The Ryan Hanley Show - The Agility Quotient: Why IQ and EQ Are No Longer Enough

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribeWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanleyWhat got you here will not get you there.The world is moving faster than any of us expected. Jobs are disappearing overnight. Industries are getting rebuilt from scratch. And the people who are winning are not the ones with the highest IQ or the most emotional intelligence. They are the ones who can handle change, disappointment, and uncertainty without losing their footing.That is AQ. Your Agility Quotient.In this episode, we break down why hustle culture is a lie. We explore the difference between taste and pastiche in an AI-driven world. We dig into the four archetypes of agility and how to figure out which one you are. We talk about the end of history illusion and why your past success might be the biggest threat to your future growth.This one is a gut check. Take notes.Liz Tran coaches the CEOs and founders of the fastest-growing companies on the planet. Her clients have raised more than $1 billion in funding from firms like A16Z, Sequoia, and Y Combinator. She spent a decade in tech, including four years as the only female executive at one of the largest venture funds in the world. She is the author of "The Karma of Success" and "AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That's Always Changing" (Penguin Random House, 2026 ).Take the AQ Quiz: https://aqquiz.com/Connect with Liz Tran:Website: https://liz-tran.com/AQ (Book ): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/786825/aq-by-liz-tran/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liztranwrites/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liztran1/Follow Ryan:Website: https://ryanhanley.comInstagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanleyThis show is part of the Unplugged Studios Network — the infrastructure layer for serious creators. 👉 Learn more at https://unpluggedstudios.fm.

Outsourcing taste to me seems like a death stroke to your long-term success. But what's missing, and I think what AI will never replace, is that human sense of intuition. I really believe that what's more important is what you release and what you let go of. How are we going to compete as the world rightfully becomes more driven by AI and more optimized? We all know IQ. Most of us have heard of EQ. How does AQ fit into the equation? An AQ stands for your agility quotient and to your capacity to handle change, disappointment, and uncertainty. What got you here won't get you there. I'd love to start our conversation actually in your first book.

And you have this, like the four pillars of spiritual strategy. Inquiring inward, manifesting mindfully, enriching your energy and becoming brilliant. I'd love for you to dig into this concept, you know, just maybe break down these four pillars. And why the idea of spirituality, which some people, have a reaction to, right? Certain people have different perceptions and biases or whatever around this idea of spirituality. Like, why use that term and how does spirituality work into being a leader, being an executive, and really growing in our work?

Where it comes from is from lived experience. And when I started thinking about these things, I was working as an executive at a venture fund in New York. And so I was surrounded by all these people who were at the top of their game. This fund was, is probably actually one of the largest in the world now. And we were early investors in Instagram and Spotify. And I was working with people who were really at the top of their field. And what I noticed is that not everyone was happy. The large line share of people who I met who had every reason to feel fulfilled and feel like they had meeting.

no matter how much they achieved and how much they, how much wealth they created, there was still this missing piece of not even just happiness, but even trusting themselves. And so during my time there, I really tried to compete on sort of the, I don't know what you would call it, but like the way that we all normally do, like what's on your resume, but I just wasn't one of those people. I hadn't gone to Harvard Business School. I hadn't gone to Stanford undergrad. I'd gone to a state school. and I was a really unusual person to be out of fund like that. And I realized that the reason why I had earned that place wasn't necessarily because of my degree or my pedigree credentials.

It was because I really was in touch with not only data, information, had a good network, but also I really trusted myself and my intuition, which came from my spiritual practice. So that's where the four pillars come from, because I think that we are inundated in a world, where we have all the information we could ever need at our fingertips, right? Like you can use AI to be one of the greatest venture fund analysts you can ever find, right? Like you can get all the data you want. You can make charts.

But what's missing, and I think what AI will never replace, is that human sense of intuition. And I think you can think of it spiritually or you can even think about it scientifically. They describe intuition as a process that the body and the brain do together, where you can actually process information faster than you have conscious awareness of. And a great example of this is when people play chess. The great chess masters who have played, you know, thousands of games, they know their next move without having to consciously think through, okay, there's a queen here, there's a knight here, I have this many ponds left on the board. They just feel it. Athletes describe the same thing where, you know, at a certain period of time, you, after a certain period of time,

you don't really have to think, okay, what's the right play or the right pass for me to do right now? You just feel it in your body. And we all have that because we've all been living in this world as humans navigating our lives, and we have to trust that. And so these four pillars are a way to pull us away from our screens, away from social media, away from comparison to other people, and return back to hearing our own voices, which can be really hard because the world is so loud. So even the first pillar, inquiring inward, it's very simple. It's just stillness and silence and solitude. And you actually don't need very much of that, but we are really lacking in it, especially if you have kids or you're busy or you've been employees. When do you ever have 15 minutes just to think? Sometimes it's in the shower or on a walk. And that's why those brilliant ideas

