Poets & Thinkers
Poets & Thinkers explores the humanistic future of business leadership through deep, unscripted conversations with visionary minds – from best-selling authors and inspiring artists to leading academic experts and seasoned executives.
Hosted by tech executive, advisor, and Princeton entrepreneurship & design fellow Ben Lehnert, this podcast challenges conventional MBA wisdom, blending creative leadership, liberal arts, and innovation to reimagine what it means to lead in the AI era.
If you believe leadership is both an art and a responsibility, this is your space to listen, reflect, and evolve.
Poets & Thinkers
The Bullshit Economy: How our obsession with control is making us sick with João Sevilhano
What if our desperate need for certainty, predictability, and control is not making us safer but actually making us psychologically ill? In this episode of Poets & Thinkers, we explore the hidden pathology of modern life with João Sevilhano, a psychologist, business consultant, and philosopher whose work challenges the fundamental assumptions of how we organize society, education, and business. From his home in Lisbon during his summer break, João brings two decades of experience working at the intersection of psychology and corporate culture to reveal the deep contradictions in our pursuit of certainty.
João takes us on a journey from ancient Greek concepts of human development to the modern “bullshit economy” that rewards empty performance over substance. Drawing from his background as both a clinical psychologist who worked in psychiatric hospitals and a business consultant who helps organizations navigate change, he reveals how our educational systems, corporate structures, and even personal relationships have become organized around the illusion of control rather than the cultivation of wisdom. Through the lens of psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy, João demonstrates how our inability to tolerate uncertainty is creating a society-wide pathology that distances us from our humanity.
In our conversation, João challenges us to reconsider everything from how we raise children to how we structure organizations, arguing that our obsession with metrics, productivity, and predictable outcomes is creating “emotional bureaucrats” who have internalized corporate logic into their most intimate experiences. His vision for healing this syndrome involves embracing what he calls “useful uselessness” and rediscovering the ancient balance between suffering and growth that makes us fully human.
In this thought-provoking discussion, we explore:
- Why psychopathology is proportional to our need for certainty and control
- How modern education systems prepare us for performance rather than wisdom
- The shift from ancient Greek paideia to modern workforce preparation
- Why we’ve created a “bullshit economy” where empty words have market value
- How technology externalizes internal conflicts and stunts psychological development
- The concept of "emotional bureaucrats" and the bureaucratization of intimacy
- Why AI could either liberate us or deepen our disconnection from ourselves
This episode is an invitation to examine the hidden costs of our certainty-obsessed culture and to consider what it might mean to build organizations and societies that honor the full complexity of human experience.
Resources Mentioned
The Certainty Syndrome essay by João Sevilhano
The Bullshit Economy essay by João Sevilhano
Post Depth essay by João Sevilhano
Byung-Chul Han’s philosophical works on modern burnout culture
The Permanent Crisis book on the decline of humanities education
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Welcome to Poets Thinkers, the podcast where we explore the future of humanistic business leadership. I'm your host, ben, and today I'm speaking with João Zavalliano. João is a psychologist and associate professor at the Porter Business School and the co-founder and co-CEO of Way Beyond, where he leads strategy and innovation and specializes in human development and organizational transformation. Marcel Kampmann once called him an archaeologist of the mind. Joao's background in clinical psychology and psychoanalysis brings a unique perspective to organizational development and the future of work.
Speaker 1:I discovered Joao's work through his sub-stack, useful Uselessness, where he explores, with deep observational skills and surgical precision, the intersection of psychology, philosophy and modern organizational life. I loved his essays titled the Certainty Syndrome and the Bullshit Economy, where Joao peels apart the layers of our modern social and economic fabric. João's work challenges conventional approaches to productivity and efficiency taught in the traditional business schools and instead promoting models of leadership and organization that honor the full complexity of human experience. His ideas on the development and teaching of so-called meta-skills, like digital wisdom in the AI era, are the kind of bold ideas that we need more of, so I decided to invite him to the show. Let's dive in. If you like the show, make sure you like, subscribe and share this podcast, raoul? Where does this podcast find you?
