984: Building Skills Better in an AI-Driven World with Matt Beane

Pete Mockaitis
Matt, welcome.

Matt Beane
My pleasure. I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn how I can save human ability in an age of intelligent machines.

Matt Beane
I think we all should be, and I’ve been trying to be excited for a good long while now. So glad to be here and chat about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, kick us off, you know, there’s a lot of chatter about AI all the time. Can you maybe tell us something that is surprising, counterintuitive, kind of over- or underappreciated in the field since you really know what’s going on and the rest of us are just parroting the Wall Street Journal and New York Times?

Matt Beane
So, the core, the middle third of The Skill Code, the book, talks about a threat that I discovered initially in robotic surgeries. I was studying how you learn how to do that thing and how that’s different from how you learn how to do the good old-fashioned method of surgery, one way or another, and dear listener, trust me, I’m not going to get any more graphic than that.

But the short story there that I found really, really fast, standing in operating rooms at the top teaching hospitals around the world, is that intelligent technology in that case, AI-enabled robots, the AI there was very mild compared to what we’re all dealing with now, but it was there, that that was fantastic in many ways for productivity, for quality. A surgeon said it was like bumper bowling compared to traditional surgery, and it’s really true, actually.

When I’m in the operating room, it’s pretty amazing, especially when somebody’s really good at it. And novices, residents, would show up, help set up the robot, help attach it to a patient. They get a little bit of hands-on experience, and then they just sit down and watch for a four-and-a-half-hour procedure they’d be lucky to get 15 minutes of time on task because the robot allowed that surgeon to do the whole job themselves.

And that right there, I’ve spent the next nine and a half years looking into whether or not this is a generalizable problem and, dear reader, it is. That’s the whole point of the book. This is cutting across all sectors of the economy that I could find. I’ve been across more than 30 different kinds of occupations, different technologies, organizations, and so on now.

It turns out that we are needlessly, I think in many cases, sacrificing novice involvement in the work on the altar of productivity. That’s the basic deal that we’re striking right now, whether it’s with generative AI, whether it’s with robotics, many different kinds of technology now. And the short reason as to why is that that tech allows that expert to just do more, better, faster, some combination of those things, and part of the way you get there is you need less help.

Novices are, by definition, slower and make more mistakes, and they take coordination costs, mentoring and so on. It takes effort, time, attention. And so, in the short run, organizations love that deal, experts love that deal because, even if it’s a 5%, 8% productivity increase, you’re in more control. Experts love using their expertise. So, it’s attempting short-run target, and that’s the sort of hidden problem in the economy right now.

The best analysis I’ve been able to do, I think that is literally a trillion-dollar problem for the economy, it’s just that it shows up with a lag. You’re only going to find out a little later when those novices aren’t ready for duty.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Matt, there are so many, so many ways we can go with this. First, I think it’s beautiful in that.

You’re highlighting something that I’m really not hearing anywhere else. It’s, like, we are missing out on the opportunity for novices, apprentices, to do the initial helper, low-skill work, because at the moment, that’s kind of what AI is okay at. Like, I will say, “Hey, AI, give me 20 potential titles for this podcast episode.”

Matt Beane
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re still not as good as my team, just saying. Thanks, team. You’re awesome. But it does give me a little spark. It’s like, “Okay, that’s a good phrase. I’ll take that phrase and work that into something else that we got. Okay.”

Matt Beane
Yep, and that translates into, not always, but often the default deal is a little bit less struggle for that person who is trying to give you that feedstock. A little bit less complexity they have to deal with. In the lingo of the book, this is the skill code that’s up front. There’s three basic components to healthy skill development.

One of them is challenge, “Are you working close to but not at the bounds of your ability?” You do that, you’re literally sweating, you’re not doing as well as you could, but that’s where we learn mostly. It’s uncomfortable. It’s not fun. The middle one’s complexity, which is, “Are you not just getting a task done, but are you engaging with the broader universe of tasks you’re embedded in?” The other people’s jobs around you, the other technologies, asking broader questions, not just focused. That’s going sort of broad where a challenge is more deep.

