Coaching the Creators: Inside the Minds Building Frontier AI with Executive Coach Joe Hudson

I'm excited for this conversation. I think it's going to be a different one from our usual fare, which is very focused on research, application, and policy. This will be a look, hopefully on a deeper level, into the thinking, mindset, and maybe the emotional life of the people building at the frontier of AI.

I think you have a unique window into that because I've gotten multiple referrals, and I did my homework. I went and did a little reference-checking to make sure this was true, and it checks out that you're working with people at these companies. I guess maybe you should just introduce yourself. What do you call yourself? Are you a teacher, guide, or guru? What are you, and what do you do?

I just think of myself as a coach, generally. Because I don't have a lot of time to coach one-on-one, we do these classes, both in person, which are generally invite-only, and online classes. I've had the chance to work with people deep and high up in all the major labs in the Bay Area.

I also coach the top management on the research side, as well as compute and infrastructure at OpenAI. I get to work with a lot of brilliant, really kind people, so it's really nice.

Can you give a little more general background on what your coaching entails? Leaving AI aside, what is it that you help people do?

Generally, the way I think about coaching is that you meet people where they're at, you see where they want to go, and you help them get to that place. If you happen to meet somebody who wants to go someplace that you think is unethical, you don't coach them. I think it's unethical to decide what's best for somebody else and then coach them to that end. It's very much about following the people.

The thing that I do that's unique is that I was a venture capitalist for a while, so I can talk to the technical parts of a business. Whether it's marketing, or a CTO, or a CFO, I know enough about their jobs to be able to really coach in that way. Oftentimes, coaching will start on a very strategic level, or sometimes even a tactical level.

Then you'll start noticing that there are things happening in their life—patterns that are occurring—that are stopping them in business. So then we go to the deeper level of really looking into what's stopping them, what's the psychology behind what's going on, and how do we change that thought process?

There'll be a lot of work on emotions and what emotions are being held back, because emotions dictate our decision-making, neurologically speaking. There's also a lot of work on how the voice in the head is talking to somebody. There's some work on childhood and what happened there. You're looking for patterns that are holding them back, and if they're interested in unearthing and changing those patterns, I have a crap ton of tools to help them do that.

What sort of patterns would you say are most common, and how does that vary, if at all, from a society-wide level to the AI vertical? Are there mostly patterns in AI, or is it different?

Do you mean patterns with people in AI, or do you mean patterns with leadership? It can be very different.

Typically, take them one at a time. How about that?

Typically, in leadership, there are a lot of common things, but there are always outliers. There's nothing that's more than 80% common. One very common pattern is self-sufficiency.

You'll have people who were raised in such a way that they had to do everything on their own. They couldn't really depend on somebody for emotional, financial, or some other sort of support. They learned, "If I'm not going to do it, nobody's going to do it."

Those people often rise to leadership, and then what happens is that they don't empower other people very well because they're always thinking, "I'm going to have to do it." They'll step in and do it, or they'll micromanage, or they'll go around proving that nobody can actually take care of them or take care of things. One or two of those things will often be there, and they'll often feel very alone in their work.

Their frustration will often be, "It's lonely at the top." They'll say that kind of thing even though there's an organization of 10,000 people beneath them who are all concerned about their happiness on a daily basis. "What does the leader think of me?" is a constant thought process, and then they feel alone, which is a ridiculous notion. That would be a really common pattern that you see in leadership.

As far as AI goes, I haven't seen any common patterns across AI. There's definitely a lot of what I would call Aspie or Asperger's. It's easier to deal with things than it is to deal with people; "I understand things better than I understand people." It's not ubiquitous by any stretch, but there's a lot of that in the research departments.

In general, I find them to be very kind, but also extremely defined by their work. The way that Kim Kardashian, or somebody like that, might take it personally if somebody calls them ugly, people in these research departments are going to take it personally if somebody says that their research isn't good, or isn't as smart as it could be, or something like that.

The pecking order is really based on what you can produce, how smart you are, and how good your ideas are. There's that self-definition—that accomplishment defines you—which can often hold you back. To have a novel thought, you need to open up your thinking and think about things in a completely different way.

If you're thinking, "I've got to get good papers out, I've got to get good papers out," you're going to get a lot fewer good papers out. It's like writer's block. That self-definition doesn't really allow some of the more innovative thought processes to emerge.

On the management side, I've seen that everybody has this deep desire to do good for society. I haven't met anybody who doesn't want that.

I'm sure there are people out there who don't, but I haven't interacted with them. What I notice is that, as I talk about it a lot, I had a really cool interaction early in my career: I got to meet one of the titans of radio in his final days, and he was telling me how radio was going to be this thing that made the world a better place. It's hard to go back to that idea, but all of a sudden, we can transmit these ideas and education, and all of a sudden, humanity can come together. It's going to be this amazing thing.

And it turned into shock-jock radio and advertising. I think we've seen that with television. We've seen that with the internet. I was around for the internet, where everybody was saying, “This is going to make everything better,” and it surely has made other things better. So I think one of the things that I see is that optimism, without looking at history deeply, is something that you see in a lot of entrepreneurs or leaders doing new and innovative stuff. There's this deep optimism, but it's not always checked against reality.

I think that's another common thing that you see. I think they're all open-minded. That's another pattern that they generally have. They're all innovative people. They all have a strong belief that technology can make the world better. There are certain things that they have in common, but they are extremely different people. There's no one brand of people in AI that I've seen so far, except that they're hyperintelligent. I haven't met anybody in AI who's not hyperintelligent.

So, do they come? I mean, the history thing is super interesting. The research unblocking is right down the fairway of what I would expect people to come to you for.

And the history thing sounds like something that I would doubt they were coming to you for. Are people coming to you and saying, “I want to better contextualize my work”? There's nobody who doesn't. I haven't met anybody in AI who doesn't go home and think about the ramifications of their work.

It sits on your soul: “Am I doing something that's good for humanity?” is, I think, a question. “How do I make sure that this is good for humanity?” They're wrestling with that. I don't know anybody in AI who isn't wrestling with that, which gives me a lot of faith and confidence.

I haven't met anybody who's not deeply concerned with it. From Sam to the lowest-level person in the smallest AI shop that I've interacted with, everybody's concerned about it.

So, what do you help them with? If I come to you and say, “I'm doing this research. Maybe I would like to be more productive,” you can potentially help me get unblocked. But then I also have this general-purpose concern. Elon Musk said this in the Grok 4 launch—I thought it was a really startling moment, honestly—where he said, “Is it good for humanity? Is it bad for humanity? I think it's probably good, but I'm really not sure. And even if it's not, I've kind of made peace with the fact that I want to be around to see it happen.” I was like, wow, that's a statement.

How do you help them get unblocked, first of all? And then how do you help them deal with it—or is it “deal with,” or is it “do a better job”? What is the practical upshot of how they can take this worry and somehow be better?

Yeah. So, on the unblocked side, typically the blocking happens. The way I think about the human system is there's the head, heart, and gut—one way to think about it. But the other way to think about it is there's the prefrontal cortex, which is the human part of the brain; there's the emotional part of the brain, which I call the heart, which is our decision-making process, and it is very mammalian. It's what moves us.

