs the positive. Okay. This speaker-0: So status, certainty. Okay. which is just how well you can predict things, autonomy, speaker-1: Okay. speaker-0: which is which is your sense of control and having choices, right? speaker-1: Right. That's so interesting because I've seen that one the research seems to indicate, and you're the scientist here, so I'm curious what you see, but the research seems to say that one of the reasons people burn out is a lack of agency. Is that tied to autonomy? Yeah. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So so think of the phrase when I when someone feels out of control, right? Right. Out of control stress, right, is the worst kind of stress. You just it just feels completely out of control. And then you find a way to control it a bit, and now it's manageable stress. It might be stressful, it might be a lot, but it's not out of control anymore, right? So this perception of having some control is very, very important in the difference between something basically being overwhelming and something manageable. Right. speaker-1: That is so true. I see that so much in my work as well. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. So autonomy is a really report variable. Yeah, autonomy, that's the AR is relatedness. and relatedness, it's a little bit of a clunky word, but it means you're on the same team. either you've got shared goals with someone, so you are you're you're you're in an in group with someone as opposed to an out group with someone, right? So you're speaker-1: Is that how how closely is that tied with the idea of belonging or trying speaker-0: A hundred percent. It's the same thing. The same thing. Yeah, but scav didn't work very well. So speaker-1: Yeah, the marketing on that the marketing team just nicks that one. Okay, so relatedness. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. So it is belonging. Yeah, it's a relatedness, very much belonging and and and but it's but there's sort of an opposite there's no real word for I guess it's not belonging, but you know, in in the science it's in group and outgroup. In group is in group is belonging, right? You feel part of a group, right? With shared goals, you're heading the same direction. But outgroup is like competing goals and right it's it's quite a strong experience. And then and then the F is for fairness, or in American I have to say fairness. Fairness on this. speaker-1: Yeah, fairness, sure. yeah, that's so true because I you find that people like my son is like that. He gets triggered. He just loses, you know, himself when he gets in a situation where he's been treated mis unfairly. Very strong reaction. speaker-0: Fairly. Yeah, well fairness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you I'm glad you brought that up. People have a different scarf priority. Right. Like so so everyone has a different one of those five, sometimes two, but mostly one. And we collected a lot of data to be able to say this. people have one of these five things that's really strong. So if if your son, for example, is fairness, it sounds like he is. If if you are, let's say, status, right, you guys are gonna wrap up against each other. Yeah. Right, you'll rub each other the wrong way because you're trying to look good and he's trying to be fair and or fairness and relatedness can compete in some ways. But it's interesting. So often in a workplace context, you'll get a senior leader with autonomy as a big driver. Because generally the more senior you go, the more likely autonomy the driver, right? Yeah. But often their team are certainty people who who are there to create structure and and process and execute, you know, on that vision, right? So often you'll get this tension in the workplace between a a an autonomy leader and a certainty or fairness employee. speaker-1: f the fine the finance person wants certainty in terms of the cash flows and the revenues and then maybe maybe the entrepreneur on the team wants more autonomy to try and do things that could be costly to the organization kind of thing. How do you do you have a t like a like a test? is there a some an online test you can take to understand I don't know your different levels in in your or what what your scarf looks like or or like which fa which factor is more important to you or not? speaker-0: Yeah, no, we we do have one. It's pretty easy to find online, but it's the Okay. the the new book, the whole first chunk, the first quarter or so of the new book is devoted to understanding each one and working out which one is yours and cool what to do with that and how to kind of structure your life and all So the first kind of part of the book is is introducing the model and which one are you. Interesting. Although that's that's only one sort of value of it. There's many, many other purposes and benefits to using Scarf, but that one's a a helpful one. If you understand your priority, you'll organize your life better and you'll be able to communicate your needs to others better as well. So they don't just, tick you off all the time. speaker-1: So so so it so it begs a question, which I can't help asking, right? But if I look at Scarf and then I think of you as a scientist, an author, but also, a a father, a husband, a friend, which one of those five is your is your