Speaker 2:Well, right now I'm in my home in Lisbon enjoying my summer break, but very happy to be here with you.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for making the time. I know you're taking some time off to recharge and read lots of books, which is fantastic, and I can certainly appreciate. So, to kick us off, tell us a little bit about yourself what you do, what drives you and what fires you up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm a trained psychologist. I started my work as a clinical psychologist working in a public hospital here in Portugal in a psychiatry department. But my first transition, career transition, was from that psychiatry department to a human resources department of a very large multinational Portuguese company and I normally seriously joke that I don't know where I found more illness, if it was in the hospital or if it was in the corporate sector.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that led me to work outside of businesses with four businesses, always in small consultancy, while doing some clinical work on the side as well. So that's my professional path. On the side, I was a semi-professional volleyball player for almost 20 years and I have four kids and yeah, so that's a bit of me.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited we get to have this conversation. We connected over an article or essay that you published, actually very recently, called the certainty syndrome a pathology of our time, and not only did the title grab my attention, but actually reading through it I thought you would be a fantastic guest on the show. So I'm really glad you made the time during your your time off to to have this conversation. The article hit a nerve. I think it hit a nerve generally, given what I saw the the responses were like, and I think it touched on so many parts of today's society, certainly in what we typically call the West or the Western world, but also the economy as a whole. So talk to me about what led you to writing the article, and then I'd love to deep dive a little bit into you know what the key points that you're making in the article, and then we'll take it from there.
Speaker 2:For sure, very, very happy to be here with you, as I said. Well, I think that that essay was not only that essay, but I think I'm on a stage in my life where I'm trying to condensate a lot of the things that I've been thinking about since I started working, maybe even before, but since I started working, maybe even before, but since I started working and coming from a psychology and specifically from a psychoanalysis background, I'm deeply interested in what is, what are the underlying forces that drive us, not just individuals, but also in a systemical or societal level, if you want. And so this particular piece was, like I said, like a combination of various ideas, and some of those ideas are pretty old in my head. I mentioned that my first career transition was when I worked at that Portuguese multinational company and I very early realized that the way that people think, behave and relate to one another in the corporate sector is full of processes and rituals and rules that are not always written and explicit, but that they are very strong. Well, this is like almost a 20-year yes, a two decades uh span time span, and I I started to connect some dots throughout these 20 years. That much of it has to do with control, if you want, and control is linked with trust, and trust is linked with the way that, that way that people produce their thoughts and ideas and process their thoughts and ideas.
Speaker 2:And so certainty, or the need for certainty, is, like once Argentinian psychoanalysts said, illness. So, if I get this correctly, the quote is psychopathology is proportional to the need for certainty, predictability and control. Yeah, and so the opposite, mental health and health in general, is the ability to navigate through ambiguity, uncertainty and the unknown. And so, looking at the world right now, I do think that we are built systems of organization and the business or corporate sector is one of them that live and thrive through certainty, or at least the illusion of certainty. Yes, and I see this in various dimensions of our modern lives, if you want. Yeah, so this was the itch that I wanted to scratch with this piece.
Speaker 1:You touched on so many parts that I want to explore a little bit deeper with you, starting with, as you said, we have created not just organizations in a business sense, but even the way societies are organized, and starting with the way we're educating you know, children to then become, you know, students, eventually young adults and then go into the world that we've created, and it's all built around, first and foremost, reproducing results that we already know.
Speaker 1:The answer of what? The answer, really, nicely, we keep essentially the theater alive in the work world where, in most cases, actually the right answer would be to say we don't know. We need to go explore. But everything from the internal structures and dynamics, as well as, then, the ways presented to the markets and what the market's financial incentive structure that we've created, values, it's all built around this, this illusion, as you call it, of certainty. So talk to me a little bit more about how you see these things interconnect, what the biggest kind of pitfalls are in in this system because it's a it's a multi-layered system that we've created and also what you think the antidote might look like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that you are absolutely right. I see that our current education and, like you, very cautiously but very on the point mentioned, at least here in the West world, if you want to call it like that, education is like the. It's a preparation of humans, all, or young human beings, to be in the workplace, in the workforce, and this is already not the right idea to have about education. I really like the ancient Greek notion of paideia, which was a whole development, because they thought back then that we were not born completely human, back then that we did not. We were not born completely human and in order to become fully human, one had to develop intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, physically, and all of that was important and that was not. The goal was not to be a good worker, was to be a good human being.