come to us in those rare, quiet moments of stillness. So that's the first pillar. And I think it's actually one of the most important because it's the easiest to do. And once you start doing it, your whole world opens up. And my favorite example of this is with Einstein. And he was known for, actually, wait, let me just start that from the beginning. It's been a while since I actually thought about this book. So I've just been on like an AQ press store. But yeah, one of my favorite anecdotes of this is with Einstein. And when he was stuck on some sort of really unyield, scientific problem. He didn't spend more time researching. He didn't consult colleagues. He would actually just take a nap. So he would sit in a rocking chair and he would hold two metal balls in his

hands. And he would allow himself to drift into that space between sleep and being awake where things were really quiet and really still. And just as he started to fall asleep, the balls would drop from his hands. They would wake him up with noise. He would have arrived at the answer to his question. And so we don't all need to just nap intermittently throughout the day in a rocking chair with two metal balls. But it's this idea of creating that stillness in our lives. And you might call that spirituality. Some people call it, you know, forest bathing, meditation, even just exercise. But whatever it is, that's your, whatever it is, we all need a gateway or a path to hearing our inner voice more clearly.

Yeah, but Liz, like we got to be grinding all the time and pushing hard. And if we're not, then we're falling behind, right? Like, we got to be doing market research and copying people and figuring out what they're doing and dissecting and implementing new plans and running AB tests and push, push, push, or otherwise, don't we just get left behind in this wave and onslaught of activity? How does, like, how can we, if we're still for even five minutes, aren't we falling behind? That is one of the biggest myths that has been perpetuated over the past couple decades. And you see it all the time.

I come up through tech culture, so I have been working in startups since 2008. I, you know, worked at a venture fund for four years. And now I coach CEOs and founders of tech companies. And that myth is one of the biggest disservices that has ever been presented to us, which is the idea that you need to be sleeping in your office, you need to be grinding, hustling, just taking a bunch of adderol and drinking coffee and putting in more hours throughout the day. But it's not actually about quantity. It's all about pure quality. And that's what I coach my clients on is I think about their brilliance and their genius as a finite resource, right? It's a gas tank for your car. And if you're constantly running

on empty, it doesn't matter how much time you're sitting behind the wheel. You're not going anywhere. You need a full tank. You need to feel at your best self. So I'd honestly rather have, you know, 15 minutes of peak Ryan, right, than six hours of you at your worst when you're depleted, you're not in touch with yourself, you're not thinking clearly. And so I think that the return to this understanding that we are so much more than how much time we log behind our computers is really, really important, especially in the age of AI, where I think it becomes really easy to sit there and just type, type, type, and accumulate information. I think the myth is related to how smart people accumulate, right? You accumulate wisdom, you accumulate contacts,

you know, you log the hours behind your desk. But in this new paradigm, I really believe that what's more important is what you release and what you let go of. It's a constant process of not just accumulating information, but also understanding how to unlearn. I think this is so incredibly relevant to what literally every human, whether it's in a business context or in a personal life context, relationally, et cetera, this is like the challenge of our age, it seems like the idea of even like I like to read and I like to start my day with reading and I have a library of books and I've read some I've read five times. I always got two or three books going and I just love to read,

and I particularly like to start my day reading. And I had someone recently was like, well, if you read for a half hour, then like, you know, isn't that, why don't you just like have AI do a summarization of the book? And I try to explain to them that even though, you know, I'm reading, I'm not necessarily still in so much as I'm just sitting in my head, the calm, the tactile nature. I use this app called Endel, which is like sound waves for ADHD,

that kind of helps you concentrate, which I've actually found, I wasn't a believer until I started using this app, but I'm an incredible believer in particularly people who may have some hyperactivity, like how sound can really help you focus. And like even a half hour of that, man, it's almost like a meditative state is just being still in that regard, like not even just going pure, calm or doing a walk without headphones. And even that people will fight.

They're like, oh, just get the book summarized via AI. and I'm like, you're almost missing the entire point in my mind. If everything is an AI optimized, summarized version of the thing with just the three key points of, you know, this 165 page, you know, or 200 page, you know, work that someone did. And all you really care about are the five key points. Like, one, I feel like you're not retaining it, two, you're going to really struggle to own it. that it seems more like just an egotistical checkbox that somehow now you can like quote that book in you know one way that allows you to be smarter at cocktail parties and like this this it just

feels like the vibration level of every decision we make is just tuned way up and even people like everybody is is is like just dialed way up and they they can't figure out how to come back down so if you're one of those people and you're sitting here going, man, this is me. Like I struggle with stillness. Like I struggle with this idea. I feel like I constantly have all this activity in my brain. What is the first step? Particularly for maybe say one of your executive coaching clients or a founder who finds