hot button? speaker-0: I'm autonomy followed by autonomy, autonomy, autonomy, and autonomy. I'm all five autonomy. No, it's a it's not exactly true. I'm but but I I'm very much like autonomy. A lot of people who develop thought leadership or ideas often have autonomy. They're trying to understand the world, feel more in control in the world. They don't like being told what to do, a little unemployable speaker-1: Yeah, I had a head hunter tell me that once. speaker-0: Yeah, I'm a little unemployable for sure. I tried it for about five days once working for someone. I just didn't suit my constitution. I never went back. I've been an entrepreneur really literally since I was like eighteen, nineteen years old. So so I just very much like to find my way. And sometimes that's much to my own detriment and I could do things much easier. But I I just yeah, I like to find my own way and feel in control. So that's that's definitely me, yeah. speaker-1: it seems like the release of your book could not be more timely given everything that's happening, right? And so obviously we can't talk about your book and your work without talking about the elephant of the room, particularly what happened after this week. Let's shift gears for a second and start and and talk a little bit about artificial intelligence. And and I'd love to have your perspective on, you know, you have worked and studied leadership and the neuroscience of leadership. for for twenty five plus years, right? You are an expert on this stuff and you you speak about this stuff all over the world, work with the organizations all over the world. How how do you see AI changing the nature of leadership at work, David? speaker-0: It's an abject disaster. speaker-1: Tell us more. speaker-0: This is gonna do to what leadership to leadership, what social media did to a generation of teenagers' brains. Make them much worse. It's a long story. speaker-1: Why is that? speaker-0: It's a long story. But I will say that that social media took twenty years or something for for some guardrails to be put in with teenagers, like Australia, the UK and New Zealand all just banned it for teenagers. That should have happened decades. speaker-1: my God. I I I I agree so much. when I see how much my kids use Instagram, it's horrifying. speaker-0: That's horrifying. So we just published a piece. We've we've been publishing a lot this year. I'll point you to some articles that are freely available. We we we published one, I'll I'll find the title in a minute, but it was essentially Science, which is the most one of the most prestigious journals in the world, right? Scientific journals, did a study of the large language models in relation to people using them for interpersonal issues. Right. So they literally like tested conversations, right, with the main LLMs. I think they you tested all of them. And they what does it look like? What's the architecture of a conversation when someone goes to it? I'm having a conflict with this person. Right. Or I need this person's not delivering what they promised. What do I do? Or I just don't understand this person. Right. So interpersonal challenges. And what they found to a T is that these, these, these, and these are Gen AI tools, to be specific. There's these Gen AI tools basically made the person Much less likely to take responsibility for anything, much less likely to repair anything, much less and much more likely to blame the other person for everything. And say yeah, no, li r literally. And so the AI would basically say, you know, let's let's work out why this person is such a problem. Or I'm I'm sorry this speaker-1: So it would automatically take your side. speaker-0: automatically take your side, unquestioning. Yeah, yeah, unquestioning. And the the the problem is, you can see you can start to see all sorts of problems with that, right? There's so many problems with that. But but when you when you extrapolate this to leadership, which is what we did, the leader is the problem a good chunk of the time. Right. And the the the piece is called AI might be fueling a new leadership crisis. It's it's in fast company. AI might be fueling a new leadership crisis. Right. You just look that up. and so So we extrapolated that to leadership and said, well, what happens when leaders are using gen AIs for interpersonal issues? And they just they're just story after story after story popped up of leaders who have a simple conflict with someone that just blows up, right? And they start sending a hundred page document gen generated by AI of all all the reasons why this person is is a mess up. And that person sends another hundred page document back, neither of them reading anything. And what could be a quick water cooler conversation just blows up into someone being fired really quickly. And when I was in Australia recently where I'm from, I'm based in the US f permanently now, but when I went back there, there was this massive explosion in government complaints to the government about employees and managers and people, like work f they have this this whole thing that you can, you know, you can basically say, hey, I'm you know, I'm and and so the partially it's 'cause people can complain more easily, you know, just ask your phone to do it for you. But there's a massive