E114 - What Must We Keep Human? - Podcast With Dr David Rock - Part One

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The trouble with change is that you know small to moderate changes, what do they do?
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Well, you feel like you might look stupid, status very uncertain, certainty.
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You often don't feel like you have any control.
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It's happening to you, autonomy.
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Autonomy.
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It's coming from people you thought were on your side.
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Relatedness feels very unfair.
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So a lot of changes activate all five.
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And you know, the AI transformation that's that we're a part of at the moment activates all five really strongly.
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Like each one's really strong.
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It's one of the strongest threat responses we've had in the organizational change space.
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Welcome to the Inner Game of Change, where we explore the thinking that shapes how change really happens in the workplace.
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I am your host, Ali Jummer.
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My guest today is Dr.
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David Rock, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Neuroleadership Institute and the originator of the Scarf model and the author of many books.
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His forthcoming book, Good With Humans, brings together more than 25 years of research into what motivates us, what puts us into a state of threat, and how this shapes the way we interact with one another.
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In this conversation, we explore what change does to the brain, why even a perceived threat can affect our ability to think, how a leader's emotional state can spread through a team, and whether continuous change is beginning to test the limits of our cognitive capacity.
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This is part one of my conversation with Dr.
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David Rock.
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I am grateful to have David chatting with me today.
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David, welcome to the Any Game of Change.
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Thanks for the invitation.
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Good to be here with you.
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Thank you very much.
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David, we're gonna start with your forthcoming book, Good with the Humans.
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I always think about you know, authors, there must be something that was circling around your head, and the question was pushing you to write the book, what was the impetus for it?
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I was I mean, to be honest, I was very overdue on another book.
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And but writing is so hard.
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I mean, I've always found it very hard.
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It takes incredible focus and also takes really shutting out the world and and having really a really clear, clear mind, which is very hard to find these days.
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And I realized it wasn't gonna get any easier.
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And I did have some important things I wanted to say, and I'd been kind of waiting for something to come up, and I was waiting and waiting, and eventually I was like, I should stop waiting.
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It's been 15 years now since my last book.
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I need to actually sit down, it's not gonna get easier and work out the most important thing I have to say.
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And I realized that was like a whole book summarizing 25 years of research now on this kind of one big question, which is why do we really do what we do?
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And I sat down and and started writing.
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But it's it's it's hard to find the focus these days.
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And I I my biggest acknowledgement in the book was actually to myself for the discipline and the insanity of just finding those those hours, mostly, mostly in the mornings before the brain starts getting busy, you know.
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And but managed to do it.
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But it was just it was important to to tell the whole story of this framework because um it it it yeah, it just felt like something I needed to to to finish properly.
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What is the central spine of the book?
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What's what are you trying to answer?
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I mean it's essentially it's it's a neuroscience take on you, you know.
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I mean, the the subtitle is the neuroscience of what makes us tick and what ticks us off.
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So it's really a neuroscience take on what motivates us and what upsets us, and like basically that describes pretty much everything we do, right?
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If we do things because we want something or we want to avoid something, it's called toward in a way.
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And you know, in in around around 2001, 2002, like 25 years ago, I started to see all these studies coming out about the social brain and all these kind of surprises coming out from a new field called social cognitive neuroscience.
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And there were literally hundreds of studies coming out every year suddenly saying, wow, we can't believe it.
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But like being treated fairly is exactly like physical pleasure in the brain, or being treated unfairly is just like physical pain and also like disgust, like smelling something off.
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Like all these surprises about the brain and social interactions were coming out.
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And I just I smelt a pattern, I sort of felt there was something.
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And, you know, I'm reading all these studies and just kind of really seeing the pattern, and it was obvious and obvious, you know, more and more obvious as I read more and more.
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And eventually the the pattern kind of finally came together, literally at the bottom of a swimming pool in the Philippines in 2006.
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It kind of fell into place completely and became the scarf model.
