You’re Not Stuck. You’re Swimming in the Wrong Direction | Alec Litowitz - EP 827

Alec Litowitz, investor, entrepreneur, and author of The Adaptability Quotient, explains why adaptability—not intelligence, grit, or emotional intelligence—may be the defining skill of the next era.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John R. Miles?

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• 1:04Speaker 02

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• 1:46Speaker 02

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• 2:25John R. Miles?

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• 3:10John R. Miles?

  In open water, an athlete can execute a flawless stroke, keep pace with the pack, and end up miles off course by failing to sight the buoy. High achievers fail by swimming at breakneck speed in the wrong direction. Here is investor and polymath Alec Litowitz on the hidden cost of executing inside an obsolete frame. Take a listen.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  When the current's moving fast, when the wind is moving fast, when the world's changing super fast, what do you need to do? You need to lift your head up, because you could be swimming with another group of people exactly, super fast, in the absolute wrong direction. Things are changing so fast. If I'm on the wrong course, who cares if I'm swimming with another group of people? Blockbuster was swimming really fast, giving you popcorn and raisinettes inside a store that was selling you DVDs. Wrong frame. Netflix had the frame. It doesn't matter. Adaptability is what says you're touching true reality as it is right now, and without it...

• 4:10John R. Miles?

  Hey, it's your friend John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

• 4:51John R. Miles?

  Welcome back to episode 827 of Passion Struck. Have you ever worked incredibly hard towards something, only to realize later that the world around you had changed and you were still following an old map? That's one of the questions I wanted to explore with today's guest, Alec Litowitz. Alec has one of the most unusual intellectual backgrounds of anyone I've ever interviewed. He studied mathematics and anthropology at MIT, eventually earned a JD, an MBA, and built a career in investing and entrepreneurship. But what connects those seemingly different disciplines is the way Alec has learned to

• 5:34John R. Miles?

  look for the underlying structures, rules, constraints, and systems that shape how people and organizations behave. He has spent his career asking, not just what is happening, but what framework are we operating inside, and what happens when that framework changes? That question has become particularly important for Alec as we enter what he describes as a second cognitive revolution. He argues that artificial intelligence isn't simply another tool we can pick up and put down. It is fundamentally changing the environment in which we think, communicate, make decisions, and understand the world.

• 6:13John R. Miles?

  And if we aren't careful, we can begin outsourcing not only tasks, but our own agency. That is also why Alec believes adaptability is different from intelligence. Emotional intelligence, and even grit, those qualities can help us move through the world we understand, but when the environment changes, we have to be willing to question the frame itself. We have to ask whether we're still solving the right problem, pursuing the right mission, and moving in the right direction. As Alec puts it, "Adaptability is ultimately about touching reality as it is right now." And that makes this conversation a fitting way to close our interview series portion of The Adaptive Human.

• 6:58John R. Miles?

  Over the past several weeks, we've explored how our environment shapes us, how agency gives us the ability to act, how curiosity and experience expand our possibilities, how relationships influence who we become, and how we respond when the world doesn't unfold the way we expect it. Alec brings many of those ideas together through a very different lens, and ultimately brings us back to the question I've been asking throughout this entire series. How do we remain the authors of our lives when the world around us keeps changing? Here's my conversation with Alec Litowitz. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 7:49John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely honored and thrilled today to welcome Alec Litowitz to Passion Struck. Alec, so great to see you. Such a pleasure to be here, excited to have a conversation. Alec, I'm going to open this up with a really fun question, because I've been wondering the answer of this question I'm about ready to ask you for about 30 years. When I was growing up, two of my favorite cousins, husband and wife, lived in Virginia, and we visited them really frequently as a kid. But they have three kids my age, but what's interesting about them is my cousin Art is a psychiatrist, and my cousin Barb, his wife, is a psychologist.

• 8:30John R. Miles?

  And I always wondered for their three kids, what it was like growing up in a household of two psychoanalysts. So, interestingly enough, you are the person to answer this, because you also grew up in a family of two psychoanalysts, with a mother who also held, if I have it correctly, a PhD in linguistics. What was that like?

• 8:54Speaker 03

  I should have asked you upfront what happened to those children, but just jokingly, it is a, it gives you a very unique perspective. And you're absolutely right. So both my parents are psychoanalysts. My dad had an M.D. My mom has a PhD in linguistics, became the dean of Erickson Institute for Child Development, and then went on to get, to be a psychoanalyst. Let me give you first an example of what it was like, okay? So imagine back, I'm 13 or 14. This is a typical day, late 1970s, early 1980s. And I'm coming in from being outside, either on my banana seat bicycle or playing basketball with some friends or something. And I'm walking in the house and I look over, I see my parents sitting. And I would walk by my parents and say, hey, are you guys okay? Are you guys happy?

• 9:36Speaker 03

  And they would look, my mom would turn to me and say, happy? Happy is a strong word. What's your definition of happy? By the way, that was not a special occasion. That was Tuesday. So everything was peeled back. You really learn to think a lot about, and compare this, by the way, to other childhood. So let's go back to typical childhood. So when you're born and you're a baby, you're exploring. And you don't per se have an identity yet, and you're trying to get a model of the world. And so you drop things, you play with things, other than your mom or dad saying, don't put your finger in the socket. That's a binding constraint. Other than that, you explore for a while and you ask why a million times. Over time, you begin to learn that you need your parents and to get certain reactions

• 10:18Speaker 03

  from them, you can act certain ways and you get rewarded for it. And you go to school and you realize you act certain ways and you get rewarded for it. So over time, you begin to stop exploring and what I call exploiting, you begin to act certain ways, closing the loop, if you will. I was in a family that didn't close the loop. I was not rewarded for having the right answer. I was rewarded for having another and a better question. It's just a very different childhood where uncertainty was the place where curiosity get to, got to run free. I would say, I didn't grow up with a sort of a fixed ideology. Certainly there were values and morals that were imparted to me and that I hold strongly. But answers are provisional, always.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  And I didn't overlap my identity that, oh, I'm that person with the right answers, or that's what you really want to be. It was really the person who could ask the next better questions. That's what having two psychoanalysts and a mother as a PhD in linguistics. Words weren't per se what the word meant. There was always a hidden meaning under something. There were other, very much a systems thinking, their structure, their structure that people don't see. And that was really the attitude that I grew up with at a very young age.

• 11:32John R. Miles?