explosion in complaints about other people at work, but in particular managers, because They are actually getting more toxic if they're using these devices. So that's one part of the problem. There's some other part, there's some other, really big parts of the problem, but but what it's doing, because these devices are built on, not all of them, but most of them are built on a model of keeping you engaged, right? The last thing you the last thing they're gonna do is challenge you, right? Right. Right. They they want you to stay engaged. So from my perspective, teenagers being banned from social media is really, really important. Should have happened twenty years ago. managers being bad from banned from using social media for interpersonal issues is really important. So you need a different kind of AI tool, right? Or preferably not an AI, right? To go to a human. But if you're going to use an AI, you want one that's really tuned to challenging you and, you know, the the the business model isn't keeping you engaged. It's actually making you smarter. And, you know, so it's it's a really it's a really, really important thing. But beyond that, I wrote a piece that just came out also in Fast Company called AI is fast food for your brain. speaker-1: I just read that piece. Yeah, that's a great piece. Yeah. Yeah. speaker-0: It's it took me a while to write it. It was really a beautiful journey to write it. Difficult, writing so hard in this time with just so many distractions, but I was really happy with it. But it's AI is fast food for your brain. It really tells the story. And the the basic challenge is that the there's a perfect storm of your brain loves to not have to think. It's like deeply exciting to your brain if you can find a way to do a task without having to do physical or mental labor. It's the same in the brain. you have to get from A to B and you can work out how to do it without any effort. It's it's naturally exciting. It's just deeply embedded in our brain, right? So so firstly, not thinking is so rewarding. Secondly, and this is important, is that your company is saying use this as much as possible. Most companies are saying, we've got this thing for you to be more efficient, use it as much as you can, right? Yeah. Which is which is a terrible, terrible message, by the way. Companies have to stop saying that. And then the third element of the perfect storm is that all the the the big LLMs have hacked what's called the default effect. Right. The default effect is basically you make the easy automatic option the one you want people to do, right? And make people have to work to do the an alternative option. Right. So in there's a and I quote this in the article like if you're a country and you want people to to donate their organs when they die or in an accident or something, you just make that the default. And you and people have to opt out, right? Exactly. Now 90% of people are donating their organs, right? But if you make it that they have to opt in, only ten percent of people donate their organs, right? So which one is right? Is is is it the ten percent of people want to do it or is it the ninety percent of people want to do it? Well, it literally turns out to be based on how you ask them. Right speaker-1: Of course. speaker-0: it's either. And what the AI companies have done is hacked this default effect and basically made AI part of every single process automatically, right? And it just like the fast food, would you like fries with that? Would you like me to supersize that? Was required to be asked, right? Every single task you do, do you want my help? AI, do you want my help? Do you want my help? So you speaker-1: Talk about this in the article. You talk about this in the article, which I found fascinating, but but it explain it explain it to somebody who doesn't really understand neuroscience, right? When when you're when you're using say ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or whatever you're using and you are starting to default to some of the decision making to these LLMs, what does it do to your brain in terms of your capability to make your own decision? speaker-0: Yeah. So there's multiple problems with it. 'Cause some people listening to this might go, Well, so what? Right? I'm getting all my work done much faster. It's fine. Look and there are some s kinds of tasks that aren't important. So you're not trying to be creative, you're not ma it doesn't matter. But if you're firstly if you're using this to communicate with other people, they can tell they get really pissed. I don't know if I'm allowed to work. speaker-1: Yeah, we've all seen the emails where like my god there's a dash here this was totally written. speaker-0: It's like awful, awful. Any email I receive, I immediately delete and I never want to see an email from that person again. Right. So my team, we've got a couple of hundred employees, we're banned from sending AI written emails, internally or externally. It's absolutely not allowed, right? So so so that's the smallest problem. Slightly bigger problem is that forty percent of what AI tells you is wrong. But an even bigger problem is a hundred percent of what AI tells you is average by definition. It's exactly what the person down the road is getting when they ask the same