The AI Skills Nobody is Teaching (And Everyone Needs) with AI Expert Ethan Mollick

**Simon Sinek** (0:00)
So when you're interviewing for a job, and everybody's good because of AI, how do I stand out and get a job that they still need to hire for? I'm fascinated by that.

**Ethan Mollick** (0:11)
Like, if Claude is really good at running your company, Claude's also good at running every other company, and there's no variation between them. And generically high quality with no variation means there's no boats or competitive edge. I think humans who bring competitive edge to this one way or another, just by providing variation, nothing else, is a useful way to think about problems, right? You start to care a lot more about the taste of that person than you do about the entire organization built to deliver the product.

**Simon Sinek** (0:38)
We're all a little afraid of AI. Even the people who love it are a little bit afraid. Some of us are afraid it'll take our jobs or make us dumber, or change everything so fast we'll never be able to catch up. It doesn't help that most AI experts fall into one of two camps. They're the do-mers or they're the zealots. That's why I wanted to talk to Ethan Mollick. He's an AI expert who, refreshingly, is neither. Ethan's a Wharton professor studying how AI, entrepreneurship, and innovation impact our work. He focuses on how employees actually use these tools rather than how they're theoretically supposed to improve our work. His New York Times bestseller Co-Intelligence and his popular substack, One Useful Thing, have become the go-to resources for all those people trying to make sense of AI without losing their minds. Ethan believes we have more agency over AI than we think. It's our experience, our taste, and our genuine points of view that are things that AI can never replace. And that's important, because the choices we make about how we integrate AI, personally and at work, as a society, will shape what it becomes. If you like this episode, please remember to subscribe. This is a bit of optimism.
You are very popular right now.
What were you, I know you teach entrepreneurship and other things. Before AI, what were you teaching that was the hot thing?

**Ethan Mollick** (2:18)
In addition to AI stuff, my other thing I really care about is games and education at scale, two related things. I've done a lot of work on using video games for teaching. So I was, as the brand says, not famous, but known in that space. I'm thinking about games and teaching at scale. How do we teach transformationally? So that is what they have worked on for a long time, and the AI work was in parallel to that.

**Simon Sinek** (2:40)
Was it your own personal curiosity about AI that sucked you in, or you were forced to use AI in the work that you were doing because it made it better?

**Ethan Mollick** (2:49)
I went to business school and my PhD program at MIT, and I worked with the MIT Media Lab with their AI group. So Marvin Minsky was one of the fathers of the field, and I was the non-technical guy in the group. So I was the person who had to explain to other people what AI was, how it worked, when we'd go talk and have technical conversations, I'd come along. I had been AI adjacent or involved for 20 years, but always in the non-technical, like how do we use this, how do we explain it role, and everybody else was technical because it wasn't really working out. AI had limited use cases. So when GPT-3 came along and started to make a splash, and then ChatGPT after that, I was well positioned in this world of someone who had been thinking about explaining this for a while in a non-technical world.

**Simon Sinek** (3:30)
The reason I was really interested in talking to you, is to be honest with you, I try not to have AI guests on.
And the reason is, is because they generally come in one of two flavors, right? It's the greatest thing that ever happened, and it's going to make the world a better place, or it's the worst thing that ever happened, we're all going to die. And the conversations are, for obvious reasons, a little lopsided and one-sided, and they usually have some vested interest in one opinion or the other.

**Ethan Mollick** (3:58)
Yes.

**Simon Sinek** (3:58)
And the reason I wanted to talk to you, to be honest with you, is yours is just more practical. It's not, it's the savior, it's not, it's going to kill us all, but it's kind of like, well, it's here, you know, kind of like the internet showed up. What's the best way to use this thing?