And then human connection, human relationships, warm bonds of trust and respect between human beings. Those three things, you take that subtle, small, in your case, “just help me along a little bit” deal, which by the way is a much nicer version of what’s generally going on out there. You’ll just do it yourself in many cases if you can. Then all three of those things take a hit, but not for you. It’s for that next person trying to work up the chain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And now you say this is a trillion-dollar problem. I’m curious what industries or professions do you think it’s going to hit the most hard? And, selfishly, are there any sort of market investment opportunities we should be exploiting, Matt? That’s what it’s all about, right?

Matt Beane
Yep. I’ll give you the one I care about most, which is to say there’s a huge potential upside here, yeah. So, you can sort of short the market. There are plenty of places where you should expect things to be more readily automatable with these technologies faster. And this fits in, I’ve got a piece in Harvard Business Review coming out in two or three weeks, or maybe a month on this.

Anything that is remote work right now means you don’t have to use your body to do it. In other words, it’s “Receive some information, process that information, communicate about that process, and send a changed work product off,” but it’s all digital. That’s a lot more straightforward for these kinds of technologies to handle, especially if it doesn’t involve multimodal data, just like text.

Some folks will lose their jobs there and that’s a serious issue for those affected. We should care about it. But they’re going to see, most folks are going to see a ton of job change. Like, what it means to do my job is going to radically change for that person who could entirely be remote versus somebody who has to show up and use their body for something. So you can go looking there, and you can look in places in the economy where the exposure to these technologies and the potential upside of using them is really high and concentrated in a job. A colleague of mine, Daniel Rock, who’s at Wharton, he recently, with co-authors at OpenAI, published a paper that maps this exposure across the economy. And if you want to make a smart bet about where there’s going to be the most change, look at those places.

The upside, though, is the one that I wrote the back third of the book about, basically, which is we like to romanticize this master-apprenticeship relation as if it’s somehow the peak of what humans can do in terms of transferring and developing skill, and we’ve relied on it for literally 160,000 years, so it ain’t broke exactly, but it can suck. And could it be better?

I think I’m very convinced, I’m trying to build technology like this now, that we can use the very technology that’s part of the insult to build new systems that, in fact, make that connection richer, better, more flexible than it ever was before, so that skill development functions better and from now forward than it ever could have in all of human history.

Companies that try to figure that out, reconfigure their systems so that just by using it, you’re nudged towards healthier skill and you get your productivity, that company’s going to kill. I mean, that’s such a great story. So, anyway, I think there’s opportunities in both directions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds really cool. Could you paint a picture for what that looks like? And is that happening somewhere right now?

Matt Beane
It’s funny, you should ask, only a few folks have asked. I am now CEO of a startup called SkillBench. In about a month, we’re going to come out and put up a stealthy website or whatever. But we are building a technology that helps an organization see this joint optimization problem based on rich data from inside their own firm.

Like, think of those as two dimensions. You’ve got productivity that comes out of AI, like, “How much juice are we getting out of this stuff?” By the way, it’s going to be less than you expect. We can show you that.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s my vibe, yeah, impression.

Matt Beane
Yeah, but it’s not none, and sometimes it will be negative, but seeing what that is, is actually not trivial. But we frame it as a joint optimization problem, and we get data that will help you show, “Fine, you get plus one utils productivity-wise out of implementing AI. You’ve bought your 20,000 licenses like everybody else. What’s the simultaneous interdependent effect of that on the human capital, the people who repeatedly have to do that job that now involves AI? Are they getting up-skilled or down-skilled? Are they more or less motivated? And are they more or less connected with each other?”

You know, these kinds of things, we’re building a tool to automatically help organizations just get a live dashboard of that so that they can figure out, “Do we like the trade-off that we’re making?” In some places they will, and that’s fine, right? Sometimes it’s the right thing to do to sacrifice building human capital for sake of a giant productivity gain, if you’ve got one. But right now, you just said it, I think, earlier, maybe three, four minutes ago.

It’s not a problem you’d ever really heard of that this is a joint optimization problem. There’s this trade space between how much productivity boon are we getting out of this thing. Oh, but that’s also interrelated with what happens to the humans that are left in that job after we change that job. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s up in both territories, in both categories.