question. It's exactly what every one of your competitors is getting when they ask the same question. And it doesn't really matter which LLM, it doesn't matter that you've got Claude and you think it's cleverer. It doesn't matter. Right? All twenty five models were asked, the top twenty-five models were asked to do the same task. Come up with two metaphors for time. They all came up with the exact same two metaphors. Right? Yeah. No, sorry, that's not great. Come up with a metaphor for time. They all came up with one of two themes, all of the top twenty five. large language model. So basically they all output the same thing. So a hundred percent of what you're getting is average. Yeah. But a hundred percent of the time you're being convinced that it's amazing. Right? You you you think it it's been telling you how great you are, how great it is, right? But it's it's really, really average. And none of those are actually the big problem. So pe people hating you, producing wrong or average work, those are not the big problem. The really big problem is this, is that once you ta do any kind of task that you normally take, say 30 to 60 minutes and you do it in one, right? Once you once you take any kind of task, it normally takes you 36 minutes and you do it in one, it's practically impossible to go back. And the reason for that is that you you to go back to doing it in 30 to 60 minutes, right? Whether that's building a deck or writing an email or you know, reproposing. And of course, there are very, very, very good uses of Gen AI, like synthesizing complex data and finding patterns in things. That's different, right? But if it's something you're trying to output, Right, if it's something you're trying to build, if you're using AI to do it and it now takes you a minute and it used to take you thirty, you're trying to go back to thirty and at the end of every minute your brain says, I could have been done by now. Why are you still trying? I could have been done. speaker-1: my god. So it gets harder and harder the more you use it to go back to doing it the way you were doing it before. speaker-0: You physically can't because you have this intrusive thought literally every minute of of like, why am I doing this right? And you literally can't focus. Now, here's the problem. That turns out to be exactly what happens if the skill that you're you're playing with is judgment itself. So when you start letting AI judge things for you, is this good or not? And you normally take 30 minutes or an hour or an afternoon to sit with it, process it, maybe ask some people, maybe show a colleague, right? maybe sleep on it, which is one of the best things, and wake up the next morning and realize it's rubbish, what you just wrote, right? If you're asking AI to judge for you, right, and it does that in thirty seconds now, you you now c it's very hard to go back. And it turns out that judgment itself is one of the first skills that people lose it. It's number two skill. The first one is like understanding a problem. The second one is judgment itself. So people are like literally losing judgment. Yeah. The ability to have judgment of whether something's good or not. So so that's the biggest problem. And so what happens is that becomes a downward spiral where you just use it more and more and more and more and more. Now, twenty years ago, if you look at the top ten companies in the world, Patrick, one of them was a tech company. Ten years ago, five or six of them in the top ten in the world were tech companies. It's now eight of the biggest companies in the world, right? It's gonna be ten. Right. There's a takeover where everything that used to be ours is now rented, right? Music, right? We used to have C Ds, you remember? You and I remember owning CDs now speaker-1: my god, I remember I remember that. We're speaker-0: Everything. speaker-1: totally dating ourselves. speaker-0: Right? Cars now. Your car, if not yet, it's on the way, right? It's a software thing, you'll be renting software. Like everything we're gonna be like renting, and they could just switch that off anytime. So we're we're we're like we're like giving companies the ability to like own our decision making, our thinking, right? They I don't know if you aren't this is making sense. It's really bad. And Yeah. About six percent of people in companies that we're studying are using AI very, very well, which means they're using it actually very little. And they're using it to challenge their thinking, but they are still doing the thinking. Right. So they're getting smarter. That's about six percent, but about ninety four percent are not getting smarter, right? They're losing judgment, losing skills. speaker-1: So if you were so if you were gonna tell if you were gonna give advice to a leader who is leading a group of people, what would you tell them in terms of how they should guide their teams to use AI? What do you what should you do and what should you not what how do you use let me try and see if I can articulate this question properly. Where should you use AI to improve and speed up your work? And where should you really focus on not using AI? speaker-0: Yeah. So the first thing is speeding up your work is a bad idea most of the time. So the the concept of efficiency as the reason for AI, right? So