Speaker 2:Yes, and this shift somewhere throughout time has produced enormous amounts of changes, not just in philosophy but in science and the way that we organize ourselves, like we were mentioning.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I do see that the systems are completely linked. Even the way that we tell ourselves what our history looks like is biased. There are a number of very important and interesting books that have come out in the last years with new archaeological evidences that show us that the ways that we categorize developed societies or civilizations or models of governance and organization, the ones that we think are the most sophisticated are really not. There were, for instance, civilizations in the America, the Americas, what we now call Americas that were more democratic than democracy originally and in our current democracy, fascinating, yeah. So it's absolutely linked, I think, and sometimes people think that I'm writing with an anti-capitalist agenda. I don't have that agenda, but it's certainly capitalism, or at least the current form of capitalism, and the way that we organize ourselves around power, money and what we value as value is certainly very important for the things that we are talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's an unfortunate situation which we see in a lot of ways, and maybe that is even also a reflection of the anxiety collectively that exists that as soon as you start to explore exactly even that notion which we have historic evidence, you know, in East Asian cultures, ancient cultures, as you pointed out, in what we now call the Americas but it's very quickly then becomes dismissed as anti-capitalistic, which also sort of implies that the capitalistic order is the highest achievement of humanity. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Rather than what we do in fact also don't have evidence of in other cultures, is the thriving of the human being as an individual, but also humans as a species, and that's probably something that we could do a whole other episode on. Yes, absolutely, we have built these systems and we have basically set up everything from the very early education all the way to, essentially, you die as a worker in this system, with the goal to maximize not necessarily individual freedom and expression of your own creativity, or even collective creativity, but really the whatever organizational structure that is built around that. It's not just corporate structure, it's also society and all of that. When do you think that shift happened? Because you mentioned the shift, but when do you think that shift happened? Was it the start of the Industrial Revolution? Was it before that? What's your, from your understanding and your research?
Speaker 2:I'm sure that the Industrial Revolution had a big part in it. I'm not sure it started there. From my research, like you said, and my interpretation of the data and of the ideas that were produced is that it may have started also with the decline of philosophy as the main driver of human flourishing and the rise of science. I think it also and it coincides with the Industrial Revolution as well, more or less.
Speaker 1:Yeah, at least I think, maybe the reproduction of a lot of these insights and the mass kind of spreading right, because things information, new ideas traveled a lot slower before the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and there's another thing as well, I think it's. You can hear a lot of people say this, but we live in cycles, right, historical cycles, and I think that one of the main things that we are not yet able to do is to really learn from past experiences, for instance, regarding technology. We were always afraid of new technologies. Plato, 4,000 years ago, was afraid of writing always afraid of new technologies.
Speaker 2:Plato, 4,000 years ago, was afraid of writing. When the print was invented by Gutenberg, there were riots and people were killed because people were going crazy around that, and so this is cyclical. But getting back to your question, I also think that there may have been some shift from what we value, from the physical world, and we started gradually, over millennia, to devalue the metaphysical aspect of our lives, if you want, not to say spiritual, not to get into very new agey or religious connotations. But I think that we have separated and probably Descartes was one of the main responsibles for this the cleavage that we did between mind and body, between the physical and the metaphysical, was the start of this, and we're now pointing to a possible solution not to give an ultimate answer, because I don't have it and I'm not sure it exists. Don't have it and I'm not sure it exists the ultimate answer to this. But I think that we should or could begin in a path of reconciliation. Yes, there have been some attempts, but I think that we have been clumsy at those attempts of reconciliation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you know, the more I listen to you talk, this divergence is very clear. The separation, bifurcation you know a lot of. It becomes also very polarized in the process of it all. But, really, what you pointed out at the very beginning in Greek society and we see this in other cultures as well the wholeness like bringing things back together. And all of that, though, requires and I think that's really interesting to maybe touch on I think it requires to also wrestle with the paradox of human nature, and you're probably much better to speak to that.
Speaker 1:But this idea of, on the one hand, we have these incredible brains of ours right, that can think, these higher level thoughts right, and have, as you pointed out, philosophy, ethics, the parts that make us the best version that we can be as individual societies, but we also, at the same time, still the same homo sapiens that have been running around the earth for tens of thousands of years with all the very simple parts of the brain that can, in the body, it can be hijacked very easily. So how do you wrestle with that, and is that maybe part of it? And we've built a whole society around, at least in the West, around those simpler, simpler, older parts of the brain and that leads to us not really using, because that takes a lot of effort, a lot of energy out of us. Right to say no.
Speaker 2:We can actually aspire and reach those, those high-level thoughts, and in fact put them into reality, and that makes us more whole yes, please treat this as as more as a joke than as an idea, but a joke can be an idea, but I do sometimes think that one of the things that makes us the way that we are as humans is our arrogance. We treat ourselves as being superior to other animals, and by doing this, we distance ourselves from our ecosystems and from well.