But it’s like driving with no rear-view mirror. Organizations are not in the habit of gathering data on that second one at all, or interrelating them two together. So just getting a window on what the heck is going on in that trade space is what we’re doing. But there are numerous firms out there trying to build technology to use AI, for instance, to make better, high-quality, briefer matches between an expert and a novice on a specific project.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Can you zoom into a particular industry, like how we’d see that in practice?

Matt Beane
A good instance is in chip design, one firm that I recently got some data on. Basically, when you’re trying to lay out a new chip, the state of the art in the last, say, 10 years or so is you’re going to use automated software to sort of do this optimization problem of mapping out where all the different components go on that chip.

And so, increasingly, over those last 10 years, basically that junior engineer, who would have been sort of sleeves rolled up over a diagram and doing math that contributes upwards to that senior engineer, who’s doing the block diagram and laying things out, they’re just going to have less opportunity to play in that interaction of designing that chip. They might do some isolated analysis, and actually, the dynamic’s very similar in investment banking.

Well, it turns out that that is not true for all chip projects, for all types of components at all phases of the game. So, in fact, if somebody is a junior engineer, and they’re working on power optimization, that part of the problem, like, “How do I make sure there’s the right amount of power going to this certain amount of the chip?” maybe the chip that they’re currently working on, they would just lose out on that opportunity.

But, in fact, there’s somebody in a fab in Jakarta right now who is working on a chip that could use a little manual help because it’s an ASIC, for instance, which is just a custom piece of silicon as opposed to something you’d produce, mass produce. Well, in the world that we inhabited before this kind of information was available, no human could know that for this one- or two-week window, there’s a senior engineer in Jakarta who could use the help of a junior engineer in upstate New York.

But now you can get that real time work data and say, “Hey, no, this is not done. The capabilities here are underbaked.” But there are firms that have realized, “Oh, this is some sort of problem I got to manage, and maybe there’s a way to make better sort of work-related matches as opposed to just matches across a hierarchy.” That’s the old school way of doing it, that many firms are still deploying, and that’s not bad, but it’s just very coarse.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. And with regard to, when you mentioned these things, like surgery, investment banking, chip making, which by the way, I read the book The Chip War. Extreme ultraviolet lithography is the most complicated thing I’ve ever heard of, and it blew my mind, which is actually a shoutout.

Matt Beane
It is pretty incredible, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Book recommendation there. But that really does paint a picture in terms of, at the at the highest level, yeah, there are some expertise that’s pretty high stakes – life or death, millions or billions of dollars, huge factory waste or safety matters – that, “Yeah, we’re going to be super careful associated with having a senior person and then a novice apprentice kind of learning under them and doing some work as they’re developing those skills.”

And, yes, it does seem kind of spooky that we could find ourselves in a place where those lesser experienced people don’t have the opportunity to do that thing anymore. And so, I’m curious, if some of us are already starting to find ourselves in that position, what should we do?

Matt Beane
First of all, in order to take effective action to address this problem, you got to know what an effective solution looks like. Like, “What would it look like if things were good for me, or the people that report to me, or the people that are in my profession, for building skill?”

There hasn’t really been a lot of proliferation of different views about what skill is, how you build it, and so on, and big theories that, sort of, “First, you do this, then you do this, then you do this, then you do that.” And I just realized this book was not going to be able to do that. Like, there are too many different ways of working now, different technologies and so on, different modalities of interacting.

But the raw ingredients, sort of like, and I use a DNA metaphor, that’s what’s on the cover of the book, if I could give you the amino acids of skill development, and they’re going to show up in different combinations in your setting, they’re going to show up in different sequences, different emphases. But for each one of those three things – the challenge, the complexity, the connection – I give you a 10-point checklist in the book.

You can immediately go look at your work scenario and say, “All right, how healthy is challenge for me? How am I doing on this, like, 10-point quiz? How healthy is complexity? How healthy is connection? And if it’s not great, then I, at least, know how and why it might change, because each one of those items is a specific set of interactions.”

For instance, in challenge, your challenge is healthiest when you have an expert nearby who can help you deal with the frustration that comes with not performing at your best. You can struggle on your own. You can get really far. A lot of autodidacts have shown us, like, you don’t really necessarily need someone to build skill but you need them to get superb progress towards skill.

