How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain with Nicholas Wright

How much of global conflict is driven by our own biology? In this episode of The Mindset Economy, we are joined by Dr. Nicholas Wright to examine the "brain-war" connection through the lens of neuroscience and military strategy.

We explore the neuroscience of war, how our evolutionary wiring influences modern battlefields and how the experience of conflict fundamentally reshapes the human brain. Nicholas breaks down the cognitive biases that lead to escalation and shares insights on how understanding cognitive psychology and military psychology can help us navigate a more stable future.

In this episode, we discuss:

- The biological origins of human conflict and aggression.
- How war physically alters brain function across societies.
- Overcoming cognitive pitfalls in high-stakes strategic decision-making.
- The future of neuro-influence and its role in international relations.
- The impact of AI on warfare and autonomous drones.

Resources Mentioned: Nicholas Wright's book, Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and How War Shapes the Brain, is available now.

Reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender: 

Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, Wiley, 2023) 
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, Baker Books, 2023)

Social:

Instagram           @mindseteconomypodcast
LinkedIn             The Mindset Economy Podcast
Bluesky            @mindseteconomy.bsky.social
YouTube           @TheMindsetEconomy
 
The Mindset Economy Podcast is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside Consulting Ltd production.

Transcript

Nicholas Wright: 0:00

There was almost nobody who was busier than Winston Churchill during World War Two. He was a very busy guy, and yet he actively took time to reflect. This is a man who stamped Action This Day stickers on key orders. He was a man of action, and yet he deliberately took time to reflect. And so I think whoever you are, you're not under more stress than Winston Churchill in World War Two, and if he can take time to stop and reflect, then you can as well.

Scott Allender: 0:25

Jean, what's new with you, my friend?

Jean Gomes: 0:28

Hi, Scott. Well, the team is doing a lot of work on research in the mindset economy, and that includes a piece of really interesting research that we're doing at UCL, looking at long-term future implications of leadership, and when we think maybe two decades ahead and working back, what are the promising young leaders of the future going to have to do differently in order to be leaders credible enough to cope in that future? So we're doing that, we're also doing a series of investigations into AI and robotics and other technologies in the global healthcare system, and we'll be releasing those in the autumn, and I don't know why I'm doing this, but I'm writing another book, so wow, you've got a lot going on. How do you approach how do you approach a research project like that that has a sort of that future back methodology that you mentioned? Well, we're bringing together a lot of very diverse voices and expertise, neuroscience, robotics, and AI specialists, geopolitics, economics, all sorts of different people to help us kind of understand how the world is changing and how it might develop, but it's not a futurology project. What it's really trying to do is understand the human condition, because that never really changes under different types of pressures and strains that are likely to develop, and therefore, what are leaders going to have to do differently than they might do today? And how will you start to develop yourself as a young leader in that environment? So, I'm fascinated to explore that, and using the future bank methodology that we've used so effectively in other applications kind of opens up a different perspective onto the assumptions of today. Yeah, well, I can't wait to see what you discover, and

Scott Allender: 2:30

I'm sure our listeners will be keen to know too. Well, friends, welcome back to The Mindset Economy. We've got a great episode to share with you today. We recently spoke with Dr. Nicholas Wright, a neuroscientist and advisor to the Pentagon and UK government, whose work sits at the intersection of the brain, technology, and security. He's a researcher at UCL, Georgetown University, and the National Defence University in Washington, DC. And I was just captivated by this conversation.

Jean Gomes: 3:00

Yeah, it's a really rich exploration on everything from how the brain operates under stress to the implications of that playing out in geopolitics and AI. So, let's get into it and hear from Dr. Nicholas Wright.

Scott Allender: 3:17

So, Dr. Wright, welcome to the show. In 2017 you wrote a paper for the Pentagon with the argument that in modern conflict the goal has shifted from destroying your adversary's capacity to fight to influencing how they think, you don't defeat them, you change their model of the situation, you call this the grey zone conflict, and I'd love for you to unpack this for us, particularly from a perspective of what you see happening inside of organisations where competition has shifted a bit from sort of resources to mental models and decision making.

Nicholas Wright: 3:51

Yeah, well, of course, thank you so much, so much for having me on. I mean, it's a great question. So, that that report, you're absolutely right, that came in 2017 but actually that was the first sort of public report, but we've been working on that really since 2014 since what happened in Crimea, right? Because things changed, and now what you had was Russia that was willing to put little green men, as they were, but they were Russian troops, pretending not to be Russian troops. They were putting them into Crimea, and they were also starting to.. it was obvious they were conducting, you know, quite serious information operations in Western countries. They were doing all sorts of things, and what we realised was, is that in the Pentagon was that things were changing, right? We were no longer in the US unipolar moment. We were now facing serious adversaries who were highly capable. You can.. it wasn't like even someone, someone Bin Laden, or whatever.. you know, you could potentially kill terrorists. Could lock terrorists up, you could prevent terrorists from doing things, but you can't destroy, you can't prevent Russia from doing things, because Russia has an enormous nuclear arsenal, and so the centrepiece became thinking about human minds. Right, how do you, when you can't physically prevent somebody from doing something, how can you influence them, right? And so the question then became, how can we influence them if they're thinking about doing something like Crimea, if they're thinking about doing something like information operations in Western countries, if they're thinking about doing something like launching a nuclear weapon, right? Because that's what you have to think about when you're thinking about Russia, as we've seen in the last, you know, more recently in 2022 and so the centrepiece of all of that is the human brain, and what we realised as well was that so many people just didn't really have a very realistic view of how brains worked, right, the dominant set of ideas were all really quite inadequate in many ways, and by that what I mean is, you know, you have people like Stephen Pinker, you know, got his big book coming out saying, "Don't worry, guys, the world is tending towards peace, you know, human humans are rational, and all the rest of it, you know, and that just wasn't really how the world worked, and so what we needed to do was start applying some science to thinking about how we can influence other people and how we can protect ourselves from their influence, and that's what that's what this, that's what that's what this work was, was all about. Now, How does that relate to organisations, so I think the key things, remember, is everybody within your organisation is a human being, right? Everyone in, you know, you're trying to sell to in a market is a human being, and so you need to, and of course, you yourself, right, you're also a human being, and we all make, for example, so if I'm trying to sell to you, try and do something for you, we all make really obvious typical mistakes. Now, the reason I do that is the same reason that you do that, Scott, and that you do that, Jean, is that we all have human brains, and these brains are limited. They're absolutely remarkable, and they're limited, so Jean, your brain works on the power of a dim incandescent light bulb,

Jean Gomes: 7:27

that's that's where it's all gone,

Nicholas Wright: 7:30

and Scott, so does yours, right? Oh no, and so does mine, and so does every listener out there, right, every every viewer out there, that's what our brain operates on, right, and you said it, still it does all these remarkable things, so we constantly, How does it do it? Does that by being efficient, it does that by using models of the world, right? It has to have models that simplify the world, right. A model is a process that links senses to actions that help us achieve our goals, right, and those models will always be imperfect. They're extremely useful. They're always being perfect. They're perfect in predictable ways. And just to give one tangible example of that, you know, right back there in 2014 2015 when we were really starting to grapple with a lot of these new issues in the science, we had to go back to basics, and it comes back to, I don't know, for you guys, you know, there was a famous, I think, 1960s marketing paper about called Marketing Myopia by a chap called Levitt in Harvard Business Review, the idea that people often think inside out rather than outside in, right, and that that's what so many different parts of the US government, of the British government, and the German government, or the French government were doing back then, right, and thinking about what they wanted to do, not thinking about how key audiences in Russia or in Ukraine or in other places were actually thinking, and that isn't a really typical human thing to do, is to be too egocentric to think inside out rather than outside in, put ourselves in the shoes of others, and so I'd say that is really one of the key things. If you're thinking about how to convince people of something in your organisation, if you're thinking about how to market things to people outside your organisation, you, if you have a better understanding of how their brains actually work, you can put yourselves in their shoes, and you can do a better job of marketing to them and changing their mindset, if you, if you, so choose,

Jean Gomes: 9:23

and it seems like we never seem to learn this, because the Cold War was dominated with the two sides just doing that inside out thinking and arriving a whole range of inaccurate conclusions, despite the billions that they had that they were putting into that, and you're the subjects of your wonderful book, Warhead, is how the brain shapes war and how war shapes the brain. You've started to give us a kind of understanding of that, that relationship, and you unpack it in so many wonderful ways, in terms of how people think, how they perceive reality, how they relate to one another, and. When you, when you wrote that, what was the most surprising thing that you found?