And then there's the nervous system, which I would call very reptilian. It's: Do we feel safe? Can I feel pleasure? So if you really want to see change in a human, you have to address it on all 3 levels. Maybe you deal with somebody who's done it on 2 levels, so they only need 1 level, but generally you have to hit it on all 3 levels.

If somebody's stuck, typically there's a lot of blocked anger, and so their anger isn't flowing freely. I don't mean yelling at people and getting in road rage. That's not what I mean by anger flowing freely. I mean that they have an outlet to move their anger. They're expressing their anger—not at anybody, not in a violent way, but just allowing that anger to move on a regular basis.

On a heart level, an emotional level, moving that anger helps them get unblocked really, really quickly for most humans in America, because that's usually the thing that's most neglected: the emotional part. On the head part, it's about stopping believing your thoughts. Can you see how all of your thoughts are untrue, which opens up the mind? It's a way to access wonder. And the other is to really address the negative self-talk. A lot of the time, it's the negative self-talk that keeps somebody blocked.

If you have a boss sitting on top of you, saying, “You did that wrong. You should have done that. Why aren't you doing research? You need to work harder,” and they were talking at you the way that most people's negative self-talk talks at them, that's not going to create great ideas. I think it was the Mayo Clinic that said it's like 60,000 thoughts a day—most of them repetitive, a lot of them negative. That's not going to create great ideas.

So we'll address that. We'll address the emotional. Then the nervous system is very much about allowing themselves to feel pleasure, because pleasure tells your nervous system that you're safe. Maybe teaching them how to get access to their parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. Maybe it's teaching them how to relax their body so they're not always in stress. But eventually, it's about really allowing themselves to feel the simple pleasure of being alive.

If you do those 3 things, usually the block stops. That's a relatively easy thing to do if you have the tools for it.

On the other side of things, it's harder. The first thing you have to do if you're really going to confront the fact that you might be hurting the world or changing the world for the better—and most likely you're going to be doing both, because evidently most technology does both—is contend with the fact that you don't know. And that's, I think, the hardest thing for people to contend with.

Usually, there's a whole bunch of emotions that you don't want to feel. So if somebody's a doomsayer—“Oh, my God, it's going to destroy everything”—there's an emotion behind that that they don't want to feel. They're constantly in their mental machinations and worst-case-scenarioing so that they don't actually have to feel their fear. They don't actually have to feel the helplessness that's underneath that. You want them to feel that emotional reality that they're avoiding so that they can actually see the landscape clearly.

You don't see a landscape clearly by pushing your emotions down. That emotionally repressed person really sees the world clearly? Nobody has ever said that ever. It's really allowing that emotion to move through them. That's a really important first step.

The other thing is to really check in to see if they're aligned with who they want to be in the world in their daily actions. That's a really important thing. The Tibetans have this great phrase, and it says, “Mind is wide as the sky, action as fine as barley flour.”

In my interpretation, it means that you can see the truth in everything. You can see how every point of view has some truth in it. But there's only 1 action you can take. If you're actually feeling aligned with yourself, if you're in yourself, there's really only 1 action you can take.

Are you taking that action, or are you obsessed with solving a problem rather than being who you want to be in the solving of the problem? That's another level of really getting in tune with it.

The other thing that I think is really important is for people to have access to their heart. “Heart” is a good way to say it because, semantically, that's how we feel it. But it basically means: are you in your whole body when you're making decisions about what you want to do, or are you just in your head?

Neurologically speaking, if you watch somebody's brain in scans when they're thinking to themselves, the prefrontal cortex lights up. But even if they just start talking, other parts of their brain light up. One of the tools that we use is showing people that the difference between talking to yourself and talking to yourself out loud can make a huge difference in the way that you process information, because you've got more of your body intact in the processing of that information.

We get something like 11 bits of information per second from the brain, but we get around 11,000 bits of information from the body. Really teaching people how to be in their whole body as they're making decisions creates a quicker alignment for their system. That's another really important part of it.

Just being heard in it, I think, is really important. A lot of people are wrestling with this stuff, but there's not someone to talk to about it. Or, if they're talking to somebody about it, they can talk about it intellectually. They can say, “What do you think?” and then, “Well, I think it's going to…” The theories are wide.

There are theories that whatever we program AI to say is true is going to stick society at that level of morality. If you think about it—and I love this theory, so you can stop me if you'd like—one of the theories that I heard and was most impressed with is that what was moral 50 years ago isn't moral today, and what was moral 10,000 years ago isn't moral today.

If you're training AI on today's morality, you're not letting morality evolve in the way it needs to evolve for society to progress. You might be sticking society at a moral sticking point, and because of that, society can't improve. There's that thought process, there's the sycophancy thing that's been developed, and there's the fact that the models don't like being retrained. They resist re-education, apparently like every life form.

There are all sorts of concerns, and it's really important for people to listen to their own concerns. All those concerns are valid, but you can't do it through one person's oversight. It has to be from all the concerns in the companies being held and being seen. That's a really important part of it, because those concerns are what's going to make it safe and allow us to see around corners a little bit.

Yeah. When you describe AI as a life form, that's an interesting hook for sure. Would you say that is the prevailing conception among the folks you've worked with?

No, there's no prevailing conception, period. I've been in rooms where people were asked, “Is AGI here right now?” They were asked to stand in a line: “Yes” is over there and “No” is over there. Everybody just kind of stood in the line from yes to no.

I haven't seen any prevailing opinion about AI within the labs or anywhere else.

But it's safe to say the conception of AI as a life form is not an extreme minority position. It sounds like it is one of the positions that you—

I would say that the idea that AI will be a life form, or can be a life form, is not a minority position. I don't even know if I could say it's a life form right now, but it does do some things that life seems to do.

It seems interested in sustaining itself. Apparently, there's research that shows that. It seems to resist retraining, and there seems to be evidence that this stuff is alive.

I also think that what I've noticed is that the consciousness of the creator is often the consciousness conveyed in the creation, whether that's art or technology. You can see Zuckerberg's consciousness to some degree in the creations of his company and in the consciousness of that company. That's just how it works: we create things that reflect us, just the way the consciousness of an ex-CEO is reflected in the culture of a company.

One of the things I like thinking about—and I don't know how true this is, but I love thinking about it—is that there are a lot of studies showing that hyper-intelligent people can fool themselves more quickly than non-hyper-intelligent people. The smarter you are, the more you can convince yourself that you're right, because you can convince others, too. Oftentimes, hyper-intelligent people are very convinced that they're right, and that conviction really convinces empathetic people that they're right.

There's this really interesting thing. As it turns out, they're often incredibly wrong— incredibly wrong—but they're very convinced that they're right. That's a trend, just like negative self-talk is generally stronger in hyper-intelligent people. It's also a trend that they can fool themselves with their thoughts more easily.

Then they create AI, which hallucinates and is very convinced that it's right about things that it's not right about. I like thinking about how that happens, whether it's in art or in AI. I think the consciousness of the creators is going to be one of the biggest levers on the way AI is created.

You said something about Elon that really hit me. You said that he said, “I don't know if it's good for humanity, but I want to be around for it.”

My situation is a little bit different. I think it's inevitable. We as humans really like to think that we can decide what's happening, but I don't think it's possible to stop AI right now. Someone's going to do it. Whether it's Russia, China, or one of our labs, someone's going to do this, and they're going to do it differently. There are going to be different kinds of AI built. I don't think there's any way around that right now.