And if you have an expert around who can help frame the difficulty you’re embedded in, in a broader context, like you want to be able to hit a fastball at major league speeds, well, the first goal is, “Why don’t you just try to even make contact? Like, forget about a fair ball. Get up and try to do that, and then you hit a foul ball, and instead of going, ‘Good job, dummy. That’s a foul ball,’ they can say, ‘Okay, you can hit a foul ball in the major leagues. Tomorrow we’re going to work on…’” right? They can sort of help you put that in context.

So, that’s just one tiny little micro example. That, I hope, the first three chapters can help anyone, in any role, in any job, look at that situation and say, “Is it healthy or is it not?” The next move that’s peppered throughout the book is, “Okay, assume in some cases, in some part of your life, in some part of your organization, this has been good or is currently great, what is it that is allowing for things to work well over there that’s not working well over here?”

Like, “The job I had last year, I was learning so much. Now, not so much.” What was happening back then that you could port? Or if you’re a manager in an organization, “Fine, skill development’s great over here. Why is it?” Because the job rotation program is so annoying. It turns out that rotating people through different jobs, no one likes that, and it is incredibly beneficial for your skills and career development. It gets you engaged with that complexity thing I was talking about in the middle of those three Cs.

So, lots of notes, angry notes, like, “I have to rotate through yet another function.” It’s like, “Yeah, you do.” And the job of the leader then is to say, “This is actually really critical for your career and it is no fun. So, I’m right there with you on it and we’re definitely doubling down on that,” that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. So, it’s not so much, necessarily, that the wise expert mentor person has to be pouring forth, necessarily, expert nuanced insight wisdom, so much as they just have a bit of a broad perspective associated with, “Yeah, this sucks, it’s uncomfortable, it’s unpleasant in these ways, and also it’s useful.” And just that, in and of itself, is a huge value because the learner is able to then persist through the frustrations and rock and roll.

Matt Beane
Yep. And then, you know, I mean, technologists, people who are building these technologies that are currently enabling all this new potential productivity, and in some cases actual, they have a big choice about like how do they want to design their tech, how do they want to sell it. There are ways of doing that, the default ways, that will appeal to this monetary productivity-oriented logic that’s deeply embedded in business and firms, and they can win. And yet that doesn’t have to be that way.

I have a post on my Substack called “Don’t Let AI Dumb You Down.” And in the back third of that post, there are specific changes you can make to ChatGPT through its custom settings to have it nudge you towards more skill while you’re getting productivity out of it. It’s very straightforward. The interface is available, but that takes every single user doing that for themselves. That’s no way for the human species to win.

Like, OpenAI or Anthropic or Google, if they just made a few tweaks to that UX, anybody at the end of the day would be mildly annoyed, maybe more, by the technology because it keeps asking, “Do you know any other human beings you could connect with about this skill, rather than just me?” And it’s like, “No, I don’t want to debrief this interaction.” “No, I don’t want a harder version.” “No, I don’t want to try it myself.”

But if that’s the option, how many people, if it was turned on by default, would turn it off? Some, but a whole bunch of other folks, millions probably, would just know more about musicology at the end of the week for having used ChatGPT, or have made connections with other human beings in their local area.

This happens to me. Like, I am now connected to a rocket enthusiasts club in the Santa Barbara area because we all like to watch the rocket launches out of Vandenberg Air Force Base, and I just went into ChatGPT, asking for some code to predict when they were going to land the boosters back here in Santa Barbara. And because I had configured it that way, it said, “Is there any other human being locally you might connect with about that?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, good one.” So, the tech, just so much power in the hands of the folks rolling this tech out, so it’s such easy changes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing, this notion of these little nudges and how just transformational their impact can be. Like, 401k savings, it’s like, “Well, the default is this much is deployed into your 401k savings.” And people say, “Okay,” which is wild. You know, it’s like, “This is your money.” It’s like, “All right, sure, 8%, cool. Oh, you said, okay, nine? All right, nine, sure.” It’s like, “Whatever.” Like, most people just sort of roll with that default, and that’s interesting.