so companies that say, Well, built we're getting this to be more efficient, to be more productive, is that starts the slippery slope. That's that's where everything goes wrong. Because when the tool is to be more efficient, everyone's gonna use it as much as possible. Of course. And you you don't want everyone using this as much as possible. You want large swathes of their work not to be AI driven in any way. Especially if they're in marketing or sales or communication or management or many, many functions. And of course, if you if your job all day is sitting creating videos, you'll use AI a lot, right? But but you not to do finished products, but to tweak things. So it depends on the function, right? But but overall, you never want to say, please use this because it's gonna make your efficient more efficient and use this as much as possible. So instead of efficiency, you want to think about your company's mission, right? If you're a scientific organization, we have AI to accelerate the science. Right. Right. If you're a customer service organization, a bank or something, we have AI to to to make the customer experience even more amazing. Right? Right. Or we have AI just to to accelerate the value we provide to our customers. So it's nothing to do with efficiency and effectiveness. Because if your company is also saying be more efficient, their brain will just not be able to help just using this as much as possible. So that's the first thing. The second thing is by function, put some guardrails in. Right. If you're in sales, you're not allowed to send an email with a dozen typos. You you get fired if you do that over and over. And you're also not allowed to send an email that's generated by AI, right? You just you should be getting fired if you do that because it's terrible for your brand. So more guardrails as to hard no, right? But also hard yes. Here are some great ways to use Gen AI by function. Right. And and then showing them what that looks like. And we've developed a point of view on that. The the most important thing is what we call human in the lead. Is that you're the one doing the thinking and the AI is a tool to challenge your thinking. Right. But you're the one doing the thinking. And that's making you smarter, you're having the insights, and you're getting this tool that can really help you think deeper and wider. So that's that's speaker-1: It sounds like it it sounds like what you're saying, and I and I love human in the lead. I I think that makes so much sense because everybody's been talking about human in the loop, which is why we're in the mess that we're speaker-0: It doesn't exist. It's not possible. speaker-1: exactly. So so if I'm gonna summarize this, is it accurate to say use AI to do kind of like routine, mundane tasks that don't really provide a lot of value to organization, they're fairly repetitive, that you know, might the might be time sucking are not gonna really help you become, a better version of yourself and make sure that you do not use AI for things that really require strategic thinking or a lot of introspection or a lot of creativity. speaker-0: Or communication. Or communication. Just j decision making. So I was I was I'm just back from Europe. I was there for a couple of weeks and I I visited a few of our key partners and one of the most interesting companies in the world I've ever visited was Vacheron, Vacheron Constantine. It's a it's a company in speaker-1: The the watchmakers. speaker-0: the watchmakers. Yeah, they sell six hundred thousand dollar watches. I asked for one for visiting speaker-1: No, it's crazy. I have a store right next to my office and it's like the cheapest watch is fifty K. But anyway. speaker-0: That's it was insane. So I'm I'm like, what's the price of a house? Interesting. What goes into it? Like I went to their factory and they walked me around and I spoke to their engineers and I saw all the machines, I saw how they make it. It's incredible. They'll take something literally the size of a speck of dust. Like literally the size of a speck of dust. You can barely see it with your eye. They'll take something that that's made of but it happens to be made of, say, brass or tungsten or something, and they'll machine it so that it's literally like a perfect cog or a perfect little ma and they were machine at that size. So they're machining things down to the size of literally a speck of dust. You can barely see. And they put these together in in thousands of pieces into these watches. And I was walking around, I was asking them about AI. I took the whole tour of the factory. I met everyone and and there was no AI being used anywhere. There w what there was was people with amazing magnifying glasses so they could see. Right. And people with screens with magnifiers so you could see and There's all sorts of technology so that you could perceive things better, right? But there was no AI involved in making these things. Now, you could say, well, because watches are not very digital, but it turns out there was some AI. I was looking around and I looked out the window and they have these beautiful lawns. And on the lawn was this robot lawnmower that had lots of AI driving it. And, you know, mowing the lawns is not important to making watches. So they have AI in the lawn