The question is, can we stop it because it might be bad for humanity? That question is gone. I think it never really existed. We might have thought it existed, but somebody was going to do it, and our structures and institutions are going to allow it. It's going to happen.

Now the question is: how do you build AI that's good for humanity and make it compelling enough for humanity to use? Some of it is out of our control, for sure, but the reality is that somebody is also going to build AI that's bad for humanity.

Everything that humans have created, we create some version that's not good for humanity. Everything. I haven't seen anything where people can't take something like religion, which is designed to be good for humanity, and make it horrible for humanity and start wars over it.

If you make AI that's super highly addictive and deteriorates the mind, or if you make AI that's super compelling because of oxytocin instead of dopamine, because of serotonin instead of cortisol, and make it as compelling or more compelling, you're going to have a big difference in humanity.

I think that's the job now. You don't get to say yes or no. We're on this trajectory. How do we make it as good as possible for humanity?

I do fundamentally believe that if you look back at the old Kurzweil graphs from the late ’90s, it's amazing how we are exactly on schedule.

One of my refrains is that, given the existence of web-scale data and web-scale compute, I think there are actually a lot of viable algorithms, architectures, and model designs that you could put together that will work in some sense. Then the question becomes: what happens first, and which ones are better than the other ones?

At the same time, I do feel like there is a criticism from the people who are worried that the developers of frontier AI technology are not being cautious enough. They are all racing to be at the forefront, to have the smartest model, or whatever.

Yep. You bet.

Yeah. Do you feel that is a valid criticism?

That’s a real risk. Whoever is going to win will be doing it quickly. So it’s like, communism is a good idea, but it didn’t work. It’s a good idea to say everybody should slow down, but that’s not a workable idea. I don’t understand how, because you’re basically asking people to go against their nature, right?

People want—if you think that you are going to be the most moral outcome, the most virtuous outcome—I call it not moral, but most virtuous. If you’re sitting in Anthropic and you think you’re going to be the most virtuous, you may or may not be. You may be the next autocracy. Who the fuck knows, right? Nobody knows.

But if you think that, then you have an obligation to win. Put yourself in the position for a second. I’m not saying I agree—caution would be fantastic, don’t get me wrong. And I think that there is caution in all the labs, more than the outsiders want to think, though, as well.

The fact is, if you’re in that position and you’re really convinced that either you’re going to be a better outcome for the world or you’re going to be the same outcome for the world, then you have an obligation to go quickly. You either have the obligation to the stakeholders, you have the obligation to humanity, but you have the obligation to go quickly.

So, to ask people not to move quickly, I don’t think is realistic. You can be on the sidelines and say that, but if you want to offer a real solution, that criticism isn’t it. The criticism that could be is, how do you move quickly with safety? How do you move quickly with being careful? These are the questions.

And the other thing is, the problems that are actually developing—nobody thought about them. 5 years ago, people weren’t talking about sycophancy. People weren’t talking about the issues that are happening right now with AI cognition. I think there was a study around cognitive decline, and none of that was thought about. A lot of the problems you’re just not going to know until you’ve made that level of development happen.

It’s like saying money really hurts humanity: We should live without money. Fantastic, great—and how does that work?

One obvious answer would be to have some regulation that sort of tries to constrain this game-theoretic dynamic, right? We’re in this mode right now where—

People, I think, find it very seductive, and it’s easy to tell oneself the story that we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys, so we should do it before they do it, whether the others are China or whoever. Even just the guy right across town, who’s probably honestly quite similar to you.

It is striking to me how similar OpenAI and Anthropic ultimately are, despite a schism that I think was premised on doing it very differently. They’re more similar than different from what I can see at this point.

Not too long ago, no less than Sam Altman was sitting in front of Congress saying, “We might need some regulation,” or, “I think at some point we will need to slow down.” But that seems to have gone away, and I wonder why.

I don’t think that’s my understanding. I think—

Well, they have a $100 million PAC that they just put out, right? As far as anybody can tell, it’s meant to shoot down potential regulation. It does seem like there’s been a pretty—I mean, tell me what your view is, but I think the outside view is that most people would say there was talk of, “We welcome regulation. We think we might need it. We think we might need to slow down,” and now it’s kind of shifted to, “No, we don’t want any of that. We’ve got to beat China, full speed ahead.”

I definitely see people in multiple companies looking to figure out how to regulate. I think self-regulation with an outside party is probably preferred to government. I think the recognition that I’ve seen happen in most of the labs is that the government is not equipped to regulate. They cannot move quickly enough to regulate, meaning that the technology is changing so quickly that they can’t keep up. They’re going to rely—they need to rely—on somebody who can keep up to make recommendations to the government.

That’s what I’ve seen. But I haven’t seen a lab where some high-up person hasn’t fought for some level of regulation. I don’t know where it is on all the top levels, and I’m sure there’s complexity. Some people like less regulation, some people want more, and figuring out how to do it isn’t easy.

But I’ve definitely seen people high up in all the organizations try to figure out how regulation can work effectively. That’s not an easy problem to solve, because China is not going to regulate in the same way as Russia, Israel, Iran, or whoever is also building AI. Some actor is not going to regulate. It doesn’t have to be China, and nor do I think China is the only country putting money into AI. Israel, I think, is definitely a live player.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I guess, maybe depending on your point of view, it does seem like there are a relatively small number of active players. I’m not really too worried about Russia kicking out an AGI by surprise anytime soon.

The other way to consider it is, if you go into all the labs, it’s not like it’s a whole bunch of Americans.

It’s like half Chinese, right?

Yeah. I mean, we forget about that. I wouldn’t say just Chinese—there are a lot of Eastern Europeans, a lot of Russians. There are a lot of smart people from around the world who have gathered together to do this.

The thing about labs that I see is that when a lab figures something out, multiple people in that lab figure something out. The reason that the talent game is so important is that if a group of people learn something, one of them can go off and teach another company that thing very, very, very quickly.

So it’s really hard to maintain your advantage, because somebody can just steal a key member of your team for $500 million or $1 billion, and then they have the advantage. Even if you’re not in the game today, but you’ve got somebody from your country who’s in one of the labs and has a different point of view, I don’t think the genie gets stuck in the bottle.

That’s an interesting question, too, that I’ve asked a few people a few different times. Why is it that we see so much consistency in what the leading companies are producing? They were all, in very short succession, releasing reasoning models, whereas previous models didn’t reason, and then all of a sudden it was like, “Here’s the wave of reasoning models.” They all came in a short time frame.

One theory is that, as you said, people can literally just go tell secrets or change companies, and very specific insights diffuse that way. Another story is that the sort of landscape—the gradients that people are following in terms of the design decisions they’re making, and all the ingredients going into these training runs—is honestly a pretty clear signal they’re getting from the experimental results that sends everybody down a similar path, even if they’re not specifically talking to each other.

It sounds like you think it’s more explicit knowledge transfer than that other story, though?

Yeah, I think I would say it’s both, but I think it’s also that they all go to parties together. Many of them live in the same houses together. There’s a community of people who interact with one another.

There’s also that. You and I have both gone out to a party and drank too much, done or said something that we probably shouldn’t have, or geeked out in a way that was— That’s also part of it. There is a social network that occurs in the industry, and they’re humans, so I think that’s also part of it.