himself in this place and is aware enough to know it's not the path, but maybe not educated enough or just hasn't spent enough time with it to start to develop more stillness. What are some ways that you work with your clients to build stillness into their busy lives? 100%. Well, the first thing I'll say is that we can all feel energy, right? It's not like a, it's not a spiritual woo-woo thing. You definitely know when you meet someone at a dinner party and you sit next to them and you immediately think, okay, this person's running hot. I do not want to talk to this person. Their intensity is amped way up. Or you're like, oh, this person's just like not giving me anything. Like we all feel energy. You can walk into a room of 50 people and know what the average. energy levels right away. This is something we're all really skilled at. You know, humans are tribal

creatures. We're meant to experience that. And so what I'll say to that is like when I have clients who are way up there, they're running so hot that it's like boiling water, I actually recommend that they take a 24-hour reset. And that's it. They need to go away somewhere. They can't be in their home. They should probably be alone. And all they need to do is be close to nature, have some movement, whether that's, you know, exercise or a hike and have that stillness, you know, those three s's of stillness, silence, and solitude. And you don't really need a long time. I mean, experience this the other day because I have a new baby. I have a newborn at home. I have an eight-week-old. I've been on book tour. I was on book tour until 39 weeks. I was running so hot.

And then I dropped my phone in the bathtub because, of course, I was trying to optimize my bathtub time by like taking a bath while also listening to a podcast at one and a half X speed. It was like relaxing but also learning. And my phone dropped in the, the bathtub, so I didn't have a phone for 24 hours until they could mail me one. And that was my reset. I felt so much better afterwards because I wasn't compulsively getting all this data and information streamed at me constantly through my phone. So it's actually really, it will feel very, very hard for the first six hours, but afterwards your mind will rest in this place where it's supposed to be. And what I think you're saying about books is a real thing because I always say,

I heard this somewhere, I don't remember where, but a book is actually a trampoline for your own imagination. So you're reading, right? Like, if you get a summary on Blinkist, you don't have that space to bounce off of the book. But when you're reading that tactile book, you're turning the pages, your mind's drifting off a little bit. You're hearing the music. That actually gives spaciousness for your brain and your intuition to think about your own life, even if you don't realize that you're processing it. That's why sometimes when I'm reading and I really have that stillness, I'll jump up and be like, oh, I have this great idea for my business or I need to do that. Do you ever have that experience?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, constantly. I actually have an AI agent dedicated to all the crazy ideas that pop into my brain. And that's perfect. And you said it's like meditation. And I think that what you have actually done is created a hack for someone who has ADHD, because for you probably sitting in a room, like, or underneath a tree for 20 minutes with nothing is not going to be good for you. I also have ADHD.

But you're getting just enough stimulus, but still enough space. for your brain to operate at peak creativity. Yeah, it's funny. Meditation does not work for me. I've tried it a million times. I completely believe that it works for some people. And so I'm not knocking it. I just, that does not work.

I've found I need to be doing something but detached from technology. And if it's tactile, that's an added bonus. So it's something like, I love to golf. And immediately in certain circles, you get the, oh, blah, you know, they just think it's, you know, a bunch of buddies pounding beers and talking crap on a golf course and wasting time, right? Like, but for me, what I love about it is, one, I don't have my phone, right? I'll block that time off. I'll just throw the phone in the cart and I won't even look at it for, you know, two, three hours,

depending on, you know, how long I'm playing or whatever. And then there's a, you're in nature, but there's also like this, tactile experience of having to focus for moments and hit this little tiny ball and try to keep it in the fair way and all the different skills that go into it. Same thing with like, say, coaching baseball or going for a run, but even that I lose it a little bit. Like prayer actually works really well. So if I'm if I'm in prayer and, you know, reciting or reading the Bible, say I'm a Christian, like that will work. But that pure silence or pure, like, pure, like, without some sort of activity, it's really hard to find that place.

Like, it's almost like certain portions of my brain need to grab onto something in order for the creative part to have space. And I guess my question for you in this long diatribe is, like, how does someone figure out their version of this? Is it just kind of F-A-F-O? Is, are there like, for certain personality types, there are certain paths that seemingly work better. Like, how do you find that?

Because I could, like you could say, you know, meditation, Ryan, meditation. And I could go meditate and come back and be like, Liz, what the heck, man? Like meditation doesn't work for me. How do we start to figure out what that version of this is? Because I couldn't agree more with you on this stillness aspect. I think it is the baseline building block of everything else that you teach and really of success in our lives is this idea. If we can't find this, it seems like we're on a hamster wheel that just goes nowhere. Yeah.

I don't actually think it's hard to figure out what the thing is. And I actually, it's funny with my clients, I call it, like, finding your church. You don't have to necessarily think of yourself as a religious person, or you can. But, you know, one of my clients came from her where she was talking about how, you know, when she goes to visit the place where she grew up, she'll go sit by the ocean. And she's like, oh, that's my church. And then I'm like, okay, well, what is it for everyone else where you can hear that? And I think that everyone kind of intuitively knows what theirs is. You know, another client, his is going on really, really long bike rides.

