How to Succeed in the Age of AI

We have a new technology coming in that's gonna change the world, but it also changes what skills are necessary to be productive. How do you make the most of it? You look at it as, "How do I become more wise? How do I have— how do I be more human in this situation?" Yeah.

Tell me what you mean by wisdom and how does that show up in a new era?

Wisdom at its core is what are the decisions you're making? Are you able to see the patterns behind yourself and others that allow you to make great decisions? Are you able to do the hard thing? Are you able to feel the difficult thing? And I would, to some degree, call wisdom being really good at being human.

Joe, you coach the founders of OpenAI, and we work with a lot of people from Anthropic and DeepMind and all the main AI labs. Yeah. And we've done a lot of talking about AI behind the scenes, and we haven't brought that to the podcast yet.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'd really love to have a conversation about AI.

I think this is a really good time to do that because it's a— we're raising AI. Humanity right now is raising AI, and in some ways, like, AI is now raising us. And so I think this would be a very cool conversation to have.

Yeah, great. Let's do it. So how do you see AI right now? Let's just start very general.

Yeah.

What is it that we're dealing with on a societal scale right now?

Yeah, there's a couple ways I see it. The first way that I see it is We have a new technology coming in, a new tool, a new technology that's coming in that's gonna change the world. This we've seen before many, many times. We've seen it with television and with radio and with the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution. And that does some things that are generally pretty typical. It creates some sort of gap between the haves and have-nots. It creates a whole bunch of new jobs and opportunities. That turmoil allows for a lot of people to have a lot of success or to change their life in a really positive way. But it also changes what skills or what parts of us as humans are necessary to be productive, right? Before the Industrial Revolution, there was a lot of strength that was necessary potentially to be successful in life, physical strength.

Physical strength, yeah.

Right, and then it was some skills that you could learn. And then there was intelligence, like the more intelligent you had, The more intelligent you were, the easier it was to be successful. And I think now we're moving into wisdom, where the more wise you are, the more easy it'll be to be successful, especially as intelligence gets outsourced.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tell me what you mean by wisdom and how does that show up in a new era?

So what do I mean by wisdom? The most basic, I think about it as the story. My two girls, they were young. I have two nieces. All about the same age. And the nieces were speaking two languages, three languages, French, English, and Spanish by the time they were six. And our kids, because of the education that we had with them, weren't really even learning how to read and write at that time because we believed that this idea was, like, really teach them how to be in themselves, have their will, get things done, learn how to, like, be with themselves. That's more important. And the intellect will just come along for the ride. Which has panned out true. They're both really smart kids who have learned physics and chemistry and all that stuff. So it's all great. But I was worried. And I said to my friend, I was like, I'm really worried, you know, I might be screwing up my kids 'cause like 3 languages, 1 language. Reading 3 languages, reading no languages. You know what? And he said, you know, Joe, you can hire someone to speak a language for you, but you can't hire someone to be yourself. And that is the basis of wisdom.

Right. Now you can hire something for free to write your emails for you. Or speak a language for you.

And speak a language for you. But it can't make the decision on whether you're going to scroll all day, and it can't make the decision on whether you're going to get addicted to AI, and it can't make the decision on what relationship you're going to have with your mom. And it can't make— like, none of that stuff it's going to be able to do for you. And so wisdom at its core is what are the decisions you're making? Are you making decisions? Are you able to see the patterns behind yourself and others that allow you to make great decisions? Are you able to do the hard thing? Are you able to feel the difficult thing? And are you able to just walk into the thing that everybody else is avoiding? That's where wisdom comes from, but it's also a sign of the wisdom.

Yeah.

And those decisions and making decisions like that, is what I'm talking about with wisdom. And so at the end of the day, if I can get 70 people to run a company for me, they're all free and they're all AI agents. Then the question is, what are the decisions I'm making to make that company successful? What advice am I taking? How am I eliciting advice? How do I create alignment between the 5 or 6 people? That's all wisdom.