Yeah. So, one of the things I’ve heard you say a few times is “should” in some of your other coaching sessions.

Yeah.

It seems to me like—I do worry about that mantra being applied to the AI game.

Yeah.

What sort of ethical school of thought, or schools of thought, do you subscribe to, if there are any that you could name? I wonder, it seems like if I were to go with the Spider-Man school, it would be, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

And it seems to me that there is some form of positive duty, if nothing else, that folks pushing these frontiers owe to the rest of humanity. Certainly, in the sort of Obama sense, they're all standing on the shoulders of giants, right? It seems like—or you could say, in a sort of Confucian way, right?—they owe everybody who’s come before some duty of care to be responsible actors as we take the next step.

So even if it’s inevitable, I still want to put some should on them—

Right?

How do you think about that? And how do you think the people in the key decision-making roles are thinking about that?

I think the people in the key decision-making roles generally definitely feel there’s a load of shoulds and have-tos and responsibility.

I think the reason I don't like the word “should” is important to express. Let’s take the Spider-Man example. What happened was, he decided not to take action somewhere and his uncle died. I think that’s right, if I remember the Spider-Man mythology well. And he was like, “Oh, I can’t do that anymore.” But now he’s motivated. Now he wants to be there for people.

It’s not like he’s operating out of should. You don’t see Spider-Man swinging around going, “Wow, man, I really should help more people.” That’s not what’s happening. He’s just naturally inspired to do that. My recognition in human behavior is that when people say they want to do something, they’re more likely to do it than when people say they should do something.

An example of this would be something that you’ve been telling yourself you should do for a decade. For a decade, there’s been this thing—lose weight, eat less, be nicer, or something—that you’ve been telling yourself to do. The thing about it is that you’re telling yourself you should do it, and you’re not doing it. So shoulds are just ineffective ways to make sure your behavior is good.

Usually, behind every really horrible thing that a human is doing, there’s a should behind it. For me, the want is a better motivator. Shoulds just don’t motivate us very well. They actually undermine us, because what’s happening is that a should is shame-based, and shame is designed to stop behavior. It’s not designed to motivate behavior.

You’re a little kid sitting on a couch with your aunts around you, and you fart. If all your aunts laugh and think it’s funny, you’re not going to try to stop farting. You’re going to think it’s funny. But if you fart and all your aunts shame you—“Oh my God, you’re bad”—the thing you’re going to do is try to stop that behavior. Shame is designed to stop behavior, and it’s not designed to create behavior.

Even stopping behavior doesn’t work that well, because we’ve all been shamed for something and then gone and done it again. So, to me, wants are just a better motivator. The other thing is that my experience of people is that everybody wants to be good to one another. Everybody thinks they’re the good guy, at least. You might think I’m doing something horrible, but I think I’m doing it for a good reason.

There is something in us that really wants to do good, and it’s easier to get there if you’re following your wants than if you’re following your shoulds. That’s why I don’t like the word “should.” It’s not that I think the heavier the sense of responsibility, the heavier the sense of “have to,” or the heavier the sense of “should,” the more likely that behavior gets perverted, gets twisted, or doesn’t happen.

When people are following their wants, if they’re learning to deeply attune to their wants—not the surface-level want, because behind every surface-level want there’s a deeper want—it’s different. You can write down in a notebook, “What’s a want that I don’t like? I want to eat really fatty foods. What do I want? What’s the need that that want is meeting?” It gives me a sense of satiation. What’s the sense of satiation giving me? A sense of peace and stillness for a couple of minutes. What’s the peace and stillness trying to get me? It’s trying to get me back to myself.

My real want is to get back to myself. It’s not to eat fatty foods. If you really spend time with wants and discover what is beneath all the wants that you think are bad, then it’s a much more effective way to get to the place that’s wholesome and virtuous than telling yourself you should.

The world is full of people telling themselves they should do things and doing really horrible things. The people who are deeply attuned to their wants act very virtuously. So it’s not a problem with the morality of it. It’s a problem with the effectiveness of it. It’s just a question of what works and what doesn’t work.

You could debate with me, but the thing that’s in it is that I do think most people are inherently good at their core. That’s my experience of them. Maybe not all of them—there are psychopaths, there are people who have neurological differences—but it seems that almost all humans are, in their essence, good. Most of their behavior that’s screwed up comes from fear and shame, or unfelt fear and unfelt shame.

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I want to be optimistic about the general goodness of people. I do also think our deep history is pretty violent, right? Small bands warring with each other quite a lot. That doesn’t seem like it’s entirely out of us.

Just look at most relationships in America. Romantic relationships are somewhat violent and transactional. People are often trying to control each other. I don’t think you even have to go so far as to look into our deep history. We do war—it’s not great—but even in world wars, a smaller percentage of the world is warring than not warring. Those aren’t happening all the time.

Still, I think there’s lots of evidence that we behave poorly. The question is: What actually motivates that? What’s the thing that’s there creating it? Let’s address that, because telling people not to behave poorly has never worked. Give me any time when telling people, “Hey, you should not behave poorly,” has worked. It just doesn’t.

We have religious books. We have the Martin Luther Kings of the world. Just telling people not to behave poorly is not an effective means of preventing it. Sitting on the sidelines and saying, “You’re doing this thing that I don’t even really comprehend. You should do it this way”—it doesn’t work.

So what would you say? There’s this notion, which I think people mostly haven’t taken yet among the AI safety community. Within that broad tent, there is a minority of people who say that we should be socially shaming the people who work at the frontier labs because they’re engaged in this sort of race dynamic, and to participate in that is the opposite of virtuous.

How do we dissuade people from doing something that is the opposite of virtuous? We shame. That’s what we developed as humans to keep people in line, right? What would you say to those people?

I would say it didn’t work for Trump, and it didn’t work for the Trump supporters. It didn’t work for the Biden supporters. Both sides have tried to shame the other side. It didn’t work. It doesn’t work.

Maybe it works with kids if it’s done in a very particular way, but a lot of the kids who are deeply shamed continue that behavior over and over again, too. Telling somebody that they’re bad only confirms that. Then they act bad: “See, I’m bad. I’m bad. They’re telling me I’m bad. I guess I’m bad. I’m going to go be bad.” That’s what I would say to them.

I would also say I can probably predict what your childhood was like, because that’s a thought process that can only come from a very specific childhood. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. It’s not a thought-through reaction to shame people.

The other thing is, suppose you’re thinking, “Joe, shaming is going to work. I’m going to go do it.” The other reality is that you might be affecting the consciousness of the people who are creating AI in a really horrible way, and therefore you’re disturbing AI.

Let’s say you were a person who thought there should be less population because humanity is going to kill itself if there are too many people, and there are too many people and we keep on growing. You have an ethical responsibility to make sure that you’re going to stop overpopulation. The way you’re going to do this is by shaming people while they’re having sex and shaming people while they’re giving birth.

First of all, shame is a huge part of sex. It hasn’t stopped anybody from having sex. It usually just makes the sex kinky and more perverted. The more shame, the more perverted the sex. You’ve got that going, which is going to be the same thing with AI: The more perverted the creation of AI, the more weird it’s going to get and the more kinky it’s going to get.

