You’re Not Stuck. You’re Swimming in the Wrong Direction | Alec Litowitz - EP 827

Passion Struck with John R. Miles

In this episode, investor Alec Litowitz discusses the concept of the 'Adaptability Quotient' and why traditional intelligence (IQ) and emotional intelligence

Key takeaways

• The transition into the fourth industrial revolution is a 'second cognitive revolution' because AI processes tokens with meaning rather than just bits.
• Adaptability is a meta-skill that allows individuals to recognize when their current environmental framework has become obsolete.
• Litowitz distinguishes between being a 'resistor,' an 'adopter,' and an 'adapter' of new technologies like AI.
• The decline of 'cold stabilizers'—such as trusted institutions and religion—has led to the rise of 'shallow stabilizers' like social media algorithms.
• True agency is found in making 'acts of commission, not omission,' ensuring one remains the author of their own life.

Main topics

• The Adaptability Quotient (AQ)
• AI and the Second Cognitive Revolution
• Structural Anthropology and Systems Thinking

Notable quotes

Adaptability is what says you're touching true reality as it is right now.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful call to action for individuals to cul

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people, and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce, while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth. start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for pre-order now at matteringeffect.com. In open water, an athlete can execute a flawless stroke, keep pace with the pack, and end up miles off course by failing to sight the buoy. High achievers fail by swimming at breakneck speed in the wrong direction. Here is investor and polymath Alec Littowitz on the hidden cost of executing inside an obsolete frame. Take a listen. Speaker 3 (1:00) When the current's moving fast, when the wind is moving fast, when the world's changing super fast, what do you need to do? You need to lift your head up because you could be swimming with another group of people exactly super fast in the absolute wrong direction. Things are changing so fast. If I'm on the wrong course, who cares if I'm swimming with another group of people? Blockbuster was swimming really fast, giving you popcorn and Raisinets inside a store that was selling you DVDs. Wrong frame. Netflix had the frame. It doesn't matter. Adaptability is what says you're touching true reality as it is right now and without it. Hey, it's your Speaker 2 (1:37) friend John and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Speaker 2 (2:17) Welcome back to episode 827 of PassionStruck. Have you ever worked incredibly hard towards something only to realize later that the world around you had changed and you were still following an old map? That's one of the questions I wanted to explore with today's guest Alec Littowitz. Alec has one of the most unusual intellectual backgrounds of anyone I've ever interviewed. He studied mathematics and anthropology at MIT, eventually earned a JD and MBA, and built a career in investing and entrepreneurship. But what connects those seemingly different disciplines is the way Alec has learned to look for the underlying structures, rules, constraints, and systems that shape how people and organizations behave. He has spent his career asking not just what is happening, but what framework are we operating inside and what happens when that framework changes? That question has become particularly important for Alec as we enter what he describes as a second cognitive revolution. He argues that artificial intelligence isn't simply another tool we can pick up and put down. It is fundamentally changing the environment in which we think, communicate, make decisions, and understand the world. And if we aren't careful, we can begin outsourcing not only tasks, but our own agency. That is also why Alec believes adaptability is different from intelligence. Emotional intelligence, and even grit, those qualities can help us move through the world we understand. But when the environment changes, we have to be willing to question the frame itself. We have to ask whether we're still solving the right problem, pursuing the right mission, moving in the right direction. As Alec puts it, adaptability is ultimately about touching reality as it is right now. And that makes this conversation a fitting way to close our interview series portion of the Adaptive Human. Over the past several weeks, we've explored how our environments shape us, how agency gives us the ability to act, how curiosity and experience expand our possibilities, how relationships influence who we become, and how we respond when the world doesn't unfold the way we expect it. Alec brings many of those ideas together through a very different lens and ultimately brings us back to the question I've been asking throughout this entire series. How do we remain the authors of our lives when the world around us keeps changing? Here's my conversation with Alec Littowitz. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. Speaker 2 (5:16) Absolutely honored and thrilled today to welcome Alec Littowitz to PassionStruck. Alec, so great to see you. Such a pleasure to be here. Excited to have a conversation. Alec, I'm going to open this up with a really fun question because I've been wondering the answer of this question I'm about ready to ask you for about 30 years. When I was growing up, two of my favorite cousins, husband and wife, lived in Virginia and we visited them really frequently as a kid. but they have three kids my age but what's interesting about them is my cousin art is a psychiatrist and my cousin barb his wife is a psychologist and i always wondered for their three kids what it was like growing up in a household of two psychoanalysts so interestingly enough you are the person to answer this because you also grew up in a family of two psychoanalysts with a mother who also held, if I have it correctly, a PhD in linguistics. What was that like? Speaker 3 (6:20) I should ask you up front what happened to those children, but just jokingly, it gives you a very unique perspective. Speaker 2 (6:28) And you're