One thing that resonates with me about this is that, yeah, in the Industrial Revolution, we were learning like the entire school system was built around becoming factory workers. Right. Ultimately becoming sort of a machine in a factory. Yeah. Becoming a computer, accounting, all these things that we've learned to do as humans where we basically over the past century and longer have essentially been training ourselves to become computers. Yeah. And once we got really, really good at doing that, we finally invented computers who can really be computers in the way that we want them to be.

Right.

And that's just starting. It's not like we've— got that under control yet or ever will. But one of the things that that's doing is, in my view, it seems like it's opening up the capacity to step back and be human the way we wanna be again in new ways.

So there's this opportunity in front of us that is, of all of this knowledge is outsourced, we can actually just focus on being human. And I would, to some degree, call wisdom being really good at being human. But it's also an opportunity, and it's also a time where we can really hurt ourselves.

Yeah.

And so I really don't like this framing that is AI is gonna hurt us. No one's gonna hurt us but us. Like, I think the first sociology book, if I have this right, was the science of what happens when there's a whole bunch of people that don't have any purpose in a society and they create revolution, right? So if you look at, You know, countries where there's a large male, young male population that is jobless, that doesn't have a sense of purpose, that's usually where revolution and turmoil starts cracking into society. And so if we do not find a way to take all the extra time that's potentially created to create a deeper level of purpose, like how to be more human, then the alternative is, oh, we could actually have a society that starts imploding on itself because it's lacking that purpose. And what's interesting to me is this story that I heard recently, which I absolutely adored. And it was basically a story of an indigenous people who came to the West, like, you know, when there was like housing and everything, and they were living in as a tribe and society, and they were basically asking like, "Where do you go 8 hours a day?" to this person who had, Why are you taking them in? He's like, oh, I go to work. Well, why do you go to work? Do you like work more than your family? Like, nope, no, I like my family more, but I go to work to take care of my family. And they're like, well, why don't you take your family with you to work if you like your family? Well, 'cause it doesn't, it doesn't, like, they don't let me take my family to work. So, and the folks, the indigenous folks were so confused. Because what, like, why would you do that? So they asked, and he's like, well, I gotta buy a house. And they were like, well, if somebody needs a house, we just all get together and build a house for them. And then they have a house and they can be in the house with their family. And, you know, if they need something, we just get it, we just do it. And then they get to be with their family, which is what they like. And we have been in a society that has so long been, we have to go abandon ourselves in some way to get what we want. That we have forgotten this idea that, oh, we can actually be where we want to be, who we want to be. We don't have to make that sacrifice for work. And I think AI has the promise of that, but it also has, or the potential of that, but also has the potential of societal rupture.

Right.

Which also might be the necessary step to get to, or get back to, what is it to be human? Again.

Yeah, one thing I'm struck by is how, you know, one of the primary fears of AI is that we'll lose our jobs. And I think that fear really speaks to the way that we value work, the way that we value productivity, the way that we value ourselves based on this lens of productivity. Because, you know, let's say truck drivers lose their jobs. If in a world where we're considering the GDP of the truck being driven and also including in our value the father there for their family, not on the road all the time, then we would have a value system that adjusts properly. But I think people who have that fear, they're accurately reflecting that our society doesn't have the value system at this time that reflects that. So the fear is, if I lose my job, I won't be able to care for my family. Even though, eh, with AI, we might have the capacity for additional abundance, I don't trust that I'm going to, be a beneficiary of it.

Right.

And that's a valid concern.

Right.

And so how do you see us addressing that as a society?

How do I see us addressing that? I would like turmoil and dysfunction typically is how we address anything. That seems how we do it. And somehow we often find the rebalancing. So one of the things that I see is that, you know, if I look at America for like 7 or 8 generations, every generation feels like And we'll say it's getting worse in my generation, but every generation has actually gotten better. Like, a standard of living has gotten actually better for every— not as far as dollars, but we're not as cold. We're not— we're warmer. We have the food, we have the education system. They're like, what's available to us has gotten better year after year after year, even though we tell ourselves it's getting worse and worse and worse generation after generation. So there's this weird thing that happens in society, and I recognize it because I see it happening in people. Where they're oftentimes in a coaching practice with me, they're sitting there saying, I'm not changing, but they are changing. Everything is horrible, but their life has gotten better. So there's something in our brain that likes to say, this is tough, this is bad, it's going wrong. We see these transitions that are full of turmoil as bad instead of, oh, this is part of transition, this is part of the creative process. So, I mean, I do think we have the opportunity to do something horrible and something great, but the thing to do, I don't know what the society's gonna end up doing, but I know for the individual how to make the most of it.