  So interesting. When I was growing up, I was this very inquisitive child. So my parents tell me today that never would stop asking questions and it drove them mad because I would ask question after question, trying to understand the layers underneath what they were telling me. But my grandmother, my maternal grandmother had a really huge influence on my life because she went to her deathbed with huge regrets about not pursuing, becoming a doctor that she wanted to pursue earlier in life. And so as a result, growing up, she always had these huge expectations about what we

• 12:16John R. Miles?

  should become, but also indoctrinating us with, don't be like me, don't go to your deathbed, not pursuing the thing that drove your passions in life, which is partly, I think, a backdrop to doing what I'm doing now, because it's so different than what I did for 25 years in my career. My question for you is, did you realize, like, when you were an adolescent, that you were being trained to question and assumptions? Or did you only recognize that later in life?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  No, I think that being the son of two psychoanalysts, you learn early that you're different than the other kids. You can't escape it. There's different dinner table conversations that happen. I think that thoughts are like nesting dolls in some ways. There was just always another layer you thought you had peeled back. And there was just no way, and I don't mean to escape it in a bad way, but I like to say it this way, and I talk about it in my book, I call it telescoping. And what it is that, one of the things that I got from my parents is to be able to view something from multiple angles, right? When I mentioned earlier the story about happy, happy is a model viewed from somewhere. Somebody's model is their perspective viewed at something.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  And so as opposed to sitting in going, oh, I grew up with one perspective, or it made me think that I should grow up and do X or do Y. It was N dimensional. It was, oh, wait a minute, I can take something and I can look at it from this angle, and then that angle, and this angle. I was really bred into doing that, if you will. And it carried with me. So I'll just say this, when I, probably because of identification with my father, when I was very young, I really wanted to be a doctor and probably wanted to do that because my dad did it. And the funny story, which I don't think I've told anybody, that at one point, my dad was telling me, I thought about it because the story you just told, that my dad said to me, Alec, you don't have to be a doctor.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  If you don't want to be a doctor, you don't have to be a doctor, just because I'm a doctor. And I started crying. And my mom was like, why are you crying? And I said, being a doctor is all I know how to do. Here I am as a little kid, of course, I don't know how to be a doctor, but I had identified so much with my father about it. Later I went to college and I wound up studying math and anthropology and eventually got a J D M B A. And I think the point of all those, and just going back to where I was before, is that those are just rules. And the rules, there are areas that have a hidden set of rules. And I wanted to know what were the rules and who formed them, right? Math is the rules of nature. Anthropology, structural anthropology is the rules underlying society and cultures.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Law and business are the rules under which we interact with each other personally, as well as commercially. For me, these were all different angles. It wasn't four subjects. It was the subject of what are the rules, the constraints, which are artificial, which are natural, what are the boundaries and barriers? All of this for me was a fabric and a framework. I didn't think I needed to be something or another. I felt constantly like, even as a teenager, I'm still learning different sets of rules and structures. That was for me, so there was, that's really, not only as a child, but going up through and into college, was just this concept of structures, not identifying specifically,

• 15:40Speaker 03

  other than that one sort of, you can tell psychoanalytic, probably my parents would say, story of identifying with my father. Other than that, really it was looking at the fabric and keeping open the possibilities for what I, what would I do with all this, either knowledge, information, or different ways of looking at things? It was just always left open. I was, I didn't want to collapse it early. And I wound up changing my mind, obviously, in terms of what I did. So I was, I didn't have any premature, other than a Freudian sort of idea that I would be a doctor, I didn't have any predetermined direction.

• 16:13John R. Miles?

  Alec, I just want to stick on your education just for a second. My first cousin came to me years ago. He was coming out of Cambridge, and at this time, he was trying to decide, do I get an MBA or do I go to law school? He ended up going to Stanford Law. But when he was asking me, I said, it's a fundamental question that comes down to this. Do you want to practice law or not? Is law something you're going to enjoy or not? Because if the answer is no, then I think the path should be go and get an MBA. I, fast forward, a good friend of mine, Ed Kopko, who you might know, he used to be the publisher of Chief Executive Magazine.

• 16:54John R. Miles?

  His son went to Princeton and then he went to University of Chicago in the J D M B A program, which is what you went through as well. But when I look at your background, as you mentioned, you have this interesting combination. So at MIT, you studied mathematics, so systems, pattern, logic, probability, but also anthropology. So human, culture, behavior, meaning. And then you go into law, reasoning. Interpretations and then combine it with business. So markets, incentives, organizations. It's like one of the most fascinating backgrounds I've had of anyone who I've ever interviewed.

• 17:37John R. Miles?

  Like, why that background? And then while you're at MIT, I also understand you became an all-American squash player. So it's this really dynamic background you have.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Geez. As I said a second ago, I think I would say the following. I would say that this fascination with structure was really important to me, that I viewed the world as people got expertise, but there were times where, and look, expertise is not a bad thing. Expertise is a great thing. But it does tend to, over time, solidify your view from one angle. And I just felt like that was limited. Where do these connect? The anthropology I chose was not physical anthropology. I did take one class over at Harvard at the P. W. B. Museum, but most of it was structural anthropology. And structural anthropology, for anybody who's listening, was, at the time, at any rate, was a lot

• 18:29Speaker 03

  about Claude Levy Strauss. And he thinks in terms of opposites, right? Life versus death, gender, male, female. What are those? They're binaries. Binaries are numbers. And so he was always sitting around, in fact, he worked with a famous mathematician, actually, if you go back, to try to bring some quantitative thinking to anthropology. For me, it was, what is this hidden nature? Why do cultures and societies grow? Why do humans organize themselves in certain ways? Math is, of course, the beauty of math is that it's the science of nature, but also math teaches you things that are, in particular, higher level math,

• 19:10Speaker 03

  depending on what you go into, teaches you a lot about nonlinearities, and that the human mind tends to think in linear terms. And I like to think sometimes in nonlinear, and I want to tell you why this matters. And then I went to law school knowing I did not want to be a lawyer. I never intended to be a lawyer. I took the bar, but I wanted the experience. I wanted to think. I wanted to understand the issue spotting. And so I graduate, I did go to J. P. Morgan for a very short period of time. Six months later, I was at what was going to become Citadel Investment Group, and leave aside hedge funds and trading strategy. But let me just tell you why I'm adding this component. I went into an area called risk arbitrage, which is trading on announced mergers. Again, doesn't per se matter for the audience. But the point is that, because I'd never traded a day in

• 19:55Speaker 03

  my life, I didn't know what a hedge fund was. I didn't know what the strategy was. But it was a structure, and it was a system, and there were people in it, and they thought from certain angles. And I went in and said, well, beginner's mind, I'm going to break it all down. And then I'm going to restructure how I think it should be done. But this business that I just described, people trading, the markets, that's crowds, that's a culture. I could think about, well, what angle do people have that, from their perspective? Math, well, there's tons of math inside the markets, obviously. I could go into that. And markets have a tendency to not work in linear ways. And then law, well, a merger is a contract. It's between parties. Well, that's my law background. Well, business,

• 20:39Speaker 03

  well, why are they doing the merger? So I kept running into situations where I viewed this from a lot of different angles. Whereas most people came in, and depending on their background, they're sort of like arrows in their quiver. They were generally more bucketed. And I have found, if you looked at my business career, almost all of it is very thematic to, where is it that other people are constrained in their perspective? Where is the space in between the artificiality of the buckets? And where can I go in with a different perspective where other people don't like to venture? Because they don't, and there's a word for this, E. O. Wilson called a conciliance. It's not so much that the content overlaps, it's that there's structure underneath that is relational. And