You know, the more stressed out he has at work, the longer the bike rides will be. And that's just, you know, enough physical activity for him. But it clears his mind in that way. But I think the key to it is releasing our productivity bias. So it's not actually like really a strategic. thing. It's more of giving yourself the permission to say, go golfing for two or three hours, and know that that is actually the best thing that you can do to refill that gas tank of creativity, of power, of, you know, even, you know, your synapsis connecting. It's a way of just like thinking

of your brain as a really pristine being that you really have to care for, right? And it needs time to rest. It's the same thing as like when we take our computers and if you have 80 or 90 browser tabs open, of course your computer is going to crash. And so you just have to shut those browser tabs and know that restarting your computer is the best thing that you can do. You know, there's that urge to just keep working and be like, okay, I'm going to work through this. And so I think it's for everyone accepting that operating at their greatest potential is not the same thing as being your most productive and busy. we think that they're related intertwined, but they're very, very different. And so once you give

yourself that permission and even force yourself to say, hey, what can I find that's an hour of that stillness a day? Then let yourself do that for me. I used to think it was such a waste of time to cook for my family. And I would just think, I live in New York most of the time. And I would just think, oh, well, I can just make something for the kids really easily. And then, like, my husband and I will have take out. And that's the most efficient thing. And then I realized it's an hour for me that I love that's quiet. I get to be a little bit creative, especially if I'm making something that I know how to make really well. And I'm like, wow, I can feel my gas tank rising.

And so that's a good way to even think about it too, is really keep tabs of that from a quantitative state. So the goal is to wake up and do whatever you can to get yourself to attend energetically. and then have one or two points throughout the day where you're re-upping whatever is in your gas tank. And so if people struggle to, you know, to relax and give themselves that stillness and time, sometimes thinking about that way feels more productive than just saying, okay, I'm going to have, you know, I'm just going to have like two hours where I'm, you know, doing nothing. I couldn't agree with you more. And guys, you guys, you guys listening to this, I think this idea of, I love this, this productivity,

bias idea where we're we've been almost programmed to believe that you know TPS ports TPS reports slid across the desk is more important than the quality of the information on the individual you know report or whatever like it's I I just I look at I think about like um like you know obviously mental health is is an issue that people are deal there's more talk and people with mental health issues today than ever before in history. And I'm not a psychologist, nor am I trying to maybe diagnose this. But it is interesting to think that as we, as more emphasis has been put on efficiency and optimization and total task output, our overall mental health, at least particularly

attached to work, has not improved. That, you know, so, you know, causation does an equal correlation. and again, I don't have studies to go behind this, but I'm sure we could go do some research. But as we become more efficient and AIed and automated, and I think those things are very positive. I mean, a big part of my work is helping people remove those things or use automation AI and outsourcing to get back more of their human time.

But there definitely is a correlation there. And it feels like, you know, you see your grandmother, you know, spending two hours making a sauce and cooking, you know, this beautiful, you know, spaghetti dinner or whatever. And you're, oh, you know, well, you know, grandma, it's like that was, she also probably had a really solid mental health. She felt very satisfied. She was cooking for her family.

She created this thing. She used her knowledge. She had built up over years making this and literate iterations to make it her own from probably her mother or her father, whoever taught it to her, you know, et cetera. And, like, that time, though, a. applied to some, you know, spreadsheet or, or time audit is going to feel like wasted time. But she probably sleeps well that night. Feels very satisfied with the connection that she has with the people who are eating this food that she made for.

You know what I mean? Like there's something there that I feel like as a we're discounting. And it, it certainly impacts our personal life. But I feel like, and this is why I was so excited to talk to you. I feel like this is a big part of our work life that we are not talking. about enough. It's just so much optimization, optimization and efficiency. And I really love this argument that that just might not be the best thing for us. I love the example of a grandma making sauce because part of this too is how are we going to compete as the world, you know, rightfully

becomes more driven by AI and more optimized. You're seeing this trend where it's actually more important to have a personality now, to have perspectives and opinions. And, you know, you can use AI to do all the things that that don't require that, of course. Like, that's, that's great. Like, I'm a big, big fan of that. I'm a big fan. I'm probably one of the most efficient people in the world. But also, it is going to be an advantage to have taste, to have the ability to curate to know yourself and to be a little bit of a, you know, to have a counterfactual opinion, to be a little bit of a, you know, I'm going to play devil's advocate here. I'm going to see things differently. And that only comes through lived experience. And so it's taking the long

way, I think is often sometimes the shortest path somewhere. I love it. I wish that I had this at my fingertips. I don't. But I saw this woman who was talking about, she created a Instagram real and it just caught my attention around taste versus pastis. Now, first, it caught my attention because I had never heard the word pastis before, so I had to go look that up. And for those of you, creative mimicry is essentially pastis. So you see, you know, you're a painter and you see Da Vinci and you start, you know, you first start by trying to mimic Da Vinci's style and then maybe you create your own.