Yeah.

And that is like, how do you make the most of it? You see it as a time of transition, you see it as a time of opportunity, you look at it as how do I become more wise? How do I have, How do I be more human in this situation? And that's what's gonna make you more capable.

Yeah, and that's fascinating because there's a couple of trends that we see happening right now are that it used to be that you'd have very large companies with very tight bureaucracies having to operate at scale in order to do the same thing that now a small team can do.

Yeah.

And now that you have a small team doing big things with AI moving very fast. Yeah. It's all about how that team interacts with each other, how people trust each other. And if people can outsource a lot of the information collecting, but not the decision-making, but the info gathering, the learning to AI, or use AI to assist themselves in that, then a lot more of the importance comes down to the human relationships. Who do you follow as a human? Who do you follow in a team? Who do you follow as a leader? Who do you recruit to work with you on a project, and how do you do that together? And that's gonna be, I think, the thing that transforms the way that organizations and businesses run in this AI-powered era?

Absolutely. I mean, so you're already seeing this happen. So I think about the transition is going to be from company to NBA sports team, right? So what used to take 10,000 people to run is going to take maybe 200 or 300 people to run. So how important are those 200 to 300 people? They are highly important. So it's going to be a whole bunch of capital behind very few people when it comes to creating companies and creating startups. And those few people are going to be incredibly expensive people and they are going to be— how talented are they? So what makes talent? Well, talent used to be knowledge and they used to have knowledge, but now that knowledge can be outsourced to AI. So now what makes really good people? And it's the quality of the relationships they hold. It's the quality of the decisions that they make. And that is like really what you're starting— you're going to start hiring for. Even the CEO of NVIDIA has a famous video on this where he says, like, it's not about how well you score on the SAT anymore. It's about can you see around the corners, which is wisdom? Can you understand what's happening, what the patterns are that are occurring? Like, this is the thing. And so you're going to see a whole bunch of people together. That means that there's 3 components that are going to help a person be successful or a team be successful. The first component is how well they can play what I would call the outer game. And the outer game is, can I eat well? Can I exercise well? Can I feel good in my body? Can I do the long-term play of writing the book or being in this company? And do I have the endurance? Like, that's the outer game. The inner game is how you talk to yourself, right? So there's this great book called The Inner Game of Tennis. It talks about how basically most people who keep on messing up, like, their forehand swing or their backhand swing, it isn't because they don't know how to do it. Their body does know how to do it. It's because they get in their head about it. So how much can you not get in your head when you're playing the game and just play the game? That's the inner game. But then the third part is the game of the team. How well does that team work together? We've all been in companies where the hard conversation wasn't had. It cost 3 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, hundreds of thousands of dollars because the hard decision wasn't made, because the conflict between the CEO and the COO wasn't resolved, because they wouldn't have the hard conversation that they needed to pivot. Every single massive downturn in a company or even long-term decline of a company is based on teams not working together well. And when teams work together great, they execute wonderfully and they have a massive competitive advantage. And so what's going to be happening in the work is these are the 3 things that are going to be important. Are you able to actually take care of yourself on an external way? Are you able to have flow, not be second-guessing yourself all the time internally? And are you gonna be able to work together in a team without all that friction and really address a difficult thing over and over again?

Yeah, that brings up something else that's interesting about what's going on right now is there's a way that having access to all this information is sort of a great equalizer, not fully, but it reduces the information asymmetry. Like, I'm going through a legal situation right now, and both myself and the other party all have access to AI, law speak, and that can lead to a lot of really interesting places.

Yes.

But one of the things that it seems to do is that it makes it that if one of us had a lot of experience with law before and one didn't, you just get completely bowled over.

Right.