Nicholas Wright: 10:07

So, one thing that I didn't know beforehand was quite how important teaching and learning are, right? So, we think that we are very capable, you know, I've done all of this stuff, and you guys are very, you know, you've, you've, you've achieved all these different things, you've done all these different things in your lives, and you have all these different skills, but we don't realise is how much of that is is entirely cumulative, is based upon what what we had learned from others, right, and how absolutely central that is to humans, and it's something that I, I obviously, I mean, I sorted me, but I didn't realise, you know quite how important that was, and how much we can learn about that. So, let's give you an example. So, humans are the only primates that teach. Other primates can learn, so a chimp, a juvenile chimp, can learn from its mother how to crack a nut or whatever, but only humans, right, amongst all the primates, only humans actually teach, which is to put effort into trying to impart some kind of new knowledge, a new, a new model of how the world works in some way, how to crack nuts, how to solve some kind of puzzle box, how to speak, how to do a podcast, right, how to market something, do whatever, account double entry bookkeeping, whatever it is, right, we're the only animals that teach, and so one of the things that you know, and I wouldn't have said that that was so important, but that is actually absolutely central to everything we do. Every successful organisation, every successful military organisation, the teaching and learning, so we're also incredibly avid learners. Humans are incredibly avid learners, far more than any other primate, and that teaching learning spiral is absolutely central to every successful organisation. So that's that's one thing, that cumulative thing. And then I just also say this comes a little bit back to, you know, the strength of our societies, which is that our societies also, you know, that that they rest on that type of cumulative effect, right? It so we often think we're often worried that, you know, society is falling apart, right? It's all a disaster, you know, this political polarisation, all the rest of it, but the remarkable thing is not that society is falling apart. The remarkable thing is our societies are coherent enough to function at all, right? No other primate, no other primate can get above, you know, two, 300 individuals in a coherent group, right? Human beings can, and how can we do that? It's a spiral, so it's not the teaching learning spiral, although it's related to that, it's the identity culture spiral. We have identity, we have an identity which says, like, who am I, and then we have culture, which is the rules of how things are done around here, and that spiral takes years and years to change, and again, it's because we are so dependent on learning skills, right, that we have to, we have to make sure that we as humans can can be in a functioning society where we can learn those skills from others, and so those take years to change, and so, and I think this is something also that changed my perspective a little bit, and a lot of questions about changes in organisational culture or changes in cultural societies, which is that it often takes years, right, because these, these, these cultural bonds, these cultural ideas we have are so strong, they take years to form, they take years to change, and I'll give one tangible example of that, so in 1945 the Germans had lost World War Two, definitely 100% lost, right? No doubt about that. Cities have been pummelled, you know, turned to dust, and all the rest of it. And yet, still, for years after that, right between 1945 and 1949 consistently a majority of Germans who were polled thought that Nazism was a good idea badly applied, right? Still consistently right. It took years of occupation, of reconciliation, all sorts of things to change how the Germans perceive the world, and that took years and years and years and years. So, I'd say these two related ideas, the idea that teaching and learning being so fundamental, and the idea that it culture is extremely important, and it takes years to change. Those were two things that changed my understanding about how organisations and societies work at a really fundamental level.

Scott Allender: 14:32

What is the role of emotion in that, as you're talking about our unique capacity to build these sort of cultures and societies and organising principles. I'm curious about is the complexity and depth of our emotions. Does that play a central role in our model making and our ability to care and our ability to sort of coalesce around sort of central ideas?

Nicholas Wright: 14:55

Yeah, definitely. I mean, so I think so. I mean, the. Answer is to some extent, you know. Yes, of course, emotions matter. The question is not whether emotions do or don't matter in many ways, unless you're a hardcore economist, you think that everybody, you know, thinks that everybody is, you know, doing everything rationally, which, which almost nobody believes. Even Alan Greenspan, I remember, he wrote after the financial crisis, an entire book, saying maybe we should have taken a bit more accounts of human behaviour in our, in our models, but yeah, the key question is, How can we think about fitting emotions within how human brains work, and so, so, in the book, the way I think about the brain is, so I travel through the brain, look at 10 different brain areas, so start right at the brain stem, right down at the bottom of the brain, and that does really basic things like heart rate, right, that type of thing, breathing, and then the all the way to the other end of the brain, right through to 10 different brain regions, and the other end of the brain, the frontal porches, the very end of the brain, and that kind of us thinking about thinking, that's the most uniquely human part of the brain. Now, each of those in all these different brain regions, they all add really important new functions, right?

Really important new things: 16:13

perception, action, emotions, right, vital drives like hunger and thirst, and so on, and they, these brain regions all work together like an orchestra. So, I'd say that's a really important metaphor. The metaphor of an orchestra, the brain is like, is an orchestra of systems, and our emotions are a really important part of that orchestra. Right now, animals also have emotions. It's very important to remember that. So, this is not something that is, you know, most remarkably human in that sense, and yet for you and me and everyone else, you know, these are absolutely central to how we function, right. So I'll give you a tangible example against the fear, right. So we think about fear as something that's bad, right. We don't want fear, or we don't like fear, but the thing is, fear is useful. We need fear, right? So fear, in particular, rests on what's very important to fear, is a tiny part of the brain, or small part of the brain, the size of an almond called the amygdala, which is quite deep inside the brain. And the amygdala, you can actually lose the amygdala, you can have.. there are some rare patients, and I've met some of them, who can lose this omitted this positive brain, so they no longer feel fear and no longer see fear in others, right? And you might think this could make them become fearless criminals, for example, but that isn't, isn't what happens, right? What actually happens is they become, if they live somewhere a bit more dangerous, such as I think you grew up in LA, you were saying there's a very famous case, a lady who's been studied extensively by the people at Caltech, and she lives in a not particularly pleasant part of LA, it's just quite a dangerous part of LA, and she is just often a victim of crime, right, because she can't navigate her social world properly, because she doesn't have fear properly, and she can't see fear in others, so we need those emotions, right? They are an important part of the orchestra systems in our brain. And then we also need to then think about how we can control those systems, right? So, and there are useful ways that we can control those, harness those, use them, so that we can be more effective as individuals in our everyday life, and at work, and of course in war as well, so just

Jean Gomes: 18:47

coming back to the top of this conversation, when we talked about you're bringing this insight around how mental models is where the kind of new kind of territory of warfare is. What are you practically being asked to do by the White House, or, you know, the Pentagon, or yeah, office?