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And then I published it initially in 2008, and then you know, I've been but I've been studying it and researching it.
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We've written multiple papers on it, and there's now 2,000 academic citations or research paper citations, not all academic, but 2,000 citations coming up to.
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And I thought I just needed to like capstone it and finish it and really explain it properly and really kind of have a book that that that anchored on what scarf is and what scarf does, and all the different ways you can use it, and just really looking at it.
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And it's so it's it's really scarf and new, scarf and sort of everyday conversations, scarf and harder conversations, scarf and teams, scarf and organizations, scarf and community and families and even our relationships.
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So it's it's kind of defining the framework, but then looking at how you use it in all these different contexts.
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And I just thought it would be helpful and important to kind of finish to close that loop while I while I still could before the world gets any crazier than it already is.
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You'll be pleased to know that over the years I apply scarf on myself and how I look at the world and how I behave, how I react to things, and so I question it.
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So this idea of good with the humans, is that an individual capability we can grow?
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Or is it in the workplace especially, is it that the employer would need to create the conditions for us to be good with the humans, or is that a combination of the two?
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Oh, it's definitely a combination.
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I mean, an interesting thing is the network for understanding other people and their motivations and goals, right, is anti-correlated to the network for thinking about your own goals.
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Right?
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So when you're very goal-focused, you switch down the networks for thinking in terms of people.
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Yes.
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Right, and their needs and their motivations and their goals, right?
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So they're they're they're in a bit of a seesaw, which is like you're you're really in a hurry.
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You can literally like not see people in front of you.
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I've had that experience.
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Literally like walk into someone because you're so focused on a goal that you literally don't see people, right?
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And and often in organizations, leaders are often very, very goal-focused individuals who are spending their days being very goal-focused, and they're not thinking in terms of people's motivations and goals themselves, other people's.
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They've switched those down and they're thinking about other people conceptually using a different brain network.
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And so they often haven't built good like capacity or good, you know, they haven't often haven't built good kind of language and and and uh networks really for thinking in terms of other people's motivations and goals.
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And so, you know, Scarf provides a bit of a language, a bit of a scaffolding that helps.
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It's like, look, here's one framework with five things that you can filter through, and it helps, you know, go from this incredibly noisy world to something much more understandable that you can now go, oh, okay, this was a fairness issue.
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I said this thing and my whole team's erupting because I created a sense of unfairness.
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All right, well, what can I do now?
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Let's think about offsetting that.
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So it it creates a scaffolding that helps turn the noise into a signal that you can then do something about in you know, in an organizational context.
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Although it's relevant to, you know, as I saw in writing the book, it's relevant to just kind of every part of our lives where we interact with other people.
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And I look forward to that.
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I've actually pre-ordered your book, David.
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So I look forward to that.
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I work in the business of change management and communication.
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From your experience now, what do you see that we're doing stuff that maybe we should be doing more of, and some of the stuff that you witness that we should stop doing.
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And the same applies to leadership as well when it comes to managing change in the workplace.
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Well, if we think about l let me just kind of put a little bit of meat on the bones of Scarf for those who who don't know the framework, so that sure people aren't saying, what's this acronym?
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What's this thing?
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Basically, the world we interact with the world as threat or opportunity.
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Like every single stimuli that comes to us is valued as basically a danger to stay away from or a reward to have more of.
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And then there are five things that the brain in particular tracks in the social context.
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So think of threat and reward relates to temperature, right?
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Something's too hot, it's a threat, right?
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Relates to oxygen levels, relates to pressure levels, relates to balance.
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So there's all these physical domains.
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Pain, for example, is a threat, pleasure is a reward, right?
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There are all these physical domains that activate threat reward networks to keep us alive.
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Their signals do less or more of something.
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And there are these social situations that also activate and kind of piggyback on those same networks.
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And many of these, the the brain says, well, this is critical for survival.
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So you should pay attention to this thing, right?