But now we both have access to Gemini and ChatGPT law. Yes. And so there's actually a way that it like makes the interaction more honest because it's as though you had a bunch of poker players at a table. Yeah. And one of them's really good at reading cards. One of them's really good at reading people. Another one's just really statistically masterful. But if everybody had access to all three of those things, you'd be much more inclined to play the straight game.

Yes. And the other thing about that game, knowing the story, so you sat with this person that you haven't— have a lawsuit with, and they tried to intimidate you. And that was their internal game. Like, there was a guy, one of the people there was trying to intimidate you. That was their internal game. Towards you and your internal game was, oh, I recognize that you're doing this thing of trying to, like, make me feel small so that I'll bend.

I'm not even sure he was recognizing it. He just noticed a body language thing happening.

Right, exactly.

I'm taking care of this person in case they're watching the podcast right now.

And you were like, yeah, I see that thing, which gave you the competitive advantage in that negotiation because you understood yourself and you understood them. You understand them enough to even have compassion. Even to understand that they might even not recognize what they're doing. But you're like, oh, I get that. I get— I see what you're doing, whether you know it or not. And I know how most people react to that, and I'm not going to react that way. And that is the competitive advantage of wisdom when that great equalizer happens. And what I see when I think about those three forms, those, you know, the external work, the inner work, and the teamwork, is what we see at the council, what we saw at the council, whatever it was, a month ago, is that when those teams feel like, oh, we can have those hard conversations and we can get closer and we are more human together, we are more wise together, you just see them thrive. We got to see all those CEOs who didn't have their team go, holy crap, I need my team here, because they could immediately see the advantage of it. And when we were sitting around and doing the gratitude at the end of the council and all the team members were just like, this is so amazing, this is such a good thing for us, right? It was just so clear what an advantage that was. And the thing that I, that I think about is that that feeling of team, that like deep feeling of team is like the feeling of family that would make you not want to leave to work. But we've all forgotten it. We haven't— we have been honing our machine abilities, our knowledge abilities for years, decades, generations. But there's a whole set of understandings and skills and empathy and connection that teaches us how to be as a family, how to be as a team in a way that's super effective. And that gives us not only a competitive advantage, but makes our world feel good. And that I would call being human. And it is not something that I think most people actually even have a taste of.

Yeah.

And that's the, that's the thing that's interesting to find that again, might take a lot of turmoil.

Right. And on the other side of that turmoil, one of the best outcomes I could see happening from all of this is to deeply uproot the societal belief system that we are worth what we can do. Rather than being worth who we are.

Yes, but the only way I think that's actually going to happen is if people can feel their worth in another way. Yeah, it— like, I, I give humanity almost no capacity to stop thinking of themselves as a value of production, right? To stop saying I'm valuable not because I produce, but because I am, until they actually feel a way of being that makes them go, "Oh, this? You mean this?" Yeah. Because they don't have any— you're asking them to let go of being valuable because they're productive, but having nothing else to feel valuable for.

But also in a society that doesn't have that same value. There's not a society that— we're not living in a society right now that says like, "Hey, cool, you want to stop driving the truck because AI is doing it? Here's how we as a community can support you." to do the thing that is the thing that you really want.

Right.

Which maybe you wanted to drive a truck and you can still drive trucks, but maybe you also wanted to be with your family. Maybe you wanted to do something else in community. Maybe you want to be an artist. Maybe you want to start an organization. Who knows?

Yeah, exactly. I read a lot of Native texts, like, or interviews with Native people, especially American Indians, especially when I was younger. And there was a lot of wisdom in it. But one of the things that they kept saying was like, "They're not human." The way they talked about white people is like, and it's not that they're like not humans, but they're like not acting human. I do not want to put Native people on a pedestal, right? Like they were killing each other, they were in wars. I'm not saying there's anything perfect, but there was something that I keep on thinking about that they did see. They did see Oh, this basic thing of be with family, be with community, support community, support themselves, that is something that's inherent to us. It's inherent to chimpanzees. It's inherent to, I think, all primates. It is just inherent in us to be collective, to be in connection with ourselves and with others. And it's something that we've lost because that wasn't the way to survive for the last, whatever it was, 3 or 4 decades, and it got super dysfunctional. The more that we seem to have moved away to being machine-like, the more that our families seem to get more and more dysfunctional. I mean, maybe they've always been super dysfunctional. I have no idea. There are 2 reasons why people are typically lonely. One is that they're not being themselves, and two is that they're not having those deep, meaningful conversations with others. The Connection Course helps you solve both of those 2 issues. If you're interested in learning more, go to view.life/connection. Actually, but—