• 21:24Speaker 03

  the way those relate is where a lot of value is. So I viewed that, again, similar to my upbringing, was, why are people structured this way? Why is nature structured this way? Why do people do business this way? And then why do people who are even doing the business of investing, structured the way they are? And why do they have the perspective they do? And that necessarily, that doesn't mean it's wrong or right, but it's only one of many possible ways to do this. And so that may be helpful, that from my experience in college, to the graduate school on, it looks like a bunch of different lenses. Going back to your squash, just to full circle that, which is a bit of a non sequitur, when I explore something, I like to go pretty deep into it. And I'm a pretty big believer,

• 22:09Speaker 03

  if you ask me, in my life, because I know you write about it, and for me, what about meaning and purpose, or at least mission, and we can go into, I have my own opinions on meaning and purpose. But how I implement it, for me, is, I want to be a good father, I want to be a good husband, son, et cetera, friend. I want to be good at business. I want it about strong, moral, ethical. I want to have a spiritual, like, strong, and I want to be physically strong and capable. And you'll see that in my life, like, I try to, I'm not the best at any of those, but I want to be good enough on all of them to a certain level. I think in some ways, that's harder to keep it all afloat. If you look at any given moment of my life, I just spent three years, a lot of it, writing a book,

• 22:53Speaker 03

  but squash was a moment where, I'm extreme on one of these at any given moment. I probably, if you ask my fraternity brother, spent very little time studying and a lot of time playing squash. But it was a moment, so it sort of balances overall, but it mattered to me to be, we can talk about it later, but mastery as some form of meaning and purpose. And mastery doesn't mean you're the best ever. It just means, I go into something and I want to explore it. I want to understand it, not at a surface level, and how it connects to things. And so mastery is one element. I'm not saying that's the concept for everybody of meaning and purpose, but mastery and meaning, not that I'm the best dad in the world, hopefully I'm a good one. I have four sons, I hope they would say that. But I want to

• 23:36Speaker 03

  be good enough to what I consider a level of mastery across the board. And so you'll see it at times poke out, I did Iron Man, I was not the best Iron Man in the world. Mastery, that's a physical and mental exercise. And mastery over that is a form of agency.

• 23:51John R. Miles?

  Let's pause for a moment. If you've been following the Adaptive Human series, I hope these conversations have given you a deeper understanding of what it really means to adapt, not simply to change with the world, but to remain intentional about who you're becoming as the world changes around you. If you haven't already, subscribe to Passion Struck, where you listen to podcasts such as Apple Podcast or Spotify. And if you're watching on YouTube, subscribe there as well. This conversation gives you something to think about, please share it with someone who might need to hear it. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 24:37John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Alec Litowitz. First thing I wanted to say, Alec, is you hit on something that has quartered this podcast, and that is, people sometimes ask me, why isn't this a self-improvement podcast? Why is this an alternative health podcast? And what I say is, I have this concept of, our life is like a stool, and underneath that stool are different supports. And those supports get into our mental health, our physical health, our relationship health, our career health, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, our spiritual health, kind of what you're describing. And the idea is, those things have to be in balance. You're going

• 25:19John R. Miles?

  to have mastery in some, more than others, like the big leap idea from Guy's book, but the idea is, you want them to balance, because when they balance, that's what gives you a fulfilling or complete life. So hearing you talk about this and building your life like that is really interesting, because when I think about kind of my personal mission or my life plan, it evolves into all of those, and trying to touch on them. So I have an interesting question for you before we get further into adaptability, and that is, a friend of mine, Mick Hunt, has a great podcast called Mick Unplugged, and he has this question I love, that he asks every guest. Simon Sinek talks about your why, but underneath that,

• 26:04John R. Miles?

  why is your because? What is your because?

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Wow. By the way, going back to what you just said, I'm just laughing, because I'm wondering, a good question for everybody, maybe, how many legs of a stool does everybody's stool have? I think my wife thinks that, I'm so curious on so many things, that might be my stool has too many legs. I don't know. I don't know what it becomes when it's just, doesn't even have room for another leg, it just is solid structure. My because, and I certainly have read Simon Sinek's Why, and I do Why, but I think my because is... And I think everybody has this, and let me go back a second, being a son of two psychoanalysts, why I think in some ways it's there in everybody, not just me, but maybe in you. So I'm not saying that my because is universal, but I think part of it is. And that is the following, which is that when you were a child, we talked about this moment when

• 26:53Speaker 03

  you're born and you're exploring everything. But I think everybody listening, or if they don't know, you are, a woman's hips, as is how we evolved, are not big enough to have a baby's head come out fully formed. A baby's head, brain expands two times during the early years of life. You are completely, you're not ready to be on your own, unlike other animals. You are reliant completely on the parent. And as soon as you get out of that, anybody who's had kids, I have four, when you get their two and three-year-old, they are all over the place, expressing agency immediately, when all sorts of little rebellious, the terrible twos and threes. And I think that follows you in life, which is that it is, it is a part of, I don't know,

• 27:33Speaker 03

  the DNA as much as that, and also the nature of, that you want to be able to take actions, right? That in the response to being absolutely dependent. So my because has always been that I want to think about a lot of things, but there has to be agency involved. There's a Norman Rockwell painting that, I collect some art, and it's a very unusual Rockwell painting, but the name of the painting is "The Thing to Do with Life is Live It." And I just think, living it means that whatever your mission is, which was like, call it, you said exactly, that there's a mission, there's a purpose. I think purpose is higher than mission, than you have a strategy. So we can talk about what level Y is at.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  But the because, like underneath it is this desire, I would say that I have always had to be the author of my life. I do not like being in a position where someone is authoring my life. I want to be the author. I may make a lot of mistakes, and I have, but I can't imagine a life that I don't get to be the author of. I think it's not the answer, the outcome. Ultimately, it's how you, it's not just the journey, it's how you take the journey. And so my because is that in all these cases, and I, again, good things, bad things, things I've screwed up and otherwise, the because is always that I want to make it an act of,

• 28:54Speaker 03

  anybody working with me forever, I keep saying the words, I want acts of commission, not omission. I don't want to live my life by having not made a decision. So my because in every aspect, how I do relationships, how I do at work, how I did squash, these are all, I want to make acts of commission. That is my because. I want to be the author.

• 29:18John R. Miles?

  Then my follow-up question to that would be, you are obviously someone who is passion-struck. What does passion-struck mean to you?

• 29:26Speaker 03

  It's funny, when I built Magnetar, I was debating about whether to have certain values that we elucidate, illuminate, do we have any, do you have to have them written? Do you not? You can debate this. Well, if everybody understands them, should you have to write them? And I decided early on that I don't think there's anything wrong with writing them down. And I whittled it down, I had a lot of them. And number one for me was integrity, which is, my definition is, how do you act when no one's looking? The other is insight, because our job was to gather insight and invest and pass it on to investors. But the third was passion. And I think that passion is, look, I knew you've had Angela Duckworth on, I love her books. Passion, where does passion differ from grit?