It’s funny, I have a calorie-tracking app, and I just changed the default to like, “Just assume that I burn fewer calories naturally.” Like, the threshold at which it turns green versus red is now different. And I know, I know I set it up to do that, and yet it does nudge me, it’s like, “Okay, maybe I’ll have a healthier snack so I can stay green because I want it.”

And so, that’s really clever how if we’re engaging frequently with ChatGPT or some of these things, if we can make the default setting to be one that nudges us in positive ways, we will benefit. And it’s funny, it’s sort of like, “Yes, I know talking to other people is generally a cool thing,” but it doesn’t occur to you in the moment. Likewise, it’s like, “Yes, I know I could look at the manual to figure this out.” I was like, “But, actually, yeah, maybe I will. I’d do that.” Because it said it, I was like, “Yeah, actually, maybe I’ll learn something else if I get the whole PDF manual of this appliance that’s giving me trouble right now.”

Matt Beane
Exactly. And, in fact, to the opposite, I lay out in the book, like there’s many cases where we grab for the manual and that hurts your skill development. It turns out that with, and in the book, I cite the research on this, that reading the manuals can be hazardous to your health of your skill. Basically, folks do it too soon, too early. We front load all kinds of explicit knowledge and learning into school, into work, formal training classes, checklists, SOPs, all this kind of stuff, when it’s generally better to get the minimally sufficient amount of explicit information and then just dive in the pool.

And then, after you’ve had a good struggle and a stroke and managed to get heaving and scuffing up to the edge of the pool, then somebody could say, “You want to learn a little bit about strokes now?” Humans are better at learning that way. So, a system like this, if you asked for the PDF, it could say, “You’re a little early in trying to deal with it. How about you just try a little harder? It’d probably be better for you.” I mean, it wouldn’t do that, because people would say, “No, go to hell, give me the PDF.”

But there are ways of doing that where, if you, as the user, specify, “Here’s my trade zone between getting my productivity,” and it’s like your 401k contribution. By the way, the returns on your skill are much better than the returns you will get by putting money in a 401k. So, if you set that slider, “So today I want to be pretty darn annoyed and learn a lot,” or, “I want to be not annoyed at all and not learn anything,” that’s your choice. But the technologists can make that available to people is the point. Like, that’s just a huge missed market opportunity, from my point of view.

Pete Mockaitis
And you say we can go ahead and do it ourselves. Is there a magic copy-pasted thing you recommend we shove in there? Or how do we get it done?

Matt Beane
Yes. I boiled down the entire book into two short paragraphs that I dumped into the custom instructions in ChatGPT, and that is in the bottom third of that post on my Substack. Substack is called WildWorldofWork.org, and the post is called “Don’t Let AI Dumb You Down.” I can send the URL after we’re done. But, yeah, the literal contents of those boxes, even as of today, I keep updating it whenever I make changes, is sitting right there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, cool. And so, that’s nudged you to go meet some rocket people and has some other good impacts on your life as well?

Matt Beane
Yes, absolutely. And, you know, if I I’m perfectly candid, and most of the time, the thing says, “Hey, if you want more challenge, what about this? If you want more complexity, what about this? And how about some human connection?” And I wave it off 90% of the time, 94% of the time something. I could go get the data. And it’s always there though and I don’t not notice it.

And, by the way, what I have put together is the most basic ham-fisted, ridiculously coarse approach to this problem so it’s helped me. Yes, I have, for instance, I’ve learned a bunch more about coding because it itself suggested that I leave, you may have seen this yourself if you’re doing the sort of work where ChatGPT, or Claude, is generating code. You can turn a radio button on where you can watch that code getting written.

And it writes it at reasonable, it’s like 2x human speed or something, 2.5x, which is like listening to a podcast, you can track. And so, I’ve learned some stuff about coding just by watching, too. Like, I wasn’t ever a professional coder. I took some classes in graduate school. It had been 10 years for me or so since I’d tried to write any code to do anything, and now, kind of casually use code to solve problems. But you don’t learn anything about that if you just let the machine do its thing and take the output.

So, leaving that window open is a way where I just am like, it’s like pair coding, by the way, the best learning about how to code comes from sitting physically side-by-side with somebody where they’re coding and you’re watching and you’re chatting through the problem, that kind of thing. The best coders at Google are pair coding, side-by-side.