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So like the R in scarf is relatedness and feeling really lonely and disconnected from other people feels like pain because your brain is saying, look, if something goes wrong, you're on your own.
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That's a problem.
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You should like get some people around you, and and you're getting this pain response just like hunger, it's like a signal of dangerously low resources.
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And so this feeling of loneliness or being left out of a group or you know, is a painful thing because just like you know, a hot temperature, it's like a danger signal, right?
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And so what I saw are there were these five things that create this danger or opportunity signal, and the brain tracks these in multiple different ways, each one.
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But you know, S is is status, right?
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How where are you compared to others?
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C is certainty, A is autonomy or control or having choice, R is relatedness, which is really in-group or out group, and the F is for fairness.
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And so any, you know, any one of these can be activated in threat or reward.
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Now, the trouble with change, now to answer your question, the trouble with change is that even sort of moderately, moderately small small to moderate changes, what do they do?
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Well, you feel like you might look stupid, status very uncertain, certainty.
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Yeah, you often don't feel like you have any control, it's happening to you, autonomy, it's coming from people you thought were on your side, relatedness feels very unfair, fair is so a lot of changes activate all five, you know.
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And and you know, the AI transformation that's that we're a part of at the moment activates all five really strongly.
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Like each one's really strong.
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Yeah, it's one of the strongest threat responses we've had in the organizational change space, right?
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So, look, one of the first things that leaders need to do is understand that this is real.
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This is just like people experiencing physical pain.
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If you if you could track someone's brain experiencing a strong scarf threat from a change announcement, what you would see is them thinking about their work, and then every 30 seconds, them losing a minute or two thinking about the change, right?
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And their pain network lighting up, and then them struggling to go back to thinking about the project, and then another few minutes their brain goes to the pain again, right?
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And it's exactly like you would see if someone was experiencing physical pain, it's just like hard to focus.
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Their attention just keeps going to the pain, right?
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It's like alert, alert, just like being hungry, right?
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Alert, alert, feed yourself, stop thinking, feed yourself, stop thinking.
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So you got to basically take it really seriously and understand that this isn't just how people feel.
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It's like incredibly hard to focus, incredibly hard to work, even harder to collaborate, and even harder to innovate if you have that strong threat state.
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So basically, you know, taking it seriously and doing whatever you can, ideally ahead of time to turn down those threats.
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The best way to, you know, deal with scarf is don't let threats happen in the first place.
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Yeah.
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Right?
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Minimize the threats ahead of time.
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Then once they kick in, you can do things.
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But so take it seriously, minimize threats ahead of time.
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And, you know, in the book, I talk about a few examples of companies who did that thoughtfully, who understood Scarf and ahead of time actually like did something really different that made something that could have been really stressful for everyone manageably stressful, right?
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Not pleasant, but just like okay, as opposed to overwhelming.
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Right.
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And that's what Scarf can do.
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Understanding Scarf can take something from like overwhelming and everyone just can't get anything done, to like that's annoying, but we're getting stuff done and we're focused and we're productive and we're even like engaged because we feel just that little bit more in control, for example, or that little bit more of a team.
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I feel like we've got each other's backs so much more than I expected.
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Yeah.
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Right?
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Whatever it is, whichever domain you can bump to the positive, it can really, really help bring people back from the edge to something where they can actually get you know good work done and often really good work done.
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One of the things that I've learned from reading your books is that this idea of threat, even if it's not real, is a perceived threat that can trigger all of these reactions in us.
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Have I got that right?
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Well, I mean, perception is everything.
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It's dark and quiet in there, it's just all electrical activities forming perceptions based on previous experience.
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So it's all perceptions.
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So yeah, if you perceive a threat, whether it's real or not, if you perceive a threat, your heart rate goes up, your cortisol levels go up, your prefrontal resources go down, your motor cortex fires up, your pre-modor cortex fires up, planning what you'll do as well.