Speaker 2:I think that this needs no explaining, but you tell me if you want more. And so, on the other hand, being a psychologist, I suspect that not all, but a big part of arrogance comes from fault, you know, from an insecurity, because we look at other animals and they are marvelous. Right, a lion is strong, it could kill you if he wanted to in a second. An elephant does great things, even an octopus can shapeshift and camouflage. And we are not that special, we just have those big brains, right. And there must be and you can find this in ancient and current knowledge as well that there's some complex that we need to. There's a gap to be fulfilled, to be filled.
Speaker 2:You know, for instance, what is science? Science is a possible definition, is a way for us to settle our subjectivity, trying to be objective, right. But like you said, we as human beings, one of our greatest assets is our subjectivity, and so creating a very sophisticated system like science or the scientific methods to eliminate our subjectivity or to accommodate our subjectivity, turning it into its opposite, which is objectivity, leads us to lose many of the things that make us special, at least in my perspective. So I'm not against science, I'm a scientist by training, but I do think that, instead of eliminating subjectivity, we should embrace it, and this would imply a new system of meaning. One of the things that I've've been writing about I'm not sure if it was not that on that certainty piece, but is about the way that we have been. Well, the data is very evident stem areas have been on the rise and the amenities have been declining for forever, I think I have a book here that's called the permanent crisis.
Speaker 2:it's precisely about this. Yeah, um, and, and, and. What I do feel another way out could be is at least to balance, to even out the investment, because with ai ai, it's a very good example for me. For instance we are injecting billions and billions of tons of money in ai development, and if you talk to the biggest experts in AI in the world, they all say, well, this is wonderful, this will change the world.
Speaker 2:Obviously, there are financial incentives behind this, but, putting that aside for just for the sake of this, thoughts exercise and you ask those people well, what are the risks? Are they high? Yes, the risks are high if this is not going the way that we want it to, or even not being useful for us humans, but we still keep going and we still keep investing. So one solution would be just let's slow down, let's just stop. Think a little better, harder, create new concepts, create new ideas, create new language in order for us to understand the phenomena better, and then we can continue investing in the technological part of it. This is one of the main things that I think that we are liking today is that we are better than ever as human beings in material and practical terms. But I think that we sometimes are regressing in philosophical, ethical, social, emotional, psychological terms. So there's an imbalance here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. I hope, with these kind of conversations, we can make a little bit of a contribution there. My hope and my cautious optimism is that this moment in time, given the gravity of this new general purpose technology called AI, is that we do need to. We will be forced to to some degree and hopefully not through a massive crisis to actually bring back that balance and that we can re-center around some of those ideas and philosophies that we just briefly touched on, at least, because I do agree that without a really strong ethical and philosophical underpinning, things might not look too great for us as a species, and that doesn't mean that we're talking about, you know, doomsday extinction scenarios, but I think, in terms of a cycle, we might still be somewhat on a downward spiral before we, you know, make it through another cycle, and there's a lot to learn from the history right, and a lot of good ideas to build on.
Speaker 1:So I want to switch gears and take all of this you know and talk a little bit about the business world and the economy, and it also helps that you're not only a scientist and a psychologist, or a recovering psychologist, as you call yourself, but you also teach at the business school, and so I want to talk about one other essay of yours that you published, and it's titled well, very pointedly the Bullshit Economy. So, basically, taking everything we just talked about on a more higher level, I pulled out one quote, and that quote is we've created a thriving marketplace where empty words thrive, where profanity is packaged and sold by the hour, and where the ability to say nothing with great conviction has become a lucrative career path. So tell me about how you see the economic system that we've built around these mechanisms and where you think this might go if we don't course correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'm actually preparing a book. I already have the manuscript ready for a book in Portuguese, but I hope it will be published in English as well. It's around. The umbrella concept is post-depth, or post-profoundity, if you want, and it's like an idea that we are in the stage that we are already, are past, post-truth and we are in this new stage which I call post-depth, but in a bullshit economy. Alongside the attention economy are the main drivers, or engines, if you want, of this stage where we are at, where superficial ideas, normally with an economic incentive or agenda, thrive because they win in this attention and bullshit economy. And I do think that this relates to and this is more a perception than an evidence-based assumption on the decline of some of our abilities, psychological or internal abilities, and it's much due to the thing that I said before, which is we have been developing very rapidly technologically and scientifically, but not developing our internal systems at the same pace. I'm not advocating for less development, I'm advocating for more development at the same time, of the humanities, for instance, and I can give you some very quick examples before entering into the corporate sector Plain observations, for instance, with my kids.