Anyway, this is all just one guy’s semi-random, I mean, fine, I wrote a book on the topic, and I know some stuff, but, come on, the world can do better than one guy. Like, we have to take wholesale effort. We have a huge opportunity to nudge all of humanity in a healthier direction on skill while getting crazy cool new things out of AI.

Pete Mockaitis
And it makes you wonder kind of about everything that we allow to be done for us, and like, “Is this trade-off worth it? And is it worth it every time? The dishwasher washes my dishes. Thank you, dishwasher.” But, in some ways, it can be kind of mindful, cathartic, Zen-like, just hot soapy water, physically cleaning some stuff, and sometimes that’s the right answer.

Likewise, the calculator or the GPS or anything that does anything for us, yeah, it productively accomplishes that thing faster. Cool. Thanks. But there may very well be times and places when I’d say, “No, no, autopilot. I want the control.” And it is enriching me in a skills development kind of a way and some other ways because I have wrest back control.

Matt Beane
Yes, exactly right. And it’s not obvious where you win by giving up the tech and in what ways you give it up. There are other cases, by the way, let’s be real clear, where by using the tech in its fullest capacity, you are going to build ridiculously more skill than you would have otherwise. So, in fact, there’s a win-win there where you were like just stabbing for productivity, and because you get to skip some stuff that is actually repetitive, annoying, you get to deal with the cool complex parts of the problem.

And so, we don’t pay a price at all. In fact, you learn a whole bunch more, “Oh, but maybe I’m sacrificing that novice’s involvement. Gosh, darn it, there’s no free lunches there.” So, it’s not just an optimization problem for me, Matt Beane, or you, Pete. It’s like, “I’m winning, but what about the people around me? What about the people who want to come up the ranks?”

It’s really, that’s a tall order to ask any one expert to be looking out for their own results and seeing that, in fact, if they don’t actively do something to support that novice, that person is out to sea. Whereas, in the past, to cycle, I skipped way past it in the beginning, like the traditional mode of doing surgery is a lot like doing lots of kind of work, which is, if you and I were doing it and you’re my mentor, there are four hands required for that job.

Like, somebody’s holding that patient open while the other person is doing something inside of them and that takes four hands. So, I can be at the shallow end of the pool, so to speak, if you decide I’m not really ready, but I’m not doing nothing. I’m on task the whole time. And so, that radical shift is the difference.

Like, that kind of shift as we’ve used new technologies to automate small parts of the work, the calculator for instance in accounting, that wasn’t such an extensive chunk of the work that the junior accountant was left hung out to dry. In minor ways, but that they were making up for by other forms of involvement. That’s the intensity and the pace of the change is really the main thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, if we could maybe think outside of AI entirely, when it comes to acquiring skills, we’ve laid out some of these fundamentals, the challenge, the complexity of the human connection, are there any particularly underrated do’s and don’ts you think that make a world of difference as we’re trying to develop skills?

Matt Beane
So, number one, when you are not performing at your best, when you are not having fun, and you are struggling to the point where you might be sweating and really can’t hear if somebody’s talking to you, like, you’re totally focused, that’s the domain where you’re appropriately challenged and will be learning the most.

So, it’s not a space that, you know, the minute you tell this to anybody, you’re like, “Yeah, there was that time where I kind of got a years’ worth of learning in four hours because everything was riding on me doing a good job. I did not do a great job, but, hey, I did it, and now I know how I can handle that situation, right?”

So that challenge, we, in many ways, have unintentionally created a sort of, the world of work has become a bit of a padded playground a little bit on this front. Like, being uncomfortable and real struggle is a status threat, like, you don’t look like you’re doing so hot, and so maybe you’re going to avoid doing that in front of people when you want to maintain an impression kind of thing. Or there are policies that will literally keep you away from challenge and so on.

Anyway, challenge is no fun, and it is absolutely necessary, and an expert, by the way, can really help you eat a lot more challenge than you could on your own. So having somebody there who can, if you can throw a flag to ask for help, or who can give you some key guidance at key points, there’s ways of amplifying, you know, eating even more of it. That’s one.