Nicholas Wright: 19:06

So I'll describe if the US system works fundamentally. So each of the areas divided, the world is divided up into areas, right? It's a bit like Imperial Rome, so I say that as a joke, but it is a bit bit like Imperial Rome. You have lots of different provinces, right? The whole world is bled into different areas. Say, for example, you have Centcom, which is Central Command, which is the Middle East, and so on. Then you have Indo-Pom, which is around, sort of, you know, China, India, Indian Ocean, Pacific. Now each of those has a combatant commander, right. And then you have other functional commands, so there's geographical commands, and there are functional commands, so like the men and women who deal with nuclear weapons, for example. Now that the combatant commanders could have a difficult problem, and so what they'll often ask the group that I work with to do is to bring together. An interdisciplinary set of approaches to understand that problem better, because there's no one approach that's going to give you everything you need, right. So, you need people who are anthropologists. We have obviously exactly what we do will depend on on the challenge, but it'll be there'll be anthropologists, there'll be people who are experts in, you know, economics, perhaps, or, you know, computing, right? Political scientists, obviously, right. And so we will then come together, and we will, and I'm like the cognitive guy, that's my perspective, right. I didn't say that the cognition is going to explain everything, but if you don't understand human beings, right, you're not going to better understand these tough challenges, like for example, how do we deter Vladimir Putin? Right, so you know, whilst I was writing this book, you know, every couple of weeks we would have meetings with Stratcom, the people who are doing things to do with nuclear weapons, and the big challenge now is that how do they update their thinking about their plan, their way of the ways that they plan to deal with a new reality, which is that now, like in the Cold War, there was just Russia, so it was Russia essentially, there was Russia in the US, and it was just a two-body problem, but now it's a three-body problem, because China is also a serious nuclear weapon state, so How can we think about deterring Russia and China from doing this you don't want them to do, right? And so central to that is cognition, because what you're actually trying to do, and this is literally in the, not saying anything that's, you know, not, you know, this is all in the public domain, literally. What you're trying to do is you're trying to make a model of, you're trying to understand the way that a specific individual decision maker, somebody like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, or whoever, right, or a small number of people, how they will make a choice about with certain whether to act or not act right or which action they will take, and you're trying to understand their decision calculus from their perspective right, and so what my job is is to try and provide a more evidence-based, a more scientifically grounded understanding of the as a human nature that will affect how they make those decisions and how we can best influence those decisions, and that's what I would do, and so I provide insights about things like how to use surprise, how do you moderate surprise, how to use emotions, right, and and that's one practical example that whilst I was literally writing that book of a task that, that we, that you know, that we helped conduct there at the Pentagon, I wasn't the only person, it was a range of different perspectives, and often you need all of the different people coming together to really, you know, come up with a, you know, an effective, effective set of solutions,

Jean Gomes: 22:57

so we have this predicting brain that's constantly trying to reduce the amount of energy that it uses based on assumptions of the past, and now we have a situation with a combination of AI and certainties around globalisation all changing at rapid speed. In a war scenario, you're dealing with constant ambiguity and surprise, and so on. So, when you're helping this, you know, working in this multidisciplinary way, what is the thing that most leaders fail to notice about how they think about these things? Do you think

Nicholas Wright: 23:39

so? The first thing I'll say is that people are often very negative about leaders, about military leaders.

Scott Allender: 23:47

Yeah,

Nicholas Wright: 23:49

but you know, you know, I've had the privilege as working with a large number of different military leaders in Britain and America, in particular, and there are a huge number of people that, you know, for which one can have a huge amount of respect, so I'll give you one practical, again, sort of example of that. The very first flag officer I briefed in person in the Pentagon, so this flag officer, as you know, an admiral or a general, or whatever. The very first one I briefed, he was a brigadier general, and I briefed him the Pentagon, and we were in one of those, you know, places we can't bring your telephones, and all the rest of it come in, and I, he spends it like, you know, well over an hour, and I'm briefing him about, you know, the brain, and how we can think about this point, it was about deterring Iran and influencing Iran, this, this is some years ago, not the current, the current conflict, and, and you know, he was really interested in the brain, how the brain works. I then wrote, edited a book on AI, a couple of years later, with people from Harvard and Stanford, and so on, and he was then a major general, and he wrote a foreword for that book, right, because he was. Interested, AI is important. You need to know about it, right? He's a tough guy, but he's a reflective, thoughtful, perceptive guy. He's now the Supreme Mallard Commander in Europe, right? Alexis Greenkovic- he's a four stars. It's about seniors, pretty much as seniors you can get in the American military, and he is a reflective, thoughtful guy. Now, what kind of mistakes do those people make, so I'd say this is one of those things where people won't think, oh, you know, all these people are idiots, it's easy to say they're going to make loads of stupid mistakes, but that's that's that's not the case. And another important thing to remember is, is that people who make good generals in peacetime don't necessarily could make generals make good generals in wartime. So, famously, George C. Marshall, he was the head of the US military, right, in World War Two, he sacked the great bulk of the generals right early on in right just before the start of before World War Two, because he needs to clear out the more peacetime generals and get in the more wartime generals. Now, what are the mistakes they most typically make? I would say I would say probably it is, it is a, and this is difficult because you're in a huge machine, like any bit, you're in Shell or BP or Google now, or whoever it is, you know, you're in a huge machine, but I would say, you know, I'd say the most typical mistake is to focus too much on internal process and not focus enough on creatively generating outcomes, results that matter in the world, right, and, and I say that as somebody who, you know, spent quite a lot of time working with people on difficult challenges to deal with, for example, the war on terror, and also worked on the Kerry peace process in Israel-Palestine back in 2014 and so on, and people don't - they get too focused on the internal process, not enough on the outcomes, and they also don't learn enough, so I think you know they don't. In fact, that would probably be the key thing. All plans, the classic thing of Eisenhower, right? You know, plans are worthless, but planning is everything, right? Or Von Molker, who was this German, famous German general, you know, every plan, no plan suffers first contact with the enemy, right? You also change plans, but so I'd say probably it's not learning and updating their models of the world, their plans, their ideas in light of the realities of the world that emerges in the conflict they're involved in, so I'd say that will probably be the key thing. It would be learning to focus, so you can focus creatively on results that matter rather than on process and internal process. I'd say that's probably the thing I've seen most, but again, I don't want to be negative, because no, these guys know you with extremely difficult challenges, and I love doing a really great job.

Scott Allender: 28:04

I love, I love that you're saying this, and you know, Jean and I coach leaders on this all the time, about focusing on outcomes instead of inputs. The challenge becomes getting them to actually do that, particularly under stress and pressure when the amygdala is hijacked. Right? How do you think about your thinking and take a wide angle view and stay focused on outcomes. I'd love to hear more. They'll be to unpack this further in terms of what you're seeing, or from a brain perspective. How can people get better at actually doing this?