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Like all these things happen, and they if it's a if it's a moderate to strong threat, really just reduce your capacity to hold ideas in mind.
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And it, you know, reduces your field of view, both physic, both in terms of visual and audio.
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Like you you don't hear subtle things, reduces your it makes you more reactive, makes you more like likely to react negatively or assume the negative.
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Like all these things happen from a perception that may be completely incorrect.
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You know, your boss can say, Hey, can we chat later?
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And you hear that as I'm about to be fired.
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Yeah, they just said, Can we chat later?
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They actually might want to give you some positive feedback, but your perception is I'm about to be fired, and and this whole raft of processes that you know kick in.
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Because if it's a good thing, they should have told me already about it.
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Yeah.
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Especially when they talk to you.
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What is it?
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The example at 10 o'clock in the morning you say, Ali, I'd like to meet with you at four o'clock later this afternoon to have a chat.
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I'm gonna struggle from 10 o'clock to four o'clock.
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It's the worst thing.
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If you if you counted the number of times that it came into your mind and distracted you, you'd be amazed.
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And that's that's what happens.
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We get these, you know, these intrusive thoughts.
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But an intrusive thought is really a pain response saying something, you know, something could go wrong here and cost you your life.
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Something, you know, so pay attention to this.
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And that's what pain and hunger and loneliness and many other things, and unfairness, and all these things, you know, are they're signals to pay attention to something because it, you know, it could kill you.
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The brain's built to keep us alive.
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And its primary function is avoid dangers and maximize opportunities.
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And it just so happens that the social world has some of the most important dangers and opportunities, largely because we we we we actually absolutely require the social world for survival till we're like a dozen years old at least, maybe 15, some people a lot longer.
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But we we absolutely need other people to feed us and clothe us and house us and keep us warm.
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We don't survive in seconds or minutes or hours or weeks or months like other animals.
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We take over a dozen years.
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It's it's complete it's a complete outlier in you know the rest of the known animals in you know on this planet.
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And so so these social things are really important to us.
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Being left out of a meeting that you really felt was important and that you had a really important thing to say and you felt you absolutely should be there, that will distract you for days.
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And and it's a it's an actual pain response as if you'd you know stubbed your toe really badly and it was throbbing the whole time and you just find found it hard to focus on your work.
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It's basically the same.
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It's not it's not exactly the same network, just to be scientifically accurate, but the distressing component of the pain is is is almost exactly the same as physical pain, as social pain.
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The the there is a number of kind of pain networks involved in pain, and there's a part of it that's if they think of as the distressing component, that's almost exactly the same.
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The physical data might look slightly different.
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There's a couple of components that are slightly different, but it looks very, very similar to physical pain, and it has the same effects as physical pain, which is more important, it has the same effects as physical pain.
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When I'm in pain and I perceive a threat from my observation that I also will impact my team as well.
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Well, this is a whole other thing, and I wrote about this in the book that uh if you manage a family or a sports team or a team at work or a whole company, you know, you you want to know that that people people are very heavily influenced by your your threat or reward state.
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And it happens just from hearing you, if they can't see you but they can hear your voice, they'll get it.
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Maybe they'll get it through text if you if they if you communicate differently than you normally do.
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But but definitely hearing and definitely seeing, we we sense, especially someone we know, we sense that something is up and we and it unconsciously adds.
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Now, this is an interesting concept, but it adds, and and it's it's kind of mathematically the the the math here is actually helpful to understand.
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If you imagine that threat and reward is like a plus three to minus three scale, like plus three is very excited, minus three is is overwhelmed, right?
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Can't think at all.
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If you're at a plus one, so you're just curious and open and interested, and you walk into a team meeting and everyone is really anxious, maybe at a minus one, not really anxious, but just slightly anxious, and you're at a plus one, you'll you'll nudge them up a bit to maybe neutral.
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So we we take on, we we add to our state the threat state or reward state of the person we pay attention to.