• 30:08Speaker 03

  And I do think it is a little different, but I just wanted to highlight that when I was willing down as the son of a linguist, I had lots of words at my fingertips, but I did choose passion as one of the three that I thought would define what I built at Magnetar and what I wanted from the culture and otherwise. I think passion does many things. Someone asked me at a prior time, what do you have, and I know when you're a child, when you're younger, sometimes your motivation is external. I want to please, I want to do other things. I feel like the better, and people ask me all the time, how do you compensate someone? Can you motivate someone with compensation? I'm a believer ultimately that passion is the internal drive, that it just, there's

• 30:51Speaker 03

  nothing as powerful as passion or drive. It's innate, it's in you. Obviously, there's some point at which, if you successfully, probably, I don't have to ask my parents, go through childhood, you switch, and it becomes less imposed on you and more that you impose it on yourself. So for me, it is that engine that is always, I could say I want to have agency and I want to be the actor, but it is, I don't know, I basically would say, what is that? That's a passion for life. Life lived a certain way. I don't want to lick the lollipop down to what's at the core. I have a hierarchy. But I do think that there's something about passion as being this core energy and core driver that infiltrates everything you do.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  And again, I differentiate that with an outcome. Passion doesn't mean you're right all the time. It means that the motivation is authentic, that it's not coming from outside, that it's coming from in you. It's not a response to something, it's a response effectively to wanting to, not in the Steve Jobs, or I think it was him, put a dent in the world, as much as, it doesn't have to be a dent, it can be a scratch, a nick, it's to touch reality. That to me is just touch reality. And by the way, we can go into that, I have the absolute pleasure of having lived a life where I get to touch it a lot with very few constraints. But I talk in my book about Shackleton and the endurance and his story in Antarctica.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  One of the books that I've read that really transformed my thinking was Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. He had a much, much narrower scope of an environment and ability to exercise agency. And so I'm fascinated with people that have passion to survive challenges that many of us would never survive. I've been lucky, I've not had some of the challenges. I'm incredibly respectful of people that have been through circumstances that I haven't. I've been through races that I impose on myself. There are occasional times where I've had something imposed on me, but I'm in awe of the people that find meaning and purpose and passion to get them over the hump of things that I can't even imagine enduring.

• 33:02John R. Miles?

  I try to go back every year and reread Man's Search for Meaning, which is always a difficult exercise, but I've learned, for me, the best way to do it is by listening to it on audiobook. But one of my favorite things that he talks about in the book is how you can find meaning in different ways. Meaning, a lot of us find it from our career, but one of the ways that he talks about finding is through hardship. Either us going through a hardship, or another way you find meaning is through your love and care of someone else. So that could just be your love of your spouse, or it could be your love of someone who's going through a hardship, where your meaning changes to supporting them through it.

• 33:45John R. Miles?

  So that is always one of my favorite aspects of the book. And I think, as you just said, passion kind of works the same way. And Angela and I, when I was writing my first book, had this interesting dialogue where I was trying to tell her that passion and perseverance are great, but unless you have another layer underneath them, it can be misdirected. And so I was trying to get her to come to my way of thinking, which intentionality plays a huge role in where you apply your grit. She looks at it as self-control, but it's the same thing. If you have grit and you're not aligned to your values, you're not aligned to where

• 34:27John R. Miles?

  you're taking your life, then all of a sudden, that grit can go in the opposite direction that you want your life to go, was basically my message to her. And I think for so many people today, with all that's hitting us, if you're not able to adapt to those environments that we're finding ourselves in, you could suffer some huge consequences if you're not preparing your mind for success in the next human era, as you explain in your new book, about how you're thinking about this. And I'm just going to digress one more second here. When I was at Lowe's, those of us who were deemed high potential had to go through this analysis where they brought in psychoanalysts from corn fairy, of all places.

• 35:12John R. Miles?

  Anyone who was in the top right quadrant, who they thought could be a C level someday, had to go through this assessment. And the lead psychoanalyst brings me into the office at the end of the discussion, and she basically brings up Marshall Goldsmith's book, "What got you here isn't going to get you to where you need to go, John." And she said to me, "The most important thing in the future is going to be EQ." And I remember to this day, I looked at her and I said, EQ is extremely important, but I think you're absolutely wrong. I think the most important thing in the next era is going to be adaptability. Because I know I've had to change myself like seven or eight times. And I think this, I was an outlier.

• 35:55John R. Miles?

  I think this is going to be the norm in the future. And I was interested because that's the name of your book, the adaptability quotient. What your thought is on this?