And her, the point that she was making and it kills me that I can't remember her name, but I just, I watch this. I watch it like five times was that we have over indexed on pastis at the expense of taste. And who we truly, who attracts the most value are the individuals who have taste, the, you know, Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, you know what I mean? who have this individual taste. Maybe there are pieces of their work that were pulled from other things,

but it was their particular taste that defined the product that they created that drew so much attention to them and that we've, AI in particular was her point is really just a pastise engine. All it's doing is going out, seeing what else has been done, and pulling it back into some sort of mishmash

based on your prompt. You're not actually, it's not creating taste. and that her argument was we need to start indexing back to taste. And with the pitfall being, your taste could suck and it could be terrible and people can not like it. But ultimately, it's still yours. And there's no way to clearly define yourself if everything you do is this idea of pastis. I thought that was a really interesting and clever way of framing it and something that I thought was really important and kind of relevant to what we're discussing here. Yeah, it's so true because even if you just think about the mechanism behind

the way AI works is it's just trying to predict the most likely token that comes next based on all this data. It's exactly what you said. It can only do pasties. And the only way taste gets created is that, you know, you do take that long way. You do have a lot of times where you're in the kitchen and you don't do the sauce properly, right? And then you learn how to really develop your own style on it. And I think that a lot of times some of the best creations have been accidental, right? Like you hear about penicillin, right? That was a lab accident. And you only get there.

Not from, you know, you can, if AI existed back then, you could probably be like, okay, what are some of the most likely hypotheses I could have for creating X, Y, and Z in the lab? And then, you know, they're already doing that with drugs these days for drug candidates. And but, but that time of, of trying, failing, trying, failing, getting better, figuring out hacks, that only happens from that real world iteration where you go and do it with, you know, the proverbial, your two hands. Sometimes it actually is with your two hands. Other times it's just like sitting there and you're trying to vibe code something, whatever it might be. But I really, really believe in that.

And even when I think about my kids and they're young, I have little kids, but I think about their pedagogy and how I want to raise them, a big hallmark of that is that I do want to generate that sense of taste in them. And that means, you know, creating a wide world for them not just to go, you know, shallow on different topics because it's very easy to be a little jack of all trades, a master of none in the AI world, but to be able to go really deep where they're interested because sometime or another it will come around into the work that they do. Yeah. I think I love that. I have a 12 and 10 year old boys. And I, you know, you know this as well as anyone who has children. You can't help but think about, you know, think about them all. everything you do, what they're doing, all this stuff. It's like impossible. And my 12 year old recently wanted an Instagram account. And I asked him why. And he said, I want to start creating like you do, Dad. And I was like, well, hopefully better than me. But, you know, uh, you know, but I wanted him, the fact that he wanted to start posting things. And he's like, at first, he would post something and he would delete it. And he would post it and he would delete it. And I was

like, leave that stuff up. And he's like, I'm like, and nothing was offensive. He's posting like, videos of him playing basketball and baseball and his different sports and stuff. And he takes like, he goes to his school sports games. We'll take images of some of the varsity players and post them and write little. And I was like, but what I liked about it was I was like, dude, keep those up because what you are starting to develop at an incredibly young age relative to most people is a taste for angles of shots, caption styles. Is it multi-images?

Is it one image? Is it a video? Are you putting a voiceover over the top? You know, music. Like, these are all these little iterative things that allow you to develop a taste. Because, and this is where I'm very interested in your take on this topic is like, I love AI same for a lot of reasons, right? Like post-production of the podcast.

I get everything I need with one prompt, built it over time. You know what I mean? I have a whole skill set, put in the relevant stuff and it does. Awesome, awesome. knows what it needs to do, knows what it needs to say, got it. But it's all retroactive, right? Like you said, it's predicting the next token based on what's already been created. And I think what we're discussing is, in my mind, taste is a forward-looking activity.

It's a forward-looking skill. It's, it's okay, I can understand what's come in the past, and AI can help me reproduce that in my own way for sure. but how do I know where to place my future bets? You know, is it, is it, you know, a new product? Is it a new, you know, line of thought in my business? Is it a new style of creating? Is it, you know, taking a deeper tact in a certain portion of your personality? Those are the things that there's literally no way for AI to predict that in any way that's

relevant to you. I mean, it could obviously guess, but it's guessing. And you have to make that choice. And outsourcing taste to me seems like a death stroke to your long-term success. Yeah. And I think that, like, I've tried it. Like, would I love a world where AI could just give us the most interesting, creative ideas? That would be great. But it just actually doesn't work. So when I was writing my latest book, which is called AQ, I knew I wanted to. to write a book on change, this idea that the capacity to handle change uncertainty is the most important skill that people need to learn because I had seen this and I'd been thinking about it for 10 years. But having written one book, I knew that there were a million books on change

out in the market, you know, and you can't, you need a great title. You need a hook for your book. And I can't even tell you how many hours I logged with AI trying to ask it to help me come out, come up with a really clever title. And the title ultimately came when I was sitting on a long-haul flight and there was no internet. It was really sad. Everyone on the plane was like, oh, no, no internet. And I had been flying a lot. And so I'd watched like all the movies that they were already there. And I just sort of sat there and I was like, okay, what all I do? I'm like, I'll pull out just a random book I have in my backpack. And it wasn't even related to the concept of change. But just as soon as I started reading, you know, 15 pages of this fiction book, I thought, AQ, that's what it is.