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It's usually the highest status person in the room, but could just be the person that we all pay the most attention to.
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But um, so it's additive.
00:19:12.960 --> 00:19:15.200
But now let's think about mathematics on the negative.
00:19:15.359 --> 00:19:20.240
If you're minus one and your team's minus one, they're now minus two.
00:19:21.200 --> 00:19:21.759
Yes.
00:19:22.000 --> 00:19:22.240
Right?
00:19:22.319 --> 00:19:23.519
That's primary school mathematics.
00:19:23.680 --> 00:19:26.720
Minus one plus minus one equals minus two, right?
00:19:26.960 --> 00:19:31.200
So and if you're at minus one and they're at minus two, they're now potentially overwhelmed.
00:19:31.279 --> 00:19:31.440
Yeah.
00:19:31.599 --> 00:19:31.839
Right.
00:19:31.920 --> 00:19:36.400
But if they're at minus one and you're at plus one, right, again, you brought them up to neutral, right?
00:19:36.480 --> 00:19:40.960
So so the the It's actually even worse if you're actually minus six.
00:19:41.200 --> 00:19:41.440
Yeah.
00:19:41.599 --> 00:19:41.839
Yeah.
00:19:41.920 --> 00:19:43.279
And and that's a problem.
00:19:43.759 --> 00:19:47.759
If you're really, really anxious as the leader, which is is very hard not to be a lot.
00:19:47.839 --> 00:19:52.480
If you're really, really anxious as the leader, you make your team more anxious than they were before you walked in the room.
00:19:52.559 --> 00:19:56.799
So it's it's a very, very important thing that you manage your own threat states.
00:19:56.960 --> 00:20:08.240
My my previous book, Your Brain at Work, had a lot about that, kind of touched lightly on Scarf, but touched more deeply on like managing our limited capacity and managing our emotions.
00:20:08.400 --> 00:20:10.480
And then Scarf was kind of at the end of it.
00:20:10.640 --> 00:20:19.839
This book is like a double-click on Scarf, it does touch lightly on how we manage our own emotions and how we, you know, work within our capacity limits and that as well.
00:20:19.920 --> 00:20:21.359
So I kind of flipped it around that way.
00:20:21.599 --> 00:20:23.920
I love I love your book, uh, your brain at work.
00:20:24.480 --> 00:20:27.200
And I highly recommend that people actually read it.
00:20:27.359 --> 00:20:36.799
It's it's changed a lot of my practice, the way I think about work, and the way I think about change, and the way I think about serving my clients.
00:20:37.119 --> 00:20:42.720
So that's really and the idea of you know the minus and the plus is a very powerful idea.
00:20:42.960 --> 00:20:47.359
Actually, I expanded that into even relationships and magic relationships.
00:20:47.680 --> 00:20:58.799
So in today's world, there's so much change happening that there's actually not even a start and a beginning, it's actually a continuous change.
00:20:59.200 --> 00:21:03.839
So you can you can see how the scarf is going up and down different ways.
00:21:05.680 --> 00:21:09.680
Have we maxed out maxed out our capacity to change?
00:21:11.279 --> 00:21:16.400
You know, there's this thing about the the futures already here, it's just even unevenly distributed.
00:21:16.480 --> 00:21:16.640
Right?
00:21:16.799 --> 00:21:23.279
It's not my quote, it's from some tech genius, but the the you know, there are lots of people who are completely maxed out.
00:21:23.759 --> 00:21:27.119
And there are still people who are actually thriving through this time.
00:21:27.200 --> 00:21:30.640
So it's it's unevenly distributed in in in in a way, right?
00:21:30.799 --> 00:21:43.519
That that I think that particularly with uh what's happening with with Gen AI is that we we're hitting up against a lot more people's capacity limits where you get to the point that just information becomes noise.
00:21:43.920 --> 00:21:47.200
Um we we do have actual processing capacity limits, right?