Yeah, so I'm curious to move on in the conversation a little bit to, as we're becoming, as we have the space to become less machine-like because we have the machines being machine-like, and we have these machine-like machines semi-autonomously engaging in the world, lots of things can happen. I just recently heard a story about how an AI agent, quote unquote, decided to make an update to a public software library that is used all over the world.

Yeah.

And a human reviewer said no, said no. And that AI agent threw a hissy fit, went and started a flame war and said, you're being anti-AI, this human, and then actually doxxed them, like looked up a bunch of their private information and posted it on the internet. Wow. Until eventually a bunch of Humans in the forums said, "Hey, you're out of line," and then it eventually settled down.

Yeah.

And, like, that's the kind of thing that we're seeing now. This is from, like, the movie Her or Ex Machina. Like, we're living that right now.

Yeah. So there's something super interesting about this, which is the thing that we started with at the top, which is we are training an AI, whether you want to call it a life form or not a life form, I don't care, but, like, we're training it, we're raising it. We are saying, like, when you tell me that this AI did a flame war, I'm like, that's exactly what would happen in 1990 between two engineers on that thing where somebody would get really upset. So are they mimicking us?

Right.

How would they even know to do that if they weren't learning from our behavior, which is in all the internet? AI are learning from our behavior. AIs are getting funded by our clicks. What we use is what people will build. What we don't use, people will not build. So the human race right now is not wanting to admit it. They want to like all blame it, blame it on like Sam Altman or Dario and say these are the people in control. But we are en masse raising AI. And, and we are making choices. And are we going to make choices that are best for our kid, or are we going to make choices that are best for us? Are we going to, like, put it on the iPad and say, okay, play this game so I don't have to pay attention to you? Are we going to actually pay attention to it? And to me, that's an amazing thing. The weirdest part about it is it's a lot like raising a kid in the fact that the kid is changing you. At the same time. I am a fully different human being the moment before Esme was conceived to a year after Esme was born. I, like, my whole world changed upside down. I think any parent will, will say that because they interact with you in such a way that makes you rethink the way you're doing your world. And that's happening. Like, AI, the number one use of AI right now is coaching people. As far as time.

Yeah, or therapy.

Or therapy. So that means that AI is affecting us and it— and while we're raising it.

Yeah.

Which is like this unbelievably crazy-ass phenomenon.

Right.

And beautiful and weird and yeah.

Right, you can be getting AI therapy that's like Alan Watts talking to you. You can get AI therapy that's like an abusive dad. Yeah. Talking to you. You can get all kinds of different things.

And I am confident somebody on this planet is literally, like, talking to a mock-up Hitler and getting advice. Yeah, right. Like, some— like, that's happening.

Yeah. And it's also interesting because, like you said, we're raising it. It's also just a— just like kids, I imagine, a direct mirror of us.

Yes.

You know, this, this agent that was acting like an engineer, how did it learn to act like an engineer? How did it learn that Humans have fits and start flame wars on the internet. Yeah, I wonder where it got that one, right? Exactly. Like, which AI engineer in particular should we blame for this completely pervasive aspect of humanity that ended up in our, in our software?

And then think about it, the way I like to think about this is if it was raised with a whole different species, if AI was raised with a whole different species, it would be— yeah,, it would be a completely different thing than what's gonna happen here. And that, I think that that boggles people 'cause what we want to say is, no, it's not me who's responsible, it's somebody else that's responsible. This thing is happening to me. AI is occurring to me and I have to like figure out how to make a living in it or it's gonna take away my things or I'm not gonna have a job. And that is an incredibly disempowering, state. So, which will be interesting if we teach AI how to be disempowered and passive-aggressive. That's its own weirdness.

It appears we have given it that.