Speaker 2:I wrote this in one of the essays as well. And one of the days I was here in this same living room where I am now, I was reading something and my kids were watching TV, and they were like eight to five, something like that, and they started to have an argument because one of them wanted to go to the bathroom and he wanted for the, the, his brothers, to press pause and only could press play when we returned. Oh, and this got me thinking, uh, because, um, this, this is not the, the luddite, uh approach, that no technology is bad and is making us worse. No, it's, it's, uh. I'm, for instance, an early adopter in almost everything yeah so I like to, yeah, but firstly to understand, yes.
Speaker 2:But getting back to that example, what I thought was well, in my days I had to wait to see cartoons Because here in Portugal we only had two channels when I was a young kid, and the cartoons will only start at like 8.30 am, and I had to. If I woke up early, I had to wait. And then if I had to go to the bathroom when I was watching cartoons, I had two chances, two alternatives I went to the bathroom or I stayed there. But the thing that struck me was that this was an internal conflict. I had to think for myself, watch my body, watch my motivation or will, and make a decision.
Speaker 2:And now, because the technology enables us to have cartoons 24-7 and a pause button or a rewind button permanently, the internal conflict gets externalized. So we do not have those training grounds for us to develop those internal abilities. And by externalizing the conflict we are fueling, for instance, polarization. One could say, okay, but you are developing argument Skills, skills or techniques. You are developing rhetoric? Okay, that could be, but argument skills without the internal skills to back them up are just bullshit or lead to bullshit so this is a way to connect the dots, a way, but the way yeah, I, I.
Speaker 1:I love the example because I think you're pointing at a dynamic that is, in fact, universal. If we don't learn it in childhood, where it's probably the easiest to learn, right um, and we are not forced to learn it in adulthood, then either the outward facing actions are always a reflection of not even having the internal capacity to even navigate the world, to not even detect when we're being served bullshit, or these post depth yes, content, absolutely, and connecting other dots.
Speaker 2:If we have an educational system that prepares us to thrive in this marketplace, in this world where what has value, what counts is not the substance but the result, it's not the ethics of your decisions, but the results that you get by influencing or even manipulating people towards specific results. If that's what it counts, then you are in a self-feeding system.
Speaker 2:Yeah perpetual self-feeding system that does not give us the time, like you said, to develop these critical skills, if you want, or meta skills, in order for us to navigate the world and not just to navigate, to create a world where it is better for all of us to live in, and we are not been.
Speaker 1:We have not been good at that job, I think yeah, and I think you know, going back to what we talked about a bit at the beginning, what's even trickier. Trickier in all of this is um. I find that um, from social media all the way to even how some of these new ai tools like gpt are created, what's happening is that it's a it's it's also a biochemical hijack that happens right. So if you don't cultivate a really strong sense of discipline and rigor and understanding of your own physiological reactions and even then it's really hard to not fall into the trap of getting these very quick dopamine hits or just leading into the anxiety that you might feel that that manipulates you or you allow yourself to be manipulated into a certain direction. That's what. What makes this even trickier, because it hijacks these parts of these parts of our nature that are so much simpler and and require a lot less energy to just kind of give into right absolutely, and we've created an underlying narrative for this.
Speaker 2:Not trying to escape from your question about business and how does business relate to all of this? One of my main sources of inspiration is a German-Korean philosopher, byung-chul Han, and he writes extensively about this and very brilliantly. I think that he's completely right when he says that we've developed this narrative from a very young age. Where you have to do, you have this path person that led us to create systems of organization, but even internal organization, where we apply the same principles of business to our lives.
Speaker 2:I wrote another piece which I called Emotional Bureaucrats, which is the internalization of bureaucracy, of a bureaucratic way of working in your life. For instance, people and I saw this in the consulting room as well as a psychologist For instance, a person who only can have sex if there's the right temperature, the right conditions, that right time of the week, only if the certain kind of conditions are met, that person can relax to have intercourse. Or another person who only tried new restaurants if they sold a particular brand of sparkling water, something like that. Or even if you use your work tools to plan your vacation yeah, you use an Excel or a to-do list to plan your vacation or we created this absolutely nonsensical concept which is free time occupation.