Speaker 3 (6:28) absolutely right. So both my parents are psychoanalysts. My dad had an MD. My mom has a PhD in linguistics, became the dean of Erickson Institute for Child Development, and then went on to be a psychoanalyst. Let me give you first an example of what it was like. Okay. So imagine back, I'm 13 or 14. This is a typical day, late 1970s, early 1980s. And I'm coming in from being outside, either on my banana seat bicycle or playing basketball with some friends or something. And I'm walking in the house and I look over, I see my parents sitting and I would walk by my parents and say, Hey, are you guys okay? Are you guys happy? And they would look at, my mom would turn to me and say, Happy. Happy is a strong word. What's your definition of happy? By the way, that was not a special occasion. That was Tuesday. So everything was peeled back. You really learn to think a lot about, compare this, by the way, to other childhood. So let's go back to typical childhood. So when you're born and you're a baby, you're exploring and you don't per se have an identity yet. And you're trying to get a model of the world. And so you drop things, you play with things other than your mom or dad saying, don't put your finger on the socket. That's a binding constraint. Other than that, you explore for a while and you ask why a million times. Over time, you begin to learn that you need your parents and to get certain reactions from them, you can act certain ways and you get rewarded for it. And you go to school and you realize you act certain ways and you get rewarded for it. So over time, you begin to stop exploring and what I call exploiting. You begin to act certain ways, closing the loop, if you will. I was in a family that didn't close the loop. I was not rewarded for having the right answer. I was rewarded for having another and a better question. It's just a very different childhood where uncertainty was the place where curiosity got to run free. I would say that I didn't grow up with a sort of a fixed ideology. Certainly there were values and morals that were imparted to me and that I hold strongly. But answers are provisional always. And I didn't. overlap my identity that, oh, I'm that person with the right answers, or that's what you really want to be. It was really the person who could ask the next better questions. That's what having two psychoanalysts and a mother as a PhD in linguistics. Words weren't per se what the word meant. There was always a hidden meaning under something. There were other, very much a systems thinking, their structure, their structure that people don't see. And that was really the attitude that I grew up with at a very young age. Speaker 2 (8:58) So interesting. When I was growing up, I was this very inquisitive child. So my parents tell me today that I never would stop asking questions and it drove them mad because I would ask question after question, trying to understand the layers underneath what they were telling me. But my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, had a really huge influence on my life because she went to her deathbed with... huge regrets about not pursuing becoming a doctor that she wanted to pursue earlier in life. And so as a result, growing up, she always had these huge expectations about what we should become, but also indoctrinating us with, don't be like me, don't go to your deathbed, not pursuing the thing that drove your passions in life, which is partly I think a backdrop to doing what I'm doing now, because it's so different than what I did for 25 years in my career. My question for you is, did you realize when you were an adolescent that you were being trained to question and assumptions, or did you only recognize that later in life? Speaker 3 (10:14) No, I think that being the son of two psychoanalysts, you learn early that you're different than the other kids. You can't escape it. There's different dinner table conversations that happen. I think that thoughts are like nesting dolls in some ways. There was just always another layer you thought you had peeled back. And there was just no way, and I don't mean escape it in a bad way, but I like to say it this way, and I talk about it in my book. I call it telescoping. And what it is that... One of the things that I got from my parents is to be able to view something from multiple angles, right? When I mentioned earlier the story about Happy, Happy is a model viewed from somewhere. Somebody's model is their perspective viewed at something. And so as opposed to sitting and going, oh, I grew up with one perspective or it made me think that I should grow up and do X or do Y. It was N dimensional. It was, oh, wait a minute. I can take something and I can look at it from this angle. And then that angle and this angle, I was really bred into doing that, if you will. And it carried with me. So I'll just say this when I probably because of an identification with my father, when I was very young, I really wanted to be a doctor and probably wanted to do that because my dad did it. And the funny story, which I don't think I've told anybody, that at one point my dad was telling me, I thought about it because the story you just told. that my dad said to me, Alec, you don't have to be a doctor. If you don't want to be a doctor, you don't have to be a doctor just because I'm a doctor. And I started crying. And my mom was like, why are you crying? And I said, being a doctor is all I know how to do. Here I am as a little kid. Of course, I don't know how to be a doctor, but I had identified so much with my father about it. But later I went to college and I wound up studying. math and anthropology and eventually got a JD MBA. And I think the point of all those, and this is going back to where I was before, is that those are just rules. And the rules, they're areas that have a hidden set of rules. And I wanted to know what were the rules and who formed them, right? Math is the rules of nature. Anthropology, structural anthropology is the rules underlying society and cultures. Law and business are the rules under which we interact with each other personally. as well as commercially. For me, these were all different angles. It wasn't four subjects. It was the subject