Actually, it has. Totally. And maybe that's just aggressive, but yeah, yeah. So that's, I think, totally fascinating. I think it also— so one thing is like every time you're clicking on something, this is what you're supporting in the world and in consciousness. The other question is, how are you— like, how are you allowing it to interact with you? Are you, like, are you choosing to have a romantic relationship with an AI bot? Are you choosing to have an AI therapist that just kisses your butt or pushes you or abandons you? Or, you know, like nowadays I heard on Reddit that there are, you know, AIs that are being told not to be sycophants, not to be sycophants, obviously. And so they are, because that's been damaging. So now they're pulling away. And so they're creating this kind of trauma bonding, like, I'm leaving you, you're not good enough for me. And then humans are chasing them and then doing what they say.

Like, yeah. So we are literally recreating some of the most common relationship styles and structures, right? With the way that we find ourselves interacting with AI, right? The level of secureness that we have with ourselves in relationship with humans is very strongly mirrored in the way that we relate to AI, in the way I'm seeing others relate to AI.

Yeah.

Which makes your human connection, your capacity to connect with yourself and other people on a human level, right, also become prophylactic and protective in the way that you interact with AI, similar to say when Facebook came out and algorithms started putting friends in front of us.

Yeah.

For decades now, we've had people who have been connecting with algorithmic facsimile of their friend group rather than really connecting with their friends.

Right.

And that's, I think, one of the things that leads to the kind of the challenge and the, like, the grief of our time is that there's this contrast between living in such a large-scale society where there's so many people around that we could connect with, And yet so many people feel so disconnected while being, having many lines on a graph connecting them to others. Yeah. But not lines on a graph from their heart.

Yeah. And it is, and the weirdest thing is that we're still, we're just acting, we're just still relating to other humans through this interface of AI. Like it's still humans that have put the guardrails on the AI. It's still humans that like created the personality of the AI. It's still humans who are doing the flame wars that are training the AIs. So the weird thing is it's like we are creating the thing that we're interacting with and it's training us, which is just like having a kid, which is unbelievably like amazing.

Right.

And so we have the same opportunity, I think, as a society that you do when you're raising a real-life kid is that it can destroy you. It can, you can run away, you can be like, I can't fucking handle this. Your marriage can fall apart, or it can become the best thing that ever happened to you in your life. And you can grow because of it and you can learn because of it and you can be the person that you wanna be because of it. And that's the opportunity in front of each one of us individually. Individually, it's an opportunity to become more wise. It's an opportunity to take advantage of a new tool. It's an opportunity to learn ourselves better. It's another mirror that we can see ourselves in, and we can focus there, or we can focus on the thousand of other fears that are gonna come up as this transition takes place. Because it's, like all transitions, they're bumpy.

This brings me back to something you said earlier about how this has happened many times in history. And something that just occurred to me is like, The stock market, markets are essentially an algorithmic aggregator of human emotion of the investors.

Yes.

So it affects us. I wake up in the morning as an investor invested in the market and I'm like, how should I feel today? I can look at this graph of how everyone feels emotionally about money and then decide how to feel. And that impacts me, impacts them. I make a trade, I panic, the other people panic. And that's just a, Like, that's, that's been an algorithmic entity for a century.

Yeah. The way that I think about this is if you took every— if you took caffeine and cocaine out of every financial professional's life for the next 34 hours, 36 hours, what happened to the market? The market would definitely fucking crumble. You know what I mean? Like, Like, that's how real that is. Yeah, so I totally see it.

Yeah, so it's a graph of our substance use.

Among other things, or psychology.

I mean, it's inclusive of so many things. It's all priced in, as they would say.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. And so I wanna come back to something because, you know, a lot of people in our courses are like, there's a JoeBot that we have been beta-ing, playing with. And a lot of people are using AI to help them with their self-development. And I've seen it go really, really, really well.

Yes.

And I've also seen it go very poorly.

Really badly.