The second sort of counterintuitive one has to do with the complexity bit, which is getting your job done faster because of technology allows you, unintentionally, to skip by a whole bunch of collateral work and understanding that’s necessary for you to not have fragile or brittle skill. So, I did some research in warehousing, for instance, recently, and the people who really were good managers of their area were good because they knew about things like seasonality in the business. They knew about different vendors that they were using for staffing.

They knew about the technology, like the taping machine, and why that thing is rickety and how to shim it so that it doesn’t shake the packages too much as they go through. These are not things that you should be paying attention to in your job, but these people not only tried to get good at being a manager of a small group, but they wanted to understand more and more of the different jobs, different work, other skills that were connected to it so that when a shock came, for them, it was like, “Oh yeah, it’s wintertime, big jackets come through the building. We got this. Here’s what we do.”

And, usually, the way to do that is do not, first, go to the rulebook, do not, first, try to explain to a newbie in detail everything to expect. Give them the least information they need to get out on the field and try. So that’s kind of the opposite. Corporate training is show up. What’s the first thing you do? New employee orientation and training.

And that just front loads a bunch of concepts and knowledge into people’s heads that usually is just going to melt away, and then, at worst, they’re going to be clutching the rulebook while they’re out there for the first week trying to do whatever, instead of just trying to pay attention, do a good job and learn.

And the last one is that we write off human relationships as if they are somehow unconnected to how we build skill, and in particular, like trust and respect between human beings, when, in fact, it’s the main event. Like, number one, nobody’s going to give you a chance to build skill unless they trust and respect you, at least a little bit. So, if you’re not earning that, you don’t get to play. So, there’s an access bit.

But the other part is motivation. Like, I can point to the places in my career, but, also, it’s clear in the research. The reason you’re motivated to build that skill is because usually there’s somebody around whose trust and respect you want to earn, like you have a manager or an expert you work with, and you want to do a good job and you want them to recognize and see it, and say, “Hey, that was good.” Or, you know, “That was good, chef, and don’t do that again,” right?

You’re getting real feedback from somebody and you want a better chance to do something cooler next time, and so you’re going to work extra hard. You’re going to get up early in the morning to do a good job because of that human connection, not because of some, like, “I want to be competent,” abstract goal. Those are things that are important, of course, but like, un-divorce human relationships from your skill, like, they’re bound together.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Matt Beane
I’ll go for one that has been oriented my career for a long time, which is “The future’s already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” People attribute that to William Gibson, a famous sci-fi writer, and he, it turns out, fun cocktail party fact, does not remember saying that, and thinks he never said it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Matt Beane
The Milgram experiments with people’s willingness to obey an authority figure and administer potentially lethal shocks to somebody across a divide.

Obviously, that study has been debunked in a number of ways and so on. But seeing that as a 12-year-old kid, the video, I was just shown that in a class, woke me up to you can do research about this stuff, and, “Dear, God, people will do what for what reason?” Like, that just really just woke me up intellectually in a way that few pieces of research since have done.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Matt Beane
Well, the one I tend to go off about still, a couple years after reading about it, is one called There Is No Antimemetics Division by an author with no vowels in it, QNTM. They prefer to remain anonymous. I’ll leave it at that, because that book will, if you are into sci-fi at all, that will literally melt the head off your body. It is incredibly creative. It’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Matt Beane
That’s got to be sitting in the morning, almost every single morning, with my wife having coffee before the day starts. That’s sort of a sacrosanct thing that she and I have established over the last, like, 15 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Matt Beane
Yeah, “We’re sacrificing learning on the altar of productivity.” It’s one that I came out with for my TED Talk, and that’s one that I hear back a fair number of times, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Matt Beane
MattBeane.com. M-A-T-T-B-E-A-N-E.com. That will get you access to the book. It’ll also get you access to the Substack that I mentioned before. If you want the latest rulings coming out of my brain, that’ll take you to Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, but it’s all there, sort of a central hub.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Matt Beane
Yeah. So, just figure out for yourself what kind of deal you’re making with AI around productivity, and what it might be costing you or others around you in terms of skill. It could be great, bully for you, and then your job is to help other people figure that out, but it probably isn’t. Go take a second look.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Matt, thank you. I wish you all the best.

Matt Beane
Thank you very much. I appreciated the opportunity.