It's not IQ. It's not EQ. AQ is the way to describe what I'm talking about here. And I don't even know where it came from. I don't know if it's a great idea or not, but it worked. You know, I had a great, you know, auction for my book. Just, you know, when you sell a book, then it's just purely based on the title. The tagline. how you're going to market it. It's just the idea. You don't have to have written the book yet. But the idea was good enough that it went to auction and four publishers competed for it. But I really, really tried to have AI help me because I was so stuck. And so with the generation of net new ideas, that's sort of lightning in a bottle, it can't be rushed. I think it has to happen when you're

not chasing it. You know, you just have to live your life. And I love what your son's doing and the advice that you gave him because that's how he's going to find out his own personality, his own style. And I think when you turn to really little kids, they could be really great role models because they will get really fascinated by, you know, putting a top on a bottle for a long time, or they get really into Egypt and want to know everything about Egypt or get really into Star Wars Legos and want to do every single set that they can find. And we should allow ourselves that same, I guess that same grace to pursue things, pursue things without an immediate result or like an immediate impact because it will happen sooner rather than later. You're just creating your own database, right?

Think of yourself as an AI where you have to fill up your own database of sources too. Yeah, kids don't throttle their curiosity the way we do. You know, we have this timer in our mind when we go down a curious path. that everyone maybe's got a different one and maybe every topic's different, but we hit that timer we're just like, okay, I've researched this enough, you know, I'm back to my real life, even if we are just completely engaged.

And it's funny, I have, you know, one of the biggest complaints that I get about this podcast is the very, the breadth of guests that I bring on. And, you know, we tend to skew mostly in business, leadership, personal development, but I've also had people on to talk about psychedelic therapy and space and ancient civilizations because I'm just really curious about those things.

And I think to your point, and I love that you found the idea for your book out of a fiction book, we can't assume where the inspiration is going to come from. You know, if you read Stephen Pressfield's work, I think I truly believe in this conceptual idea, whether real or not, and I don't know enough about other planes of existence to maybe have an accurate feeling on this, but the muse, right? He always says the muse rewards those who put in the work, who are open, who expand their mind, who take in data points from all these places. And here you are opening a random book on a random flight that just happened to not have Wi-Fi. You read 15 pages of a fictional book, which your book is not fictional, and all of a sudden, bam, there's the inspiration.

It's only because you allowed your mind to be so open that, at least I believe, that you allowed your mind to be so open to inspiration that the muse was like, you know what, Liz? I was messing with you for a while because you were being a little too optimized, but now that you're open, bam, here it is. So on that matter, we all know IQ. Most of us have heard of EQ. How does AQ fit into the equation?

AQ is the single most important intelligence that we need for this age that we're living in, the age of AI, the age of exponential change. And if you think about it, most of us don't know the roots of IQ, but it's a pretty antiquated concept. It's from the late 1800s when France mandated that all kids go to school. And so they suddenly needed a way to take all these kids who are living on farms, various levels of education, and to put them into the right classrooms. no matter their age. So two researchers created what was the first IQ test, and that actually became the Stanford-Binay IQ test, which is our de facto way of assessing, quote-unquote, intelligence or cognitive horsepower in the U.S. And it happened at a time in industrialization where suddenly all these other people and companies needed a way to assess intelligence as well.

So the military, that turned into military assessment, civil service. So government started needing a version of the IQ test. So that's what we've been trained to believe means that you're smart if you get a high IQ score. But it's only a little over 100 years old. And then in the 1990s, so 30 plus years ago, there was the rise of knowledge work. So suddenly more people were just sitting behind the desk, not really doing anything, but more facilitating the doing of work. So suddenly communication, collaboration, and working with people in different cultures rose to the top. This is when you really see management culture, people who

don't do the work, but they're managing teams. So EQ was popularized in 1995, this idea of, hey, we don't just need the ability to do the job. We also need the ability to help others work with us to do the job. And that was 35 years ago. Both of which both IQ and EQ are important. I'm not negating that, but they are insufficient to explain the moment that we're in, which is a moment where Gen Z, which is the youngest generation in the workforce, they're predicted to have at least 18 different jobs across six industries and their adult lives. And that's not even to say what's going to happen to Generation Alpha, Generation Beta, you know, our kids' generations. And what we do know, though, is that for all of us,