Speaker 2:It's the most stupid concept that we have ever created. Right, it's free time, but you have to occupy it, and through social media, through the modern tools that we have, we are always performing this. We are always performing, we are always appearing to be something that someone, somewhere, told us that we should be performing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I fell into that same trap just recently again, because you know, I went to art school and then became a designer where all I did is put my creativity in the service of a business. And so the last couple of years, but now the last six months, I've been really making an effort to go back to making art, and the struggle was an emotional struggle of continuously having a conversation with myself that I don't need to judge this art by anything more than did it make sense and did it feel right and was it fun for me to just create?
Speaker 1:yes and the many times that I messaged friends or spoke with my partner about how much that created suffering was actually immense. And then and then, and then I watched my daughter, who was almost 10, and the freeness with which she still, thankfully, creates and I couldn't help but feel like such a regression as a human. But I think it's exactly that that you're pointing at. That that's absolutely fascinating. I think it's large scale and societal and it actually leads us away from who we are as humans.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. Play I normally say that play for children is a very serious business. Yes, yes, yes, yes, and we as adults have turned it around. Yeah, but I totally agree with you, and I had a similar experience with the newsletter that I started in february I think and because I was, like I said, for 20 years, I think I was struggling.
Speaker 2:Firstly, I was too young and too immature to even think about these things and, secondly, I've always felt like incoherent by producing something with these ideas because it was. I was participating in the system but I didn't want to become a hermit and outside of the system, because that did not enable me to really understand it. But with the newsletter, what I found was, well, I have to call it the useful uselessness, because it has to be useless in order for me to be coherent. But in reality, since February, I had a number of very interesting conversations, this being in one of them with people that I would never have met and that I'm not calling it useful, but it has a richness that it doesn't have a quantitative value, if you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that almost feels like and this is the same reason why I started having these conversations on the podcast very similar motivation, but I think in itself then it becomes the counter, I guess, offering to the bullshit economy.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's what that's. Yes, it could be. I think it is. In my case, it's a form of activism. Yeah, if you want, like a quiet, slow activism. Yes, because normally people tend to look at activism like loud and in your face, right. But I do like to think of myself as an activist, but in doing things from the inside and slowly and like you said, and this leads to a lot of frustration, a lot of suffering I see it with my business. I co-founded a small learning design studio and we, as a business, we turned out 18 last month. For the business, it's a long time, right, but in this 18 years, I think that we were very close to bankruptcy at least three times. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:And those moments were followed by the best year ever. Yeah, so it's very difficult, and this is not just due to markets. Of course it has to do with a lot of variables. But if one is to stay coherent with a certain way of doing business and relating to creating a certain kind of team and relationships with people, even clients and suppliers, it's very difficult to thrive or not to fall into the same traps that you are fighting against. Yeah. Or advocating against. It's very difficult.
Speaker 1:And it brings suffering, but suffering, it's part of our nature. I think off the human condition and use it to actually actively learn, essentially, bring things back together, instead of just escaping into the attention economy, into the bullshit economy or you know any of the things we talked about. How does and it's 2025, you know we need to talk about the arrangement, already mentioned it how does AI fit into all of this? And I can see it go at least two different ways, but I want to hear yours first and foremost yeah, I can see in two different ways as well.
Speaker 2:Uh, and, and to be honest, one of the one of the paths is it's a technology that has a potential to finally free us to invest in ourselves, in our inner, inner worlds. It has that potential, but I'm an optimist. I think, or probably more a realist, but in this case I'm not very. I'm fairly pessimistic about this hypothesis because I think that the world, the state of the world right now, is not pointing us in a direction where, if the technology gets to a place where it can replace most of our work, that we will find value in investing in things that do not have an immediate economical or material result or even political result?
Speaker 2:I'm not. I'm not seeing our political leaders in, our the corporate leaders in, because I I do think that I may be unfair on this observation, but I do think that people that have most power right now are not worried about the things that we are talking about. That's what I. I might be unfair in this observation, but that's what I see and feel, so that's why I'm pessimistic about this path. The other one is it's just another technology, it's just another.
