Ethan Mollick

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673 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Ethan Mollick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Strange Loop Podcast · Ethan Mollick | The long way is the shortcut: experiments over AI playbooks · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

But it's not really AI that shortcuts it, it's our choices as people.

So I think we were talking before about art, right, and that you might want human art.

I think in the same way we're gonna want human effort and struggle, and companies are gonna have to be okay with tolerating a learning process.

And they're not built for that.

We've been very lucky for the last 4,000 years, which is apprenticeship has worked out well for everybody.

Right, as a middle manager, you get somebody who is gonna do the work for you, you know, that you don't wanna do, and they're gonna do pretty cheaply.

And you're gonna be able to assess whether they're good or bad without spending a lot of money or a lot of effort.

And the junior person gets to learn the ropes because even if your manager is a bad manager, you're still learning what's there, what isn't, you're learning the unwritten rules, which we've talked about before, and you're getting assessed on whether you're doing a good or bad job.

And that all broke this last summer, right?

Because every junior employee, you know, junior hire would be much better off using AI.

It's faster and the results are gonna be better.

than uh then then doing it themselves and every real manager would rather have the ai do the work because the humans are fallible and sometimes they complain or they don't show up for work and you don't want to deal with that so that break has already happened and the question is how we reconstruct it there's a bunch of ways forward but they're going to take real effort for parts of an organization that aren't used to doing that we're used to getting the benefits of learning while doing and we're gonna have to separate those now

So that's the organizational design question.

I mean, increasingly, the decisions leaders make in organizations matter because you get agency if you are given it in some ways in organizations.

I mean, you can decide not to use AI, but in an organization where all your compatriots are using AI secretly,

you're going to fail in that kind of outcome.

So we have to incentivize people to be able to exercise this kind of agency and choice in the right kind of way.

And that isn't something that happens naturally because you still have agency, right?

You're making choices, but you'd be foolish to make the choice that I'm not going to use AI and I'm going to try and struggle through this on my own because that would hurt you.

So we have to set up incentives to incentivize that the right kind of way.

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