• 36:04Speaker 03

  I think I'm going to agree with you. Let me frame my thought on, and maybe it'll touch a little bit on Angela, who I don't know, but I admire and respect. I would say the following, and I know you had Epstein on earlier, and I have not read his new book. I read Range probably twice, but I would say the following, I would say that we're in a very, part of the reason I wrote the book, right? All the money's going to charity. So I wrote it because I was worried about the moment we're in. And I'm going to use your phraseology, but I'm worried about the environment we're in. And in a lot of environments, Shackleton was in an environment where the weather, the ice was visible. Frankel was an environment very visible, you know, concentration camp, et cetera. We're in a very unique moment because it feels like it's invisible to some people.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  And I think that's why some people still say IQ and EQ because they're using the wrong map. So let me draw the map that I see and why I agree with you and why I think adaptability is the meta skills. Here's how I view it. In the first industrial revolution, we manipulated atoms and we used that to make devices, steam engines. We offloaded some of the agrarian work and we moved on. And second industrial revolution, we manipulated atoms again. We made production lines, we moved to cities, we made electricity, railroads. Again, we changed the physical structure of something, tools made tools. And then in the third industrial revolution, we didn't manipulate per se atoms. Of course, they're always manipulated, but it was something called bits. And we were able to offload, storage, retrieval, computation.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  But once again, it changed how we work. This time, AI, and I think we're in a fourth industrial revolution. We are at the physical side of it. So what's happening, data centers, semiconductor chips, power, special materials. There's an incredible growth that's occurring from massive production of something. And that is causing constraint on copper and it's changing prices, et cetera. But what is being produced this time is not the same thing. What is being produced right now is tokens. And tokens, while their bits are different, tokens have, and especially for you, have meaning. A bit, a chisel and a hammer don't care if they're next to each other.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  A bit doesn't actually matter if it's next to another bit, right? But a token, I always use the example, like if I say to you, hey, let's go to the bank of the river. I gotta go to the bank to withdraw money. You can bank on it. All the same word, completely different because of how I placed them in a sentence. AI understands that. LLMs understand it. They have meaning and because they have meaning, they can generate meaning. That means that this is not just the fourth industrial revolution. This is the second cognitive revolution. The first one is when we learn language, when I could sit, everything prior to that was grunts. It was in your head. That meant that I could think about the future. I could say, hey, there's an animal around the corner, you, me, you go that way, I go this way. We're going to have a dinner tonight. Let's plan, organize.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  That was what separated humans. This is the second cognitive revolution, but there's a synthetic participant in the way you think. And where I'm going to tie this back around to, and I'll stop there. I could go further. We can go much more deeper about what the implications of the production of knowledge and what happens in regime shifts. Cause this is where I've made my money, studying, understanding and taking advantage of regime shifts. This time, because this one is so big, as I'm about to explain, I had to write a book about it. And not so much warn people, but give people the tools, how to take advantage of it and to use uncertainty as an edge as opposed to something to fear. But let's just step back for a second, go back to the environment.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  Because my argument is AI looks like a tool at the interface. I use it, but it creates an environment. And the reason it's obvious is because go to part one of this revolution, which was social media. What was the deal? The deal was that I'll offload attention and you will give me connectivity. Is that the trade we got? I think that we got excessive loneliness. We've got more people saying they have fewer friends or no close friend, all on the heels of coincidence. It's correlation, we'll get studies, studies are coming out. I think it will show, I'm not going to say I can guarantee it, pretty confident it's going to show some causality to social media. Clearly, if you look at the studies of how much time young people spend directly person to person, it's gone way down from what it was when we were children.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  So there is an effect, the social media has created an environment. It feeds based on algorithms. It feeds extremes, right? You think that everybody thinks you're crazy and you think everybody's crazy because you only see the extremes. So we offloaded our belonging and we got a very thin thing back from it. And I think it's going to wind up having been incredibly challenging for humans and especially for young people. Because we did it one person at a time. We ate, back to my language, we all made an act of omission. But the result was we live in a particular environment right now. It's not just a tool. It has changed how we think and how we interact with each other.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Now comes along an unbelievably fluent oracle that can tell us things and seems smarter than us. And it's not just a tool to help complete a sentence or it changes the environment in which you think. Language is in your head. It, it takes a question. It goes and compresses, it's not a search function that gives you a million pages in a Google search. It already pre-compresses it down to one answer. It changes the water in which you swim and think. That is more than a tool. I'm not saying both of these, and I'll come back to it, could be used to augment you. But we chose to use social media in a way, most of us, to atrophy.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  I'm very worried about us doing the same thing with AI. So when you turn around and you sit and say, we'll come back to agency and choice. But it's very easy to have a drop in agency. My book, I consider to be our parakeet for agency. Why? Because I can easily live in the world that is shown to me. It's comfortable. I can easily not have cognition, just have it do it for me. I think I'm thinking, but I'm not really, I'm offloading it and I'm getting a thin version back. That's the reduction of agency. And I understand that these changes are making the world uncertain. And we can go into my definition, which I go into the book, risk and uncertainty are not the same thing. But without delving into the difference between those, uncertainty is what everybody feels right now.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  And it's easy then to go and just have your identity be on the people of these people on this Slack, this social media channel. These are my people and I feel my identity. And where you really need to have, your identity should be to be adaptable. That's how you survive this, right? If you go look at Shackleton, if you go and look at Frankel, part of what they did is they were adaptive to their environment. Even in the smallest of ways, we can talk about how Frankel did it. And why does that matter? Because if you have judgment and agency or grit or any of those things, they point in a direction. Okay, IQ and EQ are very helpful for navigating a world as you understand it. But when the environment changes, when we have a change that is, in my opinion, the biggest one.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  This one is different. It is not the same as all the industrial revolutions before. It is a technology at one level. It is an environmental change drastically different than all the others. That requires a moment for people to choose how they act in that. And we made a bad choice once over the last 20 years. Let us not do it again with our cognition. Or we wind up listening to other people, listening to the AI and you become an avatar. Or as my young kids will say, an NPC, a non-player character. That's the opposite of agency. So IQ is valuable, EQ is valuable. The analogy sometimes I give is my Ironman swim.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  I used to do Ironmans and here's the analogy, let's say IQ was my stroke, my engine, how fast I can swim in one direction. And EQ, for anybody who swims, is if I can get in a group of people and work together, then I can draft off of them and we can go even faster. Cause it's 20% more efficient. We can just all go harder and then get a break, go harder and get a break. But when the current's moving fast, when the wind is moving fast, when the world's changing super fast, what do you need to do? You need to lift your head up because you could be swimming with another group of people exactly super fast in the absolute wrong direction. AQ is the ability to look up and go, you know what? Am I even exercising my grit, my EQ or IQ in the direction of the world?

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Because agent, let me tell you what's not agency. Doing all those things right in the world that isn't reality. Adaptability is what says, am I in the right frame? Things are changing so fast. If I'm on the wrong course, who cares if I'm swimming with another group of people? Blockbuster was swimming really fast, giving you popcorn and raisinettes inside a store that was selling you DVDs. Wrong frame. Netflix had the frame. It doesn't matter. Adaptability is what says you're touching true reality as it is right now. And without it, no matter what you do in the wrong frame, that's not agency. You're not touching reality. You're not getting real feedback loops. That is a problem. So that's effectively how I see the world and why I wrote the book.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  And I know there was a lot there probably to unpack.

• 45:31John R. Miles?

  Alec, I could go in so many different directions with this because you and I have been exploring. The same thing from different angles. What I'm hearing you say is if AI increasingly becomes part of the environment which we think, where's the line between augmentation and surrendering our agency? And then what I heard you think, how do we make sure that AI is expanding our cognitive range rather than shrinking it? And something that's so interesting to what you're talking about is, in my own thinking, I have been going back to the start of the Industrial Revolution myself.

• 46:12John R. Miles?

  Because I look at the words of Henry David Thoreau when he says, "The mass of men are leading lives of quiet desperation." And I think he was right, but I expand it to what I think the mass of men is leading today is a life of quiet disorientation. Because when he said that, at his point in time, which was the late 1800s, early 1900s, we were just at the beginning part of the first industrial revolution, and it was a world with walls. Now we don't have walls. And so this disorientation takes root because of that. And so as I've been examining this, I look at what Jonathan Haidt has done in his books,

• 46:57John R. Miles?