Nicholas Wright: 28:31

So, one of the most effective ways of doing it, if you're actually going to speak to, say, for example, you're actually briefing General Greenkiewicz. Now, I haven't met him for a few years, but you know every one of that is unbelievably busy, right? And often the way to really get something through is to have a tangible story or example or analogy, so I'll give you a few analogies that can help you know illustrate some of these ways that we can better think about our own thinking, right? So we can be more effective. So there was almost nobody who was busier than Winston Churchill during World War Two. He was a very busy guy, right? Not only because he packed about 1.5 working days into every day, and he took almost no vacations for the whole of World War Two, bearing in mind, but he was an extremely busy guy, and yet he actively took time to reflect. Right, this is a man who, you know, stamped action this day stickers on his, you know, on key orders, right? He was a man of action, and yet he deliberately took time to reflect. And so I think one of the key things is to say to people, look, really, you know, whoever, almost whoever you are, you're not under more stress than Winston Churchill in World War Two, and if he can take time to stop and reflect, then you can as well, right? So, I think that's that's that, that, that, that's one example that the importance of reflection is there, and that's because you can then see the bigger picture, and so he was able, for example, to see the. Big picture to move troops and resources from between theatres, he could see the bigger picture, and he deliberately took the most of things, like for example, when he was on a ship that had to, that was sailing to the US, right? He took advantage of that time to reflect, so that's one example, Winston Churchill. Another thing is about having a good tapestry of knowledge, a range of different analogy of examples from which you can draw. This is for people, perhaps often you're a little bit more junior, right, because you can build this, or more middle grade, because you can build this tapestry of knowledge. You can build your tapestry of knowledge, different sets of analogies you can bring to bear. So, a good example here is Eisenhower. Eisenhower was the ally supreme commander during D-Day, he was a middling officer, not doing enormously well, but in many ways, and he got a not particularly plumb post into Panama, right? So he sent off to Panama, not like the most, you know, amazing posting when he was, when he was a middle-grade officer, but there he had a fantastic mentor, and again, this comes out to teaching, teaching, learning thing, but Eisenhower had this fantastic mentor who forced him to read lots of different examples, right, different stories, different historical episodes, and that turbocharged Eisenhower's career. And again, if you think you're too busy to do that, another great example here is Nelson Mandela. I mean, if you've ever been to Robben Island, where he was incarcerated, I mean, the guy was in a prison cell, not much bigger than the desk, you know, the table in front of us, Cian, right. And yet, if Nelson Mandela can read widely, think widely, educate people, do a remarkable job, right, build his knowledge, then I think, you know, we're very few of us are in quite such difficult circumstances as the incarcerated for the years on Robin Island by an apartheid regime. Another thing is about feedback and discussion. Now, Joseph Stalin is a good example. Here, you might not think that he was a man who was happy to literally purge, and by purge, that doesn't mean giving them a slap on the wrist and sending them onto the naughty step, you know. The guy was prepared to, you know, a lot of people, he killed a lot of people who didn't agree with him, right. But actually, in World War Two, one of the reasons why he did better in World War Two than that of Hitler was that Hitler increasingly, to begin earlier on in the war, when he had, you know, let's be honest, alas, and it gives me any pleasure to say, an enormous, you know, enormous military successes, he worked largely by committee. He had other people who could inform his ideas, right? And often a better way we can think about our own thinking is to have other people, we express, tell our other people our plans, and then they can interrogate them, right? Other people can give us honest feedback, and so on. And Hitler increasingly failed to do that during World War Two, whereas Stalin actually, as did Churchill, as did Roosevelt, ran the war by committee. Committees are often derided, but having people who can give us honest feedback is a really useful thing. I'll give you one last example, another practical way of doing this, which is that there's this, so we can be more aware of the typical errors that we make in our thinking, right? So one way we can improve our thinking of our own thinking is that we can be aware of the typical errors we make, and then that means we can try and avoid them. So I'll give you an example, which is that when we think we really know something, right? When we're very fluent, right? This idea of fluency, when you're very fluent in understanding something, then you're, you're overconfident about it, right? So try and see things from a new perspective, where you won't be as fluent, where you won't have this false fluency that can trick you into being more confident than you should be. So, to give you an example, one of the things I did at the end of the book was I looked at the last 2530 years of history, not from the typical Western perspective, right, British or American, or whatever, because I lived through quite a bit of that history, I know a lot of the key players, and so on, but I look from a Chinese perspective, I tried to take a different perspective and look from a Chinese perspective, and then when you see the last 25 years of world history from a Chinese perspective, you start seeing in a different way, right? 911 for example, was a really big deal in America, and I'm not belittling in any way, but it just simply was not as big a deal in China, and that's not because they weren't good guys, it's just that it was something that happened very far away in a different country. So that's another practical way again. So take time to reflect, build a better tapestry of knowledge, get feedback from others, and try and avoid erroneous fluency, for example, by taking, by taking a new perspective. Those are all practical ways that we can, we can enhance our metacognition, or thinking about thinking.

Jean Gomes: 34:55

Those are incredibly useful practical strategies. I think it might be worth just doing a little sidebar on what metacognition is, because we talk about it as thinking about thinking, but one of our previous guests on our other show was Steve Fleming, who you know, ah, well, yeah,

Nicholas Wright: 35:13

he's a character in the book, in fact, he's my daughter's godfather, terrible guy, terrible guy, handsome, brilliant rugby player, incredibly clever, awful guy, load, and successful.

Jean Gomes: 35:26

But you talk about when you were working with him, uncovering these kind of four levels of metacognition, is that right?

Nicholas Wright: 35:35

Yeah, you are right. Yeah, I didn't do that. We didn't do that. I have done Steve, and I have worked together, like doing metacognition research, and in fact testing people in China at Peking University and other places, but, but that research is done by somebody else, the specific thing of many. In fact, although my daughter - this is one of those classic things - my daughter was 11, she went to Steve's. I took her to Steve's inaugural lecture when he got his professorship at UCL, and she was too shy to say her question, because they're all of these August professors, and all the rest of it. She's only, I think, 10 or 11, and she said to me afterwards, Daddy, if there's thinking about thinking, can you have thinking about thinking about thinking? And I was like, wow, CC, that is an excellent question. So I emailed Steve, and he was like, yes, there's a great paper about thinking about thinking about thinking, and even thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking. Sorry, anyway, that's that's that's the question you were told

Jean Gomes: 36:30

metacognition.

Nicholas Wright: 36:31

Exactly, exactly.

Scott Allender: 36:36

Okay, pausing here for just a moment to underscore this idea of metacognition, because Jean, this is a concept that you and I have been discussing for years. We've discussed it on our previous show, The Evolving Leader, and now it's already coming up on the mindset economy, and I'm sure it's going to continue to be a point of conversation as the capacity and capability to think about one's thinking is a critical component of mindset building, and it's essential in the mindset economy.

Jean Gomes: 37:07

Yeah, I mean, what's fascinating is that when we first started talking about this, it was definitely confined to a niche academic topic, and what we're doing on this show is we're trying, we're not trying to add to just more performance hacks that people have got to make themselves more efficient and fall into this kind of treadmill of trying to be the best version of yourself from an efficiency perspective. This is actually exactly what you're talking about, which is expanding our capacity for judgement, because AI without human judgement is just compute going around circles, as Satella Nadela said a couple of weeks ago in his thought piece. So, I think, yeah, it's incredibly important in terms of it actually differentiates us in an automated world. It's not about trying to keep up with machines, it's trying to differentiate us from them.

Scott Allender: 37:59

Yeah, and what I love is that Nick lays out, you know, very practical ways, four pragmatic ways to harness metacognition, taking actual time to reflect, and I don't just mean, you know, when you're in the bathroom or stuck in traffic, but building an actual discipline of intentional reflection, also building a wider tapestry of knowledge, getting real feedback, being open to real feedback, and forcing yourself to look at things from a completely different perspective.

Jean Gomes: 38:28

Yeah, it's about breaking that false confidence that when metacognition is not very at work, that we can stay in the comfort zone of what we, what we think we already know, so let's get back to the conversation with Nick and pull back the curtain on how these brain models are being used to anticipate major global events in the world right now. Think the point about this, you know, when it comes to judgement, there could be no more crucial, consequential decisions you make than on the battlefield or on a theatre of war, and this idea of helping leaders to build their ability to update their beliefs and like new information, so they don't become inside out thinkers. Where are you seeing that in the current conflicts that are happening, where are you seeing it, good and bad, that it might be influencing things in Iran or in Ukraine?

Nicholas Wright: 39:32

So, I think there are different, different levels of ways you can think about it. So, one of the first things to say is that, so us military officers on the whole are better educated and more reflective than those military officers elsewhere on the whole. Something you may not, I know you might disagree with, but you know, need to give you an example. You know, I put together a thing a while ago about very.. this is very inside base, but. Type stuff, but Jad CT, which is this command and control thing, and then there was, like, you know, just this major general who had a PhD in computer science, who was just happy to come and have a chat and a serving major, you know, me amazing, amazing bench they have in America, they really take it very seriously, and I think partly that is, that is, that the US in particular has a very good, so everybody basically copied the general staff. So I work with the Pentagon Joint Staff, right? All of these staffs are all copies, essentially of an institution that was founded at the beginning of the 19th century by Carl von Clausewitz and others, which was the Prussian General Staff. Yeah, so what you can do with that, and this is a wonderful example of how you can create institutions that then create cultures, and they can change how individuals work, and they can make really effective individuals, and often this can go on for decades, right. So, bear in mind, von Clausewitz, so the Prussian general staff was, was essentially a way of teaching officers. They, the Prussian army thought it was the best army in the world, but the best army in Europe, and they were defeated by Napoleon, the genius. He was a military genius, essentially Napoleon, right. He could bring up with these incredible plans in his head, right, what, what it would take a whole staff of people to, as it later on, to do, he could do in his own head, he was, he was a military genius. So, what the Prussians wanted to do was turn a talented officer, but not a genius, right, into a really effective decision maker, and so they produced a way of doing that, which was training, and then operating in this general staff, and part of that was about reflecting, and it was about reading, writing, reflecting, and so, for example, Clausewitz literally marked the homework of Von Moltke the Elder. He was a key general who won a series of victories in the, in the 1860s Prussian general, and that helped form Germany, and this went right down to World War Two. Right, you have this incredible, and so the Germans is something we forget in America or, or Britain, or wherever, right? The Germans, and again, it gives me no pleasure to say this, as you know from the front of that, but my relatives fought against the Germans for many years, but the Germans were better than us on land, right at fighting. They were better in attack, they were better in defence, they were better when they had air cover and when they didn't have air cover, right, and a lot of that was to do with the incredible this institution of the Prussian and then German general staff, and we all copied that, so in Britain we have the general staff, and in America they have the joint staff, and so I'd say the Americans like the ability of Americans to American military planners is really absolutely without, without equal in the world. Like, I think if they have half a dozen American planners helping the Russians in February 2022 you know, the they're that good, they're extremely good. So I think on that level they're extremely good, but I think then there's another level, which is what is the political goal that we're trying to achieve, of which these military instruments are part of it. So I think they did do that with the Venezuela raid, right? That was an explicitly lethal force. This was the raid that took up Maduro in capture Maduro in January this year, but the purpose of that wasn't it. The purpose of that again was about to influence the regime in Caracas. They didn't want to do regime change, they wanted to influence that regime, right? So that there was a political goal, and the military instrument helped achieve that political goal, and I think that's where I'd say perhaps sometimes the Americans haven't done such a good job is in, in that part of the process, they're very good at the reflection and execution, perhaps at the what was called the operational level, military planning, but slightly less good sometimes, not always, as when Venezuela, but slightly less good sometimes the political integrating the political and military goals together.