this notion of a career ladder no longer exists. It used to be pretty clear like what a career path, quote unquote, was. You go work somewhere. You know you're going to get a promotion every two to four years. And if you just keep climbing the ladder run by wrong, you'll get to the top. Now it looks a little bit more like you're zigzagging through a forest without a trail. And what I always say to my clients is that it's no longer important to know how to climb a career ladder. No one has access to that anymore. but you have to get really good at bushwhacking, which is creating a trail where one did not exist before. And I think that's what all of us feel in our careers deeply,

where maybe three years ago you would look at your buddy who worked at META in like a senior product manager role and was like, oh, you've got it easy. You know, you can be there for 10 years. You're going to have a year, you know, parental leave. You're going to have 401K, whatever. And now there's a rumor that 70% of the people who work there are going to be laid out. off. You would never have thought that. And so jobs that felt so steady, even like, you know, an accountant, you know, you think of that as never going away. All these jobs are getting replaced by AI.

And so it's not to be scary because we're actually going to, you know, hopefully create more net new jobs than we're replacing. But that ability to bushwhack your way through the world is where your AQ comes in. and AQ stands for your agility quotient and to your capacity to handle change, disappointment, and uncertainty because those are the skills that help you navigate a world where you don't see what's coming around the corner.

I literally couldn't agree with you more. I think this, I think agility is, it is the thing we have to deal with today because everyone's going, well, you know, so the industry that I came up out of is the insurance industry. and very antiquated. Why more people haven't come into insurance

and kind of pushed it forward is, I mean, there's some systemic reasons, but I think mostly just because people see it as boring. But basically, if you can look at the world today, the beauty is you just apply the things that are done today to the insurance industry and you look like an innovator because it's constantly about a decade behind. but even in that space there's all these conversations

and I literally just got myself in a bunch of trouble on LinkedIn because I was like the conversations happening here on LinkedIn around AI are like a fifth grader trying to explain calculus like it's so remedial compared to what's going on on X. You know what I mean? Like if you're on X, I mean guys have like automated their entire lives. Yeah, I'm sure there's a little bit of, you know, blurring reality there. But it looks like so incredibly sharp and rich

and you can see where it's going. And I think X maybe isn't broadstroke this way, but I see so much less dumerism around AI on X than I do. And LinkedIn, it's just, this isn't happening to us, or we're all going to get fired and it's all over and we're screwed, right? And so I find one, that echo chamber that you're in around, this is really interesting because they are so different. But I tend to be where you are.

I think that like every other, major innovation, although I do think AI is going to be particularly disruptive, as, you know, coin-based let's go of, what was it, 14% of their workforce or something like that, those people aren't, those specific jobs, you know, a senior program developer, manager of this department, yes, that specific job may be going away. But the need for that human to do a job in the workforce is not. not going away. And we've only seen that white collar jobs have increased during this period of time, even though you see these large layoffs, they make for easy dumerism. The actual,

you know, if you look into the actual underlying stats, white collar work and white collar jobs have actually increased since AI is at the market. So it's a, it feels very tumultuous. It coming all the way back around to this long contextual gyotripe that I'm giving you here is that this idea of agility, this seems like. like a core tenant of both our personal satisfaction value as well as our ability to kind of create a career that that will enjoy. So how do you cultivate agility? Like how do you cultivate AQ? Yeah. Well, there are definitely some tips and tricks that I have in my book and strategies for cultivating agility. But I think the first thing to acknowledge is that it's going to look

really different for each person. There are different ways of being agile. And what I have in the book are the four archetypes. So you are either an astronaut, a novelist, neurosurgeon, or a firefighter. You can take a quiz online at aquequiz.com. But it starts to be your window into what your toolkit is, what your resources are, what you do well. So for instance, a firefighter is really good at emergency situations naturally. So they're the person who you call when there's an emergency. Their flight gets canceled. They think, no big deal. I'll figure out another route. They're really creative problem solvers. And truly, they thrive in chaos. So, you know, the more spontaneous a situation, the more they feel at home and comfortable. For them, it's cultivating their agility isn't necessarily

about, you know, responsiveness because they're already great at that. But where they can really learn to be more agile is to be more intentional about taking bets. So firefighters don't really think that far ahead because they know they have the capacity to handle any situation that comes their way. But actually sitting down and slowing down is how a firefighter can grow their agility. It seems counterintuitive, right? Because you think pivoting, moving fast, breaking things. But for firefighters, they're already good at that. But they can become more agile when they work against their status quo. And they learn to be more planful and intentional about expanding their aperture. The opposite of that is the novelist. So I'm a novelist. I love planning out my life. And I get pretty spun around when things, when plans change

on me. I'm getting better at it now because I've been, you know, consciously trying to cultivate that. But even, you know, a year or two before, if my flight got canceled at the airport, I would just think, oh, oh, no, what am I going to do? I have this carefully planned out agenda. And you just can't operate that like that in the world anymore. And so what a novelist has to do is to purposely put themselves in situations where they're not in the driver's seat, right? Let someone else make the decision. Ask people for their input and actually listen to it. You know, novelists think I have the answer to everything, but where you can grow your agility is you start to become more pliable and more open to other people's opinions, other way of doing things, et cetera. So each of the

for archetypes, you're going to learn what your toolkit is that you're already crushing. And then also maybe the areas where there are some deficiencies. But in short, the central idea behind that is, you know, understand yourself. Understand what your status quo is, what your default mode is in the world, and then fight against it. And there's going to be friction. It's going to feel uncomfortable. But it's the same way when you have a really tough workout at the gym and your muscles are on fire. you're like, ah, that was a good workout.