of what are the rules, the constraints, which are artificial, which are natural, what are the boundaries and barriers? All of this for me was a fabric and a framework. I didn't think I needed to be something or another. I felt constantly like, even as a teenager, I'm still learning different sets of rules and structures. That was for me. So there was... That's really not only as a child, but going up through and into college was just this concept of structures, not identifying specifically other than that one sort of you can tell psychoanalytic. Probably my parents would say story of identifying with my father. Other than that, really, it was. looking at the fabric and keeping open the possibilities for what I, what would I do with all this either knowledge, information, or different ways of looking at things. It was just always left open. I was, I didn't want to collapse it early and I wound up changing my mind, obviously, in terms of what I did. So I was, I didn't have any premature, other than a Freudian sort of idea that I would be a doctor. I didn't have any predetermined direction. Speaker 2 (13:39) Alec, I just want to stick on your education just for a second. My first cousin came to me years ago. He was coming out of Cambridge, and at this time, he was trying to decide, do I get an MBA or do I go to law school? He ended up going to Stanford Law. But when he was asking me, I said, it's a fundamental question that comes down to this. Do you want to practice law or not? Is law something you're going to enjoy or not? Because if the answer is no, then I think the path should be go and get an MBA. I fast forward a good friend of mine, Ed Kopko, who you might know. He used to be the publisher of Chief Executive Magazine. His son went to Princeton and then he went to University of Chicago in the JD MBA program, which is what you went through as well. But when I look at your background, as you mentioned, you have this interesting. Speaker 2 (14:36) combination. So at MIT, you studied mathematics, so systems, pattern, logic, probability, but also anthropology, so human, culture, behavior, meaning. And then you go into law, reasoning, interpretations, and then combine it with business, so markets, incentives, organizations. It's like one of the most fascinating backgrounds I've had of anyone who I've ever interviewed. Like why that background? And then while you're at MIT, I also understand you became an all-American squash player. Speaker 3 (15:11) So it's Speaker 2 (15:12) this really Speaker 3 (15:12) dynamic Speaker 2 (15:13) background you have. Speaker 3 (15:14) Geez. As I said a second ago, I think I would say the following. I would say that this fascination with structure was really important to me, that I viewed the world as people got expertise, but there were times where, and look, expertise is not a bad thing. Expertise is a great thing. But it does tend to, over time, solidify your view from one angle. And I just felt like that was limited. Where do these connect? The anthropology I chose was not physical anthropology. I did take one class over at Harvard at the Peabody Museum, but most of it was structural anthropology. And structural anthropology, for anybody who's listening, was, at the time, at any rate, was a lot about Claude Lévi-Strauss. And he thinks in terms of opposites, right? Life versus death, gender, male, female. What are those? They're binaries. Binaries are numbers. And so he was always sitting around. In fact, he worked with a famous mathematician, actually, if you go back, to try to bring some. quantitative thinking to anthropology. For me, it was what is this hidden nature? Why do cultures and societies grow? Why do humans organize themselves in certain ways? Math is, of course, the beauty of math is that it's the science of nature, but also math teaches you things that are, in particular, higher level math, depending on what you go into, teaches you a lot about nonlinearities. and that the human mind tends to think in linear terms. And I like to think sometimes in nonlinear, and I want to tell you why this matters. And then I went to law school knowing I did not want to be a lawyer. I never intended to be a lawyer. I took the bar, but I wanted the experience. I wanted to think. I wanted to understand the issue spotting. And so I graduate. I did go to J.P. Morgan for a very short period of time. Six months later, I was at what was going to become Citadel Investment Group. And leave aside. hedge funds and trading strategy. But let me just tell you why I'm adding this component. I went into an area called risk arbitrage, which is trading unannounced mergers. Again, it doesn't per se matter for the audience. But the point is that because I've never traded a day in my life, I didn't know what a hedge fund was. I didn't know what the strategy was, but it was a structure and it was a system and there were people in it and they thought from certain angles. And I went in and said, well, beginner's mind, I'm going to break it all down. And then I'm going to restructure how I think it should be done. But this business that I just described, people trading the markets, that's crowds, that's a culture. I could think about, well, what angle do people have from their perspective? Math. Well, there's tons of math inside the markets. Obviously, I could go into that. And markets have a tendency to not work in linear ways. And then law, well, a merger is on a contract. It's between parties. Well, that's my law background. Well, business. Well, why are they doing the merger? So I kept running into situations where I viewed this from a lot of different angles, whereas most people came in and depending on their background, they're sort of like arrows in their quiver. They were generally more bucketed. And I have found, if you looked at my business career, almost all of it is very thematic to where is it that other people are constrained in their perspective? Where is the space in between the artificiality of the buckets? And where can I go in with a different perspective where other people don't like to venture because they don't? And there's a word for this E.O. Wilson called a consilience. It's not so much that the content overlaps. It's that there's