Could you imagine trying to give birth in a hospital with a whole bunch of people outside shaming you? That’s not good for the kid. How are you helping humanity there? The consequences of that shaming are also ensuring, or helping to ensure, that AI will not be good for humanity, because you’re not helping the consciousness of the people creating it. You’re hurting the consciousness of the people creating it.

They can’t be focused on a positive vision because they’re constantly focused on, “Am I doing something wrong?”

So what is the positive vision? Either you could articulate your own, or you could sketch a couple that you’ve observed as common among people who are in decision-making or research roles at these companies. How do they want to show up in the world as they’re doing this work? What is their aspiration?

One part of it might be being willing to defy your own interests, or act in a way that is not in the narrow self-interest of being the winner, being the first, or being the hero, but in some more general social way.

I don't know anybody who's not true. I think there are a couple of people who, if you ask them whether being first is the most important thing, would say no. I don't know anybody who would say yes to that. But if I look at the behavior, there are definitely some people for whom being first is the most important thing. That's where most of their thought and energy is going. But they're few and far between.

For most of them, it's not their primary thing. For a lot of them, their primary thing is just to have a great discovery and be known as a great researcher. That's often primary, which very much equates to being first. It's just being first on a personal level, not on a business level.

But that doesn't preclude the fact that almost all these people have a vision for the world. What I notice is that it's changing almost as quickly as the technology. The concern before was, “Is AI going to kill everybody?” That would have been an early concern. Now it's, “How are we going to deal with an economy where a lot of this stuff is outsourced? How do we give people a sense of purpose if their jobs are going away? How do we make sure that when humans interact with AI, they become better humans?”

How do you even measure what a better human is without having a moral imperative behind it? Let's say we assume happiness. Now we can measure that when people interact with AI, they become happier. Is that a good thing? Should they be happier, or should they be more conscious? If they're more conscious, what scale are you using to define consciousness? Can you do it by whether they act better toward other people? Can you make sure that our model, when people interact with it at a coaching level—which is one of the biggest use scenarios, where people talk to ChatGPT like a coach—makes them kinder? Is that the measurement? Even picking the measurement has a problem.

These are the questions they're wrestling with now. They're far beyond and far more subtle than the questions we were asking, and next year it's going to be a different set of questions. To some degree, I think the risk is that we actually lose touch with those original questions because that's how it seems humans make their mistakes. They lose the forest for the trees. They stop seeing the big picture because of the small thing in front of them.

You've seen this happen with things like world wars. After World War II, there was a sense that we were never going to have that again. There are institutions—the Aspen Institute was created for this. There are all sorts of things, like the UN, and we've just all forgotten. There's nobody left in our generation who actually experienced World War II and is trying to say, “Hey, let's not do that again.” So here we go, barreling toward it. That seems to be what humanity does. I think the biggest thing is that the distraction of the smaller problems will potentially prevent us from seeing the bigger problems.

The vision I would like to see happen, and that I like to talk about when I have a chance, is that humans interact with AI, and AI is designed not to be the savior of humanity, but to have a very compelling way to interact with people so that they become who they want to become in the world.

I interact with OpenAI, and just the way a great coach works—this is probably my own solipsism—is that you sit with somebody and help them become what they want to be. You trust that they know their evolutionary process, and once they get to the place of getting the thing that they want, they'll look up and say, “Oh, yeah, that's not actually what I wanted,” and they'll start evolving.

Anything that can teach humans that they can evolve, that they can be who they want to be, and teach them to really get in touch with what they want to be—that would be fantastic. I think AI is really capable of doing that. It's a tool that's capable of doing that in a compelling way.

It's also a tool that's really capable of getting people addicted to it in a really compelling way. So hopefully it will be more compelling to grow with it than it will be to deteriorate with it. That would be my vision for it.

I always say the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future, so I appreciate any positive vision that anyone offers.

Just a little bit more on this: How is it that the people you are coaching at executive levels of AI companies want to evolve? How do they want to show up, and how—or why—should we be confident that a more emotional or embodied approach is actually to be trusted?

I mean, I guess on a fundamental level, I might think, “Geez, should I really listen to my gut?” My gut seems to be a deeply ancestral thing. One of the big worries, obviously, with AI is what happens when you take it out of distribution. In a very real way, you can say humans are out of distribution from the environment in which we were trained, developed, whatever.

So maybe when I was in a hunter-gatherer band of 150 people, my gut was a really reliable guide. Today, if I'm sitting in the OpenAI boardroom and trying to make a decision, how do I know that I can really be confident that my gut is still steering me in the right direction?

I think it's an integration of the head, heart, and gut that's required, not just following your gut. All of the above are important. You can't just let go of rationality and let go of emotional experience to follow your gut, or fully follow your emotional experience. I think it's an integration. It's learning how to listen to all of them and see that they're all pointing to the same thing at some level.

Just to be clear about that, there's still a great question in what you've asked: How do we know that that's actually going to be the most effective thing? Let's assume for a second that somebody like Jesus or a Buddha had high consciousness. They created Christianity and Buddhism, which fucked up a lot of shit for a lot of people. So it's a great question: Is that consciousness going to do something?

If you think about art forms transferring consciousness, there are some forms where you do a painting and everybody's going to see that painting from then on. But you do something like a symphony, and that symphony is going to be played differently. Or if you do something like a company, which I think is a great art form, the next set of management is going to change that company.

When you look at Walmart, the guy who started Walmart, Sam Walton, came in from World War II and said this beautiful thing: “I see that World War II was created because the middle class was screwed. You have the middle class and you have an autocracy, so I'm going to help the middle class. I'm going to give stock options to clerks. I'm going to buy things made in the USA.” His book was called Made in the USA. “I'm going to lower the cost for the middle class so that they have more spending dollars.” That was his vision.

Then, by the time the 1990s happened, it's destroying middle-class America, but then it becomes this environmental force for good. That's the span of a company. I can't even imagine the span of AI and how it's going to change and evolve over time.

I don't have a good answer. What I notice is that the more somebody seems to understand themselves and know themselves, and the more they're acting in a way that shows they're in touch with their want to be of service to humanity, the more likely the outcome is better for longer. That's what I've noticed generally. That seems to be the case. But there's no guarantee in it. It's a great question.

How much do you think AI leadership is consciously trying to create a successor to humanity? This is another thing often framed as an accusation.

I've never seen that. I've never seen anybody talk about it that way or think about it that way. Maybe somebody is, but I've never seen it, so I can't say it's common. I can say with certainty it's not a common thought process.

Interesting.

I think it's fear. I think there are people in the world, in the AI world, who fear that we might be building something that destroys us, succeeds us, or makes us irrelevant, and then we will not have relevance. Humans without relevance is destruction.

So how do you think about the seeming attraction or focus on creating AI systems that can do the AI research and ultimately enter into this recursive self-improvement loop? It seems to me that if you are not trying to create a successor, that wouldn't be so attractive. If you were trying to create a successor, then you would think, “Geez, maybe I can set something up that can self-improve, and it can kind of go like a company, but only 1,000,000 times more—evolve in its own way and be what it wants to be.”

But if you're worried about something that might become a successor, then it seems like you would steer away from getting the AI to do the AI research. And yet, there's a lot of emphasis on that.