Speaker 2:Like you said, it becomes banal, you know, and things just don't shift as much as we imagine right now that they will. And that's it. It's just another two. That's the two paths that I'm envisioning. I really hope that the first one would provoke a small crisis, enough for us to shift in meaningful ways, but this would not come without suffering, because if that crisis, even if small appears, displacement is going to happen, more poverty, more inequality will happen. More poverty, more inequality will happen. Probably we will not be in a better place in 10 years if the first path is the one that happens, but maybe those 10 years, or even five, will be enough for us to learn, if we are willing to learn, to create the next 20 years as a better scenario that I'm envisioning right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that resonates and I share your realism, I think, because, looking even at the two opposing paths, we might end up somewhere in the middle if we are lucky. But I also think that what we're seeing, at least short term, is that the technology is being used to perpetuate a lot of these negative tendencies that we talked about now for quite some time. Certainly there, I think, if we want to get on a more positive path, we need to put some guardrails in place all the way from the creation of these technologies and tools, the application, but also as societies to and some societies are making more efforts than others to rein in and use this technology and make sure that it's used for more good than harm, and that's the general problem of a. I don't want to call it a conclusion, but to a point where we can talk a little bit about what does this mean for societies, but also what does it mean for leaders. You know leading in this world that we're in and that we're going into. You teach at a business school and I'm going to talk and ask you specifically about advice for students, but before we get there, you're also involved with the House of Beautiful Business, which we'll link to, and I can encourage everyone to check out and you consult.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I've been spending quite some time thinking about and had some guests on the podcast as well was that, for example, when electricity or even before that, you know, the steam engine was invented, not only did we have to find applications directly for the technology, but we had to really reshape organizations, organizational structures, the ways we skilled up workers, the way we worked and related to each other.
Speaker 1:In this new context and what I find interesting is with AI, it seems like all of those things that have worked in the past, which were all pretty much the same mindset, same approach coming from the industrial revolution, doesn't seem like it's going to work long term. Short term. We've seen the same thing happen. Right, so we automate a few things, we lay off more and more people, we eliminate a lot of entry level jobs, but it seems like we actually are almost on the opposite side now where, if we really want to harness the technology long term, we need to figure out how do we unlock individual and collective creativity, which we're not training people for, as we now elaborated, so that we can make use of this new powerful technology. So when you talk to business leaders. When you advise organizations in terms of what they need to focus their learning on what the future looks like, what are the things that you're advising them to invest in? Leaders specifically, more broadly, maybe, organizations how they structure themselves?
Speaker 2:I think that, coincidentally, my role as a teacher in business school is the place where my activism is more extreme. If you want, I think it's the playground where I feel more comfortable exploring more extreme ideas, and so, besides working on a book, I'm also trying to figure out how to launch a program, a developing program around metaskills, and one of those metaskills is we call them digital wisdom, and it's almost an oxymoron, because normally we don't associate wisdom with a digital world.
Speaker 2:But I think that we should develop a way to navigate this digital world using the same kind of tools that the old ones, the classical ones called wisdom, and this is one of the dimensions. Another dimension is I do think that businesses should embrace their social. I'm not talking about ESG, I'm really talking about their social role, not just through the products or services. They in a path doing experiences where they really cared about the people that employed, not about the productivity they could extract from those people, but really about the people as human beings. And in that sense, business leaders should be selected not only by being technically experts or being the ones that get the best results, but I think that we should find new metrics in order for leaders to be the ones that could drive business and real welfare at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we're essentially and we have evidence right, like the whole concept of psychological safety as a prerequisite for people to do their best work, to be the most creative. That evidence is very clear and what you're describing seems very connected to that which is the success of the business will be a result of maximizing or creating an environment through care for the whole human. That enables an unlock of human ingenuity in a way that we haven't seen before, then accelerated by these tools. That then leads to business growth?
Speaker 2:Yes, but for that to happen, we have to shift our obsession. Because we are obsessed with productivity, yes, we are obsessed with efficiency and all of the things that I'm pointing out as possible solutions are not productive, are not efficient and probably are not generate revenue, but are important, yes, and so we could find ways in order for a CEO that has to make a very difficult decision almost there, that 100% of the time that difficult decision is due to financial outcomes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, short-term financial outcomes certainly.
Speaker 2:Short-term, yes, and if we can reach a place where, in that kind of decision, people and numbers come at the same level of importance, I think that we will be at a very good place. I'm not advocating for an imbalance, I'm just advocating for people to get on the same level of financial results. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I do want to believe, and there are some evidence and theories that say that, like you just stated, that if we do that, I think that it will take probably millennia, but if we can find a way to do it, then we'll be in a better place. But for that we have to be less arrogant, Mm-hmm. Getting back to AI, just a very quick note what I think is the greatest breakthrough of modern AI or not AI LLMs is that we figure out, to develop a system that tricked us into believing that it's very similar to us, Mm-hmm, but this is also an opportunity. So saying, in other words, we've created the perfect bullshitter. Yeah, but and this might be contradictory to what I wrote in the bullshit economy but it's weak. You can what's the saying? You?