  where he is firmly putting the blame on youth mental health crisis as the evolution of social media and the smart device. And I think he is right in some ways, but I think he is wrong in some ways. Where I think he gets it wrong is I think it's just an accelerant of something that's been building up for 200 years underneath the surface. And what we're experiencing now is a further flame that is taking that accelerant and turning it into a wildfire.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Let me try to square the circle. Maybe I can help, maybe I can't. And of all places, I'm going to grab it from structural anthropology. So go back to Claude Levy Strauss, and we'll see if this applies as a part of conciliance of different frameworks and frames. So one of the things that Claude Levy Strauss talks about are hot and cold societies. And hot societies are when technology changes come and things rapidly change, and they're disorienting to people. And this happened in the first and second industrial revolutions. But there is something in those time periods that he calls, I said, hot and cold, cold stabilizers. This can get into chaos theory, there's a lot of places that we can go with this.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  But you get these hot movements, but you need something that stabilizes society. And back in those days, we had trusted institutions, churches, religion. We had, because it wasn't, we weren't yet fully into the cities, you had local neighborhoods, people that you belonged to clubs with or organizations with. There was a ballast, if you will, that kept order despite the fact that the world was changing. You mentioned that quote at the beginning of my book, I have, William Blake's one of my favorite poet. And I start the book with a poem by him, "Auguries of Innocence," which was written right at the first industrial revolution. I think you were talking about the second.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  But either way, he wrote about, his poem was, wow, there was nature and beauty, and it was right at the beginning of the first, and what's going on? And I think that if you go back, a lot of people will say, well, Alec, we've had these prior ones, and I did the same thing exactly as you. I went back to look. And I do think this one's different, but here's one of the reasons why, and let me finish, that they're connecting the dots. And that is that, so we had these stabilizers. But starting around the mid 20th century, and so maybe I'm not going back as far as you might want to go, but we started to lose them. And if you go look at what happened even during the time where I was a child, I'm about to turn 60, we started to lose religion. I'm not saying religion's good or bad, or any particular one.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  But it was a stabilizer, and we started to have fewer people interested in religion. We certainly have a drop in trust in institutions. We certainly have had a drop in whether you had unions or, and again, I'm not suggesting these things are good or bad. The point is, what has replaced the stabilizers? You go back and say, well, one of the stabilizers, being the son of a psychoanalyst, was that you had a childhood and you grew up in a family. And there's another great sociologist, very smart, and he was a polyphobe actually, but any rate, Pierre Bordeaux. And Pierre Bordeaux talks about habitus. And that is, so think about psychoanalytic thing, your relationship with your parents and all that. Habitus is the environment in which you grow up.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  And whereas when I grew up, it was the local community, it was my parents' main influence. Our children are growing up in a digital habitus, right? It's a very different type of environment. This environment that stabilized us a long time ago now comes into a destabilizing moment that has not just social media. It's been happening, and I agree with you before, I could spend my whole, a lot of time delving down to where and how did those cold stabilizers break down? But we knew that they, it wasn't just immediate at social media, it had been in the process of breaking down. And what happens when you have a breakdown of these cold stabilizers? Here's the problem with what it does.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  It forces people who, when you, and this is from chaos theory, when you feel unstable and unmoored and disoriented, you grab what's next to you that floats. And what floats is an identity that you can attach onto, a channel in social media where people, you belong. These are what I call shallow stabilizers. Those are not your friends, they're not your family. These are shallow versions of the real thing. They're the artifact, I call, of true friction. You don't want the artifact, you want the real thing. So the question becomes, how do you get back a stabilizer? How do you wind up? One of the things that I didn't articulate when I was younger, I was talking about when

• 51:45Speaker 03

  I was younger, is the concept of stable self-provisional answer. And that stable self starts being, well, what is your identity? If my identity, because I'm disoriented, comes in some answer, I believe this because it makes me a part of the group and that is safe, then even when it's obvious that I should update and adapt, I won't. So here's my point. My point is, all these destabilizers have led to a lot of people fixing their identity on an answer because it's stabilized them as part of a group. When you and I are saying, guess what? The world you're entering in right now, you have to relocate that identity to being adaptable.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Relocate it, because if you have an identity stuck to an outcome, you will defend that answer. If you have an identity stuck to adaptability, you'll update when the world changes. But everybody over this period of time has slowly and slowly, and then all of a sudden, that's how you go bankrupt, slowly at first and then all of a sudden, has been geared and been gearing people toward, I'm better off if I have an answer, because given the destabilization, given the way that things have arisen, I get more reward from being in this group. And I'm not looking at it and objectively deciding whether that's the right answer. I just get the reward, and if I'm forced to think about another possibility, you're forcing me out of my identity, and it's the only thing that I have left keeping me afloat.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  I don't want to let go of it. So I, long-winded answer to that question.

• 53:16John R. Miles?

  Well, and part of what I think is happening to people is when we're in these environments that people are finding themselves in today, where we treat people around us as resources for what they can produce rather than as sources of inherent value and agency, what do you think is going to happen? So that's why I believe employee disengagement, people feeling burned out, the loneliness epidemic, people feeling hopeless, mental health rising. I think we keep treating these things as separate things when they're symptoms of this larger gap that you and I are describing.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  We agree 100% on that. I always like to disagree even with myself, because otherness is the only source of value. I know a lot of people want to find channels where they agree with people. I tried to do the opposite, and that is how you should use AI, because anything that differs with you is the only place where you could potentially learn, right? Somebody who completely agrees with you, there's nothing to learn from that. But in this particular case, I think we have the same philosophy around that, which is, I think what you're saying is, hey, and go back to what I said earlier, this is a frame you have, it is a systems thinking perspective. There's people in all the, which is why I wrote the book, probably why you are yours. My book does have, it has sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis,

• 54:42Speaker 03

  systems thinking, information theory, cognitive science, neuros, because, and I'm not an expert on any of them, but sometimes when people are stuck from their perspectives going, oh, this is the reason for it, oh, that's the reason for it. They don't step back and go, oh, wait a minute, there's a structure underlying it. It's what I talked about when I got the JDMBA and the math and that. It's like, there's an underlying structure here that appears to be hidden. When you said that the walls disappear and that's disorienting, the mental image I have actually, that some of what you and I are talking about and worried about is, at least for the young people, is, but you know what just showed up is really comfortable furniture? Just lowly, boy, you sit in it, and you just, this is really comfortable, I'm part of this group, I don't have to tax my brain.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  And you just start slowly not wandering, and you don't explore anything, and it's just really comfortable. But you now have no agency, you're not interacting anymore, you've just sat down, and it's of course always fine occasionally to rest. But this is something that, as I was saying before, so the effects that you and I are talking about, which frankly makes it hard, unlike Shackleton, unlike Viktor Frankl, they're invisible. It's an invisible enemy here of agency. And yet, we have, the risk is, you and I can decide that we see this. I don't want to say it's red pill, blue pill, but if enough other people don't, we're going to make a collective decision.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  We just did it with one technology, are we going to do it again? For me, it's like, part of the problem of you seeing this, I see it, again, we both see it, is that it's an invisible thing. You only see it over time by what it does to you. And right now, you're in the middle of this change. It's not, shouldn't be lost on anybody, that those who are adaptive, that are looking for patterns go, oh my God, I see what's coming. And other people who are comfortable sitting on the couch, haven't, they're in it. I'm reminded of the joke that the old fish is swimming in the water and two little fish are swimming in the other direction. And the old fish says to the young fish, how's the water, boys? And the two fish swim on, and one looks at the other and goes, what's water?

• 56:53Speaker 03

  I'm not sure people know the water they're swimming in right now.