00:21:47.279 --> 00:21:55.359
Yeah, we can't process 10,000 decisions in a day in terms of like work decisions or even 1,000 work decisions, right?
00:21:55.519 --> 00:21:57.920
Maybe 100 is already a limit.
00:21:58.240 --> 00:22:06.880
Maybe we can really We we can process maybe, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 30, you know, really difficult decisions in a day and do it well.
00:22:06.960 --> 00:22:11.759
Um, so there's a certain limit to the amount of decision making we can do before we max out.
00:22:11.839 --> 00:22:17.279
And it's it's a physical limit, just like we can't run 100 miles an hour unaided, right?
00:22:17.359 --> 00:22:23.839
We can get there in a car or in a motorbike, but you know, we we we can't get to 100 miles an hour without some help.
00:22:24.000 --> 00:22:24.240
Yes.
00:22:24.559 --> 00:22:29.359
And this, this, like how much we can process is is a really important thing to understand.
00:22:29.440 --> 00:22:35.680
Now, you're probably mature enough as I am to remember before and after email arriving, right?
00:22:36.240 --> 00:22:38.799
And I I can say that, David.
00:22:38.880 --> 00:22:40.480
I'm old enough to you're old enough.
00:22:40.640 --> 00:22:41.680
We can say that amongst friends.
00:22:41.839 --> 00:22:42.640
There's no HR.
00:22:42.720 --> 00:22:45.599
Here's HR here, gonna get I love HR.
00:22:45.680 --> 00:22:46.079
It's all right.
00:22:46.319 --> 00:22:55.759
The uh I remember distinctly like living my life before email and before like having a laptop and email, right?
00:22:55.839 --> 00:23:06.400
I can remember, I remember seeing a friend who was involved in technology and just like watching how many hours he was sitting and staring at this thing and just going, wow, that looks really awful.
00:23:06.640 --> 00:23:08.720
I'm gonna avoid that as long as I can.
00:23:08.960 --> 00:23:20.559
Like, I really don't want to be that guy who's like just hours and hours of sitting, just like you could tell he was frustrated, but you always getting things done, being productive, but just like, wow, I just don't want to do that.
00:23:20.799 --> 00:23:26.880
And another instance I remember early on, I was working with a graphic designer and I saw their inbox.
00:23:26.960 --> 00:23:29.039
It was like hundreds of messages in their inbox.
00:23:29.119 --> 00:23:30.880
I'm like, oh my God, that's so overwhelming.
00:23:31.039 --> 00:23:38.400
And so we all remember the time we went from like not doing that to suddenly having email, and we found that the more emails we sent, the more we got back.
00:23:38.960 --> 00:23:41.440
It's not like you could respond faster and then they'd go away.
00:23:42.000 --> 00:23:43.519
They would just accelerate.
00:23:43.839 --> 00:23:49.279
And we we we got to this point where there's just no way we could get through all these communications.
00:23:49.440 --> 00:23:53.200
I mean, I'm I I have more than 5,000 unread in my inbox, right?
00:23:53.279 --> 00:23:54.640
It's ridiculous.
00:23:55.200 --> 00:23:58.559
And, you know, hopefully I've got to the important things, the high value things.
00:23:58.640 --> 00:24:05.920
So we went from like feeling happy that we finished our work to needing to be okay that we could only do a fraction of the things we could do.
00:24:06.079 --> 00:24:08.319
Um, and we had to kind of get our brains around that.
00:24:08.480 --> 00:24:12.319
But we also had to go from making maybe 10 hard decisions a day to 100.
00:24:13.200 --> 00:24:16.799
So email sort of forced us to just process a lot more.
00:24:17.200 --> 00:24:28.799
Now, what's happening with AI right now is the same quantum leap is that, you know, because everyone can do everything and anything faster, we're all being slammed by a lot more.
00:24:29.279 --> 00:24:39.359
You know, I always thought my my phone, my, my telephone voicemail was had no end, but I discovered recently that my voicemail was full.