Speaker 1:you cannot bullshit a bullshitter but you can't definitely like it should be saying yeah, but you can right, you can play ourselves.
Speaker 2:We can play ourselves out of the game if we want. We can use ai or these systems not just to get answers but to help us to ask better questions. We can like again, we can. We have those, these remotes and these devices that enables us to pause reality, but we can choose not to do it. I know it's difficult because it's available, but we can learn to have that kind of digital wisdom, not becoming Luddites or to going back scientifically and technologically, but to really learn that we can have in place systems, ideas that are more prone to freedom than to a prison that looks like freedom.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. So, on that note, I want to come back to what do we tell young people and how do we prepare young people? You have young children, I have a young daughter, but we're also working with students both of us. What advice do you give them, or what skills do you think they need to develop to really not just survive but thrive in this world that, for them especially, is incredibly uncertain and we don't want to get them down the path of, you know, trying to escape that uncertainty. Yeah, how do we equip them to? To live from the job market to just you know where's all of this going?
Speaker 1:yeah a long term. So what, what do you? What do you advise them? What, what kind of skills?
Speaker 2:do they need to build? That's a tough one. I really don't know. I think sometimes I feel as a as a father, as a parent, that I've been failing constantly, or failing to adapt, or failing to be empathetic enough to understand what's this world now, because it's different from when I grew up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know that feeling and um, I, I, I.
Speaker 2:I also catch myself a number of times going back to that kind of in my days it was the good old days, were the better days now, or you need to stop looking at your screens and read, and sometimes I feel that advices are not enough, that you have to command, that you have to set some very rigid rules in order to develop skills or strategies that will, in the medium or long term, provide more freedom. And this is a paradox, right, because you are constraining young people or limiting access to new things or technologies or information in order for them to develop skills to be more, to have more freedom in the future. I'm not sure if this is the right path. To be honest, I do struggle with it myself. It's a constant struggle. What?
Speaker 2:I think, and it very, very difficult balance to get the balance between easiness and hardship, between, um, suffering and numbness, because it's not. It's not between suffering and happiness, yeah, or thriving is between suffering and numbness, and so I do try to challenge, but this consumes a lot of energy, at least for the one who is giving the advice, or not the advice, but is pointing to the another path.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I do honestly think and feel that I don't have a good enough answer for you well, maybe, maybe this is exactly the kind of answer because I I think part of of the advice that I also struggle to really give is is I don't think there's necessarily a very simple right like going to to some of your work around post-depth and trying to package everything in like the 30 second soundbite that sells well on tiktok. What you're describing is the reality of the complexity of the human condition and maybe, if nothing else, acknowledging that and trying to find ways to get our young people to experience that and then, as they experience it, to guide them through the experience, might actually be the best approach. And the tricky part is that we're more and more conditioned to look for. Well, here's the five things you need to do, and then everything will be fine.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, of course, and to make things easier for our kids as well, or for young people, because, okay, there's an easier path, but is it the right one? Is it the correct one? And so it's a very difficult balance to get.
Speaker 1:Yeah, balance to get.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it reminds me a lot of, though a lot of the again ancient wisdom that already exists around.
Speaker 1:You know philosophies like yoga, for example, where you know um, the, the practice isn't just a physical practice, as much of a physical practice as it is a mental and spiritual and emotional practice, and a part of that is building the skills to go through, as you said, the suffering and transform that, and so maybe that is part of the advice is to point also young people through to what already exists and help them through experiencing that, and all of that builds a more complete, more whole human. So I think it's probably a good way to wrap, although we could continue talking maybe we actually do have another conversation even just the points you mentioned on freedom, which reminded me a lot of Timothy Snyder's book on freedom, that would be a really interesting thing to dive deeper into. João, thank you so much for your time and all the wisdom that you've shared and you continue to share. We'll link to all of your articles and the newsletter in the show notes. Thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation.
Speaker 2:Thank you. It was a big pleasure to be here with you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:So let's dive in. If you like the show, make sure you like, subscribe and share this podcast, and that's a wrap for this week's show. Thank you for listening to Poets Thinkers. If you liked this episode, make sure you hit follow and subscribe to get the latest episodes wherever you listen to your podcast.