If you're feeling that type of friction in your life feels hard, you feel like you're not good at something, then you're probably growing your AQ, which is a very good thing. How do you balance this is how I got here? So say I'm the firefighter, right? And my ability to handle, you know, just everything's a mess. There's bombs going off all over the place. Everyone's running around with their hair on fire.

And I somehow can walk through that. slow-mo and none of the debris's hitting me like this is some like you know uh spielberg movie or whatever um how do i manage that this is what got me here with like this need to be agile because because i know i run into people in my own work who are incredibly successful coming to me because of some either satisfaction or stagnation usually are the two biggest reasons that someone will come and approach me. But oftentimes the first thing they'll say when we start talking about change or,

you know, I don't necessarily use the word agility, but just that's your word agility, which I think is phenomenal. Well, this is what got me here. I'm the put fire out guy. That's what I do. Like people call me and I put fires out. That's what I'm good at.

Like, why should I have to change? How do you manage that part and that feeling of if I start to work on some of these other things or I start to inject more planning or more structure, I think people worry that'll take away from what got them to that successful moment in the first place. Yeah. I mean, my favorite phrase, which comes from another executive coach,

but I think it's Marshall Goldsmith, but what got you here won't get you there. And it's very, very true. But a lot of us, particularly ones who are quite successful, we really believe in what psychologists call the end of history illusion, which is this idea that we've already arrived at the most complete version of ourselves. But that's a myth because when researchers have studied people living at different decades, we do change as much in our 60s and 70s as we do in our 20s.

But sometimes it's a self-fulfilling prophecy is when you are subject to that end of history illusion. And you think, I'm already here. I have arrived. then you stop seeking out new experiences and in turn you stop growing. And so you aren't putting yourself in positions where you can see the world in a different way. And so what I'll say is that, you know, the effort to become agile is not about diminishing your strengths. It's just about adding to them. It's plus plus plus. You're never going to change like nothing. If you develop a new skill on the side, it's not going to make you worse at the thing that you are already so naturally

gifted at, it's just going to give you another tool in your kit. You're going to have a hammer, a screwdriver, and a saw instead of just trying to use a saw to fix everything in your house, which, as we know, you know, you start coming up with really weird ways to fix a problem if all you have is a saw. So I really feel this. I think that, you know, to go back to the whole spirituality question in the beginning, you can call it, you know, you can say what got you here won't get you there. Or another way phrasing that is what Buddhist called Beginner's Mind. And it's just the idea that no matter how familiar a situation is to you, you can arrive at it with fresh eyes as of seeing it for the first time with that same

sort of excitement, curiosity, and questioning as a beginner. It doesn't take away from what you already know. It just allows you to see the world through a new lens. The book is AQ, a new kind of intelligence for a world that's always changing, available wherever books are sold. I'm assuming where else can people go? And guys, all the resources that Liz share with us and mentions, we'll have in the show notes where you're watching on YouTube or wherever you listen to the podcast, et cetera, we'll have them. So just scroll down in the description you can find them or go there direct. But can people get access to the, where can people get access to the test? I'm really interested. I want to take this test because I'm really interested to find out where I personally

fall in the different aspects there. Part of me is hoping I'm an astronaut, but I have a feeling I'm going to be a firefighter. But I'm very interested. So where can people go to do that? You can take it at aQquiz.com. I also thought you're an astronaut, just as I was researching you before arriving on the podcast. But it could be that you are a firefighter in one realm of your life, like at home and then an astronaut at work. So keep that in mind, people, you can be one, you know, core archetype, but then it can show up differently in other realms. Yeah, take the quiz there. The book is everywhere. Books are sold. And then on Instagram, I'm at Liz Tran writes. I love it. Thank you so much. This is wonderful. I love this idea. And to be honest,

I'm really excited to take the quiz because I want to find out where I fall. Okay. You have to let me know which one you are. I will for sure. Thank you. And congratulations on the baby, by the way. You blew right past that and I didn't have a chance to come back to it. But thinking that you did all of this and produced a little human into the world is absolutely incredible. So congratulations. Thank you. Just living that AQ lifestyle over here. I love it. I love it. Thanks, Brian.

Absolutely.