mower, right? They don't need a human mowing the lawns at Vashlo and Constantine, right? So that's a great use of AI. Now it's a metaphor, but also a true story. That that there are things that just don't matter to the business. They're just not central. They don't involve customers. They don't involve the product. They're just annoying ancillary things. Great. Use AI for that to save yourself a little brain power. But the theory, Patrick, was everyone would get these tools and have more time to think. The reality is because everyone's using it for everything, no one's got more time to think. Everyone's more overwhelmed. Right. speaker-1: It it's super interesting that you're that you say that because I I I was recently in Panama giving a keynote for the Association of Panamanian HR professionals and and I had to do a lot of data research. And that was one of the data points that came out across Latin America at least, is that 60% of people feel that they were promised this panacea, this this solution to get more time, to be more productive, to do all this more stuff, and they're actually working longer hours not doing more stuff. speaker-0: Yeah, much worse. Universally appropriate. speaker-1: Shit that we were promised on productivity is maybe it's translating to the to the bottom line for companies, but it's not it doesn't seem to be translating to employees. And so the other question I wanted to ask you on this subject is we seem to have been coming, we're seem to be coming full circle where there's been so much hyper on this technology, right? And now you have anthropic being valued at $2 trillion before they go public, which is madness, right? And People seem to be starting to say that, corporate America has poured billions into this stuff and the only thing we're getting back is just exhausted people. How much of that is real? speaker-0: Unbelievably terrifyingly true. I just wrote another piece, came out in Fortune a couple of weeks ago. It's called From AI FOMO to AI Hangover. Yeah. From AI FOMO to AI Hangover. And it's literally what's happening. People were promised all these things and have got literally the opposite in most situations, with with some exceptions, right? Remember I said six percent. So six percent of people are doing great, right? Six percent of people in companies. We're not we haven't studied the general population, but Six percent of people in companies are are doing much better work sustainably, but ninety-four percent are doing worse work unsustainably. So so you so there are pockets, and of course, when you look at research or medicine or science or technology, there are amazing breakthroughs possible with this technology. Although that's usually not gen AI, that's different embedded AI tools. But but there are incredible, success stories with this. I think calling people, you know, companies were sold essentially that they'd be able to reduce their biggest cost, which is which is people. That's turned out not to be true. That also sold people will have more time, people will be smarter, people will have better thinking, all this stuff. That's turned out to be the opposite of what's happened. So there is a big hangover right now in corporate America. And we're we're out there talking about this a lot. We're also saying, look, this is what you need to do instead. And, stop talking about efficiency, start talking about value, stop talking about using this as much as possible, start defining it by function and Stop talking about human in the loop. It's not possible. If you if you if you're not involved in every step of the process, you don't have the ability to judge the work. So you're just guessing. So it's it's either human in the lube or it's or you're offloading and losing the skill and not judging if it's good or not. So speaker-1: So so so that that kind of brings us to your book, right? I mean, so it's like it seems every day there's a new book out about AI from some angle or or or another. But you know, you're you're unique in that, you know, you've been doing neuroleadership work for twenty five plus years. You've written six books, you've talked all over the world, you've helped a ton of people, millions. Why good with humans and why now? speaker-0: Yeah, look I I I have the galley right here, I'm very very proud of seeing speaker-1: Yeah, I'm looking forward to my signed copy. I'm right up the street. speaker-0: There you go. There you go. I might have one for you. So look, it's it it literally is twenty five years ago that I first noticed a pattern that I wanted to solve. And it took from two thousand about two thousand and one to about two thousand six to kind of find the pattern. And then I published the first paper on the scarf model in two thousand and eight. And then s we've been researching it ever since. We've done a huge amount of research and none of that research was published anywhere. We were finding it about about Scarf and you, Scarf and others, Scarf and teams, Scarf and organizations, Scarf and Change. I've everything. And there was just there's just, I've just had literally thousands of people come and say to me, this has just been one of the most helpful ways of or one of the most helpful tools I've ever had for understanding people, why they do what they do and for