Scott Allender: 44:27

This question of what is it that we're trying to achieve is seemingly so simple, and yet oftentimes I think leaders and people lose sight of asking themselves that question and become quite solution-led, sort of falling in love with their ideas of what they want to achieve, and they're not sort of letting the problem take them where they need to go. I'd love to kind of get your thoughts from a brain science perspective. What's happening there? Why do we fall in love with our solutions and and activities and lose sight of what it is we actually are trying to achieve?

Nicholas Wright: 45:00

It's a great question, and this also comes a little bit back to I know that you're interested in AI, not as an engine itself, but as you know, so it's so one of the big challenges we face at AI is what's called the alignment problem. How do we get AI to do stuff right that is that we want it to do, right. So, typically with an AI, like literally what you're doing is you set it a task, right. There's what's called an objective function, you say I want you to do x, y, and z, right, or x, right. And the classic problem here is, is that how do you specify that objective? It, so you know, and one example people often give is paper clips. You ask the AI that can, you know, that's in charge of factories to make paper clips, but then what it does is it decides the best way to make paper clips is to turn us all, like, kill all the humans, you turn all of our factories and all of our stuff into paperclip making stuff, and then sail off into, you know, the thing, and make more paper clips, and other on other planets, right. So, how do we define these goals? And that's extremely difficult, right. And that's extremely difficult for an AI. I would say it's actually essentially impossible in important ways. And so, what we end up with is, is like, what is the ultimate goal? So I'd only get, like, two metaphysical Scotts and Jean, but you know what is, like, what is the, what is the goal of your life? Yeah, like, what is the ultimate goal? What is the ultimate purpose? Like, you're doing this pod, this episode of the podcast gets like different perspective, like using, you know, war and stuff, give different perspective on the issues you're interested in, then the podcast parts of a series, then that series is part of a thing, and it's part of thing, but like, what's the point? So, actually, it's very difficult to know what the point is, right? And is open to debate, so it's same for AI, and it's the same for humans, and so often we have to work in the realm of process, right? So you were saying that, why do leaders get stuck in doing something, but we like, we have to, because, like, what, what, like, that is actually how we run most of our lifestyle. The way our models of the world work is they're hierarchical models, in the sense that there are lower level components making this podcast, higher level components have a series of podcasts, whatever it is that you hope to achieve beyond that. So we have to work at these lower levels, and we have, and we often get stuck in process, because that's just the way it, like our brains work, and indeed that they have to work, and also, like, say, for example, you are the CEO of a company. What is your goal? Often, your goal, actually, you know, is probably to is a

mixture of different things: 47:53

your own career, right, your shareholders, other, you know, other stakeholders, depending on what type of country, if you're Germany, for example, if you're in Germany, you have, like, you know, the workers council, and the rest of it, and I think often that's why you have really good leaders like Winston Churchill, you have really good institutions that can help you do it, like the general staff for their military reflection, for example, people don't necessarily apply that question of what is we're really trying to achieve here, and I think that's because you're always working up against the challenge that this is to some extent an insoluble problem, and all we can ever do is manage

Scott Allender: 48:40

the

Nicholas Wright: 48:40

problem, we can never definitively, we can never definitively work out exactly what it is that we're trying to achieve.

Jean Gomes: 48:46

So this might be a more of a philosophical rather than a scientific question, but as you start to think about, you know, you write about this paradox about self knowledge and that our brain is actively resisting self knowledge, but if we think about your daughter and my, my children, and Scott's children, given what you're, you're thinking about here, and this world that they're going to grow up into, what, what is going through your mind in terms of the things that we can help them to navigate more successfully forward?

Nicholas Wright: 49:21

Yeah, I mean so I think the first thing is it's not so much, it's the classic thing, everyone makes mistakes raising their kids, they, and then you correct those mistakes and you make other mistakes, it's the classic thing, isn't it? So, so, whatever we do, we'll get it wrong in some regards, that's important, but what I would say is, is that it's more about so rather than like specific brain science that we should be teaching them, it's more, I'd say, at the moment I think some aspects of the way we are raising children has gone too far in, in some particular directions, and and I think it. Be good to try and sort of correct those a little bit, that would be, I think, that's the most important thing. I come into that, and then there are just some facts about the world that I'll come on to as a second, a second thing. So I think one of the things that we, you know, and I'm not the only person to say this, but you know now I think we are not setting children up often to deal with failure, to deal with getting things wrong, to deal with losing, and all of us lose, all of us fail, all of us make mistakes, and I think when we are too, when we mollycod the children too much, essentially that, and that doesn't mean you need to be supportive, and in addition to that, allow them to fail and learn that failure is something that you can get over and learn from, is often it sounds like a strange thing, but Mao Zedong, right, one of the key things he said was actually, you know, when he was thinking about learning, was you have to learn from failures, right? And we all see that in our life, you have to learn from your failures and be able to be resilient and come back from failures. So, I'd say that's one key area with, with children, and another thing is, is that we can, we are remarkably resilient, so I think children need to know they are often remarkably resilient. So, at the front of the book, you see there my great uncle Sydney, who is, and so he was in World War Two, and he was an officer in British tank commander in World War Two. He's an Operation Torch, if you know, which is a big Anglo-American landing on the west coast of North Africa, and then he fought his way all the way up through, through, through Italy, and won a military cross with a high water for bravery, and he was in the war for years, and famous, you know, famously in family law, whether it's true or not, I don't actually know, but so I'm not going to test this theory to destruction, because I don't want to fire off his class at Sandhurst, which is the military training officers training senior, he, there were only three of them who survived without death or serious injury, and he was one of them. This was an extremely dangerous thing. He got through all of that right, and, and you know, the picture at the beginning of that book is him holding my then baby son at my great uncle Sidney's 100th birthday, right in Brighton, which is on the south coast of England, in a hotel in Brighton, and he was having a lovely time, surrounded by friends, family, and I remember as a happy man, he used to push me around his garden in a wheelbarrow when I was a kid, and all the rest of it, right, we are remarkably resilient, and I think that is another thing that we need to remember, is that we're remarkably resilient, so learning from failures and actually humans are a lot more resilient, we don't need to worry quite so much about anxiety and fears and all the rest of it, actually often that's not to minimise that in a small number of people and so on, but we're actually not resilient, people think, and then a bigger issue, which isn't, is just that I think we need to see ourselves as humans as as the good in us and the bad in us, and that will always be that, that will always be part of what it is to be human, right? So war will always be part of what we are as humans, right? There will always be the potential for conflict. There will always be conflict. We will never, in my opinion, ever get to a world where there is no possibility of serious war. I don't think that is possible, because we are humans, and there are so many aspects. As you travel through the brain, there are just.. there's not one simple reason why we fight wars. There are many different reasons to do with many different brain systems that we have. But then, on the other hand, we also make peace. We have the ability as humans to collaborate more than any other animals in the whole world, which is also remarkable, so I'd say that broader, you know, that broader picture that they will potentially face big challenges in the future. You know, at the end of the book, I give my probability that my children, there will be a global catastrophe, something on the scale of World War One or World War Two, I'd say, and that could be a pandemic, not like Covid, which was a really, you know, by the grand scheme of things, a much smaller thing. So, again, not to minimise those, and I went back to trade, you know, people that you know work in hospital during Covid, and so on myself, but a really big thing about World One or World War Two, I'd say there's about one in three chance by the end of the century, but the thing is that the majority of people did get through World War Two, okay, and the majority of people will get through, just like my grandkids, and the majority of people will get through these big challenges, okay, and we are actually making the world a better place. The world is a better place now than, in my opinion, it was 50 years ago, and it was better then than 50 years before that, right, so I think we should also be hopeful and realistic about what it is to be human.