• 56:58John R. Miles?

  The metaphor, as I was reading the book, that really had me leaning into the book is that we have spent so much time building this map that we think is the map that is going to guide us in the future. But as you explained, that map is no longer matching the terrain that we're living in. And I think what people don't realize is that their mental map is now outdated, which is exactly what you and I have been talking about for the past 15, 20 minutes. So let's just, before we close out with a couple more questions, let's go back to Shackleton, because I think it's one of the best examples from the book.

• 57:39John R. Miles?

  His mission changed completely, for those of you who aren't familiar with his story, once the environment changed, because he had to make different decisions. But I don't think Shackleton ever abandoned the larger purpose, which was getting his men home. How do leaders know, and how do individuals know when to abandon their plan, their life plan, their company plan, without abandoning the mission?

• 58:06Speaker 03

  That's an excellent question, and of course, it would be nice if people read my book, but I highly encourage people to read the book about his expedition called The Endurance, which is the book about Shackleton's expedition. It's probably the greatest adventure story that everybody will think is fiction if it weren't for the fact that it's real. And it might be the best real adventure story that ever occurred. And you're 100% right around changing the mission. I think that, here's my answer to your question, and this goes back, I think I alluded to it earlier, and maybe this will be helpful in answering it, or you could, I'll answer it, and you could say, no, I want to dig deeper. When I talked earlier about stable self provisional answers, what I meant, the question that

• 58:48Speaker 03

  you're asking me, or I'm interpreting it as, what stays and what changes? What's allowed never to move and what's allowed to move? And so you said that he had a mission. His mission was to cross the, be the first to cross Antarctica. That was his mission. He's been an explorer, and there was always a submission. Hey, I'd like to cross with everybody alive. I assume that was a submission. It wasn't stated, but it was a, as soon as his boat got crushed after 10 months being in Antarctica on the ice, and I have been to the South Pole, by the way, I've been to Antarctica, I've been to the South Pole, so I can speak with a little bit more, I think fewer people have been to the South Pole than the top of Everest, so I could speak a little bit about what it's like there. But you're right, that he said, you know what, that mission's no longer available.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  What ensues, though, is not just that one decision, great, get back. It's an unbelievable story of adversity and a constant changing of the environment and a constant state of adapting. So my response to your question is that, here's for me what never changes. What never changes is your values, and that means sort of morals, ethics. What do you hold dear? My parents, as psychoanalysts, told me something I still believe, some listeners probably disagree with me, but I've held it and I like it, and that is, your character's your character, but you can change your behavior. And your character's like, what makes up your values? You could always change your behavior, you can learn, but you're, so some values have to stick no matter what.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  And then the other thing, ironically, that I think becomes critical, is the thing you and I are working on, which is that your identity as being adaptable is itself something that can't ever change. Because the minute that changes, you're fixed on an answer, and the world will eventually show you an environment that it's no longer applicable to. So where I'm changing, I'm not, I'm answering your question, but I guess what I'm saying is, let's go to the hierarchy. Your purpose, which was, it's part of your values, it's, I'm the steward of 28 men, whatever your purpose is, that stays. But your mission to achieve that purpose, it's like a hierarchy. It moves slowly.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Someone would go, Alec, I thought mission is something that always stays. But obviously, if you don't have a boat anymore, the mission has to change, okay? It can be a very sticky mission, the word mission, but at some point, it is subject to being rewritten. Strategy can definitely change, right? Definitely change. And so I view that as, that when I say stable self, I think that is, your values should never change, and your method for remaining adaptive. My book is basically a how-to kit. This, in a world of uncertainty, this is how you should make adaptive decisions. It doesn't say you should have this answer. It's a much more abstracted level of, it doesn't matter what the conditions are.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  If you follow these processes, whatever is new, you will, it's an updating mechanism, a formula. It's not IQ or EQ, those are traits and they're stuck. Maybe you can increase your EQ a little bit, but those are stuck, and soon IQ's going to be downloadable. That's not going to separate people. Anybody who says IQ, someone could say EQ, but EQ is a tool you use when you know what frame you're in and you know where you're headed. It's not something that tells you, EQ and IQ don't say, you know what, I'm in the wrong room. Once you're in the right room, they're very useful. So my answer to you around that is, that the stability is in your values and in your identity as being adaptable, right? Identify with these values, identify with this methodology for being adaptive.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Everything else has degradation. Strategy can change very quickly. Mission less quickly, but it is, it can change. And I know people, that's why you can get into Simon Sinek's Why, what's your mission, vision, what's your why? And it depends on where you think he places the why, or where you personally place it. But I think of mission as being something that moves slow, it's like a glass, probably people know this, glass of liquid. It moves very slowly, right? Go to churches in Europe that are really old, and you'll see the bottom is more thick than the top. It moves very slowly, but it still moves. So I think about those two things as being things that never change. And the line, basically, I think about as, and how do you know which, is pretty simple,

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  and then it's all about feedback loops, right? Agency, the way that you and I think others on your podcast have talked about, agency requires feedback, right? Adaptability, you can study cybernetics doing this, an adaptive system, its behavior is governed by feedback. So if you're Shackleton, and you have this mission, and you want to know, should I change it or not? There was no way to get feedback about his mission to cross Antarctica when he had no boat and no, no way to get, the mission changes because that feedback loop is gone. Now I'm going home. Now, the process of going home, he gets unbelievable amounts of, tried that, didn't work, this happened, it's an unbelievable story, I can't even, some of the stories I can't even make up.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  But it's a constant state of feedback loops. And so if you're getting feedback loops that are updating you, then you're probably on the right target. When you hear nothing back, when there is nothing to get a feedback loop on, then you're probably on the wrong mission, and it has to be updated. And that could be an external event, it could be internal, but I consider that, sometimes you're not getting feedback, you're asking the wrong question, and that's in my book. But ultimately, if you've done the right things and you're not getting feedback, or the feedback is saying, you're in the wrong room, that's when you change what room you want to be in. And there's a methodology for doing that. But there are some things, regardless what room you're in, that you bring along with you. And one is what you stand for.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  And the other is, I brought with me my ability to figure out that now I'm in the new room, if this turns out to be the wrong room, I have the ability to get into the next room. That as an identity is persistent over time. And I'm afraid that the news for people is, I foresee a very high pace of change now, which is why I even left Magnetar, why I wanted to model with this environment, the second cognitive revolution, and why I even wrote the book, is I'm saying to people, here's the source code, here's the decision-making process, not the answer, the process for knowing, am I in the right room, am I not? When should I abandon, when should I not? When do I use grit?