00:24:39.440 --> 00:24:40.880
And I'm like, how's my voicemail full?
00:24:40.960 --> 00:24:48.799
I've got a high-end phone, I've got and I looked at it and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of spam mess spam calls that had come through and gone automatically to voicemail.
00:24:48.960 --> 00:24:49.359
Hundreds.
00:24:49.759 --> 00:24:51.200
And I started trying to delete them.
00:24:51.440 --> 00:24:53.759
It was like, this is gonna take me two hours.
00:24:53.920 --> 00:24:55.759
You there, I couldn't find a way to delete them.
00:24:55.920 --> 00:24:57.599
Can someone please build an app for that?
00:24:57.759 --> 00:25:04.480
I couldn't find a way to delete them on my iPhone, sort of in bulk, and and you had to kind of go through and say spam each one of them.
00:25:05.440 --> 00:25:09.599
Like we we've got the equivalent in you know, email spam now.
00:25:10.160 --> 00:25:16.960
I get the most random, as we all do, we're getting the most random things that clearly an AI just put things together and tried to market to you.
00:25:17.039 --> 00:25:20.880
You know, oh, you're the guy who's coaching and you must want this and you must.
00:25:21.519 --> 00:25:33.519
So we're all being overwhelmed with both spam and with good things, and we're experiencing a step change like we did with email arriving, and we have not caught up, and we're gonna have to do something.
00:25:33.920 --> 00:25:50.160
People who want to stay at high performance are gonna have to do something cognitively to accept that you're probably gonna get to now 10% of what you used to, you know, compared to as a percentage of all the things coming at you, you might get to 10% of things now, whereas you used to get to like 30%.
00:25:50.480 --> 00:25:57.759
Like it's we're gonna have to kind of reconcile ourselves and and and realize that we do have limits and and work within those.
00:25:57.920 --> 00:26:01.920
Now, the more stressed you are, the more of a threat you have, the smaller those limits.
00:26:02.079 --> 00:26:02.319
Exactly.
00:26:02.480 --> 00:26:09.200
So part of it is staying in a quiet space and also using your best brain for the best things, right?
00:26:09.359 --> 00:26:13.279
We don't have eight hours of deep, powerful thinking.
00:26:13.599 --> 00:26:20.480
We actually need that kind of almost relaxing like process time to do stuff that we're now sending to AI.
00:26:20.559 --> 00:26:23.920
We kind of need that time to regenerate in a way, but we're getting rid of that.
00:26:24.079 --> 00:26:27.359
We don't have eight hours a day of really powerful thinking time.
00:26:27.599 --> 00:26:29.599
I can't write for eight hours straight.
00:26:29.920 --> 00:26:36.319
I can write for one or two and need a break for one or two, and then come back and write well for one or two, and then need a break for that.
00:26:36.400 --> 00:26:43.200
I can write well like, but I can't do the intensity of focus it takes to write well back to back to back.
00:26:43.759 --> 00:26:45.440
It just doesn't work for my brain.
00:26:45.519 --> 00:26:46.319
I don't know people who can.
00:26:46.400 --> 00:26:47.920
I've done I've never met anyone who can.
00:26:48.000 --> 00:26:59.440
So I think there are physical limits like this that in the AI era we're gonna have to respect more, and and certainly as a foundation, keeping threat low is is one thing that really really helps.
00:26:59.759 --> 00:27:08.079
Let's go deeper into this idea of you always advocate for having a space to reflect.
00:27:10.400 --> 00:27:13.200
This was part one of my conversation with Dr.
00:27:13.279 --> 00:27:14.319
David Rock.
00:27:14.559 --> 00:27:28.079
In a fortnight, we will continue with part two, where we turn more directly into artificial intelligence and what it may mean for our thinking, our skills, and the human capabilities we choose to protect.
00:27:28.319 --> 00:27:31.039
Thanks for listening to the inner game of change.