Scott Allender: 54:49

I love everything you just said, and I'd love to hold it up against the backdrop of the speed of change. I mean, so many conversations on a sort of weekly basis about how fast the world is changing now, so you. Mentioned that it's better, but it seems to be moving a lot, lot quicker, and sometimes it feels like mentally and emotionally it's hard to keep up. So, I'd love to get your comments and thoughts on that.

Nicholas Wright: 55:12

Well, the first thing to say is that everybody always says we're living in a time of change. I remember seeing a while ago that they have the National Security Strategy, which is published each four years by each new incoming administration in the US, and every single one says we're in a time of unprecedented change. It's really remarkable that everything's different, and it's like, ah, really is everything. But I would say this time really is different, which is also another terrible thing to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. But I'd say this time really is different. I think we're in a transition phase, and the reason for that is just brute power shifts in the world, right. The is, in my opinion, now we are in a world where there are really only two massive centres of power, and they are so dominant in the.. I'm literally speaking to you, Scott. Here we go. You're in America, that's one of the giant centres of power, right, and the other is China, right. America absolutely dominates in weightless industries, things like AI, right, movies, music, all the rest of it, science, despite funding cuts. Before you said, but, and whatever, right. Just to put that in, suppose, Nvidia is now worth its marketization is just, is roughly the equivalent of every single one of the top fifth, top 40 French companies. Sorry, Jean, if you are French, and plus, plus every single one of the top 40 German companies. That's just one of America's mega corporations, right? I advise Europe's largest company, right? It was founded over, which is SAP, which is a tech company. It was founded over 50 years ago, right? That no companies in the whole of Europe, right, or in any rich democracy other than the US, have been founded in the last 50 years and now worth over $100 billion market capitalization, right? And sustained there, right, with the exception of SoftBank, which is speculator. America is absolutely dominant in lots of ways, but China is absolutely dominant physically, right. China now produces more than the next four or maybe even nine countries in the world combined, terms of manufacturing. They dominate advanced manufacturing now, right. In 2024 China produced 12 million electric vehicles. The whole of the rest of the world only produced like four and a half million, right? BYD alone produces more electric vehicles each year than the entirety of the former automotive powerhouse, Germany, right? Germany, every type of German car, petrol, diesel, hybrid, right? China, so dominant now the world we're having is a world that is crystallising around that reality of American and Chinese dominance, and very asymmetric dominance, because, because America is, is, is now a manufacturing, you know, is not very strong at manufacturing in many ways, so China, for example, has 240 times America's shipbuilding capacity. So, if there was a war in the Western Pacific, obviously that's a massive issue for the United States, right? So, China and America are both unbelievably powerful, and they are both - they both have fundamental weaknesses, and the whole world is now crystallising around, in my opinion, that reality. Um so yes, I think we really are in a period of significant change, and I think your, your podcast is on the money, in terms of it's about mindset, so I think when, when you're in a period that is roughly, you know, roughly stable, then institutions and procedures and ways of doing things that are codified, that they are excellent, because you know that they're set up for meeting the challenges of that time, but we're now in a different time, we're in a, where there's a transition, there's a shift, there's a transformation in the entire way the world is working, not just to do with AI, well, that's a portable to do with global power shifts, and as a consequence, individuals, human beings, the ability to adapt, the ability to solve problems, that suddenly becomes much more important. And so I would say this would be the so your question was, you know, how can we deal better with this challenge, and the first thing to say is, is that people are not wrong. I think things really are shifting more than they were like when I was younger. I think that's just a fact about the world. First of all, to recognise that, so it's not surprising, so that we can cope with it better. And then the next thing I'd say is to is that it is about being more flexible, I think. People have to invest more in their own personal training, and that also do things like, you know, having a go with Claude, for example. As I did the other day, I programmed an app, you know, the other day, just just to test out the new, the latest capabilities, right? I mean, we're going to have to. That type of thing, obviously, do a lot of stuff with other stuff with AI, but just haven't used Claude, just to be clear, for this specific purpose of the new coding. So, I think that's the way we're going to have to deal with it, is to understand the world really is shifting, and we're going to have to try and be more adaptive and learn better and train ourselves better as individuals,

Jean Gomes: 1:00:26

and how are you thinking about AI? What's your kind of, how's that relationship developing?

Nicholas Wright: 1:00:33

I mean, so I'd say, so, so I've done a lot of work on AI over the years, so I did my pitch in the lab at DeepMind, just spun out of, and seen I was doing police programming and stuff, which now, again, because of Claude, I'm like, well, I don't know why I bothered to learn that, alas. So, so I think the key thing here about is, if you speak to any futurist, the first thing they'll say is there's no such thing as this is the future, they're always, they will always say futures, right? So you know, I sit there with people from Google and all the places, they're like basically just all we need to work out is how to pay for all of the people who have nothing to do, because almost no one - scientists, waiters, you know, taxi drivers- they're all gonna be unemployed within the next few years, and so how do we pay for them to do something that's, you know, and I'm like, well, I mean, possibly, but that's one potential future, right? But I actually think that's the much less likely idea that we're going to get this massive recursive, so, like, you know, AI improving AI, improving AI, and it getting to super intelligence, causing the end of the, you know, huge, huge issues in that sense, possibly the end of the world. It's possible, but I think that's a less likely scenario. I think the more likely scenario is that AI will be a new technology like electricity, which is very powerful, and it will change a large number of industries, especially knowledge industries like writing, producing content like these podcasts, and so on. I think it's going to really change a lot of that. Those industries fundamentally, and if you're not thinking about how you can get out of industries that are going to be, you know, eviscerated essentially, or be on the right side of the change, then I think that you know that's going to be highly problematic for you over the next, you know, 10 to 15 years. So I think I would just sit, not just, I'd see it as more likely to be like another industrial revolution, and we've had a number of different.. you can have, you know, you can.. we had the first one was here in Britain, and then you had another one, which we've had over.. and then we had, you know, electricity, internal combustion engine, and so on, and then we had computing, and I think this will be another one, you could call it the fourth industrial revolution, or the.. I call it the nth industrial revolution, so there's so much discussion about how many we've had, but I think this would just be a new industrial revolution, and that will have ramifications across many different areas of society. There are risks to do with that transition, and we have to try, and for us as individuals, and for us as societies, and we have to try and mitigate those as best we can, and take the opportunities, because it will hopefully, I also think, makes us, you know, if we have dark factories, the idea of dark factories, which are factories that are so robotized that you can turn the lights off, because robots don't need light, right? Like, if they can produce loads of stuff in those factories, if we can have an electro electrified economy, like they have their building in China, right? If we can do all of this without the world turning into catastrophe, which I'm, I think there's a good chance that we can, then that will make the world a better, cleaner, more pleasant, lovelier place for many of us. So I'm optimistic. You're

Michelle Beagley: 1:03:59

listening to The Mindset economy, where your beliefs, resilience, and adaptability aren't just innate qualities we should take for granted. They're your new currency in an automated world. How you feel, think, and see the world will largely define your success and satisfaction. Make sure you subscribe, so we can explore this new world together. You what

