Azeem Azhar

You think about London taxi drivers, which is something a bit like Henry Ford's factory that you and I have to talk about a lot.

The London taxi drivers hippocampus grows because they spend a lot of time studying the maps and essentially becoming homing pigeons in London.

You know, when you read a book, the book changes you.

And it's the act of doing that that changes a person, that sort of judgment that a biologist in their 60s has or a shopkeeper in their 60s who's done it for a long time to look at the stock and say, well, we're low on chewing gum.

is a function of judgment that is almost certainly reflected in, you know, connections in the brain and changes there.

There is something about the skill that you developed

The skills I have developed, which involved late nights, mundane, repetitive work that allow us to work at this higher level.

So I'm thinking less about this from a skills acquisition perspective.

point.

I'm thinking about this from the perspective of an individual and how they establish certain classes of mastery.

My team will tell you that there are certain things that I just will not notice and I'm kind of rubbish at them.

And there are certain things where I have such acute mastery that I can spot the crack from two miles away.

And that has come not because of genes, but it's come from banging my head against the wall for 25 years.

So when you look at that and you think about your own personal experience, how does this, you know, how do you address this hollowing out?

I think this is a really, really interesting point, question.

And I just want to dig into, Anthropic is one of the leading firms here in this space.

So you've obviously got this realization internally ahead of many other companies.

So what is a sense of things that are working in practice when you look at your junior team members and you think,

How do we get around the missing rungs in this ladder?

How do I help, you know, Junior Jenny and Starter Steve get those skills that I got through sort of sweating it through in late nights?