leading better and parenting better. And I had so many people coming and saying that I'm like, I felt a responsibility to get this out. And then the AI thing was just came along at the same time. I've been w working thinking about this for twenty five years. The AI thing just okay, well it turns out to be good with humans and to understand AI and how to use it well, you also want to understand status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness. So so there's a there's a connection to driving change and how threatened people feel about this change. There's a connection to AI with just like understanding people, but it's not an AI book. By the way, there are about four million books a year coming out now. And only most of those are self published and most of them are terrible because they're AI. produce. And if you if you go to a real publisher, they won't take a book from you with any AI in it. You you you can't, you know, that but anyway, so it's not really an AI book, but it it turns out to be timely because one of the things happening in organizations is is is it's becoming more and more important, but also harder to actually be good with humans. Right. Because we're all spending so too much time on technology. It's becoming harder and more important to be good with people, especially as a manager or leader. So it it's it ended up being timely. You know, that's what happens when you write six books, eventually one of them is perfect timing. speaker-1: You need multiple swings at that, yeah. speaker-0: Yeah. So I got lucky, I guess, in that sense. But look, it's it's a book that just the the closing chapter of the book, I love the closing chapter. And I read the audio version for the first time in all my books. I they I I I I said I had to. I really wanted to read it. And the closing chapter just really is I I don't know, I liked it, but it's the it's it's titled All Models Are Wrong, Some Are Useful. All Models Are Wrong, Some Are Useful, right? And so any model, whether it's the big five psychological factors or Hogan or Myers Briggs or Star Signs or Scarf or anything. All all of them are a description of one slice of experience. And it's very interesting when you look at say psychological or psychometric models and they all say they're validated. And then you look at them and you put them up against each other and you say, But they're all completely different. How can they all be validated? Right. Well, so there's an element of you see what you look for because the brain's so complex. And And and and there's also an element of the model is just a description of something. It's not the something. So in that way, all models are wrong, right? But some are useful. And what's useful about Scarf, I came to understand. It took me literally to finishing the book to understand it, was that it it gives you some really helpful training wheels for two of the three most difficult things about managing leading or parenting or coaching, right? And I mentioned this right at the start. Turns out the three things that are really, really hard. About parenting, coaching, managing, leading, right? One of them is our limited cognitive capacity, just how how much we can think about. And AI was built to try to fix that, right? So we have limited cognitive capacity. when you're an individual contributor, you've got a lot to think about. Now you're a first time manager, you've got way more to think about, right? It's harder to to process. So this is being stretched. The second one is limited self regulation, which is dealing with stress, managing emotions. That's that's challenging as an individual contributor. Now you're a first time manager. It's much more challenging. It's much more stressful. Right. So that capacity is also as you go up an organization keeps getting harder, but also more important. And then the third one is understanding other people, right? Which means understanding their motivations and their goals, right? That whole capacity in the brain, right, social cognition, it's called, also, as you go up, becomes harder, but also more important. The top leader doesn't need a lot of technical skins, then skills any skills. So basically a limited cognitive capacity, limited self regulation, limited social cognition, those three things are the three biggest challenges of leadership. Every single leadership book you read addresses one, two or three of those in some way. That that's speaker-1: And it's interesting because it's interesting because the first part of your book really is is is all about energy yourself. speaker-0: Limited cognitive capacity. Your brain at work. The first part of your brain at work. My earlier book is all about that first challenge. And the rest of it touches on the second challenge, limited self regulation. And it lightly touches on scarf at the end of that book. That's when it came out in two thousand nine. So I just come up with it. And then this speaker-1: Work also starts with managing yourself, doesn't it? speaker-0: Bit, a little bit, but the new book is very anchored on social cognition, really understanding other people. Sort of like 60%, 70% that, maybe 30% self-regulation, and just a little bit on managing your own brain. So on capacity, right? So the first book was sort of the first