Jean Gomes: 1:04:24

are the risks around AI and warfare? Well, the first, I mean,

Nicholas Wright: 1:04:30

the first thing to say is, is that a lot of people say, "Oh, we shouldn't use, you know, I mean, AI is absolutely impossible that cutting-edge militaries will not use AI, right? You cannot. You will not be able to compete if you don't use AI, right? You look at the tempo of what the US is doing in Iran, right, and we know that they're now using a lot of AI to do this, in terms of target selection and creating operational plans and. So, on like, if you're the Chinese and you're not using AI to compete with that, you're not going to be able to compete, right? If, if the Russians - and the Russians are effective, tough guys who learn and improve - yeah, they made a horrible set of blunders in February 20-eighth militarily, but they've actually learned, and they've, you know, and they've now become much more effective in many ways, right, with the number of years they've spent in Ukraine. If we're going to go up, go up against them, right, which is far from in the Western Europeans, which is far from impossible, and then we're going to have to be able to use these technologies, right, and that's especially the case, if we're not going to lose a lot of human lives, so what do we.. how do we want to fight the Russians? Do you want to fight the Russians as the Ukrainians are having to do it, which is use with, you know, 1000s of deaths and cash trees every month, or are we going to try and do it in a more technology sophisticated way? I mean, I almost.. we are going to try and do it in a more technology sophisticated way, because that is simply better for us. So we will use AI, is what I'm saying. It is absolutely impossible that we're not going to use AI, and already, so for example, if you look back at drones, so last September, I think the first public reports emerged of a swarm of drones that had been given a target by this is in Ukraine, who'd been targeted by human commander, and then the swarm of drones decided itself how it would deliver lethal force. Right, that's the first time that had been publicly reported now. that's what Ukraine is doing, and Ukraine is far less technology sophisticated in many ways than America and China and Britain and Germany, and so on. So this is where it's all going to go now. Then, how do we think about this about something about morality? So we are going to have what we're going to have is, we're going to have humans controlling swarms of drones, right? And there'll be, especially if it's a US-China scenario, I think you're likely to have a relatively small number of humans controlling swarms of drones in America, and a relatively small number of humans controlling swarms of drones from China, and that the drone debut in drone and drought will be like the Battle of Britain, where you have a relatively small number of technologists duelling with each other, I think that's where we're going to get to now. How the humans going to control those drones, it'll be a human, human will be on the loop, the drones will be making most of the decisions, the swarm of drones will make a decision, the humans will be on the loop, overseeing that, giving them intent and trying to stop them doing things they don't want them to do right as well, if it's like civilian casualties, and so on. Although some civilian casualties will always be a possibility in war, that's that's the way war works, alas. How do you do that? So, how does the human communicate with the swarm of drones, right? That involves understanding the human and it understands involves understanding communication and involves understanding the swarm of drones, right. And I think that's that's that's very much like one of the next frontiers. How we can get those to work, and then also within those drains we're going to have to build in AI morality, because the drones are going to be making a lot of decisions on their own, and they, and they are going to have to be able to make those decisions in a way that is broadly consistent with our moral and rules of engagement that we prescribe in our societies, whatever those are, and so we're going to have to build that in as well,

Jean Gomes: 1:08:39

something analogous going to happen in organisations where small number of people are managing vast number of agents who are acting in consequential ways, but the degree of moral reasoning needed on both sides of that equation. How do you think about that in terms of accountability, because you've got this enormous power now that we didn't have in the past. How do we build in the guardrails that aren't just about coding but also about leadership?

Nicholas Wright: 1:09:14

I mean, so I think, I think so. If you have it, so humans have always used tools, right? The reason why, and I'm sorry, Scott, again, compared to a juvenile chimp, you know, you're a guy.

Scott Allender: 1:09:30

Did you just compare? Do you just compare me to a juvenile?

Nicholas Wright: 1:09:32

I said, compared, not favourite,

Scott Allender: 1:09:35

does that all the time,

Nicholas Wright: 1:09:39

and the same with me, right? Because human beings are weedy, right? We have, compared to chimps, right, we have, like, you know, our bowels are 60% of the length they should be, you know, our jaws are puny, because we have tools, right? We have tool-using animals, right? We grind corn and we cook things, and whatever, and that's why we don't need really powerful jaws, because. As we can cook stuff, so we've always used tools. Now the type of tools, so often what the type of tool we have, it might be a hammer, an inert tool, right, or something that always produces the same outcome, like you type four plus four into a calculator and it will give you the number eight every time, right? A normal calculator, so you have brilliant to these much simpler tools, and then you have a colleague, another human being, like you two work together as a team, right? And that there's a lot going on there in the way that you communicate and do things together as a team. Now, what this new AI is, this generative AI, is it somewhere in the middle of that tool colleague spectrum, because actually degenerative AI is probabilistic, it's highly sophisticated and complex, and it can come out with different answers on different occasions, and with really very subtle differences in the prompts. Now, we humans have actually often operated with that with like things like that before, like a dog, but we domesticated dogs, right? Or a horse, right? A horse can do a lot of what it wants to do, and we have to communicate with it, and tell, tell it what we wanted to do, train it, change the context within which works, all the types of things you do with prompt engineering, and all the rest of it, right. We've worked within this type of situation with these types of things somewhere between an inert hammer and a colleague. We've worked with things like dogs and horses before. So that's where I think we are. And then, in addition to that, because they're probabilistic. I think a lot of this is going to come down to, are you acting reasonably, and is the AI acting reasonably? And so I think a lot of it will be, especially in America, will come down to law. You know, it's like, if you're so, I'm a medical doctor that I don't practice medicine anymore, but every doctor makes mistakes, every doctor gets things wrong, certainly with the benefit of hindsight, that is absolutely inevitable. Because even if you do your best, but the point is, were you acting reasonably? Did you do your best? Did you a reasonable job in this in that situation? And I think that's where we're going to end up with a lot of these AIs. There will be a division of responsibility between the user and the AI, and how do you divide out that responsibility? And I think a lot of that's going to be because it's probabilistic now with these AIs. There's going to be that type of division. It'll be legal, it'll be organisational, it'll be about ideas about what's reasonable. And again, I think because they're so sophisticated now, and they're becoming increasingly powerful, we're going to have to try and build in morality in some broad sense, rules of engagement, and that will just be a necessary part of how all those AIs work, because I just see no alternative, given that we cannot control every aspect of what it is that they're doing.

Jean Gomes: 1:12:59

It's fascinating, and you know, it comes back to, again, full circle to metacognition, in terms of your ability to, to know whether you are being reasonable, whether you are considering those things.

Nicholas Wright: 1:13:11

Yeah, I mean, and they are metacognition is part of, so if you think about, if you think about how, so not far from, well, just is actually a bit fits. It's about, about five miles from here is Queen Square, right? The Institute of Neurology, where I work in, in London, which is a brain science sort of area, looks at Leafy Square in London, and both the 2024 Nobel prizes in AI had strong links to Queen Square, strong links to neuroscience, so Geoffrey Hinton, right, who came up with a lot of the artificial neural networks that underlie a lot of what we're doing now. Why people are excited about AI. So he was at Queen Square, so at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and he was explicitly trying to build, if you listen to him, he was explicitly trying to build a human brain, Dennis, a Sabbath, so he and I had a desk in the same office for a little bit, whilst he was finishing his PhD, and I was, and I was starting mine, and Dennis looked at the brain, he studied the brain, explicit, you know, he did a proper functional brain imaging PhD, just like I did, right, he looked at the hippocampus and imagination, right now every everything we've really, the really big things with AI, in many ways, have been to do with giving it new human style capabilities. So the big leap in 2012 was the reason why people got excited about AI was Inegenet, it was giving machines near and then soon up better than human capabilities of visual object recognition, right? Picture of a monkey, a picture of a spoon, a picture of a balloon, a picture of a bottle, right, identifying objects. Then the big thing, obviously, with November, in November is 2022 fall 2022 autumn 2022 as I'm in London was. Language, right. Yeah, and Chat GPT was amazing at language. It was the ability to have language, right. The next big things I've been right about this for a while, and I'm pleased that, you know, the head of Nvidia also agrees that this is that, because he's quite a successful guy, is, you know, world models, right? So, physical things, and so ready, you're seeing robots that are able to do quite remarkable things, right? Although they're not able to yet, as of the, as at the time of this podcast, they're not able to fold a basket for laundry, right? But that's the next type of thing, and I think metacognition. To get back to your point, metacognition, the ability to think about thinking, right, understand how confident you are, how confident you should be, how good your level of confidence is in your own decisions, in your own perception, in your own actions, in your own feelings. That metacognition is something, in my opinion, that will be a crucial building block for AI