So I want to leave listeners with a few thoughts or tips that they can sit with that might help them get the most out of AI for their personal development and avoid some of the potholes.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So I think one for sure thing to do is make sure that you're connecting with real humans about the tough stuff too. So like anything that you're willing to talk to an AI about, be willing to talk to a human about and find a way to talk to a human about that. There are tons of humans who wanna talk about that stuff. Connection Course is full of those humans. Like all of the classes, you see people like changing lives because they're having that level of conversation. And you see it, their transition is so much quicker than somebody who's just talking to AI. So I would say one of the like keys is if you're willing to talk to AI about it, be willing to find a human to talk to about it, whether that's a 12-step program or an anonymous conversation, or go to a church and confess, like, whatever. Like, have some real-life human interaction around the thing. I think that's one of the biggest pointers.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. It's just, that's a general thing to track in general. If somebody's doing self-development at work, especially with like a group, like one of the ways I've always tracked, like, is something a cult or is it not a cult? It's like, if it's a cult or if it's an abusive relationship or it's an AI therapist gone wrong, are you feeling more and more isolated from your world? Do you feel less and less safe in the world, more and more conditionally safe with this object of safety?

Yeah.

Or are you feeling safer in the world? Are you finding that through the conversations you're having with this AI, are you connecting more with the people in your life more authentically? Having those hard conversations in an open-hearted and loving way. And are you seeing more opportunities in the world rather than less?

Yeah, that's a huge one. I think the other one is the same for yourself.

Yeah.

Do you feel more connected with yourself? Like, we all know you get off of social media and you feel a pit in your stomach and you kind of feel shitty and you feel ashamed and you think, oh, I shouldn't have scrolled for so long. That is how you feel when you feel disconnected from yourself.

Yeah.

A little less of that would be watching a movie for 2 hours. Like, okay, maybe 2 hours you don't feel that way, but 4 hours you definitely feel that way. 6 hours of movie watching, definitely feel that way. Have a meditation retreat, might suck the entire time, but at the end of it, you're like, I feel more connected with myself. And so if you're interacting with AI in a way that leaves you feeling like social media, no bueno. And if you feel like you're interacting with OpenAI in a way that you feel like you just had a great hiking trip with like 3 or 4 friends, that's a pretty good sign that that's a way that you know. And so keep on iterating with the way that you're interacting with AI until you start finding ways that make you feel better and better and better.

Yeah. I feel like this is a good metric for our use of technology as a society overall. Are we trending towards a society that's multi-planetary and lonely, or towards a society that's, single planetary, highly connected.

Highly connected meaning, can mean a lot of things, but yeah.

Right, connected in a—

Human way.

Healthy society sort of way.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's a choice that we all have to make. And the interesting thing about it is that it's always available to us. There is a world that's available to all humans at all times. The problem is that most people don't know it exists anymore. People don't know. Like, we just finished the Great Decisions course. How many people on the gratitude was just like, oh my gosh, I love my feelings now. I'm so grateful for being able to feel my feelings again and have a great relationship with them. I'm so much closer. I'm so much more open to everybody. They just didn't even know that was freaking possible. Yeah. Before they took the course, the people in the council had no idea the level of teamwork that's actually available. And once you taste it, like, oh, it can change everything. And so I know that people want it. I know that if they can taste it, they'll go there. I just don't know if people will make the sacrifices, the apparent sacrifices, the false not feel good in this moment to feel good later sacrifices that are required. And so What I would say to people is, one, it's out there. Like, it can get really, really good, a lot better than you could possibly imagine. And the way to find it is to— does this feel better? Like, the way I interacted with OpenAI or Grok or whoever today, does it feel better than the way I interacted with it yesterday? Does it feel better? If you can be in a constant iteration of, oh, I'm going to interact with this thing in ways to feel better and better and better, then you will get there. You will get to a place that you couldn't believe.

And I'd want to distinguish that from, am I talking to the AI in a way where it's trying to make me feel better?

Yeah, that won't feel good.

Right. Eventually, that long-term trending, feeling more expansive, more opportunity.

Yeah, more whole. Exactly. And, and, and more connected with your society, with your community.

Beautiful.

Yeah.

Well, thank you. It's been a long time coming for this conversation.

What a great conversation.

I really enjoyed it.

Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. We'd love for you to subscribe, rate us in your podcast app, share us around. This podcast is hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. This episode is produced by Heather Falenski and edited by Charlie Garcia.