one, the second one a light touch, and the third one, this is like a lot on the third one on social cognition, a little on the second, and not much the first. So so I just realized that we needed to double-click on like Scarf and really understanding other people. And so the reason it's been so helpful and and it's useful is it's it's training wheels for for for two of the three things that we're real that are really hard, that get harder and more important as you go up in an organization. And that's self-regulation and social cognition. So Scarf gives you this language in real time to see why people are are about to do something or wh why they are doing something, right? You you you you you develop a strategy Then you imagine, wow, I'm gonna get a fairness reaction if I send it out like this, right? So it gives you this capacity ahead of time or in real time to to really understand what's gonna happen or what is happening in the human brain. So that's that's why I say scarf is useful and it happens to be extra useful just 'cause it's sticky and memorable and therefore you can like apply it a lot more. It's like a tool that lives on your tool belt rather than in your toolbox. it's just kind of always close to the surface that way. speaker-1: What do you think is the what what is the number one thing you would like people to take away from your new book? What wh what would you like people to take away from Good With Humans after they write? speaker-0: I would say just read it slowly and digest it. Read it with someone. Most powerful thing you can do, read it with someone, your partner, a friend, a colleague at work, a book club, group of leaders at work. But read it with people. Get it get the language into the, into your into the into the world. But it will, it will explain an enormous amount of things that don't make sense at the moment, where conflict comes from and how to do it differently and, how to actually have feedback conversations that really work and why our teenagers yell back at us and what what and and why the world is reacting so intensely to AI as well. because also AI, Gen AI in particular, creates a scarf threat in all five domains. It's it's an attack on all five things. So so it basically explains a lot of things that sort of hadn't made sense before. So from that perspective it's just really useful. But read it slowly or listen to it slowly and and you'll start to see it just kind of brings the lights on in lots of different places. speaker-1: And it's out November seventeenth. All major bookstores, all major online bookstores, available for available for pre order. speaker-0: Yep, pre order now. It's it's the first of October today. It's we're in October now, so it's available pre order now. Amazon, all the bookstores, everywhere. Fantastic. Get in there and and if you love it, find me on LinkedIn. I I'm Dr. Rock on LinkedIn. I'd love some comments and feedback. connect with me there and love to hear your thoughts and and and how it affected you. speaker-1: David, this has been amazing. I wanna close us off real quick with our three lightning round questions. It's three quick questions, three quick answers, and then we can wrap up. But this has been amazing. And I'll make sure that in the show notes people have the link to you, your website where they can find the book and everything else. Question number one for you in the lightning round. Are you ready? speaker-0: Yep, still it. speaker-1: If you could have one superpower, what would you choose? speaker-0: Gosh, one superpower, unlimited energy. speaker-1: Okay. Question number two if you could have dinner with anyone in history, alive or dead, who would it be? speaker-0: Richard Feynman. Feynman. Richard Feynman, yeah, ebulent bongo player, turns out. but one of the one of the most clever people ever. He made complex things really simple, which is very, very hard. just a genius physicist, yep. speaker-1: All right. And last one, if you could give one piece of advice to a young person looking for a career of meaning and purpose, what would you tell them? speaker-0: Two hard things. speaker-1: Do hard things. I love that. Yeah. Folks, this has been amazing. you know, David, you know, the the the wealth of knowledge that you have, the contributions that you've made to to science, to to leadership, your your approach to leadership is really inspiring. You know, the number of people all over the world who have benefited from your work is is is tremendous. The organizations that have worked with you is tremendous. and of course people, this is a book that you have to read. Make sure that you follow David on on social media, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, Instagram. The book speaker-0: I don't have any of those to be honest. I don't have any of those. You can only find me on LinkedIn. You have to search Doctor Rock. You can't find me on LinkedIn. speaker-1: Okay, follow Dr. Rock on LinkedIn and make sure to pre-order or pick up a copy of Good With Humans out November seventeenth. If this episode was helpful, useful, make sure to subscribe to the channel, leave us a like, leave us a question for David Rock, and we look forward to welcoming you on another episode of Mork Unfiltered. Thank you so much, David. speaker-0: Thanks so much, Patrick.