Scott Allender: 1:16:00

in the not too distant future, wonderful. So, just building on that, you know, cognition conversation and AI. What are the risks or potential futures, I guess, in terms of AI's impact on our cognition? So, yeah, you know, there's some early publications and studies around the idea that back in the, in the search engine days, of, you know, have you know, knowing where to find information instead of knowing something became kind of maybe the first step in that, but at least had to parse through the information that Google provided, and now we're sort of offloading a lot of our thinking into AI, and we're not engaging with it, and how do we make sure, what are your thoughts on the potential risks associated with what AI is going to do to our cognition if we don't use it wisely,

Nicholas Wright: 1:16:49

so I could, I could cheat and look at noon, yeah, I could cheat and say that, that, and there's an elementary to this, that that's what could be called an empirical question, you know. We can't ahead of time know, right? But I think there's a good amount of evidence, and we know, for example, that the structure of our brains can change depending on your experiences. So, to give you an example, a famous study was done in London at Queen Square, actually, which is about London taxi drivers. So, London taxi drivers, black cab drivers, have to do something called the knowledge. They have to learn 1000s and 1000s of streets and landmarks, and they're tested on take me from Trafalgar Square to Putney Bridge, or whatever, and they have to tell you exactly how they would get there. And learning the knowledge changes the structure of their brain, changes the structure of the hippocampus. So that's what Demis has, Abbas's supervisor, that was her most famous set of studies, right. So we know it can change structures of brain, but is this a much larger change than other changes that have happened in the last, say, 250 years. So, let me give you an example. The majority of people in early 19th century Britain were illiterate, and so we've learned to read and write. Now, is that a bigger change? And then, and then, and then we got, you know radio, and then we got television, right? And now we can all talk, you know. Then we got, I had a Nokia telephone, or whatever, you know, and Eric's, I had, you know, it's send text messages, we could all. So, is this new AI offloading of some aspects of thinking? I think you're entirely correct. It, this is important, but is it going to be a much bigger change than those changes? I think I would say probably not. It could be different. It will be. It will affect different aspects of our cognition, but I don't think it's going to be bigger. The other thing I'd say is that this is something that you know, again, we have to anticipate. So, our brains are expectation machines. We should be good at anticipating, we need to anticipate this. So, how, for example, like I remember about three years ago at the site, I'm affiliated with the National Defence University in Washington, and they were like Nick, all of the, because they had, you know, they get lots of American military officers, then they were like, Nick, like loads of these officers using AI to write their essays, basically, and whatever, and there was a whole discussion about the degree to which I was like, well, just get them to write some stuff using a pen and paper. This is not beyond the wits of man to solve this at least part of this challenge. It's important they should know how to use AI, and it's important they should, you have those sets of skills, but you can also check how they think through things, and their ability to have enough factual knowledge themselves, and enough ability to structure answers and coherently construct a sophisticated argument. You could test that using pen and paper, and so I think actually. So we need to anticipate that exactly as you say that a lot of these things could, because clearly, if people never write their own essay at all, if you're doing a history degree and you basically never write an essay, I don't understand how you can say anything useful about history, so I completely agree that they will become totally be skilled, but I think we could just get some people to write things with pencil paper, and also, for example, if you need, if we, to some extent, have to artificially create junior jobs for lawyers and others, you know, well, that's what we have to do, that's part of the training, so we'll still need some lawyers who can rise up through the ranks to oversee AI agents, if only because they are the people whose names will have to be signed on a piece of paper, saying, you know, I take responsibility that this is, I have done due diligence, you know, or whatever it would be, appropriately. So, so I think we can anticipate this. I don't think it's going to be out of this, I don't think it's going to radically change such of our brains in terrible ways, but I do think it's important, and I think we need to think through practical mitigating fact like strategies, such as writing exams at universities with pens and paper, and making sure we have good training for more junior people in organisations where junior people are going to become in some cases superfluous.

Jean Gomes: 1:21:26

Yeah, this has been a wonderful conversation. I think we've probably run out of time. You

Nicholas Wright: 1:21:34

can cut it down to an amazing 10 minutes

Jean Gomes: 1:21:38

at all. What's your next kind of area of focus? What's what's what's the problem you're currently working on?

Nicholas Wright: 1:21:47

Yeah, so I think I'm at the moment thinking about the big challenge of how we are going to work in a more imperial world in which America and China are so much more powerful than everywhere else, and within those, and their power is quite asymmetric. And how does America cope with this? You know, if you don't mind me saying, you know, you were talking about your, your, you moved from California to Tennessee, right? I mean, that is, I was, you know, how does America cope with the huge inequalities that are going to emerge, or ever will be emerging, are already emerging? The fact that, you know, I really liked the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book, Abundance, and there are other people working out more on the right of the political spectrum, and then you know, watching, look, you're seeing the other day that Texas has pretty much as much battery capacity now as almost all of the other US states put together, really, you know, how do we think about the asymmetries within America, and what that's going to do to the United States? How is America going to reindustrialize, which, in my opinion, it needs to do if it's going to be able to deter a war, a potentially catastrophic war with China, because I think unless America reindustrializes, it is not going to be able to win a protracted war against China, probably, and therefore, if the Chinese realise that, then it will be more difficult for Americans to deter such a war. So, I think reindustrialization, which I know is deeply unpopular in lots of quarters, I think is going to be absolutely crucial for the United States. So, I think there are huge challenges. So, that's that's kind of my next project is is thinking about this world of change that you both say nicely described, which really is changing now, as opposed to all of the, the, you know, the world of change that we've had for the last 40 years, where actually it was quite evolutionary. I think now we're in a period of revolutionary, revolutionary transformation.

Scott Allender: 1:24:00

This has been so educational, and I really, really, we both really appreciate your time, your insights, your research. Thank you for the book. I love the book. I recommend everybody get a copy, and yeah, thank you. Good luck on your next endeavours.

Jean Gomes: 1:24:15

And the mindset economy has really benefited from your time, and hope everybody watching, listening into this, does take time to read your book, and at least think about some of the big questions that you've posed in here, they're incredibly powerful. Thank you,

Nicholas Wright: 1:24:32

and hopefully it will help you with everyday life as well. Just that, yeah, exactly,

Scott Allender: 1:24:36

it will,

Nicholas Wright: 1:24:37

grounding, grounding from the big to the to the to the everyday help, that's

Jean Gomes: 1:24:40

what's so great about it. Does, yeah, does go from, you know, from the big questions down to everyday life. So I

Nicholas Wright: 1:24:46

agree. Thank you so much.

Jean Gomes: 1:24:52

Wow, every time I talk to Nick, I feel like my mental model is getting a significant upgrade. Yeah, this conversation

Scott Allender: 1:24:58

really highlights why the. Mindset economy isn't just our attempt at some catchy phrase or title for a show. When the world enters a revolutionary phase of change like the one that we're currently in, our ability to learn and adapt and update our thinking will profoundly influence our economic success, our well-being, and our capacity to brace uncertainty.

Jean Gomes: 1:25:21

If you want to get a deeper dive into his work and his ideas, then definitely pick up a copy of Warhead. It's a phenomenal read, and it bridges the gap between brain science and how human behaviour is playing out in global strategy. It's, it's really worth it.

Scott Allender: 1:25:40

Absolutely, Jean. So, folks, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you hit that follow button, so you don't miss our upcoming episodes. Rate the show, leave us a review, and tell us, are you actively updating your mental models? If you're here, it means you're willing to. So, be sure to join us next time as we continue to explore the mindset economy.