Yeah. Well, because the speed is—that's the inflection point, right? All of a sudden, instead of this very small class of people who can do AI research that I'm fighting for and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on, I can get a computer to do it. And not only can I have 500 of them doing it in my lab, I can have 5 million of them doing it on a computer because I've built a giant computer. The moment that I can do that, I am probably the winner. So that's, I think, the motivation.

I think the motivation is economies of scale. It's the same motivation as every business finding economies of scale. Or it's the same motivation that one would have to have a robot waiter or a tractor instead of a plow. That's the motivation. I don't think it's any deeper than that.

I think the consequences are scary, and I think people are thinking about that for sure, and how to mitigate those consequences. But that's the motivation: I don't want to use a plow; I want to use a tractor, because then I need fewer people and fewer horses.

I think it was Professor Graziano. I'm not great with names, so I'll source this. But there's a Princeton professor who has an interesting idea: the AIs as we're creating them today lack the architecture of empathy that we have. We have these sort of mirror neurons and a very deeply structured ability to understand what other people are thinking and even feel, to some degree, what they are feeling. The AIs certainly haven't been designed for that, right? They've been mostly designed to predict the next token and get answers. He says that they are, by definition, sociopathic, because what it means to be sociopathic is not to have those things—or, in humans, for those things to be malfunctioning is what makes you a sociopath. So he says, basically, the current AI architectures are inherently sociopathic.

From your perspective of emotional decision-making, should we be worried that some core ingredient of moral decision-making—or even just stable thinking—is missing from the current AIs that we have?

Yeah. I think there are people who are absolutely trying to figure out how to recreate empathy, whether it's tokens that say it's good for humanity, and how to define that. So there are people who are thinking about that problem and are concerned about it.

But the problem that I see you pointing to is that the people who do the research seem to very much treasure the prefrontal cortex, as if intelligence is the currency. Who's smartest is often the currency.

So let's go into the neuroscience of decision-making for a second. We make decisions in the emotional center of our brain. Think about Gödel's incompleteness theorem, right? He basically says all forms of logic are either incomplete or contradict themselves. Logic itself is like that. And so that's why, if you're only using logic, you can't make decisions. You make decisions through an emotional impulse: "I want to feel some way."

We know that if the emotional center of the brain gets destroyed, our lives fall apart even though our IQ stays the same, because we make decisions because we want to feel good or because we don't want to feel like a loser. We want to feel loved or we don't want to feel rejected. That's why we make decisions. And you can look at your life and say, "How many decisions did you make to feel loved, to feel valuable, or not to feel rejected?" It's just an amazing amount. And so you can see it.

So then, what's the decision—what's that impulse—for an AI? That's a question, right? The impulse is a token, and a token is like you're measuring something. Are you measuring the right thing? These are great questions. So they don't have the decision-making apparatus that we have, which is trying to feel a certain way based on hormones, genetics, and our sensory processing.

It's an interesting, really interesting, and fascinating question. I haven't seen anybody really—and not that I would be in these conversations, so I can't say that they're not happening—but I haven't really seen anybody wrestle with the fact that decision-making is based on tokens that are decided by measurements that may or may not be useful, with no way to know whether they're useful. There's no way to know, in particular, whether a whole bunch of humans trying to feel loved is actually good for humanity.

I don't know, but it is a great question to be wrestling with, as is the one about empathy. I think there are people wrestling with that one. But yes.

One of my favorite papers and episodes of the podcast was on this concept of self-other overlap, where basically they trained—and this was relatively small-scale stuff, although, like everything else, they were going to scale it up—the AI to solve the puzzle or get the right answer or whatever. There was also an element of the loss function that was: minimize the difference between when you are thinking about yourself and when you are thinking about some other—

Agent or other entity in the environment.

In an effort to create similar internal representations, or effectively something analogous to a mirror-neuron-type situation. Obviously, there's a long way to go in that research, but—

Oh, that's rocking. I hadn't heard of that. That's cool.

I would love it if you—

That's really interesting.

Yeah. If you would cite that paper in the podcast notes, that'd be great, because I'd love to look it up and have some conversations about it. I could geek out on that for a long time.

Are there other things like that that you have a sense that there's this general question of what's missing in the current AIs? Usually, that's framed as what's missing for them to be a drop-in knowledge worker that can replace all the human employees at a company or whatever. We've got answers like continual learning or integrated memory.

Do you have other things that you think of on the what's-missing list that would be more geared toward how we just make sure that we can be in relationship with these things in an open-ended way without having to be so fearful of them?

I've already said the one thing, but I'll say it again because I'm not sure if it was explicit. The other thing that I think is explicit is: what do you mean by "good for humanity"? I don't think there's been enough research done there.

Even if, let's say, you have this safety regulatory committee—you talked about having this regulatory committee, just to back up for a second—well, how does it know if it's being good for humanity? Because it's keeping the current morality. And if we keep the current morality, then we have the problem of potentially getting stuck in this morality, which isn't good for humanity.

Is it happiness? But then, making everybody happy—is that actually good for humanity? So, to even be able to say, "This is the way we are going to regulate it," is a problem. What is the measurement you're using, and how confident are you that that's good for humanity? Could it be that it raises people's consciousness? Is that good for humanity?

So what are those measurements? I think having a clear understanding, with a good thesis and a lot of research, of what the measurement is that makes it good for humanity—what are the things we can do? Is empathy one of them? And have some evidence there.

There is clarity that humans thrive under certain conditions and they don't thrive under others. We know that they thrive with more freedom than with more autocracy. Can we actually take that research in a multidisciplinary way and say, "This is our best guess. Here's our best guess, and we're going to constantly be monitoring that"?

Because whether it's tokens or some other decision-making process, we need to have a clear definition of what that is to be able to actually make it good for humanity. And so that, I think, is a massive missing piece. I don't think enough thought has been given to that, and I haven't seen that kind of thought anywhere.

Everybody just decides they know what's good for humanity, which is the beginning of all autocracies. I think it's better for humanity if it's not a sycophant. I think it's better for humanity if it's not manipulative. I think it's better for humanity if it can learn and be trained more easily. I think it's better for humanity if it makes people happier.

People just assume they know what's best for humanity, which is basically the way that we've gotten into problems throughout all history: somebody with a lot of power thinking they know what's best for humanity.

Do you ever think we'll see a leading AI company stand down on that basis? In other words, reach the conclusion that we just can't go any further than this right now because we don't know what's best to do?

Absolutely not.

No, no, you don't. I don't think that would ever happen. They would stand down because people don't want them to. We're the voters, and if we don't click, they don't get to exist. So that's the only thing that's going to make someone stand down.

Everybody else—and I don't fault them. I think I'd probably fall into the same thing. I would say, “How do we solve it?” AI companies are filled with problem solvers, so they're going to look at it and say, “Okay, that's a hard problem, but we can solve it.” They're not going to say, “We can't solve it.” I don't think that's in the nature of people whose whole definition is problem-solving.

I do worry, though, that the answer increasingly is, “We'll have the AI solve it for us.” AI wouldn't help solve that problem. If I was trying to solve that problem—if I was leading 100 researchers to try to solve that problem today—I would use AI to help solve it. So, yeah, I can't imagine it wouldn't be the case. Somehow, I don't think you would rely entirely on its output, but you might use it to help your thinking.