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  When do I use curiosity? As your other guests, when do I shrink the box, which I call exploit? And when do I keep exploring? I think my book relates to yours and theirs, maybe on a more even, and I haven't read yours yet, on a meta level of the meta skill on top, which says, you need a structure that tells you where to point the other things. And it's especially true when you have regime shifts, and people don't like uncertainty and change, and their identity likes to be stuck. But that is going to be dangerous right now. And even if you think and act, not acting keeps you safe, it doesn't, because you're swimming in the water, no matter what, you're already in the new environment.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  So if you don't change and you start acting, you're going to get no feedback, and you're going to, by the way, sometimes the smartest people are the best at convincing you that the old room is still valid. It's almost a detriment, they can, you know, EQ and IQ, I can talk to you and convince you, that still room is still right. When you and I know, I say it, once a regime shift happens, it never goes back. They're irreversible. We never go back to a world where we don't have information of the internet. We're not going back to a world without AI. So you have a choice to be either a resistor, say it's not there, an adopter, where you use the tool, or an adapter.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  And an adopter thinks it's a tool, and an adapter is the one that says, this isn't just a tool. It not only is a tool I can use, and it can be used right to augment, I think there's good uses out of it, but it changes me, the user, when I use it. Unlike a chisel, and a hammer, or a spreadsheet, this changes my, what I see, how I think. And that means, if I'm a resistor or an adopter, not an adapter, I haven't really thought out far enough about how this all fits together. And that's why the book, some people have called it, I think it's gotten good reviews so far, but some people say it's dense but rewarding to get through, because I'm trying to give people the tools to take that last step to becoming an adapter, because it's

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  the toolkit you need. That almost above all else, which is what you said earlier, that's the defining skill of the next era. It's certainly not IQ. And EQ is helpful. It's this ability to know what frame you're supposed to be taking, all your other attributes and pointing them.

• 1:07:55John R. Miles?

  I think the last thing you just said, Alec, is the soundbite for this episode. And I just want to give a couple testimonials about your book from people I know and who are friends. One is Stephen Kotler, who's the author of The Art of Impossible and The Rise of Superman, called it "a clear, compelling guide to thinking under pressure." Eli Finkel, who's another guest who's been on the show, calls it "a deep, important, and compulsively readable book among the best works of nonfiction I've encountered in a decade." And that's a ton coming from Eli. And then I'll just read Book Below's comment about it, that "You make a quiet, but pressing

• 1:08:38John R. Miles?

  case that raw intelligence will never carry us through the next decade. What matters is how quickly we can update our thinking when the ground shifts." Alec, your book came out the week that we're doing this recording. It's available everywhere for people who want to purchase books. Where can people find more information on what you're doing beyond the book?

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  I have a Substack somewhat new to me this year that I write, not just about the book, but I write thoughts and I'll continue to write thoughts. So it's free, so people can look me up on Substack. That's probably the best place. There's a, for my family office, we have a, it's called Q-Star Capital, is Q-Star Cap. And so Q-Star is one way to see what we're up to. And then probably we'll see as a result of this, I'm certainly going to do fewer podcasts, and I don't have another book coming out. This might be a one and done. But the best place probably to see what I'm continuously thinking is my Substack, to be honest with you. And I do that, and like I did for the book, just, this is my way of trying, at any rate, to give back for anybody who wants to listen. And the beauty of it, when I think you're headed down that direction as well, is the

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  beauty of adaptability is that I believe everybody has the capability to wield it. IQ and EQ, I know a lot of people with higher IQ and higher EQ than me, but I just don't think it's the defining still going forward. And the beauty is that it's great that the one thing that I really, truly believe is everybody is born with and humans are exceptional at. And the beauty of a human, and there are some species that can attempt this, we are by far the best. And last thing I'll say is that we evolved through adaptation by luck, mutations, and then some take hold. Humans can adapt in our lifetime. It's an incredible gift. Why would anybody want to give that away? When you have the ability, every listener here, everybody who's not listening, has

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  the ability to take the environment and to say, "Great, show me how I can get the most use out of social media, how I get the most use out of AI," which I agree with you, is about expanding the set. And then, "How do I ward off the negatives?" It can be done. It's an act of commission. You have to get up, you have to act. But it could be the moment where we really do see what the most humans can do is. It's there, it's waiting to be done. We just have to make it a conscious, active agency. That's what I hope everybody does. And I appreciate that you and your guests are all contributing to that, writing it, taking your time. I hope I'm a tiny little helpful piece of it, I hope, but I just want everybody and be a part of people that are moving it forward.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  I'm very pro-human, all-human, just pro-human. And so I appreciate you having me on and letting me speak my part.

• 1:11:19John R. Miles?

  Alec, it was great to have you. Thank you so much for joining us on Passion Struck.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:11:25John R. Miles?

  I hope that conversation with Alec gave you a new way to think about adaptability. His analogy about swimming in the wrong direction is a powerful one because it reminds us that effort alone isn't enough. Sometimes we don't need to swim harder, we need to lift our heads, look at the current, and ask whether we're still moving toward the right destination. And with that, we've reached the end of our interview series portion of The Adaptive Human: How We Thrive in a Changing World. On Friday, I'll be doing a recap solo episode. However, over the past several weeks, we've explored this idea from so many different perspectives. Angela Duckworth helped us to understand how much our environments shape us. Marty Stiligman showed us the importance of agency, the belief that our actions can

• 1:12:09John R. Miles?

  make a difference. David Epstein challenged us to think differently about expertise and the experiences that prepare us for an uncertain future. Jared Diamond helped us to think about adaptability through the lens of leadership. Cole Brower showed us what adaptation looks like when you're alone in the middle of the ocean. Marissa Franco took us inward in our relationship with ourselves. Alex Edmonds explored how our collective environments can distort our judgment. Scott Simon and Gregory Stock reminded us of the courage required to ask better questions. Peter Gray brought us back to childhood play, curiosity, and the development of independence. And now Alec has challenged us to lift our heads, question the framework operating within,

• 1:12:54John R. Miles?

  and recognize when reality itself has changed. But there's one more piece of this story I want to explore. This Friday, I'm going to bring the entire series together in a special solo episode. I'll look across these conversations and the themes we've uncovered: agency, identity, curiosity, relationships, belonging, environment, and adaptability, and explore what they reveal about the human need to know that our lives have significance. Because adapting to the world is only part of the challenge, we have to ask what kind of world we're adapting to and what that world is telling us about our own value. And that brings us to next week. On October 6, I'll be launching my new book, The Mattering Effect.

• 1:13:37John R. Miles?

  In a special solo episode next week, I'll take you inside the book and explain the ideas behind the Great Erasure, The Mattering Gap, and The Mattering Tax, and why I believe the erosion of human significance has become one of the most defining challenges of modern life. Here's a preview. Being needed is not the same as mattering. Being needed communicates, "What you do is valuable to me." Mattering communicates, "You are valuable to me, and your presence makes a difference." And if you're in the Tampa Bay area, I'd love to see you in person on launch day, October 6, at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, where I'll be celebrating the launch of The

• 1:14:19John R. Miles?

  Mattering Effect in a conversation with Linda Hurtado from Fox News. So this is the final interview in the Adaptive Human series, but it's also a bridge into what comes next. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.