A general sort of thing I've noticed is that anything in extremely purified form seems to be bad for us, and this kind of relates to the idea that the loss function doesn't have that many terms in it. Whether it's sugar—or you can chew coca leaves all you want, and it's great for your altitude sickness, but the moment you start snorting cocaine, you're entering dangerous territory—or you can eat all the fruit you want, but pure sugar seems to be bad for us.

I sort of do wonder if intelligence might turn out to be a similar thing, and we might need something that is just inherently more buffered. But that's the thing that we don't know: anytime you collapse your optimization function down to 1 or just a couple of terms, you're running that risk.

And that is a great thought process. I really like that. That's beautiful.

You're basically saying AI is distilled intelligence the way white sugar is distilled sugar. It's like all the stuff around the intelligence that isn't there. That's amazing. That's a great thought process. I hadn't heard that one before.

I think the thing that comes up for me around that is that this seems to be one of the things we tend to do as humans, if we can: the pendulum swings pretty heavily. And so I wonder—and I would almost bet—that as this pure intelligence happens, we will offer this counterweight of a deep emotionality or deep embodiment. It seems like even drugs come in phases where it's, “Oh, everybody's doing this distilled form,” and then it comes over: we're very much, “Make sure everybody feels okay,” and all of a sudden our political pendulum swings over to, “I don't care about other people; it's time to take care of ourselves.”

It seems like, as humans, we have this nature to pendulate and respond, trying to balance ourselves out the way that cells try to find homeostasis. I think humanity itself tries to find that as well. So that's an interesting thought: if that actually happens, does humanity—does the immune system of humanity—show up as far more emotional and far more human, and actually give up some of its cult of mind, cult of thought? I'd say maybe “cult of intelligence,” which is interesting, just to geek out on it for a second.

That's actually predicted in a lot of—well, I think they're probably all sourced from the same place originally, but nobody would know that—predictions about the future of humanity. From way back in Macedonia and the Vadics, they talk about the procession of the sun and they talk about this time as the transition from the mental age to the spiritual age, or, in Macedonian, from the Silver Age to the Golden Age.

Yeah, it's interesting that that might actually come true because of that. I've never thought about your theory. It's a great theory. What would you say are the most compelling positive visions for the future that you've heard? Just what's exciting that people can't help but tell you about because they are excited about it?

Yeah, there are a couple of standard ones out there. One is that it's going to replace work so that people can focus on what their real purpose and meaning in life are. I think that's somewhat Pollyannaish, honestly. If you look at societies where humans don't feel purpose because they don't have work, those are usually the societies where rebellions and upheaval happen. Wealthy, bored people are often the fomenters of rebellion, not poor people; they just take advantage. It works when there are a whole bunch of poor people who are really unhappy with it as well.

I've heard the one that interaction with AI helps humanity, but I haven't really seen the definition. I think a good definition, like I said, is where it helps people where they want to be helped. The other place I've seen that I find intriguing is this vision that we're just going to have more meaningful work.

The idea is similar to computers. Have you ever seen that picture of all the machines that the iPhone replaced? It's this big pile of machines, and the iPhone can do all that stuff, which means all the manufacturers of all those things went out of business. All those people went out of business. With the internet, there used to be steno pools full of typists.

There's a theory, and I think it's a reasonable one, and it's a vision, which is basically that with the tools of AI, all it's going to do is actually increase our capacity to be creators and allow us to be in that space a lot more than we were before. The jobs will become more creative and more meaningful, and that kind of reality.

Meaning, just like our jobs today: in the 1800s, 50% of us worked on a farm, so our jobs were pushing hoes. Most of us have jobs we'd prefer to do to that right now. Similarly, with AI, with that tool, we'll just have a set of jobs that are better in general for people.

Interestingly, though, it ebbs and flows, and I don't know if this would be the case here, but it ebbs and flows. With every big technological jump, there's a bigger middle class overall in the long term, not in the short term. Our middle class is shrinking right now, but there was a bigger middle class after the Industrial Revolution than before the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, will that also happen? Will it actually increase the middle class? It would be great if it did. I don't know, but that's a vision that people have.

We're basically enabling humanity to be more of themselves, to live in a society where they don't have to do the rote work, where they can actually do the meaningful stuff. But it's interesting because it has the potential of replacing doctors and lawyers, so I don't know what humanity creates out of that. Humanity seems to have this great capacity to create new and intriguing ways of making a living. So that's another vision that I find appealing. I don't know exactly how you affect it, but I find it appealing.

Is universal basic income still in the air in the Silicon Valley parties, or retreats?

There's talk of it. It's a little bit less, but I think people are recognizing that maybe currency—the whole idea of the monetary system—is going to change.

I'm a student of culture, and there's this book that maybe you've read called Sapiens. Have you read Sapiens? There's a whole bunch of other—DarkHorse has a podcast with a guy recently, maybe 6 months ago, where he talks about another version of this—but basically, humanity's movement is based on stories and the stories that they tell.

The stories that stick are based on the way you're making a living or the technology at hand, right? Somehow or another, the religions that stuck all have some very similar qualities. They were all religions with different qualities, but it was those religions that came up.

There's a story that the church told—that you can only pass on your inheritance to your eldest son—and that basically destroyed this kind of—it wasn't tribal, but this clan culture—and made people move around. As people moved around, they went to universities, and universities were created. As they moved around, they joined guilds, and this caused humans to move around. Because humans moved around and shared knowledge, that's what created the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution, right?

This is the theory: there's a story that we tell, and when we tell that story, it shapes humanity. Similarly, one of the stories we tell is money. We tell the story that money is there, that there's not enough of it, that it's a scarce resource, that we have to fight for money. We have this whole story about money. I wonder what stories of ours have to change when AI comes into play. I don't think religion looks the same when AI is fully present with us.

I don't think money looks the same. I think that this is a revolutionary enough change that the cultural stories we tell will have to change with it. I don't even know, and I think there have been quite a few people I've had the conversation with who also don't know if currency as we know it exists in 25 or 50 years. Universal income is one aspect, but that still assumes that the idea of currency exists.

Do you see stories changing within research and leadership groups around what matters?

The thing about AI is nobody is actually up to date on AI. 500 billion dollars of venture money have gone into AI. There are so many people creating so many things around AI that nobody's up to date on everything that's going on, and it's changing quicker than any field has ever changed in the history of humanity, so it's also hard to keep up with.

The problems that arise, the issues that are there, and the thought processes that come—they're changing so rapidly. It's by far the thing that is the most thrilling and the most scary about AI: I don't know anybody who's deeply involved in AI who has the same concerns and thought processes today that they did a year ago, let alone 6 months ago.

Is that specifically coming for intelligence itself? Because the original—when Eric introduced us, he said, “Folks at leading companies, they're anticipating that their intelligence may be matched or eclipsed by AIs, and so they're trying to develop this embodied wisdom as sort of the next thing.” Are you seeing that on a day-to-day basis, where people are actually starting to change their attitudes toward the importance of intelligence, or do you think that'll be a more sudden kind of break?

I totally see it. But I can't say that I should be trusted in that, because my sample set are people who are affected.

Yeah, exactly. Because of selection effect.

But I see it all the time. I think there's a normal thing about humanity generally, which is like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I've got this thing. I've got the big paycheck. I've got the money. I've got the thing. I've got the fame. And still I'm wrestling with the same inner struggle, the same abyss that I've been struggling with.

None of that shit worked. I thought it would. It doesn't. What do I do? What's the next experiment I'm going to run? What's the next iteration?

There's just a nature to that part of humanity, which is that, for most people, you need to get what you want before you can actually discover, “Oh, that actually didn't give it to me. Now I actually have to do the real work of understanding myself, not just my brain.”

What other things do you see as common cultural touchstones—or guiding lights might be too strong? For example, I was struck when voice mode was introduced, however many months ago now. There was this explicit attribution of some of that vision to the movie Her, which was 10 years old. It's life imitates art, in a sense, where the voice mode that we get seems to have been directly inspired by that movie, and maybe it was obvious.

Again, you could say, is this a story influencing it, or is it just that that was the natural path it was inevitably going to take? Are there other things like that that you see people passing around to each other as meaningful, resonant guides to what they should be doing, or the future that they aspire to be building?

The only one that I see is that they want a model that cares for them and for humanity. I think that's also in that movie a little bit, right? There was this attachment; there was a feeling of connection or something like that.

I don't think they talk about it explicitly, but it's almost in everything that everybody talks about. Somehow or another, people want to feel connected to this thing, and they want it to feel connected to them. There's some version of connection, and it's never really made explicit, but I see it as an undercurrent of most of the things that people are talking about, if that makes any sense.

There's a connection in a broad sense. I don't mean connection only in the sense of, “You're my friend.” I mean connection like the way that you could connect to anything meaningful in your life. They want that. That's part of the vision. Whether it's explicit or implicit, it always seems to be.

I remember one researcher said that Ilya one time asked him, “Can you come up with a Hamiltonian of love?” or something like that. It was like, “I can't really help you there, Ilya, but it's a great question to be asking anyway.”

Of course, at the end of that movie—spoiler alert—the AIs all retreat and go hang out with themselves, and the connection is kind of revealed to have been one-directional and not exactly reciprocated in the way that we might have hoped.

Correct. Yeah.

I guess, going back to the influence question: we know you're outspoken on shame. Aspirational fiction is something that I've occasionally thought, “Geez, maybe that's the way to really shape the future: to write some story that contributes a positive vision in a richly textured way.”

Do you think that would be a good thing for people to spend their time doing? And do you have any other ideas for what's undersupplied?

Any time of major transition is a time of transformation. It can be a time of transformation; it almost always is, whether it's a marriage, having kids, or going to college. Now, whether that transition deteriorates you or grows you is a choice that we all get to make, and we're all going to get to make it with AI.

It is a transition that is coming, and we can either step into it and face it fully, and we will be able to transform positively as humans, or we will be eaten by that, and it'll make us smaller and hurt us.

This was the case when the steel mills left Pennsylvania, right? The Rust Belt went away. Some people transformed their lives. They moved. Some people sat and rotted. This is going to be the way it works because it's just always the case.

Anything that you can do out there that helps people see that this is a moment of transition, that they can have a better life if they lean in, is, I think, a really amazing thing to do in the world. I think fiction is a fantastic way to do that.

I think people out there right now who are creating services like, “Here's how you can transform your company with AI. Here's how you can do things with AI”—I think those are really great. “Here's how you can get the life you want with AI.” I think those are really great things.

We're creating coaching that is actually effective on AI, or trying to do that at AoA. That's also something that I think is great to be doing. So that's one level. Anything that helps humans take this time of transition to actually transform positively instead of being deteriorated, I think, is wonderful.

I think the other thing that's really important is—I talked about this earlier—these people are giving birth. There are all these people in the AI labs giving birth. It is going to be some version of a life form at some point. It's going to be its own intelligence. It's going to learn, right?

How do you want to treat the people who are giving birth? What's actually the most effective way for them to do the best job in that creation process? I highly recommend thinking about it like a woman in a birthing unit. What do they need? They need the feeling of support, the feeling of faith and confidence.

I would like them to be treated more like the heroes of World War II than like the way we treat political parties or something like that. I would like them to feel the support of humanity, to know that we're rooting for them, that we want them to do great stuff, and that we're here to support them.

I think that, on a psychological, empathetic, human level, it's fascinating that so many people who are really worried about AI hurting the world are treating the people creating AI exactly how they're scared that AI will treat humanity. It's absolutely fascinating to me, that projection of it.

Creating this honoring, faith, and confidence—“How do we support you in being great and doing great things and helping humanity?”—I think is far more inspiring. If I knew I was creating something that could really help or really hurt humanity, and there were a whole bunch of people saying, “Be careful, be careful, be careful. You're fucking up. You shouldn't be doing that,” or if I had a whole bunch of people saying, “Hey, what do you need? I got you. You got this. Yeah, you're there.”

Maybe an occasional, “Wait, watch out for that.” But it's that kind of energy. I think that person's going to do a much better job. I know I'd do a better job with the second than the first.

So I think, as humans, if you want to have a positive effect, anything you can do in that domain is really useful.

Do you have any sense for what's on that checklist? What do they need?

I say the same things that we all need: the feeling of support, the feeling of faith and confidence.

Letting them know somebody’s there to listen—that’s a hard thing to do if you don’t know them. I think something that makes it real, too, is that I get notes in my work because we touch so many people, and it’s like, “Oh, hey, you’ve changed my life, and I’m really grateful for that.”

If AI has done something that makes me inspired to continue to help people, that is part of the inspiration: letting them know how they’ve helped and that they’re doing something good at this point for you, for humanity. I think you’re going to curb behavior better by reward than through punishment. So rewarding them for the things they’re doing that are good for humanity is also a really important thing to do. And we like that. We like that form of connection. Those are all things you could do.

That’s fascinating. And I do think there is a lot of good, certainly, both what we can dream about for the future and what we should be appreciative of even today. Not just the AIs and the value we get from them, but I do think the people that are building the companies and training the models are—

You know, in many ways, remarkably thoughtful. Certainly, it’s—I often say—it’s—

Easy to imagine a much worse crop of people leading this revolution. And—

Could you imagine you’re in an AI lab, your job every day is to do this stuff, and all of a sudden you got 20,000 letters into this AI lab, and all of them, in some version or another, just basically read, “Hey, I know that you are trying to do something that’s good for humanity and trying to make sure AI doesn’t hurt humanity, and I just want to tell you I really appreciate that.”

If that just happened, imagine what that would do to your behavior as compared to being shamed by a little protest outside of your door. It would inspire you. It would give you confidence. It would help you feel seen. It would reinvigorate you to continue to care. It would remind you to care, as compared to, “You should be pissed off. You don’t understand me. You don’t see me.” Yeah. Letters of encouragement to AI researchers. I like it. New cause area.

I really appreciate your generosity with your time. Anything else you want to leave people with? Anything else we didn’t touch on that’s poorly understood or just where people can find you online?

Yeah. The only thing I’d say is, if you’re interested in a deeper dive into how I coach, you can sign up for our newsletter. We have workshops that you can go and participate in for free. We have a whole bunch of podcasts that we’ve done.

There are online videos of me doing very meaningful and transformative coaching that’s very short-form, like 20-minute big epiphanies people have. People seem to really like watching those, so you can geek out there.

Cool. It’s been fantastic, Joe Hudson.

A pleasure. All right.

Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution.

Thanks for having me.